PARTISAN REVIEW
will be immediate. Everybody quotes Mr. Eliot's remark about Henry
James having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it, which
suggests an odd, violent, notion of the relation of minds and ideas,
not at all the notion that James himself held; and everybody knows
the passage in which Mr. Eliot insists on the indifferent connection
which Dante and Shakespeare had with the intellectual formulations
of their respective times. I think I can understand-and sympathetical–
ly as well as sociologically-Mr. Eliot's feeling for a mode of being in
which the act and tone of ideation are not dominant, just as I can
understand the admiration which may be felt for a society, such as
Yeats celebrated, which expresses its sense of life not by means of
words but by means of houses and horses and by means of violence,
manners, courage and death. But I do not understand what Mr.
Eliot means when he makes
.a
sharp distinction between ideas and
emotions in literature; I think that Plato was right when in
The
Symposium
he represented ideas as continuous with emotions, both
springing from the appetites.
It is a prevailing notion that a novel which contains or deals
with ideas is bound to be pallid and abstract and intellectual.
As
against this belief here is an opinion from the great day of the novel.
"There are active souls who like rapidity, movement, conciseness,
sudden shocks, action, drama, who avoid discussion, who have little
fondness for meditation and take pleasure in results. From such people
comes what I should call the Literature of Ideas." This odd defini–
tion, whose seeming contradictions we will not pause over, was made
by Balzac in the course of his long review of
The Charterhouse of
Parma)
and it is Stendhal whom Balzac mentions as the great exem–
plar of the literature of ideas. And we know what ideas are at work
in
The Charterhouse
and
The Red and the Black:
they are the ideas
of Rousseau and they are named as such. These ideas are not to be
separated from the passions of Julien and Fabrice; they are reci–
procally expressive of each other. To us it is strange that ideas should
be expressed so, and also in terms of prisons and rope-ladders, pistols
and daggers. It should not seem strange, for it is in the nature of ideas
to be so expressed.
Yet although these two great examples support much of my
view of the place of ideas in the novel, they do not support all of it.
They make for me the point of the continuity of ideas and emotions,
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