FRENCH WITH TEARS-AND LAUGHTER
(The French, Stendhal remarked, are incapable of real love because they
live too much by vanity and ego; Mr. Turnell remarks that the French
have produced the greatest literature on the subject of love. These two
remarks may express opposite sides of the same truth, for the glory of
French literature here is precisely in recording the impact of the senti–
ments of love upon the ego--something we do not find in the literature
of the Italians, who, according to Stendhal, are much more adapted to
the experience of love.)
These studies of Moliere and Racine are written, then, with an eye
not only to the continuing tradition of French life and thought, but also
to the continuity of these classical writers with later novelists like Con–
stant, Stendhal, and Proust. The cultivation of the past for present uses
is the critic's chief business; years ago when Eliot plunged into the
study of the Elizabethans, he was really aiming at a dream of the
rebirth of poetic drama (a possibility that has not yet materialized)
or anyway at the use of Elizabethan sensibility in his own poetry. Racine
and Moliere can hardly
be
recommended fruitfully to study by our
modern dramatists, for the contemporary theater is not in a condition
to absorb these influences; but the recommendation might be made
profitably to some of our younger American novelists. With its depen–
dence upon texture, atmosphere, furniture, the novel in some quarters
now threatens to dissolve into sheer decor (much as I admire Jean
Stafford, I sometimes wonder what she would do without her afghan
rugs, challis guimpes, raffia baskets, etc., etc.), and against this general
tendency it might
be
a useful exercise in discipline for somebody to try
to write a novel with the bareness of a Racine play.
Imagine a harried reader struggling through the dense atmosphere
of one of these novels of sensibility where every page is as intricately em–
broidered as a piece of Venetian point: as he pushes his way down a
new page, stumbling on the faded Axminster carpet he bumps against
the sham buhl table, crashes against the Sheraton sideboard, and wheel–
ing to get out of the way of the furniture fetches up with a crack of his
head against an ormolu clock on the imitation-marble mantelshelf; at
which point, rubbing his bruises, he may very well let out a bellow of
impatient rage: "Get this god-damned furniture out of the novel!"
Well, I exaggerate; and of course it would
be
silly to argue one
exclusion of taste for another; but exaggeration has been the usual
weapon in the history of criticism for calling people's attention to one
kind of taste, and the taste for the kind of literature I am talking about
is one that I find generally lacking, and lacking even in certain people
whose literary sensitivity I otherwise admire very much.
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