A casual reader of the foregoing pages—whether careless or malicious—might fancy I’m announcing an age of biblical bombast in literature’s immediate future: a formal reversion to prophetic inspiration and diction, coupled with an absurd contempt for our predecessors and the Works that taught us our craft, all in the service of an exclusive fixation on the idea of God. And this idea, remaining fuzzy in the woolly minds I suspect prone to such misapprehension, evokes nothing so much as the tedium of windy lyricism.
Both the careless and the malicious can be safely ignored. Still, one wants to bar the door against such nonsense.
What I have actually argued in these pages is, first and principally, that Art reaches its original and ultimate flowering in the atmosphere of the Absolute—hence through Religion in its beginnings, Metaphysics in its culmination—and second, that today’s public leaves artists with a stark choice: prostitution or exile. The old saying runs: “He who rises above isolates himself”—grim enough already. But our shabby contemporary truth is that merely refusing to stoop is enough to ensure solitude.
None of this precludes the resources of observation—whether Stendhal’s psychological variety, M. Zola’s physiological approach, or M. de Goncourt’s fusion of both in what might be called a modernist mode. I name these three advisedly, for though they command varying degrees of esteem, they surely embody what’s most distinctive in our literary moment. Yet anyone with eyes to see will readily distinguish between what in their works panders magnificently to public taste (that taste which finds “refined” expression in Messieurs Daudet and Loti, “vulgar” in M. Ohnet) and what betrays their failure to meet the full measure of our age’s demands. What an hour this is! The world’s end or a world’s beginning? Such questions needn’t be universal to be significant—it’s enough that our finest and most honest minds are seized by them. Clearly, they burn to bear witness to their Humanity, seeing in Art a sacred instrument—not to be debased—for testifying to their race and themselves. Perhaps they mean to leave a younger generation the concentrated legacy of centuries of spiritual wealth; perhaps to answer, when the question drops from heaven: “Digni sumus”(TN)
This noble, urgent ambition doesn’t breed contempt for the past—quite the reverse. It demands respect, but respect with eyes open, free from slavish devotion to history’s sterile critical viewpoint. A living respect that seeks in the past not dead monuments but lessons that light the way forward, helping today’s intuitions crystallise into fertile new syntheses.
We honour established forms precisely insofar as they bear within them the seeds of forms to come.
Let us then read the future in the present, the present in the past—new formulas in the womb of the old.
TN: “Digni sumus” means “We are worthy” in Latin. In this context, Morice seems to be using it as a kind of existential declaration or affirmation—as if humanity is being asked by some higher power whether it has proven itself worthy, and the artists of the age feel compelled to answer “Yes, we are worthy.”
Léon Hennique Novel 