Decorations

34 War II: B. F. Skinner's Waiden II, Ivan Yefremov's Andromeda and Aldous Huxley's Island. The Future as Nightmare Is annoying In a major respect. Since Wells's rapid reversal about I900 from anti-utopian to Utopian so conveniently puts him on both sides of the issue, and since, In any case, the ground of this shift is the main puzzle of Wells criticism today, It Is disturbing that Mr. Hillegas registers the changeover In silence as to its causes or its significance. One inevitably wonders In just what sense the anti-utoplans are Wellslan and In what sense counter-Wellsian if Wells himself was somehow both. The force of Wells's influence, and of its binocular quality, are not In question here. Mr. Hillegas very fully and convincingly demonstrates the deliberate evisceration of fatbellied Wellslanlsm In the great antl-utoplas; and he is equally authoritative In demonstrating the less obvious fact that, more or less consciously or unconsciously, the anti-utopias (except That Hideous Strength) are derivative in form and in certain important imagery from Wells's early works of cosmic pessimism, the scientific romances. Nevertheless, it Is with some sense of disappointment that one reads at the conclusion of an incontrovertible demonstration of Zamyatln's reverencing of Wells as one who detested regimented Utopian perfection that "Actually, Zamyatln probably did not understand the drift of Wells's work well enough to see that the rationalism and regimentation he opposed in We_ was at least a strong element In Wells's thought." Yes, but when did it become a strong element and how and why? Zamyatln was not wrong If he was thinking primarily of The Time Machine or The Island of Dr. Moreau; nor could it be asserted positively that Wells admires regimentation more than he abhors it even in When the Sleeper Wakes. It would be ungrateful to continue in this vein. The Future as Nightmare leaves one with a solid sense of acquaintance with the whole genre of antl-utopia and with proof positive of the direct influence of H. G. Wells upon each of its major practitioners. University of Michigan David Y. Hughes 38 death, at his request. Nevertheless, Wright has turned tens of thousands of pages in volumes owned by Hardy, and identified patterns of influence and thought in the marginalia recorded, year after year, in Hardy's precise script. Hardy's Judgment that he was, first of all, a poet has led Wright to examine such crucial questions as how Hardy developed a poetic theory for himself. Heargues that there are two Hardys in the poetry: one, the poet who, "when told that one of his poems was not good, would reply that it was, nonetheless, true," and the other, "the genius, trained in the craft, but transcending it," "so familiar with the voices of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and the rest that the essence of their art often infused his verse." Wright has retraced the history of Hardy's absorption in the Napoleonic Wars, from his earliest years, when he read Dryden, Vergil, and "the classics," to the later years, when he visited Napoleon's tomb, the Tuileries, Saint Cloud, the battlefield at Waterloo, and Chelsea Hospital, where he talked to veterans of the campaigns. The major part of this study is devoted to the literary uses that Hardy made of his disparate (and perhaps ultimately irreconcilable) materials. It is a fuller treatment of Hardy's use of sources than W. R. Rutland's pioneering analysis of the Trafalgar scenes (in Thomas Hardy: A Study of His Writings and Their Background, 1938"Î A-useful chapter, "The Text from Hough Draft to Book," evaluates the extent and quality of the revisions which Hardy made before page-proofs went back to the printer; Wright's collation of the rough draft, the copy, the British Museum manuscript, and the printed text, is a Judicious summary of small points. It will no longer do to say that The Dynasts was written to illustrate a German philosophy, or that the poem is anti-humanistic, or that it represents an eccentric deviation from epic tradition, or that Hardy should have continued writing novels. No...