Fiction

LETTERS IN CANADA: 1939 289 In the presen,ce of those eight lines, comment is stilled; as it is almost stilled too by Mr Pratt's verses (like Mrs In Night): To the poets who have Red To pools where little breezes dusk and shiver, Who need still life to deliver Their souls of their songsThere are roses blanched of red In the Qrien t Japanese urns to limn With delicate words, and enough wrongs To exhaust an Olympian quiver, And time, be it said, For a casual hymn To be sung for the hundred thousand dead In the mud of the Yellow River:. abounding in echoes, bursting with varying from seem at first unlike the verses of Mrs Innis. They same absolute and at the end of this review of our poetry in 1939, it is pleasant to note that 1940 will Mr Pratt's heroic narrative of the Martyrs. H. FICTION ]. R. Canadian fiction in in of some falling off' in bulk, made a rather better showing than in any year this survey Indeed, for several reasons it considered It been openly asserted in newspapers, indignant from the publishers, that at least two recent Canadian novels are read here in this country before have sanction in Great Britain or the United States. There has been a gratifying growth of interest in the ordinary Canaclian scene as a not for our fiction. Several readable stories n",:''''''nt-, and civilization of French Canada been written In problems have not been entirely one t"P"'A!"""'t" has turned his own in the Spanish civil war to good account in and writer of great promise, whose first novel was little more than a mild, sentimental has in her second book us with the in this land of bounded opportunity. LETTERS IN CANADA: 1939 289 In the presen,ce of those eight lines, comment is stilled; as it is almost stilled too by Mr Pratt's verses (like Mrs In Night): To the poets who have Red To pools where little breezes dusk and shiver, Who need still life to deliver Their souls of their songsThere are roses blanched of red In the Qrien t Japanese urns to limn With delicate words, and enough wrongs To exhaust an Olympian quiver, And time, be it said, For a casual hymn To be sung for the hundred thousand dead In the mud of the Yellow River:. abounding in echoes, bursting with varying from seem at first unlike the verses of Mrs Innis. They same absolute and at the end of this review of our poetry in 1939, it is pleasant to note that 1940 will Mr Pratt's heroic narrative of the Martyrs. H. FICTION ]. R. Canadian fiction in in of some falling off' in bulk, made a rather better showing than in any year this survey Indeed, for several reasons it considered It been openly asserted in newspapers, indignant from the publishers, that at least two recent Canadian novels are read here in this country before have sanction in Great Britain or the United States. There has been a gratifying growth of interest in the ordinary Canaclian scene as a not for our fiction. Several readable stories n",:''''''nt-, and civilization of French Canada been written In problems have not been entirely one t"P"'A!"""'t" has turned his own in the Spanish civil war to good account in and writer of great promise, whose first novel was little more than a mild, sentimental has in her second book us with the in this land of bounded opportunity. 290 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY these positive gains there may be added two negative ones: some withering blight seems to have decimated the usual crop of stories about the R.C.M.P., and several of our most prolific writers of sentimental romance have in 1939 had a vacation or a change of heart. It has been a surprising year in many ways. Frederick Niven's The Story oj Their Days may be numbered among the pleasant surprises. Mr Niven is a highly competent novelist who has sometimes published undistinguished work. This is the best of his books which I have read; the...