Crackanthorpe in Facsimile

307 laid in the future, is satiric in the manner of 1984 and Brave New World. As in many a piece of science-fiction, the time is long after the Third World War, when the twenty million survivors of holocaust have retreated into caverns and, beyond the barbarism Hardy imagined, become beasts. A central character, Jael 97, revolts against the dictatorship that seeks to abolish "pain, love, idealism, and the right to know and become oneself." CP. Snow, on the other hand, treats modern life from 1914 to the present in a method reminiscent of an older realism. The central character of the series called Strangers and Brothers. Lewis Eliot, reflects Snow's experiences as student, physicist. University tutor , minister in the Labour Government, publicist, and lecturer. Settings are in Cambridge, London, and a midland town like Leicester . "Each novel has its conflict that meshes with the private and public conflict of Eliot, that makes the series as a whole both an ideological and a dramatic unity." Webster calls the series "the most ambitious . . . linked novels anyone apart from Proust, DuGard, Mann, Romains, Dos Passos, and Anthony Powell has undertaken in our century." In conclusion, Webster presents in a few sentences each a dozen or so novelists not treated in a chapter, among them Golding, of whom he says: "Against the grain of most criticism I feel that it is triumph he writes about in Lord of the Files, of Ralph and Piggy's endurances by cowardice and cunning until the return of the reign of law that keeps us civilized." After the Trauma, sound and scholarly, though pungently written and here and there racy, has many values. For the reader seeking an English novel both sober and "relevant," it is a guide; for the person who may have read widely but not studied novels, it properly places his reading in the main stream. This study may provide even the specialist-professor a useful perspective. Chiefly , perhaps, it invites the non-specialist to read some writers casual selection has caused him to overlook. University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill J. 0. Bailey 3. CRACKANTHORPE IN FACSIMILE Collected Stories (1893-1897) of Hubert Crackanthorpe Together with An Appreciation by Henry James, introd by William Peden. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969. $25.00. This one-volume reprint of Crackanthorpe's four collections of stories and sketches is the kind of publishing venture one wishes were more common. Few libraries have the original editions of Wreckage (I893), Sentimental Studies and A Set o_f Village Tales (1895). Vignettes (1896). and Last Studies (I897), which includes Henry James's appreciation. Over the past ten years, copies have become relatively scarce on the antiquarian book market. 308 One suspects that interest in Crackanthorpe may have been adversely affected by such irrelevant factors as his unlikely name and, more seriously, the unavailability of his books. The latter is unfortunately the case with many minor yet sometimes quite influential writers of the 1890's. Also, like so many of the men of the 'nineties, he produced a relatively small body of work and most of that in forms of small scope, and thus, one supposes, littlß weight. The short form - story, sketch, vignette, portrait -, whatever the label, was unquestionably the most characteristic literary form of the 'nineties. The period was, if not the nursery or elementary school, the high school of the modern short story in all its variety. Crackanthorpe, although often labelled "the English Maupassant" and although somewhat influenced by Henry James, remained very much in the shadows of the great writers. Professor Peden wisely does not try to bloat Crackanthorpe's minor talent. Crackanthorpe, however , was a dedicated craftsman. He did provide fine examples of stories in which moods and impressions are kept under artistic control . The sense of the sadness of life seldom degenerates into mawkish sentimentality, nor into the aggressive loathsomeness with which he was often charged. Finally, one wishes that Professor Peden had included the few uncollected stories and sketches but especially such critical essays as "Reticence in Literature" and "Realism in France and England," both of which contributed quite significantly to the debate in which, at various times, Henry James...