I dipped into Adam Bede, and my
impression that George Eliot will never be among the classical writers was made a certainty. Her style, though not
without shrewdness, is too rank to have any enduring vitality. People call it
‘masculine’. Quite wrong! It is downright, aggressive, sometimes rude, but
genuinely masculine, never. On the contrary it is transparently feminine –
feminine in its lack of restraint, its wordiness, and the utter lack of feeling
for form which characterises it. The
average woman italicises freely. George Eliot of course had trained herself too
well to do that, at least formally; yet her constant undue insistence springs
from the same essential weakness, and amounts practically to the same expedient
Emily and Charlotte Brontë are not guiltless
on this count, but they both have a genuine, natural appreciation of the value
of words, which George Eliot never had.
Jane Austen, now, is
different. By no chance does she commit the artistic folly of insisting too
much. Her style has the beauty and the strength of masculinity and femininity
combined and, very nearly, the weakness of neither.
In May Chapman’s there is a story by Henry
James. His mere ingenuity, not only in construction but in expression is
becoming tedious, though one cannot but
admire. Also his colossal cautiousness instatement is very trying. If he would
only now and then contrive to write a sentence without a qualifying clause!
- Journal of Arnold Bennett, May 13, 1896
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