Humanities: Literary Studies

390 LEITERS IN CANADA: 1965 characters in their trouble ·and .turrnoil are struggling shapes in the middle.disi:ance: their inner life is never real enough .to us to justify the high romantic tone, the portentous intensity, which permeates the novel's dialogue, descriptions, and moments of introspection. . The remaining three novels can be dealt with more briefly. Arthur Hailey's Hotel (Doubleday, pp. viii, 376, $6.95), is another commercially successful addition to his growing series of formula novels: a technologically complex setting which is carefully and extensively researched (this time not an airport or hospital but a large hotel) and a suspenseful two-dimensional story (this time cruder and :more predictable ). The book's only moment of poetry comes (pp. 127 ff.) when. the wealthy hotel chain magnate, Curtis O'Keefe, describes his vision of the hotel of the future perfected through the wonders of technology. David Walker is a less calculating and more self-indulgent \1\'fiter than Hailey. Mallabec (Collins, pp. 223, $4.50) has a complicated plot involving an adulterous triangle which repeats itself over two generations, but the story is almost lost in the portentous nature and river symbolism that pervades the novel. The attempt !s to give more substance to a threadbare and unconvincing.set of human events by linking ·it to the elemental world of Canadian nature. Walker's undeniable fluency and descriptive power are much less evident than in his grand failure of the same kind several years ago, Where the High Winds Blow. Finally, Kenneth Orvis's Night Without Darh.ness (McClelland & Stewart, pp. 223, $4.95) is a pastiche of Ian Fleming, sufficient warning for anyone who has begun to feel that1 the cultural lag and its evil consequences are a thing of the past. HUMANITIES LITERARY STUDIES The Poet and His Faith: Religion and Poetry in England from Spenser to Eliot and Auden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [Toronto: University of Toronto Press], pp. xii, 304, $6.95) by Professor· A. P. HUMANITIES 391 Woodhouse represents the first of a series of lectures under the auspices of the FrankL. Weil Institute for Studies in Religion and the Humanities , in Cincinnati. They were composed and delivered at a time .of anxious and distressing .personal preoccupations, and the author was never altogether happy, even after .re-writing, with ·some. parts of his manuscript. ·Readers will note some recurring evidence·of ·this feeling in the text, as well as in the preface. Nor· has the publisher done much to make the .book initially attractive : the title is unfortunate, the jacket and blurb mean and trashy. Woodhouse was good on titles, as on so much else. He once observed of Saintsbury's The Peace of the Augustans that one should remember the title only: that was perceptive, the text not worth. the effort. Here we have the opposite situation: the subject seems worn, the title flatly conventional, and lectures covering this much ground do not always turn out well. But the reader who persists beyond these externals, and gets right into the text, will be held by the operation of a powerful and discriminating intellect upon a central tradition in English poetry. For connoisseurs of W oodhousiana (and there are many) some incidental remarks will sharpen the pleasure: for example, he says of George Wither, ". . . whose reliance on inspiration rather than art seems to have been on the whole ill founded"; or of Coleridge, "Having named his first son Hartley, Coleridge called his second Berkeley; and if he had continued 'this useful practice, we should have had a valuable guide to his intellectual history-it would have required, however, an inordinately large family." But these ornaments are by the way. For the substance of what emerges as a central argument, one should begin with· the description of Richard Hooker's position, on pp. 13-15.·T ake that- and it is a handsome piece of writing in itself-with its admiration for a lucid and rational answer to the anxieties of an age when politics got mixed up with religion (as happens now in states recapitulating old problems), and put it with the inspired quotation of Philip Larkin's "Churchgoing" (with the...