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PARTISAN REVIEW
the good (if Milly Theale and Maggie Verver are its highest expressions)
remains a tender, fastidious, singularly pure and beautiful ideal, but a
tenuous, late Transcendental, and imperfectly substantial one.
6. Even his austere preoccupation with form impossible to discuss
naively on its own terms. What was compulsive, compensatory, protective
of the wounded ego, in that too. Remember Flaubert's remark to Louise
Colet: "The very great men often wr.ite quite badly, and so much the
better for them. One must look for formal perfection not in
their
work
but in that of the secondary men."
7. Suggestive but unsatisfactory discussion in last chapter of J.'s
vues d'ensemble.
Why not confess that--compared with such men as
Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Proust, Mann-J. had little capacity for
general ideas and that his work is really much less illuminated, much
less toughened by them than the work of those others? ... F. 0. M.
rightly feels that the view of life expressed in his books now seems
inadequate to "both the religious man and the political and economic
man," that there is no synthesis in them (as there was in his father's now
archaic work) of the two orders of experience, and adds that "the next
synthesis must be more rigorously based in both political economy and
theology, in the theology that recognizes anew man's radical imperfec–
tion" and in an equalitarian politics. Quite impossible to follow F. 0. M.
here in the strangely wishful conviction that dogmatic theology can
ever be reconciled with a revolutionary democratism, or ever prove any–
thing but a stubborn barrier to the fuller humanization of man. J.'s
freedom from such regressive delusions one of the secrets of his true
strength. With a more masculine grasp, indeed, of "man's place in
"nature" than he had, he might have been, as he is not, one of Flaubert's
"very great men.''
NEWTON ARVIN
"HE TOO HAS LIVED IN ARCADIA .
..
II
THE WoRLD OF WAsHINGTON IRVING.
By Van Wyck Brooks. Dutton.
$3.75.
T
HE JOYS
and pleasures and rewards which come to one in reading
Van Wyck Brooks are so continuous as to require emphatic state–
ment. His books often represent a triumph of style, which is not aston–
ishing in the least, since his method of composition is confessedly that
of anthologizing the golden passages of his authors, who are sometimes
great masters of expression.
If
one has the proper--or improper-bias,
one can regard the volumes of his literary history of America as an
Arcadian idyl, the imagination and projection of what Brooks would
like the literary life to be. This, I think, is the explanation of the pleas–
ure one cannot fail to receive from his work.
