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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. Stapfer¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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!¹²
 

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.¹³
 

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,"¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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's¹⁶ 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;¹⁷ 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?¹⁸ 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.

SUCCESS AND THE IDEA OF BEAUTY

I

In one of his Paradoxes, where he at times has a touch of Heine's irony or of Schopenhauer's wit, Max Nordau has sketched the Machiavellian plan of a school of success. The reverse of the usual morality would be taught there, and not virtue, but the art of arriving. This school already exists. It is life. Precocious eyes and ears take in its teachings from adolescence. There are young men who consecrate themselves to success, like others to the priesthood or to glory. Are they unreasonable? No. And contemptible? Why? Writing, singing, sculpturing are acts. Thinking, even in the silence of the night and in the depth of a dungeon, is an act. But what act is there that has not for its end its own accomplishment? The reasoner who has convinced himself will necessarily wish to persuade others; and the poet who admires himself, to force others to share his enthusiasm. Those who are contented with an intimate or restricted approbation are perhaps wise, but they will not be numbered among the strong. Though timid, though disdainful, the dreamer wishes the glory of dreaming, and he would dream with delight before throngs rapturously contemplating his eyes lost in an ocean of dreams and of nonsense. That would be success. Success has something precise which soothes and nourishes. It is a repast. It is a fact. It is the final goal.

Success is a fact in itself, and quite aside from the word or the act which it accompanies. The assassin who has accomplished his crime, step by step, experiences other joys than that of slaked avidity. He finds, in short, that success has declared for him; and, all pursuit thrown off his track, we understand very well the state of mind that Barbey d'Aurevilly has dared to describe. Yet crime, unless of a political order, is seldom publicly applauded in our civilizations, as among the Dyaks of Borneo, or the subjects of the Old Man of the Mountain. That is why, in spite of the celebrated irony, we shall not consider assassination "as one of the fine arts." It should at least be classed among the arts whose success is their one and only end, and which attach much less importance to their initial designation than to what they are called at the end. But that is not the subject of this essay, which is very serious, and whose words will all be carefully weighed. It will deal exclusively with works of art and, in particular, with literary works.

Success, then, is a fact; but, in the case of those acts which concern us here, it is a contingent fact and one that does not change the essence of the act itself. In this respect, I should be inclined to compare success to consciousness – a torch which, lighted within us, illumines our actions and our thoughts, but has no more influence on their nature than, when the moon is shining, the shadow of a passing train has on its speed. Consciousness determines no act. Success does not create a work, but sheds such light upon it that some trace of it almost always remains in the memory of men. A writer does not become Racine because he has been applauded before the footlights, and he remains Racine, even if Phèdre be played six nights in succession to empty boxes;¹⁹ but he becomes Pradon, and that is a good deal. To be Pradon through the centuries is to live with a glory dark and disagreeable, sad and vain. Quite so, but it is scarcely less precarious than the life which we call real. Pradon is at once ridiculous and illustrious. It is impossible to tell the story of Racine's career without bringing his name into it. We search his works in order to understand that renown of a day which has been prolonged over so many morrows. It cannot be doubted; Pradon had almost no talent, though he was fairly adroit in his trade as a dramatic constructor. He was, as the journalists say, a man of the theatre. Critics have even gone so far as to claim²⁰ that, in order to have a perfect Phèdre, the play should have been written by Racine on Pradon's plan. That is absurd; but every success has its cause. The cabal explains nothing. The Duchesse de Bouillon would not have risked the battle on a worthless card. Pradon was known. His tragedy of Pyrame et Thisbé had been applauded. Ten years after Phèdre, and without any cabal, his Régulus was praised to the skies. He was therefore destined to enjoy a moderate reputation, such as Solyman, for example, brought its author, the Abbé Abeille, about the same date.

Was it fortunate for this commonplace poet to have encountered the Duchesse de Bouillon? Anticipating our modern methods, this terrible woman had hired the boxes of the two theatres, filling those at one and leaving the others empty. To-day, she would have bought the newspapers in addition, but no one knows how much she paid the cackling of the newsmongers and the pamphleteers. It was a masterpiece in its way, since it succeeded marvellously; but what did Pradon gain by it? After much abuse, an ocean of posthumous blame. Not a day passes that some professor does not treat him as if he were a Damiens or a Ravaillac. Is immortality a sufficient reward for such treatment? Is shameful immortality preferable to oblivion? First of all, we should dismiss the shame, and ignore the abuse. Every success inflames the fire of hatred and deepens the descending smoke. That does not matter. Hate is an opinion. So is abuse; and so are the words that cast infamy. Success is a fact. The Duchesse de Bouillon could not change the essential value of the two Phèdres, any more than she could transmute "vile lead" into pure gold; but she could veil the gold and gild the lead, and she could force posterity to repeat her favourite's name. That was her work. It was well done and it has remained memorable. No one knew at the time which to admire of these two paintings with like frames. Pradon's friends were as powerful as Racine's. The latter had Boileau, the former Sanlecque, his sometimes successful rival. But Boileau's authority faded before that of Madame des Houlières, representing polite society and the ruelles. Thanks to the quarrel of the Sonnets, even wit ranged itself on Pradon's side, for the Duc de Nevers' still conserves to-day the most amusing malice. Molière, who detested Racine, and had already lent his theatre to a parody of Andromaque, would, no doubt, have favoured Pradon. His death spared the friends of sound letters that scandal. It was, therefore, a reasonable illusion around which success crystallized, and the witlings had no cause to blush for the part which they played. It is a pious lie on the part of the historians of French literature to pretend that the true public avenged Racine for the desert organized by Madame de Bouillon. The boxes of the Hôtel de Bourgogne had been hired for six days, while Racine's Phèdre had but seven performances. The public had understood. It obeyed success as dogs obey the sound of the whistle.

The reason is that success, though organized by fraudulent means, possesses a powerful attraction for the throng, even the literary throng. Assuredly, the theatrical public was, in 1677, far superior, in point of intelligence, education and taste, to the average public to-day. Yet it is seen applauding decidedly commonplace plays, while disdaining those of the first quality. The reason is that success, and especially theatrical success, can spring spontaneously from an accident, – from the agreeable face of an actress, from a fine gesture, from a well-timed bit of applause, from the caprice or emotion of a small group of spectators. The herd follows – since all men who come together are herds – and history numbers one more name and date.

The Americans – of the North, for in the South they have more finesse – never hesitate before success. What dramatic poem is it whose success has surpassed the enthusiasm aroused even by the Cid and by Hernani? Cyrano de Bergerac. Then this work is worthy of admiration, and they have it, as well as l'Aiglon, learned by heart in the schools where, though themselves illiterate, they cultivate learned wives. To repeat once more my real thought, I do not find that unreasonable. Let us not confound history, which is a complete or at least a consecutive novel, with the present, which appears to us in fragments, like a newspaper torn into a thousand pieces. How are these to be arranged, in what order? We have not the slightest idea. Our wisest and sanest contemporary judgment will be ridiculous in twenty years, because we lacked patience to reconstitute the entire sheet, or because the fire or the wind snatched away a number of the tiny squares. In this hazy state of our ideas, success gleams like an electric moon. Something undeniable is shining – something that the professors of philosophy call a criterium. But let us call it simply a fact, just as a flower is a fact, or a shower, or a conflagration. And what can be opposed to this fact, to contradict it? Almost nothing – the product of a judgment, certain men's notion of literary beauty. Moreover, this opposition is not radical, since beauty does not at all, in principle, exclude the chances of success. No bets should be placed on beauty. It would be imprudent to back her on even terms; but there are historic instances where the most beautiful work has also been the most warmly welcomed. In such cases success is adorable, like the sun which comes at just the right moment to ripen the crops, or the storm to fill the brooks and springs to overflowing. What is a beautiful book of which not a single copy remains known to us? What was an armless Venus before M. de Marcellus had summoned her from the abysses? Success is like daylight and, once again, if it does not create the work, it completes it by rending the shadowy veil by which it is encompassed.

There is another consideration which enhances still further the value of success, namely that, if the purpose of a work of art be to please, the greater will be the number of its conquests and the better this purpose will have been accomplished. Art has certainly a function, since it exists. It satisfies a need of our nature. To say that this need is, precisely, the artistic taste, is to say that a man likes coffee or tobacco because they satisfy his taste for coffee or tobacco. It is to say nothing at all – not even nonsense. It is to utter words without any meaning whatsoever. Things do not correspond with this simplicity in life – with this amiable relation of the kettle to its cover. Let us leave such explanations to the Christian philosophy of final causes. The purpose of art being to please, success is at least a first evidence in favour of the work. The idea of pleasing is very complex. We shall see later what it contains; but the word may serve us provisionally. Then this work pleases. A tower has suddenly arisen accompanied by the passionate plaudits of the crowd. That is the fact. This tower should be demolished. That is not easy, since by a singular magic almost all the battering-rams brought against it turn into buttresses which add their weight to the solidity of the monument. This monument must be convinced that it does not exist, this crowd that its admiration has not moved all those stones, that it lies; that it is hallucinated, or that it is imbecile. This cannot be done. It finds the tower beautiful. What can we answer, except "Yes, it is beautiful"?