STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
STUDIES
IN
OSE AND VERSE
ARTHUR SYMONS
WITH PORTRAHf IN PHOTOGRAVURE
LONDON
J. ML DENT fc CO. NEW YORK: E. P. BUTTON & CO.
STUDIES
IN
PROSE AND VERSE
BY
ARTHUR SYMONS
WITH PORTRAITS IN PHOTOGRAVURE
LONDON
J, M. DENT & CO. NEW YORK: E. P. BUTTON & CO.
ptf
5-)
£3
S3S384
TO MRS LUDWIG MOND
T DEDICATE this book to you in memory of evenings, now too many to count, in London and in Rome, when we have talked of books together. There are many things in it with which you will not agree ; yet in you there is one thing I can count on, a continual sympathy ; and another, rarer thing as well, which does not always go with it : a divination which can strike through the words to the meaning ; and deeper, to that meaning's meaning.
If there are any names here that do not interest you, disregard them, or read other names in their places. I am interested only in first principles, and it seems to me that lo study Jirst principles one must wait for them till they are made flesh and dwell among us. I have rarely contrasted one writer with another, or compared very carefully the various books of any writer among themselves. Criticism is not an examination with marks and prizes. It is a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their direction. It is concerned with them only as force, and it is concerned with force only in its kind and degree.
As you will see in reading the book, I have a few principles of criticism, and I apply these few principles to every writer and on every occasion. If, as I hope, there is any essential unity in this collection of essays on
vi DEDICATION
contemporary writers, that unity must come wholly from the uniformity of the tests which I have applied to all this varying material. Others may care, possibly, for my opinion on Balzac, my opinion on Tolstoi ; you, I know, will see what my real aim has been, and your interest in the matter will be the same as mine.
ARTHUR STMONS.
Poltescoe, Cornwall,
September 17, 1904.
I
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION : FACT IN LITERATURE ... i
BALZAC ....... 5
PROSPER MERIMEE ..... 26
THEOPHILE GAUTIER ..... 42
A WORD ON DE QUINCEY .... 47
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE .... 52
WALTER PATER ..... 63
ROBERT Louis STEVENSON . . . . 77
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS . . . . 83
WILLIAM MORRIS'S PROSE . . . . 91
GUY DE MAUPASSANT ..... 97
ALPHONSE DAUDET . . . . .108
HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE . . . . 117
ROBERT BUCHANAN . . . . . 121
AN ARTIST IN ATTITUDES: OSCAR WILDE . . 124 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO . . . . .129
A NOTE ON GEORGE MEREDITH . . . 143
A NOTE ON ZOLA'S METHOD . . . . 152
THE RUSSIAN SOUL: GORKI AND TOLSTOI . . 164
TOLSTOI ON ART . . . . . 173
A CENSOR OF CRITICS . . . . .183
WHAT is POETRY? ..... 192
viii CONTENTS
CAMPOAMOR . . . . . .196
ROBERT BRIDGES ..... 207
AUSTIN DOBSON . . . . . 224
MR W. B. YEATS . . . . .230
MR STEPHEN PHILLIPS . . . . .242
ERNEST DOWSON . . . . .261
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF SILHOUETTES . 279
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF LONDON NIGHTS . 283
CONCLUSION : THE CHOICE 286
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
BALZAC ...... Frontispiece
From an Etching by H. H. CRICKMORE.
WALTER PATER ..... facing page 63
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS . . „ 83
Rep reduced by kind permission of Mrs WALTER LEAF, /row a Picture In her possession.
HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE . . . . „ 117
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO . . . . „ 129
From an unpublished Photograph by Count JOSEPH PRJMOLI.
ROBERT BRIDGES ...... 207
AUSTIN DOBSON . . . „ 224
MR W. B. YEATS . . . „ 230
INTRODUCTION
FACT IN LITERATURE
THE invention of printing helped to destroy literature. Scribes, and memories not yet spoilt by over-cram- ming, preserved all the literature that was worth preserving. Books that had to be remembered by heart, or copied with slow, elaborate penmanship, were not thrown away on people who did not want them. They remained in the hands of people of taste. The first book pointed the way to the first newspaper, and a newspaper is a thing meant to be not only forgotten but destroyed. With the deliberate destruction of print, the respect for printed literature vanished, and a single term came to be used for the poem and for the " news item." What had once been an art for the few became a trade for the many, and, while in painting, in sculpture, in music, the mere fact of production means, for the most part, an attempt to produce a work of art, the function of written or printed words ceased to be necessarily more than what a Spanish poet has called uthe jabber of the human animal." Unfortunately, words can convey facts ; unfortunately, people in general have an ill-regulated but insatiable appetite for facts. Now music cannot convey facts at all ; painting or sculpture can only convey fact through a medium which necessarily trans- forms it. But literature is tied by that which gives it wings. It can do, in a measure, all that can be done by the other arts, and it can speak where they can but make beautiful and expressive gestures. But it has
2 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
this danger, that its paint, or clay, or crotchets and quavers, may be taken for the colour, or form, or sound, and not as the ministrants of these things. Literature, in making its beautiful piece of work, has to use words and facts ; these words, these facts, are the common property of all the world, to whom they mean no more than what each individually says, before it has come to take on beautiful form through its adjustment in the pattern. So, while paints are of no use to the man who does not understand the science of their employment, nor clay, nor the notations of musical sound, to any but the trained artist, words may be used at will, and no litera- ture follow, only something which many people will greatly prefer, and which they will all have the mis- fortune to understand.
There exist, then, under the vague title of literature, or without even the excuse of a stolen title, books which are not books, printed paper which has come from the rag-heap to return to the rag-heap, that nameless thing the newspaper, which can be likened only, and that at its best, to a printed phonograph. It is assumed that there is a reason in nature why the British shop- keeper should sit down after business hours, and read, for the price of a penny or a halfpenny, that a fire broke out at the other end of London at ten o'clock in the morning, and that a young lady of whom he has never heard was burned to death. But the matter is really of no importance to him, and there is no reason in nature why he should ever know anything at all about it. He has but put one more obstacle between himself and any rational conception of the meaning of his life, between himself and any natural happiness, between himself and any possible wisdom. Facts are difficult of digestion, and should
INTRODUCTION
be taken diluted, at infrequent intervals. They suit few constitutions when taken whole, and none when taken indiscriminately. The worship of fact is a wholly modern attitude of mind, and it comes together with a worship of what we call science. True science is a kind of poetry, it is a divination, an imaginative reading of the universe. What we call science is an engine of material progress, it teaches us how to get most quickly to the other end of the world, and how to kill the people there in the most precise and economic manner. The function of this kind of science is to extinguish wonder, whereas the true science deepens our sense of wonder as it enlightens every new tract of the envelop- ing darkness.
What royalties and religions have been, the news- paper is. It is the idol of the hour, the principality and power of the moment ; the average man's Bible, friend, teacher, guide, entertainment, and opiate. Because its power is the aggregate of separate feeblenesses, let us not commit the error of denying that power. As well deny the power of folly, which is the voice of the mob ; or of the mob, which is the mouthpiece of folly. The newspaper is the fulfilment of the prophecy that the voice of the people shall be the voice of God. It is the perpetual affirmation of the new law which has abolished all other laws : the law of the greatest wisdom of the greatest number.
The newspaper is the plague, or black death, of the modern world. It is an open sewer, running down each side of the street, and displaying the foulness of every day, day by day, morning and evening. Every- thing that, having once happened, has ceased to exist, the newspaper sets before you, beating the bones of the buried without pity, without shame, and without understanding. Its pride is that it is the record of facts,
4 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
but it tells you no fact twice in the same way ; for it gorges its insatiable appetite upon rumour, which is wind and noise. All the hypocrisies of the State, of the Church, of the market-place, cling together for once in brotherly love, and speak with unanimous voices.
The excuse for existence offered by the newspaper, and by every other form of printed matter which does not aim at some artistic end, is that it conveys fact, and that fact is indispensable. But, after all, what is fact ? " For poetry," says Matthew Arnold, " the idea is everything, the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotions to the idea ; the idea is the fact." Let it be granted that some kind of fact is indispensable to every man : to one man one kind of idea is fact, to another man another ; and there remain those to whom fact is really the news of the newspaper. But, even to these, it must be this fact and not that, and certainly not a deluge of any.
Reported speech, for that is what literature is when it is not the musical notation of song, has become more and more a marketable product. It is not paid for, as even the worst picture is paid for, on account of some imagined artistic merit (a picture being always " pretty to look at "), but because it satisfies a curiosity. If the artist in literature chooses to throw in beauty when he is asked only to answer a question, the beauty is not always rejected along with the answer. But the answer will be considered, at the best, a little unsatisfactory, because a plain man wants a plain answer.
1902.
BALZAC
I
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 mis- understood with admiration.
In choosing the name of the u Human Comedy" for a series of novels in which, as he says, there is at once uthe 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 equi- valent 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 has taken refuge from the terrible
6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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 "Astree" 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, a 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 Heloise," 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 dis- tance, not altogether wisely, developed the form of half-imaginary autobiography in " Monsieur Nicolas," a book of which the most significant part may be com- pared 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 Abbe Prevost's one great story, uManon 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 Stae'l, Chateaubriand, in " Adolphe," " Corinne," " Rene." 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.
8 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
" There is but one animal," he declares, in his Avant- Profos, 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 realising 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 cf the task he has undertaken. And in a letter to Mme. de Hanska he summarises every detail of his scheme.
"The Etudes des Maeurs 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 Etudes philosophiques, for after the effects come the causes. In the Etudes des M(zurs I shall have painted the sentiments and their action, life and the fashion of life. In the Etudes
BALZAC
i
philosophiques I shall say why the sentiments, on what the life. . . .
"Then, after the effects and the causes, come the Etudes analytiques, to which the Physiologic du manage belongs, for, after the effects and the causes, one should seek the principles. . . .
u After having done the poetry, the demonstration, of a whole system, I shall do the science in the Essai sur les forces hwnaines. 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 rhumanite." 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 A*v ant- Prop os, taking an example at random, "are, for me, those of humanity." To Balzac manners
io STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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.
II
The two books into which Balzac has put his deepest thought, the two books which he himself cared for the most, are " Seraphita " and " Louis Lambert." Of u Louis Lambert " he said : " I write it for myself and a few others " ; of " Seraphita " : " My life is in it." "One could write 'Goriot' any day," he adds; ui Seraphita' only once in a lifetime." I have never been able to feel that "Seraphita" is altogether a success. It lacks the breath 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 " Seraphita " had been begun, he writes : u 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
BALZAC ii
of God." "Seraphita" is a prose poem in which the most abstract part of that mystical system, which Swedenborg perhaps materialised too crudely, is pre- sented 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, uan intellectual gulf," as he truly calls it ; a sober and concise history of ideas in their devouring action upon a too 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 dis- embodied 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 inter- course," the whole 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
12 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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 pro- gramme 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.
Ill
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 Sibyls of Michelangelo something more
BALZAC 13
- - - ----
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. He 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 mis- interpreted 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 CEdipus 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 u 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
14 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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 some- thing 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, u 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 Josepha, a mistress who had cast him off in the time of his prosperity, and asks her to lodge him for a few
BALZAC 15
days in a garret. She laughs, pities, and then questions him.
" ' Est-ce vrai, vieux,' reprit-elle, ' que tu as tue ton frere et ton oncle, ruine ta famille, surhypotheque la maison de tes enfants et mange la grenouille du gouverne- ment en Afrique avec la princesse ? '
" Le Baron inclina tristement la tete.
" 'Eh bien, j'aime cela! ' s'ecria Josepha, qui se leva pleine d'enthousiasme. c C'est un brulage general ! c'est sardanapale ! c'est grand ! c'est complet ! On est une canaille, mais on a du coeur.' '
The cry is Balzac's, and it is a characteristic part of his genius to have given it that ironical force by utter- ing it through the mouth of a Josepha. 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, not less sympathetic, not less perfectly realised, than the search of Clae's after the Absolute. " The great and terrible clamour of egoism " is the voice to which he is always attentive; u 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.
1 6 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
IV
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 VAbsolu ; he figures it to himself as almost a substance, and he is the alchemist on its track. u 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 subordi- nated action 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 syste- matic, 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.
BALZAC 17
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 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 predisposition aux recherches qui fait faire a un savant germanique cent lieues dans ses guetres pour trouver une verite qui le regard en riant, assise a 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 roulerent entre les beaux cils de Madame Hulot, arreterent 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
B
1 8 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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 close- ness 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 of 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 paren- thesis 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 com- mentator. 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, arid not either a great refusal or a new vision.
BALZAC 19
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, " La Chartreuse de Parme " ; a book of profound criticism, " Racine et Shakspeare " ; and a cold and penetrating study of the physiology of love, uDe 1' Amour," by the side of which Balzac's " Physiologic du Manage " 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, Valerie Marneffe, Pons, Grand et, 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 to say " Valerie ! " 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
20 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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 meanwhile 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 care- fully at Frederic Moreau, and Madame Gervaisais, and the Abbe 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 main-spring 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
BALZAC 21
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 under- stand 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
22 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
come suddenly, after a long quiet in Andalusia ; and I feel already a new pulse in my blood, a keener con- sciousness 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 under- stand 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 senti- ments 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.
BALZAC 23
VI
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 com- paring 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 only earthly paradise. It meant leisure to visit the woman whom he loved, and at the end it meant the possibility of marry- ing 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
24 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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 pre- sent. But we see the force of that sentiment passing into his work ; u Seraphita " is its ecstasy, everywhere is its human shadow ; it refines his strength, it gives him surprising intuitions, it gives him all that was want- ing 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 neces- ^sity 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
BALZAC
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 MERIMEE
I
STENDHAL has left us a picture of Merimee 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 disinter- ested friend, is a picture of Merimee 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 attendrusement unefois par an, on the subordination of natural feeling to a somewhat disdainful aloofness, the real Merimee?
Early in life, Merimee 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 Eng- land 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
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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 sensu- ality, Pagan in the hard, eighteenth-century sense. From the beginning he was a student, of art, of his- tory, 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, uLe Theatre 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 decolletee 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 Regne 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 Vezelay, 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 Hun-
28 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
gary, in Bohemia, usually with a definite, scholarly ob- ject, 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 Eugenie, he was a friend, not a courtier, at the court of the Third Empire. He was elected to the Academy, mainly for his " Etudes sur 1'Histoire Romaine," a piece of dry history, and immedi- ately scandalised his supporters by publishing a story, " Arsene 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 Merimee in one of his letters ; des idees tres-arretees, as he adds with emphasis in another. Precise opinions lead easily to prejudices, and Merimee, who prided himself on the really very logical quality of his mind, put himself somewhat de- liberately 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 alto- gether 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-com- placency that he defines the only kind of society in
PROSPER MERIMEE 29
which he found himself at home : " (i) With unpreten- tious 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 FYench verse." The carefulness with which he avoids received opinions shows a certain consciousness of those opinions, which in a more imagi- natively 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. Clear- ing away, as it seemed to him, every illusion from be- fore his eyes, he forgot the last illusion of positive people : the possibility that one's eyes may be short- sighted.
Merimee 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 experi- ence, and of the document, which is the summing up of human experience. To Merimee history itself was a matter of detail. " In history I care only for anecdotes," he says in the preface to the "Chronique du Regne 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 man-
30 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
kind 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 inter- esting 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, Merimee found much of his entertainment 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, Merimee 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 Merimee 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 draw- ing-rooms and the pursuit of uneventful adventures.
Only, though we are automates autant qdesprit, as Pascal tells us, it is useless to expect that what is auto- matic 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 Merimee as with all the rest of the world, the
PROSPER MERIMEE 31
scheme breaks down one day, just when a reasonable solution to things seems to have been arrived at. Meri- mee 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 feel- ing, 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 him- self 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: uTo 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 him- self ?) : " You always fear first impulses ; do you not
32 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
see that they are the only ones which are worth any- thing 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 Merimee show us love triumphing over the most carefully guarded personality. Here the obstacle is not duty, nor circum- stance, 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 relin- quished to the control of second thoughts. A habit of repressive irony goes deep : Merimee might well have thought himself secure against the outbreak of an un- conditional passion. Yet here we find passion betray- ing 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 lead- ing, 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 be- comes an artist by his intensification of memory. Meri- mee has himself defined art as exaggeration a propos.
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Well, to the artist his own life is an exaggeration not a 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 Merimee, 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 mysteri- ous 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 MerimeVs type of woman. She has the u wicked eyes " of all his heroines, from the Mariquita of his first attempt in literature, who haunts the Inquisitor with u 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 Tour- guenieff, " 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 Merimee, we can hardly doubt, came not only from her queer like- ness of temperament to his, but from the singular,
c
34 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
flattering pleasure which it must have given him to find that he had invented with so much truth to nature.
II
Merimee 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 Merimee 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 in- toxicating themselves with strange sensations, hoping that u nature would take the pen out of their hands and write," just at the moment when their own thoughts became least coherent, Merimee 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 con- cealed, if not a little ashamed of. It is the thing itself he wishes to give you, not his feelings about it ; and his
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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 con- vinced 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, Merimee tells us that u La Venus dllle " 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. uLa Venus d'llle" is a modern setting of the old story of the Ring given to Venus, and Merimee 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 super- natural. 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
36 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
abandonment of all to Venus. Merimee 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 can- not 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 ?
Merimee had always delighted in mystifications ; he was always on his guard against being mystified him- self, 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 uthe decadence," in our times, "of energetic passions, in favour of tranquillity and perhaps of happiness." These energetic passions he
PROSPER MERIMEE 37
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. Merimee 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 Merimee 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 Merimee, 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
38 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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?
Merimee had an abstract interest in, almost an en- thusiasm 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 con- sidered 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 satisfac- tion 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 Regne 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. Merimee 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 scrupulously exact than its devotees. "Belief," says some one in this
PROSPER MERIMEE 39
book, as if speaking for Merimee, uis 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 u 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 sug- gests 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 "Arsene Guillot," only not in such perfect things as u Carmen," as "Mateo Falcone"), is what Merimee just lets us see, underneath an almost faultless skill of narrative. An incident told by Merimee 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
40 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
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 signifi- cantly 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 labour 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. Merimee 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 Bias." All the little parade of local colour and philology, the appendix on the Calo of the gipsies, done to heighten the illusion, has more sig- nificance than people sometimes think. In this story all the qualities of Merimee 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 Merimee at the Academic Franchise 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."
PROSPER MERIMEE 41
Already Merimee 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 Caesar, 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 u 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
THEOPHILE GAUTIER
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 tem- perament, a thing which he had collaborated with nature in making, with an effective heightening
THEOPHILE GAUTIER 43
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 nature's. 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
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acute, almost disinterested pity that he watched him- . self 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 Mile, 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 genera- tion 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 out- line 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
THEOPHILE GAUTIER 45
meditation has all the fixity of a kind of sharp, precise criticism.
What Gautier saw he saw with unparalleled exacti- tude : 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 edition definitive of the " Fleurs du Mai," 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 uparfait magicien es lettres franchises," 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 appre- ciated 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
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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 ; bril- liance, solidity, colour.
1902.
A WORD ON DE QUINCEY
THE work of De Quincey must be read tolerantly, rarely, and in fragments. Not even Coleridge is so uneven as De Quincey, for with Coleridge there is always an alert intellectual subtlety, troubling itself very little about the words in which it is to express itself; an unsteady, but incessant, inner illumination. De Quincey, always experimentalising with his form, forgetting and remembering it with equal persistence, has no fixed mind underneath the swaying surface of his digressions, and holds our interest, when he has once captured it, in a kind of unquiet expectancy. He will write about anything, making what he chooses of his subject, as in the fantasias around the mail- coach ; he writes, certainly, for the sake of writing, and also to rid himself of all the cobwebs that are darkening his brain. His mind is subtle, yet without direction ; his nerves are morbidly sensitive, and they speak through all his work; he is a scholar outside life, to whom his own mind is interesting, not in the least because it is his own ; and he has the scholar's ideal of a style which is a separate thing from the thing which it expresses.
"My mother," he says in a significant passage, "was predisposed to think ill of all causes that required many words : I, predisposed to subtleties of all sorts and degrees, had naturally become acquainted with cases that could not unrobe their apparellings down to that degree of simplicity. ... I sank away in a hopelessness that was immeasurable from all effort at explanation."
47
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And he defines " the one misery having no relief," as " the burden of the incommunicable." That burden, thus desperately realised, was always his, and the whole of his work is a tangled attempt to communicate the incommunicable. He has a morbid kind of conscience, an abstract, almost literary conscience, which drives him to the very edge and last gulf of language, in his endeavour to express every fine shade of fact and sensation. At times this search is rewarded with miraculous findings, and all the colours seem to fade down to him out of the sunset when he would put purple into speech, words turn into solemn music when he would have them chant, and sensations become embodied fear or pain or wonder when he evokes them upon the page. But, in its restlessness, its discontent with the best service that words can render, it heaps parenthesis on parenthesis, drags down paragraphs with leaden foot-notes, and pulls up the reader at every other moment to remind him of something which he has forgotten or does not wish to know. De Quincey never knows when to stop, because his own mind never stops. He turns upon himself, like a nervous man trying to get out of a room full of people ; apologises, interrupts his own apologies, leaving you at last a sharer of his own fluster. And in all this search for exactitude there is a certain pedantry, and also a certain mental haze. His imagination was pictorial, but it was not always precise enough in its outlines. Rhetoric comes into even the finest of his " dream- scenery," and rhetoric, in a picture, is colour making up for absence of form. He believed in words too much and too little.
De Quincey's " Confessions " are among the most fascinating of autobiographies, but they have an air of unreality because they are written round such experi-
A WORD ON DE QUINCEY 49
ences as only a very unreal kind of man could have known. However sincere he may mean to be, De Quincey must always make a deliberate arrangement of what he has to tell us ; things fall into attitudes as he looks at them ; he hears them in long and winding sentences. To an opium-smoker time and space lose even that sort of reality which normal people are accustomed to assign to them. Under the influence of such a drug it is somewhat perilous to cross the street, for it is impossible to realise the distance between oneself and the hansom which is coming towards one, or the length of time which it will require to get from pavement to pavement. It is this disturbed sense of proportion, this broken equilibrium of the mind, which gave De Quincey so faint and variable a hold on fact, even mental fact. He saw everything on the same plane, one thing not more important than another ; at the moment when it engaged his interest anything was of supreme importance. But interest drove out interest, or came and went, with the disturb- ance of an obsession. In writing he wants to tell us everything about everything ; he takes up first one subject, handling it elaborately ; then handles another subject elaborately; then goes back to the first ; and so the narrative moves on- ward, like a worm, turning back upon itself as it moves.
When people praise the style of De Quincey, they praise isolated outbursts, and there are outbursts in his work which have almost every quality of external splendour. But it was De Quincey's error to seek splendour for its own sake, to cultivate eloquence in rhetoric, to write prose loudly, as if it were to be delivered from a pulpit. Listen to
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L of tndden death! that once in youth I interpreted by die shadows of thy averted rapture of panic taking the shape (which tombs in churches I have seen) of ^nmaa hnrslipg her sepulchral bonds — of woman's Ionic form bending futwjiiJ from the ruins of her grave with arching foot, with eyes upraised, with clasped
for the trumpet's call to rise from dust for ever." Now if prose is mmflhinr; said, as poetry is some- thing song, that is not good prose, any more than it is even bad poetry. It is oratory, and oratory has qualities quite different from literature; which fit it to impress a multitude when aloud, in a voice artificially heightened in to be heard by that multitude. De Quincey's is artificially heightened; it cannot be spoken r, but must be spoken with an emphasis quite •fclrr that of even the most emotional speech. Per- haps die most perfect prose in the English language is the prose of Shakespeare: take a single sentence from u Lore's Labour's Lost * : •• The sweet war-man is dead and rotten ; sweet chocks, beat not the bones of the buried : when he breathed, he was a man ! " There you have every merit of prose, in form and substance, and it may be spoken as easily as the expression of one's own thought. Hamlet's "What a piece of work is man ! ~ with its elaborate splendour, can be spoken on the conversational level of the race. Now De Quincey thinks it a mean thing to write as if he were but talking, and. whenever he rises with his subject, seems to get on a plat- form. It is a wonderful thing, undoubtedly, that he grres us, but a thing structurally unsatisfactory.
A WORD ON DE QUINC 51
Carried further, used with less a finer sense for the colour of words, it the style of Raskin, and is what is frankly called prose poetry, a lucky bastard, glorying in the illegiti- macy of its origin.
1901.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
ALL Hawthorne's work is one form or another of ''handling sin." He had the Puritan sense of it in the blood, and the power to use it artistically in the brain. With Tolstoi, he is the only novelist of the soul, and he is haunted by what is obscure, dangerous, and on the confines of good and evil ; by what is abnormal, indeed, if we are to accept human nature as a thing set within responsible limits, and conscious of social relations. Of one of his women he says that she u was plucked up out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her." It is what is mysterious, really, in the soul that attracts him. u When we find ourselves fading into shadows and unrealities " : that is when he cares to concern himself with humanity. And, finding the soul, in its essence, so intangible, so mistlike, so unfamiliar with the earth, he lays hold of what to him is the one great reality, sin, in order that he may find out something definite about the soul, in its most active, its most interesting, manifestations.
To Hawthorne what we call real life was never very real, and he has given, as no other novelist has given, a picture of life as a dream, in which the dreamers them- selves are, at intervals, conscious that they are dreaming. At a moment of spiritual crisis, as at that moment when Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale meet in the forest, he can render their mental state only through one of his ghostly images: " It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in 52
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 53
the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread, as not wonted to this companionship of disembodied spirits." To Hawthorne, by a strange caprice or farsightedness of temperament, the supreme emotion comes only under the aspect of an illusion, for the first time recognised as being real, that is, really an illusion. "He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms," he says of Clifford, " lay darkly behind his pleasure and knew it to be a baby-play, which he was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing." To Clifford, it is mental ruin, a kind of exquisite imbecility, which brings this con- sciousness ; to Hester Prynne, to Arthur Dimmesdale, to Donatello, to Miriam, it is sin. Each, through sin, becomes real, and perceives something of the truth.
In this strange pilgrim's progress, the first step is a step outside the bounds of some moral or social law, by which the soul is isolated, for its own torture and benefit, from the rest of the world. All Hawthorne's stories are those of persons whom some crime, or misunderstood virtue, or misfortune, has set by themselves, or in a worse companionship of solitude. Hester Prynne c ' stood apart from moral interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt." The link between Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale, between Miriam and Donatello, was u the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other sins, it brought along with it its obligations." Note how curious the obsession by which Hawthorne can express the force of the moral law, the soul's bond with itself, only through the consequences of the breaking of that law ! And note, also, with how perfect a sympathy he can render the sensation itself, what is exultant, liberating, in a
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strong sin, not yet become one's companion and accuser. "For, guilt has its rapture, too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ecstatic sense of freedom."
"I tremble at my own thoughts," he says somewhere, " yet must needs probe them to their depths." His people are always, like Miriam, " hinting at an intangible confession, such as persons with overburdened hearts often make to children and dumb animals, or to holes in the earth, where they think their secrets may be at once revealed and buried." All his work is such a confession, which he seems to make shyly, and, at the end, to have only half made. He wonders, speculates, plays around a dreadful idea, like a moth around the flame of a candle ; and then draws back, partly with the artist's satisfaction, partly with a slight natural shiver. In the preface to the u Mosses from an Old Manse" he dwells on the story of the boy who wanders upon the battle- field, axe in hand, out of the woods where he has been felling trees, and, by a sort of fierce unconscious instinct, kills the wounded British soldier. " Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career, and observe how his soul was tortured by the bloodstain." He is always searching for these bloodstains on the conscience, delicately weighing the soul's burden of sin ; and it is his " intellectual and moral exercise."
Though Hawthorne has said, not without truth, " so far as I am a man of really individual attributes, I veil my face," there never was a more sincere or a more personal writer. Everything in his work is a growth out of his own soil, and we must be careful not to attribute any too deliberate intentions to what may seem most conscious or persistent in his work. The qualities which we prize most in it seem to have been those against which he tried hardest to be on
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 55
his guard. We find him wishing for some contact with the u small, familiar, gentle interests of life," that they may " carry off what would otherwise be a dangerous accumulation of morbid sensibility." He is interested only in those beings, of exceptional temperament or destiny, who are alone in the world ; and yet what he represents is the necessity and the awfulness, not the pride or the choice, of isolation. "This perception of an infinite shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist," brings with it no sense of even consciously per- verse pleasure. His men and women are no egoists, to whom isolation is a delight ; they suffer from it, they try in vain to come out of the shadow and sit down with the rest of the world in the sunshine. Something ghostly in their blood sets them wandering among shadows, but they long to be merely human, they would come back if they could, and their tragedy is to find some invisible and impenetrable door shut against them.
It had always been the destiny of Hawthorne to watch life from a corner, as he watched the experi- mental life at Brook Farm, sitting silent among the talkers in the hall, "himself almost always holding a book before him, but seldom turning the pages." In all his novels, there is some such spectator of life, whom indeed he usually represents as a cold or malevolent person, intent for his own ends on the tragic climax which he will not actually precipitate. Hawthorne's attitude was rather that of a sensitive but morbidly clear-sighted friend, or of a physician, affectionately observant of the disease which he cannot cure. It was his sympathy with the soul that made him so watchful of its uneasy moods, its strange adventures, especially
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those which remove it furthest from the daylight and perhaps nearest to its true nature and proper abode.
"Not supernatural, but just on the verge of nature, and yet within it : " that is where he sets himself to surprise the soul's last secrets. What Hawthorne aimed at doing was to suggest that mystery, which is the most definite thing which we know about human life. " It annoys me very much," says Hilda, in "Transformation," " this inclination, which most people have, to explain away the wonder and the mystery out of everything." To Hawthorne it was the wonder and the mystery which gave its meaning to life, and to paint life without them was like painting nature without atmosphere. Only, in his endeavour to evoke this atmosphere, he did not always remember that, if it had any meaning at all, it was itself a deeper reality. And so his weakness is seen in a persistent desire to give an air of miracle to ordinary things, which gain nothing by becoming im- probable ; as in the sentence which describes Hester's return to her cottage, at the end of "The Scarlet Letter " : " In all these years it had never once been unlocked ; but either she unlocked it, or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadowlike through these impediments — and, at all events, went in." His books are full of this futile buzzing of fancy ; and it is not only in the matter of style that he too often substitutes fancy for imagination.
Hawthorne never quite fully realised the distinction between symbol and allegory, or was never long able to resist the allegorising temptation. Many of his shorter stories are frankly allegories, and are among the best of their kind, such as "Young Goodman Brown," or "The Minister's Black Veil." But, in all
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 57
his work, there is an attempt to write two meanings at once, to turn what should be a great spiritual reality into a literal and barren figure of speech. He must always broider a visible badge on every personage : Hester's UA," Miss Hepzibah's scowl, the birthmark, the furry ears of the Faun. In all this there is charm, surprise, ingenuity ; but is it quite imagination, which is truth, and not a decoration rather than a symbol? He passes, indeed, continually from one to the other, and is now crude and childish, as in the prattle about the Faun's furry ears, and now subtly creative, as in the figure of the child Pearl, who is in the true sense a living symbol. Nor does he insist less that every coincidence shall be as obedient as a wizard's phantom, nature and circumstance always in attendance to complete the emotion or the picture. He has used the belief in witchcraft with admirable effect, the dim mystery which clings about haunted houses, the fantastic gambols of the soul itself, under what seem like the devil's own promptings. But he must direct his imps as if they were marionettes, and, as he lets us see the wires jerking, is often at the pains to destroy his own illusion.
Hawthorne is the most sensitive of those novelists who have concerned themselves with the soul's prob- lems ; and he concerns himself, though all in hints and reticences, with the great spiritual realities. The subject of " The Scarlet Letter " is the most poignant in the world. In " Transformation " Hawthorne asks himself, seriously enough : " The story of the Fall of Man ! Is it not repeated in our romance of Monte Beni?" He is at home in all those cloudy tracts of the soul's regions in which most other novelists go astray ; he finds his way there, not by sight, but by feeling, like the blind. He responds to every sensation
58 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
of the soul ; morbidly, as people say : that is, with a consciousness of how little anything else matters.
Yet is there not some astringent quality lacking in Hawthorne, the masculine counterpart of what was sensitively feminine in him ? Is he not like one of his characters " whose sensibility of nerves often produced the effect of spiritual intuition ? " No one has ever rendered subtler sensations with a more delicate pre- cision. When he speaks of flowers, we can say of him, as he says of Clifford: uHis feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste as an emotion." Speaking of a rare wine he says: "The wine demanded so deliberate a pause in order to detect the hidden peculiarities and subtle exquisiteness of its flavor that to drink it was really more a moral than a physical enjoyment." Of all natural delights and horrors, of every sensation in which the soul may be thought to have a part, he can write as if he wrote literally with his nerves. And he is full of wise dis- cretion, he knows what not to say, he will never dissect, with most surgical analysts, the corpse of a sensation. Yet there is much in his sentiment and in his reflection which is the more feminine part of sensitiveness, and which is no more than a diluted and prettily coloured commonplace. That geniality of reflection, of which we find so much in "The House of the Seven Gables," is really a lack of intellectual backbone, a way of dis- guising any too austere truth from his sensibilities. The two chapters, in that often beautiful and delightful book, written around Judge Pyncheon, as he sits dead in his chair, show how lamentable a gap existed in the intellectual taste of Hawthorne. They need only be compared with the treatment of Maeterlinck of a not unsimilar situation in the little dramatic masterpiece, " Interieur," to see all the difference between the work
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 59
of the complete artist and the work of one in whom there remained always something of the amateur.
Mr Henry James has, very unjustly, as I think, accused Hawthorne of provincialism. There was no- thing provincial in the temperament or intelligence of this shy and brooding spectator of human affairs, but he was not without some of the graces and limitations of the amateur. His style, at its best so delicately woven, so subdued and harmonious in colour, has gone threadbare in patches ; something in its gentlemanly ease has become old-fashioned, has become genteel. There are moments when he reminds us of Charles Lamb, but in Lamb nothing has faded, or at most a few too insistent pleasantries : the salt in the style has pre- served it. There is no salt in the style of Hawthorne. Read that charming preface to the " Mosses from an Old Manse," so full of country quiet, with a music in it like the gentle, monotonous murmur of a country stream. Well, at every few pages the amateur peeps out, anxiously trying to knit together his straying substance with a kind of arch simplicity. In the stories, there is rarely a narrative which has not drifted somewhere a little out of his control; and of the novels, only uThe Scarlet Letter" has any sort of firmness of texture ; and we have only to set it beside a really well-constructed novel, beside " Madame Bovary," for instance, to see how loosely, after all, it is woven. Even that taste, which for growing things and for all the strange growths of the soul is so fine, so sensitive, passes into a vague, moralising sentimentality whenever he speaks, as he does so often in "Transformation," of painting or of sculpture. He seems incapable of looking at either without thinking of something else, some fancy or moral, which he must fit into the frame or the cube, or else drape around it, in the form of a veil meant for orna-
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ment. Yet, in all this, and sometimes by a felicity in some actual weakness, turned, like a woman's, into a fragile and pathetic grace, there is a continual weaving of intricate mental cobwebs, and an actual creation of that dim and luminous atmosphere in which they are best seen. And, in the end, all that is finest in Haw- thorne seems to unite in the creation of atmosphere.
In the preface to " Transformation," Hawthorne admits that he " designed the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and proportions of their own should be implicitly and in- sensibly acknowledged." And he defends himself, on the ground of reality, by saying: "The actual ex- perience of even the most ordinary life is full of events that never explain themselves, either as regards their origin or their tendency." Is it not the novelist's business, it may be objected, to explain precisely what would not, in real life, explain itself, to those most closely concerned in it? But to Hawthorne, perhaps rightly, even the clearest explanation is no more than a deepening of the illusion, as the poor ghosts, like Feathertop in the story, see themselves for what they are. Something unsubstantial, evasive, but also some- thing intellectually dissatisfied, always inquiring, in his mind, set Hawthorne spinning these arabesques of the soul, in which the fantastic element may be taken as a note of interrogation. Seeing always " a grim identity between gay things and sorrowful ones," he sets a masquerade before us, telling us many of the secrets hidden behind the black velvet, but letting us see no more than the glimmer of eyes, and the silent or ambiguous lips.
Hawthorne's romances are not exactly (he never
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 61
wished them to be) novels, but they are very nearly poems. And they are made, for the most part, out of material which seems to lend itself singularly ill to poetic treatment. In the preface to " Transformation " he says : " No author, without a trial, can be conscious of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong." Yet this shadow, this antiquity, this mystery, this picturesque and gloomy wrong, is what he has found or created in America. Already in the "Twice-Told Tales" ("these fitful sketches," as he called them, " with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose —so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank — often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they propose to image ") there is a kind of ghostly America growing older and older as one looks at it, as if some wizard had set ivy climbing over new walls. In " The House of the Seven Gables," and in his master- piece, "The Scarlet Letter," we have, without any undue loss of reality, a more admirably prepared atmos- phere, which I imagine to be quite recognisably American, and which is at least as much the atmosphere proper to romance as the Italian atmosphere of " Trans- formation." Each is not so much a narrative which advances, as a canvas which is covered ; or, in his own figure, a tapestry " into which are woven some airy and unsubstantial threads, intermixed with others twisted out of the commonest stuff of human existence." A Puritan in fancy dress, he himself passes silently through the masquerade, as it startles some quiet street in New England. Where what is fantastic in Poe remains geo- metrical, in Hawthorne it is always, for good and evil, moral. It decorates, sometimes plays pranks with, a fixed
62 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
belief, a fundamental religious seriousness ; and has thus at least an immovable centre to whirl from. And, where fancy passes into imagination, and a world, not quite what seems to us the real world, grows up about us with a new, mental kind of reality, it is as if that arrangement or transposition of actual things with which poetry begins had taken place already. I do not know any novelist who has brought into prose fiction so much of the atmosphere of poetry, with so much of the actual art of composition of the poet. It is a kind of poetry singularly pure, delicate, and subtle, and, at its best, it has an almost incalculable fascination, and some not quite realised, but insensibly compelling, white magic.
1904.
WALTER PATER
WALTER PATER was a man in whom fineness subtlety of ; were united with ai : and
rship; in whom a personality singu- larly unconventional, and singularly full of charm, found for its expression an absolutely personal and an absolutely novel style, which was the most care- fully and curiously beautiful of all English styles. The man and his style, to those who knew him, were identical; for, as his style was unlike that of other men, concentrated upon a kind of perfection which, for the most part, they could not even dis- tinguish, so his inner life was peculiarly his own, centred within vond which he refused to
ier; his mind, to quote son* own,
» a solitary prison- dream of a
wor And he was the most lovable of men; to
those who rightly apprehended him, the most fasci- nating ; the most generous and helpful of private friends, and in literature a living counsel of perfection, whose removal seems to leave modern English prose without a contemporary standard of vai.
u For it is with the delicacies of tine literature especially, its gradations of expression, its fine judg- ment, its pure sense of words, of vocabulary — th! alas! dying out in the Engli • of the pre
together with the appreciation < in our liter
of the past — that his literary mission is chiefly cerned." These words, applied by Pater to v Lamb, might reasonably enough have been ap
WALTER PATER
WALTER PATER was a man in whom fineness and subtlety of emotion were united with an exact and profound scholarship; in whom a personality singu- larly unconventional, and singularly full of charm, found for its expression an absolutely personal and an absolutely novel style, which was the most care- fully and curiously beautiful of all English styles. The man and his style, to those who knew him, were identical; for, as his style was unlike that of other men, concentrated upon a kind of perfection which, for the most part, they could not even dis- tinguish, so his inner life was peculiarly his own, centred within a circle beyond which he refused to wander; his mind, to quote some words of his own, "keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world." And he was the most lovable of men ; to those who rightly apprehended him, the most fasci- nating ; the most generous and helpful of private friends, and in literature a living counsel of perfection, whose removal seems to leave modern English prose without a contemporary standard of values.
" For it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations of expression, its fine judg- ment, its pure sense of words, of vocabulary — things, alas ! dying out in the English literature of the present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of the past — that his literary mission is chiefly con- cerned." These words, applied by Pater to Charles
Lamb, might reasonably enough have been applied to
63
64 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
himself; especially in that earlier part of his work, _which remains to me, as I doubt not it remains to many 'others, the most entirely delightful. As a critic, he selected for analysis only those types of artistic character in which delicacy, an exquisite fineness, is the principal attraction ; or if, as with Michelangelo, he was drawn towards some more rugged personality, some more massive, less finished art, it was not so much from sympathy with these more obvious qualities of rugged- ness and strength, but because he had divined the sweetness lying at the heart of the strength : " ex forti dulcedo." Leonardo da Vinci, Joachim du Bellay, Coleridge, Botticelli : we find always something a little exotic, or subtle, or sought out, a certain rarity, which it requires an effort to disengage, and which appeals for its perfect appreciation to a public within the public ; those fine students of what is fine in art, who take their artistic pleasures consciously, deliberately, critically, with the learned love of the amateur.
And not as a critic only, judging others, but in his own person as a writer, both of critical and of imagi- native work, Pater showed his preoccupation with the " delicacies of fine literature." His prose was from the first conscious, and it was from the first perfect. That earliest book of his, " Studies in the History of the Renaissance," as it was then called, entirely individual, the revelation of a rare and special temperament, though it was, had many affinities with the poetic and pictorial art of Rossetti, Swinburne, and Burne Jones, and seems, on its appearance in 1873, to nave been taken as the manifesto of the so-called u aesthetic " school. And, indeed, it may well be compared, as artistic prose, with the poetry of Rossetti ; as fine, as careful, as new a thing as that, and with something of the same exotic odour about it : a savour in this case of French soil, a
WALTER PATER 65
Watteau grace and delicacy. Here was criticism as a fine art, written in prose which the reader lingered over as over poetry ; modulated prose which made the splendour of Ruskin seem gaudy, the neatness of Matthew Arnold a mincing neatness, and the brass sound strident in the orchestra of Carlyle.
That book of " Studies in the Renaissance," even with the rest of Pater to choose from, seems to me sometimes to be the most beautiful book of prose in our literature. Nothing in it is left to inspiration ; but it is all inspired. Here is a writer who, like Baudelaire, would better nature ; and in this gold- smith's work of his prose he too has " reve le miracle d'une prose poetique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime." An almost oppressive quiet, a quiet which seems to exhale an atmosphere heavy with the odour of tropical flowers, broods over these pages ; a subdued light shadows them. The most felicitous touches come we know not whence, " a breath, a flame in the door- way, a feather in the wind " ; here are the simplest words, but they take colour from each other by the cunning accident of their placing in the sentence, " the subtle spiritual fire kindling from word to word." ^
In this book prose seemed to have conquered a new province ; and further, along this direction, prose could not go. Twelve years later, when " Marius the Epicurean " appeared, it was in a less coloured manner of writing that the " sensations and ideas " of that reticent, wise, and human soul were given to the world. Here and there, perhaps, the goldsmith, adding more value, as he thought, for every trace of gold that he removed, might seem to have scraped a little too assidu- ously. But the style of " Marius," in its more arduous self-repression, has a graver note, and brings with it a severer kind of beauty. Writers who have paid
E
66 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
particular attention to style have often been accused of caring little what they say, knowing how beautifully they can say anything. The accusation has generally been unjust : as if any fine beauty could be but skin- deep ! The merit which, more than any other, distin- guishes Pater's prose, though it is not the merit most on the surface, is the attention to, the perfection of, the ensemble. Under the soft and musical phrases an inexorable logic hides itself, sometimes only too well. Link is added silently, but faultlessly, to link ; the argument marches, carrying you with it, while you fancy you are only listening to the music with which it keeps step. Take an essay to pieces, and you will find that it is constructed with mathematical precision; every piece can be taken out and replaced in order. I do not know any contemporary writer who observes the logical requirements so scrupulously, who conducts an argument so steadily from deliberate point to point towards a determined goal. And here, in " Marius," though the story is indeed but a sequence of scenes, woven around a sequence of moods, there is a scarcely less rigorous care for the ensemble, as that had been in- tended, the story being properly speaking no story, but the philosophy of a soul. And thus it is mainly by a kind of very individual atmosphere, mental and physical, that the sense of unity is conveyed. It is a book to read slowly, to meditate over ; more than any of Pater's books, it is a personal confession and the scheme of a doctrine.
In this book, and in the " Imaginary Portraits " of three years later, which seems to me to show his imaginative and artistic faculties at their point of most perfect fusion, Pater has not endeavoured to create characters, in whom the flesh and blood should seem to be that of life itself; he had not the energy of creation,
WALTER PATER 67
and he was content with a more shadowy life than theirs for the children of his dreams. What he has done is to give a concrete form to abstract ideas ; to represent certain types of character, to trace certain developments, in the picturesque form of narrative ; to which, indeed, the term portrait is very happily applied ; for the method is that of a very patient and elaborate brush- work, in which the touches that go to form the likeness are so fine that it is difficult to see quite their individual value, until, the end being reached, the whole picture starts out before you. Each, with perhaps one excep- tion, is the study of a soul, or rather of a consciousness; such a study as might be made by simply looking within, and projecting now this now that side of oneself on an exterior plane. I do not mean to say that I attribute to Pater himself the philosophical theories of Sebastian van Storck, or the artistic ideals of Duke Carl of Rosenmold. I mean that the attitude of mind, the outlook, in the most general sense, is always limited and directed in a certain way, giving one always the picture of a delicate, subtle, aspiring, unsatisfied personality, open to all impressions, living chiefly by sensations, little anxious to reap any of the rich harvest of its intangible but keenly possessed gains ; a personality withdrawn from action, which it despises or dreads, solitary with its ideals, in the circle of its ''exquisite moments," in the Palace of Art, where it is never quite at rest. It is somewhatj such a soul, I have thought, as that which Browning has traced in " Sordello " ; indeed, when reading for the first time " Marius the Epicurean," I was struck by a certain resemblance between the record of the sensa- tions and ideas of Marius of White-Nights and that of the sensations and events of Sordello of Goito.
The style of the " Imaginary Portraits " is the ripest, the most varied and flawless, their art the most assured
68 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
and masterly, of any of Pater's books : it was the book that he himself preferred in his work, thinking it, to use his own phrase, more " natural" than any other. And of the four portraits the most wonderful seems to me the poem, for it is really a poem, named " Denys 1'Auxerrois." For once, it is not the study of a soul, but of a myth ; a transposition (in which one hardly knows whether to admire most the learning, the ingenuity, or the subtle imagination) of that strangest myth of the Greeks, the " Pagan after-thought " of Dionysus Zagreus, into the conditions of mediaeval life. Here is prose so coloured, so modulated, as to have captured, along with almost every sort of poetic rich- ness, and in a rhythm which is essentially the rhythm of prose, even the suggestiveness of poetry, that most volatile and unseizable property, of which prose has so rarely been able to possess itself. The style of " Denys 1'Auxerrois " has a subdued heat, a veiled richness of colour, which contrasts curiously with the silver-grey coolness of "A Prince of Court Painters," the chill, more leaden grey of " Sebastian van Storck," though it has a certain affinity, perhaps, with the more variously- tinted canvas of " Duke Carl of Rosenmold." Watteau, Sebastian, Carl : unsatisfied seekers, all of them, this after an artistic ideal of impossible perfection, that after a chill and barren ideal of philosophical thinking and living, that other after yet another ideal, unattain- able to him in his period, of life aim Ganzen, Guten, Schonen," a beautiful and effective culture. The story of each, like that of u Marius," is a vague tragedy, ending abruptly, after so many uncertainties, and always with some subtly ironic effect in the accident of its conclusion. The mirror is held up to Watteau while he struggles desperately or hesitatingly forward, snatch- ing from art one after another of her reticent secrets ;
WALTER PATER 69
then, with a stroke, it is broken, and this artist in immortal things sinks out of sight, into a narrow grave of red earth. The mirror is held up to Sebastian as he moves deliberately, coldly, onward in the midst of a warm life which has so little attraction for him, freeing himself one by one from all obstructions to a clear philosophic equilibrium ; and the mirror is broken, with a like suddenness, and the seeker disappears from our sight, to find, perhaps, what he had sought. It is held up to Duke Carl, the seeker after the satisfying things of art and experience, the dilettante in material and spiritual enjoyment, the experimenter on life ; and again it is broken, with an almost terrifying shock, just as he has come to a certain rash crisis : is it a step upward or downward? a step, certainly, towards the concrete, towards a possible material felicity.
We see Pater as an imaginative writer, pure and simple, only in these two books, u Marius " and the u Imaginary Portraits," in the unfinished romance of " Gaston de Latour " (in which detail had already begun to obscure the outlines of the central figure), and in those " Imaginary Portraits " reprinted in various volumes, but originally intended to form a second series under that title: "Hippolytus Veiled," " Apollo in Picardy," "Emerald Uthwart " ; and that early first chapter of an unwritten story of modern English life, "The Child in the House." For the rest, he was content to be a critic : a critic of poetry and painting in the " Studies in the Renaissance " and the " Appreciations," of sculpture and the arts of life in the " Greek Studies," of philosophy in the volume on " Plato and Platonism." But he was a critic as no one else ever was a critic. He had made a fine art of criticism. His criticism, abounding in the close and strenuous qualities of
70 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
really earnest judgment, grappling with his subject as if there were nothing to do but that, the " fine writing " in it being largely mere conscientiousness in providing a subtle and delicate thought with words as subtle and delicate, was, in effect, written with as scrupulous a care, with as much artistic finish, as much artistic purpose, as any imaginative work whatever ; being indeed, in a sense in which, perhaps, no other critical work is, imaginative work itself.
" The aesthetic critic," we are told in the preface to the u Studies in the Renaissance," u regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind. This in- fluence he feels, and wishes to explain, analysing it, and reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable for their virtues, as we say in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure." To this state- ment of what was always the aim of Pater in criticism, I would add, from the later essay on Wordsworth, a further statement, applying it, as he there does, to the criticism of literature. " What special sense," he asks, " does Wordsworth exer- cise, and what instincts does he satisfy? What are the subjects which in him excite the imaginative faculty ? What are the qualities in things and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to others, in an extraordinary way ? " How far is this ideal from that old theory,
WALTER PATER 71
not yet extinct, which has been briefly stated, thus, by Edgar Poe: "While the critic is permitted to play, at times, the part of the mere commentator- while he is allowed, by way of merely interesting his readers, to put in the fairest light the merits of his author — his legitimate task is still, in pointing out and analysing defects, and showing how the work might have been improved, to aid the cause of letters, without undue heed of the individual literary men." And Poe goes on to protest, energetically, against the more merciful (and how infinitely more fruitful !) principles of Goethe, who held that what it concerns us to know about a work or a writer are the merits, not the defects, of the writer and the work. Pater certainly carried this theory to its furthest possible limits, and may almost be said never, except by implication, to condemn anything. But then the force of this implication testifies to a fastidiousness infinitely greater than that of the most destructive of the destructive critics. Is it necessary to say that one dislikes a thing? It need but be ignored ; and Pater ignored whatever did not come up to his very exacting standard, finding quite enough to write about in that small residue which remained over.
Nor did he merely ignore what was imperfect, he took the further step, the taking of which was what made him a creative artist in criticism. " It was thus," we are told of Gaston de Latour, in one of the chapters of the unfinished romance, "it was thus Gaston understood the poetry of Ronsard, generously expanding it to the full measure of its inten- tion." That is precisely what Pater does in his criticisms, in which criticism is a divining-rod over hidden springs. He has a unique faculty of seeing,
72 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
through every imperfection, the perfect work, the work as the artist saw it, as he strove to make it, as he failed, in his measure, quite adequately to achieve it. He goes straight to what is fundamental, to the root of the matter, leaving all the rest out of the question. The essay on Wordsworth is per- haps the best example of this, for it has fallen to the lot of Wordsworth to suffer more than most at the hands of interpreters. Here, at last, is a critic who can see in him "a poet somewhat bolder and more passionate than might at first sight be supposed, but not too bold for true poetical taste ; an unim- passioned writer, you might sometimes fancy, yet thinking the chief aim, in life and art alike, to be a certain deep emotion"; one whose "words are themselves thought and feeling " ; " a master, an expert, in the art of impassioned contemplation." Reading such essays as these, it is difficult not to feel that if Lamb and Wordsworth, if Shakespeare, if Sir Thomas Browne, could but come to life again for the pleasure of reading them, that pleasure would be the sensation: "Here is some one who understands just what I meant to do, what was almost too deep in me for expression, and would have, I knew, to be divined; that something, scarcely expressed in any of my words, without which no word I ever wrote would have been
written."
Turning from the criticisms of literature to the studies in painting, we see precisely the same qualities, but not, I think, precisely the same results. In a sen- tence of the essay on "The School of Giorgione," which is perhaps the most nicely balanced of all his essays on painting, he defines, with great precision: "In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more
WALTER PATER 73
definite message for us than an accidental play of sun- light and shadow for a moment on the floor : is itself in truth a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself." But for the most part it was not in this spirit that he wrote of pictures. His criticism of pictures is indeed creative, in a fuller sense than his criticism of books ; and, in the necessity of things, dealing with an art which, as he admitted, has, in its primary aspect, no more definite message for us than the sunlight on the floor, he not merely divined, but also added, out of the most sympathetic knowledge, certainly. It is one thing to interpret the meaning of a book ; quite another to interpret the meaning of a picture. Take, for instance the essay on Botticelli. That was the first sympathetic study which had appeared in English of a painter at that time but little known ; and it contains some of Pater's most exquisite writing. All that he writes, of those Madonnas " who are neither for Jehovah nor for his enemies," of that sense in the painter of " the wistfulness of exiles," represents, certainly, the impression made upon his own mind by these pictures, and, as such, has an inter- pretative value, apart from its beauty as a piece of writing. But it is after all a speculation before a canvas, a literary fantasy; a possible interpretation, if you will, of one mood in the painter, a single side of his intention ; it is not a criticism, inevitable as that criticism of Wordsworth's art, of the art of Botticelli.
This once understood, we must admit that Pater did more than any one of our time to bring about a more intimate sympathy with some of the subtler aspects of art ; that his influence did much to rescue us from the dangerous moralities, the uncritical enthusiasms and
74 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
prejudices, of Ruskin ; that of no other art-critic it could be said that his taste was flawless. In some of the " Greek Studies " in the essays on " The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture," and the rest, he has made sculp- ture a living, intimate thing ; and, with no addition of his fancy, but in a minute, learned, intuitive piecing together of little fact by little fact, has shown its growth, its relation to life, its meaning in art. I find much of the same quality in his studies in Greek myths : that coloured, yet so scrupulous " Study of Dionysus," the patient disentanglings of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. And, in what is the latest work, practically, that we have from his hand, the lectures on "Plato and Platonism," we see a like scrupulous and discriminating judgment brought to bear, as upon an artistic problem, upon the problems of Greek ethics, Greek philosophy.
"Philosophy itself indeed, as he conceives it," Pater tells us, speaking of Plato (he might be speaking of himself), " is but the systematic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things." And philo- sophy, as he conceives it, is a living, dramatic thing, among personalities, and the strife of temperaments ; a doctrine being seen as a vivid fragment of some very human mind, not a dry matter of words and disembodied reason. "In the discussion even of abstract truth," he reminds us, "it is not so much what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells." Thus, the student's duty, in reading Plato, "is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or make apology for what may seem erratic or impossible in him ; still less, to furnish himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction of his own. His duty is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental
WALTER PATER 75
process there, as he might witness a game of skill ; better still, as in reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The Republic, to watch, for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a powerful, of a sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group of conditions which can never in the nature of things occur again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary monument." It is thus that Pater*' studies his subject, with an extraordinary patience and precision ; a patience with ideas, not, at first sight, so clear or so interesting as he induces them to become ; a precision of thinking, on his part, in which no licence is ever permitted to the fantastic side-issues of things. Here again we have criticism which, in its divination, its arrangement, its building up of many materials into a living organism, is itself creation, becomes imaginative work itself.
We may seem to be far now, but are not in reality so far as it may seem, from those "delicacies of fine literature," with which I began by showing Pater to be so greatly concerned. And, in considering the develop- ment by which a writer who had begun with the "Studies in the Renaissance " ended with u Plato and Platonism," we must remember, as Mr Gosse has so acutely pointed out in his valuable study of Pater's personal characteristics, that, after all, it was philosophy which attracted him before either literature or art, and that his first published essay was an essay on Coleridge, in which Coleridge the metaphysician, and not Coleridge the poet, was the interesting person to him. In his return to an early, and one might think, in a certain sense, immature interest, it need not surprise us to find a development, which I cannot but consider as techni- cally something of a return to a primitive lengthiness and involution, towards a style which came to lose
76 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
..many of the rarer qualities of its perfect achievement.
"I remember that when he once said to me that the " Imaginary Portraits " seemed to him the best written of his books, he qualified that very just appreciation by adding: ult seems to me the most natural." I think he was even then beginning to forget that it was not natural to him to be natural. There are many kinds of beauty in the world, and of these what is called natural beauty is but one. Pater's temperament was at once shy and complex, languid and ascetic, sensuous and spiritual. He did not permit life to come to him without a certain ceremony ; he was on his guard against the abrupt indiscretion of events ; and if his whole life was a service of art, he arranged his life so that, as far as possible, it might be served by that very dedication. With this conscious ordering of things, it became a last sophistication to aim at an effect in style which should bring the touch of unpre- meditation, which we seem to find in nature, into a
. faultlessly combined arrangement of art. The lectures on Plato, really spoken, show traces of their actual delivery in certain new, vocal effects, which had begun already to interest him as matters of style ; and which we may find, more finely, here and there in " Gaston de Latour." Perhaps all this was but a pausing-place in a progress. That it would not have been the final stage, we may be sure. But it is idle to speculate what further development awaited, at its own leisui so incalculable a life.
1896.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
THE death of Robert Louis Stevenson deprived English literature of the most charming and sympathetic writer of the present day. He was a fastidious craftsman, caring, we might almost say pre-eminently, for style ; yet he was popular. He was most widely known as the writer of boys' books of adventure ; yet he was the favourite reading of those who care only for the most literary aspects of literature. Within a few days after the news of his death reached England, English news- papers vied with each other in comparing him with Montaigne, with Lamb, with Scott, with Defoe; and he has been not merely compared, but preferred. Un- critical praise is the most unfriendly service a man can render to his friend ; but here, where so much praise is due, may one not try to examine a little closely just what those qualities are which call for praise, and just what measure of praise they seem to call for ?
Stevenson somewhere describes certain of his own essays as being "but the readings of a literary vagrant." And, in truth, he was always that, a literary vagrant ; it is the secret of much of his charm, and of much of his weakness. He wandered, a literary vagrant, over the world, across life, and across literature, an adven- turous figure, with all the irresponsible and irresistible charm of the vagabond. To read him is to be for ever setting out on a fresh journey, along a white, beckon- ing road, on a blithe spring morning. Anything may happen, or nothing; the air is full of the gaiety of possible chances. And in this exhilaration of the
77
78 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
blood, unreasoning, unreasonable, as it is, all the philo- sophies merge themselves into those two narrow lines which the ''Child's Garden of Verses " piously encloses for us :
u The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings."
It is the holiday mood of life that Stevenson ex- presses, and no one has ever expressed it with a happier abandonment to the charm of natural things. In its exquisite exaggeration, it is the optimism of the invalid, due to his painful consciousness that health, and the delights of health, are what really matter in life. Most of those who have written captivatingly of the open air, of what are called natural, healthy things, have been invalids : Thoreau, Richard Jefferies, Steven- son. The strong man has leisure to occupy his thoughts with other things ; he can indulge in abstract thinking without a twinge of the brain, can pursue the moral issues of conduct impersonally ; he is not condemned to the bare elements of existence. And, in his calm acceptance of the privileges of ordinary health, he finds no place for that lyric rapture of thanksgiving which bright day, a restful night, wakens in the invalid. Th< actual fever and languor in the blood : that counts foi something in Stevenson's work, and lies at the root oi some of its fascination.
His art, in all those essays and extravagant tales int< which he put his real self, is a romantic art, alike in th< essay on "Walking Tours" and in the u Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts." Stevenson was passionately interested in people; but there was some- thing a trifle elvish and uncanny about him, as of a bewitched being who was not actually human, had not
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 79
actually a human soul, and whose keen interest in the fortunes of his fellows was really a vivid curiosity, from one not quite of the same nature as those about him. He saw life as the most absorbing, the most amusing, game ; or, as a masquerade, in which he liked to glance behind a mask, now and again, on the winding and coloured way he made for himself through the midst of the pageant. It was only in his latest period that he came to think about truth to human nature ; and even then it was with the picturesqueness of character, with its adaptability to the humorous freaks of incident, that he was chiefly concerned.
He was never really himself except when he was in some fantastic disguise. From u The Pavilion on the Links" to uDr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," he played with men and women as a child plays with a kaleidoscope ; using them freakishly, wantonly, as colours, sometimes as symbols. In some wonderful, artificial way, like a wizard who raises, not living men from the dead, but the shadows of men who had once died, he calls up certain terrifying, but not ungracious, phantoms, who frisk it among the mere beings of flesh and blood, bring- ing with them the strangest "airs from heaven or blasts from hell." No; in the phrase of Beddoes, Stevenson was u tired of being merely human." Thus there are no women in his books, no lovers ; only the lure of hidden treasures and the passion of adventure. It was for the accidents and curiosities of life that he cared, for life as a strange picture, for its fortunate con- fusions, its whimsical distresses, its unlikely strokes of luck, its cruelties, sometimes, and the touch of madness that comes into it at moments. For reality, for the endeavour to see things as they are, to represent them 1 1 as they are, he had an impatient disregard. These matters did not interest him.
8o STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
But it is by style, largely, we are told, that Stevenson is to live, and the names of Lamb and of Montaigne are called up on equal terms. Style, with Stevenson, was certainly a constant preoccupation, and he has told us how, as a lad, he trained himself in the use of language ; how, in his significant phrase, he u lived with words " ; by " playing the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann." He was resolved from the first to reject the ready-made in language, to combine words for himself, as if no one had ever used them before ; and, with labour and luck, he formed for his use a singularly engaging manner of writing, full of charm, freshness, and flexibility, and with a certain human warmth in the words. But it is impossible to consider style in the abstract without taking into account also what it expresses ; for true style is not the dress, but the very flesh, of the informing thought. Stevenson's tendency, like that of his admirers, was rather to the forgetfulness of this plain and sometimes uncongenial tfact. But, in comparing him with the great names of literature, we cannot but feel all the difference, and all the meaning of the difference, between a great intellect and a bright intelligence. The lofty and familiar homeliness of Montaigne, the subtle and tragic humour of Lamb, are both on a far higher plane than the gentle and attractive and whimsical confidences of Stevenson. And, underlying what may seem trifling in both, there is a large intellectual force, a breadth of wisdom, which makes these two charming writers not merely charming, but great. Stevenson remains charm- ing ; his personality, individual and exquisite as it was, had not the strength and depth of greatness. And, such as it was, it gave itself to us completely ; there
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 81
was no sense, as there is with the really great writers, of reserve power, of infinite riches to draw upon. Quite by himself in a certain seductiveness of manner, he ranks, really, with Borrow and Thoreau, with the men of secondary order in literature, who appeal to us with more instinctive fascination than the very greatest ; as a certain wayward and gipsy grace in a woman thrills to the blood, often enough, more intimately and immediately than the august perfection of classic beauty. He is one of those writers who speak to us on easy terms, with whom we may exchange affections. We cannot lose our heart to Shakespeare, to Balzac ; nay, even to Montaigne, because of the height and depth, the ardour and dignity, of the wisdom in his " smiling " pages (to use Stevenson's own word). But George Borrow makes every one who comes under his charm a little unfit for civilisation, a little discontented with drawing-rooms ; Thoreau leads his willing victim into the ardent austerity of the woods ; and Stevenson awakens something of the eternal romance in the bosom even of the conventional. It is a surprising, a marvellous thing to have done ; and to afford such delights, to call forth such responsive emotions, is a boon that we accept with warmer rejoicing than many more solid gifts. But to be wine and song to us for a festive evening is, after all, not the highest form of service or the noblest ministration of joy. It is needful to discriminate in these generous and perilous en- thusiasms, as it is in judging fairly of the character of a friend. Let us love our friend, with all his short- comings ; let him be the more lovable for them, if chance wills it ; but it is better to be aware of the truth, before we proceed to act with affectionate dis- regard of it. Stevenson captivates the heart : that is why he is in such danger of being wronged by indis-
F
82 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
criminate eulogy. Let us do him justice : he would have wished only for justice. It is a dishonour to the dead if we strive to honour their memory with any- thing less absolute than truth.
1894.
•
JOHP
TON S \'DS
MR Hi
Symo *oc-
- how n
>us subtlety in art. These two volumes, containing, for the most part, extracts from an auto- biography, from diaries and from ler ven together so as to make an almost consecw plan which recalls a little the admirable and unusual method of Mason's u Gray ") present a most carefully arranged portrait, which, in one sense, is absolutely the creation of the biographer. All this material, ready-made as it may ogethtr, accord- ing to <<
and diligence, and with a renv sigh ' ery complex nature of the m^
portrait is h cnted to the world. It is a pa
a tragic book, i; chequered, confuseo and yet at the same tun book, v -lickens one
bill ties of life by its revelati the nobility, the fixed ai and undaunted endeavour of resolvedly in the Whole, the Good the Beaut To those who knew and loved the calls u[
merely the blithe companion of any hour's advei but the real, suffering, and sympathetic individ that lay deeper ; and it recalls that memory with <i intolerable vivid:
-
• he courage,
v thwarted
pirit u to live
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
MR HORATIO BROWN'S Life of John Addington Symonds is composed with so careful and so suc- cessful a reticence on the part of the author, that it is not at first sight obvious how much its concealment of art is a conscious subtlety in art. These two volumes, containing, for the most part, extracts from an auto- biography, from diaries and from letters, woven together so as to make an almost consecutive narrative (a plan which recalls a little the admirable and unusual method of Mason's " Gray ") present a most carefully arranged portrait, which, in one sense, is absolutely the creation of the biographer. All this material, ready-made as it may seem to be, has really been fitted together, accord- ing to a well-defined scheme, with immense ingenuity and diligence, and with a remarkable subtlety and in- sight into the very complex nature of the man whose portrait is here presented to the world. It is a painful, a tragic book, this record of what Symonds calls " my chequered, confused, and morally perturbed existence," and yet at the same time an inspiring, an exhilarating book, which quickens one with a sense of the possi- bilities of life by its revelation of the charm, the courage, the nobility, the fixed aim, the endlessly thwarted and undaunted endeavour of a human spirit " to live resolvedly in the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful." To those who knew and loved the man, it calls up, not merely the blithe companion of any hour's adventure, but the real, suffering, and sympathetic individuality that lay deeper ; and it recalls that memory with almost intolerable vividness.
84 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
In the early part of 1889 Symonds wrote an Auto- biography, which he himself considered the best piece of literary work he had ever done. A good deal, especially of the earlier part, of this Autobiography is incorporated in Mr Brown's volumes, and I am inclined to think that Symonds was right in his estimate of it. It is full of subtle self-analysis of a nature which realises itself to be " impenetrably reserved in the depths of myself, rhetorically candid on the surface." That, indeed, was Symonds' attitude through life ; and (strange, contradictory, as the man was in all things) even more so at the beginning than at the end of his career. Early in the Autobiography we find this curious description of a kind of trance which occurred at intervals up to the age of twenty-eight.
" Suddenly, at church or in company, or when I was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensa- tions, which resembled the awakening from anaesthetic influence. One reason why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible, though it is probable that many readers of these pages will recog- nise the state in question. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call ourself. In pro- portion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essenti; consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract self. The universe became without form and void of content. But self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness,
:in
;
ial
TOT
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 85
feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then ? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious self, the sense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion, stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return to ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first recovering the power of touch, and then by the gradual though rapid influx of familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At last I felt myself once more a human being ; and though the riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thankful for this return from the abyss — this deliver- ance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of scepticism."
The record of this singular experience is but one of many revelations which we get in these pages of that brooding meditativeness which lay at the root of Symonds' nature; that painfully minute introspection which finds more concrete expression in these passages from a Diary, written at the age of twenty-one :
u I may rave, but I shall never rend the heavens : I may sit and sing, but I shall never make earth listen. And I am not strong enough to be good — what is left ? I do not feel strong enough to be bad. . . . The sum of intellectual progress I hoped for has been obtained, but how much below my hopes. My character has developed, but in what puny proportions, below my meanest anticipations. I do not feel a man. This book is an evidence of the yearnings without power, and the brooding self-analysis without creation that afflict me."
In all this there was a certain undoubted truth, and
- >~
^- ; -
-r -:- - --:, ' ' *3I | SI -
*« '*
JOHN APniNViTON SYMONDS 87
I
\V
Balanced personality nor an achieved work of art. No one ever had a higher ideal of perfection rove more earnestly to reach it. But, as he well • . there was something lacking, a certain disarray ".iculties. and the full achievement never came, hosi: ii to the path to pursue,, law or
;tnre. and. if literature, the special form of it, are t. Every true artist is eternally doubtful of himself, eternally di< i with the result of his best
endeavours. But no true artist doubts in his heart of s whether the art of his choice is really the art for which he is best fitted. Himself he doubts, not his Now with Symonds the very impulse towards .:ure was a half-hearted one. He came to it as to a branch of culture ; he toiled at it conscientiously, enthusiastically; but it was, in a certain sense/1 work with- out hopc."and'it \\.is. s »
a way of lot ti-. Much of SymondV writing
ijnost of it being so curiously impersonal, and yet not im- personal in the truly artistic way) was a means of escape. escape tYom hiiuselt'. " Neither then nor afterwa he \\utes, near the beginning of the Autobiography, "did 1 tear anything so much .is m\ >-^ ^
Symonds' detailed estimate of his own literary cap** cities and acquirements, in the Autobiography) is some-
\\h.it cruelly JQII
" Having an active d a liyeU v, I was
al\\.us acijuirmi; mtoim.Uion. \\hile tl;
rotontivo po\\er made me CvMitinuallv lose the larger
piMtion ot u Yet in this \\.\\ m\ intellectual tun-.
»MC\\ to be .1 \a»;iu\ ill-di>>-
in possilMlities. but pooi in solid MutV. » , » I CAUUOt
le.un anxthiuj; s\ stematicalU iiiammai. lo
economy, the e\ -\1 insupeiable ditli
cullies to my mind Theiesuh is. that 1 kno\\
88 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
thoroughly, and I do not think this is so much due to laziness as to cerebral incapacity. . . . Retentive recep- tivity is the quality I claim. Combined with a moderate estimate of my own powers and a fair share of common sense, together with an active curiosity, this receptive and retentive susceptibility to various objects and emotions has given a certain breadth, a certain catho- licity, a certain commonplaceness, to my aesthetic con- clusions.
" My powers of expression were considerable, yet not of first-rate quality. Vaughan, at Harrow, told me the truth when he said that my besetting sin was 'fatal facility.' I struggled long to conquer fluency. Still, I have not succeeded. I find a pleasure in expression for its own sake ; but I have not the inevitable touch of the true poet, the unconquerable patience of the con- scious artist. As in other matters, so here, I tried to make the best of my defects. Concentration lies beyond my grasp. The right words do not fall into the right places at my bidding. I have written few good para- graphs, and possibly no single perfect line."
Not a word need be added, nor a word altered, in this unsparing self-criticism. In truth, Symonds was neither a scholar nor an artist. He loved literature for its own sake, scholarship for the sake of its gifts to culture. Living always under sentence of death, he filled out that a indefinite reprieve " with the diligence of a fixed endeavour to work while it was day. But it was probably this sense of the shortness as well as the relish of life, this somewhat feverish intentness upon opportunity, which caused him to do many things hastily that would have been done better with more leisure, and to attempt a universal conquest of literature where limitation would have been an act of wisdom. What he possessed, however, was an extraordinarily interesting
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 89
and unusual personality, which, gradually outgrowing the reserve and speculation of the earlier years, came at last to be intensely vivid, human, and in love with humanity. In 1877 he writes in a letter:
u I, for my part, try to live without asking many ques- tions. I do not want to be indifferent to the great problems of morals, immortality, and the soul ; but I want to learn to be as happy as my health and passions will allow me, without raising questions I am convinced no one will ever answer from our human standpoint."
It was a sort of awakening, this more human view of life ; and, this sense of reality once firmly appre- hended, he could write, as he does in one of his latest letters :
"With me life burns ever more intense as my real strength wanes and my days decrease. It seems to me sometimes awful — the pace at which I live in feeling— inversely to the pace at which myself is ebbing to annihilation."
Gradually, therefore, a new estimate of the value, not merely of such literature as he could write, but of literature itself, formed itself in his mind, and united with that other feeling of powerlessness in still further discouraging him from too keen a following of art and the rewards of art. A passage which I may quote from an unpublished letter gives characteristic expression to this view of things :
" You are quite right to regard art, literature, as the noblest function of your life. What I gently said, and somewhat cynically, perhaps, to the contrary, is very much the result of a long experience in renunciation and patience, the like of which you have not yet had to undergo. I think it best for men to arm themselves with Stoicism as regards success (either external, or in proportion to their own ideals) and to maintain as a
90 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
guiding principle what is the ultimate fact — namely, that art and literature are and never can be more than functions of human life. Life therefore first."
u Life therefore first." Symonds was right ; and it was the life in him, the personality, that gave the man his real interest, his real fascination. But either he did not realise, or realised too late, that where he might have added something vital to literature was precisely in the record of this passionate communion with life. Perhaps, after all, " the right word " would never have u fallen into the right place." But, judging by the few personal things that he did, and by what we are allowed to read of that Autobiography, which is not likely at present to be published in its entirety, he might have done much ; he would certainly have done something more essentially valuable than the never quite satisfying contributions to general culture, to which the main part of his life was devoted. But, as I have said, all this work was in part an escape, an escape from himself; and the u life " which he placed before " literature " was in part also an escape in another direction. Never "truly reconciled either with life or with himself," he chose the simpler task of writing the History of the Renaissance, rather than the perhaps impossible one of writing the history of his own soul.
WILLIAM MORRIS'S PROSE
THE later work of William Morris is mostly in prose, and it consists in a series of prose romances, "News from Nowhere," "The Roots of the Mountains," "The Wood beyond the World," " The Sundering Flood," and others, into which he put the same placid and passionate love of beauty, the same sense of life and of nature, as into his verse. In their simple remoteness, their cunningly woven pattern, their open-heartedness, so absolute that it seems to be itself the concealment of a secret, they have commonly been taken to be not so much romances as allegories, and many fruitless attempts have been made to find out what meaning is hidden away under so much mere decoration. Morris has set this question finally at rest in a letter to the Spectator, dated July 16, 1895, where the statement made in reference to a single one of the prose romances holds good in reference to them all. "I had not," he wrote, "the least intention of thrusting an allegory into 'The Wood beyond the World ' : it is meant for a tale pure and simple, with nothing didactic about it. If I have to write or speak on social problems, I always try to be as direct as I possibly can be. On the other hand, I should consider it bad art in any one writing an allegory not to make it clear from the first that that was his intention, and not to take care throughout that the allegory and the story should interpenetrate, as does the great master of allegory, Bunyan."
Morris was a poet, never more truly a poet than when he wrote in prose ; and it was because he was a
9»
92 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
poet that he resented the imputation of writing allegories. Allegory is the prose writer's substitute for symbol ; and, in its distressing ingenuity, it resembles what it aims at as closely as the marionette resembles his less methodical brother, man. Without the in- dwelling symbol, art is no more than a beautiful body without breath ; but this breath, this flame, this inde- structible and fragile thing, need be no more visible in the work of art than the actual breath of our nostrils, which needs the frost before it shows us its essential heat. To Morris art was a peculiar, absorbing, quite serious kind of play, in which the stanza of a poem, an acanthus on a wall-paper, a square of stitches in tapestry, a paragraph of prose, were all of precisely equal import- ance, and, in a way, equal lack of importance. He was in love with the beauty of the world, and he loved the beauty of the world joyously, as no one of our time has been simple enough and pure enough and strong enough to do. And he loved all visible beauty indifferently, as a child does, not preferring the grass to the emerald, nor the lake to the leaf. His many activities, in which it seemed to some of his friends that he scattered his energy too liberally, were but so many expressions of his unbounded delight in beauty, in the unbounded beauty of all the forms of life. He was not a thinker ; the time-woven garment of the unseen was too satisfying to him that he should ever have cared to look behind it ; but wisdom came to him out of his love of the earth, and a curious pathos, touching one like the sight of wet blossoms or a child's smile, from his apprehension of what is passing, and subject to the dishonour of age, in earthly beauty. His work, then, is a tender re- fashioning of his own vision of the world, of the world as it was to him ; that is to say, as it never was, and never will be, in any past or future golden age, to any
WILLIAM MORRIS'S PROSE 93
one who is not a poet, and something of a child, at heart. He takes one "morsel of the world" after another, and it is to him as to Birdalone, in the book, when she awakes : " And it was an early morning of later spring, and the sky was clear blue, and the sun shining bright, and the birds singing in the garden of the house, and in the street was the sound of the early market-folk passing through the streets with their wares ; and all was fresh and lovely." He knows that there are u dragons" to be slain; but, knowing that Perseus or St George is even now coming through the woods or to the sea-shore, he is content, when it is not his turn to strike, merely to pass on, through ways which are none the less beautiful, weaving all these things into pictures, whereby joy may come into the hearts of weary people whose eyes are dim with sorrow and much labour.
u The Water of the Wondrous Isles," like all Morris's prose, is written in that elaborately simple language, in which the Latin element of English is drawn on as little as possible, and the Saxon element as largely as possible, a language which it has pleased some persons to call a bastard tongue. Artificial, indeed, to a certain extent, it undoubtedly, and very properly, is. Every writer of good prose is a conscious artificer ; and to write without deliberately changing the sequence of words as they come into the mind is to write badly. There is no such thing, properly speaking, as a " natural " style ; and it is merely ignorance of the mental processes of writing which sometimes leads us to say that the style of Swift, for instance, is more natural than the style of Ruskin. To write so that it may seem as if the words were unpremeditated is at least as artificial a process, and at least as difficult, as to write picturesquely, allowing more liberty to words,
94 STUDIES IN PROSE AND VERSE
in their somewhat unreasonable desire to sparkle and shoot many colours, and become little unruly orchestras of their own. And so, in regard to Morris's choice of language, it is merely to be noted that he writes a purer English than most people, obtaining an effect of almost unparalleled simplicity, together with a certain monotony, perhaps even greater than that required by style, though without monotony there can be no style. If he occa- sionally uses a word now obsolete, such as u hight," or a combination now unfamiliar, such as u speech-friend," how numberless are the words of hurried modern coin- age from which he refrains ! seeming to have read the dictionary, as Pater used to advise young writers to read it, in order to find out the words not to use. It is suffi- cient justification of his style to say that it is perfectly suited to his own requirements, and that it could not possibly suit the requirements of any other writer; being, as it is, so intimate a part of his own personality, of his own vision of things.
And here, as elsewhere, it must be remembered that art, to Morris, was always conventional art, in which the external shape, so carefully seen in nature and so care- fully copied, was realised always as line or colour in a pattern, which it was the business of the artist to dis- entangle from the lovely confusions of growth. Morris was passionate only in his impersonality ; in deep passion he was as lacking as he was lacking in profound thought. He loved nature, as I have said, joyously ; and nature, apprehended without passion, becomes a kind of decora- tion. He beheld a golden and green and blue earth, in which the fashion of the world is like that coloured, flat- surfaced thing which the painters before perspective made into pictures. A craftsman's term comes naturally to him when he is speaking of " the green earth and its well-wrought little blossoms and leaves and grass." The
WILLIAM MORRIS'S PROSE 95
beautiful description of Birdalone's body has almost the reflecting coldness of a mirror, so purely is the living beauty of woman seen as a piece of decoration, a tape- stried figure in a u we 11- wrought " green wood. Here and there, tenderness, which is never absent, rises, in the intensity of its pity, into a kind of grave passion, as in these words : "and tender was she of her body as of that which should one day be so sorely loved." And once more, in the accomplishment of love foreseen :
" And she murmured over him : O friend, my dear, think not that I had will to hide me from thee. All that is here of me is thine, and thine, and thine.
" And she took his hand, and they arose together, and she said : O friend, I fled from thee once and left thee lonely of me because I deemed need drave me to it ; and I feared the strife of friends, and confusion and tangle. Now if thou wilt avenge thee on me thou mayst, for I am in thy power. Yet will I ask thee what need will drive thee to leave me lonely ?
" He said : The need of death. But she said : Mayhappen we shall lie together then, as here to-night we shall lie."
But, for the rest, this book, like the others, is of an equable sweetness, a continual going on, like running water in pale sunlight, never rising or falling, nor vary- ing in colour, nor changing in sound. It is a story, which takes place at a time without a date, in a country without a name, among persons who have the simple, elementary qualities of humanity, the qualities which are older than civilisation, and yet who are shown to us only in conventionalised attitudes and in decorative costumes. Never was anything so close to nature and so far from it. I had no notion, when I had finished the book, whether the story had been well told, as the phrase is, or ill told. Meeting, immediately
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afterwards, a friend and admirer of Morris, I learnt from him that Morris's romances were " rambling." To me it was as if he had said that a pattern of scroll- work was rambling. Within its limits the art of the thing had seemed to me flawless. I was in a world which indeed you may refuse to enter, but where, having entered, you have no choice ; you can impose no limit but the limits of the design. I find stories, as a rule, difficult to read ; but I read these five hundred pages of prose as easily as if they had been verse, and with the same kind of pleasure. To read such a book is to receive an actual gift of happiness, in this quickened sense of the beauty of life and of the visible world, without that after-sense of the worm at the fruit's heart, which is left with us by most histories of the doings of humanity.
1897.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
I
THE first aim of art, no doubt, is the representation of things as they are. But, then, things are as our eyes see them and as our minds make them, and it is thus of primary importance for the critic to distinguish the precise qualities of those eyes and minds which make the world into imaginative literature. Reality may be so definite and so false, just as it may be so fantastic and so true ; and, among work which we can apprehend as dealing justly with reality, there may be quite as much difference in all that constitutes outward form and likeness as there is between a Dutch interior by Peter van der Hooch, the portrait of a king by Velazquez, and the image of a woman smiling by Leonardo da Vinci. The soul, for instance, is as real as the body ; but, as we hear it only through the body speaking, and see it only through bodily eyes, and measure it, often enough, only in the insignificant moment of its action, it may come to seem to us, at all events, less realisable ; and thus it is that we speak of those who have vividly painted exterior things as realists. Properly speaking, Maupassant is no more a realist than Maeterlinck. He paints a kind of reality which it is easier for us to recognise ; that is all.
Every artist has his own vision of the world. Maupassant's vision was of solid superficies, of texture which his hands could touch, of action which his mind
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could comprehend from the mere sight of its incidents. He saw the world as the Dutch painters saw it, and he was as great a master of form, of rich and sober colour, of the imitation of the outward gestures of life, and of the fashion of external things. He had the same view of humanity, and shows us, with the same indif- ference, the same violent ferment of life, the life of full- blooded people who have to elbow their way through the world. His sense of desire, of greed, of all the baser passions, was profound ; he had the terrible logic of animalism. Love-making, drunkenness, cheat- ing, quarrelling, the mere idleness of sitting drowsily in a chair, the gross life of the farmyard and the fields, civic dissensions, the sordid provincial dance of the seven deadly sins, he saw in the same direct, un- illuminating way as the Dutch painters ; finding, indeed, no beauty in any of these things, but getting his beauty in the deft arrangement of them, in the mere act of placing them in a picture. The world existed for him as something formless which could be cut up into little pictures. He saw no further than the lines of his frame. The interest of the thing began inside that frame, and what remained outside was merely material.
As a writer, Maupassant was de race, as the French say ; he was the lineal descendant of the early conteurs. Trained under the severe eye of the impeccable Flaubert, he owed infinitely, no doubt, to that training, and much to the actual influence of the great novelist, who, in " L'Education Sentimentale," has given us the type of the modern novel. But his style is quite different from that of Flaubert, of which it has none of the splendid, subdued richness, the harmonious move- ment ; it is clear, precise, sharply cut, without ornament or elaboration ; with much art, certainly, in its deliberate
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plainness, and with the admirable skill of an art which conceals art. M. Halevy has aptly applied to him the saying of Vauvenargues : " La nettete est le vernis des maitres." Not Swift himself had a surer eye or hand for the exact, brief, malicious notation of things and ideas. He seems to use the first words that come to hand, in the order in which they naturally fall; and when he has reached this point he stops, not con- ceiving that there is anything more to be done. u Maupassant," writes Goncourt in his Journal, with that acuteness which the touch of malice only sharpened, uis a very remarkable novelliere, a very charming writer of short stories, but a stylist, a great writer, no, no ! "
A story of Maupassant, more than almost anything in the world, gives you the impression of manual dexterity. It is adequately thought out, but it does not impress you by its thought ; it is clearly seen, but it does not impress you specially by the fidelity of its detail ; it has just enough of ordinary human feeling for the limits it has imposed on itself. What impresses you is the extreme ingenuity of its handling; the way in which this juggler keeps his billiard-balls harmoniously rising and falling in the air. Often, indeed, you cannot help noticing the conscious smile which pre- cedes the trick, and the confident bow which con- cludes it. He does not let you into the secret of the trick, but he prevents you from ignoring that it is after all only a trick which you have been watching.
There is a philosophy of one kind or another behind the work of every artist. Maupassant's was a simple one, sufficient for his needs as he understood them, though perhaps really consequent upon his artistic methods, rather than at the root of them. It was
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the philosophy of cynicism, the most effectual means of limiting one's outlook, of concentrating all one's energies on the task in hand. Maupassant wrote for men of the world, and men of the world are content with the wisdom of their counting-houses. The man of the world is perfectly willing to admit that he is no better than you, because he takes it for granted that you will admit yourself to be no better than he. It is a way of avoiding comparisons. To Maupassant this cynical point of view was invaluable for his purpose. He wanted to tell stories just for the pleasure of telling them ; he wanted to concern himself \*ith his story simply as a story; incidents interested him, not ideas, nor even characters, and he wanted every incident to be immediately effective. Now cynicism in France supplied a sufficient basis for all these requirements ; it is the equivalent, for popular purposes, of that appeal to the average which in England is sentimentality. Compare, for instance, the first and perhaps the best story which Maupassant ever wrote, u Boule de Suif," with a story of somewhat similar motive, Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat." Both stories are pathetic, but the pathos of the American (who had formed himself upon Dickens, and in the English tradition) becomes sentimental, and gets its success by being sentimental ; while the pathos of the Frenchman (who has formed himself on Flaubert, and in the French tradition) gets its success precisely by being cynical.
And then this particular variety of Maupassant's cynicism was just that variation of the artistic idea upon the temperament which puts the best finish upon work necessarily so limited, obliged to be so clenching, as the short story. Flaubert's gigantic dissatisfactio with life, his really philosophic sense of its vanity, would have overweighted a writer so thoroughly
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equipped for his work as the writer of " Boule de Suif " and " La Maison Tellier." Maupassant had no time, he allowed himself no space, to reason about life ; the need was upon him to tell story after story, each with its crisis, its thrill, the summing up of a single existence or a single action. The sharp, telling thrust that this conception of art demanded could be given only by a very specious, not very profound, very forth-right kind of cynicism, like the half-kindly, half-contemptuous laugh of the man who tells a good story at his club. For him it was the point of the epigram.
II
Maupassant in his work gives us the will to live, and with him it is the will of the body to be always happy, always conscious of happiness, not too conscious of itself, the body's desire of light, heat, comfort, the pleasure of all the senses, and sound sleep without dreams. His work is the confession of the average sensual man, in whom an extravagance of health turns to fever, that there is something in the world, or not in it, which sets a term to enjoyment even while one has both will and strength to enjoy. Here is one of the most intimate of his confessions : " How gladly, at times, I would think no more, feel no more, live the life of a brute, in a warm, bright country, in a yellow country, without crude and brutal verdure, in one of those Eastern countries in which one falls asleep with- out sadness, awakens without concern, is active and has no cares, loves and has no distress, and is scarcely aware that one is going on living." It is in " Sur FEau" that he says that, the book in which he has
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" thought simply " and written down his thoughts as they came to him. It is love of life which drives him to this fear even of living, this desire of a vegetable warmth and growth, which seems to promise con- tinuance. Goncourt notes in his "Journal," in 1889, how Mirbeau "speaks curiously of the fear of death which haunts Maupassant, and which is the cause of his life of perpetual wandering over land and sea, in the effort to escape from that fixed idea." In " Sur TEau " he speaks, in terrified words, of this fear of death, this fear of an invisible monster, hidden in some corner, spying on men's lives, and breathing a slow pestilence upon them. The soul hardly comes at all into this hatred of the earth on which men suffer so much before dying ; it is the body which cries out against age, wrinkles, and the sure tardiness of decay. It is the body which will not be satisfied with what it can gather to itself under the sun, nor with any of the fruits of the earth into which it is to relapse, in the end.
Maupassant loved and hated life, and he hated it because he loved it. Tolstoi has pointed out how he becomes unconsciously a moralist by the mere force and clear-sightedness of his talent, his fidelity to what he has seen and to what he has felt. Caring for nothing in the world so much as for women, setting the monotonous and various drama of sex in motion through all his stones, he comes in the end to find all this amusing and absorbing comedy turning tragic. uHe would have exalted love, but the more he knew it the more he cursed it." He cannot endure solitude, and he finds only a more ignoble solitude where it has been his pleasure to seek distraction. " I was at home and alone, and I felt that if I remained there I should fall into a horrible fit of melancholy, the sort of
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melancholy that must drive men to suicide if it returns too often." That is how he presents to us the state of mind of the man who is going out to " a night of pleasure " ; and, at the end of that typical story, "L'Armoire," we see the man, overcome by horror and pity, hurrying home in the middle of the night, that he may escape from a more poignant sense of the wretchedness of things.
Maupassant saw life with his senses, and he reflected on it in a purely animal revolt, the recoil of the hurt animal. His observation is not, as it has been hastily assumed to be, cold ; it is as superficially emotional as that of the average sensual man, and its cynicism is only another, not less superficial, kind of feeling. He saw life in all its details, and his soul was entangled in the details. He saw it without order, without recompense, without pity; he saw too clearly to be duped by ap- pearances, and too narrowly to distinguish any light beyond what seemed to him the enclosing bounds of darkness. And so he settled down, with a kind of violent indifference, which was almost despair, to live his life and to accomplish his task. Goncourt reports a conversation in which Ceard "declares that, in him, literature was a matter wholly of instinct, not of reflection ; and affirms that, of all the men whom he has known, he was the most absolutely indifferent to everything, and that, at the very moment in which he seemed most keenly set on a thing, he was already aloof from it." In ten years he wrote thirty volumes ; he wrote well or ill, but he wrote always, not for love of art nor for love of money, but out of the need of his organism to spend its force after its kind, after all kinds.
In that famous chapter on the novel, which Maupas- sant put as a preface to u Pierre et Jean," he summarises
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for us those counsels of Flaubert under which he worked for seven years, before the publication of "Boule de Suif " in the " Soirees de Medan" of 1880, presented him to the public as a finished artist. 4 ' ' Talent is a long patience.' The thing is to look at what one wishes to express, long enough and carefully enough to discover in it an aspect which no one has ever seen or said. In everything there is something undiscovered, because we are only accustomed to use our eyes with the recollection of what people have thought before us about the thing at which we are looking. There is a certain unknown quantity in the smallest thing. Find it." This unknown quantity in familiar things Maupas- sant knew how to find. He sought for it chiefly in that part of human nature which interested him most and which was most familiar to him. Being professedly not a psychologist, being content to leave the soul out of the question, he found that the animal passions were at the root of our nature, that they gave rise to the most vivid and interesting kinds of action, and he persisted in rendering mainly the animal side of life. Probably no writer has ever done so more convincingly, with a more thorough knowledge of his subject, and a more perfect mastery of his knowledge. At his best he gives us, as in uUne Vie," "the humble truth," or, in uLa Petite Roque," the horrible truth, or, in " Le Horla," the truth which destroys. It was the fear of death that wrung imagination out of him : " Le Horla," the invisible spectre of the mind. " Le Horla " is the soul of the materialist vindicating itself against the self-confidence of the body.
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III
Everything which Maupassant wrote is interesting, it is more exclusively and merely interesting than the work of any writer of fiction who has been called great, it is too exclusively and merely interesting to be really great work. Really great work, in fiction as in every other form of art, requires too close and too constant an atten- tion to be quite easy reading. When we read Balzac we seem to have been plunged suddenly into the midst of so great a turbulence of life that the effort to absorb this new, irresistible, hurrying, and mysterious world makes us pause ; we try to withdraw into ourselves, as one might step aside into a doorway out of a great crowd, in the streets of a city. We look up from the page, we half-close the book, that we may think a little, that we may rest from this fatiguing demand on all our faculties. When we read Flaubert, we are delightfully delayed by the completeness and the beauty of every detail ; we linger over this prose as we linger over verse. When we read Merimee, even, in those stories which may be so well compared with Maupassant's for their economy and precision of effect, we are conscious of some hard, intellectual quality which takes hold of us, not only through the mere events of the story. But we read Maupassant for nothing but the story ; we read him hurriedly, without lifting our eyes from the page ; we are only anxious to get to the end, to see what happens. One should never read stories for the story. However absorbing may be the interest of the plot, of the work- ing out of a given situation, the plot and the situation should never be taken as more than the means to an end. In great art they are never more than the means to an end, to the interpretation, the new creation, of
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life; and no great artist allows himself to become so amusing, in his treatment of what is not essential, as to withdraw the attention of the reader from what is essen- tial. That is why no great writer has ever been immediately popular. The books that pass away are the books that have too easily, too feverishly, interested a generation.
Maupassant is the best of the popular novelists, of the novelists who have not had to wait for admiration. His appeal is genuine, and his skill, of its kind, incon- testable. He attracts, as certain men do, by a warm and blunt plausibility. He is so frank, and seems so broad ; and is so skilful, and seems so living. All the exterior heat of life is in his work ; and this exterior heat gives a more immediate illusion of what we call real life than the profound inner vitality of, let us say, Hawthorne. He comes to us, saying impressively : " Certain meetings, certain inexplicable combinations of things, contain undoubtedly, however insignificant they may seem to be, a larger quantity of the secret quintessence of life than that dispersed in the ordinary course of events." He promises us this secret quint- essence of life, and he tells us anecdote after anecdote, full of moving facts, and the obvious emotion of every fact. He is eager and unabashed, and, he assures us, this is life, and these amusing and horrible and ordinary things are the things that really happen. He assures us : "Blind and intoxicated with foolish pride must he be who believes himself more than an animal a little better than the others." And the others ? " I seem to see in them the horror of their souls as one sees a monstrous fcetus in spirits of wine, in a glass jar." And his scornful conclusion is: "Happy are they whom life satisfies, who can amuse themselves, and be content. . . . Happy are they who have not discovered, with a vast
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disgust, that nothing changes, that nothing passes, and that all things are a weariness."
Is that a philosophy or is it an outcry ? Is it not the unprofitable anger of the craftsman with his material ? Is it not the helpless anger of the child with the toys which he has broken?
1899,
ALPHONSE DAUDET
THE novels of Daudet are distinguished from the average popular novel not in kind, but in degree. The study of manners, the novel of sensation, the pathetic novel, the novel of satire, the novel of humour, he has done them all, and he has done them all with an admir- able skill, a controlling sense of art. But he has brought nothing new into fiction, or, if he has brought anything, it is the particular variety of his humour, a Southern blend, which seems to unite American humour with Irish humour. u Tartarin " should be compared with the work of Mark Twain and with the work of Carleton, not, certainly, with anything greater than the work of these admirable writers. "Tartarin" is an heroical farce, full of comic observation, of comic invention, but, after all, how little more than the froth on the wine as it bubbles over! Daudet is himself rash enough to challenge comparison with uDon Quixote," and the comparison has been extended to Falstaff. But here the difference is a difference in kind. Daudet is a genuine humourist, but he is a humourist for his time, not for all time. He deals, not with that humour of fundamental ideas which is one of the voices of wisdom, but rather with a humour of shining accidents, which is at its best but the consecration of folly. There are men of science, men who deserve well of science, who have spent their lives in classifying a single species of beetle. That is what Daudet has done in "Tartarin," into which he has packed all the exterior qualities of the
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South, " les gestes, frenesies et ebullitions de notre soleil," as he says.
And so with his serious studies in life. He is a quick observer, but never a disinterested observer, for he is a sentimentalist among realists. All his power comes from the immediateness of his appeal to the heart : to the intellect he never appeals. He appeals, certainly, to the average human sympathies, and he appeals to them with his power of writing a story which shall absorb the interest as an English novel absorbs the interest, by its comedy, using that word in its broadest sense. Even "Sapho" is essentially comedy, and Daudet is not far from being at his best in that brief, emphatic tale of a dull and disenchanted Bohemia. Others before Daudet had studied the life of a woman professionally u gay." Huysmans had studied it brutally, with a deliberate lack of sympathy, in " Marthe." Zola had studied it, with his exuberant method of repre- senting, not the living woman, but the pattern of her trade. Goncourt had studied it, delicately, but with a subtlety which digresses into merely humanitarian con- siderations, in " La FilJe Elisa." Daudet gives us neither vice nor romance, but the average dreariness of le collage. Yet he is not content with painting his picture : he must moralise, arrange, with an appeal to the sympathies as definitely sentimental, for all its dis- guises, as that of u La Dame aux Camelias." He cannot be as indifferently just to his Sapho as Flaubert in a L'Education Sentimentale " is indifferently and supremely just to Rosanette. And, partly for this very reason, it is only the external semblance of life which he gives ; rarely the heart, never the soul.
In his vivid, passionate, tragically pathetic studies of u that exciting Paris" (it is his own word), " where the very dolls talk," Daudet is as entertaining as
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the writer of a fairy tale, and he writes fairy tales, in which J. Tom Levis, the pseudo-Englishman of the confidential agency, Jansoulet, the Nabob, Delobelle the actor, Sidonie (a new Sidonia the Sorceress), Bompard, Tartarin, are all inhabitants of a world cer- tainly more amusing than real life. That they should u o'erstep the modesty of nature " at every movement is partly his intention, partly he is indifferent to it, and partly unaware of it.
No gift with which a man can be cursed is more fatal than a thin vein of poetry. Daudet had a thin vein of poetry, not enough to make him a poet, but enough to distort the focus of his vision of truth. When he looked at external objects he saw something a little different from their shape as it appears to people in general, but he did not see them transfigured into the celestial images of themselves, as the poet sees them. He saw the face of Joy a little more laughing than it is, the face of Sorrow a little more distressed, and just that half-poetical exaggeration, missing all that is essential in poetry, was enough to leave him somewhere between the realists and the properly imaginative writers, artistically insincere, though, in his intention, of an almost touching sincerity.
He was a novelist as men are ceasing to be novelists, a novelist for the story's sake. He professes frankly to amuse you, and his absence of affectation in regard to his own art is itself almost an affectation. And his stories first of all amuse, excite, distress himself; "and then one loves them, these books, these novels, sorrowful fruits of your entrails, made of your very flesh and blood ; how can one look on them disinterestedly ? " He never could, indeed, look on them disinterestedly, either while they were making or when they were made. He made them with actual tears and laughter ;
ALPHONSE DAUDET in
and they are read with actual tears and laughter by the crowd. May it not, therefore, be said that he achieved his end, that he gained the reward he had proposed to himself, and that a more lofty, a more lonely, fame would have left one who was always so eager after present happiness, after what is companionable in praise, a little cold and unsatisfied ?
" It is all very well to put oneself outside the crowd and above it; it always comes, in the end, to be the crowd for which one writes." That sentence, written by Daudet in an article on Goncourt, does something to show why the writer of "Sapho," " Froment Jeune et Risler Aine," and u Les Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin de Tarascon " was a popular writer, but not a great writer. Daudet wrote for the crowd. He wrote also, certainly, for his own pleasure ; he wrote as he might have talked; and it would have been easier to imagine Zola not writing than Daudet not writing. It amused him supremely to tell stories; but he had to be listened to. Feverish as his method of writing was, he took endless pains to write well, writing every MS. three times over from beginning to end. But he had no philosophy behind his fantastic and yet only too probable creations. Caring, as he thought, supremely for life, he cared really for that surprising, bewildering pantomime which life seems to be to those who watch its coloured movement, its flickering lights, its changing costumes, its powdered faces, without looking through the eyes into the hearts of the dancers. He wrote from the very midst of the human comedy ; and it is for this that he seems at times to have caught the bodily warmth and the taste of the tears and the very ring of the laughter of men and women. He was too much the comrade of his own characters ; there are times when he seems actually to judge them from their own point of view,
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to be deceived by the speciousness of their protes- tations, to descend to their own level.
To the great artist life is indeed a comedy, but it is a comedy in which his own part is to stand silently in the wings, occasionally ringing down the curtain. Every joy and sorrow which he gives to his characters he has indeed felt, in his own heart, or in his own imagination ; but, his characters once in motion, he surveys them with the controlling indifference of Fate. He will render the pity of love and death, but he will not say, with Daudet : " Quel coup terrible pour la jeune fille ! " He will feel the whole intimacy of the contact between nature and humanity, but he will not say with Daudet: "A passionate sob, so profound, so rending, that it would have touched any heart, especially in the presence of nature, splendid and pitiless in the soft, odorous heat." He will render the sensation of, for instance, the happi- ness of a loving family, but he will not, with Daudet, bless the Paris Sunday, "especially because of all the happiness that thou givest, over and above other days, on that day, in the large new house at the end of the old suburb." He will write tragedy, not melodrama; comedy, not farce.
By the very superficiality with which he has entered into the sentiment of his creations, Daudet has obtained an impression of life which cannot be obtained by a more careful, a more truly successful artist. We praise a photograph for its likeness, and we please ourselves and the photographer if we say that it is a flattering likeness ; that is to say, if, in the average or accidental expression which the camera has caught for us, we have removed precisely those lines, wrinkles, idiosyncratic defects, which indicate character. But when we come to look at a portrait, painted by a great painter, we consider, indeed, the question of the likeness, and at its
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full value ; but we consider, besides, how many qualities, purely of art, which have nothing to do with the exactitude of the reflection, but whose presence or absence gives the picture its worth or defect. Daudet shows us, for the most part, exceptional people, grimacing with the exterior violence of life with which he has animated them, seeming to be wonderfully close to us, but at the best as close to us as the people we pass in the street, not as the friend whose soul is in our hands. It might almost be said that his human curiosity was as great as Balzac's ; but what a different kind of curiosity ! It is never fundamental, it is often for no more than the bric-a-brac of humanity. u Le Nabab," " Les Rois en Exil " : he is as filled with wonder- ment before these fantastic and misplaced people as any Provencal from Avignon or Aries. " Ah ! " he cries, u c'etait le bon temps alors. Paris bonde d'etrangers, et non pas d'etrangers de passage, mais une installation de fortunes exotiques ne demandant que noces et ripailles." Even in his satire you feel the naivete of a certain surprise. In u Le Nabab," for instance, which is a satire of the manifold hypocrisies of modern society, the indignation which thrills through all the satire is really the recoil of a shock which has come heavily upon an ingenuous nature ; and one of the finest chapters of that book, u Un Debut dans le Monde," a masterpiece of the satirical observation of small mean- nesses, has all the pungency, with all the limitation, of the young debutant himself, to whom these things are personally irritating. And his pathos has the same quality as his satire.
The pathos of Daudet, a very genuine pathos, as melting as that of Dickens or Bret Harte, is a pathos of things which are also laughable, a grotesque, a fantastic pathos, made of the antithesis of unhappiness
H
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and its surroundings. Delobelle the actor in " Fro- ment Jeune," the Nabob, the kings in exile, are studies of "humours," in Ben Jonson's sense; they are not studies of character. And so, in their pathos, they are either traps to catch tears, or part of the rhetoric of situation. Daudet's pathos is the pathos of the sentimentalist ; it dwells on grief where grief is picturesque, touching, immediately telling ; it has no reserve, no transfusion into other substances. The sovereign pathos of Lear, the noble pathos of Anti- gone, do not make you cry ; the pathos of Jack makes you cry. And this easy tribute of tears is but the return of sentiment to sentiment, a wholly physical sensation, in which the intellect is jfor nothing. Pathos which can touch the intellect becomes so transfigured that its tears shine : you can see by their light. But we cry over melodrama because a single appeal is made to a single sense, an appeal, from the point of view of the finest art, almost as illegitimate as the appeal of obscenity. Pathos such as Daudet's comes from th< man to whom life is an entertainment absolutely enter- taining : he dreads only its ending, or an accident which may interrupt it. The