Ernest Rhys

94 negative, relentlessly parodie, its contempt so great that it rejects the validity of aesthetic structures" (p. 129). But this distinction is undermined by his odd use of the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. While Purdy can be trenchant , I find some of his generalizations to be more puzzling than enlightening. Without supporting evidence, the following assertion about modernism is rather eccentric: "In fundamental ways the Gospels mean more to Conrad than to any modernist, including Eliot. . . . Conrad represents the end of a long literary trad it ion —the tradition of Shakespeare and Donne, of Blake and Shelley and Browning—of a lively dialogue with the Gospels" (p. 108). Can any serious reader of Ash Wednesday and The Four Quartets—to say nothing of Joyce's A Portrai t of the Artist or Ulysses and Lawrence's The Rainbow or The Man Who Died —accept the accuracy of the above remark? That the bibliography mentions only two items written after 1979—and none after 1980—also undermines the scholarly stature of this interesting but flawed book. Daniel R. Schwarz Cornell University 5. ERNEST RHYS J. Kimberley Roberts. Ernest Rhys. Univ. of Wales Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983. Paper $6.25 Ernest Rhys died in 1946 at an advanced age. He had been a member of the Rhymers' Club, had been one of the first poets to make use of Welsh history and myth, had been an energetic man of letters for fifty years. At the time of his death, though, he was remembered mainly as the editor of the Everyman series to which he gave thirty years of life. The Everyman books were cheap, well produced editions of classics , old and not so old, for which Rhys wrote over 130 introductions, some of them, to be sure, of no more than two or three pages. About four years back a lecture given to the Eighteen Nineties Society of London concentrated pretty exclusively on Rhys's editorial work. Yet even at the time that lecture was delivered, Rhys's diverse talents, after a long silence, were undergoing a modest revaluation. Poet, novelist, vivid if somewhat inaccurate memorialist , biographer, writer of short stories, novelist, his energy and diversity mark him as one of the last all rounders in the high Victorian mode. His father was Welsh, his mother English and he himself was brought up in Carmathen in southwest Wales, then as now one of the focal points of indigenous Welsh culture. His father wished him to have a conventional university education but the young Rhys decided to become a 95 mining engineer, a career he pursued till January 1886 when, at the age of twenty six, like so many provincials, he moved to London in pursuit of a literary career. That career, as Kimberley Roberts suggests in his brisk essay, was limited perhaps by the unremitting years he gave to the Everyman Library and his doubts about his identity: was he Welsh, Cymric of the Cymri? London English? or, indeed, like the well-known Rugby Football team, London Welsh? The dominant image of the Celt in the 1880s derived from Matthew Arnold's lectures on Celtic Literature. It was sympathetically condescending. The Celt was always in pursuit of the beautiful impossibility: was he not everywhere a race, but nowhere a nation? Yet this practical failure had its own nobility. The Celt, indeed, was a type of collective touchstone for Arnold, by which the materialism of the age might be measured and found to be wanting. As to their sensibility and their literature: it was suffused with the sense of a lost, splendid past; it was elegiac: "they went forth to the battle but they always fell"; it was responsive to the spirits of dew and fire, the unseen powers that worked in and through the natural scene. The vulgar Englishman merely remarked that the modern Irish had little visual sense, and left it at that. Hearing these tones, so magisterial , so seductive, what could the poor aspiring Celtic writer do but attempt to live up to Arnold's prescription? The image was confining, but at least it encouraged the contemporary involvement with Celtic mythology and the poetry of the...