The Humanities

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1957 459 past and exerts her irresistible fascinations. Here, certainly, is almost the stereotype of women's magazine fiction. Yet, the novel is always sustained by a probing and sensitive style, and by the author's awareness of the complexity of any human situation. All this is not enough, however, for the book leaves one with a final sense of empty depression. The main reason for this, I think, is that Miss Marshall has failed to relate the inner world of her characters to the outer world in which they move. The two worlds seem, in fact, to be quite distinct from each other. This is a pity, for each world is skilfully presented. Toronto, for instance, is recorded with meticnlous, if unloving, accuracy, and there are passages of unusually keen discernment into the nature of middle-class Toronto society. Miss Marshall's failure to bring together her inner and outer worlds has, I think, a general significance for Canadian fiction. All too often the outer world becomes an end in itself, as it does, for instance, in Tamarac, or, on the other hand, the characters live in a stuffy cave, cut off from the outside light, as they do in Lovers and Strangers. Frank Freedman's first novel, This Side of Holman's Hill (Secker & Warburg [British Book Service], 197 pp., $2.75), is another illustration of absorption in an inner world. It is a study in the pathology of the hospital patient, done with a relentless intensity and a scrupnlous care for authentic detail that leaves the reader exhausted and depressed. Compare either Lovers and Strangers or This Side of Holman's Hill with The Feast of Lupercal, and you get a vivid idea of the releasing effect of an author's social vision. Mr. Moore is also concerned with highly introverted characters; but his novel leaves one with a sense of exhilaration as if one had been permitted to gain an insight into the multiple interrelation between society and the individual. Despite the solid achievement of writers like Ethel Wilson and Morley Callaghan, and others too, one feels at times that the novelist has not yet learned to be completely at home in Canada, and that he has difficnlty in seeing this country as a human society. That is the reason why so much of our fiction splinters into dramatized sociology, or earnest parable, or private narrative. But that is the reason, too, why the writing of fiction in this country should be a quest and may ultimately be a discovery. THE HUMANITIES Professor Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, x, 383 pp., $6.90) is a work which cannot readily be fitted into the pattern of the reviewing demanded by a survey such as "Letters 4bU THE HUMANITIES in Canada." Consequently an extended review of it by Professor M. H. Abrams of Cornell University will appear in a forthcoming issue. Comments on other books in the Humanities follow. [EDITOR] To feel the living personality of a man at the distance of more than a century and a half is an exciting experience, and it is such an experience that reading Coleridge's notebooks provides. The publication of a double volume consisting of the text covering the decade 1794-1804, and the accompanying notes, edited by Kathleen Coburn (The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I, 1794-1804: Text and Notes. Bollingen Series L. New York: Pantheon Books [Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited], 1957. Pp. xlii, 546 (text) ; xlvi, 615 (notes) . $14.00) is the beginning of the projected complete edition of the notebooks in five or six double volumes. Perhaps the double volumes provide the only feasible solution for presenting such a mass of material; yet it is awkward to handle text and notes in separate books. Until their fairly recent acquisition by the British Museum, the fiftyfive notebooks which were in the library of the late Lord Coleridge were inaccessible except to Professor Coburn, who had been privileged to work on them there. With Lord Coleridge's permission Professor Coburn generously made available to some other scholars certain materials pertinent to works in progress; but except for the fragments in Anima...