ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Vrsta: Istorija svetske književnosti
Autor: Strani

U dobrom stanju, pečati i signatura biblioteke.

English Literature and Ideas in the Twentieth Century : An Inquiry Into Present Difficulties and Future Prospects

English Literature and Ideas in the Twentieth Century. By H. V. ROUTH. Methuen, 1946

Review
This is a remarkable book. An immense amount of knowledge, learning, and research has gone to its making. In it Dr. Routh appraises, with a confidence as competent as it is self-assured, more than sixty writers who, in his opinion, have served the spirit of twentieth- century literature—apportioning to each the measure of attention which he thinks each deserves from this angle of approach.
Besides these appreciations of various writers, the book devotes some chapters to general considerations of a period of literature which more than any other has been influenced by the impact of new knowledge and new ideas—too new to be as yet assimilated, but potent to confuse and disturb.
At the outset Dr. Routh asks: ‘Is literature slowly dying out of our civilization in which it has no longer a place, or is it entering upon a new life too big to be mastered without half a century of unsuccessful endeavour?’ In the space of a review it is impossible to deal adequately with Dr. Routh’s answers to the stupendous question he propounds.
After reading his book and pondering over its many provocative reflections, I am uncertain whether hope or fear for the future of our literature predominates in his mind, and, in this tortured age, it is perhaps inevitable that he should be inconclusive.
The materials for great literature he admits ‘are not lacking—the atmosphere is crowded with expansive ideas’ chiefly supplied by the progress of Science, but so far literature has not
made them her own or achieved the polarity which minds, in Dr. Routh’s own words, have gained ‘by trust in those age-long intimations which have served mankind since the dawn of culture’, and I am left in some doubt whether he really believes that a renascence of literature will come ‘from observation and curiosity inspired by Science’.
In another place Dr. Routh quotes the words of J. Maritain, ‘every man has within him a soul which is spirit, and which has a greater value than the whole physical universe’, a thought which, incidentally, Tennyson expressed with implications singularly pertinent to the limitations of science in the world of the spirit.
Tho’ world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers
And other forms of life than ours
What know we greater than the soul?
And this belief surely postulates contacts in the greatest literature with standards of absolute values that, in the last resort, are independent of the tensions to which increasing knowledge, but not increasing wisdom, now subject the spirit of man. Be that as it may, it seems certain that hitherto the great survivals in art and literature have drawn their inspiration from sources of power that are outside the ‘stark facts’ that science has revealed in bio-chemistry, psychoanalysis, anthropology, &c. And soonewonders if Dr. Routh is writing with any firm conviction when he argues that it will be the business of the imaginative writer, when he has discovered the necessary technique, to humanize these stark facts if literature is to renew its life.
As the greater part of Dr. Routh’s book consists of appreciations of a host of modern writers, special acknowledgement is due to the perception and judgement with which he has assessed the qualities and intentions of the greater writers of our age. It would be difficult to have, in so small a compass, sounder or more discerning estimates for instance of Kipling, Shaw, Masefield, Yeats, Edward Carpenter, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, to mention a few. The only quarrel one has with Dr. Routh’s book is that it deals with too many writers. Some of them, as irrelevant to
his general argument, might with advantage have been omitted, and thus more expansion given to his generalizations on the ideas and tendencies of twentieth-century literature

Engleska književnost