FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?
and reader are of the same world and have the same opinions about
everything. Thus, each production of the mind is at the same time
an act of courtesy, and style is the supreme courtesy of the author
toward his reader; and the reader, for his part, never tires of find–
ing the same thoughts in the most diverse of books because these
thoughts are his own and he does not ask to acquire others but only
to be offered, with magnificence, those which he already has. Hence,
it is in a spirit of complicity that the author presents his reader with
a portrait which is necessarily abstract; addressing a parasitical class,
he cannot show man at work or, in general, the relations between
man and external nature. And as, on the other hand, there are bodies
of specialists, under the control of the Church and the Monarchy,
whose concern it is to maintain the spiritual and secular ideology,
the writer does not even suspect the importance of economic, religious,
metaphysical, and political factors in the constittJtion of the person;
and as the society in which he lives confounds the present with the
eternal, he cannot even imagine the slightest change in what he calls
human nature. He conceives history as a series of accidents which
affect the eternal man on the surface without deeply modifying him,
and
if
he had to assign a meaning to historical duration he would see
in it both an eternal repetition (so that previous events can and ought
to provide lessons for his contemporaries) and a process of slight
degeneration, since the fundamental events of history have long since
passed
and since, perfection in letters having been attained in antiq–
uity, his ancient models seem peerless.
In all this he is in full harmony with a public which considers
work a curse, which does not
feel
its situation in history and in the
world simply because it is privileged and because its only concern is
faith, respect for the monarch, passion, war, death, and courtesy.
In short, the image of the classical man is purely psychological
because the classical public is conscious only of its psychology. Fur–
thermore, it must be understood that this psychology is itself tradi–
tionalist; it is not concerned with discovering new and deep truths
about the human heart nor of setting up hypotheses. It is in unstable
societies, when the public exists on several social levels, that the
writer, torn and dissatisfied, invents explanations for his anguish.
The psychology of the seventeenth century is purely descriptive. It is
not based so much upon the author's personal experience as it is the
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