12
PARTISAN REVIEW
scious of itself as standing apart from society and as possessing
special and superior interests and ideals.
The modern artist has been rebuked time and again by social–
minded critics both of the right and of the left for his obsessive
introversion, his jealously maintained privacy, his esthetic mys–
ticism, his bent toward the obscure and the morbid. Yet without
such qualities, given the boundaries of the bourgeois world, he
could not have survived. These qualities are not derived from a
limitless confidence that this artist has in himself (the opposite is
often the case) but from the group-ethos, from the proud self–
imposed isolation of a cultivated minority. It is this isolation which
was translated ideologically into various doctrines-the theory of
art for art's sake is a striking example--that could simultaneously
be put to aristocratic as well as bohemian uses. For a long time it
enabled the art-object to resist being drawn into the web of com–
modity relations. Being an impersonal exchange value, a com–
modity is a product that dominates its producer; and whereas in
almost every hther sphere the conversion ·of products into com–
modities robbed the producers of their individuality, in the sphere
of art many producers still found it possible--through a valiant
effort, certainly, and at the cost of much suffering-to remain the
masters instead of the victims of their products.
But the contradiction in this is that it is precisely its integrity
which is to a large extent synonymous with the "anti-social" char–
acter of so much of modern art. Inevitably so, for during the
greater part of the bourgeois epoch not to con£orm meant to repel
the social, and rather than pay the price of being at one with
society, the artist chose to be alone with his art: he preferred
alienation from the community to alienation from himself. "Any–
where out of the world," said Baudelaire; and Flaubert formulated
the belief of a whole race of artists in claiming that "now that the
bourgeoisie is all humanity" art had become particirlarly valuable,
since in art, at least, "all is liberty in a world of fictions." "When
there is no encouragement to be derived from one's fellows," he
wrote, "when the exterior world is disgusting, enervating, corrup–
tive, and brutalizing, honest and sensitive people are forced to seek
within themselves a more suitable place to live...• The soul, made ·
to overflow, will be concentrated in itself."
Flaubert and the other protestants of art and thought did not
