64 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Romance and Realism does suffer from major flaws. The attempt to encompass an entire epoch spanning three centuries in an essay of 100 pages was bound to result in a certain irritating sketchiness. The reduction of the complexities of forms and techniques to the simplicities of the socio-economic basis vitiates the process of evaluation. It cannot be said that the present essay marks a significant advance on the parallel chapters in Illusion and Reality, "The Development of Modern Poetry" and "The English Poets". But it contains brilliant observations regarding the sociological and intellectual determinants of many English novelists. Caudwell exposes the absurdity of the subjective-objective dicho' tomy in literature by pointing out that subject and object are not mutually exclusive opposites He goes on to say : as long as we suppose subject and object self-determined, forgetting that the subject, as part of reality, is tied to the object, and vice-versa, we get these contradictions and with them the pointless dualisms that make use of 'subjective5 and 'objective' as literary criteria, both misleading and time-wasting. Many writers are dealt with in a cursory manner. But the brief analyses he offers of Hardy and Kipling are penetrating indeed. His discussion of what he terms as the epistemological crisis in the novel since Henry James is particularly revealing. The crisis was the discovery of the reality of bourgeois norms, hitherto taken as absolute, whether in art, society, or physics. It was the discovery that the mind of the bourgeois observer, in which these norms of perception or reflection or action were established, was itself determined by the environment on which it imposed these norms. Caudwell relates it to the crisis in physics brought about by the theory of relativity. The distortions and limitations of the modern bourgeois novelists are seen by Caudwell in the light of their inability to solve the crisis of the point of view. Caudwell criticises Eliot's doctrine of the poetic mind functioning like a catalyst in poetic creation. According to Caudwell it is "the typical bourgeois myth of the free man, the undetermined observer, the man who participates in social process without being affected by it. Even the analogy is fallacious. Any reaction hastened by a catalyst can take place without that particular catalyst, but no one has yet seen poems created without a mind. The theory of ideas and emotions contained in a mind, which remains aloof from them, is as illogical and absurd as a red hot poker in which the iron is aloof from the heat." In all his mature writings Caudwell pleaded for a scientific approach to the discussion of different intellectual disciplines—an approach which would explore their mutual determinations and interconnections even while recognising the fact that each has a distinguishable sphere where the laws of other spheres should not be mechanically imported. Despite its flaws Romance and Realism is a valuable addition to British Marxist criticism. MOHAN THAMPI