Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Let us review the candidates: Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The Bostonians. The other night, someone tried to make a case for Moby-Dick. Along with Tristam Shandy and Daniel Deronda, it is one of my great unreadables. I have tried, but always jumped ship before leaving Nantucket. Clarissa: immense power — if not as much fun as Pamela — yet I have no enthusiasm for rereading it. The Bostonians: again, great power — but what about more matter with less art, and was James really writing in English?
Pride and Prejudice: with Portia and Rosalind, Lizzie Bennet is one of the Three Graces, the most delicious girls in fiction (poor Portia, to think of the long slow tragedy of marriage to Bassanio). For all Miss Austen’s perfection, we are surely in search of a larger scale. Middlemarch has that. But Dorothea Brooke is irritating, while Ladislaw is a bloodless niminy-piminy whimsy: almost makes one sympathise with Casaubon. (Forgive the name-drop, but I once suggested to Tom Stoppard that he write a play with a sympathetic account of Karenin. Could the same be done for Casaubon?) One can understand Sir James Chettam’s impulse to call out Ladislaw and shoot him. If only Dorothea had met Lydgate early and managed to break the bonds of class to marry him. Then, however, there would have been no story.
Apropos of story, it is inescapable. We cannot stand against the whirlwind. The gaucheness, the naivety, the gross sentimentality, the absurd parodies of his opponents’ arguments: in each case, our author is guilty as charged. But the creativity, the scope, the wit, the linguistic inventiveness: Dickens overpowers the critics’ scruples, never more so than in Bleak House.
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