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quately convey, so that his characters are oftenstiff, self-conscious, bookish and sombre wherethey should be relaxed, good-humoured andcontented. Whether the absence from MrCowans fictions of gaiety, optimism andhumour is the result of temperament or doctrineone cannot know; but it deprives them ofimpact and veracity. We recognise but do notinhabit his joyless world.Wordsworth and the Artist's Vision: An Essayin Interpretation. Alec King, The AthlonePress, the University of London, 1966. Pp. 181.Professor King's book, Wordsworth and theArtist's Vision, is both novel and interesting.Much of both the novelty and the interest liesin Professor King's attitude which is neitherthat of the philosophic historian nor strictlythat of the Hterary critic. What he offers insteadis a series of insights set against a backgroundof artistic experience and religious tradition.The central insight is into the nature ofWordsworth's vision (and "vision" here has anentirely proper ambiguity). There has beensome interest lately in the sort of abnormalconsciousness that Blake seems to describe,and there have even been experiments in deliberatederangement, such as Aldous Huxley'swith mescahne, but as Northrop Frye drylyremarks, this is not precisely what Blake meantby "cleansing the doors of perception". ProfessorKing opens a much more suggestive andimportant line by making clear the similaritybetween Wordsworth's description of the vision(and its consequences) and descriptions of artisticvision by a number of major painters.For both this vision arises out of the interactionof the outer world and the inner life."The so-called distortions of the painter's artare the sign that he is not describing naturebut an active relationship in which the unionof the personal and the objective is rhythmicallydelighted in". True sight, in fact, is alsoinsight.This comparison, of course, puts the Visionfirmly where Wordsworth himself placed it, inthe physical and mental act of seeing. HereProfessor King quotes Matisse, "to see is itselfa creative operation, requiring an effort". Atthe same time this act by which the forms ofthe outward world enrich the inner life is, forboth Wordsworth and the artists, the act ofdiscovering the life of the world and the divinewhich is in it (Professor King rightly remarksthat in this context "God" is not the poeticallyappropriate word).From this the book moves to deal, in successivechapters, with Wordsworth's descriptionsof the life of the world and the mind,with moral being, and with childhood and thestate of grace. The exposition itself is not radicallynew but the understanding which ProfessorKing draws from his experience ofvisual art and from his sensitivity to the implicationsof religious feeling make his accountvery real and illuminating. He then goes onto relate Wordsworth's simple style to hisfeeling for 'things' and makes an interestingcomparison between his style and the sculpturalstyle of Henry Moore. Oddly, he doesnot here treat the style Wordsworth uses forhis more visionary landscapes, and earlier remarksthat the apocalyptic vision on the Simp-Ion Pass is "consciously in the style of 'TheSublime School' ", though the chapter in whichthis occurs brings out very powerfully theapocalyptic quality of the Vision itself.A further chapter relates Wordsworth's styleto his sensitiveness to the inner life of feelingand a final chapter, relating Wordsworth to thechanges that came before and after him inscientific and religious thought, argues stronglyfor his relevance to our own day.The book is easily and gracefully written,but its greatest virtue is its focus. It bringsout in Wordsworth's poetry those things whichthe poet himself placed at the centre, and itsunderstanding of the poet is never eccentric.It is infinitely more successful in its attempt toshow Wordsworth as relevant today than were,for instance, the attempts of the Americanlatter-day transcendentalists to revive theWordsworth of 1805 and after as a professionalphilosopher. It clarifies Wordsworthwithout distorting him and among its othervirtues, it should be a most useful book withundergraduates, because it grounds his meaningin experience. At the same time, it is perhapsa compliment rather than a complaintthat Professor King's comparatively shortstudy makes one want to go behind it andbeyond it. One thing one notices is that theartists quoted here, and there are many ofthem, range in time only from Delacroix toMatisse and Chagall, and that the theologiannamed is the Bishop of Woolwich (who canpresumably be taken as embracing the radicalWESTERLY. No. 1 of 1967 69