202
PARTISAN REVIEW
Romanticism is the study of the self that is not central in man; I
am almost prepared to say that it is
th~
study of the non-existent
self. (The so-called romanticism of Corneille's
Cid
is not the
romanticism of Marcel Proust's· novel.) Scepticism is the belief
that a man is equally composed of a positive self and a negative
one. With this belief, the self never really is; it is always
becoming.
Out of a romanticism of valor and love striving to harmonize
with the world and thereby purify it,-that is, out of the roman–
ticism of
Le Cid
and
Hamlet,
has been forged the romanticism of
self-analysis and self-pity. Out of the scepticism of the Renais–
sance, that is, the scepticism of Montaigne and Hamlet, which was
doubt arising from an absence of facts and a wonderment over the
meaning of an isolated fact and its mobile meaning arising from
its juxtaposition with other facts, has grown the modern scepticism
concerning truth and values.
Tragedy does not arise from the intermittences of a hero's
heart. It arises from the hero's pact made with the world; a pact
that is unremitting and sealed. Tragedy follows contemplation
because tragedy is a commitment. (In contemplation there is no
need for commitment.) Proust's hero contemplates the world of
his sensitivity and signs no pact with any other world. He knows
all the dangerous freedom of intermittences and ignores the danger
of a willed subservience. Swann does not live in alliance with his
destiny. He lives in the dissolution of all his moral prejudices and
he seeks no escape from this empty state. He is the contemplator
of
infec~ndity
and the modern hero of inaction.
