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Historiography and those damned saints: shadow and light in Fifth Business WILFRED CUDE For those interested in examining them, the legends that have proliferated about the lives of the saints can be a source of rapture, bewilderment and frustration. We may look into The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to see what a fine historian does with this material: and the wry pungency of Gibbon's commentary, tart with scorn and astringent with rationality, cannot conceal his baffled fascination with the spiritual forces that endured beyond the wreck of the West's most massive political construct. We may also look into Fifth Business to see what a fine novelist does with the same material: and the unanimous discomfiture of Davies' characters, ranging from the incertitude of the devout to the incredulity of the nonbeliever, cannot conceal his frolicsome delight in the spiritual forces that persist within the secularism of the West's most cumbersome materialistic constructs. It is very like Davies to introduce the intricacies of the forgotten discipline of hagiography by means of a child, and a child figuring in a neglected nineteenth-century work of religious popularization at that. Little W.V., the cherub for whom A Child's Book of Saints was ostensibly written, vaguely senses that the stories of the saints, lovely and edifying though they are, bring her "to the awful brink of religious controversies and insoluble mysteries": hence, she yearns for the Second Coming, that she might get her facts straight from Christ Himself. Anything about our Lord -engrossed her imagination; and it was a frequent wish of hers that He would come again. "Then," - poor perplexed little mortal! whose difficulties one could not even guess at - "we should be quite sure of things. Miss Catherine tells us from books: He would tell us from His memory. Journal of Canadian Studies People would not be so cruel to Him now. Queen Victoria would not allow anyone to crucify Him." 1 Davies' introduction is beautifully deft. We acquiesce in the patronizing tone of Dunny Ramsay's narrative as he pushes past this childish prattle, since that is precisely how most of us would deal with ideas derived from such a flimsy book. "It was a pretty volume .... It was the work of one William Canton, ... which I thought a model of elegant writing." (35) Consequently, we are a trifle taken aback when Dunny moderates his tone in deference to the religious ,notions of Diana Marfleet, the witty, charming and sophisticated young woman who initi,ates Dunny into cultured life, since that is precisely how most of us would reverse ourselves over ideas endorsed by such a scintillating person. "I had come to think of little W.V. as rather a pill, but I now reserved my judgment, for Diana was little W.V. to the life, and I was all for Diana."(75) In this totally unorthodox manner, commencing with the naive bemusement of a child and proceeding rapidiy to the romantic enthusiasm of an adult, Davies bids us prepare for our own pilgrimage into the realm of the saints. It soon becomes clear that Davies has no intention of leaving us with the notions of little W.V. and Diana, stranded (as it were) upon the fringes of hagiography. Following in the footsteps of Dunstan Ramsay, historian and aspirant to the title of hagiographer, we progress through the beliefs of several clerics until we arrive at those of Father Blazon - the most venerable hagiographer of them all, the oldest of the Bollandists,2 tolerated with his numerous eccentricities by that stern historic society "for his great learning and for what was believed to be his great age." ( 153) Father Blazon takes up quite unawares little W.V.'s innocent fancy of the Second Coming, embroidering it in his own style with the subtlety of his experienced imagination. Unlike little W.V. or Diana, he has a historical vision that aids him in perceiving the virtuous dead as they might have 47 appeared to their contemporaries. That is to say, he has a historical vision that owes much of its penetration to a discernment of the disconcerting effect the virtuous living have on...

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