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PARTISAN REVIEW
lem of why
M oby-Dick
indubitably manages to hold the interest of its
readers, and why some of these readers even think it has a story, when
it is "a book of which Henry James would have said that it told no
story to speak of." Instead of being led by this to question James's
narrowly restricted notion of a story, and perhaps realizing that
M oby–
Dick
was based on the far more fundamental narrative element of epic
action, Mr. Blackmur can only conclude that those readers who think
Melville had a story were deceived. In his latest essay, though, Mr.
Blackmur has reached the point of repudiating the Master himself;
for in the teeth of James's declaration that
War and Peace
lacks "deep–
breathing economy of organic form," Mr. Blackmur answers that Tol–
stoy's book has every quality of organic form James admires although
"in a different relation to executive form than any he [James] could
accept." It is good to get this
a priori
notion of dramatic form finally
out of the way, useful though it has been in the hands of so acute a
critic as Mr. Blackmur in sharpening our eye for the aesthetics of fiction.
Mr. Blackmur's essay on the later novels of James is an intense
and wide-ranging effort to seize the moral terms in which James drama–
tized "the permanent struggle between the human condition and human
aspirations." So far as Mr. Blackmur confines himself to the characters
and themes in these books, his insights are unsurpassed for penetration
and suggestiveness; one feels that at last these novels have found a
critic who measures up to their intricate delicacy and moral refinement.
But Mr. Blackmur throws out so wide a net as he goes along that one
cannot help being surprised at some of the catch that is hauled in.
Maggie Verver in
The Golden Bowl
becomes James's version of Dante's
Beatrice; we are told that she learns in a London drawing-room two
of the lessons that Dostoevsky found in the enormous abyss of
The
Brothers Karamazov;
and before the essay is over we have heard about
the rise of art for art's sake, the great growth of population
in
modern
times, the disestablishment of culture and the resulting shift in the bases
of society, as well as a number of other interesting matters which, in
spite of Mr. Blackmur's assurances, have only the loosest connection
with anything we can find in a late James novel.
From a criticism that moved in the direction of making finer and
finer discriminations within the work of art, Mr. Blackmur now appears
to be going in the direction of an analogical affability that dissolves all
formal, historical and cultural boundaries in the warmth of its embrace.
Nor is it hard to understand the natural evolution by which this change
has been gradually accomplished. Mr. Blackmur sees all cultural move–
ment proceeding under the form of his dialectic; and, ever since Plato,
