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PARTISAN REVIEW
the sincerity, enthusiasm and faith expressed in the preface. I was
told that like me he lived in the country, secluded and working as
hard as he could. The bourgeois had the greatest contempt for him.
He complained of being constantly slandered and insulted; he suf–
fered the common ordeal of unrecognized geniuses. Eventually he
lost his mind, and now he is raving and screaming and treated with
cold baths. Who can assure me that I am not on the same path? What
is the line of demarcation bctwcen inspiration and madness, between
stupidity and ecstasy? To be an artist is it not necessary to
see every–
thing
differently from other men? Art is no mere game of the intel–
lect; it is a special atmosphere that we breathe. But if in search of
more and more potent air we descend ever deeper into art's sub–
terranean recesses, who knows that we may not end by breathing
deadly miasmas?
It
would make a nice book-the story of a man
whose mind is sound (quite possibly my young friend is sane) locked
up as insane and treated by stupid doctors.
March 31, 1853
Nothing great is ever done without fanaticism. Fanaticism is re–
ligion; and the eighteenth-century
philosophes
who decried the
former actually overthrew the latter. Fanaticism is faith, the es–
sence of faith, burning faith, active faith, the faith that works
miracles. Religion is a relative conception, a thing invented by
man-an idea, in sum; the other is a feeling. What has changed
on earth is the dogmas, the
stories
of Vishnu, Ormuzd, Jupiter, Jesus
Christ. But what has never changed is the amulets, the sacred springs,
the votive offerings, etc., the brahmins, the santons, the hermits–
in a word the belief in something superior to life and the need to
put one's self under the protection of this force.
In Art, too, the creative impulse is essentially fanatical. Poetry
is only a way of perceiving external objects, a special sense through
which matter is strained and transfigured without being changed.
Now, if you see the world solely through this lens, the color of the
world will be the color of the lens and the words you use to express
your feeling will thus be inevitably related to the facts that produce
it. To be well done, a thing must accord with your constitution. A
botanist's hands, eyes and head must not be like those of an astron-
