RHETORIC OF RHETORIC
739
bureaucratization, since his thought so plainly issues from the intellectual
mystique of these phenomena-a mystique which in our time has evolved
into a secular religion philosophically supported by the rags and tatters
of western thought thrown together in an obscure jargoning dissonance
entirely bereft of emotional innerness, rational tact, and humane purpose.
Richard Chase
ON TWO FRONTIERS
THE PLENIPOTENTIARIES.
By
H.
J .
Koplon. Korpers. $3 .00.
WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME.
By
Robert Penn Worren. Random House.
$4.50.
While it is possible to read both
The Plenipotentiaries
and
World Enough and Time
with an awareness only of their peculiar de–
fects and virtues, as
if
they were the sole representatives of their kinds,
the authors have obviously intended for us to be conscious of the tradi–
tions to which they belong. The title of H. J . Kaplan's book alludes,
of course, to Henry James'
Ambassadors,
and via James' earlier novels
on the same theme back to a prototype in Hawthorne's
Marble Faun.
R. P. Warren's novel, calling itself "Romantic" in a subtitle and echoing
the very phrases of a mid-Nineteenth Century popular novelist, W. Gil–
more Simms ("in the first green and gristle of his youth"), refers us the
long dull way back to Cooper's
The Prairie.
Chance has paired for us
at the midpoint of our own century, the most recent instances of the
two basic fictional treatments of the American myth: the novel of the
International Theme, and the romance of the West.
Both Kaplan's book and Warren's are Frontier novels. The myth
of America has traditionally come to literary consciousness on its two
frontiers: at its western margin, where the trapper or settler pursuing
innocence confronts the polar experience of nature, and on its eastern
border where the artist or expatriate fleeing innocence confronts the
polar experience of civilization. The confrontation of the Ultimate
Wilderness and the Ultimate City, of the West and of Europe, have
both been treated, with crass or complicated sentimentality, as ways of
salvation: Natty Bumppo is saved by an endless westering, Lambert
Strether by the eastward passage.
Understandably enough, the former experience has become the
subject
par excellence
of the "popular" novel, the latter of the "high–
brow" novel. To attempt either of these forms today is, therefore, to
run into certain cliches of anticipation that may defeat understanding
