The weight of the sanctuary

(Afterword of Volume 2 of Complete Works, Tchou)

Jean Paulhan, neither in his words nor in his writings, has a decisive or affirmative tone. Its light remains nebulous. He does not break the reed that he has broken. What happens to this subtle contest of day and night? Let the reader, in turn, shy away. However, one of them, more daring or more diligent, must express himself, for the author's sake, a little higher than him, despite the veiled elegances that it would have been so delicious to preserve. It is therefore a question here of piously committing a form of sacrilege and, instead of quoting the oracle, of speaking in its name.

Any man whose taste and his profession lead him to judge books, at least in our century, is struck with fear. The diversity of the best minds and their sentences, as if at pleasure, discordant, on the same work, and above all new, overwhelm reflection. The rigor of judgments was previously supported by a public code and common rules. Skillful definers had locked the birds, according to their species, in well-sealed cages. Before Sainte-Beuve, we wanted an ode to be an ode, a novel a novel, pathos a genre. As much as Horace, Boileau knew what he was talking about. A Chinese painter and a Japanese poet obeyed the seasons which beat their time. In short, art depended on knowledge. In Madagascar, inspiration was born from the commonplaces that the jousters threw back and forth like bullets. The writer did not pride himself on being original any more than the chess player claims that the black pieces mesh with the game or that the king skips a square. Since the Romantics, literature has only breathed in France in the shadow of the scaffold. A crowd of Saints-Justs, baptized critics, took as their motto: Sincerity or death. We read the novelist in his person and his work in his life. We regret that Corneille did not marry his wife on the corpse of his father-in-law. We hope that Racine-Néro poisoned Marquise-Britannicus. We swear that Pascal, memorial aside, only experienced anguish of faith. Molière-Arnolphe and Molière-Alceste devoured the other Molière. Madame de Sévigné's letters are from a mother who sleeps with her daughter. Finally, it is clear that Shakespeare was an assassin just as Gide was a giton. We only question genius in his transparent Plutarch.

On the other hand, talent is a lie, style is fabrication, form is lack of substance. The wonder is to write the way you write when you're not writing. We adore the ignorance of boors, the muttering of simpletons, the holy absurdity of fools, the treasures of puerility. We worship the gods who evaporate. We would almost dare to criticize a writer for consulting a dictionary or a grammar book. Use, they whispered in his ear, the unheard word which you will only use once. Invent not only your subject, or rather your absence of subject, but also virgin, fierce, monstrous words. Don't do anything unless you undo something. The modern muse is bound only by the oath to burn museums. See our admirable painters: they flee from canvas to canvas; we recognize them in proportion as they have the honor of misrecognizing themselves. Art, in a word, is nothing more than an eruption of theatrical twists.

Unfortunately, the floor is stunned. He no longer knows what miracle to devote himself to. There's worse. Some awakened people are beginning to realize that the merchants of oddities are boring imitators of two or three tireless fads. They have drawn from the dream only mechanical antics, and from the automaton which is in man only inhuman puppets. The astonishing Cocteau remains prisoner of his eternal tricks and one doubts whether he was a young old man or an old young man. Fashion is born wrinkled like the Ogre's boot, at the moment when we thought it was fresh like Tom Thumb's wild apple. It seems that the artists, jealous of the physicist's prodigies, have in turn flattered themselves to change literature and painting, that is to say the heart of man, in the same way as one changes the air in one's house. They pretended to no longer accept any law which had formerly been the mistress of the masters.

It must be admitted that this audacity was as sublime as it was presumptuous. Never had we hoped so much for the mind or despaired of more minds. In modest centuries, Racine was born slowly from Euripides and Napoleon from Livy. Those who blazed a trail began by following the beaten paths. Moreover, the scientists themselves were careful not to deny their elders. Einstein, far from abolishing Newton, accomplished it. Invention has, on this side, only the exterior of ingratitude and the chain does not spoil freedom. Proof of this is the constancy of mathematics and, consequently, of a stable, rigorous, universal language.

We have sometimes wanted to be surprised by the difficulty we find in drawing positive words either from Paulhan himself or from his works. This is because there is in him and in them, in addition to the delicate delicacy of a very finicky logician, the childhood and curiosity of a very open observer. The perpetual friend of Madecan proverbs favors with such ardor the trials, the torments and the abortions of verse or prose. With one half of his nature, Paulhan leaned towards numbers, towards tradition, towards dogmas, but the other cheek of Janus looked towards rebellion and unknown gods. From this we must conclude that Chesterton was Paulhan's model because he was secretly his brother. What a mirror of Jean Paulhan's temperament is the precious and brief book, dazzling and full, to which Chesterton gave the title of Orthodoxy! What brilliant tricks to finally establish that Rome is in Rome and the truth is in the Pope! The arguments of the left hand justify the diamond that the right hand grips. When fools claimed that there was no fire in the center of Paulhan, it is almost as if they had maintained that, since a scale has two arms, it does not have a beam. It is easy to see where the error of narrow skulls comes from. It is clear that Chesterton did not think of inventing the Church nor Francis of Assisi of forging Jesus Christ. However, the violent love of the old Gospel still produces fools for God.

This is how, in a completely different subject and with a comparable instinct, Paulhan had no need to imagine rhetoric - any more than Abelard had to create Héloïse.
However, history shows us that in certain ages the sun was darkened. Shadows had to be pushed aside. How can we deny that around the middle of the 20th century, a multitude of Albigensians, locked in the belly of Freud, aimed to ruin all literature? Paulhan, at the same time, was amused and alarmed by it - because his friends are those of language, like Étiemble or Saint-John Perse, as well as the madmen like Michaux or Fautrier.

It seems, however, that Paulhan was more successful in embarrassing his adversaries than in celebrating his allies, or rather he strives to discomfit each other without anyone, except the Great Vulture, lying on the battlefield. A logician, he senses the follies of reason. A grammarian, he enjoys the vicissitudes of syntax and the poverty of etymology. But there is in this slippery man a kind of faith in the crank of the well and in its rope. A greedy and patient reader, cautiously attracted by magic, he reduces to quia, on certain points, the brilliant and uncontemporary heads of Benda, Valéry, Alain. A vast mind, although marauding, and nourished by old ambrosia, he quarrels with Breton and with Aragon, he quibbles with Sartre. This is because despite a soft voice and charming modesty, Paulhan was born a peeler and epiloguer. He grabs people by a button on their jacket and by the little feather on their hat. Because the long ardor of his thought is maintained by the scandal of contradiction, that is to say by the religion of words. We could find there some memory of the Huguenot virtue par excellence, so quick but so slow to fade into the texts and to impose its meticulous love on them. What means of explaining, other than through a somewhat sacred study of the word, the value that Paulhan attaches to antilogies? Neither Leibniz nor Hegel dwells on this. They triumph over oppositions in the third term where they confuse them. Paulhan is Manichaean. Chesterton said that when you go to the surgeon, you don't know if you will come back on two legs; at the very least, no one leaves the hospital with three legs. Paulhan's method is binary. What happens? That a judge accustomed to reconciling the parties remains as if suspended in the air, at the moment of leaving, without flowers in hand, the garden of Tarbes. It’s because the gardener goes about his academic routine. When we press him to conclude, he responds with his refrain: “But we’ll talk about it again.” Whether it is a sentence, a letter, a chapter or a book, Paulhan has the genius of a perpetual tomorrow and of an age whose gold is in the staircase.

The ill-intentioned or the impatient infer that the alchemist has no secrets. The wisest persist in pushing from parentheses to parentheses until they reach the word of the enigma. They then discover that it is simple and inexhaustible, like that of Oedipus.

The mystery of Paulhan is the same as that of Descartes, I mean common sense.
It is permissible for anyone who holds a pen to observe, after La Bruyère, that the right expression, and which is the most naively correct, escapes us at first and, sometimes, escapes us forever. It's not that it's rare or obscure or reserved. Rather, she lives in this citadel, painted by Ariosto, where the lovers searched tirelessly for each other because they met without recognizing each other. The truth is not hidden: this is precisely why some do not see it while others only see it with one eye. The invincible difficulty that mystics experience in showing us God through themselves has its source in the evidence. No one can explain what everything is explained by. The light illuminates us without us being able to illuminate the light. What man understands about nature, he understands through his own, but he is very far from understanding his own nature. The reason begins with a stroke of brilliance which is not her fault and into which she does not fit any more than a child enters its mother's womb. Note, moreover, this mixture of appetite and disappointment that Newton's apple and Columbus' egg leave in children. I recall the first story: Newton is under an apple tree. An apple falls. Why, he said to himself, does it fall instead of rising? This is a question that fools will find stupid in proportion as they are stupefied by habit.

We must therefore be indulgent to the temerity of ingenuous people who delve into postulates. Now Paulhan the Obscure enters into this subject through this commonplace that men speak to understand each other. But the better they talk, the less they get along. The best soothsayers are blind. The Oedipes do not discern the Jocastas. It does not seem that criticism is easy for those to whom art comes easily. We think of the fable of the two snakes, each of which begins to eat the tail of the other until there is nothing left in the place. Greco suggests delivering Michelangelo's Last Judgment to the sponges. Courbet is of the opinion that Manet is only a rehash of Velazquez, Valéry hates Pascal, Claudel loathes Corneille. Stendhal loathes Chateaubriand.

As for professional critics, of whom it was hoped that, less dazzled by their own mirror, they would have their eyes open to the diversity of loves, what could be more miserable than their natural light? The blunders of Sainte-Beuve are equaled only by those of Brunetière and Taine.

But was Paulhan’s taste, after all, infallible? It must be said to the glory of a man condemned to weigh manuscripts that he did not often mistake a marten for a fox, and that the admirable lesson of Fénéon was not lost on his disciple. What lesson though? Is it an intimate and, therefore, incommunicable sense, or a real method?

Paulhan did not hide his great design which meets Valéry's philosophical ambition. The way gold was made should give us the means of making gold from lead. If we drew from an excellent work the laws which produced its excellence, this public alchemy would return the artist to the artisan and the masterpiece to mastery. Literature would become the mother of companions. She would rediscover this honesty that the people of the Renaissance depraved when they deified talent. Genius would be nothing more than a shadow of which curses would be the body. Valéry's triumph would have consisted not in writing the Young Parque but in having it written by a multitude of executors. This is how the proponents of the new novel promise anonymous perfection to anyone who wants to work on it. In the end, La Bruyère's wish would be listened to and a book would be made like a clock is made, or as, it is said, the churches of the 13th century were built in France. The undertakings of language, finally clear and well established, would have the solidity that music had in the illustrious family of Johann Sebastian Bach. Certainly superiority would maintain its degrees. Among the Couperins we can distinguish François d'avec Louis and d'avec Charles. However, differences never become disparate. What, for so many centuries, sustained the strength and longevity of Chinese art would in turn be the virtue of ours. Magic would be based on rhetoric. On the one hand, the originals would not be ashamed of being copies, on the other hand, the copies would not fail to be originals. The West, renouncing the incredible torment of singular inventions and the dogma of the fatherless son or the prodigious orphan, would humbly return to the old school that the rest of the world has not left.

It is through this means that Jean Paulhan's devout respect for the Contemplators of Japan and the passion he has for painting, when it has no object other than itself, are disentangled. Constable said of Turner: “His landscapes are all the more similar because they resemble nothing.” It was like sticking a gold tooth in a fake wound. Because the subject of a painting is, strictly speaking, the painting itself. He only represents what he is. The clean color blends in with the general decoration. Thus any language, the more universal it is, the more it speaks divinely. When Paulhan impudently mocks what he calls the little stories of the Bible, he first criticizes them for being Jewish and personal. The two Testaments never tire of telling of graces and elections. Paulhan naturally has too much modesty to adore privileges. On the contrary, he is fascinated by the jumble and incognito of Japanese monkhood. He admires the Buddhists who burn Buddha and the singers of whom nothing remains but the song. The gold prospector of Madagascar became forever alien to the spirit of particularity. The epics that are over and over again, the rumination of novels, the love rituals of the East, the manuals of commonplaces, the grammar of ideas, in short, occupy this maker of acute and difficult pamphlets with their vast erudition.

It happened, however, that this curious uniformity fell through the chimney into the engineering office. The Nouvelle Revue Française tested the rarest pistols in literature. The man who had brought in his suitcases a whole heap of fixed poetry wrapped in unshakable proverbs discovered, still fresh from Antananarivo, the dogma of the new sun each morning. There is no writer who does not claim to be the last dew. The temple only opened to innocence. The impulses of an incredible voice were combined with the tricks of extravagance. The well-made baskets were hidden under a miraculous peach. Criticism only wanted to be scholarly in order to see the imitators coming from afar, and to do justice to them. Any candle that was lit by a master's flame was blown out. Minerva had to come out armed, not with a migraine from Jupiter, but with the candor of her sleep.

Jean Paulhan submitted gently, and with a diligent smile, to a method entirely opposed to the Malagasy one. Instead of there, the merit of the poet being measured, as in Virgil's Bucolics, by the usual verses taken from the old arsenal and which one of the rivals placed better, the West, especially after Rimbaud and after him, demanded from the vaticinator a torrent of illuminations. What is incomprehensible about God the Father takes nothing away from the beauties of Creation. We then saw Paulhan, fortifying his shyness but apologizing for his firmness, sitting in Fouquier-Tinville's chair.

What way to educate yourself unless you hold both ends of the chain? The need for disruption is yet another rule and, of all, the most despotic. It was a matter of gradually reducing the authors, entrenched in their supreme marvels, to silence and suicide. However Paulhan, sensitive to the entertainment of the counterweight, faithful in his bones to the powers of rhetoric, also supported its champions. The same mist that Picasso spread across his palette, without being able to nail Proteus to one of his forms, made Jean Paulhan's criticism agile and furtive. His greatest pleasure is to perceive in the conversation as it is the mind as it hides itself. Paulhan is a philosopher of the common place and common sense. While the common ear falls asleep to the clarity which it believes to be decisive in the opinions received and the sentences made, Paulhan questions our thinking clerks. Why does the Englishman, barely in Calais, seeing a redhead pass by on the quay, conclude too quickly that all French women have Judas hair? It is because an indiscreet appetite for novelty, combined with the laziness of impatience, and the authority of freshness, prides itself on reducing the rainbow to a single color. To reason is to simplify. To understand is to strangle the abundant detail of observation by a law. The truth betrays truths.

This is precisely the point where Paulhan triumphs, but in the manner of the Parthian horsemen. It hurts prejudices, errors, presumptions with little blows; he has a happy skirmish. However, don't count on him to finish the war and seal victory. This stubborn quarrel then fled the lists. It escapes the thickness of the standards. He prefers the corner of the eye to the confident look and the touches of wisdom to his square doctrine.
We know that Alain hated systems, like mousetraps. So he did not forge any cage to think. However, from refusal to refusal, from prudence to prudence, he does not fail to dogmatize on many points. He tells us so frankly what he doesn't want that he doesn't fail to say exactly what he wants. We draw from his words, without forcing the lock, very positive negatives.

On the contrary, Paulhan prides himself on restoring the darkness he disturbed. He is a teacher of modesty, or one of those people who file a lawsuit that they fear winning. This illusion, the mystery of which he has pierced, and which consists of speaking of the trunk as if it were the elephant, is more due to the misfortune of reflection than to the defect of his own.

We walk in safety under the auspices of this man. His friendship is as faithful as his judgments. However, he likes to try on the small herd with which he surrounds himself the new books that he has himself examined. By proposing them or praising them with a word he envelopes them in nonchalance and uncertainty. He places the freedom of others in a kind of freedom that he in turn pretends to have almost rediscovered. It then seems manageable and of such good composition that one would swear it was docile to the tinkling of the bells. The familiars do not abandon themselves to these charming facilities. It's not far from the courthouse to the hot seat. What sentence addressed to the guilty cannot make the one who passes it guilty?
No matter. There is nothing hypocritical about this affable condescension. It happened several times that the authors, of whom Paulhan subsequently became the unshakable supporter, were not unearthed by him. Fautrier, for example, became his painter with difficulty before, without return, he established his reputation. A fable of infallibility has been spread around Paulhan. Now, if he has the half-silences of an oracle, he does not have the presumption of it. A luminous maturity suits the turn of his mind better than the stroke of light. It's not that the fads are foreign to him, but sometimes he corrects them, sometimes confirms them, with subtle information. He does not fear being, even to the point of scandal, the sole advocate of a good cause; However, through ordinary discretion, this gracious Don Quixote fears the misfortunes of heresy. He is so free from heaviness and pedantry that we forget the diligence and constancy of this eater of books and this pillar of galleries. Rarely has a connoisseur rubbed shoulders with more people and more things.

This is because language cannot be invented. This is because the sign and the idea are not divided like the angel and the beast. Alas! grammar has its surgeons, passion has its incendiaries. Some would like to think as we speak, others would like to speak as we feel. To some, language is magical, to others, feeling. Some believe that Abbé Prévost wrote Manon, others are convinced that Manon fell hot from a bed into a book. But both are betting absurdly. Who does not remember the admirable naivety in which Tristan and Iseult recognize each other, as in a kiss:

Beautiful friend, so are we,
Neither you without me, nor me without you.

Jean Paulhan spent his life, without wasting it, explaining this double simplicity. What a way, when you're a man, to not be crazy! We readily allow lovers to be foolish. We do not take at his word anyone who claims that mathematicians are extravagant. Now the understanding goes astray no less when it aims at pure dryness than does the heart guided by the absence of a guide. Valéry's mind is no less alienated than Rousseau's instinct. Such pride may reduce the soul to a machine or change the bird into a blue bird, but the wise man also distrusts anyone who refuses either the food of the night or the service of the torch. Our condition condemns us to this equivocal unity. It is true that it does not satisfy either Descartes or Lao-Tseu. It is true, however, that the most sovereign heads put up with it. Vinci the Fabricator uses a mysterious brush which plunges the Virgin into the cave and the Baptist's finger into the clouds. We no longer know in Faust whether Goethe is the enchanter or the enchanted one. In Plato, Socrates and his demon, the tale and the reason come together.

We now see why the story of Psyche relates, unless it announces it, the greatest danger in the world. When the soul looks at love, they both fade away. So metaphysics is a sin. Let us add that it is useless, like morality. Paulhan is interested neither in the laws of the heart nor in man's place in the universe. He only intends to make criticism more solid by better use of his tools. This involves applying the law of 19 Frimaire of Year VIII to literature. A sort of academy of weights and measures would verify the accounts of language. If Paulhan has a chimera, it is the chimera of accuracy. He suggests that we link speech to a metric system. The painting but the event which occupies five lines of a newspaper or a court chronicle, the story of a suffering or that of a dream, a conversation or the deceptions of politics, in turn amuse the surveyor. Let us admit that the followers of Vailati, from whom Paulhan borrows his method, have hardly taught us. Often boring and ordinarily sterile, some of them derive from counting an author's favorite words an arithmetic of talent. This forgets that the docility of numbers is the modern resource of all public abusers. Additions are the armrests of lies. They will prove whatever it pleases me to prove. The apparatus of science becomes the instrument of caprice. Furthermore, the clever will not fail to maintain that the terms with which a poet is most careful indicate the secret interest he has in them. Ultimately the account is false, as are the factory statements and especially those of the tax authorities. We must return to the famous emptiness of the inns of Spain the mechanical complacency of the too good servant. From the loving use that Paul Valéry makes of the word pure, I am free to conclude that it expresses the substance of his doctrine or that it manifests its impotence, depending on whether it designates a fact or a wish, a fruit or a wish, an obstinate pursuit or a drivel. The calculator is never more than a dancer, and it will depend on my intention whether the sum I sneeze adds or refuses to one of the four winds of the mind.

Paulhan is careful not to give such thick advice, but, at the same time, he deprives himself of the arguments which shut down the adversary. Suppose that a sequel to Les Fleurs de Tarbes and a treatise on the False Days of Judgment finally appear, what means of correcting, according to this table of errors, the evil of opinion? Although literature magnifies blunders and allows us to put our stamp on misunderstandings, criticism nonetheless remains the occasion for the finest tricks and the most slippery delicacies. Sainte-Beuve and Taine are much better than their faults. Most writers are superior, in the detail of their works, to the ideas which are their pillars. Read Balzac's prefaces: one would swear that they were composed by a hercules at the fair. Rarely have we been so heavily Catholic, so immersed in Charles X and Buffon. Yet read the novels, in the pages where the author forgets to think out loud, what wonders then come out of him in spite of himself! This is how Stendhal's logical framework is strong beneath the elegant and penetrating way in which he uses it. Execution saves the design. The force of the river erases the steepness of the banks. But a true critic has no weight other than that of his genius and genius has the privilege of drunkards: they festoon without falling, they fall without being crushed. After all, posterity ends up tuning its flutes. Rimbaud's fable will perhaps perish; Rimbaud will stay. Whether the poet is a gargoyle, as Plato wants, or a wise demon, as Edgar Poe wants, Ronsard and Malherbe appear side by side in the anthologies. The history of tastes and that of schools are just middle school banter. The theories don't matter. Apollo's basket collects the enemy's masterpieces pell-mell. Let us be assured that despite the ambiguities of the language, Paulhan, better than anyone, untangles the rockets that he enjoys confusing. He says, for example, that there is good will or bad will in a man who says thank you. But giving thanks and crying thanks also mark fullness. Enough touches too much and pleasure touches pain. If words were only means of showing things and the exercise of the mind were a hardware store, the expression would be perfectly accurate because the soul would be perfectly body. However, the dictionary continues to move from the visible to the invisible and the big business, when writing, is not to describe what is seen, but to give eyes to secret realities. We can talk about a flute in terms of a luthier; they are precise, they are abundant, they only have virtue for a very small number of people. However, a particular Mozart aria through the breath and under the fingers of a particular performer does not only address a musician to his profession; the diversity of hearts, and in each of us our own heart, appeals to this strange language which sounds all the poorer on the outside as it appears richer on the inside.

Now Paulhan, completely occupied with an ambition which he believes to be modest and which is not, thinks of subjecting the mutterings of love to the property of a gardening treatise. Let's not doubt it. A well-crafted rhetoric, and a map of the Tender much better drawn up than the old one, would enlighten our cave. But do we honestly want to dispel the darkness? What would we say if we spoke no higher or lower than ourselves? Isn't involuntary or deliberate hypocrisy made of the same stuff as thought? Can we imagine a machine to read hearts that would not stop them from beating? Jean Paulhan would perhaps answer me that the silence to which this rhetoric would reduce me, and any reader too, would be the most beautiful thing in the world. On this, he is right, or, at least, I give him victory.