The Great Tradition by F. R. Leavis

Author:F. R. Leavis [F. R. Leavis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571280803
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

The influence of Dickens is plain here. It is the Dickens, not, as in The Princess Casamassima, of Little Dorrit, but of Martin Chuzzlewit. This passage of Roderick Hudson, of course, couldn’t possibly have been written by Dickens: something has been done to give the Dickensian manner a much more formidable intellectual edge. We feel a finer and fuller consciousness behind the ironic humour, which engages mature standards and interests such as Dickens was innocent of. It is quite personal, a remarkably achieved manner for a first novel. Roderick Hudson, in fact, is a much more distinguished, lively and interesting work than, at the prompting of the retrospective James, is generally supposed.

What I offer this passage as illustrating is not merely James, in the way I have suggested earlier in this book, seeing life through literature – and English literature. More importantly, what we have here is a good instance of the way in which a great original artist learns from another. Incomparably more mature in respect of standards as James was than Dickens, his debt to Dickens involves more than a mere manner; he was helped by him to see from the outside, and critically place, the life around him.

To bring out the full force of this point I will jump forward a dozen years and quote, for comparison, a passage from one of James’s acknowledged masterpieces, The Bostonians:

Towards nine o’clock the light of her hissing burners smote the majestic person of Mrs Farrinder, who might have contributed to answer that question2 of Miss Chancellor’s in the negative. She was a copious, handsome woman in whom angularity had been corrected by the air of success; she had a rustling dress (it was evident what she thought about taste), abundant hair of a glossy blackness, a pair of folded arms, the expression of which seemed to say that rest, in such a career as hers, was as sweet as it was brief, and a terrible regularity of feature. I apply that adjective to her fine placid mask because she seemed to face you with a question of which the answer was preordained, to ask you how a countenance could fail to be noble of which the measurements were so correct. You could contest neither the measurements nor the nobleness, and had to feel that Mrs Farrinder imposed herself. There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the American matron and the public character. There was something public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk, over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogized by a leading citizen. Mrs Farrinder, at almost any time, had the air of being introduced by a few remarks. She talked with great slowness and distinctness, and evidently a high sense of responsibility; she pronounced every syllable of every word and insisted on being explicit. If, in conversation with her, you attempted

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