LITERATURE IN TWO WORLDS
15
rary, from a profound accord with that civilization, that he as an artist
draws the strength of his genius.
We have formed the habit of living and thinking within a civilization
to which the intellect by its very nature is opposed. I have no desire here
to go into any complicated ideologies; I should, rather, like to make clear
a very simple fact, and that is this: whatever may be their strength or
their weakness, the contemporary institutions of Western Europe are in–
separable from a certain hypocrisy. Many of my listeners have lived
through the War; and their sense of irritation at that time was due, not
to a theory, but to the consciousness of a cleavage between the bloody and
tragic reality that surrounded them-even though they may have found
in it certain elements of grandeur-and the manner in which that reality
was expressed, in newspapers and in books. In this respect, the world has
not changed greatly since the War.
But let us not compare the best of Soviet art to the worst that the
bourgeoisie has to show. Rather, let us look at the highest manifestations
of bourgeois art and try to see just where it is the essential difference lies.
For more than sixty years, the great works of Western art have followed
a consistent line of development. It is no longer a question, as Balzac
put it, of depicting a world, but of giving a pictorial representation of the
evolution of a personal problem.
The Possessed
is not a depiction, not
even an unfriendly one, of a Russian revolutionary scene; it is the develop–
ment of Dostoievski's ethical thinking through a succession of living char–
acters. Like Nietzsche in his
Zarathustra,
Dostoievski is a thinker who
expresses himself parabolically.
We find the same problem in painting.
If
Cezanne diminishes more
and more the importance of the subject, it is not due to a flair for "good
painting" in the Dutch sense, nor to a love for the stiii-life itself; it is
because he is thus free to express himself; and this disappea rance of the
subject, which leads to abstract painting, does not indicate, as has been
asserted, an ever-increasing respect for the graphic element, but, the truth
is, an ever-growing respect for the painter himself. The modern abstract
painter sets about creating his own myth, just as Dostoievski did; and
just as Goethe observed that every writer writes his complete works, so it
may be said that, practically speaking, Picasso has never ceased painting
his complete works.
• • •
The artist's essential task being, thus, the creation of his own myth,
it remains to explain how it is this myth is propagated and the work of
art comes to take on viability. I shall select two examples, Baudelaire
and Fromentin. In each of these two cases, what we have is an artist
endowed with a very special sensitivity, in which a certain number of
