SOURCE: "Of Literature," in Julien Benda, The University of Michigan Press, 1956, pp. 224-54.

"Avoir raison n'est pas litteraire."

That lapidary—and not completely unliterary—phrase from La France byzantine contains the essence of the long attack on the art of literature which Benda began in Dislogues h Byance and which he has enormously developed in the books of the late years of his career. Clearly this antiliterary campaign has been his true favorite, for none of the others is either as old in his work or as continuously developed. But unfortunately for his reputation, it has also been the one which has served most to alienate from him large segments of that "bonne compagnie" to which he has never ceased addressing himself, whatever his opinion of that audience may be, since in it Benda has been doubly impolitic in his own particular way: he has been irritatingly right in some of his conclusions and so touched the sore spot, and, worse, he has also dared treat many of his most distinguished contemporaries with such violence—indeed, sometimes with such obvious injustice—that he has succeeded in discouraging almost everyone, even those best disposed toward his basic views. If unpopularity deliberately sought is the mark of purity, then Benda is the purest of the Levites.

Since its inception in Dialogues a Byzance the campaign has been of dual aspect: a prolonged effort to demonstrate the inanity of literary art, where Benda carries on and extends an antiliterary tradition that has as its guarantors Plato and Renouvier, among others; and a more original and violent attack on the creators of literature, the poets and novelists and dramatists, for certain moral and intellectual deficiencies he finds inherent in their status. Most of his critics, in thoroughly modern fashion, like to use his arguments as pretexts for amateur psychologizing and tend to ascribe his views to certain personal causes—his extreme age, his own comparative lack of success as a creator of fiction, his failure to win the Goncourt prize, a desire on his part for notoriety, envy, a natural perverseness and iconoclasm—but although all of them are doubtless partly right, none of their explanations touches on the true cause, Benda's experience in the Dreyfus Case. It is notable that his chief targets in Dialogues a Byzance, with the exception of one or two generals, are nearly all men of letters—Brunetiere, Lavedan, Lemaitre, Coppee, Bourget, Hervieu, Barrés, Donnay—but obviously what most infuriated him in the Affaire was not simply the fact that an overwhelming proportion of prominent writers were on the wrong side of the question, that "poete" almost surely meant "patriotard," but that it marked the first time in French history that men of letters, writing as men of letters, were given a large voice in a purely judicial debate, were listened to by the public, and were given importance and influence in a matter which he contends was specifically beyond their competence. On a good many occasions after 1898 Benda was to complain bitterly and not completely unreasonably that the artist, merely because he is in the public eye, is given far too much credit in matters which cannot in the nature of things concern him and in which he cannot have important opinions, for after all the artist's merit lies, in Benda's view, in his sensibility and in his knowledge of worldly passions and in nothing more. It was the spectacle of the general weak-mindedness and muddleheadedness the poets displayed in debate in the Affaire, their passion for taking their own vibrations for reasons, their images for arguments, and their sonorities for ideas, that first made Benda conclude that the littérateur, dominated by his sensibility to emotion and sentiment, to metaphysical notions like "patrie," to pure sound and color, was the congenital opposite of the scientist or the philosopher, the intellectual properly speaking, who is dominated by sensibility to Idea alone.

In the course of his investigation of literature Benda has found that there are three main faults which seem to characterize the man of letters: he is essentially insincere, willing to corrupt his idea for the purpose of embellishing it and willing to give the public what it wants to hear at whatever cost to his own probity and integrity; he is essentially an "imperialist" and antidemocrat, loving to sing of war and hatred and violence; and he is essentially incapable of true intellectualism. Although Benda has never elucidated the point, the arguments and examples he adduces in support of these contentions make it clear that he regards the first of these faults as basic to the literary condition, as a universal vice of the littérateur in all climates and in all ages; the second would similarly appear to be a fundamental characteristic of the man of letters, though it has appeared chiefly in modern times, with the rise of egalitarian societies; while the third, if not quite a fault of the contemporary writer alone, is at least more widespread today than ever before.

The first of his criticisms, though perhaps the most fundamental, is not so much developed in the campaign as the other two. It does appear as early as Dialogues X Byzance and recurs not infrequently all through his discussion of the literary estate, but it is most stressed in the recent attacks on the contemporary man of letters, where the accusation of charlatanism is always present, implicitly or explicitly. The core of his opinion on this score is contained in one of the essays which appeared in Les Nouvelles litteraires, "Péchés d'artistes" (reprinted in Précision). His basic theory here, undoubtedly an extension of Renouvier's remarks on the literary "dishonesty" Renan had demonstrated in the presentation of his ideas, is that it might be possible to show that literary talent, i.e., "l'art d'arranger des mots en vue d'un certain effet," necessarily implies a certain improbity. He is convinced that all free minds will concede his point that literature, in its essence, includes a certain "tricherie de l'esprit," since if they will take the time to look at the laws of writing they will immediately see that the author is compelled to make all kinds of concessions to his public, however sincere he may think himself.

For what are the rules of "good writing"? The author must not repeat the same word too soon on any page and so must seek synonyms where "la droite pensée" demands the same word; he must often substitute a feminine word for a masculine, when it is the masculine that he really wishes to employ; he must avoid harsh words, which are sometimes the very ones that tell his thought precisely; he must seek variety in a logical movement which asks only to be uniform. Now, all those who write "well" observe the laws, apparently without realizing that these are so many small betrayals; but it is unfortunately true that if they continue to observe them for very long their mental apparatus inevitably becomes twisted and impaired. Benda points out, justly enough, that a sentence which perfectly expresses a certain idea need not necessarily please or even hold the attention of the "honnete homme," the man interested in thought but at the same time a nonspecialist, for logic has no consideration at all for this man's tastes and preferences. If the writer attempts to arrange his sentence so that it will please the "honnete homme," therefore, he agrees to change it as the perfect expression of his idea. "Le dernier des humains, dit un verdict célèbre, est celui qui cheville. Risquerai-je: le dernier des humains est celui qui écrit bien." It seems to him that the philosophers who are outstanding for probity of mind, Kant, Comte, Renouvier, write badly, at least for the "honnete homme," but that the philosophers who are known for their literary talent are quite lacking in intellectual rigor—obviously, in thinking so much of Bergson and Renan he forgets Plato and Lucretius.

Benda's second charge, that the littérateur is essentially an imperialist and antidemocrat, a true reactionary, is both more original with him and more thoroughly developed in his work, this undoubtedly because of his tendency to see all of modern life as conditioned by political passion. This reproach is implicit all through Dialogues. Byzance, where it is constantly suggested that the poets were on Mercier's side because of their fundamental love of hierarchy, of "architectonic" social organization, and because of their equally fundamental detestation of any system looking to equality and justice. In Les Sentiments de Critias and Billets de Sirius, both written around the moral problems posed by the First World War, he argues that most French men of letters secretly bless the conflict, indeed bless war in general, for war always serves the ideas they love—militarism, clericalism, and the like—and provides them with their best, perhaps their only real source of lyricism. Peace would be a real catastrophe for many of them, he is sure, for with its coming all their inspiration would disappear: "…la guerre est la substance du lyrisme et de sa fortune. Oter la guerre aux lyriques, c'est leur Ôter le pain de la bouche." In these books he is particularly bitter on the subject of the contemporary literary exaltation of the feudal and warlike soul, the praise of violence and scorn for peace and civilization in which so many gens de letters seem to indulge in times of stress. The littérateur is a man to whom falseness is very nearly the norm of conduct, but nowhere does he seem so false and base as when he depicts war in terms of heroism and pathos, for it is here that he most corrupts the naive public mind and so renders conflict eternal.

But these early books were mere exercises in which Benda tried out his idea on the public. It was not until La TrAlison des clercs and the works which followed it that he went at all deeply into the question of the littérateur's basic political and moral preferences, but once he had begun his investigation in earnest it yielded some highly provocative ideas.

One of the forms of clerkly betrayal to which Benda pays the keenest attention in La Trahison des clercs is the introduction of political passions into those works which had traditionally been mirrors of the disinterested intellect, the works of literary art. The process is not particularly surprising as a characteristic of the poets, he concedes, for the poetic document can scarcely be separated from its creator's passions, which in some instances, even in France, have always been political in nature. But certain modern poets have sounded a completely new and far more dangerous note, have indeed invented a whole new genre, "le lyrisme philosophique," in which the action of lyricism adds to itself the prestige of the spirit of abstraction:

On ne saurait nier … que la passion politique, telle qu'elle s'exprime chez un Claudel ou un d'Annunzio, cette passion consciente et organisée, exempte de toute naïveté, froidement méprisante de l'adversaire, cette passion qui, chez le second de ces poètes, se montre si précisément politique, si savamment ajustée aux convoitises profondes de ses compatriotes, à la vulnérabilité exacte de l'étranger, ne soit quelque chose d'autre que les éloquentes généralites des Tragiques ou de l'Année terrible.

But the poets are not the only guilty ones; they may, in fact, be less guilty than some of their confreres, the novelists and dramatists. Here the situation is really more serious, for it is the function of these two types of littérateurs to depict the movements of the human soul in as objective a manner as possible. Where the modern novelist sins is not in sowing his work with tendentious reflections—Balzac did that—but in refusing to endow his fictional characters with sentiments and actions conformable to living reality and in insisting on making his personages the mirrors of his own passions. In some novels, for example, the traditionalist displays the only noble soul, in others it is the worker; in some only the Frenchman is admirable, in others only the foreign revolutionary:

La malfaisance de ce procédé est double: non seulement il attise considérablement la passion politique dans le cceur du lecteur, mais il lui supprime un des effets les plus éminemment civilisateurs de l'oeuvre d'art, je veux parler de ce retour sur soi auquel tout spectateur est porté devant une représentation de l'être humain qu'il sent vraie et uniquement soucieuse du vrai. [La Trahison des cleres]

Such malpractice is the surest sign of a great decline in the artist himself and in the value of his activity, for his greatness lies precisely in the fact that he "plays" at human passions instead of living them and finds in his "game" the same joys as the common run of humanity finds in the pursuit of reality.

In Benda's investigation of the causes of the transformation of the clerc, the discussion very quickly turns to the gens de lettres, so quickly indeed that one suspects that the Trahison is fundamentally concerned with their defection alone. He points out that the new writers differ radically from their French predecessors in their stronger career interests; since for the past two centuries the highest literary success has gone, in France at least, only to those who have adopted clearly defined political attitudes, they quite understandably feel that if they wish to succeed they are obliged to adopt such an attitude. And if the attitude they adopt is so often authoritarian in nature, that is because all writers realize that the bourgeoisie is all-powerful now and that accordingly they must serve up to it the ideas it likes if they expect to reap the highest rewards. The writer is no longer a leader and guide of minds, he is a member of the flock. Then again, certain changes have taken place within the clerkly mind itself in recent times, especially in the mind of the literary clerc. He has, for instance, perfected his Romanticism, by which Benda here means the will to exploit only those themes which lend themselves readily to striking literary attitudes: the doctrines of authority, discipline, tradition, the scorn of the spirit of liberty, the affirmation of the morality of war and the necessity of some kind of human slavery are infinitely more likely to strike the minds of simple people than the sentimental effusions of liberals. When they are passed off as having their foundations in science and in "pure experience," as they so often are, these doctrines are even more effective. This development is the source of what Benda likes to call the "romantisme pessimiste" of the contemporary man of letters.

But the most profound change that has occurred in the clerkly mentality is indicated by the growing desire of artists to venerate only their "sensibilite artistique" and to find in it the basis of all their judgments:

On peut dire que jusqu'à ces derniers trente ans les gens de lettres, du moins du monde latin, disciples en cela de la Grèce, se voulaient déterminés dans leurs jugements—même littéraires—incomparablement plus par la sensibilité à la raison que par la sensibilité artistique, dont, au reste, ils prenaient à peine conscience en tant que distincte de la première. [La Trahison des clercs]

Benda concedes that a weakening of sensibility to pure reason did take place around 1830, but scorn for intellectual sensibility is a completely new trait in the man of letters, a product of the other Romantic revolution of 1890. At about that time writers, enlightened by Bergsonian analysis, began to become clearly aware of the profound difference that separates "la sensibilite artistique" and "la sensibilite intellectuelle" and violently to choose in favor of the first. They began to declare, specifically, that a work is great if it is successful literarily, that its intellectual content is of no interest or importance, that all theses are equally defensible. This new reasoning inevitably had its effect on their political ideas, for if an object or a system is good only to the degree that it satisfies our artistic needs and desires, then it is evident that the authoritarian regimes alone are good:

… la sensibilité artistique est autrement satisfaite par la vue d'un système qui tend à la réalisation de la force et de la grandeur que d'un système qui tend à l'établissement de la justice, le propre de la sensibilité artistique étant l'amour des réalités concrètes et la répugnance aux conceptions abstraites et de pure raison, dont l'idée de justice est le modèle; surtout la sensibilité artistique est éminemment flattée par la vue d'un ensemble d'Xlments qui se subordonnent les uns aux autres jusqu'i un terme supreme qui les prime tous, tandis que la vue, qu'offre une d& mocratie, d'un ensemble d'Tlments dont aucun n 'est le premier frustre un des besoins fonciers de cette sensibilite. [La Trahison des cieres]

And there are psychological reasons, too, for this hatred, which Benda finds endemic in the literary type: the typical man of letters inclines by nature to regard as a kind of personal insult any doctrine which honors universal man, for the characteristic of all artists is precisely that they see themselves as exceptional beings, made to enjoy the world, not to serve it; again, the artist will detest any regime that limits his freedom of action by enforcing consideration of the rights of others, for as an artist he is tempted to believe that he has certain sovereign privileges, the familiar "rights of genius."

Benda's third charge against the littérateur—that he is fundamentally nonintellectual, even anti-intellectual, in character and mental conformation—stems as clearly as the other two from the Dreyfus Case, where day after day he witnessed the irritating spectacle of the public's insistence on giving the same value to the arguments of a Coppee or a Brunetiere, even of a Zola or a France, as to the findings of the judicial experts themselves. His later work makes it quite apparent that he set out from that time to correct the situation, to bring the littérateur back to what he considers to be his true place in society, a place well below the scientist and the philosopher, and to demonstrate that the creator of fictions, whatever his pretentions and success with the intellectually naive, has no real place in the corporation of thinkers. It is true that he never goes so far as to say specifically that literary talent excludes intellectual ability (as it seems to him to exclude probity), that style cancels thought, though he constantly implies exactly that; but he does admit, significantly, that even the masters who were able to join true thought to literary talent, Renan, Taine, Montesquieu, arouse in him a secret distrust which he does not at all experience when he reads the pages of such "untalented" thinkers as Descartes and Comte. Benda's paramount idea with respect to the artist is that, try as he will to make himself into an intellectual, he remains forever a "technicien de la jouissance"; the writer's sole function is to express his sensibility and by its expression to move the sensibility of others. It is this definition that allows him to repeat approvingly Comte's judgment that the littérateur in all ages is a false and superficial mind; it is by its terms that he can say quite seriously in La Jeunesse d'uo clerc: "Je garde une grande consideration a l'erudit qui, s'il n'est que la valet de la grande intelligence synthetique, me semble une forme d'humanité meilleure et plus evolu&e que le littérateur dont le propre est de se repaitre de periodes agreables et d'affirmations creuses." And again, in Exercice d'un enterre vif: "Je les [i.e., littérateurs] trouve volontiers enfantins et tiens un Kant ou un Descartes, voire un Fresnel ou un Darwin, pour des exemplaires humains superieurs a Ronsard ou Baudelaire, voire a Dante ou Victor Hugo."

These ideas on the literary condition are most succinctly expressed in the second section of La France byzantine, entitled "Essai d'une psychologie originelle du littérateur," the point of departure of which is the argument that the littérateur represents a unique type on the face of the earth and that he was so long confounded with the intellectual because of an apostasy from his true nature as artist. Benda's first observation in this "psychologie originelle" is that the littérateur tends by essence to vagueness of ideas, since historically he has always wished to produce emotions, and vague ideas are far more suitable to that end than precise ideas, the characteristic of which is to inhibit emotion. The first states of consciousness to receive literary form, he observes, were stupor, terror, ecstasy, joy, sadness, hatred, fury, love, and all the earliest forms of literature express emotions, never ideas—epic, ode, elegy, tragedy, tale. The literature of observation and analysis arose only much later. Of course ideas began very early to accompany emotions in literature, but the ones which the littérateur found valid for his purpose—the creation of emotion—were vague ideas. And even those authors who in more recent times have taken philosophical systems as their subject matter offer no real contrast to their predecessors: they are still littérateurs because in the beginning they were moved by these ideas, and they were moved by them because they had stripped them of their precise outline and logical apparatus. The same must hold, of course, for those littérateurs who take science as their theme; Renan's works and the works that resemble them do not disprove his claim, he thinks, for they all depend on such terms as "peuple," "race," "classe," ".nation," the very type of vague ideas and hence charged with a pathetic potential. "Le littérateur, en proscrivant l'idée nette et la rigueur logique, délétères de l'émotionnel, ne fait que prendre conscience d'une de ses raisons d'être" (La France byzantine).

Secondly, the littérateur, by essence, rejects general ideas, impersonal truth, objectivity. The earliest literature aimed at the expression of exterior reality alone, and only later in literary evolution did general types of humanity begin to appear. Perhaps because of his interest in individual beings and objects, the primitive littérateur always marked his work with his own personality; modesty and self-abnegation were not his characteristics, and here again he displays a sign of his basic unintellectualism, his flight from objectivity and impersonal truth—in which, Benda declares, the littérateur cannot believe. It is true, of course, that as he expresses his own soul and temperament the artist also gives expression to the souls of other men, but even as he thus gives voice to a kind of universal he does so in a personal form and therefore automatically rejects the judgment of the multitude, for sensibility to art is not characteristic of all men. And in this way again he is opposed to the intellectual, whose affirmations are in principle evident to all men, all men having the faculty of understanding.

Again, the littérateur by essence places form above matter:

Le littérateur est celui qui, exprimant des sentiments, voire des idées, confère de l'importance a la matière verbale—la lettre, littera, litteratura—par quoi il les exprime, et introduit de la beauté ou ce qu'il croit tel dans cette matière considérée en soi, c'est-à-dire indépendamment, du moins pour une partie, de son rapport à la chose exprimée. [La Frnce byzantine]

It is the search for verbal beauty that is the true hallmark of the littérateur, and the writer who would express his ideas without concern for beauty might be a great scientist, a great philosopher, a great psychologist, "il peut offrir le spectacle de l'Pmotion la plus profonde et la plus troublante" (ibid.), he still would not be a littérateur. And Benda insists: if a writer pursues only logical perfection he will not find what the littérateurs call beauty, for though there is clearly a kind of "ideological" beauty, the kind we find in a memoir of Fresnel or a page of Descartes, this is not beauty as the literary specialist sees it. But if the writer attempts to create beauty, even though he has nothing to say, then he is a littérateur: Guez de Balzac, Voiture are the type. "En somme, un des traits organiques du vrai littérateur est de porter au moins autant d'amour h la forme dont il v& sa pens&e qu'a cette pens&e elle-meme … ". And thus it is that the littérateur can be called congenitally insincere, since concern with form always implies willingness to compromise with truth.

Lastly, the littérateur has by essence the desire to please, and the man who would create literature only for himself would be a monster, contrary to nature. For literature in principle is an eminently social activity, and the man who practices it inevitably resembles the female in his desire to please, his coquettishness, his vanity, and his jealousy. And because he is "female"—Benda does not quite say "a prostitute"—with a basic desire to charm others, he has no scruple at all in "arranging" the truth, in disrespecting it. This "psychologie" is indeed an original one.

It is scarcely necessary to point out that these observations on the littérateur must inevitably apply to Benda himself, for there is simply no doubt at all that he is, in a certain sense at least, a littérateur too. There are, for example, his specific admissions that he regards himself as an homme de lettres. In Exercice d'wi enterre vifhe openly declares that much of his fury against his fellow writers came from his consciousness that he resembled them only too much and describes his long attraction to the novel as a very torment of his life, for each time he found himself in possession of a broad and powerful idea he was torn between his desire to incarnate it in fictional form and his consciousness that an essay would make a better vehicle. In Uo Regulier dans le siecle he admits frankly that in writing Les Amorandes he had consciously tried to write a novel of life, of color, of concrete images, a novel capable of pleasing the mondains with whom he was then passing much of his time. If these admissions are not enough, there is the obvious fact of his literary practice itself—two novels, a volume of sketches, the constant and often successful search for a compelling personal style, as rhythmic and filled with what he calls "carnal" images as any of our time, his persistent effort toward the most dramatic form for his ideas, exemplified in his unusually numerous "dialogues" of Renanian type, his frequent and attractive "pensées detachees," the whole body of the Elutheriana, in which the literary intention is so evident. Taken in its mass, his work is clearly as much the product of the type of mentality he assails as of the kind he has always consciously tended toward. Here again is the basic struggle within the man between the forces of life and of idea, here again the secret of his interest. But, of course, the argument that his motives were all too frequently as literary as his contemporaries' has little real importance; it has no more validity than the argument that his criticism of the bourgeoisie is vitiated by his own bourgeois condition, or that his critique of nationalism is invalidated by his own chauvinistic temper. These observations serve only to demonstrate that this man who, by the estimate of some of his contemporaries, has made a career of injustice is courageous enough and honest and just enough to make an effort to look disinterestedly at the corporation to which his most fundamental inclinations bind him, whatever the dictates of his reasoning mind. If his conclusions are so exaggerated and so damning, that is undoubtedly because they are the product of an exaggerated desire to be fair.

Now, what of literature itself, what of the products of the literary mind? Almost the same ambivalence, in different terms, is evident in this context. All through Benda's works there are the most obvious signs of a wide literary knowledge and a real love of literary beauty, and almost equally frequent signs that literature holds a very high place in his scale of values because of the superior morality it connotes as one of the supreme "activites de luxe," one of the most beneficent because most disinterested agents of civilization. Indeed, it is this very regard for the philosophical and moral importance of literature that has served in part to keep Benda from whole-hearted devotion to the Communist principle of social organization, because, however much he may talk about the new reign of justice, it is clear that a society which would banish literature in its traditional Occidental sense could never have his complete support. For he is a clerc, a mandarin, and where does the mandarin find his pleasure but in the realm of the exquisite? It is apparent, too, that while he consistently regards science as the basis of intellectualism and while his preferences clearly go to it as the highest human activity, he also regards literature as the basis of culture, and much of his long career has been a struggle for the maintenance of culture in its traditional sense. The volume and frequency of his criticisms of the literary phenomenon, just as with Bergsonism, point to a long fascination. And even though these criticisms are often so violent and farfetched that they seem to justify the usual charge of philistinism brought against him, there are still good grounds for thinking that he does not mean all he says, that when he is most bitter about the faults of literature in general he is actually referring only to contemporary literature in its specifically "modern" aspects, and that he customarily pushes his expression beyond the bounds of reasonable acceptability because he is combating a popular fetish and because he is engaged in a polemic where nearly everyone is against him. He really cannot expect us always to take him seriously in the campaign, any more than in the campaign against Bergson; many of his most peremptory remarks, indeed, are obviously no more than the tactics of "la bonne guerre."

The criticisms he brings against the general nature of literature, i.e., literature in its eternal manifestations and not simply in its modern appearances, are two, and they reflect exactly two faults of the littérateur as Benda defines him: that literature is imperialism incarnated and that, far from being an agent of truth, it possesses no intrinsic intellectual value whatsoever. The first, the moral charge, is one of his favorite minor themes and as such is often discussed by Eleuthere in his musings on life and ideas [in Songe d'Eleuthirel. The point he makes is obviously an extension of the passion for justice which Benda and Eleuthere share, the corollary of the belief that all existing things are evil by the mere fact of their existence, and a development of Benda's fixed opinion that it is in the nature of the artist to regard the world as made for his own uses alone. On more than one occasion, as Eleuthere regards the great artistic accomplishments of the past, his deep pleasure in them is somewhat tempered by the realization that art in all its forms is the most evident symbol of the oppression of the people by an elite. But now that societies have arisen which promise an end to oppression of the many by the few, societies whose principle is the guarantee of equality to all men, Eleuthere is somewhat baffled by the continuing existence of art, for it seems to him that it has become a real anomaly in the new world: such societies cannot, in the nature of things, produce art if they remain faithful to their basic principle. When democracy's authoritarian opponents tax it with inability to create beauty, democracy should cease its efforts to prove that its atmosphere is fully as favorable to artistic accomplishment as monarchy itself: it should simply and truthfully reply that its concern is not with beauty at all, but that it is in its nature to give mankind something far higher, justice. And when democracy's proponents argue that certain modern states have produced great artists, Eleuthere replies, in Songe d'Eleuthire, that they did not do so by observing their own principle, for democracy itself did not produce these great artists, they simply happened to be born under a democratic regime. No true artist can practice democracy in his capacity of artist, he is sure, and indeed an enormous number of artists seem to have detested the very word and very many still do; even Hugo and Michelet are not exceptions to his law, he believes, for although they took democracy as a theme of art and although their ideas were undeniably democratic, still their temperament was not: "Un temperament democratique ne passera jamais des heures a arranger des phrases par besoin de s'affirmer. Un tel besoin est souverainement imperialiste" (Songe d'Eleuthire). Inescapably, the work of art is impious:

Elle naît d'une soif de dominer. L'ordre qu'elle insère au-dedans d'elle-même est un moyen d'accroître sa domination, de s'assurer contre l'extérieur qui veut la ramener au néant comme il y veut ramener toute chose. C'est un acte essentiellement militaire. Cela éclate dans l'art or-donné par essence: I'architecture. Tout le monde sent l'impérialisme d'une cathédrale.

Here, quite clearly, Eleuthere has gotten himself and his creator in a bit of trouble, for if organization and order are the primary sins of art, as they are of all life, then such literature as surrealism and Dadaism have produced would seem to be far holier than the art of the Greek, Roman, and French classics, "ordered" as it indisputably is. Yet surrealism and Dadaism and all their derivatives and congeners are anathema to Benda, and Eleuthere's preferences are for the classics. Eleuthere is not unconscious of the dilemma and in Songe d'Eleuthere does concede that the works which present a minimum of conscious organization are perhaps most aggreable to God. He quite prudently does not give his own opinion about them. It is interesting to speculate, all the same, that the theories of Essai d'un discours coherent lead directly and inevitably to the most advanced esthetic thinking of our time and that, if circumstances had been slightly different, Benda might well have collaborated on the Manifeste surrealiste. Moreover, what of the question of the clerc who is an artist in the manner of a Baudelaire or a Verlaine? If his activity is essentially imperialistic in nature and gives other men the sensation of imperialism in action, how can he be a true clerc? For is not the clerc's major duty to eradicate the very spirit of imperialism in mankind? Yet, by the definition of the Trahison itself, writing is one of the clerkly vocations and by no means the least honorable. Benda's discourse here is scarcely coherent.

Those not entirely unimportant points aside, however, it is Benda's final conclusion, expressed by Eleuthere in Délice d'Eleuthère, that art is intrinsically, basically evil: "Toute litterature est opposition, c'est-a-dire guerre. La non-opposition est silence, intelligence totale, antilitterature" (italics mine). But perhaps there is more than a touch of Baudelairean attraction toward sin in him, for, evil or not, art has never ceased occupying him.

Benda's second criticism, that literature has no intellectual function and no intellectual value, is much more developed and much more seriously presented than the first; this is no mere metaphysical exercise but a long and reasoned attempt to prove by constant argument and example that modern society is in serious error when it looks to art for truth. Although as early as Dialogues a Byzance there are already clear evidences in his work that he considers literature a distinctly lower activity than science, even an infantile one, the campaign did not really begin in earnest until the opening of his attack on Bergson. It was very probably the "literary" character of Bergsonism that touched it off, the ideas advanced around the turn of the century by so many critics, more or less under the spell of the new belief, that philosophy and literature are sister activities with no clear line of demarcation between them, that the man of letters is frequently a better seer and guide to humanity than the pure intellectual in his library or his laboratory, and that accordingly literature can be a real agent for the discovery and dissemination of truth. It has always been Benda's intention to disprove this theory, to demonstrate that philosophy and science, with their essential rationality, are both organically different from literature and superior to it in moral value, that literature, raised by popular opinion to the level of highest human activity because it contains all the others, has in fact only one function, to please, to produce amusement, and that man's love of art is at bottom only a love of sensual delight.

The actual point of departure for the attack, the little phrase that can make Benda see red—and at the basis of every one of his campaigns there is probably such a phrase—is Anatole France's remark to the effect that if he had to choose between truth and beauty he would unhesitantingly choose beauty, sure that it bore within itself a truth higher than the truth itself. Time and again Benda has returned to the statement, always arguing in the same way: that the word "vérité," as Anatole employs it, is nothing but a play on words, that the "truth" of the frieze of the Parthenon or of Phryne's limbs—assuming that it exists at all—is a far different truth from the truth of Faraday's law or of Fermat's principle. Art is art, he will maintain, it is a product of human sensibility, not of human intellect—literature is not philosophy, much less science; literature, again as Anatole France had it, is the Thousand and One Nights of the Occident.

Yet the fact constantly arises to plague him that there is a good deal of literature, even poetry, which does contain valid valuable ideas and that he himself gave an excellent example of it in L'Ordination. His answer, most succinctly expressed in Exercise d'on enterre isf is that although real thought can be introduced into the forms of art, it is still introduced there, it is not there naturally: "La pensee, par sa nature, manque de style," that somewhat debatable argument of Valery's, is his motto. For it is his conclusion, also to be found in the Exercise, that thought and artistic beauty are two essentially distinct qualities which, if they join at all, join only by accident.

This thought is considerably developed in Do Style d'idées, where Benda presents in the most ponderously reasoned form all the conclusions on the relationship of literature and ideas that he had reached during a lifetime of speculation. In the very first pages of the book he faces a crucial problem—one, incidentally, which he had already touched on in Discours a la nation europdenne—the relationship of idea and word. In the foreword he offers this specific statement of belief:

Le style d'idées a … cela de particulier, par quoi il diffère du style littéraire, qu'il doit se mouler exactement sur la pensée, de měme qu'en retour celle-ci lui demande de ne lui valoir qu'un vêtement transparent sans rechercher de beauté pour lui-même, sa beauté consistant dans le parfait de cette transparence. On pourrait observer à ce propos que les fameux vers de Boileau prêtent à l'esprit une action en deux temps, laquelle au vrai n'en présente qu'un. II ne semble point que l'esprit commence par "concevoir bien," c'est-à-dire par former une idee claire et que ce soit ensuite que pour exprimer cette idée les mots "-arrivent aisément." La vérité est que ces deux opérations n'en font qu'une et que, lorsque l'esprit forme vraiment une idée claire, les mots voulus sont 1à dans le même moment, par la raison que notre esprit est ainsi fait que la formation d'un concept et l'évocation d'un mot sont un seul et même acte. [first italics mine, second Benda's.]

It is not clear, unfortunately, why the process Benda attributes to the ideologist should not also be that of the littérateur, but in the distinction he makes between the two modes of composition lies the basis of his whole campaign, the argument that while the man of ideas expresses himself directly, that is honestly, the man of letters does not. It is the very difference he establishes between word and idea as employed by the artist that enables him to bring one of his most frequent charges: that the idea of the man of letters, when stripped of its garment of style, is more often than not reduced to a pure "misère." It is scarcely necessary to point out that changes in literary style imply quite as much difference in idea as do changes in the "ideological" style, and that the process he describes of "stripping" such and such an author's thought of its expression is not logical analysis at all but deliberate reduction in level of rhetoric.

This, however, is not the real interest of Du Style d'idées, which is to be found rather in its long discussion of the intellectual value of the various literary genres. Passing them in review—essay, novel, drama, poetry—he concludes that none of them has any real validity as expression of rational thought, because the inherent nature of literature makes it impossible for the writer, even if he were capable of straight thinking, to express any more than scattering and sporadic, personal views on humanity and on human passional movements. Literature has significance in the history of society; in the history of ideas it has absolutely none at all.

Nowhere is this opinion expressed with such pungency as it is concerning the poets, the writers who undoubtedly suffer from the most desperate case of "literaturism" and who represent the diametrical opposite of the "scientific" mind as Benda defines it. Simply because they are the most literary of littérateurs (and most foreign to his own kind of soul) they offer him one of those "cas-limites" he likes so well to discuss, and he finds them so interesting that he has lately been more and more drawn to contemplate their art, to attempt to discover the meaning and value of the contemporary movement, and to assay the human value of poetry, the poet's function in society.

It is in Du Poétique, an offshoot of La France byzantine, that Benda approaches the first of these subjects and tries to seek out the reasons why men apply the adjective "poetic" to certain groups of words. Unfortunately, however, his search results only in a very long listing of the ideas (he seems to confuse ideas with themes here) which to his mind have intrinsic poetic power and another, shorter list in which he includes those which do not seem to him to have this power. What is remarkable in these lists is not the ideas themselves (most of them are hackneyed and indicate a distinctly limited range of acceptance on his part), but the amazing claim that there are some ideas which have poetic virtue in themselves quite apart from any rendition by the poet and some which do not. He does not appear to realize that his ideas-poetic-in-themselves have already been treated by poets and so were endowed with poetic form when he encountered them. What he mistakes for their intrinsic poetry is the residue of that form lying deep in his subconscious, the remnants of the beauty which some poet's expression had given them. One has the impression, as this analysis unfolds, that Benda agrees with his classic master that "Tout est dit," but given the whole inclination of his mind to look backward for its truth and beauty, it is not surprising that he should fail to see that the domain of poetry lies limitlessly ahead.

Accompanying this list of ideas which have intrinsic poetic power is a series of quite surprising contrasts he draws between the poetic spirit and technique on the one hand and the scientific and philosophic spirit on the other, together with a number of provocative remarks on the general morality of the poetic exercise. Where Benda is most controversial, certainly, is in his discussion of the degree to which poetry is capable of interpenetrating the other forms of intellectual activity. Here he is obviously replying to the critics (and to the poets themselves) who profess to see the poetic manner and the poetic view in all kinds of exercises which lie outside the strict domain of verse, and to those numerous other intellectuals who would attempt to introduce the poet's ways into their own endeavors. As a good Kantian, he is shocked by such a tendency and so sets about writing a small "Critique of Pure Poetry" in which he attempts to draw up something like a delimitation of its proper sphere, his conclusion being that no other genre, so long as it continues to observe its own laws, can ever be properly poetic. Concerning philosophy, which both philosophers and poets are trying so hard to incorporate into the realm of poetry nowadays, he remarks:

Pour autant qu'elle est science—psychologie objective, logique, morale expèrimentale—elle ne nous donne aucun sentiment du poétique; elle nous le prodigue, au contraire, en tant qu'elle est métaphysique, qu'elle manie les idées d'infini, d'inconnaissable, d'ineffable, de nécessité, de liberté, d'immortalite, de création personnelle ou non du monde, et autres dont 1'adéquation ou non au réel est indémontrable. C'est sur ce terrain, oú elle ignore la science, qu'on a pu dire que la philosophie rejoint la poésie. [Du Poétique]

Just how unpoetic poetry can be when it treats a really philosophical concept and at the same time just how infantile it can be from the philosophical point of view is demonstrated, he thinks, by the verses of "Le Cimetiere marin" which treat the ideas of Zeno. And with such poems as "Eloa" or "La Maison du berger," the philosophy consists in a description of the poet's sensibility in the face of the problem of evil, not in any treatment of the problem itself.

Benda is equally willing to give his views on what human movements cannot, in the nature of things, produce poetry. He considers that no written document is poetic when it takes on the guise of science or eloquence or oratory, or when it expresses a too-precise view of things—he finds no poetry, for instance, in the "Ballade des pendus" or "Montfaucon"—for the true sentiment of poetry is given by the ear, by "les mages du musical," i.e., by the symbolists, not by the Parnassians or the other masters of the picturesque. Poetry is much more likely to be produced by the floating contours drawn by a Loti or a Chateaubriand than by Hugo's firm and "cutting" visuality. It is possible to conclude, he thinks, that any idea that is too clear and distinct, even when expressed by the most beautiful image, is by the very fact of its clarity the negation of poetry. Nor does he feel that "le sentiment poetique" is created by the spectacle of the object limited to itself, for limitation is scientific, but rather by the object that allows us to understand more than it declares. Poetry is a product of "le prolonge," not of "I'arrete," it comes only from the "extra-texte." This is why he finds no poetry in any expression of a soul state that is too precisely rendered: "ce qui, dans la chose ecrite, me donne le sentiment du po& tique est ce qui abolit en moi l'idee du determine et de l'explicable et y profuse le sens du reve et du mystere" (Du Poeffque). By this preference, he submits, the great line of French poets would be composed of Charles d'Orleans, Villon, Ronsard, La Fontaine, Lamartine, Musset, Verlaine, Fargue. "Baudelaire n'est plus esthetique que poetique" (ibid.).

In the last section of the book Benda faces the question which obviously has attracted him from the beginning, the moral value of poetry and of poetic sensibility. His general conclusion is that poetry would appear to be an immoral exercise, inasmuch as it addresses itself to the inner being and is thus the exact opposite of the most highly moral exercise, science, whose distinguishing characteristic is its tendency to envisage the world apart from any connection with man. Then too, since poetry is linked to the idea of mystery, of the unexplained, it seems to Benda to be the plaything of a humanity still in its infancy and thus devoid of real moral conceptions. It is serious that poetry should so often turn for its inspiration to the cruel forces of nature, to the shadowy, "fatal" past, to what is generally "military" in the world, but it is even more serious that the poetic spirit should flourish especially in those races which have remained nearest the state of nature and whose moral sense is correspondingly slight and that it should be weakest in those nations most open to the appeal of reason, for Benda is certain that the more man approaches true Christianity, the more insensitive he becomes to the appeal of poetry:

Je situerai encore le statut moral du sentiment poétique en observant qu'en tant que lié au sens de l'épandu, non de l'arrêté, de l'estompé, non du précis, du musical, non du plastique, il est lié á la conscience du sensuel, non de l'intellectuel, du voluptueux, non du sévère. Sa conformation morale est femelle. Il est curieux de voir certaines personnes qui ne se nourrissent que de poésie soutenir qu'elles cultivent ainsi leur esprit et refuser de convenir qu'elles n'entendent satisfaire, au fond, que leur sensualité.

Quant au sentiment du poétique en tant qu'il consiste à être charmé par des sons harmonieux, par un vocable évocateur, par une image belle ou gracieuse, il ne comporte aucune valeur morale. On le trouve au plus haut point chez des peuplades sauvages, dépourvues de toute moralité.

En somme l'immoral l'emporte. [Du Poétique.]

So much for poetry as intellectual and spiritual exercise. Now what of it in its most specifically poetic form, modern poetry? The conclusions are even more damaging. Benda's general view is that while poetic sensibility evolved more rapidly in the nineteenth century than in all the two thousand years preceding the Romantics—he cites the fact of a whole new range of themes: progress, political freedom, the liberating power of science, the mystery of childhood, the Middle Ages, the Bible, the Eastern myths, and the introduction of new sensations and new associations of sensations—such enrichment has not been continued by the poets of our time. Some of the ideas discovered by the nineteenth century have inspired poems which are notable for their power of expression or their vigor of sentiment, but the evolutive process has actually stopped, he believes. Look, for example, at the surrealist doctrine that the two fundamental themes of poetry should be a mystic state in which the old separation of subject and object would be abolished, and the union of the individual soul to the "world soul"; it has produced a host of manifestoes and critical writings of all kinds, but not a single composition that gives him the sense of true poetry. Nor has the new attempt to create a poetry of words alone succeeded any better. "Le progres de notre sensibilite poetique, qui va de l'action de Victor Hugo jusqu'a celle des symbolistes, semble depuis ce temps arrêté" (Du Po&dfque).

Benda is willing to go further: not only have our contemporaries failed to increase our range of poetic sensibility, for the most part they have not even touched it—and this because they seem to lack, nearly all of them, that quality which may loosely be called "naïveté" or "generosity." In their poems as well as in their doctrines they are all too much occupied by purely verbal techniques, by the desire to be "rare" and original, by the obligations of esthetic systems and theories of language, and so they never think of offering us emotions, never think of giving us human sympathy as we found it in "Le Lac" or the "Nuits." They are, in short: "plus occupes d'etre les illustrateurs d'une po& tique que des poètes" (Do Poetique).

It is perhaps true, he remarks, that no time ever saw so many doctrines but so little poetry—and is the profusion of doctrines not the surest sign of decadence in literature?

He is disturbed especially by two fundamental changes in the form of poetry (both, incidentally, stemming from the same new theory, that the poem must be spoken, not read): the suppression of meter in favor of pure rhythm and the elimination of punctuation. The first is the more serious of the two because it involves an important question concerning the acceptability of modern poetry to the public at large, implying as it does a distinct return to primitive modes of expression which the public, conditioned by thirty centuries of education, refuses to attempt. What the moderns are trying for here is a reconstitution of one form of the most primitive mode of existence, poetry molded to man in the state of nature. Humanity simply replies that it cannot take the step back: "Non possumus." But it is not only lack of punctuation and meter which exercises Benda, it is the deliberate unintelligibility of the modern poet that evokes his criticism. He is sure, to begin with, that the modern theorists are trying to pull the wool over the public's eyes when they declare that they are opposed only to "facile" intelligibility; at bottom, he thinks, they refuse all intelligibility, and this squarely on the ground that intelligibility of any kind comes from reason and the new poetry wishes to render only sensation:

… elle toise non pas ceux qui ne comprennent que des truismes, mais tous ceux qui prétendent "comprendre," dès l'instant que ce mot veut dire autre chose que mobiliser des sensations et implique l'usage d'idées claires, si peu simples fussent-elles, mais qui ne désavouent pas l'intelligibilité cartésienne; en d'autres termes, l'obscurité n'est pas pour cette litterature une condition relative, variable suivant la qualité du lecteur et qu'il peut ne point ressentir grâce à un don spécial; elle en est un attribut organique, auquel elle est liée par essence et dont elle ne saurait se départir sous peine de se nier ellemême. [Non Possumus—italics Benda's.]

Nowhere, Benda thinks, is the basically antisocial nature of contemporary literature better illustrated than in this aspect of the new theories.

But why should the poets decree that they will no longer make themselves intelligible? Benda thinks their practice grows out of the contemporary philosophical movement: the will to express soul states different from the classic "formes arretes," i.e., the desire to seek out and render the states that lie below words; a new desire to commune with the nature of things, with the essence of the universe; the will to place themselves in the sphere of profound action, "pur devenir," dynamism and incessant mobility. And to this last intention his reply is an echo of his oldest arguments against his oldest enemy:

… le sentiment du poétique ne nous est pas donné par la vue du mouvement, lequel, en tant que tel, est essentiellement inintelligible, mais par l'idée du mouvement, laquelle n'est pas un mouvement et est, elle, en tant qu'idée, une chose intelligible. Il ne nous est pas donné par le spectacle de la bataille de Waterloo, mais par l'idée, éminemment intelligible, que nous en proposent Victor Hugo ou Stendhal. [Non Possumus—italics Benda's.]

But whatever the motives of the new philosopher-poets, Benda is sure that their fundamental goal is everywhere and always to satisfy their personal aspirations by their art. And so they seem not to care at all what the profanum vulgus demands of poetry—though they may care more than a little that it does not buy their books.

Above all, Benda cannot agree with the doctrine that the reader must create his own sense for each poem he reads, because he is sure that the public will always demand some fixed meaning, not necessarily intellectual but at least "identical to itself," in what it reads. It is for this reason that he feels such deep frustration with those who would make of poetry only an arrangement of words, for in their refusal to construct patterns of sense he finds nothing but a colossal contempt for the public and for the whole business of art.

The feeling of a real divorce between public and poet becomes strongest, he observes, in the little magazines, where he finds all kinds of technical discussions, manifestoes, ukases, and decrees, but never a question as to whether the poets are satisfying the public. Nor indeed is the public even represented, for these magazines are edited by men who are all more or less poets, writing only for themselves and their specialized milieu. And if a new Hugo were to appear—but this is doubtful, for in the past four decades Benda has not seen a poet of value who was not esoteric—would the public have the courage to praise him after the jibes of the chapelles? For even in a democracy this is one situation where the majority does not rule and while the chapelles often intimidate the public, the opposite never happens.

Yet Benda considers that beneath the public's silence there is discernible a constant demand, an unchanging belief that it knows what it wants in poetry. He feels that the entire history of literature, with all its contradictions and enormous variations of taste, still indicates that mankind has ever sought two characteristics in poetry before it has declared itself satisfied: a certain universality based on intelligibility and a certain representative value, in which states of consciousness which are "identical to themselves" are proposed, for "tout poeme qui nous touche, fit-il du plus abscons de nos aedes, dans la mesure oi il nous touche, nous propose quelque chose, ce quelque chose pouvant être un pur état sentimental, voire sensoriel" (Non Possumus—italics Benda's). It has always been true and always will remain true, he is sure, that the verse which refuses coherence and communication will touch the sensibilities of none but its author and his allies. But though he is as firmly convinced of this truth as of any in his canon, Benda is realistic enough at the same time to know that the new poetry is not doomed to extinction because it does not observe these fundamental laws; on the contrary, it seems, it is its opposite which is condemned.

It is sufficiently clear that poetry, far from being the queen of the arts, occupies a somewhat lower place in Benda's formal hierarchy. This being so, what is the poet's peculiar function, what does he do specifically that no other man can do so well? Not quite surprisingly, Benda seems disinclined to accept either the modern view that he is simply afaber, a worker in words, or the current revival, led by such prophets as Rolland de Reneville, Bertele, Aragon, and Breton, of the Romantic argument that the poet is the true vates. On a good many occasions he has taken the opportunity to express quite a different opinion and to assign the muse's servant a humbler role than some of her modern worshipers would give him.

What most exercises Benda, and the point of view he expresses is certaintly not his alone, is the constant attribution of "discovery value" to poetry—the dominant theory that poetry is no longer simply a means of expression but a means of penetrating the secrets of the universe, the frequent preachment that we must "hearken to the poet" because he will lead us to the truth. Lead us to the truth indeed! In the first place, he thinks, we ordinary readers ask the poet to do no such thing; we ask him to move us, to charm us, and that is all. And even if we, the public, had such a view of the poet's capabilities, could he respond to our appeal? Surely not, for the restrictions of his art, as Benda sees them, permit him to discover neither intellectual truth, "scientific" truth, nor even mystic truth. In actual fact, Benda argues in Du Style d'idées, the poet is the very type of writer from whom it would be supremely impertinent to ask real thought, for his open and declared function is to express his own sensibility (and sometimes also, indirectly, the collective sensibility), not to discover its wellsprings or to cause us to advance in knowledge of its nature. He does not go so far as to claim that the poet cannot, on occasion, illuminate with a singularly piercing light certain of the components of his emotion, but at best such views on his part are scattered and secondary to his object. For his object is always and eternally to live his emotion, never to explain it in the abstract, independently of his personal coefficient, a mode of knowledge for which, Benda thinks, the poet has nothing but contempt. His role, by the argument of Du Style d'idées, is to offer us a description of his soul states in the face of the riddle of the world, the immensity of the sea, the charm of woman, the eternal suffering of mankind, but never to seek the true nature of religious sentiment, of sexual attraction, of the emotion of sympathy. If he gives expression to an idea at all, it must be in connection with a state of sensibility, surrounded by a kind of halo and never clear and distinct, for Valery was right, according to Benda, when he observed that where clarity and distinctness begin, there poetry ends. Even if the poet is a Vigny and expresses a scientific or philosophic state, i.e., a soul state produced by a scientific or philosophical idea, he must still present it as a state of sensibility, never as a pure idea. And moreover, it has been Benda's experience that when the poet's ideas, given form as states of sensibility, are stripped of their "vetement sensible" they become strangely banal or irritatingly gratuitous. What did we ever learn of the nature of religion from Louis Racine's poem or of justice from Sully Prudhomme's long meditation?

But there is one aspect of their activity wherein one might reasonably expect the poets to expound real ideas, and that is as theorists of the poetic activity itself. Yet even in the most famous of their pronouncements—Poe's Poetical Principles, Baudelaire's commentary on the same work, the preface to the Odes et Ballades—one is amazed to see that although there are many ingenious views on isolated points of technique, penetrating judgments of other poets, all kinds of precepts, resolutions, attacks, prohibitions, banishments, anathemas, there never is offered the slightest adequate or general idea of what the poet's function really is or of the special mechanism that governs it. Not one of the poets, he thinks, has produced anything so substantial as Renouvier's book on Victor Hugo. Here again, the poet remains still a poet, that is, incapable of the deliberate consideration of abstractions.

… en effet, [Benda says in Du Poétique] énoncer des idées qui vaillent par elles-mêmes, si l'on songe á la langue analytique qu'exigent de telles idées, est contraire á l'essence de la poésie; on pourrait même soutenir qu'il lui est contraire de les penser. Et peut-être certains poètes (encore que je n'en voie guere) ont-ils eu de telles idées. Mais les eurent-ils en tant que poètes?

But the poets will protest, and their words will be recorded in a score of little magazines, that of course they cannot give the kind of truth Benda speaks of; "scientific" truth; they are not illustrating concepts generated in a laboratory. But they will insist that they can give us another and higher kind of truth, a mystic truth, a spiritual transformation, a new soul, a new sense of life's meaning, a new innocence. And here again we, the public, differ: we do not want these things from them, Benda proclaims in his capacity as public interpreter, we do not even think they can give them. We ask of them emotions, the spectacle of a finer sensibility moving among the vicissitudes of life, and when the poet tells us of the somber or radiant revelations he will deliver before our eyes we "Lamoignons" cannot help thinking of the cock of the fable, with his pathetic demurrer: "Mais le moindre grain de mil / Ferait bien mieux mon affaire!" (Non Possumus).

And so at the end of all his discussion of the intellectual capabilities of the man of letters Benda comes to a pessimistic conclusion:

En résumé, si l'on appelle littérateurs les moralistes d'anthologie, les critiques agréés du siècle, les romanciers, les dramaturges, les poètes, tous ceux chez qui domine l'élément littéraire, on peut dire que leur contribution a la connaissance de la réalité humaine consiste, dans le meilleur cas, en des observations perçantes mais éparses, ignorant la fécondation de l'une par l'autre que permettrait leur rapproachement et donc dénuées d'une avancée vraiment profonde dans cette réalité … Unc histoire des idées vraiment fortes sur la réalité humaine peut negliger les littérateurs. Sur le sujet dont ils ont le plus traité, les passions, ce qui a été dit d'important, I'a été par certains philosophes ou savants, lesquels, d'ailleurs, forment eux-mêmes, dans leur corporation, une très infime minorité. [Du Style d'idées]

These then, are the reasons why Benda says that to be right is not literary and why he appends to Taine's remark that literary ideas are necessarily vague ideas the corollary that ideas, insofar as they strive to emerge from vagueness, are not literary at all:

Ceux qui traitent la pensée selon un mode littéraire sont … les Alain et les Valéry, avec leurs affirmations non fondées, productrices d'étonnement, méprisantes de toute intention de persuader, qui contentent ces besoins si fréquents chez les raffinés: le goût du paradoxe, le sentiment de soufflet lancé au "sens commun;" affirmations vagues malgré leur ostentatoire précision, épargnant donc á l'attention du lecteur la fatigue de se fixer, la souffrance de se limiter; sibyllines et donc aguichantes; exprimées sous une forme qui avant tout se veut rare. [Exercice d'un enterre vif]

These are curious arguments indeed, although Benda is, historically, by no means the only one to represent this point of view. Yet perhaps no critic, at least in France, has ever pushed such conclusions quite so far as he, and certainly no recent student of French literature has gone to the extremes of Du Style d'idées or La France byzantine. And it is again their exaggeration which renders them unacceptable, for it is difficult to deny some of his points a certain truth, especially when they are seen against the background of "Parisianism" which is their constant though unannounced context. It is clearly high time for someone to react vocally against the fantastic glorification of the artist which has become the stock in trade of too many of the more advanced magazines, and this is certainly the moment to recall that the writer does not hold the answer to all the questions and to protest against the advancement of political and moral opinion by men whose ideas are, in fact, not always better reasoned or more interesting than those of humbler condition.

But to concede a certain rightness—perhaps better, a certain justification—is not to concede that the attacks Benda has mounted are completely valid, for serious objections can be brought against every one of his major points. What does he mean, for instance, by the "littérateur"? Who is this man? Does Benda include in the class all writers, even the eternal geniuses, or is he referring only to such figures as Guez de Balzac or Maurice Dekobra? There is no way of knowing, and so Benda's "littérateur" becomes every writer—but he is also no writer, for even littérateurs are not mere figures on a chart any more than their critics are; they are men who differ radically among themselves in tastes and ideas, abilities and intentions, and to create out of any such heterogeneous human stock a mythical class of evildoers is a typical error of old-fashioned rationalism. Worse, the creation of such an imaginary class, all-inclusive as it seems to be, looks very much like an attempt on Benda's part to render the great guilty of the errors and deficiencies of the small, to make Homer and Dante and Shakespeare responsible for the faults of Upton Sinclair and Crebillon pere and Paul de Kock, all for the greater glory of Comte and Darwin and Lamarck. If Benda meant to hurl his diatribes against literary hacks, then a good many of his points are sound and cogent, but nowhere in the campaign does he make any significant exceptions and by that error his whole argument becomes doubtful. There is more than a suspicion that he is directing his fire not at writers in general but at the moderns in particular, especially at Gide and Valery and Alain, for a considerable part of his whole effort has gone to proving that the faults of modern literature are due in great measure to its abandonment of the classic standard. He would have troubled fewer readers if he had been more careful of his definitions.

And what of the writer's supposed insincerity? The whole argument here depends on what seems to be a basic error of observation, the belief that style and idea are separate for the artist but not for the intellectual, and that the writer's temperament and personality dominate his report on experience, while the intellectual's do not. But if Buffon's belief that style comes "de l'homme meme" has any validity at all, then it would seem that the very stylistic deficiencies of the intellectual as Benda portrays him in Du Style d'idées, for instance, are in some way a measure of the man himself. Perhaps the public is not wholly wrong in refusing to pay so much honor to the pure intellectual as to the man of letters, in whom, perhaps, it unconsciously recognizes a higher human exemplar, or at least a more compelling temperament. And even though Benda's points were well taken, it is still difficult to see how the intrusion of a great personality can be construed as a defect and as grounds for bitter moral reproach.

As for the writer's "imperialism," the idea is ingenious and intriguing and possibly valid; only, it would seem that the same argument might also be brought against the work of philosophy and more especially against the work of moralistic intention, where the thinker's individual choices are implicitly or explicitly held up as a model for humanity. But Benda is silent on this kind of imperialism and by his silence betrays a disturbing prejudice.

Then, what of the littérateur's "anti-intellectualism"? Benda's theory depends on the fact—is it a fact?—that the contemporary author, because he seeks diversity and variety and because he refuses to "choose," does not conduct himself as a true intellectual should. But here Benda calls into question all of modern thought, not literature alone, since it may reasonably be argued that one of the primary characteristics of the contemporary intellectual movement is the very refusal to choose, to eliminate, to organize, and this squarely on intellectual grounds. Correspondingly, such failure to observe classic modes of thought, instead of representing nonintellectualism or anti-intellectualism, might well represent intellectualism of a higher order. The true weakness of Benda's position, however, is not his effort to prove that intellectualism must necessarily be Spinozist or Kantian in form and manner, but his insistence that the modern writer is morally inferior because he refuses to adhere to the older systems, and his even broader argument that in general the artist is inferior to the scientist or the philosopher. These are judgments that are difficult to defend, even though Plato and Renouvier might have approved them.

But the portion of the campaign in which Benda obviously lays himself most open to criticism is his long discussion of the relationship of literature and idea. There are, it would seem, two intentions here: an attempt to demonstrate that it is actually morally sounder and intellectually preferable to write badly than to write well, and a second attempt to demonstrate that literature is neither science nor rational philosophy. But of course this is not so, and it was scarcely necessary to write Do Style d'idées to prove it. Again, the whole conclusion rests on the most debatable premise—that truth, "rightness," can be found only in works of organized and developed ideas, only in works which are "scientific" in the wide sense. Perhaps Benda is right, but the modern world does not seem to agree. What is novel in this part of the attack is the constant resort to moral judgments of the broadest kind, the condemnation of literature for not giving what it cannot give. It is already a truism that good literature is not made with good sentiments; it could be added that good criticism is not made with sophistries.

On the whole, this is perhaps the most disappointing of Benda's campaigns, in spite of the fire and the elan and the real ingenuity with which it is conducted. In no other do his characteristics loom up so clearly, and in no other has he defined himself so thoroughly, for better or for worse. Unfair though it probably is, the suspicion keeps rising that it is in reality only a long plea pro domo. It may be of great help in assaying the value of Benda's career, but as "intellectual enrichment," what will the histories of criticism say?