PARTISAN REVIEW
value of the apparently superfluous, the strange beauty of the com–
monest things when seen from a certain angle, so as to deserve almost
the praise Baudelaire gave to the great seventeenth-century French
sculptor Puget:
«Toi qui sus ramasser la beaute des goujats."
Thus
he represents the extreme limit of proletarianization so far reached
by literature.
At first only kings were considered fit characters for tragedies:
at first only great events were to be a theme for narration: then
Montaigne appeared and the apparently insignificant shades of humor
and sensibility were brought into literary expression; then land–
scapes, bourgeois interiors, still-lifes formed subjects for independent
pictures; and so little by little the humble sides of society and of
life have been given attention, until they have come nowadays to
the limelight.
Un Coeur simple
is only an episode, though one of
the greatest, in Flaubert's career: Hemingway's, on the other hand,
is a world of simple hearts and simple minds, simple-looking even
if they are complex: in him we see the return to primitivism in an
age of great technical development, the standard being set by the
man in the street as it once used to be set by the court. His influence
on the two Italian authors I have discussed, both of whom once
belonged' to the left wing of the Fascist party (one is now a promi–
nent Communist), is tell-tale enough.
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