ART AND REVOLT
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over totally to other beings, where
all
life takes on the aspect of
destiny?l The world of the novel is nothing but the correction of
our own world, following man's profound desire. For we are still
in the same world; the suffering is the same, the deception and the
love. The heroes speak our language; have our weaknesses, our
strengths. Their universe is neither more beautiful nor more edifying
than ours. But they at least pursue their destiny to its end, and no
hero is so overwhelming as the one who follows his passion to its
farthest limits: Kirilov and Stavrogin, Mme. Graslin, Julien Sorel or
the Prince de Cleves. It is here that we lose their measure, for they
finish what we shall never accomplish.
Mme. de Lafayette drew the
Princesse de Cleves
from bitterest
experience. She is herself, without doubt, Mme. de Cleves and
yet she is not. Where is the difference? The difference is that Mme.
de Lafayette did not enter a convent and that nobody in her en–
tourage expired for love. No doubt she knew the agonizing moments
of that unequaled love. But it did not have any final point, she
outlived and prolonged it by ceasing to live in it; and nobody,
not even herself, would have known its shape if she had not given
it the naked embodiment of her faultless language. There is no
story more "like a novel" and more beautiful than that of Sophie
Tonska and Casimir in
Les Pleiades
of Gobineau. Sophie, a beauti':
ful and sensitive woman (who enables one to understand Stendhal's
confession that "only women of marked temperament can make me
happy" ), forces Casimir to reveal his love. Accustomed to being
loved, she becomes impatient with Casimir who sees her every day
and yet never drops his irritating calm. Casimir avows his love,
indeed, but as if he were exposing some legal argument. He has
studied Sophie, knows her as well as he knows himself, and is con–
vinced that this love- without which he cannot live- has no future.
He has thus decided to inform her, at one and the same time, of
his love and its futility, and to make her a present of his fortune–
she is wealthy herself, and this gesture is of no importance-on con–
dition that she provide him with a modest pension to enable him to
live in the suburbs of a city chosen at random (the city is Vilna ) ,
1. Even if the novel speaks only of nostalgia, despair, the unachieved, it
still creates the form and the salvation. To name despair is already to go
beyond
it.
The literature of desperation is a contradiction in tenns.
