324
PARTISAN REVIEW
vividly presented. Auerbach believes, however, that the other world in
the
Divine Comedy
becomes primarily a stage for human beings and
passions, that Dante's inhabitants of the three realms lead a changeless
existence which represents the final and absolute realization of a par–
ticular earthly personality, now set fast in God's order. The image of
man eclipses the image of God.
After Dante, the divine framework was broken. The sense of the
figural was lost. In Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and
Cervantes, individual lives become interesting, problematic, and tragic
in their own right, here on earth, with little or no reference to the
supernatural scheme. This sense of human complexity derived, however,
from the realistic Christian figural and creatural tradition. In Rabelais,
the play of perspectival effects and the mixture of kinds of reality and
of styles become ends in themselves.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, limitation of style and
of genres and a corresponding limitation in the representation of reality
became dominant again. This is true not only in French comedy and
tragedy of the seventeenth century, governed by neo-classic rules, but in
most of the work of the French Enlightenment, and in the sentimental
bourgeois dramas and novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries in Germany. Goethe himself, though he had a strong sense of
organic development in the individual, had taken a class attitude which
prevented him from grasping contemporary historical developments
with "the genetico-realistic-sensory method peculiar to him on other oc–
casions." He had to fall back on eighteenth century moralistic reflections.
The only eighteenth century writer whom Auerbach
treat~
admiringly
as in the great realistic tradition is the memoirist Saint-Simon.
In Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, however, what
Auerbach calls "historism" was born. It saw history as a lawful develop–
ment through distinctly different periods, each with its own peculiar
complexities and depths, political, cultural, economic, folkish. Marx,
Michelet, and Taine were "historicists"; so were the major French
realists, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, and Zola, who
thought of themselves as writing histories of their own period. For
these novelists Auerbach has great respect, though he carefully defines
their limitations, and even defends the bourgeoisie against Flaubert!
"Are not these bourgeois the same people who undertook the tremendous
task, the bold adventure, of the economic, scientific, and technological
civilization of the nineteenth century, and who also produced the leaders
of the revolutionary movements...." Zola, he thinks, will increase in
stature with time.
Germinal
is still a terrifying book which has lost
none of its significance and timeliness.
