THE IDEAL BEES
"Afin de réduire le Ternaire, par le moyen
du Quaternaire, à la simplicité de l'unité."
Le R. P. Esprit Sabathier, _l'Ombre_
_idéale de la sagesse universelle._
"Ah! yes," mused Hubert, as he replaced the book in the corner
restricted to philosophers, "the pages of Ribot's positive and
disenchanting psychology make good reading at a moment, not of spleen,
but of stark boredom. This penetrating dialectician clearly proves to
me that my personality is a fragile chord which a single false note in
the keyboard can destroy. It is all the same to me: a madness caused by
a fixed idea must greatly assist in supporting life. Thus, collectors
are to be envied, those who gather and classify old copper buttons,
or old secret locks, or all that has been written against women, or
the figurines of Sèvres porcelain, or the articles of M. Lemaître, or
the slippers of historic balls. One need not be fastidious in choosing
a mania: to be good it has only to be inexhaustible. As for the more
distinguished follies, many excellent ones can be noted and, in
general, none of those which are termed mild manias should be scorned:
the people once knew this well, for they respected, in the persons of
fools, the state of mind never attained by men of sense: happiness."
He continued thus for a long time, stretched back on his armchair,
smoking cigarettes, wearied from his night and still enfeebled by
a protracted bath. At bottom, he was deeply ashamed of himself, as
after every similar defilement, and not at all reassured as to the
metaphysical consequences of this sin. No reasoning, brutal though his
unbelief might be, could efface such an impression. The being endowed
with human intelligence and will always regulates himself by some
rule, a mental guide that is often unconscious, but whose existence
is immediately and with certitude revealed by the transgression.
There is no common moral conscience outside of a religion that is
strict and observed in all its commandments, the laws of society, and
the special regulations belonging to a certain group: morality is a
personal talent. Thus, Entragues felt himself soiled by an immersion
in pleasure where others would still have enjoyed, even repletion, the
gratification of a ruminant.
Moreover, he was not impious: having seen remorse rear its head before
him, now that the hour of the bravado had passed, he trembled at the
memory of the reproachful phantom. That night cut a phase of his life
in two, and he saw himself equal to those whom physical existence
confines beneath its claws: brother of the first comer and thrown back
among the vulgar elements, he ceased to be himself. Ah! he had judged!
Now he could be judged.
In this state of mind, nothing could interest him; since the principle
of all interest vanished. Opium-like dreams benumbed him and all the
texts on the vanity of things which he had gathered here and there in
his readings, played under his skull, like the bell of a rattle.
Love, strangled by his hand, barred his path: to advance, it was
necessary to leap over the dead thing: no! he would remain on this
side, unless a miraculous and quite questionable resurrection occurred.
Glory! the bell has been melted so that little bells could be made.
And as for the brass of the bells, does one ever know the right of
the metal to the claim? One dies and the cracked sounds make the
bell-ringers laugh.
He recited the proud and yet disheartening verses of old Dante:
La mondaine rumeur n'est rien qu'un souffle
De vent qui vient d'ici, qui vient de là,
Et, changeant d'aire, change aussi de nom.
Having put these three lines in French syllables, Hubert observed how
difficult it was to clothe Dante in a fitting foreign garb. He pardoned
the well-intentioned persons who had attempted it in scandalous
translations: one could do no better than to adopt an exact, if
disfiguring, metaphor: the precision of the original becomes loose, its
clearness shadowy, for it is necessary to employ certain short words
whose true sense is lost, and others which are no longer read except
in glossaries. Finally, he laid down this aphorism: it is impossible
to translate into an old and refined language a work belonging to the
youth of a kindred language.
These technical notations, the reading of some verse, trips from his
table to his library, had somewhat revived him. Although he felt that
the depression might last all day and doubtless many more days, he
recovered courage and believed himself fit for some light work. Hubert
was not a poet, no more than many others who pretend to the poetic
gift. His impressions translated themselves into little notes of
analytical prose, not into fixed and exact rhythms; but he had learned
the craft, knew the most modern secrets of versification, and in happy
hours could, without illusion, fabricate an interesting piece according
to the rules.
This morning, he succeeded in giving the final details to a diptych
whose appearance had heretofore not satisfied him. It was heavy and the
hammer beat had shaped it, directed by a hand that was more strong than
adroit, but it seemed to him that the metal was good and without cracks.
MORITURA
Dans la serre torride, une plante exotique
Penchante, résignée: éclos hors de saison
Deux boutons fléchissaient, l'air grave et mystique;
La sève n'était plus pour elle qu'un poison.
Et je sentais pourtant de la fleur accablée
S'évaporer l'effluve âcre d'un parfum lourd,
Mes artères battaient, ma poitrine troublée
Haletait, mon regard se voilait, j'étais sourd
Dans la chambre, autre fleur, une femme très pale,
Les mains lasses, la tête appuyée aux coussins:
Elle s'abandonnait: un insensible râle
Soulevait tristement la langueur de ses seins.
Mais ses cheveux tombant en innombrables boucles
Ondulaient sinueux comme un large flot noir
Et ses grands yeux brillaient du feu des escarboucles
Comme un double fanal dans la brume du soir.
Les cheveux m'envoyaient des odeurs énervantes,
Pareilles à l'éther qu'aspire un patient,
Je perdais peu à peu de mes forces vivantes
Et les yeux transperçaient mon coeur inconscient.
The afternoon vanished, a very calm night conquered, he found
himself astonished at the sudden return of vigor and of capacity for
work. Three days after, he had completed "Peacock Plumes" and "The
Twenty-Eighth of December;" he reread them, not without suffering from
a sense of inmost shame, for although the conception of this last
study was anterior to the luckless night, he had not been able, so
identically did the situations present themselves, to develop his old
idea except by borrowing from his recent adventure.
It had often happened to him that his revery intervened in the active
series and broke its determination; such a result, certainly, no longer
filled him with childish astonishments, but this time there was a truly
marvelous subordination of the fact to the idea. This was the theme:
faithless to a beloved Dead, A desires another woman, who yields and
gives herself to him; but, at the moment of possession, the beloved
Dead woman appears to him, in certain conditions to be developed,
and the old love vanquishes the new. This outline, with some linear
modifications, could symbolically have characterized the unexpected
events of his night with Valentine. Presentiment and coincidence did
not explain such an occurrence and, moreover, such an occurrence was
the hundredth he had observed. Hence the conception of a possible
event had brought it into his life, conditioned by the intervention of
an external will, adapted to the vital limits of time and space, but
recognizable in its constituent and original elements. It was worth
reflecting upon: it was a whole corner of the yet unknown psychology,
a whole order of phenomena as curious, for example, as the fact of
suggestion so bungled by official hypnotizers, who lack philosophic
understanding. This could even be classed under the chapter of
suggestions; but if, in things of this kind, one knew the suggester,
the person to whom a thing was suggested would escape. Nor was it a
matter of a will dimly or even unconsciously domineered by another
will; there was rather, as a point of departure, a will seeking to
bring about the wholly ideal and wholly subjective accomplishment
of a thing. But how could this will act upon the immutable order of
things? Since the suggester found himself, in the case of the person
subject to his will, in the second state, was it not merely a case
of auto-suggestion? Then, too, it was necessary to explain how the
subjected person could bring over, into his orb, wills and facts
external to himself and how, in sustaining an order suggested by his
mental activity, he could make it submit to all its relationships
of things and beings. Idealism unveiled these dim arcana for him.
Assuredly the thinking person dominates those who do not think, and the
man who wills, though unwittingly, the realization, though ideal, of a
group of facts, dominates all wills which, unwarned, are not on guard,
finding themselves unprepared to oppose will with will. The material
and unconscious world lives and moves only in the intelligence which
perceives and recreates it anew according to personal forms; there is
as much of the thinking world as a superior intelligence unites and
fashions to his wish. The conflict is only among superiorities, and the
rest, the herd, follows the masters, willy-nilly: ah! revolt is quite
useless.
Entragues consequently found himself arrived at that point of
intellectuality where one commences to make himself obeyed: order,
apparently incoercible, yielded to his dream. It was now a question of
mastering the dream and will. This was quite different: never having
cultivated that faculty, he only possessed it to a rudimentary degree.
The method was clear, he should have known how to make use of it; he
could not and the world, without a doubt, would escape him. His regret
was moderate: his desires did not exceed potentiality. The ideal world,
as he held it, sufficed for his activity which was entirely mental and
too unarmed for the struggle.
He had chosen the best part: should he be mad enough to consent to a
disastrous exchange? Everything belonged to him in the sphere where
he revolved: under logic's eye, he was the absolute master of a
transcendent reality whose joyous domination did not give him leisure
for a vulgar life and human preoccupations. To will? To will what? Ah!
how much more interesting it is to watch oneself think: what spectacle
equals that of the human brain, that marvelous hive where the ideal
bees, in their nest of cells, distil thought: a fleeting activity, but
which at least gives the illusion of duration. Ah! merely illusion, for
only the eternal exists.
At this point in his revery Entragues was bitten by a serpent: the
external, disdained and almost disowned world was evoked in the image
of Sixtine. It was necessary to admit it: he had interests in this part
of the perceptible world.
Then returned the same lamentations: fear, hope, doubt: love, composed
of these three terms, ever arose, leading the trinity to unity and
it was a circle, imperious as a circle. He lived a whole day in this
prison, then towards evening a quite sharp sensation of indignity
struck his heart and this obsession, poisoned by the arrow, inflamed
the wound: "I am going to see Sixtine, I want to see her, but if she
yields to my entreaty, the idea that she surprised me with another
woman will make me fancy that only jealousy inclines her to unshared
desires, and I will be paralyzed. I should do better to return to my
home." But the image was stronger: he obeyed the suggestion.
"Ah!" he told himself, always capable of strict reasoning, "I am afraid
I looked at the work of the ideal bees from too near a view, I well
know that I think, but I no longer know what I think."