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JULIEN BENDA 581
cultivated, less a prey to life, that people are going to begin to have
leisure, or women be no longer able to make their taste supreme.
Which is to say, in our opinion and contrary to the opinion of some
others, that this aesthetic is not at all a fashion, but on the contrary
that it is destined to endure, to-intensify. This without denying
the probability of some backward cast toward a violent “classicism,”
which will indeed be a fashion, and a special form of the need for
excess into the bargain.
III
Having in mind this aesthetic attitude (destined to endure, we
believe) of good French society, what shall we conclude in regard
to the future of art? That the divorce will only go on deepening
between that company and the intellectualistic artist, whether he
is so named because of his presentation of ideas like Montesquieu,
Taine, Renan, or because intelligence and judgement preside more
than sentiment at the composition of his work, as in the case of
Racine or La Fayette. A divorce which will be new only in degree,
since the temporal success of such masters has always managed to
be far from violent. (This does not apply to Taine, but for polit-
ical reasons.) Understand: we do not wish to say that such an
artist will lack readers; we believe, on the contrary, that with the
growing diffusion of books, with the more and more intense inter-
communication between citizens, there will be, there are already,
a much greater number than before; but they will be among the
intellectuals by profession, among the solitaries, curious in matters
of the spirit, not, certainly, among people of the world. And per-
haps one may fear that the definite renunciation of their interest
will little by little discourage the care for grace and delicate forms,
which is one of the conditions without which art cannot exist in the
world of ideas. And further, in view of the apparent future of social
life and culture, it may be asked whether even the appearance of
such a brain, at once artistic and intellectual, is still a possible thing;
whether we shall not see, eternally separate, “regarding one another
with an angry stare,” on one side the savant, a perfect stranger to
his “age,”’ on the other, the man of the world, quite shut against all
discipline of the mind; whether the synthesis in a single head of