Читать книгу The Art of Thinking - Ernest Dimnet - Страница 11

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We all know them. We are all conscious of a double state of mind in which, behind a fascinating object, we see a threatening or discouraging phantasm doing its best to neutralize the healthy influence we would love not to lose. For instance, we see somebody we know engaged in a French conversation with a foreigner. How exquisite is distinguished, well-modulated French! What fluidity the loosening influence of the mute e and the nonchalance of the n sounds give to that language. Why, that girl seems to speak like a native. I had no idea she did. Not a trace of effort on her part, and that Frenchman does not seem conscious of talking with a foreigner. It is really wonderful. How absurd that I should have given up French! I still read it without much difficulty when I have to, but it is not often, and if I had to talk, I know I should be ridiculous. I really must do something. This very evening I will begin. Our French teacher used to say that if we would learn ten words a day, which is nothing, we should know almost four thousand words in a year, which sounds like a lot. Why should I not do it? Of course I will. And in a year and a half, I shall go to Tours or Grenoble to practise my four or five thousand words on harmonious natives. That’s really worth doing, instead of going to silly plays.

Ten o’clock at night. Chardenal, the French Dictionary, Mérimée’s Colomba, and an austere-looking vocabulary once bought in a hotel lobby are on the table. They do not look as attractive as that conversation sounded. Chardenal does not look attractive at all. Yet, the grammar must be swallowed, verbs and all. Here are the four conjugations, not one less than last time the book was opened, and as merciless as ever. (Enter phantasms as bad as phantoms.) Of course, people with excellent memories can learn those verbs, but my memory is not good. Ten words a day is nothing, Mademoiselle used to say. Then, why is it that not a single girl learned them then, or has learned them since? Everybody imagined she would do it, but in fact nobody did. I have no perseverance. I have not even perseverance enough to reduce. I am not like So and So. No perseverance. So it is useless to try. Besides, is it so necessary that I should know French? Everything gets translated, and, when Sorel or Guitry come over, you can always guess a little and pretend a little. As everybody does it, and if I did know French nobody would believe that I did, it does not matter. After all there are other useful things besides French. That lecturer the other day pointed out quite correctly that we talk about Shakespeare all the time but read him about as much as the Bible. Let me read Shakespeare. One act every night should see me through in five or six months. I’ll finish this trashy, amusing book I began last night, but immediately after I shall start on Titus Andronicus.

Memory not good. No perseverance. What’s the good? So and So can do it, but I cannot. All these disheartening little visions are what Miss Austen’s characters used to call the “blues,” not idées noires, but idées bleu foncé, not exactly obsessions, but parasitical obstructions. They all rush to the attack of a nascent volition and try to crush it out. If it shows a little fight in its desire to become a resolve, the hostile phantasms come back seven times more numerous and charge again till they firmly implant the inferiority complex: “I can’t do it, it can’t be done.”

If we will indulge in a little introspection we shall find that our mind is peopled with more incipient obsessions than ideas, and that their presence is largely the cause of our impotency.

Inferiority complexes are not always the result of the presence of shadows like those I have just mentioned. It is sufficient that some purpose or desire, foreign to the thought or possibility of thought we are pursuing, should step in to arrest the process of effective thinking. Many people act in daily life a character not their own, and the working of their minds is hopelessly vitiated by the constant effort. Quite a few Englishmen, having trimmed their beards so as to look like Edward VII or George V, have never been themselves afterwards. Their thoughts, words and actions have been those of actors. I used to meet in Paris a man who looked miraculously like Alfred de Musset. But he was not Alfred de Musset, alas! and as he had persuaded himself he was no longer Dupont or Durand, he was nothing at all. Politicians frequently act historical characters and their natural insincerity becomes tenfold in consequence. People who begin to possess a language well enough to imagine that they may pass for natives, but have not really mastered it enough to use it as their instrument, can be frequently detected acting Italian exuberance, French vivacity, or British stolidity. Few students who have completely annexed a foreign language have escaped that rather ignominious phase; and they must admit that, as long as it lasted, their thoughts were not quite their own, but the reflection of some fancied Italian, French, or English type. One cannot exaggerate the influence of the English-American language in the Americanization of aliens.

Social intercourse with its requirements and its indulgence,—its hypocrisy, to call it by its name,—is highly productive of thought-hindering insincerity. How many people dare to say they have not read the book which three or four other people in a drawing room are discussing in non-committal language? How many are brave enough not to join in with an “oh! yes, charming book!” which does not deceive anybody, but which strengthens the soul-devastating habit of saying something when one has nothing to say. There is a quite as shameful via media between deceit and sincerity which consists in buying the book even if it is never to be opened. Casual inspection of some people’s shelves is illuminating. The leaves of a certain category of favorites are uncut. I have no doubt that the success, not long ago, of one philosophical best seller was of the uncut description.

The same comedy is acted especially by callow young people who put on a profound air of having mastered it all. They affect the cant of sciences or arts about which they know nothing. What does one hear at picture exhibitions? It takes even less knowledge to display an after-the-concert appreciation summed up in “line, color and sonority.”

The desire to appear, instead of really being, can vitiate even the legitimate operation of the intellect. Two men can be supposed, for example, to apply their minds with equal intensity to the question of the origins of the great war. If one of the two wants to display in his mastery of this question either his patriotism or his internationalism he will produce thought of a quality inferior to the other man’s, whose sole object is to discover facts. The reason is that at every step onwards which he takes in his investigation, the former student sees himself using the information just gained, and the vision, like any parasitical phantasm, weakens, because it divides, his thinking power. Again, listen to a speech or read a poem with a view to remembering it: you will remember it better, no doubt, but your impression of the oratory or of the poetic charm will be diminished by the extraneous preoccupation.

Two notions juxtaposed in the mind invariably hinder its working. You do not see a picture as it really is when you have been told it is a copy whereas it really is original. The moment you hear that it is not a copy, the picture returns on you with an energy it did not possess a few minutes before. The only comparison that seems adequate is your surprise when you discover that what you thought was only a flaw in the window-pane really is a large kite in the sky: you actually see the tiny dot grow ten times as large as it seemed before. Exactly the same phenomenon can take place in our minds. We may have known a person, older than we are, for many years without realising, one may say without seeing, his face: one day we suddenly see it and we are shocked to find it is an old face.

We live on notions and with notions. I have seen an intelligent and even, at times, scintillating man deteriorate long before his time, because he used at first to save every brilliant thought coming to him, for a better occasion, and gradually resent even producing such thoughts, as the torpedo-fish may resent discharging his electricity in the conviction that it must exhaust him. His registering every intellectual operation he was conscious of interfered with them all till, in time, he was a mere wreck. Methodicalness pushed to an extreme is well known to produce similar effects, because it becomes a haunting phantasm.

It would seem as if writers who are professionally trained to watch the operation of their minds, and in whose Mss. one is sure to find rich material for the composition of an Art of Thinking, ought to be freer than the rest of mankind from those blighting shadows. But it is not so. Most writers endowed with the real literary gift are nervous subjects, or at all events, exceptionally sensitive individuals on whose imaginations all impressions work freely and often cruelly. The Romanticists were proud of this sensitiveness and tire us by too frequent allusions to it, but it exists all the same, even in apparently robust intellects. In fact, it is one of the literary professional characteristics and is limited to the professional field. A number of literary people find relaxation in drawing and do so without any consciousness of their usual trammels. On the other hand, the careless and even reckless freedom of many artists, when they happen to write, frequently excites the envy of their purely literary brethren.

A writer is a man whose inner life is intended for public inspection. Unless he feel powerful enough to take this ordeal as a matter of course he is apt to think too continuously of this inevitable exposition of himself, and the consciousness of it is a weakening phantasm. Nobody knows so well as the writer that he should not think of two things at a time, but nobody is more inclined than he to do so. Even that perfect collector of mere facts, that incarnation of unperturbed erudition, old Varro, has noted it. He actually says, in pithy Latin, that the man who informs himself in order to retail his information to others is a prey, while so doing, to an inferiority complex.

The writer is constantly beset with phantasms. Taine was haunted with a desire to hit upon an impossible world-mirroring formula, until the study of history cured him of this yearning by substituting such a simple summary of what history teaches us that, at first, the author was ashamed of it. A kindred phantasm is the fear of seeing only one aspect of the subject one is studying. Carlyle admits that he knew this obsession and had to make a desperate effort to overcome it. The writer is not afraid of mere critics—they belong to his own craft and he is ready to fight them with all professional weapons, including contempt—but he dreads the smile of imaginary readers, men or women, whom he has never met and who possibly do not exist, but whom he sees, in his mind’s eye, as the realisation of all he would wish to be, mastering his subject as if they were giants. The obsession becomes worse when the formidable reader is known to be in the flesh. Most of Angellier’s pupils have become writers: I have never known one who did not shiver at the idea of his master’s good-natured criticisms, ruthless because they pointed out so infallibly the incompleteness of the disciple’s outlook. Yet, Angellier himself was not always the olympian he seemed to be: the moment he thought of his own works he frequently showed anxiety or even depression, wondering at what height his inspiration really placed him, wistfully mindful not only of the greatest and strongest, but even of minors with a delicate handling of subtle nuances, dreading to be inferior to what he had felt himself to be in his first great effort, l’Amie Perdue, uncertain whether the subjects he was attracted by were in his best vein, and, during many years,—in fact, till he recovered some of his mother’s religious belief,—staking his hope of immortality on the survival of some of his poems in the precarious memory of future generations.

Nobody can tell how many sterling literary vocations have been ruined by the notion that it is useless to repeat what must have been said many times in the past. Men like Amiel, or, before him, Joubert or Doudan, only escaped from this phantasm by writing things which they imagined nobody else would ever read. On the few occasions when they did write for the public, the cramping influence became visible at once.

The list of such influences hindering a gifted man’s thinking could be endless. I cannot help adding that even a man as deliberately free from any clogging accretions as Jules Lemaître admits that the effort to visualise the past can become an obsession: its victim walks through the delightful quaintness of old Paris but does not see it: where the book-binders of to-day sip their white wine of a warm afternoon, the obsession will show the revolutionary workmen of Les Dieux ont Soif, and the two visions neutralise each other. Many a Frenchman has never been able to recapture his first delicious impression of Paris, after reading the volumes of Marquis de Rochegude. Substitute Renan’s or Signor Ferrero’s mental habit of seeing the past as if it were the present, of speaking of the Roman equites in terms of Wall Street, and everything will be clarified in an instant; but the something which differentiated an eques from a banker, the spell attached to the distant past, will vanish.

The act of writing itself is productive of phantasms and is dangerous for the legitimate production of thought. Nobody ought to write who does not write with pleasure. But a number of professional writers are more conscious of an effort than of an enjoyment. Yet, self-expression is a joy to everybody and is often found to be a unique relief. The reason why it is not always so may be an imperfect command of the language used, or lack of real interest in the subject treated, or some one of the causes enumerated in the foregoing pages. But it is chiefly a phantasm acquired in school days, the habit of thinking of the blank sheets lying under the one we are writing upon, hating their breadth and length, and wondering how they can ever be all scribbled over.

Some people imagine they have to write a book as, at fifteen, they had to write an essay, whether they liked it or not. All the time they are at work on a chapter which ought to monopolise their attention, they are anxious over future chapters still unborn and even unconceived, and the anxiety throws its shadow over the page just being written. As long as an author does not take the habit of “only writing his book,” as Joubert says, “when it is finished in his mind,” or cannot honestly say, like Racine: “My tragedy is done, now I have only to write the verses,” he will be a prey to the school-boy’s error. Nothing is as exciting as the hunt after thoughts or facts intended to elucidate a question we think vital to us, and the enjoyment of writing when the hunt has been successful is an unparalleled reward for intellectual honesty. Leave only the slavish necessity or the meretricious desire for producing a book and all the pleasure will be gone.

Some people who think freely and charmingly in speaking seem to put their minds in a strait-jacket the moment they begin to write. The wittiest man I have ever known, a French aristocrat, used to produce drab letters over which he would plod for hours. A former colleague of mine, with an entirely literary background, showed, however, an interest in philosophy and, without having read any of the philosophers, would discourse on the fundamental issues with surprising originality. “The Robinson Crusoe of philosophy,” another colleague used to call him. This genius, every time he was compelled to write, relapsed into the state of mind in which he used to be, years before, when going through examinations at the Sorbonne. His own originality in thought or expression frightened him, and the results of his efforts, or I should say probably tortures, were cold, elaborate pages recalling dons’ prefaces to dictionaries.

Most writers are slaves to certain models of expression. Millions of sentences might be curtailed of a final clause beginning with and which may be unnecessary as it is so often a mere repetition or summary added solely to round off the sentence. The habit of using three verbs or three adjectives where only one would suffice is almost as general. The average writer is not guided but coerced by a cheap rhythm as inseparable from him as the flute-player was from the orator of antiquity. A man’s thought is hampered by these miserable toils.

More artistic writers cannot get rid of the notion that the language they use is fatally inferior to the classical style of past generations and, consequently, what they produce is bound to appear as a monument of decadence. They will not remember Goethe’s well-grounded remark that “the man who has been of his own time has really been of all times.” This thought would open the door of the cage for them, but they go on knocking their heads against the bars.

The writer the most cramped by adventitious preoccupations, impairing even a beginning of sincerity, is the art critic. Compare Reynolds’ Discourses, or Ruskin’s Modern Painters, or, in French, the absolutely honest manual of de Piles with the articles on art appearing in most newspapers. You will feel at once that the so-called critics only pretend to know what they are writing about, and write about this negative quantity in an entirely artificial style. It is always a surprise to me to see a forcible and direct writer of fiction use, in dealing with pictures, a cliché style which, in another man, would disgust him by its effete far-fetchedness. The cause is that the novelist transmuted into an art critic is not himself any more but another man, and the double consciousness is like a man’s effort to see two objects at the same time.

Our mind then, is like our eye: it must be single. Children, plain people, saintly people, artists, all people possessed of a mastering purpose leaving no room for inferior preoccupations, reformers, apostles, leaders or aristocrats of all kinds, strike us by the directness of their intellectual vision. On the contrary, timid, weak, easily abashed people, people made to follow rather than to guide, sensitive people anxious about the impression they may produce, doubtful of the working of their own faculties and everlastingly trying to get reassured, have a fatal capacity for letting in extraneous thoughts or mental parasites, which at first only obstruct but gradually obsess their own, hampering their vision, and ultimately leaving upon them that chronic sense of inadequacy which the term “inferiority complex” describes clearly, at all events to the present generation. Had Freud and Adler done nothing else but reveal the existence of such complexes and popularize the belief that proper treatment can dissolve them, their influence ought to be regarded as beneficial.