AN DRE MALRAUX
373
Finally a Severe style emerged from the taste of the great periods, from
the discovery of the
Kores
on the Acropolis and from the resurrection of
Olympia. Phidias was admired not as the precursor of classical sculpture
(about which we care very little) but as the last and most lyrical genius of the
Severe period. Placed face to face with the Lapiths of Olympia and the
Herakles of Aegina but not with the Venus ofthe Medicis and the statuary
of the Pere Lachaise cemetery which were left us by Alexandria and Rome .
At the time of the discovery of the real Sophocles, Racine, who knew Greek,
appears to have seen in the heroes of Euripides the statues of the Belvedere.
Conversely one could easily trace Gislebertus of Autun or the Tym–
panum of Moissac, as well as Homer, Virgil, Villon and even Shakespeare
or Racine. None of our great styles has escaped metamorphosis since the
Renaissance had to resurrect a buried past and romanticism a despised one .
Dostoevsky could not speak ofJulien Sorel in the way we do . The sub–
stitution of the Colloquy for the dialogue is less concerned with establishing
the kinship between Julien and Raskolnikov than with illustrating the dif–
ference between the two novels as it is shown in the working of these two
parallel ambitions.
It
is tempting to compare the methods by which the two
writers convey an identical feeling. This is an illusion. The comparison does
not illustrate different ways of expression, but a radically different field of
operation.
It
mayor may not be ambition, but what Dostoevsky selects from
the shapeless fabric of life
is
not what Stendhal selects. They wear differently
colored spectacles. This analysis can be extended to the production of a play,
to psychology and even to style. (The change in the narrative allowed Flau–
bert to use first the direct and then the indirect past tense in the same sen–
tence .) This analysis is less instructive than that first impression so easily ex–
pressed by saying: .•After we have seen Raskolnikov ,Julien looks different ."
"The most important thing in a picture, " wrote Braque when he was
eighty years old, " is always what it cannot say." When there is an extensive
Colloquy devoted to Baudelaire (how surprising that there isn't one, but
how can a poet be translated? . .. ) we will find ourselves wondering, faced
with an art which has become a Declaration of the Rights of the Unformu–
lable, if the specific quality of every art, what used to be described as its es–
sence, will not always consist of . 'what it cannot say. "
The
Rouge et Ie Noir
that we admire is obviously not the one ofJanin
