Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautramont — Poems

1 The poetic whines of this century are nothing but sophisms. The first principles must be beyond dispute. I accept Euripides and Sophocles; but I do not accept Aeschylus. Do not show bad taste and lack of the most elementary decency towards the Creator. Abandon incredulity: that will please me. There are not two kinds of poetry: there is only one. There is a far from tacit convention between author and reader by which the former says he is sick and takes the latter as his nurse. The poet consoles mankind! The roles have been arbitrarily reversed. I do not wish to be decried as a poseur. I shall leave no memoirs. 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 bloody screw-plates by which logic is forced to retreat, exaggerations, lack of sincerity, catch-words, platitudes, the sombre, the lugubrious, creations worse than murders, passions, the clan of assize-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, bastard, 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 titillations, 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 passions for their own sake: the moral conclusion is absent. To describe the passions 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 surpasses him who writes the former by as much as virtue surpasses 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 Dumas’ 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 d’oeuvre 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 Voltaire’s 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 extinguishing 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 don’t 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 multitudes 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 surpass 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 mass, 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 passed 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 titles. 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 pagodas 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 Titans thunderstruck by Jupiter, the evil gods 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 passions, mortal enmities, ambition, and through it all the howlings of a pride which it is impossible to read, which restrains itself, and of which nobody 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 appeasement. 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 bloody 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 masse, 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 bitches, 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 shipwreck, 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 ennobled 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, God's wisdom, the value of life, the order of the universe, physical beauty, the love of the family, marriage, social institutions. 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 God; 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, God'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 manqué 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 Circumcised 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 shirt; 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 bloody 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 class, day after day, these two carcasses 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 himselfcomposed 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 passed. 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 doubt 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 certitude, the glory and not the scum 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 passions. 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 classics. 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 worship 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 passions. 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 friendship not to notice the increase in our friends' friendship. 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. How the turpitudes of the novel crouch in the bookshop windows! Just as some men would kill for a hundred sous, it sometimes seems to a man who is lot that a book should be killed. Lamartine believed that the fall of an angel would mean the Elevation of Man. He was wrong to believe so. A banal truth contains more genius than the works of Dickens, Gustave Aymard, Victor Hugo, Landelle. With the aid of the latter a child who had survived the destruction of the universe would not be able to reconstruct the human soul. With the former it could. I suppose it would not discover the definition of sophism sooner or later. Words expressing evil are destined to take on a more positive meaning. Ideas improve. The sense of words takes part in this process. Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps an author's sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea. To be well wrought, a maxim does not need to be corrected. It needs to be developed. As soon as dawn comes, young girls go picking roses. A breath of innocence crosses the valleys, the capital cities, inspiring the most enthusiastic poets, bringing peace and protection to cradles, crowns to youth, belief in immortality to old men. I have seen men wearing out the moralists who attempted to discover their heart, and bringing upon themselves blessings from above. They were uttering meditations as vast as possible, bringing joy to the author of our felicity. They showed respect to childhood and to age, to all that breathes and all that does not breathe, they paid homage to woman and consecrated tomodesty the parts of the body which we refrain from naming. The firmament, whose beauty I acknowledge, the earth, image of my heart, were invoked by me, in order to represent myself as a man who did not believe himself good. The sight of this monster, had it ever proved to be real, would not have killed me with shock: it takes more than that to kill a man. All this needs no comment. Reason and feeling counsel and supplement each other. Whoever knows only one of these, renouncing the other, depriving himself all of the aid which has been granted us to guide our actions. Vauvenargues said: ‘is depriving himself of a part of the aid.’ Though his sentence and mine are based on the personification of the soul in feeling and reason, the one I chose at random would be no better than the other, if I had written both. The one cannot be rejected by me. The other could be accepted by Vauvenargues. When a predecessor uses a word from the domain of evil to describe the good, it is dangerous for this sentence to subsist alongside the other. It is better to leave the word’s evil meaning unchanged. Before one can use a word from the domain of evil for the good, one must first have the right. He who uses for evil words from the domain of good does not have this right. He is not believed. no one would wish to use Gerard de Nerval’s tie. The soul being one, sensibility, intelligence, will, reason imagination and memory can be introduced into our discourse. I spent a great deal of time studying abstract sciences. Because one only has to communicate with a small number of people in such studies, I did not tire of them. When I began the study of man, I saw that these sciences were particular to him, that by flinging myself into these studies I was less able to change my condition than others who knew nothing of them. I forgave them their lack of interest! I did not believe I would find many fellow-students of this subject of man. I was wrong. There are more students of man than of geometry. We die joyfully, provided no one talks about it. The passions become weaker with age. Love, which should not be classified among the passions, becomes weaker, too. What is loses on one hand, it gains on the other. It is no longer so demanding towards the object of its desires, it does justice to itself: a certain expansion is accepted. The senses no longer excite the organs of the flesh. The love of mankind begins. On days when man feels he is an altar adorned with his own virtues, and recollects all the sorrows he has ever felt, the soul, in a recess of the heart where everything seems to be born, feels something which is no longer beating. I have just described memory. The writer can, without separating one from the other, indicate the laws which govern each one of his poems. Some philosophers are more intelligent than some poets. Spinoza, Malebranche, Aristotle, Plato are not Hegesippe Moreau, Malfilatre, Gilbert, Andre Chenier. Faust, Manfred, Konrad are archetypes. They are not yet reasoning types. They are the archetypes of the agitator. A meadow, three rhinoceroses, half a catafalque, these are descriptions. They may be memory or prophecy. They are not the paragraph which I am about to complete. The regulator of the soul is not the regulator of a soul. The regulator of a soul is the regulator of the soul when these two kinds of souls are so commingled that it is possible to state that a regulator is only a regulatress in the imagination of a joking madman. The phenomenon passes. I seek the laws. There are men who are not archetypes. Archetypes are not men. One must not be dominated by the accidental. Judgments on poetry are worth more than poetry itself. They are the philosophy of poetry. Philosophy, in this sense, includes poetry. Poetry cannot do without philosophy. Philosophy can do without poetry. Racine is not capable of condensing his tragedies into precepts. A tragedy is not a precept. To one and the same mind, a precept is a more intelligent act than a tragedy. Put a goose-quill pen in the hands of a moralist who is a first-class writer. He will be superior to poets. Hide, war. Feelings express happiness, make us smile. The analysis of feelings expresses happiness, all personality apart; makes us smile. The former elevates the soul, dependently of space and time, to the conception of mankind considered in itself and in it illustrious members. The latter elevates the soul independently of time and space to the conception of mankind in its highest expression, the will! The feelings are concerned with vice and virtue; the latter is concerned only with virtue. The feelings are not aware of the course they follow. The analysis of feelings makes this known, and increases the strength of our feelings. With the former, all is uncertainty. They are the expression of happiness and sorrow, two extremes. With the latter, all is certainty. It is the expression of the happiness derived, at a given moment, from being able to restrain oneself amidst good and bad passions. In its composure it blends the description of the passions into a principle which informs its pages: the non-existence of evil. Feelings overflow when necessary, and also when it is not necessary. The analysis of feelings does not weep. It possesses a latent sensibility which takes us by surprise, helps us transcend our woes, teaches us to do without a guide, provides us with a weapon. Feelings, the sign of weakness, are not Feeling! The analysis of feeling, sign of strength, engenders the most magnificent feelings I know. The writer who is deceived by his feelings cannot be put on a par with the writer who is deceived neither by his feelings, nor by himself. Youth indulges in sentimental lucubrations. Maturity begins to reason clearly. Whereas once we only felt, now we think. We allowed our sensations to roam freely; now we give them a guide. If I consider mankind as a woman, I will merely say that her youth is on the ebb, that her maturity is approaching. Her mind is changing for the better. The ideal of poetry will change. Tragedies, poems elegies will no longer take first place. The coldness of the maxim will dominate! In the time of Quinault, they would have been capable of understanding what I have just said. Thanks to certain faint glimmerings in reviews and folios in the last few years, I can understand it in myself. My genre is as different from that of the moralists who merely state the evil without suggesting the remedy than theirs is from the melodramas, the funeral orations, the ode and the religious stanza. The sense of struggle is lacking. Elohim is made in man’s image. Several certainties have been contradicted. Several falsehoods remain uncontradicted. Contradiction is the sign of falsehood. Non-contradiction is the sign of certainty. A philosophy for the sciences exists. But not for poetry. I know of no moralist who is a first-rate poet. It is strange, someone will say. It is a horrible thing to feel what is yours falling to pieces. One even only hangs on to it in the wish to find out if there is anything permanent. Man is a subject devoid of errors. Everything shows him the truth. Nothing deceives him. The two principles of truth, reason and sense, apart form being reliable each for itself, enlighten each other. The senses enlighten reason by true appearances. And this same service which they perform for her, they also receive it from her. Each one takes it in turn. The phenomena of the soul pacify the senses, making impressions on the which I cannot assert to be unpleasant. They do not lie. They do not vie with each other in deception. Poetry must be made by everyone. Not by one. Poor Hugo! Poor Racine! Poor Coppee! Poor Corneille! Poor Boileau! Poor Scarron! Tics, tics, and tics. The sciences have extremities which touch. The first is the state of ignorance all men are in when born. The second is the ignorance attained by great souls. They have surveyed all that men can know, find that they know everything, and are yet in the same state of ignorance as when they set out. Theirs is a knowing ignorance, self-aware. Those who, having left the first ignorance behind, have some smattering of this sufficient knowledge, act as if they know all the answers. The former do not trouble the world, their judgment is no worse than all the others’. The people and the clever determine the course of a nation. The others, who respect it, are no less respected by it. To know things, it is not necessary to know the details. As they are limited, our knowledge is solid. Love is not to be confused with poetry. Woman is at my feet! We must not in describing heaven, use the materials of the earth. We must leave the earth and its materials where they are, in order to embellish life by its ideal. To speak in familiar tones to Elohim, to address him at all, is seemly buffoonery. The best means of showing our gratitude towards him is not to trumpet into his ears that he is mighty, that he created the world, that we are worms in comparison with his greatness. He knows all that better than we. Men can refrain from telling him these things. The best means of showing our gratitude to him is to console mankind, torelate everything we do to mankind; to take it by the hand and treat is as a brother. It is more honest. To study order, one must not study disorder. Scientific experiments, like tragedies, stanzas to my sister, gibberish about misfortune, have got nothing to do with life on earth. It is not good for all laws to be known. To study evil in order to extract the good from it is not the same as to study the good. Given an instance of good, I will seek its cause. Up to now, misfortune has been described in order to inspire terror and pity. I will describe happiness, to inspire the opposite. A logic for poetry exists. It is not the same as the logic of philosophy. Philosophers are not on a par with poets. Poets have the right to consider themselves above philosophers. I do not need to bother about what I will do later. What i am doing now I had to do. I do not need to discover the things that I will discover later. In the new science, everything comes in its place—that is its excellence. There are the makings of the poet in moralists an philosophers. The poet contains the thinker. Each caste suspects the other, developing its own qualities at the expense of those which bring it closer to the other caste. The pride of the latter proves incompetent to do justice to tenderer minds. Whatever a man’s intelligence may be, the process of thinking must be the same for all. The existence of tics having been established, we are not surprised to see the same words recurring more often than their due: in Lamartine, the tears which fall from his horse’s nostrils, the colour of his mother’s hair; in Hugo, the shadow and the madman are part of the binding. The science I am establishing is a science distinct from poetry. I am not writing the latter. I am trying to discover its source. Across the helm which directs all poetic thought, billiards and teachers will distinguish the development of sentimental theses. The theorem is in its nature a form of mockery. It is not indecent. The theorem does not insist on being applied. The application we make of it debases it, becomes indecent. Call the struggle of matter against the ravages of the mind application. To struggle against evil is to pay it too great a compliment. If I allow men to despise it, I hope they do not forget to say that that is all I can do for them. Man is certain that he is not wrong. We are not content with the life within us. We wish to lead an imaginary life in other people’s minds. We strive to appear to be what we are. We make every effort to preserve this imaginary being, which is simply the real one. If we are generous, faithful, we are eager not to let it be known, we wish to attribute these virtues to this being. We do not get rid of them and then attach them to this being. We are brave in order to avoid the reputation of being cowards. A sign of our being’s incapacity to be satisfied with the one without the other, to renounce either. That man who did not live to defend his virtue would be a scoundrel. Despite the sight of our greatness, which has caught us by the throat, we have an instinct which corrects us, which we cannot repress, which exalts us! Nature has perfections to show that it is the image of Elohim, faults to show that it is nonetheless only an image. It is right that laws should be obeyed. The people understand what makes it just. It does not break the laws. Were we to make their justice depend on anything else, it is easy to cast doubt on it. Peoples are not subject to revolt. Those who are out of order tell those who are in order that they are straying from nature. They believe they are right. One must have a fixed standpoint in order to judge. And where else is this standpoint to be found but in morality? Nothing is less surprising than the contradictions in man. He is made to know truth. He seeks it. When he tries to grasp it, he is so dazzled an confused that no one would envy him the possession of it. Some wish to deny man’s knowledge of truth, others to assert it. Each side uses such dissimilar arguments that they dispel his confusion. There is no other guiding-light than that which is to be found in nature. We are born just. Everyone seeks his own good. It is the wrong way round. We must aim for the general good. The descent towards self if the end of all disorder, in war, in economics. Men, having conquered death, misery and ignorance, have, in order to be happy, taken it into their heads not think of these things. It is the only method they have devised to console themselves for so few ills. Most rich consolation. It does not cure the ill. It hides it for a short while. In hiding it, it gives the impression that it is being cured. By a legitimate reversal of man’s nature, it is not the case that ennui, which is man’s most deeply felt evil, is his greatest good. It can contribute more than anything else to help him seek his redemption. That is all. Amusement, which he regards as his greatest good, is his least ill. More than anything else, he seeks in this the remedy to all his ills. Both are a counter-proof of the misery, the corruption of man, apart from his greatness. Man in his boredom seeks this multitude of activities. He has a notion of the happiness he has gained; finding it within himself, he seeks it in external things. He is content. Unhappiness is not in us, nor is in other creatures. It is in Elohim. Nature makes us happy in all states. Our desires represent to us an unhappy state. They add to our present state the afflictions of the imaginary one. Yet if we ever experience these sorrows, we still would not be unhappy, we would have other desires corresponding to our new state. The strength of reason appears greater in those who know it than in those who do not know it. We are so far from being presumptuous that we would wish to be known all over the earth, and even by those who come after us when we are dead. We are so far from being vain that the esteem of five—let us make it six—people amuses and honours us. The least thing consoles us. The greatest things afflict us. Modesty is so natural in the heart of man that a worker carefully avoids boasting, yet wishes to have his admirers. Philosophers want theirs, too. And poets most of all! Those who write for glory wish to have the distinction of having written well. Those who read wish to have the distinction of having read. I, who write this, boast that I have this wish. Those who read it will do the same. The mind of the greatest man is not so dependent that he is liable to be troubled by all the hurly-burly around him. It does not take the silence of the cannon to hinder his thoughts. It does not take the noise of a weather-vane or a pulley. The fly cannot gather its thoughts at present. A man is buzzing at its ears. It is enough to make it incapable of good counsel. If I want to discover the truth, I will chase away this animal which keeps its reason in check, troubling this intelligence which governs realms.The purpose of these people playing tennis with such concentration of the mind and movement of the body is to boast to their friends that they have played better than their opponent. That is the reason for their love of the game. Some sweat in their studies to prove to the mathematical experts that they have solved an algebraical problem which was no problem at all until then. Others expose themselves to dangers to boast of what they have achieved by what, in my opinion, are less spiritual means. The last group try desperately hard to see these things. They are certainly no less wise. It is above all to show that they know how worth-while it is. They are the least foolish of the whole lot. They know hat they are doing. Perhaps the others would not be the same if they did not have this knowledge. The example of Alexander’s continence has made no more converts to chastity than that of his drunkenness has made teetotalers. People are not ashamed to not be as virtuous as he. They believe their virtues are not quite the same as the generality of men’s when they see these same virtues practised by the great. They cling on to that which he has in common with them. However exalted they may be, they always have a point which connects them with the rest of mankind. They do not hover in the air, separated from our society. If they are greater than we, it is because they are flesh and blood as we are. They are on the same level, they stand on the same ground. At this extremity, they are as exalted as we, as children, a little more than animals. The best means of persuading consists in not persuading. Despair is the smallest of our errors. Whenever we hear of a thought, a truth which is on everyone’s lips, we only need to develop it and we find that it is a discovery. One can be just, if one is not human. The storms of youth precede the brilliant days. Unawareness, dishonour, lubricity, hatred and contempt for men all have their price. Liberality multiplies the advantages of riches. Those who are honest in their pleasures are also honest in their other dealings. It is the sign of a gentle disposition, since pleasure humanizes. The moderation of great men limits only their virtues. We offend me by praising them beyond their strict deserts. Many people are modest enough not to object in the least to being well thought of. We must expect everything, fear nothing, from time, from men. If merit and glory do not make men unhappy, then what we call misfortune is not worth their grief. A soul deigns to accept fortune, respite, if it can superimpose on them the strength of its feelings, the flight of its genius. We admire great designs when we feel capable of great successes. Reserve is the apprenticeship of minds. We say sound things when we do not attempt to say extraordinary things. Nothing which is true is false; nothing which is false is true. All is the contrary of a dream, of illusion. We must not think that those whom nature has made lovable are vicious. There has never been a century or a people which has inaugurated imaginary virtues and vices. One can only judge the beauty of life by the beauty of death. A playwright can give to the word ‘passion’ a meaning of utility. But he is then no longer a playwright. A moralist can give to any word whatsoever a meaning of utility. He remains a moralist just the same! Whoever examines the life of a man will find it in the history of the species. Nothing has been able to vitiate it. Do I have to write in verse to set myself apart from other men? Let charity decide! The pretext of those who make others happy is that they are seeking their good. Generosity shares in the joys of others as if it were responsible for them. Order dominates among the human species. Reason and virtue are not the strongest. Princes have few ungrateful subjects. They give all they can. We can love with all our heart those in whom we find great faults. It would be impertinent to think that only imperfections have the right to please us. Our weaknesses attach us to each other as much as that which is not virtue could do. If our friends do favours for us, we think that, as friends, they owe us them. We do not at allthink they owe us their enmity. He who was born to command, would command, even on the throne. When our duties have exhausted us we think we have exhausted our duties. We say that the heart of man can contain everything. Everything lives by action. Communication between beings, the harmony of the universe, come from action. We find that this fecund law of nature is a vice in man. He is obliged to obey it. Unable to rest for a moment, we conclude he is left in his place. We know what the sun and the heavens are. We possess the secret of their movements. In the hands of Elohim, a blind instrument, an imperceptible spring, the world compels our homage. The revolutions of empires, the phases of time, the nations, the conquerors of knowledge, all this comes from a crawling atom, lasts only a day, destroys the spectacle of the universe through all the ages. There is more truth than errors, more good qualities than bad, more pleasures than pains. We like to examine our character. We exalt ourselves above our species. We adorn ourselves with the esteem which we lavish on it. We think we cannot separate our own interest from that of mankind, that we cannot slander our race without compromising ourselves. This ridiculous vanity has filled books with hymns in favour of nature. Man is in disgrace with all those who think. It is a question of who can accuse him of the most vices. When was he not about to pick himself up, to piece together his virtues? Nothing has been said. We have come too early. Man has existed for seven thousand years. In the matter of morals, as in everything else, that which is the least good is the most highly thought of. We have the advantage of working after the ancients, after the ablest of the moderns. We are capable of friendship, justice, compassion, reason. Oh my friends! What then is the absence of virtue? As long as my friends are still alive, I will not speak of death. We are dismayed by our relapses and to see that our misfortunes have corrected our faults. One can only judge the beauty of death by the beauty of life. The three full stops make me shrug my shoulders with pity. Does one really need that to prove that one is a man of wit, i.e. an imbecile? As if clarity was not as good as vagueness, in the matter of full stops!