And he can only awaken these desires by making us contemplate the supreme beauty to which the utmost efforts of his art have enabled him to attain. But by a singular and moreover providential law of mental optics (a law which signifies perhaps that we are unable to receive the truth from anyone else but must create it ourselves), the end-point of their wisdom appears to us only as the beginning of our own, so that it is at the moment when they have told us everything they could have told us that they give rise to the feeling in us that as yet they have told us nothing.
Moreover, if we put questions to them which they are unable to answer, we also ask them for answers which would teach us nothing. For an effect of the love which poets arouse in us is to make us attach a literal importance to things significant to them only of personal emotions. In each picture that they show us, they seem to afford us only a brief glimpse of some marvellous location, different from the rest of the world, and we would like them to make us enter into the very heart of it.
‘Take us,’ we would like to be able to say to M. Maeterlinck or Mme de Noailles, ‘ “into the Zeeland garden where the old-fashioned flowers grow”, along the highway scented “with clover and artemisia”, and into all those places on the earth of which you have not spoken in your books but which you adjudge to be as beautiful as these.’ We would like to go and visit the field which Millet (for painters teach us in the same manner as poets) shows us in his ‘Springtime’, we would like M. Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the Seine, to that bend in the river which he allows us barely to make out through the morning mist.
Yet, in actual fact, it was the mere chance of an acquaintance or family connection which gave Mme de Noailles, or Maeterlinck, or Millet, or Claude Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby and made them choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river rather than another. What makes them seem other and more beautiful to us than the rest of the world is that they bear on them like some elusive reflection the impression they made on a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singular and despotic across the submissive and indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.
This surface with which they charm and disappoint us, and beyond which we would like to go, is the very essence of that in a sense depthless thing – a mirage arrested on a canvas – which is a vision.
And the mist which our eager eyes would like to pierce is the last word in the painter’s art. The supreme effort of the writer as of the artist only succeeds in raising partially for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe. Then does he say: ‘Look, look,
Parfumés de trèfle et d’armoise
Serrant leurs vifs ruisseaux étroits
Les pays de l’Aisne et de l’Oise.
Scented with clover and artemisia
Gripping their quick, narrow streams
The country of the Aisne and of the Oise.
‘Look at the house in Zeeland, pink and shiny as a seashell. Look! Learn to see!’ At which moment he disappears. That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
There are certain cases, however, certain as it were pathological cases of spiritual depression, when reading may become a sort of healing discipline and be entrusted, by way of repeated incitements, with reintroducing a lazy mind perpetually into the life of the spirit. Then books play a role for it analogous to that of psychotherapists for certain cases of neurasthenia.
We know that in certain affections of the nervous system, without any of the organs themselves being affected, the patient is mired in a sort of impossibility of willing, as if in a deep rut, from which he cannot escape unaided and where ultimately he would waste away, if a strong and helping hand were not held out to him. His brain, his legs, his lungs, his stomach are sound. He is not truly incapacitated from working, from walking, from exposing himself to the cold, from eating.
But he is incapable of willing these various actions, which he would be perfectly capable of performing. And an organic degeneration, which would end by becoming the equivalent of the diseases he does not have, would be the irremediable consequence of this inertia of the will, if the impulsion he is unable to find in himself were not to come to him from outside, from a doctor who will will for him, until such time as his various organic wills have been re-educated. Now there exist certain minds that might be compared to patients such as these, who are prevented by a sort of laziness4 or frivolity from descending spontaneously into the deeper parts of the self where the true life of the spirit begins.
It is not that once they have been shown the way there they are incapable of discovering and exploiting its true riches, but that, failing such intervention from without, they live on the surface in a perpetual forgetfulness of themselves, in a sort of passivity which makes them the plaything of every pleasure and reduces them to the stature of those roundabout who excite them, so that, like the man of gentle birth who, having shared the life of highway robbers ever since childhood, could not remember his name any more so long ago was it that he had ceased to bear it, they would end by abolishing in themselves all sense and recollection of their spiritual nobility, were an outside impulsion not to come to reintroduce them forcibly in a sense into the life of the mind, where they suddenly recover the power of thinking for themselves and of creating.
Now it is clear that this impulsion, which the lazy mind cannot find in itself but which has to come to it from another, must be received in that solitude outside of which, as we have seen, the very activity of creation that is to be resuscitated cannot occur. From pure solitude the lazy mind can derive nothing, since it is incapable of setting its creative activity in motion of its own accord. But the most lofty conversation and the most pressing advice are of no assistance to it either, for they cannot produce this original activity directly.
What it takes then, is an intervention which, though it comes from someone else, occurs deep inside ourselves, the impulsion certainly of another mind but received in the midst of our solitude. But we have already seen that this was exactly the definition of reading, and applicable to reading alone. Thus the one discipline that can exercise a favourable influence on such minds is reading: quod erat demonstrandum, as the geometers say.
But here again, reading works only as an incitement which can in no way take the place of our own personal activity; it is content simply to restore the use of it to us, just as, in the nervous ailments to which I was alluding a little earlier, the psychotherapist merely restores to the patient the willpower to make use of his still sound stomach, legs and brain.
Whether it is that all minds have more or less of such laziness, of this stagnation of the lower depths, or whether, though it may not be essential, the exaltation that some reading can produce has a propitious influence on our own work, more than one writer is quoted as having liked to read some choice extract before sitting down to work. Emerson seldom began to write without having reread a few pages of Plato. And Dante is not the only poet whom Virgil has conducted to the threshold of paradise.
For as long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary.
It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.
Sometimes even, in certain somewhat exceptional and anyway, as we shall see, less dangerous cases, the truth, still conceived of as something external, is at a distance from us, concealed in a place difficult of access. Then it is some secret document, some unpublished correspondence, some memoir which may shed an unexpected light on certain characters, but which can be imparted to us only with difficulty.
What happiness, what respite for the mind
