The Epic Strain in the English Novel, by E.M.W. Tillyard

[p020] The Epic Strain in the English Novel, by E. M. W. Tillyard. (Chatto and Windus, 21s.) READING books about books is a specialized taste. Most are content to read novels for entertainment—for the age-old delight in a story, or for the newer, subtler pleasures of psychological reflection—and not to classify or correlate. Thus to most readers elaborate and lengthy works of literary criti- cism seem as little relevant to their own pleasure in reading as statistical breakdowns of the percentage of men under forty north of the Trent using cut-throat razors are to their own shaving habits. There are, nevertheless, some people who like to analyse the sources and modes of their enjoyment. Moreover, clear and level-headed exposition by critics is of much benefit to writers. Dr Tillyard’s engrossing book is even more valuable for its sustained note of cool calm understanding than for its interesting thesis. Even those who reject his definition of epic should agreed that he keeps scrupulously within his terms of reference and refrains from reading his own opinions into the works he judges. Astonishingly, he vividly restores one’s sympathetic interest p 113

[p021] Nn : "—_a}n—an—aY d+ 3 CT Ea a ea a SE oS LABOUR REVIEW in Scott. More remarkable still, he has made me willing to take up Conrad once more, after a lifetime of ‘just can’t read him’. His appraisals of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘An Old Wives’ Tale’ are crisp, lucid and eminently satisfying. I have no quarrel with his contention that epic must express the “un- conscious metaphysic’ of a considerable mass of people. It is an illuminating and resilient definition, and when, in working from it, he accepts ‘Crusoe’, ‘Waverley’, ‘Rob Roy’, ‘Heart of Midlothian’, ‘Nostromo’ and ‘Old Wives’ Tale’, but rejects ‘Tom Jones’, ‘Ivanhoe’, ‘Vanity Fair’ and ‘Middlemarch’, he makes his case most convincingly. Yet—like almost everyone who ventures to tangle with “Ulysses’—he finally succumbs to confusion, and quite fails to see how his own definition applies to Joyce’s misinterpre- ted, over-analysed, under-comprehended work. He declares against ‘Ulysses’ as an epic: yet the ‘unconscious metaphysic’ of the Irish people permeates every page. He doubts ‘whether the sense of exile or failure to fit in can be the substance of an epic’: yet on his own definition, an Irish epic could hardly be anything else, since that precise sense very largely is the Irish ‘unconscious metaphysic’. Admitting that Joyce pitilessly mauls a bogus kind of Irish patriotism’, he cannot see that here speaks the profoundest instinct of the Irish people. Joyce’s sardonic love-hate is not individual, but very highly characteristic and symptomatic of his country as a whole. Dr Tillyard ought to have studied at least something of the Irish ‘unconscious metaphysic’ before committing himself. He is the victim of his own unconscious supposition that the Irish are merely English-gone-funny—west Britons, in fact; but if you persist in supposing the caviar to be blackcurrant jam, you will never appreciate it. ‘Ulysses’ ‘has established no grip on the minds of Irishmen at large’ because they have never been allowed to hear of its existence save as a remote, incomprehensible and obscene work. In any case, Dr Tillyard elsewhere does not contend that an epic must be read by the mass, but that it must express them—whether they ‘like’ it or not. In short, he does not know what ‘Ulysses’ is all about— which is, simply enough, the entire social and moral chaos which Perpetual Coercion Acts, ‘Hell is not hot enough’ and the fiendish glee with which Parnell was ‘downed’ had pro- duced for almost the whole of Joyce’s. generation in Ireland. Alas, Dr Tillyard is more at home with the mental climate of England three centuries ago than that of Ireland fifty years ago. None the less, chapter viii apart, this is a stimulating and ‘remarkably readable book. S.F.H. Victorian Historian