152
PARTISAN REVIEW
"The title
Natural Supernaturalism,"
Abrams writes in his preface, "indi–
cates that my recurrent . . . concern will be with the secularization of
inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking." Thus, more than midway
through his study , Abrams is able to conclude, with the justified expectation
that his reader has been carried along with him by the extensive and
well-chosen illustrations, "Faith in an apocalypse by revelation had been
replaced by faith in an apocalypse by revolution, and this now gave way to
faith in an apocalypse by imagination or cognition. In the ... frame of
Romantic thought, the mind of man confronts the old heaven and earth and
possesses within itself the power ... to transform them into a new heaven and
new earth, by means of a total revolution of consciousness."
Yet good as
Natural Supernaturalism
is in many ways-and in many
ways it
is
the best intellectual treatment of its subject now in print-Abrams'
book suffers finally from a basic lack of urgency. We aren't made
to
feel,
through the analyses of scores ofmajor texts, anything resembling the tension
and high excitement that the texts and Abrams' argument might be expected
to
convey. Rather, what we encounter is an extraordinarily well informed ,
highly intelligent observer whose mode of discourse (unlike, say, Hartman's
on Wordsworth) remains at too great a distance from his subject. Further–
more , it just may be that Abrams' organizing
conception-inherited
ways of
thinking-commits his argument excessively to an elegiac attitude . In short,
questions of "methodology" probably shouldn't be related (as they usually
are)
to
abstract issues concerning a "system"; instead, they deserve more
to
be recognized as indexes of the relative fulness by which a writer has appre–
hended the potential of his subject.
Which leads me
to
the last of the books under review, Kenneth Neill
Cameron's
Shelley: The Golden Yean .
Unabashedly anti-formalistic, this is a
book that puts
to
shame many of the smaller (and much more sophisticated)
Shelleyan "studies" of the past ten or so years. Cameron really does believe in
Shelley's greatness in a fashion which permits him
to
write of his subject–
Shelley's life and works from 1814 to his death in 1822-with an extraordi–
nary degree ofassurance. Moreover, unlike]ones's book, Cameron 's possesses
a natural focus for the exploration of the interrelationship between literary art
and political change: Shelley himself, a figure whom Cameron has been
studying intensively for more than thirty years. The result is that
Shelley
adds
a great deal
to
our understanding of the biographical, political, social, and
intellectual context out of which Shelley's major poetry grew. Indeed, on the
question of the "background" for Shelley, Cameron's book (along with his
Young Shelley
of 1950) is probably the best thing now available.
Nevertheless, there is a fundamental weakness about Cameron's ap–
proach , and I think it's one that helps to indicate still again the continuing
