CHAPTER VI.

PARODIES OF MYSTICISM.

THE artistic and poetic forms of mysticism, which we have studied

hitherto, might perhaps inspire doubts in superficial or insufficiently

instructed minds as to their origin in degeneration, and present

themselves as manifestations of a genuine and fertile talent. But

beside them appear others, in which a state of mind reveals itself

which suddenly arrests and perplexes any reader, however credulous,

and however accessible to the suggestion of printed words, and to

self-puffing charlatanism. Books and theories find publication, in

which even the unlearned observe the deep intellectual degradation of

their authors. One pretends to be able to initiate the reader into the

black art, and enable him to practise magic himself; another gives a

poetical form to definitely insane ideas, such as have been classified

by mental therapeutics; a third writes books as if prompted by thoughts

and feelings worthy of little children or idiots. A great part of the

works I have in view would justify, without further consideration, the

placing of their authors under constraint. As, however, in spite of

their manifest craziness, well-known critics are bent upon discovering

in them ‘the future,’ ‘fresh nerve-stimulations,’ and beauties of a

mysterious kind, and to puff them by their chatter to gaping simpletons

as revelations of genius, it is not superfluous to devote some brief

consideration to them.

A not very large amount of mysticism leads to belief; a larger

amount leads necessarily to superstition, and the more confused, the

more deranged, the mind is, so much the crazier will be the kind of

superstition. In England and America this most frequently takes the

form of spiritualism and the founding of sects. The hysterical and

deranged receive spiritual inspirations, and begin to preach and

prophesy, or they conjure up spirits and commune with the dead. In

English fiction ghost-stories have begun to occupy a large place, and

in English newspapers to act glibly as stopgaps, as was done formerly

in the Continental press by the sea-serpent and the Flying Dutchman.

A society has been formed which has for its object the collecting of

ghost-stories, and testing their authenticity; and even literary men

of renown have been seized with the vertigo of the supernatural, and

condescend to serve as vouchers for the most absurd aberrations.

In Germany, too, spiritualism has found an entrance, although, on the

whole, it has not gained much ground. In the large towns there may be

some small spiritualist bodies. The English expression _trance_ has

become so familiar to some deranged persons that they have adopted

it in German as _trans_, imagining apparently, with the popular

etymology, that it means ‘beyond’ instead of ‘ecstasy,’ or, in other

words, the state in which, according to the spiritualist hypothesis,

the medium ought to find himself who enters into communication with

the world of spirits. Nevertheless, spiritualism has as yet exerted

little influence on our literature. Excluding the later romanticists

who have fallen into childishness, notably the authors of tragedies

based on the idea of ‘fatality’ (_Schicksalstragödien_), few writers

have dared to introduce the supernatural into their creations otherwise

than allegorically. At most in Kleist and Kerner it attains a certain

importance, and healthy readers do not consider that as a merit in the

dramas of the unfortunate author of the _Hermannsschlacht_, and in the

_Seer of Prevorst_ of the Swabian poet. On the other hand, it must

certainly be noted that it is the ghost element precisely which has

brought to these two writers, in recent times, a renewal of youth and

popularity among degenerate and hysterical Germans. Maximilian Perty,

who was evidently born too soon, met with but rare and even rather

derisive notice from the less soft-headed generation which preceded

ours, for his bulky books on apparitions. And, among contemporaries,

none but Freiherr Karl du Prel has chosen the spirit world as the

special subject of his theoretic writings and novels. After all, our

plays, our tales, are very little haunted, scarcely enough to make a

schoolgirl shiver; and even among the eminent foreign authors best

known in Germany, such, for example, as Tourgenieff, it is not the

world of apparitions which attracts German readers.

The few ghost-seers whom we have at present in Germany endeavour

naturally to give their mental derangement a scientific colouring, and

appeal to individual professors of mathematics and natural science who

happen entirely to agree with them, or are supposed to be partially

inclined to do so. However, their one sheet-anchor is Zöllner, who is

simply a sad proof of the fact that a professorship is no protection

from madness; and they can besides, at any rate, point to opportune

remarks of Helmholtz and other mathematicians on _n_ dimensions, which

they, either intentionally or from mystical weakness of mind, have

misunderstood. In an analytical problem the mathematician, instead

of one, two, or three dimensions, may place _n_ dimensions without

altering thereby the law of the problem and its legitimately resulting

corollaries, but it does not occur to him to imagine, under the

geometrical expression, ‘nth dimension,’ something given in space, and

capable of being apprehended by the senses. When Zöllner gives the

well-known example of the inversion of the india-rubber ring which,

because only possible in the third dimension, necessarily appeared

quite inconceivable and supernatural to a bi-dimensional being, he

believes that he facilitates the comprehension of the formation of

a knot in a closed ring as an operation practicable in the fourth

dimension. In doing this he simply offers one more example of the known

tendency of the mystic to delude himself, as he does others, with words

which seem to signify something, and which a simpleton is convinced

oftener than not that he understands, but which in reality express no

idea, and are, therefore, empty sound, void of import.

France is about to become the promised land of believers in ghosts.

Voltaire’s countrymen have already got the start of the pious

Anglo-Saxons in dealings with the supernatural. I am not now thinking

of the lower ranks of the people, among whom the book of dreams (_La

Clé des Songes_) has never ceased to constitute the family library,

together with the Calendar, and, perhaps, the ‘Paroissien’ (missal);

nor of the fine ladies who at all times have ensured excellent

incomes to clairvoyantes and fortune-tellers; but only of the male

representatives of the educated classes. Dozens of spiritualist circles

count their numbers by thousands. In numerous drawing-rooms of the

best (even in the opinion of the ‘most cultured’!) society, the dead

are called up. A monthly publication, _L’Initiation_, announces, in

weighty tones, and with a prodigality of philosophical and scientific

technicalities, the esoteric doctrine of the marvels of the unearthly.

A bi-monthly publication, _Annales des Sciences Psychiques_, terms

itself a ‘collection of observations and researches.’ Next to these two

most important periodicals, a whole series of others exist, similar in

tendency, and all having a wide circulation. Strictly technical works

on hypnotism and suggestion run through edition after edition, and it

has become a profitable speculation for doctors without practice, who

do not attach much importance to the opinions of their colleagues,

to compile so-called manuals and text-books on these subjects, which

scientifically are completely worthless, but which are bought up by the

public like hot rolls. Novels have, with rare exceptions, no longer any

sale in France, but works on obscure phenomena of nerve function go off

splendidly, so that sagacious publishers give their discouraged authors

this advice: ‘Leave novels for a time, and write on magnetism.’

Some of the books on magic which have appeared of late years in

France connect their subject directly with the phenomena of hypnotism

and suggestion; for example, A. De Rochas’ _Les États profonds de

l’Hypnose_, and C. A. de Bodisco’s _Traits de Lumière_, or ‘physical

researches dedicated to unbelievers and egoists.’ This has brought

many observers to the idea that the works and discoveries of the

Charcot school in general have given the impulse to the whole of this

movement. Hypnotism, say the representatives of this opinion, has

brought such remarkable facts to light that the accuracy of certain

traditions, popular beliefs and old records can no longer be doubted,

though hitherto they have been generally considered inventions of

superstition; possession, witch-spells, second-sight, healing by

imposition of hands, prophecy, mental communication at the remotest

distance without the intervention of words, have received a new

interpretation and have been recognised as possible. What, then, more

natural than that minds weak in balance, and of insufficient scientific

training, should become accessible to the marvellous (against which

they had shielded themselves, as long as they considered it to be all

old nurses’ fables), when they saw it appear in the garb of science,

and found themselves in the best society by believing in it?

Plausible as this opinion is, it is not the less false. It puts the

cart before the horse. It confounds cause with effect. No completely

sound mind has been led by the experiences of the new hypnotic science

into a belief in the marvellous. In former times no attention was paid

to obscure phenomena, or they were passed by with eyes intentionally

closed, because they could not be fitted in to the prevailing system,

and were consequently held to be chimæras or frauds. For the last

twelve years official science has taken cognizance of them, and

Faculties and Academies are engaged upon them. But no one thinks

of them for a moment as supernatural, or supposes the working of

unearthly forces behind them. They class them with all other natural

phenomena which are accessible to the observation of the senses, and

are determined by the ordinary laws of nature. Our knowledge has simply

enlarged its frame, and admitted an order of facts which in former

times had remained beyond its pale. Many processes of hypnosis are

more or less satisfactorily explained; others as yet not at all. But

an earnest and healthy mind attaches no great importance to this, for

he knows that the pretended explanation of phenomena does not go very

far, and that we have mostly to be satisfied to determine them with

certainty, and to know their immediate conditions. I do not say that

the new science has exhausted its subject and has reached its limits.

But whatever it may bring to light of the unknown and the unexpected,

it is not a matter of doubt to the healthy mind that it will be

accounted for by natural means, and that the simple, ultimate laws of

physics, chemistry and biology cannot be shaken by these discoveries.

If, therefore, so many people now interpret the phenomena of hypnosis

as supernatural, and indulge the hope that the conjuration of

the spirits of the dead, aerial voyages on Faust’s magic cloak,

omniscience, etc., will soon be arts as common as reading and writing,

it is not the discoveries of science which have brought them to this

delusion, although the existing delusion is happy to be able to pass

itself off for science. Far from concealing itself, as formerly, it

exhibits itself proudly in the streets on the arms of professors and

academicians. Paulhan understands the matter very well: ‘It is not the

love of positive facts,’ he says,[215] ‘which has carried minds away;

there has been a certain kind of return for the love of the marvellous

in desires formerly satisfied, and which, now repressed, slumbered

unacknowledged in a latent condition. Magic, sorcery, astrology,

divination, all these ancient beliefs correspond to a need of human

nature; that of being able easily to act upon the external world and

the social world; that of possessing, by means relatively easy, the

knowledge requisite to make this action possible and fruitful.’ The

stormy outburst of superstition has by no means been let loose through

hypnological researches; it merely launches itself into the channels

they have dug. We have here already repeatedly drawn attention to the

fact that unbalanced minds always adapt their crazes to the prevailing

views, and usurp by predilection the most recent discoveries of

science to explain them. The physicists were still far from occupying

themselves with magnetism and electricity, when the persons attacked

by persecution-mania were already referring their own unpleasant

sensations and hallucinations to the electric currents or sparks which

their persecutors were supposed to cast on them through walls, ceilings

and floors; and in our days the degenerate were equally the first to

appropriate to themselves the results of hypnological researches, and

to employ them as ‘scientific’ proofs of the reality of spirits, angels

and devils. But the degenerate started with the belief in miracles; it

is one of their peculiar characteristics,[216] and it was not first

called forth by the observations of Parisian and Nancy hypnologists.

If another proof were needed in support of this affirmation, it could

be found in the fact that the greater number of ‘occultists,’ as they

call themselves, in their treatises on occult arts and magic sciences,

scorn to fall back on the results of hypnological experiments, and,

without any pretext of ‘modernity,’ without any concession to honest

investigation of nature, have direct recourse to the most ancient

traditions. Papus (the pseudonym of a physician, Dr. Encausse) writes

a _Traité méthodique de Science occulte_, an enormous large-octavo

volume of 1,050 pages, with 400 illustrations, which introduces the

reader to the cabala, magic, necromancy and cheiromancy, astrology,

alchemy, etc., and to which an old, not undeserving savant, Adolf

Franck, of the Institute of France, was imprudent enough to write a

long eulogistic preface, presumably without having even opened the book

himself. Stanislaus de Guaita, revered with awe by the adepts as past

master in the Black Art, and arch-magician, gives two treatises, _Au

Seuil du Mystère and Le Serpent de la Genèse_, so darkly profound that,

in comparison, Nicolas Flamel, the great alchemist, whom no mortal

has ever comprehended, seems clear and transparent as crystal. Ernest

Bose confines himself to the theory of the sorcery of the ancient

Egyptians. His book, _Isis dévoilée, ou l’Egyptologie sacrée_, has

for the sub-title: ‘Hieroglyphics, papyri, hermetic books, religion,

myths, symbols, psychology, philosophy, morals, sacred art, occultism,

mysteries, initiation, music.’ Nehor has likewise his speciality. If

Bosc unveils Egyptian mysteries, Nehor reveals the secrets of Assyria

and Babylonia. _Les Mages et le Secret magique_ is the name of the

modest pamphlet in which he initiates us into the profoundest magic

arts of the Chaldean Mobeds, or Knights Templars.

If I do not enter more fully into these books, which have found readers

and admirers, it is because I am not quite certain that they are

intended to be in earnest. Their authors read and translate so fluently

Egyptian, Hebraic and Assyriac texts, which no professional Orientalist

has yet deciphered; they quote so frequently and so copiously from

books which are found in no library in the world; they give with

such an imperturbable air exact instructions how to resuscitate the

dead, how to preserve eternal youth, how to hold intercourse with the

inhabitants of Sirius, how to divine beyond all the limits of time and

space, that one cannot get rid of the impression that they wished, in

cold blood, to make fun of the reader.

Only one of all these master-sorcerers is certainly to be taken in

good faith, and as he is at the same time intellectually the most

eminent among them, I will deal with him somewhat more in detail.

This is M. Joséphin Péladan. He has even arrogated to himself the

Assyrian royal title of ‘Sar,’ under which he is generally known.

The public authorities alone do not give him his Sar title; but then

they do not usually recognise any titles of nobility in France. He

maintains he is the descendant of the old Magi, and the possessor of

all the mental legacies of Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Orpheus. He is,

moreover, the direct heir of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians,

both of which orders he has amalgamated and revived under a new form

as the ‘Order of the Rosy Cross.’ He dresses himself archaically in

a satin doublet of blue or black; he trims his extremely luxuriant

blue-black hair and beard into the shape in use among the Assyrians;

he affects a large upright hand, which might be taken for mediæval

character, writes by preference with red or yellow ink, and in the

corner of his letter-paper is delineated, as a distinctive mark of

his dignity, the Assyrian king’s cap, with the three serpentine

rolls opening in front. As a coat of arms he has the device of his

order; on an escutcheon divided by sable and argent a golden chalice

surmounted by a crimson rose with two outspread wings, and overlaid

with a Latin cross in sable. The shield is surmounted by a coronet

with three pentagrams as indents. M. Péladan has appointed a series of

commanders and dignitaries of his order (‘grand-priors,’ ‘archons,’

‘æsthetes’), which numbers, besides, ‘postulants’ and ‘grammarians’

(scholars). He possesses a special costume as grand-master and Sar (in

which his life-sized portrait has been painted by Alexandre Séon), and

a composer, who belongs to the order, has composed for him a special

fanfare, which on solemn occasions is to be played by trumpets at his

entrance. He makes use of extraordinary formulæ. His letters he calls

‘decrees,’ or commands (_mandements_). He addresses the persons to whom

they are directed either as ‘magnifiques,’ or ‘peers,’ sometimes also

‘dearest adelphe,’ or ‘synnoède.’ He does not call them ‘sir,’ but

‘your lordship’ (_seigneurie_). The introduction is: ‘Health, light

and victory in Jesus Christ, in the only God, and in Peter, the only

king’; or ‘_Ad Rosam per Crucem, ad Crucem per Rosam, in eâ, in eis

gemmatus resurgam_.’ This is at the same time the heraldic motto of

the Order of the Rosy Cross. At the conclusion is usually, ‘_Amen. Non

nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nominis tui gloriæ solæ._’ He writes the

name of his order, with a cross inserted in the middle, thus: ‘_Rose_

✠ _Croix._’ His novels he calls ‘_éthopées_,’ himself as their author

‘_éthopoète_,’ his dramas ‘_wagneries_,’ their table of contents

‘_éumolpées_.’

Every one of his books is ornamented with a large number of symbols.

That which appears the most often is a vignette showing on a column

a cowering form with the head of a woman breathing flames, and with

a woman’s breast, lion’s paws, and the lower part of the body of a

wasp or dragon-fly, terminating in an appendage similar to the tail

of a fish. The work itself is always preceded by some prefaces,

introductions and invocations, and is often followed by pages of

the same nature. I take as an example the book entitled, _Comment

on devient Mage_.[217] After the two title-pages adorned with a

great number of symbolical images (winged Assyrian bulls, the mystic

rose cross, etc.), comes a long dedication ‘to Count Antoine de la

Rochefoucauld, grand-prior of the temple, archon of the Rose ✠ Cross.’

Then follows in Latin a ‘prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, well suited to

warn the reader against the possible errors of this book’; after this,

an _élenctique_ (counter-demonstration) containing a sort of profession

of Catholic faith; next, an ‘invocation to ancestors’ in the style of

the Chaldean prayers; lastly, a long allocution ‘to the contemporary

young man,’ after which the book properly begins.

At the head of every chapter appear nine mysterious formulæ. Here are

two examples: ‘I. The Neophyte. Divine Name: Jud (the Hebrew letter

so called). Sacrament: Baptism. Virtue: Faith. Gift: Fear of God.

Beatitude: Poor in spirit. Work: Teaching. Angel: Michael. Arcanum:

Unity. Planet: Samas. II. Society. Divine Name: Jah--El (in Hebrew

characters, which Péladan evidently cannot read, for he turns it into

El-lah). Sacrament: Consecration. Virtue: Hope. Gift: Pity. Beatitude:

Gentleness. Work: Counsel. Angel: Gabriel. Arcanum: Duality. Planet:

Sin.’

Of the further contents of this mighty volume I think no examples need

be given. They correspond exactly with the headings of these chapters.

The novels or ‘éthopées’ of M. Péladan, of which nine have appeared

hitherto, but of which the author has announced fourteen, are arranged

in groups of seven, the mystical number. He has even established a

_Schéma de Concordance_,[218] which claims to give a synopsis of their

leading ideas. Let us hear how he explains his works:

‘First series of seven: I. The supreme vice. Moral and mental Diathesis

of the Latin decline--Merodach, summit of conscious will, type of

absolute entity; Alta, prototype of the monk in contact with the

world; Courtenay, inadequate man-of-fate, bewitched by social facts;

L. d’Este, extreme pride, the grand style in evil; Coryse, the true

young maiden; La Nine, the wicked Androgyne, or, better, Gynander;

Dominicaux, conscious reprobate, character of the irremediable,

resulting from a specious æsthetic theory for every vice, which kills

consciousness and, in consequence, conversion. Every novel has a

Merodach, that is, an abstract Orphic principle, as opposed to an ideal

enigma.

‘II. Inquisitive. Parisian clinical collective-phenomenism. Ethics:

Nebo; the systematic, sentimental will. Erotics: Paula, passionate

with Androgynous Prism. The great horror, the Beast with two backs,

in Gynander (IX.), metamorphosing itself into unisexual corruption.

Inquisitive, that is the everyday and the everybody of instinct.

Gynander, the Goethesque midnight, and the exceptional,’ etc.

I have taken pains to reproduce faithfully all M. Péladan’s whimsical

methods of expression. That his _Concordance_ can give even the

slightest idea of the contents of his novels, I do not for a moment

believe. I will, therefore, say a few words about these in non-magian

language.

They all move in the three following circles of ideas, variously

penetrating and intersecting each other: The highest intellectual aim

of man is to hear and thoroughly to appreciate Wagnerian music; the

highest development of morality consists in renouncing sexuality and

in transforming one’s self into a hybrid hermaphrodite (Androgyne and

Gynander); the higher man can quit and retake his body at pleasure,

soar into space as an ‘astral being,’ and subject to his will the

entire supernatural power of the world of spirits, of the good as well

as the bad.

Accordingly, in every romance a hero appears who unites in himself the

distinctive marks of both sexes, and resists with horror the ordinary

sexual instincts, who plays or enjoys the music of Wagner, enacts in

his own life some scene from the Wagnerian drama, and conjures up

spirits or has to repel their attacks.

If anyone wishes to trace the origin of all these delirious ideas, it

will not be difficult to discover how they arose. One day while reading

the Bible Péladan alighted on the name of the Babylonian king, Merodach

Baladan. The similarity of sound between ‘Baladan’ and ‘Péladan’ gave

an impulse to his imagination to establish relations between himself

and the Biblical Babylonian king. Once he began to reflect on this, he

found a resemblance, in the cast of his features, the colour of his

hair, and the growth of his beard, to the heads of Assyrian kings on

the alabaster casts from the palace at Nineveh. Thus he easily arrived

at the idea that he was possibly a descendant of Baladan, or of other

Assyrian kings, or, at least, that it would be a curious thing if he

were. And he continued to work out this thought, until one day he

resolutely took the title of Sar. If he were descended from the kings

of Babylon, he could also be the heir of the wisdom of the Magi. So

he began to proclaim the Magian esoteric doctrine. To these musings

were added afterwards the impressions he received on a pilgrimage to

Bayreuth, from _Tristan_, and especially from _Parsifal_. In fancy

he wrought his own life into the legend of the Grail, looked upon

himself as a knight of the Grail, and created his order of the ‘Rose

Croix,’ which is entirely composed of reminiscences of _Parsifal_.

His invention of the asexual hybrid being shows that his imagination

is actively preoccupied with presentations of a sexual character, and

unconsciously seeks to idealize the ‘contrary sexual feelings.’

The mental life of Péladan permits us to follow, in an extremely

well-marked instance, the ways of mystic thought. He is wholly

dominated by the association of ideas. A fortuitous assonance

awakens in him a train of thought which urges him irresistibly to

proclaim himself an Assyrian king and Magus, without his attention

being in a condition to make him realize the fact that a man can be

called Péladan without being, therefore, necessarily descended from

a Biblical Baladan. The meaningless flow of words of the mediæval

scholastics misleads him, because he is continually thinking by

way of analogy, that is to say, because he follows exclusively the

play of the association of ideas provoked by the most secondary and

superficial resemblances. He receives every artistic suggestion with

the greatest ease. If he hears Wagner’s operas, he believes himself

to be a Wagnerian character; if he reads of the Knights Templars and

Rosicrucians, he becomes the Grand-Master of the Temple, and of all

other secret orders. He has the peculiar sexual emotionalism of the

‘higher degenerates,’ and this endows him with a peculiar fabulous

shape, which, at once chaste and lascivious, embodies, in curiously

demonstrative manner, the secret conflicts which take place in his

consciousness between unhealthily intensified instincts, and the

judgment which recognises their dangerous character.

Does Péladan believe in the reality of his delusions? In other words,

does he take himself seriously? The answer to this question is not so

simple as many perhaps think. The two beings which exist in every human

mind are, in a nature such as Péladan’s, a prey to a strange conflict.

His unconscious nature is quite transfused with the _rôle_ of a Sar,

a Magus, a Knight of the Holy Grail, Grand-Master of the Order, etc.,

which he has invented. The conscious factor in him knows that it is

all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the

unconscious life to do as it pleases. It is thus that little girls

behave who play with dolls, caressing or punishing them, and treating

them as if they were living beings, all the time well aware that in

reality they have before them only an object in leather and porcelain.

Péladan’s judgment has no power over his unconscious impulses. It is

not in his power to renounce the part of a Sar or a Magus, or no longer

to pose as grand-master of an order. He cannot abstain from perpetually

returning to his ‘Androgynous’ absurdity. All these aberrations, as

well as the invention of neologisms and the predilection for symbols,

the prolix titles, and the casket-series of prefaces, so characteristic

of the ‘higher degenerates,’ proceed from the depths of his organic

temperament, and evade the influence of his higher centres. On its

conscious side Péladan’s cerebral activity is rich and beautiful.

In his novels there are pages which rank among the most splendid

productions of a contemporary pen. His moral ideal is high and noble.

He pursues with ardent hatred all that is base and vulgar, every form

of egoism, falsehood, and thirst for pleasure; and his characters are

thoroughly aristocratic souls, whose thoughts are concerned only with

the worthiest, if somewhat exclusively artistic, interests of humanity.

It is deeply to be regretted that the overgrowth of morbidly mystic

presentations should render his extraordinary gifts completely sterile.

Far below Péladan stands Maurice Rollinat, who ought, nevertheless, to

be mentioned first, because he embodies in a very instructive manner a

definite form of mystic degeneration, and next because all French, and

many foreign, hysterical persons honour in him a great poet.

In his poems, which with characteristic self-knowledge he entitles

_Les Névroses_[219] (Nervous Maladies) he betrays all the stigmata of

degeneration, which by this time ought to be familiar enough to the

reader for me to content myself with a brief notice of them.

He feels in himself criminal impulses (_Le Fantôme du Crime_):

‘Wicked thoughts come into my soul in every place, at all hours, in the

height of my work.... I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones

which vibrate in my heart where Satan knocks; and although I have a

horror of vile saturnalias, of which the mere shadow suffices to anger

me, I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones.... The phantom

of crime across my reason prowls around (in my skull).... Murder, rape,

robbery, parricide, pass through my mind like fierce lightnings....’

The spectacle of death and corruption has a strong attraction for him.

He delights in putrefaction and revels in disease.

‘My ghostly belovèd, snatched by death, played before me livid and

purple.... Bony nakedness, chaste in her leanness! Hectic beauty as sad

as it is ardent!... Near her a coffin ... greedily opened its oblong

jaws, and seemed to call her....’ (_L’Amante macabre_).

‘Mademoiselle Squelette!

Je la surnommais ainsi:

Elle était si maigrelette!

‘Crachant une gouttelette

De sang très peu cramoisi...

Elle était si maigrelette!...

‘Sa phthisie étant complète;...

Sa figure verdelette...

Un soir, à l’espagnolette

Elle vint se pendre ici.

‘Horreur! une cordelette

Décapitait sans merci

Mademoiselle Squelette:

Elle était si maigrelette!’

_Mademoiselle Squelette._

‘That I might rescue the angelically beautiful dead from the horrible

kisses of the worm I had her embalmed in a strange box. It was on a

winter’s night. From the ice-cold, stiff and livid body were taken out

the poor defunct organs, and into the open belly, bloody and empty,

were poured sweet-smelling salves....’ (_La Morte embaumée_).

‘Flesh, eyebrows, hair, my coffin and my winding-sheet, the grave

has eaten them all; its work is done.... My skull has attested its

shrinking, and I, a scaling, crumbling residue of death, have come to

look back with regret upon the time when I was rotting, and the worm

yet fasted not....’ (_Le mauvais Mort_).

This depravity of taste will not seldom be observed among the deranged.

In Rollinat it merely inspires loathsome verses; among others it leads

them to the eager devouring of human excretions, and, in its worst

forms, to being enamoured of a corpse (_Necrophilia_).

Violent erotomaniacal excitement expresses itself in a series of

poems (_Les Luxures_), which not only celebrate the most unbridled

sensuality, but also all the aberrations of sexual psychopathy.

But the most conspicuous are the sensations of undefined horrors which

continually beset him. Everything inspires him with anguish; all the

sights of Nature appear to him to enclose some frightful mystery. He is

always expecting, in trembling, some unknown terror.

‘I always shudder at the strange look of some boot and some shoe. Ay,

you may shrug your shoulders mockingly, I do shudder; and suddenly, on

thinking of the foot they cover, I ask myself: “Is it mechanical, or

living?” ...’ (_Le Maniaque_).

‘My room is like my soul.... Heavy curtains, very ancient, cling round

the deep bed; long fantastic insects dance and crawl on the ceiling.

When my clock strikes the hour it makes an appalling noise; every swing

of the pendulum vibrates, and is strangely prolonged.... Furniture,

pictures, flowers, even the books, all smell of hell and poison; and

the horror, which loves me, envelops this prison like a pall....’ (_La

Chambre_).

‘The library made me think of very old forests; thirteen iron lamps,

oblong and spectral, poured their sepulchral light day and night on

the faded books full of shadow and secrets. I always shuddered when I

entered. I felt myself in the midst of fogs and death-rattles, drawn

on by the arms of thirteen pale armchairs, and scanned by the eyes of

thirteen great portraits....’ (_La Bibliothèque_).

‘In the swamp full of malice, which clogs and penetrates his stockings,

he hears himself faintly called by several voices making but one. He

finds a corpse as sentinel, which rolls its dull eyeballs, and moves

its corruption with an automatic spring. I show to his dismayed eyes

fires in the deserted houses, and in the forsaken parks beds full

of green rose.... And the old cross on the calvary hails him from

afar, and curses him, crossing its stern arms as it stretches out and

brandishes them....’ (_La Peur_).

I will not weary by multiplying examples, and will only quote the

titles of a few more poems: _The Living Grave_; _Troppmann’s Soliloquy_

(a well-known eight-fold murderer); _The Crazy Hangman_; _The Monster_;

_The Madman_; _The Headache_ (_La Céphalalgie_); _The Disease_; _The

Frenzied Woman_; _Dead Eyes_; _The Abyss_; _Tears_; _Anguish_; _The

Slow Death-struggle_; _The Interment_; _The Coffin_; _The Death-knell_;

_Corruption_; _The Song of the Guillotined_, etc.

All these poems are the production of a craze, which will be frequently

observed among degenerates. Even Dostojevski, who is known to have

been mentally afflicted, suffered from it also. ‘As soon as it grew

dusk,’ he relates of himself,[220] ‘I gradually fell into that state

of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I have been ill,

and which I shall call mystic fright. It is a crushing anxiety about

something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not

actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realized suddenly, at

this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable,

horrible, unshapen fact.’ Legrain[221] quotes a degenerate lunatic

whose mania began ‘with feelings of fear and anguish at some fancy.’

Professor Kowalewski[222] indicates as degrees of mental derangement in

degeneration--first, neurasthenia; secondly, impulses of ‘obsession’

and feelings of morbid anguish. Legrand du Saulle[223] and Morel[224]

describe this state of groundless, undefined fear, and coin for it

the not very happy word ‘Panophobia.’ Magnan calls it more correctly

‘Anxiomania’--frenzied anguish--and speaks of it as a very common

stigma of degeneration. The anguish mania is an error of consciousness,

which is filled with presentations of fear, and transfers their

cause into the external world, while, as a matter of fact, they are

stimulated by pathological processes within the organism. The invalid

feels oppressed and uneasy, and imputes to the phenomena which

surround him a threatening and sinister aspect, in order to explain

to himself his dread, the origin of which escapes him, because it is

rooted in the unconscious.

As in Rollinat we have learnt to know the poet of anxiomania, so shall

we find in another author, whose name has become widely known in the

last two years, in the Belgian, Maurice Maeterlinck, an example of

an utterly childish idiotically-incoherent mysticism. He reveals the

state of his mind most characteristically in his poems,[225] of which I

will give a few examples. Here is the first of the collection--_Serres

chaudes_:

‘O hot-house in the middle of the woods. And your doors ever closed!

And all that is under your dome! And under my soul in your analogies!

‘The thoughts of a princess who is hungry; the tedium of a sailor in

the desert; a brass-band under the windows of incurables.

‘Go into the warm moist corners! One might say, ‘tis a woman fainting

on harvest-day. In the courtyard of the infirmary are postilions; in

the distance an elk-hunter passes by, who now tends the sick.

‘Examine in the moonlight! (Oh, nothing there is in its place!) One

might say, a madwoman before judges, a battle-ship in full sail on a

canal, night-birds on lilies, a death-knell towards noon (down there

under those bells), a halting-place for the sick in the meadows, a

smell of ether on a sunny day.

‘My God! my God! when shall we have rain and snow and wind in the

hot-house?’

These idiotic sequences of words are psychologically interesting,

for they demonstrate with instructive significance the workings of

a shattered brain. Consciousness no longer elaborates a leading or

central idea. Representations emerge just as the wholly mechanical

association of ideas arouses them. There is no attention seeking to

bring order into the tumult of images as they come and go, to separate

the unconnected, to suppress those that contradict each other, and to

group those which are allied into a single logical series.

A few more examples of these fugitive thoughts exclusively under the

rule of unbridled association. Here is one entitled _Bell-glasses_

(_Cloches de verre_):

‘O bell-glasses! Strange plants for ever under shelter! While the wind

stirs my senses without! A whole valley of the soul for ever still! And

the enclosed lush warmth towards noon! And the pictures seen through

the glass!

‘Never remove one of them! Several have been placed on old moonlight.

Look through their foliage. There is perhaps a vagabond on a throne;

one has the impression that corsairs are waiting on the pond, and that

antediluvian beings are about to invade the towns.

‘Some have been placed on old snows. Some have been placed on ancient

rains. (Pity the enclosed atmosphere!) I hear a festival solemnized on

a famine Sunday; there is an ambulance in the middle of the house, and

all the daughters of the king wander on a fast-day across the meadows.

‘Examine specially those of the horizon! They cover carefully very old

thunderstorms. Oh, there must be somewhere an immense fleet on a marsh!

And I believe that the swans have hatched ravens. (One can scarcely

distinguish through the dampness.)

‘A maiden sprinkles the ferns with hot water; a troop of little girls

watch the hermit in his cell; my sisters have fallen asleep on the

floor of a poisonous grotto!

‘Wait for the moon and the winter, among these bells, scattered at last

on the ice.’

Another called _Soul_ (_Ame_):

‘My soul! O my soul truly too much sheltered! And these flocks of

desires in a hot-house! Awaiting a storm in the meadows! Let us go to

the most sickly: they have strange exhalations. In the midst of them I

cross a battlefield with my mother. They are burying a brother-in-arms

at noon, while the sentries take their repast.

‘Let us go also to the weakest; they have strange sweats: here is a

sick bride, treachery on Sunday, and little children in prison. (And

further across the mist.) Is it a dying woman at the door of a kitchen?

Or a nun, who cleans vegetables at the foot of the bed of an incurable?

‘Let us go lastly to the saddest: (at the last because they have

poisons). O my lips accept the kisses of one wounded!

‘All the ladies of the castle are dead of hunger this summer in the

towers of my soul! Here is the dawn, which enters into the festival!

I have a glimpse of sheep along the quays, and there is a sail at the

windows of the hospital!

‘It is a long road from my heart to my soul! And all the sentries are

dead at their posts!

‘One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my soul!

They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning; and all the convent

virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal one sunny fast-day. While

the swans suffered under a poisonous bridge. The trees were lopped

about the prison; medicines were brought one afternoon in June, and

meals for the patients were spread over the whole horizon!

‘My soul! And the sadness of it all, my soul! and the sadness of it

all!’

I have translated with the greatest exactness, and not omitted one

word of the three ‘poems.’ Nothing would be easier than to compose

others on these models, overtrumping even those of Maeterlinck--_e.g._,

‘O Flowers! And we groan so heavily under the very old taxes! An

hour-glass, at which the dog barks in May; and the strange envelope

of the negro who has not slept. A grandmother who would eat oranges

and could not write! Sailors in a ballroom, but blue! blue! On the

bridge this crocodile and the policeman with the swollen cheek beckons

silently! O two soldiers in the cowhouse, and the razor is notched! But

the chief prize they have not drawn. And on the lamp are ink-spots!’

etc. But why parody Maeterlinck? His style bears no parody, for it has

already reached the extreme limits of idiocy. Nor is it quite worthy of

a mentally sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an idiot.

Certain of his poems consist simply of assonances, linked together

without regard to sense and meaning, _e.g._, one which is entitled

_Ennui_:

‘The careless peacocks, the white peacocks have flown, the white

peacocks have flown from the tedium of awaking; I see the white

peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, the peacocks that went away during my

sleep, the careless peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, reach lazily the

pond where no sun is, I hear the white peacocks, the peacocks of ennui,

waiting lazily for the times when no sun is.’

The French original reveals why these words were chosen; they contain

almost all the nasal sounds, ‘en’ or ‘an’ or ‘aon’: ‘_Les paons

nonchalants, les paons blancs ont fui, les paons blancs ont fui l’ennui

du réveil; je vois les paons blancs ... atteindre indolents l’étang

sans soleil_,’ etc. This is a case of that form of echolalia which is

observed not seldom among the insane. One patient says, _e.g._, ‘_Man

kann dann ran Mann wann Clan Bann Schwan Hahn_,’ and he continues to

grind similar sounds till he is either tired, or takes a word spoken

before him as a starting-point for a new series of rhymes.

If Maeterlinck’s poems are read with some attention, it is soon seen

that the muddled pictures which follow each other pell-mell as in a

dream, are borrowed from a very limited circle of ideas, which have

either generally, or only for him, an emotional content. ‘Strange,’

‘old,’ ‘distant,’ are the adjectives he constantly repeats; they have

this in common that they indicate something indistinct, not definitely

recognisable, away on the bounds of the distant horizon, corresponding,

therefore, to the nebulous thought of mysticism. Another adjective

which sets him dreaming is ‘slow’ (_lent_). It also influences the

French Symbolists, and hence their fondness for it. They evidently

associated it with the idea of the movements of the priest reading the

Mass, and it awakens in them the emotions of the mysticism of faith.

They betray this association of ideas by this, that they frequently

use _lent_ together with _hiératique_ (sacerdotal). Maeterlinck,

moreover, is constantly thinking of hospitals with their sick, and

of everything connected with them (nuns, invalids’ diet, medicines,

surgical operations, bandages, etc.), of canals with ships and swans,

and of princesses. The hospitals and the canals, which are a feature in

the Belgian landscape, may be connected with the first impressions of

his childhood, and therefore produce emotions in him. The princesses,

on the contrary, shut up in towers, suffering hunger, going astray,

wading through swamps, etc., have evidently remained fixed in his

imagination from the childish ballads of the pre-Raphaelites, one

of which, by Swinburne, was given above as an example. Hospitals,

canals, princesses, these are the pictures which always recur with the

obstinacy of obsessions, and in the midst of the nebulous chaos of his

jargon, alone show some sort of firm outline.

A few of his poems are written in the traditional poetical form;

others, on the contrary, have neither measure nor rhyme, but consist

of lines of prose, arbitrarily changing in length, not according to

the style of Goethe’s free poems, or of Heine’s _North Sea Songs_,

which ripple by with very strongly marked rhythmic movement, but deaf,

jolting and limping, as the items of an inventory. These pieces are a

servile imitation of the effusions of Walt Whitman, that crazy American

to whom Maeterlinck was necessarily strongly attracted, according to

the law I have repeatedly set forth--that all deranged minds flock

together.

I should like here to interpolate a few remarks on Walt Whitman, who is

likewise one of the deities to whom the degenerate and hysterical of

both hemispheres have for some time been raising altars. Lombroso ranks

him expressly among ‘mad geniuses.’[226] Mad Whitman was without doubt.

But a genius? That would be difficult to prove. He was a vagabond,

a reprobate rake, and his poems[227] contain outbursts of erotomania

so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly

be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to

thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew to him the

attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and

incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime.

‘This is the deepest theory of susceptibility,’ he says in one place,

‘without preference or exclusion; the negro with the woolly head, the

bandit of the highroad, the invalid, the ignorant--none are denied.’

And in another place he explains he ‘loves the murderer and the thief,

the pious and good, with equal love.’ An American driveller, W. D.

O’Connor, has called him on this account ‘The good gray Poet.’ We know,

however, that this ‘goodness,’ which is in reality moral obtuseness and

morbid sentimentality, frequently accompanies degeneration, and appears

even in the cruellest assassins, for example, in Ravachol.

He has megalomania, and says of himself:

‘From this hour I decree that my being be freed from all restraints and

limits.

‘I go where I will, my own absolute and complete master.

‘I breathe deeply in space. The east and the west are mine.

‘Mine are the north and south. I am greater and better than I thought

myself.

‘I did not know that so much boundless goodness was in me....

‘Whoever disowns me causes me no annoyance.

‘Whoever recognises me shall be blessed, and will bless me.’

He is mystically mad, and announces: ‘I have the feeling of all. I am

all, and believe in all. I believe that materialism is true, and that

spiritualism is also true; I reject nothing.’ And in another still more

characteristic passage:

‘Santa Spirita [_sic!_], breather, life, Beyond the light, lighter

than light, Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above

hell, Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume,

Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including

Saviour and Satan, Ethereal, pervading all, for without me what were

all? what were God? Essence of forms, life of the real identities ...

Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the

general soul.’

In his patriotic poems he is a sycophant of the corrupt American

vote-buying, official-bribing, power-abusing, dollar-democracy, and a

cringer to the most arrogant Yankee conceit. His war-poems--the much

renowned _Drum Taps_--are chiefly remarkable for swaggering bombast and

stilted patter.

His purely lyrical pieces, with their ecstatic ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ with

their soft phrases about flowers, meadows, spring and sunshine, recall

the most arid, sugary and effeminate passages of our old Gessner, now

happily buried and forgotten.

As a man, Walt Whitman offers a surprising resemblance to Paul

Verlaine, with whom he shared all the stigmata of degeneration, the

vicissitudes of his career, and, curiously enough, even the rheumatic

ankylosis. As a poet, he has thrown off the closed strophe as too

difficult, measure and rhyme as too oppressive, and has given vent to

his emotional fugitive ideation in hysterical exclamations, to which

the definition of ‘prose gone mad’ is infinitely better suited than

it is to the pedantic, honest hexameters of Klopstock. Unconsciously,

he seemed to have used the parallelism of the Psalms, and Jeremiah’s

eruptive style, as models of form. We had in the last century the

_Paramythien_ of Herder, and the insufferable ‘poetical prose’ of

Gessner already mentioned. Our healthy taste soon led us to recognise

the inartistic, retrogressive character of this lack of form, and

that error in taste has found no imitator among us for a century. In

Whitman, however, his hysterical admirers commend this _réchauffé_ of

a superannuated literary fashion as something to come; and admire,

as an invention of genius, what is only an incapacity for methodical

work. Nevertheless, it is interesting to point out that two persons

so dissimilar as Richard Wagner and Walt Whitman have, in different

spheres, under the pressure of the same motives, arrived at the same

goal--the former at ‘infinite melody,’ which is no longer melody; the

latter at verses which are no longer verses, both in consequence of

their incapacity to submit their capriciously vacillating thoughts to

the yoke of those rules which in ‘infinite’ melody, as in lyric verse,

govern by measure and rhyme.

Maeterlinck, then, in his poems is a servile imitator of crazy Walt

Whitman, and carries his absurdities still further. Besides his poems

he has written things to which one cannot well refuse the name of

plays, since they are cast in the form of dialogues. The best known of

them is _The Princess Maleine_.[228]

The ‘dramatis personæ,’ as he, true to the romantic and mystical

practice of the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, entitles the list of

his characters, are as follows: Hjalmar, King of one part of Holland;

Marcellus, King of another part of Holland; Prince Hjalmar, son of

King Hjalmar; little Allan, son of Queen Anne; Angus, friend to Prince

Hjalmar; Stephano and Vanox, officers of Marcellus; Anne, Queen of

Jütland; Godeliva, wife of King Marcellus; Princess Maleine, daughter

of Marcellus and Godeliva; Maleine’s nurse; Princess Uglyane, daughter

of Queen Anne. With them come all the old well-known jointed dolls

and puppets out of the dustiest corners of the old lumber-rooms of

romance--a fool, three poor people, two old peasants, courtiers,

pilgrims, a cripple, beggars, vagabonds, an old woman, seven (the

mystic number!) nuns, etc.

The names which Maeterlinck gives to his figures should be noted.

As a Fleming, he knows very well that Hjalmar is not Dutch, but

Scandinavian; that Angus is Scotch. But he makes this confusion

intentionally, in order to obliterate the distinct outlines with which

he appears to surround his figures, when he calls them ‘Kings of

Holland’; in order again to detach them from the firm ground on which

he pretends to place them and to suppress their co-ordinates, which

assign them a place in space and time. They may wear clothes, have

names and take a human rank, but all the while they are only shadows

and clouds.

King Hjalmar comes with Prince Hjalmar to the castle of Marcellus in

order to ask for the hand of the Princess Maleine. The two young people

see each other for the first time, and only for a few minutes, but they

instantly fall in love with each other. At the banquet in honour of the

King a quarrel breaks out, about which we learn no particulars; King

Hjalmar is seriously offended, swears revenge, and leaves the castle

in a rage. In the interlude Hjalmar wages war against Marcellus, kills

him and his wife, Godeliva, and at once razes his castle and town to

the ground. Princess Maleine and her nurse were on this occasion--how,

why and by whom is not explained--immured in a vaulted room in a tower;

then the nurse, after three days’ work with her finger-nails, loosens a

stone in the wall, and the two women obtain their liberty.

Since Maleine loves Hjalmar and cannot forget him, they make their way

towards his father’s castle. Things are going very badly in Hjalmar’s

castle. There Queen Anne of Jütland resides, who has been driven away

by her subjects, and with her grown-up daughter Uglyane and her little

son Allan (here also the Dane is systematically given a Scottish name),

has found hospitality with King Hjalmar. Queen Anne has turned the head

of the old man. She has become his mistress, rules him completely, and

makes him ill in body and soul. She wishes that his son should marry

her daughter. Hjalmar is in despair about his father’s collapse. He

detests his morganatic step-mother, and shudders at the thought of a

marriage with Uglyane. He believes Maleine to have been slain with her

parents in the war, but he cannot yet forget her.

Maleine has in the meantime been wandering with her nurse through a

kind of enchanted forest, and through an incomprehensible village,

where she has uncanny meetings with all sorts of people, beggars,

vagabonds, peasants, old women, etc., interchanging odd talk, and

reaches Hjalmar’s castle, where no one knows her. She is, however, in

spite of this, at once appointed as lady-in-waiting to the Princess

Uglyane.

One evening Prince Hjalmar decides to make advances to Uglyane, and

with that object he gives her a nocturnal rendezvous in the park of the

castle, not a secret, but, so to speak, an official, lovers’ tryst, to

which he, with his father’s consent, and she, with her mother’s, is to

go. Maleine hinders it by telling Uglyane, who is splendidly attiring

and adorning herself, that Prince Hjalmar has gone into the forest

and will not come. She then goes herself into the park, and makes

herself known to Hjalmar, who arrives punctually. He leads her in great

delight to his father, who receives her as his future daughter-in-law,

and there is no further talk of his betrothal to Uglyane. Queen Anne

determines to get rid of the intruder. She behaves at first in a

friendly manner, assigns her a beautiful room in the castle, then

in the night she forces the King, who for a long time resists her,

to penetrate into Maleine’s room, where she puts a cord round the

Princess’s neck and strangles her. Signs and wonders accompany the

deed: a tempest forces open a window, a comet appears, a wing of the

castle falls in ruins, a forest bursts into flames, swans fall wounded

out of the air, etc., etc.

Next morning the body of the Princess Maleine is discovered. King

Hjalmar, whom the night’s murder has robbed of the last remnant of

reason, betrays the secret of the deed. Prince Hjalmar stabs Queen

Anne, and then plunges the dagger into his own heart. Thereupon the

piece closes thus:

NURSE. Come away, my poor lord.

KING. Good God! good God! She is waiting now on the wharf of hell!

NURSE. Come away! come away!

KING. Is there anybody here that fears the curses of the dead?

ANGUS. Ay, my lord, I do.

KING. Well, you close their eyes, and let us be gone.

NURSE. Ay, ay. Come hence! come hence!

KING. I will; I will. Oh, oh! how lonely I shall feel hereafter! I am

steeped in misery up to my ears at seventy-seven years of age. But

where are you?

NURSE! Here, here!

KING. You will not feel angry with me? Let us go to breakfast. Will

there be salad for breakfast? I should like a little salad.

NURSE. Yes, yes. You shall have some, my lord.

KING. I do not know why; I feel somewhat melancholy to-day. Good God!

good God! How unhappy the dead do look! [_Exit with_ NURSE.

ANGUS. Another night such as this, and all our heads will have turned

white.

[_Exeunt all save the_ NUNS, _who begin singing the Miserere while

conveying the corpses towards the bed. The church bells cease

sounding. Nightingales are heard warbling without. A cock jumps on the

window-sill, and crows._

When we begin to read this piece we are startled, and ask: ‘Why is all

this so familiar to me? Of what does it remind me?’ After a few pages

it all at once becomes clear: the whole thing is a kind of cento from

Shakespeare! Every character, every scene, every speech in any way

essential to the piece! King Hjalmar is put together out of King Lear

and Macbeth; Lear in his madness and manner of expressing himself,

Macbeth in his share in the murder of the Princess Maleine. Queen

Anne is patched up out of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude; Prince

Hjalmar is unmistakably Hamlet, with his obscure speeches, his profound

allusions and his inner struggles between filial duty and morality; the

nurse is from Romeo and Juliet; Angus is Horatio; Vanox and Stephano

are Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, with an admixture of Marcellus and

Bernardo, and all the subordinate characters, the fool, the doctor, the

courtiers, etc., bear the physiognomy of Shakespeare’s characters.

The piece begins in the following manner:

_The Gardens of the Castle._

_Enter_ STEPHANO _and_ VANOX.

VANOX. What o’clock is it?

STEPHANO. Judging from the moon, it should be midnight.

VANOX. I think ‘tis going to rain.

Let us compare this with the first scene in _Hamlet_:

_A platform before the Castle._

FRANCISCO ... BERNARDO.

FRANCISCO. You come most carefully upon your hour.

BERNARDO. ‘Tis now struck twelve....

FRANCISCO. ... ‘Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart, etc.

One could, if it were worth while, trace scene for scene, word for

word, from some passage in Shakespeare. In the _Princesse Maleine_

we find in succession the fearfully stormy night from _Julius Cæsar_

(Act I., Scene 3); the entrance of King Lear into the palace of Albany

(Act I., Scene 4 ... ‘LEAR: Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get

it ready,’ etc.); the night scene in _Macbeth_, where Lady Macbeth

induces her husband to commit murder; the thrice-repeated ‘Oh! oh!

oh!’ of Othello which Queen Anne here utters; Hamlet’s conversation

with Horatio, etc. The death of the Princess Maleine has been inspired

by memories both of Desdemona suffocated and of Cordelia hanged. All

this is jumbled up in the craziest manner, and often distorted almost

beyond recognition, or given the opposite meaning; but, with a little

attention, one can always find one’s way.

Let us imagine a child, at the age when he is able to follow the

conversation of grown-up people, attending a performance or a reading

of _Hamlet_, _Lear_, _Macbeth_, _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Richard II._,

and who on his return to the nursery should relate in his own way to

his little brothers and sisters what he had heard. We should in this

way get a correct idea of the composition of _Princesse Maleine_.

Maeterlinck has crammed himself with Shakespeare, and reproduces the

pieces undigested, yet repulsively altered and with the beginnings of

foul decomposition. This is an unappetizing picture, but it alone can

serve to illustrate the mental process which goes on in the so-called

‘creations’ of the degenerate. They read greedily, receive a very

strong impression in consequence of their emotionalism; this pursues

them with the force of an ‘obsession,’ and they do not rest till they

have reproduced, sadly travestied, what they have read. Thus their

works resemble the coins of the barbarians, which are imitations of

Roman and Greek models, while betraying that their artificers could not

read or understand the letters and symbols inscribed on them.

Maeterlinck’s _Princesse Maleine_ is a Shakespearian anthology for

children or Tierra del Fuegians. The characters of the British poet

have gone to make parts for the actors in a theatre of monkeys.

They still remind us more or less of the attitudes and movements of

the persons whom they ape, but they have not a human brain in their

heads, and cannot say two connected and rational words. Here are a few

examples of the manner in which Maeterlinck’s people converse:

King Marcellus in the First Act (Scene 2) endeavours to dissuade the

Princess Maleine from loving Hjalmar.

MARCELLUS. Well, Maleine!

MALEINE. My lord?

MARCELLUS. Do you not understand?

MALEINE. What, my lord?

MARCELLUS. Will you promise me to forget Hjalmar?

MALEINE. My lord!...

MARCELLUS. What say you? Do you still love Hjalmar?

MALEINE. Ay, my lord.

MARCELLUS. Ay, my lord. Oh, devils and tempests! she coolly confesses

it. She dares to tell me this without shame. She has seen Hjalmar once

only, for one single afternoon, and now she is hotter than hell.

GODELIVA. My lord!...

MARCELLUS. Be silent, you. “Ay, my lord!” and she is not yet fifteen!

Ha! it makes one long to kill them then and there....

GODELIVA. My lord....

NURSE. Isn’t she free to love, just like anyone else? Do you mean to

put her under a glass case? Is this a reason to bully a poor child?

She has done no harm....

MARCELLUS. Oh, she has done no harm!... Now, in the first place, hold

your peace, you.... I am not addressing you; and it is doubtless at

your prompting, you procuress....

GODELIVA. My lord!...

NURSE. A procuress! I a procuress!

MARCELLUS. Will you let me speak? Begone! begone, both of you! Oh!

I know well enough you have put your heads together, and that the

season of scheming and plotting has set in; but wait awhile....

Now, Maleine, ... you should be reasonable. Will you promise to be

reasonable?

MALEINE. Ay, my lord.

MARCELLUS. There! come now. Therefore you will not think any more of

this marriage?...

MALEINE. Ay.

MARCELLUS. Ay? You mean you will forget Prince Hjalmar?

MALEINE. No.

MARCELLUS. You do not yet give up Prince Hjalmar?

MALEINE. No.

MARCELLUS. Now, supposing I compel you? Ay, I! and supposing I

have you put under lock and key? and supposing I separate you for

evermore from your Hjalmar with his puny, girlish face? What say you?

(_She weeps._) Ha! that’s it--is’t? Begone, and we shall see about

that--begone!

Next, the scene in the second act, where Maleine and Hjalmar meet in

the gloomy park of the castle:

HJALMAR. ... Come!

MALEINE. Not yet.

HJALMAR. Uglyane! Uglyane!

[_Kisses her. Here the waterfall, blown about by the wind, collapses

and splashes them._

MALEINE. Oh! what have you done?

HJALMAR. It is the fountain.

MALEINE. Oh, oh!

HJALMAR. It’s the wind.

MALEINE. I am afraid.

HJALMAR. Think not of that any longer. Let us get further away. Let us

not think of that any more. Ah, ah, ah! I am wet all over.

MALEINE. There is somebody weeping, close by us.

HJALMAR. Somebody weeping?

MALEINE. I am afraid.

HJALMAR. But cannot you hear that it’s only the wind?

MALEINE. What are all those eyes on the tree, though?

HJALMAR. Where? Ha! those are the owls. They have returned. I will put

them to flight. (_Throws earth at them._) Away! away!

MALEINE. There is yonder one that will not go.

HJALMAR. Where is it?

MALEINE. On the weeping willow.

HJALMAR. Away!

MALEINE. He is not gone.

HJALMAR. Away, away!

[_Throws earth at the owl._

MALEINE. Oh! you have thrown earth on me.

HJALMAR. Thrown earth on you?

MALEINE. Ay, it fell on me.

HJALMAR. Oh, my poor Uglyane!

MALEINE. I am afraid.

HJALMAR. Afraid--at my side?

MALEINE. There are flames amid the trees.

HJALMAR. That is nothing--mere lightning. It has been very sultry

to-day.

MALEINE. I am afraid. Oh! who can be digging so at the ground around us?

HJALMAR. That is nothing. ‘Tis but a mole--a poor little mole at work.

(The mole in Hamlet! To our old acquaintance greeting!)

MALEINE. I am afraid.

After some more conversation in the same style:

HJALMAR. What are you thinking of?

MALEINE. I feel sad.

HJALMAR. Sad? Now, what are your sad thoughts about, Uglyane?

MALEINE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.

HJALMAR. What do you say?

MALEINE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.[229]

HJALMAR. Do you know Princess Maleine?

MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine.

HJALMAR. You are not Uglyane?

MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine.

HJALMAR. What! you Princess Maleine? Dead! But Princess Maleine is

dead!

MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine.

Has anyone anywhere in the poetry of the two worlds ever seen such

complete idiocy? These ‘Ahs’ and ‘Ohs,’ this want of comprehension of

the simplest remarks, this repetition four or five times of the same

imbecile expressions, gives the truest conceivable clinical picture of

incurable cretinism. These parts are precisely those most extolled by

Maeterlinck’s admirers. According to them, all has been chosen with a

deep artistic intention. A healthy reader will scarcely swallow that.

Maeterlinck’s puppets say nothing, because they have nothing to say.

Their author has not been able to put a single thought into their

hollow skulls, because he himself possesses none. The creatures moving

on his stage are not thinking and speaking human beings, but tadpoles

or slugs, considerably more stupid than trained fleas at a fair.

Moreover, _Princesse Maleine_ is not altogether a Shakespearian dream.

The ‘seven nuns,’ _e.g._, belong to Maeterlinck. They are an astounding

invention. They are ever marching like demented geese through the

piece, winding in and out, with their psalm-singing, through all the

rooms and corridors of the King’s castle, through the court, through

the park, through the forest, coming unexpectedly round a corner in

the middle of a scene, trotting across the stage and off at the other

side without anyone understanding whence they come, whither they go,

or for what purpose they are brought on at all. They are a living

‘obsession,’ mixing itself irresistibly in all the incidents of the

piece. Here also we find all the intellectual fads which we noticed in

the _Serres Chaudes_. The Princess Maleine is herself the embodiment

of the hungry, sick, strayed princesses, wandering over the meadows,

who haunt these poems, and undoubtedly sprang from Swinburne’s ballad

of _The King’s Daughters_. The canals also play their part (p. 18).

‘And the expression of her eyes! It seemed as though one were all of a

sudden in a great stream [Fr. _canal_] of fresh water....’ (p. 110).

‘We have been to look at the windmills along the canal,’ etc. And sick

people and illness are mentioned on almost every page (p. 110):

ANNE. I was fever-stricken myself.

THE KING. Everyone is fever-stricken on arriving here.

HJALMAR. There is much fever in the village, etc.

Besides _Princesse Maleine_, Maeterlinck has written some other

pieces. One, _L’Intruse_ (The Intruder), deals with the idea that in a

house where a sick person lies _in extremis_, Death intrudes towards

midnight, that he walks audibly through the garden, makes at first a

few trial strokes with his scythe on the grass before the castle, then

knocks at the door, forces it open because they will not admit him,

and carries off his victim. In a second, _Les Aveugles_ (The Blind),

we are shown how a number of blind men, the inmates of a blind asylum,

were led by an old priest into a forest, how the priest died suddenly

without a sound, how the blind men did not at first notice this, but

becoming at length uneasy, groped about, succeeded in touching the

corpse, already growing cold, assured themselves by questioning each

other that their leader was dead, and then in terrible despair awaited

death by hunger and cold. For this charming story takes place on a wild

island in the far north; and between the wood and the asylum lies a

river, crossed by only one bridge, which the blind cannot find without

a guide. It never occurs either to Maeterlinck or to his inconsolable

blind men as possible that in the asylum, where, as is expressly

mentioned, there are attendant nuns, the long absence of the whole body

of blind men would be noticed, and someone sent out to look for them.

The reader will not expect me to point out in detail the craziness of

the assumption in both these pieces, or that, after these examples, I

should relate and analyze two other pieces of Maeterlinck’s, _Les Sept

Princesses_ (‘seven,’ of course!) and _Pelléas et Mélisande_.

_The Intruder_ has been translated into several languages, and

performed in many towns. The Viennese laughed at its imbecility. In

Paris and London men shook their heads. In Copenhagen an audience of

appreciators of the ‘poetry of the future’ was touched, enraptured and

inspired. This demonstrates the hysteria of to-day quite as much as the

piece itself.

The history of Maeterlinck’s celebrity is especially remarkable and

instructive. This pitiable mental cripple vegetated for years wholly

unnoticed in his corner in Ghent, without the Belgian Symbolists, who

outbid even the French, according him the smallest attention; as to

the public at large, no one had a suspicion of his existence. Then one

fine day in 1890 his writings fell accidentally into the hands of the

French novelist, Octave Mirbeau. He read them, and whether he desired

to make fun of his contemporaries in grand style, or whether he obeyed

some morbid ‘impulsion’ is not known; it is sufficient to say that he

published in _Le Figaro_ an article of an unheard-of extravagance,

in which he represented Maeterlinck as the most brilliant, sublime,

moving poet which the last three hundred years had produced, and

assigned him a place near--nay, above Shakespeare. And then the world

witnessed one of the most extraordinary and most convincing examples

of the force of suggestion. The hundred thousand rich and cultivated

readers to whom the _Figaro_ addresses itself immediately took up the

views which Mirbeau had imperiously suggested to them. They at once saw

Maeterlinck with Mirbeau’s eyes. They found in him all the beauties

which Mirbeau asserted that he perceived in him. Andersen’s fairy-tale

of the invisible clothes of the emperor repeated itself line for line.

They were not there, but the whole court saw them. Some imagined they

really saw the absent state robes; the others did not see them, but

rubbed their eyes so long that they at least doubted whether they saw

them or not; others, again, could not impose upon themselves, but dared

not contradict the rest. Thus Maeterlinck became at one stroke, by

Mirbeau’s favour, a great poet, and a poet of the ‘future.’ Mirbeau had

also given quotations which would have completely sufficed for a reader

who was not hysterical, not given over irresistibly to suggestion, to

recognise Maeterlinck for what he is, namely, a mentally debilitated

plagiarist; but these very quotations wrung cries of admiration from

the _Figaro_ public, for Mirbeau had pointed them out as beauties

of the highest rank, and one knows that a decided affirmation is

sufficient to compel hypnotic subjects to eat raw potatoes as oranges,

and to believe themselves to be dogs or other quadrupeds.

Everywhere apostles were quickly at hand to proclaim, interpret and

extol the new master. The ‘mashers’ of the critic world, whose ambition

is set on being the first to assume--nay, where it is possible, to

foretell--the very latest fashions, the fashion of to-morrow, as much

in the styles of literature, as in the colour and shape of neckties,

vied with each other in deifying Maeterlinck. Ten editions of his

_Princesse Maleine_ have been sold out since Mirbeau’s suggestion, and,

as I have said before, his _Aveugles_ and _Intruse_ have been performed

in various places.

We now know the different forms under which the mysticism of

degeneration manifests itself in contemporary literature. The magism of

a Guaita and a Papus, the Androgyne of a Péladan, the anxiomania of a

Rollinat, the idiotic drivelling of a Maeterlinck, may be regarded as

its culminating aberrations. At least I cannot myself imagine that it

would be possible for mysticism to go beyond, even by the thickness of

a hair, these extreme points without even the hysterical, the devotees

and the snobs of fashion, who are still in some degree capable of

discernment, recognising in it a profound and complete intellectual

darkness.

BOOK III.

_EGO-MANIA._

CHAPTER I.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EGO-MANIA.

HOWEVER dissimilar such individualities as Wagner and Tolstoi, Rossetti

and Verlaine, may at first sight appear, we have, nevertheless,

encountered in all of them certain common traits, to wit, vague and

incoherent thought, the tyranny of the association of ideas, the

presence of obsessions, erotic excitability, religious enthusiasm, by

which we may recognise them as members of one and the same intellectual

family, and justify their union into one single group--that of mystics.

We must go a step farther and say that not only the mystics among the

degenerate, but in the main all the degenerate, of whatever nature they

may be, are moulded from the same clay. They all show the same lacunæ,

inequalities, and malformations in intellectual capacity, the same

psychic and somatic stigmata. If, then, anyone, having a certain number

of degenerate subjects to judge from, were to bring into prominence

and represent as their exclusive peculiarity merely mystical thought

in some, merely erotic emotionalism in others, merely vague, barren,

fraternal love and a mania for regenerating the world, or else merely

an impulsion to commit acts of a criminal nature, etc., he would

manifestly be seeing only one side of the phenomenon, and taking no

account of the rest. One or another stigma of degeneration may, in a

given case, be especially apparent; but, on duly careful inspection,

the presence of all the others, or, at least, indications of them, will

be discerned.

To the celebrated French alienist, Esquirol, is due the signal merit

of having discovered that there are forms of mental derangement in

which thought proceeds apparently in a perfectly rational manner,

but in which, in the midst of intelligent and logical cerebral

activity, some insane presentations appear, like erratic boulders,

thus enabling us to recognise the subject as mentally diseased. But

Esquirol has committed the fault of not digging deep enough; his

observation is too much on the surface. It was through this that he

came to introduce into science the notion of ‘monomania,’ that is, of

well-delimitated, partial madness, of an isolated, fixed idea beside

which all the rest of the intellectual life operates with sanity.

This was an error. There is no monomania. Esquirol’s own pupil, the

elder Falret, has sufficiently proved it, and our Westphal, from whose

other merits I have no wish to detract, was far from standing in

the forefront of research, when, half a century after Esquirol, and

thirty years after Falret, he still described the ‘fear of space,’ or

agoraphobia, as a special mental malady, or kind of monomania. What

is apparently monomania is in reality an indication of a profound

organic disorder which never reveals itself by one single phase of

folly. A fixed idea never exists in isolation.[230] It is always

accompanied by other irregularities of thought and feeling, which, it

is true, at a cursory glance, may not be so distinctly remarked as

the more strongly developed insane idea. Recent clinical observation

has discovered a long series of similar fixed ideas or ‘monomanias,’

and recognised the fact that they are one and all the consequence of

a fundamental disposition of the organism, viz., of its degeneration.

It was unnecessary for Magnan to give a special name to each symptom

of degeneration, and to draw up in array, with almost comical effect,

the host of ‘phobias’ and ‘manias.’ Agoraphobia (fear of open space),

claustrophobia (fear of enclosed space), rupophobia (fear of dirt),

iophobia (fear of poison), nosophobia (fear of sickness), aichmophobia

(fear of pointed objects), belenophobia (fear of needles), cremnophobia

(fear of abysses), trichophobia (fear of hair), onomatomania (folly of

words or names), pyromania (incendiary madness), kleptomania (madness

for theft), dipsomania (madness for drink), erotomania (love madness),

arithmomania (madness of numbers), oniomania (madness for buying), etc.

This list might be lengthened at pleasure, and enriched by nearly all

the roots of the Greek dictionary. It is simply philologico-medical

trifling. None of the disorders discovered and described by Magnan

and his pupils, and decorated with a sonorous Greek name, forms an

independent entity, and appears separately; and Morel is right in

disregarding as unessential all these varied manifestations of a

morbid cerebral activity, and adhering to the principal phenomenon

which lies at the base of all the ‘phobias’ and ‘manias,’ namely,

the great emotionalism of the degenerate.[231] If to emotionalism, or

an excessive excitability, he had added the cerebral debility, which

implies feebleness of perception, will, memory, judgment, as well as

inattention and instability, he would have exhaustively characterized

the nature of degeneration, and perhaps prevented psychiatry from being

stuffed with a crowd of useless and disturbing designations. Kowalewski

approached much nearer to the truth in his well-known treatise,[232]

where he has represented all the mental disorders of the degenerate

as one single malady, which merely presents different degrees of

intensity, and which induces in its mildest form neurasthenia; under

a graver aspect impulsions and groundless anxieties; and, in its most

serious form, the madness of brooding thought or doubt. Within these

limits may be ranged all the particular ‘manias’ and ‘phobias’ which at

present swarm in the literature of mental therapeutics.

But if it be untenable to make a particular malady out of every symptom

in which the fundamental disorder (_i.e._, degeneration) shows itself,

it should not, on the other hand, be ignored that among certain of the

degenerate a group of morbid phenomena distinctly predominates, without

involving the absence of the other groups. Thus, it is permissible to

distinguish among them certain principal species, notably, beside the

mystics, of whom we have studied the most remarkable representatives in

contemporary art and poetry, the ego-maniacs (_Ichsüchtigen_). It is

not from affectation that I use this word instead of the terms ‘egoism’

(_Selbstsucht_) and ‘egoist,’ so generally employed. Egoism is a lack

of amiability, a defect in education, perhaps a fault of character, a

proof of insufficiently developed morality, but it is not a disease.

The egoist is quite able to look after himself in life, and hold his

place in society; he is often also, when the attainment of low ends

only is in view, even more capable than the superior and nobler man,

who has inured himself to self-abnegation. The ego-maniac, on the

contrary, is an invalid who does not see things as they are, does not

understand the world, and cannot take up a right attitude towards it.

The difference I make in German between _Ichsucht_ and _Selbstsucht_,

the French also make in their language, where a careful writer will

never confound the word ‘egotisme,’ borrowed from the English, with

‘egoïsme’--that is, selfishness.

Of course the reader to whom the mental physiognomy of ego-maniacs is

shown ought always to remember that, if the principal representatives

of this species and of that of the mystics are characterized with

sufficient clearness, the confines of the latter type are fluctuating.

The ego-maniacs are, on the one hand, at once mystics, erotics, and,

though it seems paradoxical, even affect occasionally an appearance of

philanthropy; among the mystics, on the other hand, we frequently meet

with a strongly-developed ego-mania. There are certain specimens among

the degenerate in whom all the disorders are produced to such an equal

degree that it is doubtful whether they ought to be classed with the

mystics or the ego-maniacs. As a general rule, however, co-ordination

under one class or the other will not be very difficult.

That egoism is a salient feature in the character of the degenerate

has been unanimously confirmed by all observers. ‘The degenerate

neither knows nor takes interest in anything but himself,’ says

Roubinovitch;[233] and Legrain[234] asserts that he ‘has ... only

one occupation, that of satisfying his appetites.’ This peculiarity

establishes a bond which unites the highest of the degenerate to the

lowest, the insane genius to the feeble mental cripple. ‘All delirious

geniuses,’ remarks Lombroso, ‘are very much captivated by, and

preoccupied with, their own selves,’[235] and Sollier writes on the

subject of their antipodes, the imbeciles: ‘Undisciplined as they are,

they obey only through fear, are often violent, especially to those

who are weaker than themselves, humble and submissive towards those

they feel to be stronger. They are without affection, egoistic in the

highest degree, braggarts.’[236]

The clinicist is satisfied with indicating the fact of this

characteristic egoism, but for ourselves we wish further to investigate

what are its organic roots, why the degenerate must be more than

egoistic, why he must be an ego-maniac, and cannot be otherwise.

In order to understand how the consciousness of the ‘I’ (morbidly

exaggerated and frequently increasing to megalomania) originates, we

must recall how the healthy consciousness of the ‘I’ is formed.

It is, of course, not my intention here to treat of the whole theory of

cognition. It is only the most important results of this science, so

highly developed in the present day, that can find place in this work.

It has become a philosophical commonplace that we know directly only

those changes which take place in our own organism. If, in spite of

this, we are able to form an image of the external world surrounding

us, from perceptions derived only from within, it is because we trace

the changes in our organism which we have perceived to causes exterior

to it; and from the nature and force of the changes taking place in our

organism draw conclusions as to the nature and force of the external

events causing them.

How we come in general to assume that there is something exterior, and

that changes perceived by us only in our organism can have causes which

are not in the organism itself, is a question over which metaphysics

has cudgelled its brain for centuries. So little has it found an

answer, that, in order to put an end to this difficulty anyhow, it has

simply denied the very question, and jumped to the conclusion that the

‘I’ has actually no knowledge of a ‘not-I,’ of an external world, and

cannot have it because there is no external world at all, that what we

so call is a creation of our mind, and exists only in our thought as a

presentation, but not outside our ‘I’ as a reality.

It is a fact characteristic of the soporific action exercised by

the sound of a word on the human mind that this wholly senseless

cackle, glib, well arranged and formed into the philosophical system

of idealism, should have thoroughly satisfied for nearly eight

generations the greater number of professional metaphysicians, from

Berkeley to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. These wise men repeated,

in a tone of conviction, the doctrine of the non-existence of the

‘not-I,’ and it did not trouble them that they themselves contradicted

constantly, in all their actions, their own fustian; that they devoted

themselves from their birth to their death to an uninterrupted series

of absolutely absurd actions, if there were no objective external

world; that therefore they themselves recognised their system to be

but wind and shadow, a childish game with words devoid of sense. And

the most logical among these grave drivellers, Bishop Berkeley, did

not even observe that after all he had not obtained, even at the

price of the total abdication of common sense, the answer he sought

to the fundamental question of knowledge, for his dogmatic idealism

denies, it is true, the reality of the external world, but admits with

frivolous thoughtlessness that there are other minds outside of him,

Berkeley, and even a universal mind. Thus, then, even according to

him, the ‘I’ is not all; there is still something outside of the ‘I,’

a ‘not-I’; there does exist an external world, if only under the form

of immaterial spirits. This, however, brings up the question, How does

Berkeley’s ‘I’ come to conceive the existence of something outside of

itself, the existence of a ‘not-I’? That was the question which had

to be answered, and, in spite of its sacrificing the whole world of

phenomena, Berkeley’s idealism, like the idealism of every one of his

successors, makes no reply to it whatsoever.

Metaphysics could find no answer to the question, because the latter,

as stated by the former, does not admit of an answer. Scientific

psychology--_i.e._, psycho-physiology--does not encounter the same

difficulties. It does not take the finished ‘I’ of the adult, clearly

conscious of himself, feeling himself distinctly opposed to the ‘not-I’

to the entire external world, but it goes back to the beginnings of

this ‘I,’ investigates in what manner it is formed, and then finds

that, at a time when the idea of the existence of a ‘not-I,’ would be

really inexplicable, this idea, in fact, was absolutely non-existent,

and that, when we do meet it, the ‘I’ has already had experiences which

completely explain how it could and must arrive at the formation of the

idea of a ‘not-I.’

We may assume that a certain degree of consciousness is the

accompanying phenomenon of every reaction of the protoplasm on external

action--_i.e._, is a fundamental quality of living matter. Even the

simplest unicellular living organisms move with obvious intention

towards certain goals, and away from certain points; they distinguish

between foods and such materials as are unfit for nutrition; thus

they have a species of will and judgment, and these two activities

presuppose consciousness.[237] What may be the nature of this

consciousness localized in protoplasm not yet even differentiated into

nerve-cells, is a thing of which it is impossible for the human mind

to form a definite idea. The only thing we can presuppose with any

certainty is that in the crepuscular consciousness of a unicellular

organism, the notion of an ‘I’ and a ‘not-I,’ which is opposed to it,

does not exist. The cell feels changes in itself, and these changes

provoke others, in accordance with established bio-chemical or

bio-mechanical laws; it receives an impression to which it responds by

a movement, but it has certainly no idea that the impression is caused

by a process in the external world, and that its movement reacts on the

external world.

Even among animals very much higher in the scale, and considerably more

advanced in differentiation, a consciousness of the ‘Ego,’ properly so

called, is inconceivable. How can the ray of a star-fish, the bud of a

tunicate, of a botryllus, the half of a double animal (diplozoon), the

tube of an actinia, or of some other coral polypus, be aware of itself

as a separate ‘I,’ seeing that, though it is an animal, it is at the

same time a portion of a composite animal, of a colony of animals, and

must perceive impressions which strike it directly, as well as those

experienced by a companion of the same colony? Or can certain large

worms, many of the species of Eunice, for example, have an idea of

their ‘Ego,’ when they neither feel nor recognise portions of their own

bodies as constituent parts of their individuality, and begin to eat

their tails when, by any accident in coiling themselves, it happens to

lie in front of their mouths?

The consciousness of the ‘Ego’ is not synonymous with consciousness

in general. While the latter is probably an attribute of all living

matter, the former is the result of the concordant action of a nervous

tissue highly differentiated and ‘hierarchized,’ or brought into a

relation of mutual dependence. It appears very late in the series

of organic evolution, and is, up to the present, the highest vital

phenomenon of which we have knowledge. It arises little by little from

experiences which the organism acquires in the course of the natural

activity of its constituent parts. Every one of our nerve-ganglia,

every one of our nerve-fibres, and even every cell, has a subordinate

and faint consciousness of what passes in it. As the whole nervous

system of our body has numerous communications between all its parts,

it perceives in its totality something of all the stimulations of its

parts, and the consciousness which accompanies them. In this manner

there arises in the centre where all the nerve ducts of the whole

body meet, _i.e._, in the brain, a total consciousness composed of

innumerable partial consciousnesses, having evidently for its object

only the processes of its own organism. In the course of its existence,

and that at a very early period, consciousness distinguishes two kinds

of wholly different perceptions. Some appear without preparation,

others accompanied and preceded by other phenomena. No act of will

precedes the stimulation of the senses, but such an act does precede

every conscious movement. Before our senses perceive anything, our

consciousness has no notion of what they will perceive; before our

muscles execute a movement, an image of this movement is elaborated

in the brain, or spinal marrow (in the case of a reflex action).

There exists then, beforehand, a presentation of the movement which

the muscles will execute. We feel clearly that the immediate cause

of the movement lies in ourselves. On the other hand, we have no

similar feelings in regard to sense-impressions. Again, we learn by

the muscular sense the realization of motor images elaborated by our

consciousness; on the other hand, we experience nothing similar when

we elaborate a motor image not having our own muscles exclusively for

its object. We wish, for example, to raise our arm. Our consciousness

elaborates this image, the brachial muscles obey, and consciousness

receives the communication that the image has been realized by the

brachial muscles. Next, we wish to raise or throw a stone with our

arm. Our consciousness elaborates a motor image, involving our own

muscles and the stone. When we are executing the desired and meditated

movement, our consciousness receives sensations from the muscles in

activity, but not from the stone. Thus it perceives the movements which

are accompanied by muscular sensations, and others which appear without

this accompaniment.

In order thoroughly to comprehend the formation of our consciousness

of the ‘Ego,’ and the presentation of the existence of a ‘non-Ego,’

we must consider a third point. All the parts, all the cells of our

body, have their own separate consciousness, which accompanies every

one of their excitations. These excitations are occasioned partly by

the activity of nutrition, of assimilation, of the cleavage of the

nucleus--that is to say, by the vital processes of the cell itself,

and partly by action of the environment. The excitations which proceed

from the interior, the bio-chemical and bio-mechanical processes of the

cell, are continued, and endure as long as the life of the cell itself.

The stimulations which are the result of the action of the environment

only appear, of course, with this action, _i.e._, not continuously,

but intermittently. The vital processes in the cell have direct value

and significance only for the cell itself, not for the whole organism;

actions of the environment may become important for the whole organism.

The principal organ, the brain, acquires the habit of neglecting the

excitations relating to the interior vital activity of the cell--first,

because they are continuous, and we perceive distinctly only a change

of state, not a state itself; and then, because the cell accomplishes

its own functions by its own energy, which renders the interference

of the brain useless. The brain takes notice, on the contrary, of

excitations which are produced by action _ab extra_--first, because

they appear with interruptions; and, secondly, because they may

necessitate an adaptation of the whole organism, which could only take

place through the intervention of the brain.

It cannot be doubted that the brain has knowledge also of the internal

excitations of the organism, and only for the reasons already stated

is not, as a general rule, distinctly conscious of them. If through

illness a disturbance is produced in the functions of the single cell,

we at once become conscious of the processes in the cell--we feel the

diseased organ, it stimulates our attention; the whole organism is

uncomfortable and out of tune. It is sensations of this kind, which,

in a healthy state, do not distinctly reach our consciousness, that

make up the sensation of our body, our organic ‘I,’ the so-called

cœnæsthesis or general sensibility.

Cœnæsthesis, the organic dimly-conscious ‘I,’ rises into the clear

consciousness of the ‘Ego,’ by excitations of the second order,

reaching the brain from the nerves and muscles, for they are stronger

and more distinct than the others, and are interrupted. The brain

learns the changes produced in the nervous system by external causes,

and the contraction of the muscles. How it has knowledge of the latter

is still obscure. It has been recently asserted that the muscular sense

has for its seat the nerves of the joints. This is certainly false.

We have distinct sensations of the contractions of muscles which put

no joint in movement--for example, of the orbicular and constrictor

muscles. Then there are the cramps and spasms even of isolated muscular

fibres, which likewise do not produce a change of position in the

joints. But in any case the perceptions of muscular sense exist,

however they are or are not produced.

Thus consciousness very soon learns that the muscular movements it

perceives are preceded by certain acts accomplished by itself, namely,

the elaboration of motor images, and the despatch of impulses to the

muscles. It receives knowledge of these movements twice, one after the

other--it perceives them, first, directly as its own presentation and

act of volition, as a motor image elaborated in the nerve-centres;

and immediately afterwards as an impression arising from the muscular

nerves as accomplished movement. It acquires the habit of connecting

its own acts--those previously elaborated motor images--with the

muscular movements, and of regarding the latter a consequence of the

former--in short, of thinking causally. If consciousness has adopted

the habit of causality, it seeks a cause in all its perceptions, and

can no longer imagine a perception without a cause. The cause of

muscular perceptions--that is, of movements consciously willed--it

finds in itself. The cause of nervous perceptions--that is, the

information reported by the nervous system concerning the excitations

which it experiences--it does not find in itself. But the latter must

have a cause. Where is it? As it is not in consciousness, it must

necessarily exist somewhere else; there must then be something else

outside consciousness, and so consciousness comes, through the habit of

causal thought, to assume the existence of something outside itself, of

a ‘not-I,’ of an external world, and to project into it the cause of

the excitations which it perceives in the nervous system.

Experience teaches that the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’

is really only a question of a habit of thought, of a form of thought,

and not of an effective, certain knowledge, which carries in itself

the criteria of its accuracy and certitude. When, in consequence

of a morbid disturbance, our sensory nerves or their centres of

perception are excited, and consciousness acquires knowledge of this

excitation, it imputes to it without hesitation, according to its

habit, an external cause existing in the ‘not-I.’ Hence arise illusions

and hallucinations, which the patient takes for realities, and that

so positively that there is absolutely no means of convincing him

that he perceives facts passing within him, not outside of him. In

the same manner consciousness concludes that the movements executed

unconsciously are occasioned by an extraneous will. It perceives the

movement, but it has not noticed that the habitual internal cause,

viz., a motor image and an act of the will, has preceded it; hence it

places the cause of the movement without hesitation in the ‘not-I,’

although it resides in the ‘I,’ and is only occasioned by subordinate

centres, the activity of which remains concealed from consciousness.

This it is which gives rise to spiritualism, which, in so far as it

is in good faith and not openly a hocus-pocus, is simply a mystical

attempt to explain movements, the real cause of which consciousness

does not find in itself, and which it places, in consequence, in the

‘not-I.’

In ultimate analysis, the consciousness of the ‘Ego,’ and notably the

opposition of the ‘Ego’ and the ‘non-Ego,’ is an illusion of the senses

and a fallacy of thought. Every organism is related to a species,

and, over and above that, to the universe. It is the direct material

continuation of its parents; it is itself continued directly and

materially in its descendants. It is composed of the same materials as

the whole environing world; these materials are constantly penetrating

into it, transforming it, producing in it all the phenomena of life

and consciousness. All the lines of action of the forces of nature are

prolonged in its interior; it is the scene of the same physical and

chemical processes in action throughout the universe. What pantheism

divines and clothes in needlessly mystic words is clear, sober fact,

namely, the unity of nature, in which each organism is also a part

related to the whole. Certain parts are more nearly connected; others

are more separated from one another. Consciousness perceives only the

closely-knit parts of its physical basis, not those more remote. Thus

it falls into the illusion that the parts near together alone belong

to it, and that the more distant are strangers to it, and to consider

itself as an ‘individuum,’ confronting the world as a separate world or

microcosm. It does not observe that the ‘I,’ so rigidly posited, has

no fixed limits, but continues and spreads beneath the threshold of

consciousness, with an ever-diminishing distinctness of separation, to

the extreme depths of nature, till it blends there with all the other

constituents of the universe.

We may now resume much more briefly the natural history of the ‘I’

and the ‘not-I,’ and present it in a few formulæ. Consciousness is a

fundamental quality of living matter. The highest organism itself is

only a colony of the simplest organisms--that is to say, of living

cells--differentiated diversely in order to qualify the colony for

higher functions than the simple cell can accomplish. The collective

or ego-consciousness of the colony is composed of the individual

consciousness of the parts. The ego-consciousness has an obscure and

disregarded part which relates to the vital functions of the cells, or

the cœnæsthesis, and a clear, privileged part which is attentive to the

excitations of the sensory nerves, and to the voluntary activity of the

muscles, and which recognises them. Clear consciousness learns from

experience that acts of will precede voluntary movements. It arrives at

the assumption of causality. It observes that the sensorial excitations

are not caused by anything contained in itself. It is compelled, in

consequence, to transfer this cause, the assumption of which it cannot

renounce, elsewhere, and is necessarily first brought by this to the

presentation of a ‘not-I,’ and afterwards to the development of this

‘not-I’ into an apparent universe.

The old spiritualistic psychology, which regards the ‘Ego’ as

something entirely different from the body, as a special unitary

substance, maintains that this ‘Ego’ considers its own body as

something not identical with it, as opposed to the ‘Ego’ properly so

called, as something external--in fact, as ‘non-Ego.’ Thus, it denies

cœnæsthesis--that is to say, an absolutely certain empirical fact. We

constantly have an obscure sensation of the existence of all parts of

our body, and our ego-consciousness immediately experiences a change

if the vital functions of any one of our organs or tissues suffers a

disturbance.[238]

Development advances from the unconscious organic ‘I’ to the clear

conscious ‘I,’ and to the conception of the ‘not-I.’ The infant

probably has cœnæsthesis even before, in any case after, its birth,

for it feels its vital internal processes, shows satisfaction when

they are in healthy action, manifests its discomfort by movements and

cries, which are also only a movement of the respiratory and laryngeal

muscles, when any disturbances appear there, perceives and expresses

general states of the organism, such as hunger, thirst and fatigue.

But clear consciousness does not yet exist for it; the brain has not

yet taken command over the inferior centres. Sense-impressions are

perhaps perceived, but certainly not yet grouped into ideas; the

greater part of the movements are preceded by no conscious act of will,

and are only reflex actions--that is, manifestations of those local

consciousnesses which later become so obscure as to be imperceptible,

when the cerebral consciousness has attained its full clearness.

Little by little the higher centres develop; the child begins to give

heed to its sense-impressions, to form from its perceptions ideas,

and to make voluntary movements adapted to an end. With the awakening

of its conscious will the birth of the consciousness of its ‘Ego’ is

linked. The child apprehends that it is an individual. But its internal

organic processes occupy it very much more than does the procedure

of the external world, transmitted to it by the sensory nerves, and

its own states fill up its consciousness more or less completely. The

child is, for this reason, a model of egoism, and, until it reaches a

more advanced age, is wholly incapable of displaying either attention

or interest in anything at all which is not directly connected with

itself, its needs and inclinations. By the continued culture of his

brain man finally arrives at that degree of maturity in which he

acquires a just idea of his relations to other men and to Nature. Then

consciousness pays less and less regard to the vital processes in its

own organism, and more and more to the stimulations of its senses. It

only notices the former when they reveal pressing necessities; it is,

on the contrary, always concerned with the latter when in a waking

state. The ‘I’ retires decidedly behind the ‘not-I,’ and the image of

the world fills the greater part of consciousness.

As the formation of an ‘I,’ of an individuality clearly conscious of

its separate existence, is the highest achievement of living matter,

so the highest degree of development of the ‘I’ consists in embodying

in itself the ‘not-I,’ in comprehending the world, in conquering

egoism, and in establishing close relations with other beings, things

and phenomena. Auguste Comte, and after him Herbert Spencer, have

named this stage ‘altruism,’ from the Italian word _altrui_, ‘others.’

The sexual instinct which forces an individual to seek for another

individual is as little altruism as the hunger which incites the

hunter to follow an animal in order to kill and eat it. There can be

no question of altruism until an individual concerns himself about

another being from sympathy or curiosity, and not in order to satisfy

an immediate, pressing necessity of his body, the momentary hunger of

some organ.

Not till he attains to altruism is man in a condition to maintain

himself in society and in nature. To be a social being, man must

feel with his fellow-creatures, and show himself sensitive to their

opinion about him. Both the one and the other presuppose that he is

capable of so vividly representing to himself the feelings of his

fellow-creatures as to experience them himself. He who is not capable

of imagining the pain of another with sufficient clearness to suffer

the same himself will not have compassion, and he who cannot exactly

feel for himself what impression an action or an omission on his part

will make on another will have no regard for others. In both cases he

will soon see himself excluded from the human community as the enemy

of all, and treated as such by all, and very probably he will perish.

And to defend himself against destructive natural forces and turn them

to his advantage, man must know them intimately--that is, he must be

able distinctly to picture their effects. A clear presentation of the

feelings of others, and of the effects of natural forces, presupposes

the faculty of occupying himself intensively with the ‘not-I.’ While a

man is attending to the ‘not-I,’ he is not thinking of his ‘Ego,’ and

the latter descends below the level of consciousness. In order that the

‘not-I’ should in this way prevail over the ‘I,’ the sensory nerves

must properly conduct the external impressions, the cerebral centres of

perception must be sensitive to the excitations of the sensory nerves,

the highest centres must develop, in a sure, rapid and vigorous manner,

the perceptions into ideas, unite these into conceptions and judgments,

and, on occasion, transform them into acts of volition and motor

impulses. And as the greatest part of these different activities is

accomplished by the gray cortex of the frontal lobes, this means that

this gray cortex must be well developed and work vigorously.

It is thus that a sane man appears to us. He perceives little and

rarely his internal excitations, but always and clearly his external

impressions. His consciousness is filled with images of the external

world, not with images of the activity of his organs. The unconscious

work of his inferior centres plays an almost vanishing part by the side

of the fully conscious work of the highest centres. His egoism is no

stronger than is strictly necessary to maintain his individuality, and

his thoughts and actions are determined by knowledge of Nature and his

fellow-creatures, and by the consideration he owes to them.

Quite otherwise is the spectacle offered by the degenerate person. His

nervous system is not normal. In what the digression from the norm

ultimately consists we do not know. Very probably the cell of the

degenerate is formed a little differently from that of sane men, the

particles of the protoplasm are otherwise and less regularly disposed;

the molecular movements take place, in consequence, in a less free

and rapid, less rhythmic and vigorous, manner. This is, however, a

mere undemonstrable hypothesis. Nevertheless, it cannot reasonably be

doubted that all the bodily signs or ‘stigmata’ of degeneration, all

the arrests and inequalities of development that have been observed,

have their origin in a bio-chemical and bio-mechanical derangement of

the nerve-cell, or, perhaps, of the cell in general.

In the mental life of the degenerate the anomaly of his nervous system

has, as a consequence, the incapacity of attaining to the highest

degree of development of the individual, namely, the freely coming out

from the factitious limits of individuality, _i.e._, altruism. As to

the relation of his ‘Ego’ to his ‘non-Ego,’ the degenerate man remains

a child all his life. He scarcely appreciates or even perceives the

external world, and is only occupied with the organic processes in his

own body. He is more than egoistical, he is an ego-maniac.

His ego-mania may spring directly from different circumstances of his

organism. His sensory nerves may be obtuse, are, in consequence, but

feebly stimulated by the external world, transmit slowly and badly

their stimuli to the brain, and are not in a condition to incite it

to a sufficiently vigorous perceptive and ideational activity. Or

his sensory nerves may work moderately well, but the brain is not

sufficiently excitable, and does not perceive properly the impressions

which are transmitted to it from the external world.