48
PARTISAN REVIEW
must
be
opposed to sword (of which I am by no means convinced).
It is necessary first of all and above all to oppose the spirit to the
spirit, something which is seldom done any more. The historians of
tomorrow will inquire how and why, the end having been swallowed
up in the means, the communist spirit has ceased to oppose the fascist
spirit and even to differentiate itself from it.
*
*
*
I continue to read Abel Hermant with the liveliest interest.
His article in this morning's
Figaro
lends itself to discussion.
"If
Flaubert had lived until our time," he says, "he would
laugh a good deal at our 'slogans', for he had a very special hatred
for those ready-made phrases which we, today, call slogans in the
American style." The slogan is not exactly a "ready-made phrase";
· it was originally a "battle cry" capable of rallying the members of a
party. The word today designates any formulation which is concise,
easy to remember because of its shortness and apt to strike the im–
agination. Such are those phrases of Mussolini which cover the
walls of Italy. Perhaps Flaubert might have admired these formula–
tions; what made him indignant, was to see them accepted without
criticism. But the formula-slogan does not n·ecessarily hide a common–
place. The words of St. Francis de Sales, noted by Massis, form a
slogan: "There is no ready-made saintness", as does Malraux's
phrase: "Culture is not inherited, it is won". And Flaubert would
have approved of them, for it is the "ready-made" to which he
objects, all that- is obtained without a struggle, or m6re precisely
still: laziness and anything that favors it.
Flaubert's
slogan:
"I term bourgeois whoever thinks meanly,"
seems to imply a great deal more than Abel Hermant recognizes.
If
I were to interpret it, I would say, in the name of Flaubert: I care
very little about ''social classes"! There can be "bourgeois" people
among the nobles just as well as among the workers and the poor.
I recognize the bourgeois, not at all by his clothing or his social
level, but by the level of his thoughts, and, to simplify, I should
call anyone "bourgeois" who thinks meanly. And if Flaubert,
in
another
slogan
which Abel Hermant also quotes, adds: "The bour–
geois hates literature", I see in this phrase (much less of a "slogan"
than the first), not what Abel Hermant sees in it: "Flaubert called
bourgeois anyone who did not like what he was doing", but rather:
the
bourgeois,
that is to say: whoever thinks meanly, hates the
