Reviewer's Art
George Eliot and Iler Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews. Edited by John Holmstrom and Laurence Lerner. (Bodley Head, 30s.) WHEN at the age of thirty-six George Eliot began to write novels, G. H. Lewes doubted whether she had the necessary power of commanding pathos. He was soon convinced, and after she had read to him the episode of Milly's death in 'Amos Barton,' she records: 'We both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying, "I think your pathos is better than your fun."' That two such intelligent people should weep together over a piece of fiction illustrates strikingly the differences between the Victorians and ourselves. This selection of contemporary reviews, assembled by John Holmstrom and Laurence Lerner, alloys.: the Victorians to ex- plain themselves. The intelligence of critics in The Times, the set:cm-ma or Blackwood's should make us pause when we assume too easily that our own literary criticism is superior.
The Victorians admired many now-slighted aspects of George Eliot's art. They particularly liked her pithy asides on everyday life. The Tinter quoted with appreciation her comment in Adam Bede on the inability of men to think evil of pretty women : 'People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.' Above all they stressed her social realism, of which the witty truisms were a part, and her convincing tributes in her early novels to the eoodness of ordinary people-- Mrs Poyser, Adam Bede, Dolly Winthrop. An image of nor- mality and virtue was created to which her readers, even if they were intellectuals, could relate themselves. The Victorians enjoyed her pathos because it invoked vicarious participa- tion in the suffering of others. This desire among contemporary reviewers to feel part of a normal, everyday society led to the later attacks on the growing unpleasantness of her subject matter, Disgusted by Maggie Tulli‘er's sexual desire for Stephen, the Guardian felt such 'perverted and unwholesome growths' of passion should be left obscure.
A more intelligent re% itn% in the srEcTaTott of 1872 commented on her grow ing melancholy, And argued that in Aliddh-niarch she allows a cynical disbelief in human virtues to degenerate into scorn. And alter the publication of Daniel Deronda in 1876 the resicwcrs began to agree that her later work was inferior. The SPEC- I A 10K called Daniel Deranda 'little more than a wreath of moral mist.' This development of George Eliot's reputation reflects fundamental changes between the Victorian and the modern, perhaps too complex to be summarised briefly. Whereai in Adam Bede we are invited into the company of a rich, vital community, in the late novels Dorothea and Deronda are set against English society, adversary to much of its cul- ture, and we move towards the modern aliena- tion of artist and intellectual. After reading the sane, intelligent criticism of the best Victorian reviewers, we may wonder if they were wholly wrong to distrust this development. Are we sure that the modern tendency to enjoy alienation does not induce as much blindness in literary criticism as the Victorians' desire to associate themselves with simple examples of virtue in everyday life?
Lerner and Holmstrom have very sensibly cut the contemporary reviews (which were often more like substitute sermons), and they have treated fully only three novels—The Mill on the Floss, Middlenzarch and Daniel Deronda. Lerner provides linking commentaries, often acute in their comparison between Victorian and modern attitudes. One weakness is that, except for quoting Henry James, the editors make almost no reference to American and European re- sponses to George Eliot. The authors are to produce a similar volume on Thomas Hardy. I should like more space for Lerner's comments, perhaps even a concluding chapter on Victorian assumptions with some comparisons made be- tween America, Europe and Britain. The reply might be that the book would become unwieldy. Alas! we no longer live in the spacious age when the editor of Blackwood's allowed the re- viewer of Middlemarch 12,000 words, and a SPECTATOR critic could claim to have read Silas Marner forty times.
C. B. COX
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