THE ADVENTURES OF THE SOUL

Anatole France

As I understand criticism it is, like philosophy and history, a kind of novel for the use of
discreet and curious minds. And every novel, rightly understood, is an autobiography.
The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
There is no such thing as objective criticism any more than there is objective art, and all
who flatter themselves that they put aught but themselves into their work are dupes of
the most fallacious illusion. The truth is that one never gets out of oneself. That is one of
our greatest miseries. What would we not give to see, if but for a minute, the sky and the
earth with the many-faceted eye of a fly, or to understand nature with the rude and
simple brain of an ape? But just that is forbidden us. We cannot, like Tiresias, be men and
remember having been women. We are locked into our persons as into a lasting prison.
The best we can do, it seems to me, is gracefully to recognize this terrible situation and to
admit that we speak of ourselves every time that we have not the strength to be silent.
To be quite frank, the critic ought to say:
"Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the subject of Shakespeare, or Racine, or
Pascal, or Goethe subjects that offer me a beautiful opportunity."
I had the honor of knowing M. Cuvillier-Fleury, who was a very earnest old critic. One
day when I had come to see him in his little house in the Avenue Raphael, he showed me
the modest library of which he was proud.
"Sir," he said to me, "oratory, pure literature, philosophy, history, all the kinds are
represented here, without counting criticism which embraces them all. Yes, the critic is by
turn orator, philosopher, historian."
M. Cuvillier-Fleury was right. The critic is all that or, at least, he ought to be. He has
occasion to show the rarest, most diverse, most varied faculties of the intellect. And when
he is a Sainte-Beuve, a Taine, a Jules Lematre, a Ferdinand Brunetire, he does not fail
to do so. Remaining definitely within himself he creates the intellectual history of man.
Criticism is the youngest of all the literary forms: it will perhaps end by absorbing all the
others. It is admirably suited to a very civilized society with rich memories and long
traditions. It is particularly appropriate to a curious, learned and polite humanity. For its
prosperity it demands more culture than any of the other literary forms. Its creators were
Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, Bayle, Montesquieu. It proceeds simultaneously from
philosophy and history. It has required, for its development, an epoch of absolute
intellectual liberty. It has replaced theology and, if one were to seek the universal doctor,
the Saint Thomas Aquinas of the nineteenth century, of whom would one be forced to
think but of Sainte-Beuve?...
According to Littr a book is a bound bundle of paper sheets whether hand-written or
printed. That definition does not satisfy me. I would define a book as a work of magic
whence escape all kinds of images to trouble the souls and change the hearts of men. Or,
better still, a book is a little magic apparatus which transports us among the images of the
past or amidst supernatural shades. Those who read many books are like the eaters of
hashish. They live in a dream. The subtle poison that penetrates their brain renders them
insensible to the real world and makes them the prey of terrible or delightful phantoms.
Books are the opium of the Occident. They devour us. A day is coming on which we shall
all be keepers of libraries, and that will be the end.
Let us love books as the mistress of the poet loved her grief. Let us love them: they cost us
dear enough. Yes, books kill us. You may believe me who adore them, who have long
given myself to them without reserve. Books slay us. We have too many of them and too
many kinds. Men lived for long ages without reading and precisely in those ages their
actions were greatest and most useful, for it was then that they passed from barbarism to
civilization. But because men were then without books they were not bare of poetry and
morality: they knew songs by heart and little catechisms. In their childhood old women
told them the stories of the Ass's Skin and of Puss in Boots of which, much later, editions
for bibliophiles have been made. The earliest books were great rocks covered with
inscriptions in an administrative or religious style.
It is a long time since then. What frightful progress we have made in the interval! Books
multiplied in a marvelous fashion in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Today their
production has increased an hundredfold. In Paris alone fifty books are published daily
without counting the newspapers. It is a monstrous orgy. We shall emerge from it quite
mad. It is man's fate to fall successively into contradictory extremes. In the Middle Ages
ignorance bred fear. Thus maladies of the mind reigned then which we no longer know.
To-day, through study, we are hastening toward general paralysis. Would it not be wiser
and more elegant to keep some measure?
Let us be lovers of books and let us read them: but let us not gather them with
indiscriminate hands: let us be delicate: let us choose, and, like that lord in one of
Shakespeare's comedies, let us say to our book-seller: "I would that they be well-bound
and that they speak of love."