Essays from the Chap-Book - Various 2 стр.

Is it not unfair to take any book, certainly any great piece of literature, and deliberately sit down to pass judgment upon it? Great books are not addressed to the critical judgment, but to the life, the soul. They need to slide into ones life earnestly, and find him with his guard down, his doors open, his attitude disinterested. The reader is to give himself to them, as they give themselves to him; there must be self-sacrifice. We find the great books when we are young, eager, receptive. After we grow hard and critical we find few great books. A recent French critic says: It seems to me works of art are not made to be judged, but to be loved, to please, to dissipate the cares of real life. It is precisely by wishing to judge them that one loses sight of their true significance.

How can a man learn to know himself? inquires Goethe. Never by reflection, only by action. Is not this a half-truth? One can only learn his powers of action by action, and his powers of thought by thinking. He can only learn whether or not he has power to command, to lead, to be an orator or legislator, by actual trial. Has he courage, self-control, self-denial, fortitude, etc.? In life alone can he find out. Action tests his moral virtues, reflection his intellectual. If he would define himself to himself he must think. We are weak in action, says Renan, by our best qualities; we are strong in action by will and a certain one-sidedness. The moment Byron reflects, says Goethe, he is a child. Byron had no self-knowledge. We have all known people who were ready and sure in action who did not know themselves at all. Your weakness or strength as a person comes out in action; your weakness or strength as an intellectual force comes out in reflection.

Verlaine: A Feminine Appreciation

By

Mrs. Reginald de Koven

IN early days, when the triumphs and the torments of his overwhelming vitality swept at will across his soul, Paul Verlaine was sometimes god and sometimes satyr. From aspiring altitudes of spiritual emotions he swung like a pendulum to unspoken depths of vice.

The world spirit doubly charged his strange and terrible personality, pouring into it the essences and intuitions of the body and the soul. Into the alembic were dissolved the entities of Baudelaire and Villon, floating still upon the earth.

Then the whole was set to the vibration of a new rhythm as strange and as remote from the consciousness of men as the songs of inter-lunar space, so that his utterances with the naturalness of a birds song or an infants lisp should have the accents of melody undreamed of. And this is not all strangest and most tragically terrible in its possibilities of pain the chrism of conscience burns his sinister brow. The phantom of the immortal soul drives him into the outer darkness.

What are the undiscovered laws of spiritual heredity and of a poetic paternity, such as are suggested in the likeness of Baudelaire and Verlaine to their prototype Villon? The secret is yet to find. It is all as strange as the mystery of Bernhardts strayed existence in this modern day. An emanation from some Egyptian tomb, wild spirit of genius and of vice is she, vampire-like, inhuman, wandering among a people who have thrilled to her voice and wondered, not knowing whence she came.

Behind them both Baudelaire with his luminous, despairing eyes, and Verlaine with his terrible glabrous head the madcap figure of Villon shines out of a cloud of time, and we hear the sound of his reckless laughter and the music of his tears.

But if the relation between these two moderns and this singing renegade of the Middle Ages is that of mysterious paternity, between Baudelaire and Verlaine there is a brotherhood which is as wonderful as an oriental dream of metempsychosis.

Baudelaires verses, read in early youth, so saturated and possessed the new-born soul of Paul Verlaine that he became more a reincarnation of Baudelaire than a separate existence. The passions and the madness of Baudelaire became his own he heard the same strange music saw the same visions. Incarnate of the mad poet, Verlaine, his second soul, fled a second slave in the footsteps of the same strange goddess beauty in decay.

And where one had madly followed, so the other fled, enamoured of her fatal loveliness, wherever her fickle steps should lead. Sometimes she would escape them, disappearing in mists and mysterious darkness, and sometimes they would come upon her suddenly in glimpses of green light, dancing strange frivolous steps, and the color of her robes would be mingled rose and mystic blue, and the halo of her head the phosphor of decay.

And she has led them through strange paths into the dwelling-place of death, and where love and life live together, for these two are never separated, and, through many places of terror and delight, to that ultimate spot, occult, remote, where dwells the soul of woman.

There the youngest of her slaves found himself one day outstripping his brother, and saw with living eyes the mystery,  and thenceforward he was no more Paul Verlaine; he was the prophet and interpreter of woman.

To him alone has the secret been revealed; to him alone, the mantle of deceit she wears, the slavish dress of the centuries, is no concealment. He has seen, has known, and he understands. The very worst thing in the world, says an unknown writer, is the soul of a woman. Forced to inaction, and fed on lies, her principal power, founded on mans weakness, curiosity, and the imagination of the intellect, lead her in many wandering ways. Tasting but few of the actual joys, the triumphs, and the trials of life, from the harem of her slavery her fancy has wandered with the winds. In her mind the unique and fatal experimenter, she has known all crimes, all horrors, as well as martyrdoms and joys. And this, while her gentle feminine hands have ministered to suffering, her voice has cheered, her smile has illumined, and her divine patience has endured.

Consider these lines their spiritual intuition is the parallel of Wordsworth in his limpid moods; their knowledge, like a single glow of summer lightning, illumines all the darkened land as the glimmering patient light of Bourgets candle in cycles of encyclopedics will never do.

Behold the woman!

The appealing weakness of women is the first note, invariably stronger than command and then the reference to their hands. This is very characteristic of Verlaine they haunt him.

The last is a very poignant line and again in Ariettes Oubliées,

Then comes the reflection as to the eyes of women, profoundly true and observant, contained in the last two verses of the first stanza:

Then the next stanza:

Here is the creature who could be both nurse and courtesan concise and convincing classification.

Then he continues relating how, as man as well as poet, he has vibrated to the clear soprano of

How he has dreamed over the tender sentiment of her twilight song, and been melted and conquered by the still greater, more beautiful appeal of the emotional soul for love and understanding,  beau sanglot indeed!

The last is a very poignant line and again in Ariettes Oubliées,

Then comes the reflection as to the eyes of women, profoundly true and observant, contained in the last two verses of the first stanza:

Then the next stanza:

Here is the creature who could be both nurse and courtesan concise and convincing classification.

Then he continues relating how, as man as well as poet, he has vibrated to the clear soprano of

How he has dreamed over the tender sentiment of her twilight song, and been melted and conquered by the still greater, more beautiful appeal of the emotional soul for love and understanding,  beau sanglot indeed!

Then comes the wonderful third stanza, and its denunciation of mans brutality and selfishness.

Here is the appeal for sentiment, for the love of the spirit, choked in the throats of dumb and suffering women.

Quelque chose du cœur, he repeats and persuades, enfantin et subtil.

From him, the convict poet, from this heart rotten with all the sins of fancy and of deed, bursts this plea as naive as it is earnest, for the spiritual in love for sentiment, the essence of the soul. Strange anomaly stranger still that it should be he who has understood.

Three lines more, from an early poem called Vœu, of such condensed significance and biting truth as lacks a parallel.

What a portrait, typical and individual jamais étonnée, my sisters, what an accusation!

Verlaine is dead. The last shred of that ruined soul which has for years been rotting away in chance Parisian brasseries, has loosened its hold upon life and slipped into the unknown; but the poetry he has left behind him, with its sighs and bitter sobbings, and its few gleams of beauty and of joy, contains the essence of his strange nature.

Although repudiating the responsibility of the position, he was the founder and leader of that school of poetic expression which has most importantly distinguished the end of his century.

Half faun, half satyr, his nature was allied to baseness and brutal animalism, but possessed a strange and childish naïveté which remained with him to the last, and a spirit remotely intact in the chaos of his wayward senses, whence issued songs of matchless purity and inimitable music.

Degeneration

By

Alice Morse Earle

I WRITE this paper as a solemn, an earnest warning, an appeal to the unsuspecting and serene general public not to read Dr. Max Nordaus book Degeneration. I give this word of admonition with much the same spirit of despairing yet powerless misery as might animate the warning of any slave to a despised habit, a hashish-eater, an opium smoker, an alcoholic inebriate. I have read this book of Dr. Nordaus, and through it I am become the unwilling victim of a most deplorable, most odious, most blighting habit,  that of searching for degenerates. I do not want or like to do this, but I do it instinctively, mechanically. The habit has poisoned all the social relations of my life, has entered into my views of the general public; it has sapped my delight in novelty, choked my admiration of genius, deadened my enthusiasm, silenced my opinions; and it has brought these wretched conditions not only into my regard of matters and persons of the present times, but retrospectively it has tainted the glories of history. All this is exceeded by the introspective blight of the book through exacting a miserable and mortifying self-examination, which leads to the despairing, the unyielding conclusion that I am myself a degenerate.

The book is, unfortunately, so explicit in explanation as to lure every reader to amateur investigation. Indeed, such a vast array of mental and physical traits are enumerated as stigmata the marks of the beast as to paralyze the thoughtless, and to make the judicious grieve. Our mental traits we can ofttimes conceal from public view, our moral traits we always conceal, but many of our physical characteristics cannot, alas, be wholly hidden. Dr. Nordau enumerates many physical stigmata, all interesting, but perhaps the most prominent, most visible one, is the degenerate malformation of the ear.

I was present recently, at an interesting function whereat the subject of the evening was discussion of this book Degeneration. In the course of a brilliant and convincing address one of the lecturers chanced to name that most hateful and evident stigma, the ear-mark, so to speak, of the accursed. Though simple were his words, as subtle as sewer-gas was his poison; as all-pervading and penetrating as the sandstorm in the desert, it entered every brain in the room. I speedily and furtively glanced from side to side at my neighbors ears, only to find them regarding mine with expressions varying from inquisitiveness through surprise and apprehension, to something closely approaching disgust. After the discussion was ended, friends advanced to speak with me; they shook hands, not looking with pleasant greeting into my eyes, but openly staring at my ears.

Now, that would be necessarily most abhorrent to every one,  to quote Spenser:

And it is specially offensive to me it would be anyway, for my ears are not handsome; but worse still must be admitted, they are not normal. They answer every purpose of hearing and of restraining my hat from slipping down over my eyes and on my neck, which is all I have demanded of them hitherto. But now I know that as emblems of my mental and moral characteristics they are wholly remiss, even degraded. They are .079 larger than normality; they stand out from my head at an angle which exhibits 2° too much obtusity; the lobule displays .17 too little pendulosity; and, worst of all, the fossa scaphoida of my pinna is basely unconvoluted. I am sore ashamed of all this. I think of having the twin base betrayers of my degenerate nature shaved off in spots, and already I tie them close to my head at night in a feeble attempt at improvement. But I am not in my callow youth; I fear they have not been bent in the way they should be inclined, that their degeneracy is irremediable.

It is not through physical stigmata alone that I find myself branded. I find that I am impulsive, I have a predilection for inane reverie, and for search for the bases of phenomena all sad traits. Worst of all, I have the irresistible desire of the degenerate to accumulate useless trifles. Nordau says, It is a stigmata of degeneration, and has had invented for it the name oniomania or buying craze. The oniomaniac is simply unable to pass by any lumber without feeling an impulse to acquire. When I read that sentence I glanced guiltily at my cabinets of old china well, I could use it on the table and thus make it unstigmatic; at my Dutch silver I might melt it up and sell it; my books, my autographs, my photographs, all may find some excuse; but how can I palliate my book-plates, or ever live down having gone for a year through every village, city, and town where I chanced or sought to wander, asking at every jewellers, silversmiths, and watch-repairers, Have you any bridges of old verge watches? I fear those watch-bridges stamp me an oniomaniac. And am I wholly free from Lombrosos graphomania? Have I not an insane desire to write? I conceal my obsession, but it ever influences me. I may confess also (since I confess at all) that I have rupophobia (fear of dirt), iophobia (fear of poison), nosophobia (fear of sickness), belenophobia (fear of needles especially on the floor), and one or two other wretched obsessions, particularly an inordinate love for animals, upon which I had hitherto rather bridled as the mark of a tender nature.