To Franz Liszt
What is a thyrsus? According to the moral and the poetic meaning, it is a sacerdotal emblem in the hands of priests and priestesses celebrating divinity of which they are the interpreters and the servants. But physically it is only a staff, a pure staff, a pole for hops, a vine prop, dry, hard and straight. Around this staff, in its capricious windings, stems and flowers play and frolic, some sinuous and fugitive, and others bent over like bells or reversed cups. And an amazing glory rises up from this complexity of lines and colors, tender or resplendent. It might be said that the curved line and the spiral pay court to the straight line and dance around, in silent worship. Might it not be said that all those delicate corollas, all those calyxes, explosions of perfume and color, dance a mystical fandango around the hieratic staff? And yet, where is the imprudent mortal who dares decide whether the flowers and the vine branches were made for the staff, or whether the staff is only the pretext to show the beauty of the vine branches and the flowers? The thyrsus is the representation of your amazing duality, powerful and venerated master, dear Bacchant of the mysterious and impassioned Beauty. Never did a nymph exasperated by invincible Bacchus shake her thyrsus over the heads of her terrified companions with as much energy and caprice as you wave your genius over the hearts of your brothers. The staff is your will, straight, strong and steady; the flowers are the wandering of your fancy around your will, the feminine element performing around the male her fascinating pirouettes. Straight line and arabesque line, intention and expression, strength of will, sinuosity of the word, unity of the goal, variety of the means, all-powerful and indivisible amalgam of genius, what analyst will have the hateful courage to divide you and separate you?
Dear Liszt, through fog, beyond rivers, above cities where pianos sing your glory, where printing presses translate your wisdom, in whatever place you are, in the beauty of the eternal city or in the fogs of countries of dreamers consoled by Gambrinus, improvising songs of joy and unspeakable grief, or confiding to paper your abstruse meditations, singer of eternal Pleasure and Anguish, philosopher, poet and artist, I greet you in immortality!