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II
Other neglected pieces are notable for their subjects (though these too are often by writers important in their own right). For instance, Andor Gomme's reviews of William Faulkner's A Fable (77 [8 Oct. 1955]: 9) and Faulkner's County: Tales of Yoknapatawpha County (77 [5 Nov. 1955]: 139) have not been recorded. Gomme writes of The Fable that it “is precisely the book which one did not expect from Faulkner; and it is a book which he, perhaps, can ill afford. Too big a writer for it to be taken as a matter of course, he may yet not be big enough for it to make no difference.” Of the anthology of Faulkner's writings, he concludes that “it must be admitted that few who have not enjoyed meeting Faulkner's county will get much fun out of coming to know his world.”
Besides reviews of new literature, the CR contains essays on earlier writers and works. What I conceive to be an important talk on Wordsworth, one printed in the 29 April 1950 number (71: 464-466), is overlooked by Elton F. Henley and David H. Stam, editors of Wordsworthian Criticism, 1945-1964: An Annotated Bibliography (1965). The address was by George Macaulay Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a name with which to conjure. The bibliography does list Wordsworth at Cambridge, an account of the centenary meetings, but there is no explicit mention of Macaulay or of Ernest Alfred Benians, Master of St John's College, Cambridge, who spoke on “St. John's College in Wordsworth's Time.” Benians's address is printed on pages 2-10 of Wordsworth at Cambridge, the full title of which is A Record of the Commemoration Held at St. John's College, Cambridge in April, 1950, published at the Cambridge University Press in that year; Trevelyan's address, on pages 21-26. In 1980 Trevelyan's daughter, Mary Moorman, wrote a Memoir of her father in which she tells of his love of Wordsworth's poetry; her remarks (see the index) should be added to Trevelyan on Wordsworth.
An important discussion especially striking for its omission from the NCBEL is that over the authorship of Observations upon a Late Libel, which its editor Hugh Macdonald attributed in 1940 to George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax. The ascription was attacked by B. Behrens of Newham College in a piece titled “Pseudo-Halifax” in the 19 November 1940 CR (62: 107-108). Macdonald replied at length on the 29th (62: 146-147), and Miss Behrens, having been shown the proofs of Macdonald's reply, answered in the same number (147-148). Herbert Butterfield joined in and professed polite doubt about the attribution, as did Brian Wormald of Peterhouse (148-149). It was not until 7 January 1941 that Macdonald answered his critics and at that time appealed to the authority of H. C. Foxcroft, the biographer of Halifax, who supported his view in a signed statement (182-183). Immediately upon
Volume 86 of CR (1964-65) provides a number of examples of consequential discussions that have not been recorded. In those pages Roy Stone (unknown to fame, unlike the two other writers to be discussed) wrote a provocative article titled “Dr. Johnson: Philologist or Philosopher?” (14 Nov. 1964: 114-119, 121), in which Wittgenstein's name appears a number of times, as well as those of other philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and writers on legal matters. The NCBEL is, of course, selective, but Stone's article, important enough to deserve notice by Johnsonians, may have been unknown to the compiler of that entry. It is also not recorded in James L. Clifford and Donald J. Greene's Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (1970).
Also in that volume is Arthur Pollard's piece “Mrs. Gaskell's Short Stories” (8 May 1965: 374-377, 379), which became the first half of Chapter 7, “Short Stories and Novels,” of his Mrs. Gaskell (1966, pp. 172-187). Indeed, the first seven paragraphs of CR are repeated in the book, with only minor changes in phrasing. Major differences, however, occur beginning in paragraph nine, a discussion of the story “A Dark Night's Work” that is considerably expanded in the book. Paragraphs eleven through thirteen are identical, and then Pollard comes to the story “Six Weeks in Heppenheim,” which he could not rate quite so highly as Mrs. Gaskell, an opinion not expressed in CR. The rest of the paragraph (two paragraphs in the book) is, again, verbatim. The concluding paragraph in CR becomes the concluding paragraph of the whole chapter in the book. Pollard's is the outstanding name in studies of Mrs. Gaskell; his piece deserves to be known by scholars interested in Mrs. Gaskell's writings.
A third item of interest in that volume is by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, who with Edmund Blunden contributes pieces to the CR on the fiftieth anniversary of Rupert Brooke's death. As Christopher Hassall's biography of Brooke had come out earlier in 1964, Sir Geoffrey takes occasion to offer some comments on that biography. Sir Geoffrey stated in the introduction to A Bibliography of Rupert Brooke (1959) that he and Brooke “entered the same house at Rugby in the same term” (15); Brooke was fourteen then, and
When Brooke died it was not primarily the poet that his friends mourned. It was rather the sense that the light of a shining personality and intellect had been extinguished. His poetic faculties might have increased in power—more probably they would have waned with the growth of more critical and scholarly perceptions. His creativeness might have taken quite other turns, but he would have left his mark in some unexpected way on the life of England.
Finally, one can also mine from the CR reviews of important criticism and critical editions. B. J. Kirkpatrick's Soho bibliography of Edmund Blunden (1979) lists one piece from the CR, on Rupert Brooke's poetry (86 [12 June 1965]: 483-484), but neglects Blunden's review of Frank Kendon's Seatonian Prize Poem, The Flawless Stone (64 [24 April 1943]: 270). The review ends, “The sensibilities of the poet have chosen his speech and his cadences in this and in other parts of his work, and if the poem is one more of those that `prove nothing' it is one of those also which gives the listener a deep desire to encounter life with the freshness of spirit so eloquent in it all.” Similarly, Susan Vander Closter's 1985 reference guide to secondary materials on Joyce Cary and Lawrence Durrell fails to record J. B. Broadbent's review of Cary's Art and Reality, the 1956 Clark Lectures (80 [18 Oct. 1958]: 49, 51). Broadbent states that “These are the finest Clark Lectures since Mr Forster's Aspects of the Novel in 1927 (not that the competition in those thirty years has been fierce).”
Frederick P. W. McDowell's E. M. Forster: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him (1976) includes a 1975 article by George Savidis in the Times Literary Supplement, but Savidis's review of Forster's Two Cheers for Democracy in the 1 December 1951 CR (73 [Dec. 1951]: 182, 184) is not listed. The review is titled “Our Mutual Friend” and begins with the statements that “No suitable label has yet been found for Mr E. M. Forster” and that “it has been suggested lately that, in the absence of a single word to describe him, Mr Forster's own description of André Gide, in his note on Gide's Death, could be applied, without modification, to Mr Forster himself.” Savidis goes on to suggest that despite the affinities between the two writers, “yet in at least one essential respect the two men stand very much apart.” Forster had described Gide as a humanist, “not of other ages, but of this one.” The humanist, according to Forster, must have “a belief in the human race,” and it is in this characteristic that the two men differ, for Forster believed in the human race while Gide did not. Savidis concludes by stating that the book
Henley and Stam's bibliography of writings on Wordsworth lists sixteen reviews of Ben Ross Schneider's Wordsworth's Cambridge Education (1957) but omits the long and thoughtful one by John Beer in 79 [7 June 1958]: 618-621—even though it does cite another book Beer reviewed at the same time. Willis J. Buckingham's 1970 bibliography of Emily Dickinson for the years 1850-1966 includes Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 biography and six reviews of it. Arthur Sale's highly critical review (77 [19 May 1956]: 599, 601-602) is not among them, though Buckingham does cite two other pieces by him from the CR. In one of them, his review of Johnson's edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (80 [21 Feb. 1959]: 357-358), Sale continues his assault on the biography: he speaks of the “editor, whose Introduction is as good, but too brief, as his `interpretative biography' of 1955 was undistinguished, and too long.” Students of Henry James can likewise benefit by turning to the CR. Joan Bennett reviews F. O. Matthieson's edition of The Note Books of Henry James (70 [23 Oct. 1948]: 38, 40) and Janet Adam Smith's Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism (70 [19 Feb. 1949]: 396); neither review has been included in the bibliographies of criticism of James.
Andor Gomme's review of F. R. Leavis's D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (77 [12 Nov. 1955]: 151, 153) should be read in the light of his later remarks about Leavis on Lawrence in his Attitudes to Criticism (1966). In the review Gomme describes Leavis's work as “a tiresome heavyweight of a book, lumpily constructed, stodgily written, and, though strikingly poor in illuminating vocabulary, full of Dr. Leavis's familiar array of quips and sneers and jibes and jeers. I can scarcely imagine many who are not already hardened Leavisites or established Lawrentians giving it the attention it deserves.” Another review pertaining to Lawrence, W. W. Robson's long (almost eight columns) assessment of Graham Hough's The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (78 [1 June 1957] 638-641, 643) is mandatory reading, particularly to complement Robson's lengthy discussion of Lawrence in his Modern English Literature (1970) and specifically of Women in Love in The Modern Age (edited by Boris Ford, 1961; this article reprinted in Robson's Critical Essays, 1966). Robson has nothing but scorn for Hough's criticism.
Bibliographers and other students of literary history have much to gain from scrutiny of the Cambridge Review. Those who ignore the periodical do so at their risk.
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