20 FEBRUARY 1948, Page 18

BOOKS OF THE DAY

0.H.E.L.

It looks as if the new Oxford History of English Literature will vary as much volume by volume as did the old Cambridge chapter by chapter. But who would look for unanimity in a team of scholars ? Professor Bush opened on a full round note with the seventeenth century ; Sir Edmund Chambers changed to a high dry pitch with the fifteenth . and now Mr. Bennett moves into a lower key with Chaucer. He turns resolutely away from Sir Edmund's audience of earnest research students to address the plain man, and on the whole he serves him, well. It is after all the plain man that Chaucer was out to catch.

More puzzling is the curious lay-out of the material in this new history, with a division of interests which will ultimately make for inconvenience in a standard work of reference. It fell to Sir Edmund in the second part of this double volume to deal officially with Malory ; now Mr. Bennett anticipates him with some pages on the prose style of the Morte Darthur. Useful pages as it happens, for Sir Edmund was content to treat the facts rather than the spirit of the book. In this volume Mr. Bennett himself writes of James I and Henryson, but is denied Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. They are not so far removed in date, and it would seem logical to have treated the Scottish Chadcerians together. Perhaps luck again overrides logic, for like Chaucer's Parson Mr. Bennett is " nat a northern man." There is some imperfect sympathy in dismissing The Testament of Criseyde as "a not unworthy pendant to Chaucer's poem." However we judge it, as success or failure, the Testament is either more or less than that. It lives with an independent spirit of its own, and to some readers it is one of the great moving achievements of its century.

Mr. Bennett does not set out to present a new view of Chaucer, but he restates old truths with conviction and freshness ; and much is put with point in small space. The chapters on Author and Public and on Fifteenth Century Prose say some things which have not been said so relevantly before. As we should expect from the student of the mediaeval manor and the Pastons his emphasis is towards social history. He will not bury his author under a mass of erudition, for he argues that more is to be obtained from a study of the age and the events which shaped the poet's career. Well, shall we say at least as much—for a voice might be raised from the " textual " ranks to correct an occasional inaccuracy in his translations, or to supply a work the bibliography has missed. Tolkien's study of the dialect of the two Cambridge students in the Reeve's Tale (Transactions of the Philological Society, 034) is too important and rare an example of real Chaucerian scholarship to be absent from the language section of an Oxford history.

In a footnote Mr. Bennett records that Reginald Pecock was elected " into a fellowship " at Oriel College in 1417. There speaks the voice of Cambridge under the imprimatur of the Clarendon Press. This presumably is a trace of the old Latin formula " in societatem" which has survived in the other university, but has never been the English usage for an Oxford election. A nice academic point for the student of the age and bibliographer of this