Ils font autour du reliquaire
Fumer les légers encensoirs.
Dédaignant le douleur vulgaire
Qui pousse des cris importuns,
Dans ces poèmes je veux faire
A tous mes beaux rêves défunts,
A toutes mes chères reliques,
Une chapelle de parfums
Et de cierges mélancoliques.”
In building for his fair dead dreams a chapel of sad perfumes and
melancholy candles, he spent the better part of his life. His prose
was written later than his verse, but years did not alter the object of
his architecture.
He was sometimes assailed by other moods, but did not allow himself
to yield to them. He had succeeded young; it is possible that having
charmed already, he was half afraid of losing by any change the odour
and the essence impossible to analyse, in which he knew that he could
trust, and which, once at any rate, had been personal to himself. There
remain, however, the indications of occasional faith in mutability.
Sometimes he flung himself boldly in the direction whither life would
have taken him. But the feeling of boldness, of experiment, that
pervades, for example, _Le Coupable_, is enough to show that he was ill
at ease. The story is that of a man who leaves his mistress, a Parisian
grisette. She has a child, who, born in the gutter, grows up among the
vicious and finds his way to a penitentiary, and, at last, committing a
serious crime, is brought for judgment before his father. The father,
learning his identity, tells the whole story, and asks whether he
himself, rather than his son, is not the true _coupable_. Coppée finds
in it an opportunity for a study of society from below, for much close
and accurate description, and for a very searching account of the
reformatory system. It is a clever book, but somehow Coppée has dropped
out of it.
I do not mean that all Coppée’s best work is to be known by an
atmosphere of sentimental yearning for the past. His mood is much more
delicate. He writes as a man whose illusions are gone, but he does not
often cry aloud,
“Hélas! les beaux jours sont finis.”
He only says that there have been fine days. By fine days he means days
of enthusiasm and of a simple heart. He has once walked with the world
far below his feet; but, now that its wisdom has risen over his head,
he cannot recover that old enthusiasm by pretending to be ignorant.
Knowing too much, his only care is to preserve as a touchstone the
memory of his lost unwisdom. He does not often more directly express
his regret. But it is a recognition of his regretfulness that makes his
stories bitter to the very young, half-conscious of their youth, and
pained by all that helps to waken them to simultaneous knowledge and
loss of it.
In _Toute une Jeunesse_ he confesses that his hero, “personnage
imaginaire dans une action imaginaire, sent la vie comme je la sentais
quand j’étais un enfant, et quand j’étais un jeune homme.” Much of
the imaginary action follows very closely the course of his own life,
and it is possible in reading it to watch the fine days and then the
gradual realisation that they had been fine. Amédée Violette, born in
a little flat in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, behind the gardens of
the Luxembourg, the son of a government clerk, loses his mother very
young, and grows up in loneliness, except for the little girls next
door. He goes to school in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, turning out
of the other. There is a plane-tree in the schoolyard, which allows
the schoolmaster to offer a garden on his prospectus. The assistant
masters are grotesque and wretched. The head of the principal is like
the terrestrial globe that stands on the desk in his study to impress
his pupils’ parents. Amédée grows up, spending fine evenings in long
walks through Paris with his father, the widower, who takes gradually
to absinthe for the sake of forgetfulness. He grows up in the quarter,
studies at the university, solitary in the midst of its gregarious
frivolity, partly from poverty, partly from love of the child with
whom he used to play. He leaves the university with a degree, and is
taken on in the same office as his father, as a supernumerary clerk.
So many hours a day disappear from his life, and he wakens only in the
evenings, which he spends in rhyming, and on Sundays when he writes
all day without leaving his room. He has a few friends who count him
almost a hermit. A young actor takes him to the Café de Séville in the
Boulevard Montmartre, where he introduces him to Paul Sillery, a poet
and editor of an unpopular review--Catulle Mendès, perhaps. The café is
full of men with beards, politicians, and men with hair, poets. Sillery
recognises a poet in him, and when the actor recites one of his poems
with success at a charity performance in a theatre, sends him to a
publisher--no doubt Lemerre, who published the Parnassians. His first
volume is printed and successful. He has come so far when his youth is
taken from him. His nearest friend betrays him, and he has to compel
him to marry the girl he has so long loved himself. He passes through
various more or less empty adventures. The Franco-Prussian war leaves
the girl a widow with a boy, and his friend’s last wish is that they
should marry. The wish is fulfilled: Amédée, married to a woman he has
loved from childhood, has a wife whose heart is buried with his friend.
It is all so different from its promises. The poet is left with the
consolation of his art, and the book ends: “Hélas! ta jeunesse est
finie, pauvre sentimental! Les feuilles tombent! Les feuilles tombent!”
The leaves fall on the paper as Coppée writes. It is always autumn in
his books, because he is always thinking of spring. But _Toute une
Jeunesse_ lets us into more of his secrets than this. It is full of
love for Paris, and obsessed by the contrast between rich and poor, or
rather between appearances and the other appearances they hide. Life
is very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you
open the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one
inside. You open that and find a blue. Within the blue is a scarlet
one again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final.
There is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an
unemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic
dream. Coppée is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability
than of his regret for particular yesterdays. He must put all he writes
of in the scarlet box. Paris for him is always the Paris of 1866. He
felt, he said, like Madame de Staël, “la nostalgie de son cher ruisseau
de la rue du Bac,” but the gutter he yearned for flowed in the days
when he was young. It is this that gives some of his work an appeal
that has nothing to do with its merit. For there are many to whom Paris
represents the days when they were young, many to whom the names tune
the pulses to a quick and joyous march, names like the rue Notre Dame
des Champs, twisting grey street, whose pavements still beat with the
airy tread of new generations of dreamers. It is the same throughout.
When he talks of buying books at the Odéon, we do not watch an old man
choosing what he wishes, and paying for it from a pocketful of money
that he has not counted. We see the Coppée of 1864, or ourselves of
ten years ago; boys, with the price of the book, and perhaps ten sous
for dinner, spending nevertheless an hour in looking at all the other
books on the stalls, and then buying the one for which we had come with
the swift manner of those who have walked straight to the bookshop,
and, having got what they want as expeditiously as possible, are going
straight off again. We see that dead Coppée, or ourselves, sitting
among the nurse-maids in the gardens opposite, cutting the leaves with
a clasp-knife from a fair. The Café de Seville, once a meeting-place
for men of beards and men of hair, is made a tryst for Coppée and his
dead youth. And when he says that for the Parisian the seasons come to
town, and that, in a green and rose sunset, he can find the autumn’s
morbid melancholy, and, in a sunny morning in the Luxembourg gardens,
all the divine joyousness of spring, we know of what Parisian he is
speaking.
His obsession by the contrast between rich and poor reduces to the
same sentiment. He does not hate the rich because they are rich; he is
only sorry for them if money has taken away from them something they
might have had in poverty. He is not sorry for the poor because they
are poor, but only if their poverty expresses the lack of something
that, with money, they think they might have had. He has come to regard
illusions as the only sterling coin. In the two contrasted tales of
“The Italian Organ” he seems to weigh rich and poor in opposite scales,
and to find a balance between them. One tune of the organ reminds a
poor clerk’s wife of the days before she married, when she was the
prettiest girl at the cheap dances, and Monsieur Fred, amusing himself,
filled her head with dreams. Riches have carried him away from her,
and she has grown paler, and married Jules with the stiff collar and
the india-rubber-cleaned gloves. It is very sad. Another tune reminds
the Countess of the days before she married, when as la Belle Adah of
the American Circus, she reigned in her own place. The Count fell in
love with her, pursued her, married her, and trained her to be a lady.
She spends her mornings in visiting institutions, and there is a vicar
waiting on her in the drawing-room. It is very sad. But the sorrow
of both these women is not for their riches or their poverty. It is
mourning for a life that can never be lived. Coppée’s love for the poor
is unlike Daudet’s. Daudet loves the poor because they are brave and
picturesque. Coppée sees in them the simpleness of heart and the power
of dreaming that were his when he was poor himself, that is to say,
when he was young. The poor invented Christianity.
Very little happens in Coppée’s short stories. In some of them nothing
happens at all. Things are remembered and set down, and from those
notes rises less a tale than the suggestion of a story that might have
been told. Now it is old Mother Bernu, who saw Marie Antoinette carried
to the guillotine in a white shirt, and is thrown up by a careless
Time to take the little Coppée out for walks. Now it is a couple of
old bachelors talking of might-have-beens. Now, “Mon Ami Meurtrier,”
a swaggering athletic clerk, is discovered to be the mildest of men,
attending to his mother’s lap-dog, and mixing good coffee. In most of
the stories it is more than usually evident that the author is the real
hero. “The White Frock” is the tale of a lame child whose only white
dress is worn at her first communion. All her friends wear a second
on their wedding days, and she will never be married. It is really
the tale of a man who passes daily through a little street, and, in
watching the street change, beards whiten, and children marry, sees his
own youth passing from him, and, in the little lame girl, a melancholy
piece of childhood’s jetsam whose dream will never be realised, never
be destroyed. There was a little boy who lived near the gardens of the
Luxembourg, and walked there in the spring, when the trees were caught
in a net of fluttering green, and in the summer heat, when those long
walks were patterned black and white with sun-thrown shadows, and in
the autumn, when the leaves were rusty gold, and fell to the ground to
make a pleasant trampling place for children’s feet, and in the winter,
when, over the round steel pond, the grey stone Queens of France looked
mournfully at the straight-fronted palace. He walked there, intimate
with all the moods of the garden, his eyes awake with possibilities,
rhyming verses that perhaps would never be published, and finding the
world a fairy-tale with so many ends from which to choose that it was
fortunate it would not finish soon. He was always alone there, in the
midst of the students, girls and nurse-maids. He and the sparrows
seemed to have the garden to themselves. The others did not seem to
matter. And this boy never left the study of François Coppée. If Coppée
looked up from his desk he was there, almost reproachful, a ghostly
boy with clear and truthful eyes, walking under the trees, in ragged
clothes, rhyming verses for himself. The wisdom of the world turned to
dross beside his golden ignorance, and the man who had grown up felt,
like the loiterer along the quays, a continuous pride and pain in
thinking of the days when the sunset had shone for him alone.
1909.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
AN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION
_To I. C. R._
Philosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the
tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of
dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his
thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery,
on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring,
personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of
the body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe
the filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste,
and, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason
of this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity,
but in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth.
If the true is universally true, if a thing either _is_, or _is not_,
then the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or,
by the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness
of the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the
existence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely
denied, and denied in two ways.
First, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the
word “true” was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that
the justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged
pragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: “The
falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is
here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The
question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving,
species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally
inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic
judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that
without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of
reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable,
without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers,
man could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a
renunciation of life, a negation of life.”[5]
Secondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a
disturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the
guarantee that once at least that thought had been true. “Now
philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to
all later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and
to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many
disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs....
Whoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men
finds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous,
for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal
touch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the
philosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can
form conclusions as to the soil. _That_ mode of life, of viewing human
affairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.” He
wrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek
philosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the
distant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground
behind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain
peaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal
to their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable
as particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little
gathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet
been admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche’s habit of thought, his
impatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust
in the poetic, the particular. “What verse is to the poet,” he says,
“dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order
to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.” From this view
he never departed. In _Beyond Good and Evil_ he repeats his belief in
the personal character of thought: “In each cardinal problem there
speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about
man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only
follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.” And again in
_Zarathustra_: “‘This is now my way--where is yours?’ Thus did I answer
those who asked me ‘the way.’ For _the_ way--it doth not exist.”
And so, for Nietzsche, truth is infinitely variable, minted afresh
by each man and dependent upon his image and superscription for a
guarantee of its particular validity. It was for this reason that
he despised the elaborate stage-play of reasoning. He believed that
to exhibit ideas in a white light and at a mean temperature, when
they offered themselves in the glow of the morning or in the heat of
noon, was to strip them of their credentials. He insisted that his
own thoughts were true in relation to himself, and preserved their
concreteness by way of preserving the conditions of their truth. He
refused the step from the concrete to the abstract as a step into
annihilation, and in this way identified himself with the poets. To
misunderstand him here is to misread him everywhere.
We are examining, then, in Friedrich Nietzsche a man whose view of
truth demanded the personal presence of the thinker as guarantee of
the thought. Consequently, though for reasons I have already given it
is usual on the part of philosophers and their critics to rule the
personality of a thinker out of a discussion of his thought, here,
at least, we are justified in glancing at a man’s character before
we examine the ideas that will help us to fill it out to approximate
verisimilitude.
Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, went mad in January 1889, and
died on August 25, 1900. His father was a country parson, simple,
upright, patriotic and monarchical. He found joy in the coincidence of
his son’s birthday with that of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and this
circumstance gave Nietzsche his names. His mother was a young woman of
high spirits and great physical energy, so exuberant and so lovable
as to be described as “a gorgeous savage” by her mother-in-law. His
father, “preordained to pay only a flying visit--a gracious reminder
of life rather than life itself,” died in his six and thirtieth year,
before Nietzsche was five. A grandmother, two aunts and his mother
presided over a pious happy childhood, from which he emerged as a model
schoolboy, laughably virtuous, walking slowly home in a rainstorm
in spite of his mother’s frenzied urging, and rebuking this urging
with pained austerity: “But, mamma, in the rules of the school it is
written, ‘On leaving school boys are forbidden to jump and run about
in the streets, but must walk quietly and decorously to their homes.’”
This sedateness persisted with him, although he could so completely
forget himself in playing with children, that when he was twenty-six
and a professor, he was laughed at and told he was only fourteen. He
always dressed with notable nicety. Though he said, with pride, that
he would rather be a satyr than a saint, he had a dignity that belongs
rather to holiness than to lust. Children and old women loved him. The
fruit-sellers in the Turin market-place hurried to pick out for him
their finest grapes. He had gentle manners, a beautiful voice, and a
profound sense of the politeness that an aristocrat owes to himself.
He clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen,
and was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman
among the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled
French moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal,
who resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners.
His precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical
condition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air
and on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain
thought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other
people to follow his example. “Remain seated as little as possible,
put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the
accompaniment of free bodily motion--nor in one in which even the
muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in
the intestines.”
He seized on Flaubert’s “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis,” with a
cry: “Here have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real
sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking
have any value.”
He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that
“apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of
such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was
detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy
man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the
will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his
own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and
a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect,
and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his
healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche
learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the
standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret
work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is
laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness
and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of
blood and muscle,” and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he
enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious
than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain.
When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of
Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition
of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added
the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!”
Such, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background
on which we must set his work.