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PARTISAN REVI EW
of the mind-eicero's definition of eloquence), which gives con–
ciseness, distinctness, form, energy, rhythm, diversity.
It
doesn't re–
quire much brains to be a critic: you can judge the excellence of
a book by the strength of its punches and the time it takes you to
recover from them. And then the excesses of the great masters! They
pursue an idea to its furthermost limits. In Moliere's
Monsieur de
Pourceaugnac
there is a question of giving a man an enema, and a
whole troop of actors carrying syringes pour down the aisles of the
theater. Michelangelo's figures have cables rather than muscles; in
Rubens' bacchanalian scenes men piss on the ground; and think of
everything in Shakespeare, etc. etc. and the most recent representa–
tive of the family, old Hugo. What a beautiful thing
Notre Dame
is! I recently re-read three chapters of it, including the sack of the
church by the vagabonds. That's the sort of thing that's strong! I
think that the greatest characteristic of genius is, above all,
energy.
Hence, what I detest most of all in the arts, what sets me on edge,
is the
ingenious,
the clever. This is not at all the same as bad taste,
which is a good quality gone wrong. In order to have what is called
bad taste, you must have a sense for poetry; whereas cleverness, on
the contrary,
is
incompatible with genuine poetry. Who was cleverer
than Voltaire, and who less a poet? In our darling France, the
public
will
accept poetry only if it is disguised.
If
it is given to them
raw they protest. They have to be treated like the horses of Abbas–
Pasha, who are fed tonics of meat-balls covered with flour. That's
what art is: knowing how to make the covering! But have no fear:
if you offer this kind of flour to lions, they will recognize the smell
twenty paces away and spring at it.
August 21 -22, 1853
Yes, I maintain (and in my OpInIOn this should be a rule of
conduct for an artist) that one's existence should be in two parts:
one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-God. Physical
and intellectual gratifications have nothing in common.
If
they hap–
pen to coincide, hold fast to them. But do not
try
to combine them :
that would be factitious. And this idea of "happiness," incidentally,
is
the almost exclusive cause of all human misfortunes. We must
store up our hearts' marrow and give of it only in small doses; and
)
