THE CRITICISM OF JACQUES RIVIERE
189
It will be generally agreed that literature has been profoundly
altered by the discredit into which the classical metaphysic has fallen
and by the rise of the idealist philosophies. The result of this change,
said Riviere, was the writer's progressive loss of faith in the reality
of the external world and a retreat into the world within. This meant
the end of the conflict between the man and his milieu, which for
Riviere was the starting point of nearly all good art, and the pre–
dominance of pure "creation," a word that he was inclined to iden–
tify
with the uncontrolled "inspiration" of the Romantics: "The
writer feels
his
creative power taking precedence over his percep–
tion.... Creation, immediate and continuous creation, becomes his
only help and his only duty."
He studies the effect of this change on nineteenth-century liter–
ature and, more particularly, on language in some detail in the two
essays
called
«Reconnaissance
a
Dada"
and
«Marcel Proust et la Tra–
dition Classique.'
I have only space for one quotation, but it illus–
trates Riviere's extraordinary intuition, his faculty of going straight to
the root of the matter which is one of his greatest gifts:
From
Stendhal onward, there sets in a continuous degradation of
our ancient, inveterate faculty of understanding and rendering feeling.
Flaubert represents the moment at which the evil becomes sensible and
aJanning. I do not mean that
Madame Bovary
and
L'Education senti–
mentale
show no knowledge of the human heart; but neither of them
reveals the slightest sign of a direct view into its complexity; neither
carries us a step further in our knowledge of it or gives us a frontal
view of fresh aspects of it. There is in the writer a certain heaviness
of
intelligence in relation to his sensibility; it follows it badly; it no
longer unravels it; it can no longer penetrate into its caprices or its
nuances.
This is an extreme statement of the case against Flaubert; but
though the criticism may appear severe it was surely a correct diag–
nosis of the tendencies at work in nineteenth-century literature. The
aim
of the essay on Dada was to show that Romanticism led logically
to surrealism, that the work of Flaubert, Mallarme and even Rimbaud
represented stages on the way. It gives precision to the criticisms of
Symbolism originally made in
«Le Roman d'Aventure"
and when
we
look at the later essay as a whole, it seems to me that Riviere
proves
his
case up to the hilt.
