BOOKS Curate's eggs

Martin SEYMOUR-SMITH

The Sphere History of Literature in the English Language: Vol. 1: The Middle Ages edited W. F. Bolton Vol 2: English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674 edited Christopher Ricks Vol. 7: The Twentieth Century edited Bernard Bergonzi (All Barrie and Jenkins 70s each) There cannot be enough histories of any literatures, even indifferent ones: the student and the general reader can always pick up something. A sad conclusion; but this new 'Sphere' history confirms it. The aim is to 'present a comprehensive survey . . . rather than a guide only to the major landmarks': presumably, then, to present the background, and to put the writers in their contexts rather than merely deal with the important figures. This is not adequately done; but there are some useful individual essays, as well as some bad ones.

The general aim is excellent: we still need a comprehensive picture of the 'movements' in English, with some view of continental influences. And in what is in one way the least demanding task, The Middle Ages, we do get it. Professor Bolton's introductory essay on literary composition in mediaeval England has some mastery: it is not a mere academic summary. J. E. Cross's 'The Old English Period' is the best survey, of its length, in existence. The four Chaucer essays, especially the introductory one by the editor on his life, succeed in putting him into his context as well as appraising his work. Douglas Gray deals better with John Skelton, usually a poet offensive to academics, more fairly and enthusiastically than C. S. Lewis in the relevant volume of the Oxford His- tory; and Lewis did better than most. In fact, in just that period in which individuality seems most hard to find and to grasp, it is most successfully brought out. N. F. Blake's 'Late Mediaeval Prose' shows, for example, that a potentially dull subject is anything but dull. This volume, the one with only the minority appeal, is the least donnish and the most lively .

Today true literature, a matter of effort and thought as well as of impulse and passion, is threatened by a cult of ignorance and undiscipline. The hard-gained victories of the avante-garde of the earlier part of this century are exploited by the ungifted, with their raw outcries and pastiche. All the more reason why any new history of literature should emphasise that all literature is the result of an engagement with life itself— and not the theoretical exercise begged for in the bizarre, fear-ridden fantasies perpe-

trated by W. K. Wimsatt and others. In a sound and scholarly series of essays, this could well be a unifying theme; and it is exactly what I should have expected from the volume edited by Professor Ricks, who is a brilliant, incisive and humane as well as scholarly critic. The period he deals with was the one in which English writers became sub- versive, in which literature became not only a criticism of life but, incidentally, of the manner in which life is immediately con- ducted. I can only think, then, that when Professor Ricks received certain of the con- tributions to this volume his face resembled nothing so much as a certain celebrated pic- ture by Edvard Munch.

His own brief introduction is, as one might expect, intelligent and original in its ap- proach. He has taken the aim of the whole series, to present writers in their context, seriously. Spenser is most valuably to be understood, by the beginner, in the context of his life and times: he receives this treat- ment. In another case the most immediately relevant context is a genre: thus Elizabeth Story Donno, editor of an excellent an- thology of them, surveys the epyllion (or

minor epic), of which Venus and Adonis and the Marlowe/Chapman Hero and Leander are the chief examples. These essays are valu- able; and Ricks's own, on the literary con- texts of Milton's early Poems (1645), and the very late poems, are illuminating.

But is Shakespeare's sonnet sequence really best treated as a genre, as Thomas P. Roche is encouraged to treat it? Ricks rightly says that Shakespeare 'transformed the sonnet sequence'; but he did so because, at least after he had completed the first score or so of sonnets, he found himself under an emotional pressure that none of the other sonneteers had experienced. From Roche's dull account one would imagine that he had sat down to compose what Sir Sidney Lee called 'literary exercises'. Because we have gratefully abandoned the sentimental- romantic view of literature current at the beginning of the centurf, we must not imagine that it has no relationship with psy- chological reality. Roche's essay, in the light of its subject, is absurdly inadequate.

Students should certainly be encouraged to gain an awareness of genres, without which they cannot fully appreciate individual works; but not to think of literature itself as composed only of genres.

Again, however competent and interesting (or otherwise) Mrs Alicia Ostriker's historical survey of the lyric, no student should be asked to put up with a paragraph on Sir Walter Raleigh that fails to mention his greatest poem (the 'Cynthia' fragment) and which, without quoting it, calls 'The Lie' a poem like a knife'; or with an index that lists Sir John Davies (surely important) and a text that fails to mention him. We shall need this volume for Patricia Thomson's learned account of Wyatt and Surrey, and for John Carey's essay on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prose, as well as for the contributions already mentioned; but as a survey of the period it is disappointing.

Bernard Bergonzi is a drably orthodox critic in comparison to Professor Ricks, and

The Twentieth Century is little more than

a ragbag of essays of varying merit. His own introduction on the advent of modernism is unexceptionable (except for a hardly fruit- ful comparison of Conrad with Kipling); but it is unexciting, and its acceptance of

'modernism' is more innately conservative than illuminating or convincing. An impor- tant opportunity is missed: Andrew Bear fails to do more than scratch at the surface of a

problem when he tries to trace the relation4 ship between sensationalist trash of the Fleming-Amis-Bond type, and serious fiction. However, some of the essays are better, par. ticularly John Fuller on T. S. Eliot, where the issue of Eliot's anti-semitism and fascism is by no means shirked; the notorious 'depre- cation', published in 1933, of 'excessive toler- ation' of the Jews, is quite properly quoted, so that readers may judge of Eliot's human sensitivity for themselves. Poetry and drama are competently surveyed by G. S. Fraser and G. K. Hunter respectively. David Lodge, often a good critic, is disappointingly per functory on modern literary criticism.

These volumes, especially the first, contain useful, and occasionally more than useful, contributions. The first volume is outstand- ing. But the enterprise as a unity looks set for mediocrity,