54
PARTISAN REVIEW
book is addressed. I mean Levy's belief in the inevitahility of the advent
of the classless society:* No doubt at this moment, when barbarism is
drunk with triumph on all fronts, the belief in the inevitable success of
socialism has a supreme consolatory value. But this is hardly an argu–
ment for its truth. In the long run, the consolation a false belief brings
us is not worth the price we pay for it. In any case, since we are far
from beaten, what we need today is not consolation but a practical
program which will be efficient in stol->ping the victorious rampage of
the barbarians. Because Levy docs not offer such a program this book,
it would seem, is quite appropriately entitled. For its content is little
ebe than
a philosophy--with
emphasis on both words-for
a
modern
man; bearing in mind that philosophy, historically, has never been much
n;ore than an intellectual substitute for consolatory religion.
ELIsEo VIVAS
POMPES FUNEBRES DE TROISIEME CLASSE
FOUR FRENCH NOVELISTS.
By Georges Lemailre. Oxford Univer–
sity Press. $3 .50.
The official mode of French rhetoric., suitable for every occasion, is
the eulogy. The final canon of academic criticism, especially when
professed
in partibus infidelium,
is the ability to convert every living
figure it touches into something illustrious, immortal, worthy to be im–
mured in the Pantheon and commemorated by the name of a street, but
unreservedly dead. Anyone who has ever written anything is guaranteed
under the cultural dispensation of the Third Republic his inalienable
right to a
vie,
an
oeuvre,
and a
pensie.
The
vie
and the
oeuvre
tend, in
critical practice, to get glowingly muddled, so that the author is credited
with the deeds of his characters and the books arc viewed as chapters
in his autobiography. But the
pensee,
when everything ehe has been
abstracted from it, remains, electric, inviolate, and-as we are so often
told-French.
The author of this book proceeds from Marcel Proust to Andre Gide,
from Andre Gide to Jean Giraudoux, and from Jean Giraudoux to Paul
Morand, devoting about a hundred pages to each, and remaining quite
cheerful up to the end. On his stolid and nondescript level of exposition,
there is room for neither esthetic distinctions nor social implications.
Then, once we have wearily acknowledged that they are all modern
and cosmopolite and nervous and eclectic, what sort of pattern do his
four novelists make? M. Lemaitre claims that they "offer perhaps the
*
The arguments against historical inevitability, which I have no space
to present here, are brilliantly outlined in an article by Mr. William Gruen in
vol. xxxiii, no. 23, of the
Journal of Philosophy.
The interested reader is referred
to this article.
