BOO KS
591
Taine and he wouldn't be Taine for anything. He is a kind of John
Morley who has read Eliot on classicism but who continues to pick
and choose among French books according to the degree of their af–
finity to "the great liberal tradition
in
England."
There are advantages to this position. Mr. Turnell has his own
kind of idealism and independence even if it does not always permit
him to see the idealism and independence of other writers. As a judge
of books he
is
never monotonous; the dreary critical amalgam is foreign
to
him.
If
the morbid Flaubert repels
him,
the morbid Proust attracts
him so much that he ranks him only just below his favorite, Stendhal.
And Stendhal himself has not always been as acceptable to Mr. Turnell's
tradition as he is to Mr. Turnell: Henry James found him great but
immoral. Yet Stendhal's moral interest, or part of it, is perfectly ex–
pressed when Mr. Turnell says: "He possessed the
vue directe
into the
human heart, the power of seizing feelings at the moment of their
formation and translating them with admirable lucidity." The sexual
frankness that dismayed James in Stendhal has been domesticated by
the liberal tradition and does not dismay Mr. Turnell. On the other
hand, he is free of the naturalistic
obsession,
and can appreciate a
writer who, like Mme. de Lafayette, owes her power partly to her
grave and delicate feeling for "the disruptive effects of sexual passion
on the community." And he is equally instructive on the subject of
Les liaisons dangereuses,
where, as he says, the boudoir is almost the
whole arena of life and the ottoman almost the sole piece of furniture
in it. This sinister great book seems as remarkable to Mr. Turnell as it
did to Baudelaire and Gide, but he shudders less happily than they and
analyzes more coolly. It is
in
such chapters that his liberal English
detachment is most effective.
Excepting the chapter on Proust, the remainder of the book leaves
us much more inclined to argue. The praise of Constant's
Adolphe
may
be justified, as Mr. Turnell maintains, by its firm prose and moral
clairvoyance. But this story seems singularly poor in invention, and as
Mr. Turnell goes on
to
compare it favorably with several great RovelS,
his touchstone is revealed as a sheer weapon. It is good, on the other
hand, to have the fact of Balzac's appalling limitations forced upon
us with all Mr. Turnell's persistence. The
Comedie humaine
has cer–
tainly enjoyed a unique fate in being at once so influential and so
generally unreadable, so fascinating in its implications and so stultifying
in its language. In their haste to arrive at the more palatable aspect of
it, critics may have passed too easily over the other. Mr.
Turnell
re–
minds us that the other is solidly present; he also considers foul'
d
