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affable, worldly, plain-spoken to a degree. There is paradox, surely, and
biting wit but none of the innuendo, the obliqueness, the
insistent
mystery
of a Mallarme. These are left inside the house; in the nooks and cran–
nies of the line; waiting to be discovered or, perhaps, hoping never
to be unsealed. Wilier than the purely hermetic writer, Baudelaire de–
veloped an exoteric front which has protected him effectively against
subtle interpretations of the wrong kind-and, by and large, of the
right kind as well. Critics approach him as, one imagines, he would have
liked to see them approach him: with a mixture of awe and faint con–
descension toward his "foibles"; much the way these same critics–
and Baudelaire himself-would approach Victor Hugo. But what of
the illumination of the work which, one presumes, is the critic's office
and
raison d'etre?
If
the critic risks being the dupe of the poet, then
the ordinary reader may find himself the dupe of the critic: there is
extremely little in this vast body of interpretation that we could not have
gleaned unaided. Mr. Tumell, whose studies in the classical French
drama I respect a great deal, does not figure among the exceptions.
The book is divided into six chapters to which a brief conclusion
is added. The chapters vary in merit. The grammatical section of the
one called "Style" is easily the best, the section on prosody only slightly
inferior: here the limits of inquiry are strictly defined and the critic,
his sleeves rolled up, gets down to business. The short essay on
Le Voyage
has shape and contains a number of trenchant remarks.
In
the more
ambitious sections Mr. Tumell does less well. "The Originality of Bau–
delaire" abounds in lame distinctions ("realism" as against "psycho–
logical realism" and the like) and the key term,
originality,
is allowed
to remain fuzzy. The only place I found rewarding was the one where
some of Laforgue's remarks on Baudelaire's literary attitudes are quoted :
I wish the author had quoted them all.
In
that distorting mirror certain
aspects of the older man's work are flashed upon us persuasively, with
the sharp outlines of extreme exaggeration, while others appear gro–
tesquely dwarfed or are lost altogether. But neither does Mr. Tumell's
selection do full justice to the sharp idiosyncrasy that colors these
aper~us
nor his comment to the part played by historical distance as
their necessary setting. Laforgue is presented to us as a "true" witness
who, if he errs at all, does so by omission only, never by slanting. That
seems to me to be a rather naive view of the way in which writers re–
flect upon their predecessors: T. S. Eliot, whose authority in such
matters Mr. Tumell likes to invoke, has certainly done nothing to en–
courage any simple notions about critical reception and recognition. "A
19th-Century Vocation" is largely a retelling of what the autobiograph-
