As I understand criticism it is, like philosophy and history, a kind of novel fo

r 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 a
rt, 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 get
s out of oneself. That is one of our greatest miseries. What would we not give t
o 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 a
dmit that we speak of ourselves every time that we have not the strength to be s
ilent.
To be quite frank, the critic ought to say:
"Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the subject of Shakespeare, or Ra
cine, 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 criti
c. 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 ki
nds are represented here, without counting criticism which embraces them all. Ye
s, 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 t
he intellect. And when he is a Sainte-Beuve, a Taine, a Jules Lematre, a Ferdinan
d Brunetire, he does not fail to do so. Remaining definitely within himself he cr
eates the intellectual history of man. Criticism is the youngest of all the lite
rary forms: it will perhaps end by absorbing all the others. It is admirably sui
ted to a very civilized society with rich memories and long traditions. It is pa
rticularly appropriate to a curious, learned and polite humanity. For its prospe
rity it demands more culture than any of the other literary forms. Its creators
were Montaigne, Saint-Evremond, Bayle, Montesquieu. It proceeds simultaneously f
rom philosophy and history. It has required, for its development, an epoch of ab
solute intellectual liberty. It has replaced theology and, if one were to seek t
he 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 transp
orts us among the images of the past or amidst supernatural shades. Those who re
ad many books are like the eaters of hashish. They live in a dream. The subtle p
oison 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 t
he 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 pr
ecisely in those ages their actions were greatest and most useful, for it was th
en that they passed from barbarism to civilization. But because men were then wi
thout 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 i
n an administrative or religious style.
It is a long time since then. What frightful progress we have made in the interv
al! Books multiplied in a marvelous fashion in the sixteenth and eighteenth cent
uries. Today their production has increased an hundredfold. In Paris alone fifty
books are published daily without counting the newspapers. It is a monstrous or
gy. We shall emerge from it quite mad. It is man's fate to fall successively int
o 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 ke
ep 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."