Humanities

480 Iq LEITERS IN CANADA: 1959 and generalized in the words "So, it seems, popular poetry is not sincere. He does not say what he means by 'popular poetry.' The main thing is to sneer at what is popular." Mr. West is a young critic with wide interests in life and literature. He approaches his material with confidence, and some ofhis writing is lively. But the subjects of this book are worth more than this easy run-over. (N. J. ENDIcorr) Paul West's The Growth ofthe Novel (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , Publications Branch, pp. viii, 87, $1.00 paper, $1.50 cloth) contains the texts ofeight half-hour talks, broadcast on C.B.C. "University of the Air." A rapid survey ofa genre as elusive as the novel needs some idea to hold it together, and Mr. West quite acceptably follows the novel's growth "from abstraction, through social realism, into introspective privacy," and hence back to "abstraction" again; he begins with Homer and Longus and ends with Camus and Hemingway. Like all historians of the novel who try to get behind Defoe, he runs into trouble with his classifications at the beginning, but moves easily enough through the last two centuries. I could object to almost every label he puts on the novels he deals with, but that wouldn't be fair, because the short radio talk leaves no room for reflection, for considered analysis: two-thirds of the time has to be spent in summarizing plots and apologetically closing off interesting by-paths. A genially instructive little book. Professor Victor Leathers, in a mercifully briefand unpretentious study, British Entertainers in France (University of Toronto Press, pp. x, 179, $4.50), has assembled, chiefly from secondary sources, notices of the performances in France of British entertainers (tumblers, clowns, dancers, mimes, creators of equestrian spectaculars, vaudeville artists, and Shakespearean troupes) from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century. From the graveyards of theatrical history, he has exhumed a few facts of more than antiquarian interest. It appears, for example, that from the harlequinades of Richard Baxter (ft. 1712-20) to the Shakespearean performances of Macready and Helena Faucit in the 1840'S, English performers were distinguished for their pantomime, for a certain fluidity and extravagance inimical to the traditions of the French classical theatre, and that the English play most certain to outrage a cultivated French audience is Othello; an unfortunate performance of that play in r822 was prophetic of the mixed reception of the 1827-8 season of English plays in Paris, which was hailed by the French Romantics and damned with faint praise HUMANITIES tq 48 I by conventional critics. The real hero ofthe chronicle is Philip Astley, who made such a good thing out ofequestrian acts before the Revolution; the moral seems to be that cultural exchanges are most successful at the level of physical skill. One would hardly guess that Mr. Leathers is describing the activities of "the quality," of a splendid if sometimes disreputable company of gifted, vivacious, temperamental, adventurous popular idols and the "harlotry players" who supported them; in his book they all appear like Sunday afternoon guests in the parlour of some provincial clergyman of Methodist extraction, presenting their engraved cards with press clippings attached. (MILLAR MACLURE) A devotee of the Canadian poets of the nineties, Arthur S. Bourinot justly notes in the Preface to his latest briefvolume that he is "still a voice crying in the wilderness" for the publication "of letters of our Canadian writers." Since it is unlikely that his cry will be answered in the near future by unendowed Canadian publishers, we must be grateful for Mr. Bourinot 's private efforts and hope that Canadian writers (or their families) will endow our university libraries with the personal records so valuable to literary historians. Mr. Bourinot's new collection, Some Letters ifDuncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman and Others (Ottawa: the editor, 158 Carleton Road, Rackliffe, pp. viii, 64, $3 .50), throws valuable light on the character and ideas of D. C. Scott. Of particular interest is a correspondence between Scott and E. K. Brown which reveals much about the editorial background of the posthumous Lampman volume At the Long...