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VICTOR BROMBERT
make a single reference
to
the Podsnaps, the Veneerings, Fascination
Fledgeby, who are "theatrical" triumphs, certainly, but like the Merdles
and the Barnacles quite different from anything one can find in the
early novels.
If
the later novels do exhibit some loss of energy-no one in them
is quite as demoniacal as Quilp or as exhilarating as Pecksniff-they
also show more substantial gains than Mr. Garis will allow, notably
greater poetic unity and sharper comic focus. His commitment to the
metaphor of a Dickens theater-and however apt, it
is
only a metaphor
-prevents him from doing full justice to their proliferating life (too
rich to
be
transferred to the stage), with its thick atmosphere and skein
of associations. The social satire, too, is both deeper and more pointed
than vague talk about "the System" would suggest. More often
than
not the System is specifically Victorian society, as refracted through
Dickens' genius; but in his own way Mr. Garis is as indifferent to
historical considerations as Professor Hillis Miller. On the other hand
Great Expectations,
which he rates more highly than the other late
novels, is surely not unique in its pessimism about ultimate social
pos–
sibilities. Mr. Garis compares it to
Civilization and Its Discontents;
but
then Walter Bagehot detected in all the later work "a tone of objec–
tion to the necessary constitution of human society."
One wants to quarrel with some of Mr. Garis' conclusions. But
he is always relevant and often penetrating, while his tone, except
when he touches his forelock
to
Dr. Leavis-I do wish he wouldn't
talk
about passages "offering themselves as representative"-is ad–
mirably thoughtful and civilized.
John Gross
CHEZ PROUST
PROUST: The Leter Yeers. By George D. Peinter. Little, Brown end
Compeny. $7.50.
MARCEL PROUST: The Fictions of Life end of Art. By Leo Berseni.
Oxford University Press. $6.50.
When the second volume of his important biography ap–
peared, George D. Painter was again accused of model-hunting. The
reviewer of the
Times Literary Supplement
(August 5, 1965) com–
plained of the "entertaining but irrelevant game" of seeking a factual
basis for every incident in Proust's novel, and indirectly provoked a
rather acrid exchange of letters between a distant relative of one of the
so-called "models" and Mr. Painter himself. But
this
was of course
