The allusion to Voudooism in the last stanza especially interested me, and I questioned the gentleman who furnished me with the song as to the significance of the words: "I will make him turn into a phantom." I had fancied that the term fantome might be interpreted by "ghost," and that the whole line simply constituted a threat to make some one "give up the ghost."
"It is not exactly that," replied my friend; "it is an allusion, I believe, to the withering and wasting power of Voudoo poisons. There are such poisons actually in use among the negro obi-men—poisons which defy analysis, and, mysterious as the poisons of the Borgias, slowly consume the victims like a taper. He wastes away as though being dried up; he becomes almost mummified; he wanes like a shadow; he turns into a phantom in the same sense that a phantom is an unreal mockery of something real."
Thus I found an intelligent Louisianan zealous to confirm an opinion to which I was permitted to give expression in the Commercial nearly three years ago—that a knowledge of secret septic poisons (probably of an animal character), which leave no trace discoverable by the most skilful chemists, is actually possessed by certain beings who are reverenced as sorcerers by the negroes of the West Indies and the Southern States, but more especially of the West Indies, where much of African fetichism has been transplanted.
Ozias Midwinter.
CHAPTER IX.—THE POET OF MYOPIA
THE dependence not only of the literary character and workmanship of a writer, but even his innermost psyche, upon vision, normal or abnormal, is a truth which has been dimly and falteringly felt by several writers. Concerning "Madame Bovary," and his friend Flaubert, Maxime du Camp reflects some glintings of the truth. But these and others, lacking the requisite expert definiteness of knowledge, have failed to catch the satisfying and clear point of view. To illustrate I may quote the paragraph of du Camp:
"The literary procedure of Flaubert threw everybody off the track and even some of the experts. But it was a very simple matter; it was by the accumulation and the superposition of details that he arrived at power. It is the physiologic method, the method of the myopes who look at things one after the other, very exactly, and then describe them successively. The literature of imagination may be divided into two distinct schools, that of the myopes and that of the hyperopes. The myopes see minutely, study every line, finding each detail of importance because everything appears to them in isolation; about them is a sort of cloud in which is detached the object in exaggerated proportions. They have, as it were, a microscope in their eye which enlarges everything. The description of Venice from the Campanile of St. Mark, that of Destitution in 'Captain Fracasse,' by Gautier are the capital results of myopic vision. The hyperopes, on the other hand, look at the ensemble, in which the details are lost, and form a kind of general harmony. The detail loses all significance, except perhaps they seek to bring it into relief as a work of art.... Besides, the myopes seek to portray sensations, while the hyperopes especially aim at analysis of the sentiments. If a hyperopic writer suddenly becomes myopic, his manner of thinking, and consequently of writing, at once is modified. What I call the school of the myopes, Gautier names the school of the rabids. He said to Mérimée: 'Your characters have no muscles,' and Mérimée answered, 'Yours have no draperies.'"
But there is one consequence, common both to Flaubert and to Hearn, a most strange unity of result flowing from a seemingly opposed but really identical cause in the two men. I have elsewhere set forth the reasons for my belief that the secret of Flaubert's life, character, and literary art consisted in an inability to think and write at the same time. He was one of the most healthy and brilliant of men when he did not read or write, but his mind refused to act creatively whenever he wrote or read. From this resulted his epilepsy. Fathered by the fear of this disease, mothered by opium, and reared by unhygiene and eye-strain, came the miserable "St. Anthony" of the second remaking. In the failure of this pitiful work there was naught left except bottomless pessimism, the "cadenced phrase," and all the rest, called "Madame Bovary" and "art for art's sake."