Youth and Egolatry Part 11

Diogenes Laertius tells us that when Zeno consulted the oracle as to what he should do in order to attain happiness in life, the deity replied that he should a.s.similate himself with the dead. Having understood, he applied himself exclusively to the study of books.

Thus speaks Laertius, in the translation of Don Jose Ortiz y Sanz. I confess that I should not have understood the oracle. However, without consulting any oracle, I have devoted myself for some time to reading books, whether ancient and modern, both out of curiosity and in order to learn something of life.

CERVANTES, SHAKESPEARE, MOLIeRE

For a long time, I thought that Shakespeare was a writer who was unique and different from all others. It seemed to me that the difference between him and other writers was one of quality rather than of quant.i.ty. I felt that, as a man, Shakespeare was of a different kind of humanity; but I do not think so now. Shakespeare is no more the quintessence of the world's literature than Plato and Kant are the quintessence of universal philosophy. I once admired the philosophy and characters of the author of Hamlet; when I read him today, what most impresses me is his rhetoric, and, above all, his high spirit.

Cervantes is not very sympathetic to me. He is tainted with the perfidy of the man who has made a pact with the enemy (with the Church, the aristocracy, with those in power), and then conceals the fact.

Philosophically, in spite of his enthusiasm for the Renaissance, he appears vulgar and pedestrian to me, although he towers above all his contemporaries on account of the success of a single invention, that of Don Quixote and Sancho, which is to literature what the discovery of Newton was to Physics.

As for Moliere, he is a poor fellow, who never attains the exuberance of Shakespeare, nor the invention that immortalizes Cervantes. But his taste is better than Shakespeare's and he is more social, more modern than Cervantes. The half-century or more that separates the work of Cervantes from that of Moliere, is not sufficient to explain this modernity. Between the Spain of _Quixote_ and the France of _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, lies something deeper than time. Descartes and Ga.s.sendi had lived in France, while, on the other hand, the seed of Saint Ignatius Loyola lay germinating in the Spain of Cervantes.

THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS

A French journalist who visited my house during the summer, remarked:

"The ideas were great in the French Revolution; it was not the men." I replied: "I believe that the men of the French Revolution were great, but not the ideas."

Of all the philosophical literature of the pre-revolutionary period, what remains today?

What books exert influence? In France, excerpts from Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau are still read in the schools, but outside of France, they are read nowhere.

Only an extraordinary person would go away for the summer with Montesquieu's _Esprit des Lois_, or Jean Jacques Rousseau's _Emile_ in his grip. Montesquieu is demonstration of the fact that a book cannot live entirely by virtue of correctness of style.

Of all the writers who enjoyed such fame in the eighteenth century, the only one who will bear reading today is Voltaire--the Voltaire of the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ and of the novels.

Diderot, whom the French consider a great man, is of no interest whatsoever to the modern mind, at least to the mind which is not French.

He is almost as dull as Rousseau. _La Religieuse_ is an utterly false little book. Some years ago I loaned a copy to a young lady who had just come from a convent. "I have never seen anything like this,"

she said to me. "It is a fantasy with no relation to the truth." That was my idea. _Jacques, le fataliste_ is tiresome; _Le Neveu de Rameau_ gives at first the impression that it is going to amount to something, to something powerful such as the _Satiricon_ of Petronius, or _El Buscon_ of Quevedo; but at the end, it is nothing.

The only writer of the pre-revolutionary period who can be read today with any pleasure--and this, perhaps, is because he does not attempt anything--is Chamfort. His characters and anecdotes are sufficiently highly flavoured to defy the action of time.

THE ROMANTICISTS

_Goethe_

If a militia of genius should be formed on Parna.s.sus, Goethe would be the drum-major. He is so great, so majestic, so serene, so full of talent, so abounding in virtue, and yet, so antipathetic!

_Chateaubriand_

A skin of Lacrymae Christi that has turned sour. At times the good Viscount drops mola.s.ses into the skin to take away the taste of vinegar; at other times, he drops in more vinegar to take away the sweet taste of the mola.s.ses. He is both moth-eaten and sublime.

_Victor Hugo_

Victor Hugo, the most talented of rhetoricians! Victor Hugo, the most exquisite of vulgarians! Victor Hugo--mere common sense dressed up as art.

_Stendhal_

The inventor of a psychological automaton moved by clock work.

_Balzac_

A nightmare, a dream produced by indigestion, a chill, rare acuteness, equal obtuseness, a delirium of splendours, cheap hardware, of pretence and bad taste. Because of his ugliness, because of his genius, because of his immorality, the Danton of printers' ink.

_Poe_

A mysterious sphinx who makes one tremble with lynx-like eyes, the goldsmith of magical wonders.

_d.i.c.kens_

At once a mystic and a sad clown. The Saint Vincent de Paul of the loosened string, the Saint Francis of a.s.sisi of the London Streets.

Everything is gesticulation, and the gesticulations are ambiguous. When we think he is going to weep, he laughs; when we think he is going to laugh, he cries. A remarkable genius who does everything he can to make himself appear puny, yet who is, beyond doubt, very great.

_Larra_ [Footnote: A Spanish poet and satirist (1809-37), famous under the pseudonym of Figaro. He committed suicide. The poet Zorrilla first came into prominence through some verses read at his tomb.]

A small, trained tiger shut up in a tiny cage. He has all the tricks of a cat; he mews like one, he lets you stroke his back, and there are times when his fiercer instincts show in his eyes. Then you realize that he is thinking: "How I should love to eat you up!"

THE NATURALISTS

_Flaubert_

Flaubert is a heavy-footed animal. It is plain that he is a Norman. All his work has great specific gravity. He disgusts me. One of Flaubert's master strokes was the conception of the character of Homais, the apothecary, in _Madame Bovary_. I cannot see, however, that Homais is any more stupid than Flaubert himself, and he may even be less so.

_The Giants_

The good Zola, vigorous, dull and perspiring, dubbed his contemporaries, the French naturalistic novelists, "Giants." What an imagination was possessed by Zola!

These "Giants" were none other than the Goncourts, whose insignificance approached at times imbecility, and in addition, Alphonse Daudet, with the air of a cheap comedian and an armful of mediocre books--a truly French diet, feeble, but well seasoned. These poor Giants, of whom Zola would talk, have become so weak and shrunken with time, that n.o.body is able any longer to make them out, even as dwarfs.