A Yea and a Nay for Two Edwardian Studies

critics of this postwar, generation believe constitute his greatest artistic achievement. Moss's style is better than journalistic; it is occasionally aphoristic and particularly good at relating biographical information to the stories. Indeed, a thirty-three page chapter entitled "The Foundations," which sketches Kipling's life, may be the best-written essay of its length on the very special circumstances of Kipling's family background and upbringing. It is judiciously proportioned, and it has important things to say about Kipling's Victorianism, his mother complex, his changing attitude toward war, and the significant parallels between life in India and life in East Sussex. The book does, not Insist on the existence of hitherto-unspected meanings, symbols, or "paradigms" in stories that we are all familiar with, and benefits thereby. It moves briskly from story to story, and its treatment of Kim is both a model of selective analysis and a natural climax for the entire work. It is surprising that Moss has not taken advantage of the insights contained in Lord Birkenhead's biography (the book has been out long enough—since 1978—to have proved useful on a number of points of some concern to Moss's study). A systematic review of the Kipling Journal, which has been publishing since 1927, would have unearthed a large number of relevant materials, more at any rate than the few items with a largely critical emphasis cited in the Bibliography. Moss does not seem to have consulted the 5,672 pages of The Readers' Guide to Rudyard Kipling's Work, prepared by Roger Lancelyn Green, Alec Mason, and R. E Harbord between 1961 and 1972, or he would have qualified some judgments and reconsidered others. Such scholarship is not necessarily antithetical to the sort of book Moss has produced here, which is based on wide reading; perhaps (we may hope) it will serve as a starting point for a volume that treats Kipling's later work. At any rate, he will find a rich bibliography of Kipling biography and criticism in Helmut E. Gerber and Edward Lauterbach's listings, published In English Fiction in Transition, III, nos. 3-5 (1960), and VIII, nos. 3-4 (1965); they are a logical place to identify patterns in Klplingiana. In the meantime, Moss's book should be welcomed by many readers who seek an intelligent, straightforward treatment of a major theme in Kipling's life and work. Harold Orel University of Kansas 2. A YEA AND A NAY FOR TWO EDWARDIAN STUDIES Jefferson Hunter. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982. $17.50 That genial bookman, Ernest Rhys, once lectured at the University of Pennsylvania on the art of getting to know a book by holding it with friendly finger tips, turning over the leaves casually to obtain preliminary glimpses in an unpremeditated order to get a candid introduction to the author's personality. Jefferson Hunter's book responded pleasingly to that probing. The glimpses arranged themselves· The dedication, the preface, the acknowledgments, the promise to notice not only the main subjects but also contemporary novels that would appear on no one's reading list and were long out of print offered a cheering introduction that the book fulfilled. The poems by Alfred Austin and W. E. Henly struck the tone of the period with perfect fairness. 54 The author understands the continous flow of incentive from earlier writing to sensitive readers who become the new writers, and supplies fresh knowledge of the process, as of George Chetwyn Griffith's influence on H. G. Wells, and Walter Besant's on Kipling. Hunter's noticing the work of such writers as E. V. Lucas, Walter de la Mare, G. K. Chesterton, George Douglas, M. P. Wlllcocks, Oliver Onions, Ernest Bramah, Ronald Firbank, Hilaire Belloc, W. H. Hudson, Eden Philipotts, Phyllis Bottome, Kipling, and Conan Doyle shows his keen awareness of the breadth and vitality of the writing experiences surrounding the selected subjects. I hail the tribute to Arnold Bennett's art: "The integrity of a scrupulously honest mind determined to say all that it can about the ordinary life," and eager to disclose the romance throbbing within that life. There is so much that...