HERE French must lend its subtler and more penetrating aroma. A
stronger spice must brace the good old English toned-down flavor. The
word must be supposed invigorated, for the thing it is to mean is
forcible. Waywardness is not the humor of this perversity, and it has
more of the perverted than of the perverse. Surface hits at cussedness,
facile thrusts at contrariness, leave it unscathed; for it goes deeper
than whimsicality and underlies the quaintness sharp wit picks out of
little things gone wrong. Perversity, thus for a space restored to its
unemasculated meaning, is a twisted distortion of root and branch, not
a gentle deflection of airy twigs. To paint a French thing the word
must assume a Gallic hue, and as the thing is deep-dyed, so the word
must borrow for the nonce a fuller tone.
Words, indeed, are but things. The names on which French thought
has thrived have been true tokens of its moods, and word-changes
have meant revolutions of fact, for the facts here are the words.
Realism worsting Romanticism, the newest Decadence undoing Realism,
are evolutions in speech which cover a progression in life. The
sentimentality of Art meant gush in practice and the attitudes of
literature were struck in reality. Dissection in fiction argued an
actual habit of analysis, and materiality was most lived for when
it was most written about. The reaction in words has ushered in a
revolution of fact, or, what comes to the same, the new literature has
sprung from the new life. From paroxysm to anti-climax has been the way
of this parallel progression, as it is of every change. The pendulum
has swayed from Realism and struck the opposite beam. But the earth
turned while we swung, and we have landed, not on Romance again, whence
we had leaped to Realism, but on Perversity, whence a lucky spring
may eventually set us down on something wiser and better. Yet there
are books in the running brooks, and there may be sermons in even the
troubled streams that water this new land of our discovery. The inner
reaction in men and things which the outer anti-climax of names and
words betokens is no barren waste, and yields experience a plentiful
harvest. The fruits are not seldom ill-flavored, but the flavor is
strong, and the uses of this new perversity are not insipid, though
they be but bittersweet.
Idealism is our perversion, and the Soul depraves us. We are drinking
the dregs of the immaterial and have touched the dingiest bottoms of
purity. The relativity of the object has turned our heads, and we are
soul-mad. Apotheosis of soul and annihilation of body, the only seemly
pegs on which well-thinking “jeunes” can now hang their periods, which
once the bait-hook of “analytical observation” alone could catch, are
the principles of our disintegration. Their work is swift, for the fear
of lagging in the race for modernity speeds it, and it is wholesale.
Nature and common-sense crumble, and sincerity has long since withered
away. Cabaret conversations are of the stupidity of sex, and small-talk
in drawing-rooms runs on the idiocy of love. Mating is a platitude,
begetting an absurdity, and motherhood has the quaintness of things
obsolete. The abolition of sex is the new crusade, and the last
religion is of the future, when the aristocracy of the intellect shall,
Jupiter-like, eschew animality, and engender its children in a thought.
Literature foretells the time, and art paints the soul with daring
straightforwardness on canvas, using microscopic brushes dipped in gold
and devoting years to the task, for psychic delineation is minute and
precious.
Soul gives form, and the ethereal must take outward shape. Hence the
new attitude. A virginal appearance and the candor of an “enfant
de chœur” are its necessary conditions. The hair, dark for women,
preferably golden for men, is long, forlorn, and parted. Complexions
are of wax when feminine; when masculine, of pale peach-blossom! A
cherub’s smile plays on the lips, and eyes must, within the bounds of
feasibility, show the vacuity of an infant’s. In voice and gesture,
being more easily practised, is the new puerility most felicitously
expressed. The secret lies in the suppression of both. The voice must
be “white,” and every accent, every shade of tone that gives but the
faint image of a color, is a flaw. A still grosser imperfection would
be aught of hasty or unmeasured in gesture or movement. In small-talk
anent the Soul, as in the impressive elocution of nursery rhymes,
carnal oblivion must be insured by immovableness of limb, and further
than the uplifting of a finger the soulful do not venture. The
golden-haired youth, lisping with the “voix blanche” of white-robed
“premières communiantes,” pictures the perversion of purity.
As at once a sign of health and a stigma of decay there comes amid
this struggling for a Soul the fitful yet eventual triumph of the
flesh. The trampled body turns and fells its oppressors, and this is
Nature’s victory, claiming, after all, her own. But it is also Nature’s
revenge, for she bestows not of her best on those who have spurned
the boon, and her gifts are cruel to her prodigal sons. Passion is
vouchsafed generously anew to some few who abjured it, but it has to
pay its penalty. The actress who (not for respectability’s sake—this
care is unknown in her Bohemia—but as a tribute to the new perversion)
had renounced the flesh, and the poet who had made dying all the rage
and relegated mere living to the lumber-room, have to screen the
simplest of idyls, not from the stare of the Puritan, but from the
prying of the last decadence. More often a yet heavier penalty is paid.
The flesh will out, and, stifled by the perversion of purity, breaks
impurely forth. The fat little Marseillais poet who may be heard of
an evening in his popular part of the prophet of the new renunciation
anathematizing the scurrility of sex and execrating the ugliness
of love, the golden-haired painter whose boast is his choir-boy
appearance, are rivals in innuendo and salaciousness when the work of
life is over and play-hours begin. In the day-time even the test of a
bottle of champagne or of but a half pint of beer is one the new purity
will hardly stand. The slender youth whom you have heard preaching
the gospel of asceticism amid a circle of amused and half-deceived
ladies goes with you to sip a “quart” at the Café de la Place Blanche,
upstairs, and shows surprising intimacy with the feminine element of
that particular world, and no little experience of fleshly doctrines.
The uses of perversity wander wide in seriousness and in theory, and
return to Nature in practice and at play. But the return is by a yet
muddier way than the digression, and a cleaner and wholesomer path must
be opened up before the straight line can be struck again.