I
It would seem, Miguel, that your audience will have to allow you,
if only just for once, to talk aloud to yourself, to unburden your
heart.--Do it now, and then it will be all the easier to do it again
some other day.--Writing for the public is a harsh kind of slavery.
Doubtless you willed it. You chose to be a writer and you must
patiently bear the consequences of your choice. But are we as free to
choose our vocation as we think we are?
You crave retirement, tranquillity and silence in order that you may
devote yourself to some solid and unhurried task, remote from the
turmoil that deafens the ear with its noise and blinds the eye with its
dust. Your heart with its yearning for solitude turns longingly towards
those men of old who dedicated themselves to works that endure, far
from the traffic of the world with its daily contentions and anxieties.
You yearn for the classic, the eternally classic. But the vertigo of
life sweeps you along and you find yourself involved in the burning
dissensions of your contemporaries. You cannot live among the dead; you
have to live among the living.
And yet, dear Miguel, what a source of consolation and strength is this
intercourse with the glorious dead, whose works never die! How the soul
is refreshed by the vivifying streams that flow from those immortal
spirits who live their deepest lives in us--Homer, Plato, Virgil, St.
Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, and so many
others!
Yes, there is no doubt about it--this insane eagerness to know what
those round about us are saying or repeating hinders us from following
the progress of the human soul as it reveals itself in its immortal
sons, those erect pillars that are landmarks for all time. What does
it matter to you, tell me, what your neighbour is clamouring about?
You are not going to follow the example of those whose time and soul
are so absorbed in listening to all the superficialities of their
contemporaries that they have no time left to enjoy the enduring legacy
of humanity. This form of modernity serves only to enfeeble both men
and peoples. Distrust novelties, Miguel, and be sure that there is
nothing more novel than what is for ever. Homer and Shakespeare are
more modern than most of the living writers who are accounted most
modern. You will learn more from Plato than from the author of the
latest volume in Alcan’s Library of Modern Philosophy. The modern is
the fashionable and you must fly from all fashions.
But it is useless--I know it--useless. I can see that the voices round
about you, the ardent voices of the living, have caught your ear,
perhaps in spite of yourself. It is the voice of humanity, and you are
and ought to be before all else a man. Do you remember what your dead
friend Coleridge, the wonderful Coleridge, says in his _Biographia
Literaria_ about his contemporaries? I will repeat it to you again:
“The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another
race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and
submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a
contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded
by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners,
possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a
man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans his hope.
The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To
recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt
due to one who exists to receive it.”
Consider this same Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote these words and
tell me if the memory of this man who died many years before you were
born can give you that glow which the recollection of one still living
gives you. And nevertheless, you will say, how sweet and peaceful it is
to converse with those who once were and to-day sleep in the lap of the
teeming earth.
* * * * *
You have dreamed of producing a _magnum opus_ that would endure, and
you find yourself condemned to the fragmentary and fugitive labour of
journalism. Must you repine at that? We never know, believe me, when we
have succeeded best.
And remember that the slowly and carefully elaborated work of the
solitary author, holding himself aloof from all collaboration with his
public, is perhaps after all only the monument of his own egoism.
Collaboration with the public, I say. For the public collaborates more
or less ostensibly in the work of every publicist, sometimes with
applause, sometimes with censure. I know that you have been influenced
in your work by the letters which from time to time you receive from
unknown readers, especially from those in America, and which have
provided you with helpful notes and suggestions. But in addition to
this, you are influenced, perhaps without knowing it, by the reaction
of your readers, of those who follow your work, and this reaction
affects what you write, forcing you sometimes to adapt yourself to your
readers’ point of view, sometimes to combat it and endeavour to make it
conform to yours.
It is said that some of the greatest dramas, among others those of
Shakespeare, have been actually created on the stage, in collaboration
with the public, having been modified at every representation according
to the way in which the public received them. And do you not think that
the successive works of a productive author are not very often merely
successive editions, more or less revised, of one and the same work?
Every author who writes much repeats himself much; the more original
he is and the more he draws from his own depths instead of merely
echoing what he hears round about him, the more he repeats himself.
The greatest geniuses have been men of few and simple ideas expressed
with vigour and efficacy, but expressed also with more uniformity and
continuity than those of writers of only average ability. There have
been men whose greatness has been owing to the fact that they were
men of one idea, men who were simply an idea incarnate. By dint of
living one single but noble and fruitful idea, they have succeeded in
presenting it to us in all its forms. Variety, multiplicity of points
of view, almost always indicates a certain spiritual weakness. But I
do not need to convince you of this, for I know how much you admire
Athanasius for being a man of one idea.
Yes, your own works, in spite of their apparent variety--novels,
commentaries, essays, poems--are, if you consider it carefully, simply
the continuous development in multiple forms of but one and the same
fundamental idea. And in thus seeking to communicate this central
thought of yours, you go on condensing it more and more and discovering
new forms of expression for it, until perhaps some day you will hit
upon the most adequate, the most precise form. And, believe me, a
writer achieves a lasting place when he has discovered the permanent
form of any idea, when he has succeeded in giving it its definitive
body. And in your effort to discover this, who shall say that this
writing of fugitive and fragmentary pieces is not as useful as any
other way of search? You know that very often one thinks more when
talking than when meditating.
Do you remember that experience which occurred to you one afternoon
when you were walking with your friend Vincent, that wise and subtle
spirit, so unhappily cut off in his prime? You were arguing as usual;
his subtle objections forced you to concentrate your mind, and after
a quick reply to one of his questions, almost before the words were
out of your mouth, you exclaimed delightedly: “How right that is! how
exact! how precise!” And when he showed surprise that you should be
astonished by one of your own remarks, you said: “The fact is, it is
as new to me as it is to you. Doubtless the solution was already there
in my mind, but it was dim and confused. I myself was not conscious of
its being there. It was only in the effort to meet your objections that
it took shape and disclosed itself to me. And so you see it was really
as new to me as to you.”
And so it often happens. Thought depends upon language, for we think
with words, and language is a social thing. Language is conversation.
And thought itself is therefore social. The only clear thought is
transmissible thought. If anyone tells you that he sees a thing quite
clearly but that he does not know how to communicate it, you may
reply that he cannot be sure whether he sees it clearly or not. To
every writer it has happened more than once that he has realized the
absurdity or obscurity of his own thought only after he has seen it in
print.
Be assured, then, that you meditate more and meditate better when you
are writing things like this letter that you are now addressing to
yourself than when you shut yourself up in your room to devote yourself
to what is called meditation and what is really only mind-wandering.
The necessity of giving your thought transmissible expression is that
which makes it a living and effective process. It is when your pen is
in your hand that things occur to you most readily, and the reason is
because then you are not thinking for yourself but thinking for others.
Thinking for oneself is not properly thinking--it is losing oneself
in vague reveries, like a man on the verge of sleep idly watching the
drift of his cigar-smoke. To think is to think for others; thinking is
a social function.
You have sometimes heard it said that Paul of Tarsus used to draw
inspiration from his own words, that these words provoked ideas, and
that in his epistles it is possible to follow this process of ideation
by means of verbal associations. And of Augustine of Hippo--one of
the immortal pillars, like Paul, Bernard and Martin Luther, of the
Christianity of the heart--it has been said that he developed his theme
by antitheses, that is to say rhetorically. And both Paul and Augustine
were men of burning passion, not solitary contemplatives, but active
fighters.
They consider you to be an egotist because you often refer to
yourself--you are doing it now in this soliloquy--and talk about
yourself, but the truth is that this self of yours, in so far as you
are a writer, is something that belongs to all the world--you stand
in the middle of the street, hailed by everybody and answering back.
You would be not merely an egotist but a miserable egoist if you shut
yourself up in the tower of ivory, far from your fellows, and worked
day after day upon some minute and exquisite jewel. You work in the
open air, in the public gaze, and from time to time, in order to keep
your work clean, you blow away the dust of the turmoil that has settled
upon it.
Enough. Let us talk no more together, you and I, this hidden and
intimate self and this apparent and public self. Are they really two?
Are you anything else but a writer? Or rather, this self that is not
the publicist, of what worth is it?