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PARTISAN REVIEW
political program, helped to create the hysterical atmosphere that
brought about the destruction of everything he valued.
George's stature as a poet was hotly debated during his lifetime,
and Mr. Bennett tries to steer a course between his one-sided detractors
and his equally one-sided disciples. Against the former, he rightly af–
firms that George was a greatly gifted writer; against the latter, who
are never tired of mentioning him in the same breath with Dante,
Shakespeare and Goethe, he rightly reduces him to a lesser stature. For
there is something fundamentally inhuman about George's work that
prevents it from reaching the very first rank, or even from being very
attractive to a reader who approaches it from outside the special cul–
tural situation in which it was created.
George's pretensions are not redeemed by any suffering, as with
Baudelaire and Rimbaud ; certainly not by charm and a sense of humor,
as with Mallarme; nor yet by the deep human comprehension of Yeats or
the compassion of Rilke. His feelings were too special to be widely shared,
and he made no effort, as did Proust and Gide, to use their troubled
complexity as a source of new insights. George preserved his aloofness
and remoteness from the rest of mankind with true German thorough–
ness; and the result is that his work, despite its grandiose attitudes, lacks
the touch of plebeian universality that is a necessalY ingredient of all
true literary grandeur. For most readers, it is impossible to do more
than admire his polished perfection qualifiedly from a distance. Once
his immediate circle of disciples has gone, Mr. Bennett believes, the
aura of grandeur they have built around him will be hard to preserve.
The truth is that, despite their continuing efforts, it has already begun
to evaporate.
Joseph Frank
