The Victorian Sage

REVIEWS THE VICTORIAN SAGE" F. E. L. PRIESTLEY Two generations ago it would hardly have been necessary to describe a book with the title The Victorian Sage; its contents would have been safely predictable: potted extract of message, with inspirational quotations. One generation ago the title would have been equally revealing: facetious debunking of Victorian pretensions to moral wisdom. It is a relief to have come to a period in which neither attitude need be mandatory, and in which the Victorian idiom neither dominates nor repels. Mr. Holloway's approach seems to me wholly admirable in its balance; the purpose he defines for himself, "an objective understanding" of what his authors did, is well achieved. He chooses for his study six authors, three of them obvious "sages": Carlyle, Newman, and Arnold; three of them novelists: Disraeli, George Eliot, and Hardy. The inclusion of the novelists is an important part of Mr. Holloway's design; his analysis of intention and techniques in the novels constantly produces fruitful parallels with the polemical prose of the other three authors. The activity of the sage, "to give expression to notions about the world, man's place in it, and how he should live," is "a distinctive activity, a unique use of words." The sage offers a special kind of knowledge (or wisdom), presented in a special way: "all of these authors insist on how acquiring wisdom is somehow an opening of the eyes, making us see in our experience what we failed to see before. This unanimity suggests that conviction comes here essentially from modifying the reader's perceptiveness, from stimulating him to notice something to which he was previously blind. This new perception, moreover, is usually allied to ordinary perception by the senses. It is not of some quite new reality; it is seeing old things in a new way." The sage, then, performs the task Browning ascribes in Sardella to the highest rank of poets, the task of the "Maker-see." And it is as true of the sage who writes prose as of the poet that "what he has to say is not a matter just of 'content' or narrow paraphrasable meaning, but is transfused by the whole texture of his writing as it constitutes an experience for the reader." It is this texture, as related to the meaning, which Mr. Holloway's essays examine. For purposes of clarity he treats elements of the texture separately, with however constant reminders of the unity and relation *The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument. By JOHN HOLLOWAY. London : Macmillan & Co. Ltd. [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada]. 1953. pp. viii, 301. $4.00 193 194 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY of whole works. The various functions of incident and character in the novel, in historical prose, and in polemical prose are analysed in detail to reveal their place in "the whole weave of a book," their operation in "mediating world views." Very detailed analyses of the structure of the argument in Carlyle, Newman, and Arnold provide some of the most stimulating passages in the book. At a number of points Mr. Holloway sets forth, with varying degrees of formality, the results of his analysis, as when he notes four distinct functions of metaphor in George Eliot (p. 154), to which he adds two others in Newman (p. 185) and Hardy (p. 270). He makes a good deal of the effect of tone of a work, and the means by which it is produced, particularly in Disraeli, Newman, and Arnold. His last major category of texture is "control of the sense of words," and here again he usefully distinguishes four varieties (p. 192), adding an ingenious recognition test (pp. 194, 196). At all points the reader is aware of Mr. Holloway's close "nd penetrating familiarity with the texts studied, and is bound to be impressed by the felicity of his examples and the skill with which they are related. A single paragraph often brings together sentences from three or four different works, or kindred illustrations from half-a-dozen novels,. yet one never feels the presence of the card-index; all seems to proceed from a long and loving acquaintance with the works discussed, and the...