Fearful Joy ed. by James Downey, Ben Jones (review)

HUMANITIES 375 has never devoted himself to Calder6n at all. He dismisses the playas very inferior. Among the reviewers who might have been quoted is E.M. Wilson, one of the leading specialists on Calder6n who has been in the forefront of the revaluation of his comedias: his review gives the play the high praise it deserves. To go on finding fault with individual entries would, however, give a totally wrong impression. Y lque importa errar 10 menDs';quien acert6 10 demas? The over-all aderto is of inestimable value to all calderonistas, who must express unqualified gratitude to editors and compilers for their patient and meritorious labours. Praise must also go to the University of Toronto Press for the perfect photographic reproduction of a typescript, and not least to the typist or typists for their faultless work. (A.A. PARKER) James Downey and Ben Jones, editors, Fearful Joy. McGill-Queen's University Press, xvii, 266, $11.50 I regret not having attended the Bicentenary Conference on Gray in Ottawa, for although I now review the papers, I missed the company of scholars from Aberystwyth to Los Angeles and Donald Davie's afterword tells me that I missed the battles over Johnson on Gray. I should have liked to hear (I suspect I know) what Donald Greene said to the scholar who called Johnson one of those 'insular tories' unable to see that the paths of glory lead not to the grave, but to the season of triumph . Mr Davie's note, isolated, might suggest that the conference was spent (in every sense) on this topic, but while two essayists (Roger Lonsdale and Donald Greene) address themselves specifically to it, and while another (Alistair MacDonald) extends the study of response to Gray in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in superb detail, others (except Louis Kampf, somewhat ill-tempered in the concluding essay on the humanist tradition) deal with Gray directly. Mr Lonsdale's notes are superb, as is his account of how Boswell's fashionable enthusiasm for Gray may have ignited Johnson. That controversy is still with us; I was happier (for all the learning) with the other papers, not so much in the notecard way, but for the imaginative readings they offered. Mr MacDonald wrote an introductory poem for the volume as well as his study of the critics. Jean Hagstrum's perceptive paper on Gray's sensibility, with some tactful use of psychoanalytic material, does 'imagine the passion that lay behind the word,' commenting on those intense friendships Ian Jack extends in his study of the letters, 'the best and fullest first-hand account we have of the life of a scholar during the most distinguished period in the history of our prose.' Eli Mandel's rather too dense study of voice in Gray and in Smart ought to be read next to Arthur Johnston, whose best passages are his analyses of Gray's fasci- 376 LETTERS IN CANADA nation with war and with warriors, images too heavily and too dogmatically presented by James Steele. The editors introductorily regret that no study is given to Gray's humour, but at least half the writers allude to it. 1 think especially of Johnston on the satires, Hagstrum on Miss Speed, wit, and A Long Story, Jack on epistolary playfulness and MacLean, impishly, on how Gray wrote of 'waterspouts, impolitely.' Clarence Tracy's essay on the Elegy was included from another occasion . He notices that our quotations come from the first part and thinks that 'the second half of the "Elegy" is a failure not because Gray could not make himself clear, but because he was not himself clear as to what he meant to say.' This paper is widely sensitive, to Gray's uses of Milton and to Gray as an industrious poetical student in the age of empiricism. 1 liked the opening, Mr Tracy's tale of his excitement when he visited Pembroke and held a copy of the manuscript of the poem. His kind of delight takes me to the two most impressive literary studies, those by George Whalley and Kenneth MacLean, both of whom illuminate Gray on his own and in terms of their Coleridge and...