My Friend, the Incurable
Oneof my critics sent me a New Year’s wish and admonition: “You are hectic. Why not see things as they are? You must learn to be simple.”
This is another attempt on the part of my good-wishers to cure me, in defiance of my resolute declaration that I cannot and do not want to be cured. Furthermore, I am in the position of a normal lunatic who considers the whole world, except himself, insane; not only do I refuse to learn the art of being simple, but I regard simplicity as a vice, a defect, a misery.
What is simplicity? I cannot define things; definitions are absurd, limiting, simplifying. In this case perhaps I ought to adopt the method of the school-boy who defined salt as “what makes potatoes nasty when not applied to.” It is an English joke which I have tried with discouraging results on the American sense of humor; it suits my purpose nevertheless. How would this do: “Simplicity is that which makes life dull when applied to?” No; decidedly, I cannot think in Procrustean formulas.
Nothing is simple. What nonsense it is to synonymize this word with “natural,” as if nature were not most complex and complicated! Neither is the primitive savage simple, for he conceives things not “as they are,” but through a veil of awe and mystery. Nor is the child simple, Messrs. and Mesdames Pedagogues; you may instruct it scientifically, tell it “plain truths” and facts, but the not-yet-educated young mind will distrust you and will continue to live in its illusionary, fantastic world. Not even beasts may be accused of that vice: recall Maeterlinck’s subtle dogs and horses.
Nothing is simple, although civilization has attempted to simplify a good deal. We have come to live in accordance with established standards, customs, regulations; inertia and routine have replaced impulse and initiative. Science has endeavored to explain away man’s dreams, to do away with religion, soul, imagination, to prove away our mysteries and wonders. Known stuff. Thus has come to be the matter-of-fact multitude, the simple, the all-knowing, those who act and think and feel “as everybody else does,” as they are taught and trained by the ingenious apparatus of scientific, moral, and social classifications, definitions, simplifications, in a word—the civilized man.
Yet side by side with civilization, machinization, automatonization, there is another powerful force moving the world: culture. Cultureversuscivilization, this is how I gauge the issue. Do not ask me to define these words: let Professor Herrick do it. We are all civilized, of course; especially theGermans: witness their recent astounding achievements. Now try to apply the term “culture” to the activities of thoseKulturtraegerin Belgium and before Rheims—Q. E. D. Michael Bakounin “tried” it in 1848, when he suggested to his fellow-revolutionists in Dresden that they place on the besieged walls Raphael’s Madonna in order to avert the canon of the cultured Prussians; luckily the Saxons knew better their cousins, “the blond beasts.” Pardon this paroxysm of my old disease, Prussophobia. Bakounin, you see, belonged to the few, to the non-simple, to those who had an insight beyond the apparent, the fact, to the hectic, to the abnormal, if you please; “abnormal” is the label given to such individualities by the many, the civilized.
I am not so vulgar as to affect megalomania, when asserting that I am cultured: this is anapologia, a confession of my sins before my critic, the advocate of simplicity. When facing a sunset, I do not simply see a display of colors, nor do I think of the simple explanation of this phenomenon as offered by science, but I live through a world of associations, recollections of diverse impressions and reactions imprinted on my mind by Boecklin, Mallarmé, Debussy—by all the gods that make up the religion of modern man. Life external, simple facts, are to me an artless raw libretto, which, naturally, cannot in itself satisfy one who has come into this world with the intention of enjoying grandiose opera. I call it culture, this faculty of seeing thingscreatively, not in monotones, not through window-panes, but through multiplying lenses which collect the rays of all suns and concentrate them on the focus. Now, pray, is there any hope for me “to learn how to be simple?”
Life is composed of hundreds of grey days interspersed with a few scintillating moments, the few moments justifying our otherwise superfluous existence. In this respect I am not a Croesus, but the half dozen or so of meteoric flashes that have pierced through the ordinariness of my life I treasure grudgingly, and would not exchange them for years of continuous well-being. Congratulate me: I have become enriched now with another moment of rare beatitude, of indelible radiance. I was present at the transubstantiation of Oscar Wilde, performed by John Cowper Powys.
Was it a lecture? “Most certainly,” would advise me my simple friend. What a dwarfish misnomer for the solemn rite that took place in the dark temple, the “catacomb” of the Little Theatre! I close my eyes, and see once more the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light, invoking the Uranian Oscar. We, the worshipers, sit entranced, hypnotized, demundanized, bewitched; the sorcerer makes us feel the presence in flesh and spirit of the Assyrian half-god, half-beast, who had the moral courage of living his life actively, to the full; we follow bewildered the quaint meteor of Wilde’s genius illuminating the world for a moment, dropping down into a hideous pit, reflaming in the pale glimmer of discovered sorrow; we finally hear the sonorous requiem to Oscar’s break-down from the shock of havingdiscovered a heart in himself. The lights are on, the sorcerer is gone, but we remain under the spell of the hovering spirit.
To quote Powys is as impossible as totella symphony. It is the How and the What and the stage background that combine in creating the inexpressible charm of that experience. As to Oscar Wilde—well, what does it matter whether we agree with Mr. Powys’s interpretation or not? Wilde was my idol for a long time; I chanted dithyrambs to him and worshiped him fanatically. Later, in the perpetual process of dethroning gods, I observed the halo of the Prince of Paradoxes becoming paler in my eyes. Mr. Powys rekindled in my heart the sacred flame, for a moment at least, and gave me the rare sensation of reliving an old love.
À propos of simplicity: Wilde proclaimed artificiality as the great virtue, and certainly lived up to his theory. Compare his short but italicized life with the last weary years of Tolstoy that were an attempt for “simple life.” Need I tell you which I prefer?