VI. PARODIES OF MYSTICISM
THE artistic and poetic forms of mysticism, which we have studied hitherto, might perhaps inspire doubts in superficial or insufficiently instructed minds as to their origin in degeneration, and present themselves as manifestations of a genuine and fertile talent. But beside them appear others, in which a state of mind reveals itself which suddenly arrests and perplexes any reader, however credulous, and however accessible to the suggestion of printed words, and to self-puffing charlatanism. Books and theories find publication, in which even the unlearned observe the deep intellectual degradation of their authors. One pretends to be able to initiate the reader into the black art, and enable him to practise magic himself; another gives a poetical form to definitely insane ideas, such as have been classified by mental therapeutics; a third writes books as if prompted by thoughts and feelings worthy of little children or idiots. A great part of the works I have in view would justify, without further consideration, the placing of their authors under constraint. As, however, in spite of their manifest craziness, well-known critics are bent upon discovering in them ‘the future,’ ‘fresh nerve-stimulations,’ and beauties of a mysterious kind, and to puff them by their chatter to gaping simpletons as revelations of genius, it is not superfluous to devote some brief consideration to them.
A not very large amount of mysticism leads to belief; a larger amount leads necessarily to superstition, and the more confused, the more deranged, the mind is, so much the crazier will be the kind of superstition. In England and America this most frequently takes the form of spiritualism and the founding of sects. The hysterical and deranged receive spiritual inspirations, and begin to preach and prophesy, or they conjure up spirits and commune with the dead. In English fiction ghost-stories have begun to occupy a large place, and in English newspapers to act glibly as stopgaps, as was done formerly in the Continental press by the sea-serpent and the Flying Dutchman. A society has been formed which has for its object the collecting of ghost-stories, and testing their authenticity; and even literary men of renown have been seized with the vertigo of the supernatural, and condescend to serve as vouchers for the most absurd aberrations.
In Germany, too, spiritualism has found an entrance, although, on the whole, it has not gained much ground. In the large towns there may be some small spiritualist bodies. The English expression trance has become so familiar to some deranged persons that they have adopted it in German as trans, imagining apparently, with the popular etymology, that it means ‘beyond’ instead of ‘ecstasy,’ or, in other words, the state in which, according to the spiritualist hypothesis, the medium ought to find himself who enters into communication with the world of spirits. Nevertheless, spiritualism has as yet exerted little influence on our literature. Excluding the later romanticists who have fallen into childishness, notably the authors of tragedies based on the idea of ‘fatality’ (Schicksalstragödien), few writers have dared to introduce the supernatural into their creations otherwise than allegorically. At most in Kleist and Kerner it attains a certain importance, and healthy readers do not consider that as a merit in the dramas of the unfortunate author of the Hermannsschlacht, and in the Seer of Prevorst of the Swabian poet. On the other hand, it must certainly be noted that it is the ghost element precisely which has brought to these two writers, in recent times, a renewal of youth and popularity among degenerate and hysterical Germans. Maximilian Perty, who was evidently born too soon, met with but rare and even rather derisive notice from the less soft-headed generation which preceded ours, for his bulky books on apparitions. And, among contemporaries, none but Freiherr Karl du Prel has chosen the spirit world as the special subject of his theoretic writings and novels. After all, our plays, our tales, are very little haunted, scarcely enough to make a schoolgirl shiver; and even among the eminent foreign authors best known in Germany, such, for example, as Tourgenieff, it is not the world of apparitions which attracts German readers.
The few ghost-seers whom we have at present in Germany endeavour naturally to give their mental derangement a scientific colouring, and appeal to individual professors of mathematics and natural science who happen entirely to agree with them, or are supposed to be partially inclined to do so. However, their one sheet-anchor is Zöllner, who is simply a sad proof of the fact that a professorship is no protection from madness; and they can besides, at any rate, point to opportune remarks of Helmholtz and other mathematicians on n dimensions, which they, either intentionally or from mystical weakness of mind, have misunderstood. In an analytical problem the mathematician, instead of one, two, or three dimensions, may place n dimensions without altering thereby the law of the problem and its legitimately resulting corollaries, but it does not occur to him to imagine, under the geometrical expression, ‘nth dimension,’ something given in space, and capable of being apprehended by the senses. When Zöllner gives the well-known example of the inversion of the india-rubber ring which, because only possible in the third dimension, necessarily appeared quite inconceivable and supernatural to a bi-dimensional being, he believes that he facilitates the comprehension of the formation of a knot in a closed ring as an operation practicable in the fourth dimension. In doing this he simply offers one more example of the known tendency of the mystic to delude himself, as he does others, with words which seem to signify something, and which a simpleton is convinced oftener than not that he understands, but which in reality express no idea, and are, therefore, empty sound, void of import.
France is about to become the promised land of believers in ghosts. Voltaire’s countrymen have already got the start of the pious Anglo-Saxons in dealings with the supernatural. I am not now thinking of the lower ranks of the people, among whom the book of dreams (La Clé des Songes) has never ceased to constitute the family library, together with the Calendar, and, perhaps, the ‘Paroissien’ (missal); nor of the fine ladies who at all times have ensured excellent incomes to clairvoyantes and fortune-tellers; but only of the male representatives of the educated classes. Dozens of spiritualist circles count their numbers by thousands. In numerous drawing-rooms of the best (even in the opinion of the ‘most cultured’!) society, the dead are called up. A monthly publication, L’Initiation, announces, in weighty tones, and with a prodigality of philosophical and scientific technicalities, the esoteric doctrine of the marvels of the unearthly. A bi-monthly publication, Annales des Sciences Psychiques, terms itself a ‘collection of observations and researches.’ Next to these two most important periodicals, a whole series of others exist, similar in tendency, and all having a wide circulation. Strictly technical works on hypnotism and suggestion run through edition after edition, and it has become a profitable speculation for doctors without practice, who do not attach much importance to the opinions of their colleagues, to compile so-called manuals and text-books on these subjects, which scientifically are completely worthless, but which are bought up by the public like hot rolls. Novels have, with rare exceptions, no longer any sale in France, but works on obscure phenomena of nerve function go off splendidly, so that sagacious publishers give their discouraged authors this advice: ‘Leave novels for a time, and write on magnetism.’
Some of the books on magic which have appeared of late years in France connect their subject directly with the phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion; for example, A. De Rochas’ Les États profonds de l’Hypnose, and C. A. de Bodisco’s Traits de Lumière, or ‘physical researches dedicated to unbelievers and egoists.’ This has brought many observers to the idea that the works and discoveries of the Charcot school in general have given the impulse to the whole of this movement. Hypnotism, say the representatives of this opinion, has brought such remarkable facts to light that the accuracy of certain traditions, popular beliefs and old records can no longer be doubted, though hitherto they have been generally considered inventions of superstition; possession, witch-spells, second-sight, healing by imposition of hands, prophecy, mental communication at the remotest distance without the intervention of words, have received a new interpretation and have been recognised as possible. What, then, more natural than that minds weak in balance, and of insufficient scientific training, should become accessible to the marvellous (against which they had shielded themselves, as long as they considered it to be all old nurses’ fables), when they saw it appear in the garb of science, and found themselves in the best society by believing in it?
Plausible as this opinion is, it is not the less false. It puts the cart before the horse. It confounds cause with effect. No completely sound mind has been led by the experiences of the new hypnotic science into a belief in the marvellous. In former times no attention was paid to obscure phenomena, or they were passed by with eyes intentionally closed, because they could not be fitted in to the prevailing system, and were consequently held to be chimæras or frauds. For the last twelve years official science has taken cognizance of them, and Faculties and Academies are engaged upon them. But no one thinks of them for a moment as supernatural, or supposes the working of unearthly forces behind them. They class them with all other natural phenomena which are accessible to the observation of the senses, and are determined by the ordinary laws of nature. Our knowledge has simply enlarged its frame, and admitted an order of facts which in former times had remained beyond its pale. Many processes of hypnosis are more or less satisfactorily explained; others as yet not at all. But an earnest and healthy mind attaches no great importance to this, for he knows that the pretended explanation of phenomena does not go very far, and that we have mostly to be satisfied to determine them with certainty, and to know their immediate conditions. I do not say that the new science has exhausted its subject and has reached its limits. But whatever it may bring to light of the unknown and the unexpected, it is not a matter of doubt to the healthy mind that it will be accounted for by natural means, and that the simple, ultimate laws of physics, chemistry and biology cannot be shaken by these discoveries.
If, therefore, so many people now interpret the phenomena of hypnosis as supernatural, and indulge the hope that the conjuration of the spirits of the dead, aerial voyages on Faust’s magic cloak, omniscience, etc., will soon be arts as common as reading and writing, it is not the discoveries of science which have brought them to this delusion, although the existing delusion is happy to be able to pass itself off for science. Far from concealing itself, as formerly, it exhibits itself proudly in the streets on the arms of professors and academicians. Paulhan understands the matter very well: ‘It is not the love of positive facts,’ he says,[215] ‘which has carried minds away; there has been a certain kind of return for the love of the marvellous in desires formerly satisfied, and which, now repressed, slumbered unacknowledged in a latent condition. Magic, sorcery, astrology, divination, all these ancient beliefs correspond to a need of human nature; that of being able easily to act upon the external world and the social world; that of possessing, by means relatively easy, the knowledge requisite to make this action possible and fruitful.’ The stormy outburst of superstition has by no means been let loose through hypnological researches; it merely launches itself into the channels they have dug. We have here already repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that unbalanced minds always adapt their crazes to the prevailing views, and usurp by predilection the most recent discoveries of science to explain them. The physicists were still far from occupying themselves with magnetism and electricity, when the persons attacked by persecution-mania were already referring their own unpleasant sensations and hallucinations to the electric currents or sparks which their persecutors were supposed to cast on them through walls, ceilings and floors; and in our days the degenerate were equally the first to appropriate to themselves the results of hypnological researches, and to employ them as ‘scientific’ proofs of the reality of spirits, angels and devils. But the degenerate started with the belief in miracles; it is one of their peculiar characteristics,[216] and it was not first called forth by the observations of Parisian and Nancy hypnologists.
If another proof were needed in support of this affirmation, it could be found in the fact that the greater number of ‘occultists,’ as they call themselves, in their treatises on occult arts and magic sciences, scorn to fall back on the results of hypnological experiments, and, without any pretext of ‘modernity,’ without any concession to honest investigation of nature, have direct recourse to the most ancient traditions. Papus (the pseudonym of a physician, Dr. Encausse) writes a Traité méthodique de Science occulte, an enormous large-octavo volume of 1,050 pages, with 400 illustrations, which introduces the reader to the cabala, magic, necromancy and cheiromancy, astrology, alchemy, etc., and to which an old, not undeserving savant, Adolf Franck, of the Institute of France, was imprudent enough to write a long eulogistic preface, presumably without having even opened the book himself. Stanislaus de Guaita, revered with awe by the adepts as past master in the Black Art, and arch-magician, gives two treatises, Au Seuil du Mystère and Le Serpent de la Genèse, so darkly profound that, in comparison, Nicolas Flamel, the great alchemist, whom no mortal has ever comprehended, seems clear and transparent as crystal. Ernest Bose confines himself to the theory of the sorcery of the ancient Egyptians. His book, Isis dévoilée, ou l’Egyptologie sacrée, has for the sub-title: ‘Hieroglyphics, papyri, hermetic books, religion, myths, symbols, psychology, philosophy, morals, sacred art, occultism, mysteries, initiation, music.’ Nehor has likewise his speciality. If Bosc unveils Egyptian mysteries, Nehor reveals the secrets of Assyria and Babylonia. Les Mages et le Secret magique is the name of the modest pamphlet in which he initiates us into the profoundest magic arts of the Chaldean Mobeds, or Knights Templars.
If I do not enter more fully into these books, which have found readers and admirers, it is because I am not quite certain that they are intended to be in earnest. Their authors read and translate so fluently Egyptian, Hebraic and Assyriac texts, which no professional Orientalist has yet deciphered; they quote so frequently and so copiously from books which are found in no library in the world; they give with such an imperturbable air exact instructions how to resuscitate the dead, how to preserve eternal youth, how to hold intercourse with the inhabitants of Sirius, how to divine beyond all the limits of time and space, that one cannot get rid of the impression that they wished, in cold blood, to make fun of the reader.
Only one of all these master-sorcerers is certainly to be taken in good faith, and as he is at the same time intellectually the most eminent among them, I will deal with him somewhat more in detail. This is M. Joséphin Péladan. He has even arrogated to himself the Assyrian royal title of ‘Sar,’ under which he is generally known. The public authorities alone do not give him his Sar title; but then they do not usually recognise any titles of nobility in France. He maintains he is the descendant of the old Magi, and the possessor of all the mental legacies of Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Orpheus. He is, moreover, the direct heir of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, both of which orders he has amalgamated and revived under a new form as the ‘Order of the Rosy Cross.’ He dresses himself archaically in a satin doublet of blue or black; he trims his extremely luxuriant blue-black hair and beard into the shape in use among the Assyrians; he affects a large upright hand, which might be taken for mediæval character, writes by preference with red or yellow ink, and in the corner of his letter-paper is delineated, as a distinctive mark of his dignity, the Assyrian king’s cap, with the three serpentine rolls opening in front. As a coat of arms he has the device of his order; on an escutcheon divided by sable and argent a golden chalice surmounted by a crimson rose with two outspread wings, and overlaid with a Latin cross in sable. The shield is surmounted by a coronet with three pentagrams as indents. M. Péladan has appointed a series of commanders and dignitaries of his order (‘grand-priors,’ ‘archons,’ ‘æsthetes’), which numbers, besides, ‘postulants’ and ‘grammarians’ (scholars). He possesses a special costume as grand-master and Sar (in which his life-sized portrait has been painted by Alexandre Séon), and a composer, who belongs to the order, has composed for him a special fanfare, which on solemn occasions is to be played by trumpets at his entrance. He makes use of extraordinary formulæ. His letters he calls ‘decrees,’ or commands (mandements). He addresses the persons to whom they are directed either as ‘magnifiques,’ or ‘peers,’ sometimes also ‘dearest adelphe,’ or ‘synnoède.’ He does not call them ‘sir,’ but ‘your lordship’ (seigneurie). The introduction is: ‘Health, light and victory in Jesus Christ, in the only God, and in Peter, the only king’; or ‘Ad Rosam per Crucem, ad Crucem per Rosam, in eâ, in eis gemmatus resurgam.’ This is at the same time the heraldic motto of the Order of the Rosy Cross. At the conclusion is usually, ‘Amen. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nominis tui gloriæ solæ.’ He writes the name of his order, with a cross inserted in the middle, thus: ‘Rose ✠ Croix.’ His novels he calls ‘éthopées,’ himself as their author ‘éthopoète,’ his dramas ‘wagneries,’ their table of contents ‘éumolpées.’
Every one of his books is ornamented with a large number of symbols. That which appears the most often is a vignette showing on a column a cowering form with the head of a woman breathing flames, and with a woman’s breast, lion’s paws, and the lower part of the body of a wasp or dragon-fly, terminating in an appendage similar to the tail of a fish. The work itself is always preceded by some prefaces, introductions and invocations, and is often followed by pages of the same nature. I take as an example the book entitled, Comment on devient Mage.[217] After the two title-pages adorned with a great number of symbolical images (winged Assyrian bulls, the mystic rose cross, etc.), comes a long dedication ‘to Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, grand-prior of the temple, archon of the Rose ✠ Cross.’ Then follows in Latin a ‘prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, well suited to warn the reader against the possible errors of this book’; after this, an élenctique (counter-demonstration) containing a sort of profession of Catholic faith; next, an ‘invocation to ancestors’ in the style of the Chaldean prayers; lastly, a long allocution ‘to the contemporary young man,’ after which the book properly begins.
At the head of every chapter appear nine mysterious formulæ. Here are two examples: ‘I. The Neophyte. Divine Name: Jud (the Hebrew letter so called). Sacrament: Baptism. Virtue: Faith. Gift: Fear of God. Beatitude: Poor in spirit. Work: Teaching. Angel: Michael. Arcanum: Unity. Planet: Samas. II. Society. Divine Name: Jah--El (in Hebrew characters, which Péladan evidently cannot read, for he turns it into El-lah). Sacrament: Consecration. Virtue: Hope. Gift: Pity. Beatitude: Gentleness. Work: Counsel. Angel: Gabriel. Arcanum: Duality. Planet: Sin.’
Of the further contents of this mighty volume I think no examples need be given. They correspond exactly with the headings of these chapters.
The novels or ‘éthopées’ of M. Péladan, of which nine have appeared hitherto, but of which the author has announced fourteen, are arranged in groups of seven, the mystical number. He has even established a Schéma de Concordance,[218] which claims to give a synopsis of their leading ideas. Let us hear how he explains his works:
‘First series of seven: I. The supreme vice. Moral and mental Diathesis of the Latin decline--Merodach, summit of conscious will, type of absolute entity; Alta, prototype of the monk in contact with the world; Courtenay, inadequate man-of-fate, bewitched by social facts; L. d’Este, extreme pride, the grand style in evil; Coryse, the true young maiden; La Nine, the wicked Androgyne, or, better, Gynander; Dominicaux, conscious reprobate, character of the irremediable, resulting from a specious æsthetic theory for every vice, which kills consciousness and, in consequence, conversion. Every novel has a Merodach, that is, an abstract Orphic principle, as opposed to an ideal enigma.
‘II. Inquisitive. Parisian clinical collective-phenomenism. Ethics: Nebo; the systematic, sentimental will. Erotics: Paula, passionate with Androgynous Prism. The great horror, the Beast with two backs, in Gynander (IX.), metamorphosing itself into unisexual corruption. Inquisitive, that is the everyday and the everybody of instinct. Gynander, the Goethesque midnight, and the exceptional,’ etc.
I have taken pains to reproduce faithfully all M. Péladan’s whimsical methods of expression. That his Concordance can give even the slightest idea of the contents of his novels, I do not for a moment believe. I will, therefore, say a few words about these in non-magian language.
They all move in the three following circles of ideas, variously penetrating and intersecting each other: The highest intellectual aim of man is to hear and thoroughly to appreciate Wagnerian music; the highest development of morality consists in renouncing sexuality and in transforming one’s self into a hybrid hermaphrodite (Androgyne and Gynander); the higher man can quit and retake his body at pleasure, soar into space as an ‘astral being,’ and subject to his will the entire supernatural power of the world of spirits, of the good as well as the bad.
Accordingly, in every romance a hero appears who unites in himself the distinctive marks of both sexes, and resists with horror the ordinary sexual instincts, who plays or enjoys the music of Wagner, enacts in his own life some scene from the Wagnerian drama, and conjures up spirits or has to repel their attacks.
If anyone wishes to trace the origin of all these delirious ideas, it will not be difficult to discover how they arose. One day while reading the Bible Péladan alighted on the name of the Babylonian king, Merodach Baladan. The similarity of sound between ‘Baladan’ and ‘Péladan’ gave an impulse to his imagination to establish relations between himself and the Biblical Babylonian king. Once he began to reflect on this, he found a resemblance, in the cast of his features, the colour of his hair, and the growth of his beard, to the heads of Assyrian kings on the alabaster casts from the palace at Nineveh. Thus he easily arrived at the idea that he was possibly a descendant of Baladan, or of other Assyrian kings, or, at least, that it would be a curious thing if he were. And he continued to work out this thought, until one day he resolutely took the title of Sar. If he were descended from the kings of Babylon, he could also be the heir of the wisdom of the Magi. So he began to proclaim the Magian esoteric doctrine. To these musings were added afterwards the impressions he received on a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, from Tristan, and especially from Parsifal. In fancy he wrought his own life into the legend of the Grail, looked upon himself as a knight of the Grail, and created his order of the ‘Rose Croix,’ which is entirely composed of reminiscences of Parsifal. His invention of the asexual hybrid being shows that his imagination is actively preoccupied with presentations of a sexual character, and unconsciously seeks to idealize the ‘contrary sexual feelings.’
The mental life of Péladan permits us to follow, in an extremely well-marked instance, the ways of mystic thought. He is wholly dominated by the association of ideas. A fortuitous assonance awakens in him a train of thought which urges him irresistibly to proclaim himself an Assyrian king and Magus, without his attention being in a condition to make him realize the fact that a man can be called Péladan without being, therefore, necessarily descended from a Biblical Baladan. The meaningless flow of words of the mediæval scholastics misleads him, because he is continually thinking by way of analogy, that is to say, because he follows exclusively the play of the association of ideas provoked by the most secondary and superficial resemblances. He receives every artistic suggestion with the greatest ease. If he hears Wagner’s operas, he believes himself to be a Wagnerian character; if he reads of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, he becomes the Grand-Master of the Temple, and of all other secret orders. He has the peculiar sexual emotionalism of the ‘higher degenerates,’ and this endows him with a peculiar fabulous shape, which, at once chaste and lascivious, embodies, in curiously demonstrative manner, the secret conflicts which take place in his consciousness between unhealthily intensified instincts, and the judgment which recognises their dangerous character.
Does Péladan believe in the reality of his delusions? In other words, does he take himself seriously? The answer to this question is not so simple as many perhaps think. The two beings which exist in every human mind are, in a nature such as Péladan’s, a prey to a strange conflict. His unconscious nature is quite transfused with the rôle of a Sar, a Magus, a Knight of the Holy Grail, Grand-Master of the Order, etc., which he has invented. The conscious factor in him knows that it is all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the unconscious life to do as it pleases. It is thus that little girls behave who play with dolls, caressing or punishing them, and treating them as if they were living beings, all the time well aware that in reality they have before them only an object in leather and porcelain.
Péladan’s judgment has no power over his unconscious impulses. It is not in his power to renounce the part of a Sar or a Magus, or no longer to pose as grand-master of an order. He cannot abstain from perpetually returning to his ‘Androgynous’ absurdity. All these aberrations, as well as the invention of neologisms and the predilection for symbols, the prolix titles, and the casket-series of prefaces, so characteristic of the ‘higher degenerates,’ proceed from the depths of his organic temperament, and evade the influence of his higher centres. On its conscious side Péladan’s cerebral activity is rich and beautiful. In his novels there are pages which rank among the most splendid productions of a contemporary pen. His moral ideal is high and noble. He pursues with ardent hatred all that is base and vulgar, every form of egoism, falsehood, and thirst for pleasure; and his characters are thoroughly aristocratic souls, whose thoughts are concerned only with the worthiest, if somewhat exclusively artistic, interests of humanity. It is deeply to be regretted that the overgrowth of morbidly mystic presentations should render his extraordinary gifts completely sterile.
Far below Péladan stands Maurice Rollinat, who ought, nevertheless, to be mentioned first, because he embodies in a very instructive manner a definite form of mystic degeneration, and next because all French, and many foreign, hysterical persons honour in him a great poet.
In his poems, which with characteristic self-knowledge he entitles Les Névroses[219] (Nervous Maladies) he betrays all the stigmata of degeneration, which by this time ought to be familiar enough to the reader for me to content myself with a brief notice of them.
He feels in himself criminal impulses (Le Fantôme du Crime):
‘Wicked thoughts come into my soul in every place, at all hours, in the height of my work.... I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones which vibrate in my heart where Satan knocks; and although I have a horror of vile saturnalias, of which the mere shadow suffices to anger me, I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones.... The phantom of crime across my reason prowls around (in my skull).... Murder, rape, robbery, parricide, pass through my mind like fierce lightnings....’
The spectacle of death and corruption has a strong attraction for him. He delights in putrefaction and revels in disease.
‘My ghostly belovèd, snatched by death, played before me livid and purple.... Bony nakedness, chaste in her leanness! Hectic beauty as sad as it is ardent!... Near her a coffin ... greedily opened its oblong jaws, and seemed to call her....’ (L’Amante macabre).
‘Mademoiselle Squelette! Je la surnommais ainsi: Elle était si maigrelette!
‘Crachant une gouttelette De sang très peu cramoisi... Elle était si maigrelette!...
‘Sa phthisie étant complète;... Sa figure verdelette... Un soir, à l’espagnolette Elle vint se pendre ici.
‘Horreur! une cordelette Décapitait sans merci Mademoiselle Squelette: Elle était si maigrelette!’
Mademoiselle Squelette.
‘That I might rescue the angelically beautiful dead from the horrible kisses of the worm I had her embalmed in a strange box. It was on a winter’s night. From the ice-cold, stiff and livid body were taken out the poor defunct organs, and into the open belly, bloody and empty, were poured sweet-smelling salves....’ (La Morte embaumée).
‘Flesh, eyebrows, hair, my coffin and my winding-sheet, the grave has eaten them all; its work is done.... My skull has attested its shrinking, and I, a scaling, crumbling residue of death, have come to look back with regret upon the time when I was rotting, and the worm yet fasted not....’ (Le mauvais Mort).
This depravity of taste will not seldom be observed among the deranged. In Rollinat it merely inspires loathsome verses; among others it leads them to the eager devouring of human excretions, and, in its worst forms, to being enamoured of a corpse (Necrophilia).
Violent erotomaniacal excitement expresses itself in a series of poems (Les Luxures), which not only celebrate the most unbridled sensuality, but also all the aberrations of sexual psychopathy.
But the most conspicuous are the sensations of undefined horrors which continually beset him. Everything inspires him with anguish; all the sights of Nature appear to him to enclose some frightful mystery. He is always expecting, in trembling, some unknown terror.
‘I always shudder at the strange look of some boot and some shoe. Ay, you may shrug your shoulders mockingly, I do shudder; and suddenly, on thinking of the foot they cover, I ask myself: “Is it mechanical, or living?” ...’ (Le Maniaque).
‘My room is like my soul.... Heavy curtains, very ancient, cling round the deep bed; long fantastic insects dance and crawl on the ceiling. When my clock strikes the hour it makes an appalling noise; every swing of the pendulum vibrates, and is strangely prolonged.... Furniture, pictures, flowers, even the books, all smell of hell and poison; and the horror, which loves me, envelops this prison like a pall....’ (La Chambre).
‘The library made me think of very old forests; thirteen iron lamps, oblong and spectral, poured their sepulchral light day and night on the faded books full of shadow and secrets. I always shuddered when I entered. I felt myself in the midst of fogs and death-rattles, drawn on by the arms of thirteen pale armchairs, and scanned by the eyes of thirteen great portraits....’ (La Bibliothèque).
‘In the swamp full of malice, which clogs and penetrates his stockings, he hears himself faintly called by several voices making but one. He finds a corpse as sentinel, which rolls its dull eyeballs, and moves its corruption with an automatic spring. I show to his dismayed eyes fires in the deserted houses, and in the forsaken parks beds full of green rose.... And the old cross on the calvary hails him from afar, and curses him, crossing its stern arms as it stretches out and brandishes them....’ (La Peur).
I will not weary by multiplying examples, and will only quote the titles of a few more poems: The Living Grave; Troppmann’s Soliloquy (a well-known eight-fold murderer); The Crazy Hangman; The Monster; The Madman; The Headache (La Céphalalgie); The Disease; The Frenzied Woman; Dead Eyes; The Abyss; Tears; Anguish; The Slow Death-struggle; The Interment; The Coffin; The Death-knell; Corruption; The Song of the Guillotined, etc.
All these poems are the production of a craze, which will be frequently observed among degenerates. Even Dostojevski, who is known to have been mentally afflicted, suffered from it also. ‘As soon as it grew dusk,’ he relates of himself,[220] ‘I gradually fell into that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I have been ill, and which I shall call mystic fright. It is a crushing anxiety about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realized suddenly, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable, horrible, unshapen fact.’ Legrain[221] quotes a degenerate lunatic whose mania began ‘with feelings of fear and anguish at some fancy.’ Professor Kowalewski[222] indicates as degrees of mental derangement in degeneration--first, neurasthenia; secondly, impulses of ‘obsession’ and feelings of morbid anguish. Legrand du Saulle[223] and Morel[224] describe this state of groundless, undefined fear, and coin for it the not very happy word ‘Panophobia.’ Magnan calls it more correctly ‘Anxiomania’--frenzied anguish--and speaks of it as a very common stigma of degeneration. The anguish mania is an error of consciousness, which is filled with presentations of fear, and transfers their cause into the external world, while, as a matter of fact, they are stimulated by pathological processes within the organism. The invalid feels oppressed and uneasy, and imputes to the phenomena which surround him a threatening and sinister aspect, in order to explain to himself his dread, the origin of which escapes him, because it is rooted in the unconscious.
As in Rollinat we have learnt to know the poet of anxiomania, so shall we find in another author, whose name has become widely known in the last two years, in the Belgian, Maurice Maeterlinck, an example of an utterly childish idiotically-incoherent mysticism. He reveals the state of his mind most characteristically in his poems,[225] of which I will give a few examples. Here is the first of the collection--Serres chaudes:
‘O hot-house in the middle of the woods. And your doors ever closed! And all that is under your dome! And under my soul in your analogies!
‘The thoughts of a princess who is hungry; the tedium of a sailor in the desert; a brass-band under the windows of incurables.
‘Go into the warm moist corners! One might say, ‘tis a woman fainting on harvest-day. In the courtyard of the infirmary are postilions; in the distance an elk-hunter passes by, who now tends the sick.
‘Examine in the moonlight! (Oh, nothing there is in its place!) One might say, a madwoman before judges, a battle-ship in full sail on a canal, night-birds on lilies, a death-knell towards noon (down there under those bells), a halting-place for the sick in the meadows, a smell of ether on a sunny day.
‘My God! my God! when shall we have rain and snow and wind in the hot-house?’
These idiotic sequences of words are psychologically interesting, for they demonstrate with instructive significance the workings of a shattered brain. Consciousness no longer elaborates a leading or central idea. Representations emerge just as the wholly mechanical association of ideas arouses them. There is no attention seeking to bring order into the tumult of images as they come and go, to separate the unconnected, to suppress those that contradict each other, and to group those which are allied into a single logical series.
A few more examples of these fugitive thoughts exclusively under the rule of unbridled association. Here is one entitled Bell-glasses (Cloches de verre):
‘O bell-glasses! Strange plants for ever under shelter! While the wind stirs my senses without! A whole valley of the soul for ever still! And the enclosed lush warmth towards noon! And the pictures seen through the glass!
‘Never remove one of them! Several have been placed on old moonlight. Look through their foliage. There is perhaps a vagabond on a throne; one has the impression that corsairs are waiting on the pond, and that antediluvian beings are about to invade the towns.
‘Some have been placed on old snows. Some have been placed on ancient rains. (Pity the enclosed atmosphere!) I hear a festival solemnized on a famine Sunday; there is an ambulance in the middle of the house, and all the daughters of the king wander on a fast-day across the meadows.
‘Examine specially those of the horizon! They cover carefully very old thunderstorms. Oh, there must be somewhere an immense fleet on a marsh! And I believe that the swans have hatched ravens. (One can scarcely distinguish through the dampness.)
‘A maiden sprinkles the ferns with hot water; a troop of little girls watch the hermit in his cell; my sisters have fallen asleep on the floor of a poisonous grotto!
‘Wait for the moon and the winter, among these bells, scattered at last on the ice.’
Another called Soul (Ame):
‘My soul! O my soul truly too much sheltered! And these flocks of desires in a hot-house! Awaiting a storm in the meadows! Let us go to the most sickly: they have strange exhalations. In the midst of them I cross a battlefield with my mother. They are burying a brother-in-arms at noon, while the sentries take their repast.
‘Let us go also to the weakest; they have strange sweats: here is a sick bride, treachery on Sunday, and little children in prison. (And further across the mist.) Is it a dying woman at the door of a kitchen? Or a nun, who cleans vegetables at the foot of the bed of an incurable?
‘Let us go lastly to the saddest: (at the last because they have poisons). O my lips accept the kisses of one wounded!
‘All the ladies of the castle are dead of hunger this summer in the towers of my soul! Here is the dawn, which enters into the festival! I have a glimpse of sheep along the quays, and there is a sail at the windows of the hospital!
‘It is a long road from my heart to my soul! And all the sentries are dead at their posts!
‘One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my soul! They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning; and all the convent virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal one sunny fast-day. While the swans suffered under a poisonous bridge. The trees were lopped about the prison; medicines were brought one afternoon in June, and meals for the patients were spread over the whole horizon!
‘My soul! And the sadness of it all, my soul! and the sadness of it all!’
I have translated with the greatest exactness, and not omitted one word of the three ‘poems.’ Nothing would be easier than to compose others on these models, overtrumping even those of Maeterlinck--e.g., ‘O Flowers! And we groan so heavily under the very old taxes! An hour-glass, at which the dog barks in May; and the strange envelope of the negro who has not slept. A grandmother who would eat oranges and could not write! Sailors in a ballroom, but blue! blue! On the bridge this crocodile and the policeman with the swollen cheek beckons silently! O two soldiers in the cowhouse, and the razor is notched! But the chief prize they have not drawn. And on the lamp are ink-spots!’ etc. But why parody Maeterlinck? His style bears no parody, for it has already reached the extreme limits of idiocy. Nor is it quite worthy of a mentally sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an idiot.
Certain of his poems consist simply of assonances, linked together without regard to sense and meaning, e.g., one which is entitled Ennui:
‘The careless peacocks, the white peacocks have flown, the white peacocks have flown from the tedium of awaking; I see the white peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, the peacocks that went away during my sleep, the careless peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, reach lazily the pond where no sun is, I hear the white peacocks, the peacocks of ennui, waiting lazily for the times when no sun is.’
The French original reveals why these words were chosen; they contain almost all the nasal sounds, ‘en’ or ‘an’ or ‘aon’: ‘Les paons nonchalants, les paons blancs ont fui, les paons blancs ont fui l’ennui du réveil; je vois les paons blancs ... atteindre indolents l’étang sans soleil,’ etc. This is a case of that form of echolalia which is observed not seldom among the insane. One patient says, e.g., ‘Man kann dann ran Mann wann Clan Bann Schwan Hahn,’ and he continues to grind similar sounds till he is either tired, or takes a word spoken before him as a starting-point for a new series of rhymes.
If Maeterlinck’s poems are read with some attention, it is soon seen that the muddled pictures which follow each other pell-mell as in a dream, are borrowed from a very limited circle of ideas, which have either generally, or only for him, an emotional content. ‘Strange,’ ‘old,’ ‘distant,’ are the adjectives he constantly repeats; they have this in common that they indicate something indistinct, not definitely recognisable, away on the bounds of the distant horizon, corresponding, therefore, to the nebulous thought of mysticism. Another adjective which sets him dreaming is ‘slow’ (lent). It also influences the French Symbolists, and hence their fondness for it. They evidently associated it with the idea of the movements of the priest reading the Mass, and it awakens in them the emotions of the mysticism of faith. They betray this association of ideas by this, that they frequently use lent together with hiératique (sacerdotal). Maeterlinck, moreover, is constantly thinking of hospitals with their sick, and of everything connected with them (nuns, invalids’ diet, medicines, surgical operations, bandages, etc.), of canals with ships and swans, and of princesses. The hospitals and the canals, which are a feature in the Belgian landscape, may be connected with the first impressions of his childhood, and therefore produce emotions in him. The princesses, on the contrary, shut up in towers, suffering hunger, going astray, wading through swamps, etc., have evidently remained fixed in his imagination from the childish ballads of the pre-Raphaelites, one of which, by Swinburne, was given above as an example. Hospitals, canals, princesses, these are the pictures which always recur with the obstinacy of obsessions, and in the midst of the nebulous chaos of his jargon, alone show some sort of firm outline.
A few of his poems are written in the traditional poetical form; others, on the contrary, have neither measure nor rhyme, but consist of lines of prose, arbitrarily changing in length, not according to the style of Goethe’s free poems, or of Heine’s North Sea Songs, which ripple by with very strongly marked rhythmic movement, but deaf, jolting and limping, as the items of an inventory. These pieces are a servile imitation of the effusions of Walt Whitman, that crazy American to whom Maeterlinck was necessarily strongly attracted, according to the law I have repeatedly set forth--that all deranged minds flock together.
I should like here to interpolate a few remarks on Walt Whitman, who is likewise one of the deities to whom the degenerate and hysterical of both hemispheres have for some time been raising altars. Lombroso ranks him expressly among ‘mad geniuses.’[226] Mad Whitman was without doubt. But a genius? That would be difficult to prove. He was a vagabond, a reprobate rake, and his poems[227] contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew to him the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime. ‘This is the deepest theory of susceptibility,’ he says in one place, ‘without preference or exclusion; the negro with the woolly head, the bandit of the highroad, the invalid, the ignorant--none are denied.’ And in another place he explains he ‘loves the murderer and the thief, the pious and good, with equal love.’ An American driveller, W. D. O’Connor, has called him on this account ‘The good gray Poet.’ We know, however, that this ‘goodness,’ which is in reality moral obtuseness and morbid sentimentality, frequently accompanies degeneration, and appears even in the cruellest assassins, for example, in Ravachol.
He has megalomania, and says of himself:
‘From this hour I decree that my being be freed from all restraints and limits.
‘I go where I will, my own absolute and complete master.
‘I breathe deeply in space. The east and the west are mine.
‘Mine are the north and south. I am greater and better than I thought myself.
‘I did not know that so much boundless goodness was in me....
‘Whoever disowns me causes me no annoyance.
‘Whoever recognises me shall be blessed, and will bless me.’
He is mystically mad, and announces: ‘I have the feeling of all. I am all, and believe in all. I believe that materialism is true, and that spiritualism is also true; I reject nothing.’ And in another still more characteristic passage:
‘Santa Spirita [sic!], breather, life, Beyond the light, lighter than light, Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell, Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume, Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and Satan, Ethereal, pervading all, for without me what were all? what were God? Essence of forms, life of the real identities ... Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the general soul.’
In his patriotic poems he is a sycophant of the corrupt American vote-buying, official-bribing, power-abusing, dollar-democracy, and a cringer to the most arrogant Yankee conceit. His war-poems--the much renowned Drum Taps--are chiefly remarkable for swaggering bombast and stilted patter.
His purely lyrical pieces, with their ecstatic ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ with their soft phrases about flowers, meadows, spring and sunshine, recall the most arid, sugary and effeminate passages of our old Gessner, now happily buried and forgotten.
As a man, Walt Whitman offers a surprising resemblance to Paul Verlaine, with whom he shared all the stigmata of degeneration, the vicissitudes of his career, and, curiously enough, even the rheumatic ankylosis. As a poet, he has thrown off the closed strophe as too difficult, measure and rhyme as too oppressive, and has given vent to his emotional fugitive ideation in hysterical exclamations, to which the definition of ‘prose gone mad’ is infinitely better suited than it is to the pedantic, honest hexameters of Klopstock. Unconsciously, he seemed to have used the parallelism of the Psalms, and Jeremiah’s eruptive style, as models of form. We had in the last century the Paramythien of Herder, and the insufferable ‘poetical prose’ of Gessner already mentioned. Our healthy taste soon led us to recognise the inartistic, retrogressive character of this lack of form, and that error in taste has found no imitator among us for a century. In Whitman, however, his hysterical admirers commend this réchauffé of a superannuated literary fashion as something to come; and admire, as an invention of genius, what is only an incapacity for methodical work. Nevertheless, it is interesting to point out that two persons so dissimilar as Richard Wagner and Walt Whitman have, in different spheres, under the pressure of the same motives, arrived at the same goal--the former at ‘infinite melody,’ which is no longer melody; the latter at verses which are no longer verses, both in consequence of their incapacity to submit their capriciously vacillating thoughts to the yoke of those rules which in ‘infinite’ melody, as in lyric verse, govern by measure and rhyme.
Maeterlinck, then, in his poems is a servile imitator of crazy Walt Whitman, and carries his absurdities still further. Besides his poems he has written things to which one cannot well refuse the name of plays, since they are cast in the form of dialogues. The best known of them is The Princess Maleine.[228]
The ‘dramatis personæ,’ as he, true to the romantic and mystical practice of the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, entitles the list of his characters, are as follows: Hjalmar, King of one part of Holland; Marcellus, King of another part of Holland; Prince Hjalmar, son of King Hjalmar; little Allan, son of Queen Anne; Angus, friend to Prince Hjalmar; Stephano and Vanox, officers of Marcellus; Anne, Queen of Jütland; Godeliva, wife of King Marcellus; Princess Maleine, daughter of Marcellus and Godeliva; Maleine’s nurse; Princess Uglyane, daughter of Queen Anne. With them come all the old well-known jointed dolls and puppets out of the dustiest corners of the old lumber-rooms of romance--a fool, three poor people, two old peasants, courtiers, pilgrims, a cripple, beggars, vagabonds, an old woman, seven (the mystic number!) nuns, etc.
The names which Maeterlinck gives to his figures should be noted. As a Fleming, he knows very well that Hjalmar is not Dutch, but Scandinavian; that Angus is Scotch. But he makes this confusion intentionally, in order to obliterate the distinct outlines with which he appears to surround his figures, when he calls them ‘Kings of Holland’; in order again to detach them from the firm ground on which he pretends to place them and to suppress their co-ordinates, which assign them a place in space and time. They may wear clothes, have names and take a human rank, but all the while they are only shadows and clouds.
King Hjalmar comes with Prince Hjalmar to the castle of Marcellus in order to ask for the hand of the Princess Maleine. The two young people see each other for the first time, and only for a few minutes, but they instantly fall in love with each other. At the banquet in honour of the King a quarrel breaks out, about which we learn no particulars; King Hjalmar is seriously offended, swears revenge, and leaves the castle in a rage. In the interlude Hjalmar wages war against Marcellus, kills him and his wife, Godeliva, and at once razes his castle and town to the ground. Princess Maleine and her nurse were on this occasion--how, why and by whom is not explained--immured in a vaulted room in a tower; then the nurse, after three days’ work with her finger-nails, loosens a stone in the wall, and the two women obtain their liberty.
Since Maleine loves Hjalmar and cannot forget him, they make their way towards his father’s castle. Things are going very badly in Hjalmar’s castle. There Queen Anne of Jütland resides, who has been driven away by her subjects, and with her grown-up daughter Uglyane and her little son Allan (here also the Dane is systematically given a Scottish name), has found hospitality with King Hjalmar. Queen Anne has turned the head of the old man. She has become his mistress, rules him completely, and makes him ill in body and soul. She wishes that his son should marry her daughter. Hjalmar is in despair about his father’s collapse. He detests his morganatic step-mother, and shudders at the thought of a marriage with Uglyane. He believes Maleine to have been slain with her parents in the war, but he cannot yet forget her.
Maleine has in the meantime been wandering with her nurse through a kind of enchanted forest, and through an incomprehensible village, where she has uncanny meetings with all sorts of people, beggars, vagabonds, peasants, old women, etc., interchanging odd talk, and reaches Hjalmar’s castle, where no one knows her. She is, however, in spite of this, at once appointed as lady-in-waiting to the Princess Uglyane.
One evening Prince Hjalmar decides to make advances to Uglyane, and with that object he gives her a nocturnal rendezvous in the park of the castle, not a secret, but, so to speak, an official, lovers’ tryst, to which he, with his father’s consent, and she, with her mother’s, is to go. Maleine hinders it by telling Uglyane, who is splendidly attiring and adorning herself, that Prince Hjalmar has gone into the forest and will not come. She then goes herself into the park, and makes herself known to Hjalmar, who arrives punctually. He leads her in great delight to his father, who receives her as his future daughter-in-law, and there is no further talk of his betrothal to Uglyane. Queen Anne determines to get rid of the intruder. She behaves at first in a friendly manner, assigns her a beautiful room in the castle, then in the night she forces the King, who for a long time resists her, to penetrate into Maleine’s room, where she puts a cord round the Princess’s neck and strangles her. Signs and wonders accompany the deed: a tempest forces open a window, a comet appears, a wing of the castle falls in ruins, a forest bursts into flames, swans fall wounded out of the air, etc., etc.
Next morning the body of the Princess Maleine is discovered. King Hjalmar, whom the night’s murder has robbed of the last remnant of reason, betrays the secret of the deed. Prince Hjalmar stabs Queen Anne, and then plunges the dagger into his own heart. Thereupon the piece closes thus:
NURSE. Come away, my poor lord.
KING. Good God! good God! She is waiting now on the wharf of hell!
NURSE. Come away! come away!
KING. Is there anybody here that fears the curses of the dead?
ANGUS. Ay, my lord, I do.
KING. Well, you close their eyes, and let us be gone.
NURSE. Ay, ay. Come hence! come hence!
KING. I will; I will. Oh, oh! how lonely I shall feel hereafter! I am steeped in misery up to my ears at seventy-seven years of age. But where are you?
NURSE! Here, here!
KING. You will not feel angry with me? Let us go to breakfast. Will there be salad for breakfast? I should like a little salad.
NURSE. Yes, yes. You shall have some, my lord.
KING. I do not know why; I feel somewhat melancholy to-day. Good God! good God! How unhappy the dead do look! [Exit with NURSE.
ANGUS. Another night such as this, and all our heads will have turned white.
[Exeunt all save the NUNS, who begin singing the Miserere while conveying the corpses towards the bed. The church bells cease sounding. Nightingales are heard warbling without. A cock jumps on the window-sill, and crows.
When we begin to read this piece we are startled, and ask: ‘Why is all this so familiar to me? Of what does it remind me?’ After a few pages it all at once becomes clear: the whole thing is a kind of cento from Shakespeare! Every character, every scene, every speech in any way essential to the piece! King Hjalmar is put together out of King Lear and Macbeth; Lear in his madness and manner of expressing himself, Macbeth in his share in the murder of the Princess Maleine. Queen Anne is patched up out of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude; Prince Hjalmar is unmistakably Hamlet, with his obscure speeches, his profound allusions and his inner struggles between filial duty and morality; the nurse is from Romeo and Juliet; Angus is Horatio; Vanox and Stephano are Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, with an admixture of Marcellus and Bernardo, and all the subordinate characters, the fool, the doctor, the courtiers, etc., bear the physiognomy of Shakespeare’s characters.
The piece begins in the following manner:
The Gardens of the Castle.
Enter STEPHANO and VANOX.
VANOX. What o’clock is it?
STEPHANO. Judging from the moon, it should be midnight.
VANOX. I think ‘tis going to rain.
Let us compare this with the first scene in Hamlet:
A platform before the Castle.
FRANCISCO ... BERNARDO.
FRANCISCO. You come most carefully upon your hour.
BERNARDO. ‘Tis now struck twelve....
FRANCISCO. ... ‘Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart, etc.
One could, if it were worth while, trace scene for scene, word for word, from some passage in Shakespeare. In the Princesse Maleine we find in succession the fearfully stormy night from Julius Cæsar (Act I., Scene 3); the entrance of King Lear into the palace of Albany (Act I., Scene 4 ... ‘LEAR: Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get it ready,’ etc.); the night scene in Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth induces her husband to commit murder; the thrice-repeated ‘Oh! oh! oh!’ of Othello which Queen Anne here utters; Hamlet’s conversation with Horatio, etc. The death of the Princess Maleine has been inspired by memories both of Desdemona suffocated and of Cordelia hanged. All this is jumbled up in the craziest manner, and often distorted almost beyond recognition, or given the opposite meaning; but, with a little attention, one can always find one’s way.
Let us imagine a child, at the age when he is able to follow the conversation of grown-up people, attending a performance or a reading of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II., and who on his return to the nursery should relate in his own way to his little brothers and sisters what he had heard. We should in this way get a correct idea of the composition of Princesse Maleine. Maeterlinck has crammed himself with Shakespeare, and reproduces the pieces undigested, yet repulsively altered and with the beginnings of foul decomposition. This is an unappetizing picture, but it alone can serve to illustrate the mental process which goes on in the so-called ‘creations’ of the degenerate. They read greedily, receive a very strong impression in consequence of their emotionalism; this pursues them with the force of an ‘obsession,’ and they do not rest till they have reproduced, sadly travestied, what they have read. Thus their works resemble the coins of the barbarians, which are imitations of Roman and Greek models, while betraying that their artificers could not read or understand the letters and symbols inscribed on them.
Maeterlinck’s Princesse Maleine is a Shakespearian anthology for children or Tierra del Fuegians. The characters of the British poet have gone to make parts for the actors in a theatre of monkeys. They still remind us more or less of the attitudes and movements of the persons whom they ape, but they have not a human brain in their heads, and cannot say two connected and rational words. Here are a few examples of the manner in which Maeterlinck’s people converse:
King Marcellus in the First Act (Scene 2) endeavours to dissuade the Princess Maleine from loving Hjalmar.
MARCELLUS. Well, Maleine!
MALEINE. My lord?
MARCELLUS. Do you not understand?
MALEINE. What, my lord?
MARCELLUS. Will you promise me to forget Hjalmar?
MALEINE. My lord!...
MARCELLUS. What say you? Do you still love Hjalmar?
MALEINE. Ay, my lord.
MARCELLUS. Ay, my lord. Oh, devils and tempests! she coolly confesses it. She dares to tell me this without shame. She has seen Hjalmar once only, for one single afternoon, and now she is hotter than hell.
GODELIVA. My lord!...
MARCELLUS. Be silent, you. “Ay, my lord!” and she is not yet fifteen! Ha! it makes one long to kill them then and there....
GODELIVA. My lord....
NURSE. Isn’t she free to love, just like anyone else? Do you mean to put her under a glass case? Is this a reason to bully a poor child? She has done no harm....
MARCELLUS. Oh, she has done no harm!... Now, in the first place, hold your peace, you.... I am not addressing you; and it is doubtless at your prompting, you procuress....
GODELIVA. My lord!...
NURSE. A procuress! I a procuress!
MARCELLUS. Will you let me speak? Begone! begone, both of you! Oh! I know well enough you have put your heads together, and that the season of scheming and plotting has set in; but wait awhile.... Now, Maleine, ... you should be reasonable. Will you promise to be reasonable?
MALEINE. Ay, my lord.
MARCELLUS. There! come now. Therefore you will not think any more of this marriage?...
MALEINE. Ay.
MARCELLUS. Ay? You mean you will forget Prince Hjalmar?
MALEINE. No.
MARCELLUS. You do not yet give up Prince Hjalmar?
MALEINE. No.
MARCELLUS. Now, supposing I compel you? Ay, I! and supposing I have you put under lock and key? and supposing I separate you for evermore from your Hjalmar with his puny, girlish face? What say you? (She weeps.) Ha! that’s it--is’t? Begone, and we shall see about that--begone!
Next, the scene in the second act, where Maleine and Hjalmar meet in the gloomy park of the castle:
HJALMAR. ... Come!
MALEINE. Not yet.
HJALMAR. Uglyane! Uglyane!
[Kisses her. Here the waterfall, blown about by the wind, collapses and splashes them.
MALEINE. Oh! what have you done?
HJALMAR. It is the fountain.
MALEINE. Oh, oh!
HJALMAR. It’s the wind.
MALEINE. I am afraid.
HJALMAR. Think not of that any longer. Let us get further away. Let us not think of that any more. Ah, ah, ah! I am wet all over.
MALEINE. There is somebody weeping, close by us.
HJALMAR. Somebody weeping?
MALEINE. I am afraid.
HJALMAR. But cannot you hear that it’s only the wind?
MALEINE. What are all those eyes on the tree, though?
HJALMAR. Where? Ha! those are the owls. They have returned. I will put them to flight. (Throws earth at them.) Away! away!
MALEINE. There is yonder one that will not go.
HJALMAR. Where is it?
MALEINE. On the weeping willow.
HJALMAR. Away!
MALEINE. He is not gone.
HJALMAR. Away, away!
[Throws earth at the owl.
MALEINE. Oh! you have thrown earth on me.
HJALMAR. Thrown earth on you?
MALEINE. Ay, it fell on me.
HJALMAR. Oh, my poor Uglyane!
MALEINE. I am afraid.
HJALMAR. Afraid--at my side?
MALEINE. There are flames amid the trees.
HJALMAR. That is nothing--mere lightning. It has been very sultry to-day.
MALEINE. I am afraid. Oh! who can be digging so at the ground around us?
HJALMAR. That is nothing. ‘Tis but a mole--a poor little mole at work.
(The mole in Hamlet! To our old acquaintance greeting!)
MALEINE. I am afraid.
After some more conversation in the same style:
HJALMAR. What are you thinking of?
MALEINE. I feel sad.
HJALMAR. Sad? Now, what are your sad thoughts about, Uglyane?
MALEINE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.
HJALMAR. What do you say?
MALEINE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.[229]
HJALMAR. Do you know Princess Maleine?
MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine.
HJALMAR. You are not Uglyane?
MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine.
HJALMAR. What! you Princess Maleine? Dead! But Princess Maleine is dead!
MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine.
Has anyone anywhere in the poetry of the two worlds ever seen such complete idiocy? These ‘Ahs’ and ‘Ohs,’ this want of comprehension of the simplest remarks, this repetition four or five times of the same imbecile expressions, gives the truest conceivable clinical picture of incurable cretinism. These parts are precisely those most extolled by Maeterlinck’s admirers. According to them, all has been chosen with a deep artistic intention. A healthy reader will scarcely swallow that. Maeterlinck’s puppets say nothing, because they have nothing to say. Their author has not been able to put a single thought into their hollow skulls, because he himself possesses none. The creatures moving on his stage are not thinking and speaking human beings, but tadpoles or slugs, considerably more stupid than trained fleas at a fair.
Moreover, Princesse Maleine is not altogether a Shakespearian dream. The ‘seven nuns,’ e.g., belong to Maeterlinck. They are an astounding invention. They are ever marching like demented geese through the piece, winding in and out, with their psalm-singing, through all the rooms and corridors of the King’s castle, through the court, through the park, through the forest, coming unexpectedly round a corner in the middle of a scene, trotting across the stage and off at the other side without anyone understanding whence they come, whither they go, or for what purpose they are brought on at all. They are a living ‘obsession,’ mixing itself irresistibly in all the incidents of the piece. Here also we find all the intellectual fads which we noticed in the Serres Chaudes. The Princess Maleine is herself the embodiment of the hungry, sick, strayed princesses, wandering over the meadows, who haunt these poems, and undoubtedly sprang from Swinburne’s ballad of The King’s Daughters. The canals also play their part (p. 18). ‘And the expression of her eyes! It seemed as though one were all of a sudden in a great stream [Fr. canal] of fresh water....’ (p. 110). ‘We have been to look at the windmills along the canal,’ etc. And sick people and illness are mentioned on almost every page (p. 110):
ANNE. I was fever-stricken myself.
THE KING. Everyone is fever-stricken on arriving here.
HJALMAR. There is much fever in the village, etc.
Besides Princesse Maleine, Maeterlinck has written some other pieces. One, L’Intruse (The Intruder), deals with the idea that in a house where a sick person lies in extremis, Death intrudes towards midnight, that he walks audibly through the garden, makes at first a few trial strokes with his scythe on the grass before the castle, then knocks at the door, forces it open because they will not admit him, and carries off his victim. In a second, Les Aveugles (The Blind), we are shown how a number of blind men, the inmates of a blind asylum, were led by an old priest into a forest, how the priest died suddenly without a sound, how the blind men did not at first notice this, but becoming at length uneasy, groped about, succeeded in touching the corpse, already growing cold, assured themselves by questioning each other that their leader was dead, and then in terrible despair awaited death by hunger and cold. For this charming story takes place on a wild island in the far north; and between the wood and the asylum lies a river, crossed by only one bridge, which the blind cannot find without a guide. It never occurs either to Maeterlinck or to his inconsolable blind men as possible that in the asylum, where, as is expressly mentioned, there are attendant nuns, the long absence of the whole body of blind men would be noticed, and someone sent out to look for them. The reader will not expect me to point out in detail the craziness of the assumption in both these pieces, or that, after these examples, I should relate and analyze two other pieces of Maeterlinck’s, Les Sept Princesses (‘seven,’ of course!) and Pelléas et Mélisande.
The Intruder has been translated into several languages, and performed in many towns. The Viennese laughed at its imbecility. In Paris and London men shook their heads. In Copenhagen an audience of appreciators of the ‘poetry of the future’ was touched, enraptured and inspired. This demonstrates the hysteria of to-day quite as much as the piece itself.
The history of Maeterlinck’s celebrity is especially remarkable and instructive. This pitiable mental cripple vegetated for years wholly unnoticed in his corner in Ghent, without the Belgian Symbolists, who outbid even the French, according him the smallest attention; as to the public at large, no one had a suspicion of his existence. Then one fine day in 1890 his writings fell accidentally into the hands of the French novelist, Octave Mirbeau. He read them, and whether he desired to make fun of his contemporaries in grand style, or whether he obeyed some morbid ‘impulsion’ is not known; it is sufficient to say that he published in Le Figaro an article of an unheard-of extravagance, in which he represented Maeterlinck as the most brilliant, sublime, moving poet which the last three hundred years had produced, and assigned him a place near--nay, above Shakespeare. And then the world witnessed one of the most extraordinary and most convincing examples of the force of suggestion. The hundred thousand rich and cultivated readers to whom the Figaro addresses itself immediately took up the views which Mirbeau had imperiously suggested to them. They at once saw Maeterlinck with Mirbeau’s eyes. They found in him all the beauties which Mirbeau asserted that he perceived in him. Andersen’s fairy-tale of the invisible clothes of the emperor repeated itself line for line. They were not there, but the whole court saw them. Some imagined they really saw the absent state robes; the others did not see them, but rubbed their eyes so long that they at least doubted whether they saw them or not; others, again, could not impose upon themselves, but dared not contradict the rest. Thus Maeterlinck became at one stroke, by Mirbeau’s favour, a great poet, and a poet of the ‘future.’ Mirbeau had also given quotations which would have completely sufficed for a reader who was not hysterical, not given over irresistibly to suggestion, to recognise Maeterlinck for what he is, namely, a mentally debilitated plagiarist; but these very quotations wrung cries of admiration from the Figaro public, for Mirbeau had pointed them out as beauties of the highest rank, and one knows that a decided affirmation is sufficient to compel hypnotic subjects to eat raw potatoes as oranges, and to believe themselves to be dogs or other quadrupeds.
Everywhere apostles were quickly at hand to proclaim, interpret and extol the new master. The ‘mashers’ of the critic world, whose ambition is set on being the first to assume--nay, where it is possible, to foretell--the very latest fashions, the fashion of to-morrow, as much in the styles of literature, as in the colour and shape of neckties, vied with each other in deifying Maeterlinck. Ten editions of his Princesse Maleine have been sold out since Mirbeau’s suggestion, and, as I have said before, his Aveugles and Intruse have been performed in various places.
We now know the different forms under which the mysticism of degeneration manifests itself in contemporary literature. The magism of a Guaita and a Papus, the Androgyne of a Péladan, the anxiomania of a Rollinat, the idiotic drivelling of a Maeterlinck, may be regarded as its culminating aberrations. At least I cannot myself imagine that it would be possible for mysticism to go beyond, even by the thickness of a hair, these extreme points without even the hysterical, the devotees and the snobs of fashion, who are still in some degree capable of discernment, recognising in it a profound and complete intellectual darkness.
Book III
EGO-MANIA.
I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EGO-MANIA
HOWEVER dissimilar such individualities as Wagner and Tolstoi, Rossetti and Verlaine, may at first sight appear, we have, nevertheless, encountered in all of them certain common traits, to wit, vague and incoherent thought, the tyranny of the association of ideas, the presence of obsessions, erotic excitability, religious enthusiasm, by which we may recognise them as members of one and the same intellectual family, and justify their union into one single group--that of mystics.
We must go a step farther and say that not only the mystics among the degenerate, but in the main all the degenerate, of whatever nature they may be, are moulded from the same clay. They all show the same lacunæ, inequalities, and malformations in intellectual capacity, the same psychic and somatic stigmata. If, then, anyone, having a certain number of degenerate subjects to judge from, were to bring into prominence and represent as their exclusive peculiarity merely mystical thought in some, merely erotic emotionalism in others, merely vague, barren, fraternal love and a mania for regenerating the world, or else merely an impulsion to commit acts of a criminal nature, etc., he would manifestly be seeing only one side of the phenomenon, and taking no account of the rest. One or another stigma of degeneration may, in a given case, be especially apparent; but, on duly careful inspection, the presence of all the others, or, at least, indications of them, will be discerned.
To the celebrated French alienist, Esquirol, is due the signal merit of having discovered that there are forms of mental derangement in which thought proceeds apparently in a perfectly rational manner, but in which, in the midst of intelligent and logical cerebral activity, some insane presentations appear, like erratic boulders, thus enabling us to recognise the subject as mentally diseased. But Esquirol has committed the fault of not digging deep enough; his observation is too much on the surface. It was through this that he came to introduce into science the notion of ‘monomania,’ that is, of well-delimitated, partial madness, of an isolated, fixed idea beside which all the rest of the intellectual life operates with sanity. This was an error. There is no monomania. Esquirol’s own pupil, the elder Falret, has sufficiently proved it, and our Westphal, from whose other merits I have no wish to detract, was far from standing in the forefront of research, when, half a century after Esquirol, and thirty years after Falret, he still described the ‘fear of space,’ or agoraphobia, as a special mental malady, or kind of monomania. What is apparently monomania is in reality an indication of a profound organic disorder which never reveals itself by one single phase of folly. A fixed idea never exists in isolation.[230] It is always accompanied by other irregularities of thought and feeling, which, it is true, at a cursory glance, may not be so distinctly remarked as the more strongly developed insane idea. Recent clinical observation has discovered a long series of similar fixed ideas or ‘monomanias,’ and recognised the fact that they are one and all the consequence of a fundamental disposition of the organism, viz., of its degeneration. It was unnecessary for Magnan to give a special name to each symptom of degeneration, and to draw up in array, with almost comical effect, the host of ‘phobias’ and ‘manias.’ Agoraphobia (fear of open space), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed space), rupophobia (fear of dirt), iophobia (fear of poison), nosophobia (fear of sickness), aichmophobia (fear of pointed objects), belenophobia (fear of needles), cremnophobia (fear of abysses), trichophobia (fear of hair), onomatomania (folly of words or names), pyromania (incendiary madness), kleptomania (madness for theft), dipsomania (madness for drink), erotomania (love madness), arithmomania (madness of numbers), oniomania (madness for buying), etc. This list might be lengthened at pleasure, and enriched by nearly all the roots of the Greek dictionary. It is simply philologico-medical trifling. None of the disorders discovered and described by Magnan and his pupils, and decorated with a sonorous Greek name, forms an independent entity, and appears separately; and Morel is right in disregarding as unessential all these varied manifestations of a morbid cerebral activity, and adhering to the principal phenomenon which lies at the base of all the ‘phobias’ and ‘manias,’ namely, the great emotionalism of the degenerate.[231] If to emotionalism, or an excessive excitability, he had added the cerebral debility, which implies feebleness of perception, will, memory, judgment, as well as inattention and instability, he would have exhaustively characterized the nature of degeneration, and perhaps prevented psychiatry from being stuffed with a crowd of useless and disturbing designations. Kowalewski approached much nearer to the truth in his well-known treatise,[232] where he has represented all the mental disorders of the degenerate as one single malady, which merely presents different degrees of intensity, and which induces in its mildest form neurasthenia; under a graver aspect impulsions and groundless anxieties; and, in its most serious form, the madness of brooding thought or doubt. Within these limits may be ranged all the particular ‘manias’ and ‘phobias’ which at present swarm in the literature of mental therapeutics.
But if it be untenable to make a particular malady out of every symptom in which the fundamental disorder (i.e., degeneration) shows itself, it should not, on the other hand, be ignored that among certain of the degenerate a group of morbid phenomena distinctly predominates, without involving the absence of the other groups. Thus, it is permissible to distinguish among them certain principal species, notably, beside the mystics, of whom we have studied the most remarkable representatives in contemporary art and poetry, the ego-maniacs (Ichsüchtigen). It is not from affectation that I use this word instead of the terms ‘egoism’ (Selbstsucht) and ‘egoist,’ so generally employed. Egoism is a lack of amiability, a defect in education, perhaps a fault of character, a proof of insufficiently developed morality, but it is not a disease. The egoist is quite able to look after himself in life, and hold his place in society; he is often also, when the attainment of low ends only is in view, even more capable than the superior and nobler man, who has inured himself to self-abnegation. The ego-maniac, on the contrary, is an invalid who does not see things as they are, does not understand the world, and cannot take up a right attitude towards it. The difference I make in German between Ichsucht and Selbstsucht, the French also make in their language, where a careful writer will never confound the word ‘egotisme,’ borrowed from the English, with ‘egoïsme’--that is, selfishness.
Of course the reader to whom the mental physiognomy of ego-maniacs is shown ought always to remember that, if the principal representatives of this species and of that of the mystics are characterized with sufficient clearness, the confines of the latter type are fluctuating. The ego-maniacs are, on the one hand, at once mystics, erotics, and, though it seems paradoxical, even affect occasionally an appearance of philanthropy; among the mystics, on the other hand, we frequently meet with a strongly-developed ego-mania. There are certain specimens among the degenerate in whom all the disorders are produced to such an equal degree that it is doubtful whether they ought to be classed with the mystics or the ego-maniacs. As a general rule, however, co-ordination under one class or the other will not be very difficult.
That egoism is a salient feature in the character of the degenerate has been unanimously confirmed by all observers. ‘The degenerate neither knows nor takes interest in anything but himself,’ says Roubinovitch;[233] and Legrain[234] asserts that he ‘has ... only one occupation, that of satisfying his appetites.’ This peculiarity establishes a bond which unites the highest of the degenerate to the lowest, the insane genius to the feeble mental cripple. ‘All delirious geniuses,’ remarks Lombroso, ‘are very much captivated by, and preoccupied with, their own selves,’[235] and Sollier writes on the subject of their antipodes, the imbeciles: ‘Undisciplined as they are, they obey only through fear, are often violent, especially to those who are weaker than themselves, humble and submissive towards those they feel to be stronger. They are without affection, egoistic in the highest degree, braggarts.’[236]
The clinicist is satisfied with indicating the fact of this characteristic egoism, but for ourselves we wish further to investigate what are its organic roots, why the degenerate must be more than egoistic, why he must be an ego-maniac, and cannot be otherwise.
In order to understand how the consciousness of the ‘I’ (morbidly exaggerated and frequently increasing to megalomania) originates, we must recall how the healthy consciousness of the ‘I’ is formed.
It is, of course, not my intention here to treat of the whole theory of cognition. It is only the most important results of this science, so highly developed in the present day, that can find place in this work.
It has become a philosophical commonplace that we know directly only those changes which take place in our own organism. If, in spite of this, we are able to form an image of the external world surrounding us, from perceptions derived only from within, it is because we trace the changes in our organism which we have perceived to causes exterior to it; and from the nature and force of the changes taking place in our organism draw conclusions as to the nature and force of the external events causing them.
How we come in general to assume that there is something exterior, and that changes perceived by us only in our organism can have causes which are not in the organism itself, is a question over which metaphysics has cudgelled its brain for centuries. So little has it found an answer, that, in order to put an end to this difficulty anyhow, it has simply denied the very question, and jumped to the conclusion that the ‘I’ has actually no knowledge of a ‘not-I,’ of an external world, and cannot have it because there is no external world at all, that what we so call is a creation of our mind, and exists only in our thought as a presentation, but not outside our ‘I’ as a reality.
It is a fact characteristic of the soporific action exercised by the sound of a word on the human mind that this wholly senseless cackle, glib, well arranged and formed into the philosophical system of idealism, should have thoroughly satisfied for nearly eight generations the greater number of professional metaphysicians, from Berkeley to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. These wise men repeated, in a tone of conviction, the doctrine of the non-existence of the ‘not-I,’ and it did not trouble them that they themselves contradicted constantly, in all their actions, their own fustian; that they devoted themselves from their birth to their death to an uninterrupted series of absolutely absurd actions, if there were no objective external world; that therefore they themselves recognised their system to be but wind and shadow, a childish game with words devoid of sense. And the most logical among these grave drivellers, Bishop Berkeley, did not even observe that after all he had not obtained, even at the price of the total abdication of common sense, the answer he sought to the fundamental question of knowledge, for his dogmatic idealism denies, it is true, the reality of the external world, but admits with frivolous thoughtlessness that there are other minds outside of him, Berkeley, and even a universal mind. Thus, then, even according to him, the ‘I’ is not all; there is still something outside of the ‘I,’ a ‘not-I’; there does exist an external world, if only under the form of immaterial spirits. This, however, brings up the question, How does Berkeley’s ‘I’ come to conceive the existence of something outside of itself, the existence of a ‘not-I’? That was the question which had to be answered, and, in spite of its sacrificing the whole world of phenomena, Berkeley’s idealism, like the idealism of every one of his successors, makes no reply to it whatsoever.
Metaphysics could find no answer to the question, because the latter, as stated by the former, does not admit of an answer. Scientific psychology--i.e., psycho-physiology--does not encounter the same difficulties. It does not take the finished ‘I’ of the adult, clearly conscious of himself, feeling himself distinctly opposed to the ‘not-I’ to the entire external world, but it goes back to the beginnings of this ‘I,’ investigates in what manner it is formed, and then finds that, at a time when the idea of the existence of a ‘not-I,’ would be really inexplicable, this idea, in fact, was absolutely non-existent, and that, when we do meet it, the ‘I’ has already had experiences which completely explain how it could and must arrive at the formation of the idea of a ‘not-I.’
We may assume that a certain degree of consciousness is the accompanying phenomenon of every reaction of the protoplasm on external action--i.e., is a fundamental quality of living matter. Even the simplest unicellular living organisms move with obvious intention towards certain goals, and away from certain points; they distinguish between foods and such materials as are unfit for nutrition; thus they have a species of will and judgment, and these two activities presuppose consciousness.[237] What may be the nature of this consciousness localized in protoplasm not yet even differentiated into nerve-cells, is a thing of which it is impossible for the human mind to form a definite idea. The only thing we can presuppose with any certainty is that in the crepuscular consciousness of a unicellular organism, the notion of an ‘I’ and a ‘not-I,’ which is opposed to it, does not exist. The cell feels changes in itself, and these changes provoke others, in accordance with established bio-chemical or bio-mechanical laws; it receives an impression to which it responds by a movement, but it has certainly no idea that the impression is caused by a process in the external world, and that its movement reacts on the external world.
Even among animals very much higher in the scale, and considerably more advanced in differentiation, a consciousness of the ‘Ego,’ properly so called, is inconceivable. How can the ray of a star-fish, the bud of a tunicate, of a botryllus, the half of a double animal (diplozoon), the tube of an actinia, or of some other coral polypus, be aware of itself as a separate ‘I,’ seeing that, though it is an animal, it is at the same time a portion of a composite animal, of a colony of animals, and must perceive impressions which strike it directly, as well as those experienced by a companion of the same colony? Or can certain large worms, many of the species of Eunice, for example, have an idea of their ‘Ego,’ when they neither feel nor recognise portions of their own bodies as constituent parts of their individuality, and begin to eat their tails when, by any accident in coiling themselves, it happens to lie in front of their mouths?
The consciousness of the ‘Ego’ is not synonymous with consciousness in general. While the latter is probably an attribute of all living matter, the former is the result of the concordant action of a nervous tissue highly differentiated and ‘hierarchized,’ or brought into a relation of mutual dependence. It appears very late in the series of organic evolution, and is, up to the present, the highest vital phenomenon of which we have knowledge. It arises little by little from experiences which the organism acquires in the course of the natural activity of its constituent parts. Every one of our nerve-ganglia, every one of our nerve-fibres, and even every cell, has a subordinate and faint consciousness of what passes in it. As the whole nervous system of our body has numerous communications between all its parts, it perceives in its totality something of all the stimulations of its parts, and the consciousness which accompanies them. In this manner there arises in the centre where all the nerve ducts of the whole body meet, i.e., in the brain, a total consciousness composed of innumerable partial consciousnesses, having evidently for its object only the processes of its own organism. In the course of its existence, and that at a very early period, consciousness distinguishes two kinds of wholly different perceptions. Some appear without preparation, others accompanied and preceded by other phenomena. No act of will precedes the stimulation of the senses, but such an act does precede every conscious movement. Before our senses perceive anything, our consciousness has no notion of what they will perceive; before our muscles execute a movement, an image of this movement is elaborated in the brain, or spinal marrow (in the case of a reflex action). There exists then, beforehand, a presentation of the movement which the muscles will execute. We feel clearly that the immediate cause of the movement lies in ourselves. On the other hand, we have no similar feelings in regard to sense-impressions. Again, we learn by the muscular sense the realization of motor images elaborated by our consciousness; on the other hand, we experience nothing similar when we elaborate a motor image not having our own muscles exclusively for its object. We wish, for example, to raise our arm. Our consciousness elaborates this image, the brachial muscles obey, and consciousness receives the communication that the image has been realized by the brachial muscles. Next, we wish to raise or throw a stone with our arm. Our consciousness elaborates a motor image, involving our own muscles and the stone. When we are executing the desired and meditated movement, our consciousness receives sensations from the muscles in activity, but not from the stone. Thus it perceives the movements which are accompanied by muscular sensations, and others which appear without this accompaniment.
In order thoroughly to comprehend the formation of our consciousness of the ‘Ego,’ and the presentation of the existence of a ‘non-Ego,’ we must consider a third point. All the parts, all the cells of our body, have their own separate consciousness, which accompanies every one of their excitations. These excitations are occasioned partly by the activity of nutrition, of assimilation, of the cleavage of the nucleus--that is to say, by the vital processes of the cell itself, and partly by action of the environment. The excitations which proceed from the interior, the bio-chemical and bio-mechanical processes of the cell, are continued, and endure as long as the life of the cell itself. The stimulations which are the result of the action of the environment only appear, of course, with this action, i.e., not continuously, but intermittently. The vital processes in the cell have direct value and significance only for the cell itself, not for the whole organism; actions of the environment may become important for the whole organism. The principal organ, the brain, acquires the habit of neglecting the excitations relating to the interior vital activity of the cell--first, because they are continuous, and we perceive distinctly only a change of state, not a state itself; and then, because the cell accomplishes its own functions by its own energy, which renders the interference of the brain useless. The brain takes notice, on the contrary, of excitations which are produced by action ab extra--first, because they appear with interruptions; and, secondly, because they may necessitate an adaptation of the whole organism, which could only take place through the intervention of the brain.
It cannot be doubted that the brain has knowledge also of the internal excitations of the organism, and only for the reasons already stated is not, as a general rule, distinctly conscious of them. If through illness a disturbance is produced in the functions of the single cell, we at once become conscious of the processes in the cell--we feel the diseased organ, it stimulates our attention; the whole organism is uncomfortable and out of tune. It is sensations of this kind, which, in a healthy state, do not distinctly reach our consciousness, that make up the sensation of our body, our organic ‘I,’ the so-called cœnæsthesis or general sensibility.
Cœnæsthesis, the organic dimly-conscious ‘I,’ rises into the clear consciousness of the ‘Ego,’ by excitations of the second order, reaching the brain from the nerves and muscles, for they are stronger and more distinct than the others, and are interrupted. The brain learns the changes produced in the nervous system by external causes, and the contraction of the muscles. How it has knowledge of the latter is still obscure. It has been recently asserted that the muscular sense has for its seat the nerves of the joints. This is certainly false. We have distinct sensations of the contractions of muscles which put no joint in movement--for example, of the orbicular and constrictor muscles. Then there are the cramps and spasms even of isolated muscular fibres, which likewise do not produce a change of position in the joints. But in any case the perceptions of muscular sense exist, however they are or are not produced.
Thus consciousness very soon learns that the muscular movements it perceives are preceded by certain acts accomplished by itself, namely, the elaboration of motor images, and the despatch of impulses to the muscles. It receives knowledge of these movements twice, one after the other--it perceives them, first, directly as its own presentation and act of volition, as a motor image elaborated in the nerve-centres; and immediately afterwards as an impression arising from the muscular nerves as accomplished movement. It acquires the habit of connecting its own acts--those previously elaborated motor images--with the muscular movements, and of regarding the latter a consequence of the former--in short, of thinking causally. If consciousness has adopted the habit of causality, it seeks a cause in all its perceptions, and can no longer imagine a perception without a cause. The cause of muscular perceptions--that is, of movements consciously willed--it finds in itself. The cause of nervous perceptions--that is, the information reported by the nervous system concerning the excitations which it experiences--it does not find in itself. But the latter must have a cause. Where is it? As it is not in consciousness, it must necessarily exist somewhere else; there must then be something else outside consciousness, and so consciousness comes, through the habit of causal thought, to assume the existence of something outside itself, of a ‘not-I,’ of an external world, and to project into it the cause of the excitations which it perceives in the nervous system.
Experience teaches that the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’ is really only a question of a habit of thought, of a form of thought, and not of an effective, certain knowledge, which carries in itself the criteria of its accuracy and certitude. When, in consequence of a morbid disturbance, our sensory nerves or their centres of perception are excited, and consciousness acquires knowledge of this excitation, it imputes to it without hesitation, according to its habit, an external cause existing in the ‘not-I.’ Hence arise illusions and hallucinations, which the patient takes for realities, and that so positively that there is absolutely no means of convincing him that he perceives facts passing within him, not outside of him. In the same manner consciousness concludes that the movements executed unconsciously are occasioned by an extraneous will. It perceives the movement, but it has not noticed that the habitual internal cause, viz., a motor image and an act of the will, has preceded it; hence it places the cause of the movement without hesitation in the ‘not-I,’ although it resides in the ‘I,’ and is only occasioned by subordinate centres, the activity of which remains concealed from consciousness. This it is which gives rise to spiritualism, which, in so far as it is in good faith and not openly a hocus-pocus, is simply a mystical attempt to explain movements, the real cause of which consciousness does not find in itself, and which it places, in consequence, in the ‘not-I.’
In ultimate analysis, the consciousness of the ‘Ego,’ and notably the opposition of the ‘Ego’ and the ‘non-Ego,’ is an illusion of the senses and a fallacy of thought. Every organism is related to a species, and, over and above that, to the universe. It is the direct material continuation of its parents; it is itself continued directly and materially in its descendants. It is composed of the same materials as the whole environing world; these materials are constantly penetrating into it, transforming it, producing in it all the phenomena of life and consciousness. All the lines of action of the forces of nature are prolonged in its interior; it is the scene of the same physical and chemical processes in action throughout the universe. What pantheism divines and clothes in needlessly mystic words is clear, sober fact, namely, the unity of nature, in which each organism is also a part related to the whole. Certain parts are more nearly connected; others are more separated from one another. Consciousness perceives only the closely-knit parts of its physical basis, not those more remote. Thus it falls into the illusion that the parts near together alone belong to it, and that the more distant are strangers to it, and to consider itself as an ‘individuum,’ confronting the world as a separate world or microcosm. It does not observe that the ‘I,’ so rigidly posited, has no fixed limits, but continues and spreads beneath the threshold of consciousness, with an ever-diminishing distinctness of separation, to the extreme depths of nature, till it blends there with all the other constituents of the universe.
We may now resume much more briefly the natural history of the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I,’ and present it in a few formulæ. Consciousness is a fundamental quality of living matter. The highest organism itself is only a colony of the simplest organisms--that is to say, of living cells--differentiated diversely in order to qualify the colony for higher functions than the simple cell can accomplish. The collective or ego-consciousness of the colony is composed of the individual consciousness of the parts. The ego-consciousness has an obscure and disregarded part which relates to the vital functions of the cells, or the cœnæsthesis, and a clear, privileged part which is attentive to the excitations of the sensory nerves, and to the voluntary activity of the muscles, and which recognises them. Clear consciousness learns from experience that acts of will precede voluntary movements. It arrives at the assumption of causality. It observes that the sensorial excitations are not caused by anything contained in itself. It is compelled, in consequence, to transfer this cause, the assumption of which it cannot renounce, elsewhere, and is necessarily first brought by this to the presentation of a ‘not-I,’ and afterwards to the development of this ‘not-I’ into an apparent universe.
The old spiritualistic psychology, which regards the ‘Ego’ as something entirely different from the body, as a special unitary substance, maintains that this ‘Ego’ considers its own body as something not identical with it, as opposed to the ‘Ego’ properly so called, as something external--in fact, as ‘non-Ego.’ Thus, it denies cœnæsthesis--that is to say, an absolutely certain empirical fact. We constantly have an obscure sensation of the existence of all parts of our body, and our ego-consciousness immediately experiences a change if the vital functions of any one of our organs or tissues suffers a disturbance.[238]
Development advances from the unconscious organic ‘I’ to the clear conscious ‘I,’ and to the conception of the ‘not-I.’ The infant probably has cœnæsthesis even before, in any case after, its birth, for it feels its vital internal processes, shows satisfaction when they are in healthy action, manifests its discomfort by movements and cries, which are also only a movement of the respiratory and laryngeal muscles, when any disturbances appear there, perceives and expresses general states of the organism, such as hunger, thirst and fatigue. But clear consciousness does not yet exist for it; the brain has not yet taken command over the inferior centres. Sense-impressions are perhaps perceived, but certainly not yet grouped into ideas; the greater part of the movements are preceded by no conscious act of will, and are only reflex actions--that is, manifestations of those local consciousnesses which later become so obscure as to be imperceptible, when the cerebral consciousness has attained its full clearness. Little by little the higher centres develop; the child begins to give heed to its sense-impressions, to form from its perceptions ideas, and to make voluntary movements adapted to an end. With the awakening of its conscious will the birth of the consciousness of its ‘Ego’ is linked. The child apprehends that it is an individual. But its internal organic processes occupy it very much more than does the procedure of the external world, transmitted to it by the sensory nerves, and its own states fill up its consciousness more or less completely. The child is, for this reason, a model of egoism, and, until it reaches a more advanced age, is wholly incapable of displaying either attention or interest in anything at all which is not directly connected with itself, its needs and inclinations. By the continued culture of his brain man finally arrives at that degree of maturity in which he acquires a just idea of his relations to other men and to Nature. Then consciousness pays less and less regard to the vital processes in its own organism, and more and more to the stimulations of its senses. It only notices the former when they reveal pressing necessities; it is, on the contrary, always concerned with the latter when in a waking state. The ‘I’ retires decidedly behind the ‘not-I,’ and the image of the world fills the greater part of consciousness.
As the formation of an ‘I,’ of an individuality clearly conscious of its separate existence, is the highest achievement of living matter, so the highest degree of development of the ‘I’ consists in embodying in itself the ‘not-I,’ in comprehending the world, in conquering egoism, and in establishing close relations with other beings, things and phenomena. Auguste Comte, and after him Herbert Spencer, have named this stage ‘altruism,’ from the Italian word altrui, ‘others.’ The sexual instinct which forces an individual to seek for another individual is as little altruism as the hunger which incites the hunter to follow an animal in order to kill and eat it. There can be no question of altruism until an individual concerns himself about another being from sympathy or curiosity, and not in order to satisfy an immediate, pressing necessity of his body, the momentary hunger of some organ.
Not till he attains to altruism is man in a condition to maintain himself in society and in nature. To be a social being, man must feel with his fellow-creatures, and show himself sensitive to their opinion about him. Both the one and the other presuppose that he is capable of so vividly representing to himself the feelings of his fellow-creatures as to experience them himself. He who is not capable of imagining the pain of another with sufficient clearness to suffer the same himself will not have compassion, and he who cannot exactly feel for himself what impression an action or an omission on his part will make on another will have no regard for others. In both cases he will soon see himself excluded from the human community as the enemy of all, and treated as such by all, and very probably he will perish. And to defend himself against destructive natural forces and turn them to his advantage, man must know them intimately--that is, he must be able distinctly to picture their effects. A clear presentation of the feelings of others, and of the effects of natural forces, presupposes the faculty of occupying himself intensively with the ‘not-I.’ While a man is attending to the ‘not-I,’ he is not thinking of his ‘Ego,’ and the latter descends below the level of consciousness. In order that the ‘not-I’ should in this way prevail over the ‘I,’ the sensory nerves must properly conduct the external impressions, the cerebral centres of perception must be sensitive to the excitations of the sensory nerves, the highest centres must develop, in a sure, rapid and vigorous manner, the perceptions into ideas, unite these into conceptions and judgments, and, on occasion, transform them into acts of volition and motor impulses. And as the greatest part of these different activities is accomplished by the gray cortex of the frontal lobes, this means that this gray cortex must be well developed and work vigorously.
It is thus that a sane man appears to us. He perceives little and rarely his internal excitations, but always and clearly his external impressions. His consciousness is filled with images of the external world, not with images of the activity of his organs. The unconscious work of his inferior centres plays an almost vanishing part by the side of the fully conscious work of the highest centres. His egoism is no stronger than is strictly necessary to maintain his individuality, and his thoughts and actions are determined by knowledge of Nature and his fellow-creatures, and by the consideration he owes to them.
Quite otherwise is the spectacle offered by the degenerate person. His nervous system is not normal. In what the digression from the norm ultimately consists we do not know. Very probably the cell of the degenerate is formed a little differently from that of sane men, the particles of the protoplasm are otherwise and less regularly disposed; the molecular movements take place, in consequence, in a less free and rapid, less rhythmic and vigorous, manner. This is, however, a mere undemonstrable hypothesis. Nevertheless, it cannot reasonably be doubted that all the bodily signs or ‘stigmata’ of degeneration, all the arrests and inequalities of development that have been observed, have their origin in a bio-chemical and bio-mechanical derangement of the nerve-cell, or, perhaps, of the cell in general.
In the mental life of the degenerate the anomaly of his nervous system has, as a consequence, the incapacity of attaining to the highest degree of development of the individual, namely, the freely coming out from the factitious limits of individuality, i.e., altruism. As to the relation of his ‘Ego’ to his ‘non-Ego,’ the degenerate man remains a child all his life. He scarcely appreciates or even perceives the external world, and is only occupied with the organic processes in his own body. He is more than egoistical, he is an ego-maniac.
His ego-mania may spring directly from different circumstances of his organism. His sensory nerves may be obtuse, are, in consequence, but feebly stimulated by the external world, transmit slowly and badly their stimuli to the brain, and are not in a condition to incite it to a sufficiently vigorous perceptive and ideational activity. Or his sensory nerves may work moderately well, but the brain is not sufficiently excitable, and does not perceive properly the impressions which are transmitted to it from the external world.
The obtuseness of the degenerate is attested by almost all observers. From the almost illimitable number of facts which could be adduced on this point, we will only give a very concise, but sufficiently characteristic selection. ‘Among many idiots,’ says Sollier, ‘there is no distinction between sweet and bitter. When sugar and colocynth are administered to them alternately, they manifest no change of sensation.... Properly speaking, taste does not exist among them.... Besides this, there are perversions of taste. We are not speaking here of complete idiots ... but even of imbeciles who eat ordure or repulsive things ... even their own excrements.... The same remarks apply to smell. Perhaps sensibility appears still more absolutely obtuse for smells than for taste.... Tactile sensibility is very obtuse in general, but it is always uniformly so.... Sometimes it might be a question whether there is not complete anæsthesia.’[239] Lombroso has examined the general sensitiveness of skin in sixty-six criminals, and has found it obtuse in thirty-eight among them, and unequal in the two halves of the body in forty-six.[240] In a later work he sums up in these words his observations of sensorial acuteness in the degenerate: ‘Inaccessible to the feeling of pain, themselves without feeling, they never understand pain even in others.’[241] Ribot traces the ‘diseases of personality’ (that is, the false ideas of the ‘I’) to ‘organic disturbances, of which the first result is to depress the faculty of feeling in general; the second, to pervert it.’ ‘A young man whose conduct had always been excellent suddenly gave himself up to the worst inclinations. It was ascertained that in his mental condition there was no sign of evident alienation, but it could be seen that the whole outer surface of the skin had become absolutely insensible.’ ‘It may seem strange that weak and false sensitivity ... that is, that simple disturbances or sensorial alterations should disorganize the “Ego.” Nevertheless, observation proves it.’[242] Maudsley[243] describes some cases of degeneration among children whose skin was insensible, and remarks: ‘They cannot feel impressions as they naturally should feel them, nor adjust themselves to their surroundings, with which they are in discord; and the motor outcomes of the perverted affections of self are accordingly of a meaningless and destructive character.’[244]
The defective sensibility of the degenerate, confirmed by all observers, is, moreover, susceptible of different interpretations. Whereas many consider it a consequence of the pathological condition of the sensory nerves, others believe that the perturbation has its seat, not in these nerves, but in the brain; not in the ducts, but in the centres of perception. To quote one of the most eminent among the psycho-physiologists of the new school, Binet[245] has proved that, ‘if a portion of the body of a person is insensible, he is ignorant of what passes there; but, on the other hand, the nervous centres in connection with this insensible region can continue to act; the result is that certain acts, often simple, but sometimes very complicated, can be accomplished in the body of a hysterical subject, without his knowledge; much more, these acts can be of a psychical nature, and manifest an intelligence which will be distinct from that of the subject, and will constitute a second “I” co-existent with the first. For a long time there was a misconception of the true nature of hysterical anæsthesia, and it was compared to a common anæsthesia from organic causes, due, for example, to the interruption of afferent nerves. This view must be wholly abandoned, and we know now that hysterical anæsthesia is not a true insensibility; it is insensibility from unconsciousness from mental disaggregation; in a word, it is psychical insensibility.’
Most frequently it is not a question of simple cases, where it is the sensory nerves alone, or only the cerebral centres which work badly, but of mixed cases, where the two apparatuses have a diversely varying part in the disturbance. But whether the nerves do not conduct the impressions to the brain, or the brain does not perceive, or does not raise the impressions brought to it into consciousness, the result is always the same, viz., the external world will not be correctly and distinctly grasped by consciousness, the ‘not-I’ will not be suitably represented in consciousness, the ‘I’ will not experience the necessary derivation of the exclusive preoccupation with the processes taking place in its own organism.
The natural healthy connection between organic sensations and sense-perceptions is much more strongly displaced when to the insensibility of the sensory nerves, or of the centres of perception, or both, is added an unhealthily modified and intensified vital activity of the organs. Then the organic ego-sensibility, or cœnæsthesis, advances irrepressibly into the foreground, overshadowing in great part or wholly the perceptions of the external world in consciousness, which no longer takes notice of anything but the interior processes of the organism. In this way there originates that peculiar hyper-stimulation or emotionalism constituting, as we have seen, the fundamental phenomenon of the intellectual life of the degenerate. For the fundamental emotional tone, despairing or joyful, angry or tearful, which determines the colour of his presentations as well as the course of his thoughts, is the consequence of phenomena taking place in his nerves, vessels and glands.[246] The consciousness of the emotionally degenerate subject is filled with obsessions which are not inspired by the events of the external world, and by impulsions which are not the reaction against external stimulation. To this is added next the unfailing weakness of will of the degenerate person, which makes it impossible for him to suppress his obsessions, to resist his impulsions, to control his fundamental moods, to keep his higher centres to the attentive pursuit of objective phenomena. According to the saying of the poet, the necessary result of these conditions is that the world must be differently reflected in such heads than it is in normal ones. The external world, the ‘not-I,’ either does not exist at all in the consciousness of an emotionally degenerate subject, or it is merely represented there as on a faintly reflecting surface, by a scarcely recognisable, wholly colourless image, or, as in a concave or convex mirror, by a completely distorted, false image; consciousness, on the other hand, is imperiously monopolized by the somatic ‘I,’ which does not permit the mind to be occupied with anything but the painful or tumultuous processes taking place in the depths of the organs.
Badly-conducting sensory nerves, obtuse perceptive centres in the brain, weakness of will with its resulting incapacity of attention, morbidly irregular and violent vital processes in the cells, are therefore the organic basis on which ego-mania develops.
The ego-maniac must of necessity immensely over-estimate his own importance and the significance of all his actions, for he is only engrossed with himself, and but little or not at all with external things. He is therefore not in a position to comprehend his relation to other men and the universe, and to appreciate properly the part he has to play in the aggregate of social institutions. There might at this juncture be an inclination to confound ego-mania with megalomania, but there is a characteristic difference between the two states. Megalomania, it is true, is itself, like its clinical complement, the delusion of persecution, occasioned by morbid processes within the organism obliging consciousness perpetually to be attending to its own somatic ‘Ego.’ More especially the unnaturally increased bio-chemical activity of the organs gives rise to the pleasantly extravagant presentations of megalomania, while retarded or morbidly aberrant activity gives rise to the painful presentations of the delusion of persecution.[247] In megalomania, however, as in the delusion of persecution, the patient is constantly engrossed with the external world and with men; in ego-mania, on the contrary, he almost completely withdraws himself from them. In the systematically elaborated delirium of the megalomaniac and persecution-maniac, the ‘not-I’ plays the most prominent part. The patient accounts for the importance his ‘Ego’ obtains in his own eyes by the invention of a grand social position universally recognised, or by the inexorable hostility of powerful persons, or groups of persons. He is Pope, or Emperor, and his persecutors are the chief men in the State, or great social powers, the police, the clergy, etc. His delirium, in consequence, takes account of the State and society; he admits their importance, and attaches the greatest value, in one case, to the homage, in the other to the enmity, of his neighbours. The ego-maniac, on the contrary, does not regard it as necessary to dream of himself as occupying some invented social position. He does not require the world or its appreciation to justify in his own eyes himself as the sole object of his own interest. He does not see the world at all. Other people simply do not exist for him. The whole ‘non-Ego’ appears in his consciousness merely as a vague shadow or a thin cloud. The idea does not even occur to him that he is something out of the common, that he is superior to other people, and for this reason either admired or hated; he is alone in the world; more than that, he alone is the world and everything else, men, animals, things are unimportant accessories, not worth thinking about.
The less diseased are the conducting media, the centres of nutrition, perception and volition, so much the weaker naturally will the ego-mania be, and so much the more harmlessly will it be manifested. Its least objectionable expression is the comic importance which the ego-maniac often attributes to his sensations, inclinations and activities. Is he a painter? he has no doubt that the whole history of the universe only hinges on painting, and on his pictures in particular. Is he a writer of prose or verse? he is convinced that humanity has no other care, or at least no more serious care, than for verses and books. Let it not be objected that this is not peculiar to ego-maniacs, but is the case with the vast majority of mankind. Assuredly everyone thinks what he is doing is important, and that man would not be worth much who performed his work so heedlessly and so superficially, with so little pleasure and conscientiousness, that he himself could not look upon it with respect. But the great difference between the rational and sane man and the ego-maniac is, that the former sees clearly how subordinate his occupation is to the rest of humanity, although it fills his life and exacts his best powers, while the latter can never imagine that any exertion to which he devotes his time and efforts can appear to others as unimportant and even puerile. An honest cobbler, resoleing an old boot, gives himself up heart and soul to his work, nevertheless he admits that there are far more interesting and important things for humanity than the repairing of damaged sole-leather. The ego-maniac, on the contrary, if he is a writer, does not hesitate to declare, like Mallarmé, ‘The world was made to lead up to a fine book.’ This absurd exaggeration of one’s own occupations and interests produces in literature the Parnassians and the Æsthetes.
If degeneration is deeper, and ego-mania is stronger, the latter no longer assumes the comparatively innocent form of total absorption in poetic and artistic cooings, but manifests itself as an immorality, which may amount to moral madness. The tendency to commit actions injurious to himself or society is aroused now and then even in a sane man when some obnoxious desire demands gratification, but he has the will and the power to suppress it. The degenerate ego-maniac is too feeble of will to control his impulsions, and cannot determine his actions and thoughts by a regard to the welfare of society, because society is not at all represented in his consciousness. He is a solitary, and is insensible to the moral law framed for life in society, and not for the isolated individual. It is evident that for Robinson Crusoe the penal code did not exist. Alone on his island, having only Nature to deal with, it is obvious he could neither kill, steal, nor pillage in the sense of the penal code. He could only commit misdemeanours against himself. Want of insight and of self-control are the only immoralities possible to him. The ego-maniac is a mental Robinson Crusoe, who in his imagination lives alone on an island, and is at the same time a weak creature, powerless to govern himself. The universal moral law does not exist for him, and the only thing he may possibly see and avow, perhaps also regret a little, is that he sins against the moral law of the solitary, i.e., against the necessity of controlling instincts in so far as they are injurious to himself.
Morality--not that learnt mechanically, but that which we feel as an internal necessity--has become, in the course of thousands of generations, an organized instinct. For this reason, like all other organized instincts, it is exposed to ‘perversion,’ to aberration. The effect of this is that an organ, or the whole organism, works in opposition to its normal task and its natural laws, and cannot work otherwise.[248] In perversion of taste the patient seeks greedily to swallow all that ordinarily provokes the deepest repugnance, i.e., is instinctively recognised as noxious, and rejected for that reason--decaying organic matter, ordure, pus, spittle, etc. In perversion of smell he prefers the odours of putrefaction to the perfume of flowers. In perversion of the sexual appetite he has desires which are directly contrary to the purpose of the instinct, i.e., the preservation of the species. In perversion of the moral sense the patient is attracted by, and feels delight in, acts which fill the sane man with disgust and horror. If this particular perversion is added to ego-mania, we have before us not merely the obtuse indifference towards crime which characterizes moral madness, but delight in crime. The ego-maniac of this kind is no longer merely insensible to good and evil, and incapable of discriminating between them, but he has a decided predilection for evil, esteems it in others, does it himself every time he can act according to his inclination, and finds in it the peculiar beauty that the sane man finds in good.
The moral derangement of an ego-maniac, with or without perverted moral instincts, will naturally manifest itself in ways varying according to the social class to which he belongs, as well as according to his personal idiosyncrasies. If he is a member of the disinherited class, he is simply either a fallen or degraded being, whom opportunity has made a thief, who lives in horrible promiscuity with his sisters or daughters, etc., or is a criminal from habit and profession. If he is cultivated and well-to-do, or in a commanding position, he commits misdemeanours peculiar to the upper classes which have as their object not the gratification of material needs, but of other kinds of craving. He becomes a Don Juan of the drawing-room, and carries shame and dishonour without hesitation into the family of his best friend. He is a legacy-hunter, a traitor to those who trust in him, an intriguer, a sower of discord, and a liar. On the throne he may even develop into a rapacious animal, and to a universal conqueror. With a limited tether he becomes Charles the Bad the Count d’Evreux and King of Navarre, Gilles de Rais, the prototype of Blue Beard, or Cæsar Borgia; and, with a wider range, Napoleon I. If his nervous system is not strong enough to elaborate imperious impulsions, or if his muscles are too feeble to obey such impulsions, all these criminal inclinations remain unsatisfied, and only expend themselves by way of his imagination. The perverted ego-maniac is then only a platonic or theoretic malefactor, and if he embraces the literary career, he will concoct philosophic systems to justify his depravity, or will employ an accommodating rhetoric in verse and prose to celebrate it, bedizen it and present it under as seductive a form as possible. We then find ourselves in the presence of the literary phases called Diabolism and Decadentism. ‘Diaboliques’ and ‘décadents’ are distinguished from ordinary criminals merely in that the former content themselves with dreaming and writing, while the latter have the resolution and strength to act. But they have this bond in common, of being both of them ‘anti-social beings.’[249]
A second characteristic which is shared by all ego-maniacs is their incapacity to adapt themselves to the conditions in which they live, whether they assert their anti-social inclinations in thought or action, in writings or as criminals. This want of adaptability is one of the most striking peculiarities of the degenerate, and it is to them a source of constant suffering, and finally of ruin. It is a necessary result, however, of the constitution of his central nervous system. The indispensable premise of adaptation is the having an exact presentation of the facts to which a man must adapt himself.[250] I cannot avoid the ruts in the road if I do not see them; I cannot ward off the blow I do not see coming; it is impossible to thread a needle if its eye is not seen with sufficient clearness, and if the thread is not carried with steady hand to the right spot. All this is so elementary it is scarcely necessary to say it. What we term power over Nature is, in fact, adaptation to Nature. It is an inexact expression to say we make the forces of Nature subject to us. In reality we observe them, we learn to know their peculiarities, and we manage so that the tendencies of natural forces and our own desires coincide. We construct a wheel at the point where the water power, by natural law, must fall, and we have then the advantage that the wheel turns according to our needs. We know that electricity flows along copper wire, and so, with cunning submission to its peculiar ways, we lay down copper lines to the place where we want it, and where its action would be useful to us. Without knowledge of Nature, therefore, no adaptation, and without adaptation no possibility of profiting by its forces. Now, the degenerate subject cannot adapt himself, because he has no clear idea of the circumstances to which he ought to adapt himself, and he does not obtain from them any clear idea, because, as we know, he has bad nerve-conductors, obtuse centres of perception, and feeble attention.
The active cause of all adaptation, as of all effort in general--and adaptation is nothing else than an effort of a particular kind--is the wish to satisfy some organic necessity, or to escape from some discomfort. In other words, the aim of adaptation is to give feelings of pleasure, and to diminish or suppress the feelings of discomfort. The being incapable of self-adaptation is for this reason far less able to procure agreeable, and avoid disagreeable, sensations than the normal being; he runs up against every corner, because he does not know how to avoid them; and he longs in vain for the luscious pear, because he does not know how to catch hold of the branch on which it hangs. The ego-maniac is a type of such a being. He must, therefore, necessarily suffer from the world and from men. Hence at heart he is bad-tempered, and turns in wrathful discontent against Nature, society and public institutions, irritated and offended by them, because he does not know how to accommodate himself to them. He is in a constant state of revolt against all that exists, and contrives how he may destroy it, or, at least, dreams of destruction. In a celebrated passage Henri Taine indicates ‘exaggerated self-esteem’ and ‘dogmatic argument’ as the roots of Jacobinism.[251] This leads to contempt for and rejection of institutions already established, and hence not invented or chosen by himself. He considers the social edifice absurd because it is not ‘a work of logic,’ but of history.
Besides these two roots of Jacobinism which Taine has brought to light, there is yet another, and the most important, that has escaped his attention, viz., the inability of the degenerate to adapt himself to given circumstances. The ego-maniac is condemned by his natural organization to be a pessimist and a Jacobin. But the revolutions he wishes for, preaches, and perhaps effectively accomplishes, are barren as regards progress. He is, as a revolutionary, what an inundation or cyclone would be as a street-sweeper. He does not clear the ground with conscious aim, but blindly destroys. This distinguishes him from the clear-minded innovator, the true revolutionary, who is a reformer, leading suffering and stagnating humanity from time to time by toilsome paths into a new Canaan. The reformer hurls down with pitiless violence, if violence is necessary, the ruins which have become obstacles, in order to make way for useful constructions; the ego-maniac raves against everything that stands upright, whether useful or useless, and does not think of clearing the building-ground after the devastation; his pleasure consists in seeing heaps of rubbish overgrown by noxious weeds where once walls and gables reared themselves.
There is an impassable gulf between the sane revolutionary and the ego-maniac Jacobin. The former has positive ideals, the latter has not. The former knows what he is striving for; the latter has no conception how that which irritates him could be changed for the better. His thoughts do not reach so far; he never troubles himself to question what will replace the things destroyed. He knows only that everything frets him, and he desires to vent his muddled and blustering ill-humour on all around him. Hence it is characteristic that the foolish necessity to revolt of this kind of revolutionary frequently turns against imaginary evils, follows puerile aims, or even fights against those laws which are wise and beneficent. Here they form a ‘league against lifting the hat in saluting’; there they oppose compulsory vaccination; another time they rise in protest against taking the census of the population; and they have the ridiculous audacity to conduct these silly campaigns with the same speeches and attitudes that the true revolutionaries assume--for example, in the service of suppression of slavery, or liberty of thought.
To the ego-maniac’s incapacity for adaptation is often added the mania for destruction, or clastomania, which is so frequently observed among idiots and imbeciles, and in some forms of insanity.[252] In a child the instinct of destruction is normal. It is the first manifestation of the desire to exert muscular strength. Very soon, however, the desire is aroused to exert its strength, not in destroying, but in creating. Now, the act of creating has a psychic premise, viz., attention. This being absent in the degenerate, the impulse to destroy, which can be gratified without attention, by disorderly and casual movements, does not rise in them to the instinct of creation.
Hence, discontent as the consequence of incapacity of adaptation, want of sympathy with his fellow-creatures arising from weak representative capacity, and the instinct of destruction, as the result of arrested development of mind, together constitute the anarchist, who, according to the degree of his impulsions, either merely writes books and makes speeches at popular meetings, or has recourse to a dynamite bomb.
Finally, in its extreme degree of development, ego-mania leads to that folly of Caligula in which the unbalanced mind boasts of being ‘a laughing lion,’ believes himself above all restraints of morality or law, and wishes the whole of humanity had one single head that he might cut it off.
The reader who has hitherto followed me will now, I hope, quite comprehend the psychology of ego-mania. As I have stated above, consciousness of the ‘Ego’ originates from the sensations of the vital processes in all parts of our body, and the conception of the ‘non-Ego’ from changes in our organs of special sense. How, generally speaking, we arrive at the assumption of the existence of a ‘not-I,’ I have explained above in detail, hence it is unnecessary to repeat it here. If we wish to leave the firm soil of positively established facts, and risk ourselves on the somewhat shaky ground of probable assumptions, we may say that consciousness of the ‘Ego’ has its anatomical basis in the sympathetic system, and the conception of the ‘not-I’ in the cerebro-spinal system. In a healthy man the perception of vital internal facts does not rise above the level of consciousness. The brain receives its stimulations far more from the sensory, than from the sympathetic nerves. In consciousness the presentation of the external world greatly outweighs the consciousness of the ‘Ego.’ In the degenerate, either (1) vital internal facts are morbidly intensified, or proceed abnormally, and are therefore constantly perceived by consciousness; or (2) the sensory nerves are obtuse, and the perceptional centres weak and sluggish; or (3) perhaps these two deviations from the norm co-exist. The result in all three cases is that the notion of the ‘Ego’ is far more strongly represented in consciousness than the image of the external world. The ego-maniac, consequently, neither knows nor grasps the phenomenon of the universe. The effect of this is a want of interest and sympathy, and an incapacity to adapt himself to nature and humanity. The absence of feeling, and the incapacity of adaptation, frequently accompanied by perversion of the instincts and impulses, make the ego-maniac an anti-social being. He is a moral lunatic, a criminal, a pessimist, an anarchist, a misanthrope, and he is all these, either in his thoughts and his feelings, or also in his actions. The struggle against the anti-social ego-maniac, his expulsion from the social body, are necessary functions of the latter; and if it is not capable of accomplishing it, it is a sign of waning vital power or serious ailment. Toleration, and, above all, admiration, of the ego-maniac, be he one in theory or in practice, is, so to speak, a proof that the kidneys of the social organism do not accomplish their task, that society suffers from Bright’s disease.
In the following chapters we shall study the forms under which ego-mania manifests itself in literature, and we shall find occasion to treat in detail of many points to which at this stage mere allusion has been sufficient.
II. PARNASSIANS AND DIABOLISTS
IT has become the custom to designate the French Parnassians a school, but those who are comprised under this denomination have always refused to allow themselves to be included under a common name. ‘The Parnassus?’ ... exclaimed one of the most undoubted Parnassians, M. Catulle Mendès.[253] ‘We have never been a school!... The Parnassus! We have not even written a preface!... The Parnassus originated from the necessity of reaction against the looseness of poetry issuing from the adherents of Murger, Charles Bataille, Amédée Rolland, Jean du Boys; then it became a league of minds, who sympathized in matters of art....’
The name ‘Parnassiens’ was, in fact, applied to a whole series of poets and writers who have scarcely a point in common between them. They are united by a purely external bond; their works have been brought out by the Parisian editor Alphonse Lemerre, who was able to make Parnassians, as the editor Cotta, in the first half of this century, made German classics. The designation itself emanates from a sort of almanac of the Muses, which Catulle Mendès published in 1860 under the title, Le Parnasse contemporain: recueil de vers nouveaux, and which contains contributions from almost all the poets of the period.
With most of the names of this numerous group I do not need to concern myself, for those who bear them are not degenerate, but honest average men, correctly twittering what others have first sung to them. They have exercised no sort of direct influence on contemporary thought, and have only indirectly contributed to strengthen the action of a few leaders by grouping themselves around them in the attitude of disciples, and in permitting them thus to present themselves with an imposing retinue, which always makes an impression on vacuous minds.
The leaders alone are of importance in my inquiries. It is of them we think when we speak of the Parnassians, and it is from their peculiarities that the artistic theory attributed to Le Parnasse has been derived. Embodied most completely in Théophile Gautier, it can be summed up in two words: perfection of form and impassibilité, or impassiveness.
To Gautier and his disciples the form is everything in poetry; the substance has no importance. ‘A poet,’ says he,[254] ‘say what you will, is a labourer; he ought not to have more intelligence than a labourer, or know any other trade than his own, otherwise he will do it badly. I hold the mania that there is for putting them on an ideal pedestal is perfectly absurd; nothing is less ideal than a poet.... The poet is a keyboard [clavecin], and nothing more. Every idea in passing lays its finger on a key; the key vibrates and gives its note, that is all.’ In another place he says: ‘For the poet, words have in themselves, and outside the sense they express, a beauty and value of their own, like precious stones as yet uncut, and set in bracelets, necklaces, or rings; they charm the connoisseur who looks at them, and sorts them with his finger in the little bowl where they are stored.’[255] Gustave Flaubert, another worshipper of words, takes entirely this view of the subject when he exclaims:[256] ‘A beautiful verse meaning nothing, is superior to a verse less beautiful meaning something.’ By the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘less beautiful,’ Flaubert here understands ‘names with triumphant syllables, sounding like the blast of clarions,’ or ‘radiant words, words of light.’[257] Gautier only credited Racine, for whom he, a romanticist, naturally had a profound contempt, with one verse of any value:
‘La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.’
The most instructive application of this theory is found in a piece of poetry by Catulle Mendès, entitled Récapitulation, which begins as follows:
‘Rose, Emmeline, Margueridette, Odette, Alix, Aline.
‘Paule, Hippolyte, Lucy, Lucile, Cécile, Daphné, Mélite.
‘Artémidore, Myrrha, Myrrhine, Périne, Naïs, Eudore.’
Eleven stanzas of the same sort follow, which I will dispense with reproducing, and then this final strophe:
‘Zulma, Zélie, Régine, Reine, Irène!... Et j’en oublie.’[258]
‘And I forget the rest’--this is the only one of the sixty lines of the piece which has any sense, the fifty-nine others being composed of women’s names only.
What Catulle Mendès intends here is clear enough. He wishes to show the state of a libertine’s soul, who revels in the remembrance of all the women he has loved, or with whom he has flirted. In the mind of the reader the enumeration of their names is to give rise to voluptuous images of a troop of young girls, ministrants of pleasure, of pictures of a harem or of the paradise of Mahomet. But apart from the length of the list, which makes the piece insupportably wearisome and chilling, Mendès does not attain the desired effect for yet a second reason--because his artificiality betrays at the first glance the profound insincerity of his pretended emotion. When before the mind of a gallant the figures of the Phyllises of his pastoral idylls present themselves, and he really feels the necessity of tenderly murmuring their names, he certainly does not think of arranging these names as a play on words (Alix--Aline, Lucy--Lucile, Myrrha--Myrrhine, etc.). If he is cold-blooded enough to give himself up to this barren desk-work, he cannot possibly find himself in the lascivious ecstasy which the piece is supposed to express and impart. This emotion, immoral and vulgar in its boasting, would still have the right, like every genuine affection of the soul, of being lyrically expressed. But a list of unmeaning names, artificially combined, and arranged according to their assonance, implies nothing. According to the art theory of the Parnassians, however, Récapitulation is poetry--nay, the ideal of poetry--for it ‘ne signifie rien,’ as Flaubert requires, and is wholly composed of words which, according to Th. Gautier, ‘ont en eux-mêmes une beauté et une valeur propres.’
Another eminent Parnassian, Théodore de Banville,[259] without pushing to its extreme limits, with the intrepid logic of Catulle Mendès, the theory of verbal resonance bare of all meaning, has professed it with a sincerity to which homage is due. ‘I charge you,’ he exclaims to poets in embryo, ‘to read as much as possible, dictionaries, encyclopædias, technical works treating of all the professions, and of all the special sciences, catalogues of libraries and of auctions, handbooks of museums--in short, all the books which can increase your stock of words, and give you instruction on their exact sense, proper or figurative. Directly your head is thus furnished you will be already well prepared to find rhymes.’ The only essential thing in poetry, according to Banville, is to catch rhymes. To compose a piece of poetry on any subject, he teaches his disciples: ‘All the rhymes on this subject must first of all be known. The remainder, the soldering, that which the poet must add to stop up the holes with the hand of an artist and workman--these are called the plugs. I should like to see those who counsel us to avoid the plugs bind two planks together with the help of thought.’ The poet--Banville thus sums up his doctrine--has no ideas in his brain; he has only sounds, rhymes, and play on words (calembours). This play on words inspires his ideas, or his simulacra of ideas.
Guyau rightly uses this criticism with regard to the æsthetic theory of the Parnassians established by Banville.[260] ‘The search for rhyme, pushed to the extreme, tends to make the poet lose the habit of logically connecting his ideas--that is to say, in reality to think--for to think, as Kant has said, is to unite and to bind. To rhyme, on the contrary, is to place in juxtaposition words necessarily unconnected.... The cult of rhyme for rhyme’s sake introduces into the brain itself of the poet, little by little, a kind of disorder and permanent chaos; all the usual laws of association, all the logic of thought is destroyed in order to be replaced by the chance encounter of sounds.... Periphrasis and metaphor are the only resources for good rhyming.... The impossibility in seeking for rich rhymes, of remaining simple, involves in its turn a consequent risk of a certain lack of sincerity. Freshness of spontaneous feeling will disappear in the too consummate artist in words; he will lose that respect for thought as such which ought to be the first quality of the writer.’
Where Guyau commits an error is when he says that the cult of rhyme for rhyme’s sake ‘introduces into the brain even of the poet a kind of disorder and permanent chaos.’ The proposition must be reversed. ‘Permanent chaos’ and ‘disorder’ in the brain of the poet are there already; the exaggeration of the importance of rhyme is only a consequence of this state of mind. Here we have again to deal with a form of that inaptitude for attention, well known to us, which is a peculiarity of the degenerate subject. The course of his ideas is determined, not by a central idea round which the will groups all other ideas, suppressing some and strengthening others with the help of attention; but by the wholly mechanical association of ideas, awakened in the case of the Parnassians by a similar or identical verbal sound. His poetical method is pure echolalia.
The Parnassian theory of the importance of form, notably of rhyme, for poetry, of the intrinsic value of beauty in the sound of words, of the sensuous pleasure to be derived from sonorous syllables without regard to their sense, and of the uselessness, and even harmfulness, of thought in poetry, has become decisive in the most recent development of French poetry.[261] The Symbolists, whom we have studied in an earlier chapter, hold closely to this theory. These poor in spirit, who only babble ‘sonorous syllables’ without sense, are the direct descendants of the Parnassians.
The Parnassian theory of art is mere imbecility. But the ego-mania of the degenerate minds who have concocted it reveals itself in the enormous importance they attribute to their hunt for rhymes, to their puerile pursuit of words which are ‘tonitruants’ and ‘rayonnants.’ Catulle Mendès ends a poem (La seule Douceur), where he describes in the most fulsome manner a series of the pleasures of life, with this envoi: ‘Prince, I lie. Beneath the Twins or the Urn (? Aquarius) to make noble words rhyme together in one’s book, this is the sole joy of life.’[262] He who is not of this opinion is simply said to forfeit his humanity. Thus it is that Baudelaire calls Paris ‘a Capernaum, a Babel peopled by the imbecile and useless, not over-fastidious in their ways of killing time, and wholly inaccessible to literary pleasures.’[263] To treat as imbecile those who look upon a senseless jumble of rhymes and a litany of so-called beautiful proper names as of no value, is a stupid self-conceit at which one might well laugh. But Baudelaire goes so far as to speak of the ‘useless.’ No one has a right to live who is inaccessible to what he calls ‘literary pleasures’--that is, an idiotic echolalia! Because he cultivates the art of playing on words with a puerile seriousness, everyone must place the same importance as he does on his infantile amusements, and whoever does not do so is not simply a Philistine or an inferior being, without susceptibility or refinement--no, he is a ‘useless creature.’ If this simpleton had the power, he would no doubt wish to pursue his idea to the end and sweep the ‘useless’ out of the ranks of the living, as Nero put to death those who did not applaud his acting in the theatre. Can the monstrous ego-mania of one demented be more audaciously expressed than in this remark of Baudelaire’s?
The second characteristic of the Parnassians, after their insane exaggeration of the value for humanity of the most external form for poetry and rhyming, is their ‘impassibility,’ or impassivity. They themselves, of course, will not admit that this term is applicable to them. ‘Will they ever have done with this humbug!’ angrily cried Leconte de Lisle, when interrogated on the subject of ‘impassibility,’ and Catulle Mendès says, ‘Because Glatigny has written a poem entitled Impassible, and because I myself wrote this line, the avowed pose in which is belied in the course of the poem,
‘“Pas de sanglots humains dans le chant des poètes!”[264]
it has been concluded that the Parnassians were or wished to be “impassive.” Where do they find it, where do they see it, this icy equanimity, this dryness which they have ascribed to us?’[265]
Criticism, in sooth, has chosen its word badly. ‘Impassibility’ in art, in the sense of complete indifference to the drama of nature and of life, there cannot be. It is psychologically impossible. All artistic activity, in so far as it is not the mere imitation of disciples, but flows from an original necessity, is a reaction of the artist upon received impressions. Those which leave him completely indifferent inspire the poet with no verse, the painter with no picture, the musician with no tone composition. Impressions must strike him in some way or other, they must awaken in him some emotion, in order that he may have the idea at all of giving them an objective artistic form. In the infinite volume of phenomena flowing uniformly past his senses, the artist has distinguished the subject he treats with the peculiar methods of his art; he has exercised a selective activity, and has given the preference to this subject over others. This preference presupposes sympathy or antipathy; the artist, therefore, must have felt something on perceiving his subject. The sole fact that an author has written a poem or a book testifies that the subject treated of has inspired him with curiosity, interest, anger, an agreeable or disagreeable emotion, that it has compelled his mind to dwell upon it. This is, therefore, the contrary of indifference.
The Parnassians are not impassive. In their poems there is whimpering, cursing and blasphemy, and the utterance of joy, enthusiasm and sorrow. But what tortures them or enchants them is exclusively their own states, their own experiences. The only foundation of their poetry is their ‘Ego.’ The sorrow and joy of other men do not exist for them. Their ‘impassibilité’ is, therefore, not impassivity, but rather a complete absence of sympathy. The ‘tower of ivory’ in which, according to the expression of one of them, the poet lives and proudly withdraws himself from the indifferent mob, is a pretty name given to his obtuseness in regard to the being and doing of his fellow-creatures. All this has been well discerned by that beneficently clear-minded critic, M. Ferdinand Brunetière. ‘One of the worst consequences,’ he writes, ‘that they [the theories of the Parnassians, and, in particular, those of Baudelaire] may involve, is, by isolating art, to isolate the artist as well, making him an idol to himself, and as it were enclosing him in the sanctuary of his “Ego.” Not only, then, does his work become a question merely concerned with himself--of his griefs and his joys, his loves and his dreams--but, in order to develop himself in the direction of his aptitudes, there is no longer anything which he respects or spares, there is nothing he will not subordinate to himself; which is, to speak by the way, the true definition of immorality. To make one’s self the centre of things, from a philosophical point of view, is as puerile an illusion as to see in man “the king of creation,” or in the earth what the ancients called “the navel of the world”; but, from the purely human point of view, it is the glorification of egoism, and, consequently, the negation itself of solidarity.’[266]
Thus Brunetière notices the ego-mania of the Parnassians, and affirms their anti-social principles, their immorality; he believes, however, that they have freely chosen their point of view. This is his only error. They are not ego-maniacs by free choice, but because they must be, and cannot be otherwise. Their ego-mania is not a philosophy or a moral doctrine; it is their malady.
The impassivity of the Parnassians is, as we have seen, a callousness with regard, not to everything, but only to their fellow-creatures, united to the tenderest love for themselves. But their ‘impassibility’ has yet another aspect, and those who have found the term have probably thought above all of this, without having given themselves a complete account of it. The indifference which the Parnassians display, and of which they are particularly proud, applies less to the joys and sufferings of their fellow-creatures than to the universally recognised moral law. For them there is neither virtue nor vice, but only the beautiful and the ugly, the rare and the commonplace. They took their point of view ‘beyond good and evil,’ long before the moral madness of Frederick Nietzsche found this formula. Baudelaire justifies it in the following terms: ‘Poetry ... has no other aim than itself; it cannot have any other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, as that which will have been written only for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to say--be it well understood--that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result may not be to raise man above vulgar interests. This would evidently be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a moral aim he has diminished his poetical power, and it is not imprudent to wager that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot, under pain of death or degradation, assimilate itself to science or morals. It has not truth for its object, it has only itself.’ And Th. Gautier, who records this remark, wholly approves of it. ‘On the high summits he [the poet] is at peace: pacem summa tenent,’ he says,[267] in employing an image which occurs dozens of times in Nietzsche.
Let us nail here first of all a current sophistical artifice employed by Baudelaire. The question to which he wishes to reply is this: Is poetry to be moral or not? Suddenly he smuggles science, with which it has nothing to do, into his demonstration, names it in the same breath with morality, shows triumphantly that science has nothing in common with poetry, and then acts as though he had demonstrated the same thing on the subject of morality. Now, it does not occur to any reasonable man of the present day to demand of poetry the teaching of scientific truths, and for generations no serious poet has thought of treating of astronomy or physics in a didactic poem. The only question which some minds would wish to consider as an open one is that of knowing if we may, or may not, exact of poetry that it be moral, and it is this question that Baudelaire answers by an unproven affirmative, and by a crafty shuffling.
I have no wish to linger here on this question, not because it embarrasses me and I should like to avoid it, but because it seems to me more in place to discuss it when considering the disciples of the ‘Parnassus,’ the ‘Décadents,’ and the Æsthetes, who have pushed the doctrine to its extreme. I will for the present leave uncontradicted the assertion of the Parnassians, that poetry has not to trouble itself about morality. The poet ought to stand ‘beyond good and evil.’ But that could only reasonably signify an absolute impartiality; it can only amount to this--that the poet, in considering some action or aspect, simply aspires to find himself confronted by a drama, which he judges only for its beauty or ugliness, without even asking if it is moral or not. A poet of this kind must necessarily see, then, as many beautiful as ugly things, as many moral as immoral. For, taking all in all, moral and beautiful things in humanity and Nature are at least as frequent as the contrary, and must even preponderate. For we consider as ugly, either what presents a deviation from laws which are familiar to us, and to which we have adapted ourselves, or that in which we recognise the manifestation of anything prejudicial to us; and we regard as immoral all that is contrary to the prosperity, or even the maintenance, of society. Now, the mere fact that we have looked to find laws is a proof that phenomena corresponding to recognised laws, and consequently agreeable to us, must be far more numerous than the phenomena in contradiction to those laws, and therefore repulsive; and so, too, the maintenance of society is a proof that conservative and favourable, i.e., moral, forces must be more vigorous than destructive, i.e., immoral, forces. Hence, in a poem which while it did not trouble itself about morals, was nevertheless truly impartial, as it pretended to be, morality would be represented on a scale at least as large as, and even somewhat larger than, immorality. But in the poetry of the Parnassians this is not the case. It delights almost exclusively in depravity and ugliness. Théophile Gautier extols, in Mademoiselle de Maupin, the basest sensuality, which, if it should become the general rule, would carry humanity back to the condition of savages living in sexual promiscuousness without individual love, and without any family institutions whatever; Sainte-Beuve, in other respects more romanticist than Parnassian, builds in his novel Volupté an altar to sexual pleasure, at which the ancient Asiatic adorers of Ashtaroth could, without hesitation, have performed their worship; Catulle Mendès, who began his literary career by being condemned for a moral outrage (brought upon himself by his play Le Roman d’une Nuit) exalts in his later works, of which I will not quote the titles, one of the most abominable forms of unnatural license; Baudelaire sings of carrion, maladies, criminals and prostitutes; in short, if one contemplates the world in the mirror of Parnassian poetry, the impression received is that it is composed exclusively of vices, crimes and corruption without the smallest intermixture of healthy emotions, joyous aspects of Nature and human beings feeling and acting honestly. In perpetual contradiction to himself, as becomes a truly degenerate mind, the same Baudelaire, who in one place does not wish poetry to be confounded with morality, says in another place: ‘Modern art has an essentially devilish [démoniaque] tendency. And it seems that this infernal side of his nature, which man takes a pleasure in explaining to himself, increases daily, as if the devil amused himself by magnifying it through artificial processes, in imitation of the poultry-farmers, patiently cramming the human species in his hen-yards to prepare for himself a more succulent nourishment.’[268]
There is no indifference here to virtue or vice; it is an absolute predilection for the latter, and aversion for the former. Parnassians do not at all hold themselves ‘beyond good or evil,’ but plunge themselves up to the neck in evil, and as far as possible from good. Their feigned ‘impartiality’ with regard to the drama of morality or immorality is in reality a passionate partisanship for the immoral and the disgusting. It was wrong, therefore, to think of characterizing them by ‘impassibility.’ Just as they lack feeling only towards their fellow-creatures, and not towards themselves, so they are only cold and indifferent towards good, not towards evil; the latter attracts them, on the contrary, as forcibly, and fills them as much with feelings of pleasure, as the good attracts and rejoices the sane majority of men.
This predilection for evil has been discerned by many observers, and a good number have endeavoured to explain it philosophically. In a lecture on ‘Evil as the Object of Poetical Representation,’ Franz Brentano says:[269]
‘Since what is presented in tragedy appears so little desirable and cheerful, it suggests the idea that these explanations (of the pleasure we find in it) are less to be sought in the excellence of the subject than in some peculiar need of the public, which finds a response alone in the things thus exhibited.... Can it be that man feels, from time to time, the need of a melancholy emotion, and longs for tragedy as for something which satisfies this need in the most efficacious way, assisting him, so to speak, to weep heartily for once?... If for a long time no passions, such as tragedies excite, have had sway in us, the power to experience them demands anew, in some way, to manifest itself, and it is tragedy which comes to our aid; we feel the emotions painfully, it is true, but at the same time we experience a beneficial alleviation of our need. I think I have observed similar facts a hundred times--less in myself than in others, in those, for example, who devour with avidity the newspaper report of the “latest murder.”’
Professor Brentano here confounds first of all, with a lamentable levity, what is evil and what is saddening--two wholly different concepts. The death of a beloved being, for example, is saddening, but there is nothing evil in it, i.e., immoral, unless, by a subtle quibble, it is proposed to interpret as an immorality the action of natural forces in the dissolution of the individual. Further, he gives as an explanation what is only a perfectly superficial paraphrase--Why do we take pleasure in evil? Because ...we have evidently in us a tendency to take pleasure in evil! Opium facit dormire quia est in eo virtus dormitiva. M. Fr. Paulhan has treated the question more seriously, but neither do we get very far with him. ‘A contemplative, broad, inquisitive, penetrating mind,’ he says,[270] ‘with profound moral tendencies, which can nevertheless sink into oblivion in great part during scientific research or æsthetic contemplation; sometimes also with a slight natural perversion, or simply a marked tendency towards certain pleasures, whatever they may be, which are not an evil in themselves, and may even be a good, but of which the abuse is an evil--such are the foundations of the sentiment (love of evil) which is occupying us. The idea of evil, by flattering a taste, finds a solid point of support; and there is one reason more why it is agreeable--in that it satisfies, ideally, an inclination which reason hinders from being satisfied really to satiety.’
Here again is this sequence of ideas revolving in a circle, like a cat at play biting its tail: we have a taste for evil, because we find a taste for evil. The intellectual ineptitude which M. Paulhan here reveals is so much the more surprising in that, some pages above, he came very near the true solution of the enigma. ‘There are morbid states,’ he there says, ‘where the appetites are depraved; the patient eagerly swallows coal, earth, or things still worse. There are others in which the will is vitiated, and the character warped in some point. The pathological examples are striking, and the case of the Marquis de Sade is one of the most characteristic.... One sometimes finds enjoyment in the evils suffered by one’s self, just as in those of others. The sentiments of voluptuousness, sorrow and pity, which psychology has studied, appear to betray sometimes a veritable perversion, and to contain as elements the love of sorrow for sorrow itself.... Often one has to do with people who desire their own weal primarily, and then the woe of others. One or other of these psychical states is visible in many cases of wickedness; for example, in the fact of a rich manufacturer falsely accusing a young man, who is going to marry, of being affected by a venereal disease, and maintaining his assertion for the pleasure of doing so ... or, again, of a young villain who relishes the pleasure of theft to the point of crying: “Even if I were rich, I should always like to steal.” Even the sight of physical suffering is not always disagreeable; many people seek it.... This perversion is probably of all times and of all countries.... It would seem that into the mind of a man of our times there might enter a certain enjoyment in upsetting the order of nature, which does not appear to have been manifested before with a similar intensity. It is one of the thousand forms of recoiling on one’s self which characterizes our advanced civilization.’ Here M. Paulhan touches the kernel of the question, without remarking it or being arrested by it. The love of evil is not a universally human attribute; it is an ‘aberration’ and a ‘perversion,’ and ‘one of the thousand forms of recoiling on one’s self,’ otherwise more briefly and more clearly expressed as ego-mania.
The literature of penal legislation and mental therapeutics has registered hundreds of cases of aberration in which the patient has felt a passionate predilection for the evil and horrible, for sorrow and death. I should like to quote only one characteristic example: ‘In the autumn of 1884 there died, in a Swiss prison, Marie Jeanneret, a murderess. After having received a good education she devoted herself to the care of the sick, not for the love of doing good, but to satisfy a mad passion. The sufferings, groans and distorted features of the sick filled her with secret voluptuousness. She implored the doctors, on her knees and with tears, to allow her to assist in dangerous operations, in order to be able to gratify her cravings. The death-agony of a human being afforded her the height of enjoyment. Under the pretext of a disease of the eyes, she had consulted several oculists, and had obtained from them belladonna and other poisons. Her first victim, a woman, was her friend; others followed; the doctors, to whom she had recommended herself as nurse, having no suspicions, the less so because she frequently changed her residence. An attempt failing in Vienna led to discovery; she had poisoned not less than nine persons, but felt neither repentance nor shame. In prison her most ardent wish was to fall dangerously ill, in order to satiate herself in the looking-glass with the contortions of her own features.’[271]
Thus we recognise, in the light of clinical observation, the true nature of the Parnassians. Their impassivity, in so far as it is mere indifference to the sufferings of others, and to virtue and vice, proceeds from their ego-mania, and is a consequence of their obtuseness, which makes it impossible for them to receive a sufficiently keen presentation of the external world, hence also of sorrow, vice, or ugliness, so as to be able to respond by normal reactions, by aversion, indignation, or pity. But in cases where impassivity constitutes a declared predilection for what is evil and disgusting, we can see the same aberration which makes of the imbecile a cruel torturer of animals,[272] and of Marie Jeanneret, cited above, a tenfold poisoner. The whole difference consists in the degree of impulsion. If it is strong enough, its consequences are heartless acts and crimes. If it is elaborated by diseased centres with insufficient force, it can be satisfied by imagination alone, by poetic or artistic activity.
Of course there have been attempts made to defend aberration as something justified and voluntary, and even to erect it into an intellectual distinction. Thus it is that M. Paul Bourget[273] puts into the mouth of the ‘Décadents,’ with little artifices of style which do not permit a moment’s doubt that he is expressing his own opinion, the following argument: ‘We delight in what you call our corruptions of style, and we delight at the same time the refined people of our race and our time. It remains to be seen whether our exception is not an aristocracy, and whether, in the æsthetic order, the majority of suffrages represents anything else than the majority of ignorances.... It is a self-deception not to have the courage of one’s intellectual pleasure. Let us delight, therefore, in our singularities of ideal and of form, even if we must shut ourselves up in a solitude without visitors.’
It seems scarcely necessary to show that by these arguments, in which M. Bourget anticipates the whole delirious ‘philosophy’ of Nietzsche, every crime can be glorified as an ‘aristocratic’ action. The assassin has ‘the courage of his intellectual pleasure,’ the majority which does not approve of him is a majority of the ‘ignorant,’ he delights in the ‘singularity’ of his ‘ideal,’ and for this reason must at the most allow himself to be shut up in ‘a solitude without visitors,’ i.e., to speak plainly, in a reformatory, if ‘the majority of ignorances’ does not have him hanged or guillotined. Has not the ‘Décadent’ Maurice Barrès defended and justified Chambige, a specimen of the murderer for love of murder, with Bourget’s theory?
This same repulsive theorist of the most abandoned anti-social ego-mania denies also that one can speak of a mind as diseased or healthy. ‘There is,’ he says,[274] ‘from the metaphysical observer’s point of view, neither disease nor health of the soul; there are only psychological states, for he perceives in our sufferings and in our faculties, in our virtues and in our vices, in our volitions and in our renunciations, only changing combinations, inevitable, and therefore normal, subject to the known laws of the association of ideas. Only prejudice, in which the ancient doctrine of final causes and the belief in the definite aim of the universe reappear, can make us consider the loves of Daphnis and Chloë in the valley as natural and healthy, and the loves of a Baudelaire as artificial and unwholesome.’
To bring this silly sophistry down to its just value, common-sense has only to recollect the existence of lunatic asylums. But common-sense has not the right of suffrage among the rhetoricians of M. Paul Bourget’s stamp. We reply to him, then, with a seriousness he does not merit, that in fact every vital manifestation, those of the brain as of any other organ, is the necessary and only possible effect of the causes which occasion them, but that, according to the state of the organ and of its elementary parts, its activity, necessary and natural as such, can be useful or hurtful to the whole organism. Whether the world has a purpose is a question that can altogether be left indecisive, but the activity of each part of the organism has nevertheless, if not the aim, at least unquestionably the effect, of preserving the whole organism; if it does not produce this effect, and if, on the contrary, it thwarts it, it is injurious to the whole organism, and for such an injurious activity of any particular organ language has coined the word ‘disease.’ The sophist who denies that there may be disease and health must also logically deny that there may be life and death, or, at least, that death may have some sort of importance. For, as a matter of fact, given a certain activity of its parts which we call morbid, the organism perishes, while with an activity of another nature, which we qualify as healthy, it lives and thrives. As long, then, as Bourget does not lay down the dogma that pain is as agreeable as pleasure, decrepitude as satisfactory as vigour, and death as desirable as life, he proves that he does not know, or dares not draw from his premise, the just conclusion which would immediately make the absurdity of it apparent.
The whole theory which must explain and justify the predilection for evil has, besides, been invented as an after-thought. The inclination for what is evil and disgusting existed first, and was not a consequence of philosophical considerations and self-persuasion. We have here merely another case of that method of our consciousness, so often attested in the course of these inquiries, which consists of inventing rational causes for the instincts and acts of the unconscious.
In the predilection of the Parnassians for the immoral, criminal and ugly, we have to deal merely with an organic aberration, and with nothing else. To pretend that inclinations of this kind exist in all men, even in the best and sanest, and are merely stifled by him, while the Parnassians give the rein to theirs, is an arbitrary and unproved assertion. Observation and the whole march of the historical development of humanity contradict it.
There may be repulsion and attraction in nature--no one denies it. A glance at the magnetic poles, at the positive and negative electrodes, suffices to establish this fact. We find this phenomenon again among the lowest forms of life. Certain materials attract, others repel them. There is no question here of an inclination or an expression of the will. We must rather consider the process as purely mechanical, having its reason probably in molecular relations which are still unknown to us. Microbiology gives to the attitude of micro-organisms towards attractive and repulsive matter the name of ‘chemotaxis’ or chimiotaxia, invented by Pfeffer.[275] In higher organisms the conditions are naturally not so simple. Among them also, it is true, the ultimate cause of inclinations and aversions is certainly chimiotactic, but the effect of chimiotaxia must necessarily manifest itself under another form. A simple cell such as a bacillus, for example, is repelled directly when it penetrates into the radius of a chimic body which repels it. But the cell constituting a portion of a higher organism has not this liberty of movement. It cannot change its place independently. If it is now chimiotactically repelled, it cannot escape from the pernicious action, but must remain exposed to it, and submit to the disturbances in its vital activity. If these are sufficiently serious to injure the functions of the whole organism, the latter obtains knowledge of it, endeavours to perceive their cause, discovers it also, as a general rule, and does for the suffering cell what the latter cannot do alone, namely, shields it from the repelling action. The organism necessarily acquires experience in its defence against pernicious influences. It learns to know the circumstances in which they appear, and no longer permits matters to reach the stage of the really chimiotactic effect, but for the most part evades disturbing matters before they can exert a really direct repulsion. The knowledge acquired by the individual becomes hereditary, transforms itself into an organized faculty of the species, and the organism feels subjectively, as a discomfort which may amount to pain, the warning that a pernicious influence is acting upon it, and that it has to avoid it. To escape from pain becomes one principal function of the organism, which it cannot insufficiently provide against or neglect without expiating that negligence by its ruin.
In the human being processes take place not otherwise than as they have been here described. The hereditary organized experience of the species warns him of the noxiousness of influences to which he is frequently exposed. His outposts against naturally hostile forces are his senses. Taste and smell give him, as to repulsive chimiotactic matter, the impressions of nausea and of stench; the different kinds of skin-sensations make him aware, through sensations of pain, heat, or cold, that a given contact is unfavourable to him; eye and ear place him on his guard, by loud, shrill, discordant sensations, against the mechanical effects of certain physical phenomena. Finally, the higher cerebral centres respond to recognised noxious influences of a composite nature, or to the representation of them by an equally composite reaction of aversion in different degrees of intensity, from simple discomfort to horror, indignation, dismay, or fury.
The vehicle of this hereditary, organized, racial experience is the unconscious life; to it is confided defence against simple, frequently recurring noxious influences. Nausea at intolerable tastes, repugnance to insufferable smells, the fear of dangerous animals, natural phenomena, etc., have become for it an instinct to which the organism abandons itself without reflection--i.e., without the intervention of consciousness. But the human organism learns to distinguish and avoid not only all that is directly prejudicial to itself; it acts in the same way with regard to that which menaces it not as an individual, but as a racial being, as a member of an organized society; antipathy to influences injurious to the maintenance or prosperity of the society becomes in him an instinct. But this enriching of organized unconscious cognition represents a higher degree of development than many human beings attain to. The social instincts are those that a man acquires last of all, and, in conformity to a known law, he loses them first when he retrogrades in his organic development.
Consciousness has occasion to declare the dangerous nature of phenomena, and to defend the organism against it, only if these phenomena are either quite new, or very rare, so that they cannot be hereditarily recognised and dreaded; or if they enclose in themselves many different elements, and do not act directly, but only by their more or less remote consequences, so that to know them exacts a complex activity of representation and judgment.
Thus aversion is always the instinctive, or conscious cognition of a noxious influence. Pleasure, its opposite, is not merely, as has been sometimes maintained, the absence of discomfort--i.e., a negative state--but something positive. Every part of the organism has definite needs which assert themselves as a conscious or unconscious tendency, as an inclination or appetite; the satisfaction of these needs is felt as a pleasure which can rise to a feeling of bliss. The first need of each organ is to manifest itself in activity. Its simple activity is a source of pleasure to it, so long as it does not go beyond its powers. The activity of the cerebral centres consists in receiving impressions, and in transforming them into representations and movements. This activity produces in them feelings of pleasure; they have in consequence a strong desire to receive impressions so as to be put into activity by them, and experience feelings of pleasure.
This, broadly sketched, is the natural history of the feelings of pleasure and pain. The reader who has mastered it will experience no difficulty in comprehending the nature of aberration.
Unconscious life is subject to the same biological laws as conscious life. The vehicle of the unconscious is the same nervous tissue--although, it may be, another portion of the system--in which consciousness is also elaborated. The unconscious is just as little infallible as consciousness. It can be more highly developed or retarded in its development; it can be more or less stupid or intelligent. If the unconscious is incompletely developed, it distinguishes badly and judges falsely, it deceives itself in the knowledge of what is prejudicial or favourable to it, and instinct becomes unreliable or obtuse. Then we get the phenomenon of indifference to what is ugly, loathsome, immoral.
We know that among the degenerate divers arrested developments and malformations appear. Particular organs or entire systems of organs are arrested at a degree of development which corresponds to infancy, or even to the fœtal life. If the highest cerebral centres of the degenerate stop in their development at a very low stage, they become imbeciles or idiots. If the arrest of development strikes the nervous centres of unconscious life, the degenerate lose the instincts which, in normal beings, find expression in nausea and disgust at certain noxious influences; I might say, their unconscious life suffers from imbecility or idiocy.
Again, we have seen in the preceding chapter that the impressionability of the nerves and brain in the degenerate subject is blunted. Hence he only perceives strong impressions, and it is only these which excite his cerebral centres to that intellectual and motor activity which produces in them feelings of pleasure. Now, disagreeable impressions are naturally stronger than agreeable or indifferent impressions, for if they were not stronger we should not feel them as painful, and they would not induce the organism to make efforts to defend itself. To procure, then, the feelings of pleasure which are linked with the activity of the cerebral centres, to satisfy the need of functioning which is peculiar to the cerebral centres as to all the other organs, the degenerate person seeks impressions which are strong enough to excite to activity his obtuse and inert centres. But such impressions are precisely those which the healthy man feels as painful or repugnant. Thus, the aberrations or perversions of the degenerate find explanation. They have a longing for strong impressions, because these only can put their brains into activity, and this desired effect on their centres is only exercised by impressions that sane beings dread because of their violence, i.e., painful, repugnant and revolting impressions.
To say that every human being has secretly a certain predilection for the evil and the abominable is absurd: the only little spark of truth contained in this foolish assertion is, that even the normal human being becomes obtuse when fatigued, or exhausted by illness; i.e., he falls into the state which, in the degenerate, is chronic. Then he presents naturally the same phenomena as we have attested in the case of the latter, although in a much lower degree. He may find pleasure, then, in crime and ugliness, and in the former rather than in the latter; for crimes are social injuries, while uglinesses are the visible form of forces unfavourable to the individual; but social instincts are feebler than the instincts of self-preservation. Consequently they are sooner put to sleep, and for this reason the repulsion against crime disappears more quickly than that against ugliness. In any case, this state is also an aberration in the normal being, but imputable to fatigue, and in him is not chronic, as in the degenerate, nor does it amount to the hidden fundamental character of his being, as the sophists who calumniate him pretend.
An uninterrupted line of development leads from the French romantic school to the Parnassians, and all the germs of the aberrations which confront us in full expansion among the latter can be distinguished in the former. We have seen in the preceding book how superficial and poor in ideas their poetry is, how they exalt their imagination above the observation of reality, and what importance they assign to their world of dreams. Sainte-Beuve, who at first joined their group, says on this subject, with a complacency which proves he was not conscious of expressing any blame: ‘The Romance School ... had a thought, a cult, viz., love of art and passionate inquisitiveness for a vivid expression, a new turn, a choice image, a brilliant rhyme: they wished for every one of their frames a peg of gold. [A remarkably false image, let it be said in passing. A rich frame may be desired for a picture, but as to the nail which supports it, regard will be had to its solidity and not to its preciousness.] Children if you will, but children of the Muses, who never sacrifice to ordinary grace [grâce vulgaire].’[276]
Let us hold this admission firmly, that the romantic writers were children; they were so in their inaptitude to comprehend the world and men, in the seriousness and zeal with which they gave themselves up to their game of rhymes, in the artlessness with which they placed themselves above the precepts of morality and good sense in use among adults. Let us exaggerate this childishness a little (without allying with it the wild and exuberant imagination of a Victor Hugo, and his gift of lightning-like rapidity of association, evoking the most startling antitheses), and we obtain the literary figure of Théophile Gautier, whom the imbecile Barbey d’Aurevilly could name in the same breath with Goethe,[277] evidently for the sole reason that the sound of the great German poet’s name in French pronunciation has a certain resemblance to that of Gautier, but of whom one of his admirers, M. J. K. Huysmans, says:[278] ‘Des Esseintes [the hero of his novel] became gradually indifferent to Gautier’s work; his admiration for that incomparable painter had gone on diminishing from day to day, and now he was more astonished than delighted by his indifferent descriptions. The impression left by the objects was fixed on his keenly observant eye, but it was localized there, and had not penetrated further into his brain and flesh [?]; like a monstrous reflector, he was constantly limited to reverberate his environment with an impersonal distinctness.’
When M. Huysmans regards Gautier as an impersonal mirror of reality, he is the victim of an optical illusion. In verse as in prose, Gautier is a mechanical worker, who threads one line of glittering adjectives after another, without designing anything particular. His descriptions never give a clear outline of the object he wishes to depict. They recall some crude mosaic of the later Byzantine decadence, the different stones of which are lapis-lazuli, malachite, chrysoprase and jasper, and which yield, for this reason, an impression of barbarous splendour, while scarcely any design is discernible. In his ego-mania, lacking all sympathy with the external world, he does not suspect what sorrows and joys its drama encloses, and just as he feels nothing in the prospect before him, so neither can he awaken in the reader emotion of any sort by his listless and affected attempts to render it. The only emotions of which he is capable, apart from his arrogance and vanity, are those connected with sex; hence, in his works we merely find alternations between glacial coldness and lubricity.
If we exaggerate Théophile Gautier’s worship of form and lasciviousness, and if to his indifference towards the world and men we associate the aberration which caused it to degenerate into a predilection for the bad and the loathsome, we have before us the figure of Baudelaire. We must stop there awhile, for Baudelaire is--even more than Gautier--the intellectual chief and model of the Parnassians, and his influence dominates the present generation of French poets and authors, and a portion also of English poets and authors, to an omnipotent degree.
It is not necessary to demonstrate at length that Baudelaire was a degenerate subject. He died of general paralysis, after he had wallowed for months in the lowest depths of insanity. But even if no such horrible end had protected the diagnosis from all attack, there would be no doubt as to its accuracy, seeing that Baudelaire showed all the mental stigmata of degeneration during the whole of his life. He was at once a mystic and an erotomaniac,[279] an eater of hashish and opium;[280] he felt himself attracted in the characteristic fashion by other degenerate minds, mad or depraved, and appreciated, for example, above all authors, the gifted but mentally-deranged Edgar Poe, and the opium-eater Thomas de Quincey. He translated Poe’s tales, and devoted to them an enthusiastic biography and critique, while from the Confessions of an Opium-Eater, by De Quincey, he compiled an exhaustive selection, to which he wrote extravagant annotations.
The peculiarities of Baudelaire’s mind are revealed to us in the collection of his poems, to which he has given a title betraying at once his self-knowledge and his cynicism: Les Fleurs du Mal--‘The Flowers of Evil.’ The collection is not complete. There lack some pieces which only circulate in manuscript, because they are too infamous to bear the full publicity of a marketable book. I will take my quotations, however, from the printed verses only, which are quite sufficient to characterize their author.
Baudelaire hates life and movement. In the piece entitled Les Hiboux, he shows us his owls sitting in a row, motionless, under the black yews, and continues:
‘Leur attitude au sage enseigne Qu’il faut en ce monde qu’il craigne Le tumulte et le mouvement.
L’homme ivre d’une ombre qui passe Porte toujours le châtiment D’avoir voulu changer de place.’
Beauty says of herself, in the piece of that name:
‘Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes; Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.’
He abhors the natural as much as he loves the artificial. Thus he depicts his ideal world (Rêve Parisien):
‘De ce terrible paysage Que jamais œil mortel ne vit, Ce matin encore l’image, Vague et lointaine, me ravit....
‘J’avais banni de ces spectacles Le végétal irrégulier....
‘Je savourais dans mon tableau L’enivrante [!] monotonie Du métal, du marbre et de l’eau.
‘Babel d’escaliers et d’arcades C’était un palais infini, Plein de bassins et de cascades Tombant dans l’or mat ou bruni;
‘Et des cataractes pesantes, Comme des rideaux de cristal, Se suspendaient, éblouissantes, A des murailles de métal.
‘Non d’arbres, mais de colonnades Les étangs dormants s’entouraient, Où de gigantesques naïades, Comme des femmes, se miraient.
‘Des nappes d’eau s’épanchaient, bleues, Entre des quais roses et verts, Pendant des millions de lieues, Vers les confins de l’univers;
‘C’étaient des pierres inouïes Et des flots magiques; c’étaient D’immenses glaces éblouies Par tout ce qu’elles reflétaient.
‘Et tout, même la couleur noire, Semblait fourbi, clair, irisé....
‘Nul astre d’ailleurs, nuls vestiges De soleil, même au bas du ciel, Pour illuminer ces prodiges, Qui brillaient d’un feu personnel (!)
‘Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles Planait (terrible nouveauté! Tout pour l’œil, rien pour les oreilles!) Un silence d’eternité.’
Such is the world he represents to himself, and which fills him with enthusiasm: not an ‘irregular’ plant, no sun, no stars, no movement, no noise, nothing but metal and glass, i.e., something like a tin landscape from Nuremberg, only larger and of more costly material, a plaything for the child of an American millionaire suffering from the wealth-madness of parvenus, with a little electric lamp in the interior, and a mechanism which slowly turns the glass cascades, and makes the glass sheet of water slide. Such must necessarily be the aspect of the ego-maniac’s ideal world. Nature leaves him cold or repels him, because he neither perceives nor comprehends her; hence, where the sane man sees the picture of the external world, the ego-maniac is surrounded by a dark void in which, at most, uncomprehended nebulous forms are hovering. To escape the horror of them he projects, as from a magic-lantern, coloured shadows of the images which fill his consciousness; but these representations are rigid, inert, uniform and infantile, like the morbid and weak cerebral centres by which they are elaborated.
The incapacity of the ego-maniac to feel aright external impressions, and the toil with which his brain works, are also the key of the frightful tedium of which Baudelaire complains, and of the profound pessimism with which he contemplates the world and life. Let us hear him in Le Voyage:
‘Nous avons vu partout... Le spectacle ennuyeux de l’immortel péché:
‘La femme, esclave vile, orgueilleuse et stupide, Sans rire s’adorant et s’aimant sans dégôut; L’homme, tyran goulu, paillard, dur et cupide, Esclave de l’esclave et ruisseau dans l’égout;
‘Le bourreau qui jouit, le martyr qui sanglote; La fête qu’assaisonne et parfume le sang;...
‘Et les moins sots, hardis amants de la démence, Fuyant le grand troupeau parqué par le Destin, Et se réfugiant dans l’opium immense [!]. --Tel est du globe entier l’éternel bulletin...
‘O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre! Ce pays nous ennuie, O Mort! Appareillons!
‘Nous voulons... Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe? Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’
This desperate cry towards the ‘new’ is the natural complaint of a brain which longs to feel the pleasures of action, and greedily craves a stimulation which his powerless sensory nerves cannot give him. Let a sane man imagine the state of mind into which he would fall if he were imprisoned in a cell where no ray of light, no noise, no scent from the outer world would reach him. He would then have an accurate idea of the chronic state of mind in the ego-maniac, eternally isolated by the imperfection of his nervous system from the universe, from its joyous sounds, from its changing scenes and from its captivating movement. Baudelaire cannot but suffer terribly from ennui, for his mind really learns nothing new and amusing, and is forced constantly to indulge in the contemplation of his ailing and whimpering self.
The only pictures which fill the world of his thought are sombre, wrathful and detestable. He says (Un Mort joyeux):
‘Dans une terre grasse et pleine d’escargots Je veux creuser moi-même une fosse profonde Où je puisse à loisir étaler mes vieux os Et dormir dans l’oubli comme un requin dans l’onde... Plutôt que d’implorer une larme du monde Vivant, j’aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux A saigner tous les bouts de ma carcasse immonde.
‘O vers! noir compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux, Voyez venir à vous un mort libre et joyeux!’
In La Cloche fêlée, he says of himself:
‘... Mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu’en ses ennuis Elle veut de ses chants peupler l’air froid des nuits Il arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie
Semble le râle épais d’un blessé qu’on oublie Au bord d’un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts.’
Spleen:
‘...on triste cerveau... C’est.. un immense caveau Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune. --Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune Où, comme des remords, se traînent de longs vers....’
Horreur sympathique:
‘Cieux déchirés comme des grèves, En vous se mire mon orgueil! Vos vastes nuages en deuil.
‘Sont les corbillards de mes rêves, Et vos lueurs sont le reflet, De l’Enfer où mon cœur se plaît!’
Le Coucher du Soleil romantique:
‘Une odeur de tombeau dans les ténèbres nage, Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marécage, Des crapauds imprévus et de froids limaçons.’
Dance macabre: The poet speaking to a skeleton:
‘Aucuns t’appelleront une caricature, Qui ne comprennent pas, amants ivres de chair, L’élégance sans nom de l’humaine armature. Tu réponds, grand squelette, à mon goût le plus cher!...’
Une Charogne:
‘Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, Ce beau matin d’été si doux: Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme Sur un lit semé de cailloux,
‘Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique Brûlante et suant les poisons, Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons....
‘Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe [!] Comme une fleur s’épanouir. La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe Vous crûtes vous évanouir....
‘Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure, A cette horrible infection, Étoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature, Vous, mon ange et ma passion!
‘Oui! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces, Après les derniers sacrements, Quand vous irez, sous l’herbe et les floraisons grasses, Moisir parmi les ossements....’
That which pleases Baudelaire most are these pictures of death and corruption which I could quote in still greater numbers if I did not think that these examples sufficed. However, next to the frightful and the loathsome it is the morbid, the criminal and the lewd, which possess the strongest attraction for him.
Le Rêve d’un Curieux:
‘Connais-tu, comme moi, la douleur savoureuse?...’
Spleen:
‘Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux....’
Le Vin du Solitaire:
‘Un baiser libertin de la maigre Adeline....’
Le Crépuscule du Soir:
‘Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel; ... Et l’homme impatient se change en bête fauve....’
La Destruction:
‘Sans cesse à mes côtés s’agite le Démon.... Je l’avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon Et l’emplit d’un désir éternel et coupable....
‘Il me conduit.... Haletant et brisé de fatigue, au milieu Des plaines de l’Ennui, profondes et désertes,
‘Et jette dans mes yeux.... Des vêtements souillés, des blessures ouvertes, Et l’appareil sanglant de la Destruction!’
In Une Martyre he describes complacently and in detail a bedroom in which a young, presumably pretty courtesan has been murdered; the assassin had cut off her head and carried it away. The poet is only curious to know one thing:
‘L’homme vindicatif que tu n’as pu, vivante, Malgré tant d’amour, assouvir, Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante L’immensité de son désir?’
Femmes damnées, a piece dedicated to the worst aberration of degenerate women, terminates with this ecstatic apostrophe to the heroines of unnatural vice:
‘O vierges, ô démons, ô monstres, ô martyres, De la réalité grands esprits contempteurs, Chercheuses d’infini, dévotes et satyres, Tantôt pleines de cris, tantôt pleines de pleurs,
Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies, Pauvres sœurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains....’
Préface:
‘Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie, N’ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins, C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie....’
But if he is not bold enough to commit crimes himself, he does not leave a moment’s doubt that he loves them, and much prefers them to virtue, just as he prefers the ‘end of autumns, winters, springs steeped in mud,’ to the fine season of the year (Brumes et Pluies). He is ‘hostile to the universe rather than indifferent’ (Les sept Vieillards). The sight of pain leaves him cold, and if tears are shed before him they only evoke in his mind the image of a landscape with running waters.
Madrigal triste:
‘Que m’importe que tu sois sage? Sois belle! et sois triste! Les pleurs Ajoutent un charme au visage, Comme le fleuve au paysage.’
In the struggle between Abel et Caïn he takes the part of the latter without hesitation:
‘Race d’Abel, dors, bois et mange; Dieu te sourit complaisamment.
‘Race de Caïn, dans la fange Rampe et meurs misérablement.
‘Race d’Abel, ton sacrifice Flatte le nez du Séraphin.
‘Race de Caïn, ton supplice Aura-t-il jamais une fin?
‘Race d’Abel, vois tes semailles Et ton bétail venir à bien;
‘Race de Caïn, tes entrailles Hurlent la faim comme un vieux chien.
‘Race d’Abel, chauffe ton ventre A ton foyer patriarchal;
‘Race de Caïn, dans ton antre Tremble de froid, pauvre chacal!
‘Ah! race d’Abel, ta charogne Engraissera le sol fumant!
‘Race de Caïn, ta besogne N’est pas faite suffisamment.
‘Race d’Abel, voici ta honte: Le fer est vaincu par l’épieu! [?]
‘Race de Caïn, au ciel monte Et sur la terre jette Dieu!’
If he prays it is to the devil (Les Litanies de Satan):
‘Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs De l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence! Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l’Arbre de Science, Près de toi se repose....’
Here there mingles with the aberration that mysticism which is never wanting in the degenerate. Naturally, the love of evil can only take the form of devil-worship, or diabolism, if the subject is a believer, if the supernatural is held to be a real thing. Only he who is rooted with all his feelings in religious faith will, if he suffers from moral aberration, seek bliss in the adoration of Satan, in impassioned blasphemy of God and the Saviour, in the violation of the symbols of faith, or will wish to incite unnatural voluptuousness by mortal sin and infernal damnation, though humouring it in the messe noire, in the presence of a really consecrated priest, and in a hideous travesty of all the forms of the liturgy.
Besides the devil, Baudelaire adores only one other power, viz., voluptuousness. He prays thus to it (La Prière d’un Païen):
‘Ah! ne ralentis pas tes flammes! Réchauffe mon cœur engourdi, Volupté, torture des âmes!... Volupté, sois toujours ma reine!’
To complete the portrait of this mind, let us cite two more of his peculiarities. He suffers first from images of perpetual anguish, as his piece testifies (Le Gouffre), which is valuable as a confession:
‘... Tout est abîme,--action, désir, rêve, Parole! et sur mon poil qui tout droit se relève Mainte fois de la peur je sens passer le vent.
‘En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la grève, Le silence, l’espace affreux et captivant... Sur le fonde de mes nuits, Dieu, de son doigt savant, Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans trêve.
‘J’ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d’un grand trou, Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait où; Je ne vois qu’infini par toutes les fenêtres,
‘Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hanté, Jalouse du néant l’insensibilité.’
Baudelaire describes here accurately enough that obsession of degenerates which is called ‘fear of abysses’ (cremnophobia).[281] His second peculiarity is his interest in scents. He is attentive to them, interprets them; they provoke in him all kinds of sensations and associations. He expresses himself thus on this subject in Correspondances:
‘Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se répondent.
‘Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, --Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
‘Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.’
He loves woman through his sense of smell ... (‘Le parfum de tes charmes étranges,’ A une Malabaraise), and never fails, in describing a mistress, to mention her exhalations.
Parfum exotique:
‘Quand les deux yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d’automne, Je respire l’odeur de ton sein chaleureux, Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux Qu’eblouissent les feux d’un soleil monotone.’
La Chevelure:
‘O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l’encolure! O boucles! O parfum chargé de nonchaloir!...
‘La langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique, Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque défunt, Vit dans tes profondeurs, forêt aromatique!’
Naturally, instead of good odours, he prefers the perfumes which affect the healthy man as stinks. Putrefaction, decomposition and pestilence charm his nose.
Le Flacon:
‘Il est de forts parfums pour qui toute matière Est poreuse. On dirait qu’ils pénètrent le verre... Parfois on trouve un vieux flacon qui se souvient, D’où jaillit toute vive une âme qui revient.
‘Voilà le souvenir enivrant qui voltige Dans l’air troublé; les yeux se ferment; le vertige Saisit l’âme vaincue et la pousse à deux mains Vers un gouffre obscurci de miasmes humains;
‘Il la terrasse au bord d’un gouffre séculaire, Où, Lazare odorant déchirant son suaire, Se meut dans son réveil le cadavre spectral D’un vieil amour ranci, charmant et sepulcral.
‘Ainsi, quand je serai perdu dans la memoire Des hommes, dans le coin d’une sinistre armoire Quand on m’aura jeté, vieux flacon désolé, Décrépit, poudreux, sale, abject, visqueux, fêlé,
‘Je serai ton cercueil, aimable pestilence! Le témoin de ta force et de ta virulence, Cher poison préparé par les anges!...’
We now know all the features which compose Baudelaire’s character. He has the ‘cult of self’;[282] he abhors nature, movement and life; he dreams of an ideal of immobility, of eternal silence, of symmetry and artificiality; he loves disease, ugliness and crime; all his inclinations, in profound aberration, are opposed to those of sane beings; what charms his sense of smell is the odour of corruption; his eye, the sight of carrion, suppurating wounds and the pain of others; he feels happy in muddy, cloudy, autumn weather; his senses are excited by unnatural pleasures only. He complains of frightful tedium and of feelings of anguish; his mind is filled with sombre ideas, the association of his ideas works exclusively with sad or loathsome images; the only thing which can distract or interest him is badness--murder, blood, lewdness and falsehood. He addresses his prayers to Satan, and aspires to hell.
He has attempted to make his peculiarities pass for a comedy and a studied pose. In a note placed at the head of the first edition (1857) of the Fleurs du Mal, he says: ‘Among the following pieces, the most characteristic ... has been considered, at least by men of intellect, only for what it really is: the imitation of the arguments of ignorance and fury. Faithful to his painful programme, the author has had, like a good comedian, to fashion his mind to all sophisms, as to all corruptions. This candid declaration will, doubtless, not prevent honest critics from ranking him among the theologians of the people,’ etc. Some of his admirers accept this explanation or appear to accept it. ‘His intense disdain of the vulgar,’ murmurs Paul Bourget, ‘breaks out in extremes of paradox, in laborious mystification.... Among many readers, even the keenest, the fear of being duped by this grand disdainer hinders full admiration.’[283] The term has become a commonplace of criticism for Baudelaire; he is a ‘mystificateur’; everything for him is only a deception; he himself neither feels nor believes anything he expresses in his poetry. It is twaddle, and nothing else. A rhetorician of the Paul Bourget sort, threshing straw, and curling scraps of paper, may believe that an inwardly free man is capable of preserving artificially, all his life long, the attitude of a galley-slave or a madman, well knowing he is only acting a comedy. The expert knows that the choice of an attitude, such as Baudelaire’s, is a proof in itself of deep-seated cerebral disturbance.
Mental therapeutics has declared that persons who simulate insanity with some perseverance, even with a rational object, as, for example, in the case of certain criminals on their trial, in order to escape punishment, are almost without exception really mad,[284] although not to the degree they try to represent, just as the inclination to accuse one’s self, or to boast, of imaginary crimes is a recognised symptom of hysteria. The assertion of Baudelaire himself, that his Satanism is only a studied rôle, has no sort of value whatever. As is so frequently the case among the ‘higher degenerates,’ he feels in his heart that his aberrations are morbid, immoral and anti-social, and that all decent persons would despise him or take pity on him, if they were convinced that he was really what he boasts of being in his poems; he has recourse, consequently, to the childish excuse that malefactors also often have on their lips, viz., ‘that it was not meant seriously.’ Perhaps also Baudelaire’s consciousness experienced a sincere horror of the perverse instincts of his unconscious life, and he sought to make himself believe that with his Satanism he was laughing at the Philistines. But such a tardy palliation does not deceive the psychologist, and is of no importance for his judgment.