Conrad: A Mixture Warmed Over

246 7. Conrad: A Mixture Warmed Over Frank W. Cushwa. AN INTRODUCTION TO CONRAD. New York: Odyssey P, 1933; 15th printing. $2.50. For resasons best kept to themselves, the editors of the Odyssey Press have seen fit to reprint a 31-year-old potpourri of Joseph Conrad, entitled AN INTRODUCTION TO CONRAD. If it were simply an anthology of short fiction, it would be innocuous; but its editor, the late Frank V/. Cushwa, mingles chunks of Conrad's letters and memoirs with fragments of stories and novels to make up an "autobiographical" section of the book that occupies three-fifths of the volume. With "Marlow is really Conrad" (p. 87) as a work rule, the editor, despite his enthusiasm for Conrad's talent, cannot possibly convey any understanding of Conrad's intention as an artist in fiction. The perhaps unavoidable failure to include any of the recently revealed information about Conrad's early life in Poland and France is bad enough; but this refusal to distinguish between reminiscence and fiction renders the volume useless for any serious student of Conrad, and more importantly, cruelly confusing for the beginning reader of this important novelist. Purdue University Raney Stanford 8. Selected Victorians E. D. H. Johnson (ed). THE WORLD OF THE VICTORIANS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY AND PROSE. New York: Scribner's, 1964. $3.95. Paper. This anthology is obviously designed for a rather specific kind of course and is therefore limited in its usefulness. The contents are organized by topic rather than chronologically or by author. The six parts are labelled: "Signs of the Times," "The Individual and Society," "The Search for Faith," "The Role of the Artist," "The Ends of Education," "The Mask of Comedy." Because the emphasis seems to be mainly on ideas rather than on giving individual authors representation according to their importance or providing poems which will represent . the essential quality of a given author, many teachers of Victorian literature will undoubtedly find the treatment of individual authors inadequate. Tennyson and Browning, for example, are quite thinly represented and the pieces they are represented by hardly characterize the complexity and variety of their work. Hardy is represented by only "Nature's Questioning" and "In Tenebris II." On the other hand, this volume does include rather more pieces by Pater, including "The Child in the House." Even more unusual and admirable, is the inclusion of a passage from W. H. Mal lock's THE NEW REPUBLIC which parodies Pater's style and ideas and a portion of the satiric musical banks section of Samuel Butler's EREWHON. Professor Johnson's anthology, although not very serviceable for the conventional course in Victorian poetry and prose, might be a useful text in a course dealing with Victorian thought. Even then, I for one, would supplement this text with additional readings in the Victorian novel, such as Dickens' HARD TIMES or BLEAK HOUSE, Gissing's NEW GRUB STREET, and perhaps a few essays. Purdue University H. E. Gerber ...