PARTISAN REVIEW
" " you're in the literal sense of the word, more civilized. I dare
say," added Rowland, "that Miss Garland would think so."
"That's not what she would call it; she would say I'm spoiled; I'm
not sure she wouldn't say that I'm already hideously corrupted."
After Allston's return to America he produced a few pictures in
which there is a small but personally felt vein of poetry that is new
in his work. And yet Mr. Richardson's attempt to argue that Allston's
homecoming was not an artistic calamity for him is not only uncon–
vincing, but absurd when he argues that Allston finally failed, not be–
cause New England presented an unfavorable environment, but because
the exact opposite was the case. "The world was too interested and
friendly, too eager to encourage him.... " This represents a complete
misunderstanding of the whole problem, which centers in the relation–
ship of the American artist with the European tradition (as far as I
know no one of any intelligence has ever questioned the decency and
well-meaningness of Americans towards art), and one has to go back
to the concluding pages of
Roderick Hudson
to understand what really
happened, why Allston
in
New England turned more and more from
painting to aesthetics and literature.
It
was not merely for the sake of
ending his novel that James brought Roderick Hudson to disaster at the
cliff's edge:
"Roderick's stricken state had driven him, in the mere motion of
flight, higher and further than he knew; he had outstayed supposably
the first menace of the storm and perhaps even found a dark distraction
in watching it. Perhaps he had simply lost himself. The tempest had
overtaken him, and when he tried to return it had been too late. He had
attempted to descend the
cliff
in the treacherous gloom, he had made
the inevitable slip, and whether he had fallen fifty or three hundred
feet little mattered now. Even
if
it had not been far, it had been far
enough."
Marius Bewlev
THE GHETTO AND THE WORLD
PRINCE OF THE GHETTO. By
Mllurice Somuel. Alfred A. Knopf.
$3.00.
In this book on Peretz, a companion volume to his
World of
Shalom Aleichem,
Maurice Samuel continues the very good work of
bringing an undeservedly dying literature to a possible resuscitation with
the English reader, Gentile or (alas) Jew, who can have no other contact
with it. The only thing I regret in the two books of translations of this
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