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RICHARD CHASE
Mill did in reading Wordsworth) not so much an emotional ful–
fillment as a substitute for emotion and a mode of psychic sal–
vation.
The chapter on the industrial novels of Mrs. Gaskell, Dickens,
Disraeli, Kingsley, and George Eliot is fresh and useful. The fan–
tasy of circus life as an apparent "answer" to industrialism in
Dickens'
Hard Times
is described as "adolescent." Disraeli's anger
at the industrial system, though not scorned, is called "the general–
ized anger of an outsider making his way." All of these novels,
genuine as they are, seem to Mr. Williams to illustrate equally a
middle-class concern for and fear of the working-class-a fear of
violence and revolution which history has proven baseless. Matthew
Arnold naturally comes in for extended discussion, and yet despite
his pivotal position in the development of the idea of culture, Mr.
Williams finds him more vulnerable to argument from historical
reality than Burke and Newman. Williams is too astute to echo the
old charges that Arnold's "culture" is merely snobbish and literary
(though he does toss the word "priggish" at the author of
Culture
and Anarchy).
Yet he finds basic equivocations in Arnold's account
of the relation of culture to politics and to social facts, as well as a
final indecision as to whether culture is an absolute (with or with–
out divine sanction?) or a process. Morris is "the last of the great
Victorian rebels," speaking an old-fashioned moral rhetoric but
looking forward to the increasing alliance of culture with the
working-class.
In the discussion of guild socialists like Penty and Cole we
begin to hear much about "community" as against "mass civiliza–
tion." Mr. Williams pays tribute to Lawrence's "instinct for com–
munity" and "his endless venture into consciousness," and appar–
ently identifies himself a good bit with Lawrence as one who also
knows by birth the "living process" of the working-class and the
struggle to bring that process to consciousness. The main effort of
Eliot, Richards, and Leavis, says Mr. Williams, was to bring
art
back into the context of society and culture, after the "aesthetic"
excursion of the
fin de
siecle.
The English Marxists are examined
in some detail and are found to be in a final confusion as to
