What years of labor, what study and comparison, are
needed to bring the critical judgment to maturity! Like Plato's sage, it
is only at fifty that the critic rises to the true height of his
literary priesthood, or, to put it less pompously, of his social
function. By then only can he hope for insight into all the modes of
being, and for mastery of all possible shades of appreciation. And
Sainte-Beuve joined to this infinitely refined culture a prodigious
memory, and an incredible multitude of facts and anecdotes stored up for
the service of his thought.
December 8, 1869.--Everything has chilled me this morning; the cold of
the season, the physical immobility around me, but, above all, Hartman's
"Philosophy of the Unconscious." This book lays down the terrible thesis
that creation is a mistake; being, such as it is, is not as good as
non-being, and death is better than life.
I felt the same mournful impression that Obermann left upon me in my
youth. The black melancholy of Buddhism encompassed and overshadowed me.
If, in fact, it is only illusion which hides from us the horror of
existence and makes life tolerable to us, then existence is a snare and
life an evil. Like the Greek Annikeris, we ought to counsel suicide, or
rather with Buddha and Schopenhauer we ought to labor for the radical
extirpation of hope and desire--the causes of life and resurrection.
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