Confessions of Aleister Crowley

202 I went through life at this time with a kind of cynical bonhomie; nothing was really any particular good, so I might as well do what was expected of me. I wrote even of Buddhism with a certain detached disenchantment, as may be seen by reference to my Summa Spes, which I published separately (twelve copies contain the portrait of me by Haweis and Coles, subsequently reproduced in volume II of the vellum edition of my Collected Works) and sent to some of my friends in Paris on my departure for England. After Rodin, the most important of these friends was Marcel Schwob. Eugčne Carričre I met only once. He had just recovered from an operation for cancer of the throat, and I remember principally his remark, calm to the point of casual indifference, "if it comes back, I shall kill myself." Fritz {341} Thäulow I saw several times. He was rather a new type to me; a jolly, bearded senior on whom life had left no scars. He believed in his art and in his family; enjoyed everything, worried about nothing --- it was not at all one's idea of a great artist. I had already got it into my mind that the life of the artist must be a sequence of pungent pangs either of pleasure or pain; that his nature obliged him to regard commonplace circumstances rather as the average man regards deep sleep. But Thäulow lived every line of his life; he had somehow attained that supreme philosophy which contemplates all things alike with cheerful calm. Marcel Schwob excited my unbounded admiration. He was admittedly the finest French scholar of English. His style glittered with the superb simplicity and silken satire which compels me to regard Anatole France as his pupil. He had translated Hamlet and Macbeth for Sara Bernhardt with astonishing spiritual fidelity to the soul of Shakespeare. His Vies Imaginaires might have served as the model for Le Puits de Sante Claire, and his Île des Diurnales is as brilliantly bitter as anything that Swift ever wrote. He lived on the Ile St. Louis in a delightful flat, rich with the suggestion of the East (emphasized by a Chinese servant he had picked up after the exhibition of 1900), yet he suffered as few men suffer. Part of his crucifixion was rather ridiculous. It was suspected that he was more or less a Jew, and he was constantly aware that he did not enjoy the position in French literature to which his genius entitled him. His wife was one of the most beautiful women on whom I had ever laid eyes; an exquisite siren with a smile hat left La Gioconda standing, and a voice which would have burst the ropes that bound Ulysses to his mast. But she had been an actress, and this duchess and that countess did not call. It galled. The real tragedy of the man was that he was tortured by chronic constipation. It killed him soon after. Even after all these years I glow with boyish pleasure to recall his gracious, unassuming acquiescence in my impertinent existence and his acknowledgement of my Alice, An Adultery as a "little masterpiece". My sonnet on Rodin begins "Here is a man", which Marcel Schwob very properly translated, "Un homme". I took the draft to Rodin's studio. One of the men present was highly indignant. "Who is this Marcel Schwob," He exclaimed, "to pretend to translate from this English? The veriest schoolboy would know that 'here is a man' should be turned into 'Voici un homme'." This is the sort of thing one meets at every turn. The man was perfectly friendly, well educated and familiar with literature; yet he was capable of such supreme stupidity. The moral is that when an acknowledge master does something that seems at first sight peculiar, the proper attitude is one of reverent eagerness to understand the meaning of his action. This critic made as ass of himself by lack of imagination. He should have know that "Voci un homme" would have sprung instantly into Schwob's mind as the obvious {342} and adequate rendering. His rejection of it argues deep consideration; and the man might have learnt a valuable lesson by putting himself in Schwob's place, trying to follow the workings of his mind, and finally discovering the considerations which determine his judgment. I quote this case rather than grosser examples which I recall, because it is so simple and non-controversial, yet