This stems doubtless from the fact that the contemporary ideas which writers and artists of originality make accessible and desirable to the public, are to some extent so much part of them that they are more easily diverted by different ideas. It asks a greater effort of them, to go to where these are, and so gives them more pleasure; we always like to be taken out of ourselves a little, to travel, when we read.
But there is another cause to which, finally, I would rather ascribe this predilection in great minds for old works.11 Which is that, unlike contemporary works, they do not only have for us the beauty which the mind that created them was able to put into them. They receive another beauty, more affecting still, from the fact that their substance, I mean the language in which they were written, is like a mirror of life.
Something of the happiness one feels walking in a town like Beaune, whose fifteenth-century hospice has been preserved intact, with its well, its wash-house, the painted panels of its wooden ceiling, the tall gabled roof, pierced by dormer windows surmounted by frail finials of beaten lead (all the things that an age left behind there as it were when it vanished, all the things that were its alone since none of the ages which followed saw anything similar arise), one feels something of that happiness again as one wanders in the midst of a tragedy by Racine or a volume of Saint-Simon. For these contain all the lovely suppressed forms of a language that preserve the memory of usages or ways of feeling which no longer exist, persistent traces of the past unlike anything in the present and whose colours time alone, as it passed over them, has been able further to enhance.
A tragedy by Racine or a volume of Saint-Simon’s memoirs resemble beautiful objects which are no longer made. The language from which they have been sculpted, by great artists, with a freedom which shows off its mellowness and brings out its native vigour, affects us like the sight of certain marbles, uncommon today, which were used by the workmen of old. No doubt in this old building or that the stone has faithfully preserved the sculptor’s thought, but also, thanks to the sculptor, the stone itself, of a kind unknown today, has been preserved for us, dressed in all the colours he was able to extract from it, to show off and to harmonize.
It is very much the living syntax of seventeenth-century France – and in it customs and a way of thinking that have vanished – which we love to discover in the poetry of Racine. It is the actual forms of this syntax, laid bare, reverenced, embellished by his very free yet very delicate chisel, which move us in those turns of phrase so colloquial as to be both strange and daring,12 whose abrupt pattern we can see, in the gentlest and tenderest of passages, pass swiftly by like an arrow or turn back in lovely, broken lines.
It is these obsolete forms drawn from the life of the past itself which we go to visit in the work of Racine as in some ancient yet still intact citadel. Before them we feel the same emotion as before those architectural forms, likewise suppressed, which we can now admire only in the rare and magnificent examples of them bequeathed to us by the past which fashioned them: such as old town walls, keeps and towers, or the baptisteries of churches; such as, next to the cloister, or beneath the charnel-house of the Aître, the little burial ground where, beneath its butterflies and its flowers, the funerary Fountain and the Lantern of the Dead stand forgotten in the sun.
Furthermore, it is not only the phrases themselves that trace for us the forms of the ancient soul. Between the phrases – I am thinking of those books of antiquity which were originally recited, – in the interval which separates them, there is still contained today, as in some inviolate hypogeum, filling their interstices, a silence many centuries old.
Often, in St Luke’s Gospel, when I come upon the ‘colons’ which punctuate it before each of the almost canticle-like passages with which it is strewn,13 I have heard the silence of the worshipper who has just stopped from reading out loud so as to intone the verses following,14 like a psalm reminding him of the older psalms in the Bible.
This silence still filled the pause in the sentence which, having been split into two so as to enclose it, had preserved its shape; and more than once, as I was reading, it brought to me the scent of a rose which the breeze entering by the open window had spread through the upper room where the Gathering was being held and which had not evaporated in almost two thousand years.
The Divine Comedy or the plays of Shakespeare also give one an impression of contemplating something of the past, inserted into the present moment; that very uplifting impression which makes certain ‘days of reading’ resemble days spent strolling in Venice, on the Piazzetta for example, where before you, in their half unreal colours of objects at once a few paces and many centuries distant, you have the twin columns of pink and grey granite bearing on their capitals, the one the lion of St Mark and the other St Theodore trampling on the crocodile; these two beautiful and slender foreigners came once from the East, across the sea that is breaking at their feet; uncomprehending of the remarks exchanged around them, they continue to live out their twelfth-century days amidst the crowds of today, on that public square where, close beside you, there still gleams their remote and distracted smile.
Notes
- I have to admit that a certain use of the imperfect indicative – that cruel tense which portrays life to us as something both ephemeral and passive, and which, in the very act of retracing our actions, reduces them to an illusion, annihilating them in the past without, unlike the perfect, leaving us with the consolation of activity – has remained for me an inexhaustible source of mysterious sadness. Even today I can have been reflecting calmly on death for hours on end; but I only have to open a volume of Sainte-Beuve’s Lundis and light, for example, upon these words of Lamartine’s (they concern Mme d’Albany). ‘Nothing about her at that time recalled [rappelait] … She was [c’était] a small woman whose figure had somewhat collapsed beneath her weight and lost, etc.,’ to feel myself at once invaded by the profoundest melancholy. In novels the author’s intention of making us suffer is so obvious that we brace ourselves rather better.
- One can try this, in a roundabout way, with books which are not pure imagination but have a substratum of history. Balzac, for example, whose work is in a sense impure, being a mixture of thought and of a reality insufficiently transformed, sometimes lends himself particularly well to being read in this way. He has at any rate found the most admirable of ‘historical readers’ in M. Albert Sorel, who has written matchless essays on Une Ténébreuse affaire and L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine. How well reading, indeed, an enjoyment at once ardent and sedate, seems to suit M. Sorel, with his inquiring spirit and his calm, powerful body, reading, in the course of which the countless sensations of poetry and of a vague contentment that wing cheerfully up from the depths of our well-being come to create a pleasure as sweet and as golden as honey around the reader’s reverie. It is not only with semi-historical works, either, that M. Sorel has perfected this art of encompassing so many powerful and original reflections within a single reading. I shall always remember – and with such gratitude – that my study of The Bible of Amiens was the subject of perhaps the most powerful pages he has ever written.
- In point of fact this sentence is not to be found in Le Capitaine Fracasse, at least in this form. Instead of ‘so it appears from the Odyssey of Homerus, the Grecian poet,’ we have simply ‘according to Homerus’. But since the expressions ‘it appears from Homerus’ and ‘it appears from the Odyssey’, to be found elsewhere in the book, gave me the same degree of delight, I have permitted myself, so that the example might be more striking for my readers, to fuse all these beauties into one, now that, truth to tell, I no longer feel a religious veneration for them. Elsewhere in Le Capitaine Fracasse, Homerus is again described as a Grecian poet, and I do not doubt but that this too enchanted me.
All the same I am no longer capable of recovering these forgotten joys with sufficient accuracy to be sure that I have not gone too far and overstepped the mark in amassing so many wonderful things in a single sentence! I do not think so, however. And I reflect to my regret that the exhilaration with which I used to repeat that sentence from Le Capitaine Fracasse to the irises and the periwinkles overhanging the riverbank, as I trod the gravel of the path, would have been more delightful still had I been able to find in a single sentence of Gautier’s so many of the charms which my own artifice
