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GEORGE LEVINE
The prose and the attitudes here are characteristic of the entire book.
There is the judiciousness, the careful balancing, the rejection of enthu–
siasms, the refusal to reject either alternative, no matter how feebly em–
bodied (as in Birrell) and the deep commitment to cultural history
which is more than literary-the province of the early reviewers.
The balance is supported here by an implicit conception of the
"ordinary reader" which is peculiarly English. It would be hard to locate
in America a body of ordinary readers which would be able to make the
distinction between the kinds of histories Gross is talking about. The
ordinary reader of that kind would be very special, indeed, probably self–
consciously a part of an intellectual minority, whether attached to an
academy or not. Gross surely has the "ordinary reader" in mind as he
proceeds in his history of the "fall" of the man of letters; the loss entailed
in that fall is largely the ordinary reader's loss.
If
he exists, I wonder
if he feels it? But surely in England he did once exist. For whom else
did all those popular literary histories get written? Who else attended
the adult schools that became a mark of Victorian education? Surely it
was his money that lined the pockets of the literary journalists Gross
describes in later chapters. But the existence of this kind of reading pub–
lic is more a sociological than a literary phenomenon. And it is more
likely that the disappearance of the kind of critical writing which would
appeal to this public is more a function of technology than of the be–
havior of the writers with whom Gross deals.
The professionalism of academia, as it admitted English literature
into its curriculum, made standards of scholarship more rigorous and
eventually led to the incorporation and institutionalization of New Crit–
icism. Such criticism tended to ignore literature's larger and more ob–
vious relations to life and culture in favor of the text. But one of the
difficulties of Gross's method in handling this development is that,
al–
though he is aware that the changes followed large scale cultural and
technological changes, his focus on particular writers (quite reasonably
taken as representative or influential) gives the impression that this move–
ment was the responsibility of a few key writers.
This, in turn, leads to a positive need for judiciousness of the kind
I have been describing, since it is obvious that no single writer or group
of writers is to be blamed ("blame" may be an injudicious word and an
inexact description of Gross's activity). At any rate, the book takes great
pains to show that, on the one hand, the Belle-Lettrists were not simply
absurd and shallow, and that, on the other, the professional academicians
-becoming increasingly professional-were also involved in a
Good
Thing despite their cold efficiency. "Blame" is, indeed, hard to fasten.
But the balance of the judgments reminds us
again
that the perspec-
