This cannot hurt your pride or hinder the expansion of your own personality. Quite the contrary. This studious humility is the surest path toward the conquest of your own soul. The anatomists will explain to you that the human embryo adopts successively, in its quick evolution, all the forms the species has known before its actual flowering. This great law rules also in the moral order, and do not count on escaping it. It is by first knowing the world through the masters that you will succeed some day in grasping it in your hands, dominating it yourself.
Ambition is an intoxicating passion, but to go to school to genius is a prudent measure and a sweet experience, too.
VIII
If you are unhappy, oppressed, if you have melancholy doubts of your future, of your ability, of your power to love, and if nothing in heaven replies to your prayer, to your need for deliverance, remember that you are not abandoned without resource. Men remain to you. The best among them have made for your consolation, for your redemption, statues, books and songs.
Open one of these books, therefore, and plunge into it! Sink into it as into a cool forest, as into a deep, running brook.
A man is speaking to you of himself or of the world. Read! Read on! Little by little the harmonious voice envelopes you, cradles you, lifts you up and suddenly bears you away. The tightness in your throat seems to relax, you breathe with a sort of fervor and exaltation. Generous tears start to your eyes or your whole soul shakes with laughter.
This great and wholesome exaltation people attribute to the miraculous presence of beauty. No doubt, no doubt! But that vague and simple explanation is an almost mythical one.
For you must realize that the man with whom you have just been having a sort of intimate colloquy has comforted you and carried you out of yourself mainly because he has been able to prove to you that you were neither abandoned, nor destitute, nor truly disgraced. He has seemed to you great but, in recalling to you that you are of the same race as himself, he has effaced himself before you. He has given you happy, courageous, new thoughts, and you have suddenly seen that you were thinking them also. For a second you have both communed together. And you have felt yourself once more in possession of a treasure that was escaping you.
It is true, all these thoughts are your own, since it is enough for you to see them in writing to recognize them. It is true, you too have your grandeur, your nobility and infinite resources. How could you have forgotten it for a moment? It is enough for you to open that book or to hum that song to remember it. It is true, your life also is astonishing and full of adventures. How did you fall into that despair? What did that discouragement signify?