But what good humor, what good taste! As we willingly follow this companion so full of high spirits on his adventures; he is so likeable that everything around him becomes likeable too. After the few days he spends with Captain Lebarbier de Tinan, delayed aboard his fine vessel ‘glittering like gold’ by a storm, we are sad that he says not a word more about this amiable seaman and makes us bid him farewell forever without telling us what became of him.14 We can tell perfectly well that the cheerful braggadocio, the melancholy fits too, are in his case the somewhat bohemian habits of the journalist.
But we pass over all of these faults, we do what he wants, we are entertained when he comes home soaked to the skin and dying of hunger and sleeplessness, and we are sad when he lists with a newspaper feuilletonist’s sadness the names of the men of his generation who have died before their time.
I was saying about him that his sentences sketch out his features, but when he least suspects it: for when words are chosen not by our mind pursuing its innermost affinities but by our desire to portray ourselves, then they will represent that desire, not our self. Fromentin, or Musset, despite all their gifts, left very second-rate portraits of themselves to posterity precisely because a portrait is what they wanted to leave; even so, they still interest us greatly, because their failure is instructive.
So even when a book is not the mirror of a strong individual personality, it still reflects interesting intellectual defects. Bent over a book by Fromentin or one by Musset, we perceive at the core of the former how limited and foolish ‘distinction’ is, and at the core of the latter the emptiness of eloquence.
If the taste for books grows with intelligence, its dangers, as we have seen, decrease with intelligence. An original mind knows how to subordinate reading to its own individual activity. For such a mind, reading is nothing more than the noblest of distractions, and above all the most ennobling, because only reading and knowledge can teach us the ‘good manners’ of the mind.
We can develop the strength of our sensibility and our intelligence only within ourselves, in the depths of our inner life, but it is through the contact with other minds which constitutes reading that our minds are ‘fashioned.’ Literary men remain, despite everything, the intellectual aristocracy, and not to know a certain book, a certain fact about the world of literature, will always be, even in a man of genius, a sign of intellectual commonness. Distinction and nobility – in the realm of the mind as well – consist in a sort of freemasonry of secret signs, and in having inherited certain traditions.15
In their taste for and enjoyment of reading, great writers are very quickly drawn to the classic books. Even those who seemed most ‘romantic’ to their contemporaries read hardly anything but the ‘classics’. When Victor Hugo speaks in conversation about his reading, the names which come up the most often are Molière, Horace, Ovid, Regnard. Alphonse Daudet, the least bookish of writers, whose work is so full of modernity and vitality that it seems to have rejected the entire classical heritage, has ceaselessly read, quoted, and commented on Pascal, Montaigne, Diderot, Tacitus.16
One might almost go so far as to say – reviving, perhaps, with this in any case quite partial interpretation, the old distinction between Classic and Romantic – that it is the public (the intelligent public, of course) who are romantic, while the masters (even the masters called romantic, the masters preferred by the romantic public) are classical. (This remark can be extended to all the arts.
The public goes to hear the music of Vincent d’Indy; Vincent d’Indy studies his Monsigny.17 The public goes to see Vuillard and Denis exhibits while Vuillard and Denis go to the Louvre.) This results, no doubt, from the fact that contemporary ideas, which original writers and artists make accessible and desirable to the public, are to a certain extent so much a part of them that a different idea is more diverting. This different idea demands of them, in order for them to approach it, more effort, and thus also gives them more pleasure; we always like to go outside ourselves a little, to travel, when we read.
But there is another reason to which, in conclusion, I would like to attribute this predilection that great minds have for older works.18 Namely, that they contain more than just the beauty which the spirit that created them put into them. Contemporary works have that, but older works have received another, still more moving beauty from the fact that their very material, I mean the language in which they were written, is like a mirror held up to life.
A little of the happiness we feel in walking around a city like Beaune, which preserves intact its fifteenth-century hospital complete with well, wash-house, vault of painted and paneled timber, the roof with high gables pierced by dormer windows and crowned with delicate spikes of hammered iron – everything there that the age left behind, so to speak, when it disappeared; all the things that must have belonged to that age alone, since none of the ages that followed witnessed the birth of anything like them – we feel a little of that happiness again when we wander in a tragedy by Racine or a volume by Saint-Simon. For they contain all the beautiful, obsolete forms of language which preserve the memory of usages and ways of feeling that no longer exist, enduring traces of a past unlike anything in the present, whose colours only time, in passing over them, has been able to enhance.
A tragedy by Racine, a volume of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, is like those beautiful things which are made no longer. The language in which they were cast by the great artists, with a freedom that makes their sweetness shine and their native force stand out, moves us like the sight of certain kinds of marble, no longer in use today but used often by the workmen of the past.
There is no question that the stone in these old buildings has faithfully preserved the sculptor’s thought, but the sculptor has also preserved for us the stone of a type unknown today, clothed it in all the colours he knew how to draw from it, bring out, and harmonise.
It is likewise the living syntax of seventeenth-century France – and in it vanished customs and turns of thought – that we love to find in Racine’s poetry. The forms themselves of this syntax, laid bare, honoured, embellished by a chisel as sturdy as it is delicate, are what move us in his turns of phrase, colloquial to the point of strangeness and daring,19 whose abrupt pattern we see, in the sweetest and most touching passages, flash by like an arrow or turn back in beautiful broken lines.
It is these bygone forms, taken from the very life of the past, that we go to see in the works of Racine, as though in an ancient city preserved intact. We feel the same emotion before these forms of language as we feel before equally obsolete forms of architecture; them, too, we can admire only in the rare and magnificent examples that the past which made them has bequeathed to us: the old city walls, the castle keeps, the towers, the baptisteries of the churches; the little cemetery, near the cloister or under the ossuary Atrium, in which rest forgotten, in the sun, beneath its butterflies and its flowers, the funerary Fountain and the Lantern of the Dead.
Furthermore, it is not only the sentences and phrases which sketch out before our eyes the olden shapes of the soul. Between the phrases – I am thinking here of the very old books, which were originally read out loud – in the intervals which separate them, there remains, even now, as in an undefiled hypogeum, filling up all the interstices, a silence many centuries old.
Often, in the Gospel of St Luke, coming across the two dots of ink which interrupt it before each of the almost song-like passages with which it is strewn,20 I have heard the silence of the worshipper who has just stopped reading out loud in order to intone the verses that follow21 like a psalm that reminds him of the oldest psalms in the Bible.
This silence still fills the pause in the sentence which, having divided itself in two to enclose that silence, preserved its shape; more than once, while I read, it carried to me the scent of a rose which the breeze coming in through the open window had spread throughout the upper chamber that held the Assembly, a scent which has not dispersed for seventeen hundred years.
How many times, in the Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare, have I had the impression of coming face to face with a little of the past inserted into an hour of the present – the same dreamlike impression you have in Venice, on the Piazzetta, before the two grey and pink granite columns which bear atop their Greek capitals the Lion of St Mark on one, Saint Theodore treading upon the crocodile on the other: two handsome foreigners from the East, come from across the same sea
