We must first establish that Art is the soul’s journey back into its own depths, where it casts off every shackle in pursuit of joy and understanding—of both the world and itself. This defines the metaphysical atmosphere pervading the entire work, the essential and primary significance of this Prologue.
Yet such freedom, such liberation, by its very nature reveals the world’s disorder. Freedom constitutes the natural order; if everything that lives remains enslaved, then nothing follows nature’s laws. And there is indeed no freedom in this world. Each life finds itself chained to another—to a vice, to the artificial obligations that define Society as we know it. The mind instantly grasps that this return to oneself through natural freedom creates an exceptional state, that reclaiming Order through freedom places the soul bold enough to attempt it in singular solitude.
This is the very solitude one must cultivate within the soul “to hear God’s voice”. From these three cardinal virtues—Freedom, Order, Solitude—there springs immediately a feeling of limitless power, the Infinite’s own counsel. At once the soul knows with certainty its own eternity within this exceptional solitude, understanding that death no more exists than birth, that true life means being conscious centres of infinite vibration.
Gradually, across the screen of thought, there drifts—vague at first, then crystallising—the pristine model of Humanity: that archetype from before time, which the ages have mirrored in those few sublime figures memory has rescued from history’s night and declared divine.
From this ideal reality, contemplated in its atmosphere of the Absolute, emanates a moral faith and the unshakeable conviction that our only human duty is to rise as far as possible towards this ideal. We sense that this great Countenance comprehends all; that it forms the human centre where divinity’s currents descend and ascend; that it is what our eyes unknowingly seek when they turn skyward; that it embodies the Perfection whose memory inhabits every living thought—the archetype against which we unconsciously measure those faces we call beautiful, those souls we call noble. It is the human Beauty of divine Truth, a metaphysical realm where the secret soul of all things finds exaltation in the flower-like eyes of this sublime and enchanting humanity; where the sound of its voice breathes soul into nature’s every voice; where everything in this divinely human being reveals the hidden meanings linking all natural kingdoms. It is the human conscious centre of infinite vibration, from which the Messiahs and Religions drew their revealed grandeur—gradually, through gospels of physical security and privation, then sensual freedom and joy, then spiritual security and sorrow. And from this being itself, directly contemplated through the prismatic Fables, Art shall in turn reflect the Religion of Beauty, the worship of spiritual freedom and Joy.
AND TO THE POET GRANTED THIS VISION, ART REVEALS ITSELF AS THE GAZE AND VOICE, THE NATURAL GESTURE OF THIS IDEAL HUMANITY.
Ideal, yes—but how remote from every soul throughout the ages! This gesture would remain shackled by the dead weight of appearances and conventions, were the hour not even now striking for deliverance—calling humanity back from the absurd smallness of those shattered pedestals where it had mounted its own statue, returning it to the proper grandeur of a consciousness that understands: humanity’s glory in the world lies not in being the questionable elect of some phantom crown, but in accepting its role as Nature’s genuine minister and intimate. Here Natural Science steps forward to seal with Metaphysics a fruitful pact: Science confirms those truths that time’s passage has obscured yet which live on in their cryptic tongue—truths discovered by the magi, the astrologers and magicians, the alchemists and kabbalists before and after Christ.
The Poet hears this hour strike and rises to meet it. Free and solitary in his soul, who could stop him from entering the kingdom of joyous order, following intuitions grounded in the testimony of antiquity’s mysterious scholars and fortified by the endorsement of today’s clear-minded scientists?
At this point, Society looms before the Poet as a potential and formidable barrier.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Rousseau’s worn-out formula. Society does not inherently corrupt man, any more than man is born without base instincts. Society is one of the painful conditions of humanity’s present transitional state—the crystallisation of our inner weaknesses, a wall we have built between our souls and God, a wall where time has carved grimacing faces that mock eternity, a veil thrown over nature herself. There is no point in rebelling against society, and to let oneself be “corrupted” by it would be to fall victim to childish anger. The only answer is to escape into the soul’s inmost sanctuary. The Poet’s function is neither revolt against evil nor charity towards the wicked—neither the clenched fist nor the hand stretched downward, but the finger raised upward, pointing the way for those who have eyes to see.
This religion of Beauty, moreover, will never be universal—not if the Crowd should ever again drown with its great artless din the vapid babble of a “reasonable” populace. (For where might we hope for renewal through the beneficent surge of a child-people? And even if it came, such a torrent would likely sweep away the ideal vision with everything else!) Humanity, in truth, has never consisted of more than the smallest minority of free spirits amid an immense majority of slaves.
Here the Poem’s thought reaches its completion. The first of the three acts that compose the aesthetic action has accomplished itself: Fiction stands ready to be born.
Léon Hennique Novel 