LITERA'TURE AND SOCIETY
35
example, are flowers that could only bloom under glass. The individual
with whom they are concerned is a leisured one, who has all the time in
the world to study his passions of mind and soul, with all the time that is
needed for those passions to develop in due course.
I do not mean to bring any indictment against that literature which
I am discussing. No one admires more than myself the masterpieces to
which it has given birth. I might even say that, since the age of Greece,
art has never attained so high a point of perfection. Some one has said,
those tragic kings and queens of the seventeenth century no longer hold
any interest for
us;
but I can only pity those who are insensitive to the
pure beauty of their words and deeds, being unable to appreciate the
authentic quality of the passions which all that purple merely serves to
clothe and shield. Nevertheless, all the actors in these tragedies are privi–
leged beings.
A literature that is willing to consider only beings such as these, and,
even where they are concerned, to look at nothing but the head and heart,
is in danger of losing all solid footing. By breaking off contact with
reality, with life, art speedily becomes artifice. With the exception of the
Latin, which in this respect goes the classic French one better, there is
no other literature-none in Europe, certainly,-that impresses me as
being so bloodless, so constantly and so perilously near to the ·factitious
as our own.
For it is always at the base, on the ground, with the people, that a
literature finds new strength and sap. In this regard, it is comparable to
Antaeus, who, as the wise old Greek fable has it, loses the strength and
power that are his when his feet are no longer on the earth. The thing
that brought a new and much needed vigor into French letters in the
seventeenth century was not the influence exerted by Montesquieu and Vol–
taire, however great their
geni~s
may have been-no, it was the work of
plebians, of commoners, of a Jean-Jacques, or Diderot.
Owing, it may be, to an excessive love of form, of outward appearance
and the word, French literature finds itself unremittingly drawn toward
the artificial and the factitious. So true is this, that we see the Romantic
Movement combatting the artificialities of classicism with works that are
even more artificial than the older ones. And thus it is, of all the great
representatives of the new school, Musset, Vigny, Hugo himself, there
was not a one who came from the people and who brought what might be
called fresh blood.
Hugo, the truth is, was well aware of where salvation lay; whence,
the tremendous effort he made to come near to the people, to speak in their
name, to represent the people, an effort which so irritates those of the Right
today, who see in it only a proof of Hugo's "stupidity"-where I see,
