BOOKS
49
wants us to do more than reexamine our criteria. It sets the modem
novel
above
the modern poem, and pointing to the technical decline of
recent verse, predicts its imminent collapse. Now up to a certain point
it is hard not to agree. Certainly the modem novel has gathered to itself
the broadest experience of the age, and thus shown itself to be the heir
of the poetic epic and the poetic drama. But, though true of the
past and the near-past, is this true today? And should not the state of the
novel in 1938 warn us against invidious prophecies as to its future as
compared with the future of verse?
Mr. Wilson's attack on the dogmas of the poetic tradition involves
a long train of consequences for criticism, and many of them are of
course observable in his own work.
In Axel's Castle
the critical touch–
stones were literary methods: Symbolism and Naturalism; but in
The
Triple Thinkers,
which follows
The American Jitters
and
Travels in Two
Democracies-both
books ventures in purely social criticism-the criteria
are supplied by significant ideas. And this shift brings about a re-group–
ing of the writers of the past, and leads to the discovery of a whole
range of buried correspondences among them. So, coming to Pushkin, we
find that his kinship with Byron is minimized, while his kinship with the
Russian novelists and French realists is underscored. And Flaubert,
in~
stead of being shown in his relation to the Symbolists-with whom, on
the basis of his artistic asceticism, he is usually associated-is shown in
his relation to Karl Marx, to the social novelist George Sand, to the
historians Michelet, Renan and Taine, and to the historical critic Sainte–
Beuve. Henry James, conventionally the architect of aristocratic ro–
mances, finds a place, marginal, to be sure,
in
the democratic American
tradition and emerges, along with Samuel Butler, as one of the satirists
of the money power. With Bernard Shaw, finally, the process is reversed:
and Shaw, who is always held up as a specimen of the social philosopher
in the arts, is shown to have drawn heavily on the heritage of the
romantic hero, and, like the Symbolists, to have adapted musical forms
to his writing. Thus, at the touch of the historical method, the technical
distinction~
in literature dwindle in importance; ideology appears as the
common denominator, and the traditions of the past re-form along new
lines.
The Triple Thinkers
is well-stored with novelties and paradoxes,
most of which, given the novel method and point of view, seem thorough–
ly justified. But, as a possible exception, consider Henry James. It is true
that, between his critics and his partisans, between those who exalt him
on grounds of technique and those who disparage him on grounds of
patriotism, the "old Balzac in James" has been lost sight of; and Mr.
Wilson's account of him, which gives due weight to the social factor,
is the best study and estimate of James in existence. But it doesn't neces–
sarily follow that the novels of his grimmest, most Balzacian "middle
period" are to be preferred, as Mr. Wilson would have it, to the works
of his "poetic," next-to-Iast period. On the contrary, don't
The Ambas–
sadors, The Wings of the Dove
and
The Golden Bowl
incorporate, toge–
ther with the Balzac in James, the Pope in him-the poet, that is, with
