SYMBOLISM.
A SIMILAR phenomenon to that which we observed in the case of the
pre-Raphaelites is afforded by the French Symbolists. We see a number
of young men assemble for the purpose of founding a school. It assumes
a special title, but in spite of all sorts of incoherent cackle and
subsequent attempts at mystification it has, beyond this name, no
kind of general artistic principle or clear æsthetic ideal. It only
follows the tacit, but definitely recognisable, aim of making a noise
in the world, and by attracting the attention of men through its
extravagances, of attaining celebrity and profit, and the gratification
of all the desires and conceits agitating the envious souls of these
filibusters of fame.
Shortly after 1880 there was, in the Quartier Latin in Paris, a group
of literary aspirants, all about the same age, who used to meet in an
underground café at the Quai St. Michel, and, while drinking beer,
smoking and quibbling late into the night, or early hours of the
morning, abused in a scurrilous manner the well-known and successful
authors of the day, while boasting of their own capacity, as yet
unrevealed to the world.
The greatest talkers among them were Emile Goudeau, a chatterbox
unknown save as the author of a few silly satirical verses; Maurice
Rollinat, the author of _Les Névroses_; and Edmond Haraucourt, who now
stands in the front rank of French mystics. They called themselves the
‘Hydropaths,’ an entirely meaningless word, which evidently arose out
of an indistinct reminiscence of both ‘hydrotherapy’ and ‘neuropath,’
and which was probably intended, in the characteristic vagueness of the
mystic thought of the weak-minded, to express only the general idea
of people whose health is not satisfactory, who are ailing and under
treatment. In any case there is, in the self-chosen name, a suggestion
of shattered nervous vitality vaguely felt and admitted. The group,
moreover, owned a weekly paper _Lutèce_, which ceased after a few
issues.[104]
About 1884 the society left their paternal pot-house, and pitched
their tent in the Café François I., Boulevard St. Michel. This _café_
attained a high renown. It was the cradle of Symbolism. It is still the
temple of a few ambitious youths, who hope, by joining the Symbolist
school, to acquire that advancement which they could not expect
from their own abilities. It is, too, the Kaaba to which all foreign
imbeciles make a pilgrimage, those, that is, who have heard of the new
Parisian tendency, and wish to become initiated into its teachings
and mysteries. A few of the Hydropaths did not join in the change
of quarters, and their places were taken by fresh auxiliaries--Jean
Moréas, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Morice, etc. These dropped the old
name, and were known for a short time as the ‘Décadents.’ This had been
applied to them by a critic in derision, but just as the ‘Beggars’ of
the Netherlands proudly and truculently appropriated the appellation
bestowed in contempt and mockery, so the ‘Décadents’ stuck in their
hats the insult, which had been cast in their faces, as a sign of
mutiny against criticism. Soon, however, these original guests of the
François I. became tired of their name, and Moréas invented for them
the designation of ‘Symbolists,’ under which they became generally
known, while a special smaller group, who had separated themselves from
the Symbolists, continued to retain the title of ‘Décadents.’
The Symbolists are a remarkable example of that group-forming tendency
which we have learnt to know as a peculiarity of ‘degenerates.’ They
had in common all the signs of degeneracy and imbecility: overweening
vanity and self-conceit, strong emotionalism, confused disconnected
thoughts, garrulity (the ‘logorrhœa’ of mental therapeutics), and
complete incapacity for serious sustained work. Several of them had had
a secondary education, others even less. All of them were profoundly
ignorant, and being unable, through weakness of will and inability
to pay attention, to learn anything systematically, they persuaded
themselves, in accordance with a well-known psychological law, that
they despised all positive knowledge, and held that only dreams and
divinings, only ‘intuitions,’ were worthy of human beings. A few of
them, like Moréas and Guaita, who afterwards became a ‘magian,’ read in
a desultory fashion all sorts of books which chanced to fall into their
hands at the _bouquinistes_ of the Quais, and delivered themselves of
the snatched fruits of their reading in grandiloquent and mysterious
phrases before their comrades. Their listeners thereupon imagined that
they had indulged in an exhausting amount of study, and in this way
they acquired that intellectual lumber which they peddled out in such
an ostentatious display in their articles and pamphlets, and in which
the mentally sane reader, to his amused astonishment, meets with the
names of Schopenhauer, Darwin, Taine, Renan, Shelley and Goethe; names
employed to label the shapeless, unrecognisable rubbish-heaps of a
mental dustbin, filled with raw scraps of uncomprehended and insolently
mutilated propositions and fragments of thought, dishonestly extracted
and appropriated. This ignorance on the part of the Symbolists, and
their childish flaunting of a pretended culture, are openly admitted by
one of them. ‘Very few of these young men,’ says Charles Morice,[105]
‘have any exact knowledge of the tenets of religion or philosophy.
From the expressions used in the Church services, however, they retain
some fine terms, such as “monstrance,” “ciborium,” etc.; several have
preserved from Spencer, Mill, Shopenhauer (_sic!_), Comte, Darwin,
a few technical terms. Few are those who know deeply what they talk
about, or those who do not try to make a show and parade of their
manner of speaking, which has no other merit than that of being a
conceit in syllables.’ (Charles Morice naturally is responsible for
this last unmeaning phrase, not I.)
The original guests of the François I. made their appearance at one
o’clock in the day at their café, and remained there till dinner-time.
Immediately after that meal they returned, and did not leave their
headquarters till long after midnight. Of course none of the Symbolists
had any known occupation. These ‘degenerates’ are no more capable of
regularly fulfilling any duty than they are of methodical learning.
If this organic deficiency appears in a man of the lower classes, he
becomes a vagabond; in a woman of that class it leads to prostitution;
in one belonging to the upper classes it takes the form of artistic and
literary drivel. The German popular mind betrays a deep intuition of
the true connection of things in inventing such a word as ‘day-thief’
(_Tagedieb_) for such æsthetic loafers. Professional thieving and the
unconquerable propensity to busy, gossiping, officious idleness flow
from the same source, to wit, inborn weakness of brain.
It is true that the boon companions of the café are not conscious of
their mentally-crippled condition. They find pet names and graceful
appellations for their inability to submit themselves to any sort of
discipline, and to devote persistent concentration and attention to
any sort of work. They call it ‘the artist nature,’ ‘genius roaming
at large,’ ‘a soaring above the low miasma of the commonplace.’ They
ridicule the dull Philistine, who, like the horse turning a winch,
performs mechanically a regular amount of work; they despise the
narrow-minded loons who demand that a man should either pursue a
circumscribed bourgeois trade or possess an officially acknowledged
status, and who profoundly distrust impecuniary professions. They
glory in roving folk who wander about singing and carelessly begging,
and they hold up as their ideal the ‘commoner of air,’ who bathes in
morning dew, sleeps under flowers, and gets his clothing from the same
firm as the lilies of the field in the Gospel. Richepin’s _La Chanson
des Gueux_ is the most typical expression of this theory of life.
Baumbach’s _Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen_ and _Spielmannslieder_
are analogous specimens in German literature, but of a less pronounced
character. Schiller’s _Pegasus im Joch_ seems to be pulling at the
same rope as these haters of the work society expects of them, but
it is only apparently so. Our great poet sides not with the impotent
sluggard, but with that overflowing energy which would fain do greater
things than the work of an office-boy or a night-watchman.
Moreover, the pseudo-artistic loafer, in spite of his imbecility
and self-esteem, cannot fail to perceive that his mode of life
runs contrary to the laws on which the structure of society and
civilization are based, and he feels the need of justifying himself
in his own eyes. This he does by investing with a high significance
the dreams and chatter over which he wastes his time, calculated to
arouse in him the illusion that they rival in value the most serious
productions. ‘The fact is, you see,’ says M. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘that
a fine book is the end for which the world was made.’[106] Morice
complains[107] touchingly that the poetic mind ‘should be bound to
suffer the interruption of a twenty-eight days’ army drill between
the two halves of a verse.’ ‘The excitement of the streets,’ he goes
on, ‘the jarring of the Governmental engine, the newspapers, the
elections, the change of the Ministry, have never made so much noise;
the stormy and turbulent autocracy of trade has suppressed the love of
the beautiful in the thoughts of the multitude, and industry has killed
as much silence as politics might still have permitted to survive.’ In
fact, what are all these nothings--commerce, manufactures, politics,
administration--against the immense importance of a hemistich?
The drivelling of the Symbolists was not entirely lost in the
atmosphere of their café, like the smoke of their pipes and
cigarettes. A certain amount of it was perpetuated, and appeared
in the _Revue Indépendante_, the _Revue Contemporaine_, and other
fugitive periodicals, which served as organs to the round table of
the François I. These little journals and the books published by the
Symbolists were not at first noticed outside the café. Then it happened
that _chroniqueurs_ of the Boulevard papers, into whose hands these
writings chanced to fall, devoted an article to them on days when
‘copy’ was scanty, but only to hold them up to ridicule. That was all
the Symbolists wanted. Mockery or praise mattered little so long as
they got noticed. Now they were in the saddle, and showed at once what
unparalleled circus-riders they were. They themselves used every effort
to get into the larger newspapers, and when one of them succeeded, like
the smith of Jüterbock in the familiar fairy tale, in throwing his
cap into an editor’s office through the crack of the door incautiously
put ajar, he followed it neck and crop, took possession of the place,
and in the twinkling of an eye transformed it into the citadel of the
Symbolist party. In these tactics everything served their turn--the
dried-up scepticism and apathy of Parisian editors, who take nothing
seriously, are capable neither of enthusiasm nor of repugnance, and
only know the cardinal principle of their business, viz., to make
a noise, to arouse curiosity, to forestall others by bringing out
something new and sensational; the uncritical gaping attitude of the
public, who repeat in faith all that their newspaper gossips to them
with an air of importance; the cowardice and cupboard-love of the
critics who, finding themselves confronted by a closed and numerous
band of reckless young men, got nervous at the sight of their clenched
fists and angry threatening glances, and did not dare to quarrel
with them; the low cunning of the ambitious, who hoped to make a
good bargain if they speculated on the rise of shares in Symbolism.
Thus the very worst and most despicable characteristics of editors,
critics, aspiring authors, and newspaper readers, co-operated to make
known, and, in part, even famous, the names of the original habitués
of the François I., and to awaken the conviction in very many weak
minds of both hemispheres that their tendency governed the literature
of the day, and included all the germs of the future. This triumph of
the Symbolists marks the victory of the gang over the individual. It
proves the superiority of attack over defence, and the efficacy of
mutual-admiration-insurance, even in the case of the most beggarly
incapacity.
With all their differences, the works of the Symbolists have two
features in common. They are vague often to the point of being
unintelligible, and they are pious. Their vagueness is only to be
expected, after all that has been said here about the peculiarities of
mystic thought. Their piousness has attained to an importance which
makes it necessary to consider it more in detail.
When, in the last few years, a large number of mysteries, passion
plays, golden legends, and cantatas appeared, when one dozen after
another of new poets and authors, in their first poems, novels, and
treatises, made ardent confessions of faith, invoked the Virgin Mary,
spoke with rapture of the sacrifice of the Mass, and knelt in fervent
prayer, the cry arose amongst reactionists, who have a vested interest
in diffusing a belief in a reversion of cultured humanity to the mental
darkness of the past: ‘Behold, the youth, the hope, the future of the
French people is turning away from science; “emancipation” is becoming
bankrupt; souls are opening again to religion, and the Holy Catholic
Church steps anew into its lofty office, as the teacher, comforter,
and guide of civilized mankind.’ The Symbolistic tendency is designedly
called ‘neo-Catholic,’ and certain critics pointed to its appearance
and success as a proof that freethought was overthrown by faith. ‘Even
the most superficial glance at the state of the world,’ writes Edouard
Rod,[108] ‘shows us that we are on all sides in the full swing of
reaction.’ And, further, ‘I believe in reaction in every sense of the
word. How far this reaction will go is the secret of to-morrow.’
The jubilant heralds of the new reaction, in inquiring into the cause
of this movement, find, with remarkable unanimity, this answer, viz.:
The best and most cultivated minds return to faith, because they found
out that science had deceived them, and not done for them what it
had promised to do. ‘The man of this century,’ says M. Melchior de
Vogüé,[109] ‘has acquired a very excusable confidence in himself....
The rational mechanism of the world has been revealed to him.... In
the explanation of things the Divine order is wholly eliminated....
Besides, why follow after doubtful causes, when the operations of the
universe and of humanity had become so clear to the physicist and
physiologist?... The least wrong God ever wrought was that of being
unnecessary. Great minds assured us of this, and all mediocre spirits
were convinced of it. The eighteenth century had inaugurated the
worship of Reason. The rapture of that millennium lasted but a moment.
Then came eternal disillusion, the regularly recurring ruin of all that
man had built upon the hollow basis of his reason.... He had to admit
that, beyond the circle of acquired truths, the abyss of ignorance
appeared again just as deep, just as disquieting.’
Charles Morice, the theorist and philosopher of the Symbolists,
arraigns Science on almost every page of his book, _La Littérature de
tout-à-l’heure_, for her great and divers sins. ‘It is lamentable,’ he
says in his apocalyptic phraseology,[110] ‘that our learned men have
no idea how, in popularizing science, they were disorganizing it (?).
To entrust principles to inferior memories, is to expose them to the
uncertainty of unauthorized interpretations, of erroneous commentaries
and heterodox hypotheses. For the word that the books contain is a
dead letter, and the books themselves may perish, but the impact which
they leave behind them, the breath going forth from them, survives.
And what if they have breathed out storm and unloosed (!) darkness?
But this is just what all this chaos of vulgarization has as its most
patent result.... Is not such the natural consequence of a century
of psychological investigation, which was a good training for the
reason, but whose immediate and actual consequences must inevitably
be weariness, and disgust, ay, and despair of reason?... Science had
erased the word mystery. With the same stroke of the pen she had
expunged the words beauty, truth, joy, humanity.... And now mysticism
takes from Science, the intruder and usurper, not only all that she
had stolen, but something also, it may be, of her own property. The
reaction against the shameless and miserable negations of scientific
literature ... has taken the form of an unforeseen poetical restoration
of Catholicism.’
Another graphomaniac, the author of that imbecile book, _Rembrandt
as Educator_, drivels in almost the same way. ‘Interest in science,
and especially in the once so popular natural science, has widely
diminished of late in the German world.... There has been to a certain
extent a surfeit of induction; there is a longing for synthesis; the
days of objectivity are declining once more to their end, and, in its
place, subjectivity knocks at the door.’[111]
Edouard Rod[112] says: ‘The century has advanced without keeping all
its promises’; and further on he speaks again of ‘this ageing and
deluded century.’
In a small book, which has become a sort of gospel to imbeciles and
idiots, _Le Devoir présent_, the author, M. Paul Desjardins,[113] makes
continual attacks on ‘so-called scientific empiricism,’ and speaks of
the ‘negativists, the empiricists, and the mechanists, whose attention
is wholly taken up with physical and inexorable forces,’ boasting of
his intention ‘to render invalid the value of the empirical methods.’
Even a serious thinker, M. F. Paulhan,[114] in his investigation of the
basis of French neo-mysticism, comes to the conclusion that natural
science has shown itself powerless to satisfy the needs of mankind.
‘We feel ourselves surrounded by a vast unknown, and demand that at
least access to it should be permitted to us. Evolution and positivism
have blocked the way.... For these reasons evolution could not but
show itself incapable of guiding the mind, even if it left us great
thoughts.’
Overwhelming as may appear this unanimity between strong minds
commanding respect and weak graphomaniacs, it does not, nevertheless,
contain the slightest spark of truth. To assert that the world turns
away from science because the ‘empirical,’ which means the scientific,
method of observation and registration has suffered shipwreck, is
either a conscious lie or shows lack of mental responsibility. A
healthy-minded and honourable man must almost feel ashamed to have
still to demonstrate this. In the last ten years, by means of
spectrum-analysis, science has made disclosures in the constitution
of the most distant heavenly bodies, their component matter, their
degree of heat, the speed and direction of their motions; it has
firmly established the essential unity of all modes of force, and
has made highly probable the unity of all matter; it is on the track
of the formation and development of chemical elements, and it has
learnt to understand the building up of extremely intricate organic
combinations; it shows us the relations of atoms in molecules, and
the position of molecules in space; it has thrown wonderful light on
the conditions of the action of electricity, and placed this force at
the service of mankind; it has renewed geology and palæontology, and
disentangled the concatenation of animal and vegetable forms of life;
it has newly created biology and embryology, and has explained in a
surprising manner, through the discovery and investigation of germs,
some of the most disquieting mysteries of perpetual metamorphosis,
illness, and death; it has found or perfected methods which, like
chronography, instantaneous photography, etc., permit of the analysis
and registration of the most fleeting phenomena, not immediately
apprehensible by human sense, and which promise to become extremely
fruitful for the knowledge of nature. And in the face of such splendid,
such overwhelmingly grand results, the enumeration of which could
easily be doubled and trebled, does anyone dare to speak of the
shipwreck of science, and of the incapacity of the empirical method?
Science is said not to have kept what she promised. When has she
ever promised anything else than honest and attentive observation of
phenomena and, if possible, establishment of the conditions under which
they occur? And has she not kept this promise? Does she not keep it
perpetually? If anyone has expected of her that she would explain from
one day to another the whole mechanism of the universe, like a juggler
explains his apparent magic, he has indeed no idea of the true mission
of science. She denies herself all leaps and flights. She advances step
by step. She builds slowly and patiently a firm bridge out into the
Unknown, and can throw no new arch over the abyss before she has sunk
deep the foundations of a new pier in the depths, and raised it to the
right height.
Meanwhile, she asks nothing at all about the first cause of phenomena,
so long as she has so many more proximate causes to investigate. Many
of the most eminent men of science go so far, indeed, as to assert
that the first cause will never become the object of scientific
investigation, and call it, with Herbert Spencer, ‘the Unknowable,’
or exclaim despondingly with Du Bois-Reymond, _Ignorabimus_. Both of
them in this respect are completely unscientific, and only prove
that even clear thinkers like Spencer, and sober investigators like
Du Bois-Reymond, stand yet under the influence of theological dreams.
Science can speak of no Unknowable, since this would presuppose that
she is able to mark exactly the boundaries of the Knowable. This,
however, she cannot do, since every new discovery thrusts back that
boundary. Moreover, the acceptance of an Unknowable involves the
acknowledgment that there is something which we cannot know. Now, in
order to be able seriously to assert the existence of this Something,
either we must have acquired some knowledge of it, however slight
and indistinct, and this, therefore, would prove that it cannot be
unknowable, since we actually know it, and nothing then would justify
us in declaring beforehand that our present knowledge of it, however
little it may be, will not be extended and deepened; or else we have
no knowledge, even of the minutest character, of the philosopher’s
Unknowable, in which case it cannot exist for us. The whole conception
is based upon nothing, and the word is an idle creation of a dreaming
imagination. The same thing can be said of _Ignorabimus_. It is the
opposite of science. It is not a correct inference from well-founded
premises, it is not the result of observation, but a mystical prophecy.
No one has the right to make communications with respect to the future
as matters of fact. Science can announce what she knows to-day; she can
also mark off exactly what she does not know; but to say what she will
or will not at any time know is not her office.
It is true that whoever asks from Science that she should give an
answer to all the questions of idle and restless minds with unshaken
and audacious certainty must be disappointed by her; for she will
not, and cannot, fulfil his desires. Theology and metaphysics have an
easier task. They devise some fable, and propound it with overwhelming
earnestness. If anyone does not believe in them, they threaten and
insult the intractable client; but they can prove nothing to him,
they cannot force him to take their chimeras for cash. Theology and
metaphysics can never be brought into a dilemma. It costs them nothing
to add to their words more words, to unite to one voluntary assertion
another, and pile up dogma upon dogma. It will never occur to the
serious sound mind, which thirsts after real knowledge, to seek it from
metaphysics or theology. They appeal only to childish brains, whose
desire for knowledge, or, rather, whose curiosity, is fully satisfied
with the cradling croon of an old wife’s tale.
Science does not compete with theology and metaphysics. If the
latter declare themselves able to explain the whole phenomenon of
the universe, Science shows that these pretended explanations are
empty chatter. She, for her part, is naturally on her guard against
putting in the place of a proved absurdity another absurdity. She says
modestly: ‘Here we have a fact, here an assumption, here a conjecture.
‘Tis a rogue who gives more than he has.’ If this does not satisfy
the neo-Catholics, they should sit down and themselves investigate,
themselves find out new facts, and help to make clear the weird
obscurity of the phenomenon of the universe. That would be a proof of
a true desire for knowledge. At the table of Science there is room for
all, and every fellow-observer is welcome. But this does not enter
into even the dreams of these poor creatures, who drivel about the
‘bankruptcy of science.’ Talk is so much easier and more comfortable
than inquiry and discovery!
True, science tells us nothing about the life after death, of
harp-concerts in Paradise, and of the transformation of stupid youths
and hysterical geese into white-clad angels with rainbow-coloured
wings. It contents itself, in a much more plain and prosaic manner,
with alleviating the existence of mankind on earth. It lessens the
average of mortality, and lengthens the life of the individual through
the suppression of known causes of disease; it invents new comforts,
and makes easier the struggle against Nature’s destructive powers. The
Symbolist, who is preserved after surgical interference through asepsy
from suppuration, mortification, and death; who protects himself by
a Chamberland filter from typhus; who by the careless turning of a
button fills his room with electric light; who through a telephone can
converse with someone beloved in far-distant countries, has to thank
this alleged bankrupt science for it all, and not the theology to which
he maintains that he wants to return.
The demand that science should give not only true, if limited,
conclusions, and offer not only tangible benefits, but also solve all
enigmas to-day and at once, and make all men omniscient, happy, and
good, is ridiculous. Theology and metaphysics have never fulfilled this
demand. It is simply the intellectual manifestation of the same foolish
conceit, which in material concerns reveals itself in hankering after
pleasure and in shirking work. The man who has lost his social status,
who craves for wine and women, for idleness and honours, and complains
of the constitution of society because it offers no satisfaction to his
lusts, is own brother to the Symbolist who demands truth, and reviles
science because it does not hand it to him on a golden platter. Both
betray a similar incapacity to grasp the reality of things, and to
understand that it is not possible to acquire goods without bodily
labour, or truth without mental exertion. The capable man who wrests
her gifts from Nature, the industrious inquirer who in the sweat of his
brow bores into the sources of knowledge, inspires respect and cordial
sympathy. On the other hand, there can be but little esteem for the
discontented idlers who look for riches from a lucky lottery ticket, or
a rich uncle, and for enlightenment from a revelation which is to come
to them without trouble on their part over the slovenly beer-drinking
at their favourite café.
The dunces who abuse science, reproach it also for having destroyed
ideals, and stolen from life all its worth. This accusation is just as
absurd as the talk about the bankruptcy of science. A higher ideal than
the increase of general knowledge there cannot be. What saintly legend
is as beautiful as the life of an inquirer, who spends his existence
bending over a microscope, almost without bodily wants, known and
honoured by few, working only for his own conscience’ sake, without
any other ambition than that perhaps one little new fact may be firmly
established, which a more fortunate successor will make use of in a
brilliant synthesis, and insert as a stone in some monument of natural
science? What religious fable has inspired with a contempt of death
sublimer martyrs than a Gehlen, who sank down poisoned while preparing
the arsenious hydrogen which he had discovered; or a Crocé-Spinelli,
who was overtaken by death in an over-rapid ascent of his balloon while
observing the pressure of the atmosphere; or an Ehrenberg, who became
blind over his life’s work; or a Hyrtl, who almost entirely destroyed
his eyesight by his anatomical corrosive preparations; or the doctors,
who inoculate themselves with some deadly disease--not to speak of the
innumerable crowd of discoverers travelling to the North Pole, and
to the interior of dark continents? And did Archimedes really feel
his life to be so worthless when he entreated the pillaging bands of
Marcellus, ‘Do not disturb my circles’? Genuine healthy poetry has
always recognised this, and finds its most ideal characters, not in
a devotee, who murmurs prayers with drivelling lips, and stares with
distorted eyes at some visual hallucination, but in a Prometheus and a
Faust, who wrestle for science, _i.e._, for exact knowledge of nature.
The assertion that science has not kept its promises, and that,
therefore, the rising generation is turning away from it, does not
for a moment resist criticism, and is entirely without foundation.
It is a senseless premise of neo-Catholicism, were the Symbolists to
declare a hundred times over that disgust with science had made them
mystics. The explanations which even a healthy-minded man makes with
respect to the true motives of his actions are only to be accepted
with the most cautious criticism; those proffered by the degenerate
are completely useless. For the impulse to act and to think originate,
for the degenerate, in the unconscious, and consciousness finds
subsequent, and in some measure plausible, reasons for the thoughts and
deeds, the real source of which is unknown to itself. Every book on
suggestion gives illustrations of Charcot’s typical case: a hysterical
female is sent into hypnotic sleep, and it is suggested to her that
on awaking she is to stab one of the doctors present. She is then
awakened. She grasps a knife and makes for her appointed victim. The
blade is wrenched from her, and she is asked why she wishes to murder
the doctor. She answers without hesitation, ‘Because he has done me an
injury.’ Note that she had seen him that day for the first time in her
life. This person felt when in a waking condition the impulse to kill
the doctor. Her consciousness had no presentiment that this impulse had
been suggested to her in a hypnotic state. Consciousness knows that a
murder is never committed without some motive. Forced to find a motive
for the attempted murder, consciousness falls back upon the only one
reasonably possible under the circumstances, and fancies that it got
hold of the idea of murder in order to avenge some wrong.
The brothers Janet[115] offer, as an explanation of this psychological
phenomenon, the hypothesis of dual personality. ‘Every person consists
of two personalities, one conscious and one unconscious. Among
healthy persons both are alike complete, and both in equilibrium. In
the hysteric they are unequal, and out of equilibrium. One of the
two personalities, usually the conscious, is incomplete, the other
remaining perfect.’ The conscious personality has the thankless task
of inventing reasons for the actions of the unconscious. It resembles
the familiar game where one person makes movements and another
says words in keeping with them. In the degenerate with disturbed
equilibrium consciousness has to play the part of an ape-like mother
finding excuses for the stupid and naughty tricks of a spoiled child.
The unconscious personality commits follies and evil deeds, and the
conscious, standing powerless by, and unable to hinder it, seeks to
palliate them by all sorts of pretexts.
The cause of the neo-Catholic movement, then, is not to be sought in
any objection felt by younger minds to science, or in their having
any complaint to make against it. A De Vogüé, a Rod, a Desjardins, a
Paulhan, who impute such a basis to the mysticism of the Symbolists,
arbitrarily attribute to it an origin which it never had. It is
due solely and alone to the degenerate condition of its inventors.
Neo-Catholicism is rooted in emotivity and mysticism, both of these
being the most frequent and most distinctive stigmata of the degenerate.
That the mysticism of the degenerate, even in France, the land of
Voltaire, has frequently taken the form of religious enthusiasm might
at first seem strange, but will be understood if we consider the
political and social circumstances of the French people during the last
decade.
The great Revolution proclaimed three ideals: Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity. Fraternity is a harmless word which has no real meaning,
and therefore disturbs nobody. Liberty, to the upper classes, is
certainly unpleasant, and they lament greatly over the sovereignty of
the people and universal suffrage, but still they bear, without too
much complaint, a state of things which, after all, is sufficiently
mitigated by a prying administration, police supervision, militarism,
and gendarmerie, and which will always be sufficient to keep the mob
in leash. But equality to those in possession is an insufferable
abomination. It is the one thing won by the great Revolution, which has
outlasted all subsequent changes in the form of government, and has
remained alive in the French people. The Frenchman does not know much
about fraternity; his liberty in many ways has a muzzle as its emblem;
but his equality he possesses as a matter of fact, and to it he holds
firmly. The lowest vagabond, the bully of the capital, the rag-picker,
the hostler, believes that he is quite as good as the duke, and says
so to his face without the smallest hesitation if occasion arises. The
reasons of the Frenchman’s fanaticism for equality are not particularly
elevated. The feeling does not spring from a proud, manly consciousness
and the knowledge of his own worth, but from low envy and malicious
intolerance. There shall be nothing above the dead level! There shall
be nothing better, nothing more beautiful or even more striking, than
the average vulgarity! The upper classes struggle against this rage for
equalization with passionate vehemence, especially and precisely those
who have reached their high position through the great Revolution.
The grandchildren of the rural serfs, who plundered and destroyed the
country seats of noblemen, basely murdered the inmates, and seized upon
their lands; the descendants of town grocers and cobblers, who waxed
rich as politicians of street and club, as speculators in national
property and assignats, and as swindlers in army purveyance, do not
want to become identified with the mob. They want to form a privileged
class. They want to be recognised as belonging to a more honourable
caste. They sought, for this purpose, a distinguishing mark, which
would make them at once conspicuous as members of a select class, and
they found it in belonging to the Church.
This choice is quite intelligible. The mass of the people in France,
especially in towns, is sceptical, and the aristocracy of the _ancien
régime_, who in the eighteenth century bragged about free thought, had
come out of the deluge of 1789 as very pious persons, comprehending
or divining the inner connection between all the old ideas and emblems
of the Faith, of the Monarchy, and of feudal nobility. Hence, through
their clericalism, the parvenus at once established a contrast between
themselves and the multitude from whom they wanted to keep distinct,
and a resemblance with the class into which they would like to smuggle
or thrust themselves.
Experience teaches that the instinct of preservation is often the
worst adviser in positions of danger. The man who cannot swim,
falling into the water, involuntarily throws up his arms, and thus
infallibly lets his head be submerged and himself be drowned; whereas
his mouth and nose would remain above water if he held his arms and
hands quietly under the surface. The bad rider, who feels his seat
insecure, usually draws up his legs, and then comes the certainty of
a fall; whereas he would probably be able to preserve his equilibrium
if he left his legs outstretched. Thus the French _bourgeoisie_, who
knew that they had snatched for themselves the fruits of the great
upheaval, and let the Fourth Estate, who alone had made the Revolution,
come out of it empty-handed, chose the worst means for retaining
their unjustly-acquired possessions and privileges, and for escaping
unnatural equalization when they made use of their clericalism for the
establishment of their social status. They alienated, in consequence,
the wisest, strongest, and most cultivated minds, and drove over to
socialism many young men who, though intellectually radical, were yet
economically conservative, and little in favour of equality, and who
would have become a strong defence for a free-thinking _bourgeoisie_,
but who felt that socialism, however radical its economic doctrines and
impossible its theories of equality, represented emancipation.
But I have not to judge here whether the religious mimicry of the
French _bourgeoisie_, which was to make them resemble the old nobility,
exerts the protection expected of it or not; I only set down the fact
of this mimicry. It is a necessary consequence that all the rich
and snobbish parvenus send their sons to the Jesuit middle and high
schools. To be educated by the Jesuits is regarded as a sign of caste,
very much as is membership of the Jockey Club. The old pupils of the
Jesuits form a ‘black freemasonry,’ which zealously advances their
protégés in every career, marries them to heiresses, hurries to their
assistance in misfortune, hushes up their sins, stifles scandal, etc.
It is the Jesuits who for the last decade have made it their care to
inculcate their own habits of thinking into the rich and high-born
youth of France entrusted to them. These youths brought brains of
hereditary deficiency, and therefore mystically disposed, into the
clerical schools, and these then gave to the mystic thoughts of the
degenerate pupils a religious content. This is not an arbitrary
assumption, but a well-founded fact. Charles Morice, the æsthetic
theorist and philosopher of the Symbolists, received his education from
the Jesuits, according to the testimony of his friends.[116] So did
Louis le Cardonnel, Henri de Régnier, and others. The Jesuits invented
the phrase ‘bankruptcy of science,’ and their pupils repeat it after
them, because it includes a plausible explanation of their pietistic
mooning, the real organic causes of which are unknown to them, and for
that matter would not be understood if they were known. ‘I return to
faith, because science does not satisfy me,’ is a possible statement.
It is even a superior thing to say, since it presupposes a thirst for
truth and a noble interest in great questions. On the contrary, a man
will hardly be willing to confess, ‘I am an enthusiastic admirer of the
Trinity and the Holy Virgin because I am degenerate, and my brain is
incapable of attention and clear thought.’
That the Jesuitical argument as reported by MM. de Vogüé, Rod,
etc., can have found credit beyond clerical circles and degenerate
youth, that the half-educated are heard repeating to-day, ‘Science
is conquered, the future belongs to religion,’ is consistent with
the mental peculiarities of the million. They never have recourse to
facts, but repeat the ready-made propositions with which they have been
prompted. If they would have regard to facts, they would know that
the number of faculties, teachers and students of natural science, of
scientific periodicals and books, of their subscribers and readers,
of laboratories, scientific societies and reports to the academies
increases year by year. It can be shown by figures that science does
not lose, but continually gains ground.[117] But the million does not
care about exact statistics. In France it accepts without resistance
the suggestion, that science is retreating before religion, from a few
newspapers, written mainly for clubmen and gilded courtezans, into
the columns of which the pupils of the clerical schools have found an
entrance. Of science itself, of its hypotheses, methods, and results,
they have never known anything. Science was at one time the fashion.
The daily press of that date said, ‘We live in a scientific age’; the
news of the day reported the travels and marriages of scientists; the
feuilleton-novels contained witty allusions to Darwin; the inventors of
elegant walking-sticks and perfumes called their productions ‘Evolution
Essence’ or ‘Selection Canes’; those who affected culture took
themselves seriously for the pioneers of progress and enlightenment.
To-day those social circles which set the fashions, and the papers
which seek to please these circles, decree that, not science is
_chic_, but faith, and now the paragraphs of the boulevard papers
relate small piquant sayings of preachers; in the feuilleton-novels
there are quotations from the _Imitation of Christ_; inventors bring
out richly-mounted prie-dieus and choice rosaries, and the Philistine
feels with deep emotion the miraculous flower of faith springing up and
blossoming in his heart. Of real disciples science has scarcely lost
one. It is only natural, on the contrary, that the plebs of the salons,
to whom it has never been more than a fashion, should turn their backs
on it at the mere command of a tailor or a modiste.
Thus much on the neo-Catholicism which, partly for party reasons,
partly from ignorance, partly from snobbishness, is mistaken for a
serious intellectual movement of the times.
The pretension of Symbolism to be, not only a return to faith, but a
new theory of art and poetry, is what we must now proceed to test.
If we wish to know at the outset what Symbolists understand by symbol
and symbolism, we shall meet with the same difficulties we encountered
in determining the precise meaning of the name pre-Raphaelitism, and
for the same reason, viz., because the inventors of these appellations
understood by them hundreds of different mutually contradictory,
indefinite things, or simply nothing at all. A skilled and sagacious
journalist, Jules Huret,[118] instituted an inquiry about the new
literary movement in France, and from its leading representatives
acquired information, by which he has furnished us with a trustworthy
knowledge of the meaning which they connect, or pretend to connect,
with the expressions and phraseology of their programme. I will here
adduce some of these utterances and declarations. They will not tell us
what Symbolism is. But they may afford us some insight into symbolist
methods of thought.
M. Stéphane Mallarmé, whose leadership of the Symbolist band is least
disputed among the disciples, expresses himself as follows: ‘To name
an object means to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of a
poem--_i.e._, of the happiness which consists in gradually divining
it. Our dream should be to suggest the object. The symbol is the
perfected use of this mystery, viz., to conjure up an object gradually
in order to show the condition of a soul; or, conversely, to choose
an object, and out of it to reveal a state of the soul by a series of
interpretations.’
If the reader does not at once understand this combination of vague
words, he need not stop to solve them. Later on I will translate the
stammerings of this weak mind into the speech of sound men.
M. Paul Verlaine, another high-priest of the sect, expresses himself
as follows: ‘It was I who, in the year 1885, laid claim to the name
of Symbolist. The Parnassians, and most of the romanticists, in a
certain sense lacked symbols.... Thence errors of local colouring in
history, the shrinking up of the myth through false philosophical
interpretations, thought without the discernment of analogies, the
anecdote emptied of feeling.’
Let us listen to a few second-rate poets of the group. ‘I declare
art,’ says M. Paul Adam, ‘to be the enshrining of a dogma in a symbol.
It is a means of making a system prevail, and of bringing truths to
the light of day.’ M. Rémy de Gourmont confesses honestly: ‘I cannot
unveil the hidden meaning of the word “symbolism,” since I am neither
a theorist nor a magician.’ And M. Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique utters
this profound warning: ‘Let us take care! Symbolism carried to excess
leads to _nombrilisme_, and to a morbid mechanism.... This symbolism is
to some extent a parody of mysticism.... Pure symbolism is an anomaly
in this remarkable century, remarkable for militant activities. Let us
view this transitional art as a clever trick played upon naturalism,
and as a precursor of the poetry of to-morrow.’
We may expect from the theorists and philosophers of the group more
exhaustive information concerning their methods and aims. Accordingly,
M. Charles Morice instructs us how ‘the symbol is the combination of
the objects which have aroused our sensations, with our souls, in a
fiction [_fiction_]. The means is suggestion; it is a question of
giving people a remembrance of something which they have never seen.’
And M. Gustav Kahn says: ‘For me personally, symbolic art consists
in recording in a cycle of works, as completely as possible, the
modifications and variations of the mind of the poet, who is inspired
by an aim which he has determined.’
In Germany there have already been found some imbeciles and idiots,
some victims of hysteria and graphomania, who affirm that they
understand this twaddle, and who develop it further in lectures,
newspaper articles and books. The cultured German Philistine, who from
of old has had preached to him contempt for ‘platitude,’ _i.e._, for
healthy common-sense, and admiration for ‘deep meaning,’ which is as a
rule only the futile bubbling of soft and addled brains incapable of
thought, becomes visibly uneasy, and begins to inquire if there may not
really be something behind these senseless series of words. In France
people have not been caught on the limed twigs of these poor fools
and cold-blooded jesters, but have considered Symbolism to be what in
fact it is, madness or humbug. We shall meet with these words in the
writings of noted representatives of all shades of literary thought.
‘The Symbolists!’ exclaims M. Jules Lemaître, ‘there are none....
They themselves do not know what they are or what they want. There
is something stirring and heaving under the earth, but unable to
break through. Do you understand? When they have painfully produced
something, they would like to build formulæ and theories around it, but
fail in doing so, because they do not possess the necessary strength
of mind.... They are jesters with a certain amount of sincerity--that
I grant them--but nevertheless jesters.’ M. Joséphin Péladan describes
them as ‘whimsical pyrotechnists of metrics and glossaries, who combine
in order to get on, and give themselves odd names in order to get
known.’ M. Jules Bois is much more forcible: ‘Disconnected action,
confused clamour, such are the Symbolists. Cacophony of savages
who have been turning over the leaves of an English grammar, or a
glossary of obsolete words. If they have ever known anything, they
pretend to have forgotten it. Indistinct, faulty, obscure, they are
nevertheless as solemn as augurs.... You, decadent Symbolists, you
deceive us with childish and necromantic formulæ.’ Verlaine himself,
the co-founder of Symbolism, in a moment of sincerity, calls his
followers a ‘flat-footed horde, each with his own banner, on which is
inscribed _Réclame_!’ M. Henri de Régnier says apologetically: ‘They
feel the need of gathering round a common flag, so that they may fight
more effectually against the contented.’ M. Zola speaks of them as ‘a
swarm of sharks who, not being able to swallow us, devour each other.’
M. Joseph Caraguel designates symbolical literature as ‘a literature
of whining, of babbling, of empty brains, a literature of Sudanese
Griots [minstrels].’ Edmond Haraucourt plainly discerns the aims of
the Symbolists: ‘They are discontented, and in a hurry. They are the
Boulangists of literature. We must live! We would take a place in the
world, become notorious or notable. We beat wildly on a drum which is
not even a kettledrum.... Their true symbol is “Goods by express.”
Everyone goes by express train. Their destination--Fame.’ M. Pierre
Quillard thinks that under the title of Symbolists ‘poets of rare
gifts and unmitigated simpletons have been arbitrarily included.’ And
M. Gabriel Vicaire sees in the manifestoes of Symbolists ‘nothing but
schoolboy jokes.’ Finally, M. Laurent Tailhade, one of the leading
Symbolists, divulges the secret: ‘I have never attached any other value
to this performance than that of a transient amusement. We took in
the credulous judgment of a few literary beginners with the joke of
coloured vowels, Theban love, Schopenhauerism, and other pranks, which
have since made their way in the world.’ Quite so; just, as we have
already said, in Germany.
To abuse, however, is not to explain, and although summary justice is
fit in the case of deliberate swindlers, who, like quack-dentists, play
the savage in order to entice money from market-folk, yet anger and
ridicule are out of place in dealing with honest imbeciles. They are
diseased or crippled, and as such deserve only pity. Their infirmities
must be disclosed, but severity of treatment has been abolished even in
lunatic asylums since Pinel’s time.
The Symbolists, so far as they are honestly degenerate and imbecile,
can think only in a mystical, _i.e._, in a confused way. The unknown
is to them more powerful than the known; the activity of the organic
nerves preponderates over that of the cerebral cortex; their emotions
overrule their ideas. When persons of this kind have poetic and
artistic instincts, they naturally want to give expression to their
own mental state. They cannot make use of definite words of clear
import, for their own consciousness holds no clearly-defined univocal
ideas which could be embodied in such words. They choose, therefore,
vague equivocal words, because these best conform to their ambiguous
and equivocal ideas. The more indefinite, the more obscure a word is,
so much the better does it suit the purpose of the imbecile, and it
is notorious that among the insane this habit goes so far that, to
express their ideas, which have become quite formless, they invent new
words, which are no longer merely obscure, but devoid of all meaning.
We have already seen that, for the typical degenerate, reality has
no significance. On this point I will only remind the reader of the
previously cited utterances of D. G. Rossetti, Morice, etc. Clear
speech serves the purpose of communication of the actual. It has,
therefore, no value in the eyes of a degenerate subject. He prizes
that language alone which does not force him to follow the speaker
attentively, but allows him to indulge without restraint in the
meanderings of his own reveries, just as his own language does not aim
at the communication of definite thought, but is only intended to give
a pale reflection of the twilight of his own ideas. That is what M.
Mallarmé means when he says: ‘To name an object means to suppress three
quarters of the pleasure.... Our dream should be to suggest the object.’
Moreover, the thought of a healthy brain has a flow which is regulated
by the laws of logic and the supervision of attention. It takes for its
content a definite object, manipulates and exhausts it. The healthy man
can tell what he thinks, and his telling has a beginning and an end.
The mystic imbecile thinks merely according to the laws of association,
and without the red thread of attention. He has fugitive ideation.
He can never state accurately what he is thinking about; he can only
denote the emotion which at the moment controls his consciousness. He
can only say in general, ‘I am sad,’ ‘I am merry,’ ‘I am fond,’ ‘I am
afraid.’ His mind is filled with evanescent, floating, cloudy ideas,
which take their hue from the reigning emotion, as the vapour hovering
above a crater flames red from the glow at the bottom of the volcanic
caldron. When he poetizes, therefore, he will never develop a logical
train of thought, but will seek by means of obscure words of distinctly
emotional colouring to represent a feeling, a mood. What he prizes in
poetical works is not a clear narrative, the exposition of a definite
thought, but only the reflected image of a mood, which awakens in him
a similar, but not necessarily the same, mood. The degenerate are well
aware of this difference between a work which expresses strong mental
labour and one in which merely emotionally coloured fugitive ideation
ebbs and flows; and they eagerly ask for a distinguishing name for
that kind of poetry of which alone they have any understanding. In
France they have found this designation in the word ‘Symbolism.’ The
explanations which the Symbolists themselves give of their cognomen
appear nonsensical; but the psychologist gathers clearly from their
babbling and stammering that under the name ‘symbol’ they understand a
word (or series of words) expressing, not a fact of the external world,
or of conscious thought, but an ambiguous glimmer of an idea, which
does not force the reader to think, but allows him to dream, and hence
brings about no intellectual processes, but only moods.
The great poet of the Symbolists, their most admired model, from
whom, according to their unanimous testimony, they have received
the strongest inspiration, is Paul Verlaine. In this man we find,
in astonishing completeness, all the physical and mental marks of
degeneration, and no author known to me answers so exactly, trait
for trait, to the descriptions of the degenerate given by the
clinicists--his personal appearance, the history of his life, his
intellect, his world of ideas and modes of expression. M. Jules
Huret[119] gives the following account of Verlaine’s physical
appearance: ‘His face, like that of a wicked angel grown old, with
a thin, untrimmed beard, and abrupt(?) nose; his bushy, bristling
eyebrows, resembling bearded wheat, hiding deep-set green eyes; his
wholly bald and huge long skull, misshapen by enigmatic bumps--all
these give to his physiognomy a contradictory appearance of stubborn
asceticism and cyclopean appetites.’ As appears in these ludicrously
laboured and, in part, entirely senseless expressions, even the most
unscientific observer has been struck with what Huret calls his
‘enigmatic bumps.’ If we look at the portrait of the poet, by Eugène
Carrière, of which a photograph serves as frontispiece in the _Select
Poems_ of Verlaine,[120] and still more at that by M. Aman-Jean,
exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon in 1892, we instantly remark the
great asymmetry of the head, which Lombroso[121] has pointed out among
degenerates, and the Mongolian physiognomy indicated by the projecting
cheek-bones, obliquely placed eyes, and thin beard, which the same
investigator[122] looks upon as signs of degeneration.
Verlaine’s life is enveloped in mystery, but it is known, from his own
avowals, that he passed two years in prison. In the poem _Écrit en_
1875[123] he narrates in detail, not only without the least shame,
but with gay unconcern, nay, even with boasting, that he was a true
professional criminal:
‘J’ai naguère habité le meilleur des châteaux
Dans le plus fin pays d’eau vive et de coteaux:
Quatre tours s’élevaient sur le front d’autant d’ailes,
Et j’ai longtemps, longtemps habité l’une d’elles...
Une chambre bien close, une table, une chaise,
Un lit strict où l’on pût dormir juste à son aise,...
Tel fut mon lot durant les longs mois là passés...
...J’étais heureux avec ma vie,
Reconnaissant de biens que nul, certes, n’envie.’
And in the poem _Un Conte_ he says:
...’ce grand pécheur eut des conduites
Folles à ce point d’en devenir trop maladroites,
Si bien que les tribunaux s’en mirent--et les suites!
Et le voyez-vous dans la plus étroite des boîtes?
Cellules! prison humanitaires! Il faut taire
Votre horreur fadasse et ce progrès d’hypocrisie’...
It is now known that a crime of a peculiarly revolting character led
to his punishment; and this is not surprising, since the special
characteristic of his degeneration is a madly inordinate eroticism.
He is perpetually thinking of lewdness, and lascivious images fill
his mind continually. I have no wish to quote passages in which
this unhappy slave of his morbidly excited senses has expressed the
loathsome condition of his mind, but the reader who wishes to become
acquainted with them may be referred to the poems _Les Coquillages_,
_Fille_, and _Auburn_.[124] Sexual license is not his only vice. He is
also a dipsomaniac, and (as may be expected in a degenerate subject) a
paroxysmal dipsomaniac, who, awakened from his debauch, is seized with
deep disgust of the alcoholic poison and of himself, and speaks of ‘les
breuvages exécrés’ (_La Bonne Chanson_), but succumbs to the temptation
at the next opportunity.
Moral insanity, however, is not present in Verlaine. He sins through
irresistible impulse. He is an Impulsivist. The difference between
these two forms of degeneration lies in the fact that the morally
insane does not look upon his crimes as bad, but commits them with the
same unconcern as a sane man would perform any ordinary or virtuous
act, and after his misdeed is quite contented with himself; whereas the
Impulsivist retains a full consciousness of the baseness of his deeds,
hopelessly fights against his impulse until he can no longer resist
it, and after the performance[125] suffers the most terrible remorse
and despair. It is only an Impulsivist who speaks in execration of
himself as a reprobate (‘Un seul Pervers,’ in _Sagesse_), or strikes
the dejected note which Verlaine touches in the first four sonnets of
_Sagesse_:
‘Hommes durs! Vie atroce et laide d’ici bas!
Ah! que du moins, loin des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne,
‘Quelque chose du cœur enfantin et subtil,
Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment quand la mort viendra que reste-t-il?...
‘Ferme les yeux, pauvre âme, et rentre sur-le-champ:
Une tentation des pires. Fuis l’infâme ...
Si la vieille folie était encore en route?
‘Ces souvenirs, va-t-il falloir les retuer?
Un assaut furieux, le suprême, sans doute!
O va prier contre l’orage, va prier!...
‘C’est vers le Moyen-Age énorme et delicat
Qu’il faudrait que mon cœur en panne naviguât,
Loin de nos jours d’esprit charnel et de chair triste ...
‘Et là que j’eusse part...
...à la chose vitale,
Et que je fusse un saint, actes bons, pensers droits,
‘Haute théologie et solide morale,
Guidé par la folie unique de la Croix
Sur tes ailes de pierre, ô folle Cathédrale!’
This example serves to show that there is not wanting in Verlaine
that religious fervour which usually accompanies morbidly intensified
eroticism. This finds a much more decided expression in several other
poems. I should wish to quote only from two.[126]
‘O mon Dieu, vous m’avez blessé d’amour,
Et la blessure est encore vibrante,
O mon Dieu, vous m’avez blessé d’amour.
‘O mon Dieu, votre crainte m’a frappé,
Et la brûlure est encore là qui tonne
O mon Dieu, votre crainte m’a frappé.
(Observe the mode of expression and the constant repetitions.)
‘O mon Dieu, j’ai connu que tout est vil,
Et votre gloire en moi s’est installée,
O mon Dieu, j’ai connu que tout est vil.
‘Noyez mon âme aux flots de votre vin,
Fondez ma vie au pain de votre table,
Noyez mon âme aux flots de votre vin.
‘Voici mon sang que je n’ai pas versé,
Voici ma chair indignée de souffrance,
Voici mon sang que je n’ai pas versé.’
Then follows the ecstatic enumeration of all the parts of his body,
which he offers up in sacrifice to God; and the poem closes thus:
‘Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne,
Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
Mais ce que j’ai, mon Dieu, je vous le donne.’
He invokes the Virgin Mary as follows:
‘Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mère Marie.
Tous les autres amours sont de commandement,
Nécessaires qu’ils sont, ma mère seulement
Pourra les allumer aux cœurs qui l’ont chérie.
‘C’est pour Elle qu’il faut chérir mes ennemis,
C’est pour Elle que j’ai voué ce sacrifice,
Et la douceur de cœur et le zèle au service.
Comme je la priais, Elle les a permis.
‘Et comme j’étais faible et bien méchant encore,
Aux mains lâches, les yeux éblouis des chemins,
Elle baissa mes yeux et me joignit les mains,
Et m’enseigna les mots par lesquels on adore.’
The accents here uttered are well known to the clinics of psychiatry.
We may compare them to the picture which Legrain[127] gives of some of
his patients. ‘His speech continually reverts to God and the Virgin
Mary, his cousin.’ (The case in question is that of a degenerate
subject who was a tramway conductor.) ‘Mystical ideas complete the
picture. He talks of God, of heaven, crosses himself, kneels down, and
says that he is following the commandments of Christ.’ (The subject
under observation is a day labourer.) ‘The devil will tempt me, but I
see God who guards me. I have asked of God that all people might be
beautiful,’ etc.
The continual alternation of antithetical moods in Verlaine--this
uniform transition from bestial lust to an excess of piety, and
from sinning to remorse--has struck even observers who do not know
the significance of such a phenomenon. ‘He is,’ writes M. Anatole
France,[128] ‘alternately devout and atheistical, orthodox and
sacrilegious.’ These he certainly is. But why? Simply because he is
a _circulaire_. This not very happy expression, invented by French
psychiatry, denotes that form of mental disease in which states of
excitement and depression follow each other in regular succession.
The period of excitement coincides with the irresistible impulses to
misdeeds and blasphemous language; that of dejection with the paroxysms
of contrition and piety. The _circulaires_ belong to the worst
species of the degenerate. ‘They are drunkards, obscene, vicious, and
thievish.’[129] They are also in particular incapable of any lasting,
uniform occupation, since it is obvious that in such a condition
of mental depression they cannot accomplish any work which demands
strength and attention. The _circulaires_ are, by the nature of their
affliction, condemned to be vagabonds or thieves, unless they belong
to rich families. In normally constituted society there is no place
for them. Verlaine has been a vagabond the whole of his life. He has
loafed about all the highways of France, and roamed as well through
Belgium and England. Since his release from prison he has spent most of
his time in Paris, where, however, he has no residence, but resorts to
the hospitals under the pretext of rheumatism, which for that matter
he may easily have contracted during the nights which, as a tramp, he
has spent under the open sky. The administration winks at his doings,
and grants him food and shelter gratis, out of regard for his poetical
capacity. Conformably with the constant tendency of the human mind
to beautify what cannot be altered, he persuades himself that his
vagrancy, which was forced upon him by his organic vice, is a glorious
and enviable condition; he prizes it as something beautiful, artistic,
and sublime, and looks upon vagabonds with especial tenderness.
Speaking of them he says (_Grotesques_):
‘Leur jambes pour toutes montures,
Pour tous biens l’or de leurs regards,
Par le chemin des aventures
Ils vont haillonneux et hagards.
‘Le sage, indigné, les harangue;
Le sot plaint ces fous hasardeux;
Les enfants leur tirent la langue
Et les filles se moquent d’eux.’
We find in every lunatic and imbecile the conviction that the rational
minds who discern and judge him are ‘blockheads.’
‘... Dans leurs prunelles
Rit et pleure--fastidieux--
L’amour des choses éternelles,
Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!
‘Donc, allez, vagabonds sans trêves,
Errez, funestes et maudits,
Le long des gouffres et des grèves,
Sous l’œil fermé des paradis!
‘La nature à l’homme s’allie
Pour châtier comme il le faut
L’orgueilleuse mélancolie
Qui vous fait marcher le front haut.’
In another poem (_Autre_) he calls to his chosen mates:
‘Allons, frères, bons vieux voleurs,
Doux vagabonds
Filous en fleur
Mes chers, mes bons,
‘Fumons philosophiquement,
Promenons nous
Paisiblement:
Rien faire est doux.’
As one vagabond feels himself attracted by other vagabonds, so does
one deranged mind feel drawn to others. Verlaine has the greatest
admiration for King Louis II. of Bavaria, that unhappy madman in whom
intelligence was extinct long before death, in whom only the most
abominable impulses of foul beasts of the most degraded kind had
survived the perishing of the human functions of his disordered brain.
He apostrophizes him thus:
‘Roi, le seul vrai Roi de ce siècle, salut, Sire,
Qui voulûtes mourir vengeant votre raison
Des choses de la politique, et du délire
De cette Science intruse dans la maison,
‘De cette Science assassin de l’Oraison
Et du Chant et de l’Art et de toute la Lyre,
Et simplement et plein d’orgueil et floraison
Tuâtes en mourant, salut, Roi, bravo, Sire!
‘Vous fûtes un poète, un soldat, le seul Roi
De ce siècle ...
Et le martyr de la Raison selon la Foi....’
Two points are noticeable in Verlaine’s mode of expression. First, we
have the frequent recurrence of the same word, of the same turn of
phrase, that chewing the cud, or _rabâchage_ (repetition), which we
have learnt to know as the marks of intellectual debility. In almost
every one of his poems single lines and hemistiches are repeated,
sometimes unaltered, and often the same word appears instead of
one which rhymes. Were I to quote all the passages of this kind, I
should have to transcribe nearly all his poems. I will therefore
give only a few specimens, and those in the original, so that their
peculiarity will be fully apparent to the reader. In the _Crépuscule
du soir mystique_ the lines, ‘Le souvenir avec le crépuscule,’ and
‘Dahlia, lys, tulipe et renoncules,’ are twice repeated without any
internal necessity. In the poem _Promenade sentimentale_ the adjective
_blême_ (wan) pursues the poet in the manner of an obsession or
‘onomatomania,’ and he applies it to water-lilies and waves (‘wan
waves’). The _Nuit du Walpurgis classique_ begins thus:
‘Un rythmique sabbat, rythmique, extrêmement
Rythmique.’...
In the _Sérénade_ the first two lines are repeated _verbatim_ as the
fourth and eighth. Similarly in _Ariettes oubliées_, VIII.:
‘Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.
‘Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.
‘Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées.
‘Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.
‘Corneille poussive,
Et vous, les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres
Quoi donc vous arrive?
‘Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.’
The _Chevaux de bois_ begins thus:
‘Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,
Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,
Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,
Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.’
In a truly charming piece in _Sagesse_ he says:
‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme!
Un arbre, par dessus le toit
Berce sa palme.
‘La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit,
Doucement tinte.
Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit,
Chante sa plainte.’
In the passage in _Amour_, ‘Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs
innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,’ ‘champs’ and ‘gens’
sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetition of similar sounds
suggests a senseless pun, to the poet, and as for this stanza in
_Pierrot gamin_:
‘Ce n’est pas Pierrot en herbe
Non plus que Pierrot en gerbe,
C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot.
Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse,
Le cerneau hors de la cosse,
C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot!’
it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make sense,
but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him pleasure.
The closing lines of the poem _Mains_ point to a complete ideational
standstill, to mechanical mumbling:
‘Ah! si ce sont des mains de rêve,
Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.’[130]
The second peculiarity of Verlaine’s style is the other mark of mental
debility, viz., the combination of completely disconnected nouns and
adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless
meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of
sound. We have already found some examples of this in the extracts
cited above. In these we find the ‘enormous and tender Middle Ages’ and
the ‘brand which thunders.’ Verlaine writes also of ‘feet which glide
with a pure and wide movement,’ of ‘a narrow and vast affection,’ of ‘a
slow landscape,’[131] of ‘a slack liqueur’ (‘jus flasque’), ‘a gilded
perfume,’ a ‘condensed’ or ‘terse contour’ (‘galbe succinct’), etc. The
Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ‘the research for rare
and precious epithets’ (la recherche de l’epithète rare et précieuse).
Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his thoughts,
and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological point of view,
_Art poétique_, in which he attempts to give a theory of his lyric
creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a fundamental method:
‘De la musique avant toute chose
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.’
The two verbs ‘pèse’ and ‘pose’ are juxtaposed merely on account of
their similarity of sound.
‘Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir les mots sans quelque méprise;
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.
‘C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,
C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C’est par un ciel d’automne attiédi,
Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!
‘Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!
Oh! la nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!’
(This stanza is completely delirious; it places ‘nuance’ and ‘colour’
in opposition, as though the latter were not contained in the former.
The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine had an inkling, but could
not bring to a complete conception, is probably that he prefers subdued
and mixed tints, which lie on the margin of several colours, to the
full intense colour itself.)
‘Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L’esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!’
It cannot be denied that this poetical method in the hands of Verlaine
often yields extraordinarily beautiful results. There are few poems in
French literature which can rival the _Chanson d’Automne_:
‘Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
‘Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
‘Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure.
‘Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.’
Even if literally translated, there remains something of the melancholy
magic of the lines, which in French are richly rhythmical and full of
music. _Avant que tu ne t’en ailles_ (p. 99) and _Il pleure dans mon
cœur_ (p. 116) may also be called pearls among French lyrics.
This is because the methods of a highly emotional, but intellectually
incapable, dreamer suffice for poetry which deals exclusively with
moods, but this is the inexorable limit of his power. Let the true
meaning of mood be always present with us. The word denotes a state of
mind, in which, through organic excitations which it cannot directly
perceive, consciousness is filled with presentations of a uniform
nature, which it elaborates with greater or less clearness, and one
and all of which relate to those organic excitations inaccessible to
consciousness. The mere succession of words, giving a name to these
presentations, the roots of which are in the unknown, expresses
the mood, and is able to awaken it in another. It has no need of a
fundamental thought, or of a progressive exposition to unfold it.
Verlaine often attains to astonishing effects in such poetry of moods.
Where, however, distinct vision, or a feeling the motive of which is
clear to consciousness, or a process well delimitated in time and
space, is to be poetically rendered, the poetic art of the emotional
imbecile fails utterly. In a healthy and sane poet even the mood
pure and simple is united to clear presentations, and is not a mere
undulation of fragrance and rose-tinted mist. Poems like Goethe’s
_Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, _Der Fischer_, or _Freudvoll und
leidvoll_, can never be created by the emotionally degenerate; but,
on the other hand, the most marvellous of Goethe’s poems are not so
utterly incorporeal, not such mere sighs, as three or four of the best
of a Verlaine.
We have now the portrait of this most famous leader of the Symbolists
clearly before us. We see a repulsive degenerate subject with
asymmetric skull and Mongolian face, an impulsive vagabond and
dipsomaniac, who, under the most disgraceful circumstances, was placed
in gaol; an emotional dreamer of feeble intellect, who painfully fights
against his bad impulses, and in his misery often utters touching
notes of complaint; a mystic whose qualmish consciousness is flooded
with ideas of God and saints, and a dotard who manifests the absence
of any definite thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless
expressions and motley images. In lunatic asylums there are many
patients whose disease is less deep-seated and incurable than is that
of this irresponsible _circulaire_ at large, whom only ignorant judges
could have condemned for his epileptoid crimes.
A second leader among the Symbolists, whose prestige is in no quarter
disputed, is M. Stéphane Mallarmé. He is the most curious phenomenon
in the intellectual life of contemporary France. Although long past
fifty years of age, he has written hardly anything, and the little that
is known of him is, in the opinion of his most unreserved admirers,
of no account; and yet he is esteemed as a very great poet, and
the utter infertility of his pen, the entire absence of any single
work which he can produce as evidence of his poetical capacity, is
prized as his greatest merit, and as a most striking proof of his
intellectual importance. This statement must appear so fabulous to any
reader not deranged in mind, that he may rightly demand proofs of
these statements. M. Charles Morice[132] says of Mallarmé: ‘I am not
obliged to unveil the secrets of the works of a poet who, as he has
himself remarked, is excluded from all participation in any official
exposition of the beautiful. The fact itself that these works are
still unknown ... would seem to forbid our associating the name of
M. Mallarmé with those of men who have given us books. I let vulgar
criticism buzz without replying to it, and state that M. Mallarmé,
without having given us books ... is famous--a fame which, of course,
has not been won without arousing the laughter of stupidity in both
petty and important newspapers, but which does not offer public and
private ... ineptitude that opportunity for showing its baseness which
is provoked by the advent of a new wonder.... The people, in spite
of their abhorrence of the beautiful, and especially of novelty in
the beautiful, have gradually, and in spite of themselves, come to
comprehend the prestige of a legitimate authority. They themselves,
even they, feel ashamed of their foolish laughter; and before this man,
whom that laughter could not tear from the serenity of his meditative
silence, laughter became dumb, and itself suffered the divine contagion
of silence. Even for the million this man, who published no books, and
whom, nevertheless, all designated “a poet,” became, as it were, the
very symbol of a poet, seeking, where possible, to draw near to the
absolute.... By his silence, he has signified that he ... cannot yet
realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create. Should
cruel life refuse to support him in his effort, our respect--nay, more,
our veneration--can alone give an answer worthy of a reticence thus
conditioned.’
The graphomaniac Morice (of whose crazy and distorted style of
expression this literally translated example gives a very good idea)
assumes that perhaps Mallarmé will yet create his ‘unprecedented
work.’ Mallarmé himself, however, denies us the right to any such
hope. ‘The delicious Mallarmé,’ Paul Hervieu relates,[133] ‘told me
one day ... he could not understand that anyone should let himself
appear in print. Such a proceeding gave him the impression of an
indecency, an aberration, resembling that form of mental disease called
“exhibitionism.” Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as
this incomparable thinker.’[134]
So, then, this ‘incomparable thinker’ shows ‘a complete discretion
as regards his soul.’ At one time he bases his silence on a sort of
shamed timidity at publicity; at another, on the fact that he ‘cannot
yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create,’
two reasons for that matter reciprocally precluding each other. He is
approaching the evening of his life, and beyond a few brochures, such
as _Les Dieux de la Grèce_ and _L’après-midi d’un Faune_, together
with some verses and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in
periodicals, the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published
nothing but some translations from the English and a few school-books
(M. Mallarmé is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycée), and yet
there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one exclusive
poet, and they overwhelm the ‘blockheads’ and the ‘fools’ who laugh at
him with all the expressions of scorn that the force of imagination
in a diseased mind can display. Is not this one of the wonders of our
day? Lessing makes Conti, in _Emilia Galotti_, say that ‘Raphael would
have been the greatest genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately
been born without hands.’ In M. Mallarmé we have a man who is revered
as a great poet, although ‘he has unfortunately been born without
hands,’ although he produces nothing, although he does not pursue the
art he professes. During the period when in London a great number of
bubble-company swindles were being promoted, when all the world went
mad for the possession of the least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it
happened that a few sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers,
inviting people to subscribe for shares in a company of which the
object was kept a secret. There really were men who brought their
money to these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis
regards this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees
it repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a poet whose
works are his own secret, and will probably remain such, and others
trustingly and humbly bring their admiration as required. The sorcerers
of the Senegal negroes offer their congregation baskets and calabashes
for veneration, in which they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed.
As a matter of fact they contain nothing; but the negroes regard the
empty vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors
divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarmé the fetich of the
Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually far below the
Senegal negroes.
This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he has attained
by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round him embryonic poets and
authors, and develops his art theories before them. He speaks just as
Morice and Kahn write. He strings together obscure and wondrous words,
at which his disciples become as stupid ‘as if a mill-wheel were going
round in their heads,’ so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and
with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman disclosures
have been made to them. If there is anything comprehensible in the
incoherent flow of Mallarmé’s words, it is perhaps his admiration
for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who drew the attention of the
Symbolists to this school, and enjoined imitation of it. It is through
Mallarmé that the French mystics received their English mediævalism and
neo-Catholicism. Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical
features of Mallarmé are ‘long pointed faun-like ears.’[135] After
Darwin, who was the first to point out the apish character of this
peculiarity, Hartmann,[136] Frigerio,[137] and Lombroso,[138] have
firmly established the connection between immoderately long and pointed
external ears and atavism and degeneration; and they have shown that
this peculiarity is of especially frequent occurrence among criminals
and lunatics.
The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean Moréas, a
Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his thirty-sixth year (his
friends assert, it may be in friendly malice, that he makes himself
out to be very much younger than he is) has produced _in toto_ three
attenuated collections of verses, of hardly one hundred to one hundred
and twenty pages, bearing the titles, _Les Syrtes_, _Les Cantilènes_,
and _Le Pélerin passionné_. The importance of a literary performance
does not, of course, depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise
unusually significant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable
café séances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art
of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of childish
verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the material
insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject for ridicule.
Moréas is one of the inventors of the word ‘Symbolism.’ For some few
years he was the high-priest of this secret doctrine, and administered
the duties of his service with requisite seriousness. One day he
suddenly abjured his self-founded faith, and declared that ‘Symbolism’
had always been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal;
and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism (_romanisme_).
Under this new word he affirms a return to the language, versification
and mode of feeling of the French poets at the close of the Middle
Ages, and of the Renaissance period; but it were well to adopt his
declarations with caution, since in two or three years he may be
proclaiming his ‘romanisme’ as much a tap-room joke as his ‘symbolism.’
The appearance of the _Pélerin passionné_ in 1891 was celebrated by
the Symbolists as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era
in poetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Moréas, and in the
after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from the
shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour who was
bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And the same poets who
sat at the table with Moréas, and delivered to him rapturous addresses
or joined in the applause, a few weeks after this event overwhelmed
him with contumely and contempt. ‘Moréas a Symbolist!’ cried Charles
Vignier.[139] ‘Is he one through his ideas? He laughs at them himself!
His thoughts! They don’t weigh much, these thoughts of Jean Moréas!’
‘Moréas?’ asks Adrien Remacle,[140] ‘we have all been laughing at him.
It is that which has made him famous.’ René Ghil calls his _Pélerin
passionné_ ‘doggerel written by a pedant,’ and Gustav Kahn[141] passes
sentence on him thus: ‘Moréas has no talent.... He has never done
anything worth mentioning. He has his own particular jargon.’ These
expressions disclose to us the complete hollowness and falseness of the
Symbolistic movement, which outside France is obstinately proclaimed
as a serious matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French
inventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world that
they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap-room jest and
advertise themselves.
After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus, I may
really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on Moréas; I will,
however, cite a few examples from his _Pélerin passionné_, in order
that the reader may form an idea of the softness of brain which
displays itself in these verses.
The poem Agnes[142] begins thus:
‘Il y avait des arcs où passaient des escortes
Avec des bannières de deuil et du fer
Lacé (?) des potentats de toutes sortes
--Il y avait--dans la cité au bord de la mer.
Les places étaient noires, et bien pavées, et les portes,
Du côté de l’est et de l’ouest, hautes; et comme en hiver
La forêt, dépérissaient les salles de palais, et les porches,
Et les colonnades de belvéder.
C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de
ton adolescence.
‘Dans la cité au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdes
De pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets,
Tu t’en venais, devisant telles bourdes,
Tu t’en venais entre tes deux laquais
Si bouffis et tant sots--en verité, des happelourdes!--
Dans la cité au bord de la mer tu t’en venais et tu vaguais
Parmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques,
Le long des môles et des quais.
C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de
ton adolescence.
And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and in every
line we find the characteristics of the language used by imbeciles and
made notorious by Sollier (_Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile_),
the ‘ruminating’ as it were, of the same expressions, the dreamy
incoherence of the language, and the insertion of words which have no
connection with the subject.
Two _Chansons_[143] run thus:
‘Les courlis dans les roseaux!
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
Des courlis dans les roseaux?)
O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘Le porcher et les pourceaux!
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
Du porcher et des pourceaux?)
O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘Mon cœur pris en vos réseaux!
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
De mon cœur en vos réseaux?)
O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘On a marché sur les fleurs au bord de la route,
Et le vent d’automne les secoue si fort, en outre.
‘La malle-poste a renversé la vieille croix au bord de la route;
Elle était vraiment si pourrie, en outre.
‘L’idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route,
Et personne ne le pleurera, en outre.’
The stupid artifice with which Moréas here seeks to produce a feeling
of wretchedness by conjuring up the three associated figures of crushed
flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an overturned and mouldering cross,
and a dead, unmourned idiot, makes this poem a model of the would-be
profound production of a madhouse!
When Moréas is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical turgidity
which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau in his worst efforts.
Only one example[144] of this kind, and we have done with him:
‘J’ai tellement soif, ô mon amour, de ta bouche,
Que j’y boirais en baisers le cours detourné
Du Strymon, l’Araxe et le Tanaïs farouche;
Et les cent méandres qui arrosent Pitané,
Et l’Hermus qui prend sa source où le soleil se couche,
Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza,
Sans que ma soif s’en apaisât.’
Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas a troop of minor
Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the one great
poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do not entitle
them to any special observation. Sufficient justice is dealt them if
the spirit they are made of be characterized by quoting a few lines
of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, ‘unique not only in his generation,
but in all the republic of literature,’[145] cries: ‘Oh, how daily
[_quotidienne_] is life!’ and in his poem _Pan et la Syrinx_ we come
upon lines like the following:
‘O Syrinx! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette
matinée et la circulation de la vie.
Oh, vous là! et moi, ici! Oh vous! Oh, moi! Tout est dans Tout!’[146]
Gustav Kahn, one of the æstheticists and philosophers of Symbolism,
says in his _Nuit sur la Lande_: ‘Peace descends from thy lovely eyes
like a great evening, and the borders of slow tents descend, studded
with precious stones, woven of far-off beams and unknown moons.’
In German, at least, ‘borders of slow tents which descend’ is
completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also
unintelligible; but in the original their meaning becomes apparent.
‘Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,’ the line runs, and betrays
itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of similar sounds, as it
were, echoing each other.
Charles Vignier, ‘the beloved disciple of Verlaine,’ says to his
mistress:
‘Là-bas c’est trop loin,
Pauvre libellule,
Reste dans ton coin
Et prends des pilules...
‘Sois Edmond About
Et d’humeur coulante,
Sois un marabout
Du Jardin des Plantes.’
Another of his poems, _Une Coupe de Thulé_, runs thus:
‘Dans une coupe de Thulé
Où vient pâlir l’attrait de l’heure,
Dort le sénile et dolent leurre
De l’ultime rêve adulé.
‘Mais des cheveux d’argent filé
Font un voile à celle qui pleure,
Dans une coupe de Thulé
Où s’est éteint l’attrait de l’heure.
‘Et l’on ne sait quel jubilé
Célèbre une harpe mineure
Que le hautain fantôme effleure
D’un lucide doigt fuselé!...
Dans une coupe de Thulé!’
These poems remind us so forcibly of those doggerel rhymes at which in
Germany jovial students are often wont to try their skill, and which
are known as ‘flowery [_lit._ blooming] nonsense,’ that, in spite of
the solemn assurance of French critics, I am convinced that they were
intended as a joke. If I am right in my supposition, they are really
evidences, not of the mental status of Vignier, but of his readers,
admirers, and critics.
Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner:
‘Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble reine!
O Tsaristsa [_sic!_] de glace et de fastes Souveraine!
Matrone hiératique et solennelle et vénérée!...
Toi qui me forces à rêver, toi qui me deconcertes,
Et toi surtout que j’aime, Émail, Beauté, Poème, Femme.
Néva! j’évoque ton spectacle et l’hymne de ton âme!’
And René Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is chief of a
school entitled ‘évolutive-instrumentiste’), draws from his lyre these
tones, which I also quote in French; in the first place because they
would lose their ring in a translation, and, secondly, because if I
were to translate them literally, it is hopeless to suppose that the
reader would think I was serious:
‘Ouïs! ouïs aux nues haut et nues où
Tirent-ils d’aile immense qui vire ...
et quand vide
et vers les grands pétales dans l’air plus aride--
‘(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, et
Titille qui n’alentisse d’air qui dure, et!
Grandie, erratile et multiple d’éveils, stride
Mixte, plainte et splendeur! la plénitude aride)
‘et vers les grands pétales d’agitations
Lors évanouissait un vol ardent qui stride....
‘(des saltigrades doux n’iront plus vers les mers....)’
One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists have
an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong to pure
madhouse literature; the title is always remarkable. We have already
seen that Moréas names one of his collection of verses _Les Syrtes_.
He might in truth just as well call it the _North Pole_, or _The
Marmot_, or _Abd-el-Kader_, since these have just as much connection
with the poems in the little volume as _Syrtes_; but it is undeniable
that this geographical name calls up the lustre of an African sun, and
the pale reflection of classic antiquity, which may well please the
eye of the hysteric reader. Edouard Dubus entitles his poem, _Quand
les Violons sont partis_; Louis Dumur, _Lassitudes_; Gustave Khan,
_Les Palais nomades_; Maurice du Plessis, _La Peau de Marsyas_; Ernest
Raynaud, _Chairs profanes_ and _Le Signe_; Henri de Régnier, _Sites
et Episodes_; Arthur Rimbaud, _Les Illuminations_; Albert Saint Paul,
_L’Echarpe d’Iris_; Viélé-Griffin, _Ancæus_; and Charles Vignier,
_Centon_.
Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some examples.
I should further like to cite only a few passages from a book which
the Symbolists declare to be one of their most powerful mental
manifestations, _La Littérature de tout-à-l’heure_, by Charles Morice.
It is a sort of bird’s-eye view of the development of literature up to
the present time, a rapid critique of the more and most recent books
and authors, a kind of programme of the literature of the future. This
book is one of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It
strongly resembles _Rembrandt as Educator_, but is far beyond that
book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations of words. It is
a monument of pure literary insanity, of ‘graphomania’; and neither
Delepierre in his _Littérature des Fous_, nor Philomnestes (Gustave
Brunet) in his _Fous Littéraires_, quotes examples of more complete
mental dislocation than are visible in every page of this book. Notice
the following confession of faith by Morice:[147] ‘Although in this
book treating only of æsthetics--although of æsthetics based upon
metaphysics--we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from
pure philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word which will
more than once be made use of, and which, in the highest sense here
put upon it, is not incapable of being paraphrased. God is the first
and universal cause, the final and universal end; the bond between
spirits; the point of intersection where two parallels would meet; the
fulfilment of our inclinations; the fruition which accords with the
glories of our dreams; the abstraction itself of the concrete; the
unseen and unheard and yet certain ideal of our demands for beauty
in truth. God is, par excellence, THE very word--the very word, that
is to say, that unknown certain word of which every author has the
incontrovertible, but undiscernible idea, the self-evident but hidden
goal which he will never reach, and which he approaches as near as
possible. In, so to say, practical æsthetics He is the atmosphere
of joy in which the mind revels victorious, because it has reduced
irreducible mystery to imperishable symbols.’ I do not for a moment
doubt that this incomparable jumble will be quite intelligible to
theologians. Like all mystics, they discover a sense in every sound;
that is, they persuade themselves and others that the nebulous ideas
which the sound awakens in their brains by association are the meaning
of that sound. But anyone who demands of words that they should be the
media of definite thoughts, will perceive in the face of this twaddle
that the author was not thinking anything at all when he wrote,
although he was dreaming of many things. ‘Religion’ is for Morice (p.
56), ‘the source of art, and art in its essence is religious’--an
affirmation which he borrows from Ruskin, although he does not
acknowledge it. ‘Our scholars, our thinkers ... the luminous heads of
the nineteenth century,’ are ‘Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer,
Darwin, Auguste Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot’ (p. 57). Edgar Poe
by the side of Spencer, Darwin, and Claude Bernard! never have ideas
danced a crazier fools’ quadrille in a disordered brain.
And this book, of which the passages we have cited give a sufficiently
correct idea, was, in France (just as _Rembrandt as Educator_ was in
Germany), pronounced by thoroughly responsible critics to be ‘strange,
but interesting and suggestive.’ A poor degenerate devil who scribbles
such stuff, and an imbecile reader who follows his twaddle like passing
clouds, are simply to be pitied. But what words of contempt are strong
enough for the sane intellectual tatterdemalions who, in order not
to offend or else to give themselves the appearance of possessing
a remarkable faculty of comprehension, or to affect fairness and
benevolence even towards those whose opinions they in part do not
share, insist that they discover in books of this kind many a truth,
much wit along with peculiar whims, an ideal of fervour and frequent
lightnings of thought?
The word ‘Symbolism’ conveys, as we have seen, no idea to its
inventors. They pursue no definite artistic tendency; hence it is
not possible to show them that their tendency is a false one. It is
otherwise with some of their disciples, who joined their ranks, partly
through a desire to advertise themselves, partly because they thought
that, in the conflicts between literary parties, they were fighting
on the side which was the stronger and the more sure of victory, and
partly, also, through the folly of fashion, and through the influence
exerted by any noisy novelty over uncritical minds. Less weak-brained
than the leaders, they felt the need of giving the word ‘Symbolism’ a
certain significance, and, in fact, drew up a number of axioms which,
according to their profession, serve to guide them in their creations.
These axioms are sufficiently defined to allow of discussion.
The Symbolists demand greater freedom in the treatment of French verse.
They fiercely rebel against the old alexandrines, with the cæsura in
the middle, and the necessary termination of the sentence at the end;
against the prohibition of the hiatus; against the law of a regular
alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. They make defiant use
of the ‘free verse,’ with length and rhythm _ad libitum_, and false
rhymes. The foreigner can only smile at the savage gestures with which
this conflict is carried on. It is a schoolboys’ war against some
hated book, which is solemnly torn in pieces, trodden under foot, and
burned. The whole dispute concerning prosody and the rules of rhyme
is, so to speak, an inter-Gallic concern, and is of no consequence to
the literature of the world. We have long had everything which the
French poets are only now seeking to obtain by barricades and street
massacres. In Goethe’s _Prometheus_, _Mahomet’s Gesang_, _Harzreise im
Winter_, in Heine’s _Nordsee Cyklus_, etc., we possess perfect models
of free verse; we alternate the rhymes as we will; we allow masculine
and feminine rhymes to follow one another as seems good to us; we do
not bind ourselves to the rigid law of old classic metres, but suffer,
in the cradling measure of our verse, anapæsts to alternate with
iambics and spondees, according to our feeling for euphony. English,
Italian and Sclavonic poetry have gone equally far, and if the French
alone have remained behind, and have at last found a need for casting
aside their old matted, moth-eaten periwig, this is quite reasonable;
but to anyone but a Frenchman they merely make themselves ridiculous
when they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are far
in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths and opening
up of new roads, and as an advance inspired by the ideal into the dawn
of the future.
Another æsthetic demand of the Symbolists is that the line should,
independently of its sense, call forth an intended emotion merely by
its sound. A word should produce an effect, not through the idea which
it embodies, but as a tone, language becoming music. It is noteworthy
that many of the Symbolists have given their books titles which are
intended to awaken musical ideas. We find _Les Gammes_ (The Scales),
by Stuart Merrill; _Les Cantilènes_, by Jean Moréas; _Cloches dans la
Nuit_, by Adolphe Retté; _Romances sans Paroles_, by Paul Verlaine,
etc. To make use of language as a musical instrument for the production
of pure tone effects is the delirious idea of a mystic. We have seen
that the pre-Raphaelites demand of the fine arts that they should not
represent the concrete plastically or optically, but should express
the abstract, and therefore simply undertake the _rôle_ of alphabetic
writing. Similarly, the Symbolists displace all the natural boundary
lines of art, and impose upon the word a task which belongs to musical
signs only. But while the pre-Raphaelites wish to raise the fine arts
to a higher rank than is suited to them, the Symbolists greatly degrade
the word. In its origin sound is musical. It expresses no definite
idea, but only a general emotion of the animal. The cricket fiddles,
the nightingale trills, when sexually excited. The bear growls when
stirred by the rage of conflict; the lion roars in his pleasure when
tearing a living prey. In proportion as the brain develops in the
animal kingdom, and mental life becomes richer, the means of vocal
expression are evolved and differentiated, and become capable of making
perceptible to the senses not only simple generic emotions, but also
presentative complexes of a more restricted and definitely delimitated
nature--nay, if Professor Garner’s observations concerning the language
of apes are accurate, even tolerably distinct single presentations.
Sound, as a means of expressing mental operations, reaches its final
perfection in cultivated, grammatically articulated language, inasmuch
as it can then follow exactly the intellectual working of the brain,
and make it objectively perceptible in all the minutest details. To
bring the word, pregnant with thought, back to the emotional sound is
to renounce all the results of organic development, and to degrade
man, rejoicing in the power of speech, to the level of the whirring
cricket or the croaking frog. The efforts of the Symbolists, then,
result in senseless twaddle, but not in the word-music they intend,
for this simply does not exist. No word of any single human language
is, as such, musical. Many languages abound in consonants; in others
vowels predominate. The former require more dexterity in the muscles
employed in speaking; their pronunciation, therefore, counts as more
difficult, and they seem less agreeable to the ears of foreigners than
the languages which are rich in vowels. But this has nothing to do
with the musical side of the question. What remains of the phonetic
effect of a word if it is whispered, or if it is only visible as a
written character? And yet in both cases it is able to awaken the same
emotions, as if it had reached consciousness full-toned through the
sense of hearing. Let anyone have read aloud to him the most cleverly
chosen arrangement of words in a language completely unknown to him,
and try to produce in himself a definite emotion through the mere
phonetic effect. In every case it will be found impossible. The meaning
of a word, and not its sound, determines its value. The sound is as
such neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes so only through the voice
which gives it life. Even the first soliloquy in Goethe’s _Iphigenie_
would be ugly coming from the throat of a drunkard. I have had the
opportunity of convincing myself that even the Hottentot language,
spoken in a mellow, agreeable contralto voice, could be pleasing.
Still more cracked is the craze of a sub-section of the Symbolists,
the ‘Instrumentalists,’ whose spokesman is René Ghil. They connect
each sound with a definite feeling of colour, and demand that the
word should not only awaken musical emotion, but at the same time
operate æsthetically in producing a colour-harmony. This mad idea has
its origin in a much-quoted sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud, _Les Voyelles_
(Vowels), of which the first line runs thus:
‘A black, e white, i red, u green, o blue.’
Morice declares[148] explicitly (what in any case no one in a sane
state of mind would have doubted) that Rimbaud wished to make one
of those silly jokes which imbeciles and idiots are in the habit
of perpetrating. Some of his comrades, however, took the sonnet in
grim earnest, and deduced from it a theory of art. In his _Traité du
Verbe_ René Ghil specifies the colour-value, not only of individual
vowels, but of musical instruments. ‘Harps establish their supremacy
by being white. And violins are blue, often softened by a shimmer of
light, to subdue paroxysms.’ (It is to be hoped the reader will duly
appraise these combinations of words.) ‘In the exuberance of ovations,
brass instruments are red, flutes yellow, allowing the childlike to
proclaim itself astonished at the luminance of the lips. And the organ,
synthesis of all simple instruments, bewails deafness of earth and
the flesh all in black....’ Another Symbolist, who has many admirers,
M. Francis Poictevin, teaches us, in _Derniers Songes_, to know
the feelings corresponding to colours. ‘Blue goes--without more of
passion--from love to death; or, more accurately, it is a lost extreme.
From turquoise blue to indigo, one goes from the most shame-faced
influences to final ravages.’
Wiseacres were, of course, at once to the fore, and set up a
quasi-scientific theory of ‘colour-hearing.’ Sounds are said to
awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this
was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according
to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between
the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments.
This anatomical explanation is entirely arbitrary, and has not been
substantiated by any facts. But ‘colour-hearing’ itself is by no means
confirmed. The most complete book hitherto published on this subject,
the author of which is the French oculist, Suarez de Mendoza,[149]
collects all the available observations on this alleged phenomenon,
and deduces from them the following definition: ‘It is the faculty
of associating tones and colours, by which every objective acoustic
perception of sufficient intensity, nay, even the memory-image of such
a perception, arouses in certain persons a luminous or non-luminous
image, which is always the same for the same letters, the same tone
of voice or instrument, and the same intensity or pitch of tone.’
Suarez well hits the truth when he says, ‘Colour-hearing’ (he calls
it _pseudo-photesthésie_) ‘is often a consequence of an association
of ideas established in youth ... and often of a special action of
the brain, the particular nature of which is unknown to us, and may
have a certain similarity to sense-illusion and hallucination.’ For my
part, I have no doubt that colour-hearing is always the consequence
of association of ideas, the origins of which must remain obscure,
because the combination of certain presentations of colour with certain
sensations of sound may possibly depend upon the very evanescent
perceptions of early childhood, which were not powerful enough to
arouse the attention, and have therefore remained undiscerned in
consciousness. That it is a question of purely individual associations
brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic
co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections,
is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a
different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that
to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in his
_Farbenlehre_) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’
black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.
The relation between the external world and the organism is originally
very simple. Movements are continually occurring in nature, and the
protoplasm of living cells perceives these movements. Unity of effect
corresponds to unity of cause. The lowest animals perceive of the
outer world only this, that something in it changes, and possibly,
also, whether this change is marked or slight, sudden or slow. They
receive sensations differing quantitatively, but not qualitatively.
We know, for example, that the proboscis, or syphon, of the _Pholas
dactylus_, which contracts more or less vigorously and quickly at
every excitation, is sensitive to all external impressions--light,
noise, touch, smell, etc. This mollusc sees, hears, feels and smells,
therefore, with this simple organ; his proboscis is to him at once
eye, ear, nose, finger, etc. In the higher animals the protoplasm
is differentiated. Nerves, ganglia, brain and sense-apparatus are
formed. The movements of nature are now perceived in a variety of
ways. The differentiated senses transform the unity of the phenomenon
into the diversity of the percept. But even in the highest and most
differentiated brain there still remains something like a very
distant and very dim remembrance that the cause which excites the
different senses is one and the same movement, and there are formed
presentations and conceptions which would be unintelligible if we
could not concede this vague intuition of the fundamental unity of
essence in all perceptions. We speak of ‘high’ and ‘deep’ tones, and
thus give to sound-waves a relationship in space which they cannot
have. In the same way we speak of tone-colour, and, conversely, of
colour-tones, and thus confound the acoustic and optic properties of
the phenomena. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ lines or tones, ‘sweet’ voices, are
frequent modes of expression, which depend on a transference of the
perception of one sense to the impressions of another. In many cases
this method of speech may no doubt be traced to mental inertia. It is
more convenient to designate a sense-perception by a word which is
familiar, though borrowed from the province of another sense, than to
create a special word for the particular percept. But even this loan
for convenience’ sake is possible and intelligible only if we admit
that the mind perceives certain resemblances between the impressions of
the different senses--resemblances which, although they are often to be
explained by conscious or unconscious association of ideas, are oftener
quite inexplicable objectively. It only remains for us to assume that
consciousness, in its deepest substrata, neglects the differentiation
of phenomena by the various senses, passes over this perfection
attained very late in organic evolution, and treats impressions only
as undifferentiated material for the acquirement of knowledge of the
external world without reference to their origin by way of this or
that sense. It thus becomes intelligible that the mind mingles the
perceptions attained through the different senses, and transforms them
one into another. Binet[150] has established, in his excellent essays,
this transposition of the senses in hysterical persons. A female
patient, whose skin was perfectly insensible on one half of her body,
took no notice when, unseen by herself, she was pricked with a needle.
But at the moment of puncture there arose in her consciousness the
image of a black (in the case of another invalid, of a bright) point.
Consciousness thus transposed an impression of the nerves of the skin,
which, as such, was not perceived, into an impression of the retina, of
the optic nerve.
In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated
brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the
differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the
reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to
the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the
height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise
the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of
sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity
in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the
consciousness of man to that of the oyster.
Moreover, it is an old clinical observation that mental decay is
accompanied by colour mysticism. One of Legrain’s[151] mental
invalids ‘endeavoured to recognise good and evil by the difference of
colour, ascending from white to black; when he was reading, words had
(according to their colour) a hidden meaning, which he understood.’
Lombroso[152] cites ‘eccentric persons’ who, ‘like Wigman, had the
paper for their books specially manufactured with several colours
on each page.... Filon painted each page of the books he wrote in a
different colour.’ Barbey d’Aurevilly, whom the Symbolists venerate as
a pioneer, used to write epistles in which each letter of a word was
coloured with a different tint. Most alienists know similar cases in
their experience.
The more reliable Symbolists proclaim their movement as ‘a reaction
against naturalism.’ Such a reaction was certainly justified and
necessary; for naturalism in its beginnings, as long as it was embodied
in De Goncourt and Zola, was morbid, and, in its later development in
the hands of their imitators, vulgar and even criminal, as will be
proved further on. Nevertheless Symbolism is not in the smallest degree
qualified to conquer naturalism, because it is still more morbid than
the latter, and, in art, the devil cannot be driven out by Beelzebub.
Finally, it is affirmed that Symbolism connotes ‘the inscribing of
a symbol in human form.’ Expressed unmystically, this means that in
the poems of the Symbolists the particular human form should not only
exhibit its special nature and contingent destiny, but also represent
a general type of humanity, and embody a universal law of life. This
quality, however, is not the monopoly of Symbolistic poetry, but
belongs to all kinds of poetry. No genuine poet has yet been impelled
to deal with an utterly unprecedented and unique case, or with a
monstrous being whose likeness is not to be found in mankind. That
which interests him in men and their destiny is just the intimate
connection between the two and the universal laws of human life. The
more the government of universal laws is made apparent in the fate of
the individual, the more there is embodied in him that which lives in
all men, so much the more attractive will this destiny and this man be
to the poet. There is not in all the literature of humanity a single
work of recognised importance which in this sense is not symbolic,
and in which the characters, their passions and fortunes, have not a
typical significance, far transcending the particular circumstances.
It is, therefore, a piece of foolish arrogance in the Symbolists to
lay claim to the sole possession of this quality in the works of their
school. They show, moreover, that they do not understand their own
formulæ; for those theorists of the school who demand of poetry that it
should be ‘a symbol inscribed in human form,’ assert at the same time
that only the ‘rare and unique case’ (_le cas rare et unique_) deserves
the attention of the poet, _i.e._, the case which is significant of
nothing beyond itself, and consequently the opposite of a symbol.[153]
We have now seen that Symbolism, like English pre-Raphaelitism (from
which it borrowed its catch-words and opinions), is nothing else
than a form of the mysticism of weak-minded and morbidly emotional
degeneration. The efforts of some followers of the movement to import
a meaning into the stammering utterances of their leaders, and falsely
to ascribe to them a sort of programme, do not for a moment withstand
criticism, but show themselves to be graphomaniac and delirious
twaddle, without the smallest grain of truth or sound reason. A young
Frenchman, who is certainly not adverse to rational innovation, Hugues
Le Roux,[154] describes the group of Symbolists quite correctly in
saying of them: ‘They are ridiculous cripples, each intolerable to the
other; they live uncomprehended by the public, several by their friends
as well, and a few by themselves. As poets or prose writers they
proceed in the same way: no material, no sense, and only juxtapositions
of loud-sounding musical (?) words; teams of strange rhymes, groupings
of unexpected colours and tones, swaying cadences, hurtlings,
hallucinations and evoked suggestions.’