[The English Novel by George Saintsbury]@TWC D-Link bookThe English Novel CHAPTER VI 3/36
Flimsily constructed, hastily written, reflecting indeed the ways and speech of the time after a fashion, but in a distorted mirror and with a thin and superficial representation, nearer to bad drama than to good literature, full of horseplay and forced high jinks--his stories have all the inseparable faults of improvisation together with those of art that is out of fashion and manners-painting (such as it is) of manners that are dead, and when alive were those of a not very picturesque, pleasing, or respectable transition.
Yet, for all this, Hook has a claim on the critical historian of literature, and especially of the novel, which has been far too little acknowledged.
And this claim does not even consist in the undoubted fact that his influence both on Dickens and on Thackeray was direct and very great.
It lies in the larger and more important, though connected, fact that, at a given moment, his were the hands in which the torch of the novel-procession was deposited.
He stands to fiction almost exactly as Leigh Hunt stands to the miscellaneous essay.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|