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Page 1 of 11928 · PDF PAGE 179
which makes one think of autumn suns, the beauty of well-ripened women, and Saint Mar- tins Summers. None of those who were present in the tav- ern of the Rue de la Villa-Hermosa will forget with what petulance the painter gave up his waistcoat to the poet, so well did he under- stand what a fine thing it was to sing of the poor dogs. Just so did a magnificent Italian tyrant in the Good Age offer to the divine Aretino either a dagger crusted with precious stones or a mantle fit to wear at Court in exchange for a well-wrought sonnet or a curiou…
1928 · PDF PAGE 124
flowers and the leaves have been made for the stick, or if the stick is but a pretext to display the beauty of the leaves and of the flowers? The thyrsus is a symbol of your astonishing duality, Franz Liszt, powerful and revered mas- ter, dear Bacchante of mysterious and pas- sionate beauty. Never did nymph, frenzied by unconquerable Bacchus, shake her thyrsus over the heads of her maddened companions with so much energy and caprice as you when you wield your genius upon the hearts of your brothers! The staff is your will; straight, stiff, uns…
1928 · PDF PAGE 145
to select; to be able to deliberate is already a decadence. It is then that one definitely hunts for beauty; as for me, gentlemen, I flatter my- self that I have arrived long since at the cli- macteric epoch of the third grade, when beauty itself no longer suffices unless it is sea- soned by perfume, adornment, and the rest. I will even admit that I sometimes aspire as if to an unknown happiness, to a certain fourth de- gree, whose stigma should be perfect calm; but, during my life, except at the age of Chérubin, I have been more sensitive than…
1928 · PDF PAGE 14
…ensibility of the sea, the changelessness of the prospect, revolt me. Ah! must one eternally suffer, of fly eternally before the face of beauty? O! no, piti- less enchantress ever victorious rival, leave me alone cease to tempt my passion and my pride! The study of the beautiful is a duel where the artist cries with fear even before he is conquered.
1928 · PDF PAGE 25
… deprived of love and friendship, and in that respect how far below the least of brutes! Yet I am made, I too, to understand and to feel beauty immortal. Ah, Goddess, have pity of my sadness, of my madness! But the implacable Venus looks afar off upon I know not what, with marble eyes.
1928 · PDF PAGE 11
… brother. Your friends? There you employ a word whose sense I have never understood. Your country? I do not know its latitude. Beauty? I would love it willingly, Goddess and Immortal. Gold? I hate is as you hate God. Ah, what then do you love, strange man? I love the clouds . . . . the clouds that float . . . down there . . . the marvellous clouds.
1928 · PDF PAGE 143
…hips with their complicated rigging on which the swell imprints its harmonious oscillations, serve to banquet the pleasure of rhythm and beauty in the soul. And above all, there is a sort of mysterious and aristocratic pleasure for him who has no longer either curiosity or am- bition to lie upon the terrace or to lean upon the quay and watch in contemplative mood the movements of those who come and go, of those who have still the force to will, the desire to travel or to acquire riches.
1928 · PDF PAGE 137
… TRUE ONE? I ONCE knew a girl called Benedicta, who filled the atmosphere with the ideal, whose eyes shed forth the desire of greatness, beauty, glory, all that which makes a man be- lieve in immortality. But this miraculous girl was too lovely to live long, and some days after I had become acquainted with her she died. It was I myself that buried her, one day when the Spring swung its thurible even within cemeteries. It was I that buried her, well shut up into a bier of perfumed wood, incorruptible as are the cof- fers of India. And as my eyes…
1928 · PDF PAGE 89
…, and so beautiful. She will succeed, no doubt, this good Dorothy; the childs master is so miserly, too miserly to understand any other beauty than that of gold.
1928 · PDF PAGE 76
whose beauty has the penetrating magic of ru- ins. Her air was at once imperious and loose; and her eyes, although heavily ringed, were full of the force of fascination. What struck me most was the mystery of her voice, at whose sound I recalled both the most delicious con- tralto singers, and also a little of that hoarse- ness which characterizes the throats of very old drunkards. Wilt though know my power? cried the false goddess with her charming and paradoxi- cal voice; Listen! and she put to her mouth a gigantic trumpet covered with ri…
1928 · PDF PAGE 129
… agonies and the ecstasies of every soul that hath ever lived, that lives, that ever shall live. As I bade farewell to this incomparable beauty I felt myself smitten down even to death, and therefore whenever one of my companions cried At last! I was only able to cry Already!
1928 · PDF PAGE 88
…ves on, a harmony; happy in living, smiling an ivory smile as if she beheld afar off in space a mirror reflecting her move- ment and her beauty. At the hour when the very dogs groan with pain under the biting sun, what powerful mo- tive can have sent the idle Dorothy, beautiful and cold as bronze, upon her journeyings? Why has she left her coquettishly arranged little house, whose flowers and mats make so cheaply so perfect a boudoir; where she takes so much pleasure in combing her hair, in smoking, in fanning herself or in looking at herself i…
1928 · PDF PAGE 96
…est statues of antiquity (miraculously ani- mated, living, walking, seeing, as they are,) are relatively to our general confused idea of beauty; that would doubtless be a singular and altogether unexpected case. Fanciullo was that evening a perfect ideali- zation, which it was impossible not to suppose living, possible, real. The buffoon went and came, laughed and wept, gesticulated, with an indestructible aureole about his head, an aure- ole invisible for all except for myself, where mingled in a strange amalgam the rays of art with the halo o…
1928 · PDF PAGE 175
whose associates they are, and the poet who looks upon them with a fraternal eye. Fie upon the insipid beauty-dog, this absurd quadruped, Pomeranian, King Charles, pug or lap dog, so pleased with himself that he runs indiscreetly between the legs or on the knees of a visitor as if he were sure of pleasing, as boisterous as a child, as silly as a beldame, sometimes as snappish and insolent as a ser- vant. Shame above all upon those four-footed serpents, shivering and idle, that they call Ital- ian greyhounds, and who do not keep in their pointed…
1928 · PDF PAGE 74
…! The second Satan had not that air at the same time tragic and smiling, nor those in- sinuating manners, not that delicate and scented beauty. It was a hulk of a man, with coarse, eyeless face, whose heavy paunch hung over his thighs, and all whose skin was gilded and as if tattooed with the images of a crowd of little moving figures to represent the innumerable forms of universal wretchedness. There were little lank men who had hung themselves from a nail; there were little mis-
1928 · PDF PAGE 65
…, on the road, among the thistles and net- tles, there was another child, dirty, puny, soot- begrimed; one of those outcast brats, whose beauty an unbiased eye would discover, if, as the connoisseurs eye divines an ideal painting under a coachmakers varnish, he were to clean it from the repugnant rust of wretched- ness. Across these symbolic bars that keep apart these two worldsthe main road and the cas- tlethe poor child showed the rich child his own toy, which the latter greedily examined as a rare and unknown object. Now the toy which th…
1928 · PDF PAGE 69
…with any greed for the visible goods of life was doomed to find himself one day terribly embarrassed by his millions. So, too, a love of beauty and poetic power were given to the son of a dirty rascal, a quar- ryman by trade, who could not in any manner assist the development of the gifts, or supply the needs of his unlucky offspring. I forgot to tell you that the distribution in these solemn cases is without appeal, and that no one may refuse a gift. All the Fairies rose, thinking that their spell of hard labour was at an end, for there re- ma…
1928 · PDF PAGE 167
…e houses? My soul remains dumb. Would Batavia smile on you perhaps more sweetly? There we should find the spirit of Europe wedded to the beauty of the tropics. Not a word. Can my soul be dead? Are you then come to such a point of ener- vation that you take pleasure only in your un- happiness? If so, let us away to those coun- tries that are the emblem of death. I have it, poor soul, we will pack for Tornéo. Let us go farther still, to the far end of the Baltic, still farther from life, if it is possible. Let us set up our camp at the Pole! Ther…
1928 · PDF PAGE 105
…s, their children; never again to confront the lofty billows of the sea. Strange faces were there, of men and women, marked with a fatal beauty; it seemed to me that I had known them long since, at times and in countries whose exact remem- brance I could no longer fix, and which rather inspired me with a fraternal sympathy than with that fear which usually arises at the sight of the unknown. If I wished to try to define in any way their strange expression, I would say that never have I seen eyes that shone more forcefully with the horror of bor…
1928 · PDF PAGE 53
with fear. In short, thoughts of the beauty with which I was surrounded filling me as it did with enthusiasm, I felt myself at perfect peace with myself and with the Universe. I even believe that, in my perfect happiness and my total for- getfulness of all terrestrial evil, I had arrived at no longer thinking so ridiculous those newspa- pers which pretend that man is naturally good; when, immedicable matter renewing its impor- tunities, I thought I would repair the ravages of fatigue and quench the appetite caused by so lengthy an ascent. I pul…