The English Novel

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 392, 27 December 1946, Page 13

The English Novel

HE study of English literature in our educational institutions is all too often the inculcation of a mild hypocrisy. Gloomily and perfunctorily, the young learn how to retail the reasons for their vivid admiration of that which they do not admire; and for the rest of their days, great literary masterpieces remain for them accumulations of inorganic matter, knowledge of which they will nevertheless force upon their children, prompted to this by motives perhaps better left unrealised. Few have written better sense on this unhappy topic, or have pleaded more sensitively and compellingly for the teaching of literature as an approach to living language, not as the coverage of a limited number of bottled and preserved classics, than L. A. G. Strong, who began a BBC series on The Development of the English Novel — woefully familiar title-from 3YA on Friday, December 13. Mr. Strong dealt with Richardson and Fielding, that pair of incompatibles whose Pamela and Tom Jones engendered the long line which has resulted in Virginia Woolf and F-r-v-r Amb-r. The great novelists of his talk in their vitality, and

confidence, manifested in very dissimilar ways, infused a picaresque quality into the English variety which it has never entirely lost; but Mr. Strong’s talk, worn perhaps by many years of popular broadcasting, seemed a little lacking in penetration, not attempting to give us much more than the technical contributions made by Richardson and Fielding to the structural growth of the novel. Perhaps as the series (which has replaced those melancholy puppet-shows English Architects) unfolds itself, this talk may be seen as organically part of a larger whole. Meanwhile, we wait and hope.