Maldoror And Poems Part 4

Poetry is not the tempest, nor is it the tornado. It is a majestic and fertile river.

Only by accepting the physical presence of the night have we come to accept it morally. O Night Thoughts of Young, many is the headache you have caused me!

One only dreams when one is asleep. It is only words such as a dream, the futility of life, the earthly journey, the preposition perhaps, the misshapen tripod, which have infiltrated this dank languorous poetry like the corruption into your souls. There is only one step from the words to the ideas.

Upheavals, anxieties, deprivation, death, exceptions in the physical and moral order, the spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations willfully induced, torture, destruction, sudden reversals of fortune, tears, insatiability, servitude, wildly burrowing imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the mysterious, vulture-like chemical peculiarities which watch over the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiments, bug-like obscurities, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of profound stupors, funeral orations, jealousies, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive outbursts, dementia, spleen, reasoned terrors, strange anxieties which the reader would prefer to be spared, grimaces, neuroses, the b.l.o.o.d.y screw-plates by which logic is forced to retreat, exaggerations, lack of sincerity, catch-words, plat.i.tudes, the sombre, the lugubrious, creations worse than murders, pa.s.sions, the clan of a.s.size-court novelists, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes perpetually present, reason howled down with impunity, odours of milksops, mawkishness, frogs octopi, sharks, the simoun of the deserts, all that is somnambulous, shady, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulous, viscous, speaking seals, the ambiguous, the consumptive, the spasmodic, the aphrodisiac, the anaemic, the one-eyed, hermaphrodite, b.a.s.t.a.r.d, albino, pederast, abortions from the aquarium, bearded women, the drunken hours of silent depression, fantasies, sourness, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, excrement, those who do not think with the innocence of a child, desolation, that intellectual manchineel, perfumed chancres, thighs covered with camellias, the culpability of the writer who rolls down the slope of the abyss, despising himself with cries of joy, remorse, hypocrisy, vague perspectives which crush you in their imperceptible works, spitting on sacred axioms, vermin and their insinuating t.i.tillations, extravagant prefaces, such as those to Cromwell, those by Mlle Daupin and Dumas the younger, decay, impotence, blasphemy, asphyxia, suffocation, fits of rage--it is time to react against these repulsive charnel-houses which I blush to name, to react against everything which is supremely shocking and oppressive.

Your mind is perpetually unhinged, lured into, and trapped inside the darkness created by the crude art of egoism and amour-propre.

Taste is the fundamental quality which epitomizes all others. It is the nec plus ultra of the understanding. By virtue of this faculty alone can genius maintain the health and balance of all the other faculties. Villemain is thirty-four times more intelligent than Eugene Sue and Frederic Soulie. His preface to the Dictionary of the Academy will outlive the novels of Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, and all the novels conceivable and imaginable. The novel is a false genre, because it describes the pa.s.sions for their own sake: the moral conclusion is absent. To describe the pa.s.sions is nothing: it is enough to have been born with something of the nature of a jackal, a vulture, a panther. It is a task we do not care for. But to describe them and then subject them to a high moral concept, as Corneille did, is another thing. He who refrains from doing the former but remains capable of admiring and understanding those who do the second surpa.s.ses him who writes the former by as much as virtue surpa.s.ses vice.

A sixth-form teacher, simply by saying: 'Not for all the treasures in the universe would I wish to have written novels such as those of Balzac and Alexander Dumasa proves himself to be more intelligent than Alexander Dumas and Balzac. Simply by realizing that one should not write of moral and physical deformity, by this alone, a fifth-year pupil shows that he is stronger, more able, and more intelligent than Victor Hugo, if he had only written novels, dramas, and letters.

Alexander Dumas the younger will never, absolutely never, make a speech at a school-prize day. He does not know what morality is. It makes no compromises. If he did, he would have to cross out, in a single stroke, every word he has written up to now, starting with absurd prefaces. Find me a jury of competent men and let them decide: I maintain that a good sixth-former is better than Dumas in anything you care to mention, including the filthy question of courtesans.

The chefs daoeuvre of the French language are school prize-day speeches, and academic speeches. In fact, the instruction of youth is perhaps the finest practical expression of duty, and a good appreciation of Voltaireas works (I stress the word appreciation) is preferable to those works themselves. Naturally!

The best novelists and dramatists would eventually distort the famous idea of good, if the teaching profession, that conservatory of clarity and precision, did not keep the younger and the older generations of the path of honest and hard work.

In his own name and in spite of it, I have come to disown, with implacable will and the tenacity of iron, the hideous past of whining humanity. Yes: I wish to proclaim the Beautiful on my golden lyre, having eliminated the goitral sadness and the stupid outbursts of pride which corrupt the swampy poetry of this century! I will crush underfoot the bitter stanzas of scepticism which have no right to exist. Judgment, in the full bloom of its strength, imperious and resolute, without for a second hesitating in the derisory uncertainties of misplaced pity, condemns them, fatidically, like an Attorney General. We must relentlessly be on our guard against the purulent insomnia and atrabilious nightmares. I despise and execrate pride and the indecent delights of that extinguis.h.i.+ng irony which disjoints the precision of our thought.

Some excessively intelligent characters--there is no reason to dispute it with palinodes of doubtful taste--flung themselves headlong into the arms of evil. It is the absinthe (savorous? no, I donat think so, but noxious) which morally destroyed the author of Rolla. Woe to its connoisseurs! Scarcely has the English aristocrat reached maturity than his harp is shattered beneath the walls of Missolonghi, having gathered on his way only the flowers which brood on the opium of gloomy disasters.

Though he was more gifted than ordinary geniuses, if there had been at his time another poet, gifted as he was, with the same measure of exceptional intelligence, and capable of rivaling him, he would have to have been the first to admit the futility of his efforts to produce incongruous mult.i.tudes of maledictions; and to acknowledge that the sole and exclusive good worthy of being striven for is, by unanimous agreement, to win our esteem. The fact is that there was no one who could successfully compete with him. And this is a point that no one has ever made. Strange to say, even perusing the miscellanies and books of his age, no critic ever thought of mentioning the rigorous syllogism of the preceding sentence. And I, who surpa.s.s him in this, cannot have been the first to think of this. So full were they of stupor and apprehension, rather than reflective admiration, in the face of works written by a perfidious hand which nevertheless revealed imposing aspects of a soul which did not belong to the common ma.s.s, which was freely able to face the last consequences of one of the two least obscure problems which interest non-solitary minds: good and evil. It is granted only to a few to approach this problem, either in the one direction, or in the other. That is why, while praising without reservation the marvelous intelligence which he, one of the four or five beacons of humanity, shows at every moment, one must have numerous silent reservations about the unjustifiable application and use which he made of that intelligence. He should not have pa.s.sed through the satanic realms.

The fierce revolt of the Troppmanns, the Napoleon, the firsts, the Papvoines, the Victors Noirs, and the Charlotte Cordays will be kept a good distance from my cold and severe look. In one quick movement I push aside all these major criminals with their different t.i.tles. Who do they think they are fooling here? I ask, I slowly interpose. Hobby-horses of penal colonies! Soap-bubbles! Ridiculous dancing-jacks! Worn-out strings! Let them approach, the Conrads, the Manfreds, the Laras, the sailors who resemble the Corsair, the Mephistopheles, the Werthers, the Don Juans, the Fausts, the Iagos, the Rodins, the Caligulas, the Cains, he Iridions, the megaerae a la Columba, the Ahrimanes, the manichean manitous, bespattered with human brains, who ferment the blood of their victims in the sacred paG.o.das of Hindustan, the serpent, the toad and the crocodile, divinities, now considered abnormal, of ancient Egypt, the sorcerers and the demoniac powers of the Middle Ages, the Prometheuses, the mythological t.i.tans thunderstruck by Jupiter, the evil G.o.ds vomited up by the primitive imagination of barbarian peoples--the whole noisy stack of paper devils. Certain of overcoming them, I grasp the whip of indignation and concentration, and, feeling its weight in my hand, I stand my ground and await these monsters as their preordained tamer.

There are a number of degraded writers, dangerous buffoons, jokers and clowns, sombre hoaxers, genuine lunatics, who deserve to be locked up in Bedlam. Their cretinizing heads, which have a screw loose somewhere, create gigantic phantoms which go down instead of going up. A scabrous exercise, a specious form of gymnastics. Away with the grotesque nonsense, quick as can be. Please withdraw from my presence, fabricators by the dozen of forbidden enigmas, in which I could not previously, as I can today, find the trivial solution at the first glance. A pathological case of dreadful egotism. Fantastic automata: point out to each other, my children, the epithet which puts them in their place.

If, beneath the plastic reality, they existed somewhere, they would be, in spite of their undoubted, but false, intelligence, the disgrace, the opprobrium and the shame of the planets where they lived. Imagine them all gathered together with beings of their own kind. There would be an uninterrupted succession of combats, such as bulldogs, forbidden in France, sharks, and hammer-headed whales cannot dream of. There would be torrents of blood in those chaotic regions full of hydras and minotaurs, from which the dove, terrified beyond all hope, flees as fast as its wings will carry it...They are a bunch of apocalyptic beasts, who know quite well what they are doing. There are the conflicts of the pa.s.sions, mortal enmities, ambition, and through it all the howlings of a pride which it is impossible to read, which restrains itself, and of which n.o.body can even approximately sound out the reefs and the shallows.

But they will no longer impress me. Suffering is a weakness, when one doesn't need to do so, when one can find something better to do. But, suffocating in the marshes of perversity, to exhale sufferings of deranged splendour, is to show even less resistance and less courage! With the voice and with all the solemnity of my great days, I call you to my hearth, glorious hope. Wrapped in the cloak of illusions, come and sit beside me on the reasonable tripod of appeas.e.m.e.nt. With a whip of scorpions I chased you, like an unwanted piece of furniture from my abode. If you wish me to believe that, in returning, you have forgotten all the grief which my short-lived repentance caused you in the past, well, then bring along with you the sublime procession--hold me up, I am fainting!--of the virtues which I offended, and their everlasting atonements.

With bitterness I have to state that there are only a few drops of blood left in the arteries of our phthisic age. Ever since the bizarre and odious whinings of the Jean-Jacques Rosseaus, the Chateaubriands, and the Obermanns, wet nurses of chubby babies, and all the other poets who have wallowed in the filthy slime, up to the dreams of Jean-Paul the suicide of Dolores de Veintemilla, Allan's Raven, the Pole's Infernal Comedy, the b.l.o.o.d.y eyes of Zorilla, and the immortal cancer, a carrion, lovingly painted once by the morbid lover of the Hottentot Venus, the incredible sorrows which this century has created for itself, in their deliberate and disgusting monotony, have made it consumptive. Wet through with tears in their intolerable torpor!

And so on, the same old story.

Yes, good people, I order you to burn, on a spade red-hot from the fire, and with a little yellow sugar for good measure, the duck of doubt with its vermouth lips, which, in the melancholy struggle between good and evil, shedding tears which are not heartfelt, creates everywhere, without the aid of a pneumatic machine, universal emptiness. It is the best thing you can do.

Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en ma.s.se, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil. In a word, in all its arguments, it glorifies the human backside. Let me speak! You are becoming evil I say, and your eyes are taking on the colour of men sentenced to death. I will not retract what I have just said. I want to write poetry that can safely be read by fourteen-year-old girls.

True sorrow is incompatible with hope. However great this sorrow may be, hope rises a hundred cubits higher. But spare me these seekers, leave me in peace. Down with them, down, paws off, droll b.i.t.c.hes, troublemakers, poseurs. That which suffers, that which dissects the mysteries which surround us, does not hope. Poetry which discusses necessary truths is less beautiful than that which does not discuss it. Extreme vacillations, talent misused, waste of time: nothing could be easier to demonstrate.

It is puerile to praise Adamastor, Jocelyn, Rocambole. It is only because the author takes it for granted that the reader will forgive his villainous heroes that he gives himself away, relying on the good to justify his description of the bad. It is in the name of those same virtues which Frank disdained that we wish to uphold it, oh mountebanks of incurable diseases!

Do not imitate those shameless explorers of melancholy, magnificent in their own eyes, who find hidden 'treasures' in their minds and in their bodies.

Melancholy and sadness are the beginning of doubt; doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the different degrees of evil. To confirm this you need only read the Confession of a Contemporary. The slope is fatal, once you begin to go down it. You are bound to end with evil. Beware of that slope. Destroy the evil at its roots. Reject the cult of adjectives such as indescribable, unspeakable, brilliant, incomparable, colossal, which shamelessly lie to the nouns which they disfigure: for they are followed by lubricity.

Second-rate intellects such as Alfred de Musset may doggedly push one or two of their faculties further than the corresponding faculties of first-rate intellects, Lamartine, Hugo. We are witnessing the derailment of an old and worn-out locomotive. A nightmare is holding the pen. But the soul has twenty faculties. So don't talk to me of the beggars who have magnificent hats, and nothing else but sordid rags!

Here is a means of proving Musset's inferiority to the other two poets. Read Rolla, Night Thoughts, Cobb's Madmen, or, failing that, the descriptions of Gwynplaine and Dea, or the Tale of Theramene from Euripides, translated into French verse by Racine the Elder, to a young girl. She trembles, frowns, raises and lowers her hands with no apparent object, like a man drowning; her eyes glow with a greenish light. Read her the Prayer For Us All, by Victor Hugo. The effect is the diametrical opposite. The kind of electricity is no longer the same. She bursts into laughter, she asks you to read more.

Of Hugo's work, the only poems about children will survive, and they are not all good.

Paul and Virginie offends against our deepest aspirations to happiness. In the past, this episode which is riddled with gloom from beginning to end, especially the final s.h.i.+pwreck, used to set my teeth on edge. I would roll on the carpet and kick my wooden horse. The description of sorrow is an error. We should see the beauty in everything. Had this incident been recounted in a simple biography, I would not attack it. That would change its character altogether. Misfortune is enn.o.bled by the inscrutable will of Him who created it. But man should not create misfortune in his books. That is only to see one side of things. Oh maniacal howlers that you are!

Do not deny the immortality of the soul, G.o.d's wisdom, the value of life, the order of the universe, physical beauty, the love of the family, marriage, social inst.i.tutions. Ignore the following baneful pen-pushers: Sand, Balzac, Alexander Dumas, Musset, Du Terrail, Feval, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Leconte and the Greve des Forgerons!

Communicate to your readers only the experience of sorrow, which is not the same as sorrow itself. Do not cry in public.

One must be able to grasp the literary beauty even in the midst of death; but these beauties are not part of death. Death here is only the occasional cause. It is not the means, but the end, which is not death.

The immutable and necessary truths which are the glory of nations and which doubt vainly strives to shake have existed since the beginning of time. They should not be touched. Those who wish to create anarchy in literature on the pretext of change are making a serious error. They do not dare to attack G.o.d; they attack the immortality of the soul. But the immortality of the soul is itself as old as the crust of the earth. What other belief will replace it, if it is to be replaced? It will not always be a negation.

If one recalls the one truth from which all others follow, G.o.d's greatness and His absolute ignorance of evil, sophisms break down of themselves. So too, and just as quickly, does the literature which is based on them. All literature which disputes external axioms is condemned to live by itself alone. It is unjust. It devours its own liver. The novissima Verba bring haughty smiles to the faces of the snot-nosed filth-formers. We have no right to interrogate the Creator on any subject whatsoever.

If you are unhappy, you must not tell the reader. Keep it to yourself.

If these sophisms were corrected by their corresponding truths, only the corrections would be true; while the work which had been thus revised would no longer have the right to be called false. The rest would be outside the realm of the true, tainted with falsehood, and would thus necessarily be considered null and void.

Personal poetry has had its day, with its relative sleights of hand and its contingent contortions. Let us gather up again the thread of impersonal poetry, rudely interrupted since the birth of the manqu philosopher of Ferney, since that great abortion Voltaire.

It appears beautiful and sublime, on the pretext of humility or pride, to discuss final causes, and to falsify their known and lasting consequences. Do not believe it, because nothing could be more stupid! Let us link up again the great chain which connects us with the past; poetry is geometry par excellence. It has lost ground. Thanks to whom? To the Great Soft-heads of our age. Thanks to the sissies, Chateaubriand, the Melancholy Mohican; Senancourt, the Man in Petticoats; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Surly Socialist; Anne Radcliffe, the Spectre-Crazed; Edgar Poe, the Mameluke of Alcoholic Dreams; Mathurin, the Crony of Darkness; George Sand, the Circ.u.mcised Hermaphrodite; Theophile Gautier, the Incomparable Grocer; Leconte, the Devil's Captive; Goethe, the Suicide who makes you weep; Sainte-Beuve, the Suicide who makes you laugh; Lamartine, the Tearful Stork; Lermontov, the Roaring Tiger; Victor Hugo, the Gloomy Green Echalas; Misckiewicz, the Imitator of Satan; Musset, the Fop who didn't wear an intellectual's s.h.i.+rt; and Byron, the Hippopotamus of Infernal Jungles.

From the beginning of time doubt has been in the minority. In this century it is in the majority. Through our pores we breathe in the dereliction of duty. This has only ever happened once; it will never happen again.

So clouded are the simplest notions of reason nowadays that the first thing third-form teachers do when they are teaching their pupils Latin verse--these young poets whose lips are still wet from mother's milk--is to reveal to them in practice the name of Alfred de Musset. Well, I ask you! Fourth-form teachers set two b.l.o.o.d.y episodes for their pupils to translate into Greek verse. The first is the repulsive comparison of the pelican. And the second will be the dreadful catastrophe which happened to a ploughman. What is the use of looking at evil? Is it not in the minority? Why turn these schoolboys' heads towards subjects which, unable to understand them, men such as Pascal and Byron were driven mad by?

A schoolboy told me that his sixth-form teacher had set his cla.s.s, day after day, these two carca.s.ses to translate into Hebrew verse. These two blots on human and animal nature made him so ill for a month that he had to go to the hospital. As we were friends, he asked his mother to ask me to come and see him. He told me, though somewhat naively, that his nights were troubled by recurring dreams. He thought he saw an army of pelicans swooping down on him and tearing his breast to pieces. Then they would fly off to a burning cottage. They ate the ploughman's wife and children. His body blackened with burns, the ploughman came out of the cottage and joined dreadful combat with the pelicans. Then they all rushed into the cottage which fell to pieces. And from the pile of ruins--without fail--he would see his teacher emerging, holding his heart in one hand and in the other a piece of paper on which could be made out the sulphurous lines of the comparison of the pelican and the ploughman as Musset had himself composed them. It was not at first easy to diagnose what kind of illness this was. I urged him to be meticulously silent, and not speak to anyone, least of all his teacher. I shall advise his mother to keep him at home for a few days and will make sure she does so. In fact, I made a point of going there for several hours every day, and the illness pa.s.sed.

Criticism must attack the form but never the content of your ideas, your sentences. Act accordingly.

All the water in the sea would not be enough to wash away one intellectual bloodstain.

2.

Genius guarantees the faculties of the heart.

Man is no less immortal than his soul.

Reason is the source of all great thoughts!

Fraternity is not a myth.

Children, when born, know nothing of life, not even its greatness.

In misfortune, the number of our friends increases.

Abandon despair, all ye who enter here.

Goodness, your name is man.

Here dwells the wisdom of nations.

Every time I read Shakespeare, it seemed I was cutting in pieces the brain of a jaguar.

I shall write my thoughts methodically, according to a clear plan. If they are exact, each one will be the consequence of the others. This is the only true order. It indicates my object despite the untidiness of my handwriting. I would be debasing my subject, if I did not treat it methodically.

I reject evil. Man is perfect. Our soul never fell from a state of grace. Progress exists. Good is irreducible. Anti-christs, accusing angels, eternal torment, religions, are the product of doubt.

Dante and Milton, hypothetically describing the infernal regions, proved that they were hyenas of the first order. The proof is excellent. The result is poor. Their works do not sell.

Man is an oak. There is nothing more robust in all of nature. The universe does not have to take up arms to defend him. A drop of water is not enough to save him. Even if the universe were to defend him, he would no more be dishonoured than that which does not save him. Man knows that his reign is without end, and that the universe has a beginning. The universe knows nothing: it is, at the very most, a thinking reed.

I think Elohim as being cold rather than sentimental.

Love of a woman is incompatible with love of mankind. Imperfection must be rejected. There is nothing more imperfect than egotism a deux. In life, mistrust, recriminations, and oaths are written in a powder pullulate. We no longer hear of the lover of Chimene; now it is the lover of Graziella. No longer of Petrarch; not it is Alfred du Musset. At the moment of death, a rocky region near the sea, a lake somewhere, the forest of Fontainebleau, the isle of Ischia, a raven in a study, a Chambre Ardente with a crucifix, a cemetery where in the predictable and tedious moonlight, the beloved rises from her grave, stanzas in which a group of young girls whose names we do not know, take turns to make an appearance, giving the measure of the author, uttering their regrets. In both cases, all dignity is lost.

Error is the sorrowful legend.

By singing hymns to Elohin, poets, in their vanity, get into the habit of not bothering with the things of this earth. That is the great danger with these hymns. Mankind grows out of the habit of counting on the writer. It abandons him. It calls him a mystic, an eagle, a traitor to his mission. You are not the dove they seek.

A student could acquire a considerable amount of literary knowledge by saying the opposite of what the poets of this century have said. He would replace their affirmations with negations. If it is ridiculous to attack first principles it is even more ridiculous to defend them against the same attacks. I will not defend them.

Sleep is a reward for some, a torture for others. It is, for everyone, a sanction.

If Cleopatra's morality had been less free, the face of the earth would have changed. But her nose wouldn't have become any longer.

Hidden actions are the most admirable. When I see so many of them in history I like them a lot. They have not been completely hidden. They have become known. And this little by which they have become known increases their merit. It is the finest quality of all that they wouldn't be kept hidden.

The charm of death exists only for the brave.

Man is so great that his greatness shows above all else in his refusal to admit that he is miserable. A tree does not know its own greatness. To be great is to know that one is great. To be great is to refuse to admit one's misery. His greatness rejects his miseries. The greatness of a king.

When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This action reminds me of my strength which at every moment I forget. I learn as I link my thoughts together. But I am only moving towards the realization of one thing: the contradiction between my mind and nothingness.

The heart of man is a book which I have learnt to esteem.

Not imperfect, unfallen, man is no longer the greatest mystery.

I allow no one, not even Elohim, to doubut my sincerity.

We are free to do good.

Man's judgment is infallible.

We are not free to do evil.

Man is the conqueror of chimeras, the novelty of tomorrow, the regularity which makes chaos groan, the subject of conciliation. He judges all things. He is not an imbecile. He is not a maggot. He is the depository of truth, the epitome of cert.i.tude, the glory and not the sc.u.m of the universe. If he humbles himself, I praise him. If he praises himself, I praise him more. I win him over. He is beginning to realize that he is the sister of the angel.

There is nothing incomprehensible.

Thought is no less clear than crystal. A religion whose lies are based on it can trouble it for a few minutes, to speak of long-term effects. To speak of short term effects, the murder of eight people at the gates of a capital city will trouble it--certainly--to the point where the evil is destroyed. Thought soon regains its limpidity.

Poetry must have for its object practical truth. It expresses the relation between the first principles and the secondary truths of life. Everything remains in place. The mission of poetry is difficult. It is not concerned with political events, with the way a people is governed, makes no allusion to historical periods, coups d'etat, regicides, court intrigues. It does not speak of those struggles which, exceptionally, man has with himself and his pa.s.sions. It discovers the laws by which political theory exists, universal peace, the refutations of Machiavelli, the cornets of which the work of Proudhon consists, the psychology of mankind. A poet must be more useful than any other citizen of his tribe. His work is the code of diplomats, legislators, and teachers of youth. We are far from the Homers, the Virgils, the Klopstocks, the Camoens, the liberated imaginations, the ode-producers, the merchants of epigrams against the deity. Let us return to Confucius, Buddha, Jesus Christ, those moralists who went hungry through the villages. From now on we have to reckon with reason which operates only on those faculties which watch over the category of the phenomena of pure goodness.

Nothing is more natural than to read the Discourse on Method after reading Berenice. Nothing is less natural than to read Biechy's Treatise on Induction or Navill's Problem of Evil after reading Autumn Leaves or the Contemplations. There is no continuity. The mind rebels against rubbish, mystagogy. The heart is appalled at those pages some puppet has scrawled. This violence suddenly makes everything clear. He closes the book. He sheds a tear in memory of the barbaric authors. Contemporary poets have abused their intelligence. Philosophers have not abuse theirs. The memory of the former will fade. The latter are cla.s.sics.

Racine, Corneille would have been capable of writing the works of Descartes, Malebranche, Bacon. The spirit of the former is one with that of the latter. Lamartine, Hugo would not have been capable of writing the Treatise on the Intellect. The mind of its author is not equal to that of the former. Fatuity has made them lose the central qualities. Lamartine, Hugo although superior to Taine, possess, like him--it is painful to admit this--only secondary faculties.

Tragedies excite the obligatory qualities of pity and terror. That is something. It is bad. It is not as bad as modern lyric poetry. Legouve's Medea is preferable to a collection of the works of Byron, Capendu, Zaccone, Feliz, Gagne, Gaboriau, Lacordaire, Sardou, Goethe, Ravignana, Charles Diguet. Which one of you writers can produce works to compare with--what is it? What are these snorts of disagreement?--the Monologue of Augustus! Hugo's barbaric vaudevilles do not proclaim duty. The melodramas of Racine and Corneille, the melodramas of La Calprenede do not proclaim it. Lamartine is not capable of producing Pradon's Phedre; nor Hugo the Venceslas of Rotrou; nor Sainte-Beuve the tragedies of Laharpe or Marmontel. Musset is capable of producing proverbs. Tragedy is an involuntary error, it accepts the idea of struggle, it is the first step towards the good, it will not appear in this work. It maintains its prestige. The same cannot be said of the sophistries--the belated metaphysical gongorism of the self-parodists of my heroico-burlesque age.

The principle of all forms of wors.h.i.+p is pride. It is ridiculous to address Elohim, as the Jobs, the Jeremiahs, the Davids, the Solomons, the Turquetys have done. Prayer is a false act. The best way of pleasing him is indirect, more consistent with our own powers. It consists in making our race happy. There are no two ways of pleasing Elohim. The idea of the good is one. That which is good in smaller things being also good in greater, I cite the example of the mother. To please his mother, a sone will nto tell her that she is wise, radiant, that he will behave in such a way as to deserve most of her praise. He acts otherwise. He convinces by his actions, not by protestations, he abandons the sadness which swells up the eyes of the Newfoundland dog. The goodness of Elohim must not be confused with triviality. Everyone is plausible. Familiarity breeds contempt; reverence breeds the contrary. Hard work prevents us from indulging our feelings and pa.s.sions.

No thinking man believes what contradicts his reason.

Faith is a natural virtue by which we accept the truths which Elohim has revealed to us through conscience.

I know no other grace than that of being born. An impartial mind finds this adequate.

Good is the victory over evil, the negation of evil. If one writes of the good, evil is eliminated by this fitting act. I do not write of what must not be done. I write of what must be done. The former does not include the latter. The latter includes the former.

Youth listens to the advice of its elders. It has unlimited confidence in itself.

I know of nothing which is beyond the reach of the human mind, except truth.

The maxim does not need to be proved. One point in an argument requires another. The maxim is a law which contains a number of arguments. The closer the argument comes to the maxim, the more perfect it becomes. Once it has become a maxim, its perfection rejects the evidence of a transformation.

Doubt is a homage to hope. It is not a voluntary homage. Hope would never consent to be a mere homage.

Evil revolts against the good. It can do no less.

It is a proof of friends.h.i.+p not to notice the increase in our friends' friends.h.i.+p.

Love is not happiness.

If we had no faults we would not take so much pleasure in curing ourselves of them and in praising in others what we ourselves lack.

Those men who have resolved to detest their fellow-beings have forgotten that one must start by detesting oneself.

Those who never take part in duels believe that those who fight duels to the death are brave.