The Man of Genius

But, when we think of the integrity of his life, the method and order to be perceived in all his affairs, can we dismiss him merely as a man of unsound mind? And, when we remember the relative novelty of his ideas, can we confuse him with the many absurd mattoids already described? Certainly not.

Let us suppose that Giuseppe Ferrari, instead of a superior culture, had only received Bosisio’s education; we should certainly have had, in place of a savant justly admired by the world, something similar to Bosisio. Certainly, indeed, those systems of historical arithmetic, with kings and republics dying on a fixed day, at the will of the author, can only belong to the world of mental alienation.

The same thing might be said of Michelet, if one thinks of his fancy natural history, his academic obscenities, his incredible vanity,[350 - “Toute une littérature est née de mon Insecte et de mon Oiseau. —L’Amour et la Femme restent et resteront, comme ayant deux bases, l’une scientifique, la nature même, – l’autre morale, le cœur des citoyens…“J’ai défini l’histoire une résurrection. – C’est le titre le plus approprié à mon 4 volumes…“En 1870, dans le silence universel, seul, je parlai. Mon livre fait en 40 jours fut la seule défense de la patrie…”] and the later volumes of his History of France which are nothing but a tangled thicket of scandalous anecdotes and grotesque paradoxes.[351 - He studies, as an important document, the journal of Louis XIV.’s digestion, and divides his reign into two periods – before and after the fistula. In the same way Francis I.’s reign is divided into the periods before and after the abscess. Conclusions of the following kind abound: —“De toute l’ancienne monarchie, il ne reste à la France qu’un nom, Henri IV.; et deux chansons Gabrielle et Marlborough.”] So, too, of Fourier and his disciples, who predict with mathematical exactness that, 80,000 years hence, man will attain to the age of 144; that in those days we shall have 37 millions of poets (unhappy world!); likewise 37 millions of mathematicians equal to Newton; of Lemercier, who, along with some very fine dramas, wrote some in which speeches are assigned to ants, seals, and the Mediterranean; and of Burchiello, who asks painters to depict for him an earthquake in the air, and describes a mountain giving a pair of spectacles to a bell-tower! The same is true of the heir of Confucius, the astronomer who created the Dio Liberale; of the pseudo-geologist who has discovered a secret of embalming bodies which might be known to any assistant demonstrator of anatomy, and who believes that the world can be purified by cremation.

In Italy, a man has for many years been a professor in one of the great universities who, in his treatises, created the nation of the cagots, and suggested a certain instrument for resuscitating the apparently drowned, which would have been enough to suffocate a healthy person. Another talked of baths at a temperature of – 20°, and the advantages of sea-water owing to the exhalations of the fish! Yet his volumes contain some very fine things, and have reached a second edition, and none of his colleagues ever suspected that his mind was not perfectly sound. How is he to be classified? He occupies a middle place between the madman, the man of genius, and the graphomaniac, with which last he has in common the sterility of his aims, and his calm and persistent search after paradoxes.

Italy, for the rest, as I have shown in Tre Tribuni,[352 - Pp. 119, 120, 121.] has had, and idolized, for a brief quarter of an hour, two mattoids of considerable gifts, Coccapieller and Sbarbaro, who, in the midst of immoralities, trivialities, contradictions, and paradoxes, had a few traits of genius,[353 - Sbarbaro, e. g., in the midst of numberless absurdities, wrote: “The man who feels no hatred for the foul and unjust things which cumber our social life is the false phantom of a citizen, a eunuch in heart and mind” (Forche, 21).“Parliamentary systems do not work well, since they do not allow of the best being at the top, and nonentities at the bottom” (Forche, 3). This, however, is borrowed from Machiavelli’s Decades.“If you call me a malcontent,” he said to the Council of Public Instruction, “you do me honour: progress is due to rebels and malcontents. Christ Himself was a rebel and an agitator.”] explicable by a less degree of misoneism, and a greater facility in adopting new ideas.

Décadent Poets.– Some acquaintance with this new variety of literary madmen will explain to us the existence, in the seventeenth century, of the French précieux, and, at the present day, that of the Parnassiens, Symbolistes, and Décadents.

“I have read their verses,” says Lemaître,[354 - Revue politique et littéraire, 1888, No. 1.] “and not even seen as much as the turkey in the fable, who, if he did not distinguish very well, at least saw something. I have been able to make nothing of these series of words, which – being connected together according to the laws of syntax – might be supposed to have some sense, and have none, and which spitefully keep your mind on the stretch in a vacuum, like a conundrum without an answer…

“ ‘En ta dentelle où n’est notoire
Mon doux évanouissement,
Taisons pour l’âtre sans histoire
Tel vœu de lèvres résumant.

Toute ombre hors d’un territoire
Se teinte itérativement
A la lueur exhalatoire
Des pétales de remuement.’…

“One of them, however, has explained to us what they intended doing, in a pamphlet modestly entitled, Traité du Verbe, by Stéphane Mallarmé. By this it appears that they have invented two things – the symbol, and ‘poetic instrumentation.’

“The invention of the symbolists seems to consist in not saying what feelings, thoughts, or states of mind they express by images. But even this is not new. A SYMBOL is, in short, an enlarged comparison of which only the second term is given – a connected series of metaphors. Briefly, the symbol is the old ‘allegory’ of our fathers.[355 - We have seen that a love of symbolism is one of the characteristics of monomaniacs.]

“Now, here is the second discovery made by our wild-eyed symbolists. Men have suspected, ever since Homer’s time, that there are relations, correspondences, affinities, between certain sounds, forms, and colours, and certain states of mind. For instance, it was felt that the repeated sound of a had something to do with the impression of freshness and peace produced by this line of Virgil —

“ ‘Pascitur in silva magna formosa juvenca.’

It was known that sounds may, like colours, be striking or subdued; like feelings, sad or joyful. But it was thought that these resemblances and relations are somewhat fugitive, having nothing constant or sharply-defined, and that they are, at least, hinted at by the sense of the words which compose the musical phrase.

“Now, attend to this! For these gentlemen, a = black, e = white, i = blue, o = red, u = yellow.

“Again, black = the organ, white = the harp, blue = the violin, red = the trumpet, yellow = the flute.

“Again, the organ expresses monotony, doubt, and simplicity; the harp, serenity; the violin, passion and prayer; the trumpet, glory and ovation; the flute, smiles and ingenuousness.

“It is difficult to make out to what degree the young symbolards still take account of the sense of words. That degree, however, is, in any case, very slight, and, for my part, I cannot well distinguish the passages where they are obscure from those where they are only unintelligible.

“In short, a poetry without thoughts, at once primitive and subtle, which does not (like classic poetry) express a connected series of ideas, nor (like the poetry of the Parnassiens) the physical world in its exact outlines, but states of mind in which we can scarcely distinguish ourselves from surrounding objects, where sensation is so closely united to sentiment; where the latter grows so rapidly and naturally out of the former, that it is quite sufficient for us to note down our sensations at random just as they present themselves, to express ipso facto the emotions which they successively give rise to in the mind.

“Do you understand?.. Neither do I. One would have to be drunk in order to understand this.”

I can only conceive that the poetry, an attempt to define which has here been made, could be that of a solitary, a nerve-sufferer, and almost a madman. This poetry thus flourishes on the borderland between reason and madness.

Yet these mattoids have their man of genius – Verlaine. Let us hear Lemaître on this subject: —

“I imagine he must be almost illiterate. He has a strange head – the profile of Socrates, an enormous forehead, a skull knobbed like a battered basin of thin copper. He is not civilized, he ignores all received codes of morality.

“One day he disappears. What has become of him? It would be in character for him to have been publicly cast out from regular society. I see him behind the grate of a prison, like François Villon – not for having, like him, become an accomplice of thieves and rogues, for the love of a free life, but rather for an error of over-sensitiveness – for having avenged (by an involuntary stab, given, as it were, in a dream) a love reprobated by the laws and customs of the modern and Western world. But, though socially degraded, he remains innocent. He repents as simply as he sinned – with a Catholic repentance, all terror and tenderness, without reasoning, without pride of intellect. In his conversion, as in his sin, he remains a purely emotional being…

“Then, it may be, a woman took pity on him, and he let himself be led like a little child. He reappears, but continues to live apart. No one has ever seen him on the Boulevards, or in a theatre, or at the Salon. He is somewhere at the other end of Paris, in the back-room of a wine-merchant’s shop, drinking blue wine. He is as far from us as if he were an innocent satyr in the great forests. When he is ill, or at the end of his resources, some doctor, whom he knew formerly, when in jail, gets him into the hospital; he stays there as long as he can and writes verses; he hears queer, sad songs whispered to him out of the folds of the cold white calico curtains. He is not a déclassé, for he never had a class. His case is rare and peculiar. He finds means to live, in a civilized society, as he could live in a state of the freest nature.

“It may be that he has sometimes felt for an instant the influence of some contemporary poets, but these have done nothing for him, save to awaken and reveal to him the extreme and painful sensibility which is his whole being. In the main, he is without a master. He moulds language at his will, not, like a great writer because he knows it, but, like a child, because he is ignorant of it. He gives wrong senses to words in his simplicity. Little as we might expect it, this poet, whom his disciples regard as such a consummate artist, writes on occasion (if we may dare to speak out), like a pupil of the technical schools, or a second-rate chemist subject to lyric outbursts. After this, it is amusing to see him while posing as the impeccable artist, the sculptor of strophes, the gentleman who distrusts imagination, write, with the keenest sense of enjoyment: —

“ ‘A nous qui ciselons les mots comme des coupes
Et qui faisons des vers émus très froidement…
Ce qu’il nous faut, à nous, c’est, aux lueurs des lampes,
La science conquise et le sommeil dompté.’

Yet this writer, so wanting in ordinary technical skill, has yet written – I cannot tell how – verses of a penetrating sweetness, a languid charm which is peculiarly his own, and which perhaps arises from a union of these things – charm of sound, clearness of feeling, and partial obscurity in the words. Thus, when he tells us that he is dreaming of an unknown woman, who loves him, who understands him, and weeps with him, he adds: —

“ ‘Son nom? Je me souviens qu’il est doux et sonore,
Comme ceux des aimés que la vie exila.

Son regard est pareil au regard des statues,
Et pour sa voix lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a
L’inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.’

“I am also very fond of the Chanson d’Automne, though certain words (blême and suffocant) are not perhaps used with entire accuracy, and scarcely correspond with the “languor” described just before.

“Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure.

Et je m’en vais
Au voit mauvais
Qui m’emporte
De ça, de là,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.’

“He celebrates the Virgin in an exceedingly fine hymn: —

“ ‘Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mère Marie.

…