BOOKS
149
DON QUIXOTE RIDES AGAIN
THE GATES OF HORN : A STUDY OF FIVE FRENCH REALISTS. By
Horry Levin. Oxford Un iversity Press. $8.50.
DOCUMENTS OF MODERN LITERARY REALISM. By George
J.
Becker.
Princeton University Press. $8.50.
The textbook account that divides French literature after
Ro–
manticism into Parnassianism-Symbolism in poetry and Realism-Natural–
ism in the novel is overdue for reappraisal. Such unassimilated cases as
Barbey d'Aurevilly and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam make the pattern look very
flimsy. It was not perverseness that led Baudelaire to welcome Balzac
as a brother and a pure visionary.
If
we are lucky, the resurvey will
produce some heated debate and one or two major books. As if in
preparation, French critics have been publishing studies of individual
figures and seem to have avoided for some thirty years any important
new synthesis. (Michaud's and Beuchat's multi-volume histories of
Symbolism and Naturalism respectively, appearing within two years of
each other shortly after the war, serve their causes not by challenging
the party line but by assembling a mass of documentation that blurs
as much as it proves the
idee re,ue. )
Many of the best recent volumes
treating French literature of the period in its complex relations to
society and politics have been written by
foreigner~the
Hungarian
Georg Lukacs, the Germans Bernhard Groethuysen and E. R. Curtius,
the Englishman A. G. Lehman, the Italian Mario Praz, and the
American Edmund Wilson. Professor Harry Levin's
The Gates of Horn
claims a plare near the head of that list for the ambitiousness of its
subject and the fullness of its scholarship. The nature and acceptability
of its thesis will require close scrutiny. None of Mr. Levin's earlier books,
on Joyce, on Shakespeare, on Marlowe, and on a group of classic
American authors, has the scope of this one, which takes on single–
handed the five outstanding novelists of an abundant era. He is not
the first to annex Stendhal to one end and Proust to the other of the
line of realists, yet his is the most convincing demonstration to date that
the enlarged "dynasty" has a unity of vital statistics and accomplish–
ments that outweighs its differences.
In brief the argument runs like this. Mr. Levin's profound con–
cern is with "fabulation, man's habitual interest in telling stories to
summarize his experiences and crystallize his attitudes, while ultimately
passing them on to us." Fabula tion may move in two directions, as
suggested by the story Homer used of two gates of experience. The
