1'10
PARTISAN REVIEW
In his mature work Riviere asserts once again that we cannot
put the clock back. "We must take advantage," he writes, "of the
great operation carried out by Rousseau and Romanticism, that
is
to say, the introduction of the individual into literature." But we must
also "renounce subjectivism, effusion, pure creation, the transmigra–
tion of the ego and the disregard of the object which have plunged
us into the void. . . . The mind must recover its faith in a reality
which is distinct from its creative power and come to distinguish
in itself again an instrument and a substance."
I think that it can now be seen that Riviere was strong where
so many French critics have been painfully weak. His classicism
was
not a system or a doctrine or even strictly speaking a theory. Nor
was
it
something which 'happened' in the seventeenth century
and
then came to an end. It was a way of apprehending life which
is
found in Proust no less than in Racine. This means that classicism,
as Riviere understood it, was something essentially organic, some–
thing that was constantly growing and developing and, most impor–
tant of all, was comprehensive. He possessed a perfectly clear con–
ception of the function of literature; he wrote
his
criticism from a
definite standpoint; but instead of allowing it to distort his sensibility
and narrow the scope of
his
work, he turned it into a source of
strength. It gives it a breadth and clarity which are rare in French
criticism. He did not try to fit literature into some personal phil–
osophical system; he saw the lines along which it was developing;
and he used criticism not to demolish theories for purely polemical
purposes, but to try to influence the artist. Few modem critics,
in–
deed, have possessed a more realistic conception of "the function of
criticism at the present time."
