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Title: Affirmations
Author: Havelock Ellis
Release date: May 13, 2025 [eBook #76076]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Walter Scott, Limited, 1898
Credits: Jens Sadowski, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFFIRMATIONS ***
AFFIRMATIONS.
AFFIRMATIONS
BY
HAVELOCK ELLIS
LONDON:
WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1898
PREFACE.
THERE are at least two ways of looking at books and at the
personalities books express. In its chief but rarer aspect literature
is the medium of art, and as such can raise no ethical problems.
Whatever morality or immorality art may hold is quiescent, or lifted
into an atmosphere of radiant immortality where questioning is
irrelevant. Of the literature that is all art we need not even speak,
unless by chance we too approach it as artists, trying to grasp it by
imaginative insight. In literature, as elsewhere, art should only be
approached as we would approach Paradise, for the sake of its joy.
It would be well, indeed, if we could destroy or forget all that has
ever been written about the world’s great books, even if it were once
worth while to write those books about books. How happy, for instance,
the world might be if there were no literature about the Bible, if
Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and thousands of smaller men had not
danced on it so long, stamping every page of it into mire, that now the
vision of a single line, in its simple sense, is almost an effort of
inspiration. All my life long I have been casting away the knowledge I
have gained from books about literature, and from opinions about life,
and coming to literature itself or to life itself, a slow and painful
progress towards that Heaven of knowledge where a child is king.
But there is another kind of literature, a literature which is not all
art--the literature of life. Literature differs from design or music
by being closer to life, by being fundamentally not an art at all, but
merely the development of ordinary speech, only rising at intervals
into the region of art. It is so close to life that largely it comes
before us much as the actual facts of life come before us. So that
while we were best silent about the literature of art, sanctified by
time and the reverence of many men, we cannot question too keenly the
literature of life. In this book I deal with questions of life as they
are expressed in literature, or as they are suggested by literature.
Throughout I am discussing morality as revealed or disguised by
literature. I may not care, indeed, to pervert my subjects in order
to emphasise my opinions, but I frankly take my subjects chiefly on
those sides which suit my own pleasure, and I select them solely
because they do that so well. I use them as the ancient device of the
stalking-horse was used, to creep up more closely to the game that my
soul loves best.
So far as possible I dwell most on those aspects of my subjects which
are most questionable. It was once brought against me that I had a
predilection for such aspects. Assuredly it is so. If a subject is not
questionable it seems to me a waste of time to discuss it. The great
facts of the world are not questionable; they are there for us to
enjoy, or to suffer, in silence, not to talk about. Our best energies
should be spent in attacking and settling questionable things that so
we may enlarge the sphere of the unquestionable--the sphere of real
life--and be ready to meet new questions as they arise. It is only by
dealing with the questionable aspects of the world that criticism of
life can ever have any saving virtue for us. It is waste of life to
use literature for pawing over the unquestionable. Even a healthy dog,
having once ascertained the essential virtue of a bone, contentedly
eats it, or buries it.
And yet, it may well be, there is a time for affirming the simple
eternal facts of life, a time, even, when those simple eternal facts
have drifted so far from us that we count them also questionable.
The present moment has seemed to me a fitting one to set a few such
affirmations in order. The century now nearly over has performed many
dirty and laborious tasks; it has had to organise its own unwieldiness,
to cleanse its Augean stables of the filth it has itself deposited,
to pull down the buildings it has itself erected. When we witness
such work carried out--blunderingly, it may be, but yet, we thought,
humbly--we may well point out what splendid fellows these modest,
begrimed toilers really were, what useful and noble work they were
engaged in, how large a promise they bear for the future. That was my
own point of view. But the case is altered when these yet unwashed
toilers rise up around us in half-intoxicated jubilation over the
triumphs of their own little epoch, well assured that there never was
such an age or such a race since the world began. Then we may well
pause. It is time to recall the simple eternal facts of life. It is
time to affirm the existence of those verities which are wrought into
our very structure everywhere and always, and in the face of which the
paltry triumphs of an “era” fall back into insignificance.
Yet every man must make his own affirmations. The great questions
of life are immortal, only because no one can answer them for his
fellows. I claim no general validity for my affirmations. It has been
well said that certain books possess a value that is in the ratio of
the spiritual vigour of those who use them, acting as a tonic to the
strong, still further dissolving and enfeebling the weakness of the
weak. It would be presumptious to claim any potent and peculiar energy
for this book; but the observation is one which a reader may do well
always to bear in mind. The final value of any book is not in the
beliefs which it may give us or take away from us, but in its power to
reveal to us our own real selves. If I can stimulate any one in the
search for his own proper affirmations, he and I may well rest content.
He is welcome to cast aside mine as the idle conclusions of a dreamer
lying in the sunshine. Our own affirmations are always the best. Let us
but be sure that they are our own, that they have grown up slowly and
quietly, fed with the strength of our own blood and brain. Only with
the help of such affirmations can we find a staff to comfort us through
the valley of life. It is only when they utter affirmations, one has
said, that the wands of the angels blossom.
H. E.
_August 1897._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
NIETZSCHE 1
CASANOVA 86
ZOLA 131
HUYSMANS 158
ST. FRANCIS AND OTHERS 212
AFFIRMATIONS.
NIETZSCHE.
FOR some years the name of Friedrich Nietzsche has been the war-cry
of opposing factions in Germany. It is not easy to take up a German
periodical without finding some trace of the passionate admiration or
denunciation which this man has called forth. If we turn to Scandinavia
or to France, whither his fame and his work are also penetrating, we
find that the same results have followed. And we may expect a similar
outburst in England now that the translation of his works has at last
begun. At present, however, I know of no attempt to deal with Nietzsche
from the British point of view, and that is my excuse for trying to
define his personality and influence.[1] I do not come forward as the
champion of Nietzschianism or of Anti-Nietzschianism. It appears to
me that any human individuality that has strongly aroused the love
and hatred of men must be far too complex for absolute condemnation or
absolute approval. Apart from praise or blame, which seem here alike
impertinent, Nietzsche is without doubt an extraordinarily interesting
figure. He is the modern incarnation of that image of intellectual
pride which Marlowe created in Faustus. A man who has certainly stood
at the finest summit of modern culture, who has thence made the most
determined effort ever made to destroy modern morals, and who now leads
a life as near to death as any life outside the grave can be, must
needs be a tragic figure. It is a figure full of significance, for it
represents one of the greatest spiritual forces which have appeared
since Goethe, full of interest also to the psychologist, and surely not
without its pathos, perhaps its horror, for the man in the street.
I.
It has only lately become possible to study Nietzsche’s life-history.
For a considerable period the Nietzsche-Archiv at Naumburg and Weimar
has been accumulating copious materials which have now been utilised by
Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in the production of
an authoritative biography. This sister is herself a remarkable person;
for many years she lived in close association with her brother, so
that she was supposed, though without reason, to have exerted an
influence over his thought; then she married Dr. Förster, the founder
of the New Germany colony in Paraguay; on his death she returned home
to write the history of the colony, and has since devoted herself to
the care of her brother and his fame. Only the first two volumes of the
_Leben Nietzsche’s_ have yet appeared, but they enable us to trace
his development to his departure from Basel, and throw light on his
whole career.
Nietzsche belonged, according to the ancestral tradition (though the
name, I am told, is a common one in Wendish Silesia), to a noble Polish
family called Nietzky, who on account of strong Protestant convictions
abandoned their country and their title during the eighteenth century
and settled in Germany. Notwithstanding the large amount of German
blood in his veins, he always regarded himself as essentially a Pole.
The Poles seemed to him the best endowed and most knightly of Sclavonic
peoples, and he once remarked that it was only by virtue of a strong
mixture of Sclavonic blood that the Germans entered the ranks of gifted
nations. He termed the Polish Chopin the deliverer of music from
German heaviness and stupidity, and when he speaks of another Pole,
Copernicus, who reversed the judgment of the whole world, one may
divine a reference to what in later years Nietzsche regarded as his own
mission. In adult life Nietzsche’s keen and strongly marked features
were distinctly Polish, and when abroad he was frequently greeted
by Poles as a fellow-countryman; at Sorrento, where he once spent a
winter, the country people called him Il Polacco.
Like Emerson (to whose writings he was strongly attracted throughout
life) and many another strenuous philosophic revolutionary, Nietzsche
came of a long race of Christian ministers. On both sides his ancestors
were preachers, and from first to last the preacher’s fervour was
in his own blood. The eldest of three children (of whom one died in
infancy), Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Röcken, near Lützen,
in Saxony. His father--who shortly after his son’s birth fell down the
parsonage steps, injuring his head so severely that he died within
twelve months--is described as a man of noble and poetic nature,
with a special talent for music, inherited by his son; though once
described by his son as “a tender, lovable, morbid man,” he belonged
to a large and very healthy family, who mostly lived to an extreme
old age, preserving their mental and physical vigour to the last.
The Nietzsches were a proud, sincere folk, very clannish, looking
askance at all who were not Nietzsches. Nietzsche’s mother, said to
be a charming woman and possessed of much physical vigour, was again
a clergyman’s daughter. The Oehler family, to which she belonged,
was also very large, very healthy, and very long-lived; she was only
eighteen at her son’s birth, and is still alive to care for him in his
complete mental decay. I note these facts, which are given with much
precision and detail in the biography, because they certainly help
us to understand Nietzsche. It is evident that he is no frail hectic
flame of a degenerating race. There seems to be no trace of insanity
or nervous disorder at any point in the family history, as far back
as it is possible to go. On the contrary, he belonged to extremely
vigorous stocks, possessing unusual moral and physical force, people
of “character.” A similar condition of things is not seldom found in
the history of genius. In such a case the machine is, as it were, too
highly charged with inherited energy, and works at a pressure which
ultimately brings it to perdition. All genius must work without rest,
it cannot do otherwise; only the most happily constituted genius works
without haste.
The sister’s account of the children’s early life is a very charming
part of this record, and one which in the nature of things rarely finds
place in a biography. She describes her first memories of the boy’s
pretty face, his long fair hair, and large, dark, serious eyes. He
could not speak until he was nearly three years old, but at four he
began to read and write. He was a quiet, rather obstinate child, with
fits of passion which he learnt to control at a very early age; his
self-control became so great that, as a boy, on more than one occasion
he deliberately burnt his hand, to show that Mucius Scævola’s act was
but a trifling matter.
The widowed mother went with her children to settle at Naumburg on
the Saale with her husband’s mother, a woman of fine character with
views of her own, one of which was that children of all classes should
first be brought up together. Little Fritz was therefore sent to the
town school, but the experiment was not altogether successful. He was
a serious child, fond of solitude, and was called “the little parson”
by his comrades. “The fundamental note of his disposition,” writes a
schoolfellow in after-life, “was a certain melancholy which expressed
itself in his whole being.” He avoided his fellows and sought beautiful
scenery, as he continued to do throughout life. At the same time he
was a well-developed, vigorous boy, who loved games of various kinds,
especially those of his own invention. But although the children lived
to the full the fantastic life of childhood, the sister regretfully
confesses that they remained models of propriety. Fritz was “a very
pious child; he thought much about religious matters, and was always
concerned to put his thoughts into practice.” It is curious that,
notwithstanding his instinctive sympathy with the Greek spirit and his
philological aptitudes, he found Greek specially difficult to learn.
At the age of ten appeared his taste for verse-making, and also for
music, and he soon began to show that inherited gift for improvisation
by which he was always able to hold his audience spellbound. Even as
a boy the future moralist made a deep impression on those who knew
him, and he reminded one person of the youthful Jesus in the Temple.
“We Nietzsches hate lies,” an aunt was accustomed to say; in Friedrich
sincerity was a very deep-rooted trait, and he exercised an involuntary
educational influence on those who came near him.
In 1858 a place was found for him at Pforta, a remarkable school of
almost military discipline. Here many of the lines of his future
activity were definitely laid down. At an even earlier date, excited
by the influence of Humboldt, he had been fascinated by the ideal of
universal culture, and at Pforta his intellectual energies began to
expand. Here also, in 1859, when a pianoforte edition of _Tristan_
was first published, Nietzsche became an enthusiastic Wagnerian,
and even to the last _Tristan_ remained for him “music _par
excellence_.” Here, too, he began those philological studies which
led some years later to a professorship. He turned to philology,
however, as he himself recognised, because of the need he felt to
anchor himself to some cool logical study which would not grip his
heart like the restless and exciting artistic instincts which had
hitherto chiefly moved him. During the latter part of his stay at this
very strenuous educational establishment young Nietzsche was a less
brilliant pupil than during the earlier part. His own individuality
was silently growing beneath the disciplinary pressure which would
have dwarfed a less vigorous individuality. His philosophic aptitudes
began to develop and take form; he wished also to devote himself to
music; and he pined at the confinement, longing for the forest and the
woodman’s axe. It was the beginning of a long struggle between the
impulses of his own self-centred nature and the duties imposed from
without, by the school, the university, and, later, his professorship;
he always strove to broaden and deepen these duties to the scope of his
own nature, but the struggle remained. It was the immediate result of
this double strain that, during 1862, strong and healthy as the youth
appeared, he began to suffer from headaches and eye-troubles, cured by
temporary removal from the school. He remained extremely short-sighted,
and it was only by an absurd error in the routine examination that,
some years later, he was passed for military service in the artillery.
In the following year, 1863, Nietzsche met a schoolfellow’s sister, an
ethereal little Berlin girl, who for a while appealed to “the large,
broad-shouldered, shy, rather solemn and stiff youth.” To this early
experience, which never went beyond poetic _Schwärmerei_, his
sister is inclined to trace the origin of Nietzsche’s view of women as
very fragile, tender little buds. The experience is also interesting
because it appears to stand alone in his life. We strike here on
an organic abnormality in this congenital philosopher. Nietzsche’s
attitude was not the crude misogyny of Schopenhauer, who knew women
chiefly as women of the streets. Nietzsche knew many of the finest
women of his time, and he sometimes speaks with insight and sympathy
of the world as it appears to women; but there was clearly nothing in
him to answer to any appeal to passion, and his attitude is well summed
up in an aphorism of his own _Zarathustra_: “It is better to fall
into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of an ardent woman.”
“All his life long,” his sister writes, “my brother remained completely
apart from either great passion or vulgar pleasure. His whole passion
lay in the world of knowledge; only very temperate emotions remained
over for anything else. In later life he was grieved that he had never
attained to _amour passion_, and that every inclination to a
feminine personality quickly changed to a tender friendship, however
fascinatingly pretty the fair one might be.” He would expend much
sympathy on unhappy lovers, yet he would shake his head, saying to
himself or others: “And all that over a little girl!”
Young Nietzsche left Pforta, in 1863, with the most various and
incompatible scientific tastes and interests (always excepting in
mathematics, for which he never possessed any aptitude), but, as he
himself remarked, none that would fit him for any career. One point
in regard to the termination of his school-life is noteworthy: he
chose Theognis as the subject of his valedictory dissertation. His
meditations on this moralist and aristocrat, so contemptuous of popular
rule, may have served as the starting-point of some of his own later
views on Greek culture. In 1864 he became a student at Bonn, and the
year that followed was of special import in his inner development; he
finally threw off the beliefs of his early youth; he discovered his
keen critical faculty; and self-contained independence became a visible
mark of his character, though always disguised by amiable and courteous
manners. At Bonn his life seems to have been fairly happy, though he
was by no means a typical German student. He spent much money, but
it was chiefly on his artistic tastes--music and the theatre--or on
little tours. No one could spend less on eating and drinking; like
Goethe and like Heine, he had no love for tobacco or for beer, and he
was repelled by the thick, beery good-humour of the German student.
People who drink beer and smoke pipes every evening, he always held,
were incapable of understanding his philosophy; for they could not
possibly possess the clarity of mind needed to grasp any delicate or
complex intellectual problem. He returned home from Bonn “a picture of
health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather fair thick
hair, and exactly the same height as Goethe;” and then went to continue
his studies at Leipzig.
Notwithstanding the youth’s efforts to subdue his emotional and
æsthetic restlessness by cool and hard work, he was clearly tortured by
the effort to find a philosophic home for himself in the world. This
effort absorbed him all day long, frequently nearly all the night. At
this time he chanced to take up on a bookstall a totally unknown work,
entitled _Der Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_; in obedience to an
unusual impulse he bought the book without consideration, and from that
moment began an acquaintance with Schopenhauer which for many years
exerted a deep influence on his life. At that time, probably, he could
have had no better guide into paths of peace; but even as a student
he was a keen critic of Schopenhauer’s system, valuing him chiefly as,
in opposition to Kant, “the philosopher of a re-awakened classical
period, a Germanised Hellenism.” Schumann’s music and long solitary
walks aided in the work of recuperation. A year or two later Nietzsche
met the other great god who shared with Schopenhauer his early worship.
“I cannot bring my heart to any degree of critical coolness before
this music,” he wrote, in 1868, after listening to the overture to the
_Meistersinger_; “every fibre and nerve in me thrills; it is a
long time since I have been so carried away.” I quote these words, for
we shall, I think, find later that they have their significance. A few
weeks afterwards he was invited to meet the master, and thus began a
relationship that for Nietzsche was fateful.
Meanwhile his philological studies were bringing him distinction. A
lecture on Theognis was pronounced by Ritschl to be the best work
by a student of Nietzsche’s standing that he had ever met with.
Then followed investigations into the sources of Suidas, a lengthy
examination _De fontibus Diogenis Laertii_, and palæographic
studies in connection with Terence, Statius, and Orosius. He was now
also consciously perfecting his German style, treating language,
he remarks, as a musical instrument on which one must be able to
improvise, as well as play what is merely learnt by heart. In 1869,
when only in his twenty-sixth year, and before he had taken his
doctor’s degree, he accepted the chair of classical philology at Basel.
He was certainly, as he himself said, not a born philologist. He had
devoted himself to philology--I wish to insist on this significant
point--as a sedative and tonic to his restless energy; in this he was
doubtless wise, though his sister seems to suggest that he thereby
increased his mental strain. But he had no real vocation for philology,
and it is curious that when the Basel chair was offered to him he
was proposing to himself to throw aside philology for chemistry.
Philologists, he declares again and again, are but factory hands in
the service of science. At the best philology is a waste of acuteness,
since it merely enables us to state facts which the study of the
present would teach us much more swiftly and surely. Thus it was that
he instinctively broadened and deepened every philological question
he took up, making it a channel for philosophy and morals. With his
specifically philological work we are not further concerned.
I have been careful to present the main facts in Nietzsche’s early
development because they seem to me to throw light on the whole of
his later development. So far he had published nothing except in
philological journals. In 1871, after he had settled at Basel,
appeared his first work, an essay entitled _Die Geburt der Tragödie
aus dem Geiste der Musik_, dedicated to Wagner. The conception of
this essay was academic, but in Nietzsche’s hands the origin of tragedy
became merely the text for an exposition of his own philosophy of art
at this period. He traces two art impulses in ancient Greece: one,
starting in the phenomena of dreaming, which he associates with Apollo;
the other, starting in the phenomena of intoxication, associated with
Dionysus, and through singing, music and dithyramb leading up to
the lyric. The union of these, which both imply a pessimistic view
of life, produced folksong and finally tragedy, which is thus the
outcome of Dionysiac music fertilised by Apollonian imagery. Socrates
the optimist, with his views concerning virtue as knowledge, vice as
ignorance, and his identification of virtue with happiness, led to the
decay of tragedy and the triumph of Alexandrian culture, in the net
of which the whole modern world is still held. Now, however, German
music is producing a new birth of tragedy through Wagner, who has again
united music and myth, inaugurated an era of art culture, and built
the bridge to a new German heathenism. This remarkable essay produced
considerable controversy and much consternation among Nietzsche’s
philological friends and teachers, who resented--reasonably enough,
we may well admit--the subordination of philology to modern philosophy
and art, and could not understand the marvellous swan they had hatched.
A philologist Nietzsche could never have continued, but this book
publicly put an end to any hope of academic advancement. It remains
characteristic of Nietzsche’s first period, as we may call whatever
he wrote before 1876, in its insistence on the primary importance of
æsthetic as opposed to intellectual culture; and it is characteristic
of his whole work in its grip of the connection between the problems
and solutions of Hellenic times and the problems and solutions of
the modern world. For Nietzsche the Greek world was not the model of
beautiful mediocrity imagined by Winckelmann and Goethe, nor did it
date from the era of rhetorical idealism inaugurated by Plato. The
real Hellenic world came earlier, and the true Hellenes were sturdy
realists enamoured of life, reverencing all its manifestations and
signs, and holding in highest honour that sexual symbol of life which
Christianity, with its denial of life, despises. Plato Nietzsche hated;
he had wandered from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellene. His
childish dialectic can only appeal, Nietzsche said, to those who are
ignorant of French masters like Fontenelle. The best cure for Plato, he
held, is Thucydides, the last of the old Hellenes who were brave in
the face of reality; Plato fled from reality into the ideal and was a
Christian before his time. Heraclitus was Nietzsche’s favourite Greek
thinker, and he liked to point out that the moralists of the Stoa may
be traced back to the great philosopher of Ephesus.
_Die Geburt der Tragödie_ is the prelude to all Nietzsche’s work.
He outgrew it, but in one point at least it sounds a note which recurs
throughout all his work. He ever regarded the Greek conception of
Dionysus as the key to the mystery of life. In _Götzendämmerung_,
the last of his works, this is still affirmed, more distinctly than
ever. “The fundamental Hellenic instinct,” he there wrote, “was first
revealed in the Dionysiac mysteries. What was it the Greek assured to
himself in these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life,
the future promised and consecrated in the present, the triumphal
affirmation of life over death and change, _true_ life or
immortality through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality.
Thus the sexual symbol was to the Greeks the profoundest and most
venerable symbol in the whole range of ancient piety. Every individual
act of reproduction, of conception, of birth was a festival awaking
the loftiest emotions. The doctrine of the mysteries proclaimed the
holiness of pain; the pangs of childbirth sanctified all pain. All
growth and development, every promise for the future, is conditioned
by pain. To ensure the eternal pleasure of creation, the eternal
affirmation of the will to live, the eternity of birth-pangs is
absolutely required. All this is signified by the word Dionysus: I know
no higher symbolism than this Greek Dionysiac symbolism. In it the
deepest instinct of life, of the future of life, the eternity of life,
is experienced religiously; generation, the way to life, is regarded as
a sacred way. Christianity alone, with its fundamental horror of life,
has made sexuality an impure thing, casting filth on the beginning, the
very condition, of our life.”
Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche wrote four essays--on David Strauss,
the Use and Abuse of History in relation to Life, Schopenhauer as an
Educator, and Richard Wagner--which were published as a series of
_Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_. The essay on Strauss was written
soon after the great war, amid the resulting outburst of flamboyant
patriotism and the widely-expressed conviction that the war was a
victory of “German culture.” Fresh from the world of Greece, Nietzsche
pours contempt on that assumption. Culture, he says, is, above all,
unity of artistic style in every expression of a people’s life.
The exuberance of knowledge in which a German glories is neither
a necessary means of culture nor a sign of it, being, indeed, more
allied to the opposite of culture--to barbarism. It is in this
barbarism that the modern German lives, that is to say, in a chaotic
mixture of all styles. Look at his clothing, Nietzsche continues, his
houses, his streets, all his manners and customs. They are a turmoil
of all styles in which he peacefully lives and moves. Such culture is
really a phlegmatic absence of all sense of culture. Largely, also,
it is merely a bad imitation of the real and productive culture of
France which it is supposed to have conquered in 1870. Let there be
no chatter, he concludes, about the triumph of German culture, for at
present no real German culture exists. The heroic figures of the German
past were not “classics,” as some imagine; they were seekers after
a genuine German culture, and so regarded themselves. The would-be
children of culture in Germany to-day are Philistines without knowing
it, and the only unity they have achieved is a methodical barbarism.
Nietzsche attacks Strauss by no means as a theologian, but as a typical
“culture-Philistine.” He was moved to this by the recent publication
of _Der Alte und der Neue Glaube_. I can well understand the
emotions with which that book filled him, for I, too, read it soon
after its publication, and can vividly recall the painful impression
made on me by its homely pedestrianism, the dull unimaginativeness
of the man who could only compare the world to a piece of machinery,
an engine that creaks in the working, a sort of vast Lancashire mill
in which we must spend every moment in feverish labour, and for our
trouble perhaps be caught between the wheels and cogs. But I was young,
and my youthful idealism, eager for some vital and passionate picture
of the world, inevitably revolted against so tawdry and mechanical a
conception. Nietzsche, then and ever, failed to perceive that there
is room, after all, for the modest sturdy bourgeois labourer who, at
the end of a hard life in the service of truth, sits down to enjoy his
brown beer and Haydn’s quartettes, and to repeat his homely confession
of faith in the world as he sees it. Nietzsche failed to realise that
Strauss’s limitations were essential to the work he had to do, and that
he remained a not unworthy follower of those German heroes who were not
“classics,” but honest seekers after the highest they knew. In this
hypertrophied repulsion for the everyday work of the intellectual world
we touch on a defect in Nietzsche’s temperament which we must regard as
fundamental, and which wrought in him at last to wildest issues.
In another of these essays, _Schopenhauer als Erzieher_, Nietzsche
sets forth his opinions concerning his early master in philosophy. It
is a significant indication of the qualities that attracted him to
Schopenhauer that he compares him to Montaigne, thus at once revealing
his own essential optimism, and the admiration which he then and always
felt for the great French masters of wisdom. He regards Schopenhauer
as the leader from Kant’s caves of critical scepticism to the open sky
with its consoling stars. Schopenhauer saw the world as a whole, and
was not befooled by the analysis of the colours and canvas wherewith
the picture is painted. Kant, in spite of the impulse of his genius,
never became a philosopher. “If any one thinks I am thus doing Kant
an injustice, he cannot know what a philosopher is, _i.e._, not
merely a great thinker but also a real man;” and he goes on to explain
that the mere scholar who is accustomed to let opinions, ideas, and
things in books always intervene between him and facts, will never see
facts, and will never be a fact to himself; whereas the philosopher
must regard himself as the symbol and abbreviation of all the facts of
the world. It remained an axiom with Nietzsche that the philosopher
must first of all be a “real man.”
In this essay, which Nietzsche always preferred to his other early
works, he thus for the first time clearly sets forth his conception of
the philosopher as a teacher, a liberator, a guide to fine living;
Schopenhauer’s metaphysical doctrine he casts aside with indifference.
Unconsciously, as in late years he seems to have admitted, he was
speaking of himself and setting forth his own aims. Thus it is
characteristic that he here also first expressed his conception of the
value of individuality. Shakespeare had asked:
“Which can say more
Than this rich praise, that you alone are you?”
But Shakespeare was only addressing a single beloved friend. Nietzsche
addresses the same thought to the common “you.” “At bottom every man
well knows that he can only live one single life in the world, and that
never again will so strange a chance shake together into unity such
singularly varied elements as he holds: he knows that, but he hides it
like a bad conscience.” This was a sane and democratic individualism;
in later years, as we shall see, it assumed stranger shapes.
At Basel Nietzsche lived in close communion with Wagner and Frau
Cosima, who at this time regarded him as the prophet of the
music-drama. The essay on Wagner, which starts from the standpoint
reached in the previous essays, seems to justify this confidence.
There is a deep analogy for those to whom distance is no obscuring
cloud, Nietzsche remarks, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer
and Empedocles, Wagner and Æschylus. “The world has been orientalised
long enough, and men now seek to be hellenised.” The Gordian knot has
been cut and its strands are fluttering to the ends of the world; we
need a series of Anti-Alexanders mighty enough to bring together the
scattered threads of life. Wagner is such an Anti-Alexander, a great
astringent force in the world. For “it is not possible to present the
highest and purest operations of dramatic art, and not therewith to
renew morals and the state, education and affairs.” Bayreuth is the
sacred consecration on the morning of battle. “The battles which art
brings before us are a simplification of the actual battles of life;
its problems are an abbreviation of the endlessly involved reckoning of
human action and aspiration. But herein lies the greatness and value of
art, that it calls forth the appearance of a simpler world, a shorter
solution of the problems of life. No one who suffers in life can
dispense with that appearance, just as no one can dispense with sleep.”
Wagner has simplified the world, Nietzsche continues; he has related
music to life, the drama to music; he has intensified the visible
things of the world, and made the audible visible. Just as Goethe found
in poetry an expression for the painter’s vocation he had missed, so
Wagner utilised in music his dramatic instinct. And Nietzsche further
notes the democratic nature of Wagner’s art, so strenuously warm and
bright as to reach even the lowliest in spirit. Wagner takes off the
stigma that clings to the word “common,” and brings to all the means
of attaining spiritual freedom. “For,” says Nietzsche, “whosoever
will be free, must make himself free; freedom is no fairy’s gift to
fall into any man’s lap.” Such are the leading thoughts in an essay
which remains an interesting philosophic appreciation of the place of
Wagner’s art in the modern world; yet one may well admit that it is
often over-strained, with a strain that expresses the obscure struggle
of nascent antagonism.
It is, indeed, _Wagner in Bayreuth_ which brings to an end
Nietzsche’s first period, and leads up to the crash which inaugurated
his later period. Hitherto Nietzsche’s work was unquestionably
sane both in substance and form. No doubt it had called forth much
criticism; work so vigorous, sincere, and independent could not fail
to arouse hostility. But as we look back to-day, these fine essays
represent, with much youthful enthusiasm, the best that was known and
thought in Germany a quarter of a century ago. Nietzsche’s opinions
on Wagner and Schopenhauer, on individualism and democracy, the
significance of early Hellenism for moderns, the danger of an excessive
historical sense, the conception of culture less as a striving after
intellectual knowledge than as that which arouses within us the
philosopher, the artist, and the saint--all these ideas, wild as some
of them seemed to Nietzsche’s German contemporaries, are the ideas
which have now largely permeated European culture. The same cannot be
said of his later ideas.
It was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 that this chapter in
Nietzsche’s life was finally closed. His profound admiration for
Wagner, his intimate intercourse with the greatest figure in the German
world of art, had hitherto been the chief fact in his life. All his
ideals of life and his hopes for the future had grown up around the
figure of Wagner, who seemed the leader into a new Promised Land.
During the previous two years, however, Nietzsche had seen little of
Wagner, who had left Switzerland, and he had been unable to realise
either his own development or Wagner’s. Whatever enthusiasm Nietzsche
may have felt in early life for a return to German heathenism, he was
yet by race and training and taste by no means allied to primitive
Germanism; it was towards Greece and towards France that his conception
of national culture really drew him. Wagner was far more profoundly
Teutonic, and in the Nibelung cycle, which Nietzsche was about to
witness for the first time on the stage, Wagner had incarnated the
spirit of Teutonic heathenism with an overwhelming barbaric energy
which, as Nietzsche could now realise, was utterly alien to his own
most native instincts. Thus it was that Bayreuth marked the crisis of a
subtle but profound realisation, the most intense self-realisation he
had yet attained.
The whole history of this Wagner episode in Nietzsche’s life is full
of interest. The circumstantial narrative in the second volume of the
_Leben Nietzsche’s_ renders it clear at every point, and reveals a
tragedy which has its significance for the study of genius generally.
Nietzsche, it must be remembered, was more than thirty years younger
than Wagner. He was younger, and also he was less corrupted by the
world than Wagner. The great artist of the music-drama possessed,
or had acquired, a practical good sense in all that concerned the
realisation of his own mighty projects such as always marks the
greatest and most successful of the world’s supreme artists. Like
Shakespeare, he knew that the dyer’s hand must ever be a little subdued
to what it works in, if the radiant beauty of his stuffs is ever to
be perfectly achieved. But Nietzsche could never endure any fleck on
his hand; he shrank with horror from every soiling contact; he was an
artist who regarded life itself as the highest art. He could never
have carried through the rough task of dying the gorgeous garments of
a narrower but more perfectly attainable art. Nietzsche’s idealised
admiration for Wagner was complicated, after his appointment to
the Basel chair, by a deep personal friendship for the Master, the
chief friendship of his life. And his friendships were deeper than
those of most; although they show no traces of sexual tincture they
were hypertrophied by the defective sexuality of the man who always
regarded friendship as a more massive and poignant emotion than love.
That there were on either side any petty faults to cause a rift in
friendship there is no reason whatever to believe. Nietzsche was above
such, and Wagner’s friendship was always hearty until he realised
that Nietzsche was no longer his disciple, and then he dropped him,
silently, as a workman drops a useless tool. In addition it must be
noted that Nietzsche was probably at this time often over-strained,
almost hysterical,--at least so, we may gather, he impressed Wagner,
who urged him to marry a rich wife and to travel,--and he was still
afflicted by a disorder which not even genius can escape in youth,
he was still something of what we vulgarly call a “prig”; he had not
yet quite outgrown “the youthful Jesus in the Temple.” “Your brother
with his air of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,”
said Wagner to Frau Förster-Nietzsche; “one can always see what he is
thinking; sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes--and then I
crack them more madly than ever.” Wagner’s jokes, it appears, were of
a homely and plebeian sort, not appealing to one who lived naturally
and habitually in an atmosphere of keen intellectual activity. Bearing
all this in mind, one can imagine the impression made upon Nietzsche
by the inaugural festival at Bayreuth for which he had just written an
impassioned and yet philosophic prologue. Wagner was absorbed in using
all his considerable powers of managing men in finally vanquishing
the difficulties in his way. To any one who could see the festival
from the inside, as Nietzsche was able to see it, there were all the
inevitable squabbles and scandals and comic _contretemps_ which
must always mark the inception of a great undertaking, but which to-day
are hidden from us, pilgrims from many lands, as we ascend to that
hillside structure which is the chief living shrine of art in Europe.
And the people who were crowding in to this “sacred consecration on
the morning of battle” were aristocrats and plutocrats--bejewelled,
corpulent, commonplace--headed by the old Emperor, anxious to do his
duty, decorously joining in the applause as he whispered “Horrible!
horrible!” to his _aide-de-camp_, and hurrying away as quickly as
possible to the military manœuvres. There was more than enough here
to make his own just issued battle-cry seem farcical to Nietzsche. All
was conspiring to one end. The conception of the sanctity of Bayreuth,
his personal reverence for Wagner were slipping away together, and at
the same time he was forced to realise that the barbaric Germanism
of this overpowering Nibelung music was not the music for him. His
development would inevitably have carried him away from Wagner, but
the festival brought on the crisis with a sudden clash. Nietzsche had
finally conquered the mightiest of his false ideals, and stood for ever
after free and independent of all his early gods; but the wounds of
that victory were never quite closed to the last: a completely serene
and harmonious conception of things, so far as Wagner was concerned,
Nietzsche never attained.
It may well be that the change was also physical. The excitement of the
festival precipitated an organic catastrophe towards which he had long
been tending. His sister finds the original source of this catastrophe
in the war of 1870. He desired to serve his country as a combatant, but
the University would only allow him leave to attend to the wounded. The
physical and emotional over-tension involved by his constant care of
six young wounded men culminated in a severe illness, which led on to
a never-ending train of symptoms--eye-troubles, dyspepsia, headache,
insomnia--which were perhaps aggravated by the reckless use of drugs.
I have already noted passages which indicate that he was himself
aware of a consuming flame within, and that from time to time he made
efforts to check its ravages. That it was this internal flame which
largely produced the breakdown is shown by the narrative of Nietzsche’s
friend, Dr. Kretzer, who was with him at Bayreuth. It was evident he
was seriously ill, Kretzer tells us, utterly changed and broken down.
His eye-troubles were associated, if not with actual brain disease,
at all events with a high degree of neurasthenia.[2] At Bayreuth,
Nietzsche was forced to realise the peril of his position as he had
never realised it before. He could no longer disguise from himself that
he must break with all the passionate interests of his past. It was
an essential measure of hygiene, almost a surgical operation. This is
indeed how he has himself put the matter. In the preface to _Der Fall
Wagner_, he said that it had been to him a necessary self-discipline
to take part against all that was morbid within himself, against
Wagner, against Schopenhauer, against all the impassioning interests
of modern life, and to view the world, so far as possible, with the
philosopher’s eyes, from an immense height. And again he speaks of
Wagner’s art as a beaker of ecstasy so subtle and profound that it acts
like poison and leaves no remedy at last but flight from the siren’s
cave. Nietzsche was henceforth in the position of a gouty subject who
is forced to abandon port wine and straightway becomes an apostle of
total abstinence. The remedy seems to have been fairly successful. But
the disease was in his bones. Impassioning interests that were far more
subtly poisonous slowly developed within him, and twelve years later
flight had become impossible, even if he was still able to realise the
need for fight.
Nietzsche broke very thoroughly with his past, yet the break has
been exaggerated, and he himself often helped to exaggerate it. He
was in the position of a beleaguered city which has been forced to
abandon its outer walls and concentrate itself in the citadel; and
however it may have been in ancient warfare, in spiritual affairs
such a state of things involves an offensive attitude towards the
former line of defence. The positions we have abandoned constitute a
danger to the positions we have taken up. Many of the world’s fiercest
persecutors have but persecuted their old selves, and there seems to be
psychological necessity for such an attitude. Yet a careful study of
Nietzsche’s earlier activity reveals many germs of later developments.
The critical attitude towards conventional morality, the individualism,
the optimism, the ideal of heroism, which dominate his later thought,
exist as germs in his earlier work. Even the flagrant contrast between
_Richard Wagner in Bayreuth_ and _Der Fall Wagner_ was the
outcome of a gradual development. In the earlier essay Nietzsche had
justly pointed out that Wagner’s instincts were fundamentally dramatic.
As years went on he brooded over this idea; the nimble and lambent wit
of his later days played around it until Wagner became a mere actor in
his work and in his life, a rhetorician, an incarnate falsehood, the
personification of latter-day decadence, the Victor Hugo of music, the
Bernini of music, the modern Cagliostro. At the same time he admits
that Wagner represents the modern spirit, and that it is reasonable for
a musician to say that though he hates Wagner he can tolerate no other
music. The fact is, one may well repeat, that Nietzsche was not Teuton
enough to abide for ever with Wagner. He compares him contemptuously
with Hegel, cloud-compellers both, masters of German mists and German
mysticism, worshippers of Wotan, the god of bad weather, the god of
the Germans. “How could they miss what we, we Halcyonians, miss in
Wagner--_la gaya scienza_, the light feet, wit, fire, grace,
strong logic, the dance of the stars, arrogant intellectuality, the
quivering light of the south, the smooth sea--perfection?” It was
scarcely, however, the Halcyonian in Nietzsche that stood between him
and Wagner. That is well shown by his attitude towards _Parsifal_.
Whatever we may think of the ideas embodied in _Parsifal_, it may
yet seem to us the most solemn, the most graciously calm and beautiful
spectacle that has ever been fitly set to music. In Nietzsche the
thinker and the moralist were so much stronger than the artist that
he could see nothing here but bad psychology, bad thinking, and bad
religion.
The rebellion against Wagner was inevitable. It is evident that
Nietzsche had not gained complete mastery of his own personality in
his earlier work. It is brilliant, full of fine perceptions and
critical insight, but as a personal utterance incomplete. It renders
the best ideas of the time, not the best ideas that Nietzsche could
contribute to the time. The shock of 1876 may have been a step towards
the disintegration of his intellect, but it was also a rally, a step
towards a higher self-realisation. Nietzsche had no genuine affinity
with Schopenhauer or with Wagner, though they were helpful to his
development; he was no pessimist, he was no democrat. As he himself
said, “I understood the philosophic pessimism of the nineteenth century
as the symptom of a finer strength of thought, a more victorious
fulness of life. In the same way Wagner’s music signified to me the
expression of a Dionysiac mightiness of soul in which I seemed to hear,
as in an earthquake, the upheaval of the primitive powers of life,
after age-long repression.” Now he only needed relief, “golden, tender,
oily melodies,” to soothe the leaden weight of life, and these he found
in _Carmen_.
Any discussion of the merits of the question as between Wagner and
Bizet, the earlier and the later Nietzsche, seems to me out of place,
though much has been made of it by those who delight to see a giant
turn and rend himself. Nietzsche himself said he was writing for
psychologists, and it is not unfair to add that it is less “Wagner’s
case” that he presents to us than “Nietzsche’s case.” As to the
merits of the case, we may alike admit that Nietzsche’s enthusiasm
for Wagner was not excessive, and that the pleasant things he said of
_Carmen_ are fully justified; we may address both the early and
the late Nietzsche in the words habitually used by the landlord of the
“Rainbow”: “You’re both wrong and you’re both right, as I allus says.”
Most of the mighty quarrels that have sent men to battle and the stake
might have been appeased had each side recognised that both were right
in their affirmations, both wrong in their denials.
Nietzsche occupied his chair at Basel for some years longer; in 1880
his health forced him to resign and he was liberally pensioned. As
a professor he treated the most difficult questions of Greek study,
and devoted his chief attention to his best pupils, who in their turn
adored him. Basel is an admirable residence for a cosmopolitan thinker;
it was easy for Nietzsche to keep in touch with all that went on from
Paris to St. Petersburg. He was also on terms of more or less intimate
friendship with the finest spirits in Switzerland, with Keller the
novelist, Böcklin the painter, Burckhardt the historian. We are told
that he was a man of great personal charm in social intercourse. But
his associates at Basel never suspected that in this courteous and
amiable professor was stored up an explosive energy which would one
day be felt in every civilised land. With pen in hand his criticism of
life was unflinching, his sincerity arrogant; when the pen was dropped
he became modest, reserved, almost timorous.
The work he produced between 1877 and 1882 seems to me to represent the
maturity of his genius. It includes _Menschliches, Allzumenschliches_,
_Morgenröthe_, and _Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft_. In form all these
volumes belong to _pensée_ literature. They deal with art, with
religion, with morals and philosophy, with the relation of all
these to life. Nietzsche shows himself in these _pensées_ above all
a freethinker, emancipated from every law save that of sincerity,
wide-ranging, serious, penetrative, often impassioned, as yet always
able to follow his own ideal of self-restraint.
After leaving Basel he spent the following nine years chiefly at health
resorts and in travelling. We find him at Sorrento, Venice, Genoa,
Turin, Sils Maria, as well as at Leipzig. Doubtless his fresh and
poignant _pensées_ are largely the outcome of strenuous solitary
walks in the Engadine or among the Italian lakes. We may assume that
during most of these years he was fighting, on the whole successfully
fighting, for mental health. Yet passages that occur throughout his
books seem to suggest that his thoughts may have sometimes turned
to the goal towards which he was tending. It is a mistake, he points
out, to suppose that insanity is always the symptom of a degenerating
culture, although to nod towards the asylum is a convenient modern way
of slaying spiritual tyrants; it is in primitive and developing stages
of culture that insanity has played its chief part; only by virtue of
what seemed to be the “Divine” turbulence of insanity and epilepsy
could any new moral law make progress among early cultures. Just as
for us there seems a little madness in all genius, so for them there
seemed a little genius in all madness; sorcerers and saints agonised
in solitude and abstinence for some gleam of madness which would bring
them faith in themselves and openly justify their mission.
What may perhaps be called Nietzsche’s third period began in 1883 with
_Also sprach Zarathustra_, the most extraordinary of all his
works, mystical and oracular in form, but not mystical in substance.
Zarathustra has only a distant relationship to his prototype Zoroaster,
though Nietzsche had a natural sympathy with the symbolism of fire and
water, with the reverence for light and purity, which mark the rites
associated with the name of the Bactrian prophet; he has here allowed
himself to set forth his own ideas and ideals in the free and oracular
manner of all ancient scriptures, and is thus enabled to present his
visions in a concrete form. _Zarathustra_, for the first and
last time, gave scope to the artist within Nietzsche, and with all
its extravagance and imperfection it must remain for good or evil his
most personal utterance. It was followed by _Jenseits von Gut und
Böse_, _Zur Genealogie der Moral_, _Der Fall Wagner_, and
_Götzendämmerung_. It is during this period that we trace the
growth of the magnification of his own personal mission which finally
became a sort of megalomania. (“I have given to men the deepest book
they possess, my _Zarathustra_,” he wrote towards the end.) In
form the books of this period are sometimes less fragmentary than those
of the second period; in substance they are marked by their emphatic,
often extravagant, almost reckless insistence on certain views of
morality. If in the first period he was an apostle of culture, in the
second a freethinker, pronouncing judgment on all things in heaven and
earth, he was now exclusively a moralist, or, as he would prefer to
say, an immoralist. It was during this period that he worked out his
“master morality”--the duty to be strong--in opposition to the “slave
morality” of Christianity, with its glorification of weakness and pity,
and that he consistently sought to analyse and destroy the traditional
conceptions of good and evil on which our current morality rests. The
last work which he planned, but never completed, was a re-valuation of
all values, _Umwerthung aller Werthe_, which would have been his
final indictment of the modern world, and the full statement of his own
immoralism and Dionysiac philosophy.
It is sometimes said that Nietzsche’s mastery of his thought and style
was increasing up to the last. This I can scarcely admit, even as
regards style. No doubt there is at the best a light and swift vigour
of movement in these last writings which before he had never attained.
He can pour out now a shimmering stream of golden phrases with which
he has intoxicated himself, and tries to intoxicate us. We may lend
ourselves to the charm, but it has no enduring hold. This master of
gay or bitter invective no longer possesses the keenly reasoned and
piercing insight of the earlier Nietzsche. We feel that he has become
the victim of obsessions which drive him like a leaf before the wind,
and all his exuberant wit is unsubstantial and pathetic as that of
Falstaff. The devouring flame has at length eaten the core out of the
man and his style, leaving only this coruscating shell. And at a touch
even this thin shell collapsed into smouldering embers.
From a child Nietzsche was subject to strangely prophetic dreams. In
a dream which, when a boy, he put into literary form, he tells how
he seemed to be travelling forward amid a glorious landscape, while
carolling larks ascended to the clouds, and his whole life seemed
to stretch before him in a vista of happy years; “and suddenly a
shrill cry reached our ears; it came from the neighbouring lunatic
asylum.” Even in 1876 his friends began to see that Nietzsche
attached extraordinary importance to his own work. After he wrote
_Zarathustra_, this self-exaltation increased, and began to find
expression in his work. Latterly, it is said, he came to regard himself
as the incarnation of the genius of humanity. It has always been found
a terrible matter to war with the moral system of one’s age; it will
have its revenge, one way or another, from within or from without,
whatever happens after. Nietzsche strove for nothing less than to
remodel the moral world after his own heart’s desire, and his brain was
perishing of exhaustion in the immense effort. In 1889--at the moment
when his work at last began to attract attention--he became hopelessly
insane. A period of severe hallucinatory delirium led on to complete
dementia, and he passes beyond our sight.
II.
Nietzsche was by temperament a philosopher after the manner of the
Greeks. In other words, philosophy was not to him, as to the average
modern philosopher, a matter of books and the study, but a life to be
lived. It seemed to him to have much less concern with “truth” than
with the essentials of fine living. He loved travel and movement, he
loved scenery, he loved cities and the spectacle of men; above all, he
loved solitude. The solitude of cities drew him strongly; he envied
Heraclitus his desert study amid the porticoes and peristyles of the
immense temple of Diana. He had, however, his own favourite place of
work, to which he often alludes, the Piazza di San Marco at Venice,
amid the doves, in front of the strange and beautiful structure which
he “loved, feared, and envied;” and here in the spring, between ten
o’clock and midday, he found his best philosophic laboratory.
It was in Italy that Nietzsche seems to have found himself most at
home, although there are no signs that he felt any special sympathy
with the Italians, that is to say in later than Renaissance days. For
the most part he possessed very decided sympathies and antipathies.
His antipathy to his own Germans lay in the nature of things. Every
prophet’s message is primarily directed to his own people. And
Nietzsche was unsparing in his keen criticism of the Germans. He tells
somewhere with a certain humour how people abroad would ask him if
Germany had produced of late no great thinker or artist, no really good
book, and how with the courage of despair he would at last reply,
“Yes, Bismarck!” Nietzsche was willing enough to recognise the kind
of virtue personified in Bismarck. But with that recognition nearly
all was said in favour of Germany that Nietzsche had to say. There is
little in the German spirit that answered to his demands. He admired
clearness, analytic precision, and highly organised intelligence,
light and alert. He saw no sufficient reason why profundity should
lack a fine superficies, nor why strength should be ungainly. His
instinctive comparison for a good thinker was always a good dancer.
As a child he had been struck by seeing a rope-dancer, and throughout
life dancing seemed to him the image of the finest culture, supple to
bend, strong to retain its own equilibrium, an exercise demanding the
highest training and energy of all the muscles of a well-knit organism.
But the indubitable intellectual virtues of the bulky and plodding
German are scarcely those which can well be symbolised by an Otero or
a Caicedo. “There is too much beer in the German intellect,” Nietzsche
said. For the last ten centuries Germany has wilfully stultified
herself; “nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two
great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity,” to which he
was inclined to add music. (“The theatre and music,” he remarked in
_Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft_, “are the haschisch and betel of
Europeans, and the history of the so-called higher culture is largely
the history of narcotics.”) “Germans regard bad writing,” he said,
“as a national privilege; they do not write prose as one works at a
statue, they only improvise.” Even “German virtue”--and this was the
unkindest cut of all--had its origin in eighteenth century France, as
its early preachers, such as Kant and Schiller, fully recognised. Thus
it happens that the German has no perceptions--coupling his Goethe
with a Schiller, and his Schopenhauer with a Hartmann--and no tact,
“no finger for _nuances_,” his fingers are all claws. The few
persons of high culture whom he had met in Germany, he noted towards
the end of his life, and especially Frau Cosima Wagner, were all of
French origin. Nietzsche regarded it as merely an accident that he was
himself born in Germany, just as it was merely an accident that Heine
the Jew, and Schopenhauer the Dutchman, were born there. Yet, as I
have already hinted, we may take these utterances too seriously. There
are passages in his works--though we meet them rarely--which show that
Nietzsche recognised and admired the elemental energy, the depth and
the contradictions in the German character; he attributed them largely
to mixture of races.
Nietzsche was not much attracted to the English. It is true that he
names Landor as one of the four masters of prose this century has
produced, while another of these is Emerson, with whom he had genuine
affinity, although his own intellect was keener and more passionate,
with less sunny serenity. For Shakespeare, also, his admiration was
deep. And when he had outgrown his early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer,
the fine qualities which he still recognised in that thinker--his
concreteness, lucidity, reasonableness--seemed to him English. He
was usually less flattering towards English thought. Darwinism, for
instance, he thought, savoured too much of the population question,
and was invented by English men of science who were oppressed by the
problems of poverty. The struggle for existence, he said, is only an
exception in nature; it is exuberance, an even reckless superfluity,
which rules. For English philosophic thought generally he had little
but contempt. J. S. Mill was one of his “impossibilities”; the
English and French sociologists of to-day, he said, have only known
degenerating types of society, devoid of organising force, and they
take their own debased instincts as the standard of social codes
in general. Modern democracy, modern utilitarianism, are largely
of English manufacture, and he came at last to hate them both.
During the past century, he asserted, they have reduced the whole
spiritual currency of Europe to a dull plebeian level, and they are
the chief causes of European vulgarity. It is the English, he also
asserted--George Eliot, for instance--who, while abolishing Christian
belief, have sought to bolster up the moral system which was created by
Christianity, and which must necessarily fall with it. It is, moreover,
the English, who with this democratic and utilitarian plebeianism have
seduced and perverted the fine genius of France.
Just as we owe to England the vulgarity which threatens to overspread
Europe, so to France we owe the conception of a habit of nobility, in
every best sense of the word. On that point Nietzsche’s opinion never
wavered. The present subjection of the French spirit to this damnable
Anglo-mania, he declared, must never lead us to forget the ardent and
passionate energy, the intellectual distinction, which belonged to the
France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[3] The French, as
Nietzsche always held, are the one modern European nation which may
be compared with the Greeks. In _Menschliches, Allzumenschliches_
he names six French writers--Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère,
Fontenelle (in the _Dialogues des Morts_), Vauvenarges,
Chamfort--who bring us nearer to Greek antiquity than any other group
of modern authors, and contain more real thought than all the books of
the German philosophers put together. The only French writer of the
present century for whom he cared much (putting aside Mérimée) was
Stendhal, who possesses some of the characters of the earlier group.
The French, he points out, are the most Christian of all nations,
and have produced the greatest saints. He enumerates Pascal (“the
first among Christians, who was able to unite fervour, intellect, and
candour;--think of what that means!”), Fénelon, Mme. de Guyon, De
Rancé, the founder of the Trappists who have flourished nowhere but
in France, the Huguenots, Port-Royal--truly, he exclaims, the great
French freethinkers encountered foemen worthy of their steel! The land
which produced the most perfect types of Anti-Christianity produced
also the most perfect types of Christianity. He defends, also, that
seeming superficiality which in a great Frenchman, he says, is but the
natural epidermis of a rich and deep nature, while a great German’s
profundity is too often strangely bottled up from the light in a dark
and contorted phial.
I have briefly stated Nietzsche’s feeling as regards each of the three
chief European peoples, because we are thus led up to the central
points of his philosophy--his attitude towards modern religion and
his attitude towards modern morals. We are often apt to regard these
matters as of little practical importance; we think it the reasonable
duty of practical social politics to attend to the immediate questions
in hand, and leave these wider questions to settle themselves. Rightly
or wrongly, that was not how Nietzsche looked at the matter. He was too
much of a philosopher, he had too keen a sense of the vital relation of
things, to be content with the policy of tinkering society, wherever
it seems to need mending most badly, avoiding any reference to the
whole. That is our English method, and no doubt it is a very sane
and safe method, but, as we have seen, Nietzsche was not in sympathy
with English methods. His whole significance lies in the thorough and
passionate analysis with which he sought to dissect and to dissolve,
first, “German culture,” then Christianity, and lastly, modern morals,
with all that these involve.
It is scarcely necessary to point out, that though Nietzsche rejoiced
in the title of freethinker, he can by no means be confounded with the
ordinary secularist. He is not bent on destroying religion from any
anæsthesia of the religious sense, or even in order to set up some
religion of science which is practically no religion at all. He is thus
on different ground from the great freethinkers of France, and to some
extent of England. Nietzsche was himself of the stuff of which great
religious teachers are made, of the race of apostles. So when he writes
of the founder of Christianity and the great Christian types, it is
often with a poignant sympathy which the secularist can never know;
and if his knife seems keen and cruel, it is not the easy indifferent
cruelty of the pachydermatous scoffer. When he analyses the souls of
these men and the impulses which have moved them, he knows with what he
is dealing: he is analysing his own soul.
A mystic Nietzsche certainly was not; he had no moods of joyous
resignation. It is chiefly the religious ecstasy of active moral
energy that he was at one with. The sword of the spirit is his weapon
rather than the merely defensive breastplate of faith. St. Paul is
the consummate type of such religious forces, and whatever Nietzsche
wrote of that apostle--the inventor of Christianity, as he truly
calls him--is peculiarly interesting. He hates him, indeed, but even
his hatred thrills with a tone of intimate sympathy. It is thus in a
remarkable passage in _Morgenröthe_, where he tells briefly the
history and struggles of that importunate soul, so superstitious and
yet so shrewd, without whom there would have been no Christianity.
He describes the self-torture of the neurotic, sensual, refined
“Jewish Pascal,” who flagellated himself with the law that he came to
hate with the hatred of one who had a genius for hatred; who in one
dazzling flash of illumination realised that Jesus by accomplishing the
law had annihilated it, and so furnished him with the instrument he
desired to wreak his passionate hatred on the law, and to revel in the
freedom of his joy. Nietzsche possesses a natural insight in probing
the wounds of self-torturing souls. He excels also in describing
the effects of extreme pain in chasing away the mists from life, in
showing to a man his own naked personality, in bringing us face to
face with the cold and terrible fact. It is thus that, coupling the
greatest figure in history with the greatest figure in fiction, he
compares the pathetic utterance of Jesus on the cross--“My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?”--with the disillusionment of the
dying Don Quixote. Of Jesus himself he speaks no harsh word, but
he regarded the atmosphere of Roman decay and languor--though very
favourable for the production of fine personalities--as ill-adapted
to the development of a great religion. The Gospels lead us into the
atmosphere of a Russian novel, he remarks in one of his last writings,
_Der Antichrist_, an atmosphere in which the figure of Jesus had
to be coarsened to be understood; it became moulded in men’s minds
by memories of more familiar types--prophet, Messiah, wonder-worker,
judge; the real man they could not even see. “It must ever be a matter
for regret that no Dostoievsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most
interesting _décadent_, I mean some one who could understand the
enthralling charm of just this mixture of the sublime, the morbid, and
the childlike.” Jesus, he continues, never denied the world, the state,
culture, work; he simply never knew or realised their existence; his
own inner experience--“life,” “light,” “truth”--was all in all to him.
The only realities to him were inner realities, so living that they
make one feel “in Heaven” and “eternal”; this it was to be “saved.” And
Nietzsche notes, as so many have noted before him, that the fact that
men should bow the knee in Christ’s name to the very opposite of all
these things, and consecrate in the “Church” all that he threw behind
him, is an insoluble example of historical irony. “Strictly speaking,
there has only been one Christian, and he died on the cross. The Gospel
_died_ on the cross.”
There may seem a savour of contempt in the allusion to Jesus as
an “interesting _décadent_,” and undoubtedly there is in
_Der Antichrist_ a passionate bitterness which is not found
in Nietzsche’s earlier books. But he habitually used the word
_décadent_ in a somewhat extended and peculiar sense. The
_décadent_, as Nietzsche understood him, was the product of an
age in which virility was dead and weakness was sanctified; it was
so with the Buddhist as well as with the Christian, they both owe
their origin and their progress to “some monstrous disease of will.”
They sprang up among creatures who craved for some “Thou shalt,”
and who were apt only for that one form of energy which the weak
possess, fanaticism. By an instinct which may be regarded as sound
by those who do not accept his disparagement of either, Nietzsche
always coupled the Christian and the anarchist; to him they were both
products of decadence. Both wish to revenge their own discomfort
on this present world, he asserted, the anarchist immediately, the
Christian at the last day. Instead of feeling, “_I_ am worth
nothing,” the _décadent_ says, “_Life_ is worth nothing,”--a
terribly contagious state of mind which has covered the world with
the vitality of a tropical jungle. It cannot be too often repeated,
Nietzsche continues, that Christianity was born of the decay of
antiquity, and on the degenerate people of that time it worked like a
soothing balm; their eyes and ears were sealed by age and they could
no longer understand Epicurus and Epictetus. At such a time purity
and beneficence, large promises of future life, worked sweetly and
wholesomely. But for fresh young barbarians Christianity is poison.
It produces a fundamental enfeeblement of such heroic, childlike,
and animal natures as the ancient Germans, and to that enfeeblement,
indeed, we owe the revival of classic culture; so that the conclusion
of the whole matter is here, as ever, Nietzsche remarks, that “it is
impossible to say whether, in the language of Christianity, God owes
more thanks to the Devil, or the Devil to God, for the way in which
things have come about.” But in the interaction of the classic spirit
and the Christian spirit, Nietzsche’s own instincts were not on the
side of Christianity, and as the years went on he expresses himself in
ever more unmeasured language. He could not take up the _Imitation
of Christ_--the very word “imitation” being, as indeed Michelet had
said before, the whole of Christianity--without physical repugnance.
And in the _Götzendämmerung_ he compares the Bible with the Laws
of Manu (though at the same time asserting that it is a sin to name
the two books in the same breath): “The _sun_ lies on the whole
book. All those things on which Christianity vents its bottomless
vulgarity--procreation, for example, woman, marriage--are here handled
earnestly and reverently, with love and trust. I know no book in which
so many tender and gracious things are said about women as in the Laws
of Manu.” Again in _Der Antichrist_--which represents, I repeat,
the unbalanced judgments of his last period--he tells how he turns
from Paul with delight to Petronius, a book of which it can be said
_è tutto festo_, “immortally sound, immortally serene.” In the
whole New Testament, he adds, there is only one figure we can genuinely
honour--that of Pilate.
On the whole, Nietzsche’s attitude towards Christianity was one of
repulsion and antagonism. At first he appears indifferent, then he
becomes calmly judicial, finally he is bitterly hostile. He admits that
Christianity possesses the virtues of a cunningly concocted narcotic
to soothe the leaden griefs and depressions of men whose souls are
physiologically weak. But from first to last there is no sign of any
genuine personal sympathy with the religion of the poor in spirit.
Epicureanism, the pagan doctrine of salvation, had in it an element of
Greek energy, but the Christian doctrine of salvation, he declares,
raises its sublime development of hedonism on a thoroughly morbid
foundation. Christianity hates the body; the first act of Christian
triumph over the Moors, he recalls, was to close the public baths
which they had everywhere erected. “With its contempt for the body
Christianity was the greatest misfortune that ever befell humanity.”
And at the end of _Der Antichrist_ he sums up his concentrated
hatred: “I _condemn_ Christianity; I raise against the Christian
Church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered.
It is to me the most profound of all thinkable corruptions.”
It is scarcely necessary to add that Nietzsche’s condemnation of
Christianity extended to the Christian God. He even went so far as to
assert that it was the development of Christian morality itself--“the
father-confessor sensitiveness of the Christian conscience translated
and sublimed into a scientific conscience”--which had finally
conquered the Christian God. He held that polytheism had played an
important part in the evolution of culture. Gods, heroes, supernatural
beings generally, were inestimable schoolmasters to bring us to the
sovereignty of the individual. Polytheism opened up divine horizons
of freedom to humanity. “Ye shall be as gods.” But it has not been
so with monotheism. The doctrine of a single God, in whose presence
all others were false gods, favours stagnation and unity of type;
monotheism has thus perhaps constituted “the greatest danger which
humanity has had to meet in past ages.” Nor are we yet freed from its
influence. “For centuries after Buddha died men showed his shadow in a
cave--a vast terrible shadow. God is dead: but thousands of years hence
there will probably be caves in which his shadow may yet be seen. And
we--we must go on fighting that shadow!” How deeply rooted Nietzsche
believed faith in a god to be is shown by the fantastic conclusion to
_Zarathustra_. A strange collection of _Uebermenschen_--the
men of the future--are gathered together in Zarathustra’s cave:
two kings, the last of the popes--thrown out of work by the death
of God--and many miscellaneous creatures, including a donkey. As
Zarathustra returns to his cave he hears the sound of prayer and smells
the odour of incense; on entering he finds the _Uebermenschen_ on
their knees intoning an extraordinary litany to the donkey, who has
“created us all in his own image.”
In his opposition to the Christian faith and the Christian God,
Nietzsche by no means stands alone, however independent he may have
been in the method and standpoint of his attack. But in his opposition
to Christian morality he was more radically original. There is a very
general tendency among those who reject Christian theology to shore up
the superstructure of Christian morality which rests on that theology.
George Eliot, in her writings at all events, has been an eloquent and
distinguished advocate of this process; Mr. Myers, in an oft-quoted
passage, has described with considerable melodramatic vigour the “sibyl
in the gloom” of the Trinity Fellows’ Garden at Cambridge, who withdrew
God and Immortality from his grasp, but, to his consternation, told
him to go on obeying Duty. What George Eliot proposed was one of those
compromises so dear to our British minds. Nietzsche would none of it.
Hence his contemptuous treatment of George Eliot, of J. S. Mill, of
Herbert Spencer, and so many more of our favourite intellectual heroes
who have striven to preserve Christian morality while denying Christian
theology. Nietzsche regarded our current moral ideals, whether
formulated by bishops or by anarchists, as alike founded on a Christian
basis, and when that foundation is sapped they cannot stand.
The motive of modern morality is pity, its principle is altruistic, its
motto is “Love your neighbour as yourself,” its ideal self-abnegation,
its end the greatest good of the greatest number. All these things
were abhorrent to Nietzsche, or so far as he accepted them, it was in
forms which gave them new values. Modern morality, he said, is founded
on an extravagant dread of pain, in ourselves primarily, secondarily
in others. Sympathy is fellow-suffering; to love one’s neighbour as
oneself is to dread his pain as we dread our own pain. The religion of
love is built upon the fear of pain. “On n’est bon que par la pitié;”
the acceptance of that doctrine Nietzsche considers the chief outcome
of Christianity, although, he thinks, not essential to Christianity,
which rested on the egoistic basis of personal salvation: “One thing is
needful.” But it remains the most important by-product of Christianity,
and has ever been gaining strength. Spinoza and Kant stood firmly
outside the stream, but the French freethinkers, from Voltaire onwards,
were not to be outdone in this direction by Christians, while Comte
with his “Vivre pour autrui” even out-Christianised Christianity, and
Schopenhauer in Germany, J. S. Mill in England, carried on the same
doctrine. “The great question of life,” said Benjamin Constant in
_Adolphe_--and it is a saying that our finest emotions are quick
to echo--“is the pain that we cause.”
Both the sympathetic man and the unsympathetic man, Nietzsche argues,
are egoists. But the unsympathetic man he held to be a more admirable
kind of egoist. It is best to win the strength that comes of experience
and suffering, and to allow others also to play their own cards and
win the same strength, shedding our tears in private, and abhorring
soft-heartedness as the foe of all manhood and courage. To call the
unsympathetic man “wicked,” and the sympathetic man “good,” seemed
to Nietzsche a fashion in morals, a fashion which will have its
day. He believed he was the first to point out the danger of the
prevailing fashion as a sort of moral impressionism, the outcome of
the hyperæsthesia peculiar to periods of decadence. Not indeed that
Christianity is, or could be, carried out among us to its fullest
extent: “That would be a serious matter. If we were ever to become
the object to others of the same stupidities and importunities which
they expend on themselves, we should flee wildly as soon as we saw
our ‘neighbour’ approach, and curse sympathy as heartily as we now
curse egoism.” Our deepest and most personal griefs, Nietzsche remarks
elsewhere, remain unrevealed and incomprehensible to nearly all other
persons, even to the “neighbour” who eats out of the same dish with us.
And even though my grief should become visible, the dear sympathetic
neighbour can know nothing of its complexity and results, of the
organic economy of my soul. That my grief may be bound up with my
happiness troubles him little. The devotee of the “religion of pity”
will heal my sorrows without a moment’s delay; he knows not that the
path to my Heaven must lie through my own Hell, that happiness and
unhappiness are twin sisters who grow up together, or remain stunted
together.
“Morality is the mob-instinct working in the individual.” It rests,
Nietzsche asserts, on two thoughts: “the community is worth more than
the individual,” and “a permanent advantage is better than a temporary
advantage;” whence it follows that all the advantages of the community
are preferable to those of the individual. Morality thus becomes a
string of negative injunctions, a series of “Thou shalt nots,” with
scarcely a positive command amongst them; witness the well-known table
of Jewish commandments. Now Nietzsche could not endure mere negative
virtues. He resented the subtle change which has taken place in the
very meaning of the word “virtue,” and which has perverted it from an
expression of positive masculine qualities into one of merely negative
feminine qualities. In his earliest essay he referred to “active sin”
as the Promethean virtue which distinguishes the Aryans. The only
moral codes that commended themselves to him were those that contained
positive commands alone: “Do this! Do it with all your heart, and all
your strength, and all your dreams!--and all other things shall be
taken away from you!” For if we are truly devoted to the things that
are good to do we need trouble ourselves little about the things that
are good to leave undone.
Nietzsche compared himself to a mole boring down into the ground
and undermining what philosophers have for a couple of thousand
years considered the very surest ground to build on--the trust in
morals. One of his favourite methods of attack is by the analysis
of the “conscience.” He points out that whatever we were regularly
required to do in youth by those we honoured and feared created our
“good conscience.” The dictates of conscience, however urgent, thus
have no true validity as regards the person who experiences them.
“But,” some one protests, “must we not trust our feelings?” “Yes,”
replies Nietzsche, “trust your feelings, but still remember that
the inspiration which springs from feelings is the grandchild of an
opinion, often a false one, and in any case not your own. To trust
one’s feelings--that means to yield more obedience to one’s grandfather
and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods within _our
own_ breasts: our own reason and our own experience.” Faith in
authority is thus the source of conscience; it is not the voice of God
in the human heart but the voice of man. The sphere of the moral is
the sphere of tradition, and a man is moral because he is dependent on
a tradition and not on himself. Originally everything was within the
sphere of morals, and it was only possible to escape from that sphere
by becoming a law-giver, medicine-man, demigod--that is to say by
making morals. To be customary is to be moral,--I still closely follow
Nietzsche’s thought and expression,--to be individual is to be wicked.
Every kind of originality involves a bad conscience. Nietzsche insists
with fine eloquence, again and again, that every good gift that has
been given to man put a bad conscience into the heart of the giver.
Every good thing was once new, unaccustomed, _immoral_, and gnawed
at the vitals of the finder like a worm. Primitive men lived in hordes,
and must obey the horde-voice within them. Every new doctrine is
wicked. Science has always come into the world with a bad conscience,
with the emotions of a criminal, at least of a smuggler. No man can be
disobedient to custom and not be immoral, and feel that he is immoral.
The artist, the actor, the merchant, the freethinker, the discoverer,
were once all criminals, and were persecuted, crushed, rendered morbid,
as all persons must be when their virtues are not the virtues idealised
by the community. The whole phenomena of morals are animal-like, and
have their origin in the search for prey and the avoidance of pursuit.
Progress is thus a gradual emancipation from morals. We have to
recognise the services of the men who fight in this struggle against
morals, and who are crushed into the ranks of criminals. Not that we
need pity them. “It is a new _justice_ that is called for, a new
_mot d’ordre_. We need new philosophers. The moral world also is
round. The moral world also has its antipodes, and the antipodes also
have their right to exist. A new world remains to be discovered--and
more than one! Hoist sail, O philosophers!”
“Men must become both better _and wickeder_.” So spake
Zarathustra; or, as he elsewhere has it, “It is with man as with a
tree, the higher he would climb into the brightness above, the more
vigorously his roots must strive earthwards, downwards, into the
darkness and the depths--into the wicked.” Wickedness is just as
indispensable as goodness. It is the ploughshare of wickedness which
turns up and fertilises the exhausted fields of goodness. We must
no longer be afraid to be wicked; we must no longer be afraid to be
hard. “Only the noblest things are very hard. This new command, O my
brothers, I lay upon you--become hard.”
In renewing our moral ideas we need also to renew our whole conception
of the function and value of morals. Nietzsche advises moralists to
change their tactics: “Deny moral values, deprive them of the applause
of the crowd, create obstacles to their free circulation; let
them be the shame-faced secrets of a few solitary souls; _forbid
morality_! In so doing you may perhaps accredit these things among
the only men whom one need have on one’s side, I mean heroic men.
Let it be said of morality to-day as Meister Eckard said: ‘I pray
God that he may rid me of God!’” We have altogether over-estimated
the importance of morality. Christianity knew better when it placed
“grace” above morals, and so also did Buddhism. And if we turn to
literature, Nietzsche maintains, it is a vast mistake to suppose that,
for instance, great tragedies have, or were intended to have, any
moral effect. Look at _Macbeth_, at _Tristan und Isolde_,
at _Œdipus_. In all these cases it would have been easy to make
guilt the pivot of the drama. But the great poet is in love with
passion. “He calls to us: It is the charm of charms; this exciting,
changing, dangerous, gloomy, yet often sun-filled existence! It is an
_adventure_ to live--take this side or that, it will always be the
same!’ So he speaks to us out of a restless and vigorous time, half
drunken and dazed with excess of blood and energy, out of a wickeder
time than ours is; and we are obliged to set to rights the aim of a
Shakespeare and make it righteous, that is to say, to misunderstand it.”
We have to recognise a diversity of moral ideals. Nothing is more
profoundly dangerous than, with Kant, to create impersonal categorical
imperatives after the Chinese fashion, to generalise “virtue,” “duty,”
and “goodness,” and sacrifice them to the Moloch of abstraction.
“Every man must find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative;”
it must be founded on inner necessity, on deep personal choice. Only
the simpleton says: “Men ought to be like this or like that.” The real
world presents to us a dazzling wealth of types, a prodigious play
of forms and metamorphoses. Yet up comes a poor devil of a moralist,
and says to us: “No! men ought to be something quite different!” and
straightway he paints a picture of himself on the wall, and exclaims:
“Ecce homo!” But one thing is needful, that a man should attain the
fullest satisfaction. Every man must be his own moralist.
These views might be regarded as “lax,” as predisposing to easy
self-indulgence. Nietzsche would have smiled at such a notion. Not
yielding, but mastering, was the key to his personal morality. “Every
day is badly spent,” he said, “in which a man has not once denied
himself; this gymnastic is inevitable if a man will retain the joy
of being his own master.” The four cardinal virtues, as Nietzsche
understood morals, are sincerity, courage, generosity, and courtesy.
“Do what you will,” said Zarathustra, “but first be one of those who
_are able to will_. Love your neighbour as yourself--but first
be one of those who _are able to love themselves_.” And again
Zarathustra spoke: “He who belongs to me must be strong of bone and
light of foot, eager for fight and for feast, no sulker, no John o’
Dreams, as ready for the hardest task as for a feast, sound and hale.
The best things belong to me and mine, and if men give us nothing, then
we take them: the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts,
the fairest women!” There was no desire here to suppress effort and
pain. That Nietzsche regarded as a mark of modern Christian morals.
It is pain, more pain and deeper, that we need. The discipline of
suffering alone creates man’s pre-eminence. “Man unites in himself the
creature and the creator: there is in him the stuff of things, the
fragmentary and the superfluous, clay, mud, madness, chaos; but there
is also in him the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer,
the divine blessedness of the spectator on the seventh day.” Do you
pity, he asks, what must be fashioned, broken, forged, refined as by
fire? But our pity is spent on one thing alone, the most effeminate of
all weaknesses--pity. This was the source of Nietzsche’s admiration for
war, and indifference to its horror; he regarded it as the symbol of
that spiritual warfare and bloodshed in which to him all human progress
consisted. He might, had he pleased, have said with the Jew and the
Christian, that without shedding of blood there shall be no remission
of sins. But with a difference, for as he looked at the matter, every
man must be his own saviour, and it is his own blood that must be shed;
there is no salvation by proxy. That was expressed in his favourite
motto: _Virescit volnere virtus._
Nietzsche’s ideal man is the man of Epictetus, as he describes him in
_Morgenröthe_, the laconic, brave, self-contained man, not lusting
after expression like the modern idealist. The man whom Epictetus
loved hated fanaticism, he hated notoriety, he knew how to smile. And
the best was, added Nietzsche, that he had no fear of God before his
eyes; he believed firmly in reason, and relied, not on divine grace,
but on himself. Of all Shakespeare’s plays _Julius Cæsar_ seemed
to Nietzsche the greatest, because it glorifies Brutus; the finest
thing that can be said in Shakespeare’s honour, Nietzsche thought,
was that--aided perhaps by some secret and intimate experience--he
believed in Brutus and the virtues that Brutus personified. In course
of time, however, while not losing his sympathy with Stoicism, it
was Epicureanism, the heroic aspects of Epicureanism, which chiefly
appealed to Nietzsche. He regarded Epicurus as one of the world’s
greatest men, the discoverer of the heroically idyllic method of living
a philosophy; for one to whom happiness could never be more than an
unending self-discipline, and whose ideal of life had ever been that
of a spiritual nomad, the methods of Epicurus seemed to yield the
finest secrets of good living. Socrates, with his joy in life and in
himself, was also an object of Nietzsche’s admiration. Among later
thinkers, Helvetius appealed to him strongly. Goethe and Napoleon were
naturally among his favourite heroes, as were Alcibiades and Cæsar.
The latest great age of heroes was to him the Italian Renaissance.
Then came Luther, opposing the rights of the peasants, yet himself
initiating a peasants’ revolt of the intellect, and preparing the way
for that shallow plebeianism of the spirit which has marked the last
two centuries.
Latterly, in tracing the genealogy of modern morals, Nietzsche’s
opinions hardened into a formula. He recognised three stages of moral
evolution: first, the _pre-moral_ period of primitive times,
when the beast of prey was the model of conduct, and the worth of an
action was judged by its results. Then came the _moral_ period,
when the worth of an action was judged not by its results, but by
its origin; this period has been the triumph of what Nietzsche calls
slave-morality, the morality of the mob; the goodness and badness of
actions is determined by atavism, at best by survivals; every man is
occupied in laying down laws for his neighbour instead of for himself,
and all are tamed and chastised into weakness in order that they may
be able to obey these prescriptions. Nietzsche ingeniously connected
his slave-morality with the accepted fact that for many centuries the
large, fair-haired aristocratic race has been dying out in Europe,
and the older down-trodden race--short, dark, and broad-headed--has
been slowly gaining predominance. But now we stand at the threshold
of the _extra-moral_ period. Slave-morality, Nietzsche asserted,
is about to give way to master-morality; the lion will take the place
of the camel. The instincts of life, refusing to allow that anything
is forbidden, will again assert themselves, sweeping away the feeble
negative democratic morality of our time. The day has now come for the
man who is able to rule himself, and who will be tolerant to others
not out of his weakness, but out of his strength; to him nothing is
forbidden, for he has passed beyond goodness and beyond wickedness.
III.
So far I have attempted to follow with little or no comment what seems
to me the main current of Nietzsche’s thought. It may be admitted
that there is some question as to which is the main current. For my
own part I have no hesitation in asserting that it is the current
which expands to its fullest extent between 1876 and 1883 in what I
term Nietzsche’s second or middle period; up to then he had not gained
complete individuality; afterwards began the period of uncontrolled
aberrations. Thus I am inclined to pass lightly over the third period,
during which the conception of “master-morality” attained its chief and
most rigid emphasis, although I gather that to Nietzsche’s disciples as
to his foes this conception seems of primary importance. This idea of
“master-morality” is in fact a solid fossilised chunk, easy to handle
for friendly or unfriendly hands. The earlier and more living work--the
work of the man who truly said that it is with thinkers as with snakes:
those that cannot shed their skins die--is less obviously tangible. So
the “master-morality” it is that your true Nietzschian is most likely
to close his fist over. It would be unkind to say more, for Nietzsche
himself has been careful to scatter through his works, on the subject
of disciples and followers generally, very scathing remarks which must
be sufficiently painful to any faithful Nietzschian.
We are helped in understanding Nietzsche’s philosophic significance if
we understand his precise ideal. The psychological analysis of every
great thinker’s work seems to reveal some underlying fundamental image
or thought--often enough simple and homely in character--which he has
carried with him into the most abstract regions. Thus Fraser has found
good reason to suppose that Hegel’s main ideas were suggested by the
then recent discovery of galvanism. In Nietzsche’s case this key is
to be found in the persistent image of an attitude. As a child, his
sister tells us, he had been greatly impressed by a rope-dancer who had
performed his feats over the market-place at Naumburg, and throughout
his work, as soon as he had attained to real self-expression, we may
trace the image of the dancer. “I do not know,” he somewhere says,
“what the mind of a philosopher need desire more than to be a good
dancer. For dancing is his ideal, his art also, indeed his only piety,
his ‘divine worship.’” In all Nietzsche’s best work we are conscious of
this ideal of the dancer, strong, supple, vigorous, yet harmonious and
well-balanced. It is the dance of the athlete and the acrobat rather
than the make-believe of the ball-room, and behind the easy equipoise
of such dancing lie patient training and effort. The chief character
of good dancing is its union of the maximum of energetic movement with
the maximum of well-balanced grace. The whole muscular system is alive
to restrain any excess, so that however wild and free the movement may
seem it is always measured; excess would mean ignominious collapse.
When in his later years Nietzsche began, as he said, to “philosophise
with the hammer,” and to lay about him savagely at every hollow “idol”
within reach, he departed from his better ideal of dancing, and his
thinking became intemperate, reckless, desperate.
Nietzsche had no system, probably because the idea that dominated
his thought was an image, and not a formula, the usual obsession of
philosophers, such as may be clapped on the universe at any desired
point. He remarks in one place that a philosopher believes the worth
of his philosophy to lie in the structure, but that what we ultimately
value are the finely carven and separate stones with which he builded,
and he was clearly anxious to supply the elaborated stones direct.
In time he came to call himself a realist, using the term, in no
philosophic sense, to indicate his reverence for the real and essential
facts of life, the things that conduce to fine living. He desired to
detach the “bad conscience” from the things that are merely wicked
traditionally, and to attach it to the things that are anti-natural,
anti-instinctive, anti-sensuous. He sought to inculcate veneration
for the deep-lying sources of life, to take us down to the bed-rock
of life, the rock whence we are hewn. He held that man, as a reality,
with all his courage and cunning, is himself worthy of honour, but
that man’s ideals are absurd and morbid, the mere dregs in the drained
cup of life; or, as he eventually said--and it is a saying which will
doubtless seal his fate in the minds of many estimable persons--man’s
ideals are his only _partie honteuse_, of which we may avoid any
close examination. Nietzsche’s “realism” was thus simply a vigorous
hatred of all dreaming that tends to depreciate the value of life, and
a vivid sense that man himself is the _ens realissimum_.
A noteworthy point in Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy is his
increasingly clear conception of its fundamentally psychological
character. I mean to say that Nietzsche knows that a man’s philosophy,
to be real, must be the inevitable outcome of his own psychic
constitution. It is a point that philosophers have never seen.
Perhaps Nietzsche was the first, however hesitatingly, to realise
it. It is only in the recognition of this fact that the eirenicon of
philosophies--and one might add, of religions--can ever be found.
The philosopher of old said: “This is _my_ conception of the
universe;” it was well. But he was apt to add: “It is _the_
conception of the universe,” and so put himself hopelessly in the
wrong. It is as undignified to think another man’s philosophy as to
wear another man’s cast-off clothes. Only the poor in spirit or in
purse can find any satisfaction in doing either. A philosophy or
religion can only fit the man for whom it was made. “There has only
been one Christian,” as Nietzsche put it, “and he died on the cross.”
But why waste energy in trying to manufacture a second Christian?
We may be very sure that we can never find another Christian whom
Christianity would fit so admirably as it once fitted Christ. Why
not rest content with Christ? Let Brown be a Brownite and Robinson
a Robinsonian. It is not good that they should exchange their
philosophies, or that either should insist on thrusting his threadbare
misfits on Jones, who prefers to be metaphysically naked. When men
have generally begun to realise this the world will be a richer and
an honester world, and a pleasanter one as well. That Nietzsche had
vaguely begun to realise it seems to me his chief claim to distinction
in the purely philosophic field.
To recognise the free and direct but disconnected nature of Nietzsche’s
many-sided vision of the world is to lessen the force of his own
antagonisms as well as of the antagonisms he has excited. Much of
Nietzsche’s work, especially in the third period, is the utterance of
profound half-truths, keenly and personally felt, but still half-truths
of which he has himself elsewhere supplied the complements. The reason
is that during that period he was not so much expressing himself as
appealing passionately against himself to those failing forces whose
tonic influence he thirsted after. The hardness, the keen sword, the
reckless energy he idealised were the things that had slipped utterly
away and left him defenceless to the world. He grew to worship cruel
strength as the consumptive Keats, the sickly Thoreau, loved beauty and
health, with “the desire of the moth for the star.” Such an attitude
has its rightness and power, so long as we understand it, though it
comes short of the serenity of the greatest spirits who seek, like
Goethe, to live at each moment in the whole. The master-morality of
Nietzsche’s later days, on which friends and foes have alike insisted,
is a case in point. This appears to have been hailed, or resented, as
a death-blow struck at the modern democratic _régime_. To take
a broad view of Nietzsche’s philosophic attitude is to realise that
both views are alike out of place. On this matter, as on many others,
Nietzsche moved in a line which led him to face an opposite direction
in his decay from that which he faced in his immaturity. He began by
regarding democracy as the standard of righteousness, and ended by
asserting that the world only exists for the production of a few great
men. It would be foolish to regard either of the termini as the last
outpost of wisdom. But in the passage between these two points many
excellent things are said by the way. Nietzsche was never enamoured of
socialism or democracy for its own sake; reasonably enough, he will
not even admit that we have yet attained democracy; though the horses,
indeed, are new, as yet “the roads are the same old roads, the wheels
the same old wheels.” But he points out that the value of democracy
lies in its guarantee of individual freedom: Cyclopean walls are being
built, with much toil and dust, but the walls will be a rampart against
any invasion of barbarians or any new slavery, against the despotism of
capital and the despotism of party. The workers may regard the walls as
an end in themselves; we are free to value them for the fine flowers of
culture which will grow in the gardens they inclose. To me, at least,
this attitude of Nietzsche’s maturity seems the ample justification of
democracy.
Nietzsche was not, however, greatly interested in questions of
government; he was far more deeply interested in questions of morals.
In his treatment of morals--no doubt chiefly in the last period--there
is a certain element of paradox. It must again be pointed out that this
is to be explained by the organic demands of Nietzsche’s own nature.
In attacking the excessive tendency to sympathy which he seemed to
see around him he was hygienically defending himself from his own
excessive sympathy. His sister quotes with a smile the declaration
that his Paradise lay beneath the shadow of his sword; we scarcely
need her assurance of his tender-hearted sensitiveness. He could
attack relentlessly, but he never attacked a person save as the symbol
of what he regarded as a false principle held in undeserved honour.
When he realised that the subject of such attack was really a living
person he was full of remorse. He attacked Strauss because Strauss
was the successful representative of a narrow ideal of culture; a few
months later Strauss died, having, it now appears, borne the onset
philosophically enough, and Nietzsche was full of grief lest he had
embittered the dying man’s last hours. It was because he had himself
suffered from the excesses of his own sympathy that he was able so
keenly to analyse the secrets of sympathy. He spoke as the Spanish poet
says that every poet--and indeed every seer--must always speak, _por
la boca de su herida_, through the mouth of his wound. That is why
his voice is often so poignantly intimate; it is also why we sometimes
find this falsetto note of paradox. In his last period, Nietzsche grows
altogether impatient of morals, calls himself an immoralist, fervently
exhorts us to become wickeder. But if any young disciple came to the
teacher asking, “What must I do to become wickeder?” it does not appear
that Nietzsche bade him to steal, bear false witness, commit adultery,
or do any other of the familiar and commonly-accepted wickednesses.
Nietzsche preached wickedness with the same solemn exaltation that
Carducci lauded Satan. What he desired was far indeed from any
rehabilitation of easy vice; it was the justification of neglected and
unsanctified virtues.
At the same time, and while Nietzsche’s immoralist is just as austere
a person as the mere moralists who have haunted the world for many
thousand years, it is clear that Nietzsche wished strictly to limit the
sphere of morals. He never fails to point out how large a region of
life and art lies legitimately outside the moral jurisdiction. In an
age in which many moralists desire to force morals into every part of
life and art--and even assume a certain air of virtue in so doing--the
“immoralist” who lawfully vindicates any region for free cultivation is
engaged in a proper and wholesome task.
No doubt, however, there will be some to question the value of such a
task. Nietzsche the immoralist can scarcely be welcome in every camp,
although he remains always a force to be reckoned with. The same may
be said of Nietzsche the freethinker. He was, perhaps, the typical
freethinker of the age that comes after Renan. Nietzsche had nothing
of Renan’s genial scepticism and smiling disillusionment; he was
less tender to human weakness, for all his long Christian ancestry
less Christian, than the Breton seminarist remained to the last. He
seems to have shaken himself altogether free of Christianity--so
free, that except in his last period he even speaks of it without
bitterness--though by no means wholly untouched by that nostalgia
of the cloister which now and then pursues even those of us who are
farthest from any faith in Christian dogma. He never sought, as
among ourselves Pater sought, the germ of Christianity in things
pagan, the undying essence of paganism in things Christian. Heathen
as he was, I do not think even Heine’s visions of the gods in exile
could have touched him; he never felt the charm of fading and faded
things. It is remarkable. It is scarcely less remarkable that, far
as he was from Christianity, he was equally far from what we usually
call “paganism,” the pasteboard paganism of easy self-indulgence and
cheerful irresponsibility. It was not so that he understood Hellenism.
Matthew Arnold once remarked that the Greeks were never sick or sad.
Nietzsche knew better. The greater part of Greek literature bears
witness that the Hellenes were for ever wrestling with the problems of
pain. And none who came after have more poignantly uttered the pangs of
human affairs, or more sweetly the consolations of those pangs, than
the great disciples of the Greeks who created the Roman world. The
classic world of nymphs and fauns is an invention of the moderns. The
real classic world, like the modern world, was a world of suffering.
The difference lay in the method of facing that suffering. Nietzsche
chose the classic method from no desire to sport with Amaryllis in
the shade, but because he had known forms of torture for which the
mild complacencies of modern faith seemed to offer no relief. If we
must regard Nietzsche as a pagan, it is as the Pascal of paganism.
The freethinker, it is true, was more cheerful and hopeful than the
believer, but there is the same tragic sincerity, the same restless
self-torment, the same sense of the abyss.[4]
There still remains Nietzsche, the apostle of culture, the philosopher
engaged in the criticism of life. From first to last, wherever you
open his books, you light on sayings that cut to the core of the
questions that every modern thinking man must face. I take, almost at
random, a few passages from a single book: of convictions he writes
that “a man possesses opinions as he possesses fish, in so far as he
owns a fishing-net; a man must go fishing and be lucky, then he has
his own fish, his own opinions; I speak of living opinions, living
fish. Some men are content to possess fossils in their cabinets--and
convictions in their heads.” Of the problem of the relation of science
to culture he says well: “The best and wholesomest thing in science, as
in mountains, is the air that blows there. It is because of that air
that we spiritual weaklings avoid and defame science;” and he points
out that the work of science--with its need for sincerity, infinite
patience, complete self-abnegation--calls for men of nobler make than
poetry needs. When we have learnt to trust science and to learn from
it, then it will be possible so to tell natural history that “every
one who hears it is inspired to health and gladness as the heir and
continuer of humanity.” This is how he rebukes those foolish persons
who grow impatient with critics: “Remember that critics are insects
who only sting to live and not to hurt: they want our blood and not
our pain.” And he utters this wise saying, himself forgetting it in
later years: “Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in
bitterness.” Nietzsche desires to prove nothing, and is reckless of
consistency. He looks at every question that comes before him with the
same simple, intent, penetrative gaze, and whether the aspects that he
reveals are new or old, he seldom fails to bring us a fresh stimulus.
Culture, as he understood it, consists for the modern man in the task
of choosing the simple and indispensable things from the chaos of crude
material which to-day overwhelms us. The man who will live at the level
of the culture of his time is like the juggler who must keep a number
of plates spinning in the air; his life must be a constant training in
suppleness and skill so that he may be a good athlete. But he is also
called on to exert his skill in the selection and limitation of his
task. Nietzsche is greatly occupied with the simplification of culture.
Our suppleness and skill must be exercised alone on the things that
are vital, essential, primitive; the rest may be thrown aside. He is
for ever challenging the multifarious materials for culture, testing
them with eye and hand; we cannot prove them too severely, he seems
to say, nor cast aside too contemptuously the things that a real man
has no need of for fine living. What must I do to be saved? What do I
need for the best and fullest life?--that is the everlasting question
that the teacher of life is called upon to answer. And we cannot be too
grateful to Nietzsche for the stern penetration--the more acute for his
ever-present sense of the limits of energy--with which he points from
amid the mass to the things which most surely belong to our eternal
peace.
Nietzsche’s style has often been praised. The style was certainly the
man. There can be little doubt, moreover, that there is scarcely any
other German style to compare with it, though such eminence means
far less in a country where style has rarely been cultivated than it
would mean in France or even England. Sallust awoke his sense for
style, and may account for some characteristics of his style. He also
enthusiastically admired Horace as the writer who had produced the
maximum of energy with the minimum of material. A concentrated Roman
style, significant and weighty at every point, _ære perennius_,
was always his ideal. Certainly the philologist’s aptitudes helped
here to teach him the value and force of words, as jewels for the
goldsmith to work with, and not as mere worn-out counters to slip
through the fingers. One may call it a muscular style, a style wrought
with the skilful strength of hand and arm. It scarcely appeals to
the ear. It lacks the restful simplicity of the greatest masters, the
plangent melody, the seemingly unconscious magic quivering along our
finest-fibred nerves. Such effects we seem to hear now and again in
Schopenhauer, but rarely or never from any other German. This style
is titanic rather than divine, but the titanic virtues it certainly
possesses in fullest measure: robust and well-tempered vigour,
concentration, wonderful plastic force in moulding expression. It
becomes over-emphatic at last. When Nietzsche threw aside the dancer’s
ideal in order to “philosophise with the hammer,” the result on his
style was as disastrous as on his thought; both alike took on the
violent and graceless character of the same implement. He speaks indeed
of the virtue of hitting a nail on the head, but it is a less skilled
form of virtue than good dancing.
Whether he was dancing or hammering, however, Nietzsche certainly
converted the whole of himself into his work, as in his view every
philosopher is bound to do, “for just that art of transformation
_is_ philosophy.” That he was entirely successful in being a “real
man” one may doubt. His excessive sensitiveness to the commonplace in
life, and his deficiency in the sexual instinct--however highly he
may have rated the importance of sex in life--largely cut him off
from true fellowship with the men who are most “real” to us. He was
less tolerant and less humane than his master Goethe; his incisive
insight, and, in many respects, better intellectual equipment, are
more than compensated by this lack of breadth. But, as his friend the
historian Burckhardt has said, he worked mightily for the increase
of independence in the world. Every man, indeed, works with the
limitations of his qualities, just as we all struggle beneath the
weight of the superincumbent atmosphere; our defects are even a part
of our qualities, and it would be foolish to quarrel with them.
Nietzsche succeeded in being himself, and it was a finely rare success.
Whether he was a “real man” matters less. With passionate sincerity
he expressed his real self and his best self, abhorring, on the one
hand, what with Voltaire and Verlaine he called “literature,” and, on
the other, all that mere indigested material, the result of mental
dyspepsia, of which he regarded Carlyle as the supreme warning. A
man’s real self, as he repeated so often, consists of the things which
he has truly digested and assimilated; he must always “conquer” his
opinions; it is only such conquests which he has the right to report to
men as his own. His thoughts are born of his pain; he has imparted to
them of his own blood, his own pleasure and torment. Nietzsche himself
held that suffering and even disease are almost indispensable to the
philosopher; great pain is the final emancipator of the spirit, those
great slow pains that take their time, and burn us up like green wood.
“I doubt whether such pain betters us,” he remarks, “but I know that it
deepens us.” That is the stuff of Nietzsche’s Hellenism, as expressed
in the most lighthearted of his books. _Virescit volnere virtus._
It is that which makes him, when all is said, a great critic of life.
It is a consolation to many--I have seen it so stated in a respectable
review--that Nietzsche went mad. No doubt also it was once a
consolation to many that Socrates was poisoned, that Jesus was
crucified, that Bruno was burnt. But hemlock and the cross and the
stake proved sorry weapons against the might of ideas even in those
days, and there is no reason to suppose that a doctor’s certificate
will be more effectual in our own. Of old time we killed our great men
as soon as their visionary claims became inconvenient; now, in our
mercy, we leave the tragedy of genius to unroll itself to the bitter
close. The devils to whom the modern Faustus is committed have waxed
cunning with the ages. Nietzsche has met, in its most relentless form,
the fate of Pascal and Swift and Rousseau. That fact may carry what
weight it will in any final estimate of his place as a moral teacher:
it cannot touch his position as an aboriginal force. He remains in
the first rank of the distinguished and significant personalities our
century has produced.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: This statement (made at the end of 1895) has ceased to
be true, but it explains the genesis of this study, and I leave it
standing.]
[Footnote 2: The most convincing word-portrait of Nietzsche I have
met with (by M. Schuré) dates from the visit to Bayreuth:--“I was
struck both by the superiority of his intellect and the strangeness
of his face. A broad forehead, short hair brushed back, the prominent
cheek-bones of the Slav. The heavy moustache and the bold outline of
the face would have given him the aspect of a cavalry officer if it
had not been for his timid and haughty air. The musical voice and slow
speech indicated the artist’s organisation, while the circumspect
meditative carriage was that of a philosopher. Nothing more deceptive
than the apparent calm of his expression. The fixed eye revealed the
painful travail of thought. It was at once the eye of an acute observer
and a fanatical visionary. The double character of this gaze produced a
disquieted and disquieting impression, all the more so since it seemed
to be always fixed on a single point. In moments of effusion this gaze
was softened to a dream-like sweetness, but soon became hostile again.”
This picture is confirmed by Nietzsche’s sister, who also refers to his
“unusually large, beautiful, and brilliant eyes.”]
[Footnote 3: One may be allowed to regret that Nietzsche was not
equally discriminating in his judgment of our country. Had he not
been blinded by the spiritual plebeianism of the nineteenth century
in England, he might also have discerned in certain periods some of
the same ardent and heroic qualities which he recognised in sixteenth
century France, the more easily since at that time the same Renaissance
wave had effected a considerable degree of spiritual union between
France and England. In George Chapman, for instance, at his finest and
lucidest moments the typical ethical representative of our greatest
literary age, Nietzsche would have found a man after his own heart, not
only one who scarcely yielded to himself in generous admiration of the
great qualities of the French spirit but a man of “absolute and full
soul” who was almost a precursor of his own “immoralism,” a lover of
freedom, of stoic self-reliance, one who was ever seeking to enlarge
the discipline of a fine culture in the direction of moral freedom and
dignity.]
[Footnote 4: Pater’s description of the transition we may trace from
the easy prose of Pascal’s first book to the “perpetual _agonia_”
of his later work, applies with scarcely a change to the similar
transition in Nietzsche:--“Everywhere in the _Letters_ he had
seemed so great a master--a master of himself--never at a loss, taking
the conflict so lightly, with so light a heart: in the great Atlantean
travail of the _Thoughts_ his feet sometimes ‘are almost gone.’
In his soul’s agony theological abstractions seem to become personal
powers.... In truth, into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem, of the
tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not merely the personal
feelings, the temperament of an individual, but his malady also, a
physical malady.”]
CASANOVA.
THERE are few more delightful books in the world than Casanova’s
_Mémoires_.--That is a statement I have long vainly sought to see
in print. It is true, one learns casually that various eminent literary
personages have cherished a high regard for this autobiography, have
even considered it the ideal autobiography, that Wendell Holmes was
once heard defending Casanova, that Thackeray found him good enough to
steal from. But these eminent personages--and how many more we shall
never know--locked up the secret of their admiration for this book in
some remote casket of their breasts; they never confided it to the
cynical world. Every properly constituted “man of letters” has always
recognised that any public allusion to Casanova should begin and end
with lofty moral reprobation of his unspeakable turpitude.
No doubt whatever--and this apart from the question as to
whether his autobiography should be counted as moral or immoral
literature--Casanova delivered himself bound into the hands of the
moralists. He recognised this; his autobiography, as he himself truly
said, was “a confession, if ever there was one.” But he wrote at the
end of a long and full life, in the friendly seclusion of a lonely
Bohemian castle, when all things had become indifferent to him save
the vivid memories of the past. It mattered little to him that the
whirlwind of 1789 had just swept away the eighteenth century together
with the moral maxims that passed current in that century. We have to
accept these facts at the outset when we approach Casanova. And if a
dweller in the highly respectable nineteenth century may be forgiven a
first exclamation of horror at Casanova’s wickedness, he has wofully
failed in critical insight if he allows that exclamation to be his last
word concerning these _Mémoires_.
There are at least three points of view from which Casanova’s
_Mémoires_ are of deep and permanent interest. In the first place
they constitute an important psychological document as the full and
veracious presentation of a certain human type in its most complete
development. In the second place, as a mere story of adventure and
without reference to their veracity, the _Mémoiries_ have never
been surpassed, and only equalled by books written on a much smaller
scale. In the third place, we here possess an unrivalled picture of
the eighteenth century in its most characteristic aspects throughout
Europe.
I.
Casanova lived in an age which seems to have been favourable to the
spontaneous revelation of human nature in literature. It was not only
the age in which the novel reached full development; it was the age
of diaries and autobiographies. Pepys, indeed, though he died in the
eighteenth century, had written his diary long before; but during
Casanova’s lifetime Boswell was writing that biography which is so
wonderful largely because it is so nearly an autobiography. Casanova’s
communicative countryman, Gozzi, was also his contemporary. Rousseau’s
_Confessions_ only preceded Casanova’s _Mémoires_ by a few
years, and a little later Restif de la Bretonne wrote _Monsieur
Nicolas_, and Madame Roland her _Mémoires Particulières_. All
these autobiographies are very unlike Casanova’s. They mostly seem to
present the shady sides of otherwise eminent and respectable lives.
The highly-placed government official of versatile intellectual tastes
exhibits himself as a monster of petty weaknesses; the eloquent apostle
of the return to Nature uncovers the corroding morbidities we should
else never suspect; the philanthropic pioneer in social reform exposes
himself in a state of almost maniacal eroticism; the austere heroine
who was nourished on Plutarch confesses that she is the victim of
unhappy passion. We are conscious of no such discords in Casanova’s
autobiography. Partly it may be because we have no other picture of
Casanova before our eyes. Moreover, he had no conventional ideals to
fall short of; he was an adventurer from the first. “I am proud because
I am nothing,” he used to say. He could not boast of his birth; he
never held high position; for the greatest part of his active career he
was an exile; at every moment of his life he was forced to rely on his
own real and personal qualities. But the chief reason why we feel no
disturbing discord in Casanova’s _Mémoires_ lies in the admirable
skill with which he has therein exploited his unquestionable sincerity.
He is a consummate master in the dignified narration of undignified
experiences. Fortified, it is true, by a confessed and excessive
_amour propre_, he never loses his fine sense of equilibrium, his
power of presenting his own personality broadly and harmoniously. He
has done a few dubious things in his time, he seems to say, and now and
again found himself in positions that were ridiculous enough; but as he
looks back he feels that the like may have happened to any of us. He
views these things with complete human tolerance as a necessary part
of the whole picture, which it would be idle to slur over or apologise
for. He records them simply, not without a sense of humour, but with no
undue sense of shame. In his heart, perhaps, he is confident that he
has given the world one of its greatest books, and that posterity will
require of him no such rhetorical justification as Rousseau placed at
the head of his _Confessions_.
In the preface to the _Mémoires_, Casanova is sufficiently frank.
He has not scrupled, he tells us, to defraud fools and rascals, “when
necessary,” and he has never regretted it. But such incidents have
been but episodes in his life. He is not a sensualist, he says, for he
has never neglected his duty--“when I had any”--for the allurements
of sense; yet the main business of his life has ever been in the
world of sense; “there is none of greater importance.” “I have always
loved women and have done my best to make them love me. I have also
delighted in good cheer, and I have passionately followed whatever has
excited my curiosity.” Now in old age he reviews the joys of his life.
He has learnt to be content with one meal a day, in spite of a sound
digestion, but he recalls the dishes that delighted him: Neapolitan
macaroni, Spanish olla podrida, Newfoundland cod, high-flavoured game,
old cheese (has he not collected material for a _Dictionnaire des
Fromages_?), and without any consciousness of abrupt transition
he passes on to speak of the fragrant sweetness of the women he had
loved. Then with a smile of pity he turns on those who call such tastes
depraved, the poor insensate fools who think the Almighty is only able
to enjoy our sorrow and abstinence, and bestows upon us for nought the
gift of self-respect, the love of praise, the desire to excel, energy,
strength, courage, and the power to kill ourselves when we will. And
with the strain of Stoicism which is ever present to give fibre to
his Epicureanism, he quotes the maxim which might well belong to both
philosophies: “Nemo læditur nisi a seipso.”
The fact that Casanova was on one side a Venetian must count for
something in any attempt to explain him. Not indeed that Venice ever
produced more than one Casanova; I would imply no such disrespect to
Venice--or to Casanova--but the racial soil was favourable to such a
personality. The Venetians are a branch of a more northern people who
long since settled by the southern sea to grow mellow in the sunshine.
It suited them well, for they expanded into one of the finest races
in Christendom, and certainly one of the least Christian races there,
a solid, well-tempered race, self-controlled and self-respecting. The
Venetian genius is the genius of sensuous enjoyment, of tolerant
humanity, of unashamed earthliness. Whatever was sane and stable in
Casanova, and his instinctive distaste for the morbid and perverse,
he owes to his Venetian maternal ancestry. If it is true that he was
not a mere sensualist, it was by no means because of his devotion to
duty--“when I had any,”--but because the genuine sensualist is only
alive on the passive side of his nature, and in Casanova’s nervous
system the development of the sensory fibres is compensated and held
in balance by the equal vigour of the motor fibres; what he is quick
to enjoy he is strong and alert to achieve. Thus he lived the full and
varied life that he created for himself at his own good pleasure out
of nothing, by the sole power of his own magnificent wits. And now the
self-sufficing Venetian sits down to survey his work and finds that
it is good. It has not always been found so since. A “self-made” man,
if ever there was one, Casanova is not revered by those who worship
self-help. The record of his life will easily outlive the largest
fortune ever made in any counting-house, but the life itself remains
what we call a “wasted” life. Thrift, prudence, modesty, scrupulous
integrity, strict attention to business--it is useless to come to
Casanova for any of these virtues. They were not even in his blood; he
was only half Venetian.
The Casanova family was originally Spanish. The first Casanova on
record was a certain Don Jacobo, of illegitimate birth, who in the
middle of the fifteenth century became secretary to King Alfonso. He
fell in love with a lady destined to the religious life, and the day
after she had pronounced her vows he carried her off from her convent
to Rome, where he finally obtained the forgiveness and benediction of
the Pope. The son of this union, Don Juan, killed an officer of the
King of Naples, fled from Rome, and sought fortune with Columbus, dying
on the voyage. Don Juan’s son, Marcantonio, secretary to a cardinal,
was noted in his day as an epigrammatic poet; but his satire was too
keen, and he also had to flee from Rome. His son became a colonel,
and, unlike his forefathers, died peacefully, in extreme old age, in
France. In this soldier’s grandson, Casanova’s father, the adventurous
impulsiveness of the family again came out; he ran away from home
at nineteen with a young actress, and himself became an actor;
subsequently he left the actress and then fell in love with a young
Venetian beauty of sixteen, Zanetta Farusi, a shoemaker’s daughter. But
a mere actor could find no favour in a respectable family, so the young
couple ran away and were married; the hero of these _Mémoires_,
born on the 2nd April, 1725, was their first-born. There is probably
no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy of this family history, but
if one desired to invent an ancestry for Casanova he could scarcely
better it.
His race helps to account for Casanova, but the real explanation of
the man can only lie in his own congenital organisation. That he was
a radically abnormal person is fairly clear. Not that he was morbid
either in body or mind. On the contrary, he was a man of fine presence,
of abounding health--always looking ten years younger than his age--of
the most robust appetites, a great eater, who delighted to see others,
especially women, eat heartily also, a man of indubitable sexual
vigour; however great the demands he made upon his physical energy
it seldom failed to respond, and his capacity for rest was equally
great; he could sleep nineteen hours at a stretch. His mental health
was not less sound. The most punctilious alienist, with this frank and
copious history before him, could not commit Casanova to an asylum.
Whatever offences against social codes he may have committed, Casanova
can scarcely be said to have sinned against natural laws. He was only
abnormal because so natural a person within the gates of civilisation
is necessarily abnormal and at war with his environment. Far from
being the victim of morbidities and perversities, Casanova presents
to us the natural man _in excelsis_. He was a man for whom the
external world existed, and who reacted to all the stimuli it presents
to the healthy normal organism. His intelligence was immensely keen
and alert, his resourcefulness, his sagacious audacity, his presence
of mind, were all of the first order. He was equally swift to feel,
to conceive, and to act. His mental organisation was thus singularly
harmonious, and hence his success in gratifying his eager and immense
appetite for the world, an appetite unsatiated and insatiable even
to the last, or he would have found no pleasure in writing these
_Mémoires_. Casanova has been described as a psychological type
of instability. That is to view him superficially. A man who adapts
himself so readily and so effectively to any change in his environment
or in his desires only exhibits the instability which marks the most
intensely vital organisms. The energy and ability which Casanova
displayed in gratifying his instincts would have sufficed to make a
reputation of the first importance in any department, as a popular
statesman, a great judge, a merchant prince, and enabled him to die
worn out by the monotonous and feverish toil of the senate, the court,
or the counting-house. Casanova chose to _live_. A crude and
barbarous choice it seems to us, with our hereditary instinct to spend
our lives in wasting the reasons for living. But it is certain that
Casanova never repented his choice. Assuredly we need not, for few
judges, statesmen, or merchants have ever left for the joy of humanity
any legacy of their toil equal to these _Mémoires_.
But such swift energy of vital action and reaction, such ardour of
deed in keeping pace with desire, are in themselves scarcely normal.
Casanova’s abnormality is suggested by the tendency to abnormality
which we find in his family. We have seen what men his ancestors were;
in reading the _Mémoires_ we gather incidentally that one of his
brothers had married, though impotent, and another brother is described
as a somewhat feeble-minded ne’er-do-well. All the physical and mental
potency of the family was intensely concentrated in Casanova. Yet he
himself in early childhood seems to have been little better than an
idiot either in body or mind. He could recall nothing that happened
before he was eight years of age. He was not expected to live; he
suffered from prolonged hæmorrhages from the nose, and the vision
of blood was his earliest memory. As a child he habitually kept his
mouth open, and his face was stupid. “Thickness of the blood,” said
the physicians of those days; it seems probable that he suffered from
growths in the nose which, as we now know, produce such physical and
mental inferiority as Casanova describes. The cure was spontaneous. He
was taken to Padua, and shortly afterwards began to develop wonderfully
both in stature and intelligence. In after years he had little cause to
complain either of health or intellect. It is notable, however, that
when, still a boy, he commenced his ecclesiastical training (against
his wishes, for he had chosen to be a doctor), he failed miserably as a
preacher, and broke down in the pulpit; thus the Church lost a strange
ornament. Moreover, with all his swift sensation and alert response,
there was in Casanova an anomalous dulness of moral sensibility.
The insults to Holy Religion which seem to have brought him to that
prison from which he effected his marvellous escape, were scarcely the
serious protests of a convinced heretic; his deliberate trickery of
Mme. d’Urfé was not only criminal but cruel. His sense of the bonds
of society was always somewhat veiled, and although the veil never
became thick, and might be called the natural result of an adventurer’s
life, one might also, perhaps, maintain that it was a certain degree
of what is sometimes called moral imbecility that made Casanova an
adventurer. But while we thus have to recognise that he was a man of
dulled moral sensibility, we must also recognise that he possessed
a vigorous moral consciousness of his own, or we misunderstand him
altogether. The point to be remembered is that the threshold of
his moral sensibility was not easily reached. There are some people
whose tactile sensibility is so obtuse that it requires a very wide
separation of the æsthesiometer to get the right response. It was so
with Casanova’s moral sensitiveness. But, once aroused, his conscience
responded energetically enough. It seems doubtful whether, from his
own point of view, he ever fell into grave sin, and therefore he is
happily free from remorse. No great credit is thus due to him; the same
psychological characteristic is familiar in all criminals. It is not
difficult to avoid plucking the apples of shame when so singularly few
grow on your tree.
Casanova’s moral sensibility and its limits come out, where a man’s
moral sensibility will come out, in his relations with women. Women
played a large part in Casanova’s life; he was nearly always in love.
We may use the word “love” here in no euphemistic sense, for although
Casanova’s passions grew and ripened with the rapidity born of long
experience in these matters, so fresh is the vitality of the man that
there is ever a virginal bloom on every new ardour. He was as far
removed from the cold-blooded libertine typified in Laclos’s Valmont,
unscrupulously using women as the instruments of his own lust, as from
Laura’s sonneteering lover. He had fully grasped what the latest
writer on the scientific psychology of sex calls the secondary law
of courting, namely, the development in the male of an imaginative
attentiveness to the psychical and bodily states of the female, in
place of an exclusive attentiveness to his own gratification. It is not
impossible that in these matters Casanova could have given a lesson to
many virtuous husbands of our own highly moral century. He never sank
to the level of the vulgar maxim that “all’s fair in love and war.”
He sought his pleasure in the pleasure, and not in the complaisance,
of the women he loved, and they seem to have gratefully and tenderly
recognised his skill in the art of love-making. Casanova loved many
women, but broke few hearts. The same women appear again and again
through his pages, and for the most part no lapse of years seems to
deaden the gladness with which he goes forth to meet them anew. That
he knew himself well enough never to take either wife or mistress must
be counted as a virtue, such as it was, in this incomparable lover of
so many women. A man of finer moral fibre could scarcely have loved so
many women; a man of coarser fibre could never have left so many women
happy.
This very lack of moral delicacy which shuts Casanova off from the
finest human development is an advantage to the autobiographer. It
insures his sincerity because he is unconscious of offence; it saves
us from any wearisome self-justification, because, for all his amused
self-criticism, he sees no real need for justification. In Rousseau’s
_Confessions_ we hear the passionate pleader against men at
the tribunal of God; here we are conscious neither of opponent nor
tribunal. Casanova is neither a pillar of society nor yet one of the
moral Samsons who delight to pull down the pillars of society; he has
taken the world as it is, and he has taken himself as he is, and he
has enjoyed them both hugely. So he is free to set forth the whole of
himself, his achievements, his audacities, his failures, his little
weaknesses and superstitions, his amours, his quarrels, his good
fortune and his bad fortune in the world that on the whole he has found
so interesting and happy a place to dwell in. And his book remains an
unending source of delightful study of the man of impulse and action
in all his moods. The self-reliant man, immensely apt for enjoyment,
who plants himself solidly with his single keen wit before the mighty
oyster of the world, has never revealed himself so clearly before.
What manner of man Casanova seemed to his contemporaries has only been
discovered of recent years; and while the picture which we obtain of
him has been furnished by his enemies, and was not meant to flatter, it
admirably supports the _Mémoires_. In 1755 a spy of the Venetian
Inquisition reported that Casanova united impiety, imposture, and
wantonness to a degree that inspired horror. It was in that same year
that he was arrested, chiefly on the charge of contempt for religion,
and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Fifteen months later he
had effected his famous escape, and was able to pursue his career as
an assured and accomplished adventurer who had brilliantly completed
his apprenticeship. It is not until many years later, in 1772, when
his long efforts to obtain pardon from his country still remained
unsuccessful, that we obtain an admirable picture of him from the
Venetian agent at Ancona. “He comes and goes where he will,” the agent
reports, “with open face and haughty mien, always well equipped. He
is a man of some forty years at most [really about forty-eight, thus
confirming Casanova’s statement that he was always taken for some ten
years younger than his years], of lofty stature, of fine and vigorous
aspect, with bright eyes and very brown skin. He wears a short,
chestnut-coloured peruke. I am told that his character is bold and
disdainful, but especially that he is full of speech, and of witty and
well-instructed speech.” Two years later Casanova was at last permitted
to return to Venice. He there accepted the post of secret agent of
the State Inquisition for service within the city. Like Defoe and
Toland, who were also secret political agents, he attempted to justify
himself on grounds of public duty. In a few years, however, he was
dismissed, perhaps, as Baschet suggests, on account of the fact that
his reports contained too much philosophy and not enough espionage;
probably it was realised that a man of such powerful individuality
and independence was not fitted for servile uses. Finally, in 1782,
he was banished from Venice for an offence to which the blood of the
Casanovas had always been easily inclined--he published an audacious
satire against a patrician. From Venice he went to Trieste, and thence
to Vienna. There he met Count Waldstein, a fervent adept of Kabbalistic
science, a subject in which Casanova himself claimed to be proficient;
he had found it useful in certain dealings with credulous people. In
1784 the count offered him the post of librarian, with a salary of
one thousand florins, at his castle of Dux, in Bohemia. It is said to
be a fine castle, and is still noted for its charming park. Here this
prince of Bohemians spent the remainder of his life, devoting seven
years to the _Mémoires_, on which he was still engaged at his
death. A terra-cotta bust discovered at the castle (and etched some
years ago for _Le Livre_) shows him in mature age, a handsome,
energetic, and imposing head, with somewhat deep-set eyes; it is by
no means the head of a scamp, but rather that of a philosopher, a
philosopher with unusual experience of affairs, a successful statesman,
one might say. A medallion portrait, of later date, which has also
been reproduced, shows him at the age of sixty-three with lean, eager
face, and lofty, though receding forehead, the type of the man of
quick perception and swift action, the eagle type of man. The Prince
de Ligne has also left a description of him as he appeared in old age,
now grown very irritable, ready to flare up at any imagined insult,
engaged in perpetual warfare with domestics, but receiving the highest
consideration from those who knew how to appreciate the great qualities
of the man and his unequalled experiences, and who knew also how to
indulge his susceptibilities and smile at his antique fashions. Once
he went off in a huff to Weimar, and was graciously received by the
Duke, but he soon came back again; all the favours there were showered
on a certain court favourite, one Goethe. It is clear, as we read
the Prince de Ligne’s detailed description, that the restless old
adventurer had need, even in the peaceful seclusion of Dux, of all the
consolation yielded by Socrates, Horace, Seneca, and Boethius, his
favourite philosophers. Here, at Dux, on the 4th of June 1798, Casanova
died. “Bear witness that I have lived as a philosopher and die as a
Christian;” that, we are told, was his last utterance after he had
received the sacraments.
From that moment Casanova with everything that concerned him was
covered by a pall of oblivion. He seems to have been carelessly cast
aside, together with the century of which he was so characteristic,
and, as it now appears, so memorable a child. The world in which he
had lived so joyously and completely had been transformed by the
Revolution. The new age of strenuous commercialism and complacent
philanthropy was in its vigorous youth, a sword in its right hand and
a Bible in its left. The only adventurer who found favour now was he
who took the glad news of salvation to the heathen, or mowed them
down to make new openings for trade. Had he been born later, we may
be well assured, Casanova would have known how to play his part; he
would not have fallen short of Borrow, who became an agent of the Bible
Society. But as it was, what had the new age to do with Casanova? No
one cared, no one even yet has cared, so much as to examine the drawers
and cupboards full of papers which he left behind at Dux. Only on the
13th of February, 1820, was the oblivion a little stirred. On that
date a certain Carlo Angiolieri appeared at Leipzig in the office of
the famous publisher, Brockhaus, carrying a voluminous manuscript in
the handwriting (as we now know) of Casanova and bearing the title,
_Histoire de ma Vie jusqu’à l’an 1797_.
But even the appearance of Carlo Angiolieri failed to dissipate
the gloom. Fifty years more were to pass before the figure of
Casanova again became clear. This man, so ardently alive in every
fibre, had now become a myth. The sagacious world--which imparts
the largest dole of contempt to the pilgrim who brings back to it
the largest gifts--refused to take Casanova seriously. The shrewd
critic wondered who wrote Casanova, just as he has since wondered who
wrote Shakespeare. Paul Lacroix paid Stendhal the huge compliment of
suggesting that he had written the _Mémoires_, a sufficiently
ingenious suggestion, for in Stendhal’s Dauphiny spirit there is
something of that love of adventure which is supremely illustrated
in Casanova. But we now know that, as Armand Baschet first proved,
Casanova himself really wrote his own _Mémoires_. Moreover, so
far as investigation has yet been able to go, he wrote with strict
regard to truth. Wherever it is possible to test Casanova, his
essential veracity has always been vindicated. In the nature of things
it is impossible to verify much that he narrates. When, however, we
remember that he was telling the story of his life primarily for his
own pleasure, it is clear that he had no motive for deception; and
when we consider the surpassingly discreditable episodes which he
has recorded, we may recall that he has given not indeed positive
proof of sincerity, but certainly the best that can be given in the
absence of direct proof. It remains a question how far a man is able
to recollect the details of the far past--the conversations he held,
the garments he wore, the meals he ate--so precisely as Casanova
professes to recollect them. This is a psychological problem which
has not yet been experimentally examined. There are, however, great
individual differences in memory, and there is reason to believe that
an organisation, such as Casanova’s, for which the external world is
so vivid, is associated with memory-power of high quality. That this
history is narrated with absolute precision of detail Casanova himself
would probably not have asserted. But there is no reason to doubt his
good faith, and there is excellent reason to accept the substantial
accuracy of his narrative. It remains a personal document of a value
which will increase rather than diminish as time goes by. It is one of
the great autobiographical revelations which the ages have left us,
with Augustine’s, Cellini’s, Rousseau’s, of its own kind supreme.
II.
The _Mémoires_ are authentic; they give us what they profess
to give us--the true story of a man who unites (as it has been well
said) the characters of Gil Blas and of Figaro. Thus Casanova was
the incarnation in real life of the two most typical imaginative
figures of his century. Yet even if the _Mémoires_ had been the
invention of some novelist of surpassing genius they would still
possess extraordinary interest. We may forget that the book is an
autobiography, and still find it, as a story of adventure, the
apotheosis of the picaresque novel.
The picaresque novel--although a Frenchman brought it to perfection in
_Gil Blas_--arose and flourished in Spain, Casanova’s ancestral
country, and its piquancy, variety, and audacity seem to have been
very congenial to the Spanish spirit and the Spanish soil. Casanova’s
_Mémoires_ carry this form of story on to a broader and in some
respects higher plane. The old _picaro_ never dared affront
the world; he cringed before it and slunk behind its back to make
grimaces. Casanova, too, was an adventurer living by his wits, but he
approached the world with the same self-confidence as he approached
a beautiful woman, and having won its favours treats it with the
same consideration. Unlike the _picaro_ whose delight it is to
reveal the pettinesses of the men he has duped, Casanova shows his
magnificence in adventure by regarding the world as a foeman worthy
of all his courtesy; and with incomparable impartiality, as well as
skill, he presents to us the narrative of all the perils he encountered
or sought. Few old men sitting down in the evening of their days to
chatter of old times have been so free as Casanova from the vices of
senile literature. He never maunders of the things that are so dear to
the aged merely because they are past; he introduces no superfluous
reflections or comments. We recognise that the hand which keeps this
pen so surely to the point is the hand of a man of action. Casanova’s
skill in narrative is conspicuously shown in the love-adventures which
form so large and important a part of his book, as of his life. (Men
usually regard love as a bagatelle, he says somewhere, but, for his
own part, he adds, he has found no more important business in life.)
There would seem to be nothing so difficult as to tell a long series of
amours, unshrinkingly, from first to last, without drawing a curtain at
any stage. Nearly every writer in fiction or in autobiography who has
attempted this has only produced an effect of weary monotony or else
of oppressive closeness. But Casanova succeeds. Partly this is due to
the variety and individuality he is able to give, not only to every
incident, but to every woman he meets; so that his book is a gallery
of delightful women, drawn with an art that almost recalls his great
contemporary, Goethe. Partly it seems he was aided by his vivid and
sympathetic Venetian temperament; his swift, unliterary style finds
time for no voluptuous languors. He was aided even by his immodesty,
for in literature as in the plastic arts and in life itself, the nude
is nearer to virtue than the _décolleté_. The firm and absolute
precision of every episode in these _Mémoires_ leaves no room for
any undue dallying with the fringes of love’s garments. Casanova tells
his story swiftly and boldly, with no more delay than is needed to
record every essential detail; he is the absolute anti-type to Sterne
as a narrator; the most libertine of authors, he is yet free from
prurience. Thus the man of action covers the romancer with confusion;
this supreme book of adventures is a real man’s record of his own real
life.
But let us forget that it is an autobiography and take it merely as a
story. Its immense range of human interest, its audacious realism, its
freedom from perversity, entitle us to regard it as a typical story of
adventure. And I ask myself: What is the relation of such a book to
life? what is the moral worth of Casanova’s _Mémoires_?
A foolish, superfluous question, I know, it seems to many. And I am
willing to admit that there may possibly be things in life which it is
desirable to do, and yet undesirable to moralise over; I would even
assert that the moral worth of many of our actions lies precisely in
their unconsciousness of any moral worth. Yet beneath the freest moral
movements there must be a solid basis of social law, just as beneath
the most gracious movements of the human body there lies the regulated
play of mechanical law. When we find it assumed that there are things
which are good to do and not good to justify we may strongly suspect
that we have come across a mental muddle.
To see the matter rightly we must take it at the beginning. No one
can rightly see the moral place of immoral literature--the literature
of adventure--in the case of adults unless he sees it in the case
of children. Of late years the people who write in newspapers and
magazines have loudly abused all stories of the crudely heroic order,
the stories of impossible virtue and unheard-of villainy in far-away
lands, of marvellously brave bands under extravagantly reckless
leaders, who march on through careless bloodshed to incredible victory
or incalculable treasure. The hero of the average boy--magnificent
sombrero on head, pistols in belt, galloping off on his mighty
charger, a villain grasped by the scruff of the neck in each
outstretched hand--has been severely mauled. The suggestions offered
for the displacement of this literature furnish documents for the
psychologist. Let us have cheap lives of Jesus and the Apostle Paul!
let us flood the world with the sober romances licensed by religious
societies!--say those good people in the newspapers and the magazines.
If they have ever themselves been children, and if so, how they came
into the world shrouded in an impenetrable caul which will for ever
shut them out from insight into the hearts of the young, is not known,
and perhaps is no matter. Putting aside these estimable persons,
there is in every heart a chamber dedicated to the impossible, and
the younger the heart the larger is this golden ventricle. For the
child who can just read, Jack the Giant-killer, and the story of those
human-souled swans which make the swan a mystic bird for all our lives,
are better worth knowing than any fact of the visible world. Some
day the Life of Jesus, and even perhaps the Life of Paul, will seem
to be among the sweetest and strangest of the world’s fairy-tales;
but that day will hardly come until every church and chapel has been
spiritually razed to the ground. It cannot come to the generation which
has had the name of Jesus thrust down its throat in Sunday-schools and
board-schools. We English are a practical, common-sense people, and
we cure our children of any hearty taste for religion as confectioners
are said to cure their assistants of any excessive taste for sweets,
by a preliminary surfeit. No doubt we are very wise, but we postpone
indefinitely the day when children will come to our religious tales in
the pure gladness of their joy in the marvellous.
In the meantime there ought not to be any doubt that children should
be fed on fairy-tales as their souls’ most natural food. Nothing can
make up for the lack of them at the outset, just as no later supply of
milk can compensate for the starvation involved in feeding infants on
starch. The power of assimilating fairy-tales is soon lost, and unless
the child has a rarely powerful creative imagination its spiritual
growth on this side at least remains for ever stunted.
If then childhood needs its pure fairy-land, and youth its fairy-land
of impossible adventure, what fairy-land is left for adult age?
Scarcely the novel. The modern novel in its finest manifestations,
however engrossingly interesting, takes us but a little step from
the passionate interests of our own lives. If I turn to the two
recent novels which have most powerfully interested me--Huysmans’ _En
Route_ and Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_--I find that their interest
lies largely in the skill with which they present and concentrate
two mighty problems of actual life, the greatest of all problems,
religion and sex. In adult life we seek a fairy-land occupied by beings
at once as real as ourselves, and yet far removed from the sphere
of our own actual interests and the heavy burden of the atmosphere
under which we live; only so can it fascinate the imaginations of
those who have outgrown the simple imaginative joys of early life.
Casanova’s _Mémoires_ is the perfected type of the books which answer
these requirements. It is unflinchingly real, immensely varied, the
audaciously truthful narrative of undeniably human impulses. And yet
it carries us out of relation with the problems of our actual life; it
leads us into the realm of fairy-land.
But--analysing the matter a little more closely--it may still fairly
be asked whether a book which, in spite of its remoteness, represents
a form of human life, must not have a certain bearing on morals. Is
not a part of its attraction, and indeed that of all fairy-lands, the
existence of a different code of morals? It seems to me that this is
so. But precisely in that lies the moral value of such literature.
Indeed the whole question of the moral value of art--that is to say,
of æsthetic enjoyment--is really involved here. The matter is worth
looking into.
It is one of Schopenhauer’s unforgettable sayings, that whatever
course of action we take in life there is always some element in our
nature which could only find satisfaction in an exactly contrary
course; so that, take what road we will, we yet always remain restless
and unsatisfied in part. To Schopenhauer that reflection made for
pessimism; it need not. The more finely and adequately we adjust
ourselves to the actual conditions of our life the larger, no doubt,
the unused and unsatisfied region within us. But it is just here
that art comes in. Art largely counts for its effects on playing on
these unused fibres of our organism, and by so doing it serves to
bring them into a state of harmonious satisfaction--moralises them,
if you will. Alienists have described a distressing form of insanity
peculiar to old maids who have led honourable lives of abstinence
and abnegation. After years of seeming content with the conditions
of their lot they begin to manifest uncontrollable obsessions and
erotic impulses; the unused elements of life, which they had shut
down in the cellars of their souls and almost forgotten, have at last
arisen in rebellion, clamouring tumultuously for satisfaction. The
old orgies--the Saturnalian festival at Christmas and the Midsummer
Festival on St. John’s Day--bear witness that the ancients in their
wisdom recognised that the bonds of the actual daily moral life must
sometimes be relaxed lest they break from over-tension. We have lost
the orgy, but in its place we have art. Our respectable matrons no
longer send out their daughters with torches at midnight into the
woods and among the hills, where dancing and wine and blood may lash
into their flesh the knowledge of the mysteries of life, but they take
them to _Tristan_, and are fortunately unable to see into those
carefully brought-up young souls on such occasions. The moralising
force of art lies, not in its capacity to present a timid imitation
of our experiences, but in its power to go beyond our experience,
satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activities of our nature.
That art should have such an effect on those who contemplate it is not
surprising when we remember that, to some extent, art has a similar
influence on its creators. “Libertin d’esprit mais sage de mœurs,” it
was said of Watteau. Mohammed when he wrote so voluptuously of the
black-eyed houris of Paradise was still young and the blameless husband
of an aged woman.
“Singing is sweet; but be sure of this,
Lips only sing when they cannot kiss.”
It has been said of Wagner that he had in him the instincts of
an ascetic and of a satyr, and the first is just as necessary as
the second to the making of a great artist. It is a very ancient
observation that the most unchaste verse has often been written by
the chastest poets, and that the writers who have written most purely
have found their compensation in living impurely.[5] In the same
manner it has always been found in Christendom, both among Catholics
and Protestants, that much of the most licentious literature has been
written by the clergy, by no means because the clergy are a depraved
class, but precisely because the austerity of their lives renders
necessary for them these emotional athletics. Of course, from the
standpoint of simple nature, such literature is bad, it is merely a
form of that obscenity which, as Huysmans has acutely remarked, can,
only be produced by those who are chaste; in Nature desire passes
swiftly into action, leaving little or no trace on the mind. A certain
degree of continence--I do not mean merely in the region of sex but in
the other fields of human action also--is needed as a breeding-ground
for the dreams and images of desire to develop into the perfected
visions of art. But the point of view of society is scarcely that
of unadulterated nature. In society we have not always room for the
swift and free passage of impulse into action; to avoid the evils of
repressed impulse this play of the emotions on a higher and serener
plane becomes essential. Just as we need athletics to expand and
harmonise the coarser unused energies of the organism, so we need art
and literature to expand and harmonise its finer energies, emotion
being, as it may not be superfluous to point out, itself largely a
muscular process, motion in a more or less arrested form, so that there
is here more than a mere analogy. Art from this point of view is the
athletics of the emotions.
The adventures of fairy-land--of which for our age I take Casanova’s
_Mémoires_ as the type--constitute an important part of this
athletics. It may be abused, just as we have the grosser excesses of
the runner and the cyclist; but it is the abuse and not the use which
is pernicious, and under the artificial conditions of civilisation the
contemplation of the life and adventures of the heroically natural
man is an exercise with fine spiritual uses. Such literature thus
has a moral value: it helps us to live peacefully within the highly
specialised routine of civilisation.
That is the underlying justification for Casanova’s _Mémoires_
as moral literature. But there is no reason why it should emerge into
consciousness when we take up these _Mémoires_, any more than
a man need take up a branch of physical athletics with any definite
hygienic aim. It is sufficient to be moved by the pure enjoyment of
it. And there must be something unwholesome and abnormal--something
corrupt at the core--in any civilised man or woman who cannot win some
enjoyment from this book.
III.
The more I contemplate the eighteenth century the more interesting I
find it. In my youth it seemed to me unworthy of a glance. The books
and the men, Shelley above all, who stirred my young blood belonged to
the early nineteenth century. I was led to regard the last century as
a dull period of stagnation and decay, a tomb into which the spirit
of man sank after the slow death which followed the Renaissance. The
dawn of the nineteenth century was an Easter Day of the human soul,
rising from the sepulchre and flinging aside the old eighteenth century
winding-sheet.
I have nothing yet to say against the early nineteenth century, which
was indeed only the outcome of the years that went before, but I have
gained a new delight in the men of the eighteenth century. It was in
that age that the English spirit found its most complete intellectual
expression, unaffected by foreign influence. When that spirit, reviving
after the wars that lamentably cut short the development of Chaucer’s
magnificent song, again began its free literary development--no doubt
with some stimulus from Humanism--it was suddenly smothered at birth
by the Renaissance wave from Italy and France. We may divine how it
would have developed independently if we think of John Heywood’s
dramatic sketches--pale as those are after the Miller’s tale in which
for the first and last time Chaucer perfectly mated English realism to
the lyric grace of English idealism--and to some extent, also, when
we turn to the later Heywood’s plays, or Dekker’s, and especially to
the robust and tolerant humanity, the sober artistic breadth of the
one play of Porter’s which has come down to us. But the intoxicating
melodies of Ronsard and his fellows were heard from over sea, and the
men of the English Renaissance arose--Lyly and Lodge and Campion with
their refinements, Greene and Nash with their gay and brilliant music,
Marlowe with his arrogant, irresistible energy--and brought to birth
an absolutely new spirit, which may have been English enough in its
rich and virginal elements, but received the seminal principle from
abroad. It needed a century and more for that magnificent tumult to
subside, and for the old English spirit to reappear and reach at last
full maturity, by happy chance again in association with France, though
this time it is England that chiefly plays the masculine part and
impregnates France. Thus the eighteenth century was an age in which the
English spirit found complete self-expression, and also an age in which
England and France joined hands intellectually, and stood together at
the summit of civilisation, with no rivals, unless Goethe and Kant may
suffice to stand for a whole people. In the great Englishmen of these
days we find the qualities which are truly native to Britain, and which
have too often been torn and distracted by insane aberrations. There
is a fine sobriety and sagacity in the English spirit, a mellow human
solidity, such as the Romans possessed always, but which we in our
misty and storm-swept island have often exchanged, perhaps for better,
but certainly for other qualities. It was not so in the eighteenth
century, and by no accident the historian who has most finely expressed
the genius of Rome was an eighteenth century Englishman. All the most
typical men of that age possessed in varying degree the same qualities:
Locke, Swift, Fielding, Hume, Richardson, Goldsmith, Hogarth, Johnson,
Godwin. Thus the eighteenth century should undoubtedly be a source of
pride to the British heart. England’s reputation in the world rests
largely on our poetic aptitudes and our political capacity. Eighteenth
century England is not obviously pre-eminent in either respect,
although it was the great age of our political development and the
seed-time of our second great poetic age; it produced scarcely more
than a single first-class poet exclusively within its limits, and it
lost America. Yet our greatest philosopher, our greatest historian,
our greatest biographer, nearly all our greatest novelists, our great
initiators in painting, who were indirectly the initiators of the
greater art of France, belong wholly to this century, and an unequalled
cluster of our greatest poets belongs to its close. And these men were
marked by sanity and catholicity, a superb solidity of spirit; they
became genuinely cosmopolitan without losing any of their indigenous
virtues. Without the eighteenth century we should never have known
many of the greatest qualities which are latent, and too often only
latent, in our race. Landor and Wordsworth alone were left to carry
something of the spirit of the English eighteenth century far on into
the literature of our own wholly alien century.
And their brothers of France were their most worthy peers. This spirit,
indeed, which we see so conspicuously in the finest men of their age
in England and France, was singularly widespread throughout Europe, a
cheerful sobriety, a solid humanity, little troubled by any of those
“movements” which were to become so prolific and so noisy in the next
century. Christianity, it seemed, was decaying. Diderot, well informed
on English affairs, wrote to a friend that in a few years it would be
extinct, and looking at the state of the English Church at that time,
no one could reasonably have surmised that Zinzendorf in Germany,
and after him Wesley in England on a lower plane and Law on a higher
plane, had already initiated that revival of Christianity which in
our own century was destined to work itself out so obstreperously.
But the world seemed none the worse for the apparent subsidence
of Christianity; in the opinion of many it seemed to be very much
the better. The tolerant paganism of classic days appeared to be
reasserting itself, robustly in England, with a delicate refinement
in France,--setting the paganism of Watteau against the paganism
of Fielding--while Goethe and the Germans generally were striving
to rescue and harmonise the best of Christianity with the best of
antiquity. European civilisation was fully expanded; for a long time
no great disturbing force had arisen, and though on every side the
tender buds of coming growths might have been detected, they could not
yet reveal their strength. Such a period certainly has its terrible
defects; mellowness is not far from rottenness. But then youth also has
its defects, and its crude acidity is still further from perfection.
The nineteenth century has a higher moral standard than the eighteenth,
so at least we in our self-righteousness have been accustomed to
think. But even if so, the abstract existence of a high moral standard
is another thing from the prevalence of high moral living. Whatever
the standard may be, it is a question whether the lives are much
different. In the one case the standard is much above the practice,
in the other only a little above it--that is the chief difference.
And the advantages of winding the standard up to the higher pitch are
not so unmixed as is sometimes assumed. One need not question these
advantages, well recognised in the present century. But the advantages
of a lower standard are less often recognised. There is especially
the great advantage that we attain a higher degree of sincerity, and
sincerity, if not itself the prime virtue, is surely, whatever the
virtue may be, its chief accompaniment. A life that is swathed and
deformed in much drapery is not so wholesome or so effective as one
that can live nearer to the sun. And the unrecognisable villain is
most pernicious; the brigand who holds a revolver at your head is
better than the sleek and well-dressed thief who opens the proceedings
with prayer. The eighteenth has been called a gross and unintelligent
century. In the department of criticism, indeed, this century in
England (for it was far otherwise in Germany) comes very short of our
own century, and it is largely this failure to measure the precise
value of things in æsthetic perception which now makes that age seem
so shocking. From this point of view every great age--and not least
our own greatest Elizabethan age--is equally defective. A period
of energetic life cannot afford to spend much time on the solitary
contemplation of its own bowels of æsthetic emotion. To produce a Pater
is the one exquisite function of a spiritually barren and exhausted
age. And still the eighteenth century redeems its critical grossness
by making even this later development possible; it lifted the man of
letters from the place of a dependent to the place of a free man boldly
prophesying in his own right; and, moreover, it was the first century
which dared to claim the complete equality of men and women with all
which that involves.
If it has required a certain insight for the child of our own century
to discover the great qualities of the last century, there cannot be
much doubt about the final judgment of the most competent judges.
The eighteenth was, as Renouvier has called it, the first century
of humanity since Christ, while at the same time, as Lange has said,
it was penetrated through by the search for the ideal, or, as a more
recent thinker concludes, it was a century dominated by the maxim
_Salus populi suprema est lex_, holding in its noble aspirations
after general happiness the germs of all modern socialism. In art and
literature it saw the fresh spring of those blossoms which opened so
splendidly and faded so swiftly in our century; it was the century not
only of Hogarth and Fielding and Voltaire, but of Blake and Rousseau,
of Diderot, of Swedenborg and Mesmer, of the development of modern
music with Mozart and Beethoven, of the unparalleled enthusiasm
awakened by the discovery of the Keltic world. And as its crowning
glory the eighteenth century claims Goethe. Men will scarcely look
back to our own century as so good to live in. One may well say that
he would have gladly lived in the thirteenth century, perhaps the most
interesting of all since Christ, or in the sixteenth, probably the most
alive of all, or the eighteenth, surely the most human. But why have
lived in the nineteenth, the golden age of machinery, and of men used
as machines?
Eighteenth century Europe, being what it was, formed a perfect stage
for Casanova to play his part on. With his Spanish and Italian blood,
he was of the race of those who had come so actively to the front
in the last days of old classic Rome, and his immediate ancestors
had lived in the centre of the pagan Rome of the Renaissance. Thus
he carried with him traditions which consorted well with much in
the eighteenth century. And he had that in him, moreover, which no
tradition can give, the incommunicable vitality in the presence of
which all tradition shrivels into nothingness.
Casanova knew not only Italy, France, England, Germany, and Holland;
he had visited Spain, Russia, Poland, Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor.
He was received by Benedict XII., by Frederick II. of Prussia, by the
Empress Catherine, by Joseph II. He was at home in Paris, in London,
in Berlin, in Vienna; he knew Munich, Dresden, Moscow, St. Petersburg,
Warsaw, Barcelona. His picture of London is of great interest. He
spent much of the year 1763 there, and some of his most interesting
experiences, romantic and psychological, occurred during that period.
He even dated the close of what he calls the second act in the comedy
of his life from that visit to London, the next and concluding act
being one of slow declination. So profound was his depression at this
time that one day he went towards the Thames at the Tower with the
deliberate intention of drowning himself, having first filled his
pockets with bullets to ensure sinking. Fortunately an English friend
(to whom the world owes thanks) met him on the way, read his resolve
in his face, and insisted on carrying him off to a very convivial
party, whose indecorous proceedings, although Casanova only remained
a passive witness, served to dissipate all thoughts of suicide. He
is not, however, prejudiced against England; on the contrary, he
finds that no nation offers so many interesting peculiarities to the
attentive observer. As usual, in London Casanova mixed indiscriminately
with the best and the worst society; his wit, his knowledge, his
imperturbable effrontery, his charming conversation, served to open
any door that he desired to open. He gives us curious glimpses into
the lives of English noblemen of the day, and not less intimate
pictures of the _chevaliers d’industrie_ who preyed upon them.
In the course of one adventure with people of the latter sort he was
haled before the eminent blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, whom
he seems to have mistaken, though this is not quite clear, for his
yet more eminent brother Henry. He also met Kitty Fischer, the most
fashionable _cocotte_ of her day, whom we may yet see as Reynolds
caught her in a well-inspired moment, dilating her sensitive nostrils,
radiantly inhaling the joy of life, and he tells us anecdotes of her
extravagance, of the jewels she wore, of the thousand guinea banknote
which she ate in a sandwich.[6]
Throughout Europe Casanova knew many of the most celebrated people
of his time, though it is clear--as one would expect from a man of
his impartial humanity--he seldom went out of his way to meet them.
His visit to Voltaire is a distinct contribution to our knowledge
of that sage; he admired Helvetius, and wondered how a man of so
many virtues could have denied virtue; D’Alembert he thought the
most truly modest man he had ever met, an interesting tribute from
the most truly immodest man of that period. The value of Casanova’s
record of the eighteenth century lies, however, by no means in the
glimpses he has given us of great personalities: that has been much
better done by much more insignificant writers. It is as a picture of
the manners and customs of the eighteenth century throughout Europe
that the _Mémoires_ are invaluable. Casanova saw Europe from
the courts of kings to the lowest _bas fonds_. He lived in the
castles of French and Italian nobles, in the comfortable homes of
Dutch merchants, in his own house in Pall Mall, in taverns and inns
and peasants’ cottages anywhere. He had no intellectual prejudices,
he had an immense versatility in tastes and practical aptitudes, he
was genuinely interested in all human things. Thus he approached life
with no stereotyped set of opinions, but with all the aloofness of an
unclassed adventurer, who was at the same time a scholar and a man of
letters. It can scarcely be that there is any record to compare with
this as a vivid and impartial picture of the eighteenth century, in its
robust solidity, its cheerful and tolerant scepticism, its serene and
easy gaiety, its mellow decay. That is our final debt to this unique
and immortal book.
What should be our last word about Casanova? It is true that
although--if indeed one should not say because--he was so heroically
natural Casanova was not an average normal man. It is scarcely given
to the average man to expend such versatile and reckless skill in the
field of the world, or to find so large a part wherein to play off that
skill. But neither are the saints and philosophers normal; St. Bernard
was not normal, nor yet Spinoza. And surely it is a poor picture of
the world which would show us St. Bernard and Spinoza and shut out
Casanova. “Vous avez l’outil universel,” Fabrice said to Gil Blas.
Casanova’s brain was just such a tool of universal use, and he never
failed to use it. For if you would find the supreme type of the human
animal in the completest development of his rankness and cunning, in
the very plenitude of his most excellent wits, I know not where you may
more safely go than to the _Mémoires_ of the self-ennobled Jacques
Casanova Chevalier de Seingalt.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: I take the first example which comes to hand, for whatever
it may be worth:--“Luttrell was talking of Moore and Rogers--the
poetry of the former so licentious, that of the latter so pure; much
of its popularity owing to its being so carefully weeded of everything
approaching to indelicacy; and the contrast between the _lives_
and the _works_ of the two men--the former a pattern of conjugal
and domestic regularity, the latter of all the men he had ever known
the greatest sensualist” (Greville’s _Memoirs_, vol. iii. p. 324).]
[Footnote 6: For another side of life we may read his description of
the English Sunday:--“On Sunday one dares neither to play at cards
nor to perform music. The numerous spies who infest the streets of
this capital listen to the sounds which come from the parlours of
the houses, and if they suspect any gaming or singing they conceal
themselves and slip in at the first opportunity to seize those bad
Christians who dare to profane the Lord’s Day by amusements which
everywhere else are counted innocent. In revenge the English may go
with impunity to sanctify the holy day in the taverns and brothels
which are so plentiful in this city.” One may compare with this Mme.
de Staël’s almost Dantesque description--so at least it remains in the
memory--of the gloom of the Scotch Sabbath in the days of Burns. This
statement of the matter remained substantially accurate until almost
yesterday. So long it remained for the English spirit to re-conquer
Sunday! It must be remembered that Puritanism, while always a part of
the English spirit, was not originally its predominant note; it only
became so as an inevitable reaction against the exotic Renaissance
movement. Mary Stuart made Knox, Charles I. made Cromwell, and
both monarchs were intimately associated with the last wave of the
Renaissance.]
ZOLA.
ZOLA’S name--a barbarous, explosive name, like an anarchist’s bomb--has
been tossed about amid hoots and yells for a quarter of a century.
In every civilised country we have heard of the man who has dragged
literature into the gutter, who has gone down to pick up the filth of
the streets, and has put it into books for the filthy to read. And
in every civilised country his books have been read, by the hundred
thousand.
To-day, his great life-work is completed. At the same time, the
uproar that it aroused has, to a large extent, fallen silent. Not
that there is any general agreement as to the rank of the author of
the Rougon-Macquart series; but the storms that greeted it have worn
themselves out, and it is recognised that there are at least two sides
to this as to any other question. Such a time is favourable to the calm
discussion of Zola’s precise position.
The fundamental assertion of those who, in their irreconcilable
opposition to Zola, have rightly felt that abuse is not argument, has
always been that Zola is no artist. The matter has usually presented
itself to them as a question of Idealism _versus_ Realism.
Idealism, as used by the literary critic, seems to mean a careful
selection of the facts of life for artistic treatment, certain facts
being suited for treatment in the novel, certain other facts being
not so suited; while the realist, from the literary critic’s point of
view, is one who flings all facts indiscriminately into his pages. I
think that is a fair statement of the matter, for the literary critic
does not define very clearly; still less does he ask himself how far
the idealism he advocates is merely traditional, nor, usually, to
what extent the manner of presentation should influence us. He does
not ask himself these questions, nor need we ask him, for in the case
of Zola (or, indeed, of any other so-called “realist”) there is no
such distinction. There is no absolute realism, merely a variety of
idealisms; the only absolute realism would be a phonographic record,
illustrated photographically, after the manner of the cinematograph.
Zola is just as much an idealist as George Sand. It is true that he
selects very largely from material things, and that he selects very
profusely. But the selection remains, and where there is deliberate
selection there is art. We need not trouble ourselves here--and I doubt
whether we are ever called upon to trouble ourselves--about “Realism”
and “Idealism.” The questions are: Has the artist selected the right
materials? Has he selected them with due restraint?
The first question is a large one, and, in Zola’s case at all events,
it cannot, I think, be answered on purely æsthetic grounds; the second
may be answered without difficulty. Zola has himself answered it; he
admits that he has been carried away by his enthusiasm, and perhaps,
also, by his extraordinary memory for recently-acquired facts (a memory
like a sponge, as he has put it, quickly swollen and quickly emptied);
he has sown details across his page with too profuse a hand. It is
the same kind of error as Whitman made, impelled by the same kind of
enthusiasm. Zola expends immense trouble to get his facts; he has told
how he ransacked the theologians to obtain body and colour for _La
Faute de l’Abbé Mouret_, perhaps the best of his earlier books. But
he certainly spent no more preliminary labour on it than Flaubert spent
on _Madame Bovary_, very far less than Flaubert spent on the study
of Carthage for _Salammbô_. But the results are different; the
one artist gets his effects by profusion and multiplicity of touches,
the other by the deliberate self-restraint with which he selects and
emphasises solely the salient and significant touches. The latter
method seems to strike more swiftly and deeply the ends of art. Three
strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth a thousand of Denner’s.
Rich and minute detail may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in
the end. If a man takes his two children on to his knees, it matters
little whether he places Lénore on his right knee and Henri on his
left, or the other way about; the man himself may fail to know or to
realise, and the more intense his feelings the less likely is he to
know. When we are living deeply, the facts of our external life do not
present themselves to us in elaborate detail; a very few points are--as
it has been termed--focal in consciousness, while the rest are marginal
in subconsciousness. A few things stand out vividly at each moment of
life; the rest are dim. The supreme artist is shown by the insight
and boldness with which he seizes and illuminates these bright points
at each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due subordination.
Dramatists so unlike as Ford and Ibsen, novelists so unlike as Flaubert
and Tolstoi, yet alike impress us by the simple vividness of their
artistic effects. The methods adopted by Zola render such effects
extremely difficult of attainment. Perhaps the best proof of Zola’s
remarkable art is the skill with which he has neutralised the evil
results of his ponderous method. In his most characteristic novels, as
_L’Assommoir_, _Nana_, _Germinal_, his efforts to attain
salient perspective in the mass of trivial or technical things--to
build a single elaborate effect out of manifold details--are often
admirably conducted. Take, for instance, the Voreux, the coal-pit which
may almost be said to be the hero of _Germinal_ rather than any
of the persons in the book. The details are not interesting, but they
are carefully elaborated, and the Voreux is finally symbolised as a
stupendous idol, sated with human blood, crouching in its mysterious
sanctuary. Whenever Zola wishes to bring the Voreux before us, this
formula is repeated. And it is the same, in a slighter degree, with the
other material personalities of the book. Sometimes, in the case of a
crowd, this formula is simply a cry. It is so with the Parisian mob
who yell “A Berlin!” in the highly-wrought conclusion to _Nana_;
it is so with the crowd of strikers in _Germinal_ who shout for
bread. It is more than the tricky repetition of a word or a gesture,
overdone by Dickens and others; it is the artful manipulation of a
carefully-elaborated, significant phrase. Zola seems to have been the
first who has, deliberately and systematically, introduced this sort of
_leit-motiv_ into literature, as a method of summarising a complex
mass of details, and bringing the total impression of them before
the reader. In this way he contrives to minimise the defects of his
method, and to render his complex detail focal. He sometimes attains
poignantly simple effects by the mere repetition of a _leit-motiv_
at the right moment. And he is able at times, also, to throw aside his
detailed method altogether, and to reach effects of tragic intensity.
The mutilation of Maigrat’s corpse is a scene which can scarcely have
been described in a novel before. Given the subject, Zola’s treatment
of it has the strength, brevity, and certainty of touch which only
belong to great masters of art. That Zola is a great master of his art,
_L’Assommoir_ and _Germinal_--which, so far as I have read
Zola, seem his two finest works--are enough to prove. Such works are
related to the ordinary novel much as Wagner’s music-dramas are related
to the ordinary Italian opera. Wagner reaches a loftier height of art
than Zola; he had a more complete grasp of all the elements he took in
hand to unite. Zola has not seen with sufficient clearness the point of
view of science, and the limits of its capacity for harmonising with
fiction; nor has he with perfect sureness of vision always realised the
ends of art. He has left far too much of the scaffolding standing amid
his huge literary structures; there is too much mere brute fact which
has not been wrought into art. But, if Zola is not among the world’s
greatest artists, I do not think we can finally deny that he is a great
artist.
To look at Zola from the purely artistic standpoint, however, is
scarcely to see him at all. His significance for the world generally,
and even for literature, lies less in a certain method of using his
material--as it may be said to lie, for example, in the case of the
Goncourts--than in the material itself, and the impulses and ideas that
prompted his selection of that material. These growing piles of large
books are the volcanic ejecta of an original and exuberant temperament.
To understand them we must investigate this temperament.
A considerable and confused amount of racial energy was stored up
in Zola. At once French, Italian, and Greek--with a mother from
the central Beauce country of France, more fruitful in corn than
in intellect, and a father of mixed Italian and Greek race, a
mechanical genius in his way, with enthusiastic energies and large
schemes--he presents a curious combination of potential forces,
perhaps not altogether a very promising combination. One notes that
the mechanical engineer in the father seems to have persisted in the
son, not necessarily by heredity, but perhaps by early familiarity
and association. Young Zola was a delicate child and by no means a
brilliant schoolboy, though he once won a prize for memory; such
ability as he showed was in the direction of science; he had no
literary aptitudes. He seems to have adopted literature chiefly because
pen and ink come handiest to the eager energies of a poor clerk. It
is scarcely fanciful to detect the mechanical aptitudes still. Just
as all Huxley’s natural instincts were towards mechanics, and in
physiology he always sought for the “go” of the organism, so Zola,
however imperfect his scientific equipment may be, has always sought
for the “go” of the social organism. The history of the Rougon-Macquart
family is a study in social mathematics: given certain family strains,
what is the dynamic hereditary outcome of their contact?
To the making of Zola there went, therefore, this curious racial blend,
as a soil ready to be fertilised by any new seed, and a certain almost
instinctive tendency to look at things from the mechanical and material
point of view. To these, in very early life, a third factor was added
of the first importance. During long years after his father’s death,
Zola, as a child and youth, suffered from poverty, poverty almost
amounting to actual starvation, the terrible poverty of respectability.
The whole temper of his work and his outlook on the world are clearly
conditioned by this prolonged starvation of adolescence. The timid and
reserved youth--for such, it is said, has been Zola’s character both
in youth and manhood--was shut up with his fresh energies in a garret
while the panorama of the Paris world was unfolded below him. Forced
both by circumstances and by temperament to practise the strictest
chastity and sobriety, there was but one indulgence left open to him,
an orgy of vision. Of this, as we read his books, we cannot doubt that
he fully availed himself, for each volume of the Rougon-Macquart series
is an orgy of material vision.[7]
Zola remained chaste, and, it is said, he is still sober--though we
are told that his melancholy morose face lights up like a gourmet’s at
the hour of his abstemious dinner--but this early eagerness to absorb
the sights as well as the sounds, and one may add the smells, of the
external world, has at length become moulded into a routine method.
To take some corner of life, and to catalogue every detail of it, to
place a living person there, and to describe every sight and smell
and sound around him, although he himself may be quite unconscious of
them--that, in the simplest form, is the recipe for making a _roman
expérimental_. The method, I wish to insist, was rooted in the
author’s experience of the world. Life only came to him as the sights,
sounds, smells, that reached his garret window. His soul seems to
have been starved at the centre, and to have encamped at the sensory
periphery. He never tasted deep of life, he stored up none of those
wells of purely personal emotion from which great artists have hoisted
up the precious fluid which makes the bright living blood of their
creations. How different he is in this respect from the other great
novelist of our day, who has also been a volcanic force of world-wide
significance! Tolstoi comes before us as a man who has himself lived
deeply, a man who has had an intense thirst for life, and who has
satisfied that thirst. He has craved to know life, to know women, the
joy of wine, the fury of battle, the taste of the ploughman’s sweat
in the field. He has known all these things, not as material to make
books, but as the slaking of instinctive personal passions. And in
knowing them he has stored up a wealth of experiences from which he
drew as he came to make books, and which bear about them that peculiar
haunting fragrance only yielded by the things which have been lived
through, personally, in the far past. Zola’s method has been quite
otherwise: when he wished to describe a great house he sat outside
the palatial residence of M. Menier, the chocolate manufacturer, and
imagined for himself the luxurious fittings inside, discovering in
after years that his description had come far short of the reality;
before writing _Nana_, he obtained an introduction to a courtesan,
with whom he was privileged to lunch; his laborious preparation for the
wonderful account of the war of 1870, in _La Débâcle_, was purely
one of books, documents, and second-hand experiences; when he wished
to write of labour he went to the mines and to the fields, but never
appears to have done a day’s manual work. Zola’s literary methods are
those of the _parvenu_ who has tried to thrust himself in from
outside, who has never been seated at the table of life, who has never
really lived. That is their weakness. It is also their virtue. There
is no sense of satiety in Zola’s work as there is in Tolstoi’s. One
can understand how it is that, although their methods are so unlike,
Tolstoi himself regards Zola as the one French novelist of the day
who is really alive. The starved lad, whose eyes were concentrated
with longing on the visible world, has reaped a certain reward from
his intellectual chastity; he has preserved his clearness of vision
for material things, an eager, insatiable, impartial vision. He is a
zealot in his devotion to life, to the smallest details of life. He has
fought like the doughtiest knight of old-world romance for his lady’s
honour, and has suffered more contumely than they all. “On barde de fer
nos urinoirs!” he shouts in a fury of indignation in one of his essays;
it is a curious instance of the fanatic’s austere determination that
no barrier shall be set up to shut out the sights and smells of the
external world. The virgin freshness of his thirst for life gives its
swelling, youthful vigour to his work, its irrepressible energy.
It has, indeed, happened with this unsatisfied energy as it will
happen with such energies; it has retained its robustness at the
sacrifice of the sweetness it might otherwise have gained. There is a
certain bitterness in Zola’s fury of vision, as there is also in his
gospel of “Work! work! work!” One is conscious of a savage assault on
a citadel which, the assailant now well knows, can never be scaled.
Life cannot be reached by the senses alone; there is always something
that cannot be caught by the utmost tension of eyes and ears and nose;
a well-balanced soul is built up, not alone on sensory memories,
but also on the harmonious satisfaction of the motor and emotional
energies. That cardinal fact must be faced even when we are attempting
to define the fruitful and positive element in Zola’s activity.
The chief service which Zola has rendered to his fellow-artists and
successors, the reason of the immense stimulus he supplies, seems to
lie in the proofs he has brought of the latent artistic uses of the
rough, neglected details of life. The Rougon-Macquart series has been
to his weaker brethren like that great sheet knit at the four corners,
let down from Heaven full of four-footed beasts and creeping things
and fowls of the air, and bearing in it the demonstration that to the
artist as to the moralist nothing can be called common or unclean. It
has henceforth become possible for other novelists to find inspiration
where before they could never have turned, to touch life with a vigour
and audacity of phrase which, without Zola’s example, they would have
trembled to use, while they still remain free to bring to their work
the simplicity, precision, and inner experience which he has never
possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of the novel. He has brought
the modern material world into fiction in a more definite and thorough
manner than it has ever been brought before, just as Richardson
brought the modern emotional world into fiction; such an achievement
necessarily marks an epoch. In spite of all his blunders, Zola has
given the novel new power and directness, a vigour of fibre which was
hard indeed to attain, but which, once attained, we may chasten as we
will. And in doing this he has put out of court, perhaps for ever,
those unwholesome devotees of the novelist’s art who work out of their
vacuity, having neither inner nor outer world to tell of.
Zola’s delight in exuberant detail, it is true, is open to severe
criticism. When, however, we look at his work, not as great art but
as an important moment in the evolution of the novel, this exuberance
is amply justified. Such furious energy in hammering home this
demonstration of the artistic utility of the whole visible modern
world may detract from the demonstrator’s reputation for skill;
it has certainly added to the force of the demonstration. Zola’s
luxuriance of detail--the heritage of that romantic movement of which
he was the child--has extended impartially to every aspect of life
he has investigated, to the working of a mine, to the vegetation of
the Paradou, to the ritual of the Catholic Church. But it is not on
the details of inanimate life, or the elaborate description of the
industrial and religious functions of men, that the rage of Zola’s
adversaries has chiefly been spent. It is rather on his use of the
language of the common people and on his descriptions of the sexual and
digestive functions of humanity. Zola has used slang--the _argot_
of the populace--copiously, chiefly indeed in _L’Assommoir_, which
is professedly a study of low life, but to a less extent in his other
books. A considerable part of the power of _L’Assommoir_, in many
respects Zola’s most perfect work, lies in the skill with which he uses
the language of the people he is dealing with; the reader is bathed
throughout in an atmosphere of picturesque, vigorous, often coarse
_argot_. There is, no doubt, a lack of critical sobriety in the
profusion and reiteration of vulgarisms, of coarse oaths, of the varied
common synonyms for common things. But they achieve the end that Zola
sought, and so justify themselves.
They are of even greater interest as a protest against the exaggerated
purism which has ruled the French language for nearly three centuries,
and while rendering it a more delicate and precise instrument for
scientific purposes, has caused it to become rather bloodless and
colourless for the artist’s purposes, as compared with the speech used
by Rabelais, Montaigne, and even Molière, the great classics who have
chiefly influenced Zola. The romantic movement of the present century,
it is true, added colour to the language, but scarcely blood; it was
an exotic, feverish colour which has not permanently enriched French
speech. A language rendered anæmic by over-clarification cannot be
fed by exotic luxuries but by an increase in the vigorous staples of
speech, and Zola was on the right track when he went to the people’s
common speech, which is often classic in the true sense and always
robust. Doubtless he has been indiscriminate and even inaccurate in
his use of _argot_, sometimes giving undue place to what is of
merely temporary growth. But the main thing was to give literary place
and prestige to words and phrases which had fallen so low in general
esteem, in spite of their admirable expressiveness, that only a writer
of the first rank and of unequalled audacity could venture to lift them
from the mire. This Zola has done; and those who follow him may easily
exercise the judgment and discretion in which he has been lacking.
Zola’s treatment of the sexual and the digestive functions, as I
pointed out, has chiefly aroused his critics. If you think of it, these
two functions are precisely the central functions of life, the two
poles of hunger and love around which the world revolves. It is natural
that it should be precisely these fundamental aspects of life which in
the superficial contact of ordinary social intercourse we are for ever
trying more and more to refine away and ignore. They are subjected
to an ever-encroaching process of attenuation and circumlocution,
and as a social tendency this influence is possibly harmless or even
beneficial. But it is constantly extending to literature also, and
here it is disastrous. It is true that a few great authors--classics
of the first rank--have gone to extremes in their resistance to this
tendency. These extremes are of two kinds: the first issuing in a sort
of coprolalia, or inclination to dwell on excrement, which we find to a
slight extent in Rabelais and to a marked extent in the half-mad Swift;
in its fully-developed shape this coprolalia is an uncontrollable
instinct found in some forms of insanity. The other extreme is that
of pruriency, or the perpetual itch to circle round sexual matters,
accompanied by a timidity which makes it impossible to come right
up to them; this sort of impotent fumbling in women’s placket-holes
finds its supreme literary exponent in Sterne. Like coprolalia,
when uncontrolled, prurience is a well-recognised characteristic of
the insane, leading them to find a vague eroticism everywhere. But
both these extreme tendencies have not been found incompatible with
the highest literary art. Moreover, their most pronounced exponents
have been clerics, the conventional representatives of the Almighty.
However far Zola might go in these directions, he would still be in
what is universally recognised as very good company. He has in these
respects by no means come up with Father Rabelais and Dean Swift and
the Rev. Laurence Sterne; but there can be little doubt that, along
both lines, he has missed the restraint of well-balanced art. On the
one hand he over-emphasises what is repulsive in the nutritive side of
life, and on the other hand, with the timid obsession of chastity, he
over-emphasises the nakedness of flesh. In so doing, he has revealed a
certain flabbiness in his art, although he has by no means diminished
his service in widening the horizon of literary speech and subject.
Bearing in mind that many crowned kings of literature have approached
these subjects quite as closely as Zola, and far less seriously, it
does not seem necessary to enter any severer judgment here.
To enlarge the sphere of language is an unthankful task, but in
the long run literature owes an immense debt to the writers who
courageously add to the stock of strong and simple words. Our own
literature for two centuries has been hampered by the social tendency
of life to slur expression, and to paraphrase or suppress all forceful
and poignant words. If we go back to Chaucer, or even to Shakespeare,
we realise what power of expression we have lost. It is enough, indeed,
to turn to our English Bible. The literary power of the English Bible
is largely due to the unconscious instinct for style which happened
to be in the air when it was chiefly moulded, to the simple, direct,
unashamed vigour of its speech. Certainly, if the discovery of the
Bible had been left for us to make, any English translation would
have to be issued at a high price by some esoteric society, for fear
lest it should fall into the hands of the British matron. It is our
British love of compromise, we say, that makes it possible for a
spade to be called a spade on one day of the week, but on no other;
our neighbours, whose minds are more logically constituted, call it
_le cant Britannique_. But our mental compartments remain very
water-tight, and on the whole we are even worse off than the French
who have no Bible. For instance, we have almost lost the indispensable
words “belly” and “bowels,” both used so often and with such admirable
effect in the Psalms; we talk of the “stomach,” a word which is not
only an incorrect equivalent, but at best totally inapt for serious
or poetic uses. Any one who is acquainted with our old literature,
or with the familiar speech of the common folk, will recall similar
instances of simple, powerful expressions which are lost or vanishing
from literary language, leaving no available substitute behind. In
modern literary language, indeed, man scarcely exists save in his
extremities. For we take the pubes as a centre, and we thence describe
a circle with a radius of some eighteen inches--in America the radius
is rather longer--and we forbid any reference to any organ within the
circle, save that maid-of-all-work the “stomach”; in other words, we
make it impossible to say anything to the point concerning the central
functions of life.
It is a question how far real literature can be produced under such
conditions, not merely because literature is thus shut out from
close contact with the vital facts of life, but because the writer
who is willing to be so shut out, who finds himself most at home
within the social limits of speech, will probably not be made of
the heroic stuff that goes to the moulding of a great writer. The
social limits of speech are useful enough, for we are all members of
society, and it is well that we should have some protection against
the assaults of unbridled vulgarity. But in literature we may choose
to read what we will, or to read nothing, and the man who enters the
world of literature timidly equipped with the topics and language
of the drawing-room is not likely to go far. I once saw it stated
depreciatingly in a grave literary review that a certain novel by a
woman writer dealt with topics that are not even discussed by men
at their clubs. I had never read it, but it seemed to me then that
there might be hope for that novel. No doubt it is even possible in
literature to fall below the club standard, but unless you can rise
above the club standard, better stay at the club, tell stories there,
or sweep the crossing outside.
All our great poets and novelists from Chaucer to Fielding wrote
sincerely and heroically concerning the great facts of life. That is
why they are great, robustly sane, radiantly immortal. It is a mistake
to suppose that no heroism was involved in their case; for though
no doubt they had a freer general speech on their side they went
beyond their time in daring to mould that speech to the ends of art,
in bringing literature closer to life. It was so even with Chaucer;
compare him with his contemporaries and successors; observe how he
seeks to soothe the susceptibilities of his readers and to deprecate
the protests of the “precious folk.” There is no great art at any
epoch without heroism, though one epoch may be more favourable than
another to the exercise of such heroism in literature. In our own age
and country daring has passed out of the channels of art into those of
commerce, to find exercise, foolish enough sometimes, in the remotest
corners of the earth. It is because our literature is not heroic, but
has been confined within the stifling atmosphere of the drawing-room,
that English poets and novelists have ceased to be a power in the
world and are almost unknown outside the parlours and nurseries of
our own country. It is because in France there have never ceased to
be writers here and there who have dared to face life heroically and
weld it into art that the literature of France is a power in the
world wherever there are men intelligent enough to recognise its
achievements. When literature that is not only fine but also great
appears in England we shall know it as such by its heroism, if by no
other mark.
Language has its immense significance because it is the final
incarnation of a man’s most intimate ideals. Zola’s style and method
are monotonous--with a monotony which makes his books unreadable when
we have once mastered his secret--and the burden they express is ever
the same: the energy of natural life. Whatever is robust, whatever is
wholesomely exuberant, whatever, wholesomely or not, is possessed by
the devouring fury of life--of such things Zola can never have enough.
The admirable opening of _La Terre_, in which a young girl drives
the cow, wild for the male, to the farm where the stockbull is kept,
then leading the appeased animal home again, symbolises Zola’s whole
view of the world. All the forces of Nature, it seems to him, are
raging in the fury of generative desire or reposing in the fulness
of swelling maturity. The very earth itself, in the impressive pages
with which _Germinal_ closes, is impregnated with men, germinating
beneath the soil, one day to burst through the furrows and renew the
old world’s failing life. In this conception of the natural energies of
the world--as manifested in men and animals, in machines, in every form
of matter--perpetually conceiving and generating, Zola reaches his most
impressive effects, though these effects are woven together of elements
that are separately of no very exquisite beauty, or subtle insight, or
radical novelty.
In considering Zola, we are indeed constantly brought back to the fact
that most of the things that he has tried to do have been better done
by more accomplished artists. The Goncourts have extended the sphere of
language, even in the direction of slang, and have faced many of the
matters that Zola has faced, and with far more delicate, though usually
more shadowy, art; Balzac has created as large and vivid a world of
people, though drawing more of it from his own imagination; Huysmans
has greater skill in stamping the vision of strange or sordid things on
the brain; Tolstoi gives a deeper realisation of life; Flaubert is as
audaciously naturalistic, and has, as well, that perfect self-control
which should always accompany audacity. And in Flaubert, too, we find
something of the same irony as in Zola.
This irony, however, is a personal and characteristic feature of
Zola’s work. It is irony alone which gives it distinction and poignant
incisiveness. Irony may be called the soul of Zola’s work, the
embodiment of his moral attitude towards life. It has its source,
doubtless, like so much else that is characteristic, in his early
days of poverty and aloofness from the experiences of life. There is
a fierce impartiality--the impartiality of one who is outside and
shut off--in this manner of presenting the brutalities and egoisms
and pettinesses of men. The fury of his irony is here equalled by
his self-restraint. He concentrates it into a word, a smile, a
gesture. Zola believes, undoubtedly, in a reformed, even perhaps
a revolutionised, future of society, but he has no illusions. He
sets down things as he sees them. He has no tendernesses for the
working-classes, no pictures of rough diamonds. We may see this very
clearly in _Germinal_. Here every side of the problem of modern
capitalism is presented: the gentle-natured shareholding class unable
to realise a state of society in which people should not live on
dividends and give charity; the official class with their correct
authoritative views, very sure that they will always be needed to
control labour and maintain social order; and the workers, some
brutalised, some suffering like dumb beasts, some cringing to the
bosses, some rebelling madly, a few striving blindly for justice.
There is no loophole in Zola’s impartiality; the gradual development
of the seeming hero of _Germinal_, Etienne Lantier, the agitator,
honest in his revolt against oppression, but with an unconscious
bourgeois ideal at his heart, seems unerringly right. All are the
victims of an evil social system, as Zola sees the world, the enslaved
workers as much as the overfed masters; the only logical outcome is a
clean sweep--the burning up of the chaff and straw, the fresh furrowing
of the earth, the new spring of a sweet and vigorous race. That is the
logical outcome of Zola’s attitude, the attitude of one who regards
our present society as a thoroughly vicious circle. His pity for men
and women is boundless; his disdain is equally boundless. It is only
towards animals that his tenderness is untouched by contempt; some
of his most memorable passages are concerned with the sufferings of
animals. The New Jerusalem may be fitted up, but the Montsou miners
will never reach it; they will fight for the first small, stuffy,
middle-class villa they meet on the way. And Zola pours out the stream
of his pitiful, pitiless irony on the weak, helpless, erring children
of men. It is this moral energy, combined with his volcanic exuberance,
which lifts him to a position of influence above the greater artists
with whom we may compare him.
It is by no means probable that the world will continue to read Zola
much longer. His work is already done; but when the nineteenth century
is well past it may be that he will still have his interest. There will
be plenty of material, especially in the newspapers, for the future
historian to reconstruct the social life of the latter half of the
nineteenth century. But the material is so vast that these historians
will possibly be even more biassed and one-sided than our own. For a
vivid, impartial picture--on the whole a faithful picture--of certain
of the most characteristic aspects of this period, seen indeed from
the outside, but drawn by a contemporary in all its intimate and even
repulsive details, the reader of a future age can best go to Zola.
What would we not give for a thirteenth century Zola! We should read
with painful, absorbed interest a narrative of the Black Death as
exact as that of nineteenth century alcoholism in _L’Assommoir_.
The story of how the serf lived, as fully told as in _La Terre_,
would be of incomparable value. The early merchant and usurer would
be a less dim figure if _L’Argent_ had been written about him.
The abbeys and churches of those days have in part come down to us,
but no _Germinal_ remains to tell of the lives and thoughts of
the men who hewed those stones, and piled them, and carved them. How
precious such record would have been we may realise when we recall
the incomparable charm of Chaucer’s prologue to _The Canterbury
Tales_. But our children’s children, with the same passions alive at
their hearts under incalculably different circumstances, will in the
pages of the Rougon-Macquart series find themselves back again among
all the strange remote details of a vanished world. What a fantastic
and terrible page of old-world romance!
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: “Mes souvenirs,” he told a psychological interviewer,
“ont une puissance, un relief extraordinaire; ma mémoire est énorme,
prodigieuse, elle me gêne; quand j’évoque les objets que j’ai vus, je
les revois tels qu’ils sont réellement avec leurs lignes, leurs formes,
leurs couleurs, leurs odeurs, leurs sons; _c’est une matérialisation
à outrance_; le soleil qui les éclaire m’éblouit presque; l’odeur
me suffoque, les détails s’accrochent à moi et m’empêchent de voir
l’ensemble. Aussi pour le ressaisir me faut-il attendre un certain
temps. Cette possibilité d’évocation ne dure pas très longtemps; le
relief de l’image est d’une exactitude, d’une intensité inouïes,
puis l’image s’efface, disparaît, cela s’en va.” This description
suggests myopia, and it is a fact that Zola has been short-sighted from
youth; he first realised it at sixteen. His other senses, especially
smell, are very keen--largely, however, as an outcome of attention
or practice. Thus while his tactile sensibility and sensibility to
pain are acute, his olfactory keenness is rather qualitative than
quantitative; that is to say that it mainly consists in a marked
memory for odours, a tendency to be emotionally impressed by them,
and an ability to distinguish them in which he resembles professional
perfumers. All these and many other facts have been very precisely
ascertained by means of the full psychological and anthropological
study of M. Zola which has been carried out by experts under the
superintendence of Dr. Toulouse.]
HUYSMANS.
IN trying to represent the man who wrote the extraordinary books
grouped around _A Rebours_ and _En Route_, I find myself
carried back to the decline of the Latin world. I recall those restless
Africans who were drawn into the vortex of decadent Rome, who absorbed
its corruptions with all the barbaric fervour of their race, and then
with a more natural impetus of that youthful fervour threw themselves
into the young current of Christianity, yet retaining in their flesh
the brand of an exotic culture. Tertullian, Augustine, and the rest
gained much of their power, as well as their charm, because they
incarnated a fantastic mingling of youth and age, of decayed Latinity,
of tumultuously youthful Christianity. Huysmans, too, incarnates the
old and the new, but with a curious, a very vital difference. To-day
the _rôles_ are reversed; it is another culture that is now young,
with its aspirations after human perfection and social solidarity,
while Christianity has exchanged the robust beauty of youth for the
subtler beauty of age. “The most perfect analogy to our time which I
can find,” wrote Renan to his sister amid the tumults of Paris in 1848,
a few weeks after Huysmans had been born in the same city, “is the
moment when Christianity and paganism stood face to face.” Huysmans had
wandered from ancestral haunts of mediæval peace into the forefront of
the struggles of our day, bringing the clear, refined perceptions of
old culture to the intensest vision of the modern world yet attained,
but never at rest, never once grasping except on the purely æsthetic
side the significance of the new age, always haunted by the memory of
the past and perpetually feeling his way back to what seems to him the
home of his soul.--The fervent seeker of those early days, indeed, but
_à rebours_!
This is scarcely a mere impression; one might be tempted to say that it
is strictly the formula of this complex and interesting personality.
Coming on the maternal side from an ordinary Parisian bourgeois stock,
though there chanced to be a sculptor even along this line, on the
paternal side he belongs to an alien aristocracy of art. From father
to son his ancestors were painters, of whom at least one, Cornelius
Huysmans, still figures honourably in our public galleries, while
the last of them left Breda to take up his domicile in Paris. Here
his son, Joris Karl, has been the first of the race to use the pen
instead of the brush, yet retaining precisely those characters of
“veracity of imitation, jewel-like richness of colour, perfection of
finish, emphasis of character,” which their historian finds in the
painters of his land from the fourteenth century onwards. Where the
Meuse approaches the Rhine valley we find the home of the men who,
almost alone in the north, created painting and the arts that are
grouped around painting, and evolved religious music. On the side
of art the Church had found its chief builders in the men of these
valleys, and even on the spiritual side also, for here is the northern
home of mysticism. Their latest child has fixed his attention on the
feverish activities of Paris with the concentrated gaze of a stranger
in a strange land, held by a fascination which is more than half
repulsion, always missing something, he scarcely knows what. He has
ever been seeking the satisfaction he had missed, sometimes in the
æsthetic vision of common things, sometimes in the refined Thebaid of
his own visions, at length more joyfully in the survivals of mediæval
mysticism. Yet as those early Africans still retained their acquired
Roman instincts, and that fantastic style which could not be shaken
off, so Huysmans will surely retain to the last the tincture of
Parisian modernity.
Yet we can by no means altogether account for Huysmans by race and
environment. Every man of genius is a stranger and a pilgrim on the
earth, unlike other men, seeing everything as it were at a different
angle, mirroring the world in his mind as in those concave or convex
mirrors which elongate or abbreviate absurdly all who approach them.
No one ever had a keener sense of the distressing absurdity of human
affairs than M. Huysmans. The Trocadero is not a beautiful building,
but to no one else probably has it appeared as an old hag lying on her
back and elevating her spindle shanks towards the sky. Such images of
men’s works and ways abound in Huysmans’ books, and they express his
unaffected vision of life, his disgust for men and things, a shuddering
disgust, yet patient, half-amused. I can well recall an evening spent
some years ago in M. Huysmans’ company. His face, with the sensitive,
luminous eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire’s portraits, the face of a
resigned and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity
of the Divine order but has no wish to make any improper use of his
discovery. He talked in low and even tones, never eagerly, without
any emphasis or gesture, not addressing any special person; human
imbecility was the burden of nearly all that he said, while a faint
twinkle of amused wonderment lit up his eyes. And throughout all his
books until almost the last “l’éternelle bêtise de l’humanité” is the
ever-recurring refrain.
Always leading a retired life, and specially abhorring the society and
conversation of the average literary man, M. Huysmans has for many
years been a government servant--a model official, it is said--at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here, like our own officials at Whitehall,
he serves his country in dignified leisure--on the only occasion on
which I have seen him in his large and pleasant _bureau_, he
was gazing affectionately at Chéret’s latest _affiche_, which
a lady of his acquaintance had just brought to show him--and such
duties of routine, with the close contact with practical affairs they
involve, must always be beneficial in preserving the sane equipoise
of an imaginative temperament. In this matter Huysmans has been more
fortunate than his intimate friend Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who had
wandered so far into the world of dreams that he lost touch with the
external world and ceased to distinguish them clearly. One is at
first a little surprised to hear of the patient tact and diplomacy
which the author of _A Rebours_ spent round the death-bed of
the author of _Contes Cruels_ to obtain the dying dreamer’s
consent to a ceremony of marriage which would legitimate his child.
But Huysmans’ sensitive nervous system and extravagant imagination
have ever been under the control of a sane and forceful intellect;
his very idealism has been nourished by the contemplation of a world
which he has seen too vividly ever to ignore. We may read that in the
reflective deliberation of his grave and courteous bearing, somewhat
recalling, as more than one observer has noted, his own favourite
animal, the cat, whose outward repose of Buddhistic contemplation
envelops a highly-strung nervous system, while its capacity to enjoy
the refinements of human civilisation comports a large measure of
spiritual freedom and ferocity. Like many another man of letters,
Huysmans suffers from neuralgia and dyspepsia; but no novelist has
described so persistently and so poignantly the pangs of toothache
or the miseries of _maux d’estomac_, a curious proof of the
peculiarly personal character of Huysmans’ work throughout. His sole
pre-occupation has been with his own impressions. He possessed no
native genius for the novel. But with a very sound instinct he set
himself, almost at the outset of his career, to describe intimately
and faithfully the crudest things of life, the things most remote from
his own esoteric tastes but at that time counted peculiarly “real.”
There could be no better discipline for an idealist. Step by step he
has left the region of vulgar actualities to attain his proper sphere,
but the marvellous and slowly won power of expressing the spiritually
impalpable in concrete imagery is the fruit of that laborious
apprenticeship. He was influenced in his novels at first by Goncourt,
afterwards a little by Zola, as he sought to reproduce his own vivid
and personal vision of the world. This vision is like that of a man
with an intense exaltation of the senses, especially the senses of
sight and smell. Essentially Huysmans is less a novelist than a poet,
with an instinct to use not verse but prose as his medium. Thus he
early fell under the influence of Baudelaire’s prose-poems. His small
and slight first volume, _Le Drageoir à Epices_, bears witness
to this influence, while yet revealing a personality clearly distinct
from Baudelaire’s. This personality is already wholly revealed in the
quaint audacity of the little prose-poem entitled “L’Extase.” Here,
at the very outset of Huysmans’ career, we catch an unconscious echo
of mediæval asceticism, the voice, it might be, of Odo of Cluny, who
nearly a thousand years before had shrunk with horror from embracing a
“sack of dung;” “quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus!”
“L’Extase” describes how the lover lies in the wood clasping the hand
of the beloved and bathed in a rapture of blissful emotion; “suddenly
she rose, disengaged her hand, disappeared in the bushes, and I heard
as it were the rustling of rain on the leaves;” at once the delicious
dream fled and the lover awakes to the reality of commonplace human
things. That is a parable of the high-strung idealism, having only
contempt for whatever breaks in on its ideal, which has ever been the
mark of Huysmans. His sensitive ear is alive to the gentlest ripple of
nature, and it jars on him; it becomes the deafening Niagara of “the
incessant deluge of human foolishness;” all his art is the research for
a Heaven where the voice of Nature shall no more be heard. Baudelaire
was also such a hyperæsthetic idealist, but the human tenderness
which vibrates beneath the surface of Baudelaire’s work has been the
last quality to make itself more than casually felt in Huysmans. It
is the defect which vitiated his early work in the novel, when he
was still oscillating between the prose-poem and the novel, clearly
conscious that while the first suited him best only in the second
could mastery be won. His early novels are sometimes portentously
dull, with a lack of interest, or even attempt to interest, which
itself almost makes them interesting, as frank ugliness is. They are
realistic with a veracious and courageously abject realism, never,
like Zola’s, carefully calculated for its pictorial effectiveness, but
dealing simply with the trivialest and sordidest human miseries. His
first novel _Marthe_--which inaugurated the long series of novels
devoted to state-regulated prostitution in those slaughter-houses of
love, as Huysmans later described them, where Desire is slain at a
single stroke,--sufficiently repulsive on the whole, is not without
flashes of insight which reveal the future artist, and to some readers
indeed make it more interesting than _La Fille Elisa_, which
the Goncourts published shortly afterwards. Unlike the crude and
awkward _Marthe_--though that book reveals the influence of the
Goncourts--_La Fille Elisa_ shows the hand of an accomplished
artist, but it is also the work of a philanthropist writing with an
avowed object, and of a fine gentleman ostentatiously anxious not to
touch pitch with more than a finger-tip. The Preface to _Marthe_
contains a declaration which remains true for the whole of Huysmans’
work: “I set down what I see, what I feel, what I have lived, writing
it as well as I am able, _et voilà tout_!” But it has ever been a
dangerous task to set down what one sees and feels and has lived; for
no obvious reason, except the subject, _Marthe_ was immediately
suppressed by the police. This first novel remains the least personal
of Huysmans’ books; in his next novel, _Les Sœurs Vatard_--a study
of Parisian workgirls and their lovers--a more characteristic vision
of the world begins to be revealed, and from that time forward there
is a continuous though irregular development both in intellectual grip
and artistic mastery. “Sac au Dos,” which appeared in the _Soirées
de Médan_, represents a notable stage in this development, for
here, as he has since acknowledged, Huysmans’ hero is himself. It is
the story of a young student who serves during the great war in the
Garde Mobile of the Seine, and is invalided with dysentery before
reaching the front. There is no story, no striking impression to
record--nothing to compare with Guy de Maupassant’s incomparably more
brilliant “Boule-de-Suif,” also dealing with the fringe of war, which
appears in the same volume--no opportunity for literary display,
nothing but a record of individual feelings with which the writer
seems satisfied because they are interesting to himself. It is, in
fact, the germ of that method which Huysmans has since carried to so
brilliant a climax in _En Route_. All the glamour of war and
the enthusiasm of patriotism are here--long before Zola wrote his
_Débâcle_--reduced to their simplest terms in the miseries of the
individual soldier whose chief aspiration it becomes at last to return
to a home where the necessities of nature may be satisfied in comfort
and peace. At that time Huysmans’ lack of patriotic enthusiasm seemed
almost scandalous; but when we bear in mind his racial affinities it is
natural that he should, as he once remarked to an interviewer, “prefer
a Leipzig man to a Marseilles man,” “the big, phlegmatic, taciturn
Germans” to the gesticulating and rhetorical people of the French
south. In _Là-Bas_, at a later date, through the mouth of one of
his characters, Huysmans goes so far as to regret the intervention of
Joan of Arc in French history, for had it not been for Joan France and
England would have been restored to their racial and prehistoric unity,
consolidated into one great kingdom under Norman Plantagenets, instead
of being given up to the southerners of Latin race who surrounded
Charles VII.
The best of Huysmans’ early novels is undoubtedly _En Ménage_. It
is the intimate history of a young literary man who, having married a
wife whom he shortly afterwards finds unfaithful, leaves her, returns
to his bachelor life, and in the end becomes reconciled to her. This
picture of a studious man who goes away with his books to fight
over again the petty battles of bachelorhood with the _bonne_
and the _concierge_ and his own cravings for womanly love and
companionship, reveals clearly for the first time Huysmans’ power
of analysing states of mind that are at once simple and subtle.
Perhaps no writer surprises us more by his revealing insight into the
commonplace experiences which all a novelist’s traditions lead him to
idealise or ignore. As a whole, however, _En Ménage_ is scarcely
yet a master’s work, a little laboured, with labour which cannot yet
achieve splendour of effect. Nor can a much slighter story, _A Vau
l’Eau_, which appeared a little later, be said to mark a further
stage in development, though it is a characteristic study, this sordid
history of Folantin, the poor, lame, discontented, middle-aged clerk.
Cheated and bullied on every side, falling a prey to the vulgar woman
of the street who boisterously takes possession of him in the climax
of the story, all the time feeling poignantly the whole absurdity of
the situation, there is yet one spot where hope seems possible. He has
no religious faith; “and yet,” he reflects, “yet mysticism alone could
heal the wound that tortures me.” Thus Folantin, though like André
in _En Ménage_ he resigns himself to the inevitable stupidity
of life, yet stretches out his hands towards the Durtal of Huysmans’
latest work.
In all these novels we feel that Huysmans has not attained to full
self-expression. Intellectual mastery, indeed, he is attaining, but
scarcely yet the expression of his own personal ideals. The poet in
Huysmans, the painter enamoured of beauty and seeking it in unfamiliar
places, has little scope in these detailed pictures of sordid or
commonplace life. At this early period it is still in prose-poems,
especially in _Croquis Parisiens_, that this craving finds
satisfaction. Des Esseintes, the hero of _A Rebours_, who on
so many matters is Huysmans’ mouthpiece, of all forms of literature
preferred the prose-poem when, in the hands of an alchemist of genius,
it reveals a novel concentrated into a few pages or a few lines, the
concrete juice, the essential oil of art. It was “a communion of
thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual
collaboration among a dozen superior persons scattered throughout
the world, a delectation offered to the finest wits, and to them
alone accessible.” Huysmans took up this form where Baudelaire and
Mallarmé had left it, and sought to carry it yet further. In that
he was scarcely successful. The excess of tension in the tortured
language with which he elaborates his effects too often holds him
back from the goal of perfection. We must yet value in _Croquis
Parisiens_ its highly wrought and individual effects of rhythm
and colour and form. In France, at all events, Huysmans is held to
inaugurate the poetic treatment of modern things--a characteristic
already traceable in _Les Sœurs Vatard_--and this book deals with
the æsthetic aspects of latter-day Paris, with the things that are
“ugly and superb, outrageous and yet exquisite,” as a type of which
he selects the Folies-Bergère, at that time the most characteristic
of Parisian music-halls, and he was thus the first to discuss the
æsthetic value of the variety stage which has been made cheaper since.
For the most part, however, these _Croquis_ are of the simplest
and most commonplace things--the forlorn Bièvre district, the poor
man’s _café_, the roast-chestnut seller--extracting the beauty or
pathos or strangeness of all these things. “Thy garment is the palette
of setting suns, the rust of old copper, the brown gilt of Cordovan
leather, the sandal and saffron tints of the autumn foliage.... When
I contemplate thy coat of mail I think of Rembrandt’s pictures, I see
again his superb heads, his sunny flesh, his gleaming jewels on black
velvet. I see again his rays of light in the night, his trailing gold
in the shade, the dawning of suns through dark arches.” The humble
bloater has surely never before been sung in language which recalls
the Beloved of the “Song of Songs.” Huysmans has carried to an even
extravagant degree that re-valuation of the world’s good in which
genius has ever found its chief function. To abase the mighty and exalt
the humble seems to man the divinest of prerogatives, for it is that
which he himself exercises in his moments of finest inspiration. To
find a new vision of the world, a new path to truth, is the instinct
of the artist or the thinker. He changes the whole system of our
organised perceptions. That is why he seems to us at first an incarnate
paradox, a scoffer at our most sacred verities, making mountains of our
mole-hills and counting as mere mole-hills our everlasting mountains,
always keeping time to a music that clashes with ours, at our hilarity
_tristis, in tristitia hilaris_.
In 1889 _A Rebours_ appeared. Not perhaps his greatest
achievement, it must ever remain the central work in which he has
most powerfully concentrated his whole vision of life. It sums up the
progress he had already made, foretells the progress he was afterwards
to make, in a style that is always individual, always masterly in its
individuality. Technically, it may be said that the power of _A
Rebours_ lies in the fact that here for the first time Huysmans has
succeeded in uniting the two lines of his literary development: the
austere analysis in the novels of commonplace things mostly alien to
the writer, and the freer elaboration in the prose-poems of his own
more intimate personal impressions. In their union the two streams
attain a new power and a more intimately personal note. Des Esseintes,
the hero of this book, may possibly have been at a few points suggested
by a much less interesting real personage in contemporary Paris,
the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, but in the main he was certainly
created by Huysmans’ own brain, as the representative of his author’s
hyperæsthetic experience of the world and the mouthpiece of his most
personal judgments. The victim of over-wrought nerves, of neuralgia
and dyspepsia, Des Esseintes retires for a season from Paris to the
solitude of his country house at Fontenay, which he has fitted up, on
almost cloistral methods, to soothe his fantasy and to gratify his
complex æsthetic sensations, his love of reading and contemplation. The
finest pictures of Gustave Moreau hang on the walls, with the fantastic
engravings of Luyken, and the strange visions of Odilon Redon. He has
a tortoise curiously inlaid with precious stones; he delights in all
those exotic plants which reveal Nature’s most unnatural freaks; he
is a sensitive amateur of perfumes, and considers that the pleasures
of smell are equal to those of sight or sound; he possesses a row of
little barrels of liqueurs so arranged that he can blend in infinite
variety the contents of this instrument, his “mouth-organ” he calls
it, and produce harmonies which seem to him comparable to those
yielded by a musical orchestra. But the solitary pleasures of this
palace of art only increase the nervous strain he is suffering from;
and at the urgent bidding of his doctor Des Esseintes returns to the
society of his abhorred fellow-beings in Paris, himself opening the
dyke that admitted the “waves of human mediocrity” to engulf his
refuge. And this wonderful confession of æsthetic faith--with its long
series of deliberately searching and decisive affirmations on life,
religion, literature, art--ends with a sudden solemn invocation that
is surprisingly tremulous: “Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who
doubts, on the sceptic who desires to believe, on the convict of life
who embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the
consoling beacons of ancient faith.”
“He who carries his own most intimate emotions to their highest point
becomes the first in file of a long series of men;” that saying is
peculiarly true of Huysmans. But to be a leader of men one must turn
one’s back on men. Huysmans’ attitude towards his readers was somewhat
like that of Thoreau, who spoke with lofty disdain of such writers as
“would fain have one reader before they die.” As he has since remarked,
Huysmans wrote _A Rebours_ for a dozen persons, and was himself
more surprised than any one at the wide interest it evoked. Yet that
interest was no accident. Certain æsthetic ideals of the latter half
of the nineteenth century are more quintessentially expressed in _A
Rebours_ than in any other book. Intensely personal, audaciously
independent, it yet sums up a movement which has scarcely now worked
itself out. We may read it and re-read, not only for the light which it
casts on that movement, but upon every similar period of acute æsthetic
perception in the past.
II.
The æsthetic attitude towards art which _A Rebours_ illuminates is
that commonly called decadent. Decadence in art, though a fairly simple
phenomenon, and world-wide as art itself, is still so ill understood
that it may be worth while to discuss briefly its precise nature, more
especially as manifested in literature.
Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic
style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further
specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having
become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are
subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole
is subordinated to the parts. Among our own early prose-writers Sir
Thomas Browne represents the type of decadence in style. Swift’s prose
is classic, Pater’s decadent. Hume and Gibbon are classic, Emerson and
Carlyle decadent. In architecture, which is the key to all the arts,
we see the distinction between the classic and the decadent visibly
demonstrated; Roman architecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine
developments completely decadent, and St. Mark’s is the perfected type
of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic
in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of
detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while later Gothic, grown
weary of the commonplaces of structure and predominantly interested
in beauty of detail, is again decadent. In each case the earlier and
classic manner--for the classic manner, being more closely related
to the ends of utility, must always be earlier--subordinates the
parts to the whole, and strives after those virtues which the whole
may best express; the later manner depreciates the importance of the
whole for the benefit of its parts, and strives after the virtues of
individualism. All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a
rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes.
Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we walk down
a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when
we walked up it. But if it is a figurative hill then we view Hell at
the bottom. The word “corruption”--used in a precise and technical
sense to indicate the breaking up of the whole for the benefit of its
parts--serves also to indicate a period or manner of decadence in art.
This makes confusion worse, for here the moralist feels that surely
he is on safe ground. But as Nietzsche, with his usual acuteness
in cutting at the root of vulgar prejudice, has well remarked (in
_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_), even as regards what is called
the period of “corruption” in the evolution of societies, we are apt
to overlook the fact that the energy which in more primitive times
marked the operations of the community as a whole has now simply been
transferred to the individuals themselves, and this aggrandisement
of the individual really produces an even greater amount of energy.
The individual has gained more than the community has lost. An age
of social decadence is not only the age of sinners and degenerates,
but of saints and martyrs, and decadent Rome produced an Antoninus
as well as a Heliogabalus. No doubt social “corruption” and literary
“corruption” tend to go together; an age of individualism is usually
an age of artistic decadence, and we may note that the chief literary
artists of America--Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman--are for the most part in
the technical sense decadents.
Rome supplies the first clear types of classic and decadent literature,
and the small group of recent French writers to whom the term has been
more specifically applied were for the most part peculiarly attracted
by later Latin literature. So far as I can make out, it is to the
profound and penetrating genius of Baudelaire that we owe the first
clear apprehension of the legitimate part which decadence plays in
literature. We may trace it, indeed, in his own style, clear, pure,
and correct as that style always remains, as well as in his literary
preferences. He was a good Latinist, and his favourite Latin authors
were Apuleius, Juvenal, Petronius, Saint Augustine, Tertullian, and
other writers in prose and verse of the early Christian Church. He
himself wrote a love-poem in rhymed Latin verse, adding to it a note
concerning the late Latin decadence regarded as “the supreme sigh of
a vigorous person already transformed and prepared for the spiritual
life,” and specially apt to express passion as the modern world feels
it, one pole of the magnet at the opposite end of which are Catullus
and his band. “In this marvellous tongue,” he added, “solecism and
barbarism seem to me to render the forced negligences of a passion
which forgets itself and mocks at rules. Words taken in a new meaning
reveal the charming awkwardness of the northern barbarian kneeling
before the Roman beauty.” But the best early statement of the meaning
of decadence in style--though doubtless inspired by Baudelaire--was
furnished by Gautier in 1868 in the course of the essay on Baudelaire
which is probably the most interesting piece of criticism he ever
achieved. The passage is long, but so precise and accurate that it must
here in part be quoted: “The poet of the _Fleurs du Mal_ loved
what is improperly called the style of decadence, and which is nothing
else but art arrived at that point of extreme maturity yielded by the
slanting suns of aged civilisations: an ingenious complicated style,
full of shades and of research, constantly pushing back the boundaries
of speech, borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colour
from all palettes and notes from all key-boards, struggling to render
what is most inexpressible in thought, what is vague and most elusive
in the outlines of form, listening to translate the subtle confidences
of neurosis, the dying confessions of passion grown depraved, and the
strange hallucinations of the obsession which is turning to madness.
The style of decadence is the ultimate utterance of the Word, summoned
to final expression and driven to its last hiding-place. One may recall
in this connection the language of the later Roman Empire, already
marbled with the greenness of decomposition, and, so to speak, gamy,
and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine school, the last forms
of Greek art falling into deliquescence. Such indeed is the necessary
and inevitable idiom of peoples and civilisations in which factitious
life has replaced natural life, and developed unknown wants in men.
It is, besides, no easy thing, this style disdained of pedants, for
it expresses new ideas in new forms, and in words which have not yet
been heard. Unlike the classic style it admits shadow.... One may well
imagine that the fourteen hundred words of the Racinian vocabulary
scarcely suffice the author who has undertaken the laborious task of
rendering modern ideas and things in their infinite complexity and
multiple colouration.”
Some fifteen years later, Bourget, again in an essay on Baudelaire
(_Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine_), continued the exposition
of the theory of decadence, elaborating the analogy to the social
organism which enters the state of decadence as soon as the individual
life of the parts is no longer subordinated to the whole. “A similar
law governs the development and decadence of that other organism which
we call language. A style of decadence is one in which the unity of
the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page,
in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of
the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the
word.” It was at this time (about 1884) that the term “decadent” seems
first to have been applied by Barrès and others to the group of which
Verlaine, Huysmans, Mallarmé were the most distinguished members,
and in so far as it signified an ardent and elaborate search for
perfection of detail beyond that attained by Parnassian classicality
it was tolerated or accepted. Verlaine, indeed, was for the most part
indifferent to labels, neither accepting nor rejecting them, and
his work was not bound up with any theory. But Huysmans, with the
intellectual passion of the pioneer in art, deliberate and relentless,
has carried both the theory and the practice of decadence in style to
the farthest point. In practice he goes beyond Baudelaire, who, however
enamoured he may have been of what he called the phosphorescence of
putrescence, always retained in his own style much of what is best in
the classic manner. Huysmans’ vocabulary is vast, his images, whether
remote or familiar, always daring,--“dragged,” in the words of one
critic, “by the hair or by the feet, down the worm-eaten staircase of
terrified Syntax,”--but a heart-felt pulse of emotion is restrained
beneath the sombre and extravagant magnificence of this style, and
imparts at the best that modulated surge of life which only the great
masters can control.
Des Esseintes’s predilections in literature are elaborated through
several chapters, and without question he faithfully reflects his
creator’s impressions. He was indifferent or contemptuous towards
the writers of the Latin Augustan age; Virgil seemed to him thin and
mechanical, Horace a detestable clown; the fat redundancy of Cicero,
we are told, and the dry constipation of Cæsar alike disgusted him;
Sallust, Livy, Juvenal, even Tacitus and Plautus, though for these
he had words of praise, seemed to him for the most part merely
the delights of pseudo-literary readers. Latin only began to be
interesting to Des Esseintes in Lucan, for here at least, in spite
of the underlying hollowness, it became expressive and studded with
brilliant jewels. The author whom above all he delighted in was
Petronius--who reminded Des Esseintes of the modern French novelists he
most admired--and several eloquent pages are devoted to that profound
observer, delicate analyst, and marvellous painter who modelled his own
vivid and precise style out of all the idioms and slang of his day.
After Petronius there was a gap in his collection of Latin authors
until the second century of our own era is reached with Apuleius and
the sterner Christian contemporaries of that jovial pagan, Tertullian
and the rest, in whose hands the tongue that in Petronius had reached
supreme maturity now began to dissolve. For Tertullian he had little
admiration, and none for Augustine, though sympathising with his
_City of God_ and his general disgust for the world. But the
special odour which the Christians had by the fourth century imparted
to decomposing pagan Latin was delightful to him in such authors as
Commodian of Gaza, whose tawny, sombre, and tortuous style he even
preferred to Claudian’s sonorous blasts, in which the trumpet of
paganism was last heard in the world. He was also able to maintain
interest in Prudentius, Sedulius, and a host of unknown Christians
who combined Catholic fervour with a Latinity which had become, as it
were, completely putrid, leaving but a few shreds of torn flesh for
the Christians to “marinate in the brine of their new tongue.” His
shelves continued to show Latin books of the sixth, seventh, and eighth
centuries, among which he found special pleasure in the Anglo-Saxon
writers, and only finally ceased at the beginning of the tenth century,
when “the curiosity, the complicated _naïveté_” of the earlier
tongue were finally lost in scholastic philosophy and mere cartalaries
and chronicles.[8] Then, with a formidable leap of ten centuries, his
Latin books gave place to nineteenth century French books.
Des Esseintes is no admirer of Rabelais or Molière, of Voltaire
or Rousseau. Among the older French writers he read only Villon,
D’Aubigné, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Nicole, and especially Pascal. Putting
these aside, his French library began with Baudelaire, whose works he
had printed in an edition of one copy, in episcopal letters, in large
missal _format_, bound in flesh-coloured pig-skin; he found an
unspeakable delight in reading this poet who, “in an age when verse
only served to express the external aspects of things, had succeeded
in expressing the inexpressible, by virtue of a muscular and sinewy
speech which more than any other possessed the marvellous power of
fixing with strange sanity of expression the most morbid, fleeting,
tremulous states of weary brains and sorrowful souls.” After Baudelaire
the few French books on Des Esseintes’s shelves fall into two groups,
one religious, one secular. Most of the French clerical writers he
disregarded, for they yield a pale flux of words which seemed to him
to come from a school-girl in a convent. Lacordaire he regarded as
an exception, for his language had been fused and moulded by ardent
eloquence, but for the most part the Catholic writers he preferred were
outside the Church. For Hello’s _Homme_, especially, he cherished
profound admiration, and an inevitable sympathy for its author, who
seemed to him “a cunning engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker
of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of a passion and to
explain the play of the wheelwork,” and yet united to this power of
analysis all the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet, and the tortured
ingenuity of a master of style--an ill-balanced, incoherent, yet subtle
personality. But above all he delighted in Barbey d’Aurevilly, shut
out from the Church as an unclean and pestiferous heretic, yet glorying
to sing her praises, insinuating into that praise a note of almost
sadistic sacrilege, a writer at once devout and impious, altogether
after Des Esseintes’s own heart, so that a special copy of the
_Diaboliques_, in episcopal violet and cardinal purple, printed
on sanctified vellum with initials adorned by satanic tails, formed
one of his most cherished possessions. In D’Aurevilly’s style alone he
truly recognised the same gaminess, the speckled morbidity, the flavour
as of a sleepy pear which he loved in decadent Latin and the monastic
writers of old time. Of contemporary secular books he possessed not
many; by force of passing them through the screw-press of his brain few
were finally found solid enough to emerge intact and bear rereading,
and in this process he had accelerated “the incurable conflict which
existed between his ideas and those of the world into which by chance
he had been born.” Certain selected works of the three great French
novelists of his time--Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola--still remained,
for in all three he found in various forms that “nostalgie des au-delà”
by which he was himself haunted; and with Baudelaire, these three were,
in modern profane literature, the authors by whom he had chiefly been
moulded. The scanty collection also included Verlaine, Mallarmé, Poe,
and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whose firm fantastic style and poignantly
ironic attitude towards the utilitarian modern world he found entirely
to his taste. Finally, there only remained the little anthology of
prose-poems. Des Esseintes thought it improbable that he would ever
make any additions to his library; it seemed impossible to him that
a decadent language--“struggling on its death-bed to repair all the
omissions of joy and bequeath the subtlest memories of pain”--would
ever go beyond Mallarmé. This brief summary of the three chapters,
all full of keen if wayward critical insight, which describe Des
Esseintes’s library, may serve at once both to indicate the chief
moulding influences on Huysmans’ own style and to illustrate the
precise nature of decadence in art and the fundamental part it plays.
We have to recognise that decadence is an æsthetic and not a moral
conception. The power of words is great, but they need not befool
us. The classic herring should suggest no moral superiority over the
decadent bloater. We are not called upon to air our moral indignation
over the bass end of the musical clef. All confusion of intellectual
substances is foolish, and one may well sympathise with that fervid
unknown metaphysician to whom we owe the Athanasian creed when he
went so far as to assert that it is damnable. It is not least so in
the weak-headed decadent who falls into the moralist’s snare and
complacently admits his own exceeding wickedness. We may well reserve
our finest admiration for the classic in art, for therein are included
the largest and most imposing works of human skill; but our admiration
is of little worth if it is founded on incapacity to appreciate the
decadent. Each has its virtues, each is equally right and necessary.
One ignorant of plants might well say, on gazing at a seed-capsule with
its seeds disposed in harmonious rows, that there was the eternally
natural and wholesome order of things, and on seeing the same capsule
wither and cast abroad its seeds to germinate at random in the earth,
that here was an unwholesome and deplorable period of decay. But
he would know little of the transmutations of life. And we have to
recognise that those persons who bring the same crude notions into the
field of art know as little of the life of the spirit.
III.
For some years after the appearance of _A Rebours_ Huysmans
produced nothing of any magnitude. _En Rade_, his next novel,
the experience of a Parisian married couple who, under the stress of
temporary pecuniary difficulties, go into the country to stay at an
uncle’s farm, dwells in the memory chiefly by virtue of two vividly
naturalistic episodes, the birth of a calf and the death of a cat.
More interesting, more intimately personal, are the two volumes of art
criticism, _L’Art Moderne_ and _Certains_, which Huysmans
published at about this period. Degas, Rops, Raffaelli, Odilon Redon
are among the artists of very various temperament whom Huysmans
either discovered, or at all events first appreciated in their full
significance, and when he writes of them it is not alone critical
insight which he reveals, but his own personal vision of the world.
To Huysmans the world has ever been above all a vision; it was no
accident that the art that appeals most purely to the eyes is that
of which he has been the finest critic. One is tempted, indeed,
to suggest that this aptitude is the outcome of heredity, of long
generations devoted to laborious watchfulness of the desire of the eye
in the external world, not indeed by actual accumulation of acquired
qualities, but by the passing on of a nervous organism long found so
apt for this task. He has ever been intensely preoccupied with the
effort to express those visible aspects of things which the arts of
design were made to express, which the art of speech can perhaps
never express. The tortured elaboration of his style is chiefly due to
this perpetual effort to squeeze tones and colours out of this foreign
medium. The painter’s brain holds only a pen and cannot rest until it
has wrung from it a brush’s work. But not only is the sense of vision
marked in Huysmans. We are conscious of a general hyperæsthesia, an
intense alertness to the inrush of sensations, which we might well term
morbid if it were not so completely intellectualised and controlled.
Hearing, indeed, appears to be less acutely sensitive than sight, the
poet is subordinated to the painter, though that sense still makes
itself felt, and the heavy multicoloured paragraphs often fall at
the close into a melancholy and poignant rhythm laden with sighs. It
is the sense of smell which Huysmans’ work would lead us to regard
as most highly developed after that of sight. The serious way in
which Des Esseintes treats perfumes is characteristic, and one of the
most curious and elaborate of the _Croquis Parisiens_ is “Le
Gousset,” in which the capacities of language are strained to define
and differentiate the odours of feminine arm-pits. Again, earlier, in
a preface written for Hannon’s _Rimes de Joie_, Huysmans points
out that that writer--who failed to fulfil his early promise--alone
of contemporary poets possessed “la curiosité des parfums,” and
that his chief poem was written in honour of what Huysmans called
“the libertine virtues of that glorious perfume,” opoponax. This
sensitiveness to odour is less marked in Huysmans’ later work, but the
dominance of vision remains.
The two volumes of essays on art incidentally serve to throw
considerable light on Huysmans’ conception of life. For special
illustration we may take his attitude towards women, whom in his
novels he usually treats, from a rather conventionally sexual point of
view, as a fact in man’s life rather than as a subject for independent
analysis. In these essays we may trace the development of his own
personal point of view, and in comparing the earlier with the later
volume we find a change which is significant of the general evolution
of Huysmans’ attitude towards life. He is at once the ultra-modern
child of a refined civilisation and the victim of nostalgia for an
ascetic mediævalism; his originality lies in the fact that in him these
two tendencies are not opposed but harmonious, although the second
has only of late reached full development. In a notable passage in
_En Rade_, Jacques, the hero, confesses that he can see nothing
really great or beautiful in a harvest field, with its anodyne toil,
as compared with a workshop or a steamboat, “the horrible magnificence
of machines, that one beauty which the modern world has been able to
create.” It is so that Huysmans views women also; he is as indifferent
to the feminine ideals of classic art as to its literary ideals. In
_L’Art Moderne_, speaking with admiration of a study of the nude
by Gauguin, he proceeds to lament that no one has painted the unclothed
modern woman without falsification or premeditated arrangement, real,
alive in her own intimate personality, with her own joys and pains
incarnated in the curves of her flesh, and the lash of childbirth
traceable on her flanks. We go to the Louvre to learn how to paint,
he remarks, forgetting that “beauty is not uniform and invariable,
but changes with the age and the climate, that the Venus of Milo,
for instance, is now not more beautiful and interesting than those
ancient statues of the New World, streaked and tattooed and adorned
with feathers; that both are but diverse manifestations of the same
ideal of beauty pursued by different races; that at the present date
there can be no question of reaching the beautiful by Venetian, Greek,
Dutch, or Flemish rites; but only by striving to disengage it from
contemporary life, from the world that surrounds us.” “Un nu fatigué,
délicat, affiné, vibrant” can alone conform to our own time; and he
adds that no one has truly painted the nude since Rembrandt. It is
instructive to turn from this essay to that on Degas, written some six
years later. It may fairly be said that to Degas belongs the honour of
taking up the study of the nude at the point where Rembrandt left it;
and like Rembrandt, he has realised that the nude can only be rightly
represented in those movements, postures, and avocations by which it is
naturally and habitually exposed. It is scarcely surprising, therefore,
that Huysmans at once grasped the full significance of the painter’s
achievement. But he has nothing now to say of the beauty that lies
beneath the confinement of modern garments, “the delicious charm of
youth, grown languid, rendered as it were divine by the debilitating
air of cities.” On the contrary, he emphasises the vision which Degas
presents of women at the bath-tub revealing in every “frog-like and
simian attitude” their pitiful homeliness, “the humid horror of a body
which no washing can purify.” Such a glorified contempt of the flesh,
he adds, has never been achieved since the Middle Ages. There we catch
what had now become the dominant tone in Huysmans’ vision; the most
modern things in art now suggest to him, they seem to merge into, the
most mediæval and ascetic. And if we turn to the essay on Félicien Rops
in the same volume--the most masterly of his essays--we find the same
point developed to the utmost. Rops in his own way is as modern and as
daring an artist of the nude as Degas. But, as Huysmans perceives, in
delineating the essentially modern he is scarcely a supreme artist,
is even inferior to Forain, who in his own circumscribed region is
insurpassable. Rops, as Huysmans points out, is the great artist of
the symbolical rather than the naturalistic modern, a great artist
who furnishes the counterpart to Memlinc and Fra Angelico. All art,
Huysmans proceeds, “must gravitate, like humanity which has given birth
to it and the earth which carries it, between the two poles of Purity
and Wantonness, the Heaven and the Hell of art.” Rops has taken the
latter pole, in no vulgar nymphomaniacal shapes, but “to divulge its
causes, to summarise it Catholically, if one may say so, in ardent and
sorrowful images”; he has drawn women who are “diabolical Theresas,
satanised saints.” Following in the path initiated by Baudelaire and
Barbey D’Aurevilly, Huysmans concludes, Rops has restored Wantonness to
her ancient and Catholic dignity. Thus is Huysmans almost imperceptibly
led back to the old standpoint from which woman and the Devil are one.
_Certains_ was immediately followed by _Là-bas_. This novel
is mainly a study of Satanism, in which Huysmans interested himself
long before it attracted the general attention it has since received
in France. There are, however, three lines of interest in the book,
the story of Gilles de Rais and his Sadism, the discussion of Satanism
culminating in an extraordinary description of a modern celebration
of the Black Mass, and the narration of Durtal’s _liaison_ with
Madame Chantelouve, wherein Huysmans reaches, by firm precision and
triumphant audacity, the highest point he has attained in the analysis
of the secrets of passion. But though full of excellent matter,
the book loses in impressiveness from the multiplicity of these
insufficiently compacted elements of interest.
While not among his finest achievements, however, it serves to mark
the definite attainment of a new stage in both the spirit and the
method of his work. Hitherto he had been a realist, in method if
not in spirit, and had conquered the finest secrets of naturalistic
art; by the help of _En Ménage_ alone, as Hennequin, one of
his earliest and best critics has said, “it will always be possible
to restore the exact physiognomy of Paris to-day.” At the outset of
_Là-bas_ there is a discussion concerning the naturalistic novel
and its functions which makes plain the standpoint to which Huysmans
had now attained. Pondering the matter, Durtal, the hero of the book,
considers that we need, on the one hand, the veracity of document, the
precision of detail, the nervous strength of language, which realism
has supplied; but also, on the other hand, we must draw water from
the wells of the soul. We cannot explain everything by sexuality and
insanity; we need the soul and the body in their natural reactions,
their conflict and their union. “We must, in short, follow the great
high-way so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a
parallel path in the air, another road by which we may reach the Beyond
and the Afterward, to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic
naturalism.” Dostoievsky comes nearest to this achievement, he remarks,
and the real psychologist of the century is not Stendhal but Hello. In
another form of art the early painters--Italian, German, especially
Flemish--realised this ideal. Durtal sees a consummate revelation
of such spiritual naturalism in Matthæus Grünewald’s crucifixion at
Cassel--the Christ who was at once a putrid and unaureoled corpse and
yet a manifest god bathed in invisible light, the union of outrageous
realism and outrageous idealism. “Thus from triumphal ordure Grünewald
extracted the finest mints of dilection, the sharpest essences of
tears.” One may say that the tendency Huysmans here so clearly asserts
had ever been present in his work. But in his previous novels his own
native impulse was always a little unduly oppressed by the naturalistic
formulas of Goncourt and Zola. The methods of these great masters had
laid a burden on his work, and although the work developed beneath, and
because of, that burden, a sense of laborious pain and obscurity too
often resulted. Henceforth this disappears. Huysmans retains his own
complexity of style, but he has won a certain measure of simplicity
and lucidity. It was a natural development, no doubt furthered also
by the position which Huysmans had now won in the world of letters.
_A Rebours_, which he had written for his own pleasure, had
found an echo in thousands of readers, and the consciousness of an
audience inspired a certain clarity of speech. From this time we
miss the insults directed at the _bêtise_ of humanity. These
characteristics clearly mark Huysmans’ next and perhaps greatest book,
in which the writer who had conquered all the secrets of decadent art
now sets his face towards the ideals of classic art.
In _En Route_, indeed, these new qualities of simplicity,
lucidity, humanity, and intensity of interest attain so high a degree
that the book has reached a vast number of readers who could not
realise the marvellous liberation from slavery to its material which
the slow elaboration of art has here reached. In _A Rebours_
Huysmans succeeded in taking up the prose-poem into his novel form,
while at the same time certainly sacrificing something of the fine
analysis of familiar things which he had developed in _En Ménage_.
In _En Route_ he takes the novel from the point he had reached in
_A Rebours_, incorporates into it that power of analysis which
has now reached incomparable simplicity and acuity, and thus wields the
whole of the artistic means which he has acquired during a quarter of
a century to one end, the presentation of a spiritual state which has
become of absorbing personal interest to himself.
I well remember hearing M. Huysmans, many years ago, tell how a
muddle-headed person had wished to commission him to paint a head of
Christ. It seemed then a deliciously absurd request to make of the
author of _A Rebours_, and his face wore the patient smile which
the spectacle of human stupidity was wont to evoke, but I have since
thought that that muddle-headed person was wiser than he knew. As we
look back on Huysmans’ earlier work it is now easy to see how he has
steadily progressed towards his present standpoint. _En Route_
does not represent, as some might imagine, the reaction of an exhausted
debauchee or even the self-deception of a disappointed man of the
world. The temperament of Durtal is that of André and Folantin and Des
Esseintes; from the first, in the _Drageoir à Epices_, Huysmans
has been an idealist and a seeker, by no means an ascetic, rather a man
whose inquisitive senses and restless imagination had led him to taste
of every forbidden fruit, but never one to whom the vulgar pleasures
of life could offer any abiding satisfaction. The more precise record
of Des Esseintes’s early sexual life may help us here; while for
the penultimate stage Durtal’s relations with Madame Chantelouve in
_Là-bas_, and the mingled attraction and repulsion which he felt
for her, are certainly significant. In _En Route_ Durtal magnifies
his own wickedness, as Bunyan did in his _Grace Abounding_; the
saints have always striven to magnify their wickedness, leaving to the
sinners the congenial function of playing at righteousness. To trace
the real permanence of Huysmans’ attitude towards religion it is enough
to turn back to _A Rebours_. Des Esseintes had been educated by
the Jesuits, and it sometimes seemed to him that that education had put
into him some extra-terrestrial ferment which never after ceased to
work, driving him in search of a new world and impossible ideals. He
could find no earthly place of rest; he sought to build for himself a
“refined Thebaid” as a warm and comfortable ark wherein to find shelter
from the flood of human imbecility. He was already drawn towards the
Church by many bonds, by his predilection for early Christian Latinity,
by the exquisite beauty of the ecclesiastical art of the Middle Ages,
by his love for monastic mediæval music, “that emaciated music which
acted instinctively on his nerves” and seemed to him precious beyond
all other. Just as Nietzsche was always haunted by the desire for a
monastery for freethinkers, so Des Esseintes dreamed of a hermitage,
of the advantages of the cloistered life of convents, wherein men are
persecuted by the world for meting out to it the just contempt of
silence.
Des Esseintes, and even the Durtal of _Là-bas_, always put aside
these thoughts with the reflection that, after all, the Church is
only an out-worn legend, a magnificent imposture. In _En Route_
Durtal has taken a decisive step. He has undergone that psychological
experience commonly called “conversion.” It is only of recent years
that the phenomena of conversion have been seriously studied, but we
know at all events that it is not intellectual, not even necessarily
moral transformation, though it may react in either direction, but
primarily an emotional phenomenon; and that it occurs especially in
those who have undergone long and torturing disquietude, coming at
last as the spontaneous resolution of all their doubts, the eruption
of a soothing flood of peace, the silent explosion of inner light. The
insight with which this state is described in _En Route_ seems to
testify to a real knowledge of it. No obvious moral or intellectual
change is effected in Durtal, but he receives a new experience of
reposeful faith, a conviction deeper than all argument. It is really
the sudden emergence into consciousness of a very gradual process, and
the concrete artistic temperament which had been subjected to the
process reacts in its own way. A more abstract intelligence would have
asked: “But, after all, is my faith true?” Durtal, in the presence of
the growing structure of sensory and imaginative forms within him,
which has become as it were a home, feels that the question of its
truth has fallen into the background. Its perfect fitness has become
the affirmation of its truth. Henceforth it is the task of his life to
learn how best to adapt himself to what he recognises as his eternal
home. _En Route_ represents a stage in this adaptation.
By a rare chance--a happier chance than befell Tolstoi under somewhat
similar circumstances--a new development in artistic achievement has
here run parallel, and in exquisite harmony, with the new spiritual
development. The growing simplicity of Huysmans’ work has reached a
point beyond which it could not perhaps be carried without injury to
his vivid and concrete style. And the new simplicity of spirit, of
which it is the reflection, marks the final retreat into the background
of that unreasonable contempt for humanity which ran through nearly
all the previous books, and now at last passes even into an ecstasy
of adoration in the passages concerning old Simon, the monastery
swine-herd. Huysmans has chiefly shown his art, however, by relying
almost solely for the interest of his book on his now consummate power
of analysis. This power, which we may perhaps first clearly trace in
“Sac au Dos,” had developed in _En Ménage_ into a wonderful skill
to light up the unexplored corners of the soul and to lay bare those
terrible thoughts which are, as he has somewhere said, the lamentable
incarnation of “the unconscious ignominy of pure souls.” In his earlier
masterpiece, _A Rebours_, however, it is little seen, having
mostly passed into æsthetic criticism. The finest episode of emotional
analysis here is the admirable chapter in which Des Esseintes’s attempt
to visit London is narrated. All his life he had wished to see two
countries, Holland and England. (And here we may recall that the former
is Huysmans’ own ancestral land, and that his French critics find in
his work a distinct flavour of English humour.) He had actually been to
Holland, and with visions won from the pictures of Rembrandt, Steen,
and Teniers he had returned disillusioned. Now he went to Galignani’s,
bought an English Baedeker, entered the bodega in the Rue de Rivoli
to drink of that port which the English love, and then proceeded to
a tavern opposite the Gare St. Lazare to eat what he imagined to be
a characteristic English meal, surrounded by English people, and
haunted by memories of Dickens. And as time went by he continued to
sit still, while all the sensations of England seemed to pass along
his nerves, still sat until at last the London mail had started. “Why
stir,” he asked himself, “when one can travel so magnificently in a
chair?... Besides, what can one expect save fresh disillusionment, as
in Holland?... And then I have experienced and seen what I wanted to
experience and see. I have saturated myself with English life; it would
be madness to lose by an awkward change of place these imperishable
sensations.... He called a cab and returned with his portmanteaus,
parcels, valises, rugs, umbrellas, and sticks to Fontenay, feeling the
physical and mental fatigue of a man who returns home after a long and
perilous journey.” There could be no happier picture of the imaginative
life of the artistic temperament. But in _En Route_ analysis is
the prime element of interest; from first to last there is nothing to
hold us but this searching and poignant analysis of the fluctuations of
Durtal’s soul through the small section which he here travels in the
road towards spiritual peace. And on the way, lightly, as by chance,
the author drops the finest appreciations of liturgical æsthetics, of
plain-chant, of the way of the Church with the soul, of the everlasting
struggle with the Evil One. There could, for instance, be no better
statement than this of one of the mystic’s secrets: “There are two
ways of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens us, casting it away
or letting it fall. To cast away requires an effort of which we may not
be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is simpler, without peril,
within reach of all. To cast away, again, implies a certain interest,
a certain animation, even a certain fear; to let fall is absolute
indifference, absolute contempt; believe me, use this method, and Satan
will flee.” How many forms of Satan there are in the world before which
we may profitably meditate on these words! To strive or cry in the face
of human stupidity is not the way to set it to flight; that is the
lesson which Des Esseintes would never listen to, which Durtal has at
last learnt.[9]
_En Route_ is the first of a trilogy, and the names of the succeeding
volumes, _La Cathédrale_ and _L’Oblat_, sufficiently indicate the end
of the path on which Durtal, if not indeed his creator, has started.
But however that may prove, whatever Huysmans’ own final stage may be,
there can be little doubt that he is the greatest master of style, and
within his own limits the subtlest thinker and the acutest psychologist
who in France to-day uses the medium of the novel. Only Zola can be
compared with him, and between them there can be no kind of rivalry.
Zola, with his immense and exuberant temperament, his sanity and
width of view, his robust and plebeian art, has his own place on the
high-road of modern literature. Huysmans, an intellectual and æsthetic
aristocrat, has followed with unflinching sincerity the by-path
along which his own more high-strung and exceptional temperament has
led him, and his place, if seemingly a smaller one, is at least as
sure; wherever men occupy themselves with the literature of the late
nineteenth century they will certainly sometimes talk about Zola,
sometimes read Huysmans. Zola’s cyclopean architecture can only be
seen as a whole when we have completed the weary task of investigating
it in detail; in Huysmans we seek the expressiveness of the page,
the sentence, the word. Strange as it may seem to some, it is the
so-called realist who has given us the more idealised rendering of
life; the concentrated vision of the idealist in his own smaller sphere
has revealed not alone mysteries of the soul, but even the exterior
secrets of life. True it is that Huysmans has passed by with serene
indifference, or else with contempt, the things which through the ages
we have slowly learnt to count beautiful. But on the other hand, he has
helped to enlarge the sphere of our delight by a new vision of beauty
where before to our eyes there was no beauty, exercising the proper
function of the artist who ever chooses the base and despised things of
the world, even the things that are not, to put to nought the things
that are. Therein the decadent has his justification. And while we
may accept the pioneer’s new vision of beauty, we are not called upon
to reject those old familiar visions for which he has no eyes, only
because his gaze must be fixed upon that unfamiliar height towards
which he is leading the men who come after.
IV.
Huysmans very exquisitely represents one aspect of the complex modern
soul, that aspect which shrinks from the grosser forces of Nature,
from the bare simplicity of the naked sky or the naked body, the
“incessant deluge of human foolishness,” the eternal oppression of
the commonplace, to find a sedative for its exasperated nerves in the
contemplation of esoteric beauty and the difficult search for the
mystic peace which passes all understanding. “Needs must I rejoice
beyond the age,” runs the motto from the old Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck
set on the front of _A Rebours_, “though the world has horror of
my joy and its grossness cannot understand what I would say.” Such is
decadence; such, indeed, is religion, in the wide and true sense of
the word. Christianity itself, as we know it in the western church,
sprang from the baptism of young barbarism into Latin decadence. Pagan
art and its clear serenity, science, rationalism, the bright, rough
vigour of the sun and the sea, the adorable mystery of common life and
commonplace human love, are left to make up the spirit that in any age
we call “classic.”
Thus what we call classic corresponds on the spiritual side to the love
of natural things, and what we call decadent to the research for the
things which seem to lie beyond Nature. “Corporea pulchritudo in pelle
solummodo constat. Nam si viderent homines hoc quod subtus pellem est,
sicut lynces in Beotia cernere interiore dicuntur, mulieres videre
nausearent. Iste decor in flegmate et sanguine et humore ac felle
constitit.” That is St. Odo of Cluny’s acute analysis of woman, who
for man is ever the symbol of Nature: beauty is skin-deep, drowned in
excretions which we should scarcely care to touch with the finger’s
tip. And for the classic vision of Nature, listen to that fantastic
and gigantic Englishman, Sir Kenelm Digby, whose _Memoirs_,
whose whole personality, embodied the final efflorescence of the
pagan English Renaissance. He has been admitted by her maids to the
bedchamber of Venetia Stanley, the famous beauty who afterwards became
his wife; she is still sleeping, and he cannot resist the temptation to
undress and lie gently and reverently beside her, as half disturbed in
her slumber she rolled on to her side from beneath the clothes; “and
her smock was so twisted about her fair body that all her legs and the
best part of her thighs were naked, which lay so one over the other
that they made a deep shadow where the never-satisfied eyes wished for
the greatest light. A natural ruddiness did shine through the skin, as
the sunbeams do through crystal or water, and ascertained him that it
was flesh that he gazed upon, which yet he durst not touch for fear
of melting it, so like snow it looked. Her belly was covered with her
smock, which it raised up with a gentle swelling, and expressed the
perfect figure of it through the folds of that discourteous veil.
Her paps were like two globes--wherein the glories of the heaven
and the earth were designed, and the azure veins seemed to divide
constellations and kingdoms--between both which began the milky way
which leadeth lovers to their Paradise, somewhat shadowed by the
yielding downwards of the uppermost of them as she lay upon her side,
and out of that darkness did glisten a few drops of sweat like diamond
sparks, and a more fragrant odour than the violets or primroses, whose
season was nearly passed, to give way to the warmer sun and the longest
days.” They play with the same counters, you observe, these two, Odo
and Digby, with skin, sweat, and so forth, each placing upon them his
own values. Idealists both of them, the one idealises along the line
of death, the other along the line of life which the whole race has
followed, and both on their own grounds are irrefutable, the logic
of life and the logic of death, alike solidly founded in the very
structure of the world, of which man is the measuring-rod.
The classic party of Nature seems, indeed, the stronger--in seeming
only, and one recalls that, of the two witnesses just cited, the abbot
of Cluny was the most venerated man of his age, while no one troubled
even to publish Digby’s _Memoirs_ until our own century--but
it carries weakness in its very strength, the weakness of a great
political party formed by coalition. It has not alone idealists on its
side, but for the most part also the blind forces of robust vulgarity.
So that the more fine-strung spirits are sometimes driven to a reaction
against Nature and rationalism, like that of which Huysmans, from
“L’Extase” onwards, has been the consistent representative. At the
present moment such a reaction has attained a certain ascendency.
Christianity once fitted nearly every person born into the European
world; there must needs be some to whom, in no modern devitalised
form but in its purest essence, it is still the one refuge possible.
No doubt conditions have changed; the very world itself is not what
it was to the mediæval man. One has to recognise that the modern
European differs in this from his mediæval ancestor that now we know
how largely the world is of our own making. The sense of interiority,
as the psychologists say, is of much later development than the sense
of exteriority. For the mediæval man,--as still to-day for the child in
the darkness,--his dreams and his fancies, every organic thrill in eye
or ear, seemed to be flashed on him from a world of angels and demons
without. In a sense which is scarcely true to-day the average man of
those days--not the finer or the coarser natures, it may well be--might
be said to be the victim of a species of madness, a paranoia, a
systematised persecutional delusion. He could not look serenely in the
face of the stars or lie at rest among the fir-cones in the wood, for
who knew what ambush of the Enemy might not lurk behind these things?
Even in flowers, as St. Cyprian said, the Enemy lay hidden.
“Nil jocundum, nil amœnum,
Nil salubre, nil serenum,
Nihil dulce, nihil plenum.”
There was only one spot where men might huddle together in safety--the
church. There the blessed sound of the bells, the contact of holy
water, the smell of incense, the sight of the Divine Flesh, wove a
spiritual coat of mail over every sensory avenue to the soul. The winds
of hell might rave, the birds of night dash themselves against the
leaden spires of that fortress whence alone the sky seemed blue with
hope.
Huysmans, notwithstanding a very high degree of intellectual subtlety,
is by virtue of his special æsthetic and imaginative temperament
carried back to the more childlike attitude of this earlier age. The
whole universe appears to him as a process of living images; he cannot
reason in abstractions, cannot _rationalise_; that indeed is why
he is inevitably an artist. Thus he is a born leader in a certain
modern emotional movement.
That movement, as we know, is one of a group of movements now
peculiarly active. We see them on every hand, occultism, theosophy,
spiritualism, all those vague forms on the borderland of the unknown
which call to tired men weary of too much living, or never strong
enough to live at all, to hide their faces from the sun of nature and
grope into cool, delicious darkness, soothing the fever of life. It
is foolish to resent this tendency; it has its rightness; it suits
some, who may well cling to their private dream if life itself is but
a dream. At the worst we may remember that, however repugnant such
movements may be, to let fall remains a better way of putting Satan to
flight than to cast away. And at the best one should know that this is
part of the vital process by which the spiritual world moves on its
axis, alternating between darkness and light.
Therefore soak yourself in mysticism, follow every intoxicating path
to every impossible Beyond, be drunken with mediævalism, occultism,
spiritualism, theosophy, and even, if you will, protestantism--the cup
that cheers, possibly, but surely not inebriates--for the satisfaction
that comes of all these is good while it lasts. Yet be sure that Nature
is your home, and that from the farthest excursions you will return
the more certainly to those fundamental instincts which are rooted in
the zoological series at the summit of which we stand. For the whole
spiritual cosmogony finally rests, not indeed on a tortoise, but on the
emotional impulses of the mammal vertebrate which constitute us men.
Meanwhile we will not grieve because in the course of our pilgrimage
on earth the sun sets. It has always risen again. We may lighten the
darkness of the journey by admiring the beauty of night, plucking back
the cowl if needs must we wear it.--_Eia, fratres, pergamus._
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: It may be gathered from the Preface he wrote at a
later date for M. Remy de Gourmont’s delightful volume, _Le Latin
Mystique_, that Huysmans would no longer draw a line at this point;
for he here speaks with enthusiasm of the styles of St. Bernard, St.
Bonaventure, and St. Thomas d’Aquinas.]
[Footnote 9: In the seventeenth century a great English man of science,
Stephen Hales, had discovered the same truth, for we are told that
“he could look even upon wicked men, and those who did him unkind
offices, without any emotion of particular indignation, not from want
of discernment or sensibility; but he used to consider them only like
those experiments which, upon trial, he found could never be applied to
any useful purpose, and which he therefore calmly and dispassionately
laid aside.”]
ST. FRANCIS AND OTHERS.
THE religion of Jesus was the invention of a race which itself never
accepted that religion. In the East religions spring up, for the most
part, as naturally as flowers, and, like flowers, are scarcely a matter
for furious propaganda. These deep sagacious Eastern men threw us of
old this rejected flower, as they have since sent us the vases and fans
they found too tawdry; and when we send our missionaries out to barter
back the gift at a profit, they say no word, but their faces wear the
mysterious Eastern smile. Yet for us, at all events, the figure of
Jesus symbolises, and will always symbolise, a special attitude towards
life, made up of tender human sympathy and mystical reliance on the
unseen forces of the world. In certain stories of the Gospels, certain
sayings, in many of the parables, this attitude finds the completest
expression of its sweetest abandonment. But to us, men of another
race living in far distant corners of the world, it seems altogether
oriental and ascetic, a morbid exceptional phenomenon. And as a matter
of fact Jesus found no successor. Over the stage of those gracious and
radiant scenes swiftly fell a fire-proof curtain, wrought of systematic
theology and formal metaphysics, which even the divine flames of that
wonderful personality were unable to melt.
Something even stronger than theology or metaphysics has served to
cut us off from the spirit of Jesus, and that is the spirit of Paul,
certainly the real founder of “Christianity,” as we know it, for
Jerome, Augustine, Luther, were all the children of Paul, and in no
respect the children of Jesus. That marvellous little Jew painted in
its main outlines the picture of Christianity which in the theatre of
this world has for so many centuries shut us off from Jesus. Impelled
by the intense and concentrated energy of his twisted suffering nature,
Paul brought “moral force” into our western world, and after it that
infinite procession of hypocrisies and cruelties and artificialities
which still trains loathsomely across the scene of civilised life.
Jesus may have been a visionary, but his visions were in divine harmony
with the course of nature, with the wine and the bread of life,
with children and with flowers. We may be very sure that Paul never
considered the lilies, or found benediction with children. He trampled
on nature when it came in his way, and for the rest never saw it.
He was not, as Festus thought, a madman, but whether or not, as his
experiences seem to indicate, he was a victim to the “sacred disease”
of epilepsy, concerning his profoundly neurotic temperament there can
be no manner of question.
He flung himself on to men, this terrible apostle of the “Gentiles,”
thrusting faith down their throats at the point of a spiritual sword
so fiery and keen that, by no miracle, it soon became a sword of steel
with red blood dripping from its point. Well-nigh everything that
has ever been evil in Christianity, its temporal power, its accursed
intolerance, its contempt for reason, for beautiful living, for every
sweet and sunny and simple aspect of the world--all that is involved
in the awful conception of “moral force”--flows directly from Paul.
What eternal torture could be adequate for so monstrous an offender?
And yet, when you think of the potent personality concentrated in this
morbid man, of his courage, of the intolerance that he wreaked on
himself, the flashes of divine insight in his restless and turbulent
spirit, of the humility of the neuropath who desired to be “altogether
mad,” the pathos of it all, indignation falls silent. What can be said?
Thus Paul and not Peter was the rock on which the Church was built,
and whatever virtues the Church may have possessed have not been the
virtues of Jesus but the quite other virtues of Paul. Yet Jesus has not
wholly been left without witness even in Europe, and it is the special
charm and significance of Francis of Assisi that he, if not alone
certainly chief among European men, has incarnated some measure of the
graciousness that was in Jesus, and made it visible and real to the
European world. And he has done that by no means through the influence
of the Church, or by imitation, but by wholly natural and spontaneous
impulse. To understand Francis we must first of all realise that he was
in no sense and at no time the creature of the Church, being indeed
from first to last in a very real sense antagonistic to the Church. The
whole world as Francis knew it was Christian, and he was by no means a
man of inquisitive analytic intellectual type, a Bruno or a Campanella;
he accepted Christianity because it was there, and while remaining in
it was never of it, resenting fiercely any attempt of the Church to
encroach on the free activity of his personality, dispensing himself of
any intimate adherence not by intellectual sophistries, but by lightly
brushing away science and theology altogether as useless superfluities.
An acute psychologist has well remarked that those famous historical
persons who have passed through two antithetical phases of character,
survive for us usually only in one of those phases, that we can
remember only the post-conversion Augustine and the pre-abdication
Diocletian. Such one-sided views of great and complex characters suit
our rough and lazy methods of ordinary thought, content to regard a
man only on that side which has been most prominently displayed to the
world. But such methods are fatal to any clear psychological conception
of character or to any sound ethical conception of life. Francis lived
one of these double-sided lives, and the Francis we remember is the
emaciated saint already developing the stigmata of divine grace. In
his earlier biographies we catch glimpses of a younger and quite other
Francis, _in vanitatibus nutritus insolenter_, the spendthrift
companion of nobles, proud to surpass them in youthful extravagance and
dissipation, the head of a band which dazzled the citizens of Assisi
with the luxury of their rich garments and the sound of their festive
songs by night, a passionate lover of chivalry and the troubadours,
whose music then filled the air, so full of gaiety that he sometimes
seemed almost mad to the grave citizens of his town, one whose nature
it was from the first to go to excess, always to a fine and generous
excess, that spiritual excess which Blake called the road to the palace
of wisdom.
The later Francis survived; the early Francis is forgotten. But we
may be assured that there would have been no Francis the saint if
there had not been Francis the sinner. That grace and elation, the
tender humanity and infinite delight in natural things, even the
profound contempt for luxury and superfluity, were not learnt in any
of the saint’s beloved Umbrian cells; they were the final outcome
of a beautifully free and excessive life acting on an exquisitely
fine-strung organism. Rarely has any follower of Francis attained
in any measure to his level of exalted freedom, joy, and simplicity
in saintliness. It was not alone that they could not possess his
organism, but they had not lived his life. Their piety even blinded
their eyes, and just as the biographers of Jesus omitted all reference
to the formative years of his life, so also the biographers of Francis
gradually eliminated the early records, terrified at the thought that
their founder may not have been a virgin. We do not win any clear
psychological insight into the man until we realise this.
It is not alone the psychological aspect which becomes clear in the
light of Francis’s early life. These stages of development have
their ethical significance also. It seems to be too often forgotten
that repression and licence are two sides of the same fact. We can
only attain a fine temperance through a fine freedom, even a fine
excess. The women who think that they must at all costs repress
themselves, and the men who--usually with the help of certain private
“accommodements”--consider repression as the proper ideal, have missed
the true safeguards against licence, and flounder for ever in a turbid
sea, at war with themselves, at war with nature. The saints knew
better. By a process of spiritual Pasteurism, a natural and spontaneous
process, they guaranteed their eternal peace. All the real saints, so
far as we know them, had many phases, such of them as were saints from
their mothers’ wombs possessing a significance which for human beings
generally is minimal. The real saints in all ages have forgotten so
many beautiful things, storing so many wonderful experiences in their
past. We should not dye our clothes, says St. Clement of Alexandria,
our life should now be anything but a pageant. Flower-like garments
should be abandoned, and Bacchic revelries, “useful for tragedies, not
for life.” The dyes of Sardis--olive, green, rose-coloured, scarlet,
and ten thousand other hues--invented for voluptuousness, the garments
of embroidered gold and purple, dipped in perfume, stained in saffron,
the bright diaphanous tissues of the dancing girl--to all these we must
bid farewell. But we cannot bid them farewell unless we have known
them. If you would be a saint you must begin by being something other
than a saint. This it was that St. Clement forgot, or never knew.
In youth we are so full of energy, and life seems so long. In our
ethical fervour we accept Clement’s theory of conduct at his own
valuation. One is so scrupulous of others, so anxious lest he hurt
them; and another is so contemptuous of others, so eager to hold
himself back from all but the highest good, and never to let himself
fully go. And there is a fine thrill of pleasure in the self-restraint,
an athletic tension of the soul. It is as if the infant at the breast
should say, I will hold myself back from sucking; I will take only just
ever so little, and not let myself go and draw in the delicious stream
with no after-thought; there will be time for that when I am grown up.
But it is not so. There is only one time in life for milk, only one
time for youth; we cannot postpone life or retrace its milestones, and
what is once lost is lost for ever. The cold waters of self-restraint
and self-denial, as we first put our young feet in them, send a tonic
shiver along the nerves, and we go on and on. But suddenly we find that
the water has risen to our breasts, to our chins, that it is too late,
too late, that we shall never again move and breathe freely in the open
air and sunshine. That is the fate that overtakes the young ascetic
ideal. Unhappier yet are those who snatch the cup of life so hastily in
youth and fill it with such muddy waters that the dregs cling to their
lips for ever, spoiling the taste of the most exquisite things. To
live remains an art, an art which every one must learn, and which no
one can teach.
It may seem that I speak of out-worn things, and that the problem of
saintliness has little relation to the moral problems of our time.
It is far otherwise. You have never seen the world if you have not
realised that an element of asceticism lies at the foundation of life.
You may expel it with the fork of reason or of self-enjoyment, but
being part of Nature herself it must ever return. All the art of living
lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding in. The man who makes
the one or the other his exclusive aim in life will die before he has
ever begun to live. The man who has carried one part of the process to
excess before turning to the other will indeed learn what life is, and
may leave behind him the memory of a pattern saint. But he alone is
the wise master of living who from first to last has held the double
ideal in true honour. In these, as in other matters, we cannot know the
spiritual facts unless we realise the physical facts of life. All life
is a building up and a breaking down, a taking in and a giving out,
a perpetually anabolic and katabolic rhythm. To live rightly we must
imitate both the luxury of Nature and her austerity.
What should be the place of asceticism in modern life? Evidently there
is in human nature an instinct which craves for the sharpening of
enjoyment which comes from simplicity and a finely-tempered abstinence,
a measured drawing back when also it were possible recklessly to let
go. It is easy to wave aside religious asceticism. That, it seems,
may well be left to those who decide to invest their enjoyments in a
heavenly bank which will pay large dividends in another world. There
still remains the rational asceticism that is sweet either for its own
sake, or for its immediate and visible results in human joy.
When we contemplate the modern world from a broadly biological
standpoint, there can be but little difficulty in finding free and
wholesome scope for the ascetic instinct. For the Christian or Buddhist
ascetic of old (as in some measure for his feeble modern imitator, the
theosophist) asceticism was a rapturous indifference to life for the
sake of something that seemed more than life, something that was itself
a “higher life,” and only to be achieved in the treading under foot of
all that men counted life. Such conceptions belong to the past, and can
only be revivified in the failing imaginations of the weary and the
aged who belong to the past. The more subtle and complex conception of
life which has grown up in the modern world traces life to its roots
and finds it most precious where it is most intense. When we wish to
carve out a world for ourselves it is the periphery which we cut away
and not the core. The immense accretions of that periphery in the
modern world make clearer to us than it was to our predecessors that
it is in the simple and elementary things that our life consists. It
is to the honour of Francis that in a vague, imperfect way he foresaw
this. Aided by his early experiences, he cast aside the superfluities
of knowledge and labour and skill--all that vain plethora of mere
formal things and prescribed acts which men foolishly count life--and
symbolising them in wealth, joyfully espoused Poverty as a bride. For
poverty to Francis meant contact with Nature and with men. The free
play of the individual soul in contact with Nature and men, Francis
instinctively felt, is joy and liberation; and if the simple-minded
saint went farther than this, and allowed a certain set of dogmatic
opinions and conventional abstentions, we may be sure that herein he
had no warrant of personal inspiration, but was content to follow the
well-nigh unquestioned traditions of his day. Francis fought, not for
Christianity and still less for the Church, but for the great secret of
fine living which he had personally divined. It was by a true instinct
that his modern biographer finds the motto of his life in the exquisite
saying of the saint’s great precursor, Joachim of Flora, that the true
ascetic counts nothing his own, save only his harp: “Qui vere monachus
est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.”
In former days we used to regard the civilised man as in some way
incorporating in his organism and bringing into the world with him
the inheritance of the ages of human culture. Now the tendency is to
regard civilisation as a growth totally outside man, and to consider
the man himself as a savage who merely adapts himself to civilisation
as he grows up, bringing, it may be, his own little contribution
to its development, but himself remaining practically a savage.
Thus Weismann has argued that the development of music is purely a
development of traditions, and that given the traditions any savage
has a chance of becoming a Bach or a Beethoven. I think this is a more
extreme view than the facts warrant us in taking. But it is fairly
obvious that there has been no growth of the human intellect during
at least the last two or three thousand years. We cannot beat the
Romans at government; we cannot express passion better than Sappho, or
form better than Phidias. We have produced no more truly scientific
physicians than Hippocrates or Galen; we cannot map out the world
more philosophically than Aristotle, nor play at ball with it with
a greater dialectical facility than Plato. What we have done is to
burden ourselves with a vaster mass of tradition. Civilisation is the
garment which man makes to clothe himself with. It is for each of us
to help to put in a patch here, to sew on a button there, or to work
in more embroidery. But the individual himself, with his own personal
organic passions, never becomes part of the garment, he only wears it.
Not, indeed, that we are called upon to refuse to wear it. The person
who can so refuse to follow the whole tradition of the race whence he
springs is organically abnormal, not to say morbid. His fellows have
a fair right to call him a lunatic or a criminal. The real question
is whether we shall allow ourselves to be crushed to the earth, lame,
impotent, and anæmic, by the mere garment of civilisation, or whether
we shall so strive to live that we wear it loosely and easily and
athletically, recognising that it is infinitely less precious than the
humanity it clothes, still not without its beauty and its use.
If we wish to realise how many things are not required for fine living
we may contemplate the “triumphs of the Victorian era.” Contemplating
these we are enabled also to see that they mostly belong to the
mechanical side of existence, among the things that are remote from the
core of life. The new energy that all these inventions may give you on
one side they take from you on the other. They run on the energy that
you yourself supply. They are but devices for burdening your progress
and draining away your energy. For what does it avail though tons of
food are piled before you at the banquet of life if the capacity of
your stomach remains strictly limited? Only the more exquisite quality
of the banquet, with a finer equity in its distribution, could have
brought you new joy and strength. The exquisite things of life are
to-day as rare and as precious as ever they were. If the Victorian era
had given a keener sauce to hunger, a more ravishing delight to love,
if it had added a new joy to the sunlight, or a more delicious thrill
to the springtime, if it had made any of these things a larger part of
the common life, there indeed were a triumph to boast of! But so far
as one can see, the Victorian era has mostly helped to cover over and
push away from men the essential joys of living. Even those who prate
so gleefully of its triumphs find chief of these its narcotics. Let us
use these “triumphs” as much as we will, they belong to the unessential
background against which the real drama of our life must still be
played.
We waste so much of our time on the things that are not truly
essential, worrying ourselves and others. Only one thing is really
needful, whether with this man we say “Seek first the kingdom of
Heaven,” or with that, “Make to yourself a perfect body.” It matters
little, because he who pointed to the kingdom of Heaven came eating and
drinking, the friend of publicans and sinners, and he who pointed to
the body sought solitude and the keenest spiritual austerity. The body
includes the soul, and the kingdom of Heaven includes the body. The one
thing needful is to seek wisely the fullest organic satisfaction. The
more closely we cling to that which satisfies the deepest cravings of
the organism, the more gladly we shall let fall the intolerable burden
of restraints and licences which are not required for fine living. “The
true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp.” It is best to
feel light and elate, free in every limb. Every man may have his burden
to bear; let him only beware that he bears no burden which is not a joy
to carry. If a man cannot sing as he carries his cross he had better
drop it.
One has to admit that among English-speaking races at all events
the conditions have not been favourable for fine living. The racial
elements that have chiefly gone to making the English-speaking peoples
have been mainly characterised by energy, and while energy is the prime
constituent of living, it is scarcely sufficient for fine living. It
is quality rather than quantity of life which finally counts: that
is the terrible fact it has taken so long for our race to learn. To
plough deep in the furrows of life, to scatter human seed broadcast, to
bring to birth your random millions to wilt and fade in the black fog
of London alleys or the hot steam of Lancashire mills, casting abroad
the residue to wreak the vengeance in their blood on every fair and
unspoilt land the world may hold--that is scarcely yet civilisation;
fishes that spawn in the deep have carried the art of living as far
as that. Not energy, even when it shows itself in the blind fury
of righteousness, suffices to make civilisation, but sincerity,
intelligence, sympathy, grace, and all those subtle amenities which go
to what we call, perhaps imperfectly enough, humanity--therein more
truly lie the virtues of fine living.
It seems not unnecessary to point out that civilisation was immortal
long before the first Englishman was born. The races that have given
the world the chief examples of fine living have never, save sometimes
in their decay, sought quantity rather than quality of life. Some of
the world’s most eternal cities are its smallest cities. If indeed the
reckless excess of human life tended to produce happiness, we might
well recognise compensation, and rest content. But, as we know, that
is not so. The country that men call the wealthiest is the poorest in
humanity when the lives and safeties of its workers are concerned, the
law of our righteousness demanding that the weakest shall go to the
wall.
One asks oneself if such a condition of things is fatally necessary.
If that were so, then indeed the outlook of the world is dark. If
the ideal of quantity before quality, of brute energy, of complacent
self-righteousness, is for ever to dominate a large part of the world
through the English-speaking peoples, then indeed we may die happy that
the memory and the vision of better things were yet extant in our time.
Yet surely it is not necessary. If civilisation is a tradition then
we may mould that tradition. We are no longer fatally damned into the
world. If our fathers ate sour grapes our teeth are not on edge. And
even so far as the influence of race counts, there is yet to be set
against it the influence of climate. In sunnier English-speaking lands
we may already trace a new foreign element of grace and suavity, a
deeper insight into the art of living, clearly due in large measure to
sky alone. When races change their sky, unlike individuals, they change
their dispositions also.
But if we put aside this factor--though it is one of much significance
when we recall the accumulating evidence that under proper conditions
the white races can live and flourish in hot climes--are there no
reasons for thinking that even the English in England may acquire
those aptitudes which make not only for the grosser virtues of
civilisation, but also for those finer qualities which alone make life
truly worth living? I think there are.
It is common for pessimists of the baser sort to lament the relative
decay of English supremacy in manufacturing and commercial energy,
and to look enviously at the development in these directions of other
and younger lands. Such an attitude is in any case inhuman, since
these younger countries, especially Germany, are undertaking the
cruder tasks of civilisation in at once a more scientific and a more
humane spirit than we have ever been able to achieve. But it is also
uncalled for. As a civilisation declines in brutal material energy it
gains in spiritual refinement, thus winning more subtle and permanent
influence. Egypt in her old age helped to mould young Greece, which in
turn as she fell civilised her barbarian Roman conquerors. Of early
vigorous Rome nothing remains save the empty echo of heroic virtue;
but on the magnificent compost of Roman, Alexandrian, and Byzantine
decay we northerners are flourishing even to-day. France has not taken
a leading part in the grosser work of modern civilisation, but her
laboratories of ideas, her workshops of beauty, above all her skill in
the fine art of living, have given her an influence over men’s minds
which swarming millions of pale factory hands and an inconceivable
tonnage of mercantile shipping have not so far given to us. But in the
very dying down of these grosser energies there is hope, for we may be
sure that the forces of life are not yet extinct, and that worthier and
subtler ends will float before our eyes as the sculleries and outhouse
offices of life are gradually removed elsewhere. England, there can be
little doubt, is peculiarly fitted to exercise the finer functions of
civilisation, if not indeed for the world generally, at all events for
those peoples of the globe which are allied to her wholly by language
and largely by race. In new countries, in the hurry of cities, in the
barren solitude of plains and hills, men have no time or no chance to
elaborate the ideals and visions for which they yet thirst; they are
not in touch with those great traditions on which alone all worthy
and abiding effort must finally rest. The little group of islands
hidden in this far corner of the Atlantic, bathed in their everlasting
halo of iridescent mist, will be a sacred shrine for fully half the
world. It was the womb in which the world’s most energetic race was
elaborated; we may be sure that the mother feeling will never die out.
Every great name and episode in the slow incubation of the race has
its place and association there. Nothing there which is not visibly
bathed in that glory which for ever touches us in the far past. In
the light of a newer civilisation every aspect of it will claim the
picturesque beauty of the past. And if, as Ribot has lately asserted,
the factories of this century will haunt the minds of future men with
the same picturesque suggestion as the ruins of thirteenth century
abbeys to-day haunt us, how rich a treasure England will possess here!
Men will come from afar to wander among the ruined factories and
furnaces of Lancashire and the Midlands, to gaze at the crumbling charm
of those structures once mortared by tears and blood. They will seek
the massive whirr of vanished mills at dawn, the prolonged clatter of
clogs along the pavement, the flutter of shawls down dark alleys, the
echo of brutal forgotten oaths. Their eyes will vainly try to recall
the men and women of the Victorian era, huddled together in pathetic
self-satisfaction beneath a black pall of smoke and disease and death,
playing out the tragedy they called life. A tender melancholy mightier
than beauty will cling to the decay of that vanished past.
So far we have been developing the modern applications of that spirit
of _simplicity_--of sincere and natural asceticism--which was a
chief part of the secret of the Umbrian saint’s charm. Francis--as
in an earlier age the great Cynics of Greece, and in a later age the
New England transcendentalists--enables us to see that asceticism
is a natural instinct; he knew that so far from being an effort to
crush the body it was an effort to give elation and freedom to the
body--_Gaude, frater corpus!_--and that so far from being an
appeal to sorrow it was a perpetual appeal to joy. Let us throw aside
the useless burdens of life, he seems to say, the things that oppress
body and mind,--care and wealth and learning and books,--that thus we
may become free to concentrate ourselves on the natural things of the
world, attaining therein the joy of living. That was the simplicity of
Francis. There is another vaguer and subtler aspect of his personality
which may be expressed by the allied word _purity_. I mean that
clearness and perfect crystalline transparency symbolised by water,
in which it has its source. That Francis, with all his fine natural
instincts, fully realised all the implications of purity, either on its
physical or its spiritual sides, one may well doubt. Purity has never
been a great Christian virtue, though ever greatly talked about in
Christendom; and while the reliance of Francis on instinct carried him
far beyond the age and the faith in which he lived, his indifference to
the intellectual grip of things which was part of that natural instinct
caused him to be often swayed by the conventions and traditions around
him.
It has been well said that purity--which in the last analysis is
physical cleanness--is the final result of evolution after which
Nature is ever striving. When she had attained to the production of
naked savage man, a creature no longer encumbered with the care of his
fur but freely and constantly bathed by the elements, the perfection of
purity was attained. With the wearing of clothes dirt was again brought
into the world; and so-called civilised man--except when he possesses
leisure for prolonged attention to his person and his clothes--is once
more brought to the level of the lower animals, indeed below them, for
few animals spend so little time and trouble in attaining cleanliness
as garmented man. Pagan classic times, no doubt, cherished a cult of
the body which involved a high regard for physical purity. That is
the very reason why such purity has never been a Christian or modern
virtue. The early Church, feeling profound antagonism to the vices
which in classic times were associated with the bath, from the outset
frequently denied that there was any need for cleanliness at all. Even
so cultured a Christian as Clement of Alexandria would only admit
that women should be clean; it was not necessary for men; “the bath
is to be taken by women for cleanliness and health, by men for health
alone;” in later days the hatred of cleanliness often became quite
whole-hearted. Thus it happens that throughout Europe and wherever
the influence of Christianity has spread there has been on the whole
an indifference to dirt, which is indeed not uncommonly found among
degraded peoples untouched by Christianity, but is certainly nowhere
else found in association with a grade of culture in most other
matters so high. To the Roman the rites of the bath formed one of the
very chief occupations of life, and to this race it has happened, as
probably to no other ancient race, that their baths have often survived
their temples; Rome holds no more memorable relic than the Baths of
Caracalla. For the Mohammedan the love of water is part of religion,
and the energy and skill with which in its prime Islamic civilisation
exploited the free and beautiful use of water, are still to be traced
throughout southern Spain. In the fine civilisation of Japan, again,
the pursuit of physical purity has ever been a simple and unashamed
public duty, and “a Japanese crowd,” says Professor Chamberlain, “is
the sweetest in the world.” How different things are in Christendom one
need not insist.
It is, however, impossible to overrate the magnitude of the issues
which are directly and indirectly enfolded in this question of physical
purity. Christianity, with its studied indifference to cleanliness,
is, after all, a force from the outside so far as we are concerned;
every spontaneous reflective movement of progress involves a reaction
against it. On the physical side it is the mark of the better social
classes that they are clean, and any striving for betterment among the
masses is on the physical side a striving for greater cleanliness.
Personal dirtiness is the real and permanent dividing line of classes.
The instinctive physical shrinking of the clean person from the dirty
person--except at the rare moments when some stronger emotion comes
into play--is profound and inevitable. Nearly every form of honest
natural vulgarity it is possible to find tolerable and sometimes even
charming, but personal physical unwholesomeness remains an impossible
barrier. There is no social equality between the clean and the dirty.
The question of physical purity lies at the root of the real democratic
problem.
Our attitude towards physical purity inevitably determines our attitude
towards the body generally. Without the ideal of cleanliness the body
becomes impure. It cannot be shown. Complete concealment becomes
the ideal of the impure. And however pure and excellent the body
may actually be among ourselves, the traditions of the past remain.
The Greeks considered the dislike to nakedness as a mark of Persian
and other barbarians; the Japanese--the Greeks of another age and
clime--had not conceived the reasons for avoiding nakedness until
taught by the lustful and shame-faced eyes of western barbarians.
Among ourselves it is “disgusting” even to-day to show so much as the
foot.[10] We certainly could not imitate St. Francis, who broke with
his old life by abandoning his father’s house and all that he owned,
absolutely naked.
There is no real line of demarcation between physical purity and
spiritual purity, and the spiritual impurity which marks our
civilisation is certainly related to the physical impurity which has so
long been a tradition of Christendom. Both alike are a consciousness
of uncleanness involving a cloak of hypocrisy. We may well recall that
_sincerity_, if we carry its history sufficiently far back, is one
with physical purity. In some districts of Italy a girl shows that she
is chaste by joining in a certain procession and bearing the symbols of
purity in her hand. At all events so it was once. All women now walk
in the procession of the chaste. In civilised modern life everywhere,
indeed, we all walk in that procession, and bright lustful eyes mingled
with faint starved eyes both look out incongruously from behind the
same monotonously chaste masks. We have forgotten, if we ever knew,
that the filthy rags of our righteousness have alike robbed desire of
its purity and restraint of its beauty.
How far Francis had instinctively divined the meaning and significance
of purity, either on the physical or the moral side, it would be
idle to attempt to inquire too precisely. But this delicate and
admirable saint brings us into an atmosphere in which the true grace
of purity may at least be discerned. His indifference to nakedness,
his affection for animals and interest in their loves, his audacious
banding together of men and women in one order, his gospel of joy and
his everlasting delight in all natural and elementary things, make up a
whole inconceivably different from that vision of the world which the
great mediæval monks, from St. Bernard downwards, spent their lives
in maintaining. He brings us to a point at which we are enabled to
go beyond his own insight, a point at which we may not only see that
asceticism is a simple and natural instinct, not alone recognise the
beauty of sex in flowers and birds, but in human creatures also, and
learn at last that the finest secrets of purity are known only to the
man and woman who have mingled the scent of their sweat with the wild
thyme.
At the present moment it may indeed be said that the purity which is
one with sincerity presents itself to us more broadly and more clearly
in the road of our evolution than it ever has before. Even on the
physical side secrecy is becoming impossible, and as the progress of
physical science makes matter more and more transparent to our eyes,
sincerity must ever become a more stringent and inevitable virtue. And
on the psychic side, also, purity--if you will, sincerity--is even more
surely imposing itself. Within our own time we have been privileged
to see psychology taken from the study into the laboratory and into
the market-place. There is no recess of the soul--however intimate,
however, as we have been taught to think, disgusting--that is not now
opened to the childlike, all-scrutinising curiosity of science. We may
perhaps rebel, but so it is. There are no mysteries left, no noisome
abysses of ignorance veiled by the pretty mists of innocence. In the
face of this tendency private vice must ever become more difficult; we
are learning to detect the whole man in the slightest quiver of his
muscles. Thus, again, purity becomes yet more stringent and inevitable.
We gaze at all facts now, and find none too mean or too sacred for
study. But it is fatal to gaze at certain facts if you cannot gaze
purely. In that lies the final triumph of purity. We may rebel, I
repeat, but so it is, so it must remain.
I do not wish to insist here on the moral aspects of purity--grave and
profound as these are--for I am dealing less with the social aspects
of simplicity and purity than with what I would call their religious
aspects, their power to win our personal peace and joy. How far we are
to-day, at all events in England, from the simplicity and purity of
Francis in the search for peace and joy is brought home very clearly
to those who have ever made it their business to observe the masses of
our population in their finest moments of would-be peace and joy. Many
years ago a curious fascination drew me every Bank Holiday to haunt the
structure and grounds of the Crystal Palace, near which I then lived.
The vision of humanity in the mass, when it has lost the interest which
individuals possess, and taken on the more abstract interest belonging
to the species, has for me at least always had a certain attraction.
But these Bank Holiday crowds had a more special interest. They summed
up and wrote large the characteristics of a nation. These thirty
thousand persons belonging to the class which by virtue of greater
fertility furnishes the ultimate substance of all classes, seemed
to reveal to me the heart of my own people. The perpetual, violent
movement, the meaningless shouts and yells, the haggard bands of young
women standing in the corridors to tramp wearily a treadmill variation
of the Irish jig until they fell into an almost hypnotic state, the
wistful, weary looks in the dull eyes of these seekers, rushing on
among the plaster images of old serene gods, seeing nothing but always
moving, moving they knew not whither, faint, yet pursuing they knew not
what,--the whole of the northern soul, the English soul above all, was
there. On! on! never mind how or where: that seemed the perpetual cry
of these pale, lean, awkward youths and women. And I would think of the
bands of boys and girls in the mediæval crusading epidemics, starting
from the north with the same eyes, asking for Jerusalem at every town,
soon to be slain or drowned in unknown obscure ways. Or sometimes I
recalled the bas-reliefs in the museum at Naples--that most fascinating
of museums--which show how the failing Greek genius concentrated its
now spiritualised energy in the forms of Dionysus and his mænads. With
eager face grown languid he leans on the great thyrsus, which bends
beneath his weight, and in front his mænads, upheld by the ardour of
the search, with heads thrown back and flying hair, still beat their
cymbals desperately, seeking, until they have grown almost unconscious
of search, a far-away joy, an ever-fleeting ideal, of which they have
at last forgotten the name. And so for hours my gaze would be fixed on
the pathetic vulgarity of those terrible crowds.
Of late I have been able to see how the other vigorous and
reproductive race--the race that chiefly shares with England the
partition of the uncivilised world--comports itself at its great
festivals. The Russians are a profoundly and consciously religious
race, and I recall above all the unforgettable scene at the ancient
monastery of Troitsa, near Moscow, as it appeared on the festival of
the Assumption, when pilgrims, women mostly, in every variety of gay
costume, crowded thither on foot from all parts of Russia. There, at
length within the walls of that monastery-fortress on the hill at
Sergievo, they fervently kiss the sacred relics, and having been served
by the dark-robed, long-haired monks with soup and black bread, they
lie down and fall asleep, placid and motionless, on all sides. Young
women, grasping the pilgrim’s staff, a little droop sometimes in the
lips, yet with large brawny thighs beneath the short skirts, stolid
great-breasted women of middle age, wrinkled old women decked in their
ancient traditional adornments--all this gay-coloured multitude fling
themselves down to sleep on the church steps, around its walls, over
the silent graves, heaped up anywhere that the march of on-coming
pilgrims leaves a little space, tired mænads filled for once with the
wine their souls craved, colossal images of immense appeasement. It is
the orgy of a strong, silent, much-suffering race, with all the charm
of childhood yet upon it, too humane to be ferocious in its energy.
We English subordinate the sensory to the motor side of life, and even
find our virtue in so doing. To live in the present, to suffer and
to enjoy our actual evil and good, facing it squarely and making our
account with it--that we cannot do: that was the way of the Greeks and
Romans; it is not our way. We are ever poets and idealists, down to
the dregs of life’s cup. We must strive and push, using our muscles to
narcotise our senses, ever contemptuous of the people who more fully
exercise their senses to grasp the world around them. For the sake of
this muscular auto-intoxication we miss the finest moments life has to
give. The Japanese masses, who fix their popular festival for the day
when the cherry-tree is in finest bloom, and take their families into
the woods to sip tea and pass the day deliciously with the flowers, are
born to a knowledge of that mystery which Francis painfully conquered.
The people to whom such an art of enjoyment is the common practice of
the common people may possibly not succeed in sending ugly and shoddy
goods to clothe and kill the beautiful skins of every savage tribe
under heaven, but we need not fear to affirm that they have learnt
secrets of civilisation which are yet hidden from us in England.
The worth of a civilisation, we may be very sure, is more surely
measured by its power to multiply among the common people the
possibility of having and enjoying such moments than by the mileage of
cotton goods its factories can yield, or even by the output of Bibles
its weary factory hands can stitch. We can know no moments of finer or
purer exhilaration, whether we breathe the bright air of Australian
solitudes and watch the virgin hills lie fold within fold beneath the
stainless sunlight, or in the dimmer and damper air of this old country
recline on Surrey heights by the great beeches of the old deserted
Pilgrim’s Way and meditate of the past. There are few things sweeter
or more profitable than to lie on the velvety floor of a little pine
wood on a forgotten southern height in May, where tall clumps of
full-flowered rhododendra blend with the fragrant gorse which spreads
down to the sparkling sea, and to throw aside everything and dream. In
such moments at such spots we reach the summits of life, learning those
secrets of asceticism which Francis knew so well.
Thus by his words and by his deeds Francis still has his significance
for us. He brought asceticism from the cell into the fields, and became
the monk of Nature. One may doubt whether, as Renan thought, the Song
to the Sun is the supreme modern expression of the religious spirit,
but without doubt it gathers up vaguely and broadly the things that
most surely belong to our eternal peace in this world. That it is the
simplest and naturalest things to which eternal joy belongs is the
divine secret which makes Francis a prince among saints, and it was by
a true inspiration that he dedicated the chief utterance of his worship
of joy in life to the sun.
If it should ever chance that a sane instinct of worship is born again
on earth among civilised men, let us be sure that nothing will seem
more worthy of worship than the sun, the source of that energy out
of which we and all our ideals ultimately spring. Some day, again,
perhaps, men will greet the rising of the sun at the summer solstice on
the hills with music and song and dance, framing their most exquisite
liturgical art to the honour of that supreme source of all earthly
life. It was natural, doubtless, that at some stage of human progress
new-found moral conceptions should intrude themselves as worthier of
human worship. But even the cross itself--if not its great rival the
lunar Mohammedan crescent--was first the symbol of sun-worship, of the
source of life. We may yet rescue that sacred symbol, now fallen to
such sorrowful uses, bearing it onwards to sunnier heights of wholeness
and joy.
Religions are many, and in the mass they seem to us--blinded to the
social functions that religions originally subserved--endlessly harsh
and cruel. But in their summits, in their finest personalities, they
are simple and natural enough, and alike lovely. Look at the Jesus
of the Gospels, the friend of publicans and sinners, the marriage
guest at Cana, so tender-hearted in the house of Simon, the author
of those sayings of quintessential natural wisdom preserved to us in
that string of adorable pearls men call the Sermon on the Mount. Look
at the prophet of Islam, when gazing back at the earth as it seemed
to recede into the distance at the end of his long career, he counted
as first among its claims the simple natural joys: “I love your world
because of its women and its perfumes.” And we remember the depths to
which Christianity and Mohammedanism have alike fallen. Look, again,
at Francis, who in no prim academical sense may be called the first
modern apostle of sweetness and light, a man who found joy unspeakable
in inhaling the fragrance of flowers, in watching the limpid waters of
mountain streams, and whose most characteristic symbol is the soaring
lark he loved so well. And we remember that a century later even
Chaucer, that sweetest and most sympathetic of poets, can only speak
of his friar in words that seem to be of inevitable and unconscious
irony. For every religion begins as the glorious living flame of a
lovely human personality,--or so it seems,--and continues as a barren
cinder-heap. As such, as a Church, whether pagan or Christian, it can
scarcely afford us either light or heat.
Why, one asks oneself, is it necessary for me to choose between Paul
and Petronius? Why pester me on the one hand with the breastplate of
faith and the helmet of salvation, on the other with the feast of
Trimalchio and the kisses of Giton? “A plague of both your houses!” We
are not barbarians, tortured by a moral law, neither are we all pagans
with unmixed instincts of luxury. We are the outcome of a civilisation
in which not only has what we are pleased to regard as the sensual fury
of the ape and tiger become somewhat chastened, but the ascetic fury of
the monk and priest also. Let the child of the south feast still in the
house of Trimalchio with unwounded conscience, if he can; we will not
forbid him. And let the barbarian still flagellate his tense rebellious
nerves with knotted spiritual scourges, if only so can he draw out the
best music they yield; we will be the first to applaud. But most of us
have little to do with the one or the other. The palmiest days of both
ended a thousand years ere we were born. Before the threshold of our
modern world was reached Francis sang in the sun and smiled away the
spectres that squatted on the beautiful things of the earth. On the
threshold of our world Rabelais built his Abbey of Thelème, in whose
rule was but one clause, _Fay ce que vouldras_, a rule which no
pagan or Christian had ever set up before, because never before except
as involved in the abstract conceptions of philosophers, had the
thought of voluntary co-operation, of the unsolicited freedom to do
well, appeared before European men.
What have we to do also, it may be added, with modernity, with the
fashions of an hour? It is well, indeed, to live in the present,
whatever that present may be, but sooner or later we are pushed back,
weary or disillusioned, on the inspiration of our own personality. All
the activity of Francis only wrought a plague of grey friars, scattered
like dust on the highways of Europe. But Francis still remains, and
all things wither into nothingness in the presence of one natural man
who dared to be himself. The best of us can scarcely hope to be more
successful than Francis. But at least we may be ourselves. “Whatever
happens I must be emerald:” that, Antoninus said, is the emerald’s
morality; that must remain our finest affirmation.
Our feet cling to the earth, and it is well that we should learn to
grip it closely and nakedly. But the earth beneath us is not all of
Nature; there are instincts within us that lead elsewhere, and it is
part of the art of living to use naturally all those instincts. In so
doing the spiritual burdens which the ages have laid upon us glide away
into thin air.
And for us, as for him who wrote _De Imitatione Christi_--however
far differently--there are still two wings by which we may raise
ourselves above the earth, simplicity, that is to say, and purity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Thus one learns from the newspapers that the offence of
wearing sandals has involved ejection even from so great a centre of
enlightenment as the Reading Room of the British Museum, while the mere
assertion that an actress appeared on the stage with bare legs was so
damaging that it involved an action for slander, a public apology, and
the payment of “a substantial sum” in compensation.]
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PRESS OPINIONS ON “THE NEW SPIRIT.”
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Woodward.”--_Manchester Guardian._
XI. THE SCIENCE OF FAIRY TALES. By E. SIDNEY HARTLAND.
“Mr. Hartland’s book will win the sympathy of all earnest
students, both by the knowledge it displays, and by a thorough
love and appreciation of his subject, which is evident
throughout.”--_Spectator._
XII. PRIMITIVE FOLK. By ELIE RECLUS.
“An attractive and useful introduction to the study of some aspects of
ethnography.”--_Nature._
XIII. THE EVOLUTION OF MARRIAGE. By Professor LETOURNEAU.
“Among the distinguished French students of sociology, Professor
Letourneau has long stood in the first rank. He approaches the
great study of man free from bias and shy of generalisations. To
collect, scrutinise, and appraise facts is his chief business.
In the volume before us he shows these qualities in an admirable
degree.”--_Science._
XIV. BACTERIA AND THEIR PRODUCTS. By Dr. G. SIMS WOODHEAD.
Illustrated. Second Edition.
“An excellent summary of the present state of knowledge of the
subject.”--_Lancet._
XV. EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. By J. M. GUYAU.
“It is at once a treatise on sociology, ethics, and pædagogics. It
is doubtful whether among all the ardent evolutionists who have had
their say on the moral and the educational question any one has
carried forward the new doctrine so boldly to its extreme logical
consequence.”--Professor SULLY in _Mind_.
XVI. THE MAN OF GENIUS. By Prof. LOMBROSO. Illustrated.
“By far the most comprehensive and fascinating collection of facts
and generalizations concerning genius which has yet been brought
together.”--_Journal of Mental Science._
XVII. THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE. By Prof. KARL PEARSON.
Illustrated.
“The problems discussed with great ability and lucidity, and often in a
most suggestive manner, by Prof. Pearson, are such as should interest
_all_ students of natural science.”--_Natural Science._
XVIII. PROPERTY: ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. By CH.
LETOURNEAU, General Secretary to the Anthropological Society,
Paris, and Professor in the School of Anthropology, Paris.
“M. Letourneau has read a great deal, and he seems to us to have
selected and interpreted his facts with considerable judgment and
learning.”--_Westminster Review._
XIX. VOLCANOES, PAST AND PRESENT. By Prof. EDWARD HULL,
L.L.D., F.R.S.
“A very readable account of the phenomena of volcanoes and
earthquakes.”--_Nature._
XX. PUBLIC HEALTH. By Dr. J. F. J. SYKES. With numerous
Illustrations.
“Not by any means a mere compilation or a dry record of details and
statistics, but it takes up essential points in evolution, environment,
prophylaxis, and sanitation bearing upon the preservation of public
health.”--_Lancet._
XXI. MODERN METEOROLOGY. AN ACCOUNT OF THE GROWTH AND PRESENT
CONDITION OF SOME BRANCHES OF METEOROLOGICAL SCIENCE. By FRANK
WALDO, PH.D., Member of the German and Austrian Meteorological
Societies, etc.; late Junior Professor, Signal Service, U.S.A. With 112
Illustrations.
“The present volume is the best on the subject for general use that we
have seen.”--_Daily Telegraph_ (London).
XXII. THE GERM-PLASM: A THEORY OF HEREDITY. By AUGUST
WEISMANN, Professor in the University of Freiburg-in-Breisgau.
With 24 Illustrations.
“There has been no work published since Darwin’s own books which has
so thoroughly handled the matter treated by him, or has done so much
to place in order and clearness the immense complexity of the factors
of heredity, or, lastly, has brought to light so many new facts and
considerations bearing on the subject.”--_British Medical Journal._
XXIII. INDUSTRIES OF ANIMALS. By F. HOUSSAY. With numerous
Illustrations.
“His accuracy is undoubted, yet his facts out-marvel all romance. These
facts are here made use of as materials wherewith to form the mighty
fabric of evolution.”--_Manchester Guardian._
XXIV. MAN AND WOMAN. By HAVELOCK ELLIS. Illustrated. Second
Edition.
“Mr. Havelock Ellis belongs, in some measure, to the continental school
of anthropologists; but while equally methodical in the collection
of facts, he is far more cautious in the invention of theories, and
he has the further distinction of being not only able to think, but
able to write. His book is a sane and impartial consideration, from a
psychological and anthropological point of view, of a subject which is
certainly of primary interest.”--_Athenæum._
XXV. THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN CAPITALISM. By JOHN A. HOBSON,
M.A.
“Every page affords evidence of wide and minute study, a weighing of
facts as conscientious as it is acute, a keen sense of the importance
of certain points as to which economists of all schools have
hitherto been confused and careless, and an impartiality generally
so great as to give no indication of his [Mr. Hobson’s] personal
sympathies.”--_Pall Mall Gazette._
XXVI. APPARITIONS AND THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE. By FRANK PODMORE,
M.A.
“A very sober and interesting little book.... That thought-transference
is a real thing, though not perhaps a very common thing, he certainly
shows.”--_Spectator._
XXVII. AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. By Professor C.
LLOYD MORGAN. With Diagrams.
“A strong and complete exposition of Psychology, as it takes shape in
a mind previously informed with biological science.... Well written,
extremely entertaining, and intrinsically valuable.”--_Saturday
Review._
XXVIII. THE ORIGINS OF INVENTION: A STUDY OF INDUSTRY AMONG PRIMITIVE
PEOPLES. By OTIS T. MASON, Curator of the Department of Ethnology in
the United States National Museum.
“A valuable history of the development of the inventive
faculty.”--_Nature._
XXIX. THE GROWTH OF THE BRAIN: A STUDY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM IN
RELATION TO EDUCATION. By HENRY HERBERT DONALDSON, Professor of
Neurology in the University of Chicago.
“We can say with confidence that Professor Donaldson has executed his
work with much care, judgment, and discrimination.”--_The Lancet._
XXX. EVOLUTION IN ART: AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE LIFE-HISTORIES OF DESIGNS.
By Professor ALFRED C. HADDON. With 130 Illustrations.
“It is impossible to speak too highly of this most unassuming and
invaluable book.”--_Journal Anthropological Institute._
XXXI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS. By TH. RIBOT, Professor
at the College of France, Editor of the _Revue Philosophique_.
“Professor Ribot’s treatment is careful, modern, and
adequate.”--_Academy._
XXXII. HALLUCINATIONS AND ILLUSIONS: A STUDY OF THE FALLACIES OF
PERCEPTION. By EDMUND PARISH.
“This remarkable little volume.”--_Daily News._
XXXIII. THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY. By E. W. SCRIPTURE, Ph.D.
(Leipzig). With 124 Illustrations.
XXXIV. SLEEP: ITS PHYSIOLOGY, PATHOLOGY, HYGIENE, AND
PSYCHOLOGY. By MARIE DE MANACÉÏNE (St. Petersburg).
Illustrated.
THE SCOTT LIBRARY.
Crown 8vo, Cloth Elegant, Price 1s. 6d. per Volume.
_ISSUE OF NEW VOLUMES._
Vasari’s Lives of Italian Painters. Selected and Prefaced by
HAVELOCK ELLIS.
“Vasari’s Lives” may be approached for such knowledge as they afford
concerning the history of art and the cataloguing of the art-products
of the Italian Renaissance; or they may be approached for the light
Vasari throws on the psychology of genius in artists, from which point
of view he is incomparable. As the personal friend or acquaintance of
some of the world’s greatest artists, Vasari moved in an atmosphere
of artistic tradition, which he has fully recorded. In this volume
the editor has sought to gather from the voluminous _Lives_
everything that is really of value regarding the intimate nature and
habits of the great Florentine artists of the Italian Renaissance.
Laocoon; and other Prose Writings of Lessing. A New Translation, with
an Introduction, by W. B. RÖNNFELDT.
This volume, representative of the prose of Lessing, contains,
besides the Laocoon essay, those portions of Lessing’s Dramatic Notes
(_Hamburgische Dramaturgie_) which deal with various principles
of dramatic art, and which are of permanent interest, together with
the _Education of the Human Race_, Lessing’s last contribution
to theological discussion. A biographical note is prefixed to the
introduction. An entirely new translation is here given.
Pelleas and Melisanda and The Sightless. Two Plays by Maurice
Maeterlinck. Translated from the French by LAURENCE ALMA
TADEMA.
The preface to this volume, while providing for the reader who is
unacquainted with the peculiarly imaginative dramas of Maeterlinck
an excellent introduction to them, furnishes also a bibliography of
Maeterlinck’s works. For the song in Act III. of Pelleas and Melisanda
(“_Mes longs cheveux descendent_”), the attempt at an adequate
English rendition of which has baffled various translators, another
song has, at the request of M. Maeterlinck, been substituted.
The Complete Angler of Walton and Cotton. Edited, with an Introduction,
by CHARLES HILL DICK.
This is a carefully edited reprint of this famous book, prefixed by a
biographical introduction. Pains has been taken in the selection of
the type for this edition, which will be found one of the neatest and
handiest of the many editions of _The Angler_ which have appeared.
Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise.” Translated, with an Introduction, by
Major-General PATRICK MAXWELL.
As the translator of Schiller’s “Maid of Orleans,” “William Tell,”
and of various plays and essays, General Maxwell’s work has been
received with considerable critical appreciation. An analysis of
the play precedes the text in this volume, and copious elucidatory
notes are appended. This translation of one of the most notable
dramatic productions of the last century will be found as faithful and
effective as any that has yet been given to the English reader.
LONDON: WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED, PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unbalanced.
Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant
preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not
changed.
Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.
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