Literary and Critical Studies

2BB UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY mer vacation when he travelled to the nearest Hudson's Bay Company post to sell his furs and stock up for another winter on the trap lines. It is not an occupation for the squeamish. To survive and prosper one must always be killing- the waiting prisoners caught in the traps and the wandering herds of caribou, the final and most conspicuous victims of the carnivorous north. Mounds of their carcasses were collected by a camp to provide meat, most of it for the dogs. It seems like an appalling carnage so that women may wear fur coats. Professor Arthur R. M. Lower also writes reminiscences of the far north: one-third of his volume on Unconventional Voyages (Ryerson, xii, 156 pp., $3.50) is about a government expedition which he headed to the western shore of Hudson Bay in the summer of 1914, long before the days of easy and rapid transportation to the region. Of his other maritime adventures described in this miscellaneous volume the most notable were during his service with the Dover Patrol in the First World War. By contrast, a trip down the Great Lakes in a grain-carrier, a journey across Canada by car, and an Atlantic crossing with several hundred American students do not appear to be particularly unconventional voyages or worth reporting. 2. Literary and Critical Studies THE EDITOR AND OTHERS Several important volumes which belong under the above heading are to be reviewed in a later number of the QUARTERLY. These include : Goethe's Faust by Barker Fairley, Poetic Process by George Whalley, Imitation and Design by Reid MacCallum, and Willa Cather by E. K. Brown and Leon Ede!. Professor F. E. L. Priestley has contributed the following review of Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (University of Toronto Press, xviii, 164 pp., $4.50) by Clarence Tracy. Despite its sensational title, this is a thorough and scholarly biography . The melodrama of Savage's claim to noble birth and of his tragic, unstable career, while by no means suppressed, is not exploited in the fashion suggested by the title, nor does the author's final judgment on Savage's claim seem identical with the judgment implied in the title. The most impressive thing about the book is in fact the judicious skill and subtlety with which Professor Tracy marshals all of the available evidence, clearly distinguishing certainties, probabilities, and improbabilities , weighing the value of each item as he fits it into a pattern ; he exhibits the shrewd logic and keenness of scent of a superior detective, and it seems doubtful whether anything but the highly unlikely discovery of fresh evidence could improve on his account. The LETTERS IN CANADA: 1953 289 difficulty of detennining the facts of Savage's parentage is great, but perhaps no greater than that of arriving at an understanding of Savage 's character. Here again the author is to be congratulated. He has resolutely abstained from psychological hypothesis and is concerned primarily to record the evidence; if Savage finally appears inexplicable , the motives of his behaviour not readily conceivable, it does not necessarily follow that the portrait here is unsatisfactory: Savage does not seem to have been transparent to his companions, yet he was vivid enough to them and is vivid enough here. The associations of Savage in both fashionable and literary society introduce many sidelights on his period and on his contemporaries. In particular, Johnson's sympathy with Savage, which might otherwise be dismissed as due to a scoundrel's plausibility and Johnson's sentimentality, seems highly reasonable in the light of the evidence. Pope's behaviour to Savage demonstrates a charity and forbearance not often emphasized as part of Pope's character, and Savage's alliance with Pope in the war against the dunces appears, as here interpreted , more creditable to both than often thought. Professor Tracy offers a number of corrections to the biographies of eighteenth-century literary figures. These give his work, as he says, an "incidental usefulness." Its main achievement is to have produced a biography which supersedes all earlier ones, which makes integral use of Savage's own writings, and which never leads the reader...