36
P.JRTISAN REVIEW
opportunism perhaps, but in that very opportunism a deep-sighted intuition.
May it be that I am exaggerating this tendency on the part of our
literature to the artificial and the factitious? I do not believe so. I find
it once again in the Symbolist reaction which so closely followed the realism
of Zola. And even Zola, whose worth and importance are shamefully
unappreciated by a number of our critics and literary historians,-even in
Zola, I discover a tendency to synthesis and abstraction which, in spite of
his passion for realism, binds him so very closely to a certain romanticism
of form, if not of inspiration.
No, I am not exaggerating in the least. I am amused, when I hear
one of the most authoritative and representative critics of the Right under–
taking the defense of civilization, in what I must admit is a notable article;
I am amused when I hear him admitting the artificial aspect of our culture
and, at the same time, entering upon a defense of the artificial. There is
nothing like getting one's
vi~ion
straight; and a statement such as his is
of the sort that compels one to take a clearly defined position.
"Civilization," we read in a ·recent number of the
Action Fran,aise,
"civilization is a lie; it is an effort to substitute the artificial man for the
natural man, the garment, the adornment, the mask, for man's native
nudity,"
And our critic goes on to say:
"He who will not admit this
anti-natural
effort, this splendid lie, to
be civilization's reason for being, constituting its real grandeur and that
which is our own,-such a one is an enemy of civilization itself."
Ah l no l I cannot believe that civilization must, necessarily, rest
upon a lie. An artificial civilization of this sort, one that sets out to be
factitious and which proclaims itself as such, worthy product and reflection
of a mendacious social system, bears within itself the germs of d·eath. Those
literary works which it continues to spawn are moribund, as is the society
behind them; and unless we are able to shake all this off, we too are dead
and done for. Hothouse culture has seen its day; if the nationalists stick
up for it, all the better; it only enables me to see the more clearly and to
realize the more assuredly that culture's true defenders are on the other
side of the fence.
But as I have said, I have no intention of attacking this culture.
However artificial it may be, it has led to the production of some remarkable
works. To deny the past is a vain and absurd proceeding. I would even
go so far as to say that the culture which we today visualize doubtless
could not have been produced straightaway, and that it no doubt was a
good thing for this mendacious variety to have ru·n its course; just as the
capitalistic system, however much we may loathe it, surely had to precede
that Communist society toward which we are bending our efforts.
