Part 8 (2/2)
He is Paul Verlaine.
A style like Verlaine's, which is non-sequent, macerated, free, is indispensable to any mastery of the rhetoric of the minor key. This, to me, has always been my literary ideal.
THE VALUE OF MY IDEAS
From time to time, my friend Azorin attempts to a.n.a.lyse my ideas. I do not pretend to be in the secret of the scales, as such an a.s.sumption upon my part would be ridiculous. As the pilot takes advantage of a favourable wind, and if it does not blow, of one that is unfavourable, I do the same. The meteorologist is able to tell with mathematical accuracy in his laboratory, after a glance at his instruments, not only the direction of the prevailing wind, but the atmospheric pressure and the degree of humidity as well. I am able only, however, to say with the pilot: ”I sail this way,” and then make head as best I may.
GENIUS AND ADMIRATION
I have no faith in the contention of the Lombrosians that genius is akin to insanity, neither do I think that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. Lombroso, for that matter, is as old-fas.h.i.+oned today as a hoop skirt.
Genius partakes of the miraculous. If some one should tell me that a stick had been transformed into a snake by a miracle, naturally I should not believe it; but if I should be asked whether there was not something miraculous in the very existence of a stick or of a snake, I should be constrained to acknowledge the miracle.
When I read the lives of the philosophers in Diogenes Laertius, I arrive at the conclusion that Epicurus, Zeno, Diogenes, Protagoras and the others were nothing more than men who had common sense. Clearly, as a corollary, I am obliged to conclude that the people we meet nowadays upon the street, whether they wear gowns, uniforms or blouses, are mere animals masquerading in human shape.
Contradicting the a.s.sumption that the great men of antiquity were only ordinary normal beings, we must concede the fact that most extraordinary conditions must have existed and, indeed, have been pre-exquisite, before a Greece could have arisen in antiquity, or an Athens in Greece, or a man such as Plato in Athens.
By very nature, the sources of admiration are as mysterious to my mind as the roots of genius. Do we admire what we understand, or what we do not understand? Admiration is of two kinds, of which the more common proceeds from wonder at something which we do not understand. There is, however, an admiration which goes with understanding.
Edgar Poe composed several stories, of which _The Goldbug_ is one, in which an impenetrable enigma is first presented, to be solved afterwards as by a talisman; but, then, a lesson in cryptography ensues, wherein the talisman is explained away, and the miraculous gives place to the reasoning faculties of a mind of unusual power.
He has done something very similar in his poem, _The Raven_, where the poem is followed by an a.n.a.lysis of its gestation, which is called _The Philosophy of Composition_. Would it be more remarkable to write _The Raven_ by inspiration, or to write it through conscious skill? To find the hidden treasure through the talisman of _The Goldbug_, or through the possession of a.n.a.lytical faculties such as those of the protagonist of Poe's tale?
Much consideration will lead to the conclusion that one process is as marvellous as the other.
It may be said that there is nothing miraculous in nature, and it may be said that it is all miraculous.
MY LITERARY AND ARTISTIC INCLINATIONS
Generally speaking, I neither understand old books very well, nor do I care for them--I have been able to read only Shakespeare, and perhaps one or two others, with the interest with which I approach modern writers.
It has sometimes seemed to me that the unreadableness of the older authors might be made the foundation of a philosophic system. Yet I have met with some surprises.
One was that I enjoyed the _Odyssey_.
”Am I a hypocrite?” I asked myself.
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