758
PARTISAN REVIEW
laws or movements and fight with tireless tenacity for his "middle
way." The third Tocqueville is the curious human animal who looks
into his brain and heart to seek there the secret springs of his thoughts
and actions: for him the destinies of the world proceed as the con–
trary result of the intentions that produce them; for him neither events
nor persons (including himself) are ever what they appear to be;
and for him the unpredictable passions and sentiments of men are the
only reality.
It is this last Tocqueville who gives the
Recollections
an astringent
melancholy and a bitter humour. A supremely able observer, aristocrat
by birth and temperament, impatient of mediocrity and sham, records
a period of revolution marked by nothing more than by platitudes and
histrionics. Like a lepidopterist he is forever out to catch new specimens
for his collection: his victims are human, his net is the fine network of
his intelligence, and the labels under the mounted specimens all read
alike
genus vanitas.
He may, at times, be hyper-critical; that, after all, is the privilege
of the moralist. But he is always incisive and never dull: whether he
comments on the rhetorical style of Louis-Philippe--"Jean-Jacques
with a touch of nineteenth century kitchenmaid"-, on the peculiar
gait of Lamennais who "glided through the crowd with an awkward,
modest air, as though he were leaving the sacristy,"-on George Sand's
affair with Merimee, conducted, he hears, "in accordance with Aristotle's
rules of time and place,"-or on his own psychological insecurity whose
source he finds not in modesty but in "a great pride ... as restless and
disquieted as the mind itself."
John Clive
NOTE:
It has been the recent policy of PR not to review books by editors
and advisory editors. Readers will be interested, however, to know of the
publication of
The Liberal Imagination,
by Lionel Trilling, Viking Press,
$3.50, and of the fortcoming book of poems by Delmore Schwartz,
Vaude–
ville For A Princess,
New Directions, $2.75.
