Sulpice; this is
why it has never attached any importance to literature, excluding it
almost entirely. The rule of the St. Sulpice Company is to publish
everything anonymously, and to write in the most unpretending
and retiring style possible. They see clearly the vanity, and the
drawbacks of talent, and they will have none of it. The word which
best characterises them is mediocrity, but then their mediocrity
is systematic and self-planned. Michelet has described the alliance
between the Jesuits and the Sulpicians as "a marriage between death
and vacuum." This is no doubt true, but Michelet failed to see that
in this case the vacuum is loved for its own sake. There is something
touching about a vacuum created by men who will not think for fear of
thinking ill. Literary error is in their eyes the most dangerous of
errors, and it is just on this account that they excel in the true
style of writing. St. Sulpice is now the only place where, as
formerly at Port-Royal, the style of writing possesses that absolute
forgetfulness of form which is the proof of sincerity. It never
occurred to the masters that among their pupils must be a writer or an
orator. The principle which they insisted upon the most earnestly was
never to make any reference to self, and if one had anything to say,
to say it plainly and in undertones. It was all very well for you, my
worthy masters, with that total ignorance of the world which does
you so much honour, to take this view; but if you knew how little
encouragement the world gives to modesty, you would see how difficult
it is for literature to act up to your principles.
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