Victorian Poetics

Grieux for Manon. Every page of this book is a revelation. Like everyone else Ihad always thought that the main events of the novel took place during the Regency period. But now I discover, and am persuaded, that the tragedy is acted out during the last years of the reign of Louis XIV. But the great discovery, for those who have read only Manon Lescaut, wi1l be that Prevost was not simply a writer who had a lucky break with one novel. On the contrary, although the focusofthis study is Manon Lescaut, the novel is, in fact, discussed in the light of the other twelve, in such a way thatwecome to appreciate the enormous variety ofPrevost's artistry and the extent of his genius. Only at the end of the book do we fully realize how skilfully we have been guided through the labyrinthine ways of Pr~vost's world. And all this without a semiotic square or a word of jargon to mar the elegant and lucid prose that has led us closer to an understanding of the art and artifice which are the hallmark of a great novelist. Victorian Poetics DONALD s. HAIR W. David Shaw. The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age University of Wisconsin Press 1987. xix, 311. us $26.50 This is a major achievement in criticism, and a brief review cannot do it justice. It is a major achievement because of its scope, because of its charting of multiple lines and overlapping territories in the history of ideas, and because of the relations Shaw establishes among philosophers, critics, and poets. These relations are revealing, and are likely to prove seminal, because Shaw, in showing that Victorian poetics can best be understood through the period's changing theories of knowledge and of language, suggests a great many promising lines of investigation. Shaw's model is Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp, but The Lucid Veil is (to use Coleridge's distinction) an imitation and not a copy. Like Abrams, Shaw has his organizing metaphors, and the shift from Abrams's antithesis to Shaw's oxymoron is an indication of the Victorian attempt to mediate between the two philosophical traditions (usefully summed up in Mill's essays on Bentham and Coleridge) which the age inherited. Shaw begins with the familiar image of the mind as the mirror of nature or as the window on nature, and then describes the 'lucid veiling' of that mirror or window as it is framed or as the glass darkens. From 1860on, the veil hides more than it reveals, and is often replaced by the kaleidoscope. Unlike Abrams, Shaw links these metaphors, not only to literary critics and theorists, butalso to philosophers and to thinkers whose immediate concern is not poetry at all, so that The Lucid Veil is not just Abrams's 'the critical tradition' but also (as Shaw says in one of his headings) 'philosophy UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY. VOLUME 57. NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1987/ 8 VICTORIAN POETICS 351 among the poets.' He begins with Mill and ends with Hegel. Mill's A System ofLogic provides us with the metaphor of the mind as the mirror of nature, a metaphor which is modified by the idealists, for whom the world is framed by a self-conscious subject. This image brings us to the many kinds of framed poem or framed story, the 'narrative strip-tease' (p 64) of Sartor Resartus being one of the most influential of these experiments. With agnostic thought, the mirror darkens, and Shaw's oxymoron becomes the motif in his examination ofKantian, Tractarian, and Hegelian axioms of cognition, until it too gives way to the kaleidoscope of Paterand the aesthetes. The claim for Hegel's place among the poets is an especially powerful one, and Jowett emerges as the central figure; his teaching of Hegel at Oxford from mid-century on, and his teaching of Plato 'through a Hegelian lens' (p 239), seem to have been immensely influential. The most exciting aspect of this book is its tracing of lines of influence, however crossed or tangled they may be; the linking of thinkers and poets often seems surprising at first, and then...