AN ORE MALRAUX
365
not a genius. Particularly in literature: Peuarch and Ariosto were just better
ordinary poets; for the Romantics the worst poet was a bad Shakespeare. The
artist has ceased to be a man who "makes" poems, pictures or statues: the
verb to make-so important to the Greeks-has ceased to apply to him. A
god of
art
was made manifest through his prophets , but although Olympio
was not quite Victor Hugo and Balzac not quite Honore, the effigy had been
created. The romanticism which refused to admit the existence of both
Balzac and Honore also declined to admit that Honore was an individual
who could change his skin and become Balzac when his extrasensory powers
were working ·at their full stretch . Just as romanticism carries its own realism
from which all future realism will be derived , so the myth of the artist claims
his biography. The same contradictory force impels the reader to create his
own
Balzac
by Rodin and to make it more tractable by reading
Balzac en
Pantoufles.
From the very first lines, whether he realizes it or not (and why should
he not realize it?) , Gozlan writes about the Balzac whom the characters of
the real Balzac have created in the imagination of his readers: an image ren–
dered familiar by Madame Hanska 's early letters and other correspondence
of the period, and to which Rodin gave shape with genius. Honore has no
slippers because the slippers of Monsieur Dupont or Mr. Smith would be of
no interest whatsoever. Slippers, in the eyes of a Romantic, only exist
if
the
feet are made of bronze.
We learn from the Key to the Dreams of Mesopotamia that in Babylon
they constantly dreamed about octopus-like creatures, although , doubtless,
they had never seen any octopuses . The mythical Balzac sleeps on in every
one of his readers like those octopuses in the Babylonian night. Every book
devoted to an artist partially deals with this symbolic character linked to his
time by his mythology, his biography and his work, because that part of him
which is made of bronze sleeps in the irrational awareness which unite him
with the reader.
It
would be difficult, but in no way impossible, to replace a Colloquy by
synthesizing it . It would have been done in an earlier time. In the
eighteenth century it would have been treated as the raw material from
which a single author would have spun a continuous story . In the nineteenth
cenfury the separate studies would have been accepted inasmuch as they
woUld have produced a collective work with a single theme such as a contin–
uous story in a biography . Achieving an elaborate perspective, as in paint–
ing, implied a system of values as in biography . The Colloquies break with
this system as resolutely as Cubism broke with the perspective ofLeonardo .
No biography escapes from the unity it owes to its author and none
claims to do so. Only when it tries to imitate Cubism does a biography lose
