REPLIES TO 13 QUESTIONS
161
as constant and profound as the other, I met with cries of paradox.
But that this is so is becoming more and more apparent. And I am
not sure that French literature will not owe its place in the new
world above
all
to its Pascalian accent (philosophy, religion, destiny),
which
is
not without some echo
in
America.
However, there is another strain
in
French literature, the one
that runs through Montaigne, Moliere, La Bruyere, Chamfort,
Stendhal, etc., the people who can't be taken in, who insist on
knowing what they are talking about. The dream rectifiers . . . the
moralists, after
all.
Notice that there are no real moralists except
in France and England. The English .and the French are the only
ones who have made any serious judgments about women. The
Russians, who have created fiction's dominating women, have writ–
ten nothing important on the subject of women. Stendhal wrote
La
Chartreuse,
and
De l'Amour,
Tolstoi created Anna Karenina and
Natasha, but he
is
the great Tolstoi
in
fiction only. Look at what
Goethe and Nietzsche wrote about women, when they talked about
them "directly." We have not seen the last of the moralists, I be–
lieve.
This twofold human effort, on the one hand to bring about
man's participation in a privileged part of himself-or in what
surpasses him-and, on the other, to reduce to a minimum the part
played by the element of
comedie
natural to the human condition–
this twofold effort is,
in
the ethical realm, the very hallmark of the
new human type. One feels it trying to take form while Europe goes
from convulsion to convulsion. There have been quite a few who
have allowed themselves to dream about a new humanism; perhaps
this should be taken as one of the first signs of it. A remark of mine
made in 1940 received favorable mention on the radio: "May
victory belong to those who fought the war without liking it!" It
may
be
that a kind of lucid madness, though still fraternal, was the
form of human gr.andeur which at that moment was trying to find
itself.
In
L'Espoir
and in your lecture at the Sorbonne, you seek to discern
the equality of man as it reveals itself in the various cultures and civil–
izations. But cultures and civilizations, as you have shown, change
form. What is the future of ours?
