It is not given to every man to bathe in a multitude: to enjoy a crowd is an art; and only that man is able, at the expense of humanity, to experience a bout of vitality, into whom a fairy has breathed, when he was in his cradle, the taste for travesty and masks, the hate for family life and the passion for traveling.
Multitude, solitude: synonymous terms and convertible by the active and creative poet. He who cannot people his solitude, cannot be alone in a busy crowd.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being at will himself and someone else. Like those wandering souls looking for a body, he enters, when he wishes to, the personality of each man. For him alone, everything is opened; if certain places seem closed to him, that is because for him they are not worth the trouble of being visited.
The solitary meditative walker draws an unusual excitement from this universal communion. The man who easily joins with the crowd knows feverish pleasures, of which the egotist, closed like a chest, and the lazy person, imprisoned like a mollusc, will forever be deprived. He adopts all professions as his own, all the joys and woes which circumstance presents to him.
What men call love is very small, limited and weak, compared with that ineffable orgy, that holy prostitution of the soul which gives itself completely, poetry and charity, to the unforeseen which appears, to the unknown which passes by.
It is good sometimes to tell the lucky ones in this world, even if it is only to humiliate for a moment their foolish pride, that there is a happiness superior to theirs, vaster and more refined. Founders of colonies, pastors of people, missionary priests exiled at the ends of the earth, doubtless know something of this mysterious excitement; and, at the heart of the vast family which their genius has created, they must sometimes laugh at those who pity them for their perturbed fortune and their chaste life.