European Ideologies

memory of ... . [sic] nothing escaped my ear, and I was convinced it was not your generous self that was repeating words so foreign to your nature, to your tender heart! Some of this light decor and drama is out of Sterne and Rousseau; but I should suppose that the detail of living was something that would have come to Poe through his own family- not his wealthy Allan step-parents, but his own poor Poe relatives. Though Mrs. C!emm kept a boarding house and was a drudge who delivered the letters, she is to be suspected of having known what a fine room looked like, and how one behaved therein. Their own living in the Fordham cottage was, I should guess, French pastoral- straw beds, purest white sheets, and the luxury of a tortoise-shell cat. A definitive edition of Poe's letters at this time was very much in order. Many new letters have been printed, separately and in groups, since Mr. Harrison's collection appeared in 1902. Mr. Ostrom prints 339 letters, thirty or more of which are new or arc printed in full for the first time. These volumes appear in a style worthy of the great effort of the editor. The transcript is as exact as type will produce. Each letter is followed immediately by a note clarifying persons, places, and writings involved. Each note (practically ) is complete and self-contained. A bibliographical footnote appears for each letter in a separate section. Another separate section is a seventy-five page check-list of letters to and from Poe (830 items in all ), revised now since its separate publication in 1941. Mr. Ostrom's annotation is limited to persons and publications. Most modestly, he does " not attempt to give his hunches about Poe's literary and intellectual ancestries . The running ballad reference, which would encourage us to put Poe's dissipations, with those of Burns, in the simple "auld lang syne" category, is unnotcd. In his handling of persons, the editor has adopted a matter-of-fact way, but there are some lively moments when he is correcting some of Poe's "honesties." Mr. Ostrom continually sends the reader to Arthur Quinn's biography, that other monument in Poe scholarship to appear in this decade. EUROPEAN IDEOLOGIES' KARL F. HELLElNER The number of books and articles which offer to guide bemused North American students through the realm of contemporary European ideas, with its moral and intellectual confusion of tongues, is *European Ideologies: A Survey of 20th Century Political Ideas. Edited by FELIKS GRO SS, with an Introduction by ROBERT M. M ACIVER. New York: Philosophical Library [Toronto: McLeod]. 1948. Pp. xvi, 1075. ($16.00) 90 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY legion. The present collection of essays on some of the more influential or vociferous schools of political thought in modern Europe is another attempt to interpret the strange vocabulary and complicated ideological syntax of European political doctrines for the benefit of readers not sufficiently familiar with such "un-American" idioms as Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Fascism, Nazism, Falangism, and the like. The kaleidoscope of opinion-if we may vary our metaphorspresented by Professor Gross and his collaborators, while it reveals some fascinating patterns, yet gives rise to a few wistful thoughts. It would almost seem as if recent political philosophy had reached one of those barren stages of development, described by Mrs. Susanne K. Langer, when its "motive concepts" have become exhausted. "An answer once propounded wins a certain number of adherents who subscribe to it despite the fact that other people have shown conclusively how wrong or inadequate it is; since its rival solutions suffer from the same defect, a choice among them really rests on temperamental grounds. They are not intellectual discoveries . . . but doctrines ."l Anthologies like the one under review are apt to reveal this sorry state of affairs more clearly than monographs. The frank juxtaposition of conflicting doctrines makes the reader aware of the increasingly academic nature of contemporary political philosophy. "The watchword henceforth is Refutation, its life is argument rather than private thinking.'" Eclecticism supersedes creative thought. Of this general tendency the present volume affords at least one perfect example. Mr. George...