The Hardy Letters

92 DALE KRAMER periodic freezing of the Thames, the nuptials of Princess Elizabeth and the death o!Prince Henry; in the same tradition is the voluminous work ofJohn Taylor, the Water Poet. While these are some of the more ohvious antecedents, the tradition could be traced much further back. Indeed, it is startling that a book on the river in early American literature should make no mention at all of the greatest examples of river literature, Spenser's marriage of the Thames and Medway, the Prothalamion, and Drayton's Poly-Olbion. Virtually the only English antecedent that Seelye discusses is Denham's Cooper's Hill. Certainly the author is correct in stressing that biblical rivers offer the real paradigm for the settlers' response to their landscape. But this view suggests that at the borders of the Holy Land the Jordan became subterranean, only to resurface in America around 1600. If Seelye's view of river literature is one-sided, it must be emphasized that he is not trying to offer a comprehensive survey of the genre. In a prefatory note to his index he remarks that the 'river names are chiefly keys to symbolic roles' (p 405), and this is generally true of his treatment of the river. He is not examining the manifestations of the river motif. Rather, he perceives it as emblematic of the American experience. Its symbolic nature is prophetic ofwhat will happen to the Cavalier and Puritan impulses as they are naturalized in the New World. John Seelye's subject matter, then, is not really the river, although it meanders through his discussion of the literature and history. Rather, the river is a fixed symbol drawn from the landscape and used to remind us of a recurrent pattern in American cultural history. Scholars will return to Prophetic Waters, not for what it tells us about rivers, but for what it tells us of the emerging characteristics of American literature that are latent, but very much present, in these early works. As Seelye explains in his Ex Ubris, he is responding to a current tradition in American studies. As I have suggested, his waters do not always run smoothly; to navigate them one must often resist the rhetorical current, and be aware of those snags that get in the way of his meaning. I would recommend that one begin Prophetic Waters at the concluding Ex Libris, where Seelye provides a chart for the intellectual currents we are to follow; this is an important work and will have a crucial place in the critical tradition that he outlines there. The Hardy Letters DALE KRAMER The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Volume I: 1840-1892 Edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978. xxii, 293· $37.50 Readers who expect letters by great literary artists to have a certain bent which fascinates will be surprised when they come across this edition. Unlike Keats who discourses inventively and self-perceptively on matters of aesthetics, Byron THE HARDY LETTERS 93 who revels in his own personality and in the activities of his societylor George Eliot (Maryann Evans) who combines sensitive awareness of others' feelings and an astute judgement of affairs of the intellectual world, Hardy restricts himself in his letters to the matters at hand - which more often than not are the details of arranging for and being paid for the stories he wrote, or the reviewers' criticisms he was always anxious to disparage or explain away, or, while writing to his wife Emma, the arrangements he was making for their yearly stay in London. He seldom permits himself to say anything personal or self-revelatory, and when he does he is likely to attempt to disguise whatever degree of heartfeltness there may have been in the utterance. For instance, when writing to Edmund Gosse about Robert Louis Stevenson's departure from England in search of a healthier climate , Hardy goes abruptly from a reference to Stevenson's usual 'high-spirited ardent mood, irrespective of circumstances' to'As to despondency I have known the very depths of it - you would be quite shocked if I were to tell you how many weeks & months in byegone years I...