Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas

Even before he speaks, a child knows the value of a smile. It is his first language, and nothing proves that it is absolutely instinctive. The animal has only those attitudes which are the sign of a need. Some are beautiful, some are pretty, but none are voluntary.

The smallest child's smile often veils an intention. Woman has taught it the mystery of exchanges, and the fact that a friendly gesture can win food and other things essential to life. The little girl, better disposed than the boy to appreciate this teaching, knows the value of curving lips and of the wave of her rosy hand, long before knowledge of the vocal signs has permitted her tender brain the most elementary reasoning. It is, then, in her case, pure imitation; but the act is favoured by recollection of the end already obtained by the first attempt, and we have here a very curious and obscure example of an effect determining its cause in physiological unconsciousness.

Since women have little in their lives but passional relations, this very primitive play remains the basis of their social tactics. Men feel progressively the need of complicating this elementary science, but it always remains for them a supreme resource. To touch his conqueror, to please him – such is the last argument of the conquered.

All mimetic art is the work of women. Even when she is silent, a woman continues to speak – often with a sincerity which her words lack. Even when she is motionless she continues to speak, and she is often more eloquent then than with words or with gestures. The form of her body makes her breathing a language. The rhythm of her bosom betrays the state of her soul and the degree of her emotion. No speech finds a man more sensitive. But their eyes have at their disposal a keyboard still more extended, though less effective. With her eyes, with the varied curves of her mute mouth, woman can express her inmost thought. The eye pales or kindles, lifts or lowers its look, and it spells desire or disdain, anger or promise – so many pages understood by man the moment he has an interest in reading them. To these gleams and these movements, the play of the eyelids adds its value. This play is affirmative, negative, interrogative. It utters a short and decisive yes, or a yes of languor and abandon. It questions in the tone of anger or of complaining. It refuses with a half-abrupt closing of the pupil, which veils the eyes without closing them. But how many other shades there are, and how rich in speech the smile is, also! The whole woman speaks. She is language incarnate.

Her children will first be actors. Like their mother, they will learn how to speak at the start with everything that is silent – precious acquisition. Darwin found the first sketch of emotional expression in animals. There is an important element of instinct in the human mimetic. Woman has cultivated these primitive movements, has refined and multiplied them. To the signs of the true emotions have come to be added the signs of the false emotions, and then only has a language been created. Animal expression of the emotions is not a language, for it would be incapable of making believe. True language begins with the lie. There is a real meaning in the famous saying that language was given to man to disguise his thought. The lie, which is the sole external proof of psychological consciousness, is also the sole proof that signs are language, and not unconscious mimetic. The lie is the very basis of language and its absolute condition. Analysis of linguistic facts proves this clearly enough, since every word contains a metaphor, and since every metaphor is a transposition of reality, when it is not a wilful, premeditated falsehood. But, taking language such as it appears to us, and supposing each word to correspond to an object, it may be said that, if there existed a man who had never lied, that man never spoke. It is not, in fact, speaking, to say "I am afraid," or "I am cold," when you are afraid, or are cold. It is expressing an emotion or a sensation by means of verbal signs analogous to the trembling of the animal famished or frozen. But if, on the contrary, denying his emotion or his sensation, the man who is cold says "I am warm," and the man who is hungry says "I am not hungry," he speaks. Whether he employ words, gestures or written signs, it is by this, by the lie – that is to say, by consciousness – that the man is recognized. Lie, let it be understood, here signifies expression of an imaginary sensation. It is a matter of psychology, not of morality – separate domains.

If woman is language, she should be lie, and also consciousness. All three are connected and form but one. The first of these points has never been studied, but popular opinion favours it. Not only do women speak more readily than men, they employ a better syntax, a less haphazard vocabulary, their pronunciation is excellent. One feels that language is their element. The second point, the lie, is not disputed; but women are reproached with it, whereas it is the consequence of another gift and, moreover, an assertion of their spiritual nature. Women lie more than men. Then it is because they have a greater sentiment of independence, a livelier consciousness; and here we have reached the third point, without, it seems to me, a minute demonstration being necessary.

The hysterical lie has been spoken of. It is probable that there is an error here, not in the terms, but in the intention which has brought them together. If unconscious life is meant, it is an absurdity. The lie is, on the contrary, the very sign of consciousness, and there can be no lie save where there is full and active consciousness. A distempered sensation, expressed as felt, should not be confused with the intentional travestying of the exposition of a true sensation – the first term of the series with the last. The animal never lies. How could it? It is forced to express its sensation just as he feels it. If it wishes to bite, the dog curves his lips, shows his teeth. If you see it hold back, play the hypocrite, lie, it is because, through its contact with man, it has perhaps acquired a rudiment of consciousness – because its acquired education comes, at such a moment, into conflict with its instinct. Moreover, ruse – especially when applied to defence, or to the search for food – is something quite different from the lie. It is the acute form of prudence. The true lie is purposeless, without other utility than the assertion of a superior detachment. It presents itself as a negation of the ties that attach man to reality, in which respect it approaches poetry and art, of which it is one of the elements. Art is born, like the lie, of a lively consciousness of the sensations and emotions. It declares a state of extreme sensibility, together with a tendency to repel that reality whereby a man's senses were wounded. Art, whatever its form, implies a profound knowledge of the signs, and the will to transpose them, without reference to their customary concordances. The artist is he who lies superiorly – better than other men. If he lies with speech, he is the poet; with inarticulate sounds, the musician; with forms whose attitudes he fixes, the sculptor, and his art is merely the extreme development of the language of motion (of which the dancer represents a very fugitive stage); with lines and colours, the painter, and what does this last do if not restore to primitive hieroglyphics their true aspect and all their natural scope? Art is a language, and it is only that.

But if woman is language, how do women happen to have played so inconspicuous a part in the supreme activity of language? Critics, to flatter them, have alleged some sort of lateral heredity whereby it is demonstrated that, as the daughters of mothers less and less cultivated, going back through the centuries, it is not surprising that their aptitudes are inferior to those of the males. This is not to be taken seriously. For, if it be true that genius and talent are often directly related with anterior cultures, there are also sudden aptitudes developed by the environment. Why should not a girl find this aptitude in her flesh, like her brother? Moreover, for thousands of years now, women have been taught music. Yet it is perhaps the art in which they have least created. The cause lies deeper. Woman is language, but language is useful. Her rôle is not to create, but to conserve. She accomplishes this task marvellously. She creates neither poems nor statues, but she creates the creators of the poems and of the statues. She teaches them language, which is the condition of their science, the lie which is the condition of their art, the consciousness which gives them their genius. When the child, about the age of six or seven, leaves the woman's hands, the man is already man. He speaks, and that is man in his entirety.

Woman's great intellectual task is teaching the language. The grammarians and their substitutes, school-teachers and professors, fancy that they are the masters of language, and that, without their intervention, men's language would perish in confusion and incoherence. They have been maintained for ages in this illusion, yet there is none more ridiculous. Women are the elementary, and poets the superior artisans of language, both unconscious of their function. The intervention of grammarians is almost always bad, unless it limit itself to a statement of the facts – unless it dare restore to the hands of women and of poets an influence which science could exert only with injustice. Here are some children who speak. They are going to school to have a lesson in grammar. They speak, and employ all the forms of the verb, all the shades of syntax, easily and correctly. They speak, but here now is the school, and the master succeeds in teaching them the nature of the imperfect subjunctive. For a function, the pedagogue has substituted a notion. He has replaced the act by consciousness of the act, the word by its definition. He teaches grammar. He does not teach language.

Language is a function. Grammar is the analysis of this function. It is as useless to know grammar in order to speak one's native tongue, as to know physiology in order to breathe with one's lungs, or to walk with one's legs. Compared with the rôle of the ignorant mother who plucks, like a flower, the first word blossoming on her child's lips, the teacher's rôle amounts to almost nothing. It is the mother herself who sowed this word which has just bloomed. For, if language be a function, it must be given the material on which to work. A woman's idle chatter, differing so slightly from that of the little girl talking to her doll, is the child's first lesson, and the one whose importance surpasses every other. Words are so many seeds which will sprout, grow and come to fruition in the young brain. Without this ceaseless random sowing, the child's linguistic function would remain inert, and only vague and perhaps inarticulate sounds would issue from its lips. It has sometimes been wondered what language children, brought up together beyond reach of the human voice, would speak. Perhaps they would speak none at all. It is a question that no one can solve. At all events, they would speak merely a rudimentary language – that is to say, one too rich, variable and entirely unknown. For innate roots exist no more than innate ideas. The child does not create his language. Still less does he secrete his language. He learns it. He speaks the way people speak about him in his cradle. He is a phonograph and at first functions no less mechanically. Before he is able to situate verbal signs with reference to the objects represented, he possesses them in great quantity, but in confusion, pell-mell. Later he will learn to utilize this wealth. Since he knows, on the one hand, the words and, on the other, the objects, the operation of combining them in his memory will be of the simplest, most natural order. The woman directs this combination joyfully, and she admires herself in her admiration of the child's progress. She believes that the double acquisition of the word and of the object is made exclusively at her command, and that fills her with pride. Thus, ignorance of the child's psychological mechanism assures the teacher's success.

Later, as poet, story-teller, philosopher, theologian or moralist – as creator of values, in Nietzsche's very forceful expression – the child will usually employ in her honour this language that he receives almost entirely from woman. The larger part of literature is the indirect work of woman, made for her, to please or to pique her, to exalt or to decry her, to touch her heart, to idealize or to curse her beauty and her love. The two sexes had to be thus profoundly dissimilar, foreign, opposite, for one to become the other's adorer. With equality of tastes, of needs, of desires, bodily differences would not have sufficed, nor the injunction of the species. Humanity could perpetuate itself without love;28 but love would have been impossible without the radical divergences which render man and woman two mutually mysterious worlds. Only the unknown can be adored. There is no longer a religion where there is no longer mystery. In all societies, so long as she is young and beautiful, woman, even when a slave, is the mistress of civilization. The poets, inspired by her grace, heighten this supremacy by making her the theme of their songs; and poetry, which had, at first, no other aim than to tell the joys of possession or the pangs of desire, completed its evolution by creating love. For love, with all the sentiment, the passion, the dream, the happiness, the tears which this word implies, is at bottom a verbal creation and the imaginative achievement of the artists of language.

It is through poems, tales, traditional narratives, that ordinary man, inclined to enjoyment only, has learned to love, to enhance infinitely his commonplace joys and futile sorrows. Let us repeat here Nietzsche's saying – the poet has been the creator of sentimental values. But almost as soon as created, they have escaped him. Possessing herself of these new values, woman has turned them into instruments to assure her sovereignty. She has, in all simplicity, culled the fruits of language, her work.

How love has evolved under this domination, with all the benefits which have accrued from it, would be a long chapter in the history of civilization.

1901.

Note. – Philosophic deductions are of value only if they agree exactly with science; but then they have a value. I have therefore availed myself of the opportunity to complete the note on a previous page, concerning the lie considered as a vital reaction. Here is the scientific statement of the question:

"M. R. Quinton has been led, in the course of his investigations, to recognize that all living beings are divided into two great physiological groups, which correspond exactly to the two anatomical groups: Invertebrates and Vertebrates– The first, and lower group (Invertebrates), always in equilibrium with the environment, supporting all the exterior conditions, however unfavourable; the second, and higher (Vertebrates), not accepting these conditions, reacting against them, always in disequilibrium with the environment, maintaining internally the saline concentration of their origins, in opposition to the sea, which becomes more concentrated, or to fresh water which loses its salt; maintaining, moreover, its original temperature in opposition to a terrestrial environment which grows colder, lying to the environment, in short, in order to maintain its most favourable conditions of life. The lie, of which we speak, is only the psychological form of this reaction, on the part of the Vertebrates, against the hostility of the environment."

The obscure terms in this note (saline concentration, temperature of the origins) are explained in M. Quinton's book: L'Eau de mer, milieu organique.

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ AND THE IDEA OF DECADENCE

Decadence: A very convenient word for ignorant pedagogues; a vague word behind which our laziness and lack of curiosity concerning the law seek shelter.

BAUDELAIRE:Letter to JulesJanin.

I

Abruptly, about 1885, the idea of decadence entered French literature. After serving to glorify or to ridicule a whole group of poets, it had perched, as it were, upon a single head. Stéphane Mallarmé was the prince of this ironical, almost injurious realm, as it would have been, had the word itself been rightly understood and employed. But, by an eccentricity which is a Latin trait, the academic world, in keeping with its normal but unwholesome horror when confronted with new tendencies, called thus the fever for originality which tormented a generation. M. Mallarmé, rendered responsible for the acts of rebellion which he had encouraged, appeared to the innocent ass-drivers who accompany but do not conduct the caravan a redoubtable Aladdin, assassin of the sound principles of universal imitation.

These are, after all, thoroughly literary habits. They have been flourishing now for nearly three centuries, and the most celebrated revolts have hardly lopped their branches – have never uprooted them. No sooner had the Romantic insolences subsided than the poet was forced to crawl, half-smothered, under the ancient greenwood which furnishes ferules.

These habits are also thoroughly Latin. The Romans, so long as they were Romans only, knew nothing of individualism. Their civilization offers the spectacle of a fine social animality. Emulation with them aimed at likeness, just as, with us, it aims at unlikeness. Once they possessed five or six poets – successful off-shoots of Hellenic grafting – they refused to admit any others, and it is quite possible that, their social, racial instinct dominating the instinct of freedom and individuality, no poet of fresh inspiration was born to them for four or five centuries. They had the emperor and they had Virgil, and they obeyed both equally until the Christian revolt and the barbarian invasion joined hands above the Capitol. Literary liberty, like all other liberties, is born of the union of consciousness and strength. The day when Saint Ambrose, writing his hymns, disregarded the Horatian principles should be memorable, for it marks unmistakably the birth of a new mentality.

Just as the political history of the Romans has furnished us with the conception of historical decadence, so the history of their literature has furnished us with the conception of literary decadence – the two faces of a single idea; for it has been easy to indicate the coincidence of the two movements, and to inculcate the belief that there was a necessary connection between the two. Montesquieu owes his fame to the fact that he was particularly the dupe of this illusion.

Savages find it very difficult to admit the possibility of natural death. For them, every death is a murder. They have not the slightest sense of law; they live in the domain of the accidental. It has been agreed to call this state of mind inferior, and it is inferior, though the notion of rigid law is just as false and as dangerous as its negation. The only absolutely necessary laws are natural laws, which can neither vary nor change. In the case of social and political evolution, not only are there no necessary laws, but there are no very general laws even. Either these so-called laws, confused with the facts which they explain, amount to nothing but wise and honourable assertions, or else they declare, though over-emphatically, the very principle of change. Empires, then, are born, grow and die. Social combinations are unstable. Human groups have, at different epochs, different powers of cohesion. New affinities appear and are propagated. Here there would be the material for a treatise on social mechanics, if the writer did not insist too rigorously on squaring his philosophy with the reality of unexpected catastrophes. For the unexpected must be left a place which is sometimes the throne whence irony flashes and laughs. The idea of decadence is, then, merely the idea of natural death. Historians admit no other. To explain the taking of Byzantium by the Turks, they make us listen to the murmur of theological quarrels, and the crack of the Blue's whip in the circus. Longchamps leads to Sedan, no doubt, but Epsom leads to Waterloo also. The long decadence of crumbling empires is one of the most singular illusions in history. If certain empires have died of sickness or of old age, the greater number, on the contrary, have succumbed to violent death, in the plenitude of their physical power, in the full force of their intellectual vigour.

Then, too, intelligence is personal, and no reasonable relation can be established between the power of a people and the genius of an individual. Neither Greek literature, nor the literatures of the Middle Ages, correspond to stable and powerful political institutions, Greek, Italian or French; and it is precisely now, when their material power has become negligible, that the Scandinavian kingdoms have decked themselves with original talents. It would, perhaps, be nearer the truth to say that political decadence is the condition most favourable for intellectual flowering. It is when a Gustavus Adolphus and a Charles XII are no longer possible, that an Ibsen and a Björnson appear. In the same way, the fall of Napoleon seemed a signal for nature to clothe herself again joyously in green, and to put forth her most magnificent growths. Goethe was the contemporary of his country's ruin. In order to exercise and satisfy our tendencies towards historical scepticism, we should not, however, fail to oppose to these examples the phenomena of those doubly glorious epochs of which the pompous century of Louis XIV is the venerated model. After this, a few minutes' reflection will force us to adopt a somewhat different opinion from that which passes current persistently in text-books and in conversation.

Bossuet was the first to whom it occurred to judge universal history – or what he naïvely regarded as such – in accordance with the principles of Biblical Judaism. He saw the fall of all those empires upon which Jehovah had laid his heavy hand. This is the idea of decadence explained by that of punishment. Montesquieu's more complicated philosophy is perhaps even more puerile. It is impossible to name without a sort of disgust a historian who dates the decadence of Rome from the dawn of those admirable centuries of world-peace which, perhaps, constitute the one happy epoch of civilized humanity. The meaning of the words must be scrutinized closely. Then it will be perceived that they have no sense, and that memorable writers used them all their lives without understanding them. But however debatable, or at least however vague, it may be, the general idea of decadence is clear and distinct compared with the more restricted notion of literary decadence.

From Racine to Vigny, France produced no great poet. This is a fact. Such a period is certainly one of literary decadence; yet we should not go further than the fact itself, or attribute to it an absurd character of logic and necessity. Poetry was asleep in the eighteenth century, through lack of poets; but this failure is not the result of a too free flowering prior to that period. It is what it is, and nothing more. If we call it decadence, we admit the existence of a sort of mysterious organism – a being, a woman – Poetry – who is born, brings forth, and dies, at almost regular intervals, after the manner of human beings. This is an agreeable conception – subject for a dissertation or lecture – but one which should be omitted from a discussion, which aims only at the anatomy of an idea.

The principal trait of eighteenth century poetry is its spirit of imitation. That century was Roman in its cultivation of this spirit. It imitated furiously, gracefully, tenderly, ironically, stupidly. It was "Chinese" as well as Roman. There were "models." The word was imperative. The poet was not obliged to describe the impression produced upon him by life; he had to watch Racine and scale the mountain. What a singular psychology! The same philosopher who sapped the idea of respect in politics, replastered and whitewashed it anew in literature. There were critics. While Goethe was writing Werther, they were comparing Gilbert and Boileau. It was a degradation. Must we seek a cause for it? That would be vain. To attempt to explain why no poet was born in France for a hundred years, with the exception of Delille29 and of Chénier, would lead necessarily to explaining the birth of Ronsard, Théophile or Racine also. We know nothing about it, and nothing can be known. Stripped of its mysticism, its necessity, all its historical genealogy, the idea of literary decadence is reduced to a purely negative notion – to the simple idea of absence. This sounds so simple that one scarcely dares to express it; but, when superior intelligences are lacking at a given moment, the multiplication of mediocrities makes itself acutely and actively felt; and, as the mediocre man is an imitator, the epochs that have justly been called decadent are nothing but epochs of imitation. In the last analysis, the idea of decadence is identical with the idea of imitation.