The Argonauts

by Eliza Orzeszkowa

CHAPTER VI

For the first time surely in that city, separated from England by lands and seas, a certain number of people, very limited, it is true, might admire small, bachelor's apartments, fitted up with tapestry, sculpture, and stained-glass, from the London factory of Morris, Faulkner, Marshall & Co. The drawing-room was not large, but there was in it absolutely nothing which had its origin elsewhere than in that factory founded by a famous poet and member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The famous poet and artist, William Morris, had become a manufacturer for the purpose of correcting aesthetic taste in the multitude, and filling people's dwellings with works of pure beauty. The objects in this apartment were really beautiful. The tapestry on the walls represented a series of pictures taken from romances of knighthood, and from marvellous legends: Tristan and Isolde, on the deck of a ship; Flor and Blancheflor, in a garden of roses; the monk Alberich, in a Dominican habit, descending into hell. The tapestry on the furniture was full of winged heads and fantastic flowers; on all sides were seen great art in weaving and masterly borders, which recalled the margins of old prayer-books. Dulled and dingy colors, producing the impression of things which had emerged from the mist of ages, and only glass window-screens, framed in columns and pointed arches, were brilliant with the colors of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. The window-panes were stained with roses and with the figures of saints having pale profiles and wearing bright robes. On one of the tables was a bronze pulpit in the form of a Gothic chapel; in another place was a lamp-support, which represented the Triumph of Death; Death was a woman with the wings of a bat; she was in a flowing robe; she had curved talons on her feet, and a scythe in her hand. This was a sculptured copy of Orcagna, from the Campo Santo of Pisa. In the middle of the dining-room, which was seen beyond an open door, stood a table, in the style of the eighteenth century. Altogether simple was this table, and like those under which, instead of carpets, men (of that century) used to put a layer of hay. The side table (fourteenth century), with painted carvings; a box (fourteenth century, a copy from the Museum of Cluny), with fantastic beasts carved on its cover, and with small figures on the front side, on very narrow niches, figures representing the twelve peers of France; another box, which was in the bedroom, was like this one, but the carving which covered it represented the anointing of Louis XI at Rheims (Museum of Orleans). It stood at the feet of Brother Alberich, who, in his white habit, was entering the black jaws of hell; it took the place of a sofa, there being no sofa in the room. Both these boxes of wood and iron, immensely artistic, though merely copies of authentic relics, served as places in which to keep objects of art, and served as seats also. Besides these, there were only a few stools, with arms carved in trefoil shape (fourteenth and fifteenth century), and still fewer armchairs, immensely deep and wide—so-called cathedras—covered with most wonderful stuffs; but everything was there which was needed, if the dwelling was to preserve a purely Middle Age character as to style. In the air, slightly colored by the brightly stained-glass, hovered something archaic and exotic—hoary antiquity reigned—and a critical spirit with the odor of mysticism might be felt floating around there. But all this seemed quite comprehensible and natural to anyone who knew Baron Emil, the owner of that dwelling—a trained and exacting aesthete—moreover, the baron was of that school called Mediaeval; and as a Mediaevalist he professed homage for Middle Ages romances and legends; for subtle works of art and for inspirations touching a world beyond the present which resulted from them.

Three years before Maryan Darvid, in company with, or more strictly under the protection of Kranitski, entered for the first time this dwelling, which had been recently furnished. The baron had brought home, from one of the Mediterranean islands, the mortal remains of his mother, who had died just before; he had received from her a great inheritance, and to put his interests in order he had settled in his native city for a period. Kranitski, long a friend in the house of his father and mother, had known him from childhood, and exhibited on greeting him an outburst of tenderness. This amused the baron, but pleased him also a little. "He is a trifle odd, good, poor devil—on the whole: gentle, perfectly presentable, and active." Kranitski was very active. He went to the boundary to take out of the custom-house everything which had come to the baron's address from England; and then helped him in the arrangement of the dwelling, which was attended with considerable labor. Upholsterers and other assistants lost their heads at sight of those knights, ladies, monks, peers of France, and the Triumph of Death, which came out of the boxes. Kranitski was astonished at nothing, for he had read much, and knew many things also, but he could not be very enthusiastic in this case. When the installation was accomplished, with his active and skilful assistance, he thought: "The place is funereal, and there is little comfort here." He looked askance somewhat at the boxes with the peers of France and Louis XI. on them. The covers of these boxes, rough with carving, did not seem to him the most agreeable places to sit on. He said nothing, however, for he was ashamed to confess that he did not understand or did not favor that which was the flower of the newest exotic fashion. He visited the baron and spent many hours in his dwelling, and soon he took there a second man—a young friend of his. When Maryan Darvid found himself for the first time in the company and at the house of a Mediaevalist, he was confused, like a man who is standing in the presence of something immensely above him. Almost ten years older, the baron surpassed Maryan immeasurably in all branches of knowledge, both of books and life; and his little dwelling was a marvel of originality and outlay. Maryan felt poor both in body and spirit. Though a yearly allowance of six thousand received from his father had not been enough up to that time, it seemed to him then a chip, only fit to be kicked away. As to the mental side, he was simply ashamed that he could still find any pleasant thing in that world which surrounded him, and in the life which he was leading. Commonness, cheapness, vulgarity! The meaning of these words he understood clearly after he had been in the baron's society. Even earlier he had begun to feel the need of something loftier; something beyond those pleasures of the senses—of fancy and of vanity—which he had experienced, though these were considerable. The substance and nature of these pleasures lay on the surface—they were accessible to a considerable number of people. The baron, in the manner usual with him, speaking somewhat through his nose and teeth, said:

"We, the experienced and disenchanted, seek for new shivers, just as alchemists of the Middle Ages sought for gold. We are in search of the rare and of the novel."

In search of the rare and the novel in shivers, or universal impressions: sensuous, mental, and aesthetic, Maryan went once with the baron, and a second time alone, on a journey through Europe. He visited many countries and capitals. To investigate the Salvation Army, he joined its ranks for a period in England. In Germany he was connected with the almost legendary, politico-religious sect which bears the name Fahrende Leute; and, again, for some time, in an immense wagon drawn by gigantic Mechlenburgers, he wandered through the mountainous Hartz forest and along the banks of the picturesque Saal; he spent most time in Paris, where, with the theosophists he summoned up spirits, and with the decadents, otherwise known as incoherents, and still otherwise as the accursed poets; in the club of hashish-eaters he had dreams and visions brought on by using narcotics. Besides, he saw many other rare and peculiar things; but he was ever hampered by slender financial means and the need of incurring great debts; and was irritated by the impossibility of finding anything which could satisfy him permanently, or, at least, for a long period. He felt satisfactions, but brief ones. Everything of which he had dreamed seemed less after he had attained it—more common, weaker than in his imagining. The brightness was dimmed; on the glitter there were defects; the warm inspirations which came from afar, grew stiff when they were touched, stiffened, as oil does when floating on water. In the taste of things, sweetness and tartness became insipid and nauseous, the moment they reached his palate.

This was by no means a surfeit devoid of appetites; but, on the contrary, such an immense flood of appetites that the insurgent wave of them struck the region of the impossible with fury, because it could not rush over that barrier. This was also an inflammation of the fancy, which had risen from an active mind, and which early and numerous experiences had turned into a festering wound. Finally, it was also the placing of self on some imagined summit, standing apart and aloft, beyond and above all. I—and the rabble. What is not I, and a handful like me—is the rabble. What is to be mine cannot be of the rabble; what is of the rabble must be not of mine. This pride was not of birth or money; it might be called nervous mental arrogance. Mental summits other than those of the rabble, and other requirements of the nerves; the highest bloom of human civilization—sickly, but the highest; the crash, but also the coronation of mankind. In all this there was a principle—one, but indestructible: the respect of individuality; the preservation of it from all limitations and changes which might come from outside; a respect reaching the height of worship. Everything might be, according to time and place, a painted pot; but individuality (that is, the way in which a man's wishes, tastes, way of thinking were fashioned) was sacred—the only sacred thing. It was not permitted to give this into captivity to anyone or anything, or to submit it to criticisms, or corrections. I am what I am; and I will remain myself. I will and I am obliged to know how to will—something like the superhuman preached by Friedrich Nietsche. The baron's dwelling was not only original and fabulously expensive, but it had in itself besides, that which the Germans define by the word Stimmung. A number of young polyglots examined for a long time various languages of Europe to find a word which would answer best to the German Stimmung, till Maryan first, possessing the greatest linguistic capacity, came on the Polish expression nastroj (tone of mind). Yes, they agreed, universally, that the baron's dwelling produced a tone of mind; an impression not of what was in it, but of something of which it was the mysterious expression or symbol. It produced an impression which had its cause beyond this world. To believe in something beyond this world does not mean to profess a religion—as that of Buddha, Zoroaster, or Chrystos. No, of course not; that would be well for early ages and infantile people; ..old ones, too, run wild after fables, for the principle of the beautiful is in these fables; but they do not let fables lead them off by the nose. An impression from beyond the world is something entirely different; it is a shiver of delights which are unknown here, and only anticipated, coming from a world inaccessible to the senses. That such a world exists is shown by the enormous poverty of this one, and the mad monotony of those sources of pleasure which are contained in the world accessible to human senses. A poet is so far a poet, an aesthete so far an aesthete, as he is able, by intuition and unheard-of delicacy of nerves, to burst into the world above the senses and to experience the taste, or rather the odor, which goes before it. For it is an absolute condition that the feeling should be hazy, something in the nature of an odor; or, better still, the echo of an odor. No key of a musical instrument is to be touched; no definite features are to be drawn; the tone of mind alone is to be produced. The baron's dwelling gave the tone of mind for another world. He and his associates believed in another world, beyond the earth and the grave; on the basis of the poverty and commonness of the world before the grave—that is, in despair of the case. For them it was not subject to doubt—that world, the slight odors of which flew to them in moments when they were in the tone of mind, was filled with perfect beauty, nothing but beauty; a beauty which, in this world, even by itself alone, raises men above the level of the rabble. If this beauty did not exist, we should be justified in accepting Hartmann's theory of the collective suicide of mankind, and in throwing a "bloody spittle of contempt" at life. A "bloody spittle," as is known from Arthur Rimbaud's sonnets on consonants, stands before the eyes of everyone who pronounces the vowel i, just as the vowel a brings up the picture of "black, shaggy flies, which buzz around terribly fetid objects."

"Ah, no, my friend! No, no! That passes my power! In heaven's name I beg you not to say another word!"

With this exclamation Arthur Kranitski, like a pike out of water, struggled in the immensely deep cathedra; and, with his arms in the air kept calling out:

"Terribly fetid objects! Bloody spittle! that is not poetry—it is not even decent! And those shaggy flies whirling around—that—No! I feel a nausea, which mounts to my throat. No, my friends, I will never agree that that is poetry!"

His voice broke, so wounded was he in his aesthetic conceptions. The young men laughed. That dear, honest Pan Kranitski is an innocent. In spite of his forty and some years clearly sounded, and his romantic experiences, his love for good eating and other nice things, the highest point of extravagance of all sorts for him were Boccaccio, Paul de Kock, Alfred Musset—simpletons, or babies.