BOOKS
The Critic's Eye
By TOM HOPKINSON ENTHUSIASM is the first requirement for an author Who is to write freshly on a familiar subject. Frank O'Connor* declares his enthusiasm at the very outset : . . the nineteenth-century novel still seems to me incomparably the greatest of modern art forms, greater even than the symphony with which it has so much in common; greater perhaps than any other popular literary form since the Greek theatre.'
Enthusiasm, however, has two drawbacks. On the one hand it is apt to rush into exaggeration; on the other it leads the enthusiast to neglect and underestimate whatever does not happen to attract him. On the very next page after his declaration of enthusiasm,. Mr. O'Connor leaps into exaggera- tion. He writes that the nineteenth-century novel was 'a great popular art, shared by the whole com- munity In a way inconceivable in either the eighteenth or the twentieth century.' Shared by the whole community' . . . what picture can this author have of nineteenth-century Britain, France and, above all, of nineteenth-century Russia?
Led by his enthusiasm, Mr. O'Connor strikes out what are not so much criticisms as flashes of imaginative understanding of the authors he admires, which can lastingly enrich our enjoy- ment of their work. Merging himself with a writer, Perceiving his intentions and appreciating his limitations, he can sometimes give a far better exposition of his achievements than the author himself could ever have done.
Here he is on the style of James Joyce : 'It is not an attempt at communicating the experience to the reader, who is supposed to be present only by courtesy, but at equating the prose with the experience. Indeed, one might say that it aims at replacing the experience by the prose. . .
And here on Henry James and his attitude to money: . . as usual, he portrays innocence as rolling in money and corruption as seedy and hard-up. Though it is almost a contradiction in terms, it seems as' if James were incapable of imagining any form of innocence which did not involve parting with hard cash or any form of corruption which was not broke.'
Mr. O'Connor is at his best and most perceptive in a field which lies somewhere between literary criticism, psycho-analysis and social history. He is Particularly good on Balzac, Dostoievsky, Flau- bert. He understands thoroughly the bastard nature of the novel, in which philosophy and morals are inevitably mixed up with art, and is entertaining about Flaubert's attempt to construct stories and novels out of style alone.
At times, however, Mr. O'Connor's enthusiasm breaks free from his critical sense and we are given judgements which do not so much stimulate IRE MIRROR IN '11117. ROADWAY: A Study of the Modern Novel. By Frank O'Connor. (Hamish Hamil- ton, 25s.) argument . and interest as paralyse it, from the feeling that we have no common ground to stand on. These judgements are sometimes positive. Of Sons and Lovers; 'Absolutely, the opening half is the greatest -thing in English fiction.' And here the word 'absolutely' seems clearly the over- assertion of uncertainty. Sometimes they are negative. The sentence quoted above goes on : 'It has all the brilliance of Pride and Prejudice and the opening of Middlemarch with the tragic. power of certain scenes in The Last Chronicle' (of Barset). That one word Midellentarch is the sole reference to George Eliot in a book described as a study of the modern novel. There is no reference whatever to Charlotte Brontë ; Peacock or Samuel Butler, and all that is said of Meredith is that he was a . fine poet and influenced by the Darwinian theory.
It is as if the writer had two eyeS of quite' dif- ferent calibre, and exulted equally in the keenness of the one and the blindness of the other. As a rule he reserves his keen eye for authors he loves and the blind one for those to whom he is not attracted, but occasionally he turns both eyes On to different aspects of the same author.
With his seeing eye he observes of Thomas Hardy : `To read him is like looking at a Cotman drawing in which one can identify the very quality of materials, wood, stone, and tile, from the draughtsmanship.' A long stare through the blind one brings the astonishing statement that Hardy, having been born into the English working classes, was never socially accepted. . . . 'Nor, English society being what it was, was it ever possible for him. . . .' And the evidence for this, in face of the immense adulation of Hardy 'culminating in his Westminster Abbey funeral, is an anonymous character who once explained to Mr. O'Connor that 'Mister Hardy was what is known in this country as a self-made man,' but admitted that his wife knew Hardy's wife 'socially.'
If the students of the Harvard Summer School swallowed that, I must say I think they would have swallowed anything; and it seems to me that both the qualities and the defects of The Mirror in the Roadway are due to the fact that the book derives from—one could perhaps say largely con- sists of—a series of lectures which have never been thought out afresh and recast as a book. This fact has allowed the author to choose aspects of his subject which appealed to him, relate them loosely to each other, and ignore the rest. An audience has to be kept interested, and this puts a premium on enthusiasm and the personal statement rather than the considered judgement. Personal state- ments are always more interesting to listen to; their drawback is that frequently what they are telling us is not something about the author sup- posedly under discussion, but about the lecturer who is making them. When personalised judgements -are positive— based on approval or affection—they have a value, even if they are inaccurate. The value is that they may interest readers in an author they either don't know or have never fully enjoyed. When Mr. O'Connor declares himself a 'fanatic admirer' of Trollope, one warms towards him, even if one cannot share his opinion that 'Trollope was as great a novelist as either [Stendhal or Tolstoy], and a far greater novelist than Hardy.' 'But when' judgements of this kind are negative, such effect as they have is destructive—and the fact that the Writer is speaking in the role of a lecturer addres- sing students has absolved him of the need to support his assertions with the argument he would need to maintain his position among equals.
The fact that Mr. O'Connor depends largely on a form of psycho-analytic theory is' another source of mingled strength and weakness. It has enabled him to write of Thackeray and Trollope with real illumination. But about Chekhov all that he has to say is strangely superficial, and this, I think, is because there are so few traces in Chekhov's work of an inner conflict to which this particular theory can be applied. .
In relation to Stendhal, too, though he prides himself on his understanding ('On this subject his editors are endlessly • gullible.' . . . 'Stendhal's gifts as a novelist are more limited than his wor- shippers realise') he keeps walking round and round without ever delivering a real thrust of fresh criticism or appreciation.
The Mirror in the Roadway is. 1 feel, a book of valuable stimulus to those with some knowledge of the modern novel—provided their own judge- ment is established enough to be proof against the author's failures of critical assessment, and at the same time free enough to respond to his enthusiasms.
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