Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers (review)

only from a careful and comprehensive reading of the fiction itself. The categories and distinctions of German Idealist philosophy may very well have suggested to James ways of dramatizing the problems of freedom and the will, but whether they also provided him with the solutions to these problems is not at all certain. To support his views, DonadÃ-o quotes passages from James's letters and Prefaces, such as "the free spirit, always much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic, or whatever ... only through having remained free" (p. 129). The problem is that James does not tel I us in this passage just what he means by "remained free," and this crucial definition can only be gathered from the fiction itself. Because DonadÃ-o does not examine specific novels at any length, he is forced to rely on generalizations about the "Jamesian novel," as if it were a fixed quantity about which critical unanimity existed; and although many of his observations, particularly on The Golden Bow I, are helpful and persuasive, too often they seem intended less to describe particular qualities of James's fiction than to satisfy a special thesis. The effect of Donadio's critical approach is that he misses important differences of tone between James and Nietzsche, particularly with regard to the distinction they both made between superior and ordinary types of humanity. For Nietzsche, the distinction is between the Ãœbermenschen and the "herd"; for James, it Is between the finer spirits possessing the capacity to "see" and the "fatal fools" who cannot (p. 110). Nietzsche's slavish herd consists of the spiritually vacuous common men upon whom the supermen have every right, if not the obligation, triumphantly to impose their will. James's "fatal fools," on the other hand—the Henrietta Stackpoles as well as the Charlotte Stants—are never simply written off from life, but exist in the realm of comic or tragic incompleteness. Though Henrietta is certainly btlnd to many things in Portrait, she inspires good-natured laughter; and it is just because Charlotte cannot be dominated simply and unequivocally that Maggie's story possesses its special moral and aesthetic power. To equate James's views with Nietzsche's is helpful in demonstrating that they both responded to similar general pressures of their age, but fatal In assessing the character of their responses, and it leads finally to distorted conceptions of the essential spirit of thefir work, for it neglects the permanent reservoir of Christian humanism in James's sensibility, the exact body of thought and feeling Nietzsche wished to extirpate from the modern world. James's view that in art "we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which also everything is saved by style" must stand as a warning that only by attending to James's own style can one recognize the salvation he extends to the blindest and most foolish as to the most perceptive and intelligent of his men and women. Jonathan Brent Northwestern University Henry Nash Smith. Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978. 204 pp. 13.95. What can we learn from Democracy and the Novel about the popular contemporary resistance to what are now universally accepted as the classics of nineteenth-century America? Not much, I am afraid, that we did not already know. Yet it is still an occasion when familiar ground is traversed by one who has been among the premier guides to American literary culture. It is as if the author of the pioneering Virgin Land, the scholar who so deftly anatomized the voices of Mark Twain, the co-editor of that monumental presentation of the letters of William Dean Howells and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, has now decided to offer us his considered observations on the classic novelists of the last century. Choosing 71 to limit himself to the novel, Smith can rule out Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman among the writers of the period which F. 0. Matthiessen named ,fthe American Renaissance." Taking his lead from Matt h lessen's sumptuous and seminal studies (Randall Stewart described the experience of reading American...