George Meredith: A Bibliography by Michael Collie (review)

392 LETTERS IN CANADA art, and (more importantly) with a readiness to reread Tennyson himself. There are not many books that do as much. (DONALD s. HAIR) Michael Collie, George Meredith: A Bibliography. University of Toronto Press, 290, $25.00 Michael Collie's bibliography of Meredith will be much less agreeable to Meredithians than it would have been had it been a more adequate piece of scholarship. It raises the question posed by any imperfect work of scholarship - as opposed to criticism - of how far - and how much - it can be trusted. In a bibliography aspiring in all but one of its parts (Part v, Translations) 'to completely comprehensive coverage' that the question is raised at all must make the reader profoundly uneasy. The volume is intended as a complement to c.L. Cline's superb 3volume edition of the Letters (~970) and to the posthumous publication of Phyllis Bartlett's edition of the poetry. (There is no definitive edition of the novels, as Professor Collie points out.) It lists the first and bibliographically interesting other editions of the novels and short stories, the other prose, the poems, collected editions, and translations. Throughout there is an informal character to the work, the result of Professor Collie's mingling of citations from Cline's letters, gestures at criticism of his own, observations on the manuscripts (some made at length, as with Diana of the Crossways) and commentary on the development of the works and usually their publication history with the bibliographieal descriptions. The result, from the introduction forward, is a colloquial cast to the volume, which mayor may not be desirable, depending on the reader; Professor Collie is a presence in the volume and one is unable to forget for long that this is an interpretative bibliography in many senses. Probably the extent of the interpretation and the scope of the book's ambition account for many of its shortcomings. It expands and contracts apparently at will: eg, 3lf pages each for The Egoist and The Tragic Comedians followed by n for Diana, 6 for One of Our Conquerors, and 2Jf for Lord Ormont and his Aminta. What accounts for the elaborate treatment given to Diana (largely through a detailed account of Meredith 's agonies in producing the book and an attempt at reconstructing the process of composition out of the several manuscripts) is not clear unless it is the novel's popularity - though how that could do so is uncertain . But the scale of the bibliography's attempt at 'authoritative statements on the development of Meredith as a writer' is too massive since those cannot be made in 1.1. pages any more than in 2~ - and it is distressing to the reader, when for example he begins the lengthy section on the mss of Diana, to realize once again that the volume is much HUMANITIES 393 less careful than it is ambitious. Several letters are there cited by Professor Collie and in the course of ten lines, 4 errors are committed, including the wrong dating of one letter and the misspelling of the name of the correspondent to whom it was addressed ! (Letter 729 in Cline is to Mrs Wyse, not Wise and it was written on 23 January 1882, not 23 June.) The slipshod scholarship is probably, as I suggest, the result of Professor Collie's spreading his net too widely. Something had to give and what gave was the painstaking care for detail and the accuracy which alone give a bibliography value. But here I must warn the reader that he will have to verify, among other things, each reference to Cline's edition of the letters since - to judge from those I have examined - they are as likely to be incorrect as not. In addition, certain eccentricities in the treatment of the material are also, I think, to be attributed to the volume's ambitions. Professor Collie seems to include or delete things as the fancy takes him - or to hurry them aside. One instance of the latter occurs on pages 83- 4 when he is dealing with the first English publication of The Tale of Chloe. He lists the Ward, Lock & Bowden edition covered in...