Glory is a fact pure and simple, and not a fact of justice. There is
no exact relation between the real merit of a writer (our examination
is limited to literary glory) and his standing. In order to reward the
survival of the book during the last four hundred years, in accordance
with the dictates of chance and, if you like, of injustice, criticism
has invented a hierarchal system which divides writers into castes,
from the idiot to the man of genius. This looks solid and serious. It
is, however, arbitrary, since aesthetic or moral judgments are merely
generalized sensations. Literary judgment thus rejoins religious
judgment so completely as to become identified with it.
Earthly immortality and the other--that which operates ideally
beyond real life--are conceptions of the same order, due to a
single cause--the impossibility for thought to think of itself as
non-existent. Descartes merely presented a physiological maxim whose
human truth is so absolute that it would have been understood by
the oldest and humblest peoples. "I think, therefore I am," is the
verbal translation of a cellular state. Every living brain thinks
this, even though unconsciously. Each minute of life is an eternity.
It has neither beginning nor end. It is what it is. It is absolute.
Yet the disagreement between the cerebral truth and the material
truth is complete. The organ by which man thinks himself immortal
dies, and the absolute is conquered by reality. The disagreement is
complete, evident, undeniable. Yet it is inexplicable. Confronted with
such a contradiction, the hypothesis of a duality assumes a certain
force, besides which the laboratory itself affirms the essential
difference between muscular and cerebral toil. The bending of the
forearm, and even of a phalanx, releases a certain amount of carbonic
acid. Cerebral activity, all muscles being in repose, registers no
trace of combustion. This does not mean that the organs of thought
are immaterial. They can be touched, weighed and measured; but their
materiality is of a special sort whose vital reactions are as yet
unknown. Inexplicable in theory, the disagreement between thought and
the flesh is thus explained, in fact, by a difference at least of
molecular construction. They are two states, each of which has but a
superficial knowledge of the other, and the flesh which thought always
represents to itself as eternal is certain of dissolution.
There are, then, two immortalities: the subjective immortality which
a man accords himself readily, even necessarily, and the objective
immortality, of which Pratinas has been robbed and which is a fact. If
what we have said be true and if, in the absence of precise methods
of analysis, the first--religious or literary--no longer admits of
other than philosophic--that is to say, vague--reflections, objective
immortality, on the other hand, is a less abstract subject for
discussion. It would even be possible, with a little good will, to
bring all history within its scope; but French literature forms a long
and brilliant enough cavalcade for our purpose.
The moment words clasp beneath their wings a certain amount of
perceptible reality, they readily yield their formula. Glory is life in
the memory of men. But of what men, what life?
M. Stapfer[8] has attempted to enumerate the works which, from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth century, have lasted--what is called
"lasting" in professional critical language. This chapter, wittily
entitled (with a touch of Jansenism) "the little number of elect,"
would be brief were it but a catalogue. In short--and this may be
admitted provisionally--among all the French writers of the last three
centuries, twenty-five or thirty may be said to have achieved what
is called glory; but of these thirty, the majority are scarcely more
than a name. What life, and of what men? M. Stapfer is thinking of
works that it might occur to a modern Frenchman, "of average culture,"
to glance at on a rainy day. It is impossible to make a serious
analysis if we permit such expressions as "average culture" to enter
our reasoning. A man of "average culture" may very possibly enjoy
Saint-Simon, without owning either a Pascal, a Bossuet, a Corneille or
a Malherbe. A man can read and reread Pascal, yet have little taste for
Rabelais. But these amateurs of hard reading are professors, churchmen,
lawyers--men who, even if they are not writers themselves, have a
professional interest in letters, and are obliged to keep in touch with
the classic period of French literature. And where have they learned
that Boileau is a better poet than Théophile or Tristan? At college,
for it is through the college that literary glory maintains itself in
the bored recollection of heedless generations. There is no "average
culture" that can be felt and figured by a flexible curve; but there
are programmes. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam invented the "Glory Machine."
There is, in the Ministry of Public Instruction, a hall on the door
of which should be read: "Bureau of Glory." It is the seat of the
Superior Council which elaborates the study programme. This programme
is the "stuffer" which produces average cultures. Names omitted from
it will remain eternally unknown to generations whose paternal guide
it will be. But an educator's conscience will not permit him to impose
upon children knowledge of writers whose morality is not universally
admitted. Molière was very immoral in his day, and this was the secret
of his success with a public which had no other choice, on its days of
repentance, than among the most eloquent or the most skilful preachers.
It is as he has been less understood, that Molière has become, little
by little, a moralist. As successive sensibilities have distinguished
themselves more sharply from the sensibility of the seventeenth
century, the coarseness has lost its rank odour and we have come at
last to find delicate certain sallies which, brought up to date, would
embarrass us. Molière, much more brutal at bottom than on the surface,
enjoys what might be called an acquired morality. It is an inevitable
phenomenon of adjustment. It was necessary either to sacrifice Molière
or to demonstrate the beauty of his philosophic genius.
His saying, which is only a saying, "For the love of humanity," has
been hollowed and dug out by the commentators like an ivory ball which,
at last, in the lathe, becomes a system of concentric spheres. It is
merely a child's rattle. How are the _Femmes Savantes_ and Feminism
to be reconciled? This will be a very curious teat to follow. In her
_Réflexions sur les Femmes_, so penetrating and so well written, Madame
de Lambert says that this comedy, odious in itself, made education for
young women seem improper, immodest, almost obscene; whence the craze
for purely sensual pleasure to which women inclined, since they had
no other resources than love and good living. The difficulty will be
solved by considering separately the idea of feminism and the idea of
the _Femmes Savantes_, and by cavilling at the word "savant," which
has recently come to have a very definite significance. The _savant_,
in the seventeenth century, was the amateur, not only of the sciences,
but of letters--the man eager for all novelties, who discussed vortices
without neglecting Vaugelas. Madame de Sévigné was a "femme savante,"
also Ninon. No doubt it was necessary to save Molière's work. It was
worth it. But might not it have been done more honestly, and with
greater lucidity?
Attempted on Rabelais and on Montaigne, the same work of adjustment
has been less successful. Rabelais, in particular, has discouraged
the most stubbornly naïve; and, since it was impossible to glean
virtuous sheaves in his abbey of good pleasure, Pantagruel was classed
among the vague precursors of modern ideas--which has no appreciable
meaning, modern ideas being extremely contradictory. La Fontaine has
lent himself to the caprices of the moralists with that indifference
to good and evil which was the peculiarity of his exclusively sensual
temperament; while, as for Racine, whose work would be frightful,
were it not expressed in a language as cold and abstract as algebra,
the Jansenist devotion of his last days has made it possible to
discover pious intonations even in his most delirious celebrations
of cruelty and lust.[9] Why has not the same process been applied to
a Saint-Amant or a Théophile? Here is seen the influence of Boileau,
whom it is still dangerous to contradict when seeking a certain quality
of reputation. Happy to find their task limited and determined by a
celebrated authority, the educators closed their catalogue of glories
the moment it was decently long enough. Their enterprise was one of
moral, far more than literary, criticism. A single book--the _Fables_,
for example--would have sufficed them as an album wherein to deposit
the cunning aphorisms of the old catechism. The educator's ideal is the
_Koran_, whose pages contain, at the same time, a sample of writing, a
model of style, a religious code, and a handbook of morals.
We may, then, conclude that, in reality, there is no literary glory.
The great writers are offered to our admiration not as writers, but as
moralists. Literary glory is an illusion.
And yet, in reserving for school-use some of the greatest French men
of genius, the literary historians have been obliged to justify their
choice, to feign artistic preoccupations. Nisard wrote a history of
French literature concerned with little else than morality. Such a
preoccupation was found noble, but too exclusive. The common handbooks
mingle adroitly the two orders. A child should not know quite whether
La Fontaine is prescribed for him as a great poet or as an old chap
who counselled prudence--as the author of _Philémon et Baucis_, or as
the precursor of Franklin. Armed with the four rules of literature,
the professors have examined talents and classified them. They have
conferred prizes and honourable mentions. There is the first order
and there are orders graduated all the way down to the fourth and the
fifth. French literature has become arranged hierarchically like a
tenement house. "Villon," one of these measurers once said to me, "is
not of the first order." Admiration must be shaded according to the
seven notes of the university scale. Earnest flutists excel at this
game.
It is not a question of disputing the awards of glory or of proposing
a revised list. Such as it is, it serves its purpose. It may have the
same usefulness as the arbitrary classifications of botany. It is not a
matter of amending it, it is a matter of tearing it up.
That Racine is a better poet than Tristan l'Hermite, and that
_Iphigénie_ is superior to _Marianne_, are two propositions unequally
true; for we might quite as well be asked to compare this, which is by
Racine:
Que c'est une chose charmante
De voir cet étang gracieux
Où, comme en un lit précieux,
L'onde est toujours calme et dormante!
Quelles richesses admirables
N'ont point ces nageurs marquetés,
Ces poissons aux dos argentés,
Sur leurs écailles agréables![10]
with this, which is by Tristan:
Auprès de cette grotte sombre
Où l'on respire un air si doux,
L'onde lutte avec les cailloux,
Et la lumière avec que l'ombre.
Ces flots, las de l'exercice
Qu'ils ont fait dessus ce gravier,
Se reposent dans ce vivier,
Où mourut autrefois Narcisse.
L'ombre de cette fleur vermeille
Et celle de ces jons pendans
Paraissent estre la-dedans
Les songes de l'eau qui someille.[11]
I am well aware that I am here comparing the best of Tristan with the
worst of Racine; but all the same, if Racine had his park, Tristan had
his garden, and it is often agreeable there. Let us then tear up the
list of awards in order to remain ignorant of the fact that Tristan
l'Hermite is a poet "whose versification is ridiculous,"[12] so that
our pleasure in meeting him may not thus be spoiled in advance, and so
that, with him, we may dare address his muse:
Fay moy boire au creux de tes mains,
Si l'eau n'en dissout point la neige.
This is the drawback to comparative methods. Having set up the great
poet of the century as a standard, the critics thereafter value the
others merely as precursors or as disciples.[13] Authors are often
judged according to what they are not, through failure to understand
their particular genius, and often also through failure to question
them themselves. Pratinas, truly, is better treated. He enjoys silence.
But he is dead, and we are discussing the living. Living what life,
and in the memory of what men? Life is a physical fact. A book which
exists as a volume in a library is not dead, and is it not perhaps
a glory more enviable to remain unknown, like Théophile, than to be
famous, like Jean-Baptiste Rousseau? When glory is merely classic, it
is perhaps one of the harshest forms of humiliation. To have dreamed
of thrilling men and women with passion, and to become but the dull
task which keeps the careless schoolboy a captive! Are there, however,
any universal reputations that are not classic? Very few, and in that
case, they have another blemish. It is for their smut that Restif's[14]
ridiculous novels are still read--also Voltaire's syphilitic tales, and
that tedious _Manon Lescaut_, so clumsily adapted from the English. The
books of yesterday no longer have a public, if by public be understood
disinterested men who read simply for their pleasure, enjoying the art
and the thought contained in a book; but they still have readers, and
all have some.
The only dead book is the book which is lost. All the rest live,
almost with the same life, and the older they grow, the more intense
this life becomes, becoming more precious. Literary glory is nominal.
Literary life is personal. There is not a poet of the prodigious
seventeenth century who does not come to life again each day in the
pious hands of a lover. Bossuet has not been more thumbed than this
_Recueil_ by Pierre du Marteu;[15] and, all things considered, the
_Plainte du cheval Pégase aux chevaux de la petite Écurie_, by Monsieur
de Benserade, is more agreeable and less dangerous reading than the
_Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle_. Is pompous moralizing after
all so superior to sprightly burlesque? Every mountain plant offers
an equal interest to the artless botanist. For him the euphorbia is
not celebrated or the borage ridiculous (besides which it has the most
beautiful eyes in the world), and he fills his bag till it can hold
not another blade of grass. Literary glory was invented for the use
of children preparing their examinations. It matters little to the
explorer of the mind of the past that this agreeable verse is by an
unknown poet, or that profound thought by a despised thinker. A man
and his work are so different in interest! The man is a physiological
entity of value only in the environment that developed it. The work,
whatever it may be, can keep an abstract power for centuries. This
power should not be exaggerated or erected into a tyranny. A thought is
very little more than a dry flower; but the man has perished and the
flower still lies in the herbal. It is the witness to a life that has
disappeared, the sign of an annihilated sensibility.
When, in the Gallery of Apollo, we gaze at those onyxes and those
corundums in the form of conches and cups, those gold plaques engraved
with flowers, and those flaming enamels, do we, before daring to
rejoice, demand the name of the artist who created such objects? If we
did, the question would be vain. The work lives and the name is dead.
What matters the name?
"I, who have no wish for glory," wrote Flaubert. He spoke of
posterity--of that future and, consequently, non-existent time, to
which so many second-rate energies sacrifice the one reality, the
present hour. Since none of Flaubert's books can serve as a pretext
for moral teaching, he was well-advised. He did not wish for glory,
and he will not have it, unless _Madame Bovary_ retains during
the next century its equivocal reputation and finds a place, in
schoolboy-tradition, among the celebrated bad books. This is little
likely, seeing that _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ is already hard to read.
But that which cannot be said for the future, either of him or of any
writer of the last half of the century, may be said for the past.
Gautier and Flaubert have known glory--the glory that they accorded
themselves in the invincible consciousness of their genius. Glory is a
sensation of life and of strength; a food-sprite would taste it in a
tree trunk.
How amusing it is to listen to the eloquent professor who declares:
"This book will not last." But no book lasts, and yet all books last.
Do you know _Palemon, fable bocagère et pastorale_, by the Sieur
Frénicle?[16] Well, this book has lasted, since I have just read it,
and since I resurrect one of its verses, which is not ugly:
O, que j'eus de plaisir à la voir toute nue!
It is time man learned at last to resign himself to annihilation,
and even to enjoy that idea whose sweetness is incomparable. Writers
might give the people the example, by resolutely abandoning their
vainglorious hopes. They will leave a name which will grace the
catalogues for several centuries, and works which will last as long as
the matter upon which they are printed. This is a rare privilege, for
which they ought to be willing to silence their complaints. And even
were this illusory eternity to be denied them, as well as all present
glory, why should that diminish their activity? It is to the passer-by,
not to future humanity, that the wild cherry-tree offers its fruits;
and even if no one passes, just as in the spring it has covered itself
with snow, so it puts on its purple with the coming of summer. Life
is a personal, immediate fact, which glides past the very moment it
is perceived. It is bad reasoning to attach to this moment the age to
come; for the present alone exists, and we must keep within the limits
of logic in order to remain men. Let us be a little less primitive, not
fancying that the next century will be the "double" of the present,
and that our works will keep the position they hold to-day, or will
have a worse. Our way of understanding _Bérénice_ would afflict
Racine, and Molière would gladly blow out the candles on nights when
the _Misanthrope_ is such a bore. Books have but one season. Trees,
shrubs, or simple blades of grass, they die having sometimes sown their
kind, and true glory for a writer would be to call forth a work whose
shade would smother him. That would be true glory, because it would
be a return to the noblest conditions of life. The witnesses of the
past are never anything but paradoxes. They began to languish a few
years, or even less, after their birth, and their old age drags on, sad
and wrinkled, amid men who no longer either understand or love them.
To desire immortality is to wish to live forever in the condition of
Swift's "Struldbruggs."
"Such are the details imparted to me respecting the Immortals of this
country...."--and man's sentiment continues to revolt against the
idea of destruction, and the writer trembles at the idea of perennial
obscurity. Our sensibility needs a tiny light in the far-off distance
among the trees which line our horizon. That reassures the muscles,
calms the pulses.
1900.
[1] _Communication à l'Académie des Sciences_ (_13 Avril 1896_),
certified and rendered more precise by later investigations which
M. Quinton has explained to me. Here, without scientific apparatus,
is what, as a result of precious conservations, would appear to be
the general order in which the animals appeared, beginning with the
fishes, and taking account only of those which have yet been covered:
I. Fish IV. Mammals V. Birds
II. Batracians a. Monotremata x. Primates:
III. Reptiles b. Marsupials (Lemurs, Monkeys,
c. Edentates Men)
d. Rodents y. Carnivora:
e. Insectivora (latest arrivals:
f. -- -- blue fox, white
g. -- -- -- bear)
h. -- -- -- z. Ruminants:
-- -- -- (last arrival:
-- -- -- reindeer)
The bearing of this list upon any question whatsoever of general
philosophy is evident for all who know how to disassociate ideas.
It would have thrilled Voltaire. For the rest, I claim the honour
of having been the first to announce to the larger public these new
scientific views, which will, logically, have a magnificent wealth of
consequences. I have already made a less precise allusion to them,
notably in the _Wiener Rundschau_, May 1899.
[2] Intelligence can thus be conceived as an initial form of instinct,
in which case the human intelligence would be destined to crystallize
into instinct, as has occurred in the case of other animal species.
Consciousness would disappear, leaving complete liberty to the
unconscious act, necessarily perfect in the limits of its intention.
The conscious man is a scholar who will reveal himself a master the
moment he has become a delicate but unerring machine, like bee and
beaver.
[3] _La Survivance de l'Ame et l'idée de justice chez les peuples non
civilisés_, Paris, Leroux, 1894.
[4] _Des Réputations littéraires: Essai de morale et d'histoire_.
Première série. Paris, Hachette, 1893.
[5] _Livres perdus: Essai bibliographique sur les livres devenus
introuvables_, by Philoumeste Junior, Brussels, 1882.
[6] These privately printed editions of three hundred copies or less
have necessarily been worn out in proportion to their success.
[7] _Opera et Fragmenta veterorum poetarum latinorum_. London, 1713
[8] Opus cit., p. 103.
[9] This was written on the appearance of M. Louis Proal's work, _Le
Crime et le Suicide Passionnels_ (F. Alcan, 1910), in which, referring
to sex dramas in the criminal courts, Racine is quoted, every ten
pages, for reference and comparison. Everyone hesitates to say just
what an age of passion and of carnal madness the _Grand Siècle_ really
was.
[10] _L'Étang_. This poem forms part of the set of five odes in which
Racine celebrated Port-Royal des Champs: _L'Étang, Les Prairies, Les
Bois, Les Troupeaux, Les Jardins_.
[11] _Le Promenoir des Deux Amans_.
[12] Vapereau, _Dictionnaire des Littératures_.
[13] An excellent doctor's thesis on Tristan l'Hermite, by M. V. M.
Demadin, bears precisely this title: _Un précurseur de Racine_.
[14] The first volume, and that alone, of Restif de la Bretonne's
_Monsieur Nicholas_ should be excepted.
[15] _Recueil de quelques pièces nouvelles et galantes, tant en prose
qu'en vers_. Cologne, 1667.
[16] Paris, published by Jacques Dugast, aux Gants Couronnez, 1632.