AN DRE MALRAUX
371
time, " he discovers them in a non-chronological order according to the
affinities they share. He does not begin at the beginning but today. He goes
from Verlaine to Villon, and not from Villon to Verlaine. Already the con–
flict between academic values and those cherished by the writers of the past
disappeared before the strange imperialism of any history of literature . This
collection m0gestly entitled
Tableau
showed that a general view of the sub–
ject could be only incidentally obedient to history, and yet , even more than
a history written by a single author, it would avoid subjective or impres–
sionistic criticism. Where a system was expected, a sphere was discovered,
and literary metamorphosis at work.
I had asked
all
the contributors to speak of what they liked . In this re–
spect the
Tableau
was radically different from what had gone before . On the
assumption that art has no cognizance of anything but talent and mere emp–
tiness , the book was concerned only to make the writers it dealt with bet–
ter, or differently loved, and thus to bring them before the reader; each
author became the stage director of the writer he had chosen .
This "criticism," like its contemporary in painting, did not attempt to
convince by argument but by contagion. Our dialogue with the past recog–
nized as supreme value , as immeasurable value, the
presence
of a work.
It
is
of no interest to a poet that Gerard de Nerval author of
Chimeres
is a lesser
artist than Victor Hugo author of
La
Legende des
Siecles- presence cannot
be measured. A resurrected dwarf is no less astonishing than a giant , and he
is more like a resurrected giant than a dead one . In dealing with each poet
according to his own standards, be it Louise Labe or Corneille, that book
broke with the perspective that anthologies had always imposed on poetry .
Reducing a long poem to a short play makes what I have called a literary ob–
ject or ornament . Musset's
Souvenir,
Hugo's
Olympio,
read like extracts
from Racine . Just as the enlargement of a photograph gives an "expression–
ist" element to details, quotations in an anthology give a poem a classical
resonance. ...
The total metamorphosis of a civilization nourished on anthologies is
not to be brought about by its reform, but by its disappearance . St. Bernard
could not have cared less about the Greek Anthology.
"Understanding a work" is an expression no less vague than " under–
standing a man ." What matters is not to make a work intelligible but to
make the reader sensitive to its quality . Failure to understand a work of lit–
erature is not like failing to understand a lecture . In the latter case the reader
understands
nothing,
in the former he blunders about. He attacks the
artist 's intention and attributes to him a purpose he never had . He re–
proaches him for having conceived or badly carried out this imaginary pur–
pose . The endless and deliberate accusations hurled at innovators proves it.
