Читать книгу The Art of Thinking - Ernest Dimnet - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Enter thinker.

We have all seen him standing amidst the surprised, incredulous and often silly group of non-thinkers. Sometimes he is a very simple man, the roadside mechanic slowly walking out of his garage. Round the car two or three men, hot with ineffective guessing, are still talking excitedly when the taciturn man appears; for an hour they have talked, tried and failed. They stop and not another word is heard. The intelligent eyes of the artisan, helped by his seemingly infallible hands, go over the organs of the machine; meanwhile we know that his mind is going over dozens of hypotheses which to us are only riddles. Soon the trouble is found. Sometimes the man smiles. At what? At whom? I often wonder. At any rate we have felt the presence of a brain.

A score of medical students are standing round a bed: three or four of them have examined the patient and an interne is now doing it, for the case is exceptionally interesting and may go on record. Every now and then the young doctor says a few words which a score of pencils note down. But a flutter passes over the little crowd. The patron, Potain himself, is here. He has heard of this case and wants to see for himself. In a few moments his magnificent head bends towards the patient and a scene, unforgettable to those who once witnessed it, begins. Not a word. The splendid intelligence of the famous physician now abides in his ear. With closed eyes and a marvellous receptivity over his face, Potain listens. At intervals something like beatitude in his expression shows that this examination goes well: every infinitesimal sound, every absence of sound is interrogated: the students know that even a crease in the pleura becomes visible to this prodigious man as he listens. Half an hour passes without one of these young men getting tired of this scene, however mute, and entirely given up to thought. At last Potain reappears: the case is as clear as if all the organs were on the dissecting table—as, alas! they will be in a few days—and a few plain words describe it: through the solid thorax an irresistible intellect has done its divining work.

Do you know Cézanne’s portrait by himself, a marvellous thing produced with such simple means that the artist might have found them on a desert island? If you have looked at it for only ten seconds, you will never forget the eyes, clear, hard, harsh, cold and sharp as steel. Artists often possess those eyes less made to love reality, as people say, than to go straight to its essentials. Degas had that kind of eyes. Lucien Simon has them. Forain, at nearly eighty, still has them. Not very long ago, I saw those eyes in the head of a smartly dressed, dark-looking young painter, outside the “Ruche,” in Vaugirard: he interested me and our glances were like crossed swords, high above the sphere of mere politeness. Those eyes see where others see not. What is the power of a Napoleon, even of a Mussolini? Not mere “power,” but magnetism, and the magnetism is more intelligence than force. Such men see, they see the necessities of an epoch, and woe to the people who will not see them as they do! The contempt of the eagle for crawling creatures will fall upon them.

I remember once taking Angellier,^[1] rather by surprise, to a drawing-room which the Quality was filling with the soft hubbub of elegant nothingness. He sat down and listened. Certainly he had a head which even conventionality at its worst could not pass by, a superb head so well poised on athletic shoulders that many people imagined the man was tall, though he was not. But, above all, he had a power of attention, so visible in his deep sunken eyes that it actually seemed to throw out a net on the exterior world. The disproportion between what Angellier seemed to expect and what he was treated to, that afternoon, could not be left unnoticed, yet in a few minutes the conversation became more substantial, every word of it addressed to this unknown man with the expectant face. Soon, too, the reward came. Angellier was seized by his demon and gave us of his best: a succession of illuminating statements which his Shakespearean metaphors clothed in magical brilliance. A rare spectacle. It recalled Angellier’s own description of Robert Burns in the Edinburgh drawing-rooms.

All great men, you say, all more or less famous men! True, but is there a single human being who does not know in his immediate vicinity a man or woman gifted with a power of intellectual vision so superior to the average as to be striking? Is there a village where some tavern star does not play the part acted by Branwell Brontë in Haworth? Is there a single family, or little social circle, without its tintinnajo, the family oracle of whom it is said, when difficult questions are at issue: Oh! he will see the whole thing? Few conversations pass without our making the mental note: I had not thought of that. It means that somebody, perhaps accidentally, has been a thinker. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, in 1917, half a dozen people in a Paris salon were indulging in the then familiar pastime of comparing the Czar with Louis the Sixteenth, the Czarina with Marie-Antoinette, Kerensky with the Girondists, etc., so that the future of Russia could easily be inferred from the history of the French Revolution. Somebody said: “Oh! you think the crisis is over, don’t you? But what is that Council of Soldiers and Workmen which meets at the Finland Station? Wait; you will see what comes out of that.” A brilliant intuition, which, in a few weeks, facts began to corroborate.

Such experiences are familiar to all of us and often leave a deep impression behind them. We love to see the thinker in action, for his personality, joined to the unexpectedness of his performances, acts upon us even more than the illumination he provides. Nobody denies that thought, like oratory, gains by being drunk at the spring. The Port-Royalists appreciated nothing in Pascal so much as what they called his “eloquence”: to them the word did not mean, as it does to us, persuasive rhetoric, but a capacity for the ready expression of thoughts difficult to clothe in words. Probably their interest in the almost indecipherable memoranda left by the philosopher lay in the hope that these scraps of paper might revive the impression of his originality. Readers of Boswell do not doubt that Johnson was an extraordinary conversationalist, but how few students of English literature have a clear notion that a decade or two of the eighteenth century would never have been called the Age of Johnson had it been only for the Dictionary, Rasselas or the Lives of the Poets? Johnson’s genius was in his talk and not in his books. As Léon Daudet says it, à propos of Marcel Proust, we love a conversation “full of flowers and stars,” the stars being the rare thoughts and the flowers their fascinating expression.

Yet, from time to time, we see a thinker’s ideas progress independently of him, either because the thinker was not eloquent, or because his ideas were difficult to grasp, or because the man himself remained nebulous to his contemporaries. This phenomenon cannot but give us an exalted idea of the greatness of thought. Measure Descartes, the refugee to Holland, or his disciple Spinoza, the artisan, or that typical provincial professor, Kant, or Karl Marx, by confronting their personalities with their influence. The contrast between those humble lives and the mental effervescence they have left behind them is startling. One flash through a human brain, and, in spite of a total lack of worldly influence, in spite of the recondite character of the doctrines, in spite of the absence of literary talent, the whole intellectual trend of mankind will be changed for several generations. Much more spectacular the process is when the man’s personality is as powerful as his influence (Julius Cæsar, Napoleon), but it is not so extraordinary. Thought can indeed be called divine, for it is creative.

What is it that characterises the thinker? First of all, and obviously, vision: the word underlies every line of the descriptions above. The thinker is preëminently a man who sees where others do not. The novelty of what he says, its character as a sort of revelation, the charm that attaches to it, all come from the fact that he sees. He seems to be head and shoulders above the crowd, or to be walking on the ridge-way while others trudge at the bottom. Independence is the word which describes the moral aspect of this capacity for vision. Nothing is more striking than the absence of intellectual independence in most human beings: they conform in opinion, as they do in manners, and are perfectly content with repeating formulas. While they do so, the thinker calmly looks round, giving full play to his mental freedom. He may agree with the consensus known as public opinion, but it will not be because it is universal opinion. Even the sacrosanct thing called plain common-sense is not enough to intimidate him into conformity. What could seem nearer to insanity, in the sixteenth century, than a denial of the fact—for it was a fact—that the sun revolves round the earth? Galileo did not mind: his intellectual bravery should be even more surprising to us than his physical courage. But, three hundred years later, it was no less difficult for Henri Poincaré to assert that there was as much scientific truth in the old notion as in Galileo’s doctrine. Einstein’s denial of the principle that two parallels can never meet is another stupendous proof of intellectual independence.

Genius of the most exceptional order is necessary for such achievements, you say. Evidently. But it took no mathematics to feel sure, as Mussolini did, that, at times, tyranny is more beneficial than freedom; yet, Mussolini alone realised this notion with its wealth of consequences. How many people, in August 1914, shook their heads at the world’s certainty that the war could not last more than three or four months? Very few. Hundreds of people in Europe are trying to protect pedestrians from motorists; only one, that I know of, ever thought of the radical measure which alone would compel the motorist to slacken his speed: take away his Klaxon from him. Everybody laughs at the bombastic eloquence resounding in Parliament-houses, and obviously destined for some far-away constituency. There would be an easy method for greatly diminishing this evil, which would be to compel orators to speak seated, but who thinks of it? How many Americans realize that their country is not a democracy but an oligarchy, and owes a good deal of its stability to that fact? How many Frenchmen see—for it can be seen—the contrast between their modern architecture and the sublime or exquisite monuments scattered all over their soil? Indeed the world lives on words which it goes on repeating till some thinker, or repeated experience—experientia magistra stultorum—makes a breach in the solid and stolid wall of conformity.

People who think for themselves often appear haughty and self-satisfied, because they can hardly be dissatisfied with themselves, or irreverent, because they knock down idols and cannot but enjoy the sport. Men of the intellectual type of Mr. Bernard Shaw would evidently be sorry if all silly people suddenly became as wise as themselves. Hating folly and playing with it rather cruelly is a healthy exercise of the faculties: the Bible abounds with instances. Thinkers are also apt to appear dictatorial, to compel people to follow in their wake. The reason is because seeing the truth—whose other name is salvation—and realising that other people will not see it, they treat them as grown-ups must treat children. Once more Mussolini can be used as an instance in point. But, in their innermost nature, thinkers are preëminently teachers, and it is to the credit of most of them that they devote their lives to preaching the truth they see. Some of them do so in admirable speeches or books, others in the picturesque language of the artist, but, whatever the vehicle, the devotion to truth remains visible. Some literary men appear original because of the bizarre character of their expression; but the least effort to boil down their most arresting page to its salt of pure thought will show that they have little to say: not being able to pose as teachers, they must be content with imitating the acrobat who makes a speech standing on his head while gesticulating with his legs. Such men will find imitators but no followers, whereas the thinker, whether he wishes it or not, is a leader.

[1]	Auguste Angellier (1848-1912), professor of English Literature in Lille and Paris, critic and poet. His two volumes on Robert Burns and his sonnets A l’Amie Perdue are his chief titles to fame. His personal influence was extraordinary.