NEW SUGGESTIONS
"Le fol n'a Dieu."
Epilogue des Contes d'Eutrappei.
"What a painful evening!" thought Hubert, after returning to his home. "What nonsense I have had to think, what platitudes to hear, what stupid remarks to bray? And in what a language! Just so the practical part of my talk be not useless! I count on brutality blended with much weeping: Sixtine will be irritated or bored, and the Russian will disappear from our life. Yes, our life, I have rights upon this woman, those rights of mutual intelligence. We understand each other; with a little attention and verbal caresses, I can acquire a pleasant antenuptial position near her. She is not one of those who are dominated by a perpetual appetite of the flesh and I believe that her delicacy would regard as shameful the very idea of yielding to force. Ah! in short, I do not know her: the plan I have given Moscowitch is perhaps good. Yes, one can never know, but if he adopts it he will have an air of insincerity and she will perceive it."
He was less philosophical on the morrow, and, in a moment of ill-humor, gave himself this alternative which had for an instant occupied him the evening before: Either he would be completely disinterested in Sixtine, or he would become her lover within twenty-four hours. "I cannot play the rôle of a companion to Moscowitch, I cannot admit such a possibility in my life—he or I. What! will those dear arms I have clasped around my neck in dreams caress the Austrian beard of this dramatist? I do not even wish to give expression to my jealousy: in himself, Moscowitch is only another person. Thus, shall another person have those lips and eyes and hair? Vulgar plaints of a vulgar jealous person: to what details do I apply my imagination? How the obscene image possesses me! So one must come to this point, and that is why I love her—for that alone! Bravo! words are useful: with words one analyzes everything, one destroys and sullies everything. Since it is this, I no longer wish it. Valentine plays the beast prettily, and what more do I want! She is sly as a succuba and charming in her ways, and what more do I want! Her caresses have a profuse generosity: her heart is on her hand and on her lips, and what more do I want!"
He took a walk, despite the cold, through the bare and muddy alleys of the Luxembourg, among the shivering statues and silent trees.
"If desire," he thought once more, "permits me—even in thought—the freedom of choice, what is the good of loving, or do I really and truly love? I would perhaps need, like a woman, possession to free me of my doubts. I am afraid lest, after its first blossoming, my temperament grow effeminate and give way, corroded by the rust of a devouring indecision. After my ideas, I analyze my sentiments: the air is becoming unbreathable. I thought that a passion would have refashioned the synthesis of my will; it is too late—the elements, dispersed, have become irreconcilable; here I am, approaching the state of a fakir who, with arms uplifted to an empty sky, immobile and with feet firmly pressed against the ground, dreams of the life he will no longer live. Thinking is not living; living is feeling. Where am I? I wished to penetrate the essence of each thing; I saw that there was nothing but movement, and the world, reduced to an indivisible force, vanished: I expected to double my sensations by dividing them, and I have seen them annihilated. There is nothing worth the lifting of a finger tip: one's reason reduces everything to a vague stirring of cerebral atoms, to a little inward bluster."
As he whispered in the gloomy silence of the vast garden, the words took flight, leaving only a murmuring trace of their passage. It required an effort for him to reseize the logic of his complaints:
"Yes, I was in doubt. Well! I believe that I have cast it beyond the previous limits." This satisfaction of the author cheered him: "So, I shall write about it, I shall show how this little inward bluster, which is nothing, contains everything, how, with the support of a single sensation always the same and distorted from its very inception, a brain isolated from the world can create a world for itself. My Adorer will show whether it is necessary, for the purpose of living, to mingle with surrounding complications. But it is only an experiment and my real work will be this: a being born with the complete paralysis of all his senses, nothing functioning but the brain and the digestive apparatus. This being has no knowledge of external things since, even the sensitiveness of the skin is absent. A miracle, electric or otherwise, partially cures him; he learns to talk and relates his cerebral life: it is just like other lives. It is necessary to find the point of departure, to find, at least, a medical example."
While reflecting, he recognized that his scorn of materialism was leading him a little far: it was hurling him into absurdity. Yet, such an imagination seemed less stupid than the psychical negation of the one group and the dualism of the other. The spiritualists, in fact, did not inspire him with less wrath: these bastards of Theology and Common Sense really formed the most obnoxious hybrid of all the human flora. Of all the outrages which the ignorant pour like a shower of mud on all who think, this class especially offended him and nothing irritated him so much as to hear grouped as idealists, without distinction, all those who do not admit the theories of Büchner, in science, or those of Zola, in literature.
"Ah! I grow angry against ignorance; that is worse than warring with stupidity. And then, among those who do not know are some who would like to know: it is not their fault. A few suffice, besides: only the summits count. It is on the mountains that formerly the annunciatory beacons blazed."
This last reflection was sufficiently disinterested: he willingly thought of himself as a summit, but he also knew that no beacon would ever burn there. The world was not ready to hear any great tidings he cared to announce. Without doubt, like others, he had come too late or too early. The ears would be stopped up if he opened his mouth, for he could only repeat the vain speech of the prophets: Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domun, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant earn....
"Hello! what are you doing alone, walking like an inspired person?"
"Ah! my dear Calixte, I am bored to death."
"What about spending the evening together?" asked Heliot. "You know, I am hardly entertaining, but we will talk."
"Agreed," said Entragues, taking his friend's arm, "I cling to you, as a castaway to a spar."
"But," returned Calixte laughing, "I am in no wise the partial result of a shipwreck. I ride the sea quite well, the mast is firmly planted, the hull is sound ... come, embark and don't treat me like a wreck. Now, listen, I am going to return and get rid of this cumbersome portfolio; I will get some verses I want to show you, then we will go to your home and you will also read me some slightly symbolic pages, eh?"
They discussed the value of the words with which the modern schools of writers distinguish themselves. The symbolists, according to Entragues, usurped their name; one never makes a symbol purposely, unless one is dedicated to this career as the fabulists to the fable. For him the symbol was the summit of art, conquered only by those who had placed upon it a statue which was superhuman and which yet had a human appearance, containing an idea in its form.
"Now," he continued, "in Milton's Satan you have a symbol, in de Vigny's Moïse you have a symbol, in Villiers' Hadaly you have a symbol. The symbol is a soul made visible: the type is only the resume or the epitome of a character."
"Your definition is not clear. It seems to me that what you take for the symbol is rather to be called synthesis."
"No, synthesis is found, indeed, in the symbol—it is the final process; if synthesis has not been preceded by an analysis—it matters not whether it be brief or long provided it be exact—there is no symbol, because there is no life."
"Say rather that every psychological masterpiece contains a symbol."
"Perhaps," conceded Entragues. "Would a symbolist then signify a fabricator of masterpieces?"
"At least that is quite an interesting ideal and I believe you will not disclaim it. You don't worry about the public any more than I do; you would rather please ten select persons than please everybody, to the exclusion of the ten."
"Evidently. We are not actors and the applause do not make us beam with joy. But if we write neither to win universal approbation nor to earn money, we become truly incomprehensible."
"Write for your mistress," said Calixte.
"I have none," said Entragues.
"Write for the Madonna of Botticelli," said Calixte.
"That is what I am doing," said Entragues.
"A lovely and noble confident. Do you remember what the page says in the Gitana? I know it by heart. It is the portrait of our mistress, since it is that of poetry, Listen to it in the stately language of Cervantes: 'La poesia es una bellissima doncella, casta, honesta, discreta, aguda, retirada, y que se contien en las limites de la discrecion mas alta: es amiga de la soledad, las fuentes la entretien, los prados la consuelan, los arboles la desenojan, los flores le alegran; y finalmente deleyta y ensena a quantos con ella communican.'"
Their talk often ended thus, by the recollection of an old impression, in mystic and shy plaints. Calixte was gentle towards life, which had not shown him the same clemency. No one knew what he sought, excepting the fine editions of old poets and the mysterious modern prints: his disdain of all vainglory was more sincere than that of Entragues, in whom heredity determined a dim need of social domination. Entragues strove to scorn life. During the long and painful reckonings of his tutelage, he had undergone, without external revolt, the humiliation of a lowly situation, a horror of the forced fabrication of worthless copy for miserly publishers. The verdict of several lawsuits had despoiled him of the relics of his patrimony; but he would have consented to a Castilian wretchedness rather than abandon his dream. He wished to regild his name, and, encircled by glory, he hated the present, as an obstacle, but he would have liked to assume the existence that was due him, to put it on like a ducal cloak, without astonishment, with the satisfaction of a lord returning to his domains. He was waiting; nothing would have surprised him, but neither did the nothing surprise him: hence, the infinite contradictions of his character and conduct. He knew his nature and had applied to himself, with a joy which revealed the triplicity of his soul, this line of Dante:
Che sensa speme vivemo in disio.
"And without hope live in desire." His triplicity, a quite elementary scholastic division, he thus explained: a soul that wills, a soul that knows the uselessness of willing, a soul that watches the struggle of the other two and writes the Iliad of it.
He had no naïveté, save perhaps in his rare unfortunate crises, for in his normal state his proud indifference of principle saved him from anger and its consequences. Thus, his indignation against Moscowitch had become deadened after the first thought of vengeance, and he was the man, on matters that did not touch the essentials, to give up a thing in despair, send the handle after the ax. But he was also the man to lift and unite the fallen instrument. He was the man to do the contrary of what he pretended to do, but as his acts were a spectacle to himself, and the most amusing of all spectacles, he never let it sadden him beyond measure. He knew himself full of the unexpected and liked it: ah! without this he surely would have been wearied, for the rest of the world unrolled itself to his wearied eyes but as a circus performance, truly too monotonous; the world was peopled by vague and distant phantoms thrown on the eternally trod course.
Calixte was much more simple: all dream, all faith, all spontaneity. No one could guess at the aim of his movements, and, in short, he had no other aim than movement itself. Older than Entragues by five or six years, and having attained a certain renown as a stylist and delicate thinker, he was unconcerned with it; he always kept the tone and the manners of a beginner, carried his manuscripts here and there, preferably to the little new reviews, not, like others, with the purpose of lording it there, but rather from a need of silence, not to have to discuss, to demonstrate, by a necessary charlatanry, the merit of a work.
He earned little, because of his indifference, for he could easily have won a lucrative position in journalism. But he loved, above all things, to work freely and with dignity.
His disdain of life was naive: he did not know life, just as one is ignorant of analytical chemistry, and he no more felt the inclination to live in the modern fashion than to shut himself up in a cellar with retorts; either of these careers seemed equally absurd in his estimation. Some dream figures—creatures encountered in the pages of Shakespeare or Calderon, personal creations—sufficed to people his days. He considered his illusions the only beings not endowed with the melancholy spirit of contradiction; he loved them, and he loved Entragues and all the intelligent persons who discussed things politely and without prolixity.
He was said to be as chaste as a Franciscan monk: he disclaimed such an eccentricity. A pretty and short love affair did not displease him: he enjoyed a woman's grace more than her beauty, her childishness more than her sex. He considered nervous disorders, so aggravated by the complacency of deteriorated writers, as repugnant maladies that were anti-harmonious, and he shunned dark and thin women, who smell fresh flesh, like the ogre.
They entered, as had been agreed, the home of Entragues, who read the following tale to his friend.