On Reading (On Series)

by Marcel Proust

Victor Hugo knew Quintus-Curtius, Tacitus, and Justinian by heart, and that if anyone challenged him on the validity of a term he could trace its genealogy all the way back to its origins, citing quotations which demonstrated a true erudition.11 (I have shown elsewhere how this erudition could nourish his genius instead of stifling it, the way a bundle of sticks can put out a small fire but feed a large one.) Maeterlinck, who for me is the opposite of a ‘literary man’ in this sense, whose spirit is constantly open to the thousand nameless emotions communicated by the beehive, the soil, or the grass, greatly reassures us about the dangers of erudition, of bibliophilia almost, when he describes for us as an amateur the engravings which adorn an old edition of Jacob Cats or Antonius Sanderus.