When the last page had been read, the book was finished. With a deep sigh I had to halt the frantic racing of my eyes and of my voice, which had followed after my eyes without making a sound, stopping only to catch its breath. Then, to give the turmoil within me (unleashed too long to be able to calm down on its own) other movements to occupy itself with, I would stand up and walk back and forth next to my bed, my eyes still fixed on a point which one would have sought in vain within the room, or outside the room either, for it was located at a distance of the soul and nowhere else – one of those distances that cannot be measured in feet or miles like other distances, and that moreover it is impossible to confuse with the other kind of distance when you look at the ‘faraway’ eyes of someone whose thoughts are ‘elsewhere’.
And now what? Is that all there was to the book? These beings to whom we had given more of our attention and affection than we give to the people in our life, not always daring to admit the extent to which we loved them, so that we even feigned boredom or closed the book with pretended indifference when our parents came upon us while we were reading and seemed to smile at our emotion; these people for whom we had panted and sobbed – we would never see them again, never learn anything more about them.
Already, for a few pages in a cruel ‘Epilogue’, the author had taken care to ‘trail off’, leaving more and more space between the characters with an indifference simply unbelievable to anyone who knew the interest with which he had followed them, step by step, until that point.
What these people did with every hour of their lives was told to us and then, suddenly: ‘Twenty years after these events, you might have met an old man on the streets of Fougères, his back not yet bent by age…’3 Having spent two volumes letting us glimpse the delightful possibilities of a certain marriage, having frightened us and then delighted us with every obstacle encountered and then overcome, the author let us learn from a passing comment by a secondary character that the marriage had taken place, we don’t know exactly when or how – this astonishing epilogue seemed to have been written from the heights of heaven by someone who cared nothing for our transient passions, someone substituted somehow for our author.
How we wanted the book to keep going, and, if that were not possible, wanted more information about all of its characters, wanted to learn something further about their lives, and spend our own on matters not altogether foreign to the love that they inspired within us,4 whose object we had suddenly lost; how we wanted not to have loved in vain, for an hour, those beings who tomorrow will be nothing but names on a forgotten page, in a book that has nothing to do with life, and whose value we had seriously mistaken, since its fate here below, we now understand (and our parents inform us, if necessary, with a contemptuous word), was not in the least to contain the whole of the world and all of destiny, as we had thought, but simply to occupy a very narrow place on a notary’s bookshelf, between the undistinguished annals of the Illustrated Magazine of Fashion and the Geography of the Eure-et-Loir Region…
Before attempting to show, at the threshold of ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, why Reading cannot in my opinion play the dominating role in life that Ruskin assigns to it in this little work of his, I have felt obliged to make an exception for that enchanting childhood reading whose memory must remain sacred to us all. Doubtless I have shown only too well, by the length and the character of the preceding pages, what I asserted at the start: that what our childhood reading leaves behind in us is above all the image of the places and days where and when we engaged in it.
I have not escaped its sorcery: intending to speak about reading I have spoken of everything but books, because it is not of books that the reading itself has spoken to me. But maybe the memories it has given back to me, one after the other, will themselves have awakened in the reader – will have gradually led the reader, with all these delays on flowered and winding paths, to recreate in his own mind – the original psychological act called Reading, and done so with enough force to enable him now to follow, as though within himself, the various reflections which remain for me to present here.
‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ is a lecture on reading that Ruskin delivered at the Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, on 6 December 1864, to benefit a library fund at the Rusholme Institute. On December 14, he delivered a second lecture, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, on the role of women, to benefit the establishment of a school in Ancoats. ‘All through that year, 1864,’ W.G. Collingwood writes in his excellent The Life and Work of Ruskin, ‘he remained at home, except for frequent evenings with Carlyle.
And when, in December, he gave those lectures at Manchester which afterwards, as Sesame and Lilies, became his most popular work,5 we can trace his better health of mind and body in the brighter tone of his thought. We can hear the echo of Carlyle’s talk in the heroic, aristocratic, Stoic ideals, and in the insistence on the value of books and free public libraries,- Carlyle being the founder of the London Library…’
Since I want here only to discuss Ruskin’s thesis in itself, without regard to its historical origins, we might sum it up rather exactly with these words of Descartes: ‘The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the most upstanding persons of past centuries – their authors.’ Ruskin may not have known this somewhat arid reflection by the French philosopher, but in fact it can be found everywhere in Ruskin’s lecture, only it has been wrapped in an Apollonian gold with the English fogs melted into it, like the gold whose glory illuminates the landscapes of his favorite painter, Turner.
‘Granting,’ he writes, ‘that we had both the will and the sense to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power, how limited is the sphere of choice. We cannot know whom we would… We may, by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice; or put a question to a man of science, and be answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes’ talk on a cabinet minister, or have, once in our lives, the privilege of arresting the glance of a queen.
And yet these momentary chances we covet; and spend our years, and passions, and powers, in pursuit of little more than these; while, meantime, there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round us all day long,- kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! – we never go to seek it out, in those plainly furnished ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves,- never listen to a word they would say!’6 ‘You may tell me, perhaps,’ Ruskin adds, ‘that if you prefer the company of living men, it is because you can see their faces’, but he refutes that first objection and then a second; he shows that reading is precisely a conversation with men much wiser and more interesting than those we can know in person.
I have tried to show, in the notes with which I have accompanied my translation, that reading cannot be equated like this to conversation, even a conversation with the wisest of men; that the essential difference between a book and a friend is not their greater or lesser wisdom but the manner in which we communicate with them – reading, unlike conversation, consists for each of us in receiving the communication of another thought while remaining alone, or in other words, while continuing to bring into play the mental powers we have in solitude and which conversation immediately puts to flight; while remaining open to inspiration, the soul still hard at its fruitful labours upon itself.
If Ruskin had drawn the proper inferences from the other truths he states a few pages later, he would probably have come to a conclusion analogous to my own. But clearly he was not trying to get
