Truth - Thursday, April 11, 1895

The Queensberry vengeance has been a source of unmixed pleasure here. It strikes people as a turning of the tables on "virtuous England." The revelations of great names hinted at in telegrams from London are awaited with the keenest curiosity. Le Figaro traces the source of the scandals to aesthetic art and literature, bred of Carlyle’s maania for the far-fetched and incomprehensible. Rossetti, Burne Jones, and Swinburne are represented as being at one end of the curve, with Ibsen, Suderman, and Oscar Wilde at the other. I wonder at Strindberg being left out. Honour to whom honour is due, good Figaro! The founder of the l’art pour l’art school was that unmitigated Epicurean Théophile Gautier. He was neither literary painter nor sculptor, but a worker in mosaics. There was beauty of a kind in his writings; but under his reeking sensualism there was no more warmth than in those mediaeval incubes and succubes that haunted monasteries because sent there on soul-destroying missions by the Evil One. Théophile’s Mademoiselle de Manpin was cold and canaille. The canaillerie was meant to spice up into a deceptive warmth the mosaic coldness. The workmanship was wondrous; but as it had no life behind it, more and more spice was needed for every succeeding chapter, to prevent interest from flagging. The grande seigneurs of the time and the fine ladies were taken with it, and the Quartier Marboeuf became a subject for "sonnets." "Chanteurs" coming to sing them, a familiar of the Court, M. Gilloutet, brought in his Bull to screen private life as with a wall. This measure succeeding, fine people from all parts come here to seek its shelter. Many of the wanderers come from beyond the Channel.

L’art pour l’art authors can only produce middling effects, there being so little life behind their art. Which of them has said anything worth saying, unless De Goncourt in "la Fille Élisa," and Zola in "Thérèse Raquin". The great resource of the early professors of this art was the contrast between super-refined elegance of form and the cloven foot. But as the taste they stimulated grew blasé, they had to give their demons a grossness in harmony with the temptations which they offer. In short, faisandé savouriness was resorted to. Roman cooks, when spice palled on the jaded palates of their masters, tried asafoetida, and succeeded with it in making appetising dishes. French literature of fiction has long since reached the asafoetida point. I dare say that English literature might have done so too, had Society alone swayed the book market. The horrors of the actual French novels often challenge attention on the covers. It is impossible now to stop five minutes at the shop-front of a boulevard bookseller without knowing all about them. "Art" is the excuse for all the morbid erotism; and when an excuse is found, what may not be done? If Medea’s infanticides were closely investigated in the name of art, massacres of innocents would be of every-day occurrence. The literary "artist" of the French book-market writes grammatically, and knows how to juggle with words. Every Easter there is a Society exodus from England to Paris. While it lasts one sees gentlemen and ladies, whom one might expect to meet at Hurlingham pigeon-shootings, gathering round the shopfront stands of boulevard booksellers. The last week of Lent and the first week after must be a great harvest time for those who cater to lovers of art-for-the-sake-of-art.

Another dissolvent of the l’art pour l’art character is what the Princess Mathilde calls "les saletés" of Mlle. Yvette Guilbert. You have an excuse for everything in the applause she wins at soirées given in honour of Grand Duchesses and Royal wanderers. There is no better way to attract illustrious prize guests than by promising them a Chat Noir entertainment, and giving them to understand that the artists will let out more than in a place of public entertainment, because not under the eye of the police agent. It was the Princesse Metternich and the Marquis de Massa, at Compiègne, who brought what was most raffish at the music-hall into the gilded drawing-room. It is true that Thérésa, who was a woman of genius, was the excuse. But the moral and aesthetic standards of the Princess were Viennese, and the Marquis had no standard. The Princesse being une très-grande dame, her example gave an excuse to every petite-maîtresse to be as dévergondée as her instincts prompted. The Ambassadress had a physique in harmony with her innovations. The face was that of a gay simian creature, and the lithe body had simian agility, as shown in tarentelle dances.

I can imagine these fashionable diversions, if reproduced in England, being much more pernicious than here. The French are, by long habit, as it were vaccinated against certain kinds of moral maladies. Apart from this, they have cooler heads. A French man or woman, however heated by passion, never forgets that this is a hard world, and that where there is no money no mercy is to be expected. The nervous system is not overmastered by athletic sports and food appropriate to them. When the organisation formed by these sports is brought under the art-for-the-sake-of-art influence, la béte est lachée, and a Gadarene rush is made down a steep place. The French keep their heads on the edges of cliffs. There is nothing more unusual than to hear of man or woman being financially or socially ruined by l’art pour l’art experiment suggested by Catulle Mendès’ novels, Baudelaire’s poems, Rochegosse’s Babylonian paintings, or Sappho’s odes. There is every indulgence for wealth and wickedness when they go hand in hand, but there is none for impecunious vice. The vicious poor man is called a "crapule," and if he runs into debt he goes to prison as a swindler.