No More Learning

A horrible life and a horrible city! Let us run over the events of the
day. I have seen several literary men; one of them wished to know if he
could get to Russia by land (he seemed to have an idea that Russia was
an island); I have disputed generously enough with the editor of a
review, who to each objection replied: "We take the part of respectable
people," which implies that every other paper but his own is edited by a
knave; I have saluted some twenty people, fifteen of them unknown to me;
and shaken hands with a like number, without having taken the
precaution of first buying gloves; I have been driven to kill time,
during a shower, with a mountebank, who wanted me to design for her a
costume as Venusta; I have made my bow to a theatre manager, who said:
"You will do well, perhaps, to interview Z; he is the heaviest,
foolishest, and most celebrated of all my authors; with him perhaps you
will be able to come to something. See him, and then we'll see," I have
boasted (why? ) of several villainous deeds I never committed, and
indignantly denied certain shameful things I accomplished with joy,
certain misdeeds of fanfaronade, crimes of human respect; I have refused
an easy favour to a friend and given a written recommendation to a
perfect fool. Heavens! it's well ended.

Discontented with myself and with everything and everybody else, I
should be glad enough to redeem myself and regain my self-respect in the
silence and solitude.

Souls of those whom I have loved, whom I have sung, fortify me; sustain
me; drive away the lies and the corrupting vapours of this world; and
Thou, Lord my God, accord me so much grace as shall produce some
beautiful verse to prove to myself that I am not the last of men, that I
am not inferior to those I despise.




THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST.


How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah, yes, penetrating enough
to be painful even; for there are certain delicious sensations whose
vagueness does not prevent them from being intense; and none more keen
than the perception of the Infinite. He has a great delight who drowns
his gaze in the immensity of sky and sea. Solitude, silence, the
incomparable chastity of the azure--a little sail trembling upon the
horizon, by its very littleness and isolation imitating my irremediable
existence--the melodious monotone of the surge--all these things
thinking through me and I through them (for in the grandeur of the
reverie the Ego is swiftly lost); they think, I say, but musically and
picturesquely, without quibbles, without syllogisms, without deductions.

These thoughts, as they arise in me or spring forth from external
objects, soon become always too intense.
The energy working within
pleasure creates an uneasiness, a positive suffering. My nerves are too
tense to give other than clamouring and dolorous vibrations.

And now the profundity of the sky dismays me! its limpidity exasperates
me. The insensibility of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle,
revolt me. Ah, must one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from
Beauty?

Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, leave me! Tempt my
desires and my pride no more. The contemplation of Beauty is a duel
where the artist screams with terror before being vanquished.




THE THYRSUS.

TO FRANZ LISZT.


What is a thyrsus? According to the moral and poetical sense, it is a
sacerdotal emblem in the hand of the priests or priestesses celebrating
the divinity of whom they are the interpreters and servants. But
physically it is no more than a baton, a pure staff, a hop-pole, a
vine-prop; dry, straight, and hard. Around this baton, in capricious
meanderings, stems and flowers twine and wanton; these, sinuous and
fugitive; those, hanging like bells or inverted cups. And an astonishing
complexity disengages itself from this complexity of tender or brilliant
lines and colours.