42
PARTISAN REVIEW
sleep, before leaving him for good in the sleep of death.
As
I went through
the museum, I caught sight of a visitor who was taking the measurements
of these carvings; and I could not but think of how dumbfounded the one
who made them would have been, had he been able to foresee that his work
would end up as an artistic problem,-such the outcome of that moment,
some three thousand years before Christ, and somewhere in the neighbor–
hood of the Nile, when a nameless carver of images first took it upon him–
self to depict the human soul.
Every work of art is created to satisfy a need, a need that is passionate
enough to give it birth. Then the need withdraws from the art-work
as blood from a body, and the mysterious process of transfiguration sets in.
The art-work, thereupon, enters the realm of shades; and it is only our
own need, our own passion which can summon it forth again. Until such
a time, it is like a great, sightless statue, before which there passes a long
drawn out procession of the blind. And the impulsion which shall bring
one of the blind to the statue shall be sufficient to open both their eyes
at once.
We have but to go back a hundred years in order to find utterly
ignored any number of works which today are among the most indispens–
able that we possess. Two hundred years, and we shall find the radiant,
withered smile of Gothic become synonymous with the grin. A work of
art is an object; but it is, in addition, an encounter with time; and I am
aware, needless to say, that we have made the discovery of history. Works
born of love may find their way to the store-loft or to the museum, which
is scarcely a happier fate. Any work is dead, the moment love has ebbed.
Nevertheless, there is a meaning to all this. Art, thought, poems,
all the old dreams of mankind,-if we have need of them in order to go
on living, they have need of us that they may live again. Need of our
passion, our longings-nee.d
of our
will.
They are not mere sticks of fur–
niture, standing about for an inventory after the owner's death; rather,
they are like those shades in the infernos of old, eagerly awaiting the ap–
proach of the living. Whether or not we mean to do so, we create them
in creating ourselves. His very impulse to create leads Ronsard to resur–
rect Greece; Racine, Rome; Hugo, Rabelais; Corot, Ver-Meer. There
is not a single great individual creation which is not enmeshed in the
centuries, which does not trail after it the slumbering grandeurs of the
past. Our inheritance is not handed down; it is one to be achieved.
Writers of the West, we are engaged in a bitter struggle with that
which is our own. Comrades of the Soviets, you did well to hold your
Moscow Congress beneath the portraits of the great of old; but what
we
expect of that civilization of yours, which has safeguarded those master·
pieces, through blood and famine and typhus, is something more than a
