Publisher's Synopsis
Here is the account of a conscientious student's explorations across a horrible great waste. We are more than grateful. It sets one's conscience finally to rest. Vicarious erudition is in some matters, we always knew, the only divine salvation of one's literary life! That way marked with bones of the dead, chiefly camels and asses, we shall not feel in duty bound to go unto perdition. But what commendable courage, what genius for the prolonged fast of the spirit, in the audacious and ascetic Dr. Tucker! Unless the comic spirit is restrained by a feeling for beauty, or at least, a sense of obligation to beautiful form, its products perish as they should; and elaborately to record and analyze them, is like insisting on a resurrection en masse here and now of the mediocre millions well dead and duly replaced. Only a thing of beauty is a joy forever, and hence it chances that nothing is so likely to make one perish of self-pity or snort with rage as obsolete righteous indignation, and elaborate efforts at satiric laughter preserved in doggerel, or, worse yet, would-be heroic verse! A great reverence for the comic has made us welcome this study by Dr. Tucker for its sane critical perspective and scholarly frankness.
The introductory chapter is an essay of no mean value. The table in which Dr. Tucker endeavors to classify the world's comic literature may leave out such things as Hugo's Chatiments ox Heine's Atta Troll and the "North Sea" poems; but it is nevertheless suggestive. Making the law of conception and the method of comic procedure subordinate, for purpose of classification, to the often extraneous distinction of verse and prose (so that things spiritually akin are artificially sundered by a great gulf, and things unakin are forced by the token of doggerel rhyme to feign close affinity), would seem an insurmountable obstacle were the author to attempt a sympathetic judgment of artistic satire. But, that Dr. Tucker is nowise the victim of his erudition, - the kind that earns honors these days, but must straightway be got out of the system in a thesis, or slay its proud but unfortunate possessor, - is evinced by the altogether delightful treatment accorded Chaucer as a satirist and humorist. Nothing could more startlingly manifest Chaucer's strangeness to the evolution considered in the whole study, than the character of the score of pages dealing with our one great satiric poet before Shakespeare in his Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. They bid us hope that now Dr. Tucker is emancipated from the odious necessity of being painfully erudite, having proved that he can be it, to the full satisfaction of all identifiers of dullness and scholarship, he may give us now studies of such satire as really constitutes literature, whether verse or prose, and help us to a worthier appreciation of such marvels of comic imaginative genius, for instance, as Swift, Fielding and Byron, not to mention many others; though only too few, all in all, we are disposed at times to fear, for the salvation of Anglo-Saxondom from the appalling solemnity which consecrates dullness, and the sentimentality that makes softness to be mistaken for the very hallmark of what is virtuous and holy. Can Dr. Tucker, now that he has chiefly warned us away from deserts, lead us into a few more oases like his Chaucer?
-The Sewanee Review, Vol. 17
