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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