A portion of the shelves which lined the walls of his orange and blue
study was devoted exclusively to those Latin works assigned to the
generic period of "The Decadence" by those whose minds have absorbed
the deplorable teachings of the Sorbonne.
The Latin written in that era which professors still persist in
calling the Great Age, hardly stimulated Des Esseintes. With its
carefully premeditated style, its sameness, its stripping of supple
syntax, its poverty of color and nuance, this language, pruned of all
the rugged and often rich expressions of the preceding ages, was
confined to the enunciation of the majestic banalities, the empty
commonplaces tiresomely reiterated by the rhetoricians and poets; but
it betrayed such a lack of curiosity and such a humdrum tediousness,
such a drabness, feebleness and jaded solemnity that to find its
equal, it was necessary, in linguistic studies, to go to the French
style of the period of Louis XIV.
The gentle Vergil, whom instructors call the Mantuan swan, perhaps
because he was not born in that city, he considered one of the most
terrible pedants ever produced by antiquity. Des Esseintes was
exasperated by his immaculate and bedizened shepherds, his Orpheus
whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who simpers
about bees, his Aeneas, that weak-willed, irresolute person who walks
with wooden gestures through the length of the poem. Des Esseintes
would gladly have accepted the tedious nonsense which those
marionettes exchange with each other off-stage; or even the poet's
impudent borrowings from Homer, Theocritus, Ennius and Lucretius; the
plain theft, revealed to us by Macrobius, of the second song of the
_Aeneid_, copied almost word for word from one of Pisander's poems; in
fine, all the unutterable emptiness of this heap of verses. The thing
he could not forgive, however, and which infuriated him most, was the
workmanship of the hexameters, beating like empty tin cans and
extending their syllabic quantities measured according to the
unchanging rule of a pedantic and dull prosody. He disliked the
texture of those stiff verses, in their official garb, their abject
reverence for grammar, their mechanical division by imperturbable
caesuras, always plugged at the end in the same way by the impact of a
dactyl against a spondee.
Borrowed from the perfected forge of Catullus, this unvarying
versification, lacking imagination, lacking pity, padded with useless
words and refuse, with pegs of identical and anticipated assonances,
this ceaseless wretchedness of Homeric epithet which designates
nothing whatever and permits nothing to be seen, all this impoverished
vocabulary of muffled, lifeless tones bored him beyond measure.
It is no more than just to add that, if his admiration for Vergil was
quite restrained, and his attraction for Ovid's lucid outpourings even
more circumspect, there was no limit to his disgust at the elephantine
graces of Horace, at the prattle of this hopeless lout who smirkingly
utters the broad, crude jests of an old clown.
Neither was he pleased, in prose, with the verbosities, the redundant
metaphors, the ludicrous digressions of Cicero. There was nothing to
beguile him in the boasting of his apostrophes, in the flow of his
patriotic nonsense, in the emphasis of his harangues, in the
ponderousness of his style, fleshy but ropy and lacking in marrow and
bone, in the insupportable dross of his long adverbs with which he
introduces phrases, in the unalterable formula of his adipose periods
badly sewed together with the thread of conjunctions and, finally, in
his wearisome habits of tautology. Nor was his enthusiasm wakened for
Caesar, celebrated for his laconic style. Here, on the contrary, was
disclosed a surprising aridity, a sterility of recollection, an
incredibly undue constipation.
He found pasture neither among them nor among those writers who are
peculiarly the delight of the spuriously literate: Sallust, who is
less colorless than the others; sentimental and pompous Titus Livius;
turgid and lurid Seneca; watery and larval Suetonius; Tacitus who, in
his studied conciseness, is the keenest, most wiry and muscular of
them all. In poetry, he was untouched by Juvenal, despite some
roughshod verses, and by Persius, despite his mysterious insinuations.
In neglecting Tibullus and Propertius, Quintilian and the Plinies,
Statius, Martial, even Terence and Plautus whose jargon full of
neologisms, compound words and diminutives, could please him, but
whose low comedy and gross humor he loathed, Des Esseintes only began
to be interested in the Latin language with Lucan. Here it was
liberated, already more expressive and less dull. This careful armor,
these verses plated with enamel and studded with jewels, captivated
him, but the exclusive preoccupation with form, the sonorities of
tone, the clangor of metals, did not entirely conceal from him the
emptiness of the thought, the turgidity of those blisters which emboss
the skin of the _Pharsale_.
Petronius was the author whom he truly loved and who caused him
forever to abandon the sonorous ingenuities of Lucan, for he was a
keen observer, a delicate analyst, a marvelous painter. Tranquilly,
without prejudice or hate, he described Rome's daily life, recounting
the customs of his epoch in the sprightly little chapters of the
_Satyricon_.
Observing the facts of life, stating them in clear, definite form, he
revealed the petty existence of the people, their happenings, their
bestialities, their passions.
One glimpses the inspector of furnished lodgings who has inquired
after the newly arrived travellers; bawdy houses where men prowl
around nude women, while through the half-open doors of the rooms
couples can be seen in dalliance; the society of the time, in villas
of an insolent luxury, a revel of richness and magnificence, or in the
poor quarters with their rumpled, bug-ridden folding-beds; impure
sharpers, like Ascylte and Eumolpe in search of a rich windfall; old
incubi with tucked-up dresses and plastered cheeks of white lead and
red acacia; plump, curled, depraved little girls of sixteen; women who
are the prey of hysterical attacks; hunters of heritages offering
their sons and daughters to debauched testators. All pass across the
pages. They debate in the streets, rub elbows in the baths, beat each
other unmercifully as in a pantomime.
And all this recounted in a style of strange freshness and precise
color, drawing from all dialects, borrowing expressions from all the
languages that were drifting into Rome, extending all the limits,
removing all the handicaps of the so-called Great Age. He made each
person speak his own idiom: the uneducated freedmen, the vulgar Latin
argot of the streets; the strangers, their barbarous patois, the
corrupt speech of the African, Syrian and Greek; imbecile pedants,
like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. These
people are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables,
exchanging stupid, drunken speech, uttering senile maxims and inept
proverbs.
This realistic novel, this slice of Roman life, without any
preoccupation, whatever one may say of it, with reform and satire,
without the need of any studied end, or of morality; this story
without intrigue or action, portraying the adventures of evil persons,
analyzing with a calm finesse the joys and sorrows of these lovers and
couples, depicting life in a splendidly wrought language without
surrendering himself to any commentary, without approving or cursing
the acts and thoughts of his characters, the vices of a decrepit
civilization, of an empire that cracks, struck Des Esseintes. In the
keenness of the observation, in the firmness of the method, he found
singular comparisons, curious analogies with the few modern French
novels he could endure.
Certainly, he bitterly regretted the _Eustion_ and the _Albutiae_,
those two works by Petronius mentioned by Planciade Fulgence which are
forever lost. But the bibliophile in him consoled the student, when he
touched with worshipful hands the superb edition of the _Satyricon_
which he possessed, the octavo bearing the date 1585 and the name of
J. Dousa of Leyden.
Leaving Petronius, his Latin collection entered into the second
century of the Christian era, passed over Fronto, the declaimer, with
his antiquated terms; skipped the _Attic Nights_ of Aulus Gellius, his
disciple and friend,--a clever, ferreting mind, but a writer entangled
in a glutinous vase; and halted at Apuleius, of whose works he owned
the first edition printed at Rome in 1469.
This African delighted him. The Latin language was at its richest in
the _Metamorphoses_; it contained ooze and rubbish-strewn water
rushing from all the provinces, and the refuse mingled and was
confused in a bizarre, exotic, almost new color. Mannerisms, new
details of Latin society found themselves shaped into neologisms
specially created for the needs of conversation, in a Roman corner of
Africa. He was amused by the southern exuberance and joviality of a
doubtlessly corpulent man. He seemed a salacious, gay crony compared
with the Christian apologists who lived in the same century--the
soporific Minucius Felix, a pseudo-classicist, pouring forth the still
thick emulsions of Cicero into his _Octavius_; nay, even
Tertullian--whom he perhaps preserved for his Aldine edition, more
than for the work itself.
Although he was sufficiently versed in theology, the disputes of the
Montanists against the Catholic Church, the polemics against the
gnostics, left him cold. Despite Tertullian's curious, concise style
full of ambiguous terms, resting on participles, clashing with
oppositions, bristling with puns and witticisms, dappled with vocables
culled from the juridical science and the language of the Fathers of
the Greek Church, he now hardly ever opened the _Apologetica_ and the
_Treatise on Patience_. At the most, he read several pages of _De
culta feminarum_, where Tertullian counsels women not to bedeck
themselves with jewels and precious stuffs, forbidding them the use of
cosmetics, because these attempt to correct and improve nature.
These ideas, diametrically opposed to his own, made him smile. Then
the role played by Tertullian, in his Carthage bishopric, seemed to
him suggestive in pleasant reveries. More even than his works did the
man attract him.
He had, in fact, lived in stormy times, agitated by frightful
disorders, under Caracalla, under Macrinus, under the astonishing High
Priest of Emesa, Elagabalus, and he tranquilly prepared his sermons,
his dogmatic writings, his pleadings, his homelies, while the Roman
Empire shook on its foundations, while the follies of Asia, while the
ordures of paganism were full to the brim. With the utmost sang-froid,
he recommended carnal abstinence, frugality in food, sobriety in
dress, while, walking in silver powder and golden sand, a tiara on his
head, his garb figured with precious stones, Elagabalus worked, amid
his eunuchs, at womanish labor, calling himself the Empress and
changing, every night, his Emperor, whom he preferably chose among
barbers, scullions and circus drivers.
This antithesis delighted him. Then the Latin language, arrived at its
supreme maturity under Petronius, commenced to decay; the Christian
literature replaced it, bringing new words with new ideas, unemployed
constructions, strange verbs, adjectives with subtle meanings,
abstract words until then rare in the Roman language and whose usage
Tertullian had been one of the first to adopt.
But there was no attraction in this dissolution, continued after
Tertullian's death by his pupil, Saint Cyprian, by Arnobius and by
Lactantius. There was something lacking; it made clumsy returns to
Ciceronian magniloquence, but had not yet acquired that special flavor
which in the fourth century, and particularly during the centuries
following, the odor of Christianity would give the pagan tongue,
decomposed like old venison, crumbling at the same time that the old
world civilization collapsed, and the Empires, putrefied by the sanies
of the centuries, succumbed to the thrusts of the barbarians.
Only one Christian poet, Commodianus, represented the third century in
his library. The _Carmen apologeticum_, written in 259, is a
collection of instructions, twisted into acrostics, in popular
hexameters, with caesuras introduced according to the heroic verse
style, composed without regard to quantity or hiatus and often
accompanied by such rhymes as the Church Latin would later supply in
such abundance.
These sombre, tortuous, gamy verses, crammed with terms of ordinary
speech, with words diverted from their primitive meaning, claimed and
interested him even more than the soft and already green style of the
historians, Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victorus, Symmachus the
letter writer, and Macrobius the grammarian and compiler. Them he even
preferred to the genuinely scanned lines, the spotted and superb
language of Claudian, Rutilius and Ausonius.
They were then the masters of art. They filled the dying Empire with
their cries; the Christian Ausonius with his _Centon Nuptial_, and his
exuberant, embellished _Mosella_; Rutilius, with his hymns to the
glory of Rome, his anathemas against the Jews and the monks, his
journey from Italy into Gaul and the impressions recorded along the
way, the intervals of landscape reflected in the water, the mirage of
vapors and the movement of mists that enveloped the mountains.
Claudian, a sort of avatar of Lucan, dominates the fourth century with
the terrible clarion of his verses: a poet forging a loud and sonorous
hexameter, striking the epithet with a sharp blow amid sheaves of
sparks, achieving a certain grandeur which fills his work with a
powerful breath. In the Occidental Empire tottering more and more in
the perpetual menace of the Barbarians now pressing in hordes at the
Empire's yielding gates, he revives antiquity, sings of the abduction
of Proserpine, lays on his vibrant colors and passes with all his
torches alight, into the obscurity that was then engulfing his world.
Paganism again lives in his verse, sounding its last fanfare, lifting
its last great poet above the Christianity which was soon entirely to
submerge the language, and which would forever be sole master of art.
The new Christian spirit arose with Paulinus, disciple of Ausonius;
Juvencus, who paraphrases the gospels in verse; Victorinus, author of
the _Maccabees_; Sanctus Burdigalensis who, in an eclogue imitated
from Vergil, makes his shepherds Egon and Buculus lament the maladies
of their flock; and all the saints: Hilaire of Poitiers, defender of
the Nicean faith, the Athanasius of the Occident, as he has been
called; Ambrosius, author of the indigestible homelies, the wearisome
Christian Cicero; Damasus, maker of lapidary epigrams; Jerome,
translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary Vigilantius, who attacks
the cult of saints and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and already
preaches, with arguments which future ages were to repeat, against the
monastic vows and celibacy of the priests.
Finally, in the fifth century came Augustine, bishop of Hippo. Des
Esseintes knew him only too well, for he was the Church's most reputed
writer, founder of Christian orthodoxy, considered an oracle and
sovereign master by Catholics. He no longer opened the pages of this
holy man's works, although he had sung his disgust of the earth in the
_Confessions_, and although his lamenting piety had essayed, in the
_City of God_, to mitigate the frightful distress of the times by
sedative promises of a rosier future. When Des Esseintes had studied
theology, he was already sick and weary of the old monk's preachings
and jeremiads, his theories on predestination and grace, his combats
against the schisms.
He preferred to thumb the _Psychomachia_ of Prudentius, that first
type of the allegorical poem which was later, in the Middle Ages, to
be used continually, and the works of Sidonius Apollinaris whose
correspondence interlarded with flashes of wit, pungencies, archaisms
and enigmas, allured him. He willingly re-read the panegyrics in which
this bishop invokes pagan deities in substantiation of his
vainglorious eulogies; and, in spite of everything, he confessed a
weakness for the affectations of these verses, fabricated, as it were,
by an ingenious mechanician who operates his machine, oils his wheels
and invents intricate and useless parts.
After Sidonius, he sought Merobaudes, the panegyrist; Sedulius, author
of the rhymed poems and abecedarian hymns, certain passages of which
the Church has appropriated for its services; Marius Victorius, whose
gloomy treatise on the _Pervesity of the Times_ is illumed, here and
there, with verses that gleam with phosphorescence; Paulinus of Pella,
poet of the shivering _Eucharisticon_; and Orientius, bishop of Auch,
who, in the distichs of his _Monitories_, inveighs against the
licentiousness of women whose faces, he claims, corrupt the people.
The interest which Des Esseintes felt for the Latin language did not
pause at this period which found it drooping, thoroughly putrid,
losing its members and dropping its pus, and barely preserving through
all the corruption of its body, those still firm elements which the
Christians detached to marinate in the brine of their new language.
The second half of the fifth century had arrived, the horrible epoch
when frightful motions convulsed the earth. The Barbarians sacked
Gaul. Paralyzed Rome, pillaged by the Visigoths, felt its life grow
feeble, perceived its extremities, the occident and the orient, writhe
in blood and grow more exhausted from day to day.
In this general dissolution, in the successive assassination of the
Caesars, in the turmoil of carnage from one end of Europe to another,
there resounded a terrible shout of triumph, stifling all clamors,
silencing all voices. On the banks of the Danube, thousands of men
astride on small horses, clad in rat-skin coats, monstrous Tartars
with enormous heads, flat noses, chins gullied with scars and gashes,
and jaundiced faces bare of hair, rushed at full speed to envelop the
territories of the Lower Empire like a whirlwind.
Everything disappeared in the dust of their gallopings, in the smoke
of the conflagrations. Darkness fell, and the amazed people trembled,
as they heard the fearful tornado which passed with thunder crashes.
The hordes of Huns razed Europe, rushed toward Gaul, overran the
plains of Chalons where Aetius pillaged it in an awful charge. The
plains, gorged with blood, foamed like a purple sea. Two hundred
thousand corpses barred the way, broke the movement of this avalanche
which, swerving, fell with mighty thunderclaps, against Italy whose
exterminated towns flamed like burning bricks.
The Occidental Empire crumbled beneath the shock; the moribund life
which it was pursuing to imbecility and foulness, was extinguished.
For another reason, the end of the universe seemed near; such cities
as had been forgotten by Attila were decimated by famine and plague.
The Latin language in its turn, seemed to sink under the world's
ruins.
Years hastened on. The Barbarian idioms began to be modulated, to
leave their vein-stones and form real languages. Latin, saved in the
debacle by the cloisters, was confined in its usage to the convents
and monasteries.
Here and there some poets gleamed, dully and coldly: the African
Dracontius with his _Hexameron_, Claudius Memertius, with his
liturgical poetry; Avitus of Vienne; then, the biographers like
Ennodius, who narrates the prodigies of that perspicacious and
venerated diplomat, Saint Epiphanius, the upright and vigilant pastor;
or like Eugippus, who tells of the life of Saint Severin, that
mysterious hermit and humble ascetic who appeared like an angel of
grace to the distressed people, mad with suffering and fear; writers
like Veranius of Gevaudan who prepared a little treatise on
continence; like Aurelianus and Ferreolus who compiled the
ecclesiastical canons; historians like Rotherius, famous for a lost
history of the Huns.
Des Esseintes' library did not contain many works of the centuries
immediately succeeding. Notwithstanding this deficiency, the sixth
century was represented by Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers, whose hymns
and _Vexila regis_, carved out of the old carrion of the Latin
language and spiced with the aromatics of the Church, haunted him on
certain days; by Boethius, Gregory of Tours, and Jornandez. In the
seventh and eighth centuries since, in addition to the low Latin of
the Chroniclers, the Fredegaires and Paul Diacres, and the poems
contained in the Bangor antiphonary which he sometimes read for the
alphabetical and mono-rhymed hymn sung in honor of Saint Comgill, the
literature limited itself almost exclusively to biographies of saints,
to the legend of Saint Columban, written by the monk, Jonas, and to
that of the blessed Cuthbert, written by the Venerable Bede from the
notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarn, he contented himself with
glancing over, in his moments of tedium, the works of these
hagiographers and in again reading several extracts from the lives of
Saint Rusticula and Saint Radegonda, related, the one by Defensorius,
the other by the modest and ingenious Baudonivia, a nun of Poitiers.
But the singular works of Latin and Anglo-Saxon literature allured him
still further. They included the whole series of riddles by Adhelme,
Tatwine and Eusebius, who were descendants of Symphosius, and
especially the enigmas composed by Saint Boniface, in acrostic
strophes whose solution could be found in the initial letters of the
verses.
His interest diminished with the end of those two centuries. Hardly
pleased with the cumbersome mass of Carlovingian Latinists, the
Alcuins and the Eginhards, he contented himself, as a specimen of the
language of the ninth century, with the chronicles of Saint Gall,
Freculfe and Reginon; with the poem of the siege of Paris written by
Abbo le Courbe; with the didactic _Hortulus_, of the Benedictine
Walafrid Strabo, whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourd
as a symbol of fruitfulness, enlivened him; with the poem in which
Ermold the Dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Debonair, a
poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbidding
style and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws of
sentiment, here and there, in the unpliant metal; with the _De viribus
herbarum_, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly delighted him
because of his poetic recipes and the very strange virtues which he
ascribes to certain plants and flowers; to the aristolochia, for
example, which, mixed with the flesh of a cow and placed on the lower
part of a pregnant woman's abdomen, insures the birth of a male child;
or to the borage which, when brewed into an infusion in a dining room,
diverts guests; or to the peony whose powdered roots cure epilepsy; or
to the fennel which, if placed on a woman's breasts, clears her water
and stimulates the indolence of her periods.
Apart from several special, unclassified volumes, modern or dateless,
certain works on the Cabbala, medicine and botany, certain odd tomes
containing undiscoverable Christian poetry, and the anthology of the
minor Latin poets of Wernsdorf; apart from _Meursius_, the manual of
classical erotology of Forberg, and the diaconals used by confessors,
which he dusted at rare intervals, his Latin library ended at the
beginning of the tenth century.
And, in fact, the curiosity, the complicated naivete of the Christian
language had also foundered. The balderdash of philosophers and
scholars, the logomachy of the Middle Ages, thenceforth held absolute
sway. The sooty mass of chronicles and historical books and
cartularies accumulated, and the stammering grace, the often exquisite
awkwardness of the monks, placing the poetic remains of antiquity in a
ragout, were dead. The fabrications of verbs and purified essences, of
substantives breathing of incense, of bizarre adjectives, coarsely
carved from gold, with the barbarous and charming taste of Gothic
jewels, were destroyed. The old editions, beloved by Des Esseintes,
here ended; and with a formidable leap of centuries, the books on his
shelves went straight to the French language of the present century.