PARTISAN REVIEW
have chosen to have them with the defunct. They get excited only
about classified matters, closed quarrels, stories whose ends are known.
They never bet on uncertain issues, and since history has decided for
them, since the objects which terrified or angered the authors they
read have disappeared, since bloody disputes seem futile at a distance
of two centuries, they can be charmed with balanced periods, and
everything happens for them as
if
all literature were only a vast
tautology and as
if
every new prose-writer had invented a new way
of speaking only for the purpose of saying nothing.
To speak of archetypes and "human nature"-is that speaking
in order to say nothing? All the conceptions of our critics oscillate
from one idea to the other. And, of course, both of them are false.
Our great writers wanted to destroy, to edify, to demonstrate. But
we 'no longer hold on to the proofs which they have advanced because
we have no concern with what they mean to prove. The abuses which
they denounced .are no longer those of our time. There are others
which stir us up which they did not suspect. History has given the
lie to some of their predictions, and those which have been fulfilled
became true so long ago that we have forgotten that they were, at
first, flashes of their genius. Some of their thoughts are utterly dead,
and there are others which the whole human race has taken up to
its advantage and which we now regard as commonplaces.
It
follows
that the best arguments of these writers have lost their effectiveness.
We admire only their order and rigor. Their most compact composi–
tion is in our eyes only .an ornament, an elegant architecture of expo–
sition, with no more practical application than such other architectures
as the fugues of Bach and the arabesques of the Alhambra.
We are still moved by the passion of these impassioned geome–
tries when the geometry no longer convinces us. Or rather by the
representation of the passion. In the course of centurie:; the ideas
have turned flat, but they remain the little personal objectives of a
man who was once flesh and bone; behind the reasons of reason,
which languish, we perceive the reasons of the heart, the virtues, the
vices and that great pain that men have in living. Sade does his best
to win us over, but we hardly find him scandalous. He is no longer
anything but a soul eaten by a beautiful disease, a pearl-oyster. The
Letter on the Theater
no longer keeps anyone from going to the
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