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PARTISAN REVIEW
freeing themselves from the objective reality which they believed
extraneous to their art, they have provided the plastic will with no
resisting object, or none except itself as expressed by other painters,
and are therefore beginning to express themselves in mere competitive
ingenuity? It is no accident of the
Zeitgeist
that Cubism is the classic
painting of our time. The Cubists, bold as they were, accepted the
conditioned, and kept in touch with a world of literality. And this is
the opinion of one of the greatest of the Cubists, Juan Gris. "Those
who believe in abstract painting," he wrote in a letter of 1919, "are
like weavers who think they can produce material with only one set of
threads and forget that there has to be another set to hold these
to~
gether. Where there is no attempt at plasticity how can you control
representational liberties? And where there is no concern for reality
how can you limit and unite plastic liberties?"
What is true of the Cubists is also true of the great classic
writers of our time-the sense of
things
is stronger in them than in
their expositors, they grew in naturalism, in literalism, and they in
their way insist on it as much as Flaubert, or the Goncourts, or Zola.
The impulse of succeeding writers to build on Joyce
is
pretty sure to
be frustrated, for it is all too likely to be an attempt to build on
Joyce's notions of form, which have force only in relation to Joyce's
superb sense of literal fact, his solid, simple awareness that in the
work of art some things are merely denotative and do not connote
more than appears, that they are
data
and must be permitted , to
exist as
data.
The last of James's statements about Howells concerns his in–
difference to evil. For us today this constitutes a very severe in–
dictment. We are all aware of evil; we began to be aware of it in
certain quasi-religious senses a couple of decades or so ago; and
as time passed we learned a great deal about the physical, political
actuality of evil, saw it expressed in the political life in a kind of
gratuitous devilishness which has always been in the world but
which never before in Western Europe had been organized and, as it
were, rationalized. A proper sense of evil is surely an attribute of a
great writer, and nowadays we have been drawn to make it al–
most a touchstone of greatness, drawn to do so in part by our re–
vived religious feelings or nostalgia for religious feelings, in part
