Chapter VIII: Part 8

Now, it is precisely the _gratuitous half_ (pardon the word) which we contend should be excluded. You say, How can natural labor sustain competition with foreign labor, when the former has all the work to do, and the latter only does one-half, the sun supplying the remainder? But if this _half_, being _gratuitous_, determines you to exclude competition, how should the _whole_, being _gratuitous_, induce you to admit competition? If you were consistent, you would, while excluding as hurtful to native industry what is half gratuitous, exclude _a fortiori_ and with double zeal that which is altogether gratuitous.

Once more, when products such as coal, iron, corn, or textile fabrics are sent us from abroad, and we can acquire them with less labor than if we made them ourselves, the difference is a free gift conferred upon us. The gift is more or less considerable in proportion as the difference is more or less great. It amounts to a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product, when the foreigner only asks us for three-fourths, a half, or a quarter of the price we should otherwise pay. It is as perfect and complete as it can be, when the donor (like the sun in furnishing us with light) asks us for nothing. The question, and we ask it formally, is this, Do you desire for our country the benefit of gratuitous consumption, or the pretended advantages of onerous production? Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you exclude, as you do, coal, iron, corn, foreign fabrics, _in proportion_ as their price approximates to _zero_, what inconsistency would it be to admit the light of the sun, the price of which is already at _zero_ during the entire day!

STULTA AND PUERA

There were, no matter where, two towns called Fooltown and Babytown. They completed at great cost a highway from the one town to the other. When this was done, Fooltown said to herself, "See how Babytown inundates us with her products; we must see to it." In consequence, they created and paid a body of _obstructives_, so called because their business was to place _obstacles_ in the way of traffic coming from Babytown. Soon afterwards Babytown did the same.

At the end of some centuries, knowledge having in the interim made great progress, the common sense of Babytown enabled her to see that such reciprocal obstacles could only be reciprocally hurtful. She therefore sent a diplomatist to Fooltown, who, laying aside official phraseology, spoke to this effect:

"We have made a highway, and now we throw obstacles in the way of using it. This is absurd. It would have been better to have left things as they were. We should not, in that case, have had to pay for making the road in the first place, nor afterwards have incurred the expense of maintaining _obstructives_. In the name of Babytown, I come to propose to you, not to give up opposing each other all at once,--that would be to act upon a principle, and we despise principles as much as you do,--but to lessen somewhat the present obstacles, taking care to estimate equitably the respective _sacrifices_ we make for this purpose."

So spoke the diplomatist. Fooltown asked for time to consider the proposal, and proceeded to consult in succession her manufacturers and agriculturists. At length, after the lapse of some years, she declared that the negotiations were broken off. On receiving this intimation, the inhabitants of Babytown held a meeting. An old gentleman (they always suspected he had been secretly bought by Fooltown) rose and said:--"The obstacles created by Fooltown injure our sales, which is a misfortune. Those which we have ourselves created injure our purchases, which is another misfortune. With reference to the first, we are powerless; but the second rests with ourselves. Let us at least get quit of one, since we cannot rid ourselves of both evils. Let us suppress our _obstructives_ without requiring Fooltown to do the same. Some day, no doubt, she will come to know her own interests better."

A second counselor, a practical, matter-of-fact man, guiltless of any acquaintance with principles, and brought up in the ways of his forefathers, replied--

"Don't listen to that Utopian dreamer, that theorist, that innovator, that economist; that _Stultomaniac_. We shall all be undone if the stoppages of the road are not equalized, weighed, and balanced between Fooltown and Babytown. There would be greater difficulty in _going_ than in _coming_, in _exporting_ than in _importing_. We should find ourselves in the same condition of inferiority relatively to Fooltown, as Havre, Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon, London, Hamburg, and New Orleans, are with relation to the towns situated at the sources of the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne, the Tagus, the Thames, the Elbe, and the Mississippi; for it is more difficult for a ship to ascend than to descend a river. [_A Voice_--'Towns at the _embouchures_ of rivers prosper more than towns at their source.'] This is impossible. [_Same Voice_--'But it is so.'] Well, if it be so, they have prospered _contrary to rules_."

Reasoning so conclusive convinced the assembly, and the orator followed up his victory by talking largely of national independence, national honor, national dignity, national labor, inundation of products, tributes, murderous competition. In short, he carried the vote in favor of the maintenance of obstacles; and if you are at all curious on the subject, I can point out to you countries, where you will see with your own eyes Roadmakers and Obstructives working together on the most friendly terms possible, under the orders of the same legislative assembly, and at the expense of the same taxpayers, the one set endeavoring to clear the road, and the other set doing their utmost to render it impassable.

INAPPLICABLE TERMS

From 'Economic Sophisms'

Let us give up ... the puerility of applying to industrial competition phrases applicable to war,--a way of speaking which is only specious when applied to competition between two rival trades. The moment we come to take into account the effect produced on the general prosperity, the analogy disappears.

In a battle, every one who is killed diminishes by so much the strength of the army. In industry, a workshop is shut up only when what it produced is obtained by the public from another source and in _greater abundance_. Figure a state of things where for one man killed on the spot two should rise up full of life and vigor. Were such a state of things possible, war would no longer merit its name.

This, however, is the distinctive character of what is so absurdly called _industrial war_.

Let the Belgians and the English lower the price of their iron ever so much; let them, if they will, send it to us for nothing: this might extinguish some of our blast-furnaces; but immediately, and as a _necessary_ consequence of this very cheapness, there would rise up a thousand other branches of industry more profitable than the one which had been superseded.

We arrive, then, at the conclusion that domination by labor is impossible, and a contradiction in terms, seeing that all superiority which manifests itself among a people means cheapness, and tends only to impart force to all other nations. Let us banish, then, from political economy all terms borrowed from the military vocabulary: _to fight with equal weapons, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute_, etc. What do such phrases mean? Squeeze them, and you obtain nothing. Yes, you do obtain something; for from such words proceed absurd errors, and fatal and pestilent prejudices. Such phrases tend to arrest the fusion of nations, are inimical to their peaceful, universal, and indissoluble alliance, and retard the progress of the human race.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

(1821-1867)

BY GRACE KING

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821; he died there in 1867. Between these dates lies the evolution of one of the most striking personalities in French literature, and the development of an influence which affected not only the literature of the poet's own country, but that of all Europe and America. The genuineness of both personality and influence was one of the first critical issues raised after Baudelaire's advent into literature; it is still one of the main issues in all critical consideration of him. A question which involves by implication the whole relation of poetry, and of art as such, to life, is obviously one that furnishes more than literary issues, and engages other than literary interests. And thus, by easy and natural corollaries, Baudelaire has been made a subject of appeal not only to judgment, but even to conscience. At first sight, therefore, he appears surrounded either by an intricate moral maze, or by a no less troublesome confusion of contradictory theories from opposing camps rather than schools of criticism. But no author--no dead author--is more accessible, or more communicable in his way; his poems, his theories, and a goodly portion of his life, lie at the disposition of any reader who cares to know him.

The Baudelaire legend, as it is called by French critics, is one of the blooms of that romantic period of French literature which is presided over by the genius of Théophile Gautier. Indeed; it is against the golden background of Gautier's imagination that the picture of the youthful poet is best preserved for us, appearing in all the delicate and illusive radiance of the youth and beauty of legendary saints on the gilded canvases of mediaeval art. The radiant youth and beauty may be no more truthful to nature than the gilded background, but the fact of the impression sought to be conveyed is not on that account to be disbelieved.

Baudelaire, Gautier writes, was born in the Rue Hautefeuille, in one of those old houses with a pepper-pot turret at the corner which have disappeared from the city under the advancing improvement of straight lines and clear openings. His father, a gentleman of learning, retained all the eighteenth-century courtesy and distinction of manner, which, like the pepper-pot turret, has also disappeared under the advance of Republican enlightenment. An absent-minded, reserved child, Baudelaire attracted no especial attention during his school days. When they were over, his predilection for a literary vocation became known. From this his parents sought to divert him by sending him to travel. He voyaged through the Indian Ocean, visiting the great islands: Madagascar, Ceylon, Mauritius, Bourbon. Had there been a chance for irresolution in the mind of the youth, this voyage destroyed it forever. His imagination, essentially exotic, succumbed to the passionate charm of a new, strange, and splendidly glowing form of nature; the stars, the skies, the gigantic vegetation, the color, the perfumes, the dark-skinned figures in white draperies, formed for him at that time a heaven, for which his senses unceasingly yearned afterwards amid the charms and enchantments of civilization, in the world's capital of pleasure and luxury. Returning to Paris, of age and master of his fortune, he established himself in his independence, openly adopting his chosen career.

He and Théophile Gautier met for the first time in 1849, in the Hotel Pimodau, where were held the meetings of the Hashish Club. Here in the great Louis XIV. saloon, with its wood-work relieved with dull gold; its corbeled ceiling, painted after the manner of Lesueur and Poussin, with satyrs pursuing nymphs through reeds and foliage; its great red and white spotted marble mantel, with gilded elephant harnessed like the elephant of Porus in Lebrun's picture, bearing an enameled clock with blue ciphers; its antique chairs and sofas, covered with faded tapestry representing hunting scenes, holding the reclining figures of the members of the club; women celebrated in the world of beauty, men in the world of letters, meeting not only for the enjoyment of the artificial ecstasies of the drug, but to talk of art, literature, and love, as in the days of the Decameron--here Baudelaire made what might be called his historic impression upon literature. He was at that time twenty-eight years of age; and even in that assemblage, in those surroundings, his personality was striking. His black hair, worn close to the head, grew in regular scallops over a forehead of dazzling whiteness; his eyes, the color of Spanish tobacco, were spiritual, deep, penetrating, perhaps too insistently so, in expression; the mobile sinuous mouth had the ironical voluptuous lips that Leonardo da Vinci loved to paint; the nose was delicate and sensitive, with quivering nostrils; a deep dimple accentuated the chin; the bluish-black tint of the shaven skin, softened with rice-powder, contrasted with the clear rose and white of the upper part of his cheeks. Always dressed with meticulous neatness and simplicity, following English rather than French taste; in manner punctiliously observant of the strictest conventionality, scrupulously, even excessively polite; in talk measuring his phrases, using only the most select terms, and pronouncing certain words as if the sound itself possessed a certain subtle, mystical value,--throwing his voice into capitals and italics;--in contrast with the dress and manners about him, he, according to Gautier, looked like a dandy who had strayed into Bohemia.

The contrast was no less violent between Baudelaire's form and the substance of his conversation. With a simple, natural, and perfectly impartial manner, as if he were conveying commonplace information about every-day life, he would advance some axiom monstrously Satanic, or sustain, with the utmost grace and coolness, some mathematical extravagance in the way of a theory. And no one could so inflexibly push a paradox to the uttermost limits, regardless of consequences to received notions of morality or religion; always employing the most rigorous methods of logic and reason. His wit was found to lie neither in words nor thoughts, but in the peculiar standpoint from which he regarded things, a standpoint which altered their outlines,--like those of objects looked down upon from a bird's flight, or looked up to on a ceiling. In this way, to continue the exposition of Gautier, Baudelaire saw relations inappreciable to others, whose logical bizarrerie was startling.

His first productions were critical articles for the Parisian journals; articles that at the time passed unperceived, but which to-day furnish perhaps the best evidences of that keen artistic insight and foresight of the poet, which was at once his greatest good and evil genius. In 1856 appeared his translation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe; a translation which may be said to have naturalized Poe in French literature, where he has played a role curiously like that of Baudelaire in Poe's native literature. The natural predisposition of Baudelaire, which fitted him to be the French interpreter of Poe, rendered him also peculiarly sensitive to Poe's mysteriously subtle yet rankly vigorous charms; and he showed himself as sensitively responsive to these as he had been to the exotic charms of the East. The influence upon his intellectual development was decisive and final. His indebtedness to Poe, or it might better be said, his identification with Poe, is visible not only in his paradoxical manias, but in his poetry, and in his theories of art and poetry set forth in his various essays and fugitive prose expressions, and notably in his introduction to his translations of the American author's works.

In 1857 appeared the "Fleurs du Mal" (Flowers of Evil), the volume of poems upon which Baudelaire's fame as a poet is founded. It was the result of his thirty years' devotion to the study of his art and meditation upon it. Six of the poems were suppressed by the censor of the Second Empire. This action called out, in form of protest, that fine appreciation and defense of Baudelaire's genius and best defense of his methods, by four of the foremost critics and keenest artists in poetry of Paris, which form, with the letters from Sainte-Beuve, de Custine, and Deschamps, a precious appendix to the third edition of the poems.

The name 'Flowers of Evil' is a sufficient indication of the intentions and aim of the author. Their companions in the volume are: 'Spleen and Ideal,' 'Parisian Pictures,' 'Wine,' 'Revolt,' 'Death.' The simplest description of them is that they are indescribable. They must not only be read, they must be studied repeatedly to be understood as they deserve. The paradox of their most exquisite art, and their at times most revolting revelations of the degradations and perversities of humanity, can be accepted with full appreciation of the author's meaning only by granting the same paradox to his genuine nature; by crediting him with being not only an ardent idealist of art for art's sake, but an idealist of humanity for humanity's sake; one to whom humanity, even in its lowest degradations and vilest perversions, is sublimely sacred;--one to whom life offered but one tragedy, that of human souls flying like Cain from a guilt-stricken paradise, but pursued by the remorse of innocence, and scourged by the consciousness of their own infinitude.

But the poet's own words are the best explanation of his aim and intention:--

"Poetry, though one delve ever so little into his own self,
interrogate his own soul, recall his memories of enthusiasms,
has no other end than itself; it cannot have any other aim,
and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of
the name of poem, as that which shall have been written
solely for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to
say that poetry should not ennoble manners--that its final
result should not be to raise man above vulgar interests.
That would be an evident absurdity. I say that if the poet
has pursued a moral end, he has diminished his poetic force,
and it would not be imprudent to wager that his work would be
bad. Poetry cannot, under penalty of death or forfeiture,
assimilate itself to science or morality. It has not Truth
for object, it has only itself. Truth's modes of
demonstration are different and elsewhere. Truth has nothing
to do with ballads; all that constitutes the charm, the
irresistible grace of a ballad, would strip Truth of its
authority and power. Cold, calm, impassive, the demonstrative
temperament rejects the diamonds and flowers of the muse; it
is, therefore, the absolute inverse of the poetic
temperament. Pure Intellect aims at Truth, Taste shows us
Beauty, and the Moral Sense teaches us Duty. It is true that
the middle term has intimate connection with the two
extremes, and only separates itself from Moral Sense by a
difference so slight that Aristotle did not hesitate to
class some of its delicate operations amongst the virtues.
And accordingly what, above all, exasperates the man of taste
is the spectacle of vice, is its deformity, its
disproportions. Vice threatens the just and true, and revolts
intellect and conscience; but as an outrage upon harmony, as
dissonance, it would particularly wound certain poetic minds,
and I do not think it would be scandal to consider all
infractions of moral beauty as a species of sin against
rhythm and universal prosody.

"It is this admirable, this immortal instinct of the
Beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its spectacle
as a sketch, as a correspondent of Heaven. The insatiable
thirst for all that is beyond that which life veils is the
most living proof of our immortality. It is at once by poetry
and across it, across and through music, that the soul gets a
glimpse of the splendors that lie beyond the tomb. And when
an exquisite poem causes tears to rise in the eye, these
tears are not the proof of excessive enjoyment, but rather
the testimony of a moved melancholy, of a postulation of the
nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect, which wishes to
take immediate possession, even on earth, of a
revealed paradise.

"Thus the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human
aspiration toward superior beauty; and the manifestation of
this principle is enthusiasm and uplifting of the
soul,--enthusiasm entirely independent of passion,--which is
the intoxication of heart, and of truth which is the food of
reason. For passion is a natural thing, even too natural not
to introduce a wounding, discordant tone into the domain of
pure beauty; too familiar, too violent, not to shock the pure
Desires, the gracious Melancholies, and the noble Despairs
which inhabit the supernatural regions of poetry."

Baudelaire saw himself as the poet of a decadent epoch, an epoch in which art had arrived at the over-ripened maturity of an aging civilization; a glowing, savorous, fragrant over-ripeness, that is already softening into decomposition. And to be the fitting poet of such an epoch, he modeled his style on that of the poets of the Latin decadence; for, as he expressed it for himself and for the modern school of "decadents" in French poetry founded upon his name:--

"Does it not seem to the reader, as to me, that the language
of the last Latin decadence--that supreme sigh of a robust
person already transformed and prepared for spiritual
life--is singularly fitted to express passion as it is
understood and felt by the modern world? Mysticism is the
other end of the magnet of which Catullus and his band,
brutal and purely epidermic poets, knew only the sensual
pole. In this wonderful language, solecisms and barbarisms
seem to express the forced carelessness of a passion which
forgets itself, and mocks at rules. The words, used in a
novel sense, reveal the charming awkwardness of a barbarian
from the North, kneeling before Roman Beauty."

Nature, the nature of Wordsworth and Tennyson, did not exist for Baudelaire; inspiration he denied; simplicity he scouted as an anachronism in a decadent period of perfected art, whose last word in poetry should be the apotheosis of the Artificial. "A little charlatanism is permitted even to genius," he wrote: "it is like fard on the cheeks of a naturally beautiful woman; an appetizer for the mind." Again he expresses himself:

"It seems to me, two women are presented to me, one a rustic
matron, repulsive in health and virtue, without manners,
without expression; in short, owing nothing except to simple
nature;--the other, one of those beauties that dominate and
oppress memory, uniting to her original and unfathomable
charms all the eloquence of dress; who is mistress of her
part, conscious of and queen of herself, speaking like an
instrument well tuned; with looks freighted with thought, yet
letting flow only what she would. My choice would not be
doubtful; and yet there are pedagogic sphinxes who would
reproach me as recreant to classical honor."

In music it was the same choice. He saw the consummate art and artificiality of Wagner, and preferred it to all other music, at a time when the German master was ignored and despised by a classicized musical world. In perfumes it was not the simple fragrance of the rose or violet that he loved, but musk and amber; and he said, "my soul hovers over perfumes as the souls of other men hover over music."

Besides his essays and sketches, Baudelaire published in prose a novelette; 'Fanfarlo,' 'Artificial Paradises,' opium and hashish, imitations of De Quincey's 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; and 'Little Prose Poems,' also inspired by a book, the 'Gaspard de la Nuit' of Aloysius Bertrand, and which Baudelaire thus describes:--

"The idea came to me to attempt something analogous, and to
apply to the description of modern life, or rather a modern
and more abstract life, the methods he had applied to the
painting of ancient life, so strangely picturesque. Which one
of us in his ambitious days has not dreamed of a miracle of
poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme,
supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the
lyrical movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie,
and to the assaults of conscience?"

Failing health induced Baudelaire to quit Paris and establish himself in Brussels; but he received no benefit from the change of climate, and the first symptoms of his terrible malady manifested themselves--a slowness of speech, and hesitation over words. As a slow and sententious enunciation was characteristic of him, the symptoms attracted no attention, until he fell under a sudden and violent attack. He was brought back to Paris and conveyed to a "maison de santé," where he died, after lingering several months in a paralyzed condition, motionless, speechless; nothing alive in him but thought, seeking to express itself through his eyes.

The nature of Baudelaire's malady and death was, by the public at large, accepted as confirmation of the suspicion that he was in the habit of seeking his inspiration in the excitation of hashish and opium. His friends, however, recall the fact of his incessant work, and intense striving after his ideal in art; his fatigue of body and mind, and his increasing weariness of spirit under the accumulating worries and griefs of a life for which his very genius unfitted him. He was also known to be sober in his tastes, as all great workers are. That he had lent himself more than once to the physiological and psychological experiment of hashish was admitted; but he was a rare visitor at the séances in the saloon of the Hotel Pimodau, and came as a simple observer of others. His masterly description of the hallucinations produced by hashish is accompanied by analytical and moral commentaries which unmistakably express repugnance to and condemnation of the drug:--

"Admitting for the moment," he writes, "the hypothesis of a
constitution tempered enough and strong enough to resist the
evil effects of the perfidious drug, another, a fatal and
terrible danger, must be thought of,--that of habit. He who
has recourse to a poison to enable him to think, will soon
not be able to think without the poison. Imagine the horrible
fate of a man whose paralyzed imagination is unable to work
without the aid of hashish or opium.... But man is not so
deprived of honest means of gaining heaven, that he is
obliged to invoke the aid of pharmacy or witchcraft; he need
not sell his soul in order to pay for the intoxicating
caresses and the love of houris. What is a paradise that one
purchases at the expense of one's own soul?... Unfortunate
wretches who have neither fasted nor prayed, and who have
refused the redemption of labor, ask from black magic the
means to elevate themselves at a single stroke to a
supernatural existence. Magic dupes them, and lights for them
a false happiness and a false light; while we, poets and
philosophers, who have regenerated our souls by incessant
work and contemplation, by the assiduous exercise of the will
and permanent nobility of intention, we have created for our
use a garden of true beauty. Confiding in the words that
'faith will remove mountains,' we have accomplished the one
miracle for which God has given us license."

The perfect art-form of Baudelaire's poems makes translation of them indeed a literal impossibility. The 'Little Old Women,' 'The Voyage,' 'The Voyage to Cytherea,' 'A Red-haired Beggar-girl,' 'The Seven Old Men,' and sonnet after sonnet in 'Spleen and Ideal,' seem to rise only more and more ineffable from every attempt to filter them through another language, or through another mind than that of their original, and, it would seem, one possible creator.

MEDITATION

Be pitiful, my sorrow--be thou still:
For night thy thirst was--lo, it falleth down,
Slowly darkening it veils the town,
Bringing its peace to some, to some its ill.

While the dull herd in its mad career
Under the pitiless scourge, the lash of unclean desire,
Goes culling remorse with fingers that never tire:--
My sorrow,--thy hand! Come, sit thou by me here.

Here, far from them all. From heaven's high balconies
See! in their threadbare robes the dead years cast their eyes:
And from the depths below regret's wan smiles appear.

The sun, about to set, under the arch sinks low,
Trailing its weltering pall far through the East aglow.
Hark, dear one, hark! Sweet night's approach is near.

Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

THE DEATH OF THE POOR

This is death the consoler--death that bids live again;
Here life its aim: here is our hope to be found,
Making, like magic elixir, our poor weak heads to swim round,
And giving us heart for the struggle till night makes end of the pain.

Athwart the hurricane--athwart the snow and the sleet,
Afar there twinkles over the black earth's waste,
The light of the Scriptural inn where the weary and the faint may
taste
The sweets of welcome, the plenteous feast and the secure retreat.

It is an angel, in whose soothing palms
Are held the boon of sleep and dreamy balms,
Who makes a bed for poor unclothèd men;
It is the pride of the gods--the all-mysterious room,
The pauper's purse--this fatherland of gloom,
The open gate to heaven, and heavens beyond our ken.

Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

_MUSIC_. Photogravure from a Painting by J.M. Strudwick.

MUSIC

Sweet music sweeps me like the sea
Toward my pale star,
Whether the clouds be there or all the air be free
I sail afar.
With front outspread and swelling breasts,
On swifter sail
I bound through the steep waves' foamy crests
Under night's veil.
Vibrate within me I feel all the passions that lash
A bark in distress:
By the blast I am lulled--by the tempest's wild crash
On the salt wilderness.
Then comes the dead calm--mirrored there
I behold my despair.

Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

THE BROKEN BELL

Bitter and sweet, when wintry evenings fall
Across the quivering, smoking hearth, to hear
Old memory's notes sway softly far and near,
While ring the chimes across the gray fog's pall.

Thrice blessed bell, that, to time insolent,
Still calls afar its old and pious song,
Responding faithfully in accents strong,
Like some old sentinel before his tent.

I too--my soul is shattered;--when at times
It would beguile the wintry nights with rhymes
Of old, its weak old voice at moments seems
Like gasps some poor, forgotten soldier heaves
Beside the blood-pools--'neath the human sheaves
Gasping in anguish toward their fixèd dreams.

Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

The two poems following are used by permission of the J.B. Lippincott Company.

THE ENEMY

My youth swept by in storm and cloudy gloom,
Lit here and there by glimpses of the sun;
But in my garden, now the storm is done,
Few fruits are left to gather purple bloom.

Here have I touched the autumn of the mind;
And now the careful spade to labor comes,
Smoothing the earth torn by the waves and wind,
Full of great holes, like open mouths of tombs.

And who knows if the flowers whereof I dream
Shall find, beneath this soil washed like the stream,
The force that bids them into beauty start?
O grief! O grief! Time eats our life away,
And the dark Enemy that gnaws our heart
Grows with the ebbing life-blood of his prey!

Translation of Miss Katharine Hillard.

BEAUTY

Beautiful am I as a dream in stone;
And for my breast, where each falls bruised in turn,
The poet with an endless love must yearn--
Endless as Matter, silent and alone.

A sphinx unguessed, enthroned in azure skies,
White as the swan, my heart is cold as snow;
No hated motion breaks my lines' pure flow,
Nor tears nor laughter ever dim mine eyes.

Poets, before the attitudes sublime
I seem to steal from proudest monuments,
In austere studies waste the ling'ring time;
For I possess, to charm my lover's sight,
Mirrors wherein all things are fair and bright--
My eyes, my large eyes of eternal light!

Translation of Miss Katharine Hillard.

DEATH

Ho, Death, Boatman Death, it is time we set sail;
Up anchor, away from this region of blight:
Though ocean and sky are like ink for the gale,
Thou knowest our hearts are consoled with the light.

Thy poison pour out--it will comfort us well;
Yea--for the fire that burns in our brain
We would plunge through the depth, be it heaven or hell,
Through the fathomless gulf--the new vision to gain.

Translated for the 'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE

From 'L'Art Romantique'

The crowd is his domain, as the air is that of the bird and the water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is "to wed the crowd." For the perfect _flâneur_, for the passionate observer, it is an immense pleasure to choose his home in number, change, motion, in the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from one's home and yet to be always at home; to be in the midst of the world, to see it, and yet to be hidden from it; such are some of the least pleasures of these independent, passionate, impartial minds which language can but awkwardly define. The observer is a prince who everywhere enjoys his incognito. The amateur of life makes the world his family, as the lover of the fair sex makes his family of all beauties, discovered, discoverable, and indiscoverable, as the lover of painting lives in an enchanted dreamland painted on canvas. Thus the man who is in love with all life goes into a crowd as into an immense electric battery. One might also compare him to a mirror as immense as the crowd; to a conscious kaleidoscope which in each movement represents the multiform life and the moving grace of all life's elements. He is an ego insatiably hungry for the non-ego, every moment rendering it and expressing it in images more vital than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. "Any man," said Mr. G---- one day, in one of those conversations which he lights up with intense look and vivid gesture, "any man, not overcome by a sorrow so heavy that it absorbs all the faculties, who is bored in the midst of a crowd is a fool, a fool, and I despise him."

When Mr. G---- awakens and sees the blustering sun attacking the window-panes, he says with remorse, with regret:--"What imperial order! What a trumpet flourish of light! For hours already there has been light everywhere, light lost by my sleep! How many lighted objects I might have seen and have not seen!" And then he starts off, he watches in its flow the river of vitality, so majestic and so brilliant. He admires the eternal beauty and the astonishing harmony of life in great cities, a harmony maintained in so providential a way in the tumult of human liberty. He contemplates the landscapes of the great city, landscapes of stone caressed by the mist or struck by the blows of the sun. He enjoys the fine carriages, the fiery horses, the shining neatness of the grooms, the dexterity of the valets, the walk of the gliding women, of the beautiful children, happy that they are alive and dressed; in a word, he enjoys the universal life. If a fashion, the cut of a piece of clothing has been slightly changed, if bunches of ribbon or buckles have been displaced by cockades, if the bonnet is larger and the back hair a notch lower on the neck, if the waist is higher and the skirt fuller, be sure that his eagle eye will see it at an enormous distance. A regiment passes, going perhaps to the end of the earth, throwing into the air of the boulevards the flourish of trumpets compelling and light as hope; the eye of Mr. G---- has already seen, studied, analyzed the arms, the gait, the physiognomy of the troop. Trappings, scintillations, music, firm looks, heavy and serious mustaches, all enters pell-mell into him, and in a few moments the resulting poem will be virtually composed. His soul is alive with the soul of this regiment which is marching like a single animal, the proud image of joy in obedience!

But evening has come. It is the strange, uncertain hour at which the curtains of the sky are drawn and the cities are lighted. The gas throws spots on the purple of the sunset. Honest or dishonest, sane or mad, men say to themselves, "At last the day is at an end!" The wise and the good-for-nothing think of pleasure, and each hurries to the place of his choice to drink the cup of pleasure. Mr. G---- will be the last to leave any place where the light may blaze, where poetry may throb, where life may tingle, where music may vibrate, where a passion may strike an attitude for his eye, where the man of nature and the man of convention show themselves in a strange light, where the sun lights up the rapid joys of fallen creatures! "A day well spent," says a kind of reader whom we all know, "any one of us has genius enough to spend a day that way." No! Few men are gifted with the power to see; still fewer have the power of expression. Now, at the hour when others are asleep, this man is bent over his table, darting on his paper the same look which a short time ago he was casting on the world, battling with his pencil, his pen, his brush, throwing the water out of his glass against the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt,--driven, violent, active, as if he fears that his images will escape him, a quarreler although alone,--a cudgeler of himself. And the things he has seen are born again upon the paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, singular and endowed with an enthusiastic life like the soul of the author. The phantasmagoria have been distilled from nature. All the materials with which his memory is crowded become classified, orderly, harmonious, and undergo that compulsory idealization which is the result of a childlike perception, that is to say, of a perception that is keen, magical by force of ingenuousness.

MODERNNESS

Thus he goes, he runs, he seeks. What does he seek? Certainly this man, such as I have portrayed him, this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, always traveling through the great desert of mankind, has a higher end than that of a mere observer, an end more general than the fugitive pleasure of the passing event. He seeks this thing which we may call modernness, for no better word to express the idea presents itself. His object is to detach from fashion whatever it may contain of the poetry in history, to draw the eternal from the transitory. If we glance at the exhibitions of modern pictures, we are struck with the general tendency of the artists to dress all their subjects in ancient costumes. That is obviously the sign of great laziness, for it is much easier to declare that everything in the costume of a certain period is ugly than to undertake the work of extracting from it the mysterious beauty which may be contained in it, however slight or light it may be. The modern is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent, the half of art, whose other half is the unchanging and the eternal. There was a modernness for every ancient painter; most of the beautiful portraits which remain to us from earlier times are dressed in the costumes of their times. They are perfectly harmonious, because the costumes, the hair, even the gesture, the look and the smile (every epoch has its look and its smile), form a whole that is entirely lifelike. You have no right to despise or neglect this transitory, fleeting element, of which the changes are so frequent. In suppressing it you fall by necessity into the void of an abstract and undefinable beauty, like that of the only woman before the fall. If instead of the costume of the epoch, which is a necessary element, you substitute another, you create an anomaly which can have no excuse unless it is a burlesque called for by the vogue of the moment. Thus, the goddesses, the nymphs, the sultans of the eighteenth century are portraits morally accurate.

FROM 'LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE'

EVERY ONE HIS OWN CHIMERA

Under a great gray sky, in a great powdery plain without roads, without grass, without a thistle, without a nettle, I met several men who were walking with heads bowed down.

Each one bore upon his back an enormous Chimera, as heavy as a bag of flour or coal, or the accoutrements of a Roman soldier.

But the monstrous beast was not an inert weight; on the contrary, it enveloped and oppressed the man with its elastic and mighty muscles; it fastened with its two vast claws to the breast of the bearer, and its fabulous head surmounted the brow of the man, like one of those horrible helmets by which the ancient warriors hoped to increase the terror of the enemy.

I questioned one of these men, and I asked him whither they were bound thus. He answered that he knew not, neither he nor the others; but that evidently they were bound somewhere, since they were impelled by an irresistible desire to go forward.

It is curious to note that not one of these travelers looked irritated at the ferocious beast suspended from his neck and glued against his back; it seemed as though he considered it as making part of himself. None of these weary and serious faces bore witness to any despair; under the sullen cupola of the sky, their feet plunging into the dust of a soil as desolate as that sky, they went their way with the resigned countenances of those who have condemned themselves to hope forever.

The procession passed by me and sank into the horizon's atmosphere, where the rounded surface of the planet slips from the curiosity of human sight, and for a few moments I obstinately persisted in wishing to fathom the mystery; but soon an irresistible indifference fell upon me, and I felt more heavily oppressed by it than even they were by their crushing Chimeras.

HUMANITY

At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those artificial fools, those voluntary buffoons whose duty was to make kings laugh when Remorse or Ennui possessed their souls, muffled in a glaring ridiculous costume, crowned with horns and bells, and crouched against the pedestal, raised his eyes full of tears toward the immortal goddess. And his eyes said:--"I am the least and the most solitary of human beings, deprived of love and of friendship, and therefore far below the most imperfect of the animals. Nevertheless, I am made, even I, to feel and comprehend the immortal Beauty! Ah, goddess! have pity on my sorrow and my despair!" But the implacable Venus gazed into the distance, at I know not what, with her marble eyes.

WINDOWS

He who looks from without through an open window never sees as many things as he who looks at a closed window. There is no object more profound, more mysterious, more rich, more shadowy, more dazzling than a window lighted by a candle. What one can see in the sunlight is always less interesting than what takes place behind a blind. In that dark or luminous hole life lives, dreams, suffers.

Over the sea of roofs I see a woman, mature, already wrinkled, always bent over something, never going out. From her clothes, her movement, from almost nothing, I have reconstructed the history of this woman, or rather her legend, and sometimes I tell it over to myself in tears.

If it had been a poor old man I could have reconstructed his story as easily.

And I go to bed, proud of having lived and suffered in lives not my own.

Perhaps you may say, "Are you sure that this story is the true one?" What difference does it make what is the reality outside of me, if it has helped me to live, to know who I am and what I am?

DRINK

One should be always drunk. That is all, the whole question. In order not to feel the horrible burden of Time, which is breaking your shoulders and bearing you to earth, you must be drunk without cease.

But drunk on what? On wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a moat, in the dull solitude of your chamber, you awake with your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, the wave, the star, the clock, of everything that flies, sobs, rolls, sings, talks, what is the hour? and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will answer, "It is the hour to get drunk!" Not to be the martyred slave of Time, get drunk; get drunk unceasingly. Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose.

FROM A JOURNAL

I swear to myself henceforth to adopt the following rules as the everlasting rules of my life.... To pray every morning to God, the Fountain of all strength and of all justice; to my father, to Mariette, and to Poe. To pray to them to give me necessary strength to accomplish all my tasks, and to grant my mother a life long enough to enjoy my reformation. To work all day, or at least as long as my strength lasts. To trust to God--that is to say, to Justice itself--for the success of my projects. To pray again every evening to God to ask Him for life and strength, for my mother and myself. To divide all my earnings into four parts--one for my daily expenses, one for my creditors, one for my friends, and one for my mother. To keep to principles of strict sobriety, and to banish all and every stimulant.

LORD BEACONSFIELD

(1804-1881)

BY ISA CARRINGTON CABELL

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, born in London, December, 1804; died there April 19th, 1881. His paternal ancestors were of the house of Lara, and held high rank among Hebrew-Spanish nobles till the tribunal of Torquemada drove them from Spain to Venice. There, proud of their race and origin, they styled themselves, "Sons of Israel," and became merchant princes. But the city's commerce failing, the grandfather of Benjamin Disraeli removed to London with a diminished but comfortable fortune. His son, Isaac Disraeli, was a well-known literary man, and the author of 'The Curiosities of Literature.' On account of the political and social ostracism of the Jews in England, he had all his family baptized into the Church of England; but with Benjamin Disraeli especially, Christianity was never more than Judaism developed. His belief and his affections were in his own race.

Benjamin, like most Jewish youths, was educated in private schools, and at seventeen entered a solicitor's office. At twenty-two he published 'Vivian Grey' (London, 1826), which readable and amusing take-off of London society gave him great and instantaneous notoriety. Its minute descriptions of the great world, its caricatures of well-known social and political personages, its magnificent diction,--too magnificent to be taken quite seriously,--excited inquiry; and the great world was amazed to discover that the impertinent observer was not one of themselves, but a boy in a lawyer's office. To add to the audacity, he had conceived himself the hero of these diverting situations, and by his cleverness had outwitted age, beauty, rank, diplomacy itself.

Statesmen, poets, fine ladies, were all genuinely amused; and the author bade fair to become a lion, when he fell ill, and was compelled to leave England for a year or more, which he spent in travel on the Continent and in Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine. His visit to the birthplace of his race made an impression on him that lasted through his life and literature. It is embodied in his 'Letters to His Sister' (London, 1843), and the autobiographical novel 'Contarini Fleming' (1833), in which he turned his adventures into fervid English, at a guinea a volume. But although the spirit of poesy, in the form of a Childe Harold, stalks rampant through the romance, there is both feeling and fidelity to nature whenever he describes the Orient and its people. Then the bizarre, brilliant _poseur_ forgets his rôle, and reveals his highest aspirations.

When Disraeli returned to London he became the fashion. Everybody, from the prime minister to Count D'Orsay, had read his clever novels. The poets praised them, Lady Blessington invited him to dine, Sir Robert Peel was "most gracious."

But literary success could never satisfy Disraeli's ambition: a seat in Parliament was at the end of his rainbow. He professed himself a radical, but he was a radical in his own sense of the term; and like his own Sidonia, half foreigner, half looker-on, he felt himself endowed with an insight only possible to, an outsider, an observer without inherited prepossessions.

Several contemporary sketches of Disraeli at this time have been preserved. His dress was purposed affectation; it led the beholder to look for folly only: and when the brilliant flash came, it was the more startling as unexpected from such a figure. Lady Dufferin told Mr. Motley that when she met Disraeli at dinner, he wore a black-velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several rings outside, and long black ringlets rippling down his shoulders. She told him he had made a fool of himself by appearing in such a dress, but she did not guess why it had been adopted. Another contemporary says of him, "When duly excited, his command of language was wonderful, his power of sarcasm unsurpassed."

He was busy making speeches and writing political squibs for the next two years; for Parliament was before his eyes. "He knew," says Froude, "he had a devil of a tongue, and was unincumbered by the foolish form of vanity called modesty." 'Ixion in Heaven,' 'The Infernal Marriage,' and 'Popanilla' were attempts to rival both Lucian and Swift on their own ground. It is doubtful, however, whether he would have risked writing 'Henrietta Temple' (1837) and 'Venetia' (1837), two ardent love stories, had he not been in debt; for notoriety as a novelist is not always a recommendation to a constituency.

In 'Henrietta' he found an opportunity to write the biography of a lover oppressed by duns. It is a most entertaining novel even to a reader who does not read for a new light on the great statesman, and is remarkable as the beginning of what is now known as the "natural" manner; a revolt, his admirers tell us, from the stilted fashion of making love that then prevailed in novels.

'Venetia' is founded on the characters of Byron and Shelley, and is amusing reading. The high-flown language incrusted with the gems of rhetoric excites our risibilities, but it is not safe to laugh at Disraeli; in his most diverting aspects he has a deep sense of humor, and he who would mock at him is apt to get a whip across the face at an unguarded moment. Mr. Disraeli laughs in his sleeve at many things, but first of all at the reader.

He failed in his canvass for his seat at High Wycombe, but he turned his failure to good account, and established a reputation for pluck and influence. "A mighty independent personage," observed Charles Greville, and his famous quarrel with O'Connell did him so little harm that in 1837 he was returned for Maidstone. His first speech was a failure. The word had gone out that he was to be put down. At last, finding it useless to persist, he said he was not surprised at the reception he had experienced. He had begun several things many times and had succeeded at last. Then pausing, and looking indignantly across the house, he exclaimed in a loud and remarkable tone, "I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me."

He married the widow of his patron, Wyndham Lewis, in 1838. This put him in possession of a fortune, and gave him the power to continue his political career. His radicalism was a thing of the past. He had drifted from Conservatism, with Peel for a leader, to aristocratic socialism; and in 1844, 1845, and 1847 appeared the Trilogy, as he styled the novels 'Coningsby,' 'Tancred,' and 'Sibyl.' Of the three, 'Coningsby' will prove the most entertaining to the modern reader. The hero is a gentleman, and in this respect is an improvement on Vivian Grey, for his audacity is tempered by good breeding. The plot is slight, but the scenes are entertaining. The famous Sidonia, the Jew financier, is a favorite with the author, and betrays his affection and respect for race. Lord Monmouth, the wild peer, is a rival of the "Marquis of Steyne" and worthy of a place in 'Vanity Fair'; the political intriguers are photographed from life, the pictures of fashionable London tickle both the vanity and the fancy of the reader.

'Sibyl' is too clearly a novel with a motive to give so much pleasure. It is a study of the contrasts between the lives of the very rich and the hopelessly poor, and an attempt to show the superior condition of the latter when the Catholic Church was all-powerful in England and the king an absolute monarch.