Engaged and Disengaged by Douglas Bush (review)

414 LETTERS IN CANADA The collection of lectures from the English Institute of 1965, Northrop Frye in Modem Criticism (Columbia University Press [Toronto: Copp Clark], pp. xii, 203, $5.00 U.S.) is a self-reviewing book. Frye's own work in the schematizing of literature and the anatomy of criticism has already been widely reviewed and discussed, as the full bibliography attests. To this discussion the book adds first a rather full introductory essay by the editor, Murray Krieger, "Ariel and the Spirit of Gravity," which delights the reader with a neat and useful diagram contrasting Frye's theory with the traditional theory of the relation of Critic, Work, and World; then a letter by Frye welcoming the decision to devote a session of the Institute to the consideration of a contemporary critic; then the three lectures. Angus Fletcher, in "Utopian History and the Anatomy of Criticism," pursues the analogy between Frye's critical endeavours and the replanning of Paris by Baron Haussmann, and Geoffrey Hartman , in "Ghostlier Demarcations," sees Frye as a fulfilment of Bishop Hurd, the eighteenth-century reviver of chivalry and romance, and finds the Anatomy at its best as an Anatomy of Romance. W. K. Wimsatt, who seems determined to be, in cheerless phrase, nobody's fool, contributes a vigorous essay, "Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth." This encounter of minds is concluded by Frye's "Reflections in a Mirror," surely one of his deftest and most pleasing performances. The task of the reviewer is to refrain from saying anything that yet another commentator can comment on. The lectures are quite good ones, up to the usual standard of the English Institute. The specialist in critical theory will need to read them; the general student of literature will be better occupied in re-reading the Anatomy of Criticism. Inflationary pressures being what they are, I think the apotheosis of Frye in mid-career is likely to occasion the apocolocyntosis of many another professor. (WILLIAM BLISSETT) This collection of essays by Douglas Bush (Engaged and Disengaged, Harvard University Press [Toronto: Saunders of Toronto]' pp. viii, 251, $4.75) ranges in time from two pieces published in 1929, On such diverse subjects as Thomas Bowdler and Professor A. J. Bell of Victoria College, to an uproarious review of Maren-Sofie RslSstvig's The Hidden Sense in 1966. In genre, the essays run from parody-spoof through polemic to affirmation of the traditional values of the humanist's creed. Of nineteen essays, five have reference in their titles to humane studies HUMANITIES 415 and attitudes, and the ideal is present by implication in them all. The author is profoundly conservative (not in the political but in the a-political sense); he quotes with approval Howard Mumford Jones' definition of humane teaching, that it should lead men to accept "the changeless meaning of the three most powerful words in any dialect-justice, virtue, and love. 1I Professor Bush early saw the kind of leverage one can employ with what is called the "topos of affected humility," and some would say that he has used it so often that it has become a cliche, but in his case it has been supported by the genuine humility of the scholar. There has never been anything despotic about his way of going at literature, and this is one reaSOn why generations of English students bave trusted him when they have not trusted some of his more absolute contemporaries. All the same, he's a witty man, and he enjoys cutting down some of the Orgoglios of the profession, John Dewey, for example, or the less persuasive of the myth-and-symbol critics. Harvard has been no ivory tower for him, and many of these essays and addresses illustrate his strong sense of the responsibility of the scholar and teacher to work, like Nehemiah, with the trowel in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster. (M,LLAR MAcLuRE) DRAMA Marion B. Smith's Dualities in Shakespeare (University of Toronto Press, pp. viii, 252, $6.50) is a book of Shakespearean criticism one welcomes. While the chapters on the Sonnets and the different plays are not equally persuasive or profound, the style of...