For that, powerful influences must be brought into play and friends made with the venerable Archbishop of Utrecht, his handsome square face like that of an old Jansenist, and with the pious keeper of the archives in Amersfoort. In such instances the conquest of the truth is seen as the triumph of a sort of diplomatic mission in which the journey was not without its difficulties nor the negotiation without its hazards. But what matter?
All these members of the little old church in Utrecht, on whose good will our entering into possession of the truth depends, are charming folk whose seventeenth-century faces make a change from those we are used to and with whom it will be most amusing to remain in touch, at least by letter. The esteem with which, from time to time, they will continue to send us their evidence will raise us in our own eyes and we shall keep their letters as a warranty and as a curiosity.
And we shall not fail one day to dedicate one of our books to them, which is certainly the least one can do for people who have made one a gift … of the truth. And as for the few enquiries, the brief labour that we shall be obliged to undertake in the library of the convent, and which will be the indispensable prelude to the act of entering on possession of the truth – that truth on which, for prudence’s sake and so as not to risk its escaping from us, we shall take notes – it would be ungrateful to complain of the pains they may have cost us: the peace and coolness of the old convent are so exquisite, where the nuns still wear the tall headdresses with white wings that they have in the Roger van der Weyden in the visiting-room; and as we are working the seventeenth-century carillons fondly take the chill off the artless waters of the canal, which a little pale sunlight is sufficient to make to dazzle us between the double row of trees, bare since the summer ended, that brush against the mirrors hanging from the gabled houses on either bank.5
This conception of a truth deaf to the appeals of reflection but docile to the exercise of influence, of a truth to be obtained through letters of recommendation, which is put into our hands by whoever had charge of it materially without perhaps even knowing of it, of a truth which allows itself to be copied out into a notebook, such a conception of the truth is yet far from being the most dangerous of all.
Because very often, for the historian and even for the scholar, the truth which they go to seek far away in a book is not so much the truth itself, properly speaking, as its index or its proof, leaving room consequently for another truth of which it is the promise or the verification and which is, this time at least, an individual creation of their own minds.
It is not at all the same for the literary man. He reads in order to read, to retain what he has read. For him the book is not the angel who takes wing the moment he has opened the gates into the celestial garden, but a motionless idol, which he adores for its own sake and which, instead of acquiring a true dignity from the thoughts it arouses, communicates a factitious dignity to everything around it.
The literary man invokes it smilingly in honour of some name to be found in Villehardouin or in Boccaccio,6 or in favour of some custom described in Virgil. His mind has no original activity of its own and is unable to pick out in books the substance which might fortify it; it encumbers itself with them as a whole so that, instead of being an assimilable element for him, a principle of life, they are merely a foreign body, a principle of death.
Is there any need to say that if I qualify this fondness, this sort of fetishistic reverence for books as unhealthy, it is relative to what the ideal habits of a mind without defects would be, which does not exist, just as physiologists do who describe the normal workings of organs such as are hardly to be met with in living persons.
In real life, on the contrary, where there are no perfect minds any more than entirely healthy bodies, those whom we call great minds are afflicted as others are by this ‘literary disease’. More so than others, one might say. It seems that the liking for books grows along with the intellect, a little below it but on the same stem, just as any passion goes with a predilection for what surrounds its object, has some connection with it and still speaks of it in its absence.
And so the greatest writers, at those times when they are not in direct communication with their own thought, take pleasure in the company of books. Is it not above all for them, moreover, that they were written; do they not disclose to them untold beauties which remain hidden from the masses? But in truth, the fact that superior minds may be what one terms bookish in no way proves that this is not a failing in someone.
From the fact that mediocre men are often industrious and intelligent ones often lazy, one cannot conclude that hard work is not a better discipline for the mind than laziness. In spite of which, to meet with one of our own faults in a great man always sets us to wondering whether it was not at bottom an unacknowledged virtue, and it is not without pleasure that we learn that Hugo knew Quintus Curtius, Tacitus and Justinian by heart, and that if the legitimacy of a word was challenged in his presence he was quite ready to trace its genealogy back to its origins, by quotations that demonstrated a genuine erudition. (I have shown elsewhere how in his case this erudition fostered his genius instead of stifling it, just as a bundle of sticks may put out a small fire but helps a large one.)
Maeterlinck, who is for me the opposite of a literary man, whose mind is perpetually open to the countless anonymous emotions conveyed by the beehive, the flowerbed or the pasture, reassures us largely as to the dangers of erudition, and almost of bibliophilia, when he describes as an amateur the engravings decorating an old edition of Jacob Cats or the Abbé Sanderus.
These dangers, when they exist, are anyway much less of a threat to our intellect than to our sensibility, and the capacity to read with profit is, if I may so express it, much greater among thinkers than among imaginative writers. Schopenhauer for example, offers us the image of a mind whose vitality wears the most enormous reading lightly, each new item of knowledge being at once reduced to its element of reality, to the portion of life that it contains.
Schopenhauer never puts forward an opinion without at once supporting it by several quotations, but one has the feeling that for him the texts he cites are merely examples, unconscious or anticipatory allusions in which he likes to discover a few features of his own thought but which have in no way been his inspiration. I recall a passage in The World as Will and Idea where there are perhaps twenty quotations in a row.
The subject is pessimism (I will abridge the quotations, naturally): ‘Voltaire, in Candide, wages war on optimism in an agreeable manner. Byron did so, in his tragic style, in Cain. Herodotus reports that the Thracians greeted the newborn with lamentations and rejoiced at each death. This is what is expressed in the lovely lines that Plutarch records: Lugere genitum, tanta, qui intravit mala, etc.
To which must be attributed the custom among the Mexicans of wishing, etc., and Swift was obeying the same sentiment when from his young days on (if Sir Walter Scott’s biography is to be believed) he was accustomed to celebrating the day of his birth as a day of affliction. Everyone knows the passage in Plato’s Apology where he says that death is a good to be admired. A maxim of Heraclitus is similarly framed: Vitae nomen quidam est vita, opus autem mors.
As for the lovely lines of Theognis, they are famous: Optima sors homini natum non esse, etc. Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, summarizes it as follows: Natum non esse sortes vincit alias omnes, etc. Euripides says: Omnis hominum vita est plena dolore (Hippolytus), and Homer had already said it: Non enim quidquam alicubi
