The A.S.P. Woodhouse volume

THE A.S.P. WOODHOUSE VOLUME' For an old Woodhousean, the shock and sadness of his death are tempered by the fact that he lived to receive the tribute offered him in this volume of essays by his friends and colleagues and former students. The man whose name stood for the best in the Canadian contribution to humanistic scholarship in general, and to English studies in particular, was denied in retirement the ''busy leisure of the scholar" wished for him in the just and graceful introduction . The man there described as in a sense the "onlie begetter" of this collection had, however, the pleasure of seeing his multi-faceted learning reHected in essays which range through the literary facts and forms and ideas of the centuries that interested him most. Collections of this kind can only be unified by dedicatory purpose and scholarly zeal, although in this case a theological thread runs (naturally enough) through about half the pieces, even warming into religious fervour when William Blissett finds that Spenser's two cantos evoke Eliot's Fo"r Quartets by ending, 41equally to our surprise and satisfaction, in prayer," or when N. J. Endicott agrees with Sir Thomas Browne that it is certainly better "to believe in guardian angels than that there are no angels at all." One questions whether most of these pieces, learned articles bristling with analogues and parallels and sources and footnotes, are properly to be called essays. But then, no other suitable and compendious term offets itself. And as for unity, every author and work treated, not merely the four essays on Milton, was an object of interest to Professor Woodhouse. The pieces are chronologically arranged; it is only by accident that the book begins with a bit of scholarly detective work reminding us of the "perfectly splendid reconstruction " of a statue from a thumb and kneecap in And Now All This, and has for its penultimate chapter a sweeping survey of a century. Rosemond Tuve takes an Ovidian tag on the last page of a manuscript of Gower's ConfessW Amantis belonging to Lady Warwick (while still a Russell), and speculating on the possibility of its being in Spenser's Italian hand, ingeniously reconstructs his probable relationships with the family, showing further by an analysis of The Ruines of Time how the multiple deaths of 1586-90 cut short his hopes of patronage. Though the curious set of connected facts "helps us to remarkably little proven knowledge," the whole treatment is persuasive, with the engaging admission that some facts show a {{conspiratorial obligingness" when there is "some hypothesis in the offing toward which they can bend themselves." Another speculative study is that on "Milton and Cats" by Geoffrey Bullough, where we are told that Milton may have known the Dutch poet's Tro,,-Ringh with its handling of Genesis materials, though he was more likely to know van Baerle's Latin·Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt, eds., Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance fo the Victorian Age: Presented to A. S. P. Woodhouse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964. Pp. xii, 340, $7.50. Volume xxxv, Number 1, October, 1965. THE A. S. P. WOODHOUSE VOLUME 105 Paradisus. Nothing is provable in either case, but "the three poems provide instances of resemblance and difference within the tradition of Renaissance religious poetry which illuminate two literatures and deserve further study." There are many fresh explorations of familiar works. William Blissett suggests that the "Two Cantos of Mutabilitie" are not left-over fragments of The Faerie Queene, but rather "a detached retrospective commentary on the poem as a whole," and further, that this "final bold foray" shows us Spenser in the unusual aspect of an ironist existentially aware of the alienated consciousness . After this formidable statement, one relaxes a little with Hugh MacLean's relating of Ben Jonson's poems to a theory of social order and "a harmonious ideal of friendship"; with R. C. Bald's tolerant treatment of Walton's Life of Donne because of the "charm and sincerity" in tbe portrait and the prevailing "classical principle of decorum" in biographical writing. though he "committed sins heinous enough to make the hair of...