to his mind, naturally at once recognises what is hidden behind the
word-wash of Gautier and Baudelaire. Their description of the state of
mind which the ‘decadent’ language is supposed to express is simply a
description of the disposition of the mystically degenerate mind, with
its shifting nebulous ideas, its fleeting formless shadowy thought,
its perversions and aberrations, its tribulations and impulsions.
To express this state of mind, a new and unheard-of language must
in fact be found, since there cannot be in any customary language
designations corresponding to presentations which in reality do not
exist. It is absolutely arbitrary to seek for an example and a model
of ‘decadent’ expression in the language of the Later Roman Empire. It
would be difficult for Gautier to discover in any writer whatever of
the fourth or fifth century the ‘mottled greenness of decomposition
and, as it were, gamy’ Latin which so greatly charms him. M. Huysmans,
monstrously exaggerating Gautier’s and Baudelaire’s idea, as is the way
with imitators, gives the following description of this supposed Latin
of the fifth century: ‘The Latin tongue, ... now hung [!], completely
rotten, ... losing its members, dropping suppurations, scarcely
preserving, in the total decay of its body, some firm parts which the
Christians detached in order to pickle them in the brine of their new
language.’[290]
This debauch in pathological and nauseous ideas of a deranged mind with
gustatory perversion is a delirium, and has no foundation whatever in
philological facts. The Latin of the later period of decadence was
coarse and full of errors, in consequence of the increasing barbarity
in the manners and taste of the readers, the narrow-mindedness and
grammatical ignorance of the writers, and the intrusion of barbarous
elements into its vocabulary. But it was very far from expressing ‘new
ideas with new forms’ and from taking ‘colours from all palettes’;
it surprises us, on the contrary, by its awkwardness in rendering
the most simple thoughts, and by its profound impoverishment. The
German language has also had a similar period of decadence. After
the Thirty Years’ War, even the best writers, a Moscherosch, a
Zinkgref, a Schupp, were ‘often almost incomprehensible’ with ‘their
long-winded and involved periods,’ and ‘their deportment as distorted
as it was stiff’;[291] the grammar displayed the worst deformities,
the vocabulary swarmed with strange intruders, but the German of
those desolate decades was surely not ‘decadent’ in the sense of
Gautier’s, Baudelaire’s and Huysmans’ definitions. The truth is, that
these degenerate writers have arbitrarily attributed their own state
of mind to the authors of the Roman and Byzantine decadence, to a
Petronius, but especially to a Commodianus of Gaza, an Ausonius, a
Prudentius, a Sidonius Apollinaris, etc., and have created in their
own image, or according to their morbid instincts, an ‘ideal man of
the Roman decadence,’ just as Rousseau invented the ideal savage and
Chateaubriand the ideal Indian, and have transported him by their own
imagination into a fabulous past or into a distant country. M. Paul
Bourget is more honest when he refrains from fraudulently quoting the
Latin authors of the Latin decline, and thus describes the ‘decadence,’
independently of his Parnassian masters: ‘The word “decadence” denotes
a state of society which produces too great a number of individuals
unfit for the labours of common life. A society ought to be assimilated
to an organism. As an organism, in fact, it resolves itself into a
federation of lesser organisms, which again resolve themselves into
a federation of cells. The individual is the social cell. In order
that the whole organism should function with energy, it is necessary
that the component organisms should function with energy, but with a
subordinate energy. And in order that these inferior organisms should
themselves function with energy, it is necessary that their component
cells should function with energy, but with a subordinate energy. If
the energy of the cells becomes independent, the organisms composing
the total organism cease likewise to subordinate their energy to
the total energy, and the anarchy which takes place constitutes the
decadence of the whole.’[292]
Very true. A society in decadence ‘produces too great a number of
individuals unfit for the labours of common life’; these individuals
are precisely the degenerate; ‘they cease to subordinate their energy
to the total energy,’ because they are ego-maniacs, and their stunted
development has not attained to the height at which an individual
reaches his moral and intellectual junction with the totality, and
their ego-mania makes the degenerate necessarily anarchists, _i.e._,
enemies of all institutions which they do not understand, and to
which they cannot adapt themselves. It is very characteristic that
M. Bourget, who sees all this, who recognises that ‘decadent’ is
synonymous with inaptitude for regular functions and subordination
to social aims, and that the consequence of decadence is anarchy and
the ruin of the community, does not the less justify and admire the
decadents, especially Baudelaire. This is ‘la conscience dans le mal’
of which his master speaks.
We will now examine the ideal ‘decadent’ that Huysmans draws so
complacently and in such detail for us, in _A Rebours_. First, a word
on the author of this instructive book. Huysmans, the classical type of
the hysterical mind without originality, who is the predestined victim
of every suggestion, began his literary career as a fanatical imitator
of Zola, and produced, in this first period of his development,
romances and novels in which (as in _Marthe_) he greatly surpassed
his model in obscenity. Then he swerved from naturalism, by an
abrupt change of disposition, which is no less genuinely hysterical,
overwhelmed this tendency and Zola himself with the most violent
abuse, and began to ape the Diabolists, particularly Baudelaire. A red
thread unites both of his otherwise abruptly contrasted methods, viz.,
his lubricity. That has remained the same. He is, as a languishing
‘Decadent,’ quite as vulgarly obscene as when he was a bestial
‘Naturalist.’
_A Rebours_ can scarcely be called a novel, and Huysmans, in fact,
does not call it so. It does not reveal a history, it has no action,
but presents itself as a sort of portrayal or biography of a man whose
habits, sympathies and antipathies, and ideas on all possible subjects,
specially on art and literature, are related to us in great detail.
This man is called Des Esseintes, and is the last scion of an ancient
French ducal title.
The Duke Jean des Esseintes is physically an anæmic and nervous man
of weak constitution, the inheritor of all the vices and all the
degeneracies of an exhausted race. ‘For two centuries the Des Esseintes
had married their children to each other, consuming their remnant of
vigour in consanguineous unions.... The predominance of lymph in the
blood appeared.’ (This employment of technical expressions and empty
phrases, scientific in sound, is peculiar to many modern degenerate
authors and to their imitators. They sow these words and expressions
around them, as the ‘learned valet’ of a well-known German farce
scatters around him his scraps of French, but without being more
cognizant of science than the latter was of the French language.) Des
Esseintes was educated by the Jesuits, lost his parents early in life,
squandered the greater part of his patrimony in foolish carousing
which overwhelmed him with ennui, and soon retired from society, which
had become insupportable. ‘His contempt for humanity increased; he
understood at last that the world is composed for the most part of
bullies and imbeciles. He had certainly no hope of discovering in
others the same aspirations and the same hatreds, no hope of uniting
himself with a kindred spirit delighting in a diligent decrepitude [!]
as he did. Enervated, moody, exasperated by the inanity of interchanged
and accepted ideas, he became like a person aching all over, till at
last he was constantly excoriating his epidermis, and suffering from
the patriotic and social nonsense which was dealt out each morning in
the newspapers.... He dreamed of a refined Thebaid, of a comfortable
desert, a warm and unmoving ark, where he would take refuge far from
the incessant flood of human stupidity.’
He realizes this dream. He sells his possessions, buys Government stock
with the ruins of his fortune, draws in this way an annual income of
fifty thousand francs, buys himself a house which stands alone on a
hill at some distance from a small village near Paris, and arranges it
according to his own taste.
‘The artificial appeared to Des Esseintes as the distinguishing mark
of human genius. As he expressed it, the day of nature is past: by the
disgusting uniformity of its landscapes and skies, it has positively
exhausted the attentive patience of refined spirits. In sooth, what
platitude of a specialist who sees no further than his own line!
what pettiness of a tradeswoman keeping this or that article to the
exclusion of every other! what a monotonous stock of meadows and trees!
what a commonplace agency for mountains and seas!’ (p. 31).
He banishes, in consequence, all that is natural from his horizon, and
surrounds himself by all that is artificial. He sleeps during the day,
and only leaves his bed towards evening, in order to pass the night in
reading and musing in his brightly-lit ground-floor. He never crosses
the threshold of his house, but remains within his four walls. He will
see no one, and even the old couple who wait on him must do their work
while he is asleep, so as not to be seen by him. He receives neither
letters nor papers, knows nothing of the outer world. He never has
an appetite, and when by chance this is aroused, ‘he dips his roast
meat, covered with some extraordinary butter, into a cup of tea [oh,
the devil!], a faultless mixture of Si-a-Fayun, Mo-yu-tan and Khansky,
yellow teas brought from China and Russia by special caravans’ (p. 61).
His dining-room ‘resembled a ship’s cabin,’ with ‘its little French
window opening in the wainscot like a port-hole.’ It was built within a
larger room pierced by two windows, one of which was exactly opposite
the port-hole in the wainscot. A large aquarium occupied the whole
space between the port-hole and this window. In order, then, to give
light to the cabin, the daylight had to pass through the window, the
panes of which had been replaced by plate glass, and then through the
water. ‘Sometimes, in the afternoon, when by chance Des Esseintes was
awake and up, he set in motion the play of the pipes and conduits which
emptied the aquarium and filled it afresh with pure water, introducing
into it drops of coloured essences, thus producing for himself at
pleasure the green or muddy yellow, opalescent or silver, tones of a
real river, according to the colour of the sky, the greater or less
heat of the sun, the more or less decided indications of rain; in a
word, according to the season and the weather. He would then imagine
himself to be between-decks on a brig, and contemplated with curiosity
marvellous mechanical fish, constructed with clock-work, which passed
before the window of the port-hole, and clung to the sham weeds, or
else, while breathing the smell of the tar with which the room had been
filled before he entered, he examined the coloured engravings hung on
the walls representing steamers sailing for Valparaiso and La Plata,
such as are seen at steamship agencies, and at Lloyd’s’ (p. 27).
These mechanical fish are decidedly more remarkable than Baudelaire’s
landscapes in tin. But this dream of an ironmonger, retired from
business and become an idiot, was not the only pleasure of the Duc
des Esseintes, who despised so deeply the ‘stupidity and vulgarity of
men,’ although, of all his acquaintance, probably not one would have
stooped to ideas so asinine as these mechanical fish with clock-work
movements. When he wishes to do himself a particularly good turn,
he composes and plays a gustatory symphony. He has had a cupboard
constructed containing a series of little liqueur barrels. The taps of
all the barrels could be opened or shut simultaneously by an engine
set in motion by pressure on a knob in the wainscot, and under every
tap stood an ‘imperceptible’ goblet, into which, on the turning of the
cock, a drop fell. Des Esseintes called this liquor-cupboard his ‘mouth
organ.’ (Notice all these ridiculous complications to mix a variety of
liqueurs! As if it required all this deeply thought out mechanism!)
‘The organ was then open. The stops labelled “flute, horn, voix
céleste,” were drawn out ready for action. Des Esseintes drank a drop
here and there, played internal symphonies, and succeeded in procuring
in the throat sensations analogous to those that music offers to the
ear. Each liqueur corresponded in taste, according to him, to the
sound of an instrument. Dry curaçoa, for example, to the clarionet,
the tone of which is acescent and velvety; kümmel brandy to the oboë,
with its sonorous nasal sound; mint and anisette to the flute, which
is at the same time sugary and peppery, squeaking and sweet; while, to
complete the orchestra, kirsch rages with the blast of a trumpet; gin
and whisky scarify the palate with their shrill outbursts of cornets
and trombones; liqueur-brandy fulminates with the deafening crash of
the tuba; while Chios-raki and mastic roll on to the mucous membrane
like the thunder-claps of cymbals and kettledrums struck with the
arm!’ Thus he plays ‘string quartettes under the vault of his palate,
representing with the violin old eau-de-vie, smoky and subtle, sharp
and delicate; with the tenor simulated by strong rum;’ with vespetro
as violoncello, and bitters as double bass; green chartreuse was the
major, and benedictine the minor key,’ etc. (p. 63).
Des Esseintes does not only hear the music of the liqueurs: he sniffs
also the colour of perfumes. As he has a mouth organ, he possesses a
nasal picture-gallery, _i.e._, a large collection of flasks containing
all possible odorous substances. When his taste-symphonies no longer
give him pleasure, he plays an olfactory tune. ‘Seated in his
dressing-room before his table ... a little fever disturbed him, he
was ready for work.... With his vaporizers he injected into the room
an essence formed of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet peas, ess.
bouquet, an essence which, when it is distilled by an artist, deserves
the name by which it is known, viz., “extract of flowery meadow.”
Then, in this meadow, he introduced an exact fusion of tuberose, of
orange and almond flower, and forthwith artificially-created lilacs
sprang up, while limes winnowed each other, pouring down upon the earth
their pale emanations. Into this decoration, laid on in broad outlines
... he blew ... a light rain of human and quasi-feline essences,
savouring of skirts, and indicating the powdered and painted woman,
the stephanotis, ayapana, opoponax, cypress, champak, and sarcanthus:
on which he juxtaposed a suspicion of syringa, in order to instil into
the factitious atmosphere which emanated from them a natural bloom of
laughter bathed in sweat (!!), and of joys which riot boisterously in
full sunshine’ (pp. 154-157).
We have seen how slavishly M. Huysmans, in his drivel about tea,
liqueurs and perfumes, follows to the letter the fundamental principle
of the Parnassians--of ransacking technical dictionaries. He has
evidently been forced to copy the catalogues of commercial travellers
dealing in perfumes and soaps, teas and liqueurs, to scrape together
his erudition in current prices.
That Des Esseintes should be made ill by this mode of life is not
surprising. His stomach rejects all forms of food, and this renders
the highest triumph of his love for the artificial possible: he is
obliged to be nourished by means of peptonized injections, hence, in a
way, diametrically opposed to nature.
Not to be too prolix, I omit many details, _e.g._, an endless
description of tones associated with colours (pp. 17-20); of orchids
which he loves, because they have for him the appearance of eruptions,
scars, scabs, ulcers and cancers, and seem covered with dressings,
plastered with black mercurial axunge, green belladonna unguents (p.
120 _et seq._); an exposition of the mystical aspect of precious and
half-precious stones (pp. 57-60), etc. We will only acquaint ourselves
with a few more peculiarities of taste in this decadent type:
‘The wild spirit, the rough, careless talent of Goya captivated him;
but the universal admiration which Goya’s works had gained deterred
him somewhat, and for many years he had ceased having them framed....
Indeed, if the finest tune in the world becomes vulgar, insupportable,
as soon as the public hum it and barrel-organs seize upon it, the
work of art to which false artists are not indifferent, which is not
disputed by fools, which is not content with stirring up the enthusiasm
of some, even it becomes, by this very means, for the initiated
polluted, commonplace and almost repulsive’ (p. 134).
The reference to barrel-organs is a trick calculated to mislead the
inattentive reader. If a beautiful tune becomes insupportable as
played on barrel-organs, it is because the organs are false, noisy and
expressionless, _i.e._, they modify the very essence of the tune and
drag it down to vulgarity; but the admiration of the greatest fool
himself changes absolutely nothing in a work of art, and those who have
loved it for its qualities will again find all these qualities complete
and intact, even when the looks of millions of impassive Philistines
have crawled over it. The truth is, the decadent, bursting with silly
vanity, here betrays involuntarily his inmost self. The fellow has not,
in fact, the smallest comprehension of art, and is wholly inaccessible
to the beautiful as to all external impressions. To know if a work of
art pleases him or not, he does not look at the work of art--oh no!
he turns his back and anxiously studies the demeanour of the people
standing before it. Are they enthusiastic, the decadent despises the
work; do they remain indifferent, or even appear displeased, he admires
it with full conviction. The ordinary man always seeks to think, to
feel, and to do the same as the multitude; the decadent seeks exactly
the contrary. Both derive the manner of seeing and feeling, not from
their internal convictions, but from what the crowd dictate to them.
Both lack all individuality, and they are obliged to have their eyes
constantly fixed on the crowd to find their way. The decadent is,
therefore, an ordinary man with a _minus_ sign, who, equally with the
latter, only in a contrary sense, follows in the wake of the crowd,
and meanwhile makes things far more difficult for himself than the
ordinary man; he is also constantly in a state of irritation, while
the latter as constantly enjoys himself. This can be summed up in one
proposition--the decadent snob is an anti-social Philistine, suffering
from a mania for contradiction, without the smallest feeling for the
work of art itself.
Des Esseintes reads occasionally between his gustatory and olfactory
_séances_. The only works which please him are naturally those of the
most extreme Parnassians and Symbolists. For he finds in them (p. 266)
‘the death-struggle of the old language, after it had become ever
mouldier from century to century, was ending in dissolution, and in
the attainment of that deliquescence of the Latin language which gave
up the ghost in the mysterious concepts and enigmatical expressions of
St. Boniface and St. Adhelm. Moreover, the decomposition of the French
language had set in all at once. In the Latin language there was a long
transition, a lapse of 400 years, between the speckled and beautiful
speech of Claudian and Rutilius, and the gamy speech of the eighth
century. In the French language no lapse of time, no succession in
age, had taken place; the speckled (_tacheté_) and superb style of the
brothers De Goncourt and the gamy style of Verlaine and Mallarmé rubbed
elbows in Paris, existing at the same time and in the same century.’
We now know the taste of a typical decadent in all directions. Let us
cast another glance at his character, morals, sentiments and political
views.
He has a friend, D’Aigurande, who one day thinks of marrying. ‘Arguing
from the fact that D’Aigurande possessed no fortune, and that the dowry
of his wife was almost nothing, he (Des Esseintes) perceived in this
simple desire an infinite perspective of ridiculous misfortunes.’ In
consequence (!) he encouraged his friend to commit this folly, and what
had to happen did happen: the young couple lacked money, everything
became a subject for altercations and quarrels; in short, the life of
both became insupportable. He amused himself out of doors; she ‘sought
by the expedients of adultery to forget her rainy and dull life.’ By
common consent they cancelled their contract and demanded a legal
separation. ‘My plan of battle was exact, Des Esseintes then said to
himself, experiencing the satisfaction of those strategists who see
their long-foreseen manœuvres succeeding.’
Another time, in the Rue de Rivoli, he comes upon a boy of about
sixteen years old, a ‘pale, cunning-looking’ child, smoking a bad
cigarette, and who asks him for a light. Des Esseintes offers him
Turkish aromatic cigarettes, enters into conversation with him, learns
that his mother is dead, that his father beats him, and that he works
for a cardboard-box maker. ‘Des Esseintes listened thoughtfully. “Come
and drink,” said he, and led him into a café, where he made him drink
some very strong punch. The child drank in silence. “Come,” said Des
Esseintes suddenly, “do you feel inclined for some amusement this
evening? I will treat you.”’ And he leads the unfortunate boy into a
disorderly house, where his youth and nervousness astonish the girls.
While one of these women draws the boy away, the landlady asks Des
Esseintes what was his idea in bringing them such an imp. The decadent
answers (p. 95): ‘I am simply trying to train an assassin. This boy
is innocent, and has reached the age when the blood grows hot; he
might run after the girls in his quarter, remain honest while amusing
himself.... Bringing him here, on the contrary, into the midst of a
luxury of which he had no conception, and which will engrave itself
forcibly on his memory, in offering him every fortnight such an
unexpected treat, he will get accustomed to these pleasures from which
his means debar him. Let us admit that it will require three months
for them to become absolutely necessary to him.... Well, at the end of
three months I discontinue the little _rente_ which I am going to pay
you in advance for this good action, and then he will steal in order to
live here.... He will kill, I hope, the good gentleman who will appear
inopportunely while he is attempting to break open his writing-table.
Then my aim will be attained; I shall have contributed, to the extent
of my resources, in creating a villain, one more enemy of that hideous
society which fleeces us.’ And he leaves the poor defiled boy on this
first evening with these words: ‘Return as quickly as possible to your
father.... Do unto others what you would not wish them to do to you;
with this rule you will go a long way. Good-evening. Above all, don’t
be ungrateful. Let me hear of you as soon as possible through the
police news.’
He sees the village children fighting for a piece of black bread
covered with curd cheese; he immediately orders for himself a similar
slice of bread, and says to his servant: ‘Throw this bread and cheese
to those children who are doing for each other in the road. Let the
feeblest be crippled, not manage to get a single piece, and, besides,
be well whipped by their parents when they return home with torn
breeches and black eyes; that will give them an idea of the life that
awaits them’ (p. 226).
When he thinks of society, this cry bursts from his breast: ‘Oh,
perish, society! Die, old world!’ (p. 293).
Lest the reader should feel curious as to the course of Des Esseintes’
history, let us add that a serious nervous illness attacks him in his
solitude, and that his doctor imperiously orders him to return to
Paris and the common life. Huysmans, in a second novel, ‘_Là-bas_,’
shows us what Des Esseintes eventually does in Paris. He writes a
history of Gilles de Rais, the wholesale murderer of the fifteenth
century, to whom Moreau de Tours’ book (treating of sexual aberrations)
has unmistakably called the attention of the Diabolist band, who are
in general profoundly ignorant, but erudite on this special subject
of erotomania. This furnishes M. Huysmans with the opportunity of
burrowing and sniffing with swinish satisfaction into the most horrible
filth. Besides this, he exhibits in this book the mystic side of
decadentism; he shows us Des Esseintes become devout, but going at the
same time to the ‘black mass’ with a hysterical woman, etc. I have no
occasion to trouble myself with this book, as repulsive as it is silly.
All I wished was to show the ideal man of decadentism.
We have him now, then, the ‘super-man’ (_surhomme_) of whom Baudelaire
and his disciples dream, and whom they wish to resemble: physically,
ill and feeble; morally, an arrant scoundrel; intellectually, an
unspeakable idiot who passes his whole time in choosing the colours
of stuffs which are to drape his room artistically, in observing the
movements of mechanical fishes, in sniffing perfumes and sipping
liqueurs. His raciest notion is to keep awake all night and to sleep
all day, and to dip his meat into his tea. Love and friendship are
unknown to him. His artistic sense consists in watching the attitude of
people before some work, in order immediately to assume the opposite
position. His complete inadaptability reveals itself in that every
contact with the world and men causes him pain. He naturally throws
the blame of his discomfort on his fellow-creatures, and rails at
them like a fish-wife. He classes them all together as villains and
blockheads, and he hurls at them horrible anarchical maledictions.
The dunderhead considers himself infinitely superior to other people,
and his inconceivable stupidity only equals his inflated adoration of
himself. He possesses an income of 50,000 francs, and must also have
it, for such a pitiable creature would not be in a position to draw
one sou from society, or one grain of wheat from nature. A parasite of
the lowest grade of atavism, a sort of human sacculus,[293] he would
be condemned, if he were poor, to die miserably of hunger in so far as
society, in misdirected charity, did not assure to him the necessaries
of life in an idiot asylum.
If M. Huysmans in his Des Esseintes has shown us the Decadent with all
his instincts perverted, _i.e._, the complete Baudelairian with his
anti-naturalism, his æsthetic folly and his anti-social Diabolism,
another representative of decadent literature, M. Maurice Barrès, is
the incarnation of the pure ego-mania of the incapacity of adaptation
in the degenerate. He has dedicated up to the present a series of four
novels to the _culte du moi_, and has annotated, besides, an edition
of the three first in a brochure much more valuable for our inquiry
than the novels themselves, inasmuch as all the sophisms by which
consciousness forces itself to explain _a posteriori_ the impulsions of
morbid unconscious life appear here conveniently summed up in a sort of
philosophical system.
A few words on M. Maurice Barrès. He first made himself talked
of by defending, in the Parisian press, his friend Chambige, the
Algerian homicide, a logical cultivator of the ‘Ego.’ Then he became
a Boulangist deputy, and later he canonized Marie Bashkirtseff, a
degenerate girl who died of phthisis, a victim to moral madness, with
a touch of the megalomania and the mania of persecution, as well as of
morbid erotic exaltation. He invoked her as ‘Our Lady of the wagon-lit’
(_Notre Dame du Sleeping_).[294]
His novels, _Sous l’[Œil des Barbares_, _Un Homme libre_, _Le Jardin
de Bérénice_, and _L’Ennemi des Lois_, are constructed after the
artistic formula established by M. Huysmans. The description of a
human being, with his intellectual life, and his monotonous, scarcely
modulated external destinies, gives the author a pretext for expressing
his own ideas on all possible subjects; on Leonardo da Vinci and
Venice;[295] on a French provincial museum and the industrial art of
the Middle Ages;[296] on Nero,[297] Saint Simon, Fourier, Marx, and
Lassalle.[298] Formerly it was the custom to utilize these excursions
into all possible fields of discussion as articles for newspapers or
monthly periodicals, and afterwards to collect them in book form. But
experience has taught that the public does not exhibit much interest
in these collections of essays, and the Decadents have adopted the
clever ruse of connecting them by means of a scarcely perceptible
thread of narrative, and presenting them to their readers as a novel.
The English novelists of the preceding century, then Stendhal, Jean
Paul and Goethe himself, have also made use of these insertions of the
author’s personal reflections in the course of the story; but with them
(with the exception, perhaps, of Jean Paul) these interpellations were
at least subordinated to the work of art as a whole. It was reserved
for M. Huysmans and his school to give them the chief place, and to
transform the novel from an epic poem in prose into a hybrid mixture of
_Essais_ of Montaigne, of _Parerga et Paralipomena_ of Schopenhauer,
and the effusions in the diary of a girl at a boarding-school.
M. Barrès makes it no secret that he has described his own life in his
novels, and that he considers himself a typical representative of a
species. ‘These monographs ... are,’ he says,[299] ‘a communication
of a type of young man already frequently met with, and which, I
feel sure, will become still more numerous among the pupils who are
now at the Lycée.... These books ... will eventually be consulted as
documents.’
What is the nature of this type? Let us answer this question in the
author’s own words. The hero of the novels is ‘somewhat literary,
proud, fastidious and _désarmé_’ (_Examen_, p. 11); ‘a young
_bourgeois_ grown pale, and starving for all pleasures’ (p. 26);
‘discouraged by contact with men’ (p. 34); he is one of those ‘who find
themselves in a sad state in the midst of the order of the world ...
who feel themselves weak in facing life’ (p. 45). Can one imagine a
more complete description of the degenerate incapable of adaptation,
badly equipped for the struggle for existence, and for this reason
hating and fearing the world and men, but shaken at the same time by
morbid desires?
This poor shattered creature, who was necessarily rendered an
ego-maniac by the weakness of will in his imperfect brain, and the
perpetual turmoil of his unhealthy organs, raises his infirmities to
the dignity of a system which he proudly proclaims. ‘Let us keep to
our only reality, to our “I”’ (p. 18). ‘There is only one thing which
we know and which really exists.... This sole tangible reality, it is
the “I,” and the universe is only a fresco which it makes beautiful
or ugly. Let us keep to our “I.” Let us protect it against strangers,
against Barbarians’ (p. 45).
What does he mean by Barbarians? These are the ‘beings who possess
a dream of life opposed to that which he (the hero of one of his
books) forms of it. If they happen to be, moreover, highly cultured,
they are strangers and adversaries for him.’ A young man ‘obliged by
circumstances to meet persons who are not of his _patrie psychique_’
experiences ‘a shock.’ ‘Ah! what matters to me the quality of a
soul which contradicts some sensibility? I hate these strangers who
impede, or turn aside the development of such a delicate hesitating
and self-searching “I,” these Barbarians through whom more than one
impressionable young man will both fail in his career and not find his
joy of living’ (p. 23). ‘Soldiers, magistrates, moralists, teachers,’
these are the Barbarians who place obstacles in the way of the
development of the “I”’ (p. 43). In one word, the ‘I’ who cannot take
his bearings in the social order regards all the representatives and
defenders of that order as his enemies. What he would like would be ‘to
give himself up without resistance to the force of his instincts’ (p.
25), to distinguish ‘where lie his sincere curiosity, the direction of
his instinct, and his truth’ (p. 47). This idea of setting instinct,
passion and the unconscious life free from the superintendence of
reason, judgment and consciousness recurs hundreds of times in the
author’s novels. ‘Taste takes the place of morality’ (_L’Ennemi
des Lois_, p. 3). ‘As a man, and a free man, may I accomplish my
destiny, respect and favour my interior impulsion, without taking
counsel of anything outside me’ (p. 22). ‘Society enclosed by a line
of demarcation! You offer slavery to whoever does not conform to the
definitions of the beautiful and the good adopted by the majority. In
the name of humanity, as formerly in the name of God and the City, what
crimes are devised against the individual!’ (p. 200). ‘The inclinations
of man ought not to be forced, but the social system must be adapted
to them’ (p. 97). (It would be very much more simple to adapt the
inclinations of a single man to the social system which is a law to
millions of men, but this does not seem to suggest itself to our
philosopher!)
It is absolutely logical that M. Barrès, after having shown us in his
three first novels or _idéologies_ the development of his ‘cultivator
of the _moi_,’ should make the latter become an anarchist and an
_ennemi des lois_. But he feels himself that the objection will be
justly raised, that society cannot exist without a law and an order
of some sort, and he seeks to forestall this objection by asserting
that everyone knows how to behave himself, that instinct is good and
infallible: ‘Do you not feel,’ he says (p. 177), ‘that our instinct
has profited by the long apprenticeship of our race amid codes and
religions?’ He admits then that ‘codes and religions’ have their use
and necessity, but only at a primitive period of human history. When
the instincts were still wild, bad and unreasonable, they required the
discipline of the law. But now they are so perfect that this guide and
master is no longer necessary to them. But there are still criminals.
What is to be done with them? ‘By stifling them with kisses and
providing for their wants they would be prevented from doing any harm.’
I should like to see M. Barrès obliged to use his method of defence
against a night attack of garrotters!
To allow one’s self to be carried away by instincts is, in other
words, to make unconscious life the master of consciousness, to
subordinate the highest nervous centres to the inferior centres.
But all progress rests on this, that the highest centres assume more
and more authority over the entire organism, that judgment and will
control and direct ever more strictly the instincts and passions, that
consciousness encroaches ever further on the domain of the unconscious,
and continually annexes new portions of the latter. Of course, instinct
expresses a directly felt need, the satisfaction of which procures a
direct pleasure. But this need is often that of a single organ, and
its satisfaction, however agreeable to the organ which demands it,
may be pernicious, and even fatal, to the total organism. Then there
are anti-social instincts, the gratification of which is not directly
injurious to the organism itself, it is true, but makes life in common
with the race difficult or impossible, worsening consequently its
vital conditions, and preparing its ruin indirectly. Judgment alone is
fitted to oppose these instincts by the representation of the needs
of the collective organism and of the race, and the will has the
task of ensuring the victory over suicidal instinct to the rational
representation. Judgment may be deceived, for it is the result of the
work of a highly differentiated and delicate instrument, which, like
all fine and complicated machinery, gets out of order more easily than
a simpler and rougher tool. Instinct, the inherited and organized
experience of the race, is as a rule more sure and reliable. This must
certainly be admitted. But what harm is done if judgment does make
a mistake for once in the opposition which it offers to instinct?
The organism is, as a rule, only deprived of a momentary feeling of
pleasure; it suffers therefore at most a negative loss; the will, on
the other hand, will have made an effort, and acquired strength by the
exercise, and this is for the organism a positive gain, which nearly
always at least balances those negative losses.
And then all these considerations take for granted the perfect health
of the organism, for in such a one only does the unconscious work as
normally as consciousness. But we have seen above that the unconscious
itself is subject to disease; it may be stupid, obtuse and mad, like
consciousness; it then ceases completely to be dependable; then the
instincts are as worthless guides as are the blind or drunken; then
the organism, if it gives itself up to them, must stagger to ruin and
death. The only thing which can sometimes save it in this case is the
constant, anxious, tense vigilance of the judgment, and as the latter
is never capable, by its own resources, of resisting a strong flood
of revolted and riotous instincts, it must demand reinforcements from
the judgment of the race, _i.e._, from some law, from some recognised
morality.
Such is the foolish aberration of the ‘cultivators of the “I.”’
They fall into the same errors as the shallow psychologists of the
eighteenth century, who only recognised reason; they only see one
portion of man’s mental life, _i.e._, his unconscious life; they wish
to receive their law only from instinct, but wholly neglect to notice
that instinct may become degenerate, diseased, exhausted, and thereby
be rendered as useless for legislative purposes as a raving lunatic or
an idiot.
Besides, M. Barrès contradicts his own theories at every step. While
he pretends to believe that instincts are always good, he depicts many
of his heroines, with the most tender expressions of admiration, as
veritable moral monsters. The ‘little princess’ in _L’Ennemi des Lois_
is a feminine Des Esseintes: she boasts of having been, as a child,
‘the scourge of the house’ (p. 146). She looks upon her parents as
her ‘enemies’ (p. 149). She loves children ‘less than dogs’ (p. 284).
Naturally, she gives herself at once to every man that strikes her eye,
for, otherwise, where would be the use of being a ‘cultivator of the
“Ego,”’ and an adept at the law of instinct? Such are the good beings
of M. Barrès, who no longer need laws, because they have ‘profited by
the long apprenticeship of our race.’
Yet a few more traits to complete the mental portrait of this Decadent.
He makes his ‘little princess’ relate: ‘When I was twelve years old,
I loved, as soon as I was alone in the country, to take off my shoes
and stockings and plunge my bare feet into warm mud. I passed hours in
this way, and that gave me a thrill of pleasure through all my body.’
M. Barrès resembles his heroine; he ‘experiences a thrill of pleasure
through all his body’ when he ‘plunges himself into warm mud.’
‘There is not a detail in the biography of Berenice which is not
shocking’--thus begins the third chapter of the _Jardin de Bérénice_.
‘I, however, retain of it none but very delicate sensations.’ This
Berenice was a dancer at the Eden Theatre in Paris, whom her mother and
elder sister had sold as a little child to some old criminals, and whom
a lover took away later from the prostitution which had already stained
her infancy. This lover dies and leaves her a considerable fortune.
The hero of the novel, who had known her as a gutter-child, meets
her at Arles, where he presents himself as the Boulangist candidate
for the Chamber, and he resumes his ancient relations with her. What
charms him most in their intercourse, and increases his pleasure in the
highest degree, is the idea of the intense love she felt for her dead
lover, and the abandonment with which she had reposed in his arms. ‘My
Berenice, who still bears on her pale lips and against her dazzling
teeth the kisses of M. de Transe [the lover in question].... The young
man who is no more has left her as much passion as can be contained
in a woman’s heart’ (p. 138). The feeling which M. Barrès seeks to
crown with the help of inflated, grandiloquent expressions is simply
the well-known excitement that hoary sinners feel at the sight of the
erotic exploits of others. All those who are conversant with Parisian
life know what is meant in Paris by a _voyeur_, or pryer. M. Barrès
reveals himself here as a metaphysical _voyeur_. And yet he would
wish to make us believe that his little street-walker, whose dirty
adventures he describes with the warmth of love and the enthusiasm of a
dilettante, is in reality a symbol; it is only as a Symbolist that he
claims to have formed her. ‘A young woman is seen about a young man.
Is it not rather the history of a soul with its two elements, female
and male?’ Or is it by the side of the ‘I’ which guards itself, wishes
to know and establish itself, also the imagination in a young and
sensitive person, for the taste pleasure and for vagabondage?[300] One
may well ask him, where is the ‘symbolism’ in the biographical details
of Petite Secousse, the name that he gives to his ‘symbol.’
Disease and corruption exercise the customary Baudelairian attraction
over him. ‘When Berenice was a little girl,’ he says, in the _Jardin
de Bérénice_ (p. 72), ‘I much regretted that she had not some physical
infirmity.... A blemish is what I prefer above everything ... flatters
the dearest foibles of my mind.’ And in one place (p. 282) an engineer
is scoffed at ‘who wishes to substitute some pond for carp for our
marshes full of beautiful fevers.’
The stigmata of degeneracy known as zoöphilia, or excessive love for
animals, is strongly shown in him. When he wishes particularly to edify
himself he runs ‘to contemplate the beautiful eyes of the seal, and to
distress himself over the mysterious sufferings of these tender-hearted
animals shown in their basin, brothers of the dogs and of us.’[301]
The only educator that M. Barrès admits is--the dog. ‘The education
which a dog gives is indeed excellent!... Our collegians, overloaded
with intellectual acquisitions, which remain in them as notions, not
as methods of feeling, weighted by opinions which they are unable
thoroughly to grasp, would learn beautiful ease from the dog, the
gift of listening, the instinct of their “I.”’[302] And it must not
be imagined that in such passages as these he is quizzing himself or
mocking the Philistine who may by inadvertence have become a reader of
the book. The part played by two dogs in the novel testifies that the
phrases quoted are meant in bitter earnest.
Like all the truly degenerate, M. Barrès reserves for the hysterical
and the demented all the admiration and fraternal love which he
has not expended on seals and dogs. We have already mentioned his
enthusiastic regard for poor Marie Bashkirtseff. His idea of Louis II.
of Bavaria is incomparable. The unfortunate King is, in his eyes, an
_insatisfait_ (_L’Ennemi des Lois_, p. 201); he speaks of ‘his being
carried away beyond his native surroundings, his ardent desire to make
his dream tangible, the wrecking of his imagination in the clumsiness
of execution’ (p. 203). Louis II. is ‘a most perfect ethical problem’
(p. 200). ‘How could this brother of Parsifal, so pure, so simple, who
set the prompting of his heart in opposition to all human laws--how
could he suffer a foreign will to interfere in his life? And it really
seems that to have drawn Dr. Gudden under water was his revenge upon
a barbarian who had wished to impose his rule of life upon him’ (p.
225). It is in such phrases that M. Barrès characterizes a madman,
whose mind was completely darkened, and who for years was incapable
of a single reasonable idea! This impudent fashion of blinking a fact
which boxed his ears on both sides; this incapacity to recognise the
irrationality in the mental life of an invalid, fallen to the lowest
degree of insanity; this obstinacy in explaining the craziest deeds as
deliberate, intentional, philosophically justified and full of deep
sense, throw a vivid light on the state of mind in the Decadent. How
could a being of this kind discern the pathological disturbance of his
own brain, when he does not even perceive that Louis II. was not ‘an
ethical problem,’ but an ordinary mad patient, such as every lunatic
asylum of any size contains by dozens?
We now understand the philosophy and moral doctrine of the Barrès type
of the ‘cultivators of the “I.”’ Only one word more on their conduct in
practical life. The hero of the _Jardin de Bérénice_, Philippe, is the
happy guest of Petite Secousse, in the house which her last lover had
left to her. After some time he wearies of the latter’s ‘educational
influence’; he leaves her, and strongly advises her to marry his
opponent in the election--which she does. ‘The enemy of the laws,’
an anarchist of the name of André Maltère, condemned to prison for
several months for a newspaper article eulogizing a dynamite attempt,
has become, by his trial, a celebrity of the day. A very rich orphan
offers him her hand, and the ‘little princess’ her love. He marries the
rich girl, whom he does not love, and continues to love the ‘little
princess,’ whom he does not marry. For this is what the ‘culture of
his “I”’ exacts. To satisfy his æsthetic inclinations and to ‘act’ by
word and pen, he must have money, and to relieve the needs of his heart
he must have the ‘little princess.’ After some months of marriage he
finds it inconvenient to dissimulate his love for the ‘little princess’
before his wife. He allows her then to guess at the needs of his heart.
His wife understands philosophy. She is ‘comprehensive.’ She goes
herself to the ‘little princess,’ takes her to the noble anarchist,
and from this moment Maltère lives rich, loved, happy, and satisfied
between heiress and mistress, as becomes a superior nature. M. Barrès
believes he has here created ‘a rare and exquisite type.’ He deceives
himself. The cultivators of the ‘I,’ like the Boulangist Philippe and
the anarchist André, meet by thousands in all large towns, only the
police know them under another name. They call them _souteneurs_. The
moral law of the brave anarchist has long been that of the gilded Paris
prostitutes, who from time immemorial have kept ‘_l’amant de cœur_,’ at
the same time as the ‘other,’ or the ‘others.’
Decadentism has not been confined to France alone; it has also
established a school in England. We have already mentioned, in the
preceding book, one of the earliest and most servile imitators of
Baudelaire--Swinburne. I had to class him among the mystics, for the
degenerative stigma of mysticism predominates in all his works. He has,
it is true, been train-bearer to so many models that he may be ranked
among the domestic servants of a great number of masters; but, finally,
he will be assigned a place where he has served longest, and that is
among the pre-Raphaelites. From Baudelaire he has borrowed principally
diabolism and Sadism, unnatural depravity, and a predilection for
suffering, disease and crime. The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of
the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity
and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration
of the importance of art, have found their English representative among
the ‘Æsthetes,’ the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.
Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works.
Like Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose rose-coloured silk hats and gold lace
cravats are well known, and like his disciple Joséphin Péladan, who
walks about in lace frills and satin doublet, Wilde dresses in queer
costumes which recall partly the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly
the rococo modes. He pretends to have abandoned the dress of the
present time because it offends his sense of the beautiful; but this
is only a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What
really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed,
to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about.
It is asserted that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon
dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his
head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi-heraldic symbol of the
Æsthetes. This anecdote has been reproduced in all the biographies of
Wilde, and I have nowhere seen it denied. But is a promenade with a
sunflower in the hand also inspired by a craving for the beautiful?
Phasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is a proof
of honourable independence to follow one’s own taste without being
bound down to the regulation costume of the Philistine cattle, and
to choose for clothes the colours, materials and cut which appear
beautiful to one’s self, no matter how much they may differ from the
fashion of the day. The answer to this cackle should be that it is
above all a sign of anti-social ego-mania to irritate the majority
unnecessarily, only to gratify vanity, or an æsthetical instinct of
small importance and easy to control--such as is always done when,
either by word or deed, a man places himself in opposition to this
majority. He is obliged to repress many manifestations of opinions and
desires out of regard for his fellow-creatures; to make him understand
this is the aim of education, and he who has not learnt to impose
some restraint upon himself in order not to shock others is called by
malicious Philistines, not an Æsthete, but a blackguard.
It may become a duty to combat the vulgar herd in the cause of truth
and knowledge; but to a serious man this duty will always be felt as a
painful one. He will never fulfil it with a light heart, and he will
examine strictly and cautiously if it be really a high and absolutely
imperative law which forces him to be disagreeable to the majority of
his fellow-creatures. Such an action is, in the eyes of a moral and
sane man, a kind of martyrdom for a conviction, to carry out which
constitutes a vital necessity; it is a form, and not an easy form, of
self-sacrifice, for it means the renunciation of the joy which the
consciousness of sympathy with one’s fellow-creatures gives, and it
exacts the painful overthrow of social instincts, which, in truth, do
not exist in deranged ego-maniacs, but are very strong in the normal
man.
The predilection for strange costume is a pathological aberration of
a racial instinct. The adornment of the exterior has its origin in
the strong desire to be admired by others--primarily by the opposite
sex--to be recognised by them as especially well-shaped, handsome,
youthful, or rich and powerful, or as preeminent through rank or merit.
It is practised, then, with the object of producing a favourable
impression on others, and is a result of thought about others, of
preoccupation with the race. If, now, this adornment be, not through
mis-judgment but purposely, of a character to cause irritation to
others, or lend itself to ridicule--in other words, if it excites
disapproval instead of approbation--it then runs exactly counter to the
object of the art of dress, and evinces a perversion of the instinct of
vanity.
The pretence of a sense of beauty is the excuse of consciousness for a
crank of the conscious. The fool who masquerades in Pall Mall does not
see himself, and, therefore, does not enjoy the beautiful appearance
which is supposed to be an æsthetic necessity for him. There would be
some sense in his conduct if it had for its object an endeavour to
cause others to dress in accordance with his taste; for them he sees,
and they can scandalize him by the ugliness, and charm him by the
beauty, of their costume. But to take the initiative in a new artistic
style in dress brings the innovator not one hair’s breadth nearer his
assumed goal of æsthetic satisfaction.
When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in ‘æsthetic costume’ among
gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule or their wrath, it
is no indication of independence of character, but rather from a purely
anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to
make a sensation, justified by no exalted aim; nor is it from a strong
desire for beauty, but from a malevolent mania for contradiction.
Be that as it may, Wilde obtained, by his buffoon mummery, a notoriety
in the whole Anglo-Saxon world that his poems and dramas would never
have acquired for him. I have no reason to trouble myself about these,
since they are feeble imitations of Rossetti and Swinburne, and of
dreary inanity. His prose essays, on the contrary, deserve attention,
because they exhibit all the features which enable us to recognise in
the ‘Æsthete’ the comrade in art of the Decadent.
Like his French masters, Oscar Wilde despises Nature. ‘Whatever
actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine
feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be
inartistic.’[303]
He is a ‘cultivator of the Ego,’ and feels deliciously indignant at
the fact that Nature dares to be indifferent to his important person.
‘Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in
the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle
that browse on the slope’ (p. 5).
With regard to himself and the human species, he shares the opinion of
Des Esseintes. ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree
with me I always feel that I must be wrong’ (p. 202).
His ideal of life is inactivity. ‘It is only the Philistine who seeks
to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young
dandy sought to be somebody rather than to do something’ (p. 65).
‘Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in
its eyes.... People ... are always coming shamelessly up to one ...
and saying in a loud, stentorian voice, “What are you doing?” whereas,
“What are you thinking?” is the only question that any civilized being
should ever be allowed to whisper to another.... Contemplation ...
in the opinion of the highest culture, is the proper occupation of
man.... It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and
relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease
and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams’ (pp. 166-168). ‘The
sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make one’s self
useful’ (p. 175). ‘From time to time the world cries out against some
charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase,
he has “nothing to say.” But if he had something to say, he would
probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he
has no new message that he can do beautiful work’ (p. 197).
Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In a very
affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith Wainwright,
designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of several people, he
says: ‘He was a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a
subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.
This remarkable man, so powerful with “pen, pencil, and poison,”’ etc.
(p. 60). ‘He sought to find expression by pen or poison’ (p. 61).
‘When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he
shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do,
but she had very thick ankles”’ (p. 86). ‘His crimes seem to have had
an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his
style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked’ (p. 88). ‘There
is no sin except stupidity’ (p. 210). ‘An idea that is not dangerous is
unworthy of being called an idea at all’ (p. 179).
He cultivates incidentally a slight mysticism in colours. ‘He,’
Wainwright, ‘had that curious love of green which in individuals is
always the sign of a subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations is
said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals’ (p. 66).
But the central idea of his tortuously disdainful prattling, pursuing
as its chief aim the heckling of the Philistine, and laboriously
seeking the opposite pole to sound common-sense, is the glorification
of art. Wilde sets forth in the following manner the system of the
‘Æsthetes’: ‘Briefly, then, their doctrines are these: Art never
expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as
Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.... The second
doctrine is this: All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature,
and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used
as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real
service to Art they must be translated into artistic conventions.
The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium [?] it surrenders
everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two
things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and
modernity of subject matter.[304] To us who live in the nineteenth
century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.
The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us....
It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are
so suitable a motive for a tragedy....’[305] (pp. 52-54). The third
doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the
fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and
that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize
that energy’ (p. 65).
On this third point--the influence of art on life--Wilde does not refer
to the fact, long ago established by me, that the reciprocal relation
between the work of art and the public consists in this, that the
former exercises suggestion and the latter submits to it.[306] What he
actually wished to say was that nature--not civilized men--develops
itself in the direction of forms given it by the artist. ‘Where, if
not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that
come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing
the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their
master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river,
and turn to faint forms of fading grace, curved bridge and swaying
barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of
London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular
school of Art’ (p. 40). If he simply wished to affirm that formerly
fog and mist were not felt to be beautiful, and that the artistic
rendering of them first drew to them the attention of the multitude,
nothing could be said in contradiction; he would have propounded just
a hackneyed commonplace with misplaced sententiousness. He asserts,
however, that painters have changed the climate, that for the last
ten years there have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists
have painted fogs--a statement so silly as to require no refutation.
It is sufficient to characterize it as artistic mysticism. Lastly,
Wilde teaches the following: ‘Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They
belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is
the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more
important in the development of the individual than a sense of right
and wrong’ (pp. 210, 211).
Thus the doctrine of the ‘Æsthetes’ affirms, with the Parnassians, that
the work of art is its own aim; with the Diabolists, that it need not
be moral--nay, were better to be immoral; with the Decadents, that it
is to avoid, and be diametrically opposed to, the natural and the true;
and with all these schools of the ego-mania of degeneration, that art
is the highest of all human functions.
Here is the place to demonstrate the absurdity of these propositions.
This can, of course, be done only in the concisest manner. For to treat
fully of the relation of the beautiful to morals and truth to Nature,
of the conception of aim in artistic beauty, and of the rank held by
art among mental functions, it would be necessary to expound the whole
science of æsthetics, on which the somewhat exhaustive text-books
amount to a considerable number of volumes; and this cannot be my
purpose in this place. Hence I shall of necessity only recapitulate the
latest results in a series of the clearest and most obvious deductions
possible, which the attentive reader will be able without difficulty to
develop by his own reflection.
The ‘bonzes’ of art, who proclaim the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake,’
look down with contempt upon those who deny their dogma, affirming that
the heretics who ascribe to works of art any aim whatsoever can be only
pachydermatous Philistines, whose comprehension is limited to beans and
bacon, or stock-jobbers with whom it is only a question of profit, or
sanctimonious parsons making a professional pretence of virtue. They
believe that they are supported in this by such men as Kant, Lessing,
etc., who were likewise of the opinion that the work of art had but
one task to perform--that of being beautiful. We need not be overawed
by the great names of these guarantors. Their opinion cannot withstand
the criticism to which it has been subjected during the last hundred
years by a great number of philosophers (I name only Fichte, Hegel and
Vischer), and its inadequacy follows from the fact, among others, that
it allows absolutely no place for the ugly as an object of artistic
representation.
Let us remind ourselves how works of art and art in general originated.
That plastic art originally sprang from the imitation of Nature is a
commonplace, open justly to the reproach that it does not enter deeply
enough into the question. Imitation is without doubt one of the first
and most general reactions of the developed living being upon the
impressions it receives from the external world. This is a necessary
consequence of the mechanism of the higher activity of the nervous
system. Every compound movement must be preceded by the representation
of this movement, and, conversely, no representation of movement can be
elaborated without at least a faint and hinted accomplishment of the
corresponding movement by the muscles. Upon this principle depends,
for example, the well-known ‘thought-reading.’ As often, therefore,
as a being (whose nervous system is developed highly enough to raise
perceptions to the rank of representations) acquires knowledge, _i.e._,
forms for itself a representation of any phenomenon whatever comprising
in itself a more or less molar form of movement (molecular movements,
and, _a fortiori_, vibrations of ether are not directly recognised as
changes of position in space), it has also a tendency to transform the
representation into a movement resembling it, and hence to imitate
the phenomenon, in that form, naturally, which, with its means, it
is capable of realizing. If every representation be not embodied in
perceptible movement, the cause is to be traced to the action of
the inhibitive mechanism of the brain, which does not permit every
representation at once to set the muscles into activity. In a state of
fatigue inhibition is relaxed, and, in fact, all sorts of unintentional
imitations make their appearance, as, for example, symmetrical
movements, such as the left hand involuntarily and aimlessly makes of
those executed by the right hand in writing, etc. There is also a rare
disease of the nerves[307] hitherto observed chiefly in Russia, and
especially in Siberia, there called _myriachit_, in which inhibition
becomes completely disorganized, so that the diseased persons are
forced at once to imitate any action seen by them, even if it be
disagreeable or pernicious to them. If, for example, they see someone
fall, they are compelled to throw themselves also to the ground, even
if they are standing in a muddy road.
Except in disease and fatigue, the action of inhibition is suspended
only when the excitation produced in the nervous system by an
impression is strong enough to vanquish it. If this impression is
disagreeable, or menacing, the movements set loose by it are those of
defence or flight. If, on the contrary, the impression is pleasant,
or if it is surprising without being disquieting, then the reaction
of the organism against it is a movement without objective aim, most
frequently a movement of imitation. Hence, among healthy men possessed
of well-working inhibitory mechanism in their nervous system, this
movement does not appear with every phenomenon, but only with such as
strike it forcibly, fix its attention, engage and stimulate it--in a
word, cause an emotion. Activity of imitation (and the plastic arts
are at bottom nothing but residuary traces of imitative movements)
has consequently an immediate organic aim, viz., the freeing of the
nervous system from an excitation set up in it by some visual cause. If
the excitation is not caused by the sight of any external phenomenon,
but by an internal organic state (_e.g._, sexual _erethism_), or by
a representation of an abstract nature (_e.g._, the joy of victory,
sorrow, or longing), it likewise transforms itself, it is true, into
movements; but these are naturally not imitative. They embody no motor
representation, but are in part such as have for their sole end the
relaxing of the nerve-centres overcharged with motor impulsions, as in
the dance, in outcries, song and music, and in part such as disburden
the centres of ideation, like declamation, lyric and epic poetry. If
artistic activity is frequently exercised and facilitated by habit, it
no longer requires emotions of extraordinary strength to provoke it. As
often, then, as man is excited by such external or internal impressions
as demand no action (conflict, flight, adaptation), but reach his
consciousness in the form of a mood, he relieves his nervous system of
this excitation through some kind of artistic activity, either by means
of the plastic arts or by music and poetry.
Hence imitation is not the source of the arts, but one of the media
of art; the real source of art is emotion. Artistic activity is not
its own end, but it is of direct utility to the artist; it satisfies
the need of his organism to transform its emotions into movement. He
creates the work of art, not for its own sake, but to free his nervous
system from a tension. The expression, which has become a commonplace,
is psycho-physiologically accurate, viz., the artist writes, paints,
sings, or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.
To this primary end of art--the subjective end of the self-deliverance
of the artist--a second must be added, viz., the objective end of
acting upon others. Like every other animal living in society and
partly dependent upon it, man has, in consequence of his racial
instinct, the aspiration to impart his own emotions to those of his
own species, just as he himself participates in the emotions of those
of his own species. This strong desire to know himself in emotional
communion with the species is sympathy, that organic base of the
social edifice.[308] In advanced civilization, where the original
natural motives of actions are partly obscured and partly replaced by
artificial motives, and the actions themselves receive an aim other
than the theoretical one proper to them, the artist is, it is true,
not limited to sharing his emotions with others, but creates his work
of art with the accessory purpose of becoming famous--a wish springing
none the less from social instincts, since it is directed towards
obtaining the applause of his fellow-creatures, or even of earning
money, a motive no longer social, but purely egoistic. This vulgarly
egoistic motive is still the only one influencing the countless
imitators who practise art, not from original strong desire, and as
the natural and necessary mode of expressing their emotions, but whose
artistic activity is caused by the envy with which they regard the
success of others in art.
Once we have established, as a fact, that art is not practised for its
own sake alone, but that it has a double aim, subjective and objective,
viz., the satisfaction of an organic want of the artist, and the
influencing of his fellow-creatures, then the principles by which every
other human activity pursuing the same end is judged are applicable to
it, _i.e._, the principles of law and morality.
We test every organic desire to see whether it be the outcome of
a legitimate need or the consequence of an aberration; whether
its satisfaction be beneficial or pernicious to the organism. We
distinguish the healthy from the diseased impulse, and demand that
the latter be combated. If the desire seeks its satisfaction in an
activity acting upon others, then we examine to see if this activity is
reconcilable with the existence and prosperity of society, or dangerous
to it. The activity imperilling society offends against law and custom,
which are nothing but an epitome of the temporary notions of society
concerning what is beneficial and what is pernicious to it.
Notions healthy and diseased, moral and immoral, social or anti-social,
are as valid for art as for every other human activity, and there is
not a scintilla of reason for regarding a work of art in any other
light than that in which we view every other manifestation of an
individuality.
It is easily conceivable that the emotion expressed by the artist in
his work may proceed from a morbid aberration, may be directed, in
an unnatural, sensual, cruel manner, to what is ugly or loathsome.
Ought we not in this case to condemn the work and, if possible, to
suppress it? How can its right to exist be justified? By claiming
that the artist was sincere when he created it, that he gave back
what was really existing in him, and for that reason was subjectively
justified in his artistic expansion? But there is a candour which is
wholly inadmissible. The dipsomaniac and clastomaniac are sincere
when they respectively drink or break everything within reach. We do
not, however, acknowledge their right to satisfy their desire. We
prevent them by force. We put them under guardianship, although their
drunkenness and destructiveness may perhaps be injurious to no one but
themselves. And still more decidedly does society oppose itself to
the satisfaction of those cravings which cannot be appeased without
violently acting upon others. The new science of criminal anthropology
admits without dispute that homicidal maniacs, certain incendiaries,
many thieves and vagabonds, act under an impulsion; that through their
crimes they satisfy an organic craving; that they outrage, kill,
burn, idle, as others sit down to dinner, simply because they hunger
to do so; but in spite of this and because of this, it demands that
the appeasing of the sincere longings of these degenerate creatures
be prevented by all means, and, if needs be, by their complete
suppression. It never occurs to us to permit the criminal by organic
disposition to ‘expand’ his individuality in crime, and just as little
can it be expected of us to permit the degenerate artist to expand his
individuality in immoral works of art. The artist who complacently
represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it,
perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the
criminal who actually commits it. It is a question of the intensity of
the impulsion and the resisting power of the judgment, perhaps also
of courage and cowardice; nothing else. If the actual law does not
treat the criminal by intention so rigorously as the criminal in act,
it is because criminal law pursues the deed, and not the purpose; the
objective phenomenon, not its subjective roots. The Middle Ages had
places of sanctuary where criminals could not be molested for their
misdemeanours. Modern law has done away with this institution. Ought
art to be at present the last asylum to which criminals may fly to
escape punishment? Are they to be able to satisfy, in the so-called
‘temple’ of art, instincts which the policeman prevents them from
appeasing in the street? I do not see how a privilege so inimical to
society can be willingly defended.
I am far from sharing Ruskin’s opinion that morality alone, and
nothing else, can be demanded of a work of art. Morality alone is
not sufficient. Otherwise religious tracts would be the finest
literature, and the well-known coloured casts of sacred subjects turned
out wholesale in Munich factories would be the choicest sculpture.
Excellence of form maintains its rights in all the arts, and gives to
the finest creation its artistic value. Hence the work need not be
moral. More accurately, it need not be designed expressly to preach
virtue and the fear of God, and to be destined for the edification
of devotees. But between a work without sanctified aim and one of
wilful immorality there is a world of difference. A work which is
indifferent from a moral point of view will not be equally attractive
or satisfying to all minds, but it will offend and repel no one. An
explicitly immoral work excites in healthy persons the same feelings of
displeasure and disgust as the immoral act itself, and the form of the
work can change nothing of this. Most assuredly morality alone does not
give beauty to a work of art. But beauty without morality is impossible.
We now come to the second argument with which the Æsthetes wish to
defend the right of the artist to immorality. The work of art, they
say, need only be beautiful. Beauty lies in the form. Hence the content
is a matter of indifference. This may be vice and crime; but it cannot
derogate from the excellences of form if these be present.
He alone can venture to advance such principles who is without the
least inkling of the psycho-physiology of the æsthetic feelings.
Everyone who has studied this subject in the least knows that two
kinds of the beautiful are distinguished--the sensuously-beautiful
and the intellectually-beautiful. We feel those phenomena to be
beautiful, the sense-perception of which is accompanied by a feeling
of pleasure--_e.g._, a particular colour, perhaps a pure red, or a
harmony; nay, even a single note with its severally indistinguishable
but synchronous overtones. The researches of Helmholtz[309] and
Blaserna[310] have thrown light on the cause of the feeling of
pleasure connected with certain acoustic perceptions, while those of
Brücke[311] have led to similar results with regard to the mechanism
of the feelings of pleasure following optical impressions. It is a
question of discernment by the sensory nerves of definite simple
numerical relations in the vibrations of matter or of ether. We know
less concerning the causes of the pleasures connected with smell
and touch; yet here also it seems to be a question of more or less
strong impressions, hence equally of quantities--_i.e._, of numbers.
The ultimate cause of all these feelings is that certain modes of
vibrations are in accord with the structure of the nerves, are easy for
them and leave them in order, while other modes disturb the arrangement
of the nerve particles, often costing the nerves an effort, often
dangerous to their existence or at least their functioning, to restore
them to their natural order. The former will be felt as pleasure, the
latter as discomfort, and even as pain. With the sensuously-beautiful
there can be no question of morality, for it exists as perception only,
and does not rise to the rank of representation.
Above the sensuously-beautiful stands the intellectually-beautiful,
no longer consisting of mere perceptions, but of representations, of
concepts and judgments, with their accompanying emotions elaborated in
the unconscious. The intellectually-beautiful must also awaken feelings
of pleasure, to be perceived as beautiful; and, as above explained,
with feelings of pleasure are united, in healthy, fully-developed human
beings equipped with the social instinct (altruism), only those ideas
the content whereof is conducive to the existence and prosperity of the
individual being, society, or species. Now, that which is favourable
to the life and prosperity of the individual and of the species is
precisely that which we call moral.
From this it results by an iron necessity that a work which awakens no
feelings of pleasure cannot be beautiful, and that it can awaken no
feelings of pleasure if it is not moral, and we arrive at the final
conclusion, that morality and beauty are in their innermost essence
identical. It were not false to assert that beauty is statical repose,
and morality beauty in action.
This is only apparently contradicted by the fact that what is
incontestably ugly and bad may also be agreeable, and hence awaken
feelings of pleasure. The mental process set up by percepts and ideas
is not, in this case, so simple and direct as with respect to the
beautiful and the good. Associations sometimes of a highly complex
nature must first be put into activity, finally, however, to lead to
the single great result, viz., the awakening of feelings of pleasure.
The well-known Aristotelian catharsis, purging or purification,
explains how tragedy, though it offers the spectacle of pain and ruin,
finally produces an agreeable effect. The representation of deserved
misfortune awakens ideas of justice, a moral, agreeable idea; and even
that of unmerited misfortune gives rise to pity, in itself a feeling
of pain, though, in its quality of a racial instinct, beneficial
and therefore not only moral, but, in its final essence, agreeable.
When Valdez, in his famous picture of the _Caridad de Sevilla_,
shows us an open coffin in which lies the corpse of an arch-bishop
in full vestments, swarming with worms, this spectacle is in itself
undeniably repulsive. Nevertheless it permits us at once to recognise
the emotion which the painter wished to express, viz., his feeling of
the nothingness of all earthly possessions and honours, the frailty
of man in the face of the primeval power of Nature. It is the same
emotion embodied by Holbein in his ‘Dance of Death,’ not so profoundly
and passionately as by the Spaniard with his stronger feelings, but
with self-mockery and bitterness. The same emotion is heard, somewhat
less gloomily and with more of a melancholy resignation, in Mozart’s
_Requiem_. In the idea of the contrast between the insignificance of
individual life and the vastness and eternity of Nature, there mingles
itself an element of the sublime, of which the idea, as the choicest
form of activity in the highest brain-centres, is united with feelings
of pleasure.
Another circumstance in the plastic arts has to be considered. In works
of sculpture and painting a broad separation is possible between the
form and the content, between the sensuous and the moral. A painting,
a group, may represent the most immoral and most criminal incident;
nevertheless, the individual constituent parts--the atmosphere, the
harmonies of colour, the human figures--may be beautiful in themselves,
and the connoisseur may derive enjoyment from them without dwelling on
the subject of the work. The engravings in the _Editions des fermiers
généraux_ of the last century, the works in marble and bronze of the
pornographic museum at Naples, are, in a measure, repulsively immoral,
because they represent unnatural vice. In themselves, however, they are
excellently executed, and are accessible to a mode of contemplation
which disregards their idea and keeps in view only the perfection of
their form. Here, therefore, the impression of the work of art is
a mixture of disgust for the subject treated, and enjoyment of the
beauty of the several figures and their attitudes--painted, drawn, or
modelled. The feeling of pleasure may preponderate, and the work, in
spite of its depravity, produce, not a repellent, but an attractive
effect. It is the same in nature. If that which is pernicious and
frightful is sometimes felt to be beautiful, it is because it contains
certain features and elements which have no cogent reference to the
frightful or pernicious character of the whole, and can hence in
themselves operate æsthetically. The hammer-headed viper is beautiful
on account of its metallic lustre; the tiger for its strength and
suppleness; the foxglove (_Digitalis_) for its graceful form and rich
rosy hue. The noxiousness of the snake does not lie in its copper-red
dorsal bands, nor the terribleness of the beast of prey in its
graceful appearance, nor the danger of the poisonous plant in the form
and colour of its blossoms. In these cases the sensuously-beautiful
outweighs the morally-repulsive, because it is more immediately
present, and, in the collective impression, allows the feelings of
pleasure to predominate. The spectacle of the display of strength and
resolution is equally a beautiful one, on account of the ideas of
organic efficiency awakened by it. Would this, however, be thought
beautiful if one could see how an assassin overpowers a victim who
is resisting violently, hurls him to the ground and butchers him?
Certainly not; for before such a picture it is no longer possible to
separate the display of strength, beautiful in itself, from its aim,
and to enjoy the former regardless of the latter.
In poetry this separation of the form from the content is far less
possible than in the plastic arts. The word can hardly in itself
produce an effect of sensuous beauty by its auditory or visual image,
even if it presents itself rhythmically regulated and strengthened by
the more expressive double sound of a rhyme. It operates almost solely
by its content, by the representations which it awakens. Hence it is
hardly conceivable that one can hear or read a poetical exposition
of criminal or vicious facts, without having present at each word a
representation of its content, and not of its form--_i.e._, of its
sound. In this case, therefore, the impression can no longer be a
composite one, as at the sight of a finely-painted portrayal of a
repulsive incident, but must be purely disagreeable. The pictures
of Giulio Romano, to which Pietro Aretino dedicated his _Sonetti
lussuriosi_, may be found beautiful by the admirers of the effeminate
style of that pupil of Raphael; the sonnets are only the more
disgusting. Who would experience feelings of pleasure from the perusal
of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Andrea de Nercia or Liseux?
Only one species of human beings--that of the degenerate with perverted
instincts. Portrayals of crime and vice in art and literature have
their public; that we well know. It is the public of the gaols. Besides
dismally sentimental books, criminals read nothing so willingly as
stories of lust and violence;[312] and the drawings and inscriptions
with which they cover the walls of their cells have, for the most
part, their crimes as subjects.[313] But the healthy man feels himself
violently repelled by works of this kind, and it is impossible for him
to receive an æsthetic impression from them, be their form never so
conformable to the most approved rules of art.
In yet another case it is possible for that which is most ugly and
vicious in artistic portrayal to operate in the direction of the
morally beautiful. This is when it allows us to recognise the moral
purpose of the author and betrays his sympathetic emotion. For that
which we, consciously or unconsciously, perceive behind every artistic
creation is the nature of its creator and the emotion from which it
sprang, and our sympathy with, or antipathy for, the emotion of the
author has the lion’s share in our appreciation of the work. When
Raffaelli paints shockingly degraded absinthe-drinkers in the low
drinking dens of the purlieus of Paris, we clearly feel his profound
pity at the sight of these fallen human beings, and this emotion we
experience as a morally beautiful one. In like manner we have not a
momentary doubt of the morality of the artist’s emotions when we behold
Callot’s pictures of the horrors of war, or the bleeding, purulent
saints of Zurbaran, or the monsters of Breughel van der Hölle, or
when we read the murder scene in Dostojevsky’s _Raskolnikow_.[314]
These emotions are beautiful. Sympathy with them gives us a feeling
of pleasure. Against this feeling the displeasure caused by the
repulsiveness of the work cannot prevail. When, however, the work
betrays the indifference of the author to the evil or ugliness he
depicts, nay, his predilection for it, then the abhorrence provoked
by the work is intensified by all the disgust which the author’s
aberration of instinct inspires in us, and the aggregate impression is
one of keenest displeasure. Those who share the emotions of the author,
and hence are with him attracted and pleasurably excited by what is
repugnant, diseased and evil, are the degenerate.
The Æsthetes affirm that artistic activity is the highest of which
the human mind is capable, and must occupy the first place in the
estimation of men. How do they manage to establish this assertion from
their own standpoint? Why should I place a high value on the activity
of a fellow who with rapture describes the colours and odours of putrid
carrion; and why should I bestow my especial esteem on a painter who
shows me the libidinousness of a harlot? Because the amount of artistic
technique involved is difficult? If that is to be the decisive point,
then, to be logical, the Æsthetes must place the acrobat higher than
the artist of their species, since it is much more difficult to learn
the art of the trapezist than the rhyming and daubing which constitutes
the ‘art’ of the Æsthetes. Is it to be on account of sensations of
pleasure given by artists? First of all, those artists over whom the
Æsthetes grow so enthusiastic create in the healthy man no pleasure,
but loathing or boredom. But granted that they do provide sensations,
the first inquiry must then be of what sort these sensations are.
Every sensation, even if we for the moment find it agreeable, does not
inspire us with esteem for the person to whom we are indebted for it.
At the card-table, in the public-house and the brothel, a base nature
may procure sensations the intensity of which those offered by any work
of the Æsthetes is far from being able to rival. But even the most
dissolute drunkard does not in consequence hold the keepers of these
places of his pleasures in specially high esteem.
The truth is that the claim of the highest rank for art advanced by the
Æsthetes involves the complete refutation of their other dogmas. The
race estimates individual activities according to their utility for the
whole. The higher this develops itself, the more exact and profound
is the understanding it acquires of that which is really necessary
and beneficial to it. The warrior, who in a low grade of civilization
rightly plays the most prominent part, because society must live,
and to this end must defend itself against its enemies, recedes to a
more humble position as manners become more gentle, and the relations
between peoples cease to resemble those between beasts of prey, and
assume a human character. Once the race has attained in some degree
to a clear comprehension of its relation to nature, it knows that
knowledge is its most important task, and its profoundest respect is
for those who cultivate and enlarge knowledge--_i.e._, for thinkers and
investigators. Even in the monarchical state, which, conformably with
its own atavistic nature, gauges the importance of the warrior by the
standard of primitive men (and in the present condition of Europe, in
the presence of the scarcely restrained fury for war, among a whole
series of nations, the _raison d’être_ for this atavism cannot, alas!
be contested), the scholar, as professor, academician, counsellor, is a
constituent part of the governmental machine, and honours and dignities
fall far more to his lot than to the poet and artist. The enthusiasts
of the latter are youths and women--_i.e._, those components of the
race in whom the unconscious outweighs consciousness; for artist and
poet address themselves first of all to emotion, and this is more
easily excited in the woman and the adolescent than in the mature man;
their accomplishments are, moreover, more accessible to the multitude
than those of the scholar whom almost the best alone of his time can
follow, and whose importance is in general fully appreciated only by a
few specialists, even in our days of the popularization of science by
the press. State and society, however, seek to compensate him for the
evasion of this reward, by surrounding him with official forms of high
esteem.
It is true that very great artists and poets, admitted pioneers, whose
influence is recognised as lasting, likewise receive their share of the
official honours disposed of by the organized commonwealth as such,
and these exceptional men obtain a more brilliant reward than any
investigator or discoverer; for together with the common distinctions
shared by them with the latter, they possess the wide popularity which
the investigator and discoverer must dispense withal. And why is the
artist sometimes placed, even by persons of good and serious minds, on
a level with, or even above, the man of science? Because these persons
value the beautiful more than the true, emotion more than knowledge?
No; but because they have the right feeling that art is equally a
source of knowledge.
It is so in three ways. Firstly, the emotion evoked by the work of art
is itself a means of obtaining knowledge, as Edmund R. Clay, James
Sully, and other psychologists have seen, without, however, dwelling
on the important fact. It constrains the higher centres to attend to
the causes of their excitations, and in this way necessarily induces a
sharper observation and comprehension of the whole series of phenomena
related to the emotion. Next, the work of art grants an insight into
the laws of which the phenomenon is the expression; for the artist, in
his creation, separates the essential from the accidental, neglects
the latter, which in nature is wont to divert and confuse the less
gifted observer, and involuntarily gives prominence to the former as
that which chiefly or solely occupies his attention, and is therefore
perceived and reproduced by him with especial distinctness. The
artist himself divines the idea behind the structure, and its inner
principle and connection, intelligible but not perceivable, in the
form, and discloses it in his work to the spectator. That is what
Hegel means when he calls the beautiful ‘the presence of the idea
in limited phenomenon.’ By means of his own deep comprehension of
natural law, the artist powerfully furthers the comprehension of it
by other men.[315] Finally, art is the only glimmer of light, weak
and dubious though it be, which projects itself into the future, and
gives us at least a dream-like idea of the outlines and direction of
our further organic developments. This is not mysticism, but a very
clear and comprehensible fact. We have seen above[316] that every
adaptation--_i.e._, every change of form and function of the organs--is
preceded by a representation of this change. The change must first be
felt and desired as necessary; then a representation of it becomes
elaborated in the higher or highest nerve-centres, and finally the
organism endeavours to realize this representation. This process
repeats itself in the same way in the race. Some state is disturbing
to it. It experiences feelings of discomfort from this state. It
suffers from it. From this results its desire to change the state. It
elaborates for itself an image of the nature, direction and extent of
this change. According to the older, mystic phrase, ‘it creates for
itself an ideal.’ The ideal is really the formative idea of future
organic development with a view to better adaptation. In the most
perfect individuals of the species it exists earlier and more distinct
than in the average multitude, and the artist ventures with uncertain
hand to make it accessible to sense through the medium of his work
of art long before it can be organically realized by the race. Thus
art vouchsafes the most refined and highest knowledge, bordering on
the marvellous, viz., the knowledge of the future. Not so definitely,
of course, nor so unequivocally, does art express the secret natural
law of being and becoming as science. Science shows the present, the
positive; Art prophesies the future, the possible, though stammeringly
and obscurely. To the former Nature unveils her fixed forms; to the
latter she grants, amidst shudderings, a rapid, bewildered glimpse of
the depths where what is yet formless is struggling to appear. The
emotion from which the divining work of art springs is the birth throe
of the quick and vigorous organism pregnant with the future.[317]
This art of presentiment is certainly the highest mental activity of
the human being. But it is not the art of the Æsthetes. It is the most
moral art, for it is the most ideal, a word only meaning that it is
parallel with the paths along which the race is perfecting itself--nay,
coincides with these.
By the most diverse methods we have always attained the same result,
viz., it is not true that art has nothing in common with morality.
The work of art must be moral, for its aim is to express and excite
emotions. In virtue of this aim it falls within the competence of
criticism, which tests all emotions by their utility or perniciousness
to the individual or the race; and if it is immoral, it must be
condemned like every other organic activity opposed to this aim. The
work of art must be moral, for it is intended to operate æsthetically.
It can only do this if it awakens feelings of pleasure, at least
ultimately; it provides such, only if it includes beauty in itself; but
beauty is in its essence synonymous with morality. Finally, the highest
work of art can, from its inmost nature, be none other than moral,
since it is a manifestation of vital force and health, a revelation
of the capacity for evolution of the race; and humanity values it so
highly because it divines this circumstance.
Concerning the last doctrine of the Æsthetes, viz., that art must shun
the true and the natural, this is a commonplace pushed to an absurdity,
and converted into its contrary. Perfect, actual truth and naturalness
need not be denied to art; they are impossible to it. For whereas
the work of art makes the artist’s idea tangible, an idea is never
an exact copy of a phenomenon of the external world. Before it can
become an idea in a human consciousness every phenomenon experiences
two very essential modifications--one in the afferent and receptive
organs of sense, the other in the centres elaborating sense-perceptions
into representations. These sensory nerves and centres of perception
change the modes of the external stimuli conformably with their own
nature; they give to these their particular colouring, as different
wind-instruments played by the same person give forth different
shades of sound with the same force of breath. The centres forming
representations modify in their turn the actual relation of the
phenomena to each other, in that they bring some into stronger relief,
and neglect others of really equal value. Consciousness does not take
cognizance of all the countless perceptions uninterruptedly excited
in the brain, but of those only to which it is attentive. But by the
simple fact of attention, consciousness selects individual phenomena,
and gives them an importance they do not possess in the unceasing
uniformity of universal movement.
But if the work of art never renders reality in its exact relations,
it can, on the other hand (and this is both a psychological and
æsthetical commonplace), never be constructed from constituents other
than those supplied by reality. The mode in which these constituents
are blended and united by the artist’s imagination permits the
recognition of another fact, as true and natural as any that is
habitually designated by us as real, to wit, the character, mode of
thought, and emotion of the artist. For what is imagination? A special
case of the general psychological law of association. In scientific
observation and judgment the play of association is most rigorously
supervised by attention; the will violently inhibits the propagation of
stimuli along the most convenient paths, and prevents the penetration
of mere similarities, contrasts, and contiguities in space or time
into consciousness, which is reserved for the images of immediate
reality transmitted by the senses. In artistic creation imagination
rules--that is to say, the inhibition exercised by the will is relaxed;
in accordance with the laws of association a presentation is allowed
to summon into consciousness representations which are similar,
contrasted, or contiguous in space or time. But inhibition is not
wholly inactive, and the will does not permit the union of reciprocally
exclusive representations into a concept; thus it prohibits the
elaboration of an intellectual absurdity, such as is yielded by purely
automatic association or fugitive ideation. The emotion of the artist
reveals itself in accordance with the way in which representations
supplied by association are grouped into concepts, for it causes
representations agreeing with it to be retained, and the indifferent or
contradictory to be suppressed. Even fantastic images, as extravagant
as a winged horse or a woman with lion’s paws, reveal a true emotion:
the former an aspiration proceeding from the spectacle of the bird
soaring light and free; the latter a horror of the power of sexuality
subjugating reason and conjuring up devouring passion. It would be
a grateful task for workers in the histology of psychology to trace
the emotions whence the best known fantastic figures of art and the
metaphors of poets have proceeded. Hence it may be said that every work
of art always comprises in itself truth and reality in so far as, if it
does not reflect the external world, it surely reflects the mental life
of the artist.
Hence, as we have seen, not one of the sophisms of the Æsthetes
withstands criticism. The work of art is not its own aim, but it has
a specially organic, and a social task. It is subject to the moral
law; it must obey this; it has claim to esteem only if it is morally
beautiful and ideal. And it cannot be other than natural and true,
in so far, at least, as it is the offprint of a personality, which
is also a part of nature and reality. The entire system takes as its
point of departure a few erroneous or imprudent assertions of thinkers
and poets commanding respect, but developed by the Parnassians and
Decadents in a way of which Lessing, Kant and Schiller never allowed
themselves to dream. This is no other than the well-known attempt to
explain and justify impulsions by motives more or less obvious and
invented _post facto_. The degenerate who, in consequence of their
organic aberrations, make the repulsive and ugly, vice and crime, the
subject-matter of plastic and literary works of art, naturally have
recourse to the theory that art has nothing in common with morality,
truth and beauty, since this theory has for them the value of an
excuse. And must not the excessive value set upon artistic activity
as such, without regard to the worth of its results, be highly
welcome to the limitless crowd of imitators who practise art, not
from an inner prompting, but from a foolhardy craving for the respect
surrounding real artists--imitators who have nothing of their own to
say, no emotion, not an idea, but who, with a superficial professional
dexterity easily acquired, falsify the views and feelings of masters in
all branches of art? This rabble, which claims for itself a top place
in the scale of intellectual rank, and freedom from the constraint of
all moral laws as its most noble privilege, is certainly baser than
the lowest scavenger. These creatures are of absolutely no use to the
commonwealth, and injure true art by their productions, whose multitude
and importunateness shut out from most men the sight of the genuine
works of art--never very numerous--of the epoch. They are weaklings
in will, unfitted for any activity requiring regular uniform efforts,
or else victims to vanity, wishing to be more famous than is possible
to a stone-breaker or a tailor. The uncertainty of comprehension and
taste among the majority of mankind, and the incompetency of most
professional critics, allow these intruders to make their nest among
the arts, and to dwell there as parasites their life long. The buyer
soon distinguishes a good boot from a bad one, and the journeyman
cobbler who cannot properly sew on a sole finds no employment. But that
a book or painting void of all originality is indifferent in quality,
and for that reason superfluous, is by no means so easily recognised
by the Philistine, or even by the man armed with the critical pen,
and the producer of such chaff can apply himself undisturbed to his
assiduous waste of time. These bunglers with pen, brush and modelling
spattle, strutting about in cap and doublet, naturally swear by the
doctrine of the Æsthetes, carry themselves as if they were the salt of
humanity, and make a parade of their contempt for the Philistine. They
belong, however, to the elements of the race which are most inimical to
society. Insensible to its tasks and interests, without the capacity
to comprehend a serious thought or a fruitful deed, they dream only of
the satisfaction of their basest instincts, and are pernicious--through
the example they set as drones, as well as through the confusion they
cause in minds insufficiently forewarned, by their abuse of the word
‘art’ to mean demoralization and childishness. Ego-maniacs, Decadents
and Æsthetes have completely gathered under their banner this refuse of
civilized peoples, and march at its head.
CHAPTER IV.
IBSENISM.
IN the course of the last two centuries the whole civilized world
has, with greater or less unanimity, repeatedly recognised a sort of
intellectual royalty in some contemporary, to whom it has rendered
homage as the first and greatest among living authors. For a great
part of the eighteenth century Voltaire, ‘_le roi Voltaire_,’ was the
‘poet laureate’ of all civilized nations. During the first third of the
present century this position was held by Goethe. After his death the
throne remained vacant for a score of years, when Victor Hugo ascended
it amidst the enthusiastic acclamations of the Latin and Slavonic
races, and with a feeble opposition from those of Teutonic origin, to
hold it until the end of his life.
At the present time voices have for some years been heard in all
countries claiming for Henrik Ibsen the highest intellectual honours
at the disposal of mankind. It is wished that the Norwegian dramatist
should, in his old age, be recognised as the world-poet of the closing
century. It is true that only a part of the multitude and of the
critical representatives of its taste acclaims him; but the fact that
it has entered anyone’s mind at all to see in him a claimant for the
throne of poetry makes a minute examination of his titles to the
position necessary.
That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power is not for a
moment to be denied. He is extraordinarily emotive, and has the gift
of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and impressive manner
that which has excited his feelings. (We shall see that these are
almost always feelings of hatred and rage, _i.e._, of displeasure.) A
natural capacity drew him towards the stage--a capacity for imagining
situations in which the characters are forced to turn inside out their
inmost nature; in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds,
and modes of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible to the senses, but
potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in attitudes and
gestures, in the play of feature and in words. Like Richard Wagner, he
knows how to group events into living frescoes possessing the charm of
significant pictures; with this difference, however, that Ibsen works,
not like Wagner, with strange costumes and properties, architectural
splendour, mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with
penetrating vision into the backgrounds of souls and the conditions of
humanity. Fairy-lore is not lacking in Ibsen either, but he does not
allow the imagination of the spectators to run riot in mere spectacles;
he forces them into moods, and binds them by his spell in circles of
ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.
His strong desire to embody the thought occupying his mind in a single
picture, which can be surveyed at one view, also dictated to him the
set form of his drama--a form not invented, but largely perfected, by
him. His pieces are, as it were, final words terminating long anterior
developments. They are the sudden breaking into flame of combustible
materials accumulating during years, it may be during whole human
lives, or even generations, and of which the sudden flare brilliantly
illumines a wide extent of time and space. The incidents of the
Ibsen drama more frequently take place in a day, or at most in twice
twenty-four hours, and in this short space of time there are concentred
all the effects of the course of the world and of social institutions
on certain characters, in such a conspectus that the destinies of the
dramatis personæ become clear to us from the moment of their first
appearance. _The Doll’s House_, _Ghosts_, _Rosmersholm_, _The Pillars
of Society_, and _Hedda Gabler_ comprise about twenty-four hours; _An
Enemy of Society_, _The Wild Duck_, _The Lady from the Sea_, about
thirty-six hours. It is the return to the Aristotelian doctrine of the
unities of time and space with an orthodoxy compared with which the
French classicists of the age of Louis XIV. are heretics. I might well
term the Ibsenite technique a technique of fireworks, for it consists
in preparing long in advance a staging on which the suns, Roman
candles, squibs, fireballs and concluding fire-sheaves are carefully
placed in proper position. When all is ready the curtain rises, and the
artistically-constructed work begins to crackle, explosion following
explosion uninterruptedly with thunder and lightning. This technique
is certainly very effective, but hardly true. In reality events rarely
lead up to a catastrophe so brilliant and succinct. In Nature all is
slowly prepared, and unrolls itself gradually, and the results of
human deeds covering years of time do not compress themselves into a
few hours. Nature does not work epigrammatically. She cannot trouble
herself about Aristotelian unities, for she has always an infinity of
affairs of her own in progress at one and the same time. As a matter of
handicraft, one is certainly often forced to admire the cleverness with
which Ibsen guides and knots the threads of his plot. Sometimes the
labour is more successful than at other times, but it always implies a
great expenditure of textile skill. Whoever sets most store on truth in
a poem--that is, on the natural action of the laws of life--will often
enough bring away from Ibsen’s dramas an impression of improbability,
and of toilsome and subtle lucubrations.
The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a
situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher
than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time, which
may be said to be the poetic counterpart of the painter’s artifice
(difficult, but for the most part barren) of foreshortening in space.
Each of the terse words which suffice him has something of the nature
of a peep-hole, through which limitless vistas are obtained. The
plays of all peoples and all ages have few situations at once so
perfectly simple and so irresistibly affecting as the scenes--to cite
only a few--where Nora is playing with her children,[318] where Dr.
Rank relates that he is doomed to imminent death by his inexorable
disease,[319] where Frau Alving with horror discerns his dissolute
father[320] in her only son, where the housekeeper, Frau Helseth, sees
Rosmer and Rebecca die in each other’s arms,[321] etc.
Similarly, it must be acknowledged that Ibsen has created some
characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness such
as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare. Gina
(in _The Wild Duck_) is one of the most profound creations of
world-literature--almost as great as Sancho Panza, who inspired it.
Ibsen has had the daring to create a female Sancho, and in his temerity
has come very near to Cervantes, whom no one has equalled. If Gina is
not quite so overpowering as Sancho, it is because there is wanting
in her his contrast to Don Quixote. Her Don Quixote, Hjalmar, is no
genuine, convinced idealist, but merely a miserable self-deluding
burlesquer of the ideal. None the less, no poet since the illustrious
Spanish master has succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain,
jolly, healthy common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety as to
things eternal, and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, obvious
duties, without a suspicion of higher moral obligations, as this Gina,
_e.g._, in the scene where Hjalmar returns home after having spent the
night out.[322] Hjalmar also is a perfect creation, in which Ibsen
has not once succumbed to the cogent temptation to exaggerate, but
has exercised most entrancingly that ‘self-restraint’ in every word
which, as Goethe said, ‘reveals the master.’ Little Hedwig (again in
_The Wild Duck_), the aunt Juliane Tesman (in _Hedda Gabler_), perhaps
also the childishly egoistical consumptive Lyngstrand (in _The Lady
from the Sea_), are not inferior to these characters. It should,
however, be noticed that, with the exception of Gina, Hjalmar and
Hedwig, the lifelike and artistically delightful persons in Ibsen’s
dramas never play the chief parts, but move in subordinate tasks
around the central figures. The latter are not human beings of flesh
and blood, but abstractions such as are evoked by a morbidly-excited
brain. They are attempts at the embodiment of Ibsenite doctrines,
_homunculi_, originating not from natural procreation, but through the
black art of the poet. This is even admitted, although reluctantly and
with reservation, by one of his most raving panegyrists, the French
professor, Auguste Ehrhard.[323] Doubtless Ibsen takes immense pains
to rouge and powder into a semblance of life the talking puppets who
are to represent his notions. He appends to them all sorts of little
peculiarities for the purpose of giving them an individual physiognomy.
But this perpetually recurring imbecile ‘Eh?’ of Tesman[324] (in _Hedda
Gabler_), this ‘dash it all!’ and stealthy nibbling of sweetmeats by
Nora[325] (in _A Doll’s House_), this ‘smoking a large meerschaum’ and
champagne-drinking of Oswald (in _Ghosts_), do not delude the attentive
observer as to their being anything but automata. In spite of the
poet’s artifices, one sees, behind the thin varnish of flesh-colour,
the hinges and joints of the mechanism, and hears, above the tones of
the phonographs concealed in them, the creaking and grating of the
machinery.
I have endeavoured to do justice to the high poetical endowment of
Ibsen, and shall sometimes be able in the course of this inquiry to
recognise this gift again. Is it this, however, which alone or chiefly
has gained for him his admirers in all lands? Do his retinue of fifers
and bagpipers prize him for his homely emotional scenes, and for his
truly lifelike accessory figures? No. They glorify something else
in him. They discover in his pieces world-pictures of the greatest
truth, the happiest poetic use of scientific methods, clearness and
incisiveness of ideas, a fiercely revolutionary desire for freedom,
and a modernity pregnant with the future. Now we will test and examine
these affirmations _seriatim_, and see if they can be supported
by Ibsen’s works, or are merely the arbitrary and undemonstrable
expressions of æsthetic wind-bags.
It is pretended that Ibsen is before all things exemplary in
truthfulness. He has even become the model of ‘realism.’ As a matter of
fact, since Alexandre Dumas père, author of _The Three Musketeers_ and
_Monte Cristo_, no writer has heaped up in his works so many startling
improbabilities as Ibsen. (I say improbabilities, because I dare not
say impossibilities; for, after all, everything is possible as the
unheard-of exploit of some fool, or as the extraordinary effect of
a unique accident.) Is it conceivable that (in _Ghosts_) the joiner
Engstrand, wishing to open a tavern for sailors, should call upon
his own daughter to be the odalisque of his ‘establishment’--this
daughter who reminds him that she has been ‘brought up in the house of
Madam Alving, widow of a lord-in-waiting,’ that she has been treated
‘almost as a child of the house’? Not that I imagine Engstrand to be
possessed of any moral scruples. But a man of this stamp knows that
one woman does not suffice for his house; and since he must engage
others, he would certainly not turn to his daughter, bred as she
was in the midst of higher habits of life, and knowing that, if she
wishes to lead a life of pleasure, it would not be necessary to become
straightway a prostitute for sailors. Is it conceivable that Pastor
Manders (_Ghosts_), a liberally educated clergyman in the Norway of
to-day, a country of flourishing insurance companies, banks, railways,
prosperous newspapers, etc., should dissuade Madam Alving from insuring
against fire the asylum she had just founded? ‘For my own part,’ he
says, ‘I should not see the smallest impropriety in guarding against
all contingencies.... I mean [by really responsible people] men in such
independent and influential positions that one cannot help allowing
some weight to their opinions.... People would be only too ready to
interpret our action as a sign that neither you nor I had the right
faith in a Higher Providence.’ Does Ibsen really wish to make anyone
believe that in Norway there are persons who have religious scruples
concerning insurance against fire? Has not this nonsensical idea come
into his head simply because he wishes to have the asylum burned down
and finally destroyed? For this purpose Madam Alving must have no money
to rebuild the asylum, it must not be insured, and hence Ibsen thought
it necessary to assign a motive for the omission of the insurance. A
poet who introduces a fire into his work, as a symbol and also as an
active agent--for it has the dramatic purpose of destroying the lying
reputation for charity of the defunct sinner Alving--should also have
the courage to leave unexplained the omission of the insurance, strange
as it may seem. Oswald Alving relates to his mother (_Ghosts_) that a
Paris doctor on examining him had told him he had a ‘kind of softening
of the brain.’ Now, I appeal to all the doctors of the world if they
have ever said plainly to a patient, ‘You have softening of the brain.’
To the family it perhaps may be revealed, to the patient never. Chiefly
because, if the diagnosis be correct, the invalid would not understand
the remark, and would certainly no longer be in a fit state to go alone
to the doctor. But for yet another reason these words are impossible.
In any case, Oswald’s disease could not have been a softening, but a
hardening, a callous, sclerotic condition of the brain.
In _A Doll’s House_ Helmer, who is depicted as somewhat sensual,
although prosaic, homely, practical, and commonplace, says to his
Nora: ‘Is that my lark who is twittering outside there?... Is the
little squirrel running about?... Has my little spendthrift bird been
wasting more money?... Come, come; my lark must not let her wings
droop immediately.... What do people call the bird who always spends
everything?... My lark is the dearest little thing in the world; but
she needs a very great deal of money.... And I couldn’t wish you to be
anything but exactly what you are--my own true little lark....’ And
it is thus that a husband, a bank director and barrister, after eight
years of married life, speaks to his wife, the mother of his three
children; and not in a momentary outburst of playful affection, but
in the full light of an ordinary day, and in an interminable scene
of seven pages (pp. 2-8), with a view to giving us an idea of the
habitually prevalent tone in this ‘doll’s home!’ I should much like to
know what my readers of both sexes who have been married at least eight
years think of this specimen of Ibsen’s ‘realism.’
In _The Pillars of Society_ all the characters talk about ‘society.’
‘You are to rise and support society, brother-in-law,’ says Miss
Hessel, ‘earnestly and with emphasis.’ ‘If you strike this blow, you
ruin me utterly, and not only me, but also a great and blessed future
for the community which was the home of your childhood.’ And a little
further on: ‘See, this I have dared for the good of the community!...
Don’t you see that it is society itself that forces us into these
subterfuges?’ The persons thus holding forth are a wholesale merchant
and consul, and a school-mistress who has long resided in America, and
has broad views. Can the word ‘society’ in the mouth of cultivated
people, when so used, have any other meaning than ‘social edifice?’
Well, but the characters in the piece, as it is again and again
repeated, employ the word ‘society’ in reference to the well-to-do
classes in a small seaside place in Norway--that is, to a clique of six
or eight families! Ibsen makes the readers of his piece believe that
it is a question of upholding the social edifice, and they learn with
astonishment that this only concerns the protection of a diminutive
coterie of Philistines in a northern Gotham.
The American ship _Indian Girl_ is undergoing repairs in Consul
Bernick’s dock. Her hull is quite rotten. If she is sent to sea she
will assuredly founder. Bernick, however, insists that she shall sail
in two days. His foreman Aune pronounces this impossible. Then Bernick
threatens Aune with dismissal, at which the latter yields, and promises
that ‘in two days the _Indian Girl_ will be ready to sail.’ Bernick
knows that he is sending the _Indian Girl’s_ crew of eighteen men to
certain death. And why does he commit this wholesale murder? He gives
the following explanation: ‘I have my reasons for hurrying on the
affair. Have you read this morning’s paper? Ah! then you know that the
Americans have been making disturbances again. The shameless pack put
the whole town topsy-turvy. Not a night passes without fights in the
taverns or on the street, not to speak of other abominations.... And
who gets the blame for all this disturbance? It is I--yes, I--that
suffer for it. These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping
at us for giving our whole attention to the _Palm Tree_. And I, whose
mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such
things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t do for me to have
my name bespattered in this way.... Not just now; precisely at this
moment I need all the respect and good-will of my fellow-citizens.
I have a great undertaking on hand, as you have probably heard; but
if evil-disposed persons succeed in shaking people’s unqualified
confidence in me, it may involve me in the greatest difficulties. So
I must silence these carping and spiteful scribblers at any price,
and that is why I give you till the day after to-morrow.’ This paltry
motive for the coldly-planned murder of eighteen men is so ridiculous
that even Ehrhard, who admires everything in Ibsen, dares not defend
it, and timidly remarks that ‘the author does not very well explain why
the anxiety for his reputation should require the sending to sea of a
vessel which he has not had time thoroughly to repair.’[326]
At the head of a delegation of his fellow-citizens, sent to thank
him for the establishment of a railway, Pastor Rörlund delivers an
address to Bernick in which the following passages occur: ‘We have
often expressed to you our gratitude for the broad moral foundation
upon which you have, so to speak, built up our society. This time we
chiefly hail in you the ... citizen, who has taken the initiative in
an undertaking which, we are credibly assured, will give a powerful
impetus to the temporal prosperity and well-being of the community....
You are in an eminent sense the pillar and corner-stone of this
community.... And it is just this light of disinterestedness shining
over all your actions that is so unspeakably beneficent, especially in
these times. You are now on the point of procuring for us--I do not
hesitate to say the word plainly and prosaically--a railway.... But
you cannot reject a slight token of your grateful fellow-citizens’
appreciation, least of all on this momentous occasion, when, according
to the assurances of practical men, we are standing on the threshold
of a new era.’ I have not interrupted by a single remark or note
of exclamation this unheard-of balderdash. It shall produce its
own unaided effect upon the reader. If this nonsense appeared in
a burlesque farce, it would be hardly funny enough, but otherwise
acceptable. Now, this claims to be ‘realistic’! We are to take Ibsen’s
word for it that Pastor Rörlund was sober when he made this speech! A
more insulting demand has never been made by an author on his readers.
In _An Enemy of Society_ the subject treats of a rather
incomprehensible bathing establishment, comprising at once mineral
waters, medicinal baths and sea-bathing. The doctor of the
establishment has discovered that the springs are contaminated with
typhoid bacilli, and insists that the water shall be taken from a place
higher up in the mountains, where it would not be polluted by sewage.
He is the more urgent in his demands, as without this precaution a
fatal epidemic will break out among the visitors. And to this the
burgomaster of the town is supposed to reply: ‘The existing supply
of water for the baths is once for all a fact, and must naturally be
treated as such. But probably the directors, at some future time, will
not be indisposed to take into their consideration whether, by making
certain pecuniary sacrifices, it may not be possible to introduce some
improvements.’ This is a question of a place which, as Ibsen insists,
has staked its future on the development of its youthful bathing
establishment; the place is situated in Norway, in a small district
where all the inhabitants are mutually acquainted, and where every
case of illness and death is noticed by all. And the burgomaster will
run the risk of having a number of the visitors at the establishment
attacked with typhoid, when he is forewarned that this will certainly
happen if the conduit pipes of the spring are not transferred. Without
having an exaggeratedly high opinion of the burgomaster mind in
general, I deny that any idiot such as Ibsen depicts is at the head of
the local administration of any town whatsoever in Europe.