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PARTISAN REVIEW
hand only at the moment when from sudden failure of the heart his
eyes, as he sank back in his chair, closed for ever.
Derogation
is a splen–
did fragment; it evidently would have been one of his high successes.
I am not prepared to say it would have waked up the libraries.
The country of the blue, as R.P. Blackmur has pointed out, is the place
of pure imagination, a region set apart from the world in the interests of
formal perfection. Whether in James's 'The Next Time' or Stevens's 'The
Man with the Blue Guitar', the country of the blue is a place given over
to the imagination: while the going is good there, artists are permitted to
feel that they can 'reduce the monster to myself,' the monster being the
otherwise obdurate reality, intolerably opaque.
But when the going ceases to be good, the creative imagination must
take up other burdens. Lionel Trilling has written of Conrad's
Heart of
Darkn.ess
(1899) in this context; he refers to "its strange and terrible mes–
sage of ambivalence toward the life of civilization":
It is one of the great points of Conrad's story that Marlow speaks of
the primitive life of the jungle not as being noble or charming or even
free but as being base and sordid and for that reason compelling: he
himself feels quite overtly its dreadful attraction. It is to this devilish
baseness that Kurtz has yielded himself, and yet Marlow, although he
does indeed treat him with hostile irony, does not find it possible to
suppose that Kurtz is anything but a hero of the spirit ... Is this not
the essence of the modern belief about the nature of the artist, the
man who goes down into that hell which is the historical beginning
of the human soul, a beginning not outgrown but established in
humanity as we know it now, preferring the reality of this hell to the
bland lies of the civilization that has overlaid it?
Of course the alienation of artists from the society they somehow
addressed was established long before the 1890s. Flaubert was prosecuted for
the obscenity of
Madame Bovary
in 1857; in the same year, Baudelaire was
prosecuted for the offense he comnlitted against public morals in
Les Fleurs
du Mal.
But it took many years because such alienation-or, as Pater called
it, such antinonuanism-was established as a writer's expected, settled rela–
tion to society. Antinon"lianism took several forms. In "The Autumn of the
Body" (1898) Yeats spoke of writers "struggling allover Europe . . . against
that picturesque and declamatory way of writing, against that 'externality'
which a time of scientific and political thought has brought into literature."
Yeats offered it as a disability that Shaw had "no true quarrel with his time."
