Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (review)

It is the rare student of Victorian literature who has not encountered the work of George Levine at some point, and the rare scholar who has been untouched by the force of his arguments on the relation between Victorian realism and Victorian science. We now have a sort of Levine ana: a collection of ten essays, published over the last twenty-five years, that weave together a family of ideas and figures that he has made central to the study of Victorian culture and that present an intellectual portrait of the man himself. While the pieces gathered here do not finally amount to a monograph—and admittedly are not intended to—they do nevertheless cohere, reinforcing certain themes and expanding on or trimming back others, to a degree that illustrates the remarkable coherence of Levine’s scholarly career itself. If I have one quibble with the formal organization of the book, it is that, not unlike a man preparing his memoirs or putting his affairs in order, Levine has carefully erased every sign of the essays’ origins so as to make them seem all the more of a piece: there are no dates of publication, and the essays have been revised (though not heavily altered) just enough to make them seem contemporary. The result is a peculiarly suspended affair. It is entirely possible that one of Levine’s young and earnest editors at Cambridge University Press decided that, based on truisms generated by the academic publishing industry, collections of unrelated essays will not sell, and something that at least looks like a book is a better bet financially than something that does not. It goes without saying that these would be editors who have not read Isaiah Berlin or his ilk. But if this is so, I wish Levine had resisted more heartily. What I miss most of all in this book is the sense of an intellectual trajectory: a sense that Levine’s ideas developed over time, that he changed his mind at various cultural/political crossroads in real life, that consistency, if not exactly the hobgoblin of little minds, is not the one thing necessary to which all intellectual endeavors must be sacrificed. The first-time reader will not know the order in which these essays were published, will have little understanding of their context, and could easily imagine they were all written in the past year. And that is a shame.

The big theme in all of Levine’s work is inseparable from the great Victorian anxiety: whether science has made morality obsolete. Most readers will be familiar with the theme from the twentieth-century essays of C. P. Snow on the “two cultures” and Lionel Trilling’s stirring, if ultimately inadequate, rebuttal. Levine has done more than perhaps any living literary critic to demonstrate the extent to which this seemingly modern debate is rooted in Victorian culture. He also demonstrates, to great effect, how haltingly we have advanced from our Victorian predecessors. When Levine elaborates on George Eliot’s relationship to Auguste Comte’s positivism, or Charles Dickens’s representation of money, or the difference between John Ruskin and Charles Darwin on the nature of matter, he is also telling us about ourselves. The real wisdom of Levine’s scholarship, if I can put it that way, lies in his splendidly informed relationship to our not so distant past. In these essays, the postmodern is not nearly as distant from the Victorian as one might imagine: we are still looking, that is, for an answer to the question whether what “is” can have any effect on what “ought” to be. Levine’s lucid essays, in other words, are situated (whatever their putative Victorian focus) at the place where the sciences and humanities intersect in the modern academy—which is nothing if not a central and much contested location.

Levine’s controlling conceit is not particularly new: “the Victorian moral/intellectual...