A New Edition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel

257 tion whether Hardy's intention (and one he ably fulfilled) to write accurate Sapphics deserves the cordial attention Zietlow gives. Or, one may feel that his credulity is being stretched beyond endurance when he is asked to believe that the "worse than bad prose" of line 11 of "To an Unborn Pauper Child" is Hardy's attempt to make of the poem itself a "flawed, defective object, a manifestation of a world into v/hich no one should be born." In the first case, it may appear that Zietlow is giving the intention too much artistic value; in the second, it may appear that he is excusing bad writing by calling it intentional. Such are the potential pitfalls of Zietlow ' s critical method; but for most readers, I think, the dangers will be far outweighed by the quantity of new insight the method produces. All that is best in this book stems from Zietlow's willingness to extend to Hardy's poetry that preliminary good-v/ill v/hich, at its most distant extensions, might make some readers nervous. Moments of Vision makes, I think, as full a case as can be made for Hardy the deliberate and thorough craftsman. Because Zietlow's book draws our attention in a new way to both the Collected Poems as a whole and to numbers of individual poems, and because it points the way toward the remaining work to be done, the rest of us will have to take respectful account of the context Zietlow has set up. Illinois State University William W. Morgan 2. A New Edition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel Oliver Stallybrass (ed). The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster (Lond: Edward Arnold): Vol 12, Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings (1974). £5·25· Increasingly, The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster impresses by its thoroughness. It provides a standard at which editors can aim in the preparation of editions for other authors in the period 1880-1920. Now that debonair, but by no means slight, contribution to narrative theory, Aspects of the Novel, has become a part of this monument to E. M. Forster's genius. For the Forster student there is the boon of the most reliable text possible for Aspects, as a result of Oliver Stallybrass's collation of the I969 reprinting of the Pocket edition with all other important editions and with such fragments of the manuscript as survive. None of the emendations are startling, though some do change (and clarify) the sense of Forster's discourse at crucial points. Of great interest also is Stallybrass's Preface which recreates the circumstances under which the lectures were composed and which quotes from various Forster letters. At the time, For- 258 ster had begun to feel malaise at writing a work of non-fiction when he felt that he ought to be writing fiction, describing himself as "a dummy, from whom real life has been withdrawn." The recollections of two auditors at the lectures, George Rylands and F. R. Leavis, are interesting, and Stallybrass surveys the criticism of the book, possibly paying more attention to its defects than to its merits. Previously unpublished materials enhance the book for all readers of Forster. There is the delightfully ironic "The Fiction Factory" (on Clayton Hamilton's Materials and Methods of Fiction), a broadcast talk on "The Art of Fiction" for the "EEC Eastern Service (24 Nov 1944), and "Extracts from Forster's Commonplace Book." The latter provide most interesting browsing and allow one to compare at several points in Aspects Forster's original thoughts with those that he elaborated for his completed book. Some of the observations which did not get into the book are delightful and shrewd in their own right: (Tristram Shandy.) The "humours" or "ruling passions" are done from within and become obsessions instead of labels. (The Golden Bowl.) One can approach the meaning of pattern by seeing what James sacrifices to it . . . snipping beetroots and spring onions for his salad: for I know he would keep among the vegetables, if only because their reproductive organs are not prominent . . . . Perhaps, too, there is a sort of dried poetry in these...