The obtuseness of the degenerate is attested by almost all observers.

From the almost illimitable number of facts which could be adduced

on this point, we will only give a very concise, but sufficiently

characteristic selection. ‘Among many idiots,’ says Sollier, ‘there

is no distinction between sweet and bitter. When sugar and colocynth

are administered to them alternately, they manifest no change of

sensation.... Properly speaking, taste does not exist among them....

Besides this, there are perversions of taste. We are not speaking

here of complete idiots ... but even of imbeciles who eat ordure or

repulsive things ... even their own excrements.... The same remarks

apply to smell. Perhaps sensibility appears still more absolutely

obtuse for smells than for taste.... Tactile sensibility is very obtuse

in general, but it is always uniformly so.... Sometimes it might be a

question whether there is not complete anæsthesia.’[239] Lombroso has

examined the general sensitiveness of skin in sixty-six criminals, and

has found it obtuse in thirty-eight among them, and unequal in the two

halves of the body in forty-six.[240] In a later work he sums up in

these words his observations of sensorial acuteness in the degenerate:

‘Inaccessible to the feeling of pain, themselves without feeling, they

never understand pain even in others.’[241] Ribot traces the ‘diseases

of personality’ (that is, the false ideas of the ‘I’) to ‘organic

disturbances, of which the first result is to depress the faculty of

feeling in general; the second, to pervert it.’ ‘A young man whose

conduct had always been excellent suddenly gave himself up to the worst

inclinations. It was ascertained that in his mental condition there

was no sign of evident alienation, but it could be seen that the whole

outer surface of the skin had become absolutely insensible.’ ‘It may

seem strange that weak and false sensitivity ... that is, that simple

disturbances or sensorial alterations should disorganize the “Ego.”

Nevertheless, observation proves it.’[242] Maudsley[243] describes some

cases of degeneration among children whose skin was insensible, and

remarks: ‘They cannot feel impressions as they naturally should feel

them, nor adjust themselves to their surroundings, with which they are

in discord; and the motor outcomes of the perverted affections of self

are accordingly of a meaningless and destructive character.’[244]

The defective sensibility of the degenerate, confirmed by all

observers, is, moreover, susceptible of different interpretations.

Whereas many consider it a consequence of the pathological condition

of the sensory nerves, others believe that the perturbation has its

seat, not in these nerves, but in the brain; not in the ducts, but

in the centres of perception. To quote one of the most eminent among

the psycho-physiologists of the new school, Binet[245] has proved

that, ‘if a portion of the body of a person is insensible, he is

ignorant of what passes there; but, on the other hand, the nervous

centres in connection with this insensible region can continue to

act; the result is that certain acts, often simple, but sometimes very

complicated, can be accomplished in the body of a hysterical subject,

without his knowledge; much more, these acts can be of a psychical

nature, and manifest an intelligence which will be distinct from that

of the subject, and will constitute a second “I” co-existent with the

first. For a long time there was a misconception of the true nature

of hysterical anæsthesia, and it was compared to a common anæsthesia

from organic causes, due, for example, to the interruption of afferent

nerves. This view must be wholly abandoned, and we know now that

hysterical anæsthesia is not a true insensibility; it is insensibility

from unconsciousness from mental disaggregation; in a word, it is

psychical insensibility.’

Most frequently it is not a question of simple cases, where it is the

sensory nerves alone, or only the cerebral centres which work badly,

but of mixed cases, where the two apparatuses have a diversely varying

part in the disturbance. But whether the nerves do not conduct the

impressions to the brain, or the brain does not perceive, or does not

raise the impressions brought to it into consciousness, the result is

always the same, viz., the external world will not be correctly and

distinctly grasped by consciousness, the ‘not-I’ will not be suitably

represented in consciousness, the ‘I’ will not experience the necessary

derivation of the exclusive preoccupation with the processes taking

place in its own organism.

The natural healthy connection between organic sensations and

sense-perceptions is much more strongly displaced when to the

insensibility of the sensory nerves, or of the centres of perception,

or both, is added an unhealthily modified and intensified vital

activity of the organs. Then the organic ego-sensibility, or

cœnæsthesis, advances irrepressibly into the foreground, overshadowing

in great part or wholly the perceptions of the external world in

consciousness, which no longer takes notice of anything but the

interior processes of the organism. In this way there originates that

peculiar hyper-stimulation or emotionalism constituting, as we have

seen, the fundamental phenomenon of the intellectual life of the

degenerate. For the fundamental emotional tone, despairing or joyful,

angry or tearful, which determines the colour of his presentations as

well as the course of his thoughts, is the consequence of phenomena

taking place in his nerves, vessels and glands.[246] The consciousness

of the emotionally degenerate subject is filled with obsessions which

are not inspired by the events of the external world, and by impulsions

which are not the reaction against external stimulation. To this is

added next the unfailing weakness of will of the degenerate person,

which makes it impossible for him to suppress his obsessions, to resist

his impulsions, to control his fundamental moods, to keep his higher

centres to the attentive pursuit of objective phenomena. According to

the saying of the poet, the necessary result of these conditions is

that the world must be differently reflected in such heads than it is

in normal ones. The external world, the ‘not-I,’ either does not exist

at all in the consciousness of an emotionally degenerate subject, or it

is merely represented there as on a faintly reflecting surface, by a

scarcely recognisable, wholly colourless image, or, as in a concave or

convex mirror, by a completely distorted, false image; consciousness,

on the other hand, is imperiously monopolized by the somatic ‘I,’ which

does not permit the mind to be occupied with anything but the painful

or tumultuous processes taking place in the depths of the organs.

Badly-conducting sensory nerves, obtuse perceptive centres in the

brain, weakness of will with its resulting incapacity of attention,

morbidly irregular and violent vital processes in the cells, are

therefore the organic basis on which ego-mania develops.

The ego-maniac must of necessity immensely over-estimate his own

importance and the significance of all his actions, for he is only

engrossed with himself, and but little or not at all with external

things. He is therefore not in a position to comprehend his relation

to other men and the universe, and to appreciate properly the part he

has to play in the aggregate of social institutions. There might at

this juncture be an inclination to confound ego-mania with megalomania,

but there is a characteristic difference between the two states.

Megalomania, it is true, is itself, like its clinical complement, the

delusion of persecution, occasioned by morbid processes within the

organism obliging consciousness perpetually to be attending to its own

somatic ‘Ego.’ More especially the unnaturally increased bio-chemical

activity of the organs gives rise to the pleasantly extravagant

presentations of megalomania, while retarded or morbidly aberrant

activity gives rise to the painful presentations of the delusion of

persecution.[247] In megalomania, however, as in the delusion of

persecution, the patient is constantly engrossed with the external

world and with men; in ego-mania, on the contrary, he almost completely

withdraws himself from them. In the systematically elaborated delirium

of the megalomaniac and persecution-maniac, the ‘not-I’ plays the most

prominent part. The patient accounts for the importance his ‘Ego’

obtains in his own eyes by the invention of a grand social position

universally recognised, or by the inexorable hostility of powerful

persons, or groups of persons. He is Pope, or Emperor, and his

persecutors are the chief men in the State, or great social powers, the

police, the clergy, etc. His delirium, in consequence, takes account

of the State and society; he admits their importance, and attaches

the greatest value, in one case, to the homage, in the other to the

enmity, of his neighbours. The ego-maniac, on the contrary, does not

regard it as necessary to dream of himself as occupying some invented

social position. He does not require the world or its appreciation to

justify in his own eyes himself as the sole object of his own interest.

He does not see the world at all. Other people simply do not exist for

him. The whole ‘non-Ego’ appears in his consciousness merely as a vague

shadow or a thin cloud. The idea does not even occur to him that he is

something out of the common, that he is superior to other people, and

for this reason either admired or hated; he is alone in the world; more

than that, he alone is the world and everything else, men, animals,

things are unimportant accessories, not worth thinking about.

The less diseased are the conducting media, the centres of nutrition,

perception and volition, so much the weaker naturally will the

ego-mania be, and so much the more harmlessly will it be manifested.

Its least objectionable expression is the comic importance which

the ego-maniac often attributes to his sensations, inclinations and

activities. Is he a painter? he has no doubt that the whole history

of the universe only hinges on painting, and on his pictures in

particular. Is he a writer of prose or verse? he is convinced that

humanity has no other care, or at least no more serious care, than for

verses and books. Let it not be objected that this is not peculiar

to ego-maniacs, but is the case with the vast majority of mankind.

Assuredly everyone thinks what he is doing is important, and that man

would not be worth much who performed his work so heedlessly and so

superficially, with so little pleasure and conscientiousness, that he

himself could not look upon it with respect. But the great difference

between the rational and sane man and the ego-maniac is, that the

former sees clearly how subordinate his occupation is to the rest of

humanity, although it fills his life and exacts his best powers, while

the latter can never imagine that any exertion to which he devotes

his time and efforts can appear to others as unimportant and even

puerile. An honest cobbler, resoleing an old boot, gives himself up

heart and soul to his work, nevertheless he admits that there are far

more interesting and important things for humanity than the repairing

of damaged sole-leather. The ego-maniac, on the contrary, if he is a

writer, does not hesitate to declare, like Mallarmé, ‘The world was

made to lead up to a fine book.’ This absurd exaggeration of one’s own

occupations and interests produces in literature the Parnassians and

the Æsthetes.

If degeneration is deeper, and ego-mania is stronger, the latter no

longer assumes the comparatively innocent form of total absorption in

poetic and artistic cooings, but manifests itself as an immorality,

which may amount to moral madness. The tendency to commit actions

injurious to himself or society is aroused now and then even in a

sane man when some obnoxious desire demands gratification, but he has

the will and the power to suppress it. The degenerate ego-maniac is

too feeble of will to control his impulsions, and cannot determine

his actions and thoughts by a regard to the welfare of society,

because society is not at all represented in his consciousness. He

is a solitary, and is insensible to the moral law framed for life in

society, and not for the isolated individual. It is evident that for

Robinson Crusoe the penal code did not exist. Alone on his island,

having only Nature to deal with, it is obvious he could neither kill,

steal, nor pillage in the sense of the penal code. He could only commit

misdemeanours against himself. Want of insight and of self-control

are the only immoralities possible to him. The ego-maniac is a mental

Robinson Crusoe, who in his imagination lives alone on an island, and

is at the same time a weak creature, powerless to govern himself. The

universal moral law does not exist for him, and the only thing he may

possibly see and avow, perhaps also regret a little, is that he sins

against the moral law of the solitary, _i.e._, against the necessity of

controlling instincts in so far as they are injurious to himself.

Morality--not that learnt mechanically, but that which we feel as

an internal necessity--has become, in the course of thousands of

generations, an organized instinct. For this reason, like all other

organized instincts, it is exposed to ‘perversion,’ to aberration.

The effect of this is that an organ, or the whole organism, works in

opposition to its normal task and its natural laws, and cannot work

otherwise.[248] In perversion of taste the patient seeks greedily

to swallow all that ordinarily provokes the deepest repugnance,

_i.e._, is instinctively recognised as noxious, and rejected for

that reason--decaying organic matter, ordure, pus, spittle, etc. In

perversion of smell he prefers the odours of putrefaction to the

perfume of flowers. In perversion of the sexual appetite he has desires

which are directly contrary to the purpose of the instinct, _i.e._,

the preservation of the species. In perversion of the moral sense the

patient is attracted by, and feels delight in, acts which fill the sane

man with disgust and horror. If this particular perversion is added

to ego-mania, we have before us not merely the obtuse indifference

towards crime which characterizes moral madness, but delight in crime.

The ego-maniac of this kind is no longer merely insensible to good

and evil, and incapable of discriminating between them, but he has a

decided predilection for evil, esteems it in others, does it himself

every time he can act according to his inclination, and finds in it the

peculiar beauty that the sane man finds in good.

The moral derangement of an ego-maniac, with or without perverted moral

instincts, will naturally manifest itself in ways varying according

to the social class to which he belongs, as well as according to his

personal idiosyncrasies. If he is a member of the disinherited class,

he is simply either a fallen or degraded being, whom opportunity has

made a thief, who lives in horrible promiscuity with his sisters or

daughters, etc., or is a criminal from habit and profession. If he is

cultivated and well-to-do, or in a commanding position, he commits

misdemeanours peculiar to the upper classes which have as their object

not the gratification of material needs, but of other kinds of craving.

He becomes a Don Juan of the drawing-room, and carries shame and

dishonour without hesitation into the family of his best friend. He is

a legacy-hunter, a traitor to those who trust in him, an intriguer, a

sower of discord, and a liar. On the throne he may even develop into a

rapacious animal, and to a universal conqueror. With a limited tether

he becomes Charles the Bad the Count d’Evreux and King of Navarre,

Gilles de Rais, the prototype of Blue Beard, or Cæsar Borgia; and,

with a wider range, Napoleon I. If his nervous system is not strong

enough to elaborate imperious impulsions, or if his muscles are too

feeble to obey such impulsions, all these criminal inclinations remain

unsatisfied, and only expend themselves by way of his imagination. The

perverted ego-maniac is then only a platonic or theoretic malefactor,

and if he embraces the literary career, he will concoct philosophic

systems to justify his depravity, or will employ an accommodating

rhetoric in verse and prose to celebrate it, bedizen it and present

it under as seductive a form as possible. We then find ourselves in

the presence of the literary phases called Diabolism and Decadentism.

‘Diaboliques’ and ‘décadents’ are distinguished from ordinary criminals

merely in that the former content themselves with dreaming and writing,

while the latter have the resolution and strength to act. But they have

this bond in common, of being both of them ‘anti-social beings.’[249]

A second characteristic which is shared by all ego-maniacs is their

incapacity to adapt themselves to the conditions in which they live,

whether they assert their anti-social inclinations in thought or

action, in writings or as criminals. This want of adaptability is one

of the most striking peculiarities of the degenerate, and it is to them

a source of constant suffering, and finally of ruin. It is a necessary

result, however, of the constitution of his central nervous system. The

indispensable premise of adaptation is the having an exact presentation

of the facts to which a man must adapt himself.[250] I cannot avoid the

ruts in the road if I do not see them; I cannot ward off the blow I

do not see coming; it is impossible to thread a needle if its eye is

not seen with sufficient clearness, and if the thread is not carried

with steady hand to the right spot. All this is so elementary it is

scarcely necessary to say it. What we term power over Nature is, in

fact, adaptation to Nature. It is an inexact expression to say we make

the forces of Nature subject to us. In reality we observe them, we

learn to know their peculiarities, and we manage so that the tendencies

of natural forces and our own desires coincide. We construct a wheel

at the point where the water power, by natural law, must fall, and we

have then the advantage that the wheel turns according to our needs.

We know that electricity flows along copper wire, and so, with cunning

submission to its peculiar ways, we lay down copper lines to the place

where we want it, and where its action would be useful to us. Without

knowledge of Nature, therefore, no adaptation, and without adaptation

no possibility of profiting by its forces. Now, the degenerate subject

cannot adapt himself, because he has no clear idea of the circumstances

to which he ought to adapt himself, and he does not obtain from them

any clear idea, because, as we know, he has bad nerve-conductors,

obtuse centres of perception, and feeble attention.

The active cause of all adaptation, as of all effort in general--and

adaptation is nothing else than an effort of a particular kind--is

the wish to satisfy some organic necessity, or to escape from some

discomfort. In other words, the aim of adaptation is to give feelings

of pleasure, and to diminish or suppress the feelings of discomfort.

The being incapable of self-adaptation is for this reason far less

able to procure agreeable, and avoid disagreeable, sensations than the

normal being; he runs up against every corner, because he does not know

how to avoid them; and he longs in vain for the luscious pear, because

he does not know how to catch hold of the branch on which it hangs. The

ego-maniac is a type of such a being. He must, therefore, necessarily

suffer from the world and from men. Hence at heart he is bad-tempered,

and turns in wrathful discontent against Nature, society and public

institutions, irritated and offended by them, because he does not know

how to accommodate himself to them. He is in a constant state of revolt

against all that exists, and contrives how he may destroy it, or, at

least, dreams of destruction. In a celebrated passage Henri Taine

indicates ‘exaggerated self-esteem’ and ‘dogmatic argument’ as the

roots of Jacobinism.[251] This leads to contempt for and rejection of

institutions already established, and hence not invented or chosen by

himself. He considers the social edifice absurd because it is not ‘a

work of logic,’ but of history.

Besides these two roots of Jacobinism which Taine has brought to

light, there is yet another, and the most important, that has escaped

his attention, viz., the inability of the degenerate to adapt himself

to given circumstances. The ego-maniac is condemned by his natural

organization to be a pessimist and a Jacobin. But the revolutions he

wishes for, preaches, and perhaps effectively accomplishes, are barren

as regards progress. He is, as a revolutionary, what an inundation or

cyclone would be as a street-sweeper. He does not clear the ground

with conscious aim, but blindly destroys. This distinguishes him

from the clear-minded innovator, the true revolutionary, who is a

reformer, leading suffering and stagnating humanity from time to time

by toilsome paths into a new Canaan. The reformer hurls down with

pitiless violence, if violence is necessary, the ruins which have

become obstacles, in order to make way for useful constructions; the

ego-maniac raves against everything that stands upright, whether

useful or useless, and does not think of clearing the building-ground

after the devastation; his pleasure consists in seeing heaps of

rubbish overgrown by noxious weeds where once walls and gables reared

themselves.

There is an impassable gulf between the sane revolutionary and the

ego-maniac Jacobin. The former has positive ideals, the latter has not.

The former knows what he is striving for; the latter has no conception

how that which irritates him could be changed for the better. His

thoughts do not reach so far; he never troubles himself to question

what will replace the things destroyed. He knows only that everything

frets him, and he desires to vent his muddled and blustering ill-humour

on all around him. Hence it is characteristic that the foolish

necessity to revolt of this kind of revolutionary frequently turns

against imaginary evils, follows puerile aims, or even fights against

those laws which are wise and beneficent. Here they form a ‘league

against lifting the hat in saluting’; there they oppose compulsory

vaccination; another time they rise in protest against taking the

census of the population; and they have the ridiculous audacity to

conduct these silly campaigns with the same speeches and attitudes

that the true revolutionaries assume--for example, in the service of

suppression of slavery, or liberty of thought.

To the ego-maniac’s incapacity for adaptation is often added the mania

for destruction, or clastomania, which is so frequently observed among

idiots and imbeciles, and in some forms of insanity.[252] In a child

the instinct of destruction is normal. It is the first manifestation

of the desire to exert muscular strength. Very soon, however, the

desire is aroused to exert its strength, not in destroying, but in

creating. Now, the act of creating has a psychic premise, viz.,

attention. This being absent in the degenerate, the impulse to destroy,

which can be gratified without attention, by disorderly and casual

movements, does not rise in them to the instinct of creation.

Hence, discontent as the consequence of incapacity of adaptation, want

of sympathy with his fellow-creatures arising from weak representative

capacity, and the instinct of destruction, as the result of arrested

development of mind, together constitute the anarchist, who, according

to the degree of his impulsions, either merely writes books and makes

speeches at popular meetings, or has recourse to a dynamite bomb.

Finally, in its extreme degree of development, ego-mania leads to that

folly of Caligula in which the unbalanced mind boasts of being ‘a

laughing lion,’ believes himself above all restraints of morality or

law, and wishes the whole of humanity had one single head that he might

cut it off.

The reader who has hitherto followed me will now, I hope, quite

comprehend the psychology of ego-mania. As I have stated above,

consciousness of the ‘Ego’ originates from the sensations of the

vital processes in all parts of our body, and the conception of

the ‘non-Ego’ from changes in our organs of special sense. How,

generally speaking, we arrive at the assumption of the existence of

a ‘not-I,’ I have explained above in detail, hence it is unnecessary

to repeat it here. If we wish to leave the firm soil of positively

established facts, and risk ourselves on the somewhat shaky ground of

probable assumptions, we may say that consciousness of the ‘Ego’ has

its anatomical basis in the sympathetic system, and the conception

of the ‘not-I’ in the cerebro-spinal system. In a healthy man the

perception of vital internal facts does not rise above the level of

consciousness. The brain receives its stimulations far more from

the sensory, than from the sympathetic nerves. In consciousness the

presentation of the external world greatly outweighs the consciousness

of the ‘Ego.’ In the degenerate, either (1) vital internal facts

are morbidly intensified, or proceed abnormally, and are therefore

constantly perceived by consciousness; or (2) the sensory nerves

are obtuse, and the perceptional centres weak and sluggish; or (3)

perhaps these two deviations from the norm co-exist. The result in

all three cases is that the notion of the ‘Ego’ is far more strongly

represented in consciousness than the image of the external world. The

ego-maniac, consequently, neither knows nor grasps the phenomenon of

the universe. The effect of this is a want of interest and sympathy,

and an incapacity to adapt himself to nature and humanity. The absence

of feeling, and the incapacity of adaptation, frequently accompanied

by perversion of the instincts and impulses, make the ego-maniac an

anti-social being. He is a moral lunatic, a criminal, a pessimist,

an anarchist, a misanthrope, and he is all these, either in his

thoughts and his feelings, or also in his actions. The struggle

against the anti-social ego-maniac, his expulsion from the social

body, are necessary functions of the latter; and if it is not capable

of accomplishing it, it is a sign of waning vital power or serious

ailment. Toleration, and, above all, admiration, of the ego-maniac,

be he one in theory or in practice, is, so to speak, a proof that the

kidneys of the social organism do not accomplish their task, that

society suffers from Bright’s disease.

In the following chapters we shall study the forms under which

ego-mania manifests itself in literature, and we shall find occasion to

treat in detail of many points to which at this stage mere allusion has

been sufficient.

CHAPTER II.

PARNASSIANS AND DIABOLISTS.

IT has become the custom to designate the French Parnassians a school,

but those who are comprised under this denomination have always

refused to allow themselves to be included under a common name. ‘The

Parnassus?’ ... exclaimed one of the most undoubted Parnassians, M.

Catulle Mendès.[253] ‘We have never been a school!... The Parnassus! We

have not even written a preface!... The Parnassus originated from the

necessity of reaction against the looseness of poetry issuing from the

adherents of Murger, Charles Bataille, Amédée Rolland, Jean du Boys;

then it became a league of minds, who sympathized in matters of art....’

The name ‘Parnassiens’ was, in fact, applied to a whole series of poets

and writers who have scarcely a point in common between them. They

are united by a purely external bond; their works have been brought

out by the Parisian editor Alphonse Lemerre, who was able to make

Parnassians, as the editor Cotta, in the first half of this century,

made German classics. The designation itself emanates from a sort of

almanac of the Muses, which Catulle Mendès published in 1860 under the

title, _Le Parnasse contemporain: recueil de vers nouveaux_, and which

contains contributions from almost all the poets of the period.

With most of the names of this numerous group I do not need to concern

myself, for those who bear them are not degenerate, but honest average

men, correctly twittering what others have first sung to them. They

have exercised no sort of direct influence on contemporary thought,

and have only indirectly contributed to strengthen the action of a

few leaders by grouping themselves around them in the attitude of

disciples, and in permitting them thus to present themselves with an

imposing retinue, which always makes an impression on vacuous minds.

The leaders alone are of importance in my inquiries. It is of them

we think when we speak of the Parnassians, and it is from their

peculiarities that the artistic theory attributed to _Le Parnasse_ has

been derived. Embodied most completely in Théophile Gautier, it can

be summed up in two words: perfection of form and _impassibilité_, or

impassiveness.

To Gautier and his disciples the form is everything in poetry; the

substance has no importance. ‘A poet,’ says he,[254] ‘say what you

will, is a labourer; he ought not to have more intelligence than a

labourer, or know any other trade than his own, otherwise he will do

it badly. I hold the mania that there is for putting them on an ideal

pedestal is perfectly absurd; nothing is less ideal than a poet....

The poet is a keyboard [_clavecin_], and nothing more. Every idea

in passing lays its finger on a key; the key vibrates and gives its

note, that is all.’ In another place he says: ‘For the poet, words

have in themselves, and outside the sense they express, a beauty and

value of their own, like precious stones as yet uncut, and set in

bracelets, necklaces, or rings; they charm the connoisseur who looks

at them, and sorts them with his finger in the little bowl where they

are stored.’[255] Gustave Flaubert, another worshipper of words, takes

entirely this view of the subject when he exclaims:[256] ‘A beautiful

verse meaning nothing, is superior to a verse less beautiful meaning

something.’ By the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘less beautiful,’ Flaubert

here understands ‘names with triumphant syllables, sounding like the

blast of clarions,’ or ‘radiant words, words of light.’[257] Gautier

only credited Racine, for whom he, a romanticist, naturally had a

profound contempt, with one verse of any value:

‘La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.’

The most instructive application of this theory is found in a piece of

poetry by Catulle Mendès, entitled _Récapitulation_, which begins as

follows:

‘Rose, Emmeline,

Margueridette,

Odette,

Alix, Aline.

‘Paule, Hippolyte,

Lucy, Lucile,

Cécile,

Daphné, Mélite.

‘Artémidore,

Myrrha, Myrrhine,

Périne,

Naïs, Eudore.’

Eleven stanzas of the same sort follow, which I will dispense with

reproducing, and then this final strophe:

‘Zulma, Zélie,

Régine, Reine,

Irène!...

Et j’en oublie.’[258]

‘And I forget the rest’--this is the only one of the sixty lines of

the piece which has any sense, the fifty-nine others being composed of

women’s names only.

What Catulle Mendès intends here is clear enough. He wishes to show the

state of a libertine’s soul, who revels in the remembrance of all the

women he has loved, or with whom he has flirted. In the mind of the

reader the enumeration of their names is to give rise to voluptuous

images of a troop of young girls, ministrants of pleasure, of pictures

of a harem or of the paradise of Mahomet. But apart from the length

of the list, which makes the piece insupportably wearisome and

chilling, Mendès does not attain the desired effect for yet a second

reason--because his artificiality betrays at the first glance the

profound insincerity of his pretended emotion. When before the mind of

a gallant the figures of the Phyllises of his pastoral idylls present

themselves, and he really feels the necessity of tenderly murmuring

their names, he certainly does not think of arranging these names as a

play on words (Alix--Aline, Lucy--Lucile, Myrrha--Myrrhine, etc.). If

he is cold-blooded enough to give himself up to this barren desk-work,

he cannot possibly find himself in the lascivious ecstasy which the

piece is supposed to express and impart. This emotion, immoral and

vulgar in its boasting, would still have the right, like every genuine

affection of the soul, of being lyrically expressed. But a list of

unmeaning names, artificially combined, and arranged according to

their assonance, implies nothing. According to the art theory of the

Parnassians, however, _Récapitulation_ is poetry--nay, the ideal of

poetry--for it ‘ne signifie rien,’ as Flaubert requires, and is wholly

composed of words which, according to Th. Gautier, ‘ont en eux-mêmes

une beauté et une valeur propres.’

Another eminent Parnassian, Théodore de Banville,[259] without pushing

to its extreme limits, with the intrepid logic of Catulle Mendès,

the theory of verbal resonance bare of all meaning, has professed it

with a sincerity to which homage is due. ‘I charge you,’ he exclaims

to poets in embryo, ‘to read as much as possible, dictionaries,

encyclopædias, technical works treating of all the professions, and

of all the special sciences, catalogues of libraries and of auctions,

handbooks of museums--in short, all the books which can increase

your stock of words, and give you instruction on their exact sense,

proper or figurative. Directly your head is thus furnished you will

be already well prepared to find rhymes.’ The only essential thing in

poetry, according to Banville, is to catch rhymes. To compose a piece

of poetry on any subject, he teaches his disciples: ‘All the rhymes on

this subject must first of all be known. The remainder, the soldering,

that which the poet must add to stop up the holes with the hand of an

artist and workman--these are called the plugs. I should like to see

those who counsel us to avoid the plugs bind two planks together with

the help of thought.’ The poet--Banville thus sums up his doctrine--has

no ideas in his brain; he has only sounds, rhymes, and play on words

(_calembours_). This play on words inspires his ideas, or his simulacra

of ideas.

Guyau rightly uses this criticism with regard to the æsthetic theory

of the Parnassians established by Banville.[260] ‘The search for

rhyme, pushed to the extreme, tends to make the poet lose the habit

of logically connecting his ideas--that is to say, in reality to

think--for to think, as Kant has said, is to unite and to bind. To

rhyme, on the contrary, is to place in juxtaposition words necessarily

unconnected.... The cult of rhyme for rhyme’s sake introduces into the

brain itself of the poet, little by little, a kind of disorder and

permanent chaos; all the usual laws of association, all the logic of

thought is destroyed in order to be replaced by the chance encounter

of sounds.... Periphrasis and metaphor are the only resources for good

rhyming.... The impossibility in seeking for rich rhymes, of remaining

simple, involves in its turn a consequent risk of a certain lack of

sincerity. Freshness of spontaneous feeling will disappear in the too

consummate artist in words; he will lose that respect for thought as

such which ought to be the first quality of the writer.’

Where Guyau commits an error is when he says that the cult of rhyme

for rhyme’s sake ‘introduces into the brain even of the poet a kind

of disorder and permanent chaos.’ The proposition must be reversed.

‘Permanent chaos’ and ‘disorder’ in the brain of the poet are there

already; the exaggeration of the importance of rhyme is only a

consequence of this state of mind. Here we have again to deal with

a form of that inaptitude for attention, well known to us, which is

a peculiarity of the degenerate subject. The course of his ideas is

determined, not by a central idea round which the will groups all other

ideas, suppressing some and strengthening others with the help of

attention; but by the wholly mechanical association of ideas, awakened

in the case of the Parnassians by a similar or identical verbal sound.

His poetical method is pure echolalia.

The Parnassian theory of the importance of form, notably of rhyme, for

poetry, of the intrinsic value of beauty in the sound of words, of

the sensuous pleasure to be derived from sonorous syllables without

regard to their sense, and of the uselessness, and even harmfulness, of

thought in poetry, has become decisive in the most recent development

of French poetry.[261] The Symbolists, whom we have studied in an

earlier chapter, hold closely to this theory. These poor in spirit,

who only babble ‘sonorous syllables’ without sense, are the direct

descendants of the Parnassians.

The Parnassian theory of art is mere imbecility. But the ego-mania

of the degenerate minds who have concocted it reveals itself in the

enormous importance they attribute to their hunt for rhymes, to their

puerile pursuit of words which are ‘tonitruants’ and ‘rayonnants.’

Catulle Mendès ends a poem (_La seule Douceur_), where he describes in

the most fulsome manner a series of the pleasures of life, with this

envoi: ‘Prince, I lie. Beneath the Twins or the Urn (? Aquarius) to

make noble words rhyme together in one’s book, this is the sole joy of

life.’[262] He who is not of this opinion is simply said to forfeit his

humanity. Thus it is that Baudelaire calls Paris ‘a Capernaum, a Babel

peopled by the imbecile and useless, not over-fastidious in their ways

of killing time, and wholly inaccessible to literary pleasures.’[263]

To treat as imbecile those who look upon a senseless jumble of rhymes

and a litany of so-called beautiful proper names as of no value, is

a stupid self-conceit at which one might well laugh. But Baudelaire

goes so far as to speak of the ‘useless.’ No one has a right to live

who is inaccessible to what he calls ‘literary pleasures’--that is, an

idiotic echolalia! Because he cultivates the art of playing on words

with a puerile seriousness, everyone must place the same importance as

he does on his infantile amusements, and whoever does not do so is not

simply a Philistine or an inferior being, without susceptibility or

refinement--no, he is a ‘useless creature.’ If this simpleton had the

power, he would no doubt wish to pursue his idea to the end and sweep

the ‘useless’ out of the ranks of the living, as Nero put to death

those who did not applaud his acting in the theatre. Can the monstrous

ego-mania of one demented be more audaciously expressed than in this

remark of Baudelaire’s?

The second characteristic of the Parnassians, after their insane

exaggeration of the value for humanity of the most external form for

poetry and rhyming, is their ‘impassibility,’ or impassivity. They

themselves, of course, will not admit that this term is applicable

to them. ‘Will they ever have done with this humbug!’ angrily cried

Leconte de Lisle, when interrogated on the subject of ‘impassibility,’

and Catulle Mendès says, ‘Because Glatigny has written a poem entitled

_Impassible_, and because I myself wrote this line, the avowed pose in

which is belied in the course of the poem,

‘“Pas de sanglots humains dans le chant des poètes!”[264]

it has been concluded that the Parnassians were or wished to be

“impassive.” Where do they find it, where do they see it, this icy

equanimity, this dryness which they have ascribed to us?’[265]

Criticism, in sooth, has chosen its word badly. ‘Impassibility’ in

art, in the sense of complete indifference to the drama of nature

and of life, there cannot be. It is psychologically impossible.

All artistic activity, in so far as it is not the mere imitation

of disciples, but flows from an original necessity, is a reaction

of the artist upon received impressions. Those which leave him

completely indifferent inspire the poet with no verse, the painter

with no picture, the musician with no tone composition. Impressions

must strike him in some way or other, they must awaken in him some

emotion, in order that he may have the idea at all of giving them an

objective artistic form. In the infinite volume of phenomena flowing

uniformly past his senses, the artist has distinguished the subject

he treats with the peculiar methods of his art; he has exercised a

selective activity, and has given the preference to this subject over

others. This preference presupposes sympathy or antipathy; the artist,

therefore, must have felt something on perceiving his subject. The sole

fact that an author has written a poem or a book testifies that the

subject treated of has inspired him with curiosity, interest, anger, an

agreeable or disagreeable emotion, that it has compelled his mind to

dwell upon it. This is, therefore, the contrary of indifference.

The Parnassians are not impassive. In their poems there is whimpering,

cursing and blasphemy, and the utterance of joy, enthusiasm and sorrow.

But what tortures them or enchants them is exclusively their own

states, their own experiences. The only foundation of their poetry is

their ‘Ego.’ The sorrow and joy of other men do not exist for them.

Their ‘impassibilité’ is, therefore, not impassivity, but rather a

complete absence of sympathy. The ‘tower of ivory’ in which, according

to the expression of one of them, the poet lives and proudly withdraws

himself from the indifferent mob, is a pretty name given to his

obtuseness in regard to the being and doing of his fellow-creatures.

All this has been well discerned by that beneficently clear-minded

critic, M. Ferdinand Brunetière. ‘One of the worst consequences,’

he writes, ‘that they [the theories of the Parnassians, and, in

particular, those of Baudelaire] may involve, is, by isolating art,

to isolate the artist as well, making him an idol to himself, and as

it were enclosing him in the sanctuary of his “Ego.” Not only, then,

does his work become a question merely concerned with himself--of

his griefs and his joys, his loves and his dreams--but, in order

to develop himself in the direction of his aptitudes, there is no

longer anything which he respects or spares, there is nothing he will

not subordinate to himself; which is, to speak by the way, the true

definition of immorality. To make one’s self the centre of things, from

a philosophical point of view, is as puerile an illusion as to see in

man “the king of creation,” or in the earth what the ancients called

“the navel of the world”; but, from the purely human point of view, it

is the glorification of egoism, and, consequently, the negation itself

of solidarity.’[266]

Thus Brunetière notices the ego-mania of the Parnassians, and affirms

their anti-social principles, their immorality; he believes, however,

that they have freely chosen their point of view. This is his only

error. They are not ego-maniacs by free choice, but because they must

be, and cannot be otherwise. Their ego-mania is not a philosophy or a

moral doctrine; it is their malady.

The impassivity of the Parnassians is, as we have seen, a callousness

with regard, not to everything, but only to their fellow-creatures,

united to the tenderest love for themselves. But their ‘impassibility’

has yet another aspect, and those who have found the term have probably

thought above all of this, without having given themselves a complete

account of it. The indifference which the Parnassians display, and

of which they are particularly proud, applies less to the joys and

sufferings of their fellow-creatures than to the universally recognised

moral law. For them there is neither virtue nor vice, but only the

beautiful and the ugly, the rare and the commonplace. They took their

point of view ‘beyond good and evil,’ long before the moral madness

of Frederick Nietzsche found this formula. Baudelaire justifies it

in the following terms: ‘Poetry ... has no other aim than itself; it

cannot have any other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly

worthy of the name of poem, as that which will have been written only

for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to say--be it well

understood--that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result

may not be to raise man above vulgar interests. This would evidently

be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a moral aim he

has diminished his poetical power, and it is not imprudent to wager

that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot, under pain of death or

degradation, assimilate itself to science or morals. It has not truth

for its object, it has only itself.’ And Th. Gautier, who records this

remark, wholly approves of it. ‘On the high summits he [the poet] is at

peace: _pacem summa tenent_,’ he says,[267] in employing an image which

occurs dozens of times in Nietzsche.

Let us nail here first of all a current sophistical artifice employed

by Baudelaire. The question to which he wishes to reply is this: Is

poetry to be moral or not? Suddenly he smuggles science, with which it

has nothing to do, into his demonstration, names it in the same breath

with morality, shows triumphantly that science has nothing in common

with poetry, and then acts as though he had demonstrated the same thing

on the subject of morality. Now, it does not occur to any reasonable

man of the present day to demand of poetry the teaching of scientific

truths, and for generations no serious poet has thought of treating

of astronomy or physics in a didactic poem. The only question which

some minds would wish to consider as an open one is that of knowing if

we may, or may not, exact of poetry that it be moral, and it is this

question that Baudelaire answers by an unproven affirmative, and by a

crafty shuffling.

I have no wish to linger here on this question, not because it

embarrasses me and I should like to avoid it, but because it seems to

me more in place to discuss it when considering the disciples of the

‘Parnassus,’ the ‘Décadents,’ and the Æsthetes, who have pushed the

doctrine to its extreme. I will for the present leave uncontradicted

the assertion of the Parnassians, that poetry has not to trouble itself

about morality. The poet ought to stand ‘beyond good and evil.’ But

that could only reasonably signify an absolute impartiality; it can

only amount to this--that the poet, in considering some action or

aspect, simply aspires to find himself confronted by a drama, which

he judges only for its beauty or ugliness, without even asking if it

is moral or not. A poet of this kind must necessarily see, then, as

many beautiful as ugly things, as many moral as immoral. For, taking

all in all, moral and beautiful things in humanity and Nature are at

least as frequent as the contrary, and must even preponderate. For we

consider as ugly, either what presents a deviation from laws which are

familiar to us, and to which we have adapted ourselves, or that in

which we recognise the manifestation of anything prejudicial to us; and

we regard as immoral all that is contrary to the prosperity, or even

the maintenance, of society. Now, the mere fact that we have looked to

find laws is a proof that phenomena corresponding to recognised laws,

and consequently agreeable to us, must be far more numerous than the

phenomena in contradiction to those laws, and therefore repulsive;

and so, too, the maintenance of society is a proof that conservative

and favourable, _i.e._, moral, forces must be more vigorous than

destructive, _i.e._, immoral, forces. Hence, in a poem which while it

did not trouble itself about morals, was nevertheless truly impartial,

as it pretended to be, morality would be represented on a scale at

least as large as, and even somewhat larger than, immorality. But in

the poetry of the Parnassians this is not the case. It delights almost

exclusively in depravity and ugliness. Théophile Gautier extols, in

_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, the basest sensuality, which, if it should

become the general rule, would carry humanity back to the condition

of savages living in sexual promiscuousness without individual love,

and without any family institutions whatever; Sainte-Beuve, in other

respects more romanticist than Parnassian, builds in his novel

_Volupté_ an altar to sexual pleasure, at which the ancient Asiatic

adorers of Ashtaroth could, without hesitation, have performed their

worship; Catulle Mendès, who began his literary career by being

condemned for a moral outrage (brought upon himself by his play _Le

Roman d’une Nuit_) exalts in his later works, of which I will not quote

the titles, one of the most abominable forms of unnatural license;

Baudelaire sings of carrion, maladies, criminals and prostitutes;

in short, if one contemplates the world in the mirror of Parnassian

poetry, the impression received is that it is composed exclusively

of vices, crimes and corruption without the smallest intermixture of

healthy emotions, joyous aspects of Nature and human beings feeling

and acting honestly. In perpetual contradiction to himself, as becomes

a truly degenerate mind, the same Baudelaire, who in one place does

not wish poetry to be confounded with morality, says in another place:

‘Modern art has an essentially devilish [_démoniaque_] tendency. And it

seems that this infernal side of his nature, which man takes a pleasure

in explaining to himself, increases daily, as if the devil amused

himself by magnifying it through artificial processes, in imitation

of the poultry-farmers, patiently cramming the human species in his

hen-yards to prepare for himself a more succulent nourishment.’[268]

There is no indifference here to virtue or vice; it is an absolute

predilection for the latter, and aversion for the former. Parnassians

do not at all hold themselves ‘beyond good or evil,’ but plunge

themselves up to the neck in evil, and as far as possible from good.

Their feigned ‘impartiality’ with regard to the drama of morality or

immorality is in reality a passionate partisanship for the immoral and

the disgusting. It was wrong, therefore, to think of characterizing

them by ‘impassibility.’ Just as they lack feeling only towards their

fellow-creatures, and not towards themselves, so they are only cold and

indifferent towards good, not towards evil; the latter attracts them,

on the contrary, as forcibly, and fills them as much with feelings of

pleasure, as the good attracts and rejoices the sane majority of men.

This predilection for evil has been discerned by many observers, and

a good number have endeavoured to explain it philosophically. In a

lecture on ‘Evil as the Object of Poetical Representation,’ Franz

Brentano says:[269]

‘Since what is presented in tragedy appears so little desirable and

cheerful, it suggests the idea that these explanations (of the pleasure

we find in it) are less to be sought in the excellence of the subject

than in some peculiar need of the public, which finds a response alone

in the things thus exhibited.... Can it be that man feels, from time

to time, the need of a melancholy emotion, and longs for tragedy as

for something which satisfies this need in the most efficacious way,

assisting him, so to speak, to weep heartily for once?... If for a

long time no passions, such as tragedies excite, have had sway in us,

the power to experience them demands anew, in some way, to manifest

itself, and it is tragedy which comes to our aid; we feel the emotions

painfully, it is true, but at the same time we experience a beneficial

alleviation of our need. I think I have observed similar facts a

hundred times--less in myself than in others, in those, for example,

who devour with avidity the newspaper report of the “latest murder.”’

Professor Brentano here confounds first of all, with a lamentable

levity, what is evil and what is saddening--two wholly different

concepts. The death of a beloved being, for example, is saddening,

but there is nothing evil in it, _i.e._, immoral, unless, by a subtle

quibble, it is proposed to interpret as an immorality the action of

natural forces in the dissolution of the individual. Further, he gives

as an explanation what is only a perfectly superficial paraphrase--Why

do we take pleasure in evil? Because ...we have evidently in us a

tendency to take pleasure in evil! _Opium facit dormire quia est in

eo virtus dormitiva._ M. Fr. Paulhan has treated the question more

seriously, but neither do we get very far with him. ‘A contemplative,

broad, inquisitive, penetrating mind,’ he says,[270] ‘with profound

moral tendencies, which can nevertheless sink into oblivion in great

part during scientific research or æsthetic contemplation; sometimes

also with a slight natural perversion, or simply a marked tendency

towards certain pleasures, whatever they may be, which are not an evil

in themselves, and may even be a good, but of which the abuse is an

evil--such are the foundations of the sentiment (love of evil) which is

occupying us. The idea of evil, by flattering a taste, finds a solid

point of support; and there is one reason more why it is agreeable--in

that it satisfies, ideally, an inclination which reason hinders from

being satisfied really to satiety.’

Here again is this sequence of ideas revolving in a circle, like a

cat at play biting its tail: we have a taste for evil, because we

find a taste for evil. The intellectual ineptitude which M. Paulhan

here reveals is so much the more surprising in that, some pages

above, he came very near the true solution of the enigma. ‘There are

morbid states,’ he there says, ‘where the appetites are depraved; the

patient eagerly swallows coal, earth, or things still worse. There

are others in which the will is vitiated, and the character warped

in some point. The pathological examples are striking, and the case

of the Marquis de Sade is one of the most characteristic.... One

sometimes finds enjoyment in the evils suffered by one’s self, just

as in those of others. The sentiments of voluptuousness, sorrow and

pity, which psychology has studied, appear to betray sometimes a

veritable perversion, and to contain as elements the love of sorrow

for sorrow itself.... Often one has to do with people who desire

their own weal primarily, and then the woe of others. One or other of

these psychical states is visible in many cases of wickedness; for

example, in the fact of a rich manufacturer falsely accusing a young

man, who is going to marry, of being affected by a venereal disease,

and maintaining his assertion _for the pleasure_ of doing so ... or,

again, of a young villain who relishes the pleasure of theft to the

point of crying: “Even if I were rich, I should always like to steal.”

Even the sight of physical suffering is not always disagreeable; many

people seek it.... This perversion is probably of all times and of all

countries.... It would seem that into the mind of a man of our times

there might enter a certain enjoyment in upsetting the order of nature,

which does not appear to have been manifested before with a similar

intensity. It is one of the thousand forms of recoiling on one’s self

which characterizes our advanced civilization.’ Here M. Paulhan touches

the kernel of the question, without remarking it or being arrested

by it. The love of evil is not a universally human attribute; it is

an ‘aberration’ and a ‘perversion,’ and ‘one of the thousand forms

of recoiling on one’s self,’ otherwise more briefly and more clearly

expressed as ego-mania.

The literature of penal legislation and mental therapeutics has

registered hundreds of cases of aberration in which the patient has

felt a passionate predilection for the evil and horrible, for sorrow

and death. I should like to quote only one characteristic example: ‘In

the autumn of 1884 there died, in a Swiss prison, Marie Jeanneret, a

murderess. After having received a good education she devoted herself

to the care of the sick, not for the love of doing good, but to

satisfy a mad passion. The sufferings, groans and distorted features

of the sick filled her with secret voluptuousness. She implored the

doctors, on her knees and with tears, to allow her to assist in

dangerous operations, in order to be able to gratify her cravings. The

death-agony of a human being afforded her the height of enjoyment.

Under the pretext of a disease of the eyes, she had consulted several

oculists, and had obtained from them belladonna and other poisons. Her

first victim, a woman, was her friend; others followed; the doctors,

to whom she had recommended herself as nurse, having no suspicions,

the less so because she frequently changed her residence. An attempt

failing in Vienna led to discovery; she had poisoned not less than nine

persons, but felt neither repentance nor shame. In prison her most

ardent wish was to fall dangerously ill, in order to satiate herself in

the looking-glass with the contortions of her own features.’[271]

Thus we recognise, in the light of clinical observation, the true

nature of the Parnassians. Their impassivity, in so far as it

is mere indifference to the sufferings of others, and to virtue

and vice, proceeds from their ego-mania, and is a consequence of

their obtuseness, which makes it impossible for them to receive a

sufficiently keen presentation of the external world, hence also of

sorrow, vice, or ugliness, so as to be able to respond by normal

reactions, by aversion, indignation, or pity. But in cases where

impassivity constitutes a declared predilection for what is evil and

disgusting, we can see the same aberration which makes of the imbecile

a cruel torturer of animals,[272] and of Marie Jeanneret, cited above,

a tenfold poisoner. The whole difference consists in the degree of

impulsion. If it is strong enough, its consequences are heartless acts

and crimes. If it is elaborated by diseased centres with insufficient

force, it can be satisfied by imagination alone, by poetic or artistic

activity.

Of course there have been attempts made to defend aberration as

something justified and voluntary, and even to erect it into an

intellectual distinction. Thus it is that M. Paul Bourget[273] puts

into the mouth of the ‘Décadents,’ with little artifices of style which

do not permit a moment’s doubt that he is expressing his own opinion,

the following argument: ‘We delight in what you call our corruptions

of style, and we delight at the same time the refined people of our

race and our time. It remains to be seen whether our exception is not

an aristocracy, and whether, in the æsthetic order, the majority of

suffrages represents anything else than the majority of ignorances....

It is a self-deception not to have the courage of one’s intellectual

pleasure. Let us delight, therefore, in our singularities of ideal

and of form, even if we must shut ourselves up in a solitude without

visitors.’

It seems scarcely necessary to show that by these arguments, in which

M. Bourget anticipates the whole delirious ‘philosophy’ of Nietzsche,

every crime can be glorified as an ‘aristocratic’ action. The assassin

has ‘the courage of his intellectual pleasure,’ the majority which does

not approve of him is a majority of the ‘ignorant,’ he delights in the

‘singularity’ of his ‘ideal,’ and for this reason must at the most

allow himself to be shut up in ‘a solitude without visitors,’ _i.e._,

to speak plainly, in a reformatory, if ‘the majority of ignorances’

does not have him hanged or guillotined. Has not the ‘Décadent’ Maurice

Barrès defended and justified Chambige, a specimen of the murderer for

love of murder, with Bourget’s theory?

This same repulsive theorist of the most abandoned anti-social

ego-mania denies also that one can speak of a mind as diseased or

healthy. ‘There is,’ he says,[274] ‘from the metaphysical observer’s

point of view, neither disease nor health of the soul; there are only

psychological states, for he perceives in our sufferings and in our

faculties, in our virtues and in our vices, in our volitions and in our

renunciations, only changing combinations, inevitable, and therefore

normal, subject to the known laws of the association of ideas. Only

prejudice, in which the ancient doctrine of final causes and the belief

in the definite aim of the universe reappear, can make us consider the

loves of Daphnis and Chloë in the valley as natural and healthy, and

the loves of a Baudelaire as artificial and unwholesome.’

To bring this silly sophistry down to its just value, common-sense has

only to recollect the existence of lunatic asylums. But common-sense

has not the right of suffrage among the rhetoricians of M. Paul

Bourget’s stamp. We reply to him, then, with a seriousness he does

not merit, that in fact every vital manifestation, those of the brain

as of any other organ, is the necessary and only possible effect

of the causes which occasion them, but that, according to the state

of the organ and of its elementary parts, its activity, necessary

and natural as such, can be useful or hurtful to the whole organism.

Whether the world has a purpose is a question that can altogether be

left indecisive, but the activity of each part of the organism has

nevertheless, if not the aim, at least unquestionably the effect, of

preserving the whole organism; if it does not produce this effect,

and if, on the contrary, it thwarts it, it is injurious to the whole

organism, and for such an injurious activity of any particular organ

language has coined the word ‘disease.’ The sophist who denies that

there may be disease and health must also logically deny that there

may be life and death, or, at least, that death may have some sort

of importance. For, as a matter of fact, given a certain activity of

its parts which we call morbid, the organism perishes, while with an

activity of another nature, which we qualify as healthy, it lives

and thrives. As long, then, as Bourget does not lay down the dogma

that pain is as agreeable as pleasure, decrepitude as satisfactory as

vigour, and death as desirable as life, he proves that he does not

know, or dares not draw from his premise, the just conclusion which

would immediately make the absurdity of it apparent.

The whole theory which must explain and justify the predilection for

evil has, besides, been invented as an after-thought. The inclination

for what is evil and disgusting existed first, and was not a

consequence of philosophical considerations and self-persuasion. We

have here merely another case of that method of our consciousness, so

often attested in the course of these inquiries, which consists of

inventing rational causes for the instincts and acts of the unconscious.

In the predilection of the Parnassians for the immoral, criminal and

ugly, we have to deal merely with an organic aberration, and with

nothing else. To pretend that inclinations of this kind exist in all

men, even in the best and sanest, and are merely stifled by him,

while the Parnassians give the rein to theirs, is an arbitrary and

unproved assertion. Observation and the whole march of the historical

development of humanity contradict it.

There may be repulsion and attraction in nature--no one denies it. A

glance at the magnetic poles, at the positive and negative electrodes,

suffices to establish this fact. We find this phenomenon again among

the lowest forms of life. Certain materials attract, others repel

them. There is no question here of an inclination or an expression of

the will. We must rather consider the process as purely mechanical,

having its reason probably in molecular relations which are still

unknown to us. Microbiology gives to the attitude of micro-organisms

towards attractive and repulsive matter the name of ‘chemotaxis’

or chimiotaxia, invented by Pfeffer.[275] In higher organisms the

conditions are naturally not so simple. Among them also, it is

true, the ultimate cause of inclinations and aversions is certainly

chimiotactic, but the effect of chimiotaxia must necessarily manifest

itself under another form. A simple cell such as a bacillus, for

example, is repelled directly when it penetrates into the radius of a

chimic body which repels it. But the cell constituting a portion of

a higher organism has not this liberty of movement. It cannot change

its place independently. If it is now chimiotactically repelled, it

cannot escape from the pernicious action, but must remain exposed to

it, and submit to the disturbances in its vital activity. If these are

sufficiently serious to injure the functions of the whole organism, the

latter obtains knowledge of it, endeavours to perceive their cause,

discovers it also, as a general rule, and does for the suffering cell

what the latter cannot do alone, namely, shields it from the repelling

action. The organism necessarily acquires experience in its defence

against pernicious influences. It learns to know the circumstances

in which they appear, and no longer permits matters to reach the

stage of the really chimiotactic effect, but for the most part evades

disturbing matters before they can exert a really direct repulsion. The

knowledge acquired by the individual becomes hereditary, transforms

itself into an organized faculty of the species, and the organism feels

subjectively, as a discomfort which may amount to pain, the warning

that a pernicious influence is acting upon it, and that it has to avoid

it. To escape from pain becomes one principal function of the organism,

which it cannot insufficiently provide against or neglect without

expiating that negligence by its ruin.

In the human being processes take place not otherwise than as they

have been here described. The hereditary organized experience of the

species warns him of the noxiousness of influences to which he is

frequently exposed. His outposts against naturally hostile forces are

his senses. Taste and smell give him, as to repulsive chimiotactic

matter, the impressions of nausea and of stench; the different kinds of

skin-sensations make him aware, through sensations of pain, heat, or

cold, that a given contact is unfavourable to him; eye and ear place

him on his guard, by loud, shrill, discordant sensations, against

the mechanical effects of certain physical phenomena. Finally, the

higher cerebral centres respond to recognised noxious influences of

a composite nature, or to the representation of them by an equally

composite reaction of aversion in different degrees of intensity, from

simple discomfort to horror, indignation, dismay, or fury.

The vehicle of this hereditary, organized, racial experience is the

unconscious life; to it is confided defence against simple, frequently

recurring noxious influences. Nausea at intolerable tastes, repugnance

to insufferable smells, the fear of dangerous animals, natural

phenomena, etc., have become for it an instinct to which the organism

abandons itself without reflection--_i.e._, without the intervention of

consciousness. But the human organism learns to distinguish and avoid

not only all that is directly prejudicial to itself; it acts in the

same way with regard to that which menaces it not as an individual, but

as a racial being, as a member of an organized society; antipathy to

influences injurious to the maintenance or prosperity of the society

becomes in him an instinct. But this enriching of organized unconscious

cognition represents a higher degree of development than many human

beings attain to. The social instincts are those that a man acquires

last of all, and, in conformity to a known law, he loses them first

when he retrogrades in his organic development.

Consciousness has occasion to declare the dangerous nature of

phenomena, and to defend the organism against it, only if these

phenomena are either quite new, or very rare, so that they cannot be

hereditarily recognised and dreaded; or if they enclose in themselves

many different elements, and do not act directly, but only by their

more or less remote consequences, so that to know them exacts a complex

activity of representation and judgment.

Thus aversion is always the instinctive, or conscious cognition of a

noxious influence. Pleasure, its opposite, is not merely, as has been

sometimes maintained, the absence of discomfort--_i.e._, a negative

state--but something positive. Every part of the organism has definite

needs which assert themselves as a conscious or unconscious tendency,

as an inclination or appetite; the satisfaction of these needs is felt

as a pleasure which can rise to a feeling of bliss. The first need of

each organ is to manifest itself in activity. Its simple activity is a

source of pleasure to it, so long as it does not go beyond its powers.

The activity of the cerebral centres consists in receiving impressions,

and in transforming them into representations and movements. This

activity produces in them feelings of pleasure; they have in

consequence a strong desire to receive impressions so as to be put into

activity by them, and experience feelings of pleasure.

This, broadly sketched, is the natural history of the feelings of

pleasure and pain. The reader who has mastered it will experience no

difficulty in comprehending the nature of aberration.

Unconscious life is subject to the same biological laws as

conscious life. The vehicle of the unconscious is the same nervous

tissue--although, it may be, another portion of the system--in

which consciousness is also elaborated. The unconscious is just as

little infallible as consciousness. It can be more highly developed

or retarded in its development; it can be more or less stupid or

intelligent. If the unconscious is incompletely developed, it

distinguishes badly and judges falsely, it deceives itself in the

knowledge of what is prejudicial or favourable to it, and instinct

becomes unreliable or obtuse. Then we get the phenomenon of

indifference to what is ugly, loathsome, immoral.

We know that among the degenerate divers arrested developments and

malformations appear. Particular organs or entire systems of organs

are arrested at a degree of development which corresponds to infancy,

or even to the fœtal life. If the highest cerebral centres of the

degenerate stop in their development at a very low stage, they become

imbeciles or idiots. If the arrest of development strikes the nervous

centres of unconscious life, the degenerate lose the instincts which,

in normal beings, find expression in nausea and disgust at certain

noxious influences; I might say, their unconscious life suffers from

imbecility or idiocy.

Again, we have seen in the preceding chapter that the impressionability

of the nerves and brain in the degenerate subject is blunted. Hence he

only perceives strong impressions, and it is only these which excite

his cerebral centres to that intellectual and motor activity which

produces in them feelings of pleasure. Now, disagreeable impressions

are naturally stronger than agreeable or indifferent impressions, for

if they were not stronger we should not feel them as painful, and

they would not induce the organism to make efforts to defend itself.

To procure, then, the feelings of pleasure which are linked with the

activity of the cerebral centres, to satisfy the need of functioning

which is peculiar to the cerebral centres as to all the other organs,

the degenerate person seeks impressions which are strong enough to

excite to activity his obtuse and inert centres. But such impressions

are precisely those which the healthy man feels as painful or

repugnant. Thus, the aberrations or perversions of the degenerate find

explanation. They have a longing for strong impressions, because these

only can put their brains into activity, and this desired effect on

their centres is only exercised by impressions that sane beings dread

because of their violence, _i.e._, painful, repugnant and revolting

impressions.

To say that every human being has secretly a certain predilection

for the evil and the abominable is absurd: the only little spark of

truth contained in this foolish assertion is, that even the normal

human being becomes obtuse when fatigued, or exhausted by illness;

_i.e._, he falls into the state which, in the degenerate, is chronic.

Then he presents naturally the same phenomena as we have attested

in the case of the latter, although in a much lower degree. He may

find pleasure, then, in crime and ugliness, and in the former rather

than in the latter; for crimes are social injuries, while uglinesses

are the visible form of forces unfavourable to the individual; but

social instincts are feebler than the instincts of self-preservation.

Consequently they are sooner put to sleep, and for this reason the

repulsion against crime disappears more quickly than that against

ugliness. In any case, this state is also an aberration in the normal

being, but imputable to fatigue, and in him is not chronic, as in the

degenerate, nor does it amount to the hidden fundamental character of

his being, as the sophists who calumniate him pretend.

An uninterrupted line of development leads from the French romantic

school to the Parnassians, and all the germs of the aberrations which

confront us in full expansion among the latter can be distinguished

in the former. We have seen in the preceding book how superficial and

poor in ideas their poetry is, how they exalt their imagination above

the observation of reality, and what importance they assign to their

world of dreams. Sainte-Beuve, who at first joined their group, says

on this subject, with a complacency which proves he was not conscious

of expressing any blame: ‘The Romance School ... had a thought, a

cult, viz., love of art and passionate inquisitiveness for a vivid

expression, a new turn, a choice image, a brilliant rhyme: they wished

for every one of their frames a peg of gold. [A remarkably false

image, let it be said in passing. A rich frame may be desired for a

picture, but as to the nail which supports it, regard will be had to

its solidity and not to its preciousness.] Children if you will, but

children of the Muses, who never sacrifice to ordinary grace [_grâce

vulgaire_].’[276]

Let us hold this admission firmly, that the romantic writers were

children; they were so in their inaptitude to comprehend the world

and men, in the seriousness and zeal with which they gave themselves

up to their game of rhymes, in the artlessness with which they placed

themselves above the precepts of morality and good sense in use among

adults. Let us exaggerate this childishness a little (without allying

with it the wild and exuberant imagination of a Victor Hugo, and his

gift of lightning-like rapidity of association, evoking the most

startling antitheses), and we obtain the literary figure of Théophile

Gautier, whom the imbecile Barbey d’Aurevilly could name in the same

breath with Goethe,[277] evidently for the sole reason that the sound

of the great German poet’s name in French pronunciation has a certain

resemblance to that of Gautier, but of whom one of his admirers, M.

J. K. Huysmans, says:[278] ‘Des Esseintes [the hero of his novel]

became gradually indifferent to Gautier’s work; his admiration for that

incomparable painter had gone on diminishing from day to day, and now

he was more astonished than delighted by his indifferent descriptions.

The impression left by the objects was fixed on his keenly observant

eye, but it was localized there, and had not penetrated further into

his brain and flesh [?]; like a monstrous reflector, he was constantly

limited to reverberate his environment with an impersonal distinctness.’

When M. Huysmans regards Gautier as an impersonal mirror of reality,

he is the victim of an optical illusion. In verse as in prose, Gautier

is a mechanical worker, who threads one line of glittering adjectives

after another, without designing anything particular. His descriptions

never give a clear outline of the object he wishes to depict. They

recall some crude mosaic of the later Byzantine decadence, the

different stones of which are lapis-lazuli, malachite, chrysoprase and

jasper, and which yield, for this reason, an impression of barbarous

splendour, while scarcely any design is discernible. In his ego-mania,

lacking all sympathy with the external world, he does not suspect what

sorrows and joys its drama encloses, and just as he feels nothing in

the prospect before him, so neither can he awaken in the reader emotion

of any sort by his listless and affected attempts to render it. The

only emotions of which he is capable, apart from his arrogance and

vanity, are those connected with sex; hence, in his works we merely

find alternations between glacial coldness and lubricity.

If we exaggerate Théophile Gautier’s worship of form and

lasciviousness, and if to his indifference towards the world and

men we associate the aberration which caused it to degenerate into

a predilection for the bad and the loathsome, we have before us the

figure of Baudelaire. We must stop there awhile, for Baudelaire

is--even more than Gautier--the intellectual chief and model of the

Parnassians, and his influence dominates the present generation of

French poets and authors, and a portion also of English poets and

authors, to an omnipotent degree.

It is not necessary to demonstrate at length that Baudelaire was a

degenerate subject. He died of general paralysis, after he had wallowed

for months in the lowest depths of insanity. But even if no such

horrible end had protected the diagnosis from all attack, there would

be no doubt as to its accuracy, seeing that Baudelaire showed all the

mental stigmata of degeneration during the whole of his life. He was

at once a mystic and an erotomaniac,[279] an eater of hashish and

opium;[280] he felt himself attracted in the characteristic fashion by

other degenerate minds, mad or depraved, and appreciated, for example,

above all authors, the gifted but mentally-deranged Edgar Poe, and

the opium-eater Thomas de Quincey. He translated Poe’s tales, and

devoted to them an enthusiastic biography and critique, while from

the _Confessions of an Opium-Eater_, by De Quincey, he compiled an

exhaustive selection, to which he wrote extravagant annotations.

The peculiarities of Baudelaire’s mind are revealed to us in the

collection of his poems, to which he has given a title betraying at

once his self-knowledge and his cynicism: _Les Fleurs du Mal_--‘The

Flowers of Evil.’ The collection is not complete. There lack some

pieces which only circulate in manuscript, because they are too

infamous to bear the full publicity of a marketable book. I will take

my quotations, however, from the printed verses only, which are quite

sufficient to characterize their author.

Baudelaire hates life and movement. In the piece entitled _Les Hiboux_,

he shows us his owls sitting in a row, motionless, under the black

yews, and continues:

‘Leur attitude au sage enseigne

Qu’il faut en ce monde qu’il craigne

Le tumulte et le mouvement.

L’homme ivre d’une ombre qui passe

Porte toujours le châtiment

D’avoir voulu changer de place.’

Beauty says of herself, in the piece of that name:

‘Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes;

Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.’

He abhors the natural as much as he loves the artificial. Thus he

depicts his ideal world (_Rêve Parisien_):

‘De ce terrible paysage

Que jamais œil mortel ne vit,

Ce matin encore l’image,

Vague et lointaine, me ravit....

‘J’avais banni de ces spectacles

Le végétal irrégulier....

‘Je savourais dans mon tableau

L’enivrante [!] monotonie

Du métal, du marbre et de l’eau.

‘Babel d’escaliers et d’arcades

C’était un palais infini,

Plein de bassins et de cascades

Tombant dans l’or mat ou bruni;

‘Et des cataractes pesantes,

Comme des rideaux de cristal,

Se suspendaient, éblouissantes,

A des murailles de métal.

‘Non d’arbres, mais de colonnades

Les étangs dormants s’entouraient,

Où de gigantesques naïades,

Comme des femmes, se miraient.

‘Des nappes d’eau s’épanchaient, bleues,

Entre des quais roses et verts,

Pendant des millions de lieues,

Vers les confins de l’univers;

‘C’étaient des pierres inouïes

Et des flots magiques; c’étaient

D’immenses glaces éblouies

Par tout ce qu’elles reflétaient.

‘Et tout, même la couleur noire,

Semblait fourbi, clair, irisé....

‘Nul astre d’ailleurs, nuls vestiges

De soleil, même au bas du ciel,

Pour illuminer ces prodiges,

Qui brillaient d’un feu personnel (!)

‘Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles

Planait (terrible nouveauté!

Tout pour l’œil, rien pour les oreilles!)

Un silence d’eternité.’

Such is the world he represents to himself, and which fills him with

enthusiasm: not an ‘irregular’ plant, no sun, no stars, no movement,

no noise, nothing but metal and glass, _i.e._, something like a tin

landscape from Nuremberg, only larger and of more costly material,

a plaything for the child of an American millionaire suffering from

the wealth-madness of parvenus, with a little electric lamp in the

interior, and a mechanism which slowly turns the glass cascades,

and makes the glass sheet of water slide. Such must necessarily be

the aspect of the ego-maniac’s ideal world. Nature leaves him cold

or repels him, because he neither perceives nor comprehends her;

hence, where the sane man sees the picture of the external world,

the ego-maniac is surrounded by a dark void in which, at most,

uncomprehended nebulous forms are hovering. To escape the horror of

them he projects, as from a magic-lantern, coloured shadows of the

images which fill his consciousness; but these representations are

rigid, inert, uniform and infantile, like the morbid and weak cerebral

centres by which they are elaborated.

The incapacity of the ego-maniac to feel aright external impressions,

and the toil with which his brain works, are also the key of the

frightful tedium of which Baudelaire complains, and of the profound

pessimism with which he contemplates the world and life. Let us hear

him in _Le Voyage_:

‘Nous avons vu partout...

Le spectacle ennuyeux de l’immortel péché:

‘La femme, esclave vile, orgueilleuse et stupide,

Sans rire s’adorant et s’aimant sans dégôut;

L’homme, tyran goulu, paillard, dur et cupide,

Esclave de l’esclave et ruisseau dans l’égout;

‘Le bourreau qui jouit, le martyr qui sanglote;

La fête qu’assaisonne et parfume le sang;...

‘Et les moins sots, hardis amants de la démence,

Fuyant le grand troupeau parqué par le Destin,

Et se réfugiant dans l’opium immense [!].

--Tel est du globe entier l’éternel bulletin...

‘O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre!

Ce pays nous ennuie, O Mort! Appareillons!

‘Nous voulons...

Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?

Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’

This desperate cry towards the ‘new’ is the natural complaint of a

brain which longs to feel the pleasures of action, and greedily craves

a stimulation which his powerless sensory nerves cannot give him. Let a

sane man imagine the state of mind into which he would fall if he were

imprisoned in a cell where no ray of light, no noise, no scent from the

outer world would reach him. He would then have an accurate idea of

the chronic state of mind in the ego-maniac, eternally isolated by the

imperfection of his nervous system from the universe, from its joyous

sounds, from its changing scenes and from its captivating movement.

Baudelaire cannot but suffer terribly from ennui, for his mind really

learns nothing new and amusing, and is forced constantly to indulge in

the contemplation of his ailing and whimpering self.

The only pictures which fill the world of his thought are sombre,

wrathful and detestable. He says (_Un Mort joyeux_):

‘Dans une terre grasse et pleine d’escargots

Je veux creuser moi-même une fosse profonde

Où je puisse à loisir étaler mes vieux os

Et dormir dans l’oubli comme un requin dans l’onde...

Plutôt que d’implorer une larme du monde

Vivant, j’aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux

A saigner tous les bouts de ma carcasse immonde.

‘O vers! noir compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux,

Voyez venir à vous un mort libre et joyeux!’

In _La Cloche fêlée_, he says of himself:

‘... Mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu’en ses ennuis

Elle veut de ses chants peupler l’air froid des nuits

Il arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie

Semble le râle épais d’un blessé qu’on oublie

Au bord d’un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts.’

_Spleen_:

‘...on triste cerveau...

C’est.. un immense caveau

Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune.

--Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune

Où, comme des remords, se traînent de longs vers....’

_Horreur sympathique_:

‘Cieux déchirés comme des grèves,

En vous se mire mon orgueil!

Vos vastes nuages en deuil.

‘Sont les corbillards de mes rêves,

Et vos lueurs sont le reflet,

De l’Enfer où mon cœur se plaît!’

_Le Coucher du Soleil romantique_:

‘Une odeur de tombeau dans les ténèbres nage,

Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marécage,

Des crapauds imprévus et de froids limaçons.’

_Dance macabre_: The poet speaking to a skeleton:

‘Aucuns t’appelleront une caricature,

Qui ne comprennent pas, amants ivres de chair,

L’élégance sans nom de l’humaine armature.

Tu réponds, grand squelette, à mon goût le plus cher!...’

_Une Charogne_:

‘Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,

Ce beau matin d’été si doux:

Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme

Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

‘Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique

Brûlante et suant les poisons,

Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique

Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons....

‘Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe [!]

Comme une fleur s’épanouir.

La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe

Vous crûtes vous évanouir....

‘Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,

A cette horrible infection,

Étoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,

Vous, mon ange et ma passion!

‘Oui! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces,

Après les derniers sacrements,

Quand vous irez, sous l’herbe et les floraisons grasses,

Moisir parmi les ossements....’

That which pleases Baudelaire most are these pictures of death and

corruption which I could quote in still greater numbers if I did not

think that these examples sufficed. However, next to the frightful

and the loathsome it is the morbid, the criminal and the lewd, which

possess the strongest attraction for him.

_Le Rêve d’un Curieux_:

‘Connais-tu, comme moi, la douleur savoureuse?...’

_Spleen_:

‘Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière

Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux....’

_Le Vin du Solitaire_:

‘Un baiser libertin de la maigre Adeline....’

_Le Crépuscule du Soir_:

‘Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel; ...

Et l’homme impatient se change en bête fauve....’

_La Destruction_:

‘Sans cesse à mes côtés s’agite le Démon....

Je l’avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon

Et l’emplit d’un désir éternel et coupable....

‘Il me conduit....

Haletant et brisé de fatigue, au milieu

Des plaines de l’Ennui, profondes et désertes,

‘Et jette dans mes yeux....

Des vêtements souillés, des blessures ouvertes,

Et l’appareil sanglant de la Destruction!’

In _Une Martyre_ he describes complacently and in detail a bedroom in

which a young, presumably pretty courtesan has been murdered; the

assassin had cut off her head and carried it away. The poet is only

curious to know one thing:

‘L’homme vindicatif que tu n’as pu, vivante,

Malgré tant d’amour, assouvir,

Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante

L’immensité de son désir?’

_Femmes damnées_, a piece dedicated to the worst aberration of

degenerate women, terminates with this ecstatic apostrophe to the

heroines of unnatural vice:

‘O vierges, ô démons, ô monstres, ô martyres,

De la réalité grands esprits contempteurs,

Chercheuses d’infini, dévotes et satyres,

Tantôt pleines de cris, tantôt pleines de pleurs,

Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies,

Pauvres sœurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains....’

_Préface_:

‘Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie,

N’ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins

Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,

C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie....’

But if he is not bold enough to commit crimes himself, he does not

leave a moment’s doubt that he loves them, and much prefers them to

virtue, just as he prefers the ‘end of autumns, winters, springs

steeped in mud,’ to the fine season of the year (_Brumes et Pluies_).

He is ‘hostile to the universe rather than indifferent’ (_Les sept

Vieillards_). The sight of pain leaves him cold, and if tears are shed

before him they only evoke in his mind the image of a landscape with

running waters.

_Madrigal triste_:

‘Que m’importe que tu sois sage?

Sois belle! et sois triste! Les pleurs

Ajoutent un charme au visage,

Comme le fleuve au paysage.’

In the struggle between _Abel et Caïn_ he takes the part of the latter

without hesitation:

‘Race d’Abel, dors, bois et mange;

Dieu te sourit complaisamment.

‘Race de Caïn, dans la fange

Rampe et meurs misérablement.

‘Race d’Abel, ton sacrifice

Flatte le nez du Séraphin.

‘Race de Caïn, ton supplice

Aura-t-il jamais une fin?

‘Race d’Abel, vois tes semailles

Et ton bétail venir à bien;

‘Race de Caïn, tes entrailles

Hurlent la faim comme un vieux chien.

‘Race d’Abel, chauffe ton ventre

A ton foyer patriarchal;

‘Race de Caïn, dans ton antre

Tremble de froid, pauvre chacal!

‘Ah! race d’Abel, ta charogne

Engraissera le sol fumant!

‘Race de Caïn, ta besogne

N’est pas faite suffisamment.

‘Race d’Abel, voici ta honte:

Le fer est vaincu par l’épieu! [?]

‘Race de Caïn, au ciel monte

Et sur la terre jette Dieu!’

If he prays it is to the devil (_Les Litanies de Satan_):

‘Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs

Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs

De l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!

Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l’Arbre de Science,

Près de toi se repose....’

Here there mingles with the aberration that mysticism which is never

wanting in the degenerate. Naturally, the love of evil can only take

the form of devil-worship, or diabolism, if the subject is a believer,

if the supernatural is held to be a real thing. Only he who is rooted

with all his feelings in religious faith will, if he suffers from

moral aberration, seek bliss in the adoration of Satan, in impassioned

blasphemy of God and the Saviour, in the violation of the symbols of

faith, or will wish to incite unnatural voluptuousness by mortal sin

and infernal damnation, though humouring it in the _messe noire_, in

the presence of a really consecrated priest, and in a hideous travesty

of all the forms of the liturgy.

Besides the devil, Baudelaire adores only one other power, viz.,

voluptuousness. He prays thus to it (_La Prière d’un Païen_):

‘Ah! ne ralentis pas tes flammes!

Réchauffe mon cœur engourdi,

Volupté, torture des âmes!...

Volupté, sois toujours ma reine!’

To complete the portrait of this mind, let us cite two more of his

peculiarities. He suffers first from images of perpetual anguish, as

his piece testifies (_Le Gouffre_), which is valuable as a confession:

‘... Tout est abîme,--action, désir, rêve,

Parole! et sur mon poil qui tout droit se relève

Mainte fois de la peur je sens passer le vent.

‘En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève,

Le silence, l’espace affreux et captivant...

Sur le fonde de mes nuits, Dieu, de son doigt savant,

Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans trêve.

‘J’ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d’un grand trou,

Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait où;

Je ne vois qu’infini par toutes les fenêtres,

‘Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hanté,

Jalouse du néant l’insensibilité.’

Baudelaire describes here accurately enough that obsession of

degenerates which is called ‘fear of abysses’ (cremnophobia).[281]

His second peculiarity is his interest in scents. He is attentive to

them, interprets them; they provoke in him all kinds of sensations

and associations. He expresses himself thus on this subject in

_Correspondances_:

‘Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent.

‘Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,

--Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

‘Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,

Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,

Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.’

He loves woman through his sense of smell ... (‘Le parfum de tes

charmes étranges,’ _A une Malabaraise_), and never fails, in describing

a mistress, to mention her exhalations.

_Parfum exotique_:

‘Quand les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d’automne,

Je respire l’odeur de ton sein chaleureux,

Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux

Qu’eblouissent les feux d’un soleil monotone.’

_La Chevelure_:

‘O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l’encolure!

O boucles! O parfum chargé de nonchaloir!...

‘La langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique,

Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque défunt,

Vit dans tes profondeurs, forêt aromatique!’

Naturally, instead of good odours, he prefers the perfumes which affect

the healthy man as stinks. Putrefaction, decomposition and pestilence

charm his nose.

_Le Flacon_:

‘Il est de forts parfums pour qui toute matière

Est poreuse. On dirait qu’ils pénètrent le verre...

Parfois on trouve un vieux flacon qui se souvient,

D’où jaillit toute vive une âme qui revient.

‘Voilà le souvenir enivrant qui voltige

Dans l’air troublé; les yeux se ferment; le vertige

Saisit l’âme vaincue et la pousse à deux mains

Vers un gouffre obscurci de miasmes humains;

‘Il la terrasse au bord d’un gouffre séculaire,

Où, Lazare odorant déchirant son suaire,

Se meut dans son réveil le cadavre spectral

D’un vieil amour ranci, charmant et sepulcral.

‘Ainsi, quand je serai perdu dans la memoire

Des hommes, dans le coin d’une sinistre armoire

Quand on m’aura jeté, vieux flacon désolé,

Décrépit, poudreux, sale, abject, visqueux, fêlé,

‘Je serai ton cercueil, aimable pestilence!

Le témoin de ta force et de ta virulence,

Cher poison préparé par les anges!...’

We now know all the features which compose Baudelaire’s character.

He has the ‘cult of self’;[282] he abhors nature, movement and life;

he dreams of an ideal of immobility, of eternal silence, of symmetry

and artificiality; he loves disease, ugliness and crime; all his

inclinations, in profound aberration, are opposed to those of sane

beings; what charms his sense of smell is the odour of corruption;

his eye, the sight of carrion, suppurating wounds and the pain of

others; he feels happy in muddy, cloudy, autumn weather; his senses

are excited by unnatural pleasures only. He complains of frightful

tedium and of feelings of anguish; his mind is filled with sombre

ideas, the association of his ideas works exclusively with sad or

loathsome images; the only thing which can distract or interest him

is badness--murder, blood, lewdness and falsehood. He addresses his

prayers to Satan, and aspires to hell.

He has attempted to make his peculiarities pass for a comedy and

a studied pose. In a note placed at the head of the first edition

(1857) of the _Fleurs du Mal_, he says: ‘Among the following pieces,

the most characteristic ... has been considered, at least by men of

intellect, only for what it really is: the imitation of the arguments

of ignorance and fury. Faithful to his painful programme, the author

has had, like a good comedian, to fashion his mind to all sophisms,

as to all corruptions. This candid declaration will, doubtless, not

prevent honest critics from ranking him among the theologians of the

people,’ etc. Some of his admirers accept this explanation or appear to

accept it. ‘His intense disdain of the vulgar,’ murmurs Paul Bourget,

‘breaks out in extremes of paradox, in laborious mystification....

Among many readers, even the keenest, the fear of being duped by this

grand disdainer hinders full admiration.’[283] The term has become

a commonplace of criticism for Baudelaire; he is a ‘mystificateur’;

everything for him is only a deception; he himself neither feels nor

believes anything he expresses in his poetry. It is twaddle, and

nothing else. A rhetorician of the Paul Bourget sort, threshing straw,

and curling scraps of paper, may believe that an inwardly free man is

capable of preserving artificially, all his life long, the attitude of

a galley-slave or a madman, well knowing he is only acting a comedy.

The expert knows that the choice of an attitude, such as Baudelaire’s,

is a proof in itself of deep-seated cerebral disturbance.

Mental therapeutics has declared that persons who simulate insanity

with some perseverance, even with a rational object, as, for example,

in the case of certain criminals on their trial, in order to escape

punishment, are almost without exception really mad,[284] although

not to the degree they try to represent, just as the inclination to

accuse one’s self, or to boast, of imaginary crimes is a recognised

symptom of hysteria. The assertion of Baudelaire himself, that his

Satanism is only a studied _rôle_, has no sort of value whatever. As

is so frequently the case among the ‘higher degenerates,’ he feels in

his heart that his aberrations are morbid, immoral and anti-social,

and that all decent persons would despise him or take pity on him,

if they were convinced that he was really what he boasts of being in

his poems; he has recourse, consequently, to the childish excuse that

malefactors also often have on their lips, viz., ‘that it was not

meant seriously.’ Perhaps also Baudelaire’s consciousness experienced

a sincere horror of the perverse instincts of his unconscious life,

and he sought to make himself believe that with his Satanism he was

laughing at the Philistines. But such a tardy palliation does not

deceive the psychologist, and is of no importance for his judgment.

CHAPTER III.

DECADENTS AND ÆSTHETES.

AS on the death of Alexander the Great his generals fell on the

conqueror’s empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so did the

imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his contemporaries and the

generation following--many even without waiting for his madness and

death--take possession of some one of his peculiarities for literary

exploitation. The school of Baudelaire reflects the character of its

master, strangely distorted; it has become in some sort like a prism,

which diffracts this light into its elementary rays. His delusion

of anxiety (anxiomania), and his predilection for disease, death

and putrefaction (necrophilia), have fallen, as we have seen in the

preceding book, to the lot of M. Maurice Rollinat. M. Catulle Mendès

has inherited his sexual aberrations and lasciviousness, and besides

all the newer French pornographists rely upon them for proving the

‘artistic raison d’être’ of their depravity. Jean Richepin, in _La

Chanson des Gueux_, has spied in him, and copied, his glorification

of crime, and, further, in _Les Blasphèmes_, has swelled Baudelaire’s

imprecations and prayers to the devil to the size of a fat volume,

in a most dreary and wearisome manner. His mysticism suckles the

Symbolists, who, after his example, pretend to perceive mysterious

relations between colours and the sensations of the other senses, with

this difference, that they hear colours while he smelt them; or, if

you will, they have an eye in their ear, while he saw with the nose.

In Paul Verlaine we meet again his mixture of sensuality and pietism.

Swinburne has established an English depot for his Sadism, compounded

of lewdness and cruelty, for his mysticism and for his pleasure in

crime, and I greatly fear that Giosué Carducci himself, otherwise so

richly gifted and original, must have turned his eyes towards the

_Litanies de Satan_, when he wrote his celebrated _Ode à Satan_.

The diabolism of Baudelaire has been specially cultivated by Villiers

de l’Isle-Adam and Barbey d’Aurevilly. These two men have, in addition

to the general family likeness of the degenerate, a series of special

features in common. Villiers and Barbey attributed to themselves, as

the deranged frequently do, a fabulous genealogy; the former aspired

to be a descendant of Count de l’Isle-Adam, the celebrated Marshal

and Grand-Master of Malta (who as such could not be married, be it

understood!), and he claimed one day, in a letter addressed to the

Queen of England, the surrender of Malta in virtue of his right of

heritage. Barbey annexed the aristocratic surname of d’Aurevilly, and

during the whole of his life spoke of his noble race--which had no

existence. Both made a theatrical display of fanatical Catholicism, but

revelled at the same time in studied blasphemies against God.[285] Both

delighted in eccentricities of costume and modes of life, and Barbey

had the habit of graphomaniacs, which we know already, of writing his

letters and his literary works with different coloured inks. Villiers

de l’Isle-Adam, and still more Barbey d’Aurevilly, created a class

of poetry to the worship of the devil, which recalls the craziest

depositions of witches of the Middle Ages when put to the torture.

Barbey especially may be said to have gone, in this respect, to the

limits of the imaginable. His book _Le Prêtre marié_ might be written

by a contemporary of witch-burners; but it is surpassed in its turn by

_Les Diaboliques_, a collection of crack-brained histories, where men

and women wallow in the most hideous license, continually invoking the

devil, extolling and serving him. All the invention in these ravings

Barbey stole with utter shamelessness from the books of the Marquis

de Sade, without a shade of shame; that which belongs properly to him

is the colouring of Catholic theology he gives to his profligacies.

If I only speak in general terms of the books mentioned here, without

entering into details, without summarizing the contents, or quoting

characteristic passages, it is because my demonstrations do not require

a plunge into this filth, and it is sufficient to point the finger from

afar at the sink of vice which testifies to Baudelaire’s influence on

his contemporaries.

Barbey, the imitator of Baudelaire, has himself found an imitator in

M. Joséphin Péladan, whose first novel, _Vice suprême_, occupies an

eminent place in the literature of diabolism. M. Péladan, who had not

yet promoted himself to the dignity of a first-class Assyrian king,

paraphrases in his book what he means by ‘_vice suprême_’: ‘Let us

deny Satan! Sorcery has always sorcerers ... superior minds which have

no need of conjuring-book, their thought being a page written by hell

for hell. Instead of the kid they have killed the good soul within

them, and are going to the Sabbath of the Word.’ [May the reader not

stumble over obscurities! What were Péladan if he were not mystical?]

‘They assemble to profane and soil the idea. Existing vice does not

satisfy them; they invent, they rival each other in seeking for, _new

evil_, and if they find it they applaud each other. Which is worst, the

Sabbath-orgies of the body or those of the mind, of criminal action

or of perverted thought? To reason, justify, to apotheosize evil, to

establish its ritual, to show the excellence of it--is this not worse

than to commit it? To adore the demon, or love evil, the abstract or

the concrete term of one and the same fact. There is blindness in the

gratification of instinct, and madness in the perpetration of misdeeds;

but to conceive and theorize exacts a calm operation of the mind which

is the _vice suprême_.’[286]

Baudelaire has expressed this much more concisely in one single verse:

‘_La conscience dans le Mal_’ (‘consciousness in evil’).[287]

The same Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who has copied his diabolism from

Baudelaire, has appropriated the predilection of the latter for the

artificial, and has raised it to a funny pitch in his novel _L’Ève

future_. In this half-fantastic half-satirical and wholly mad book,

he imagines, as the next development of humanity, a state in which

the woman of flesh and blood will be abolished, and be replaced by a

machine to which he allows (which is a little contradictory) the shape

of a woman’s body, and which it will be sufficient with the help of

a screw so to dispose, in order to obtain from it at once whatever

happens to be desired: love, caprices, infidelity, devotion, every

perversion and every vice. This is in sooth even more artificial than

Baudelaire’s tin and glass landscape!

A later disciple, M. Joris Karl Huysmans, is more instructive than

all those imitators of Baudelaire who have only developed the one or

the other side of him. He has undertaken the toilsome task of putting

together, from all the isolated traits which are found dispersed

in Baudelaire’s poems and prose writings, a human figure, and of

presenting to us Baudelairism incarnate and living, thinking and

acting. The book in which he shows us his model ‘Decadent’ is entitled

_A Rebours_ (‘Against the Grain’).

The word ‘décadent’ was borrowed by the French critics, in the fifties,

from the history of the declining Roman Empire, to characterize the

style of Théophile Gautier, and notably of Baudelaire. At the present

time the disciples of these two writers, and of their previous

imitators, claim it as a title of honour. Otherwise than with the

expressions ‘pre-Raphaelites’ and ‘Symbolists,’ we possess an exact

explanation of the sense which those who speak of ‘decadence’ and

‘decadents’ attach to these words.

‘The style of decadence,’ says Théophile Gautier,[288] ‘... is nothing

else than art arrived at that extreme point of maturity produced by

those civilizations which are growing old with their oblique suns[!]--a

style that is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of

meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language,

borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colours from

all palettes, notes from all keyboards, forcing itself to express in

thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and

most fleeting contours; listening, that it may translate them, to the

subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of ageing and

depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea

verging on madness. This style of decadence is the last effort of the

Word (_Verbe_), called upon to express everything, and pushed to the

utmost extremity. We may remind ourselves, in connection with it,

of the language of the Later Roman Empire, already mottled with the

greenness of decomposition, and, as it were, gamy (_faisandée_), and of

the complicated refinements of the Byzantine school, the last form of

Greek art fallen into deliquescence. Such is the inevitable and fatal

idiom of peoples and civilizations where factitious life has replaced

the natural life, and developed in man unknown wants. Besides, it is no

easy matter, this style despised of pedants, for it expresses new ideas

with new forms and words that have not yet been heard. In opposition

to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem

and swarm with the larvæ of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of

insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which starts and turns back at the

slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure

phantasies at which the daylight would stand amazed, and all that the

soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in

its deepest and furthest recesses.’

The same ideas that Gautier approximately expresses in this rigmarole,

Baudelaire enumerates in these terms: ‘Does it not seem to the reader,

as it does to me, that the language of the later Latin decadence--the

departing sigh of a robust person already transformed and prepared for

the spiritual life--is singularly appropriate to express passion as it

has been understood and felt by the modern poetic world? Mysticism is

the opposite pole of that magnet in which Catullus and his followers,

brutal and purely epidermic poets, have only recognised the pole of

sensuality. In this marvellous language, solecism and barbarism appear

to me to convey the forced negligences of a passion which forgets

itself and mocks at rules. Words, received in a new acceptation,

display the charming awkwardness of the Northern barbarian kneeling

before the Roman beauty. Even a play on words, when it enters into

these pedantic stammerings, does it not display the wild and bizarre

grace of infancy?’[289]