The day-dreams of love cannot be scrutinised. I have observed that I can re-read a good novel every three years with the same pleasure. It gives me feelings akin to the kind of emotional taste, which dominates me at the moment, or if my feelings are nil, makes for variety in my ideas. Also, I can listen with pleasure to the same music, but, in this, memory must not intrude. The imagination should be affected and nothing else; if, at the twentieth representation, an opera gives more pleasure, it is either because the music is better understood, or because it also brings back the feeling it gave at the first. As to new lights, which a novel may throw upon our knowledge of the human heart, I still remember clearly the old ones, and am pleased even to find them noted in the margin. But this kind of pleasure pertains to the novels, in so far as they advance me in the knowledge of man, and not in the least to day-dreaming--the veritable pleasure of novels. Such day-dreaming is inscrutable. To watch it is for the present to kill it, for you fall into a philosophical analysis of pleasure; and it [Pg 51] is killing it still more certainly for the future, for nothing is surer to paralyse the imagination than the appeal to memory(9). If I find in the margin a note, depicting my feelings on reading _Old Mortality_ three years ago in Florence, I am plunged immediately into the history of my life, into an estimate of the degree of happiness at the two epochs, in short, into the deepest problems of philosophy--and then good-bye for a long season to the unchecked play of tender feelings. Every great poet with a lively imagination is timid, he is afraid of men, that is to say, for the interruptions and troubles with which they can invade the delight of his dreams. He fears for his concentration. Men come along with their gross interests to drag him from the gardens of Armida, and force him into a fetid slough: only by irritating him can they fix his attention on themselves. It is this habit of feeding his soul upon touching dreams and this horror of the vulgar which draws a great artist so near to love. The more of the great artist a man has in him, the more must he wish for titles and honours as a bulwark. [1] Scents. [2] See note 2, p. 28. [3] Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria.--Dante, _Inf._, V (Francesca). [No greater sorrow than to remember happy times in misery.--Tr.] [Pg 52] CHAPTER XV