Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

But anyway, quite apart from their intellectual content, these theories seemed to me to indicate the inferiority of their supporters, in the same way that a really well brought-up child who hears the people with whom he has been taken to lunch saying: “We don’t hide anything here, we say whatever we think,” senses that this indicates a moral quality inferior to that inherent in good deeds, pure and simple, which do not need words. Real art has nothing to do with proclamations of this sort, and carries out its work in silence. Also, the people who indulged in this kind of theorizing used ready-made expressions which had a curious similarity to those of the idiots they were attacking. Indeed it may well be that quality of language is a better gauge of the level of moral or intellectual endeavor than aesthetic approach. Conversely, though, this quality of language (and the laws of character can be equally well studied in a frivolous subject and in a serious one, just as an anatomist can as easily study the laws of anatomy on the body of an imbecile as on that of a man of talent, the great moral laws, as much as those of the circulation of the blood or renal filtration, differing very little with the intellectual level of the individual), which the theoreticians think they can do without, those who admire the theoreticians believe simplistically that it shows no great intellectual worth, worth which they need, if they are to discern it, to see expressed directly and which they...