The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism ed. by S.P. Rosenbaum

Abstract

474 E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a brings him home in the end to the era of the gospel, so that at the close his point of view can merge with that of Adam and that of the Christian reader. The final view of book xn is that offered by Christian liberty, and it casts light back on all that has gone before. Milton has created in the structure of his poem, and expressed particularly through the awareness of his narrator, a pattern analo­ gous to that which he saw relating the Old Testament and the New. One of the most persuasive essays in Milton: A Structural Reading is that on Samson Agonistes. Here the method of seeking the significance of seeming discontinuities and contradictions yields a rewarding analysis of the mixed nature of Samson's heroism and of our response to it. Here too the theme of iconoclasm fits the action more adequately than in Paradise Lost as we watch the progress of Samson “ from idol and idol-worshipper to iconoclast" (156). Yet the effect of an approach which stresses oppositions is once again to hamstring a progressive response to the work as an unfolding whole experienced in time. Bouchard shows little sense of the importance of Samson's agonized analysis of his sin, and as a result his interpretation of the play, like Dr Johnson's, provides a beginning and an end, but no middle. The essay on Paradise Regained contains some acute observations on the importance of Christ's human nature and on his concrete earthly mission; however, the argument that his mission concerns the rejection of the image of man as god that was "fabricated by the humanists of the Renaissance" (167) is presented sketchily and without much textual support. It is surprising to find an essay on Paradise Regained which is concerned with the poem's treatment of the individual in relation to history and yet makes no reference to the work of Barbara Lewalski in Milton's Brief Epic. A radical reassessment of Milton that argues for a new view of his work must show that it is able to use and correct the best of the poet's critics ; Bouchard's rather general and unsystematic references to other critics fail to offer convincing proof that this can be done. Nor does his book demonstrate how a structural reading of Milton can accommodate many of the qualities of the poet and his work which have attracted critics in the past, such as his sense of genre, his mastery of aesthetic pattern, his concern with liberty, and his commitment to acting as "an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things." HUGH m a c c a l l u m / University of Toronto S.P. Rosenbaum, editor, The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1975). xxi, 444. $25.00 cloth, $10.00 paper This is a selected and annotated collection of writings by and about the Bloomsbury Group. S.P. Rosenbaum provides a brief foreword, a chronology, a 475 R e v ie w s judicious selection of additional works on Bloomsbury, a rigorously chosen bibliography for each of the members of Old Bloomsbury except Adrian Stephen and Saxon Sydney-Turner, and an alphabetical list identifying impor­ tant people and places. For a more thorough annotated record of names relevant to Bloomsbury, one may refer to the sixty-two crammed pages of biographical notes at the end of Denys Sutton's edition of the Letters of Roger Fry (London 1972). The writings are carefully reproduced from their sources with only minor variations to regularize punctuation and format. The headnotes preceding the selections are informed, scholarly, and especially helpful in referring to unpub­ lished manuscripts. The degree of accuracy throughout is high though one may be permitted the minor complaints that this reviewer's name is twice misspelled and that Noel Annan's review of Leonard Woolf's autobiography, reprinted on pages 187-94, should not reappear in the selective bibliography, especially with a variant title. And one may be permitted the further...