I cannot fuse together materials and ideas. If we are to
give anything a form, we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it.
[Footnote: Compare this paragraph from the "Pensees of a new writer, M.
Joseph Roux, a country cure, living in a remote part of the _Bas
Limousin_, whose thoughts have been edited and published this year by M.
Paul Marieton (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre):
"Le verbe ne souffre et ne connait que la volonte qui le dompte, et
n'emporte loin sans peril que l'intelligence qui lui menage avec empire
l'eperon et le frein."]
We must treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling lest we
are doing it a wrong. We must be able to transmute and absorb it into
our own substance. This sort of confident effrontery is beyond me: my
whole nature tends to that impersonality which respects and subordinates
itself to the object; it is love of truth which holds me back from
concluding and deciding. And then I am always retracing my steps:
instead of going forward I work in a circle: I am afraid of having
forgotten a point, of having exaggerated an expression, of having used a
word out of place, while all the time I ought to have been thinking of
essentials and aiming at breadth of treatment. I do not know how to
sacrifice anything, how to give up anything whatever.
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