PARTISAN REVIEW
ogous to that of male and female; reading has become a simple means
of information and writing a very general means of communication.
In the seventeenth century being able to write really meant being
able to write well. Not that Providence divided the gift of style
equally among all men, but because the reader,
if
not strictly identi–
cal with the writer, was a potential writer. He belonged to a para–
sitical elite for whom the art of writing was, if not a profession, at
least the mark of its superiority. One read because one could write;
with a little luck one might have been able to write what one had
read.
The public was active; productions of the mind were really
submitted
to it. It judged them by a scale of values which it helped
to maintain. A revolution like romanticism was not conceivable in
this period because there would have to have been the cooperation
of an indecisive mass, which one surprises, overwhelms, and suddenly
animates by revealing to it ideas or feelings of which it was ignorant,
a mass which, lacking firm convictions, constantly needs to be rav–
ished and fecundated. Convictions in the seventeenth century were
unshakeable; the religious ideology was bolstered by a political
ideology which the temporal itself secreted; no one publicly ques–
tioned the existence of God or the divine right of kings. "Society''
had its language, its graces, and its ceremonies which it expected
to find in the books it read. Its conception of time, too.
As
the two
historical facts upon which it constantly meditated--original sin and
redemption-belonged to a remote past, as it was also from this past
that the great ruling families drew their pride and the justification
of their privileges, as the future could bring nothing new, since God
was too perfect to change, and since the two great earthly powers,
the Church and the Monarchy, aspired only to immutability, the
active element of temporality was the past, which is itself a phenom–
enal degradation of the Eternal; the present is a perpetual sin which
can find an excuse for itself only if it reflects, with the least possible
unfaithfulness, the image of a completed era. For an idea to be re–
ceived, it must prove its antiquity; for a work of art to please, it
must have been inspired by an ancient model.
Again we find writers expressly making themselves the guardians
of
this
ideology. There were still great clerks who belonged to the
Chqrch and who had no other concern than to defend dogma. To
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