Albert Camus
ART AND REVOLT
Art, like revolt, is a movement which exalts and denies
at the same time. "No artist can tolerate the real," said Nietzsche.
This
is true; but no artist can do without the real. Creation is a
demand for unity and a refusal of the world. But it refuses the
world because of what it lacks, and in the name of that which,
sometimes, it is. Revolt can be observed in art in its pure state,
in
its primitive composition, outside history. Art, then, should give
us a perspective on the content of revolt.
We must note, however, the hostility to art shown by
all
re–
volutionary reformers. Plato is still moderate. He only impugns the
deceitful function of language and exiles poets from
his
republic.
For the rest, he placed beauty about the world. But the revolution–
ary
movement of modem times coincides with a process of placing
art on trial which is not yet finished. The Reformation chooses
morality and exiles beauty. Rousseau denounces art as a corruption
added by society to nature. Saint-Just thunders against the theater
and,
in
the excellent program that he drew up for the "Feast of
Reason," desires that reason be personified by a figure "virtuous
rather than beautiful." The French Revolution did not give birth
to any artist; only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and a clan–
destine writer, the Marquis de Sade. The one poet of his time
[Andre Chenier] is guillotined by the Revolution. The only great
prose writer [ChateaubriandJ is exiled to London and pleads for
Christianity and the throne. A bit later, the Saint-Simonians will
demand an art "socially useful." "Art for progress" is a common–
place which runs through the century and that Hugo took up,
though he did not succeed in making it convincing. Only Valles,
in
pronouncing a malediction on art, brings to it an imprecatory
tone which has an authentic ring.
