Part 12
The greatest thing that there is among men is a poet, a lyric poet, that is to say a real poet. A poet is a man who keeps no secrets from God in his heart, and who, in singing his griefs, his fears, his hopes and his memories, purifies and purges them from all falsehood. His songs are your songs, are my songs.
Have you ever heard any deeper, any more intimate, any more enduring poetry than that of the Psalms? And the Psalms are meant for singing alone. I know that they are sung by crowds, assembled together under the same roof in religious services; but in singing them the crowd ceases to be a crowd. In singing the Psalms, each one withdraws into himself and the voices of others echo in his ears simply as the consonance and reinforcement of his own voice.
And I observe this difference between a crowd assembled together to sing the Psalms and a crowd assembled to see a drama or to hear an orator: it is that the former is a real society, a company of living souls, in which each one exists and subsists by himself, while the other is a formless mass and each one of those who compose it no more than a fragment of the human herd.
I have never felt any desire to move a crowd, to exercise influence upon a mass of people--who lose their personality in being massed together--and on the other hand I have always felt a furious desire to perturb the heart of each individual man, to exercise an influence upon each one of my brothers in humanity. Whenever I have spoken in public I have almost always succeeded in employing a kind of lyrical oratory, and I have endeavoured to force upon myself the illusion that I was speaking to only one of my hearers, to any one, no matter which, to each one, not to all of them _en masse_.
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We men are impenetrable. Spirits, like solid bodies, can only communicate with one another by the contact of surfaces, not by penetrating one another, still less by fusing together.
You have heard me say a thousand times that most spirits seem to me like crustaceans, with the bone outside and the flesh inside. And when in some book that I have forgotten I read what a painful and terrible thing it would be if the human spirit were to be incarnated in a crab and had to make use of the crab’s senses, organs and members, I said to myself: “This is what actually happens; we are all unfortunate crabs, shut up in hard shells.”
And the poet is he whose flesh emerges from the shell, whose soul oozes forth. And when, in our hours of anguish or joy, our soul oozes forth, we are all of us poets.
And that is why I believe that it is necessary to agitate the masses, to shake men and winnow them as in a sieve, to throw against one another, in order to see if in this way their shells will not break and their spirits flow forth, whether they will not mingle and unite with one another, and whether the real collective spirit, the soul of humanity, may not thus be welded together.
But the sad thing is, if we are to go by past experience, that all these mutual rubbings and clashings, far from breaking the shells, harden, thicken and enlarge them. They are like corns that grow larger and stronger with rubbing. Although perhaps it is that the clashes are not violent enough. And in any case it must be clashing, not rubbing. I do not like to rub against people but to clash against them; I do not like to approach people obliquely and glance off them at a tangent, but to meet them frontally, and if possible split them in two. It is the best service I can do them. And there is no better preparation for this task than solitude.
It is very sad that we have to communicate with one another by touching, at most by rubbing, through the medium of the hard shells that isolate us from one another. And I am convinced that this hard shell becomes weaker and more delicate, in solitude, until it changes into the most tenuous membrane which permits of the action of osmosis and exosmosis. And that is why I believe that it is solitude that makes men really sociable and human.
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There are two kinds of union: one by removing differences, separating the elements that differentiate from those that unite, the other by fusion, bringing these differences into agreement. If we take away from the mind of each man that which is his own, that way of looking at things that is peculiar to him, everything that he takes care to hide for fear people should think him mad, we are left with that which he has in common with everyone else, and this common element gives us that wretched thing that is called common sense and which is nothing more than the abstract of the practical intelligence. But if we fuse into one the differing judgments of people, with all that they jealously preserve, and bring their caprices, their oddities, their singularities into agreement, we shall have human sense, which, in those who are rich in it, is not common but private sense.
The best that occurs to men is that which occurs to them when they are alone, that which they dare not confess, not only not to their neighbour but very often not even to themselves, that which they fly from, that which they imprison within themselves while it is in a state of pure thought and before it can flower into words. And the solitary is usually daring enough to express this, to allow it to flower, and so it comes about that he speaks that which others think in solitude by themselves and which nobody dares to publish. The solitary thinks everything aloud, and surprises others by saying that which they think beneath their breath, while they seek to deceive one another by pretending to make them believe that they are thinking something else, but without anybody believing them.
All this will help you to deduce for yourself in what way and to what extent solitude is the great school of sociability, and how right it is that we should sometimes withdraw ourselves from men in order that we may the better serve them.
INTELLECTUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. _Hamlet_, Act I, Scene V.
For some days he had been spiritually restless. His sterile mind flitted hither and thither like a butterfly. Nothing succeeded in interesting him. He picked up a book, read two or three pages and then had to close it again, unable to control his wandering attention. He tried to write, but half of the sheets that he wrote he tore up. And yet he had never enjoyed better health, never felt the blood coursing more vigorously through his veins, or the heart and lungs working in better unison. At the same time he had a premonition of something strong and mature within himself striving to come to birth; he felt that he was on the verge of bringing forth thoughts brimful of vitality and splendour. But something, a kind of solemn calm, against which he contended in vain, encompassed and paralysed him. It was no doubt sheer insensibility in him not to wait in peace for the grace of the Spirit to visit him but to seek to force it with violence.
At last, one afternoon, when the light of the setting sun was pouring upon the wide balcony of his cell-like room, he shut himself up in it, with its dumb books, with all its familiar objects the sight of which was always grateful to him. It was like shutting himself up within himself, or even better than that, for this wonted ambience served him as a means of communion with the world. That square glass inkstand, those fat pen-holders, that carpet, that stout leather arm-chair in which his body rested while his mind went galloping away, those rough plain chairs, those rows of books against the white naked walls: all these things were a kind of prolongation of his spirit and at the same time they were like arms which the world stretched out to enfold him in. They belonged to him and yet they belonged also to the world; they were himself and at the same they were the not-himself. They would not deceive him, no. He had touched them once and a thousand times and every touch had linked itself with all the other touches, until at last these things of humble use had become invested with a kind of soul made up of the outpourings of spirit and memories.
He had books that were like lovers, grateful, remembering, for whenever he opened them at random they opened themselves of their own accord at the same place, always offering him the same passage, the choicest, the most intense, the most life-giving that they had to offer. And when he read the passage over again, the intimate ambience of the peaceful room yielded up the memory of all the other fugitive moments when he had read it before, and his soul vibrated across the gulf of time until its vibrations were lost in that remoteness of the past where consciousness loses itself too.
From the balcony of his room, across red roofs stained here and there with the green of lichen, he could just glimpse the clouds glowing in the sunset light. And nearer at hand, along the eaves of the roof opposite, the white stone-crop blossomed, its tiny flowerets nourishing their life upon the moist earthy sediment washed down by the rain from the sun-baked clay tiles and deposited in the guttering. In summer, pigeons flew down from the neighbouring belfry to bill and coo upon the roof, picking the seeds of the stone-crop at its edge, while the dark swifts skimmed through the air above. Sometimes cats crept stealthily with sinuous movement across the tiles. Upon this roof too his eyes had often rested; the little wild garden in the gutter, the pigeons, the swifts, the cats, these too belonged to him and at the same time to the world; and often while he had held them in his gaze his mind had been intent upon his innermost thoughts.
He shut himself up there in his study, like an oyster in its shell. He untethered his mind, letting it roam at will, without spur or bridle. For a time it wandered up and down, plucking at passing ideas, ranging over the backs of the books and divining famous names and titles of renown. Then it collected itself and withdrew into the body that it animated and made use of, and presently the arm of this body reached out for a sheet of paper and the eyes glanced over it.
It was the strident manifesto that had been so much talked about; it was the famous composition into which he, he himself, who was now sitting at ease in his cow-hide arm-chair, had emptied his spirit. He began to read it, and as he read it a strange disquiet invaded him. No, that was not his, that was not what he had thought and believed, that was not what he had written. And yet there could be no doubt about it. That, that which now seemed so strange to him, he had written that, and it had increased his fame. He read it over again.
No, we do not communicate what we want to communicate, he reflected. No sooner does a thought incarnate itself in words and issue forth into the world than it belongs to someone not ourself, or rather it belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody. The flesh with which language clothes itself is communal and external; it wizens up thought, it imprisons it and even reverses and falsifies it.
It was a singular and disturbing effect that was produced in him by reading himself as if he were a stranger, as if his writing had been written by someone else. This effect of the duplication of his personality reminded him of a former experience of self-duplication which he never recalled without a shudder. Once when gazing at the reflection of his own gaze in a mirror he had the sensation of seeing himself as someone else; he regarded himself as an unsubstantial shadow, as an impalpable phantom, and this alarmed him to such a degree that he called to himself softly by his own name. And his voice sounded to him as if it were the voice of another, a voice which came forth out of space, out of the invisible, out of impenetrable mystery. He cleared his throat, touched himself, felt the quickened beating of his heart. He had never forgotten that unforgettable experience.
His present feeling was not the same, but it had something that resembled it. Had he written that? Was he the same person as the man who had written that? Did he contain within himself more than one person? Might it not be that he carried within him a whole legion of souls sleeping one below another? Were not all his ancestors sleeping somewhere in the limbo of his brain? Did others see him as he saw himself, or did they see him quite differently, and was he always actually doing and saying that which he thought he was?
This last idea, an absurd and extravagant idea, had obsessed him for some time past and it caused him anguish, for he said to himself: This is madness, this is sheer madness.
Only too often, in fact, as he walked quietly along the street, it had occurred to him to think something like this: “What if, instead of walking quietly and soberly, I were really pirouetting or making ridiculous contortions or behaving improperly? This hostility which I have remarked in certain of my acquaintance, may it not have arisen because I have said things to them which I am unaware of having said, or because when I thought I was offering them my hand I was in fact making some impudent or contemptuous gesture? When I imagine myself to be saying one thing, may it not be they hear something very different or perhaps contrary?”
This absurd obsession disquieted him, irritated him, made him doubt the sanity and vigour of his reason, and he had to exercise all the power of autosuggestion at his command to overcome it.
With a vigorous effort he threw off this obstinate vagary of his mind, but only to return to the question of the strangeness of what he had written.
Formerly, a long time ago, he had been a convinced determinist, unable to tolerate even the mention of free will, so irrational did the supposition of it seem to him. But later on, after further examination of the question, his inflexible determinist faith had broken down; and now, at the time at which we discover him, seated in his arm-chair in his study, he has put this question of determinism and free will away into the lumber-room of metaphysics from which he rarely takes it out. He believes now that science has not succeeded in putting this question in its true light, but that it always involves it in a _petitio principii_. But what he really does feel--he feels rather than thinks it--is that however free a man may be within himself, in so far as he has to exteriorize and manifest himself, to speak or to act, to communicate with his fellows, in so far as he has to avail himself of his body and of the bodies of others, he remains bound by the rigid laws of these bodies, he is a slave. My acts--he thinks--are never exclusively mine: if I speak I have to make use of air that is not mine in order to produce my voice; neither are my vocal cords, strictly speaking, mine; nor is the language mine which I must use if I wish to make myself understood; and the case is the same if I write, if I strike a blow, if I kiss, if I fight. And he asks himself in conclusion: “Am I myself really mine?” And so the tormenting obsession buzzes round him again.
There is something which we have incorporated and made our own and there is much that is completely alien to us; and between these two extreme terms everything is partly ours and partly not ours. Our life is a continual combat between our spirit which seeks to make itself master of the world, to make the world its own, to make the world it, and the world which in its turn seeks to possess itself of our spirit, to make our spirit its own. I wish to make the world mine--our man thinks--to make it myself, and the world tries to make me its, to make me it; I strive to personalize it and it strives to depersonalize me. And in this tragic combat--for yes, the combat is a tragic one--I have to make use of my enemy in order to dominate him, and my enemy has to make use of me in order to dominate me. Whatever I say, write or do, it is only with the world’s help that I can say, write or do it; and thus the world at once depersonalizes my saying, writing and doing and makes them its own, and I appear to be different from what I am.
What an unhappy necessity is that of writing! What woeful constraint is that of having to talk! Between any two who talk together, language mediates, the world mediates, that which is neither one nor the other of the interlocutors mediates; they are involved in this intrusive element which, while enabling them to communicate, separates them. If it were only possible to create language in the very act of speaking our thought!...
Undoubtedly speech is a more perfect medium than writing, because it is less material: the vibrations of the air are dissipated, while the trace of the ink remains. Undoubtedly the _flatus vocis_, like everything fugitive, is richer in association, more complete in orchestration, while writing, like everything concrete, remains detached. But better still if pure thought could communicate itself by means only of those vague and fluid words upon which it floats within the soul! To make oneself understood in words or writing is to communicate the accidents, not the substance, of thought.
Our man looks at the clouds in the western sky, combed out by the unseen comb of the wind, and watches them turn to flame in the light of the setting sun. And he thinks of the substantial communion of spirits, communication by the act of spiritual presence alone. He remembered how once, on hearing some old ballad sung by a shepherd boy, the sound of which had come to him faintly through a leafy screen of grey oaks, he had trembled and felt as if he heard voices from another world, not from another world beyond this world, but from a world that lives within the world we know--voices which seemed to issue from the very heart of things, as if they were the song of the soul of the oaks, of the clouds, of the pebbles of the stream, of the earth and of the sky. Where had he heard that song before?
Who knows? Perhaps one night, when he lay asleep, the shepherd boy had passed by singing his song, and the song had lapped his dream and steeped it in the fountains of life.
Another time--he remembered--when on a journey, he had met a woman, a foreigner, who did not know his language nor did he know hers. Neither of them knew any human tongue in which they could make themselves understood, and they sat there in the railway carriage alone, opposite one another, looking and sometimes smiling at one another. Theirs was a protracted and mute conversation. When he thought kindly and tenderly of her the stranger smiled, and when a less innocent desire stirred within him the shadow of a frown crossed her brow. Perhaps they heard, without themselves knowing that they heard, the measured beating of their hearts, beating in unison while their eyes gazed at one another; but without a doubt the breath of their souls mingled together. For the soul breathes.
The soul breathes.--Why not speak in metaphors?
Our man began to think about breathing and how the air, penetrating into the cells of the lungs, aerates the blood, this inner atmosphere of our bodies. It is the material substance of the world--he thought--which circulates within us; it is the world diluted and made our own. And from this he went on to imagine a kind of spiritual aeration of our mind, and how the world of colours, forms, sounds and impressions of every kind is diluted in it.
But these are metaphors, nothing but metaphors, he said, then at once reflecting: Metaphors? and what is not metaphor? Science is built up of metaphors and language is essentially metaphorical. Matter, force, light, memory--all metaphors. When positivists, or those who consider themselves positivists, try to sweep science clean of metaphors, they sweep them away with a metaphorical broom, and so sweep the metaphors back again.
And then his mind began to play around one of his specially favourite ideas, namely the idea of the superiority of what we call imagination over the other so-called faculties of the spirit, and how the excellency of poets was greater than that of men of science and men of action.
A thousand times he had deplored the barbarous intransigence of most of those with whom he had to communicate--in accidental, not substantial, communion; that dismal lack of comprehension of every opinion which they do not themselves share; that ridiculous belief that there are ideas which one must necessarily consider absurd and which can only be professed by confused and unhinged minds. All that--he was wont to say to himself--is simply lack of imagination, incapacity to see things oneself, even momentarily, as others see them, sheer aridity of mind. How far from all that was the large spirit of the great Goethe, who was able to feel himself deist, pantheist, atheist all at the same time, whose mind embraced a profound understanding of paganism together with an equally profound understanding of Christianity! But Goethe was a poet, the poet, a true and essential poet, not a miserable didacticist or dogmatist like those who think they travel more safely the more ballast of formal logic they carry, at the expense of intelligence, and the more closely they hug the level shores of thought, moored fast to tradition and the senses.
Our man cast his eyes once more over the manifesto and said to himself: “And I have been called an intellectual! I! I who abhor intellectualism more than anybody! If they had labelled me ‘an imaginative’--well and good. But an intellectual?” And he thought of Paul of Tarsus and the pregnant sentences of his epistles.
He thought of Paul of Tarsus and his classification of men into carnal, intellectual and spiritual, for so he was pleased to translate it, or rather to interpret it. For there was a time when he had delighted in exegesis. Not scientific exegesis; not investigating and searching for the actual meaning of the writers of the sacred books; not co-ordinating them logically and trying to discover, by reference to the ideas and sentiment of the age and country in which they lived, what they really felt and thought; but taking as his starting-point the text that had been consecrated and enriched by centuries of tradition and thence launching out into free speculation. The moment that Paul of Tarsus gave his epistles to the world they ceased to be his, they belonged to the world, they were part of the common stock, of the patrimony, of humanity, and it was possible for him to understand them and feel them altogether differently from the way in which the Apostle himself had felt and understood them. That which others did to his writings when they read them and commented upon them, it was possible for him to do to the Apostle’s, provided he undertook the task with knowledge and conscientiousness. The actual text furnished his mind with the necessary foothold, it was the jumping-off place from which his imagination could take flight.