96
PARTISAN REVI EW
makes one giddy and teaches one all manner of things. It fills you
with such sadness! And makes you dream so of love! Ah, elegy–
makers, it is not on ruins that you should lean, but on the breasts
of these light women.
Yes, that man has missed something who has never awakened
in an anonymous bed beside a face he will never see again, and who
has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into
the river out of pure disgust for life. And just their shameless way
of dressing-the temptation of the chimera-the aura of the un–
known, of the
maudit-the
old poetry of corruption and venality!
During my first years in Paris, I used to sit in front of Tortoni's on
hot summer evenings and watch the street-walkers stroll by in the
last rays of the sun. At such moments I overflowed with Biblical
poetry.... I swear that I was never more chaste. My only complaint
about prostitution is that it no longer exists. The kept woman has
invaded the field of debauchery, just as the journalist has invaded
poetry; everything is becoming mongrelized. There are no more
courtesans, just as there are no more saints; there are only varieties
of semi-prostitutes, each more sordid than the last.
June 28-29, 1853
I find Musset's remarks on
Hamlet
utterly bourgeois, and this
is why. He criticizes as an inconsistency the fact that Hamlet is
skeptical even after seeing
his
father's soul with his own eyes. But
in the first place it was not the soul that he saw. He saw a ghost,
a shade, a
thing,
a material living thing, which was in no way
pop–
ularly or poetically related, at that period, to the abstract idea of the
soul.
It
is we, metaphysicians and moderns that we are, who use
such language as that. And Hamlet does not
doubt
at all in the phil–
osophical sense; rather, he wonders. I think that Musset's observa–
tion is not original with him; that he took it from Mallefille's preface
to his
Don Juan .
In my opinion it is superficial. A peasant of our
own day can perfectly well see a ghost, and next morning in the
crude light of day he will not ponder on the flesh and the soul,
though he may think generally about life and death. Hamlet thinks
in terms not of scholastic concepts, but of human attitudes. His
perpetual state of fluctuation, his constant uncertainty, his irresolu-
