Meyer H. Abrams - The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

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ISBN-13 978-0-19-501471-6

Copyright 1953 by Oxford" University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 53-7616

First published by Oxford University Press, 1953

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1971

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Preface

The development of literary theory in the lifetime of Coleridge was to a surprising extent the making of the modern critical mind. There were many important differences between, let us say, Horace's Art of Poetry and the criticism of Dr. Johnson, but there was also a discernible continuity in premises, aims, and methods. This continuity was broken by the theories of romantic writers, English and German; and their innovations include many of the points of view and procedures which make the characteristic differences between traditional criticism and the criticism of our own time, including some criticism which professes to be anti-romantic.

The primary concern of this book is with the English theory of poetry, and to a lesser extent of the other major arts, during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. It stresses the common orientation which justifies us in identifying a specifically 'romantic' criticism; but not, I trust, at the cost of overlooking the many important diversities among the writers who concerned themselves with the nature of poetry or art, its psychological genesis, its constitution and kinds, its major criteria, and its relation to other important human concerns. The book deals, for the most part, with the original and enduring critics of the time, rather than with the run-okhe-mill reviewers who often had a more immediate, though shorter-lived influence on the general reading public.

In order to emphasize the pivotal position of the age in the general history of criticism, I have treated English romantic theory in a broad intellectual context, and I have tried to keep constantly in view the background of eighteenth-century aesthetics from which romantic aesthetics was in part a development, and against which it was, still more, a deliberate reaction. I have described some of the relations of English critical theory to foreign thought, especially to the richly suggestive German speculations of the age, beginning with Herder and Kant, when Germany replaced England and France as the chief exporter of ideas to the Western world. I have also moved freely in time, going back to the Greek and Roman origins of aes

PREFACE

thetic thought and ahead to various critical ideas current today. Finally, I have undertaken, although briefly, to trace the origins o prominent romantic ideas, not only in earlier aesthetic discussion, but also in philosophy, ethics, theology, and in the theories and discoveries of the natural sciences. In aesthetics, as in other provinces of inquiry, radical novelties frequently turn out to be migrant ideas which, in their native intellectual habitat, were commonplaces.

The title of the book identifies two common and antithetic metaphors of mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives. The first of these was characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to the eighteenth century; the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind. I have attempted the experiment of taking these and various other metaphors no less seriously when they occur in criticism than when they occur in poetry; for in both provinces the recourse to metaphor, although directed to different ends, is perhaps equally functional. Critical thinking, like that in all areas of human interest, has been in considerable part thinking in parallels, and critical argument has to that extent been an argument from analogy. As this inquiry will indicate, a number of concepts most rewarding in clarifying the nature and criteria of art were not found simply in the examination of aesthetic facts, but seem to have emerged from the exploration of serviceable analogues, whose properties were, by metaphorical transfer, predicated of a work of art. From this point of view the shift from neo-classJc to romantic criticism can be formulated, in a preliminary way, as a radical alteration in the typical metaphors of

critical discourse.

The bringing of submerged analogies into the open puts certain old facts into a new and, it seems to me, a revealing perspective. Perhaps the attempt may deserve the measured commendation Dr. Johnson awarded to Lord Karnes: He 'has taken the right method in his Elements of Criticism. I do not mean he has taught us anything, but he has told us old things in a new way.' There are, however, many profitable ways to approach the history of criticism. 1 have tried to use whatever ways seemed most pertinent, and to restrict the analysis of basic metaphors to problems in which this approach promised genuine illumination.

This book had its distant origin in a study of the writings of Johnson and Coleridge, under the stimulating direction of I. A. Richards at Cambridge University, and it was developed at Harvard University with the guidance and encouragement of my mentor and friend, the late Theodore Spencer. In

PREFACE

the ten years and more that the work has been in progress, 1 have incurred many intellectual obligations which are indicated in the text and footnotes. In this place I wish to acknowledge both a Rockefeller Fellowship, which gave me an invaluable year for catching up broken threads after the war, and a grant for summer research from Corr/ell University. I wish also gratefully to record the material assistance of many colleagues and friends. Victor Lange and Israel S, Stamm helped me make my way through the intricacies of German criticism; and Harry Caplan, James Hutton, and Friedrich Solmsen have been valuable sources of information on classical and medieval matters. I have had access to the full resources of the Cornell and Harvard University Libraries; and H. H. King, of the Cornell Library staff, whose services were made available to me by a grant from the Cornell Graduate School, has been of great assistance in verifying quotations and in many bibliographical matters. Richard Harter Fogle and Francis E. Mineka have made a number of useful suggestions. William Rea Keast undertook to read the entire manuscript, at a time when he was heavily burdened by other enterprises; the book has benefited in a great many ways from his command of the history and methods of criticism. To my wife I owe the greatest debt, for her fortitude and her unfailing cheerfulness while doing and redoing the most laborious of the tasks needed to make ready this book.

Some of the material incorporated in the seventh chapter appeared in an article, 'Archetypal Analogies in the Language of Criticism,' The University of Toronto Quarterly, July 1949.

M. H. A. Cornell University Summer 1953

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Contents

Preface, vit

I. INTRODUCTION: ORIENTATION OF CRITICAL THEORIES, 3

1, Some Co-ordinates of Art Criticism, 6 H. Mimetic Theories, 8 jii. Pragmatic Theories, 14 iv. Expressive Theories, ar v. Objective Theories, 26

II. IMITATION AND THE MIRROR, 30

t. Art Is Like a Mirror, 31

ii. The Objects of Imitation: the Empirical Ideal, 35 iii. The Transcendental Ideal, 42

III. ROMANTIC ANALOGUES OF ART AND MIND, 47

i. Metaphors of Expression, 48 ii. Emotion and the Objects of Poetry, 53 iii. Changing Metaphors of Mind, 57