ON THE FRINGE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 916, 1 March 1957, Page 13

ON THE FRINGE

ESSAYS BY DIVERS HANDS, Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, volume xxviii; Oxford University Press, English price 15/-. HIS annual volume is a puzzle for the reviewer, its contents being so diverse each year. The Royal Society of Literatire gives its full members the right of putting F.R.S.L. after their names, which ought to be a distinction, but somehow it never Appears to be one. The scientist, rightly, aspires to be an F.R.S., or a Fellow of the Royal Society; the classical scholar hopes one day to be an F.B.A., or a Fellow of the British Academy. But the English poet and the novelist (unlike his French colleague, who aspires to be an Academician) shows no enthusiasm for being elected an F.R.S.L. He'd rather have a good review or a substantial advance on royalties. All this gives the transactions of this body the air of being the minutes of a kind of gentlemanly senior literary debating society. The papers are written by writers, admittedly, but writers whose writing is on the fringe of literature rather than in the centre. The late Duff Cooper ‘discourses with good

sense on Keats; Viscount Esher chats pleasantly. on Tennyson; Cyril Falls lays aside military history for a little Elizabethan gossip ___ story; Charles Morgan _introduces a speaker with urbane rotundity. One is sorry not have been present at what must have been a series of agreeable functions. But in print, the results don’t add up to much. I except Guy Boas, who

writes with scholarship on Evelyn, and Cecil Day Lewis, who contributes a real critical essay on Edward Thomas.

I.A.

G.