Joseph Epstein has a review in the current Weekly Standard about Gertrude Himmelfarb’s new study of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and it contains the maddening binary traits that are always on appearance in Epstein’s (frequent) writing. On one hand, he’s one of the most prolific and prominent critics of Victorian era literature, a man seemingly always eager to snap up and report back on some new biography of Disraeli or Dickens. Himmelfarb’s book is right in his wheelhouse, and he makes some nice observations about it and Daniel Deronda in what is a largely fluent piece of work.

On the other hand, Epstein is perhaps the laziest writer alive, and when the material strays from his limited comfort zone, instead of stretching himself he invariably tries to cover with a reflexive and dismissive waspishness—an attempt to ridicule it all out of existence.

buy A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge The most ludicrous instance of this laziness came in a 2007 New Criterion article in which he tried to summarize how the literary world stood at that time, and in so doing made it manifestly clear that he hadn’t read more than 8 works of contemporary fiction in the past decade. But things aren’t much better in this piece on George Eliot. Epstein begins by establishing a kind of soccer-pitch rivalry of mores between the Victorian era and the Bloomsbury Group, and he writes the following:

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The Bloomsbury Group–a name that today sounds suspiciously like a dubious hedge fund–stood opposed to everything the Victorians stood for: earnestness, probity, the struggle with fundamental social, political, and moral problems and issues. The Victorians came at things straight on; the Bloomsbury writers–Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Strachey, et alia–preferred obliquity.

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The Victorians had a comprehensive and confident view of human nature; the Bloomsbury writers could only assert, as Woolf contended, that human nature had changed in 1910, though she neglected to say precisely from what to what. The Victorians asserted the need for soundness of thought, high principles, and life considered in the long run; John Maynard Keynes, Bloomsbury’s economist, said that in the long run we are all dead, which eased the way for his fellow Bloomsburyites rather joylessly to philander, bugger, and stress personal relations over national destinies. For a long spell, it appeared that Bloomsbury had won, making the Victorians seem little more than a roster of prudish neurotics dedicated to nothing grander than sexual repression.

Which is all very neat, except that it is almost entirely untrue, and I don’t just mean the implied assertion that there were no gay people in the 19th century. For instance, Woolf’s overworked quote about “human character” (not “nature”) changing in 1910 of course is The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer hd grounded in context: she was talking about the shifting relationships between ”masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children”—which, in the spectrum of her profundities falls rather on the obvious side. And does Epstein really want to go on the record saying that the author of A Passage to India and Abinger Harvest was not interested in “fundamental social, political, and moral problems and issues”? And yet, as dumb as that sounds, it’s nothing next to the blindingly stupid statement that John Maynard Keynes (and, by implication, Leonard Woolf) had no interest in national (or, more relevantly at the time, global) destinies. (Keynes’ famous quote, manhandled here, concerned monetary policy, for Pete’s sake; Epstein acts as though he wrote it while performing at Woodstock.) Epstein is obviously correct that Lytton Strachey savaged many aspects of Victorian culture in Eminent Victorians Love Actually rip

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(although Strachey’s nearly hagiographic portrayal of Florence Nightingale gives the lie to Epstein’s too-easy formula), but he acts as though that nasty little book alone, and not a war in which nearly a million British men and women died to no apparent purpose, instigated the reaction against the assumptions of the previous century.

See, that’s the thing–when Epstein moves on to discussing George Eliot, he does fine; but your reading experience has been irrevocably tainted by the three paragraphs in which he insists on snidely talking out of his ass. It’s the exact same divide-and-conquer brainlessness that you find on cable news, where sneers and rants and distortions substitute for thought. Bad enough on CNN, but doubly depressing when it comes from a writer who knows so much about George Eliot.

My advice? Skip this review and head straight and untainted to Daniel Deronda, which really is one of the great books of all time.

—Sam Sacks

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