Dhamma

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

How to Judge People by What They Look Like by Edward Dutton

‘You can’t judge people by what they look like!’ It’s drummed into us as children and, as this book proves, it is utterly false. In this highly readable analysis of the academic research, Dutton shows that we are evolved to judge people’s psychology from what they look like, we can accurately work out people’s personality and intelligence from how they look, and (quite often) we have to if we want to survive. Body shape, hairiness, eye width, finger length, even how big a woman’s breasts are . . . Dutton shows that these, and much else, are windows into personality, intelligence, or both. Once you read How to Judge People by What They Look Like, you’ll never look at people the same again.

Foreword by Prof. Bruce Charlton

Appearances are not always deceptive. Indeed, quite the opposite. In this highly informative and entertaining mini-book, Dr Dutton surveys the psychological data in support of the neglected idea that we can tell a lot about someone from how they look. The fact that most people believe they can judge a stranger by their face and body makes it plausible that we really can do this, if not with total accuracy, then at least to a useful degree. It is a question of probabilities. So long as we are better than random at predicting traits such as personality, intelligence or aggression; overall this would have a positive impact on reproductive success. As social mammals, this attribute would have been very helpful, and sometimes vital, during our evolutionary history. Dr Dutton’s book is a necessary corrective to misleading modern myths and taboos about ‘judgmentalism’ and stereotyping. As he makes clear; so long as we are prepared to modify our first impressions in the light of further evidence; it is reasonable and sensible to take seriously our innate ability to sum-up a stranger with a glance.

Prof. Bruce Charlton 

Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University and Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham.  


Chapter One

The Strange Death of Physiognomy

‘People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Everyone’s heard the cliché, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ Don’t judge people by their appearance. Judge people, if you have to judge them at all, by what’s in their hearts. It’s a warm, cuddly idea: that nobody can help what they look like and what they look like is nothing to do with what they actually are like. Imploring people not to judge by appearances has many benefits: it makes you seem kind, for one, and it emphasises your profundity. You are somehow able to rise above your instincts, ignore the ‘superficial,’ and plunge into the depths of people’s hearts. 

In the 2001 comedy Shallow Hal, Jack Black plays Hal Larsen, who is obsessed with physical beauty. Hal’s superficiality appals the ‘life success coach’ Tony Robbins (who plays himself). Robbins ends up sharing an elevator with Hal. Robbins hypnotises Hal such that he can only see people’s inner beauty. If they’re a good person then they’ll be attractive; if they’re a nasty person then they’ll look hideous. Accordingly, Hal ends-up dating an extremely kind but morbidly obese young woman, played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Unaccountably, from Hal’s perspective, chairs collapse under this slender goddess, she creates an enormous splash at the local swimming pool, and she has a bizarrely negative opinion of her own appearance. Most of us would like to think that we are like the hypnotized Hal and that we ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’  

1. The Wisdom of the Ancients

Except, we generally do. Despite gaining all the social benefits of claiming we don’t judge by appearances we almost certainly do so, even if only unconsciously. And we do so because we are evolved to do so, and because doing so has worked up until now. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) quipped, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘Only shallow people do not judge by appearances’ (Wilde, 2012). In Medieval and Early Modern England, it went without saying that you judged by appearances. Although the hypotheses which underpinned their thought-systems – such as astrology – were hopeless, our ancestors had it partly right when it came to what is called ‘physiognomy.’ This is the attempt to judge a person’s character from what they look like. 

The Ancient Greeks were firm believers in physiognomy. Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote in Prior Analytics that, ‘It is possible to infer character from features’ (Aristotle, 1989) and many other Greek scholars took the same view. Michael Scot (1175-1232), a Scottish mathematician and a scholar at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote a learned thesis on the subject (Porter, 2005, p.122). In the late 14th century work Canterbury Tales, the author, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400), gives the Wife of Bath a gap in her front teeth to imply that she is highly sexual. The Reeve is of slim build, to suggest he is ‘choleric’ (bad-tempered and irritable), while the Summoner is ugly, because he’s an unpleasant person (see Hallissy, 1995). Physiognomy was taught as an academic subject at English universities, until it was outlawed by Henry VIII (r.1509-1547) for having become associated with fortune-telling (Porter, 2005, p.134).

Even so, it continued to be widely accepted in academic and literary circles. Shakespeare made frequent use of it (see Baumbach, 2008). This is most obvious in Julius Caesar’s description of Cassius: 

‘Let me have men about me that are fat 

Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights 

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look 

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous’ 

(Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II). 

The medic Thomas Browne (1605-1682) published his Religio Medici in 1643, in which he observed, ‘there is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe . . . For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters that carry in them the motto of our Souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures’ (Browne, 1844, p.102). 

Physiognomy fell into disrepute precisely because of its association with ‘Master Mendicants,’ but it was then re-popularised by the Swiss scholar Johan Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) (see Lavater, 1826). Up until Lavater, people had believed that there were a number of ‘general types’ of people, with physiognomy allowing you to discern which type a person was: choleric (temperamental), phlegmatic (calm), mercurial (changeable and unpredictable) or sanguine (optimistic). Lavater developed this, arguing that physiognomy could be used to be far more specific – to discern the character traits of individuals. Physiognomy was duly revived and by the nineteenth century it was implicit in many novels, and most obviously in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was written in 1890. Dorian wants to maintain his beauty but live an amoral and hedonistic life. Accordingly, he sells his soul in return for his amoral life being reflected in a portrait of him, rather than on his own face and body. He remains beautiful, while the portrait becomes increasingly unattractive. In many other Victorian novels, besides, the good characters were physically attractive while the bad characters were ugly and deformed. Appearance was, once again, a short-hand for character (see essays in Percival & Tytler, 2005). Famously, the captain of The Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, wanted an ‘energetic young man’ as a gentleman companion on his voyage. The nature of Charles Darwin’s nose told Fitzroy that Darwin could not possibly be that man. Darwin’s daughter, Henrietta, later stated that Fitzroy had ‘made up his mind that no man with such a nose could have energy.’ Fortunately, the rest of Darwin’s face compensated for this: ‘His brow saved him’ (quoted in Highfield et al., 2009). 

And this is where the English gentleman scientist Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) makes an appearance. Statistician, polymath, social scientist, proto-geneticist, inventor, meteorologist, geographer and even tropical explorer, Galton was Renaissance man. If there was a belief that remained yet to be scientifically proved or disproved, Galton was drawn to proving or disproving it (see Bulmer, 2004). Physiognomy, therefore, fascinated him. In 1878, Galton published an article in the journal Nature in which he presented his findings. He developed a system of composite photographs in which he superimposed a variety of faces onto each other using multiple exposures. This allowed him to create photographic representations of those with certain qualities, such as being beautiful, criminal or ill. These led to distinct photographs, implying, for example, that there is a degree to which criminals have distinct faces from the rest of the population. 

Unfortunately, physiognomy became associated – and, perhaps, remains associated – with phrenology. Pioneered by German scientist Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828), this was the belief that the nature of a person’s character can be discerned by small differences in the shape of their skull. As the brain is an organ, and different parts of the brain have different functions, it seemed to follow that bumps or indentations in the skull would reflect similar properties in the brain. As such, people could ‘have their lumps felt’ and it would reveal a great deal about the nature of their personality; albeit based on the very limited nineteenth century knowledge of brain modules. Phrenology became hugely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the establishment of learned phrenology societies, including a significant one in Edinburgh (see de Giustino, 2016). The Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded by the Scottish solicitor George Combe (1788-1858) who asserted, ‘that the brain is the organ of mind; that the brain is an aggregate of several parts, each subserving a distinct mental faculty; and that the size of the cerebral organ is, caeteris paribus, an index of power or energy of function’ (quoted in Fodor, 1983, p.131). Unsurprisingly, phrenology was debunked. Physiognomy found itself (intellectually) guilty by association.

2. ‘Not by the colour of their skin . . .’ 

The other problem physiognomy has to deal with is the obvious unpleasant consequences judging people by their appearance has when it comes to the issue of ‘race.’ This is most obvious in the case of a bunch of nasty, anti-intellectuals who took power in Germany and attempted to wipe out the race which they regarded as their own race’s chief competitor. The Nazis measured facial features in order to determine the archetypal ‘Jew’ and the archetypal ‘Aryan,’ giving the measurement of facial features for any broader purpose a bad name. But the actions of the Nazis are entirely irrelevant. As we will see shortly, physiognomy works, in most cases, within races. We will look more at ‘race,’ and its relationship with physiognomy, shortly.

But most importantly, if we accept Darwinian Theory, we really must ask ourselves, ‘Why wouldn’t physiognomy work?’ Humans are an advanced form of ape, very closely related to all mammals, such as the lion. Female lions are more attracted to males with darker manes. This is because these males have higher levels of testosterone, as reflected in the colour of their manes, and are thus more aggressive and more likely to win fights. Physiognomy works with lions (West & Packer, 2002). It would be extraordinary if it didn’t work with humans.     

But before proving that it does work, we should be clear on our key terms. I have already defined these terms in detail in my book The Genius Famine (Dutton & Charlton, 2015). So those who have read that book may wish to skip this section as much of it is exactly the same as in The Genius Famine.

ENVY A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck

Man the Envier

Throughout history, in all stages of cultural development, in most languages and as members of widely differing societies, men have recognized a fundamental problem of their existence and have given it specific names: the feeling of envy and of being envied.

Envy is a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being, and, which occurs as soon as two individuals become capable of mutual comparison. This urge to compare oneself invidiously with others can be found in some animals but in man it has acquired a special significance. Man is an envious being who, were it not for the social inhibitions aroused within the object of his envy, would have been incapable of developing the social systems to which we all belong today. If we were not constantly obliged to take account of other men’s envy of the extra pleasure that accrues to us as we begin to deviate from a social norm, ‘social control’ could not function.

Man the envier can, however, overshoot the mark and arouse or release inhibitions which have a retarding effect on the ability of a group to adapt to new environmental problems. Envy can also turn man to destruction. Almost all the fragmentary literature which has hitherto dealt with envy (essays, belles-lettres, philosophy, theology, psychology) has constantly seen its destructive, inhibitory, futile and painful element. In all the cultures of mankind, in all proverbs and fairytales, the emotion of envy is condemned. The envious person is universally exhorted to be ashamed of himself. And yet his existence, or the belief in his ubiquity, has at the same time always provided enough latent apprehension of other people’s views to allow a system of social controls and balances to evolve.

Although some schools of modern psychology have practically deleted the word ‘envy’ from their vocabulary, as if it simply did not exist as a primary source of motivation, the available evidence leaves no doubt whatever of its universality. In almost all languages, from those of the simplest primitive peoples to those of the Indo-European group, in Arabic, Japanese and Chinese, there is invariably a term to indicate envy or the envious person. Proverbs of the most varied cultures deal with it in hundreds of different forms. Aphorists and philosophers have touched on it. For instance envy had a particular significance for Kierkegaard, who even attributed envy to those who aroused envy in others. In fiction envy often plays a role and sometimes a major one; and every one of us has encountered envy in his own life. It is the great regulator in all personal relationships: fear of arousing it curbs and modifies countless actions.

Considering the key role played by envy in human existence, and that nothing new in the way of conceptual apparatus was needed in order to recognize it, it is truly remarkable how few works have dealt exclusively with it. They include an essay by Francis Bacon; a short book by the Frenchman, Eugène Raiga, written in the late 1920s, and a Russian novella, Envy, of the same date; besides these, there is a novel by the almost forgotten nineteenth-century French author, Eugène Sue, several aphorisms in Nietzsche and a study by Max Scheler which in fact deals more with the special case of resentment than envy proper.

This book may disturb many readers, including those with widely differing opinions on social and political issues. I believe, though, that I can demonstrate two things: first, that envy is much more universal than has so far been admitted or even realized, indeed that envy alone makes any kind of social co-existence possible; secondly, however, I believe envy as the implicit or explicit fulcrum of social policy to be much more destructive than those who have fabricated their social and economic philosophy out of envy would care to admit.

That our fellow man is always potentially envious—and the probability as well as the degree of his envy increases in ratio to his propinquity—is one of the most disturbing, often one of the most carefully concealed yet most basic facts of human existence at all levels of cultural development. The inadequacies, the historical limitations of so many respected social philosophies and economic theories, become obvious when it is realized how much they depend on the assumption that human envy is the outcome of arbitrary, haphazard and purely temporary circumstances—in particular that it is the result of gross inequalities and may disappear once these are removed: in other words, that it can be permanently cured.

Most of the achievements which distinguish members of modern, highly developed and diversified societies from members of primitive societies—the development of civilization, in short—are the result of innumerable defeats inflicted on envy, i.e., on man as an envious being. And what Marxists have called the opiate of religion, the ability to provide hope and happiness for believers in widely differing material circumstances, is nothing more than the provision of ideas which liberate the envious person from envy, the person envied from his sense of guilt and his fear of the envious. Correctly though Marxists have identified this function, their doctrines have remained blind and naïve when faced with the solution of the problem of envy in any future society. It is hard to see how the totally secularized and ultimately egalitarian society promised us by socialism can ever solve the problem of the residual envy latent in society.

However, it is not only the determining philosophical and ideological content of a culture but also social structures and processes, themselves in part supported by or derived from ideological factors, which exert an influence on the part played by envy.

The world from the viewpoint of the envier

We must begin by looking at the world as seen by the envious man. A certain predisposition to envy is part of man’s physical and social equipment, the lack of which would, in many situations, simply result in his being trampled down by others. We use our latent sense of envy when, for instance, we examine social systems for their efficiency: before joining an association or firm we try to discern whether it has any intrinsic structure which might arouse strong envy in ourselves or in others. If so, it is probably an organization which is not very well adapted to particular functions. In the recent past a few American colleges and universities have tried to attract able academic celebrities as professors by offering salaries perhaps twice as high as those earned by the standard full professor. I know of several cases of a man being unable to bring himself to accept the offer because, as he told me, he could not bear the thought of being the object of so much envy in the faculty.

Further, potential envy is an essential part of man’s equipment if he is to be able to test the justice and fairness of the solutions to the many problems which occur in his life. Very few of us, when dealing with employees, colleagues, etc., are able to take a position which consciously ignores the existence of envy, such as that adopted by the master in the Biblical parable of the toilers in the vineyard. No matter how mature, how immune from envy a personnel manager or plant manager may himself be, when he has to deal with the taboo subject of wages or staff regulations he must be able to sense exactly what sort of measures are tolerable, given the general tendency to mutual envy.

The phenomenon described by the word ‘envy’ is a fundamental psychological process which of necessity presupposes a social context: the co-existence of two or more individuals. Few concepts are so intrinsic a part of social reality yet at the same time so markedly neglected in the categories of behavioural science. If I emphasize envy as a pure concept representing a basic problem, I am not claiming that this concept, or the theory of the role of envy, explains everything in human life, in society, or in cultural history. There are various related concepts and processes, as there are various other aspects of man’s social existence, which cannot be explained by reference to his capacity for envy. Man is not only Homo invidiosus, he is also Homo ludens and Homo faber; but the fact that he is capable of associating in lasting groups and societies is primarily due to his being subject to a constant, frequently subliminal urge to be envious of all those deviating from a norm.

If we are to recognize the role of envy this phenomenon must be unmasked, as sex has been unmasked by psychoanalysis. I do not wish to give the impression, however, that I consider the tendency to envy as a universal ultimate cause: envy does not explain everything, but it throws light on more things than people have hitherto been prepared to admit or even to see.

Envy has the advantage of other modern terms such as ambivalence, relative deprivation, frustration or class war, in that as a concept it has a pre-scientific origin. For centuries, indeed for millennia, countless people who have never regarded themselves as social scientists have consistently and unanimously observed a form of behaviour—envy—which they described in words that were often the etymological equivalents of the same words in other languages.[1]

An exhaustive study of envy in its active and passive roles in social history is important not only because this emotion and motivational syndrome are crucial in individual human life; it is also relevant to politics, since the right or wrong assessment of the phenomenon of envy, the under- or over-estimation of its effects, and above all the unfounded hope that we can so order our social existence as to create people or societies devoid of envy, are all considerations of immediate political significance, particularly where economic and social policies are concerned.

If envy were no more than one of many psychological states such as homesickness, desire, worry, disgust, avarice and so on, one might be prepared to admit that on the whole most people know what envy is and what it involves. It would still be a rewarding task, and one of great importance to many fields of study such as child psychology, educational science or psychotherapy to classify systematically all that we know about envy and to develop it methodically into a theory. This book is also an attempt to do that. But a proper appraisal of man’s potential for envy, a realization of its universality and persistence, could in years to come determine how much common sense is exercised in the domestic social and economic policies of parliamentary democracies, as well as in their dealings with the so-called developing nations. As we shall show, we are least capable of acting sensibly in economic and social matters when we face, or believe we face, an envious beneficiary of our decision. This is true especially when we mistakenly tell ourselves that his envy is a direct consequence of our being better off, and will necessarily wane when we pander even to unrealistic demands. The allocation of scarce resources, in any society, is rarely optimal when our decision rests on fear of other men’s envy.

(...)

 Repression of the concept of envy?

It is most curious to note that at about the beginning of this century authors began to show an increasing tendency, above all in the social sciences and moral philosophy, to repress the concept of envy. This I regard as a genuine instance of repression. The political theorist and the social critic found envy an increasingly embarrassing concept to use as an explanatory category or in reference to a social fact. In isolated cases, and then only as a rider to other remarks, some modern authors have referred to envy as to something obvious, but even then they have almost invariably played down its significance. It may be invoked to explain a localized problem—why, for instance, some over-specialized critics refuse to find anything good to say about a book intended for a general readership; but the concept of envy is avoided if its recognition as an element of social reality would lead to the fundamentals of social policy being questioned.[4]The indexes of relevant periodicals in the English language during recent years have been remarkably unproductive for the study of the concept of envy. There is not a single instance of ‘envy,’ ‘jealousy’ or ‘resentment’ in the subject indexes of the following periodicals: American Sociological Review, Vols. 1–25 (1936–1960); American Journal of Sociology, 1895–1947; Rural Sociology, Vols. 1–20 (1936–1955); The British Journal of Sociology, 1949–1959; American Anthropologist and the Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, 1949–1958; Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vols. 1–20 (1945–1964). It is true that individual articles may be found here and there in these periodicals over the course of the years in which short and very penetrating observations are made concerning envy, clearly attributing significance to the term. But to the people who made the indexes, terms such as ‘envy,’ ‘resentment’ and ‘jealousy’ were so remote that they disregarded them. Under terms as vague as ‘aggression’ a few contributions may be found in which ‘envy’ sometimes makes an appearance. In the anthropological journals it was not difficult to find phenomena which, conceptually speaking, should properly be termed envy by looking under ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ in the index. But oddly enough, the term ‘evil eye,’ which is the concomitant of envy, is, without exception, again omitted from the aforementioned indexes.

Now and again we find envy and its problems mentioned under veiled or misleading titles, or as part of a treatise on something else, yet it is quite remarkable how often scientists have evaded this emotional syndrome. Why is it that for well over a generation writers have avoided tackling this subject, affecting as it does every human being? In such cases depth psychology has long since taught us to suspect that repression is at work. The subject has been felt by many writers well equipped to handle it to be distasteful, unpleasant, painful and politically explosive. Many remarks that will be cited in this book support this interpretation.

Much as I should like to agree with all those authors who for millennia have consistently described and condemned the negative and destructive aspect of envy once it has become an end in itself, data will be presented to show that man cannot exist in society without envy. The utopia of a society free from envy, and in which there will no longer be any grounds for envy, is unlikely to be replaced by the totally utopian plan of eradicating envy from human nature by means of education; although so far in the history of social experiment people have been rather more successful when attempting to create the second sort of society than when striving towards one composed of unenvious equals.

Every man must be prone to a small degree of envy; without it the interplay of social forces within society is unthinkable. Only pathological envy in the individual, which tinges every other emotion, and the society entirely designed to appease imagined multitudes of enviers, are socially inoperative. The capacity for envy establishes a necessary social warning system. Here it is remarkable how seldom the vernacular forms of different languages permit one to say directly to another person: ‘Don’t do that. It will make me envious!’ Instead, we tend to talk in abstract terms of justice, saying that something or other is intolerable or unfair, or we relapse into sour and bitter silence. No child warns his parents against taking an ill-considered step by saying something like ‘If you do/give/allow that, I shall be envious of Jack/Jill.’ The taboo against an open declaration of envy is effective even at this level, although it is true that in both English and German one may say: ‘I envy you your success/your property’—i.e., one may only speak of one’s own envy when the actual situation between the participants, at least the ‘official’ version of it, excludes the possibility of genuine, destructive, malicious envy.

Oddly enough, in German one cannot even say: ‘I resent you.’ There is no such verb, and the alternative construction (literally, ‘I have a resentment against you’) sounds so clumsy and pompous that no one is likely to use it. In English one frequently hears and reads the expression: ‘I resent that,’ or ‘I resent your action, your remark,’ etc. This does not indicate resentment so much as a feeling of indignation or annoyance at a piece of thoughtlessness or carelessness on someone else’s part, an unreasonable suggestion or an impugnment of our motives.

Acting as though there were no envy

To anticipate one of the main theses of this work: the more both private individuals and the custodians of political power in a given society are able to act as though there were no such thing as envy, the greater will be the rate of economic growth and the number of innovations in general. The social climate best suited to the fullest, most unhampered deployment of man’s creative faculties (economic, scientific, artistic, etc.) is one where accepted normative behaviour, custom, religion, common sense and public opinion are more or less agreed upon an attitude which functions as if the envious person could be ignored. This represents a conviction shared by most members of such a society, enabling them to cope realistically, and relatively unconsumed by envy, with the evident differences that exist between people; the attitude, in effect, which enables legislators and governments to offer equal protection to the unequal achievements of the members of the community, while on occasion even offering them unequal advantages so that the community may benefit in the long run from achievements which initially, perhaps, only few are capable of attaining.

In reality these optimal conditions for growth and innovation are never more than partially reached. On the other hand many well-meant proposals for the ‘good society’ or the completely ‘just society’ are doomed because they are based on the false premise that this must be a society in which there is nothing left for anyone to envy. This situation can never occur because, as is demonstrable, man inevitably discovers something new to envy. In the utopian society in which we all would have not only the same clothes but the same facial expressions, one person would still envy the other for those imagined, innermost feelings which would enable him, beneath the egalitarian mask, to harbour his own private thoughts and emotions.[5][1] Bronislaw Malinowski once criticized the tendency to hide concrete phenomena, for which we have perfectly good terms, under pretentious neologisms: ‘I must admit that from the point of view of field-work I have never been quite clear how we are going to test, measure or assess these somewhat formidable yet vague entities: euphoria and dysphoria. . . . When we try to translate the state of being satisfied . . . into concrete cases, we are faced not with the communal state of consciousness but rather with such individual factors as personal resentment, thwarted ambition, jealousy, economic grievance. . . . In any case, why not study the concrete and detailed manifestations of resentment and of satisfactions instead of hiding them behind euphoria and dysphoria writ large.’ (In his introduction to: H. Ian Hogbin, Law and Order in Polynesia, London, 1934, pp. xxiv ff.; Hamden [Conn.], 1961.)

[2] A group which in 1966 might have been specifically classified as resentful of the monarchy and the display of royal pomp were the Amsterdam Provos. A dispute as to whether the crown may still fulfil an envy-free function in a society developed between Edward Shils and N. Birnbaum (see E. Shils and M. Young, ‘The Meaning of the Coronation,’ in The Sociological Review, Vol. I, December 1953, pp. 63–81; and N. Birnbaum, ‘Monarchs and Sociologists,’ idem, Vol. III, July 1955, pp. 5–23).

[3] In earlier centuries envy (or the envious man) was sometimes depicted as a man riding on a dog with a bone in its mouth, e.g., the illustration ‘Envy’ on p. 14 of Heinz-Günter Deiters’ Die Kunst der Intrige (The Art of Intrigue), Hamburg, 1966. The picture is taken from a series of woodcuts entitled ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ by an anonymous master from the Constance region, ca. 1480–90, in the Albertina, Vienna.

[4] Oliver Brachfeld, for instance, wonders why ‘Envy, curiously enough, has been rather neglected by the psychologists; one hardly comes across it except in some disguise, e.g. that of jealousy, etc.’ (Inferiority Feelings in the Individual and the Group, New York, 1951, p. 109). Is it mere coincidence that so articulate an author as the young German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, for instance, managed to write his Theory of Social Conflict without once using the word ‘envy’? I do not think so, because elsewhere he has had no hesitation in ascribing, twice on one page, feelings of mutual envy to American and European intellectuals. (Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland [Society and Democracy in Germany], 1965, p. 320.)

[5] David Riesman has pointed out that in a materially egalitarian and consumption-oriented society such as the American, people are still prone to imagine that another person enjoys greater sexual gratification and to envy him for it: ‘If someone else has a new Cadillac, the other-directed person knows what that is, and that he can duplicate the experience, more or less. But if someone else has a new lover, he cannot know what that means. Cadillacs have been democratized. So has the sexual glamour, to a degree. . . . But there is a difference between Cadillacs and sexual partners in the degree of mystery. And with the loss or submergence of moral shame and inhibitions . . . the other-directed person has no defenses against his own envy. . . he does not want to miss . . . the qualities of experience he tells himself the others are having.’ (The Lonely Crowd, New Haven, 1950, p. 155.) Man’s fear of being envied for having a unique sexual experience may have led, at least in part, to the various rituals, designed to ward off envious spirits, performed prior to the consummation of marriage in many tribal societies.

Monday, June 19, 2023

Sainte-Beuve & Baudelaire

 Kamchatka

Sainte-Beuve hovered over Parisian literary life like an authoritative and malevolent uncle. Baudelaire and a few others called him Uncle Beuve. A certain deference was obligatory as was the expectation of, or sometimes the demand for, some critical blessing on his part, which could be of vital importance. But this was seldom granted, especially to writers of great talent. Sainte-Beuve got rattled and became evasive as soon as he suspected certain of his contemporaries of greatness. This happened regularly: with Stendhal, with Balzac, with Baudelaire, and with Flaubert. He mentioned them only to belittle them. And sometimes he barely mentioned them at all (Baudelaire was the cruelest case) or avoided them altogether (as happened with Nerval). In those same years, he was indulgent and scrupulous with many mediocre writers. Yet Sainte-Beuve’s elusive and disparaging words went farther, even with those writers he ostentatiously ignored, and his words are of more help in understanding them than anything written by their first devotees. Subsequently, Sainte-Beuve’s sidestepping became the main argument for sidestepping Sainte-Beuve’s own work, a posthumous vendetta of the harshest sort, which made Port-Royal one of the least read great books in French literature.

But Sainte-Beuve did not ooze venom only for writers who were younger than he or his contemporaries. Even with regard to masters he ostensibly venerated, such as Chateaubriand, he was lethally venomous, and sometimes he could not manage to conceal this. 

His course on Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire sous l’Empire teems with defamatory asides, whispered in a corner by an old friend of Mme Récamier’s who willingly let everyone suspect that Chateaubriand had a detailed knowledge of the secrets and tricks of the house, some of which he practiced himself to please the Enchanter and his lady.

Once more Baudelaire wrote to Sainte-Beuve, daring to ask for a review. As always, in vain. In the postscript, he added that a few days before, heading toward rue Montparnasse, where Sainte-Beuve lived, he had passed in front of a gingerbread shop – and had been struck by the ‘conviction that he [Sainte-Beuve] must have liked gingerbread.’ He followed with a detailed explanation of how to eat it (with wine, as a dessert, or also in the English manner, with butter and jam). Then the conclusion: ‘I hope you have not taken this piece of gingerbread, coated with angelica, for a naughty boy’s joke and that you have eaten it with simplicity … Warmest greetings. Wish me well. I am in a great crisis.’

About Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve’s feelings first of all betrayed a certain fear. The great critic, whose task it was to show every Monday, with calm affability – albeit invariably with some drops of concealed venom – the correct attitude toward matters of literature and the world, realized that Baudelaire had gone too far. That he had crossed the barriers of civilized society and had by now settled in some remote territory, forest, or steppe.

Sainte-Beuve vowed not to talk about Baudelaire – or even about Poe, that sinister alter ego of his, even though his editor had judged Poe to be suitable material for him. For a critic-judge of Sainte-Beuve’s ilk, the decision not to write about a contemporary was a political act of great consequence. But at times the critic was obliged to express himself fitfully and circuitously, condensing in a few stray lines all that he was loath to discuss in depth.

On more than one occasion Sainte-Beuve, with the agility of a monkey, avoided writing an article about Baudelaire. When he finally decided to do so, he took such a roundabout approach that no one could have suspected him. On Monday, January 20, 1862, instead of dealing with a single author, as was his custom, he published an article titled ‘Des prochaines élections à l’Académie,’ a current affairs piece on a subject that was always a delicate one. This seldom happened, and all the ladies or illustrious officials whom Sainte-Beuve imagined savoring his words every Monday must have felt a mild frisson on picking up their copy of Le Constitutionnel that day. Sainte-Beuve’s arguments were, as always, clear and seamlessly written. But an attentive eye would have spotted, right from the first lines, that this was a discourse on various levels of which most readers would have done well not to notice. And yet again Sainte-Beuve would humor them in their wish not to know, thanks to his tone of ‘decent liberty,’ which implied a firm resolve to round off any rough edges. Yet the topic was fraught with risk. It was not so much a matter, as Sainte-Beuve claimed, of proposing a new procedure for the selection of candidates for the Académie, but of insinuating a sharp, peremptory judgment on what the Académie was in itself. And this, since Richelieu’s day, was tantamount to making a judgment on the state of health of the literary world. A master of reticence, Sainte-Beuve was also a master of the sudden, piercing thrust. So, after having described the academicians with affectionate irony as figures devoted to ‘perfect idleness’ and relieved of any menial task because they were held only to ‘correspond directly’ with the sovereign, Sainte-Beuve dared to write, ‘The Académie, in the persons of various important members, is, in effect, very much afraid.’ Let’s remove the padding. What remains? That the Académie is very much afraid. But who could threaten it? Perhaps politics, ever oppressive and intrusive? No, there is something even more worrisome: ‘the fear of the literary Bohème.’ At this point the prudent Sainte-Beuve realizes that he has gone over the score. And he immediately circumscribes the statement. But, notoriously, toning down statements often ends up making them even more emphatic. And that is what happens here: ‘Nonetheless it is a good thing not to exaggerate its extent, to know where it begins and ends [for a moment, Bohème returns to its geographical connotation]. A discussion of the names considered suspect would be useful [suspect? whom? and regarding what?]. It is necessary to avoid, by dint of being on one’s guard against the Bohème, to abstain from all current, vital literature.’ Prudent now, and on his guard, he ends by referring to the zone from which the danger is coming: ‘current, vital literature.’ But who are we talking about? Why should the Forty Immortals, protected as they often are by their noble birth and impregnable social position, be afraid of a certain literature of shady origin? Sainte-Beuve immediately avoids answering questions that he himself has raised and cuts things short, as if frightened by what he has done. By way of an excuse, he says that the public (‘which must always be taken more or less into account’) has not yet reached the point in which it ‘imperiously imposes one of those choices whereby renowned fame almost assumes the right to do violence to the naturally conservative spirit.’ It is an irresistibly slippery downward slope: with every word of apology and mitigation for what he has just said, Sainte-Beuve makes his situation worse. There is nothing else he can do but cut things short. And so he moves on to the examination of the candidates for M. Scribe’s position: a list made up of three lines of names now forgotten, at the end of which we read, ‘M. Baudelaire.’ For the other vacant position, that of Lacordaire, there was only one candidate: the Prince de Broglie. (And Sainte-Beuve was later to explain the reasons for this undisturbed solitude: the duke was someone who ‘has made the effort to be born’ – and by this he implied that all other efforts in his life would have been superfluous.) Brief portraits of the candidates follow, all imbued with a lethal bonheur. Praise of the critic Cuvillier-Fleury, as soon as it goes into specifics, becomes sardonic: ‘He is a man of true merit, learned, conscientious, who applies himself.’ And immediately after: ‘Sometimes he is ingenious, but after much sweat. He is more estimable than agreeable. It is never necessary to dare him to make a gaffe because he does this by himself, even without being asked to.’ Few can match Sainte-Beuve in the art of debunking with what seems like praise.

At the tail end of the list, it is Baudelaire’s turn. Since the other candidates were presented by Sainte-Beuve as highly respectable – even though, for different reasons, they have nothing much to qualify them – Baudelaire appears to be the only one to whom Sainte-Beuve’s initial argument about the perils of the ‘literary Bohème’ and the fears that it aroused may apply. Not to mention the fact that, for Baudelaire, who was certainly not a bohemian but ‘a dandy lost in the bohème,’ according to Gautier’s definition, it already sounded humiliating to be considered in such a light.

But Sainte-Beuve was only at the beginning of the humiliations he felt obliged to inflict upon the oldest of his young friends. How was it that Baudelaire had so much as entertained the idea of presenting his candidature for the Académie? Sainte-Beuve answers his own question: ‘At first one wondered if M. Baudelaire, in applying, wished to make an epigram, to mock the Académie; unless his intention was to let the Académie know in this way that the time was ripe for welcoming into its ranks that poet and writer so distinguished and so able in all genres of writing who is Théophile Gautier, his master.’ One humiliation heaped upon another: to make it understood that Baudelaire’s candidature was in itself an affront, and hence conceivable only as a joke; and even as such, comprehensible only if understood as an allusion to a better writer than Baudelaire, one who was his master (just to keep things in the right proportion). But there’s more. Baudelaire is not only minor, but nonexistent: ‘It was necessary to make known, to spell out M. Baudelaire’s name, to more than one member of the Académie, who was completely unaware of his existence.’ For no previous candidate had Sainte-Beuve felt obliged to produce such a certificate of nonexistence. Moreover, he knew Baudelaire well enough to understand how sensitive he was about the way in which his 

name was liable to be mispronounced. This time, too, Sainte-Beuve made sure he wounded at least twice with the same blow. There follow some lines of measured appreciation for Les Fleurs du mal, in which, however, the emphasis is on the generous efforts that, one is led to suppose, Sainte-Beuve had to make in order to illustrate the work: ‘It is not as easy as one might think to prove to certain political academicians and men of state that in Les Fleurs du mal there are some passages that are truly remarkable for talent and art.’ This is the highest praise that Sainte-Beuve would allow himself. But here, too, he does not hold back from betrayal, giving us the very words he might have uttered to the face of some impassive, incredulous, and bored academician absorbed with some problem of state: ‘As you can see, my dear friend, we have done everything possible.’

One might think that, once his judgment of Les Fleurs du mal had been handed down – and once he had defined as ‘gems’ two prose pieces in Le Spleen de Paris – Sainte-Beuve no longer felt bound to justify his lukewarm attitude toward Baudelaire himself. But Sainte-Beuve was not just a shrewd voyager in the baser waters of literary life. He was also a great writer, and at times, even in the most stifling contexts, he managed to shrug off all his fears and scruples to say some tremendously precise, definitive words, which erupt in the middle of his argument. It had been hard enough to make sclerotic academicians understand the singular beauties of some of Baudelaire’s poems. But it would have been even harder to introduce them to the locus of Baudelaire. ‘All in all,’ Sainte-Beuve continues, ‘M. Baudelaire has found a way to construct, at the extremities of a strip of land held to be uninhabitable and beyond the confines of known Romanticism, a bizarre pavilion, a folly, highly decorated, highly tormented, but graceful and mysterious, where people read the books of Edgar Allan Poe, where they recite exquisite sonnets, intoxicate themselves with hashish to ponder about it afterward, where they take opium and thousands of other abominable drugs in cups of the finest porcelain. This singular folly, with its marquetry inlays, of a planned and composite originality, which for some time has drawn the eye toward the extreme point of the Romantic Kamchatka, I call Baudelaire’s folly. The author is content to have done something impossible, in a place where it was thought that no one could go.’ This passage is the foundation of all that can be said and has been said about Baudelaire. It cannot be replaced with any other description; it should be observed in every detail, as if one were wandering around that solitary folly, which stands out against a desolate landscape. It does not appear that Sainte-Beuve had particular geographical or ethnographic interests. For him, Kamchatka must have been one of those names that appeared in Le Magasin Pittoresque along with some exotic drawing. But his choice of place for the transposition of Baudelaire into an image could not have been more apt. Of course, Kamchatka is a slender strip of land (to signify that Baudelaire, too, is more like a pointed extremity than a vast rustling forest), but behind him there extends the immensity of Asia, which supports him. But to what does that boundless steppe and taiga correspond? To ‘known Romanticism,’ which borders on civilized eighteenth-century Europe to become, little by little, ever more ‘uninhabitable’ before finally extending, as if in a final lunge, to that Kamchatka pierced by one hundred and twenty volcanoes, which would be the place ‘beyond the confines’ of Romanticism itself. And there stands a folly that contains a blend of the horror vacui of primitive ornamentation and the sobriety of the products of perfect civilization (the exquisite porcelain). A place that is ‘highly decorated, highly tormented, but graceful and mysterious’: a quadrilateral of words that delimit the locus of Baudelaire, where the pleasure of ornament is united with self-inflicted torture, where mystery cannot forgo being frivolous and erotic seduction opens the doors of mystery. In the middle of a desert inhabited only by shamanic presences, what meets the eye, like a mirage, is a Folly, a name that stands not only for that which has always eluded psychic habitation and rational control – and this is the real reason for that ‘fear of the Bohème,’ which was rather a fear of Kamchatka – but also for certain enchanting maisons de plaisance, pavilions devoted to idleness and pleasure. Since the days of the Régence up to Bagatelle, which the count of Artois had built in two months, like a dream, to win a bet with the very young Marie Antoinette, such constructions dotted the outskirts of Paris. Later absorbed into the metropolis, they often became the residences of the supreme demi-mondaines. Ambiguous and mad, uninhabitable and sensual, Baudelaire’s folly was a self-sufficient, sovereign place, which would have been pointless to introduce to the academicians. They could never have understood it. Then, little by little, like successive waves of nomads who made their camps in it, there grew up around that folly the essence of that which was to appear since then under the name of literature.As soon as he had finished the memorable lines on Kamchatka, Sainte-Beuve felt the need to fall back on the triple cross, as if afraid that he had exposed himself too much. And the sound of this falling back grates more than ever. ‘At this point, and after having explained as well as possible to somewhat amazed and esteemed colleagues all these exotica, these piquant flavors, these refinements, could they then see them as qualifications for the Académie, and could the author have perhaps been able to convince himself of this?’ A brusque return to the initial argument: Baudelaire’s entire œuvre is a curiosity that the author had thought to propose to the Académie only in jest. And Sainte-Beuve wants his colleagues to be completely convinced that this is what he thinks, too. But the high point of the gibe, which Sainte-Beuve inflicts simultaneously on Baudelaire and his colleagues, and on himself, comes immediately after, in a few words as heartfelt as a peroration in favor of a young man accused of some reckless behavior: ‘Certainly, M. Baudelaire loses nothing by being seen [in person], and whereas one expects to find a strange, eccentric man, one finds oneself in the presence of a courteous, respectful, exemplary candidate, a good boy, refined in speech and entirely classical in form.’ At this point the curtain is drawn, and the ‘good boy,’ Baudelaire, withdraws again to his folly in Kamchatka.


From: Roberto Calasso

LA FOLIE BAUDELAIRE

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Remizov

 MONTAGNES RUSSES

On Aleksey Remizov

It’s an impudence on my part to write about Aleksey Remizov, to try to introduce to Polish readers this Russian writer who has such a completely unique character. I write of him not as a literary critic, which I’m not, and even less as a literary scholar; I write because I am astonished by this writer, and I would like to share my late discovery.

Remizov’s prose seems to me composed not of words as we commonly think of them, but of a living, tangible fabric present to every sense. It contains pain “to the point of a whine,” to the point of cruel bitterness, blind revolt, and also “angelic tears,” a sensitive and tender all-forgiving regard, a love restorative of man, a love of life, every the most tormented and downtrodden life. A reader is constantly thrown from the darkest pitch black to the stars and again thrown back into complete night. I would not recommend the expedition into the montagnes russes1 of his books to every gentle sensibility.

And every day Verka goes down those stairs to school, carrying the slippery filth and foulness of the staircase around with her feet.

And I don’t know why there’s that sticky foulness, that stuffy cramped apartment, when the stars have such a wide berth in the clear heavens and transparent streams flow across our harsh earth . . . 

Here in our attic, which the water doesn’t reach and where only the wind wanders in the cold nights, when the stars come out I whisper to them under the steely noise of wires, through the window frame:

“stars, most beautiful stars of mine.”

I know of no writer who voices the Russian language so sensually, colorfully, richly, and sonorously, with a rhythm and diction that grow from the Muscovite era, before Peter, long before the “too German” epoch of Karamzin’s and Pushkin’s “too French” one.

Aleksey Tolstoy, author of Peter the Great, told me in Tashkent that as a writer he owes everything to Remizov. But in the heavy, thick historical prose of Tolstoy’s novel I did not find Remizov’s stars, I found nothing of the light subtlety that runs through Remizov’s work.

Remizov’s prose should be read aloud, so important is the texture of the words and the rhythm of the sentences. You have only to immerse yourself in this world a little to feel the impoverishment of sound in your own words, the randomness, the lack of finesse, the trivialization of glib, threadbare phrases thoughtlessly repeated.

Remizov is the first formalist on the list of heretical writers in Zhdanov’s anathema. This discoverer of unrepeatable sentences and harmonies, a formalist? But I have not found one passage in this writer’s prose where the most unexpected sentence, rhythm, or word was not a necessity, a budding of inner content that could find expression only in that one word, that syntax. If you consider haphazard chiseling and language play that are unconnected to content to be formalist, then Remizov is the least formalist of any writer I know.

The Petersburg period from Pushkin to Blok is really the only Russian world to which I have had intimate access, until now. After a period of striving to acquaint myself with Remizov, I now discover new facets of Russia of which I knew very little and always from the outside, facets that are a hundred times more Russian. This world is so terrible, and so far away from me at times, so alien in its life’s passions, those of every life, even in its mercy and sweetness, which coexist painfully, but quite naturally, with a world of breathtaking cruelty, injustice, blood, and humiliation, that I more and more often put his books away, lacking the strength to go on reading them. I lack the strength to be harried on every page as if on a speeding car, not at a funfair but across some vast montagne russe built between heaven and earth. Remizov’s genius obliges me not only to come to know this world but also in some way to honor and even grow to love it.

Moscow and the Russian provinces around it—that is Remizov’s world. His language, like his strange handwriting, is no mere pastiche of the seventeenth century. The spirit of that century is resurrected in him but at the same time it is made contemporary. It grows not from imitation but from Remizov’s own being, not just from his enormous knowledge of that world, his feeling for the Russian language, but also from an inner blood connection, a Moscow childhood, an unbroken tradition and a memory of the centuries bordering on sorcery.

Remizov lives on the edge of the world of fantasy, not just in his fairy tales and stories, but he himself is forever surrounded by fantasy figures, which for him are just as alive as living people. On the table lies a tattered dwarf: “It’s accompanied me since 1921.” Remizov tells of gnomes, of Asyta, the king of monkeys, as if these creatures visited him daily. And at the same time his fairy tales, like Tale of Two Beasts: Ikhnelat, are based on many years of study. Remizov found the first sources in Sanskrit, a Tibetan version of Persian, Arabic, Yiddish, Latin translations from which these fairy tales passed into all European languages, and constantly changing with every epoch and country, they became the favorite reading of Muscovite Rus'. This particular tale with Remizov’s own illustrations was published by his friends in 1950 in an edition of three hundred copies. His fantastic stories about the possessed, also published in three hundred copies in 1951, tell the love of Savva Grudtsyn and the sufferings of the possessed Salomonia. Into the seventeenth-century story about Savva, Remizov inserts an unchecked invocation of love—breathless as an avalanche, growing like a flame—to the lover he has killed in a fit. Two packed pages without a comma or a full stop. I remember pages in Joyce’s Ulysses that flow like a current, without commas or periods. But the worlds of these two books are too remote for comparison. It’s probably only in the medieval legends and tales of love that you find Remizov’s large breath and thrust.

The tale of Salomonia breathes a morbid atmosphere of cruel fate, despair, and possession, and, toward the end, of all-embracing mystical charity. Even Dostoevsky seems less obscure in comparison; after all, he read Les Misérables, and Georges Sand, and next to Remizov, Dostoevsky’s Russianness is “groomed.”

Remizov published his first book almost fifty years ago, in 1902. In emigration, he published nothing in Russian for eighteen years. From 1931 right up to 1949. None of his books has appeared in Russia for twenty-six years. To one of the last Remizov added about sixty-two titles of previously published books! Four of his novels have appeared in French. La Famille Bourkow with an introduction by Romain Rolland. His novel Sur champs d’azur came out at Plon in the excellent series Feux croisés, which includes prominent writers from all over the world, even one Korean writer (though there is not a single Pole).

I first heard about Remizov from Dmitry Filosofov, who had been a friend of his at the beginning of the twentieth century. He spoke to me about him around 1924. He was just back from the West, and he’d met Remizov briefly in Germany. He was visibly under the impression of their conversation, which as he said had been too “brutal,” because they had to speak of the most important matters in haste. He told me only: “I told Remizov that he should go back to Russia. He is too exclusively Russian. He won’t be able to bear emigration.” These words surprised me; Filosofov was always vehemently against all returns by what were then called smenovekhovtsy.2 I didn’t manage to get more out of him at the time. He kept repeating: “He won’t be able to bear emigration . . .” A few days later a postcard from Remizov arrived. The height of German kitsch: a fat German in a brightly colored jacket grabs the tail of a fat piglet. From some kind of masochism Filosofov pinned the card to the wall of his room on Sienna Street.

I met Remizov a few years later at one of Diaghilev’s ballets. He was standing with Prokofiev during the intermission. The diminutive figure of Remizov caught my eye at once, with his large, almost Chinese head and dark glasses. I was struck by the gaze, immediate and so very personal and cordial, from behind those dark glasses, by the attention he granted me at the time. He was then interesting to me mostly indirectly, as a friend of Rozanov and Blok. But I had read only scraps of Remizov, and incidentally at that, on the side. I cared about the vivid details about Blok, Rozanov described by their friend.

Only in 1938, on a Warsaw tram traveling down Nowy Świat, did I discover in Nouvelles littéraires the first real prose of Remizov, his short stories. Even through an irritating translation, irritating because so remote, I felt such a knot of desolate solitude and pain that I still remember the place where I read the story. It was a fragment from the as-yet-unpublished novel The Music Teacher. I was overcome by acute regret that living in Paris I had made no attempt to visit him and come to know him better. From that day another thirteen years passed, and what years they were. Now I suddenly heard that Remizov was living completely alone; in 1945 he lost his wife, the closest companion of all his years of misfortune, and all his work, he was almost entirely blind, poor, living with the fitful help of a handful of friends. Lonely, suspended in a void, not like Pan Twardowski3 between heaven and earth, but between the hell of quarrels, jealousies, and poverty in emigration and the hell of repression in his native country.

I went to see him: a card on the door with strange handwriting telling the visitor to knock loudly, and a light, quick step inside. The door opens and I recognize the same little figure, just more humpbacked from bending over books, and the big Chinese face with the charming smile. With the same warm smile he leads me down a long, dark corridor to a bright study and bedroom. Shelves with books, walls stuck from floor to ceiling with little clippings of abstract paintings that look like Chinese screens and drawings by Paul Klee. Those walls glow silver and red. Remizov sits me down across from himself on a sofa worn threadbare by visitors, and he himself sits at a table with a big inkwell.

“What do you live on?” I ask him outright after a brief exchange.

“Oh, you see, there are many more kind people then we tend to imagine. They take care of me. Here, today, I have a piece of pork fat, du lard, a good neighbor brought it for tomorrow. And in the evening, tea with bread is enough for me. If only you knew how good it is to work in this complete silence and solitude. The last few years, I almost never leave this apartment. I’m so happy I live on the rue Boileau—after all, it was Boileau who wrote L’Art poétique. The French really know how to work the word, they know what the word is, while we Russians are still only talking about content. How few people understand the meaning of a word. Because either they are geniuses, like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy—whatever they tried to write, they could carry it off!” (I think of Mallarmé’s remark to Degas, when the painter complained that he had a bunch of ideas, but he couldn’t manage to write a decent sonnet: “Mais Degas, ce n’est pas avec des idées que l’on fait des vers . . . C’est avec des mots.”)

When that most Russian of Russians, Remizov, pronounces sentences in French, I don’t so much have the impression that he’s speaking French with a Russian accent, more that he assimilates French words into Russian. How very Russian French words like concièrge, coffre, or ordure sound on his tongue. And how are they any worse than the existing Russian words taken from foreign languages, like parikmakher (barber) or galstuk (necktie). Let purists take no offense. In 1833, Mickiewicz, who after all had not been in Paris long, wrote blithely in his articles of “eklerers” (éclaireurs), “emetes” (émeutes), and of the fact that émigrés doomed to inactivity “ruminate” (ruminent)!4

Even in the best translation we fail to reach the core of Remizov’s language, but Łobodowski’s translation seems to be closer than the best French translations, so diametrically opposed is the spirit of the French language to that dark treasure house full of twists, that shimmering sensuality of Remizov’s tongue. The author speaks of the word with mysterious piety, as of a word born from “the radiance of blood, for in the beginning was blood.”

Rozanov, who shared more than friendship with Remizov, for they had a great affinity and a passionate, arch-Russian attitude toward life, in his book Solitaria railed at the printing press: “As if that cursed Gutenberg had measured all writers with his bronze tongue.” Printing had caused literature to lose its mystery, the enchantment of intimacy possessed by the literature of the Middle Ages. Remizov’s manuscripts, unpublished, written in graceful handwriting with drawings by the author, bound in covers made by the author: Is this perhaps a return to the intimate, medieval literature of which Rozanov wrote with such ecstasy, literature not written for the Prix Goncourt, or for American speculation on best sellers and Hollywood, or for the censors of Czytelnik or Gosizdat? (“It’s not worth writing if you’re read by only a thousand people,” I am told by a jaded but gifted writer dazzled by the news of Koestler’s having bought an island).

In Remizov’s currently unavailable book Whirlwind Russia (published in Paris by Tair in 1926) there is a chapter dedicated to the memory of Blok, also a friend of his. “There is not one among the younger writers untouched by a ray from his star,” Remizov writes of him, and he quotes the words Blok spoke to him in the last year of his life: “It’s impossible to write under this kind of pressure”—but remembering those words Remizov adds in those first years of exile that for a Russian, writing outside Russia is even harder, and if you have to perish, it’s better to do it in Russia. To him it also seemed at that time that for a writer to leave his country amounted to suicide, but Remizov did not cease to write. He creates the work of his life, cut off from his homeland for thirty years. Volumes with memoirs of Russia, fairy tales and historical tales, grow despite his solitude and his poverty.

Perhaps not despite but because of them? Perhaps it is necessary to pass through desolation, through this desert, to arrive at this radiance of language, this glow of goodness and these “angels’ tears.”

A cedar is born not of gardens but deserts

The void is the cradle of giants

Great poets only arrive

when they don’t exist!

Suddenly, after eighteen years, four books are published in 1949, two of them by a group of friends as poor as Remizov himself, but one by YMCA press: With Cropped Eyes. His memories from early childhood through the first exile. A reader insensitive to the word may hear the small print run of these books—written in strange and difficult language—with a smile of condescending pity, the pity of people who think in terms of mass culture, noisy publicity, and fat earnings. But it seems to me that when millions of books printed under the pressure of one sort of power or another, some fad or another, perish and fall to dust, these books of Remizov’s will endure and nourish us.

The Music Teacher (1923–1939) is an autobiographical book, as is everything he writes. Not just in the books that describe the present or the confessional fairy tales; Remizov writes of himself even when he describes the remote past: “I tell of my past from the ninth century onward,” he writes in the introduction to Dancing Demon.

When he works on Tristan and Isolde—that love story that, as he says, came to Russia by way of a Belorussian version—when he works on fairy tales whose origins he finds in Sanskrit literature, or when he writes about the cruel fates of the first Russian printers, who had to flee from Russia to Lithuania with Prince Kurbsky after the burning of the Moscow printing house, then on to Lvov, from where Batory moved one of them to Kraków, ordering him to cast not letters but weaponry; or when he writes of Avvakuum, burnt at the stake for defending the old versions of holy scriptures, of about the mice who were his friends at the time of the German occupation of Paris, about the hunger and cold of the war years, in that meld of vision and piercing realism, Kafkaesque fantasy and the most sensual delight in the life’s phenomena, we feel everywhere the writer’s intimate confessions about himself. “I only know how to write about myself,” Remizov tells me. I remind him of a page from his story about the printers who fled Moscow to the West. “Ah yes,” he says. “That story was written on the basis of documentation. I read everything that could ever have been written about it.”

The old man bows his big Chinese head with the glasses and speaks to me as if confessing. “That . . . that was from memory . . . You can’t learn things like that, or make them up. It’s all from the depths of memory . . .” And when Remizov says during our conversation: “You Poles were in Smolensk at that time,” it’s as if he’s speaking of yesterday that he witnessed those events. Born in Moscow, living outside Russia for thirty years, this writer has the history of his country in his blood and in the folds of his brain.

This indefatigable seventy-year-old writer, who has to grope for his inkwell with one hand, because he can no longer see it, and who touches the end of his cigarette with a finger before he lights it, for he doesn’t see it, either, continues to write and bind in his library, volumes of books written by hand in thick letters and very black ink. Surrounded by books, by silver, red, sapphire picture cuttings, and a tight, a very tight circle of devoted friends, torn from their own world like him, solitary and poor—Remizov has preserved his burning heart and creative power through all the injustices, ambushes, and humiliations of emigration.

“Humiliation,” Rozanov wrote, “after a few days always transforms itself into a spiritual light, to which nothing can compare. It is not implausible to say that some of the highest spiritual illuminations are unattainable without first suffering humiliation, that some spiritual absolutes would remain hidden forever, closed to those who were always victorious, who celebrated only triumphs and were always ‘on top.’”

The humiliation of every emigration that lasts not days but years gives rise not just to bitterness, bickering, and hatred, it also yields light.

The more I think about emigration, the more it seems to me that a phenomenon like creative power in the desert of exile is the greatest justification for the wanderings of emigrants. The most Russian of writers has become universal through his faithfulness to that Russianness and creative passion.

Once in the period of Poland’s brief and phony flirtation with the Soviets, Radek5 in an article for Wiadomości arrogantly settled scores with the Russian emigration. He wrote that it had given the world only Parisian chauffeurs and cabarets. The fact that thirty years after leaving Russia, Remizov is writing, and more, able to publish a few books with the funding of those impoverished Russian followers—that fact, which is not an isolated case, is the reply to that article.

“Heavy is the road of exile,” but what if it leads to pure stars moving in the pure heavens, as Remizov writes, and to the transparent streams running across our harsh earth?

MEMORIES OF STAROBIELSK

Essays Between Art and History

JÓZEF CZAPSKI

Tuesday, June 13, 2023

On Gobineau


In the realm of French literature, one of the surest signs of an author's consecration is inclusion in the definitive, critical Bibliothèque de la Pléiade published by Gallimard. The works of Arthur de Gobineau finally received such recognition in 1983, missing the centennial of his death by one year. Gobineau would, however, have been satisfied. "Time is on my side," he wrote in 1869.[ 1]  He also wrote, "My contemporaries will only appreciate me one hundred years after my death,"[ 2]  which, perhaps, offers evidence of clairvoyance, if not logic. But then Logic and Luck were not among those presiding over his birth. It would be difficult to name a nineteenth-century writer more at odds with his era.

The simplest way to characterize Gobineau is by the prefix anti. He was antirepublican, anticolonialist, antiprogressive, and antievolutionist in the century of democratization, imperialist expansion, technical progress, and Darwinism. As a student, he was judged impertinent and expelled from school. As a writer, he offended even some of his strongest supporters (Tocqueville, for one) with the somber anti-Christian determinism of Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines , irked such veteran orientalists as Botta, Pott, and Mohl with his eccentric explanation of the cuneiforms, and ranted in vain against evolutionists as entrenched as Lyell, Oppert, and even Darwin. But he felt an equal contempt for the "so outrageously ignorant and inept" good Catholics - in the opposite camp.[ 3]  As a diplomat in Greece, he antagonized his English and Russian counterparts as well as the Greek Nationalists. And he periodically infuriated his administrative superiors with his constant complaints, leaving a voluminous record of his squabbles with them in a thick (still unpublished) dossier monomaniacally labeled "Various Knaveries." Yet, this rebel sought admission to the Legion of Honor and usurped the title of count, courted, however awkwardly, seats in two academies, and solicited an audience with Napoleon III, "that Bonaparte" whom he despised almost as much as the "Rrrrépubbblique."[ 4]  His personal life ended in vociferous strife with his wife and two daughters and led to a testament worthy of the Divine Marquis: "I hereby leave and bequeath what Madame de Gobineau my wife has not stolen or spent from my estate to Baroness de Guldencrone, born Diane de Gobineau . . . and do so only because the law requires it."[ 5] Should we see him, as one of his most sympathetic critics does, as "a torn and aggressive being, tentative and proud . .{nb. dreaming of what he is not and rejecting what he is"[ 6]  or, more prosaically, as a neurotic? Neither view is an inducement to read his works or to learn more about him.

But we can also see in him a loving newlywed; an attentive, if demanding, father; a fiercely loyal and sometimes chivalrous friend. He was cultivated by many eminent personalities of his time and, because he was a brilliant conversationalist, was lionized by many hostesses. Although reduced to a roving bachelorhood during the last twenty years of his life, he invariably found, wherever he was stationed, the love of women who were always beautiful and often distinguished. Perhaps the secret of his charisma lay in his indomitable energy. The young writer's naive mottoes (Réussir ou mourir or Malgré tout ), the adult's passion for daring voyages, the older man's willing plunge into a second career, all show the same lust for life. It takes unusual faith in oneself, in art, and in the world to take up the sculptor's chisel as a serious commercial venture after twenty-eight years of civil service. Gobineau worked at his sculpture with the same magnitude of conception demonstrated in his most ambitious poetic works. Unlike his fiction, his sculpture, unfortunately, turned out to be as mediocre as his poetry. Still, the vision of a penniless, aged, feverish, and half-blind Gobineau stubbornly carving away in his barren Rome studio (which he once considered sharing with an ill-treated donkey) offers a clue to the question of why, after fascinating his contemporaries, he has been hailed by ours as one of the real tempéraments in French literature. Whether he is also "the most underrated writer in the nineteenth century"[ 7]  is for his readers to decide.

"We Were, in Short, the Uprooted"[en8]"We Were, in Short, the Uprooted" [8]

In another display of singular logic, Gobineau wrote of his birth in 1816 in Ville-d'Avray, "I was born on a Fourteenth of July . . . which proves that opposites often come together."[ 9]  What it proved is unclear; but what Gobineau meant to indicate was the irony of this child of a Legitimist family, later a man haunted by a nostalgia for the old monarchic order and boasting of a Viking Jarl as his ancestor, having been born on Bastille Day. His father, Louis, an officer from an ancient and distinguished Bordeaux family, was indeeed faithful enough to the Bourbon kings that he went to jail on this account in 1813 and was later (in 1831) ordered to retire. Thus, the family settled into the relative poverty that would plague Gobineau all his life, even though he was at heart disdainful of material possessions.

While he maintained a satisfactory relationship with his respectable but mediocre father, it was his mother who really shaped his destiny. Anne-Louise Madeleine de Gercy brought to the marriage the double enigma of a father who might have been one of Louis XV's bastards and of a Creole mother from Santo Domingo. While Creoles are, of course, defined as of pure white blood, by a curious metonymy, they represented for Gobineau (who married one himself) the closest thing to mulatto women, in whom he found "an often powerful charm."[ 10] Madeleine de Gobineau was restless and bored by provincial life and had literary ambitions, which eventually resulted in two obscure publications. The story of her life is not unlike that of a less worthy "Muse du Département," that daring Balzac heroine. But what makes a good feuilleton rarely makes a good family.

After the birth of a second child, Caroline (who was always to remain Gobineau's confidante), Madame de Gobineau had another daughter by her children's young preceptor, Charles de La Coindière. In 1827 (Gobineau was then eleven) she and her lover left the conjugal home, taking the three children along on a life of wandering and less than straight business. In 1830, charged with swindling, she fled to Basel and then to Bienne, also in Switzerland, where Gobineau attended the local gymnasium for approximately eighteen months. Madame de Gobineau thereby fulfilled the old truth that no parental curse or beneficence is unmitigated. For while she created in the young Gobineau an immense insecurity and anxiety about his origins (one she would later increase by circulating rumors that he was a foundling), she was also responsible for giving him a solidly Germanic and Germanophile education. The gymnasium masters introduced him to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German idealism and its two-pronged currents: organicism and orientalism. The former promoted a biological model for all aspects of human endeavor, particularly in the social sciences; the latter, a rediscovery of the Orient as the cradle of Western civilization. Gobineau's lifelong tropisms—his organic view of history and his obsession with origins (of mankind, of cultures, of writing, of Persia, and eventually  of his own family)—were activated by the curriculum of the Bienne gymnasium and reinforced, in the second case, by the basic and private wound of a displaced and ill-loved child.

In 1834, the two older children were called back to France by their father, then living in Lorient. 

Instead of pursuing mathematics, which would have opened to him the doors of Saint-Cyr, Gobineau embarked on a program of general studies, of which the classics, folklore and (even this early) oriental subjects and languages comprised a sizable part. In October 1835, having failed to gain entrance to the military academy, he left for Paris with fifty francs in his pocket. His Parisian uncle, Thibault-Joseph, an aging lecher and the supposed "rich uncle," never became the gold mine anticipated by the family. Gobineau rented a garret and painfully survived with menial jobs. This harsh initiation into the "hell" of Paris triggered his lasting hatred of the metropolis and his eventual self-imposed expatriation.


He had arrived with letters of introduction to some of the eminent men and fashionable salons of the time. The lively correspondence with his family—his sister in particular—constitutes a humorous documentation of the life of an impecunious twenty-year-old would-be dandy and already committed intellectual. Under the wings of such established scholars as Mohl, Baron Eckstein, Quatremère, Sainte-Beuve, acquainted with Ballanche, Lamartine, de Maistre, Lacordaire, Talleyrand, Tocqueville, and even Alexander von Humboldt, the great anthropologist and pioneering ecologist, Gobineau served his apprenticeship as a mediocre poet, passable orientalist, and gifted journalist. Between 1840 and 1848, he published several feuilletons, including "Mademoiselle Irnois," and wrote one tragedy. With a group of selected friends (the "Scelti") he founded the soon-aborted Revue de l'orient and then, in 1848, the more serious Revue provinciale , dedicated to the administrative decentralization of France. 


Sometime in 1844, Gobineau, who in the  first years of his Parisian life had had his heart broken by a provincial girlfriend, met Clémence Monnerot, and in 1846 he married her. Whether coincidence or the result of Gobineau's personal bent, she, like Gobineau's maternal grandmother, was a Creole, and, like his mother (who by then had seen the inside of several prisons), seems to have been a willful woman. Beautiful enough to have served as a model for Chassériau, distinguished in manners and with a flair for elegance, Clémence nevertheless repeated the pattern set by Gobineau's family: she eventually left her husband. However, in 1849, the turning point in his career, their marriage was quiet and happy. The couple became the parents of a daughter, Diane, and only the lack of money prevented perfect happiness. But that same year, their financial situation improved. Tocqueville, who had been one of Gobineau's mentors since 1843, became minister of foreign affairs and took his protégé as his chef de cabinet , then secured his appointment as first secretary of the French Legation in Berne.

It was thus that Gobineau's thirty-year career as a maverick diplomat began. He was not a success. Although his journalistic training had given him a fine intuition about foreign affairs, he was cantankerous, frank, stubborn, proud, and poor—five reasons for his superiors, many of whom were run-of-the-mill bureaucrats, to dislike him. His posts and missions took him all over the world, from Switzerland to Greece, from Germany to Newfoundland, and from Brazil to Sweden. By far the most important assignment for Gobineau's intellectual maturation was his being posted to the Middle East, which he welcomed as "the real thing" after his merely bookish (and perhaps superficial) knowledge of the Orient.


He went twice to Persia. The first time, from May 1855 to January 1858, he was chargé de mission , then head of the French Legation. During this period, he traveled in a caravan from Boûchir to Teheran, camping in the midst  of bedouins. The impression made on the neophyte Gobineau by this rough but relatively genuine way of apprehending Persia and by the unforgettable visions of Persepolis and Ispahan would color forever his responses to the Middle East. Teheran, where he and his family enjoyed the novelty of being western "potentates," was, at least at first, more to the taste of Clémence. But soon, cholera, administrative harassment, the corruption of French adventurers in Persia, diplomatic complications resulting from the aftermath of the Crimean War and from the war between Persia and Afghanistan, and Clémence's increasing loneliness disenchanted them with the diplomatic profession. Nothing, however, succeeded in causing Gobineau to be disenchanted with Persia itself. After eighteen months, Clémence insisted on returning to France with Diane; Gobineau accompanied them to the Russian frontier. At this time cholera was taking its toll everywhere, and Gobineau almost lost his own daughter, if not to cholera, to an exotic fever. Clémence, exhausted and pregnant, and Diane, barely recovered, dragged themselves through the Caucasus to the Black Sea where, thanks to the intervention of a close friend, the Austrian statesman Prokesch-Osten, they were able to regain Constantinople on an English frigate, though not without encountering a storm so terrible that the tiller broke and the passengers had to be lashed to their bunks. It is not surprising that Clémence was hardly on solid land when she bought (with the money left by Thibault-Joseph, who had finally condescended to die) the small castle of Trye near Beauvais and that she was, thereafter, less willing to accompany her husband on diplomatic missions. Persia, which had fulfilled Gobineau's dreams to the point that, as he wrote later, he would mourn it the rest of his life,[ 11]  had indeed been a double-edged bounty.


Gobineau himself returned to France. By then, he had published his extravagant Lecture des textes cunéiformes and was working on Trois ans en Asie and L'Histoire des Perses.


In 1859, he turned down an appointment in China and accepted a diplomatic mission to Newfoundland, a seven-month trip to which we owe the story, "The Caribou Hunt." In 1862 and 1863, Gobineau, now plenipotentiary, returned alone to Persia via Constantinople and the Caucasus. This time he stayed mostly in Teheran, which allowed him to expand his knowledge of Persian and Arabic languages and literatures. Under the guidance of rabbis and mullahs, he led the life of "a happy alchemist," wallowing in rare manuscripts and old books and attempting to become "more Persian than the Persians."[ 12]  He finished another work on cuneiforms as well as Les Religions et les philosophies dans l'Asie Centrale . But partly under pressure from his wife, who had been lobbying for his transfer and who had not yet entirely given up her conjugal prerogatives, Gobineau had himself put on leave and returned home. Clémence succeeded almost too well. There were rumors of an appointment in Washington. Nothing could have more appalled Gobineau, who saw the United States as the cauldron of all evils: not only did the Americans treat Indians and blacks cruelly, disowning in private their public ideals, but, even worse, theirs was the prototype of a democratic, technological, and uniform mass culture. Fortunately, he was appointed to Greece. Gobineau, Clémence, and their (by then) two daughters arrived in Athens in November 1865.


If Persia had been an intellectual catalyst for Gobineau, Greece was the station where he achieved the greatest personal happiness. This time, Clémence condescended to go along; the appointment promised to be glamorous. Her elegance and the beauty of her two daughters thrilled the court of nineteen-year-old King George I. The family's status reached its apex in April 1866 when, with pomp and circumstance, Diane married one of the king's aides-de-camp, the Danish Baron de Guldencrone, on a French frigate in Piraeus harbor. Acquiring a real Viking as a son-in-law fit perfectly Gobineau's Aryan myth. 

Gobineau now turned to a new cycle of literary production, partly under the influence of Zoé and Marie Dragoumis, two sisters of an enlightened Athens family, one of whom, Zoé, he secretly loved for many years. Excursions to Corfu, Naxos and Santorin, with their many remains of medieval French occupation, motivated him to see to the publication of his historical novel, L'Abbaye de Typhaines . He wrote "The Crimson Handkerchief" and was already conceiving the fine "Akrivie Phrangopoulo" and a collection of poems, L'Aphroessa , which was no less mediocre than his earlier ones.

Greece could have been interesting professionally. Still trying its wings as a sovereign state, it depended on the protection of England, France, and Russia. Gobineau was not, unfortunately, the supple mediator that the situation required. Moreover, he was exasperated by the Greek Nationalists' push for expansion, which he considered immature (he noted in "Akrivie Phrangopoulo" that Turkish rule in the Cyclades had at least the advantage of having maintained a very low profile). His years in Persia had made him a supporter of the crescent rather than the cross. Perhaps the most embarrassing and painful moment in his career came when he had his compatriot, Gustave Flourens (the son of physiologist Pierre Flourens, whom he admired very much), arrested and deported for agitating in favor of the Cretan insurrection. But what good could be expected from a country that, although it boasted of descending from the original Hellenes, offered one of the worst examples of racial mixing?

Alas, the Greek Eden turned out to be only an oasis. Gobineau was appointed plenipotentiary to Rio de Janeiro and took up his post in March 1869, without Clémence. The single bonus of his new position was an active intellectual friendship with Emperor Dom Pedro II. Although he continued to kindle the flame in his letters to the Greek sisters, he was not long in finding another muse, a Brazilian Bovary, Aurea Posno, with whom he would for several years exchange curiously ambiguous letters. But the miasma of Brazil did not agree with him. In his boredom, his imagination flew back to sunny Greece or to other times. He wrote two epics in verse, Beowulf and the first version of Amadis , and two of his best stories, "Akrivie Phrangopoulo" and "Adélaïde."
In 1870, having contracted swamp fever, Gobineau was granted a medical leave. He returned to his beloved Trye, where he had been elected mayor. It could not have been a worse time to exercise his stewardship. Because of his education and his many friends amongst the German intelligentsia, he did not believe that Germany would ally itself with Prussia or that the Prussian soldiers could become barbarous ruffians. The Franco-Prussian War proved him wrong on both counts. However, Gobineau performed his duty as first magistrate impeccably, organizing the defense of the canton, staying in the village while the population fled, and negotiating with the Prussians in place of the prefect, who also had fled. In 1871, he mediated between the Thiers government and the occupiers, considerably reducing the war levy for the department of the Oise. But in the opinion of his constituents, none of this made up for the fact that he spoke German fluently and had a polite relationship with the German officers billeted in his chateau or that his son-in-law was a blond, blue-eyed foreigner. During that year, Gobineau, whose material circumstances bordered on misery, watched the struggle between the Commune and the Versailles government with relatively less contempt and more sympathy for the popular rebellion than for the Versaillais. But in the midst of the turmoil, his major preoccupation remained the writing of his longest and most ambitious novel, Les Pléiades.

Fortunately for his purse, for he was by then reduced to expedients, Gobineau was appointed plenipotentiary to Stockholm in 1872. His correspondence from Sweden shows, at first, his delight at being in the only part of the world that,  according to him, retained traces of the great Aryan race. His literary production was at full momentum: he started on Nouvelles asiatiques and La Renaissance , published Souvenirs de voyage and finished Les Pléiades. Perhaps Gobineau felt relieved that Clémence did not endure Stockholm for more than six months. After her departure, he channeled his full emotional and intellectual energy into a passionate relationship with Mathilde de La Tour, an Italian diplomat's wife, who became his constant love, companion, and protector throughout his last years. Whether it was this liaison or a series of petty financial quarrels with his wife and daughters that precipitated it, the rupture with his family was permanent by 1876; and Trye, the only fixed residence Gobineau had had in his wandering existence, was sacrificed to this intensive war.

In January 1877, Minister of Foreign Affairs Descazes, feeling (with good reason) that Gobineau, who had been traveling with Dom Pedro for four months, had become a plenipotentiary in absentia, summarily retired him. For the next six years, Gobineau resumed his nomadic life, this time between Italy, where Madame de La Tour resided; Chaméane, her castle in the center of France; Solesme, the Benedictine abbey which his sister had entered in 1868; Paris; and, occasionally, Bayreuth, as the guest of Wagner, whom he had met in Berlin and Venice. (Posterity would later brand mere literary exchanges regarding Amadis and Nouvelles asiatiques as the conspiracy of the prophet and the cantor of the master race.) The second version of Amadis , written during the period 1877 to 1879, was Gobineau's swan song. In these years, he devoted himself almost entirely to his sculptures and to complicated schemes through which he hoped to sell them. His health, which was seriously impaired by the Brazilian fevers, declined, and he began to lose his sight. He bore his poverty and physical ailments with an elegant stoicism, finding solace in Madame de La Tour's tenderness, the loyalty  of his old servant, Honoré, and the affection of his two dogs. On October 13, 1882, on his way from Chaméane to Pisa, where his friend San Vitale awaited him, he felt exhausted and took refuge in a hotel in Turin. The next day, in the carriage taking him back to the train station, he suffered a massive stroke. He died at around midnight, alone in a simple hotel room in a strange city. It was the last caravansary in a nomadic life; he would have preferred a tent and a camel train.

History, Natural and Otherwise

Gobineau's literary works cannot be presented without a discussion of his Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines as it is the cornerstone of his worldview. It is also the basis for Gobineau's reputation as apologist for the master race and instigator of the Holocaust. In fact, this reputation is undeserved, for to have had the impact on modern history that some claim, the Essai would have had to have been read widely, especially in Germany. We can now make a reasonable estimate of its readership in the years following publication: four hundred readers in France, perhaps one hundred fifty in Germany.[ 13] And in both countries, it received very few reviews; the most extensive, by the linguist, Pott, was not favorable. One of the two direct forefathers of National Socialism, Houston S. Chamberlain, Wagner's son-in-law, belittled Gobineau, calling him a paranoid, an unrealistic dreamer not interested in building a Brave New World; the other, Alfred Rosenberg, never mentioned him.

It is true that after 1890 awkward attempts by the Gobineau Vereinigung (a group of Gobinolators headed by Ludwig Schemann) to salvage his reputation in Germany succeeded in making La Renaissance and Nouvelles asiatiques better known. 

And when Wilhelm II mounted the throne in 1890, German neo-Nationalists and expansionists exhumed the Essai from thirty-five years of obscurity and claimed to find in it a theoretical justification for their will to power. But Gobineau was dead by then and, alas, could not protest the astonishing twists given his ideas. It is also true that around the turn of the century, when anti-Semitism grew in Western Europe, it found an excuse in Gobineau's sentimental and mythical vision of the original Aryans, even though that vision had as many practical implications for its author as the Golden Age might have had for Ovid. Indeed, Gobineau twice referred to his projection of the distant future as a "divination."[ 14] The Essai irked enough of Gobineau's contemporaries to block his election to the Académie française, but for reasons arising from concerns that are quite different. Tocqueville, for instance, disapproved of its anti-Christian determinism, which he perceived as a sort of Jansenism in the guise of science; Quatrefages, an anthropologist, found Gobineau's argument regarding miscegenation scientifically unconvincing; and Renan abstained from reviewing the book, undoubtedly because he was about to pilfer it in his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques . Gobineau never thought of the Jews as a race , since the Semites were but one branch of the original white race and the Jews but one of the Semitic groups. In contrast, Renan wrote that "the Semitic race . . . truly represents an inferior combination in human nature."[ 15]  Why is it, then, that "Renanism" did not supersede "Gobinism" as a synonym of anathema in the French language? And if the standard should be biological determinism, why not talk of "Tainism" or "Zolaism," among others? Moreover, at the time the Essai appeared, Germanophile attitudes were not extraordinary in France. Around 1850, the hereditary enemy was still England; the tradition of revenge against the Huns did not enter French life prior to the 1870 defeat by Prussia. Gobineau grew up and wrote in a literary world in which Germany had been an ally and, occasionally, a figurehead.


If one actually reads the Essai (its length makes it a chore), it becomes clear that Gobineau would not plead guilty to the three counts he has been charged with. First, the Essai could not possibly confer on the Aryan race a mandate to rule the world, since Gobineau considered the race extinguished by centuries of miscegenation and relegated its pure state to a legendary prehistoric time.[ 16]  He conceded that a few isolated remnants might still survive in Norway, Sweden, and Great Britain, but all other modern nations had long since diluted their pure white blood with black or yellow blood. The Latin peoples were especially tainted, as were the French and even the Germans , those "hybrids" (métis ). Second, expansionism (such as the Third Reich later sought) contained the seeds of its own destruction: no race could conquer others and remain pure, no state could expand and remain stable and free. Disequilibrium was built into growth; aggressive civilizations escaped the Charybdis of instability only to crash into the Scylla of despotism. The Essai , then, could never have sponsored national socialism since the core of its political argument (if there was one at all) goes against all forms of centralized government, from the early Hamite despots to the modern American megastate via the Greek city and the Roman Empire. Only local, self-contained, and organic modes of government, such as the ancient Aryan Odel, could achieve stability, peace, and freedom. Third, and finally, the Jews are treated, in the Essai , in exactly the same way as other ethnic groups. Both branches of the original white race, the Hamite and the Semite, were vigorous in their beginnings, but both had degenerated through centuries of interbreeding with black and yellow peoples. Thus, in its disparaging view of modern mankind, the Essai never singles out the Jews. In fact, Gobineau salutes the ancient Hebrews as "a people gifted in everything they undertook, a free people, a strong people, an intelligent people which, before bravely losing, arms in hand, the title of independent nation, had given the world almost as many scholars as merchants."[ 17] So what is the Essai? It is a somber epic on the origins and history of mankind, prompted, like all fiction, by its author's psychic needs. Raised on a Legitimist myth, bypassed by the bourgeois monarchy of his time, disgusted by the spectacle of the 1848 Revolution, and tormented by his own origins, Gobineau saved his sanity by finding the world sick, even moribund. According to him the explanation of man's present condition is to be found in the past, and the first books of the Essai offer such an explanation, a priori, with a superb contempt for scientific induction. Having confronted the mortality of civilizations and their inequality in the past as well as in the present and having eliminated one by one all institutional and environmental causes, Gobineau focuses on the notion of genetic leveling among races originally unequal.


Did Gobineau believe in the superiority of the white race? In its original state , yes. Yes, when it came to dynamism and to a certain mixture of altruism and practicality, the qualities in which he saw the best guarantees of lasting civilization. The two other races, however, had their own strengths, which made miscegenation a partial gain.[ 18]  Blacks had intuition and artistic instinct,[ 19]  but they were passive. Gobineau wrote later that they embodied the feminine principle.[ 20]  The yellow race was materialistic, tenacious, and diligent, but unimaginative. It embodied the masculine principle. The special greatness of the white race came from the fact that, masculine in origin, it had been strong enough to expand and to integrate the complementary principles of other races while keeping its momentum long enough to flourish. For example, the Sistine Chapel would not exist if blacks had not intermarried with the Assyrian and Egyptian civilizations, which are the mothers of ours.[ 21] Nonetheless,  the white race, too, eventually declined through this process, for if miscegenation strengthened the weak, in the long run it weakened the strong. It was an ambiguous message and a harsh vision: one pays a price for everything, even for success.


The subsequent books of the Essai develop a somber script. In Book II, Gobineau tells how the Hamites (now become black through intermarriage with the people they had vanquished) mixed with the white Semites, thus causing the decadence of Egypt but also the birth of arts and poetry, and in Book III, how the white Aryans, whose name meant "honorable" and who came originally from the plateaus of Central Asia, conquered China (where they were overwhelmed by the yellow populations) and India (in the south of which they were penetrated by black elements). Book IV focuses on the most ancient white populations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, including the Greeks, and Book V, on the beginnings of Western Europe, ending with the grandeur and decadence of Rome. Book VI takes up what Gobineau considered the true "Western civilization," that is, Germanic, as it had been several centuries before Christ, and appends two chapters on America, vilipending the Anglo-Saxons both for their genocide of the Indians and blacks and for their illusory democratic regime (his challenge to Tocqueville). Finally, the "Conclusion générale " recapitulates this grim panorama and evokes its logical consequences in a great prophetic vision: the modern human species shall become but the tasteless, colorless, fiberless product, the caput mortuum , of an endless mixing of blood, characterless, futureless—but equal in all its parts.

On balance, is Gobineau a racist? Yes, in a nineteenth-century way, that is, imbued with the notion of differences and with the assumption of an initial inequality among races and prejudiced as to the canon of physical beauty (although the odious description of the black type in the Essai is of-ten contradicted by the traveler's impressions in Trois ans en Asie ).[ 22]  Yes, in the sense that he considered genetic factors as decisive and sufficient and that he underrated environmental ones in the destiny of nations and individuals. But he was not a racist in our modern sense, first, because in his view all races had, by his time, degenerated, and second, because he never implied hatred or hinted at genocide. "A society is in itself neither good nor evil; neither wise nor foolish; it is." Races were comparable to oaks or grass which "occupy each its place in vegetal series" and whose strength or weakness is therefore no cause for pride or contempt.[ 23]  After Ancillon and Herder and before Spengler and (why not?) Lévi-Strauss, Gobineau's thesis implied the respect for diversity that our egalitarian and homogenizing culture may have lost.

Scientifically, was all this extravagance? In the light of twentieth-century anthropology and ethnology, assuredly. Gobineau had access to the science of his time, though not always at first hand.

His footnotes sometimes amounted to mere name-dropping. But his vehemence and a sort of ontological persecution complex account even more for his lack of objectivity. For he sensed that he had been beached on disenchanted shores after the wreck of a whole world, his world, whose roots were to be found in the Aristotelian order of nature. All species had been created simultaneously and ever after coexisted harmoniously in "the Great Chain of Being." The "Reigns of Nature" (to use Buffon's words) constituted "a whole forever alive, forever unchanging."[ 24]  The evolutionary hypothesis (widely promulgated since the eighteenth century and fought to the bitter end by Gobineau) played havoc with the essential, atemporal perfection of nature. So had the history of Man, by stirring the original distribution of human races. Gobineau's "syndrome," then, was a more ontological and epistemological variation of the romantic mal du siècle , and it explains his particular kind of apocalypticism.

The idea of the life and death of civilizations was common to almost all great nineteenth-century syntheses. Long before Valéry borrowed the theme from Gobineau's Essai , Vico, Saint-Simon, Ballanche, Herder, Hegel, and Michelet (to name but a few) proposed this application of the organic model to history. But most saw it in the light of cycles of regeneration and ultimate progress. What characterizes Gobineau is the death wish at the core of his vision: "Mankind [i.e. , man as the product of history] is sick, therefore it will die," but also, "Mankind is degenerate, therefore guilty, therefore it must die." Consequently, unlike its romantic counterpart, Gobineau's apocalypse does not feature clashing planets, or falling stars, or the voice from "the Mouth of Darkness." It does not intimate the survival of the spirit. Instead, the earth is left a barren swamp in which helpless herds of ruminants (Gobineau's last metaphor for the human race) will forever stagnate in torpid stupidity, an unusually materialistic statement for that time.

from the book Mademoiselle Irnois and Other Stories   by Arthur Joseph de Gobineau
ANNETTE AND DAVID SMITH

de Gobineau, Arthur Joseph. Mademoiselle Irnois and Other Stories. Berkeley:
University of California Press, c1987 1988. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2w1004x8