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PARTISAN REVIEW
metamorphosis. Set in time, the life of a masterpiece and that of man are
equally irreversible. The finished book can no more go back to its origins
than the adult to his childhood.
* * *
Although we are not sure what successive values the future will attri–
bute to works of art, we believe that our own relationship to them will hold
its own. We place ourselves outside history: a disconcerting privilege. We
shall never know what
The Wounded Lioness
meant to a King of Nimrod,
nor even to its sculptor, but we admire it as much as Goya's
The Execution of
3rdMay,
and Picasso's
Guernica
...
Our provisional immortalities would have astOnished our forebears .
This astonishment is instructive, for it reveals one of the .strongest girders in
the rubble of values amongst which we live . Almost every civilization pre–
ceding our own has been concerned with the
training
of man. They have
been less interested in knowing what he is, than in laying down what he
ought to be. A civilization capable of molding man does not ask too many
questions about him.
To these questions the nineteenth century replied: tomorrow science
will tell. Today science answers that its discoveries can destroy men but
cannot make one .
I once wrote that:
Men have always been fashioned by other means: religion, family, ex–
ample and imagination. Of these, the last was not the least important.
Spain and Great Britain , who founded the two greatest empires, both
had a word for the exemplary man:
caballero
and
gentleman.
For Rome,
it sufficed
to
be called a Roman. Culture became known as the Hu–
manities. Yet our own civilization, differing in many respects from
all
the others, is the first not
to
hold any ultimate values. The human ani–
mal , at its most powerful, is also the first
to
mistake exemplarity and
success. Less and less do we imagine the man that we should like
to
be.
The concepts which governed the development of man are gradually
disappearing. Our civilization is ebbing-in every sense of the word . A
Christian of the thitteenth century, or an atheist from the middle of the
nineteenth, would say that we have made problems of their certainties.
Dante was not disconcerted by man, nor Balzac by the individual, nor
Michelangelo by art .
