The New Romanticism

Those critics who felt uneasy about the nature of Mr Graham Greene's achievement in The End of the Affair will not be reassured by his first excursion into drama. The Living Room raises in a particularly forceful way a problem that has always been attendant on his work-that of finding what Mr Eliot has termed a satisfactory objective correlative, or 'a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately invoked'. The same point might be expressed by saying that Mr Greene's work tends to lack artistic inevitability, so that the tale tends either to be arbitrarily controlled by the informing theological interest, or it is quite inadequate to convey the complexity of that interest. In Brighton Rock, for instance, the narrative pattern is obviously incapable of carrying the deeper meanings of the tale the distinction between good and evil and right and wrong, with which the novel is so much concerned, cannot be said to arise organically from the characters of Pinkie and Ida Arnold. The consequent effect on the reader is the reverse of the novelist's presumed intention-the theological interest giving the impression of being a device enabling the author to heighten and sustain the emotional pitch of his 'thriller'. Neither The Heart of the Matter nor The End of the Affair seem to be free from this criticism, in spite of their obviously greater range and maturity. Only in The Power and the Glory does the theological interest seem entirely organic, where the central character, a priest, combines in his own person the conflicting themes of fallen man and the operation of sanctifying grace

Art history · Citation · Library science · Romanticism · Byzantine Studies and History · Computer Science · History · Medieval Literature and History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity