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PARTISAN REJIIEW
be. For all tenets tend to harden into dogma, and all dogma breeds hatred
and bigotry, and is therefore stultifying. And the condescensjon of the
political party
towa~d
the artist is always clear, however well disguised.
The artist will be "given" his freedom; as though it were not the artist
who "gives" freedom to the world, and not only "gives" it, but is the only
person capable of enduring it, or of understanding what it costs. The artists
who remain exemplars have often, it is true, become entangled in politics,
but it is not their political work which we remember. Nonsense concerning
the function of the arts has been tossed about for centuries. Art has been
asked, again, as the wind changed, to be "romantic," "filled with sensibil·
ity," "classic," "useful," "uplifting" and whatnot. The true artist will
instinctively reject "burning questions" and all "crude oppositions" which
can cloud his vision or block his ability to deal with his world. All this
has been fought through before now: Turgenev showed up the pretentions
of the political critic Belinsky; Flaubert fought the battle against "useful·
ness" all his life; Yeats wrote the most superb anti-political poetry ever
written. Flaubert wrote, in the midst of one bad political period: "Let us
[as writers] remain the river and turn the mill."
7. In the event of another war, I plan to oppose it with every means
in
my power. The responsibilities of writers in general, I should think, lie
in
such active opposition.
Lionel Trilling:
7. I should like to answer the last question first because I find that it is
the only one that I "face." The other questions are interesting but this one
is immediate and crucial. The possibility of war is the great objective and
subjective fact which
confro~ts
every writer.
· Whether or not he is wholly conscious of it, the writer lives by his
faith in continuity. He must feel that he himself will go on indefinitely to
practice his craft; he must suppose a connection between himself and the
past; and he must assume, however modestly, that he has some connection
with the future. This sense of continuity is, of course, attenuated or
destroyed by the possibility of war. Perhaps tomorrow, the writer feels,
he will cease to be a writer-and immediately it becomes infinitely more
difficult for him to be a writer today. He knows what war will mean: for
the war-period, at the very least, there will be a cessation of literary activ·
