Common Sense

The Realists By C. P. Snow Scribner’s, 336 pp., $12.95 Lord Snow has served up an elegant gallery of portraits, including as his subjects many of the greatest literary artists of the nineteenth century. Everyone knows about seven of his eight realists: Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Proust. The eighth writer, the nineteenth century Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdos, comes as a surprise. I was completely unfamiliar with Galdos before Snow told me about him, but it is a measure of my admiration for Snow’s book that I am prepared to admit his appropriateness in this company until my own reading prompts me to do otherwise.

Anyone who has ever attempted to write biographical essays can appreciate Snow’s mastery of a difficult form. He manages to supply the pertinent details of his subjects’ lives, to introduce and comment intelligently on their works, and to keep his narrative flowing steadily. There is more actual insight into the character of Dostoyevsky, for example, than in the entire first volume of Professor Joseph Frank’s vast tome on the same subject, published a couple of years ago. I do not intend, in saying this, to insult the laborious fact-finders who devote their days to digging among musty archives. Of course they have their place, and the Snows of the world would be lost without them. But there is no substitute for the distilled reflections of a wise man, which is what we have here.

MR

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Mitchell S. Ross

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The Realists By C. P. Snow Scribner’s, 336 pp., $12.95 Lord Snow has served up an elegant gallery of portraits, including as his subjects many of the greatest literary artists of the nineteenth century. Everyone knows about seven of his eight realists: Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Proust. The eighth writer, the nineteenth century Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdos, comes as a surprise. I was completely unfamiliar with Galdos before Snow told me about him, but it is a measure of my admiration for Snow’s book that I am prepared to admit his appropriateness in this company until my own reading prompts me to do otherwise.

Anyone who has ever attempted to write biographical essays can appreciate Snow’s mastery of a difficult form. He manages to supply the pertinent details of his subjects’ lives, to introduce and comment intelligently on their works, and to keep his narrative flowing steadily. There is more actual insight into the character of Dostoyevsky, for example, than in the entire first volume of Professor Joseph Frank’s vast tome on the same subject, published a couple of years ago. I do not intend, in saying this, to insult the laborious fact-finders who devote their days to digging among musty archives. Of course they have their place, and the Snows of the world would be lost without them. But there is no substitute for the distilled reflections of a wise man, which is what we have here.