The Colbeck Collection

Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 and one wishes that the Keefes had extended this area of inquiry. They begin by examining the Victorian politics of Apollonianism. Although the Keefes do not distinguish adequately between Pater's intellectual liberalism and his political conservatism, they note how German classicists like Müller and Winckelmann were part of the "post-Napoleonic reaction that swept through Germany" (111) and how their conservative Apollonianism was absorbed by British Hellenists like Arnold and Pater. According to the Keefes, Pater did not begin in the conservative camp, but later moved "toward a civilized Dorianism that mirrors the virtues of modern conservative society" (115). "By the 1880s," they claim, "Pater had become a conservative writer" (27). They see the "Lacedaemon" chapter of Plato and Platonism as "the most regrettable piece Pater ever wrote." They say, "The Pythagorean/ Platonic harmony he admires so much has a distinctly Prussian cadence when applied to politics, a tendency to replace the dissonance of freedom with a repressive social sonority" (129). The Keefes place Plato and Platonism in the tradition of "authoritarian conservatism" that characterized "various forms of British and American aestheticism" (129). Even in "Style" they detect an elitism that translates into a fear of the masses. In addition to political conservatism, they also levy the charge of essentialism against Pater's later writing. "For all his historicism," they say, "Pater longs for the philosophical surety of an essentialist world" (124). They offer no evidence for Pater's essentialism, however; and in my reading of Pater, from the very beginning he was profoundly relativist and never essentialist. Even in Plato and Platonism, as the section on dialectic makes clear, this charge is untenable. There will be disagreement over this book; but despite its shortcomings , it suggests some interesting possibilities for future Pater scholarship. F. C. McGrath _______________________________University of Southern Maine_________ THE COLBECK COLLECTION A Bookman's Catalogue: The Norman Colbeck Collection of NineteenthCentury and Edwardian Poetry and Belles Lettres. 2 vols. Tirthankar Bose, ed. Norman Colbeck, comp. Introduction by William E. Fredeman . Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. $60 U.S. $75 Canada Norman Colbeck's career lies in the best tradition of the book collector. A second-hand book dealer from 1927 on, he amassed a 223 Book Reviews, 32:2, 1988 private library of his own, mainly consisting of Victorian poetry. We are all accustomed by now to great American or Canadian institutions of higher learning nonchalantly buying whole collections. So were matters accomplished in the years of the fat kine. In 1967, thanks to the energy of Dr. W. E. Fredeman, the University of British Columbia acquired not merely the collection, but the collector himself. Colbeck was imported as the person most apt to catalogue what he had himself assembled. In his new home at Vancouver, Norman Colbeck married, acquired Canadian citizenship, received an academic appointment, and in his eighties memorializes himself in this massive two-volume catalogue which represents the nineteenth-century element in his collection. Colbeck's heroes are the great bibliographers of the 1920s and 1930s, Michael Sadleir principally, and those whom Sadleir influenced, John Carter and Robert Lee Woolf. And in the 1930s there was the sharp and formidable A. J. A. Symons. The characteristic of Sadleir and his school, the "biblioboys" as they called themselves, was a reliance on binding cloth rather than on paper and pagination. And despite Dr. Fredeman's assurances in his Preface, pagination is rarely given. Dates of publication even are on occasion omitted (see, for example, William de Morgan's Joseph Vance, 193). As to colour, there is after all no agreed colour code. By the rigorous and more sophisticated standards of the 1960s and 1970s, this Bookman's Catalogue is indeed a catalogue; it is not a bibliography, embodying the aspiration to represent edition, impression, issue and state. It is, though, only fair to say that the two volumes here are offered not as a bibliography but a catalogue, or at all events one of those less exacting forms that lie between the mandarin niceties of Virginia and Oxford and the humble check list. Moreover, the entries here are the consequence of serendipity and of what Dr...