INNER RUMBLINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 469, 18 June 1948, Page 14

INNER RUMBLINGS

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, By Henry James. THE EGOIST. By George Meredith. Oxford University Press (Geoffrey Cumberlege). "Poor old James," Meredith said in one of his more sarcastic moments, "he sets down on paper these mysterious ‘rumblings in his bowels-but who could be expected to understand them?" A pretty question indeed, but one which the present spate of criticism and anecdote about the Great American is‘ doing a good deal towards answering. Meredith’s own inner rumblings were, of course, of a different kind. His obscurities are those of a poet, sensuous and imaginative, while James’s are more in the realm of ‘expression, due to his compressed allusiveness of manner. But Meredith too is being revived at the present time. It would be interesting to know exactly why these two eminent Victorians are attracting so much more popular attention to-day than they have for many years. Perhaps one reason is that both were analysts of the mind and soul, philosophic commentators on the position of man (and woman) in society, and both; in their separate fashions, idea-men.. In the works of both, too, the novel advanced a_ visible step in technique; they enlarged the scope of realism and opened new vistas in the novelist’s art. Meredith the poet-novelist and James the aesthete perfected individually a method of revealing their drama through the minds of one or two characters -- "mirrors," James called them-like Isabel Archer in The Portrait, and Clare Middleton and Sir Willoughby in The Egoist. And ~when we trace the descent of this technique through its yarious modifications in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Graham Greene, to that of contemporaries like Philip Toynbee, we may feel that here is the mainstream of the English novel, and that a study of its Victorian sources should add much to our understanding and enjoyment of its ramifications to-day, These two excellent reprints-World’s Classics Double Volumes-on India paper and in O.U.P.’s best manner of printing and binding, have been well chosen to introduce new readers to the world of James and Meredith. The Portrait of a Lady was the first of James’s mature masterpieces, written after he had perfected his literary technique but before the advent of his Mandarin-like later manner; The Egoist was deliberately framed by Meredith as the complete example of his theory of comedy, and is easily his most popular work.

P.J.

W.