Kitabı oku: «Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas», sayfa 8
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ AND THE IDEA OF DECADENCE
Decadence: A very convenient word for ignorant pedagogues; a vague word behind which our laziness and lack of curiosity concerning the law seek shelter.
BAUDELAIRE:Letter to JulesJanin.
I
Abruptly, about 1885, the idea of decadence entered French literature. After serving to glorify or to ridicule a whole group of poets, it had perched, as it were, upon a single head. Stéphane Mallarmé was the prince of this ironical, almost injurious realm, as it would have been, had the word itself been rightly understood and employed. But, by an eccentricity which is a Latin trait, the academic world, in keeping with its normal but unwholesome horror when confronted with new tendencies, called thus the fever for originality which tormented a generation. M. Mallarmé, rendered responsible for the acts of rebellion which he had encouraged, appeared to the innocent ass-drivers who accompany but do not conduct the caravan a redoubtable Aladdin, assassin of the sound principles of universal imitation.
These are, after all, thoroughly literary habits. They have been flourishing now for nearly three centuries, and the most celebrated revolts have hardly lopped their branches – have never uprooted them. No sooner had the Romantic insolences subsided than the poet was forced to crawl, half-smothered, under the ancient greenwood which furnishes ferules.
These habits are also thoroughly Latin. The Romans, so long as they were Romans only, knew nothing of individualism. Their civilization offers the spectacle of a fine social animality. Emulation with them aimed at likeness, just as, with us, it aims at unlikeness. Once they possessed five or six poets – successful off-shoots of Hellenic grafting – they refused to admit any others, and it is quite possible that, their social, racial instinct dominating the instinct of freedom and individuality, no poet of fresh inspiration was born to them for four or five centuries. They had the emperor and they had Virgil, and they obeyed both equally until the Christian revolt and the barbarian invasion joined hands above the Capitol. Literary liberty, like all other liberties, is born of the union of consciousness and strength. The day when Saint Ambrose, writing his hymns, disregarded the Horatian principles should be memorable, for it marks unmistakably the birth of a new mentality.
Just as the political history of the Romans has furnished us with the conception of historical decadence, so the history of their literature has furnished us with the conception of literary decadence – the two faces of a single idea; for it has been easy to indicate the coincidence of the two movements, and to inculcate the belief that there was a necessary connection between the two. Montesquieu owes his fame to the fact that he was particularly the dupe of this illusion.
Savages find it very difficult to admit the possibility of natural death. For them, every death is a murder. They have not the slightest sense of law; they live in the domain of the accidental. It has been agreed to call this state of mind inferior, and it is inferior, though the notion of rigid law is just as false and as dangerous as its negation. The only absolutely necessary laws are natural laws, which can neither vary nor change. In the case of social and political evolution, not only are there no necessary laws, but there are no very general laws even. Either these so-called laws, confused with the facts which they explain, amount to nothing but wise and honourable assertions, or else they declare, though over-emphatically, the very principle of change. Empires, then, are born, grow and die. Social combinations are unstable. Human groups have, at different epochs, different powers of cohesion. New affinities appear and are propagated. Here there would be the material for a treatise on social mechanics, if the writer did not insist too rigorously on squaring his philosophy with the reality of unexpected catastrophes. For the unexpected must be left a place which is sometimes the throne whence irony flashes and laughs. The idea of decadence is, then, merely the idea of natural death. Historians admit no other. To explain the taking of Byzantium by the Turks, they make us listen to the murmur of theological quarrels, and the crack of the Blue's whip in the circus. Longchamps leads to Sedan, no doubt, but Epsom leads to Waterloo also. The long decadence of crumbling empires is one of the most singular illusions in history. If certain empires have died of sickness or of old age, the greater number, on the contrary, have succumbed to violent death, in the plenitude of their physical power, in the full force of their intellectual vigour.
Then, too, intelligence is personal, and no reasonable relation can be established between the power of a people and the genius of an individual. Neither Greek literature, nor the literatures of the Middle Ages, correspond to stable and powerful political institutions, Greek, Italian or French; and it is precisely now, when their material power has become negligible, that the Scandinavian kingdoms have decked themselves with original talents. It would, perhaps, be nearer the truth to say that political decadence is the condition most favourable for intellectual flowering. It is when a Gustavus Adolphus and a Charles XII are no longer possible, that an Ibsen and a Björnson appear. In the same way, the fall of Napoleon seemed a signal for nature to clothe herself again joyously in green, and to put forth her most magnificent growths. Goethe was the contemporary of his country's ruin. In order to exercise and satisfy our tendencies towards historical scepticism, we should not, however, fail to oppose to these examples the phenomena of those doubly glorious epochs of which the pompous century of Louis XIV is the venerated model. After this, a few minutes' reflection will force us to adopt a somewhat different opinion from that which passes current persistently in text-books and in conversation.
Bossuet was the first to whom it occurred to judge universal history – or what he naïvely regarded as such – in accordance with the principles of Biblical Judaism. He saw the fall of all those empires upon which Jehovah had laid his heavy hand. This is the idea of decadence explained by that of punishment. Montesquieu's more complicated philosophy is perhaps even more puerile. It is impossible to name without a sort of disgust a historian who dates the decadence of Rome from the dawn of those admirable centuries of world-peace which, perhaps, constitute the one happy epoch of civilized humanity. The meaning of the words must be scrutinized closely. Then it will be perceived that they have no sense, and that memorable writers used them all their lives without understanding them. But however debatable, or at least however vague, it may be, the general idea of decadence is clear and distinct compared with the more restricted notion of literary decadence.
From Racine to Vigny, France produced no great poet. This is a fact. Such a period is certainly one of literary decadence; yet we should not go further than the fact itself, or attribute to it an absurd character of logic and necessity. Poetry was asleep in the eighteenth century, through lack of poets; but this failure is not the result of a too free flowering prior to that period. It is what it is, and nothing more. If we call it decadence, we admit the existence of a sort of mysterious organism – a being, a woman – Poetry – who is born, brings forth, and dies, at almost regular intervals, after the manner of human beings. This is an agreeable conception – subject for a dissertation or lecture – but one which should be omitted from a discussion, which aims only at the anatomy of an idea.
The principal trait of eighteenth century poetry is its spirit of imitation. That century was Roman in its cultivation of this spirit. It imitated furiously, gracefully, tenderly, ironically, stupidly. It was "Chinese" as well as Roman. There were "models." The word was imperative. The poet was not obliged to describe the impression produced upon him by life; he had to watch Racine and scale the mountain. What a singular psychology! The same philosopher who sapped the idea of respect in politics, replastered and whitewashed it anew in literature. There were critics. While Goethe was writing Werther, they were comparing Gilbert and Boileau. It was a degradation. Must we seek a cause for it? That would be vain. To attempt to explain why no poet was born in France for a hundred years, with the exception of Delille29 and of Chénier, would lead necessarily to explaining the birth of Ronsard, Théophile or Racine also. We know nothing about it, and nothing can be known. Stripped of its mysticism, its necessity, all its historical genealogy, the idea of literary decadence is reduced to a purely negative notion – to the simple idea of absence. This sounds so simple that one scarcely dares to express it; but, when superior intelligences are lacking at a given moment, the multiplication of mediocrities makes itself acutely and actively felt; and, as the mediocre man is an imitator, the epochs that have justly been called decadent are nothing but epochs of imitation. In the last analysis, the idea of decadence is identical with the idea of imitation.
II
Yet, in the case of Mallarmé and of a literary group, the idea of decadence has been assimilated to its exact opposite – the idea of innovation. Such judgments have made a particular impression upon men of one generation because, doubtless, we ourselves were involved and foolishly flouted by "right-minded" critics; they were, however, merely the clumsy and decrepit modern version of those decrees with which the mandarins of every age have sought to curse and to crush the new serpents breaking their shell under the ironical eye of their old mother. Diabolical intelligence laughs at exorcisms, and the University has been no more able than the Church to disinfect it with its holy water. In the past a man rose up – buckler of the faith – against heresies and novelties. He was the Jesuit. To-day it is too often the Professor who arises as champion of the rules. Here again we have the antinomy which surprises us in Voltaire and the Voltairian of yesterday. The same man, so courageous where justice or political liberty is concerned, recoils the moment it is a matter of literary novelty or liberty. When, reaching Tolstoy and Ibsen, he alludes to their glory, he adds (in a note): "Are these reputations – especially Ibsen's – firmly established? The question whether the author of Ghosts is a mystifier or a genius has not yet been settled."30 Such, confronted with the unknown – with the not yet seen or read – is the attitude of a writer who, in the very volume here quoted, proves that he possesses praiseworthy independence of judgment. I need not add that, in his pages, the "decadents" are scouted on every occasion. How, after this, can we be surprised at the dull raillery of lesser minds? A new way of stating the eternal truths is always a scandal for men – especially for men who are too well-educated. They feel a sort of fright, and to recover their assurance they have recourse to denial, to abuse, to derision. It is the natural attitude of the human animal in the presence of physical danger. But how have we come to regard as a peril every real innovation in art or in literature? Why, above all, is this assimilation one of the maladies peculiar to our time – perhaps the gravest of all, since it tends to restrict movement and to obstruct life?
For years Delacroix and Puvis de Chavannes, so different in their genius, were hooted and rejected by the juries. Under evidently contradictory pretexts, a single explanation is discovered – originality. The guardians of art feel themselves menaced by a work which reveals almost no trace of previous methods – one not visibly attached to something known and already understood. Each of them reacts to the provocation according to his own peculiar temperament. Formulae change, too, periodically. The eighteenth century considered non-imitation a breach of taste, and that was a serious matter at a time when Voltaire was erecting a temple, which was only a templet, to this sprightly god. For ten years, and up to a few weeks ago, artists and writers who refused to rifle the masters were branded decadents or symbolists. This last insult prevailed in the end, being verbally more obscure and consequently easier to handle; it contains, moreover, precisely the same abhorrent notion of non-imitation.
It was said long ago, considerably before M. Tarde had developed his theory of social philosophy, that "imitation rules the world of men, as abstraction that of things." This law is very evident in the particular domain of art and of literature. Literary history is, in sum, nothing but the chart of a succession of intellectual epidemics. Some have been brief. Fashion changes or continues in accordance with caprices impossible to foresee and difficult to determine. Shakespeare had no immediate influence. Honoré d'Urfé, during his life and after his death, was, for half a century, the master and inspirer of all romantic fiction. He would have reigned still longer, had it not been for La Princesse de Clèves, the clandestine work of a grande dame. The seventeenth century, part of whose literature was merely translation and imitation, was not, however, averse to moderate and prudent novelties. The reason is that, if it would have been discreditable not to imitate the ancients – or, strange as it may seem, the Spaniards, but only the Spaniards! – in their fables and phrases (Racine trembled because he had written Bajazet), it was a mark of honour to be able to give classic borrowings an air of freshness and novelty.
However, this literature itself very quickly became classic. There was thus a second source of imitation; and, since it was more accessible than the first, it soon came to be almost the sole spring sought by successive generations to drink and pray and water their ink. Boileau was deified before his death. As soon as he could read at all, Voltaire read Boileau. The principle of imitation was thenceforth supreme in French literature.
Leaving aside the exceptions – however memorable – this principle has remained very powerful and so well understood, with the spread of education, that a critic has only to invoke it, for a shamefaced reader to cast aside a new work which he has found refreshing. Thus the newspaper critics have kept Ibsen from being acclimatized in France. Thus, too, verse plays, imitative works par excellence, succeed even on the boulevards! These theatrical events, always much magnified by advertising, furnish excellent illustrations for a theory.
The idea of imitation has, then, become the very soul of art and of literature. It is no more possible to-day to conceive of a novel which is not a counterpart or sequel of a preceding novel, than it is to conceive of rhymeless verse, or verses whose syllables have not been scrupulously scanned. When such innovations nevertheless occurred, altering suddenly the accustomed aspect of the literary landscape, there was a flutter among the experts. To conceal their embarrassment, they began to laugh (third method). Then they uttered judgments. Since these productions in verse or in prose are not imitated after the latest models, or the works praised by the handbooks, they must necessarily spring from an abnormal source, since it is not familiar to us – but which? There were attempts at explanation by means of Pre-Raphaelitism, but they were not decisive; they were even a little ridiculous, so profound and invulnerable was the ignorance on every hand. But about this time appeared a book which suddenly enlightened all minds. A parallel imposed itself inexorably between the new poets and the obscure versifiers of the Roman decadence, praised by des Esseintes. The movement was unanimous, and the very ones thus decried accepted this opprobrious epithet as a distinction. Once the principle was admitted, there was no lack of comparisons. Since no one – not even des Esseintes himself, perhaps – had read the depreciated poets, it was no trick at all for any critic to compare Sidonius Apollinaris, of whom we knew nothing, with Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he did not understand. Neither Sidonius Apollinaris nor Mallarmé is a decadent, since both possess, in different degrees, their own originality; but for that very reason the word was justly applied to the poet of L'Après-midi d'un Faune, for it signified obscurely, in the minds of the very persons who employed it, something little known, difficult, rare, precious, unexpected, new.
If, on the contrary, it were desired to restore to the idea of literary decadence its real and really cruel meaning, it is not, we suspect, Mallarmé or Laforgue, or any symbolist still writing, who should be named to-day. The decadent of Latin literature is neither Ammianus Marcellinus, nor Saint Augustine, each of whom fashioned a language in his own manner, nor is it Saint Ambrose, who created the hymn, nor Prudentius, who developed a literary genre, the lyrical biography.31 We are beginning to have a greater indulgence for Latin literature of the second period. Tired, perhaps, of ridiculing it without reading it, we have begun to glance at it a little. Before long, this simple notion will be admitted, that there is no inherent distinction between good Latin and bad Latin; that languages live and that their changes are not necessarily corruptions; that a man could have genius in the sixth century as well as in the second, in the eleventh as well as in the eighteenth; that classic prejudices constitute an obstacle to the development of literary history and to integral knowledge of the language itself. Had they been better understood, the poets in the library at Fontenay would not have served to christen a literary movement, unless the intention had been to compare idealistic with Christian innovators – a difficult and rather ridiculous undertaking.
III
I have wished here merely to attempt the historical (or anecdotal) analysis of an idea, and to indicate, by means of a somewhat elaborate example, how a word comes to have only the meaning which it is our interest to give it. Hence I do not believe it necessary to establish minutely the ground of Stéphane Mallarmé's claims to either hatred or ridicule.
Hatred is queen in the hierarchy of literary sentiments. Literature is, perhaps, with religion, the abstract passion which excites men most violently. True, we have not yet seen literary wars resembling the religious wars of – let us say – the past; but that is because literature has never yet descended suddenly to the people's level. By the time it reaches them, it has lost its explosive force. It is far from the first night of Hernani to the sale of the play in illustrated editions. However, it is not hard to imagine a mobilization of German sentimentality against English humour or French irony. It is because peoples do not know each other that they hate each other so little. An alliance marked by close fraternization always ends in cannon shot.
The hatred which pursued Mallarmé was never very bitter, for men hate seriously, even in matters of literature, only when material interests come to envenom a little the strife for the ideal; but he offered no surface for envy, and he bore injustice and abuse as necessities inherent in the very nature of genius. It was only, then, the pure and unalloyed superiority of his intelligence that was derided, on the pretext that he was obscure. Artists, even when depreciated by instinctive cabals, receive orders, earn money. Poets have the resource of long articles in the reviews and in the newspapers. Certain of them, like Théophile Gautier, earned their living in this way. Baudelaire succeeded ill at it, Mallarmé worse still. It was, then, in his case, against the poet stripped of every social ornament that the sarcasm was directed.
There is, by accident, at the Louvre, in a ridiculous collection, a marvel, an Andromeda, carved in ivory by Cellini. It is a terror-stricken woman, all her flesh aquiver with fright at being bound. Where can she flee? It is also Mallarmé's poetry. The emblem is the more appropriate that, like the sculptor, the poet wrought nothing but cups, vases, caskets, statuettes. He is not colossal, he is perfect. His poetry does not present a great human treasure spread forth before the dazzled crowd. It does not express common, strong ideas, which easily galvanize popular attention dulled by toil. It is personal, shrinking like those flowers that fear the sun. It has no scent save at evening. It yields its thought only to the intimacy of another thought, trusty and sincere. Its excessive modesty, it is true, draws about itself too many veils; but there is much delicacy in this eagerness to flee the eyes and hands of popular appreciation. Flee, where could it flee? Mallarmé sought refuge in obscurity as in a cloister. He interposed the wall of a cell between himself and the understanding of others. He wished to live alone in his pride. But that was the Mallarmé of the last years, when, hurt, but not disheartened, he felt himself seized with the same disgust for vain phrases which had also, in the past, stricken Jean Racine – the years when he created a new syntax for his own use, when he used words according to a system of new and secret relations. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote relatively much, and the greater part of his work is stained by no obscurity; but, if later and towards the last, beginning with the Prose pour des Esseintes, there are doubtful phrases or irritating verses, it is only an inattentive and vulgar mind that dreads to undertake the delicious conquest.
There are too few obscure writers in French. So we accustom ourselves like cowards to love only writing that is easy and that will soon be elementary. Yet it is rare that books blindly clear are worth rereading. It is clearness that constitutes the prestige of classic literature and it is clearness that makes them so clearly tiresome. Clear minds are commonly those that see but one thing at a time. When the brain is rich in sensations and in ideas, there is a constant eddy, and the smooth surface is troubled at the moment of spouting. Let us, like M. Doudan, prefer marshes swarming with life, to a glass of clear water. One is thirsty at times, to be sure. Well, then, one filters. Literature which gives immediate pleasure to all men is necessarily of no value. It must first, falling from on high, leap in cascades from ledge to ledge, in order to flow at last through the valley, within reach of all men and of all stocks.
If, then, one undertook a definitive study of Stéphane Mallarmé, the question of obscurity would have to be treated exclusively from the psychological standpoint, for the reason that there is never absolute, literal obscurity in an honestly written work. A sensible interpretation is always possible. It will, perhaps, vary according to the evening hour, like the play of cloud-shadows on the velvet lawn; but the truth, here and everywhere, will be what our passing sentiment shall make it. Mallarmé's work is the most marvellous pretext for reveries yet offered men weary of so many heavy and useless affirmations. It may well be that a poetry full of doubts, of shifting shades, and of ambiguous perfumes, can alone please us henceforward; and, if the word decadence really summed up all these autumnal, twilight charms, we might welcome it, even making it one of the keys of the viol; but it is dead; the master is dead, the penultimate is dead.
1898.
