Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 43.1 (2000) 107-109

Book Review

J. M. Robertson: Rationalist and Literary Critic

John Mackinnon Robertson (1856-1933) was a considerable figure in his day: a prolific author and critic, a noted public lecturer, a journalist, and a politician who held minor office in the last British Liberal government. Yet he is almost forgotten today. As this sympathetic but critical study of his life and literary ideas makes clear, his way of thinking has passed out of fashion, but his name, if not reputation, needs resurrection if the diversity of critical theory is to be understood.

The first of the book's four chapters is biographical. Robertson was a self- educated, lower-class Scot with a formidable intellect and an extraordinary appetite for hard work. Drawn into politics through Charles Bradlaugh's radical, freethinking National Secular Society, he was introduced by Annie Besant in the mid-1880s to literary and scientific circles in London. Many of Robertson's literary ideas were first worked out for Besant's publications--her magazine, Our Corner, and the weekly political review, the National Reformer, which she co-edited with Bradlaugh. After Besant passed over to socialism in 1887, Robertson became Bradlaugh's sub-editor and then successor in 1891. [End Page 107] When the National Reformer failed in 1893, Robertson continued it as the monthly Free Review for a further two years. Though politics occupied much of his time for the next two decades, his literary output was scarcely diminished. However, the core of ideas discussed in Odin Dekker's work are those formulated in the 1880s and 1890s, the high point of Victorian scientism, of which Robertson was a leading advocate.

The second chapter provides a useful overview of the development of scientism and the rationalist frame of mind which sought to apply scientific method to all areas of human thought. Robertson rejected all religions as irrational survivals in an evolutionary world. Not for him the occasional doubts of a Charles Darwin or the temporising agnosticism of a Thomas Huxley. Robertson was a clear and dogmatic rationalist: the scientific method was the only gateway to knowledge. As a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, Robertson found his key to the history of ideas in sociology. For him, as for T. H. Buckle whom he much admired, regularity and causation pervaded all the human sciences, making them intelligible to the rational intellect. This gave Robertson his distinctive approach, placing him outside the mainstream empirical tradition of British scholarship and associating him more with Continental writers.

The significance of this is shown in Chapter Three's discussion of the theory of scientific literary criticism. The aim of these critics was to discover and set out those rules by which literary critics could avoid subjectivity and achieve the impartiality of science. Whether this was attainable was much disputed, with Matthew Arnold and George Saintsbury ranged against the likes of George Lewes and Eneas Sweetland Dallas. The most significant figures in this context were the Frenchmen, Hippolyte Taine, Ferdinand Bruntière, and Emile Hennequin, the latter being particularly influential in the development of Robertson's ideas. Other contributors referred to in some detail include Hutchenson Macaulay Posnett, Richard Green Moulton, and John Addington Symonds. Though Dekkers attempts to be even-handed in his treatment of these theorists, and gives them due credit for attempting to establish a scientific approach to literary criticism, his overall conclusion is that they succeeded only insofar as they did not recognise the partiality of their own prejudices and tastes. Robertson's contribution, which Dekkers then discusses, took the form of two collections, Essays Towards a Critical Method (1889) and New Essays Towards a Critical Method (1897). Here he sought to uncover those principles which would enable literary critics to maintain consistency of judgment through the application of rational criteria to the structure of the literary phenomena being studied, the mental processes of the author, and the responses of the...