244
PARTISAN REVIEW
material to suit their desire for an unrestricted expansion of the
medium, whereas James selects with a view to delimiting the
medium and defining its proper course. He confirms, as very
few novelists do, Goethe's observation that the artistic effect re·
quires a closed space. It is true that at bottom it is culture and
the history of culture which constitute the inner theme of all
three writers, but while Joyce and Proust express it by continually
revealing its universality, James expresses it by limiting himself,
through an extraordinary effort of esthetic calculation, to its
particularity.
One need not go so far as to say that the formal character
of the Jamesian novel is determined by its social character
in
order to emphasise the close relation between the two. Both mani·
fest the same qualities of particularity and exclusiveness. But
why, it might be asked, is Proust's work so different in fonn,
given the fact that he, too, is drawn by the resplendent image of
the "great world" and, presumably, is quite as responsive to some
of the values attributed to James? The answer would be that
even on this ground the American and the French novelist are
more at variance than would seem at first glance.
Proust's picture of society contains elements of lyricism as
well as elements of objective analysis. He is a more realistic
painter of social manners than James, perhaps for the reason that
he permits no ethical issues to intervene between him and the
subject, approaching the world
ab
initio
with the tacit assumption
that ethics are irrelevant to its functions. By comparison James
is a traditional moralist whose insight into experience turns on
his judgment of conduct.
If
sometimes we are made to feel that
he is witholding judgment or judging wrongly, that may be he·
cause he is either conforming, or appears to conform, to certain
moral conventions of the world's making by which it manages to
flatter itself. In Proust such conventions are brought out into the
open, but not for purposes of moral judgment. The sole morality
of which the protagonist of his novel is conscious grows out of
the choice he faces between two contrary ideals. He must decide
whether to pursue the art of life or the life of art, and the novel
can be said to be an epical autobiography of his effort to come
to a decision. But it is not until the end·volume that the world
is finally renounced; and through a kind of optical illusion in·
