Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head
of water for the critic to instal his power station on them. The
necessary gradient, in the case of Surrealism, is produced by the
difference in intellectual level between France and Germany. What sprang
up in 1919 in France in a small circle of literati—we shall give the
most important names at once: André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe
Soupault, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard—may have been a meagre stream, fed
on the damp boredom of postwar Europe and the last trickle of French
decadence. The know-alls who even today have not advanced beyond the
‘authentic origins’ of the movement, and even now have nothing to say
about it except that yet another clique of literati is here mystifying
the honourable public, are a little like a gathering of experts at a
spring who, after lengthy deliberation, arrive at the conviction that
this paltry stream will never drive turbines.
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