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    THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE

    BY

    ARTHUR SYMONS

    AUTHOR of

    _"Cities of Italy," "Plays, Acting and Music," "The Romantic
    Movement in English Literature," "Studies in Seven
    Arts," "Colour Studies in Paris,"_ etc.

    _REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION_


    NEW YORK
    E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
    681 FIFTH AVENUE

    1919


    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION
    BALZAC
    PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
    GÉRARD DE NERVAL
    THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
    GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
    CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
    EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT
    VLLLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM
    LÉON CLADEL
    A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD
    STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ
    PAUL VERLAINE
    JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS
    ARTHUR RIMBAUD
    JULES LAFORGUE
    MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC
    CONCLUSION
    BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES
    TRANSLATIONS




THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE




THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT


INTRODUCTION


"It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously,
lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted
the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it
highest." Carlyle

Without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, not even
language. What are words themselves but symbols, almost as arbitrary
as the letters which compose them, mere sounds of the voice to which
we have agreed to give certain significations, as we have agreed to
translate these sounds by those combinations of letters? Symbolism
began with the first words uttered by the first man, as he named
every living thing; or before them, in heaven, when God named the
world into being. And we see, in these beginnings, precisely what
Symbolism in literature really is: a form of expression, at the best
but approximate, essentially but arbitrary, until it has obtained
the force of a convention, for an unseen reality apprehended by the
consciousness. It is sometimes permitted to us to hope that our
convention is indeed the reflection rather than merely the sign of that
unseen reality. We have done much if we have found a recognisable sign.

"A symbol," says Comte Goblet d'Alviella, in his book on _The Migration
of Symbols,_ "might be defined as a representation which does not aim
at being a reproduction." Originally, as he points out, used by the
Greeks to denote "the two halves of the tablet they divided between
themselves as a pledge of hospitality," it came to be used of every
sign, formula, or rite by which those initiated in any mystery made
themselves secretly known to one another. Gradually the word extended
its meaning, until it came to denote every conventional representation
of idea by form, of the unseen by the visible. "In a Symbol," says
Carlyle, "there is concealment and yet revelation: hence, therefore, by
Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance."
And, in that fine chapter of _Sartor Resartus,_ he goes further,
vindicating for the word its full value: "In the Symbol proper, what we
can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly,
some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made
to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were,
attainable there."

It is in such a sense as this that the word Symbolism has been used to
describe a movement which, during the last generation, has profoundly
influenced the course of French literature. All such words, used
of anything so living, variable, and irresponsible as literature,
are, as symbols themselves must so often be, mere compromises, mere
indications. Symbolism, as seen in the writers of our day, would have
no value if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in
every great imaginative writer. What distinguishes the Symbolism of
our day from the Symbolism of the past; is that it has _now_ become
conscious of itself, in a sense in which it was unconscious even
in Gérard de Nerval, to whom I trace the particular origin of the
literature which I call Symbolist. The forces which mould the thought
of men change, or men's resistance to them slackens; with the change
of men's thought comes a change of literature, alike in its inmost
essence and in its outward form: after the world has starved its soul
long enough in the contemplation and the re-arrangement of material
things, comes the turn of the soul; and with it comes the literature of
which I write in this volume, a literature in which the visible world
is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream.

The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that
of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the
Goncourts, Taine, Zola, Leconte de Lisle. Taine was the philosopher
both of what had gone before him and of what came immediately after;
so that he seems to explain at once Flaubert and Zola. It was the
age of Science, the age of material things; and words, with that
facile elasticity which there is in them, did miracles in the exact
representation of everything that visibly existed, exactly as it
existed. Even Baudelaire, in whom the spirit is always an uneasy guest
at the orgie of life, had a certain theory of Realism which tortures
many of his poems into strange, metallic shapes, and fills them with
imitative odours, and disturbs them with a too deliberate rhetoric of
the flesh? Flaubert, the one impeccable novelist who has ever lived,
was resolute to be the novelist of a world in which art, formal art,
was the only escape from the burden of reality, and in which the soul
was of use mainly as the agent of fine literature. The Goncourts
caught at Impressionism to render the fugitive aspects of a world
which existed only as a thing of flat spaces, and angles, and coloured
movement, in which sun and shadow were the artists; as moods, no less
flitting, were the artists of the merely receptive consciousnesses of
men and women. Zola has tried to build in brick and mortar inside the
covers of a book; he is quite sure that the soul is a nervous fluid,
which he is quite sure some man of science is about to catch for us, as
a man of science has bottled the air, a pretty, blue liquid. Leconte
de Lisle turned the world to stone, but saw, beyond the world, only a
pause from misery in a Nirvana never subtilised to the Eastern ecstasy.
And, with all these writers, form aimed above all things at being
precise, at saying rather than suggesting, at saying what they had to
say so completely that nothing remained over, which it might be the
business of the reader to divine. And so they have expressed, finally,
a certain aspect of the world; and some of them have carried style to
a point beyond which the style that says, rather than suggests, cannot
go. The whole of that movement comes to a splendid funeral in M. de
Heredia's sonnets, in which the literature of form says its last word,
and dies.

Meanwhile, something which is vaguely called Decadence had come into
being. That name, rarely used with any precise meaning, was usually
either hurled as a reproach or hurled back as a defiance. It pleased
some young men in various countries to call themselves Decadents, with
all the thrill of unsatisfied virtue masquerading as uncomprehended
vice. As a matter of fact, the term is in its place only when applied
to style; to that ingenious deformation of the language, in Mallarmé
for instance, which can be compared I with what we are accustomed to
call the Greek and Latin of the Decadence. No doubt perversity of
form and perversity often found together, and, among the lesser men
especially, experiment was carried far, not only in the direction of
style. But a movement which in this sense might be called Decadent
could but have been a straying aside from the main road of literature.
Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional
vice and the desire to "bewilder the middle-classes" is itself
middle-class. The interlude, half a mock-interlude, of Decadence,
diverted the attention of the critics while something more serious was
in preparation. That something more serious has crystallised, for the
time, under the form of Symbolism, in which art returns to the one
pathway, leading through beautiful things to the eternal beauty.

In most of the writers whom I have dealt with as summing up in
themselves all that is best in Symbolism, it will be noticed that the
form is very carefully elaborated, and seems to count for at least
as much as in those writers of whose over-possession by form I have
complained. Here, however, all this elaboration comes from a very
different motive and leads to other ends. There is such a thing as
perfecting form that form may be annihilated. All the art of Verlaine
is in bringing verse to a bird's song, the art of Mallarmé in bringing
verse to the song of an orchestra. In Villiers de l'Isle-Adam drama
becomes an embodiment of spiritual forces, in Maeterlinck not even
their embodiment, but the remote sound of, their voices. It is all
an attempt to spiritualise literature, to evade the old bondage of
rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority. Description is banished that
beautiful things may be evoked, magically; the regular beat of verse is
broken in order that words may fly, upon subtler wings. Mystery is no
longer feared, as the great mystery in whose midst we are islanded was
feared by those to whom that unknown sea was only a great void. We are
coming closer to nature, as we seem to shrink from it with something
of horror, disdaining to catalogue the trees of the forest. And as we
brush aside the accidents of daily life, in which men and women imagine
that they are alone touching reality, we come closer to humanity, to
everything in humanity that may have begun before the world and may
outlast it.

Here, then, in this revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric,
against a materialistic tradition; in this endeavour to disengage the
ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever, exists and can be realized by
the consciousness; in this dutiful waiting upon every symbol by which
the soul of things can be made visible, literature, bowed down by so
many burdens, may at last attain liberty, and its authentic speech.
In attaining this liberty, it accepts a heavier burden; for in speaking
to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken
to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and
responsibilities of the sacred ritual.




BALZAC


1

The first man who has completely understood Balzac is Rodin, and it
has taken Rodin ten years to realise his own conception. France has
refused the statue in which a novelist is represented as a dreamer,
to whom Paris is not so much Paris as Patmos: "the most Parisian of
our novelists," Frenchmen assure you. It is more than a hundred years
since Balzac was born: a hundred years is a long time in which to be
misunderstood with admiration.

In choosing the name of the _Human Comedy_ for a series of novels in
which, as he says, there is at once "the history and the criticism
of society, the analysis of its evils, and the discussion of its
principles," Balzac proposed to do for the modern world what Dante,
in his _Divine Comedy,_ had done for the world of the Middle Ages.
Condemned to write in prose, and finding his opportunity in that
restriction, he created for himself a form which is perhaps the nearest
equivalent for the epic or the poetic drama, and the only form in
which, at all events, the epic is now possible. The world of Dante was
materially simple compared with the world of the nineteenth century;
the "visible world" had not yet begun to "exist," in its tyrannical
modern sense; the complications of the soul interested only the
Schoolmen, and were a part of theology; poetry could still represent
an age and yet be poetry. But to-day poetry can no longer represent
more than the soul of things; it had taken refuge from the terrible
improvements of civilisation in a divine seclusion, where it sings,
disregarding the many voices of the street. Prose comes offering its
infinite capacity for detail; and it is by the infinity of its detail
that the novel, as Balzac created it, has become the modern epic.

There had been great novels, indeed, before Balzac, but no great
novelist; and the novels themselves are scarcely what we should to-day
call by that name. The interminable _Astrée_ and its companions form
a link between the _fabliaux_ and the novel, and from them developed
the characteristic eighteenth-century _conte,_ in narrative, letters,
or dialogue, as we see it in Marivaux, Laclos, Crebillon _fils,_
Crebillon's longer works, including _Le Sopha,_ with their conventional
paraphernalia of Eastern fable, are extremely tedious; but in two
short pieces, _La Nuit et le Moment_ and _Le Hasard du Coin du Feu,_
he created a model of witty, naughty, deplorably natural comedy, which
to this day is one of the most characteristic French forms of fiction.
Properly, however, it is a form of the drama rather than of the novel.
Laclos, in _Les Liaisons Dangereuses,_ a masterpiece which scandalised
the society that adored Crebillon, because its naked human truth left
no room for sentimental excuses, comes much nearer to prefiguring the
novel (as Stendhal, for instance, is afterward to conceive it), but
still preserves the awkward traditional form of letters. Marivaux had
indeed already seemed to suggest the novel of analysis, but in a style
which has christened a whole manner of writing that precisely which
is least suited to the writing of fiction. Voltaire's _contes, La
Religieuse_ of Diderot, are tracts or satires in which the story is
only an excuse for the purpose. Rousseau, too, has his purpose, even
in _La Nouvelle Héloise,_ but it is a humanising purpose; and with
that book the novel of passion comes into existence, and along with it
the descriptive novel. Yet with Rousseau this result is an accident of
genius; we cannot call him a novelist; and we find him abandoning the
form he has found, for another, more closely personal, which suits him
better. Restif de la Bretonne, who followed Rousseau at a distance, not
altogether wisely, developed the form of half-imaginary autobiography
in _Monsieur Nicolas,_ a book of which the most significant part may be
compared with Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris._ Morbid and even mawkish as it
is, it has a certain uneasy, unwholesome humanity in its confessions,
which may seem to have set a fashion only too scrupulously followed
by modern French novelists. Meanwhile, the Abbé Prévost's one great
story, _Manon Lescaut,_ had brought for once a purely objective study,
of an incomparable simplicity, into the midst of these analyses of
difficult souls; and then we return to the confession, in the works of
others not novelists: Benjamin Constant, Mme. de Staël, Chateaubriand,
in _Adolphe, Corinne, René._ At once we are in the Romantic movement,
a movement which begins lyrically among poets, and at first with a
curious disregard of the more human part of humanity.

Balzac worked contemporaneously with the Romantic movement, but he
worked outside it, and its influence upon him is felt only in an
occasional pseudo-romanticism, like the episode of the pirate in _La
Femme de Trente Ans._ His vision of humanity was essentially a poetic
vision, but he was a poet whose dreams were facts. Knowing that, as
Mme. Necker has said, "the novel should be the better world," he knew
also that "the novel would be nothing if, in that august lie, it were
not true in details." And in the _Human Comedy_ he proposed to himself
to do for society more than Buffon had done for the animal world.

"There is but one animal," he declares, in his _Avant-Propos,_ with
a confidence which Darwin has not yet come to justify. But "there
exists, there will always exist, social species, as there are
zoological species." "Thus the work to be done will have a triple
form: men, women, and things; that is to say, human beings and the
material representation which they give to their thought; in short,
man and life." And, studying after nature, "French society will be the
historian, I shall need to be no more than the secretary." Thus will be
written "the history forgotten by so many historians, the history of
manners." But that is not all, for "passion is the whole of humanity."
"In realizing clearly the drift of the composition, it will be seen
that I assign to facts, constant, daily, open, or secret, to the acts
of individual life, to their causes and principles, as much importance
as historians had formerly attached to the events of the public life
of nations." "Facts gathered together and painted as they are, with
passion for element," is one of his definitions of the task he has
undertaken. And in a letter to Mme. de Hanska, he summarises every
detail of his scheme.

"The _Études des Mœurs_ will represent social effects, without a
single situation of life, or a physiognomy, or a character of man or
woman, or a manner of life, or a profession, or a social zone, or a
district of France, or anything pertaining to childhood, old age, or
maturity, politics, justice, or war, having been forgotten.

"That laid down, the history of the human heart traced link by link,
the history of society made in all its details, we have the base....

"Then, the second stage is the _Études philosophiques,_ for after the
_effects_ come the _causes._ In the _Études des Mœurs_ I shall have
painted the sentiments and their action, life and the fashion of life.
In the _Études philosophiques_ I shall say _why the sentiments, on what
the life...._

"Then, after the _effects_ and the _causes,_ come the _Études
analytiques,_ to which the _Physiologie du mariage_ belongs, for, after
the _effects_ and the _causes,_ one should seek the _principles...._

"After having done the poetry, the demonstration, of a whole system, I
shall do the science in the _Essai sur les forces humaines._ And, on
the bases of this palace I shall have traced the immense arabesque of
the _Cent Contes drolatiques_!"

Quite all that, as we know, was not carried out; but there, in its
intention, is the plan; and after twenty years' work the main part of
it, certainly, was carried out. Stated with this precise detail, it
has something of a scientific air, as of a too deliberate attempt upon
the sources of life by one of those systematic French minds which are
so much more logical than facts. But there is one little phrase to be
noted: "La passion est toute l'humanité." All Balzac is in that phrase.

Another French novelist, following, as he thought, the example of the
_Human Comedy,_ has endeavoured to build up a history of his own time
with even greater minuteness. But _Les Rougon-Macquart_ is no more
than system; Zola has never understood that detail without life is the
wardrobe without the man. Trying to outdo Balzac on his own ground,
he has made the fatal mistake of taking him only on his systematic
side, which in Balzac is subordinate to a great creative intellect,
an incessant, burning thought about men and women, a passionate human
curiosity for which even his own system has no limits. "The misfortunes
of the _Birotteaus,_ the priest and the perfumer," he says, in his
_Avant-Propos,_ taking an example at random, "are, for me, those of
humanity." To Balzac manners are but the vestment of life; it is
life that he seeks; and life, to him (it is his own word) is but the
vestment of thought. Thought is at the root of all his work, a whole
system of thought, in which philosophy is but another form of poetry;
and it is from this root of idea that the _Human Comedy_ springs.


2

The two books into which Balzac has put his deepest thought, the two
books which he himself cared for the most, are _Séraphita_ and _Louis
Lambert._ Of _Louis Lambert_ he said: "I write it for myself and a few
others"; of _Séraphita:_ "My life is in it." "One could write _Goriot_
any day," he adds; "_Séraphita only once_ in a lifetime." I have never
been able to feel that _Séraphita_ is altogether a success. It lacks
the breadth of life; it is glacial. True, he aimed at producing very
much such an effect; and it is, indeed, full of a strange, glittering
beauty, the beauty of its own snows. But I find in it at the same time
something a little factitious, a sort of romanesque, not altogether
unlike the sentimental romanesque of Novalis; it has not done the
impossible, in humanising abstract speculation, in fusing mysticism and
the novel. But for the student of Balzac it has extraordinary interest;
for it is at once the base and the summit of the _Human Comedy._ In a
letter to Mme. de Hanska, written in 1837, four years after _Séraphita_
had been begun, he writes: "I am not orthodox, and I do not believe in
the Roman Church. Swedenborgianism, which is but a repetition, in the
Christian sense, of ancient ideas, is my religion, with this addition:
that I believe in the incomprehensibility of God." _Séraphita_ is a
prose poem in which the most abstract part of that mystical system,
which Swedenborg perhaps materialised too crudely, is presented in a
white light, under a single, superhuman image. In _Louis Lambert_ the
same fundamental conceptions are worked out in the study of a perfectly
human intellect, "an intelligent gulf," as he truly calls it; a sober
and concise history of ideas in their devouring action upon a feeble
physical nature. In these two books we see directly, and not through
the coloured veil of human life, the mind in the abstract of a thinker
whose power over humanity was the power of abstract thought. They show
this novelist, who has invented the description of society, by whom
the visible world has been more powerfully felt than by any other
novelist, striving to penetrate the correspondences which exist between
the human and the celestial existence. He would pursue the soul to its
last resting-place before it takes flight from the body; further, on
its disembodied flight; he would find out God, as he comes nearer and
nearer to finding out the secret of life. And realising, as he does
so profoundly, that there is but one substance, but one ever-changing
principle of life, "one vegetable, one animal, but a continual
intercourse," the world is alive with meaning for him, a more intimate
meaning than it has for others. "The least flower is a thought, a life
which corresponds to some lineaments of the great whole, of which he
has the constant intuition." And so, in his concerns with the world, he
will find spirit everywhere; nothing for him will be inert matter,
everything will have its particle of the universal life. One of those
divine spies, for whom the world has no secrets, he will be neither
pessimist nor optimist; he will accept the world as a man accepts the
woman whom he loves, as much, for her defects as for her virtues.
Loving the world for its own sake, he will find it always beautiful,
equally beautiful in all its parts. Now let us look at the programme
which he traced for the _Human Comedy,_ let us realise it in the light
of this philosophy, and we are at the beginning of a conception of what
the _Human Comedy_ really is.


3

This visionary, then, who had apprehended for himself an idea of God,
set himself to interpret human life more elaborately than any one else.
He has been praised for his patient observation; people have thought
they praised him in calling him a realist; it has been discussed how
far his imitation of life was the literal truth of the photograph.
But to Balzac the word realism was an insult. Writing his novels at
the rate of eighteen hours a day, in a feverish solitude, he never had
the time to observe patiently. It is humanity seen in a mirror, the
humanity which comes to the great dreamers, the great poets, humanity
as Shakespeare saw it. And so in him, as in all the great artists,
there is something more than nature, a divine excess. This something
more than nature should be the aim of the artist, not merely the
accident which happens to him against his will. We require of him a
world like our own, but a world infinitely more vigorous, interesting,
profound; more beautiful with that kind of beauty which nature finds
of itself for art. It is the quality of great creative art to give
us so much life that we are almost overpowered by it, as by an air
almost too vigorous to breathe: the exuberance of creation which makes
the Sibyl of Michelangelo something more than human, which makes
Lear something more than human, in one kind or another of divinity.

Balzac's novels are full of strange problems and great passions turned
aside from nothing which presented itself in nature; and his mind was
always turbulent with the magnificent contrasts and caprices of fate.
A devouring passion of thought burned on all the situations by which
humanity expresses itself, in its flight from the horror of immobility.
To say that the situations which he chose are often romantic is but
to say that he followed the soul and the senses faithfully on their
strangest errands. Our probable novelists of to-day are afraid of
whatever emotion might be misinterpreted in a gentleman. Believing, as
we do now, in nerves and a fatalistic heredity, we have left but little
room for the dignity and disturbance of violent emotion. To Balzac,
humanity had not changed since the days when Œdipus was blind and
Philoctetes cried in the cave; and equally great miseries were still
possible to mortals, though they were French and of the nineteenth
century.

And thus he creates, like the poets, a humanity more logical than
average life; more typical, more sub-divided among the passions, and
having in its veins an energy almost more than human. He realised, as
the Greeks did, that human life is made up of elemental passions and
necessity; but he was the first to realise that in the modern world
the pseudonym of necessity is money. Money and the passions rule the
world of his _Human Comedy._

And, at the root of the passions, determining their action, he saw
"those nervous fluids, or that unknown substance which, in default of
another term, we must call the will." No word returns oftener to his
pen. For him the problem is invariable. Man has a given quantity of
energy; each man a different quantity: how will he spend it? A novel
is the determination in action of that problem. And he is equally
interested in every form of energy, in every egoism, so long as it
is fiercely itself. This pre-occupation with the force, rather than
with any of its manifestations, gives him his singular impartiality,
his absolute lack of prejudice; for it gives him the advantage of an
abstract point of view, the unchanging fulcrum for a lever which turns
in every direction; and as nothing once set vividly in motion by any
form of human activity is without interest for him, he makes every
point of his vast chronicle of human affairs equally interesting to his
readers.

Baudelaire has observed profoundly that every character in the _Human
Comedy_ has something of Balzac, has genius. To himself, his own genius
was entirely expressed in that word "will." It recurs constantly in his
letters. "Men of will are rare!" he cries. And, at a time when he had
turned night into day for his labour: "I rise every night with a keener
will than that of yesterday." "Nothing wearies me," he says, "neither
waiting nor happiness." He exhausts the printers, whose fingers can
hardly keep pace with his brain; they call him, he reports proudly, "a
man-slayer." And he tries to express himself: "I have always had in me
something, I know not what, which made me do differently from others;
and, with me, fidelity is perhaps no more than pride. Having only
myself to rely upon, I have had to strengthen, to build up that self."
There is a scene in _La Cousine Bette_ which gives precisely Balzac's
own sentiment of the supreme value of energy. The Baron Hulot, ruined
on every side, and by his own fault, goes to Josépha, a mistress who
had cast him off in the time of his prosperity, and asks her to lodge
him for a few days in a garret. She laughs, pities, and then questions
him.

"'Est-ce vrai, vieux,' reprit-elle, 'que tu as tué ton frère et ton
oncle, ruiné ta famille, surhypothéqué la maison de tes enfants et
mangé la grenouille du gouvernement en Afrique avec la princesse?'

"Le Baron inclina tristement la tête.

"'Eh bien, j'aime cela!' s'écria Josépha, qui se leva pleine
d'enthousiasme. 'C'est un _brûlage_ général! c'est sardanapale! c'est
grand! c'est complet! On est une canaille, mais on a du cœur.'"

The cry is Balzac's, and it is a characteristic part of his genius to
have given it that ironical force by uttering it through the mouth
of a Josépha. The joy of the human organism at its highest point of
activity: that is what interests him supremely. How passionate, how
moving he becomes whenever he has to speak of a real passion, a mania,
whether of a lover for his mistress, of a philosopher for his idea,
of a miser for his gold, of a Jew dealer for masterpieces! His style
clarifies, his words become flesh and blood; he is the lyric poet. And
for him every idealism is equal: the gourmandise of Pons is not less
serious, nor less sympathetic, not less perfectly realised, than the
search of Claës after the Absolute. "The great and terrible clamour of
egoism" is the voice to which he is always attentive; "those eloquent
faces, proclaiming a soul abandoned to an idea as to a remorse," are
the faces with whose history he concerns himself. He drags to light the
hidden joys of the _amateur,_ and with especial delight those that are
hidden deepest, under the most deceptive coverings. He deifies them
for their energy, he fashions the world of his _Human Comedy_ in their
service, as the real world exists, all but passive, to be the pasture
of these supreme egoists.


4

In all that he writes of life, Balzac seeks the soul; but it is the
soul as nervous fluid, the executive soul, not the contemplative soul,
that, with rare exceptions, he seeks. He would surprise the motive
force of life: that is his _recherche de l'Absolu;_ he figures it to
himself as almost a substance, and he is the alchemist on its track.
"Can man by thinking find out God?" Or life, he would have added; and
he would have answered the question with at least a Perhaps.

And of this visionary, this abstract thinker, it must be said that his
thought translates itself always into terms of life. Pose before him
a purely mental problem, and he will resolve it by a scene in which
the problem literally works itself out. It is the quality proper to
the novelist, but no novelist ever employed this quality with such
persistent activity, and at the same time subordinated faction so
constantly to the idea. With him action has always a mental basis, is
never suffered to intrude for its own sake. He prefers that an episode
should seem in itself tedious rather than it should have an illogical
interest.

It may be, for he is a Frenchman, that his episodes are sometimes too
logical. There are moments when he becomes unreal because he wishes to
be too systematic, that is, to be real by measure. He would never have
understood the method of Tolstoi, a very stealthy method of surprising
life. To Tolstoi life is always the cunning enemy whom one must lull
asleep, or noose by an unexpected lasso. He brings in little detail
after little detail, seeming to insist on the insignificance of each,
in order that it may pass almost unobserved, and be realised only after
it has passed. It is his way of disarming the suspiciousness of life.

But Balzac will make no circuit, aims at an open and an unconditional
triumph over nature. Thus, when he triumphs, he triumphs signally; and
action, in his books, is perpetually crystallising into some phrase,
like the single lines of Dante, or some brief scene, in which a whole
entanglement comes sharply and suddenly to a luminous point. I will
give no instance, for I should have to quote from every volume. I
wish rather to remind myself that there are times when the last fine
shade of a situation seems to have escaped. Even then, the failure is
often more apparent than real, a slight bungling in the machinery of
illusion. Look through the phrase, and you will find the truth there,
perfectly explicit on the other side of it.

For it cannot be denied, Balzac's style, as style, is imperfect. It
has life, and it has an idea, and it has variety; there are moments
when it attains a rare and perfectly individual beauty; as when, in _Le
Cousin Pons,_ we read of "cette prédisposition aux recherches qui fait
faire à un savant germanique cent lieues dans ses guêtres pour trouver
une vérité qui le regard en riant, assise à la marge du puits, sous le
jasmin de la cour." But I am far less sure that a student of Balzac
would recognise him in this sentence than that he would recognise the
writer of this other: "Des larmes de pudeur, qui roulèrent entre les
beaux cils de Madame Hulot, arrêtèrent net le garde national." It is
in such passages that the failure in style is equivalent to a failure
in psychology. That his style should lack symmetry, subordination, the
formal virtues of form, is, in my eyes, a less serious fault. I have
often considered whether, in the novel, perfect form is a good, or even
a possible thing, if the novel is to be what Balzac made it, history
added to poetry. A novelist with style will not look at life with an
entirely naked vision. He sees through coloured glasses. Human life
and human manners are too various, too moving, to be brought into the
fixity of a quite formal order. There will come a moment, constantly,
when style must suffer, or the closeness and clearness of narration
must be sacrificed, some minute exception of action or psychology must
lose its natural place, or its full emphasis. Balzac, with his rapid
and accumulating mind, without the patience oft selection, and without
the desire to select where selection means leaving out something
good in itself, if not good in its place, never hesitates, and his
parenthesis comes in. And often it is into these parentheses that he
puts the profoundest part of his thought.

Yet, ready as Balzac is to neglect the story for the philosophy,
whenever it seems to him necessary to do so, he would never have
admitted that a form of the novel is possible in which the story shall
be no more than an excuse for the philosophy. That was because he was
a great creator, and not merely a philosophical thinker; because he
dealt in flesh and blood, and knew that the passions in action can
teach more to the philosopher, and can justify the artist more fully,
than all the unacting intellect in the world. He knew that though life
without thought was no more than the portion of a dog, yet thoughtful
life was more than lifeless thought, and the dramatist more than
the commentator. And I cannot help feeling assured that the latest
novelists without a story, whatever other merits they certainly have,
are lacking in the power to create characters, to express a philosophy
in action; and that the form which they have found, however valuable it
may be, is the result of this failure, and not either a great refusal
or a new vision.


5

The novel as Balzac conceived it has created the modern novel, but no
modern novelist has followed, for none has been able to follow, Balzac
on his own lines. Even those who have tried to follow him most closely
have, sooner or later, branched off in one direction or another, most
in the direction indicated by Stendhal. Stendhal has written one book
which is a masterpiece, unique in its kind, _Le Rouge et le Noir;_ a
second, which is full of admirable things, _Le Chartreuse de Parme;_
a book of profound criticism, _Racine et Shakspeare;_ and a cold and
penetrating study of the physiology of love, _De l'Amour,_ by the side
of which Balzac's _Physiologie du Mariage_ is a mere _jeu d'esprit._
He discovered for himself, and for others after him, a method of
unemotional, minute, slightly ironical analysis, which has fascinated
modern minds, partly because it has seemed to dispense with those
difficulties of creation, of creation in the block, which the triumphs
of Balzac have only accentuated. Goriot, Valérie Marneffe, Pons,
Grandet, Madame de Mortsauf even, are called up before us after the
same manner as Othello or Don Quixote; their actions express them so
significantly that they seem to be independent of their creator; Balzac
stakes all upon each creation, and leaves us no choice but to accept or
reject each as a whole, precisely as we should a human being. We do not
know all the secrets of their consciousness, any more than we know all
the secrets of the consciousness of our friends. But we have only so
say "Valérie!" and the woman is before us. Stendhal, on the contrary,
undresses Julien's soul in public with a deliberate and fascinating
effrontery. There is not a vein of which he does not trace the course,
not a wrinkle to which he does not point, not a nerve which he does
not touch to the quick. We know everything that passed through his
mind, to result probably in some significant inaction. And at the end
of the book we know as much about that particular intelligence as the
anatomist knows about the body which he has dissected. But mean-while
the life has gone out of the body; and have we, after all, captured a
living soul?

I should be the last to say that Julien Sorel is not a creation, but
he is not a creation after the order of Balzac; it is a difference
of kind; and if we look carefully at Frédéric Moreau, and Madame
Gervaisais, and the Abbé Mouret, we shall see that these also,
profoundly different as Flaubert and Goncourt and Zola are from
Stendhal, are yet more profoundly, more radically, different from the
creations of Balzac. Balzac takes a primary passion, puts it into a
human body, and sets it to work itself out in visible action. But since
Stendhal, novelists have persuaded themselves that the primary passions
are a little common, or noisy, or a little heavy to handle, and they
have concerned themselves with passions tempered by reflection, and the
sensations of elaborate brains. It was Stendhal who substituted the
brain for the heart, as the battle-place of the novel; not the brain
as Balzac conceived it, a motive-force of action, the mainspring of
passion, the force by which a nature directs its accumulated energy;
but a sterile sort of brain, set at a great distance from the heart,
whose rhythm is too faint to disturb it. We have been intellectualising
upon Stendhal ever since, until the persons of the modern novel have
come to resemble those diaphanous jelly-fish, with balloon-like heads
and the merest tufts of bodies, which float up and down in the Aquarium
at Naples.

Thus, coming closer, as it seems, to what is called reality, in this
banishment of great emotions, and this attention upon the sensations,
modern analytic novelists are really getting further and further from
that life which is the one certain thing in the world. Balzac employs
all his detail to call up a tangible world about his men and women,
not, perhaps, understanding the full power of detail as psychology, as
Flaubert is to understand it; but, after all, his detail is only the
background of the picture; and there, stepping out of the canvas, as
the sombre people of Velazquez step out of their canvases at the Prado,
is the living figure, looking into your eyes with eyes that respond to
you like a mirror.

The novels of Balzac are full of electric fluid. To take up one of
them is to feel the shock of life, as one feels it on touching certain
magnetic hands. To turn over volume after volume is like wandering
through the streets of a great city, at that hour of the night when
human activity is at its full. There is a particular kind of excitement
inherent in the very aspect of a modern city, of London or Paris; in
the mere sensation of being in its midst, in the sight of all those
active and fatigued faces which pass so rapidly; of those long and
endless streets, full of houses, each of which is like the body of a
multiform soul, looking out through the eyes of many windows. There is
something intoxicating in the lights, the movement of shadows under the
lights, the vast and billowy sound of that shadowy movement. And there
is something more than this mere unconscious action upon the nerves.
Every step in a great city is a step into an unknown world. A new
future is possible at every street corner. I never know, when I go out
into one of those crowded streets, but that the whole course of my life
may be changed before I return to the house I have quitted.

I am writing these lines in Madrid, to which I have come suddenly,
after a long quiet in Andalusia; and I feel already a new pulse in my
blood, a keener consciousness of life, and a sharper human curiosity.
Even in Seville I, knew that I should see to-morrow, in the same
streets, hardly changed since the Middle Ages, the same people that I
had seen to-day. But here there are new possibilities, all the exciting
accidents of the modern world, of a population always changing, of
a city into which civilisation has brought all its unrest. And as
I walk in these broad, windy streets and see these people, whom I
hardly recognise for Spaniards, so awake and so hybrid are they, I
have felt the sense of Balzac coming back into my veins. At Cordova he
was unthinkable; at Cadiz I could realise only his large, universal
outlines, vague as the murmur of the sea; here I feel him, he speaks
the language I am talking, he sums up the life in whose midst I find
myself.

For Balzac is the equivalent of great cities. He is bad reading for
solitude, for he fills the mind with the nostalgia of cities. When a
man speaks to me familiarly of Balzac I know already something of the
man with whom I have to do. "The physiognomy of women does not begin
before the age of thirty," he has said; and perhaps before that age no
one can really understand Balzac. Few young people care for him, for
there is nothing in him that appeals to the senses except through the
intellect. Not many women care for him supremely, for it is part of
his method to express sentiments through facts, and not facts through
sentiments. But it is natural that he should be the favourite reading
of men of the world, of those men of the world who have the distinction
of their kind; for he supplies the key of the enigma which they are
studying.


6

The life of Balzac was one long labour, in which time, money, and
circumstances were all against him. In 1835 he writes: "I have lately
spent twenty-six days in my study without leaving it. I took the air
only at that window which dominates Paris, which I mean to dominate."
And he exults in the labour: "If there is any glory in that, I alone
could accomplish such a feat." He symbolises the course of his life
in comparing it to the sea beating against a rock: "To-day one flood,
to-morrow another, bears me along with it. I am dashed against a rock,
I recover myself and go on to another reef." "Sometimes it seems to me
that my brain is on fire. I shall die in the trenches of the intellect."

Balzac, like Scott, died under the weight of his debts; and it would
seem, if one took him at his word, that the whole of the _Human Comedy_
was written for money. In the modern world, as he himself realised more
clearly than any one, money is more often a symbol than an entity, and
it can be the symbol of every desire. For Balzac money was the key
of his earthly paradise. It meant leisure to visit the woman whom he
loved, and at the end it meant the possibility of marrying her.

There were only two women in Balzac's life: one, a woman much older
than himself, of whom he wrote, on her death, to the other: "She was
a mother, a friend, a family, a companion, a counsel, she made the
writer, she consoled the young man, she formed his taste, she wept like
a sister, she laughed, she came every day, like a healing slumber, to
put sorrow to sleep." The other was Mme. de Hanska, whom he married in
1850, three months before his death. He had loved her for twenty years;
she was married, and lived in Poland; it was only at rare intervals
that he was able to see her, and then very briefly; but his letters to
her, published since his death, are a simple, perfectly individual,
daily record of a great passion. For twenty years he existed on a
divine certainty without a future, and almost without a present. But we
see the force of that sentiment passing into his work; _Séraphita_ is
its ecstasy, everywhere is its human shadow; it refines his strength,
it gives him surprising intuitions, it gives him all that was wanting
to his genius. Mme. de Hanska is the heroine of the _Human Comedy,_ as
Beatrice is the heroine of the _Divine Comedy._

A great lover, to whom love, as well as every other passion and the
whole visible world, was an idea, a flaming spiritual perception,
Balzac enjoyed the vast happiness of the idealist. Contentedly,
joyously, he sacrificed every petty enjoyment to the idea of love, the
idea of fame, and to that need of the organism to exercise its forces,
which is the only definition of genius. I do not know, among the lives
of men of letters, a life better filled, or more appropriate. A young
man who, for a short time, was his secretary, declared: "I would not
live your life for the fame of Napoleon and of Byron combined!" The
Comte de Gramont did not realise, as the world in general does not
realise, that, to the man of creative energy, creation is at once a
necessity and a joy, and to the lover, hope in absence is the elixir
of life. Balzac tasted more than all earthly pleasures as he sat there
in his attic, creating the world over again, that he might lay it at
the feet of a woman. Certainly to him there was no tedium in life, for
there was no hour without its vivid employment, and no moment in which
to perceive the most desolate of all certainties, that hope is in the
past. His death was as fortunate as his life; he died at the height of
his powers, at the height of his fame, at the moment of the fulfilment
of his happiness, and perhaps of the too sudden relief of that delicate
burden.

1899.




PROSPER MÉRIMÉE


1


Stendhal has left us a picture of Mérimée as "a young man in a grey
frock-coat, very ugly, and with a turned-up nose.... This young man
had something insolent and extremely unpleasant about him. His eyes,
small and without expression, had always the same look, and this look
was ill-natured.... Such was my first impression of the best of my
present friends. I am not too sure of his heart, but I am sure of his
talents. It is M. le Comte Gazul, now so well known; a letter from him,
which came to me last week, made me happy for two days. His mother has
a good deal of French wit and a superior intelligence. Like her son,
it seems to me that she might give way to emotion once a year." There,
painted by a clear-sighted and disinterested friend, is a picture of
Mérimée almost from his own point of view, or at least as he would
himself have painted the picture. How far is it, in its insistence on
the _attendrissement une fois par an,_ on the subordination of natural
feelings to a somewhat disdainful aloofness, the real Mérimée?

Early in life, Mérimée adopted his theory, fixed his attitude, and to
the end of his life he seemed, to those about him, to have walked along
the path he had chosen, almost without a deviation. He went to England
at the age of twenty-three, to Spain four years later, and might seem
to have been drawn naturally to those two countries, to which he was
to return so often, by natural affinities of temper and manner. It
was the English manner that he liked, that came naturally to him; the
correct, unmoved exterior, which is a kind of positive strength, not to
be broken by any onslaught of events or emotions; and in Spain he found
an equally positive animal acceptance of things as they are, which
satisfied his profound, restrained, really Pagan senusality, Pagan
in the hard, eighteenth-century sense. From the beginning he was a
student, of art, of history, of human nature, and we find him enjoying,
in his deliberate, keen way, the studied diversions of the student;
body and soul each kept exactly in its place, each provided for without
partiality. He entered upon literature by a mystification, _Le Théâtre
de Clara Gazul,_ a book of plays supposed to be translated from a
living Spanish dramatist; and he followed it by _La Guzla,_ another
mystification, a book of prose ballads supposed to be translated
from the Illyrian. And these mystifications, like the forgeries of
Chatterton, contain perhaps the most sincere, the most undisguised
emotion which he ever permitted himself to express; so secure did he
feel of the heart behind the pearl necklace of the _décolletée_ Spanish
actress, who travesties his own face in the frontispiece to the one,
and so remote from himself did he feel the bearded gentleman to be, who
sits cross-legged on the ground, holding his lyre or _guzla,_ in the
frontispiece to the other. Then came a historical novel, the _Chronique
du Règne de Charles IX.,_ before he discovered, as if by accident,
precisely what it was he was meant to do: the short story. Then he
drifted into history, became Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and helped
to save Vézelay, among other good deeds toward art, done in his cold,
systematic, after all satisfactory manner. He travelled at almost
regular intervals, not only in Spain and England, but in Corsica,
in Greece and Asia Minor, in Italy, in Hungary, in Bohemia, usually
with a definite, scholarly object, and always with an alert attention
to everything that came in his way, to the manners of people, their
national characters, their differences from one another. An intimate
friend of the Countess de Montijo, the mother of the Empress Eugénie,
he was a friend, not a courtier, at the court of the Third Empire.
He was elected to the Academy, mainly for his _Études sur l'Histoire
Romaine,_ a piece of dry history, and immediately scandalised his
supporters by publishing a story, _Arsène Guillot,_ which was taken for
a veiled attack on religion and on morals. Soon after, his imagination
seemed to flag; he abandoned himself, perhaps a little wearily, more
and more to facts, to the facts of history and learning; learned
Russian, and translated Poushkin and Tourguenieff; and died in 1870,
at Cannes, perhaps less satisfied with himself than most men who have
done, in their lives, far less exactly what they have intended to do.

"I have theories about the very smallest things--gloves, boots, and the
like," says Mérimée in one of his letters; _des idées très-arrêtées,_
as he adds with emphasis in another. Precise opinions lead easily to
prejudices, and Mérimée, who prided himself on the really very logical
quality of his mind, put himself somewhat deliberately into the hands
of his prejudices. Thus he hated religion, distrusted priests, would
not let himself be carried away by any instinct of admiration, would
not let himself do the things which he had the power to do, because
his other, critical self came mockingly behind him, suggesting that
very few things were altogether worth doing. "There is nothing that I
despise and even detest so much as humanity in general," he confesses
in a letter; and it is with a certain self-complacency that he defines
the only kind of society in which he found himself at home: "(1)
With unpretentious people whom I have known a long time; (2) in a
Spanish _venta,_ with muleteers and peasant women of Andalusia." One
day, as he finds himself in a pensive mood, dreaming of a woman,
he translates for her some lines of Sophocles, into verse, "English
verse, you understand, for I abhor French verse." The carefulness with
which he avoids received opinions shows a certain consciousness of
those opinions, which in a more imaginatively independent mind would
scarcely have found a place. It is not only for an effect, but more and
more genuinely, that he sets his acquirements as a scholar above his
accomplishments as an artist. Clearing away, as it seemed to him, every
illusion from before his eyes, he forgot the last illusion of positive
people: the possibility that one's eyes may be short-sighted.

Mérimée realises a type which we are accustomed to associate almost
exclusively with the eighteenth century, but of which our own time can
offer us many obscure examples. It is the type of the _esprit fort:_
the learned man, the choice, narrow artist, who is at the same time the
cultivated sensualist. To such a man the pursuit of women is part of
his constant pursuit of human experience, and of the document, which
is the summing up of human experience. To Mérimée history itself was
a matter of detail. "In history, I care only for anecdotes," he says
in the preface to the _Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._ And he adds:
"It is not a very noble taste; but I confess to my shame, I would
willingly give Thucydides for the authentic memoirs of Aspasia or of
a slave of Pericles; for only memoirs, which are the familiar talk
of an author with his reader, afford those portraits of _man_ which
amuse and interest me." This curiosity of mankind above all things,
and of mankind at home, or in private actions, not necessarily of any
import to the general course of the world, leads the curious searcher
naturally to the more privately interesting and the less publicly
important half of mankind. Not scrupulous in arriving at any end by the
most adaptable means, not disturbed by any illusions as to the physical
facts of the universe, a sincere and grateful lover of variety,
doubtless an amusing companion with those who amused him, Mérimée
found much of his entertainments and instruction, at all events in his
younger years, in that "half world" which he tells us he frequented
"very much out of curiosity, living in it always as in a foreign
country." Here, as elsewhere, Mérimée played the part of the amateur.
He liked anecdotes, not great events, in his history; and he was
careful to avoid any too serious passions in his search for sensations.
There, no doubt, for the sensualist, is happiness, if he can resign
himself to it. It is only serious passions which make anybody
unhappy; and Mérimée was carefully on the lookout against a possible
unhappiness. I can imagine him ending every day with satisfaction, and
beginning every fresh day with just enough expectancy to be agreeable,
at that period of his life when he was writing the finest of his
stories, and dividing the rest of his leisure between the drawing-rooms
and the pursuit of uneventful adventures.

Only, though we are _automates autant qu'-esprit,_ as Pascal tells us,
it is useless to expect that what is automatic in us should remain
invariable and unconditioned. If life could be lived on a plan, and
for such men on such a plan, if first impulses and profound passions
could be kept entirely out of one's own experience, and studied only
at a safe distance, then, no doubt, one could go on being happy, in
a not too heroic way. But, with Mérimée as with all the rest of the
world, the scheme breaks down one day, just when a reasonable solution
to things seems to have been arrived at. Mérimée had already entered
on a peaceable enough _liaison_ when the first letter came to him from
the _Inconnue_ to whom he was to write so many letters, for nine years
without seeing her, and then for thirty years more after he had met
her, the last letter being written but two hours before his death.
These letters, which we can now read in two volumes, have a delicately
insincere sincerity which makes every letter a work of art, not because
he tried to make it so, but because he could not help seeing the form
simultaneously with the feeling, and writing genuine love-letters with
an excellence almost as impersonal as that of his stories. He begins
with curiosity, which passes with singular rapidity into a kind of
self-willed passion; already in the eighth letter, long before he has
seen her, he is speculating which of the two will know best how to
torture the other: that is, as he views it, love best. "We shall never
love one another really," he tells her, as he begins to hope for the
contrary. Then he discovers, for the first time, and without practical
result, "that it is better to have illusions than to have none at all."
He confesses himself to her, sometimes reminding her: "You will never
know either all the good or all the evil that I have in me. I have
spent my life in being praised for qualities which I do not possess,
and calumniated for defects which are not mine." And, with a strange,
weary humility, which is the other side of his contempt for most things
and people, he admits: "To you I am like an old opera, which you are
obliged to forget, in order to see it again with any pleasure." He, who
has always distrusted first impulses, finds himself telling her (was
she really so like him, or was he arguing with himself?): "You always
fear first impulses; do not you see that they are the only ones which
are worth anything and which always succeed?" Does he realise, unable
to change the temperament which he has partly made for himself, that
just there has been his own failure?

Perhaps of all love-letters, these of Mérimée show us love triumphing
over the most carefully guarded personality. Here the obstacle is
not duty, nor circumstance, nor a rival; but (on her side as on his,
it would seem) a carefully trained natural coldness, in which action,
and even for the most part feeling, are relinquished to the control
of second thoughts. A habit of repressive irony goes deep: Mérimée
might well have thought himself secure against the outbreak of an
unconditional passion. Yet here we find passion betraying itself,
often only by bitterness, together with a shy, surprising tenderness,
in this curious lovers' itinerary, marked out with all the customary
sign-posts, and leading, for all its wilful deviations, along the
inevitable road.

It is commonly supposed that the artist, by the habit of his
profession, has made for himself a sort of cuirass of phrases against
the direct attack of emotion, and so will suffer less than most people
if he should fall into love, and things should not go altogether
well with him. Rather, he is the more laid open to attack, the more
helplessly entangled when once the net has been cast over him. He lives
through every passionate trouble, not merely with the daily emotions of
the crowd, but with the whole of his imagination. Pain is multiplied
to him by the force of that faculty by which he conceives delight. What
is most torturing in every not quite fortunate love is memory, and the
artist becomes an artist by his intensification of memory. Mérimée has
himself defined art as exaggeration _à propos._ Well, to the artist his
own life is an exaggeration not _à propos,_ and every hour dramatises
for him its own pain and pleasure, in a tragic comedy of which he is
the author and actor and spectator. The practice of art is a sharpening
of the sensations, and, the knife once sharpened, does it cut into
one's hand less deeply because one is in the act of using it to carve
wood?

And so we find Mérimée, the most impersonal of artists, and one of
those most critical of the caprices and violences of fate, giving in to
an almost obvious temptation, an anonymous correspondence, a mysterious
unknown woman, and passing from stage to stage of a finally very
genuine love-affair, which kept him in a fluttering agitation for more
than thirty years. It is curious to note that the little which we know
of this _Inconnue_ seems to mark her out as the realisation of a type
which had always been Mérimée's type of woman. She has the "wicked
eyes" of all his heroines, from the Mariquita of his first attempt in
literature, who haunts the Inquisitor with "her great black eyes, like
the eyes of a young cat, soft and wicked at once." He finds her at the
end of his life, in a novel of Tourguenieff, "one of those diabolical
creatures whose coquetry is the more dangerous because it is capable
of passion." Like so many artists, he has invented his ideal before he
meets it, and must have seemed almost to have fallen in love with his
own creation. It is one of the privileges of art to create nature, as,
according to a certain mystical doctrine, you can actualise, by sheer
fixity of contemplation, your mental image of a thing into the thing
itself. The _Inconnue_ was one of a series, the rest imaginary; and
her power over Mérimée, we can hardly doubt, came not only from her
queer likeness of temperament to his, but from the singular, flattering
pleasure which it must have given him to find that he had invented with
so much truth to nature.


2

Mérimée as a writer belongs to the race of Laclos and of Stendhal,
a race essentially French; and we find him representing, a little
coldly, as it seemed, the claims of mere unimpassioned intellect, at
work on passionate problems, among those people of the Romantic period
to whom emotion, evident emotion, was everything. In his subjects he
is as "Romantic" as Victor Hugo or Gautier; he adds, even, a peculiar
flavour of cruelty to the Romantic ingredients. But he distinguishes
sharply, as French writers before him had so well known how to do,
between the passion one is recounting and the moved or unmoved way
in which one chooses to tell it. To Mérimée art was a very formal
thing, almost a part of learning; it was a thing to be done with a
clear head, reflectively, with a calm mastery of even the most vivid
material. While others, at that time, were intoxicating themselves
with strange sensations, hoping that "nature would take the pen out
of their hands and write," just at the moment when their own thoughts
became least coherent, Mérimée went quietly to work over something a
little abnormal which he had found in nature, with as disinterested, as
scholarly, as mentally reserved an interest as if it were one of those
Gothic monuments which he inspected to such good purpose, and, as it
has seemed to his biographer, with so little sympathy. His own emotion,
so far as it is roused, seems to him an extraneous thing, a thing to be
concealed, if not a little ashamed of. It is the thing itself he wishes
to give you, not his feelings about it; and his theory is that if the
thing itself can only be made to stand and speak before the reader, the
reader will supply for himself all the feeling that is needed, all the
feeling that would be called out in nature by a perfectly clear sight
of just such passions in action. It seems to him bad art to paint the
picture, and to write a description of the picture as well.

And his method serves him wonderfully up to a certain point, and then
leaves him, without his being well aware of it, at the moment even when
he has convinced himself that he has realised the utmost of his aim. At
a time when he had come to consider scholarly dexterity as the most
important part of art, Mérimée tells us that _La Vénus d'Ille_ seemed
to him the best story he had ever written. He has often been taken at
his word, but to take him at his word is to do him an injustice. _La
Vénus d'Ille_ is a modern setting of the old story of the Ring given to
Venus, and Mérimée has been praised for the ingenuity with which he has
obtained an effect of supernatural terror, while leaving the way open
for a material explanation of the supernatural. What he has really done
is to materialise a myth, by accepting in it precisely what might be a
mere superstition, the form of the thing, and leaving out the spiritual
meaning of which that form was no more than a temporary expression. The
ring which the bridegroom sets on the finger of Venus, and which the
statue's finger closes upon, accepting it, symbolises the pact between
love and sensuality, the lover's abdication of all but the physical
part of love; and the statue taking its place between husband and wife
on the marriage-night, and crushing life out of him in an inexorable
embrace, symbolises the merely natural destruction which that granted
prayer brings with it, as a merely human Messalina takes her lover on
his own terms, in his abandonment of all to Venus. Mérimée sees a cruel
and fantastic superstition, which he is afraid of seeming to take too
seriously, which he prefers to leave as a story of ghosts or bogies,
a thing at which we are to shiver as at a mere twitch on the nerves,
while our mental confidence in the impossibility of what we cannot
explain is preserved for us by a hint at a muleteer's vengeance. "Have
I frightened you?" says the man of the world, with a reassuring smile.
"Think about it no more; I really meant nothing."

And yet, does he after all mean nothing? The devil, the old pagan
gods, the spirits of evil incarnated under every form, fascinated him;
it gave him a malign pleasure to set them at their evil work among
men, while, all the time, he mocks them and the men who believed in
them. He is a materialist, and yet he believes in at least a something
evil, outside the world, or in the heart of it, which sets humanity
at its strange games, relentlessly. Even then he will not surrender
his doubts, his ironies, his negations. Is he, perhaps, at times,
the atheist who fears that, after all, God may exist, or at least who
realises how much he would fear him if he did exist?

Mérimée had always delighted in mystifications; he was always on his
guard against being mystified himself, either by nature or by his
fellow-creatures. In the early "Romantic" days he had had a genuine
passion for various things: "local colour," for instance. But even then
he had invented it by a kind of trick, and, later on, he explains what
a poor thing "local colour" is, since it can so easily be invented
without leaving one's study. He is full of curiosity, and will go far
to satisfy it, regretting "the decadence," in our times, "of energetic
passions, in favour of tranquillity and perhaps of happiness." These
energetic passions he will find, indeed, in our own times, in Corsica,
in Spain, in Lithuania, really in the midst of a very genuine and
profoundly studied "local colour," and also, under many disguises, in
Parisian drawing-rooms. Mérimée prized happiness, material comfort, the
satisfaction of one's immediate desires, very highly, and it was his
keen sense of life, of the pleasures of living, that gave him some
of his keenness in the realisation of violent death, physical pain,
whatever disturbs the equilibrium of things with unusual emphasis.
Himself really selfish, he can distinguish the unhappiness of others
with a kind of intuition which is not sympathy, but which selfish
people often have: a dramatic consciousness of how painful pain must
be, whoever feels it. It is not pity, though it communicates itself to
us, often enough, as pity. It is the clear-sighted sensitiveness of a
man who watches human things closely, bringing them home to himself
with the deliberate, essaying art of an actor who has to represent a
particular passion in movement.

And always in Mérimée there is this union of curiosity with
indifference: the curiosity of the student, the indifference of the
man of the world. Indifference, in him, as in the man of the world,
is partly an attitude, adopted for its form, and influencing the
temperament just so much as gesture always influences emotion. The
man who forces himself to appear calm under excitement teaches his
nerves to follow instinctively the way he has shown them. In time
he will not merely seem calm but will be calm, at the moment when he
learns that a great disaster has befallen him. But, in Mérimée, was
the indifference even as external as it must always be when there is
restraint, when, therefore, there is something to restrain? Was there
not in him a certain drying up of the sources of emotion, as the man of
the world came to accept almost the point of view of society, reading
his stories to a little circle of court ladies, when, once in a while,
he permitted himself to write a story? And was not this increase of
well-bred indifference, now more than ever characteristic, almost the
man himself, the chief reason why he abandoned art so early, writing
only two or three short stories during the last twenty-five years of
his life, and writing these with a labour which by no means conceals
itself?

Mérimée had an abstract interest in, almost an enthusiasm for,
facts; facts for their meaning, the light they throw on psychology.
He declines to consider psychology except through its expression in
facts, with an impersonality far more real than that of Flaubert. The
document, historical or social, must translate itself into sharp action
before he can use it; not that he does not see, and appreciate better
than most others, all there is of significance in the document itself;
but his theory of art is inexorable. He never allowed himself to write
as he pleased, but he wrote always as he considered the artist should
write. Thus he made for himself a kind of formula, confining himself,
as some thought, within too narrow limits, but, to himself, doing
exactly what he set himself to do, with all the satisfaction of one who
is convinced of the justice of his aim and confident of his power to
attain it.

Look, for instance, at his longest, far from his best work, _La
Chronique du Règne de Charles IX._ Like so much of his work, it has
something of the air of a _tour de force,_ not taken up entirely for
its own sake. Mérimée drops into a fashion, half deprecatingly, as if
he sees through it, and yet, as with merely mundane elegance, with
a resolve to be more scrupuously exact than its devotees. "Belief,"
says some one in this book, as if speaking for Mérimée, "is a precious
gift which has been denied me." Well, he will do better, without
belief, than those who believe. Written under a title which suggests
a work of actual history, it is more than possible that the first
suggestion of this book really came, as he tells us in the preface,
from the reading of "a large number of memoirs and pamphlets relating
to the end of the sixteenth century." "I wished to make an epitome of
my reading," he tells us, "and here is the epitome." The historical
problem attracted him, that never quite explicable Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, in which there was precisely the violence of action and
uncertainty of motive which he liked to set before him at the beginning
of a task in literature. Probable, clearly defined people, in the dress
of the period, grew up naturally about this central motive; humour
and irony have their part; there are adventures, told with a sword's
point of sharpness, and in the fewest possible words; there is one of
his cruel and loving women, in whom every sentiment becomes action, by
some twisted feminine logic of their own. It is the most artistic, the
most clean-cut, of historical novels; and yet this perfect neatness of
method suggests a certain indifference on the part of the writer, as
if he were more interested in doing the thing well than in doing it.

And that, in all but the very best of his stories (even, perhaps,
in _Arsène Guillot_ only not in such perfect things as _Carmen,_ as
_Mateo Falcone),_ is what Mérimée just lets us see, underneath an
almost faultless skill of narrative. An incident told by Mérimée at
his best gathers about it something of the gravity of history, the
composed way in which it is told helping to give it the equivalent of
remoteness, allowing it not merely to be, but, what is more difficult,
to seem classic in its own time. "Magnificent things, things after my
own heart--that is to say, Greek in their truth and simplicity," he
writes in a letter, referring to the tales of Poushkin. The phrase is
scarcely too strong to apply to what is best in his own work. Made
out of elemental passions, hard, cruel, detached as it were from
their own sentiments, the stories that he tells might in other hands
become melodramas: _Carmen,_ taken thoughtlessly out of his hands, has
supplied the libretto to the most popular of modern light operas. And
yet, in his severe method of telling, mere outlines, it seems, told
with an even stricter watch over what is significantly left out than
over what is briefly allowed to be said in words, these stories sum up
little separate pieces of the world, each a little world in itself.
And each is a little world which he has made his own, with a labor at
last its own reward, and taking life partly because he has put into
it more of himself than the mere intention of doing it well. Mérimée
loved Spain, and _Carmen,_ which, by some caprice of popularity, is
the symbol of Spain to people in general, is really, to those who
know Spain well, the most Spanish thing that has been written since
_Gil Blas._ All the little parade of local colour and philology, the
appendix on the _Calo_ of the gipsies, done to heighten the illusion,
has more significance than people sometimes think. In this story
all the qualities of Mérimée come into agreement; the student of
human passions, the traveller, the observer, the learned man, meet
in harmony; and, in addition, there is the _aficionado,_ the true
_amateur,_ in love with Spain and the Spaniards.

It is significant that at the reception of Mérimée at the Académie
Française in 1845, M. Etienne thought it already needful to say:
"Do not pause in the midst of your career; rest is not permitted to
your talent." Already Mérimée was giving way to facts, to facts in
themselves, as they come into history, into records of scholarship.
We find him writing, a little dryly, on Catiline, on Cæsar, on Don
Pedro the Cruel, learning Russian, and translating from it (yet, while
studying the Russians before all the world, never discovering the
mystical Russian soul), writing learned articles, writing reports. He
looked around on contemporary literature, and found nothing that he
could care for. Stendhal was gone, and who else was there to admire?
Flaubert, it seemed to him, was "wasting his talent under the pretence
of realism." Victor Hugo was "a fellow with the most beautiful figures
of speech at his disposal," who did not take the trouble to think, but
intoxicated himself with his own words. Baudelaire made him furious,
Renan filled him with pitying scorn. In the midst of his contempt, he
may perhaps have imagined that he was being left behind. For whatever
reason, weakness or strength, he could not persuade himself that it
was worth while to strive for anything any more. He died probably at
the moment when he was no longer a fashion, and had not yet become a
classic.

1901.




GÉRARD DE NERVAL


1

This is the problem of one who lost the whole world and gained his own
soul.

"I like to arrange my life as if it were a novel," wrote Gérard de
Nerval, and, indeed, it is somewhat difficult to disentangle the
precise facts of an existence which was never quite conscious where
began and where ended that "overflowing of dreams into real life," of
which he speaks. "I do not ask of God," he said, "that he should change
anything in events themselves, but that he should change me in regard
to things, so that I might have the power to create my own universe
about me, to govern my dreams, instead of enduring them." The prayer
was not granted, in its entirety; and the tragedy of his life lay in
the vain endeavour to hold back the irresistible empire of the unseen,
which it was the joy of his life to summon about him. Briefly, we
know that Gérard Labrunie (the name de Nerval was taken from a little
piece of property, worth some 1500 francs, which he liked to imagine
had always been in the possession of his family) was born at Paris,
May 22, 1808. His father was surgeon-major; his mother died before he
was old enough to remember her, following the _Grande Armée_ on the
Russian campaign; and Gérard was brought up, largely under the care of
a studious and erratic uncle, in a little village called Montagny, near
Ermenonville. He was a precocious schoolboy, and by the age of eighteen
had published six little collections of verses. It was during one of
his holidays that he saw, for the first and last time, the young girl
whom he calls Adrienne, and whom, under many names, he loved to the
end of his life. One evening she had come from the château to dance
with the young peasant girls on the grass. She had danced with Gérard,
he had kissed her cheek, he had crowned her hair with laurels, he had
heard her sing an old song telling of the sorrows of a princess whom
her father had shut in a tower because she had loved. To Gérard it
seemed that already he remembered her, and certainly he was never to
forget her. After-wards, he heard that Adrienne had taken the veil;
then, that she was dead. To one who had realised that it is "we, the
living, who walk in a world of phantoms," death could not exclude hope;
and when, many years later, he fell seriously and fantastically in love
with a little actress called Jenny Colon, it was because he seemed to
have found, in that blonde and very human person, the re-incarnation of
the blonde Adrienne.

Meanwhile Gérard was living in Paris, among his friends the Romantics,
writing and living in an equally desultory fashion. _Le bon Gérard_
was the best loved, and, in his time, not the least famous, of the
company. He led, by choice, now in Paris, now across Europe, the life
of a vagabond, and more persistently than others of his friends who
were driven to it by need. At that time, when it was the aim of every
one to be as eccentric as possible, the eccentricities of Gérard's life
and thought seemed, on the whole, less noticeable than those of many
really quite normal persons. But with Gérard there was no pose; and
when, one day, he was found in the Palais-Royal, leading a lobster
at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and
knows the secrets of the sea), the visionary had simply lost control of
his visions, and had to be sent to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Montmartre.
He entered March 21, 1841, and came out, apparently well again, on
the 21st of November. It would seem that this first access of madness
was, to some extent, the consequence of the final rupture with Jenny
Colon; on June 5, 1842, she died and it was partly in order to put as
many leagues of the earth as possible between him and that memory that
Gérard set out, at the end of 1842, for the East. It was also in order
to prove to the world, by his consciousness of external things, that
he had recovered his reason. While he was in Syria, he once more fell
in love with a new incarnation of Adrienne, a young Druse, Saléma, the
daughter of a Sheikh of Lebanon; and it seems to have been almost by
accident that he did not marry her. He returned to Paris at the end
of 1843 or the beginning of 1844, and for the next few years he lived
mostly in Paris, writing charming, graceful, remarkably sane articles
and books and wandering about the streets, by day and night, in a
perpetual dream from which, now and again, he was somewhat rudely
awakened. When, in the spring of 1853, he went to see Heine, for whom
he was doing an admirable prose translation of his poems, and told him
he had come to return the money he had received in advance, because
the times were accomplished, and the end of the world, announced by
the Apocalypse, was at hand, Heine sent for a cab, and Gérard found
himself at Dr. Dubois' asylum, where he remained two months. It was on
coming out of the asylum that he wrote _Sylvie,_ a delightful idyl,
chiefly autobiographical, one of his three actual achievements. On
August 27, 1853, he had to be taken to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Passy,
where he remained till May 27, 1854. Thither, after a month or two
spent in Germany, he returned on August 8, and on October 19 he came
out for the last time, manifestly uncured. He was now engaged on the
narrative of his own madness, and the first part of _Le Rêve et la Vie_
appeared in the _Revue de Paris_ of January I, 1855. On the 20th he
came into the office of the review, and showed Gautier and Maxime du
Camp an apron-string which he was carrying in his pocket. "It is the
girdle," he said, "that Madame de Maintenon wore when she had _Esther_
performed at Saint-Cyr." On the 24th he wrote to a friend: "Come and
prove my identity at the police-station of the Châtelet." The night
before he had been working at his manuscript in a pot-house of Les
Halles, and had been arrested as a vagabond. He was used to such little
misadventures, but he complained of the difficulty of writing. "I set
off after an idea," he said, "and lose myself; I am hours in finding
my way back. Do you know I can scarcely write twenty lines a day, the
darkness comes about me so close!" He took out the apron-string. "It
is the garter of the Queen of Sheba," he said. The snow was freezing
on the ground, and on the night of the 25th, at three in the morning,
the landlord of a "penny doss" in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a
filthy alley lying between the quays and the Rue de Rivoli, heard
some one knocking at the door, but did not open, on account of the
cold. At dawn, the body of Gérard de Nerval was found hanging by the
apron-string to a bar of the window.

It is not necessary to exaggerate the importance of the half-dozen
volumes which make up the works of Gérard de Nerval. He was not a
great writer; he had moments of greatness; and it is the particular
quality of these moments which is of interest for us. There is the
entertaining, but not more than entertaining, _Voyage en Orient;_ there
is the estimable translation of _Faust,_ and the admirable versions
from Heine; there are the volumes of short stories and sketches, of
which even _Les Illuminés,_ in spite of the promise of its title, is
little more than an agreeable compilation. But there remain three
compositions: the sonnets, _Le Rêve et la Vie,_ and _Sylvie;_ of which
_Sylvie_ is the most objectively achieved, a wandering idyl, full of
pastoral delight, and containing some folk-songs of Valois, two of
which have been translated by Rossetti; _Le Rêve et la Vie_ being the
most intensely personal, a narrative of madness, unique as madness
itself; and the sonnets, a kind of miracle, which may be held to have
created something at least of the method of the later Symbolist. These
three compositions, in which alone Gérard is his finest self, all
belong to the periods when he was, in the eyes of the world, actually
mad. The sonnets belong to two of these periods, _Le Rêve et la Vie_ to
the last; _Sylvie_ was written in the short interval between the two
attacks in the early part of 1853. We have thus the case of a writer,
graceful and elegant when he is sane, but only inspired, only really
wise, passionate, collected, only really master of himself, when he
is insane. It may be worth looking at a few of the points which so
suggestive a problem presents to us.


2

Gérard de Nerval lived the transfigured inner life of the dreamer. "I
was very tired of life!" he says. And like so many dreamers, who have
all the luminous darkness of the universe in their brains, he found
his most precious and uninterrupted solitude in the crowded and more
sordid streets of great cities. He who had loved the Queen of Sheba,
and seen the seven Elohims dividing the world, could find nothing more
tolerable in mortal conditions, when he was truly aware of them, than
the company of the meanest of mankind, in whom poverty and vice, and
the hard pressure of civilisation, still leave some of the original
vivacity of the human comedy. The real world seeming to be always so
far from him, and a sort of terror of the gulfs holding him, in spite
of himself, to its flying skirts, he found something at all events
realisable, concrete, in these drinkers of Les Halles, these vagabonds
of the Place du Carrousel, among whom he so often sought refuge. It was
literally, in part, a refuge. During the day he could sleep, but night
wakened him, and that restlessness, which the night draws out in those
who are really under lunar influences, set his feet wandering, if only
in order that his mind might wander the less. The sun, as he mentions,
never appears in dreams; but, with the approach of night, is not every
one a little readier to believe in the mystery lurking behind the world?

    Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'épie!

he writes in one of his great sonnets; and that fear of the invisible
watchfulness of nature was never absent from him. It is one of the
terrors of human existence that we may be led at once to seek and so
shun solitude; unable to bear the mortal pressure if its embrace,
unable to endure the nostalgia of its absence. "I think man's happiest
when he forgets himself," says an Elizabethan dramatist; and, with
Gérard, there was Adrienne to forget, and Jenny Colon the actress,
and the Queen of Sheba. But to have drunk of the cup of dreams is to
have drunk of the cup of eternal memory. The past, and, as it seemed
to him, the future were continually with him; only the present fled
continually from under his feet. It was only by the effort of this
contact with people who lived so sincerely in the day, the minute,
that he could find even a temporary foothold. With them, at least, he
could hold back all the stars, and the darkness beyond them, and the
interminable approach and disappearance of all the ages, if only for
the space between tavern and tavern, where he could open his eyes on so
frank an abandonment to the common drunkenness of most people in this
world, here for once really living the symbolic intoxication of their
ignorance.

Like so many dreamers of illimitable dreams, it was the fate of
Gérard to incarnate his ideal in the person of an actress. The fatal
transfiguration of the footlights, in which reality and the artificial
change places with so fantastic a regularity, has drawn many moths into
its flame, and will draw more, as long as men persist in demanding
illusion of what is real, and reality in what is illusion. The Jenny
Colons of the world are very simple, very real, if one will but refrain
from assuming them to be a mystery. But it is the penalty of all
imaginative lovers to create for themselves the veil which hides from
them the features of the beloved. It is their privilege, for it is
incomparably more entrancing to fancy oneself in love with Isis than
to know that one is in love with Manon Lescaut. The picture of Gérard,
after many hesitations, revealing to the astonished Jenny that she is
the incarnation of another, the shadow of a dream, that she has been
Adrienne and is about to be the Queen of Sheba; her very human little
cry of pure incomprehension, _Mais vous ne m'aimez pas!_ and her
prompt refuge in the arms of the _jeune premier ridé,_ if it were not
of the acutest pathos, would certainly be of the most quintessential
comedy. For Gérard, so sharp an awakening was but like the passage from
one state to another, across that little bridge of one step which lies
between heaven and hell, to which he was so used in his dreams. It gave
permanency to the trivial, crystallising it, in another than Stendhal's
sense; and when death came, changing mere human memory into the terms
of eternity, the darkness of the spiritual world was lit with a new
star, which was henceforth the wandering, desolate guide of so many
visions. The tragic figure of Aurélia, which comes and goes through
all the labyrinths of dream, is now seen always "as if lit up by a
lightning-flash, pale and dying, hurried away by dark horsemen."

The dream or doctrine of the re-incarnation of souls, which has given
so much consolation to so many questioners of eternity, was for
Gérard (need we doubt?) a dream rather than a doctrine, but one of
those dreams which are nearer to a man than his breath. "This vague
and hopeless love," he writes in _Sylvie,_ "inspired by an actress,
which night by night took hold of me at the hour of the performance,
leaving me only at the hour of sleep, had its germ in the recollection
of Adrienne, flower of the night, unfolding under the pale rays of
the moon, rosy and blonde phantom, gliding over the green grass, half
bathed in white mist.... To love a nun under the form of an actress!
... and if it were the very same! It is enough to drive one mad!" Yes,
_il y a de quoi devenir fou,_ as Gérard had found; but there was also,
in this intimate sense of the unity, perpetuity, and harmoniously
recurring rhythm of nature, not a little of the inner substance
of wisdom. It was a dream, perhaps refracted from some broken,
illuminating angle by which madness catches unseen light, that revealed
to him the meaning of his own superstition, fatality, malady: "During
my sleep, I had a marvelous vision. It seemed to me that the goddess
appeared before me, saying to me: 'I am the same as Mary, the same as
thy mother, the same also whom, under all forms, thou hast always
loved. At each of thine ordeals I have dropt yet one more of the masks
with which I veil my countenance, and soon thou shalt see me as I am!'"
And in perhaps his finest sonnet, the mysterious _Artémis,_ we have,
under other symbols, and with the deliberate inconsequence of these
sonnets, the comfort and despair of the same faith.

    La Treizième revient... C'est encor la première;
    Et c'est toujours la seule,--ou c'est le seul moment:
    Car es-tu reine, ô toi! la première ou dernière?
    Es-tu roi, toi le seul ou le dernier amant?...

    Aimez qui vous aima du berceau dans la bière;
    Celle que j'aimai seul m'aime encor tendrement;
    C'est la mort--ou la morte ... Ô délice! ô tourment!
    La Rose qu'elle tient, c'est la Rose trémière.

    Sainte napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux,
    Rose au cœur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule;
    As-tu trouvé ta croix dans le désert cieux?

    Roses blanches, tombez! vous insultez nos dieux:
    Tombez, fantômes blancs, de votre ciel qui brûle:
    --La Sainte de l'abîme est plus sainte à mes yeux!

Who has not often meditated, above all what artist, on the slightness,
after all, of the link which holds our faculties together in that sober
health of the brain which we call reason? Are there not moments when
that link seems to be worn down to so fine a tenuity that the wing of
a passing dream might suffice to snap it? The consciousness seems,
as it were, to expand and contract at once, into something too wide
for the universe, and too narrow for the thought of self to find room
within it. Is it that the sense of identity is about to evaporate,
annihilating all, or is it that a more profound identity, the identity
of the whole sentient universe, has been at last realised? Leaving the
concrete world on these brief voyages, the fear is that we may not have
strength to return, or that we may lose the way back. Every artist
lives a double life, in which he is for the most part conscious of the
illusions of the imagination. He is conscious also of the illusions of
the nerves, which he shares with every man of imaginative mind. Nights
of insomnia, days of anxious waiting, the sudden shock of an event, and
one of these common disturbances may be enough to jangle the tuneless
bells of one's nerves. The artist can distinguish these causes of
certain of his moods from those other causes which come to him because
he is an artist, and are properly concerned with that invention which
is his own function. Yet is there not some danger that he may come
to confuse one with the other, that he may "lose the thread" which
conducts him through the intricacies of the inner world?

The supreme artist, certainly, is the furthest of all men from this
danger; for he is the supreme intelligence. Like Dante, he can pass
through hell unsinged. With him, imagination is vision; when he looks
into the darkness, he sees. The vague dreamer, the insecure artist and
the uncertain mystic at once, sees only shadows, not recognising their
outlines. He is mastered by the images which have come at his call; he
has not the power which chains them for his slaves. "The kingdom of
Heaven suffers violence," and the dreamer who has gone tremblingly into
the darkness is in peril at the hands of those very real phantoms who
are the reflection of his fear.

The madness of Gérard de Nerval, whatever physiological reasons may
be rightly given for its outbreak, subsidence, and return, I take to
have been essentially due to the weakness and not the excess of his
visionary quality, to the insufficiency of his imaginative energy, and
to his lack of spiritual discipline. He was an unsystematic mystic;
his "Tower of Babel in two hundred volumes," that medley of books of
religion, science, astrology, history, travel, which he thought would
have rejoiced the heart of Pico della Mirandola, of Meursius, or of
Nicholas of Cusa, was truly, as he says, "enough to drive a wise man
mad." "Why not also," he adds, "enough to make a madman wise?" But
precisely because it was this _amas bizarre,_ this jumble of the
perilous secrets in which wisdom is so often folly, and folly so often
wisdom. He speaks vaguely of the Cabbala; the Cabbala would have been
safety to him, as the Catholic Church would have been, or any other
reasoned scheme of things. Wavering among intuitions, ignorances,
half-truths, shadows of falsehood, now audacious, now hesitating,
he was blown hither and thither by conflicting winds, a prey to the
indefinite.

_Le Rêve et la Vie,_ the last fragments of which were found in his
pockets after his suicide, scrawled on scraps of paper, interrupted
with Cabbalistic signs and "a demonstration of the Immaculate
Conception by geometry," is a narrative of a madman's visions by the
madman himself, yet showing, as Gautier says, "cold reason seated
by the bedside of hot fever, hallucination analysing itself by a
supreme philosophic effort." What is curious, yet after all natural,
is that part of the narrative seems to be contemporaneous with what
it describes, and part subsequent to it; so that it is not as when De
Quincey says to us, such or such was the opium-dream that I had on such
a night; but as if the opium-dreamer had begun to write down his dream
while he was yet within its coils. "The descent into hell," he calls it
twice; yet does he not also write: "At times I imagined that my force
and my activity were doubled; it seemed to me that I knew everything,
understood everything; and imagination brought me infinite pleasures.
Now that I have recovered what men call reason, must I not regret
having lost them?" But he had not lost them; he was still in that state
of double consciousness which he describes in one of his visions,
when, seeing people dressed in white, "I was astonished," he says, "to
see them all dressed in white; yet it seemed to me that this was an
optical illusion." His cosmical visions are at times so magnificent
that he seems to be creating myths; and it is with a worthy ingenuity
that he plays the part he imagines to be assigned to him in his astral
influences.

"First of all I imagined that the persons collected in the garden (of
the madhouse) all had some influence on the stars, and that the one who
always walked round and round in a circle regulated the course of the
sun. An old man, who was brought there at certain hours of the day, and
who made knots as he consulted his watch, seemed to me to be charged
with the notation of the course of the hours. I attributed to myself an
influence over the course of the moon, and I believed that this star
had been struck by the thunderbolt of the Most High, which had traced
on its face the imprint of the mask which I had observed.

"I attributed a mystical signification to the conversations of the
warders and of my companions. It seemed to me that they were the
representatives of all the races of the earth, and that we had
undertaken between us to re-arrange the course of the stars, and to
give a wider development to the system. An error, in my opinion, had
crept into the general combination of numbers, and thence came all the
ills of humanity. I believed also that the celestial spirits had taken
human forms, and assisted at this general congress, seeming though they
did to be concerned with but ordinary occupations. My own part seemed
to me to be the re-establishment of universal harmony by Cabbalistic
art, and I had to seek a solution by evoking the occult forces of
various religions."

So far we have, no doubt, the confusions of madness, in which what may
indeed be the symbol is taken for the thing itself. But now observe
what follows:

"I seemed to myself a hero living under the very eyes of the gods;
everything in nature assumed new aspects, and secret voices came to me
from the plants, the trees, animals, the meanest insects, to warn and
to encourage me. The words of my companions had mysterious messages,
the sense of which I alone understood; things without form and without
life lent themselves to the designs of my mind; out of combinations
of stones, the figures of angles, crevices, or openings, the shape of
leaves, out of colours, odours, and sounds, I saw unknown harmonies
come forth. 'How is it,' I said to myself, 'that I can possibly have
lived so long outside Nature, without identifying myself with her!
All things five, all things are in motion, all things correspond; the
magnetic rays emanating from myself or others traverse without obstacle
the infinite chain of created things: a transparent network covers the
world, whose loose threads communicate more and more closely with the
planets and the stars. Now a captive upon the earth, I hold converse
with the starry choir, which is feelingly a part of my joys and
sorrows.'"

To have thus realised that central secret of the mystics, from
Pythagoras onwards, the secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes
betrays in its "As things are below, so are they above"; which Boehme
has classed in his teaching of "signatures," and Swedenborg has
systematised in his doctrine of "correspondences"; does it matter very
much that he arrived at it by way of the obscure and fatal initiation
of madness? Truth, and especially that soul of truth which is poetry,
may be reached by many roads; and a road is not necessarily misleading
because it is dangerous or forbidden. Here is one who has gazed at
light till it has blinded him; and for us all that is important is
that he has seen something, not that his eyesight has been too weak
to endure the pressure of light overflowing the world from beyond the
world.


3

And here we arrive at the fundamental principle which is at once
the substance and the æsthetics of the sonnets "composed," as he
explains, "in that state of meditation which the Germans would call
supernaturalistic.'" In one, which I will quote, he is explicit, and
seems to state a doctrine.

    VERS DORÉS

    Homme, libre penseur! te crois-tu seul pensant
    Dans ce monde où la vie éclate en toute chose?
    Des forces que tu tiens ta liberté dispose,
    Mais de tous tes conseils l'univers est absent.
    Respecte dans la bête un esprit agissant:
    Chaque fleur est une âme à la Nature éclose;
    Un mystère d'amour dans le métal repose;
    "Tout est sensible!" Et tout sur ton être est puissant.

    Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'épie!
    A la matière même un verbe est attaché ...
    Ne la fais pas servir à quelque usage impie!

    Souvent dans l'être obscur habite un Dieu caché;
    Et comme un œil naissant couvert par ses paupières,
    Un pur esprit s'accroît sous l'écorce des pierres!

But in the other sonnets, in _Artémis,_ which I have quoted, in _El
Desdichado, Myrtho,_ and the rest, he would seem to be deliberately
obscure; or at least, his obscurity results, to some extent, from the
state of mind which he describes in _Le Rêve et la Vie:_ "I then saw,
vaguely drifting into form, plastic images of antiquity, which outlined
themselves, became definite, and seemed to represent symbols, of which
I only seized the idea with difficulty." Nothing could more precisely
represent the impression made by these sonnets, in which, for the first
time in French, words are used as the ingredients of an evocation, as
themselves not merely colour and sound, but symbol. Here are words
which create an atmosphere by the actual suggestive quality of their
syllables, as, according to the theory of Mallarmé, they should do;
as, in the recent attempts of the Symbolists, writer after writer has
endeavoured to lure them into doing. Persuaded, as Gérard was, of the
sensitive unity of all nature, he was able to trace resemblances where
others saw only divergences; and the setting together of unfamiliar
and apparently alien things, which comes so strangely upon us in his
verse, was perhaps an actual sight of what it is our misfortune not
to see. His genius, to which madness had come as the liberating, the
precipitating, spirit, disengaging its finer essence, consisted in a
power of materialising vision, whatever is most volatile and unseizable
in vision and without losing the sense of mystery, or that quality
which gives its charm to the intangible. Madness, then, in him, had
lit up, as if by lightning-flashes, the hidden links of distant and
divergent things; perhaps in somewhat the same manner as that in which
a similarly new, startling, perhaps over-true sight of things is gained
by the artificial stimulation of haschisch, opium, and those other
drugs by which vision is produced deliberately, and the soul, sitting
safe within the perilous circle of its own magic, looks out on the
panorama which either rises out of the darkness before it, or drifts
from itself into the darkness. The very imagery of these sonnets is
the imagery which is known to all dreamers of bought dreams. _Rose au
cœur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule; le Temple au péristyle immense;
la grotte où nage la syrène:_ the dreamer of bought dreams has seen
them all. But no one before Gérard realised that such things as these
might be the basis of almost a new æsthetics. Did he himself realise
all that he had done, or was it left for Mallarmé to theorise upon what
Gérard had but divined?

That he made the discovery, there is no doubt; and we owe to the
fortunate accident of madness one of the foundations of what may be
called the practical æsthetics of Symbolism. Look again at that sonnet
_Artémis,_ and you will see in it not only the method of Mallarmé, but
much of the most intimate manner of Verlaine. The first four lines,
with their fluid rhythm, their repetitions and echoes, their delicate
evasions, might have been written by Verlaine; in the later part the
firmness of the rhythms and the jewelled significance of the words are
like Mallarmé at his finest, so that in a single sonnet we may fairly
claim to see a fore-shadowing of the styles of Mallarmé and Verlaine
at once. With Verlaine the resemblance goes, perhaps, no further; with
Mallarmé it goes to the very roots, the whole man being, certainly, his
style.

Gérard de Nerval, then, had divined, before all the world, that poetry
should be a miracle; not a hymn to beauty, nor the description of
beauty, nor beauty's mirror; but beauty itself, the colour, fragrance,
and form of the imagined flower, as it blossoms again out of the page.
Vision, the over-powering vision, had come to him beyond, if not
against, his will; and he knew that vision is the root out of which the
flower must grow. Vision had taught him symbol, and he knew that it is
by symbol alone that the flower can take visible form. He knew that
the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd,
and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness
is not a necessary virtue. So it was with disdain, as well as with
confidence, that he allowed these sonnets to be overheard. It was
enough for him to say:

    J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène;

and to speak, it might be, the siren's language, remembering her. "It
will be my last madness," he wrote, "to believe myself a poet: let
criticism cure me of it." Criticism, in his own day, even Gautier's
criticism, could but be disconcerted by a novelty so unexampled. It
is only now that the best critics in France are beginning to realise
how great in themselves, and how great in their influence, are these
sonnets, which, forgotten by the world for nearly fifty years, have all
the while been secretly bringing new æsthetics into French poetry.




THÉOPHILE GAUTIER


1

Gautier has spoken for himself in a famous passage of _Mademoiselle de
Maupin_: "I am a man of the Homeric age; the world in which I live is
not my world, and I understand nothing of the society which surrounds
me. For me Christ did not come; I am as much a pagan as Alcibiades or
Phidias. I have never plucked on Golgotha the flowers of the Passion,
and the deep stream that flows from the side of the Crucified and sets
a crimson girdle about the world, has never washed me in its flood; my
rebellious body will not acknowledge the supremacy of the soul, and my
flesh will not endure to be mortified. I find the earth as beautiful as
the sky, and I think that perfection of form is virtue. I have no gift
for spirituality; I prefer a statue to a ghost, full noon to twilight.
Three things delight me: gold, marble, and purple; brilliance,
solidity, colour.... I have looked on love in the light of antiquity,
and as a piece of sculpture more or less perfect.... All my life I have
been concerned with the form of the flagon, never with the quality of
its contents." That is part of a confession of faith, and it is spoken
with absolute sincerity. Gautier knew himself, and could tell the truth
about himself as simply, as impartially, as if he had been describing
a work of art. Or is he not, indeed, describing a work of art? Was not
that very state of mind, that finished and limited temperament, a thing
which he had collaborated with nature in making, with an effective
heightening of what was most natural to him, in the spirit of art?

Gautier saw the world as mineral, as metal, as pigment, as rock, tree,
water, as architecture, costume, under sunlight, gas, in all the
colours that light can bring out of built or growing things; he saw it
as contour, movement; he saw all that a painter sees, when the painter
sets himself to copy, not to create. He was the finest copyist who ever
used paint with a pen. Nothing that can be expressed in technical terms
escaped him; there were no technical terms which he could not reduce
to an orderly beauty. But he absorbed all this visible world with the
hardly discriminating impartiality of the retina; he had no moods, was
not to be distracted by a sentiment, heard no voices, saw nothing but
darkness, the negation of day, in night. He was tirelessly attentive,
he had no secrets of his own and could keep none of naturels. He could
describe every ray of the nine thousand precious stones in the throne
of Ivan the Terrible, in the Treasury of the Kremlin; but he could tell
you nothing of one of Maeterlinck's bees.

The five senses made Gautier for themselves, that they might become
articulate. He speaks for them all with a dreadful unconcern. All his
words are in love with matter, and they enjoy their lust and have no
recollection. If the body did not dwindle and expand to some ignoble
physical conclusion; if wrinkles did not creep yellowing up women's
necks, and the fire in a man's blood did not lose its heat; he would
always be content. Everything that he cared for in the world was to be
had, except, perhaps, rest from striving after it; only, everything
would one day come to an end, after a slow spoiling. Decrepit,
colourless, uneager things shocked him, and it was with an acute,
almost disinterested pity that he watched himself die.

All his life Gautier adored life, and all the processes and forms of
life. A pagan, a young Roman, hard and delicate, with something of
cruelty in his sympathy with things that could be seen and handled,
he would have hated the soul, if he had ever really apprehended it,
for its qualifying and disturbing power upon the body. No other modern
writer, no writer perhaps, has described nakedness with so abstract a
heat of rapture: like d'Albert when he sees Mlle, de Maupin for the
first and last time, he is the artist before he is the lover, and he
is the lover while he is the artist. It was above all things the human
body whose contours and colours he wished to fix for eternity, in the
"robust art" of "verse, marble, onyx, enamel." And it was not the body
as a frail, perishable thing, and a thing to be pitied, that he wanted
to perpetuate; it was the beauty of life itself, imperishable at least
in its recurrence.

He loved imperishable things: the body, as generation after generation
refashions it, the world, as it is restored and rebuilt, and then
gems, and hewn stone, and carved ivory, and woven tapestry. He loved
verse for its solid, strictly limited, resistant form, which, while
prose melts and drifts about it, remains unalterable, indestructible.
Words, he knew, can build as strongly as stones, and not merely rise
to music, like the walls of Troy, but be themselves music as well as
structure. Yet, as in visible things he cared only for hard outline
and rich colour, so in words too he had no love of half-tints, and was
content to do without that softening of atmosphere which was to be
prized by those who came after him as the thing most worth seeking.
Even his verse is without mystery; if he meditates, his meditation has
all the fixity of a kind of sharp, precise criticism.

What Gautier saw he saw with unparalleled exactitude; he allows himself
no poetic license or room for fine phrases; has his eye always on the
object, and really uses the words which best describe it, whatever
they may be. So his books of travel are guide-books, in addition to
being other things; and not by any means "states of soul" or states
of nerves. He is willing to give you information, and able to give
it to you without deranging his periods. The little essay on Leonardo
is an admirable piece of artistic divination, and it is also a clear,
simple, sufficient account of the man, his temperament, and his way of
work. The study of Baudelaire, reprinted in the _édition définitive_
of the "Fleurs du Mal," remains the one satisfactory summing up, it
is not a solution, of the enigma which Baudelaire personified; and it
is almost the most coloured and perfumed thing in words which he ever
wrote. He wrote equally well about cities, poets, novelists, painters,
or sculptors; he did not understand one better than the other, or feel
less sympathy for one than for another. He, the "parfait magicien
ès lettres françaises," to whom faultless words came in faultlessly
beautiful order, could realise, against Balzac himself, that Balzac
had a style: "he possesses, though he did not think so, a style, and a
very beautiful style, the necessary, inevitable, mathematical style of
his ideas." He appreciated Ingres as justly as he appreciated El Greco;
he went through the Louvre, room by room, saying the right thing about
each painter in turn. He did not say the final thing; he said nothing
which we have to pause and think over before we see the whole of its
truth or apprehend the whole of its beauty. Truth, in him, comes to
us almost literally through the eyesight, and with the same beautiful
clearness as if it were one of those visible things which delighted him
most: gold, marble, and purple; brilliance, solidity, colour.

1902.




GUSTAVE FLAUBERT


_Salammbô_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has
told us, to "perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods
of the modern novel." By the modern novel he means the novel as he
had reconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary._ That perfect book is
perfect because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject
suited to his method, had made his method and his subject one. On his
scientific side Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps
a more intimately personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in
a large, sweeping way. The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine,_ the analyst made _L'Education Sentimentale;_ but in
_Madame Bovary_ we find the analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium.
It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed as any story
that has ever been written, and observed in surroundings of the most
ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds the romantic material which he
loved, the materials of beauty, in precisely that temperament which he
studies so patiently and so cruelly. Madame Bovary is a little woman,
half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her
trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-rate pleasures and
second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity
to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of
Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by
that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is saved from any
vague ascents of rhetoric in his rendering of it.

In writing _Salammbô_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of
the reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the
closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a
passing steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view
of a foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind,
moment by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble
Arch? Think, then, of the attempts to reconstruct no matter what
period of the past, to distinguish the difference in the aspect of
a world perhaps bossed with castles and ridged with ramparts, to
two individualities encased within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his
antiquity wisely: a period of which we know too little to confuse us,
a city of which no stone is left on another, the minds of Barbarians
who have left us no psychological documents. "Be sure I have made
no fantastic Carthage," he says proudly, pointing to his documents:
Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him with "the _exact_ form of a
door"; the Bible and Theophrastus, from which he obtains his perfumes
and his precious stones; Gesenius, from whom he gets his Punic names;
the _Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions._ "As for the temple
of Tanit, I am sure of having reconstructed it as it was, with the
treatise of the Syrian Goddess, with the medals of the Duc de Luynes,
with what is known of the temple at Jerusalem, with a passage of St.
Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De Diis Syriis_), with the plan of the
temple of Gozzo, which is quite Carthaginian, and best of all, with
the ruins of the temple of Thugga, which I have seen myself, with my
own eyes, and of which no traveller or antiquarian, so far as I know,
has ever spoken." But that, after all, as he admits (when, that is, he
has proved point by point his minute accuracy to all that is known of
ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to every indication which can serve
for his guidance, his patience in grouping rather, than his daring in
the invention of action and details), that is not the question. "I
care little enough for archæology! If the colour is not uniform, if
the details are out of keeping, if the manners do not spring from the
religion and the actions from the passions, if the characters are not
consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate to the habits and the
architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there is not harmony, I am
in error. If not, no."

And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can
give a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time
a definition of the merit which sets _Salammbô_ above all other
historical novels. Everything in the book is strange, some of it
might easily be bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony.
The harmony is like that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying
its charm, or even the secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a
monotony coiling perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its
own. Or rather, it is like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite
colours, firmly detached from a background of burning sky; a procession
of Barbarians, each in the costume of his country, passes across the
wall; there are battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army
besieges a great city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains;
the ground is paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living
burden, stand against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear
again and again, expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.

Flaubert himself has pointed, with his unerring self-criticism, to
the main defect of his book: "The pedestal is too large for the
statue." There should have been, as he says, a hundred pages more
about Salammbô. He declares: "There is not in my book an isolated or
gratuitous description; all are useful to my characters, and have an
influence, near or remote, on the action." This is true, and yet,
all the same, the pedestal is too large for the statue. Salammbô,
"always surrounded with grave and exquisite things," has something
of the somnambulism which enters into the heroism of Judith; she has
a hieratic beauty, and a consciousness as pale and vague as the moon
whom she worships. She passes before us, "her body saturated with
perfumes," encrusted with jewels like an idol, her head turreted with
violet hair, the gold chain tinkling between her ankles; and is hardly
more than an attitude, a fixed gesture, like the Eastern women whom
one sees passing, with oblique eyes and mouths painted into smiles,
their faces curiously traced into a work of art, in the languid
movements of a pantomimic dance. The soul behind those eyes? the
temperament under that at times almost terrifying mask? Salammbô is as
inarticulate for us as the serpent, to whose drowsy beauty, capable of
such sudden awakenings, hers seems half akin; they move before us in a
kind of hieratic pantomime, a coloured, expressive thing, signifying
nothing. Mâtho, maddened with love, "in an invincible stupor, like
those who have drunk some draught of which they are to die," has the
same somnambulistic life; the prey of Venus, he has an almost literal
insanity, which, as Flaubert reminds us, is true to the ancient view
of that passion. He is the only quite vivid person in the book, and
he lives with the intensity of a wild beast, a life "blinded alike"
from every inner and outer interruption to one or two fixed ideas. The
others have their places in the picture, fall into their attitudes
naturally, remain so many coloured outlines for us. The illusion is
perfect; these people may not be the real people of history, but at
least they have no self-consciousness, no Christian tinge in their
minds.

"The metaphors are few, the epithets definite," Flaubert tells us,
of his style in this book, where, as he says, he has sacrificed less
"to the amplitude of the phrase and to the period," than in _Madame
Bovary._ The movement here is in briefer steps, with a more earnest
gravity, without any of the engaging weakness of adjectives. The style
is never archaic, it is absolutely simple, the precise word being put
always for the precise thing; but it obtains a dignity, a historical
remoteness, by the large seriousness of its manner, the absence of
modern ways of thought, which, in _Madame Bovary,_ bring with them an
instinctively modern cadence.

_Salammbô_ is written with the severity of history, but Flaubert notes
every detail visually, as a painter notes the details of natural
things. A slave is being flogged under a tree: Flaubert notes the
movement of the thong as it flies, and tells us: "The thongs, as they
whistled through the air, sent the bark of the plane trees flying."
Before the battle of the Macar, the Barbarians are awaiting the
approach of the Carthaginian army. First "the Barbarians were surprised
to see the ground undulate in the distance." Clouds of dust rise and
whirl over the desert, through which are seen glimpses of horns, and,
as it seems, wings. Are they bulls or birds, or a mirage of the
desert? The Barbarians watch intently. "At last they made out several
transverse bars, bristling with uniform points. The bars became denser,
larger; dark mounds swayed from side to side; suddenly square bushes
came into view; they were elephants and lances. A single shout, 'The
Carthaginians!' arose." Observe how all that is seen, as if the eyes,
unaided by the intelligence, had found out everything for themselves,
taking in one indication after another, instinctively. Flaubert puts
himself in the place of his characters, not so much to think for them
as to see for them.

Compare the style of Flaubert in each of his books, and you will
find that each book has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its
subject-matter. The style, which has almost every merit and hardly
a fault, becomes what it is by a process very different from that
of most writers careful of form. Read Chateaubriand, Gautier, even
Baudelaire, and you will find that the aim of these writers has been
to construct a style which shall be adaptable to every occasion,
but without structural change; the cadence is always the same. The
most exquisite word-painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm for
rhythm into English, without difficulty; once you have mastered
the tune, you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same.
But Flaubert is so difficult to translate because he has no fixed
rhythm; his prose keeps step with no regular march-music. He invents
the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with every mood
or for the convenience of every fact. He has no theory of beauty in
form apart from what it expresses. For him form is a living thing,
the physical body of thought, which it clothes and interprets. "If I
call stones blue, it is because blue is the precise word, believe me,"
he replies to Sainte-Beuve's criticism. Beauty comes into his words
from the precision with which they express definite things, definite
ideas, definite sensations. And in his book, where the material is so
hard, apparently so unmalleable, it is a beauty of sheer exactitude
which fills it from end to end, a beauty of measure and order, seen
equally in the departure of the doves of Carthage at the time of their
flight into Sicily, and in the lions feasting on the corpses of the
Barbarians, in the defile between the mountains.

1901.




CHARLES BAUDELAIRE


Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one
English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate
about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to
English readers: in the columns of the _Spectator_, it is amusing to
remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise
in his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy
on his death, _Ave atque Vale._ There have been occasional outbreaks'
of irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally
misspelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at random
in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking
up, over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces
of the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?

It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection,
and we have never realised that perfection is a thing to aim at. He
only did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all
his life, not because he would not work, but because he would work
only at certain things, the things which he could hope to do to his
own satisfaction. Of the men of letters of our age he was the most
scrupulous. He spent his whole life in writing one book of verse (out
of which all French poetry has come since his time), one book of prose
in which prose becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest,
subtlest, and surest which his generation produced, and a translation
which is better than a marvellous original. What would French poetry
be to-day if Baudelaire had never existed? As different a thing from
what it is as English poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of
them is quite among the greatest poets, but they are more fascinating
than the greatest, they influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an
equally great critic. He discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where
even Sainte-Beuve, with his vast materials, his vast general talent
for criticism, went wrong in contemporary judgments, Baudelaire was
infallibly right. He wrote neither verse nor prose with ease, but
he would not permit himself to write either without inspiration. His
work is without abundance, but it is without waste. It is made out
of his whole intellect and all his nerves. Every poem is a train of
thought and every essay is the record of sensation. This "romantic"
had something classic in his moderation, moderation which becomes at
times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To "cultivate one's hysteria" so
calmly, and to affront the reader _(Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable,
mon frère)_ as a judge rather than as a penitent; to be a casuist in
confession; to be so much a moralist, with so keen a sense of the
ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered the world, even in his
own country, where the artist is allowed to live as experimentally as
he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary, secret, a confessor of
sins who has never told the whole truth, _le mauvais moine_ of his own
sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.

To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read,
not only the four volumes of his collected works, but every document
in Crépet's _Œuvres Posthumes,_ and above all, the letters, and
these have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of
an editor who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crépet.
Baudelaire put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself
at a given moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of
every observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he
has read the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to
whom he showed his business side, or the letters to la Présidente, the
touchstone of his _spleen et idéal,_ his chief experiment in the higher
sentiments, Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments,
it is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of.
We hear of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own
health. The tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things
(poetry, Jeanne Duval, the "artificial paradises") deliberately, is
made a little clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But
the man remains baffling, and will probably never be discovered.

As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses
into his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to
see. Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes
lets out, through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of
understanding him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to
Sainte-Beuve that he defines and explains the origin and real meaning
of the _Petits Poèmes en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui
exigent une bonne humeur constante (bonne humeur nécessaire, même
pour traiter des sujets tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin
de spectacles, de foules, de musiques, de réverbères même, voilà ce
que j'ai voulu faire!_ And, writing to some obscure person, he will
take the trouble to be even more explicit, _us_ in this symbol of
the sonnet: _Avez-vous observé qu'un morceau de ciel aperçu par un
soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deux rochers, ou par une arcade,
donnait une idée plus profonde de l'infini que le grand panorama vu du
haut d'une montagne?_ It is to another casual person that he speaks out
still more intimately (and the occasion of his writing is some thrill
of gratitude towards one who had at last done "a little justice," not
to himself, but to Manet): _Eh bien! on m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar
Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il
me resemblait. La première fois que j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai
vu avec épouvante et ravissement, non seulement des sujets rêvés par
moi, mais des phrases, pensées par moi, et écrites par lui, vingt ans
auparavant._ It is in such glimpses as these that we see something of
Baudelaire in his letters.

1906.




EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT


My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May, 1892. I remember my
immense curiosity about that "House Beautiful," at Auteuil, of which I
had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown
at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to
some friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with
the usual loosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck.
He was wearing a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could
see the fine sweep of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I
thought him the most distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever
seen; for he had at once the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and
of that delicate artistic genius which, with him, was so intimately
a part of things beautiful and distinguished. He had the eyes of an
old eagle; a general air of dignified collectedness; a rare, and a
rarely charming, smile, which came out, like a ray of sunshine, in the
instinctive pleasure of having said a witty or graceful thing to which
one's response had been immediate. When he took me indoors, into that
house which was a museum, I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the
tenderness with which he handled his treasures, touching them as if he
loved them, with little, unconscious murmurs: _Quel goût! quel goût!_
These rose-coloured rooms, with their embroidered ceilings, were filled
with cabinets of beautiful things, Japanese carvings, and prints (the
miraculous "Plongeuses"!), always in perfect condition (_Je cherche le
beau_); albums had been made for him in Japan, and in these he inserted
prints, mounting others upon silver and gold paper, which formed a sort
of frame. He showed me his eighteenth-century designs, among which I
remember his pointing out one (a Chardin, I think) as the first he had
ever bought; he had been sixteen at the time, and he bought it for
twelve francs.

When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me
all of his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions
of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me,
of the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother
with a serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and
appropriate; and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain
of the _brouillard Scandinave,_ in which it seemed to him that France
was trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvais
brouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to
represent the only thing worth representing, _le vie vécue, la vraie
vérité._ As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing,
_l'optique:_ out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have
all seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of
expressing it. "There is a true thing I have said in my journal," he
went on. "The thing is, to find a lorgnette" (and he put up his hands
to his eyes, adjusting them carefully) "through which to see things.
My brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it
from us."

How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most
essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing,
literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in
the invention of this that they have invented that "new language" of
which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained.
You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in _Charles
Demailly:_ "I am a man for whom the visible world exists." Well, that
is true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.

"The delicacies of fine literature," that phrase of Pater always comes
into my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to
me the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in
their manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of
their books, to _Madame Gervaisais,_ to _L'Art du XVIIIe
Siècle,_ to _Chérie;_ with a passing objection to what he called the
"immodesty" of this last book, and a strong emphasis in the assertion
that "that was how it seemed to him a book should be written." I
repeated this once to Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what
Patera work was like; and he lamented that his ignorance of English
prevented him from what he instinctively realised would be so intimate
an enjoyment. Pater was of course far more scrupulous, more limited, in
his choice of epithet, less feverish in his variations of cadence; and
naturally so, for he dealt with another subject-matter and was careful
of another kind of truth. But with both there was that passionately
intent preoccupation with "the delicacies of fine literature"; both
achieved a style of the most personal sincerity: _tout grand écrivain
de tous les temps,_ said Goncourt, _ne se reconnaît absolument qu'à
cela, c'est qu'il a une langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque
page, chaque ligne, est signée, pour le lecteur lettré, comme si son
nom était au has de cette page, de cette ligne:_ and this style, in
both, was accused, by the "literary" criticism of its generation, of
being insincere, artificial, and therefore reprehensible.

It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid
attributing to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne
his name alone. That is an error which he himself would never have
pardoned. _Mon frère et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and
in his journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and
admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to
have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think,
had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity;
for the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in
even that excessively specialised world of their common observation,
a yet more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no
doubt, was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for
the qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live.
It has been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details
of human character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the
document, the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to
the curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent
devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new
language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their
distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they have
been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to deliberate
eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may,
perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was
their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as
peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see
in the handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics
of his style. Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a
certain elegant stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the
"continual slight novelty" of its form to be quite clear at a glance:
very personal, very distinguished writing.

It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius,
but are perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our
century. They have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new
weaknesses and the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum
up in themselves certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at
things, notions of literary duty and artistic conscience, which have
only lately become at all actual, and some of which owe to them their
very origin. To be not merely novelists (inventing a new kind of
novel), but historians; not merely historians, but the historians of
a particular century, and of what was intimate and what is unknown in
it; to be also discriminating, indeed innovating critics of art, but
of a certain section of art, the eighteenth century, in France and in
Japan; to collect pictures and _bibelots,_ beautiful things, always
of the French and Japanese eighteenth century: these excursions in so
many directions, with their audacities and their careful limitations,
their bold novelty and their scrupulous exactitude in detail, are
characteristic of what is the finest in the modern conception of
culture and the modern ideal in art. Look, for instance, at the
Goncourts' view of history. _Quand les civilisations commencent, quand
les peuples se forment, l'histoire est drame ou geste.... Les siècles
qui out précédé notre siècle ne demandaient à l'historien que le
personnage de l'homme, et le portrait de son génie.... Le XIXe siècle
demande l'homme qui était cet homme d'État, cet homme de guerre, ce
poète, ce peintre, ce grand homme de science ou de métier. L'âme qui
était en cet acteur, le cœur qui a vécu derrière cet esprit, il les
exige et les réclame; et s'il ne peut recueillir tout cet être moral,
toute la vie intérieure, il commande du moins qu'on lui en apporte
une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique._ From this theory, this
conviction, came that marvellous series of studies in the eighteenth
century in France (_ La Femme au XVIIIe Siècle, Portraits intimes du
XVIIIe Siècle, La du Barry,_ and the others), made entirely out of
documents, autograph letters, scraps of costume, engravings, songs,
the unconscious self-revelations of the time, forming, as they justly
say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman vrai que la postérité appellera
peut-être un jour l'histoire humaine._ To be the bookworm and the
magician; to give the actual documents, but not to set barren fact by
barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in documents, to make them more
living and more charming than the charm of life itself: that is what
the Goncourts have done. And it is through this conception of history
that they have found their way to that new conception of the novel
which has revolutionised the entire art of fiction.

_Aujourd'hui,_ they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie
Lacerteux, que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la
grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'étude littéraire et
de l'enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche
psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le
Roman s'est imposé les devoirs de la science, il peut en revendiquer
les libertés et les franchises. Te public aime les romans faux,_ is
another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman est un roman
vrai._ But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood by
_un roman vrai?_ The old notion of the novel was that it should be
an entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own
sake; a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to
produce as nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing
having been omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on
oath; in a word, it is the same as the old notion of history, _drame
ou geste._ That is not how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they
conceive it should be rendered. As in the study of history they seek
mainly the _inédit,_ caring only to record that, so it is the _inédit_
of life that they conceive to be the main concern, the real "inner
history." And for them the _inédit_ of life consists in the noting of
the sensations; it is of the sensations that they have resolved to
be the historians; not of action, nor of emotion, properly speaking,
nor of moral conceptions, but of an inner life which is all made up
of the perceptions of the senses. It is scarcely too paradoxical to
say that they are psychologists for whom the soul does not exist. One
thing, they know, exists: the sensation flashed through the brain,
the image on the mental retina. Having found that, they bodily omit
all the rest as of no importance, trusting to their instinct of
selection, of retaining all that really matters. It is the painter's
method, a selection made almost visually; the method of the painter who
accumulates detail on detail, in his patient, many-sided observation
of his subject, and then omits everything which is not an essential
part of the _ensemble_ which he sees. Thus the new conception of what
the real truth of things consist in has brought with it, inevitably,
an entirely new form, a breaking up of the plain, straightforward
narrative into chapters, which are generally quite disconnected, and
sometimes of less than a page in length. A very apt image of this new,
curious manner of narrative has been found, somewhat maliciously, by
M. Lemaître. _Un homme qui marche à l'intérieur d'une maison, si nous
regardons du dehors, apparaît successivement à chaque fenêtre, et dans
les intervalles nous échappe. Ces fenêtres, ce sont les chapitres de
MM. de Goncourt. Encore,_ he adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenêtres
où l'homme que nous attendions ne passe point._ That, certainly, is
the danger of the method. No doubt the Goncourts, in their passion
for the _inédit,_ leave out certain things because they are obvious,
even if they are obviously true and obviously important; that is the
defect of their quality. To represent life by a series of moments,
and to choose these moments for a certain subtlety and rarity in
them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these the only perils
which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There are others,
essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, first of all,
as we may see on every page of that miraculous _Journal,_ which will
remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece of human
history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeing life
through the medium of diseased nerves. _Notre œuvre entier,_ writes
Edmond de Goncourt, _reposa sur la maladie nerveuse; les peintures
de la maladie, nous les avons tirées de nous-mêmes, et, à force de
nous disséquer, nous sommes arrivés à une sensitivité supra-aiguë
que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie._ This unhealthy
sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as certain
shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision of
reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of
things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening
the acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one
derives from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and
fragrant way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the
notion of time, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the
subtler poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it,
fleetingly, like Whistler; they do not render it in hard outline, like
Flaubert, like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world
of the Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fire-works
at Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in
mirrors. It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is
choice, there is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.

Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the
Goncourts, with those of Théophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said
to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and
also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but
it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or,
rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you
the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of
view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute,
distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things
as an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might
see them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate
attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way
in which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a
picture. In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no
sacrifice, from no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction,
archaism, barbarous epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as
it tends to render a sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase
should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive,
super-subtle in expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity
in their relations with language, which they would have not merely a
passionate and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of
a delicately depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer
sort of French critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language;
that the language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless
French of the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most
wonderful of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a
new vision of things, they have invented a new language.

1894, 1896.




VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM


_A chacun son infini_


1

Count Philippe Auguste Mathias de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam was born at
St. Brieuc, in Brittany, November 28, 1838; he died at Paris, under the
care of the Frères Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, August 19, 1889. Even before
his death, his life had become a legend, and the legend is even now
not to be disentangled from the actual occurrences of an existence so
heroically visionary. The Don Quixote of idealism, it was not only in
philosophical terms that life, to him, was the dream, and the spiritual
world the reality; he lived his faith, enduring what others called
reality with contempt, whenever, for a moment, he becomes conscious of
it. The basis of the character of Villiers was pride, and it was pride
which covered more than the universe. And this pride, first of all,
was the pride of race.

Descendant of the original Rodolphe le Bel, Seigneur de Villiers
(1067), through Jean de Villiers and Maria de l'Isle and their son
Pierre the first Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
born in 1384, had been Marshal of France under Jean-sans-Peur, Duke
of Burgundy; he took Paris during the civil war, and after being
imprisoned in the Bastille, reconquered Pontoise from the English,
and helped to reconquer Paris. Another Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, born
in 1464, Grand Master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, defended
Rhodes against 200,000 Turks for a whole year, in lone of the most
famous sieges in history; it was he who obtained from Charles V. the
concession of the isle of Malta for his Order, henceforth the Order of
the Knights of Malta.

For Villiers, to whom time, after all, was but a metaphysical
abstraction, the age of the Crusaders had not passed. From a descendant
of the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the
nineteenth century demanded precisely the virtues which the sixteenth
century had demanded of that ancestor. And these virtues were all
summed up in one word, which, in its double significance, single to
him, covered the whole attitude of life: the word "nobility." No word
returns oftener to the lips in speaking of what is most characteristic
in his work, and to Villiers moral and spiritual nobility seemed but
the inevitable consequence of that other kind of nobility by which he
seemed to himself still a Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
It was his birthright.

To the aristocratic conception of things, nobility of soul is indeed a
birthright, and the pride with which this gift of nature is accepted
is a pride of exactly the opposite kind to that democratic pride
to which nobility of soul is a conquest, valuable in proportion to
its difficulty. This duality, always essentially aristocratic and
democratic, typically Eastern and Western also, finds its place in
every theory of religion, philosophy, and the ideal life. The pride
of _being,_ the pride of _becoming:_ these are the two ultimate
contradictions set before every idealist. Villiers' choice, inevitable
indeed, was significant. In this measure, it must always be the choice
of the artist, to whom, in his contemplation of life, the means is
often so much more important than the end. That nobility of soul which
comes without effort, which comes only with an unrelaxed diligence over
oneself, that I should be I: there can at least be no comparison of its
beauty with the stained and dusty onslaught on a never quite conquered
fort of the enemy, in a divided self. And, if it be permitted to choose
among degrees of sanctity, that, surely, is the highest in which a
natural genius for such things accepts its own attainment with the
simplicity of a birthright.

And the Catholicism of Villiers was also a part of his inheritance.
His ancestors had fought for the Church, and Catholicism was still
a pompous flag, under which it was possible to fight on behalf of
the spirit, against that materialism which is always, in one way or
another, atheist. Thus he dedicates one of his stories to the Pope,
chooses ecclesiastical splendours by preference among the many
splendours of the world which go to make up his stage-pictures, and is
learned in the subtleties of the Fathers. The Church is his favourite
symbol of austere intellectual beauty; one way, certainly, by which the
temptations of external matter may be vanquished, and a way, also, by
which the desire of worship may be satisfied.

But there was also, in his attitude towards the mysteries of the
spiritual world, that "forbidden" curiosity which had troubled the
obedience of the Templars, and which came to him, too, as a kind of
knightly quality. Whether or not he was actually a Cabbalist, questions
of magic began, at an early age, to preoccupy him, and, from the first
wild experiment of _Isis_ to the deliberate summing up of _Axël,_ the
"occult" world finds its way into most of his pages.

Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the belief common to all
Eastern mystics.[1] "Know, once for all, that there is for thee no
other universe than that conception thereof which is reflected at
the bottom of thy thoughts." "What is knowledge but a recognition?"
Therefore, "forgetting for ever that which was the illusion of
thyself," hasten to become "an intelligence freed from the bonds and
the desires of the present moment." "Become the flower of thyself! Thou
art but what thou thinkest: therefore think thyself eternal." "Man, if
thou cease to limit in thyself a thing, that is, to desire it, if, so
doing, thou withdraw thyself from it, it will follow thee, woman-like,
as the water fills the place that is offered to it in the hollow of the
hand. For thou possessest the real being of all things, in thy pure
will, and thou art the God that thou art able to become."

To have accepted the doctrine which thus finds expression in _Axël,_
is to have accepted this among others of its consequences: "Science
states, but does not explain: she is the oldest offspring of the
chimeras; all the chimeras, then, on the same terms as the world (the
oldest of them!), are _something more_ than nothing!" And in _Elën_
there is a fragment of conversation between two young students, which
has its significance also:

    _"Goetze._ There's my philosopher in full flight to the
    regions of the sublime! Happily we have Science, which is a
    torch, dear mystic; we will analyse your sun, if the planet
    does not burst into pieces sooner than it has any right to!

    _Samuel._ Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will
    end by coming to your knees.

    _Goetze._ Before what?

    _Samuel._ Before the darkness!"

Such avowals of ignorance are possible only from the height of a great
intellectual pride. Villiers' revolt against Science, so far as Science
is materialistic, and his passionate curiosity in that chimera's flight
towards the invisible, are one and the same impulse of a mind to which
only mind is interesting. _Toute cette vieille Extériorité, maligne,
compiquée, inflexible,_ that illusion which Science accepts for the one
reality: it must be the whole effort of one's consciousness to escape
from its entanglements, to dominate it, or to ignore it, and one's art
must be the building of an ideal world beyond its access, from which
one may indeed sally out, now and again, in a desperate enough attack
upon the illusions in the midst of which men live.

And just that, we find, makes up the work of Villiers, work which
divides itself roughly into two divisions: one, the ideal world, or the
ideal in the world (_Axël, Elën, Morgane, Isis,_ some of the _contes,_
and, intermediary, _La Révolte_); the other, satire, the mockery of
reality (_L'Eve Future,_ the _Contes Cruels, Tribulat Bonhomet_). It is
part of the originality of Villiers that the two divisions constantly
flow into one another; the idealist being never more the idealist than
in his buffooneries.


[1] "I am far from sure," wrote Verlaine, "that the philosophy of
Villiers will not one day become the formula of our century."


2

_Axël_ is the Symbolist drama, in all its uncompromising conflict with
the "modesty" of Nature and the limitations of the stage. It is the
drama of the soul, and at the same time it is the most pictorial of
dramas; I should define its manner as a kind of spiritual romanticism.
The earlier dramas, _Elën, Morgane,_ are fixed at somewhat the same
point in space; _La Révolte,_ which seems to anticipate _The Doll's
House,_ shows us an aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a certain
disdain, certainly with far less skill, certainly with far more beauty.
But _Axël,_ meditated over during a lifetime, shows us Villiers' ideal
of his own idealism.

The action takes place, it is true, in this century, but it takes
place in corners of the world into which the modern spirit has not
yet passed; this _Monastère de Religieuses-trinitaires, le cloître de
Sainte Appolodora, situé sur les confins du littoral de l'ancienne
Flandre française,_ and the _très vieux château fort, le burg
des margraves d'Auërsperg, isolé au milieu du Schwartzwald._ The
characters, Axël d'Auërsperg, Eve Sara Emmanuèle de Maupers, Maître
Janus, the Archidiacre, the Commandeur Kaspar d'Auërsperg, are at
once more and less than human beings: they are the types of different
ideals, and they are clothed with just enough humanity to give form to
what would otherwise remain disembodied spirit. The religious ideal,
the occult ideal, the worldly ideal, the passionate ideal, are all
presented, one after the other, in these dazzling and profound pages;
Axël is the disdainful choice from among them, the disdainful rejection
of life itself, of the whole illusion of life, "since infinity alone is
not a deception." And Sara? Sara is a superb part of that life which is
rejected, which she herself comes, not without reluctance, to reject.
In that motionless figure, during the whole of the first act silent but
for a single "No," and leaping into a moment's violent action as the
act closes, she is the haughtiest woman in literature. But she is a
woman, and she desires life, finding it in Axël. Pride, and the woman's
devotion to the man, aid her to take the last cold step with Axël, in
the transcendental giving up of life at the moment when life becomes
ideal.

And the play is written, throughout, with a curious solemnity, a
particular kind of eloquence, which makes no attempt to imitate the
level of the speech of every day, but which is a sort of ideal language
in which beauty is aimed at as exclusively as if it were written in
verse. The modern drama, under the democratic influence of Ibsen,
the positive influence of Dumas _fils,_ has limited itself to the
expression of temperaments in the one case, of theoretic intelligences
in the other, in as nearly as possible the words which the average man
would use for the statement of his emotions and ideas. The form, that
is, is degraded below the level of the characters whom it attempts to
express; for it is evident that the average man can articulate only a
small enough part of what he obscurely feels or thinks; and the theory
of Realism is that his emotions and ideas are to be given only in so
far as the words at his own command can give them. Villiers, choosing
to concern himself only with exceptional characters, and with them
only in the absolute, invents for them a more elaborate and a more
magnificent speech than they would naturally employ, the speech of
their thoughts, of their dreams.

And it is a world thought or dreamt in some more fortunate atmosphere
than that in which we live, that Villiers has created for the final
achievement of his abstract ideas. I do not doubt that he himself
always lived in it, through all the poverty of the precipitous Rue
des Martyrs. But it is in _Axël,_ and in _Axël_ only, that he has made
us also inhabitants of that world. Even in _Elën_ we are spectators,
watching a tragical fairy play (as if _Fantasio_ became suddenly in
deadly earnest), watching some one else's dreams. _Axël_ envelops us in
its own atmosphere; it is as if we found ourselves on a mountain top on
the other side of the clouds, and without surprise at finding ourselves
there.

The ideal, to Villiers, being the real, spiritual beauty being
the essential beauty, and material beauty its reflection, or its
revelation, it is with a sort of fury that he attacks the materialising
forces of the world: science, progress, the worldly emphasis on
"facts," on what is "positive," "serious," "respectable." Satire, with
him, is the revenge of beauty upon ugliness, the persecution of the
ugly; it is not merely social satire, it is a satire on the material
universe by one who believes in a spiritual universe. Thus it is the
only laughter of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that
of Swift or Rabelais. And this lacerating laughter of the idealist
is never surer in its aim than when it turns the arms of science
against itself, as in the vast buffoonery of _L'Eve Future._ A Parisian
wit, sharpened to a fineness of irony such as only wit which is also
philosophy can attain, brings in another method of attack; humour,
which is almost English, another; while again satire becomes tragic,
fantastic, macabre. In those enigmatic "tales of the grotesque and
arabesque," in which Villiers rivals Poe on his own ground, there is,
for the most part, a multiplicity of meaning which is, as it is meant
to be, disconcerting. I should not like to say how far Villiers does
not, sometimes, believe in his own magic.

It is characteristic of him, at all events, that he employs what we
call the supernatural alike in his works of pure idealism and in his
works of sheer satire. The moment the world ceased to be the stable
object, solidly encrusted with houses in brick and stone, which it is
to most of its so temporary inhabitants, Villiers was at home. When
he sought the absolute beauty, it was beyond the world that he found
it; when he sought horror, it was a breath blowing from an invisible
darkness which brought it to his nerves; when he desired to mock the
pretensions of knowledge of or ignorance, it was always with the unseen
that his tragic buffoonery made familiar.

There is, in everything which Villiers wrote, a strangeness, certainly
both instinctive and deliberate, which seems to me to be the natural
consequence of that intellectual pride which, as I have pointed out,
was at the basis of his character. He hated every kind of mediocrity:
therefore he chose to analyse exceptional souls, to construct
exceptional stories, to invent splendid names, and to evoke singular
landscapes. It was part of his curiosity in souls to prefer the complex
to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to
either. His heroes are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their
tragedies are the shock of spirit against matter, the invasion of
spirit by matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. They seek
the absolute, and find death; they seek wisdom, find love, and fall
into spiritual decay; they seek reality, and find crime; they seek
phantoms, and find themselves. They are on the borders of a wisdom too
great for their capacity; they are haunted by dark powers, instincts
of ambiguous passions; they are too lucid to be quite sane in their
extravagances; they have not quite systematically transposed their
dreams into actions And his heroines, when they are not, like _L'Eve
Future,_ the vitalised mechanism of an Edison, have the solemnity of
dead people, and a hieratic speech. _Songe, des cœurs condamnés à ce
supplice, de ne pas m'aimer!_ says Sara, in _Axël. Je ne l'aime pas,
ce jeune homme. Qu'ai-je donc fait à Dieu?_ says Elën. And their voice
is always like the voice of Elën: "I listened attentively to the sound
of her voice; it was tactiturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river
Lethe, flowing through the region of shadows." They have the immortal
weariness of beauty, they are enigmas to themselves, they desire, and
know not why they refrain, they do good and evil with the lifting of an
eyelid, and are innocent and guilty of all the sins of the earth.

And these strange inhabitants move in as strange a world. They are the
princes and châtelaines of ancient castles lost in the depths of the
Black Forest; they are the last descendants of a great race about to
come to an end; students of magic, who have the sharp and swift swords
of the soldier; enigmatic courtesans, at the table of strange feasts;
they find incalculable treasures, _tonnantes et sonnantes cataractes
d'or liquide,_ only to disdain them. All the pomp of the world
approaches them, that they may the better abnegate it, or that it may
ruin them to a deeper degree of their material hell. And we see them
always at the moment of a crisis, before the two ways of a decision,
hesitating in the entanglements of a great temptation. And this casuist
of souls will drag forth some horribly stunted or horribly overgrown
soul from under its obscure covering, setting it to dance naked before
our eyes. He has no mercy on those who have no mercy on themselves.

In the sense in which that word is ordinarily used, Villiers has no
pathos. This is enough to explain why he can never, in the phrase he
would have disliked so greatly, "touch the popular heart." His mind is
too abstract to contain pity, and it is in his lack of pity that he
seems to put himself outside humanity. _A chacun son infini,_ he has
said, and in the avidity of his search for the infinite he has no mercy
for the blind weakness which goes stumbling over the earth, without so
much as knowing that the sun and stars are overhead. He sees only the
gross multitude, the multitude which has the contentment of the slave.
He cannot pardon stupidity, for it is incomprehensible to him. He sees,
rightly, that stupidity is more criminal than vice; if only because
vice is curable, stupidity incurable. But he does not realise, as the
great novelists have realised, that stupidity can be pathetic, and that
there is not a peasant, nor even a self-satisfied bourgeois, in whom
the soul has not its part, in whose existence it is not possible to be
interested.

Contempt, noble as it may be, anger, righteous though it may be, cannot
be indulged in without a certain lack of sympathy; and lack of sympathy
comes from a lack of patient understanding. It is certain that the
destiny of the greater part of the human race is either infinitely
pathetic or infinitely ridiculous. Under which aspect, then, shall
that destiny, and those obscure fractions of humanity, be considered?
Villiers was too sincere an idealist, too absolute in his idealism, to
hesitate. "As for living," he cries, in that splendid phrase of _Axël,_
"our servants will do that for us!" And, in the _Contes Cruels,_ there
is this not less characteristic expression of what was always his
mental attitude: "As at the play, in a central stall, one sits out, so
as not to disturb one's neighbours--out of courtesy, in a word--some
play written in a wearisome style and of which one does not like the
subject, so I lived, out of politeness": _je vivais par politesse._
In this haughtiness towards life, in this disdain of ordinary human
motives and ordinary human beings, there is at once the distinction and
the weakness of Villiers. And he has himself pointed the moral against
himself in these words of the story which forms the epilogue to the
_Contes Cruels:_ "When the forehead alone contains the existence of a
man, that man is enlightened only from above his head; then his jealous
shadow, prostrate under him, draws him by the feet, that it may drag
him down into the invisible."


3

All his life Villiers was a poor man; though, all his life, he was
awaiting that fortune which he refused to anticipate by any mean
employment. During most of his life, he was practically an unknown man.
Greatly loved, ardently admired, by that inner circle of the men who
have made modern French literature, from Verlaine to Maeterlinck, he
was looked upon by most people as an amusing kind of madman, a little
dangerous, whose ideas, as they floated freely over the café-table, it
was at times highly profitable to steal. For Villiers talked his works
before writing them, and sometimes he talked them instead of writing
them, in his too royally spendthrift way. To those who knew him he
seemed genius itself, and would have seemed so if he had never written
a line; for he had the dangerous gift of a personality which seems to
have already achieved all that it so energetically contemplates. But
personality tells only within hands' reach; and Villiers failed even
to startle, failed even to exasperate, the general reader. That his
_Premières Poésies,_ published at I the age of nineteen, should have
brought him fame was hardly to be expected, remarkable, especially in
its ideas, as that book is. Nor was it to be expected of the enigmatic
fragment of a romance, _Isis_ (1862), anticipating, as it does, by so
long a period, the esoteric and spiritualistic romances which were to
have their vogue. But _Elën_ (1864) and _Morgane_ (1865), those two
poetic dramas in prose, so full of distinction, of spiritual rarity;
but two years later, _Claire Lenoir_ (afterwards incorporated in one
of his really great books, _Tribulat Bonhomet_), with its macabre
horror; but _La Révolte_ (1870), for Villiers so "actual," and which
had its moments of success when it was revived in 1896 at the Odéon;
but _Le Nouveau Monde_ (1880), a drama which, by some extraordinary
caprice, won a prize; but _Les Contes Cruels_ (1880), that collection
of masterpieces, in which the essentially French _conte_ is outdone
on its own ground! It was not till 1886 that Villiers ceased to be an
unknown writer, with the publication of that phosphorescent buffoonery
of science, that vast parody of humanity, _L'Eve Future. Tribulat
Bonhomet_ (which he himself denned as _bouffonnerie énorme et sombre,
couleur du siècle_) was to come, in its final form, and the superb poem
in prose _Akëdysséril;_ and then, more and more indifferent collections
of stories, in which Villiers, already dying, is but the shadow of
himself: _L'Amour Suprême_ (1886), _Histoires Insolites_ (1888),
_Nouveaux Contes Cruels_ (1888). He was correcting the proofs of _Axël_
when he died; the volume was published in 1890, followed by _Propos
d'au-delà,_ and a series of articles, _Chez les Passants._ Once dead,
the fame which had avoided him all his life began to follow him; he had
_une belle presse_ at his funeral.

Meanwhile, he had been preparing the spiritual atmosphere of the new
generation. Living among believers in the material world, he had been
declaring, not in vain, his belief in the world of the spirit; living
among Realists and Parnassians, he had been creating a new form of art,
the art of the Symbolist drama, and of Symbolism in fiction. He had
been lonely all his life, for he had been living in his own lifetime,
the life of the next generation. There was but one man among his
contemporaries to whom he could give, and from whom he could receive,
perfect sympathy. That man was Wagner. Gradually the younger men came
about him; at the end he was not lacking in disciples.

And after all, the last word of Villiers is faith; faith against the
evidence of the senses, against the negations of materialistic science,
against the monstrous paradox of progress, against his own pessimism
in the face of these formidable enemies. He affirms; he "believes in
soul, is very sure of God"; requires no witness to the spiritual world
of which he is always the inhabitant; and is content to lose his way
in the material world, brushing off its mud from time to time with a
disdainful gesture, as he goes on his way (to apply a significant word
of Pater) "like one on a secret errand."




LÉON CLADEL


I hope that the life of Léon Cladel by his daughter Judith, which
Lemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for the
fame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had the
good fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approval
mattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before
he had printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft of
letters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though he
worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into
his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants
and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his
vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of
rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion,
but which drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the
very shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible
uncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but
the uncouthness, when you look into it, turns out to be itself a
refinement, and what has seemed a confused whirl, an improvisation, to
be the result really of reiterated labour, whose whole aim has been to
bring the spontaneity of the first impulse back into the laboriously
finished work.

In this just, sensitive, and admirable book, written by one who has
inherited a not less passionate curiosity about life, but with more
patience in waiting upon it, watching it, noting its surprises, we
have a simple and sufficient commentary upon the books and upon the
man. The narrative has warmth and reserve, and is at once tender and
clear-sighted. _J'entrevois nettement,_ she says with truth, _combien
seront précieux pour les futurs historiens de la littérature du XIXe
siècle, les mémoires tracés au contact immédiat de l'artiste, exposés
de ses faits et gestes particuliers, de ses origines, de la germination
de ses croyances et de son talent; ses critiques à venir y trouveront
de solides matériaux, ses admirateurs un aliment à leur piété et les
philosophes un des aspects de l'Ame française._

The man is shown to us, _les élans de cette âme toujours grondante
et fulgurante comme une forge, et les nuances de ce fiévreux visage
d'apôtre, brun, fin et sinueux,_ and we see the inevitable growth,
out of the hard soil of Quercy and out of the fertilising contact of
Paris and Baudelaire, of this whole literature, these books no less
astonishing than their titles: _Ompdrailles-le-Tombeau-des-Lutteurs,
Celui de la Croix-aux-Bœufs, La Fête Votive de
Saint-Bartholomée-Porte-Glaive._ The very titles are an excitement. I
can remember how mysterious and alluring they used to seem to me when
I first saw them on the cover of what was perhaps his best book, _Les
Va-Nu-Pieds._

It is by one of the stories, and the shortest, in _Les Va-Nu-Pieds,_
that I remember Cladel. I read it when I was a boy, and I cannot think
of it now without a shiver. It is called _L'Hercule,_ and it is about
a Sandow of the streets, a professional strong man, who kills himself
by an overstrain; it is not a story at all, it is the record of an
incident, and there is only the strong man in it and his friend the
zany, who makes the jokes while the strong man juggles with bars and
cannon-balls. It is all told in a breath, without a pause, as if
someone who had just seen it poured it out in a flood of hot words.
Such vehemence, such pity, such a sense of the cruelty of the spectacle
of a man driven to death like a beast, for a few pence and the pleasure
of a few children; such an evocation of the sun and the streets and
this sordid tragic thing happening to the sound of drum and cymbals;
such a vision in sunlight of a barbarous and ridiculous and horrible
accident, lifted by the telling of it into a new and unforgettable
beauty, I have never felt or seen in any other story of a like
grotesque tragedy. It realises an ideal, it does for once what many
artists have tried and failed to do; it wrings the last drop of agony
out of that subject which it is so easy to make pathetic and effective.
Dickens could not have done it, Bret Harte could not have done it,
Kipling could not do it: Cladel did it only once, with this perfection.

Something like it he did over and over again, with unflagging
vehemence, with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and
wrestlers and thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter
says, epic; she calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric
simplicity in this tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the
language is tortured to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais
is nearer. _La recherche du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en
saveur, la surabondance des vocables puisés à toutes sources ... la
condensation de l'action autour de ces quelques motifs éternels de
l'épopée: combat, ripaille, palabre et luxure,_ there, as she sees
justly, are links with Rabelais. Goncourt, himself always aiming at an
impossible closeness of written to spoken speech, noted with admiration
_la vraie photographie de la parole avec ses tours, ses abbreviations
ses ellipses, son essoufflement presque._ Speech out of breath, that
is what Cladel's is always; his words, never the likely ones, do not
so much speak as cry, gesticulate, overtake one another. _L'âme de
Léon Cladel,_ says his daughter, _était dans un constant et flamboyant
automne._ Something of the colour and fever of autumn is in all he
wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who has probably never heard of
him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds. But Maxim Gorki makes
heroes of them, consciously, with a mental self-assertion, giving them
ideas which he has found in Nietzsche. Cladel put into all his people
some of his own passionate way of seeing "scarlet," to use Barbey
d'Aurevilly's epithet: _un rural écarlate._ Vehement and voluminous,
he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as a pupil of Baudelaire,
was to concentrate, to hold himself back; and the effort added impetus
to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemed merely extravagant;
he saw certainly what they could not see; and his romance was always a
fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be in conflict with
the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant, extracted from that hard
soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an extraordinary mingling of the
peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the long hair and beard, the
sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding eyes, in which wildness
and delicacy, strength and a kind of stealthiness, seem to be grafted
on an inflexible peasant stock.

1906.




A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD


The art of Zola is based on certain theories, on a view of humanity
which he has adopted as his formula. As a deduction from his formula,
he takes many things in human nature for granted, he is content to
observe at second-hand; and it is only when he comes to the filling-up
of his outlines, the _mise-en-scène,_ that his observation becomes
personal, minute, and persistent. He has thus succeeded in being at
once unreal where reality is most essential, and tediously real where a
point-by-point reality is sometimes unimportant. The contradiction is
an ingenious one, which it may be interesting to examine in a little
detail, and from several points of view.

And, first of all, take L'_Assommoir,_ no doubt the most characteristic
of Zola's novels, and probably the best; and, leaving out for the
present the broader question of his general conception of humanity,
let us look at Zola's manner of dealing with his material, noting by
the way certain differences between his manner and that of Goncourt,
of Flaubert, with both of whom he has so often been compared, and
with whom he wishes to challenge comparison. Contrast _L'Assommoir_
with _Germinie Lacerteux,_ which, it must be remembered, was written
thirteen years earlier. Goncourt, as he incessantly reminds us, was
the first novelist in France to deliberately study the life of the
people, after precise documents; and _Germinie Lacerteux_ has this
distinction, among others, that it was a new thing. And it is done
with admirable skill; I as a piece of writing, as a work of art, it is
far superior to Zola. But, certainly, Zola's work has a mass and bulk,
a _fougue,_ a _portée,_ which Goncourt's lacks; and it has a savour
of plebeian flesh which all the delicate art of Goncourt could not
evoke. Zola sickens you with it; but there it is. As in all his books,
but more than in most, there is something greasy, a smear of eating
and drinking; the pages, to use his own phrase, _grasses des lichades
du lundi._ In _Germinie Lacerteux_ you never forget that Goncourt
is an aristocrat; in _L'Assommoir_ you never forget that Zola is a
bourgeois. Whatever Goncourt touches becomes, by the mere magic of his
touch, charming, a picture; Zola is totally destitute of charm. But
how, in _L'Assommoir,_ he drives home to you the horrid realities of
these narrow, uncomfortable lives! Zola has made up his mind that he
will say everything, without omitting a single item, whatever he has
to say; thus, in _L'Assommoir,_ there is a great feast which lasts for
fifty pages, beginning with the picking of the goose, the day before,
and going on to the picking of the goose's bones, by a stray marauding
cat, the night after. And, in a sense, he does say everything; and
there, certainly, is his novelty, his invention. He observes with
immense persistence, but his observation, after all, is only that of
the man in the street; it is simply carried into detail, deliberately.
And, while Goncourt wanders away sometimes into arabesques, indulges in
flourishes, so finely artistic is his sense of words and of the things
they represent, so perfectly can he match a sensation or an impression
by its figure in speech, Zola, on the contrary, never finds just the
right word, and it is his persistent fumbling for it which produces
these miles of description; four pages describing how two people went
upstairs, from the ground floor to the sixth story, and then two pages
afterwards to describe how they came downstairs again. Sometimes, by
his prodigious diligence and minuteness, he succeeds in giving you the
impression; often, indeed; but at the cost of what _ennui_ to writer
and reader alike! And so much of it all is purely unnecessary, has
no interest in itself and no connection with the story: the precise
details of Lorilleux's chain-making, bristling with technical terms:
it was _la colonne_ that he made, and only that particular kind of
chain; Goujet's forge, and the machinery in the shed next door; and
just how you cut out zinc with a large pair of scissors. When Goncourt
gives you a long description of anything, even if you do not feel
that it helps on the story very much, it is such a beautiful thing in
itself, his mere way of writing it is so enchanting, that you find
yourself wishing it longer, at its longest. But with Zola, there is no
literary interest in the--writing, apart from its clear and coherent
expression of a given thing; and these interminable descriptions have
no extraneous, or, if you will, implicit interest, to save them from
the charge of irrelevancy; they sink by their own weight. Just as
Zola's vision is the vision of the average man, so his vocabulary,
with all its technicology, remains mediocre, incapable of expressing
subtleties, incapable of a really artistic effect. To find out in a
slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by an ingeniously
filthy phrase in _argot,_ and to use that phrase, is not a great feat,
or, on purely artistic grounds, altogether desirable. To go to a
chainmaker and learn the trade name of the various kinds of chain which
he manufactures, and of the instruments with which he manufactures
them, is not an elaborate process, or one which can be said to pay you
for the little trouble which it no doubt takes. And it is not well to
be too cerïain after all that Zola is always perfectly accurate in his
use of all this manifold knowledge. The slang, for example; he went to
books for it, in books he found it, and no one will ever find some of
it but in books. However, my main contention is that Zola's general
use of words is, to be quite frank, somewhat ineffectual. He tries
to do what Flaubert did, without Flaubert's tools, and without the
craftsman's hand at the back of the tools. His fingers are too thick;
they leave a blurred line. If you want merely weight, a certain kind of
force, you get it; but no more.

Where a large part of Zola's merit lies, in his persistent attention
to detail, one finds also one of his chief defects. He cannot leave
well alone; he cannot omit; he will not take the most obvious fact
for granted. _Il marcha le premier, elle le suivit,_ well, of course,
she followed him, if he walked first: why mention the fact? That
beginning of a sentence is absolutely typical; it is impossible for
him to refer, for the twentieth time, to some unimportant character,
without giving name and profession, not one or the other, but both,
invariably both. He tells us particularly that a room is composed of
four walls, that a table stands on its four legs. And he does not
appear to see the difference between doing that and doing as Flaubert
does, namely, selecting precisely the detail out of all others which
renders or consorts with the scene in hand, and giving that detail
with an ingenious exactness. Here, for instance, in _Madame Bovary,_
is a characteristic detail in the manner of Flaubert: _Huit jours
après, comme elle étendait du linge dans sa cour, elle fut prise d'un
crachement de sang, et le lendemain, tandis que Charles avait le dos
tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit: "Ah! mon Dieu!"
poussa un soupir et s'évanouit. Elle était morte._ Now that detail,
brought in without the slightest emphasis, of the husband turning his
back at the very instant that his wife dies, is a detail of immense
psychological value; it indicates to us, at the very opening of the
book, just the character of the man about whom we are to read so much.
Zola would have taken at least two pages to say that, and, after all,
he would not have said it. He would have told you the position of the
chest of drawers in the room, what wood the chest of drawers was made
of, and if it had a little varnish knocked off at the corner of the
lower cornice, just where it would naturally be in the way of people's
feet as they entered the door. He would have told you how Charles leant
against the other corner of the chest of drawers, and that the edge of
the upper cornice left a slight dent in his black frock-coat, which
remained visible half an hour afterwards. But that one little detail,
which Flaubert selects from among a thousand, that, no, he would never
have given us that!

And the language in which all this is written, apart from the
consideration of language as a medium, is really not literature at
all, in any strict sense. I am not, for the moment, complaining of
the colloquialism and the slang. Zola has told us that he has, in
_L'Assommoir,_ used the language of the people in order to render the
people with a closer truth. Whether he has done that or not is not
the question. The question is, that he does not give one the sense of
reading good literature, whether he speaks in Delvau's _langue verte,_
or according to the Academy's latest edition of classical French. His
sentences have no rhythm; they give no pleasure to the ear; they carry
no sensation to the eye. You hear a sentence of Flaubert, and you see a
sentence of Goncourt, like living things, with forms and voices. But a
page of Zola lies dull and silent before you; it draws you by no charm,
it has no meaning until you have read the page that goes before and the
page that comes after. It is like cabinet-makers' work, solid, well
fitted together, and essentially made to be used.

Yes, there is no doubt that Zola writes very badly, worse than any
other French writer of eminence. It is true that Balzac, certainly one
of the greatest, does, in a sense, write badly; but his way of writing
badly is very different from Zola's, and leaves you with the sense of
quite a different result. Balzac is too impatient with words; he cannot
stay to get them all into proper order, to pick and choose among them.
Night, the coffee, the wet towel, and the end of six hours' labour
are often too much for him; and his manner of writing his novels on
the proof-sheets, altering and expanding as fresh ideas came to him
on each re-reading, was not a way of doing things which can possibly
result in perfect writing. But Balzac sins from excess, from a feverish
haste, the very extravagance of power; and, at all events, he "sins
strongly." Zola sins meanly, he is penuriously careful, he does the
best he possibly can; and he is not aware that his best does not answer
all requirements. So long as writing is clear and not ungrammatical, it
seems to him sufficient. He has not realised that without charm there
can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without
fragrance.

And it is here that I would complain, not as a matter of morals,
but as a matter of art, of Zola's obsession by what is grossly,
uninterestingly filthy. There is a certain simile in _L'Assommoir,_
used in the most innocent connection, in connection with a bonnet,
which seems to me the most abjectly dirty phrase which I have ever
read. It is one thing to use dirty words to describe dirty things:
that may be necessary, and thus unexceptionable. It is another thing
again, and this, too, may well be defended on artistic grounds, to be
ingeniously and wittily indecent. But I do not think a real man of
letters could possibly have used such an expression as the one I am
alluding to or could so meanly succumb to certain kinds of prurience
which we find in Zola's work. Such a scene as the one in which Gervaise
comes home with Lantier, and finds per husband lying drunk asleep in
his own vomit, might certainly be explained and even excused, though
few more disagreeable things were ever written, on the ground of the
psychological importance which it undoubtedly has, and the overwhelming
way in which it drives home the point which it is the writer's business
to make. But the worrying way in which _le derrière_ and _le ventre_
are constantly kept in view, without the slightest necessity, is quite
another thing. I should not like to say how often the phrase "sa nudité
de jolie fille" occurs in Zola. Zola's nudities always remind me of
those which you can see in the _Foire au pain d'épice_ at Vincennes, by
paying a penny and looking through a peep-hole. In the laundry scenes,
for instance in _L'Assommoir,_ he is always reminding you that the
laundresses have turned up their sleeves, or undone a button or two of
their bodices. His eyes seem eternally fixed on the inch or two of bare
flesh that can be seen; and he nudges your elbow at every moment, to
make sure that you are looking too. Nothing may be more charming than a
frankly sensuous description of things which appeal to the senses; but
can one imagine anything less charming, less like art, than this prying
eye glued to the peep-hole in the Gingerbread Fair?

Yet, whatever view may be taken of Zola's work in literature, there is
no doubt that the life of Zola is a model lesson, and might profitably
be told in one of Dr. Smiles's edifying biographies. It may even be
brought as a reproach against the writer of these novels, in which
there are so many offences against the respectable virtues, that he
is too good a bourgeois, too much the incarnation of the respectable
virtues, to be a man of genius. If the finest art comes of the
intensest living, then Zola has never had even a chance of doing the
greatest kind of work. It is his merit and his misfortune to have lived
entirely in and for his books, with a heroic devotion to his ideal of
literary duty which would merit every praise if we had to consider
simply the moral side of the question. So many pages of copy a day, so
many hours of study given to mysticism, or Les Halles; Zola has always
had his day's work marked out before him, and he has never swerved
from it. A recent life of--Zola tells us something about his way of
getting up a subject. "Immense preparation had been necessary for the
_Faute de l'Abbé Mouret._ Mountains of note-books were heaped up on
his table, and for months Zola was plunged in the study of religious
works. All the mystical part of the book, and notably the passages
having reference to the cultus of Mary, was taken from the works of
the Spanish Jesuits. The _Imitation of Jesus Christ_ was largely
drawn upon, many passages being copied almost word for word into
the novel--much as in _Clarissa Harlowe,_ that other great realist,
Richardson, copied whole passages from the Psalms. The description
of life in a grand seminary was given him by a priest who had been
dismissed from ecclesiastical service. The little church of Sainte
Marie des Batignolles was regularly visited."

How commendable all that is, but, surely, how futile! Can one conceive
of a more hopeless, a more ridiculous task, than that of setting to
work on a novel of ecclesiastical life as if one were cramming for
an examination in religious knowledge? Zola apparently imagines that
he can master mysticism in a fortnight, as he masters the police
regulations of Les Halles. It must be admitted that he does wonders
with his second-hand information, alike in regard to mysticism and Les
Halles. But he succeeds only to a certain point, and that point lies
on the nearer side of what is really meant by success. Is not Zola
himself, at his moments, aware of this? A letter written in 1881, and
printed in Mr. Sherard's life of Zola, from which I have just quoted,
seems to me very significant.

"I continue to work in a good state of mental equilibrium. My novel
_(Pot-Bouille)_ is certainly only a task requiring precision and
clearness. No _bravoura,_ not the least lyrical treat. It does not
give me any warm satisfaction, but it amuses me like a piece of
mechanism with a thousand wheels, of which it is my duty to regulate
the movements with the most minute care. I ask myself the question: Is
it good policy, when one feels that one has passion in one, to check
it, or even to bridle it? If one of my books is destined to become
immortal, it will, I am sure, be the most passionate one."

_Est-elle en marbre ou non, la Vénus de Milo?_ said the Parnassians,
priding themselves on their muse with her _peplum bien sculpté._ Zola
will describe to you the exact shape and the exact smell of the rags
of his naturalistic muse; but has she, under the tatters, really a
human heart? In the whole of Zola's works, amid all his exact and
impressive descriptions of misery, all his endless annals of the poor,
I know only one episode which brings tears to the eyes, the episode
of the child-martyr Lalie in L'_Assommoir._ "A piece of mechanism
with a thousand wheels," that is indeed the image of this immense and
wonderful study of human life, evolved out of the brain of a solitary
student who knows life only by the report of his documents, his
friends, and, above all, his formula.

Zola has denned art, very aptly, as nature seen through a temperament.
The art of Zola is nature seen through a formula. This professed
realist is a man of theories who studies life with a conviction that
he will find there such and such things which he has read about in
scientific books. He observes, indeed, with astonishing minuteness, but
he observes in support of preconceived ideas. And so powerful is his
imagination that he has created a whole world which has no existence
anywhere but in his own brain, and he has placed there imaginary
beings, so much more logical than life, in the midst of surroundings
which are themselves so real as to lend almost a semblance of reality
to the embodied formulas who inhabit them.

It is the boast of Zola that he has taken up art at the point where
Flaubert left it, and that he has developed that art in its logical
sequence. But the art of Flaubert, itself a development from Balzac,
had carried realism, if not in _Madame Bovary,_ at all events in
_L'Education Sentimentale,_ as far as realism can well go without
ceasing to be art. In the grey and somewhat sordid history of Frédéric
Moreau there is not à touch of romanticism, not so much as a concession
to style, a momentary escape of the imprisoned lyrical tendency.
Everything is observed, everything is taken straight from life: realism
sincere, direct, implacable, reigns from end to end of the book. But
with what consummate art all this mass of observation is disintegrated,
arranged, composed! with what infinite delicacy it is manipulated in
the service of an unerring sense of construction! And Flaubert has no
theory, has no prejudices, has only a certain impatience with human
imbecility. Zola, too, gathers his documents, heaps up his mass of
observation, and then, in this unhappy "development" of the principles
of art which produced _L'Education Sentimentale,_ flings everything
pell-mell into one overflowing _pot-au-feu._ The probabilities of
nature and the delicacies of art are alike drowned beneath a flood of
turbid observation, and in the end one does not even feel convinced
that Zola really knows his subject. I remember once hearing M.
Huysmans, with his look and tone of subtle, ironical malice, describe
how Zola, when he was writing _La Terre,_ took a drive into the country
in a victoria, to see the peasants. The English papers once reported
an interview in which the author of _Nana,_ indiscreetly questioned
as to the amount of personal observation he had put into the book,
replied that he had lunched with an actress of the Variétés. The reply
was generally taken for a joke, but the lunch was a reality, and it
was assuredly a rare experience in the life of solitary diligence to
which we owe so many impersonal studies in life. Nor did Zola, as he
sat silent by the side of Mlle. X., seem to be making much use of
the opportunity. The language of the miners in _Germinal,_ how much
of local colour is there in that? The interminable additions and
divisions, the extracts from a financial gazette, in _L'Argent,_ how
much of the real temper and idiosyncrasy of the financier do they
give us? In his description of places, in his _mise-en-scène,_ Zola
puts down what he sees with his own eyes, and, though it is often
done at utterly disproportionate length, it is at all events done
with exactitude. But in the far more important observation of men and
women, he is content with second-hand knowledge, the knowledge of a man
who sees the world through a formula. Zola sees in humanity _la bête
humaine._ He sees the beast in all its transformations, but he sees
only the beast. He has never looked at life impartially, he has never
seen it as it is. His realism is a distorted idealism, and the man who
considers himself the first to paint humanity as it really is will be
remembered in the future as the most idealistic writer of his time.

1893.




STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ


1


Stéphane Mallarmé was one of those who love literature too much to
write it except by fragments; in whom the desire of perfection brings
its own defeat. With either more or less ambition he would have done
more to achieve himself; he was always divided between an absolute aim
at the absolute, that is, the unattainable, and a too logical disdain
for the compromise by which, after all, literature is literature.
Carry the theories of Mallarmé to a practical conclusion, multiply
his powers in a direct ratio, and you have Wagner. It is his failure
not to be Wagner. And, Wagner having existed, it was for him to be
something more, to complete Wagner. Well, not being able to be that, it
was a matter of sincere indifference to him whether he left one or two
little, limited masterpieces of formal verse and prose, the more or
the less. It was "the work" that he dreamed of, the new art, more than
a new religion, whose precise form in the world he was never quite able
to settle.

_Un auteur difficile,_ in the phrase of M. Catulle Mendès, it has
always been to what he himself calls "a labyrinth illuminated by
flowers" that Mallarmé has felt it due to their own dignity to invite
his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarmé was
obscure, not so much because he wrote differently, as because he
thought differently, from other people. His mind was elliptical, and,
relying with undue confidence on the intelligence of his readers, he
emphasised the effect of what was unlike other people in his mind by
resolutely ignoring even the links of connection that existed between
them. Never having aimed at popularity, he never needed, as most
writers need, to make the first advances. He made neither intrusion
upon nor concession to those who, after all, were not obliged to read
him. And when he spoke, he considered it neither needful nor seemly
to listen in order to hear whether he was heard. To the charge of
obscurity he replied, with sufficient disdain, that there are many
who do not know how to read--except the newspaper, he adds, in one of
those disconcerting, oddly-printed parentheses, which make his work,
to those who rightly apprehend it, so full of wise limitations, so
safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one in our time
has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the artist in
the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not always wisely, but
nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that making of
himself "a motley to the view," that handing over of his naked soul
to the laughter of the multitude? But who, in our time, has wrought
so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick
cloud on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had
the wisdom to hide their secrets in the obscurity of many meanings, or
of what has seemed meaningless; and might it not, after all, be the
finest epitaph for a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say,
even after the writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not
betrayed myself to the multitude?

But to Mallarmé, certainly, there might be applied the significant
warning of Rossetti:

    Yet woe to thee if once thou yield
    Unto the act of doing nought!

After a life of persistent devotion to literature, he has left enough
poems to make a single small volume (less, certainly, than a hundred
poems in all), a single volume of prose, a few pamphlets, and a prose
translation of the poems of Poe. It is because among these there are
masterpieces, poems which are among the most beautiful poems written in
our time, prose which has all the subtlest qualities of prose, that,
quitting the abstract point of view, we are forced to regret the fatal
enchantments, fatal for him, of theories which are so greatly needed
by others, so valuable for our instruction, if we are only a little
careful in putting them into practice.

In estimating the significance of Stéphane Mallarmé, it is necessary
to take into account not only his verse and prose, but, almost more
than these, the Tuesdays of the Rue de Rome, in which he gave himself
freely to more than one generation. No one who has ever climbed
those four flights of stairs will have forgotten the narrow, homely
interior, elegant with a sort of scrupulous Dutch comfort; the heavy,
carved furniture, the tall clock, the portraits, Manet's, Whistler's,
on the walls; the table on which the china bowl, odorous with
tobacco, was pushed from hand to hand; above all, the rocking-chair,
Mallarmé's, from which he would rise quietly, to stand leaning his
elbow on the mantelpiece, while one hand, the hand which did not
hold the cigarette, would sketch out one of those familiar gestures:
_un peu de prêtre, un peu de danseuse_ (in M. Rodenbach's admirable
phrase), _avec lesquels il avait l'air chaque fois d'entrer dans la
conversation, comme on entre en scène._ One of the best talkers of
our time, he was, unlike most other fine talkers, harmonious with his
own theories in giving no monologues, in allowing every liberty to
his guests, to the conversation; in his perfect readiness to follow
the slightest indication, to embroider upon any frame, with any
material presented to him. There would have been something almost of
the challenge of the improvisatore in this, easily moved alertness of
mental attitude, had it not been for the singular gentleness with
which Mallarmé's intelligence moved, in these considerable feats, with
the half-apologetic negligence of the perfect acrobat. He seemed to be
no more than brushing the dust off your own ideas, settling, arranging
them a little, before he gave them back to you, surprisingly luminous.
It was only afterwards that you realised how small had been your own
part in the matter, as well as what it meant to have enlightened
without dazzling you. But there was always the feeling of comradeship,
the comradeship of a master, whom, while you were there at least,
you did not question; and that very feeling lifted you, in your own
estimation, nearer to art.

Invaluable, it seems to me, those Tuesdays must have been to the young
men of two generations who have been making French literature; they
were unique, certainly, in the experience of the young Englishman
who was always so cordially received there, with so flattering a
cordiality. Here was a house in which art, literature, was the very
atmosphere, a religious atmosphere; and the master of the house, in his
just a little solemn simplicity, a priest. I never heard the price
of a book mentioned, or the number of thousand francs which a popular
author had been paid for his last volume; here, in this one literary
house, literature was unknown as a trade. And, above all, the questions
that were discussed were never, at least, in Mallarmé's treatment, in
his guidance of them, other than essential questions, considerations
of art in the abstract of literature before it coagulates into a book,
of life as its amusing and various web spins the stuff of art. When,
indeed, the conversation, by some untimely hazard, drifted too near to
one, became for a moment, perhaps inconveniently, practical, it was
Mallarmé's solicitous politeness to wait, a little constrained, almost
uneasy, rolling his cigarette in silence, until the disturbing moment
had passed.

There were other disturbing moments, sometimes. I remember one night,
rather late, the sudden irruption of M. de Heredia, coming on after a
dinner-party, and seating himself in his well-filled evening dress,
precisely in Mallarmé's favourite chair. He was intensely amusing,
voluble, floridly vehement; Mallarmé, I am sure, was delighted to see
him; but the loud voice was a little trying to his nerves, and then he
did not know what to do without his chair. He was like a cat that has
been turned out of its favourite corner, as he roamed uneasily about
the room, resting an unaccustomed elbow on the sideboard, visibly at a
disadvantage.

For the attitude of those young men, some of them no longer exactly
young, who frequented the Tuesdays, was certainly the attitude of
the disciple. Mallarmé never exacted it, he seemed never to notice
it; yet it meant to him, all the same, a good deal; as it meant, and
in the best sense, a good deal to them. He loved art with a supreme
disinterestedness, and it was for the sake of art that he wished to
be really a master. For he knew that he had something to teach, that
he had found out some secrets worth knowing, that he had discovered a
point of view which he could to some degree perpetuate in those young
men who listened to him. And to them this free kind of apprenticeship
was, beyond all that it gave in direct counsels, in the pattern of
work, a noble influence. Mallarmé's quiet, laborious life was for
some of them the only counterpoise to the Bohemian example of the
_d'Harcourt_ or the _Taverne,_ where art is loved, but with something
of haste, in a very changing devotion. It was impossible to come away
from Mallarmé's without some tranquillising influence from that quiet
place, some impersonal ambition towards excellence, the resolve, at
least, to write a sonnet, a page of prose, that should be in its own
way as perfect as one could make it, worthy of Mallarmé.


2

"Poetry," said Mallarmé, "is the language of a state of crisis"; and
all his poems are the evocation of a passing ecstasy, arrested in
mid-flight. This ecstasy is never the mere instinctive cry of the
heart, the simple human joy or sorrow, which, like the Parnassians,
but for not quite the same reason, he did not admit in poetry. It is a
mental transposition of emotion or sensation, veiled with atmosphere,
and becoming, as it becomes a poem, pure beauty. Here, for instance,
in a poem, which I have translated line for line, and almost word
for word, a delicate emotion, a figure vaguely divined, a landscape
magically evoked, blend in a single effect.

    SIGH

    My soul, calm sister, towards thy brow, whereon scarce grieves
    An autumn strewn already with its russet leaves,
    And towards the wandering sky of thine angelic eye,
    Mounts, as in melancholy gardens may arise
    Some faithful fountain sighing whitely towards the blue!
    --Towards the blue pale and pure that sad October knew,
    When, in those depths, it mirrored languors infinite,
    And agonising leaves upon the waters white,
    Windily drifting, traced a furrow cold and dun,
    Where, in one long last ray, lingered the yellow sun.

Another poem comes a little closer to nature, but with what exquisite
precautions, and with what surprising novelty in its unhesitating touch
on actual things!

    SEA-WIND

    The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read.
    Flight, only flight! I feel that birds are wild to tread
    The floor of unknown foam, and to attain the skies!
    Nought, neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,
    Shall hold this heart that bathes in waters its delight,
    O nights! nor yet my waking lamp, whose lonely light
    Shadows the vacant paper, whiteness profits best,
    Nor the young wife who rocks her baby on her breast.
    I will depart. O steamer, swaying rope and spar,
    Lift anchor for exotic lands that lie afar!
    A weariness, outworn by cruel hopes, still clings
    To the last farewell handkerchief's last beckonings!
    And are not these, the masts inviting storms, not these
    That an awakening wind bends over wrecking seas,
    Lost, not a sail, a sail, a flowering isle, ere long?
    But, O my heart, hear thou, hear thou the sailors' song!

These (need I say?) belong to the earlier period, in which Mallarmé
had not yet withdrawn his light into the cloud; and to the same period
belong the prose-poems, one of which, perhaps the most exquisite, I
will translate here.


AUTUMN LAMENT

"Ever since Maria left me, for another star--which? Orion, Altair, or
thou, green Venus?--I have always cherished solitude. How many long
days I have passed, alone with my cat! By _alone,_ I mean without a
material being, and my cat is a mystical companion, a spirit. I may
say, then, that I have passed long days alone with my cat, and alone,
with one of the last writers of the Roman decadence; for since the
white creature is no more, strangely and singularly, I have loved
all that may be summed up in the word: fall. Thus, in the year, my
favourite season is during those last languid summer days which come
just before the autumn; and, in the day, the hour when I take my
walk is the hour when the sun lingers before fading, with rays of
copper-yellow on the grey walls, and of copper-red on the window-panes.
And, just so, the literature from which my soul demands delight
must be the poetry dying out of the last moments of Rome, provided,
nevertheless, that it breathes nothing of the rejuvenating approach of
the Barbarians, and does not stammer the infantile Latin of the first
Christian prose.

"I read, then, one of those beloved poems (whose streaks of rouge have
more charm for me than the fresh cheek of youth), and buried my hand
in the fur of the pure animal, when a barrel-organ began to sing,
languishingly and melancholy, under my window. It played in the long
alley of poplars, whose leaves seem mournful to me even in spring,
since Maria passed that way with the tapers, for the last time. Yes,
sad people's instrument, truly: the piano glitters, the violin brings
one's torn fibres to the light, but the barrel-organ, in the twilight
of memory, has set me despairingly dreaming. While it murmured a gaily
vulgar air, such as puts mirth into the heart of the suburbs, an
old-fashioned, an empty air, how came it that its refrain went to my
very soul, and made me weep like a romantic ballad? I drank it in, and
I did not throw a penny out of the window, for fear of disturbing my
own impression, and of perceiving that the instrument was not singing
by itself."

Between these characteristic, clear and beautiful poems, in verse and
in prose, and the opaque darkness of the later writings, come one or
two poems, perhaps the finest of all, in which already clearness is
"a secondary grace," but in which a subtle rapture finds incomparable
expression. _L'Après-midi d'un Faune_ and _Hérodiade_ have already
been introduced, in different ways, to English readers: the former by
Mr. Gosse, in a detailed analysis; the latter by a translation into
verse. And Debussy, in his new music, has taken _L'Après-midi d'un
Faune_ almost for his new point of departure, interpreting it, at
all events, faultlessly. In these two poems I find Mallarmé at the
moment when his own desire achieves itself; when he attains Wagner's
ideal, that "the most complete work of the poet should be that which,
in its final achievement, becomes a perfect music": every word is a
jewel, scattering and recapturing sudden fire, every image is a symbol,
and the whole poem is visible music. After this point began that
fatal "last period" which comes to most artists who have thought too
curiously, or dreamed too remote dreams, or followed a too wandering
beauty. Mallarmé had long been too conscious that all publication is
"almost a speculation, on one's modesty, for one's silence"; that "to
unclench the fists, breaking one's sedentary dream, for a ruffling face
to face with the idea," was after all unnecessary to his own conception
of himself, a mere way of convincing the public that one exists; and
having achieved, as he thought, "the right to abstain from doing
anything exceptional," he devoted himself, doubly, to silence. Seldom
condescending to write, he wrote now only for himself, and in a manner
which certainly saved him from intrusion. Some of Meredith's poems,
and occasional passages of his prose, can alone give in English some
faint idea of the later prose and verse of Mallarmé. The verse could
not, I think, be translated; of the prose, in which an extreme lucidity
of thought comes to us but glimmeringly through the entanglements of a
construction, part Latin, part English, I shall endeavour to translate
some fragments, in speaking of the theoretic writings, contained in the
two volumes of _Vers et Prose_ and _Divagations._


3

It is the distinction of Mallarmé to have aspired after an impossible
liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting and
constraining in "the body of that death," which is the mere literature
of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only as a notation of
the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be employed with
an extreme care, in their choice and adjustment, in setting them to
reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all for their own
sake, for what they can never, except by suggestion, express. "Every
soul is a melody," he has said, "which needs to be readjusted; and for
that are the flute or viol of each." The word, treated indeed with
a kind of "adoration," as he says, is so regarded in a magnificent
sense, in which it is apprehended as a living thing, itself the vision
rather than the reality; at least the philtre of the evocation. The
word, chosen as he chooses it, is for him a liberating principle, by
which the spirit is extracted from matter; takes form, perhaps assumes
immortality. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of words, that
seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if they had
never been used before, that chimerical search after the virginity of
language, is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme discontent
with even the best of their service. Writers who use words fluently,
seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an unconscious
confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulous thinker, the
precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefully chosen among
them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of language,
without the formality of an after all impossible description; to be,
rather than to express: that is what Mallarmé has consistently, and
from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has sought this
wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of dreams, over
more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the depths of
many forests, far from the sunlight. To say that he has found what he
sought is impossible; but (is it possible to avoid saying?) how heroic
a search, and what marvellous discoveries by the way!

I think I understand, though; I cannot claim his own authority for my
supposition, the way in which Mallarmé wrote verse, and the reason
why it became more and more abstruse, more and more unintelligible.
Remember his principle: that to name is to destroy, to suggest is to
create. Note, further, that he condemns the inclusion in verse of
anything but, "for example, the horror of the forest, or the silent
thunder afloat in the leaves; not the intrinsic, dense wood of the
trees." He has received, then, a mental sensation: let it be the
horror of the forest. This sensation begins to form in his brain,
at first probably no more than a rhythm, absolutely without words.
Gradually thought begins to concentrate itself (but with an extreme
care, lest it should break the tension on which all depends) upon
the sensation, already struggling to find its own consciousness.
Delicately, stealthily, with infinitely timid precaution, words present
themselves, at first in silence. Every word seems like a desecration,
seems, the clearer it is, to throw back the original sensation farther
and farther into the darkness. But, guided always by the rhythm,
which is the executive soul (as, in Aristotle's definition, the soul
is the form of the body), words come slowly, one by one, shaping the
message. Imagine the poem already written down, at least composed. In
its very imperfection, it is clear, it shows the links by which it
has been riveted together; the whole process of its construction can
be studied. Now most writers would be content; but with Mallarmé the
work has only begun. In the final result there must be no sign of the
making, there must be only the thing made. He works over it, word by
word, changing a word here, for its colour, which is not precisely the
colour required, a word there, for the break it makes in the music. A
new image occurs to him, rarer, subtler, than the one he has used; the
image is transferred. By the time the poem has reached, as it seems
to him, a flawless unity, the steps of the progress have been only
too effectually effaced; and while the poet, who has seen the thing
from the beginning, still sees the relation of point to point, the
reader, who comes to it only in its final stage, finds himself in a not
unnatural bewilderment. Pursue this manner of writing to its ultimate
development; start with an enigma, and then withdraw the key of the
enigma; and you arrive, easily at the frozen impenetrability of those
latest sonnets, in which the absence of all punctuation is scarcely a
recognisable hindrance.

That, I fancy to myself, was his actual way of writing; here, in what
I prefer to give as a corollary, is the theory. "Symbolist, Decadent,
or Mystic, the schools thus called by themselves, or thus hastily
labelled by our information-press, adopt, for meeting-place, the point
of an Idealism which (similarly as in fugues, in sonatas) rejects
the 'natural' materials, and, as brutal, a direct thought ordering
them; to retain no more than suggestion. To be instituted, a relation
between images, exact; and that therefrom should detach itself a third
aspect, fusible and clear, offered to the divination. Abolished, the
pretension, æsthetically an error, despite its dominion over almost all
the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle paper other than, for
example, the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder afloat in the
leaves; not the intrinsic, dense wood of the trees. Some few bursts of
personal pride, veridically trumpeted, awaken the architecture of the
palace, alone habitable; not of stone, on which the pages would close
but ill." For example (it is his own): "I say: a flower! and out of the
oblivion to which my voice consigns every contour, so far as anything
save the known calyx, musically arises, idea, and exquisite, the one
flower absent from all bouquets." "The pure work," then, "implies the
elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields place to the words,
immobilised by the shock of their inequality; they take light from
mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,
replacing the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal direction
of the phrase." "The verse which out of many vocables remakes an entire
word, new, unknown to the language, and as if magical, attains this
isolation of speech." Whence, it being "music which rejoins verse,
to form, since Wagner, Poetry," the final conclusion: "That we are
now precisely at the moment of seeking, before that breaking up of
the large rhythms of literature, and their scattering in articulate,
almost instrumental, nervous waves, an art which shall complete the
transposition, into the Book, of the symphony or simply recapture
our own: for, it is not in elementary sonorities of brass, strings,
wood, unquestionably, but in the intellectual word at its utmost,
that, fully and evidently, we should find, drawing to itself all the
correspondences of the universe, the supreme Music."

Here, literally translated, in exactly the arrangement of the original,
are some passages out of the theoretic writings, which I have brought
together, to indicate what seem to me the main lines of Mallarmé's
doctrine. It is the doctrine which, as I have already said, had been
divined by Gérard de Nerval; but what, in Gérard, was pure vision,
becomes in Mallarmé a logical sequence of meditation. Mallarmé was
not a mystic, to whom anything came unconsciously; he was a thinker,
in whom an extraordinary subtlety of mind was exercised on always
explicit, though by no means the common, problems. "A seeker after
something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not
at all," he pursued his search with unwearying persistence with a sharp
mental division of dream and idea, certainly very lucid to himself,
however he may have failed to render his expression clear to others.
And I, for one, cannot doubt that he was, for the most part, entirely
right in his statement and analysis of the new conditions under which
we are now privileged or condemned to write. His obscurity was partly
his failure to carry out the spirit of his own directions; but, apart
from obscurity, which we may all be fortunate enough to escape, is it
possible for a writer, at the present day, to be quite simple, with
the old, objective simplicity, in either thought or expression? To be
_naif,_ to be archaic, is not to be either natural or simple; I affirm
that it is not natural to be what is called "natural" any longer. We
have no longer the mental attitude of those to whom a story was but a
story, and all stories good; we have realised since it was proved to
us by Poe, not merely that the age of epics is past, but that no long
poem was ever written; the finest long poem in the world being but a
series of short poems linked together by prose. And, naturally, we can
no longer write what we can no longer accept. Symbolism, implicit in
all literature from the beginning, as it is implicit in the very words
we use, comes to us now, at last quite conscious of itself, offering us
the only escape from our many imprisonments. We find a new, an older,
sense in the so worn-out forms of things; the world, which we can no
longer believe in as the satisfying material object it was to our
grandparents, becomes transfigured with a new light; words, which long
usage had darkened almost out of recognition, take fresh lustre. And
it is on the lines of that spiritualising of the word, that perfecting
of form in its capacity for allusion and suggestion, that confidence
in the eternal correspondences between the visible and the invisible
universe, which Mallarmé taught, and too intermittently practised, that
literature must now move, if it is in any sense to move forward.




PAUL VERLAINE


1

_"Bien affectueusement_ ... yours, P. Verlaine." So, in its gay and
friendly mingling of French and English, ended the last letter I had
from Verlaine. A few days afterwards came the telegram from Paris
telling me of his death, in the Rue Descartes, on that 8th January,
1896.

"Condemned to death," as he was, in Victor Hugo's phrase of men in
general, "with a sort of indefinite reprieve," and gravely ill as I
had for some time known him to be, it was still with a shock, not only
of sorrow, but of surprise, that I heard the news of his death. He had
suffered and survived so much, and I found it so hard to associate the
idea of death with one who had always been so passionately in love with
life, more passionately in love with life than any man I ever knew.
Rest was one of the delicate privileges of life which he never loved:
he did but endure it with grumbling gaiety when a hospital-bed claimed
him. And whenever he spoke to me of the long rest which has now sealed
his eyelids, it was with a shuddering revolt from the thought of ever
going away into the cold, out of the sunshine which had been so warm
to him. With all his pains, misfortunes, and the calamities which
followed him step by step all his life, I think few men ever got so
much out of their lives, or lived so fully, so intensely, with such a
genius for living. That, indeed, is why he was a great poet. Verlaine
was a man who gave its full value to every moment, who got out of
every moment all that that moment had to give him. It was not always,
not often, perhaps, pleasure. But it was energy, the vital force of a
nature which was always receiving and giving out, never at rest, never
passive, or indifferent, or hesitating. It is impossible for me to
convey to those who did not know him any notion of how sincere he was.
The word "sincerity" seems hardly to have emphasis enough to say, in
regard to this one man, what it says, adequately enough, of others.
He sinned, and it was with all his humanity; he repented, and it was
with all his soul. And to every occurrence of the day, to every mood
of the mind, to every impulse of the creative instinct, he brought the
same unparalleled sharpness of sensation. When, in 1894, he was my
guest in London, I was amazed by the exactitude of his memory of the
mere turnings of the streets, the shapes and colours of the buildings,
which he had not seen for twenty years. He saw, he felt, he remembered,
everything, with an unconscious mental selection of the fine shades,
the essential part of things, or precisely those aspects which most
other people would pass by.

Few poets of our time have been more often drawn, few have been easier
to draw, few have better repaid drawing, than Paul Verlaine. A face
without a beautiful line, a face all character, full of somnolence
and sudden fire, in which every irregularity was a kind of aid to
the hand, could not but tempt the artist desiring at once to render
a significant likeness and to have his own part in the creation of a
picture. Verlaine, like all men of genius, had something of the air
of the somnambulist: that profound slumber of the face, as it was in
him, with its startling awakenings. It was a face devoured by dreams,
feverish and somnolent; it had earthly passion, intellectual pride,
spiritual humility; the air of one who remembers, not without an
effort, who is listening, half distractedly to something which other
people do not hear; coming back so suddenly, and from so far, with the
relief of one who steps out of that obscure shadow into the noisier
forgetfulness of life. The eyes, often half closed, were like the eyes
of a cat between sleeping and waking; eyes in which contemplation was
"itself an act." A remarkable lithograph by Mr. Rothenstein (the face
lit by oblique eyes, the folded hands thrust into the cheek) gives with
singular truth the sensation of that restless watch on things which
this prisoner of so many chains kept without slackening. To Verlaine
every corner of the world was alive with tempting and consoling and
terrifying beauty. I have never known any one to whom the sight of the
eyes was so intense and imaginative a thing. To him, physical sight and
spiritual vision, by some strange alchemical operation of the brain,
were one. And in the disquietude of his face, which seemed to take
such close heed of things, precisely because it was sufficiently apart
from them to be always a spectator, there was a realisable process of
vision continually going on, in which all the loose ends of the visible
world were being caught up into a new mental fabric.

And along with this fierce subjectivity, into which the egoism of
the artist entered so unconsciously, and in which it counted for so
much, there was more than the usual amount of childishness, always
in some measure present in men of genius. There was a real, almost
blithe, childishness in the way in which he would put on his "Satanic"
expression, of which it was part of the joke that every one should not
be quite in the secret. It was a whim of this kind which made him put
at the beginning of _Romances sans Paroles_ that very criminal image
of a head which had so little resemblance with even the shape, indeed
curious enough, of his actual head. "Born under the sign of Saturn,"
as he no doubt was, with that "old prisoner's head" of which he tells
us, it was by his amazing faculty for a simple kind of happiness that
he always impressed me. I have never seen so cheerful an invalid as
he used to be at that hospital, the Hôpital Saint-Louis, where at one
time I used to go and see him every week. His whole face seemed to
chuckle as he would tell me, in his emphatic, confiding way, everything
that entered into his head; the droll stories cut short by a groan, a
lamentation, a sudden fury of reminiscence, at which his face would
cloud or convulse, the wild eyebrows slanting up and down; and then,
suddenly, the good laugh would be back, clearing the air. No one was
ever so responsive to his own moods as Verlaine, and with him every
mood had the vehemence of a passion. Is not his whole art a delicate
waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they are,
which it is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us,
and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily,
experience taught nothing; or rather, it taught him only to cling the
more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate
part of our spiritual life. It is no doubt well for society that man
should learn by experience; for the artist the benefit is doubtful.
The artist, it cannot be too clearly understood, has no more part in
society than a monk in domestic life: he cannot be judged by its rules,
he can be neither praised not blamed for his acceptance or rejection
of its conventions. Social rules are made by normal people for normal
people, and the man of genius is fundamentally abnormal. It is the poet
against society, society against the poet, a direct antagonism; the
shock of which, however, it is often possible to avoid by a compromise.
So much licence is allowed on the one side, so much liberty foregone
on the other. The consequences are not always of the best, art being
generally the loser. But there are certain natures to which compromise
is impossible; and the nature of Verlaine was one of these natures.

"The soul of an immortal child," says one who has understood him better
than others, Charles Morice, "that is the soul of Verlaine, with
all the privileges and all the perils of so being; with the sudden
despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties without a cause,
the excessive suspicions and the excessive confidences, the whims so
easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatuations, with, especially,
the unceasing renewal of impressions in the incorruptible integrity
of personal vision and sensation. Years, influences, teachings, may
pass over a temperament such as this, may irritate it, may fatigue
it; transform it, never--never so much as to alter that particular
unity which consists in a dualism, in the division of forces between
the longing after what is evil and the adoration of what is good; or
rather, in the antagonism of spirit and flesh. Other men 'arrange'
their lives, take sides, follow one direction; Verlaine hesitates
before a choice, which seems to him monstrous, for, with the integral
_naïveté_ of irrefutable human truth, he cannot resign himself, however
strong may be the doctrine, however enticing may be the passion, to the
necessity of sacrificing one to the other, and from one to the other he
oscillates without a moment's repose."

It is in such a sense as this that Verlaine may be said to have
learnt nothing from experience, in the sense that he learnt everything
direct from life, and without comparing day with day. That the
exquisite artist of the _Fêtes Galantes_ should become the great
poet of _Sagesse,_ it was needful that things should have happened
as disastrously as they did: the marriage with the girl-wife, that
brief idyl, the passion for drink, those other forbidden passions,
vagabondage, an attempted crime, the eighteen months of prison,
conversion; followed, as it had to be, by relapse, bodily sickness,
poverty, beggary almost, a lower and lower descent into mean
distresses. It was needful that all this should happen, in order that
the spiritual vision should eclipse the material vision; but it was
needful that all this should happen in vain, so far as the conduct of
life was concerned. Reflection, in Verlaine, is pure waste; it is the
speech of the soul and the speech of the eyes, that we must listen to
in his verse, never the speech of the reason. And I call him fortunate
because, going through life with a great unconsciousness of what most
men spend their lives in considering, he was able to abandon himself
entirely to himself, to his unimpeded vision, to his unchecked emotion,
to the passionate sincerity which in him was genius.


2

French poetry, before Verlaine, was an admirable vehicle for a really
fine, a really poetical, kind of rhetoric. With Victor Hugo, for the
first time since Ronsard (the two or three masterpieces of Ronsard
and his companions) it had learnt to sing; with Baudelaire it had
invented a new vocabulary for the expression of subtle, often perverse,
essentially modern emotion and sensation. But with Victor Hugo,
with Baudelaire, we are still under the dominion of rhetoric. "Take
eloquence, and wring its neck!" said Verlaine in his _Art Poétique;_
and he showed, by writing it, that French verse could be written
without rhetoric. It was partly from his study of English models that
he learnt the secret of liberty in verse, but it was much more a secret
found by the way, in the mere endeavour to be absolutely sincere, to
express exactly what he saw, to give voice to his own temperament, in
which intensity of feeling seemed to find its own expression, as if by
accident. _L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même,_ he
tells us in one of his later poems; and, with such a personality as
Verlaine's to express, what more has art to do, if it would truly, and
in any interesting manner, hold the mirror up to nature?

For, consider the natural qualities which this man had for the task of
creating a new poetry. "Sincerity, and the impression of the moment
followed to the letter": that is how he defined his theory of style, in
an article written about himself.

    Car nous voulons la nuance encor,
    Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance!

as he cries, in his famous _Art Poétique._ Take, then, his
susceptibility of the senses, an emotional susceptibility not less
delicate; a life sufficiently troubled to draw out every emotion of
which he was capable, and, with it, that absorption in the moment,
that inability to look before or after; the need to love and the need
to confess, each a passion; an art of painting the fine shades of
landscape, of evoking atmosphere, which can be compared only with the
art of Whistler; a simplicity of language which is the direct outcome
of a simplicity of temperament, with just enough consciousness of
itself for a final elegance; and, at the very depth of his being, an
almost fierce humility, by which the passion of love, after searching
furiously through all his creatures, finds God by the way, and kneels
in the dust before him. Verlaine was never a theorist: he left theories
to Mallarmé. He had only his divination; and he divined that poetry,
always desiring that miracles should happen, had never waited patiently
enough upon the miracle. It was by that proud and humble mysticism of
his temperament that he came to realise how much could be done by, In a
sense, trying to do nothing.

And then: _De la musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et
toujours!_ There are poems of Verlaine which go as far as verse can
go to become pure music, the voice of a bird with a human soul. It
is part of his simplicity, his divine childishness, that he abandons
himself, at times, to the song which words begin to sing in the air,
with the same wise confidence with which he abandons himself to the
other miracles about him. He knows that words are living things, which
we have not created, and which go their way without demanding of us
the right to live. He knows that words are suspicious, not without
their malice, and that they resist mere force with the impalpable
resistance of fire or water. They are to be caught only with guile or
with trust. Verlaine has both, and words become Ariel to him. They
bring him not only that submission of the slave which they bring to
others, but all the soul, and in a happy bondage. They transform
themselves for him into music, colour, and shadow; a disembodied music,
diaphanous colours, luminous shadow. They serve him with so absolute a
self-negation that he can write _romances sans paroles,_ songs almost
without words, in which scarcely a sense of the interference of human
speech remains. The ideal of lyric poetry, certainly, is to be this
passive, flawless medium for the deeper consciousness of things, the
mysterious voice of that mystery which lies about us, out of which we
have come, and into which we shall return. It is not without reason
that we cannot analyse a perfect lyric.

With Verlaine the sense of hearing and the sense of sight are almost
interchangeable: he paints with sound, and his line and atmosphere
become music. It was with the most precise accuracy that Whistler
applied the terms of music to his painting, for painting, when it aims
at being the vision of reality, _pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,_
passes almost into the condition of music. Verlaine's landscape
painting is always an evocation, in which outline is lost in atmosphere.

    C'est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,
    C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
    C'est, par un ciel d'automne attiédi,
    Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles!

He was a man, certainly, "for whom the visible world existed," but for
whom it existed always as a vision. He absorbed it through all his
senses, as the true mystic absorbs the divine beauty. And so he created
in verse a new voice for nature, full of the humble ecstasy with which
he saw, listened, accepted.

    Cette âme qui se lamente
    En cette plaine dormante
      C'est la nôtre, n'est-ce pas?
    La mienne, dis, et la tienne,
    Dont s'exhale l'humble antienne
      Par ce tiède soir, tout has?

And with the same attentive simplicity with which he found words
for the sensations of hearing and the sensations of sight, he found
words for the sensations of the soul, for the fine shades of feeling.
From the moment when his inner life may be said to have begun, he
was occupied with the task of an unceasing confession, in which one
seems to overhear him talking to himself, in that vague, preoccupied
way which he often had. Here again are words which startle one by
their delicate resemblance to thoughts, by their winged flight from
so far, by their alighting so close. The verse murmurs, with such
an ingenuous confidence, such intimate secrets. That "setting free"
of verse, which is one of the achievements of Verlaine, was itself
mainly an attempt to be more and more sincere, a way of turning poetic
artifice to new account, by getting back to nature itself, hidden away
under the eloquent rhetoric of Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Parnassians.
In the devotion of rhetoric to either beauty or truth, there is a
certain consciousness of an audience, of an external judgment: rhetoric
would convince, be admired. It is the very essence of poetry to be
unconscious of anything between its own moment of flight and the
supreme beauty which it will never attain. Verlaine taught French
poetry that wise and subtle unconsciousness. It was in so doing that
he "fused his personality," in the words of Verhaeren, "so profoundly
with beauty, that he left upon it the imprint of a new and henceforth
eternal attitude."


3

_J'ai la fureur d'aimer,_ says Verlaine, in a passage of very personal
significance.

    J'ai la fureur d'aimer. Mon cœur si faible est fou.
    N'importe quand, n'importe quel et n'importe où,
    Qu'un éclair de beauté, de vertu, de vaillance,
    Luise, il s'y précipite, il y vole, il y lance,
    Et, le temps d'une étreinte, il embrasse cent fois
    L'être ou l'objet qu'il a poursuivi de son choix;
    Puis, quand l'illusion a replié son aile,
    Il revient triste et seul bien souvent, mais fidèle,
    Et laissant aux ingrats quelque chose de lui,
    Sang ou chair....
    J'ai la fureur d'aimer. Qu'y faire? Ah, laissez faire!

And certainly this admirable, and supremely dangerous, quality was
at the root of Verlaine's nature. Instinctive, unreasoning as he
was, entirely at the mercy of the emotion or impression which, for
the moment, had seized upon him, it was inevitable that he should
be completely at the mercy of the most imperious of instincts, of
passions, and of intoxications. And he had the simple and ardent
nature, in this again consistently childlike, to which love, some kind
of affection, given or returned, is not the luxury, the exception,
which it is to many natures, but a daily necessity. To such a
temperament there may or may not be the one great passion; there
will certainly be many passions. And in Verlaine I find that single,
childlike necessity of loving and being loved, all through his life
and on every page of his works; I find it, unchanged in essence, but
constantly changing form, in his chaste and unchaste devotions to
women, in his passionate friendships with men, in his supreme mystical
adoration of God.

To turn from _La Bonne Chanson,_ written for a wedding present to a
young wife, to _Chansons pour Elle,_ written more than twenty years
later, in dubious honour of a middle-aged mistress, is to travel a long
road, the hard, long road which Verlaine had travelled during those
years. His life was ruinous, a disaster, more sordid perhaps than the
life of any other poet; and he could write of it, from a hospital-bed,
with this quite sufficient sense of its deprivations. "But all the
same, it is hard," he laments, in _Mes Hôpitaux,_ "after a life of
work, set off, I admit, with accidents in which I have had a large
share, catastrophes perhaps vaguely premeditated--it is hard, I say, at
forty-seven years of age, in full possession of all the reputation (of
the _success,_ to use the frightful current phrase) to which my highest
ambitions could aspire--hard, hard, hard indeed, worse than hard, to
find myself--good God!--to find myself _on the streets,_ and to have
nowhere to lay my head and support an ageing body save the pillows and
the _menus_ of a public charity, even now uncertain, and which might at
any moment be withdrawn--God forbid!--without, apparently, the fault of
any one, oh! not even, and above all, not mine." Yet, after all, these
sordid miseries, this poor man's vagabondage, all the misfortunes of
one certainly "irreclaimable," on which so much stress has been laid,
alike by friends and by foes, are externalities; they are not the man;
the man, the eternal lover, passionate and humble, remains unchanged,
while only his shadow wanders, from morning to night of the long day.

The poems to Rimbaud, to Lucien Létinois, to others, the whole volume
of _Dédicaces,_ cover perhaps as wide a range of sentiment as _La Bonne
Chanson_ and _Chansons pour Elle._ The poetry of friendship has never
been sung with such plaintive sincerity, such simple human feeling, as
in some of these poems, which can only be compared, in modern poetry,
with a poem for which Verlaine had a great admiration, Tennyson's _In
Memoriam._ Only with Verlaine, the thing itself, the affection or the
regret, is everything; there is no room for meditation over destiny,
or search for a problematical consolation. Other poems speak a more
difficult language, in which, doubtless, _l'ennui de vivre avec les
gens et dans les choses_ counts for much, and _la fureur d'aimer_ for
more.

In spite of the general impression to the contrary, an impression
which by no means displeased him himself, I must contend that the
sensuality of Verlaine, brutal as it could sometimes be, was after
all simple rather than complicated, instinctive rather than perverse,
in the poetry of Baudelaire, with which the poetry of Verlaine is so
often compared, there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity
which has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with
horror, in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every
complication of taste, the exasperation of; perfumes, the irritant of
cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption, to the creation and
adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served
before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a
prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine,
however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length
sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady
of love. It is love desiring the absolute, seeking in vain, seeking
always, and, finally, out of the depths, finding God.

Verlaine's conversion took place while he was in prison, during those
solitary eighteen months in company with his thoughts, that enforced
physical inactivity, which could but concentrate his whole energy on
the only kind of sensation then within his capacity, the sensations of
the soul and of the conscience. With that promptitude of abandonment
which was his genius, he grasped feverishly at the succour of God and
the Church, he abased himself before the immaculate purity of the
Virgin. He had not, like others who have risen from the same depths to
the same height of humiliation, to despoil his nature of its pride, to
conquer his intellect, before he could become _l'enfant vêtu de laine
et d'innocence._ All that was simple, humble, childlike in him accepted
that humiliation with the loving child's joy in penitence; all that was
ardent, impulsive, indomitable in him burst at once into a flame of
adoration.

He realised the great secret of the Christian mystics: that it is
possible to love God with an extravagance of the whole being, to which
the love of the creature cannot attain. All love is an attempt to break
through the loneliness of individuality, to fuse oneself with something
not oneself, to give and to receive, in all the warmth of natural
desire, that inmost element which remains, so cold and so invincible,
in the midst of the soul. It is a desire of the infinite in humanity,
and, as humanity has its limits, it can but return sadly upon itself
when that limit is reached. Thus human love is not only an ecstasy but
a despair, and the more profound a despair the more ardently it is
returned.

But the love of God, considered only from its human aspect, contains at
least the illusion of infinity. To love God is to love the absolute,
so far as the mind of man can conceive the absolute, and thus, in a
sense, to love God is to possess the absolute, for love has already
possessed that which it apprehends. What the earthly lover realises to
himself as the image of his beloved is, after all, his own vision of
love, not her. God must remain _deus absconditus,_ even to love; but
the lover, incapable of possessing infinity, will have possessed all
of infinity of which he is capable. And his ecstasy will be flawless.
The human mind, meditating on infinity, can but discover perfection
beyond perfection; for it is impossible to conceive of limitation in
any aspect of that which has once been conceived as infinite. In place
of that deception which comes from the shock of a boundary-line beyond
which humanity cannot conceive of humanity, there is only a divine rage
against the limits of human perception, which by their own failure
seem at last to limit for us the infinite itself. For once, love finds
itself bounded only by its own capacity; so far does the love of God
exceed the love of the creature, and so far would it exceed that love
if God did not exist.

But if He does exist! if, outside humanity, a conscient, eternal
perfection, who has made the world in his image, loves the humanity He
has made, and demands love in return! If the spirit of his love is as
a breath over the world, suggesting, strengthening, the love which it
desires, seeking man that man may seek God, itself the impulse which it
humbles itself to accept at man's hands; if indeed,

    Mon Dieu m'a dit: mon fils, il faut m'aimer;

how much more is this love of God, in its inconceivable acceptance
and exchange, the most divine, the only unending intoxication, in
the world! Well, it is this realised sense of communion, point by
point realised, and put into words, more simple, more human, more
instinctive than any poet since the mediæval mystics has found for the
delights of this intercourse, that we find in _Sagesse,_ and in the
other religious poems of Verlaine.

But, with Verlaine, the love of God is not merely a rapture, it is
a thanksgiving for forgiveness. Lying in wait behind all the fair
appearances of the world, he remembers the old enemy, the flesh; and
the sense of sin (that strange paradox of the reason) is childishly
strong in him. He laments his offence, he sees not only the love but
the justice of God, and it seems to him, as in a picture, that the
little hands of the Virgin are clasped in petition for him. Verlaine's
religion is the religion of the Middle Ages. _Je suis catholique,_ he
said to me, _mais ... catholique du moyen-âge!_ He might have written
the ballad which Villon made for his mother, and with the same visual
sense of heaven and hell. Like a child, he tells his sins over,
promises that he has put them behind him, and finds such _naïve,_ human
words to express his gratitude. The Virgin is really, to him, mother
and friend; he delights in the simple, peasant humanity, still visible
in her who is also the Mystical Rose, the Tower of Ivory, the Gate of
Heaven, and who now extends her hands, in the gesture of pardon, from a
throne only just lower than the throne of God.


4

Experience, I have said, taught Verlaine nothing; religion had no more
stable influence upon his conduct then experience. In that apology for
himself which he wrote under the anagram of "Pauvre Lelian," he has
stated the case with his usual sincerity. "I believe," he says, "and I
sin in thought as in action; I believe, and I repent in thought, if no
more. Or again, I believe, and I am a good Christian at this moment; I
believe, and I am a bad Christian the instant after. The remembrance,
the hope, the invocation of a sin delights me, with or without remorse,
sometimes under the very form of sin, and hedged with all its natural
consequences; more often--so strong, so natural and _animal,_ are
flesh and blood--just in the same manner as the remembrances, hopes,
invocations of any carnal freethinker. This delight, I, you, some one
else, writers, it pleases us to put to paper and publish more or less
well expressed: we consign it, in short, into literary form, forgetting
all religious ideas, or not letting one of them escape us. Can any one
in good faith condemn us as poet? A hundred times no." And, indeed, I
would echo, a hundred times no! It is just this apparent complication
of what is really a great simplicity which gives its singular value to
the poetry of Verlaine, permitting it to sum up in itself the whole
paradox of humanity, and especially the weak, passionate, uncertain,
troubled century to which we belong, in which so many doubts,
negations, and distresses seem, now more than ever, to be struggling
towards at least an ideal of spiritual consolation. Verlaine is the
poet of these weaknesses and of that ideal.

[_See also account given in "Bibliography and Notes" page_ 351.]




I. JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS


The novels of Huysmans, however we may regard them as novels,
are, at all events, the sincere and complete expression of a very
remarkable personality. From _Marthe_ to _Là-Bas_ every story, every
volume, disengages the same atmosphere--the atmosphere of a London
November, when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little
miseries of life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable
grotesqueness. Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is
mere sensation--and sensation, after all, is the one certainty in
a world which may be well or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes,
but which is certainly, for each of us, what each of us feels it to
be. To Huysmans the world appears to be a profoundly uncomfortable,
unpleasant, ridiculous place, with a certain solace in various forms
of art, and certain possibilities of at least temporary escape. Part
of his work presents to us a picture of ordinary life as he conceives
it, in its uniform trivial wretchedness; in another part he has
made experiment in directions which have seemed to promise escape,
relief; in yet other portions he has allowed himself the delight of
his sole enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of art. He himself would be the
first to acknowledge--indeed, practically, he has acknowledged that
the particular way in which he sees life is a matter of personal
temperament and constitution, a matter of nerves. The Goncourts have
never tired of insisting on the fact of their _névrose,_ of pointing
out its importance in connection with the form and structure of their
work, their touch on style, even. To them the _maladie fin de siècle_
has come delicately, as to the chlorotic fine ladies of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain: it has sharpened their senses to a point of morbid
acuteness, it has given their work a certain feverish beauty. To
Huysmans it has given the exaggerated horror of whatever is ugly and
unpleasant, with the fatal instinct of discovering, the fatal necessity
of contemplating, every flaw and every discomfort that a somewhat
imperfect world can offer for inspection. It is the transposition
of the ideal. Relative values are lost, for it is the sense of the
disagreeable only that is heightened; and the world, in this strange
disorder of vision, assumes an aspect which can only be compared with
that of a drop of impure water under the microscope. "Nature seen
through a temperament" is Zola's definition of all art. Nothing,
certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a definition of the
art of Huysmans.

To realise how faithfully and how completely Huysmans has revealed
himself in all he has written, it is necessary to know the man. "He
gave me the impression of a cat," some interviewer once wrote of him;
"courteous, perfectly polite, almost amiable, but all nerves, ready to
shoot out his claws at the least word." And indeed, there is something
of his favourite animal about him. The face is grey, wearily alert,
with a look of benevolent malice. At first sight it is commonplace,
the features are ordinary, one seems to have seen it at the Bourse or
the Stock Exchange. But gradually that strange, unvarying expression,
that look of benevolent malice, grows upon you as the influence of the
man makes itself felt. I have seen Huysmans in his office--he is an
employé in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a model employé; I have
seen him in a café, in various houses; but I always see him in memory
as I used to see him at the house of the bizarre Madame X. He leans
back on the sofa, rolling a cigarette between his thin, expressive
fingers, looking at no one and at nothing, while Madame X moves about
with solid vivacity in the midst of her extraordinary menagerie of
_bric-à-brac._ The spoils of all the world are there, in that ncredibly
tiny _salon;_ they lie underfoot, they climb up walls, they cling to
screens, brackets, and tables; one of your elbows menaces a Japanese
toy, the other a Dresden china shepherdess; all the colours of the
rainbow clash in a barbaric discord of notes. And in a corner of this
fantastic room, Huysmans lies back indifferently on the sofa, with the
air of one perfectly resigned to the boredom of life. Something is
said by my learned friend who is to write for the new periodical, or
perhaps it is the young editor of the new periodical who speaks, or
(if that were not impossible) the taciturn Englishman who accompanies
me; and Huysmans, without looking up, and without taking the trouble
to speak very distinctly, picks up the phrase, transforms it, more
likely transpierces it, in a perfectly turned sentence, a phrase of
impromptu elaboration. Perhaps it is only a stupid book that some one
has mentioned, or a stupid woman; as he speaks, the book looms up
before one, becomes monstrous in its dulness, a masterpiece and miracle
of imbecility; the unimportant little woman grows into a slow horror
before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he
seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings
a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every
sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an
idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of
contempt, so profound that it becomes almost pity, for human inbecility.

Yes, that is the true Huysmans, the Huysmans of _A Rebours,_ and it is
just such surroundings that seem to bring out his peculiar quality.
With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this
passion for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so
exclusively an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work
which, being produced to please himself, and being entirely typical
of himself, would be, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary
Decadence. And it is precisely such a book that Huysmans has written,
in the extravagant, astonishing _A Rebours._ All his other books
are a sort of unconscious preparation for this one book, a sort of
inevitable and scarcely necessary sequel to it. They range themselves
along the line of a somewhat erratic development, from Baudelaire,
through Goncourt, by way of Zola, to the surprising originality of so
disconcerting an exception to any and every order of things.

The descendant of a long line of Dutch painters--one of whom, Cornelius
Huysmans, has a certain fame among the lesser landscape men of the
great period--Joris-Karl Huysmans was born at Paris, February 5, 1848.
His first book, _Le Drageoir à Epices,_ published at the age of
twenty-six, is a _pasticcio_ of prose poems, done after Baudelaire, of
little sketches, done after Dutch artists, together with a few studies
of Parisian landscape, done after nature. It shows us the careful,
laboured work of a really artistic temperament; it betrays here and
there, the spirit of acrimonious observation which is to count for so
much with Huysmans--in the crude malice of _L'Extase,_ for example, in
the notation of the "richness of tone," the "superb colouring," of an
old drunkard. And one sees already something of the novelty and the
precision of his description, the novelty and the unpleasantness of the
subjects which he chooses to describe, in this vividly exact picture
of the carcass of a cow hung up outside a butcher's shop: "As in a
hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass. Veins shot
out on every side like trails of bind-weed; dishevelled branch-work
extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of entrails unfurled
their violet-tinted corollas, and big clusters of fat stood out, a
sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh."

In _Marthe: histoire d'une fille,_ which followed in 1876, two years
later, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in _Le
Drageoir à Epices,_ but the book, in its crude attempt to deal
realistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the life
of a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance upon
the somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is important
to remember that _Marthe_ preceded _La Fille Élisa_ and _Nana._ "I
write what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced," says the
brief and defiant preface, "and I write it as well as I can: that is
all. This explanation is not an excuse, it is simply the statement of
the aim that I pursue in art." Explanation or excuse notwithstanding,
the book was forbidden to be sold in France. It is Naturalism in its
earliest and most pitiless stage--Naturalism which commits the error
of evoking no sort of interest in this unhappy creature who rises a
little from her native gutter, only to fall back more woefully into the
gutter again. Goncourt's Élisa at least interests us; Zola's Nana at
all events appeals to our senses. But Marthe is a mere document, like
her story. Notes have been taken--no doubt _sur le vif_--they have been
strung together, and here they are with only an interesting brutality,
a curious sordidness to note, in these descriptions that do duty for
psychology and incident alike, in the general flatness of character,
the general dislocation of episode.

_Les Sœurs Vatard,_ published in 1879, and the short story _Sac au
Dos,_ which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, _Les
Soirées de Médan,_ show the influence of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ rather
than of _Germinie Lacerteux._ For the time the "formula" of Zola
has been accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a
story without a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there
is at all events a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play
of character upon incident. But in _Les Sœurs Vatard_ there is no
reason for the narrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles
of description--the workroom, the rue de Sèvres, the locomotives, the
_Foire du pain d'épice_--which lead to nothing; there are interiors,
there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, Céline and Désirée,
and their lovers; there is what Zola himself described as _tout
ce milieu ouvrier, ce coin de misère et d'ignorance, de tranquille
ordure et d'air naturellement empesté._ And with it all there is a
heavy sense of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in
the book reappears, in vastly better company, in _En Ménage_ (1881),
a novel which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from
_L'Education Sentimentale_--the starting-point of the Naturalistic
novel--than any other novel of the Naturalists.

_En Ménage_ is the story of _"Monsieur Tout-le-monde,_ an insignificant
personality, one of those poor creatures who have not even the
supreme consolation of being able to complain of any injustice in
their fate, for an injustice supposes at all events a misunderstood
merit, a force." André is the reduction to the bourgeois formula of
the invariable hero of Huysmans. He is just enough removed from the
commonplace to suffer from it with acuteness. He cannot get on either
with or without a woman in his establishment. Betrayed by his wife, he
consoles himself with a mistress, and finally goes back to the wife.
And the moral of it all is: "Let us be stupidly comfortable, if we
can, in any way we can: but it is almost certain that we cannot." In
_A Vau-l'Eau,_ a less interesting story which followed _En Ménage,_
the daily misery of the respectable M. Folantin, the government
employé, consists in the impossible search for a decent restaurant,
a satisfactory dinner: for M. Folantin, too, there is only the same
counsel of a desperate, an inevitable resignation. Never has the
intolerable monotony of small inconveniences been so scrupulously, so
unsparingly chronicled, as in these two studies in the heroic degree
of the commonplace. It happens to André, at a certain epoch in his
life, to take back an old servant who had left him many years before.
He finds that she has exactly the same defects as before, and "to find
them there again," comments the author, "did not displease him. He had
been expecting them all the time, he saluted them as old acquaintances,
yet with a certain surprise, notwithstanding, to see them neither
grown nor diminished. He noted for himself with satisfaction that
the stupidity of his servant had remained stationary." On another
page, referring to the inventor of cards, Huysmans defines him as one
who "did something towards suppressing the free exchange of human
imbecility." Having to say in passing that a girl has returned from a
ball, "she was at home again," he observes, "after the half-dried sweat
of the waltzes." In this invariably sarcastic turn of the phrase, this
absoluteness of contempt, this insistence on the disagreeable, we find
the note of Huysmans, particularly at this point in his career, when,
like Flaubert, he forced himself to contemplate and to analyse the more
mediocre manifestations of _la bêtise humaine._

There is a certain perversity in this furious contemplation of
stupidity, this fanatical insistence on the exasperating attraction of
the sordid and the disagreeable; and it is by such stages that we come
to _A Rebours._ But on the way we have to note a volume of _Croquis
Parisiens_ (1880), in which the virtuoso who is a part of the artist
in Huysmans has executed some of his most astonishing feats; and a
volume on L'_Art Moderne_ (1883), in which the most modern of artists
in literature has applied himself to the criticism--the revelation,
rather--of modernity in art. In the latter, Huysmans was the first
to declare the supremacy of Degas--"the greatest artist that we
possess to-day in France"--while announcing with no less fervour the
remote, reactionary, and intricate genius of Gustave Moreau. He was
the first to discover Raffaëlli, "the painter of poor people and the
open sky--a sort of Parisian Millet," as he called him; the first to
discover Forain, _"le véritable peintre de la fille"_; the first to
discover Odilon Redon, to do justice to Pissaro and Paul Gauguin. No
literary artist since Baudelaire has made so valuable a contribution
to art criticism, and the _Curiosités Esthétiques_ are, after all,
less exact in their actual study, less revolutionary, and less really
significant in their critical judgments, than L'_Art Moderne._ The
_Croquis Parisiens,_ which, in its first edition, was illustrated
by etchings of Forain and Raffaëlli, is simply the attempt to do in
words what those artists have done in aquafortis or in pastel. There
are the same Parisian types--the omnibus-conductor, the washerwoman,
the man who sells hot chestnuts--the same impressions of a sick and
sorry landscape, La Bièvre, for preference, in all its desolate and
lamentable attraction; there is a marvellously minute series of
studies of that typically Parisian music-hall, the Folies-Bergère.
Huysmans' faculty of description is here seen at its fullest stretch of
agility; precise, suggestive, with all the outline and colour of actual
brush-work, it might even be compared with the art of Degas, only there
is just that last touch wanting, that breath of palpitating life, which
is what we always get in Degas, what we never get in Huysmans.

In _L'Art Moderne,_ speaking of the water-colours of Forain, Huysmans
attributes to them "a specious and _cherché_ art, demanding, for its
appreciation, a certain initiation, a certain special sense." To
realise the full value, the real charm, of _A Rebours,_ some such
initiation might be deemed necessary. In its fantastic unreality, its
exquisite artificiality, it is the natural sequel of _En Ménage_ and
_A Vau-l'Eau,_ which are so much more acutely sordid than the most
sordid kind of real life; it is the logical outcome of that hatred
and horror of human mediocrity, of the mediocrity of daily existence,
which we have seen to be the special form of Huysmans' _névrose._ The
motto, taken from a thirteenth-century mystic, Ruysbroeck the Admirable,
is a cry for escape, for the "something in the world that is there in
no satisfying measure, or not at all": _Il faut que je me réjouisse
au-dessus du temps ... quoique le monde ait horreur de ma joie et
que sa grossièreté ne sache pas ce que je veux dire._ And the book
is the history of a _Thebaïde raffinée_--a voluntary exile from the
world in a new kind of "Palace of Art." Des Esseintes, the vague but
typical hero, is one of those half-pathological cases which help us to
understand the full meaning of the word _décadence,_ which they partly
represent. The last descendant of an ancient family, his impoverished
blood tainted by all sorts of excesses, Des Esseintes finds himself
at thirty _sur le chemin, dégrisé, seul, abominablement lassé._ He
has already realised that "the world is divided, in great part, into
swaggerers and simpletons." His one desire is to "hide himself away,
far from the world, in some retreat, where he might deaden the sound
of the loud rumbling of inflexible life, as one covers the street with
straw, for sick people." This retreat he discovers, just far enough
from Paris to be safe from disturbance, just near enough to be saved
from the nostalgia of the unattainable. He succeeds in making his house
a paradise of the artificial, choosing the tones of colour that go
best with candle-light, for it need scarcely be said that Des Esseintes
has effected a simple transposition of night and day. His disappearance
from the world has been complete; it seems to him that the "comfortable
desert" of his exile need never cease to be just such a luxurious
solitude; it seems to him that he has attained his desire, that he has
attained to happiness.

Disturbing physical symptoms harass him from time to time, but they
pass. It is an effect of nerves that now and again he is haunted by
remembrance; the recurrence of a perfume, the reading of a book, brings
back a period of life when his deliberate perversity was exercised
actively in matters of the senses. There are his fantastic banquets,
his fantastic amours: the _repas de deuil,_ Miss Urania the acrobat,
the episode of the ventriloquist-woman and the reincarnation of the
Sphinx and the Chimæra of Flaubert, the episode of the boy _chez_
Madame Laure. A casual recollection brings up the schooldays of his
childhood with the Jesuits, and with that the beliefs of childhood,
the fantasies of the Church, the Catholic abnegation of the _Imitatio_
joining so strangely with the final philosophy of Schopenhauer.
At times his brain is haunted by social theories--his dull hatred
of the ordinary in life taking form in the region of ideas. But in
the main he feeds himself, with something of the satisfaction of
success, on the strange food for the sensations with which he has so
laboriously furnished himself. There are his books, and among these a
special library of the Latin writers of the Decadence. Exasperated by
Virgil, profoundly contemptuous of Horace, he tolerates Lucan (which
is surprising), adores Petronius (as well he might), and delights
in the neologisms and the exotic novelty of Apuleius. His curiosity
extends to the later Christian poets--from the coloured verse of
Claudian down to the verse which is scarcely verse of the incoherent
ninth century. He is, of course, an amateur of exquisite printing, of
beautiful bindings, and possesses an incomparable Baudelaire _(édition
tirée à un exemplaire),_ a unique Mallarmé. Catholicism being the
adopted religion of the Decadence--for its venerable age, valuable in
such matters as the age of an old wine, its vague excitation of the
senses, its mystical picturesqueness--Des Esseintes has a curious
collection of the later Catholic literature, where Lacordaire and
the Comte de Falloux, Veuillot and Ozanam, find their place side by
side with the half-prophetic, half-ingenious Hello, the amalgam of a
monstrous mysticism and a casuistical sensuality, Barbey d'Aurevilly.
His collection of "profane" writers is small, but it is selected for
the qualities of exotic charm that have come to be his only care in
art--for the somewhat diseased, or the somewhat artificial beauty
that alone can strike, a responsive thrill from his exacting nerves.
"Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in order
to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness
demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route,
and sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated
deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which
he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or
of solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He
delighted in a work of art both for what it was in itself and for
what it could lend him; he would fain go along with it, thanks to it,
as though sustained by an adjuvant, as though borne in a vehicle,
into a sphere where his sublimated sensations would wake in him an
unaccustomed stir, the cause of which he would long and vainly seek
to determine." So he comes to care supremely for Baudelaire, "who,
more than any other, possessed the marvellous power of rendering,
with a strange sanity of expression, the most fleeting, the most
wavering morbid states of exhausted minds, of desolate souls." In
Flaubert he prefers _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine;_ in Goncourt, _La
Faustin;_ in Zola, _La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret-_ the exceptional, the
most remote and _recherché_ outcome of each temperament. And of the
three it is the novel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special
intimacy--that novel which, more than any other, seems to express, in
its exquisitely perverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which
Des Esseintes is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the
fine perfume, the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that
great poet (forgetting, strangely, Arthur Rimbaud) he places two poets
who are curious--the disconcerting, tumultuous Tristan Corbière, and
the painted and bejewelled Théodore Hannon. With Edgar Poe he has
the instinctive sympathy which drew Baudelaire to the enigmatically
perverse Decadent of America; he delights, sooner than all the world,
in the astonishing, unbalanced, unachieved genius of Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam. Finally, it is in Stéphane Mallarmé that he finds the
incarnation of "the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in
its organism, weakened in its ideas by age, exhausted by the excesses
of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosity which fevers sick people,
and yet hastening to say everything, now at the end, torn by the wish
_to_ atone for all its omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath its subtlest
memories of sorrow on its death-bed."

But it is not on books alone that Des Esseintes nurses his sick and
craving fancy. He pushes his delight in the artificial to the last
limits, and diverts himself with a bouquet of jewels, a concert of
flowers, an orchestra of liqueurs, an orchestra of perfumes. In flowers
he prefers the real flowers that imitate artificial ones. It is the
monstrosities of nature, the offspring of unnatural adulteries, that
he cherishes in the barbarically coloured flowers, the plants with
barbaric names, the carnivorous plants of the Antilles--morbid horrors
of vegetation, chosen, not for their beauty, but for their strangeness.
And his imagination plays harmonies on the sense of taste, like
combinations of music, from the flute-like sweetness of anisette, the
trumpet-note of kirsch, the eager yet velvety sharpness of curaçao, the
clarionet. He combines scents, weaving them into odorous melodies, with
effects like those of the refrains of certain poems, employing, for
example, the method of Baudelaire in _L'Irréparable_ and _Le Balcon,_
where the last line of the stanza is the echo of the first, in the
languorous progression of the melody. And above all he has his few,
carefully chosen pictures, with their diverse notes of strange beauty
and strange terror--the two Salomés of Gustave Moreau, the "Religious
Persecutions" of Jan Luyken, the opium-dreams of Odilon Redon. His
favourite artist is Gustave Moreau, and it is on this superb and
disquieting picture that he cares chiefly to dwell.

A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath innumerable
arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled
with vari-coloured bricks, set with mosaics, incrusted with lapis
lazuli and sardonyx, In a palace like the basilica of an architecture
at once Mussulman and Byzantine. In the centre of the tabernacle
surmounting the altar, fronted with rows of circular steps, sat the
Tetrarch Herod, the tiara on his head, his legs pressed together, his
hands on his knees. His face was yellow, parchment-like, annulated
with wrinkles, withered with age; his long beard floated like a white
cloud on the jewelled stars that constellated the robe of netted old
across his breast. Around this statue, motionless, frozen in the
sacred pose of a Hindu god, perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of
vapour, pierced, as by the phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire
of precious stones set in the sides of the throne; then the vapour
mounted, unrolling itself beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled
with the powdered gold of great sunrays, fallen jrom the domes.

In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of this
church, Salomé, her left arm extended in a gesture of command, her bent
right arm holding at the level of the face a great lotus, advances
slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who crouches on
the floor.

With collected, solemn, almost august countenance, she begins the
lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses of the aged
Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of the
whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her skin,
her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal robe,
sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold, the jewelled
breastplate, whose every stitch is a precious stone, bursts into flame,
scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned, tea-rose flesh,
like splendid insects with dazzling wings, marbled with carmine,
dotted with morning gold, diapered with steel-blue, streaked with
peacock-green. . . . . . . . . In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived
on no Scriptural data, Des Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the
strange, superhuman Salomé that he had dreamed. She was no more the
mere dancing-girl who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears
a cry of desire from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her
palpitating body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the
will, of a king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible
Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen
among, many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has
hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to
her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.

It is in such a "Palace of Art" that Des Esseintes would recreate his
already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion
is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This
one episode of action, this one touch of realism in a book given over
to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected
voyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has been
reading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours
of those ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves
upon his imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of
that _pays de brume et de bone,_ and suddenly, stung by the unwonted
desire for change, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract
himself by a visit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he
takes a cab to the office of _Galignani's Messenger,_ fancying himself,
as the rain-drops rattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the
windows, already in the midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt.
He reaches _Galignani's Messenger,_ and there, turning over Baedekers
and Mur-rays, loses himself in dreams of an imagined London. He buys a
Baedeker, and, to pass the time, enters the "Bodéga" at the corner of
the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded
with Englishmen: he sees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the
unfamiliar accents, all the characters of Dickens--a whole England
of caricature; as he drinks his Amontillado, the recollection of Poe
puts a new horror into the good-humoured faces about him. Leaving the
"Bodéga," he steps out again into the rain-swept street, regains his
cab, and drives to the English tavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has
just time for dinner, and he finds a place beside the _insulaires,_
with "their porcelain eyes, their crimson cheeks," and orders a heavy
English dinner, which he washes down with ale and porter, seasoning
his coffee, as he imagines we do in England, with gin. As time passes,
and the hour of the train draws near, he begins to reflect vaguely on
his project; he recalls the disillusion of the visit he had once paid
to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion await him in London? "Why
travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a chair? Was he not at
London already, since its odours, its atmosphere, its inhabitants, its
food, its utensils, were all about him?" The train is due, but he does
not stir. "I have felt and seen," he says to himself, "what I wanted
to feel and see. I have been saturated with English life all this
time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy change of place, these
imperishable sensations." So he gathers together his luggage, and goes
home again, resolving never to abandon the "docile phantasmagoria of
the brain" for the mere realities of the actual world. But his nervous
malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and brought him back
so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by hallucinations,
haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid exaltation of
Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music that besieges his
brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him, at the end
of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, the normal
conditions, with just that chance of escape from death or madness.
So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of a strange,
attractive folly--in itself partly a serious ideal (which indeed is
Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. Des Esseintes,
though studied from a real man, who is known to those who know a
certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: he is
the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a
sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in
the literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a
spiritual epoch.

_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that
date Huysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which
is merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_(1887)
and _Là-Bas_(1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but
neither of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism,
_Certains_ (1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on
Félicien Rops, the etcher of the fantastically erotic. _En Rade_ is a
sort of deliberately exaggerated record--vision rather then record--of
the disillusions of a country sojourn, as they affect the disordered
nerves of a town _névrose._ The narrative is punctuated by nightmares,
marvellously woven out of nothing, and with no psychological value--the
human part of the book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best,
the representation of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the
tragic ennui of the country. There is a cat which becomes interesting
in its agonies; but the long boredom of the man and woman is only
too faithfully shared with the reader. _Là-Bas_ is a more artistic
creation, on a more solid foundation. It is a study of Satanism,
a dexterous interweaving of the history of Gilles de Retz (the
traditional Bluebeard) with the contemporary manifestations of the
Black Art. "The execration of impotence, the hate of the mediocre--that
is perhaps one of the most indulgent definitions of Diabolism," says
Huysmans, somewhere in the book, and it is on this side that one finds
the link of connection with the others of that series of pessimist
studies in life. _Un naturalisme spiritualiste,_ he defines his own
art at this point in its development; and it is in somewhat the
"documentary" manner that he applies himself to the study of these
strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a real mystical corruption
that does actually exist in our midst. I do not know whether the
monstrous tableau of the Black Mass--so marvellously, so revoltingly
described in the central episode of the book--is still enacted in our
days, but I do know that all but the most horrible practices of the
sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet performed, from time
to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute. The character of
Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in literature,
to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is successful
would be to assume that the thing is possible, which one hesitates to
do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind, than _A
Rebours._ But it is not, like that, the study of an exception which has
become a type. It is the study of an exception which does not profess
to be anything but a disease.

Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to
estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much
repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make
his work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so
artificial and _recherché_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptional
characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction
impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any
master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had
but to say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des écrivains qui out du talent
et d'autres qui n'en out pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques,
décadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ça m'est égal! il s'agit pour
moi d'avoir du talent, et voilà tout!_ But, as we have seen, he has
undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first
he has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and,
even in _Le Drageoir à Epices,_ we find such daring combinations as
this _(Camaïeu Rouge)--Cette fanfare de rouge m'étourdissait; cette
gamme d'une intensité furieuse, d'une violence inouïe, m'aveuglait._
Working upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two
great modern stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style
of his own, in which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the
sense of colour. He manipulates the French language with a freedom
sometimes barbarous, "dragging his images by the heels or the hair"
(in the admirable phrase of Léon Bloy) "up and down the worm-eaten
staircase of terrified syntax," gaining, certainly, the effects at
which he aims. He possesses, in the highest degree, that _style tacheté
et faisandé_--high-flavoured and spotted with corruption--that he
attributes to Goncourt and Verlaine. And with this audacious and
barbaric profusion of words--chosen always for their colour and their
vividly expressive quality--he is able to describe the essentially
modern aspects of things as no one had ever described them before. No
one before him had ever so realised the perverse charm of the sordid,
the perverse charm of the artificial. Exceptional always, it is for
such qualities as these, rather than for the ordinary qualities of the
novelist, that he is remarkable. His stories are without incident,
they are constructed to go on until they stop, they are almost without
characters. His psychology is a matter of the sensations, and chiefly
the visual sensations. The moral nature is ignored, the emotions
resolve themselves for the most part into a sordid ennui, rising at
times into a rage at existence. The protagonist of every book is not
so much a character as a bundle of impressions and sensations--the
vague outline of a single consciousness, his own. But it is that single
consciousness--in this morbidly personal writer--with which we are
concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all their strangeness, their
charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they are, of much beside
himself, are certainly the expression of a personality as remarkable as
that of any contemporary writer.

1892.




II. THE LATER HUYSMANS

In the preface to his first novel, _Marthe: histoire d'une fille,_
thirty years ago, Huysmans defined his theory of art in this defiant
phrase: "I write what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced,
and I write it as well as I can: that is all." Ten or twelve years
ago, he could still say, in answer to an interviewer who asked him his
opinion of Naturalism: "At bottom, there are writers who have talent
and others who have not; let them be Naturalists, Romantics, Decadents,
what you will, it is all the same to me: I only want to know if they
have talent." Such theoretical liberality, in a writer of original
talent, is a little disconcerting: it means that he is without a theory
of his own, that he is not yet conscious of having chosen his own way.
And, indeed, it is only with _En Route_ that Huysmans can be said to
have discovered the direction in which he had really been travelling
from the beginning.

In a preface written not long since for a limited edition of _A
Rebours,_ Huysmans confessed that he had never been conscious of the
direction in which he was travelling. "My life and my literature,"
he affirmed, "have undoubtedly a certain amount of passivity, of the
incalculable, of a direction not mine. I have simply obeyed; I have
been led by what are called 'mysterious ways.'" He is speaking of the
conversion which took him to La Trappe in 1892, but the words apply
to the whole course of his career as a man of letters. In _Là-Bas,_
which is a sort of false start, he had, indeed, realised, though for
himself at that time ineffectually, that "it is essential to preserve
the veracity of the document, the precision of detail, the fibrous and
nervous language of Realism, but it is equally essential to become
the well-digger of the soul, and not to attempt to explain what is
mysterious by mental maladies.... It is essential, in a word, to follow
the great road so deeply dug out by Zola, but it is necessary also to
trace a parallel pathway in the air, and to grapple with the within
and the after, to create, in a word, a spiritual Naturalism." This
is almost a definition of the art of _En Route,_ where this spiritual
realism is applied to the history of a soul, a consciousness; in _La
Cathédrale_ the method has still further developed, and Huysmans
becomes, in his own way, a Symbolist.

To the student of psychology few more interesting cases could be
presented than the development of Huysmans. From the first he has
been a man "for whom the visible world existed," indeed, but as the
scene of a slow martyrdom. The world has always appeared to him to
be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, and ridiculous place; and
it has been a necessity of his temperament to examine it minutely,
with all the patience of disgust, and a necessity of his method to
record it with an almost ecstatic hatred. In his first book, _Le
Drageoir à Epices,_ published at the age of twenty-six, we find him
seeking his colour by preference in a drunkard's cheek or a carcase
outside a butcher's shop. _Marthe,_ published at Brussels in 1876,
anticipates _La Fille Élisa_ and _Nana,_ but it has a crude brutality
of observation in which there is hardly a touch of pity. _Les Sœurs
Vatard_ is a frame without a picture, but in _En Ménage_ the dreary
tedium of existence is chronicled in all its insignificance with a kind
of weary and aching hate. "We, too," is its conclusion, "by leave of
the everlasting stupidity of things, may, like our fellow-citizens,
live stupid and respected." The fantastic unreality, the exquisite
artificiality of _A Rebours,_ the breviary of the decadence, is the
first sign of that possible escape which Huysmans has always foreseen
in the direction of art, but which he is still unable to make into
more than an artificial paradise, in which beauty turns to a cruel
hallucination and imprisons the soul still more fatally. The end is
a cry of hopeless hope, in which Huysmans did not understand the
meaning till later: "Lord, have pity of the Christian who doubts, of
the sceptic who would fain believe, of the convict of life who sets
sail alone by night, under a firmament lighted only by the consoling
watch-lights of the old hope."

In _Là-Bas_ we are in yet another stage of this strange pilgrim's
progress. The disgust which once manifested itself in the merely
external revolt against the ugliness of streets, the imbecility of
faces, has become more and more internalised, and the attraction of
what is perverse in the unusual beauty of art has led, by some obscure
route, to the perilous halfway house of a corrupt mysticism. The book,
with its monstrous pictures of the Black Mass and of the spiritual
abominations of Satanism, is one step further in the direction of
the supernatural; and this, too, has its desperate, unlooked-for
conclusion: "Christian glory is a laughing-stock to our age; it
contaminates the supernatural and casts out the world to come." In
_Là-Bas_ we go down into the deepest gulf; _En Route_ sets us one stage
along a new way, and at this turning-point begins the later Huysmans.

The old conception of the novel as an amusing tale of adventures,
though it has still its apologists in England, has long since ceased
in France to mean anything more actual than powdered wigs and lace
ruffles. Like children who cry to their elders for "a story, a story,"
the English public still wants its plot, its heroine, its villain.
That the novel should be psychological was a discovery as early as
Benjamin Constant, whose _Adolphe_ anticipates _Le Rouge et le Noir,_
that rare, revealing, yet somewhat arid masterpiece of Stendhal.
But that psychology could be carried so far into the darkness of
the soul, that the flaming walls of the world themselves faded to a
glimmer, was a discovery which had been made by no novelist before
Huysmans wrote _En Route._ At once the novel showed itself capable
of competing, on their own ground, with poetry, with the great
"confessions," with philosophy. _En Route_ is perhaps the first novel
which does not et out with the aim of amusing its readers. It offers
you no more entertainment than _Paradise Lost_ or the _Confessions_
of St. Augustine, and it is possible to consider it on the same
level. The novel, which, after having chronicled the adventures of
the Vanity Fairs of this world, has set itself with admirable success
to analyse the amorous and ambitious and money-making intelligence of
the conscious and practical self, sets itself at last to the final
achievement: the revelation of the sub-conscious self, no longer the
intelligence, but the soul. Here, then, purged of the distraction of
incident, liberated from the bondage of a too realistic conversation,
in which the aim had been to convey the very gesture of breathing
life, internalised to a complete liberty, in which, just because it is
so absolutely free, art is able to accept, without limiting itself,
the expressive medium of a convention, we have in the novel a new
form, which may be at once a confession and a decoration, the soul
and a pattern. This story of a conversion is a new thing in modern
French; it is a confession, a self-auscultation of the soul; a kind
of thinking aloud. It fixes, in precise words, all the uncertainties,
the contradictions, the absurd unreasonableness and not less absurd
logic, which distract man's brain in the passing over him of sensation
and circumstance. And all this thinking is concentrated on one end,
is concerned with the working out, in his own singular way, of one
man's salvation. There is a certain dry hard casuistry, a subtlety and
closeness almost ecclesiastical, in the investigation of an obscure and
yet definite region, whose intellectual passions are as varied and as
tumultuous as those of the heart. Every step is taken deliberately,
is weighed, approved, condemned, viewed from this side and from that,
and at the same time one feels behind all this reasoning an impulsion
urging a soul onward against its will. In this astonishing passage,
through Satanism to faith, in which the cry, "I am so weary of myself,
so sick of my miserable existence," echoes through page after page,
until despair dies into conviction, the conviction of "the uselessness
of concerning oneself about anything but mysticism and the liturgy,
of thinking about anything but about, God," it is impossible not to
see the sincerity of an actual, unique experience. The force of mere
curiosity can go far, can penetrate to a certain depth; yet there is a
point at which mere curiosity, even that of genius, comes to an end;
and we are left to the individual soul's apprehension of what seems
to it the reality of spiritual things. Such a personal apprehension
comes to us out of this book, and at the same time, just as in the days
when he forced language to express, in a more coloured and pictorial
way than it had ever expressed before, the last escaping details of
material things, so, in this analysis of the aberrations and warfares,
the confessions and trials of the soul in penitence, Huysmans has found
words for even the most subtle and illusive aspects of that inner life
which he has come, at the last, to apprehend.

In _La Cathédrale_ we are still occupied with this sensitive,
lethargic, persevering soul, but with that soul in one of its longest
halts by the way, as it undergoes the slow, permeating influence of
_"la Cathédrale mystique par excellence,"_ the cathedral of Chartres.
And the greater part of the book is taken up with a study of this
cathedral, of that elaborate and profound symbolism by which "the soul
of sanctuaries" slowly reveals itself _(quel laconisme hermétique!)_
with a sort of parallel interpretation of the symbolism which the
Church of the Middle Ages concealed or revealed in colours, precious
stones, plants, animals, numbers, odours, and in the Bible itself, in
the setting together of the Old and New Testaments.

No doubt, to some extent this book is less interesting than _En
Route,_ in the exact proportion in which everything in the world is
less interesting than the human soul. There are times when Durtal is
almost forgotten, and, unjustly enough, it may seem as if we are given
this archæology, these bestiaries, for their own sake. To fall into
this error is to mistake the whole purpose of the book, the whole
extent of the discovery in art which Huysmans has been one of the first
to make.

For in _La Cathédrale_ Huysmans does but carry further the principle
which he had perceived in _En Route,_ showing, as he does, how inert
matter, the art of stones, the growth of plants, the unconscious life
of beasts, may be brought under the same law of the soul, may obtain,
through symbol, a spiritual existence. He is thus but extending the
domain of the soul while he may seem to be limiting or ignoring it;
and Durtal may well stand aside for a moment, in at least the energy
of contemplation, while he sees, with a new understanding, the very
sight of his eyes, the very staff of his thoughts, taking life before
him, a life of the same substance as his own. What is Symbolism if
not an establishing of the links which hold the world together, the
affirmation of an eternal, minute, intricate, almost invisible life,
which runs through the whole universe? Every age has its own symbols;
but a symbol once perfectly expressed, that symbol remains, as Gothic
architecture remains the very soul of the Middle Ages. To get at that
truth which is all but the deepest meaning of beauty, to find that
symbol which is its most adequate expression, is in itself a kind of
creation; and that is what Huysmans does for us in _La Cathédrale._
More and more he has put aside all the profane and accessible and
outward pomp of writing for an inner and more severe beauty of perfect
truth. He has come to realise that truth can be reached and revealed
only by symbol. Hence, all that description, that heaping up of detail,
that passionately patient elaboration: all means to an end, not, as you
may hastily incline to think, ends in themselves.

It is curious to observe how often an artist perfects a particular
means of expression long before he has any notion of what to do with
it. Huysmans began by acquiring so astonishing a mastery of description
that he could describe the inside of a cow hanging in a butcher's shop
as beautifully as if it were a casket of jewels. The little work-girls
of his early novels were taken for long walks, in which they would
have seen nothing but the arm on which they leant and the milliners'
shops which they passed; and what they did not see was described,
marvellously, in twenty pages.

Huysmans is a brain all eye, a brain which sees even ideas as if they
had a superficies. His style is always the same, whether he writes of
a butcher's shop or of a stained-glass window; it is the immediate
expression of a way of seeing, so minute and so intense that it
becomes too emphatic for elegance and too coloured for atmosphere
or composition, always ready to sacrifice euphony to either fact or
colour. He cares only to give you the thing seen, exactly as he sees
it, with all his love or hate, and with all the exaggeration which
that feeling brings into it. And he loves beauty as a bulldog loves
its mistress: by growling at all her enemies. He honours wisdom by
annihilating stupidity. His art of painting in words resembles Monet's
art of painting With his brush: there is the same power of rendering
a vivid effect, almost deceptively, with a crude and yet sensitive
realism. _"C'est pour la gourmandise de l'œil un gala de teintes"_
he says of the provision cellars at Hamburg; and this greed of the eye
has eaten up in him almost every other sense. Even of music he writes
as a deaf man with an eye for colour might write, to whom a musician
had explained certain technical means of expression in music. No one
has ever invented such barbarous and exact metaphors for the rendering
of visual sensations. Properly, there is no metaphor; the words say
exactly what they mean; they become figurative, as we call it, in their
insistence on being themselves! fact.

Huysmans knows that the motive force of, the sentence lies in the
verbs, and his verbs: are the most singular, precise, and expressive in
any language. But in subordinating, as he does, every quality to that
of sharp, telling truth, the truth of extremes, his style loses charm;
yet it can be dazzling; it has the solidity of those walls encrusted
with gems which are to be seen in a certain chapel in Prague; it blazes
with colour, and arabesques into a thousand fantastic patterns.

And now all that laboriously acquired mastery finds at last its use,
lending itself to the new spirit with a wonderful docility. At last the
idea which is beyond reality has been found, not where Des Esseintes
sought it, and a new meaning comes into what had once been scarcely
more than patient and wrathful observation. The idea is there, visible,
in his cathedral, like the sun which flashes into unity, into meaning,
into intelligible beauty the bewildering lozenges of colour, the
inextricable trails of lead, which go to make up the picture in one
of its painted windows. What, for instance, could be more precise in
its translation of the different aspects under which the cathedral of
Chartres can be seen, merely as colour, than this one sentence: "Seen
as a whole, under a clear sky, its grey silvers, and, if the sun shines
upon it, turns pale yellow and then golden; seen close, its skin is
like that of a nibbled biscuit, with its silicious limestone, eaten
into holes; sometimes, when the sun is setting, it turns crimson, and
rises up like a monstrous and delicate shrine, rose and green; and, at
twilight, turns blue, then seems to evaporate as it fades into violet."
Or, again, in a passage which comes nearer to the conventional idea
of eloquence, how absolute an avoidance of a conventional phrase, a
word used for its merely oratorical value: "High up, in space, like
salamanders, human beings, with burning faces and flaming robes, lived
in a firmament of fire; but these conflagrations were circumscribed,
limited by an incombustible frame of darker glass, which beat back the
clear young joy of the flames; by that kind of melancholy, that more
serious and more aged aspect, which is taken by the duller colours.
The hue and cry of reds, the limpid security of whites, the reiterated
halleluias of yellows, the virginal glory of blues, all the quivering
hearth-glow of painted glass, dies away as it came near this border
coloured with the rust of iron, with the russet of sauce, with the
harsh violet of sandstone, with bottle-green, with the brown of
touchwood, with sooty black, with ashen grey."

This, in its excess of exactitude (how mediæval a quality!)
becomes, on one page, a comparison of the tower without a spire to
an unsharpened pencil which cannot write the prayers of earth upon
the sky. But for the most part it is a consistent humanising of too
objectively visible things a disengaging of the sentiment which
exists in them, which is one of the secrets of their appeal to us,
but which for the most part we overlook as we set ourselves to add
up the shapes and colours which have enchanted us. To Huysmans this
artistic discovery has come, perhaps in the most effectual way, but
certainly in the way least probable in these days, through faith, a
definite religious faith; so that, beginning tentatively, he has come,
at last, to believe in the Catholic Church as a monk of the Middle Ages
believed in it. And there is no doubt that to Huysmans this abandonment
to religion has brought, among other gifts, a certain human charity
in which he was notably lacking, removing at once one of his artistic
limitations. It has softened his contempt of humanity; it has broadened
his outlook on the world. And the sense, diffused through the whole of
this book, of the living and beneficent reality of the Virgin, of her
real presence in the cathedral built in her honour and after her own
image, brings a strange and touching kind of poetry into these closely
and soberly woven pages.

From this time forward, until his death, Huysmans is seen purging
himself of his realism, coming closer and closer to that spiritual
Naturalism which he had invented, an art made out of an apprehension
of the inner meaning of those things which he still saw with the old
tenacity of vision. Nothing is changed in him and yet all is changed.
The disgust of the world deepens through _L'Oblat,_ which is the last
stage but one in the pilgrimage which begins with _En Route._ It
seeks an escape in poring, with a dreadful diligence, over a saint's
recorded miracles, in the life of _Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam,_ which
is mediæval in its precise acceptance of every horrible detail of the
story. _Les Foules de Lourdes_ has the same minute attentiveness to
horror, but with a new pity in it, and a way of giving thanks to the
Virgin, which is in Huysmans yet another escape from his disgust of
the world. But it is in the great chapter on Satan as the creator of
ugliness that his work seems to end where it had begun, in the service
of art, now come from a great way off to join itself with the service
of God, And the whole soul of Huysmans characterises itself in the turn
of a single phrase there: that "art is the only clean thing on earth,
except holiness."




ARTHUR RIMBAUD


That story of the Arabian Nights, which is at the same time a true
story, the life of Rimbaud, has been told, for the first time, in
the extravagant but valuable book of an anarchist of letters, who
writes under the name of Paterne Berrichon, and who has since married
Rimbaud's sister. _La Vie de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud_ is full of curiosity
for those who have been mystified by I know not what legends, invented
to give wonder to a career itself more wonderful than any of the
inventions. The man who died at Marseilles, at the Hospital of the
Conception, on March 10 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, _négociant,_
as the register of his death describes him, was a writer of genius,
an innovator in verse and prose, who had written all his poetry by
the age of nineteen, and all his prose by a year or two later. He had
given up literature to travel hither and thither, first in Europe, then
in Africa; he had been an engineer, a leader of caravans, a merchant
of precious merchandise. And this man, who had never written down a
line after those astonishing early experiments, was heard, in his last
delirium, talking of precisely such visions as those which had haunted
his youth, and using, says his sister, "expressions of a singular and
penetrating charm" to render these sensations of visionary countries.
Here certainly is one of the most curious problems of literature: is it
a problem of which we can discover the secret?

Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born at Charleville, in the Ardennes,
October 28, 1854. His father, of whom he saw little, was a captain
in the army; his mother, of peasant origin, was severe, rigid and
unsympathetic. At school he was an unwilling but brilliant scholar,
and by his fifteenth year was well acquainted with Latin literature
and intimately with French literature. It was in that year that he
began to write poems from the first curiously original: eleven poems
dating from that year are to be found in his collected works. When he
was sixteen he decided that he had had enough of school, and enough
of home. Only Paris existed: he must go to Paris. The first time he
went without a ticket; he spent, indeed, fifteen days in Paris, but
he spent them in Mazas, from which he was released and restored to
his home by his schoolmaster. The second time, a few days later, he
sold his watch, which paid for his railway ticket. This time he threw
himself on the hospitality of André Gill, a painter and verse-writer,
of some little notoriety then, whose address he had happened to come
across. The uninvited guest was not welcomed, and after some penniless
days in Paris he tramped back to Charleville. The third time (he had
waited five months, writing poems, and discontented to be only writing
poems) he made his way to Paris on foot, in a heat of revolutionary
sympathy, to offer himself to the insurgents of the Commune. Again he
had to return on foot. Finally, having learnt with difficulty that a
man is not taken at his own valuation until he has proved his right to
be so accepted, he sent up the manuscript of his poems to Verlaine.
The manuscript contained _Le Bateau Ivre, Les Premières Communions, Ma
Bohème, Roman, Les Effarés,_ and, indeed, all but a few of the poems
he ever wrote. Verlaine was overwhelmed with delight, and invited him
to Paris. A local admirer lent him the money to get there, and from
October, 1871, to July, 1872, he was Verlaine's guest.

The boy of seventeen, already a perfectly original poet, and beginning
to be an equally original prose-writer, astonished the whole Parnasse,
Banville, Hugo himself. On Verlaine his influence was more profound.
The meeting brought about one of those lamentable and admirable
disasters which make and unmake careers. Verlaine has told us in his
_Confessions_ that, "in the beginning, there was no question of any
sort of affection or sympathy between two natures so different as
that of the poet of the _Assis_ and mine, but simply of an extreme
admiration and astonishment before this boy of sixteen, who had already
written things, as Fénéon has excellently said, 'perhaps outside
literature.'" This admiration and astonishment passed gradually into
a more personal feeling, and it was under the influence of Rimbaud
that the long vagabondage of Verlaine's life began. The two poets
wandered together through Belgium, England, and again Belgium, from
July, 1872, to August, 1873, when there occurred that tragic parting at
Brussels which left Verlaine a prisoner for eighteen months, and sent
Rimbaud back to his family. He had already written all the poetry and
prose that he was ever to write, and in 1873 he printed at Brussels
_Une Saison en Enfer._ It was the only book he himself ever gave to
the press, and no sooner was it printed than he destroyed the whole
edition, with the exception of a few copies, of which only Verlaine's
copy, I believe, still exists. Soon began new wanderings, with their
invariable return to the starting-point of Charleville: a few days
in Paris, a year in England, four months in Stuttgart (where he was
visited by Verlaine), Italy, France again, Vienna, Java, Holland,
Sweden, Egypt, Cyprus, Abyssinia, and then nothing but Africa, until
the final return to France. He had been a teacher of French in England,
a seller of key-rings in the streets of Paris, had unloaded vessels
in the ports, and helped to gather in the harvest in the country;
he had been a volunteer in the Dutch army, a military engineer, a
trader; and now physical sciences had begun to attract his insatiable
curiosity, and dreams of the fabulous East began to resolve themselves
into dreams of a romantic commerce with the real East. He became a
merchant of coffee, perfumes, ivory, and gold, in the interior of
Africa; then an explorer, a predecessor, and in his own regions, of
Marchand. After twelve years' wandering and exposure in Africa he was
attacked by a malady of the knee, which rapidly became worse. He was
transported first to Aden, then to Marseilles, where, in May, 1891, his
leg was amputated. Further complications set in. He insisted, first,
on being removed to his home, then on being taken back to Marseilles.
His sufferings were an intolerable torment, and more cruel to him was
the torment of his desire to live. He died inch by inch, fighting
every inch; and his sister's quiet narrative of those last months is
agonising. He died at Marseilles in November, "prophesying," says his
sister, and repeating, "Allah Kerim! Allah Kerim!"

The secret of Rimbaud, I think, and the reason why he was able to do
the unique thing in literature which he did, and then to disappear
quietly and become a legend in the East, is that his mind was not
the mind of the artist but of the man of action. He was a dreamer,
but all his dreams were discoveries. To him it was an identical act
of his temperament to write the sonnet of the _Vowels_ and to trade
in ivory and frankincense with the Arabs. He lived with all his
faculties at every instant of his life, abandoning himself to himself
with a confidence which was at once his strength and (looking at
things less absolutely) his weakness. To the student of success, and
what is relative in achievement, he illustrates the danger of one's
over-possession by one's own genius, just as aptly as the saint in the
cloister does, or the mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to
the world, or the spilt wisdom of the drunkard. The artist who is above
all, things an artist cultivates a little choice corner of himself
with elaborate care; he brings miraculous flowers to growth there, but
the rest of the garden is but mown grass or tangled bushes. That is
why many excellent writers very many painters, and most musicians are
so tedious on any subject but their own. Is it not tempting, does it
not seem a devotion rather than a superstition, to worship the golden
chalice in which the wine has been made God, as if the chalice were the
reality, and the Real Presence the symbol? The artist, who is only an
artist, circumscribes his intelligence into almost such a fiction, as
he reverences the work of his own hands. But there are certain natures
(great or small, Shakespeare or Rimbaud, it makes no difference) to
whom the work is nothing; the act of working, everything. Rimbaud was
a small, narrow, hard, precipitate nature, which had the will to live,
and nothing but the will to live; and his verses, and his follies,
and his wanderings, and his traffickings were but the breathing of
different hours in his day.

That is why he is so swift, definite, and quickly exhausted in vision;
why he had his few things to say, each an action with consequences.
He invents new ways of saying things, not because he is a learned
artist, but because he is burning to say them, and he has none of
the hesitations of knowledge. He leaps right over or through the
conventions that had been standing in everybody's way; he has no time
to go round, and no respect for trespass-boards, and so he becomes the
_enfant terrible_ of literature, playing pranks (as in that sonnet of
the _Vowels),_ knocking down barriers for the mere amusement of the
thing, getting all the possible advantage of his barbarisms in mind
and conduct. And so, in life, he is first of all conspicuous as a
disorderly liver, a révolter against morals as against prosody, though
we may imagine that, in his heart, morals meant as little to him, one
way or the other, as prosody. Later on, his revolt seems to be against
civilisation itself, as he disappears into the deserts of Africa. And
it is, if you like, a revolt against civilisation, but the revolt is
instinctive, a need of the organism; it is not doctrinal, cynical, a
conviction, a sentiment.

Always, as he says _rêvant univers fantastiques,_ he is conscious
of the danger as well as the ecstasy of that divine imitation; for
he says: "My life will always be too vast to be given up wholly to
force and beauty." _J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise,_ he cries, in a
fine rapture; and then, sadly enough: "I have created all the feasts,
all the triumphs, all the dramas of the world. I have set myself to
invent new flowers, a new flesh, a new language. I have fancied that
I have attained supernatural power. Well, I have now only to put my
imagination and my memories in the grave. What a fine artist's and
story-teller's fame thrown away!" See how completely he is conscious,
and how completely he is at the mercy, of that hallucinatory rage of
vision, vision to him being always force, power, creation, which, on
some of his pages, seems to become sheer madness, and on others a
kind of wild but absolute insight. He will be silent, he tells us,
as to all that he contains within his mind, "greedy as the sea," for
otherwise poets and visionaries would envy him his fantastic wealth.
And, in that _Nuit d'Enfer,_ which does not bear that title in vain,
he exalts himself as a kind of saviour; he is in the circle of pride
in Dante's hell, and he has lost all sense of limit, really believes
himself to be "no one and some one." Then, in the _Alchimie du Verbe,_
he becomes the analyst of his own hallucinations. "I believe in all
the enchantments," he tells us; "I invented the colour of the vowels;
A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green. I regulated the form
and the movement of every consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I
flattered myself that I had invented a poetic language accessible, one
day or another, to every shade of meaning. I reserved to myself the
right of translation."[1]

Coincidence or origin, it has lately been pointed out that Rimbaud may
formerly have seen an old ABC book in which the vowels are coloured
for the most part as his are (A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U,
green). In the little illustrative pictures around them some are oddly
in keeping with the image of Rimbaud.

"... I accustomed myself to simple hallucination: I saw, quite frankly,
a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums kept by the angels,
post-chaises on the roads of heaven, a drawing-room at the bottom of a
lake; monsters, mysteries; the title of a vaudeville raised up horrors
before me. Then I explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of
words! I ended by finding something sacred in the disorder of my mind."
Then he makes the great discovery. Action, one sees, this fraudulent
and insistent will to live, has been at the root of all these mental
and verbal orgies, in which he has been wasting the "very substance of
his thought." Well, "action," he discovers, "is not life, but a way of
spoiling something." Even this is a form of enervation, and must be
rejected from the absolute. _Mon devoir m'est remis. Il ne faut plus
songer à cela. Je suis réellement d'outre-tombe, et pas de commissions._

It is for the absolute that he seeks, always; the absolute which the
great artist, with his careful wisdom, has renounced seeking. And,
he is content with nothing less; hence his own contempt for what he
has done, after all, so easily; for what has come to him, perhaps
through his impatience, but imperfectly. He is a dreamer in whom dream
is swift, hard in outline, coming suddenly and going suddenly, a real
thing, but seen only in passing. Visions rush past him, he cannot
arrest them; they rush forth from him, he cannot restrain their haste
to be gone, as he creates them in the mere indiscriminate idleness
of energy. And so this seeker after the absolute leaves but a broken
medley of fragments, into each of which he has put a little of his
personality, which he is forever dramatising, by multiplying one facet,
so to speak, after another. Very genuinely, he is now a beaten and
wandering ship, flying in a sort of intoxication before the wind, over
undiscovered seas; now a starving child outside a baker's window, in
the very ecstasy of hunger; now _la victime et la petite épouse_ of the
first communion; now:

    Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien;
    Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
    Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
    Par la Nature, heureux comme avec une femme!

He catches at verse, at prose, invents a sort of _vers libre_ before
any one else, not quite knowing what to do with it, invents a quite
new way of writing prose, which Laforgue will turn to account later on;
and having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his
own and the next generation are to busy themselves with developing, he
gives up writing, as an inadequate form, to which he is also inadequate.

What, then, is the actual value of Rimbaud's work, in verse and prose,
apart from its relative values of so many kinds? I think, considerable;
though it will probably come to rest on two or three pieces of verse,
and a still vaguer accomplishment in prose. He brought into French
verse something of that "gipsy way of going with nature, as with a
woman"; a very young, very crude, very defiant and sometimes very
masterly sense of just these real things which are too close to us to
be seen by most people with any clearness. He could render physical
sensation, of the subtlest kind, without making any compromise with
language, forcing language to speak straight, taming it as one would
tame a dangerous animal. And he kneaded prose as he kneaded verse,
making it a disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical thing. In
verse, he pointed the way to certain new splendours, as to certain new
_naïvetés;_ there is the _Bateau Ivre,_ without which we might never
have had Verlaine's _Crimen Amoris._ And, intertangled with what is
ingenuous, and with what is splendid, there is a certain irony, which
comes into that youthful work as if youth were already reminiscent
of itself, so conscious is it that youth is youth, and that youth is
passing.

In all these ways, Rimbaud had his influence upon Verlaine, and his
influence upon Verlaine was above all the influence of the man of
action upon the man of sensation; the influence of what is simple,
narrow, emphatic, upon what is subtle, complex, growing. Verlaine's
rich, sensitive nature was just then trying to realise itself. Just
because it had such delicate possibilities, because there were so many
directions in which it could grow, it was not at first quite sure of
its way. Rimbaud came into the life and, art of Verlaine, troubling
both, with that trouble which reveals a man to himself. Having helped
to make Verlaine a great poet, he could go. Note that he himself could
never have developed: writing had been one of his discoveries; he could
but make other discoveries, personal ones. Even in literature he had
his future; but his future was Verlaine.


[1] Here is the famous sonnet, which must be taken, as it was meant,
without undue seriousness, and yet as something more than a mere joke.

    VOYELLES

    A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
      Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes.
      A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
    Qui bombillent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

    Golfe d'ombre; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
      Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles;
      I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
    _I_ Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;

    U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
    Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des rides
    Que l'alchemie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;

    O, suprême clairon plein de strideurs étranges,
    Silences traversés des mondes et des Anges;
    --O l'Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!




JULES LAFORGUE


Jules Laforgue was born at Montevideo, of Breton parents, August 20,
1860. He died in Paris in 1887, two days before his twenty-seventh
birthday. From 1880 to 1886 he had been reader to the Empress Augusta
at Berlin. He married only a few months before his death. _D'allures?_
says M. Gustave Kahn, _fort correctes, de hauts gibus, des cravates
sobres, des vestons anglais, des pardessus clergymans, et de par
les nécessités, un parapluie immuablement placé sous le bras._ His
portraits show us a clean-shaved, reticent face, betraying little. With
such a personality anecdotes have but small chance of appropriating
those details by which expansive natures express themselves to the
world. We know nothing about Laforgue which his work is not better
able to tell us, even now that we have all his notes, unfinished
fragments, and the letters of an almost virginal _naïveté_ which he
wrote to the woman whom he was going to marry. His entire work, apart
from these additions, is contained in two small volumes, one of prose,
the _Moralités Légendaires,_ the other of verse, _Les Complaintes,
Limitation de Notre-Dame la Lune,_ and a few other pieces, all
published during the last three years of his life.

The prose and verse of Laforgue, scrupulously correct, but with a
new manner of correctness, owe more than any one has realised to the
half-unconscious prose and verse of Rimbaud. Verse and prose are
alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang,
neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their
reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse
is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so
piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously
obvious. It is really _vers libre,_ but at the same time correct verse,
before _vers libre_ had been invented. And it carries, as far as that
theory has ever been carried, the theory which demands an instantaneous
notation (Whistler, let us say) of the figure or landscape which one,
has been accustomed to define with such rigorous exactitude. Verse,
always elegant, is broken up into a kind of mockery of prose.

    Encore un de mes pierrots mort;
      Mort d'un chronique orphelinisme;
      C'était un cœur plein de dandysme
    Lunaire, en un drôle de corps;

he will say to us, with a familiarity of manner, as of one talking
languidly, in a low voice, the lips always teased into a slightly
bitter smile; and he will pass suddenly into the ironical lilt of

    Hotel garni
    De l'infini,

    Sphinx et Joconde
    Des défunts mondes;

and from that into this solemn and smiling end of one of his last
poems, his own epitaph, if you will:

    Il prit froid l'autre automne,
    S'étant attardi vers les peines des cors,
    Sur la fin d'un beau jour.
    Oh! ce fut pour vos cors, et ce fut pour l'automne,
    Qu'il nous montra qu' "on meurt d'amour!"
    On ne le verra plus aux fêtes nationales,
    S'enfermer dans l'Histoire et tirer les verrous,
    Il vint trop tard, il est reparti sans scandale;
    O vous qui m'écoutez, rentrez chacun chez vous.

The old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of
poetry, are all banished, on a theory as self-denying as that which
permitted Degas to dispense with recognisable beauty in his figures.
Here, if ever, is modern verse, verse which dispenses with so many of
the privileges of poetry, for an ideal quite of its own. It is, after
all, a very self-conscious ideal, becoming artificial through its
extreme naturalness; for in poetry it is not "natural" to say things
quite so much in the manner of the moment, with however ironical an
intention.

The prose of the _Moralités Légendaires_ is perhaps even more of
a discovery. Finding its origin, as I have pointed out, in the
experimental prose of Rimbaud, it carries that manner to a singular
perfection. Disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical, it
gives expression, in its icy ecstasy, to a very subtle criticism of
the universe, with a surprising irony of cosmical vision. We learn
from books of mediæval magic that the embraces of the devil are of a
coldness so intense that it may be called, by an allowable figure of
speech, fiery. Everything may be as strongly its opposite as itself,
and that is why this balanced, chill, colloquial style of Laforgue
has, in the paradox of its intensity, the essential heat of the most
obviously emotional prose. The prose is more patient than the verse,
with its more compassionate laughter at universal experience. It can
laugh as seriously, as profoundly, as in that graveyard monologue of
Hamlet, Laforgue's Hamlet, who, Maeterlinck ventures to say, "is at
moments more Hamlet than the Hamlet of Shakespeare." Let me translate a
few sentences from it.

"Perhaps I have still twenty or thirty years to live, and I shall pass
that way like the others. Like the others? O Totality, the misery of
being there no longer! Ah! I would like to set out to-morrow, and
search all through the world for the most adamantine processes of
embalming. They, too, were, the little people of History, learning to
read, trimming their nails, lighting the dirty lamp every evening, in
love, gluttonous, vain, fond of compliments, handshakes, and kisses,
living on bell-tower gossip, saying, 'What sort of weather shall we
have to-morrow? Winter has really come.... We have had no plums this
year.' Ah! everything is good, if it would not come to an end. And
thou, Silence, pardon the Earth; the little madcap hardly knows what
she is doing; on the day of the great summing-up of consciousness
before the Ideal, she will be labelled with a pitiful _idem_ in the
column of the miniature evolutions of the Unique Evolution, in the
column of négligeable quantities ...". "To die! Evidently, one dies
without knowing it, as, every night, one enters upon sleep. One has no
consciousness of the passing of the last lucid thought into sleep, into
swooning, into death. Evidently. But to be no more, to be here no more,
to be ours no more! Not even to be able, any more, to press against
one's human heart, some idle afternoon, the ancient sadness contained
in one little chord on the piano!"

In these always "lunar" parodies, _Salomé, Lohengrin, Fils de Parsifal,
Persée et Andromède,_ each a kind of metaphysical myth, he realises
that _la créature va hardiment à être cérébrale, anti-naturelle,_ and
he has invented these fantastic puppets with an almost Japanese art of
spiritual dislocation. They are, in part, a way of taking one's revenge
upon science, by an ironical borrowing of its very terms, which dance
in his prose and verse, derisively, at the end of a string.

In his acceptance of the fragility of things as actually a principle
of art, Laforgue is a sort of transformed Watteau, showing his disdain
for the world which fascinates him, in quite a different way. He
has constructed his own world, lunar and actual, speaking slang and
astronomy, with a constant disengaging of the visionary aspect, under
which frivolity becomes an escape from the arrogance of a still more
temporary mode of being, the world as it appears to the sober majority.
He is terribly conscious of daily life, cannot omit, mentally, a single
hour of the day; and his flight to the moon is in sheer desperation.
He sees what he calls l'_Inconscient_ in every gesture, but he cannot
see it without these gestures. And he sees, not only as an imposition,
but as a conquest, the possibilities for art which come from the sickly
modern being, with his clothes, his nerves: the mere fact that he
flowers from the soil of his epoch.

It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all
art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.
There is in it all the restlessness of modern life, the haste to escape
from whatever weighs too heavily on the liberty of the moment, that
capricious liberty which demands only room enough to hurry itself
weary. It is distressingly conscious of the unhappiness of mortality,
but it plays, somewhat uneasily, at a disdainful indifference. And it
is out of these elements of caprice, fear, contempt, linked together by
an embracing laughter, that it makes its existence.

_Il n'y a pas de type, il y a la vie,_ Laforgue replies to those
who come to him with classical ideals. _Votre idéal est bien vite
magnifiquement submergé,_ in life itself, which should form its
own art, an art deliberately ephemeral, with the attaching pathos
of passing things. There is a great pity at the root of this art
of Laforgue: self-pity, which extends, with the artistic sympathy,
through mere clearness of vision, across the world. His laughter,
which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as "the laughter of the
soul," is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out
of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a
metaphysical Pierrot, _Pierrot lunaire,_ and it is of abstract notions,
the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman's
patter. As it is part of his manner not to distinguish between irony
and pity, or even belief, we need not attempt to do so. Heine should
teach us to understand at least so much of a poet who could not
otherwise resemble him less. In Laforgue, sentiment is squeezed out of
the world before one begins to play at ball with it.

And so, of the two, he is the more hopeless. He has invented a new
manner of being René or Werther: an inflexible politeness towards man,
woman, and destiny. He composes love-poems hat in hand, and smiles with
an exasperating tolerance before all the transformations of the eternal
feminine. He is very conscious of death, but his _blague_ of death is,
above all things, gentlemanly. He will not permit himself, at any
moment, the luxury of dropping the mask: not at any moment.

Read this _Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot,_ with the singular pity of
its cruelty, before such an imagined dropping of the mask:

    Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!
      Nous lui dirons d'abord, de mon air le moins froid:
    "La somme des angles d'un triangle, chère âme,
            Est égale à deux droits."

    Et si ce cri lui part: "Dieu de Dieu que je t'aime!"
      "Dieu reconnaîtra les siens." Ou piquée au vif:
    "Mes claviers out du cœur, tu sera mon seul thème."
            Moi' "Tout est relatif."

    De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:
      "Ah! tu ne m'aime pas; tant d'autres sont jaloux!"
    Et moi, d'un œil qui vers l'Inconscient s'emballe:
            "Merci, pas mal; et vous?

    "Jouons au plus fidèle!"--A quoi bon, ô Nature!
      "Autant à qui perd gagne." Alors, autre couplet.
    "Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j'en suis sûre."
            "Après vous, s'il vous plaît."

    Enfins, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,
      Douce; feignant de n'en pas croire encor mes yeux,
    J'aurai un: "Ah çà, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!
            C'était donc sérieux?"

And yet one realises, if one but reads him attentively enough, how
much suffering and despair, and resignation to what is, after all,
the inevitable, are hidden away under this disguise, and also why this
disguise is possible. Laforgue died at twenty-seven: he had been a
dying man all his life, and his work has the fatal evasiveness of those
who shrink from remembering the one thing which they are unable to
forget. Coming as he does after Rimbaud, turning the divination of the
other into theories, into achieved results, he is the eternally grown
up, mature to the point of self-negation, as the other is the eternal
_enfant terrible._ He thinks intensely about life, seeing what is
automatic, pathetically ludicrous in it, almost as one might who has no
part in the comedy. He has the double advantage, for his art, of being
condemned to death, and of being, in the admirable phrase of Villiers,
"one of those who come into the world with a ray of moonlight in their
brains."




MAETERLINCK AS A MYSTIC


The secret of things which is just beyond the most subtle words,
the secret of the expressive silences, has always been clearer to
Maeterlinck than to most people; and, in his plays, he has elaborated
an art of sensitive, taciturn, and at the same time highly ornamental
simplicity, which has come nearer than any other art to being the voice
of silence. To Maeterlinck the theatre has been, for the most part,
no more than one of the disguises by which he can express himself,
and with his book of meditations on the inner life, _Le Trésor des
Humbles,_ he may seem to have dropped his disguise.

All art hates the vague; not the mysterious, but the vague; two
opposites very commonly confused, as the secret with the obscure, the
infinite with the indefinite. And the artist who is also a mystic
hates the vague with a more profound hatred than any other artist.
Thus Maeterlinck, endeavouring to clothe mystical conceptions in
concrete form, has invented a drama so precise, so curt, so arbitrary
in its limits, that it can safely be confided to the masks and feigned
voices of marionettes. His theatre of artificial beings, who are at
once more ghostly and more mechanical than the living actors whom we
are accustomed to see, in so curious a parody of life, moving with a
certain freedom of action across the stage, may be taken as itself a
symbol of the aspect under which what we fantastically term "real life"
presents itself to the mystic. Are we not all puppets, in a theatre
of marionettes, in which the parts we play, the dresses we wear, the
very emotion whose dominance gives its express form to our faces, have
all been chosen for us; in which I, it may be, with curled hair and a
Spanish cloak, play the romantic lover, sorely against my will, while
you, a "fair penitent" for no repented sin, pass quietly under a nun's
habit? And as our parts have been chosen for us, cur motions controlled
from behind the curtain, so the words we seem to speak are but spoken
through us, and we do but utter fragments of some elaborate invention,
planned for larger ends than our personal display or convenience,
but to which, all the same, we are in a humble degree necessary.
This symbolical theatre, its very existence being a symbol, has
perplexed many minds, to some of whom it has seemed puerile, a child's
mystification of small words and repetitions, a thing of attitudes
and omissions; while others, yet more unwisely, have compared it with
the violent, rhetorical, most human drama of the Elizabethans, with
Shakespeare himself, to whom all the world was a stage, and the stage
all this world, certainly. A sentence, already famous, of the _Trésor
des Humbles,_ will tell you what it signifies to Maeterlinck himself.

"I have, come to believe," he writes, in _Le Tragique Quotidien,_ "that
an old man seated in his armchair, waiting quietly under the lamplight,
listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign about
his house, interpreting without understanding it all that there is in
the silence of doors and windows, and in the little voice of light,
enduring the presence of his soul and of his destiny, bowing his head a
little, without suspecting that all the powers of the earth intervene
and stand on guard in the room like attentive servants, not knowing
that the sun itself suspends above the abyss the little table on which
he rests his elbow, and that there is not a star in the sky nor a force
in the soul which is indifferent to the motion of a falling eyelid or
a rising thought--I have come to believe that this motionless old man
lived really a more profound, human, and universal life than the lover
who strangles his mistress, the captain who gains a victory, or the
husband who 'avenges his honour.'"

That, it seems to me, says all there is to be said of the intention of
this drama which Maeterlinck has evoked; and, of its style, this other
sentence, which I take from the same essay: "It is only the words that
at first sight seem useless which really count in a work."

This drama, then, is a drama founded on philosophical ideas,
apprehended emotionally; on the sense of the mystery of the universe,
of the weakness of humanity, that sense which Pascal expressed when
he said: _Ce qui m'étonne le plus est de voir que tout le monde n'est
pas étonné de sa faiblesse;_ with an acute feeling of the pathetic
ignorance in which the souls nearest to one another look out upon
their neighbours. It is a drama in which the interest is concentrated
on vague people, who are little parts of the universal consciousness,
their strange names being but the pseudonyms of obscure passions,
intimate emotions. They have the fascination which we find in the eyes
of certain pictures, so much more real and disquieting, so much more
permanent with us, than living people. And they have the touching
simplicity of children; they are always children in their ignorance
of themselves, of one another, and of fate. And, because they are so
disembodied of the more trivial accidents of life, they give themselves
without limitation to whatever passionate instinct possesses them. I
do not know a more passionate love-scene than that scene in the wood
beside the fountain, where Pelléas and Mélisande confess the strange
burden which has come upon them. When the soul gives itself absolutely
to love, all the barriers of the world are burnt away, and all its
wisdom and subtlety are as incense poured on a flame. Morality, too,
is burnt away, no longer exists, any more than it does for children or
for God.

Maeterlinck has realised, better than any one else, the significance,
in life and art, of mystery. He has realised how unsearchable is the
darkness out of which we have but just stepped, and the darkness
into which we are about to pass. And he has realised how the thought
and sense of that twofold darkness invade the little space of light
in which, for a moment, we move; the depth to which they shadow our
steps, even in that moment's partial escape. But in some of his plays
he would seem to have apprehended this mystery as a thing merely or
mainly terrifying; the actual physical darkness sur-rounding blind men,
the actual physical approach of death as the intruder; he has shown
us people huddled at a window, out of which they are almost afraid
to look, or beating at a door, the opening of which they dread. Fear
shivers through these plays, creeping across our nerves like a damp
mist coiling up out of a valley. And there is beauty, certainly, in
this "vague spiritual fear"; but a less obvious kind of beauty than
that which gives its profound pathos to _Aglavaine et Sélysette,_ the
one play written since the writing of the essays. Here is mystery,
which is also pure beauty, in these delicate approaches of intellectual
pathos, in which suffering and death and error become transformed into
something almost happy, so full is it of strange light.

And the aim of Maeterlinck, in his plays, is not only to render the
soul and the soul's atmosphere, but to reveal this strangeness, pity,
and beauty through beautiful pictures. No dramatist has ever been so
careful that his scenes should be in themselves beautiful, or has
made the actual space of forest, tower, or seashore so emotionally
significant. He has realised, after Wagner, that the art of the stage
is the art of pictorial beauty, of the correspondence in rhythm between
the speakers, their words, and their surroundings. He has seen how, in
this way, and in this way alone, the emotion, which it is but a part of
the poetic drama to express, can be at once intensified and purified.

It is only after hinting at many of the things which he had to say
in these plays, which have, after all, been a kind of subterfuge,
that Maeterlinck has cared, or been able, to speak with the direct
utterance of the essays. And what may seem curious is that this prose
of the essays, which is the prose of a doctrine, is incomparably more
beautiful than the prose of the plays, which was the prose of an art.
Holding on this point a different opinion from one who was, in many
senses, his master, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, he did not admit that
beauty of words, or even any expressed beauty of thoughts, had its
place in spoken dialogue, even though it was not two living actors
speaking to one another on the stage, but a soul speaking to a soul and
imagined speaking through the mouths of marionettes. But that beauty of
phrase which makes the profound and sometimes obscure pages of _Axël_
shine as with the crossing fire of jewels, rejoices us, though with
a softer, a more equable, radiance, in the pages of these essays, in
which every sentence has the in-dwelling beauty of an intellectual
emotion, preserved at the same height of tranquil ecstasy from first
page to last. There is a sort of religious calm in these deliberate
sentences, into which the writer has known how to introduce that divine
monotony which is one of the accomplishments of great style. Never has
simplicity been more ornate or a fine beauty more visible through its
self-concealment.

But, after all, the claim upon us of this book is not the claim of
a work of art, but of a doctrine, and more than that, of a system.
Belonging, as he does, to the eternal hierarchy, the unbroken
succession, of the mystics, Maeterlinck has apprehended what is
essential in the mystical doctrine with a more profound comprehension,
and thus more systematically, than any mystic of recent times. He
has many points of resemblance with Emerson, on whom he has written
an essay which is properly an exposition of his own personal ideas;
but Emerson, who proclaimed the supreme guidance of the inner light,
the supreme necessity of trusting instinct, of honouring emotion, did
but proclaim all this, not without a certain anti-mystical vagueness:
Maeterlinck has systematised it. A more profound mystic than Emerson,
he has greater command of that which comes to him unawares, is less at
the mercy of visiting angels.

Also, it may be said that he surrenders himself to them more
absolutely, with less reserve and discretion; and, as he has infinite
leisure, his contemplation being subject to no limits of time, he
is ready to follow them on unknown rounds, to any distance, in any
direction, ready also to rest in any wayside inn, without fearing that
he will have lost the road on the morrow.

This old gospel, of which Maeterlinck is the new voice, has been
quietly waiting until certain bankruptcies, the bankruptcy of
Science, of the Positive Philosophies, should allow it full credit.
Considering the length even of time, it has not had an unreasonable
space of waiting; and remember that it takes time but little into
account. We have seen many little gospels demanding of every emotion,
of every instinct, "its certificate at the hand of some respectable
authority." Without confidence in themselves or in things, and led by
Science, which is as if one were led by one's note-book, they demand a
reasonable explanation of every mystery. Not finding that explanation,
they reject the mystery; which is as if the fly on the wheel rejected
the wheel because it was hidden from his eyes by the dust of its own
raising.

The mystic is at once the proudest and the humblest of men. He is as
a child who resigns himself to the guidance of an unseen hand, the
hand of one walking by his side; he resigns himself with the child's
humility. And he has the pride of the humble, a pride manifesting
itself in the calm rejection of every accepted map of the roads, of
every offer of assistance, of every painted signpost pointing out the
smoothest ways on which to travel. He demands no authority for the
unseen hand whose fingers he feels upon his wrist. He conceives of
life, not, indeed, so much as a road on which one walks, very much at
one's own discretion, but as a blown and wandering ship, surrounded by
a sea from which there is no glimpse of land; and he conceives that to
the currents of that sea he may safely trust himself. Let his hand,
indeed, be on the rudder, there will be no miracle worked for him; it
is enough miracle that the sea should be there, and the ship, and he
himself. He will never know why his hand should turn the rudder this
way rather than that.

Jacob Boehme has said, very subtly, "that man does not perceive the
truth but God perceives the truth in man"; that is, that whatever
we perceive or do is not perceived or done consciously by us, but
unconsciously through us. Our business, then, is to tend that "inner
light" by which most mystics have symbolised that which at once
guides us in time and attaches us to eternity. This inner light is
no miraculous descent of the Holy Spirit, but the perfectly natural,
though it may finally be overcoming, ascent of the spirit within us.
The spirit, in all men, being but a ray of the universal fight, it can,
by careful tending, by the removal of all obstruction, the cleansing of
the vessel, the trimming of the wick, as it were, be increased, made
to burn with a steadier, a brighter flame. In the last rapture it may
become dazzling, may blind the watcher with excess of light, shutting
him in within the circle of transfiguration, whose extreme radiance
will leave all the rest of the world henceforth one darkness.

All mystics being concerned with what is divine in life, with the
laws which apply equally to time and eternity, it may happen to one to
concern himself chiefly with time seen under the aspect of eternity, to
another to concern himself rather with eternity seen under the aspect
of time. Thus many mystics have occupied themselves, very profitably,
with showing how natural, how explicable on their own terms, are
the mysteries of life; the whole aim of Maeterlinck is to show how
mysterious all life is, "what an astonishing thing it is, merely to
live." What he had pointed out to us, with certain solemn gestures,
in his plays, he sets himself now to affirm, slowly, fully, with that
"confidence in mystery" of which he speaks. Because "there is not an
hour without its familiar miracles and its ineffable suggestions," he
sets himself to show us these miracles and these meanings where others
have not always sought or found them, in women, in children, in the
theatre. He seems to touch, at one moment or another, whether he is
discussing _La Beauté Intérieure_ or _Le Tragique Quotidien,_ on all
of these hours, and there is no hour so dark that his touch does not
illuminate it.

And it is characteristic of him, of his "confidence in mystery,"
that he speaks always without raising his voice, without surprise or
triumph, or the air of having said anything more than the simplest
observation. He speaks, not as if he knew more than others, or had
sought out more elaborate secrets, but as if he had listened more
attentively.

Loving most those writers "whose works are nearest to silence,"
he begins his book, significantly, with an essay on Silence, an
essay which, like all these essays, has the reserve, the expressive
reticence, of those "active silences" of which he succeeds in revealing
a few of the secrets. "Souls," he tells us, "are weighed in silence,
as gold and silver are weighed in pure water, and the words which we
pronounce have no meaning except through the silence in which they are
bathed. We seek to know that we may learn not to know"; knowledge, that
which can be known by the pure reason, metaphysics, "indispensable"
on this side of the "frontiers," being after all precisely what is
least essential to us, since least essentially ourselves. "We possess
a self more profound and more boundless than the self of the passions
or of pure reason.... There comes a moment when the phenomena of our
customary consciousness, what we may call the consciousness of the
passions or of our normal relationships, no longer mean anything to
us, no longer touch our real life. I admit that this consciousness is
often interesting in its way, and that it is often necessary to know
it thoroughly. But it is a surface plant, and its roots fear the great
central fire of our being. I may commit a crime without the least
breath stirring the tiniest flame of this fire; and, on the other hand,
the crossing of a single glance, a thought which never comes into
being, a minute which passes without the utterance of a word, may rouse
it into terrible agitations in the depths of its retreat, and cause
it to overflow upon my life. Our soul does not judge as we judge; it
is a capricious and hidden thing. It can be reached by a breath and
unconscious of a tempest. Let us find out what reaches it; everything
is there, for it is there that we ourselves are."

And it is towards this point that all the words of this book tend.
Maeterlinck, unlike most men ("What is man but a God who is afraid?"),
is not "miserly of immortal things." He utters the most divine secrets
without fear, betraying certain hiding-places of the soul in those most
nearly inaccessible retreats which lie nearest to us. All that he says
we know already; we may deny it, but we know it. It is what we are not
often at leisure enough with ourselves, sincere enough with ourselves,
to realise; what we often dare not realise; but, when he says it, we
know that it is true, and our knowledge of it is his warrant for saying
it. He is what he is precisely because he tells us nothing which we do
not already know, or it may be, what we have known and forgotten. The
mystic, let it be remembered, has nothing in common with the moralist.
He speaks only to those who are already prepared to listen to him, and
he is indifferent to the "practical" effect which these or others may
draw from his words. A young and profound mystic of our day has figured
the influence of wise words upon the foolish and headstrong as "torches
thrown into a burning city." The mystic knows well that it is not
always the soul of the drunkard or the blasphemer which is farthest
from the eternal beauty. He is concerned only with that soul of the
soul, that life of life, with which the day's doings have so little to
do; itself a mystery, and at home only among those supreme mysteries
which surround it like an atmosphere. It is not always that he cares
that his message, or his vision, may be as clear to others as it is
to himself. But, because he is an artist, and not only a philosopher,
Maeterlinck has taken especial pains that not a word of his may go
astray, and there is not a word of this book which needs to be read
twice, in order that it may be understood, by the least trained of
attentive readers. It is, indeed, as he calls it, "The Treasure of the
Lowly."




CONCLUSION


Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in the
measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and deadening
its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its apprehension of
the unknown. Knowing so much less than nothing, for we are entrapped
in smiling and many-coloured appearances, our life may seem to be but
a little space of leisure, in which it will be the necessary business
of each of us to speculate on what is so rapidly becoming the past
and so rapidly becoming the future, that scarcely existing present
which is after all our only possession. Yet, as the present passes
from us, hardly to be enjoyed except as memory or as hope, and only
with an at best partial recognition of the uncertainty or inutility
of both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now and
then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance, and to some perception
of where it is leading us. To live through a single day with that
overpowering consciousness of our real position, which, in the moments
in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding light or the
thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of his senses. It
is our hesitations, the excuses of our hearts, the compromises of
our intelligence, which save us. We can forget so much, we can bear
suspense with so fortunate an evasion of its real issues; we are so
admirably finite.

And so there is a great, silent conspiracy between us to forget death;
all our lives are spent in busily forgetting death. That is why we
are active about so many things which we know to be unimportant; why
we are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for the company of our
fellow-creatures. Allowing ourselves, for the most part, to be but
vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find
our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams,
in religion, passion, art; each a forgetfulness, each a symbol of
creation; religion being the creation of a new heaven, passion the
creation of a new earth, and art, in its mingling of heaven and
earth, the creation of heaven out of earth. Each is a kind of sublime
selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having each an
incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate attainment,
however, in his lower moments, he may serve God in action, or do the
will of his mistress, or minister to men by showing them a little
beauty. But it is, before all things, an escape: and the prophets
who have redeemed the world, and the artists who have made the world
beautiful, and the lovers who have quickened the pulses of the world,
have really, whether they knew it or not, been fleeing from the
certainty of one thought: that we have, all of us, only our one day;
and from the dread of that other thought: that the day, however used,
must after all be wasted.

The fear of death is not cowardice; it is, rather, an intellectual
dissatisfaction with an enigma which has been presented to us, and
which can be solved only when its solution is of no further use. All
we have to ask of death is the meaning of life, and we are waiting
all through life to ask that question. That life should be happy or
unhappy, as those words are used, means so very little; and the
heightening or lessening of the general felicity of the world means
so little to any individual. There is something almost vulgar in
happiness which does not become joy, and joy is an ecstasy which can
rarely be maintained in the soul for more than the moment during which
we recognize that it is not sorrow. Only very young people want to be
happy. What we all want is to be quite sure that there is something
which makes it worth while to go on living, in what seems to us our
best way, at our finest intensity; something beyond the mere fact that
we are satisfying a sort of inner logic (which may be quite faulty)
and that we get our best makeshift for happiness on that so hazardous
assumption.

Well, the doctrine of Mysticism, with which all this symbolical
literature has so much to do, of which it is all so much the
expression, presents us, not with a guide for conduct, not with a plan
for our happiness, not with an explanation of any mystery, but with a
theory of life which makes us familiar with mystery, and which seems to
harmonise those instincts which make for religion, passion, and art,
freeing us at once of a great bondage. The final uncertainty remains,
but we seem to knock less helplessly at closed doors, coming so much
closer to the once terrifying eternity of things about us, as we come
to look upon these things as shadows, through which we have our shadowy
passage. "For in the particular acts of human life," Plotinus tells us,
"it is not the interior soul and the true man, but the exterior shadow
of the man alone, which laments and weeps, performing his part on the
earth as in a more ample and extended scene, in which many shadows
of souls and phantom scenes appear." And as we realise the identity
of a poem, a prayer, or a kiss, in that spiritual universe which we
are weaving for ourselves, each out of a thread of the great fabric;
as we realise the infinite insignificance of action, its immense
distance from the current of life; as we realise the delight of feeling
ourselves carried onward by forces which it is our wisdom to obey; it
is at least with a certain relief that we turn to an ancient doctrine,
so much the more likely to be true because it has so much the air of
a dream. On this theory alone does all life become worth living, all
art worth making, all worship worth offering. And because it might
slay as well as save, because the freedom of its sweet captivity might
so easily become deadly to the fool, because that is the hardest path
to walk in where you are told only, walk well; it is perhaps the only
counsel of perfection which can ever really mean much to the artist.




BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES


The essays contained in this book are not intended to give information.
They are concerned with ideas rather than with facts; each is a study
of a problem, only in part a literary one, in which I have endeavoured
to consider writers as personalities under the action of spiritual
forces, or as themselves so many forces. But it has seemed to me that
readers have a right to demand information in regard to writers who are
so often likely to be unfamiliar to them. I have, therefore, given a
bibliography of the works of each writer with whom I have dealt, and
I have added a number of notes, giving various particulars which I
think are likely to be useful in fixing more definitely the personal
characteristics of these writers.




HONORÉ DE BALZAC

(1799-1850)

La Comédie Humaine

_Scènes de la Vie Privée_

_Préface. La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,_ 1829; _Le Bal de Sceaux,_
1829; _Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées,_ 1841; _La Bourse,_ 1832;
_Modeste Mignon,_ 1844; _Un Début dans la vie,_ 1842; _Albert Savarus,_
1842; _La Vendetta,_ 1830; _La Paix du ménage,_ 1829; _Madame
Firmiani,_ 1832; _Étude de femme,_ 1830; _La Fausse maîtresse,_ 1842;
_Une Fille d'Eve,_ 1838; _Le Message,_ 1832; _La Grenadière,_ 1832; _La
Femme abandonnée,_ 1832; _Honorine,_ 1843; _Beatrix,_ 1838; _Gobseck,_
1830; _La Femme de trente ans,_ 1834; _La Père Goriot,_ 1834; _Le
Colonel Chabert,_ 1832; _La Messe de l'Athée,_ 1836; _L'Interdiction,_
1836; Le _Contrat de mariage,_ 1835; Autre _étude de femme,_ 1839; La
_Grande Bretêche,_ 1832.

_Scènes de la vie de Province_

_Ursule Mirouët,_ 1841; _Eugénie Grandet,_ 1833; _Le Lys dans la
vallée_, 1835; _Pierrette,_ 1839; _Le Curé de Tours_, 1832; _La
Ménage d'un garçon,_ 1842; _L'illustre Gaudissart,_ 1833; _La Muse
du département,_ 1843; _Le Vieille fille_, 1836; _Le Cabinet des
Antiques,_ 1837; _Les Illusions Perdues,_ 1836.

_Scènes de la Vie Parisienne_

_Ferragus,_ 1833; _Là Duchesse de Langeais,_ 1834; _La Fille aux yeux
d'or,_ 1834; _La Grandeur et la Décadence de César Birotteau,_ 1837;
_La Maison Nucingen,_ 1837; _Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes,_
1838; _Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan,_ 1839; _Facino
Cane,_ 1836; _Sarrasine,_ 1830; _Pierre Grassou,_ 1839; _La Cousine
Bette,_ 1846; _Le Cousin Pons,_ 1847; _Un Prince de la Bohème,_ 1839;
_Gaudissart II,_ 1844; _Les Employés,_ 1836; _Les Comédiens sans le
savoir,_ 1845; _Les Petits Bourgeois,_ 1845.


_Scènes de la Vie Militaire_

_Les Chouans,_ 1827; _Une Passion dans le désert,_ 1830.

_Scènes de la Vie Politique_

_Un Épisode sous la Terreur,_ 1831; _Une Ténébreuse Affaire,_ 1841; _Z.
Marcos,_ 1840; _L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine,_ 1847; _Le Député
d'Arcis._

_Scènes de la Vie de Campagne_

_Le Médecin de campagne,_ 1832; _Le Curé de village,_ 1837; _Les
Paysans,_ 1845.

_Études Philosophiques_

_La Peau de Chagrin,_ 1830; _Jésus-Christ en Flandres,_ 1831; _Melmoth
réconcilié,_ 1835; _Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu,_ 1832; _Gambara,_
1837; _Massimilla Doni,_ 1839; _La Recherche de l'Absolu,_ 1834;
_L'Enfant Maudit,_ 1831; _Les Maranas,_ 1832; _Adieu,_ 1830; _Le
Réquisitionnaire,_ 1831; _El Verdugo,_ 1829; _Un Drame au bord de
la mer,_ 1834; _L'Auberge rouge,_ 1831; L'_Élixir de longue vie,_
1830; _Maître Cornélius,_ 1831; _Catherine de Médicis,_ 1836; _Les
Proscrits,_ 1831; _Louis Lambert,_ 1832; _Séraphita,_ 1833.

_Études Analytiques_

_La Physiologie du mariage,_ 1829; _Petites misères de la vie
conjugale._

_Théâtre_

_Vautrin, Drame_5 _Actes,_ 1840; _Les Ressources de Quinola, Comédie_
5 _Actes,_ 1842; _Paméla Giraud, Drame_5 _Actes,_ 1843; _La Marâtre,
Drame_5 _Actes,_ 1848; _La Faiseur (Mercadet), Comédie_ 5 _Actes,_
1851; _Les Contes Drolatiques,_ 1832, 1833, 1839.




PROSPER MÉRIMÉE

(1803-1870)

_La Guzla,_ 1827; _La Jacquerie,_ 1828; _Le Chronique du Temps de
Charles IX,_ 1829; _La Vase Etrusque,_ 1829; _Vénus d'Ille,_ 1837;
_Colomba,_ 1846; _Carmen,_ 1845; _Lokis,_ 1869; _Mateo Falcone,_
1876; _Mélanges Historiques et Littéraires,_ 1855; _Les Cosaques
d'Autrefois,_ 1865; _Étude sur les Arts au Moyen-Age,_ 1875; _Les Faux
Démétrius,_ 1853; _Étude sur l'Histoire Romaine,_ 1844; _Histoire de
Dom Pedro,_ 1848; _Lettres à une Inconnue,_ 1874.




GÉRARD DE NERVAL

(1808-1855)

_Napoléon et la France Guerrière, élégies nationales,_ 1826; _La mort
de Talma,_ 1826; _L'Académie, ou les Membres Introuvables, comédie
satirique en vers,_ 1826; _Napoléon et Talma, élégies nationales
nouvelles,_ 1826; _M. Dentscourt, ou le Cuisinier Grand Homme,_ 1826;
_Elégies Nationales et Satires Politiques,_ 1827; _Faust, tragédie
de Goethe,_ 1828 (suivi du second _Faust,_ 1840); _Couronne Poétique
de Béranger,_ 1828; _Le Peuple, ode,_ 1830; _Poésies Allemandes,
Morceaux choisis et traduits,_ 1830; _Choix de Poésies de Ronsard et
de Régnier,_ 1830; _Nos Adieux à la Chambre de Députés de Van_ 1830,
1831; _Lénore, traduite de Burger,_ 1835; _Piquilo, opéra comique_
(with Dumas), 1837; l'_Alchimiste, drame en vers_ (with Dumas), 1839;
_Léo Burckhardt, drame en prose_ (with Dumas), 1839; _Scènes de la Vie
Orientale,_ 2 vols., 1848-1850; _Les Monténégrins, opéra comique_ (with
Alboize), 1849; _Le Chariot d'Enfant, drame en vers_ (with Méry), 1850;
_Les Nuits du Ramazan,_ 1850; _Voyage en Orient,_ 1851; _L'Imagier de
Harlem, légende en prose et en vers_ (with Méry and Bernard Lopez),
1852; _Contes et Facéties,_ 1852; _Lorely, souvenirs d'Allemagne,_
1852; _Les Illuminés,_ 1852; _Petits Châteaux de Bohème,_ 1853; _Les
Filles du Feu,_ 1854; _Misanthropie et Repentir, drame de Kotzebue,_
1855; _La Bohème galante,_ 1855; _Le Rêve et la Vie; Aurélia,_ 1855;
_Le Marquis de Fayolle_ (with E. Gorges), 1856; _Œuvres Complètes,_
6 vols. (1, _Les Deux Faust de Goethe;_ 2, 3, _Voyage en Orient;_ 4,
_Les Illuminés, Les Faux Saulniers;_ 5, _Le Rêve et la Vie, Les Filles
du Feu, La Bohème galante;_ 6, _Poésies Complètes),_ 1867.

The sonnets, written at different periods and published for the first
time in the collection of 1854, "Les Filles du Feu," which also
contains "Sylvie," were reprinted in the volume of _Poésies Complètes,_
where they are imbedded in the midst of deplorable juvenilia. All,
or almost all, of the verse worth preserving was collected, in 1897,
by that delicate amateur of the curiosities of beauty, M. Remy de
Gourmont, in a tiny volume called _Les Chimères,_ which contains the
six sonnets of "Les Chimères," the sonnet called "Vers Dorés," the
five sonnets of "Le Christ aux Oliviers," and, in facsimile of the
autograph, the lyric called "Les Cydalises." The true facts of the life
of Gérard have been told for the first time, from original documents,
by Mme. Arvède Barine, in two excellent articles in the _Revue des
Deux Mondes,_ October 15 and November 1, 1897, since reprinted in _Les
Névrosés,_1898.




THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

(1811-1872)

_Les Poésies,_ 1830; _Albertus, ou l'âme et le péché,_ 1833; _Les
Jeunes-France,_ 1833; _Mademoiselle de Maupin,_ 1835; _Fortunio,_ 1838.

_La Comédie de la Mort,_ 1838; _Tras les Montes,_ 1839; _Une Larme du
Diable,_ 1839; _Gisèle, ballet,_ 1841; _Une Voyage en Espagne,_ 1843;
_Le Péri, ballet,_ 1843; _Les Grotesques,_ 1844.

_Une Nuit de Cléopâtre,_ 1845; _Premières Poésies,_ 1845; _Zigzags,_
1845; _Le Tricorne Enchanté,_ 1845; _La Turquie,_ 1846.

_La Juive de Constantine, drama,_ 1846; _Jean et Jeannette,_ 1846; _Le
Roi Candaule,_ 1847.

_Les Roués innocents,_ 1847; _Histoire des Peintres,_ 1847; _Regardez,
mais n'y touche pas,_ 1847; _Les Fêtes de Madrid,_ 1847; _Partie
carrée,_ 1851; _Italia,_ 1852; Les _Émaux et Camées,_ 1852; L'Art
_Moderne,_ 1859; _Les Beaux Arts_ en _Europe,_ 1852; _Caprices et
Zigzags,_ 1852; Ario _Marcella,_ 1852; Les _Beaux-arts en Europe,_
1855; _Constantinople,_ 1854; _Théâtre de poche,_ 1855; Le _Roman de la
Momie,_ 1856; _Jettatura,_ 1857; _Avatar_, 1857; _Sakountala, Ballet,_
1858; Honoré de Balzac, 1859; Les Fosses, 1860; _Trésors d'Art de
la Russie,_1860-1863; _Histoire de l'art théâtrale en France depuis
vingt-cinq ans,_ 1860; Le _Capitaine Fracasse,_ 1863; Les _Dieux et
les Demi-Dieux de la peintre,_ 1863; _Poésies nouvelles,_ 1863; _Loin
de Paris,_ 1864; _La Belle Jenny,_ 1864; _Voyage en Russie,_ 1865;
_Spirite,_ 1866; _Le Palais pompéien de l'Avenue Montaigne,_ 1866;
_Rapport sur le progrès des Lettres,_ 1868; _Ménagère intime,_ 1869;
_La Nature chez Elle,_ 1870; _Tableaux de Siege,_ 1871; _Théâtre,_
1872; _Portraits Contemporaines,_ 1874; _Histoire du Romantisme,_ 1874;
_Portraits et Souvenirs littéraires,_ 1875; _Poésies complètes,_ 1876:
2 vols.; _L'Orient,_ 1877; _Fusins et eaux-Fortes,_ 1880; _Tableaux à
la Plume,_ 1880; _Mademoiselle Daphné,_ 1881; Guide de _l'Amateur au
Musés du Louvre._ 1882; _Souvenirs de Théâtre d'Art et de critique,_
1883.




GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

(1821-1880)

_Madame Bovary,_ 1857; _Salammbô,_ 1863; _La Tentation de Saint
Antoine,_ 1874; _L'Education Sentimentale,_ 1870; _Trois Contes,_
1877; _Bouvard et Pécuchet,_ 1881; _Le Candidat,_ 1874; _Par les
Champs et par les Grèves,_ 1886; _Lettres à George Sand,_ 1884;
_Correspondances,_ 1887-1893.




CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

(1821-1867)

_Salon de_ 1845, 1845; _Salon de_ 1846, 1846; _Histoires
Extraordinaires, traduit de Poe,_ 1856; _Nouvelle Histoires
Extraordinaires,_ 1857; _Les Fleurs du Mal,_ 1857; _Aventures d'Arthur
Gordon Pym (Poe),_ 1858; _Théophile Gautier,_ 1859; _Les Paradis
Artificiels: Opium et Haschisch,_ 1860; _Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser
à Paris,_1861; _Euréka: Poe,_1864; _Histoires Grotesques: Poe,_ 1865;
_Les Épaves de Charles Baudelaire,_ 1866.




EDMOND and JULES DE GONCOURT

(1822-1896; 1830-1870)

_En_ 18, 1851; _Salon de_ 1852, 1852; _La Lorette,_ 1853; _Mystères des
Théâtres,_ 1853; _La revolution dans les Mœurs,_ 1854; _Histoire
de la Société Française pendant la Revolution,_ 1854; _Histoire de
la Société Française pendant la Directoire,_ 1855; _Le Peinture à
l'Exposition de Paris de_ 1855, 1855; _Une Voiture des Masques,_ 1856;
_Les Actrices,_ 1856; _Sophie Arnauld,_ 1857; _Portraits intimes
du XVIII Siècle,_ 1857-1858; _Histoire de Marie Antoinette,_ 1858;
_L'Art du XVIII Siècle,_ 1859-1875; _Les Hommes de Lettres,_ 1860;
_Les Maîtresses de Louis VI,_ 1860; _Sœur Philomène,_ 1861; _Les
Femmes au XVIII Siècle,_ 1864; _Renée Mauperin,_ 1864; _Germinie
Lacerteux,_ 1864; _Idées et Sensations,_ 1860; _Manette Salomon,_
1867; _Madame Gervaisais,_ 1869; _Gavarni,_ 1873; _La Patrie en
Danger,_ 1879; _L'Amour au XVIII Siècle,_ 1873; _La du Barry,_ 1875;
_Madame de Pompadour,_ 1878; _La Duchesse de la Châteauroux,_ 1879;
_Pages retrouvées,_ 1886; _Journal des Goncourts,_ 1887-1896, 9 Vols.;
_Préfaces et manifestes littéraires,_ 1888; _L'Italie d'hier,_ 1894;
_Edmond de Goncourt: Catalogue raisonée de l'œuvre peinte, dessiné
et gravé d'Antoine Watteau,_ 1873; _Catalogue de l'œuvre de P.
Proudhon,_ 1876; _La Fille Élisa,_ 1879; _Les Frères Zemganno,_ 1879;
_La Maison d'un Artiste,_ 1881; _La Faustin,_ 1882; _La Saint-Hubert,_
1882; _Chérie,_ 1884; _Germinie Lacerteux, pièce,_ 1888; _Mademoiselle
Clairon,_ 1890; _Outamoro, le peintre des maisons vertes,_ 1891; _La
Guimard,_ 1893; _A bas le progrès,_ 1893; _Hokouseï,_ 1896.




VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM

(1838-1889)

_Premières Poésies,_1859; _Isis,_ 1862; _Elën,_ 1864; _Morgane,_
1865; _Claire Lenoir_(in the _Revue des Lettres et des Arts),_
1867; _L'Evasion,_ 1870; _La Révolte,_ 1870; _Azraël,_ 1878; _Le
Nouveau Monde,_ 1880; _Contes Cruels,_ 1880; _L'Eve Future,_ 1886;
_Akëdysséril,_ 1886; _L'Amour Suprême,_ 1886; _Tribulat Bonhomet,_
1887; _Histoires Insolites,_ 1888; _Nouveaux Contes Cruels,_ 1889;
Axël, 1890; Chez les Passants, 1890; _Propos d'Au-delà,_ 1893;
_Histoires Souveraines,_ 1899 (a selection).

Among works announced, but never published, it may be interesting
to mention: _Seid, William de Strally, Faust, Poésies Nouvelles
(Intermèdes; Gog; Ave, Mater Victa; Poésies diverses), La Tentation
sur la Montagne, Le Vieux de la Montagne, L'Adoration des Mages,
Méditations Littéraires, Mélanges, Théâtre_ (2 vols.), _Documents sur
les Règnes de Charles VI. et de Charles VII., L'Illusionisme, De la
Connaissance de l'Utile, L'Exégèse Divine._

A sympathetic, but slightly vague, Life of Villiers was written
by his cousin, Vicomte Robert du Pontavice de Heussey: _Villiers
de l'Isle-Adam,_ 1893; it was translated into English by Lady
Mary Lloyd, 1894. See Verlaine's _Poètes Maudits,_ 1884, and his
biography of Villiers in _Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui,_ the series of
penny biographies, with caricature portraits, published by Vanier;
also Mallarmé's _Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,_ the reprint of a lecture
given at Brussels a few months after Villiers, death. _La Révolte_
was translated by Mrs. Theresa Barclay in the _Fortnightly Review,_
December, 1897, and acted in London by the New Stage Club in 1906. I
have translated a little poem, _Aveu,_ from the interlude of verse in
the _Contes Cruels_ called _Chant d'Amour,_ in _Days and Nights,_ 1889.
An article of mine, the first, I believe, to be written on Villiers
in English, appeared in the _Woman's World_ in 1889; another in the
_Illustrated London News_ in 1891.




LÉON CLADEL

(1835-1892)

_Les Martyrs Ridicules. Preface par Charles Baudelaire,_ 1862; _Pierre
Patient,_ 1862; _L'Amour Romantique,_ 1882; _Le Deuxième Mystère de
l'Incarnation,_ 1883; _Le Bouscassié,_ 1889; _La Fête-Votive de Saint
Bartholomée Porte-Glaive,_ 1872; _Les Vas-nu-Pieds,_ 1874; _Celui de la
Croix-aux-Bœufs,_ 1878; _Bonshommes,_ 1879; _Ompdrailles Le Tombeau
des Lutteurs,_ 1879; _N'a q'un Œil,_ 1885; _Tity Foyssac IV,_ 1886;
_Petits Chiens de Léon Cladel,_ 1879; _Par Devant Notaire,_ 1880;
_Crête-Rouge,_ 1880; _Six Morceaux de la Littérature,_ 1880; _Kerkades
Garde-Barrière,_ 1884; _Urbains et Ruraux,_ 1884; _Léon Cladel et
ses Kyrielle des Chiens,_ 1885; _Héros et Pantins,_ 1885; _Quelques
Sires,_ 1885; _Mi-Diable,_ 1886; _Gueux de Marque,_ 1887; _Effigies
d'Inconnus,_ 1888; _Raca,_ 1888; _Seize Morceaux de Littérature,_ 1889;
_L'ancien,_ 1889; _Juive-Errante,_ 1897.




EMILE ZOLA

(1840-1902)

Les _Rougon-Macquart,_ 1871-1893; _La Fortune des Rougons,_ 1871; _La
Curée,_ 1872; _Le Ventre de Paris,_ 1873; _La Conquête de Pluisans,_
1874; _La Faute de l'abbé Mouret,_ 1875; _Son Excellence Eugène
Rougon,_ 1876; _L'Assommoir,_ 1876; _Une Page d'Amour,_ 1878; _Nana,_
1880; _Pot.-Bouille,_ 1882; _Au Bonheur des Dames,_ 1883; _La Joie de
Vivre,_ 1884; _Madeleine Fer at,_ 1885; _La Confession de Claude,_
1886; _Contes à Ninon,_ 1891; _Nouveaux Contes à Ninon,_ 1874; _Le
Capitaine Burle,_ 1883; _La joie de vivre,_ 1884; _Les Mystères de
Marseilles,_ 1885; _Mes Haines,_ 1866; _Le Roman Expérimental,_ 1881;
_Nos Auteurs dramatiques,_ 1881; _Documents littéraires,_ 1881; _Une
Compagne,_ 1882. _Théâtre: Thérèse Raquin, Les Héritiers Rabourdin, La
Bouton de Rose,_ 1890; _L'Argent,_ 1891; _L'Attaque du Moulin,_ 1890;
_La Bête Humaine,_ 1890; La _Débâcle,_ 1892; _Le Doctor Pascal,_ 1893;
_Germinie,_ 1885; Mon Salon, 1886; Le _naturalisme au Théâtre,_ 1889;
_L'Œuvre,_ 1886; _Le Rêve,_ 1892; _Paris_, 1898; _Rome,_ 1896;
_Lourdes,_ 1894; _Fécondité,_ 1899; _Travail,_ 1901; _Vérité_, 1903.




STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

(1842-1898)

_Le Corbeau_ (traduit de Poe), 1875; _La Dernière Mode,_ 1875;
L'_Après-Midi d'un Faune,_ 1876; _Le Vathek de Beckford,_ 1876; _Petite
Philologie à l'Usage des Classes et du Monde: Les Mots Anglais,_ 1877;
_Poésies Complètes_ (photogravées sur le manuscrit), 1887; _Les Poèmes
de Poe,_ 1888; _Le Ten o'Clock de M. Whistler,_ 1888; _Pages,_ 1891;
_Les Miens: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,_ 1892; _Vers et Prose,_ 1892; _La
Musique et les Lettres_ (Oxford, Cambridge), 1894; _Divagations,_ 1897;
_Poésies,_ 1899.

See, on this difficult subject, Edmund Gosse, _Questions at Issue,_
1893, in which will be found the first study of Mallarmé that appeared
in English; and Vittorio Pica, _Letteratura d'Eccezione,_1899, which
contains a carefully-documented study of more than a hundred pages.
There is a translation of the poem called "Fleurs" in Mr. John Gray's
_Silverpoints,_1893, and translations of "Hérodiade" and three shorter
poems will be found in the first volume of my collected poems. Several
of the poems in prose have been translated into English; my translation
of the "Plainte d'Automne," contained in this volume, was made in
momentary forgetfulness that the same poem in prose had already been
translated by Mr. George Moore in _Confessions of a Young Man._ Mr.
Moore also translated "Le Phénomène Futur" in the _Savoy,_ July, 1896.




PAUL VERLAINE

(1844-1896)

_Poèmes Saturniens,_ 1866; _Fêtes Galantes,_ 1869; _La Bonne Chanson,_
1870; _Romances sans Paroles,_ 1874; _Sagesse,_ 1881; _Les Poètes
Maudits,_ 1884; _Jadis et Naguère,_ 1884; _Les Mémoires d'un Veuf,_
1886; _Louise Leclercq_ (suivi de _Le Poteau, Pierre Duchatelet, Madame
Aubin),_ 1887; _Amour,_ 1888; _Parallèlement,_ 1889; _Dédicaces,_ 1890;
_Bonheur,_ 1891; _Mes Hôpitaux,_ 1891; Chansons _pour Elle,_ 1891;
_Liturgies Intimes,_ 1892; _Mes Prisons,_ 1893; _Odes en son Honneur,_
1893; _Elégies,_ 1893; _Quinze Jours en Hollande,_ 1894; _Dans les
Limbes,_ 1894; _Epigrammes,_ 1894; _Confessions,_ 1895; _Chair_, 1896;
_Invectives,_ 1896; _Voyage en France d'un Français_ (posthumous), 1907.

The complete works of Verlaine are now published in six volumes at
the Librairie Léon Vanier (now Messein); the text is very incorrectly
printed, and it is still necessary to refer to the earlier editions
in separate volumes. _A Choix de Poésies,_1891, with a preface by
François Coppée, and a reproduction of Carrière's admirable portrait,
is published in one volume by Charpentier; the series of _Hommes
d'Aujourd'hui_ contains twenty-seven biographical notices by Verlaine;
and a considerable number of poems and prose articles exists, scattered
in various magazines, some of them English, such as the _Senate;_ in
some cases the articles themselves are translated into English, such
as "My Visit to London," in the _Savoy_ for April, 1896, and "Notes on
England: Myself as a French Master," and "Shakespeare and Racine," in
the _Fortnightly Review_ for July, 1894, and September, 1894. The first
English translation in verse from Verlaine is Arthur O'Shaughnessy's
rendering of "Clair de Lune" in _Fêtes Galantes,_ under the title
"Pastel," in _Songs of a Worker,_ 1881. A volume of translations
in verse, _Poems of Verlaine,_ by Gertrude Hall, was published in
America in 1895. In Mr. John Gray's _Silverpoints,_ 1893, there are
translations of "Parsifal," "A Crucifix," "Le Chevalier Malheur,"
"Spleen," "Clair de Lune," "Mon Dieu m'a dit," and "Green."

As I have mentioned, there have been many portraits of Verlaine. The
three portraits drawn on lithographic paper by Mr. Rothenstein, and
published in 1898, are but the latest, if also among the best, of a
long series, of which Mr. Rothenstein himself has done two or three
others, one of which was reproduced in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1894,
when Verlaine was in London. M. F. A. Cazals, a young artist who was
one of Verlaine's most intimate friends, has done I should not like to
say how many portraits, some of which he has gathered together in a
little book, _Paul Verlaine: ses Portraits,_ 1898. There are portraits
in nine of Verlaine's own books, several of them by M. Cazals (roughly
jotted, expressive notes of moments), one by M. Anquetin (a strong
piece of thinking flesh and blood), and in the _Choix de Poésies_ there
is a reproduction of the cloudy, inspired poet of M. Eugène Carrière's
painting. Another portrait, which I have not seen, but which Verlaine
himself calls, in the _Dédicaces, un portrait enfin reposé,_ was done
by M. Aman-Jean. M. Niederhausern has done a bust in bronze, Mr.
Rothenstein a portrait medallion. A new edition of the _Confessions,_
1899, contains a number of sketches; _Verlaine Dessinateur,_ 1896, many
more; and there are yet others in the extremely objectionable book of
M. Charles Donos, _Verlaine Intime,_ 1898. The _Hommes d'Aujourd'hui_
contains a caricature-portrait, many other portraits have appeared in
French and English and German and Italian magazines, and there is yet
another portrait in the admirable little book of Charles Morice, _Paul
Verlaine,_ 1888, which contains by far the best study that has ever
been made of Verlaine as a poet. I believe Mr. George Moore's article,
"A Great Poet," reprinted in _Impressions and Opinions,_ 1891, was the
first that was written on Verlaine in England; my own article in the
_National Review_ in 1892 was, I believe, the first detailed study of
the whole of his work up to that date. At last, in the _Vie de Paul
Verlaine,_ of Edmund Lepelletier, there has come the authentic record.

An honest and instructed life of Verlaine has long been wanted, if only
as an antidote to the defamatory production called _Verlaine Intime,_
made up out of materials collected by the publisher Léon Vanier in
his own defense, in order that a hard taskmaster might be presented
to the world in the colours of a benefactor. A "legend" which may
well have seemed plausible to those who knew Verlaine only at the
end of his life, has obtained currency; and a comparison of Verlaine
with Villon, not only as a poet (which is to his honour), but also as
a man, has been made, and believed. Lepelletier's book is an exact
chronicle of a friendship which lasted, without a break, for thirty-six
years--that is, from the time when Verlaine was sixteen to the time
of his death; and a more sane, loyal and impartial chronicle of any
man's life we have never read. It is written with full knowledge of
every part of the career which it traces; and it is written by a man
who puts down whatever he knows exactly as he believes it to have
been. His conclusion is that "on peut fouiller sa vie au microscope:
on y reconnaîtra des fautes, des folies, des faiblesses, bien des
souffrances aussi, avec de la fatalité au fond, pas de honte véritable,
pas une vile et indigne action. Les vrais amis du poète peuvent donc
revendiquer pour lui l'épithete d'honnête homme, sans doute très
vulgaire, mais qui, aux yeux de certains, a encore du prix."

In 1886 Verlaine dedicated _Les Mémoires d'un Veuf_ to Lepelletier,
affirming the resolve, on his part, to "garder intacte la vielle amitié
si forte et si belle." The compact has been kept nobly by the survivor.

It may, indeed, be questioned whether Lepelletier does not insist a
little too much on the bourgeois element which he finds in Verlaine.
When a man has suffered under unjust accusations, it is natural for
his friends to defend him under whatever aspect seems to them most
generally convincing. So it is interesting to know that for seven years
Verlaine was in a municipal office, the Bureau des Budgets et Comptes,
and that later, in 1882, he made an application, which was refused,
for leave to return to his former post. Lepelletier reproaches the
authorities for an action which he takes to have precipitated Verlaine
into the final misery of his vagabondage. He would have lived quietly,
he says, and written in security. Both assumptions may be doubted. What
was bourgeois, and contented with quiet, was a small part of the nature
of one who was too strong as well as too weak to remain within limits.
The terrible force of Verlaine's weakness would always, in the process
of making him a poet, have carried him far from that "tranquilité d'une
sinécure bureaucratique" which Lepelletier strangely regrets for him.
It is hardly permitted, in looking back over a disastrous life which
has expressed itself in notable poetry, to regret that the end should
have been attained, by no matter what means.

On moral questions Lepelletier speaks with the authority of an intimate
friendship, and from a point of view which seems wholly without
prejudice. He defends Verlaine with evident conviction against the
most serious charges brought against him, and he shows at least, on
documentary evidence, that nothing of the darker part of his "legend"
was ever proved against him in any of his arrests and imprisonments.
Drink, and mad rages let loose by drink, account, ignobly enough, for
all of them. In the famous quarrel with Rimbaud, which brought him into
prison for eighteen months, the accusation reads:

"Pour avoir, à Bruxelles, le 10 juillet, 1873, volontairement portés
des coups et fait des blessures ayant entraîné une incapacité de
travail personnel à Arthur Rimbaud."

The whole account of this episode is given by M. Lepelletier in great
detail, and from this we learn that it was by the merest change of
mind on the part of Rimbaud, or by sudden treachery, that the matter
came into the courts at all. Lepelletier supplies an unfavourable
account of Rimbaud, whom he looks upon as the evil counsellor of
Verlaine--probably with justice. There is little doubt that Rimbaud,
apart from his genuine touch of precocious power, which had its
influence on the genius of Verlaine, was a "mauvais sujet" of a selfish
and mischievous kind. He was destructive and pitiless; and having done
his worst, he went off carelessly into Africa.

It will surprise some readers to learn that Verlaine took his degree
of "bachelier-ès-lettres," and that on leaving the Lycée Bonaparte he
received a certificate placing him "au nombre des sujets distingués
que compte l'établissement." He was well grounded in Latin, and fairly
well in English, and at several intervals in his life attempted to
master Spanish, with the vague desire of translating Calderon. At an
early period he read French literature, classical and modern, with
avidity; translations of English, German and Eastern classics; books of
criticism and philosophy.

"Il admirait beaucoup Joseph de Maîstre. _Le Rouge et le Noir_
de Stendhal avait produce sur lui une forte impression. Il avait
déniché, on ne sait où, une Vie de sainte Thérèse, qu'il lisait avec
ravissement."

He was absorbed in Baudelaire, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Banville; he
read Pétrus Borel and Aloysius Bertrand. The only poem that remains
of this early period is the "Nocturne Parisien" of the _Poèmes
Saturniens,_ which dates from about his twentieth year. Jules de
Goncourt defined it as "un beau poème sinistre mêlant comme une Morgue
à Notre-Dame." Baudelaire, as Sainte-Beuve, in a charming letter of
real appreciation, pointed out, is here the evident "point de départ,
pour aller au delà."

The chapter in which Lepelletier tells the story of the origin of the
most famous literary movement since that of 1830, the "Parnasse," is
one of the most entertaining in the book, and gives, in its narrative
of the receptions "chez Nina" (a _salon_ which Lepelletier describes
as the ancestor of the "Chat Noir"), a vivid picture of the days when
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and François Coppée were beginners together.
Nina de Villars was one of the oddest people of her time: she made a
kind of private Bohemia for poets, musicians, all kinds of artists and
eccentric people, herself the most eccentric of them all. It was at her
house that the members of the "Parnasse" gathered, while they selected
as their more formal meeting-place the _salon_ of Madame Ricard. It is
not generally known that Verlaine's _Poèmes Saturniens_ was the third
volume to be issued by the house of Lemerre, afterwards to become a
famous "publisher of poets," and it was in this volume that the new
laws of the Parnasse were first formulated--that impassivity, that
"marble egoism," which Verlaine was so soon to reject for a more living
impulse, but which neither Leconte de Lisle nor Héredia was ever to
abandon. When one thinks of the later Verlaine, it is curious to turn
to that first formula:

    Est-elle en marvre où non, le Vénus de Milo?

Verlaine's verse suddenly becomes human with _La Bonne Chanson,_ though
the humanity in it is not yet salted as with fire. It is the record of
the event which, as Lepelletier says, dominated his whole life; the
marriage with Mathilde Maute, the young girl with whom he had fallen in
love at first sight, and whose desertion of him, however explicable,
he never forgot nor forgave. Nothing could be more just or delicate
than Lepelletier's treatment of the whole situation and there is no
doubt that he is right in saying that the young wife "eût une grande
responsabilité dans les désordres de l'existence désorbitée du poète."
Verlaine, as he says, "était bon, aimant, et c'était comme un souffrant
qu'il fallait le traiter." "Vous n'avez rien compris à ma simplicité,"
he wrote long afterwards, addressing the woman of whom Lepelletier
says, "Il l'aima toujours, il n'aima qu'elle."

With his marriage Verlaine's disasters begin. Rimbaud enters his life
and turns the current of it; the vagabondage begins, in France and
England, and the letters written from London are among the most vivid
documents in the book: thumbnail sketches full of keen observation.
Then comes his imprisonment and conversion to Catholicism. Here
Lepelletier, while he gives us an infinity of details which he alone
could give, adopts an attitude which we cannot think to be justified,
and which, as a matter of fact, Verlaine protested against during
his lifetime. "Cette conversion fut-elle profonde et véridique?" he
asks; and he answers, "Je ne le crois pas." That his conversion had
much influence on Verlaine's conduct cannot be contended, but conduct
and belief are two different things. Sincerity of the moment was his
fundamental characteristic, but the moments made and remade his moods
in their passing. The religion of _Sagesse_ is not the less genuine
because that grave and sacred book was followed by the revolt of
_Parallèment._ Verlaine tried to explain--in the poems themselves, in
prefaces, and in conversation with friends--how natural it was to sin
and to repent, and to use the same childlike words in the immediate
rendering of sin and of repentance. This _naïveté,_ which made any
regular existence an impossibility, was a part of him which gave a
quality to his work unlike that of any other poet of our time. At
the end of his life hardly anything but the _naïvetê_ was left, and
the poems became mere outcries and gestures. Lepelletier is justly
indignant at the action of Vanier in publishing after Verlaine's
deaths the collection called _Invectives,_ made up of scraps and
impromptus which the poet certainly never intended to publish. Here we
see part of the weakness of a great man, who becomes petty when he puts
off his true character and tries to be angry. "J'ai la fureur d'aimer,"
he says somewhere, and there is no essential part of his work which is
not the expression of some form of love, grotesque or heroic, human or
divine.

Of all this later, more and more miserable part of the life of
Verlaine, Lepelletier has less to tell us. It has been sufficiently
commented on, not always by friendly or understanding witnesses. What
we get in this book, for the first time, is a view of the life as a
whole, with all that is beautiful, tragic, and desperate in it. It is
not an apology: it is a statement. It not only does honor to a great
and unhappy man of genius; it does him justice.




JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS

(1848-1907)

Le _Drageoir à épices,_ 1874; _Marthe: Histoire d'une Fille,_ 1876;
_Les Sœurs Vatard,_ 1879; _Croquis Parisiens,_ 1880; _En Ménage,_
1881; _A Vau-l'Eau,_ 1882; _L'Art Moderne,_ 1883; _A Rebours,_ 1884;
_Un Dilemme,_ 1887; _En Rade,_ 1887; _Certains,_1889; _La Bièvre,_1890;
_Là-Bas,_ 1891; _En Route,_ 1895; La _Cathédrale,_ 1898; _La Bièvre
Saint-Séverin,_ 1898; Pages _Catholiques,_ 1900; Sainte _Lydwine de
Schiedam,_ 1901; De Tout, 1902; L'Oblat, 1903; Trois _Primitifs,_
1905; Les Foules de _Lourdes,_ 1906; See also the short story, _Sac
au Dos,_ in the _Soirées de Médan,_ 1880, and the pantomime, _Pierrot
Sceptique,_ 1881, in collaboration with Léon Hennique. _En Route_ was
translated into English by Mr. Kegan Paul, in 1896; and _La Cathédrale_
by Miss Clara Bell, in 1898.




ARTHUR RIMBAUD

(1854-1891)

_Une Saison en Enfer,_ 1873; _Les Illuminations,_ 1886; _Reliquaire,_
1891 (containing several poems falsely attributed to Rimbaud); _Les
Illuminations: Une Saison en Enfer,_ 1892; _Poésies Complètes,_ 1895;
_Œuvres,_ 1898.

See also Paterne Berrichon, _La Vie de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud,_ 1898,
and _Lettres de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud,_ 1899; Paul Verlaine, _Les
Poètes Maudits,_1884, and the biography by Verlaine in _Les Hommes
d'Aujourd'hui._ Mr. George Moore was the first to write about
Rimbaud in England, in "Two Unknown Poets" (Rimbaud and Laforgue) in
_Impressions and Opinions,_ 1891. In Mr. John Gray's _Silverpoints,_
1893, there are translations of "Charleville" and "Sensation." The
latter, and "Les Chercheuses de Poux," are translated by Mr. T. Sturge
Moore in _The Vinedresser, and other Poems,_ 1899.




JULES LAFORGUE

(1860-1887)

_Les Complaintes,_ 1885; _L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune,_ 1886;
_Le Concile Féerique,_ 1886; _Moralités Légendaires,_ 1887; _Derniers
Vers,_ 1890 (a privately printed volume, containing _Des Fleurs de
Bonne Volonté, Le Concile Féerique,_ and _Derniers Vers); Poésies
Complètes,_ 1894; _Œuvres Complètes, Poésies, Moralités Légendaires,
Mélanges Posthumes_ (3 vols.), 1902, 1903.

An edition of the _Moralités Légendaires_ was published in 1897, under
the care of M. Lucien Pissarro, at the Sign of the Dial; it is printed
in Mr. Ricketts' admirable type, and makes one of the most beautiful
volumes issued in French during this century. In 1896 M. Camille
Mauclair, with his supple instinct for contemporary values, wrote
a study, or rather an eulogy, of Laforgue, to which M. Maeterlinck
contributed a few searching and delicate words by way of preface.




MAURICE MAETERLINCK

(1862)

_Serres Chaudes,_ 1889; _La Princesse Maleine,_ 1890; _Les Aveugles
(L'Intruse, Les Aveugles),_ 1890; _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,
de Ruysbroeck l'Admirable,_ 1891; _Les Sept Princesses,_ 1891; _Pelléas
et Mélisande,_ 1892; _Alladine et Palomides, Intérieur, La Mort de
Tintagiles,_ 1894; _Annabella, de John Ford,_ 1895; _Les Disciples à
Sais et les Fragments de Novalis,_ 1895; _Le Trésor des Humbles,_ 1896;
_Douze Chansons,_ 1896; _Aglavaine et Sélysette,_ 1896; _La Sagesse et
la Destinée,_ 1898; _Théâtre,_ 1901 (3 vols.); _La Vie des Abeilles,_
1901; _Monna Vanna,_ 1902; _Le Temple Enseveli,_ 1902; _Joyzelle,_
1903; _Le Double Jardin,_ 1904; _L'Intelligence des Fleurs,_ 1907.

M. Maeterlinck has had the good or bad fortune to be more promptly,
and more violently, praised at the beginning of his career than at all
events any other writer of whom I have spoken in this volume. His fame
in France was made by a flaming article of M. Octave Mirbeau in the
_Figaro_ of August 24, 1890. M. Mirbeau greeted him as the "Belgian
Shakepeare," and expressed his opinion of _La Princesse Maleine_ by
saying "M. Maeterlinck has given us the greatest work of genius that
has been produced in our time, and the most extraordinary and the most
naïve too, comparable (dare I say?) superior in beauty to what is
most beautiful in Shakespeare ... more tragic than _Macbeth,_ more
extraordinary in thought than _Hamlet."_ Mr. William Archer introduced
M. Maeterlinck to England in an article called "A Pessimist Playwright"
in the _Fortnightly Review,_ September, 1891. Less enthusiastic than
M. Mirbeau, he defined the author of _La Princesse Maleine_ as "a
Webster who had read Alfred de Musset." A freely adapted version of
_L'Intruse_ was given by Mr. Tree at the Haymarket Theatre, January
27, 1892, and since that time many of M. Maeterlinck's plays have been
acted, without cuts, or with but few cuts, at various London theatres.
Several of his books have also been translated into English: _The
Princesse Maleine_ (by Gerard Harry) and _The Intruder_ (by William
Wilson), 1892; _Pelléas and Mélisande_ and _The Sightless_ (by Laurence
Alma-Tadema), 1892; _Ruysbroeck and the Mystics_ (by J. T. Stoddart),
1894; _The Treasure of the Humble_ (by A. Sutro), 1897; _Aglavaine and
Sélysette_ (by A. Sutro), 1897; _Wisdom and Destiny_ (by A. Sutro),
1898; _Alladine and Palomides_ (by A. Sutro), _Interior_ (by William
Archer), and _The Death of Tintagiles_ (by A. Sutro), 1899.

I have spoken, in this volume, chiefly of Maeterlinck's essays, and
but little of his plays, and I have said all that I had to say without
special reference to the second volume of essays, _La Sagesse et la
Destinée._ Like _Le Trésor des Humbles,_ that book is a message, a
doctrine, even more than it is a piece of literature. It is a treatise
on wisdom and happiness, on the search for happiness because it is
wisdom, not for wisdom because it is happiness. It is a book of patient
and resigned philosophy, a very Flemish philosophy, more resigned than
even _Le Trésor des Humbles._ In a sense it seems to aim less high.
An ecstatic mysticism has given way to a kind of prudence. Is this
coming nearer to the earth really an intellectual ascent or descent?
At least it is a divergence, and it probably indicates a divergence in
art as well as in meditation. Yet, while it is quite possible to at
least indicate Maeterlinck's position as a philosopher, it seems to me
premature to attempt to define his position as a dramatist. Interesting
as his dramatic work has always been, there is, in the later dramas,
so singular an advance in all the qualities that go to make great
art, that I find it impossible at this stage of his development,
to treat his dramatic work as in any sense the final expression of
a personality. What the next stage of his development may be it is
impossible to say. He will not write more beautiful dramas than he has
written in _Aglavaine et Sélysette_ and in _Pelléas et Mêlisande._
But he may, and he probably will, write something which will move
the general world more profoundly, touching it more closely, in the
manner of the great writers, in whom beauty has not been more beautiful
than in writers less great, but has come to men with a more splendid
energy.




TRANSLATIONS




_From Stéphane Mallarmé_


    I. HÉRODIADE

    Herodiade.

    To mine own self I am a wilderness.
    You know it, amethyst gardens numberless
    Enfolded in the flaming, subtle deep,
    Strange gold, that through the red earth's heavy sleep
    Has cherished ancient brightness like a dream,
    Stones whence mine eyes, pure jewels, have their gleam
    Of icy and melodious radiance, you,
    Metals, which into my young tresses drew
    A fatal splendour and their manifold grace!
    Thou, woman, born into these evil days
    Disastrous to the cavern sibylline,
    Who speakest, prophesying not of one divine,
    But of a mortal, if from that close sheath,
    My robes, rustle the wild enchanted breath
    In the white quiver of my nakedness,
    In the warm air of summer, O prophetess,
    (And woman's body obeys that ancient claim)
    Behold me in my shivering starry shame,
    I die!
    The horror of my virginity
    Delights me, and I would envelop me
    In the terror of my tresses, that, by night,
    Inviolate reptile, I might feel the white
    And glimmering radiance of thy frozen fire,
    Thou that art chaste and diest of desire,
    White night of ice and of the cruel snow!
    Eternal sister, my lone sister, lo
    My dreams uplifted before thee! now, apart,
    So rare a crystal is my dreaming heart,
    I live in a monotonous land alone,
    And all about me lives but in mine own
    Image, the idolatrous mirror of my pride,
    Mirroring this Hérodiade diamond-eyed.
    I am indeed alone, O charm and curse!

    Nurse.
    O lady, would you die then?

    Herodiade.
    No, poor nurse;
    Be calm, and leave me; prithee, pardon me,
    But, ere thou go, close to the casement; see
    How the seraphical blue in the dim glass smiles,
    But I abhor the blue of the sky!
    Yet miles
    On miles of rocking waves! Know'st not a land
    Where, in the pestilent sky, men see the hand
    Of Venus, and her shadow in dark leaves?
    Thither I go.
    Light thou the wax that grieves
    In the swift flame, and sheds an alien tear
    Over the vain gold; wilt not say in mere
    Childishness?

    Nurse.
    Now?

    Herodiade.
    Farewell. You lie, O flower
    Of these chill lips!
    I wait the unknown hour,
    Or, deaf to your crying and that hour supreme,
    Utter the lamentation of the dream
    Of childhood seeing fall apart in sighs
    The icy chaplet of its reveries.




    II. SIGH

    My soul, calm sister, towards thy brow, whereon scarce grieves
    An autumn strewn already with its russet leaves,
    And towards the wandering sky of thine angelic eyes,
    Mounts, as in melancholy gardens may arise
    Some faithful fountain sighing whitely towards the blue!
    Towards the blue pale and pure that sad October knew,
    When, in those depths, it mirrored languors infinité,
    And agonising leaves upon the waters white,
    Windily drifting, traced a furrow cold and dun,
    Where, in one long last ray, lingered the yellow sun.


    III. SEA-WIND

    The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read.
    Flight, only flight! I feel that birds are wild to tread
    The floor of unknown foam, and to attain the skies!
    Nought, neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,
    Shall hold this heart that bathes in waters its delight,
    O nights! nor yet my waking lamp, whose lonely light
    Shadows the  vacant paper, whiteness profits best,
    Nor the young wife who rocks her baby on her breast.
    I will depart! O steamer, swaying rope and spar,
    Lift anchor for exotic lands that lie afar!
    A weariness, outworn by cruel hopes, still clings
    To the last farewell handkerchief's last beckonings!
    And are not these, the masts inviting storms, not these
    That an awakening wind bends over wrecking seas,
    Lost, not a sail, a sail, a flowering isle, ere long?
    But, O my heart, hear thou, hear thou the sailors' song!


    IV. ANGUISH

    To-night I do not come to conquer thee,
    O Beast that dost the sins of the whole world bear,
    Nor with my kisses' weary misery
    Wake a sad tempest in thy wanton hair;
    It is that heavy and that dreamless sleep
    I ask of the close curtains of thy bed,
    Which, after all thy treacheries, folds thee deep,
    Who knowest oblivion better than the dead.
    For Vice, that gnaws with keener tooth than Time,
    Brands me as thee, of barren conquest proud;
    But while thou guardest in thy breast of stone
    A heart that fears no fang of any crime,
    I wander palely, haunted by my shroud,
    Fearing to die if I but sleep alone.




    _From Paul Verlaine: Fêtes Galantes_

    I. CLAIR DE LUNE

    Your soul is a sealed garden, and there go
    With masque and bergamasque fair companies
    Playing on lutes and dancing and as though
    Sad under their fantastic fripperies.

    Though they in minor keys go carolling
    Of love the conqueror and of life the boon
    They seem to doubt the happiness they sing
    And the song melts into the light of the moon,

    The sad light of the moon, so lovely fair
    That all the birds dream in the leafy shade
    And the slim fountains sob into the air
    Among the marble statues in the glade.


    II. PANTOMIME

    Pierrot, no sentimental swain,
    Washes a paté down again
    With furtive flagons, white and red.

    Cassandre, with demure content,
    Greets with a tear of sentiment
    His nephew disinherited.

    That blackguard of a Harlequin
    Pirouettes, and plots to win
    His Columbine that flits and flies.

    Columbine dreams, and starts to find
    A sad heart sighing in the wind,
    And in her heart a voice that sighs.


    III. SUR L'HERBE

    The Abbé wanders.--Marquis, now
    Set straight your periwig, and speak!
    --This Cyprus wine is heavenly, how
    Much less, Camargo, than your cheek!

    --My goddess ...--Do, mi, sol, la, si.
    --Abbé, such treason who'll forgive you?
    --May I die, ladies, if there be
    A star in heaven I will not give you!

    --I'd be my lady's lapdog; then ...
    --Shepherdess, kiss your shepherd soon,
    Shepherd, come kiss ...--Well, gentlemen?
    --Do, mi, so.--Hey, good-night, good moon!


    IV. L'ALLÉE

    As in the age of shepherd king and queen,
    Painted and frail amid her nodding bows,
    Under the sombre branches and between
    The green and mossy garden-ways she goes,
    With little mincing airs one keeps to pet
    A darling and provoking perroquet.
    Her long-trained robe is blue, the fan she holds
    With fluent fingers girt with heavy rings,
    So vaguely hints of vague erotic things
    That her eye smiles, musing among its folds.
    --Blonde too, a tiny nose, a rosy mouth,
    Artful as that sly patch that makes more sly,
    In her divine unconscious pride of youth,
    The slightly simpering sparkle of the eye.


    V. A LA PROMENADE

    The sky so pale, and the trees, such frail things,
    Seem as if smiling on our bright array
    That flits so light and gay upon the way
    With indolent airs and fluttering as of wings.

    The fountain wrinkles under a faint wind,
    And all the sifted sunlight falling through
    The lime-trees of the shadowy avenue
    Comes to us blue and shadowy-pale and thinned.

    Faultlessly fickle, and yet fond enough,
    With fonds hearts not too tender to be free,
    We wander whispering deliciously,
    And every lover leads a lady-love,

    Whose imperceptible and roguish hand
    Darts now and then a dainty tap, the lip
    Revenges on an extreme finger-tip,
    The tip of the left little finger, and,

    The deed being so excessive and uncouth,
    A duly freezing look deals punishment,
    That in the instant of the act is blent
    With a shy pity pouting in the mouth.


    VI. DANS LA GROTTE

    Stay, let me die, since I am true,
    For my distress will not delay,
    And the Hyrcanian tigress ravening for prey
    Is as a little lamb to you.


    Yes, here within, cruel Clymène,
    This steel which in how many wars
    How many a Cyrus slew, or Scipio, now prepares
    To end my life and end my pain.

    But nay, what need of steel have I
    To haste my passage to the shades?
    Did not Love pierce my heart, beyond all mortal aids,
    With the first arrow of your eye?


    VII. LES INGENUS

    High heels and long skirts intercepting them,
    So that, according to the wind or way,
    An ankle peeped and vanished as in play;
    And well we loved the malice of the game.

    Sometimes an insect with its jealous sting
    Some fair one's whiter neck disquieted,
    From which the gleams of sudden whiteness shed
    Met in our eyes a frolic welcoming.

    The stealthy autumn evening faded out,
    And the fair creatures dreaming by our side
    Words of such subtle savour to us sighed
    That since that time our souls tremble and doubt.


    VIII. CORTÈGE

    A silver-vested monkey trips
    And pirouettes before the face
    Of one who twists a kerchief's lace
    Between her well-gloved finger-tips.

    A little negro, a red elf,
    Carries her dropping train, and holds
    At arm's length all the heavy folds,
    Watching each fold displace itself.

    The monkey never lets his eyes
    Wander from the fair woman's breast,
    White wonder that to be possessed
    Would call a god out of the skies.

    Sometimes the little negro seems
    To lift his sumptuous burden up
    Higher than need be, in the hope
    Of seeing what all night he dreams.

    She goes by corridor and stair,
    Still to the insolent appeals
    Of her familiar animals
    Indifferent or unaware.


    IX. LES COQUILLAGES

    Each shell incrusted in the grot
    Where we two loved each other well
    An aspect of its own has got.

    The purple of a purple shell
    Is our souls' colour when they make
    Our burning heart's blood visible.

    This pallid shell affects to take
    Thy languors, when thy love-tired eyes
    Rebuke me for my mockery's sake.

    This counterfeits the harmonies
    Of thy pink ear, and this might be
    Thy plump short nape with rosy dyes.

    But one, among these, troubled me.


    X. EN PATINANT

    We were the victims, you and I,
    Madame, of mutual self deceits;
    And that which set our brains awry
    May well have been the summer heats.

    And the spring too, if I recall,
    Contributed to spoil our play,
    And yet its share, I think, was small
    In leading you and me astray.

    For air in springtime is so fresh
    That rose-buds Love has surely meant
    To match the roses of the flesh
    Have odours almost innocent;

    And even the lilies that outpour
    Their biting odours where the sun
    Is new in heaven, do but the more
    Enliven and enlighten one,

    So stealthily the zephyr blows
    A mocking breath that renders back
    The heart's rest and the soul's repose
    And the flower's aphrodisiac,

    And the five senses, peeping out,
    Take up their station at the feast,
    But, being by themselves, without
    Troubling the reason in the least.

    That was the time of azure skies,
    (Madame, do you remember it?)
    And sonnets to my lady's eyes,
    And cautious kisses not too sweet.

    Free from all passion's idle pother,
    Full of mere kindliness, how long,
    How well we liked not loved each other,
    Without one rapture or one wrong!

    Ah, happy hours! But summer came:
    Farewell, fresh breezes of the spring!
    A wind of pleasure like a flame
    Leapt on our senses wondering.

    Strange flowers, fair crimson-hearted flowers
    Poured their ripe odours over us,
    And evil voices of the hours
    Whispered above us in the boughs.

    We yielded to it all, ah me!
    What vertigo of fools held fast
    Our senses in its ecstasy
    Until the heat of summer passed?

    There were vain tears and vainer laughter,
    And hands indefinitely pressed,
    Moist sadnesses, and swoonings after,
    And what vague void within the breast?

    But autumn came to our relief,
    Its light grown cold, its gusts grown rough,
    Came to remind us, sharp and brief,
    That we had wantoned long enough,

    And led us quickly to recover
    The elegance demanded of
    Every quite irreproachable lover
    And every seemly lady-love.

    Now it is winter, and, alas,
    Our backers tremble for their stake;
    Already other sledges pass
    And leave us toiling in their wake.

    Put both your hands into your muff,
    Sit back, now, steady! off we go.
    Fanchon will tell us soon enough
    Whatever news there is to know.


    XI. FANTOCHES

    Scaramouche waves a threatening hand
    To Pulcinella, and they stand,
    Two shadows, black against the moon.

    The old doctor of Bologna pries
    For simples with impassive eyes,
    And mutters o'er a magic rune.

    The while his daughter, scarce half-dressed,
    Glides slyly 'neath the trees, in quest
    Of her bold pirate lover's sail;

    Her pirate from the Spanish main,
    Whose passion thrills her in the pain
    Of the loud languorous nightingale.


    XII. CYTHÈRE

    By favourable breezes fanned,
    A trellised harbour is at hand
    To shield us from the summer airs;

    The scent of roses, fainting sweet,
    Afloat upon the summer heat,
    Blends with the perfume that she wears.

    True to the promise her eyes gave,
    She ventures all, and her mouth rains
    A dainty fever through my veins;

    And, Love fulfilling all things, save
    Hunger, we 'scape, with sweets and ices,
    The folly of Love's sacrifices.


    XIII. EN BATEAU

    The shepherd's star with trembling glint
    Drops in black water; at the hint
    The pilot fumbles for his flint.

    Now is the time or never, sirs.
    No hand that wanders wisely errs:
    I touch a hand, and is it hers?

    The knightly Atys strikes the strings,
    And to the faithless Chloris flings
    A look that speaks of many things.

    The abbé has absolved again
    Eglé, the viscount all in vain
    Has given his hasty heart the rein.

    Meanwhile the moon is up and streams
    Upon the skiff that flies and seems
    To float upon a tide of dreams.


    XIV. LE FAUNE

    An aged faun of old red clay-Laughs
    from the grassy bowling-green,
    Foretelling doubtless some decay
    Of mortal moments so serene

    That lead us lightly on our way
    (Love's piteous pilgrims have we been!)
    To this last hour that runs away
    Dancing to the tambourine.


    XV. MANDOLINE

    The singers of serenades
    Whisper their faded vows
    Unto fair listening maids
    Under the singing boughs.

    Tircis, Aminte, are there,
    Clitandre has waited long,
    And Damis for many a fair
    Tyrant makes many a song.

    Their short vests, silken and bright,
    Their long pale silken trains,
    Their elegance of delight,
    Twine soft blue silken chains.

    And the mandolines and they,
    Faintlier breathing, swoon
    Into the rose and grey
    Ecstasy of the moon.


    XVI. A CLYMÈNE

    Mystical strains unheard,
    A song without a word,
    Dearest, because thine eyes,
    Pale as the skies,

    Because thy voice, remote
    As the far clouds that float
    Veiling for me the whole
    Heaven of the soul,

    Because the stately scent
    Of thy swan's whiteness, blent
    With the white lily's bloom
    Of thy perfume,

    Ah! because thy dear love,
    The music breathed above
    By angels halo-crowned,
    Odour and sound,

    Hath, in my subtle heart,
    With some mysterious art
    Transposed thy harmony,
    So let it be!


    XVII. LETTRE

    Far from your sight removed by thankless cares
    (The gods are witness when a lover swears)
    I languish and I die, Madame, as still
    My use is, which I punctually fulfil,
    And go, through heavy-hearted woes conveyed,
    Attended ever by your lovely shade,
    By day in thought, by night in dreams of hell,
    And day and night, Madame, adorable!
    So that at length my dwindling body lost
    In very soul, I too become a ghost,
    I too, and in the lamentable stress
    Of vain desires remembering happiness,
    Remembered kisses, now, alas, unfelt,
    My shadow shall into your shadow melt.

    Meanwhile, dearest, your most obedient slave.

    How does the sweet society behave,
    Thy cat, thy dog, thy parrot? and is she
    Still, as of old, the black-eyed Silvanie
    (I had loved black eyes if thine had not been blue)
    Who ogled me at moments, palsambleu!

    Thy tender friend and thy sweet confidant?
    One dream there is, Madame, long wont to haunt
    This too impatient heart: to pour the earth
    And all its treasures (of how little worth!)
    Before your feet as tokens of a love
    Equal to the most famous flames that move
    The hearts of men to conquer all but death.
    Cleopatra was less loved, yes, on my faith,
    By Antony or Cæsar than you are,
    Madame, by me, who truly would by far
    Out-do the deeds of Cæsar for a smile,
    O Cleopatra, queen of word and wile,
    Or, for a kiss, take flight with Antony

    With this, farewell, dear, and no more from me;
    How can the time it takes to read it, quite
    Be worth the trouble that it took to write?


    XVIII. LES INDOLENTS

    Bah! spite of Fate, that says us nay,
    Suppose we die together, eh?
    --A rare conclusion you discover

    --What's rare is good. Let us die so,
    Like lovers in Boccaccio.
    --Ha! ha! ha! you fantastic lover!

    --Nay, not fantastic. If you will,
    Fond, surely irreproachable.
    Suppose, then, that we die together?

    --Good sir, your jests are fitlier told
    Than when you speak of love or gold.
    Why speak at all, in this glad weather?

    Whereat, behold them once again,
    Tircis beside his Dorimène,
    Not far from two blithe rustic rovers,

    For some caprice of idle breath
    Deferring a delicious death.
    Ha! ha! ha! what fantastic lovers!


    XIX. COLUMBINE

    The foolish Leander,
    Cape-covered Cassander,
    And which
    Is Pierrot? 'tis he
    With the hop of a flea
    Leaps the ditch;

    And Harlequin who
    Rehearses anew
    His sly task,
    With his dress that's a wonder,
    And eyes shining under
    His mask;

    Mi, sol, mi, fa, do!
    How gaily they go,
    And they sing
    And they laugh and they twirl
    Round the feet of a girl
    Like the Spring,

    Whose eyes are as green
    As a cat's are, and keen
    As its claws,
    And her eyes without frown
    Bid all new-comers Down
    With your paws!

    On they go with the force
    Of the stars in their course,
    And the speed:
    O tell me toward what
    Disaster unthought,
    Without heed

    The implacable fair,
    A rose in her hair,
    Holding up
    Her skirts as she runs
    Leads this dance of the dunce
    And the dupe?


    XX. L'AMOUR PAR TERRE

    The other night a sudden wind laid low
    The Love, shooting an arrow at a mark,
    In the mysterious corner of the park,
    Whose smile disquieted us long ago.

    The wind has overthrown him, and above
    His scattered dust, how sad it is to spell
    The artist's name still faintly visible
    Upon the pedestal without its Love,

    How sad it is to see the pedestal
    Still standing! as in dream I seem to hear
    Prophetic voices whisper in my ear
    The lonely and despairing end of all.

    How sad it is! Why, even you have found
    A tear for it, although your frivolous eye
    Laughs at the gold and purple butterfly
    Poised on the piteous litter on the ground.


    XXI. EN SOURDINE

    Calm where twilight leaves have stilled
    With their shadow light and sound,
    Let our silent love be filled
    With a silence as profound.

    Let our ravished senses blend
    Heart and spirit, thine and mine,
    With vague languors that descend
    From the branches of the pine.

    Close thine eyes against the day,
    Fold thine arms across thy breast,
    And for ever turn away
    All desire of all but rest.

    Let the lulling breaths that pass
    In soft wrinkles at thy feet,
    Tossing all the tawny grass,
    This and only this repeat.

    And when solemn evening
    Dims the forest's dusky air,
    Then the nightingale shall sing
    The delight of our despair.


    XXII. COLLOQUE SENTIMENTAL

    In the old park, solitary and vast,
    Over the frozen ground two forms once passed.

    Their lips were languid and their eyes were dead,
    And hardly could be heard the words they said.

    In the old park, solitary and vast,
    Two ghosts once met to summon up the past.

    --Do you remember our old ecstasy?
    --Why would you bring it back again to me?

    --Do you still dream as you dreamed long ago?
    Does your heart beat to my heart's beating?
      --No.

    --Ah, those old days, what joys have those days seen
    When your lips met my lips!--It may have been.

    --How blue the sky was, and our hope how light!
    --Hope has flown helpless back into the night.

    They walked through weeds withered and grasses dead,
    And only the night heard the words they said.




    _From Poèmes Saturniens_

    I. SOLEILS COUCHANTS

    Pale dawn delicately
    Over earth has spun
    The sad melancholy
    Of the setting sun.
    Sad melancholy
    Brings oblivion
    In sad songs to me
    With the setting sun.
    And the strangest dreams,
    Dreams like suns that set
    On the banks of the streams,
    Ghost and glory met,
    To my sense it seems,
    Pass, and without let,
    Like great suns that set
    On the banks of streams.


    II. CHANSON D'AUTOMNE

    When a sighing begins
    In the violins
    Of the autumn-song,
    My heart is drowned
    In the slow sound
    Languorous and long.

    Pale as with pain,
    Breath fails me when
    The hour tolls deep.
    My thoughts recover
    The days that are over,
    And I weep.

    And I go

    Where the winds know,
    Broken and brief,
    To and fro,
    As the winds blow
    A dead leaf.


    III. FEMME ET CHATTE

    They were at play, she and her cat,
    And it was marvellous to mark
    The white paw and the white hand pat
    Each other in the deepening dark.

    The stealthy little lady hid
    Under her mittens' silken sheath
    Her deadly agate nails that thrid
    The silk-like dagger-points of death.

    The cat purred primly and drew in
    Her claws that were of steel filed thin:
    The devil was in it all the same.

    And in the boudoir, while a shout
    Of laughter in the air rang out,
    Four sparks of phosphor shone like flame.




    _From La Bonne Chanson_

    I

    The white moon sits
    And seems to brood
    Where a swift voice flits
    From each branch in the wood
    That the tree-tops cover....

    O lover, my lover!

    The pool in the meadows
    Like a looking-glass
    Casts back the shadows
    That over it pass
    Of the willow-bower....

    Let us dream: 'tis the hour....

    A tender and vast
    Lull of content
    Like a cloud is cast
    From the firmament
    Where one planet is bright....

    'Tis the hour of delight.


    II

    The fireside, the lamp's little narrow light;
    The dream with head on hand, and the delight
    Of eyes that lose themselves in loving looks;
    The hour of steaming tea and of shut books;
    The solace to know evening almost gone;
    The dainty weariness of waiting on
    The nuptial shadow and night's softest bliss;
    Ah, it is this that without respite, this
    That without stay, my tender fancy seeks,
    Mad with the months and furious with the weeks.




    _From Romances sans Paroles_

    I

    'Tis the ecstasy of repose,
    'Tis love when tired lids close,
    'Tis the wood's long shuddering
    In the embrace of the wind,
    'Tis, where grey boughs are thinned,
    Little voices that sing.

    O fresh and frail is the sound
    That twitters above, around,
    Like the sweet tiny sigh
    That lies in the shaken grass;
    Or the sound when waters pass
    And the pebbles shrink and cry.

    What soul is this that complains
    Over the sleeping plains,
    And what is it that it saith?
    Is it mine, is it thine,
    This lowly hymn I divine
    In the warm night, low as a breath?


    II

    I divine, through the veil of a murmuring,
    The subtle contour of voices gone,
    And I see, in the glimmering lights that sing,
    The promise, pale love, of a future dawn.

    And my soul and my heart in trouble
    What are they but an eye that sees,
    As through a mist an eye sees double,
    Airs forgotten of songs like these?

    O to die of no other dying,
    Love, than this that computes the showers
    Of old hours and of new hours flying:
    O to die of the swing of the hours!


    III

    Tears in my heart that weeps,
    Like the rain upon the town.
    What drowsy languor steeps
    In tears my heart that weeps?

    O sweet sound of the rain
    On earth and on the roofs!
    For a heart's weary pain
    O the song of the rain!

    Vain tears, vain tears, my heart!
    What, none hath done thee wrong?
    Tears without reason start
    From my disheartened heart.

    This is the weariest woe,
    O heart, of love and hate
    Too weary, not to know
    Why thou hast all this woe.


    IV

    A frail hand in the rose-grey evening
    Kisses the shining keys that hardly stir,
    While, with the light, small flutter of a wing,
    And old song, like an old tired wanderer,
    Goes very softly, as if trembling,
    About the room long redolent of Her.

    What lullaby is this that comes again
    To dandle my poor being with its breath?
    What wouldst thou have of me, gay laughing strain?
    What hadst thou, desultory faint refrain
    That now into the garden to thy death
    Floatest through the half-opened window-pane?


    V

    O sad, sad was my soul, alas!
    For a woman, a woman's sake it was.

    I have had no comfort since that day,
    Although my heart went its way,

    Although my heart and my soul went
    From the woman into banishment.

    I have had no comfort since that day,
    Although my heart went its way.

    And my heart, being sore in me,
    Said to my soul: How can this be,

    How can this be or have been thus,
    This proud, sad banishment of us?

    My soul said to my heart: Do I
    Know what snare we are tangled by,

    Seeing that, banished, we know not whether
    We are divided or together?


    VI

    Wearily the plain's
    Endless length expands;
    The snow shines like grains
    Of the shifting sands.

    Light of day is none,
    Brazen is the sky;
    Overhead the moon
    Seems to live and die.

    Where the woods are seen,
    Grey the oak-trees lift
    Through the vaporous screen
    Like the clouds that drift.

    Light of day is none,
    Brazen is the sky;
    Overhead the moon
    Seems to live and die.

    Broken-winded crow,
    And you, lean wolves, when
    The sharp north-winds blow,
    What do you do then?

    Wearily the plain's
    Endless length expands;
    The snow shines like grains
    Of the shifting sands.


    VII

    There's a flight of green and red
    In the hurry of hills and rails,
    Through the shadowy twilight shed
    By the lamps as daylight pales.

    Dim gold light flushes to blood
    In humble hollows far down;
    Birds sing low from a wood
    Of barren trees without crown.

    Scarcely more to be felt
    Than that autumn is gone;
    Languors, lulled in me, melt
    In the still air's monotone.


    VIII. SPLEEN

    The roses were all red,
    The ivy was all black:
    Dear, if you turn your head,
    All my despairs come back.

    The sky was too blue, too kind,
    The sea too green, and the air
    Too calm: and I know in my mind
    I shall wake and not find you there.

    I am tired of the box-tree's shine
    And the holly's, that never will pass,
    And the plain's unending line,
    And of all but you, alas!


    IX. STREETS

    Dance the jig!

    I loved best her pretty eyes
    Clearer than stars in any skies,
    I loved her eyes for their dear lies.

    Dance the jig!

    And ah! the ways, the ways she had
    Of driving a poor lover mad:
    It made a man's heart sad and glad.

    Dance the jig!

    But now I find the old kisses shed
    From her flower-mouth a rarer red
    Now that her heart to mine is dead.

    Dance the jig!

    And I recall, now I recall
    Old days and hours, and ever shall,
    And that is best, and best of all.

    Dance the jig!




    _From Jadis et Naguère_

    I. ART POÉTIQUE

    Music first and foremost of all!
    Choose your measure of odd not even,
    Let it melt in the air of heaven,
    Pose not, poise not, but rise and fall.

    Choose your words, but think not whether
    Each to other of old belong:
    What so dear as the dim grey song
    Where clear and vague are joined together?

    'Tis veils of beauty for beautiful eyes,
    'Tis the trembling light of the naked noon,
    'Tis a medley of blue and gold, the moon
    And stars in the cool of autumn skies.

    Let every shape of its shade be born;
    Colour, away! come to me, shade!
    Only of shade can the marriage be made
    Of dream with dream and of flute with horn.

    Shun the Point, lest death with it come,
    Unholy laughter and cruel wit
    (For the eyes of the angels weep at it)
    And all the garbage of scullery-scum.

    Take Eloquence, and wring the neck of him!
    You had better, by force, from time to time,
    Put a little sense in the head of Rhyme:
    If you watch him not, you will be at the beck of him.

    O, who shall tell us the wrongs of Rhyme?
    What witless savage or what deaf boy
    Has made for us this twopenny toy
    Whose bells ring hollow and out of time?

    Music always and music still!
    Let your verse be the wandering thing
    That flutters in flight from a soul on the wing
    Towards other skies at a new whim's will.

    Let your verse be the luck of the lure
    Afloat on the winds that at morning hint
    Of the odours of thyme and the savour of mint ...
    And all the rest is literature.


    II. MEZZETIN CHANTANT

    Go, and with never a care
    But the care to keep happiness!
    Crumple a silken dress
    And snatch a song in the air.

    Hear the moral of all the wise
    In a world where happy folly
    Is wiser than melancholy:
    Forget the hour as it flies!

    The one thing needful on earth, it
    Is not to be whimpering.
    Is life after all a thing
    Real enough to be worth it?




    _From Sagesse_

    I

    The little hands that once were mine,
    The hands I loved, the lovely hands,
    After the roadways and the strands,
    And realms and kingdoms once divine,

    And mortal loss of all that seems
    Lost with the old sad pagan things,
    Royal as in the days of kings
    The dear hands open to me dreams.

    Hands of dream, hands of holy flame
    Upon my soul in blessing laid,
    What is it that these hands have said
    That my soul hears and swoons to them?

    Is it a phantom, this pure sight
    Of mother's love made tenderer,
    Of spirit with spirit linked to share
    The mutual kinship of delight?

    Good sorrow, dear remorse, and ye,
    Blest dreams, O hands ordained of heaven
    To tell me if I am forgiven,
    Make but the sign that pardons me!


    II

    O my God, thou hast wounded me with love,
    Behold the wound, that is still vibrating,
    O my God, thou hast wounded me with love.

    O my God, thy fear hath fallen upon me,
    Behold the burn is there, and it throbs aloud,
    O my God, thy fear hath fallen upon me.

    O my God, I have known that all is vile
    And that thy glory hath stationed itself in me,
    O my God, I have known that all is vile.

    Drown my soul in floods, floods of thy wine,
    Mingle my life with the body of thy bread,
    Drown my soul in floods, floods of thy wine.

    Take my blood, that I have not poured out,
    Take my flesh, unworthy of suffering,
    Take my blood, that I have not poured out.

    Take my brow, that has only learned to blush,
    To be the footstool of thine adorable feet,
    Take my brow, that has only learned to blush.

    Take my hands, because they have laboured not
    For coals of fire and for rare frankincense,
    Take my hands, because they have laboured not.

    Take my heart, that has beaten for vain things,
    To throb under the thorns of Calvary,
    Take my heart that has beaten for vain things.

    Take my feet, frivolous travellers,
    That they may run to the crying of thy grace,
    Take my feet, frivolous travellers.

    Take my voice, a harsh and a lying noise,
    For the reproaches of thy Penitence,
    Take my voice, a harsh and a lying noise

    Take mine eyes, luminaries of deceit,
    That they may be extinguished in the tears of prayer,
    Take mine eyes, luminaries of deceit.

    Alas, thou, God of pardon and promises,
    What is the pit of mine ingratitude,
    Alas, thou, God of pardon and promises.

    God of terror and God of holiness,
    Alas, my sinfulness is a black abyss,
    God of terror and God of holiness.

    Thou, God of peace, of joy and delight,
    All my tears, all my ignorances,
    Thou, God of peace, of joy and delight.

    Thou, O God, knowest all this, all this,
    How poor I am, poorer than any man,
    Thou, O God, knowest all this, all this.

    And what I have, my God, I give to thee.


    III

    Slumber dark and deep
    Falls across my life;
    I will put to sleep
    Hope, desire, and strife.

    All things pass away,
    Good and evil seem
    To my soul to-day
    Nothing but a dream;

    I a cradle laid
    In a hollow cave,
    By a great hand swayed:
    Silence, like the grave.


    IV

    The body's sadness and the languor thereof
    Melt and bow me with pity till I could weep,
    Ah! when the dark hours break it down in sleep
    And the bedclothes score the skin and the hot hands move;
    Alert for a little with the fever of day,
    Damp still with the heavy sweat of the night that has thinned,
    Like a bird that trembles on a roof in the wind:
    And the feet that are sorrowful because of the way,

    And the breast that a hand has scarred with a double blow,
    And the mouth that as an open wound is red,
    And the flesh that shivers and is a painted show,
    And the eyes, poor eyes so lovely with tears unshed
    For the sorrow of seeing this also over and done:
    Sad body, how weak and how punished under the sun!


    V

    Fairer is the sea
    Than the minster high,
    Faithful nurse is she,
    And last lullaby,
    And the Virgin prays
    Over the sea's ways.

    Gifts of grief and guerdons
    From her bounty come,
    And I hear her pardons
    Chide her angers home;
    Nothing in her is
    Unforgivingness.

    She is piteous,
    She the perilous!
    Friendly things to us
    The wave sings to us:
    You whose hope is past,
    Here is peace at last.

    And beneath the skies,
    Brighter-hued than they,
    She has azure dyes,
    Rose and green and grey.
    Better is the sea
    Than all fair things or we.




    _From Parallèlement:_

    IMPRESSION FAUSSE

    Little lady mouse,
    Black upon the grey of light;
    Little lady mouse,
    Grey upon the night.

    Now they ring the bell,
    All good prisoners slumber deep;
    Now they ring the bell,
    Nothing now but sleep.

    Only pleasant dreams,
    Love's enough for thinking of;
    Only pleasant dreams,
    Long live love!

    Moonlight over all,
    Someone snoring heavily;
    Moonlight over all
    In reality.

    Now there comes a cloud,
    It is dark as midnight here;
    Now there comes a cloud,
    Dawn begins to peer.

    Little lady mouse,
    Rosy in a ray of blue,
    Little lady mouse:
    Up now, all of you!




    _From Chansons pour Elle_

    You believe that there may be
    Luck in strangers in the tea:
    I believe only in your eyes.

    You believe in fairy-tales,
    Days one wins and days one fails:
    I believe only in your lies.

    You believe in heavenly powers,
    In some saint to whom one prays
    Or in some Ave that one says.

    I believe only in the hours,
    Coloured with the rosy lights
    You rain for me on sleepless nights.

    And so firmly I receive
    These for truth, that I believe
    That only for your sake I live.




    _From Epigrammes_

    When we go together, if I may see her again,
    Into the dark wood and the rain;

    When we are drunken with air and the sun's delight
    At the brink of the river of light;

    When we are homeless at last, for a moment's space
    Without city or abiding-place;

    And if the slow good-will of the world still seem
    To cradle us in a dream;

    Then, let us sleep the last sleep with no leave-taking,
    And God will see to the waking.