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George Henry Lewes and hiscriticsDiderik Roll‐Hansen a

a University of Oslo ,Published online: 13 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Diderik Roll‐Hansen (1979) George Henry Lewes and his critics,English Studies, 60:2, 159-165, DOI: 10.1080/00138387908597956

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GEORGE HENRY LEWES AND HIS CRITICS

'Lewes, of course, had the luck to be immortalised with George Eliot, like afly in amber', we were told recently by a reputable academic critic. 'He gaveher quite as much as Frieda Lawrence gave her husband, shaping her per-ceptions and responses as well as affording her vital support and under-standing. And in return we find in many of her magnificent sentences, at thecore, one of Lewes's slightly vulgar, cheeky, joky sentences' (Martin BurgessGreen in the Guardian, 13 Sept. 1968, p. 5). This is ill-informed and scarcelyrepresentative of critical opinion today. George Henry Lewes was an authorof considerable importance in his own right. He was certainly not the cheekyvulgarian this donnish critic tries to make him out to have been. Nor was hejust 'the bloke George Eliot lived with'. Rene Wellek, in the fourth volumeof A History of Modern Criticism (1966), does not hesitate to place him withE. S. Dallas as one of the only two Victorian theorists who attempted to putcriticism on a scientific basis. But while Dallas merely 'erected a Victorianstyle Crazy Castle, a thing of rags and patches that cannot come to life againand remains a curiosity of the time', it was Lewes who first 'expoundedrealism' in England (pp. 141-51). And by realism Wellek means a criticalapproach which is 'rationalist, positivistic, and certainly antiromantic',which accepts evolutionary ideas in biology and sociology and tries to applythese ideas in humanistic studies, but which, in the case of Lewes, is alsomarked by a fervent admiration for French classical tragedy. After earlystudies of German idealist philosophy he came under the influence of J. S.Mill and Comte and then gradually found his own bearings. Leslie Stephen'sarticle in the D.N.B. is a reliable guide:

Lewes was invariably bright, clear, and eminently independent in his criticism. He hadgreater sympathy than most Englishmen with French canons of taste, disliked theclumsiness and obscurity of German literature, and thought that our idolatry ofShakespeare had made us blind to the merits of the classical school.

There are many others who have come forward in recent years in supportof Lewes. Geoffrey Tillotson took care to make frequent use of his criticalwork in the studies that have now been published posthumously as A Viewof Victorian Literature (1978). Elsewhere, in the introduction to the 1969reprint of The Principles of Success in Literature, one of Lewes's main criticalstatements, Tillotson concludes by arriving at a very favourable assessmentindeed: 'We are now coming to value the critical writings of the mid 19thcentury, and none are more brilliant and thoughtful than Lewes's'. These arestrong words. But Tillotson cautiously focuses on the middle of the century,a 'nadir' in the history of English criticism (Wellek, IV, 141), thereby ex-cluding (or barely excluding) not only Richard Holt Hutton, Walter Bagehot,

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Leslie Stephen, as well as Matthew Arnold, whose 1853 Preface was a firsteffort long before the bulk of his critical writings began to appear in the1860s, but also Carlyle, who, so late in his career, cannot be taken seriouslyas a competitor for the prize of being the most 'brilliant and thoughtful'among contemporary critics. Macaulay, always remarkable for brilliancerather than thoughtfulness, devoted his time more and more to the Historyof England; and J. S. Mill's occasional criticisms belong to the 1830s and1840s.

It is Lewes's versatility that first impresses the modern student. Talented,alert and genial, hard-working and urged on by intellectual curiosity in manydirections, he might seem to have been ready to make his mark in all fieldsof literature. 'English journalist, editor, critic, novelist, dramatist, actor,biographer, scientist, philosopher, and psychologist': these are the first twolines of the article on him in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (N.Y. andLondon, 1967), where Lewes has been given five columns, as compared toHerbert Spencer's nine and Alexander Bain's two. It will be useful to glanceat some of the ten careers enumerated, three of them only attempted withsome vigour off and on or over a short period, but most of them successfullyrealised.

Creative writing was of course his first ambition — poetry, fiction, drama.Two novels, as well as a number of tales (his special name for what he definedas stories of incident, most of them published serially in Blackwood's,Eraser's, or the Leader) are well worth dipping into for their vivid glimpsesof life in London and on the Continent: a cold November night in drizzling,noisy, murky, sloppy Holborn, or the satiric comedy of a young poet'seuphoria of delight and pride when he sees himself in print for the first time(in the semi-autobiographical Ranthorpe, I, iii), or the magic of sitting by thekitchen fire in a small village Gasthof listening to the singing of a duet byMozart. The prose of these fictions is always intelligent and fast-moving,though the plot may be ill-managed and the characters unconvincing,particularly in the awkward last few paragraphs, when (in E. M. Forster'sphrase) the plot 'often takes a cowardly revenge' in its losing battle with thecharacters.

Nor can Lewes be given any more than moderate praise for his early workas a playwright. He wrote nine popular plays, comedies and melodramas,eight of them published under the pseudonym Slingsby Lawrence, and mostof them adapted from some French text. They are competent stage carpentrywith quick dialogue and good timing of dramatic incident and on the wholeno worse than the average potboiler churned out at a time when the nine-teenth-century English theatre had reached its lowest ebb. It is at leastevident that the author, himself sometimes a main actor when the playswere produced, had developed a keen awareness of the stage. He also wrote atragedy in three acts, The Noble Heart, in the kind of irregular blank versethat he had himself rejected as artificial even before this poetic drama wasfirst put on the stage in 1849. Instead of 'the simple language of truth', hehad complained in an article on 'Recent Tragedies' in the Westminster Review

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in 1842, playwrights adopt 'antiquated phraseology* which will 'never touchthe common chord that vibrates through the heart of the audience' (XXX-VII, 335). If the dramatist Lewes had small success it was not because he didnot know that a play, however valuable as literature, must be treated as ablueprint in the theatre to be reinterpreted by the producer and conveyedthrough the medium of the actors to an audience that may applaud orcondemn. The sad story of Robert Browning's brief friendship with Ma-cready and the staging oi Straff ord at Covent Garden (1837) and A Blot in the'Scutcheon at Drury Lane (1843) provides suggestive examples of a creativewriter who had not learnt this lesson.

Critics of G. H. Lewes — and particularly the critics of the critics ofLewes's criticism — should be grateful for his early work in fiction anddrama. It is sobering to know that he has this advantage over most of us: hewas engaged in creative writing for several years before he found his truevocation — or one of them, because the critic continued to compete with thepsychologist and the philosopher until the end of his days. We are not sur-prised to find that after his death, as time passed and his critical work mightseem lost for ever in the back files of a variety of periodicals, the first warmtribute came from a man of the theatre. 'One of the most alert intelligencesof his time', wrote William Archer in his introduction to the Lewes sectionof Dramatic Essays (1894), a three-volume anthology of the best dramaticcriticism produced in the first half of the century, from William Hazlitt andLeigh Hunt to John Foster and Lewes:

Lewes was probably the most highly trained thinker who ever applied himself to thestudy of theatrical art in England. It was a happy chance which superadded to hisother gifts that innate passion for the stage which is the condition precedent of helpfuldramatic criticisms. (Ill, xv and xliii.)

William Archer's plea in 1894 is only a first indication that Lewes wouldeventually be granted the recognition that the more discerning of his owncontemporaries had not hesitated to grant him forthwith. Judging by thebibliographical information available it was not till the 1930s that his nameappeared on the title page as one of the subjects of a study in book form inEnglish, namely, Anna T. Kitchel's Lewes and George Eliot: A Review ofRecords (N. Y., 1933). And then, at the end of the 1940s came the first be-ginnings of what may now, perhaps, be considered a minor academic in-dustry. Morris Greenhut — an American, like so many other Lewes schol-ars — was the pioneer who published three well-argued essays on his criticalwork, its theory and practice, describing his struggle against his countrymen'sprovincialism and self-complacency and against their lack of critical stan-dards. It was easy for Greenhut to establish a convincing case for placingLewes as a writer well in advance of his age. Here was a critic who, in thefirst decade of Victoria's reign, defied the solid vote of middle class readersby attempting to dethrone idols that would continue to be worshipped forthe rest of the century. Macaulay is 'a rhetorician of the highest order', he

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wrote, 'but hardly a critic'. Sainte-Beuve is an entertaining writer who 'sub-stitutes gossip for ideas, biography for criticism' (R.E.S., XXIV, 130-1).

It was a matter of course that Gordon S. Haight should become the centreof this revival, himself contributing essays on Dickens and Lewes, and ontheir exchange of opinions concerning the peculiar case of spontaneouscombustion in Bleak House, as well as guiding or reviewing with greatacumen the work of other critics in the field. Jack Kaminski, in an article in1952 on 'The Empirical Metaphysics of George Henry Lewes', discusses hisposition in philosophy, not as the orthodox Comtist he is often made out tobe, nor as the enemy of metaphysical speculation, but as a mediator whorefused to accept what he considered unwarranted dualisms, such as thedistinction between noumenon and phenomenon and especially the dicho-tomy into 'Body and Mind', which he rejected in favour of the concept ofaspects of 'Body-mind' (Journal of the History of Ideas, XIII, 314-32). Themost useful short general introduction to Lewes the dramatist, novelist, andcritic, is still the essay written by R. L. Brett and published in Essays andStudies 1958 (English Association, ed. Basil Willey).

The books that have been written on Lewes may not all be up to the samecritical standard as these shorter studies. But the books have their ownadvantages. Alice R. Kaminsky's George Henry Lewes as a Literary Critic(Syracuse U.P., 1968) has become a basic monograph. It either provides theanswer, or it helps the reader to find the literature that provides the answer.The ample index, the numerous footnotes (three on the average to everypage), and the carefully worked out nineteen-page long classified biblio-graphy are so many welcome gifts to the research student. Dr. Kaminskymay not always draw the right conclusions. She is too quick, for example(pp. 184-5), to make nonsense of Rene Wellek's description of Lewes'scritical method as 'scientific' {History, IV, 149-52). But she scores a pointwhen, in order to rehabilitate Lewes, she proceeds to take advantage ofWellek's censure of Matthew Arnold's shortcomings (IV, 177-9), his 'gentle-man's smugness towards despair and passion' and his failure to appreciatethe French realistic novel, which repelled him by serving 'the goddessLubricity':

In the light of these standards, what should Wellek have said of Lewes, who yearsbefore Arnold wrote his essay on the 'Function of Criticism' had made the same plea foran unprejudiced, urbane, flexible criticism? Furthermore, Lewes practiced what hepreached when he displayed a broad range of sympathy for literary achievements inAmerica and Europe.

She has even arranged for some lines from the first (and the only published)volume of an Italian study of Lewes's philosophy to be translated and placedin her Conclusion (p. 183). In fact, G. Grassi Bertazzi's Esame critico dellafilosofia di George Henry Lewes (Messina, 1906) has always proved an awkwarddocument for English-speaking critics, who can scarcely hope to equalLewes's remarkable knowledge of foreign languages.

Edgar W. Hirschberg's George Henry Lewes (N. Y., 1970) certainly de-

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serves to be placed in the same class as Dr. Kaminsky's study. But it isuseful in a different way. Its approach is more general, and it shows a firmergrasp of the philosophical principles that form the basis of Lewes's criticalwork. It is more maturely argued. The discussion of Lewes's style, forexample, does not consist of just a few apt quotations from his own pro-nouncements on the subject, but examines both his theory and his practice,arriving (p. 72) at a well founded verdict, which includes a delightful satiricdig at the earnestness of scholars, whether Victorian or modern:

Ironically enough, Lewes's own writing is so clear and easy to read that critics some-times have mistaken ease of understanding for superficiality of idea. What is easycannot be profound, many scholars feel; therefore lucid explanations of any concept,complex or simple, are immediately suspect.

So few reviews have appeared of these two first books on Lewes that wecannot safely generalise. But it may be symptomatic that, in 1969, Lewesreceived what almost amounted to a brush-off in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,which printed a short notice describing him as 'a rather fusty and occasionallyperverse critic', though Dr. Kaminsky was commended for her 'balanced,original, and long overdue study' (XXIV, 246-7). The review in VictorianStudies largely supported this verdict: 'He wisely neglected to republish hiscriticism — it makes him seem rather commonplace. So inevitably doesDr. Kaminsky's book' (XIII, 230). Five years later, however, the second ofthe two books was taken very seriously in a long review in Victorian Perio-dicals Newsletter written by the Lewes expert Dr. William Baker, who foundwords of praise both for the book and for Lewes's criticism. After pointingout a number of inaccuracies, Dr. Baker concludes by heaving a modestsigh: 'To give all of Lewes's work the credit due to it is a daunting task, forwhoever undertakes it must be knowledgeable in many fields' (VII, 4, 28-30).

It may be useful to remember that the author is a lecturer in history whenwe read the latest addition to Lewes criticism, viz., Hock Guan Tjoa's GeorgeHenry Lewes: A Victorian Mind (Harvard Historical Monographs, LXX,1977, xi -f 172 pp.). He begins by analysing the new interest in qualityperiodicals, literary and general. He places Lewes as a product of the in-creasing need for 'higher journalism' in a period when the middle classbecame more and more interested in 'Culture', which, we are surprised tolearn, had earlier 'been an almost exclusively aristocratic preserve' (p. 3). Inhis first two chapters, 'The Making of a Man of Letters' and 'The Man ofLetters as Moralist', he gives a readable account of friendships, influences,and early achievements. His frame of reference is fairly wide, here as else-where in the book. In fact, the footnotes are one of its main attractions for astudent of the history of literary criticism, since they draw attention tosource material that may not be immediately available in a department ofEnglish studies (Herbert Spencer, Max Weber, J. T. Merz, Noel Annan,Ellegard on Darwin, etc.). But Dr. Tjoa might have made better critical use ofJohn Gross's book of 1969 on English literary life since 1800, which suggestedthe titles of these first two chapters. The title of the third and most ambitious

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chapter, which he has called 'The Construction of a Victorian World View',raises again a question that has been puzzling his readers ever since theirfirst glance at the title page: what does Dr. Tjoa mean by 'Victorian'?Although we gradually become aware that Victorianism, as we meet it in thisbook, has a variety of aspects, we miss some sense of historical change. Whatwere its origins? How did it develop? We feel rather let down when wefinally come to his not so very helpful conclusion: 'Lewes was neither thegreatest of Victorians nor the most Victorian of them all' (p. 135).

Dr. Tjoa is quite right to find much of his material in the important fivevolumes of Problems of Life and Mind (1874-79), some of the main ideas ofwhich he has suggested quite interestingly. But he shows small respect forthe material he is working with. 'Research fodder', he says about the fivevolumes, repeating John Gross's thoughtless jibe (p. 150). We miss an occa-sional coherent analysis of individual essays or monographs. Instead of thescattered quotations in the text (pp. 99 et passim) and the considerabledisplay of page references in the footnotes, it might have been interestingto retrace critically Lewes's argumentation in, for example, 'Mind as aFunction of the Organism' (Vol. 5, Problem II) and particularly to study hiscarefully planned definition of the concept of sentience (which he introducesat the beginning of the essay, and not, as Dr. Tjoa's footnote would suggest,on 'pp. 108, 81'). Dr. Tjoa is not a reliable close reader of a prose text. Afterquoting Lewes's sprightly ironic banter in the first edition of A BiographicalHistory of Philosophy (IV, 233) about the suspicions of the English towards'Metaphysical Speculation', and how they 'grovel in the mud' because they'cannot revel in the sky', he goes on to say that for many years 'Lewesmaintained this attitude towards any enquiry which appeared even re-motely metaphysical' (pp. 104-5). This reveals a misunderstanding both ofthe text quoted and of Lewes's intellectual development. Too often hepronounces half-truths because his evidence is only half-researched, such ashis comments on Dickens, Lewes, and spontaneous combustion (p. 85). Thehandling of footnotes and bibliographical information is not up to the markof a university publication. The gradual disclosure, for example, of what theshort title Problems stands for (pp. 78, 104, 106, 150, 164) is awkward foruninitiated readers, seeing that there is no bibliography to guide them. It issmall comfort to be told that, if they should wish more complete documen-tation, they 'may consult the original typescript in the Harvard UniversityArchives' (p. vi). But the saddest thing about this book is the off-hand wayin which Dr. Tjoa (pp. 149-50) dismisses as 'indifferent' the work of earliercritics who have been active in the same field with better results. G. H. Leweswould have disapproved in the name of truth and progress and what hisenemies had often slighted as the March of Intellect.

There is no reason to pretend that Lewes has been greeted in recent yearsas one of the great Victorians, long forgotten and now brought back tofame. When Victorian Studies finally carried an article dealing with Problemsof Life and Mind (in the summer issue of 1978), this was not primarily acontribution to the history of the philosophy of science, but a scholarly

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examination by K. K. Collins of George Eliot's revisions in the extantmanuscripts of the posthumously published two last volumes. The articlewas called 'G. H. Lewes Revised: George Eliot and the Moral Sense', andthe revised manuscripts were hailed as 'a valuable record of two powerfulVictorian minds in what can only be called sympathetic collision' (XXI, 466).In the TLS indexes for the last ten years we find no more than one mentionof Lewes, namely a reference to a criticism of a facsimile reprint of Ranthorpe.'A bad novel', the reviewer tells us bluntly, 'and its reappearance is likely toseem another case of misplaced scholarly fondness'. Even so, he proceeds tosearch this 'collapsed Wilhelm Meister' at some length for its melodrama andits 'Victorian revaluation of romanticism', until he arrives at the concludingcoup de grace by placing the novel as 'no more than an elephantine footnote'(9 May, 1975, p. 520). In fact, the review is such a vigorous piece of criticismthat it might well have been written by Lewes himself, who never thoughtmuch of his own fiction anyway. The question is not whether Lewes shouldbe raised to such and such a rank among mid-Victorian authors. The im-portant thing is that, thanks to recent research, we have become aware of adistinct profile. We recognise the special character of his prose and thinktwice before we label it Victorian or un-Victorian. He is one more reminderthat we should not be too quick to generalise about the period in which hewas active. No serious student of Victorian literature would today repeatGeorge Saintsbury's snub in the third volume of the once so authoritativeHistory of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (1900-04), which may wellhave been a main reason for Lewes's long neglect. It was inevitable thatSaintsbury, who never had any love for theories and socialists, should takean immediate dislike to Lewes. But we are not today worried by any 'quasi-philosophical tone' in his work. Nor do we discover in it 'the presence of anelement of vulgarity'. And when Saintsbury holds it against him that 'thestamp of the Exhibition of 1851 is upon him' we find such an innuendomainly of interest for an analysis of Saintsbury's own critical approach.

University of Oslo DIDERIK ROLL-HANSEN

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