458
PARTISAN REVIEW
Howells, Twain, and James a struggle with the genteel expectations of
popular reviewers, while each in his own way prepared the ground for
a growth of modernist literary sensibility.
In
this perspective he sees
Hawthorne projecting an "ontologically ambiguous fictive world"
and foreshadowing Flaubert, James, and the existentialists, while
Melville treats madness in Ahab with a "strong appeal for readers
affected by the post-Modernist cult of absurdity that has gained
momentum since the Second World War." Similarly, though the essays
on Henry Ward Beecher's
Norwood
and William Dean Howells 's
A
Modern Instance
show them to be trapped by the "middlebrow mold, "
those on Mark Twain and Henry James show by contrast how they
transmitted to twentieth-century novelists "what the next generation
could use of the achievements of their predecessors in the nineteenth
century." Smith's story is thus ruled by an implicit idea of aesthetic
progress, defined as emancipation from what Santayana called the
"genteel tradition" and movement towards the assumptions of modern
writers.
A major hazard in this literary version of the Whig interpretation
of history-reshaping the past in search of one's spiritual ancestors-is
the danger of making the past subservient to an uncriticized present, a
mere contributor to our presumed superiority. Smith is on guard
against this distortion, rightly warning us that Hawthorne "did not
intend anything so extreme" as an "absurd universe like that of the
existentialists," and that Melville's Ahab is closer to Shakespeare's
tragic heroes than to the "programmatic meaninglessness of the world
of the Keseys and Hellers and Pynchons." Smith knows that while
Twain's later solipsism may sound like "a prophecy of the fictive
world of Samuel Beckett or Thomas Pynchon," even his best work
contains "significant vestiges" of the outworn system of "middlebrow"
values. While Henry James's assertion that
"It
is art that makes life" is
"consonant with Robbe-Grillet's contention that the style of the novel
'constitutes
reality,''' still, James was shocked by the war of 1914 into
an awareness that he too, in a way not wholly different from Howells,
believed in "civilization, in progress, in a moral order in the universe"
at a time when the writers of the next generation were finding Western
civilization to be a Waste Land. Smith 's historical sensitivity thus
prevents his story from becoming a simple polar conflict between
pioneering artists and philistine reviewers.
Even so, the idea of literary progress exacts the price of elevating
Robbe-Grillet over George Eliot on the ground that the idea of art
representing life is outmoded by the idea of art making life. Smith
