Part 5

But whatever they might say or do, the age was after carrion, and the charnel-house suited them better than the boudoir; the reader would bite at no hook that was not baited with a little body already turning blue.--A state of things easily conceived; put a rose at the end of your line and the spiders will have time to spin their webs in the crook of your elbow before you catch the tiniest minnow; put on a worm or a piece of rank cheese, and carp, barbel, perch, eels, will all leap three feet out of water to snap at it.--Men are not so different from fish as people generally seem to believe.

One would have said that the newspaper men had become Quakers, Brahmins, or Pythagoreans, or bulls, they had been suddenly seized with such a horror of red and of blood.--Never had they been known to be in such a soft and melting mood;--it was cream and buttermilk.--They admitted the existence of only two colors, sky-blue and apple-green. Pink was only tolerated, and if the public would have allowed them to do as they chose, they would have led it to the banks of the Lignon to feed on spinach beside the sheep of Amaryllis. They had changed their black frock-coats for the dove-colored jacket of Celadon or Silvander, and surrounded their goose-feathers with clusters of roses and ribbons after the style of a shepherd's crook. They let their hair float in the wind like a child's, and had made themselves virgins according to the recipe of Marion Delorme, and about as successfully as she.

They applied to literature the article in the Decalogue:

Thou shalt not kill.

The least little dramatic murder was no longer permissible, and the fifth act had become an impossibility.

They considered the poniard extravagant, poison monstrous, the axe horrible beyond words. They would have liked dramatic heroes to live to the age of Melchisedec; and yet it has been a recognized fact, from time immemorial, that the object of every tragedy is to have a poor devil of a great man, who cannot help himself, murdered in the last act, just as the object of every comedy is to join in matrimony two idiots of jeunes premiers of about sixty years each.

It was about this time that I threw into the fire--after having taken a duplicate, as almost always happens--two superb and magnificent Middle-Age dramas, one in verse, the other in prose, in which the heroes were quartered and boiled on the stage, which would have been very entertaining and decidedly unusual.

To conform to their ideas, I have since composed an antique tragedy in five acts called Héliogabale, the hero of which throws himself into the privy, an extremely novel situation and one that has the merit of introducing a bit of scenery not yet seen on the stage.--I have also written a modern drama, very much superior to Antoni,--Arthur, or L'Homme Fatal, where the providential idea arrives in the shape of a Strasbourg pâté de foie gras, which the hero eats to the last crumb after committing various rapes, and that, combined with his remorse, brings on a frightful attack of indigestion of which he dies.--A moral ending, if ever there was one, which proves that God is just, and that vice is always punished and virtue rewarded.

As for the monstrosity species, you know how they have dealt with that, how they have abused Han d'Islande the cannibal, Habibrah the obi, Quasimodo the bell-ringer, and Triboulet, who is only a hunch-back--all that family so strangely swarming--all those gigantic deformities whom my dear neighbor sends crawling and leaping through the virgin forests and the cathedrals of his romances. Neither the great strokes à la Michael Angelo, nor the curiosities worthy of Callot, nor the effects of light and shade after the fashion of Goya, could find favor before them; they sent him back to his odes when he wrote novels, to his novels when he wrote dramas: the ordinary tactics of journalists who always praise what you have done at the expense of what you are doing. A fortunate man, however, is he who is acknowledged to be superior, even by the feuilletonistes, in all his works,--except, of course, the particular one with whom they are dealing,--and who need only write a theological treatise or a manual of cooking to have his plays admired.

Concerning the romance of the heart, the ardent, impassioned romance, whose father is Werther the German, and its mother Manon Lescaut the French-woman, we had a few words to say, at the beginning of this preface, of the moral scurf that has fastened itself upon it in desperation, on the pretext of religion and good morals. The critical louse is like the body-louse that deserts the dead body for the living. From the corpse of the Middle Ages the critics have passed on to the living body of this age, whose skin is tough and hard and might well break their teeth.

We think, notwithstanding a deep respect for the modern apostles, that the authors of these so-called immoral novels, without being so thoroughly married as the virtuous journalist, generally have a mother, and that several of them have sisters and are provided with an abundance of female relations; but their mothers and sisters do not read novels, even immoral novels; they sew and embroider and look after the house-keeping.--Their stockings, as Monsieur Planard would say, are--entirely white: you can look at them on their legs--they are not blue, and excellent Chrysale, who hated learned women so, would suggest them as models to the skilled Philaminte.

As for these gentlemen's wives, as they have so many of them, however spotless their husbands may be, it seems to my simple mind that there are certain things they ought to know.--Indeed, it may well be that their husbands have never shown them anything. In that case I understand that they are bent upon keeping them in that useful state of blessed ignorance. God is great and Mohammed is his prophet!--Women are inquisitive creatures; may Heaven and morality grant that they gratify their curiosity in a more legitimate way than that adopted by their grandmother Eve, and do not go putting questions to the serpent!

As for their daughters, if they have been at boarding-school, I fail to see what they can learn from these books.

It is as absurd to say that a man is a drunkard because he describes an orgy, or a debauchee because he narrates a debauch, as to claim that a man is virtuous because he has written a book on morals; we see the contrary every day. It is the character that speaks, not the author; his hero may be an atheist, that does not mean that he is an atheist; he represents brigands as acting and talking like brigands, but that does not make him a brigand. On that theory we should have to guillotine Shakespeare, Corneille, and all the writers of tragedy; they have committed more murders than Mandrin and Cartouche; we have not done it, however, and, indeed, I do not believe that we shall do it for a long time to come, however virtuous and moral criticism may become. It is one of the manias of these little shallow-brained scribblers always to substitute the author for the work, and to resort to personalities, in order to give some paltry scandalous interest to their miserable rhapsodies, which they are well aware that nobody would read if they contained only their individual opinions.

We can hardly imagine the tendency of all this wailing, or what good purpose all this indignation and snarling can serve--or who impels these Messieurs Geoffroy on a small scale to set themselves up as the Don Quixotes of morality, and, like genuine literary policemen, to lay hands upon and club, in the name of virtue, every idea that appears in a book with its mob-cap awry or its petticoats raised a little too high.--It is very strange.

Whatever they may say, the present age is immoral,--if the word means anything, which we much doubt,--and we require no other proof of it than the quantity of immoral books it produces and the success they meet with.--Books follow morals, morals do not follow books.--The Regency produced Crébillon, not Crébillon the Regency. Boucher's little shepherdesses were painted and immodest because the little marchionesses of the day were painted and immodest.--Pictures are painted after models, not models after pictures. Somebody or other has said somewhere or other that literature and the arts have a great influence on morals. Whoever he is, he is unquestionably a great fool.--It is as if some one should say: "Green peas make the springtime grow;" on the other hand, green peas grow because it is spring, and cherries because it is summer. The trees bear fruit, the fruit assuredly does not bear the trees--the law is everlasting and invariable in its variations; the centuries succeed one another and each bears its fruit, which differs from that of the preceding century; books are the fruit of morals.

Beside the moral journalists, under this shower of homilies, as if it were a summer shower in a park, there has arisen, between the boards of the Saint-Simonian stage, a school of little mushrooms of a curious new variety, of which we propose to give the natural history.

They are the utilitarian critics,--poor fellows whose noses were so short that they would not hold spectacles, and who could not see to the end of their noses.

When an author tossed upon their desk a volume of any sort,--novel or poetry,--these gentry would lean back nonchalantly in their chairs, balance them on their hind legs, sway back and forth, puffing themselves out with a knowing air, and say:

"What purpose does this book serve? How can it be applied to securing the moral and spiritual well-being of the most numerous and poorest class? What! not a word of the needs of society, nothing civilizing and progressive! How, instead of dealing synthetically with the great problems of humanity, and following, through the events of history, the phases of the regenerating, providential idea, can you waste time writing poetry and novels which lead to nothing, and which do nothing to help the generation forward in the pathway of the future? How can you concern yourself about form and style and rhythm, in presence of such grave interests?--What do we care for rhythm and style and form? that is all right in its place!" (Poor foxes, they are too green!)--"Society is suffering, it has a terrible gnawing at the vitals;" (translate: no one will subscribe to the utilitarian papers.) "It is for the poet to seek the cause of the trouble and cure it. He will find a way by sympathizing heart and soul with humanity;" (philanthropic poets! that would be something rare and charming.) "We await the coming of that poet, we pray for his coming with all our hearts. When he appears, his will be the acclamations of the multitude, his the palm-leaves, his the wreaths, his the Prytaneum."

Very fine; but as we desire the reader to stay awake to the end of this blessed preface, we will not continue this very close imitation of the utilitarian style, which, by its nature, is unusually soporific, and might advantageously replace laudanum and the discourses of the Academy.

No, fools, no, cretins and goitrous creatures that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup;--a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet is not a syringe with a continuous stream; a drama is not a railroad,--all essentially civilizing things and tending to assist humanity along the pathway of progress.

By the bowels of all the popes, past, present, and to come, no, two hundred thousand times no.

You cannot make a nightcap out of a metonymy, or wear comparisons by way of slippers; you cannot use antithesis as an umbrella; unluckily we have not the secret of clapping a few variegated rhymes upon the stomach as we put on a waistcoat. I have a firm conviction that the ode is a garment too light for winter, and that one would be no more warmly clad with the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode, than the wife of the cynic who was contented to have only her virtue as a chemise and went about as naked as your hand, as history tells us.

The famous Monsieur de la Calprenède once had a coat, and when some one asked what kind of cloth it was made of, he answered: Silvandre.--Silvandre was a play of his that had just been produced with success.

Such arguments make one raise his shoulders above his head, higher than the Duke of Gloucester's.

People who claim to be economists and who wish to rebuild society from top to bottom, seriously put forward such trash.

A novel may be useful in two ways:--one material, the other spiritual, if we may use such an expression with reference to a novel.--Its material utility consists, first, of the few thousand francs that go into the author's pocket, and ballast him so that neither the devil nor the wind can whisk him away; to the publisher it is a noble race-horse who stamps and rears with his cabriolet of ebony and steel, as Figaro says; to the paper manufacturer, one more factory on some stream and often the means of spoiling a fine site; to the printers, divers hogsheads of logwood to put their windpipes in shape once a week; to the circulating libraries, piles of big sous covered with proletariat verdigris and a quantity of grease, which if it were carefully collected and utilized would render the whale-fishery useless.--The spiritual utility consists in this: that, while you are reading novels, you fall asleep, and you are not reading utilitarian, virtuous, and progressive newspapers, or other similar indigestible, stupefying drugs.