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PARTISAN REVIEW
this excellent event ought to be accompanied by the skeptical doubt that
the poet is going to accomplish it. And when he fails to do so, his
utterances must be judged as we judge any other significant discourse.
This skepticism would seem to be the condition not only of the criticism
of poetry but, in our time, of the life of mind.
Richard Chase
FRENCH NOVELISTS AND ENGLISH MORALISTS
THE NOVEL IN FRANCE. By Mortin Turnell. New Directions. $4.25.
Martin Turnell is the English critic who wrote
The Classical
Moment,
a first-rate book on the seventeenth century French theater.
The Novel in France,
a study of seven French novelists, forms a kind
of sequel to that book.
It
is especially good on Stendhal, Laclos and
Mme. de Lafayette, writers clearly endowed with the traditional French
sanity which Mr. Turnell admired in Racine and his fellow dramatists.
With Balzac and Flaubert he is much less at his ease. The moral and
literary crudity of the one and the other's "attack on human nature,"
leave him in the main aghast; and considering the whole tenor of his
book, it is not unfair to say that such writers represent to Mr. Turnell the
traditional French insanity.
He has the right to his rejections, and in a concluding chapter he
tries to make clear his reasons for them. Taking issue with Andre Gide
on the value of the "French dialogue," Gide's term for the perennial
clash of extreme positions in French literature, he says: "For the French
novelist the issues are sometimes too clear-cut, too much a matter of
black and white. There is little room for the kind of moral drama
which is peculiarly the sphere of the representatives of the great liberal
tradition in England-George Eliot, Henry James and Conrad." But
this formula is not produced till the last minute. It remains quite un–
developed. And it is not necessarily continuous with what Mr. Turnell
has been saying about his individual novelists: Flaubert's failures, for
example, are attributed to his personal manias rather than to his par–
ticipation in any historical situation or national mind. Thus Mr. Turnell
is really confessing a bias; he is not summing up an argument. And his
book remains fragmentary in the degree that it fails to develop any
inclusive conception of the French genius.
But inclusive conceptions of alien literatures are outside Mr.
Turnell's province as a critic. He is not Taine nor was meant to
be
