There could be no recognizable differences, no conversation, in fact, if, in the impossible hypothesis of the absence of any such common language, we all shouted at one another “in vacuo” and out of pure darkness.  It is from their refusal to recognize the necessity for something at least relatively objective in what the individual imagination works upon, that certain among modern artists, if not among modern poets, bewilder and puzzle us.  They have a right to make endless experiments—­every original mind has that—­but they cannot let go their hold on some sort of objective solidity without becoming inarticulate, without giving vent to such unrelated and incoherent cries as overtake one in the corridors of Bedlam.  “Nature is the mistress of the higher intelligencies,” and though the individual imagination is at liberty to treat Nature with a certain creative contempt, it cannot afford to depart altogether from her, lest by relinquishing the common language between men and men, it should simply flap its wings in an enchanted circle, and utter sounds that are not so much different from other sounds, as outside the region where any sound carries an intelligible meaning.

The absurd idea that one gets wise by reading books is probably at the bottom of the abominable pedantry that thrusts so many tiresome pieces of antiquity down the throats of youth.  There is no talisman for getting wise—­some of the wisest in the world never open a book, and yet their native wit, so heavenly-free from “culture,” would serve to challenge Voltaire.  Lovers of books, like other infatuated lovers, best know the account they find in their exquisite obsessions.  None of the explanations they give seem to cover the field of their enjoyment.  The thing is a passion; a sort of delicate madness, and like other passions, quite unintelligible to those who are outside.  Persons who read for the purpose of making a success of their added erudition, or the better to adapt themselves—­what a phrase!—­to their “life’s work,” are, to my thinking, like the wretches who throw flowers into graves.  What sacrilege, to trail the reluctances and coynesses, the shynesses and sweet reserves of these “furtivi amores” at the heels of a wretched ambition to be “cultivated” or learned, or to “get on” in the world!

Like the kingdom of heaven and all other high and sacred things, the choicest sorts of books only reveal the perfume of their rare essence to those who love them for themselves in pure disinterestedness.  Of course they “mix in,” these best-loved authors, with every experience we encounter; they throw around places, hours, situations, occasions, a quite special glamour of their own, just as one’s more human devotions do; but though they float, like a diffused aroma, round every circumstance of our days, and may even make tolerable the otherwise intolerable hours of our impertinent “life’s work,” we do not love them because they help us here or help us there; or make us wiser or make us better; we love them because they are what they are, and we are what we are; we love them, in fact, for the beautiful reason which the author of that noble book—­a book not in our present list, by the way, because of something obstinately tough and tedious in him—­I mean Montaigne’s Essays—­loved his sweet friend Etienne.