What Is Art?

65. The contrast made is between the classes and the masses: between those who do not and those who do earn their bread by productive manual labour; the middle classes being taken as an offshoot of the upper classes.—Trans.

66. Duelling is still customary among the higher circles in Russia, as in other Continental countries.—Trans.

67. It is the weariness of life, contempt for the present epoch, regret for another age seen through the illusion of art, a taste for paradox, a desire to be singular, a sentimental aspiration after simplicity, an infantine adoration of the marvellous, a sickly tendency towards reverie, a shattered condition of nerves, and, above all, the exasperated demand of sensuality.

68.

Music, music before all things

The eccentric still prefer,

Vague in air, and nothing weighty,

Soluble. Yet do not err,

Choosing words; still do it lightly,

Do it too with some contempt;

Dearest is the song that’s tipsy,

Clearness, dimness not exempt.

Music always, now and ever

Be thy verse the thing that flies

From a soul that’s gone, escaping,

Gone to other loves and skies.

Gone to other loves and regions,

Following fortunes that allure,

Mint and thyme and morning crispness ...

All the rest’s mere literature.

69. I think there should be nothing but allusions. The contemplation of objects, the flying image of reveries evoked by them, are the song. The Parnassiens state the thing completely, and show it, and thereby lack mystery; they deprive the mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates. To name an object is to take three-quarters from the enjoyment of the poem, which consists in the happiness of guessing little by little: to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: little by little, to evoke an object in order to show a state of the soul; or inversely, to choose an object, and from it to disengage a state of the soul by a series of decipherings.

... If a being of mediocre intelligence and insufficient literary preparation chance to open a book made in this way and pretends to enjoy it, there is a misunderstanding—things must be returned to their places. There should always be an enigma in poetry, and the aim of literature—it has no other—is to evoke objects.

70. It were time also to have done with this famous “theory of obscurity,” which the new school have practically raised to the height of a dogma.

71. For translation, see Appendix IV.

72. For translation, see Appendix IV.

73. For translation, see Appendix IV.

74. For translation, see Appendix IV.

75. For translation, see Appendix IV.

76. For translation, see Appendix IV.

77.

I do not wish to think any more, except about my mother Mary,

Seat of wisdom and source of pardon,

Also Mother of France, from whom we

Steadfastly expect the honour of our country.

78. This sonnet seems too unintelligible for translation.—Trans.

79. For translation, see Appendix IV.

80. The quicker it goes the longer it lasts.

81. All styles are good except the wearisome style.

82. All styles are good except that which is not understood, or which fails to produce its effect.

83. An apparatus exists by means of which a very sensitive arrow, in dependence on the tension of a muscle of the arm, will indicate the physiological action of music on the nerves and muscles.