364
PARTISAN REVIEW
montage,
and even if the name of God were only to be pronounced in the
chapter on religion, we should still be reading a Christian book, precluding
all debate on the conception of man. Confronted with our own time even
the Montesquieu of
Les Lettres Persanes,
a far more free-thinking mind than
Racine, becomes as dogmatic as a nineteenth-century scientist. Compared to
a definitive
Racine,
a Colloquy would cry aloud what the former only whis–
pers: that it questions. And it would show clearly that fundamental ambi–
guity whereby all biographies establish retrospectively the influences of a
man's life in his work. The biographer is writing the life of a mythical
character. The statue inspires the testimony and therefore precedes it.
We know how the sculptor works. What was Rodin thinking of as he
started carving his
Balzac?
He meant to separate from his biographical being
that superhuman character worthy of having written
La
Comedie Humaine.
just as tradition has separated from an unknown Dante that aquiline profile
worthy of his
Inferno-and
just as every Greek sculptor invented his own
Aphrodite. Most of Balzac's witnesses are,testifying to readers who would
know nothing of Honore de Balzac but for Rodin's statue: in order some–
times to suggest the image transfigured by this statue, and sometimes the
man deserving of it.
Honore de Balzac no more resembled his demiurgic
power
than Michel–
angelo his
David.
But ever since the Hellenic busts invented Homer and
Socrates after a lapse of five hundred years, l;lUmankind has longed for the in–
carnation of creative genius. Homer becomes his bust just as Aphrodite
be–
came her statue . The power to give flesh and blood to the imaginary rivalled
the power to incarnate the gods. Like the
Homer
of Alexandria, the mythical
Balzac, before he took shape, filled the minds of men with his nebulous
symphony.
Romanticism identified the author with his genius. There was a little of
this in the Greek god-makers, but the gods had a hand in it; likewise in the
Renaissance, but ephemerally, for Donatello was still proud of his leather
apron. Nobody takes Corneille for a Cornelian character; Louis Racine sim–
ply considered his father as "a fine writer." But the heroes of romanticism,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Beethoven, all those whom Victor Hugo called
"The Equals," from Aeschylus, that Shakespeare of Antiquity, down
to
Shakespeare himself, these are the heroes in the Hellenistic sense, effigies of
their genius.
They owe a great deal to the disintegration of the Christian soul.
Phedre
has strayed a long way from Racine's sinfulness-from Jean's sinful
soul, as the cure said over his coffin . For Victor Hugo the
Oresteia
was
written by Aeschylus' soul and shared in the same mystery. Art became an
appendage of genius. Even in the Renaissance one had genius but one was
