Chapter 6

Résumé: Great minds are importunate; to deny them a little is judicious.

After all, let us admit it at last, and complete our statement; there is some truth in the reproaches that are hurled at them. This anger is natural. The powerful, the grand, the luminous, are in a certain point of view things calculated to offend. To be surpassed is never agreeable; to feel one’s own inferiority leads surely to feel offence. The beautiful exists so truly by itself that it certainly has no need of pride; nevertheless, given human mediocrity, the beautiful humiliates at the same time that it enchants. It seems natural that beauty should be a vase for pride, —it is supposed to be full of it; one seeks to avenge one’s self for the pleasure it gives, and this word superb ends by having two senses, —one of which causes suspicion of the other. It is the fault of the beautiful, as we have already said. It wearies: a sketch by Piranesi bewilders you; a grasp of the hand of Hercules bruises you. Greatness is sometimes in the wrong. It is ingenuous, but obstructive. The tempest thinks to sprinkle you, —it drowns you; the star thinks to give light, —it dazzles, sometimes blinds. The Nile fertilizes, but overflows. The “too much” is not convenient; the habitation of the fathomless is rude; the infinite is little suitable for a lodging. A cottage is badly situated on the cataract of Niagara or in the circus of Gavarnie. It is awkward to keep house with these fierce wonders; to frequent them regularly without being overwhelmed, one must be a cretin or a genius.

The dawn itself at times seems to us immoderate: he who looks at it straight suffers. The eye at certain moments thinks very ill of the sun. Let us not then be astonished at the complaints made, at the incessant objections, at the fits of passion and prudence, at the cataplasms applied by a certain criticism, at the ophthalmies habitual to academies and teaching bodies, at the warnings given to the reader, at all the curtains let down, and at all the shades used against genius. Genius is intolerant without knowing it, because it is itself. How can people be familiar with Æschylus, with Ezekiel, with Dante?

The I is the right to egotism. Now, the first thing that those beings do, is to use roughly the I of each one. Exorbitant in everything, —in thoughts, in images, in convictions, in emotions, in passions, in faith, —whatever may be the side of your I to which they address themselves, they inconvenience it. Your intellect, they surpass it; your imagination, they dazzle it; your conscience, they question and search it; your bowels, they twist them; your heart, they break it; your soul, they carry it off.