Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (53 page)

 

Several violent hippogriffs fell on their faces, and others fell from high precipices and smashed into trees.

And the
aficionados
and impassioned expect even greater speed, which will be the unprecedented coronation of French industry, for it is in France that this branch of sport prevails and conquers with greater force and more elements than in any other country—a coronation that will bring progress to certain manufacturers and certain champions on a field of smashed skulls and fractured bones. Already, the populace sings:
J’en ai soupé de l’automobile!
⁷²
And the automobile has
soupé
⁷³
and continues to dine on poor pedestrians who have the rotten luck to find themselves on the same street or highway with the great hulking homicidal beast.

With progress have come those ungainly (to our tongue) English words
trust, record,
looping-the-loop,
cakewalk
...; with “progress,” I say, which attempts to possess all the infinite universe by overcoming time and space. Everything created by human advances, everything invented by inventors, is created in the service of that god-like desire: to conquer time and space. In modern “sport,” that desire is complicated by the collective neurosis. Everything leads to excess: an excess of pleasure, an excess of business, a fever for speed. And the Yankee spirit, invading the entire world, decides that records will be set. And the world finds that it must understand English:
trust, record,
looping-the-loop,
cakewalk. All right!

Was an Englishman the author of that Nietzschean-culinary saying “if you want to make an omelette, you have to break eggs”? It could as well have been the Spaniard Pero Grullo or the Frenchman M. de la Palisse. But the fierce and pitiless application of the homily is, I believe, quite modern, and in fact resides among the wise sayings of Zarathustra. It is an excellent philosophy for those who eat, though unsettling for those that are eaten. In the case of the super-chauffeur, the wretch who has the miserable luck to be run over by the automobile counts for nothing. The super-chauffeur is the representative of human energy and the omnipotence of industry, of capital: Beware, those who stand in his way! It happens, however, that he, too, the super-chauffeur, may smash his person into a tree or fall off a cliff. All that is perfectly fine. The boss requires that his factory triumph, that industrial might increase, that Moloch breakfast on his omelette—and to breakfast on omelettes, there are eggs that must be broken.

The logic of this principle is applied likewise to larger matters. It was quite an omelette savored by Moloch when Great Britain smashed little Transvaal. Business is business, and the appliers of the Zarathustrean law are named Cecil Rhodes, are named Chamberlain. An age truly more shocking than any other in the history of mankind. The world’s heart is sick; life causes harm; the universal disquiet is manifested in a thousand ways, and much worse than in the year 1000. Because in the year 1000 there was still faith and hope, and the man of today has murdered both. Everything is reduced to the victory of the moment—by force, by violence, by skill. Glory is threatened with extermination, as is old Honor (already on its deathbed), and Modesty, and Charity. The degenerates from above are about to be supplanted by the lunatics from below. Kings flee, and the people know not where to turn. And the future arrives in an automobile, swiftly, madly, killing, exploding. The socialist mediocrity believes that some time ago it saw in today’s progress, there in the distant Orient, a dawn. But it is a conflagration—unless it might be an eruption, a Vesuvius or a Montagne Pelée.

Everything that once might have been seized upon and put to use in the service of the dreamed-of fraternity of the races, in the service of Christian ideals, is applied now to war and destruction; war, which Victor Hugo dreamed might disappear in the early twentieth century, has ever greater scope, despite the diplomatic leg-pulling and pacifying idylls of retarded ideologues. From the moment when money began to replace the ancient ideals, the dispute over land and wealth became more and more fierce, more and more bitter, and the shattering of morality leads to the most absolute disaster. The human being has never been less an angel than today, never more the savage and bloodthirsty beast. And this is the case with automobiles, with wireless telegraphy, with cinematography, with the omnipotence of the machine in industry and gold in everything.

All this is irrational. But all of life, says Tolstoy, is irrational. It is irrational for men to have useless organs, and for horses to have the vestige of a fifth toe—it is a useless waste of energy. Useless wastes of energy, however, are authorized by progress. The usefulness of an automobile race? Absurd. That is what happens in the kingdom of the irrational. A man who is rich, healthy, perhaps even happy, goes off, leaves his comforts, his house, his home, his beautiful wife, his children, and speeds off to devour space. And he dies. He dies, and kills. Once upon a time he went on crusades; earlier still, Jason went off in search of the ideal.

Today, heroism tends toward speculation on the one hand and annihilation on the other. A race of unquiet men, of
Bovaristes,
⁷⁴
of neurasthenics, marches toward infinite confusion. And Moloch grows fat upon his omelettes: Moloch, the eternal, the indestructible, the god of appetite and of cruelty.

Oh, que la vie est quotidienne,
⁷⁵
Jules Laforgue the Montevidean would say. Laforgue should have lived to see the twentieth century, because this age would have found in his Hamletlike and ultramodern irony its true poet. But he, too, died, run over by his time, mortally injured by the common ill.

Oh, the deliciousness of mediocrity! Not to think; to isolate oneself in unconsciousness! Oh, to wax enthusiastic over bicycle riders!

One can hear the sound of the skull’s bones cracking. I hurry to bring this to a close, for this newspaper article runs the risk of winding up as a prose poem. And that would be serious, indeed.

TO THE VENERABLE JOAN OF ORLEANS
⁷⁶

 

 

It is a holy day, venerable Joan, the day of your triumphant feast.
⁷⁷
Look how an illustrious Pontiff—the White Pope—raises the lily of your sanctity in the last days of a century of struggles. All the red of wars was born this century. Much has been thought, and many combats fought. You, formidable Maid, have been chosen by divine disposition to reign over this century’s end, which shall witness your elevation to the sovereignty of altars. And the shepherd who consecrates you is he who—in a time of hatred of the holy hierarchy and of human hierarchy, as well—stands impeccable, admirable, serene, upon his snowy-white and immaculate dais. He is looked upon by all men as the Sublime One; his genius dazzles, his power impresses, and more than once the world has watched as eagles have paid homage to the symbolic dove. And while the blood of the races throbs in tempests and miseries, in the uprisings of secular rages, agitations, and protests, in hours when there are many prayers too few, you come, diadem’d celestially, Joan of France, new saint, chaste light of Orléans.

 

The fairies in the pagan oak of your village called to you, called you to the feasts of love and life, but the divine will was with you, and when the hour of your predestination came, the archangel of war, as in the case of Judith, put in your hand a conquering sword.

Young, white, intact, the ancient Penthesilea carries her virginity before the armies of Amazons. Clorinda is at your side, like a page or an aide-de-camp, but none bears, as you do, the consecrated bouquet of paradisal lilies.

Joan of France, who touched the keys of a marvelous organ to make the highest lauds, the most thrilling antiphons, the most excellent prose, under the arches of the most wondrous of cathedrals, resound in you?

If I were an image-maker, an artist in stained glass, I would decorate the windows of your church with all the poems in crystal that might be held within the vibrations of the rainbow: Biblical dreams and legendary deeds, the actions of the prophets, the struggles, the lives of the holy kings, the luminous works of the prophecies—all, to exalt, most high Maiden, the excellencies of your predestination, the beauties of your sanctity, and the splendors of your strength.

 

There, in the forest of Domremy, the same fairies who in the days of your childhood sang to you soft songs of love, gay songs of first life, saw that you had arrived at absolute happiness, and that your lips received no kisses of mortal love, for you were destined for the passion of heaven, after the struggles and that cruel sacrifice.

An incomparable feast-day is yours, and an incomparable feast-day is the high kingdom’s, too, when you arrive, trailing your ermine roles of sanctity, treading with renewed life upon the crimson of your martyrdom.

What perfume, the perfume of celestial flowers! What white joy, the joy of ineffable lilies! What red triumph, the triumph of martyrs’ roses! What sounds, the sounds that Cecilia draws from the sweet organ that the Father has set under her alabaster fingers!

 

When you, Joan, were a poor girl, the deities of your native forest saw in you a sweet enemy of the pagan gods.

Later, Voltaire’s inkwell shattered at the feet of your marble figure! The arrows of the skinny old sagittarius could not touch the radiant candor of your wings.

In the Apocalypse, Venerable Joan, there is a grand incarnation of Evil, and she is called Whore. When the world is heated by social monsters, and threatened by immense calamities, you come, you bring the combatant’s sword, the saint’s nimbus, and the Maiden’s fleur-de-lis.

Travel Pieces and Vignettes

VIEUX PARIS
⁷⁸

Vieux Paris, April 30, 1900

 

I am in Vieux Paris, that curious reconstruction by Robida. Although, like the entire Exposition, it is not entirely completed, the impression is pleasant. From the river, the view of the ancient buildings resembles a stage-setting. Houses, towers, roofs, an entire
quartier
—called up out of the past by the talent of an artist both learned and touched with genius—greet the spectator with their picturesque perspective.

As one enters, one is welcomed by costumed players—perhaps a harquebusier, perhaps a lancer—strolling before the portals, past the souvenir vendors who, behind their display cases and tables, wear atop their heads those high pointed caps whose name, in Old French, has just escaped me. The sun filters down through the wooden scaffolding, shatters on the jewels and gold filigrees of the merchandise for sale and the soldiers’ gleaming armor, and a breeze of
life
blows through it all, the breeze that Spring brings to the immense, magnificent Exposition and to all of Paris. And since fantasy generously contributes to this moment, one inevitably finds it shocking when a morning coat, a pair of the very most modern and prosaic trousers, and a bowler hat interrupt this scene of wonder, casting a terrible blotch on the page of
vielle vie
that one is trying so hard, just now, to live in. If things of today were only slightly other, then one would enter this fair in ancient garb and speaking archaic French. Meanwhile, we resign ourselves to the semi-fantasy.

The portal of Saint-Michel stands there, and the great rose window above it, its broad ogives facing the Seine. The rue des Vielles-Écoles leads one into a picturesque quarter, its angular facades, its balconies and windows; in the broad passageways one hears the gay laughter of visitors. In one street, a follower of Nostradamus will, for a few
centimes,
read one’s fortune if one asks, and there are
badauds
⁷⁹
who ask, and who deliver the few
centimes.

But I think something is missing in this scene: the figure of the Sarrazin-olive man, strolling through the streets as he does in Montmartre, handing out his Rabelaisian advertisements and selling his tasty wares.

Robida, the recreator, is, as we all know, a skilled draftsman and witty writer. His artistic and archaeological erudition are manifested in this attempt, as his picaresque, future-gazing talent has been in imagining customs, architectures, and scientific advances—all of which he traces in the most charming drawings. In this work that I have visited, and which will surely be one of the main attractions of the Exposition, he has attempted something varied, though reduced. This is a structure composed of several individual constructions and which therefore revisits, in a single piece, several motifs that remind archaeologists of one or another bygone “type.”

The amusements of Vieux Paris are still not open, with the exception of a theater in which some of us have experienced quite a come-down. Imagine: it is no small thing to find in Vieux Paris not the recitations of troubadours or the pranks of jugglers, but rather a children’s theater with Caballero’s operetta
The Little Old Lady
! Still lacking are places where one might taste ancient dishes served up on ancient tableware, and taverns with their lovely bar-girls serving beer—or mead. Still lacking is the Paris-past of
les Écoles,
where one might see a little of the life lived by the
escholiers
of the classics, who, when their counterparts from Salamanca or Oviedo came, with their
bandurrias
⁸⁰
and their guitars, greeted them in Latin. . . . It is a pity that in the kiosks selling beverages, or jewelry of goldplate and paste, there should be this mixture of medieval dress and modern touches, for one often sees anachronisms that bring an involuntary smile to one’s lips. There should also be a section on the occupations of Old Paris, and the street-hawkers’ and craftsmen’s cries should be revived, to cheer one’s ears. Animation is lacking in the medieval quarter and the merchants’ quarter, where the seventeenth century is recreated: a complete replica of rues de Foire-Saint-Laurent, Châtelet, and Pont-au-Change. When everything is once open and available, the aspect of the place cannot but be most very attractive. What to my mind is not appropriate is the concessions made to progress and comfort, to the sacrifice of authenticity. At night, instead of the soft lanterns of the time, one encounters in the reconstructed quarters the glare of electric lights!