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 foetal 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 oeil 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’oeil, 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 coeur 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 soeurs, 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 coeur 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.