Humanities: Literary Studies

HUMANITIES tq 475 line, and its idealistic message kept to the fore in the symbols of plough, sword, and cross. John Prebble is a truly professional writer compared with these, and The Buffalo Soldiers (Seeker & Warburg [Toronto: British Book Service]. pp. vi. 233, $3.50) is a work of real skill in the "adult Western" tradition. Here. and in the title story of his collection My Creat Aunt Appearing Day (Seeker & Warburg, pp. viii. 214, $3.25). Prebble plays on a moving degiac theme: the Indian choosing to die by his old code rather than live enslaved by advancing civilization. Another adult Western. but without Prebble's historical basis, Robert Christie's The Trembling Land (Doubleday. pp. 288, h.50) is a tale of a tough old fugitive cow-hand who accidentally becomes foster father to an infant boy; it has a slick competence in presentation as well as its original plot to recommend it to anyone not afraid ofcatching saddle-sores and bow-legs. Finally, The Darkness and the Dawn (Doubleday, pp. 478, $4.50). a skilfnl confection served up by Thomas B. Costain: its setting the brutal world of Attila the Hun (a cardboard figure for all his sixty wives). this vacuous masqnerade is calculated to titillate without offending the most decorous of Mr. Costain's faithful readers. Only one French-Canadian translation has come to hand this year. Claire France's Children in Love. translated by Antonia White (Eyre & Spottiswoode [Toronto: McClelland & Stewart]. pp. 167, $3.00). A naive. intensdy romantic outpouring of adolescent love-joy, written as though in def1ance of Freud, Nabokov, Sagan, and Mallet-Joris, it seems thin and unconvincing in English. Perhaps French-Canadian readers can ddight in the innocent provinciality of this love-affair of a FrenchCanadian ingenue with France ("Andre! My young, living symbol of France ..."); and no doubt the original retains more poetic subtlety and vigour. as for example in the description of the angry school-master who "put at least three 'is' into 'Imbecile dolts'." HUMANITIES I LITERARY STUDIES A dream that an international law had been passed restrrcting critical dissertations on Shdley (and Keats) to pamphlet size, was shattered when Milton Wilson's Shelley's Later Poetry: A Study of His Prophetic Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press [Toronto: Oxford]. x pp,. 476 tq LEITERS IN CANADA: I959 332, $6.50), a volume of over three hundred pages arrived. It seems to me too long, but no doubt that depends on the particular reader; to a Shelley specialist it may not be long enough. To a general reader, parts are obscure. In any case it is a genuine work, founded in vigilant and reflective reading, and in a refusal to treat Shelley in the manner of Matthew Arnold or of more recent detractors. There is no Keats-Shelley cockfight here. What a wild fiction it ought to be, that trajectory from the rural rides of childhood in Sussex to the funeral pyre of I822 on the far Italian shore, from incompetent juvenilia in metre on ghouls and charnels to the "prophetic imagination" of the uncompleted "Triumph of Life"! Dr. Wilson has not attempted one more biography, but his survey makes Shelley's progress appear both credible and magnificent. His final chapter, as a defence ofShelley in his literary aspect- where presumably there will always be an opposition- may stand as one of the memorable things of its kind. Even there, some esoteric passages overload the main appeal; but, Dr. Wilson says himself, "the things I intend to suggest will be a mixed lot." It is not ungratefully that I comment on the limited range of critical references shown in the text and bibliography. Mary Shelley is just admitted, Leigh Hunt dimly, Horace Smith not at all. Tom Medwin is a little better treated, which would make Shelley laugh. This comment is due to many recent and highly interesting studies ofgreat writers, in which only the latest gravest monographs, or even speculations in learned journals, are negotiable. Surely this custom is amiss. Contemporary criticism, sometimes deriving power from direct knowledge, was often ahead of our quiddities. . If there are still some of the old school who think of Shelley...