La puerta condenada (part 2)

The conclusion to a story ("The sealed door") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

2

In the morning Petrone thought things over for a while as he took his breakfast and smoked a cigarette.  Sleeping poorly did not help his daytime work one bit.  He had woken up twice in the middle of the night, both of those times because of the crying.  The second time was worse because over and above the crying, he could also hear the voice of the woman as she tried to calm the child.  The voice was quite low, and yet possessed an anxious tone that lent it a certain theatrical quality, a whisper that crossed the door with so much force it was as if she were shouting.  For short periods here and there the lullaby made the baby stop; then he began again with a light, choked-up whimper of inconsolable grief.  And again the woman murmured some incomprehensible words, a mother's incantation to hush a baby tormented by his body or his soul, for being alive of for being threatened by death.

"Everything's just fine, but the manager was telling me absolute nonsense," thought Petrone as he left his room.  He did not hide the fact that the lie bothered him.  The manager did not relent in his stare.

"A little child?  You must have been confused.  There are no small children on this floor.  In the room contiguous to yours lives a solitary woman, I think I already told you that."

Petrone hesitated before speaking again.  Either the fellow was lying foolishly, or the acoustics of the hotel were playing a trick on him.  The manager was looking at him a bit askance, as if he was now the one irritated by these continuous protests.  "Perhaps he thinks I'm easily scared and simply searching for an excuse to ask to be moved," Petrone thought.  It was difficult and somewhat absurd to insist in the face of such an adamant denial.  He shrugged his shoulders and asked for the daily. 

"I could have been dreaming," he said, annoyed for saying that, or anything else for that matter.

        
3       

The cabaret was deadly boring, and his two hosts did not seem to be too enthusiastic, so it was easy for Petrone to claim that a long day's work had made him tired and get himself back to the hotel.  They would have to sign the contracts the next day in the afternoon; the business was practically complete.

The silence at the hotel's reception was so pervasive that Petrone found himself walking on tiptoe.  They had left him an evening daily next to his bed; there was also a letter from Buenos Aires, on which he recognized the handwriting of his wife.

Before going to bed he stared at the wardrobe and the protruding part of the door.  Perhaps if he placed his two suitcases in front of the wardrobe, effectively blocking the door, the sounds emanating from the neighboring room would be diminished.   As always at this time, there was no noise.  The hotel was asleep, things and people were asleep.  Yet it seemed to Petrone, who was already in a bad mood, that this was precisely the opposite state of things: everything seemed awake, breathily awake in the center of silence.  His unconfessed anxiety must have been communicating to the house, to the people within the house who were lying in wait in a kind of crouching vigilance.  Fears and more fears in abundance.

He almost didn't take this seriously until the child's crying at three in the morning brought him back to it all.  Sitting up in bed, he asked himself whether it might not be best to call for the nightwatchman as a witness to the fact that one could not sleep in this room.  The child was crying so weakly that at moments Petrone couldn't hear him, although he felt that the crying was there continuously and would not hesitate to increase anew.  Ten or twenty of the slowest seconds of his life went by; then came a short hiccup, a hardly perceivable complaint that extended softly until it erupted into a real cry.

Lighting a cigarette, he wondered whether he shouldn't knock a few times discreetly on the wall so that the woman would hush the child.  Lately when he thought about the two of them, the woman and the child, he realized that he did not believe in them, and that absurdly he did not believe that the manager had lied to him.  Now he heard the woman's voice completely stifling the child with her passionate, if still discreet consolations.  The woman was singing the child a lullaby, consoling him, and Petrone imagined her seated at the foot of the bed, moving the child's cradle or holding him in her arms.  Yet for all his might he could not imagine the child, as if the affirmation of the hotel clerk was surer than the reality to which he was now listening.  Little by little, as the time passed and the weak complaints alternated or rose between the murmurs of consolation, Petrone began to suspect that this was all a farce, a ridiculous and monstrous game that would never be explained.  He thought of those old tales about childless women organizing a clandestine cult of dolls, an invented and secret motherhood, a thousand times worse than cuddling dogs, cats, nieces, or nephews.  The woman was imitating the cry of her frustrated child, consoling the air between her empty hands, perhaps with her face awash in tears because the cry she was feigning was at the same time her real cry, her grotesque pain in the solitude of a hotel room protected by indifference and by daybreak.   

Unable to go back to sleep, Petrone turned on the bedside lamp and wondered what he was going to do.  His discontent was malignant, afflicted as if by contagion in this environment where all of a sudden everything seemed to him rigged, hollow and false: the silence, the crying, the lullaby, and the only real thing of this hour between night and day and something that continued to swindle him with its insufferable lies.  Knocking on the wall did not seem like it would be enough.  He was not completely awake even though it would have been impossible to fall asleep.  Not knowing quite how, he found himself moving the wardrobe little by little until he had fully uncovered the dusty, dirty door.  Barefoot and in pyjamas, he pinned himself to the door like a centipede and, pressing his mouth to the pinewood panels, began to imitate, in falsetto, imperceptibly, a plaintive cry like the one coming from the other side.  He raised his tone, moaned, and then sobbed.  On the other side came a silence that would last the entire night; and yet in the instant that preceded it, Petrone could hear the woman running through the room in a rustle of slippers, emitting a dry and quick scream, the beginnings of a howl that ceased at once like a tightened rope.

4

It was past ten o'clock in the morning when he passed by the reception desk.  Between dreams, after eight o'clock, he had heard the voice of the hotel employee and that of the woman.  Someone had gone around the neighboring room moving things.  He saw a trunk and two large suitcases next to the elevator.  The manager had an air about him that struck Petrone as being one of bewilderment.

"Did you sleep well last night?" he asked with that professional tone that hardly masks its indifference.

Petrone shrugged his shoulders.  He did not want to make too much of the matter since he only had another night at the hotel.

"In any case, it will soon be more quiet around here," said the manager, eyeing the suitcases, "the lady is leaving us today at noon."

He expected some commentary, so Petrone obliged him with his eyes.

"She was here for a long time.  And just like that, she's leaving.  You never know with women."

"No," said Petrone.  "You never know."

Outside on the street he felt faint, a faintness that was not physical.  While drinking a cup of bitter coffee he began to think back on the matter, forgetting his business dealings, all the while indifferent to the splendid sun.  It was his fault that the woman was leaving the hotel, crazed by fear, by shame or by anger.  She was here for a long time ... She was sick, perhaps, but harmless.  It was he not the woman who ought to have left the Cervantes.  He had the obligation of telling her that, of apologizing, and, while pledging his discretion, of asking her to stay.  He took a few steps back and stopped cold.  He was afraid to make a mess of it all, which could elicit an unpredictable reaction from the woman.  It was already time to meet his two business colleagues and he had no desire to make them wait.  Well then, this was what she deserved.  She was nothing more than an hysteric; she would find another hotel in which to take care of her imaginary child.     

5

But that night he felt bad again, and the silence of the room seemed to him thicker still.  Entering the hotel, he could not help but notice the board of keys which did not have the key of the neighboring room.  He had exchanged a few words with the hotel employee, who was yawning in anticipation of the end of his shift, and gone into his room with little expectation that he would be able to fall asleep.  He had the evening dailies and a crime novel.  He whiled away the time arranging his suitcases and his papers.  It was hot, and he opened the small window all the way.   The bed had been neatly made, but he found it uncomfortable and hard.  At length he gained the silence necessary for sleeping soundly and it burdened him.  He tossed and turned and felt himself defeated by this silence that had so cunningly complained and then returned to him whole and vengeful.  Ironically, he thought that he missed the child's crying, that this perfect calm would not allow him to sleep, much less stay awake.  He missed the child's crying and when he heard it again much later, weak but unmistakeable through the condemned door, beyond fear, beyond escape in the middle of the night, he knew full well that it was alright and the woman had not lied, she had not lied to herself while singing the child a lullaby, wishing that the child would be quiet so that they could fall asleep.

La puerta condenada (part 1)

The first part to a story ("The sealed door") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Petrone liked the Hotel Cervantes for reasons that would have displeased others.  It was gloomy, quiet and almost deserted.   As he was crossing the river amidst the steam coming off the roadway, a passing acquaintance recommended it to him, adding that the hotel was in downtown Montevideo.  Petrone took a room with a bath on the second floor that looked out directly on reception.  He knew from the board of keys at the porter's station that there were few guests at the hotel; the keys were attached to heavy bronze discs with the room number inscribed, an innocent measure on management's part to prevent guests from tossing them into their pockets.

The elevator stopped right in front of the reception desk lined with the dailies and a telephone panel.  He only had to walk a few meters to get to his room.  The water from the tap was scathingly hot, which made up for the lack of sunlight and air.  The room had a small window which looked out onto the roof of the neighboring cinema; now and then a pigeon would fly by.  The bathroom had a bigger window which sadly looked out onto a wall and a distant piece of sky, almost useless.  The furniture was good, with extra drawers and shelves.  And there were a lot of hangers, a rarity.

The manager turned out to be a tall, thin man who was completely bald.  He sported gold-rimmed glasses and spoke with the strong, sonorous voice typical of Uruguayans.  He told Petrone that the second floor was very quiet, and that in the only room contiguous to his own there lived a solitary woman, employed someplace or other, who would return to the hotel at nightfall.  Petrone met her the next day in the elevator.  He realized that this was the woman by the number of the key in the palm of her hand, as if she were offering him an enormous gold coin.  The porter took this key as well as Petrone's and placed them on the board, then remained talking to her about some letters.  Petrone had enough time to notice that she was still young, if feckless, and that she was poorly dressed like all eastern women.

The contract with the mosaic manufacturers would take about a week.  In the evening Petrone placed his clothes in the wardrobe and arranged his papers on the desk.  After his bath he went out towards downtown just as he was supposed to appear at his colleagues' office.  The day was spent in conversation, interrupted only by a round of drinks in Pocitas and a dinner at the house of the senior manager.  When they left him at his hotel it was past one.  Tired, he went to bed and fell asleep immediately.  It was almost nine when he awoke, and in those first minutes when the remains of the night and of sleep persist, he thought that at some point he had been bothered by the cry of an infant.

Before he left that morning he had a chat with an employee with a German accent working reception.  As he was informed about bus lines and street names, he gazed distractedly at the enormous room at whose end stood the door to his room and that to the solitary woman.  Between the two doors was a pedestal with an ill-fated replica of the Venus de Milo.  The other door, in the side wall, led to an exit with its inevitable chairs and magazines.  Whenever the employee and Petrone fell quiet, the hotel's silence seemed to coagulate and fall like ashes over the furniture and floor tiles.  The elevator turned out to be almost noisy; as much could be said about the rustling of newspaper pages or the scraping of a match.   

The meeting ended at nightfall and Petrone turned onto Street of the 18th of July before he dined in one of the smaller, family-run restaurants on Independence Square.  All went well and perhaps he would be able to return to Buenos Aires earlier than he thought.  He purchased an Argentine daily, a pack of black cigarettes, and walked slowly back to the hotel.  In the neighboring cinema two movies were showing which he had already seen, and, as it were, he didn't really feel like going anywhere.  The manager greeted him as he walked in and asked whether he needed more bedding.  Puffing on their smokes, they chatted for a moment then bade each other good night.   

Before going to bed, Petrone put in order the papers which he had used during the day then read the daily without much interest.  The silence of the hotel was almost excessive, and the sound of one or another streetcar heading down Soriano Street did nothing more than pause the silence, reinforcing it for a new interval.  Unworried yet with a certain amount of impatience, he tossed the newspaper into the wastebasket and got undressed as he looked at himself distractedly in the wardrobe mirror.  It was quite an old wardrobe, and it had been placed against a door that let into the adjoining room.  Petrone was surprised to discover that the door had escaped his initial inspection of the room.   In the beginning he had assumed that the building was designed to be a hotel; but now he realized that it was like many modest hotels installed in old houses or office buildings.  Now that he thought about it, in almost all the hotels he had known in his life – and there were many – the rooms had some kind of condemned door, sometimes visible, but almost invariably with a wardrobe, table or coat stand in front of it which lent it, as in this case, a certain ambiguity, an embarrassed desire to conceal its existence like a woman who thinks herself covered by placing her hands over her abdomen or her breasts.  The door was there, in any case, protruding above the height of the wardrobe.  Once upon a time people had entered and exited through it, striking it, turning it, imbuing it with a life still present in its wood, which was so distinct from the walls.  Petrone imagined that on the other side stood likewise a wardrobe, and the woman in the room thought precisely the same thing about this door.     

He was not tired but he slept with relish.  It may have been about three or four hours later when he was awoken by a sensation of discomfort, as if something had occurred, something annoying and irritating.  He turned on the bedside lamp and saw that it was two-thirty, and turned it off again.  Then from the neighboring room he heard a child's cry.

That very first moment he did not quite know what was happening.  His first movement was one of satisfaction: now he was sure that the night before a child had indeed not allowed him to rest.  With everything explained, it became much easier to go back to sleep.   But then he thought about it again and sat up slowly in his bed, without turning on the light, and listened.  He was not mistaken: the crying was coming from the neighboring room.  The sound could be heard through the condemned door, and was localized in that part of the room that corresponded to the foot of the bed.  And yet there could be no child in the neighboring room: the manager had said quite clearly that the woman lived alone and that she spent most of her day at work.  For a second it occurred to Petrone that perhaps tonight she was looking after a child of a relative or friend.  Then he thought about the night before.  Now he was sure that he had already heard the crying because it was not a cry that was easy to mistake, rather an irregular series of very faint moans, followed by plaintive hiccups of imminent sobbing, all of it inconsistent, minimal, as if the child were very ill.  It had to be a child no more than a few months old, although it did not cry with the stridency or sudden clucking and breathlessness of a newborn.  Petrone imagined a child – a boy, he did not know why he thought so – weak and sick, with a consumptive face and dull movements.  It was this child who spent his night in chaste and plaintive tears, without calling too much attention to himself.   Had the condemned door not been there, the crying would not have conquered the wall's thickness, and no one would have known that there was a child crying in the neighboring room.    

The Birth-Mark

One of the most common topoi on these pages has been one of the most ill-named: positivism.  A dictionary will tell you that this sorry word denotes a system whereby only what can be perceived by the senses is worth remarking; a good dictionary will add that this selfish approach somehow also means being positive.  It is more than a little ironic that a theory boasting of knowing nothing except what can be grasped, smelled, tasted, seen and heard by a single mortal form could dare bestow upon itself such an uplifting motto.  Let every person negate the information accumulated by the rest of the world and only count himself, and let us then behold the amazing rapture that overcomes this soul, or darkling cave, upon learning that he can only learn so much.  Indeed, even the greatest of positivist minds can only absorb so little of what the world holds that it seems laughable to think they could ever survive without the input of others.  They do, naturally, because it is their grand decision to perceive what others have already achieved.  Should all this sound like a stinking heap of particularly rotten fish, you may enjoy the gentle allegory contained in this story.

Our tale is not distinguished by its originality, but by its beauty – in which case it has much in common with its heroine, Georgiana.  Georgiana is a woman of stunning attractiveness, attractiveness that could not be more proportionate, more radiant or truer to nature's perfect design.  Yet amidst these angelic fibers lurks one small flaw, a birthmark of the oddest proportions:

It shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size.  Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy, at her birth-hour, had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek, and left this impress there, in token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all hearts.  Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand.  It must not be concealed, however, that the impression wrought by this fairy sign-manual varied exceedingly, according to the difference of temperament in the beholders.  Some fastidious persons – but they were exclusively of her own sex – affirmed that the Bloody Hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty, and rendered her countenance even hideous.

It has been said that there is nothing more repulsive than a slightly distorted version of what one finds incredibly beautiful (an example from fiction would be a loved one resurrected as a corpse-like phantom); it has also been said that there is nothing to which one inures oneself more quickly than ugliness.  The male mind, if it can successfully be cloven from the female mind on such an issue, would likely suggest that a woman's voluptuousness can blind even the fussiest of male admirers to a flaw.  But another argument can be made outside of the gossipy circles of tea parties:

It was the fatal flaw of humanity, which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.  The Crimson Hand expressed the ineludible grip in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust.

Both arguments are presented to and considered by perhaps the most important person to have to consider them, Georgiana's husband Alymer, which brings us to another story quite apart.

Alymer is "a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy," who possesses, much like this literary figure, the oracle of the Brazen Head.  What experiments he conducts in his laboratory are not ours to know, but his trusted assistant Aminadab has much of the modern cinematic notion of such helpers:

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer's underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill with which, while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he executed all the details of his master's experiments. With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that encrusted him, he seemed to represent man's physical nature; while Aylmer's slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.

Aminadab ("bad anima" reversed) should not be written off as a minor character just as Aylmer, for all his pomp and thriving circumstances, should not really be considered our protagonist.  The dichotomy indicated above finds its harshest echoes in Aminadab's own chuckling.  As Aylmer struggles, mixing, matching, meditating through alembics, ingredients and formulas, Aminadab fulfills his every command yet cannot stifle a more than occasional snicker.  For whatever triumph as Aylmer may have achieved in his eventful existence, such fortune pales in comparison to what has surrounded him, on the outside of his laboratories, its seeds and stems the essential components of innumerable concoctions.  Indeed, when he finally whisks poor Georgiana into his offices to find a means to remove her solitary blemish, he even boasts that "no king, on his guarded throne, could keep his life" if he chose to administer a certain potion he humbly dubs the Elixir of Immortality.  Georgiana resigns herself to her husband's genius because everyone else has already succumbed to his wise ways – even if what he wishes to do infringes upon all natural law.

I have previously commented that Hawthorne produces two types of goods, and despite its primitive symbolism, The Birth-Mark is undoubtedly riveting.  One can fairly whiff the exotic scents that Alymer cascades around the wretched Georgiana as if she were nothing more than another damned spot that could not be removed.  The "discord in life" that describes, in turn, Georgiana's odd mark then the havoc wreaked by the votaries of implacable materialism is also buttressed by Alymer's diary, which is something more of a financial statement than a personal account:

The volume, rich with achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the earthly part.

We should all be so lucky as to have our earthbound senses thwart us in our climb to heavenly glory.  How else are we to attempt a modest life if not by filling our gums with dirt?   Or perhaps with the red clay so ready at our fingertips.

On Lord Byron (part 2)

The conclusion to an essay by this French man of letters on this English poet.  You can read the original here.

And when necessary, this literature does not hesitate to involve itself in public disagreements so as to judge or pacify them.  For we are no longer in the days of bucolic songs, and it is not the muse of the nineteenth century who can say:

I am not agitated by the rods of the populace, but by the purple of kings.

Nevertheless this literature, like all the matters of humanity, presents in its very unity both its somber and its consoling aspects.   In its bosom two schools have been formed which represent the dual situation where our political woes have left, respectively, their spirits, resignation and despair.  Both of them recognize what a philosophy of mockery had denied: namely, the eternity of God, the immortal soul, the primordial truths and the revealed truths.  But one is to be adored and one to be damned.  The first sees to the very top of heaven; the second to the very depths of hell.  The first places in the cradle of man an angel whom he will find again on his deathbed; the second surrounds him with its demon steps, phantoms and sinister apparitions.  The first asks for his trust because he will never be alone; the second scares him by isolating him unceasingly.  Both of them possess the ability to sketch gracious scenes and outline terrible figures; but the first, careful never to break one's heart, provides the most somber pictures with some kind of divine gleam; the second, careful always to sadden, spreads an infernal light into his happiest pictures.  The first, in short, resembles Emmanuel, soft and strong, traversing his kingdom in a chariot of lightning and illumination; the second is proud Satan [2] who bore with him so many stars in his fall when he tumbled from the sky.  These two twin schools, founded upon the same basis, and born, as it were, in the same cradle, seem to us, at least in European literature, to be exemplified by two illustrious geniuses, Chateaubriand and Byron.            

Leaving behind our prodigious revolutions, two political orders were fighting on the same soil.  An old society had just collapsed, and a new society was beginning to develop.  Here were ruins, there were sketches and blueprints.  Lord Byron, in his funereal lamentations, expressed the last convulsions of the dying society; Chateaubriand, with his sublime inspiration, attended to the initial needs of the reanimated society.  The voice of one is like a swan song at the hour of its death; the voice of the other is akin to the call of the phoenix rising in rebirth from the ash. 

 By the sadness of his genius, by the arrogance of his character, by the tempests of his life, Lord Byron's is the type of poetry of which he was the poet.  All his works are profoundly marked by the stamp of his individuality.  It is invariably a somber and haughty figure that the reader sees in each poem as if through a mourning veil.  Subject at times, as are all deep thinkers, to vagueness and obscurity, he has words which probe every corner of one's soul, sighs which recount an entire existence.  It seems that his heart is ajar to every potentially rattling thought like a volcano which spews forth lightning flashes.   Pain, joy, and passion are to him no mysteries at all, and he only allows himself to view real objects through a veil, stripping bare the ideal areas.  One may reproach him for his absolute negligence of order in his poems; a serious flaw, since a poem which lacks order is an edifice without a framework or a painting without perspective.  He also pushes too far the lyrical disdain of his transitions.  And sometimes it would be desirable for this painter so faithful to inner emotions to cast less fantastic lights and less vaporous hues upon his physical descriptions.  Too often his genius resembles a person out on an aimless stroll who dreams as he walks and who, absorbed by his profound intuition, can only relay a confused image of the places he traverses.  Whatever he may be, even in his least beautiful works, this capricious imagination raises him to heights unreachable without wings.  Even though the eagle wishes to keep his eyes focused on the ground, he cannot keep himself from that sublime view whose reach stretches to the sun [3].  It has been thought that the author of Don Juan belonged, in some aspect of his mind, to the school of the author of Candide.  Quite wrong!  There is a profound difference between the laughter of Byron and the laughter of Voltaire: Voltaire did not suffer. 

 Here would be the place to say something about the very tormented life of the noble poet.  But in our uncertainty about the real causes of the domestic woes which had rendered his character sharper and more bitter, we would do better not to say a word, for fear that our pens would stray despite our efforts.  Not knowing Lord Byron apart from through his poems, it comforts us to imagine a life for him in accordance with his soul and his genius.  Like all great men he certainly fell prey to calumny; to that last violence upon him we can attribute the noise that has long since accompanied the name of the poet.  Besides, the person offended by these wrongs was surely the first to forget them in the presence of his death.  We hope that these have been forgiven, for we count ourselves among those who do not think that hate and vengeance have anything to carve on a tombstone.

And for this reason let us forgive him his faults and errors, including the works in which he seemed to have descended from the twin heights of his character and his talent.  Let us forgive him: after all he has died so nobly, falling as a great man!  And in so doing he was much like a warlike emissary of a modern muse in the land of ancient muses.  A generous auxiliary to glory, religion and liberty, he brought his sword and his lyre to the descendents of the first warriors and the first poets, and already the weight of his laurels tipped the balance in favor of the unhappy Hellenes.  We owe him, we in particular, profound acknowledgment.   He proved to Europe that the poets of the new school, however they may no longer adore the gods of pagan Greece, still admire its heroes; and that if they have deserted Olympus, at least they never bid farewell to Thermopyles.   

The death of Byron has been received throughout the continent by signs of universal grief.  The cannon of the Greeks long saluted his remains, and a national period of bereavement was consecrated to the loss of this stranger amidst all the public calamities.  The prideful doors of Westminster opened as if by themselves so that the tomb of the poet may honor the sepulcher of kings.  What will we say to that?  Amidst these glorious marks of general affliction we looked for what kind of solemn expression of enthusiasm Paris, that capital of Europe, rendered to the heroic shadow of Byron, and found only a bauble that insulted his lyre and trestles that blasphemed his coffin [4]!

--------------------------------

[2] : Here a simple reference would not suffice to justify the title of 'Satanic school' by which a talented man once designated the school of Lord Byron.

[3] : At a time where all of Europe is paying stupendous homage to the genius of Lord Byron, declared a great man since the time of his death, the reader may be curious to reread here a few quotes from that remarkable article in which the Edinburgh Review, an accredited newspaper, mentioned the illustrious poet and his first efforts.  Moreover, it is in precisely this tone that certain newspapers entertain us every morning or evening on the subject of the foremost talents of our era:

"The poesy of this young lord belongs to the class which neither God nor man are said to permit .... His effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below the level than if they were so much stagnant water.  As an extenuation of this offence, the noble author is peculiarly forward in pleading minority .... He possibly means to say, 'See how a minor can write!' .... But, alas, we all remember the poetry of Cowley at ten, and Pope at twelve; and, so far from hearing with any degree of surprise that very poor verses were written by a youth from his leaving school to his leaving college inclusive, we really believe this to be the most common of all occurrences;-that it happens in the life of nine men in ten who are educated in England, and that the tenth man writes better verse than Lord Byron.

"In truth, it is this consideration only that induces us to give Lord Byron's poems a place in our Review, besides our desire to counsel him, that he do forthwith abandon poetry, and turn his talents, which are considerable, and his opportunities, which are great, to better account.

""With this view we must beg leave seriously to assure him, that the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet; nay, although (which does not always happen) these feet should scan regularly, and have been all counted upon the fingers, is not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, even in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers, or differently expressed.

""Lord Byron should also have a care of attempting what the greatest poets have done before him, for comparisons (as he must have had occasion to see at his writing-master's) are odious.

"As to his Ossian poesy, we are not very good judges; being, in truth, so moderately skilled in that species of composition, that we should, in all probability, be criticising some bit of genuine Macpherson itself, were we to express our opinion of Lord Byron's rhapsodies.... we can so far venture an opinion in their favour, that they look very like Macpherson; and we are positive they are pretty nearly as stupid and tiresome.

"As the author has dedicated so large a part of his volume to immortalize his employments at school and college, we cannot possibly dismiss it without presenting the reader with a specimen of these ingenious effusions [the quote follows].

"But whatever judgment may be passed on the poems of this noble minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, and be content for they are the last we shall ever have from him .... whether it succeeds or not, it is highly improbable, from his situation and pursuits, that he should again condescend to become an author. Therefore, let us take what we get and be thankful. What right have we poor devils to be nice? We are well off to have got so much from a man of this lord's station .... Again we say, let us be thankful; and, with honest Sancho, bid God bless the giver, nor look the gift-horse in the mouth.

Lord Byron would deign to avenge this miserable jumble of platitudes, the perpetual topic endlessly reproduced by envious mediocrity against genius.  The authors of the Edinburgh Review were compelled to recognize his talent beneath the blows of a satiric whip.  The example seems good to follow; nevertheless, we will declare that we would have preferred to see Lord Byron show them the silence of contempt.  If it hadn't been at the behest of his best interest, it could at least have been the advice of his dignity.

[4] : Several days after the news of Lord Byron's death one could still find playing, in some tawdry theater whose name escapes me, a farce of bad tone and taste in which this noble poet is cast as a character with the ridiculous name of Lord Three-Star.

On Lord Byron (part 1)

The first part of an essay by this French man of letters on this English poet. You can read the original here.

ON THE OCCASION OF HIS DEATH

We are in June of 1824.  Lord Byron has just died. 

We are asked for our thoughts on Lord Byron, and on Lord Byron dead.  What do our thoughts matter?  What good would they be to write down, unless one thinks it impossible not to say to whomever it may concern a few words worthy of posterity on a poet and an event of such stature?  To believe those ingenious fables of the Orient, a tear will become a pearl as it falls into the sea.     

In this particular existence that has bestowed upon us a taste for literature, in this peaceful region whither we have been led by a love of independence and of poetry, Byron's death must certainly strike us, as it were, as a domestic calamity, one of those woes which touch us to the quick.  The man who has devoted his days to the religion of literature senses the circle of his physical life tightening around him at the same time as the sphere of his intellectual existence expands.  His heart's tender sentiments go out to only a few dear beings, whereas all the poets dead or alive, foreigners and countrymen, seize the affections of his soul.  Nature gave him one family; poetry creates within him a second.  His sympathies, which may summon so few to his side, will then seek out across the turbulence of social relations, beyond time and space itself, a few men whom he understands and deems deserving to understand him.  Whereas in the monotonous rotation of habits and business the indifferent mob will hurt and batter him without rousing his attention; he will establish between himself and those men he has chosen as his peers intimate connections and communications, that is to say, electric.  A soft community of thoughts like an insoluble and invisible bond will attach him to these elite beings isolated in their world just as he is in his own, in such a way that if by chance he finds himself among them, one look will suffice to reveal them to one another, one word for them both to enter into the depths of each other's souls and there to recognize this equilibrium.  And after a few moments these two strangers will be together like two brothers fed on the same milk, like two friends tried by the same misfortune.       

May we be allowed to express to him and, if necessary, to revel in such talk, our sympathy of the kind which we just said steered us to Byron.  It was certainly not the appeal that one genius inspires in another; it was rather a sincere feeling of admiration, enthusiasm and recognition, for we ought to acknowledge those men whose works and actions make the heart beat nobly.  When we were informed of the death of this poet, it seemed like a part of our future had been stolen.  It was only with bitterness that we renounced our plans never to forge with Byron one of those friendships between poets that are so soft and glorious to maintain with the majority of the main figures of our epoch, and to him we addressed this lovely line which a poet of his school employed to address the generous shadow of André Chénier :

So farewell young friend whom I never knew.

Since we just let a word escape about Lord Byron's particular school, it may then not be off the subject to examine here which place it holds in the totality of contemporary literature, which he attacks as if it could have been conquered, and which he calumniates as if it could have been condemned.  False minds, skilled at dodging all the questions, seek to emphasize a rather unusual error in our midst.  They imagined that our present society was expressed in France by two literatures in absolute opposition: that is to say, that the same tree naturally bore two fruits of opposing species and that the same cause produced simultaneously two incompatible effects.

Yet even these enemies of innovation do not realize that they have created thereby an entirely new logic.  Every day they continue to treat the literature they label classic as if it were still alive, and that which they label Romantic as something about to perish.  These learned rhetoricians who unceasingly propose to change what exists to what once existed involuntarily remind us of Ariosto's mad Orlando who so gravely begged a passer-by to take a dead mare in exchange for a live horse.  True enough, Roland accepts that his mare is dead and at the same time adds that this is her only flaw.  But the Orlandos of this alleged classic genre are not yet at this level in either judgment or good faith.   Thus one must wrest from them what they do not wish to give up willingly and tell them that today there is only one literature just like there is one society, and that previous literatures, while bequeathing us immortal monuments, had to vanish and have vanished with the generations whose social habits and political emotions they expressed.  The genius of our era may be just as beautiful as that of the most illustrious eras, but not the same; and it is not incumbent upon contemporary writers to revive a past literature[1] as it is not incumbent upon a gardener to make the leaves of autumn green again upon the branches of spring.        

Let us not be mistaken: it is first and foremost in vain that a small number of petty minds try to shepherd these general ideas towards the distressing literary system of the past century.  This naturally arid terrain has long since dried out.  Moreover, one cannot start over from the madrigals of Dorat after the guillotines of Robespierre; and Voltaire cannot carry into the century of the Corsican.  The real literature of our age in which authors are proscribed from the manner of Aristides, which, repudiated by all our quills, is then adopted by all the lyres; which, despite vast and calculated persecution, witnesses all its talents bloom within its stormy sphere, like those flowers which only grow in places battered by winds; which, finally, condemned by those who make decisions without forethought, is defended by those who think with their souls, judge with their minds and feel with their hearts.  This literature is no way the soft and shameless allure of the muse that sang of Cardinal Dubois, flattered Madame de Pompadour, and outraged our Joan of Arc.  She neither  questions the crucible of the atheist or the scalpel of the materialist.  She does not borrow from the skeptic this combination of lead in which interest alone shatters the equilibrium.  She does not give birth during orgies to songs for massacres.  She does not contain either adulation or injury.  She does not lend herself to the seductions of lying.  She does not relieve illusions of their charm.  Alien to everything which is not her true goal, she draws her poetry from the sources of truth.  Her imagination nourishes itself on faith.  She follows the progress of time but with a heavy and measured step.  Her character is serious, her voice melodious and sonorous.  She is, in a word, what must be the common thoughts of a great nation after great calamities – sad, proud, and religious.       

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[1] : One should not lose sight of the fact that, in reading this, the words 'literature of a century' must be understood not only as the totality of works produced during the century, but also the general order of ideas and sentiments which – more often than not unbeknownst even to the authors themselves – presided over their composition.