Public and Private Value: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (review)

136 the minnesota review Pentagon, I hear they grow just fine in shit." Okay, okay, they're not that funny. Heard any really good ones lately? PAUL BUHLE Public and Private Value: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Peter Smith. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984. 244 pp. $29.95 (cloth). Peter Smith's essay is one of the richest reconsiderations of the novel which we have had in several decades. His grasp of the historical and national contexts of the writers he considers (Dickens, Flaubert, James, and Conrad) is in the tradition of European scholarship. His book belongs on the shelf with Lukács' Studies in European Realism and Watt's The Rise ofthe Novel, not because its argument is indebted to either, but because Smith's book is vital reading for anyone interested in the nineteenth-century novel as a public document informed by and commenting on the compelling history of that century. Smith explores how the prose of the ancien régime, attuned to delineating the movements and concerns of private lives, could be wedded to the shattering external events of the nineteenth century. The omission of obvious figures like Balzac and Stendhal, and the inclusion of self-conscious artists like Flaubert and James, suggests the subtlety of Smith's understanding of how history informs and shapes sensibility. He would move us beyond a fundamental misconception: if the novel is not overtly historical, a la Scott, it is likely to have retreated into quotidian life, abandoning interpretation to historiography. He asserts the presence of a plot of ideas which exists beyond the "intrigue" which may clutter up the stage of Dickens or the James of The Princess Casamassima. His story is the struggle of these four writers to lift the particularities of their characters and setting to "a general design," "a controlling idea." Smith's skill in articulating these controlling ideas is redoubtable; his approach allows him to produce radically new interpretations of most of his texts. Smith's reading of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale is perhaps the clearest instance of his method. His chapter title is "History as an allegory of love," and allegory is precisely the word for his elucidation of plot. He sees Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers not as private friends, nor even as typical individuals pursuing the complementary passions of love and politics, but as "ideological fragments" whose story is the history of France from 1840 to 1851. Frederic's loves define the political and social possibilities available in those years: Mme. Arnoux is the "principle of idealism and lofty aspiration" that lies behind republicanism and is paradoxically linked also to the ancien régime; the whore Rosanette represents the 1848 republic; Mme. Dambreuse, the impending corruption of the Second Empire. Key dates underpin this reading: Frederic's relation with Mme. Arnoux ends in 1848; the auction of her personal property, representing "the desecration of that fund of spiritual sustenance which alone had kept the spark of decency alive in France" (p. 57), occurs on 1 December 1851, the day Louis Napoleon seized power. The date of the bounder Martinon's marriage to Dambreuse's illegitimate daughter—May 1850, the month in which three million voters were disenfranchised to pave the way for Louis Napoleon's seizure of power—is likewise a key to what that marriage represents: "the alliance between old money [and] a new service class of sycophantic and unscrupulous placemen, whose historic role it is to preserve intact the great fortunes of the past and transfer them into the industrial future" (p. 70). The characters' relationships are thus not to be read as choices which illuminate the individual personality but as parts of an allegory. Occasional improbabilities of plot which cannot be accounted for in terms of ordinary realism are explicable in terms of the allegory's needs, such as the appearance of the proletarian Dussardier as Frederic's second in his duel with the Baron de Cisy. reviews 137 This schematic presentation scarcely registers the complexity or insight of Smith's reading of the novel. He is particularly effective in explaining minor characters whose vagaries are illuminated by the controlling idea. One instance is M. Arnoux...