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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
FORTY
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.