The Victorian Novel THE reputation of the Victorian age has
passed through two well-defined phases : glorification and depreciation. It was glorified by itself and depreciated by its successors, and for equally understandable reasons. In this volume of essays Lord David Cecil attempts an objective criticism of certain of the great Victorian novelists, in which he tries " to illuminate those aesthetic aspects of their novels which can still make them a living delight to readers," without insisting too emphatically that they are Victorians. His book is filled with penetrating and original criticism. It is a pity, therefore, that he should have begun it with a passage of bad Strachey : " They crowd the shelves of every gentleman's library." He means the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and George Eliot, pictures " their majestic position on the shelves, rubbing shoulders on equal terms, as it. were, with Milton and Gibbon and Boswell's Life of Johnson," and after a good deal more of this says : " Let us unlock the glass doors and pull down the books and see what they look like." It is strange that a critic who can discern so quickly the falseness in Dickens' or Charlotte Bronte's work should not see that this kind of writing is bogus. His other most serious fault, closely related with the one just mentioned, is an excessive use of cliché. If it were not for these defects this volume would deserve nothing but praise. But it is irritating to be told that Dickens " hits with a bludgeon " and that Emily Brontë " never raises her voice." By such phrases the author does injustice to the originality and penetration of his criticism, wrapping it up and presenting it at intervals in a succession of labels.
The best essays in the book are those on Emily Bronte, Dickens and George Eliot. The one on Emily Brontë is very good indeed, though again it is disconcerting to be told that " in addition to her pictorial and dramatic gifts, Emily Brontë possessed the humbler arts of the writer of thrillers," and that she can " hold the reader as breathless with suspense as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle." The assumption is that it is some " humbler art " which produces this effect, not Emily Bronte's " pictorial and dramatic gifts " ; but the antithesis is surely a false one, indeed demonstrably false from the essay itself, which brilliantly shows the unity of Wuthering Heights on every plane, in conception, spirit, execution and style. " On the plane on which it is composed," the author says, " its every incident is the inevitable outcome of the situation." His extended analysis of Wuthering Heights, in which he proves this proposition, is the best piece of criticism in the book. The essay indeed is so full of fine observations that if I had space I should Ince to quote a dozen of them.
Of Dickens the author says excellently that " He had no special insight into the qualities which are characteristic of man as man ; he had an acute discernment of those qualities which divide him from other men. . . . His power to perceive the spark of individuality that resides in everybody, is Unequalled." This defines with extraordinary clearness both Dickens' strength and his weakness, which made it impossible for him, as Lord David Cecil says, to tell us much about " human beings at the great crises of their lives, when individual differences are merged in common humanity." But while defining this crucial limitation of Dickens' genius, the author does not draw any conclusion from it. Yet it is obviously a very serious limitation, and among great novelists a unique one ; for of no other English novelist of the first rank is it true that he tells us hardly anything about " human beings at the great crises of their lives." It cannot be said of Jane Austen, who wrote of far quieter events than Dickens, nor of Scott, who wrote far more idly. This inadequacy on the great crises of life is peculiar to Dickens, and it was due, one imagines, in spite of all the evidence against it, to a lack of fundamental humanity, as Mr. Kingsmill has suggested in his recent book on Dickens.
" There is one kind of novel before George Eliot and another after her," the author says : a fine stroke of observation, which he elaborates convincingly. His argument is that George Eliot substituted for the loosely-constructed picture of
life which before her had stood for the novel, the treatment of a human theme in all its relations, whose working out produced a new unity of plot. " Her story is conditioned solely by the logical demands of situation and character ; it ends sadly or happily, includes heroes or omits them, deals with the married or the unmarried, according as reason and observation lead her to think likely." This makes her, as he says, the forerunner of Henry James, Conrad and Bennett. Her preoccupation with a central theme and her interest in working it out to a conclusion came from her strong moral passion, and ever since George Eliot the novel has had a moral content which it lacked before her. It has become more serious. In claiming for George Eliot the distinction of a forerunner, I think Lord David Cecil does a slight injustice to her predecessor Jane Austen. She too was concerned with themes, social themes, it is true, rather than explicitly moral ones, but all social themes are moral ; and like the novels of George Eliot her novels also had a greater perfection of form than those of any of her predecessors or contemporaries. But it may be allowed that it was George Eliot who gave the new turn to the novel, and not Jane Austen.
The author is particularly good in his judicial revaluation of the novelists he deals with. He is perhaps a little too hard on Thackeray, and a little too lenient to Dickens ; but on the others, 'Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, his conclusions are so fair that they will probably find general agreement. Emily Broad. is the only one of these writers who enjoys a higher reputation now than she did in her lifetime. But it is quite clear that the others deserved their fame, and that they will enjoy it for a considerable time yet.
EDWIN MUM.
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