ABSTRACT
It is a clear sign of the death of the Victorian spirit that so many of our younger critics should now be saying the final word about its various exemplars. Mr. Chesterton, in a brilliant and wonderful book, “ The Victorian Age in Literature ” (Williams and Norgate, is. net) has run off a strangely simplified list of great names, with characteristic elan. Another much abused book has recently dealt discouragingly with the literature of the nineties ; and an anthology of Victorian verse has shocked both poets and precisians by its daring extension of the Victorian era to our own day. All sorts of monographs upon the Victorian writers, artists, and notabilities are appearing ; and it is noticeable that, for the most part, they reveal a resolve that this new Georgian Age should really begin clear of all muddled notions of its amorphous predecessor. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, who has already enriched the new age with eloquent poetry, has discovered in Mr. Thomas Hardy the one novelist who has raised his craft to the level of the major arts (“ Thomas Hardy : A Critical Study.” Seeker. 7s. 6d. net). He has introduced his proposition with a fable, in which man’s surplus imagination rather vaguely demands of art the complete expression and exercise of “ those inmost desires which in ordinary experience are by no means to be completely expressed.” He elaborates the idea of man’s need, and appears thereby to have given Art a definition ; which, however, is not the case, for the book, by saying what need Art satisfies, completely avoids saying what Art is. It may be questioned, in this connection, whether Art is not a stimulus to man’s imagination rather than an employer of waste energy. Mr. Abercrombie has a very vigorous intellect, and his book is distinguished by a sense of form which gives it unique value in Mr. Seeker’s handsome series. I cannot help regretting, therefore, that his parade of intellectual dignity and philosophic reasoning puts difficulties in the reader’s way, and that he should have been tempted into developing a theory of the novel which is appropriate only to Mr. Hardy. It does not seem to me any good to make a theory out of Mr. Hardy’s novels simply in order momentarily to rank the novel with the other arts. It is surely the critic’s function 52to inquire into the nature of that which is (I mean, in formulating a general proposition), and not to seek to found an art on a purely arbitrary metaphysical basis. Mr. Abercrombie’s present theory, however logical, tends to exalt one man and his method over all other methods whatsoever. Mr. Hardy is a rural novelist. The English novel, on the whole, is urban ; and urban life is more complex, and, in a way, less seizable than country life. Its characteristics are less positive. If our urban novelists are less imposingly rigid in their metaphysic than Mr. Hardy it is not because they are “ timid ” : it is because their material, being diffused, does not permit truthfully of such simplicity of form as Mr. Hardy’s. When an artist is ridden by his metaphysic, so that it becomes a tyrant rather than an interpreter, his art is the less perfect. Mr. Abercrombie, bent upon establishing a declared philosophic basis for Art, is inclined to subdue this fact, because his own sympathy lies in the direction of austere Classical determinism. But he should not write as though the accident of Mr. Hardy’s situation was a condition of Art. For most of his particular criticism, I have nothing but admiring appreciation. It seems to make worth while the sheer intellectual effort which at times is necessary in order to understand some of the rather portentous writing. And it should be recognised that the book is by far the best appreciation of Mr. Hardy that has appeared. It is a book which defies the ordinary kind of kick-and-run review, both by its profundity and its highly emphatic pride in unusual possessions.
