Chapter III

Glory is a fact pure and simple, and not a fact of justice. There is no exact relation between the real merit of a writer (our examination is limited to literary glory) and his standing. In order to reward the survival of the book during the last four hundred years, in accordance with the dictates of chance and, if you like, of injustice, criticism has invented a hierarchal system which divides writers into castes, from the idiot to the man of genius. This looks solid and serious. It is, however, arbitrary, since aesthetic or moral judgments are merely generalized sensations. Literary judgment thus rejoins religious judgment so completely as to become identified with it.

Earthly immortality and the other--that which operates ideally beyond real life--are conceptions of the same order, due to a single cause--the impossibility for thought to think of itself as non-existent. Descartes merely presented a physiological maxim whose human truth is so absolute that it would have been understood by the oldest and humblest peoples. "I think, therefore I am," is the verbal translation of a cellular state. Every living brain thinks this, even though unconsciously. Each minute of life is an eternity. It has neither beginning nor end. It is what it is. It is absolute. Yet the disagreement between the cerebral truth and the material truth is complete. The organ by which man thinks himself immortal dies, and the absolute is conquered by reality. The disagreement is complete, evident, undeniable. Yet it is inexplicable. Confronted with such a contradiction, the hypothesis of a duality assumes a certain force, besides which the laboratory itself affirms the essential difference between muscular and cerebral toil. The bending of the forearm, and even of a phalanx, releases a certain amount of carbonic acid. Cerebral activity, all muscles being in repose, registers no trace of combustion. This does not mean that the organs of thought are immaterial. They can be touched, weighed and measured; but their materiality is of a special sort whose vital reactions are as yet unknown. Inexplicable in theory, the disagreement between thought and the flesh is thus explained, in fact, by a difference at least of molecular construction. They are two states, each of which has but a superficial knowledge of the other, and the flesh which thought always represents to itself as eternal is certain of dissolution.

There are, then, two immortalities: the subjective immortality which a man accords himself readily, even necessarily, and the objective immortality, of which Pratinas has been robbed and which is a fact. If what we have said be true and if, in the absence of precise methods of analysis, the first--religious or literary--no longer admits of other than philosophic--that is to say, vague--reflections, objective immortality, on the other hand, is a less abstract subject for discussion. It would even be possible, with a little good will, to bring all history within its scope; but French literature forms a long and brilliant enough cavalcade for our purpose.

The moment words clasp beneath their wings a certain amount of perceptible reality, they readily yield their formula. Glory is life in the memory of men. But of what men, what life?

M. Stapfer[8] has attempted to enumerate the works which, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, have lasted--what is called "lasting" in professional critical language. This chapter, wittily entitled (with a touch of Jansenism) "the little number of elect," would be brief were it but a catalogue. In short--and this may be admitted provisionally--among all the French writers of the last three centuries, twenty-five or thirty may be said to have achieved what is called glory; but of these thirty, the majority are scarcely more than a name. What life, and of what men? M. Stapfer is thinking of works that it might occur to a modern Frenchman, "of average culture," to glance at on a rainy day. It is impossible to make a serious analysis if we permit such expressions as "average culture" to enter our reasoning. A man of "average culture" may very possibly enjoy Saint-Simon, without owning either a Pascal, a Bossuet, a Corneille or a Malherbe. A man can read and reread Pascal, yet have little taste for Rabelais. But these amateurs of hard reading are professors, churchmen, lawyers--men who, even if they are not writers themselves, have a professional interest in letters, and are obliged to keep in touch with the classic period of French literature. And where have they learned that Boileau is a better poet than Théophile or Tristan? At college, for it is through the college that literary glory maintains itself in the bored recollection of heedless generations. There is no "average culture" that can be felt and figured by a flexible curve; but there are programmes. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam invented the "Glory Machine." There is, in the Ministry of Public Instruction, a hall on the door of which should be read: "Bureau of Glory." It is the seat of the Superior Council which elaborates the study programme. This programme is the "stuffer" which produces average cultures. Names omitted from it will remain eternally unknown to generations whose paternal guide it will be. But an educator's conscience will not permit him to impose upon children knowledge of writers whose morality is not universally admitted. Molière was very immoral in his day, and this was the secret of his success with a public which had no other choice, on its days of repentance, than among the most eloquent or the most skilful preachers. It is as he has been less understood, that Molière has become, little by little, a moralist. As successive sensibilities have distinguished themselves more sharply from the sensibility of the seventeenth century, the coarseness has lost its rank odour and we have come at last to find delicate certain sallies which, brought up to date, would embarrass us. Molière, much more brutal at bottom than on the surface, enjoys what might be called an acquired morality. It is an inevitable phenomenon of adjustment. It was necessary either to sacrifice Molière or to demonstrate the beauty of his philosophic genius.

His saying, which is only a saying, "For the love of humanity," has been hollowed and dug out by the commentators like an ivory ball which, at last, in the lathe, becomes a system of concentric spheres. It is merely a child's rattle. How are the _Femmes Savantes_ and Feminism to be reconciled? This will be a very curious teat to follow. In her _Réflexions sur les Femmes_, so penetrating and so well written, Madame de Lambert says that this comedy, odious in itself, made education for young women seem improper, immodest, almost obscene; whence the craze for purely sensual pleasure to which women inclined, since they had no other resources than love and good living. The difficulty will be solved by considering separately the idea of feminism and the idea of the _Femmes Savantes_, and by cavilling at the word "savant," which has recently come to have a very definite significance. The _savant_, in the seventeenth century, was the amateur, not only of the sciences, but of letters--the man eager for all novelties, who discussed vortices without neglecting Vaugelas. Madame de Sévigné was a "femme savante," also Ninon. No doubt it was necessary to save Molière's work. It was worth it. But might not it have been done more honestly, and with greater lucidity?

Attempted on Rabelais and on Montaigne, the same work of adjustment has been less successful. Rabelais, in particular, has discouraged the most stubbornly naïve; and, since it was impossible to glean virtuous sheaves in his abbey of good pleasure, Pantagruel was classed among the vague precursors of modern ideas--which has no appreciable meaning, modern ideas being extremely contradictory. La Fontaine has lent himself to the caprices of the moralists with that indifference to good and evil which was the peculiarity of his exclusively sensual temperament; while, as for Racine, whose work would be frightful, were it not expressed in a language as cold and abstract as algebra, the Jansenist devotion of his last days has made it possible to discover pious intonations even in his most delirious celebrations of cruelty and lust.[9] Why has not the same process been applied to a Saint-Amant or a Théophile? Here is seen the influence of Boileau, whom it is still dangerous to contradict when seeking a certain quality of reputation. Happy to find their task limited and determined by a celebrated authority, the educators closed their catalogue of glories the moment it was decently long enough. Their enterprise was one of moral, far more than literary, criticism. A single book--the _Fables_, for example--would have sufficed them as an album wherein to deposit the cunning aphorisms of the old catechism. The educator's ideal is the _Koran_, whose pages contain, at the same time, a sample of writing, a model of style, a religious code, and a handbook of morals.

We may, then, conclude that, in reality, there is no literary glory. The great writers are offered to our admiration not as writers, but as moralists. Literary glory is an illusion.

And yet, in reserving for school-use some of the greatest French men of genius, the literary historians have been obliged to justify their choice, to feign artistic preoccupations. Nisard wrote a history of French literature concerned with little else than morality. Such a preoccupation was found noble, but too exclusive. The common handbooks mingle adroitly the two orders. A child should not know quite whether La Fontaine is prescribed for him as a great poet or as an old chap who counselled prudence--as the author of _Philémon et Baucis_, or as the precursor of Franklin. Armed with the four rules of literature, the professors have examined talents and classified them. They have conferred prizes and honourable mentions. There is the first order and there are orders graduated all the way down to the fourth and the fifth. French literature has become arranged hierarchically like a tenement house. "Villon," one of these measurers once said to me, "is not of the first order." Admiration must be shaded according to the seven notes of the university scale. Earnest flutists excel at this game.

It is not a question of disputing the awards of glory or of proposing a revised list. Such as it is, it serves its purpose. It may have the same usefulness as the arbitrary classifications of botany. It is not a matter of amending it, it is a matter of tearing it up.

That Racine is a better poet than Tristan l'Hermite, and that _Iphigénie_ is superior to _Marianne_, are two propositions unequally true; for we might quite as well be asked to compare this, which is by Racine:

Que c'est une chose charmante
De voir cet étang gracieux
Où, comme en un lit précieux,
L'onde est toujours calme et dormante!

Quelles richesses admirables
N'ont point ces nageurs marquetés,
Ces poissons aux dos argentés,
Sur leurs écailles agréables![10]

with this, which is by Tristan:

Auprès de cette grotte sombre
Où l'on respire un air si doux,
L'onde lutte avec les cailloux,
Et la lumière avec que l'ombre.

Ces flots, las de l'exercice
Qu'ils ont fait dessus ce gravier,
Se reposent dans ce vivier,
Où mourut autrefois Narcisse.

L'ombre de cette fleur vermeille
Et celle de ces jons pendans
Paraissent estre la-dedans
Les songes de l'eau qui someille.[11]

I am well aware that I am here comparing the best of Tristan with the worst of Racine; but all the same, if Racine had his park, Tristan had his garden, and it is often agreeable there. Let us then tear up the list of awards in order to remain ignorant of the fact that Tristan l'Hermite is a poet "whose versification is ridiculous,"[12] so that our pleasure in meeting him may not thus be spoiled in advance, and so that, with him, we may dare address his muse:

Fay moy boire au creux de tes mains,
Si l'eau n'en dissout point la neige.

This is the drawback to comparative methods. Having set up the great poet of the century as a standard, the critics thereafter value the others merely as precursors or as disciples.[13] Authors are often judged according to what they are not, through failure to understand their particular genius, and often also through failure to question them themselves. Pratinas, truly, is better treated. He enjoys silence.

But he is dead, and we are discussing the living. Living what life, and in the memory of what men? Life is a physical fact. A book which exists as a volume in a library is not dead, and is it not perhaps a glory more enviable to remain unknown, like Théophile, than to be famous, like Jean-Baptiste Rousseau? When glory is merely classic, it is perhaps one of the harshest forms of humiliation. To have dreamed of thrilling men and women with passion, and to become but the dull task which keeps the careless schoolboy a captive! Are there, however, any universal reputations that are not classic? Very few, and in that case, they have another blemish. It is for their smut that Restif's[14] ridiculous novels are still read--also Voltaire's syphilitic tales, and that tedious _Manon Lescaut_, so clumsily adapted from the English. The books of yesterday no longer have a public, if by public be understood disinterested men who read simply for their pleasure, enjoying the art and the thought contained in a book; but they still have readers, and all have some.

The only dead book is the book which is lost. All the rest live, almost with the same life, and the older they grow, the more intense this life becomes, becoming more precious. Literary glory is nominal. Literary life is personal. There is not a poet of the prodigious seventeenth century who does not come to life again each day in the pious hands of a lover. Bossuet has not been more thumbed than this _Recueil_ by Pierre du Marteu;[15] and, all things considered, the _Plainte du cheval Pégase aux chevaux de la petite Écurie_, by Monsieur de Benserade, is more agreeable and less dangerous reading than the _Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle_. Is pompous moralizing after all so superior to sprightly burlesque? Every mountain plant offers an equal interest to the artless botanist. For him the euphorbia is not celebrated or the borage ridiculous (besides which it has the most beautiful eyes in the world), and he fills his bag till it can hold not another blade of grass. Literary glory was invented for the use of children preparing their examinations. It matters little to the explorer of the mind of the past that this agreeable verse is by an unknown poet, or that profound thought by a despised thinker. A man and his work are so different in interest! The man is a physiological entity of value only in the environment that developed it. The work, whatever it may be, can keep an abstract power for centuries. This power should not be exaggerated or erected into a tyranny. A thought is very little more than a dry flower; but the man has perished and the flower still lies in the herbal. It is the witness to a life that has disappeared, the sign of an annihilated sensibility.

When, in the Gallery of Apollo, we gaze at those onyxes and those corundums in the form of conches and cups, those gold plaques engraved with flowers, and those flaming enamels, do we, before daring to rejoice, demand the name of the artist who created such objects? If we did, the question would be vain. The work lives and the name is dead. What matters the name?

"I, who have no wish for glory," wrote Flaubert. He spoke of posterity--of that future and, consequently, non-existent time, to which so many second-rate energies sacrifice the one reality, the present hour. Since none of Flaubert's books can serve as a pretext for moral teaching, he was well-advised. He did not wish for glory, and he will not have it, unless _Madame Bovary_ retains during the next century its equivocal reputation and finds a place, in schoolboy-tradition, among the celebrated bad books. This is little likely, seeing that _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ is already hard to read. But that which cannot be said for the future, either of him or of any writer of the last half of the century, may be said for the past. Gautier and Flaubert have known glory--the glory that they accorded themselves in the invincible consciousness of their genius. Glory is a sensation of life and of strength; a food-sprite would taste it in a tree trunk.

How amusing it is to listen to the eloquent professor who declares: "This book will not last." But no book lasts, and yet all books last. Do you know _Palemon, fable bocagère et pastorale_, by the Sieur Frénicle?[16] Well, this book has lasted, since I have just read it, and since I resurrect one of its verses, which is not ugly:

O, que j'eus de plaisir à la voir toute nue!

It is time man learned at last to resign himself to annihilation, and even to enjoy that idea whose sweetness is incomparable. Writers might give the people the example, by resolutely abandoning their vainglorious hopes. They will leave a name which will grace the catalogues for several centuries, and works which will last as long as the matter upon which they are printed. This is a rare privilege, for which they ought to be willing to silence their complaints. And even were this illusory eternity to be denied them, as well as all present glory, why should that diminish their activity? It is to the passer-by, not to future humanity, that the wild cherry-tree offers its fruits; and even if no one passes, just as in the spring it has covered itself with snow, so it puts on its purple with the coming of summer. Life is a personal, immediate fact, which glides past the very moment it is perceived. It is bad reasoning to attach to this moment the age to come; for the present alone exists, and we must keep within the limits of logic in order to remain men. Let us be a little less primitive, not fancying that the next century will be the "double" of the present, and that our works will keep the position they hold to-day, or will have a worse. Our way of understanding _Bérénice_ would afflict Racine, and Molière would gladly blow out the candles on nights when the _Misanthrope_ is such a bore. Books have but one season. Trees, shrubs, or simple blades of grass, they die having sometimes sown their kind, and true glory for a writer would be to call forth a work whose shade would smother him. That would be true glory, because it would be a return to the noblest conditions of life. The witnesses of the past are never anything but paradoxes. They began to languish a few years, or even less, after their birth, and their old age drags on, sad and wrinkled, amid men who no longer either understand or love them. To desire immortality is to wish to live forever in the condition of Swift's "Struldbruggs."

"Such are the details imparted to me respecting the Immortals of this country...."--and man's sentiment continues to revolt against the idea of destruction, and the writer trembles at the idea of perennial obscurity. Our sensibility needs a tiny light in the far-off distance among the trees which line our horizon. That reassures the muscles, calms the pulses.

1900.

[1] _Communication à l'Académie des Sciences_ (_13 Avril 1896_), certified and rendered more precise by later investigations which M. Quinton has explained to me. Here, without scientific apparatus, is what, as a result of precious conservations, would appear to be the general order in which the animals appeared, beginning with the fishes, and taking account only of those which have yet been covered:

I. Fish IV. Mammals V. Birds
II. Batracians a. Monotremata x. Primates:
III. Reptiles b. Marsupials (Lemurs, Monkeys,
c. Edentates Men)
d. Rodents y. Carnivora:
e. Insectivora (latest arrivals:
f. -- -- blue fox, white
g. -- -- -- bear)
h. -- -- -- z. Ruminants:
-- -- -- (last arrival:
-- -- -- reindeer)

The bearing of this list upon any question whatsoever of general philosophy is evident for all who know how to disassociate ideas. It would have thrilled Voltaire. For the rest, I claim the honour of having been the first to announce to the larger public these new scientific views, which will, logically, have a magnificent wealth of consequences. I have already made a less precise allusion to them, notably in the _Wiener Rundschau_, May 1899.

[2] Intelligence can thus be conceived as an initial form of instinct, in which case the human intelligence would be destined to crystallize into instinct, as has occurred in the case of other animal species. Consciousness would disappear, leaving complete liberty to the unconscious act, necessarily perfect in the limits of its intention. The conscious man is a scholar who will reveal himself a master the moment he has become a delicate but unerring machine, like bee and beaver.

[3] _La Survivance de l'Ame et l'idée de justice chez les peuples non civilisés_, Paris, Leroux, 1894.

[4] _Des Réputations littéraires: Essai de morale et d'histoire_. Première série. Paris, Hachette, 1893.

[5] _Livres perdus: Essai bibliographique sur les livres devenus introuvables_, by Philoumeste Junior, Brussels, 1882.

[6] These privately printed editions of three hundred copies or less have necessarily been worn out in proportion to their success.

[7] _Opera et Fragmenta veterorum poetarum latinorum_. London, 1713

[8] Opus cit., p. 103.

[9] This was written on the appearance of M. Louis Proal's work, _Le Crime et le Suicide Passionnels_ (F. Alcan, 1910), in which, referring to sex dramas in the criminal courts, Racine is quoted, every ten pages, for reference and comparison. Everyone hesitates to say just what an age of passion and of carnal madness the _Grand Siècle_ really was.

[10] _L'Étang_. This poem forms part of the set of five odes in which Racine celebrated Port-Royal des Champs: _L'Étang, Les Prairies, Les Bois, Les Troupeaux, Les Jardins_.

[11] _Le Promenoir des Deux Amans_.

[12] Vapereau, _Dictionnaire des Littératures_.

[13] An excellent doctor's thesis on Tristan l'Hermite, by M. V. M. Demadin, bears precisely this title: _Un précurseur de Racine_.

[14] The first volume, and that alone, of Restif de la Bretonne's _Monsieur Nicholas_ should be excepted.

[15] _Recueil de quelques pièces nouvelles et galantes, tant en prose qu'en vers_. Cologne, 1667.

[16] Paris, published by Jacques Dugast, aux Gants Couronnez, 1632.

SUCCESS AND THE IDEA OF BEAUTY