The essay called 'Comedy in the Grand Style' seems to
me the least satisfactory in the book. It is characteristic of Professor Leech that he should insist upon a head-on encounter with the problem raised by his own particular critical bias. But he is uneasy and self-contradictory both in this essay and elsewhere in the book about the exact status of works belonging, as he sees it, to the Grand Style. At one moment he maintains that literature can of course be truly great as well as Grand, that one must not denigrate the Elizabethans because they lacked the 'multi-significance' of the Jacobeans, aban- don Dante in favour of Beckett. Elsewhere, his conviction that 'the major work of art depends on tension, on unresolved con- tradiction' seems inevitably to demote a good deal of poetry and drama that we have for a long time agreed to call 'major'.
A further difficulty in 'Comedy in the Grand Style' springs from its curiously brief and peripheral discussion of comedy itself. Grand Style comedy, it seems, was written by Aristophanes, Wycherley, and Congreve among Others. Essentially a 'cruel' form, it 'cuts away non-essentials, refuses to en- tertain dubiety . . . concentrates on a single point of view, exposes human folly without mercy and exalts the human wit in its manipulation of event'. I'm not happy myself with this as a characterisation of the three writers mentioned. I am even more unhappy with the general remarks on com- edy scattered through the rest of the book. Professor Leech seems to distinguish two kinds of comedy besides the Grand Style: a mixed type which he endorses and a purer form which he never really defines but castigates as limited. The profoundest coin- f
edy. as written by Chekhov, Ben Jonson, the Shakespeare of Measure For Measure, Sterne and (on page 75, at least) by an Aristophanes suddenly exonerated from the practice of the Grand Style, is 'the product of man's incredulity as he contemplates himself'. Paradoxical and complex, it refuses us a single point of view or the consolation of that 'comic catharsis' which " purges society, in lesser plays, of its deviant members. In fact, it approaches tragedy. I'm not sure where Professor Leech places As You Like It, Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not to mention most of Moliere, but the suspicion arises that these plays represent that third and 'minor' type of comedy which hovers so mistily in the background. If this is so, something is radically wrong with the overall system of classification.
In general the least convincing portions of this bqok are the ones which partake most obviously of the aspirations of Northrop Frye. Chapter 5, 'The shaping of Time' simply reminded me that Frank Kermode has handled this particular issue more skilfully in The Sense of an Ending. The strength of the collection—and it is ultimately impressive—lies not in the theory of literature advanced but in the informed, sensitive, often brilliant discussion of in- dividual works and passages which everywhere unlies generalisation. When he sets himself to speculate on the relationship between a play and its particular stage set- ting, when he analyses a speech from The Duchess of Malfi, The Revenger's Tragedy or Troilus and Cressida, when he talks about specific experiences in the theatre, Professor Leech operates on a level that,leaves most of us (including Northrop Frye) behind. This is criticism of a very high order: imaginative, informed, acute and beautifully phrased. It is characteristic that when he actually conies to talk about Congreve in detail, in 'Congreve and the Century's End', the understanding of the plays should be subtle, precise and illuminating. You cannot fit the dramatist described here into the straitjacket of the Grand Style to which he is supposed to belong. But it is the real Congreve that emerges—and the real critic.
Occasional pieces
EMILE RUBINSTEIN
Israel among the Nations J. L. Talmon (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 40s)
point' to which he refers was peculiar: Talmon started writing at the worst period of the Cold War in Europe and the Korean War in Asia at the time of McCarthy's triumph in the United States, and of a right- wing reaction in England to the alleged creeping totalitarianism of the postwar Labour government. Among other things he wished to demonstrate, by constructing a genealogy of 'totalitarian democracy', that `empiricism is the ally of freedom'. He works through a number of polarities besides that of liberalism and totalitarianism: indi- vidualism and collectivism, nationalism and socialism, particularism and universalism, reason and irrationality. The ceaseless play of these apparently impersonal forces pro- duces that balance of contingency and in- evitability by which the 'horrible beastli- ness' of man works out its destiny.
The work under review, a tedious and ill- written compilation of occasional pieces
argues almost throughout at that level of 'reflection', and one might well dismiss its characteristic utterance as banal. It is, of
course; but not merely so. The duplicity of Talmon's enterprise, to say nothing of its simple implausibility as a 'genealogy' needs comment; for though he writes neither a serious history (i.e. in the present case more than partial or anecdotal) of the movements which lie behind the political forms which fascinate him, nor says very much to illu- minate one's understanding of the regimes in question, he conveys the impression of doing so.
Partly this is owing to the apparent coherence with which political developments of extreme complexity are described. The 'genealogy' of his first books is in effect an elaborately documented series of paranoid intuitions. In his latest book, the treatment, for example, of the history of Arab-Jewish relations in terms of largely psychological factors has a certain cogency; yet it is not a history in the sense of an account of a poli- tical relationship, even though it is that which appears to be in focus. The essay on 'Jews between Revolution and Counter- revolution' is likewise full of ambiguities (though of the three in this volume it is an obvious sense the most 'historical': and pro- vides inter alia very interesting information about the activities of revolutionists of Jewish extraction). Complex changes in poli- tical horizon, for example, as they are gener- ally discussed in terms of consciousness, arc expressed through vapid conjunctive phrases: thus `it was only to be expected' that Jews tended to universalise. Again, the revolutionary situation in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century is described largely by means of extensive quotation from Troilus and Cressida; and the Cotnmunist Manifesto which since it is supported by no distinct evidence can hardly in his formu- lation be thought of as a counter-revolution is then posed as a reaction to this state of affairs—no state of affairs at all. Revolution- ary theory is thus presented both as the auth- entic embodiment of , concrete historical change and as tfie juggernaut of 'universal oneness'. The theme of the essay (treated a great deal more concisely and illuminatingly by Isaac Deutscher shortly before his death) is how the peculiar social condition of the Jews made them both welcome and be re- jected by various currents of nineteenth- century socialism. By giving an apparently 'neutral' historical account of Jewish vul- nerability, then developing his argument through choice examples, of individual nasti- ness,. Talmon manages to link historic social-
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