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ture will be admired in a hundred years' time . To which Picasso replied that
art philosophers had the souls of picture dealers. In a civilization which re–
gards posterity as hazardous, Valery 's " absolute certainty," the fight against
chance , becomes as absurd and as invincible as the desire to escape from
death.
Which of us does not dream of catching posterity red-handed? .
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We know the Classical Imaginary Museum just as well as the Romantic.
In poetry it ranges from Malherbe to Chenier in opposition to antiquity, but
it fails to see that antiquity invented
literature as an object.
Our anthologies
changed when the object of poetry changed....
In the Middle Ages , up to St . Louis, neither the poets nor their listeners
perceived the world of poetry as a world of forms . Apart from the verbal
checkerboards which the Great Rhetoricians display at their most compli–
cated , true medieval poetry is the legend of chivalry . It is Tristan . The
Chartres sculptor made a statue before which one was to pray; the poet in–
vented a new episode to the story of Tristan in which one was to believe .
Printing allowed the poet to possess his sonnet just as the sculptor of bronze
possesses his statue. So the sonnet, unlike the Ballads of the rhetoricians ,
ceased to be a trifle , a curiosity , but became the rival of an object of litera–
ture brought back to life , in other words-immortal.
In literature and above all in culture, France inherited the Italian
primacy in painting. Classical tragedy owed its prestige much more to its
high degree of civilization than to Aristotle's canons . According to Voltaire,
Shakespeare was a barbarian. Valery even wrote (in his
Cahiers,
admittedly):
"It may be that Racine rid us of two or three monsters of a Shakespear–
ian nature ." Classicism considered itself to be not a style but
the
style . In or–
der to come out on top , romanticism had to destroy the myth of perfection
in favor of the myth of genius .
Victor Hugo left us a list of his elect : Homer and Aeschylus, Job , Isaiah
and Ezekiel; Lucretius and Tacitus , St . John and St. Paul, Dante , Rabelais ;
Cervantes and Shakespeare. Full stop . None of these elect has been put on
the shelf. We might add Sophocles, Virgil , and possibly St . Francis . One
might have expected more Great Discoveries. This Imaginery Museum is
Israel, Antiquity, and the Renaissance . We can associate Tristan with Dante,
not Beroul; symbols rather than works . Can we link Homer with the epics of
Asia and the ancient East? No . The training we owe to the combined influ–
ence of Israel and Antiquity only just survives the barrier of language,
