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REUBEN A. BROWER
Richardson and against Fielding, Mr. Price rightly emphasizes the
depth of Fielding's "benevolent" morality and its relation
to
his use of
comic artifice, to his "subversion of forms." It might be noted in
passing that Mr. Price's criticism of Fielding lend's no support to the
present fashion of setting Fielding in unfavorable opposition to Jane
Austen. (Jane Austen
is
not mentioned in
To the Palace of Wisdom.)
Fielding's definition of the love that reconciles "appetite" with "mind"
depends on the same values and is expressed in the identical terms of
"esteem and gratitude" that are the guarantee of "rational affection"
in
Pride and Prejudice, Emma,
and
Mansfield Park.
Mr. Price also writes sympathetically of authors without an obvious
moral pr.ogram, or writers in whom not "order" but "energy" pre–
dominate. He appreciates in Gay's
Triuia-a
poem that deserves ap–
preciation-the interest in what Iris Murdoch calls the "contingent,
messy, boundless, infinitely particular, and endlessly still-to-be-ex–
plained." Anyone who has tried to say something apt about Sterne,
most bewildering of writers in the century, will admire the intel–
ligibility of Mr. Price's analysis in terms of Diderot's paradoxical actor
"who must be free of emotion in order to call up emotion in others...."
The chapter on the ultimate revolutionary, Blake, culminates in a
comparison of Blake and Pope that happily resists the temptation to
make Pope a Blake before his time. Mr. Price finds a place in his
book, too, for writers in whom energy beats more faintly, in the poets
of the mid-century-Thomson (who comes actually somewhat earlier),
Young, Akenside, Collins, and Gray. There is a teasing sketch for a
book on the picturesque, which is related interestingly to the "play–
acting," the "trying-on" of new roles by these mild and tentative
innovators.
But as we read one of the more general comments on Thom–
son, our original uneasiness about the basic critical approach of the
book recurs. "The pattern [of
The Seasons],"
we are told, "prepares
us to sense each experience as implicitly moral in significance." We
should mind less
if
we read
"obuiously
moral," for in a most obvious
sense of moral, all of Thomson's descriptions and episodes are offered
as grand examples of God's (or Nature's?) "complex, stupendous
scheme of things." But Thomson lacked exactly that control of a style
disciplined by moral feeling (he was not Wordsworth) that imparts
"moral significance" implicitly through the resonances of words. Mr.
Price is by contrast most convincing when he shows how Thomson
catches in certain scenes "that curiously indefinable sense of the import
of space"; much less so when he will have us believe--as Thompson