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PARTISAN REVIEW
the thoroughness with which he analyzes the syntax of his selected
passages. As a result he has to disregard most of those questions of type
characters, moral choice, probable and necessary consequences, which
Aristotle raised in the
Poetics,
which have been endlessly debated since,
and which have obvious bearing upon characterological and moral
realism.
But if these omissions limit what
Mimesis
does, they do not weaken
it. It is an acute, profound, widely informed, richly appreciative reinter–
pretation of some of the major works and themes in the Western Euro–
pean literary heritage. It has to be read slowly because the originality
of some of its conceptions and the closeness of its analysis require the
reader to define new attitudes toward works with which he had thought
himself thoroughly familiar and to see new patterns of relation of-as
Auerbach would say-a historic-religious-socio-literary kind. Once these
are grasped they can be very illuminatingly applied to nearly all imagin–
ative literature, and to our sense of ourselves as historical beings.
Robert Gorham Davis
A MASK MAINTAINED
BAUDELAIRE. A STUDY OF HIS POETRY. By Mortin Turnell. New
Directions. $5 .00.
The literature about Baudelaire has been disappointing, es–
pecially what has been produced over here and in England. There has
been nothing quite to compare with that extraordinary study,
Concerning
Several Motifs in Baudelaire,
by the late German critic Walter Benja–
min: a compendious typology of the poet's universe, exhibiting its total
configuration now with the skill of an astronomer charting a stellar sys–
tem, now with the micrological care of a scientist studying Infusoria.
Alongside it, even the brave studies of Sartre and Charles Du Bos appear
slight. The only English essay of real merit that comes to mind is Peter
Quennell's early piece in his
Baudelaire and the Symbolists;
an elegant,
somewhat mannered performance, rich in insights, eminently just in its
tracing of the grand lines but deficient in its dealing with the "fine
structure" of a poetry which eludes the understanding the moment after
it has yielded itself generously and, as it seemed then, fully. No other
body of verse is at the same time so available to the reader and yet so
closed, hermetic.
It
seems as though Baudelaire's meanings were bent
on imitating the odd secrecy of his life-forever withdrawing into narrow
and lightless passages where the curious eye cannot reach. Yet one looks
at the factade and finds it simple; a man steps out of the house who is
