I have not escaped from its spell; I wanted to speak of my reading but I have spoken of everything except books because it was not of them that my reading spoke to me. But perhaps the memories it has given me back, one after the other, will themselves have awakened in my reader and led him gradually, as he dwelt along these flowery, circuitous paths, to recreate in his own mind the original psychological act known as Reading, sufficiently strongly for him to be able now to follow, as if within himself, the few reflections it remains to me to proffer.
We know that ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ was a lecture on reading given by Ruskin in the town hall of Rusholme, near Manchester, on 6 December 1864, to help in the setting-up of a library at the Rusholme Institute. On 14 December he gave a second, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, about the role of women, to help found schools in Ancoats.
‘All through that year,’ says Mr Collingwood in his admirable Life and Work of Ruskin, ‘he remained at home, except for … frequent evenings with Carlyle. And when, in December, he gave those lectures in Manchester which afterwards, as Sesame and Lilies, became his most popular work, we can trace his better health of mind and body in the brighter tone of his thought. We can hear the echo of Carlyle’s talk in the heroic, aristocratic, stoic ideals, and in the insistence on the value of books and free public libraries, – Carlyle being the founder of the London Library.’
Since all I wish to do here is to discuss Ruskin’s thesis in itself, without concerning myself with its historical origins, it may be summed up quite accurately in the words of Descartes, that ‘the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the worthiest individuals of past centuries who were their authors.’ Ruskin did not perhaps know of this somewhat arid reflection of the French philosopher, but it is one in point of fact which is to be found throughout his lecture, only swathed in an Apollonian gold fused with the mists of England, like those whose splendour illuminates the landscapes of his favourite painter.
‘But, granting that we had both the will and the sense to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power! or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice! … We cannot know whom we would … We may, by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice; or put a question to a man of science, and be answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes’ talk on a cabinet minister, … or snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of … arresting the kind glance of a Queen.
And yet these momentary chances we covet; and spend our years, passions, and powers in pursuit of little more than these; while, meantime, there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; … And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, – and can be kept waiting round us all day long, not to grant audience but to gain it – kings and statesmen lingering patiently in those plainly furnished and narrow anterooms, our bookcase shelves, – we make no account of that company, – perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!’ ‘You may tell me perhaps,’ adds Ruskin, ‘that if you prefer to talk with the living, it is because you can see their faces,’ etc., and rebutting this first objection, and then a second, he shows that reading is precisely a conversation with men much wiser and more interesting than those whom we may have occasion to meet with around us.
In the notes which I have added to this volume I have tried to show that reading cannot be assimilated in this way to a conversation, even with the wisest of men; that the difference essentially between a book and a friend lies not in their greater or lesser wisdom, but in the manner in which we communicate with them, reading being the reverse of conversation, consisting as it does for each one of us in receiving the communication of another’s thought while still being on our own, that is, continuing to enjoy the intellectual sway which we have in solitude and which conversation dispels instantly, and continuing to be open to inspiration, with our minds still at work hard and fruitfully on themselves.
Had Ruskin drawn the consequences of other truths which he states a few pages later on, he would probably have reached a conclusion analogous to my own. But obviously he was not seeking to get to the very heart of the idea of reading. In order to teach us the value of reading, he seeks only to recount a sort of beautiful Platonic myth, with the simplicity of the Greeks who showed us almost all the true ideas and left it to modern scruples to explore them more fully. But although I think that reading, in its original essence, in the fertile miracle of a communication effected in solitude, is something more, and something other than what Ruskin says that it is, I do not for all that think that one can allow it the preponderant role in our spiritual lives which he seems to assign to it.
The limitations of its role derive from the nature of its virtues. And it is to my childhood reading once again that I shall go to find out in what these virtues consist. The book which you saw me reading just now beside the fire in the dining-room, in my bedroom, in the depths of the armchair with its crocheted head-rest, or on fine afternoons, beneath the nut trees and hawthorns in the park, where every breath from the boundless fields came from so far off to play silently at my side, holding mutely out to my distracted nostrils the scent of the clover and the sainfoin to which my weary eyes would sometimes be raised: that book, since your eyes as you lean towards it would be unable to make out its title across those twenty years, my memory, whose eyesight is better suited to this kind of perception, will tell you what it was: Le Capitaine Fracasse, by Théophile Gautier.
In it I loved before all else two or three sentences which seemed to me the most beautiful and original in the book. I could not imagine that any other author had written comparable ones. But I had the feeling that their beauty corresponded to a reality of which Théophile Gautier allowed us to glimpse only a small corner once or twice in each volume. And as I believed that he must assuredly know it in its entirety, I would have liked to read other books by him in which all the sentences would be as beautiful as these and would have as their subject the things on which I would have liked to have his opinion.
‘Laughter is not cruel by its nature; it distinguishes man from the animals and is, so it appears from the Odyssey of Homerus, the Grecian poet, the prerogative of the blessed and immortal gods who laugh their Olympian fill as they lounge away eternity.’3 This sentence produced a genuine intoxication in me. I thought I caught sight of a marvellous antiquity through the Middle Ages as Gautier alone could reveal them to me. But I would have wished that instead of saying this furtively, after the tedious description of a château containing too many terms I did not know for me to be at all able to visualize it, he had written sentences of this kind all through the volume and spoken to me of things that once his book was finished I could continue to know and to love.
I would have wished for him, the one wise custodian of the truth, to tell me what I ought rightly to think of Shakespeare, of Saintine, of Sophocles, of Euripides, of Silvio Pellico whom I had read one very cold March, walking, stamping my feet, running along the paths, whenever I had just closed the book, exhilarated by having finished my reading, by the energy accumulated by my immobility, and by the salubrious wind blowing down the village streets.
I would have wished him above all to tell me whether I would have a better chance of arriving at the truth if I repeated my first-form year at school or later on by becoming a diplomat or an advocate at the Court of Appeal. But as soon as the beautiful sentence was finished he set to describing a table covered ‘with a layer of dust so thick that a finger might have traced letters in it’, too insignificant a thing in my eyes for me to be able even to let my attention pause at it; and I was reduced to wondering what other books Gautier had written which might better satisfy my aspirations and enable me finally to know the whole of his thought.
Indeed, it is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which will give us to see the role at once essential yet limited that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called ‘Conclusions’ but for the reader ‘Incitements’. We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves
