When literary men assemble together, what mimetic friendships, in their mutual corruption!  Creatures of intrigue, they borrow other men’s eyes, and act by feelings often even contrary to their own:  they wear a mask on their face, and only sing a tune they have caught.  Some hierophant in their mysteries proclaims their elect whom they have to initiate, and their profane who are to stand apart under their ban.  They bend to the spirit of the age, but they do not elevate the public to them; they care not for truth, but only study to produce effect, and they do nothing for fame but what obtains an instant purpose.  Yet their fame is not therefore the more real, for everything connected with fashion becomes obsolete.  Her ear has a great susceptibility of weariness, and her eye rolls for incessant novelty.  Never was she earnest for anything.  Men’s minds with her become tarnished and old-fashioned as furniture.  But the steams of rich dinners, the eye which sparkles with the wines of France, the luxurious night which flames with more heat and brilliancy than God has made the day, this is the world the man of coterie-celebrity has chosen; and the Epicurean, as long as his senses do not cease to act, laughs at the few who retire to the solitary midnight lamp.  Posthumous fame is—­a nothing!  Such men live like unbelievers in a future state, and their narrow calculating spirit coldly dies in their artificial world:  but true genius looks at a nobler source of its existence; it catches inspiration in its insulated studies; and to the great genius, who feels how his present is necessarily connected with his future celebrity, posthumous fame is a reality, for the sense acts upon him!

The habitudes of genius, before genius loses its freshness in this society, are the mould in which the character is cast; and these, in spite of all the disguise of the man, will make him a distinct being from the man of society.  Those who have assumed the literary character often for purposes very distinct from literary ones, imagine that their circle is the public; but in this factitious public all their interests, their opinions, and even their passions, are temporary, and the admirers with the admired pass away with their season.  “It is not sufficient that we speak the same language,” says a witty philosopher, “but we must learn their dialect; we must think as they think, and we must echo their opinions, as we act by imitation.”  Let the man of genius then dread to level himself to the mediocrity of feeling and talent required in such circles of society, lest he become one of themselves; he will soon find that to think like them will in time become to act like them.  But he who in solitude adopts no transient feelings, and reflects no artificial lights, who is only himself, possesses an immense advantage:  he has not attached importance to what is merely local and fugitive, but listens to interior truths, and fixes on the immutable nature of things.  He is the man of every age.  Malebranche has observed, that “It is not indeed thought to be charitable to disturb common opinions, because it is not truth which unites society as it exists so much as opinion and custom:”  a principle which the world would not, I think, disagree with; but which tends to render folly wisdom itself, and to make error immortal.