5. W. P. Ker, Form and Style in Poetry: Lectures and Notes, ed. R. W. Chambers
In this volume Mr. Chambers has gathered together a very valuable collection of Professor Ker's opuscula. The main body of the book consists of the University College lectures of 1914–1915, the text being arrived at through the collation of the verbatim report of Dr. Hitchcock's with the note-books of others who were present. (In a book of less absorbing interest than this, one could hardly refrain from discussing the extreme value of this process merely as a textual experiment.)
Similar to these, and in part overlapping them, there are some lectures on the Forms of English poetry delivered at Cambridge in 1912, the Clark lectures on Chaucer, a paper on Ballads reprinted from the Proceedings of the British Academy, and, above all, some ninety pages of Appendix, gathered from various sources, in which the very titles (De superbia Carminum . . . Rhythmorum Exampla) should whet the appetites of good men.
Such a collection however heterogeneous it were, would deserve the warmest thanks. No scrap of Ker's writing does not embody the quality of his mind as a whole, and no scrap therefore is negligible. What that quality was we shall perhaps appreciate more fully the longer we study it. No writer in modern times approached so nearly to that critical ideal of being ‘like God – easy to please and hard to satisfy.’ No beauty was too small to escape his attention: none so enchanting as to hurry his critical sanity into excess. Almost alone among the critics who have lived since the Romantic movement, he never forgot that while one thing might be good, another might be better, and that better did not cancel the good.
This is well brought out in the very interesting letters which Raleigh wrote to him after the publication of Epic and Romance, where one can guess Ker's answer from Raleigh's second letter, and where Raleigh, though a strong man himself, shows like a schoolboy. With Raleigh, to see the epic for a moment as Ker saw it habitually meant to be unfair to Romance. Ker looks at both and will not be carried away; his blood and judgement are too well commingled. Of such a man's mind the least gleanings are venerable. Even if they lay ill together, we should be glad to have them. In point of fact, however, the present collection displays a singular unity of theme. The connecting link is the doctrine of the pure Forms – the abstract pattern of the epic, the abstract tune of a stanza – which will not be strange to any reader of the preface to Dryden's Essays. It is this critical ‘realism’ which is the true topic of all these papers.
The Forms are abstractions but they are not nonentities, for we see that they are operative. Among the many influences pressing upon the poet, we must leave room for these spectral and impersonal forces: we cannot reduce the whole thing to those more personal and passionate motives that tempt the biographer. When once we have understood the Forms we shall be free from many crudities of literary history: we shall cease to talk of the ballad of Orpheus as a stage in the decay of the romance of Orfeo. We shall learn that metres have a life of their own and beget of themselves the moods that seem to create them. There is, of course, far more than this in the book: admirable chapters on Poetical Logic and on The Similie: a cooling card here and there for those who believe too intemperately in the Renaissance: and the wonderful feast of metrical types in the appendix which no one but Ker could have given us, or would if he could. But it is in the development of the doctrine of Forms – a great and sorely needed act of justice to the impersonal – that I find the backbone of these works: though, to be sure, you must read them for the digressions even if you don't care about Forms.