Forty Immortals

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AIS

RES

1

PROPISTY O

The

University of

Michigan

Libraries 1317

SCIENTIA VELITA

Helen

Christma

s 1926

Weber

1

1 1

1

FORTY IMMORTALS

THE BOOKS OF BENJAMIN DE CASSERES

THE SHADOW- EATER

CHAMELEON JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER MIRRORS OF NEW YORK FORTY IMMORTALS

IN PREPARATION BLACK SUNS

SOMERSAULTS THE OVERLORD BROKEN IMAGES THE MUSE OF LIES THE EIGHTH HEAVEN MARS AND THE MAN

WORDS, WORDS , WORDS LITANIES OF NEGATION

THE ETERNAL RETURN THE BOOK OF VENGEANCE SIR GALAHAD

FORTY

IMMORTALS

BY BENJAMIN

DE

CASSERES

SEVEN ARTS PUBLISHING COMPANY 160 Fifth Avenue New York

509 0258

Copyright, 1926, by Benjamin De Casseres

1

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Stacks Hift

Harry Weber (Estate ) 5-12-69 770283-291

To

DON

MARQUIS

Poet, Satirist, Dramatist, Epigrammatist

1 1

Every veil that man takes off the mystery of things falls over his own eyes.

Truth

only- in

exists

your

head .-Max Stirner .

Thoughts

are

thought

not

to

made be

Remy de Gourmont.

to

be

acted.—

}

Contents

1 NIETZSCHE 2 MAETERLINCK 3 THOMAS HARDY 4 SPINOZA 5 ARTHUR SYMONS : AN IMPRESSION 6 VICTOR HUGO : THUNDER-GOD 7 WILLIAM BLAKE 8 EDGAR SALTUS 9 JULES DE GAULTIER 10 JAMES BRANCH CABELL 11 REMY DE GOURMONT : AFTER-MAN 12 THOREAU 13 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 14 RICHARD JEFFERIES : A PAGAN MYSTIC 15 JULES LAFORGUE 16 BALZAC : THE CLUMSY TITAN 17 SHELLEY 18 EMERSON THE MYSTIC- THE INDIVIDUALIST—THE SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST 19 BAUDELAIRE : IRONIC DANTE 20 LORD DUNSANY 21 ANATOLE FRANCE 22 WALT WHITMAN 23 HEARN-IBSEN 24 STRINDBERG 25 MARINETTI AND FUTURISM 26 GUSTAVE LE BON 27 POE 28 MAX STIRNER: WAR-LORD OF THE EGO 29 LECONTE DE LISLE 30 THE MALady of De MAUPASSANT 31 STENDHAL : GEOMETRICAL DON JUAN 32 HAWTHORNE : EMPEROR OF SHADOWS 33 FLAUBERT : CHEMIST OF ILLUSIONS 34 AMIEL 35 EMILE TARDIEU: HISTORIAN OF ENNUI 36 IBSEN 37 VERLAINE 38 MONSIEUR SATAN 39 SHAKESPEARE 40 ROUSSEAU

Page 11 19 34 51 57 65 74 88 94 109 118 129 139 153 159 163 170 176 206 212 216 223 233 240 246 257 266 277 283 287 296 303 311 321 327 335 344 351 357 365

NIETZSCHE . Nietzsche ! In that word there flashes across the brain the confused vision of stupendous disasters ; tempestuous seas loosed from their beds of matter that fall sav agely on flaming

constellations ;

sidereal

systems

wrenched and torn from their ancient grooves and sent hurtling back to chaos ; cataracts of lava falling from inconceivable heights

on planets that hang

limply in space ; a massacre of gods and demons ; mountains that totter and go to smash in their own abysses ; hurricanes that drag with them the débris of ancient

outworn

hells ;

flashes that incinerate the

flames

and

lightning

empty thrones

of all

the murdered gods .

Above it all there is heard a frenzied dithyrambic chant that celebrates the nuptials of Death and Life. It is the passionate Dionysiac hymn of Friedrich Nietzsche, mad incendiary, who inherited his insanity from Prometheus. In the drug stores where one may have a prescription

made

up

for

Nietzsche is anathema.

a

style

while

one

waits

Like Hugo, Blake, Whit-

man, Wagner ; like the sea, the tempest, the avalanche, the volcanic eruption, he was a force that swept everything before it. He was pregnant with a million naked visions. His poems, his paradoxes , his aphorisms came into 11

FORTY

IMMORTALS

the world bellowing and trumpeting. spurted from him like hemorrhages . and

whirled

and

turned,

bit

and

His

ideas

He wheeled snarled

and

scratched. His pen was forged by Vulcan . were the viscera of Prometheus.

In his inkpot He was a giant

thundercloud that rained brimstone and hail. He composed his books as God composes worlds, with a mighty, withering, haunted chaos of fire and cloud and noxious vapors . His style is elliptical, broken, labyrinthine.

He

steps from the dome of St. Peter's to the pinnacle of the Matterhorn .

In a single sentence he smashes

the skull

of Plato

against the

skull

of Herbert

Spencer.

He tunnels, saps , undermines and then

dynamites, but never reasons. If you ride this wild horse of Tartary, see that you are strapped to its back, or you will be flung to death from an enormous height.

Through snows

and over the edelweiss you go to the summits of unknown mountains, and then, miracle of miracles ! you bound straight into the azure, for wings have sprouted.

The wild courser of earth has become

Pegasus at the threshold of the empyrean. There is a wild alarm in his pages. a tocsin sounded by night and day.

One hears

A thunder of

hoofs as in some stupendous cavalry charge. 12

Pro-

NIETZSCHE digious fissures

open and close before our eyes.

Great gouts of life are hurled at our heads. that end in screams and sobs.

Litanies

Catafalques of bronze

burst and give forth doves and butterflies-so hard, so tender is the soul of this wonderful man. He says that his "Zarathustra" is the greatest work ever written.

I know of no one competent to

contradict him unless it be the reputed author of the Old Testament. Goethe said, "The sense of life is life itself." is the secret of "Thus Spake Zarathustra."

That Zara-

thustra leaves his mountain solitude to come down into the valleys where men live to teach them the glory of earthliness. He comes to redeem them from spirituality, to destroy their belief in God and other phantoms and the itch for the immortality that will not take the body along. A religion that strikes at the senses, that strikes at the body, that spits on sex is a blasphemy.

The

priests blaspheme at life. The “ Kingdom of Heaven" is a sacrilege.

The belief in God is an infidelity.

In nature man is the only sick animal.

And he is

sick because he is apostate to life, to the earth. believes in a Beyond outside of himself.

He

He denies

his own Godhood. He is less than the eagle and the lion. He is a pervert. 13

FORTY

IMMORTALS

The existence of man justifies man. ence of pain justifies pain. justifies Death.

The exist-

The existence of Death

Whatever is is right, because it is a

rung to something higher.

Whatever is is wrong,

because it must be denied . Perpetually create new values, new vistas, new heights .

Fuse your will and your dream.

this minute into the next minute.

Empty

Put wings on

your vices.

Let your purpose be a sword.

your pains.

Make golden butterflies of your griefs.

Be playwright to yourself.

Exalt

Let your brain play

Shakespeare to the vicissitudes of your life.

Let

your supersight be Molière to your fatalities. Before every man's tomb there is a stone which can be rolled away. tion.

The superman is simply a perpetual over-

coming of oneself. vistas .

Every death has its resurrec-

It is the ascension to newer

It is the instinct of Life for more life.

earth is not a backyard .

The

It is a magical, undis-

covered empire as large or as small as your will . And the frozen summits of its mountains are arable.

Are these phrases only ?

Have they any meaning ?

They are supreme realities .

They are the steps in

the evolution of minds of the first order.

Goethe,

Spinoza, Emerson, Thoreau , Hugo , the Hindu seers, Schopenhauer, Walt Whitman , Nietzsche himself, have been overmen among us.

14

The overman is

NIETZSCHE simply the man who perpetually forges ahead of himself, who never allows his yesterday to

walk

abreast of his today, whose inner eye breeds wider horizons with each glance.

Each new perspective

has a summit to be reached.

He is a traveler with-

out a destination.

He is Power and Eye.

That is

his justification for living. To be out of bondage is to be free of yesterday. The past licks your hands and whines for a soul. Dogmas, beliefs , faiths, all your past values garrote you from behind.

But you , the dancing changeling,

have the mad folly for the new, for the unknown, for the tempestuous , for strange hells and mocking heavens.

"I love him who chastises his God," says Zarathustra.

There is no God, no idol , no image that

does not begin to emit an odor after being locked up for a certain time between the walls of the skull. The Goths and Vandals descended on Rome in the nick of time.

They cleaned house.

The mind needs

its Goths and Vandals every day. And that spot where the

senilic old

God has

babbled so long needs above all others chlorides. Our spiritual entrails are foul. lies through an emetic.

The way to salvation

Every God is a parasite.

Every belief is a vampire .

Scourge with a rod

of fire everything that lodges in the soul. 15

Be avatar

FORTY

IMMORTALS

and Phoenix over night. be a day-to-day miracle. the road to Damascus.

Metempsychosis should I wish forever to be on

I invite lightnings to strike

me, and send them back hissing and blazing into the face of my God.

We are both Jupiters.

Nietzsche put a barbaric glitter on all he touched. His mind was more Babylonian than Greek.

He

was born in some spiritual Sybaris, where life was conceived as a flavor. The world is a backgammon board, and when Destiny throws the dice we pawns are moved . Therefore the free mind will conceive the world as spectacle.

Ethical ends are illusive but invaluable as

motives for the drama being played under the stars . The æsthetic motive is substituted for the ethical motive.

Nietzsche rises beyond good and evil and

stands with Apollo

and

participator by turns.

Dionysus,

spectator

and

The fairy spectacle of life

and death, the ugly badinage of which we are all the victims, and to justify which priests and lawgivers invent ethical systems-for the Apollonian mind it is a sublime mystery-play.

And at the end

of each cycle of existence it pleads with the Master of Ceremonies for an encore.

For the universe has

no meaning except when seen through the eyes of the Eternal Contemplator.

16

NIETZSCHE

The devil's dance of Humanity which the hoodwinked call "progress" is carried on by series of crimes.

The famous "immoralism" of Nietzsche is

merely the immoralism of us all.

divided into trespassers and bores.

The world is The trespassers

sometimes go to Calvary, sometimes to St. Helena, sometimes go scot-free and are decorated . bores make the laws.

But the

Respectability is static.

the will to immobility.

It is

It is elect, baptized in its

own feculent piety. Against the mollusc and the mummy, against the sycophants and parasites the free spirit must play the Cain . The minds of the masses are sentimental lazarettos.

The highwaymen , the world incendiaries ,

the anarchs must murder the souls of the peaceful and the mediocre.

Upset their altars .

ethics of perpetual trespass. with visions of revolution.

Teach them

Set their brains on fire When thirsty, tired and

tottering, goad them on with mockeries and taunts, and dynamite the

pest-ridden

places where they

last sought shelter . Wherever there is vital , pulsating life there is the will to immorality—that is, the will to break idols and shackles , the instinct to deny the thing that is the nearest and to stretch out the hand for the thing 17

FORTY that is the farthest.

IMMORTALS

The creator of values , the eter-

nal suspect, listens to the serpent, bites deep into the apple of temptation, and then defiantly hurls the core against the walls of heaven. Man is instinctively an outlaw. a brigand.

Naturally he is

When he is straitjacketed by the disci-

pline of social and religious penalties the task is undertaken by other and stronger outlaws-priests and lawgivers.

They invent gods and hells

and

gibbets to immunize themselves . Mohammed , Christ and John Brown, Charlemagne, Torquemada, Bismarck and Napoleon invented the lie ethical in order to save their bacons.

The outlaw in the Mills Hotel

has a grievance against the outlaw in the WaldorfAstoria.

He invents an ethic called " socialism,”

and with that nimbus goes forth.

Power seeks to

gag power. We are all created in the image of one

God :

Tartuffe. Nietzsche was the devil's advocate : that is , he held a brief for Life against the leaden doctrines of despair.

He was born of Odin and Frigga, and

his name was Balder. The greatest psychologist that the world has ever known, he cut away the mask that every instinct wears, and showed us the soul of the world : The Will-to-Power .

18

MAETERLINCK.

There is a fourth dimension of thought.

There

are rare moments in life when the latencies of the soul converge and blend in a transient state of consciousness ; when the trickling stream of thought gushes over the obstructing delta of Space, Time and Circumstance and mingles with the infinite sea beyond. It is at such moments that we catch glimpses of things that threaten sanity.

We are dazzled by an

influx of light, of knowledge. to an infinitesimal point.

Personality dwindles

We see ourselves objec-

tively, as independent objects in space and time, like the clock ticking on the shelf or the moon in the sky.

We have a feeling that we have been every-

where but no particular where .

We grope back

to the terrestrial, glad to perform the most humble task, rejoicing that the ego has not been lost in that momentary vision of infinite Being. In

that

shining

ether-world,

whose

pulsating

waves flow through the brain cells like light passing through crystal, dwell the gods of life, the Fates that dominate our lives.

Inflexible, imperturbable , see-

ing but not feeling, holding within their grasp the

19

FORTY

IMMORTALS

threads of human destiny-the silken threads that hold our souls in leash-these mute gods rule for

aye. They understand and mock. lips are curled in scorn. on Olympus,

the

They hear, but their

The Greeks placed them

Scandinavians

in

Asgard,

and

Maeterlinck places them in the fourth dimension of thought. There are some choice spirits number

the Belgian

among whom I

mystic-who

seem to have

lived all their lives in this subtle sphere.

They

walk the earth and their feet are clay, but their heads are ranged with the stars . forever inflated

with

a divine

Their lungs are ether.

We little

work-a-day beings who run around their legs like mice around the base of the Colossus of Rhodes draw in the miasmatic vapors of planetary life and are content.

We sit in chairs and stare at a blank wall ;

they sit before an open door.

Our vision is bounded

by the horizon ; for them there is no horizon.

We

listen to the guttural of external life ; they catch the vibrations of law and report the ebb and flow of æons. The materialist places his mind in the universe ; the mystic places the universe in his mind.

Plot-

inus, Schopenhauer, Emerson , Maeterlinck we can

20

MAETERLINCK

hardly think of as ordinary mortals . with us but not of us.

They seem

To come under the influence

of their clairvoyant gaze, to follow them in their vertiginous flights above the striated world of matter and motion is to experience simultaneously those sensations of exaltation and depression which one feels in rising in a balloon—a sinking at the heart, a lightness of the head.

There is a sundering of the

ligatures that bind us to the familiar.

The cen-

tripetal forces tug at our feet and the centrifugal forces tug at our head. against

the

The clogging clay wars

smiling-sneering stars that summon

from overhead. solvent absolute.

The welding relative is lost in a The individual withers and his

soul is more and more. As a particle of salt is dissolved in water , so is a particular fact dissolved in its eternal Idea in such hours.

The succession of days and nights collapses

like a portable drinking cup.

Time dwindles to a

point, matter runs to fluid wastes, the stable unmoors and drifts away like cloud-fleece over a level sum-

mer sea. The world is my thought is the message of "Wis dom and Destiny."

The Belgian's soul has been

touched by some divine despair. surcease within.

But he has found

He has diked his soul against the 21

FORTY

IMMORTALS

encroaching, flooding days, and reclaimed from the wild and lawless sea of circumstance a verdant land of beauty .

Like Kubla Khan, he has

decreed a

lordly pleasure house in a mystic Xanadu.

From the

granite walls of limitations he has hewn a castle with turrets forever bathed in an opiate moonshine and around which the eagles circle and call . The world passes through his brain and even the dross is purified. the wall .

He will see beauty in a beetle on

He will catch the days with their griefs

and the nights with their lamentations and extract the beautiful as gold is extracted from the mud in the pan. For the soul of the seer is alchemic . compost into beaten gold. and smut.

He will turn

He will refine smudge

From the lees of the wine of pleasure he

will brew a heady wisdom. his beck and call.

He has an elfin band at

They labor by day and night in

the smithy of his unconscious being.

There they

forge the weapons for his conscious hours.

There

they mold helmet and shield and panoply.

His

mind is a dragnet and all is fish that comes to it. We are bolder than we know and our actions ride us to the zenith of the Invisible.

We are wiser

than we know, and our wisdom outruns the centuries.

Each man is an epitome of all men. 22

Every

MAETERLINCK

bottom is a false bottom.

What we call limitation is

lack of perception, and when we say we are undone we mean we have capitulated . Maeterlinck

there are no limitations, and capitu-

lation they do not know. anew every day. tation .

For the seers-for

They build the world

Each night they slough off a limi-

Each day they build a house, but they move

perpetually.

They

baffle

the

best-laid

plans

of

demons and gods by meeting demon and god halfway.

The slings and arrows of fortune pierce their

souls, but the tips are anointed with chrism of wisdom.

They dice with life- in-death , as does the grief-

crazed mortal, but they play with loaded dice.

They

have lived imaginatively all men's lives and fear no disaster .

Maeterlinck would have us know we cannot escape the predestined .

Tomorrow is a curtained seduc-

tion, but it stands sure.

The last day shall reveal

what the first day purposed . step.

The years walk a lock-

Each thing breeds its own manner of death .

And the trump of doom shall reveal the meaning of the prelude in Chaos.

The individual is held in the

rigid grooves of fate, and what is to be will come. Any other doctrine is blasphemous , or , worse, ridiculous.

We are gibbeted on Law.

We are spitted on

the Inevitable and our souls dangle over Chaos. 23

FORTY

IMMORTALS

It is good that to most of us the future is a sealed book. The past is ever changing in the kaleidoscope of memory ; the future alone is irrevocable.

The

day of our death is appointed, and life itself is but an oblation to death. we offer ourself up .

On the altars of the Hours

The soul is but an eddy in the

great world- stream, and the eddy has its appointed end as surely as the stream.

A mind that could have

grasped the links in the chain of causation of which Lincoln, the Civil War and Wilkes Booth were but the shadows could have predicted at Lincoln's birth the tragedy in Ford's Theater. History is Force dressed up .

The curvetings of

Law are beyond the individual stay, and the manner of the death of nations is dependent on the manner of their birth.

We are puppets on an unknown

stage, infusoria gyrating aimlessly in an unsounded sea, midges sporting our day in the sun of thought, atoms of desire, motes of the Eternal Energy.

And

Man bloweth where Law listeth .

The great problem of human evil has confronted Maeterlinck , as it has confronted Tolstoy and Ibsen . But the demands of the Sphinx cannot ruffle the feathers of the Belgian as they have that of the Norwegian and the Russian .

A mild but effulgent

serenity swims from the pages of his later plays and 24

MAETERLINCK

from "Wisdom and Destiny" and "The Treasure of the Humble."

The misery, the evil, the injustice

of the world trouble him as the winds trouble the sea. They may lash the surface into huge, tumbling billows, but in the depths there reigns a tense placidity. Serenity is born of insight, and insight must beget a contempt of the temporal order -- that order begun in desire and which is destined to end in despair. "Today misery

is the

disease

of mankind ,

as

disease is the misery of mankind ,” says Maeterlinck. Man tosses around on his bed of pain and his prayers are hurled back as echo from the stars .

He builds

and he builds and his work is swept away like the beaver's dam.

His soul, impounded in clay, wrig

gles toward freedom only to discover that it has been wriggling sheet .

out

of

He builds

a

straitjacket

a grandiose

into

a

winding

tomorrow on the

ruins of today, and when tomorrow has come and gone and turned ghost he builds again. Age always lies in the future.

His Golden

He builds altar and

capitol and dedicates his soul to prayer.

He skulks

and begs and defies and grovels, and death circles like a kite above his clay.

He believes he is going

straight to his goal, straight to that far-off divine event which Hope has builded in the azurean future. But there is no forward or backward in life.

25

Nature

FORTY

has no straight lines.

IMMORTALS

Rhythm, undulation , periodic-

ity are the laws that govern motion .

The history of

one day is the history of all days, and he who builds on the shifting sands of the temporal builds futilely. It is this Heraclitean vision of human life that has obsessed the mind of Maeterlinck. It is this Horla that has gripped his soul in its lean and icy fingers. In those strange little dramas that he has given us, and which are a fitting introduction to his " Wisdom and Destiny," we read the conflicts that have cleft the soul of this transcriber of visions . Are they human,

these peaked

and

emaciated

figures that he has silhouetted on his background of night ?

The moral world is but a thin crust that has

formed over the rolling lava streams of elemental passion.

The wan, drawn figures of the plays sport

upon this dangerous surface unmindful of the intoning flood beneath.

Is it play ?—or are the antics of

these creatures the death-squirmings of a decadent race?

A fetid air blows from the surface of life .

Is

this endless and purposeless gambol in Being an illusion, a dream in the mind of a fallen god who sates himself with sleep while his brain-puppets play out the farce ?

The willful days that image our

despair bring no answer.

Those pallid lights set in

a naked, frosty heaven have no word for us.

26

The

MAETERLINCK

soul of man preserves a cryptlike silence, like the old

man in

"Pelléas

Mélisande . "

et

His

heart

wreathes Hope with the bayleaf and crowns Memory with thorns.

But it has no answer.

Our brain cells

are catacombs where lie our ancestors embalmed in silence .

They answer not.

The web of life is woven of contingency and necessity, and the inevitable and the unknown ambuscade us at every turn .

This endless willing , this

eternal upswirl of souls from the abysms of nonbeing into the glare of frowsy day ; this ceaseless regalvanizing of corpses ; these ambling, jigging mummies that are tossed from Eternity into Time and from Time back into Eternity ; these sweating packmules saddled with the rubbish of decayed

cycles

and

ancient durations ; these crumbling tabernacles of clay, some demons, striated with their sins ; some saints , dragging ball and chain of ancestral crime up the steep Cordilleras of aspiration ; young gods with unexpanded wings , predestined for Valhalla, toiling in the galleys of this Toulon ; Calibans wallowing in the gutters that rut their imaginations ; and never an end- the same, the same and ever the same how shall we fend ourselves ' gainst this "wreckful siege"? It is in his soul that Maeterlinck has found the 27

FORTY

refuge

against

the

IMMORTALS

world of circumstance.

problem is individual.

The

Social schemes for the re-

generation of mankind only aggravate the disease from which mankind is suffering.

The deep-rooted

ills of the soul cannot be cured by a poultice. suffer little from

suffering

itself ;

but

from

"We the

manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring."

This is the keynote of his message.

Mental attitude is everything .

The gale that wrecks

the sneak-box fills the sails of the barkentine and drives her toward her goal. unnerve most of us. them.

The wise man quietly ignores

Suffering is one-half self-love and one-half

hallucination . of

The trifles of the day

man .

He

Hallucination is the normal state makes

up

his

mind

in

youth to

whimper, and whimper he does to the end of his days.

It is the future that affrights him; he puts

into a hypothetical tomorrow all the ills that flesh is not heir to.

From the murk of his dreams he

weaves strange and lurid imps of evil . this future we fear ? jack o' lantern ?

What is

Is it anything but a psychic

The future is the avatar of the

past, yesterday resurrected and expanded , Old Time with a visor on his cap to hide his identity. For the seer there is only an eternal Present that canopies both the past and the future.

28

What didn't

MAETERLINCK

happen yesterday never can happen . feared never comes.

What is not

He drains the minutes of their

contents as they pass.

He substitutes the abstract

for the concrete and plashes in generalizations. Nor time, nor place, nor circumstance can hold him.

He

knows that, like Faust, he will be lost if he bid any one thing stay. The vision of Maeterlinck is cosmic.

He does not

contend against evil ; he rejects it by accepting it. He lives above the stews.

From his citadel of spir-

itual power he sends forth his doves and they come back laden with precious secrets.

His soul paces

the ramparts of Time and Space.

He will partake

of all things, but nothing shall claim him. receptive, but unallied.

He is

There is in the soul of

each of us, Maeterlinck tells us, a repellent center, a magic flame 'round which the moths of circumstance circle only to singe their wings or be consumed.

Gusty change but flings the fire that burns

in the chalice of the soul further and further into the encircling gloom.

The wise man stands upon

the marge of the great ocean of life and fixes his gaze upon the tumbling, seething waters that stretch away to an illusive horizon.

His ear catches the

hoarse calls of expectancy and the deep gutturals of defeat, and at his feet there circle and surge the

29

FORTY

IMMORTALS

wrack of an endless , futile labor. turbed.

He is not dis-

He sees, as no man sees, the tragedy, the

comedy, the inutility of it all.

Darkness he sublimes

to light, despair he transmutes into a stoic defiance. The average person sees from an angle of personality. The sage sees from an impersonal center. This world will fawn at his feet when he calls.

In the august and significant silences of the soul, says Maeterlinck, is born the wisdom that baffles destiny.

Physical pain must cower before the eman-

cipated mind.

Was it not Socrates who discoursed

on immortality while he was stiffening in death ? Did not Epicurus in his mortal agony preach the summum bonum to his

disciples ?

These

silent

refuges that disease and death stormed in vain were wrought out in the spirit-sweat of cloistral hours ; it is here, in these darkling recesses of the soul, in the encelled silences, that the real work of freedom is done ; it is here that rest is won from the clangorous days, and the balm that was not in Gilead is found . We reach these uplands of the spirit by infinite petty exertions , by threading our way through the labyrinthine passes of whim and impulse. All things conspire against the individual.

There is a Nemesis

that seeks continually to level us to the mediocre.

30

MAETERLINCK

Those ancients , the Vulgar and the Familiar, would scythe us to their own standards.

We are kneaded

in the common image, and our days are gross.

We

are relics of the dead, effigies of the past, playthings of ancestral tendency.

All things pay tribute to the

sheeted, slumbering dead.

Yet there is within us

the spark that will not be snuffed out.

It is the I,

the resistant center, the undying defiant. It

is by developing the

Ego,

by an

insistent

coddling of Me, that we attain to a sort of Buddhahood.

The adolescent Homunculus of Faust was

Maeterlinck's overman in the ovum.

The Infinite

is hidden in an atom, and the freeman lies quiescent in the slave.

Housed and kenneled in our brains

there is a cosmic Self, a greater, grander , universal Self, distinct and other than the hallucinated microcosm that skulks and whimpers through the bogeybogus days of life .

Maeterlinck gives us no coward's message .

Flight

is not self-mastery, and the world cannot be subdued to the individual's will by shunning its blows.

We

master fate as the Japanese wrestler beats his opponent- by giving way at every point. battle ; we should absorb .

There is no way yet found

of escaping the ills of life . of imperfection.

We should not

The world is a counsel

The trammel and the bond are

31

FORTY

IMMORTALS

He must have ballast.

not rejected by the seer .

There is no back stairs to the seventh heaven of spiritual complacency .

He knows the crepuscular

mood, and the whirring pinions of the Black Bird have brushed his soul.

Recomposition is the law

of life, and from remorse and despair we compound the nectars of wisdom. carries a torch. face .

Fear is a brigand, but he

Snatch the torch and turn it on his

Beneath the visor which has frightened you And scuttle the

there is a smile.

past.

In the

measure that a man allows the past to dominate his life in that measure will the future obsess him.

To

sit down by the stream of Time and weep over the gone-by is worse than tragic ; it is comic.

Embalm

the past in a smile. Spinoza said : " Nothing shall disturb me," and nothing did.

Pyrrho said : "Nothing is true ; noth-

ing is untrue,"

and

he

died

in peace.

Marcus

Aurelius said : " Nothing matters," and nothing did. "The world is divine," chanted Emerson, and he was right.

"The world is evil and smells of grave-

mold ," said Schopenhauer, and he was right.

“ Life

is like a comedy by Molière,” said George Meredith. And Meredith was right.

Maeterlinck has uttered

"Yea" to all these men. Each brain is a premise . 32

Everything depends on

MAETERLINCK

the point of view; but there are points of view that are eternal and insisted on by the strong men of the earth with profound insight from age to age. Maeterlinck is par excellence the man of his time. His evolution has been, from his first book of poems to his later dramas, an evolution from the mysticism of moods to the mysticism of Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

Like Goethe, he calls for more light-

and to the torch of consciousness he has himself added a few giant sparks.

33

THOMAS HARDY I.

The cycle of the cosmic vision of Thomas Hardy 99 from " Desperate Remedies " to " The Dynasts. In " Desperate Remedies" he had his vision , but it struggled for a body, like an inexorable, unstanchable Thought groping for utterance on the clavier of the five senses .

In those novels which came to us through the years the Vision, the Thought, was apprehended by the reader through the events and circumstances of the drama, seen as one sees character in a person or the mood in which a picture is painted . In "The

Dynasts,"

the

last

work

of Thomas

Hardy, the vision of the universe, the implacable Thought of years, comes stark into the light, and the great artist who gave to the world "Tess of the d'Urbervilles, " "The Mayor of Casterbridge"

and

"The Return of the Native" sweeps to the Sinai of concrete perception , where he utters not only the final wisdom that is in him but the final wisdom of all time. Genius is consciousness magnified to the highest power attainable .

The consciousness of all genius

is cosmic—that is, it sees laws instead of things ; it

34

THOMAS

HARDY

solves every star in a universe, and every universe in a dewdrop, and finally every star, universe and dewdrop in the retort of its own awareness . This cosmic consciousness is the Alsace- Lorraine of the mind, where the Absolute and the Relative eternally dispute possession .

Its quality varies ; but

the cosmic consciousness of Thomas Hardy ranks with that of the Spinoza,

Hindu

Shakespeare ,

sages ,

Walt

Sophocles ,

Whitman,

Hugo ,

Schopen-

hauer, Shelley, Hegel, Jules de Gaultier, the author of Ecclesiastes , Flaubert , Emerson , Maeterlinck and the Carlyle of "The French Revolution ." Like the Hindu sages and Jules de Gaultier, he has seen enkerneled in all things the will-to-error ; like Sophocles , he has looked into the vacant stare of the Immanent Will ; like Hugo , he has hurried up and down the sidereal systems seeking an Answer to the Question, leaving no mansion in the skies unransacked ; like Whitman , he has staged for our eye—in that marvelous prelude in the Overworld in "The Dynasts "-the hopeless tangle of mankind's oneness and the fatality of

each heartbeat ;

like

Spinoza, he has come to the very sills of Unity ; like Schopenhauer, he has seen the seals of the Unconscious break bewildered

and let loose the

butterflies

dazed

of Intelligence, 35

and

light-

and

asked

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Why?; like Shakespeare, he has played stage-manager only to his puppets, leaving moral judgments to lesser minds ; like Shelley, he has felt the thrill of an

almost

hopelessly

distant

Hope ;

like the

author of Ecclesiastes and Goya, he has Nada ; like Maeterlinck, he

has looked

uttered

into the

unsoundable abysses that the human, all unwitting, skirts every second. Matter, mind and life are diaphanous .

The char-

acters in the Napoleonic drama of " The Dynasts ” are vitreous .

One sees through them into the Law.

They have no more will than the hands on the face of a clock.

They are wound up and go for a little

time or a long time .

Napoleon

is of no

more

importance in the brain of the Immanent Will than the humblest of Hardy's characters.

We are molded

"mumbly as in a dream," "patterns wrought by apt, aesthetic rote, " always menaced by the back-fire of the dead . Hence that sense of the unreality of life , that feeling of perpetual hallucination , deception, cozening

and

vaporous

somnambulism.

dreams

We

seem

through which

we

cloaked

in

discern the

granite of Reality ; but we can never step out of that vapor, which is the aura of the imagination . Tess and Michael Henchard are real to us, but 36

THOMAS

HARDY

they must have seen themselves in their last moments as each of us will see himself at the latter second : a myth, a chimerical wraith on the track of moonmotes.

At most, "artistries in

circumstance," as

Hardy says . Napoleon, in " The Dynasts," acts like an hallucinated being.

He listens, listens always at critical

moments for the promptings of "his Destiny," which is his magniloquent euphemism for his puppetry, and he is as hopelessly in the grip of his vertiginous dreams as is Saturn in the grip of its rings. Irony is the logic of contradictions . third eye of the brain .

It is the

Among all the novelists of

the age Thomas Hardy is the supreme ironist . ranks with Turgenev and Flaubert the irony of the author "Ghosts. "

He

His irony is

of " Edipus

Rex"

and

It is implacable , as insistent as death,

and godless .

Yet at the last, it is with the great

Turgenev that Thomas Hardy will stand when the history of the literature of the age is written.

Both

have dreamed Schopenhauer into their characters ; both have crushed their creations with feathersthe little mischance, the slight misstep , the almost imperceptible contretemps . Time, the winged snail , has its say, and each one shall be that which he wished to be or did not wish 37

FORTY

IMMORTALS

to be—it makes little difference ; there will be tragic disillusion in either case.

In the great Mime, where

each one masks his guilt of living, Irony speaks the epilogue from the stage.

We have acted with the

precision of the sweep of the spheres.

Everything

has been plotted ; we are allowed our ideals in order to trip over them, for this tragic Puck that Hardy names It is thinking about, maybe, a problem and we are only thought-cells in Its monstrous brain.

What has it to do with our avocations-our personal ambitions and desires ?

Irony is born of the

sightlessness of It in regard to us and our ignorance in regard to It.

" So the Will heaves through space

and molds the times with mortals for its fingers," says the Chorus of the Years.

Hence, so long as the

illusion of free will continues, there will be sport beneath the zodiac for Spirits Ironic and Spirits Sinister . If the irony of the novels may be compared to the work of Turgenev, his mysticism finds a parallel in the dramas of Maeterlinck.

In Hardy, as in the

Belgian dramatist, backgrounds are immeasurable. Against the canvas of the visible and invisible worlds his figures stand out for a second like bas-reliefs, infinitely small and inconsequent, appear in the dark.

and then

dis-

All the characters in the plays 38

THOMAS

HARDY

of Maeterlinck and the novels of Hardy are marionettes gliding over the thin spread of consciousness which cuts the Unknown like a chain of fireflies at the summit of the night.

Each one walks in an aura

of darkness, sinisterly luminous. The description of Egdon Heath , in " The Return of the Native," with its two human beings- Man and Woman- appearing on the horizon, is a chapter that is an epic in itself.

Man versus his Eternal

Enemy, which is the subject of the Greek drama and of the Maeterlinck plays , is the subject of this chapter, mystical, subtle, allegorical-and tremendously real. For that is the supreme magic of Thomas Hardy : he conveys

the

abstract

through the

concrete ,

makes us feel the mysterious in the folds of the known, and puts a ghost at the very center of the familiar.

In Maeterlinck we feel the reality of the

mysterious.

But Thomas Hardy has accomplished

a greater miracle : he makes us feel the mystery and the terror of the real and familiar.

The vision of

the world in which his mind welters flows subtly from his pages and his characters into the unconscious depths of the reader and mounts and suffuses his nerves till he feels what Hardy has felt all his

39

FORTY

life

IMMORTALS

the eerie drama of the Soul and the remote-

ness of man from the Great It. Maeterlinck has given us the same feeling, but his characters are placed out of time and out of space.

In Hardy's world, even in his great Napo-

leonic drama, we are at the very dugs of ourselves , at the very elbows of Everyday and Matter-of- Fact . In Hardy's vision the dramaturge of existence is the

Unconscious.

It is the Unconscious

as

ex-

pounded by Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann .

Plato had compared the

vast, lumbering, unknowable animal.

world to

a

It is some-

thing like this, too , that Thomas Hardy has conceived the Unconscious. it almost a visible entity.

In " The Dynasts" he makes It resembles some cosmic

mastodon that has the power of dreaming strange dreams.

Or it is like a sphinx that dreams chimeras

into a kind of semblance of reality, only to strike them dead with its mighty, clumsy paws. In the novels , the Unconscious is a stream whose currents are directed by the débris of pasts without measure, a stream cumbered with sunken wrecks and floating forests

and

drowsing dead,

a stream

on

which consciousness and intelligence are only airbubbles

and phosphorescent

40

spots .

The

Uncon-

THOMAS

HARDY

scious is the sediment and silt of Time-and each generation of man is no other than that. It is in the great ages of pessimism that the greatest wisdom comes from the human heart and brain. The seer and the

optimist are

contradictions

in

terms .

So long as man is dominated by the Will-to-

Power

and the

Will-to-Illusion

the

will go on throughout the universe.

tragi- comedy But the Artist

comes to interpret the Play to the players themselves . And among all the artists within the memory of man none has seen deeper into life, none has held more completely or sanely in his head the Cosmic Vision, none has been more fearless, inexorable or sincerer than Thomas Hardy. He has glanced at life with a superhuman , satiric eye over which has hung the mist of a perpetual tear. And that mystical Hope that has fed the world for

ages still dwells in his heart. The last words in "The Dynasts" are :

"Consciousness

the

Will

informing

till

It

fashion all things fair !"

He,

too,

has

his

dream - of

Messiah !

41

a

metaphysical

FORTY

IMMORTALS

II. Thomas Hardy's Women. Thomas Hardy occupies the same place in modern imaginative literature that Sophocles does in dramatic literature.

The English novelist's characters,

especially his women, are the mere playthings of an inscrutable Fate ; fine instruments on which Destiny, in her infinite sweeps , pipes a major or a minor and then flings to the cosmic rubbish heap. Neither Hardy nor Sophocles has formulated a theory of causation.

Life is a series of accidental

relations ; effects proceed from causes not because this cause must produce that effect, but because the gods have willed that this or that shall come to pass. To understand Hardy's women we must see them in their relations to his conception of the gods that rule our destinies. rinthine

Each one of his books is a laby-

arterial system, and if we should cut a

woman from his pages and attempt to consider her as an isolated personage the book would bleed to death. Hardy stands rooted in his age, as Sophocles did in his.

A modern of moderns, the Englishman was

caught in the very centre of nineteenth century intellectual activity, and the waters of many streams have flowed into the deep of his thought.

42

The last

THOMAS

HARDY

was a century of brilliant generalizations in science, of daring philosophic conceptions ; a brooding, introspective century, beginning with Childe Harold, René and Werther, and ending with Tolstoi and Ibsen ; a century that produced on one hand those prophets of chaos, Schopenhauer and Amiel, and on the other the Emersonian paean and the sublime synthetic vision of Herbert Spencer . From this

tangle

Hardy

mournful conclusions.

has

drawn the

most

A blind, omnipotent, non-

moral force sways the affairs of men .

Fate, to which

the Greeks, in the current polytheistic belief, gave a local habitation and a name, in the Englishman's pages goes unswathed , unnamed , unnamable ; dwells in infinite spaces, nowhere, everywhere.

It is subtle,

unappeasable, and rules with a knout . down here and raises us there. nothing.

It strikes

The individual is

Law flows, and the human débris flows

with it.

In "The Mayor of Casterbridge" this conception of Destiny, of the nothingness of man and of the utter indifference to human affairs of the powers that rule, is worked out with supreme art.

It holds

the same place in fiction that the " Edipus Rex" does in dramatic literature.

Nemesis , chance, disillusion

are the reigning conceptions in this 43

great book.

FORTY

IMMORTALS

There are no " bad " characters .

From the history

of Michael Henchard and those involved with him in the mesh of pain woven by the blind powers we rise in a fury against the forces that dominate our lives .

The present presents itself to us as an endless

past, where dwells a Gorgon, the Irrevocable . clanking of chains is heard .

The

Life smells musty.

Actions are mere fungi . Henchard is a good man, as the world goes .

For a

fault committed in youth while drunk he is hounded through the years by an unappeasable Nemesis , who works

a vengeance

offense .

of all proportion to

out

his

Each action but the more completely in-

sures his ruin .

The Furies pluck him from place

and power, roll him in the dust, lash him into shreds. The man he befriended overthrows him in business and marries the woman he loves.

In his old age,

despised, neglected , driven from the town a gibe and byword, he dies alone, cursing himself and all his ways.

upright and

Yet this man, like Job, was

feared God .

Fate

broods

over

all.

Everything

Event proceeds from event.

Trivial

freighted with tragic consequences .

is

orderly.

actions

are

But there is

never a moment when Henchard could have arrested his doom ,

To do so would have required free will 44

THOMAS

and omniscience.

HARDY

And in Hardy's view man has

neither. Into this web of chance his women take their logical places.

They never dominate.

are ordered for them.

Their lives

They are stray angels in

bonds who stand forever in mortal fear of losing their reputations .

Social law is everywhere in con-

spiracy against their souls. loyal, but of necessity.

They are fickle and dis-

To be loved is woman's one

aspiration, and she is carried along on the stream of her impulses with slight regard for the object of her desire.

Physical propinquity

is

sufficient to

arouse her emotions. Elfrida Swancourt, in " A Pair of Blue Eyes," loves four men in rapid succession, troubles her very little.

and her disloyalty

Like almost all of Hardy's

womankind, she is in love with love, not with her lover.

She is a female Edgar Fitzpiers, the hero in

"The Woodlanders, " who loves three women at one time.

Yet for all Elfrida's vacillations, she is a beau-

tiful creature, a true woman, sinned against by the gods, but never sinning. It follows logically that Hardy sees no distinction between "good" and "bad" men and women. adjectives

express

relations,

not things .

These Viewed

from the standpoint of ultimate consequences, a bad

45

FORTY

action may be good . things good.

IMMORTALS

There is a germ of evil in all

Moral principles are merely matters of

time, place and circumstance .

All virtues are ex-

quisite vices ; all vices are virtues performed at an unpropitious moment.

A " good " woman is a legal

fiction-a legislative invention.

There are good or

evil circumstances ; no good or evil women. "a portrait of a pure woman ."

Tess is

She was "taken"

twice, the first time because of her ignorance, the second time because her family needed bread . the second instance the dilemma is clear-cut :

In Was

she to send her family to the devil or go herself? She chose herself.

If this was not a "good" -nay,

sublime-action , then we must recast the sacrificial

code . What judgment, Hardy inferentially asks, shall we pass upon the Power that picks out these women with the brittle souls, these vessels of emotion , and damns them with their very virtues? Woman is the supreme illusion.

She beckons on

to a divine world, and in trying to attain it men waste their lives and build the house of pain.

This

disillusionizing spirit is everywhere present in the Wessex Novels .

Humanity never attains.

morning of life we dress for a feast. petual postponement .

In the

But it is a per-

In the evening of life we sup

46

THOMAS

HARDY

on the memory of what might have been.

We are

stripped of our last few rags and prepared for the tomb.

In that remarkable but little-read book, “ The

Well-Beloved," the whole mechanism of illusion is laid bare.

A man is doomed to pursue for sixty

years the Ideal which he believes resides in woman. It leads him from form to form .

As he is about to

clasp it, it darts away and embodies itself otherwhere, and beckons him on again. Release from the anguish of everlasting pursuit comes only with the extinguishing of all passion , when the intellect, released from the slavery of the imagination , emerges in a calm survey of its feverish and futile past. The trivial and incidental often decide the fate of the heroines of the Hardy novels . and “incidental." no meaning . climaxes,

few

I say "trivial"

But to the seer these words have

In real life there are no worked-up dramatic

These

moments.

latter ,

when they do occur, are often trivial, and of less importance in the evolution of character than ordinary events, unnoticed and disregarded .

In "A

Pair of Blue Eyes" it is not the episode of the elopement of Elfrida and her love in itself that wreck the lives of the three principal characters . cident connected with the episode .

It is an in-

In " The Return

of the Native" it is Eustacia Vye's momentary inde-

47

FORTY

IMMORTALS

cision in opening the door to let in her husband's mother which causes the death of that personage , the suicide of Eustacia, the death of her lover, and changes the subsequent career of the central male character .

A woman's mischievous

prank,

inno-

cent in itself, in " Far from the Madding Crowd," sets in motion forces which culminate in murder and insanity.

Even in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" the

climax is incidental-a mere culmination of things gone before, the momentary incarnation of the spirit of the drama.

Hardy's men and women thus stand forever in the shadow of an impending doom.

The trifles that

make up the day's round insinuate, hint of coming things .

Appeal is made to the imagination of the

reader.

Unity of mass there is always, but it is for

you to grasp .

A few swift touches -you must infer

the rest. Yet your inferences will be infallible. This foreboding prevision is incarnated in Eustacia Vye, the heroine in "The Return of the Native," Hardy's most remarkable feminine creation . The opening chapter is a description of Egdon Heath, which for sheer power has never been excelled in English literature.

This stretch of land, cursed

of God, grim, and breathing death in all its aspects, assails the mind of the reader like a live thing and 48

THOMAS

HARDY

settles down on him like an incubus of the night. He wonders if the sun will rise on the morrow ; whether spring will come again .

The dark hol-

lows on this heath rise at twilight to clasp the engulfing night as though it had a hatred of light. the daytime things

stand

out

In The

spectre-grey.

thickets are tangled blight, the roads highways of care.

Against this Rembrandt-like background rises

the figure of Eustacia Vye, who lives an almost solitary life in the very centre of Egdon.

The child

of "faded worth," breathing a Byronic despair , demanding all things, inconstant, imperious in her beauty, she but escapes from one set of hostile circumstances to fall into the jaws of another. nature of things, she can never be happy.

In the

Her mind

is a centre of centrifugal forces ; she is forever darting away from a welding centre .

She is one with

the heath that is her home and a child of a century that did not find its spiritual aliment .

She is self-

slain . Yet upon her the feeling reader will set the seal of his pity.

She did not will her nature into being.

She is a victim-one of the non-adaptables .

She

came from afar, and the waters of Lethe had not covered her before her entry here .

Eustacia Vye is

the exception among Hardy's women . 49

They are all

FORTY

born renunciants spiritual

IMMORTALS

perforce. She

Amazon .

But Eustacia

preferred

was

quiescence

a to

acquiescence.

It is thus that Hardy's women are woof and warp of his thought .

They are nothing in themselves .

They are merely corks on a current.

Like his great

Greek prototype, this seer and bringer of grim tidings surveys mankind and womankind from his imaginative height and delivers judgment . not to be.

It is better

Impotent days pass into bitter nights, and

all life is a vexation .

Overhead is the vast dome of

a grey nature ; beneath , insects that crawl to their appointed dooms .

Ruling both, an implacable Fate,

that neither chastens nor brutalizes, scourges .

50

but forever

SPINOZA.

I partake of the blood and brain and apocalyptic vision of Spinoza . born.

Our ancestor-souls were twin-

We were an inviolate One before chaos.

We

were root of the tree Ygdrasil and shoot from its highermost branches .

We were a single undimen-

sional atom in the eye of Brahma .

We looked into

the face of the I Am from Horeb with Moses.

We

were nailed to the Cross on Calvary, and feasted on our Dream at Weimar.

And maybe we were a part

of that ghostly world-apparition who ended his days at Saint Helena.

For where the Infinite is, there is Spinoza. God and the Infinite are not the same things. Spinoza and the Infinite are interchangeable terms. No one can utter the one word without thinking the other.

The Infinite may be only an attribute of God .

We do not know.

Or God may be only an attribute

of the Infinite . But the Infinite was an attribute of Spinoza. He was born a god of Comprehension . less was in him.

The time-

He was called the God-intoxicated .

But, rather , a god had become intoxicated in him, and through him—a god with eyes against whose glance faded all horizons, a god to whom Olympus 51

FORTY

IMMORTALS

was no more than Mont Blanc, a god who swooned in visions. Spinoza was not of the race of prophets. of the race of seers and supermen .

He was brother

to Æschylus , Shakespeare, Victor Hugo. these and more.

He was

He was

He was an artist emancipated from

the thralldom of sensibility.

He had purged him-

self of objects as objects. All objects are aspects of God .

All movement is

foam and spray of a super-phenomenal sea . acter is the illusion

of relations.

Matter

Charis the

blackened bulkhead against which the seas of change swirl and beat and gnash-and finally shall carry away.

Evil is a dam that raises the level of the cos-

mic spectacle .

The illusion of freewill is the crown-

ing triumph of Maya. All these conceptions are in Eschylus , speare, Balzac .

Shake-

All these things are in Spinoza.

Spinoza was a defiant and impenitent Orestes ; a Hamlet who built his house on the back of the Sphinx ; a Cain with a jeweled brand on his brow. His conception of God was the sublimest that has yet come into the world . "good."

God is " evil " as well as

It was the daring thought of Pantheism.

There is only one Substance, and everything is of that Substance.

God is a reveler ; God is wicked ;

52

SPINOZA

God is a murderer ; God is a traitor ; God is cruel. He was Christ, Borgia, Cleopatra and Saint Francis of Assisi ; Shelley and the Marquis de Sade ; Attila and Tolstoy.

God is Ormuzd and Ahriman , Belial

and Jehovah.

God is earthquake, pestilence , famine,

love and hate.

Blasphemer ! thou who dost divide thy God into halves . All .

Blasphemer ! thou who dost say God is not

Blasphemer ! thou who dost not worship evil

as well as good.

There is only one God, and He

reigns undivided and equal in the atoms of Sirius as well as in the atoms of the body of Messalina . Spinoza was the supreme pontiff of Understanding.

Humans judge.

Gods understand.

Humans

divide the Infinite, naming this good, that ill ; this big, that little.

Gods see processes only.

Their

visions span the constellations and solve the atoms. That mighty flambeau in the brain of Spinoza lighted up the world around him.

He might have

used it to fire a cosmos , but he was not a Nihilist. He might have used it to torch courts and kingdoms, but he was not an Anarchist.

He might have set in

flames the rotting sanctuaries of greed and priestcraft, but he was not a propagandist. It was a torch of ether.

Each atom in the flame

was a sun without heat. It lighted up the abysses of 53

FORTY

Being.

IMMORTALS

Its beams were scalpels .

He brought into

the world neither peace nor a sword .

He brought

Comprehension .

And across that flame, as across a mighty screen, there was played for him the comedy of Time— Time unfolding its worlds ; Time folding them up again ; Time with its witcheries of change ; Time with its revels and masques ; Time with its orchestra of atoms ; Time with its ironic enormities . His brain was the caravansary of the Infinite.

It

was the Mecca of all pilgrim thoughts from strange cities .

All streams, springs , brooks, came to that

ocean to be absorbed and eternized . there to be sublimated .

All facts came

All emotions and griefs

sought the transports of euthanasia in that temple. All matter, impregnated with the instinct for the Infinite, dissolved in that menstruum. To him Isis unveiled, and the breasts of Aphrodite rang hollow against his knuckles, and Medusa crumbled at his gaze and the Eumenides turned to pallid statues .

All lapsed in him crowned with

supersight. All lapsed in him.

The thunderous footsteps of

the gods died away on Olympus.

The bearded

Jehovah of the Jews hid his lightnings. in Asgard were hushed.

The cabals

Prometheus broke from 54

SPINOZA

his rivets in the Caucasus and faded in that immemorial dawn .

All lapsed in him.

All the giant

constellations of the human imagination were extinguished

in

the

gigantic

bands

of light

that

streamed from the Apollonian soul of Benedict de Spinoza. He was guilty of the strange heresy of impersonality.

Monstrous heresy in a world of personal in-

terests !

His business lay with the Infinite .

He often forgot to

often forgot that he was living. eat.

Ideas were real.

Number was real.

He

But his

clothes, his porridge-bowl, his body were illusions . Was he a personality

Was he a body or an orb? or an absolute?

Was he the transitory phenomenon

called Benedict de Spinoza or a Consciousness with a million million facets ? He was absolute, orb and Consciousness . the sublime race-renegade. order to live.

He was

He abandoned life in

He rubbed the breath of his person-

ality off of his crystal Vision . with a cord that fell from

He hanged himself etheric heights .

looked into the ocean within

and

plunged

He with

hosannas. Jason

went

forth

to

find

the

golden

Spinoza stayed at home and found it. from the Holy Grail each day. 55

fleece.

He quaffed

That monstrous

FORTY

IMMORTALS

vegetation that we call the emotional nature bent and broke under the colossal step of this Titan. was his passage to power.

sublimation of his emotions. heart.

It

Freedom was to him the He put an eye in his

He laid down for the world the mathematics

of liberty.

He gave us the sublime algebraic form-

ulas of the way to godhood.

His Ethics is the BaedIt is the Marseillaise of

eker of the human soul. spiritual liberty. Fate is God. breath.

Man is a wisp in the sirocco of God's

All life is a predestination .

To weep, to re-

gret, to pray, to hope, are weaknesses , blasphemies. Can you change the order of the Everlasting ? you suborn the Eternal ? orable ?

Can

Can you bribe the Inex-

Can you add a personal , private link to a

Chain that is of infinite length ?

Can you cozen

the Mystical Will ? Man, the tragic comedian, less than a sun-midge, a little more than a nothing, passes through the brain of this serene god , and to him all the world is become a phantasmagoric shadow-play, mathematically precise, stamped with a rigid fatality.

“Merely a spot, an illusory play of shadow and light on the breast of the Transcendent One," sighs Spinoza as he turns with majestic calm toward the Infinite and merges his soul with the Immanent Will. 56

ARTHUR

SYMONS :

AN IMPRESSION .

It is the fashion of the "viriles"-to coin a word -to

stigmatize the poetry of Arthur

Symons

as

"decadent" and to class that poet of exquisite sensi99 All those who turn away bilities as a "decadent ." from the illusions, the brutalities, of active life and seek their aliment within are assailed with epithets . The outside world , engaged in its incessant rag-picking, looks with disdain upon the dreamer ; when he is not a ninny he is a renegade . Who is this god of action of the Occident who is incessantly calling for worshippers ?

What has the

world for its labors ; what meaning is there in this world-tragedy of which Want is the prologue and the Grave the epilogue ?

"Act ! act ! or be damned,”

cries the world .

Higher and higher rises the fanfare of action in these days.

To Do is God and not to have done is

to placard oneself a failure . ble,

alone

are

worth the

The visible, the tangitrouble .

Poised

over

chaos , man , horsed upon the sightless couriers of his will, hurtles forth, excoriating the atmosphere with The Promised Land lies

hoarse cries of expectancy. just around yon bend ! fulfilment of Today !

Tomorrow must see the

Little does he know that each 57

FORTY

IMMORTALS

sweep forward but carries him farther away from his object, and that each act of his but the more completely insures the loss of the thing he is seeking. His Eldorado exists , but it is a state of mind, and cannot be attained by either forward or backward plungings , but lies quiescent in the depths of the spirit.

Beneath the pomps of action the time-rat gnaws ceaselessly; and all additions are but subtractions viewed from the other side. much as it appears to add.

Action takes away as

I lift a weight with bor-

rowed force, and all I possess of material goods shines with a borrowed light.

The less I expend on out-

ward things the more I have within.

At the birth of

each man the gods ladle into the vessel of his soul his allotted life-force.

Shall he keep it at home or

let it waste away through the sluices of sense and have it return to him slimed and stagnant ? Throughout all of Symons ' poetry there is displayed this hatred of action , this maenadic whirl of things, this avaricious doing.

In no single poem is

it expressed ; rather is it a spirit that pervades all his works.

A lofty soul-a Rossetti , a Swinburne, a

Verlaine, a Symons-is born into the world, in an age that is glued to the particular.

His eye sweeps

heaven and earth in a single penetrative glance58

ARTHUR SYMONS: AN IMPRESSION

that glance that alone can dart from the soul of genius.

Before its look the wrappings of the mate-

rial world fall away. bare to its gaze.

The springs of action lay

These endless futile pacings to and

fro in the world of sense appeal for interpretation . Life takes on a mottled appearance ; every action is but a death-token, a useless expenditure of force. Where does the individual belong in these endless tides of being?

At what point shall the soul debark

and in what material stuff shall the mind incarnate Or , why debark at all ?

Why insulate men-

tal activity in space and time?

Why quit the real

itself ?

world of spirit for a world of shadows ?

Who orders

him forth to run the gauntlet of life ?

An instinct

which he will renounce ;

an urge which he will

throttle. At this psychologic moment there is born the spirit of egoistic idealism.

Thenceforth the poet

will substitute ideas for things, doubting if there be things other than ideas ; holding firm to the dreamworld as the one thing substantial .

If he debouch

now and again from his cloud-capped towers to survey that world where gew-gaws pass for treasure, it is only to return to his own country more than ever convinced of its beauty. In this spiritual palace the hard-and-fast world 59

IMMORTALS

FORTY

gradually transforms itself ; the solid and substan tial sways and reels and rends its moorings.

The

stars, the sun, the mountains are dressed in the colors of the mind, and Orion rises beneath the scalp.

The senses no longer announce to the soul. a

There is

usurper

on the

throne

of life

It is now the soul

thenceforth shall not abdicate.

that regards the world in colors of its

Matter is crucified . In Symons ' worship

sound

own.

It

and passion .

Life is a diaphanous web.

poetry there is, too , that delirious

of beauty

decadent.

color,

object in

drenches its

who

that

has

been

stigmatized

as

It is in reality an aesthetic Neo -platonism

that beholds Beauty as an Idea independent of the object in which it is reflected . hidden in the soul ether-clear.

and

It is an eternal form

streams upon the world

Upon a background of nothingness it

paints a gorgeous universe .

It lends the odor in the

flower, the hues of the sunset, and when the soul it has named as its own dreams of women it enters the universe of Love, where it laves in ideal passions. I drank your flesh, and when the soul brimmed up

In that sufficing cup, Then slowly, steadfastly, I drank

Your soul ; Thus I possessed you whole.

60

ARTHUR SYMONS: AN IMPRESSION

Thus sings Symons.

It is the poetry of Pantheism

-the apotheosis of soul and flesh.

Because of this

absolute belief in the reality of the inner lifewhich is everywhere the dominant note in Symons' poetry ; because of this supersensuous view of the real , the smallest personal action is laden with a significance which is not present to the ordinary observer, with with his his eye for "facts ."

To behold a beau-

tiful woman is not only to see her with the eyes of sense but with the eyes of the spirit as well.

She

dissolves at the fairy touch of thought and

runs

molten into the spirit, filling the alleys and channels of his mental matrix, simultaneously lighting up his higher thought, sending forth his soul to brood in melancholy meditation on the decay of beauty and the evanescence of love.

The dolorous strain in Symons ' poetry is not the cry of anguish that proceeds from the disillusions of experience.

It is not the cry of Job smitten

with boils and demanding the revocation of the irrevocable ; rather is it the cry of the stoic soul who has realized in thought the agony of the world and has imaginatively drained the goblet of life to its lees of pain ; a Leopardi , who sits at home and listens to Sorrow and Care sweeping the strings of his soul.

He need not walk forth, for he knows in-

61

FORTY

IMMORTALS

tuitively that events will tally with his thought and life but verify his divinations.

What joy is left in all I look upon ? I cannot sin , it wearies me.

Alas !

I loathe the laggard moments as they pass ; I tire of all but swift oblivion .

The man of action detests analysis .

Full-blooded

and booted, he hurls himself at his object and devours it, passing on to sate a new hunger elsewhere. He is an unconscious egotist and his wants are alone the measure of his rights .

In the world he has

created the ideal melts like wax in the fires of expediency ; he constructs moral codes en passant.

He

will neither stop to dissect the basis of his wants nor the justice of his code . beginning of the end.

To do so would sound the Conscience would prick and

self-complacency become self-objurgation.

Of the latter form of self-depreciation Symons has given us some remarkable instances.

A hatred of

his finite personality pervades all his poetry. dissects himself with knife and scalpel.

He

He has

grown to hate his lower instincts , passions and desires .

That he is linked to the vices of race and is 62

ARTHUR SYMONS: AN IMPRESSION

the victim of those rending conflicts common to the human being is for him a profound tragedy.

His

transgressions are magnified and judged impersonally by the higher spirit that dwells within him. From this spiritual Olympus he sees his pettier self caught in the net of evil ;

his body,

willy-nilly,

plunged into the stews by lower impulses which the ages have erected into a stratified hierarchy.

This duality of being, this vision of the self by the Self, is the motive for one of his most beautiful poems, "The Dogs ."

The "dogs" are the desires

that assail him, the baying hounds of the instincts that are forever tugging at the leash of inhibition . These impulses are always upon him, and in spite of his present negation of them he knows intuitively that one day his soul shall be their meat .

He rises in

a fine mystic strain , which recalls Rossetti at his best, to a perception of the supersensuous world and cries to his guardian angels to succor him in his battle ;

his

soul, in its transcendental

flight ,

has

passed into the upper white lights of spiritual illumination and seeks cleansing at God's very throne ; looking down, he sees his desires assembling for a new assault, and he asserts again in closing that they will yet rend his spirit .

63

FORTY

IMMORTALS

My desires are upon me like dogs , I beat them back, Yet they yelp upon my track ; And I know that my soul one day shall lie at their feet,

And my soul be these dogs' meat ! Of such is the poetry of dreamy introspection. The man of action oozes life ; the dreamer absorbs it.

Action exhibits only the profile of the soul ; to

see the inner self, full-length and face to face, one must retire to the adytum of the temple.

To behold

the spirit of life one must live the life of the spirit. On the gloomy background of the panorama of the world the poetic dreamer rises, gaunt, eyes laden with veiled fires.

He stands gestureless, and domi-

nates the world through an omnipotent sixth sense. The material universe passes through his brain and is sieved in the process.

The human drama is not a

drama of things , but a drama of rapidly changing relations, darting snake-like currents of being on which mosaics of flesh and blood unite and dispart. To stigmatize the poets who possess this wonderful vision as " decadent" is the shriek of an age that is spiritually impotent, an age that must logically believe

Kipling

its

greatest

greatest novelist.

64

poet

and

Sabatini

its

VICTOR HUGO : THUNDER-GOD ,

Save perhaps Walt Whitman

and Shakespeare,

no poet of any century possessed a vaster imagination than Victor Hugo . subtle, tenuous

and

Shelley's imagination was

gained

through its very limitations .

in luster

and

glory

With Shelley one may

die of ecstasy and be blasted by light from etheric suns, but one is never lost. In Shakespeare, Whitman ann Hugo one may be lost utterly.

In these titanesque minds the infinite

put its sightless logic.

With them you are lost un-

less you know the highways over the constellations.

The brain of the scholar, of the savant, absorbs the culture of men. seums.

It is fed in libraries and mu-

The brain of the poet absorbs the culture of

the Time-Spirit itself .

The imperial imagination of

Victor Hugo penetrated the pores of the infinite, and on the finite world it acted like a giant suction valve.

His culture, like the culture of the greatest

geniuses, was a miracle of transubstantiation .

Until it reaches the alembic imagination of the poet and seer, the universe is vegetative . Hugo seethed, and he made all nature seethe with 65

FORTY

him .

IMMORTALS

Whatever Leconte de Lisle looked at, died ;

whatever Victor Hugo looked at, lived .

The acade-

mic tape measure failing to reach around his form, they

have

said

that

he

lacked

unity,

restraint,

measure. He had the unity of Niagara, the restraint of lightning, and the measured motion of the earthquake. When the capon looks at the eagle, it no doubt believes the eagle insane. The only limit that the mind of Victor Hugo knew was death, and that, too, was to him a limitless limit,

a lure, a promise.

Whoever believes that

chaos has its laws will understand Victor Hugo . Whoever believes that there is a discoverable unity in existence will never understand him.

The passion for unity is a symptom of fatigue. Hugo never tired of diversity. ence.

He reveled in differ-

Life with its torrential and eternal multipli-

cation of forms satisfied , and would have satisfied throughout an eternity, that gluttonous soul , and his passion for God was a craving for partnership . sought out God in order to find His secret .

He He,

Victor Hugo, craved to make atoms, stars, hurricanes , Utopias, hells and Shakespeares . Since Prometheus had Man ever such a glorifier ? Was genius ever so worshipped ? 66

Hugo's hero is the

VICTOR

Human Soul.

HUGO :

THUNDER-GOD

The evolution of the human mind

was the evolution of God.

Mind was the pontoon

that carried man from age to age. the aeroplane that

carried

The Ideal was

man to the

mystical

Hugo's brain was a portable universe.

He was

Mansion in the Skies.

always big with God

and Man .

He

himself the knight-errant of the race.

constituted All his life

he stood sword in hand at some moral Thermopylae. His arrogance was the arrogance of a Jupiter. was melodramatic ; but so is God .

He

He raved and

stormed and ranted ; but so does the Jehovah of the Jews, in whose likeness he was uttered .

His books

are a carnival of words , but they have at their best the sovereign solemnity of the "I Am" of the Lord . The flaming veil of day, the somber drop-curtain of night, all are glorified . Pagan

and

Christian .

He is Pantheist, Deist,

He

marshals

atoms

and

epochs, thunders and Cæsars , battlefields and hovels before our eye with the gesture of a man who was the director-general of a Cosmos . In

his

hands

language

became

incandescent.

Words were fennel-rods whence this Titan drew a creative fire.

Words explain everything.

is Nature's sacred syllable Om. feelings aspire to be words.

67

The poet

All thoughts and

No thought or emotion

FORTY

IMMORTALS

can be completely realized until it becomes crystallized into a word, a phrase, an epigram, a poem . To name a thing is to isolate it, confer on it a soul, give it entity.

If names, words, language did not

exist, it is doubtful whether number would exist. Words are worlds, and Hugo sat down and wept because there were no new verbal assonances to conquer . From sound he squeezed blood

and light

and

tears ; with the cymbals of syllables he struck crashing preludes, passionate intermezzos and tortuous postludes .

There are sentences in Hugo's pages that

are trumpet-calls from trans-stellar Sinais.

There

are paragraphs that are fulgurant fanfares of sound -nothing more .

Sound turning somersaults and

becoming light and lightning. into

auroras

sulphureous

and

sibilant

anathemas,

Vibration changed

twilights,

dissolved

fused

into

into

vaporous

innuendos. Victor Hugo was the Wagner of words.

Had Victor Hugo a religion? Had

Goethe ?

Had Wagner ?

Had Shakespeare ? Genius

religion, as that word is generally used. cient unto itself. hell .

needs

no

It is suffi-

It sees into hell ; it sees through

It sees into heaven ; it sees beyond heaven .

The plummet of its thought sounds all bottoms. 68

It

VICTOR

HUGO :

THUNDER-GOD

penetrates the soul of the atom, weaves itself into the mystery of the sea, and vicariously lives the life What dogma shall genius

of seer and murderer.

hold when all dogmas come to it for interpretation? What has genius to do with belief when it is conscious of miracle and mystery only? Has God a religion?

Does He believe in Himself?

God falls from grace at each minute .

He repented

of Adam and lost faith in Himself on the cross"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?” The religion of genius, like that of God, is to participate in whatever is

to partake of existence, to

Genius cannot sin ; it can do no wrong.

vitalize life .

The passion for experience knows no morality.

It

absorbs and it emits. The mind of the genius is a matrix.

Verlaine and

Christ, Hugo and Napoleon are equals in the realm of the imagination . Sick in his impotence , Victor Hugo, in a divine rage, bespattered his God. of monotony.

He accuses Omnipotence

The words are put in the mouth of

Zoïlus, but the thought

( and the words )

is the

thought of Hugo .

Charlatan ! man's buff. called life .

Have done with this game of blindWe are sick of the eternal humbug For once and for all, let us tell the 69

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Almighty some facts about Himself.

His work has

neither beginning, end, nor middle.

His imagina-

He repeats himself eternally.

tion is exhausted .

He wrote himself out after the first seven days . night

Winter and summer ; death ;

storm

and

sunshine .

and

day ;

Eternal

birth

and

repetition !

Eternal boredom ! Each thing is made in the pattern of some other thing.

The moon looks like an orange.

looks like a hedgehog . pent.

The river looks like a ser-

No invention anywhere .

nation everywhere.

The tree

Sterility and stag-

Motion itself is an illusion.

Human beings invent strange perversions of natural instincts to bless themselves with new sensations . They die of ennui. setting us crazy.

The eternal blue of heaven is

We know hope to be a liar , and

despair is as stupid as death .

There is, indeed , only one puzzle : Why is anything ?

And if God exists , of what use is He ?

does He exist ? for us.

Why

There are only three dimensions

Two and two- will they forever make that

stale four?

God , if thou wouldst divert us, invent

ten dimensions for us.

Point us the way to some

marvelous planet hidden beyond our telescope in your wrinkled ether that we may emigrate there, bag and baggage, and refresh our bored brains and

70

VICTOR

HUGO :

THUNDER-GOD

Or fabricate for us the unimaginable, the

hearts .

unguessable, the new macrocosm and the new microcosm.

Even we have invented marvelous myths and Canst not thou do as much in thy

fairy stories. omnipotence ?

If not, raffle off thy stale wonders to the monkeys , O God.

We have outgrown thy nursery wonders.

Have done! Pose !

Have done!

Pose !

Pose !

That is the cry that has

eternally assailed the savage incursions of genius into the empire of the forbidden and its assaults upon the ramparts of the conventional God.

Swine ,

cows, hens and goslings never pose. But they believe that the eagle perched upon its rock for a flight into the azure and the lion erect, expectant, do .

The

critical Poloniuses dispose of the satanism of Baudelaire, the trumpetings of Hugo, the Don Juanism of Byron, the Protean attitudes of Heine, the kaleidoscopic multi-incarnations of Wilde with the word "pose." It is a judgment writ in Liliput. Genius without pose is not genius . becomes self- conscious. to be acting a part.

All grandeur

All superior beings seem

What is called pose in genius

is the manifestation of multiple and contradictory personalities.

The

simple, 71

logical,

cut-and- dried

FORTY

IMMORTALS

minds whose thoughts , emotions and life-development have been surveyed by their ancestors , and of whom they are merely a sparkless increment and not a vital development, are puzzled before the myriad masks that genius wears .

They have the look on the

face of a cow before the changing colors of the dawn. Against Hugo as against Shelley they have hurled "Blasphemer !" pheme !

As though the mind could blas-

As though a thought could be impious !

As though the brain could ever do wrong ! human mind invented God ;

The

the human mind is

privileged to kill Him whenever it pleases.

There

is only one blasphemy of which the human mind is capable—that is, to exclude from it any thought that knocks for entry, said Herbert Spencer. Genius is never so sublime as when hurling its anathemas against the walls

of Heaven.

Lucifer

marshaling his hosts against the Lord ; Prometheus launching

his

thunderbolts

from

the

Caucasus

against Jupiter ; Cain with imprecatory fist pointed at the stars ; Lucretius canceling God in the soulless atom ; Flaubert ramming the snouts of all the credulous into the trough with St. Anthony's pig ; Shelley prying Christ from his cross and hurling him into the ditch ; Nietzsche trying to drag Dionysus onto the throne of God until the blood vessels in his brain

72

VICTOR

HUGO:

THUNDER-GOD

burst ; Baudelaire placarding the courtyard of heaven with litanies in praise of Satan ; Victor Hugo posing as Zoïlus, bespattering his God : How does this compare with the sanctimonious, buttoned-up air of a Pecksniffian race of swine ?

73

WILLIAM BLAKE

I. William Blake rose to the ultimate of the human imagination.

They accuse him of " anachronisms ."

There are no anachronisms in Eternity. proportion." nite .

"He lacked

There are no proportions in the Infi-

"His metaphors were mixed."

All images

blend and are interchangeable in the Fourth Dimension. No man who has ever lived has ever realized the meaning of the word Symbol as did William Blake. Mallarmé was an esoteric lapidary , a puzzle editor . Blake is comparable only to that Artist who created Chaos and the Human Imagination . was a madman.

In

They say he

But has any one said God was sane?

Blake there

are

mixed the

paradoxes ,

the

ecstasies , the invention, the artistry, the blindness , the

insight

and the

Dionysiac

diabolism

of the

Primal Artist. He wrought stupendous abstractions into monumental images .

His Inspiration was a Pegasus that

swallowed stars on its flight through the elements

74

WILLIAM

of Being.

BLAKE

With the fantastic and grotesque he con-

toured a cosmos .

He spurned Reason as an eagle

would spurn a ladder. He spurned ghastly, ghostly Unity for infinite, anarchic Variety.

For the Emperor of Emptiness

at the heart of life he put rebellious changelings. Blake was the Grand Recorder of unhappened facts.

He lived in Eternity.

His images lapped

the horizons of infinities.

The ravages of light and ecstasy in his brain left It was only in the vast

him a child at sixty-five.

solitudes of his imagination that he was populous. His prophecies were the pictured flame struck off by the simultaneous percussion of the Conscious and the Unconscious in his unorganized and primitive psyche . Circumstance,

which is the

sinister

Fatality, did not seem to exist for him. Holy Innocent of life .

crouch

of

He was the

Before Nietzsche , before

Whitman, before Wagner, he blazoned the Superman, and climbed, with a baby smile, beyond the ramparts of Good and Evil. A critic not yet out of his mental diapers said that William Blake put a brass band on Mount Sinai.

True, maybe .

But in that band Blake was

the ethereal Gabriel, and his trumpet blew forth 75

FORTY

IMMORTALS

suns and stars and shattered the ouposts of Space. Rather, he sat upon Mount Sinai with a golden Harp , and stung the nostrils of the dead with the wild music of Life . Blake was a divine, a sinister gap in the consciousness of the race ;

a between-time in human

sanity ; a glimpse of the Valhalla of Poets—a vista of some supra-mundane Reality intercalated in our earthly illusions . From " The Songs of Innocence" to "The Prophetic Books" is the evolution of Queen Mab to Prometheus , with Mab always apeep from the eyes of the Light- Bringer .

Some poems are written with

a golden pen on the wing of a fairy ; others are written with the sword

of Damocles

against the

walls of Heaven and Hell .

The supreme moment of this magic soul ( moving con furia, triumphantly and impenitently alive , spilling its

fiery

and

fulgurant

images

as it

moves

toward its bourne like precious blood from the o'erbrimming Grail) must be like all supreme moments of passion or ecstasy-a syncope, dithyrambic relief wherein all

a meaningless ,

objects

are fused ,

and consciousness itself dies in consciousness .

It

is the Soul tearing at the bars of matter ; the torrent of images gnashing at the granite ribs of Sequence 76

WILLIAM

BLAKE

and Space ; the o'erbulging creative Essence lashing its horizons of brass.

Blake ascends to the ecstatic

idiocy of the Sublime Discharge. Never had a poet or a mystic more completely fantomized the world around him. the familiar.

He volatilized

The street he lived on was a metaphor.

His body was a simulacrum.

Not by any process

of reasoning did he do away with the universe-to Blake, Reason was merely the logic of stupidity. He dissolved the things of sight and touch with the wand of passionate inspiration.

He was a New Sort

of Man, a Launcelot out of an unimaginable West . He was as abstract as Spinoza-a blossomy Spinoza, a

Spinoza

whose

geometrical

axioms

effloresced ,

whose "modalities " shimmered and throbbed with glorious images.

It would have been a sublimer experience to have been present at the making of the soul of William Blake than to have been present at the fabrication of a star . His mind was dominated by Image.

And the

Image was a vast synthesis, an evolved organism . There is a Beethoven in Blake

a Beethoven who

clung to the flying red cape of Mephistopheles ; a Beethoven who concluded his Ninth Symphony with a maniacal pizzicato . 77

FORTY

IMMORTALS

In reading Blake, put all accepted ideas of poetry aside.

His metre varies with the beat of his heart.

His rhythm is the rhythm of his unique personality. He glides from the form of poetry to the prose form with a beautiful nonchalance , as who should say , "To hell with you, professor ! "

He had a poetical

code and cipher of his own , like Walt Whitman, like all First Men.

Blake broke all metrical laws

with the same divine Grace that compelled Napoleon to break all social laws.

All First Men are born of

virgins.

come forth

Whence they

no

man

has

entered before them. Blake believed himself under the dominion of an Angel , Demon, or Genius. belief, but

Not merely a poetic

a tremendous truth to him.

In his

letters, in his everyday speech, he refers to this Archetype of himself. of genius First Men.

It is born-this supra-other

of the tremendous self-consciousness of They are so completely aware that their

work-a-day consciousness creations of themselves.

laps over into reflexive

It is mirror-magic.

sees more of itself than ordinary men . being than it can use .

Genius

It has more

It has more life, more aware-

ness than it can spend in procreation , artistic creation, or even in that beautiful rowdyism and roistering of, say, a Shakespeare or a Verlaine.

78

This sur-

WILLIAM

BLAKE

plusage becomes a beautiful mirage of the soul -a supreme reality. directed him.

Blake's Angel or Genius always

A myth ?

Not any more so than

Tom, Dick or Harry on the corner , who are themselves but solar phantoms, transitory shapes-but without a surplus of self. Fatality, Law, Karma conceived as Spirits ; Man the mummer and the ghost and the highly sensitized wraith of ancestral tendencies conceived as a partly glorified and partly devil-damned victim-this was Blake's superb Insight before Ibsen, Lafcadio Hearn or Maeterlinck.

He

Imagination with the

announced the godhood superb imperative

Stirner when the latter truth."

said :

" My

truth

of

of Max is the

In the pages of science one finds facts ; in

Blake's doctrine of spirits one not only finds the meaning of facts but a glorification of the protagonist of the fact-grubbing instinct— Imagination .

Matter desired wings, and it invented Blake . was Shelley's skylark.

He

His ethereal insanity puts to

shame the sanity of the race-the race with its stinkpots of common sense and Moloch Reason .

Where

does sanity get to , with its stinkpots and its Moloch ? The sanity of men I laugh at.

My pride of life

arises from having lived on the same planet with

79

FORTY

IMMORTALS

at least three insane men-Christ, Napoleon and Blake.

He was cursed -or blessed

with the gift of

infinite simultaneity of vision-that is, he saw the past, present and future, and all the forms with which they are stuffed, simultaneously and in all their infinite possibilities and potencies.

His stage

was peopled with all the characters in the Drama. If he had been born with blinders he would have been another Wordsworth or a Shelley ; but, without blinders, he saw the All and its content as one terrifying vibration prolonged in Eternity, circling in Dantean whorls throughout Infinity.

This is the

psychological cause of Blake's incoherence.

He was

cursed- or blessed- with the kind of brain broke Balzac .

that

The crush of images and the roar

of Time and the smoulder of chaoses and the travail of nebulæ is too great a burden for one brain to carry. ness .

Walt Whitman was saved by his robustiousBlake , more intense and inflammatory than

the great American seer, just escaped the sublime idiocy of Louis Lambert. To read the "Prophetic Books" of Blake is to be present at the recession of some stupendous tidal wave of matter and mind.

Here on the gnashing

and foaming and moaning beach of his conscious80

WILLIAM

ness

BLAKE

are wrecks of whole continents,

primordial

gods with grotesque skulls, and blasted Milky Ways that that measureless tidal wave had ripped from many heavens.

There are plans enough in these

books for a thousand universes.

When the Euclid

of the Stars dreams of newer cosmologies in newer dimensions he will find that Blake had foredreamed him. The iron hells and jeweled heavens of ancestral memory rode on the thundering ridge of that psychic tidal wave .

As Sin and Pity, Satan

and Christ,

Desire and Death, they walk the world of Blake, imaged analogues of infinite Experience, the cloistered ghosts of those iron hells and jeweled heavens.

William Blake more than any other poet who has ever lived in recorded ink and brush was the Dervish of the Imagination .

His ecstasy was a golden

plummet that sounded the bottomless abysms

of

myth and a winged steed that carried him beyond the heavens of Al Boraak.

His work is " the imaged

fiction of fabulous realities." To me, his mind is like the startled face of an esoteric fool or that mistless that is a baby's eye .

81

mirror

of Eternity

FORTY

IMMORTALS

II.

The Smithies of Wonder .

Anatole France has given for judges Irony and Pity. tribunal of ethics .

of Life,

They deliver decrees from the But on the throne of pure intel-

lect let us put Wonder and Mystery, giving into their hands for everlasting keep the waxen wand of Awe. Man is an errant mite blown from off the pinnacles

of

supra-cosmical

eyries

long

evanished,

mixed, foundered in the muds of matter.

Time

and Chance and the crude instruments of Circumstance work this mite to grotesque and shameful shapes .

But Time and Chance and Circumstance

are open-air workmen, they are artisans of the envelope, surface workers -for the soul of this casing of dust is inviolable.

The atoms of which we are

composed are trapdoors that lead to the smithies of Wonder.

In these smithies are forged in deliriums

of silence the rings invisible

universe

of vision that within

their

engather the

circumferences .

There labor, in the spiritual centres of the atoms , the bubble-blowers, the makers and dissolvers of the vague Beauty that runs through the morning, 82

WILLIAM

BLAKE

flowers at noon and is lost in the tenebrous hollows of the twilight . Irony and Pity we give for judges of our acts, but Wonder and Mystery shall we put on as golden veils to cover our fleeting souls. The origins of man, the phrases that mean nothing.

evolution of man There is an evolution

within an evolution, a process within a process, for, along with the extension of man's knowledge goes the extension of his Wonder.

All that he knows,

what is it besides the Sense of Knowing ? All that he has, what is it besides the Sense of Being?

Through

the open valves of the senses there flows in a world which

seems

infinite

extension ,

infinite

variety,

infinitely opulent ; but against the Innermost, pallid with amaze,

it dissolves

like snowflakes

on

vast

waters. The gradual growth of Wonder in the soul is like the inexorable advance of a slow flame that, springing miraculously from the conjunction of two atoms , advances along the wainscoting of the world, consuming the walls of the House of Familiar Things , destroying utterly and at last the dwelling we live in -burning up boundaries, domains, consuming the ground under our feet, leaving us suspended in “ the center of immensities, the conflux of eternities."

83

FORTY

IMMORTALS

We are vaguely conscious of a movement in the Void ; it is the great pendulum of Change hanging from a fabulous zenith ; each swing marks the passing of a cycle.

We are flung about in the mighty

siroccos of the Unknowable, unmoored, unleased, unallied, gleaming like gods in the spindrift

of

Wonder. Here, then, we find an outermost of our existence -an outermost that was and always will be an innermost ; a gate that swings both ways. In that ascension to and final abiding in the wonder-mood we have left behind us the rags and tatters of faiths and customs , the belief in good and evil .

At one single

blow the world of time and its stucco seemings are shattered ; at one step we return to the Primal Day. The world is then no more a world , but an evocation set in solitudes with horizons .

Each minute is a

tiny seashell resonant with the obscure mumblings of Eternity.

Now we know we are the Epics of

Wonder, and Time is but an incident of consciousness , an illusion of the brain .

Personality almost ceases in that imaginative upswirl that catches at the skirts of this enormous Mystery.

Personality is the illusion of those who still

live on angular planes .

The idea of God itself is

known at this height to be an angle of personality— 84

WILLIAM

BLAKE

the illusion of an illusion. "Where are we, then?" asks the startled groundling.

"Indeed , rather, where

are we not?" will be the reply of him who has come to realize the illusion of conscious appearance . Thought no longer exists for a being like William Blake.

Blake's

soul

winged

was

with

wonder.

There was sight without motion , feeling without emotion, growth beyond movement . Holy Innocent of poetry.

He was the

His personality was the

tool of Wonder and Mystery . Blake's was a simple nature .

Simplicity is akin to

madness because it is nearer unity-it sees far and deep , and drinks directly from the founts of Mystery.

The world is so completely and irretrievably

lost in the concrete, it has so carefully moulded of the secondary and incidental characteristics of creation a world within a world, that a poet who speaks directly of things as they are perceived by the mind not yet overlaid by the painted illusions of sight and not affected by the deadly automatism of routine is believed to have a touch of insanity.

All absolute

simplicity startles, is eccentric and bears about it the mark

of other-worldness,

when,

in

reality, it is

merely the reservation of the virginal mind in the bogs of matter, the perception of unity, mystery

85

FORTY

IMMORTALS

and wonder in the blinding fogs of this multiplied absurdity called Practical Life. Those simple, childlike songs of William Blake have the clarity of mere divine pronouncement , such as, " Let there be light"— a simple, stupendous imperative.

Blake's poems have the clarity of the eyes

of babes, the limpidity of sinlessness , the ecstatic gambol of virgin senses in first-wonder.

His mind

seemed made up of illuminated particles of matter. They who are in bondage to the familiar are still identified with the particles.

They who , like Blake,

are beyond bondage, who have taken for mistresses Wonder and Mystery, are the Luminant ; for the highest consciousness is intelligent light.

This wonder-sense can best be expressed by saying that the objects of the external world come to the brain winged, etherealized ; they are like fairies that brush by the windows of the soul, leaving pollen of light upon their panes. By prying we shall never find.

The more steadily

a thing is observed with the bodily eye the more its core-secret retreats.

Take one glance at the whole

visible universe and then suddenly avert the head, or bury the eyes in the hands, and lo ! something unutterable has brushed us . detail give us nothing.

Impressions of physical

The scientist observes the 86

WILLIAM

BLAKE

fish in water ; the poet, the wonder-smith, has seen more than a fish . twice.

Nothing will bear looking at

It is no fable that Life is only a chance word

that gives Mystery a kind of provisional definiteness . The brain that stands a-stare with Wonder is the first word and the last word in cosmic attitude.

87

EDGAR SALTUS.

Somewhere in that Never-Never Land of Lord Dunsany there is a dusty road that stretches from Here to There. figure.

Along this road there trudges a

From the fact that his clothes are ragged ,

that his shoes are split and that his face is a gray dead heaven in which are imbedded two big, black stars weltering in light you may infer that he is a Poet. A Lady, with a nimbus and a wand, incorporates herself out o' th' air and walks besides the Superfluous Being.

She is Fame.

You may know that by

the ironic grin in her eye. They talk.

And when Poet and Fame talk the

fairies and the demons listen and the solid old earth becomes such a garden as one sees in the Kingdoms of the Pipe. But the upshot of the fable is ( and I am not telling the story strictly on the level ) that Fame gives the Poet a rendezvous- behind his tombstone one hundred years from date.

Saltus !

Saltus !

In what storied urn of memory

reposed the word ?

In what sarcophagus of the past

had I laid that verbal corpse? 88

In what penetralia

EDGAR

SALTUS

had I met the man with that name?

At what Petro-

nius feast of intellectuals had I clinked glasses with that being ? The bandalettes slipped from a hidden face and the blood came surging back into petrified arteries , and eyes that I thought sealed opened wide , and great jewels fell from them that sang in words and formed themselves into daggers called epigrams . And Edgar Saltus rose out of his Pompeii.

Well ,

as a matter of fact, he had only been summering in Oblivion. There are three mysteries in American literature -the appearance of Edgar Allan Poe, the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce and the burial alive of Edgar Saltus.

It is fairly certain that the latter was pretty

comfortable in his grave ; and it is still more certain that

he

begemmed

his

coffin

with

prose

poems

scratched into the pine wood with worms- worms , which are the epigrams

of the sod .

Then, too ,

without doubt, he had his Théophile Gautier with him, his Baudelaire,

and

was fed from the am-

phora of those two angelic ghosts , Leconte de Lisle and Villiers de l'Isle Adam.

Here is an American that knows his language, that knows the

creative

and

mystical

power

of

words , that knows the phrase that kills and the sen89

IMMORTALS

FORTY

tence that is winged .

As exotic as Poe and Lafcadio

Hearn, his books should be called Pomp and Purple. A lyrical intellect, an implacable pessimist, a sublime snob, he stands aloof and alone in his work. His

contempt

things

and

disdain

is beautiful.

It is

of

"merely

a gesture

human ”

toward the

Infinite. This accounts for his unpopularity. none of the mob. is just sweat. it is a disease .

He will have

The sweat of everyday life to him

The life of the poor is not a drama ; The poor and the weary laden exist

no more for him than they did for Emerson . Whatever is not genius is dross . beautiful is right.

Whatever is

All life aspires to fiction.

mor is an attribute of God.

Hu-

Life itself is the conun-

drum of a Jester. His books take apart the mechanism of the quick. When he wrote "The Philosophy of Disenchantment " he was crowned by some one as " the Prose 99 of Pessimism. All is illusion in the

Laureate

worst of possible worlds-" so let us live in Paris." The characters

in

his

novels

of New

move like hallucinated automatons.

York life

There is a hero

in each book- Mephistopheles . Saltus is so great that he is unpleasant. unwholesome as truth.

He is as

He sees so far that his brain

90

EDGAR

SALTUS

cells must be made up of telescopes that gods in the Fourth Dimension use to study the humans in the Fifth Dimension. of immortality.

He is as uncanny as the thought And above all his work hangs the

irony of Brahma . His "Tristram Varick" is the greatest novel that ever came from the pen of an American—a fable, a philosophy and an enormous chunk of life.

It is a

tale of the pursuit of the Ideal by Man- and the end is a badly lighted room in the Tenderloin police station. He is on intimate terms with the gods and pals with the predestined criminals of all time-from Cain to the Borgias.

He plays hide and seek with

Nero , Tiberius and the Kaiser-he wrote this in 1906 in a chapter on hyenas (the hyenas are Caligula, Attila, Tamerlane, Ivan the Terrible & Co. ) : 66 ... The German Kaiser. Not long since somebody or other diagnosed in him the habitual criminal.

We doubt that he is that.

But we suspect

that were it not for the press he would show more of the primitive man than he has thus far thought judicious." But it is because of his style that he will live.

He

has said nothing new- because there is nothing new to be said.

His brain is as old as Buddha's or that 91

FORTY

IMMORTALS

of the author of " Ecclesiastes ." His style is the measured tread of his wisdom.

His sentences are cut

from the jewelled heavens in which he lives.

His

words drip into the next paragraph and form pools His crescendos flower in the air, and the

of images.

flowers remain there, frozen gardens.

One feels

him moving behind the page like a pontiff behind a huge, swaying curtain . He passes

no jolt.

There is no creak, no noise,

imperceptibly from Zeus to

Brahma, from Brahma to

Amon Râ

like

a sun-

walker shod in ether. The genius of Edgar Saltus is his masterly insincerity.

He doesn't believe in himself, in the people

he writes about, in the world he depicts , in you or me, or anything.

He is a balancer, a juggler, a Hou-

dini of phrases, a Gargantuan Capocomico who balances the Taj Mahal on his nose, the Alhambra and St. Peter's on his skull and tosses buddhas and bonzes, bibles and sultans in vast circles like eggs , precisely sure of never missing one, while the orchestra thunders Gates

a

of

Valkyrean

battle

Nowhere-an

charge

orchestra

toward

conducted

the by

the Furies.

But only the profoundly sincere in spirit can enter the Kingdom of Insincerity.

The Wildes , the

Chestertons , the Hunekers , the Anatole Frances, the 92

EDGAR

SALTUS

Shaws and the Renans are to the manner born. They may play battledore

and

shuttlecock

with

everything because they are everything—and nothing ; they have the frivolous, ironic gayety of Nature, that emits swallows and earthquakes and bluebells and pests and lunatics and fairies and passes on with a sublime indifference . Their imitators come along; then we see an elephant trying to play butterfly ; Bottom doing Puck's tricks.

Insincerity is the final sense of humor-it

is the laughter of the nihilist from the chimney of the House of Life, where he plays with the tomcats , the stars and the blind bats of chance.

Neither Molière nor Balzac sat in the Academy . Edgar Saltus must remain our forty-first Immortal .

93

JULES

DE

GAULTIER

1

I. Henri Bergson was one of the fashionable freaks of French philosophy.

He never

said

a foolish

thing—and never said a wise one. Jules de Gaultier, closely allied to the immortal group of the Mercure de France, and one of the few close friends of Remy de Gourmont , is the greatest living thinker in the world today. popular.

He will never be

His thought is aristocratic.

He will sieve

down to the public through innumerable Doctor Cranes and other secretaries and foot- servants to the Olympians .

He is nearly sixty and lives in the Côte

du Nord . It was, I believe, our great American Columbus, James Huneker, who first wrote about De Gaultier

1 on this side.

His name is heard more and more in

France. His books number about twelve.

He created the

word bovarysm in his book, "Le Bovarysm."

His

philosophy is named after the " Madame Bovary” of Gustave Flaubert, in whose great work he sees the ultimate wisdom . I here expound the thought of Jules de Gaultier as I react to it. 94

FORTY

Everything

that

Schopenhauer.

IMMORTALS

is

ultra-modern

comes

from

He completed the work of Kant and

inaugurated modernity. His "The World as Will and Idea" and his essays

were the

starting

points

of

Nietzsche, Wagner, Flaubert , De Maupassant and Turgenev.

Goethe himself admitted his debt to the

philosopher of Frankfort. sal.

His influence is univer-

His ideas dominate those who have never read

a page of his. modern world.

Schopenhauer is the

father

of the

He is a Columbus, as Kant was a

Copernicus. Jules de Gaultier stems directly from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche .

He is the author of five or six

volumes which are the most complete and the most masterly studies of the Life-Illusion that exist.

The formula of Schopenhauer, the great generalization of which everything was an expression, was "the Will-to-Live. "

Nietzsche's final generalization

was "the Will-to-Power."

De Gaultier's final gen-

eralization is "the Will-to-Illusion. ” These three generalizations are not antagonistic to one another.

Jules de Gaultier accepts both the

formula of Schopenhauer and the formula of Nietzsche and demonstrates that they are parts of a supremer generalization still : the Will-to-Illusion.

All

life is an expression of the will-to-live and the will95

JULES

GAULTIER

DE

to-power, but both the will-to-live and the will-topower depend for their very existence on the instinct The

to illusion that exists in every animate thing.

Will-to-Illusion, to unreality, to lie , is inherent in Movement

every life-movement .

itself

cannot be

conceived without it. Jules de Gaultier calls this universal truthtruth from which depend

among

mankind

a

those

other two truths, the will-to-live and the will-topower- Bovarysm, or the power that a being has of conceiving himself otherwise than he is (se concevoir autre qu'il n'est) .

Life is carried on by an act of the imagination perpetually repeated . self as he is not. same thing.

Every human being sees him-

An ideal and a lie are one and the

The life of

Madame

Bovary,

or the

instinct to romance, is the life, in one form or another, of every creature.

Error, irrationality, a per-

petual becoming, are the very bases of life.

From

the instinct to bovaryse , or to create the world as it exists

imaginatively,

tragedy of existence.

flows

all

the

comedy

and

It is the secret of history and

the secret of religions.

From the tragic viewpoint

we are all Hamlets and Madame Bovarys ; from the comic

viewpoint

we

are

all Malvolios

Quixotes .

96

and

Don

JULES

DE

GAULTIER

The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth ; that is , against the Real .

He shuns facts

from his infancy-from both his racial and individual infancy.

His life is a perpetual evasion .

acle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive.

MirThere

is no absurdity that he will not seek to perpetuate in order to escape the Dreadful Truth. fiction and myth. him free.

He lives on

It is the Lie Chimeric that makes

Animals alone are given the privilege of

lifting the Veil of Isis ; men dare not .

The animal,

awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because it has no imagination .

Man , awake , is compelled to

seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love.

From

Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie. Those few who pride themselves on their power to look the Real in the face without flinching are as thoroughly duped as the clod .

Schopenhauer, Nirvana.

to

Flaubert

escape the Real,

invented

a

sought relief in the Art-Lie.

Nietzsche took refuge in the

Overman .

Jules

de

Gaultier has built on the granite of the Real, or the True, a magical Palace of Perception, thus bovarysing himself.

But it must be said of Jules de Gaultier

that he is the first to glorify and divinize the Lie, and in his magic Palace of Perception he is a willing 97

FORTY

prisoner.

IMMORTALS

He is an Edipus

Edipus with wide-open

at

eyes.

Colonna,

but

He glorifies

an

what

Schopenhauer execrated and his philosophy is the golden dome that surmounts the edifice erected by Nietzsche.

He accepts life as an amazing frolic of

antithetical forces. He who sees the mechanism of the Game and enters

it freely with a bound

and

a

shout

and

a superb Dionysiac Yea, knowing from the first that it has no other meaning than what appears on its surface—such a person ( and such a one is Jules de Gaultier) may be said to have achieved the limit of human freedom. Reality has become a sport.

To him the war against Sometimes he is on one

side, sometimes on the other.

From his tent in the

clouds he contemplates the antics of man and the ruses of the Real.

He gives himself heartily to the

drama, and utters silently, and with what withering irony: "Thy will be done, O most admirable Dramaturge ! " "The world is my idea," said Schopenhauer . Jules de Gaultier has changed this axiom to "the world . is my invention." one.

That is his metaphysic, if he has

Imagination creates the Real.

Schopenhauer's

formula that man , by " dint-of-wishing," will in the long run become the thing he wishes to be ; Nie98

JULES

DE

GAULTIER

tzsche's command given to men that they shall endeavor to " surpass themselves," and Jules de Gaultier's dogma that all reality, social as well as cosmic, exists first of all as a figment in the brain and is externalized by a long series of trials and imitations, are at bottom the same.

It is a new cosmogony.

Man is himself a god, a

fabricator, and his workshop is in his skull .

His

brain is the loom of the Unconscious, and with the stuffs he weaves there he dresses the external world. Kant had already made man the inventor of Time and Space.

Jules de Gaultier makes him the in-

ventor of all that is, through the supremacy and dynamic quality of his imagination . God may some day become a Supreme Reality because man persists in the fiction that there is a Supreme Reality.

Here De Gaultier's thought links

itself with Hegel, who said God was not yet born. Life is, therefore, a perpetual exfoliation of the Real.

Everything first exists as a thought, a fancy,

a wish, a need in mind, either consciously or unconsciously, before it takes form and substance.

All

things are created in the manner in which Pygmalion created Galatea.

All the absurdities of dreamland

will some day be commonplaces.

The Imaginative

Will of man is the Artist par excellence, the Im99

FORTY

presario of the

IMMORTALS

world

comedy.

It

bungles

and

botches and strikes in the dark a million million times ; but it pays the penalty for its daring in the end by the complete and irretrievable externalization of its mental and emotional poses , and carries on the profound legend of Nemesis .

Don Quixote

ends by being Prospero- and Prospero ends by being Aristophanes and Heine.

The Real is the child

of our imagination , and when it stands before us in all its naked, menacing ugliness we rant and roar because the glory of the dream vanishes in the birththroes. Without this perpetual illusion life cannot be carried on.

The Ideal is the one thing needful .

the law of evolution .

It is the leit-motif of Change.

It is the mask of the forever-hidden Ironist . Ideal is the Brangaene !

Witch

It is

of the

Monstrous

World .

begetter

The

Brangaene ! of

alchemic

potions, torrential images, tumescent visions—and shabby realities ! The real world passes through the portals of sense and in the penetralia of the mind is deformed and modified by the endless deformations and modifications already enthroned there.

When it is reborn , it

comes forth glorified , bedizened, aureoled in the garments of the imagination .

100

So a Christ conceives

JULES

DE

GAULTIER

himself to be God and a Tolstoy assumes the manners of a peasant ; the soldier hearing the call to arms already sees himself as a newer Napoleon and beholds himself crossing Europe ; the middy just enlisted in the navy struts unconsciously up and down the deck as he saw Nelson do it in a picture book ; the youth who has his first speaking part given him by his theatrical manager conceives himself as a future Booth or Irving.

And it sometimes comes about

that auto-suggestion ends in complete realization and that the real is created by a fiction. There are two empires. Will

and

Idea ;

Schopenhauer called them

Nietzsche

personified

them

as

Dionysus and Apollo ; Jules de Gaultier has called them the Vital Instinct and the Instinct to Knowledge. Instinct wills , creates, carries on the work of the species .

The Intellect destroys, negatives , satirizes

and ends in pure nihilism .

Instinct creates life end-

lessly, hurling forth profusely and blindly its clowns, acrobats, tragedians and comedians .

Intellect re-

mains the eternal spectator of the play.

It partici

pates at will, but never gives itself wholly to the fine sport. tity.

It fuses with Instinct, but never loses its idenIt is eternally on the watch, for the ruses of

Instinct are uncountable.

It exists to rape the Intel-

101

FORTY

IMMORTALS

lect that has broken the shackles and escaped from the dungeons .

The Intellect, freed from the tram-

mels of the personal will, soars into the ether of perception, where Instinct follows it in a thousand disguises, seeking to draw it down to earth.

In this rise into the azure of pure perception, attainable only by a very few human beings, the spectacular sense is born.

Life is no longer good or evil.

It is a perpetual play of forces without beginning or end .

The freed

Intellect merges

itself with the

World-Will and partakes of its essence .

Life is

good because it is sublime. The great evils of existence , from this supreme height, give to the Intellect, freed for the moment from the mere act of living, the same pleasure that the most unlettered person derives from the woes of Hamlet, Lear, Œdipus and Phédra.

The grandeur

of the tragedy of man is the justification for life. "God" is glorified because he is like Shakespeare. The cosmos is an atelier.

Life is like a cinemato-

graph performance where a hidden Operator throws on the screen of Time a moving-picture show that lasts for an eternity. The Superman?

He is the man who participates

in life and watches his own antics with an indulgent irony.

He is the man who is both actor and specta-

102

JULES tor at once.

DE

GAULTIER

He is the man who commits all the fol-

lies of sentiency for the sake of the gesture and in order to analyze his sensations.

He is the man who

re-invents and reappraises himself each day;

one

who walks ahead of himself perpetually ; one who dances with joy on the catafalque of yesterday ; one who indulges every passion and is the flower of culture . He is Wagner rather than Napoleon . dhal.

He is Sten-

He is Jules de Gaultier.

II.

The Prospero of Philosophy.

Imagination is the radium of the psychic organism of man.

It is the fire-imaged ether in which his

practical life rolls .

It is the smoke,

curled

and

curved and graven to a thousand thousand fantastic shapes, which comes out of that old pipe-bowl , the human skull.

The person who shall write the history of the imagination shall have written the history of man. The human race moves to the music of the wings of

Chimera.

Logic

and 103

reason

themselves

are

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founded on imagination.

Our every act is done

every day as though it were done to last for eternity because we are forced by a law of the imagination, by the illusion of the present, to believe in the seriousness and necessity of that act. Jules de Gaultier's books are a glorification of the imagination.

He is the first thinker to give the

imagination its proper rank in the law of evolution. Indeed, he places it first, like the Hindoos, who make of Illusion the mainspring of all movement. But with this difference-that whereas the Hindoos deduce from the universality of Illusion a doctrine of despair, Jules de Gaultier finds in it a justification for life.

His is the philosophy of enchantment. The

Hindoos , tired of the cozening of the Imagination, dream of extinction, or quiescence in Nirvana. Jules de Gaultier sees in the evolution and perpetual cheat of the Imagination a divine sport.

His formula- which deserves to rank, if not out. rank, the few great philosophic formulas of all time -is that " man has been dowered with the power of conceiving himself as he is not." This law springs from the very essence of his nature.

If he could

conceive himself and the external world as they are, he would be an Absolute-hence he would not exist. But he is compelled to see himself and all things as 104

JULES

DE

GAULTIER

he and they are not because it is the law of psychic evolution.

Everything we desire or approach is

dressed in colors other than it really has and we spread over our own natures the same thaumaturgy. We glister the self with the oil of our pride and egotism.

We have a tattooed image of ourselves,

a tattooed, grandiose and ideal super-I that we strive to reach, to materialize, to eternize. The Hindoos have personified this Maya, the evil

genius of life.

instinct

as

Jules de Gaultier

calls it the bovarysing instinct of humanity, or the magical and unique power given to the human sensibility to create superb fictional escapes from Hellthat is, Reality. Like Aladdin, this great dreamer and thinker and seer rubs the lamp of his brain, and lo ! a universe is born in his own image, and the stars, like giant tops, are hurled on the ether by this playboy and made to dance to the dream of his own dreaming. Under the terrible light of his magic formula every truth looks like a fiction and every fiction looks like a truth .

Every evil, every lie, every super-

stition that has ever existed glistens and gleams and legitimizes itself as a co-ordinate part of a Whole whose horizons are lost in the Infinite.

To Prospero,

whatever is is dramatic or comic, or both, and there

105

FORTY

IMMORTALS

is no "lie,” no "truth" that does not do its part in this fantastic Show, which each one of us may conjure up in the vast auditorium of his mind if he but rid himself of notions of "good " and "evil," "true" and false," and wills to behold life as a sublime panorama of color, light and change. In the pages of Jules de Gaultier the Ideal is everywhere glorified not because it is true but because it is beautiful.

The Ideal, the eternal lure to Better

and Higher-the divine, fantastic Munchausen in our own blood-perpetuates life.

Put out those

mighty flambeaus of the race and mankind could no longer whirl on the ecliptic of Chance. tion—“ Progress ” —is

conditional

on

a

Evolu-

series

of

immanent errors ; and it is Error-or the Idealwhich if it does not make man free, does something greater : it makes him beautiful and futile—as beautiful as Prometheus and as sublimely futile as Tantalus and Sisyphus . It was Nietzsche who coined that phrase, "the superstition of ends."

In the eternity of time and

the infinity of space how can beginning, top or bottom?

there

be

end

or

Ends and beginnings

being superstitions of fatigued and uncourageous minds

an attempt to screen one's self from the

monstrous thoughts of never-an-end and never-a-

106

JULES DE

GAULTIER

rest-it follows that the universe has no meaning, life is unpurposed, undirected . meaning of life is life itself." God Atom.

Goethe said, "The Nietzsche called his

Goethe called his God Life.

Jules de Gaultier has conjured up his God from the vasty deep, and he calls it Chance.

At the heart

of the fairy spectacle of the ages he has put Chance, Hazard, the Unknown. of certainties.

The human race would die

It lives by its uncertainties .

Life is

fascinating because it is a gambler's game and each one is his own croupier.

Hope is the masque of

Chance, and the mystery of death fascinates because it is there we shall "take a chance," hazard other dimensions , other vicissitudes, or perchance become nothing, which is merely the sleep of the great god Chance. Jules de Gaultier is a new voice in the world .

He

calls us to the heroic life because life is a beautiful game.

He transforms the Vale of Tears into a great

open-air spectacle where each one may play any part by the simple ruse of conceiving himself to be other than he is.

He puts into the hand of the Spirit

of Evolution the standard of the Ideal not because it will lead that spirit anywhere in particular, but because the chants, the songs and the hosannas on the road are beautiful to the ear and the perpetually

107

FORTY

IMMORTALS .

changing scenery of the soul is healthful for the eye. And those of us who are sick, fatigued, drop in the dust?

No army stops marching because of those who

cannot

fight.

Besides , the

Theological

Hospital

Corps is always on the ground . Jules de Gaultier is for all time.

He is the first

thinker to affirm and glorify universal Error and Deception, the first-though Nietzsche played St. John the Baptist to De Gaultier

to put Error and

Deception in the rank of metaphysical facts, conditioning all existence on their billion billion protean phases.

He is indeed the Prospero of Thought.

"De quel alcool me suis-je saoule?" he asks.

On

the alcohol on which the human race has been intoxicated since its birth-the alcohol distilled in the brain, the eternal perjurer, the Imagination .

108

JAMES

BRANCH

The ironic-romantic thing in literature.

CABELL.

imagination

rarest

It is Puck flying across the uni-

verse with the wings of Lucifer. let at Gethsemane.

is the

Or it may be Ham-

Or Falstaff fighting drunk at a

convention of Bottoms, who , in a sense, are the Wardens of the Times. The imagination is a door to Eternity. is the life of Time in images . dox of the whole matter .

Romance

Irony is the final para-

The fusion of the three

is genius at its lordliest- Shakespeare , Æschylus, Cervantes, Nietzsche, Heine, Thomas Hardy.

It is

the final evolution of the artist, thus of the human race.

It may be called the Comic Calvary of man-

kind-the cream of a Jest. To speak Freudianwise, romantic irony is the Apocalypse of the deepest buried intellectual complex.

Hence its invariable satanic attributes .

The

romantic ironist revalues all our common currency . He demonetizes here, inflates there, leaving you suddenly very poor in spirit or as suddenly putting magical riches into the wallet of your brain-depends on the quality of your sensibility and the inflammability of your comprehension.

109

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Pontius Pilate, too , was an incarnation when he asked, "What is Truth ?"

Many hundreds of years

afterward Michel de Montaigne flung from the tomb his "What do I know?" Voltaire took up these enormous queries with his staccato " Why is anything ?" Here were three incarnations of skepticism. these quotations are not the end of thought. are the beginnings.

But They

For there remains the eternal

questioner himself, Man.

From these three queries

he breeds myths , the magical lies regenerative .

It is

a game within a game, for man is himself a myth, a fiction, something of a Prometheus , something of a Mad Hatter.

But he has a rare gift and a godlike.

It is the Will- to-Illusion . In a universe swept clear of certainties by Messrs. Pilate, Montaigne and Voltaire he builds mirages with the threads of his hopes , economic and religious castles in the air with the insubstantial bricks of faith, vast romping spaces with words.

It is not the

Truth conceived as Fact that shall set him free, but Illusion .

As Jules de Gaultier, the greatest of living

thinkers , has enunciated in his philosophy of Bovarysm, man by the unique power bestowed on him of conceiving himself as he is not creates his universe en passant. "What is Truth ?"

The world conceived as a

110

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

spectacle in which we are all actors, and in which genius is both actor and spectator . "What do I know?"

I know Maya- the Goddess

of Illusion- the scene-shifter and wardrobe mistress in the employ of Impresario Eternitatus, who has put on this ever-fading spectacle of life for reasons best known to himself. "Why is anything?"

Wilde attempted an answer

in his epigram, "The world was invented in order that we may argue about it. " enough.

It does not go far

The universe was invented to gratify an

æsthetic need in the brain of the Supreme Artist. It is a colossal romantic satire ; and the great human artist and actor are alone made in the image of the immanent Shakespeare-call him

Buddha

or the

Galilean, Sophocles or Aristophanes , Napoleon or Shelley,

Hugo

or

Cervantes,

Whitman

or

Beethoven or Blake, Rembrandt or Goethe.

Swift, The

Artist is the answer to " Why is anything?"

It is thus I have interpreted for myself James Branch Cabell and his work.

I feel in reading him

a miraculous levitation , an ecstasy of having loosed myself of all certainties, of standing on a phantasmagoric Horeb on the other side of matter .

In the

present state of our literature, he is indeed an ironic Moses.

He brings neither peace nor a sword, but an

111

FORTY

IMMORTALS

"escape," as Arthur Symons says of some one else. He is our Anatole France, our Jules Laforgue.

He

is sometimes a Heine.

He stands apart in the literature of America of today.

With us, he is an original, and to be an

original in America in literature is merely to think. Among Liliputians a Robert Chambers might be a but

Gulliver,

among

Gullivers

he

would

be

a

Liliputian .

But Mr. Cabell is an original in a very

simple way

he has simply followed his romantic-

ironic demon without regard to the public .

He for-

got to learn the trick of getting under their skins. Cabell is a protest.

He may be the beginning of a

great reaction in our mode of looking at things. There is soil at hand, for we are not a materialistic people.

We are the only people who ever made a

superb romance out of money getting. colossal fiction out of all we do.

We make a

We are romantic

money-makers, romantic spenders , romantic wasters . A giant with the mind of a child, some one has said. The profoundest compliment ever paid a people !

It

is because we have that child-mind that all adventures are possible to us, even the great adventure of Art, to which Cabell calls us in " Beyond Life," "Jurgen," "Figures of Earth" and " The Cream of the Jest."

112

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

We, of course, have obeyed to the letter

our

eleventh commandment, " Thou shalt not commit irony!"

But how can a child commit irony? When

our romantic nature shall have received

its first

black eye-when we have gone through that great catastrophe which no people can escape in its development - irony will be born unto us.

In a word,

this country needs a damn good licking.

After that

we shall evolve a national consciousness- and , probably, a furiously ironic literature. Cabell's credo is found in " Beyond Life ." welcomes the " truth" gorgeous lie.

only when it

comes

He is a romancing animal.

Man as

a

It is

fiction, not fact, that he has cried for through the ages .

He has a healthy contempt for knowledge as

knowledge.

Color your Easter eggs when you pre-

sent them to the children of earth.

That the earth

goes around the sun, and not vice versa , is neither interesting nor important.

I would prefer to be-

lieve that it is wheeled by a god , an angel or a demon. Man's instinct is right. set him free.

It is romance that shall

Give him each day his daily fiction is

his manner of saying grace before the hard-boiled fare at the table of every-day reality.

He seeks for

it in the newspapers , the movies, the magazines , the stage.

He is not a reasonable animal, and never

113

FORTY

wanted to be.

IMMORTALS

Appeal to his instincts and his im-

agination and he will acclaim you a god- maybe crucify you or have you raided ; but he will acclaim you .

Cinderella is the heroine of " Beyond Life."

She

ïs Romance , the little girl with the queer eyes that the Authorities look at askance.

In the Ball of the

Golden Calf she is the slavey of the Tired Business Man.

She is something aside, not a vital part of our

lives

and by Romance I mean all forms of con-

scious

art.

The

pyramid

of

our

crowned with a statue of Mammon .

civilization

is

The interior is

the tomb of dreamers— they have not even been allowed to build the pyramid. mature and starved Cinderellas .

They are the imCabell has found

the slipper of a foot that must belong to an exquisite being, and when he can proclaim her he will put her at the top of our pyramid, moving Mammon down not into the tomb of the structure but where he can serve the being at the pinnacle. The fact that this never can be done only adds a lustre to the adventure, for the finest thing about life is its sublime futility. In " Jurgen" the theme of Cabell , simple enough in " Beyond Life," is more complex and intricate. Jurgen, pawnbroker and poet, is the Don Quixote

114

JAMES BRANCH CABELL He is even

who knows a hawk from a handsaw. wiser

Shibli

than

Meredith's

Bagarag,

beautiful,

Shaving of Shagpat. "

the

unread

hero

George

of

masterpiece , "The irony.

Jurgen has a third eye

He never lost his return ticket to the earth. "Jurgen" is overloaded with beauty ; great to be perfect .

it

is too

Of course it got into trouble .

It did not obey the American unities, Junk, Bunk and Punk."

In "The Cream of the Jest" the genius of the author shines with a steady, clear flame.

Felix Ken-

naston, we are told at the end, is the human race and Litchfield is the world. the

conflict

between

It is again an epic of

Imagination

and

Reality,

Romance and Ugliness . Kennaston has met the Lady Ettarre through the power of a broken sigil that he picked up in his garden .

It admits him to an unearthly garden, where

he meets her whom he dare not touch.

To touch

her is to return to Kathleen, his wife, and all the commonplaces of life. Kennaston leads two lives -even as you and I. The illusion is his real life ; his real life is an illusion -a paradox insisted on by Cabell , and which is the profoundest

of all metaphysical truths.

To

make matters worse, or better, according to your 115

FORTY

IMMORTALS

point of view, Kennaston is a writer of romances, and when he disappears into the imaginative dimension he takes the name and becomes one of his own characters , Horvendile . Ettarre is also world's selves.

a fragment of himself-of the

In one of these transfleshly dreams

Kennaston and Ettarre stand together in the Conciergerie waiting for the tumbril to take them to the guillotine.

Kennaston says :

"There is no beauty in the world save those stray hints of you , Ettarre.

Canvas and stone and verse

speak brokenly of you sometimes ; all music yearns toward you, Ettarre ; all sunsets whisper to you, and it is because they awaken memories of you that the eyes of all children so obscurely trouble and delight us.

There is nothing, nothing in me that does not

cry out for love of you .

And it is the cream of a

vile jest that I am forbidden to win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you even, save in my dreams."

Eternal and unassuageable mockery ! The

Buffoon and his Chimera ! Now, the

cream

of Cabell's

jest

is

that Ken-

naston's wife, Kathleen, has the other half of the magical sigil, and he never knows whether she, too , has been dreaming with it ; but it is probable that Kathleen was his Ettarre and Felix was her Horven116

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

dile.

Anyhow, after Kathleen's death Kennaston

finds both parts of the sigil in her chest.

It was the

top of her cold-cream jar engraved with Egyptian jargon by one Flaherty ! There is not much that is not satirized in this story.

Tiberius Cæsar, Cromwell and Roosevelt do

not escape .

The cream of the Eternal Jest is every-

where in it ; there is no skim milk from the up-todate literary dairies .

Its style recalls Henry James ,

Walter Pater, Anatole France-I say this in order to be complimentary, for the book is , to the utter, Cabell.

We have played the flunkey before so many European literary and senilo -scientifico celebrities lately that I am wondering whether we shouldn't move away from the shine-' em-up stand long enough to rise and salute a great American literary genius, James Branch Cabell .

117

REMY DE GOURMONT :

AFTER-MAN

I.

The superman has been done to tatters . ready a verbal legend.

Nero ,

It is al-

Cæsar Borgia and

Napoleon were the only supermen of which we have any record.

Homer and Hugo, Wagner and Whit-

man were dreamers, supermen of the skull , not of life.

St. Nietzsche, immaculate as Theresa and as

gentle as St. Francis of Assisi , whispered in one of his letters that when he thought of the Overman he thought of Cæsar Borgia.

This admission alone

ought to kill the myth of the superman , for Nietzsche could outpierrot Parabrahma himself when it came to "putting one over" on the bourgeoisie. The present is not the age of supermen, but of After-Men .

Nietzsche himself was an After-Man,

that is, a Borgia, a Don Juan who sat furled in thought, an old marauder pensioned off and sent to the asylum of the impotent-the intellectual world . This is, then, the supreme type of the After-Man, Nietzsche in real life, Hamlet in fiction.

Once in a

while a manhole over the psychic sewers blows off. That's what they call a " world-smashing book. ” 118

REMY DE GOURMONT: AFTER-MAN

The After-Man unweaves and unmasks . belligerently against every affirmation.

He reacts His sensi-

bility and its sword of glittering diamonds, the brain, are always mobilized against the constructors, the world-liars, the venders of smug chimeras and sleek ideals.

Man is naturally a believer, the After-Man

is naturally a sceptic, a dissolver, a dissociationist, an intellectual Jack-the-Ripper. the Corrosive Smile.

He is Knight of

He has tasted your philosophic

goody-goodies, and pah ! there they are back in your seraphic mug.

That was the method of Jonathan

Swift, After-Man.

But there are Beau Nashes among

them-most of them are

Beau

Nashes .

Pascal ,

Montaigne, Amiel spat out the goody- goodies, but aside, in a silk handkerchief ; and their clinics were redolent of attar of roses. France

has

two

supremely

great

both artists to the soles of their thought .

After-Men, They are

Anatole France and Remy de Gourmont.

They

have turned This into That and That into This . They have burned all the inns of faith and Truth hath not where to lay its head. Flipping

his

ashes

from

his

cigarette,

Oscar

Wilde said, "The world was invented to be argued about."

Anatole France and Remy de Gourmont

have at least said "Yea" to that. 119

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Much is being written in France about De Gourmont.

He has been excavated like a buried city.

He has been articulated and rearticulated . been explained and explained away. ing Dutchman of French letters .

He has

He is the Fly-

Those who have

not tried to study and formulate the geology of the soul of the Great Chameleon have wended their ways to see him.

He is never " at home."

Olympus is ,

after all , a cenotaph, and gods are, proverbially, never "at home.” However, he writes ; and he is one of the glories of France.

He writes about everything and nothing,

and he makes nothing as fascinating as everything. His style rambles , he takes all roads ; but each road that he takes leads to a star.

His prose drifts, but

the tide is always running toward the unknown. He will start to talk about chalk and really talk about Plotinus.

In a single page he will lead you from

the Ark to Antares, and you will never know how you got there

so subtle, so delicate, so somnam-

bulistic is his style. There is no unity except the unity of the passing mood .

Remy de Gourmont is unclassifiable because

he has no thesis, no doctrine, no dogma, no "bug." He lives to expound his sensibility. ality" is the mask of the moment. 120

His " person-

The next moment

REMY DE GOURMONT: AFTER-MAN

it is not even a memory ; there is another mask.

He

has never asked anything of the Sphinx ; it is the Sphinx, perhaps, that is asking the news of him. Yes, he has one formula : " Truth is an illusion and illusion is truth."

Go deeper than that who will ?

It is life reduced to abracadabra .

It is carte-blanche

to all singeries before the Veil of Isis . It is the Logos of the eternal Chimera as it wings its way from zodiac to zodiac. The stories of Remy de Gourmont are atmospheric.

They are etched on a glamour.

no wakefulness in his pages. euthanasia of the pen. sublimated Persons

to

His style is a sort of

The commonest objects are

something

and things

There is

are

other glozed

than themselves. with

a

vaporous

fatality and the emerald gleam of death is everywhere.

The decadence is here revealed in all its

naked glory. stories.

Personages there are none in these

There are symbols of rare images, and the

stories told are as improbable and as mythical as the tale of life itself at the lattermost day. Montaigne, Rabelais , Molière, the French Encyclopedists, Voltaire, Rousseau , Renan, Poe, Baudelaire

even Walt Whitman-these are some of the

influences one may find in the psyche of Remy de Gourmont.

And

Epicurus 121

and

Nietzsche

and

FORTY

Erasmus and

IMMORTALS

Haeckel-but he is none of these.

Poet, critic, dramatist, philosopher, library grubber, biologist, novelist, grammarian, philologist—a jack of all intellectual trades

and

master

of all- he

naturally calls up to mind the immortals who have preceded him.

That

wonderful

mind

and

sensibility-ironic,

mystical, sentimental, intellectual-are in full flower today, but his roots are mediaeval, like the spiritual roots of Anatole France.

The Schoolmen are in his

nethers, but on the polecap of his brain reigns Aristophanes

a romantic Aristophanes .

Remy de Gourmont is an After-Man , a finality. He is the age .

II.

The Passing of de Gourmont.

Remy de Gourmont was an epilogue to European civilization . After the curtain went down on “ modernity” in that final crash of cymbals and drums in August, 1914, de Gourmont wrote the coda in his two war books , and in 1915 he retired from his seclusion in 122

REMY DE GOURMONT: AFTER-MAN

Paris to his seclusion in God . by vibration.

The war killed him

He was in his fifty-seventh year.

Passed then from men one of the great glories of French literature .

Passed, then, too , a spirit prob-

ably the most completely and highly civilized of any epoch.

Passed the final nuance of the creative in-

tellect, the ultra-violet ray of literary expression. After de Gourmont- nobody, as yet.

He com-

pleted a vast trajectory begun with Epicurus. He was almost from its inception the soul of the Mercure de France, that magazine unique in literary annals . ment in it until his death.

of the

mind,

He conducted a departCurious likeness between

the man and the name of the magazine, for de Gourmont was the herald of France-he was French culture incarnate. He was the author of about thirty volumesnothing less than the history of the French sensibility between the Franco-Prussian and the World

wars. Psychological

novels,

poems,

scientific

essays,

epigrams, short but perfect analyses of the great writers of the day—his field of intellectual activity covered the whole range of man's activity on the globe .

He should have been named Remy de Gour-

mand. 123

FORTY IMMORTALS

Pagan, mystic, materialist, scientist , blasphemer, devotee, he lays life bare to the sockets and recreates it in his transfiguring prose. A thousand rivers emptied themselves in the ocean of his perception.

All ghosts found a tongue in him.

He is guilty of every heresy. tracked mind.

His was a thousand-

In the hippodrome of his conscious-

ness he rode easily and gaily a thousand horses. sanity was never in question.

His

He kept the law of

balance. One might believe that he began each day with a prayer something like this : Give me this day a corroding doubt and deliver me from single-mindedness and all faith, that I may scan the centre from each point on the marvelous circle of existence and scan each point on the circle from the illusive centre ; and defraud me not of pain. One finds the inexorable logic of the absurd in all his pages.

There is life to prove his thesis . The

absurd in life is the rule.

It is Satan who whispers

into the ear of St. Anthony, in Flaubert's great book, "Suppose the Absurd should be the Truth ! "

He

whispered it also into the ear of Remy de Gourmont. An exceptional joy is the joy of doubt, a joy of which Remy de Gourmont was the chief exponent. Ideas are neither good nor bad in themselves . 124

It is

REMY DE GOURMONT: AFTER-MAN

the emotion that they inspire that lends to them what they have of pain or pleasure on their countenances.

Temperament decides everything.

Remy

de Gourmont says dogmas are without humor ; Certitude never smiles .

The joy inspired by doubt is

the joy of change and motion.

Life exists in order

to be analyzed , reintegrated , and analyzed again, and so on ad infinitum.

Doubt is his truth.

Doubt

is his own special attitude in front of the Great Mystery.

Doubt is his "will-to-power, " his " will-

to-live ."

It is his weapon of offense and defense.

It is his illusion, his North Star, his will-o'-the-wisp . Irony,

ridicule,

disdain,

the

smiling-nebulous

silence that can uncreate a god or a creed, are his darling weapons.

In his " Philosophic Promenades”

and his " Dialogues of Amateurs" all our too , too solid "truths" thaw in his unarithmetical grin.

His

mental slungshot is filled with the pebbles of a corrosive wit and his eye gleams satyrwise at the furniture of earth and heaven and choirs visible and invisible.

He knows he quibbles, he knows he jokes, he knows he contradicts himself perpetually ; but so does Life.

In his pages irony lurks behind irony,

doubt impinges on doubt, and this God of Enormous Contradictions, this philosophic merry-andrew, this 125

FORTY

IMMORTALS

fantastic mystic, laughingly burrows his way to the core of things — which is only the rind enclosing another core.

And he alone keeps wassail over his own

graves. Remy de Gourmont was at once a hermit philosopher and seraphic sensualist ,

glorifying the flesh

while he plays the surgeon to it.

When we think of

philosophers we think of heads- heads magical with dreams, heads poisoned with venom, heads that hold the secret of serenity, heads frenzied with the Absolute, heads ironic, heads lascivious, heads anarchic, and heads that carry about in them withered worlds and the parched and yellow skins of their youthful ideals-like Amiel. Remy de Gourmont, philosopher and sensualist, carried about in his microcosm all of these heads . He was an intellectual voluptuary.

His paramours

are Ideas. All his stories and essays are secret diaries. For philosophy is nothing more than the diary of a bias, the autobiography of a prolonged impulse.

His "Epilogues "-little conversations

ques-

on

tions of the day—are the subtlest and most disdainfully ironic things of their kind ; his " Physiologie de l'Amour "

is

implacable ;

his

"Sixtine" is

a

vast

spiritual "movie" ; his " Letters of a Satyr" are written with a tiny invisible diamond ; his " Litanies of 126

REMY DE GOURMONT: AFTER-MAN

the Rose" are aromatic poisons ; his " Philosophic Promenades " are fascinating studies in the decomposition of ideas ; his "A Night in the Luxembourg" is the golden book of faith and doubt, of Christ become Spinoza, Epicurus-and De Gourmont.

His

"Book of Masques," in which he analyzes the sensibilities of the French writers of his day, will last longer than the writings of most of them.

They are

psychical silhouettes . (I must brag a little.

Almost his last work was a

translation of my own " Paternoster : 1914 " for his department in the Mercure de France, with a long introduction to my " blasphemous prayer” by himself, followed by an article from his pen in La France on some of my other work. ) Ever and anon there come into the world men who will be stayed by no answer-a Sextus Empiricus , a Montaigne, a Remy de Gourmont. implacable, dreamers à rebours.

They are

They stand atop

the barricades of ancient and modern thoughtbarricades made up of the sweepings and débris of all affirmatives . nothing.

They affirm nothing, they deny

They menace.

They are the night-riders

of the intellectual world, the hangmen of all the safely housed.

With rack and screw they seek to

torture the truth out of that old hussy, Isis . 127

And,

FORTY

IMMORTALS

like Goya's skeleton , she screams her Nada into the night while the grand inquisitors are at work. If Leconte de Lisle was the Chesterfield of Nihilism, Remy de Gourmont was its Torquemada .

128

JULES

LAFORGUE

To such minds , dowered with the wit of eternity, to whom all todays are ancient and all tomorrows coffins in the making, there is one escape : cosmophobia.

Wing the soul with poetry and metaphysics.

That flight into the azure is the magnificent eloquence of fatigue.

And then there is the rapturous

delight of an eternal sabotage against the instincts and manners of the average man and woman.

Cruel ?

Yes, divinely cruel.

It is the revenge on

the race, on the species, for the birth of the seraphic demon that we call the great poet. Fumiste ?

Pierrot-Parabrahma, rather !

Pierrot-

Even Time,

with its suckers of the Hours, is spat upon in the miracle of art. Laforgue was always trying to puncture the carapace of the relative with the stiletto of his absolutism.

He was supremely a bovaryst,

Gaultier would say.

de

"Chevalier of the Holy Grail,"

another great French writer has forgue.

as Jules

called Jules La-

His aspiration to be nothing was his as-

piration for absorption in the All .

He put into

poetry and satire what Hegel put into unreadable prose.

At the last nothing could satisfy that soul

but God, and yet he would have ventured into the Presence dressed as Harlequin-with a crown of thorns on his head. 161

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Imprisoned in the aura of his metaphysical passion, rolling from boreal hell to boreal hell, the carapace of Reality stood against the battering of that mighty soul.

He stanched the flow of thought and

drove it back into the arteries of the subconscious. Still no answer. The moon, that floating pole, was silent .

Silent

the brain, silent the heart ; and so his dreams congealed in death, as happens to all of us. And now the soul of Jules Laforgue is become a magnificent butterfly imprisoned in the center of an iceberg on the Moon .

162

BALZAC : THE CLUMSY TITAN.

What is style ? ideas.

Style is a matter of materializing

It is the method by which a person who

knows something renders it to the world.

It is the

channel through which the brain frees itself of its burden.

There are some thoughts so huge, so com-

plex, that they require the aid of instruments to drag them forth.

They are delivered in agony and mis-

shapen, but they are unique and have lost nothing of greatness . Balzac bore his books to the world in that manner—and they ultimately cost the life of their creator.

Literary childbirth killed him .

We know the child that has run to us from a long way: he is weary, exhausted , excited , perspiring ; he has seen something wonderful and wants to tell us.

But he is so filled, saturated, by the thing

or things he has seen that he only stammers, splutters , begins his story in the middle with half-sentences and detached phrases , his mind-by a strange psychological paradox , noted by almost every close observer

of

minds

great

stress- repeating

trivial,

inutile incidents

under

through the tongue the

163

FORTY

IMMORTALS

that had become twisted around the larger perception. Balzac's style was like that. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes , Goethe, Whitman , Wagner and Kant, he was clumsy. for his medium of expression .

He was too great His mind appre-

hended so much at once that he had no way of expressing it.

A whirlwind

of ideas,

visions

and

emotions blew through his brain and wrecked it . He was impatient.

He felt that a whole universe

was bulging for birth in him.

He knew he could

not, like De Maupassant, spend seven years building a couch for the pitched his

perfect

accouchement.

stuff out savagely,

obliquely,

He

helter-

skelter , for Debt and Death were at his heels .

Minds of the first order-great prophets, seers and poets- never seek for style .

They are so car-

ried away by the vigor and virility of their own natures, are so completely mastered by their ideas that they smash all rules and conventions . There is in a perfect style—in the exquisite technique of a Chopin or a Loti -something ethereal and sickly.

The obsession of Beauty is a spiritual ob-

session and tends to decay, the decay of autumn . But life primarily seeks the wells of strength and virility. Beauty kills .

It blasts like lightning.

164

BALZAC : THE

Balzac happened to write. the

easiest

With

his

modes

Pen and paper were

of transcribing

wonderful

TITAN

CLUMSY

power

of

what he

saw.

co-ordinating,

he

would have made a marvelous musical composer, one who would have possessed the synthetic genius of a Beethoven with the

analytic

anarchy

of

a

Richard Strauss . He was a seer. matter .

His eyes pierced all the veils of

He saw the form that covered all spirit

and he saw the spirit imbedded in all form .

He

wrote the history of his time, but it might have been the chronicle history.

of any other period in the world's

Under the tatters of time he saw the eternal

Man ; he ripped from out its network of temporary circumstance the quivering instincts of the race and held them, naked and bloody, above his head ; he plunged his finger through the tissues of flesh and muscle, through the thin mask that civilized man wears, and touched firmly the impelling secret motive ;

he held

his finger there while

his

subject

screamed in agony and shame.

He was a surgeon of social diseases .

He pulled

out the brain and heart by the roots, turned them up, examined the fibers attentively, made voluminous notes, and stuck the things back in place .

165

A

FORTY

IMMORTALS

farmer tearing up potatoes could

not have been

more impersonal.

Man is a motive in nature.

Selfishness is the

mainspring of all action ; environment merely shapes that one motive to infinite variety.

In this sense

a man can be explained by his environment.

His

selfishness takes the method of least resistance. The social structure that a man finds himself born into merely gives the

special

character, the mode

of

activity, to that one underlying, impelling question that every man asks himself : "How may I exploit myself?"

The Comédie Humaine is the answer.

Man ex-

ploits himself by rending some one else.

If he is

a dreamer , like the Alkahest or Louis Lambert, he will turn upon himself, make of his brain a shambles of conflict or in mere impotency of rage twist it to some monstrous shape. The great sin of man is the ego , the self, the individualized , differentiated being .

The soul of man,

to Balzac, was either an inferno of lusts or a house of bad dreams .

It was his only theory- inherent

in his writings -that man was at the most an inutile appendage of an aimless protean Force ; at the bottom a contemptible intriguer, showing the mark of god166

BALZAC: THE

CLUMSY

TITAN

hood in him only when he rose to deliberate and cynical wickedness .

What a mean, shabby life he draws for us in those volumes

of the

Comédie Humaine! as

through the world museum of freaks .

a

man

He

strolls

strolls through

a

If we except Vautrin, he seemed

to have no preference among his characters.

Vau-

trin he loved because he was the ultimate expression of the forces of the ego-the logical tendency of untrammelled individuality, the flower of differentiation, the penalty the race pays for being human beings. No such figure as Vautrin had been created since Mephistopheles ; nothing so great or so significant -with perhaps the single exception of Turgénev's Bazaroff- has come out of fiction since .

Vautrin

has the brains of a Lucifer and the wisdom of a Schopenhauer.

He is without weakness—that is, he

has no conscience ; he delights in evil and the doing of evil because he is testing a theory.

He is a scien-

tist from hell ; an explorer who delightfully spends his life in following the spoor of human weaknesses.

Vautrin is Balzac. to him.

The universe was a spectacle

Good and evil existed because the gods

needed sport.

The birth, ramifications, evolution,

decay and final disappearance of passions like old 167

FORTY

IMMORTALS

man Grandet's or Cousin Bette's were traced with the precision and care of a man following a survey route.

It was business and relieved the ennui of

having to live. To Balzac the world had been invented so he could analyze it ; good and evil were only points of orientation, alternate coigns of vantage from which he, the reporter for the gods , could watch the fray. Balzac's mind was such a huge chunk of the Universal Mind- in which we exist merely as infusoria -that instead couched them.

of creating his characters, he

ac-

That is to say, the germ of every

variety of human being existed as embryo in his mind.

Goethe had said that he could readily under-

stand how a man could commit murder, because all he had to do was to gaze into himself.

Balzac, like

Goethe, enclosed in himself all species, ideas and methods .

He understood each thing because he

was that thing ; he gave birth to such vital beings because he was giving birth to particles of himself ; he could describe an obscure passion because he was that passion . He had the power of projection ; his imagination created at a bound the thing he needed .

Did he

want to know how a thief felt in the act of robbing? Presto! he was a thief robbing.

168

Like Shakespeare,

BALZAC: THE

CLUMSY

TITAN

he was the spirit of all vileness and the spirit of all sublimities . His imagination was eucharistic ; it could become literally the body and the spirit of the person he wished to accouch. 1 He lived the life of the race vicariously.

169

SHELLEY

Turn from Byron to Shelley.

From the infernos

of introspection to the Edens of space.

From the

majesty of Cain to Israfel mounted on Pegasus. From Manfred to the Witch of Atlas .

Shelley, divine interstellar flaneur, musical-mystical avatar, runner from Antares to

a goal-post

set in the Infinite, whose fast feet set suns to singing, whose hair was woven by the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, whose eyes were plebiscites of the Eternal : Shelley the ethereal melodist, a winged Prometheus nailed to the Caucasus of Time! Poets

are

intercalations.

A poet is

with the rainbow in his talons . ugly poets are interregnums.

an

eagle

In the reign of the

Among all the count-

less children of the Unimaginable Spirit only poets reach æsthetic puberty- and then die.

They reach

the threshold of the wonder-day of Beauty, and their lives are stanched in their sockets. A

few- Shelley

Aphrodite

and

among

Helena.

them- have

The

others

raped

marry the

strumpet Muses.

What is the natal country of poets ?

That coun-

try bounded by Nowhere and reached by staying 170

SHELLEY

home-the Imagination . velous

multi- colored

The Imagination, a mar-

rug that

covers

the

rough

and splintered floor of Reality ; a haunted chateau ; a vestibule between Time and Eternity ; the red Pantheon of Lucifer ; the candle-gleam of Science ; the flambeau of the lover ; the glistering west-dust of a hidden, innominate sun ; the seignory of the untrammelled instincts ; the fief of unsanctified dreams ; the palfrey that carries us toward nebulous spiritual hells ; the plasma of gods ;

Puck strapped to the

back of Balaam's ass ; the Shelley of mental faculties ; the avatar of the emotions ; a golden key that unlocks the

Bastiles

of

logic ;

a

ladder

to

the

Fourth

Dimension . Men are only men ; but poets are poets, and at birth they are given in marriage to Ariel and Lilith , and they live with them in their unacred Imagination.

Three things mark Shelley : lyrical ecstasy, the ethereal imagination and the revolutionary spirit. His ecstatic lyricism would have struck music from a shadow.

His ethereal imagination was so rarefied

and of such a degree of potency that at its touch all matter exhaled its soul and fell away into flakes of light and scintillant atomic pulsations .

His rebel-

lion was so deep -rooted and imperious that to sound 171

FORTY

IMMORTALS

the tocsin on the planet he seized for cymbals Time and Space, planted his red standard on the North Star-and then, divine lover that he was, sat down and wept and sang.

In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the Imagination .

The ethereal

imagination is the highest form of the evolution of the transfiguring power of images.

It marks the

boundary line between the mystery of matter and the mystery of spirit.

It is the fine, volatilized plasma

of an esoteric dimension, of a world where the truths hinted at by the X-ray and radium are true for the human mind and body. In the realms

of the

ethereal

imagination- a

realm in which Shelley took the highest sustained flight-we are remote from home, which is matter . It is the exit from the shanty of place to a palace in the moon .

We roll the stone of reality away and

climb the steps of the air, hallucinated by light, horizoned by the ecliptic of formless worlds . thing poems.

is

fulgurant

and

lancinating

in

EveryShelley's

He forged bolts of lightning with an infinite

number of moonbeams .

With units of light and

color captured from remote moods he moulded his "characters." Shelley's mind was primitive. 172

He saw the world

SHELLEY

with the startled eye of the child .

From the cocoon

of the familiar he liberated the Butterfly with the million-striated wings.

The trailing mane of his

imaginative

memory

swept

through

nebulæ

and

foreworlds .

He had a will- o '-the-wisp in his brain .

From "Queen Mab" to "The Triumph of Life" is an evolution of the mirages of the unreal.

On the

ruins of Reality rose the sublime thousand -winged chimeras of his fancy and through the smoke and flame of assaulted wrongs his face glows like a Bethlehemic light set in the heart of a night of storm . From the stem of Reality images detach themselves in showers and float in the azure of his imagination. Apparitions woven of imponderable stuffs rise in the empyrean and fade against marmoreal dawns and firmaments of jasper and porphyry.

The precipices

of the wind knew him and the thundercloud halved itself like the Red Sea so that he might pass through. Swinburne celebrated the death of Charles Baudelaire in an immortal poem, and Shelley in " Adonais " deified Keats, but no one has or ever can sing the song that

shall deify Shelley.

Like Shakespeare

and Hugo his is an auto-apotheosis . To have written "Prometheus Unbound" Shelley must have gathered his impetus in the Infinite for a march on the Eternal .

It is the highest imaginative 173

FORTY

IMMORTALS

altitude yet taken by the human mind. opening

speech

of Prometheus

Demogorgon there

is the

to the

urgent

and

From the finale

of

precipitate

flight of a god incandescent with passionate inspira"

tion.

The mighty forces of the knowable universe

are held in the knotted grip of that mind as Jupiter holds the thunderbolts.

He fords the ether from con-

stellation to constellation. trans-ethereal silences.

He walks the platform of

Echoes and voices of his

own creation stream to the summit of his godhood and a tongue is put in the Wound of the earth . Shelley's creation of Prometheus is Shelley himself, and the whole of " Prometheus Unbound" is the soul history of Shelley ; the hypostatic union of the Poet with the soul of Nature .

If souls ever need redemption Shelley will appear before the Sanhedrin of Eternity with "Prometheus Unbound" in his hand.

It is the epic of Man .

the metaphysical Marseillaise .

It is

It is a thunder-crash

that rolls from the Himalayas of the human mind and whose echoes are lost in the hollows of forbidden perspectives.

It is a symphony of world- love

constructed by one who was both Christ and Beethoven . The Hours and the Eternities and all things that have slept awake and all things that have suffered 174

SHELLEY

rise up and all things that are to be swoon into con sciousness when touched by the wand in Shelley's hand .

Such is the thaumaturgic power of a trans-

cendental lyrical will in the body of this BeyondBoy, whose spiritual and imaginative umbilical cord had never been cut. He had never been born unto Reality, but reigned an unconceived god in the womb of the Eternal Mother.

And his poems are measured in the per-

petual rise and fall of her bosom.

175

EMERSON

THE

MYSTIC

Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the eagle face and multiple soul ; Ralph Waldo Emerson, scuttler of rotten ships , discoverer of the spiritual mother-lode ; Ralph Waldo Emerson, carrying the shackled secrets of the East in the dungeon-keeps of his soul , his brain cells laden with chrism of light and in his hands the keys which were to unlock the doors against which the imprisoned Self had thundered for ages !

He achieved the miraculous by disclaiming all belief in miracles. Miracles !

Do we not welter in them?

Is not the

coming and going of my breath a miracle ?

The

weeds in my garden shall be my miracle, and yon blue-misted hills-the thaumaturgy of my wondrous eyes

shall be a bubble blown from my dream-

skull. We are tyrannized by the commonplace, and like polyps and puppies, are the slaves of reflex- action. The habitual has indurated us , and the days are drab because we allow ourselves to become mere dray horses. Emerson's soul was born anew every day, and his fluid spirit melted the solid- seeming world to a brain 176

EMERSON

figment.

THE

MYSTIC

The cameo dream of the ant and the un-

plumbed thought of God dwelt in that mind . miracle ?

A

He smiled at the question-and pointed

to the fly on the window - pane. Transcendentalism is a big word that has frightIt means that man is

ened men, women and priests.

greater than the event ; that nothing can happen to you- you happen on things.

Fate is portable, and

every man comes into the world with his troubles ready-made .

Like the spider, every soul spins its

own web. Everything is individual. Mount Sinai is within you. authority under the scalp . ing.

There is a Vatican of

You are God in the mak-

The whole history of mankind is a picture of

a ragged, pain-bitten tramp waiting in the anteroom of Time for an audience with the Man Behind the Arras. To crawl and cringe and fawn and fumble seem to have been man's chief occupation. crook out of your back cries Emerson.

and

out

Take the

of your

soul !

You wear cups in your knees pray-

ing to these senile gods . Up , and look at the heavens , and dare to say, "I am I, and what I do I do . Did I knead this dough?" That is transcendentalism. Most men's minds are mere kitchen-hash ; leav177

FORTY

IMMORTALS

ings of the gods ; celestial junk.

They desire above

all things that no one shall discover that they are masked.

They are optimists because they dare not

be anything else. intellectualized .

Their heads are their stomachs They live in crevices, and when

they scent danger they, like the turtle , draw in their heads—and this they call humility.

For this coun-

terfeit

man

tempt.

Oh, that we could plug a child's head at

Emerson

had the

profoundest

con-

birth, as we do a melon, to find whether there is mush or music within .

We are " parlor soldiers"

and most souls are bankrupt. salaam

that

Defeat

makes

to

Reverence is the Achievement- and

few natures rise as high as their instinct. Men's brains are only attics stuffed with disused antiques ; crumbling castles where bats whirr and the moths devour ; ghost-walks for ancestral sins . grey matter is mere soufflé.

Their

Their souls are card-

houses ; their actions mere addenda ; their triumphs are as bilious as their failures.

Successful ragpick-

ers all! This

mob-soul

bulked

and

herded

in

our

cities by the million is the product of conformity. In " Self- Reliance" Emerson uttered his Declaration . The blessed lowly who cringe beneath the rod of Power, the jigging ape without a tail , the saintly, 178

EMERSON

sentimental

sots who

THE

MYSTIC

utter their paternosters on

Sunday and go whack with the Devil on Monday, Mrs. Grundy who lives next door to every man and woman-these are all labeled and flouted in this great essay, this Magna Charta of Self. "Good or bad are but names readily transferable to this or that ; the only right is what is after my constitution ; the only wrong what is against it." Morals are local ; a cussword current in New York is counterfeit in Timbuctoo .

Our boasted virtues

are accidents of physical organization ; our highest dreams are but the reflex of a physical need .

Chari-

ties spring from philanthropic instincts, but they perpetuate the weak, who make war upon the gods of life, and with craft and guile and law and lamentation seduce them to their spongy ideals.

What is good ?

What is bad ?

asks Emerson .

Was there ever a fulfilled action, a rounded deed, an ideal realized ?

Your best intentions are ground

to powder in the mills of the mob and a good action grows mouldy in a day.

Everything rusts, stales ,

changes ; men are runners to an unstaked goal .

Sys.

tems are but rope bridges to swing us over the yawning chasms of the contingent , and codes are cobwebs . And what have I to do with consistency ? asks Emerson.

Each day is a finality. 179

Sufficient unto

FORTY

IMMORTALS

the day is the consistency thereof.

Tomorrow is x.

My instincts do not say "by your leave. " shall my intellect . frozen zone

of contemplation ,

strange secrets.

Neither

Today I lie iceberg-like in the and

I

dabble

in

Tomorrow I shall be the man of

action and smile at my dilly-dallying with yesterday's Arctic moonshine . All things go in pairs ; “ all things are double, one against the other. "

We are

the slaves of contrarieties ; our minds are but the proving-grounds of opposite theories.

The brain is

but a dramatic climax , where antagonistic laws struggle for mastery and where thoughts are twin-born —the same, but different.

" Consistency ! —the hob-

goblin of little minds," indeed .

God himself is not consistent .

See His gypsy

existence from protoplasm to brain dust. metamorphic

amorphic,

an

ever-changing

He is a God—

vengeful, merciful , tender, stern, cruel , benignant, beautiful, forbearing, dynamic and static : Jehovah,

Scarab, Manitou,

names He takes !

Allah,

Zeus ,

Brahma— what

He is a reflection from those un-

sounded abysms of man—the brain cells, a shadow on the waters of the spirit, heart- mist ; a subtle hint. And He is born anew every hour. How shall we who seek to live our lives withstand "the wreckful

siege

of battering 180

days" ?

What

EMERSON

THE

MYSTIC

measures shall we take to balk this conspiracy of the all against the one ? are

beside

the

To most men these questions

mark.

-and there you are.

Money,

dinner

and

sex

But there is a highly differen-

tiated class in every community who seek answers to these questions . answer.

The Viking of Concord has an

Just be yourself.

the better.

Well, so much

You will win so much more of yourself.

Pray for enemies . travail.

Hard ?

All things noble are born in

Friction extracts the spark.

Consciousness

itself was born of the impact of warring molecules . Necessity creates the organ it needs. sires to be great he will be. desire .

If a man de-

Mere wishing is not

Most men wish to achieve themselves ; few

desire it .

The soul is infinite, and Shakespeare lives

in every man. Michael Angelo was yourself in a different environment.

Look within and battle with-

out ; dragnet the beautiful which lies quiescent at the bottom of every soul, and hammer the eternal commonplace to shape and use. This is Emerson's esoteric secret- which he made exoteric.

The divine sheathes all men .

Mystery

and beauty and power everywhere, and you—I— the hub of all !

Infinity and Eternity are Space and

Time in transit ; whatever was, whatever shall be , meet in your mind each moment. 181

If they meet not

FORTY

IMMORTALS

there, pray , where then ?

Below us lie infinite steps

-but we are the below ; above us a ladder that is lost in the mystic canopy of impurpled exaltations -but we are the above .

Arcturus is in your heart ,

and the heavens , the earth and the abysses beneath the earth are mind-mirage .

Here and now within ,

and nowhere else , is the golden fleece you seek . you wish to see , close your eyes .

If

The senses muffle

the eternal truths , and we are lost in shadowy seemings . Life is Death on a furlough, and Time, like a mouse, nibbles at our edifices. ferred.

Everything is de-

Today wears no glamour ; tomorrow is al-

ways a holiday.

We never are ; we are going to be

—and so on a day we awake to find we have been swindled.

Emerson divined the trick in youth and

nailed the Everlasting Now above his door, and each moment brought its treasure, and no hour went by but he was not richer in spirit.

He used grief, and

ground pain beneath his iron-heeled soul.

Life , with

her ogres, her chicaneries, her hypocrisies, her seductions, slunk away shamefaced before that presence.

For he knew a trick worth two of hers.

He

utilized the Now. A straight line is the longest route between two given points.

What we

achieve we

182

achieve

ob-

EMERSON

liquely.

THE

MYSTIC

Things come to us en passant.

No man

ever reached his goal by going straight toward it. His prizes come to him accidentally, unexpectedly. His dreams have one logic, life has another, and the way to be happy is not to desire to be.

What I need

I'll get, and if I don't get it, it merely proves that I didn't need it.

Stand still and watch the stars tum-

ble into your net.

The immovable man is a magnet ;

the strenuous, hotly intent man is not even magnetic. This is the underlying thought in that wonderfully brilliant

essay,

" Compensation ."

equalized ; nothing is realized .

Everything is

For everything we

get, something is taken away; for whatever is taken. away, something is given. ble.

Gain or loss is impossi-

For every expansion there is a contraction.

There is a kernel of wisdom in every misfortune. In the husk of our failures lies buried the nut of knowledge.

Each act pulls two ways, and all bot-

toms are false bottoms.

No man is ever undone ; he

is obtuse- that's all. Genius is defective on its social side ; the social animal is defective on the side of genius.

The poet

misses the half of life ; the merchant misses the other half.

It is all one not to desire and to have, says

Seneca .

Those who are in place and wield power

have doled out their souls for it ; and those who stay 183

FORTY

IMMORTALS

at home and drowse by the grate have missed the exaltation of self-sowing. Sensuality has its secrets ; sin is a training school ; pain breeds art ; adversity is the mother of strength —and a well -rounded character is one that has not been too good.

See-saw, tweedle-dum and tweedle-

dee-all things are Janus-faced, and the contrarieties of life are but thin masks for one Power.

The

Same is spilled into a million matrices, and the lambent flame of the One spires into myriad shapes ; but you cannot add to or subtract from it ; you may change the balances , but the quantity is unchangeable.

"In Nature," says Emerson, "nothing can be

given; all things are sold."

You pay for all your

goodnesses, and Nemesis keeps the tally-sheet. System-stringers seek to " place" Emerson . he this?

Was he that?

Was he t'other ?

Was

As well

try to pigeonhole sunlight, or shunt starshine , groove moonlight, or box Aurora. His thought rounded the spheres ; his dreams topped the Cosmos .

He walks

in the ether of our imaginations and is part of the barred and crimson sunset ; he flushes in the dawn and pales with the day.

He is woven into our souls

and his thought is forever blown round about our brains.

With Jesus, Shelley and Blake he is a dis-

corporate influence, a disembodied world-power.

184

EMERSON THE INDIVIDUALIST

The individual is God differentiated . is One reduced to fractions.

Mankind

Each soul is a segment

of the primal circle-an arc curved over the deeps of Being.

The roots of the soul, like the roots of

islands, meet and merge in the depths where individual differences cease.

The individual mind is a gaunt, isolated peak that rises sheer and stark from the unplumbed abysses of the One.

And like mountains that crumble to

the sea to lay the foundations of future ranges that shall and shall not be the same, so does the individual return atom by atom to its source.

Those emotions,

desires, thoughts, that make us what we are drift back silently and inevitably to the great spiritual reservoir, and the many-tongued soul is at last resumed in God, whence it sprang .

Difference is

shrouded in like, and like undulates to difference in perpetual circles . Such, in brief, is the metaphysics of individualism as expounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson .

The greatest thing in the world is self-love.

Love

yourself, reverence yourself, and it must inexorably He loves follow that you can then hate no man. himself best who hates himself most. 185

You must

FORTY

IMMORTALS

learn to detest the petty that battens on your soul like maggots on rotten fish and the gnawing envies that dart through your veins like hungry rats in a wall, and the furtive eyed insincerities that shape the soul to obscene curves and amble after place and power like a cretin begging alms . selfish, but self-ishness .

Self-love is not

He who loves another loves

the best in himself. He who hates another loves the worst in himself. We hear much of altruism . turned saint. moralists.

Altruism is Envy

It is the creed of soggy souls and sultry

Altruism is a subtle form of egotism.

aims at self-expansion by denying self.

It

Altruists are

moral smugglers, and they have the contraband in their cellars .

They do good that they may receive

good in return .

The absurdest thing in the world is the story of how Adam named the animals ;

almost as absurd

is the doctrine of disinterested motives .

It is easier

to balance Sirius on a hair than to conceive of an action that is not motived in self-love.

The tops and

bottoms of being cannot reach beyond the Self, in which we are shrouded like the sun in its fires .

Ex-

cept a thing tend to glorify me it is worthless. The sublimest sacrifice that the world has ever seen was but the immolation of the lower on the 186

EMERSON THE INDIVIDUALIST

higher, of the mortal individual on the cosmic individual .

On the pyres of aspiration Christ burned

His lower nature.

Hence we call Him the perfect

man. It was Emerson who first gave us leave to worship ourselves.

In his high northing he skirted the open

polar seas of the spirit ; and his eye beheld the spot where all lines meet.

The forked lightnings of his

soul struck steeple and capitol , and the thunders that reverberated from " Self- Reliance" rumbled around the world.

The prim properties that feed on shred-

ded wheat and mediocrity that lives by oatmeal alone were set a-crooning, and the " home virtues "

-par-

lor magic for children—were scared into a deathchatter.

The sham gods that dwell in their tinselled

social pagodas were rocked from their embossed pedestals and the shrivelled souls of a manikin mankind-all neatly wrapped in the tinfoil virtues— were set a-squeaking and a-gibbering with horror.

All the essays and poems are, in the last analysis, a celebration of Emerson.

His own soul was the

most important fact in his life. worthier than himself.

He knew nobody

Revolutionist, transcenden.

talist, sage, stoic, bond-servant to the Spirit that dwells in the unlimned spaces of the Oversoul , he flung the age-long cadavers that had staled in his 187

FORTY

IMMORTALS

doorway over the parapets of his castle and sounded a clarion-blast of defiance to the worm-eaten faiths of the world . It is the hardest thing in the world to preserve All things tend to absorb you.

your individuality.

The world is avid of you.

The very stars are wolves

Society is an unkennelled blood-

upon your trail .

hound that roams the world seeking whom it may devour.

Time is shod in rubber, and its ferret eyes

leer with delight as it watches your soul crumble to the common level.

Threatening missives are borne

to you upon the winds and the hint of penalties falls on your ear like rain-patter on a tin roof.

Fear

circles it -

-that "obscene bird," Emerson calls

over your soul like a kite amorous of carrion .

The

cabals of Doubt are always in session, and your tiny spirit flutters and flickers like a candle set near a wind-swept

chimney.

The

whispering

negations

play over your soul like lambent flames on troubled waters.

All

thongs of habit rib your soul . elemental slime.

against

conspire

things

you.

The

You are striated with

The life of man from bib to coffin

is a vicarious atonement ; he does daily penance for the sins of his ancestors. temptation swarm in worms in a corpse.

The insinuating imps of

and out

of your

clay like

If you rise to the level of your 188

EMERSON THE INDIVIDUALIST

instincts you will be pelted by pebbled epithets and senile old women, of both sexes , will run into the highway and fling at you weapons from the slungshots of their hatred . The man who dares to be himself is a wild hair blown into the eye of his generation . "Let us have done with conformity ! " cries Emerson .

Were the mighty currents of Being set in

motion merely to float bloated bladders ?

He who

can walk the waters of life is truly a savior—at least of himself. life.

We amble and shamble through

Walking is a lost art.

We pay court here, we

doff our hat there ; we crook the knee to that senescent lie and fawn upon this pimpled fakir ;

and

our backs grow round, and like pigs with snout to the ground our senses are riveted to smut.

Con-

formity is cowardice, and all concessions are made to the devil. Isolation,

It is better to die on the Horeb of

knowing that

yourself, than to rot

you

have

been

true

to

away inch by inch in the

mephitic alleys of the commonplace.

It is better to

go your way among men, defiant of their scorn , than to go men's ways and scorn yourself.

The

cerebral activity of the average man consists of a series of apologetic molecular movements that dis189

FORTY

IMMORTALS

charge a gaseous vapor which he dignifies by the name of thought . Action is thought tempered by illusion . our actions are cowardly.

They aim at something

the world prizes-fame, honor, riches . dares to act from himself.

Most of

No man

He borrows his light.

he has an original thought he conceals it. his ; hence it is unworthy. ardice .

If

It is

His humility is cow-

His apologies are the dry cough of a con-

sumptive soul.

His life is as artificial and as useless

as civilization. His body is but the inflated bladder of a dead ego . "Don't be a mush of concessions," Emerson admonishes us .

Dare to affirm- or to deny.

a negative bravery. mobile.

There is

There is a courage that is im-

A pygmy may do and dare.

Hercules to achieve inaction .

It takes a

Dare not to do , and

you will find it harder than daring to do .

The man

who aims at nothing, whose heart is set upon nothing, whose eye lusteth not , whose soul floats with the endless currents of being in a joyful willlessness , has achieved that calm and repose that are the basic motives of the strenuous act-the act that confuses means with ends .

Emerson's

soul stood

poised

in

a measureless

calm- like a shaft of alabaster towering to the mul 190

EMERSON THE INDIVIDUALIST

titudinous stars .

His mind was an Alhambra of

beauties, and his head wore the turban of dreams. The Eternal stole on tiptoe to his soul and messaged to the world the great Saga of Self. "Trust thyself."

Why should I make believe that

I like the world-famed book I am reading if it run counter to my deepest convictions ?

Why am I

bound to believe what is said in any book, though it come with the imprint of Mount Sinai ?

Why should

I hold to any law, church, institution if there is that within me which spurns it ?

Each man is unique.

He may live again , but under other masks . thoughts are best because they are my own.

My

Each of

us is a relative absolute- relative in his qualities, absolute

in his

unique

potentialities.

The

man

firmly mortised in the granite of Self must spurn 1 gifts merely because they are gifts. What can I use ?-not what can I get?-is the question the egotist asks himself.

Each thought,

however humble, that is rightfully ours is of use. The despised trivial is often the crumbling fragment of ancient buried sublimities .

The vulture hours

gorged with the carrion of decayed cycles spit their bribes at our feet . none of them.

But your great man will have

The things he needs will flow to

191

FORTY

his feet .

Let

the

IMMORTALS

social hucksters

peddle

their

wares. The man who drinks his own spirit will no longer harpoon sardines ; he baits for Eternity. In so far as a man concedes and takes is he weak. In so far as he resists and refuses is he strong. Shall we be affronting reefs in this wild, unsounded sea of lawless law, or corks swirling anywhither ? That flowering differentiation which is called individuation was begun in the affirmation of a denial— the affirmation of the rights of the individual over the many and the denial of the power of environment.

Things develop in inverse ratio to their like-

nesses. tom

Life is conditioned on contention.

there

is

war.

Whether the

battle

At botfor

the

preservation of self is carried on in the open or in the midnight silences of the soul— it is one and the same.

It is the soul's demand for breathing space .

It is the battle for the redemption of the self from the slavery of limitation .

The law of self-preserva-

tion is the law of salvation .

To preserve yourself

at the expense of your neighbor is Nature's first ordinance . thought.

Attraction

is

secondary- an

Love is an efflorescence.

primal law.

after-

Resistance is the

Your molecules are surrounded by an 192

EMERSON THE INDIVIDUALIST

impenetrable sphere of force.

Your soul was made

to withstand impact. Emerson never tires of emphasizing this truth . In " Self-Reliance," he says : "I must be myself. will not hide my tastes or aversions."

I

He will not

sell his liberty and power to save other men's sensibilities. crite.

It is better to wound than play the hypo-

"I do not wish to expiate, but to live.

My

life is not an apology, but a life. ” It is the weak man who smilingly weaves his silken threads of craft around the strong man.

But the strong man has need

for neither craft nor apology.

He slashes his way to

liberty. I teach you the

"Behold !

Overman,"

might

have been enunciated by Emerson .

The Overman

of Nietzsche aimed at a beyond- man.

The Overman

of Emerson is to be evolved in man .

Nietzsche

sought to manufacture a God ; Emerson sought to fabricate

a

man .

Nietzsche

conceived

power

as

something that primarily flowed out of man ; Emerson conceived it as something flowing into man from the Oversoul- the shoreless, sunken seas of the potential . There is a conspiracy among the underfed to palm off the emaciated for the ethereal.

We cringe to

words ; we fawn before proverbs ; we are the paid

193

FORTY

IMMORTALS

sycophants of Mumbo-Jumbo.

We are ruled by the

senescent and the obsolescent.

Men are afraid to

Virtue is a papier-maché monument that

violate .

Impotence has erected over the grave of Hope.

At

most there is a thin piping " No," and a scamper to cover.

Men seek to do the " proper thing" -which

is generally the improper thing.

Most laws

are

obeyed through fear-and presto ! we have the "virtue " styled obedience.

The Ideal is the Cockayne

The weak man dreams his darling sin,

of the lost.

The strong man enacts his

and calls it " Heaven !"

darling sin, and the world cries " Bravo ! "-sometimes-and another "virtue" comes to being. "Do the thing you are afraid to do," Emerson tells us.

Shock the decorous .

Defy the customary, and

let us raise altars to the rebels !

It is inability that

wears the mask of patience, and we are ruled by the unfittest. Conscience ?-the tribute that weakness pays to capacity. part.

Strong men and their consciences must

Each original act smashes a scruple.

The

highest man is not a moral being, but an aesthete. Life for him is a spectacle , not an aspiration .

What

we call progress is but the primitive love of the novel.

We are dying of an overdose of " moralic

acid." 194

EMERSON SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST

At bottom we reverence power.

And we twist moral

stinctive love for the heroic. values to suit our desires . than right.

We love might more

The bandit Bonaparte has dazzled the

world ; we love him for his strength. animal .

We have an in-

He was a good

We secretly admire the great lawbreakers

and build private fanes to the great Anarchs. The Greek Prometheus is the soul of man in eternal rebellion. We like to linger over the image of Ajax defying the lightning.

The Byron legend

will fascinate the world when " Childe Harold" shall no longer be extant.

And America shall one day

count Ralph Waldo Emerson her chiefest rebel.

EMERSON SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST

"You are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence, and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions," says Emerson in his essay on Montaigne. The universe at any given moment is but a dissolving state of consciousness.

Behind the arras of

dreams there stands a Dreamer, and that there are a Dreamer and a dream are all the sceptic can affirm. Scepticism is a system of arriving at provisional universals by skipping the particular. no one thing, but affirms an All . 195

It holds to

As a particle of salt

FORTY

IMMORTALS

is dissolved in water so is a particular fact dissolved in its eternal Idea in the mind of the sage.

Your

object standing there in space, tangible and movable, has no more substantiality than the gorgeous color-bands woven by sunken autumn suns. are part and parcel of the cosmic mirage .

They

All things

seen are but projections of the seer ; all truths are aspects of the Truth ; each brain is a facet of the Universal Mind .

The universe itself is but an arc

of the uncircled eternal. The arch-sceptic is the arch-believer.

He may

smile indulgently at all your facts ranged neatly in their pigeon-holes ; but there is a Fact at which he will not smile.

He is awed by himself.

He will

not believe his eyes because there is an unlidded Eye within his soul that sweeps the infinite spaces .

He

will not believe his ears because there ring upon the spiritual tympanum the whispered vibrations of a Law that is not dependent on the atom .

He be-

lieves little in the rule of thumb and finger.

Two

and two may make four-and-an-eighth on Jupiter. An extra cerebral convolution might have made it so on this planet. The "order" of the world is an order built of chance.

Did the reverse hold true of every "uni-

versal law" we would as dogmatically assert the 196

EMERSON SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST

"fixed order" of things ; and we would get along just as well- or better

or worse.

Our reasonings are

expressions of character ; our divinations are related to temperament and our widest scientific generalization is but the orbit of the strongest sun-midge. Processes are eternal ; facts are the ephemera of Time.

Emerson held to the Processes : what the

Processes promulged he spurned . mere cavil .

Our speech is

No action is whole and completed .

real thoughts are untongued .

Our

The heart has no lips.

Our passions are but the jagged shards of an earthen vessel broken by too much usage. to the unutterable.

We are doomed

There is repetition, but no "or-

der" in the universe. Up the steep Matterhorn of these negations the sceptic soul of Emerson toiled till it reached the pinnacle

the Oversoul that canopies all negations ;

the Oversoul, that is unarithmetical and may not be numbered .

There he dwells to this day-like the 99 pinnacle of Mont Blanc, " still, snowy, and serene.'

"Life is a bubble and a scepticism ," he says in a passionate paragraph.

Things reel and sway and

pass beyond the senses in the minute.

Men lay

snares for the Present and are caught in their own traps.

Youth girds itself for a battle that is never

fought ; manhood dreams of an old age that never 197

FORTY

IMMORTALS

comes ; childhood is best enjoyed when ' tis past. The descent from anticipation to realization is sheer, and our actions are rounded by a leer.

Like Faust,

we are damned if we bid the present moment stay, and we are damned if we bid it go . tion ; motion is dispersive.

Rest is stagna-

We are lost either way.

If you are as coarse as Belial or as ethereal as Shelley you are doomed to doubt. Systems, codes , conventions , moralities are put forth in trust and faith from the larval brain of man, and Time grinds them to smut.

As the aspiring

flame from Hecla's crater is lost in the pits of night, so are our highest exaltations lost in the swash of the durations.

Nothing is fixed .

All things are travail-

ing at birth or are entering on the death-spasm . Nothing that is born or dies can be final, and that which is not final is not true. apparitional.

The temporal order is

Governments are organized instincts

-and instincts

are

sexual and stomachic.

That

which stands through eternal change is the Law of Change, and this , too , is tethered to the inner man .

"Time melts to shining ether the solid angularity of facts," says the great Transcendentalist.

And this

applies to moral as well as to physical facts . A proper perspective shatters differences . fer in time and clime.

Good and evil dif-

Shall I choose this or this ? 198

EMERSON SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST

—and how shall I know that that which I choose What is right in Constantinople is wrong

is true?

in New York.

Cain and Mary of Magdala are neces-

sary ingredients in cosmic economy. are spiritual systole and diastole . slumbering in every virtue.

Evil and good There is a vice

Comparative sociology

tends to weaken the safeguards which conscience imposes.

Time melts scruples , and the conscience of

twenty is not the conscience of sixty.

Patriotism

depends

If

on

the

accident

of

birth .

a

man

is born in a stable is he bound to ride a horse all the days of his life ?

Theft is a matter of num-

bers : there are statues to Napoleon , but none to Jack Cade.

Civilization is the closet where we hide

the racial skeleton.

Our vices are ancient virtues ;

virtues are vices that shall be. oblation of self to Self.

Self- sacrifice is the

Religion is a mood and

philosophy temperament intellectualized. A history of human opinion would be a history of mankind's errors.

The Copernican system is no

whit better than the Ptolemaic. ment of mystery-that is all .

There is an incre-

What difference does

it make whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth if we have not solved the mystery of motion ?

What difference does it

make whether matter is an expression of mind or

199

FORTY

IMMORTALS

mind an expression of matter if we can define neither term ?

The gods of the peoples are metamorphic,

and Scarab and Jove are but names .

The telescope

of Galileo increased the distance between us and the stars. Microscope , retort and crucible are not as useful as flint and spear and battle-axe.

Each brain is a premise, and what you believe, that is so.

Civilization boasts that it has given us

social order and humanized us, when in reality it has but subtilized the various forms of aggression. All things tend to complexity and perplexity.

The

simpler a thing is the nearer it is to perfection .

The

Black Fellow can realize his ideals . not.

Highly

elaborated

cerebral

highly elaborated aspirations.

Shelley could

processes

beget

Simple natures start

from simple premises , and a highly complex civilization is but a device for increasing human ills . Emerson tells us that society never advances or recedes.

It forever stands .

"progress."

In " Compensation" he riddles the Oc-

cident's pet illusion . syllable Om tized .

He is sceptical of all

The Eastern sage repeats the

a thousand times and

is self-hypno-

The Western gascon bawls " Progress ! " and

is hallucinated by the idea that he is moving in a straight line.

There is social dilatation , but "prog-

ress" is an illusion .

Mankind is like a blind horse 200

EMERSON SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST

travelling around a circus ring. edge"-in its Western sense

To acquire " knowlis a process of sharp-

ening the claws the better to grip your fellowman's throat in the competitive struggle.

If you pursue things Time will devour you ; if you stand still, you will devour Time.

Emerson's law

of compensation tallies with that profound saying of Seneca's, " For it is all one not to desire and to have."

This is the essence of scepticism.

It denies

that any one thing is better than another and affirms the identity of opposites .

Rest on the Oversoul and

watch the waterflies flit over the darkling currents of life. the

Bid no thing go ; bid no thing stay ; welcome good

and

bad- and

stand

still.

Action

is

founded on fear-the fear of one's self, the fear of silence, the fear of being alone . Action is an opiate, not

a stimulant-it drugs the

introspective

self.

Those who sleep, dream, meditate, achieve all that action unconsciously aims at and never attains— peace, calm, the lustral redemptions.

Moult hope

and fear and you enter the realm of the sage.

The

particular no longer usurps, and life in the supersensible begins.

Opinions become brain-myths and

"forward," "backward" and "progress " the patois of fishwomen . The scepticism of the mystic is born of the idea 201

FORTY

IMMORTALS

that all things eventually flow back to their sources . The ages have solved nothing. mental problems fronted Ibsen. Maeterlinck.

that

The same funda-

confronted

Eschylus

con-

The soul of Plotinus is revivified in Edipus and Hamlet were undone by

the same inscrutable Fate .

Job's piercing shrieks

were echoed back from the mouth of Manfred-Byron on the

heights

of the

Jungfrau .

The

sublime

vision that overcame Buddha amid his purple sins sublimated the soul of Tolstoy, and the Furies that lashed Orestes with serpent whips scourged Oscar Wilde to his doom.

Marriage, society, government

are still open questions. spirit persists forever .

Imago or butterfly-the

You cannot leash the spirit of

Emerson to a system nor hitch his star to a wheelbarrow . Pessimism is a sublimated , transcendental optimism .

The pessimist's ideals are so high that he will

not-cannot -conform his spirit to this world . Pure optimism is cerebral vacuity tempered by a stomach. Emerson disbelieved in the temporal order.

Like

all the mighty brotherhood , he was at war with the petty and transitory.

In the realm of Space, Time,

and Circumstance the worst always happens because the

bond- servants of the triple

hoping for the best.

chain are

always

"The Transcendentalist" was

202

EMERSON SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST

a lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston , in January 1842. as they are.

It is the great challenge to things

It is not the challenge of the sceptic ,

but the challenge of the pessimist. positiveness of all negations . Emerson .

Your

charities

It breathes the

What is worthy ? asks are

sycophantic ,

your

governments but organized theft, your civilizations "a long train of felonies ," and your boasted virtues forms of fear. Life is a degradation, and man lives in the ratwells of cunning.

"Much of our labor seems mere

waiting ; it was not that we were born for ."

His

thought is that of Buddha, the Man of Galilee , Marcus Aurelius, Seneca , Plato, Amiel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

These have all agreed , in diverse ways,

on the essential sordidness of practical life.

Life

on the terms given us is an insult to the soul of man . Hurry us from this " Iceland

of negations "

into

newer, deeper infinitudes , past these mephitic atmospheres ! How came we to Molokai ?

We are the

"butt-ends of men," the tailings of gods, celestial sawdust, leavings of past deviltries .

I will none of

it, cries our Hamlet of the white tunic in sublime disdain .

Nor could that subtle-seeing eye be deluded by the vesture of things.

" Thou ailest here , and here," 203

FORTY

IMMORTALS

said Goethe , sticking his finger into mankind's agelong sores. These

And you rot all over, said Emerson.

mechanical

inventions-the gewgaws

of a

senescent race-shall all be destroyed and leave posterity with as little knowledge of them as we have of the lost arts of Egypt, a civilization that is not yet cold in death .

The seas shall sob their litanies over the

places where you now higgle and haggle for your dole.

Your temples and shrines shall become sun-

food, and you shall sooner count the stars than number the nothings of daily speech. Things will be neither better nor worse in times to come ; they will be both. kept.

The balances are always

Evil will never grow less so long as men cling

to the temporal order.

Ixion is bound to his wheel,

and while the wheel goes round there is no help for man.

The things that are tangible are the things

that are evil.

Good is a negation.

Transcendentalism is a negative good. release the individual. is there hope.

In the Spent Dynamic alone

On the crest of the final equilibration

will man find rest.

Life is a series of undulations

and "illusion is God's method."

Facts are mere bell-

buoys on the stream of infinite being. world

is

It aims to

gelatinous .

The objective

Transcendental

seeks another order.

204

pessimism

EMERSON SCEPTIC AND PESSIMIST

The equilibration that Emerson dreamed of— is it aught but a wraith on the storm-billows ?

All mo-

tion tends to equilibration ; yet a state of equilibration cannot be preserved ; motion begins again. so are we played upon.

And

The Pythagorean Harmony,

the Spencerian Equilibration , the Emersonian Oversoul-are they not identical? But we will wait .

Patience.

Our work is not

here and the sidereal days are not for us.

Passion

born of fire, and thought born of pain, and beauty born of sex, and death born of life mean nothing to us.

We smile at your amblings and loathe your

chicaneries. a call .

We sit with our hands folded waiting

If our souls were created for nothing, then

to no thing will we return .

"If I am the Devil's

child, I will live unto the Devil. ”

We will wait for eons ; the waves of unguessed cycles shall foam upon unwombed worlds, and spit us forth in vestments new and strange ; and still we shall wait the call of the Infinite Counsellor.

And

if it come, we shall know ; and if it do not come, we shall know, too .

205

BAUDELAIRE :

IRONIC

DANTE

There are hells that are fictions and hells that are real.

There is "The Divine Comedy" of Dante and

"Les Fleurs du Mal" of Baudelaire. Dante visited hell.

Baudelaire was born in hell .

Dante's hell was in hell.

Baudelaire's hell was in

Baudelaire. Dante brought to hell an orison. Baudelaire brought to hell another hell .

In hell Dante

was an outsider, a spectator, a sightseer .

Baudelaire

was native to the place. Dante was piloted by Virgil. Baudelaire had Orestes for guide .

When Dante descended into hell

he had the air of fitting on a diver's suit. laire went there stark. ice

Baude-

Baudelaire wore a crown of

and it did not melt.

He was a Dante who had

achieved irony . Dante's hell was literary and theological.

Baude-

laire's hell was actual and psychological . " The Divine Comedy" is a narrative.

"Les Fleurs du Mal " is

a transcription . One is mathematical, has circles and stations and resting places ; it expounds sin with algebraical precision .

The other is woven of mystery,

is as indefinite, as chaotic, as unsymmetrical as the heart of man . 206

BAUDELAIRE:

IRONIC

DANTE

Both Dante and Baudelaire were Catholics . Dante was a Catholic who found his redemption in God . Baudelaire was a Catholic who found his redemption in Irony.

Dante emerged from the gloom of hell

into the fulgurant lights of Paradise .

Baudelaire

emerged from the fulgurant lights of hell to yawn in the sacerdotal gloom of Paradise. He was a Prometheus who celebrated the vultures that plucked at his spiritual entrails. He loved Beauty as one loves a mistress . was a sadic love.

But it

On the sovereign front of his di-

vine Image there stood great gouts of blood .

He fat-

tened his asps on the breasts of Aphrodite.

He was

High Priest at the marriage of Caliban and Venus.

The celestial and the satanic are one. Nature's supreme Irony.

It is the jeweled casket in

which are contained all poisons. sanctorum of Satan.

Beauty is

It is the sanctum

The mind that pursues the idea

of Beauty and seeks to enclose its hallucinations in matter will end by building a tower of skulls. Rape Helen and breed worms.

Peep over the In-

eluctable Barriers and you shall batten on the obscene.

Drain to the lees the Holy Grail of Life and

you shall anoint the edges of your imagination with

venom . Perverse Beauty !

A sacred blasphemy. 207

And that

FORTY

IMMORTALS

is the secret of Baudelaire.

He was, like Heine, the

hangman of his own dreams. were twin-born to him.

Irony and Beauty

Nothing he created was

complete until he had spat upon it. Each thing lives by its opposite. is to know Satan .

To know God

To know Good is to know Evil .

To know the Beautiful is to know the Ugly.

To

love much is to hate much.

Mysticism has for com-

panion

St.

Obscenity.

Every

Anthony

has

for

companion a pig. Baudelaire had been in the æsthetic and emotional spheres where Hegel had been in the intellectual sphere. Infinite.

Both had followed the straight line into the Both apprehended the unity of opposites.

They were the two Peeping Toms of Europe.

They

watched the phantom world of Seeming undress . Both had been in the sacred penetralia where the Eternal Fabricator weaves its meshes .

And both

came back to the world with something of their sanity gone, but with a mighty torch socketed in their souls. The perversity in the nature of Baudelaire was the manifestation of the vengeance of his thwarted instincts .

His Devil was real.

His God was a fiction .

But he dared not or could not live fully as the devil's darling child .

His tragedy lay as much in the fact 208

BAUDELAIRE :

that

his

IRONIC

instinct-to-evil

was

DANTE

being

constantly

as

thwarted as was his instinct-to-good .

He was both

Ormuzd and Ahriman. You

shall

be everlastingly

doomed

to do the

thing you do not wish to do, prophesied the Imp of the Perverse in his nature . be gall in your honey.

There shall always

You believe you are doing

one thing ; in reality, you are doing another. Evoke Astarte and you shall behold Medusa ! toward your purple heavens ! grave

in

the

slime

of

a

Fly, Icarus,

I am building your tarn!

Your

Gothic

dreams shall be the roosting place of bats and obscene night-birds .

Your Madonna shall be a Pro-

tean Madonna - a Madonna who shall be Jezebel and Thaïs and Aspasia.

You shall set out for the isles of

the Hyperboreans and shall remain to pray at Paphos. You shall play the satyr in the Temple of Vesta.

You

are a Viking who shall conquer a cabbage patch. You are a Siegfried who shall find his Brunhilde in the corner seraglio .

I am the Imp of the Perverse.

I am the everlasting contradiction . that battens on the brains of poets .

I am the Nemesis I am the sinis-

ter incarnation of the Spirit of Modernity. breach in Unity.

I am a

I am the irony of the heart.

And

Charles Baudelaire is my masterpiece. Baudelaire's cruelty was an intellectual cruelty.

209

FORTY

IMMORTALS

His malevolence was philosophical.

He sought to

verify an abstraction, to place himself at the point of view of Nature . science

seeks to

And then, if all-powerful Omnichasten

us through

agony, why

should not he, Baudelaire , be a conscious instrument of that Omniscience? He was a combination of Puck and Iago .

He had

just enough of Puck in him to redeem the Iago and just enough of Iago in him to rationalize the Puck. His jest quavered . reservations.

His diabolism has tremendous

He was an Aristophanes— but an Ar-

istophanes on Calvary.

His poisoned poignard had been to the hilt in his own heart.

His sufferings were unique to him.

And

because of this he had a grudge against those who could not suffer as he suffered .

He felt the rage of

genius , smitten with its immedicable griefs , confronted by the bovine geoisie. joy.

complacency of the bour-

At the feast of the Pharisees he was a kill-

On the fat cheeks of Mediocrity he squirted his

vitriol, and under the nose of the optimist-everlasting proof of pre-established stupidity—he rolled his worm-gnawed cadavers. And then he made the sign of the cross. All sexual emotion leads to God or woman.

The

mystical satyriasis of St. Augustine and St. Theresa 210

t

BAUDELAIRE :

and the

sumptuous

IRONIC

litanies

of

DANTE

lust

by

chanted

Baudelaire and Swinburne over the bodies of their mistresses spurt from the same source . is a secondary sexual characteristic.

Mysticism

The luminous

ecstasies of the saints are born of Eros.

And the

luminous bodies of women are clothed by the poets in the peplum woven for mystical houris . Religious mysticism is the eighth deadly singreater than all the rest.

It is there that the virgin

and the voluptuary are paramours.

It is there that

Sappho and Eugénie de Guérin embrace as sisters. It is there that the author of " Les Fleurs du Mal" and the author of the Apocalypse understand their oneness. It is in that Third Empire of mysticism that the Song of Solomon is chanted by a satyr and

the

“Laus Veneris” is intoned by a priest of the faith . In that radiant mist we see Petrarch and Thomas à Kempis and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and St. Simon the Stylite and Benedict de Spinoza and Paul Verlaine.

It is the final Pantheon of the Possessed .

It is there that the mystical sensualist and the Godintoxicated transpose their personalities before the ironic eye of Eros-Jehovah !

211

LORD DUNSANY

Peel an Irishman and find a magician . Old Sod of myth.

He is the

He is an inversion, a reversion,

an atavism . He brings fairies out of fireplugs . blackthorn is an Aladdin's lamp .

His

His porridge bowl

is a magic well . His black eye, received in no mat. ter how stupid a tavern brawl, he wears as his Croix de Guerre.

The Irishman is Baron Munchausen,

d'Artagnan and François Villon. The plays and stories of Lord Dunsany are a perfect expression of the fantastic imagination. since

William

Blake's

"Prophetic

Not

Books" -the

strangest creations in all literature-have we read of such curious creatures and cities , rivers and wars. The names of the creatures and cities would alone have inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write immortal poems. His brain is one of the garrets of heaven, a storeroom of worlds.

His humor, his irony, that runs

through all he writes like muffled thunder on clear , starlit nights , are the humor and the irony of the implacable gods that fling the suns into space. His stage is set on the edge of the world, which

212

LORD

DUNSANY

is the borderland of his skull .

The flashing temples

of immemorial demons and galleons with purple sails that founder in ultra-violet sunsets and mountains that buttress gnomic moons and strange kings that are sent on secret errands by jade and jasper Vishnus-of such are the kingdoms of Dunsany. He is a tremendous reaction against civilization . "Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world," he seems to say with Charles Baudelaire. bound up with his imagination .

The fate of man is It is the imagina-

tion, and not Karl Marx or the Bolshevists , that shall set us free.

Man cannot live by banks alone, and it

is easier for a Zeppelin to go through the Pyramid of Cheops than it is for a sentimental soap-box reformer to enter the Kingdom of the Imagination. Lord Dunsany's work leads literature back to its sources.

For literature is the unveiling of the eter-

nal, the immutable, the fugacious .

It is, in its

essence, the record of a myth done into

words,

words selected by a master-brain, words that hold the vision in a vise of gold and glass .

Was it Gau-

tier or Flaubert who said that each thought had its one word in which it perpetually sought incarnation ? Lord Dunsany always finds that exact word, that exact phrase. lungs.

His style fits his dream as air fits the

It is the prose poetry of the Bible-threads 213

FORTY

IMMORTALS

of magic utterance that weave his tale before our enchanted eyes. His plays are plays of Doom, as convincing as Maeterlinck's, without the latter's faults or sentimentality .

He stands nearer to the sources of him-

self than does the Belgian playwright.

He achieves

his effects with less effort-apparently.

In Maeter-

linck there is always some human reality.

In Dun-

sany's work there is only sheer fiction, a purely fabulous

irreality.

Unlike

Chesterton,

he

cares

nothing about the rightness of right or the wrongness of wrong.

He is a splendid literary immoralist—

one who works beyond the trenches of Good and Evil in the No Man's Land where the Greeks placed the Furies and the Fates and where Blake housed Urizen and the Four Zoas. He has written "The Book of Wonder" his books are books of wonder.

Wonder !

soul of humanity needs but that !

but all The sick

Lord Dunsany's

work is part of that renaissance of wonder to which the future points.

For wonder is the very breath of

life and imaginative amazement the proper fire of its cleansing.

It is the primal prayer, the aboriginal

creed of the soul.

"Why is anything?" asked Vol-

taire after the great earthquake at Lisbon. is anything ? -how

is

Yea, why

anything?-whither 214

goeth

LORD

DUNSANY

anything in the hurricanes of matter and the inevitable blows of Time?

He who shall make a myth of humanity and a legend of living and a song of fugacity is a king among us wraiths.

He who shall make the familiar

the unfamiliar and skin us to the quick of our mystery is a world-magician, a sorcerer of chance and days. Another

Irishman-Oscar

Wilde

came to

us

some years ago dressed in knickerbockers with a sunflower in his coat ; but Lord Dunsany came to us in khaki , his brain bulging with luminous immensities

and

Apocalyptic

images,

with

a

full-

blown rose in his coat plucked from the grave of William Blake, who lies beautifully unburied

on

"the broad Disk of Urizen upheav'd across the Void many a mile."

: 215

ANATOLE

FRANCE .

The human intelligence has not slept since the birth of Voltaire .

It has walked the floor of knowl

edge and smashed the furniture of earth and the lustres and arc lights of heaven to a billion splinters and flashing fragments . In art all unity is dead. dered in their moulds.

Forms and rules lie mur-

We stand not at Armaged-

don but at a Towel of Babel . There is isms.

a jangle

They

come !

of schools They

and

come

a jungle

the

of

vorticists ,

the vers librists , the pointillists, the imagists . There is a can-can of individualists in literature .

The in-

definite, the uncertain , the new, the paradoxical are the scarlet paradises of æsthetic intoxication .

We have gored the heart out of every artistic certainty.

Each school has its own private Nine Muses.

Unity sleeps ; nothing remains but units.

Anatole

France is one of these units . In his introduction to his fairy story, "HoneyBee," he says : "I have a pretty little neighbor of mine whose library I examined the other day. 216

I

ANATOLE

FRANCE

found many books on the microscope and the zoophytes , as well as several scientific story books. One of these I opened at the following lines : 'The cuttlefish

Sepia

Officinalis

whose body includes

is

a

cephalopodic

a spongy organ

mollusc

containing

chylaqueous fluid saturated with carbonate of lime.' My pretty little neighbor finds this story very interesting.

I beg of her, unless she wishes me to die

of mortification, never to read the story of HoneyBee." It is thus that the gentle Anatole registers his contempt for the purely scientific modern mind. He propounds here a veritable theory of education in regard to the child mind, which in a way might apply to beings of a larger and sillier growth .

Is there

a more revolting and hideous thing than to know a child of eight who has mastered Hebrew and Latin , knows algebra and can repeat without even skipping Lady Jane Grey all the rulers of England seriatim from Fool I. down to- oh, well ? In reading "Honey-Bee" lately I suddenly recalled that some years ago while rooting around in ancient schisms and sects I had run across the Fathers of the Church of Anatole . The Fathers of the Church of Anatole were called the Acataleptics , a sect from wayback opposed to the 217

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Gnostics, who were the mystical prohibitionists of their day, and knew it all. The doctrine of the Acataleptics was the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of all things. eth the

understanding.

Pyrrho

Acataleptic among the ancients .

is

the

Life passsupreme

Anatole France is

the supreme Acataleptic among the ultra-moderns . Between stands the great figure of Michel de Montaigne, on whose tomb is graven that profoundly religious question, "What Do I Know? " If catalepsy is a "possession," Acatalepsy is a state of ultimate freedom .

"The story of an intellectual

Odyssey" some one has beautifully called the career of Anatole France. Odyssey, indeed ! for the adventures of UlyssesAnatole on the way were worth the recording, and the destination is of no importance.

Anatole France

is the Ulysses of literature, as Victor Hugo was the Homer of creeds.

The world is a whimsey. nothing disproven. madman

( an

Nothing can be proven ;

"Eureka !" was uttered by a

ironical

madman ,

Poe) .

Anatole

smiles and smiles ( like Renan) and is not a villain, for, if he has given us irony as shield to fend the slings and arrows of outrageous gods, he has also uttered the word Pity. 218

ANATOLE

FRANCE

Apollo and Dionysus are his gods -ContemplaEat, drink and make merry, for

tion and Ecstasy.

tomorrow you may be an immortal, and it shall be asked of you , "Did you love My earth or reject it? ” For the kingdom of the Anatolian heaven is made

up of sane pagans. The vast smile of the great Frenchman dissolves all

systems .

minded

will

The

nets

never

woven

strangle

by the

him

Teutonic

in their folds.

Through the walls of all the granite superstitions, whether scientific, political or religious, he passes like a ghost.

His solving merriment is a

fourth dimension .

comic

His is the unarithmetical grin .

That this pacifist became a warrior in 1914, that he had gone over to Socialism, but completes the irony of his Dæmon. taking

sides.

leaped

to

its

The feet.

He rounded himself out by race, France

merely extensions of Anatole.

the and

human

in

him

humanity

were

1914 was a giant re-

tort wherein the individual in him, the literary wizard and indifferent seer disappeared like a snowstorm in a sun. The smile and the tear married and became a sword. The great ghost, Race Solidarity, rose before him like some mythologic beast . 219

His Socialism was a

FORTY

IMMORTALS

confrontation of the common enemy of man , Selfishness.

His intellect foundered in his heart .

came the thing he smiled

at.

The

Abbé

He beJerome

Coignard fell on his knees before La Pucelle. He is himself a character out of one of his books. He satirized his own life in that inscrutable August. In "The Opinions of Jerome Coignard " and " Le Jardin d'Epicure" he is a chemist of visions , the Beau Brummel of Satans .

He

analyzed

and

classified

the errors that the world believes to be certainties. He is the taxidermist of human illusions. Finally the Great Satirist had his little joke with Anatole , as Anatole had had his superb jests about all things . And why not ?

Is not France the eternal Don

Quixote of civilization ? Sinai on her brows.

She has the seals of Mount

She has always warred for the

Invisible, for a thing not seen of the

eyes , for

Chimera. On the Jacob's ladder of social evolution she has stood on the highest rung .

She is the sanity of the

world ; her socialism is a sane socialism ; her individualism a sane individualism ; her nationalism a sane nationalism . But Anatole France was not "converted " Tolstoi.

à la

He did not reject his past and call in the

220

ANATOLE

FRANCE

Savonarolas for a bonfire of his books in the Place de la Concorde, as Tolstoi would have done.

For

his sense of humor perceived that each gesture he had made to life from his birth on the Quai Malaquais was valid. If Anatole France had never written anything else, " La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque," " Thaïs” and " La Révolte des Anges" would have put him into the Pantheon .

The first named is of the very

essence of Anatole France.

It is Latinity in all its

reckless glory. In "Thaïs " one sees the influence of Flaubert. It is the irony of asceticism and sensualism. "The Revolt of the Angels" ( a bartender first gave me this book to read-you never can tell ! ) mythogony.

is a

It is the siege of Lord Abracadabra by

the Greenwich Village geniuses of the earth.

Not to

have read it is not to have read. It is a pity Victor Hugo died before it was written . He would have moved his pontifical chair down a peg.

What is the

final

Anatole France ?

" message " that we get

from

It is this : An eagle about to take

flight from a peak- such should be the attitude of the free, evolving, life-curious soul .

No thought, no

creed, is final ; each belief should be only a promon221

FORTY

IMMORTALS

tory from which to behold a more distant belief. We should go singing toward the unknown .

With-

out beyondness , without vision, humanity lives in a tomb.

Once we cease to believe in any one thing and

become spectator and actor, because it is a health gesture, we see the " great process " is not " good" or "evil," but beautiful .

We no longer demand a mor-

ality, but an æsthetic .

We glorify change, seeing in

it the method of a timeless miracle . But when will the

crowd understand

that

an

Epicurean is not necessarily a lobster cormorant and a wine guzzler ? "Life ," once said an Imp to me, " is the highest form of organized stupidity tempered by magnificent illusions ; and the universe is a great epic that a Shakespeare

has written with a worm.'

So might have said the great Anatole, one of the rarest spirits of the age.

222

WALT WHITMAN

No great man arrives until after his departure. No seer is accepted as a seer until the things he saw beyond the threshold of his time have woven themselves, by the easy processes of evolution, into the warp and woof of matter. In spite of the fact that matter does not exist the simplest of demonstrable truths-men will be99 lieve only those things that " come true.'

To the great masses , no theory of life is true until it is practical.

No doctrine is of importance until

it is appraised in the market-place or weighed in the counting-room. good for?

Ideals are good, but what are they

Can the midnight oil of the thinker be

used to grease the

wheels of progress ?

Can

prophet tell me the price of stocks next week ?

a If

not, he is a loafer , a swindler , a charlatan. Stupidity and vulgarity are unchangeable quantities.

Their devotees accept a man with the same

routine placidity with which they reject him.

Only

a dead seer is a great seer . Emerson

took

the

universe

of

thought

and

moulded it into a thousand gleaming sentences ; he took the hollow tubes of abstract conceptions and filled them with blood. 223

FORTY

Thoreau

took

the

IMMORTALS

universe

of

thought

and ,

moulded it to gleaming arrow-darts tipped with acid : he filled his fennel-rod with ichor. Nietzsche took the universe of thought and alembecized it in the retorts of hatred to a poisonous spittle which he blew full in the face of humanity. Whitman took the universe of thought and made it walk and talk and act and live . matter and retranslated

matter

He made of spirit into spirit again .

He gave to philosophy a local habitation and a name. He took the protean Ideas of Plato that the Greek philosopher declared to be living, transcendental beings in his athletic fist, and on the iron anvil of life he pounded them into shape and use.

Walt Whitman taught no philosophy, taught no metaphysics, taught no creed .

Walt Whitman was

philosophy, he was metaphysics, he was a creed. Men came to hear Emerson talk ; men came to see Whitman .

Men came to Emerson to hear the

truth ; men came to Whitman to see the truth.

In Emerson the heroic life found a tongue ; in Whitman the heroic life found a body. Whitman was greater than Emerson or Nietzsche or Ibsen .

He must be classed with Heraclitus of

Ephesus, Jesus , Epicurus , St. Francis of Assisi , Napoleon-with the men who acted their thought and 224

WALT

WHITMAN

thought little of their act.

He flew into the face of

his age ; but that did not constitute his greatness . He walked brusquely into the scented presence of respectability and deftly pulled a handful of straw out of the dummy ; but that did not constitute his greatness .

He violated the conventions ; but that did not

constitute his splendor . He was great because he was a rebel ; because he was sincere , because he lived sublimely, decently— that is, naturally- and taught with the supreme nonchalance of easy example the egocentricity of the universe and the ineffable dignity of simplicity. He was the universal man , the law-giving anarch. Anarchs believe in law more than any other men ; for that reason they oppose those gross perversions of law called the State and Church. regulated by intelligence.

Law is instinct

It is the inner urge that

aims at the procreation of an individual in its own image.

Instinct seeks autonomy , spurns vassalage , grips reality, which if it be not within a man is surely nowhere. law.

My desire is my law-your desire is your

It seeks to cast from itself all external tram-

mels and flings itself in the direction of its immanent destiny.

The disciples of the inner law are bound

by rigid rules, iron regulations , are subject to mac225

FORTY

IMMORTALS

erating penalties and tend to the center of spiritual gravity.

Sun or

satellite ?

Law-giver

or law-re-

ceiver ?—which comes nearer the core of power? "I celebrate myself and sing myself” —that is the opening line of that great epic of the ego, " Song of Myself." In singing himself he sang of the Whole . In celebrating himself he celebrated not Walt Whitman, of Mickle Street, Camden , New Jersey, but Walt Whitman, the vitalized epitome of an eternal past ; Walt Whitman the summation and recapitulation of an endlessly diffused nature ;

Walt Whitman the en-

closer of ghosts of the gone-by and the protagonist of his future incalculable incarnations . The egotism of little men is ridiculous.

The ego-

tism of supreme minds that apprehend the Infinite and the Eternal passes over into godship . egoity that physical.

describes

its

parabola

It is the

in the

super-

The boldness of Whitman's claims spring

from the profundity of his insight.

In the moral

life he drives us back to spiritual Ptolemaicism.

He

makes the soul of man the center of the universe, around which swing all forces, all matter, all potencies, all that the eye greets or the imagination limns. Only Shelley passed so completely into the world external to him.

His astral imagination— his " cos226

WALT

WHITMAN

mic conceit" he called it-was his passport beyond all the barriers erected for lesser men.

His vitality,

welling up in an unbroken stream throughout a period of forty years, passed over into the leaves of grass , the light of stars, the souls of children, the thief in his cell and the cat on its porch. So everything impinged on that spirit.

Every-

thing was part of Walt Whitman—that is, part of you, part of me, part of any one who has come to realize that the universe of visible and invisible objects is but a creation out of the exfoliating Unconscious within man ; that the soul of the individual is the great thaumaturgist ; that, literally, the Kingdom of God is within us. And that was the egotism of Walt Whitman that astounded a whole world- nothing more than his perception of the relation of all things to the one thing that supports and gives significance to the external universe-the soul of man .

And in this cele-

bration of this transcendent truth Walt Whitman selected his own soul to be the object of his poetic fervor, for that soul was not less than the others. In evolution he found the secret of immortality. Man is what he was.

Each of us literally existed in

the primordial gas and each of us has been paleozoic 227

FORTY

IMMORTALS

ooze, rock, beetle , flying fish, sea water and rain.

Afar down I see the first huge nothing, I know I was even there, I waited unseen and always , and slept through the lethargic mist. Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen , For room for me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

Change viewed scientifically is called evolution. Change looked at imaginatively is called reincarnation.

Both measure the same facts.

Walt Whitman identified himself so completely with the world-spirit that he took as the definition of his own immortality the immortality of God . Personal immortality is the dream of little minds. It springs from the love of the flesh .

It is the un-

spiritual dream, because it shrinks from change and from the infinite ; hence is without faith. Death to Whitman was absurd . death is evanescence, vanishing.

What we call When the boat

is out of sight of land does it follow that the land is no more ? "I shall come again upon the earth after five

228

WALT

WHITMAN

thousand years," he boldly asserted . Walt Whitman.

But not as

Nature never repeats her phenom-

ena ; she only repeats the spirit of phenomena ; the electric current that passes through the atmosphere and that which passes through the telegraph wire are the same, but the expression of activity is different.

His faith was organic ; it was superimposed on no stratum of doubt. his very life. adaptation. of it.

It was like the breath of his body,

Death is really only a form of re-

Death is the equal of lifethe best part

Life has made provision for all contingencies ,

and do you not think death has done as much?

The

project cut down in its inception by death, the passionate desire balked of attainment by the arrow shot out of the dark-do you think they are lost ? How can they be? hilation of a force ?

Who can conceive of the anniLife outlasts its moulds ; fire

outlasts the furnace in which it glows ; the ashes in the grate liberate forces which pass into newer centers of activity along the line of their innate characters.

What is democracy? will say.

The right to vote, one man

Equality of privilege, another will say.

The doctrine that all men are created equal will be the assertion of a third. 229

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Democracy is none of these things.

It is the cos-

mic fraternal spirit. Walt Whitman's democracy was the democracy of the spirit, a clear perception that not only were all men his brothers, but that the animals and flowers "That thou art," says the Hindu

were as well .

teacher in the "Dhama-Pada" to his disciple, pointing to a beggar .

"That am I," said Walt Whitman

looking at the drunkard arrested in the street. Democracy is a spiritual concept .

Christ was a

democrat, Buddha was a democrat, Marcus Aurelius was a democrat.

Democracy is the perception of the

relations that exist between differences .

It traces

the thread of affinity through all forms of unlikeness .

It finds in that affinity the fundamental one-

ness of man. The only legitimate aristocracy is the aristocracy of character.

Room for character ! room for the

Self-that is the essence of Walt Whitman's democracy.

Wherever there is a man there is a democrat.

And so he saw in the cab-driver, the deckhand, the illiterate pioneer an endless duplication of his miraculous Self.

They were no less than he.

They

were his brother links in that marvellous process that has spun man out of the nebula that cohered in the monstrous abysms of space, that coiled Force, insu-

230

WALT

WHITMAN

lated in matter, that has been unwinding its infinite length throughout an eternal time.

He recognized

the democracy of instinct, the democracy of origin, the democracy of aspiration in all men. He was only an accidental variant of the thief, a murderer accidentally shunted from the track of blood, a scavenger who had evolved . He comprehended all differences of circumstance, and in comprehending them he blended them and resolved them into their originals. He saluted all men reverently because they were Walt Whitman differentiated , he saluted himself because he was all men integrated .

Time is the Miraculous Day. nus mirabilis of the Creator .

Eternity is the an-

Poets are because the

universe exists to be wondered at.

Who shall say

"little" or "big" in a universe of infinitely large and infinitely small magnitudes?

Where the ultimate

origin of all things must forever be an enigma to man who shall construct an hierarchy of miracles ? Christ who walked the water and a house-fly that walks the window- pane other.

one is no less inexplicable than an-

When we explain how a thing is done we

merely add hypothesis to ignorance. Walt Whitman looked on the world with the eyes of an infant staring at the marvel of a brass button . 231

FORTY

IMMORTALS

He could conceive of no greater miracle than the hair on the back of his hand .

He flung the word com-

monplace from his vocabulary, for what was "common" in the average man was to Walt Whitman the persistent repetition of a miracle .

What through

endless repetition and elbow familiarity dulled the sense of the matter-of-fact man caused a steady enhancement of the sense of wonder in that soul fresh from

its

mother-mystery.

Merely

to

live

over-

whelmed him ; this sudden adventure of Intelligence in matter kept him agape.

Wonder enough to see a

man cross the street ; wonder of wonders that there should be a street, or a man , or locomotion, or perception. So he clothed compost and all manner of ugliness with this wonderlight that fell from him all his days . So he wrought in his cosmic astonishment a divine world out of the stale miracles we call commonplace. As Cæsar Augustus found a Rome of brick and left it a Rome of marble, so Walt Whitman found the everyday world around us a world of familiar substance and he left it a world aureoled in mystery .

His years of composition on "Leaves of Grass" was one long majestic gesture which translated a knowable universe into an unknowable fourth dimension that must forevermore claim our amaze . 232

HEARN-IBSEN

Ghosts are subject to the same laws as thought and matter.

They evolve from the simple to the

complex, from a homogeneous film that stands in a doorway or vanishes in moonlight to a heterogeneous and much involved "stream of tendency."

The ghost is a root-thought in the human mind. It will not down .

We may transform it from the

mere goblin at the gate to a " theory of heredity" or to a law of transmigration and reincarnation- nevertheless , it is still a ghost, an intangible, deceptive, ever-present force. Shakespeare's Banquo was a ghost ; so was Oswald Alving.

The great world-poet wrote in an imagina-

tive age ; an age that had not yet guessed that belief in ghosts was the mind's crude formulation of the great truth- the immemorial secret of the Eastthat no force can possibly perish ; that death is only a vanishing, not an annihilation ; that everything which has been must recur again and again. Ibsen transferred his ghost from the realm of the imagination to the brain-cells and blood corpuscles . We are all ghosts—that is , transitory agglomerations of matter, organized forces that walk the earth for 233

FORTY

IMMORTALS

a little while and then go back to the great ladle of the Button-Moulder . Ghosts are forces.

The difference between the

imaginative and scientific views of ghosts is merely a difference of locale .

In the greatest ghost story in

the world-Henry James ' "The Turn of the Screw" -we have for the first time a story that gives us the exoteric and esoteric theory of ghosts. Lafcadio Hearn and Ibsen ! Viking.

The Hindu and the

The hermit with his hut set amid the cherry

blossoms and the great hermit of the North with his Ice-Church set amid the eternal snows that drift from boreal peaks .

At first glance there seem to be no points of contact between these two men .

But it may be laid

down as axiomatic that minds of the first order are affinite. angles .

They see the same truth from different The two or three things they know hold

the essense of all wisdom.

Differences in mental

and moral constitutions between men who are on the same plane of perception are merely differences of detail- veils , earth-begotten errors of sight of the one Inner Vision .

The common fundamental Soul

will see the great fundamental facts .

Eschylus,

Shakespeare and Ibsen put in dramatic form what Pascal, Amiel and Lafcadio Hearn put in the form 234

HEARN - IBSEN

of confession and essay-the terror and the glory of man's adventure in the infinite web of force and matter. Hearn and Ibsen both saw the world with the eyes of the mystic- the closed eye that stares inward, To both these seers the downward and upward . universe

was

phantasmal,

ghost-ridden ;

round-

about were evil spirits of air and water, demoniac influences, the earth-bubbles of Shakespeare. Ibsen's characters ghastly ironic Lafcadio

are touched

effigies

with nightmare-

of human

Hearn's dreams were

All of

beings.

All

fashioned by

of the

thought : How may one escape the illusion called living ? Goblin ?

How can I be delivered from the Cosmic How many æons will it take me to un-

weave my ego ? The endless reincarnation of egos which Hearn believed in-great seer that he was ! —was called by Ibsen "spirits that walk again."

His great play-

"Ghosts "—was written to prove that the dead cannot die, that they live as ghosts in their posterity. If one thing may be predicated absolutely it is the existence of immaterial beings.

They haunt us by

the million ; they batten on us, they bludgeon us, they wheedle us, they run us down, they trip us up, they beatify us, they anathematize us . 235

We are they.

FORTY

IMMORTALS

The vulgar, the unimaginative, the literals, must have ghosts and goblins and external manifestations -they can only conceive of the immaterial in forms drawn from the material world ; it must be a man or a woman, have a head, hands, feet and body. They cannot grasp the thought that the dead may live as tendency, that atmosphere is a living thing, that the habitat of Destiny is the cells ; that cells are alive, possess knowledge, are peepers, eavesdroppers —and never take hush-money.

By no flight of the

imagination can we conceive of the material.

We are

ter is part of the illusion of the senses. dupes of touch.

Mat-

There are none so blind as those

who see. Hearn believed we were all made up of an infinite number of ghosts . Each atom in us by virtue of the law of the indestructibility

of matter

is

a tiny

haunted house, and these old vestiges of selves , scenting from their cells the old joyous earthlife , shriek through the living clay for birth .

We call these

ghosts obscure instincts and emotion , "the angel and beast that survive in us."

And that is Ibsen's corethought.

Everywhere the

ghosts of an immemorial and blood -clotted past rise up in sheeted droves to throttle the living. piration wakes demons in us. 236

Every as-

They are the Furies

HEARN-IBSEN

and Harpies of the old Greek drama, and we who seek emancipation are the fleeing Orestes. Bishop Nicholas , in "The Pretenders," one of Ibsen's earliest dramas, dreams on his deathbed of creating a ghost of himself-a perpetual motion machine—that shall work his vengeful will throughout eternity.

Ibsen touches a truth that only the

East has affirmed Hearn

the East and Schopenhauer and

that all desire is the voice and urge of an

ancestral self, an old ghost seeking incarnation in deed . The dead rule.

That is the thesis of Ibsen.

That

is the passionately persistent affirmation of Lafcadio Hearn . Behold the White Horses of Rosmersholm ! gallop

past

as

sinister

shadows,

triumph of the self-slain wife .

heralds

They of the

She reaches a long

hand from the grave, and Rebecca West and Rosmer are summoned.

It is their own will that prompts

them to the double suicide, you will say .

No !

It

is the will of a ghost. Hearn's sublime paradox that we are the dead and that only the dead live was drawn from the deepest perception of the inner eye. thought.

It is a thought beyond

For man is not what he is but what he was.

The title of Ibsen's last play-" When We Dead

237

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Awake” —might have been the title of an essay by Lafcadio Hearn .

It would have appealed , too , to

that marvelous phantom that stayed with us for so little a while-Percy Bysshe Shelley.

He, too , had

watched this solid-seeming world thaw and resolve itself into a ghost . All personality is recombination, and we are but froth on the phantom waves of Time. eternal recollection. shadows .

Nature is

She is a wraith with endless

A speck of dust in the crucible of the un-

known God.

That was Hearn's marvelous message.

So, too , in Ibsen's view, character is only a retort. The soul of man he conceives as a Black Hole of Calcutta wherein a multitude of half-dead beings struggle for breath and light. What was it that called to Brand up there on the glittering

ice plains

of

spiritual

isolation ?

The

ghosts of Agnes and his child . What spirit was it that sent the giant snow-avalanche a-toppling over his frost-bitten soul ?

The

Ghost-Nemesis that pursues those who break the leash of custom and make blind dashes toward the unattainable. What

flung

Master

crowned steeple ?

Solness

from

the

wreath-

Ghostly hands stretched out of

the soil of the past . 238

HEARN - IBSEN

Why did Peer Gynt have to go roundabout all his life ?

Because at the crossroads of every path that

he took there squatted a ghost, a shadow, the innominable

Thing

that

companioned

Hearn

and

DeMaupassant. Hedda Gabler, Irene, Rubreck, Little Eyolf were swallowed up by the extensionless goblin Past .

And

it was the social Horla that sought to blot out Herr Stockmann and Mrs. Alving . As James Huneker says , Ibsen " set his Hell on the heights."

And his heights were ghost-walks.

Do ghosts exist ?

Only Science asks that question .

Poets and seers smile at the question .

Their guesses

are nearer the truth than the affirmations of science .

239

FORTY

IMMORTALS

STRINDBERG .

I want to seize the whole of August Strindberg the man in a thought and I find that that thought cannot be marshalled in my consciousness.

I want to explain August Strindberg, and I find that to do so I would be compelled to explain Life. There is no discoverable law or premise that I can start from in approaching that world called August Strindberg.

It would first be necessary to under-

stand Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe and Tolstoi ; chaos and light ; the Devil and God ; the sensualist and the ascetic ; the laws of matter and the laws of mind ; despair and hope ; art and science ; reason and the sublimer reason of the insane.

All these things would be necessary to approach with the purpose of analyzing a man who was the spiritual, mental and emotional encyclopedia of the race . We are too near Strindberg to see his colossal proportions.

He must be seen in perspective.

So

I will transport myself by an act of the imagination to the year 1960 and put down a few impressions that my brain has registered at a glimpse of that 240

STRINDBERG

Titan standing stark and immeasurable against the background of the age.

If I do not wilt in the

glare of his soul ! Stretched on his deathbed eaten by a cancer, does he not resemble Prometheus nailed to the Caucasus , the vultures preying on his liver ?

Indeed , Strind-

berg's life in this year 1960 has almost become mythical.

Could one man go through all the rings

of hell and heaven in one lifetime?

Could a man

live who had been all things to all men and nothing to himself?

Chemist, poet, dramatist, lover, mis-

ogynist, father, mystic, realist, revolutionist, satanist , Christian-everything by turns and nothing long— he seems to have been born with premeditation ; to have been the result of a conspiracy hatched in a secret cabal between the Furies and the Fairies and the Angels in order to give to human sight a living panorama of the psychic life.

A brazen experiment,

maybe, of God and the Devil such as is revealed in "The Book of Job," such as Goethe unfolded in his 99 "Faust."

Strindberg was

primarily a

God- seeker.

Like

Spinoza, Dante , Tolstoi, he tried to snare the Everlasting.

After finding the heavens empty he went

to hell-and the Devil was in. him .

Strindberg spat at

The Devil waived the insult. 241

He ran through

FORTY

IMMORTALS

the Universe calling for God .

Satan was always at

the end of the road-smiling, waiting, imperturbable .

Microscope, telescope, spectroscope, he could He went insane in

not find the Horla of Worlds .

order to find Him, thinking He hid in fantasies and the Land of Prester John .

He returned to the ab-

surdities and inanities of commonsense with the ashes of his dreams in his hands. Then from the smoking débris of his mind and nerves Phoenix

a

Phoenix

out

arose

of the soul

always of

that

perpetual

Strindberg !

Chaos

began to gleam again with lightning flashes lambent auroras.

He became a mystic.

of his brain bled etheric rays. he took for paramour.

and

The pores

The Witch of Endor

He stood on the shoulders

of Paracelsus and Swedenborg and hallooed into the arcana of nature.

He touched the golden knee of

Pythagoras and cradled himself in the Ideas of Plato , and stood listening behind the panels of the Visible with Porphyry and Iamblichus .

He disinterred a

thousand yesterdays buried in their crypts of silence. And again he came down from the forbidden Horebs to the absurdities and inanities of commonsense. His personalities were capable of all combinations ; and he wore each one out. the quick.

He pared his selves to

He played each emotion con furia. 242

He

STRINDBERG

ran up and down each thought like a mole and hollowed it till the husk collapsed . Read all of Strindberg.

He whined , he laughed ,

he raved, he grunted , he spat, he bellowed , he grimaced .

He played Job and Puck alternately.

He

busied himself with ant and star ; affirmed that he was God while he grovelled .

He shelled heaven with

the shrapnel of his irony and sanctified Hell in an epigram .

He took matter apart molecule by mole-

cule and whirled on the ecliptic of the electrons . In the drama of the evolution of the Cosmos he tore the promptbook from the hands of the Supreme Dramaturge. He sank his teeth in his own heart and spat the blood in his own face.

Of woman he said, "Crush

the infamy!" the while he sought the peace of her bosom.

In the beginning was Jezebel ; in the end

there will be a cuckold. In his plays the Soul speaks . a bullet .

He is as direct as

He unmasks the heart and the brain and

shows them to us in their utter nakedness . a stench of sex everywhere. stable.

There is

The planet is a breeding

Woman is the eternal spy and destroyer.

She crouches like aspiration of man.

a panther behind

every noble

She hovers like a vulture over

his highest dream. 243

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Fly to the Infinite, O Poet ! travel to the zenith of imagination , O Thinker ! -woman, obscene, irrelevant, bestial, cormorant Woman awaits you .

She

is the superman, the Anti-God, matter in its nymphaleptic paroxysms . Then suddenly from Strindberg's immortal brain there comes a sob, a sigh of unutterable tenderness and love, and a fairy-drama is born.

Out of hell

stream golden bees and 'wildering-winged butterflies.

Out of a curse a chant is born.

rises on the Brocken.

A golden sun

A south wind laden with per-

fumes passes through the infernos of his vision, and the fires of his hatred sink into their viewless sockets . Intermezzos ,

scherzos , overtones,

dithyrambs-

what was there not of music, poetry and vision in that super-sane soul ? a spiritual Baedeker.

To tour that world one needs It was a symphony with a

libretto whose million interlineations have made it unintelligible.

Satan and God collaborated at the

score. For sheer power "The Father" has never been excelled as a drama.

It ranks with the " Edipus

Rex" of Sophocles , the " Orestes" of Eschylus and the "King Lear " of Shakespeare. ology of woman. war.

It is the demon-

It is the Armageddon of the sex-

It is the débâcle of Man.

244

It is the apotheosis

STRINDBERG

of the sow. the bag.

The bubble has burst.

The cat's out of

The Secret is uncovered at last.

Read

"The Father." Strindberg died with the Bible clasped passionately to his heart. Osiris

Ironic to the last !

of the North !

Farewell, thou

Spiritual Hermaphroditus !

Seraphita-Seraphitus !

245

MARINETTI AND FUTURISM .

All new movements are deadly. mental .

They are ele-

They are born of some sublime moral,

intellectual or physical transgression .

The renew.

ers and renovators, the precursors of every renaissance bring not a peace but a sword.

War is as

eternal as matter and motion and change. Spinozas,

Darwins,

Hugos,

Whitmans,

come to dynamite and destroy.

Christs, Wagners

They are in the

intellectual sphere what earthquake, lightning and thunder are in the physical world.

Everything re-

peats the elemental laws of physics .

Everything

that is great and mighty and cleansing is attained with blood.

Everything that is sublime is a form of wickedness raised to the highest power. Great prophets , newcomers,

heralds , hurl tiles

from the housetops and plant in secret places giant time-bombs that may not do their religiously murderous work for fifty years after they are planted ; but they work automatically and irreparably.

Christ

planted a time-machine that blew to fragments the ancient world.

So did Luther, Rousseau, Voltaire,

Blake and Stirner. Immeasurable exaggeration of the real and com-

246

MARINETTI

AND

FUTURISM

monplace is a necessity when confronting the eternal Will-to-Stupidity. Complacency must be blown from its sockets and the cancers of moral , intellectual and æsthetic comfort must be cut out with giant knives. Evolution is gestation .

Revolution is parturition.

Evolution is the seed and the furrow.

Revolution

is the Event, the portentous ninth-month of the embryo.

Catalinas

and

Robespierres

precede all

"dawns."

In another sphere come Hugos and Wag-

ners and Whitmans-the Marinettis. If the outcome is ironic— no matter.

The gesture is sublime .

The

passion, the superb, deadly blow, the mighty trajectory described in the azure-these count. There are no moral values ; there are only æsthetic altitudes .

From the fourth dimension of the imagi-

nation great criminals are the equal of great saints . So that they both be sublime, every Napoleon will top every Spinoza and a Byronic Lucifer will rank with a Mary Magdalen .

F. T. Marinetti has the winged prophetic soul , the destroying passion of great poetic genius and he uses the flaming speech of an Avatar. and the sublime

d'Annunzio

Old Italy is gone

with it.

Marinetti

rises out of the ruins , a vision of flame and thunder, chanting the glory of life , the divinity of impact, the legitimacy of speed , of war , of sex for sex's sake , of 247

FORTY

IMMORTALS

the modern vertigo of nerve and flesh and mind that sets its goal in the millennial flying Tomorrow. He is part of that great reaction against otherworldliness begun by Stirner and Nietzsche.

Mat-

ter and force forever and forever are divine .

The

eternal bloodsucker , the Spiritual, must be crucified again.

Away with the vampire saviors of the race !

To the rack and the crucifix with those who blaspheme against matter !

Stamp out forever the libel-

lers of the sun, the phallus, Mammon !

Only the

innate pornography of the cowled and ascetic spiritualists have made of woman's body a reek and pigsty.

Every denier of the flesh and matter is led into

his velvet heaven to the fanfare of a thousand piggrunts, like St. Anthony.

The sexual act is sublime.

Matter is the only mystery and the only reality. The future

always

belongs

to the

materialist.

The spiritualist is a reversion, an atavism, a perversion of the time-instinct and the sex-instinct. Marinetti has in art tried to break all the old moulds .

In speech, in writing, in music, in painting,

in sculpture he sweeps away all antecedent forms, seeking in

nature ,

tongue for Instinct.

in

reality,

in

matter,

a

new

An impossible Titan gashing

the ineluctable summits of the Past with his earthtools !

Those summits will never yield ; but behold 248

MARINETTI

AND

FUTURISM

the flight, the ecstasy and the exaltation of a Poet as he treads from sun to sun and puts his flaming sandals on the zenith of the world.

His pas-

sionate songs flow back to us and we call them his He is mad, divinely mad, ironically mad,

books .

sanely mad. Marinetti's soul is forever in vertiginous movement.

He is Futurism.

He is , and probably will

remain, the only Futurist, for aside from Marinetti the word has no meaning.

His books spurt passion .

His pages, whether of prose or poetry, whether in "Mafarka" or the " Monoplane of the Pope," are giant mosaics and arabesques of lightning flashes, rainbows and sulphuric geysers . Metaphors and similes lash our brain like hailstones , pounding us, blinding us, beating us to a formless pulp of aesthetic ecstasy.

One lies smitten.

One thinks of Hugo,

Blake, the Apocalypse and Nietzsche's "Zarathustra."

It is like an earthquake in a constellation , a

fall of millions of stars from the pole of the heavens toward the earth, a display of fireworks organized in Mars for the pleasure of those who live on Venus ! A great nymphaleptic orgy of sumptuous sonorities ! The Futurist poets , of which Marinetti is the soul , represent also a violent reaction against the intellectual.

It is the return from Nirvana. 249

From the

FORTY

IMMORTALS

icebound abstractions they come crashing into the jungles of the concrete. talize everyday life. giant

smokestacks,

They celebrate and immor-

Fortresses , armies, mills , ships , locomotives,

automobiles

and

docks are glorified , and in the violence of free verse they enter into hypostatic union with the universal Spirit of Energy. about .

Life must be lived, not thought Had not Marinetti been born a poet, he

would have been a brigand, a Napoleon , a Cecil Rhodes or a New York money-hawk. The Futurists have cosmophobia, but , unlike Kant, Schopenhauer and the intellectuals, they find their cosmos in the relative, the material, the transitory, the fugacious.

Instead of proclaiming from

the

attics of the abstract they have marched into the marketplace with sleeves rolled up and pikes in their hands.

They romp over the graves of dead theories

and carry the "live" theories on their pikes. have thrown away studio goggles fortresses for army field-glasses .

They

and sacked the

Spinoza was intoxi-

cated with God ; the Futurists are intoxicated with life.

They are the Euclids of chaos, the Beethovens

of dissonance, Dantes chanting the glories of Hell in the ears of the damned . The Futurists have cosmophobia, but, unlike Kant, in worlds unrealized of their own creation . 250

They

MARINETTI

AND

FUTURISM

seek the colossal, the gigantic, the enormous, the stupendous .

They seek to impose themselves on

modernity by an act of superb audacity. Alberichs, Fafners, Fasaults , Gargantuas.

They are On the

anvils of their lyricism they forge the beauty of the "coming time" with the raw material of the ugly world that dreams

are

surrounds titantic

In their poems

us.

and

They

satanic.

their

are

the

Raphaels of the Ugly.

They are revenants

of sanity

and health in a

world of alcoholic poets, anemic doctrinaires and boudoir essayists.

Marinetti's manifestos, which he

flings broadcast over the world in three or four languages, ring like a mountain call.

A style veined

with the red health of youth. He is, indeed, the Red Terror of Health who has flung himself into a tubercular and shamble-footed world. An atavism ?

Yes .

He is a reversion to Eternal

Youth ; a reversion from the Vampire-Ideal to a hotblooded Reality.

An atavism truly !

He carries us

back to the heyday of a lost frenetic life, to the dithyrambic and bacchic youth of the world, to the glory of Greece and the tabernacle of the senses, to the Te Deums of sensation and the sumptuous rituals of material strength . 251

FORTY

IMMORTALS

From the peaceful catacombs of a state of Grace he invites us to the hallucinating perspectives of perpetual transgression. these Futurists

They are very ancient are

as ancient as the first pantheists

who kissed the earth passionately and " hurled their lances at the sun." In painting they are prying behind the phenomenal.

They give us the hieroglyphics of emotions and

sensation.

They not only substitute feeling for sight

but they substitute themselves for nature.

They

evoke the other side of images , the reverse of the inspired dream .

It is the very mysticism of realism,

or the realism of mysticism ( to fall into the jargon of convention and normal art standards ) .

A new

vision of the world demands a new technique.

If the painting of the Futurist school is freakish

it m ay still be great .

And not in spite of its freak-

ishness but because of it. ish .

Whateve

r

is new is freak-

Freakis

hness is a tendency to variation , the law

of life and change .

Monet was at one time a freak ,

so was Whitma

, so was Wagner .

in the Pantheo

of Immorta

n

All three are now

, and those bobbina ting ls catacom - the skulls of academi a s c n h d oolbs cians masters — now bobbina r w t o te ith enewed errors ver n

the daring freakish

o t F V . ness f he uturist ision " is the word that Stupidit uses in ness y

"Freakish

252

MARINETTI

AND

FUTURISM

the presence of the rare . Where are there

any standards

for anything ?

Where are they to be found- in what brain, in what secret mountain of the moon, in what revelation ? Poems of marvellous beauty have come out of the insane asylums .

The rare and the normal are con-

tradictions in terms.

The beautiful and the popular

are antithetical conceptions. brain shifts.

Standards shift as the

Values change with each new emotion .

The art or thought or feeling that is not anarchic in its incipiency will never be great.

Everything great

and luminous and immortal is born a Cain . I, personally, do not see many things as the Futurist painters see them.

That is because I do not

feel about those things as they feel about them. That is my tragedy, not theirs .

Take a Black Fellow

from his native Australian bush and put him into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What would he

think of a Rubens, a Rodin, a Manet?

Tradition is

always a Black Fellow- in art, morals, physics and literature . A Futurist painter is going to paint a steel mill at Pittsburgh in full operation.

Being a poet, when his

eye falls on the structure itself the walls fall down. There is an explosion of images in his mind.

Out of

their lairs in the subconscious part of his nature 253

FORTY

IMMORTALS

crawl a million lost impressions, ideas and vague sensations .

The building no longer exists.

He puts

on canvas the psychological uproar in his soul . may be a tremendous social tract in color . be a pæan to labor.

It

It may

It may be a record of the satanic

lust for wealth of the modern Robber Barons of the Western world.

It may be a hymn celebrating noise

and flame and molten steel . will be

a

sincere

and

But whatever it is, it

spontaneous

record

of a

painter's psychic sight. For this reason in the Futurist canvases the individual is everything ; the art itself is of little moment.

It is the renaissance of Romanticism in art.

The Kingdom of the Real is within thee. you feel is true.

Whatever

I-that perpetually reincarnating

I, which is the beginning of all evil and all beauty and all wisdom and all stupidity—am the universe. It is the rejuvenation of Ptolemaicism, the new proclamation of the egocentricity of Nature. These painters and poets and sculptors who surround Marinetti stand at the Rubicon of the Unknown.

It is the débâcle of the Intellectual and the

formal anathema pronounced on all logical processes.

Again they have rolled away the stone from

the ever-yawning sepulchre of Habit .

Once again

some easy-going Certainties have stepped off their 254

MARINETTI

AND

FUTURISM

promontories into the abyss of Doubt.

Once again

the virgin eye of the New confronts the doltish gaze of Tradition . "Mafarka

the

Futurist,"

which

is

Marinetti's

greatest book and for which he was imprisoned, is Nietzschean in its grandeur . "Thus Spake Zarathustra ." in action.

It comes directly from It depicts the superman

It flames with an innominable and ter-

rible beauty.

Marfarka-el-Bar is the man of Will,

the man who writes his name in fire.

His will is a

kind of boiling lava that exudes from every atom of his body.

He is King of Tell-el-Keibir and, what is

greater, king of himself.

" I wish to excel myself in

creating with the effort alone of my heart a youth more radiant than my own , an immortal youth ! " he cries. ically.

Fear nothing.

Scorn death.

Live life ecstat-

Measure your grandeur by the number of

things your Will has crushed .

Open wide the nos-

trils of your consciousness and draw in the wild salt savor of your instincts . curse.

Sobriety of any kind is a

Battle and intoxication , pain and victory

justify life.

Rub acid in your wounds so as to mad-

den and stiffen your Will.

Keep the pistol of pur-

pose pressed against the temple of your weakness . Be cruel to no one but yourself.

Each day carry a

dead self on the pike of your Will. 255

The soul is a

FORTY

IMMORTALS

monstrous gadfly that stings matter and mind to incessant action and transformation .

Futurism , in its multi-glory, has come as a protest of the Instinctive and Poetic in the human soul against the colorless sanity and inert intellectualism of the times.

256

GUSTAVE LE BON.

to in-

rotest

Gustave Le Bon is the philosopher of instinct.

soul

He belongs to that high dynasty of impenitent real-

alism

ists founded by La Rochefoucauld .

His " Psychol-

ogy of Socialism," "The Crowd," "The Psychology of Races," and his " Psychology of Revolutions " are ruthless , unsentimental, contain no panaceas for sick people or sick individuals. To be a thinker is one thing.

To be a propagandist is another.

antithetical propositions .

They are

All thought aspires to ni-

hilism ; all propagandism aspires to the Absolute. And the thinker and the propagandist can only effect a reconciliation where parallel lines meet—in the Infinite, in the Never-Never Land of cosmic evolution . Bergson and Eucken run drug stores .

Gustave

Le Bon runs a laboratory . Le Bon rips curtains, masks and dominoes.

He

exposes relentlessly and inexorably races, individuals and "movements" and sets them in the gray light of reality.

His analysis of the eternal Instinct-

to- Sham is as merciless as is that of Jules de Gaultier.

He holds no brief for anything.

He is not in

favor of this or that ; nor is he opposed to that or this . He sees ; he records . gestions.

His books fecundate with sug-

Their style is simple, epigrammatic, fistic .

257

FORTY

IMMORTALS

His irony lies in his logic, which in his case, as in the case of all of us, is merely the justification of his instinct, his prejudgment. stinct. ing.

His is the aesthetic in-

Pessimism and optimism are without mean-

They both demand a theory of ends .

ludicrous.

They imply the finite.

be conceivable. reached it.

The infinite may

Porphyry, Spinoza and Emerson

But the finite-a thing with a beginning

and end—is plainly inconceivable. invented for Me.

All mental attitudes are

All ideals that are called "intellectual ideals"

are hypocritical. reality.

Life is a play

The rest is silence.

All intelligence lies . poses.

Ends are

Instinct is the only psychological

And instinct is murderously egotistic.

To

hide its inherent malignity it invents millions of masks .

These masks are woven of logic and reason.

Self-love and instinct are always rummaging about in the wardrobe rooms of the brain for a disguise. This psychological hypocrisy is itself an instinct— a detail of the instinct of self-preservation.

Hence

moral codes and philosophical and religious “justifications " for the insanest, absurdest and most perverse actions. reasoning.

Hence the ephemeral nature of all

Its role is purely utilitarian.

When the instincts have done their work the masks 258

GUSTAVE LE BON

or reasons- they wove are thrown away and another mask is substituted. The beautiful reasons and theories on which the French people thought they acted during the Revolution were "faked" in order to justify their spoliation of the rich.

Their right to bread, fuel, light,

heat and the "good things of life" was inherent. They murdered those who had starved them.

They

destroyed the things that had destroyed them. Here they were moral, sublime, right, and the Reign of Terror was a superb celebration of the instinct to seek one's own at any cost.

"Liberty," "Equality,"

"Fraternity" had nothing to do with the Revolution.

They were merely the moral tarpaulins that

the Instinct-to-Vengeance put on when it went forth to do its great work. And it is the Instinct-to-Vengeance that is at the bottom of every political, religious, philosophical and economic movement.

Along the highways of

the world the instincts hurry with faggot and sword ; but they send ahead an army of pamphleteers which distributes tracts that formulate everlasting urge.

and justify

the

This army is Mind.

The Instinct-to-Lie, the irrational, the chimeric, the mystical-these are the bases of all human action.

They are all, however, upon analysis, absorbed 259

FORTY

IMMORTALS

into the vital Instinct-to-Vengeance. is even metaphysical . the Lord.

This instinct

"Vengeance is mine," saith

This, taken in a popular sense, means that

vengeance is alone the prerogative of God, and not of man.

In its profounder sense it means that ven-

geance is at the heart of life , that vengeance is the dynamic principle in all motion .

The word "redress" is the shibboleth of the ages : Redress against nature, redress against the gods , redress between man and man. on the lips of Man .

That word is forever

In legend and in fact it is the

Word .

Redress is the idealization of vengeance, and 99 justice is its logical mask. The desire to " get even explains Brown,

Moses ,

Christ ,

Robespierre,

Mahomet ,

Washington,

Ferrer , Robin

John Hood ,

Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Karl Marx, Henry George, Cain and Roosevelt .

It explains every battle from

Salamis to Verdun .

It was to "get even" that the

lowly followed Christ.

It was the instinct to "get

even" that made Luther pin his proclamation on the 99 church door at Wittenberg ; it was to " get even' that the North punished the South in the American Civil War .

It is to " get even" that socialism has

come into the world. In a mystical age the Instinct-to-Vengeance will wear a religious mask.

In a sentimental age it will 260

GUSTAVE LE BON

wear a humanitarian mask. will wear the mask

In a scientific age it

of logic.

fashion, like everything else .

Bibles go

out of

The "Holy War" of

the Reformation, the " Holy War" of the French Revolution, the "Holy War" of Socialism-each has its bible, its paged and illuminated euphemisms to cover the naked intent of Instinct.

The Wittenberg

proclamation, "The Declaration of the Rights of Man," "Das Kapital" are the parables of humility on the lips of Social Vengeance . Chimera !

Chimera !

Chimera !

that Gustave Le Bon insists on . fined variously.

Another word

Man has been de-

One called him a metaphysical ani-

mal, another a practical marauder.

Le Bon insists

that he is a sort of mystical beast. Man is a born poet.

For a Euclid, a Newton , a

Darwin he cares not a rap.

But let him catch a

glimpse of a Peter the Hermit, a Christ, a Joseph Smith, a Mirabeau, a Napoleon , a Bryan, a Roosevelt and he will desert office, field and wife and follow where the sacrosanct fanatic leads him.

That is because man is a poet.

He is a mystical ,

irrational being, and not a practical, reasoning animal.

The impossible, the supernatural, the absurd

move him to the depth of his being. Chimera over corpses, temples, crowns.

L

261

He follows Truth for

FORTY

IMMORTALS

the crowd lies in the emotions. brain of its instincts.

Emotions are the

Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Spen-

cer mean nothing to the masses ; but preach to them a new Utopia for empty bellies, or tell them a tale of a mystical year to come by a simple "be it enacted, " and a hundred million ears are instantly a-prick. That all trails to Utopia lead to an Armageddon where the Prince of Jesters is always the victor means nothing to the race.

There is always another Be-

yond, always another Promised Land, always anThe Vulcans of mystical belief never

other Trail.

sleep in the smithy of the Unconscious, where the Gullibility is a means of

chimeras are fabricated .

survival, and "social progress" is accelerated by the wonderful

cock-and-bull

romances

of

Rousseau,

Marx and Bergson . Le Bon's theory of the French Revolution is that it was a mystical, a religious crusade.

Blood -letting

and saturnalias are incidental to all crusades of a mystical, religious type .

The anciently associated

ideas of God and human sacrifice will never become wholly disassociated in the human mind . of worship ,

all forms

of ecstasy,

"social progress " smell of blood .

All forms

all notions

of

Something must

die, something must be "offered up" in order that man may continue his antics on a fussy little star. 262

GUSTAVE LE BON

During the French Revolution this ancient riteinstinct came to life in the Reign of Terror.

The

heads of thousands of artistocrats were offered up to the "progressive" gods of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

In the reign of terror which international

communism in its infinite wisdom will soon inaugurate the offering will consist of those who belong to the capitalistic class .

We are still Egyptians and

Aztecs and we sacrifice before, during and after every battle. The first "progressive" of whom we have any knowledge was Cain, whose sacrifice was rejected by the Lord and who in revenge slew his heaven-petted brother-Cain the real progenitor of the French Revolution ; Cain, the first socialist. Le Bon has the greatest contempt for the crowd , for the people.

Democracy is the anonymous tyr-

anny-more terrible, more vindictive, more vengeful than any absolute monarchy, where a head or heads may be reached with a bomb.

Democracy is

the divinization of Opinion, and Opinion is always a Caligula.

The Crowd is the hydra that the Strong

Man, the Superior Man, must either slay or cajole -or be slain by it.

There is no incompetency like the incompetency of the majority.

The great masses of mankind have 263

FORTY

IMMORTALS

not even risen to the level of being good servants . They have never learned the first step that points to dominion-service.

Born to be graceless flunkeys,

the People aspire to Olympus . Holding within themselves the seed of every tyranny, every absurdity, every hypocrisy,

every diabolism,

every form of

slavery, they seek by amalgamation and a closer herding the miracle of transfiguration.

Bottom be-

lieves that a million million Bottoms will make him one of the elect. Democracy, which is the aspiration to mediocrity and incompetence, must always fail because there is a psychological hierarchy as well as a physical, geological and aesthetic hierarchy.

Bad worships Bet-

ter, and Better is enamored of Best.

This is writ

ten in the tissues and the corpuscles of man .

Dem-

ocracy must always fail because man is a religious animal- he worships instinctively what

is

above

him— that which equals him has no power over him.

The ideal of the people is to be ruled and

petted-but ruled at any cost. Hero-worship is vital.

It is the aesthetic escape of

the illiterate and heavy laden.

If the Hero does not

rise at the bidding of the people it will manufacture a god-sometimes it will be called Jupiter, sometimes Mahomet, sometimes Public Opinion . 264

There

GUSTAVE LE BON

is the eternal necessity to divinize in some form the instinct-to-dependency. But abstract formulas, like abstract deities, do not satisfy man for long.

His gods must have a local

habitation and a "record ."

A democracy begins to

totter at the very moment it seems to be successful . The great undertow toward the concrete ruler is felt. Every Feast of Reason ends in a Napoleon.

Every

"free people" fosters a Porfirio Diaz in its belly. Every aspiration to throw off the yoke of authority ends in a Cæsar.

It is because each one of us is

secretly a Cæsar , a Diaz, a Napoleon .

Each of us

is separately what we fear to create collectively. Democracy is as totally unsuited to human nature as is Christianity as taught by Christ. Democracy as applied by the beneficent strong man-a Frederick the Great, a Cromwell , a Marcus Aurelius-like the practical and sane Christianity of the Roman Catholic Church, is quite another thing.

Natural law is pulling one way ; the heart

and brain of man another.

To whom the ultimate laurel ?

Ask the firefly

what it has conquered from the dark.

265

POE.

Baudelaire each night before he retired prayed to his mother, prayed to be kept from the temptations of alcohol and prayed to the soul of Edgar Allan Poe. Maeterlinck, in Belgium, and Guy de Maupassant, in France, drank deeply of that well, and now when we speak of modern literature, we start from three names- Balzac, Goethe, Poe. Taine tells us that all genius can be explained by environment.

As a certain soil will only produce

lemon trees , so a certain social and racial soil will only produce a certain type of poet, musician or painter.

But Poe upset this interesting theory.

His

To fit in with Taine's

work is exotic in America.

theory he should have been born in the America of a thousand years hence, when she will be in her

autumn. Terror and beauty were the twin goddesses that baptized the soul of this strange genius .

And the weird is the

an excursion in the weird . beautiful plus the strange. derland

that

divides

His life was

He dwelled on the bor-

sanity

from

insanity.

He

caught gleams of a remote, super-lunar world that blasted him when he looked or listened. 266

POE

He fumbled with the keys to strange doors ; he haunted the corridors of white temples set in dreams ; he held conference with strange creatures of air and light that no one else could see ; he saw behind the veils of matter into the ghost-world. Poe is unanalyzable.

He was the victim of an

obscure mood that lies beyond the experience of ordinary men.

In reading his tales or poems we are

shot into a terra incognita.

We feel an atmosphere,

but we see nothing plainly.

We verge on the lunacy

that legends say lurks in mountain moonshine. have the sense of being haunted .

We

We feel lost in a

giant Nightmare that fascinates like the beautiful, sinister eye of a snake.

We lay down " The Fall of

the House of Usher," " Elegia " or " The Raven" to touch the furniture or listen to the ticking of the clock and thank God that we are still real and sane.

The victim of an obscure mood, his soul was stroked by subtle fingers on ghostly bodies.

His

heart pumped into his brain the most pathetic figures that ever haunted the cells of a brain-those braincells that entombed a million prenatal despairs and were the catacombs of his Leonores and Helens. What were those " sheeted memories of the past" that squeaked and gibbered at his heels all his life? His face as depicted by Valloton is the ghastly face

267

FORTY

IMMORTALS

of a man who has seen the Forbidden. Whence those gnawed and upturned dead faces that drifted past on sinister , shoreless seas of green?

And those little

cunning black eyes that flashed on him from their sunken sockets ? Hallucinated !

Hallucinated !

we say.

But all

great art is the product of hallucination, of a vivid, violent inner vision that passes before the mind's eye like a bolt of lightning over the mountain-tops . Like Hecla's torch that flames in an imperial solitude did this strange visitor to earth, Edgar Poe, live and die among men . One night, many years ago, in Philadelphia, the celebrated painter, John Sartain , was sitting in his library when Poe, wild, dishevelled, bruised ran into his room and declared he had seen on the walls of the

prison, where he had spent the previous

night, a host of angels clad in moonlight that blew from

wreathed trumpets

heavens.

wild

blasts

toward

the

Has not the poet, too, his Via Dolorosa ?

His poems take us to one region only-" bottomless vales" and "boundless floods" and "chasms and caves and titan woods." Man's-Land . the spirit ?

They are excursions in No-

Had he discovered the El Dorado of Had he forced the Northwest Passage

from matter to the super-material ? 268

POE

We wonder in what ethereal sphere his soul had been moulded and why it got itself flesh and came here to this prison-house to chant and get buried after forty pitiless years of life. The glamour of another world hung over his soul.

He seemed out of place in flesh.

A strange

brotherhood are these hallucinated beings.

They

come into life laden with inextinguishable griefs and stand at one remove from death.

They are gray of

heart and ashen-hued of brain ; they are tethered to the unseen, and you shall sooner dissever the sun from its fires than see them walk the ways of men . Poe's soul was cradled in a filmy ecstasy. reality was a blasphemy.

All

He preferred half-lights ,

doors ajar , curtains that swung in what he believed to be a mystic unison with the breeze, flames that flickered in ebon censers, waters dyed in shadows. The mystery of man ! world!

And the mystery of the

They are hieroglyphs , and no one will ever

decipher them. The dark tarn of Auber in the " Misty Mid-Region of Weir" was to Poe a real place.

Stagnant

pools and fetid heaths were the place where his spirit delighted to linger.

He could see in darkness better

than in light .

His poem "Silence" tells us of a region where he 269

FORTY

IMMORTALS

kept tryst with "Corporate silence !

What

Silence."

a thought !

Corporate

Is not the universe

Silence that has found a body? and is not silence the ghost silence !

of noise ? Silence

Sombre,

sinister,

brooding

that can never be silent, mur-

muring its drowsy secrets in the ear, forging the minutes into the forever recurring hours, weaving its arras of dreams. Poe trod strange Jungfraus of silence.

There are

deep lethean silences, lustral silences in which the soul seems to rest from its Sisyphean labors. "Ulalume" is his most remarkable and character-

istic

poem.

thought.

It

haunts

like

an

unremembered

Here at last are the Blessed Isles , here the

lotus-land of the distraught.

"Star-dials

and the

alley titanic and the realms of the boreal pole." "Ulalume” is the last word in poetic mysticism.

It

is the soul of Poe cadenced. The bitter pessimism of the man !

"The Con-

queror Worm" is a vision of the world and all the nothingness of it .

There is the same philosophy at

the bottom of it that penetrates " El Magico Prodigioso "

of Calderon.

It is life viewed from the

trenches of despair .

Men build their houses of

dreams and the worm gnaws at the foundation . life grows longer it grows shorter. 270

As

We travel from

POE womb to womb-from mother to mother-earth ; and the flesh that we love so well is spun into dust. Man has his banquet and is banqueted upon in turn . Mystic, pessimist,

poet,

mathematician ,

a man

drunk with beauty and love, a bringer of strange tidings -Edgar Allan Poe reigns from his tomb.

271

MAX STIRNER : WAR-LORD OF THE EGO

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's revolutionary essay, "Self-Reliance❞—a passionate call to arms from a mighty brain on fire with the glorified vision of its own individualized

destiny-occur ,

among

other

memorable sentences , these words : "Society is everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members .

* *

* The only right is what

is after my constitution ; the only wrong what is against

it. "

Walt

Whitman

and

Henry

Thoreau uttered equally radical words . of these men was an anarchist . to take themselves literally.

David

But no one

They were too sane

What they believed in

was the spiritual evolution of the individual , a selfovercoming, a throttling of the ghosts in one's own soul-the ghosts of fear and ignorance , the ghosts that within

ourselves

stand

at the

crossroads

of

every crisis demanding toll of our self-reliance. Self- emancipation must precede social emancipation.

If you want to abolish a mass you must begin

by reconstructing the units of that mass .

Of course

you can blow the mass up with gunpowder , but you blow up the units with it. If society everywhere conspires against the indi-

272 .

MAX

STIRNER

vidual it is because the individual has not yet freed his mind of the fixed idea that he can do without a State.

The fault comes back to each one of us .

The

State is not a thing ; it is an organized instinct ; one of the skins of evolution not yet sloughed off ; a tool that has not yet completed its work in the hands of the World-Ego. The weaknesses of " society" are the shadows of our individual weaknesses .

Its transgressions are

the sum of all individual transgressions .

Society is

no better than the average between the best and the worst individuals living within its pale.

Its crimes

against the individual are in exact ratio to the crimes of individuals against one another. Organized society will exist so long as there is an instinct to organize among individuals.

Emerson

says let each one of us fit himself to do without society-just as we have outgrown the old monstrous theologies .

The State will then drop off like

a scab. Social workers today are fighting what they call "general ills."

There are no such things.

are only individual ills .

There

Be yourself, emancipate

yourself, abolish the State by learning to do without it-that

is the

Thoreau, Ibsen.

message

of

Emerson,

Whitman ,

The latter cried , "Away with the 273

FORTY

State ! "

And

IMMORTALS

(clairvoyant thinker that

he was )

added as an afterthought-" Of course, I mean by spiritual means."

Nietzsche wrenched man out of

his social socket and made him a beatified Cain. was the poet of the Ego.

He

Had he ever heard of Max

Stirner, a war-lord of the Ego- the war-lord of the Ego? Stirner's book, " The Ego and His Own,” is the last word in egoism ; the last word in revolt.

It is not

the most dangerous book ever written because its philosophy is hopelessly impracticable.

Ibsen and

Emerson and Whitman are more dangerous in their teachings than Stirner. The latter has given us one of the most stimulating books ever written, a book that thrills, invites a man to himself ; a book that lays all the sacred spooks and ultimately brings the reader around— Egoism makes

strange bedfellows

to

where

the

philosophy of the founder of Christianity left him : You shall leave all ; the Kingdom of God is within you . Max Stirner makes the Ego of man God, and to serve it you shall leave the State, the home, the family, religion and everything that battens on the soul of man .

After you have gotten rid of all these

"earthly spooks" just what you should aspire toward

274

MAX

STIRNER

is not clear, unless it be what Stirner calls man's "Ownness ," a word that Kipling makes comprehensible in his famous injunction, "What you want go and take.” The individualism of Stirner is thus founded on the most rational idea in the world-the idea that only the individual is glorified , that only I matter— with the most irrational implications.

Away with

State, church and family!-they prevent my Ego from realizing itself. zenship is slavery. from the cradle.

Crime is my business.

Citi-

Parents maim their children

Society tickets me.

me from getting my "own."

Laws prevent

What I can do, that is

right.

Evil is failure .

ness .

All regulation is emasculation .

holy.

The thing I can use is good ; the thing that

uses me is bad.

Success is the only righteousOnly I am

Altruism is a sickness of the will.

All this is not as dangerous as it sounds, for as a matter of fact all strong men- all men who do anything in life at all, all those who differentiate themselves from the mass-act on those principles in one degree or another, generally unconsciously.

Men

never like to have their motives to action formulated . They even hate to formulate the matter secretly to themselves.

And

Stirner's

boldness

merely

sisted in putting what he thought into print.

275

con-

FORTY

IMMORTALS

The Albany and Harrisburg legislatures are reeking with men who would no doubt suppress Stirner's book if they ever heard of it— men who would long ago have known the book if it had been titled " Cash and His Own." and idealistic.

Stirner's anarchy is purely analytic But at Albany and Harrisburg the

brand of anarchy is intensely practical. And to Stirner's individualism there is a rational, majestic , sublime side .

His Ego is the hungry ani-

mal inside of us all, an animal that has got intelligence and imagination , it is true , but an animal nevertheless in that every movement of its psychic, physical and emotional nature is toward its own. Men will only marry and procreate, they will only pay taxes and support churches as long as they can be made to believe that they are getting something out of these things ; they are good so long as the good gives them pleasure—that is , swells their own Ego . They are good and altruistic for the same reasons that they are bad and egotistic ; they believe there is a gain somewhere to them.

For at bottom when you tear away the rags and tatters of hypocrisy and the mouldy crusts of convention that cover the real palpitating core of a man what will you find ?

A being that adores itself and

loves and worships only where it believes it is loved

276

MAX

STIRNER

and benefited by that worship in return . asks, "What is good ?"

Stirner

And he answers, " What I

can use." Man is a warrior .

No matter how subtle and com-

plex life becomes, no matter how highly "civilized" 99 we boast of being, it is our own-our " ownness' Stirner calls it— that we are battling for .

We, each

of us, whether in a " state of nature " or a state of society, are fighting for the conservation of the Ego. Some of us believe that the marriage institution , children and the state help us to conserve that Ego ; others believe that these adjuncts suppress it. pends on the Ego .

It de-

A business man, generally speak-

ing, finds it aids him to subscribe to the common plan of life.

A thinker like Herbert Spencer or

Schopenhauer finds it does not.

But both classes of

men worship at the shrine of the same god- the Ego. Self was the first law ; today, as ever, it is the first virtue. The Ego is a blood-smeared fact .

Man once lived

in a perpetual state of war ; he brutally struck down whatever stood in his way- if he was not struck down first.

Today we are still in a state of war, but

for the same reason that we found it necessary to kill in the old time we find it necessary now to pre277

FORTY

serve.

IMMORTALS

The Ego seeks it own through destruction

and construction.

There was a time when kind-

ness and goodness and charity would have destroyed the race . Use was God ; Use is still God . We the men and women of today, with top hats and lorgnettes and dinner pails and steam shovels , are not different in our aims from the cave-man and shaggy brute that peered out of the bramble. and the old ghost walks again . victims of egomania.

Scratch us

We are still the

Our methods are different—

that's all. This warrior-instinct cannot die. It is our sap and our virility.

It is our virtue.

We are becoming

masters now of the death-dealing forces in us and around us ; we have disciplined the things that disciplined us.

It is another mask for Ego.

It is on

these unquestionable truths that Max Stirner has reared his doctrine of Ego .

Hence it follows that this announcer of Ego does not admit the idea of self-sacrifice into his scheme of life.

And here again Stirner thinks boldly and

clairvoyantly.

For no doctrine has had more ad-

herents and fewer sincere believers than the doctrine of self-sacrifice.

Ego will not be sacrificed .

lend, but will not vanish.

It will

Self-sacrifice should be

the prerogative of power ; as it is, it is most often 278

MAX

STIRNER

the excuse that weakness makes for its inability to live for itself alone.

Suppose the doctrine of self-

sacrifice became universal.

We should have the ab-

surd spectacle of each person living for the good of some other person .

That, of course, is unthinkable.

Self-sacrifice must, in the very nature of things , be subterranean egoism. ism of the stars . "

Stirner speaks of the " ego-

It is a good example.

Each star

shines for itself ; as an incidence of power it throws its radiance into space, giving light to the darkness, shedding warmth.

But its giving is incidental .

exists first of all for itself. out of its surplus. glorification .

And self-sacrifice should be self-

All gifts should be gifts of power,

not a hand-out from duty. cries Stirner.

It

The good it causes comes

Everything is for me !

Even what he gives is still his.

And

there can be nothing to give unless one has cultivated his Ego before conferring the gift .

Unless the

gardener has given his time to raising the most beautiful plants how can his gift be worthy ?

Strangle

your instincts, throttle your inner nature, stifle the soul's cry for joy and power and its hunger for its 66 'ownness " —and Nature will brand you a sloven in your very gait and secrete the venom of your secret spite in all your "gifts."

Stirner's doctrine of the Ego leaves no room for 279

FORTY

the Socialistic state . at that fallacy.

IMMORTALS

He deals sledge-hammer blows

Socialism is to him, as it appeared to

Herbert Spencer and Gustave Le Bon, another form of slavery.

Socialism is only the popularizing of

that old enemy, the State.

The mantle has fallen

from the shoulders of the old gods onto a newer being-the People.

The Socialist believes that the

State can do what the individual cannot do , forgetting that the State is no other thing than the people. As Stirner truly says, there is no such thing as a body ; there are only bodies-that is, the State , like all abstractions , is a myth ; there are only individuals with Egos.

The Socialist believes there are individ-

uals and a State.

He makes a thing out of a word,

galvanizes it into a semblance of life, sticks a crown on its head, puts a gilded wand in its hand , sits it on a throne of theories, and cries, "Behold the Deliverer of Man- the State, the People ! "

Always the slave

of words - this poor bedeviled Man !

Always there

is a New Jerusalem-a lazy man's Utopia. was Paradise- now it is Socialism . latest illusion.

Once it

It is only the

There is no short cut to happiness .

There is no back stairs to the House of Life.

What

the individual cannot do for himself the State cannot do for him.

Nothing degrades

like dependence ;

nothing undermines a man like the certain guar280

MAX antee of a living.

STIRNER

The Ego must fight and bleed for

its “ own” —that makes the Ego godlike .

Stirner foresaw this great Socialistic propaganda that is on us .

He foresaw a slavery more terrible

than that which ever prevailed in ancient times following the erection of the Socialistic State.

By de-

stroying the competitive system the principle of individuality, the profoundest would be sapped at the core.

principle

in

nature,

Men , always certain

of life and the necessities , would lose the one supreme characteristic of their manhood— the ability to struggle and conquer.

Under Socialism we should

be ruled by a gigantic trust called the State or the People-all names for one thing. The Ego would be regulated as in mediaeval times, and on the same theory, the theory of tyrants-" public improvement . ” What should a man be helped to do then ?

To

make a better fight, to give a deadlier blow, to strike surer, to battle for the preservation of Ego.

But

he should be guaranteed nothing except death if he fails.

What is injustice ?

The equal distribution of

goods ; guaranteeing life to those who cannot fight ; preserving the weak at the expense of the strong. All men are born unequal.

Socialism- the Social

State, Stirner calls it-is confiscation of Ego . popular with those who have nothing. 281

It is

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Whatever of great things has been done in the world has been done by the individual.

The indi-

vidual— not the State or the family-is Nature's unit of value.

All that makes for material or mental

development has sprung from individual initiative, lashed by the thongs of pride and necessity.

And

wherever the State or the Church has attempted to regulate the individual and the activity of Ego decay has followed .

The old autocracy reigned on the

theory that one man should rule all men ; the new autocracy is called Socialism ; it merely reverses the It believes that all men should rule each

scheme. man.

Socialism abolishes the fear of danger in the Ego of the individual. fear and courage.

She smashes his mainsprings , No man is born with a right to

a living or anything else. what he can get and hold . competitive right. Stirner

He has only a right to Man's only right is a

The State is always evil, asserts

and Socialism is merely another gag.

Max Stirner's dream of an emancipated Ego is futile, and his reasons for dreaming it were sublime. He imposes on our brains a sublime ideal of human development.

It is like the North Star-a great

light to steer by, but he who tries to reach it is mad, mad, mad . 282

LECONTE DE LISLE .

Leconte de Lisle evokes the eternal mystery of Greece and the greater mystery that is India.

The

frenzy that seeks the breasts of Aphrodite and the frenzy that seeks Nirvana possessed him by turns. And in blending the two he discovered the secret of Greece and the secret of India : the deification of ecstasy.

The passion for beauty and the passion for

extinction bred in him an incurable melancholy in which he steeped the race of men and the race of gods.

He broke the plaster moulds of reality and

engraved his "Vanitas Vanitatum" on the finite and infinite.

His poems are mirages of life locked in heavens of ice.

He stencilled " Nada" on the breastplate of the

Lord. able.

He is as precise as Fate.

His style is inexor-

His logic is as pitiless as the logic of Eschylus He seems to be speaking from be-

and Shakespeare . yond life .

He is at an end and he prophesies back

to the beginning . Bubble.

He is the spirit of the burst

He washes his hands of God.

He reigns

over life an impalpable , imponderable brain wherein all life converges , meets and passes . peccable vision.

He is the im-

He put the tropics under glass .

Of

war he made a sublime panorama and with an irony that is satanic he took Christ at his word and laid on 283

FORTY

IMMORTALS

his head the deviltries of nineteen hundred years. When he walked he left

abysses behind him.

Where his eye fell objects relapsed There is no motion in his images. static, spent.

all things

are turned

into rigidity.

The universe is

marble.

Motion

is

The condor with full-spread wings hovers

in the Andean air motionless .

The tiger and pan-

ther , transfixed in an immemorial immobility, dream a drowsy dream in a tropic jungle that a wind has never stirred.

Silence, impassivity, sterility, trance

-in a few magical strokes the universe of living things is caught in its sin of motion- vibration is seized flagrante delicto- and stiffens in its multicolored shrouds .

The organic and the inorganic

worlds have stopped at high tide, turned to adamant as at the sudden vision of some stupendous, terrifying revelation.

And the gestures of this protracted

dying which is life are caught and registered forever in the pages of Leconte de Lisle.

One cannot dream over his

pages .

One sees .

There is complete, definitive evocation, but no suggestion. Every poem has something to say. And the thing is said completely, perfectly, inevitably.

No

great poet who ever lived was more completely the master of his visions .

Pegasus dragged Victor Hugo

through the azure at its will . 284

Leconte de Lisle kept

LECONTE

DE LISLE

his seat at the dizziest height and directed the course of the winged steed .

Hugo came back to earth bat-

tered and bruised and breathless , covered with stardust and meteoric débris.

Leconte de Lisle returned

as he had gone-immaculate, dignified , still master of the bit, with the gleam of innominable things in his abstract eyes .

The soul of man is jailed in a finite, fleeing moment .

Oblivion is not a thing to come or a thing

that has

been.

It is

a perpetual living

nonen-

tity, an eternal and continuous forgetfulness into which we sink completely at each moment in our lives.

As no two bodies can ever really touch one

another, so no two points in time, no matter how infinitesimal, can ever cohere. an abyss.

Between them there is

In that Shadow our consciousness is im-

mersed perpetually.

In that Shadow go all minutes ,

full-blown or vague, whether filled to the brim with awareness or touched with the thinnest mist of a thought.

Into this intercalated Shadow go all things .

It is the enigmatic go-between .

It is the Black-Mist

on which Maya pencils her arabesques .

Leconte

de Lisle always heard the murmur of this unsoundable Lethe flowing beneath the illusions of time.

He

wrote the obituary of a universe . There are sensibilities that translate all sensations 285

FORTY

into love. set.

IMMORTALS

Such was the sensibility of Alfred de Mus-

There is, opposed to this, the sensibility of the

Infinite.

Spinoza, Amiel , Leconte de Lisle are three

supreme types of this order of sensibility. men carried about in them a Vampire.

These

There is a

single reality : the Infinite ; and whatever crosses the portals of sense loses body, breath and soul and ceases to be anything.

Evanescence is the perpetual fact.

The Invisible swallows the visible.

Every note that

life struck on the keyboard of the sensibility of Leconte de Lisle had an overtone that flowed into and blended with the ultimate overtone, the Néant. The impact of the world breaks and is shattered against a Thought.

Centuries filled with noises and

the clamor of liars lose all significance when once touched by the black wand of this Tenant in the brain that is under the dominion of the Infinite and the Eternal.

1

To realize the end of all things before they are born, to stand at the very ends of time and watch the extinction of countless races, to apprehend before we know ; that is the privilege of God and genius . The disenchantment of eternal foresight—that is the penalty to be paid by those who are assigned by Fate to the watchtower of the Imagination.

286

THE MALADY OF DE MAUPASSANT

Guy de Maupassant was a strange ethereal beast, a satyr at sprawl amid the lilies, a star-ranging butterfly meshed in compost.

His written works are the

de profundis of a great spirit, a miserère chanted in a crypt.

There is everywhere in his works the rec-

ord of a great agony, a ceaseless conflict with devils , a sincerity pitiless and pitiful.

His poetical fancy,

as elusive as the sheen on the waterfall, bruised its gossamer envelope at every turn against some nameless Shape.

This dread shadow blocked his path

like a sewer-rat crouched on the path of a running child . What is the secret of these souls that come into life with a sure knowledge of life's worthlessness ? Where are those secrets learned ?

On what worlds of

magnificent possibilities had the spiritual

eye of

Flaubert, de Maupassant and Schopenhauer gazed that with the sure instinct which urges the average mortal to take his pleasure bade these men spurn what is here provided ?

What profound mystery lies

behind the possession of powers that by no possibility can be used on this earthly stage, constructed for the marionettes of the instinctive, the puppets

287

FORTY

IMMORTALS

of the sexual and stomachic !

From what mystic

Utopia had de Maupassant fared that this

earth

seemed to him little else than a scudding ball of ordure and the days of man hierarchies of the petty? With what gods had he conversed that the speech of mankind was to him ape-chatter ?

The great cynic and the great

idealist—and

a

cynic is an idealist temporarily bankrupt―belong to an order of their own ; and that order is not the earth-order.

Their souls in some fine foretime, un-

fettered by inelastic flesh coverings, had hurtled through super-lunar spaces in the ecstasy begotten of unlimited power-a pause, a misstep , and they are immured in clay-wrappings and are condemned to live and record. Ignorance makes for happiness , and limits that the crowd believes to be ultimate, whether they be physical, intellectual, or religious-limits at which a priest or lawyer has affixed a flaming swordnumb the will and generate that easy acquiescence in things as they are. "Happy are those whom life satisfies, who are amused and content," sighs de Maupassant .

For

him nothing changed-the days were monotones strummed upon unwashed catgut.

When he went

into the street the same men met him who met him

288

THE MALADY OF DE MAUPASSANT

the day before ; their gestures were the same ; their faces differed from one another only in the degree of stupidity which the flesh-records registered ; they shuffled, they haggled, they drank, they ate, and haggled again, and when the shadows of the sun grew long on the Parisian boulevards they shambled and shuffled home. "And for this man was born ?" asked the great French pessimist , brooding on the mob's docility, its unchangeable stupidity, its indestructible illusions, its asininity.

With a diabolical prankishness he liked to peer at the people at play, at work, at prayers ; dissect their virtues, which he knew to be masks for their sinister lusts ; wonder at their clinging to life like soft mud to a cart's wheel—and though the wheel and its endless gyrations flattened them to ooze still they rebelled not !

He wondered at that great Policeman

of the people whom they called God, with his Scotland Yard methods and Puck-like pranks .

De Mau-

passant's contempts were built up of impotent rage and a consciousness of his own transcendent vision -a vision that gave us the finest short story in the world, "The Necklace." Like Amiel, his soul was constantly gnawed by a consciousness of the Infinite-not that concept of the 289

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Infinite that terrorizes but the Infinite split into infinite shadowy goals that some minds pass before they have begun the race.

To these minds the in-

finite is a process, not a thing ; not the water that runs through the hand, but the spirit of elusiveness that animates the disappearing-reappearing, tantalizing flow.

Mentally, they are inversions, not perversions.

The commonplace, everyday being works from the layers of the concrete up to the abstract ; his idea of time is founded on the clocks he has seen ; life has first to batter his pate to a pulp before be can apprehend the idea of universal pain.

But the order

of beings of which Guy de Maupassant is a type evolves in a way that is diametrically opposed to the average mortal.

Their souls at birth are a conflux

of ideas, and they burrow their way down from the ideal to the real. create.

They interpret, translate

and

The earth-child grubs.

De Maupassant was like an ant that has crawled accidentally from the light of day through the airhole of a boy's rubber ball, there in the interior to spend its days meditating on the dark.

The mean-

ness of the universe astonished him ; the battledoreand-shuttlecock of the planets was an inane pastime ; the " music of the spheres" was cosmic yawp . "We can at least be good animals ! " he exclaims

290

THE MALADY OF DE MAUPASSANT

ironically.

"My body is real , my lusts are pleasure-

pregnant.

There is always room for the lowest.

Loaf and take thy sport, dear body.

I feel thrilling

within me the sensations of all the different species of animals , of all their instincts, of all the confused longings of inferior creatures."

Not as a poet does

he love the earth, but as a beast.

Like a pound

where on certain nights the spirits of myriad throttled beasts revivify and with snarl and claw and blood- smeared fangs

live

over

their

dead

earth-

selves, so did de Maupassant at regular intervals fling open the door of his nethers and lead forth the caged couriers of his past and glut them at the sties of pleasure .

But he writhed in his raptures, and his pastimes were crucifixions . It is curious that what is beautiful has so much of evil in it. It is often through “ sin” that spirituality is born, and what finer virtue halos the soul than the consciousness that it is always possible for us to do evil in thought and be the secret bridegroom to the throttled lusts which we style our ideals ? De Maupassant realized the beautiful through the evil in him.

He moulded the rich fungi on his brain-

walls to immortal little waxen images and pinched 291

FORTY

IMMORTALS

his heart until it gave out music-music as evil and beautiful as truth. Philostratus tells us of a dragon whose brain was a blazing gem.

Such a brain inhabited the body of

the man who called himself "a lascivious and vagabond faun."

The grotesque cravings of this man !

He shivered

in horror at the antique, ever-recurring whirr that shook him from his slumbers . to be his last and first .

Each day he wished

He would have had Death

weave her dark mantua around him each night and that his eyes should rest each morn on something new.

Poetry, art, music, bring us nothing, for they

merely record ourselves ; they are the lengthened shadows of dwarfs.

A new series is needed to re-

create the soul staled by its very uselessness .

Not

new worlds , but a new world, is the goal of the distraught.

Art is a stained image, experience is like

a romance with the woman left out, and pleasure is but an opiate for despair. We are two.

Children that spend hours talking to

themselves are aware in a dim way of the duality of the individual.

In each soul there slumbers this

other self, this shadow of the soul that waxes and wanes with our consciousness.

It is the house of de-

feated dreams , the shadowy rendezvous of our un292

THE MALADY OF DE MAUPASSANT

coffined hopes ; a weird spectre of the Great Desire. There are kennelled in the breast of this alter ego the women we never possessed, the gigantic deeds we never did, the best we have undone, the worst we have done, our abrogated acts .

Builded day by

day, in slumber and in daydream ; builded of infinite trifles , this Horla, this vast phantasm of a self that never was diswombed unto reality, is the custodian of an endless , inutile past.

It holds for aye

our brief against the Eternal and mocks us with its demon eyes and its reproaches , half-wail, half-sneer. De Maupassant, from the vats and slime-pools of despair conjured up his double and made of it a living, palpable thing of terror.

Like the apparition

that appeared to Markheim, in Stevenson's perfect story, it was both the scorekeeper and umpire of his soul.

It visited him in the dead of the night and

woke him with the dull thump of its ebon knuckles on his heart.

"It spoke to me in a short whisper of

all that my insatiable, poor and weak spirit had touched upon with a useless hope, all that toward which it had been tempted to soar without being able to tear asunder the chains of ignorance that held it." Is

this

half-created

thing

which

each

of

us

has in him, this unmanageable It of our own fabrication, a promise or a retribution ? 293

Come with it

FORTY

IMMORTALS

airs from heaven or blasts from hell ?

Is it the

shadow of a real Higher or a sooty smoke-shape of the past ? In the stupendous conflict of opposing wills which we call society, where our fine hopes are frostkilled or done to death by main force, there is always a reserve of force

or is it a residuum ?

And

that same conflict that is repeated in miniature in the cells of the individual has bred its reserve or residuum.

We call it alter ego, Horla, our better

self, our worse self.

Is it reserve or residuum ?-

unused power or slime? Though one of the intellectual elect, one who knew the pain in things before he experienced

life—a

seer who knew that the Veil of Isis was only a drab's dirty kerchief—the presence of the squalid , the distorted images of beggars, the obscene poverty of the masses, gave him pain for which he could find no cure.

The banal,

the

trite,

the

garbage

dumps

called cities, tortured him and drove him to his boat, to the seashore, to long mountain tramps, where he tried to shut out the horrible things that spawned in Paris-the City of Light and Darkness . visited

at

such

moments

by

strange

He was

penitential

scourgings that he should be among the "fortunate ." Why was he not yonder beggar or that lame thing that was a woman ?

These street pictures stood out

294

THE MALADY OF DE MAUPASSANT

year after year in his brain in an undying protest against himself.

Of misfortune he made an image as

of terror he made a Thing .

295

STENDHAL : GEOMETRICAL DON JUAN .

If we are on the spoor of Titans, we shall soon run across Henri Beyle.

In his lifetime he took the

fancy of parading under fictitious names.

These

number more than a hundred, but the one he used generally was Stendhal . knew him.

During his lifetime, few

His books are dedicated to the unborn.

They are the luminous dramas of his emotional life. Actor and spectator , soldier and thinker, lover and cynic, chronicler of magnificent nothings and analyzer of passionate dreams , Stendhal was a perfect type of the cultured superman ; that is to say, one whose brain reigns like a motionless sun over the uproar of his life experiences and the tumult of his own heart.

Pick up Stendhal anywhere.

In his novels, short

sketches, his lives of other men, his love epigrams, his record of his love escapades, his experiences with the army of Napoleon , one dominant impression is left in the mind of the reader. egotism .

That is his superb

It is the egotism that abolishes all conven-

tions, that lays every spook, that seeks the ultimate of self. He was an impenitent Cellini , a Rousseau with a

296

STENDHAL

brain.

In his beloved Italy, where life pounded his

nerves till his brain sang with thought, he saw everywhere his own splendid instinct to amorality blossom in its fulness . Crime and passion to him had no social implications .

Crime and unbridled passion were marvel-

ous color- combinations, and nothing else.

When

crime and passion no longer dominate the world, life will no longer be worth the living.

"There are

no rights except natural rights ," says Julien Sorel, the hero of " Le Rouge et le Noir," in the shadow of the guillotine. What is " goodness ” but a kind of remorse for the sins we have never committed ?

What is Heaven

but the dream of revenge deferred ?

What is the

psychologic base of the " aspiration to perfection ” and the passion for saintship if it be not the instincts brooding over their impotency before the Scourges of social and religious conventions-transfiguring and etherealizing their vigor until they exhale and lapse in the smug Nirvana of contentment?

It was in 1831 that Julien Sorel , one of the greatest creations in all literature, first saw the light.

He

is the soul of " Le Rouge et le Noir" and indeed the anti-social soul of Stendhal.

Sorel, who had fed his

mind with the Napoleonic legend, makes war on

297

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Society, which Emerson proclaimed the felon of the ages.

If there was a crime that

not

Sorel had

committed , it was because the State did not give him time.

It murdered Sorel for his crimes, which were

merely the play of a great nature cooped up in the artificial. The individual is always right and the State, in all times and in all climes, is always wrong.

Man

is not inherently good , as Rousseau believed ; but he is inherently vital and dynamic— that is , he seeks the fullest play possible for his instincts .

Nothing

is more passionately beloved by all of us than what theologians call "sin."

War , for this reason,

as

Stendhal believed before Marinetti preached it, is the supreme hygiene of the individual . There must be a playground for the great blond beast in us. Saint Theresa, who fell in love with the Mystic Bridegroom, would have been a Messalina or a Catherine de Medici if she had dared . who fear become godaleptics . of prey at heart.

But those

Tolstoi was a bird

When his physical courage gave

out, he still made war-on State and Church . There is no great dream that is not in its last analysis a bludgeon .

Julien Sorel did in miniature

what Napoleon did on a large scale : he lived his life at the expense of others .

He had not that trained

298

STENDHAL

shyness which we call the artistic sense

that sense

which wreaks its revenge on life through words, sounds and color. Stendhal might have been his own Julien if he had not been born an artist.

Beethoven, Flaubert

and Ibsen had they not escaped into the empyrean of artistic

creation

would

have

been

Catalinas ,

Masaniellos, Jack Cades-or Chadbands with the Decameron hidden in their pockets .

And Nietzsche

would have been an apache.

All who live within the pale of the

State are

divided into two classes- cowards and outlaws. The State never

created

healthy being.

a hero .

It never

created

a

At the feasts of the body and the

passions it is the eternal kill-joy. There are two ways of analyzing life-one by observation , the other by introspection and dissection. Stendhal organized his psychic experiences into a drama.

He lived tremendously.

He lived to the

hilt. There were two Stendhals.

One was Dionysian

-that is , one of him was always at a carnival. other was Apollonian . the other one. every mask.

The

This one made copy out of

It was the Sphinx hidden behind his He made a fable of his pains and 299

FORTY

IMMORTALS

thought a chagrin worth while if it gave birth to an epigram. At the moment of creation pain and pleasure are equilibrated .

The æsthetic impulse is at bottom the

impulse to the spectacular, the passion to rise above and beyond the world and one's self, to soar over life, to hover over the tragedy and comedy of one's nerves .

The minds of most men are like those tav-

erns with low ceilings, smoke clouded and soot laden from the fires and lamps of instinct.

There is no

escape from one's own hell.

The aesthetic and impersonal vision is non-existent in the average mind . a skylight at the top. spectacular sense. phean.

The Stendhalian mind has

In the azure beyond reigns the

Its magic is redemptive and Or-

It lures all the bats and serpents from the

hells of instinct and emotion-and they vanish in the ether of the blameless vision.

It is the "im-

maculate perception " of Schopenhauer which Nietzsche sneered at , but which Stendhal found to be the secret of life. This spectacular sense is the art-vision. soul of the comic, the ironic. timentality.

It is the

It is the enemy of sen-

With a glance it strips the body of

Reality of the bandelettes of affectation .

To feel

one's self as another-this is the Stendhalian meta-

300

STENDHAL

physic.

It is a sixth sense-the aeroplanic sense.

And in Stendhal's case his vision is pointed at the earth .

His thought and his style are concrete.

white light beats on everything.

A

There is no strain ,

no ornament, no rhetoric, no Baudelairian gargoyles or Dantean shivers .

He is as bare as Ibsen .

In his

pages there are no images baked to a turn or cataleptic periods.

He is rigid, precise, cold blooded .

He is a king in two kingdoms-life and thought. He could live and think, and do both simultaneously ; but he never confounded his two personalities.

Or

if he did he masked the conflict under irony or paradox.

His egotism, his vanity, his sureness of his

superiority, his contempt for what any one thought of him— these things were his poisoned poignards— poignards with which secretly he gashed his own vitals.

Who among his few friends knew the in-

fernos that kept forever belching and smoking behind that impassive exterior? In some of his pages there are fissures in his style, quakings and tremblings on the cold surface of his logical formulas as if there might ensue at any time the explosion of a hell .

But the fissures slowly close ;

the thinker and observer dominate the pages once again.

Balzac said that it was while carrying the cross of 301

FORTY

IMMORTALS

his vanity that he sweated irony.

That is the great-

est thing that will ever be said about the "style " of Stendhal.

302

HAWTHORNE :

EMPEROR

OF SHADOWS

Hawthorne drank from the Beaker of Inexhaustible Shadows ; his soul sought instinctively the obscure and the crepuscular ; the shadow-glozed figures of his brain were never mockeries of the real, but phantasms of the dead-beings called out of the endless night of the tombs to sport, at his will, in the shadow of crypts and catacombs, or to languish in half-lights , or to be the pawns in some moral problem that vexed his sensitive heart.

He dallied in byways and roamed strange, blighted moral heaths , and preferred to listen to the sinister murmurs that came from the poisonous tarn than to stand beside the gay, tumbling waterfall in the full light of the sun. He was an emperor- but an emperor of elves— an Oberon whose reign began at the twilight hour and who abdicated at the first cockcrow.

He was a giant-but a giant leashed in cobwebs. He was a thinker whose thoughts were always at half-mast for the sorrows that sucked at his heart. He was exquisitely aware of a Conscience.

He

knew that the supernormal could alone explain the 303

FORTY

IMMORTALS

normal, that the exceptional housed all the laws that governed ordinary circumstances plus an explanation, which if it did not explain gave us something better-another mystery. "The Scarlet Letter" is the romance of pain ; "The House of the Seven Gables" is the romance of crime ; "The Mable Faun" is the romance of penitential despair . The evil that is in the heart of man ; the subtle poisonous vapors that emanate from his soul like vent-hole gases ; strange, sudden maladies without name, dateless at their birth, bringing with them reversions to a kind of devilship ; moral cankers which he identified with physical environment and which he made to dwell in dank cellars,

in

old

gabled houses , in curious angles in the garden-wall, or in the fetor of old wells-these things possessed Hawthorne

completely.

He

dealt

with

pain

as

though it were a conscious being—a survival in his brain of the Puritan belief in a personal devil.

He

never burst the black cerements that kept him apart from his kind.

His tales are his soul-saga.

They

portray a man immured in a sunless dungeon- one who is content with the dark, but who, unconsciously, rises from his seat at intervals and searches the walls with his eyes for a chink of light,

-304

HAWTHORNE

His mind was a lodging-house for the distraught. What weird, pain-bitten, grief-ravaged beings took up their abode in that caravansary at night and slunk away in the morning, maybe never to return ! -unprintad, unprintable,

untellable.

And there

came, too , to stay with him myriads of wan, pale, ethereal wayfarers who seemed to wear about their eyes the light of impalpable worlds and who bore on their brows the sombre thoughts of thwarted genius. The best that is in a man is never told- and the worst is past imagining. not

formulate

in

Two things the soul can-

language :

its

remote,

obscure

emotions and its immediate noon-day certainties. In Hawthorne's face there are the wonderful tales that he never told . There is phantom-touch in his pages .

He lacked

the sense of reality-the sure test of spirituality. Long, shadowy files sweep up from out the Unconscious and form black processions across the earth. That is life .

It is the phantom lock-step.

These

shadows come and go, making frenetic, comic gestures .

They whisper hoarsely each to the other-

and this they call history.

They scud across the

earth from the immurmurous to the immurmurous -from Mist to Mist.

They are palpitant sobs or

ribald jesters vested in flesh-mesh.

305

This star is but

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IMMORTALS

a ghost-walk-the fading ramparts of a mystic Elsinore, and graveyards are but tombs within tombs. The days sheened in their meridional glories, the nights set with their little pulsing eyes are the reflections of soul-torrent.

Our arts are but the pho-

tographs of the apparitional. Who has touched the Real or tethered the Now? Who can say ,

What Hawthorne saw, that is so.

"Here thought begins and things cease ?"

Who can

put his thought upon that moment that divides the sleeping moment from the waking moment? can tell how far one trenches on the other ? but

a

conscious

sleeping ;

sleep

an

Who Life is

unconscious

waking— or a waking into the Unconscious .

Life in

prospect is always phosphorescent with hope ; the path behind is a white-capped dream. Age are both somnambules.

Youth and

Our imaginations—

and Hawthorne was an imaginative seer-are unplumbed, immeasurable.

Fancy is the mirror that

gives us back our insubstantial selves .

Life is a pro-

gressive dream , a languorous, painful unwinding. We pace the decks, withered gods , the definite shrunk to a hint, a puzzle to ourselves, a puzzle to the beasts below and the inhabitants of the fourth dimension above.

Hawthorne nowhere formulates this sense of mys306

HAWTHORNE

tery, but it stands shadowlike behind each sentence. It is the breath of his literary body. Though here of our date and time, he was a belated

spirit-a

fanciful,

roving,

ether-cleaving

spirit who one day, while peeping in curiosity over the

eaves

of his dream-mansion,

fell

into

flesh.

Society annoyed him and he turned from the rouged commonplaces of civilization with a fine contempt.

Genius treads

far from that

called civilization .

bellowing sphinx

The nineteenth century was a

coarse melodrama written by a demon for the delectation of the blasé gods .

By ignoring it entirely

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walter Pater became its greatest critics .

Civilization

at best is a

dressed up to look like a monarch.

beggar

It is that pro-

cess which has subtilized the direct and made automatic the spontaneous .

It has made a crooked line

the shortest way between two given points and has substituted Machiavelli for Euclid .

It invents pains

in order to banish from its heart the horrible boredom that oppresses it.

The vaunted arts and sciences

sit cheek-by-jowl with Mammon.

"Progress " is the

cluck-cluck of satisfaction of Caliban as he makes headway into thicker mud. Practical life stands for the utter materialization of the soul .

Its glitter, which attracts from afar, 307

FORTY

IMMORTALS

is the glitter that falls from pomade-burnished garbage cans .

In the great

cities , which Rousseau

called nature's sinks, men do not congregate, but fester.

Cities

are

great

slime-vats ,

where

familiarity has indurated the sense of smell .

long Here

the souls of men become traps : they call it "busi99 Ideals melt in these fens like the snow image ness. in Hawthorne's tale when it is dragged by the Practical Man- always and everywhere a hypocritical atheist-before the fireplace . Practical Life ! -the domain of the arched spine and the furtive glance .

It is better to become moss-

grown in the Old Manse of Dreams . Arthur

Dimmesdale ,

Clifford

Hester Prynne,

Pynchon,

Miriam

Donatello shall outlive in shadowy immortality the flesh-and-blood beings that mimic their ways here below, and the turrets and spires of our civilization shall long be gangrened in the muds of oblivion when the shadow-makers that have gone shall still with potent rod smite the souls of generations unborn, and from them, as from us , shall burst the fountains of exalted wonder. What strange shadows tread at our heels !-shadows of evil and shadows of good . a pivot turn our fortunes !

On how slight

In that exquisite fan-

tasy, "David Swan," the muffled march of events that

308

HAWTHORNE

never materialize, that cross and recross our paths unseen, unapprehended, like the ghost of Hamlet's father when he parades before the eyes of the spiritblind Queen Gertrude, is the theme of Hawthorne. In this little allegory we read the chances of life. Our destinies are brittle but inexorable, and we are tossed around in great world-forces like a bottle in the sea . Young Swan lies down to rest beside a tree that stands by a well-traveled road. deep .

He is poor and sleeps

A carriage becomes disabled near him and

the occupants, an elderly lady and gentleman , while waiting for a broken wheel to be mended contemplate his adoption, but the

coachman interrupts

with the message that the carriage is ready,

and

Fortune, which just grazed Swan in her flight, passes on forever.

Death, in the guise of thieves who are

about to murder him for his clothing, but who are opportunely frightened off, lingers near him for a second and then postpones her rendezvous with the soul of David Swan. girl

who

steps

glides by him.

Love, in the person of a young

aside

to

contemplate

and

blush,

David wakes and goes on his way

whistling . Our days are freighted with gifts and curses, and the bitterness of life lies in the consciousness of what 309

FORTY

might have been.

IMMORTALS

Yet the

Law never swerves , or

if it swerve, it carries on its breast the débris of our dreams and hurries us to the Gulf that swallows all dreams.

That might-have-been is as far away as

that which never came to being. passes close by us." space .

"Our happiness

Not so : it is the illusion of

Unless we possess it, it is but the greater

mockery when it thrusts its flowers under our noses and when we are about to inhale the perfume substi tutes pepper. Hawthorne, king of a realm fantastic, emperor of shadows, grand seigneur of the unmapped, tourist of the subterrene, who saw from behind the lattice of fancy the pain that bases the moral world and the comic lie that is called optimism—he sups with Poe, Amiel and De Maupassant on herbs and bitters . For he was one of the Order of the Black Veil.

310

FLAUBERT : CHEMIST OF ILLUSIONS.

Gustave Flaubert has been called the most impersonal of all writers-one who created his characters and painted his great frescoes with the serenity and mathematical precision of a Spinoza or a Euclid . But it is a common error to confound vision and style. Style may be impersonal, cold ; but vision is a product of sensibility, and sensibility cannot be hidden or denied.

The vision of the universe peculiar to

Flaubert, Hardy, Tolstoi or Turgenev is hidden in the tale they have to tell ; it reveals itself in the matter, not in the manner ; just as Spinoza reveals his temperament, his frenzied ecstasy in front of the ideas of God and Eternity in his bloodless, mathematical style .

Flaubert was of a profoundly religious sensibility. He was a Knight of the Absolute.

In that resided

the tragedy of his nature and (by the law of immanent paradox ) his supremacy as seer and artist.

He

sought the impossible, the Chimera, the Land of Prester John , and lived to chronicle the great adventure in the

overwhelming irony of " Madame

Bovary," "The Temptation of St. Anthony," "Salambo," "Bouvard et Pécuchet" and "The 311

Senti-

FORTY

mental Education."

IMMORTALS

He became the Cervantes , the

Molière of his own tragi-comedy.

He satirized the

absolutism and the vainglory of the Romantic movement with such terrible bitterness because he had been its chiefest victim.

He stripped Hernani of his

mask and put him into the lancinating light of reality. As Jules de Gaultier points out in " Le Génie de Flaubert," there is complete unity of psychological vision in Flaubert.

There is one single root-thought

at the bottom of everything he wrote.

All his char-

acters move in this thought or vision by a law that is fatal ; a law that is the very essence of life .

His

characters take their life, their breath , their movements from the degree in which this law operates on their respective sensibilities.

It is a law that is not

only the cause of all the tragedy and comedy of existence, but is the cause of existence itself.

It was

sensed by Erasmus in his " In Praise of Folly" ; it was grasped in its entirety but was probably never formulated consciously by Cervantes when he wrote "Don Quixote" ; it was caught fugitively by Molière. But it remained for Flaubert to unify and synthesize it and for Jules de Gaultier to transmute it into that superb

philosophic

generalization

called

" bov-

arysm. " The law of bovaryism is founded on the incon312

FLAUBERT

ceivability of existence in any form without contrarieties .

We can know one thing only through an-

other thing.

A universe without opposites is non-

existent for us. ever

leaving

But the imagination of man, for-

the

real

for the

unreal,

forsaking

the known for the unknown , tries to create realities of things that are purely negative .

He affirms an

absolute, which is, unconsciously to him, his manner of affirming nothing.

He conceives fantastic

beyond-the- tomb

and

countries

social

made up of the realities of this dreamed- of-realities as facts.

of

another

conditions

world

and

and his

affirms them

From this flows all the tragedy and com-

edy of the play called Life. The mind of man thus hovers like Mahomet's coffin between the necessary and the ideal. is a basic law of existence.

But this

Reality is born between

the upper stone of idealism—or the errors of the imagination— and the lower millstone of necessityor the cold grey facts of existence.

Life is thus an

error-as the Hindus have always affirmed—because it is divided against itself.

There is no truth ; there

is only a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible, and the ideal and the possible are pure

relations

because the

shifts with each individual. 313

groundwork

of

each

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Each human being born is thus compelled to conceive himself otherwise than he really is.

Being an

imitative animal, man seeks to model himself from his earliest years on a pattern that is sometimes the very opposite of his real nature-an idealized self, a hero in fiction or business or a supernatural being. He is an incurable romantic, but the juggernaut of Reality-daily life with its accidents, contingencies, shabby tasks and flesh needs and social needs-goes over him ; and he finds himself at last where Madame Bovary and Frédéric Moreau found themselves , standing stark, discrowned and peeled of all illusions under the drab sky of that eternal matter-of-fact universe that lies outside of us. But the adventure is epical, sublime, and Don Quixote,

Madame

Bovary,

Salambo

and

St.

An-

thony were superbest when they fell from the mocking heavens of their dear illusions ; for it is better to have lived and lost than never to have lived at all. This, then, is the groundwork, the frame, the sky and the light of the Flaubertian tragi-comedy.

His

books are the history of the catastrophes of the human imagination.

Each one of his characters is

governed by a phantom, an idealized , impossible other-self ; and if we study the characters we shall behold the human race itself—especially in that 314

FLAUBERT

tremendous and gorgeous "The Temptation of St. Anthony"

on the march to Cockaigne convoyed

by an ironic Chimera.

Mankind is always knapsacked and weaponed for the massacre of Reality !

It passes across the screen

of Time the great hallucinated bovaryzed army of the three-dimensional cosmos doing the work of the Species-Ghost. The tragedy of St. Anthony is the tragedy of the ascetic, or the man who thinks he can rise above the human law and create a reality by mixing the ether of mysticism spurned body.

with the

fiery

dreams

of a

St. Anthony, through the power be-

stowed on him, as on every human being, of conceiving himself to be other than he is in reality, takes himself into the desert and begins the life of a mystical overman .

But he must pay, and the payment

begins through his imagination .

He went in search

of Heaven, and he found Hell.

He has two perpet-

ual companions in his loneliness- Satan and a pig. It is the revenge of the flesh on the soul.

The brain

of St. Anthony becomes a gigantic brothel.

When

he is not dominated by Satan and shown by the latter, from the zenith of perception, the comedy of human intelligence and beliefs, he is carried by his strangled passions into the midst of unmentionable

315

FORTY

orgies .

IMMORTALS

You have denied the world and the flesh,

says Satan in his ear, and you must pay .

Seek sal-

vation in the desert and I'll damn you through your imagination. But the impresario of that supremely great work of Flaubert is not Satan, but Pride.

If Flaubert had

written nothing but "The Temptation ” (which was a life work) it would have made him immortal .

It

possesses a degree of universality that no other superdrama possesses .

If it outlasted the planet, it would

be intelligible in Mars, which could not be said of Goethe's "Faust" or Dante's " Divine Comedy." "The Temptation of St. Anthony" is the tragedy of the Fall of Man through saintliness .

"Madame Bovary" is an epic of the war against reality-and its tragedy is the tragedy of the romantic instinct, especially the romantic instinct embodied in the soul of woman .

The Chimera that led St. An-

thony into the bosom of Satan leads Emma Bovary to arsenic.

Reared in a convent, she carried the

incense with her into life , and it finally poisoned her. Walter Scott, Eugene Sue, Balzac and George Sand fed her with a false notion of life .

Her mental world

had no resemblance to that world in which she was going to live.

She had no notion of reality.

The

fabric began to crumble after her marriage with 316

FLAUBERT

Charles Bovary.

Her Lohengrin turned out to be

a humdrum person. shattered dream lovers.

Then she tried to remake the

with the honeyed words of her

She invented a thousand ruses to drive

away the spectre of Ennui.

St. Anthony was carried

beyond the zodiac on the horns of Satan and shown the nothingness of life ; Emma Bovary rode on the edge of the fire-laden cloud of her Dream and saw the horrors of Reality waiting for her below in the persons of her husband and stupid provincials that surrounded her. Emma Bovary, like Don Quixote, Don Juan and Master Solness , tried a feat that is utterly beyond any one to accomplish-to substitute a fictive, imaginative world for the real world . will go through granite .

There is no sword that

The human race is both

glorified and damned through its idealism .

The

phantasms of life that are the invention of the apocalyptic intelligence of genius and that are the colored mirages that burn and beckon on the firmament of the brains of men and women- mirages that solicit above the Saharas of reality- are, nevertheless , of the very essence of life .

Without illusion life would

cease .

All motion is conditioned on a phantasmal

ideal .

Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's great

Impossibletribute to the power of the Impossible

317

What Cleo-

FORTY

IMMORTALS

patra failed to do, can the Emma Bovarys , provincial brained and provincial hearted , hope to do ? "Madame Bovary" is the tragedy of the fall of woman through love.

In

"Salambo ,"

"Bouvard

et

Pécuchet"

and

"The Sentimental Education" self-deception is the leit-motif of the tragedy or comedy.

As in " The

Temptation of St. Anthony" and " Madame Bovary” the characters are hallucinated by an auto-dramatic representation of themselves or a falsification of themselves, fabricated

sometimes by environment

and early education or sometimes deliberately willed by the universal instinct to " make-believe."

Sal-

ambo lived in the domain of the miraculous and occult.

Her girl life had become a myth.

She was

surrounded by priests and soothsayers who taught her the unreality of the real.

But Mathos came in

all his masculine, barbaric splendor .

He was the

vision of the Real, the epiphany of matter and passion.

She gave herself up to him, still deluded that

what she did was of mystical origin .

And in the

last chapter , when Mathos comes toward her hacked to shreds and streaming with blood, Salambo falls dead. The veil is rent.

She had loved Mathos and de-

sired Mathos beyond all mortal and immortal things, 318

FLAUBERT

but her education had compelled her to call that love-desire something else .

She had conceived love

as love is not, believing the most beautiful and cleanest of human relations to be a thing vile and souldestroying.

But nature, Reality, was greater than

all the magical lies built on the vibrations of that exquisite sensibility ;

and the realization of love as

an inexorable necessity of the flesh exploded in her heart like a bomb, shattering in one blow all the insanities of mysticism injected there by education. In

" Bouvard

et

science, intelligence.

Pécuchet"

Flaubert

satirized

For inscription he might have

put at the head of the volume "Vanitas Vanitatum . " Bouvard and Pécuchet are two copyists who, having come into a small inheritance, resign their positions and set out to consume the wisdom of all the world . They find

nothing

but

endless

contradictions ,

Tower of Babel and a confusion of tongues .

a

As St.

Anthony in his cataleptic trances saw swim before his eye the wrangling hordes and the fanatical devotees of a thousand contradictory religious beliefs, so Bouvard and Pécuchet find that the human race is less certain of its knowledge in the nineteenth century than the cave-man.

The history of human

knowledge is a comedy, a game of blind-man's -buff. The more knowledge there is the less wisdom there 319

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Each brain is a premise, so all syllogisms are

is.

valid.

But we have found out that if the earth goes

around the sun instead of vice versa, or that it is round instead of flat , it is of no importance.

Why

does the earth exist at all ?-that is the great question. all

Unless we know the absolute, all intelligence,

science,

is

laughable ;

we

are

playing

with

shadows and building with snowflakes. The genius of Gustave Flaubert is all in five great works, a volume of three short stories, and in his correspondence .

From the standpoint of pure artis-

try, he is the greatest literary artist of all time. found the absolute in style. one.

He

Matter and manner are

Like Théophile Gautier, like Stéphane Mal-

larmé, he worked over his prose like a lapidary. His pages are made for the eye, the ear and the voice, as Wagner created his "Ring" for the fusion of three principles.

His life was a long agony, but what he

gave to us came from the Golgotha of perception . Human destiny will never be seen from a higher point on the Earth than it was by the author of Ecclesiastes , so there never will be profounder vision uttered than one finds in Flaubert, a wisdom enunciated by all the geniuses of time from Sophocles to Thomas Hardy.

320

AMIEL .

I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased I should have my will, and having my will I should be contented, and when one is contented there is no more to be desired, and-when there is no more to be desired -there is an end of it.Cervantes . The nineteenth century—that marvelous child of the ages ! Ernest

gave to the world two

Renan

and

Henri

great sceptics,

Frédéric

Amiel.

scepticism of Renan was a gay scepticism. pered all over the universe. a playground. ter ?

The It ca-

The world to him was

Was there no God ?

Well , what mat-

Was the soul of man only matter highly re-

fined ?

What difference did that make ?

Have we

not archæology, history and philosophy to console us?

The world is a beautiful red apple ; let us eat

it up before we are eaten up. He was a brave, ironic

spirit, with a touch of the satyr's glee in living.

He

was the Almighty's jester and the tinkle of the bells on his suit of motley could only be silenced by— the angelus . Henri Frédéric Amiel was the saddest sceptic the European world has known . 321

He bit the apple of

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Thought that Renan held out to him and he found a worm at the core.

Amiel was the lordliest victim

that the great Moloch, the Ideal, ever claimed .

He

was a regal soul felled by Thought, possessing a brain that in its operations was as subtle as light, an interior eye that pierced all the veils of illusion .

He

lived a solitary god of futile dream. The "Journal Intime"

is

the

minutiae

of

his

soul-life jotted down at varying intervals during thirty years. Montaigne,

There is no book like it in the world. St.

Augustine,

Rousseau,

Maurice

de

Guérin pale their fires before this feat of introspective surgery.

The minds of the great self-revealers, if Montaigne alone be excepted, are surface minds compared to this tremendous revelation of a soul in its inferno, this epiphany of a God of Woe ; this stricken Prometheus of Geneva chained to the granite walls of Necessity, his vitals picked by the vultures of Doubt. He was a Hindu sage who had once reached Nirvana but had fallen again into flesh. victim of some terrible mistake.

He was the

He was a Spectator

who stood on the banks of the river of Time and watched the hurried flow of all the baubles of earth and heaven over that troubled surface. man petrified by a vision of the Infinite. 322

He was a Half of

AMIEL

his soul lay immobile in Eternity ; the other half trailed through the sewers of matter.

Being a god, he saw all sides of all problems .

He

knew that an opinion on any subject excluded an opposite opinion . was guilt.

Hegel had said that all opinion

To make an assertion is to take sides .

What side shall we take in an infinite universe? things are in a process of change.

All

What is true in a

world where nothing lasts, where there is a perpetual becoming, an endless, issueless striving, a rebeginning each moment ? To live is a sin. journal.

That is the burden of Amiel's

And it is not the sour pessimism of world-

ly failure that utters this.

It is Wisdom's last word,

the ripened conclusion of one of the intellectual giants of the ages.

And has not that been the con-

clusion of the finest thinkers of all time ?

Sophocles,

the author of Ecclesiastes , Eschylus, Buddha, Lucretius,

Plato,

Hegel,

Schopenhauer,

Leopardi—

have they not given utterance to the same thought ? And yet Amiel had his doubts.

Like Pascal, he

suffered all things, groped through all the varying phases of his mind to find no exit. real to Amiel.

Pain alone was

All else was illusion.

"The world is but an allegory ; the idea is more

323

FORTY

IMMORTALS

real than the fact ; fairy tales and legends are as true as natural history," he says in one of his entries. All matter is merely emblematic. a myth of thought.

The universe is

It is a dream within a dream.

It is a shadowy projection of the unknown God . All action is phantasmagoria, meaningless because it is transitory.

Why should a man do anything if

nothing lasts? To him, Pain was the Great Fact .

"Those who

have not suffered are still wanting in depth," he says . Happiness stupefies, numbs, slays.

With suffering

comes insight and with insight comes resignation , renunciation, the stilling of the will, the merging of the individual soul in the World -Soul.

It is the

wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, the pagan . Amiel's type of mind was unique . compared to no one who ever lived. analogy is Hamlet.

He can be His nearest

Indeed , Amiel was the Hamlet

of his time, the man who picked all things to pieces and strewed the wreckage over the literary world ; but not in a spirit of mere destructiveness .

He wept

as he destroyed ; he lashed himself anew at each denial .

His infidelity was a prayer.

And when he

asked, "Is there a God?" there was more faith in the question than in the dogmatic assertions of all the creeds. 324

AMIEL

He says the profoundest things with the ease and simplicity of a man relating an after-dinner story. "Isis lifts the corner of her veil and he who perceives the great mystery beneath is struck with giddiness .

I can scarcely breathe.

It seems to me

that I am hanging by a thread above the fathomless abyss of Destiny.

Is this the Infinite face to face,

an intuition of the last great death?" The last great death !

Out of Karma's web, free

of the wheel of illusion, beyond the reach of Maya ! This, after all, was Amiel's elementary impulse.

He

dreamed of the Lost Land , the great unmapped territory that lies beyond matter and motion.

He turned

constantly to this mystical dream with passionate yearning.

He was like a child lost in a woods who

dimly remembers his home.

Like all minds of the first order, he had no love for science or scientific methods .

He says succinctly,

"Science is a lucid madness occupied in tabulating its own necessary hallucinations."

Minds of the

first class see, they apprehend in a single mental glance ; the scientist with his crucibles and measuring instruments plays on the surface of things . is the eternal dupe of appearance. tics alone are never duped. lying principles of all things. 325

He

Philosophic scep-

They know the underWhat do details mat-

FORTY

ter?

IMMORTALS

Born in a scientific era, Amiel saw about him

thousands of men setting forth on their voyages of discovery. cover.

But he knew there was nothing to dis-

Science deals with facts.

there are no facts.

The seer knows

There are only change, illusion ,

endless motion .

The Ideal! berless

The Ideal !

as the

sands

Her victims are as num-

of the sea.

Mocker- who will slay her ?

The immortal

She takes the savor

from our mouths and robs us of life itself. Amiel's great sad soul was a hermit in an alien universe

a hermit tortured by dreams of fair in-

finite negations .

326

EMILE TARDIEU : HISTORIAN OF ENNUI

There are two kinds of thinkers : those who explain the universe and those who explain it away. The first

are

optimists,

idealists ,

balm

venders.

The second are truthseekers , realists , satirists .

In

the first class are Plato, Leibnitz and Bergson .

In

the

second

class

Aristotle ,

are

Schopenhauer,

Nietzsche, Jules de Gaultier and Emile Tardieu.

The first class being sentimentalists, cannot properly be called thinkers.

They are schoolmasters ,

moralists, traditionalists , image-makers, emotional dandies.

They are the well-rewarded accomplices of

the Lie-Visible. right way.

They smooth the human cat the

They are ticket-sellers to a pre-estab-

lished and Edenic Beyond.

They explain God , man

and immortality with the surety that even a banker would not dare to put into practical affairs , for the rate of exchange of next week is still an open question.

However, Optimo is elect from all time, for is

it not written in the book of history, "Illusion alone shall make you free, and all who make for themselves an idol shall be saved" ? The other group- properly called thinkers because they analyze, destroy, negative and satirize—

327

FORTY

IMMORTALS

go to another sort of Valhalla.

As they do not

smooth or tickle or live on the minted fat of human credulity, they stand outside the sacred portals of the House of Smug. écrasez l'infame !

They have told the truth-

So they build their own Valhalla,

ruled by a triumvirate—Aristophanes ,

Desiderius

Erasmus and Arthur Schopenhauer . In

1903

Emile

Tardieu

published

in

Paris

book called "L'Ennui," which is a cosmology. book like it has ever been written.

a

No

It is the only

book ever written that is definitive on its subject. Schopenhauer, it is true, had insisted on boredom -or ennui- as the leit-motif of all existence.

But

it remained for Tardieu to crystallize the thought, apply it in detail, and to make of Ennui a supreme generalization. Every movement made by a sentient being is a substitute for suicide .

Rest of any kind is incon-

ceivable because rest and nothing are identical . How not to rest is the end and aim of all things, organic and inorganic.

Planets, constellations, light , men ,

flies, atoms, time, memory, plants, races, tomorrow, today, yesterday, æons , cycles , raindrops, thoughts , dreams, gods

quick

and

gods

dead

are

running

away through an eternal duration from the specter Ennui, god of all gods, shadow of all shadows, gob328

EMILE

lin of all goblins .

TARDIEU

The static, the changeless , the hell

of monotony, is the Immanent Fear that sets everything in motion and keeps everything in motion. The reign of the Same is the Vision Malefic.

Any

absurdity, any insanity, any inanity-but not Ennui ! Famines, pestilences, wars, earthquakes , planetary cataclysms— the human race can get used to them. Life can adapt itself to anything except Do- Nothing. Pain is a balm for boredom.

War is a salutary

measure against the Lethes of peace-peace, so dangerously near death !

Men will die at the poles of

the world and thinkers will go stark mad at the poles of metaphysical speculation rather than face Ennui. Ennui is the mother of necessity. cessity.

Ennui is Ne-

Arts, inventions, laws, sports, adventures

spring from Ennui.

The great temple of Karnak,

the Sphinx , the Pyramids, the Pantheon, the Kremlin and the temple to Aphrodite at Paphos were built to escape the heavy-lidded Yawner that stands an invisible Presence behind the revolving panorama of the phenomenal world .

Death is a life-belt thrown to us to escape boredom,

and extinction

is

welcomed

with hosannas

when it lifts the stone from the tomb wherein we lie buried alive-the tomb of the reiterant Same. The eternal lassitude of things ! 329

Is it not the

FORTY

IMMORTALS

burden of all religions, of all bibles, of all great books ? Buddha founded the greatest religion of the Orient on fatigue.

In Nirvana are salvation and redemp-

tion from life-from the Wheel, repetition, monotony of rebirth. Christ preached to the weary and heavy-laden , to the tired, the fatigued, to those stunned and numbed by the ghastly toil of day-in-and-day-out, and to those others, like the Magi, whose instinct for the Infinite had

crucified them

on the

Calvaries

of

Apprehension and whose days passed this side of matter were tortured

nightmares

of monotonous

futilities . What are the "glad tidings" of the Gospels viewed psychologically but the glad tidings of other, newer, more tremendous sensations in another dimension , a marvelous promise of a release from the boredom of the exhausted and tasteless three-dimensional adventure of the race? The greatest book in Christendom next to the New Testament

is

Thomas

à

Kempis'

"Imitation

of

Christ" -the passionate, poetical work of one who had met Ennui on the road to his Damascus .

And

as he flew from the Specter a wild lament came from him.

Had it not also burst from the Preacher , and 330

EMILE

TARDIEU

would not that same wild lamentation later ascend in jeweled cries from the hearts of Byron, Shelley, Alfred de Vigny and Giacomo Leopardi ? As we flee we sing, and the " music of the spheres" is a battle song. Sensation is the background of all life . out sensation is inconceivable.

Life with-

It is the metaphysi-

cal groundwork of Emile Tardieu's great study.

All

the other formulas of the great European thinkers are solved and blended in that word Sensation .

The

"Will-to-Power," the "Will-to-Live," the "Will-toIllusion," the

"Will-to-Vengeance ," the

"Will-to-

Other-Worldness," the "Will-to-Believe" are sprung from the "Will-to-Sensation."

It is the physical

"Thing-in-Itself." Ennui is vacuity.

Ennui is that monstrous thing

—an interregnum in Time, a gap in Space, a fissure in the sense of personal continuity, an airless hole in the stream of sensational consciousness.

To still

persist consciously while the dynamo of the will has broken down-that is the one formidable hell that the imagination cannot face. Sensation at any price ! screams the human machine .

Chloral , cocaine, whiskey, hashish, harlotry

-but not the dread Colossus of Unmapped Vacuities !

331

FORTY

IMMORTALS

But it comes again and again into the soul, tiptoe, as still as the first thought of murder, and in the stupendous vortices of its silence we see our sensations swirling and decomposing. For a few, this is itself a master-sensation, this confrontation

of Ennui ;

but

for the

mass

it is

oblivion.

When genius faces Ennui, a supreme manœuvre begins .

A sublime, fantastic comedy is begun .

It

is one Infinite looking into the face of another Infinite.

It is Pierrot face to face with Medusa.

Pierrot ransacks the psychological wardrobe for wigs and cloaks .

He laughs, he thunders, he spits,

he sneers, he struts .

All is permissible to escape

the Monster, so he plays all parts.

Life is a farce ;

only one thing is needful-sensation. "Come to our carnival !" cry Heine, Jules

La-

forgue, Aristophanes, Alfred de Musset, Byron.

To

the rack with the serious !

Vive le farceur !

On the

head of Ennui cap-and-bells and Til Eulenspiegel is made pope of philosophy .

What is the " sublimest " pastime of man ? flies-maybe.

Did not

Spinoza

pass

his

Killing leisure

watching one spider murder another ? Tricks,

badgering,

The Ideal-Ironic

mystifications ,

riding

a winged

332

somersaults .

cow in

calico

EMILE

azures ; the

Mumbo-Jumbo

skull

of

Kant

TARDIEU

poised

and

the

one

with other

foot on

on the

skull

of Plato ; the founder of a well-known but superannuated religion playing croquet with

Sancho

Panza ; Cleopatra chasing Spinoza , who wears an ass's head à la Bottom, through Whitechapel ; Tolstoi drinking great bumpers of beer with the shade of Buddha ; Pegasus browsing on the whiskers of Ibsen ; Hegel resetting the bones of a cosmic Corpse, over which Dante whistles the latest ragtime from Purgatory ; Caliban riding in an automobile with St. Francis of Assisi as the chauffeur ; Mephistopheles feeding bonbons to St. Theresa , while Don Juan and Thomas à Kempis play golf just over the hill-that is a sketch of the Comedy of Time that I have invented for the use of Genius when the master of worlds, Ennui, confronts it. There is nothing that is not interchangeable. "order of the world" is a myth . illusions.

The

All " values " are

In eternal time all is laughable.

In the

Infinite there is no good, no evil. From the dome of the super- apperceptive mind all is topsy-turvy. ad infinitum .

Everything can be rearranged

There are as many combinations of

"historical events " as there are atoms . 333

Nothing is

FORTY

IMMORTALS

solid, nothing is permanent, nothing really exists, as everything is fleeting, ephemeral , fugacious. Would you escape Ennui ?

Panoply yourself in

irony and make of Time and all its works a charade. Be Iago, Hamlet, Falstaff, Cordelia, Lear, Tartuffe, All life as-

Don Quixote and Touchstone at once. pires to laughter.

Out of all these characters, which

are not fictitious but which are real, living embryons within each of us , there will come

a composite

character . It is Pierrot-Isis .

Ennui

lies

dead

before the

Vision that Laughs , before the Clown Who Knows.

334

IBSEN. I.

The Multiple Ibsen

Look at his face !-that mask of iron stained with acid.

Look again !-the iron and the acid are gone ;

it is now a wind- chilled mountain tarn , a marvellous mirror of the northland that reflects storm-riven, leafless pines that swing wildly to and fro on the edge of precipices and snow-capped mountain-tops that thrust their rebellious heads in defiant challenge to the stars .

The real Ibsen lay in ambush behind the paradoxes of existence ; each play screened a separate Ibsen ; he was the soul of each one of his characters, but could not be identified with any of them. He was a mystic, a poet, a philosopher, a dramatist, and he was each one of these things utterly.

He was

a mystic because his imagination had shot beyond the masks of matter, beyond the "stream of tendency" that moulds those masks into the supercerebral, where the intuitive catches

upon the

substratum of man

hypersensitive

spiritual

plates

gleams and presages from a Third EmpireEmpire- welded of flesh and spirit, but where neither rules. 335

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Nietzsche preached an Overman. out his empire. in " Emperor dramas,

and

Ibsen mapped

This prophecy of Ibsen's appeared

and is

Galilean ,"

found

again

"When We Dead Awaken."

one in

of his his

last

earliest drama,

In the latter play he

did not leave the earth-twisted souls of Rubreck and Irene, the lovers who ascended the Mountain_together, in the snows of the pass to be picked by the crows. bodies.

The rising sun gushes full upon their cold And their souls are borne away by the

Eagles of the Dawn to his Third Empire.

He was a poet because in him burned the immortal loves and hates, because he possessed the power of transfiguring the thing he touched, of translating the ordinary into the extraordinary. the clangor and crash of Law.

His ear caught

He was ecstatic,

exalté, and flung his rebel spirit at the sneering stars. He was a philosopher because he was an interpreter of life, answering no questions because Life answers none.

Incisive, psychologic, with a grim

humor-a humor that bit and silenced - replying to all questions after the conclusion of each play by planning another play, he preserved an indifference that deceived,

as

all

philosophers

deceive .

The

aloofness of the philosopher is merely the white heat of emotion- a passionate desire not to show passion. 336

IBSEN

The art consists in seeing that the mask does not drop off. He was not a master dramatist because he was a master technician, but because he

realized

more

vividly than any dramatist who has ever lived that the heart of things is Conflict, that the god-of-thingsas-they-are is a god of war, that Man is in desperate straits here upon earth.

Crucifixion is dealt out to

those who defy the social and cosmic order.

And

death, the death of the bug that slept itself to death in a rug, awaits those who do not venture forth into the land of spiritual adventure.

II. His Riddles .

Life is a sealed book.

Who understands ?

Forth

from the night-time of the Unconscious comes that spectral shape, Man.

Back into the night-time of

the Unconscious is he hurled after his short parley with Destiny.

And the historian of this pitiful in-

cident in Eternity-what is he to say?

There is an

enigma ; if he can depict its character in a single work of art he has chronicled all Time has to say: He has posed a riddle. From Æschylus to Ibsen there is but one theme-

337

FORTY

IMMORTALS

the conflict of the will of man with the blind forces that seek his destruction ; the desperate charges of Intelligence against Circumstance.

Ibsen saw this

conflict with the clarity of Sophocles and ShakesThere is clash of battle in each play. The

peare.

world-war is carried on in the most insignificant towns in the Scandinavian peninsula.

The great

question- How may I survive ?-rises for solution at each minute into the mental and physical world of the humblest .

"Brand" and " The Master Builder" are two plays that show us two stupendous wills that seek to batter their way through the myriad menaces of a hostile environment ; in " Brand" the blows of the mighty hammer of Purpose can be heard against the granite heights by those in the valley below.

Behold Sol-

ness on the dizzy summit for just one second !

So

far and no further—too high, too high he climbed ! He is whirled off his footing into space.

The rest is

silence and a sublime defeat. What is the moral? we ask of Ibsen when the old war-lord

of individualism was alive.

ironically and turned

He smiled

away- he was not in

the

councils of Omnipotence.

In "The Wild Duck" the problem is : How may we follow our ideals and still be happy? 338

Can a husband

IBSEN

and wife live happier with a lie existing between them than if they stood mortised in the truth, though it is an unpleasant one? before marriage.

The woman has "sinned"

The husband knows nothing of it.

The idea enters a mutual friend's head that it would be a good thing to tell the husband the truth and thus found a marriage on absolute frankness. sult is a catastrophe .

Ibsen flings this question into

the face of humanity :

Truth- what is it good for?

Man cannot exist without his lies . slays. love.

The re-

Truth mocks and

Absolute frankness in love is the death of Even great truths must be lied about before

they become currency.

And what currency ! it be-

comes debased in the handling. Again the problem appears in "The Enemy of the People."

Tell the truth and the world will pelt you

with stones .

Calvary taught it nothing.

must have its pap .

The mob

When Truth comes in contact

with the Pocketbook, the Pocketbook fights with the strength of the fiend- and wins.

Herr Stockmann

told the municipality of the watering-place in which he lived that the springs the tourists drank from were poisoned.

His house was stoned.

not dismayed .

He alone is great who can stand

alone.

But he was

It is well to keep a closed mouth in the pres-

339

FORTY

ence

IMMORTALS

of a remunerative

lie

or

take

the

conse-

quences . In all his plays there sits the Sphinx with her riddle.

Answer it who may.

Man has been called a

god in ruins. Ibsen saw in him an evolving devil. A martyrdom awaits those who lift the standard of rebellion ; but it is only in rebellion that man becomes great .

III. The Egoistic Mystic.

"At times there are moments when the whole history of the world appears to me like a shipwreck ; the important thing is to save yourself."

Ibsen flung

this doctrine of egoism at a world saturated with the flabby doctrine of altruism.

The one thing needful

is to find yourself, affirm yourself in the face of all opposition.

"The kingdom of God is within you ."

When you offend yourself you offend the divine. Life was given you to live, not to sacrifice.

Nature

knows nothing of self-sacrifice ; she immolates the weak.

Self-sacrifice is great when it is a means to

the end of self-glorification ; but self-sacrifice as an end in itself is mutilation , an instrument for perpetuating ugliness . A man cannot benefit society in any better way 340

IBSEN than to teach the lesson of strength by example.

Let

the weak look to the foundations of the houses in which they live. Mint the gold within you , Ibsen wrote to Brandes . Will you mould yourself in bronze after your own ideal or become a little pewter image that can be bought in the market-place by the first cowherd ? The man who treats life ruthlessly is the great man.

Men, like races ,

survive because

of their

strength, not because of their " goodnesses."

Persis-

tence of force is persistence of strength ; the way to achieve immortality is to deserve it. The strong, full-blooded man has discovered Nature's meaning.

Man, in his pride, believes he is

subduing universal forces to his will when in reality he is doing the will of universal forces.

It is

as though the lightning rod believed it had willed the

lightning

from the

thunder-cloud.

Nature

voices its thunder through individuality . Be true to your dream of power and sweep forward with your

destiny,

Ibsen

thunders .

Nora

Helmer leaves the house of her husband when she discovers his perfidy.

She had found that she had

"a soul to cultivate."

The doll's house she lived in

collapsed in a night.

She discovered that she could

not be an ideal mother until she became an ideal 341

FORTY

woman.

IMMORTALS

She had been only a wife.

sary to be something more. human being.

It was neces-

She was first of all a

She went forth in search of herself.

Sudermann's Magda had uttered that magnificent challenge, " I am I !"

Nora Helmer cried to the night,

"I am- who?" There can be no liberty for the soul so long as it works within the limits of its ancestral conscience. Endless liberty implies endless ejection, the steady, vigorous , unashamed exploitation of what is within -the lengthening of the shadow of the Ego against the eternal wall of Circumstance.

All greatness vio-

lates ; all heroism slays .

The revolution that Ibsen preached was a spiritual revolution-a revolt of each man against his lower, conventional , mechanical nature.

The prob-

lem of individual growth is how to keep at bay the waves of suggestion from external objects and internal corpses that threaten at each minute to overwhelm the mind.

How may I use myself?

There is

a nucleus of inner forces that comes to consciousness in the brain which we call the I;" it is the organ of personal identity ; an organ within an organ, a magnet toward which all things converge for judg. ment.

To allow this center to be overruled is to 342

IBSEN

be "lost."

To immortalize it in dream and act is to

be "saved." Ibsen would not compromise with his age. was a terrible taskmaster. trine of heroic egoism.

He

He lived up to his doc-

Is it easy to live thus ?

it a philosophy of self-indulgence ? grade ?— Look at his face !

343

Is

Does it de-

VERLAINE .

In the Nietzschean philosophy, culture is either Apollonian or Dionysian. Dionysus Art .

Apollo typifies Science ;

Apollo is contemplative .

Dionysus

is ecstatic , creative, eternally burgeoning. is the Sun. brain.

Dionysus is the Earth.

Apollo

Apollo is the

Dionysus is the blood.

They are not at war.

They are complementary.

A genius may be both in turns .

Nietzsche himself

was Apollonian in his private life, Dionysian in his philosophy.

Psychoanalysis

reveals

the

frenzied

poetry of Zarathustra as the explosion of the congested desires of a contemplative invalid . is, is a paradox of itself.

Whatever

In great artists the imma-

nent paradox of their natures, set so glaringly before the world, is called contradictions . are no contradictions in nature or life.

But there Everything

gives birth to its opposite to make it whole.

The lives of Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Hugo, De Musset, Whitman , Villon , Rimbaud, Laforgue , Goethe, Byron,

d'Annunzio, Shelley,

Dowson,

Blake,

Francis

Verlaine,

Wilde ,

Thompson

and

Shakespeare are called " masses of contradiction ." This is the judgment of moralists, thumb-and-rule 344

VERLAINE

critics and Euclidean Woodrows.

It is the judg-

ment of chanticleer on the wild gyrations, the frenzied swoops

of the sun-storming

Psychi-

eagle .

cally, great poetic genius is perfect in its own being. It may fail artistically, but the lives of geniuses are perfect, for perfection is whole

self regardless

of

self-expression consequences

moral

or

Byron said his genius was based in his

standards.

"vices," not in his " virtues." from

of one's

Homer to

Whitman,

"yea" on this dictum.

Every great poet,

could

put

a

solemn

It was the Beau Brummel

of poets and thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson , who said , " If I am the Devil's child, I will live unto the Devil. "

Paul Verlaine , the great French lyrical poet, psychic brother of François Villon, is one of the greatest studies in paradox that the poetic soul furnishes in any time.

He was Mystery.

He was a human per-

sonality in which all contradictions of sensibility centered.

He was a mystical Pan.

leptic Silenus . gutters of Paris.

He was a goda-

Rapture and vision floating in the On the crest of his brain convolu-

tions sat the Imp of the Perverse

that same imp

that ruled Poe, Baudelaire and Wilde.

He lived in

a pit of awkward flesh with Satan and Mary. This lascivious pietist, like Villon, Dowson and 345

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Poe, was a born vagabond. had no instinct for place

He wore no halter, he

except the cafés of Paris,

where he wrote and recited many of his exquisite lyrics before his patron , Saint Absinthe .

Vagabond-

age is the profoundest complex in poetic natures. Their brains rove the universe, their bodies reel like drunken men over the highways and through the streets of cities of the earth.

Of old, we roved to

consume ; the poets rove to produce.

New and vivid

sensations are always needed to feed the ideas and images which gestate in the wombs of their imaginations .

They are the rolling stones that gather moss ,

the tramps that strike music from their heels , knights of the Grail, which in Paul Verlaine's case was filled with absinthe. Verlaine was never respectable .

He made a bad

husband, a bad father, he slept in cellars , he lived in hospitals, he served a term in jail, he had innumerable mistresses, and then there was the celebrated affair with Arthur Rimbaud.

If Verlaine had not

been all these things and had not done all these things, it is probable that he would have been the Longfellow of Paris-or the poetic Tupper.

It was

out of his agonies , his remorse, his willlessness, his helplessness ,

his

satyriasis, that the 346

music came.

VERLAINE

No evil?-well, then no poetry, no universe , no character, no art. The mysticism of Verlaine, like the mysticism of all poets of the sensuous, was impressionistiche was hailed as one of the founders of the Parnassian School, which was a revolt against the Romantics. But I do not use the word " impressionistic" as movement jargon.

I use it in the universal sense- " my

truth is the Truth."

His moods were things.

The external universe was merely the body of his soul.

His dreams , erotic, tender, religious, philo-

sophic, created the world in which he lived, as alcohol or morphine will create an empire of fancy that realizes itself in consciousness with a tenfold greater vividness than the objects of the external world. soul.

Dreams blossom in the very sockets of the The external universe is second hand.

senses lie. speech.

Moods never lie.

The

They are the inmost

As Amiel said , "A landscape is a state of

mind," so Verlaine might have said, "Whatever is, is a mood."

"Je suis un berceau

Qu'une main balance Au creux d'un caveau Silence, silence ! " 347

FORTY

IMMORTALS

The literature around Verlaine grows with the years ( he died in 1896 ) , as does that of Baudelaire . It was Arthur Symons, his friend , who first made Edmund Gosse has de-

him known in England .

scribed a night in Paris with Verlaine , when the poet, filthy

and

tattered ,

with

vermin

in

his

beard ,

crawled out of his absinthe stupor in the cellar to see his distinguished English visitor and recite for him his exquisite poetry—a sight to shock those implacable gold-dust twins, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, sitting forever and forever on the prophylactic Olympus of Classicism . French poetry has always been locked up in forThere is always a dominant " school," as

mulas. there poetry

is

in

Classicism

painting.

until the

coming

ruled

French

Hugo,

of Victor

who

smashed Classicism with a blast of Promethean fire . He

substituted

personal

formulas of beauty. sance of the ego.

expression

for

academic

Romanticism was the renais-

Its extravagances broke its power

(the Romantic is eternal ; Romanticism is only a formula ) . the débâcle.

The Parnassian group was born out of Verlaine was its prophet.

printed Poémes Saturniens.

In 1866 he

Théodore de Banville

said he read the volume ten times without stopping. 348

VERLAINE

Victor Hugo wrote from Guernsey, "Victor Hugo's sunset salutes Verlaine's dawn !"

The Parnassians formulated restraint, objectivity, artistic perfection .

It was the triumph of the parted

hair over the pompadour ; the part to give way in its turn to Symbolism , which was the triumph of the wig over the part.

Verlaine called it “ cymbalism. ”

No article about Verlaine is complete without mention of Arthur Rimbaud, demon and angel, poet, thug and evil genius of Verlaine's life.

Rimbaud

is one of the most extraordinary apparitions in the realm of literature. of Verlaine.

He came to Paris at the request

Verlaine left his wife to wander on the

roads with this lyrical boor.

In Belgium, Verlaine

shot Rimbaud and served a year in prison for it. He always spoke of his prison as his chateau . Was there ever such a life as Rimbaud's ?

He

roamed the world in every guisesold keyrings in Italy on the streets, begged, deserted the army, became a trader in Africa and died at thirty-seven in a hospital at Marseilles .

He stopped writing at nine-

teen, declaring literature an idiot's pastime. and conquest were his gods. a legend in France.

Force

He has already become

Poor Verlaine !

He sought God

and found- Rimbaud !

The life of Verlaine was like a forty-year war 349

FORTY

IMMORTALS

between the Principalities and Dominations on one side and the legions of Hell on the other.

Tout

Paris buried him. Let Anatole France have the last word : “ He is mad,' you say?

I certainly believe it.

And if I doubted that he was, I would tear up the pages that I have just written .

Indeed, he is mad !

But remember that the poor madman has created a new art and that there is some chance that they will say some day : 9.99 time.'

' He was the best poet of his

350

MONSIEUR SATAN.

The

French

have

Monsieur Brave-Man, so on.

strange

names.

Funny-Man,

There

Man-God,

are and

It is probably part of the Gallic imagination

these names .

So when I went to see the celebrated

Monsieur Satan in Paris I was no more astonished to find that that was really his name than that the name of the greatest poet in the world today is Gabriel the Announcer . Monsieur fascinated me, but did not astound me. Probably because fancied I had. manner.

I had known him always - or

He had a negligent, self-revealing

He would pronounce dogmatically the

most astonishing paradoxes in a tone of voice such as one would use when one would say, " Plate of buckwheats , please." He had, apparently, lived everywhere, travelled everywhere, knew everybody, knew everything.

He

went through life seeing, recording, uttering, drinking.

His impersonality was frightful .

He said he

was the right-angle of a circle, the fraction

of a

cipher,

he'd

an eternally movable horizon-then

smile at my puzzled air and order another absinthe. Beautiful summer night at the Pré- Catelan, before

351

FORTY

the war.

IMMORTALS

Paris gleamed in the distance like a mon-

strous convention of fireflies.

You could look right

through the stars into the Néant beyond, the night was so clear. We were on the question of the cinematograph. I was bound to hear something original, as the third person present (no less a person, by the way, than Remy de Gourmont ) had informed me I wouldno matter what Monsieur Satan touched on. "Yes," he began

suddenly,

as

if answering

a

question, that had been asked about a thousand years before, "the Truth is out. Great Secret.

We have discovered the

The method of the mysterious Force

is known .

"In the screenless ' movies ,' unperfected as yet, wherein with the aid of a powerful light phantoms are projected on a dark stage, we have the secret of ourselves revealed.

For we, sir, are phantoms , con-

densed etheric rays of varying degrees of ponderability, thrown on the dark stage of the world, and made visible to one another by a Light.

This Light

emanates from a Universal Mind, and if it ever ceases to be, we

the phantomsshall cease to be

with it, and the little playlets that we call our experiences will be no more. "Nothing has ever given us the sense of pleasure 352

MONSIEUR

SATAN

in the tragedies of existence like the moving picture . It has deepened the aesthetic consciousness of the race more than anything else.

By æsthetic con-

sciousness I mean the ability to enjoy life as a work of art as a sublime tragi-comedy or a farcical tragedy, or ironical drama-it is merely a matter of temperament whatever you call it. "The producer- in his

Hidden

Box-sees life

exactly as we see it in the screenless ' movies .'

His

(or Its) emotion is always pleasurable no matter 29 what happens to these puppets that we are. After this piece of pure Spinozism fired into the night from the piazza of the Pré-Catelan he poured in his absinthe, and continued : "Have you ever tried to analyze why we enjoy the woes of Edipus, Hamlet, Lear, Phédre ? we love the diabolic and inhuman in art ?

Why

Why the

Borgias, the Neros and the Napoleons fascinate us ? It is the triumph in us of the artistic sense over the personal bias.

It is the ' movie' instinct in the human

brain dominating the human heart. as life

pity

and

whimper in the

We are passionately in love with life

the more complex, the harder, the more

terrible, the profounder the fatality that it reveals to us the greater the ultimate pleasure . 353

FORTY

IMMORTALS

"When a man applauds the acting of Iago he is something of a god. "Whether it is the adventure of Robinson Crusoe, the 'Inferno' of Dante, the human hells of Dostoievsky or Balzac, or the satanism of Poe, it is the great spectacle that we demand.

The eye and the brain

and the nerves must be feasted .

We are all pagans

in this sense. "Did not the author of "The Book of Job' and Goethe in 'Faust' the former )

( a clean filch of the latter from

make of life a 'frame-up'-un coup

monté, as we say in French? Here we are doing our bit while we are being filmed on the endless running screen of Time. "The plots of life are infinitely various . only posed phantoms.

We are

We are in a Studio-call it

the Universe if you will : and the Director you will 99 never know here .' And Monsieur Satan let a smile rove over his face. Had he remembered some past meeting somewhere with"But, Monsieur Satan, " I broke in on that frosty smile, "where are all the films of these playlets kept ?" "Why," he replied , "in the pigeonholes and cylinders of the air. ”

354

MONSIEUR

SATAN

"And where may they be ? " I asked , while Remy de Gourmont drew invisible arabesques on the servi ette with a fork. "All around us," replied this man in the secrets of the Infinite . "All light photographs , and the Light that we call consciousness-do you not think that that photographs and registers everything also ? "Every movement here on Earth is registered in Space materially ;

and its metaphysical motive is

registered in the mind-the Light—of the Supreme Consciousness . "Space is an immeasurable , unimaginable collector

of scenarios.

It is

at the present

moment,

through the operations of light, putting this scene into etheric waves or boxes of ether.

"Some day when an apparatus I am working on is complete I'll show you the firing on Fort Sumter, the Siege of Paris , the Neanderthal man en famille. They are all up there, and long after the earth with its pomp and vanities and phantoms has crumbled to dust or vanished into some strange sun, the light waves flashing eternally through space will continue to carry the immaterial- if you like that word— record of all that was done here on this sun-flake, itself purely phantasmagoric . 355

FORTY

IMMORTALS

"And the Unknowable enjoys it all, for sometimes, I imagine, the plot gets beyond Its foresight, and Its characters get strangely mixed up.

Then

It feels surprise. "But you see, do you not, that we are all in the 'movies'?" Just then a pony cart in which were seated two children bolted down the road .

Monsieur Satan

was at the reins quicker than a flash of light ( I say this literally) and with a frosty smile he brought the two children to the table of the half-crazed mother. And was that act being recorded, too- in the ether-in favor of Monsieur Satan ?

356

SHAKESPEARE.

The brain of Shakespeare was the Rialto of the human race . On the plane on which we live there are three physical dimensions and four psychical planes. The three dimensions

are

commonplaces .

The four

planes are these : the unconscious, which is common to all organic life ; consciousness, which all human beings and animals partake of ; the superconsciousness of genius ; Shakespeare. One plane is founded on the other. Consciousness is erected on unconsciousness .

The super-conscious-

ness of genius is erected on consciousness.

Shake-

speare is at the pinnacle of the super-consciousness of genius.

In the ocean of the poetic imagination

there was only one tidal wave-and that occurred in Shakespeare's brain. As all average consciousness is the attempt of the Unconscious to behold itself, as all genius is the attempt of the average consciousness of man to behold itself-so Shakespeare is the attempt of all genius to see itself. Eschylus

was

sublime,

357

Homer

was

godlike,

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Sophocles was inexorable , Aristophanes was satanic, Rabelais was grotesque , Dante was grave, Shelley was ethereal , Gothe was Olympian , St. Augustine was

lyrical ,

Ibsen

was

dramatic ,

Cervantes

was

humorous , Molière was human , Heine was throstlethroated , Balzac was mystical -realistic ,

Swift was

misanthropic , Nietzsche was torrential, Byron was melancholic and cynical.

Shakespeare was all of these . His mind was the

council -chamber

Titans of literature past and to come. the Past came to puberty .

of all the In his brain

Homer was homeric .

Æschylus was æschylean , Rabelais was rabelaisian , Dante was dantesque . Shakespearean . He was an All .

But Shakespeare was

not

It may be said of him what

Descartes said of the universe , that he was a sphere with its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere .

Gods , worlds , ideas , intuitions and em-

bryons of beings -to -be swam in his brain like deepsea infusoria . He was the completest human being of which we have any knowledge.

Like a substance of infinite

protean capacities , he lived all his incarnations at once .

We know so little about him because in this 358 ·

SHAKESPEARE

human being there was no " him." being All .

He was Many,

He had the impersonality of divinity,

and being impersonal he knew nothing of good or evil.

He rammed his body up to the navel in old

mother earth , and still his Third Eye flamed from Arcturus . He was the only pagan of which we have any knowledge.

We speak of pagans, but we cannot

name a pagan. a pagan .

Goethe was religious-anything but

There may have been pagans among the

Greeks, but all we know of them is that they were a race of melancholy speculators . speare's religion, his beliefs ?

What was Shake-

His life was lived .

He left no record of the why or how. No confessions, no " technique of my art." To him life was an adventure. He came from the sweat of a man and a woman and his plays and poems came from the sweat of his soul .

Did he know anything else?

Why should he ?

He was the only pagan who ever lived because he identified himself with the World-Will.

And , like

Spinoza, he knew that the World-Will was in the ale-pot and in the eyes of a woman as well as in the transatomic

dimensions.

He

ate,

drank,

begat,

accouched a fictional universe and passed. Will

Shakespeare the intermittent

359

souse, Will

FORTY

IMMORTALS

Shakespeare the snarer and seducer of lassies , Will Shakespeare the pothouse braggart, Will Shakespeare the obscene, Will Shakespeare full of tares and blemishes—what we can piece together of you reveals to us a man more human than Christ.

You were one

of us, a radiant god who kissed matter passionately because you despised the spiritual lickspittles. were a Man.

You were the Man .

You

You were that

unique : the perfect equilibration of mind and matter, of sense and supersense. The pink-tea

zanies

of culture,

the

scholastic

nizzies , the milk-sops of morality, the winged cows of taste, the religious dunderpates, the pretty-fellows of literature, the professional jobbernowls- how do they "explain"

you,

"Will "-of-the-World,

cosmic

toss-pot, Pierrot-Parabrahma ? Dickens' works are the immortality of the disinherited , Balzac wrote the dictionary of human vice, but Shakespeare is the Hall of Fame of the human race.

Caliban and Hamlet, Doll Tearsheet and Cor-

delia, Falstaff and Iago are there

that is to say, that

in those six creations alone the history of the human race is written forever.

In each of us there is a

Caliban, a Hamlet, a Falstaff, an Iago, a Doll Tearsheet, a Cordelia, and man is the enigma of time because these persons interbreed in his soul. ‫ށ‬ 360

Some

SHAKESPEARE of us are not in Dickens and others of us are not in Balzac ; but all of us are in Shakespeare, as the part is in the whole. Shakespeare was a giant orb and on the whirling ecliptic of his imagination we are only moons.

He

was a Detective and he had a dictagraph planted in the human heart.

He transmuted the eternal modalities of Spinoza's God into flesh-and-blood fatalities which were men and women. an end.

And of wisdom in him there is never

The Orient, Greece, Egypt, and the West

are there.

There is the practical wisdom of the

Yankee horse-trader and the esoteric wisdom of the godalepts.

He absorbed whole continents of thought

and cut the lightning of his dreams into apothegms . He could talk the prose of the cowshed and converse with the sibyls and the Magi.

He was all things to

all men because he lived neither above nor below the race, but through it. "Whatever exists exists for me," he said to me once.

"Whatever is is mine.

The thing that does

not belong to me can never be born .

Matter and 99 mind and men enter into hypostatic union with me.' In the womb of his brain every day was a ninthmonth .

Greater than the creative human imagina-

tion we know nothing, and Shakespeare was the 361

FORTY

IMMORTALS The

spectroscope to which all rays converged .

human imagination sustains the three dimensions of matter, the zodiac, God, the idea of eternity and the apparatus for making tomorrows.

In three men

that we know of Homunculus rose to godhoodAnd of

Shakespeare, Spinoza and Walt Whitman. this Trinity Shakespeare was the Father. Art and morality are antithetical terms . god is Beauty.

Morality's god is God, which may

mean anything or nothing. pyrean. pools.

Morality intones Art is an eye.

Art sings in the emits jeremiads

Morality is a nose .

instinct seeks freedom. straitjackets .

Art's

in

cess-

The art-

The moral-instinct seeks

Art is life .

Morality is death-ex-

cept to nanny-goats and capons, and they do not matter.

The end of art is to record. The end of 3 morality is to reform. The moralist is always a simpering, knee-skinned Abel.

The great artist has

always something of a Cain about him.

Shakespeare is the supreme artist of all time because we learn only two things from his pages, the eternality of Beauty and the sublime nothingness of man.

The great Shuttle weaves and we are woven

of it-cotton and silk, yarn and sunbeams, rainbow strands and dirty catgut . prefaces to his plays .

There are no explanatory God does not explain life.

362

SHAKESPEARE

Why should Shakespeare ? getic cough for epilogue.

There is no dry, apoloIago is Iago to the last ;

so is Richard the Third and Shylock.

Hell belched

Richard up and the Heart of All Sweetness wafted Ariel down. Here they are.

I , William Shakespeare,

have nothing to do with it.

I am only a reporter.

There is only one man that I know of whose subtlety of mind has so clearly apprehended the interdependence of all things as Shakespeare's- and that is Thomas Hardy.

Shakespeare and Hardy possess

in almost equal degrees the sense of subtle stupenThere are no dities and stupendous subtleties. great laws ; there are infinitesimal links that chance fastens together, but may break at any moment . The great tragedy of Othello is built up on the airiest trifles, nothings , ripples on the surface of the Moor's consciousness .

Shakespeare knew that the almost-

nothing is the nebulæ of human as well as sidereal cataclysms . Predestined

Chance

is the

background

of the

Shakespearean world, as it was of the world of the Greek dramatists, and as it is of the world created by England's immeasurable Titan, Thomas Hardy. The law of Predestined Chance is the paradoxical “law” that no human being can ever explain .

On

the other side of matter all mathematical contrarie363

FORTY

IMMORTALS

ties are solved one in another.

Some minds here

are on the borderland of that Beyond .

Shakespeare,

Sophocles and Thomas Hardy had crossed .

The persons in

Shakespeare's

archetypes of the race.

dramas

are the

If the universe were de-

stroyed and only the works of Shakespeare left the Creator could make over the race from the Plays. The mythus of the real, the phantasmagoric character of what we are pleased to call " life" is nowhere better proved than when we compare the inhabitants of the Plays and the inhabitants of the " real world . ” Hannibal is more of a myth than Hamlet, and Fal staff is as vital as Napoleon .

Time confuses the

“ "real ” and the “unreal," generally to the disadvantage of the " real."

We do not know Shakespeare

himself as well as we know Lear.

Sophocles is a

myth ; Edipus walks the world as fresh and vital as the day of his birth.

The miracles of Swedenborg's

angels, who travel eternally toward the springtime of their youth , is repeated in every great work of genius.

All the planets are named for a god except the one we live on. The Earth should be renamed Shakespeare.

364

ROUSSEAU

About the 27th century B. C. the Yellow Emperor, Hoang-ti, took the royal saddle in China.

He

immediately began the manufacture and enforcement of common sense.

His subjects, previous to

that time, had been perfectly human. In Chinese history the time previous to the ascension of the Yellow Emperor is known as the Age of the Primitives.

Men did as they wished, and

crime and duty and prohibition were

unknown

concepts. But the Yellow Emperor, according to old chronicles, was a bourgeois.

He believed in work, disci-

pline, prayer, Sunday closing and Uplift. the Chinese Fall of Man . happy and free.

This is

Original Sin was to be

Along came the Yellow Emperor

and tempted his subjects with the brown bread of the regular curfew life.

Since then China has been

working for everybody else Confucius-the Benjamin Franklin of his time -made his appearance and got up an old farmers' almanac of aphorisms which bolstered up the new régime in the Chinaman's psyche.

He was as un-

imaginative as a Congressman and as practical as a doormat. 365

FORTY

IMMORTALS

But you can't kill the Greenwic Village Insti nct h in the human heart. mortal as lying. fig leaf,

The Romantic Spirit is as im-

The Chinese poets of the doormat,

Thursday prayer meeting

age got busy.

They dreamed back to the Eden of Vagabondia , when individuality in life and artistic expression were the ideals, to the time when the earth was a Hyde Park and every man, woman and child was born with a soap -box to air his ego. Comes Taoism on the scene and forms a personal liberty league against the Kaisers of the skin-tight life and their court Tupper, Confucius.

Chuang-tzu was their Swinburne, their Baudelaire, their Casanova and their Poe all rolled into one.

He proclaimed the greatness of Bohemia, he

ridiculed Mrs. Grundy, shied epigrams at the sobersides, placed Aphrodite upon the sacred tomb of Chi-lu , God of Donts, and even ventured the blasphemy that Nature was wiser than Reason.

He left

a few sayings, the most famous of which is : "One satyr is worth a royal flush." The solid ivory descendants of the Yellow Emperor had him mewed in dungeons forevermore. Chunag-tzu and his followers were the first of the modern Romantics about which Irving Babbitt , professor of French literature in Harvard, has written a

366

ROUSSEAU

book, "Rousseau and Romanticism."

It is a com-

plete thesaurus of the imaginative rascals of poetry, prose and music .

The books that are named in the

references constitute a library of the lore of the imagination.

He who sits may read, and Prof. Babbitt

has evidently been reading the literature of Romanticism since he sat in the cradle .

From Cain to Ken-

yon Cox- they are all there. The book is an indictment of the extravagant imagination and a plea for common sense.

Of course

the "New Humanism" is there—which is highbrow for socialism, pacifism and the

abolition

of the

"Family Entrance." Rousseau , as Prof. Babbitt says, is taken as the supreme type of the modern Romantic movement because the Frenchman registered the reaction against classicism . Rousseau was an embodiment, a protagonist .

He

was the great individualist, the superb egoist, the defiant chronicler of himself.

He puts bombs under the

thrones of the Yellow Emperors of the conventions. Before Old Walt he proclaimed himself.

He said : "I

am a Personality, not a member of society ; I am a Being, not an automaton ; I am a destructive, dynamic, multivisioned and multipointed Force, not a copy book. " 367

FORTY

IMMORTALS

His theories of nature and his educational doctrines and his deification of the savage were of no consequence except in so far as they upset preordained and sacrosanct facts and hurdled rules.

He

made a supreme gesture of dissent at the psychological moment.

That gesture brought from their

cellular lairs forces that upset thrones, universities and the cocksure Euclids of literature, music and paint .

Tons of paper have been scribbled o'er about Jean Jacques ; tons of paper will still continue to be inked about him.

He was the ultimate Bohemian, in the

broadest and highest sense of that word.

For Bohe-

mia is merely this-the Kingdom of Life is within thee.

Your self is Hell , Purgatory and Paradise.

Whim, be thou my god ! cried Emerson. thou wilt ! proclaimed Rabelais .

Do as

If the cops object,

do as Molière's Don Juan did-put on the silks and boiled shirt of respectability and do it bootleg style . Prof. Babbitt has analyzed and recorded all the forms of Romanticism since the apparition of the wayward, eloquent, revolutionary Jean Jacques. The Romantic is split nine ways : Romantic genius, the romantic

imagination,

romantic

morality

in

the

presence of the real, romantic love, romantic irony, romanticism

and

nature,

368

romantic

melancholy.

ROUSSEAU

These are all destructive of civilization, says Prof. Babbitt.

The naturalistic-Romantic movement is a

return to barbarity, to undisciplined egotism. As against the imagination of a Rousseau, of a Hugo, of a Swinburne, "ethical imagination . "

of a

Blake, he puts the

He quotes deprecatingly the

letter that Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, "As to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles ; you may as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton as expect anything earthly or human from me." Divine Shelley !

Pretty Babbitt !

Also : " It is surely better to escape from the boredom of life after the fashion of Edison than after the fashion of Baudelaire." Here is a proposition to babbitize us in calories. Edison is a wizard and all that, and I delight in the electric light in Bryant Park, but the dribble-shirted poet who sits under that light at night reading " Les Fleurs du Mal" seems to me, in my incorrigible Romantic way, something infinitely more interesting. Not an ethical or useful occupation, maybe just human, probably sublime.

well,

Socrates is more in

Prof. Babbitt's line ; but I'll wager a near beer to a pound of Harvard ladyfingers that Homer, Anacreon and Omar will survive him.

369

FORTY

IMMORTALS

The supreme type-to me-of the Romantic sensibility in modern times is Heinrich Heine . Babbitt gives him the negligent once over. prefers the

poetry

of Edgar

Guest,

Prof.

Probably

who

is

the

“ethical imagination " let loose in cultured rhyme. Ah!

And

there is

Byron ! -bad,

glad,

mad,

drunken, fiery George, who seized the "ethical imagination" by its tail and made it hang head downward from the Tree of Knowledge, Good and Evil, so that, like the whimpus, it could study the earthworms instead of playing hide and seek with Lady Lilith in the topmost branches . They are all in this book, soberly written in Blue Monday English ; all that glorious host of impenitent and passionate singers, chanters of dithyrambs of Dionysus and prosateurs of the riotous images and hyperbolic phrase-Romantics all, as "ethical " as the dawn, as " contained" as the roll of an earthquake, as " civilized" as the Lord preordained, no more, no less. There are Amiel, Hugo , Chateaubriand , Cellini , Balzac, Blake, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Poe, Gautier, Flaubert, Keats , Nietzsche, Hoffmann, Gérard de Nerval, Walt Whitman, Villers de l'Isle Adam, Villon, Peladan, Musset, Nero and Napoleon . But why should Prof. Babbitt worry over the dan-

370

ROUSSEAU

ger of the return of Chuang-tzu, Rousseau and the demigods of Romanticism? tional birth .

Genius is an excep-

The Babbitts we have with us always.

Give us this day our daily Babbitts ! the very metal of our ironic laughter?

THE END .

371

Are they not

These essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Tribune, the Sun, the Evening Sun, the Evening Post, Shadowland, Reedy's Mirror, Musical America, the Philistine, the Poetry Jour. nal, the International, the Papyrus, the Forum, the Reader, the Bookman, the Critic and Puck.

Thanks are hereby

extended to these publications for permission to reprint.