VARIETY
465
dane's book
La
Conscience mal–
heureuse
this is his argument-and
its terrors are something special,
that among all the horrors of ex–
istence there are some which have
peculiar metaphysical rights and
are properly exempt from the poli–
tical, seeing that they are always
with us. Only
if
the abyss is tem–
poral are there social grounds
for insisting that art confront
it. But if by the abyss is meant
that which
is
unsolvable;
incur–
able disease, "The awful daring of
a m,roment's surrender/Which an
age of prudence can never retract",
insurmountable contradiction, the
irremediable, death, etc., then
is
it
not justifiable for the art which
deals with these terrors to veil
rather than to reveal? And what
has this to do with politics?
But incomparably the best
means for veiling just these terrors
is not art at all but religion. There
is no one more adept at veiling
and concealing, there is no· one
more skilled at disguising the true
state of affairs than God. And if
we grant special privileges to cer–
tain "terrors", or permit the un–
solvable to be placed on a higher
ontological plane than that which
can be solved, we simply degrade
the artist, whose means are obvi–
ously inadequate, and encourage
the priests, who are always around
us hoping to enter the argument
just as this point is reached.
If
art is a means of concealing the
terrors of the abyss it is an inferior
means, it is, in the excellent term
of Wyndham Lewis, an "inferior
religion", a half-way house to the
Church.
Moreover it is absurd to say of
Baudelaire that he veiled any–
thing. Was not his whole art di–
rected to making us shudder? The
author of
Mon Coeur mis
a
nu-–
a revealing title--was even con-
scious of the fact that the very act
of reading tends to encourage in
the reader the illusion of being on
too high a moral plane, from this
illusion he topples us with the in–
sinuating reminder:
"HypocT"ite
lecteur, mon semblable, mon
frere!"
The tragic art, to which
Baudelaire's poetry belongs, is not
concerned to conceal the dread ob–
jects of experience, but to strength–
en the human subject in their pres–
ence. Like science, tragic poetry
is based on the image of man as
a problem-solver; when it presents
the
unsurmountable,
it does not
neglect to hem it in with an abund–
ance of successes on the plane of
form. Each phrase with which it
invokes the unbridgeable abyss
represents an abyss that has been
crossed.
If
God, the dull parent,
hides the terrible
mischance,
the
tragic poet helps us to look at it,
and at the same time prompts us
to remember the successes of the
human past with its gift for lucky
words.
Man is a solver of problems,
solutions are as metaphysically
real as that which has not been
solved, bridges are as absolute as
chasms.
And if this were not so
there could be no art of tragedy.
There is no tragedy for Christians
-although they do not announce
the fact, and are dishonest enough
to pretend admiration for Shakes–
peare and the Greeks-for since
they conceive man as incapable of
solving his
real
problems, his con–
frontation of an insoluble problem
is for them not a
contradiction
of
his being (the heart of the tragic),
but a
confirmation
of it, a proof
of his disability and so much
propaganda for God. For Chris–
tians only the abyss is real, and
insofar as Baudelaire was a Chris–
tian it must
be
admitted that he
held to this view, which only
