THE
CRITICISM OF JACQUES RIVIERE
183
There must, he thought, be something badly wrong with an art
which was so completely subjective, so cut off from the world of
common experience. It was the art of a tired people. It was time
to have done with it and to produce something more vigorous and
more vital. We no longer have the strength to go on listening to
people talking about "fluidity," "continuity" and "atmosphere." We
are exasperated by the supposed shapelessness of reality. The age
of Symbolism was an age of poetry, but it seemed clear that an age
of the novel and the drama was dawning. Instead of describing
emotions detached from their origins, the writer must deal with
something real. It was not a plea for
.a
return to the classic French
novel. "The novel that we are waiting for," he said, "will not possess
the lovely rectilinear composition, the harmonious sequence and the
simplicity of narrative which have hitherto been the virtues of the
French novel." It will be long; it will even contain
longueurs.
It
will
be a "monster" covered with "excrescences"; but it will also
contain a whole world of characters who though they may come
to resemble their creator, will at the outset be completely distinct
from
him.
He goes on to explain that by "novel of adventure," he
does not mean the works of Conan Doyle. He means the "psycho–
logical novel of adventure" and the nearest approach that he can
find to it in the past is
Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations
and
The Possessed.
When we remember that
Ulysses, A la Recherche du temps
perdu
and the
Faux Monnayeurs
were all written within the next
twelve years, Riviere's essay must seem in retrospect to have been a
remarkable forecast. We shall also see that his emphasis on psycho–
logical realism became one of the dominant themes of
his
mature
criticism.
The first thing that we notice about the essays written between
1919 and 1925 is the abandonment of any attempt to extract a
'message' from his authors. In the editorial that he wrote for the
Nouvelle Revue
Fran~aise
when it resumed publication in June 1919,
he declared roundly that "a work of art is beautiful for reasons
which are absolutely intrinsic and which can only be unraveled by
direct study and by a sort of
corps
Ii
corps
with the work itself." He
returns to the attack on Symbolism as "the cultivation of the means
