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women and admire the works of Miss Rosamond Lehmann and Miss
Elizabeth Bowen. One may agree with Robert Graves (not to mention
Mary Pickford), as Mr. Fraser does, that "our world would be a better
and happier world if women played a larger part in the ordering of
it." One may agree that "England, after all, owes a great deal to her
philistines," who always come through in times of crisis. One may
counter the criticism of I.
A.
Richards and the Cambridge school by
observing that "stock responses" are not always bad but may be positive
continuators of tradition and useful habit. All this is incontrovertible.
Perhaps it is relevant to the future of literature. But how?
Mr. Fraser is so committed to his empirical conservatism and to
finding the plain, irreducible, living substance in all writers and all
things that he becomes in some ways a doctrinaire in spite of himself.
He longs for a future situation which will somewhat recapitulate the
high Victorian era, when once again there will be that "relatively stable
background, to which we only today aspire." (Having been a neo–
Romantic a few years ago, he is now ready to be a neo-Victorian.) One
can understand humanly why he should be moved by this image of
stability. But it leads him into erroneous historical formulations. It is
simply not true that "the great novels of the past" have arisen wholly
or in part because their authors could count on "an established order
which [they] might judge to be in the main a good or in the main an
evil order, but which was in either case reliably
there."
From Cervantes
to Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, George Eliot, and Proust, the author's
feeling was precisely that the established order was
not
reliably there,
that, indeed, it was being subverted and superseded.
If
we take up Mr.
Fraser's view of the matter we are going to wind up in the arms, at
worst, of Galsworthy and, at best, of Jane Austen.
Apparently it is the paradoxically doctrinaire Fraser who finds in
The Cocktail Party
Eliot's best play, because it expresses with "massive
and compressed moral strength," an ordinary, modern human involve–
ment. He quotes the well-known passage about the routine life as op–
posed to the saintly life:
They may remember
The vision they have had, but they cease to regret it,
Maintain themselves by the common routine,
Learn to avoid expectation,
Become tolerant of themselves and others,
Giving and taking, in the usual actions
What there is to give and take.
