Butler for Beginners

310 expected to read pointed analysis of, say, THE TRUMPET MAJOR or A LAODICEAN. Of the latter book, Prof. Carpenter comments: "The book affords glimpses of what Hardy might have become if he had been denied his Wessex and his tragic outlook, his grotesque and mythic consciousness, but it is to be read as a curiosity and then laid aside without regret." Readers who know but few of Hardy's poems will appreciate Prof. Carpenter's discussion of such buried poetic treasure as "Logs on a Hearth," of which he says: "the symbolic tension between the past and the present—between this log burning on the hearth, 'sawn, sapless, darkening with soot,' and the days when he [Hardy] and his sister climbed its bending limbs for apples—constitutes the central meaning and cannot be abstracted from the metaphors which give it life," The book contains many similar examples of such close and sympathetic analysis of Hardy's less popular novels and poems. The only aspect of Hardy's work not equally well covered is his shorter fiction, for which Prof. Carpenter has less admiration. Perhaps his stories do "range in quality from that of, say, TWO ON A TOWER to that of THE V/OODLANDERS"; their range in variety and the achievement of individual stories is greater than suggested here. This complaint is a small one, however, in light of the fulfillment of the basic aims of the study. Oddly enough, the lack of a thesis is not a handicap, perhaps because of Prof, Carpenter's enlightening emphasis on the relevant motifs in Hardy's work which help us see Hardy's work as a totality, and that the same sensibility and genius may be seen throughout his work. One significant motif may be singled out: love and sacrifice, the odd mixture we see so clearly in Marty South, Tess, Henchard and Jude, "those scapegoats of the world", whose love for someone found expression in self-giving of an extraordinary kind and led to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself„ Purdue University W. Eugene Davis 3. Butler for Beginners. Lee E. Holt. SAMUEL BUTLER. NY: Twayne Publishers, 1964. ^3.5O. Lee E. Holt's SAMUEL BUTLER is a welcome contribution to Butler scholarship insofar as it contains a wealth of material covering Butler's whole career from its beginning to its end. Unfortunately, however, the boo! has two rather fatal flaws. It is not well organized and, for the most part, lacks depth. Professor Holt breaks up the material in his chapters into individual sections designated by roman numerals and subtitles. All of this organizational paraphernalia tends to fragment his discussion into parts which are difficult to relate to the whole picture that Professor Holt is attempting to create. For instance, in Chapter 1, Section 4, he begins a discussion of the Butler-Darwin controversy, In Section 5 of the same chapter, he interrupts the discussion of this topic and does not return to it until Section 6, Furthermore, we find references to this controversy in many chapters of the book; it would have been wiser to contain the whole controversy in one chapter instead of forcing the reader continually to backtrack in order to tie the strings of the controversy together. Also, too much of the book is mere summary on a very superficial level. His discussion of EREWHON in Chapter 2 is typical of this problem: "When Higgs awakes, he hears the ghostly sound the wind makes blowing through the ten statues at the pass into Erewhon—the ten commandments of Christianity which by formalizing our lives, Butler suggests, have kept us from coming nearer to ourselves. We must pass these and leave them behind; we ought not be frightened by them since they are really only hollow bogeymen" (p. 38). And "the 'Musical Banks' at which the Erewhonians worship are used to express Butler's criticism of ethical dualism and of religious hypocrisy" (p. 41). All of this is true enough, but the discussion goes on in this "summary manner" page after page. In Chapter 4, he interrupts a discussion of THE WAY OF ALL FLESH in order to discuss LIFE AND HABIT: "Since so many of...