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PARTISAN REVIEW
run down both Balzac and Flaubert, judges the former to be a writer
of sloppy prose with an immature outlook on life and the latter as
perhaps even more immature, a cynic in fact, whose fiction represents
"an attack on human nature." To my mind, this attempted revision
of the canon of the French novel falls wide of the mark. It draws no sup–
port from the historical sensibility. This is not to say that Mr. Turnell
is unaware of the factual-historical background of the novelists he has
set out to depose. It
is
rather that the historical dimension of their
art escapes him. Hence he is forced back into a tight moralism of
judgment; also to disregard the variability of the novelistic gift, which
is not an abstract potential but is actualized on the historical plane and
is to be p erceived on no other plane. Balzac is by now so far removed
from us that a response to the historicity of his work is essential to our
enjoyment of it. This is less true of Flaubert, who is in a sense still
our contemporary; but the contemporaneous too is badly understood
when the historical sense is weakly operative.
Mr. Turnell, for example, attributes the faults he discerns in
Flaubert to his personal manias. For my part, I find unacceptable this
approach to a writer of Flaubert's stature and immensely symbolic sig–
nificance in modern letters. Mr. Hauser sees quite as clearly as Mr.
Turnell the inhumanity of Flaubert's aesthetic fanaticism and his lack
of a direct relationship to life. But he also sees something else, something
more ambiguous and touching and inevitable: the torment of an
artist in whom romanticism had turned so self-conscious and prob–
lematical that it compelled him to outrage his own instincts and in–
clinations, thus enacting a sacrificial role. Certain things h ad become
historically inescapable in Flaubert's time and it is exactly because he
chose to take the burden of them upon himself that he is so authentic,
so formidable even in his failures. Is his struggle for the
mot juste
merely a personal aberration?
It
is a sign, Mr. Hauser notes, of the
gulf that had opened up in the artistic career between "the 'possession' of
life and the 'expression' of it." One thinks of Henry James, whose
stylistic distillations of the later period are likewise implicated in this
division. James, of course, was not forced to struggle for the
mot juste.
It came to him with an ease as astonishing as it is suspect. For James,
unlike the disconsolate Frenchman, finally succeeded only too well in re–
pressing within himself the human hunger for immediacy and spon–
taneity. His rules of art, i.e., his vaunted aesthetic of the novel, is
intrinsically an effort to vindicate the consequent estrangement and to
derive from it a discipline of creative work. His triumph was that he
achieved that discipline and that even in his state of estrangement he
continued to pay homage to the 'possession' of life.
