570
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
he is content to hit on a stroke that will make us see what
the person is like without attempting to fuse it in a harmonious gen–
eral effect, in the same way he gives concrete examples, instead of
libera'ting what they may contain. He describes Mme. de Bargeton's
state of mind like this: "She imagined the Pasha of Janina, she
would have liked to struggle with him in the harem, and thought
there was something splendid about being sewn up in a sack and
thrown into the Bosporus. She was envious of Lady Hester Stanhope,
that blues'tocking of the desert." So, not content with evoking the
impression he wishes to leave us with, he immediately qualifies it.
"His expression was appalling. At that moment, his glance was sub–
lime." He will tell us about Mme. de Bargeton's natural talents which
turn into affectations from dwelling on the petty affairs of provin–
ciallife; and he adds, as if he were the Comtesse d'Escarbagnas: "In
truth, a sunset is a great poem, etc." Even in
Le Lys dans la Vallee,
"one of the most chiseled stones in my edifice," he himself said–
and we know that he called it back in proof from the printers as
many as seven or eight times-he is in such a hurry to state the
facts that the sentence is left to shift for itself.
It
knew from him
what it should tell the reader, for the rest it must manage as best
it could: "Although it was so hot I walked down to the meadows
to see once again the Indre and its islets, the valley and its hillsides,
of which I appeared a passionate admirer."
As he had no conception that literary style is a particular medium
where things that are topics for conversation, subjects for study, etc.,
should not be incorporated in a crude state, he dogs every word with
what he thinks of it, and the ideas it calls up in him.
If
he mentions
an artist, he immediately says what he knows about him, as though
in a footnote. Speaking of the Sechards' printing press, he says that
it was necessary to adapt the paper to the requirements of French
civilization, which threatened to extend the right of discussion to
every subject and base its existence on a continual manifestation of
individual thinking-a real misfortune, since nations which deliberate
seldom act, etc. And so he puts in all manner of reflections which
because of that natural vulgarity of his are often commonplace, and
take on a rather comic quality from being artlessly plumped down
in the middle of a sentence; the more so, as terms such as "peculiar
to," employed for the specific purpose of defining or elucidating
