BOO KS
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prejudiced, passion-blind, wilfully or whimsically self-indulgent; the
other, that he was unlearned, ill-bred and ill-read, even anti-intellectual.
The second indictment is usually thought to follow naturally from the
first. That is, given a man of passionate temperament with certain dee.p
political or other prejudices, we inevitably get the "impressionist" or
"personal" critic in literature and the fierce "J acobin" partisan on
social issues. This is still the image in Mr. Baker's comments-much
modified, of course, and toned down into sympathy and admiration for
his "tenacious individualism," but still bearing the unmistakable marks
of its prototype in the "wild black-bill Hazlitt" manufactured by the
Tory
Quarterly
and the young turks of
Blackwood's.
There is the instance of his alleged "bigotry," which especially
exasperates Mr. Baker. In 1816, when Coleridge was about to publish
his
Lay Sermon,
Hazlitt "reviewed" the book before it even 'appeared,
for the good reason, he said, that he saw no difference between this
author's "published and unpublished compositions," since both were
"immaculate conceptions," having nothing to do with any reality
beyond Coleridge's own "voluntary self-delusion." Mr. Baker finds only
"abuse" in this satire, and for this and other attacks he makes for
CURRENT:
Freedom, Joy
&
Indignation: Letters from E. E. Cummings •
Decadence iin Miniature by Renato Poggioli
•
Cuba's Shadow Over the Americas
by Ram6n E. Ruiz;
•
The Hunter and the Hunted: Leon Edel and Henry James
by Richard Poirier
•
Tartuffe IV newly translated by Richard Wilbur •
D. J. Hughes
•
Ruth Whitman
MZ
The Massachusetts Review
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS • AMHERST, MASS. • $5.00 A YEAR
COMING :
Faulkner's Ambigu'ous Negro by Melvin Seiden · American
I nnocence: a Reconsideration by Gaylord
C.
LeR oy
•
Popular Sociol.ogy
by Eli Chinoy
•
The Art of Robert Birmelin
•
Sixteen Portraits of Artists
by Leonard Baskin
•
Special Supplement: The Literature of I reland
with Robert Skelton, Thomas Kinsella, Denis Johnston, R ichard M. Kain
