XI

Either I've made a mistake in coming to New York, or else I'm going

soft in the upper-story, he said aloud, as he opened his portfolio,

crammed with papers, some scribbled over, some blank, some carefully

folded. There is Edgar Saltus, who knows life in a broader sense,

perhaps better, than De Gourmont--he says I made a mistake. Is Paris my

real home, and am I deracinated as Maurice Barrès calls it, and only

transplanted in America? Ah! abominable music-critics' jargon, how glad

I am to have escaped your adjectives and repulsive technical terms.

That is no way to find one's individuality, overpraising vain screaming

sopranos, voluptuous contraltos--I wonder why contraltos are more

temperamental than sopranos? worst of all those monkey tenors, with

their lascivious bleatings like goats in rut. Why do women admire the

miserable, whitewash whinneying of tenor singers? Baritones and basses

are at least virile. Whether or not the tenor is castrated, he sings

like a eunuch. No, they adore the eunuch voice in preference. Thank

Apollo, I'm through with the lot, though dramatic criticism isn't much

better. In the concert-world one at least listens to good music. A good

play in New York is as rare as a well-written critique. I'm afraid that

criticism is a poor proving-ground for one's intellectual development.

Let me see what I've written the last few months. Only notations. This

romantic rot must stop. Mona--oh, Mona is all right, but the waste of

time, the waste of emotion. What of those factors?

No women! Balzac had sternly warned Théophile Gautier. The Emperor

Honoré did not practise what he preached. Compact of sex himself he

was ever preoccupied with petticoats. La crise juponnière overtook

him once a week and oftener. Ulick recalled an anecdote of the great

man when, after he had succumbed to the blind fury of eroticism--a

chambermaid, or somebody feminine had crossed his path--he went about

the boulevards bemoaning to his friends: "J'ai perdu un livre, j'ai

perdu un livre!" his theory being that an orgasm valued an entire

story, and in his case it may have. Save your seed for nobler purposes

than copulation. That is the wisdom of the sages. And the transposition

so painfully accomplished by the saints of all times, climes and

creeds, has ever impressed mankind as a deed heroic. Women secretly

admire the chaste man. He is a sum of ineluctable forces. Men deride

the Josephs and Parsifals, not crediting them with self-control. But

that is nonsense, asserted Ulick. A priest here and there succumbs, but

as a rule, and notwithstanding the atrocious martyrdom of unsatisfied

legitimate desires, the sacerdotal man emerges from the trial a

conqueror. As for women, they are the self-contained sex. No one knows

precisely what happens in the alchemy of their emotions. Some burn

their smoke, others blaze coram publico; but the majority hide this

sort of light under a bushel of hypocritical reservations.

I mustn't waste myself in little spasms then. How about correspondence?

"ça forme le style," Balzac told Gautier, and rather grudged him that

concession. Ulick smiled. He knew his master-weakness, his vice. He

knew that when the flesh moved him the spirit took a holiday. No self

abnegation for him, no transposition to his cortical cells of his

sexual longing. Like a bull he saw red everywhere. It's a pity all the

same, he sighed. I should marry, raise a family and be unfaithful to my

wife not more than twice weekly. The programme of the majority of good

fathers, good husbands. And the American man is the worst of the lot. A

regular Turk plus a religious humbug. And some clergymen! Town bulls.

Over in Brooklyn they put up statues to their piety--and virility.

Bon! They should. A womanly woman is admirable, and she is not rare. A

virile man is as rare nowadays as a chaste one.

What an enormous faculty of inattention I possess! I wander, I stray

into the queerest pastures. What's this I've written? Philanthropy is

inverted egotism. True. All the immortal turpitudes are to be found

in the ranks of the philanthropists. A pecuniary heresy. The latrines

of my soul were overflowing in Paris. Am I purer in New York? Here

we buy our ecstasy, rent that brief syncope called passion. What's

the difference? It's the début that counts. The fury of enlacement

leaves me a cynic. I wonder if women feel the same? That eternal

triangle of theirs. And the pensile penguin of the eternal masculine.

Wicked Walt has in The Children of Adam made some stunning phrases

about the procreative organs. People who rave over his rotten poetry

wouldn't read him if he hadn't been an exhibitionist in print. No one

with a particle of taste seduces a young girl nowadays; they wait

till she is married--it saves time and trouble. "Sir," roared old

Doctor Johnson, "maidenheads are for ploughboys." Oh, the delicious,

pernicious conversation that depraves. Thought deforms. Seduction by

starlight sometimes ends in a police court with a fornication and

bastardy charge. Anyhow, we must have our psychic satisfactions,

else spiritual atony. Why this mania of certitude in the choice of a

phrase? Pure dandyism of style. Goethe said in his Truth and Poetry,

"All herein is true; nothing exact." That is fine in its implications.

Stained-glass socialism! Most of it is nothing else. Anything to keep

out the daylight of reality. Like the tigress that has tasted human

flesh and blood so is the woman who knows man; neither are satisfied

but with human prey. That's why widows remarry or--: why seduced girls

"fall" again--though Ulick smiled at that silly word--why, convents are

peopled by disillusioned souls--and there is a waiting list!

Why does man crave self-abasement? Pascal is an example. Caesar wept

when, after watching a ballet of beautiful girls dance, he saw them

killed. But he didn't weep from pity, but with ecstasy because of their

beauty. The aesthetic temperament. Love is not a sentiment, it's a

sensation. The Japanese know that. An orchestra of sensations in which

the silences are sonorous. What an Iliad of Imbecility is the history

of mankind. My idealistic anxiety over my affairs is proof positive of

their pettiness. We never escape the prison of self, though we attempt

to project our personality into the thoughts of another; this process

is called sympathy. But a thought and a thing are identical. There is

no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, says William James. We

can never know anything outside of ourselves. Oh! the sour hair, the

dark breath of these psychologists! In the cuisine of love there are

flavours for all tastes. Else ugly women wouldn't be sought after. Are

there any ugly women? my brother Oswald used to say that once a pillow

over their face all women were alike to him. Discriminating person,

Oswald. His mind must be a slop-jar of the infinite. How mirific to

mingle our essences. What immaculate perception is required to pick the

precise woman with whom to "amalgamate our sublimes." The vagabondage

of my soul through the universe, fluid, profound, and choral, is a gift

denied most men and women. Yet it is at my threshold for the asking.

My conceit is character--I think; yours is merely apoplectic. The

lassitudes of love are divine. The human plant does not best flourish

in the sunlight of success; it needs darkness, sin, sorrow, crime, to

bring it to a rich maturity. The ignoble dung of miseries demands the

spade of adversity. And Flaubert has said that the ignoble is the lower

slope of the sublime. Which is consoling. As Rabelais would remark: I

am an abstractor of quintessences.

I once longed to unhook the sun from the wall of the firmament and now

I would fain crawl into a certain sultry crevice. The prism of desire

deceives the Jasons in search of the golden--or brunette--fleece.

I have made love to virtuous women who gave me the sensation of the

force and felicity that attends the commission of a rape. And the pure

woman who teases is worse than a streetwalker. A course of anatomy on a

pillow, says a fellow cynic. Ah! the rapture of her little solitudes,

her ivory tower, her mimique in the "naked war." In this life all the

rest is gesticulation or secular sorrow. Ideas may be domesticated like

cats. The pathos of distance--memorable phrase of Nietzsche--boasts

its obverse, the bathos of propinquity--Walter Littlefield's mot. Some

men look like a carefully pared thumb-nail; perhaps they are; anyhow,

it's better than being a noble débris. Lawyers earn their bread in the

sweat of their brow-beating. Fais aux autres ce que tu ne veux pas

qu'ils te fassent! Pity is inutile. Every one of our actions is an

addition. Why then worry over free-will? Not to animal life, nor to

machinery must we go when studying the human heart, but to vegetables

and flowers. I believe that romantic feelings are much less common

than we imagine; the vast majority of the race mimic the gestures

of the stage and fiction. Food, shelter, fornication, the fight for

daily existence--these are the prime levers; not sentiment. We fool

ourselves. We take our religion and sentiment in small doses. There

are souls of prey like birds of prayer. Few women are in harmony with

the moral landscape. What music is comparable to the exquisite sighs

of a woman satisfied? The orchestra of her soul and sensations plays a

triumphant fortissimo, and what a cruel, piercing note is the supreme

spasm; the entire gamut of dolor is compressed therein.

We owe the world a living, not t'other way round. How I loathe Gounod's

Ave Maria with its slimy piety, slimy echoes from the brothel. This

vibrion of music, Gounod, never touched masterpieces without blighting

them. Think of the Bach prelude accompanying the song. Think of mighty

Faust maimed, tortured to make an operatic holiday. The Truth,

so-called, is not necessarily tonic to all souls. Free-thought is

never free; sometimes it is not thought; and it is usually inverted

dogmatism. The woman who gives an elderly man the illusion of

virility will always be sought after. Man is the only animal who can

imagine what is not. We think backwards, but live forwards, said the

Scandinavian mystic, Søren Kierkegaard. There are no illegitimate

children; babies are always born legitimately. Ask the women. What

medical pathos. Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer

than into the dreams of a lustful woman? That's Nietzsche. He never

made the blunder of lying down in the dirty straw of the sex-trough.

That's why he wrote as if with a diamond on a slate of crystal. Yet

he could say in the same breath that chastity is a virtue with some,

with the majority almost a vice. Every man knows that a woman has a

dozen different ways to make him happy, and a hundred to make him

unhappy. Nous nous promenions nos préjugés! Sounds like Stendhal,

doesn't it? I imitated him when I paraphrased it in English: Let us

promenade our prejudices. Just as I gave Baudelaire the credit of a

line he never saw, though one I believe he would have approved. Here

it is: Lo! the Lesbians, their sterile sex advancing. Curious, isn't

it, how Baudelaire and Swinburne loved to write about Lesbians. The

influence of the Sapphic legend, I fancy, not alone because of the

sweet inversion.

Ah me! groaned the young man, as the light filtered through the

curtains, here's another day, and I've been wasting good sleep over

this twaddle instead of being in bed. But I couldn't sleep. Too much

black coffee. It doesn't matter what. Only I wonder how many of these

phrases are my own. I don't believe in originality. George Moore is

quite right when he derides ideas; their expression is the only worth

while to the artist prose. Truth--error? This side of the Pyrenees--

and the other side. Map-morality. He paused, and ruefully reflected:

Nor can I say much for the formal quality of these phrases. Ah! the

precious pagodas of prose, pagan and subtle, built by those master

artificers, Renan, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès. Nevertheless,

Stendhal, who wrote drily, whose books are psychological labyrinths,

is their ruling sun, one that shines in a frosty heaven of his own

fashioning. De Gourmont--a prober of the soul. Bourget, another,

though more mundane, decorative. Maurice Barrès is a metaphysical

Chopin in his feeling for nuance. He promenades his incertitudes

through many pages of perverse, cadenced prose. But perverse. He

has now deserted his ivory tower for another illusion like his

"culte du moi;"--nationalism, patriotism, as opposed to egoism and

cosmopolitanism. Well, I'm following in his footsteps, trying to become

a sturdy American citizen in my native city--where I wasn't born. I'll

stick. I like mince-pie, baseball and a good rough-neck prize-fight. I

must be a real Yankee.

As for these notes--heaven help any reader if I ever make of them

a chapter in a book. That book! Fiction or criticism, or both? The

novel as a literary form is stale. I should like to write a story,

not all empty incident, nor yet all barren analysis. Neither Henry

James, nor old Dumas--I'm not flying high, am I?--but one in which the

idealogies of Barrès and the concrete narrative of De Maupassant would

be merged. A second Dickens, a second Thackeray are inconceivable.

A soul-biography framed in harmonious happenings--Ah! what an ideal

is Walter Pater who, when his critical prose plays second-fiddle to

his fiction, will be called the master-psychologist of them all.

Marius, Imaginary Portraits, Gaston--those are unapproachable. Pater

has revealed to us the rarest of souls. He achieves ecstasy in a

prose-music never sounded since the Greeks. As Tristan is to Aida,

so Marius to all fiction--oh, but now I'm going off my handle again,

grumbled Ulick. Vanity Fair and Pickwick are good enough for me, even

if I do admire Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Mérimée and the Russians.

The man who doesn't read Pickwick once a year is fit for treason. If

only Dostoievsky, the greatest psychologist since Balzac, had mastered

the compression of Turgenev? What a scooper of souls. There's too

much descriptive padding in modern novels, too many landscapes, not

enough characterization. I don't mean descriptive characterization--

the clothes, the gait and the eternal simper of the pulchritudinous

gum-chewing heroine--but a searching characterization that not only

paints your man without, but also within. Think of Julien Sorel in

Red and Black. Not the master that is Tolstoy could better Stendhal.

A detestable character? Admitted, but what has that to do with the

vitality of his characters, the validity of his portraiture? Too much

cluttered-up with futile things our novel reminds me of a drawing-room

which you can't see because of the furniture or the bric-à-brac, so

crowded is it with everything.

To avoid conventional chapter transitions, to write swiftly with

weight, emotion, also succinctly; to cram every inch of space with

ideas as well as action--the fiction of the future--all this I fear is

not in abundance. Henry James is the man who may solve the difficulty.

Flaubert swore that the characters should reveal themselves by their

acts, and loathed long-winded analyses, though he abused his powers

of description. It is his narrative that is the pride and despair of

his successors. Henry James says character is plot, but plot is not

character. That's my notion. And Cardinal Newman was also correct when

he gently insinuated that no one could make psychology easy reading.

He didn't live long enough to read William James. Lord, Lord! And we

go afield to burn incense under foreign nostrils and here we can boast

of two such brothers of genius as William and Henry James. Magnificent

genius. But to bed. I'm afraid I'm a confused thinker. I wonder what

Easter--no I mean Mona--is doing now? Encore la femme! He fell asleep

and dreamed of a strange blonde creature, all fun and fire and flame.