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PARTISAN REVIEW
1947) and Sartre's hope for the future. Inevitably the treatment of
his–
tory shows more of the influence of Marx and Hegel than of Existential–
ism. Sartre has obviously profited a good deal from a sympathetic read–
ing of Hegel, but the Hegelian apparatus often seems unnecessary and
cumbrous, and his use of it an exuberant but self-indulgent practice of
virtuosity. The influence of Marxism shows itself in another direction:
it actually forms Sartre's judgments of taste at certain points. Thus he
undervalues the literature of the seventeenth century because it was
aristocratic, actually preferring the comedies of Beaumarchais, which be–
long to the more democratic eighteenth century, to those of Moliere, and
going so far as to describe Moliere's
Le Misanthrope
as a comedy deal–
ing only with the trivial subject of manners. The trouble is not that
Sartre lacks taste-the whole book is evidence of his passionate addic–
tion to literature-but that, as usual, he is driven too furiously by his
ideas into the violation of perceptible fact-here the perceptible facts of
taste. The result is that the brilliance of his insights on the past is often
spoiled by extreme and doctrinaire judgments.
This lack of critical balance has its most serious consequences when
Sartre is dealing with the bourgeois literature of the nineteenth century.
Here Sartre's judgments are obviously colored by his passionate hatred
of the bourgeois class itself, and in this respect he rcveals the state of
mind of France, and indeed of all Europe, where the
b~urgeoisie
is so
discredited that the unpleasant associations of the word reflect back on
the whole century of civilization dominated by that class. We in Amer–
ica who have not yet had to live through the ruin of that class are
still permitted another point of view: as bourgeois civilization-in
France, England, and elsewhere-disappears, it is possible to regret its
passing and to question very seriously the superiority of the culture that
is replacing it. Though Sartre makes some telling points against bour–
geois literature, they are usually directed at its weakest side and hardly do
justice to its main bulk of significant work. Sartre's error is the familiar
one of seeking
to
convert political and social sympathies too directly
into literary judgment, so that he accepts much too simply and whole–
heartedly the plebeian or populist taste embedded in the Marxist mind.
In general, it can be said of Sartre that he has come to Marxism too
late, that he has not lived through it and beyond it, so that he still sees
political and cultural realities under the too drastic Marxist simplifica–
tions. The facts, however, are always more complex. Flaubert, to take
one example, has always been a target for Sartre, and in this book Sar–
tre attempts to justify his severity by citing long passages from Flaubert's
letters that express an aristocratic hatred of the mob. This is all very well;
