16
PARTISAN REVIEW
· readers find their own sensitivity expressed upon a higher plane, and thereby
justified. My thought obviously calls for a degree of shading; but I think
that, speaking in the large, it may be stated that the reader pays the artist
in admiration for what the latter gives him in the way of justification. I
do not believe in any mysterious Platonic beauty, to which a few privileged
artists down the ages are able to attain, but rather, in a relation which is
set up between the sensitivities of individuals and the need which is theirs
of finding justification through expression.
This problem is at the core of all Occidental thinking on the subject
of art, and it may be said that the art of a bourgeois civilization practically
revolves about the point.
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•
•
What we must understand is, that the artist and modern society are
by their very nature opposed to each other. In a country such as France,
apart from all divisions into classes or collectivities of one sort or another
a further line of demarcation is erected between those who yield their
allegiance to the civilization about them and those who refuse such an
allegiance. And school-teachers, professors, women, laborers, and bour–
beois, in varying numbers, are likely now to find themselves caught up into
that new collectivity known as the Intelligentsia, and so discover that they
have a number of points of agreement on questions of art. {Let me not
be misunderstood here; I look: upon this collectivity, constituted as it is,
as a merely temporary one, one that would assuredly be disrupted by any
deep-going crisis; I am simply, here, taking the literary fact of the moment).
In our civilization, there is a fundamental lack of harmony between
the intellect on the one hand and social institutions on the other. The
element of hypocrisy, which I mentioned a while back, plays a preponderant
part where intellectual matters are concerned.
If
we wish to picture for
ourselves the attitude of the Russian worker toward his civilization, the
best thing that we could do would be to compare it with the state of
mind of the masses in Western Europe at the moment of mobilization,
while they still accepted the War. We can go on to imagine what an
art of the War era might have been, if the War had kept its human mean–
ing for the entire country, such a meaning as it held for the Nation during
the mobilizations of the First Republic. Soviet art is an art of this kind.
It has been said, and I will repeat it, that Soviet civilization is a totalitarian
one; by which I understand, a civilization in which men have a part, to
which they accord their conscious allegiance, and in which labor is not
the deadening part of life. The same thing has been said of Fascism.
I do not believe that is true. For Fascism, to the degree in which it grants
to capital a preponderant role, must meet again, in the ethical domain,
with all the contradictions inherent in the bourgeoisie.
If
they tell ' us
