40
PARTISAN REVIEW
cisely, just what is to be looked for in the great works of the past, the
lesson that is to be learned from them. In the first place, a work has
much to teach us by the simple fact that it is beautiful; and I descry a
certain unfamiliarity with, a certain contempt for beauty in an over–
insistence upon the lesson, in a too exclusive search for
motives,
to the
neglect of
quietives.
I feel that it is a good thing to leave each mind free
to interpret after its own fashion the great texts of literature; · and if the
individual finds in those texts a lesson that is a little different from the
usual-! was about to say, the official one, I am by no means sure that
he is, for that reason, in the wrong, or if he is in the wrong, that his
mistake may not be of greater value than a blind acquiescence in an
accepted opinion. Culture works for the freeing of the mind, not for its
subjection.
None but the avowed enemies of Communism could see in it a will
to standardization. The thing that we expect of it, and which the U .S.S.R.,
after a period of bitter struggle and a temporary restraint aimed at a more
thorough-going liberation, has already begun giving
u~
is a social state
which shall permit of the greatest conceivable expansion of each indivi–
dual, the bringing to light and fostering of all the individual potentialities.
In this sorry West of ours, as I have said, we are as yet far from the goal;
and social questions for a time seem likely to take precedence over all others
-not that they are in themselves of greater interest than any others; but the
state of culture is intimately bound up with the state of society, and it is
a love for culture which leads us to say: So long as our
soci~ty
remains
what it is, our first concern shall be to change it.
At the present time, all our sympathy, all our passionate longing for
communion, goes out toward a downtrodden, deformed and long-suffering
humanity. However, I for one cannot admit that map ceases to be inter–
esting, when he ceases to be hungry, suffering and oppressed. I refuse to
admit that he is only deserving of our sympathy when he is utterly wretched.
And I would, further, that suffering might make us bigger men,-that is
to say, when it does not prostrate us, that it might hammer us into metal
of a sterner sort. But for all of that, I like to dream of, I cannot help
longing for, a state of society in which happiness shall be the common
property of all, with human beings who shall be capable of growing
111
stature a.> they grow in joy.
Translated from the French
by
SAMUEL PuTNAM
