Pliny said so too, moreover: Nullum melius esse tempestiva morte. Shakespeare puts these words into the mouth of the old king Henry IV: ‘Oh if this were seen – The happiest youth – Would shut the book and sit him down and die.’ Byron finally: “’Tis something better not to be.” Balthasar Gracián paints existence for us in the blackest colours, including the Criticón, etc.’
Had I not already let myself be carried too far by Schopenhauer, I would have been happy to round off this little demonstration with the help of Aphorisms on Wisdom in Life, which is of all the books known to me perhaps the one which presupposes in its author the most originality along with the widest reading, so that at the head of the book, each page of which contains several quotations, Schopenhauer was able to write in all seriousness: ‘Compilation is not my forte.’
Friendship, friendship in respect of individuals, is no doubt a frivolous thing, and reading is a form of friendship. But at least it is a sincere form, and the fact that it is directed at someone who is dead, who is not there, lends something disinterested, almost moving to it. It is a form of friendship freed moreover from all that makes other forms ugly. Since we are all of us, the living, but dead people who have not yet taken up their appointment, all those politenesses, all those salutations in the entrance-hall that we call deference, or gratitude, or devotion, and into which we mix so much falsehood, are wearisome and sterile.
What is more – from our very first relations of sympathy, admiration or gratitude – the first words that we utter, the first letters we write weave around us the first threads of a canvas of habit, of a veritable mode of existence, which we are no longer able to rid ourselves of in our subsequent friendships; not to mention that during this time the excessive things we have said remain like promissory notes that we must settle, or that we shall pay for even more dearly all through our lives by our remorse at having allowed them to be protested.
In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to. We often take leave of them, at least, only with regret. And once we have left them, none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’ ‘Were we not tactless?’ ‘Did they like us?’ or the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else.
All these qualms of friendship expire on the threshold of the pure and peaceful form of it that is reading. There is no deference either, we laugh at what Molière has to say only just so far as we find it funny; when he bores us we are not afraid to look bored, and once we have definitely had enough of him we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius nor celebrity. The atmosphere of this pure form of friendship is silence, which is purer than speech. Because we speak for others, but remain silent for ourselves. So silence, unlike speech, does not bear the trace of our faults or affectations.
It is pure, it is genuinely an atmosphere. Between the author’s thought and our own it does not interpose the irreducible elements, refractory to thought, of our two distinct egos. The very language of the book is pure (if it is worthy to be called a book), made transparent by the thought of the author, which has removed whatever was not itself to make of it its own faithful image; each sentence, at bottom, resembling the others, because all are spoken with the unique inflection of a personality; hence a sort of continuity that in life our commerce with others excludes by mixing in with our own thought elements foreign to it, and which very quickly enables us to follow the actual line of the author’s thought, the features of his physiognomy as they are reflected in this tranquil mirror.
We are able to take pleasure in the features of each one in turn, without asking that they be admirable, for the mind delights in making out these profound portraits and loving them with an unselfish, unassuming friendship, as if for their own sake. Thus do we take to a Gautier, simple, a good fellow, with excellent taste (it amuses me to think that they could see him as representing perfection in art).
I do not overestimate his spiritual capacities, and in his Voyage en Espagne, where every sentence, without his suspecting it, stresses and extends the very graceful, very cheerful line of his personality (the words arranging themselves of their own accord to trace it, because his personality it was that chose them and set them out in order), I cannot help but see as anything but true art the obligation he felt himself to be under not to let a single form go by without a full description, and accompanied by a comparison which does not originate in any strong or agreeable impression and is therefore by no means appealing.
When he likens the countryside with its different forms of cultivation ‘to those tailors’ cards which have samples of trousers and waistcoats stuck down on them’, one can but blame the pitiful poverty of his imagination, as when he says that there is nothing to admire between Paris and Angoulême. And one smiles at this fervent Gothicist who could not even be bothered in Chartres to go and visit the cathedral. (‘I regret having passed through Chartres without managing to see the cathedral’, Voyage en Espagne.)
But what good humour and what taste! how willingly we follow this very buoyant companion on his adventures; so sympathetic is he that we find everything around him so too. And after the few days he spends with Captain Lebarbier de Tinan, delayed by the storm on board his fine vessel, ‘glistening like gold’, we are sad he should have nothing more to say about that amiable sailor but makes us take leave of him for ever without telling us what became of him.7 One certainly has the sense that his cheerful bragging like his fits of melancholy were in his case the somewhat unbuttoned habits of the journalist.
But we give him all that, we do what he wants, we are amused when he comes home soaked to the skin, dying of hunger and for some sleep, and sad when, as mournfully as any feuilletoniste, he recites the names of all those men of his own generation dead before their time. I was saying about him that his sentences traced his physiognomy but without his suspecting it; for if words are chosen, not by our minds in accordance with the affinities of their essence, but by our desire to portray ourselves, he represents that desire, he does not represent us.
For all their gifts, Fromentin and Musset, because they wanted to leave their own portraits to posterity, painted them very indifferently; yet they interest us enormously for that very reason, because their failure is instructive. So that even when a book is not the mirror of a powerful individuality, it is still the mirror of interesting defects in the mind. When we read closely a book by Fromentin or a book by Musset, we notice in the first how fundamentally limited and stupid a certain ‘distinction’ is, and in the second how vacuous is eloquence.
If, as we grow intellectually, our liking for books grows also, its dangers, as we have seen, are reduced. An original mind is able to subordinate its reading to its own personal activity. For it, reading is merely the noblest of distractions, above all the most ennobling, for reading and knowledge alone make for a ‘well-mannered’ mind. We can only develop the power of our sensibility and our intellect in ourselves, in the depths of our spiritual lives.
But it is in this contact with other minds that is reading that the ‘ways’ of our minds are inculcated. In spite of everything, the well-read remain the intellectual ‘quality’ as it were, and not to know a particular book, or a particular item of literary knowledge, will always be, even in a man of genius, a mark of intellectual ill-breeding. In the order of the mind too, distinction and nobility consist in a sort of freemasonry of usage and a heritage of traditions.8
The preference of great writers, in this taste and diversion of reading, is very readily given to books by the ancients. Even those whom their contemporaries saw as the most ‘romantic’ read hardly anything except the classics. When, in conversation, Victor Hugo talks about what he has been reading, it is the names of Molière, of Horace, of Ovid, of Régnard, which recur the most frequently.
Alphonse Daudet, the least bookish of writers, whose oeuvre is so thoroughly vital and modern it seems to have rejected the whole classical inheritance, was ceaselessly reading, quoting, glossing Pascal, Montaigne, Diderot, Tacitus.9 One might almost go so far as to say, so renewing perhaps, by an anyway wholly partial interpretation, the old distinction between classics and romantics, that it is audiences (intelligent audiences, of course) which are romantic, whereas the masters (even the masters said to be romantic, those preferred by romantic audiences) are classic. (An observation that could be extended to all the arts. The public goes to hear the
