George Henry Lewes [antikvár]

Preface I first became interested in George Henry Lewes in 1945 when, as an ex-G.I. who suddenly had become a student of English literature at Cambridge University, I prepared for the Tripos Examination in George Eliot under Professors Joan Bennett and F. R. Leavis. At that time Lewes was to me a shadowy little figure, lurking in the periphery of George Eliot's effulgence, in the anomalous position of being her husband, without being her husband, for the last twenty-five years of his life. Later, at Yale, when Professor Gordon S. Haight introduced me more thoroughly to Lewes, I began to understand that he was a person of real consequence, aside from his relationship with George Eliot, a man whose works were well worth studying for their own sake as productions of one of the nineteenth century's most lively, versatile, and original minds. This book makes no attempt to appraise all that Lewes did and MTote, nor is it in any sense a biography. For reasons that will become apparent to the reader, I have devoted my attention almost exclusively to his accomplishments in literature and criticism, and to my knowledge this is the first full-length study and analysis of them that has as yet been made. I believe that his most enduring importance lies in his work as a critic. Bernard Shaw considered his dramatic criticism the best that was written between William Hazlitt's day and Shaw's own. As a literary critic Lewes was the first among his English contemporaries to adopt and explicate the theory of realism, and the first to make use of this theory in setting up criteria to judge the quality of fiction. René Wellek and other literary historians have cited Lewes's importance as a critic, and I have tried to show by means of additional evidence that Lewes is indeed a figure to be reckoned with in any study of literary events in the nineteenth century. My ultimate objective has been to bring about a better under-