[The Georgian Scene] contains essays on approximately seventy-five writers who range in time from Henry James to T. S. Eliot and in importance from Shaw and Bennett to Edgar Wallace and Noel Coward. A few of the discussions are quite perfunctory, and the space devoted to each often seems to bear little relation to either the popularity or the significance of the subject, but the best are genuinely illuminating and nearly all both informative and readable. Mr. Swinnerton quite frankly discusses his authors from the point of view of an enthusiastic reader of catholic taste rather than from that of a critic with dogmatic ideas. He walks around each subject, noting significant biographical details and, in a very large number of cases, supplying personal reminiscences. He proposes no standards other than very general ones and he makes no final judgments. But he does achieve a panorama, and few men are better qualified than he to do just that….
In so far as "The Georgian Scene" has a theory, it seems to be that a fairly distinct mode of writing emerged about the time that the Henry James method went into bankruptcy, and that it held the field more or less unchallenged until the rise of what Mr. Swinnerton calls the New Academicism of T. S. Eliot and his disciples. Probably the best of all the essays is the first, on James himself, and according to that the central defect of James was his ambition to be, as he himself stated it, "just literary." The tenuousness of his writing was not due simply to his detachment but to the fact that he was not merely detached from but actually ignorant of both the material background and the driving motives of his characters, who were compelled to live in a spiritual as well as a material vacuum. He did not know precisely what forced Roderick Hudson's wayward young woman to marry a man she did not want to marry any more than he knew the precise nature of that humble household article from the manufacture of which the chief personages in "The Ambassadors" derived their income….
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