JOSEPHIN PELADAN*

JOSEPHIN PÉLADAN is an occultist and a Magian.

This is

a little embarrassing for me. I know not what to answer when a man talks of "pentaculating the arcana

of supreme love." According to M. Péladan's own definition, the Magian is the great harmonist, the sovereign master of the body, the soul and the mind. This definition does not encourage me to discuss him with honest freedom, familiarly, and in complete frankness, according to the privileges conferred by the trade of letters. Besides, I must admit it: he inspires me with acute jealousy.

It must be amusing to be a Magian. One commands Nature, and floats freely in space in an astral body. I do not believe that the most Magian of the Magians does all that he says, but it is indeed a joy to merely dream of such marvels. I feel sure that M. Joséphin Péladan suffers from illusions, and that he lives in a wonderful dream. Happy, thrice happy, this magic sleeper! It is only regrettable that during his sleep he has contracted a too lofty contempt for vulgar reality. reality. Human society inspires him with insurmountable disgust. For instance, he cannot conceive how people can be

*La victoire du mari, avec commémoration de Jules Barbey d'Aurévilly (Ethopée VI de la décadence latine).

interested in the security and the fame of their land.

Magian as he is, he will permit me to express my sincere regrets. This disdain of tasks imposed by the very nature of things, this detachment from the simplest and most august duties, is to-day only too common among our younger literary men. These refined people find patriotism a little vulgar. It is true that it is, without any doubt, the sentiment which has inspired the greatest amount of stupidity and ugliness, and deformities, because there is no other sentiment so easily accessible to imbeciles. But in a refined soul this religion lends itself to all the delicacies, and even accommodates itself to a certain degree of smartness. Let these gentlemen try! Let them love their country, as she is willing to be loved, and they will soon see how to put into this love the subtleties of modern æsthetics. M. Joséphin Péladan speaks with admiration of the old Florentines. They loved Florence. Auguste Barbier boasts of the Catholic painter who fell asleep in death" thinking of his city." Those great Italians, poets, painters, and philosophers all lived and died in that thought. We have an image of the Italian soul in the Middle Ages in good St. Francis, with his last breath, blessing his town of Assisi. Yet they were subtle minds. No, it is unworthy of M. Joséphin Péladan's talent to believe that patriotism should be left to the vulgar, as a relic of barbarism.

It is perhaps no wiser to abuse democracy, and that is what the new school is fond of doing. In his rich vocabulary M. Joséphin Péladan has no terms strong enough to denounce what he calls "the putrid equality inaugurated in 1789."

He is proud, and has not a simple heart. He suffers from being jostled by the crowd. He loathes the vulgar for being vulgar, which is nevertheless in the order of things, and according to nature. And how can he fail to see that his pride lowers him by these contemptible puerilities? What good does it do him to insult the gigantic effort of modern society, which has striven for the last hundred years to organize itself on a fair and rational basis? I am willing that he should not admire this great movement, but continue to worship the forms of the past. Still, he ought to feel that such transformations have in them something vast and inevitable. What did the Middle Ages, which he is always holding up to admiration, and which he exclusively admires-what did the magnificent thirteenth century accomplish, except what we are ourselves undertaking to-day, namely, the best possible organization of society?

Its work lasted some hundreds of years, during which life was, if not happy, at least endurable, and this is reason enough for us to speak respectfully of the feudal world, which spread majestically like the royal oak of Vincennes. The house had been built with great effort. It was a lofty battlemented house, flanked by towers. Our ancestors lived therein; but the day came when it crumbled hopelessly. Another had to be built. In spite of the fastidious, it was necessary to use plaster. This was done. The edifice is doubtless lacking in distinguished symmetry; it does not abound in symbolic statues; so far as my taste is concerned, I find it rather commonplace. But it is possible to live therein, and that is the great point. Was the old one perfect? I believe that in your eyes its greatest

merit is that it no longer exists. It is an artistic joy to live by imagination in the past; but the truth must be told, that the charms of the past exist only in our dreams, and that in reality the olden days, whose poetry we breathe with pleasure, were, when new, filled with the commonplace and sadness of all things through which flows human life. I believe that M. Joséphin Péladan, both in his loves and hates, is the victim of his artistic imagination. It is true that his politics are exactly the same as those of Gregory VII. He is all for sacerdotalism versus the Empire. This violent theocrat supports the claim that the stone conferred the diadem on Peter, who gave it to Rodolphus. Petra dedit Petro, etc. But M. Joséphin Péladan does not consider that Gregory VII failed, and that he is dead.

M. Péladan affirms that " Catholic thought is the only thought which is not a sterile sham." He is a Catholic after the type of Barbey d'Aurévilly, that is, he is full of pride. In an eloquent notice consecrated to the memory of one whom he regarded as a forefather and a master, he bitterly reproached the Archbishop of Paris for not having followed with all his clergy the coffin of the author of Diaboliques. He has erected old Barbey as a Father of the Church, and holds him to be the last Confessor of the Faith. A curious and highly fantastic opinion!

Chance a short time ago placed in my hands a recent number of a magazine published by the Jesuits. Without flattering myself, and merely to mention it in passing, I was very roughly handled therein. The reverend fathers treated me without gentleness, just as they treated Father Gratry and Father Lacordaire, I also found an article in which

Barbey d'Aurévilly, on the other hand, was highly approved. He was greatly praised for having professed, in several articles, the most Roman species of Catholicism, and for having insulted M. Ernest Renan, which was an act of piety. However, he was also reproached for levity, heedlessness, and ignorance of the catechism. It will be seen that the little fathers do not regard Barbey d'Aurévilly from exactly the same point of view as does M. Péladan. I do not hesitate for a moment in declaring that the little fathers are right. Barbey d'Aurévilly was a very compromising Catholic. M. Joséphin Péladan is very dangerous to those whom he protects. It may be that he blasphemes less than the old doctor of Diaboliques, since, for the latter, blasphemy was a supreme act of faith. But he is more sensual and prouder. He has a greater taste for sin. Add to this that he is a Platonist and a Magian, that he is continually mixing up black books with the Gospel, that he is haunted by the idea of the hermaphrodite, which inspires his books, and that he sincerely believes that he deserves a cardinal's hat! All this will seem strange. But anyhow, common sense is for an artist a secondary consideration, and M. Joséphin Péladan is an artist. If you will, he is absurd, and as mad as you please. None the less, he is full of talent.

Along with horrible defects, and a perfectly impossible style, he is a born writer, and a master of phrases. He has colour and movement. If his noisy manias are overlooked, and if we forgive him his passion for inventing verbs like luner, rener, ceinturer, pages of magnificent poetry will be found here and there in his last book.

I must tell you about this book. It is a sort of