Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/302

 296 Hughes The book concludes with some illuminating and generally true remarks about the Victorian age. An age is known by what it produces. The Victorian age produced the most fruitful scientific thinking since Copernicus. Beginning with 1832, it took larger strides in political and social reform than any other age since 1642. It went farther in theological recon- struction than any other since Luther. Any poet who faithfully chronicles the spiritual feelings of such an age, in a form supremely beautiful in itself, will scarcely lack readers so long as mankind is interested in the history of its development. We shall recur again and again to Tennyson, the poetic inter- preter of a great age. CLARK S. NORTHUP. Cornell University. MOTIVES IN ENGLISH FICTION. By Robert Naylor Whiteford, Ph.D. New York and London: G.P.Putnam's Sons, 1918. $2.00. A work which shall be at once a chronological history of English fiction from Malory to Dickens, and an analysis of "the motives that color the threads in the warp and woof of all our fiction," is what Mr. Whiteford proposes in his preface. As he has been impressed, he tells us, during a protracted reading of English fiction "by the wonderful variations of that original- ity that reveals itself as the unity of life," the whole force of his "exposition of the advance of the English novel has been thrown on the motives manifesting themselves in variations that lie back of all life." These prefatory statements are quoted, since otherwise by some readers the author's intention may be but vaguely discerned in the chapters that ensue. In ten chapters English writers of fiction not everyone, perhaps, will be willing to class as novelists Thomas Malory and Miss Mitford are discussed in a chronological order which groups in Chapter V, among others such a motley company as Samuel Johnson, Henry Brooke, and Horace Walpole; in Chap- ter VI, Frances Burney, Robert Bage, Thomas Day, and Ann Radcliffe; while it forces into Chapter VII their respective coworkers and counterparts of a little later date: Maria Edge- worth, William Godwin, Mrs. Inchbald, and "Monk" Lewis. This adherence to chronology so strict as to obviate any logical grouping of novelists and their works is a fundamental weakness in the organization of the book. The treatment of each novelist consists of a summary of the stories of some or all of his works, sometimes full, as in the case of the Morte Darthur, Congreve's Incognita, and Mrs. Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House; and at other times very brief, as in