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158 REVIEWS 1. "TRANSITIONAL WITH A DIFFERENCE." Samuel Hynes. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton: Frinceton UP, Ι90Έ. $9.75. Neither compendious nor thorough, only modestly representative and moderately balanced, slight in scale yet still sometimes skimpy, Samuel Hynes·s The Edwardian Turn of Mind satisfies nonetheless because of its unmistakable artistry and the confidence that this artistry inspires. Once we recognize and accept the limits of its conception, we are free to appreciate the author's accomplishment, and a relatively significant one it is, for this eminently readable work very successfully embodies in its ten carefully wrought, semi-autonomous chapters dramatic values that its author has subtly sensed nearly everywhere in his varied material. We have here an engaging book. Eased on considerable research, it is built so coolly that the grand effort scarcely shows. What does show, splendidly at times, is Hynes's acute sense of the timely, his gift for divining detail. Not a definitive work, it is more an assemblage of vivid vignettes. In all, for all its limitations, it is a valuable study, at once instructional and entertaining, because of the author's skill in assembling a cluster of lively scenes from the drama of Edwardian transition. The age of Edward VII, Victoria's late-blooming son, was certainly one of transition; but the nature of this transitional time - "transitional with a difference," as the author puts it has not been understood well enough, certainly not in its specifics, and herein lies Hynes's principal contribution: his particularization of what is essentially process and pattern. Here too lies its chief weakness as history: his failure to isolate dominant process and distinctive pattern. Approaching history much as an artist approaches the stuff of his art, Hynes puts his trust in the telling fact and the revealing gesture. His gift for ingenious selection, for fastening on to precisely that crisis or situation or personage most likely to illuminate nearly everything it touches, carries us a long way. It may not be history in the fullness of its happening that we thus apprehend; yet we apprehend much of the awesome whole because Hynes points us to appropriately emblematic parts. Symbolic history, if you will - but history it is and it is mighty refreshing to read. 159 It is a tribute to Hynes·s taste and to his talent as a teacher that he keeps us aware constantly of the curious equilibrium that marked this curious age. Focusing on diverse but fundamentally interrelated aspects of Edwardian life such as its puzzling politics and its precocious science, its quixotic seers, and several of its artistic orthodoxies and sexual heterodoxies, the author shows again and again the characteristic ambixalence of an adolescent age eager to identify itself even while caught between powerful pressures of revision and reaction. Hynes rightly compares this unsettled age to the early seventeenth century, which also saw the passing of a great queen who for many decades (and round the turn of the century) presided over a formidable and eternal-seeming order. Alfred North Whitehead, we should recall, shrewdly epitomized this age of Donne and Descartes as one of "revolutions," and so it was at the outset of our own century. This was "a time of undifferentiated rebellion," Hynes observes, "when many rebellious minds seem to have regarded all new ideas as adaptable if only they were contrary to the old order." (Rebellion today often wears an Edwardian costume, we might reflect.) Thus a gallery of figures in whom were yoked together strange combinations of causes and callings: "Nietzschéen and Socialist, fln-de-slecle and Fabian, Bergsonlan and Post-Impressionist." This interim age nurtured such exotic phenomena as an abundant literature of invasion (Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands. for example), desperate efforts to beef up the nation's supposedly deteriorating breeding stock (thus the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, buffers against barbarism and insurance that Brittania would not recess the way of Nineveh and Tyre), a homey cult of Pan ("Barrle . . . robbed Pan to pay Peter"), and prophets such as Beatrice Webb and Edward Carpenter, the former touting one liberating cause while remaining Insulated from most others; and the latter, socialist, sandal-maker...

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