Let us suppose that Giuseppe Ferrari, instead of a superior culture, had only received Bosisio’s education; we should certainly have had, in place of a savant justly admired by the world, something similar to Bosisio. Certainly, indeed, those systems of historical arithmetic, with kings and republics dying on a fixed day, at the will of the author, can only belong to the world of mental alienation.
The same thing might be said of Michelet, if one thinks of his fancy natural history, his academic obscenities, his incredible vanity,[350] and the later volumes of his History of France which are nothing but a tangled thicket of scandalous anecdotes and grotesque paradoxes.[351] So, too, of Fourier and his disciples, who predict with mathematical exactness that, 80,000 years hence, man will attain to the age of 144; that in those days we shall have 37 millions of poets (unhappy world!); likewise 37 millions of mathematicians equal to Newton; of Lemercier, who, along with some very fine dramas, wrote some in which speeches are assigned to ants, seals, and the Mediterranean; and of Burchiello, who asks painters to depict for him an earthquake in the air, and describes a mountain giving a pair of spectacles to a bell-tower! The same is true of the heir of Confucius, the astronomer who created the Dio Liberale; of the pseudo-geologist who has discovered a secret of embalming bodies which might be known to any assistant demonstrator of anatomy, and who believes that the world can be purified by cremation.
In Italy, a man has for many years been a professor in one of the great universities who, in his treatises, created the nation of the cagots, and suggested a certain instrument for resuscitating the apparently drowned, which would have been enough to suffocate a healthy person. Another talked of baths at a temperature of—20°, and the advantages of sea-water owing to the exhalations of the fish! Yet his volumes contain some very fine things, and have reached a second edition, and none of his colleagues ever suspected that his mind was not perfectly sound. How is he to be classified? He occupies a middle place between the madman, the man of genius, and the graphomaniac, with which last he has in common the sterility of his aims, and his calm and persistent search after paradoxes.
Italy, for the rest, as I have shown in Tre Tribuni,[352] has had, and idolized, for a brief quarter of an hour, two mattoids of considerable gifts, Coccapieller and Sbarbaro, who, in the midst of immoralities, trivialities, contradictions, and paradoxes, had a few traits of genius,[353] explicable by a less degree of misoneism, and a greater facility in adopting new ideas.
Décadent Poets.—Some acquaintance with this new variety of literary madmen will explain to us the existence, in the seventeenth century, of the French précieux, and, at the present day, that of the Parnassiens, Symbolistes, and Décadents.
“I have read their verses,” says Lemaître,[354] “and not even seen as much as the turkey in the fable, who, if he did not distinguish very well, at least saw something. I have been able to make nothing of these series of words, which—being connected together according to the laws of syntax—might be supposed to have some sense, and have none, and which spitefully keep your mind on the stretch in a vacuum, like a conundrum without an answer....
“ ‘En ta dentelle où n’est notoire
Mon doux évanouissement,
Taisons pour l’âtre sans histoire
Tel vœu de lèvres résumant.
Toute ombre hors d’un territoire
Se teinte itérativement
A la lueur exhalatoire
Des pétales de remuement.’....
“One of them, however, has explained to us what they intended doing, in a pamphlet modestly entitled, Traité du Verbe, by Stéphane Mallarmé. By this it appears that they have invented two things—the symbol, and ‘poetic instrumentation.’
“The invention of the symbolists seems to consist in not saying what feelings, thoughts, or states of mind they express by images. But even this is not new. A SYMBOL is, in short, an enlarged comparison of which only the second term is given—a connected series of metaphors. Briefly, the symbol is the old ‘allegory’ of our fathers.[355]