NOVELIST HALF-FORGOTTEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 896, 5 October 1956, Page 13

NOVELIST HALF-FORGOTTEN

WILLIAM HALE WHITE (MARK RUTHERFORD), by Irvin Stock; Allen and Unwin, English price 25/-, Q)NE by one the novelists of the Victorian period are coming under teview and reputations, once considerable but in the intervening years diminished, are rising as a new generation of critics rediscover the solid worth of what was written a hundred years ago. Only Dickens, perhaps, has suffered no great vicissitudes. He has been read continuously for a century both by the older and critical reader, and by the young and merely voracious. He satisfies them all. Other reputations have been less steady and ‘have fluctuated. Thackeray was up, then down, and is now up again; George Eliot first up, then down, and today there is a school of critics which considers her the major nineteenth century novelist; Trollope was up, then down (and out), but today he is once again a roaring success. Many haye not fluctuated, Their reading public has steadily declined. I doubt even if Hardy is today anything but a specialist’s author. Meredith is certainly not popular. George Gissing? Edmund Gosse? Kingsley? The list of names which deserve a good entry in a literary history but which are not in great demand in the public libraries is considerable, One of the downest and outest at the moment is William Hale White, the subject of this careful and appreciative study. Lionel Trilling in the Introduction says that since hig books began to appear in 1880 his admirers have not been many, but they have been choice. With the final word I shall not quibble. But my own edition of his works is the seventh, and a bibliography of all his editions (and not just of his first editions) is the one major gap in Dr. Stock’s study, It would, I am sure, have provided a firmer foothold for the historian of his reputation, which cannot be documented merely from a record of what important critics have said about him. Quite unimportant (but evidently appreciative) readers bought editions one to seven.

The size of a novelist’s audience depends, I think, almost entirely on his ability to tell a story. His literary importance is only partially due to this skill. A good story-teller will always sell his hundreds of thousands, even though (like Somerset Maugham) he has little else to offer. The great novelist brings in additions an interpretation of life, a continuation of the moralising tradition that is implicit in the English novel. Mark Rutherford is not one of the major novelists, But The Autobiography and The Deliverance and the remarkable Revolution in Tanner’s Lane are much nearer the themes and scope of the great novels than many facile yarns that have attained greater popularity. They have their minor but permanent place and will be remembered when a lot of slick story-telling is gone with the wind. /

Ian A.

Gordon