sity. he has enabled wider audiences to share the 
pleasures and scholarship of his easily written views 
and. like the Romantic poets of whom he writes, add 
vastly to their experiences. The fact that this edition 
is a reprint appearing eleven years after its first publi­
cation is no drawback, since nothing has dated. Were 
it not for the paperback, there are many coveted works 
of literature that would never reach the student’s own 
bookshelf.

One wonders if anyone today studies the Romantic 
Revival, or if it is just a memory of other-generation 
undergraduate days, spurned by the realities of the 
'sixties and lost in the convolutions of the beatnik 
brain. If Keats appealed to the unsophisticated young 
men and women of twenty-five years ago, there must 
be a handful of people alive who can still be thrilled 
and charmed by the genius of his imagination and the 
craftwork of his imagery.

Sir Maurice deals with the work of the great Five 
representatives of the age, Blake, Coleridge, Words­
worth, Shelley and Keats, and adds their con­
temporaries or “familiars” in full measure, with essays 
— or lectures — on poems by Byron, Poe, Swinburne 
and Christina Rosetti.

In the introductory theme, which gives the volume 
its title, he brings home the power that the creative 
impulse, inspired by the unseen forces of imagination, 
nature, and the spirit of man impart to poetry. At the 
same time, he admits to the limitations of the Romantic 
Movement and, withstanding the temptation to become 
a complete votar.v of its poets, weighs up their achieve­
ments with an admiration tempered with sane reserve.

Professor Bowra’s treatment of individual poems can 
help the teacher-interpreter of literature to a wider 
concept of appreciation and a richer understanding 
of what he is endeavouring to put across to his senior 
pupils. His analysis of “The Ancient Mariner” shows 
why it is Coleridge’s greatest poem and not what he 
modestly regarded as an attempt to secure “that willing 
suspension of di.sbelief for the moment which con- 
.stitutes poetic faith.”

For the student reader there is much more to be 
found. Whether he turns to the “Ode on a Grecian 
Urn” or “Intimations of Immortality,” or to any of the 
other major poems that make up the chapters of this 
readable, scholarly collection, he will find the ex­
perience refreshing and amply rewarding.

R.F.’W.

It would not be untoward in 
a review of S C I E N C E  A N D  

II  m .:;  h u m a n  v a l u e s , by J. Bron-
yj' ’ ; j owski, (Hutchinson), to take

the opportunity of saluting one 
of the most distinguished Headmasters of the Com­
monwealth, Mr. A. J. Grant, of Jeppe High School 
for Boys, Johannesburg, who retires in 1962.

“My aim in this book,” says the author, “is to show 
that the parts of civilisation make a whole; to display 
the links which give society its coherence, and more 
which give its life. I have had of all people, a historian 
tells me that science is a collection of facts, and his 
voice had not even the ironic rasp of one filing cabinet 
reproving another.” Turning to Coleridge, Dr. Bronow- 
.ski recalls the poet’s definition of beauty as “unity in 
variety.” That, says the author, is nothing more than 
“the search to discover unity in the wild variety of

nature. What is a poetic image but the seizing and 
the exploration of a hidden likeness, in holding together 
two parts of a comparison which are to give depth to 
e ach other ? The discoveries of science, the works of 
art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a 
hidden likeness. This is the act of creation in which 
an original thought is born, and it is the same act in 
original science and original art. The world which the 
human mind knows and explores does not survive if 
it is emptied of thought. And thought does not survive 
without symbolic concepts. The symbol and the 
metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.”

Alan Grant was a scientist by training, a poet by 
inclination. In his own commonroom he would pause 
to discuss with the senior maths master some recent 
and abstruse theory of knots, and a little later would 
be discussing with appreciation and information the 
poetry of Eliot or John Wain. When one first picked 
up Dr. Bronowskl’s excellent book with its Greek sense 
of wholeness, one wondered whether it had not come 
too late. Do poets read Whitehead ? Would Dr. 
Flemming enjoy John Wain ? Or, as C. P. Snow put it 
in his Rede Lecture: “There seems then to be no place 
where the cultures meet. I am not going to waste 
time saying that this is a pity; it is much worse than 
that. This culture divide exists all over the western 
world. In fact the separation between the scientists 
and the non-scientists is much less bridgeable among 
the young today.” If a bridge is to be built, then, it 
will be done by people of the calibre of Alan Grant. 
There is only one way out of all this, says C. P. Snow, 
“ it is of course, by rethinking our education. A society 
holds together by the respect which man gives man,” 
comments Dr. Bronowski. It fails In fact, it falls apart 
into groups of fear and power, when its concept of 
man is false.” The influence of a great teacher over 
generations of boys growing into manhood is tremen­
dous. Alan Grant gave many a boy a vision of human 
values, a love of science that was the more incisive 
because the same mind enjoyed Hopkins or Donne, 
because it saw in the discipline of science a way of 
handling a world in which human values survived. 
None of his pupils, some of whom occupy chairs in 
distinguished universities, seem to have fallen into the 
despair of the isolated scientist who denies the validity 
of value-judgements. “The problem of values arises 
only when men try to put together their need to be 
social animals with their need to be free men,” says 
the author. “If truth is to be found, and not given, 
and if therefore it is to be tested in action, what other 
conditions grow of themselves from this?” Dr. Bronow­
ski lists “independence in observation and in thought. 
From this follow’S dissent, the native activity of the 
scientist, which is the mark of freedom. And inde­
pendence is safeguarded by free speech, free inquiry, 
free thought and tolerance.”

Science and Human Values is the sort of book that 
Alan Grant would read and enjoy. And were that all, 
one might have dropped a private note to this end 
and omitted a personal reference on a public occasion. 
But one believes that men like this distinguished Head­
master do not stand monumentally alone. Generations 
of intelligent lads growing up in the Grant regime 
will find this book stimulating and useful.

Whilst the intention of this book is admirable, not all 
his readers will accept the assertion that the bridge 
between science and literature, especially poetry, is 
the search for likenesses. “The discoveries of science, 
the works of art are explorations . . .  of hidden likeness



B O O K S  R E V I E W E D
>>x t o c w s x v s x w s>x v s .vc s x w s>?o cc*x v s x v c s w v s x w v >x w n :c c w

. . . Modern science . . . grows from a comparison. It 
has seized a iikeness between two unlike appearances; 
for the apple in the summer garden and the grave 
moon overhead are surely as unlike in their move­
ments as two things can be. Newton traced in them 
two expressions of a single concept, gravitation.” This 
line of thought is not without its dangers. The whole 
of sympathetic magic rests on the misconstructions 
placed on likenesses. The similarity between rain and 
water passed through a sieve, for instance led to the 
untenable idea that one could induce rain by the sieve. 
Much homeopathic medicine is built on the .same 
slender deduction. Dr. Bronowski might well recon­
sider his thinking at this point. What is in common 
between the real scientist and the real poet, one might 
hazard, is firstly a capacity to observe acutely, 
secondly a capacity to bring ob.served details into a 
functional relationship, and thirdly a capacity to make 
working postulates. Metaphorical language truly in­
volves, in its more obvious manifestations, comparisons. 
But the value surely lies in the implied interpretation 
or postulate of detail . . . this new patterning of 
relationship ?

The value of any book lies not in its assertion, but 
in its capacity to suggest a re-arrangement of thought. 
This book most certainly succeeds.

B.W.R.

S H O R T  S T O R Y  S T U D Y  —  A
Critical Anthology. Compiled by 
A. J. Smith and W. H. Mason. 
(Edward Arnold).

At our present stage of fossllisation it is not easy 
to create a text book so out of line with tradition that 
by its newne.ss of approach it .startles us into a detailed 
examination of its intention and method. In many 
disciplines such a break would be anarchistic rather 
than original, but there is a growing feeling among 
the Teachers of EnglLsh that a reconsideration of 
directions and methods is overdue; there is a growing 
awareness of an increasing dislocation between the 
theory of the schools and the practice of intelligent 
men and women handling the realities — whether these 
be a Director’s Report on structural steel or a poem 
on pessimism in Western Europe.

This new Short Story Study i.s, one mu.st admit, an 
intelligently planned book designed — as the compilers 
say — to fulfil four main intentions. They are :

(1) to provide a bridge between school or university 
and the world outside; a bridge between youth 
and maturity;

(2) to stimulate close and intelligent reading;
(3) to afford some understanding of the ground of 

such literary attitudes as tragedy, comedy, melo­
drama, pathos, and sentimentality;

(4) to inculcate sound critical approaches and to 
impart familiarity with vocabulary, tools and 
methods.

The book consists of ten short stories: Paste, by 
Henry James; A Rhinocerous, Some Ladies and a 
Horse, by James Stephens; Be This Her Memorial, by 
Cardoc Evans; Tickets Please, by D. H. Lawrence; 
Shooting an Elephant, by George Orwell; In the Train, 
by Frank O’Connor; The Mower, by H. E. Bates; Of 
This Time, Of That Place, by Lionel Trilling; and The 
Followers, by Dylan Thomas.

The format is arranged in this way: First of all there 
is a biographical survey of the author. From this 
certain critical comments are derived, when these
appear to have a bearing on the story. The story
follows. After this there is a commentary. It is
chiefly through this that the compilers direct the
pupil or student to a closer and more intelligent exami­
nation of the reading. This method can be good or 
bad according to the way it is handled,, of course. 
Much of the directive in these commentaries is done 
by way of unan.swered questions; but these undoubtedly 
have the effect of drawing the attention of inex­
perienced readers to the profundities and subtleties of 
the writing. The effect even on a reviewer was to 
.send him back to the .stories them.selves in pleased 
agreement or in furious di.sagrecment. and all this 
resulted in a very pleasureable couple of hours stolen 
from the routines.

This is the sort of book one would put in the hands 
of the matriculation group of superior intelligence who 
are not mentally contained by normal matriculation 
work. It would also make an admirable book of work­
ing material for first-year university students, and 
possibly would be a useful and happy basis for 
students from non-Arts faculties reading a year’s work 
in English in order to comply with University regu­
lations.

But everyone intere.sted in the Short Story as a 
literary form should obtain a copy of this book, tor 
it will be found most stimulating.

B.W.R.

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