"the Soul of Art": Understanding Victorian Ethical Criticism‪.‬

Introduction In an 1845 article called "The Literature of Fiction," an anonymous writer in the British Quarterly Review concludes a short history of the English novel with some reservations about the morality of Scott's Waverley novels. In particular, he is concerned that the "crime of duelling is lightly dealt with; and ... is in one instance defended." Further, he regretfully observes, "great indulgence is shown to debauched and intemperate habits. The profane language also ... is highly objectionable" (542). If, in their carping tone and prescriptive approach, these remarks typify the Victorian approach to the ethics of fiction, it is hardly surprising that participants in the much-discussed "turn to ethics" in contemporary literary theory have not turned back as far as the nineteenth century. (1) After all, as the editors of a recent collection remark, "if there is any single defining characteristic in the ethical turn that marks contemporary literary studies, it resides in the fact that few critics wish to return to a dogmatically prescriptive or doctrinaire form of reading" (Davis and Womack x). If modern ethical critics refer to the nineteenth century at all, it is only as the source of just such a rule-oriented, censorious "form of reading" that contrasts with their various but all allegedly flexible and undogmatic approaches. Tracing the origins of this rigid critical tradition to Matthew Arnold, both postmodern ethical critics such as Geoffrey Galt Harpham and humanist critics such as Wayne Booth explicitly distance themselves from Arnold's twentieth-century heirs--F.R. Leavis, Yvor Winters, and Lionel Trilling especially--whom Booth calls the "hanging judges" and against whose "hectoring" voices and ideological and theoretical commitments (real or perceived) today's ethical critics of all stripes define themselves (Company 49). No doubt this distancing is as much strategic as principled, for as David Latane remarks, "[m]any currents in contemporary Anglo-American criticism and theory have become energized by a dislike of the Arnoldian stance" (390), but it is this stance with which any overt interest in ethics, as Marshall Gregory observes, is promptly associated: