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they have become diversified and segmented, and it is to be observed that certain segments of new taste are in themselves

sufficiently populous to support artistic activities of, as we say, a very advanced kind. These new circumstances of taste are very impressive. They constitute something like a revolution in culture. And it is surely clear to us that a leader in this revolution is the cinema itself. Yet a literary critic, looking at the prospects of the cinema in all their brightness, might presume to utter one word of warning. The revolution in taste of which I have spoken is a very notable event in our culture and no doubt it is a happy event. But I think we should be aware of an aspect of this event that is not happy: with the new acceptance of high and advanced art has come a new imperturbability to art. We might say that because nothing can shock our taste, nothing disquiets our minds. In the public rooms of the Hilton Hotel in New York, the walls are hung with excellent paintings by very distinguished contemporary artists, the members of every brilliant extreme school of our time. Many of these works are, as I read them, profoundly subversive, and admirable as such. The cultural level of the guests of the Hilton Hotel may be described as being that of people who choose to be the guests of the Hilton Hotel. To these people the pictures offer no shock, no affront. They are accepted as part of the decor, as a very charming, pleasing, flattering part of the decor, to which no meaning need be attached. I am not so naive as to think that when cinema aspires to be a great art, its aspirations are wholly defined by the qualities of great literature. It is also a graphic and plastic art, and to a greater degree than the stage drama. But it is also a literary art, it is also an art whose substance is the moral life of man. And the literary arts, I think, transcend the bounds of what we call taste. That which we identify as greatness in literature may indeed be associated with charm and pleasure, but it is chiefly associated with what is perturbing, even with what is distressing. It is associated with moral discovery, and to that rough and troubling enterprise it has willingly sacrificed charm of surface, even symmetry of form. My fear for the cinema is that, as it moves ahead in its new freedom which the revolution in taste may be providing, it will give us works of great brilliance and originality which will flatter our tastes and our wonderfully enlightened new prejudices, works that will not trouble us in the least. As I say this, I should make it plain that I do not speak from the height of any great satisfaction with literature as it now exists. Some years ago we cam to the end of a great classic epoch of literature, the epoch of Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Gide, Kafka, Mann, men who shook our souls and distressed our minds with the newness of what they had to say and the way they said it. However much we try to convince ourselves of the contrary, no one has followed in their pathat least for the time being.

in the least. As I say this, I should make it plain that I do not speak from the height of any great satisfaction with literature as it now exists. Some years ago we cam to the end of a great classic epoch of literature, the epoch of Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Gide, Kafka, Mann, men who shook our souls and distressed our minds with the newness of what they had to say and the way they said it. However much we try to convince ourselves of the contrary, no one has followed in their pathat least for the time being. The essential quality of literary greatness, telling the truth about life, is in abeyance. Perhaps that sad circumstance will make it easier, not harder, for film to achieve now its own greatness, if that is what it wants.

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