Squibs
I
Even though
God did not exist, Religion would be none the less holy and divine.
God is the
sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.
That which
is created by the Mind is more living than Matter.
Love is the
desire to prostitute oneself. There is,
indeed, no exalted pleasure which cannot be related to prostitution.
At the
play, in the ballroom, each one enjoys possession of all.
What is
Art? Prostitution.
The
pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of sensual joy in the
multiplication of Number.
All
is Number. Number is in all. Number is in the individual. Ecstasy is a Number.
Inclinations
to wastefulness ought, when a man is mature, to be
replaced by a wish to concentrate and to produce.
Love may
spring from a generous sentiment, the desire for prostitution; but it is soon
corrupted by the desire for ownership.
Love wishes
to emerge from itself, to become, like the conqueror with the conquered, a part
of its victim, yet to preserve, at the same time, the privileges of the
conqueror.
The sensual
delights of one who keeps a mistress are at once those of an angel and a
landlord. Charity and
cruelty. Indeed, they are
independent of sex, of beauty and of the animal species.
The green
shadows in the moist evenings of summer.
Immense
depths of thought in expressions of common speech; holes dug by generations of
ants.
The story of the Hunter, concerning the intimate relation between
cruelty and love.
II
Squibs. Of the feminine nature of the Church, as a reason for her
omnipotence.
Of violet (love repressed, mysterious, veiled; canoness colour).
The priest
is a tremendous figure, because he makes the crowd believe marvellous things.
That the
Church should wish to do all things and be all things is a law of human nature.
The People
adore authority.
Priests and the servants and sectaries of the imagination.
Revolutionary
maxim: the throne and the altar.
E. G. or
The Seductive Adventuress.
Religious intoxication of the great
cities.
Pantheism. I am all
things. All things are myself.
Whirlwind.
III
Squibs. I
believe I have already set down in my notes the Love greatly resembles an
application of torture or a surgical operation.
But this idea can be developed, and in the most ironic manner. For even when two lovers love passionately
and are full of mutual desire, one of the two will always be cooler or less
self-abandoned than the other. He or she
is the surgeon or executionary; the other, the patient
or victim. Do you hear these sighs -
preludes to a shameful tragedy - these groans, these screams, these rattling
gasps? Who has not uttered them, who has not inexorably wrung them forth? What worse sights than these could you
encounter at an inquisition conducted by adept torturers? These eyes, rolled back like the
sleepwalker's, these limbs who muscles burst and stiffen as thought subject to
the action of a galvanic battery - such frightful, such curious phenomena are
undoubtedly never obtained from even the most extreme cases of intoxication, of
delirium, of opium-taking. The human
face, which Ovid believed fashioned to reflect the stars, speaks here only of
an insane ferocity, relaxing into a kind of death. For I should consider it
indeed a sacrilege to apply the word 'ecstasy' to this species of
decomposition.
A terrible
pastime, in which one of the players must forfeit possession of himself!
It was once
asked, in my hearing, what was the greatest pleasure in Love? Someone, of course, answered: To receive, and
someone else: To give oneself - The former said: The pleasure of pride, and the
latter: The voluptuousness of humility.
All those swine talked like The Imitation of Jesus Christ. Finally, there was a shameless Utopian who
affirmed that the greatest pleasure in Love was to beget citizens for the
State. For my part, I say: the sole and
supreme pleasure in Love lies in the absolute knowledge of doing evil. And man and woman know, from birth, that in Evil is to be found all voluptuousness.
IV
Schemes. Squibs. Projects. Comedy à la Silvestre. Barbara and the sheep.
Chenavard has created a superhuman type.
My homage to Levaillant.
The Preface, a blend of mysteriousness and drollery.
Dreams and the theory of dreams, in the manner of Swedenborg.
The thought of
Concentration.
Power of the fixed idea.
Absolute frankness, the means of originality.
To relate
pompously things which are comic....
V
Squibs. Suggestions.
When a man takes to his bed, nearly all his friends have a secret desire
to see him die; some to prove that his health is inferior to their own, others
in the disinterested hope of being able to study a death-agony.
The
Arabesque is the most spiritualistic of designs.
VI
Squibs. Suggestions.
The man of letters shakes foundations.
He promotes the taste for intellectual gymnastics.
The
Arabesque is the most ideal of all designs.
We love
women in so far as they are strangers to us.
To love intelligent women is the pleasure of the pederast. Thus it follows that bestiality excludes
pederasty.
The spirit
of buffoonery does not necessarily exclude Charity, but this is rare.
Enthusiasm
applied to things other than abstractions is a sign of weakness and disease.
Thinness is
more naked, more indecent than corpulence.
VII
Tragic Sky. An
abstract epithet applied to a material entity.
Man drinks
in light with the atmosphere. Thus the
masses are right in saying that the night air is unhealthy for work.
The masses
are born fire-worshippers.
Fireworks, conflagrations, incendiaries.
If one
imagined a born fire-worshipper, a born Parsee, one could write a story ...
VIII
Mistakes
made about people's faces are due to an eclipse of the real image by some
hallucination to which it gives rise.
Know
therefore the pleasures in an austere like and pray, pray without ceasing. Prayer is the fountain of strength. (Altar of the Will. Moral dynamic. The Sorcery of the
Sacraments. Hygiene
of the Soul.)
Music
excavates Heaven.
Jean-Jacques
[Rousseau] said that he always entered a café with a certain emotional
disturbance. For a timid nature, the
ticket-office in a theatre is rather like the tribunal of Hell.
Life has
but one true charm: the charm of gambling.
But what if we are indifferent to gain or loss?
IX
Suggestions. Squibs.
Nations - like families - only produce great men in spite of
themselves. They make every effort not
to produce them. And thus the great man
has need, if he is to exist, of a power of attack greater than the power of
resistance developed by several millions of individuals.
Of sleep,
every evening's sinister adventure, it may be observed that men go daily to
their beds with an audacity which would be beyond comprehension did we not know that it is the result of their ignorance of
danger.
X
There are
some skins as hard as tortoise shell against which scorn has no power.
Many friends, many gloves.
Those who loved me have been despised persons; worthy of being despised,
I might even say, if I were determined to flatter the respectable.
For Girardin to speak Latin!
Pecudesque locutae.
It was
typical of a Society without faith to send Robert Houdin
to the Arabs to convert them from belief in miracles.
XI
These great
and beautiful ships, imperceptibly poised (swayed) on calm waters; these stout
ships, with their out-of-work, homesick air - are they not saying to us in dumb
show: When shall we set sail for happiness?
Do not
neglect the marvellous element in drama - the magical and the romanesque.
The surroundings, the atmospheres in which the whole narrative must
be steeped. (See Usher,
and compare this with the most intense sensations of hashish and opium.)
XII
Are there
mathematical lunacies and madmen who believe that two and two make three? In other words, can hallucination invade the
realms of pure reason - if the words do not cry out (at being joined
together)? If, when a man has fallen
into habits of idleness, of daydreaming and of sloth, putting of his most
important duties continually till the morrow, another man were to wake him up
one morning with heavy blows of a whip and were to whip him unmercifully, until
he who was unable to work for pleasure worked now for fear - would not that man,
the chastiser, be his benefactor and truest friend? Moreover, one may go so far as to affirm that
pleasure itself would follow, and this with much
better reason than when it is said: love comes after marriage.
Similarly,
in politics, the real saint is he who chastises and massacres the People, for
the good of the People.
Take some
copies to Michel.
Write to Moun,
to Urriès.
to Maria Clemm.
Send to
Madame Dumay to know if Mirès ...
That which
is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that
irregularity - that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are
an essential part and characteristic of beauty.
XIII
Notes. Squibs. Théodore de Banville is not
precisely a materialist; he gives forth light.
His poetry
represents happy hours.
Whenever
you receive a letter from a creditor write fifty lines upon some
extra-terrestrial subject, and you will be saved.
A great smile on the beautiful face of a giant.
XIV
Of
suicide and suicidal mania considered in their bearings upon statistics,
medicine, and philosophy.
BRIERE
DE BOISMONT
Look up the
passage: To live with someone who feels towards you nothing but aversion....
The portrait of Serenus by Seneca. That of Stagirus
by
Taedium
Vitae.
XV
Squibs.
Translation and paraphrase of La Passion rapporte
tout à elle.
Spiritual
and physical pleasures caused by the storm, electricity and the thunderbolt,
tocsin of dark amorous memories, from the distant years.
XVI
Squibs. I have
found a definition of the Beautiful, of my own conception of the
Beautiful. It is something intense and
sad, something a little vague, leaving scope for conjecture. I am ready, if you will, to apply my ideas to
a sentient object, to that object, for example, which Society finds the most
interesting of all, a woman's face. A
beautiful and seductive head, a woman's head, I mean, makes one dream, but in a
confused fashion, at once of pleasure and of sadness; conveys an idea of
melancholy, of lassitude, even of satiety - a contradictory impression, of an
ardour, that is to say, and a desire for life together with a bitterness which
flows back upon them as if from a sense of deprivation and hopelessness. Mystery and regret are also characteristics
of the Beautiful.
A beautiful
male head has no need to convey, to the eyes of man, at any rate - though
perhaps to those of a woman - this impression of voluptuousness which, in a
woman's face, is a provocation all the more attractive the more the face is
generally melancholy. But this head also
will suggest ardours and passions - spiritual
longings - ambitions darkly repressed - powers turned to bitterness through
lack of employment - traces, sometimes, of a revengeful coldness (for the
archetype of the dandy must not be forgotten here), sometimes, also - and this
is one of the most interesting characteristics of Beauty - of mystery, and last
of all (let me admit the exact point to which I am a modern in my aesthetics)
of Unhappiness. I do not pretend that
Joy cannot associate with Beauty, but I will maintain that Joy is one of her
most vulgar adornments, while Melancholy may be called her illustrious spouse -
so much so that I can scarcely conceive (is my brain become a witch's mirror?)
a type of Beauty which has nothing to do with Sorrow. In pursuit of - others might say obsessed by
- these ideas, it may be supposed that I have difficulty not concluding from
them that the most perfect type of manly beauty is Satan - as Milton saw him.
XVII
Squibs. Auto-Idolatry. Poetic harmony of character.
Eurhythmic of the character and the faculties. To preserve all the
faculties. To
augment all the faculties.
A cult (Magianism, evocatory
magic).
The
sacrifice and the act of dedication are the supreme formulae and symbols of
barter.
Two fundamental literary qualities, supernaturalism and irony. The individual ocular
impression, the aspect in which things present themselves to the writer - then the
turn of satanic wit. The
supernatural comprises the general colour and accent - that is to say, the
intensity, sonority, limpidity, vibrancy, depth and reverberation in Space and
Time.
There are
moments of existence at which Time and Duration are more profound, and the
Sense of Being is enormously quickened.
Of magic as
applied to the evocation of the great dead, to the restoration and perfection
of health.
Inspiration
comes always when man wills it, but it does not always depart when he wishes.
Of language and writing, considered as magical operations, evocatory magic.
Of airs
in Woman.
The
charming airs, those in which beauty consists, are:
The blasé,
The bored,
The
empty-headed,
The
impudent,
The frigid,
The
introspective,
The
imperious,
The
capricious,
The
naughty,
The ailing.
The feline - a blend of childishness, nonchalance and malice.
In certain
semi-supernatural conditions of the spirit, the whole depths of life are
revealed within the scene - no matter how commonplace - which one has before
one's eyes. This becomes its symbol.
As I was
crossing the boulevard, hurrying a little to avoid the carriages, my halo was
dislodged and fell into the filth of the macadam. Fortunately, I had time to recover it, but a
moment later the unhappy thought slipped into my brain that this was an ill
omen; and from that instant the idea would not let me alone; it has given me no
peace all day.
Of the cult
of oneself as a lover - from the point of view of health, hygiene, the toilet,
spiritual nobility, eloquence.
Self-purification and
anti-humanity
There is,
in the act of love, a great resemblance to torture or to a surgical operation.
There is,
in prayer, a magical operation. Prayer
is one of the great forces of intellectual dynamism. There is, as it were, an electric current.
The rosary
is a medium, a vehicle. It is Prayer
brought within the reach of all.
Work - a
progressive and accumulative force, yielding interest like capital, in the
faculties just as much as by its fruits.
Gambling,
even when it is conducted scientifically, is an intermittent force and will be
overcome, however fruitful it may be, by continuous work, however little.
If a poet
demanded from the State the right to have a few bourgeois in his stable, people
would be very much astonished, but if a bourgeois asked for some roast poet,
people would think it quite normal.
That would
not scandalize our wives, our daughters or our sisters.
Presently
he asked permission to kiss her leg, and, profiting by the occasion, he kissed
that beautiful limb in such a position that her figure was sharply outlined
against the setting sun!
"Pussy, kitty, catkin, my cat, my wolf, my little monkey, big
monkey, great big serpent, my little melancholy monkey."
Such
caprices of language, too often repeated, such excessive use of animal
nicknames, testify to a satanic aspect in love.
Have not demons the forms of beasts?
The camel of Cazotte -
camel, devil and woman.
A man goes
pistol-shooting, accompanied by his wife.
He sets up a doll and says to his wife: "I shall imagine that this
is you." He closes his eyes and
shatters the doll. Then he says, as he
kisses his companion's hand, "Dear angel, let me thank you for my skill!"
When I have
inspired universal horror and disgust, I shall have conquered solitude.
This book
is not for our wives, our daughters and our sisters. I have little to do with such things.
There are
some tortoise-like carapaces against which contempt ceases to be a pleasure.
Many friends, many gloves - for fear of the itch.
Those who
have loved me were despised people, I might even say worthy of being despised,
if I were determined to flatter the respectable.
God is a
scandal - a scandal which pays.
XVIII
Squibs.
Despise the sensibility of nobody.
Each man's sensibility is his genius.
There are
only two places where one pays for the right to spend: women and public
latrines.
From a
passionate concubinage one may guess at the joys of a
young married couple.
The precocious taste for women. I used to confuse the smell of women with the
smell of furs. I remember ... Indeed, I loved my mother for her elegance. I was a precocious dandy.
My ancestors, idiots or maniacs, in their solemn houses, all
victims of terrible passions.
The
protestant countries lack two elements indispensable to the happiness of a
well-bred man: gallantry and devotion.
The mixture
of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to
the jaded ear.
What is
exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offence.
There is,
in the creation of all sublime thought, a nervous concussion which can be felt
in the cerebellum.
STYLE. The eternal touch, eternal and cosmopolite. Chateaubriand, Alph.
Rabbe, Edgar Poe.
XIX
Squibs. Suggestions.
It is easy to guess why the rabble dislike
cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests
ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures ... etc.
XX
Squibs. A
small amount of work, repeated three hundred and sixty-five times, gives three
hundred and sixty-five times a small sum of money - that is to say, an enormous
sum. At the same time, glory is
achieved. [In the margin]
Similarly, a crowd of small pleasures compose happiness.
To write a
pot-boiler, that is genius. I ought to
write a pot-boiler.
A really
clever remark is a masterpiece.
The tone of Alphonse Rabbe.
The tone of a kept woman (My beautifullest! Oh, you fickle sex!)
The eternal tone.
The
colouring crude, the design profoundly simplified.
The prima donna and the butcher boy.
My mother
is fantastic; one must fear and propitiate her.
Hilderbrand the
arrogant.
Caesarism of
Napoleon III (Letter to Edgar Ney), Pope and Emperor.
XXI
Squibs. Suggestions. To give oneself to Satan. What does this mean?
What can be
more absurd than Progress, since man, as the event of each day proves, is for
ever the double and equal of man - is for ever, that is to say, in the state of
primitive nature! What perils have the
forest and the prairie to compare with the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether man ensnares his dupe upon the
boulevard or pierces his victim within the trackless forests, is he not
everlasting man, the most perfect of the beasts of prey?
People tell
me that I am thirty, but if I have lived three minutes in one ... am I not
ninety years old?
Is not work
the salt which preserves mummified souls?
At the
beginning of a story attack the subject, no matter where, and open with some
very beautiful phrases which will arouse the desire to complete it.
XXII
I believe
that the infinite and mysterious charm which lies in the contemplation of a
ship, especially of a ship in motion, depends firstly upon its order and
symmetry - primal needs of the human spirit as great as those of intricacy and
harmony - and, secondly, upon the successive multiplication and generation of
all the curves and imaginary figures described in space by the real elements of
the object.
The poetic
idea which emerges from this operation of line in motion is an
hypothesis of an immeasurably vast, complex, yet perfectly harmonized entity,
of an animal being possessed of a spirit, suffering all human ambition and
sighing all the sighs of men.
You
civilized peoples, who are for ever speaking foolishly about Savages and
Barbarians - soon, as d'Aurevilly says, you
will have become too worthless even to be idolaters.
Stoicism, a
religion which has but one sacrament: suicide!
To conceive a sketch for a lyrical or fairy extravagance for a
pantomime and to translate it into a serious romance. To plunge the whole into a
supernatural, dreamlike atmosphere - the atmosphere of the great days. That there should be
something lulling, even serene, in passion. Regions of pure poetry.
Moved by
contact with those pleasures which were themselves like memories, softened by
the thought of a past ill-spent, of so many faults, so many quarrels, of so
many things which each must hide from the other, he began to weep; and his
tears fell warm, in the darkness, upon the bare shoulder of his beloved and
still charming mistress. She
trembled. She, also, felt moved and
softened. The darkness shielded her
vanity, her elegant affectation of coldness.
These two fallen creatures, who could still suffer, since a vestige of
nobility remained with them, embraced impulsively, mingling, in the rain of
their tears and kisses, regrets for the past with hopes, all too uncertain, for
the future. Never, perhaps, for them, as
upon that night of melancholy and forgiveness, had pleasure been so sweet - a
pleasure steeped in sorrow and remorse.
Through the
night's blackness, he had looked behind him into the depths of the years, then he had thrown himself into the arms of his guilty
lover, to recover there the pardon he was granting her.
Hugo often
thinks of Prometheus. He applies an
imaginary vulture to his breast, which is seared only by the moxas of vanity.
Then, as the hallucination becomes more complex and varied, following
always, however, the progressive stages which medical men describe, he believes
that a fiat of
This man is
so little of a poet, so little spiritual, that he would disgust even a
solicitor.
Hugo, like
a priest, always has his head bowed - bowed so low that he can see nothing
except his own navel.
What is not
a priesthood nowadays?
Youth itself is a priesthood - according to the
young.
And what is
not a prayer? To sh-
is a prayer - according to the rabble, when they sh-
M. de Pontmartin - a man who has always the air of having just
arrived from the provinces.
Man - all
mankind, that is to say - is so naturally depraved that he suffers less
from universal degradation than from the establishment of a reasonable
hierarchy.
The world
is about to end. Its sole reason for
continuance is that it exists. And how
feeble is this reason, compared with those which announce the contrary,
particularly the following: What, under Heaven, has this world henceforth to
do? Even supposing that it continued
materially to exist, would this existence be worthy of the name or the
Historical Dictionary? I do not say that
the world will be reduced to the clownish shifts and disorders of a South
American republic, or even that we shall perhaps return to a state of nature
and roam the grassy ruins of our civilization, gun in hand, seeking our
food. No; for these adventures would
require a certain remnant of vital energy, echo of earlier ages. As a new example, as fresh victims of the
inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by that which we have believed to be our
means of existence. So far will
machinery have Americanized us, so far will Progress have atrophied in us all
that is spiritual, that no dream of the Utopians,
however bloody, sacrilegious or unnatural, will be comparable to the
result. I appeal to every thinking man
to show me what remains of Life. As for
religion, I believe it useless to speak of it or to search for its relics,
since to give oneself the trouble of denying God is the sole disgrace in these
matters. Ownership virtually disappeared
with the suppression of the rights of the eldest son; but the time will come
when humanity, like an avenging ogre, will tear their last morsel from those
who believe themselves to be the legitimate heirs of revolution. And even that will not be the worst.
Human imagination
can conceive, without undue difficulty, of republics or other communal states
worthy of a certain glory, if they are directed by holy men, by certain
aristocrats. It is not, however,
specifically in political institutions that the universal ruin, or the
universal progress - for the name matters little - will be manifested. That will appear in the degradation of the
human heart. Need I describe how the
last vestiges of statesmanship will struggle painfully in the clutches of
universal bestiality, how the governors will be forced - in maintaining
themselves and erecting a phantom of order - to resort to measures which would
make our men of today shudder, hardened as they are? Then the son will run away from the family
not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will
fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a
tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a
business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa, to be
founder and shareholder of a journal which will spread enlightenment and cause Le
Siècle of that time to be considered as an instrument of superstition. Then the erring, the déclassées,
those women who have had several lovers and who are sometimes called Angels, by
virtue of and in gratitude for the empty-headed frivolity which illumines, with
its fortuitous light, their existences logical as evil - then these women, I
say, will be nothing but a pitiless wisdom, a wisdom which condemns everything
except money, everything, even the crimes of the senses. Then, any shadow of virtue, everything indeed
which is not worship of Plutus, will be brought into
utter ridicule. Justice, if, at that
fortunate epoch, Justice can still exist, will deprive of their civil rights
those citizens who are unable to make a fortune. Thy spouse, O bourgeois! Thy chaste better half, whose legitimacy
seems to thee poetic - making legality to be henceforth a
baseness beneath reproach - vigilant and loving guardian of thy
strong-box, will be no more than the absolute type of the kept woman. Thy daughter, with an infantile wantonness,
will dream in her cradle that she sells herself for a million - and thou,
thyself, O bourgeois - less of a poet even than thou art today - thou will find
no fault in that, thou wilt regret nothing.
For there are some qualities in a man which grow strong and prosper only
as others diminish and grow less; thanks to the progress of that age, of thy bowels
of compassion nothing will remain but the guts! - That age is perhaps very
near; who knows if it is not already come and if the coarseness of our
perceptions is not the sole obstacle which prevents us from appreciating the
nature of the atmosphere in which we breathe?
For myself,
who feel within me sometimes the absurdity of a prophet, I know that I shall
never achieve the charity of a physician.
Lost in this vile world, elbowed by the crowd, I am like a worn-out man,
whose eyes see, in the depths of the years behind him, only disillusionment and
bitterness, ahead only a tumult in which there is nothing new, whether of
enlightenment or of suffering. In the
evening, when this man has filched from his destiny a few hours of pleasure,
when he is lulled by the process of digestion, forgetful - as far as possible -
of the past, content with the present and resigned to the future, exhilarated
by his own nonchalance and dandyism, proud that he is less base than the
passers-by, he says to himself, as he contemplates the smoke of his cigar: What
does it matter to me what becomes of these perceptions?
I believe I
have wandered into what those of the trade call a hors-d’oeuvre. Nevertheless, I will let these pages stand -
since I wish to record my days of anger.