PARTISAN REVIEW
that "the passions are presented before your eyes only to show all
the disorder of which they are the cause." At least insofar as one
does not take it to mean that his express purpose was to inspire a
horror of love. But to paint passion is already to.go beyond it, already
to shed it. It is not a matter of chance that, about the same time,
philosophers were suggesting the idea of curing oneself of it by knowl–
edge. And as the reflective practice of freedom when confronted by
the passions is usually adorned with the name of
morals,
it must be
recognized that the art of the seventeenth century was eminently a
moralizing art. Not that its avowed aim was to teach virtue, nor
that it was poisoned by the good intentions which produce bad litera–
ture; but by the mere fact that it quietly offered the reader his own
image, made it unbearable for him. Moralizing: this is both a
definition and a limit. It moralized and that was
all;
if it proposed
to man that he transcend the psychological toward the moral, it was
because it regarded religious, metaphysical, political, and social prob–
lems as solved; but its action was nonetheless "orthodox."
As
it con–
founded universal man with the particular men who were in power,
it did not dedicate itself to the liberation of any concrete category
of the oppressed; however, the writer, though completely assimilated
by the oppressing class, was by no means its accomplice; his work was
unquestionably a liberator since its effect, within this class, was to
free man from himself.
(Translated by Bernard Frechtman)
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