Sparkenbroke and Hardy

Extract

Since novels are often books of science, as scientific anyhow as the whimsical symbolical sketch that journalism has made of modern physics, they fall under two heads according as the tale adorns the moral or the moral adorns the tale; which is roughly what historians of philosophy mean when they class their creatures by the deductive and inductive methods; the latter coming in with Bacon, Francis to some, Roger to others. Great novels, however, like great systems of thought, are not so easily settled, and in Sparkenbroke there is such unity of philosophy and poetry and prose, such fusion of insight and love and everyday sense, that to criticize it as a didactic piece is like the recent attempt to turn Beaudelaire into commercial verse.

Mr. Morgan’s aspiration may be Platonic, yet his art is Aristotelian; ideas are embodied, the universal made concrete, the mind continued into sense. Sparkenbroke may say that Emily Bronte desired more than Marvell could give her: “My outward sense is gone—Gone. Even the green thought in the green shade—gone. No sight in the open eyes; no challenge of the brain; an ‘unutter’d harmony,’ Earth lost, the whole shell of being utterly dissolved’ ‘: he may think his senses a leash withholding him from a higher world of experience, yet often are they charged with spirit without losing their own colouring. Propter melius animae est ut corpori uniatur.