Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation by W. David Shaw (review)

HUMANITIES 133 he does not fully understand its nature. When he named the animals, and in so doing 'understood / Thir Nature: the 'sudden apprehension' granted by God was perhaps in large measure a recognition of how his own nature differed from theirs: 'in these / I found not what methought I wanted still' (VJII,354-5). In addition to the interest of its central argument concerning names, this study contains many local attractions. Words effectively glossed include 'Eden,' 'rapture,' 'servile/ 'suggestion,' 'apostate Serpent,' 'Lucifer,' and 'Leviathan.' Leonard places his own work in a tradition of critical discussion which reaches from Christopher Ricks and Alastair Fowler back to such early and still rewarding commentators as Patrick Hume, Thomas Newton, and the Richardsons. The result of such close attention to both the text and its critical reception is a study that should prove of lasting value to future editors, as well as readers, of Milton's epic. (HUGH MACCALLUM) W. David Shaw. Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation Cornell University Press. x, 370. us $36.95 Scholarly review-browsers know, when a book is called a critical debut (read: published dissertation), to expect a focused argument about a circumscribed topic industriously and more or less aggressively built on a mass of prior scholarship. We look over the reviewer's shoulder for signs of informative research or originality in approach, and hope to catch the accent of a bright new voice. A study published towards the other end of an academic career - the scholar's compendium or summa - arouses expectations of a quite complementarysort. Fromstudiesof this latterkind, to which W. David Shaw's new book belongs, we expect virtues having less to do with novelty and more with amplitude, comprehensiveness, synthesis. These virtues Victorians and Mystery exhibits in force: its breadth of reference to Victorian authors and ideas, its illuminating comparisons among works familiar yet seldom juxtaposed, its seasoned acumen in addreSSing large issues of literary, philosophical, and religious humanism, will recommend it to Victorianists embracing a range of more specialized interests. Summarizing such a summa is a futile task; indeed, the least useful portions of the book are Shaw's own introductory and concluding efforts in this kind, which provide second-level synopses of already encyclopedic discussions and are best passed over in favour of his fourteen major chapters. These chapters devoted to individual or paired authors are selfsufficient : while they will repay independent consultation, they also follow a sustained, symmetrically organized. argument. For Shaw 'mystery' denotes whatVictorian writers eitherdo not articulate for strategicreasons, or cannot articulate by reason of human limitation. Shaw subdivides this 134 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 large topic into three, taking up in grouped chapters the mysteries first of the 'unconscious,' where psychology, linguistics, and theology all somewhat loosely interact; then of 'identity,' involving the ultimately groundless yet improvised and evolving self; and lastly of 'method,' the variety of disciplinary means whereby Victorians solicited and paid homage to the unknown. Across each of these three subdivisions Shaw traces three recurrent Victorian attitudes towards mystery. The first is positive in orientation, realist or essentialist in philosophy, and authoritarian in character. It represents, so to speak, mystery under control, whether in institutional terms (the Evangelical or the Catholic Newman) or as an author-function in narrative (wheresecret truths accessible to the positivist historian Buckle, or to Dickens's narrator and reader, get ignored or repressed by their historical or fictional agents). Whether or not Victorians adopting this first attitude affirm that a mystery is capable of being solved, they consistently affirm its independent reality - and thus, although Shaw makes little of this, they authorize themselves in its name. Victorian practitioners of Shaw's second approach to mystery enjoy the contrary authority of demystification. Idealists in philosophy, they enjoin a severe epistemology that reduces the contentof mystery to the intellectual forms in which humankind apprehend it: i.e., to systems of words and signs. Shaw reads Carlyle, Mill, Clough, and others as Victorian deconstructionists for whom mystery reduces to paradox, and paradox to an agnostic blank. This negative stance, the dialectical antithesis to the first, Shaw pursues with the zeal and ingenuity one might expect of a scholar whose first book was...