Art and Reality: A Review

230 ART AND REALITY: A REVIEW Paul Goetsch, Die Romankonzept ion in England I88O-I9IO. Anglistische Forschungen, 94. Heidelberg: Winter, I967. Although the title of Goetsch's study may suggest a continuation of Richard Stang's monograph The Theory of the Novel in England I85O-I87O. and at least a partial overlapping with Kenneth Graham's recent English Criticism of the Novel I865-I9OO. Goetsch has reservations about the method of presentation chosen by both scholars . A systematic arrangement of the material around some basic functional and structural concepts of narrative art, such as plot, perspective, characterization, didacticism, would presuppose that all the novelists under discussion shared essentially the same view of the world and the role of art. That premise, however, would be false for the period from 1880 to 1910. Consequently, terminological similarities would only blur important divergencies; the demand that the novel should be "realistic," for instance, does not in itself constitute a useful criterion for the writing or the criticism of fiction if one is not sure about the nature of the reality thus to be depicted. The major issue in Goetsch's book is the views of novelists and critics on the relation between art and reality, or between the reality of life and the reality of art. In a period of change, with the Victorian concepts of realism and reality gradually breaking down, the novelists and the critics became more concerned with the difference between the objective nature of reality and the restricted , subjective view of the world of which the Individual is capable. It seemed more and more difficult to present in art an objective picture of this world, an artistic interpretation of it whose validity would be generally acceptable. The ever increasing subjectivity of the fictional world resulted from the lively critical discussion of naturalism between 1880 and 1895 in which the novelists themselves played a much more active and "progressive" role than the rather conservative professional critics. It is characteristic of the era as a period of transition that 'the tendency toward subjectivity did not lead the novelists of the years before 19IO to the extremes of the stream-of-consciousness school: to them, the objective, the empirical world never became so tenuous as to be completely merged with the perceiving subject; however mysterious, however hostile this empirical reality may have appeared to them, It did not lose Its very existence. Similarly , even radical ethical and epistemological scepticism, such as we find in Conrad, did not exclude a certain rehabilitation of human activity, which Is meaningful in his novels as well as in those of Kipling, Bennett, Galsworthy, or James. It Is this very tension between new trends and old needs which characterises these novelists; it Is these inconsistencies and contradictions In their views of the dualism of subject and object, their attitudes towards the relation of the individual to the world, towards the problems of illusion and reality, of man's self-determination and impotence, that shape the fictional worlds of their imagination. 231 Goetsch's study consists of three parts. In the first three chapters he analyses the problem of mimesis in art as discussed by critics of the novel from I87O to 1914. Tn the second, and main, section he deals with the theory and practice of fiction in the writings of eleven leading novelists of the period: Hardy, Moore and Glssing, Pater and Wilde, Stevenson and Kipling, Wells, Bennett, Conrad, and James, In the last two chapters he summarizes the results regarding the position of this period between Vlctorlanlsm and the modern age, emphasising the changing concept of reality. It is Inevitable that not everything said In a study of this nature is new. The author sometimes has to lean rather heavily on previous research, but he integrates those findings into his own line of argument (James is a case in point). Also one might doubt whether the title is altogether fortunate. The author's well-considered emphasis on the more general problem of art and reality as well as on the detailed and precise discussions of individual novels (an excellent chapter on Conrad) make the reader wonder whether "Romankonzeptlon " is the term he would have used...