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404 LETTERS IN CANADA gave characters and incidents immediacy and life. She also introduced the Abbey to a new universe, the "Gregorian" fantasy world of her wonder plays. The weakness of Professor Saddlemyer's approach is that she is inclined to overrate those plays which Lady Gregory overrated, and to ignore those which her Abbey contemporaries ignored. Thus for all the attraction of the idea of the idealist and his shattered dream, Lady Gregory's handling of the theme is not effective in The Image, and the play is perhaps not her best, though both Lady Gregory and Professor Saddlemyer assert that it is. Professor Saddlemyer also underestimates the importance of the tragedies, and is wrong to approach them from the point of view of character rather than structure. Instead of seeing in them "humanity caught in the grip of circumstance, of fate," she sees them as celebrating the "rebellious individual." Her conclusion, therefore, with regard to the tragedies is difficult to justify: "she rarely scales the heights of heroic tragedy, for as Yeats pointed out, the spirit of laughter is a great deflater, and once Lady Gregory allows her little people to take on their wayward personalities, she is no longer in control" (p. 72). With certain reservations, then, we can commend Professor Saddlemyer 's unsentimental evaluation of Lady Gregory's work. All the problems cannot be solved, nor all the avenues explored in a first book On a subject, nor indeed in any book, and that perhaps is fortunate. (ROBERT O'DRISCOLL) Academic fables for Faulkner, whether critical, scholarly, or merely anecdotal, nOw appear in America at the rate of four or five volumes a year. Too many of them are hasty and partial-works by over-eager intruders in the dust, scurrying to be the first in print with new information or new critical valuations. Two new studies by British scholars now teaching in Canada are not entirely free of this sense of pressure. Michael Millgate's The Achievement of William Faulkner (London: Constable [Toronto: Longmans], pp. xiv, 344, $10.00) betrays minor symptoms of the fever to publish, but is nevertheless a substantial and valuable contribution to Faulkner studies. (The meannesss of its design and production suggests an ailing and conventional Constable.) Joseph Gold's William Faulkner: A Study in Humanism (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, pp. x, 205, $4.95), though more opulent in design, is a thesis that reaches us in something less than vine-ripened condition. HUMANITIES 405 Michael Millgate rightly describes his work as an "attempt to chart what Faulkner wrote, when he wrote it, and in what general circumstances ." As the first attempt at what should be called a "Faulkner Handbook," it is highly successful. The author has studied Faulkner exhaustively in both manuscript and print; has consulted documents in widely-dispersed collections; has been in touch with Faulkner scholars, and with Faulkner's family, friends, and editors; and has made use of periodicals ranging from the college magazine Ole Miss for 1920 to recent issues of Studies in Bibliography. To bring a measure of order to this vast body of material he begins his study with a detailed essay on "The Career" which, though it does not attempt interpretation, is the most valuable biographical account of Faulkner we have. In succeeding sections Millgate reviews Faulkner's production volume by volume, with detailed information on the author's view of his work, and the comments of friends, relations, and critics. In addition there are copious cross-references to other works in the canon so that the reader is always conscious of the full Yoknapatawpha saga. The penultimate section considers the volumes of short stories as (in Faulkner's words) "contrapuntal in integration, toward one end, one finale." A final section deals briefly with "The Achievement." But Millgate does not leave us there: his Notes are an indispensable source for Faulkner scholars; and his Index is at once a key to Faulkner's reading and to his own. The built-in limitation of this "handbook" is that its design precludes a panoramic discussion of Faulkner's vision or "myth." By the concluding section On "The Achievement," the author seems to have...

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