A Review That Wounds Gently
The cruelest courtesy our trade permits: to praise a colleague faintly
It is a pleasure, and increasingly a rarity, to encounter a book so visibly the product of a lifetime's devotion to its subject.
Professor Hartley's study of the Victorian sermon arrives with advance praise, and much of that praise is deserved.
The archival labour on display is ; one senses that no dusty vestry in England has escaped the author's patient attention.
The prose, too, is genial and unhurried, the work of a man entirely at ease in the company of his own erudition.
It would be not to acknowledge, at the outset, how much there is here to admire.
And yet admiration, as this book unintentionally reminds us, is not the same thing as conviction.
For all its industry, the study advances a thesis so that it is difficult to imagine what evidence could ever contradict it.
Hartley contends that the sermon shaped the Victorian conscience, a proposition with which no reasonable reader would disagree, and from which, unfortunately, very little follows.
The difficulty is not that the argument is wrong, but that it has been insured against the possibility of being wrong.
Each chapter accumulates instances where a sharper mind would have gone looking, instead, for a counter-instance.
One waits, chapter after handsome chapter, for the sermon that failed, the congregation that dozed, the conscience left unshaped.
That sermon never arrives, and its absence is the book's quiet undoing.
I do not wish to be ungenerous, for generosity is precisely what the author has extended to his sources.
He treats every preacher as sincere, every text as representative, every silence as consent.
But the historian's charity, unlike the Christian's, must be audited, and here the ledger is never opened.
There are, to be fair, passages of genuine distinction.
The fourth chapter, on the rhetoric of hellfire, is worth the price of the volume, and would have made a superb essay.
One cannot help feeling that a superb essay is exactly what has been diluted, with great skill, into a merely book.
The apparatus is ; the footnotes alone testify to a scholar of the old and honourable school.
Yet immaculacy can be its own kind of evasion, a way of being on small matters while remaining on large ones.
It is a book, in short, that one respects more than one believes, and consults more readily than one rereads.
Such judgements are easily written and less easily earned, and I offer mine conscious that my own work invites the same scalpel.
For the reviewer's chair is a borrowed and eminence, from which every returns, in time, to its author.
If I have dwelt on the book's caution, it is because caution is the vice that most resembles a virtue.
A bolder book would have risked more and, in failing, taught us more than this one teaches by its safety.
Professor Hartley has written the study his subject deserved a generation ago, and the profession is the richer for it.
That the profession may also be the drowsier for it is a thought I record with reluctance and entirely without .
To praise a colleague faintly is the cruellest courtesy our trade permits, and I have tried, and perhaps failed, to avoid it.
Every judgement, after all, is a decision about how much of the truth one is prepared to be answerable for in public.
I remain, for my part, answerable for these few pages, and Hartley, deservedly, for the many hundreds I shall not soon forget.