Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (50 page)

And while we are about it: M. Groussac is mistaken when he states that Verlaine and Régnier never accepted such epithets as “decadent,” et cetera. These are trivialities of the
salon
that there is no reason for the maestro to know. . . .

That group of artists has given the world, in these last years, the knowledge of great genius: Ibsen, Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and above all, the sovereign Wagner and the prodigious Poe. Among them, anonymous or unknown, they have translated and commented upon, published and promoted. The Pre-Raphaelites are their brothers, and the work of those Pre-Raphaelites is their own: Swinburne has declared as much. It was their influence that led to the commencement of what de Vogüé called the “Latin Renaissance,” with Gabriel D’Annunzio, whom M. Groussac looked upon not so long ago with disdain but who has today entered—despite the attacks and the well-known accusations of plagiarism—the
Revue des Deux Mondes.
All these men follow the star of Beauty. There are obscure writers among them; there are bright, indeed crystalline ones. In painting and music they are followed by other brothers-at-arms. What high spirit does not feel today at least a distant influence from the Titans of modern art!. . . .

Our poetics, furthermore, is based on melody: rhythmic caprice is personal. French
vers libre,
today adapted by the moderns in all languages and initiated by Whitman, mainly, is subject to “melody.” And with that, we arrive at Wagner, but we will not enter that deep woods for now. Great poets often make mistakes. People have said that hexameter is impossible in Spanish; but it exists, and there are admirable examples. Poe denied it in English, which did not keep Longfellow’s
Evangeline
from being in hexameters.

Whitman, maestro Whitman, broke all the rules and, guided by instinct, went back to the Hebrew line. And I must concur with the diagnosis of the Jew Nordau with respect to the immense poet of
Leaves of Grass,
that rare, strange—passing strange,
degenerate
Whitman—yet honored, too, Maeterlinck’s master, that strong, cosmic Yankee. We, dear maestro, the young poets of the Spanish Americas, are preparing the way, because our own Whitman must be soon to come, our indigenous Walt Whitman, filled with the world, saturated with the universe, like that other Whitman of the north, chanted so beautifully by “our” Martí. And no one would be surprised if in this vast cosmopolis, this alembic of souls and races, where Andrade of the symbolic
Atlántida
lived his life and this young savage Lugones has just appeared, there might appear some precursor of that poet heralded by the enigmatic and terrible Montevideo madman, in his prophetic and terrifying book.

PRO DOMO MEA

Things I should point out to don Leopoldo Alas after reading Clarín’s piece published in yesterday’s
La Prensa
:

As for myself, I received, along with Clarín’s piece, a letter containing this sentence: “My admiration, my friendship, my affection, my constant reading—you have all those.” If Clarín should wish to know who wrote those lines, he should look for the highest summit of Spain, among the highest in the world.

THE JOURNALIST AND HIS LITERARY MERITS

... Today, and always, “journalists” and “writers” must of necessity be confused with one another. Most essayists are journalists. Montaigne and de Maistre are journalists in the broad sense of the word. All observers of, and commentators on, life have been journalists. Now, if you are referring simply to the mechanical aspect of the modern profession, then we can agree that the only persons who merit the name
journalist
are commercial “reporters,” those who report on daily events—and even these may be very good writers who with a grace of style and a pinch of philosophy are able to turn an arid affair into an interesting page. There are political editorials written by thoughtful, high-minded men that are true chapters of fundamental books. There are chronicles, descriptions of celebrations or ceremonies, written by reports who are artists, and these chronicles might not be out of place in literary anthologies. The journalist who writes what he writes with love and care is as much a “writer,” an “author” as any other.

The only person who merits our indifference and time’s oblivion is he who premeditatedly sits down to write, for the fleeting moment, words without the glow of burnishing, ideas without the salt taste and smell of blood.

Very beautiful, very useful, and very valuable volumes could be made up if one were to carefully pick through newspapers’ collections of “reports” written by many persons considered to be simple “journalists.”

On “Modern Life” and Politics

MUSINGS ON CRIME

Canon Rosenberg-Montrose and banker Boulain have, in the annals of notoriety, displaced the remarkable swindles of the fictional Mme. Humbert.

A canon who steals, in the coldest of cold blood, from stupid lambs and sheep, his most excellent flock—a man standing upon the Roman curia, an apostle of good and a philosopher of the ideal Jerusalem—is no small thing. So banker Boulain must take second place. He is but a vulgar
escroc
⁶⁰
with whom the Parisians amuse themselves until another, greater scandal comes along.

There can be no doubt that these resounding malefactions are more comic than tragic, though they leave many poor wretches in poverty. What is comic is that the victims are all so much like the perpetrators; that is, they are conned because they thought they were in on a con, or greedy souls who did not see the wolf’s ears peeking out from the sheep’s clothing.

There are, then, comic crimes; what is not easy to accept, despite the most vivid paradoxes, is that there are beautiful crimes. De Quincey, the opium-eater, wrote a famous essay titled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” and Gómez Carrillo has made it known in Spanish. This marvelous work of humor is parallel to Swift’s memoir on the anthropophagic leanings of children. There are no artists of crime; there are, that is, criminal talents, as there are such rare blood-hounds as Sherlock Holmes.

Many think that there are in fact artistic crimes, while others, such as Osmont think this way: If one adopts an exclusively moral point of view, there is no beautiful crime, and there could never be one. The contingent circumstances that might give some luster to a generally blameworthy action must seem all the more horrific the more they appear to be, as the old metaphor that M. Prudhomme still favors has it, flowers that decorate the abyss. That concession made, let us confess—Osmont adds—that there are very few people who place themselves in a purely moral point of view, and stand firm there.

And here enters the question of “taste.” If an aesthete were allowed to legislate morals, clearly there would be “beautiful” crimes. It would be as puerile to deny that as to write—someone has said—that a poisonous flower is never beautiful. Look at the monk’s-hood, the hellebore, the foxglove with its lovely purple blooms. When a crime is profoundly horrific, and no low motives are intermixed, and the situation in which it occurs does not disturb one’s emotions, then in order for the reader not to see the direct horror of the spilled blood and the writhings of agony, some sort of savage grandeur must be part of the true tragedy, and there are those who would applaud as though it were a well-made play. The recent Italian drama in which the Conde de Bonmartini was the victim is what they call “a beautiful crime.” Why? M. Osmont tells us: Because passion alone—but what monstrous passion!—guided the murderers’ hand. The shocking risk run by the culprits, if they should be discovered, because a man, and especially a woman of high estate, loses not just liberty and inner honor but the respect of others, and that luxury, enjoyed since childhood, has been a kind of air in which one lives; the shocking dramas revealed by the final catastrophe—all that makes a strong impression on one; it is disconcerting, disturbing—yet in some way thrilling. In that crime in Bologna, a figure emerges who strangely dominates the case: Senator Murri. That Roman virtue, that stoic courage could not occur but in a similar circumstance—very grand for our shriveled times. And as is required in a drama in which eternal justice appears to intervene, the crime will have its punishment, virtue its just reward in the carrying-out of a terrible duty. For—and this is to answer a likely objection—no one, I should think, admires a “beautiful crime” in itself. It is an image of violent hues, a moving drama. Its telling can make an
aesthetic
impression. Is there a person alive who has not admired, with horror, the scenes of torture painted by Spanish painters, or the nightmares of Goya? I do not wish to speak about political assassination. Here, a new element appears: faith. That is enough to elevate the act to sacrifice. When all is said and done, even if we agree on the existence of the “beautiful crime,” one must say that it is a most lamentable spectacle, and that it is not a school in which brains and hearts should be formed. And so, admiring in a book, or a newspaper, occasionally, the murder in Bologna, it seems to me that crimes, beautiful or not, occupy too much space in journalism and literature. They bloody every page and perpetuate in the people the Byronic idea of the sublimity of crime and the elegance of desperation. One should rather—or also—show virtue, let it be seen as it is—a superior beauty. Osmont’s ideas seduce me more, I confess, than aesthetic originalities and deviations of sensibility. Erudite Thomas de Quincey, “who at fifteen composed odes in Greek, and by twenty had read all the ancient books,” seems to me not to have been quite in his right mind,
pace
Baudelaire (another of the same sort) and my friend Carrillo.

I will not get mixed up with the Nietzscheans, but I will make reference to those, like M. Colah, who believe that the word “hero” can be given a dark reverse. Certainly, M. Colah says, from the philosophical and moral point of view crime is unworthy of admiration, but the fancy, faced with the success of certain evil deeds, falls into a state that is none other than admiration. One admires any sort of hero for his audacity, the ability he has employed in surmounting the insurmountable, the contempt for danger he has shown in carrying out an act of patriotic or social abnegation. Is it because the assassin acts antimorally that the obvious courage, the incredible wiles, the irrational audacity, the terrible temerity—the thousand difficulties that must, in the final analysis, come together to create the “beautiful crime” and that have, in fact, been met and conquered—that even in his astonishing success he should be denied the label “hero”? He is a hero in an evil cause, but nonetheless a hero! What we admire is not the outcome, the final scene, but rather the complications almost wiped away, the dangers almost shrugged off, that precede it. For a “beautiful crime” should most certainly be labored over, weighed, reflected on, sagely premeditated—while still it entails combinations which cause the triumph to be more or less fortuitous. A drama of poverty and squalor, the sad ending of a love affair, the tragic result of a scene of jealousy cannot produce a “beautiful crime,” for those are committed under the pressure and blindness of desperation, of despair, of wrath, of passion.