CHAPTER I.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM.
We have already learnt to see in mysticism a principal characteristic of degeneration. It follows so generally in the train of the latter, that there is scarcely a case of degeneration in which it does not appear. To cite authorities for this is about as unnecessary as to adduce proof for the fact that in typhus a rise in the temperature of the body is invariably observed. I will therefore only repeat one remark of Legrain’s:[64] ‘Mystical thoughts are to be laid to the account of the insanity of the degenerate. There are two states in which they are observed—in epilepsy and in hysterical delirium.’ When Federoff,[65] who makes mention of religious delirium and ecstasy as among the accompanying features of an attack of hysteria, puts them down as a peculiarity of women, he commits an error, since they are at least as common in male hysterical and degenerate subjects as in female.
What is really to be understood by this somewhat vague term ‘mysticism’? The word describes a state of mind in which the subject imagines that he perceives or divines unknown and inexplicable relations amongst phenomena, discerns in things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols, by which a dark power seeks to unveil or, at least, to indicate all sorts of marvels which he endeavours to guess, though generally in vain. This condition of mind is always connected with strong emotional excitement, which consciousness conceives to be the result of its presentiments, although it is this excitement, on the contrary, which is pre-existent, while the presentiments are caused by it and receive from it their peculiar direction and colour.
All phenomena in the world and in life present themselves in a different light to the mystic from what they do to the sane man. The simplest word uttered before the former appears to him an allusion to something mysteriously occult; in the most commonplace and natural movements he sees hidden signs. All things have for him deep backgrounds; far-reaching shadows are thrown by them over adjacent tracts; they send out wide-spreading roots into remote substrata. Every image that rises up in his mind points with mysterious silence, though with significant look and finger, to other images distinct or shadowy, and induces him to set up relations between ideas, where other people recognise no connection. In consequence of this peculiarity of his mind, the mystic lives as if surrounded by sinister forms, from behind whose masks enigmatic eyes look forth, and whom he contemplates with constant terror, since he is never sure of recognising any shapes among the disguises which press upon him. ‘Things are not what they seem’ is the characteristic expression frequently heard from the mystic. In the history of a ‘degenerate’ in the clinics of Magnan[66] it is written: ‘A child asks drink of him at a public fountain. He finds this unnatural. The child follows him. This fills him with astonishment. Another time he sees a woman sitting on a curb-stone. He asks himself what that could possibly mean.’ In extreme cases this morbid attitude amounts to hallucinations, which, as a rule, affect the hearing; but it can also influence sight and the other senses. When this is so, the mystic does not confine himself to conjectures and guesses at mysteries in and behind phenomena, but hears and sees as real, things which for the sane man are non-existent.
Pathological observation of the insane is content to describe this mental condition, and to determine its occurrence in the hysterical and degenerate. That, however, is not the end of the matter. We also want to know in what manner the degenerate or exhausted brain falls into mysticism. In order to understand the subject, we must refer to some simple facts in the growth of the mind.[67]
Conscious intellection is activity of the gray surface of the brain, a tissue consisting of countless nerve-cells united by nerve-fibres. In this tissue the nerves, both of the external bodily surface and of the internal organs, terminate. When one of these nerves is excited (the nerve of vision by a ray of light, a nerve in the skin by contact, an organic nerve by internal chemical action, etc.), it at once conveys the excitement to the nerve-cell in the cerebral cortex in which it debouches. This cell undergoes in consequence chemical changes, which, in a healthy condition of the organism, are in direct relation to the strength of the stimulus. The nerve-cell, which is immediately affected by the stimulus conveyed to it by the conducting nerve, propagates in its turn the stimulus received to all the neighbouring cells with which it is connected by fibrous processes. The disturbance spreads itself on all sides, like a wave-circle that is caused by any object thrown into water, and subsides gradually exactly as does the wave—more quickly or more slowly, with greater or less diffusion, as the stimulus that caused it has been stronger or weaker.
Every stimulus which reaches a place on the cerebral cortex results in a rush of blood to that spot,[68] by means of which nutriment is conveyed to it. The brain-cells decompose these substances, and transmute the stored-up energy in them into other forms of energy, namely, into ideas and motor impulses.[69] How an idea is formed out of the decomposition of tissues, how a chemical process is metamorphosed into consciousness, nobody knows; but the fact that conscious ideas are connected with the process of decomposition of tissues in the stimulated brain-cells is not a matter of doubt.[70]
In addition to the fundamental property in the nerve-cells of responding to a stimulus produced by chemical action, they have also the capacity of preserving an image of the strength and character of this stimulus. To put it popularly, the cell is able to remember its impressions. If now a new, although it may be a weaker, disturbance reach this cell, it rouses in it an image of similar stimuli which had previously reached it, and this memory-image strengthens the new stimulus, making it more distinct and more intelligible to consciousness. If the cell could not remember, consciousness would be ever incapable of interpreting its impressions, and could never succeed in attaining to a presentation of the outer world. Particular direct stimuli would certainly be perceived, but they would remain without connection or import, since they are by themselves, and without the assistance of earlier impressions, inadequate to lead to knowledge. Memory is therefore the first condition of normal brain activity.
The stimulus which reaches a brain-cell gives rise, as we have seen, to an expansion of this stimulus to the neighbouring cells, to a wave of stimulus proceeding in all directions. And since every stimulus is connected with the rise of conscious presentations, it proves that every stimulus calls a large number of presentations into consciousness, and not only such presentations as are related to the immediate external cause of the stimulation perceived, but also such as are only aroused by the cells that elaborate them happening to lie in the vicinity of that cell, or group of cells, which the external stimulus has immediately reached. The wave of stimulus, like every other wave-motion, is strongest at its inception; it subsides in direct ratio to the widening of its circle, till at last it vanishes into the imperceptible. Corresponding to this, the presentations, having their seat in cells which are in the immediate neighbourhood of those first reached by the stimulus, are the most lively, while those arising from the more distant cells are somewhat less distinct, and this distinctness continues to decrease until consciousness can no longer perceive them—until they, as science expresses it, sink beneath the threshold of consciousness. Each particular stimulus arouses, therefore, not only in the cell to which it was directly led, but also in countless other contiguous and connected cells, the activity which is bound up with presentation. Thus arise simultaneously, or, more accurately, following each other in an immeasurably short interval of time, thousands of impressions of regularly decreasing distinctness; and since unnumbered thousands of external and internal organic stimuli are carried to the brain, so continually thousands of stimulus-waves are coursing through it, crossing and intersecting each other with the greatest diversity, and in their course arousing millions of emerging, waning, and vanishing impressions. It is this that Goethe means when he depicts in such splendid language how
‘...ein Tritt tausend Fäden regt,
Die Schifflein herüber, hinüber schiessen,
Die Fäden ungesehen fliessen,
Ein Schlag tausend Verbindungen schlägt.’[71]
Now, memory is a property not only of the nerve-cell, but also of the nerve-fibre, which is only a modification of the cell. The fibre has a recollection of the stimulus which it conveyed, in the same way as the cell has of that which it has transformed into presentation and motion. A stimulus will be more easily conducted by a fibre which has already conveyed it, than by one which propagates it for the first time from one cell to another. Every stimulus which reaches a cell will take the line of least resistance, and this will be set out for it along those nerve-tracks which it has already traversed. Thus a definite path is formed for the course of a stimulus-wave, a customary line of march; it is always the same nerve-cells which exchange mutually their stimulus-waves. Presentation always awakens the same resulting presentations, and always appears in consciousness accompanied by them. This procedure is called the association of ideas.
It is neither volition nor accident that determines to which other cells a disturbed cell habitually communicates its stimulus, which accompanying impressions an aroused presentation draws with it into consciousness. On the contrary, the linking of presentations is dependent upon laws which Wundt especially has well formulated.
Those who have not been born blind and deaf (like the unfortunate Laura Bridgman, cited by all psychologists) will never be influenced by one external stimulus only, but invariably by many stimuli at once. Every single phenomenon of the outer world has, as a rule, not only one quality, but many; and since that which we call a quality is the assumed cause of a definite sensation, it results that phenomena appeal at once to several senses, are simultaneously seen, heard, felt, and moreover are seen in different degrees of light and colour, heard in various nuances of timbre, etc. The few phenomena which possess only one quality and arouse therefore only one sense, e.g., thunder, which is only heard, although with varying intensity, occur nevertheless in conjunction with other phenomena, such as, to keep to thunder, with a clouded sky, lightning and rain. Our brains are therefore accustomed to receive at once from every phenomenon several stimuli, which proceed partly from the many qualities of the phenomenon itself, and partly from the phenomena usually accompanying it. Now, it is sufficient that only one of these stimuli should reach the brain, in order to call into life, in virtue of the habitual association of the memory-images, the remaining stimuli of the same group as well. Simultaneity of impressions is therefore a cause of the association of ideas.
One and the same quality belongs to many phenomena. There is a whole series of things which are blue, round, and smooth. The possession of a common quality is a condition of similarity, which is greater in proportion to the number of common qualities. Every single quality, however, belongs to a habitually associated group of qualities, and can by the mechanism of simultaneity arouse the memory-image of this group. In consequence of their similarity, therefore, the memory-images can be aroused of all those groups, which resemble each other in some quality. The colour blue is a quality which belongs equally to the cheerful sky, the cornflower, the sea, certain eyes, and many military uniforms. The perception of blue will awaken the memory of some or many blue things which are only related through their common colour. Similarity is therefore another cause of the association of ideas.
It is a distinctive characteristic of the brain-cell to elaborate at the same time both a presentation and its opposite. It is probable that what we perceive as its opposite is generally, in its original and simplest form, only the consciousness of the cessation of a certain presentation. As the fatigue of the optic nerve by a colour arouses the sensation of the complimentary colour, so, on the exhaustion of a brain-cell through the elaboration of a presentation, the contrary presentation appears in consciousness. Now, whether this interpretation be right or not, the fact itself is established through the ‘contradictory double meaning of primitive roots,’ discovered by K. Abel.[72] Contrast is the third cause of the association of ideas.
Many phenomena present themselves in the same place close to, or after, one another; and we associate there, presentation of the particular place with those objects, to which it is used to serve as a frame. Simultaneity, similarity, contrast, and occurrence in the same place (contiguity), are thus, according to Wundt, the four conditions under which phenomena will be connected in our consciousness through the association of ideas. To these James Sully[73] believes yet a fifth should be added: presentations which are rooted in the same emotion. Nevertheless all the examples cited by the distinguished English psychologist demonstrate without effort the action of one or more of Wundt’s laws.
In order that an organism should maintain itself, it must be in a position to make use of natural resources, and protect itself from adverse conditions of every sort. It can accomplish this only if it possesses a knowledge of these adverse conditions, and of such natural resources as it can use; and it can do this better and more surely the more complete this knowledge is. In the more highly differentiated organism it devolves upon the brain and nervous system to acquire knowledge of the outer world, and to turn that knowledge to the advantage of the organism. Memory makes it possible for the brain to perform its task, and the mechanism by which memory is made to serve the purport of knowledge is the association of ideas. For it is clear that a brain, in which a single perception awakens through the operation of the association of ideas a whole train of connected representations, will recognise, conceive and judge far more rapidly than one in which no association of ideas obtains, and which therefore would form only such concepts as had for their content direct sense-perceptions and such representations as originated in those cells which, by the accident of their contiguity, happened to lie in the circuit of a stimulus-wave. For the brain which works with association of ideas, the perception of a ray of light, of a tone, is sufficient, in order instantly to produce the presentation of the object from which the sensation proceeds, as well as of its relations in time and space, to group these presentations as concepts, and from these concepts to arrive at a judgment. To the brain without association of ideas that perception would only convey the presentation of having something bright or sonant in front of it. In addition, presentations would be aroused which had nothing in common with this bright or sonant something; it could form no image of the exciter of the sense, but it would first have to receive a train of further impressions from several or all of the senses, in order to learn to recognise the various properties of the object, of which at first only a tone or a colour was perceived, and to unite them in a single presentation. Even then the brain would only know in what the object consisted, i.e., what it had in front of it, but not how the object stood in relation to other things, where and when it had already been perceived, and by what phenomena it was accompanied, etc. Knowledge of objects thus acquired would be wholly unadapted to the formation of a right judgment. It can now be seen what a great advantage was given to the organism in the struggle for existence by the association of ideas, and what immense progress in the development of the brain and its activity the acquirement of it signified.
But this is only true with a limitation. The association of ideas as such does not do more to lighten the task of the brain in apprehending and in judging than does the uprising throng of memory-images in the neighbourhood of the excited centre. The presentations, which the association of ideas calls into consciousness, stand, it is true, in somewhat closer connection with the phenomenon which has sent a stimulus to the brain, and by the latter has been perceived, than do those occurring in the geometrical circuit of the stimulus-wave; but even this connection is so slight, that it offers no efficient help in the interpretation of the phenomenon. We must not forget that properly all our perceptions, ideas, and conceptions are connected more or less closely through the association of ideas. As in the example cited above the sensation of blue arouses the ideas of the sky, the sea, a blue eye, a uniform, etc., so will each of these ideas arouse in its turn, according to Wundt’s law, ideas associated with them. The sky will arouse the idea of stars, clouds and rain; the sea, that of ships, voyages, foreign lands, fishes, pearls, etc.; blue eyes, that of a girl’s face, of love and all its emotions; in short, this one sensation, through the mechanism of the association of ideas, can arouse pretty well almost all the conceptions which we have ever at any time formed, and the blue object which we have in fact before our eyes and perceive, will, through this crowd of ideas which are not directly related to it, be neither interpreted nor explained.
In order, however, that the association of ideas may fulfil its functions in the operations of the brain, and prove itself a useful acquisition to the organism, one thing more must be added, namely, attention. This it is which brings order into the chaos of representations awakened by the association of ideas, and makes them subserve the purposes of cognition and judgment.
What is attention? Th. Ribot[74] defines this attribute as ‘a spontaneous or an artificial adaptation of the individual to a predominating thought’. (I translate this definition freely because too long an explanation would be necessary to make the uninitiated comprehend the expressions made use of by Ribot.) In other words, attention is the faculty of the brain to suppress one part of the memory-images which, at each excitation of a cell or group of cells, have arisen in consciousness, by way either of association or of stimulus-wave; and to maintain another part, namely, only those memory-images which relate to the exciting cause, i.e., to the object just perceived.
Who makes this selection among the memory-images? The stimulus itself, which rouses the brain-cells into activity. Naturally those cells would be the most strongly excited which are directly connected with the afferent nerves. Somewhat weaker is the excitement of the cells to which the cell first excited sends its impulse by way of the customary nerve channels; still weaker the excitement of those cells which, by the same mechanism, receive their stimulus from the secondarily excited cell. That idea will be the most powerful, therefore, which is awakened directly by the perception itself; somewhat weaker that which is aroused by the first impression through association of ideas; weaker still that which the association in its turn involves. We know further that a phenomenon never produces a single stimulus, but several at once. If, for example, we see a man before us, we do not merely perceive a single point in him, but a larger or smaller portion of his exterior, i.e., a large number of differently coloured and differently illuminated points; perhaps we hear him as well, possibly touch him, and, at all events, perceive besides him somewhat of his environment, of his spacial relations. Thus, there arise in our brain quite a number of centres of stimulation, operating simultaneously in the manner described above. There awakes in consciousness a series of primary presentations, which are stronger, i.e., clearer, than the associated or consequent representations, namely, just those presentations which the man standing before us has himself aroused. They are like the brightest light-spots in the midst of others less brilliant. These brightest light-spots necessarily predominate in consciousness over the lesser ones. They fill the consciousness, which combines them in a judgment. For what we call a judgment is, in the last resort, nothing else than a simultaneous lighting up of a number of presentations in consciousness, which we in truth only bring into relation with each other because we ourselves became conscious of them at one and the same moment. The ascendency which the clearer presentations acquire over the more obscure, the primary presentations over derived representations, in consciousness, enables them, with the help of the will, to influence for a time the whole brain-activity to their own advantage, viz., to suppress the weaker, i.e., the derived, representations; to combat those which cannot be made to agree with them; to reinforce, to draw into their circuit of stimulation, or simply to arouse, others, through which they themselves are reinforced and secure some duration in the midst of the constant emergence and disappearance of representations in their pursuit of each other. I myself conceive the interference of the will in this struggle for life amongst representations as giving motor impulses (even if unconsciously) to the muscles of the cerebral arteries. By this means the bloodvessels are dilated or contracted as required,[75] and the consequent supply of blood becomes more or less copious.[76] The cells which receive no blood must suspend their action; those which receive a larger supply can, on the contrary, operate more powerfully. The will which regulates the distribution of blood, when incited by a group of presentations temporarily predominating, thus resembles a servant who is constantly occupied in a room in carrying out the behests of his master: to light the gas in one place, in another to turn it up higher, in another to turn it off partly or wholly, so that at one moment this, and at another that, corner of the room becomes bright, dim, or dark. The preponderance of a group of presentations allows them during their period of power to bring into their service, not only the brain-cells, but the whole organism besides; and not only to fortify themselves through the representations which they arouse by way of association, but also to seek certain new sense-impressions, and repress others, in order, on the one hand, to obtain new excitations favourable to their persistence—new original perceptions—and on the other hand, through the exclusion of the rest, to ward off such excitations as are adverse to their persistence.
For instance, I see in the street a passer-by who for some reason arouses my attention. The attention immediately suppresses all other presentations which, an instant before, were in my consciousness, and permits those only to remain which refer to the passer-by. In order to intensify these presentations I look after him, i.e., the ciliary and ocular muscles, then the muscles of the neck, perhaps also the muscles of the body and of the legs, receive motor impulses, which serve the purpose only of keeping up continually new sense-impressions of the object of my attention, by means of which the presentations of him are continuously strengthened and multiplied. I do not notice other persons who for the time come into my field of vision, I disregard the sounds which meet my ears, if my attention is strong enough I do not perhaps even hear them; but I should at once hear them if they proceeded from the particular passer-by, or if they had any reference to him.
This is the ‘adaptation of the whole organism to a predominant idea’ of which Ribot speaks. This it is which gives us exact knowledge of the external world. Without it that knowledge would be much more difficult of attainment, and would remain much more incomplete. This adaptation will continue until the cells, which are the bearers of the predominating presentations, become fatigued. They will then be compelled to surrender their supremacy to other groups of cells, whereupon the latter will obtain the power to adapt the organism to their purposes.
Thus we see it is only through attention that the faculty of association becomes a property advantageous to the organism, and attention is nothing but the faculty of the will to determine the emergence, degree of clearness, duration and extinction of presentations in consciousness. The stronger the will, so much the more completely can we adapt the whole organism to a given presentation, so much the more can we obtain sense impressions which serve to enhance this presentation, so much the more can we by association induce memory-images, which complete and rectify the presentation, so much the more definitely can we suppress the presentations which disturb it or are foreign to it; in a word, so much the more exhaustive and correct will our knowledge be of phenomena and their true connection.
Culture and command over the powers of nature are solely the result of attention; all errors, all superstition, the consequence of defective attention. False ideas of the connection between phenomena arise through defective observation of them, and will be rectified by a more exact observation. Now, to observe means nothing else than to convey deliberately determined sense-impressions to the brain, and thereby raise a group of presentations to such clearness and intensity that it can acquire preponderance in consciousness, arouse through association its allied memory-images, and suppress such as are incompatible with itself. Observation, which lies at the root of all progress, is thus the adaptation through attention of the sense-organs and their centres of perception to a presentation or group of presentations predominating in consciousness.
A state of attention allows no obscurity to persist in consciousness. For either the will strengthens every rising presentation to full clearness and distinctness, or, if it cannot do this, it extinguishes the idea completely. The consciousness of a healthy, strong-minded, and consequently attentive man, resembles a room in the full light of day, in which the eye sees all objects distinctly, in which all outlines are sharp, and wherein no indefinite shadows are floating.
Attention, therefore, presupposes strength of will, and this, again, is the property only of a normally constituted and unexhausted brain. In the degenerate, whose brain and nervous system are characterized by hereditary malformations or irregularities; in the hysterical, whom we have learnt to regard as victims of exhaustion, the will is entirely lacking, is possessed only in a small degree. The consequence of weakness or want of will is incapacity of attention. Alexander Starr[77] published twenty-three cases of lesions, or diseases of the convolutions of the brain, in which ‘it was impossible for the patients to fix their attention’; and Ribot[78] remarks: ‘A man who is tired after a long walk, a convalescent who has undergone a severe illness—in a word, all weakened persons are incapable of attention.... Inability to be attentive accompanies all forms of exhaustion.’
Untended and unrestrained by attention, the brain activity of the degenerate and hysterical is capricious, and without aim or purpose. Through the unrestricted play of association representations are called into consciousness, and are free to run riot there. They are aroused and extinguished automatically; and the will does not interfere to strengthen or to suppress them. Representations mutually alien or mutually exclusive appear continuously. The fact that they are retained in consciousness simultaneously, and at about the same intensity, combines them (in conformity with the laws of conscious activity) into a thought which is necessarily absurd, and cannot express the true relations of phenomena.
Weakness or want of attention, produces, then, in the first place, false judgments respecting the objective universe, respecting the qualities of things and their relations to each other. Consciousness acquires a distorted and blurred view of the external world. And there follows a further consequence. The chaotic course of stimuli along the channels of association and of the adjacent structures arouses the activity both of contiguous, of further, and of furthest removed groups of cells, which, left to themselves, act only so long and with such varying intensity as is proportionate to the intensity of the stimulus which has reached them. Clear, obscure, and yet obscurer representations rise in consciousness, which, after a time, disappear again, without having attained to greater distinctness than they had when first appearing. The clear representations produce a thought, but such a one as cannot for a moment become firmer or clearer, because the definite representations of which it is composed are mingled with others which consciousness perceives indistinctly, or scarcely perceives at all. Such obscure ideas cross the threshold of even a healthy person’s consciousness; but in that case attention intervenes at once, to bring them fully to the light, or entirely to suppress them. These synchronous overtones of every thought cannot, therefore, blur the tonic note. The emergent thought-phantoms can acquire no influence over the thought-procedure because attention either lightens up their faces, or banishes them back to their under-world of the Unconscious. It is otherwise with the degenerate and debilitated, who suffer from weakness of will and defective attention. The faint, scarcely recognisable, liminal presentations are perceived at the same time as those that are well lit and centrally focussed. The judgment grows drifting and nebulous like floating fog in the morning wind. Consciousness, aware of the spectrally transparent shapes, seeks in vain to grasp them, and interprets them without confidence, as when one fancies in a cloud resemblances to creatures or things. Whoever has sought on a dark night to discern phenomena on a distant horizon can form an idea of the picture which the world of thought presents to the mind of an asthenic. Lo there! a dark mass! What is it? A tree? A hayrick? A robber? A beast of prey? Ought one to fly? Ought one to attack it? The incapacity to recognise the object, more guessed at than perceived, fills him with uneasiness and anxiety. This is just the condition of the mind of an asthenic in the presence of his liminal presentations. He believes he sees in them a hundred things at once, and he brings all the forms that he seems to discern into connection with the principal presentation which has aroused them. He has, however, a strong feeling that this connection is incomprehensible and inexplicable. He combines presentations into a thought which is in contradiction to all experience, but which he must look upon as equal in validity to all his remaining thoughts and opinions, because it originated in the same way. And even if he wishes to make clear to himself what is really the content of his judgment, and of what particular presentations it is composed, he observes that these presentations are, as a matter of fact, nothing but unrecognisable adumbrations of presentations, to which he vainly seeks to give a name. Now, this state of mind, in which a man is straining to see, thinks he sees, but does not see—in which a man is forced to construct thoughts out of presentations which befool and mock consciousness like will-o’-the-wisps or marsh vapours—in which a man fancies that he perceives inexplicable relations between distinct phenomena and ambiguous formless shadows—this is the condition of mind that is called Mysticism.
From the shadowy thinking of the mystic, springs his washed-out style of expression. Every word, even the most abstract, connotes a concrete presentation or a concept, which, inasmuch as it is formed out of the common attributes of different concrete presentations, betrays its concrete origin. Language has no word for that which one believes he sees as through a mist, without recognisable form. The mystic, however, is conscious of ghostly presentations of this sort without shape or other qualities, and in order to express them he must either use recognised words, to which he gives a meaning wholly different from that which is generally current, or else, feeling the inadequacy of the fund of language created by those of sound mind, he forges for himself special words which, to a stranger, are generally incomprehensible, and the cloudy, chaotic sense of which is intelligible only to himself; or, finally, he embodies the several meanings which he gives to his shapeless representations in as many words, and then succeeds in achieving those bewildering juxtapositions of what is mutually exclusive, those expressions which can in no way be rationally made to harmonize, but which are so typical of the mystic. He speaks, as did the German mystics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the ‘cold fire’ of hell, and of the ‘dark light’ of Satan; or, he says, like the degenerate in the twenty-eighth pathological case of Legrain,[79] ‘that God appeared to him in the form of luminous shadows;’ or he remarks, as did another of Legrain’s patients:[80] ‘You have given me an immutable evening’ (soirée immutable).[81]
The healthy reader or listener who has confidence in his own judgment, and tests with lucidity and self-dependence, naturally discerns at once that these mystical expressions are senseless, and do but reflect the mystic’s confused manner of thinking. The majority of mankind, however, have neither self-confidence nor the faculty of judging, and cannot throw off the natural inclination to connect some meaning with every word. And since the words of the mystic have no definite meaning in themselves, or in their juxtaposition, a certain meaning is arbitrarily imputed to them, is mysteriously conjured into them. The effect of the mystical method of expression on people who allow themselves to be bewildered is for this reason a very strong one. It gives them food for thought, as they call it; that is to say, it allows them to give way to all kinds of dream-fancies, which is very much easier, and therefore more agreeable, than the toil of reflecting on firmly outlined presentations and thoughts admitting of no evasions and extravagances.[82] It transports their minds to the same condition of mental activity determined by unbridled association of ideas that is peculiar to the mystic; it awakens in them also his ambiguous, unutterable presentations, and makes them divine the strangest and most impossible relations of things to each other. All the weak-headed appear therefore ‘deep’ to the mystic, and this designation has, from the constant use made of it by them, become almost an insult. Only very strong minds are really deep, such as can keep the processes of thought under the discipline of an extraordinarily powerful attention. Such minds are in a position to exploit the association of ideas in the best possible way, to impart the greatest sharpness and clearness to all representations which through them are called into consciousness; to suppress them firmly and rapidly if they are not compatible with the rest; to procure new sense-impressions, if these are necessary in order to make the presentations and judgments predominant at the time in their minds still more vivid and distinct; they gain in this way an incomparably clear picture of the world, and discover true relations among phenomena which, to a weaker attention, must always remain hidden. This true depth of strong select minds is wholly luminous. It scares shadows out of hidden corners, and fills abysses with radiant light. The mystic’s pseudo-depth, on the contrary, is all obscurity. It causes things to appear deep by the same means as darkness, viz., by reason of its rendering their outlines imperceptible. The mystic obliterates the firm outlines of phenomena; he spreads a veil over them, and conceals them in blue vapour. He troubles what is clear, and makes the transparent opaque, as does the cuttle-fish the waters of the ocean. He, therefore, who sees the world through the eyes of a mystic, gazes into a black heaving mass, in which he can always find what he desires, although, and just because, he actually perceives nothing at all. To the weak-headed everything which is clearly, firmly defined, and which, therefore, has strictly but one meaning, is flat. To them everything is profound which has no meaning, and which, therefore, allows them to apply what meaning they please. To them mathematical analysis is flat; theology and metaphysics, deep. The study of Roman law is flat; the dream-book and the prophecies of Nostradamus are deep. The forms assumed by pouring molten lead on New Year’s Eve are the true symbols of their depth.
The content of mystic thought is determined by the individual character and level of culture possessed by each degenerate and hysteric. For we should never forget that the morbidly-affected or exhausted brain is only the soil which receives the seed sown by nurture, education, impressions and experience of life, etc. The seed-grains do not originate in the soil; they only receive in and through it their special irregularities of development, their deformities, and crazy offshoots. The naturalist who loses the faculty of attention becomes the so-called ‘Natural Philosopher,’ or the discoverer of a fourth dimension in space, like the unfortunate Zöllner. A rough, ignorant person from the low ranks of the people falls into the wildest superstition. The mystic, nurtured in religion and nourished with dogma, refers his shadowy impressions to his beliefs, and interprets them as revelations of the nature of the Trinity, or of the condition of existence before birth or after death. The technologist who has fallen into mysticism worries over impossible inventions, believes himself to be on the track of the solution of the problem of a perpetuum mobile, devises communication between earth and stars, shafts to the glowing core of the earth, and what not. The astronomer becomes an astrologist, the chemist an alchemist and a seeker after the philosopher’s stone; the mathematician labours to square the circle, or to invent a system in which the notion of progress is expressed by a process of integration, the war of 1870 by an equation, and so on.
As was set forth above, the cerebral cortex receives its stimuli, not only from the external nerves, but also from the interior of the organism, from the nerves of separate organs, and the nerve-centres of the spinal cord and the sympathetic system. Every excitement in these centres affects the brain-cells, and arouses in them more or less distinct presentations, which are necessarily related to the activity of the centres from which the stimulus proceeds. A few examples will make this clear, even to the uninitiated. If the organism feels the need of nourishment, and we are hungry, we shall not only be generally conscious of an indeterminate desire for food, but there will also arise in our minds definite representations of dishes, of served repasts, and of all the accessories of eating. If we, from some cause, maybe an affection of the heart or lungs, cannot breathe freely, we have not only a hunger for air, but also accompanying ideas of an uneasy nature, presentiments of unknown dangers, melancholy memories, etc., i.e., representations of circumstances which tend to deprive us of breath or affect us oppressively. During sleep also organic stimuli exert this influence on the cerebral cortex, and to them we owe the so-called somatic dreams (Leibesträume), i.e., dream-images about the functioning of any organs which happen not to be in a normal condition.
Now, it is known that certain organic nerve-centres, the sexual centres, namely, in the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, are frequently malformed, or morbidly irritated among the degenerate. The stimuli proceeding from them therefore awaken, in the brain of patients of this sort, presentations which are more or less remotely connected with the sexual activity. In the consciousness, therefore, of such a subject there always exist, among the other presentations which are aroused by the varying stimuli of the external world, presentations of a sexual character, erotic thoughts being associated with every impression of beings and things. In this way he attains to a state of mind in which he divines mysterious relations among all possible objective phenomena, e.g., a railway-train, the title of his newspaper, a piano on the one hand, and woman on the other; and feels emotions of an erotic nature at sights, words, odours, which would produce no such impression on the mind of a sound person, emotions which he refers to unknown qualities in those sights, words, etc. Hence it comes that in most cases mysticism distinctly takes on a decidedly erotic colouring, and the mystic, if he interprets his inchoate liminal presentations, always tends to ascribe to them an erotic import. The mixture of super-sensuousness and sensuality, of religious and amorous rapture, which characterizes mystic thought, has been noticed even by those observers who do not understand in what way it is brought about.
The mysticism which I have hitherto investigated is the incapacity, due to weakness of will, either innate or acquired, to guide the work of the association of ideas by attention, to draw shadowy liminal representations into the bright focal circle of consciousness, and to suppress presentations which are incompatible with those attended to. There exists, however, another form of mysticism, the cause of which is not defective attention, but an anomaly in the sensitivity of the brain and nervous system. In the healthy organism the afferent nerves convey impressions of the external world in their full freshness to the brain, and the stimulation of the brain-cell is in direct ratio to the intensity of the stimulus conducted to it. Not so is the deportment of a degenerate or exhausted organism. Here the brain may have forfeited its normal irritability; it is blunted, and is only feebly excited by stimuli conveyed to it. Such a brain, as a rule, never succeeds in elaborating sharply-defined impressions. Its thoughts are always shadowy and confounded. There is, however, no occasion for me to depict in detail the characteristics of its mental procedure, for in the higher species of the degenerate a blunted brain is hardly ever met with, and plays no part in art or literature. To the possessor of a sluggishly-reacting brain it hardly ever occurs to compose or paint. He is of account only as forming the creative mystic’s partial and grateful public. Inadequate excitability may moreover be a property of the sensory nerves. This irregularity leads to anomalies in mental life, with which I shall deal exhaustively in the next book. Finally, instead of slow reaction there may exist excessive excitability, and this may be peculiar to the whole nervous system and brain, or only to a portion of the latter. A generally excessive excitability produces those morbidly-sensitive natures in whom the most insignificant phenomena create the most astonishing perceptions; who hear the ‘sobbing of the evening glow,’ shudder at the contact of a flower; distinguish thrilling prophecies and fearful threatenings in the sighing of the wind, etc.[83] Excessive irritability of particular groups of cells of the cerebral cortex gives rise to other phenomena. In the affected part of the brain, stimulated either externally or by adjacent stimuli, in other words, by sense impressions or by association, the disturbance does not in this case proceed in a natural ratio to the strength of the exciting cause, but is stronger and more lasting than is warranted by the stimulus. The aroused group of cells returns to a state of rest either with difficulty or not at all. It attracts large quantities of nutriment for purposes of absorption, withdrawing them from the other parts of the brain. It works like a machine which an unskilful hand has set in motion but cannot stop. If the normal action of the brain-cells may be compared to quiet combustion, the action of a morbidly-irritable group of cells may be said to resemble an explosion, and one, too, which is both violent and persistent. With the stimulus there flames forth in consciousness a presentation, or train of presentations, conceptions and reasonings, which suffuse the mind as with the glare of a conflagration, outshining all other ideas.
The degree of exclusiveness and insistence in the predominance of any presentation is in proportion to the degree of morbid irritability in the particular tract of brain by which it is elaborated. Where the degree is not excessive there arise obsessions which the consciousness recognises as morbid. They do not preclude the coexistence of healthy functioning of the brain, and consciousness acquires the habit of treating these co-existent obsessions as foreign to itself, and of banishing them from its presentations and judgments. In aggravated cases these obsessions grow into fixed ideas. The immoderately excitable portions of the brain work out their ideas with such liveliness that consciousness is filled with them, and can no longer distinguish them from such as are the result of sense-impressions, the nature and strength of which they accurately reflect. Then we reach the stage of hallucinations and delirium. Finally, in the last stage, comes ecstasy, which Ribot calls ‘the acute form of the effort after unity of consciousness.’ In ecstasy the excited part of the brain works with such violence that it suppresses the functioning of all the rest of the brain. The ecstatic subject is completely insensible to external stimuli. There is no perception, no representation, no grouping of presentations into concepts, and of concepts into judgments and reasoning. A single presentation, or group of presentations, fills up consciousness. These presentations are of extreme distinctness and clearness. Consciousness is, as it were, flooded with the blinding light of mid-day. There therefore takes place exactly the reverse of what has been noticed in the case of the ordinary mystic. The ecstatic state is associated with extremely intense emotions, in which the highest bliss is mixed with pain. These emotions accompany every strong and excessive functioning of the nerve-cells, every extraordinary and violent decomposition of nerve-nutriment. The feeling of voluptuousness is an example of the phenomena accompanying extraordinary decompositions in a nerve-cell. In healthy persons the sexual nerve-centres are the only ones which, conformably with their functions, are so differentiated and so adapted that they exercise no uniform or lasting activity, but, for by far the greatest part of the time, are perfectly tranquil, storing up large quantities of nutriment in order, during very short periods, to decompose this suddenly and, as it were, explosively. Every nerve-centre which operates in this way would procure us voluptuous emotion; but precisely among healthy persons there are, except the sexual nerve-centres, none which are compelled to act in this manner, in order to serve the purpose of the organism. Among the degenerate, on the contrary, particular morbidly excited brain-centres operate in this way, and the emotions of delight which accompany their explosive activity are more powerful than sexual feelings, in proportion as the brain-centres are more sensitive than the subordinate and more sluggish spinal centres. One may completely believe the assurances of great ecstatics, such as a St. Theresa, a Mohammed, an Ignatius Loyola, that the bliss accompanying their ecstatic visions is unlike anything earthly, and almost more than a mortal can bear. This latter statement proves that they were conscious of the sharp pain which accompanies nerve-action in overexcited brain-cells, and which, on careful analysis, may be distinguished in every very strong feeling of pleasure. The circumstance that the only normal organic sensation known to us which resembles that of ecstasy is the sexual feeling, explains the fact that ecstatics connect their ecstatic presentations by way of association with the idea of love, and describe the ecstasy itself as a kind of supernatural act of love, as a union of an ineffably high and pure sort with God or the Blessed Virgin. This drawing near to God and the saints is the natural result of a religious training, which begets the habit of looking on everything inexplicable as supernatural, and of bringing it into connection with the doctrines of faith.
We have now seen that mysticism depends upon the incapacity to control the association of ideas by the attention, and that this incapacity results from weakness of will; while ecstasy is a consequence of the morbid irritability of special brain-centres. The incapacity of being attentive occasions, however, besides mysticism, other eccentricities of the intellect, which may here be briefly mentioned. In extreme stages of degeneration, e.g., in idiocy, attention is utterly wanting. No stimulus is able to arouse it, nor is there any external means of making an impression on the brain of the idiot, and awakening his consciousness to definite presentations. In less complete degeneration, i.e., in cases of mental debility, attention may exist, but it is extremely weak and fleeting. Imbeciles (weak minds) present, in graduated intensity, the phenomenon of fugitive thought (Gedankenflucht), i.e., the incapacity to retain, or to unite in a concept or judgment, the representations automatically and reciprocally called into consciousness in conformity with the laws of association, and also that of reverie, which is another form of fugitive thought, but which differs from it in that the particular representations of which it is composed are feebly elaborated, and are therefore shadowy and undefined, sometimes so much so that an imbecile, who in the midst of his reveries is asked of what he is thinking, is not able to state exactly what happens to be present in his consciousness. All observers maintain that the ‘higher degenerate’ is frequently ‘original, brilliant, witty,’ and that whereas he is incapable of activity which demands attention and self-control, he has strong artistic inclinations. All these peculiarities are to be explained by the uncontrolled working of association.
The reader should recall the procedure of that brain which is incapable of attention. A perception arouses a representation which summons into consciousness a thousand other associated representations. The healthy mind suppresses the representations which are contradictory to, or not rationally connected with, the first perception. This the weak-minded cannot do. The mere similarity of sound determines the current of his thought. He hears a word, and feels compelled to repeat it, once or oftener, sometimes to the extent of ‘Echolalia’; or it calls into his consciousness other words similar to it in sound, but not connected with it in meaning,[84] whereupon he thinks and talks in a series of completely disconnected rhymes; or else the words have, besides their similarity of sound, a very remote and weak connection of meaning; this gives rise to punning. Ignorant persons are inclined to call the rhyming and punning of imbeciles witty, not bearing in mind that this way of combining ideas according to the sound of the words frustrates the purposes of the intellect by obscuring the apprehension of the real connections of phenomena. No witticism has ever made easier the discovery of any truth. And whoever has tried to hold a serious conversation with a quibbling person of weak mind will have recognised the impossibility of keeping him in check, of getting from him a logical conclusion, or of making him comprehend a fact or a causal connection. When presentations are connected, not merely according to auditory impressions of simple similarity of sound, but also according to the other laws of association, those juxtapositions of words are effected which the ignorant designate as ‘original modes of expression,’ and which confer upon their originator the reputation of a ‘brilliant’ conversationalist or author. Sollier[85] cites some characteristic examples of the ‘original’ modes of expression of imbeciles. One said to his comrade, ‘You look like a piece of barley-sugar put out to nurse.’ Another expresses the thought that his friend made him laugh so much he could not restrain his saliva, by saying, ‘Tu me fais baver des ronds de chapeaux.’ The junction of words which by their sense have little or no relation to each other is, as a rule, an evidence of imbecility, although it often enough is sensational and mirth-provoking. The cleverness which in Paris is called blague, or boulevard-esprit, the psychologist discerns as imbecility. That this condition goes hand-in-hand with artistic tendencies is easy to understand. All callings which require knowledge of fact, and adaptation to it, presuppose attention. This capacity is wanting in imbeciles; hence they are not fitted for serious professions. Certain artistic occupations, especially those of a subordinate kind, are, on the contrary, quite compatible with uncontrolled association of ideas, reverie, or fugitive thought, because they exact only a very limited adaptation to fact, and therefore have great attractions for persons of weak intellect.
Between the process of thought and movement there exists an exact parallelism explicable by the fact that the elaboration of presentations is nothing else than a modification of the elaboration of the motor impulses. The phenomena of movement make the mechanism of thought more easily apprehensible to the lay mind. The automatic association of muscular contractions corresponds to the association of ideas, their co-ordination to attention. As with defective attention there ensues no intelligent thought, so with faulty co-ordination there can be no appropriate movement. Palsy is equivalent to idiocy, St. Vitus’s dance to obsessions and fixed ideas. The attempts at witticisms of the weak-minded are like beating the air with a sword; the notions and judgments of sound brains are like the careful thrust and parry of skilful fencing. Mysticism finds its reflected image in the aimless and powerless, often hardly discernible, movements of senile and paralytic trembling; and ecstasy is, for a brain-centre, the same state as a prolonged and violent tonic contraction for a muscle or group of muscles.
[CHAPTER II.]
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES.
Mysticism is the habitual condition of the human race, and in no way an eccentric disposition of mind. A strong brain which works out every presentation to its full clearness—a powerful will, which sustains the toiling attention—these are rare gifts. Musing and dreaming, the free ranging of imagination, disporting itself at its own sweet will along the meandering pathways of association, demand less exertion, and will therefore be widely preferred to the hard labour of observation and intelligent judgment. Hence the consciousness of men is filled with a vast mass of ambiguous, shadowy ideas; they see, as a rule, in unmistakable clearness only those phenomena which are daily repeated in their most intimate personal experience, and, among these, those only which are the objects of their immediate needs.
Speech, that great auxiliary in the interchange of human thought, is no unmixed benefit. It brings to the consciousness of most men incomparably more obscurity than brightness. It enriches their memory with auditory images, not with well-defined pictures of reality. A word, whether written or spoken, excites a sense (sight or hearing), and sets up an activity in the brain. True; it always arouses presentation. A series of musical tones does the same. At an unknown word, at ‘Abracadabra,’ at a proper name, at a tune scraped on the fiddle, we also think of something, but it is either indefinite, or nonsensical, or arbitrary. It is absolute waste of labour to attempt to give a man new ideas, or to widen the circle of his positive knowledge, by means of a word. It can never do more than awaken such ideas as he already possesses. Ultimately everyone works only with the material for presentation which he has acquired by attentive personal observation of the phenomena of the universe. Nevertheless, he cannot do without the stimulus conveyed to him by speech. The desire for knowledge, without any hiatus, of all that is in the world, is irresistible; while the opportunities of perception at first hand, even in the most favourable circumstances, are limited. What we have not ourselves experienced we let others, the dead and the living, tell us. The word must take the place of the direct impressions of sense for us. And then it is itself an impression of sense, and our consciousness is accustomed to put this impression on a level with others, to estimate the idea aroused by this word equally with those ideas which have been acquired through the simultaneous co-operation of all the senses, through observations, and handling on every side, through moving and lifting, listening to, and smelling the object itself. This parity of values is an error of thought. It is false in any case if a word do more than call into consciousness a memory-image of a presentation, which it has acquired through personal experience, or a concept composed of such presentations. Nevertheless, we all of us commit this fallacy. We forget that language was only developed by the race as a means of communication between individuals, that it is a social function, but not a source of knowledge. Words are in reality much more a source of error. For a man can only actually know what he has directly experienced and attentively observed, not what he has merely heard or read, and what he repeats; and if he would free himself from the errors which words have led him into, he has no other means than the increase of his sterling representative material, through personal experience and attentive observation. And since man is never in a position to do this save within certain limits, everyone is condemned to carry on the operations of his consciousness with direct presentations, and at the same time with words. The intellectual structure which is built up with materials of such unequal solidity reminds one of those dilapidated Gothic churches which brainless masons used to patch up with a plaster of soot and cheese, giving it, by means of a wash, the appearance of stone. To the eye the frontage is irreproachable, but many parts of the building could not for one moment resist a vigorous blow of criticism.
Many erroneous explanations of natural phenomena, the majority of false scientific hypotheses, all religious and metaphysical systems, have arisen in such a way that mankind, in their thoughts and opinions, have interwoven, as equally valid components, ideas suggested by words only, together with such as were derived from direct perception. The words were either invented by mystics and originally indicated nothing beyond the unbalanced condition of a weak and diseased brain, or, whereas they at first expressed a definite, correct presentation, their proper meaning was not caught by those who repeated them, and by them was arbitrarily falsified, differently interpreted, or blurred. Innate or acquired weakness of mind and ignorance lead alike to the goal of mysticism. The brain of the ignorant elaborates presentations that are nebulous, because they are suggested by words, not by the thing itself, and the stimulus of a word is not strong enough to produce vigorous action in the brain-cells; moreover, the brain of the exhausted and degenerate elaborates nebulous presentations, because in any case it is not in a condition to respond to a stimulus by vigorous action. Hence ignorance is artificial weakness of mind, just as, conversely, weakness of mind is the natural organic incapacity for knowledge.
In one part or another of his mental field of vision each of us therefore is a mystic. From all the phenomena which he himself has not observed, everyone forms shadowy, unstable presentations. Nevertheless, it is easy to distinguish healthy men from those who deserve the designation of mystic. There is a sure sign for each. The healthy man is in a condition to obtain sharply-defined presentations from his own immediate perceptions, and to comprehend their real connection. The mystic, on the contrary, mixes his ambiguous, cloudy, half-formed liminal representations with his immediate perceptions, which are thereby disturbed and obscured. Even the most superstitious peasant has definite presentations of his field work, of the feeding of his cattle, and of looking after his landmark. He may believe in the weather-witch, because he does not know how the rain comes to pass, but he does not wait a moment for the angels to plough for him. He may have his field blessed, because the real conditions of the thriving or perishing of his seed are beyond his ken, but he will never so put his trust in supernatural favour as to omit sowing his grain. All the genuine mystic’s presentations, on the contrary, even those of daily experience, are permeated and overgrown with that which is incomprehensible, because it is without form. His want of attention makes him incapable of apprehending the real connecting links between the simplest and most obviously related phenomena, and leads him to deduce them from one or another of the hazy, intangible presentations wavering and wandering in his consciousness.
There is no human phenomenon in the art and poetry of the century with whom this characteristic of the mystic so completely agrees as with the originators and supporters of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. It may be taken for granted that the history of this movement is known—at least, in its outlines—and that it will suffice here to recall briefly its principal features. The three painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais, in the year 1848, entered into a league which was called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. After the association was formed, the painters F. G. Stephens and James Collinson, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner, joined it. In the spring of 1849 they exhibited in London a number of pictures and statues, all of which, in addition to the signature of the artist, bore the common mark P.R.B. The result was crushing. Hitherto no hysterical fanatic had tyrannically forced on the public a belief in the beauty of these works, nor was it as yet under the domination of the fashion, invented by æsthetic snobs, of considering their admiration as a mark of distinction, and of membership of a narrow and exclusive circle of the aristocrats of taste. Hence it confronted them without prepossession, and found them incomprehensible and funny. The contemplation of them roused inextinguishable laughter among the good-humoured, and wrath among the morose, who are nettled when they think themselves made fools of. The brotherhood did not renew their attempt; the P.R.B. exhibition was never repeated; the league broke up of itself. Its members no longer added the shibboleth of initials after their names. They formed no longer a closed association, involving formal admission, but only a loosely-knit circle, consisting of friends having tastes in common, and who were perpetually modifying its character by their joining and retiring. In this way it was joined by Burne Jones and Madox Brown, who also passed for Pre-Raphaelites, although they had not belonged to the original P.R.B. Later on the designation was extended from painters to poets, and among the Pre-Raphaelites, in addition to D. G. Rossetti (who soon exchanged the brush for the pen), were Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Morris.
What are the governing thoughts and aims of the Pre-Raphaelite movement? An Anglo-German critic of repute, F. Hüffer,[86] thinks that he answers this question when he says: ‘I myself should call this movement the renaissance of mediæval feeling.’ Apart from the fact that these words signify nothing, since every man may interpret ‘mediæval feeling’ as he pleases, the reference to the Middle Ages only emphasizes the most external accompanying circumstance of Pre-Raphaelitism, leaving its essence entirely untouched.
It is true that the Pre-Raphaelites with both brush and pen betray a certain, though by no means exclusive, predilection for the Middle Ages; but the mediævalism of their poems and paintings is not historical, but mythical, and simply denotes something outside time and space—a time of dreams and a place of dreams, where all unreal figures and actions may be conveniently bestowed. That they decorate their unearthly world with some features which may remotely recall mediævalism; that it is peopled with queens and knights, noble damozels with coronets on their golden hair, and pages with plumed caps—these may be accounted for by the prototypes which, perhaps unconsciously, hover before the eyes of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Movements in art and literature do not spring up suddenly and spontaneously. They have progenitors from whom they descend in the natural course of generation. Pre-Raphaelitism is the grandson of German, and a son of French, Romanticism. But in its wanderings through the world Romanticism has suffered such alteration through the influence of the changing opinions of the times, and the special characteristics of various nations, that the English offspring bears scarcely any family resemblance to its German ancestor.
German romanticism was in its origin a reaction against the spirit of the French encyclopædists, who had held undisputed sway over the eighteenth century. Their criticism of ancient errors, their new systems which were to solve the riddles of the world and of the nature of man, had at first dazzled and nearly intoxicated mankind. They could not, however, satisfy in the long-run, for they committed a great fault in two respects. Their knowledge of facts was insufficient to enable them to explain the collective phenomenon of the universe, and they looked upon man as an intellectual being. Proud of their strictly logical and mathematical reasoning, they overlooked the fact that this is a method of knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The logical apparatus is a machine, which can manufacture only the material shot into it. If the machine is not fed, it runs on empty and makes a noise, but produces nothing. The condition of science in the eighteenth century did not allow the encyclopædists to make advantageous use of their logical machine. They did not take cognizance of this fact, however, and, with their limited material and much unconscious temerity, constructed a system which they complacently announced as a faithful representation of the system of the universe. It was soon discovered that the encyclopædists, for all their intellectual arrogance, were deluding both themselves and their followers. There were known facts which contradicted their hasty explanations, and there was a whole range of phenomena of which their system took no account, and failed to cover as if with too short a cloak, and which peeped out mockingly at all the seams. Hence the philosophy of the encyclopædists was kicked and abused, and the same faults were committed with respect to it which it had perpetrated; the methods of intelligent criticism were mistaken for the results obtained by them. Because the encyclopædists, from lack of knowledge and of natural facts, explained nature falsely and arbitrarily, those who were disappointed and thirsting for knowledge cried out, that intelligent criticism as such was a false method, that consistent reasoning led to nothing, that the conclusions of the ‘Philosophy of Enlightenment’ were just as unproven and unprovable as those of religion and metaphysics, only less beautiful, colder, and narrower; and mankind threw itself with fervour into all the depths of faith and superstition, where certainly the Tree of Knowledge did not grow, but where beautiful mirages charmed the eye, and the warm fragrant springs of all the emotions bubbled up.
And more fatal than the error of their philosophy was the false psychology of the encyclopædists. They believed that the thoughts and actions of men are determined by reason and the laws of consistency, and had no inkling that the really impelling force in thought and deed are the emotions, those disturbances elaborated in the depths of the internal organs, and the sources of which elude consciousness, but which suddenly burst into it like a horde of savages, not declaring whence they come, submitting to no police regulations of a civilized mind, and imperiously demanding lodgment. All that wide region of organic needs and hereditary impulses, all that E. von Hartmann calls the ‘Unconscious,’ lay hidden from the rationalists, who saw nothing but the narrow circle of the psychic life which is illumined by the little lamp of consciousness. Fiction which should depict mankind according to the views of this inadequate psychology would be absurdly untrue. It had no place for passions and follies. It saw in the world only logical formulæ on two legs, with powdered heads and embroidered coats of fashionable cut. The emotional nature took its revenge on this æsthetic aberration, breaking out in ‘storm and stress,’ and in turn attaching value only to the unconscious, the inherited impulse, and the organic appetites, while it neglected entirely reason and will, which are there none the less.
Mysticism, which rebelled against the application of the rationalistic methods to explain the universe, and the Sturm und Drang, which rebelled against their application to the psychical life of mankind, were the first-fruits of romanticism, which is nothing but the union and exaggeration of these two revolutionary movements. That it took up with fondness the form of mediævalism was due to circumstances and the sentiment of the age. The beginnings of romanticism coincide with the time of the deepest humiliation of Germany, and the suffering of young men of talent at the ignominy of foreign rule gave to the whole content of their thought a patriotic colouring. During the Middle Ages Germany had passed through a period of the greatest power and intellectual florescence; those centuries which were irradiated at one and the same time by the might of the world-empire of the Hohenstaufen, by the splendour of the poems of the Court Minnesingers, and by the vastness of the Gothic cathedrals, must naturally have attracted those spirits who, filled with disgust, broke out against the intellectual jejuneness and political abasement of the times. They fled from Napoleon to Frederick Barbarossa, and drew refreshment with Walter von der Vogelweide from their abhorrence of Voltaire. The foreign imitators of the German romanticists do not know that if in their flight from reality they come to a halt in mediævalism, they have German patriotism as their pioneer.
The patriotic side of romanticism was, moreover, emphasized only by the sanest talents of this tendency. In others it stands revealed most signally as a form of the phenomenon of degeneration. The brothers Schlegel, in their Athenæum, give this programme of romanticism: ‘The beginning of all poetry is to suspend the course and the laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transport us again into the lovely vagaries of fancy and the primitive chaos of human nature.... The freewill of the poet submits to no law.’ This is the exact mode of thought and expression of the weak-minded, of the imbecile, whose brain is incapable of following the phenomena of the universe with discernment and comprehension, and who, with the self-complacency which characterizes the weak-minded, proclaims his infirmity as an advantage, and declares that his muddled thought, the product of uncontrolled association, is alone exact and commendable, boasting of that for which the sane-minded are pitying him. Besides the unregulated association of ideas there appears in most romanticists its natural concomitant, mysticism. That which enchanted them in the idea of the Middle Ages was not the vastness and might of the German Empire, not the fulness and beauty of the German life of that period, but Catholicism with its belief in miracles and its worship of saints. ‘Our Divine Service,’ writes H. von Kleist, ‘is nothing of the kind. It appeals only to cold reason. A Catholic feast appeals profoundly to all the senses.’ The obscure symbolism of Catholicism, all the externals of its priestly motions, all its altar service so full of mystery, all the magnificence of its vestments, sacerdotal vessels and works of art, the overwhelming effect of the thunder of the organ, the fumes of incense, the flashing monstrance—all these undoubtedly stir more confused and ambiguous adumbrations of ideas than does austere Protestantism. The conversion of Friedrich Schlegel, Adam Müller, Zacharias Werner, Count Stolberg, to Catholicism is just as consistent a result as, to the reader who has followed the arguments on the psychology of mysticism, it is intelligible that, with these romanticists, the ebullitions of piety are accompanied by a sensuousness which often amounts to lasciviousness.
Romanticism penetrated into France a generation later than into Germany. The delay is easy of historical explanation. In the storms of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the leading minds of the French people had no time to think of themselves. They had no leisure for testing the philosophy of their encyclopædists, to find it inadequate, reject it, and rise up against it. They devoted their whole energy to rough, big, muscular deeds of war, and the need for the emotional exercise afforded by art and poetry, asserted itself but feebly, being completely satisfied by the far stronger emotions of self-love and despair produced by their famous battles and cataclysmic overthrows. Æsthetic tendencies only reasserted their rights during the half-dormant period following the battle of Waterloo, and then the same causes led to the same results as in Germany. The younger spirits in this case also raised the flag of revolt against the dominating æsthetic and philosophic tendencies. They wished Imagination to grapple with Reason, and place its foot on its neck, and they proclaimed the martial law of passion against the sober procedure of discipline and morality. Through Madame de Staël and A. W. Schlegel, partly by the latter’s personal intercourse with Frenchmen, and partly by his works, which were soon translated into French, they were in some measure made acquainted with the German movement. They joined it perhaps half unconsciously. Of the many impulses which were active among the German romanticists, patriotism and Catholic mysticism had no influence on the French mind, which only lent itself to the predilection for what was remote in time and space, and what was free from moral and mental restraints.
French romanticism was neither mediæval nor pious. It took up its abode rather in the Renaissance period as regards remoteness in time, and in the East or the realms of faerie, if it wished to be spacially remote from reality. In Victor Hugo’s works the one drama of Les Burgraves takes place in the thirteenth century; but in all the others, Cromwell, Maria Tudor, Lucrezia Borgia, Angelo, Ruy Blas, Hernani, Marion Delorme, Le Roi s’amuse, the scenes were laid in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and his one mediæval romance, Notre Dame de Paris, can be set over against all the rest, from Han d’Islande, which has for its scene of action a fancied Thule, to Les Miserables and 1793, which take place in an apocalyptic Paris and in a history of the Revolution suited to the use of hashish-smokers. The bent of French romanticism towards the Renaissance is natural. That was the period of great passions and great crimes, of marble palaces, of dresses glittering with gold, and of intoxicating revels; a period in which the æsthetic prevailed over the useful, and the fantastic over the rational, and when crime itself was beautiful, because assassination was accomplished with a chased and damascened poniard, and the poison was handed in goblets wrought by Benvenuto Cellini.
The French romanticists made use of the unreality of their scene of action and costumes chiefly for the purpose of enabling them, without restraint, to attribute to their characters all the qualities, exaggerated even to monstrosity, that were dear to the French, not yet ailing with the pain of overthrow. Thus in the heroes of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Alfred de Musset, we become acquainted with the French ideal of man and woman. The subtle inquiries of Faust, the soliloquies of Hamlet, are not their affair. They talk unceasingly in dazzling witticisms and antitheses; they fight one against ten; they love like Hercules in the Thespidian night, and their whole life is one riot of fighting, wantoning, wine, perfume, and pageantry—a sort of magnificent illusion, with performance of gladiators, Don Juans, and Monte Christos; a crazy prodigality of inexhaustible treasures of bodily strength, gaiety and gold. These ideal beings had necessarily to wear doublets or Spanish mantles, and speak in the tongues of unknown times, because the tightness of the contemporary dress-coat could not accommodate all this wealth of muscle, and the conversation of the Paris salon did not admit of the candour of souls which their authors had turned inside out.
The fate of romanticism in England was exactly the reverse of that which befell it in France. Whereas the French had imitated chiefly, and even exclusively, in the German romanticists, their divergence from reality, and their declaration of the sovereign rights of the passions, the English just as exclusively elaborated their Catholic and mystical elements. For them the Middle Ages had a powerful attraction, inasmuch as it was the period of childlike faith in the letter, and of the revelling of simple piety in personal intercourse with the Trinity, the Blessed Virgin, and all the guardian saints.
Trade, industry, and civilization were nowhere in the world so much developed as in England. Nowhere did men work so assiduously, nowhere did they live under such artificial conditions as there. Hence the state of degeneration and exhaustion, which we observe to-day in all civilized countries as the result of this over-exertion, must of necessity have shown itself sooner in England than elsewhere, and, as a matter of fact, did show itself in the third and fourth decade of the century with continually increasing violence. In consequence, however, of the peculiarity of the English mind, the emotional factor in degeneration and exhaustion necessarily assumed with them a religious colouring.
The Anglo-Saxon race is by nature healthy and strong-minded. It has therefore, in a high degree, that strong desire for knowledge which is peculiar to normally-constituted persons. In every age it has inquired into the why and how of phenomena, and shown passionate sympathy with, and gratitude to, everyone who held out hopes of an explanation of them. The well-known and deeply thoughtful discourse of the Anglican noble concerning what precedes and follows man’s life—a speech which Bede has preserved for us in his account of the conversion of Edwin to Christianity—has been cited by all authors (e.g., by G. Freytag and H. Taine[87]) who have studied the origins of the English mental constitution. It shows that as early as the beginning of the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons were consumed by an ardent desire to comprehend the phenomenon of the universe. This fine and high-minded craving for knowledge has proved at once the strength and the weakness of the English. It led with them to the development along parallel lines of the natural sciences and theology. The scientific investigators contributed a store of facts won through toilsome observation; the experts in divinity obtained theirs through systems compounded of notions arbitrarily conceived. Both claimed to explain the nature of things, and the people were deeply grateful to both, more so, it is true, to the theologians than to the scholars, because the former could afford to be more copious and confident in their teaching than the latter. The natural tendency to reckon words as equivalent to facts, assertions to demonstrations, always gives theologians and metaphysicians an immense advantage over observers. The craving of the English for knowledge has produced both the philosophy of induction and spiritualism. Humanity owes to them on the one hand Francis Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Locke, Darwin, J. S. Mill; on the other, Bunyan, Berkeley, Milton, the Puritans, the Quakers, and all the religious enthusiasts, visionaries, and mediums of this century. No people has done so much for, and conferred such honour on, scientific investigators; no people has sought with so much earnestness and devotion for instruction, especially in matters of faith, as have the English. Eagerness to know is, therefore, the main source of English religiousness. There is this also to be noticed, that among them the ruling classes never gave an example of indifference in matters of faith, but systematically made religiousness a mark of social distinction; unlike France, where the nobility of the eighteenth century exalted Voltairianism into a symptom of good breeding. The evolution of history led in England to two results which apparently exclude each other—to caste-rule, and the liberty of the individual. The caste which is in possession of wealth and power naturally wishes to protect its possessions. The rigid independence of the English people precludes it from applying physical force. Hence it uses moral restraints to keep the lower ranks submissive and amenable, and, among these, religion is by far the most effective.
Herein lies the explanation both of the devoutness of the English and of the religious character of their mental degeneration. The first result of the epidemic of degeneration and hysteria was the Oxford Movement in the thirties and forties. Wiseman turned all the weaker heads. Newman went over to Catholicism. Pusey clothed the entire Established Church in Romish garb. Spiritualism soon followed, and it is worthy of remark that all mediums adopted theological modes of speech, and that their disclosures were concerned with heaven and hell. The ‘revival meetings’ of the seventies, and the Salvation Army of to-day, are the direct sequel of the Oxford stream of thought, but rendered turbid and foul in accordance with the lower intellectual grade of their adherents. In the world of art, however, the religious enthusiasm of degenerate and hysterical Englishmen sought its expression in pre-Raphaelitism.
An accurate definition of the connotation of this word is an impossibility, in that it was invented by mystics, and is as vague and equivocal as are all new word-creations of the feeble and deranged in mind. The first members of the Brotherhood believed that, in the artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the predecessors of the great geniuses of the Umbrian and Venetian schools, they had discovered minds congenial to their own. For a short time they took the methods of these painters for their models, and created the designation ‘pre-Raphaelite.’ The term was bound to approve itself to them, since the prefix ‘pre’ (‘præ’) arouses ideas of the primeval, the far-away, the hardly perceptible, the mysteriously shadowy. ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ calls up, through association of ideas, ‘pre-Adamite,’[88] ‘prehistoric,’ etc.—in short, all that is opened to view by immeasurable vistas down the dusk of the unknown, and which allow the mind to wander dreamily beyond the limits of time and in the realms of myth. But that the pre-Raphaelites should have lit on the quattrocento painters for the embodiment of their artistic ideals is due to John Ruskin.
Ruskin is one of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and one of the most powerful masters of style, of the present century. To the service of the most wildly eccentric thoughts he brings the acerbity of a bigot and the deep sentiment of Morel’s ‘emotionalists.’ His mental temperament is that of the first Spanish Grand Inquisitors. He is a Torquemada of æsthetics. He would liefest burn alive the critic who disagrees with him, or the dull Philistine who passes by works of art without a feeling of devout awe. Since, however, stakes do not stand within his reach, he can at least rave and rage in word, and annihilate the heretic figuratively by abuse and cursing. To his ungovernable irascibility he unites great knowledge of all the minutiæ in the history of art. If he writes of the shapes of clouds he reproduces the clouds in seventy or eighty existing pictures, scattered amongst all the collections of Europe. And be it noted that he did this in the forties, when photographs of the masterpieces of art, which render the comparative study of them to-day so convenient, were yet unknown. This heaping up of fact, this toilsome erudition, made him conqueror of the English intellect, and explains the powerful influence which he obtained over artistic sentiment and the theoretic views concerning the beautiful of the Anglo-Saxon world. The clear positivism of the Englishman demands exact data, measures, and figures. Supplied with these he is content, and does not criticise starting-points. The Englishman accepts a fit of delirium if it appears with footnotes, and is conquered by an absurdity if it is accompanied by diagrams. Milton’s description of hell and its inhabitants is as detailed and conscientious as that of a land-surveyor or a natural philosopher, and Bunyan depicts the Pilgrim’s Progress to the mystical kingdom of Redemption in the method of the most graphic writer of travels—a Captain Cook or a Burton. Ruskin has in the highest conceivable degree this English peculiarity of exactness applied to the nonsensical, and of its measuring and counting applied to fevered visions.
In the year 1843, almost simultaneously with the outbreak of the great Catholicizing movement, Ruskin began to publish the feverish studies on art which were subsequently collected under the title of Modern Painters. He was then a young divinity student, and as such he entered upon the study of works of art. The old scholasticism wished to make philosophy the ‘handmaid of godly learning.’ Ruskin’s mysticism had the same purpose with regard to art. Painting and sculpture ought to be a form of divine worship, or they ought not to exist at all. Works of art were valuable merely for the supersensuous thoughts that they conveyed, for the devotion with which they were conceived and which they revealed, not for the mastery of form.
From this point of view he was able to arrive at judgments among which I here quote a few of the most typical. ‘It appears to me,’ he says,[89] ‘that a rude symbol is oftener more efficient than a refined one in touching the heart, and that as pictures rise in rank as works of art they are regarded with less devotion and more curiosity.... It is man and his fancies, man and his trickeries, man and his inventions, poor, paltry, weak, self-sighted man, which the connoisseur for ever seeks and worships. Among potsherds and dunghills, among drunken boors and withered beldames, through every scene of debauchery and degradation, we follow the erring artist, not to receive one wholesome lesson, not to be touched with pity, nor moved with indignation, but to watch the dexterity of the pencil, and gloat over the glittering of the hue.... Painting is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.... It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is to be finally determined.... The early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of infants.... The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.... The less sufficient the means appear to the end the greater will be the sensation of power.’ These propositions were decisive in determining the direction taken by the young Englishmen of 1843, who united artistic inclinations with the mysticism of the degenerate and hysterical. They comprise the æstheticism of the first pre-Raphaelites, who felt that Ruskin had expressed with clearness what was vaguely fermenting within them. Here was the art-ideal which they had presaged—form as indifferent, idea as everything; the clumsier the representation, the deeper its effect; the devotion of faith as the only worthy import of a work of art. They reviewed the history of art for phenomena agreeing with the theories of Ruskin, which they had taken up with enthusiasm, and they found what they sought in the archaic Italian school, in which the London National Gallery is extraordinarily rich. There they had perfect models to imitate; they were bound to take for their starting-point these Fra Angelicos, Giottos, Cimabues, these Ghirlandajos and Pollajuolos. Here were paintings bad in drawing, faded or smoked, their colouring either originally feeble or impaired by the action of centuries; pictures executed with the awkwardness of a learner representing events in the Passion of Christ, in the life of the Blessed Virgin, or in the Golden Legend, symbolizing childish ideas of hell and paradise, and telling of earnest faith and fervent devotion. They were easy of imitation, since, in painting pictures in the style of the early masters, faulty drawing, deficient sense of colour, and general artistic incapacity, are so many advantages. And they constituted a sufficiently forcible antithesis to all the claims of the artistic taste of that decade to satisfy the proclivity for contradiction, paradox, negation and eccentricity which we have learned to recognise as a special characteristic of the feeble-minded.
Ruskin’s theory is in itself delirious. It mistakes the fundamental principles of æsthetics, and, with the unconsciousness of a saucy child at play, muddles and entangles the boundary lines of the different arts. It holds of account in plastic art only the conception. A picture is valuable only in so far as it is a symbol giving expression to a religious idea. Ruskin does not take into consideration, or deliberately overlooks the fact, that the pleasurable feelings which are produced by the contemplation of a picture are not aroused by its intellectual import, but by it as a sensuous phenomenon. The art of painting awakens through its media of colour and drawing (i.e., the exact grasp and reproduction of differences in the intensity of light), firstly, a purely sensuously agreeable impression of beautiful single colours and happily combined harmonies of colour; secondly, it produces an illusion of reality and, together with this, the higher, more intellectual pleasures arising from a recognition of the phenomena depicted, and from a comprehension of the artist’s intention; thirdly, it shows these phenomena as seen with the eye of the artist, and brings out details or collective traits, which until then the inartistic beholder had not been by himself able to perceive. The painter therefore influences, through the medium of his art, only so far as he agreeably excites the sense of colour, gives to the mind an illusion of reality, together with the consciousness that it is an illusion, and, through his deeper, more penetrating vision, discloses to the spectator the hidden treasures of the phenomenal world. If, in addition to the presentation of the picture, ‘its story’ also affects the beholder, it is no longer the merit of the painter as such, but of his not exclusively pictorial intelligence in making choice of a subject, and in committing its portrayal to his specific pictorial abilities. The effect of the story is not called forth through the media of painting; it is not based on the pleasure of the spectator in colour, on the illusion of reality, or on a better grasp of the phenomenon, but on some pre-existing inclination, some memory, some prejudice. A purely painter’s picture, such as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, charms everyone whose eye has been sufficiently trained. A picture which tells a story, but is not distinguished for its purely pictorial qualities, leaves everyone unappreciative to whom the story in itself is uninteresting, i.e., to whom it would in any case have been uninteresting, had it not been executed by the instrumentality of pictorial art, but simply narrated. A Russian eikon affects a moujik, and leaves the Western art connoisseur cold. A painting which represents a French victory over Russian troops would excite and please a French Philistine, even if it were painted in the style of an Épinal. It is true, no doubt, that there is a sort of painting which does not seek to seize and awaken visual impressions in the spectator, together with the emotions which they directly arouse, but to express ideas, and in which the picture is intended to affect the mind, not by itself and its own consummate art, but by its spiritual significance. But this kind of painting has a special name: we call it writing. The signs, which are meant to have no pictorial, but only symbolic value, where we turn away from the form in order to dwell upon their meaning, we call ‘letters,’ and the art which makes use of such symbols for the expression of mental processes is not painting, but poetry. Originally, pictures were actually, no doubt, a means of symbolizing thoughts, and their value as things of beauty was considered of secondary importance in relation to their value as means of expression. On the other hand, æsthetic impressions still play in these days a subdued accompaniment to our writing, and a beautiful handwriting, quite apart from its import, affects us more agreeably than one that is ugly. At the very beginning of their evolution, however, the kind of painting which satisfied only æsthetic needs separated itself from that of writing, which serves to render ideas perceptible to the senses. Descriptive drawing became the hieroglyph, the demotic writing, the letter; and it was reserved for Ruskin to be the first to try to annul a distinction which the scribes of Thebes had learnt to make six thousand years before him.
The pre-Raphaelites, who got all their leading principles from Ruskin, went further. They misunderstood his misunderstandings. He had simply said that defectiveness in form can be counter-balanced by devotion and noble feeling in the artist. They, however, raised it to the position of a fundamental principle, that in order to express devotion and noble feeling, the artist must be defective in form. Incapable, like all the weak-minded, of observing any process and of giving a clear account of it to themselves, they did not distinguish the real causes of the influence exercised over them by the old masters. The pictures touched and moved them; the most striking distinction between such pictures and others, to which they were indifferent, was their awkward stiffness; they did not look further, however, than this awkward stiffness for the source of what touched and moved them, and imitated with great care and conscientiousness the bad drawing of the old masters.
Now, the clumsiness of the old masters is certainly touching; but why? Because these Cimabues and Giottos were sincere. They wished to get closer to nature, and to free themselves from the thraldom of the Byzantine school, which had become entirely unreal. They struggled with vehement endeavour against the bad habits of hand and eye which they had acquired from the teachers of their guilds, and the spectacle of such a conflict, like every violent effort of an individuality which sets itself to rend fetters of any sort and save its own soul from bondage, is the most attractive thing possible to observe. The whole difference between the old masters and the pre-Raphaelites is, that the former had first to find out how to draw and paint correctly, while the latter wished to forget it. Hence, where the former fascinate, the latter must repel. It is the contrast between the first babbling of a thriving infant and the stammering of a mentally enfeebled gray-beard; between childlike and childish. But this retrogression to first beginnings, this affectation of simplicity, this child’s play in word and gesture, is a frequent phenomenon amongst the weak-minded, and we shall often meet with it among the mystic poets.
According to the doctrine of their master in theory, Ruskin, the decline of art for pre-Raphaelites begins with Raphael—and for obvious reasons. To copy Cimabue and Giotto is comparatively easy. In order to imitate Raphael it is necessary to be able to draw and paint to perfection, and this was just what the first members of the Brotherhood could not do. Moreover, Raphael lived in the most glorious period of the Renaissance. The rosy dawn of the New Thought shone in his being and his work. With the liberal-mindedness of an enlightened Cinquecentist, he no longer painted only religious subjects, but mythological and historical, or, as the mystics say, profane, subjects as well. His paintings appealed not only to the devotion of faith, but also to the sense of beauty. They are no longer exclusively divine worship; consequently, as Ruskin says, and his disciples repeat, they are devil-worship, and therefore to be rejected. Finally, it is consistent with the tendency to contradiction, and to the repudiation of what is manifest, which governs the thoughts of the weak-minded, that they should declare as false those tenets in the history of art which others than themselves deemed the most incontestable. The whole world for three hundred years had said, ‘Raphael is the zenith of painting.’ To this they replied, ‘Raphael is the nadir of painting.’ Hence it came about that, in the designation which they appropriated, they took up a direct allusion to Raphael, and to no other master or other portion of the history of art.
Consistency of sequence and unity are not to be expected from mystical thought. It proceeds after its kind in perpetual self-contradiction. In one place Ruskin says:[90] ‘The cause of the evil lies in the painter’s taking upon him to modify God’s works at his pleasure, casting the shadow of himself on all he sees. Every alteration of the features of nature has its origin either in powerless indolence or blind audacity.’ Thus the painter should reproduce the phenomenon exactly as he sees it, and not suffer himself to make the smallest alteration in it. And a few pages further on:[91] ‘There is an ideal form of every herb, flower, and tree; it is that form to which every individual of the species has a tendency to attain, freed from the influence of accident or disease.’ And, he continues, to recognise and to reproduce this ideal form is the one great task of the painter.
That one of these propositions completely nullifies the other it is hardly necessary to indicate. The ‘ideal form’ which every phenomenon strives after does not stand before the bodily eyes of the painter. He reads it, according to some preconceived notion, into the phenomenon. He has to deal with individual forms which, through ‘accident or disease,’ have diverged from the ‘ideal form.’ In order to bring them back in painting to their ideal form, he must alter the object given by nature. Ruskin demands that he should do this, but at the same time says that every alteration is an act of ‘powerless indolence or blind audacity.’ Naturally, only one of these mutually exclusive statements can be true. Unquestionably it is the former. The ‘ideal form’ is an assumption, not a perception. The separation of the essential from the accidental, in the phenomenon, is an abstraction—the work of reason, not of the eye or æsthetic emotion. Now, the subject-matter of painting is the visible, not the conjectural; the real, not the possible or probable; the concrete, not the abstract. To exclude individual features from a phenomenon as unessential and accidental, and to retain others as intrinsic and necessary, is to reduce it to an abstract idea. The work of art, however, is not to abstract, but to individualize. Firstly, because abstraction presupposes an idea of the law which determines the phenomenon, because this idea may be erroneous, because it changes with the ruling scientific theories of the day, whereas the painter does not reproduce changing scientific theories, but impressions of sense. Secondly, because the abstraction rouses the working of thought, and not emotion, while the task of art is to excite emotion.
Nevertheless, the pre-Raphaelites had no eye for these contradictions, and followed blindly all Ruskin’s injunctions. They typified the human form, but they rendered all accessories truthfully, and had neither ‘the blind audacity nor powerless indolence’ to change any of them. They painted with the greatest precision the landscape in which their figures stood, and the objects with which they were surrounded. The botanist can determine every kind of grass and flower painted; the cabinet-maker can recognise the joining and glueing in every footstool, the kind of wood and varnish in the furniture. Moreover, this conscientious distinctness is just the same in the foreground as in the extreme background, where, according to the laws of optics, things should be scarcely perceptible.
This uniformly clear reproduction of all the phenomena in the field of vision is the pictorial expression of the incapacity for attention. In intellection, attention suppresses a portion of that which is presented to consciousness (through association or perception), and suffers only a dominant group of the latter to remain. In sight, attention suppresses a portion of the phenomena in the field of vision in order distinctly to perceive only that part which the eye can focus. To look at a thing is to see one object intently, and to disregard others. The painter must observe if he wishes to make clear to us what phenomenon has engrossed him, and what his picture is to show us. If he does not dwell observantly on a definite point in the field of vision, but represents the whole field of view with the same proportion of intensity, we cannot divine what he wishes particularly to tell us, and on what he wishes to direct our attention. Such a style of painting may be compared to the disconnected speech of a weak mind, who chatters according to the current of the association of ideas, wanders in his talk, and neither knows himself what he wishes to arrive at, nor is able to make it clear to us; it is painted drivelling, echolalia of the brush.
But it is just this manner of painting which has gained for itself an influence on contemporary art. It is the pre-Raphaelite contribution to its evolution. The non-mystical painters have also learnt to observe accessories with precision, and to reproduce them faithfully; but they have prudently avoided falling into the faults of their models, and nullifying the unity of their work by filling the most distant backgrounds with still life, painted with painful accuracy. The lawns, flowers and trees, which they render with botanical accuracy, the geologically correct rocks, surfaces of soil, and mountain structures, the distinct patterns of carpets and wall-papers, which we find in the new pictures, are traceable to Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites.
These mystics believed themselves to be mentally affiliated with the Old Masters, because, like the latter, they painted religious pictures. But in this they deceive themselves. Cimabue, Giotto and Fra Angelico were no mystics, or, to put it more precisely, they are to be classed as mystics because of their ignorance, and not because of organic weakness of mind. The mediæval painter, who depicted a religious scene, was convinced that he was painting something perfectly true. An Annunciation, a Resurrection, an Ascension, an event in the lives of the saints, a scene of life in paradise or in hell, possessed for him the same incontestable character of reality as drinking bouts in a soldier’s tavern, or a banquet in a ducal palace. He was a realist when he was painting the transcendental. To him the legend of his faith was related as a fact; he was penetrated with a sense of its literal truth, and reproduced it exactly as he would have done any other true story. The spectator approached the picture with the same conviction. Religious art was the Bible of the poor. It had for the mediæval man the same importance as the illustrations in the works on the history of civilization, and on natural science, have in our day. Its duty was to narrate and to teach, and hence it had to be exact. We know from the touching stanza of Villon[92] how the illiterate people of the Middle Ages regarded church pictures. The dissolute poet makes his mother say to the Virgin Mary:
‘A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old,
I am, and nothing learn’d in letter-lore;
Within my parish-cloister I behold
A painted Heaven where harps and lutes adore,
And eke an Hell whose damned folk seethe full sore:
One bringeth fear, the other joy to me.
That joy, great Goddess, make thou mine to be—
Thou of whom all must ask it even as I;
And that which faith desires, that let it see,
For in this faith I choose to live and die.’
With this sober faith a mystic mode of painting would be quite incompatible. The painter then avoided all that was obscure or mysterious; he did not paint nebulous dreams and moods, but positive records. He had to convince others, and could do so, because he was convinced himself.
It was quite otherwise with the pre-Raphaelites. They did not paint sober visions, but emotions. They therefore introduced into their pictures mysterious allusions and obscure symbols, which have nothing to do with the reproduction of visible reality. I need cite only one example—Holman Hunt’s Shadow of the Cross. In this picture Christ is standing in the Oriental attitude of prayer with outstretched arms, and the shadow of his body, falling on the ground, shows the form of a cross. Here we have a most instructive pattern of the processes of mystic thought. Holman Hunt imagines Christ in prayer. Through the association of ideas there awakes in him simultaneously the mental image of Christ’s subsequent death on the cross. He wants, by the instrumentality of painting, to make the association of these ideas visible. And hence he lets the living Christ throw a shadow which assumes the form of a cross, thus foretelling the fate of the Saviour, as if some mysterious, incomprehensible power had so posed his body with respect to the rays of the sun that a wondrous annunciation of his destiny must needs write itself on the floor. The invention is completely absurd. It would have been childish trifling if Christ had drawn his sublime death of sacrifice, whether in jest or in vanity, in anticipation, by his shadow on the ground. Neither would the shadow-picture have had any object, for no contemporary of Christ’s would have understood the significance of the shadowed cross before he had suffered death by crucifixion. In Holman Hunt’s consciousness, however, emotion simultaneously awakened the form of the praying Christ and of the cross, and he unites both presentations anyhow, without regard to their reasonable connection. If an Old Master had had to paint the same idea, namely, the praying Christ filled with the presentiment of his impending death, he would have shown us in the picture a realistic Christ in prayer, and in a corner an equally realistic crucifixion; but he would never have sought to blend both these different scenes into a single one by a shadowy connection. This is the difference between the religious painting of the strong healthy believer and of the emotional degenerate mind.
In the course of time the pre-Raphaelites laid aside many of their early extravagances. Millais and Holman Hunt no longer practise the affectation of wilfully bad drawing and of childish babbling in imitation of Giotto’s language. They have only retained, of the leading principles of the school, the careful reproduction of the unessential and the painting of the idea. A benevolent critic, Edward Rod,[93] says of them: ‘They were themselves writers, and their painting is literature.’ This speech is still applicable to the school.
A few of the earliest pre-Raphaelites have understood it. They have recognised in time that they had mistaken their vocation, and have gone over, from a style of painting which was merely thought-writing, to genuine writing. The most notable among them is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who, though born in England, was the son of an Italian Carbonaro, and a scholar of Dante. His father gave him the name of the great poet at his entrance into the world, and this expressive baptismal name became a constant suggestion, which Rossetti felt, and has, perhaps half unconsciously, admitted.[94] He is the most instructive example of the often-quoted assertion of Balzac, of the determining influence of a name on the development and destiny of its bearer. Rossetti’s whole poetical feeling was rooted in Dante. His theory of life bears an indistinct cast of that of the Florentine. Through all his ideas there runs a reminiscence, faint or strong, of the Divina Commedia or the Vita Nuova.
The analysis of one of his most celebrated poems, The Blessed Damozel, will show this parasitic battening on the body of Dante, and at the same time disclose some of the most characteristic peculiarities of the mental working of a mystic’s brain. The first strophe runs thus:
‘The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.’
The whole of this description of a lost love, who looks down upon him from a heaven imagined as a palace, with paradisiacal decorations, is a reflection of Dante’s Paradiso (Canto iii.), where the Blessed Virgin speaks to the poet from the moon. We even find details repeated, e.g., the deep and still waters ( ... ‘ver per acque nitide e tranquille Non sì profonde, che i fondi sien persi ...’). The ‘lilies in her hand’ he gets from the Old Masters, yet even here there is a slight ring of the morning greeting from the Purgatorio (Canto xxx.), ‘Manibus o date lilia plenis.’ He designates his love by the Anglo-Norman word ‘damozel.’ By this means he makes any clear outlines in the idea of a girl or lady artificially blurred, and shrouds the distinct picture in a veil of clouds. By the word ‘girl’ we should just think of a girl and nothing else. ‘Damozel’ awakens in the consciousness of the English reader obscure ideas of slim, noble ladies in the tapestries of old castles, of haughty Norman knights in mail, of something remote, ancient, half forgotten; ‘damozel’ carries back the contemporary beloved into the mysterious depths of the Middle Ages, and spiritualizes her into the enchanted figure of a ballad. This one word awakens all the crepuscular moods which the body of romantic poets and authors have bequeathed as a residuum in the soul of the contemporary reader. In the hand of the ‘damozel’ Rossetti places three lilies, round her head he weaves seven stars. These numbers are, of course, not accidental. From the oldest times they have been reckoned as mysterious and holy. The ‘three’ and the ‘seven’ are allusions to something unknown, and of deep meaning, which the intuitive reader may try to understand.
It must not be said that my criticism of the means by which Rossetti seeks to express his own dreamy states of mind, and to arouse similar states in the reader, applies equally to all lyrics and poetry generally, and that I condemn the latter when I adduce the former as the emanations of the mystic’s weakness of mind. All poetry no doubt has this peculiarity, that it makes use of words intended not only to arouse the definite ideas which they connote, but also to awaken emotions that shall vibrate in consciousness. But the procedure of a healthy-minded poet is altogether different from that of a weak-minded mystic. The suggestive word employed by the former has in itself an intelligible meaning, but besides this it is adapted to excite emotions in every healthy-minded man; and finally the emotions excited have all of them reference to the subject of the poem. One example will make this clear. Uhland sings the Praise of Spring in these words:
‘Saatengrün, Veilchenduft,
Lerchenwirbel, Amselschlag,
Sonnenregen, linde Luft:
Wenn ich solche Worte singe,
Braucht es dann noch grosse Dinge,
Dich zu preisen, Frühlingstag?’[95]
Each word of the first three lines contains a positive idea. Each of them awakens glad feelings in a man of natural sentiment. These feelings, taken together, produce the mood with which the awakening of spring fills the soul, to induce which was precisely the intention of the poet. When, on the other hand, Rossetti interweaves the mystical numbers ‘three’ and ‘seven’ in the description of his ‘damozel,’ these numbers signify nothing in themselves; moreover, they will call up no emotion at all in an intellectually healthy reader, who does not believe in mystical numbers; but even in the case of the degenerate and hysterical reader, on whom the cabbala makes impression, the emotions excited by the sacred numbers will not involve a reference to the subject of the poem, viz., the apparition of one loved and lost, but at best will call up a general emotional consciousness, which may perhaps tell in a remote way to the advantage of the ‘damozel.’
But to continue the analysis of the poem. To the maiden in bliss it appears that she has been a singer in God’s choir for only one day; to him who is left behind this one day has been actually a matter of ten years. ‘To one it is ten years of years.’ This computation is thoroughly mystical. It means, that is, absolutely nothing. Perhaps Rossetti imagined that there may exist a higher unity to which the single year may stand as one day does to a year; that therefore 365 years would constitute a sort of higher order of year. The words ‘year of years’ therefore signified 365 years. But as Rossetti portrays this thought vaguely and imperfectly, he is far from expressing it as intelligibly as this.
‘It was the rampart of God’s house
That she was standing on;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is space begun;
So high that, looking downward, thence
She scarce could see the sun.
‘It lies in heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge.
‘Heard hardly, some of her new friends,
Amid their loving games,
Spake evermore among themselves
Their virginal chaste names,
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.
‘From the fixed place of Heaven she saw
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds....’
I leave it to the reader to imagine all the details of this description and unite them into one complete picture. If he fail in this in spite of honest exertion, let him comfort himself by saying that the fault is not his, but Rossetti’s.
The damozel begins to speak. She wishes that her beloved were already with her. For come he will.
‘“When round his head the aureole clings,
And he is clothed in white,
I’ll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light.
We will step down as to a stream.
And bathe there in God’s sight.”’
It is to be observed how, in the midst of the turgid stream of these transcendental senseless modes of speech, the idea of bathing together takes a definite shape. Mystical reverie never fails to be accompanied by sensuality.
‘“We two,” she said, “will seek the groves
Where the Lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies—
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret, and Rosalys.”’
The enumeration of these five feminine names, occupying two lines of the stanza, is a method of versification characteristic of the mystic. Here the word ceases to be the symbol of a distinct presentation or concept, and sinks into a meaningless vocal sound, intended only to awaken divers agreeable emotions through association of ideas. In this case the five names arouse gliding shadowy ideas of beautiful young maidens, ‘Rosalys’ those of roses and lilies as well; and the two verses together diffuse a glamour of faerie, as if one were roaming at ease in a garden of flowers, where between lilies and roses slender white and rosy maidens pace to and fro.
The maiden in paradise goes on picturing to herself the union with her beloved, and then:
‘she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands
And wept—I heard her tears.’
These tears are incomprehensible. The blessed maiden after her death lives in the highest bliss, in a golden palace, in the presence of God and the Blessed Virgin. What pains her now? That her beloved is not yet with her? Ten years of mortal men are to her as a single day. Even if it be her beloved’s destiny to live to be a very old man, she will at most have to wait only five or six of her days until he appears at her side, and after this tiny span of time there blossoms for them both an eternity of joy. It is not, therefore, obvious why she is distressed and sheds tears. This can only be attributed to the bewildered thoughts of the mystic poet. He imagines to himself a life of happiness after death, but at the same time there dawn in his consciousness dim pictures of the annihilation of individuality, and of final separation through death, and those painful feelings are excited which we are accustomed to associate with ideas of death, decay, and separation from all we love. Hence it is that he comes to close an ecstatic hymn of immortality with tears, which have a meaning only if one does not believe in the continuation of life after death. In other respects also there are contradictions in the poem which show that Rossetti had not formed any one of his ideas so clearly as to exclude the opposite and incompatible. Thus, at one time the dead are dressed in white, and adorned with a galaxy of stars; they appear in pairs and call each other by caressing names; they must also be thought of as resembling human beings in appearance, while on another occasion their souls are ‘thin flames’ which rustle past the damozel. Every single idea in the poem, when we try soberly to follow it out, infallibly takes refuge after this manner in darkness and intangibility.
In the ‘Divine Comedy,’ echoes of which are ever humming in Rossetti’s soul, we find nothing of this kind. This was because Dante, like the Old Masters, was a mystic from ignorance, not from the weak-mindedness of degeneration. The raw material of his thought, the store of facts with which he worked, was false, but the use his mind made of it was true and consistent. All his ideas were clear, homogeneous, and free from internal contradictions. His hell, his purgatory, his paradise, he built up on the science of his times, which based its knowledge of the world exclusively on dogmatic theology. Dante was familiar with the system of his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas (he was nine years old when the Doctor Angelicus died), and permeated by it. To the first readers of the Inferno the poem must have appeared at least as well founded on fact and as convincing as, let us say, Häckel’s Natural History of Creation does to the public of to-day. In coming centuries our ideas of an atom as merely a centre of force, of the disposition of atoms in the molecule of an organic combination, of ether and its vibrations, will perhaps be discerned to be just as much poetical dreams as the ideas of the Middle Ages concerning the abode of the souls of the dead appear to us. But that is no reason why anyone should claim the right to designate Helmholtz or William Thompson as mystics, because they base their work upon those notions which even to their minds do not to-day represent anything definite. For the same reason no one ought to call Dante a mystic like a Rossetti. Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel is not based upon the scientific knowledge of his time, but upon a mist of undeveloped germs of ideas in constant mutual strife. Dante followed the realities of the world with the keenly penetrating eyes of an observer, and bore with him its image down to his hell. Rossetti is not in a condition to understand, or even to see the real, because he is incapable of the necessary attention; and since he feels this weakness he persuades himself, in conformity with human habit, that he does not wish to do what in reality he cannot do. ‘What is it to me,’ he once said,[96] ‘whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun around the earth?’ To him it is of no importance, because he is incapable of understanding it.
It is, of course, impossible to go so deeply into all Rossetti’s poems as into the Blessed Damozel; but it is also unnecessary, since we should everywhere meet with the same mixture of transcendentalism and sensuality, the same shadowy ideation, the same senseless combinations of mutually incompatible ideas. Reference, however, must be made to some of the peculiarities of the poet, because they characterize the brain-work of weak degenerate minds.
The first thing that strikes us is his predilection for refrains. The refrain is an excellent artistic medium for the purpose of unveiling the state of a soul under the influence of a strong emotion. It is natural that, to the lover yearning for his beloved, the recurring idea of her should be ever thrusting itself among all the other thoughts in which he temporarily indulges. It is equally comprehensible that the unhappy being who is made miserable by thoughts of suicide should be unable to free himself from an idea which is in harmony with his mental condition, say of an Armensünderblum, or ‘flower of the doomed soul,’ which he sees when walking at night. (See Heine’s poem, Am Kreuzweg wird begraben, in which the line die Armensünderblum is repeated at the end of both strophes with peculiarly thrilling effect.)
Rossetti’s refrains, however, are different from this, which is natural and intelligible. They have nothing to do with the emotion or action expressed by the poem. They are alien to the circle of ideas belonging to the poem. In a word, they possess the character of an obsession, which the patient cannot suppress, although he recognises that they are in no rational connection with the intellectual content of his consciousness. In the poem Troy Town it is related how Helen, long before Paris had carried her off, kneels in the temple of Venus at Sparta, and, drunken with the luxuriant beauty of her own body, fervently implores the Goddess of Love to send her a man panting for love, where or whoever he might be, to whom she might give herself. The absurdity of this fundamental idea it is sufficient to indicate in passing. The first strophe runs thus:
‘Heaven-born Helen, Sparta’s Queen
(O Troy town!),
Had two breasts of heavenly sheen,
The sun and the moon of the heart’s desire.
All Love’s lordship lay between.
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)
‘Helen knelt at Venus’ shrine
(O Troy town!)
Saying, “A little gift is mine,
A little gift for a heart’s desire.
Hear me speak and make me a sign!
(O Troy’s down,
Tall Troy’s on fire!)”’[97]
And thus through fourteen strophes there constantly recurs, after the first line, ‘O Troy town!’ at the end of the third line, ‘heart’s desire’; and after the fourth line, ‘O Troy’s down, tall Troy’s on fire!’ It is easy to discern what Rossetti wishes. In him there is repeated the mental process which we recognised in Holman Hunt’s picture, The Shadow of the Cross. As by association of ideas, in thinking of Helen at Sparta, he hits upon the idea of the subsequent fate of Troy, so shall the reader, while he sees the young queen in Sparta intoxicated by her own beauty, be simultaneously presented with the picture of the yet distant tragical consequences of her longing desire. But he does not seek to connect these two trains of thought in a rational way. He is ever muttering as he goes, monotonously as in a litany, the mysterious invocations to Troy, while he is relating the visit to the temple of Venus at Sparta. Sollier[98] remarks this peculiarity among persons of feeble intellect. ‘Idiots,’ he says, ‘insert words which have absolutely no connection with the object.’ And further on: ‘Among idiots constant repetition [le rabâchage] grows into a veritable tic.’
In another very famous poem, Eden Bower,[99] which treats of the pre-Adamite woman Lilith, her lover the serpent of Eden, and her revenge on Adam, the litany refrain of ‘Eden Bower’s in flower,’ and ‘And O the Bower and the hour,’ are introduced alternately after the first line in forty-nine strophes. As a matter of course, between these absolutely senseless phrases and the strophe which each interrupts, there is not the remotest connection. They are strung together without any reference to their meaning, but only because they rhyme. It is a startling example of echolalia.
We frequently find this peculiarity of the weak and deranged mind, i.e., echolalia, in Rossetti. Here are a few proofs:
‘So wet she comes to wed’ (Stratton Water).
Here the sound ‘wed’ has called up the sound ‘wet.’ In the poem My Sisters Sleep, in one place where the moon is spoken of, it is said:
‘The hollow halo it was in
Was like an icy crystal cup.’
It is stark nonsense to qualify a plane surface such as a halo by the adjective ‘hollow.’ The adjective and noun mutually exclude each other, but the rhyming assonance has joined ‘hollow’ to ‘halo.’ With this we may also compare the line:
‘Yet both were ours, but hours will come and go’
(A New Year’s Burden),
and
‘Forgot it not, nay, but got it not’ (Beauty).
Many of Rossetti’s poems consist of the stringing together of wholly disconnected words, and to mystic readers these absurdities seem naturally to have the deepest meaning. I should like to cite but one example. The second strophe of the Song of the Bower says:
‘... My heart, when it flies to thy bower,
What does it find there that knows it again?
There it must droop like a shower-beaten flower,
Red at the rent core and dark with the rain.
Ah! yet what shelter is still shed above it—
What waters still image its leaves torn apart?
Thy soul is the shade that clings round it to love it,
And tears are its mirror deep down in thy heart.’[100]
The peculiarity of such series of words is, that each single word has an emotional meaning of its own (such as ‘heart,’ ‘bower,’ ‘flies,’ ‘droop,’ ‘flower,’ ‘rent,’ ‘dark,’ ‘lone,’ ‘tears,’ etc.), and that they follow each other with a cradled rhythm and ear-soothing rhyme. Hence they easily arouse in the emotional and inattentive reader a general emotion, as does a succession of musical tones in a minor key. And the reader fancies that he understands the strophe, while he, as a matter of fact, only interprets his own emotion according to his own level of culture, his character, and his recollections of what he has read.
Besides Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it has been customary to include Swinburne and Morris among the pre-Raphaelite poets. But the similarity between these two and the head of the school is remote. Swinburne is, in Magnan’s phrase, a ‘higher degenerate,’ while Rossetti should be counted among Sollier’s imbeciles. Swinburne is not so emotional as Rossetti, but he stands on a much higher mental plane. His thought is false and frequently delirious, but he has thoughts, and they are clear and connected. He is mystical, but his mysticism partakes more of the depraved and the criminal than of the paradisiacal and divine. He is the first representative of ‘Diabolism’ in English poetry. This is because he has been influenced, not only by Rossetti, but also and especially by Baudelaire. Like all ‘degenerates,’ he is extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion, and, consciously or unconsciously, he has imitated, one after another, all the strongly-marked poetic geniuses that have come under his notice. He was an echo of Rossetti and Baudelaire, as he was of Gautier and Victor Hugo, and in his poems it is possible to trace the course of his reading step by step.
Completely Rossettian, for example, is A Christmas Carol.[101]
‘Three damsels in the queen’s chamber,
The queen’s mouth was most fair;
She spake a word of God’s mother,
As the combs went in her hair.
“Mary that is of might,
Bring us to thy Son’s sight.”’
Here we find a mystical content united to the antiquarianism and childish phraseology of genuine pre-Raphaelitism. The Masque of Queen Bersabe is worked out on the same model, being an imitation of the mediæval miracle-play, with its Latin stage directions and puppet-theatre style. This, in its turn, has become the model of many French poems, in which there is only a babbling and stammering and a crawling on all fours, as if in a nursery.
Where he walks in Baudelaire’s footsteps, Swinburne tries to distort his face to a diabolical mien, and makes the woman say (in Anactoria) to the other unnaturally loved woman:
‘I would my love could kill thee. I am satiated
With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead.
I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,
And no mouth but some serpent’s found thee sweet.
I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
Intense device, and superflux of pain;
... O! that I
Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die—
Die of thy pain and my delight, and be
Mixed with thy blood and molten unto thee.’
Or, when he curses and reviles, as in Before Dawn:
‘To say of shame—what is it?
Of virtue—we can miss it,
Of sin—we can but kiss it,
And it’s no longer sin.’
One poem deserves a more detailed analysis, because it contains unmistakably the germ of the later ‘symbolism,’ and is an instructive example of this form of mysticism. The poem is The King’s Daughter. It is a sort of ballad, which in fourteen four-lined stanzas relates a fairy story about the ten daughters of a king, of whom one was preferred before the remaining nine, was beautifully dressed, pampered with the most costly food, slept in a soft bed, and received the attentions of a handsome prince, while her sisters remained neglected; but instead of finding happiness at the prince’s side, she became deeply wretched and wished she were dead. In the first and third lines of every stanza the story is rehearsed. The second line speaks of a mythical mill-stream, which comes into the ballad one knows not how, and which always, by some mysterious influence, symbolically reflects all the changes that take place as the action of the ballad progresses; while the fourth line contains a litany-like exclamation, which likewise makes a running reference to the particular stage reached in the narrative.
‘We were ten maidens in the green corn,
Small red leaves in the mill-water:
Fairer maidens never were born,
Apples of gold for the King’s daughter.
‘We were ten maidens by a well-head,
Small white birds in the mill-water:
Sweeter maidens never were wed,
Rings of red for the King’s daughter.’
In the following stanzas the admirable qualities of each of the ten princesses are portrayed, and the symbolical intermediate lines run thus:
‘Seeds of wheat in the mill-water— ... White bread and brown for the King’s daughter— ... Fair green weed in the mill-water— ... White wine and red for the King’s daughter— ... Fair thin reeds in the mill-water— ... Honey in the comb for the King’s daughter— ... Fallen flowers in the mill-water— ... Golden gloves for the King’s daughter— ... Fallen fruit in the mill-water— ... Golden sleeves for the King’s daughter— ...’
The King’s son then comes, chooses the one princess and disdains the other nine. The symbolical lines point out the contrast between the brilliant fate of the chosen one and the gloomy destiny of the despised sisters:
‘A little wind in the mill-water; A crown of red for the King’s daughter—A little rain in the mill-water; A bed of yellow straw for all the rest; A bed of gold for the King’s daughter—Rain that rains in the mill-water; A comb of yellow shell for all the rest,—A comb of gold for the King’s daughter—Wind and hail in the mill-water; A grass girdle for all the rest, A girdle of arms for the King’s daughter—Snow that snows in the mill-water; Nine little kisses for all the rest, An hundredfold for the King’s daughter.’
The King’s daughter thus appears to be very fortunate, and to be envied by her nine sisters. But this happiness is only on the surface, for the poem now suddenly changes:
‘Broken boats in the mill-water;
Golden gifts for all the rest,
Sorrow of heart for the King’s daughter.
‘“Ye’ll make a grave for my fair body,”
Running rain in the mill-water;
“And ye’ll streek my brother at the side of me,”
The pains of hell for the King’s daughter.’
What has brought about this change in her fate the poet purposely leaves obscure. Perhaps he wishes to have us understand that the King’s son has no right to sue for her hand, being her brother, and that the chosen princess for shame at the incest perishes. This would be in keeping with Swinburne’s childish devilry. But I am not dwelling on this aspect of the poem, but on its symbolism.
It is psychologically justifiable that a subjective connection should be set up between our states of mind for the time being and phenomena; that we should perceive in the external world a reflection of our moods. If the external world shows a well-marked emotional character, it awakens in us the mood corresponding to it; and conversely, if we are under the influence of some pronounced feeling, we notice, in accordance with the mechanism of attention, only those features of nature which are in harmony with our mood, which intensify and sustain it, while the opposing phenomena we neither observe nor even perceive. A gloomy ravine overhung by a cloudy sky makes us sad. This is one form of associating our humour with the outer world. But if we from any cause are already sad, we find some corresponding sadness in all the scenes around us—in the streets of the metropolis ragged, starved-looking children, thin, miserably kept cab-horses, a blind beggar-woman; in the woods withered, mouldering leaves, poisonous fungi, slimy slugs, etc. If we are joyous, we see just the same objects, but take no notice of them, perceiving only beside them, in the street, a wedding procession, a fresh young maiden with a basket of cherries on her arm, gaily-coloured placards, a funny fat man with his hat on the back of his head; in the woods, birds flitting by, dancing butterflies, little white anemones, etc. Here we have the other form of that association. The poet has a perfect right to make use of both these forms. If Heine sings:
‘Es ragt ins Meer der Runenstein,
Da sitz ich mit meinen Träumen;
Es pfeift der Wind, die Möwen schrein,
Die Wellen, die wandern und schäumen.
‘Ich habe geliebt manch schönes Kind
Und manchen guten Gesellen—
Wo sind sie hin?—Es pfeift der Wind,
Es schäumen und wandern die Wellen,’[102]
he brings his own mournful, melancholy frame of mind with him. He bemoans the fleetingness of man’s life, the impermanence of the feelings, the shadowy passing by and away of beloved companions. In this state he looks out over the sea from the shore where he sits, and perceives only those objects that are in keeping with his humour and give it embodiment: the driving gust of wind, the hurrying gulls, now seen, now lost to sight, the rolling in and trackless ebbing of the surf. These features of an ocean scene become symbols of what is passing through the poet’s mind, and this symbolism is sound and founded on the laws of thought.
Swinburne’s symbolism is of quite another kind. He does not let the external world express a mood, but makes it tell a story; he changes its appearance according to the character of the event he is describing. Like an orchestra, it accompanies all events which somewhere are taking place. Here nature is no longer a white wall on which, as in a game of shadows, the varied visions of the soul are thrown; but a living, thinking being, which follows the sinful love-romance with the same tense sympathy as the poet, and which, with its own media, expresses just as much as he does—complacency, delight, or sorrow—at every chapter of the story. This is a purely delirious idea. It corresponds in art and poetry to hallucination in mental disease. It is a form of mysticism, which is met with in all the degenerate. Just as in Swinburne the mill-water drives ‘small red leaves,’ and, what is certainly more curious, ‘little white birds,’ when everything is going on well, and on the other hand is lashed by snow and hail, and tosses shattered boats about, if things take an adverse turn; so, in Zola’s Assommoir, the drain from a dyeing factory carries off fluid of a rosy or golden hue on days of happiness, but a black or gray-coloured stream if the fates of Gervaise and Lantier grow dark with tragedy. Ibsen, too, in his Ghosts, makes it rain in torrents if Frau Alving and her son are in sore trouble, while the sunshine breaks forth just as the catastrophe is about to occur. Ibsen, moreover, goes farther in this hallucinatory symbolism than the others, since with him Nature not only plays an active part, but shows scornful malice—she not only furnishes an expressive accompaniment to the events, but makes merry over them.
William Morris is intellectually far more healthy than Rossetti and Swinburne. His deviations from mental equilibrium betray themselves, not through mysticism, but through a want of individuality, and an overweening tendency to imitation. His affectation consists in mediævalism. He calls himself a pupil of Chaucer.[103] He artlessly copies whole stanzas also from Dante, e.g., the well-known Francesca and Paolo episode from Canto V. of the Inferno, when he writes in his Guenevere:
‘In that garden fair
Came Lancelot walking; this is true, the kiss
Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day,
I scarce dare talk of the remembered bliss.’
Morris persuades himself that he is a wandering minstrel of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and takes much trouble to look at things in such a way, and express them in such language, as would have befitted a real contemporary of Chaucer. Beyond this poetical ventriloquism, so to speak, with which he seeks so to alter the sound of his voice that it may appear to come from far away to our ear, there are not many features of degeneracy in him to notice. But he sometimes falls into outspoken echolalia, e.g., in a stanza of the Earthly Paradise:
‘Of Margaret sitting glorious there,
In glory of gold and glory of hair,
And glory of glorious face most fair’—
where ‘glory’ and ‘glorious’ are repeated five times in three lines. His emotional activity in recent years has made him an adherent of a vague socialism, consisting chiefly of love and pity for his fellow-men, and which has an odd effect when expressed artistically in the language of the old ballads.
The pre-Raphaelites have for twenty years exercised a great influence on the rising generation of English poets. All the hysterical and degenerate have sung with Rossetti of ‘damozels’ and of the Virgin Mary, have with Swinburne eulogized unnatural license, crime, hell, and the devil. They have, with Morris, mangled language in bardic strains, and in the manner of the Canterbury Tales; and if the whole of English poetry is not to-day unmitigatedly pre-Raphaelite, it is due merely to the fortunate accident that, contemporaneously with the pre-Raphaelites, so sound a poet as Tennyson has lived and worked. The official honours bestowed on him as Poet Laureate, his unexampled success among readers, pointed him out to a part at least of the petty strugglers and aspirants as worthy of imitation, and so it comes about that among the chorus of the lily-bearing mystics there are also heard other street-singers who follow the poet of the Idylls of the King.
In its further development pre-Raphaelitism in England degenerated into ‘æstheticism,’ and in France into ‘symbolism.’ With both of these tendencies we must deal more fully.
[CHAPTER III.]
SYMBOLISM.
A similar phenomenon to that which we observed in the case of the pre-Raphaelites is afforded by the French Symbolists. We see a number of young men assemble for the purpose of founding a school. It assumes a special title, but in spite of all sorts of incoherent cackle and subsequent attempts at mystification it has, beyond this name, no kind of general artistic principle or clear æsthetic ideal. It only follows the tacit, but definitely recognisable, aim of making a noise in the world, and by attracting the attention of men through its extravagances, of attaining celebrity and profit, and the gratification of all the desires and conceits agitating the envious souls of these filibusters of fame.
Shortly after 1880 there was, in the Quartier Latin in Paris, a group of literary aspirants, all about the same age, who used to meet in an underground café at the Quai St. Michel, and, while drinking beer, smoking and quibbling late into the night, or early hours of the morning, abused in a scurrilous manner the well-known and successful authors of the day, while boasting of their own capacity, as yet unrevealed to the world.
The greatest talkers among them were Emile Goudeau, a chatterbox unknown save as the author of a few silly satirical verses; Maurice Rollinat, the author of Les Névroses; and Edmond Haraucourt, who now stands in the front rank of French mystics. They called themselves the ‘Hydropaths,’ an entirely meaningless word, which evidently arose out of an indistinct reminiscence of both ‘hydrotherapy’ and ‘neuropath,’ and which was probably intended, in the characteristic vagueness of the mystic thought of the weak-minded, to express only the general idea of people whose health is not satisfactory, who are ailing and under treatment. In any case there is, in the self-chosen name, a suggestion of shattered nervous vitality vaguely felt and admitted. The group, moreover, owned a weekly paper Lutèce, which ceased after a few issues.[104]
About 1884 the society left their paternal pot-house, and pitched their tent in the Café François I., Boulevard St. Michel. This café attained a high renown. It was the cradle of Symbolism. It is still the temple of a few ambitious youths, who hope, by joining the Symbolist school, to acquire that advancement which they could not expect from their own abilities. It is, too, the Kaaba to which all foreign imbeciles make a pilgrimage, those, that is, who have heard of the new Parisian tendency, and wish to become initiated into its teachings and mysteries. A few of the Hydropaths did not join in the change of quarters, and their places were taken by fresh auxiliaries—Jean Moréas, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Morice, etc. These dropped the old name, and were known for a short time as the ‘Décadents.’ This had been applied to them by a critic in derision, but just as the ‘Beggars’ of the Netherlands proudly and truculently appropriated the appellation bestowed in contempt and mockery, so the ‘Décadents’ stuck in their hats the insult, which had been cast in their faces, as a sign of mutiny against criticism. Soon, however, these original guests of the François I. became tired of their name, and Moréas invented for them the designation of ‘Symbolists,’ under which they became generally known, while a special smaller group, who had separated themselves from the Symbolists, continued to retain the title of ‘Décadents.’
The Symbolists are a remarkable example of that group-forming tendency which we have learnt to know as a peculiarity of ‘degenerates.’ They had in common all the signs of degeneracy and imbecility: overweening vanity and self-conceit, strong emotionalism, confused disconnected thoughts, garrulity (the ‘logorrhœa’ of mental therapeutics), and complete incapacity for serious sustained work. Several of them had had a secondary education, others even less. All of them were profoundly ignorant, and being unable, through weakness of will and inability to pay attention, to learn anything systematically, they persuaded themselves, in accordance with a well-known psychological law, that they despised all positive knowledge, and held that only dreams and divinings, only ‘intuitions,’ were worthy of human beings. A few of them, like Moréas and Guaita, who afterwards became a ‘magian,’ read in a desultory fashion all sorts of books which chanced to fall into their hands at the bouquinistes of the Quais, and delivered themselves of the snatched fruits of their reading in grandiloquent and mysterious phrases before their comrades. Their listeners thereupon imagined that they had indulged in an exhausting amount of study, and in this way they acquired that intellectual lumber which they peddled out in such an ostentatious display in their articles and pamphlets, and in which the mentally sane reader, to his amused astonishment, meets with the names of Schopenhauer, Darwin, Taine, Renan, Shelley and Goethe; names employed to label the shapeless, unrecognisable rubbish-heaps of a mental dustbin, filled with raw scraps of uncomprehended and insolently mutilated propositions and fragments of thought, dishonestly extracted and appropriated. This ignorance on the part of the Symbolists, and their childish flaunting of a pretended culture, are openly admitted by one of them. ‘Very few of these young men,’ says Charles Morice,[105] ‘have any exact knowledge of the tenets of religion or philosophy. From the expressions used in the Church services, however, they retain some fine terms, such as “monstrance,” “ciborium,” etc.; several have preserved from Spencer, Mill, Shopenhauer (sic!), Comte, Darwin, a few technical terms. Few are those who know deeply what they talk about, or those who do not try to make a show and parade of their manner of speaking, which has no other merit than that of being a conceit in syllables.’ (Charles Morice naturally is responsible for this last unmeaning phrase, not I.)
The original guests of the François I. made their appearance at one o’clock in the day at their café, and remained there till dinner-time. Immediately after that meal they returned, and did not leave their headquarters till long after midnight. Of course none of the Symbolists had any known occupation. These ‘degenerates’ are no more capable of regularly fulfilling any duty than they are of methodical learning. If this organic deficiency appears in a man of the lower classes, he becomes a vagabond; in a woman of that class it leads to prostitution; in one belonging to the upper classes it takes the form of artistic and literary drivel. The German popular mind betrays a deep intuition of the true connection of things in inventing such a word as ‘day-thief’ (Tagedieb) for such æsthetic loafers. Professional thieving and the unconquerable propensity to busy, gossiping, officious idleness flow from the same source, to wit, inborn weakness of brain.
It is true that the boon companions of the café are not conscious of their mentally-crippled condition. They find pet names and graceful appellations for their inability to submit themselves to any sort of discipline, and to devote persistent concentration and attention to any sort of work. They call it ‘the artist nature,’ ‘genius roaming at large,’ ‘a soaring above the low miasma of the commonplace.’ They ridicule the dull Philistine, who, like the horse turning a winch, performs mechanically a regular amount of work; they despise the narrow-minded loons who demand that a man should either pursue a circumscribed bourgeois trade or possess an officially acknowledged status, and who profoundly distrust impecuniary professions. They glory in roving folk who wander about singing and carelessly begging, and they hold up as their ideal the ‘commoner of air,’ who bathes in morning dew, sleeps under flowers, and gets his clothing from the same firm as the lilies of the field in the Gospel. Richepin’s La Chanson des Gueux is the most typical expression of this theory of life. Baumbach’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Spielmannslieder are analogous specimens in German literature, but of a less pronounced character. Schiller’s Pegasus im Joch seems to be pulling at the same rope as these haters of the work society expects of them, but it is only apparently so. Our great poet sides not with the impotent sluggard, but with that overflowing energy which would fain do greater things than the work of an office-boy or a night-watchman.
Moreover, the pseudo-artistic loafer, in spite of his imbecility and self-esteem, cannot fail to perceive that his mode of life runs contrary to the laws on which the structure of society and civilization are based, and he feels the need of justifying himself in his own eyes. This he does by investing with a high significance the dreams and chatter over which he wastes his time, calculated to arouse in him the illusion that they rival in value the most serious productions. ‘The fact is, you see,’ says M. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘that a fine book is the end for which the world was made.’[106] Morice complains[107] touchingly that the poetic mind ‘should be bound to suffer the interruption of a twenty-eight days’ army drill between the two halves of a verse.’ ‘The excitement of the streets,’ he goes on, ‘the jarring of the Governmental engine, the newspapers, the elections, the change of the Ministry, have never made so much noise; the stormy and turbulent autocracy of trade has suppressed the love of the beautiful in the thoughts of the multitude, and industry has killed as much silence as politics might still have permitted to survive.’ In fact, what are all these nothings—commerce, manufactures, politics, administration—against the immense importance of a hemistich?
The drivelling of the Symbolists was not entirely lost in the atmosphere of their café, like the smoke of their pipes and cigarettes. A certain amount of it was perpetuated, and appeared in the Revue Indépendante, the Revue Contemporaine, and other fugitive periodicals, which served as organs to the round table of the François I. These little journals and the books published by the Symbolists were not at first noticed outside the café. Then it happened that chroniqueurs of the Boulevard papers, into whose hands these writings chanced to fall, devoted an article to them on days when ‘copy’ was scanty, but only to hold them up to ridicule. That was all the Symbolists wanted. Mockery or praise mattered little so long as they got noticed. Now they were in the saddle, and showed at once what unparalleled circus-riders they were. They themselves used every effort to get into the larger newspapers, and when one of them succeeded, like the smith of Jüterbock in the familiar fairy tale, in throwing his cap into an editor’s office through the crack of the door incautiously put ajar, he followed it neck and crop, took possession of the place, and in the twinkling of an eye transformed it into the citadel of the Symbolist party. In these tactics everything served their turn—the dried-up scepticism and apathy of Parisian editors, who take nothing seriously, are capable neither of enthusiasm nor of repugnance, and only know the cardinal principle of their business, viz., to make a noise, to arouse curiosity, to forestall others by bringing out something new and sensational; the uncritical gaping attitude of the public, who repeat in faith all that their newspaper gossips to them with an air of importance; the cowardice and cupboard-love of the critics who, finding themselves confronted by a closed and numerous band of reckless young men, got nervous at the sight of their clenched fists and angry threatening glances, and did not dare to quarrel with them; the low cunning of the ambitious, who hoped to make a good bargain if they speculated on the rise of shares in Symbolism. Thus the very worst and most despicable characteristics of editors, critics, aspiring authors, and newspaper readers, co-operated to make known, and, in part, even famous, the names of the original habitués of the François I., and to awaken the conviction in very many weak minds of both hemispheres that their tendency governed the literature of the day, and included all the germs of the future. This triumph of the Symbolists marks the victory of the gang over the individual. It proves the superiority of attack over defence, and the efficacy of mutual-admiration-insurance, even in the case of the most beggarly incapacity.
With all their differences, the works of the Symbolists have two features in common. They are vague often to the point of being unintelligible, and they are pious. Their vagueness is only to be expected, after all that has been said here about the peculiarities of mystic thought. Their piousness has attained to an importance which makes it necessary to consider it more in detail.
When, in the last few years, a large number of mysteries, passion plays, golden legends, and cantatas appeared, when one dozen after another of new poets and authors, in their first poems, novels, and treatises, made ardent confessions of faith, invoked the Virgin Mary, spoke with rapture of the sacrifice of the Mass, and knelt in fervent prayer, the cry arose amongst reactionists, who have a vested interest in diffusing a belief in a reversion of cultured humanity to the mental darkness of the past: ‘Behold, the youth, the hope, the future of the French people is turning away from science; “emancipation” is becoming bankrupt; souls are opening again to religion, and the Holy Catholic Church steps anew into its lofty office, as the teacher, comforter, and guide of civilized mankind.’ The Symbolistic tendency is designedly called ‘neo-Catholic,’ and certain critics pointed to its appearance and success as a proof that freethought was overthrown by faith. ‘Even the most superficial glance at the state of the world,’ writes Edouard Rod,[108] ‘shows us that we are on all sides in the full swing of reaction.’ And, further, ‘I believe in reaction in every sense of the word. How far this reaction will go is the secret of to-morrow.’
The jubilant heralds of the new reaction, in inquiring into the cause of this movement, find, with remarkable unanimity, this answer, viz.: The best and most cultivated minds return to faith, because they found out that science had deceived them, and not done for them what it had promised to do. ‘The man of this century,’ says M. Melchior de Vogüé,[109] ‘has acquired a very excusable confidence in himself.... The rational mechanism of the world has been revealed to him.... In the explanation of things the Divine order is wholly eliminated.... Besides, why follow after doubtful causes, when the operations of the universe and of humanity had become so clear to the physicist and physiologist?... The least wrong God ever wrought was that of being unnecessary. Great minds assured us of this, and all mediocre spirits were convinced of it. The eighteenth century had inaugurated the worship of Reason. The rapture of that millennium lasted but a moment. Then came eternal disillusion, the regularly recurring ruin of all that man had built upon the hollow basis of his reason.... He had to admit that, beyond the circle of acquired truths, the abyss of ignorance appeared again just as deep, just as disquieting.’
Charles Morice, the theorist and philosopher of the Symbolists, arraigns Science on almost every page of his book, La Littérature de tout-à-l’heure, for her great and divers sins. ‘It is lamentable,’ he says in his apocalyptic phraseology,[110] ‘that our learned men have no idea how, in popularizing science, they were disorganizing it (?). To entrust principles to inferior memories, is to expose them to the uncertainty of unauthorized interpretations, of erroneous commentaries and heterodox hypotheses. For the word that the books contain is a dead letter, and the books themselves may perish, but the impact which they leave behind them, the breath going forth from them, survives. And what if they have breathed out storm and unloosed (!) darkness? But this is just what all this chaos of vulgarization has as its most patent result.... Is not such the natural consequence of a century of psychological investigation, which was a good training for the reason, but whose immediate and actual consequences must inevitably be weariness, and disgust, ay, and despair of reason?... Science had erased the word mystery. With the same stroke of the pen she had expunged the words beauty, truth, joy, humanity.... And now mysticism takes from Science, the intruder and usurper, not only all that she had stolen, but something also, it may be, of her own property. The reaction against the shameless and miserable negations of scientific literature ... has taken the form of an unforeseen poetical restoration of Catholicism.’
Another graphomaniac, the author of that imbecile book, Rembrandt as Educator, drivels in almost the same way. ‘Interest in science, and especially in the once so popular natural science, has widely diminished of late in the German world.... There has been to a certain extent a surfeit of induction; there is a longing for synthesis; the days of objectivity are declining once more to their end, and, in its place, subjectivity knocks at the door.’[111]
Edouard Rod[112] says: ‘The century has advanced without keeping all its promises’; and further on he speaks again of ‘this ageing and deluded century.’
In a small book, which has become a sort of gospel to imbeciles and idiots, Le Devoir présent, the author, M. Paul Desjardins,[113] makes continual attacks on ‘so-called scientific empiricism,’ and speaks of the ‘negativists, the empiricists, and the mechanists, whose attention is wholly taken up with physical and inexorable forces,’ boasting of his intention ‘to render invalid the value of the empirical methods.’
Even a serious thinker, M. F. Paulhan,[114] in his investigation of the basis of French neo-mysticism, comes to the conclusion that natural science has shown itself powerless to satisfy the needs of mankind. ‘We feel ourselves surrounded by a vast unknown, and demand that at least access to it should be permitted to us. Evolution and positivism have blocked the way.... For these reasons evolution could not but show itself incapable of guiding the mind, even if it left us great thoughts.’
Overwhelming as may appear this unanimity between strong minds commanding respect and weak graphomaniacs, it does not, nevertheless, contain the slightest spark of truth. To assert that the world turns away from science because the ‘empirical,’ which means the scientific, method of observation and registration has suffered shipwreck, is either a conscious lie or shows lack of mental responsibility. A healthy-minded and honourable man must almost feel ashamed to have still to demonstrate this. In the last ten years, by means of spectrum-analysis, science has made disclosures in the constitution of the most distant heavenly bodies, their component matter, their degree of heat, the speed and direction of their motions; it has firmly established the essential unity of all modes of force, and has made highly probable the unity of all matter; it is on the track of the formation and development of chemical elements, and it has learnt to understand the building up of extremely intricate organic combinations; it shows us the relations of atoms in molecules, and the position of molecules in space; it has thrown wonderful light on the conditions of the action of electricity, and placed this force at the service of mankind; it has renewed geology and palæontology, and disentangled the concatenation of animal and vegetable forms of life; it has newly created biology and embryology, and has explained in a surprising manner, through the discovery and investigation of germs, some of the most disquieting mysteries of perpetual metamorphosis, illness, and death; it has found or perfected methods which, like chronography, instantaneous photography, etc., permit of the analysis and registration of the most fleeting phenomena, not immediately apprehensible by human sense, and which promise to become extremely fruitful for the knowledge of nature. And in the face of such splendid, such overwhelmingly grand results, the enumeration of which could easily be doubled and trebled, does anyone dare to speak of the shipwreck of science, and of the incapacity of the empirical method?
Science is said not to have kept what she promised. When has she ever promised anything else than honest and attentive observation of phenomena and, if possible, establishment of the conditions under which they occur? And has she not kept this promise? Does she not keep it perpetually? If anyone has expected of her that she would explain from one day to another the whole mechanism of the universe, like a juggler explains his apparent magic, he has indeed no idea of the true mission of science. She denies herself all leaps and flights. She advances step by step. She builds slowly and patiently a firm bridge out into the Unknown, and can throw no new arch over the abyss before she has sunk deep the foundations of a new pier in the depths, and raised it to the right height.
Meanwhile, she asks nothing at all about the first cause of phenomena, so long as she has so many more proximate causes to investigate. Many of the most eminent men of science go so far, indeed, as to assert that the first cause will never become the object of scientific investigation, and call it, with Herbert Spencer, ‘the Unknowable,’ or exclaim despondingly with Du Bois-Reymond, Ignorabimus. Both of them in this respect are completely unscientific, and only prove that even clear thinkers like Spencer, and sober investigators like Du Bois-Reymond, stand yet under the influence of theological dreams. Science can speak of no Unknowable, since this would presuppose that she is able to mark exactly the boundaries of the Knowable. This, however, she cannot do, since every new discovery thrusts back that boundary. Moreover, the acceptance of an Unknowable involves the acknowledgment that there is something which we cannot know. Now, in order to be able seriously to assert the existence of this Something, either we must have acquired some knowledge of it, however slight and indistinct, and this, therefore, would prove that it cannot be unknowable, since we actually know it, and nothing then would justify us in declaring beforehand that our present knowledge of it, however little it may be, will not be extended and deepened; or else we have no knowledge, even of the minutest character, of the philosopher’s Unknowable, in which case it cannot exist for us. The whole conception is based upon nothing, and the word is an idle creation of a dreaming imagination. The same thing can be said of Ignorabimus. It is the opposite of science. It is not a correct inference from well-founded premises, it is not the result of observation, but a mystical prophecy. No one has the right to make communications with respect to the future as matters of fact. Science can announce what she knows to-day; she can also mark off exactly what she does not know; but to say what she will or will not at any time know is not her office.
It is true that whoever asks from Science that she should give an answer to all the questions of idle and restless minds with unshaken and audacious certainty must be disappointed by her; for she will not, and cannot, fulfil his desires. Theology and metaphysics have an easier task. They devise some fable, and propound it with overwhelming earnestness. If anyone does not believe in them, they threaten and insult the intractable client; but they can prove nothing to him, they cannot force him to take their chimeras for cash. Theology and metaphysics can never be brought into a dilemma. It costs them nothing to add to their words more words, to unite to one voluntary assertion another, and pile up dogma upon dogma. It will never occur to the serious sound mind, which thirsts after real knowledge, to seek it from metaphysics or theology. They appeal only to childish brains, whose desire for knowledge, or, rather, whose curiosity, is fully satisfied with the cradling croon of an old wife’s tale.
Science does not compete with theology and metaphysics. If the latter declare themselves able to explain the whole phenomenon of the universe, Science shows that these pretended explanations are empty chatter. She, for her part, is naturally on her guard against putting in the place of a proved absurdity another absurdity. She says modestly: ‘Here we have a fact, here an assumption, here a conjecture. ‘Tis a rogue who gives more than he has.’ If this does not satisfy the neo-Catholics, they should sit down and themselves investigate, themselves find out new facts, and help to make clear the weird obscurity of the phenomenon of the universe. That would be a proof of a true desire for knowledge. At the table of Science there is room for all, and every fellow-observer is welcome. But this does not enter into even the dreams of these poor creatures, who drivel about the ‘bankruptcy of science.’ Talk is so much easier and more comfortable than inquiry and discovery!
True, science tells us nothing about the life after death, of harp-concerts in Paradise, and of the transformation of stupid youths and hysterical geese into white-clad angels with rainbow-coloured wings. It contents itself, in a much more plain and prosaic manner, with alleviating the existence of mankind on earth. It lessens the average of mortality, and lengthens the life of the individual through the suppression of known causes of disease; it invents new comforts, and makes easier the struggle against Nature’s destructive powers. The Symbolist, who is preserved after surgical interference through asepsy from suppuration, mortification, and death; who protects himself by a Chamberland filter from typhus; who by the careless turning of a button fills his room with electric light; who through a telephone can converse with someone beloved in far-distant countries, has to thank this alleged bankrupt science for it all, and not the theology to which he maintains that he wants to return.
The demand that science should give not only true, if limited, conclusions, and offer not only tangible benefits, but also solve all enigmas to-day and at once, and make all men omniscient, happy, and good, is ridiculous. Theology and metaphysics have never fulfilled this demand. It is simply the intellectual manifestation of the same foolish conceit, which in material concerns reveals itself in hankering after pleasure and in shirking work. The man who has lost his social status, who craves for wine and women, for idleness and honours, and complains of the constitution of society because it offers no satisfaction to his lusts, is own brother to the Symbolist who demands truth, and reviles science because it does not hand it to him on a golden platter. Both betray a similar incapacity to grasp the reality of things, and to understand that it is not possible to acquire goods without bodily labour, or truth without mental exertion. The capable man who wrests her gifts from Nature, the industrious inquirer who in the sweat of his brow bores into the sources of knowledge, inspires respect and cordial sympathy. On the other hand, there can be but little esteem for the discontented idlers who look for riches from a lucky lottery ticket, or a rich uncle, and for enlightenment from a revelation which is to come to them without trouble on their part over the slovenly beer-drinking at their favourite café.
The dunces who abuse science, reproach it also for having destroyed ideals, and stolen from life all its worth. This accusation is just as absurd as the talk about the bankruptcy of science. A higher ideal than the increase of general knowledge there cannot be. What saintly legend is as beautiful as the life of an inquirer, who spends his existence bending over a microscope, almost without bodily wants, known and honoured by few, working only for his own conscience’ sake, without any other ambition than that perhaps one little new fact may be firmly established, which a more fortunate successor will make use of in a brilliant synthesis, and insert as a stone in some monument of natural science? What religious fable has inspired with a contempt of death sublimer martyrs than a Gehlen, who sank down poisoned while preparing the arsenious hydrogen which he had discovered; or a Crocé-Spinelli, who was overtaken by death in an over-rapid ascent of his balloon while observing the pressure of the atmosphere; or an Ehrenberg, who became blind over his life’s work; or a Hyrtl, who almost entirely destroyed his eyesight by his anatomical corrosive preparations; or the doctors, who inoculate themselves with some deadly disease—not to speak of the innumerable crowd of discoverers travelling to the North Pole, and to the interior of dark continents? And did Archimedes really feel his life to be so worthless when he entreated the pillaging bands of Marcellus, ‘Do not disturb my circles’? Genuine healthy poetry has always recognised this, and finds its most ideal characters, not in a devotee, who murmurs prayers with drivelling lips, and stares with distorted eyes at some visual hallucination, but in a Prometheus and a Faust, who wrestle for science, i.e., for exact knowledge of nature.
The assertion that science has not kept its promises, and that, therefore, the rising generation is turning away from it, does not for a moment resist criticism, and is entirely without foundation. It is a senseless premise of neo-Catholicism, were the Symbolists to declare a hundred times over that disgust with science had made them mystics. The explanations which even a healthy-minded man makes with respect to the true motives of his actions are only to be accepted with the most cautious criticism; those proffered by the degenerate are completely useless. For the impulse to act and to think originate, for the degenerate, in the unconscious, and consciousness finds subsequent, and in some measure plausible, reasons for the thoughts and deeds, the real source of which is unknown to itself. Every book on suggestion gives illustrations of Charcot’s typical case: a hysterical female is sent into hypnotic sleep, and it is suggested to her that on awaking she is to stab one of the doctors present. She is then awakened. She grasps a knife and makes for her appointed victim. The blade is wrenched from her, and she is asked why she wishes to murder the doctor. She answers without hesitation, ‘Because he has done me an injury.’ Note that she had seen him that day for the first time in her life. This person felt when in a waking condition the impulse to kill the doctor. Her consciousness had no presentiment that this impulse had been suggested to her in a hypnotic state. Consciousness knows that a murder is never committed without some motive. Forced to find a motive for the attempted murder, consciousness falls back upon the only one reasonably possible under the circumstances, and fancies that it got hold of the idea of murder in order to avenge some wrong.
The brothers Janet[115] offer, as an explanation of this psychological phenomenon, the hypothesis of dual personality. ‘Every person consists of two personalities, one conscious and one unconscious. Among healthy persons both are alike complete, and both in equilibrium. In the hysteric they are unequal, and out of equilibrium. One of the two personalities, usually the conscious, is incomplete, the other remaining perfect.’ The conscious personality has the thankless task of inventing reasons for the actions of the unconscious. It resembles the familiar game where one person makes movements and another says words in keeping with them. In the degenerate with disturbed equilibrium consciousness has to play the part of an ape-like mother finding excuses for the stupid and naughty tricks of a spoiled child. The unconscious personality commits follies and evil deeds, and the conscious, standing powerless by, and unable to hinder it, seeks to palliate them by all sorts of pretexts.
The cause of the neo-Catholic movement, then, is not to be sought in any objection felt by younger minds to science, or in their having any complaint to make against it. A De Vogüé, a Rod, a Desjardins, a Paulhan, who impute such a basis to the mysticism of the Symbolists, arbitrarily attribute to it an origin which it never had. It is due solely and alone to the degenerate condition of its inventors. Neo-Catholicism is rooted in emotivity and mysticism, both of these being the most frequent and most distinctive stigmata of the degenerate.
That the mysticism of the degenerate, even in France, the land of Voltaire, has frequently taken the form of religious enthusiasm might at first seem strange, but will be understood if we consider the political and social circumstances of the French people during the last decade.
The great Revolution proclaimed three ideals: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Fraternity is a harmless word which has no real meaning, and therefore disturbs nobody. Liberty, to the upper classes, is certainly unpleasant, and they lament greatly over the sovereignty of the people and universal suffrage, but still they bear, without too much complaint, a state of things which, after all, is sufficiently mitigated by a prying administration, police supervision, militarism, and gendarmerie, and which will always be sufficient to keep the mob in leash. But equality to those in possession is an insufferable abomination. It is the one thing won by the great Revolution, which has outlasted all subsequent changes in the form of government, and has remained alive in the French people. The Frenchman does not know much about fraternity; his liberty in many ways has a muzzle as its emblem; but his equality he possesses as a matter of fact, and to it he holds firmly. The lowest vagabond, the bully of the capital, the rag-picker, the hostler, believes that he is quite as good as the duke, and says so to his face without the smallest hesitation if occasion arises. The reasons of the Frenchman’s fanaticism for equality are not particularly elevated. The feeling does not spring from a proud, manly consciousness and the knowledge of his own worth, but from low envy and malicious intolerance. There shall be nothing above the dead level! There shall be nothing better, nothing more beautiful or even more striking, than the average vulgarity! The upper classes struggle against this rage for equalization with passionate vehemence, especially and precisely those who have reached their high position through the great Revolution.
The grandchildren of the rural serfs, who plundered and destroyed the country seats of noblemen, basely murdered the inmates, and seized upon their lands; the descendants of town grocers and cobblers, who waxed rich as politicians of street and club, as speculators in national property and assignats, and as swindlers in army purveyance, do not want to become identified with the mob. They want to form a privileged class. They want to be recognised as belonging to a more honourable caste. They sought, for this purpose, a distinguishing mark, which would make them at once conspicuous as members of a select class, and they found it in belonging to the Church.
This choice is quite intelligible. The mass of the people in France, especially in towns, is sceptical, and the aristocracy of the ancien régime, who in the eighteenth century bragged about free thought, had come out of the deluge of 1789 as very pious persons, comprehending or divining the inner connection between all the old ideas and emblems of the Faith, of the Monarchy, and of feudal nobility. Hence, through their clericalism, the parvenus at once established a contrast between themselves and the multitude from whom they wanted to keep distinct, and a resemblance with the class into which they would like to smuggle or thrust themselves.
Experience teaches that the instinct of preservation is often the worst adviser in positions of danger. The man who cannot swim, falling into the water, involuntarily throws up his arms, and thus infallibly lets his head be submerged and himself be drowned; whereas his mouth and nose would remain above water if he held his arms and hands quietly under the surface. The bad rider, who feels his seat insecure, usually draws up his legs, and then comes the certainty of a fall; whereas he would probably be able to preserve his equilibrium if he left his legs outstretched. Thus the French bourgeoisie, who knew that they had snatched for themselves the fruits of the great upheaval, and let the Fourth Estate, who alone had made the Revolution, come out of it empty-handed, chose the worst means for retaining their unjustly-acquired possessions and privileges, and for escaping unnatural equalization when they made use of their clericalism for the establishment of their social status. They alienated, in consequence, the wisest, strongest, and most cultivated minds, and drove over to socialism many young men who, though intellectually radical, were yet economically conservative, and little in favour of equality, and who would have become a strong defence for a free-thinking bourgeoisie, but who felt that socialism, however radical its economic doctrines and impossible its theories of equality, represented emancipation.
But I have not to judge here whether the religious mimicry of the French bourgeoisie, which was to make them resemble the old nobility, exerts the protection expected of it or not; I only set down the fact of this mimicry. It is a necessary consequence that all the rich and snobbish parvenus send their sons to the Jesuit middle and high schools. To be educated by the Jesuits is regarded as a sign of caste, very much as is membership of the Jockey Club. The old pupils of the Jesuits form a ‘black freemasonry,’ which zealously advances their protégés in every career, marries them to heiresses, hurries to their assistance in misfortune, hushes up their sins, stifles scandal, etc. It is the Jesuits who for the last decade have made it their care to inculcate their own habits of thinking into the rich and high-born youth of France entrusted to them. These youths brought brains of hereditary deficiency, and therefore mystically disposed, into the clerical schools, and these then gave to the mystic thoughts of the degenerate pupils a religious content. This is not an arbitrary assumption, but a well-founded fact. Charles Morice, the æsthetic theorist and philosopher of the Symbolists, received his education from the Jesuits, according to the testimony of his friends.[116] So did Louis le Cardonnel, Henri de Régnier, and others. The Jesuits invented the phrase ‘bankruptcy of science,’ and their pupils repeat it after them, because it includes a plausible explanation of their pietistic mooning, the real organic causes of which are unknown to them, and for that matter would not be understood if they were known. ‘I return to faith, because science does not satisfy me,’ is a possible statement. It is even a superior thing to say, since it presupposes a thirst for truth and a noble interest in great questions. On the contrary, a man will hardly be willing to confess, ‘I am an enthusiastic admirer of the Trinity and the Holy Virgin because I am degenerate, and my brain is incapable of attention and clear thought.’
That the Jesuitical argument as reported by MM. de Vogüé, Rod, etc., can have found credit beyond clerical circles and degenerate youth, that the half-educated are heard repeating to-day, ‘Science is conquered, the future belongs to religion,’ is consistent with the mental peculiarities of the million. They never have recourse to facts, but repeat the ready-made propositions with which they have been prompted. If they would have regard to facts, they would know that the number of faculties, teachers and students of natural science, of scientific periodicals and books, of their subscribers and readers, of laboratories, scientific societies and reports to the academies increases year by year. It can be shown by figures that science does not lose, but continually gains ground.[117] But the million does not care about exact statistics. In France it accepts without resistance the suggestion, that science is retreating before religion, from a few newspapers, written mainly for clubmen and gilded courtezans, into the columns of which the pupils of the clerical schools have found an entrance. Of science itself, of its hypotheses, methods, and results, they have never known anything. Science was at one time the fashion. The daily press of that date said, ‘We live in a scientific age’; the news of the day reported the travels and marriages of scientists; the feuilleton-novels contained witty allusions to Darwin; the inventors of elegant walking-sticks and perfumes called their productions ‘Evolution Essence’ or ‘Selection Canes’; those who affected culture took themselves seriously for the pioneers of progress and enlightenment. To-day those social circles which set the fashions, and the papers which seek to please these circles, decree that, not science is chic, but faith, and now the paragraphs of the boulevard papers relate small piquant sayings of preachers; in the feuilleton-novels there are quotations from the Imitation of Christ; inventors bring out richly-mounted prie-dieus and choice rosaries, and the Philistine feels with deep emotion the miraculous flower of faith springing up and blossoming in his heart. Of real disciples science has scarcely lost one. It is only natural, on the contrary, that the plebs of the salons, to whom it has never been more than a fashion, should turn their backs on it at the mere command of a tailor or a modiste.
Thus much on the neo-Catholicism which, partly for party reasons, partly from ignorance, partly from snobbishness, is mistaken for a serious intellectual movement of the times.
The pretension of Symbolism to be, not only a return to faith, but a new theory of art and poetry, is what we must now proceed to test.
If we wish to know at the outset what Symbolists understand by symbol and symbolism, we shall meet with the same difficulties we encountered in determining the precise meaning of the name pre-Raphaelitism, and for the same reason, viz., because the inventors of these appellations understood by them hundreds of different mutually contradictory, indefinite things, or simply nothing at all. A skilled and sagacious journalist, Jules Huret,[118] instituted an inquiry about the new literary movement in France, and from its leading representatives acquired information, by which he has furnished us with a trustworthy knowledge of the meaning which they connect, or pretend to connect, with the expressions and phraseology of their programme. I will here adduce some of these utterances and declarations. They will not tell us what Symbolism is. But they may afford us some insight into symbolist methods of thought.
M. Stéphane Mallarmé, whose leadership of the Symbolist band is least disputed among the disciples, expresses himself as follows: ‘To name an object means to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of a poem—i.e., of the happiness which consists in gradually divining it. Our dream should be to suggest the object. The symbol is the perfected use of this mystery, viz., to conjure up an object gradually in order to show the condition of a soul; or, conversely, to choose an object, and out of it to reveal a state of the soul by a series of interpretations.’
If the reader does not at once understand this combination of vague words, he need not stop to solve them. Later on I will translate the stammerings of this weak mind into the speech of sound men.
M. Paul Verlaine, another high-priest of the sect, expresses himself as follows: ‘It was I who, in the year 1885, laid claim to the name of Symbolist. The Parnassians, and most of the romanticists, in a certain sense lacked symbols.... Thence errors of local colouring in history, the shrinking up of the myth through false philosophical interpretations, thought without the discernment of analogies, the anecdote emptied of feeling.’
Let us listen to a few second-rate poets of the group. ‘I declare art,’ says M. Paul Adam, ‘to be the enshrining of a dogma in a symbol. It is a means of making a system prevail, and of bringing truths to the light of day.’ M. Rémy de Gourmont confesses honestly: ‘I cannot unveil the hidden meaning of the word “symbolism,” since I am neither a theorist nor a magician.’ And M. Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique utters this profound warning: ‘Let us take care! Symbolism carried to excess leads to nombrilisme, and to a morbid mechanism.... This symbolism is to some extent a parody of mysticism.... Pure symbolism is an anomaly in this remarkable century, remarkable for militant activities. Let us view this transitional art as a clever trick played upon naturalism, and as a precursor of the poetry of to-morrow.’
We may expect from the theorists and philosophers of the group more exhaustive information concerning their methods and aims. Accordingly, M. Charles Morice instructs us how ‘the symbol is the combination of the objects which have aroused our sensations, with our souls, in a fiction [fiction]. The means is suggestion; it is a question of giving people a remembrance of something which they have never seen.’ And M. Gustav Kahn says: ‘For me personally, symbolic art consists in recording in a cycle of works, as completely as possible, the modifications and variations of the mind of the poet, who is inspired by an aim which he has determined.’
In Germany there have already been found some imbeciles and idiots, some victims of hysteria and graphomania, who affirm that they understand this twaddle, and who develop it further in lectures, newspaper articles and books. The cultured German Philistine, who from of old has had preached to him contempt for ‘platitude,’ i.e., for healthy common-sense, and admiration for ‘deep meaning,’ which is as a rule only the futile bubbling of soft and addled brains incapable of thought, becomes visibly uneasy, and begins to inquire if there may not really be something behind these senseless series of words. In France people have not been caught on the limed twigs of these poor fools and cold-blooded jesters, but have considered Symbolism to be what in fact it is, madness or humbug. We shall meet with these words in the writings of noted representatives of all shades of literary thought.
‘The Symbolists!’ exclaims M. Jules Lemaître, ‘there are none.... They themselves do not know what they are or what they want. There is something stirring and heaving under the earth, but unable to break through. Do you understand? When they have painfully produced something, they would like to build formulæ and theories around it, but fail in doing so, because they do not possess the necessary strength of mind.... They are jesters with a certain amount of sincerity—that I grant them—but nevertheless jesters.’ M. Joséphin Péladan describes them as ‘whimsical pyrotechnists of metrics and glossaries, who combine in order to get on, and give themselves odd names in order to get known.’ M. Jules Bois is much more forcible: ‘Disconnected action, confused clamour, such are the Symbolists. Cacophony of savages who have been turning over the leaves of an English grammar, or a glossary of obsolete words. If they have ever known anything, they pretend to have forgotten it. Indistinct, faulty, obscure, they are nevertheless as solemn as augurs.... You, decadent Symbolists, you deceive us with childish and necromantic formulæ.’ Verlaine himself, the co-founder of Symbolism, in a moment of sincerity, calls his followers a ‘flat-footed horde, each with his own banner, on which is inscribed Réclame!’ M. Henri de Régnier says apologetically: ‘They feel the need of gathering round a common flag, so that they may fight more effectually against the contented.’ M. Zola speaks of them as ‘a swarm of sharks who, not being able to swallow us, devour each other.’ M. Joseph Caraguel designates symbolical literature as ‘a literature of whining, of babbling, of empty brains, a literature of Sudanese Griots [minstrels].’ Edmond Haraucourt plainly discerns the aims of the Symbolists: ‘They are discontented, and in a hurry. They are the Boulangists of literature. We must live! We would take a place in the world, become notorious or notable. We beat wildly on a drum which is not even a kettledrum.... Their true symbol is “Goods by express.” Everyone goes by express train. Their destination—Fame.’ M. Pierre Quillard thinks that under the title of Symbolists ‘poets of rare gifts and unmitigated simpletons have been arbitrarily included.’ And M. Gabriel Vicaire sees in the manifestoes of Symbolists ‘nothing but schoolboy jokes.’ Finally, M. Laurent Tailhade, one of the leading Symbolists, divulges the secret: ‘I have never attached any other value to this performance than that of a transient amusement. We took in the credulous judgment of a few literary beginners with the joke of coloured vowels, Theban love, Schopenhauerism, and other pranks, which have since made their way in the world.’ Quite so; just, as we have already said, in Germany.
To abuse, however, is not to explain, and although summary justice is fit in the case of deliberate swindlers, who, like quack-dentists, play the savage in order to entice money from market-folk, yet anger and ridicule are out of place in dealing with honest imbeciles. They are diseased or crippled, and as such deserve only pity. Their infirmities must be disclosed, but severity of treatment has been abolished even in lunatic asylums since Pinel’s time.
The Symbolists, so far as they are honestly degenerate and imbecile, can think only in a mystical, i.e., in a confused way. The unknown is to them more powerful than the known; the activity of the organic nerves preponderates over that of the cerebral cortex; their emotions overrule their ideas. When persons of this kind have poetic and artistic instincts, they naturally want to give expression to their own mental state. They cannot make use of definite words of clear import, for their own consciousness holds no clearly-defined univocal ideas which could be embodied in such words. They choose, therefore, vague equivocal words, because these best conform to their ambiguous and equivocal ideas. The more indefinite, the more obscure a word is, so much the better does it suit the purpose of the imbecile, and it is notorious that among the insane this habit goes so far that, to express their ideas, which have become quite formless, they invent new words, which are no longer merely obscure, but devoid of all meaning. We have already seen that, for the typical degenerate, reality has no significance. On this point I will only remind the reader of the previously cited utterances of D. G. Rossetti, Morice, etc. Clear speech serves the purpose of communication of the actual. It has, therefore, no value in the eyes of a degenerate subject. He prizes that language alone which does not force him to follow the speaker attentively, but allows him to indulge without restraint in the meanderings of his own reveries, just as his own language does not aim at the communication of definite thought, but is only intended to give a pale reflection of the twilight of his own ideas. That is what M. Mallarmé means when he says: ‘To name an object means to suppress three quarters of the pleasure.... Our dream should be to suggest the object.’
Moreover, the thought of a healthy brain has a flow which is regulated by the laws of logic and the supervision of attention. It takes for its content a definite object, manipulates and exhausts it. The healthy man can tell what he thinks, and his telling has a beginning and an end. The mystic imbecile thinks merely according to the laws of association, and without the red thread of attention. He has fugitive ideation. He can never state accurately what he is thinking about; he can only denote the emotion which at the moment controls his consciousness. He can only say in general, ‘I am sad,’ ‘I am merry,’ ‘I am fond,’ ‘I am afraid.’ His mind is filled with evanescent, floating, cloudy ideas, which take their hue from the reigning emotion, as the vapour hovering above a crater flames red from the glow at the bottom of the volcanic caldron. When he poetizes, therefore, he will never develop a logical train of thought, but will seek by means of obscure words of distinctly emotional colouring to represent a feeling, a mood. What he prizes in poetical works is not a clear narrative, the exposition of a definite thought, but only the reflected image of a mood, which awakens in him a similar, but not necessarily the same, mood. The degenerate are well aware of this difference between a work which expresses strong mental labour and one in which merely emotionally coloured fugitive ideation ebbs and flows; and they eagerly ask for a distinguishing name for that kind of poetry of which alone they have any understanding. In France they have found this designation in the word ‘Symbolism.’ The explanations which the Symbolists themselves give of their cognomen appear nonsensical; but the psychologist gathers clearly from their babbling and stammering that under the name ‘symbol’ they understand a word (or series of words) expressing, not a fact of the external world, or of conscious thought, but an ambiguous glimmer of an idea, which does not force the reader to think, but allows him to dream, and hence brings about no intellectual processes, but only moods.
The great poet of the Symbolists, their most admired model, from whom, according to their unanimous testimony, they have received the strongest inspiration, is Paul Verlaine. In this man we find, in astonishing completeness, all the physical and mental marks of degeneration, and no author known to me answers so exactly, trait for trait, to the descriptions of the degenerate given by the clinicists—his personal appearance, the history of his life, his intellect, his world of ideas and modes of expression. M. Jules Huret[119] gives the following account of Verlaine’s physical appearance: ‘His face, like that of a wicked angel grown old, with a thin, untrimmed beard, and abrupt(?) nose; his bushy, bristling eyebrows, resembling bearded wheat, hiding deep-set green eyes; his wholly bald and huge long skull, misshapen by enigmatic bumps—all these give to his physiognomy a contradictory appearance of stubborn asceticism and cyclopean appetites.’ As appears in these ludicrously laboured and, in part, entirely senseless expressions, even the most unscientific observer has been struck with what Huret calls his ‘enigmatic bumps.’ If we look at the portrait of the poet, by Eugène Carrière, of which a photograph serves as frontispiece in the Select Poems of Verlaine,[120] and still more at that by M. Aman-Jean, exhibited in the Champs de Mars Salon in 1892, we instantly remark the great asymmetry of the head, which Lombroso[121] has pointed out among degenerates, and the Mongolian physiognomy indicated by the projecting cheek-bones, obliquely placed eyes, and thin beard, which the same investigator[122] looks upon as signs of degeneration.
Verlaine’s life is enveloped in mystery, but it is known, from his own avowals, that he passed two years in prison. In the poem Écrit en 1875[123] he narrates in detail, not only without the least shame, but with gay unconcern, nay, even with boasting, that he was a true professional criminal:
‘J’ai naguère habité le meilleur des châteaux
Dans le plus fin pays d’eau vive et de coteaux:
Quatre tours s’élevaient sur le front d’autant d’ailes,
Et j’ai longtemps, longtemps habité l’une d’elles...
Une chambre bien close, une table, une chaise,
Un lit strict où l’on pût dormir juste à son aise,...
Tel fut mon lot durant les longs mois là passés...
...J’étais heureux avec ma vie,
Reconnaissant de biens que nul, certes, n’envie.’
And in the poem Un Conte he says:
...’ce grand pécheur eut des conduites
Folles à ce point d’en devenir trop maladroites,
Si bien que les tribunaux s’en mirent—et les suites!
Et le voyez-vous dans la plus étroite des boîtes?
Cellules! prison humanitaires! Il faut taire
Votre horreur fadasse et ce progrès d’hypocrisie’...
It is now known that a crime of a peculiarly revolting character led to his punishment; and this is not surprising, since the special characteristic of his degeneration is a madly inordinate eroticism. He is perpetually thinking of lewdness, and lascivious images fill his mind continually. I have no wish to quote passages in which this unhappy slave of his morbidly excited senses has expressed the loathsome condition of his mind, but the reader who wishes to become acquainted with them may be referred to the poems Les Coquillages, Fille, and Auburn.[124] Sexual license is not his only vice. He is also a dipsomaniac, and (as may be expected in a degenerate subject) a paroxysmal dipsomaniac, who, awakened from his debauch, is seized with deep disgust of the alcoholic poison and of himself, and speaks of ‘les breuvages exécrés’ (La Bonne Chanson), but succumbs to the temptation at the next opportunity.
Moral insanity, however, is not present in Verlaine. He sins through irresistible impulse. He is an Impulsivist. The difference between these two forms of degeneration lies in the fact that the morally insane does not look upon his crimes as bad, but commits them with the same unconcern as a sane man would perform any ordinary or virtuous act, and after his misdeed is quite contented with himself; whereas the Impulsivist retains a full consciousness of the baseness of his deeds, hopelessly fights against his impulse until he can no longer resist it, and after the performance[125] suffers the most terrible remorse and despair. It is only an Impulsivist who speaks in execration of himself as a reprobate (‘Un seul Pervers,’ in Sagesse), or strikes the dejected note which Verlaine touches in the first four sonnets of Sagesse:
‘Hommes durs! Vie atroce et laide d’ici bas!
Ah! que du moins, loin des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne,
‘Quelque chose du cœur enfantin et subtil,
Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment quand la mort viendra que reste-t-il?...
‘Ferme les yeux, pauvre âme, et rentre sur-le-champ:
Une tentation des pires. Fuis l’infâme ...
Si la vieille folie était encore en route?
‘Ces souvenirs, va-t-il falloir les retuer?
Un assaut furieux, le suprême, sans doute!
O va prier contre l’orage, va prier!...
‘C’est vers le Moyen-Age énorme et delicat
Qu’il faudrait que mon cœur en panne naviguât,
Loin de nos jours d’esprit charnel et de chair triste ...
‘Et là que j’eusse part...
...à la chose vitale,
Et que je fusse un saint, actes bons, pensers droits,
‘Haute théologie et solide morale,
Guidé par la folie unique de la Croix
Sur tes ailes de pierre, ô folle Cathédrale!’
This example serves to show that there is not wanting in Verlaine that religious fervour which usually accompanies morbidly intensified eroticism. This finds a much more decided expression in several other poems. I should wish to quote only from two.[126]
‘O mon Dieu, vous m’avez blessé d’amour,
Et la blessure est encore vibrante,
O mon Dieu, vous m’avez blessé d’amour.
‘O mon Dieu, votre crainte m’a frappé,
Et la brûlure est encore là qui tonne
O mon Dieu, votre crainte m’a frappé.
(Observe the mode of expression and the constant repetitions.)
‘O mon Dieu, j’ai connu que tout est vil,
Et votre gloire en moi s’est installée,
O mon Dieu, j’ai connu que tout est vil.
‘Noyez mon âme aux flots de votre vin,
Fondez ma vie au pain de votre table,
Noyez mon âme aux flots de votre vin.
‘Voici mon sang que je n’ai pas versé,
Voici ma chair indignée de souffrance,
Voici mon sang que je n’ai pas versé.’
Then follows the ecstatic enumeration of all the parts of his body, which he offers up in sacrifice to God; and the poem closes thus:
‘Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne,
Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
Mais ce que j’ai, mon Dieu, je vous le donne.’
He invokes the Virgin Mary as follows:
‘Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mère Marie.
Tous les autres amours sont de commandement,
Nécessaires qu’ils sont, ma mère seulement
Pourra les allumer aux cœurs qui l’ont chérie.
‘C’est pour Elle qu’il faut chérir mes ennemis,
C’est pour Elle que j’ai voué ce sacrifice,
Et la douceur de cœur et le zèle au service.
Comme je la priais, Elle les a permis.
‘Et comme j’étais faible et bien méchant encore,
Aux mains lâches, les yeux éblouis des chemins,
Elle baissa mes yeux et me joignit les mains,
Et m’enseigna les mots par lesquels on adore.’
The accents here uttered are well known to the clinics of psychiatry. We may compare them to the picture which Legrain[127] gives of some of his patients. ‘His speech continually reverts to God and the Virgin Mary, his cousin.’ (The case in question is that of a degenerate subject who was a tramway conductor.) ‘Mystical ideas complete the picture. He talks of God, of heaven, crosses himself, kneels down, and says that he is following the commandments of Christ.’ (The subject under observation is a day labourer.) ‘The devil will tempt me, but I see God who guards me. I have asked of God that all people might be beautiful,’ etc.
The continual alternation of antithetical moods in Verlaine—this uniform transition from bestial lust to an excess of piety, and from sinning to remorse—has struck even observers who do not know the significance of such a phenomenon. ‘He is,’ writes M. Anatole France,[128] ‘alternately devout and atheistical, orthodox and sacrilegious.’ These he certainly is. But why? Simply because he is a circulaire. This not very happy expression, invented by French psychiatry, denotes that form of mental disease in which states of excitement and depression follow each other in regular succession. The period of excitement coincides with the irresistible impulses to misdeeds and blasphemous language; that of dejection with the paroxysms of contrition and piety. The circulaires belong to the worst species of the degenerate. ‘They are drunkards, obscene, vicious, and thievish.’[129] They are also in particular incapable of any lasting, uniform occupation, since it is obvious that in such a condition of mental depression they cannot accomplish any work which demands strength and attention. The circulaires are, by the nature of their affliction, condemned to be vagabonds or thieves, unless they belong to rich families. In normally constituted society there is no place for them. Verlaine has been a vagabond the whole of his life. He has loafed about all the highways of France, and roamed as well through Belgium and England. Since his release from prison he has spent most of his time in Paris, where, however, he has no residence, but resorts to the hospitals under the pretext of rheumatism, which for that matter he may easily have contracted during the nights which, as a tramp, he has spent under the open sky. The administration winks at his doings, and grants him food and shelter gratis, out of regard for his poetical capacity. Conformably with the constant tendency of the human mind to beautify what cannot be altered, he persuades himself that his vagrancy, which was forced upon him by his organic vice, is a glorious and enviable condition; he prizes it as something beautiful, artistic, and sublime, and looks upon vagabonds with especial tenderness. Speaking of them he says (Grotesques):
‘Leur jambes pour toutes montures,
Pour tous biens l’or de leurs regards,
Par le chemin des aventures
Ils vont haillonneux et hagards.
‘Le sage, indigné, les harangue;
Le sot plaint ces fous hasardeux;
Les enfants leur tirent la langue
Et les filles se moquent d’eux.’
We find in every lunatic and imbecile the conviction that the rational minds who discern and judge him are ‘blockheads.’
‘... Dans leurs prunelles
Rit et pleure—fastidieux—
L’amour des choses éternelles,
Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!
‘Donc, allez, vagabonds sans trêves,
Errez, funestes et maudits,
Le long des gouffres et des grèves,
Sous l’œil fermé des paradis!
‘La nature à l’homme s’allie
Pour châtier comme il le faut
L’orgueilleuse mélancolie
Qui vous fait marcher le front haut.’
In another poem (Autre) he calls to his chosen mates:
‘Allons, frères, bons vieux voleurs,
Doux vagabonds
Filous en fleur
Mes chers, mes bons,
‘Fumons philosophiquement,
Promenons nous
Paisiblement:
Rien faire est doux.’
As one vagabond feels himself attracted by other vagabonds, so does one deranged mind feel drawn to others. Verlaine has the greatest admiration for King Louis II. of Bavaria, that unhappy madman in whom intelligence was extinct long before death, in whom only the most abominable impulses of foul beasts of the most degraded kind had survived the perishing of the human functions of his disordered brain. He apostrophizes him thus:
‘Roi, le seul vrai Roi de ce siècle, salut, Sire,
Qui voulûtes mourir vengeant votre raison
Des choses de la politique, et du délire
De cette Science intruse dans la maison,
‘De cette Science assassin de l’Oraison
Et du Chant et de l’Art et de toute la Lyre,
Et simplement et plein d’orgueil et floraison
Tuâtes en mourant, salut, Roi, bravo, Sire!
‘Vous fûtes un poète, un soldat, le seul Roi
De ce siècle ...
Et le martyr de la Raison selon la Foi....’
Two points are noticeable in Verlaine’s mode of expression. First, we have the frequent recurrence of the same word, of the same turn of phrase, that chewing the cud, or rabâchage (repetition), which we have learnt to know as the marks of intellectual debility. In almost every one of his poems single lines and hemistiches are repeated, sometimes unaltered, and often the same word appears instead of one which rhymes. Were I to quote all the passages of this kind, I should have to transcribe nearly all his poems. I will therefore give only a few specimens, and those in the original, so that their peculiarity will be fully apparent to the reader. In the Crépuscule du soir mystique the lines, ‘Le souvenir avec le crépuscule,’ and ‘Dahlia, lys, tulipe et renoncules,’ are twice repeated without any internal necessity. In the poem Promenade sentimentale the adjective blême (wan) pursues the poet in the manner of an obsession or ‘onomatomania,’ and he applies it to water-lilies and waves (‘wan waves’). The Nuit du Walpurgis classique begins thus:
‘Un rythmique sabbat, rythmique, extrêmement
Rythmique.’...
In the Sérénade the first two lines are repeated verbatim as the fourth and eighth. Similarly in Ariettes oubliées, VIII.:
‘Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.
‘Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.
‘Comme des nuées
Flottent gris les chênes
Des forêts prochaines
Parmi les buées.
‘Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.
‘Corneille poussive,
Et vous, les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres
Quoi donc vous arrive?
‘Dans l’interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.’
The Chevaux de bois begins thus:
‘Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,
Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,
Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,
Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.’
In a truly charming piece in Sagesse he says:
‘Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme!
Un arbre, par dessus le toit
Berce sa palme.
‘La cloche, dans le ciel qu’on voit,
Doucement tinte.
Un oiseau, sur l’arbre qu’on voit,
Chante sa plainte.’
In the passage in Amour, ‘Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,’ ‘champs’ and ‘gens’ sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetition of similar sounds suggests a senseless pun, to the poet, and as for this stanza in Pierrot gamin:
‘Ce n’est pas Pierrot en herbe
Non plus que Pierrot en gerbe,
C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot.
Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse,
Le cerneau hors de la cosse,
C’est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot!’
it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him pleasure. The closing lines of the poem Mains point to a complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling:
‘Ah! si ce sont des mains de rêve,
Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.’[130]
The second peculiarity of Verlaine’s style is the other mark of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely disconnected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or through a similarity of sound. We have already found some examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find the ‘enormous and tender Middle Ages’ and the ‘brand which thunders.’ Verlaine writes also of ‘feet which glide with a pure and wide movement,’ of ‘a narrow and vast affection,’ of ‘a slow landscape,’[131] of ‘a slack liqueur’ (‘jus flasque’), ‘a gilded perfume,’ a ‘condensed’ or ‘terse contour’ (‘galbe succinct’), etc. The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ‘the research for rare and precious epithets’ (la recherche de l’epithète rare et précieuse).
Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological point of view, Art poétique, in which he attempts to give a theory of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a fundamental method:
‘De la musique avant toute chose
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.’
The two verbs ‘pèse’ and ‘pose’ are juxtaposed merely on account of their similarity of sound.
‘Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point
Choisir les mots sans quelque méprise;
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.
‘C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,
C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C’est par un ciel d’automne attiédi,
Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!
‘Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance!
Oh! la nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!’
(This stanza is completely delirious; it places ‘nuance’ and ‘colour’ in opposition, as though the latter were not contained in the former. The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine had an inkling, but could not bring to a complete conception, is probably that he prefers subdued and mixed tints, which lie on the margin of several colours, to the full intense colour itself.)
‘Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L’esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!’
It cannot be denied that this poetical method in the hands of Verlaine often yields extraordinarily beautiful results. There are few poems in French literature which can rival the Chanson d’Automne:
‘Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
‘Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
‘Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure.
‘Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.’
Even if literally translated, there remains something of the melancholy magic of the lines, which in French are richly rhythmical and full of music. Avant que tu ne t’en ailles (p. 99) and Il pleure dans mon cœur (p. 116) may also be called pearls among French lyrics.
This is because the methods of a highly emotional, but intellectually incapable, dreamer suffice for poetry which deals exclusively with moods, but this is the inexorable limit of his power. Let the true meaning of mood be always present with us. The word denotes a state of mind, in which, through organic excitations which it cannot directly perceive, consciousness is filled with presentations of a uniform nature, which it elaborates with greater or less clearness, and one and all of which relate to those organic excitations inaccessible to consciousness. The mere succession of words, giving a name to these presentations, the roots of which are in the unknown, expresses the mood, and is able to awaken it in another. It has no need of a fundamental thought, or of a progressive exposition to unfold it. Verlaine often attains to astonishing effects in such poetry of moods. Where, however, distinct vision, or a feeling the motive of which is clear to consciousness, or a process well delimitated in time and space, is to be poetically rendered, the poetic art of the emotional imbecile fails utterly. In a healthy and sane poet even the mood pure and simple is united to clear presentations, and is not a mere undulation of fragrance and rose-tinted mist. Poems like Goethe’s Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, Der Fischer, or Freudvoll und leidvoll, can never be created by the emotionally degenerate; but, on the other hand, the most marvellous of Goethe’s poems are not so utterly incorporeal, not such mere sighs, as three or four of the best of a Verlaine.
We have now the portrait of this most famous leader of the Symbolists clearly before us. We see a repulsive degenerate subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face, an impulsive vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, under the most disgraceful circumstances, was placed in gaol; an emotional dreamer of feeble intellect, who painfully fights against his bad impulses, and in his misery often utters touching notes of complaint; a mystic whose qualmish consciousness is flooded with ideas of God and saints, and a dotard who manifests the absence of any definite thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expressions and motley images. In lunatic asylums there are many patients whose disease is less deep-seated and incurable than is that of this irresponsible circulaire at large, whom only ignorant judges could have condemned for his epileptoid crimes.
A second leader among the Symbolists, whose prestige is in no quarter disputed, is M. Stéphane Mallarmé. He is the most curious phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary France. Although long past fifty years of age, he has written hardly anything, and the little that is known of him is, in the opinion of his most unreserved admirers, of no account; and yet he is esteemed as a very great poet, and the utter infertility of his pen, the entire absence of any single work which he can produce as evidence of his poetical capacity, is prized as his greatest merit, and as a most striking proof of his intellectual importance. This statement must appear so fabulous to any reader not deranged in mind, that he may rightly demand proofs of these statements. M. Charles Morice[132] says of Mallarmé: ‘I am not obliged to unveil the secrets of the works of a poet who, as he has himself remarked, is excluded from all participation in any official exposition of the beautiful. The fact itself that these works are still unknown ... would seem to forbid our associating the name of M. Mallarmé with those of men who have given us books. I let vulgar criticism buzz without replying to it, and state that M. Mallarmé, without having given us books ... is famous—a fame which, of course, has not been won without arousing the laughter of stupidity in both petty and important newspapers, but which does not offer public and private ... ineptitude that opportunity for showing its baseness which is provoked by the advent of a new wonder.... The people, in spite of their abhorrence of the beautiful, and especially of novelty in the beautiful, have gradually, and in spite of themselves, come to comprehend the prestige of a legitimate authority. They themselves, even they, feel ashamed of their foolish laughter; and before this man, whom that laughter could not tear from the serenity of his meditative silence, laughter became dumb, and itself suffered the divine contagion of silence. Even for the million this man, who published no books, and whom, nevertheless, all designated “a poet,” became, as it were, the very symbol of a poet, seeking, where possible, to draw near to the absolute.... By his silence, he has signified that he ... cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create. Should cruel life refuse to support him in his effort, our respect—nay, more, our veneration—can alone give an answer worthy of a reticence thus conditioned.’
The graphomaniac Morice (of whose crazy and distorted style of expression this literally translated example gives a very good idea) assumes that perhaps Mallarmé will yet create his ‘unprecedented work.’ Mallarmé himself, however, denies us the right to any such hope. ‘The delicious Mallarmé,’ Paul Hervieu relates,[133] ‘told me one day ... he could not understand that anyone should let himself appear in print. Such a proceeding gave him the impression of an indecency, an aberration, resembling that form of mental disease called “exhibitionism.” Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as this incomparable thinker.’[134]
So, then, this ‘incomparable thinker’ shows ‘a complete discretion as regards his soul.’ At one time he bases his silence on a sort of shamed timidity at publicity; at another, on the fact that he ‘cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art which he wishes to create,’ two reasons for that matter reciprocally precluding each other. He is approaching the evening of his life, and beyond a few brochures, such as Les Dieux de la Grèce and L’après-midi d’un Faune, together with some verses and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in periodicals, the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published nothing but some translations from the English and a few school-books (M. Mallarmé is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycée), and yet there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one exclusive poet, and they overwhelm the ‘blockheads’ and the ‘fools’ who laugh at him with all the expressions of scorn that the force of imagination in a diseased mind can display. Is not this one of the wonders of our day? Lessing makes Conti, in Emilia Galotti, say that ‘Raphael would have been the greatest genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately been born without hands.’ In M. Mallarmé we have a man who is revered as a great poet, although ‘he has unfortunately been born without hands,’ although he produces nothing, although he does not pursue the art he professes. During the period when in London a great number of bubble-company swindles were being promoted, when all the world went mad for the possession of the least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it happened that a few sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers, inviting people to subscribe for shares in a company of which the object was kept a secret. There really were men who brought their money to these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis regards this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees it repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a poet whose works are his own secret, and will probably remain such, and others trustingly and humbly bring their admiration as required. The sorcerers of the Senegal negroes offer their congregation baskets and calabashes for veneration, in which they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed. As a matter of fact they contain nothing; but the negroes regard the empty vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarmé the fetich of the Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually far below the Senegal negroes.
This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he has attained by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round him embryonic poets and authors, and develops his art theories before them. He speaks just as Morice and Kahn write. He strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his disciples become as stupid ‘as if a mill-wheel were going round in their heads,’ so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman disclosures have been made to them. If there is anything comprehensible in the incoherent flow of Mallarmé’s words, it is perhaps his admiration for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who drew the attention of the Symbolists to this school, and enjoined imitation of it. It is through Mallarmé that the French mystics received their English mediævalism and neo-Catholicism. Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical features of Mallarmé are ‘long pointed faun-like ears.’[135] After Darwin, who was the first to point out the apish character of this peculiarity, Hartmann,[136] Frigerio,[137] and Lombroso,[138] have firmly established the connection between immoderately long and pointed external ears and atavism and degeneration; and they have shown that this peculiarity is of especially frequent occurrence among criminals and lunatics.
The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean Moréas, a Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his thirty-sixth year (his friends assert, it may be in friendly malice, that he makes himself out to be very much younger than he is) has produced in toto three attenuated collections of verses, of hardly one hundred to one hundred and twenty pages, bearing the titles, Les Syrtes, Les Cantilènes, and Le Pélerin passionné. The importance of a literary performance does not, of course, depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise unusually significant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable café séances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of childish verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the material insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject for ridicule.
Moréas is one of the inventors of the word ‘Symbolism.’ For some few years he was the high-priest of this secret doctrine, and administered the duties of his service with requisite seriousness. One day he suddenly abjured his self-founded faith, and declared that ‘Symbolism’ had always been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal; and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism (romanisme). Under this new word he affirms a return to the language, versification and mode of feeling of the French poets at the close of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance period; but it were well to adopt his declarations with caution, since in two or three years he may be proclaiming his ‘romanisme’ as much a tap-room joke as his ‘symbolism.’ The appearance of the Pélerin passionné in 1891 was celebrated by the Symbolists as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era in poetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Moréas, and in the after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from the shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour who was bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And the same poets who sat at the table with Moréas, and delivered to him rapturous addresses or joined in the applause, a few weeks after this event overwhelmed him with contumely and contempt. ‘Moréas a Symbolist!’ cried Charles Vignier.[139] ‘Is he one through his ideas? He laughs at them himself! His thoughts! They don’t weigh much, these thoughts of Jean Moréas!’ ‘Moréas?’ asks Adrien Remacle,[140] ‘we have all been laughing at him. It is that which has made him famous.’ René Ghil calls his Pélerin passionné ‘doggerel written by a pedant,’ and Gustav Kahn[141] passes sentence on him thus: ‘Moréas has no talent.... He has never done anything worth mentioning. He has his own particular jargon.’ These expressions disclose to us the complete hollowness and falseness of the Symbolistic movement, which outside France is obstinately proclaimed as a serious matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French inventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world that they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap-room jest and advertise themselves.
After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus, I may really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on Moréas; I will, however, cite a few examples from his Pélerin passionné, in order that the reader may form an idea of the softness of brain which displays itself in these verses.
The poem Agnes[142] begins thus:
‘Il y avait des arcs où passaient des escortes
Avec des bannières de deuil et du fer
Lacé (?) des potentats de toutes sortes
—Il y avait—dans la cité au bord de la mer.
Les places étaient noires, et bien pavées, et les portes,
Du côté de l’est et de l’ouest, hautes; et comme en hiver
La forêt, dépérissaient les salles de palais, et les porches,
Et les colonnades de belvéder.
C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de ton
adolescence.
‘Dans la cité au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdes
De pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets,
Tu t’en venais, devisant telles bourdes,
Tu t’en venais entre tes deux laquais
Si bouffis et tant sots—en verité, des happelourdes!—
Dans la cité au bord de la mer tu t’en venais et tu vaguais
Parmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques,
Le long des môles et des quais.
C’était (tu dois bien t’en souvenir) c’était aux plus beaux jours de ton
adolescence.
And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and in every line we find the characteristics of the language used by imbeciles and made notorious by Sollier (Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile), the ‘ruminating’ as it were, of the same expressions, the dreamy incoherence of the language, and the insertion of words which have no connection with the subject.
Two Chansons[143] run thus:
‘Les courlis dans les roseaux!
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
Des courlis dans les roseaux?)
O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘Le porcher et les pourceaux!
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
Du porcher et des pourceaux?)
O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘Mon cœur pris en vos réseaux!
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
De mon cœur en vos réseaux?)
O vous joli’ Fée des eaux.
‘On a marché sur les fleurs au bord de la route,
Et le vent d’automne les secoue si fort, en outre.
‘La malle-poste a renversé la vieille croix au bord de la route;
Elle était vraiment si pourrie, en outre.
‘L’idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route,
Et personne ne le pleurera, en outre.’
The stupid artifice with which Moréas here seeks to produce a feeling of wretchedness by conjuring up the three associated figures of crushed flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an overturned and mouldering cross, and a dead, unmourned idiot, makes this poem a model of the would-be profound production of a madhouse!
When Moréas is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical turgidity which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau in his worst efforts. Only one example[144] of this kind, and we have done with him:
‘J’ai tellement soif, ô mon amour, de ta bouche,
Que j’y boirais en baisers le cours detourné
Du Strymon, l’Araxe et le Tanaïs farouche;
Et les cent méandres qui arrosent Pitané,
Et l’Hermus qui prend sa source où le soleil se couche,
Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza,
Sans que ma soif s’en apaisât.’
Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Moréas a troop of minor Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the one great poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do not entitle them to any special observation. Sufficient justice is dealt them if the spirit they are made of be characterized by quoting a few lines of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, ‘unique not only in his generation, but in all the republic of literature,’[145] cries: ‘Oh, how daily [quotidienne] is life!’ and in his poem Pan et la Syrinx we come upon lines like the following:
‘O Syrinx! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matinée et la circulation de la vie.
Oh, vous là! et moi, ici! Oh vous! Oh, moi! Tout est dans Tout!’[146]
Gustav Kahn, one of the æstheticists and philosophers of Symbolism, says in his Nuit sur la Lande: ‘Peace descends from thy lovely eyes like a great evening, and the borders of slow tents descend, studded with precious stones, woven of far-off beams and unknown moons.’
In German, at least, ‘borders of slow tents which descend’ is completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also unintelligible; but in the original their meaning becomes apparent. ‘Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,’ the line runs, and betrays itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of similar sounds, as it were, echoing each other.
Charles Vignier, ‘the beloved disciple of Verlaine,’ says to his mistress:
‘Là-bas c’est trop loin,
Pauvre libellule,
Reste dans ton coin
Et prends des pilules...
‘Sois Edmond About
Et d’humeur coulante,
Sois un marabout
Du Jardin des Plantes.’
Another of his poems, Une Coupe de Thulé, runs thus:
‘Dans une coupe de Thulé
Où vient pâlir l’attrait de l’heure,
Dort le sénile et dolent leurre
De l’ultime rêve adulé.
‘Mais des cheveux d’argent filé
Font un voile à celle qui pleure,
Dans une coupe de Thulé
Où s’est éteint l’attrait de l’heure.
‘Et l’on ne sait quel jubilé
Célèbre une harpe mineure
Que le hautain fantôme effleure
D’un lucide doigt fuselé!...
Dans une coupe de Thulé!’
These poems remind us so forcibly of those doggerel rhymes at which in Germany jovial students are often wont to try their skill, and which are known as ‘flowery [lit. blooming] nonsense,’ that, in spite of the solemn assurance of French critics, I am convinced that they were intended as a joke. If I am right in my supposition, they are really evidences, not of the mental status of Vignier, but of his readers, admirers, and critics.
Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner:
‘Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble reine!
O Tsaristsa [sic!] de glace et de fastes Souveraine!
Matrone hiératique et solennelle et vénérée!...
Toi qui me forces à rêver, toi qui me deconcertes,
Et toi surtout que j’aime, Émail, Beauté, Poème, Femme.
Néva! j’évoque ton spectacle et l’hymne de ton âme!’
And René Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is chief of a school entitled ‘évolutive-instrumentiste’), draws from his lyre these tones, which I also quote in French; in the first place because they would lose their ring in a translation, and, secondly, because if I were to translate them literally, it is hopeless to suppose that the reader would think I was serious:
‘Ouïs! ouïs aux nues haut et nues où
Tirent-ils d’aile immense qui vire ...
et quand vide
et vers les grands pétales dans l’air plus aride—
‘(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, et
Titille qui n’alentisse d’air qui dure, et!
Grandie, erratile et multiple d’éveils, stride
Mixte, plainte et splendeur! la plénitude aride)
‘et vers les grands pétales d’agitations
Lors évanouissait un vol ardent qui stride....
‘(des saltigrades doux n’iront plus vers les mers....)’
One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists have an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong to pure madhouse literature; the title is always remarkable. We have already seen that Moréas names one of his collection of verses Les Syrtes. He might in truth just as well call it the North Pole, or The Marmot, or Abd-el-Kader, since these have just as much connection with the poems in the little volume as Syrtes; but it is undeniable that this geographical name calls up the lustre of an African sun, and the pale reflection of classic antiquity, which may well please the eye of the hysteric reader. Edouard Dubus entitles his poem, Quand les Violons sont partis; Louis Dumur, Lassitudes; Gustave Khan, Les Palais nomades; Maurice du Plessis, La Peau de Marsyas; Ernest Raynaud, Chairs profanes and Le Signe; Henri de Régnier, Sites et Episodes; Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations; Albert Saint Paul, L’Echarpe d’Iris; Viélé-Griffin, Ancæus; and Charles Vignier, Centon.
Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some examples. I should further like to cite only a few passages from a book which the Symbolists declare to be one of their most powerful mental manifestations, La Littérature de tout-à-l’heure, by Charles Morice. It is a sort of bird’s-eye view of the development of literature up to the present time, a rapid critique of the more and most recent books and authors, a kind of programme of the literature of the future. This book is one of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It strongly resembles Rembrandt as Educator, but is far beyond that book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations of words. It is a monument of pure literary insanity, of ‘graphomania’; and neither Delepierre in his Littérature des Fous, nor Philomnestes (Gustave Brunet) in his Fous Littéraires, quotes examples of more complete mental dislocation than are visible in every page of this book. Notice the following confession of faith by Morice:[147] ‘Although in this book treating only of æsthetics—although of æsthetics based upon metaphysics—we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from pure philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word which will more than once be made use of, and which, in the highest sense here put upon it, is not incapable of being paraphrased. God is the first and universal cause, the final and universal end; the bond between spirits; the point of intersection where two parallels would meet; the fulfilment of our inclinations; the fruition which accords with the glories of our dreams; the abstraction itself of the concrete; the unseen and unheard and yet certain ideal of our demands for beauty in truth. God is, par excellence, THE very word—the very word, that is to say, that unknown certain word of which every author has the incontrovertible, but undiscernible idea, the self-evident but hidden goal which he will never reach, and which he approaches as near as possible. In, so to say, practical æsthetics He is the atmosphere of joy in which the mind revels victorious, because it has reduced irreducible mystery to imperishable symbols.’ I do not for a moment doubt that this incomparable jumble will be quite intelligible to theologians. Like all mystics, they discover a sense in every sound; that is, they persuade themselves and others that the nebulous ideas which the sound awakens in their brains by association are the meaning of that sound. But anyone who demands of words that they should be the media of definite thoughts, will perceive in the face of this twaddle that the author was not thinking anything at all when he wrote, although he was dreaming of many things. ‘Religion’ is for Morice (p. 56), ‘the source of art, and art in its essence is religious’—an affirmation which he borrows from Ruskin, although he does not acknowledge it. ‘Our scholars, our thinkers ... the luminous heads of the nineteenth century,’ are ‘Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Auguste Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot’ (p. 57). Edgar Poe by the side of Spencer, Darwin, and Claude Bernard! never have ideas danced a crazier fools’ quadrille in a disordered brain.
And this book, of which the passages we have cited give a sufficiently correct idea, was, in France (just as Rembrandt as Educator was in Germany), pronounced by thoroughly responsible critics to be ‘strange, but interesting and suggestive.’ A poor degenerate devil who scribbles such stuff, and an imbecile reader who follows his twaddle like passing clouds, are simply to be pitied. But what words of contempt are strong enough for the sane intellectual tatterdemalions who, in order not to offend or else to give themselves the appearance of possessing a remarkable faculty of comprehension, or to affect fairness and benevolence even towards those whose opinions they in part do not share, insist that they discover in books of this kind many a truth, much wit along with peculiar whims, an ideal of fervour and frequent lightnings of thought?
The word ‘Symbolism’ conveys, as we have seen, no idea to its inventors. They pursue no definite artistic tendency; hence it is not possible to show them that their tendency is a false one. It is otherwise with some of their disciples, who joined their ranks, partly through a desire to advertise themselves, partly because they thought that, in the conflicts between literary parties, they were fighting on the side which was the stronger and the more sure of victory, and partly, also, through the folly of fashion, and through the influence exerted by any noisy novelty over uncritical minds. Less weak-brained than the leaders, they felt the need of giving the word ‘Symbolism’ a certain significance, and, in fact, drew up a number of axioms which, according to their profession, serve to guide them in their creations. These axioms are sufficiently defined to allow of discussion.
The Symbolists demand greater freedom in the treatment of French verse. They fiercely rebel against the old alexandrines, with the cæsura in the middle, and the necessary termination of the sentence at the end; against the prohibition of the hiatus; against the law of a regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes. They make defiant use of the ‘free verse,’ with length and rhythm ad libitum, and false rhymes. The foreigner can only smile at the savage gestures with which this conflict is carried on. It is a schoolboys’ war against some hated book, which is solemnly torn in pieces, trodden under foot, and burned. The whole dispute concerning prosody and the rules of rhyme is, so to speak, an inter-Gallic concern, and is of no consequence to the literature of the world. We have long had everything which the French poets are only now seeking to obtain by barricades and street massacres. In Goethe’s Prometheus, Mahomet’s Gesang, Harzreise im Winter, in Heine’s Nordsee Cyklus, etc., we possess perfect models of free verse; we alternate the rhymes as we will; we allow masculine and feminine rhymes to follow one another as seems good to us; we do not bind ourselves to the rigid law of old classic metres, but suffer, in the cradling measure of our verse, anapæsts to alternate with iambics and spondees, according to our feeling for euphony. English, Italian and Sclavonic poetry have gone equally far, and if the French alone have remained behind, and have at last found a need for casting aside their old matted, moth-eaten periwig, this is quite reasonable; but to anyone but a Frenchman they merely make themselves ridiculous when they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are far in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths and opening up of new roads, and as an advance inspired by the ideal into the dawn of the future.
Another æsthetic demand of the Symbolists is that the line should, independently of its sense, call forth an intended emotion merely by its sound. A word should produce an effect, not through the idea which it embodies, but as a tone, language becoming music. It is noteworthy that many of the Symbolists have given their books titles which are intended to awaken musical ideas. We find Les Gammes (The Scales), by Stuart Merrill; Les Cantilènes, by Jean Moréas; Cloches dans la Nuit, by Adolphe Retté; Romances sans Paroles, by Paul Verlaine, etc. To make use of language as a musical instrument for the production of pure tone effects is the delirious idea of a mystic. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites demand of the fine arts that they should not represent the concrete plastically or optically, but should express the abstract, and therefore simply undertake the rôle of alphabetic writing. Similarly, the Symbolists displace all the natural boundary lines of art, and impose upon the word a task which belongs to musical signs only. But while the pre-Raphaelites wish to raise the fine arts to a higher rank than is suited to them, the Symbolists greatly degrade the word. In its origin sound is musical. It expresses no definite idea, but only a general emotion of the animal. The cricket fiddles, the nightingale trills, when sexually excited. The bear growls when stirred by the rage of conflict; the lion roars in his pleasure when tearing a living prey. In proportion as the brain develops in the animal kingdom, and mental life becomes richer, the means of vocal expression are evolved and differentiated, and become capable of making perceptible to the senses not only simple generic emotions, but also presentative complexes of a more restricted and definitely delimitated nature—nay, if Professor Garner’s observations concerning the language of apes are accurate, even tolerably distinct single presentations. Sound, as a means of expressing mental operations, reaches its final perfection in cultivated, grammatically articulated language, inasmuch as it can then follow exactly the intellectual working of the brain, and make it objectively perceptible in all the minutest details. To bring the word, pregnant with thought, back to the emotional sound is to renounce all the results of organic development, and to degrade man, rejoicing in the power of speech, to the level of the whirring cricket or the croaking frog. The efforts of the Symbolists, then, result in senseless twaddle, but not in the word-music they intend, for this simply does not exist. No word of any single human language is, as such, musical. Many languages abound in consonants; in others vowels predominate. The former require more dexterity in the muscles employed in speaking; their pronunciation, therefore, counts as more difficult, and they seem less agreeable to the ears of foreigners than the languages which are rich in vowels. But this has nothing to do with the musical side of the question. What remains of the phonetic effect of a word if it is whispered, or if it is only visible as a written character? And yet in both cases it is able to awaken the same emotions, as if it had reached consciousness full-toned through the sense of hearing. Let anyone have read aloud to him the most cleverly chosen arrangement of words in a language completely unknown to him, and try to produce in himself a definite emotion through the mere phonetic effect. In every case it will be found impossible. The meaning of a word, and not its sound, determines its value. The sound is as such neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes so only through the voice which gives it life. Even the first soliloquy in Goethe’s Iphigenie would be ugly coming from the throat of a drunkard. I have had the opportunity of convincing myself that even the Hottentot language, spoken in a mellow, agreeable contralto voice, could be pleasing.
Still more cracked is the craze of a sub-section of the Symbolists, the ‘Instrumentalists,’ whose spokesman is René Ghil. They connect each sound with a definite feeling of colour, and demand that the word should not only awaken musical emotion, but at the same time operate æsthetically in producing a colour-harmony. This mad idea has its origin in a much-quoted sonnet by Arthur Rimbaud, Les Voyelles (Vowels), of which the first line runs thus:
‘A black, e white, i red, u green, o blue.’
Morice declares[148] explicitly (what in any case no one in a sane state of mind would have doubted) that Rimbaud wished to make one of those silly jokes which imbeciles and idiots are in the habit of perpetrating. Some of his comrades, however, took the sonnet in grim earnest, and deduced from it a theory of art. In his Traité du Verbe René Ghil specifies the colour-value, not only of individual vowels, but of musical instruments. ‘Harps establish their supremacy by being white. And violins are blue, often softened by a shimmer of light, to subdue paroxysms.’ (It is to be hoped the reader will duly appraise these combinations of words.) ‘In the exuberance of ovations, brass instruments are red, flutes yellow, allowing the childlike to proclaim itself astonished at the luminance of the lips. And the organ, synthesis of all simple instruments, bewails deafness of earth and the flesh all in black....’ Another Symbolist, who has many admirers, M. Francis Poictevin, teaches us, in Derniers Songes, to know the feelings corresponding to colours. ‘Blue goes—without more of passion—from love to death; or, more accurately, it is a lost extreme. From turquoise blue to indigo, one goes from the most shame-faced influences to final ravages.’
Wiseacres were, of course, at once to the fore, and set up a quasi-scientific theory of ‘colour-hearing.’ Sounds are said to awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments. This anatomical explanation is entirely arbitrary, and has not been substantiated by any facts. But ‘colour-hearing’ itself is by no means confirmed. The most complete book hitherto published on this subject, the author of which is the French oculist, Suarez de Mendoza,[149] collects all the available observations on this alleged phenomenon, and deduces from them the following definition: ‘It is the faculty of associating tones and colours, by which every objective acoustic perception of sufficient intensity, nay, even the memory-image of such a perception, arouses in certain persons a luminous or non-luminous image, which is always the same for the same letters, the same tone of voice or instrument, and the same intensity or pitch of tone.’ Suarez well hits the truth when he says, ‘Colour-hearing’ (he calls it pseudo-photesthésie) ‘is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth ... and often of a special action of the brain, the particular nature of which is unknown to us, and may have a certain similarity to sense-illusion and hallucination.’ For my part, I have no doubt that colour-hearing is always the consequence of association of ideas, the origins of which must remain obscure, because the combination of certain presentations of colour with certain sensations of sound may possibly depend upon the very evanescent perceptions of early childhood, which were not powerful enough to arouse the attention, and have therefore remained undiscerned in consciousness. That it is a question of purely individual associations brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in his Farbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’ black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.
The relation between the external world and the organism is originally very simple. Movements are continually occurring in nature, and the protoplasm of living cells perceives these movements. Unity of effect corresponds to unity of cause. The lowest animals perceive of the outer world only this, that something in it changes, and possibly, also, whether this change is marked or slight, sudden or slow. They receive sensations differing quantitatively, but not qualitatively. We know, for example, that the proboscis, or syphon, of the Pholas dactylus, which contracts more or less vigorously and quickly at every excitation, is sensitive to all external impressions—light, noise, touch, smell, etc. This mollusc sees, hears, feels and smells, therefore, with this simple organ; his proboscis is to him at once eye, ear, nose, finger, etc. In the higher animals the protoplasm is differentiated. Nerves, ganglia, brain and sense-apparatus are formed. The movements of nature are now perceived in a variety of ways. The differentiated senses transform the unity of the phenomenon into the diversity of the percept. But even in the highest and most differentiated brain there still remains something like a very distant and very dim remembrance that the cause which excites the different senses is one and the same movement, and there are formed presentations and conceptions which would be unintelligible if we could not concede this vague intuition of the fundamental unity of essence in all perceptions. We speak of ‘high’ and ‘deep’ tones, and thus give to sound-waves a relationship in space which they cannot have. In the same way we speak of tone-colour, and, conversely, of colour-tones, and thus confound the acoustic and optic properties of the phenomena. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ lines or tones, ‘sweet’ voices, are frequent modes of expression, which depend on a transference of the perception of one sense to the impressions of another. In many cases this method of speech may no doubt be traced to mental inertia. It is more convenient to designate a sense-perception by a word which is familiar, though borrowed from the province of another sense, than to create a special word for the particular percept. But even this loan for convenience’ sake is possible and intelligible only if we admit that the mind perceives certain resemblances between the impressions of the different senses—resemblances which, although they are often to be explained by conscious or unconscious association of ideas, are oftener quite inexplicable objectively. It only remains for us to assume that consciousness, in its deepest substrata, neglects the differentiation of phenomena by the various senses, passes over this perfection attained very late in organic evolution, and treats impressions only as undifferentiated material for the acquirement of knowledge of the external world without reference to their origin by way of this or that sense. It thus becomes intelligible that the mind mingles the perceptions attained through the different senses, and transforms them one into another. Binet[150] has established, in his excellent essays, this transposition of the senses in hysterical persons. A female patient, whose skin was perfectly insensible on one half of her body, took no notice when, unseen by herself, she was pricked with a needle. But at the moment of puncture there arose in her consciousness the image of a black (in the case of another invalid, of a bright) point. Consciousness thus transposed an impression of the nerves of the skin, which, as such, was not perceived, into an impression of the retina, of the optic nerve.
In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.
Moreover, it is an old clinical observation that mental decay is accompanied by colour mysticism. One of Legrain’s[151] mental invalids ‘endeavoured to recognise good and evil by the difference of colour, ascending from white to black; when he was reading, words had (according to their colour) a hidden meaning, which he understood.’ Lombroso[152] cites ‘eccentric persons’ who, ‘like Wigman, had the paper for their books specially manufactured with several colours on each page.... Filon painted each page of the books he wrote in a different colour.’ Barbey d’Aurevilly, whom the Symbolists venerate as a pioneer, used to write epistles in which each letter of a word was coloured with a different tint. Most alienists know similar cases in their experience.
The more reliable Symbolists proclaim their movement as ‘a reaction against naturalism.’ Such a reaction was certainly justified and necessary; for naturalism in its beginnings, as long as it was embodied in De Goncourt and Zola, was morbid, and, in its later development in the hands of their imitators, vulgar and even criminal, as will be proved further on. Nevertheless Symbolism is not in the smallest degree qualified to conquer naturalism, because it is still more morbid than the latter, and, in art, the devil cannot be driven out by Beelzebub.
Finally, it is affirmed that Symbolism connotes ‘the inscribing of a symbol in human form.’ Expressed unmystically, this means that in the poems of the Symbolists the particular human form should not only exhibit its special nature and contingent destiny, but also represent a general type of humanity, and embody a universal law of life. This quality, however, is not the monopoly of Symbolistic poetry, but belongs to all kinds of poetry. No genuine poet has yet been impelled to deal with an utterly unprecedented and unique case, or with a monstrous being whose likeness is not to be found in mankind. That which interests him in men and their destiny is just the intimate connection between the two and the universal laws of human life. The more the government of universal laws is made apparent in the fate of the individual, the more there is embodied in him that which lives in all men, so much the more attractive will this destiny and this man be to the poet. There is not in all the literature of humanity a single work of recognised importance which in this sense is not symbolic, and in which the characters, their passions and fortunes, have not a typical significance, far transcending the particular circumstances. It is, therefore, a piece of foolish arrogance in the Symbolists to lay claim to the sole possession of this quality in the works of their school. They show, moreover, that they do not understand their own formulæ; for those theorists of the school who demand of poetry that it should be ‘a symbol inscribed in human form,’ assert at the same time that only the ‘rare and unique case’ (le cas rare et unique) deserves the attention of the poet, i.e., the case which is significant of nothing beyond itself, and consequently the opposite of a symbol.[153]
We have now seen that Symbolism, like English pre-Raphaelitism (from which it borrowed its catch-words and opinions), is nothing else than a form of the mysticism of weak-minded and morbidly emotional degeneration. The efforts of some followers of the movement to import a meaning into the stammering utterances of their leaders, and falsely to ascribe to them a sort of programme, do not for a moment withstand criticism, but show themselves to be graphomaniac and delirious twaddle, without the smallest grain of truth or sound reason. A young Frenchman, who is certainly not adverse to rational innovation, Hugues Le Roux,[154] describes the group of Symbolists quite correctly in saying of them: ‘They are ridiculous cripples, each intolerable to the other; they live uncomprehended by the public, several by their friends as well, and a few by themselves. As poets or prose writers they proceed in the same way: no material, no sense, and only juxtapositions of loud-sounding musical (?) words; teams of strange rhymes, groupings of unexpected colours and tones, swaying cadences, hurtlings, hallucinations and evoked suggestions.’
[CHAPTER IV.]
TOLSTOISM.
Count Leo Tolstoi has become in the last few years one of the best-known, and apparently, also, of the most widely-read authors in the world. Every one of his words awakens an echo among all civilized nations on the globe. His strong influence over his contemporaries is unmistakable. But it is no artistic influence. No one has yet imitated him—at least, for the present. He has formed no school after the manner of the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists. The already large number of writings to which he has given occasion are explanatory or critical. There are no poetical creations modelled upon his own. The influence which he exercises over contemporary thoughts and feelings is a moral one, and applies far more to the great bulk of his readers than to the smaller circle of struggling authors who are on the look-out for a leader. What we, then, can call Tolstoism is no æsthetic theory, but rather a conception of life.
In order to bring forward the proof that Tolstoism is a mental aberration, that it is a form of the phenomenon of degeneration, it will be necessary to look critically first at Tolstoi himself, and then at the public which is inspired by his thoughts.
Tolstoi is at once a poet and a philosopher, the latter in the widest sense—i.e., he is a theologian, a moralist, and a social theorist. As the author of works of imagination he stands very high, even if he does not equal his countryman Tourgenieff, whom he at present appears in the estimation of most people to have thrown into the shade. Tolstoi does not possess the splendid sense of artistic proportion of Tourgenieff, with whom there is never a word too much, who neither protracts his subject nor digresses from his point, and who, as a grand and genuine creator of men, stands Prometheus-like over the figures he has inspired with life. Even Tolstoi’s greatest admirers admit that he is long-winded, loses himself in details, and does not always know how to sacrifice the unessential in order, with sure judgment, to enhance the indispensable. Speaking of the novel War and Peace, M. de Vogüé[155] says: ‘Is this complicated work properly to be termed a novel?... The very simple and very loose thread of the plot serves to connect chapters on history, politics, philosophy, which are all crammed promiscuously into this polygraphy of Russian life.... Enjoyment has here to be purchased in a manner resembling a mountain ascent. The way is often wearisome and hard; at times one goes astray; effort is necessary and toil.... Those who only seek diversion in fiction are by Tolstoi driven from their wonted ways. This close analyst does not know, or else disdains, the first duty of analysis, which is so natural to the French genius; we desire that the novelist should select; that he should set apart a person, a fact, out of the chaos of beings and things, in order to observe the objects of his choice. The Russian, governed by the feeling of universal interdependence, cannot make up his mind to cut the thousand cords which unite a man, a fact, a thought, to the whole course of the world.’
Vogüé sees rightly that these facts are deserving of notice, but he cannot explain them. Unconsciously he has clearly characterized the method with which a mystical degenerate looks upon the world, and depicts its phenomena. We know that it is lack of attention which constitutes the peculiarity of mystical thought. It is attention which selects from the chaos of phenomena, and so groups what it selects as to illustrate the predominating thought in the mind of the beholder. If attention fails, the world appears to the beholder like a uniform stream of enigmatic states, which emerge and disappear without any connection, and remain completely without expression to consciousness. These primary facts of mental life must ever be kept in view by the reader. The attitude of the attentive man in the face of external phenomena is one of activity; that of the inattentive man is passive; the former orders them according to a plan which he has worked out in his mind; the latter receives the turmoil of their impress without attempting to organize, separate, or co-ordinate. The difference is the same as that between the reproduction of the scenes of nature by a good painter and a photographic plate. The painting suppresses certain features in the world’s phenomena, and brings others into prominence, so that it at once permits a distinct external incident, or a definite internal emotion of the painter, to be recognised. The photograph reflects the whole scene with all its details indiscriminately, so that it is without meaning, until the beholder brings into play his attention, which the sensitive plate could not do. At the same time it is to be observed that even the photograph is not a true impression of reality, for the sensitive plate is only sensitive to certain colours; it records the blue and violet, and receives from yellow and red either a weak impression or none at all. The sensitiveness of the chemical plate corresponds to the emotionalism of the degenerate mind. The latter also makes a choice among phenomena, not, however, according to the laws of conscious attention, but according to the impulse of unconscious emotionalism. He perceives whatever is in tune with his emotions; what is not consonant with them does not exist for him. Thus arises the method of work which Vogüé has pointed out in Tolstoi’s novels. The details are perceived equally, and placed side by side, not according to their importance for the leading idea, but according to their relation with the emotions of the novelist. For that matter, there is scarcely any leading idea, or none at all. The reader must first carry it into the novel, as he would carry it into Nature herself, into a landscape, into a crowd of people, into the course of events. The novel is only written because the novelist felt certain strong emotions, and certain features of the world’s panorama as it unrolled before his eyes intensified these emotions. Thus, the novel of Tolstoi resembles the picture of the pre-Raphaelites: an abundance of amazingly accurate details,[156] a mystically blurred, scarcely recognisable, leading idea,[157] a deep and strong emotion.[158] This is also distinctly felt by M. de Vogüé, but again without his being able to explain it. He says:[159] ‘Through a peculiar and frequent contradiction, this troubled, vacillating mind, steeped as it is in the mists of Nihilism, is endowed with an incomparable clearness and power of penetration for the scientific (?) study of the phenomena of life. He sees distinctly, rapidly, analytically, everything on earth.... One might say, the mind of an English chemist in the soul of an Indian Buddhist. Let anyone who can explain this singular union; whoever succeeds will be able to explain Russia.... These phenomena, which offer so firm a basis to him when he observes them singly, he wishes to know in their universal relations, and to arrive at the definite laws governing these relations, and at their inaccessible causes. Then it is that this clear vision darkens, the intrepid inquirer loses his footing, he falls into the abyss of philosophical contradictions; in him and around him he feels only nothingness and night.’
M. de Vogüé wishes for an explanation of this ‘singular union’ between great clearness in apprehension of details, and complete incapacity of understanding their relations to each other. The explanation is now familiar to my readers. The mystical intellect, the intellect without attention, of the émotif conveys to his consciousness isolated impressions, which can be very distinct if they relate to his emotions; but it is not in the condition to connect these isolated impressions intelligibly, just because it is deficient in the attention necessary to this object.
Grand as are the qualities which Tolstoi’s works of fiction possess, it is not them he has to thank for his world-wide fame, or his influence on his contemporaries. His novels were recognised as remarkable works, but for decades of years neither Peace and War, nor Anna Karenina, nor his short stories, had very many readers outside Russia; and the critics bestowed upon their author only a guarded commendation. In Germany, as recently as 1882, Franz Bornmüller said of Tolstoi in his Biographical Dictionary of Authors of the Present Time: ‘He possesses no ordinary talent for fiction, but one devoid of due artistic finish, and which is influenced by a certain one-sidedness in his views of life and history.’ This was the opinion until a few years ago of the not very numerous non-Russian readers who knew him at all.
In 1889 his Kreutzer Sonata appeared, and was the first of his works to carry his name to the borders of civilization. This little tale was the first to be translated into all cultivated languages. It was disseminated in hundreds of thousands of copies, and was read by millions with lively emotion. From this time onward the public opinion of the Western nations placed him in the first rank of living authors: his name was in everyone’s mouth, and universal sympathy turned not only towards his early writings (which had remained unnoticed for decades), but also to his person and his career, and he became, as it were, in a night what he unquestionably is now in the evening of his life—one of the chief representative figures of the departing century. Yet the Kreutzer Sonata stands, as a poetic creation, not so high as most of his older works. A fame which was not gained by War and Peace, The Cossacks, Anna Karenina, etc., nor, indeed, until long after the appearance of these rich creations, but came at one stroke through the Kreutzer Sonata, cannot therefore depend either solely or principally on æsthetic excellence. The history of this fame shows consequently that Tolstoi the novelist is not the cause of Tolstoism.
In fact, the tendency of mind so named is far more—perhaps wholly and entirely—traceable to Tolstoi the philosopher. The philosopher is, therefore, incomparably more important to our inquiry than the novelist.
Tolstoi has formed certain views on the position of man in the world, on his relation to collective humanity, and on the aim of his life, which are visible in all his creations, but which he has also set forth connectedly in several theoretic works, especially in My Confession, My Faith, A Short Exposition of the Gospel, and About my Life. These views are but little complicated, and can be condensed in a few words: the individual is nothing; the species is everything; the individual lives in order to do his fellow-creatures good; thought and inquiry are great evils; science is perdition; faith is salvation.
How he arrived at these results is related in My Confessions: ‘I lost my faith early. I lived for a long time like everyone else, in the frivolities of life. I wrote books, and taught, like everyone else, what I did not know. Then the Sphinx began to follow me more and more ruthlessly: “Guess my problem or I will tear thee to pieces.” Science has explained absolutely nothing to me. In answer to my everlasting question, the only one which means anything, “Wherefore am I alive?” Science replied by teaching me things that were indifferent to me. Science only said ...: “Life is a senseless evil.” I wanted to kill myself. Finally I had a fancy to see how the vast majority of men lived who, unlike us of the so-called upper classes, who give ourselves up to pondering and investigation, work and suffer, and are, nevertheless, quiet and clear in their minds over the aim of life. I understood that to live like these men one must return to their simple beliefs.’
If this train of thought is seriously considered, it will be recognised at once as nonsensical. The question, ‘Wherefore am I alive?’ is incorrectly and superficially put. It tacitly presupposes the idea of finality in nature, and it is just upon this presupposition that the mind, thirsting earnestly for truth and knowledge, has to exercise its criticism.
In order to ask, ‘What is the aim of our life?’ we must take for granted, above all, that our life has a definite aim, and since it is only a particular phenomenon in the universal life of nature, in the evolution of our earth, of our solar system, of all solar systems, this assumption includes in itself the wider one, that the universal life of Nature has a definite aim. This assumption, again, necessarily presupposes the rule of a conscious, prescient, and guiding mind over the universe. For what is an aim? The fore-ordained effect in the future of forces active in the present. The aim exercises an influence on these forces in pointing out to them a direction, and is thus itself a force. It cannot, however, exist objectively, in time and space, because then it would cease to be an aim and become a cause, i.e., a force fitting in with the general mechanism of the forces of nature, and all the speculation concerning the aim would fall to the ground. But if it is not objective, if it does not exist in time and space, it must, in order to be conceivable, exist somewhere, virtually, as idea, as a plan and design. But that which contains a design, a thought, a plan, we name consciousness; and a consciousness that can conceive a plan of the universe, and for its realization designedly uses the forces of nature, is synonymous with God. If a man, however, believes in a God, he loses at once the right to raise the question, ‘Wherefore am I alive?’ Since it is in that case an insolent presumption, an effort of small, weak man to look over God’s shoulder, to spy out God’s plan, to aspire to the height of omniscience. But neither is it in such a case necessary, since a God without the highest wisdom cannot be conceived, and if He has devised a plan for the world, this is certain to be perfect, all its parts are in harmony, and the aim to which every co-operator, from the smallest to the greatest, will devote himself is the best conceivable. Thus, man can live in complete rest and confidence in the impulses and forces implanted in him by God, because he, in every case, fulfils a high and worthy destiny by co-operating in a, to him, unknown Divine plan of the world.
If, on the other hand, there is no belief in a God, it is also impossible to form a conception of the aim, for then the aim, existing in consciousness only as an idea, in the absence of a universal consciousness, has no locus for its existence; there is no place for it in Nature. But if there is no aim, then one cannot ask the question, ‘Wherefore am I alive?’ Then life has not a predetermined aim, but only causes. We have then to concern ourselves only with these causes—at least, with the more proximate, and which are accessible to our examination, since the remote, and especially the first, causes elude our cognition. Our question must then run, ‘Why do we live?’ and we find the answer to it without difficulty. We live, because we stand, like the rest of cognizable Nature, under the universal law of causality. This is a mechanical law, which requires no predetermined plan, and no design, consequently also no universal consciousness. According to this law present phenomena are grounded on the past, not on the future. We live because we are engendered by our parents, because we have received from them a definite measure of force, which makes it possible for us to resist for a given time the influence upon us of Nature’s forces of dissolution. How our life is shaped is determined by the constant interaction of our inherited organic forces and of our environment. Our life is, therefore, objectively viewed, the necessary result of the law-governed activity of the mechanical forces of Nature. Subjectively it includes a quantity of pleasures and pains. We feel as pleasure the satisfaction of our organic impulses, as pain their fruitless struggles for satisfaction. In a sound organism, possessing a high capacity for adaptation, those appetites only attain development, the satisfaction of which is possible—at least, to a certain degree—and is accompanied by no bad consequences for the individual. In such a life pleasure consequently prevails decidedly over pain, and he looks upon existence, not as an evil, but as a great good. In the organism deranged by disease degenerate appetites exist which cannot be satisfied, or of which the gratification injures or destroys the individual, or the degenerate organism is too weak or too inapt to gratify the legitimate impulses. In his life pain necessarily predominates, and he looks upon existence as an evil. My interpretation of the riddle of life is nearly related to the well-known theory of eudæmonism, but it is founded on a biological, not a metaphysical, basis. It explains optimism and pessimism simply as an adequate or inadequate vitality, as the existence or absence of adaptability, as health or illness. Unprejudiced observation of life shows that the whole of mankind stands knowingly or unknowingly at the same philosophical standpoint. Men live willingly, and rather quietly happy than sadly, so long as existence affords them gratification. If the sufferings are stronger than the feeling of pleasure conferred by the satisfaction of the first and most important of all organic impulses—the impulse of life or self-preservation—then they do not hesitate to kill themselves. When Prince Bismarck once said, ‘I do not know why I should bear all the troubles of life, if I were not able to believe in a God and a future life,’ it only shows that he is insufficiently acquainted with the progress of human thought since Hamlet, who raised somewhat the same question. He bears the troubles of life because, and as long as, he can bear them, and he throws them down infallibly at the moment in which his strength is no longer adequate to carry them. The unbeliever lives and is happy, so long as the sweets of life weigh down the scale, and for this reason also the believer, as experience daily teaches, will commit suicide if he sees his balance of life’s account yielding a deficit of satisfaction. The arguments of religion have undoubtedly in the mind of the believer, as have the arguments of duty and honour in the mind of the unbeliever, a convincing force, and must likewise be taken into account as so many assets. Nevertheless they have only a limited, if high value, and can counterbalance their own equivalent of suffering only, and no more.
From these considerations it follows that the terrible question—‘Wherefore am I alive?’—which nearly drove Tolstoi to suicide, is to be answered satisfactorily and without difficulty. The believer, who accepts the fact that his life must have an aim, will live according to his inclinations and powers, and tell himself that he performs correctly, in this way, his allotted portion of the world’s work without knowing its final aim; as also a soldier, at that point of the field of battle where he is placed, does his duty willingly, without having any notion of the general progress of the fight, and of its significance for the whole campaign. The unbeliever, who is convinced that his life is a particular instance of the universal life of Nature, that his individuality has blossomed into existence as a necessary law-governed operation of eternal organic forces, knows also very well not only ‘wherefore,’ but also ‘what for,’ he is alive; he lives because, and as long as, life is to him a source of gratification—that is to say, of joy and happiness.
Has Tolstoi found any other answer by his desperate seeking? No. The explanation which his pondering and searching did not offer him was, as we have seen in the above-quoted passage in My Confessions, given him by ‘the enormous majority of mankind, who ... labour and suffer, and, nevertheless, are quiet and clear in their minds as to the aim of life.’ ‘I understood,’ he adds, ‘that one must return to their simple faith to live as these men do.’ The conclusion is arbitrary, and is a saltum of mystic thought. ‘The masses live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the aim of life,’ not because they have a ‘simple faith,’ but because they are healthy, because they like to feel themselves alive, because life gives them, in every organic function, in every manifestation of their powers, at every moment, some gratification. The ‘simple faith’ is the accidental accompanying phenomenon of this natural optimism. No doubt the majority of the uneducated classes, who represent the healthy portion of mankind, and therefore certainly rejoice in life, receive, during childhood, instruction in religious faith, and afterwards only rarely rectify through their own thought the errors which, for state reasons, have been imparted to them; but their unthinking belief is a consequence of their poverty and ignorance, like their bad clothing, insufficient food, and insanitary dwellings. To say that the majority ‘live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the aim of life,’ because they ‘have simple faith,’ is quite as logical a sequitur as the assertion that this majority ‘live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the aim of life’ because they chiefly eat potatoes, or because they live in cellars, or because they seldom take baths.
Tolstoi has rightly noticed the fact that the majority do not share his pessimism, and rejoice in their life, but he has explained it mystically. Instead of recognising that the optimism of the masses is simply a sign of their vitality, he traces it to their belief, and then seeks in faith the clue to the aim of his existence. ‘I was led to Christianity,’ he writes in another book,[160] ‘neither through theological nor historical research, but by the circumstance that when, at fifty years of age, I asked myself and the wise among my acquaintance what myself and my life might signify, and received the answer: “You are an accidental concatenation of parts; there is no significance in life; life as such is an evil.”—I was then brought to despair, and wished to kill myself. Remembering, however, that formerly, in childhood, when I believed, life had a meaning for me, and that the people about me who believe—the greater number being men unspoilt by riches—both believe and lead real lives, I doubted the accuracy of the answer which had been given me by the wisdom of my circle, and endeavoured to understand that answer which Christianity gives to men who lead a real life.’[161]
He found this answer ‘in the Gospels, that source of light.’ ‘It was quite the same thing to me,’ he goes on to say, ‘whether Jesus was God or not God; whether the Holy Ghost proceeded from the one or the other. It was likewise neither necessary nor important for me to know when and by whom the Gospel, or any one of the parables, was composed, and whether they could be ascribed to Christ or not. What to me was important was that Light, which for eighteen hundred years was the Light of the World, and is that Light still, but what name was to be given to the source of this Light, or what were its component parts, and by whom it was lighted, was quite indifferent to me.’
Let us appraise this process of thought in a mystical mind. The Gospel is the source of truth; it is, however, quite the same thing whether the Gospel is God’s revelation or man’s work, and whether it contains the genuine tradition of the life of Christ, or whether it was written down hundreds of years after his death on the basis of obscured and distorted traditions. Tolstoi himself feels that he here makes a great error of thought, but he deceives himself over and out of it in genuine mystical fashion, in that he makes use of a simile, and pretends that his image was the matter-of-fact truth. He speaks, namely, of the Gospel as a light, and says it is indifferent to him what that light is called, and of what it consists. This is correct if it concerns a real, material light, but the Gospel is only figuratively a light, and can obviously, therefore, be compared to a light only if it contains the truth. Whether it does contain the truth should first be decided by inquiry. Should inquiry result in establishing that it is man’s work, and consists only in unauthenticated traditions, then it would evidently be no receptacle of truth, and one could not any longer compare it with light, and the magnificent image with which Tolstoi cuts short inquiry into the source of the light would vanish into air. While, therefore, Tolstoi calls the Gospel a light, and denies the necessity of following up its origin, he forthwith takes as proven the very thing which is to be proved, namely, that the Gospel is a light. We know already, however, the peculiarity of mystics to found all their conclusions on the most senseless premises, alleging contempt of reality and resisting all reasonable verification of their starting-point. I only remind the reader of Rossetti’s sentence, ‘What does it matter to me whether the sun revolves round the earth, or the earth round the sun?’ and of Mallarmé’s expression, ‘The world is made in order to lead to a beautiful book.’
One can read for one’s self in his Short Exposition how Tolstoi handles the Gospel, so that it may give him the required explanation. He does not trouble himself in the least about the literal sense of the Scriptures, but puts into them what is in his own head. The Gospel which he has so recast has about as much resemblance to the canonical Scriptures as the Physiognomische Fragmente, which Jean Paul’s ‘merry little schoolmaster, Maria Wuz in Auenthal,’ ‘drew out of his own head,’ had with Lavater’s work of the same title. This Gospel of his taught him concerning the importance of life as follows:[162] ‘Men imagine that they are isolated beings, each one shaping his own life as he wills. This, however, is a delusion. The only true life is that which acknowledges the will of the Father as the source of life. This unity of life my teaching reveals, and represents that life, not as separate shoots, but as a single tree on which all the shoots grow. He only who lives in the will of the Father, like a shoot on the tree, has life; but he who would live according to his own will, like a severed shoot, dies.’ He has already said that the Father is synonymous with God, and that God, who ‘is the eternal origin of all things,’ is synonymous with ‘Spirit.’ If, then, this passage has any sense at all, it can only be that the whole of Nature is a single living being, that every single living being, therefore also every human being, is a portion of universal life, and that this universal life is God. This teaching is, however, not invented by Tolstoi. It has a name in the history of philosophy, and is called Pantheism. It is shadowed forth in Buddhism[163] and Greek Hylozoism, and was elaborated by Spinoza. It is certainly not contained in the Gospel, and it is a definite denial of Christianity which, let its dogmas be ever so rationalistically interpreted and tortured, can never give up its doctrine of a personal God and the Divine nature of Christ without ridding itself of its whole religious import and its vitally important organs, and ceasing to be a creed.
Thus we see that, though Tolstoi supposes he has succeeded in his attempt to explain life’s problems by the Christian faith of the masses, he has, on the contrary, fallen into its very opposite, namely, Pantheism. The reply of the ‘wise,’ that he ‘is an accidental concatenation of parts, and that there is no significance in life,’ ‘drove him almost to suicide’; he is, on the contrary, quite tranquil in the knowledge that[164] ‘the true life is ...not the life which is past, nor that which will be, but is the life which now is, that which confronts everyone at the present minute’; he expressly denies in My Religion the resurrection of the body and the individuality of the soul, and does not notice that the teaching which contents him is quite the same as that of the ‘wise,’ who ‘almost drove him into suicide.’ For if life exists only in the present, it can have no aim, since this would refer to the future; and if the body does not rise again, and the soul has no individual existence, then the ‘wise’ are quite right to call the human being (certainly not accidental, but necessary, because causally conditioned) ‘a concatenation of parts.’
Tolstoi’s theory of life, the fruit of the despairing mental labour of his whole life, is therefore, nothing but a haze, a failure to comprehend his own questions and answers, and hollow verbiage. His ethics—on which he himself lays a far greater stress than on his philosophy—is not in much better case than the latter. He comprises them[165] in five laws, of which the fourth is the most important: ‘Do not resist evil; suffer wrong, and do more than men ask; and so judge not, nor suffer to be judged....’ To avenge one’s self only teaches to avenge one’s self. His admirer, M. de Vogüé, expresses Tolstoi’s moral philosophy in this form:[166] ‘Resist not evil, judge not, kill not. Consequently no courts of justice, no armies, no prisons, no public or private reprisals. No wars nor judgments. The world’s law is the struggle for existence; the law of Christ is the sacrifice of one’s own existence for others.’
Is it still necessary to point out the unreasonableness of these ethics? It is obvious to sound common-sense without saying any more. If the murderer had no longer to fear the gallows, and the thief the prison, throat-cutting and stealing would be soon by far the most generally adopted trade. It is so much more convenient to filch baked bread and ready-made boots than to rack one’s self at the plough and in the workshop. If society should cease to take care that crime should be a dangerous risk, what would there be, forsooth, to deter wicked men, who certainly exist, according to Tolstoi’s assumption, from surrendering themselves to their basest impulses; and how could the great mass of indifferent people be restrained, who have no pronounced leaning either for good or for evil, from imitating the example of the criminal? Certainly not Tolstoi’s own teaching that ‘the true life is life in the present.’ The first active measures of society, for the sake of which individuals originally formed themselves into a society, is the protection of their members against those who are diseased with homicidal mania, and against the parasites—another unhealthy variation from the normal human type—who can only live by the work of others, and who, to appease all their lusts, unscrupulously overpower every human being who crosses their path. Individuals with anti-social impulses would soon be in the majority if the healthy members did not subdue them, and make it difficult for them to thrive. Were they once to become the stronger, society, and soon mankind itself, would of a necessity be devoted to destruction.
In addition to the negative precept that one should not resist evil, Tolstoi’s moral philosophy has yet a positive precept, viz.: we ought to love all men; to sacrifice everything, even one’s own life, for them; to do good to them where we can. ‘It is necessary to understand that man, if he does good, only does that to which he is bound—what he cannot leave undone.... If he gives up his carnal life for the good, he does nothing for which he need be thanked and praised.... Only those live who do good’ (Short Exposition of the Gospel). ‘Not is alms-giving effectual, but brotherly sharing. Whoever has two cloaks should give one to him who has none’ (What ought one to Do?). This distinction between charity and sharing cannot be maintained in earnest. Every gift that a man receives from some other man without work, without reciprocal service, is an alms, and as such is deeply immoral. The sick, the old, the weak, those who cannot work, must be supported and tended by their fellow-creatures; it is their duty, and it is also their natural impulse. But to give to men capable of working is under all circumstances a sin and a self-deception. If men capable of work find no work, this is obviously attributable to some defect in the economical structure of society; and it is the duty of each individual to assist earnestly in removing this defect, but not to facilitate its continuance by pacifying for awhile the victim of the defective circumstances by a gift. Charity has in this case merely the aim of deadening the conscience of the donor, and furnishing him with an excuse why he should shirk his duty of curing recognised evils in the constitution of society. Should, however, the capable man be averse to labour, then charity spoils him completely, and kills in him entirely any inclination to put his powers into action, which alone keeps the organism healthy and moral. Thus alms, extended to an able-bodied man, degrades both the donor and the recipient, and operates like poison on the feeling of duty and the morality of both.
But the love of our neighbour which exhibits itself in alms-giving, or even brotherly sharing, is, properly speaking, no such love if we look at it closely. Love in its simplest and most original form (I speak here not of sexual love, but of general sympathy for some other living being, and that need not even be a human being) is a selfish impulse, which seeks only its own gratification, not that of the beloved being; in its higher development, on the contrary, it is principally, or wholly, bent upon the happiness of the beloved being, and forgets itself. The healthy man, who has no anti-social impulses, enjoys the company of other men; he therefore avoids almost unconsciously those actions which would cause his fellow-creatures to avoid him, and he does that which, without costing himself too much effort, is sufficiently pleasant to his fellows to attract them to him. In the same healthy man the idea of sufferings, even when they are not his own, produces pain, which is always greater or less according to the degree of excitability of his brain; the more active the idea of suffering, the more violent is the accompanying feeling of pain. Because the ideas excited by direct sense-impressions are the most vivid, the sufferings which he sees with his own eyes cause him the sharpest pain, and in order to escape from this, he makes suitable efforts to put an end to this extraneous suffering, or often, it is true, only not to witness it. This degree of love to our neighbour is, as was said above, pure self-love; it merely aims at averting pain from self, and at increasing one’s own feelings of pleasure. The love of our neighbour, on the contrary, which Tolstoi obviously wishes to preach, claims to be unselfish. It contemplates the diminution of the sufferings, and the increase of the happiness, of others; it can no longer be exercised instinctively, for it demands an exact knowledge of the conditions of life, and the feelings and wishes of others, and the acquisition of this knowledge presupposes observation, reflection, and judgment. One must earnestly consider what is really needful and good for one’s neighbour. One must come out of one’s self, must set aside one’s own habits and ideas completely, and strive to slip into the skin of him to whom one would show love. One must regard the intended benefit with the other’s eyes, and feel with his nature, and not with one’s own. Does Tolstoi do this? His novels, in which he shows his alleged love between fellow-men living and working, prove the exact contrary.
In the tale Albert[167] Delessow takes up a sickly, strolling violin-player out of admiration for his great talent, and out of pity for his poverty and helplessness. But the unhappy artist is a drunkard. Delessow locks him up in his dwelling, places him under the care of his servant Sachar, and keeps him from intoxicating drinks. On the first day Albert the artist submits, but is very depressed and out of temper. On the second day he is already casting ‘malignant glances’ at his benefactor. ‘He seemed to fear Delessow, and whenever their eyes met a deadly terror was depicted on his face.... He did not answer the questions which were put to him.’ Finally, on the third day Albert rebels against the restraint to which he believes himself subjected. ‘You have no right to shut me up here,’ he cries. ‘My passport is in order. I have stolen nothing from you; you can search me. I will go to the superintendent of police.’ The servant Sachar tries to appease him. Albert becomes more and more enraged, and suddenly ‘shrieks out at the top of his voice: “Police!”’ Delessow allows him to depart. Albert ‘goes out of the door without taking leave, and constantly muttering to himself incomprehensible words.’
Delessow had taken Albert home, because the sight was painful to him of the poorly-clad, sickly, pale artist, trembling in the cold of a Russian winter. When he saw him in his warm house, before a well-spread table, in his own handsome dressing-gown, Delessow felt contented and happy. But was Albert also contented? Tolstoi testifies that Albert feels himself much more unhappy in the new position than in the old—so unhappy that very soon he could not bear it, and freed himself from it with an outburst of fury. To whom, then, had Delessow done good, to himself or to Albert?
In this narrative a mentally diseased man is depicted, and, it must be admitted, upon such a one a benefit has frequently to be forcibly pressed, which he does not understand or appreciate as such, though, of course, in a manner more consistent, persistent, and prudent than Delessow’s. In another story in the same volume, however, From the Diary of the Prince Nechljudow, Lucerne, the absurdity of love for one’s fellow-creature which does not trouble itself about the real needs of the fellow-creature is brought out more vividly and without any excuse.
One glorious evening in July, in front of the Schweizer-Hof, in Lucerne, Prince Nechljudow heard a street-singer whose songs touched and enraptured him deeply. The singer is a poor, small, hump-backed man, insufficiently clad and looking half starved. On all the balconies of the sumptuous hotel rich Englishmen and their wives are standing; all have enjoyed the glorious singing of the poor cripple, but when he takes off his hat and begs a small reward for his artistic performance, not one person throws even the smallest coin to him. Nechljudow falls into the most violent excitement. He is beside himself over the fact that ‘the singer could beg three times for a gift, and no one gave him the smallest thing, while the greater number laughed at him.’ It seems to him ‘an event which the historian of our times should inscribe in the pages of history with indelible letters of fire.’ He, for his part, will not be a participator in this unprecedented sin. He hastens after the poor devil, overtakes him and invites him to drink a bottle of wine with him. The singer accepts. ‘Close by is a small café,’ says he; ‘we can go in there—it is a cheap one,’ he continued. ‘The words, “a cheap one,” involuntarily suggested the idea,’ relates Nechljudow in his diary, ‘not to go to a cheap cafe, but into the Schweizer-Hof, where were the people who had listened to his singing. Although he refused the Schweizer-Hof several times in timid agitation, because he thought it was much too grand there, I persisted in it.’
He leads the singer into the splendid hotel. Although he appears in the company of the princely guest, the servants look at the badly dressed vagabond with hostile and contemptuous glances. They show the pair into the ‘saloon on the left, the drinking-bar for the people.’ The singer is very much embarrassed, and wishes himself far away, but he conceals his feelings. The Prince orders champagne. The singer drinks without any real pleasure and without confidence. He talks about his life, and says suddenly: ‘I know what you wish. You want to make me drunk, and then see what can be got out of me.’ Nechljudow, annoyed by the scornful and insolent demeanour of the servants jumps up and goes with his guest into the handsome dining-room on the right hand, which is set apart for the visitors. He will be served here and nowhere else. The English, who are present, indignantly leave the room; the waiters are dismayed, but do not venture to oppose the angry Russian Prince. ‘The singer drew a very miserable, terrified face, and begged me, as soon as possible, to go away, evidently not understanding why I was angry and what I wished.’ The little mannikin ‘sat more dead than alive’ near the Prince, and was very happy when Nechljudow finally dismissed him.
It must be noticed how extremely absurdly Prince Nechljudow behaves from beginning to end. He invites the singer to a bottle of wine, although, if he had possessed the faintest glimmer of sound common-sense, he might have said to himself that a hot supper, or, still better, a five-franc piece, would be far more necessary and useful to the poor devil than a bottle of wine. The singer proposes to go to a modest restaurant, where he himself would feel comfortable. The Prince pays not the smallest attention to this natural, reasonable desire, but drags the poor devil into a leading hotel, where he feels extremely uncomfortable in his bad clothing, under the cross-fire of the waiters’ insolent and scornful looks. The Prince does not care about this, but orders champagne, to which the singer is not accustomed, and which gives him so little pleasure that the thought occurs to him that his noble host desires to make sport of him by seeing him drunk. Nechljudow begins to squabble with the waiters, proceeds to the finest saloon of the hotel, scares away the remaining guests, who do not desire to sit at supper with the street-singer, and does not concern himself during the whole of this time about the feelings of his guest, who sits on hot coals, and would far rather sink into the floor, and who only breathes again when his terrible benefactor lets him escape out of his fangs.
Did Nechljudow exercise neighbourly love? No. He did nothing pleasant to the singer. He tormented him. He only satisfied himself. He wished to revenge himself on the hard-hearted English people, with whom he was furious, and he did so at the expense of the poor devil. Nechljudow calls it an unheard-of occurrence that the wealthy Englishmen should give nothing to the singer, but what he did to the latter is worse. The odious niggardliness of the English people annoyed the singer for a quarter of an hour, perhaps; Nechljudow’s foolish entertainment tortured him for an hour. The Prince never took the trouble to consider, even for a moment, what would be agreeable and useful to the singer; he thought always of himself only, of his own feelings, his anger, his indignation. This tender-hearted philanthropist is a dangerous, depraved egoist.
The irrational neighbourly love of the emotional mystic fails necessarily in its ostensible aim, because it does not arise from a knowledge of the true needs of the neighbour. The mystic practises a sentimental anthropomorphism. He transfers his own feelings, without more ado, to other beings, who feel quite differently from himself. He is in a condition bitterly to commiserate the moles because they are condemned to brood in perpetual darkness in their underground passages, and dreams, perhaps with tears in his eyes, of introducing electric light into their burrows. Because he, as seeing, would suffer severely under the conditions of a mole’s life, therefore this animal is naturally to be pitied also, although it is blind and so does not miss the light. An anecdote relates that a child poured some hot water into the drawing-room aquarium one winter’s day because it must have been so intolerably cold for the gold-fish; and in comic papers there is frequently a hit at the benevolent societies which bestow warm winter clothing on the negroes at the equator. This is Tolstoi’s love of one’s neighbour put into practice.
One especial point of his moral doctrine is the mortification of the flesh. All sexual intercourse is for him unchaste; marriage is quite as impure as the loosest tie. The Kreutzer Sonata is the most complete, and at the same time most celebrated, embodiment of these propositions. Pozdnyscheff, the murderer from motives of jealousy, says:[168] ‘There is nothing pleasant in the honeymoon; on the contrary, it is a period of continual embarrassment, a shame, a profound depression, and, above all, boredom—fearful boredom! I can only compare the situation to that of a youth who is beginning to smoke: he feels sick, swallows his saliva, and pretends to like it very much. If the cigar is to give him any pleasure, it can only be later on, as it is with marriage. In order to enjoy it, the married couple must first accustom themselves to the vice.’
‘How do you mean—to the vice? You are speaking of one of the most natural things—of an instinct.’
‘Natural thing? An instinct? Not in the least. Allow me to tell you that I have been brought to, and maintain, the opposite conviction. I, the depraved and dissolute, assert that it is something unnatural.... It is an entirely unnatural treatment for any pure girl, just as it would be for a child.’
Further on Pozdnyscheff develops the following crazy theory of the law of life: ‘The object of man, as of humanity in general, is happiness, and to attain it humanity has a law which must be carried out. This law consists in the union of the individual beings which compose humanity. Human passions only impede this union, particularly the strongest and worst of all, sensual love, sexual pleasures. When human passions, especially the most violent, sensuality, shall have been suppressed, the union will be accomplished, and humanity, having attained its end, will have no further reason for existing.’ And his last words are: ‘People should understand that the true meaning of the words of St. Matthew, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” applies to one’s sister, and not only to a strange woman, but also, and above all, to one’s own wife.’
Tolstoi, in whom, as in every ‘higher degenerate,’ two natures co-exist, of whom the one notices and judges the follies of the other, has yet a distinct feeling of the senselessness of his Kreutzer Sonata theory, and he makes his mouthpiece, Pozdnyscheff, declare[169] that he ‘was looked upon as cracked.’ But in the Short Exposition, where Tolstoi speaks in his own name, he develops, if with somewhat more reserve, the same philosophy.[170] The temptation to break the seventh commandment is due to the fact that we believe woman to have been created for carnal pleasure, and that, if a man leave one wife and take another, he will have more pleasure. Not to fall into this temptation, we must remember that it is not the will of the Father that the man should have pleasure through feminine charms....’ In the story Family Happiness[171] he likewise explains that a husband and wife, even if they have married from love, must become enemies in their wedded life, and it is quite purposeless to attempt a lasting cultivation of the original feelings.
It is not indeed necessary to refute a theory which pours contempt on all experience, all observations of nature, all institutions and laws that have been historically developed, and the known aim of which is the destruction of humanity. The thought of assailing it with zeal could only occur to men who were themselves more or less deranged. It is sufficient for the healthy minded to state it in distinct language; it is at once recognisable, then, for what it is—insanity.
For Tolstoi the great enemy is science. In My Confession he is never tired of accusing and abusing it. It is of no use to the people, but only to governments and to capitalists. It occupies itself with idle and vain things, such as the inquiries into protoplasm and spectrum analysis, but has never yet thought of anything useful, e.g., ‘how an axe and an axe-handle can best be manufactured; how a good saw ought to be fashioned; how good bread can be baked, which species of flour is best adapted for the purpose, how to manage the yeast, construct and heat the baking-oven; what foods and beverages are the most wholesome; what mushrooms are edible,’ etc.
He is, be it noted, particularly unfortunate in his examples, since, as a matter of fact, every beginner takes up all the subjects he enumerates in the scientific study of hygiene and mechanics. In accordance with his poetic nature, he has had a strong desire to embody his views on science artistically. This he has done in the comedy The Fruits of Enlightenment. What does he scoff at in that? At the pitiable blockheads who believe in spirits and, in dread of death, hunt after bacteria. Spiritualism, and the opinions created in uneducated men of the world by the imperfectly understood news of the day, conveyed in political papers, respecting infectious micro-organisms, are what he takes for science, and against them he directs the arrows of his satire.
Real science does not need to be protected against attacks of this sort. I have already proved, in estimating the value of the reproaches which the neo-Catholic Symbolists and their critical patrons raised against natural science, that all those phrases were either childish or dishonest. The accusation of dishonesty cannot be brought against Tolstoi. He believes what he says. But childish his complaints and his mockery certainly are. He speaks of science as a blind man of colour. He has evidently no suspicion of its essence, its mission, its methods and the subjects with which it deals. He resembles Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert’s two idiots, who, completely ignorant, without teachers or guides, skim through a number of books indiscriminately, and fancy themselves in this sportive manner to have gained positive knowledge; this they seek to apply with the candour of a trained Krooboy, commit, self-evidently, one hair-raising stupidity after another, and then believe themselves justified in sneering at science, and declaring it a vain folly and deception. Flaubert avenged himself on the absurdity of his own efforts to conquer science as a lieutenant conquers a music-hall singer, by tarring and feathering Bouvard and Pécuchet. Tolstoi exploded his little fuss and fume on Science, that proud, disdainful beauty, who is only to be won by long, earnest, unselfish service, by lampooning the blockheads of his Fruits of Enlightenment. The degenerate Flaubert and the degenerate Tolstoi meet here in the same frenzy.
The way to happiness is, according to Tolstoi, the turning away from science, the renunciation of reason, and the return to the life of Nature; that is, to agriculture. ‘The town must be abandoned, the people must be sent away from the factories and into the country to work with their hands; the aim of every man should be to satisfy all his wants himself’ (What ought one to Do?).
How oddly is reason mixed with nonsense even in these economic demands! Tolstoi has rightly discerned the evils which follow the uprooting of the people from fostering Mother Earth, and the incubation of a day-wage-earning, urban industrial proletariate. It is true, also, that agriculture could employ very many more men healthily and profitably than at present if the land were the property of the community, and each one received only such a share, and that only for his lifetime, as he could himself cultivate thoroughly. But must industry on this account be destroyed? Would not that mean the destruction of civilization itself? Is it not rather the duty of intelligent philanthropy and justice carefully to maintain the division of labour, this necessary and profitable result of a long evolution, but at the same time, through a better system of economy, to transform the artisan from a factory convict, condemned to misery and ill-health, into a free producer of wealth, who enjoys the fruits of his labour himself, and works no more than is compatible with his health and his claims on life?
It is vain to seek for even the slightest hint of such a solution in Tolstoi. He contents himself with a barren enthusiasm for country life, which, if beautiful in Horace, has become annoying and ridiculous in Rousseau; and he garrulously plagiarizes the hollow phrases about the worthlessness of civilization of the eloquent Genevese, who, smitten with the mania of persecution, could only have led a sentimental century like his own by the nose. Return to nature! It is not possible to compress more absurdity into fewer words. On our earth Nature is our enemy, whom we must fight, before whom we dare not lay down our weapons. In order to maintain our span of life we must create endlessly complicated artificial conditions; we must clothe our bodies, build a roof over our heads, and store up provisions for many months, during which Nature denies us every nourishment. There is only one very narrow strip of our planet where mankind can live without exertion, without inventions and arts, like the beast in the forest and the fish in the water, and that is on some of the South Sea islands. There, in perpetual spring, he certainly needs no clothes and no dwelling, or only some palm-leaves as a shelter from occasional rain. There, at all seasons of the year, he finds food constantly prepared for him in the cocoanut palm, the bread-fruit tree, the banana, in some domestic animals, in fish and mussels. No beast of prey threatens his safety, and forces on him the development of strength and contempt of death. But how many men can this earthly paradise maintain? Perhaps a hundredth part of present humanity. The remaining ninety-nine hundredths have only the alternative either of perishing, or of settling in regions of our planet where the table is not spread, and the pillow of delight is not prepared, but in which everything which life demands for its sustenance must be procured artificially and laboriously. The ‘return to Nature’ means, in our degrees of latitude, the return to hunger, to freezing, to being devoured by wolves and bears. Not in the impossible ‘return to Nature’ lies healing for human misery, but in the reasonable organization of our struggle with Nature, I might say, in universal and obligatory service against it, from which only the crippled should be exempted.
We have now learnt to know the particular ideas which together constitute Tolstoism. As a philosophy it gives explanations of the world and of life, with unmeaning or contradictory paraphrases of some intentionally misunderstood Bible verses. As ethics, it prescribes the renunciation of resistance against vice and crime, the distribution of property, and the annihilation of mankind by complete abstinence. As sociological and economic doctrine it preaches the uselessness of science, the happiness of becoming stupid, the renunciation of manufactured products, and the duty of agriculture, though without betraying from whence the farmer is to get the necessary soil for cultivation. The remarkable thing in this system is, that it does not notice its own superfluity. If it understood itself, it would restrict itself to one single point—abstinence—since it is evident that it is unnecessary to break one’s head over the aim and import of human life, over crime and love of your neighbour, and particularly over country or town life, if in any case through abstinence humanity is to die out with the present generation.
Rod[172] denies that Tolstoi is a mystic. ‘Mysticism was always, as the word indicates, a transcendental doctrine. The mystics, especially the Christian mystics, have always sacrificed the present to the future life.... What, on the contrary, astonishes an unprejudiced mind in Tolstoi’s books is the almost complete absence of all metaphysics, his indifference to the so-called questions of the other world.’
Rod simply does not know what mysticism is. He unduly restricts the sense of the word, if he only uses it to mean the investigation of ‘other-world questions.’ If he were less superficial he would know that religious enthusiasm is only one special instance of a general mental condition, and that mysticism is any morbid obscuration and incoherence of thought which is accompanied by emotionalism, and therefore includes that thought, the fruit of which is the system at once Materialistic, Pantheistic Christian, Ascetic, Rousseauistic and Communistic, of Leo Tolstoi.
Raphael Löwenfeld, whom we have to thank for the first complete German edition of Tolstoi’s works, has also written a very commendable biography of the Russian novelist, yet in which he feels himself obliged, not only to take sides vehemently with his hero, but also to assure that hero’s possible critics beforehand of his deep contempt for them. ‘Want of comprehension,’ he says,[173] ‘calls them (the “independent phenomena” of Tolstoi’s sort) eccentrics, unwilling to allow that anyone should be a head taller than the rest. The unprejudiced man, who is capable of admiring greatness, sees in their independence the expression of an extraordinary power which has outgrown the possibilities of the time, and, leading on, points out the paths to those coming after.’ It is indeed hazardous forthwith to accuse all who are not of his opinion of ‘want of comprehension.’ One who judges so autocratically will have to put up with the answer, that he is guilty of ‘want of comprehension’ who, without the most elementary training, enters upon the criticism of a phenomenon, to the understanding of which some degree of æsthetical and literary so-called ‘knowledge’ and personal feeling are very far from sufficient. Löwenfeld boasts of his capacity to admire greatness. He is possibly wrong not to presuppose this capacity in others also. What he precisely has to prove is this, that what he admires deserves in truth the designation of greatness. His assertion, however, is the only proof he brings on this most important point. He calls himself unprejudiced. It may be admitted that he is free from prejudices, but then he is free also from the preliminary knowledge that alone entitles anyone to form an opinion on psychological phenomena, which strike even the uninitiated as extraordinary, and to present them with self-assurance. Did he possess this preliminary knowledge he would know that Tolstoi, who, ‘leading, is to point out the paths to those coming after,’ is a mere copy of a class of men who have had their representatives in every age. Lombroso[174] instances a certain Knudsen, a madman, who lived in Schleswig about 1680, and asserted that there was neither a God nor a hell; that priests and judges were useless and pernicious, and marriage an immorality; that men ceased to exist after death; that everyone must be guided by his own inward insight,’ etc. Here we have the principal features of Tolstoi’s cosmology and moral philosophy. Knudsen has, however, so little ‘pointed out, leading, the way to those coming after,’ that he still only exists as an instructive case of mental aberration in books on diseases of the mind.
The truth is that all Tolstoi’s idiosyncrasies could be traced to the best-known and most often observed stigmata of higher degeneration. He even relates of himself:[175] ‘Scepticism brought me at one time to a condition nearly bordering on frenzy. I had the idea that besides myself nobody and nothing existed in the whole world; that things were not things, but presentations, which only became phenomenal at what time I directed my attention to them, and that these presentations disappeared at once when I ceased to think of them.... There were hours when, under the influence of this fixed idea, I came to such a pitch of mental bewilderment that I at times looked quickly the other way, in the hope that in the place where I was not, I might be surprised by nothingness.’ And in his Confession he says explicitly: ‘I felt that I was not quite mentally sound.’[176] His feeling was correct. He was suffering from a mania of brooding doubt, observable in many of the ‘higher degenerates.’ Professor Kowalewski[177] explains the mania of doubt straight away as exclusively a psychosis of degeneration. Griesinger[178] relates the case of a patient who continually brooded over the notions of beauty, existence, etc., and put endless questions about them. Griesinger, however, was less familiar with the phenomena of degeneration, and therefore held his case as ‘one little known.’ Lombroso[179] mentions in the enumeration of the symptoms of his maniacs of genius: ‘Almost all are taken up, in the most painful manner, with religious doubts, which disturb the mind and oppress the timid conscience and sick heart, like a crime.’ It is not, then, the noble desire for knowledge which forces Tolstoi to be ceaselessly occupied with questions concerning the aim and meaning of life, but the degeneration-mania of doubt and brooding thought, which is barren, because no answer, no explanation can satisfy them. For it is obvious that be the ‘therefore’ never so clear, never so exhaustive, it can never silence the mechanically impulsive ‘wherefore’ proceeding from the Unconscious.
A special form of the phenomenon of scepticism and brooding thought is a rage for contradiction, and the inclination to bizarre assertions, as is noted by many clinicists—e.g., Sollier[180]—as a special stigma of degeneration. It has appeared very strongly in Tolstoi at certain times. ‘In the struggles for independence,’ relates Löwenfeld,[181] ‘Tolstoi frequently overstepped the limits of good taste, while he combated tradition only because it was tradition. Thus he called ... Shakespeare a scribbler by the dozen, and asserted that the admiration ... for the great Englishman ...has properly no other origin than the custom of echoing strange opinions with thoughtless obsequiousness.’
What one finds most touching and most worthy of admiration in Tolstoi is his boundless spirit of fraternity. I have already shown above that it is foolish in its starting-points and manifestations. Here, however, I may have to point out that it is likewise a stigma of degeneration. Though he has not the experience of an alienist, the clear-minded, healthy Tourgenieff has, by his own common-sense, ‘scoffingly’ called Tolstoi’s fervent love for the oppressed people ‘hysterical,’ as Löwenfeld[182] says. We shall find it again in many degenerate subjects. ‘In contrast to the selfish imbecile,’ Legrain[183] teaches, ‘we have the imbeciles who are good to excess, who are philanthropic, who set up a thousand absurd systems in order to advance the happiness of humanity.’ And further on: ‘Full of his love for humanity, the imbecile patient, without reflection, takes up the social question on its most difficult side, and settles it confidently in a series of grotesque inventions.’ This irrational philanthropy, untutored by judgment, which Tourgenieff, with just surmise if incorrect designation, called ‘hysterical,’ is nothing else than a manifestation of that emotionalism which constitutes for Morel the fundamental character of degeneration. Nothing in this diagnosis is altered by the fact that Tolstoi had the good fortune, during the recent famine, of being able to develop the most highly effective and most devoted helpfulness for the alleviation of the misery of his countrymen. The case happened to be very simple. The need of his fellow-creatures was of the most primitive form, want of bodily food. Fraternal love could likewise set to work in its most primitive form, in the distribution of food and clothing. A special power of judgment, a deep comprehension of the need of his fellow-creatures, was here unnecessary. And that Tolstoi’s preparations for the relief of the sufferers were more effective than those of the proper authorities only proved the stupidity and incapacity of the latter.
Tolstoi’s attitude towards women also, which must remain incomprehensible to a healthy human understanding, will, in the light of clinical experience, forthwith be understood. It has been repeatedly pointed out in these pages that the emotionalism of the degenerate has, as a rule, an erotic colouring, because of the pathological alteration in their sexual centres. The abnormal excitability of these parts of the nervous system can have as a consequence both an especial attraction towards woman and an especial antipathy to her. The common element connecting these opposing effects of one and the same organic condition is the being constantly occupied with woman, the being constantly engrossed with presentations in consciousness from the region of sexuality.[184]
In the mental life of a sane man, woman is far from filling the part she plays in that of the degenerate. The physiological relation of man to woman is that of desire for the time being toward her, and of indifference when the state of desire is not present. Antipathy, let alone violent enmity, to woman, the normal man never feels. If he desires the woman, he loves her; if his erotic excitement is appeased, he becomes cool and more distant in his attitude, though without feeling aversion or fear. The man, from his purely subjective, physiological necessities and inclinations, would certainly never have invented marriage, the persistent alliance with woman. This is not a sexual but a social arrangement. It does not rest on the organic instincts of the individual man, but on the need of collectivity. It depends on the existing economic order and the dominant opinions about the State, its problems and its relations to the individual, and changes its form with these. A man may—or at least should—choose a certain woman for his consort out of love; but what holds him fast married, after a suitable choice and successful courtship, is no longer physiological love, but a complex mixture of habit, gratitude, unsexual friendship, convenience, the wish to obtain for himself social advantages (to which must naturally be added an ordered household, social representation, etc.), considerations of duty towards children and State; more or less, also, unthinking imitation of a universal observance. But feelings such as are described in the Kreutzer Sonata and in Family Happiness the normal man never experiences towards his wife, even if he has ceased to love her in the natural sense of the word.
These relations are quite otherwise in the degenerate. The morbid activity of his sexual centres completely rules him. The thought of woman has for him the power of an ‘obsession.’ He feels that he cannot resist the exciting influences proceeding from the woman, that he is her helpless slave, and would commit any folly, any madness, any crime, at her beck and call. He necessarily, therefore, sees in woman an uncanny, overpowering force of nature, bestowing supreme delights or dealing destruction, and he trembles before this power, to which he is defencelessly exposed. If, then, besides this, the almost never-failing aberrations set in, if he, in fact, commits things for woman for which he must condemn and despise himself; or if woman, without its coming to actual deeds, awakens in him emotions and thoughts before whose baseness and infamy he is horrified, then, in the moment of exhaustion, when judgment is stronger than impulse, the dread which woman inspires him withal will be suddenly changed into aversion and savage hatred. The erotomaniac ‘degenerate’ stands in the same position to the woman as a dipsomaniac to intoxicating drinks. Magnan[185] has given an appalling picture of the struggles waged in the mind of a dipsomaniac by the passionate eagerness for the bottle, and the loathing and horror of it. The mind of an erotomaniac presents a similar spectacle, but probably still stronger struggles. These frequently lead the unhappy creature, who sees no other means of escaping from his sexual obsession, to self-mutilation. There are in Russia, as is well known, a whole sect of ‘degenerates,’ the Skoptzi, by whom this is systematically exercised, as the only effective treatment to escape the devil and be saved. Pozdnyscheff, in the Kreutzer Sonata, is a Skopetz without knowing it, and the sexual morality which Tolstoi teaches in this narrative and in his theoretic writings is the expression in literature of the sexual psychopathy of the Skoptzi.
The universal success of Tolstoi’s writings is undoubtedly due in part to his high literary gifts. But that part is not the greatest; for, as we have seen in the beginning of this chapter, it was not his artistically most important creations, the works of his best years, but his later mystical works, which have won for him his body of believers. This effect is to be explained, not on æsthetical, but on pathological grounds. Tolstoi would have remained unnoticed, like any Knudsen of the seventeenth century, if his extravagances as a degenerate mystic had not found his contemporaries prepared for their reception. The widespread hysteria from exhaustion was the requisite soil in which alone Tolstoism could flourish.
That the rise and expansion of Tolstoism is to be traced, not to the intrinsic merit of Tolstoi’s writings, but to the mental condition of his readers, is made clear in the most significant manner by the difference in those parts of his system which have made an impression in various countries. In every nation just such tones awakened an echo as were attuned with its own nervous system.
In England it was Tolstoi’s sexual morality that excited the greatest interest, for in that country economic reasons condemn a formidable number of girls, particularly of the educated classes, to forego marriage; and, from a theory which honoured chastity as the highest dignity and noblest human destiny, and branded marriage with gloomy wrath as abominable depravity, these poor creatures would naturally derive rich consolation for their lonely, empty lives, and their cruel exclusion from the possibility of fulfilling their natural calling. The Kreutzer Sonata has, therefore, become the book of devotion of all the spinsters of England.
In France Tolstoism is particularly valued for the way in which it casts out science, deposes the intellect from all offices and dignities, preaches the return to implicit faith, and praises the poor in spirit as alone happy. This is water to the mill of neo-Catholics, and those mystics, from political motives, or from degeneration, who erect a cathedral to pious symbolism, raise up also a high altar to Tolstoi in their church.
In Germany, on the whole, but little enthusiasm is evinced for the abstinence-morality of the Kreutzer Sonata, and the intellectual reaction of My Confession, My Religion, and Fruits of Enlightenment. On the other hand, his followers in that country exalt Tolstoi’s vague socialism and his morbid fraternal love into their dogma. All the muddle-headed among our people who, not from sober scientific conviction, but from hysterical emotionalism, feel a leaning towards a sickly, impotent socialism, which tends principally towards ministering cheap broth to proletarians, and towards revelling in sentimental romances and melodramas from the pretended life of the city worker, naturally discovered in Tolstoi’s ‘give-me-something-communism,’ with its scorn for all economic and moral laws, the expression of their—very platonic!—love for the disinherited. And in the circles in which Herr von Egidy’s watery rationalism (at least a hundred years behind time) could rise into notoriety, and in which his first writing could call forth nearly a hundred replies, assents, and explanations, Tolstoi’s Short Exposition of the Gospel, with its denial of the divine nature of Christ, and of existence after death, with its effusions of a superabundance of feelings of aimless love, its incomprehensible personal sanctification and rhetoric morality, and especially with its astounding misinterpretation of the clearest passages from Scripture, must indeed have been an event. All the adherents of Herr von Egidy are predestined followers of Tolstoi, and all Tolstoi’s admirers perpetrate an inconsistency if they do not enter into the new Salvation Army of Herr von Egidy.
By the special timbre of the echo which Tolstoism calls forth in different countries, he has become an instrument which is better fitted than any other tendency of degeneration in contemporary literature for the determination, measurement, and comparison, in kind and degree, of degeneration and hysteria among those civilized nations in which the phenomenon of the Dusk of the Nations has been observed.
[CHAPTER V.]
THE RICHARD WAGNER CULT.
WE have seen in a previous chapter that the whole mystic movement of the period has its roots in romanticism, and hence originally emanates from Germany. In England German romanticism was metamorphosed into pre-Raphaelitism, in France the latter engendered, with the last remains of its procreative strength, the abortions of symbolism and neo-Catholicism, and these Siamese twins contracted with Tolstoism a mountebank marriage such as might take place between the cripple of a fair and the wonder of a show-booth. While the descendants of the emigrant (who on his departure from his German home already carried in him all the germs of subsequent tumefactions and disfigurements), so changed as to be almost unrecognisable, grew up in different countries, and set about returning to their native land to attempt the renewal of family ties with their home-staying connections, Germany gave birth to a new prodigy, who was in truth only reared with great trouble to manhood, and for long years received but little notice or appreciation, but who finally obtained an incomparably mightier attractive force over the great fools’ fair of the present time than all his fellow-competitors. This prodigy is ‘Wagnerism.’ It is the German contribution to modern mysticism, and far outweighs all that the other nations combined have supplied to that movement. For Germany is powerful in everything, in evil as in good, and the magnitude of its elementary force manifests itself in a crushing manner in its degenerate, as well as in its ennobling, efforts.
Richard Wagner is in himself alone charged with a greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted. The stigmata of this morbid condition are united in him in the most complete and most luxuriant development. He displays in the general constitution of his mind the persecution mania, megalomania and mysticism; in his instincts vague philanthropy, anarchism, a craving for revolt and contradiction; in his writings all the signs of graphomania, namely, incoherence, fugitive ideation, and a tendency to idiotic punning, and, as the groundwork of his being, the characteristic emotionalism of a colour at once erotic and religiously enthusiastic.
For Wagner’s persecution mania, we have the testimony of his most recent biographer and friend, Ferdinand Praeger, who relates that for years Wagner was convinced that the Jews had conspired to prevent the representation of his operas—a delirium inspired by his furious anti-Semitism. His megalomania is so well known through his writings, his verbal utterances, and the whole course of his life, that a bare reference to it is sufficient. It is to be admitted that this mania was essentially increased by the crazy procedure of those who surrounded Wagner. A much firmer equilibrium than that which obtained in Wagner’s mind would have been infallibly disturbed by the nauseous idolatry of which Bayreuth was the shrine. The Bayreuther Blätter is a unique phenomenon. To me, at least, no other instance is known of a newspaper which was founded exclusively for the deification of a living man, and in every number of which, through long years, the appointed priests of the temple have burned incense to their household god, with the savage fanaticism of howling and dancing dervishes, bent the knee, prostrated themselves before him, and immolated all opponents as sacrificial victims.
We will take a closer view of the graphomaniac Wagner. His Collected Writings and Poems form ten large thick volumes, and among the 4,500 pages which they approximately contain there is hardly a single one which will not puzzle the unbiased reader, either through some nonsensical thought or some impossible mode of expression. Of his prose works (his poems will be treated of further on), the most important is decidedly The Art-work of the Future.[186] The thoughts therein expressed—so far as the wavering shadows of ideas in a mystically emotional degenerate subject may be so called—occupied Wagner during his whole life, and were again and again propounded by him in ever new terms and phraseology. The Opera and the Drama, Judaism in Music, On the State and Religion, The Vocation of the Opera, Religion and Art, are nothing more than amplifications of single passages of The Art-work of the Future. This restless repetition of one and the same strain of thought is itself characteristic in the highest degree. The clear, mentally sane author, who feels himself impelled to say something, will once for all express himself as distinctly and impressively as it is possible for him to do, and have done with it. He may, perhaps, return to the subject, in order to clear up misconceptions, repel attacks, and fill up lacunæ; but he will never wish to rewrite his book, wholly or in part, two or three times in slightly different words, not even if in later years he attains to the insight that he has not succeeded in finding for it an adequate form. The crazed graphomaniac, on the contrary, cannot recognise in his book, as it lies finished before him, the satisfying expression of his thoughts, and he will always be tempted to begin his work afresh, a task which is endless, because it must consist in giving a fixed linguistic form to ideas which are formless.
The fundamental thought of the Art-work of the Future is this: The first and most original of the arts was that of dancing; its peculiar essence is rhythm, and this has developed into music; music, consisting of rhythm and tone, has raised (Wagner says ‘condensed’) its phonetic element to speech, and produced the art of poetry; the highest form of poetry is the drama, which for the purpose of stage-construction, and to imitate the natural scene of human action, has associated itself with architecture and painting respectively; finally, sculpture is nothing but the giving permanence to the appearance of the actor in a dead rigid form, while acting is real sculpture in living, flowing movement. Thus all the arts group themselves around the drama, and the latter should unite them naturally. Nevertheless they appear at present in isolation, to the great injury of each and of art in general. This reciprocal estrangement and isolation of the different arts is an unnatural and decadent condition, and the effort of true artists must be to win them back to their natural and necessary conjunction with each other. The mutual penetration and fusion of all arts into a single art will produce the genuine work of art. Hence the work of art of the future is a drama with music and dance, which unrolls itself in a landscape painting, has for a frame a masterly creation of architectural art designed for the poetico-musical end, and is represented by actors who are really sculptors, but who realize their plastic inspirations by means of their own bodily appearance.
In this way Wagner has set forth for himself the evolution of art. His system calls for criticism in every part. The historical filiation of the arts which he attempts to establish is false. If the original reciprocal connections of song, dance and poetry be granted, the development of architecture, painting and sculpture is certainly independent of poetry in its dramatic form. That the theatre employs all the arts is true, but it is one of those truths which are so self-evident that it is generally unnecessary to mention them, and least of all with profound prophetic mien and the grand priestly gestures of one proclaiming surprising revelations. Everyone knows from experience that the stage is in a theatrical building, that it displays painted decorations which represent landscapes or buildings, and that on it there is speaking, singing and acting. Wagner secretly feels that he makes himself ridiculous when he strains himself to expound this trite matter of first experience in the Pythian mode, with an enormous outlay of gush and exaltation ...; hence he exaggerates it to such a degree as to turn it into an absurdity. He not only asseverates that in the drama (more correctly speaking, the opera, or the musical drama, as Wagner prefers to call it) different arts co-operate, but he asserts that it is only through this co-operation that each individual art is advanced to its highest capacity of expression, and that the individual arts must and will surrender their independence as an unnatural error, in order to continue to exist only as collaborators of the musical drama.
The first asseveration is at least doubtful. In the cathedral of Cologne architecture produces an impression without the representation of a drama; the accompaniment of music would add nothing whatever to the beauty and depth of Faust and Hamlet; Goethe’s lyric poetry and the Divina Commedia need no landscape-painting as a frame and background; Michael Angelo’s Moses would hardly produce a deeper impression surrounded by dancers and singers; and the Pastoral Symphony does not require the accompaniment of words in order to exercise its full charm. Schopenhauer, although Wagner admired him as the greatest thinker of all time, expresses himself very decidedly on this point. ‘The grand opera,’ he says,[187] ‘is, properly speaking, no product of pure artistic sense, but rather of the somewhat barbaric conception of elevating æsthetic enjoyment through accumulation of means, simultaneity of quite different impressions, and intensification of the effect through the multiplication of the operating masses and forces; while, on the other hand, music, as the mightiest of all arts, is able by itself alone completely to occupy the mind which is susceptible to it; indeed, its loftiest productions, to be appropriately grasped and enjoyed, demand a mind wholly undivided and undiverted, so that it may yield itself up to them, and lose itself in them, in order completely to understand their incredible inwardness of language. Instead of this, in highly complicated operatic music the mind is besieged at the same time by way of the eye, by means of the most variegated pomp, the most fantastic pictures, and the liveliest impressions of light and colour; while over and above this it is occupied with the story of the piece.... Strictly speaking, then, one may call opera an unmusical invention for the benefit of unmusical minds, into which music must only be smuggled by means of a medium foreign to it, that is, as a sort of accompaniment to a long spun-out, insipid love-story, and its poetical thin broth; for the libretto of an opera does not tolerate concise poetry, full of genius and thought.’ This is an absolute condemnation of the Wagnerian idea of the musical drama as the collective art-work of the future. It might seem, it is true, that certain recent experiments in psychophysics had come to the help of Wagner’s theory of the reciprocal enhancement of the simultaneous effects of different arts. Charles Féré[188] has, in fact, shown that the ear hears more keenly when the eye is simultaneously stimulated by an agreeable (dynamogenous) colour; but, in the first place, this phenomenon may also be interpreted thus: that the keenness of hearing is enhanced not by the visual impression as such, not simply as sense excitation, but only through its dynamogenous quality, which arouses the whole nervous system as well to a more lively activity. And then the question in Féré’s experiments is merely one of simple sense-perceptions, whereas the musical drama is supposed to awaken a higher cerebral activity, to produce presentations and thoughts, together with direct emotions; in which case each of the arts acting in concert will produce, in consequence of the necessary dispersion of the attention to it, a more feeble effect than if it appealed by itself alone to sense and intellect.
Wagner’s second assertion, that the natural evolution of each art necessarily leads it to the surrender of its independence and to its fusion with the other arts,[189] contradicts so strongly all experience and all the laws of evolution, that it can at once be characterized as delirious. Natural development always proceeds from the simple to the complex—not inversely; progress consists in differentiation, i.e., in the evolution of originally similar parts into special organs of different structure and independent functions, and not in the retrogression of differentiated beings of rich specialization to a protoplasm without physiognomy.
The arts have not arisen accidentally; their differentiation is the consequence of organic necessity; once they have attained independence, they will never surrender it. They can degenerate, they can even die out, but they can never again shrink back into the germ from which they have sprung. The effort to return to beginnings is, however, a peculiarity of degeneration, and founded in its deepest essence. The degenerate subject is himself on the downward road from the height of organic development which our species has reached; his imperfect brain is incapable of the highest and most refined operations of thought; he has therefore a strong desire to lighten them, to simplify the multifariousness of phenomena and make them easier to survey; to drag everything animate and inanimate down to lower and older stages of existence, in order to make them more easy of access to his comprehension. We have seen that the French Symbolists, with their colour-hearing, wished to degrade man to the indifferentiated sense-perceptions of the pholas or oyster. Wagner’s fusion of the arts is a pendant to this notion. His Art-work of the Future is the art-work of times long past. What he takes for evolution is retrogression, and a return to a primeval human, nay, to a pre-human stage.
Still more extraordinary than the fundamental idea of the book is its linguistic form. For example, let us estimate the following remarks on musical art (p. 68): ‘The sea separates and unites countries; thus musical art separates and unites the two extreme poles of human art, dancing and poetry. It is the heart of man; the blood which takes its circulation from it gives to the outward flesh its warm living colour; but it nourishes with an undulating, elastic force the nerves of the brain which are directed inward’ [!!]. ‘Without the activity of the heart, the activity of the brain would become a piece of mechanical skill [!], the activity of the external limbs an equally mechanical, emotionless procedure.’ ‘By means of the heart the intellect feels itself related to the entire body [!]; the mere sensuous man rises to intellectual activity’ [!]. ‘Now, the organ of the heart [!] is sound, and its artistic language is music.’ What here floated before the mind of Wagner was a comparison, in itself senseless, between the function of music as the medium of expression for the feelings, and the function of the blood as the vehicle of nutritive materials for the organism. But as his mystically-disposed brain was not capable of clearly grasping the various parts of this intricate idea, and of arranging them in parallel lines, he entangled himself in the absurdity of an ‘activity of the brain without activity of the heart’; of a ‘relation between the intellect and the whole body through the heart,’ etc., and finally attains to the pure twaddle of calling ‘sound’ the ‘organ of the heart.’
He wishes to express the very simple thought that music cannot communicate definite images and judgments, but merely feelings of a general character; and for this purpose devises the following rigmarole (p. 88): ‘It is never able ... of itself alone to bring the human individual, determined as to sensation and morals, to an exactly perceptible, distinctive representation; it is in its infinite involution always and only feeling; it appears as an accompaniment of the moral deed, not as the deed itself; it can place feelings and dispositions side by side, not develop in necessary sequence one disposition from another; it is lacking in moral will’ [!].
Let the reader further bury himself in this passage (p. 159): ‘It is only and exactly in the degree to which the woman of perfected womanliness, in her love for the man, and through her absorption into his being, shall have developed the masculine element as well as this womanliness, and brought it with the purely womanly element in herself to a complete consummation; in other words, in the degree in which she is not only the man’s mistress, but also his friend, is the man able to find perfect satisfaction in a woman’s love.’
Wagner’s admirers asseverate that they understand this string of words thrown together at random. Indeed, they find them remarkably clear! This, however, should not surprise us. Readers who through weakness of mind or flightiness of thought are incapable of attention always understand everything. For them there exists neither obscurity nor nonsense. They seek in the words over which their absent gaze flits superficially, not the author’s thoughts, but a reflection of their own rambling dreams. Those who have lived lovingly observant in children’s nurseries must have frequently seen the game in which a child takes a book, or printed paper, and, holding it before his face, generally upside down, begins gravely to read aloud, often the story told him by his mamma yesterday before he dropped asleep, or, more frequently, the fancies which at the moment are buzzing in his little head. This is somewhat the procedure of these blessed readers who understand everything. They do not read what is in the books, but what they put into them; and as far as the process and result of this mental activity are concerned, it is certainly very much a matter of indifference what the author has actually thought and said.
The incoherence of Wagner’s thought, determined as it is by the excitations of the moment, manifests itself in his constant contradictions. At one time (p. 187) he asserts, ‘The highest aim of mankind is the artistic; the most highly artistic is the drama;’ and in a foot-note (p. 194) he exclaims, ‘These easy-going creatures are fain to see and hear everything, except the real, undisfigured human being who stands exhorting at the exit of their dreams. But it is exactly this very human being whom we must now place in the foreground.’ It is evident that one of these affirmations is diametrically opposed to the other. The ‘artistic’ ‘dramatic’ man is not the ‘real’ man, and it will be impossible for him, who looks upon it as his task to occupy himself with the real man, to recognise art as ‘the highest aim of man,’ and to regard his ‘dreams’ as the most distinguished of his activities.
In one passage (p. 206) he says: ‘Who, therefore, will be the artist of the future? Unquestionably the poet. But who will be the poet? Incontestably the interpreter. Again, however, who will be the interpreter? Necessarily the association of all artists.’ If this has any sense at all, it can only be that in the future the people will jointly write and act their dramas; and that Wagner really meant this he proves in the passage (p. 225) where he meets the objection he anticipated, that therefore the mob is to be the creator of the art-work of the future, with the words, ‘Bear in mind that this mob is in no way a normal product of real human nature, but rather the artificial result of your unnatural civilization; that all the devices and abominations which disgust you in this mob are only the desperate movements of the fight which real human nature is carrying on against its cruel oppressor, modern civilization.’ Let us contrast with these expressions the following passage from the treatise, What is German?[190]: ‘The fact that from the bosom of the German race there have sprung Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven, too easily seduces the greater number of persons of mediocre gifts into regarding these great minds as belonging by right to them, and to attempt, with the complacency of a demagogue, to persuade the masses that they themselves are Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven.’ But who, if not Wagner himself, has thus persuaded the masses, proclaiming them to be the ‘artists of the future’? And this very madness, which he himself recognises as such in the remark quoted, has made a great impression on the multitude. They have taken literally what Wagner, with the ‘complacency of a demagogue,’ has persuasively said to them. They have really imagined themselves to be the ‘artists of the future,’ and we have lived to see societies formed in many places in Germany who wanted to build theatres of the future, and themselves to perform works of the future in them! And these societies were joined not only by students or young commercial employés in whom a certain propensity for acting plays comes as a malady of adolescence, and who persuade themselves that they are serving the ‘ideal’ when with childish vanity and in grotesque theatrical costume they gesticulate and declaim before their touched and admiring relatives and acquaintances. Nay, old burgesses, bald and bulky, abandoned their sacred skat, and even the thrice-holy morning tankard, and prepared themselves devoutly for noble dramatic achievements! Since the memorable occasion on which Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Starveling rehearsed their admirable Pyramus and Thisbe, the world has seen no similar spectacle. Emotional shopkeepers and enthusiastic counter-jumpers got Wagner’s absurdities on the brain, and the provincials and Philistines whom his joyful message had reached actually set about with their united strength to carry on the work of Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven.
In the passages quoted, in which, in the most used-up style of Rousseau, he glorifies the masses, speaks of ‘unnatural culture,’ and calls ‘modern civilization’ ‘the cruel oppressor of human nature,’ Wagner betrays that mental condition which the degenerate share with enlightened reformers, born criminals with the martyrs of human progress, namely, deep, devouring discontent with existing facts. This certainly shows itself otherwise in the degenerate than in reformers. The latter grow angry over real evils only, and make rational proposals for their remedy which are in advance of the time: these remedies may presuppose a better and wiser humanity than actually exists, but, at least, they are capable of being defended on reasonable grounds. The degenerate subject, on the other hand, selects among the arrangements of civilization such as are either immaterial or distinctly suitable, in order to rebel against them. His fury has either ridiculously insignificant aims or simply beats the air. He either gives no earnest thought to improvement, or hatches astoundingly mad projects for making the world happy. His fundamental frame of mind is persistent rage against everything and everyone, which he displays in venomous phrases, savage threats, and the destructive mania of wild beasts. Wagner is a good specimen of this species. He would like to crush ‘political and criminal civilization,’ as he expresses it. In what, however, does the corruption of society and the untenableness of the condition of everything reveal themselves to him? In the fact that operas are played with tripping airs, and ballets are performed! And how shall humanity attain its salvation! By performing the musical drama of the future! It is to be hoped that no criticism of this universal plan of salvation will be demanded of me.
Wagner is a declared anarchist. He distinctly develops the teaching of this faction in the Art-work of the Future (p. 217): ‘All men have but one common need ... the need of living and being happy. Herein lies the natural bond between all men.... It is only the special needs which, according to time, place, and individuality, make themselves known and increase, which in the rational condition of future humanity can serve as a basis for special associations.... These associations will change, will take another form, dissolve and reconstitute themselves according as those needs change and reappear.’[191] He does not conceal the fact that this ‘rational condition of future humanity’ ‘can be brought about only by force’ (p. 228). ‘Necessity must force us, too, through the Red Sea if we, purged of our shame, are to reach the Promised Land. We shall not be drowned in it; it is destructive only to the Pharaohs of this world, who have once already been swallowed up—man and horse ... the arrogant, proud Pharaohs who then forgot that once a poor shepherd’s son with his shrewd advice had saved their land from starvation.’
Together with this anarchistic acerbity, there is another feeling that controls the entire conscious and unconscious mental life of Wagner, viz., sexual emotion. He has been throughout his life an erotic (in a psychiatric sense), and all his ideas revolve about woman. The most ordinary incitements, even those farthest removed from the province of the sexual instinct, never fail to awaken in his consciousness voluptuous images of an erotic character, and the bent of the automatic association of ideas is in him always directed towards this pole of his thought. In this connection let this passage be read from the Art-work of the Future (p. 44), where he seeks to demonstrate the relation between the art of dancing, music, and poetry: ‘In the contemplation of this ravishing dance of the most genuine and noblest muses, of the artistic man [?], we now see the three arm-in-arm lovingly entwined up to their necks; then this, then that one, detaching herself from the entwinement, as if to display to the others her beautiful form in complete separation, touching the hands of the others only with the extreme tips of her fingers; now the one, entranced by a backward glance at the twin forms of her closely entwined sisters, bending towards them; then two, carried away by the allurements of the one [!] greeting her in homage; finally all, in close embrace, breast to breast, limb to limb, in an ardent kiss of love, coalescing in one blissfully living shape. This is the love and life, the joy and wooing of art,’ etc. (Observe the word-play: Lieben und Leben, Freuen und Freien!) Wagner here visibly loses the thread of his argument; he neglects what he really wishes to say, and revels in the picture of the three dancing maidens, who have arisen before his mind’s eye, following with lascivious longing the outline of their forms and their seductive movements.
The shameless sensuality which prevails in his dramatic poems has impressed all his critics. Hanslick[192] speaks of the ‘bestial sensuality’ in Rheingold, and says of Siegfried: ‘The feverish accents, so much beloved by Wagner, of an insatiable sensuality, blazing to the uttermost limits—this ardent moaning, sighing, crying, and sinking to the ground, move us with repugnance. The text of these love-scenes becomes sometimes, in its exuberance, sheer nonsense.’ Compare in the first act of the Walküre,[193] in the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, the following stage directions: ‘Hotly interrupting’; ‘embraces her with fiery passion’; ‘in gentle ecstasy’; ‘she hangs enraptured upon his neck’; ‘close to his eyes’; ‘beside himself’; ‘in the highest intoxication,’ etc. At the conclusion, it is said, ‘The curtain falls quickly,’ and frivolous critics have not failed to perpetrate the cheap witticism, ‘Very necessary, too.’ The amorous whinings, whimperings and ravings of Tristan und Isolde, the entire second act of Parsifal, in the scene between the hero and the flower-girls, and then between him and Kundry in Klingsor’s magic garden, are worthy to rank with the above passages. It certainly redounds to the high honour of German public morality, that Wagner’s operas could have been publicly performed without arousing the greatest scandal. How unperverted must wives and maidens be when they are in a state of mind to witness these pieces without blushing crimson, and sinking into the earth for shame! How innocent must even husbands and fathers be who allow their womankind to go to these representations of ‘lupanar’ incidents! Evidently the German audiences entertain no misgivings concerning the actions and attitudes of Wagnerian personages; they seem to have no suspicion of the emotions by which they are excited, and what intentions their words, gestures and acts denote; and this explains the peaceful artlessness with which these audiences follow theatrical scenes during which, among a less childlike public, no one would dare lift his eyes to his neighbour or endure his glance.
With Wagner amorous excitement assumes the form of mad delirium. The lovers in his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad, rolling in contortions and convulsions over a root of valerian. They reflect a state of mind in the poet which is well known to the professional expert. It is a form of Sadism. It is the love of those degenerates who, in sexual transport, become like wild beasts.[194] Wagner suffered from ‘erotic madness,’ which leads coarse natures to murder for lust, and inspires ‘higher degenerates’ with works like Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Tristan und Isolde.
Wagner’s graphomania is shown not only by the substance, but also by the outward form of his writings. The reader will have been able to remark in the quotations given what a misuse Wagner makes of italics. He often has whole half-pages printed in spaced letters. Lombroso expressly establishes this phenomenon among graphomaniacs.[195] It is sufficiently explained by the peculiarity of mystical thought, so often set forth in this work. No linguistic form which the mystically degenerate subject can give to his thought-phantoms satisfies him; he is always conscious that the phrases he is writing do not express the mazy processes of his brain; and as he is forced to abandon the attempt to embody these in words, he seeks, by means of notes of exclamation, dashes, dots, and blanks, to impart to his writings more of mystery than the words themselves can express.
The irresistible propensity to play on words—another peculiarity of graphomaniacs and imbeciles—is developed to a high degree in Wagner. I will here give only a few examples from the Art-work of the Future—p. 56: ‘Thus it [the science of music] acquires through sound, which has become speech ... its most exalted satisfaction, and at the same time its most satisfying exaltation,’ p. 91: ‘Like a second Prometheus, who from Thon (clay) formed men, Beethoven had striven to form them from Ton (music). Not from clay or music (Thon or Ton), but from both of these substances, should man, the image of Zeus, the dispenser of life, be created.’ Special attention may, however, be called to the following astounding passage (p. 103): ‘If fashion or custom permitted us again to adopt, in speech and writing, the genuine and true use of Tichten for Dichten (to compose poetry), we should thus obtain, in the united names of the three primitive human arts, Tanz-, Ton-, and Tichtkunst (dancing, music, and poetry), a beautifully significant, sensuous image of the essence of this trinity of sisters, viz., a perfect alliteration.... This alliteration would, moreover, be peculiarly characteristic, on account of the position held in it by Tichtkunst (poetry), for only as its last member would Tichtkunst transform the alliteration into rhyme,’ etc.
We now come to the mysticism of Wagner, which permeates all his works, and has become one of the chief causes of his influence over his contemporaries—at least, outside Germany. Although he is irreligious through and through, and frequently attacks positive religions, their doctrines and their priests, there have, nevertheless, remained active in him from childhood (passed in an atmosphere of Christian Protestant views and religious practices) ideas and sentiments which he subsequently transformed so strangely in his degenerate mind. This phenomenon, viz., the persistence, in the midst of later doubts and denials, of early-acquired Christian views, operating as an ever-active leaven, singularly altering the whole mind, and at the same time themselves suffering manifold decomposition and deformation—may be frequently observed in confused brains. We shall meet it, for example, in Ibsen. At the foundation of all Wagner’s poems and theoretical writings there is to be found a more or less potent sediment of the Catechism, distorted as to its doctrines; and in his most luxuriant pictures, between the thick, crude colours, we get glimpses of strange and hardly recognisable touches, betraying the fact that the scenes are brutally daubed on the pale background of Gospel reminiscences.
One idea, or, more accurately, one word, has remained especially deeply fixed in his mind, and pursued him throughout his whole life as a real obsession, viz., the word ‘redemption.’ True, it has not with him the value it possesses in the language of theology. To the theologian ‘redemption,’ this central idea of the whole Christian doctrine, signifies the sublime act of superhuman love, which freely takes upon itself the greatest suffering, and gladly bears it, that it may free from the power of evil those whose strength is insufficient for such a task. So understood, redemption presupposes three things. Firstly, we must assume a dualism in nature, most distinctly developed in the Zend religion; the existence of a first principle of good and one of evil, between which mankind is placed, and becomes the cause of their strife. Secondly, the one who is to be redeemed must be free from all conscious and wilful fault; he must be the victim of superior forces which he is himself incapable of warding off. Thirdly in order that the redeemer’s act may be a true act of salvation and acquire power to deliver, he must, in the fulfilment of a clearly recognised and purposed mission, offer himself in sacrifice. It is true that a tendency has often asserted itself to think of redemption as an act of grace, in which not only the victims, but also sinners, may participate; but the Church has always recognised the immorality of such a conception, and has expressly taught that, in order to receive redemption, the guilty must himself strive for it, through repentance and penance, and not passively await it as a completely unmerited gift.
This theological redemption is not redemption in Wagner’s sense. With him it has never any clearly recognisable import, and serves only to denote something beautiful and grand, which he does not more closely specify. At the outset the word has evidently made a deep impression on his imagination, and he subsequently uses it like a minor chord, let us say a, c, e, which is likewise without definite significance, but, nevertheless, awakens emotion and peoples consciousness with floating presentations. With Wagner someone is constantly being ‘redeemed.’ If (in the Art-work of the Future) the art of painting ceases to paint pictures, and produces thenceforth only decorations for the theatre, this is its ‘redemption.’ In the same way the music accompanying a poem is a ‘redeemed’ music. Man is ‘redeemed’ when he loves a woman, and the people is ‘redeemed’ when it plays at the drama. His compositions also turn upon ‘redemption.’ Nietzsche[196] has already remarked this, and makes merry over it, if with repulsively superficial witticisms. ‘Wagner,’ he says, ‘has meditated on nothing so much as on redemption’ (a wholly false assertion, since Wagner’s redemption-twaddle is certainly no result of meditation, but only a mystical echo of childish emotions); ‘his opera is the opera of redemption. With him someone is always wanting to be redeemed—now a male, now a female.... Who, if not Wagner, teaches us that innocence has a predilection for redeeming interesting sinners (the case of Tannhäuser)? Or that even the Wandering Jew will be redeemed and become sedentary when he marries (the case of The Flying Dutchman)? Or that depraved old wantons prefer to be redeemed by chaste youths (the case of Kundry)? Or that beauteous maidens like best to be redeemed by a knight who is a Wagnerian (the case in Meistersinger)? Or that even married women like to be redeemed by a knight (the case of Isolde)? Or that the ancient god, after having morally compromised himself in every respect, is redeemed by a free-thinker and an immoral character (the case in the Niebelungen)? How particularly admirable is this last profundity! Do you understand it? As for me, defend me from understanding it.’
The work of Wagner which may be truly termed ‘the opera of redemption’ is Parsifal. Here we may catch Wagner’s mind in its most nonsensical vagaries. In Parsifal two persons are redeemed: King Amfortas and Kundry. The King has allowed himself to become infatuated with the charms of Kundry, and has sinned in her arms. As a punishment, the magic spear which had been entrusted to him has been taken from him, and be wounded by this sacred weapon. The wound gapes and bleeds unceasingly, and causes him dreadful suffering. Nothing can heal it but the spear itself which gave it. But ‘the pure fool who through compassion knows’ can alone wrest the spear from the wicked magician, Klingsor. Kundry, when a young maiden, had seen the Saviour on the path of his Passion, and had laughed at him. As a penalty for her act she is doomed to live for ever, longing in vain for death, and seducing to sin all men who approach her. Only if a man is able to resist her allurements can she be redeemed from her curse. (One man has, in fact, resisted her, the magician Klingsor. Yet this victorious resistance has not redeemed her as it ought. Why? Wagner does not reveal this by a single syllable.) It is Parsifal who brings redemption to the two accursed ones. The ‘pure fool’ has no inkling that he is predestined to redeem Amfortas and Kundry, and he neither undergoes any suffering nor exposes himself to any serious danger in accomplishing the act of salvation. It is true that, in forcing his way into the enchanted garden, he is obliged to have a small bout with its knights, but this skirmish is far more a pleasure than an effort for him, for he is far stronger than his adversaries, and, after some playful passes, puts them to flight, bleeding and beaten. He certainly resists the beauty of Kundry, and this is meritorious, yet it hardly constitutes an act of deadly self-sacrifice. He obtains the magic spear without any effort. Klingsor hurls it at him to slay him, but the weapon ‘remains floating above his head,’ and Parsifal has only to stretch out his hand to take it at his convenience, and then to fulfil his mission.
Every individual feature of this mystical piece is in direct contrast to the Christian idea of redemption, which has nevertheless inspired it. Amfortas is in need of redemption through his own weakness and guilt, not on account of an invincible fate, and he is redeemed without any assistance on his part beyond whining and moaning. The salvation he is awaiting and ultimately obtains has its source completely outside his will and consciousness. He has no part in its attainment. Another effects it for him, and bestows it on him as a gift. The redemption is a purely external affair, a lucky windfall, and not the reward of an inward moral struggle. Still more monstrous are the conditions of Kundry’s redemption. Not only is she not allowed to labour for her own salvation, but she is compelled to employ all her strength to prevent it; for her redemption depends on her being despised by a man, and the task to which she has been condemned is to turn to account all the seductive power of beauty and passionate solicitation to win over the man. She must by all possible means thwart the man by whom her redemption is to come, from becoming her redeemer. If the man yields to her charms, then the redemption is frustrated, not through her fault, though by her action; if the man resists the temptation, she obtains redemption without deserving it, because in spite of her opposing effort. It is impossible to concoct a situation more absurd and at the same time more immoral. Parsifal the redeemer is, in fine, from beginning to end, a mystic re-incarnation of ‘Hans in Luck’ in the German fairy-tale. He succeeds in everything without personal effort. He sets out to kill a swan, and finds the Grail and the royal crown. His redeemership is no self-sacrifice, but a benefice. The favour of Heaven has called him to an enviable, honourable office—on what powerful recommendation Wagner does not disclose. But a closer examination reveals worse things. Parsifal, the ‘pure fool,’ is simply a precipitate of confused reminiscences of Christology. Powerfully struck by the poetical elements of the Saviour’s life and sufferings, Wagner has been impelled to externalize his impressions and emotions, and has created Parsifal, whom he causes to experience some of the most affecting scenes of the Gospel, and who in his hands becomes (partly, perhaps, without his being aware of it) at once a foolish and frivolous caricature of Jesus Christ. In the mystical work, the temptation of the Saviour in the desert is transformed into the temptation of Parsifal by Kundry. The scene in the Pharisee’s house, where the Magdalene anoints the Saviour’s feet, is reproduced exactly: Kundry bathes and anoints Parsifal’s feet, and dries them with her unbound hair; and the ‘pure fool’ plagiarizes the words of Christ, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee,’ in this exclamation: ‘Thus I accomplish my first office; be baptized and believe on the Redeemer.’ That the ordinary theatre-goer is not shocked by this misused application of the Christ legend—nay, that in the distorted fragments of the Gospel he is able to revive some of the emotions it perhaps at one time excited in him—is conceivable. But it is incomprehensible that earnest believers, and especially zealous fanatics, have never perceived what a profanation of their most sacred ideas is perpetrated by Wagner, when he endows his Parsifal with traits of the Christ Himself.
We may mention only one of the other absurd details of the Parsifal. The aged Titurel has succumbed to the earthly penalty of death, but through the Saviour’s mercy continues to live in the grave. The sight of the Grail continually renews for a time his waning vital strength. Titurel seems to attach a great value to this comfortless life-in-death existence. ‘By the mercy of the Saviour I live in the tomb,’ he joyously cries from his coffin, demanding with impetuous vehemence that the Grail be shown him, in order that his life may thereby be prolonged. ‘Am I to-day to see once more the Grail and live?’ he asks in anguish, and because he receives no immediate answer thus laments, ‘Must I die unaccompanied by the Deliverer?’ His son, Amfortas, hesitates, whereupon the old man gives his orders: ‘Unveil the Grail! The benediction!’ And when his wishes are complied with, he exults: ‘Oh, sacred bliss! How bright the Lord doth greet us to-day!’ Subsequently Amfortas has for some time neglected the unveiling of the Grail, and hence Titurel has had to die. Amfortas is in despair. ‘My father! highly blessed of heroes!... I, who alone was fain to die, to thee have I given death!’ From all this it undoubtedly results that all the persons concerned see in life, even if it be the shadowy and empty life of a being already laid in his coffin, an exceedingly precious possession, and in death a bitter misfortune. And this takes place in the same piece in which Kundry endures eternal life as a frightful curse, and passionately longs for death as a most delicious salvation! Is a more ridiculous contradiction conceivable? Moreover, the Titurel episode is a denial of all the premises of Parsifal, constructed as it is on the foundation of the religious idea of personal persistence after death. How can death frighten the man who is convinced that the bliss of paradise awaits him? We are here in the presence of the same non-comprehension of his own assumptions which has already struck us in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Tolstoi. But this is precisely the peculiarity of morbidly mystic thought. It unites mutually exclusive ideas; it shuns the law of consistency, and imperturbably combines details which are dumbfounded at finding themselves in company. We do not observe this phenomenon in one who is a mystic through ignorance, mental indolence, or imitation. He may take an absurd idea as a point of departure for a train of thought; but the latter unrolls itself rationally and consistently, and suffers no gross contradiction among its particular members.
As Christology inspired Wagner with the figures of Parsifal, so did the Eucharist inspire him with the most effective scene of the piece—the love-feast of the Grail. It is the mise-en-scène of the Catholic Mass, with the heretical addition of one Protestant feature—the partaking by the communicants of the elements in both kinds. The unveiling of the Grail corresponds to the elevation of the Host. The acolytes take the form of the choir of boys and youths. In the antiphonal songs and the actions of Amfortas, we find approximations to all four parts of the Mass. The knights of the Grail intone a sort of stunted introit, the long plaint of Amfortas: ‘No! Let it not be unveiled! Oh, may no one, no one, fathom the depths of this torment!’ etc., may be regarded as a Confiteor. The boys sing the offertory (‘Take ye my blood for the sake of our love!’ etc.). Amfortas proceeds to the consecration; all partake in the Communion, and there is even a parodied reminiscence of the ‘Ite, missa est’ in Gurnemanz’s exclamation, ‘Go out hence upon thy way!’ Since Constantine the Great, since the elevation of Christianity to the rank of a State religion, no poet has dared do what Wagner has done; he has drawn theatrical effects from the incomparable rich emotional content of the function of the Mass. He felt profoundly the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper; it provoked in him a powerful mystical excitement, and the need arose in him of endowing the symbolical event with a dramatic form, and of sensuously experiencing in all its details and in its entirety that which in the sacrifice of the Mass is only indicated, condensed, and spiritualized. He wished to see and feel in his own person how the elect enjoy, amid violent emotions, the body of Christ and His redeeming blood; and how super-terrestrial phenomena, the purple gleaming of the Grail and the downward hovering dove (in the final scene), etc., make palpable the real presence of Christ and the divine nature of the Eucharist. Just as Wagner has borrowed from the Church his inspiration for the scenes in the Grail, and then for his own purposes has popularized the liturgy in the style of the Biblia Pauperum, so does the audience find again the cathedral and high mass on his stage, and import into the piece all the emotions left in their soul by Church ceremonies. The real priest in his sacerdotal robes, the remembrance of his gestures, of the hand-bell and the genuflexions of the servers, the blue reek and perfume of the incense, the pealing of the organ and the play of chequered sunlight through the stained windows of the church—these are, in the heart of the public, Wagner’s collaborators; and it is not his art which lulls them into mystic ecstasy, but the fundamental mood inculcated in the vast majority of white races by two centuries of Christian sentiment.
Mysticism is, as we know, always accompanied by eroticism, especially in the degenerate, whose emotionalism has its chief source in morbidly excited states of the sexual centres. Wagner’s imagination is perpetually occupied with woman. But he never sees her relation to man in the form of healthy and natural love, which is a benefit and satisfaction for both lovers. As with all morbid erotics (we have already remarked this in Verlaine and Tolstoi), woman presents herself to him as a terrible force of nature, of which man is the trembling, helpless victim. The woman that he knows is the gruesome Astarté of the Semites, the frightful man-eating Kali Bhagawati of the Hindoos, an apocalyptic vision of smiling bloodthirstiness, of eternal perdition and infernal torment, in demoniacally beautiful embodiment. No poetical problem has so profoundly moved him as the relation between man and this his ensnaring destroyer. He has approached this problem from all sides, and has given it different solutions corresponding to his instincts and views of morality. The man frequently succumbs to the temptress, but Wagner revolts against this weakness, of which he is himself only too conscious, and in his chief works makes the man offer a desperate, but finally victorious, resistance. Not, however, by his own strength does man tear himself from the paralyzing charm of woman. He must receive supernatural aid. This proceeds most frequently from a pure and unselfish virgin, who forms the antithesis to the sphinx with soft woman’s body and lion’s paws. In conformity with the psychological law of contrast, Wagner invents as a counterpart to the terrible woman of his inmost perception an angelic woman, who is all love, all devotion, all celestial mildness; a woman who asks for nothing and gives all; a woman soothing, caressing and healing; in a word, a woman for whom an unhappy creature pants as he writhes, consumed by flames, in the white-hot flames of Belit. Wagner’s Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, and Gertrude are extremely instructive manifestations of erotic mysticism, in which the half-unconscious idea is struggling for form, viz., that the safety of the sexually crazy degenerate lies in purity, continence, or in the possession of a wife having no sort of individuality, no desire and no rights, and hence incapable of ever proving dangerous to the man.
In one of his first compositions, as in his last, in Tannhäuser as in Parsifal, he treats of the combat between man and his corruptress, the fly versus the spider, and in this way testifies that for thirty-three years, from youth to old age, the subject has never been absent from his mind. In Tannhäuser it is the beautiful devil Venus herself who ensnares the hero, and with whom he has to wage a desperate conflict for the salvation of his soul. The pious and chaste Elizabeth, this dream-being, woven of moonlight, prayer, and song, becomes his ‘redeemer.’ In Parsifal the beautiful devil is named Kundry, and the hero escapes the danger with which she threatens his soul only because he is ‘the pure fool,’ and is in a state of grace.
In the Walküre Wagner’s imagination surrenders itself to unbridled passion. He here represents the ardent man wildly and madly abandoning himself to his appetite, without regard to the dictates of society, and without attempting to resist the furious impetuosity of his instinct. Siegmund sees Sieglinde, and thenceforth has but one idea—to possess her. That she is another’s wife—nay, that he recognises her as his own sister—does not check him for a moment. Those considerations are as feathers before the storm. He pays for his night of pleasure by his death the following morning. For with Wagner love is always a fatality, and ever round its pillow blaze the flames of hell. And as he has not made manifest in Sieglinde the images of carnage and annihilation evoked in him by his idea of woman, he personifies these separately in the Walküre. Their appearance in the drama is for him a psychological need. The traits inseparable in his mind from his conception of woman, and ordinarily united by him in a single figure, are here separated and raised to the dignity of independent types. Venus, Kundry, are seducer and destroyer in one person. In the Walküre Sieglinde is only the seducer, but the destroyer grows into a horde of gruesome Amazons, who drink the blood of battling men, revel in the spectacle of murderous blows, and rush with wild, exulting cries across the corpse-strewn waste.
Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Tristan und Isolde are exact repetitions of the essential content of the Walküre. It is always the dramatic embodiment of the same obsession of the terrors of love. Siegfried sees Brunhilde in the midst of her fire-circle, and both instantly fall into each other’s arms in a rage of love; but Siegfried must expiate his happiness with his life, and falls under the steel of Hagen. The mere death of Siegfried does not suffice for Wagner’s imagination as the inevitable consequence of love; destiny must show itself more terribly. The castle of Asgard itself breaks out in flames, and the slave of love in dying drags to his own perdition all the gods of heaven along with him. Tristan und Isolde is the echo of this tragedy of passion. Here also is the complete annihilation of the sentiment of duty and self-conquest, by the springing up of love both in Tristan and Isolde; and here also is death as the natural end towards which love is hurried. To express his fundamental mystic thought, that love is an awful fatality wherewith the unapproachable powers of destiny visit the poor mortal incapable of resistance, he has resort to a childishly clumsy device; he introduces into his compositions love-philtres of potent spell, now to explain the birth of the passion itself, and to indicate its superhuman nature, as in Tristan und Isolde; now to withdraw all the moral life of the hero from the control of his will, and show him as the plaything of super-terrestrial forces, as in the Götterdämmerung.
Thus Wagner’s poems give us a deep insight into the world of ideas of an erotically emotional degenerate nature. They reveal the alternating mental conditions of a most reckless sensuality, of a revolt of moral sentiment against the tyranny of appetite, of the ruin of the higher man and his despairing repentance. As has already been said, Wagner is an admirer of Schopenhauer and his philosophy. Like his master, he persuaded himself that life is a misfortune, and non-existence salvation and happiness. Love, as the constantly active incitement to the maintenance of the species and continuance of life, with all its accompanying sufferings, was bound to seem to him the source of all evil; and, on the other hand, the highest wisdom and morality, to consist in the victorious resistance of this incitement, in chastity, sterility, the negation of the will to perpetuate the species. And while his judgment bound him to these views, his instincts attracted him irresistibly to woman, and forced him during his whole life to do all that flouted his convictions and condemned his doctrine. This discord between his philosophy and his organic inclinations is the inner tragedy of his mental life, and his poems form a unique whole, recounting the process of the internal conflict. He sees a woman, at once loses himself, and is absorbed in her charms (Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Brunhilde, Tristan and Isolde). This is a great sin, demanding expiation; death alone is an adequate punishment (final scenes in the Walküre, Götterdämmerung, Tristan und Isolde). But the sinner has a timid and feeble excuse: ‘I could not resist. I was the victim of superhuman powers. My seducer was of the race of the gods’ (Sieglinde, Brunhilde). ‘Magic philtres deprived me of my reason’ (Tristan, Siegfried in his relations with Gutrune). How glorious to be strong enough to vanquish the devouring monster of appetite within! How radiant and exalted the figure of a man able to plant his foot on the neck of the demon woman! (Tannhäuser and Parsifal). And, on the other hand, how beautiful and adorable the woman who should not set ablaze the hell-fire of passion in man, but aid him in quenching it; who should not exact of him a revolt against reason, duty, and honour, but be an example to him of renunciation and self-discipline; who, instead of enslaving him, should, as his loving handmaid, divest herself of her own nature, to blend herself with his; in a word, a woman who would leave him safe in his defencelessness, because she herself would be unarmed! (Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, Gutrune). The creation of these forms of woman is a sort of De Profundis of the timid voluptuary, who feels the sting of the flesh, and implores aid to protect him from himself.
Like all the degenerates, Wagner is wholly sterile as a poet, although he has written a long series of dramatic works. The creative force capable of reproducing the spectacle of universal normal life is denied him. He has recourse to his own mystico-erotic emotions for the emotional content of his pieces, and the external incidents forming their skeleton are purely the fruits of reading, the reminiscences of books which have made an impression on him. This is the great difference between the healthy and the degenerate poet who receives his sentiments at second-hand. The former is able to ‘plunge into full human life,’ as Goethe says; to seize it, and either make it enter all breathing and palpitating into a poem which itself thus becomes a part of natural life, or else remould it with idealizing art, suppressing its accidental, accessory features, so as to make prominent the essential; and in this way convincingly to reveal law behind enigmatically bewildering phenomena. The degenerate subject, on the contrary, can do nothing with life; he is blind and deaf to it. He is a stranger in the midst of healthy men. He lacks the organs necessary for the comprehension of life—nay, even for its perception. To work from a model does not lie within his powers. He can only copy existing sketches, and then colour them subjectively with his own emotions. He can see life only when it lies before him on paper in black and white. While the healthy poet resembles the chlorophyllic plant, which dives into the soil, and, by the honest labour of its own roots, procures for itself the nutritive materials out of which it constructs its blossoms and fruit, the degenerate poet has the nature of a parasitic plant, which can only live on a host, and receives its nutriment exclusively from the juices already elaborated by the latter. There are modest parasites and proud parasites. Their range extends from the insignificant lichen to the wondrous rafflesia, the flower of which, a yard in breadth, illumines the sombre forests of Sumatra with the wild magnificence of its blood-red colour. Wagner’s poems have in them something of the carrion stench and uncanny beauty of this plant of rapine and corruption. With the single exception of the Meistersinger, they are grafted on the Icelandic sagas, the epics of Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram of Eschenbach, and the singer of the Wartburg war in the Manessian manuscript, as on so many trunks of half-dead trees, and they draw their strength from these. Tannhäuser, the Niebelungen Tetralogy, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and Lohengrin, are constructed entirely from materials supplied him by ancient literature. Rienzi he derives from written history, and the Fliegender Holländer from the tradition already utilized a hundred times. Among popular legends, that of the Wandering Jew has made the deepest impression on his mind, on account of its mysticism. He has elaborated it once in the Fliegender Holländer; a second time transposed it feature for feature into a feminine form in the person of Kundry, not without weaving into this inversion some reminiscences of the legend of Herodias. All this is patchwork and dilettantism. Wagner deceives himself (probably unconsciously) as to his incapacity for creating human beings, representing, not men, but gods and demi-gods, demons and spectres, whose deeds are not to be explained by human motives, but by mysterious destinies, curses and prophecies, fatal and magic forces. That which passes before our eyes in Wagner’s pieces is not life, but spectres, witches’ sabbaths, or dreams. He is a dealer in old clothes, who has bought at second-hand the cast-off garments of fairy-tales, and makes of them (often not without clever tailoring) new costumes, in which we may recognise, strangely jumbled and joined, rags of ancient gala stuffs and fragments of damascened suits of armour. But these masquerading suits do not serve for clothes to a single being of flesh and blood. Their apparent movements are produced exclusively by the hand of Wagner, who has slipped into the empty doublets and sleeves, and behind the flowing trains and dangling robes, and kicks about in them with epileptic convulsions, that he may awaken in the spectator the impression of a ghostly animation in this obsolete wardrobe.
Healthy geniuses have also, no doubt, allied themselves with popular tradition or history, like Goethe in Faust and Tasso. But what a difference between the respective treatment by a healthy poet and a degenerate one of that which they find, of that which is given! To the former it is a vessel which he fills with genuine, fresh life, so that the new contents become the essential part; to the latter, on the contrary, the outside is and remains the chief thing, and his own activity consists at best in choking the receptacle with the chaff of nonsensical phrases. The great poets, too, lay claim to the cuckoo’s privilege of laying their egg in a strange nest. But the bird which issues from the egg is so much larger, handsomer and stronger than the original denizens, that the latter are mercilessly driven from their home and the former remains the sole possessor. When the great poet puts his new wine into old bottles, he doubtless shows a little indolence, a little poverty of invention and a not very high-minded reckoning on the reader’s pre-existing emotions. But he cannot be held too rigorously accountable for this small amount of stinginess, because, after all, he gives us so much that is his own. Imagine Faust deprived of all the portions drawn from old popular books; there would still remain nearly everything; there would remain all of the man who thirsts for knowledge and seeks for it; all the struggle between his baser instincts craving for satisfaction, and the higher morality rejoicing in renunciation; in brief, just that which makes the work one of the loftiest poems of humanity. If, on the other hand, Wagner’s old ancestral marionettes are stripped of their armour and brocades, there remains nothing, or, at best, only air and a musty smell. Assimilating minds have hundreds of times felt tempted to modernize Faust. The undertaking is so sure of success that it is superfluous; Faust in dress-coat would be no other than the unaltered embodiment of Goethe’s own Faust. But imagine Lohengrin, Siegmund, Tristan, Parsifal, as contemporaries! They would not even serve for burlesque, in spite of the Tannhäuser lampoon by the old Viennese poet Nestroy.
Wagner swaggered about the art-work of the future, and his partisans hailed him as the artist of the future. He the artist of the future! He is a bleating echo of the far-away past. His path leads back to deserts long since abandoned by all life. Wagner is the last mushroom on the dunghill of romanticism. This ‘modern’ is the degraded heir of a Tieck, of a La Motte-Fouqué—nay more, sad to say, of a Johann Friedrich Kind. The home of his intellect is the Dresden evening paper. He derives his subsistence from the legacy of mediæval poems, and dies of starvation when the remittance from the thirteenth century fails to arrive.
The subject alone of the Wagnerian poems can raise a claim to serious consideration. As for their form, it is beneath criticism. The absurdity of his style, his shallowness, the awkwardness of his versification, his complete inability to clothe his feelings and thoughts in anything like adequate language—these have been so often pointed out and exposed in detail that I may spare myself the trouble of dwelling on these points. But one faculty among the essential constituents of dramatic endowment cannot be denied him—that of picturesque imagination. It is developed in him to the point of genius. Wagner as a dramatist is really a historical painter of the highest rank. Nietzsche (in his skit, Der Fall Wagner[197]) perhaps means the same when, without stopping at this important assertion, he calls Wagner, not only ‘magnetizer’ and ‘collector of gew-gaws,’ but also a ‘fresco-painter.’ This he is in a degree never yet attained by any other dramatic author in the whole world of literature. Every action embodies itself for him in a series of most imposing pictures, which, when they are composed as Wagner has seen them with his inner eye, must overwhelm and enrapture the beholder. The reception of the guests in the hall of the Wartburg; the arrival and departure of Lohengrin in the boat drawn by the swan; the gambols of the Rhine maidens in the river; the defiling of the gods over the rainbow-bridge towards the castle of Asgard; the bursting of the moonlight into Hunding’s hut; the ride of the Walküre over the battlefield; Brunhilde in the circle of fire; the final scene in Götterdämmerung, where Brunhilde flings herself on to her horse and leaps into the midst of the funeral-pyre, while Hagen throws himself into the surging Rhine, and the heavens are aflame with the glow from the burning palace of the gods; the love-feast of the knights in the castle of the Grail; the obsequies of Titurel and the healing of Amfortas—these are pictures to which nothing hitherto in art approaches. It is on account of this gift for inventing incomparably imposing spectacles that Nietzsche has termed Wagner a ‘comedian.’ The word signifies nothing, and, in so far as it may contain a tinge of contempt, is unjust. Wagner is no comedian, but a born painter. If he had been a healthy genius, endowed with intellectual equilibrium, that is what he would undoubtedly have become. His inner vision would have forced the brush into his hand, and constrained him to realize it on canvas, by means of colour. Leonardo da Vinci had the same gift. It made him the greatest painter the world had yet known, and at the same time the unsurpassed deviser and organizer of fêtes, pageants, triumphs, and allegorical plays, which, perhaps more than his genius as a painter, won for him the admiration of his princely patrons Ludovico Moro, Isabella of Aragon, Cæsar Borgia, Charles VIII., Louis XII., Francis I. But Wagner, as is the case with all the degenerate, did not see clearly into his own nature. He did not understand his natural impulses. Perhaps also, with the feeling of his own deep organic feebleness, he dreaded the heavy labour of drawing and painting, and, conformably with the law of least effort, his instinct sought vent in the theatre, where his inner visions were embodied by others—the decorative painters, machinists, and actors—without requiring him to exert himself. His pictures have unquestionably a large share in the effect produced by his pieces. They are admired without an inquiry into how far their introduction is warranted by the rational course of the drama. However nonsensical as part of an action, they justify their appearance, from an artistic standpoint, by their intrinsic beauty, which makes of them independent æsthetical phenomena. Through their enormous aggrandizement by the media of the stage, their pictorial allurements are perceptible even to the eye of the most crass Philistine, whose sense were otherwise dead to them.
Of Wagner the musician, more important to all appearance than Wagner the author, dramatic poet and fresco-painter, I treat lastly, because this task will give us a clear proof of his degeneration, although this is very much more evident in his writings than in his music, where certain stigmata of degeneration are not so prominent, and where others appear as its unmistakable advantages. The incoherence in words, noticeable at once to an attentive person, does not exhibit itself in music unless it is excessively strongly marked; the absurdity, the contradictions, the twaddle, are hardly apparent in the language of tones, because it is not the function of music to express an exact meaning, and emotionalism is not in it an indication of disease, since emotion is music’s proper essence.
We know, moreover, that high musical talent is compatible with a very advanced state of degeneration—nay, even with pronounced delusion, illusion, and idiocy. Sollier[198] says: ‘We have to deal with certain aptitudes very often manifested with great intensity by idiots and imbeciles.... That for music especially is often met with.... Although this may seem disagreeable to musicians, it nevertheless proves that music is the least intellectual of all the arts.’ Lombroso[199] remarks: ‘It has been observed that the aptitude for music has been displayed almost involuntarily and unexpectedly among many sufferers from hypochondria and mania, and even among the really insane.’ He cites, with other cases, a mathematician attacked with melancholia, who improvised on the piano; a woman seized with megalomania, who ‘sang very beautiful airs, at the same time improvising two different themes on the piano’; a patient ‘who composed very beautiful new and melodious tunes,’ etc.; and he adds in explanation that those who are afflicted with megalomania and general paralysis surpass other mental invalids in musical talent, ‘and from the very same cause as that of their unusual aptitude for painting, viz., their violent mental excitation.’
Wagner the musician encounters his most powerful attacks from musicians themselves. He himself bears witness to it:[200] ‘Both my friends (Ferd. Hiller and Schumann) believed that they very soon discovered me to be a musician of no remarkable endowment. My success also has seemed to them to be due to the libretti written by myself.’ In other language, the same old story—musicians regarded him as a poet, and poets as a musician. It is of course convenient to explain a posteriori the decisive judgments of men who were at once prominent professionals and sincere friends of Wagner by saying (after he had attained success) that his tendency was too novel to be immediately appreciated, or even understood, by them. This solution, however, hardly applies to Schumann, as he was a friend to all innovations, and audacities, even differing from his own, rather attracted than shocked him. Rubinstein[201] still makes important reservations in regard to Wagner’s music; and among serious contemporary musical critics who have witnessed the birth, development and triumph of the Wagner cult, Hanslick remained a long time recalcitrant, until at last, though not very valiantly, he struck his colours in face of the overpowering fanaticism of hysterical Wagnerphiles. What Nietzsche (in his Der Fall Wagner) says against Wagner as a musician is unimportant, since the brochure of abjuration is quite as insanely delirious as the brochure of deification (Wagner in Bayreuth) written twelve years before.
In spite of the unfavourable judgments of many of his professional brethren, Wagner is incontestably an eminently gifted musician. This coolly-expressed recognition will certainly seem grotesque to Wagnerian fanatics, who place him above Beethoven. But a serious inquirer into truth need not trouble himself about the impressions provoked by Wagner among these persons. In the first period of his productivity Wagner much oftener achieved compositions of beauty than subsequently, and among these many may be termed pearls of musical literature, and will for a long time enjoy even the esteem of serious and rational people. But Wagner the musician had to confront a lifelong enemy, who forcibly prevented the full unfolding of his gifts, and this enemy was Wagner the musical theorist.
In his graphomaniacal muddle he concocted certain theories, which represent so many fits of æsthetic delirium. The most important of these are the dogmas of the leit-motif and of the unending melody. Everyone now undoubtedly knows what Wagner understood by the former. The expression has passed into all civilized languages. The leit-motif, in which the threshed-out discarded ‘programme music’ was bound logically to culminate, is a sequence of tones supposed to express a definite conception, and appears in the orchestration whenever the composer intends to recall to the auditor the corresponding conception. By the leit-motif Wagner transforms music into dry speech. The orchestration, leaping from leit-motif to leit-motif, no longer embodies general emotions, but claims to appeal to memory and to reason, and communicate sharply defined presentations. Wagner combines a few notes into a musical figure, as a rule not even distinct or original, and makes this arrangement with the auditor:—‘This figure signifies a combat, that a dragon, a third a sword,’ etc. If the auditor does not agree to the stipulation, the leit-motifs lose all significance, for they possess in themselves nothing which compels us to grasp the meaning arbitrarily lent them; and they cannot have anything of this kind in them, because the imitative powers of music are by its nature limited to purely acoustical phenomena, or at most to those optical phenomena ordinarily accompanied by acoustical phenomena. By imitating thunder, music can express the notion of a thunderstorm; by the imitation of the tones of a bugle, it can call up that of an army in such a way that the listener can hardly have a doubt as to the significance of the corresponding sequences of tones. On the other hand, it is absolutely denied to music, with the means at its disposal, to produce an unequivocal embodiment of the visible and tangible world, let alone that of abstract thought. Hence the leit-motifs are at best cold symbols, resembling written characters, which in themselves say nothing, and convey to the initiated and the learned alone the given import of a presentation.
Here again is found the phenomenon already repeatedly indicated by us as a mark of the mode of thought among the degenerate—the unconscious moon-struck somnambulous way in which they transgress the most firmly-established limits of the particular artistic domain, annul the differentiation of the arts arrived at by long historical evolution, and lead them back to the period of the lacustrines, nay, of the most primitive troglodytes. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites reduce the picture to a writing which is no longer to produce its effect by its pictorial qualities, but must express an abstract idea; and that the Symbolists make of the word, that conventional vehicle of a conception, a musical harmony, by whose aid they endeavour to awaken not an idea, but a phonetic effect. In precisely the same way Wagner wishes to divest music of its proper essence, and to transform it from a vehicle of emotion into a vehicle of rational thought. The disguise produced by this interchange of costumes is in this way complete. Painters proclaim themselves writers; poets behave like the composers of symphonies; the musician plays the poet. Pre-Raphaelites wishing to record a religious apothegm do not make use of writing, which leaves nothing to be desired in the way of convenience, and by which they would be distinctly understood, but plunge into the labour of a highly-detailed painting, costing them much time, and which, in spite of its wealth of figures, is far from speaking so clearly to the intelligence as a single line of rational writing. Symbolists desirous of awakening a musical emotion do not compose a melody, but join meaningless, though ostensibly musical words, capable, perhaps, of provoking amusement or vexation, but not the intended emotion. When Wagner wishes to express the idea of ‘giant,’ ‘dwarf,’ ‘tarn-cap which makes the wearer invisible,’ he does not say in words universally understood ‘giant,’ ‘dwarf,’ ‘tarn-cap’ (which makes the wearer invisible), but replaces these excellent words by a series of notes, the sense of which no one will divine without a key. Is anything more needed to expose the complete insanity of this confusion of all the means of expression, this ignorance of what is possible to each art?
It is Wagner’s ambition to imitate those facetious students who teach their dog to say ‘papa.’ He wants to perform the trick of making music say the names ‘Schulze’ and ‘Müller’ (=Smith and Jones). The score should, when necessary, supply the place of the directory. Language does not suffice him. He creates for himself a volapük, and demands that his hearers should learn it. No admission without hard work! Those who have not assimilated the vocabulary of the Wagnerian volapük cannot understand his operas. It is useless to go to the trouble of a journey to Bayreuth if one cannot talk fluently in leit-motifs. And how pitiable after all is the result of this delirious effort! H. von Wolzogen, the writer of the Thematische Leitfaden (Thematic Guide) to the Niebelungen Tetralogy, finds in all these four prodigious works only ninety leit-motifs. A language of ninety words, however inflated they may be, such as ‘motif of the weary Siegmund,’ ‘motif of the mania for vengeance,’ ‘motif of bondage,’ etc.! with such a vocabulary it would be impossible even to exchange ideas about the weather with a native of Tierra del Fuego. A page of Sanders’ lexicon contains more means of expression than Wolzogen’s entire dictionary of the Wagnerian leit-motif language. The history of art knows no more astounding aberration than this leit-motif craze. To express ideas is not the function of music; language provides for that as completely as could be desired. When the word is accompanied by song or orchestra it is not to make it more definite, but to re-enforce it by the intervention of emotion. Music is a kind of sounding-board, in which the word has to awake something like an echo from the infinite. But such an echo of presentiment and mystery does not ring out from leit-motifs coldly pasted together, as if by the labour of a conscientious registrar.
With the ‘unending melody,’ the second of Wagner’s tenets, it is the same as with the leit-motif. It is a product of degenerate thought; it is musical mysticism. It is the form in which incapacity for attention shows itself in music. In painting, attention leads to composition; the absence of it to a uniformly photographic treatment of the whole field of vision as with the pre-Raphaelites. In poetry, attention results in clearness of ideas, consistency of statement, the suppression of the unimportant, and the giving emphasis to the essential; its absence leads to twaddle as with the graphomaniacs, and to a painful prolixity in consequence of the indiscriminate recording of all perceptions as with Tolstoi. Finally, in music attention expresses itself in completed forms, i.e., in well-defined melodies; its absence, on the contrary, by the dissolution of form, the obliteration of its boundary lines, and thus by unending melodies as with Wagner. This parallelism is not an arbitrary play of ideas, but an exact picture of the corresponding mental processes among the different groups of degenerate subjects, producing in the different arts different manifestations according to their specific means and aims.
Let us grasp what melody is. It is the regular grouping of notes in a highly expressive series of tones. Melody in music corresponds to what in language is a logically-constructed sentence, distinctly presenting an idea, and having a clearly-marked beginning and ending. The dreamy rambling of half-formed nebulous thoughts as little allows the mintage of sentences of this kind, as does the fleeting agitation of the vague bewildered emotion lead to the composition of a melody. The emotions, too, have their own grades of distinctness. They, too, can appear as chaotic, or as well-regulated states. In the one case they stand out in the consciousness which grasps their composition and their purpose as discriminable modes strongly illuminated by the attention; in the other case they are a disturbing enigma to consciousness, and perceived by it merely as a generic excitement, as a sort of subterranean trembling and rumbling of unknown origin and tendency. If the emotions are intelligible, they will be fain to manifest themselves in a form at once the most expressive and most easily grasped. If, on the contrary, they are a generic continuous state, without determined cause and discoverable aim, the music presenting them to the senses will be as blurred and as nebulously fluctuating in form as themselves. Melody may be said to be an effort of music to say something definite. It is clear that an emotion unconscious of its cause and its aims, and unilluminated by attention, will not raise its musical expression to the height of melody, precisely because it has nothing definite to say.
A completed melody is a late acquisition of music, obtained by it only after long evolution. In its historic, and still more in its prehistoric, beginnings, the art of music knew it not. Music springs originally from song, and the rhythmic noise (i.e., noise repeated in equal or regular intervals of time) of accompanying stamping, knocking, or clapping of the hands; and song is nothing but speech grown louder and moving in wider intervals through emotional excitement. I should like to cite only one passage from the almost unlimited literature on this hackneyed subject. Herbert Spencer, in his well-known treatise on The Origin and Function of Music,[202] says: ‘All music is originally vocal.... The dance-chants of savage tribes are very monotonous, and in virtue of their monotony are much more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs of civilized races.... The early poems of the Greeks, which, be it remembered, were sacred legends embodied in that rhythmical, metaphorical language which strong feeling excites, were not recited, but chanted; the tones and the cadences were made musical by the same influences which made the speech poetical.... This chanting is believed to have been not what we call singing, but nearly allied to our recitative; far simpler, indeed, if we may judge from the fact that the early Greek lyre, which had but four strings, was played in unison with the voice, which was therefore confined to four notes.... That recitative—beyond which, by the way, the Chinese and Hindoos seem never to have advanced—grew naturally out of the modulations and cadences of strong feeling, we have, indeed, still current evidence. There are even now to be met with occasions on which strong feeling vents itself in this form. Whoever has been present when a meeting of Quakers was addressed by one of their preachers (whose practice it is to speak only under the influence of religious emotion) must have been struck by the quite unusual tones, like those of a subdued chant, in which the address was made.’
Recitative, which is nothing but speech intensified, and allows no recognition of completed forms of melody, is therefore the most ancient form of music; it is the degree of development reached by the art of music among savages, the ancient Greeks, and contemporary races in Eastern Asia. Wagner’s ‘unending melody’ is nothing but recitative, richly harmonized and animated, but, nevertheless, recitative. The name bestowed by him on his pretended invention must not mislead us. In the mouth of the degenerate a word has never the meaning ascribed to it by universal language. Wagner calmly applies the term ‘melody’—with a distinguishing adjective—to a form which is actually the negation and suppression of melody. He designates unending melody as an advance in music, while it is really a return to its primeval starting-point. Here there recurs in Wagner what we have so often laid stress upon in the preceding chapters, viz., that by a strange optical illusion the degenerate regard their atavism, their morbid reversion to the most remote and lowest grades of evolution, as an ascent into the future.
Wagner was led to his theory of unending melody by his limited capacity for the invention of finite, that is of real, melodies. His weakness in melodic creation has struck all impartial musicians. In youth his power in this direction was more abundant, and he succeeded in creating some superb melodies (in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Fliegende Höllander). With increasing age this power became more and more impoverished, and in proportion as the torrent of melodic invention dried up in him, he accentuated his theory of unending melody with ever more obstinacy and asperity. Always there reappears the well-known device of concocting a theory a posteriori as a plausible ground for, and palliation of, what is done through unconscious organic necessity. Wagner was incapable of distinguishing the individual personages of his operas by a purely musical characterization, and therefore he invented the leit-motif.[203] Experiencing a great difficulty, especially with advancing age, in creating true melodies, he set up the postulate of the unending melody.
All the other crotchets of his musical theory also find their explanation in this clear consciousness of definite incompetency. In the Art-work of the Future he overwhelms the theory of counterpoint and the contrapuntists—those dull pedants who abase the most vital of all arts to a desiccated, dead mathematics—with a scorn intended to be biting, but producing the effect of an echo of Schopenhauer’s invectives against the German philosophers. Why? Because, as an inattentive mystic, abandoned to amorphous dreams, he must feel intolerably oppressed by the severe discipline and fixed rules of the theory of composition, which gave a grammar to the musical babbling of primeval times, and made of it a worthy medium for the expression of the emotions of civilized men. He asserts that pure instrumental music ended with Beethoven; that progress after him is impossible; that ‘musical declamation’ is the only path along which the art of music can further develop itself. It may be that, after Beethoven, instrumental music will make no progress for decades, or for centuries. He was such a stupendous genius that it is, in fact, difficult to imagine how he can be surpassed, or even equalled. Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, produce a similar impression; and, in truth, these geniuses have not yet been surpassed. It is also conceivable that there are limits which it is impossible for any given art to pass at all, so that a very great genius says the last word for it, and after that no progress can be made in it. In such a case, however, the aspirant should humbly say: ‘I know that I cannot do better than the supreme master of my art; I am therefore contented to labour as one of the epigoni in the shadow of his greatness, content if my work expresses some peculiarities of my individuality.’ He ought not in presumptuous self-conceit to affirm: ‘There is no sense in emulating the eagle-flight of the mighty one; progress now lies alone in the flapping of my bats’-wings.’ But this is exactly what Wagner does. Not being himself endowed with any great gift for pure instrumental music, as his few symphonic works suffice to prove, he decrees in the tone of infallibility: ‘Instrumental music ended with Beethoven. It is an error to seek for anything on this well-browsed field. The future of music lies in the accompaniment of the word, and I am he who is to show you the way into that future.’
Here Wagner simply makes a virtue of his necessity, and of his weakness a title of glory. The symphony is the highest differentiation of musical art. In it music has wholly discarded its relationship with words, and attained its highest independence. Hence the symphony is the most musical of all that music can produce. To disown it is to disown that music is a special, differentiated art. To place above the symphony music as an accompaniment of words is to raise the handmaiden to a higher rank than her free-born mistress. It will never occur to a composer, whose inmost being is charged with musical feeling and thought, to seek words instead of musical themes for the expression of that in him which is yearning for embodiment. For if it does occur to him, it is a proof that in his inmost being he is a poet or an author, and not a musician. The choruses in the Ninth Symphony are not to be cited as proof of the inaccuracy of this assertion. In that case Beethoven was overmastered by an emotion so powerful and univocal, that the more general and equivocal character of purely musical expression could no longer suffice for him, and he was unconditionally compelled to call in the aid of words. In the deeply significant Biblical legend, even Balaam’s ass acquired the power of speech when he had something definite to say. The emotion which becomes clearly conscious of its content and aim ceases to be a mere emotion, and transforms itself into presentation, notion and judgment, but these express themselves, not in music, but in articulate language. When Wagner, as a fundamental principle, placed music as an accompaniment to words above that which is purely instrumental, and not as a medium for the expression of thought—for in regard to that there can be no difference of opinion—but as a musical form properly so called, he only proved that, in the inmost depths of his nature, and by virtue of his organic disposition, he was not a musician, but a confused mixture of a poet feeble in style, and a painter lazy of brush, with a Javanese ‘gamelang’ accompaniment buzzing in between. This is the case with most ‘higher degenerates,’ except that the separate fragments of their strangely intermingled hybrid talent are not so strong and great as Wagner’s.
The musical productions in which Wagner has been most successful—the Venusberg music; the E flat, G, B flat, ‘Wigala-Weia’ of the Rhinemaidens, repeated one hundred and thirty-six times; the Walküre ride; the fire incantation; the murmur of the forest; the Siegfried idyl; the Good-Friday spell; magnificent compositions, and highly praised with justice—show precisely the peculiarly unmusical character of his genius. All these pieces have one thing in common that they depict. They are not an inner emotion crying out from the soul in music, but the mental vision of the gifted eye of a painter, which Wagner, with gigantic power, but also with gigantic aberration, strives to fix in tones instead of lines and colours. He avails himself of natural sounds or noises, either imitating them directly, or awakening ideas of them through association, reproducing the ripple and roar of waves, the sough of the tree-top and the song of wild birds, which are in themselves acoustic; or, by an acoustic parallelism, the optical phenomena of the movements in the dance of voluptuous female forms, the tearing along of fiercely snorting steeds, the blazing and flickering of flames, etc. These creations are not the outgrowth of emotional excitement, but have been produced by external impressions conveyed through the senses; they are not the utterance of a feeling but a reflection—i.e., something essentially optical. I might compare Wagner’s music, at its very best, to the flight of flying-fishes. It is an astonishing and dazzling spectacle, and yet unnatural. It is a straying from a native to an alien element. Above all, it is something absolutely barren and incapable of profiting either normal fishes or normal birds.
Wagner has felt this himself very forcibly; he was quite clear on the point that no one could build further on the foundation of his tone-paintings; for with reference to the efforts of musicians eagerly desirous of founding a Wagner school, he complains[204] that ‘younger composers were most irrationally putting themselves to trouble in imitating him.’
A searching examination has thus shown us that this pretended musician of the future is an out-and-out musician of long-ago. All the characteristics of his talent point not forward, but far behind us. His leit-motif, abasing music to a conventional phonetic symbol, is atavism; his unending melody is atavism, leading back the fixed form to the vague recitative of savages; atavism, his subordination of highly differentiated instrumental music to music-drama, which mixes music and poetry, and allows neither of the two art-forms to attain to independence; even his peculiarity of almost never permitting more than one person on the stage to sing and of avoiding vocal polyphony is atavism. As a personality he will occupy an important place in music; as an initiator, or developer of his art, hardly any, or a very narrow one. For the only thing that musicians of healthy capacity can learn from him is to keep song and accompaniment in opera closely connected with the words, to declaim with sincerity and propriety, and to suggest pictorial ideas to the imagination by means of orchestral effects. But I dare not decide whether the latter is an enlargement or an upheaval of the natural boundaries of musical art, and in any event disciples of Wagner must use his rich musical palette with caution if they are not to be led astray.
Wagner’s mighty influence on his contemporaries is to be explained, neither by his capacities as author and musician, nor by any of his personal qualities, with the exception, perhaps, of that ‘stubborn perseverance in one and the same fundamental idea’ which Lombroso[205] cites as a characteristic of graphomaniacs, but by the peculiarities in the life of the present nervous temperament. His earthly destiny resembles that of those strange Oriental plants known as ‘Jericho roses’ (Anastatica asteriscus), which, dingy-brown in colour, leathery and dry, roll about, driven by every wind, until they reach a congenial soil, when they take root and blossom into full-blown flowers. To the end of his life Wagner’s existence was conflict and bitterness, and his boastings had no other echo than the laughter not only of rational beings, but, alas! of fools also. It was not until he had long passed his fiftieth year that he began to know the intoxication of universal fame; and in the last decade of his life he was installed among the demi-gods. It had come to this, that the world had, in the interval, become ripe for him—and for the madhouse. He had the good fortune to endure until the general degeneration and hysteria were sufficiently advanced to supply a rich and nutritious soil for his theories and his art.
The phenomenon repeatedly established and verified in these pages, that lunatics fly to each other as iron filings to the magnet, is quite strikingly observable in Wagner’s life. His first great patroness was the Princess Metternich, daughter of the well-known eccentric Count Sandor, and whose own eccentricities formed material for the chronicle of the Napoleonic Court. His most enthusiastic disciple and defender was Franz Liszt, whom I have elsewhere characterized (see my Ausgewählte Pariser Briefe; 2te Auflage; Leipzig, 1887, p. 172), and of whom I will therefore only briefly remark that he bore in his nature the greatest resemblance to Wagner. He was an author (his works, filling six thick volumes, have an honourable place in the literature of graphomaniacs), composer, erotomaniac and mystic, all in an incomparably lower degree than Wagner, whom he surpassed only in a prodigiously developed talent for pianoforte-playing. Wagner was an enthusiastic admirer of all graphomaniacs who came in his way—e.g., of that A. Gleizès expressly cited by Lombroso[206] as a lunatic, but whom Wagner praises in most exuberant terms;[207] and he even gathered round him a court of select graphomaniacs, among whom may be mentioned Nietzsche, whose insanity compelled his confinement in a madhouse; H. von Wolzogen, whose Poetische Laut-Symbolik might have been written by the most exquisite of French ‘Symbolists’ or ‘Instrumentists’;[208] Henri Porges, E. von Hagen, etc. But the most important relations of this kind were with the unhappy King Louis II. In him Wagner found the soul he needed. In him he met with a full comprehension of all his theories and his creations. It may be safely asserted that Louis of Bavaria created the Wagner Cult. Only when the King became his protector did Wagner and his efforts become of importance for the history of civilization; not, perhaps, because Louis II. offered Wagner the means of realizing the boldest and most sumptuous of his artistic dreams, but chiefly because he placed the prestige of his crown in the service of the Wagnerian movement. Let us for a moment consider how deeply monarchical is the disposition of the vast majority of the German people; how the knees of the beery Philistine tremble as he reverentially salutes even an empty court carriage; and how the hearts of well-bred maidens flutter with ineffable inspiration at the sight of a prince! And here was a real king, handsome as the day, young, surrounded by legends, whose mental infirmity was at that time regarded by all sentimentalists as sublime ‘idealism,’ displaying unbounded enthusiasm for an artist, and reviving on a far larger scale the relations between Charles Augustus and Goethe! From that moment it was natural that Wagner should become the idol of all loyal hearts. To share in the royal taste for the ‘ideal’ was a thing to be proud of. Wagner’s music became provisionally a royal Bavarian music, adorned with crown and escutcheon, till it should subsequently become an imperial German music. At the head of the Wagnerian movement there walks, as is fit, an insane king. Louis II. was able to bring Wagner into vogue with the entire German nation (excepting, of course, those Bavarians who were revolted by the King’s prodigalities); nevertheless, no amount of grovelling obsequiousness could by itself have produced a fanaticism for Wagner. That the mere Wagner-fashion might attain to this height another factor was necessary—the hysteria of the age.
Although not so widespread as in France and England, this hysteria is not wanting in Germany, where during the last quarter of a century it has continued to gain ground. Germany has been longer protected from it than the civilized nations of the West by the smaller development of large industry and by the absence of large cities properly so called. In the last generation, however, both of these gifts have been abundantly accorded her, and two great wars have done the rest to make the nervous system of the people susceptible to the pernicious influences of the city and the factory system.
The effect of war on the nerves of the participants has never been systematically investigated; and yet how highly important and necessary a work this would be! Science knows what disorders are produced in man by a single strong moral shock, e.g., a sudden mortal danger; it has recorded hundreds and thousands of cases in which persons saved from drowning, or present at a fire on shipboard, or in a railway accident, or who have been threatened with assassination, etc., have either lost their reason, or been attacked by grave and protracted, often incurable, nervous illnesses. In war hundreds of thousands are exposed to all these fearful impressions at the same time. For months cruel mutilation or sudden death menaces them at every step. They are frequently surrounded by the spectacle of devastation, conflagration, the most appalling wounds, and heaps of corpses frightful to behold. Moreover, the greatest demands are made on their strength; they are forced to march until they break down, and cannot count on having adequate nourishment or sufficient sleep. And shall there not appear among these hundreds of thousands the effect which is proved to result from a single one of the occurrences which take place by thousands during war? Let it not be said that in a campaign a soldier becomes callous to the horrors encompassing him. That merely signifies that they cease to excite the attention of his consciousness. They are nevertheless perceived by the senses and their cerebral centres, and therefore leave their traces in the nervous system. That the soldier does not at the moment notice the deep shock—nay, even shattering—he has experienced, equally proves nothing. ‘Traumatic hysteria,’ ‘railway spine,’ the nervous maladies consequent on a moral shock, are also frequently unobserved until months after the event occasioning them.
In my belief, it can scarcely be doubted that every great war is a cause of hysteria among multitudes, and that far the larger number of soldiers, even completely unknown to themselves, bring home from a campaign a somewhat deranged nervous system. Of course this is much less applicable to the conquerors than to the conquered, for the feeling of triumph is one of the most pleasurable the human brain can experience, and the force-producing (‘dynamogenous’) effect of this pleasurable feeling is well qualified to counteract the destructive influences of the impressions produced by war. But it is difficult for it to entirely annul these impressions, and the victors, like the vanquished, no doubt leave a large part of their nervous strength and moral health on the battlefield and in the bivouac.
The brutalization of the masses after every war has become a commonplace. The expression originates in the perception that after a campaign the tone of the people becomes fiercer and rougher, and that statistics show more acts of violence. The fact is correctly stated, but the interpretation is superficial. If the soldier on returning home becomes more short-tempered, and even has recourse to the knife, it is not because the war has made him rougher, but because it has made him more excitable. This increased excitability is, however, only one of the forms of the phenomenon of nervous debility.
Hence under the action of the two great wars in connection with the development of large industries and the growth of large towns, hysteria among the German people has, since 1870, increased in an extraordinary manner, and we have very nearly overtaken the unenviable start which the English and French had over us in this direction. Now, all hysteria, like every form of insanity, and for that matter like every disease, receives its special form from the personality of the invalid. The degree of culture, the character, propensities and habits of the deranged person give the derangement its peculiar colour. Among the English, always piously inclined, degeneration and hysteria were bound to appear both mystical and religious. Among the French, with their highly developed taste and widespread fondness for all artistic pursuits, it was natural that hysteria should take an artistic direction, and lead to the notorious extravagances in their painting, literature and music. We Germans are in general neither very pious nor very cultivated in matters of art. Our comprehension of the beautiful in art expresses itself, for the most part, in the idiotic ‘Reizend!’ (charming), and ‘Entzückend!’ (ravishing), squeaked in shrill head-tones and with upturned eyes by our well-bred daughters at the sight of a quaintly-shaved poodle, and before the Darmstadt Madonna by Holbein, indiscriminately; and in the grunts of satisfaction with which the plain citizen pumps in his beer at a concert of his singing club. Not that we are by nature devoid of a sense of the beautiful—I believe, on the contrary, that in our deepest being we have more of it than most other nations—but owing to unfavourable circumstances this sense has not been able to attain development. Since the Thirty Years’ War we have been too poor, we have had too hard a struggle for the necessities of life to have anything left for any sort of luxury; and our ruling classes, profoundly Latinized and slaves to French fashion, were so estranged from the masses, that for the last two centuries the latter could have no part in the culture, taste, or æsthetic satisfactions of the upper strata of society, separated from them by an impassable gulf. As, therefore, the large majority of the German people had no interest in art, and troubled themselves little about it, German hysteria could not assume an artistic, æsthetic form.
It assumed other forms, partly abominable, partly ignoble and partly laughable. German hysteria manifests itself in anti-Semitism, that most dangerous form of the persecution-mania, in which the person believing himself persecuted becomes a savage persecutor, capable of all crimes (the persécuté persécuteur of the French mental therapeutics).[209] Like hypochondriacs and ‘hémorroïdaires,’ the German hysterical subject is anxiously concerned about his precious health. His crazes hinge on the exhalations of his skin and the functions of his stomach. He becomes a fanatic for Jaeger vests, and for the groats which vegetarians grind for themselves. He gets vehemently affected over Kneipp’s douches and barefoot perambulations on wet grass. At the same time, he excites himself with morbid sentimentalism (the ‘Zoophilia’ of Magnan) concerning the sufferings of the frog, utilized in physiological experiments, and through all this anti-Semitic, Kneippish, Jaegerish, vegetarian, and anti-vivisection insanity, there rings out the fundamental note of a megalomaniacal, Teutonomaniacal Chauvinism, against which the noble Emperor Frederick vainly warned us. As a rule, all these derangements appear simultaneously, and in nine out of ten cases it is safe to take the proudly strutting wearer of Jaeger’s garments for a Chauvinist, the Kneipp visionary for a groats-dieted maniac, and the defender of the frog, thirsting for the professor’s blood, for an anti-Semitist.
Wagner’s hysteria assumed the collective form of German hysteria. With a slight modification of Terence’s Homo sum, he could say of himself, ‘I am a deranged being, and no kind of derangement is a stranger to me.’ He could as an anti-Semitist give points to Stoecker.[210] He has an inimitable mastery of Chauvinistic phraseology.[211] Was he not able to convince his hypnotized hysterical following that the heroes of his pieces were primeval German figures—these Frenchmen and Brabanters, these Icelanders and Norwegians, these women of Palestine—all the fabulous beings he had fetched from the poems of Provence and Northern France, and from the Northern saga, who (with the exception of Tannhäuser and the Meistersinger) have not a single drop of German blood or a single German fibre in their whole body? It is thus that, in public exhibitions, a quack hypnotist persuades his victims that they are eating peaches instead of raw potatoes. Wagner became an advocate for vegetarianism, and as the fruit needed for the nourishment of the people in accordance with this diet exists in abundance only in warm regions of the earth, he promptly advised ‘the direction of a rational emigration to lands resembling the South American peninsula, which, it has been affirmed, might, through its superabundant productivity, supply nourishment for the present population of the entire globe.’[212] He brandishes his knightly sword against the physiologists who experiment on animals.[213] He was not an enthusiast for wool, because personally he preferred silk; and this is the only hiatus in the otherwise complete picture. He did not live to witness the greatness of the reverend Pastor Kneipp, otherwise he probably would have found words of profound significance for the primitive German sanctity of wet feet, and the redeeming power vested in the knee-douche.
When, therefore, the enthusiastic friendship of King Louis had given Wagner the necessary prestige, and directed the universal attention of Germany to him; when the German people had learned to know him and his peculiarities, then all the mystics of the Jewish sacrifice of blood, of woollen shirts, of the vegetable menu, and sympathy cures, were compelled to raise their pæans in his honour, for he was the embodiment of all their obsessions. As for his music, they simply threw that into the bargain. The vast majority of Wagner fanatics understood nothing of it. The emotional excitement which the works of their idol made them experience did not proceed from the singers and the orchestra, but in part from the pictorial beauty of the scenic tableaux, and in a greater measure from the specific craze each brought with him to the theatre, and of which each worshipped Wagner as the spokesman and champion.
I do not, however, go so far as to assert that skat[214] patriotism, and the heroic idealism of natural cures, rice with fruit, ‘away with the Jews!’ and flannel, alone made the hearts of Wagner-bigots beat faster in blissful emotion when they were listening to his music. This music was certainly of a nature to fascinate the hysterical. Its powerful orchestral effects produced in them hypnotic states (at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris the hypnotic state is often induced by suddenly striking a gong), and the formlessness of the unending melody was exactly suited to the dreamy vagaries of their own thought. A distinct melody awakens and demands attention, and is hence opposed to the fugitive ideation of the weak brains of the degenerate. A flowing recitative, on the contrary, without beginning or end, makes no sort of demand on the mind—for most auditors trouble themselves either not at all, or for a very short time, about the hide-and-seek play of the leit-motif—one can allow one’s self to be swayed and carried along by it, and to emerge from it at pleasure, without any definite remembrance, but with a merely sensual feeling of having enjoyed a hot, nervously exciting tone-bath. The relation of true melody to the unending melody is the same as that of a genre or historical painting to the wayward arabesques of a Moorish mural decoration, repeated a thousand times, and representing nothing definite; and the Oriental knows how favourable the sight of his arabesques is to ‘Kef’—that dreamy state in which Reason is lulled to sleep, and crazy Imagination alone rules as mistress of the house.
Wagner’s music initiated hysterically-minded Germans into the mysteries of Turkish Kef. Nietzsche may make sport of this subject with his idiotic play on words ‘Sursum—bum-bum,’ and with his remarks about the German youth who seeks for ‘Ahnung’ (presentiments); but the fact is not to be denied that a part of Wagner’s devotees—those who brought a diseased mysticism with them to the theatre—found in him their satisfaction; for nothing is so well qualified to conjure up ‘presentiments,’ i.e., ambiguous, shadowy borderland presentations, as a music which is itself born of nebulous adumbrations of thought.
Hysterical women were won over to Wagner chiefly by the lascivious eroticism of his music, but also by his poetic representation of the relation of man to woman. Nothing enchants an ‘intense’ woman so much as demoniacal irresistibleness on the part of the woman, and trembling adoration of her supernatural power on the part of the man. In contrast to Frederick William I., who cried in anger, ‘You should not fear, but love me,’ women of this sort would rather shout to every man, ‘You are not to love me, but to lie, full of dread and terror, in the dust at my feet.’ ‘Frau’ Venus, Brunhilde, Isolde, and Kundry have won for Wagner much more admiration among women than have Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, and Gudrune.
After Wagner had once conquered Germany, and a fervent faith in him had been made the first article in the catechism of German patriotism, foreign countries could not long withstand his cult. The admiration of a great people has an extraordinary power of conviction. Even its aberrations it forces with irresistible suggestion on other nations. Wagner was one of the foremost conquerors in the German wars. Sadowa and Sedan were fought in his behalf. The world, nolens volens, had to take up its attitude with regard to a man whom Germany proclaimed its national composer. He began his triumphal march round the globe draped in the flag of Imperial Germany. Germany’s enemies were his enemies, and this forced even such Germans as withstood his influence to take his side against foreign lands. ‘I beat my breast: I, too, have fought for him against the French in speech and writing. I also have defended him against the pastrycooks who hissed his Lohengrin in Paris.’ How was one to get off this duty? Hamlet thrusts at the arras, well knowing that Polonius stands there; hence any son or brother of Polonius is bound resolutely to attack Hamlet. Wagner had the good fortune to play the part of the tapestry to the French Hamlets, giving them the pretext for thrusting at the Polonius of Germany. As a result, the attitude in the Wagner question of every German was rigidly prescribed for him.
To the zeal of Germans all manner of other things added their aid in favouring the success of Wagner abroad. A minority, composed in part of really independent men of honorably unprejudiced minds, but in part also of degenerate minds with a morbid passion for contradiction, took sides with him just because he was blindly and furiously maligned by the Chauvinist majority, who were a prey to national hatred. ‘It is contemptible,’ cried the minority, ‘to condemn an artist because he is a German. Art has no fatherland. Wagner’s music should not be judged with the memory of Alsace-Lorraine.’ These views are so reasonable and noble, that those who entertained them must have rejoiced in them and been proud of them. On listening to Wagner, they had the clear feeling, ‘We are better and cleverer than the Chauvinists,’ and this feeling necessarily placed them at the outset in such an agreeable and benevolent mood, that his music seemed much more beautiful than they would have found it if they had not been obliged first to stifle their vulgar and base instincts, and fortify those which were more elevated, free and refined. They erroneously ascribed to Wagner’s music the emotions produced by their self-satisfaction.
The fact that only in Bayreuth could this ‘music be heard, unfalsified and in its full strength, was also of great importance for the esteem in which it was held. If it had been played in every theatre, if, without trouble and formalities, one could have gone to a representation of Wagner as to one of Il Trovatore, Wagner would not have obtained his most enthusiastic public from foreign countries. To know the real Wagner it was necessary to journey to Bayreuth. This could be done only at long intervals and at specified times; seats and lodgings had to be obtained long in advance, and at great expenditure of trouble. It was a pilgrimage requiring much money and leisure; hence ‘hoi polloi’ were excluded from it. Thus, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a privilege of the rich and well-bred, and to have been to Bayreuth came to be a great social distinction among the snobs of both worlds. The journey was a thing to make a great parade of and be haughty over. The pilgrim no longer belonged to the vulgar crowd, but to the select few; he became a hadji! Oriental sages so well know the peculiar vanity of the hadjis, that one of their proverbs contains an express warning against the pious man who has been thrice to Mecca.
Hence the pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a mark of aristocracy, and an appreciation of Wagner’s music, in spite of his nationality, was regarded as evidence of intellectual preeminence. The prejudice in his favour was created, and provided one went to him in this mood, there was no reason why Wagner should not have the same influence on hysterical foreigners as on hysterical Germans. Parsifal was especially fitted completely to subjugate the French neo-Catholics and Anglo-American mystics who marched behind the banner of the Salvation Army. It was with this opera that Wagner chiefly triumphed among his non-German admirers. Listening to the music of Parsifal has become the religious act of all those who wish to receive the Communion in musical form.
These are the explanatory causes of Wagner’s conquest, first of Germany, and then of the world. The absence of judgment and independence among the multitude, who chant the antiphony in the Psalter; the imitation of musicians possessed of no originality, who witnessed his triumph, and, like genuine little boys wanting ‘to be taken,’ clung to his coat-tails—these did what was still needed to lay the world at his feet. As it is the most widely diffused, so is Wagnerism the most momentous aberration of the present time. The Bayreuth festival theatre, the Bayreuther Blätter, the Parisian Revue Wagnérienne, are lasting monuments by which posterity will be able to measure the whole breadth and depth of the degeneration and hysteria of the age.
[CHAPTER VI.]
PARODIES OF MYSTICISM.
The artistic and poetic forms of mysticism, which we have studied hitherto, might perhaps inspire doubts in superficial or insufficiently instructed minds as to their origin in degeneration, and present themselves as manifestations of a genuine and fertile talent. But beside them appear others, in which a state of mind reveals itself which suddenly arrests and perplexes any reader, however credulous, and however accessible to the suggestion of printed words, and to self-puffing charlatanism. Books and theories find publication, in which even the unlearned observe the deep intellectual degradation of their authors. One pretends to be able to initiate the reader into the black art, and enable him to practise magic himself; another gives a poetical form to definitely insane ideas, such as have been classified by mental therapeutics; a third writes books as if prompted by thoughts and feelings worthy of little children or idiots. A great part of the works I have in view would justify, without further consideration, the placing of their authors under constraint. As, however, in spite of their manifest craziness, well-known critics are bent upon discovering in them ‘the future,’ ‘fresh nerve-stimulations,’ and beauties of a mysterious kind, and to puff them by their chatter to gaping simpletons as revelations of genius, it is not superfluous to devote some brief consideration to them.
A not very large amount of mysticism leads to belief; a larger amount leads necessarily to superstition, and the more confused, the more deranged, the mind is, so much the crazier will be the kind of superstition. In England and America this most frequently takes the form of spiritualism and the founding of sects. The hysterical and deranged receive spiritual inspirations, and begin to preach and prophesy, or they conjure up spirits and commune with the dead. In English fiction ghost-stories have begun to occupy a large place, and in English newspapers to act glibly as stopgaps, as was done formerly in the Continental press by the sea-serpent and the Flying Dutchman. A society has been formed which has for its object the collecting of ghost-stories, and testing their authenticity; and even literary men of renown have been seized with the vertigo of the supernatural, and condescend to serve as vouchers for the most absurd aberrations.
In Germany, too, spiritualism has found an entrance, although, on the whole, it has not gained much ground. In the large towns there may be some small spiritualist bodies. The English expression trance has become so familiar to some deranged persons that they have adopted it in German as trans, imagining apparently, with the popular etymology, that it means ‘beyond’ instead of ‘ecstasy,’ or, in other words, the state in which, according to the spiritualist hypothesis, the medium ought to find himself who enters into communication with the world of spirits. Nevertheless, spiritualism has as yet exerted little influence on our literature. Excluding the later romanticists who have fallen into childishness, notably the authors of tragedies based on the idea of ‘fatality’ (Schicksalstragödien), few writers have dared to introduce the supernatural into their creations otherwise than allegorically. At most in Kleist and Kerner it attains a certain importance, and healthy readers do not consider that as a merit in the dramas of the unfortunate author of the Hermannsschlacht, and in the Seer of Prevorst of the Swabian poet. On the other hand, it must certainly be noted that it is the ghost element precisely which has brought to these two writers, in recent times, a renewal of youth and popularity among degenerate and hysterical Germans. Maximilian Perty, who was evidently born too soon, met with but rare and even rather derisive notice from the less soft-headed generation which preceded ours, for his bulky books on apparitions. And, among contemporaries, none but Freiherr Karl du Prel has chosen the spirit world as the special subject of his theoretic writings and novels. After all, our plays, our tales, are very little haunted, scarcely enough to make a schoolgirl shiver; and even among the eminent foreign authors best known in Germany, such, for example, as Tourgenieff, it is not the world of apparitions which attracts German readers.
The few ghost-seers whom we have at present in Germany endeavour naturally to give their mental derangement a scientific colouring, and appeal to individual professors of mathematics and natural science who happen entirely to agree with them, or are supposed to be partially inclined to do so. However, their one sheet-anchor is Zöllner, who is simply a sad proof of the fact that a professorship is no protection from madness; and they can besides, at any rate, point to opportune remarks of Helmholtz and other mathematicians on n dimensions, which they, either intentionally or from mystical weakness of mind, have misunderstood. In an analytical problem the mathematician, instead of one, two, or three dimensions, may place n dimensions without altering thereby the law of the problem and its legitimately resulting corollaries, but it does not occur to him to imagine, under the geometrical expression, ‘nth dimension,’ something given in space, and capable of being apprehended by the senses. When Zöllner gives the well-known example of the inversion of the india-rubber ring which, because only possible in the third dimension, necessarily appeared quite inconceivable and supernatural to a bi-dimensional being, he believes that he facilitates the comprehension of the formation of a knot in a closed ring as an operation practicable in the fourth dimension. In doing this he simply offers one more example of the known tendency of the mystic to delude himself, as he does others, with words which seem to signify something, and which a simpleton is convinced oftener than not that he understands, but which in reality express no idea, and are, therefore, empty sound, void of import.
France is about to become the promised land of believers in ghosts. Voltaire’s countrymen have already got the start of the pious Anglo-Saxons in dealings with the supernatural. I am not now thinking of the lower ranks of the people, among whom the book of dreams (La Clé des Songes) has never ceased to constitute the family library, together with the Calendar, and, perhaps, the ‘Paroissien’ (missal); nor of the fine ladies who at all times have ensured excellent incomes to clairvoyantes and fortune-tellers; but only of the male representatives of the educated classes. Dozens of spiritualist circles count their numbers by thousands. In numerous drawing-rooms of the best (even in the opinion of the ‘most cultured’!) society, the dead are called up. A monthly publication, L’Initiation, announces, in weighty tones, and with a prodigality of philosophical and scientific technicalities, the esoteric doctrine of the marvels of the unearthly. A bi-monthly publication, Annales des Sciences Psychiques, terms itself a ‘collection of observations and researches.’ Next to these two most important periodicals, a whole series of others exist, similar in tendency, and all having a wide circulation. Strictly technical works on hypnotism and suggestion run through edition after edition, and it has become a profitable speculation for doctors without practice, who do not attach much importance to the opinions of their colleagues, to compile so-called manuals and text-books on these subjects, which scientifically are completely worthless, but which are bought up by the public like hot rolls. Novels have, with rare exceptions, no longer any sale in France, but works on obscure phenomena of nerve function go off splendidly, so that sagacious publishers give their discouraged authors this advice: ‘Leave novels for a time, and write on magnetism.’
Some of the books on magic which have appeared of late years in France connect their subject directly with the phenomena of hypnotism and suggestion; for example, A. De Rochas’ Les États profonds de l’Hypnose, and C. A. de Bodisco’s Traits de Lumière, or ‘physical researches dedicated to unbelievers and egoists.’ This has brought many observers to the idea that the works and discoveries of the Charcot school in general have given the impulse to the whole of this movement. Hypnotism, say the representatives of this opinion, has brought such remarkable facts to light that the accuracy of certain traditions, popular beliefs and old records can no longer be doubted, though hitherto they have been generally considered inventions of superstition; possession, witch-spells, second-sight, healing by imposition of hands, prophecy, mental communication at the remotest distance without the intervention of words, have received a new interpretation and have been recognised as possible. What, then, more natural than that minds weak in balance, and of insufficient scientific training, should become accessible to the marvellous (against which they had shielded themselves, as long as they considered it to be all old nurses’ fables), when they saw it appear in the garb of science, and found themselves in the best society by believing in it?
Plausible as this opinion is, it is not the less false. It puts the cart before the horse. It confounds cause with effect. No completely sound mind has been led by the experiences of the new hypnotic science into a belief in the marvellous. In former times no attention was paid to obscure phenomena, or they were passed by with eyes intentionally closed, because they could not be fitted in to the prevailing system, and were consequently held to be chimæras or frauds. For the last twelve years official science has taken cognizance of them, and Faculties and Academies are engaged upon them. But no one thinks of them for a moment as supernatural, or supposes the working of unearthly forces behind them. They class them with all other natural phenomena which are accessible to the observation of the senses, and are determined by the ordinary laws of nature. Our knowledge has simply enlarged its frame, and admitted an order of facts which in former times had remained beyond its pale. Many processes of hypnosis are more or less satisfactorily explained; others as yet not at all. But an earnest and healthy mind attaches no great importance to this, for he knows that the pretended explanation of phenomena does not go very far, and that we have mostly to be satisfied to determine them with certainty, and to know their immediate conditions. I do not say that the new science has exhausted its subject and has reached its limits. But whatever it may bring to light of the unknown and the unexpected, it is not a matter of doubt to the healthy mind that it will be accounted for by natural means, and that the simple, ultimate laws of physics, chemistry and biology cannot be shaken by these discoveries.
If, therefore, so many people now interpret the phenomena of hypnosis as supernatural, and indulge the hope that the conjuration of the spirits of the dead, aerial voyages on Faust’s magic cloak, omniscience, etc., will soon be arts as common as reading and writing, it is not the discoveries of science which have brought them to this delusion, although the existing delusion is happy to be able to pass itself off for science. Far from concealing itself, as formerly, it exhibits itself proudly in the streets on the arms of professors and academicians. Paulhan understands the matter very well: ‘It is not the love of positive facts,’ he says,[215] ‘which has carried minds away; there has been a certain kind of return for the love of the marvellous in desires formerly satisfied, and which, now repressed, slumbered unacknowledged in a latent condition. Magic, sorcery, astrology, divination, all these ancient beliefs correspond to a need of human nature; that of being able easily to act upon the external world and the social world; that of possessing, by means relatively easy, the knowledge requisite to make this action possible and fruitful.’ The stormy outburst of superstition has by no means been let loose through hypnological researches; it merely launches itself into the channels they have dug. We have here already repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that unbalanced minds always adapt their crazes to the prevailing views, and usurp by predilection the most recent discoveries of science to explain them. The physicists were still far from occupying themselves with magnetism and electricity, when the persons attacked by persecution-mania were already referring their own unpleasant sensations and hallucinations to the electric currents or sparks which their persecutors were supposed to cast on them through walls, ceilings and floors; and in our days the degenerate were equally the first to appropriate to themselves the results of hypnological researches, and to employ them as ‘scientific’ proofs of the reality of spirits, angels and devils. But the degenerate started with the belief in miracles; it is one of their peculiar characteristics,[216] and it was not first called forth by the observations of Parisian and Nancy hypnologists.
If another proof were needed in support of this affirmation, it could be found in the fact that the greater number of ‘occultists,’ as they call themselves, in their treatises on occult arts and magic sciences, scorn to fall back on the results of hypnological experiments, and, without any pretext of ‘modernity,’ without any concession to honest investigation of nature, have direct recourse to the most ancient traditions. Papus (the pseudonym of a physician, Dr. Encausse) writes a Traité méthodique de Science occulte, an enormous large-octavo volume of 1,050 pages, with 400 illustrations, which introduces the reader to the cabala, magic, necromancy and cheiromancy, astrology, alchemy, etc., and to which an old, not undeserving savant, Adolf Franck, of the Institute of France, was imprudent enough to write a long eulogistic preface, presumably without having even opened the book himself. Stanislaus de Guaita, revered with awe by the adepts as past master in the Black Art, and arch-magician, gives two treatises, Au Seuil du Mystère and Le Serpent de la Genèse, so darkly profound that, in comparison, Nicolas Flamel, the great alchemist, whom no mortal has ever comprehended, seems clear and transparent as crystal. Ernest Bose confines himself to the theory of the sorcery of the ancient Egyptians. His book, Isis dévoilée, ou l’Egyptologie sacrée, has for the sub-title: ‘Hieroglyphics, papyri, hermetic books, religion, myths, symbols, psychology, philosophy, morals, sacred art, occultism, mysteries, initiation, music.’ Nehor has likewise his speciality. If Bosc unveils Egyptian mysteries, Nehor reveals the secrets of Assyria and Babylonia. Les Mages et le Secret magique is the name of the modest pamphlet in which he initiates us into the profoundest magic arts of the Chaldean Mobeds, or Knights Templars.
If I do not enter more fully into these books, which have found readers and admirers, it is because I am not quite certain that they are intended to be in earnest. Their authors read and translate so fluently Egyptian, Hebraic and Assyriac texts, which no professional Orientalist has yet deciphered; they quote so frequently and so copiously from books which are found in no library in the world; they give with such an imperturbable air exact instructions how to resuscitate the dead, how to preserve eternal youth, how to hold intercourse with the inhabitants of Sirius, how to divine beyond all the limits of time and space, that one cannot get rid of the impression that they wished, in cold blood, to make fun of the reader.
Only one of all these master-sorcerers is certainly to be taken in good faith, and as he is at the same time intellectually the most eminent among them, I will deal with him somewhat more in detail. This is M. Joséphin Péladan. He has even arrogated to himself the Assyrian royal title of ‘Sar,’ under which he is generally known. The public authorities alone do not give him his Sar title; but then they do not usually recognise any titles of nobility in France. He maintains he is the descendant of the old Magi, and the possessor of all the mental legacies of Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Orpheus. He is, moreover, the direct heir of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, both of which orders he has amalgamated and revived under a new form as the ‘Order of the Rosy Cross.’ He dresses himself archaically in a satin doublet of blue or black; he trims his extremely luxuriant blue-black hair and beard into the shape in use among the Assyrians; he affects a large upright hand, which might be taken for mediæval character, writes by preference with red or yellow ink, and in the corner of his letter-paper is delineated, as a distinctive mark of his dignity, the Assyrian king’s cap, with the three serpentine rolls opening in front. As a coat of arms he has the device of his order; on an escutcheon divided by sable and argent a golden chalice surmounted by a crimson rose with two outspread wings, and overlaid with a Latin cross in sable. The shield is surmounted by a coronet with three pentagrams as indents. M. Péladan has appointed a series of commanders and dignitaries of his order (‘grand-priors,’ ‘archons,’ ‘æsthetes’), which numbers, besides, ‘postulants’ and ‘grammarians’ (scholars). He possesses a special costume as grand-master and Sar (in which his life-sized portrait has been painted by Alexandre Séon), and a composer, who belongs to the order, has composed for him a special fanfare, which on solemn occasions is to be played by trumpets at his entrance. He makes use of extraordinary formulæ. His letters he calls ‘decrees,’ or commands (mandements). He addresses the persons to whom they are directed either as ‘magnifiques,’ or ‘peers,’ sometimes also ‘dearest adelphe,’ or ‘synnoède.’ He does not call them ‘sir,’ but ‘your lordship’ (seigneurie). The introduction is: ‘Health, light and victory in Jesus Christ, in the only God, and in Peter, the only king’; or ‘Ad Rosam per Crucem, ad Crucem per Rosam, in eâ, in eis gemmatus resurgam.’ This is at the same time the heraldic motto of the Order of the Rosy Cross. At the conclusion is usually, ‘Amen. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nominis tui gloriæ solæ.’ He writes the name of his order, with a cross inserted in the middle, thus: ‘Rose ✠ Croix.’ His novels he calls ‘éthopées,’ himself as their author ‘éthopoète,’ his dramas ‘wagneries,’ their table of contents ‘éumolpées.’
Every one of his books is ornamented with a large number of symbols. That which appears the most often is a vignette showing on a column a cowering form with the head of a woman breathing flames, and with a woman’s breast, lion’s paws, and the lower part of the body of a wasp or dragon-fly, terminating in an appendage similar to the tail of a fish. The work itself is always preceded by some prefaces, introductions and invocations, and is often followed by pages of the same nature. I take as an example the book entitled, Comment on devient Mage.[217] After the two title-pages adorned with a great number of symbolical images (winged Assyrian bulls, the mystic rose cross, etc.), comes a long dedication ‘to Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, grand-prior of the temple, archon of the Rose ✠ Cross.’ Then follows in Latin a ‘prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, well suited to warn the reader against the possible errors of this book’; after this, an élenctique (counter-demonstration) containing a sort of profession of Catholic faith; next, an ‘invocation to ancestors’ in the style of the Chaldean prayers; lastly, a long allocution ‘to the contemporary young man,’ after which the book properly begins.
At the head of every chapter appear nine mysterious formulæ. Here are two examples: ‘I. The Neophyte. Divine Name: Jud (the Hebrew letter so called). Sacrament: Baptism. Virtue: Faith. Gift: Fear of God. Beatitude: Poor in spirit. Work: Teaching. Angel: Michael. Arcanum: Unity. Planet: Samas. II. Society. Divine Name: Jah—El (in Hebrew characters, which Péladan evidently cannot read, for he turns it into El-lah). Sacrament: Consecration. Virtue: Hope. Gift: Pity. Beatitude: Gentleness. Work: Counsel. Angel: Gabriel. Arcanum: Duality. Planet: Sin.’
Of the further contents of this mighty volume I think no examples need be given. They correspond exactly with the headings of these chapters.
The novels or ‘éthopées’ of M. Péladan, of which nine have appeared hitherto, but of which the author has announced fourteen, are arranged in groups of seven, the mystical number. He has even established a Schéma de Concordance,[218] which claims to give a synopsis of their leading ideas. Let us hear how he explains his works:
‘First series of seven: I. The supreme vice. Moral and mental Diathesis of the Latin decline—Merodach, summit of conscious will, type of absolute entity; Alta, prototype of the monk in contact with the world; Courtenay, inadequate man-of-fate, bewitched by social facts; L. d’Este, extreme pride, the grand style in evil; Coryse, the true young maiden; La Nine, the wicked Androgyne, or, better, Gynander; Dominicaux, conscious reprobate, character of the irremediable, resulting from a specious æsthetic theory for every vice, which kills consciousness and, in consequence, conversion. Every novel has a Merodach, that is, an abstract Orphic principle, as opposed to an ideal enigma.
‘II. Inquisitive. Parisian clinical collective-phenomenism. Ethics: Nebo; the systematic, sentimental will. Erotics: Paula, passionate with Androgynous Prism. The great horror, the Beast with two backs, in Gynander (IX.), metamorphosing itself into unisexual corruption. Inquisitive, that is the everyday and the everybody of instinct. Gynander, the Goethesque midnight, and the exceptional,’ etc.
I have taken pains to reproduce faithfully all M. Péladan’s whimsical methods of expression. That his Concordance can give even the slightest idea of the contents of his novels, I do not for a moment believe. I will, therefore, say a few words about these in non-magian language.
They all move in the three following circles of ideas, variously penetrating and intersecting each other: The highest intellectual aim of man is to hear and thoroughly to appreciate Wagnerian music; the highest development of morality consists in renouncing sexuality and in transforming one’s self into a hybrid hermaphrodite (Androgyne and Gynander); the higher man can quit and retake his body at pleasure, soar into space as an ‘astral being,’ and subject to his will the entire supernatural power of the world of spirits, of the good as well as the bad.
Accordingly, in every romance a hero appears who unites in himself the distinctive marks of both sexes, and resists with horror the ordinary sexual instincts, who plays or enjoys the music of Wagner, enacts in his own life some scene from the Wagnerian drama, and conjures up spirits or has to repel their attacks.
If anyone wishes to trace the origin of all these delirious ideas, it will not be difficult to discover how they arose. One day while reading the Bible Péladan alighted on the name of the Babylonian king, Merodach Baladan. The similarity of sound between ‘Baladan’ and ‘Péladan’ gave an impulse to his imagination to establish relations between himself and the Biblical Babylonian king. Once he began to reflect on this, he found a resemblance, in the cast of his features, the colour of his hair, and the growth of his beard, to the heads of Assyrian kings on the alabaster casts from the palace at Nineveh. Thus he easily arrived at the idea that he was possibly a descendant of Baladan, or of other Assyrian kings, or, at least, that it would be a curious thing if he were. And he continued to work out this thought, until one day he resolutely took the title of Sar. If he were descended from the kings of Babylon, he could also be the heir of the wisdom of the Magi. So he began to proclaim the Magian esoteric doctrine. To these musings were added afterwards the impressions he received on a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, from Tristan, and especially from Parsifal. In fancy he wrought his own life into the legend of the Grail, looked upon himself as a knight of the Grail, and created his order of the ‘Rose Croix,’ which is entirely composed of reminiscences of Parsifal. His invention of the asexual hybrid being shows that his imagination is actively preoccupied with presentations of a sexual character, and unconsciously seeks to idealize the ‘contrary sexual feelings.’
The mental life of Péladan permits us to follow, in an extremely well-marked instance, the ways of mystic thought. He is wholly dominated by the association of ideas. A fortuitous assonance awakens in him a train of thought which urges him irresistibly to proclaim himself an Assyrian king and Magus, without his attention being in a condition to make him realize the fact that a man can be called Péladan without being, therefore, necessarily descended from a Biblical Baladan. The meaningless flow of words of the mediæval scholastics misleads him, because he is continually thinking by way of analogy, that is to say, because he follows exclusively the play of the association of ideas provoked by the most secondary and superficial resemblances. He receives every artistic suggestion with the greatest ease. If he hears Wagner’s operas, he believes himself to be a Wagnerian character; if he reads of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, he becomes the Grand-Master of the Temple, and of all other secret orders. He has the peculiar sexual emotionalism of the ‘higher degenerates,’ and this endows him with a peculiar fabulous shape, which, at once chaste and lascivious, embodies, in curiously demonstrative manner, the secret conflicts which take place in his consciousness between unhealthily intensified instincts, and the judgment which recognises their dangerous character.
Does Péladan believe in the reality of his delusions? In other words, does he take himself seriously? The answer to this question is not so simple as many perhaps think. The two beings which exist in every human mind are, in a nature such as Péladan’s, a prey to a strange conflict. His unconscious nature is quite transfused with the rôle of a Sar, a Magus, a Knight of the Holy Grail, Grand-Master of the Order, etc., which he has invented. The conscious factor in him knows that it is all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the unconscious life to do as it pleases. It is thus that little girls behave who play with dolls, caressing or punishing them, and treating them as if they were living beings, all the time well aware that in reality they have before them only an object in leather and porcelain.
Péladan’s judgment has no power over his unconscious impulses. It is not in his power to renounce the part of a Sar or a Magus, or no longer to pose as grand-master of an order. He cannot abstain from perpetually returning to his ‘Androgynous’ absurdity. All these aberrations, as well as the invention of neologisms and the predilection for symbols, the prolix titles, and the casket-series of prefaces, so characteristic of the ‘higher degenerates,’ proceed from the depths of his organic temperament, and evade the influence of his higher centres. On its conscious side Péladan’s cerebral activity is rich and beautiful. In his novels there are pages which rank among the most splendid productions of a contemporary pen. His moral ideal is high and noble. He pursues with ardent hatred all that is base and vulgar, every form of egoism, falsehood, and thirst for pleasure; and his characters are thoroughly aristocratic souls, whose thoughts are concerned only with the worthiest, if somewhat exclusively artistic, interests of humanity. It is deeply to be regretted that the overgrowth of morbidly mystic presentations should render his extraordinary gifts completely sterile.
Far below Péladan stands Maurice Rollinat, who ought, nevertheless, to be mentioned first, because he embodies in a very instructive manner a definite form of mystic degeneration, and next because all French, and many foreign, hysterical persons honour in him a great poet.
In his poems, which with characteristic self-knowledge he entitles Les Névroses[219] (Nervous Maladies) he betrays all the stigmata of degeneration, which by this time ought to be familiar enough to the reader for me to content myself with a brief notice of them.
He feels in himself criminal impulses (Le Fantôme du Crime):
‘Wicked thoughts come into my soul in every place, at all hours, in the height of my work.... I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones which vibrate in my heart where Satan knocks; and although I have a horror of vile saturnalias, of which the mere shadow suffices to anger me, I listen in spite of myself to the infernal tones.... The phantom of crime across my reason prowls around (in my skull).... Murder, rape, robbery, parricide, pass through my mind like fierce lightnings....’
The spectacle of death and corruption has a strong attraction for him. He delights in putrefaction and revels in disease.
‘My ghostly belovèd, snatched by death, played before me livid and purple.... Bony nakedness, chaste in her leanness! Hectic beauty as sad as it is ardent!... Near her a coffin ... greedily opened its oblong jaws, and seemed to call her....’ (L’Amante macabre).
‘Mademoiselle Squelette!
Je la surnommais ainsi:
Elle était si maigrelette!
‘Crachant une gouttelette
De sang très peu cramoisi...
Elle était si maigrelette!...
‘Sa phthisie étant complète;...
Sa figure verdelette...
Un soir, à l’espagnolette
Elle vint se pendre ici.
‘Horreur! une cordelette
Décapitait sans merci
Mademoiselle Squelette:
Elle était si maigrelette!’
Mademoiselle Squelette.
‘That I might rescue the angelically beautiful dead from the horrible kisses of the worm I had her embalmed in a strange box. It was on a winter’s night. From the ice-cold, stiff and livid body were taken out the poor defunct organs, and into the open belly, bloody and empty, were poured sweet-smelling salves....’ (La Morte embaumée).
‘Flesh, eyebrows, hair, my coffin and my winding-sheet, the grave has eaten them all; its work is done.... My skull has attested its shrinking, and I, a scaling, crumbling residue of death, have come to look back with regret upon the time when I was rotting, and the worm yet fasted not....’ (Le mauvais Mort).
This depravity of taste will not seldom be observed among the deranged. In Rollinat it merely inspires loathsome verses; among others it leads them to the eager devouring of human excretions, and, in its worst forms, to being enamoured of a corpse (Necrophilia).
Violent erotomaniacal excitement expresses itself in a series of poems (Les Luxures), which not only celebrate the most unbridled sensuality, but also all the aberrations of sexual psychopathy.
But the most conspicuous are the sensations of undefined horrors which continually beset him. Everything inspires him with anguish; all the sights of Nature appear to him to enclose some frightful mystery. He is always expecting, in trembling, some unknown terror.
‘I always shudder at the strange look of some boot and some shoe. Ay, you may shrug your shoulders mockingly, I do shudder; and suddenly, on thinking of the foot they cover, I ask myself: “Is it mechanical, or living?” ...’ (Le Maniaque).
‘My room is like my soul.... Heavy curtains, very ancient, cling round the deep bed; long fantastic insects dance and crawl on the ceiling. When my clock strikes the hour it makes an appalling noise; every swing of the pendulum vibrates, and is strangely prolonged.... Furniture, pictures, flowers, even the books, all smell of hell and poison; and the horror, which loves me, envelops this prison like a pall....’ (La Chambre).
‘The library made me think of very old forests; thirteen iron lamps, oblong and spectral, poured their sepulchral light day and night on the faded books full of shadow and secrets. I always shuddered when I entered. I felt myself in the midst of fogs and death-rattles, drawn on by the arms of thirteen pale armchairs, and scanned by the eyes of thirteen great portraits....’ (La Bibliothèque).
‘In the swamp full of malice, which clogs and penetrates his stockings, he hears himself faintly called by several voices making but one. He finds a corpse as sentinel, which rolls its dull eyeballs, and moves its corruption with an automatic spring. I show to his dismayed eyes fires in the deserted houses, and in the forsaken parks beds full of green rose.... And the old cross on the calvary hails him from afar, and curses him, crossing its stern arms as it stretches out and brandishes them....’ (La Peur).
I will not weary by multiplying examples, and will only quote the titles of a few more poems: The Living Grave; Troppmann’s Soliloquy (a well-known eight-fold murderer); The Crazy Hangman; The Monster; The Madman; The Headache (La Céphalalgie); The Disease; The Frenzied Woman; Dead Eyes; The Abyss; Tears; Anguish; The Slow Death-struggle; The Interment; The Coffin; The Death-knell; Corruption; The Song of the Guillotined, etc.
All these poems are the production of a craze, which will be frequently observed among degenerates. Even Dostojevski, who is known to have been mentally afflicted, suffered from it also. ‘As soon as it grew dusk,’ he relates of himself,[220] ‘I gradually fell into that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I have been ill, and which I shall call mystic fright. It is a crushing anxiety about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realized suddenly, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable, horrible, unshapen fact.’ Legrain[221] quotes a degenerate lunatic whose mania began ‘with feelings of fear and anguish at some fancy.’ Professor Kowalewski[222] indicates as degrees of mental derangement in degeneration—first, neurasthenia; secondly, impulses of ‘obsession’ and feelings of morbid anguish. Legrand du Saulle[223] and Morel[224] describe this state of groundless, undefined fear, and coin for it the not very happy word ‘Panophobia.’ Magnan calls it more correctly ‘Anxiomania’—frenzied anguish—and speaks of it as a very common stigma of degeneration. The anguish mania is an error of consciousness, which is filled with presentations of fear, and transfers their cause into the external world, while, as a matter of fact, they are stimulated by pathological processes within the organism. The invalid feels oppressed and uneasy, and imputes to the phenomena which surround him a threatening and sinister aspect, in order to explain to himself his dread, the origin of which escapes him, because it is rooted in the unconscious.
As in Rollinat we have learnt to know the poet of anxiomania, so shall we find in another author, whose name has become widely known in the last two years, in the Belgian, Maurice Maeterlinck, an example of an utterly childish idiotically-incoherent mysticism. He reveals the state of his mind most characteristically in his poems,[225] of which I will give a few examples. Here is the first of the collection—Serres chaudes:
‘O hot-house in the middle of the woods. And your doors ever closed! And all that is under your dome! And under my soul in your analogies!
‘The thoughts of a princess who is hungry; the tedium of a sailor in the desert; a brass-band under the windows of incurables.
‘Go into the warm moist corners! One might say, ‘tis a woman fainting on harvest-day. In the courtyard of the infirmary are postilions; in the distance an elk-hunter passes by, who now tends the sick.
‘Examine in the moonlight! (Oh, nothing there is in its place!) One might say, a madwoman before judges, a battle-ship in full sail on a canal, night-birds on lilies, a death-knell towards noon (down there under those bells), a halting-place for the sick in the meadows, a smell of ether on a sunny day.
‘My God! my God! when shall we have rain and snow and wind in the hot-house?’
These idiotic sequences of words are psychologically interesting, for they demonstrate with instructive significance the workings of a shattered brain. Consciousness no longer elaborates a leading or central idea. Representations emerge just as the wholly mechanical association of ideas arouses them. There is no attention seeking to bring order into the tumult of images as they come and go, to separate the unconnected, to suppress those that contradict each other, and to group those which are allied into a single logical series.
A few more examples of these fugitive thoughts exclusively under the rule of unbridled association. Here is one entitled Bell-glasses (Cloches de verre):
‘O bell-glasses! Strange plants for ever under shelter! While the wind stirs my senses without! A whole valley of the soul for ever still! And the enclosed lush warmth towards noon! And the pictures seen through the glass!
‘Never remove one of them! Several have been placed on old moonlight. Look through their foliage. There is perhaps a vagabond on a throne; one has the impression that corsairs are waiting on the pond, and that antediluvian beings are about to invade the towns.
‘Some have been placed on old snows. Some have been placed on ancient rains. (Pity the enclosed atmosphere!) I hear a festival solemnized on a famine Sunday; there is an ambulance in the middle of the house, and all the daughters of the king wander on a fast-day across the meadows.
‘Examine specially those of the horizon! They cover carefully very old thunderstorms. Oh, there must be somewhere an immense fleet on a marsh! And I believe that the swans have hatched ravens. (One can scarcely distinguish through the dampness.)
‘A maiden sprinkles the ferns with hot water; a troop of little girls watch the hermit in his cell; my sisters have fallen asleep on the floor of a poisonous grotto!
‘Wait for the moon and the winter, among these bells, scattered at last on the ice.’
Another called Soul (Ame):
‘My soul! O my soul truly too much sheltered! And these flocks of desires in a hot-house! Awaiting a storm in the meadows! Let us go to the most sickly: they have strange exhalations. In the midst of them I cross a battlefield with my mother. They are burying a brother-in-arms at noon, while the sentries take their repast.
‘Let us go also to the weakest; they have strange sweats: here is a sick bride, treachery on Sunday, and little children in prison. (And further across the mist.) Is it a dying woman at the door of a kitchen? Or a nun, who cleans vegetables at the foot of the bed of an incurable?
‘Let us go lastly to the saddest: (at the last because they have poisons). O my lips accept the kisses of one wounded!
‘All the ladies of the castle are dead of hunger this summer in the towers of my soul! Here is the dawn, which enters into the festival! I have a glimpse of sheep along the quays, and there is a sail at the windows of the hospital!
‘It is a long road from my heart to my soul! And all the sentries are dead at their posts!
‘One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my soul! They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning; and all the convent virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal one sunny fast-day. While the swans suffered under a poisonous bridge. The trees were lopped about the prison; medicines were brought one afternoon in June, and meals for the patients were spread over the whole horizon!
‘My soul! And the sadness of it all, my soul! and the sadness of it all!’
I have translated with the greatest exactness, and not omitted one word of the three ‘poems.’ Nothing would be easier than to compose others on these models, overtrumping even those of Maeterlinck—e.g., ‘O Flowers! And we groan so heavily under the very old taxes! An hour-glass, at which the dog barks in May; and the strange envelope of the negro who has not slept. A grandmother who would eat oranges and could not write! Sailors in a ballroom, but blue! blue! On the bridge this crocodile and the policeman with the swollen cheek beckons silently! O two soldiers in the cowhouse, and the razor is notched! But the chief prize they have not drawn. And on the lamp are ink-spots!’ etc. But why parody Maeterlinck? His style bears no parody, for it has already reached the extreme limits of idiocy. Nor is it quite worthy of a mentally sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an idiot.
Certain of his poems consist simply of assonances, linked together without regard to sense and meaning, e.g., one which is entitled Ennui:
‘The careless peacocks, the white peacocks have flown, the white peacocks have flown from the tedium of awaking; I see the white peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, the peacocks that went away during my sleep, the careless peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, reach lazily the pond where no sun is, I hear the white peacocks, the peacocks of ennui, waiting lazily for the times when no sun is.’
The French original reveals why these words were chosen; they contain almost all the nasal sounds, ‘en’ or ‘an’ or ‘aon’: ‘Les paons nonchalants, les paons blancs ont fui, les paons blancs ont fui l’ennui du réveil; je vois les paons blancs ... atteindre indolents l’étang sans soleil,’ etc. This is a case of that form of echolalia which is observed not seldom among the insane. One patient says, e.g., ‘Man kann dann ran Mann wann Clan Bann Schwan Hahn,’ and he continues to grind similar sounds till he is either tired, or takes a word spoken before him as a starting-point for a new series of rhymes.
If Maeterlinck’s poems are read with some attention, it is soon seen that the muddled pictures which follow each other pell-mell as in a dream, are borrowed from a very limited circle of ideas, which have either generally, or only for him, an emotional content. ‘Strange,’ ‘old,’ ‘distant,’ are the adjectives he constantly repeats; they have this in common that they indicate something indistinct, not definitely recognisable, away on the bounds of the distant horizon, corresponding, therefore, to the nebulous thought of mysticism. Another adjective which sets him dreaming is ‘slow’ (lent). It also influences the French Symbolists, and hence their fondness for it. They evidently associated it with the idea of the movements of the priest reading the Mass, and it awakens in them the emotions of the mysticism of faith. They betray this association of ideas by this, that they frequently use lent together with hiératique (sacerdotal). Maeterlinck, moreover, is constantly thinking of hospitals with their sick, and of everything connected with them (nuns, invalids’ diet, medicines, surgical operations, bandages, etc.), of canals with ships and swans, and of princesses. The hospitals and the canals, which are a feature in the Belgian landscape, may be connected with the first impressions of his childhood, and therefore produce emotions in him. The princesses, on the contrary, shut up in towers, suffering hunger, going astray, wading through swamps, etc., have evidently remained fixed in his imagination from the childish ballads of the pre-Raphaelites, one of which, by Swinburne, was given above as an example. Hospitals, canals, princesses, these are the pictures which always recur with the obstinacy of obsessions, and in the midst of the nebulous chaos of his jargon, alone show some sort of firm outline.
A few of his poems are written in the traditional poetical form; others, on the contrary, have neither measure nor rhyme, but consist of lines of prose, arbitrarily changing in length, not according to the style of Goethe’s free poems, or of Heine’s North Sea Songs, which ripple by with very strongly marked rhythmic movement, but deaf, jolting and limping, as the items of an inventory. These pieces are a servile imitation of the effusions of Walt Whitman, that crazy American to whom Maeterlinck was necessarily strongly attracted, according to the law I have repeatedly set forth—that all deranged minds flock together.
I should like here to interpolate a few remarks on Walt Whitman, who is likewise one of the deities to whom the degenerate and hysterical of both hemispheres have for some time been raising altars. Lombroso ranks him expressly among ‘mad geniuses.’[226] Mad Whitman was without doubt. But a genius? That would be difficult to prove. He was a vagabond, a reprobate rake, and his poems[227] contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew to him the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime. ‘This is the deepest theory of susceptibility,’ he says in one place, ‘without preference or exclusion; the negro with the woolly head, the bandit of the highroad, the invalid, the ignorant—none are denied.’ And in another place he explains he ‘loves the murderer and the thief, the pious and good, with equal love.’ An American driveller, W. D. O’Connor, has called him on this account ‘The good gray Poet.’ We know, however, that this ‘goodness,’ which is in reality moral obtuseness and morbid sentimentality, frequently accompanies degeneration, and appears even in the cruellest assassins, for example, in Ravachol.
He has megalomania, and says of himself:
‘From this hour I decree that my being be freed from all restraints and limits.
‘I go where I will, my own absolute and complete master.
‘I breathe deeply in space. The east and the west are mine.
‘Mine are the north and south. I am greater and better than I thought myself.
‘I did not know that so much boundless goodness was in me....
‘Whoever disowns me causes me no annoyance.
‘Whoever recognises me shall be blessed, and will bless me.’
He is mystically mad, and announces: ‘I have the feeling of all. I am all, and believe in all. I believe that materialism is true, and that spiritualism is also true; I reject nothing.’ And in another still more characteristic passage:
‘Santa Spirita [sic!], breather, life,
Beyond the light, lighter than light,
Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell,
Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume,
Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and Satan,
Ethereal, pervading all, for without me what were all? what were God?
Essence of forms, life of the real identities ...
Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the general soul.’
In his patriotic poems he is a sycophant of the corrupt American vote-buying, official-bribing, power-abusing, dollar-democracy, and a cringer to the most arrogant Yankee conceit. His war-poems—the much renowned Drum Taps—are chiefly remarkable for swaggering bombast and stilted patter.
His purely lyrical pieces, with their ecstatic ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ with their soft phrases about flowers, meadows, spring and sunshine, recall the most arid, sugary and effeminate passages of our old Gessner, now happily buried and forgotten.
As a man, Walt Whitman offers a surprising resemblance to Paul Verlaine, with whom he shared all the stigmata of degeneration, the vicissitudes of his career, and, curiously enough, even the rheumatic ankylosis. As a poet, he has thrown off the closed strophe as too difficult, measure and rhyme as too oppressive, and has given vent to his emotional fugitive ideation in hysterical exclamations, to which the definition of ‘prose gone mad’ is infinitely better suited than it is to the pedantic, honest hexameters of Klopstock. Unconsciously, he seemed to have used the parallelism of the Psalms, and Jeremiah’s eruptive style, as models of form. We had in the last century the Paramythien of Herder, and the insufferable ‘poetical prose’ of Gessner already mentioned. Our healthy taste soon led us to recognise the inartistic, retrogressive character of this lack of form, and that error in taste has found no imitator among us for a century. In Whitman, however, his hysterical admirers commend this réchauffé of a superannuated literary fashion as something to come; and admire, as an invention of genius, what is only an incapacity for methodical work. Nevertheless, it is interesting to point out that two persons so dissimilar as Richard Wagner and Walt Whitman have, in different spheres, under the pressure of the same motives, arrived at the same goal—the former at ‘infinite melody,’ which is no longer melody; the latter at verses which are no longer verses, both in consequence of their incapacity to submit their capriciously vacillating thoughts to the yoke of those rules which in ‘infinite’ melody, as in lyric verse, govern by measure and rhyme.
Maeterlinck, then, in his poems is a servile imitator of crazy Walt Whitman, and carries his absurdities still further. Besides his poems he has written things to which one cannot well refuse the name of plays, since they are cast in the form of dialogues. The best known of them is The Princess Maleine.[228]
The ‘dramatis personæ,’ as he, true to the romantic and mystical practice of the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, entitles the list of his characters, are as follows: Hjalmar, King of one part of Holland; Marcellus, King of another part of Holland; Prince Hjalmar, son of King Hjalmar; little Allan, son of Queen Anne; Angus, friend to Prince Hjalmar; Stephano and Vanox, officers of Marcellus; Anne, Queen of Jütland; Godeliva, wife of King Marcellus; Princess Maleine, daughter of Marcellus and Godeliva; Maleine’s nurse; Princess Uglyane, daughter of Queen Anne. With them come all the old well-known jointed dolls and puppets out of the dustiest corners of the old lumber-rooms of romance—a fool, three poor people, two old peasants, courtiers, pilgrims, a cripple, beggars, vagabonds, an old woman, seven (the mystic number!) nuns, etc.
The names which Maeterlinck gives to his figures should be noted. As a Fleming, he knows very well that Hjalmar is not Dutch, but Scandinavian; that Angus is Scotch. But he makes this confusion intentionally, in order to obliterate the distinct outlines with which he appears to surround his figures, when he calls them ‘Kings of Holland’; in order again to detach them from the firm ground on which he pretends to place them and to suppress their co-ordinates, which assign them a place in space and time. They may wear clothes, have names and take a human rank, but all the while they are only shadows and clouds.
King Hjalmar comes with Prince Hjalmar to the castle of Marcellus in order to ask for the hand of the Princess Maleine. The two young people see each other for the first time, and only for a few minutes, but they instantly fall in love with each other. At the banquet in honour of the King a quarrel breaks out, about which we learn no particulars; King Hjalmar is seriously offended, swears revenge, and leaves the castle in a rage. In the interlude Hjalmar wages war against Marcellus, kills him and his wife, Godeliva, and at once razes his castle and town to the ground. Princess Maleine and her nurse were on this occasion—how, why and by whom is not explained—immured in a vaulted room in a tower; then the nurse, after three days’ work with her finger-nails, loosens a stone in the wall, and the two women obtain their liberty.
Since Maleine loves Hjalmar and cannot forget him, they make their way towards his father’s castle. Things are going very badly in Hjalmar’s castle. There Queen Anne of Jütland resides, who has been driven away by her subjects, and with her grown-up daughter Uglyane and her little son Allan (here also the Dane is systematically given a Scottish name), has found hospitality with King Hjalmar. Queen Anne has turned the head of the old man. She has become his mistress, rules him completely, and makes him ill in body and soul. She wishes that his son should marry her daughter. Hjalmar is in despair about his father’s collapse. He detests his morganatic step-mother, and shudders at the thought of a marriage with Uglyane. He believes Maleine to have been slain with her parents in the war, but he cannot yet forget her.
Maleine has in the meantime been wandering with her nurse through a kind of enchanted forest, and through an incomprehensible village, where she has uncanny meetings with all sorts of people, beggars, vagabonds, peasants, old women, etc., interchanging odd talk, and reaches Hjalmar’s castle, where no one knows her. She is, however, in spite of this, at once appointed as lady-in-waiting to the Princess Uglyane.
One evening Prince Hjalmar decides to make advances to Uglyane, and with that object he gives her a nocturnal rendezvous in the park of the castle, not a secret, but, so to speak, an official, lovers’ tryst, to which he, with his father’s consent, and she, with her mother’s, is to go. Maleine hinders it by telling Uglyane, who is splendidly attiring and adorning herself, that Prince Hjalmar has gone into the forest and will not come. She then goes herself into the park, and makes herself known to Hjalmar, who arrives punctually. He leads her in great delight to his father, who receives her as his future daughter-in-law, and there is no further talk of his betrothal to Uglyane. Queen Anne determines to get rid of the intruder. She behaves at first in a friendly manner, assigns her a beautiful room in the castle, then in the night she forces the King, who for a long time resists her, to penetrate into Maleine’s room, where she puts a cord round the Princess’s neck and strangles her. Signs and wonders accompany the deed: a tempest forces open a window, a comet appears, a wing of the castle falls in ruins, a forest bursts into flames, swans fall wounded out of the air, etc., etc.
Next morning the body of the Princess Maleine is discovered. King Hjalmar, whom the night’s murder has robbed of the last remnant of reason, betrays the secret of the deed. Prince Hjalmar stabs Queen Anne, and then plunges the dagger into his own heart. Thereupon the piece closes thus:
Nurse. Come away, my poor lord.
King. Good God! good God! She is waiting now on the wharf of hell!
Nurse. Come away! come away!
King. Is there anybody here that fears the curses of the dead?
Angus. Ay, my lord, I do.
King. Well, you close their eyes, and let us be gone.
Nurse. Ay, ay. Come hence! come hence!
King. I will; I will. Oh, oh! how lonely I shall feel hereafter! I am steeped in misery up to my ears at seventy-seven years of age. But where are you?
Nurse! Here, here!
King. You will not feel angry with me? Let us go to breakfast. Will there be salad for breakfast? I should like a little salad.
Nurse. Yes, yes. You shall have some, my lord.
King. I do not know why; I feel somewhat melancholy to-day. Good God! good God! How unhappy the dead do look!
[Exit with Nurse.
Angus. Another night such as this, and all our heads will have turned white.
[Exeunt all save the Nuns, who begin singing the Miserere while conveying the corpses towards the bed. The church bells cease sounding. Nightingales are heard warbling without. A cock jumps on the window-sill, and crows.
When we begin to read this piece we are startled, and ask: ‘Why is all this so familiar to me? Of what does it remind me?’ After a few pages it all at once becomes clear: the whole thing is a kind of cento from Shakespeare! Every character, every scene, every speech in any way essential to the piece! King Hjalmar is put together out of King Lear and Macbeth; Lear in his madness and manner of expressing himself, Macbeth in his share in the murder of the Princess Maleine. Queen Anne is patched up out of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude; Prince Hjalmar is unmistakably Hamlet, with his obscure speeches, his profound allusions and his inner struggles between filial duty and morality; the nurse is from Romeo and Juliet; Angus is Horatio; Vanox and Stephano are Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, with an admixture of Marcellus and Bernardo, and all the subordinate characters, the fool, the doctor, the courtiers, etc., bear the physiognomy of Shakespeare’s characters.
The piece begins in the following manner:
The Gardens of the Castle.
Enter Stephano and Vanox.
Vanox. What o’clock is it?
Stephano. Judging from the moon, it should be midnight.
Vanox. I think ‘tis going to rain.
Let us compare this with the first scene in Hamlet:
A platform before the Castle.
Francisco ... Bernardo.
Francisco. You come most carefully upon your hour.
Bernardo. ‘Tis now struck twelve....
Francisco. ... ‘Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart, etc.
One could, if it were worth while, trace scene for scene, word for word, from some passage in Shakespeare. In the Princesse Maleine we find in succession the fearfully stormy night from Julius Cæsar (Act I., Scene 3); the entrance of King Lear into the palace of Albany (Act I., Scene 4 ... ‘Lear: Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get it ready,’ etc.); the night scene in Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth induces her husband to commit murder; the thrice-repeated ‘Oh! oh! oh!’ of Othello which Queen Anne here utters; Hamlet’s conversation with Horatio, etc. The death of the Princess Maleine has been inspired by memories both of Desdemona suffocated and of Cordelia hanged. All this is jumbled up in the craziest manner, and often distorted almost beyond recognition, or given the opposite meaning; but, with a little attention, one can always find one’s way.
Let us imagine a child, at the age when he is able to follow the conversation of grown-up people, attending a performance or a reading of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II., and who on his return to the nursery should relate in his own way to his little brothers and sisters what he had heard. We should in this way get a correct idea of the composition of Princesse Maleine. Maeterlinck has crammed himself with Shakespeare, and reproduces the pieces undigested, yet repulsively altered and with the beginnings of foul decomposition. This is an unappetizing picture, but it alone can serve to illustrate the mental process which goes on in the so-called ‘creations’ of the degenerate. They read greedily, receive a very strong impression in consequence of their emotionalism; this pursues them with the force of an ‘obsession,’ and they do not rest till they have reproduced, sadly travestied, what they have read. Thus their works resemble the coins of the barbarians, which are imitations of Roman and Greek models, while betraying that their artificers could not read or understand the letters and symbols inscribed on them.
Maeterlinck’s Princesse Maleine is a Shakespearian anthology for children or Tierra del Fuegians. The characters of the British poet have gone to make parts for the actors in a theatre of monkeys. They still remind us more or less of the attitudes and movements of the persons whom they ape, but they have not a human brain in their heads, and cannot say two connected and rational words. Here are a few examples of the manner in which Maeterlinck’s people converse:
King Marcellus in the First Act (Scene 2) endeavours to dissuade the Princess Maleine from loving Hjalmar.
Marcellus. Well, Maleine!
Maleine. My lord?
Marcellus. Do you not understand?
Maleine. What, my lord?
Marcellus. Will you promise me to forget Hjalmar?
Maleine. My lord!...
Marcellus. What say you? Do you still love Hjalmar?
Maleine. Ay, my lord.
Marcellus. Ay, my lord. Oh, devils and tempests! she coolly confesses it. She dares to tell me this without shame. She has seen Hjalmar once only, for one single afternoon, and now she is hotter than hell.
Godeliva. My lord!...
Marcellus. Be silent, you. “Ay, my lord!” and she is not yet fifteen! Ha! it makes one long to kill them then and there....
Godeliva. My lord....
Nurse. Isn’t she free to love, just like anyone else? Do you mean to put her under a glass case? Is this a reason to bully a poor child? She has done no harm....
Marcellus. Oh, she has done no harm!... Now, in the first place, hold your peace, you.... I am not addressing you; and it is doubtless at your prompting, you procuress....
Godeliva. My lord!...
Nurse. A procuress! I a procuress!
Marcellus. Will you let me speak? Begone! begone, both of you! Oh! I know well enough you have put your heads together, and that the season of scheming and plotting has set in; but wait awhile.... Now, Maleine, ... you should be reasonable. Will you promise to be reasonable?
Maleine. Ay, my lord.
Marcellus. There! come now. Therefore you will not think any more of this marriage?...
Maleine. Ay.
Marcellus. Ay? You mean you will forget Prince Hjalmar?
Maleine. No.
Marcellus. You do not yet give up Prince Hjalmar?
Maleine. No.
Marcellus. Now, supposing I compel you? Ay, I! and supposing I have you put under lock and key? and supposing I separate you for evermore from your Hjalmar with his puny, girlish face? What say you? (She weeps.) Ha! that’s it—is’t? Begone, and we shall see about that—begone!
Next, the scene in the second act, where Maleine and Hjalmar meet in the gloomy park of the castle:
Hjalmar. ... Come!
Maleine. Not yet.
Hjalmar. Uglyane! Uglyane!
[Kisses her. Here the waterfall, blown about by the wind, collapses and splashes them.
Maleine. Oh! what have you done?
Hjalmar. It is the fountain.
Maleine. Oh, oh!
Hjalmar. It’s the wind.
Maleine. I am afraid.
Hjalmar. Think not of that any longer. Let us get further away. Let us not think of that any more. Ah, ah, ah! I am wet all over.
Maleine. There is somebody weeping, close by us.
Hjalmar. Somebody weeping?
Maleine. I am afraid.
Hjalmar. But cannot you hear that it’s only the wind?
Maleine. What are all those eyes on the tree, though?
Hjalmar. Where? Ha! those are the owls. They have returned. I will put them to flight. (Throws earth at them.) Away! away!
Maleine. There is yonder one that will not go.
Hjalmar. Where is it?
Maleine. On the weeping willow.
Hjalmar. Away!
Maleine. He is not gone.
Hjalmar. Away, away!
[Throws earth at the owl.
Maleine. Oh! you have thrown earth on me.
Hjalmar. Thrown earth on you?
Maleine. Ay, it fell on me.
Hjalmar. Oh, my poor Uglyane!
Maleine. I am afraid.
Hjalmar. Afraid—at my side?
Maleine. There are flames amid the trees.
Hjalmar. That is nothing—mere lightning. It has been very sultry to-day.
Maleine. I am afraid. Oh! who can be digging so at the ground around us?
Hjalmar. That is nothing. ‘Tis but a mole—a poor little mole at work.
(The mole in Hamlet! To our old acquaintance greeting!)
Maleine. I am afraid.
After some more conversation in the same style:
Hjalmar. What are you thinking of?
Maleine. I feel sad.
Hjalmar. Sad? Now, what are your sad thoughts about, Uglyane?
Maleine. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.
Hjalmar. What do you say?
Maleine. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.[229]
Hjalmar. Do you know Princess Maleine?
Maleine. I am Princess Maleine.
Hjalmar. You are not Uglyane?
Maleine. I am Princess Maleine.
Hjalmar. What! you Princess Maleine? Dead! But Princess Maleine is dead!
Maleine. I am Princess Maleine.
Has anyone anywhere in the poetry of the two worlds ever seen such complete idiocy? These ‘Ahs’ and ‘Ohs,’ this want of comprehension of the simplest remarks, this repetition four or five times of the same imbecile expressions, gives the truest conceivable clinical picture of incurable cretinism. These parts are precisely those most extolled by Maeterlinck’s admirers. According to them, all has been chosen with a deep artistic intention. A healthy reader will scarcely swallow that. Maeterlinck’s puppets say nothing, because they have nothing to say. Their author has not been able to put a single thought into their hollow skulls, because he himself possesses none. The creatures moving on his stage are not thinking and speaking human beings, but tadpoles or slugs, considerably more stupid than trained fleas at a fair.
Moreover, Princesse Maleine is not altogether a Shakespearian dream. The ‘seven nuns,’ e.g., belong to Maeterlinck. They are an astounding invention. They are ever marching like demented geese through the piece, winding in and out, with their psalm-singing, through all the rooms and corridors of the King’s castle, through the court, through the park, through the forest, coming unexpectedly round a corner in the middle of a scene, trotting across the stage and off at the other side without anyone understanding whence they come, whither they go, or for what purpose they are brought on at all. They are a living ‘obsession,’ mixing itself irresistibly in all the incidents of the piece. Here also we find all the intellectual fads which we noticed in the Serres Chaudes. The Princess Maleine is herself the embodiment of the hungry, sick, strayed princesses, wandering over the meadows, who haunt these poems, and undoubtedly sprang from Swinburne’s ballad of The King’s Daughters. The canals also play their part (p. 18). ‘And the expression of her eyes! It seemed as though one were all of a sudden in a great stream [Fr. canal] of fresh water....’ (p. 110). ‘We have been to look at the windmills along the canal,’ etc. And sick people and illness are mentioned on almost every page (p. 110):
Anne. I was fever-stricken myself.
The King. Everyone is fever-stricken on arriving here.
Hjalmar. There is much fever in the village, etc.
Besides Princesse Maleine, Maeterlinck has written some other pieces. One, L’Intruse (The Intruder), deals with the idea that in a house where a sick person lies in extremis, Death intrudes towards midnight, that he walks audibly through the garden, makes at first a few trial strokes with his scythe on the grass before the castle, then knocks at the door, forces it open because they will not admit him, and carries off his victim. In a second, Les Aveugles (The Blind), we are shown how a number of blind men, the inmates of a blind asylum, were led by an old priest into a forest, how the priest died suddenly without a sound, how the blind men did not at first notice this, but becoming at length uneasy, groped about, succeeded in touching the corpse, already growing cold, assured themselves by questioning each other that their leader was dead, and then in terrible despair awaited death by hunger and cold. For this charming story takes place on a wild island in the far north; and between the wood and the asylum lies a river, crossed by only one bridge, which the blind cannot find without a guide. It never occurs either to Maeterlinck or to his inconsolable blind men as possible that in the asylum, where, as is expressly mentioned, there are attendant nuns, the long absence of the whole body of blind men would be noticed, and someone sent out to look for them. The reader will not expect me to point out in detail the craziness of the assumption in both these pieces, or that, after these examples, I should relate and analyze two other pieces of Maeterlinck’s, Les Sept Princesses (‘seven,’ of course!) and Pelléas et Mélisande.
The Intruder has been translated into several languages, and performed in many towns. The Viennese laughed at its imbecility. In Paris and London men shook their heads. In Copenhagen an audience of appreciators of the ‘poetry of the future’ was touched, enraptured and inspired. This demonstrates the hysteria of to-day quite as much as the piece itself.
The history of Maeterlinck’s celebrity is especially remarkable and instructive. This pitiable mental cripple vegetated for years wholly unnoticed in his corner in Ghent, without the Belgian Symbolists, who outbid even the French, according him the smallest attention; as to the public at large, no one had a suspicion of his existence. Then one fine day in 1890 his writings fell accidentally into the hands of the French novelist, Octave Mirbeau. He read them, and whether he desired to make fun of his contemporaries in grand style, or whether he obeyed some morbid ‘impulsion’ is not known; it is sufficient to say that he published in Le Figaro an article of an unheard-of extravagance, in which he represented Maeterlinck as the most brilliant, sublime, moving poet which the last three hundred years had produced, and assigned him a place near—nay, above Shakespeare. And then the world witnessed one of the most extraordinary and most convincing examples of the force of suggestion. The hundred thousand rich and cultivated readers to whom the Figaro addresses itself immediately took up the views which Mirbeau had imperiously suggested to them. They at once saw Maeterlinck with Mirbeau’s eyes. They found in him all the beauties which Mirbeau asserted that he perceived in him. Andersen’s fairy-tale of the invisible clothes of the emperor repeated itself line for line. They were not there, but the whole court saw them. Some imagined they really saw the absent state robes; the others did not see them, but rubbed their eyes so long that they at least doubted whether they saw them or not; others, again, could not impose upon themselves, but dared not contradict the rest. Thus Maeterlinck became at one stroke, by Mirbeau’s favour, a great poet, and a poet of the ‘future.’ Mirbeau had also given quotations which would have completely sufficed for a reader who was not hysterical, not given over irresistibly to suggestion, to recognise Maeterlinck for what he is, namely, a mentally debilitated plagiarist; but these very quotations wrung cries of admiration from the Figaro public, for Mirbeau had pointed them out as beauties of the highest rank, and one knows that a decided affirmation is sufficient to compel hypnotic subjects to eat raw potatoes as oranges, and to believe themselves to be dogs or other quadrupeds.
Everywhere apostles were quickly at hand to proclaim, interpret and extol the new master. The ‘mashers’ of the critic world, whose ambition is set on being the first to assume—nay, where it is possible, to foretell—the very latest fashions, the fashion of to-morrow, as much in the styles of literature, as in the colour and shape of neckties, vied with each other in deifying Maeterlinck. Ten editions of his Princesse Maleine have been sold out since Mirbeau’s suggestion, and, as I have said before, his Aveugles and Intruse have been performed in various places.
We now know the different forms under which the mysticism of degeneration manifests itself in contemporary literature. The magism of a Guaita and a Papus, the Androgyne of a Péladan, the anxiomania of a Rollinat, the idiotic drivelling of a Maeterlinck, may be regarded as its culminating aberrations. At least I cannot myself imagine that it would be possible for mysticism to go beyond, even by the thickness of a hair, these extreme points without even the hysterical, the devotees and the snobs of fashion, who are still in some degree capable of discernment, recognising in it a profound and complete intellectual darkness.
EGO-MANIA.