Humanities

HUMANITIES tq 479 Milton's "break with Presbyterianism toward the left" is characteristic of the most influential and provocative Puritan opinion during the period in question, and how the argument of the divorce tracts as it developed in Milton's mind was conditioned by the revolutionary applications of the "law of nature" which were being employed in the Puritan intellectuals' search for the rational grounds of civil liberty. Professor Sirluck has brought much fresh documentation and a gift for lucid analysis to bear upon an old subject, and the result is an important contribution to Milton studies and to the history of ideas in general. The task of annotating the divorce tracts is shared by Lowell W. Coolidge and Arnold Williams, and the letters are edited by W . Arthur Turner and Alberta T. Turner. (MILLAR MAcLuRE) In an author's note Mr. Paul West calls his "essay" The Fossils ofPiety: Literary Humanism in Decline (New York: Vantage [Toronto: Foulsham], pp. ii, 85, $2.75) an "argument with instances, rather than an exhaustive treatise." This seems rather more than self-evident as a description of seventy-five pages covering Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, Ernst Tunger, Santayana, Trilling, and others. He also remarks that he is arguing for no particular orthodoxy, religious or political, but is "aware that many of these writers almost arrive at the significant question: If the humanist can respect his faith only by narrowing it, might not that be worse than rejecting humanism for doctrines less secular?"--a statement which suggests much more objectivity than is characteristic of the book. With the help of specially selected quotations, Mr. West makes neat little summaries ofwriters whose work taken as a whole, or analysed with precision, could not be characterized ill such simple generalizations as are here set forth. Even his picture of Malraux (perhaps the most plausible) is much less than real, and when he comes to Camus the inadequacy is glaring; as for Santayana and Trilling, they are polished offin paragraphs rather than pages. For extra enlightenment we have quite a profusion of half, quarter, or decimal truths such as "The France of the 'twenties had on the one hand its Estaunie, its Valery, its Benda, and its Mauriac, and on the other its playboy escapists ... similarly England had The Waste Land, and the antics ofthe Sitwell group"; or thejudgment that Yeats was "no better than the other aesthetes" (i.e., Wilde) because he said "The form of sincere poetry, unlike that of popular poetry, may indeed be sometimes obscure or ungrammatical," a remark which is denounced 480 Iq LEITERS IN CANADA: 1959 and generalized in the words "So, it seems, popular poetry is not sincere. He does not say what he means by 'popular poetry.' The main thing is to sneer at what is popular." Mr. West is a young critic with wide interests in life and literature. He approaches his material with confidence, and some ofhis writing is lively. But the subjects of this book are worth more than this easy run-over. (N. J. ENDIcorr) Paul West's The Growth ofthe Novel (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , Publications Branch, pp. viii, 87, $1.00 paper, $1.50 cloth) contains the texts ofeight half-hour talks, broadcast on C.B.C. "University of the Air." A rapid survey ofa genre as elusive as the novel needs some idea to hold it together, and Mr. West quite acceptably follows the novel's growth "from abstraction, through social realism, into introspective privacy," and hence back to "abstraction" again; he begins with Homer and Longus and ends with Camus and Hemingway. Like all historians of the novel who try to get behind Defoe, he runs into trouble with his classifications at the beginning, but moves easily enough through the last two centuries. I could object to almost every label he puts on the novels he deals with, but that wouldn't be fair, because the short radio talk leaves no room for reflection, for considered analysis: two-thirds of the time has to be spent in summarizing plots and apologetically closing off interesting by-paths. A genially instructive little book. Professor Victor Leathers, in a mercifully briefand unpretentious study, British Entertainers...