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Title: Dramatis Personae

Author: Arthur Symons

Release Date: May 29, 2020 [EBook #62270]

Language: English

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DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

BY

ARTHUR SYMONS

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOOBS-MERRILL COMPANY




PUBLISHER'S NOTE


Although it would be presumptuous to introduce the work of Arthur
Symons, a word or two about this particular collection may not be out of
place. A number of these essays have appeared in representative American
and English periodicals, but their preservation here needs no apology as
they have already earned a meritorious place in the bibliography of
English criticism. The publisher believes, also, that the critical
reader must realize the futility of any attempt to correct discrepancies
due to the death of contemporaries, or augmentations to their work, lest
the essays as originally conceived by the author suffer in spirit.




CONTENTS

Conrad
Maurice Maeterlinck
Emily Brontë
On English and French Fiction
On Criticism
The Decadent Movement in Literature
The Rossettis
Confessions and Comments
Francis Thompson
Coventry Patmore
Sir William Watson
Emil Verhaeren
A Neglected Genius: Sir Richard Burton
Edgar Saltus
Recollections of Réjane
The Russian Ballets
On Hamlet and Hamlets
Leonardo da Vinci
Impressionistic Writing
Paradoxes on Poets




DRAMATIS PERS0NÆ




CONRAD


"_The Earth is a Temple where there is going on a Mystery Play, childish
and poignant, ridiculous and awful enough in all conscience._"


I


Conrad's inexplicable mind has created for itself a secret world to live
in, some corner stealthily hidden away from view, among impenetrable
forests, on the banks of untraveled rivers. From that corner, like a
spider in his web, he throws out tentacles into the darkness; he gathers
in his spoils, he collects them like a miser, stripping from them their
dreams and visions to decorate his web magnificently. He chooses among
them, and sends out into the world shadowy messengers, for the troubling
of the peace of man, self-satisfied in his ignorance of the invisible.
At the center of his web sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human
affairs with a calm and cynical ferocity; "that particular field whose
mission is to jog the memories of men, lest they should forget the
meaning of life." Behind that sarcasm crouches some ghastly influence,
outside humanity, some powerful devil, invisible, poisonous,
irresistible, spawning evil for his delight. They guard this secret
corner of the world with mists and delusions, so that very few of those
to whom the shadowy messengers have revealed themselves can come nearer
than the outer edge of it.

Beyond and below this obscure realm, beyond and below human nature
itself, Conrad is seen through the veil of the persons of his drama,
living a hidden, exasperated life. And it is by his sympathy with these
unpermitted things, the "aggravated witch-dance" in his brain, that
Conrad is severed from all material associations, as if stupendously
uncivilized, consumed by a continual protest, an insatiable thirst,
unsatisfied to be condemned to the mere exercise of a prodigious genius.

Conrad's depth of wisdom must trouble and terrify those who read him for
entertainment. There are few secrets in the mind of men or in the
pitiless heart of nature that he has not captured and made his
plaything. He calls up all the dreams and illusions by which men have
been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly naked. He is the
master of dreams, the interpreter of illusions, the chronicler of
memory. He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of
every vice or crime. He calls up before him all the injustices that have
come to birth out of ignorance and self-love. He shows how failure is
success, and success failure, and that the sinner can be saved. His
meanest creatures have in them a touch of honor, of honesty, or of
heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness, a mistake, some
sin or crime, to redeem. And in all this there is no judgment, only an
implacable comprehension, as of one outside nature, to whom joy and
sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civilization, are equal and
indifferent.

Reality, to Conrad, is non-existent; he sees through it into a realm of
illusion of the unknown: a world that is comforting and bewildering,
filled with ghosts and devils, a world of holy terror. Always is there
some suggestion of a dark region, within and around one; the
consciousness that "They made a whole that had features, shades of
expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye,
and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of
perdition that dwells within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable
body."

"This awful activity of mind" is seen at work on every page, torturing
familiar words into strange meanings, clutching at cobwebs, in a
continual despair before the unknown. Something must be found, in the
most unlikely quarter; a word, a hint, something unsaid but guessed at
in a gesture, a change of face. "He turned upon me his eyes suddenly
amazed and full of pain, with a bewildered, startled face, as though he
had tumbled down from a star." There is a mental crisis in that look:
the unknown has suddenly opened.

Memory, that inner voice, stealthy, an inveterate follower; memory,
Conrad has found out, is the great secret, the ecstasy and despair which
weave the texture of life. A motto from Amiel in one of his books
faintly suggests it: "_Qui de nous n'a eu sa terre promise, son jour
d'extase et sa fin en exil?_" And the book, _Almayer's Folly_, his
first, a rare and significant book, is just that. _An Outcast of the
Islands_ has the despairing motto from Calderon, that better is it for a
man had he never been born. _Lord Jim_ is the soul's tragedy, ending
after a long dim suffusion in clouds, in a great sunset, sudden and
final glory. No man lives wholly in his day; every hour of these
suspensive and foreboding days and nights is a part of the past or of
the future. Even in a splendid moment, a crisis, like the love scene of
Nina and Dain in the woods, there is no forgetfulness. "In the sublime
vanity of her kind she was thinking already of moulding a god out of the
clay at her feet. ... He spoke of his forefathers." Lord Jim, as he
dies, remembers why he is letting himself be killed, and in that
remembrance tastes heaven. How is it that no one except Conrad has got
to this hidden depth, where the soul really lives and dies, where, in an
almost perpetual concealment, it works out its plan, its own fate?
Tolstoy, Hawthorne, know something of it; but the one turns aside into
moral tracts, and the other to shadows and things spiritual. Conrad
gives us the soul's own dream of itself, as if a novelist of adventure
had turned Neo-Platonist.

A woman once spoke to me in a phrase I have never forgotten, of Conrad's
sullen subjective vision. Sullen is a fine word for the aspect under
which he sees land and sea; sullen clouds, a sullen sea. And some of
that quality has come to form part of his mind, which is protesting,
supremely conscious. He is never indifferent to his people, rarely kind.
He sees them for the most part as they reveal themselves in suffering.
Now and then he gives them the full price, the glory, but rarely in this
life, or for more than a moment. How can those who live in suspense,
between memory and foreboding, ever be happy, except for some little
permitted while? The world for those who live in it, is a damp forest,
where savagery and civilization meet, and in vain try to mingle. Only
the sea, when they are out of sight of land, sometimes gives them
freedom.

It is strange but true that Conrad's men are more subtly comprehended
and more magnificent than his women. There are few men who are seen full
length, and many of them are nameless shadows. Aissa and Nina in the
earliest books have the fierce charm of the unknown. In _Lord Jim_ there
is only one glimpse of the painful mystery of a woman's ignorant heart.
In _Nostromo_ the women are secondary, hardly alive; there is no woman
in _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, nor in _Typhoon_, nor in _Youth._
There are some women, slightly seen, in Tales of Unrest, and only one of
them, the woman of _The Return_, is actually characterized.

Is there not something of an achievement in this stern rejection of the
obvious love-story, the material of almost every novel? Not in a single
tale, even when a man dies of regret for a woman, is the woman prominent
in the action. Almayer, and not Nina, is the center of the book named
after him. And yet Nina is strange, mysterious, enchanting, as no other
woman is to be. Afterward they are thrust back out of the story; they
come and go like spinners of Destiny, unconscious, ignorant, turning
idle wheels, like the two women knitting black wool in the waiting room
of the Trading Company's office, "guarding the door of Darkness."

Now, can we conjecture why a woman has never been the center of any of
these stories? Conrad chooses his tools and his materials; he realizes
that men are the best materials for his tools. It is only men who can be
represented heroically upon the stage of life; who can be seen
adventuring doggedly, irresistibly, by sheer will and purpose; it is
only given to men to attain a visible glory of achievement. He sees
woman as a parasite or an idol, one of the illusions of men. He asks
wonderingly how the world can look at them. He shows men fearing them,
hating them, captivated, helpless, cruel, conquering. He rarely
indicates a great passion between man and woman; his men are passionate
after fame, power, success; they embrace the sea in a love-wrestle; they
wander down unsounded rivers and succumb to "the spell of the
wilderness;" they are gigantic in failure and triumph; they are the
children of the mightiness of the earth; but their love is the love of
the impossible. What room is there, in this unlimited world, for women?
"Oh, she is out of it--completely. They--the women I mean--are out of
it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful
world of their own, lets ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it."

There is Karain, "clothed in the vision of unavoidable success," flying
before a shadow, comforting himself with the certainty of a charm. There
is Kurtz, who returns to barbarism, and Tuan Jim with his sacrifice of
life to honor, and even the dying nigger steersman who, shot through by
a spear, looks once on his master, "and the intimate profundity of that
look which he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in
my memory--like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme
moment." It is with this agonizing clearness, this pitiless mercy, that
Conrad shows us human beings. He loves them for their discontent, for
their revolt against reality, for their failure, their atonement, their
triumphs. And he loves them best because their love is the love of the
impossible; he loves them because they are part of the unknown.

And so, it is _Lord Jim_ in which his genius has attained its zenith
with _Karain_ and _Heart of Darkness_ close after it. Consider the
marvelous art, the suspense, the evasion of definite statement, the
overpowering profundity of it. To begin with, there is the trick, one of
Conrad's inextricable tricks of art, by which suspense is scarcely
concerned with action, but with a gradually revealed knowledge of what
might have happened in the making of a man. Take an instance in
_Nostromo._ There is Doctor Monyngham who comes in at the beginning of
the book comes and goes briefly up to the three hundredth page; and then
suddenly, _à propos_ of nothing, the whole history of his troubles, the
whole explanation of what has seemed mysterious to him, is given in four
pages; whereupon the last sentence, four pages back, is caught up and
continued with the words: "That is why he hobbled in distress in the
Casa Gould on that morning." Now why is there this kind of hesitation?
Why is a disguise kept up so long and thrown off for no apparent reason?
It is merely one of his secrets, which is entirely his own; but another
of them he has learned from Balzac: the method of doubling or trebling
the interest by setting action within action, as a picture is set within
a frame. In _Youth_ the man who is telling the story to more or less
indifferent hearers, times his narrative with a kind of refrain. ...
"Pass the bottle," he says whenever a pause seems to be necessary; and,
as the tale is ending, the final harmony is struck by an unexpected and
satisfying chord: "He drank.... He drank again."

To find a greater novel than _Lord Jim_, we might have to go back to
_Don Quixote._ Like that immortal masterpiece, it is more than a novel;
it is life itself, and it is a criticism of life. Like Don Quixote, Lord
Jim, in his followings of a dream, encounters many rough handlings. He
has the same egoism, isolation, and conviction; the same interrupting
world about him, the same contempt of reality, the same unconsciousness
of the nature of windmills. In Marlow, he has quite a modern Sancho
Panza, disillusioned, but following his master. Certainly this narrator
of Jim's failures and successes represents them under the obscure
guidance of "a strange and melancholy illusion, evolved
half-unconsciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be
visions of remote unattainable truth, seen dimly." He is a soul "drunk
with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in himself." That
illusion is suddenly put to the test; he fails, he goes into the cloud,
emerges out of it, is struck gloriously dead.

In _Lord Jim_ Conrad has revealed, more finally than elsewhere, his
ideal: the ideal of an applauded heroism, the necessity of adding to
one's own conviction the world's acceptance and acclamation. In this
stupendous work, what secret of humanity is left untold? Only told, is
too definite a word. Here is Conrad's creed, his statement of things as
they are:


It is when we try to grapple with another man's need that we perceive
how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with
us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if
loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope
of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the
outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable,
and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.


"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," says some one in the
book, one of the many types and illustrations of men who have fallen
into a dream, all with some original sin to proclaim or conceal or
justify, men of honor, tottering phantoms clinging to a foul existence,
one crowding on another, disappearing, unrealized. All have their place,
literally or symbolically, in the slow working-out of the salvation of
Tuan Jim. Amazing they may be, but Jim "approaching greatness as genuine
as any man ever achieved," with the shame of his "jump" from a sinking
ship and his last fearless jump "into the unknown," his last
"extraordinary success," when, in one proud and unflinching glance, he
beholds "the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had
come veiled to his side": amazing he may be, but a masterpiece, proved,
authentic, justifying Man.

Next after this triumph, Karain is the greatest. It is mysterious, a
thing that haunts one by its extreme fascination; and in this, as in all
Conrad, there is the trial of life: first the trial, then the failure,
finally (but not quite always) the redemption. "As to Karain, nothing
could happen to him unless what happens to all--failure and death; but
his quality was to appear clothed in the illusion of unavoidable
success." And on what a gorgeous and barbaric and changing stage is this
obscure tragedy of the soul enacted! There is in it grave splendor. In
Conrad's imagination three villages on a narrow plain become a great
empire and their ruler a monarch.

To read Conrad is to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent
darkness. _Karain_ is full of mystery, _Heart of Darkness_ of an unholy
magic. "The fascination of the abomination--you know," the teller of the
story says for him, and "droll thing life is." The whole narrative is an
evocation of that "stillness of an implacable brooding over an
incalculable intention," and of the monstrous Kurtz who has been
bewitched by the "heavy mute spell of the wilderness that seems to draw
him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal
instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions; and this
alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted
aspiration." And it all ends with the cry: "The horror! The horror!"
called out in his last despair by a dying man. Gloomy, tremendous, this
has a deeper, because more inexplicable, agony than the tragedy of
_Karain._ Here, the darkness is unbroken; there is no remedy; body and
soul are drawn slowly and inevitably down under the yielding and
pestilent swamp. The failure seems irretrievable. We see nature casting
out one who had gone beyond nature. We see "the meanness, the torment,
the tempestuous anguish of a soul" that, in its last moment of earthly
existence, had peeped over the edge of the gulf, with a stare "that
could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace
the whole universe."

With _Nostromo_ we get a new manner and new scenery. The scene is laid
in Colombia, the Nuevo Granada of the Spaniards, and the silver mine is
its center, and around that fatal treasure-house the whole action moves.
The Spanish streets, glittering with heat, with their cool patios,
peopled by the Indians, the "whites," a cross between Spanish and
native, the Italians, the English, the Indian girls with long dark hair,
the Mozenitas with golden combs, are seen under strong sunlight with a
vivid actuality more accentuated than in any other of Conrad's scenes. A
sinister masquerade is going on in the streets, very unreal and very
real. There is the lingering death of Decoud on a deserted island ("he
died from solitude, the enemy known to few on this earth, and whom only
the simplest of us are fit to withstand"); the horrible agonies of
Hirsch; the vile survival of Doctor Monyngham. It is by profound and
futile seriousness that these persons and events take on an air of
irony, and are so comic as they endure the pains of tragedy.

This strange novel is oddly constructed. It is a narrative in which
episode follows episode with little apparent connection. The first half
is a lengthy explanation of what the second part is to put into action.
It drags and seems endless, and might be defined by a sentence out of
the book, where some one "recognized a wearisome impressiveness in the
pompous manner of his narrative." Suddenly, with Nostromo's first
actualized adventure the story begins, the interest awakens, and it is
only now that Nostromo himself becomes actual. He has been suggested by
hints, indicated in faint outline. We have been told of his power and
influence, we see the admiration which surrounds him, but the man walks
veiled. His vanity, evident at the first, becomes colossal: "The man
remained astonishingly simple in the jealous greatness of his conceit."
Then, as he awakens one morning under the sky, he rises "as natural and
free from evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and unconscious
wild beast." The figure greatens in his allegiance to the shining
spectre of the treasure, which makes him afraid because "he belonged
body and soul to the unlawfulness of his audacity." His death is
accidental, but, in Conrad's merciful last words, he has, after his
death, the "greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of his
successes. In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud
from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon,
overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the
genius of the magnificent Capataz de Caegadores dominated the dark gulf
containing his conquests of treasure and love."




II


Conrad's first fame was made by his sea-novels, and the sea is never
quite out of any of his books. Who, before or since, could have evoked
this picture of heat, stillness and solitude?

In _Typhoon_ we are cast into the midst of a terrible outrage of the
destructive force of nature:


something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of
wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering
concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been
blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other.
This is the disintegrating power of a great wind; it isolates one from
one's kind. ... The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had
an appalling helplessness; she pitched as if taking a header into a
void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. ... The seas in the
dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might
perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the
blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a
mob! hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon. ...
At last she rose slowly, staggering, as if she had to lift a mountain
with her bows.


There have been many writers about the sea, but only Conrad has loved it
with so profound and yet untrustful a love. His storms have sublimity,
made out of intense attention to detail, often trivial or ludicrous, but
heightened into tragedy by the shifting floor and changing background on
which is represented the vast struggle of man with the powers of nature.
And as he loves the earth only in its extravagances, so he loves the sea
most in storm, where love and fear mingle. The tropics, the Malay
Archipelago, and the sea in a continual tempest, the ship suffering
through a typhoon, or burning itself out on the waters: these are his
scenes, these he cherishes in his faithful and unquiet memory. How much
is memory, how much is imagination, no one need know or care. They are
one; he does not distinguish between them.

Once, in one of the pages of _Lord Jim_, Conrad has confessed himself
with perfect frankness. He represents himself receiving a packet of
letters which are to tell him the last news of Lord Jim. He goes to the
window and draws the heavy curtains.


The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his
footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over. No
more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the forests
as solemn as temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered Country
over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour was
striking! No more! No more!--but the opened packet under the lamp
brought back the sounds, the visions, the very savor of the past—a
multitude of fading faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away upon the
shores of distant seas under a passionate and unconsoling sunshine. He
sighed and sat down to read.


That is the confession of one who, of foreign race, is an alien,
solitary among his memories.




III


Conrad's stories have no plots, and they do not need them. They are a
series of studies in temperaments, deduced from slight incidents;
studies in emotion, with hardly a rag to hold together the one or two
scraps of action, out of which they are woven. A spider hanging by one
leg to his web, or sitting motionless outside it: that is the image of
some of these tales, which are made to terrify, bewilder and grip you.
No plot ever made a thing so vital as _Lord Jim_, where there is no
plot; merely episodes, explanations, two or three events only
significant for the inner meaning by which they are darkened or
illuminated. I would call this invention, creation; the evasion of what
is needless in the plots of most novels. But Conrad has said, of course,
the right thing, in a parenthesis: "It had that mysterious, almost
miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impossible of
detection, which is the last word of the highest art."

Conrad conceals his astonishing invention under many disguises. What has
seemed to some to be untidy in construction will be found to be a mere
matter of subtlety, a skilful arresting of the attention, a diverting of
it by a new interest thrust in sideways. _Lord Jim_ is a model of
intelligent disarray.

In the strict sense Conrad is not a novelist: he writes by instinct. And
his art is unlike the art of every other novelist. For instance,
Meredith or Stendhal make great things out of surface material; they
give us life through its accidents, one brilliantly, the other with
scrupulous care. Conrad uses detail as illustrations of his ideas, as
veils of life, not as any essential part of it. The allusion to him is
more real than the fact; and, when he deals with the low or trivial,
with Mr. Verloc's dubious shop in the backstreet, it is always a symbol.

Conrad, writing in English, does not always think in English. For, in
this man, who is pure Polish, there is a brooding mind, an exalted soul,
a fearless intelligence, a merciful judgment. And he has voyaged through
many seas of the soul, in which he finds that fascination, the
fascination of fear, splendor, and uncertainty, which the water that
surrounds the earth had to give him. And he has made for himself a style
which is personal, unique, naked English, and which brings into English
literature an audacious and profound English speech.

In his sarcasm Conrad is elemental. He is a fatalist, and might say with
Sidi Ali Ismayem, in the _Malay Annals_: "It is necessary that what has
been ordained should take place in all creatures." But in his fatalism
there is a furious revolt against all those evils that must be accepted,
those material and mental miseries that will never be removed. His
hatred of rule, measure, progress, civilization is unbounded. He sits
and laughs with an inhuman laughter, outside the crowd, in a chair of
wisdom; and his mockery, persuaded of the incurable horrors of
existence, can achieve monstrosity, both logical and ghastly.

In the "simple tale" of _The Secret Agent_, which is a story of horror,
in our London of to-day, the central motive is the same as that of the
other romances: memory as Nemesis. The man comes to his death because he
can not get a visible fear out of his eyes; and the woman kills him
because she can not get a more terrible, more actual thing, which she
has not seen, but which has been thrust into her brain, out of her eyes.
"That particular fiend" drives him into a cruel blunder and her into a
madness, a murder, a suicide, which combine into one chain, link after
link, inevitably.

The blood-thirstiness of Conrad's "simple story" of modern life, a
horror as profound as that of Poe, and manipulated with the same careful
and attentive skill, is no form of cruelty, but of cold observation.
What is common enough among the half-civilized population of that Malay
Peninsula, which forms so much of the material of the earlier novels,
has to be transported, by a choice of subject and the search for what is
horrible in it, when life comes to be studied in a modern city. The
interest is still in the almost less civilized savagery of the
Anarchists; and it is around the problem of blood-shedding that the
whole story revolves. The same lust of slaughter, brought from Asia to
Europe, seems cruder and less interesting as material. There the
atmosphere veiled what the gaslight of the disreputable shop and its
back-parlor do but make more visible. It is an experiment in realism
which comes dangerously near to being sensational, only just avoids it.

The whole question depends upon whether the material horror surpasses
that horror of the soul which is never absent from it; whether the
dreadful picture of the woman's hand holding the carving-knife, seen
reflected on the ceiling by the husband in the last conscious moment
before death, is more evident to us than the man's sluggish acquiescence
in his crime and the woman's slow intoxication by memory into a crime
more direct and perhaps more excusable. It seems, while you are reading
it, impossible that the intellect should overcome the pang given to the
senses; and yet, on reflection, there is the same mind seen at work,
more ruthlessly, more despairingly than ever, turning the soul inside
out, in the outwardly "respectable" couple who commit murder, because
they "refrained from going to the bottom of facts and motives." Conrad
has made a horrible, forgivable, admirable work of art out of a bright
tin can, a befouled shovel, and a stained carving knife. He has made of
these three domestic objects the symbols of that destroying element,
"red in tooth and claw," which turns the wheel on which the world is
broken.




MAURICE MAETERLINCK


I


Often, mostly at night, a wheel of memory seems to turn in my head like
a kaleidoscope, flashing out the pictures and the visions of my own that
I keep there. The same wheel turned in my head when I was in Dieppe with
Charles Conder, and it turned into these verses:


There's a tune burns, bums in my head,
And I hear it beat to the sound of my feet,
For that was the tune we used to walk to
In the days that are over and dead.

Another tune turns under and over.
And it turns in my brain as I think again
Of the days that are dead, and the ways she walks now,
To the self-same tune, with her lover.


I see, for instance, Mallarmé, with his exquisite manner of welcome, as
he opens the door to me on the fourth floor of the Rue de Rome; I hear
Jean Moréas thunder out some verses of his own to a waitress in a
Bouillon Duval, whose name was Celimène, who pretended to understand
them; Stuart Mérill at the Rue Ballier, Henri de Regnier silent under
his eye-glass in one of the rooms of the _Mercerie de France_; Maurice
Maeterlinck in all the hurry of a departure, between two portmanteaux.
That was, I suppose, one of the most surprising meetings I ever had;
for, as a matter of fact, one night in Fountain Court, it was in 1894--I
was equally surprised when I opened his _Alladine et Palamides_ which he
had sent me with a dedication. After that time I saw him, during several
years, fairly often in Paris and once in Rome, in 1903, when one
performance was given of his _Joyzelle_--the most unsatisfactory
performance I ever saw, and of certainly an unsatisfactory play. Nervous
as he always was--he used, for one thing, to keep a loaded revolver
always beside him in his bedroom--he shirked the occasion and went to
Naples. I have never forgotten the afternoon when he read to me in his
house in Paris whole pages of _Monna Vanna._ After I had left the house,
I said to a certain lady who was with me: "Rhetoric, nothing but
rhetoric! It may be obviously dramatic; but the worst of it is, all the
magic and mystery of his earlier plays had vanished: there is logic
rather than life."

It is very unfortunate for a man to be compared to Shakespeare even by
his enemies, when he is only twenty-seven and has time before him. That
is what has happened to Maurice Maeterlinck. Two years ago the poet of
_Serres Chaudes_ was known to only a small circle of amateurs of the
new; he was known as a young Belgian of curious talent who had published
a small volume of vague poems in monotone. On the appearance of _La
Princesse maleine_, in the early part of 1890, Maeterlinck had an
unexpected "greatness thrust upon him" by a flaming article of Octave
Mirbeau, the author of that striking novel _Sébastian Roch_ in the
_Figaro_ of August 24th. "Maurice Maeterlinck," said this uncompromising
enthusiast,


"_nous a donné l'oeuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus
extraordinaire et la plus naive aussi, comparable--et oserai-je le
dire?--supérieure en beauté à ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans
Shakespeare.... plus tragique que 'Macbeth,' plus extraordinaire de
pensée que 'Hamlet._'"


In short, there was no Shakespearean merit in which _La Princesse
Maleine_ was lacking, and it followed that the author of _La Princesse
Maleine_ was the Shakespeare of our age--the Belgian Shakespeare. The
merits of Maeterlinck were widely discussed in France and Belgium, and
it was not long before the five-act drama was followed by two pieces,
each in one act, called _L'Intruse_ and _Les Aveugles._ In May, 1891,
_L'Intruse_ was given by the Théâtre d'Art at the Vaudeville on the
occasion of the benefit of Paul Verlaine and Paul Gauguin.

He is not entirely the initiator of this impressionistic drama; first in
order of talent, he is second in order of time to another Belgian,
Charles van Lerberghe, to whom _Les Aveugles_ is dedicated. It was Van
Lerberghe (in _Les Flaireurs_, for example) who discovered the effect
which might be obtained on the stage by certain appeals to the sense of
hearing and of sight, newly directed and with new intentions. But what
is crude and even distracting in _Les Flaireurs_ becomes an exquisite
subtlety in _L'Intruse._ In _La Princesse Maleine_, in _L'Intruse_, in
_Les Aveugles_, in _Les Sept Princesses_, Maeterlinck has but one note,
that of fear--the "vague spiritual fear" of imaginative childhood, of
excited nerves, of morbid apprehension. In _La Princesse Maleine_ there
is a certain amount of action--action which is certainly meant to
reinvest the terrors of Macbeth and of Lear. In _L'Intruse_ and _Les
Aveugles_ the scene is stationary, the action but reflected upon the
stage, as if from some other plane. In _Les Sept Princesses_ the action,
such as it is, is "such stuff as dreams are made of," and is literally,
in great part, seen through a window. From first to last it is not the
play, but the atmosphere of the play, that is "the thing." In the
creation of this atmosphere Maeterlinck shows his particular skill; it
is here that he communicates to us the nouveau frisson, here that he
does what no one has done before.

_La Princesse Maleine_, it is said, was written for a theater of
marionettes, and it is, certainly, with the effect of marionettes that
these sudden, exclamatory people come and go. Maleine, Hjalmar,
Uglyane--these are no characters, these are no realizable persons; they
are a mask of shadows, a dance of silhouettes behind the white sheet of
the "Chat Noir," and they have the fantastic charm of these enigmatical
semblances--"luminous, gem-like, ghost-like"--with, also, their somewhat
mechanical eeriness. Maeterlinck has recorded his intellectual debt to
Villiers de l'Isle Adam, but it was not from the author of _Axel_ that
he learned his method. The personages of Maeterlinck--are only too
eloquent, too volubly poetical. In their mystical aim Villiers and
Maeterlinck are at one; in their method there is all the difference in
the world. This is how Sara, in _Axel_, speaks:--


_Songe! Des coeurs condamnés à ce supplice de pas m'aimer! ne sont-ils
pas assez infortunés d'être d'une telle nature?_


But Maleine has nothing more impressive to say than this:--


_Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! comme je suis malade! Et je ne sais pas ce que
j'ai;--et personne ne sait ce que le médecin ne sait pas ce que j'ai;
ma nourrice ne sait pas ce que j'ai; Hjalmar ne sait pas ce que j'ai._


That these repetitions lend themselves to parody is obvious; that they
are sometimes ridiculous is certain; but the principle which underlies
them is at the root of much of the finest Eastern poetry--notably in the
Bible. The charm and the impressiveness of monotony is one of the
secrets of the East; we see it in their literature, in their dances, we
hear it in their music. The desire of the West is after variety, but as
variety is the most tiring of all excesses, we are in the mood for
welcoming an experiment in monotone. And therein lies the originality,
therein also the success of Maeterlinck.

In comparing the author of _La Princesse Maleine_ with Shakespeare,
Mirbeau probably accepted for a moment the traditional Shakespeare of
grotesque horror and violent buffoonery. There is in _Maleine_ something
which might be called Elizabethan--though it is Elizabethan of the
school of Webster and Tourneur rather than of Shakespeare. But in
_L'Intruse_ and _Les Aveugles_ the spiritual terror and physical
apprehension which are common to all Maeterlinck's work have changed,
have become more interior. The art of both pieces consists in the subtle
gradations of terror, the slow, creeping progress of the nightmare of
apprehension. Nothing quite like it has been done before--not even by
Poe, not even by Villiers. A brooding poet, a mystic, a contemplative
spectator of the comedy of death--that is how Maeterlinck presents
himself to us in his work, and the introduction which he has prefixed to
his translation of _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles_ of Ruysbroeck
l'Admirable shows how deeply he has studied the mystical writers of all
ages, and how much akin to theirs is his own temper. Plato and Plotinus,
Saint Bernard and Jacob Boehme, Coleridge and Novalis--he knows them
all, and it is with a sort of reverence that he sets himself to the task
of translating the astonishing Flemish mystic of the thirteenth century,
known till now only by the fragments translated into French by Ernest
Hello from a sixteenth-century Latin version. This translation and this
introduction help to explain the real character of Maeterlinck's
dramatic work--dramatic as to form, by a sort of accident, but
essentially mystical. As a dramatist Maeterlinck has but one note--that
of fear; he has but one method--that of repetition. This is no equipment
for a Shakespeare, and it will probably be some time before Maeterlinck
can recover from the literary damage of so incredible a misnomer.

In the preface to the first volume of the collected edition, which
should be read with attention by all who are interested in knowing
Maeterlinck's opinion of his own work, we are told:--


_Quant aux deux petites pièces... je voudrais qu'il n'y eut aucun
malentendu à leur endroit. Ce n'est pas parce qu'elles sont
postérieures qu'il y faudrait chercher une évolution ou un nouveau
désir. Ce sont, à proprement parler, de petits jeux de scène, de
courts poèmes du genre assez malheureusement appelé "opéra-comique"
destinés à fournir, aux musiciens qui les avaient demandés, un thème
convenable à des développements lyriques. Ils ne prétendent à rien
d'avantage, et l'on se méprendrait sur mes intentions si l'on y voulait
trouver par surcroit de grandes arrière-pensées morales ou
philosophiques._


Maeterlinck may be taken at his word, and, if we take him at his word,
we shall be the less disappointed. The two new plays are slight; they
have neither the subtlety of meaning nor the strangeness of atmosphere
which gives their quality of beauty and force to _Pelléas et
Mélisande_ and to _Les Aveugles. Soeur Béatrice_ is a dramatic version
of the legend which Davidson told effectively in the _Ballad of a Nun;
Ariane et Barbe-Bleue_ is a new reading of the legend of Blue-Beard.
Both are written in verse, although printed as prose. It may be
remembered that Maeterlinck once admitted that _La Princesse Maleine_
was meant to be a kind of _verse libre_, and that he had originally
intended to print it as verse. As it stands now it is certainly not
verse in any real sense, where--as _Soeur Béatrice_ is written
throughout on the basis of the Alexandrine, although without rhyme. The
mute _e_ is, as in most modern French verse, sometimes sounded and
sometimes not sounded; short lines are frequently interspersed among the
lines of twelve syllables. Here are a few lines, taken at random, and
printed as verse;--


_Tu ne me réponds pas? Je n'entends pas ton souffle...
Et tes genoux fléchissent.... Viens, viens,
n'attendons pas
Que l'aurore envieuse tende ses pièges d'or
Par les chemins d'azur qui mènent au bonheur._


That is perfectly regular twelve-syllable verse with the exception of
the second line, where the final _ent of fléchissent_ is slurred.
Twelve-syllable unrhymed verse is almost as disconcerting and unknown in
English as in French, but it has been used, with splendid effect, by
Blake, and it is a metre of infinite possibilities. The metre of _Ariane
et Barbe-Bleue_ (as Maeterlinck has finally decided to call it) is
vaguer and more capricious; some of it is in twelve-syllable verse, some
in irregular verse, and some in what can not be called verse at all.
Take, for instance:--


_Il parait qu'on pleurait dans les rues.--Pourquoi est-elle venue? On
m'a dit qu'elle avait son idée. Il n'aura pas celle-ci._


The form in French is not, to our ears, successfully achieved; it seems
to take a hesitating step upon the road which Paul Fort, in his
_Ballades Françaises_ has tramped along so vigorously, but in so
doubtful a direction. Fort has published several volumes, which have
been much praised by many of the younger critics, in which verse is
printed as verse--verse which is sometimes rhymed and sometimes
unrhymed, sometimes regular and sometimes irregular; and along with this
verse there is a great deal of merely rhythmical prose, which is not
more like verse than any page of _Salammbo_, or _À Rebours_, or
_L'Étui de Nacre._ Now it seems to us that this indiscriminate mingling
of prose and verse is for the good neither of prose nor of verse. It is
a breaking down of limits without any conquest of new country. The mere
printing of verse as prose, which Maeterlinck has favored, seems to us a
travesty unworthy of a writer of beautiful prose or of beautiful verse.

_Le Temple Enseveli_ is by no means equal, as literature or as
philosophy, to _Le Trésor des Humbles_, or even to _La Sagesse et la
Destinée_, but it is, like everything which Maeterlinck writes, full of
brooding honesty of thought and of a grave moral beauty of feeling. It
is the work of a thinker who "waits patiently," like a Christian upon
divine grace, upon the secret voices which come to us out of the deepest
places in our nature. He is absolutely open-minded, his trust and his
skepticism are alike an homage to truth. If what he has to say to us is
not always "_la sagesse même_," it is at least the speech of one who
has sought after wisdom more heedfully than any other writer of our
time.

_Le Double Jardin_ is a collection of essays which form a kind of
postscript to _Le Temple Enseveli._ They are somewhat less abstract,
perhaps a little more casual, than the essays in that book, and are
concerned with subjects as varied as _The Wrath of the Bee, The
Motor-Car_, and _Old-fashioned Flowers._ Maeterlinck has never written
anything in prose more graceful, more homely, and more human than some
of these pages, particularly those on flowers. In _The Leaf of Olive_
and in _Death and the Crown_ he carries speculation beyond the limits of
our knowledge, and "thinks nobly," not of the soul alone, but also of
the intelligence of man in its conflict with the deadly, unintelligent
oppositions of the natural forces of the world. Such pages are
fortifying, and we can not but be grateful for what is plausible in
their encouragement. But the larger part of the book is made up of notes
by the way, which have all the more charm because they are not too
systematically arranged.

All, it is true, have some link of mutual relation, and proceed from a
common center. It is curious to see this harmonizing instinct at work in
the present arrangement of the essay now called _Éloge de l'Épée._
The main part of this essay was published in the _Figaro_ in 1902 under
the title _La Défense de l'Épée._ In the _Figaro_ it began with a
merely topical reference:--


_L'autre jour, dans un article charmant, Alfred Capus prévoyait la fin
de l'honneur, du moins de "l'honneur salle d'armes" et des instruments
qui le protègent._


Then followed two paragraphs questioning, a little vaguely,


_si nous vivions dans une société qui nous protège suffisamment pour
nous enlever, en toutes circonstances, le droit le plus doux et le plus
cher à l'instinct de l'homme--celui de se faire justice à soi-même._


In the essay as we now read it the topical reference has disappeared,
and more than three pages are occupied by a discussion of abstract
right, of essential justice, which seems to set, strangely and
unexpectedly, a solid foundation under a structure not visibly resting
on any foundation sufficient for its support. As the essay now stands it
has its place in a system of which it becomes one more illustration.

Few of the essays in this book will be read with more interest than that
on _The Modern Drama._ It is a development of the ideas already
suggested by Maeterlinck in two prefaces. In asking where, under the
conditions of modern life, and in the expression of modern ideas, we can
find that background of beauty and of mystery which was like a natural
atmosphere to Sophocles and to Shakespeare, he is asking, not indeed
answering, a question which is being asked just now by all serious
thinkers who are concerned with the present and the future of the drama.
This suggestive essay should be contrasted and compared with a not less
suggestive, but more audaciously affirmative essay, _De l'Évolution du
Théâtre_, given as a lecture by André Gide, and reprinted at the
beginning of the volume containing his two latest plays _Saul_ and _Le
Roi Candaule._ Everything that Gide writes is full of honest, subtle and
unusual thought, and this consideration of the modern drama, though it
asks more questions, not answering them, seems also to answer a few of
the questions asked by Maeterlinck.




II


_Le Trésor des Humbles_ is in some respects the most important, as it
is certainly the most purely beautiful, of Maeterlinck's works. Limiting
himself as he did in his plays to the rendering of certain sensations,
and to the rendering of these in the most disembodied way possible, he
did not permit himself to indulge either in the weight of wisdom or the
adornment of beauty, each of which would have seemed to him (perhaps
wrongly) as an intrusion. Those web-like plays, a very spider's work of
filminess, allowed you to divine behind them one who was after all a
philosopher rather than a playwright. The philosopher could but be
divined, he was never seen. In these essays he has dropped the disguise
of his many masks. Speaking without intermediary, he speaks more
directly, with a more absolute abandonment of every convention of human
reserve, except the reserve of an extreme fastidiousness in the choice
of words simple enough and sincere enough to convey exactly his meaning,
more spontaneously, it would seem, than any writer since Emerson. From
Emerson he has certainly learned much; he has found, for instance, the
precise form in which to say what he has to say, in little essays, not,
indeed, so disconnected as Emerson's, but with a like care to say
something very definite in every sentence, so that that sentence might
stand by itself, without its context, as something more than a mere part
of a paragraph. But his philosophical system, though it has its
essential links with the great mystical system, which has developed
itself through many manifestations, from Plotinus and Porphyry downward,
is very much his own, and owes little to anything but his own
meditation; and whether his subject is _La Beauté Intérieure_ or _Les
Femmes, Les Avertis_ or _Le Tragique Quotidien_, it is with the same
wisdom, certainty and beauty that he speaks. The book might well become
the favorite reading of those persons to whom beauty must come with a
certain dogmatism, if it is to be accepted for what it is. It reveals
the inner life, with a simplicity which would seem the most obvious if
it were not the rarest of qualities. It denies nothing, but it asserts
many things, and it asserts nothing which has not been really seen.

In the preface to the first volume of his _Théâtre_, Maeterlinck takes
us very simply into his confidence, and explains to us some of his
intentions and some of his methods. He sees in _La Princesse Maleine_
one quality, and one only: "_une certaine harmonie épouvantée et
sombre._" The other plays, up to _Aglavaine et Sélysette_,
"_présentent une humanité et des sentiments plus précis, en proie à
des forces aussi inconnues, mais un peu mieux dessinées._" These
unknown forces, "_au fond desquelles on trouve l'idée du Dieu
chrétien, mêlée à celle de la fatalité antique_," are realized, for
the most part, under the form of death. A fragile, suffering, ignorant
humanity is represented struggling through a brief existence under the
terror and apprehension of death. It is this conception of life which
gives these plays their atmosphere, indeed their chief value. For, as we
are rightly told, the primary element of poetry is


_l'idée que la poète se fait de l'inconnu dans lequel flottent
les êtres et les choses qu'il évoque, du mystère qui
les domine et les juge et qui préside à leurs destinées._


This idea it no longer seems to him possible to represent honestly by
the idea of death, and he asks: What is there to take its place?


_Pour mon humble part, après les petits drames que j'ai énumérés
plus haut, il m'a semblé loyal et sage d'écarter la mort de ce trône
auquel il n'est pas certain qu'elle ait droit. Déjà, dans le dernier,
que je n'ai pas nommé parmi les autres, dans "Aglavaine et Sélysette,"
j'aurais voulu qu'elle cédât à l'amour, à la sagesse ou au bonheur
une part de sa puissance. Elle ne m'a pas obéi, et j'attends, avec la
plupart des poètes de mon temps, qu'une autre force se révèle._


There is a fine and serious simplicity in these avowals, which show the
intellectual honesty of Maeterlinck's dramatic work, its basis in
philosophical thought. He is not merely a playwright who has found a
method, he is a thinker who has to express his own conception of the
universe, and therefore concerns literature. He finds that conception
changing, and, for the moment, he stands aside, waiting. "The man who
never alters his opinion," said Blake, "is like standing water, and
breeds reptiles of the mind."

_Aglavaine et Sélysette_ is the most beautiful play that Maeterlinck
has yet written; it is as beautiful as _Le Trésor des Humbles._
Hitherto, in his dramatic prose, he has deliberately refrained from that
explicit beauty of phrase which is to be found in almost every sentence
of the essays. Implicit beauty there has been from the first, a beauty
of reverie in which the close lips of his shadowy people seem afraid to
do more than whisper a few vague words, mere hints of whatever dreams
and thoughts had come to them out of the darkness. But of the elaborate
beauty of the essays, in which an extreme simplicity becomes more ornate
than any adornment, there has been, until now, almost nothing. In
_Aglavaine et Sélysette_ we have not merely beauty of conception and
atmosphere, but writing which is beautiful in itself, and in which
meditation achieves its own right to exist, not merely because it
carries out that conception, or forms that atmosphere. And at the same
time the very essence of the drama has been yet further spiritualized.
Maeterlinck has always realized, better than any one else, the
significance, in life and art, of mystery. He has realized how
unsearchable is the darkness out of which we have but just stepped, and
the darkness into which we are about to pass. And he has realized how
the thought and sense of that twofold darkness invade the little space
of light in which, for a moment, we move; the depth to which they shadow
our steps, even in that moment's partial escape. But in some of his
plays he would seem to have apprehended this mystery as a thing merely
or mainly terrifying--the actual physical darkness surrounding blind
men, the actual physical approach of death as a stealthy intruder into
our midst; he has shown us people huddled at a window, out of which they
almost feared to look, or beating at a door, the opening of which they
dreaded. Fear shivers through these plays, creeping across our nerves
like a damp mist coiling up out of a valley. And there is beauty
certainly in this "vague spiritual fear;" but certainly a lower kind of
beauty than that which gives its supreme pathos to _Aglavaine et
Sélysette._ Here is mystery which is also pure beauty, in these
delicate approaches of intellectual pathos, in which suffering and death
and error become transformed into something almost happy, so full is it
of strange light.

And, with this spiritualizing of the very substance of what had always
been so fully a drama of things unseen, there comes, as we have said, a
freer abandonment to the instinctive desire of the artist to write
beautifully. Having realized that one need not be afraid of beauty, he
is not afraid to let soul speak to soul in language worthy of both. And,
curiously, at the same time he becomes more familiar, more human.
Sélysette is quite the most natural character that Maeterlinck has ever
drawn, as Aglavaine is the most noble. Méléandre is, perhaps, more
shadowy than ever, but that is because he is deliberately subordinated
in the composition, which is concerned only with the action upon one
another of the two women. He suffers the action of these forces, does
not himself act; standing between them as man stands between the calling
of the intellectual and the emotional life, between the simplicity of
daily existence, in which he is good, affectionate, happy, and the
perhaps "immoral" heightening of that existence which is somewhat
disastrously possible in the achievement of his dreams. In this play,
which touches so beautifully and so profoundly on so many questions,
this eternal question is restated; of course, not answered. To answer it
would be to find the missing word in the great enigma; and to
Maeterlinck, who can believe in nothing which is not mystery, it is of
the essence of his philosophy not to answer his own question.




EMILY BRONTË


It is one hundred years to a month--I write in August--that Emily
Brontë was born; she was born in August, 1818, and died December 19th,
1848, at the age of thirty. The stoic in woman has been seen once only,
and that in the only woman in whom there is seen the paradox of passion
without sensuousness. She required no passionate experience to endow her
with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
alive in the earth. Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel,
_Wuthering Heights_, is one long outcry. Rossetti in 1854 wrote: "I've
been greatly interested in _Wuthering Heights_, the first novel I've
read for an age, and the best (as regards power and style only) for two
ages, except _Sidonia._ But it is a fiend of a book. The action is laid
in hell--only it seems places and people have English names there." He
is not altogether right in what he says, and yet there is hell in the
heart of Heathcliff, that magnificent and malevolent gypsy, who, to my
mind, can only be compared with Borrow's creations in _Lavengro_ and
_The Romany Rye_--such as the immortal Jasper Petilengro and the immoral
Ursula--and with the lesser creations of Meredith's in _The Adventures
of Harry Richmond_ (in spite of the savage and piteous and fascinating
Kiomi--I have seen a young gypsy girl of this name the other day,
tragical).

When Charlotte says of Emily that what "her mind had gathered of the
real concerning the people around her was too exclusively confined to
their tragic and terrible traits, out of which she created Earnshaw and
Catherine, and that having formed these beings, she did not know what
she had done," there is no doubt that on the whole she is right. For
these spirits are relentless and implacable, fallen and lost spirits,
and it is only in this amazing novel that I find maledictions and curses
and cries of anguish and writhings of agony and raptures of delight and
passionate supplications, such as only abnormal creatures could contrive
to express, and within the bounded space of the moors, made sad by
somber sunrises and glad by radiant sunsets. It is sad colored and
desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the clouds
that hang generally above it a rare and sunny beauty comes into the bare
outlines, quickening them with living splendor.

In the passionately tragic genius of Emily I find a primitive
nature-worship; so strangely primitive that that wonderful scene of mad
recrimination between the dying Catherine and the repentant Heathcliff,
when she cries "I forgive you! Forgive me!" and he answers: "Kiss me
again; and don't let me see your eyes. I forgive what you have done to
me. I love _my_ murderer--but _yours?_ How can I?" is almost comparable
with a passage in _Macbeth_ where Banquo speaks of "the temple-haunting
Martlet" and its loved masonry which preludes Lady Macbeth's entrance
from under the buttresses as the delicate air bears witness to the
incarnate murder that swarms, snake-like, hidden under grass. Something
of Emily's saturnine humor comes into the mouth of the Calvinistic
farm-servant, whose jests are as grim and as deadly and as plague-like
as the snow-storms that make winter unendurable.

Yes, this creator has, in herself and in her imagination, something
solitary and sorrowful--that of a woman who lived, literally, alone--and
whose genius had no scorn. She, who believed in the indestructible God
within herself, was silenced forever; herself and her genius which had
moved as a wind and moved as the sea in tumult and moved as the
thunderclouds in fury upon the tragical and perilous waters of passion
that surround "the topless towers" of _Wuthering Heights._

In one who, like Emily Brontë, was always dying of too much life, one
can imagine the sensitive reticences, the glowing eyes, and the strain
of the vehemences of that inner fire that fed on itself, which gave her
her taciturnity. "It is useless to ask her; you get no answers. The
awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had
no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling
hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted
as they had rendered in health."

"The spirit inexorable to the flesh:" there is the whole secret of what
in her life was her genius. Alone with herself--with her soul and her
body--she allows herself no respite: for she was always of an unresting
nature. So in the words of Pater--who told me of his enormous admiration
for her prose--"we are all _condamnés à mort avec des sursis
indéfinis_; we have our interval and then our place knows us no more."
How she spent these "intervals" must be forever unknown. Not in high
passions, I imagine, nor in wisdom, nor in care for material things; but
in moods of passion, in intellectual excitement, in an inexhaustible
curiosity, in an ironical contemplation "of the counted pulses of a
variegated, dramatic life." But never, I am certain, was she ever
capable--as she watches the weaving and unweaving of herself--of the
base corruption of what his existence was to Beardsley. "That he should
be so honest with his fear," I have written of him, "that he should sit
down before its face and study it feature by feature: that he should
never turn aside his eyes for more than one instant, make no attempt to
escape, but sit at home with it, travel with it, see it in his mirror,
taste it in the sacrament: that is the marvellous thing, and the sign of
his fundamental sincerity in life and art."

Emily Brontë's passionate and daring genius attains this utmost limit
of tragedy, and with this a sense--an extreme sense--of the mystery of
terror which lurks in all the highest poetry as certainly in her lyrical
prose; a quality which distinguishes such prose and verse from all that
is but a little lower than the highest. Her genius is somber in the
sense that Webster's is, but much less dramatic. Neither his tragedies
nor her novel are well-constructed; and in her case something is
certainly lacking; for her narrative is dominated by sheer chance, and
guided by mere accident. And I think that she, with her sleepless
imagination, might have said as the child Giovanni in Webster's Tragedy
says: "I have not slept these six nights. When do the dead walk?" and is
answered: "When God shall please." When in disguise she sings of the
useless rebellions of the earth, rarely has a more poignant cry been
wrenched out of "a soul on the rack"--that is to say since Santa Teresa
sang:--


A soul in God hidden from sin,
What more desires for thee remain,
Save but to love, and love again
And, all on flame, with love within,
Love on, and turn to love again?


than this stanza:


O! dreadful is the shock--intense the agony--
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think
again,
The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain.


At times there is a tragic sublimity in her imagination, which gathers
together, as it were, the winds from the world's four quarters, that
howled in winter nights across the moor around the house she lived in.
Indeed the very storm of her genius hovers in the air between things
sublime and things hideous. "There never was such a thunderstorm of a
play," said Swinburne on Cyril Tourneur's _Revenger's Tragedy._ I am
inclined to add: "There never was such a thunderstorm of a novel as
_Wuthering Heights._" And it is blood-stained with the blood of the
roses of sunsets; the heavy atmosphere is sultry as the hush and heat
and awe of midnoon; sad visions appear with tragic countenances,
fugitives try in vain to escape from the insane brooding of their
consciences. And there are serviceable shadows; implacable
self-devotions and implacable cruelties; vengeances unassuaged; and a
kind of unscrupulous ferocity is seen not only in Heathcliff but in one
of his victims. And there are startling scenes and sentences that, once
impressed on the memory, are unforgettable: as scarlet flowers of evil
and as poisonous weeds they take root in one.




ON ENGLISH AND FRENCH FICTION


I


Certainly the modern English novel begins with that elaborate
masterpiece, _Tom Jones_, of Henry Fielding. And it seems to me that his
genius is contained, on the whole, in that one book; in which he creates
living people; the very soil is living. His hero is the typical sullen,
selfish, base-born, stupid, sensual, easily seduced and adventurous
youth, with whom his creator is mightily amused. The very Prefaces are
full of humorous wisdom; copied, I suppose, from Montaigne. The
typically wicked woman is painted almost as Hogarth might have painted
her. It is quite possible that she may have a few touches, here and
there, of Lady Wishfort, who, wrote Meredith, "is unmatched for the
vigour and pointedness of the tongue. It spins along with a final ring,
like the voice of Nature in a fury, and is, indeed, racy eloquence of
the elevated fishwife."

Fielding has a strong sense of the vigilant comic, which is the genius
of thoughtful laughter, but never serving as a public advocate. Contempt
can not be entertained by comic intelligence. Blifil is essentially the
grossly and basely animal creature, who is also a villain, and who has
his part in the plot; indeed one scandalous scene in which he is
discovered is laughable in the purely comic sense.

_Jonathan Wild_ presents a case of peculiar distinction, when that man
of eminent greatness remarks on the unfairness of a trial in which the
condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of the opposite party;
yet it is immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his
own "party" should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into a
villain's ratiocination, as in Lady Booby's exclamation when Joseph
defends himself: "Your _virtue!_ I shall never survive it!" Fielding can
be equally satiric and comic: can raise laughter but never move pity.
And it is as he evokes great spirits that Meredith cries: "O for a
breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding,
Molière! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when
you do call."

After Fielding comes Thackeray, and his _Vanity Fair_ is the second
masterpiece in modern fiction. It is the work of a man of the world,
keenly observant of all the follies and virtues and vices and crimes and
splendors, of crimes and of failures, of his neither moral nor immoral
Fair. He takes his title from John Bunyan; but in originality he is
almost equal with Fielding. "As the Manager of the Performance sits
before the curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of
profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place."
Such is the moral, if you like; at any rate the whole Show "is
accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated with the
author's own candles." At the end the Finis: "Ah! _Vanitas Vanitatum!_
Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or,
having it, is satisfied?--Come children, let us shut up the box and the
puppets, for our play is played out."

There is no question that Becky Sharp is not derived from Balzac's
Lisbeth in _La Cousine Bette_, but at what a distance, when once you
think of the greatest of all novelists, who has the fortune to be
French, and of Thackeray, who has the fortune (at times the misfortune)
of being English. When we thing of Becky she startles us by her cynical
entrance: she inherits from her parents bad qualities. Her first epigram
sums her up. "Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural. I'm no angel."
She fascinates Lord Pitt, Rawdon Crawley and Lord Steyne in a way
Lisbeth never does. Lisbeth's fascination is that of the evil-doer; she
is envious, spiteful, malicious, a lying hypocrite; always deliberately
bent on having her own way, always for evil purposes: so that she, in
her sinister effrontery, causes the ruin of many of the lives she
thrives on, feigns to help, deludes; only, she never deludes as Valérie
Marnette does. We have only to say: "Valérie!" and the woman is before
us. As for Valérie: "_Elle était belle comme sont belles les femmes
assez belles, pour être belles en dormant_;" a sentence certainly
lyrical. Lisbeth's character has "_Une dose du mordant parisien._"
Unmarried, she is monstrous, her snares are inevitable, her
dissimulation impenetrable. But she is never given a scene so
consummately achieved in its sordid and voluptuous tragedy as the scene
in _Vanity Fair_ when Rawdon enters his house at midnight, and finds
Becky dressed in a brilliant toilet, her arms and her fingers sparkling
with bracelets and rings, and the brilliants in her breast which Steyne
had given her. "He had her hand in his, and was bowing to kiss it, when
Becky started up with a faint scream as she caught sight of Rawdon's
white face." And, as the writer adds, with an entire sense of the tragic
and comic drama that is over: "All her lies and her schemes, all her
selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and all her genius had come to
this bankruptcy."

I have never had any actual admiration for the novels of George Eliot;
she had her passing fame, her popularity, her success; people compared
her prose--wrongly--with the poetry of Mrs. Browning; and, as for her
attempts at verse, the less said of them the better. In favor of my
opinion I quote this scathing sentence of Swinburne: "Having no taste
for the dissection of dolls, I shall leave Daniel Deronda in his natural
place above the ragshop door; and having no ear for the melodies of a
Jew's harp, I shall leave the Spanish Gypsy to perform on that
instrument to such audience as she may collect." Certainly Charlotte
Brontë excelled George Eliot in almost every quality; the latter
having, perhaps, more knowledge and culture, but not for a moment
comparable with Charlotte's purity of passion, depth and fervor of
feeling, inspiration, imagination and a most masterly style.

As for her _Romola_, I find it almost an elaborate failure in the
endeavor to create the atmosphere of the period of Savonarola--that
amazing age when the greatest spirits of the world were alive and
producing works of unsurpassable genius--and in her too anatomical
demonstration of the varying vices and virtues of Tito: for she has none
of that strange subtlety that a writer of novels must possess to
delineate how this human soul may pass in the course of decomposition
into some irremediable ruin. She is too much of the moralist to be able
to present this character as a necessary and natural figure, such as far
greater writers have had no difficulty in doing. She presents
him--rather after the fashion of George Sand, as a fearful and warning
example. Think, for a moment,--the comparison is all but impossible,--of
this attempt at characterization with Browning's Guido Franceschini; for
in his two monologues every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient
scalpel, every joint and vein of the subtle and intricate spirit laid
bare and divided. Compare this also with Cenci: the comparison has been
made by Swinburne, with an equal praise of two masterpieces, _The Cenci_
of Shelley and _The Ring and the Book_ of Browning. Both Cenci and
Franceschini are cunningly drawn and colored so as to be absolute models
of the highest form of realism: as cunningly colored and drawn as the
immortal creation of Madame Bovary.

Take, for instance, the character of Rochester in _Jane Eyre._ It is
incomparable of its kind; an absolutely conceived living being, who has
enough nerves and enough passion to more or less extinguish the various
male characters in George Eliot's novels. That Maggie Tulliver, in _The
Mill on the Floss_, the finest of her novels, can be moved to any sense
but that of bitter disgust and sickening disdain by a thing--I will not
write, a man--of Stephen Guest's character, is a lamentable and an ugly
case of shameful failure; for as Swinburne says, "The last word of
realism has surely been spoken, the last abyss of cynicism has surely
been sounded and laid bare." And I am glad to note here that he
dismisses her with this reference to three great French writers; using,
of course, his invariable ironical paradoxes. "For a higher view and a
more cheery aspect of the sex, we must turn back to those gentler
teachers, those more flattering painters of our own--Laclos, Stendhal
and Merrimée; we must take up _La Double Méprise_--or _Le Rouge et le
Noir_--or _Les Liaisons Dangereuses._"

The genius of George Meredith is unquestionable; he was as great a
creator, in fact a greater creator, than any other English novelist; yet
his fascination is not, I think, quite explicable. Not since the
Elizabethans have we had so flame-like a life possessing the wanton body
of a style. Our literature has not a more vividly entertaining book than
_The Shaving of Shagpat_--I have the rare first edition of 1856 in my
possession--nor has the soul of a style been lost more spectacularly.
And with this fantastic, learned, poetic, passionate, intelligent style,
a style which might have lent itself so well to the making of
Elizabethan drama, Meredith has set himself the task of writing novels
of contemporary life; nor can it be wondered that every novel of his
breaks every rule which could possibly be laid down for the writing of a
novel. Why has his prose so irresistible a fascination for so many of
us, as it certainly has? I find Meredith breaking every canon of what
are to me the laws of the novel; and yet I read him in preference to any
other novelist.

Meredith first conceives that the novelist's prime study is human nature
and his first duty to be true to it. Moreover, being an artist, he is
not content with simple observations; there must be creation, the
imaginative fusion of the mass of observed fact. The philosophy of his
seeking is only another name for intuition, analysis, imaginative
thought. He has comprehension of a character from height to depth
through that "eye of steady flame," which he attributes to Shakespeare,
and which may be defined in every great artist. He sees it, he beholds a
complete nature, at once and in entirety. His task is to make others see
what he sees. But this can not be done at a stroke. It must be done
little by little, touch upon touch, light upon shade, shade upon light.
The completeness, as seen by the seer or creator--the term is the
same--must be microscopically investigated, divided into its component
parts, produced piece by piece, and connected visibly. It is this that
is meant when we talk of analysis; and the antithesis between analysis
and creation is hardly so sheer as it seems. Partly through a selection
of appropriate action, partly through the revealing casual speech, the
imagined character takes palpable form: finally it does, or it should,
live and breathe before the reader with some likeness of the hue and
breadth of actual life. But there is a step farther, and it is this step
that Meredith is strenuous to take. You have the flesh, animate it with
spirit, with soul. If this is an unworthy aim, condemn Shakespeare. This
is Meredith's, and it is this and no other consummation that he prays
for in demanding philosophy in fiction.

The main peculiarity of Meredith's style is this: he thinks, to begin
with, before writing--a singular thing, one must observe, for the
present day. Then, having certain definite thoughts to express, and
thoughts frequently of a difficult remoteness, he is careful to employ
words of a rich and fruitful significance, made richer and more fruitful
by a studied and uncommon arrangement. His sentences are architectural;
and it is natural in reading him to cry out at the strangeness. Strange,
certainly; often obscure, often tantalizing; more often magnificent and
somber and strong and passionate, his wit is perhaps too fantastical,
too remote, too allusive; partly because it is subtly ironical; perhaps
most of all because it is shrewdly stinging to our prejudices. Still,
everywhere, the poet, struggling against the bondage of prose, flings
himself on every opportunity of evading his bondage. It is thus by the
very quality that is his distraction--perhaps because he always writes
English as if it were a learned language--that Meredith holds us, by the
intensity of his vision of a world which is not our world, by the energy
of genius which has done so much to achieve the impossible.




II


Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose
that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare the whole
process and existence of character in a play of Shakespeare and in a
novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his mind is
nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of a novelist,
and his method nearer to the method of the poet. Take King Lear and take
Père Goriot. Goriot is a Lear at heart, and he suffers the same
tortures and humiliations. But precisely where Lear grows up before the
mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy mountain of trouble, Goriot
grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust
about all his fibers. Lear may exchange his crown for the fool's bauble,
knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every
bank-note that his daughters rob him of. In that definiteness, that new
power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and material way, lies one of
the great opportunities of prose.

The genius of prose is essentially different from the "genius of
poetry;" and that is the reason why writers like De Quincy and Ruskin
trespassed, as thieves do, on forbidden ground. It is much better to
pick forbidden fruit and to eat thereof, and be as stealthy as the
traveler in Blake's deliciously wicked poem who steals from the unloved
lover the woman he loves:


Soon after she has gone from me
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.


The moral of it is "Never seek to sell thy love;" but such writers as
those I have referred to tread fallen fruit ruthlessly under foot and
therefore ought to be thrust out of the garden they have robbed. Both
tried to write prose as if they were writing verse, and both failed;
Ruskin ruined by his fatal facility and De Quincy by his cultivating
eloquence in rhetoric. Certain prose writers have written lyrical prose,
because their genius at times drove them to do so, and with an absolute
success. One finds such passages in Shakespeare and Blake and Pater and
Lamb; in certain pages of Balzac and of Flaubert and of Meredith and of
Conrad. Yet, in what I must call lyrical prose, there is a certain
rhythm, but not that of rhymed verse; that is to say, if the inspiration
were the same, the mediums are different: the rhythm of prose that has
no meter and the rhythm of verse that has meter.

Take, for instance, Peacock, who was neither a great prose writer nor a
great poet, but whose novels are unique in English, and are among the
most scholarly, original and entertaining prose writings of the century.


A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wide for selfish bigots, let his page
Which charms the chosen spirits of the time
Fold itself up for the serener clime
Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation.


So Shelley praises him, who was certainly aware of Peacock's clever
scraps of rhyming that are like no other verse; the masterpiece being
the comically heroic _War-Song of Dinar Valor_, which the author defines
as "the quintessence of all war songs that were ever written, and the
sum and substances of all the appetences, tendencies and consequences of
military." This learned wit, his satire upon the vulgarity of progress
(in which he is one with Baudelaire and one with Meredith) are more
continuously present in his prose than in his verse; yet his characters
are caricatures, they speak a language that is not ours; they are given
sensational adventures, often comical in the extreme; and in these pages
plenty of nonsense and of laughter and of satire and of serious prose
with an undercurrent of bitter cynicism. He treats all his creatures
cruelly, and I can not help seeing the reason why Richard Garnett
admired his prose so much: that there is something curiously alike and
unlike in their humor.

Garnett himself told me, as I always thought, that _The Twilight of the
Gods_ was far and away the best book he had written. In France Marcel
Schwob and André Gide have done certain things comparable in their way
with these learned inventions, these ironic "criticisms of life," these
irreverent classical burlesques in which religion, morality, learning,
and all civilization's conventions, are turned topsy-turvy, and
presented in the ridiculousness of their unaccustomed attitude. But no
modern man in England has done anything remotely comparable with them,
and neither Schwob nor André Gide has heaped mockery so high as in
_Abdullah the Adite_, and remained as sure a master of all the
reticences of art and manners. This learned mockery has an undefinable
quality, macabre, diabolical, a witchcraft of its own, which I can find
in no other writer.

To return to the question of rhythm, the rhythm of prose, for one thing,
is physiological, the rhythm of poetry is musical. There is in every
play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is the physiological
rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare speaks to the blood
like wine or music: it is with exultation, with intoxication, that we
see or read _Antony and Cleopatra_ or even _Richard II_; it gives us
exactly the same intoxication and the same exultation when we hear
Vladimir de Pachmann play the piano, when we hear Wagner's _Tristan._
But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a diagram in Euclid;
it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental
exaltation of a problem solved.




III


Is not a criticism of primary ideas, the only kind of criticism, when
one considers it, that is really worth writing? A critic may tell us
that So-an-So has written a charming book, that it is the best of his
charming books, that it is better or worse than another book by another
writer with whom we see no necessity to compare him, that it is, in
short, an "addition to literature;" well and good, here is some one's
opinion, perhaps right, perhaps wrong; not very important if right, not
easy to disprove if wrong. But let him tell us, in noting the precise
quality of _À Rebours_, and its precise divergence from the tradition
of naturalism: "_Il ne s'agissait plus tant de faire entrer dans l'art,
par la représentation, l'extériorité brute, que de tirer de cette
extériorité même des motifs de rêve et de la révélation
intérieure_;" let him tell us in discussing the question of literary
sincerity that a certain writer "_est sincère, non parce qu'il avoue
toute sa pensée, mais parce qu'il pense tout son aveu_:" has he not
added to the very substance of our thought, or touched that substance
with new light?

The curious thing in regard to Benjamin Constant is that there was not a
single interest, out of the many that occupied his life, which he did
not destroy by some inconsequence of action, for no reason in the world,
apparently, except some irrational necessity of doing exactly the
opposite of what he ought to have done, of what he wanted to do. So he
creates _Adolphe_ so much of himself in it, and makes him say, in a
memorable sentence, "_Je me reposais, pour ainsi dire, dans
l'indifference des autres, de la fatigue de son amour._" He was never
tired of listening to himself, and the acute interest of his Journal
consists in the absolute sincerity of its confessions, and at the same
time the scrutinizing self-consciousness of every word that is written
down. "_Il y a en moi deux personnes, dont l'en observe l'autre._" So
cold-hearted is he that when perhaps his best friend, Mademoiselle
Talma, is dying, he spends day and night by her bedside, overwhelmed
with grief; and he writes in his Journal: "_Y étudie la mort._" So out
of this distressing kind of reality which afflicts the artist, he
creates his art, _Adolphe_, a masterpiece of psychological narrative,
from which the modern novel of analysis may have been said to have
arisen, which is simply a human document in which he has told us the
story of his liaison with the writer of _Corinne._ She made him suffer
for he writes: "_Tous les volcans sont moins flamboyants qu'elle._" He
suffers, as his hero does, because he can neither be intensely absorbed,
nor, for one moment, indifferent; that very spirit of analysis which
would seem to throw some doubt on the sincerity of his passion, does but
intensify the acuteness with which he feels it. It is the turning of the
sword in a wound. He sums up and typifies the artistic temperament at
its acutest point of weakness; the temperament which can neither resist,
nor dominate, nor even wholly succumb to, emotion; which is forever
seeking its own hurt, with the persistence almost of mania; which, if it
ruins other lives in the pursuit, as is supposed, of artistic purposes,
gains at all events no personal satisfaction out of the bargain; except,
indeed, when one has written _Adolphe_, the satisfaction of having lived
unhappily for more than sixty years, and left behind one a hundred pages
that are still read with admiration, sixty years afterward.

Flaubert, possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way
of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to
qualify, one verb to animate it, gave himself to superhuman labors for
the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that adjective.
And the desperate certitude in his spirit always was: "Among all the
expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is
but _one_--one form, one mode--to express all I want to say." He
desired, above all things, impersonality; and yet, in spite of the fact
that he is the most impersonal of novelists, the artist is always felt;
for as Pater said: "his subjectivity must and will color the incidents,
as his very bodily eye selects the aspects of things." Yet again, in
spite of the fact that Flaubert did keep _Madame Bovary_ at a great
distance from himself, we find in these pages the analyst and the lyric
poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed
as any story that has ever been written, and observed in surroundings of
the most extraordinary kind. He creates Emma cruelly, morbidly,
marvelously; he creates in her, as Baudelaire says, the adulterous woman
with a depraved imagination. "_Elle se donne_" he writes,
"_magnifiquement, généreusement, d'une manière toute masculine, à
des drôles qui ne sont pas ses égaux, exactement comme les poètes se
livrent a des drôlesses._"

As Flaubert invented the rhythm of every sentence I choose this one from
the novel I have referred to, this magnificently tragic sentence: "_Et
Emma se mit à rire, d'un rire atroce, frénétique, désespéré,
croient voir la face hideuse du misérable qui se dressait dans les
ténèbres éternelles comme un épouvantent._" Aeschylus might have put
such words as these on the lying and crying lips of Clytemnestra in her
atrocious speech after she has slain Agamemnon. With this compare a
sentence I translate from Petrus Bórel. "I have often heard that
certain insects were made for the amusement of children: perhaps man
also was created for the same pleasures of superior beings, who delight
in torturing him, and disport themselves in his groans." This is a
sentence which might almost have been written by Hardy, so clearly does
it state, in an image like one of his own, the very center of his
philosophy. Take, for example, these sentences in _The Return of the
Native_: "Yet, upon the whole, neither the man nor the woman lost
dignity by sudden death. Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting
off their erratic histories with a catastrophic dash."

Swinburne, who invariably overpraises Victor Hugo, overpraises his
atrocious novel _L'Homme qui rit._ But I forgive him everything when he
writes such Baudelairean sentences as these:


Bakilphedro, who plays the part of devil, is a bastard begotten by Iago
upon his sister, Madame de Merteuil; having something of both, but
diminished and degraded; wanting, for instance, the deep daemonic calm
of their lifelong patience. He has too much heat of discontent, too much
fever and fire, to know their perfect peace of spirit, the equable
element of their souls, the quiet of mind in which they live and work
out their work at leisure. He does not sin at rest, there is somewhat of
fume and fret in his wickedness. There is the peace of the devil, which
passeth all understanding.


Certainly, for an absolutely diabolical dissection of three equally
infamous characters, this is unsurpassable. Iago is not entirely
malignant, nor is he abjectly vile, nor is he utterly dishonest: he is
supreme in evil, and almost as far above vice as he is beyond virtue. He
has not even a fleshly desire for Desdemona: yet he is the impassioned
villain who "spins the plot." Can one conceive, as Swinburne
conjectures, "something of Iago's attitude in hell--of his unalterable
and indomitable posture for all eternity?" As for Madame Merteuil she
is, in _Les Liaisons dangereuses_, not only a counterfoil for Valmont,
but a spirit of almost inconceivable malignity; yet she is not as
abnormal as Iago. She has a sublime lack of virtue, with an immense
sense of her seductiveness. There is no grandeur in her evil, as there
is in Valmont's. In the longest letter she writes, that Baudelaire
praises, she confesses herself with so curious a shamelessness as to
intrigue one. In composing this for her Laclos shows the most sinister
side of his genius. He shows her sterility, her depraved imagination,
her deceit and her dissimulations: rarely the humiliations she has
endured. As she is resolved on the ruin of Valmont she writes in this
fashion: "_Séduite par votre réputation, il me semblait que vous
manquiez à ma gloire; je brûlais de vous combattre corps à corps._"
She is not even a criminal, not even the symbol of one of the poisonous
women of the Renaissance, who smiled complacently after an
assassination. Her nature is perverted by the lack of the intoxication
of crime. The imagination which stands to her in the place of virtue has
brought its revenge, and for her, too, there is only the release of
death.

"_Tout les livres sont immoraux_," wrote Baudelaire in his notes on this
book: certainly a sweeping paradox, for there is much less immorality in
Laclos' novel than in Rabelais or in Swift or in Aristophanes. Still as
he wrote this book in the time of the French Revolution, there was more
than enough of hell-creating material in the age of Robespierre and
Marat and Danton and Mirabeau, who wrote the infamous _Erotika Biblion._
It is amusing to note that in Perlet-Malassis's reprint in 1866 the
writer of a preface dated 1832 says: "_Le style de Mirabeau, par cette
vive puissance de la pensée que resplendit de son propre éclat sans
rien emprunter aux ornements de l'art, s'élève dans cet ouvrage
jusqu'aux beautés les plus sublimes._" Exactly a year before Mirabeau's
book appeared Laclos printed his novel; and, for what I must call the
sublimity of casuistry, here is one consummate sentence of Valmont's.
"_Je ne sortais de ses bras que pour tomber à ses genoux, pour lui
jurer un amour éternel, et, il faut tout avouer, je pensais ce que je
disais._"




IV


George Borrow has always had a curious fascination for me: for this man,
half Cornish and half French, with his peculiar kind of genius--such as
one generally finds in mixed blood--is both creative and inventive,
normal and abnormal, perverse and unpassionate, obscure and grimly
humorous. I was very young when I read his masterpiece _Lavengro_ (1851)
in its original three volumes, from which I got my first taste for a
sort of gypsy element in literature. The reading of that book did many
things for me. It absorbed me from the first page with a curiously
personal appeal, as of some one akin to me: the appeal, I suppose, to
what was wild in my blood.

What Borrow really creates is a by no means undiscovered world: I mean
the world of the Gypsies; yet he is the first to discover their peculiar
characteristics, their savagery and uncivilization; he gives them life,
in their tents, on the road, along the hedges; he makes them speak, in
their pure and corrupted dialects, much as they always speak, but nearly
always with something of Borrow in them. They are imaginative: he gives
them part of his imagination. They are not subtle, nor is he; they are
not complex, he at times is complex; he paints their morality and
immorality almost as Hogarth might have done.

In regard to the sense of fear, you find it in Shakespeare, in Balzac,
everywhere; but never I think more intensely than in the chapters in
_Lavengro_ describing Borrow's paroxysm of fear in the dingle. There is
nothing of the kind, in any language, equal to those pages of Borrow;
they go deep down into some "obscure night of the soul;" they are
abnormal. It is "the screaming horror" that takes possession of him.


The evil one was upon me; the inscrutable horror which I had felt from
boyhood had once more taken possession of me. I uttered wild cries. I
sat down with my back against a thorn-bush; the thorns entered my flesh,
and when I felt them, I pressed harder against the bush: I thought the
pain of the flesh might in some degree counteract the mental agony;
presently I felt them no longer--the power of the mental horror was so
great that it was impossible, with that upon me, to feel my pain from
the thorns.


Borrow writes as if civilization did not exist, and he obtains, in his
indirect way, an extraordinary directness. Really the most artificial of
writers, he is always true to that "peculiar mind and system of nerves"
of which he was so well aware, and which drove him into all sorts of
cunning ways of telling the truth, and making it at once bewildering and
convincing.

I have often wondered why Robert Louis Stevenson was almost invariably
looked on as a man of genius. He had touches of it, certainly; and
therein lies part of the secret of his captivating the heart; why, quite
by himself, he ranks with writers like Thoreau and with Dumas (one for a
certain seductiveness of manner, the other for his extravagant passion
for miraculous adventures); and why he appeals to us, not only from his
curious charm as a literary vagrant--to some of us an irresistible
charm--and from the exhilaration of the blood which he causes in us, and
from the actual fever of his prose, and for his inhuman sense of life's
whimsical distresses, of its cruelties and maladies and confusions, but
from a certain gypsy and wayward grace, so like a woman's, that can
thrill to the blood often more instantly than in the presence of the
august perfection of classic beauty.

His style, as he admits, is never wholly original; a "sedulous ape," as
he once humorously named himself, that aped the styles of Baudelaire and
Hawthorne and Lamb and Hazlitt; and that never, except rarely and by
certain happy accidents in his rejection of words and using some of them
as if no one had ever used them before, attains the inevitable
perfection of Baudelaire's prose style, nor the quintessential and
exultant and tragic style of Lamb, which has, beyond any writer
preeminent for charm, salt and sting; nor Montaigne's malign trickery of
style, his roving imagination, his preoccupation with himself, who said
so splendidly: "I have no other end in writing but to discover myself,
who also shall peradventure be another thing to-morrow."

As in a tragic drama so in a tragic novel we must not forbid an artist
in fiction to set before us strange instances of inconsistency and
eccentricity in conduct as well as in action; but we require of him that
he should make us feel such aberrations to be as clearly inevitable as
they are certainly exceptional. Balzac has done that and Flaubert and
Goncourt and Maupassant and Conrad. All these, at their greatest, are
inevitable; only no novelist is ever consistently great. Reade's
Griffith Gaunt is not, as he ought to have been, inevitable; for what is
tragic and pathetic and eccentric in his character is flawed by the
writer's failure in showing what ought to have been the intolerable and
irresistible force of the temptation; his art is an act of envy,
therefore a base act, and has none of the grandeur of Othello's
jealousy, which makes one love him the more for that, more even because
he is unconscious of Iago's poisoned tongue. Leontes excites our
repulsion: he is a coward, selfish and deluded and ignoble.

At his finest I find in Charles Reade certain adventures almost worthy
of Dumas; only he never had that overflowing negro-like genius of the
French novelist; who can be tedious at times, and can write very badly
when he likes, for he never had much of a style. Yet, with all his
suspense and the suddenness of his vivid action and of the living
conversation of furiously living creatures, he does really carry us
along in an amazing way; equally in the tragic figure Edmund Dantès as
in those of d'Artagnan and Aramis and Porthos. Among Reade's many faults
is the inability to blot when he ought to have blotted, to abstain, as
he too often did not, from ostentation and self-praise, by the fact that
he can not always get far enough away from what to him was the
pernicious atmosphere of the stage.

_The Picture of Dorian Gray_ (1891) is partly made out of Wilde himself,
partly out of two other men, both of whom are alive. Not being creative
he was cruel enough to mix his somewhat poisonous color after the
fashion of an impressionistic painter, and so to give a treble
reflection of three different temperaments instead of giving one. In any
case, as Pater wrote: "Dorian himself, though a quite unsuccessful
experiment in Epicureanism, in life as a fine art, is (till his inward
spoiling takes visible effect suddenly, and in a moment, at the end of
his story) a beautiful creature."

His peculiar kind of beauty might be imaged by a strangely colored
Eastern vessel, and hidden within it, a few delicate young serpents. For
he has something of the coiled up life of the serpents, in his poisonous
sins; sins he communicates to others, ruining their youthful lives with
no deliberate malice, but simply because he can not help it. He has no
sense of shame, even in his most ignoble nights. Sin is a thing that
writes itself across a man's face; but secret vices can not be
concealed; one sees them in the mere ironical curl of sinister lips, or
in the enigmatical lifting of an eyelid. He has made the devil's
bargain, but not in the sense in which Faustus sells his soul to Satan;
yet he is always entangled in the painted sins, the more and more
hideous aspects, of his intolerably accusing portrait, taken, certainly,
in Wilde's usual manner, from _La Peau de Chagrin_ of Balzac; only, and
therein lies the immense difference, the man's life never shrinks, but
the very lines and colors of his painted image shrivel, until the thing
itself--the thing he has come to hate as one hates hell--has its
revenge.

A passion for caprice, a whimsical Irish temperament, a love of art for
art's sake--it is in such qualities as these that I find the origin of
the beautiful force of estheticism, the exquisite echoes of the poems,
the subtle decadence of _Dorian Gray_, and the paradoxical truths, the
perverted common sense of the _Intentions._ Certainly, as Pater
realized, Wilde, with his hatred of the bourgeois seriousness of dull
people, has always taken refuge from commonplace in irony. Life, to him,
even when he is most frivolous, ought not to be realism, but a following
after art: a provoking enough phrase for those who are lost to the sense
of suggestiveness. He is conscious of the charm of grateful echoes, and
is always original in his quotations.

In Wilde we see a great spectacular intellect, to which, at last, pity
and terror have come in their own person, and no longer as puppets in a
play. In its sight, human life has always been something created on the
stage; a comedy in which it is the wise man's part to sit aside and
laugh, but in which he may also disdainfully take part, as in a
carnival, under any mask. The unbiased, scornful intellect, to which
humanity has never been a burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside
and laugh, and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is
nothing left desirable in illusion. Having seen, as the artist sees,
further than morality, but with so partial an eyesight as to have
overlooked it on the way, it has come at length to discover morality, in
the only way left possible, for itself. And, like most of those who have
"thought themselves weary," have made the adventure of putting thought
into action, it has had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own
inevitable expense. And now, having so newly become acquainted with what
is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the arrangements of mortal
affairs, it has gone, not unnaturally, to an extreme, and taken on the
one hand, humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more than their just
valuation in matters of art. It is that old instinct of the intellect;
the necessity to carry things to their farthest point of development, to
be more logical than either art or life, two very wayward and illogical
things, in which conclusions do not always follow from premises.

Swinburne's _Love's Cross Currents_ appeared originally under what is
now its sub-title _A Year's Letters_, in a weekly periodical, long since
extinct, called _The Tattler_, from August 25th to December 29th, 1877.
It was written under the pseudonym of Mrs. Horace Manners, and was
preceded by a letter "To the Author," supposed to come from some unnamed
publisher or literary adviser, who returns her manuscript to the lady
with much faultfinding on the ground of morality. The letter ends:


I recommend you, therefore, to suppress, or even to destroy, this book,
for two reasons: It is a false picture of domestic life in England,
because it suggests as possible the chance that a married lady may
prefer some chance stranger to her husband, which is palpably and
demonstrably absurd. It is also, as far as I can see, deficient in
purpose and significance. Morality, I need not add, is the soul of art;
a picture, poem, or story must be judged by the lesson it conveys. If it
strengthens our hold upon fact, if it heightens our love of truth, if it
rekindles our ardour for the right, it is admissible as good; if not,
what shall we say of it?


The two final sentences of the first chapter, now omitted, are amusing
enough to seem characteristic: "For the worldling's sneer may silence
religion, but philanthropy is a tough fox and dies hard. The pietist may
subside on attack into actual sermonising, and thence into a dumb agony
of appeal against what he hears--the impotence of sincere disgust; but
infinite coarse chaff will not shut up the natural lecturer; he snuffs
sharply at all implied objection, and comes up to time again, gasping,
verbose and resolute." But is there not a certain needless loss in the
omission of two or three of the piquant passages in French? One is on
the woman of sixty who "_seule sait mettre du fard moral sans jurer
avec._" There is another passage in French which comes out of page 220;
it is not clear why, for it is sprightly enough, as this is also, which
drops out of page 175: "_Ce sang répandu, voyez-vous, mon enfant,
c'était la monnaie de sa vertu._" I said I should have preferred it
without the small change. "'_Mais, avec de la grosse monnaie on
n'achète jamais rien qui vaille,' she said placidly._" Then follows, as
we now have it: "_C'était décidément une femme forte._" Such, so
slight, and at times so uncalled for, are the changes in this
"disinterment" of "so early an attempt in the great art of fiction or
creation."

In defending the form of his story in letters, Swinburne invokes the
names of Richardson and Laclos and "the giant genius of Balzac." But the
_Mémoires des deux jeunes Mariées_ is full of firm reality, _Pamela_
is full of patient analysis, and _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ is full of
reality, analysis, and a hard brilliant genius for psychology. Swinburne
may have found in Laclos a little of his cynicism, though for that he
need have gone no further than Stendhal, who is referred to in these
pages, significantly. Some one says of some one: "I'd as soon read the
_Chartreuse de Parme_ as listen to her talk long; it is Stendhal diluted
and transmuted." But neither in Laclos nor in Stendhal did he find that
great novelist's gift which both have: that passion for life, and for
the unraveling of the threads of life. His people and their doings are
spectral, lunar; all the more so because their names are "Redgie,"
Frank, and only rarely Amicia; and because they talk schoolboy slang as
schoolboys and French drawing-room slang as elderly people. They are
presented by brilliant descriptive or satiric touches; they say the
cleverest things of one another; they have a ghostly likeness to real
people which one would be surprised that Swinburne should ever have
tried to get, had he not repeated the same hopeless experiment in his
modern play _The Sisters_, which sacrifices every possible charm of
poetry or deep feeling to such a semblance; to so mere a mimicry of
every-day speech and manners. There is more reality in any mere Félise
or Fragoletta than in the plausible polite letter-writers. It is
impossible to care what they are doing or have done; not easy indeed,
without close reading, to find out; and, while there is hardly a
sentence which we can not read with pleasure for its literary savor, its
prim ironic elegance, there is not a page which we turn with the
faintest thrill of curiosity. A novel which lacks interest may have
every formal merit of writing, but it can not have merit as a novel. The
novel professes to show us men and women, alive and in action: the one
thing vitally interesting to men and women.




ON CRITICISM


Criticism is a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their
direction. It is concerned with them only as force, and it is concerned
only with force in its kind and degree.

The aim of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of
a writer; and in order to do this, its first business must be to find
out where he is different from all other writers. It is the delight of
the critic to praise; but praise is scarcely a part of his duty. He may
often seem to find himself obliged to condemn; yet condemnation is
hardly a necessary part of his office. What we ask of him is, that he
should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves: trace
what in us is a whim or leaning to its remote home or center of gravity,
and explain why we are affected in this way or that way by this or that
writer. He studies origins in effects, and must know himself, and be
able to allow for his own mental and emotional variations, if he is to
do more than give us the records of his likes and dislikes. He must have
the passion of the lover, and be enamored of every form of beauty; and,
like the lover, not of all equally, but with a general allowance of
those least to his liking. He will do well to be not without a touch of
intolerance: that intolerance which, in the lover of the best, is an act
of justice against the second-rate. The second-rate may perhaps have
some reason for existence: that is doubtful; but the danger of the
second-rate, if it is accepted "on its own merits," as people say, is
that it may come to be taken for the thing it resembles, as a wavering
image in water resembles the rock which it reflects.

Dryden, a poet who was even greater as a critic than as a poet, said,
"True judgment in poetry, like that in painting, takes a view of the
whole together, whether it be good or not; and where the beauties are
more than the faults, concludes for the poet against the little judge."
Here, in this decision, as to the proportions of merit and demerit in a
work, is the critic's first task; it is one that is often overlooked by
careful analysts, careless of what substance they are analyzing. What
has been called the historical method is responsible for a great deal of
these post-mortem dissections. How often do we not see learned persons
engaged in this dismal occupation, not even conscious that they are
fumbling among the bones and sinews of the dead. Such critics will
examine the signs of life with equal gravity in living insignificances.
But to the true critic a living insignificance is already dead.

And so, as in a dead man all the virtues go for nothing, no merit, no
number of merits, of a secondary kind, in a writer who has been adjudged
"not to exist," can avail anything. The critic concerns himself only
with such as do exist. One of these, it may be, exists for a single book
out of many books, a single poem out of many volumes of verse; an essay,
an epigram, the preface to a book, a song out of a play. No perfect
thing is too small for eternal recollection. But there are other writers
who, though they have never condensed all their quality into any quite
final achievement, live by a kind of bulk, live because there is in them
something living, which refuses to go out. It is in his judgment of
these two classes of writers, the measure of his skill in finding vital
energy concentrated or diffused, in a cell or throughout an organism,
that the critic is most likely to show his own quality. Charles Lamb is
one of the greatest critics of Shakespeare, but the infallibility of his
instinct as a critic is shown, not so much when he writes better about
_Lear_ than any one had ever written about _Lear_, but when he reveals
to us, for the first time, the secret of Ford, the mainspring of
Webster.

Criticism, when it is not mere talk about literature, concerns itself
with the first principles of human nature and with fundamental ideas.
There is a quite valuable kind of critic to whom a book is merely a
book, who is interested in things only as they become words, in emotions
only as they add fine raptures to printed pages. To such critics we owe
rules and systems; when they tabulate or elucidate meter or any
principle of form they are doing a humble but useful service to artists.
Their comments on books are often pleasant reading, sometimes turning
into a kind of literature, essays which we are content to read for their
own charm. But there is hardly anything idler than literary criticism
which is a mere describing and comparing of books, a mere praise and
blame of this and that writer and his work. When Coleridge writes a
criticism of Shakespeare, he is giving us his deepest philosophy, in a
manner in which we can best apprehend it. Criticism with Goethe is part
of his view of the world, his judgment of human nature, and of society.
With Pater, criticism is quickened meditation; with Matthew Arnold, a
form of moral instruction or mental satire. Lamb said in his criticism
more of what he had to say of "what God and man is," with more gravity
and more intensity, than in any other part of his work.

And thus it is that, while there is a great mass of valuable criticism
done by critics who were only critics, the most valuable criticism of
all, the only quite essential criticism, has been done by creative
writers, for the most part poets. The criticism of a philosopher,
Aristotle's, comes next to that of the poets, but is never that winged
thing which criticism, as well as poetry, can be in the hands of a poet.
Aristotle is the mathematician of criticism, while Coleridge is the high
priest.

When Dryden said "poets themselves are the most proper, though, I
conclude, not the only critics," he was stating a fact which many prose
persons have tried, though vainly, to dispute. Baudelaire, in a famous
passage of his essay on Wagner, has said with his invariable exactitude,
"It would be a wholly new event in the history of the arts if a critic
were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of every psychic law, a
monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets become naturally,
inevitably, critics. I pity the poets who are guided solely by instinct;
they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former there
must come a crisis when they would think out their art, discover the
obscure laws in consequence of which they have produced, and draw from
this study a series of precepts whose divine purpose is infallibility in
poetic production. It would be impossible for a critic to become a poet,
and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic." And in England
we have had few good poets who have not on occasion shown themselves
good critics. What is perhaps strange is, that they have put some of
their criticism into verse, and made it into poetry. From the days when
Lydgate affirmed of Chaucer that "he of English in making was the best,"
to the days when Landor declared of Browning:


"Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk'd along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse;"


down, indeed, to the present days, when Swinburne has repaid Landor all
his praise of poets, almost every English poet has been generously just
to his contemporaries, and almost every poet has found the exact word of
definition, of revelation, which the prose critics were laboriously
hunting for, or still more laboriously writing round. To take a single
example, could anything be more actually critical, in the severest sense
of the word, than these lines of Shelley on Coleridge, lines which are
not less admirable as verse than as criticism?


You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.


Those seven lines are not merely good criticism: they are final; they
leave nothing more to be said. Criticism, at such a height, is no longer
mere reasoning; it has the absolute sanction of intuition.

And, it will be found, the criticism of poets, not only such as is
expressed, deliberately or by the way, in verse, but such as is set down
by them in essays, or in letters, however carefully or casually, remains
the most valuable criticism of poetry which we can get; and, similarly,
the opinion of men of genius on their own work and on their own form of
art, whatever it may be, is of more value than all the theories made by
"little judges." The occasional notes and sayings of such men as Blake
and Rossetti are often of more essential quality than their more ordered
and elaborate comments. The essence they contain is undiluted. They are
what is remembered over from a state of inspiration; and they are to be
received as reports are received from eye-witnesses, whose honesty has
already proved itself in authentic deeds.

The _Biographia Literaria_ is the greatest book of criticism in English,
and one of the most annoying books in any language. The thought of
Coleridge has to be pursued across stones, ditches, and morasses; with
haste, lingering, and disappointment; it turns back, loses itself,
fetches wide circuits, and comes to no visible end. But you must follow
it step by step; and if you are ceaselessly attentive, will be
ceaselessly rewarded.

When Coleridge says, in this book, that "the ultimate end of criticism
is much more to establish the principle of writing than to furnish rules
how to pass judgment on what has been written by others," he is defining
that form of criticism in which he is supreme among critics. Lamb can be
more instant in the detection of beauty; Pater can make over again an
image or likeness of that beauty which he defines, with more sensitive
precision; but no one has ever gone deeper down into the substance of
creation itself, or more nearly reached that unknown point where
creation begins. As poet, he knows; as philosopher, he understands; and
thus, as critic, he can explain almost the origin of creation.




THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN
LITERATURE


The latest movement in European literature has been called by many
names, none of them quite exact or comprehensive--Decadence, Symbolism,
Impressionism, for instance. It is easy to dispute over words, and we
shall find that Verlaine objects to being called a Decadent, Maeterlinck
to being called a Symbolist, Huysmans to being called an Impressionist.
These terms, as it happens, have been adopted as the badge of little
separate cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries
of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and exhaust their ingenuities in
theorizing over the works they can not write. But, taken frankly as
epithets which express their own meaning, both Impressionism and
Symbolism convey some notion of that new kind of literature which is
perhaps more broadly characterized by the word Decadence. The most
representative literature of the day--the writing which appeals to,
which has done so much to form, the younger generation--is certainly not
classic, nor has it any relation with that old antithesis of the
Classic, the Romantic. After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it
has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities
that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence: an intense
self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an
over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral
perversity. If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art--those
qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the
supreme qualities--then this representative literature of to-day,
interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful
and interesting disease.

Healthy we can not call it, and healthy it does not wish to be
considered. The Goncourts, in their prefaces, in their _Journal_, are
always insisting on their own pet malady, _la névrose._ It is in their
work too, that Huysmans notes with delight _le style tacheté et
faisandé_--high-flavored and spotted with corruption--which he himself
possesses in the highest degree. "Having desire without light,
curiosity, without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, by ways traced
by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the high places to an
unknown God, who is the God of darkness"--that is how Ernest Hello, in
one of his apocalyptic moments, characterizes the nineteenth century.
And this unreason of the soul--of which Hello himself is so curious a
victim--this unstable equilibrium, which has overbalanced so many
brilliant intelligences into one form or another of spiritual confusion,
is but another form of the _maladie fin de siècle._ For its very
disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilization
grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of
action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It
reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society; its
very artificiality is a way of I being true to nature: simplicity,
sanity, proportion--the classic qualities--how much do we possess them
in our life, our surroundings, that we should look to find them in our
literature--so evidently the literature of a decadence?

Taking the word Decadence, then, as most precisely expressing the
general sense of the newest movement in literature, we find that the
terms Impressionism and Symbolism define correctly enough the two main
branches of that movement. Now Impressionist and Symbolist have more in
common than either supposes; both are really working on the same
hypothesis, applied in different directions. What both seek is not
general truth merely, but _vérité vraie_, the very essence of
truth--the truth of appearances to the senses, of the visible world to
the eyes that see it; and the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual
vision. The Impressionist, in literature as in painting, would flash
upon you in a new, sudden way so exact an image of what you have just
seen, just as you have seen it, that you may say, as a young American
sculptor, a pupil of Rodin, said to me on seeing for the first time a
picture of Whistler's, "Whistler seems to think his picture upon
canvas--and there it is!" Or you may find, with Sainte-Beuve, writing of
Goncourt, the "soul of the landscape"--the soul of whatever corner of
the visible world has to be realized. The Symbolist, in this new, sudden
way, would I flash upon you the "soul" of that which can be apprehended
only by the soul--the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meaning
of things evident. And naturally, necessarily, this endeavor after a
perfect truth to one's impression, to one's intuition--perhaps an
impossible endeavor--has brought with it, in its revolt from ready-made
impressions and conclusions, a revolt from the ready-made of language,
from the bondage of traditional form, of a form become rigid. In France,
where this movement began and has mainly flourished, it is Goncourt who
was the first to invent a style in prose really new, impressionistic, a
style which was itself almost sensation. It is Verlaine who has invented
such another new style in verse.

The work of the brothers De Goncourt--twelve novels, eleven or twelve
studies in the history of the eighteenth century, six or seven books
about art, the art mainly of the eighteenth century and of Japan, two
plays, some volumes of letters and of fragments, and a _Journal_ in six
volumes--is perhaps, in its intention and its consequences, the most
revolutionary of the century. No one has ever tried so deliberately to
do something new as the Goncourts; and the final word in the summing up
which the survivor has placed at the head of the _Préfaces et
Manifestes_ is a word which speaks of _tentatives, enfin, où les deux
frères ont à faire du neuf, ont fait leurs efforts pour doter les
diverses branches de la littérature de quelque chose que n'avaient
point songé à trouver leurs prédécesseurs._ And in the preface to
_Chérie_, in that pathetic passage which tells of the two brothers (one
mortally stricken, and within a few months of death) taking their daily
walk in the Bois de Boulogne, there is a definite demand on posterity.
"The search after _reality_ in literature, the resurrection of
eighteenth-century art, the triumph of _Japonisme_--are not these," said
Jules, "the three great literary and artistic movements of the second
half of the nineteenth century? And it is we who brought them about,
these three movements. Well, when one has done that, it is difficult
indeed not to be _somebody_ in the future." Nor, even, is this all. What
the Goncourts have done is to specialize vision, so to speak, and to
subtilize language to the point of rendering every detail in just the
form and color of the actual impression. Edmond de Goncourt once said to
me--varying, if I remember rightly, an expression he had put into the
_Journal_--"My brother and I invented an opera-glass: the young people
nowadays are taking it out of our hands."

An opera-glass--a special, unique way of seeing things--that is what the
Goncourts have brought to bear upon the common things about us; and it
is here that they have done the "something new," here more than
anywhere. They have never sought "to see life steadily, and see it
whole:" their vision has always been somewhat feverish, with the
diseased sharpness of over-excited nerves. "We do not hide from
ourselves that we have been passionate, nervous creatures, unhealthily
impressionable," confesses the _Journal._ But it is this morbid
intensity in seeing and seizing things that has helped to form that
marvelous style--"a style perhaps too ambitious of impossibilities," as
they admit--a style which inherits some of its color from Gautier, some
of its fine outline from Flaubert, but which has brought light and
shadow into the color, which has softened outline in the magic of
atmosphere. With them words are not merely color and sound, they live.
That search after _l'image peinte, l'épithète rare_, is not (as with
Flaubert) a search after harmony of phrase for its own sake; it is a
desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the impression of the
moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life. And so, in
analysis as in description, they have found a way of noting the fine
shades; they have broken the outline of the conventional novel in
chapters, with its continuous story, in order to indicate--sometimes in
a chapter of half a page--this and that revealing moment, this or that
significant attitude or accident or sensation. For the placid traditions
of French prose they have had but little respect; their aim has been but
one, that of having (as M. Edmond de Goncourt tells us in the preface to
_Chérie_) "une langue rendant nos idées, nos sensations, nos
figurations des hommes et des choses, d'une façon distincte de celui-ci
ou de celui-là, une langue personnelle, une langue portant notre
signature."

What Goncourt has done in prose--inventing absolutely a new way of
saying things, to correspond with that new way of seeing things which he
has found--Verlaine has done in verse. In a famous poem, _Art
Poétique_, he has himself defined his own ideal of the poetic art:


_Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance!
Oh! la Nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!_


Music first of all and before all, he insists; and then, not color, but
_la nuance_, the last fine shade. Poetry is to be something vague,
intangible, evanescent, a winged soul in flight "toward other skies and
other loves." To express the inexpressible he speaks of beautiful eyes
behind a veil, of the palpitating sunlight of noon, of the blue swarm of
clear stars in a cool autumn sky; and the verse in which he makes this
confession of faith has the exquisite troubled beauty--_sans rien en lui
qui pèse ou qui pose_--which he commends as the essential quality of
verse. In a later poem of poetical counsel he tells us that art should,
first of all, be absolutely clear, absolutely sincere: _L'art mes
enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même._ The two poems, with their
seven years' interval--an interval which means so much in the life of a
man like Verlaine--give us all that there is of theory in the work of
the least theoretical, the most really instinctive, of poetical
innovators. Verlaine's poetry has varied with his life; always in
excess--now furiously sensual, now feverishly devout--he has been
constant only to himself, to his own self-contradictions. For, with all
the violence, turmoil and disorder of a life which is almost the life of
a modern Villon, Paul Verlaine has always retained that childlike
simplicity, and, in his verse, which has been his confessional, that
fine sincerity, of which Villon may be thought to have set the example
in literature.

Beginning his career as a Parnassian with the _Poèmes Saturniens_,
Verlaine becomes himself, in the _Fêtes Galantes_, caprices after
Watteau, followed, a year later, by _La Bonne Chanson_, a happy record
of too confident a lover's happiness. _Romances sans Paroles_, in which
the poetry of Impressionism reaches its very highest point, is more
_tourmenté_, goes deeper, becomes more poignantly personal. It is the
poetry of sensation, of evocation; poetry which paints as well as sings,
and which paints as Whistler paints, seeming to think the colors and
outlines upon the canvas, to think them only, and they are there. The
mere magic of words--words which evoke pictures, which recall
sensations--can go no further; and in his next book, _Sagesse_,
published after seven years' wanderings and sufferings, there is a
graver manner of more deeply personal confession--that "sincerity, and
the impression of the moment followed to the letter," which he has
defined in a prose criticism on himself as his main preference in regard
to style. "Sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the
letter," mark the rest of Verlaine's work, whether the sentiment be that
of passionate friendship, as in _Amour_; of love, human and divine, as
in _Bonheur_; of the mere lust of the flesh, as in _Parallèlement_ and
_Chansons pour Elle._ In his very latest verse the quality of simplicity
has become exaggerated, has become, at times, childish; the once
exquisite depravity of style has lost some of its distinction; there is
no longer the same delicately vivid "impression of the moment" to
render. Yet the very closeness with which it follows a lamentable career
gives a curious interest to even the worst of Verlaine's work. And how
unique, how unsurpassable in its kind, is the best! "_Et tout le reste
est littérature!_" was the cry, supreme and contemptuous, of that early
_Art Poétique_; and, compared with Verlaine at his best, all other
contemporary work in verse seems not yet disenfranchised from mere
"literature." To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to
fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a
human soul: that is the ideal of Decadence, and it is what Paul Verlaine
has achieved.

And certainly, so far as achievement goes, no other poet of the actual
group in France can be named beside him or near him. But in Stéphane
Mallarmé, with his supreme pose as the supreme poet, and his two or
three pieces of exquisite verse and delicately artificial prose to show
by way of result, we have--the prophet and pontiff of the movement, the
mystical and theoretical leader of the great emancipation. No one has
ever dreamed such beautiful, impossible dreams as Mallarmé; no one has
ever so possessed his soul in the contemplation of masterpieces to come.
All his life he has been haunted by the desire to create, not so much
something new in literature, as a literature which should itself be a
new art. He has dreamed of a work into which all the arts should enter,
and achieve themselves by a mutual interdependence--a harmonizing of all
the arts into one supreme art--and he has theorized with infinite
subtlety over the possibilities of doing the impossible. Every Tuesday
for the last twenty years he has talked more fascinatingly, more
suggestively, than any one else has ever done, in that little room in
the Rue de Rome, to that little group of eager young poets. "A seeker
after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or
not at all," he has carried his contempt for the usual, the
conventional, beyond the point of literary expression, into the domain
of practical affairs. Until the publication, quite recently, of a
selection of _Vers et Prose_, it was only possible to get his poems in a
limited and expensive edition, lithographed in facsimile of his own
clear and elegant handwriting. An aristocrat of letters, Mallarmé has
always looked with intense disdain on the indiscriminate accident of
universal suffrage. He has wished neither to be read nor to be
understood by the bourgeois intelligence, and it is with some
deliberateness of intention that he has made both issues impossible.
Catulle Mendès defines him admirably as "a difficult author," and in
his latest period he has succeeded in becoming absolutely
unintelligible. His early poems, _L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Herodiade_,
for example, and some exquisite sonnets, and one or two fragments of
perfectly polished verse, are written in a language which has nothing in
common with every-day language--symbol within symbol, image within
image; but symbol and image achieve themselves in expression without
seeming to call for the necessity of a key. The latest poems (in which
punctuation is sometimes entirely suppressed, for our further
bewilderment) consist merely of a sequence of symbols, in which every
word must be taken in a sense with which its ordinary significance has
nothing to do. Mallarmé's contortion of the French language, so far as
mere style is concerned, is curiously similar to the kind of depravation
which was undergone by the Latin language in its decadence. It is,
indeed, in part a reversion to Latin phraseology, to the Latin
construction, and it has made, of the clear and flowing French language,
something irregular, unquiet, expressive, with sudden surprising
felicities, with nervous starts and lapses, with new capacities for the
exact noting of sensation. Alike to the ordinary and to the scholarly
reader, it is painful, intolerable; a jargon, a massacre. Supremely
self-confident, and backed, certainly, by an ardent following of the
younger generation, Mallarmé goes on his way, experimenting more and
more audaciously, having achieved by this time, at all events, a style
wholly his own. Yet the _chef-d'œvre inconnu_ seems no nearer
completion, the impossible seems no more likely to be done. The two or
three beautiful fragments remain, and we still hear the voice in the Rue
de Rome.

Probably it is as a voice, an influence, that Mallarmé will be
remembered. His personal magnetism has had a great deal to do with the
making of the very newest French literature; few literary beginners in
Paris have been able to escape the rewards and punishments of his
contact, his suggestion. One of the young poets who form that delightful
Tuesday evening coterie said to me the other day, "We owe much to
Mallarmé, but he has kept us all back three years." That is where the
danger of so inspiring, so helping a personality comes in. The work even
of Henri de Regnier, who is the best of the disciples, has not entirely
got clear from the influence that has shown his fine talent the way to
develop. Perhaps it is in the verse of men who are not exactly following
in the counsel of the master--who might disown him, whom he might
disown--that one sees most clearly the outcome of his theories, the
actual consequences of his practise. In regard to the construction of
verse, Mallarmé has always remained faithful to the traditional
syllabic measurement; but the freak or the discovery of _le vers libre_
is certainly the natural consequence of his experiments upon the
elasticity of rhythm, upon the power of resistance of the cæsura. _Le
vers libre_ in the hands of most of the experimenters becomes merely
rhymeless irregular prose. I never really understood the charm that may
be found in this apparent structureless rhythm until I heard, not long
since, Dujardin read aloud the as yet unpublished conclusion of a
dramatic poem in several parts. It was rhymed, but rhymed with some
irregularity, and the rhythm was purely and simply a vocal effect. The
rhythm came and went as the spirit moved. You might deny that it was
rhythm at all; and yet, read as I heard it read, in a sort of slow
chant, it produced on me the effect of really beautiful verse. But _vers
libres_ in the hands of a sciolist are the most intolerably easy and
annoying of poetical exercises. Even in the case of _Le Pèlerin
Passionné_ I can not see the justification of what is merely regular
syllabic verse lengthened or shortened arbitrarily, with the Alexandrine
always evident in the background as the foot-rule of the new metre. In
this hazardous experiment Jean Moréas, whose real talent lies in quite
another direction, has brought nothing into literature but an example of
deliberate singularity for singularity's sake. I seem to find the
measure of the man in a remark I once heard him make in a _café_, where
we were discussing the technique of meter: "You, Verlaine!" he cried,
leaning across the table, "have only written lines of sixteen syllables;
I have written lines of twenty syllables!" And turning to me, he asked
anxiously if Swinburne had ever done that--had written a line of twenty
syllables.

That is indeed the measure of the man, and it points a criticism upon
not a few of the busy little _littérateurs_ who are founding new
_revues_ every other week in Paris. These people have nothing to say,
but they are resolved to say something, and to say it in the newest
mode. They are Impressionists because it is the fashion, Symbolists
because it is the vogue, Decadents because Decadence is in the very air
of the cafés. And so, in their manner, they are mile-posts on the way
of this new movement, telling how far it has gone. But to find a new
personality, a new way of seeing things, among the young writers who are
starting up on every hand, we must turn from Paris to Brussels--to the
so-called Belgian Shakespeare, Maurice Maeterlinck.

In truth, Maeterlinck is not a Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan violence
of his first play is of the school of Webster and Tourneur rather than
of Shakespeare. As a dramatist he has but one note, that of fear; he has
but one method, that of repetition.

The window, looking out upon the unseen--an open door, as in
_L'Intruse_, through which Death, the intruder, may come invisibly--how
typical of the new kind of symbolistic and impressionistic drama which
Maeterlinck has invented! I say invented, a little rashly. The real
discoverer of this new kind of drama was that strange, inspiring,
incomplete man of genius whom Maeterlinck, above all others, delights to
honor, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Imagine a combination of Swift, of Poe,
and of Coleridge, and you will have some idea of the extraordinary,
impossible poet and cynic who, after a life of brilliant failure, has
left a series of unfinished works in every kind of literature; among the
finished achievements one volume of short stories, _Contes Cruels_,
which is an absolute masterpiece. Yet, apart from this, it was the
misfortune of Villiers never to attain the height of his imaginings, and
even _Axël_, the work of a lifetime, is an achievement only half
achieved. Only half achieved, or achieved only in the work of others;
for, in its mystical intention, its remoteness from any kind of outward
reality, _Axël_ is undoubtedly the origin of the symbolistic drama.
This drama, in Villiers, is of pure symbol, of sheer poetry. It has an
exalted eloquence which we find in none of his followers. As Maeterlinck
has developed it, it is a drama which appeals directly to the
sensations--sometimes crudely, sometimes subtly--playing its variations
upon the very nerves themselves. The "vague spiritual fear" which it
creates out of our nervous apprehension is unlike anything that has ever
been done before, even by Hoffman, even by Poe. It is an effect of
atmosphere--an atmosphere in which outlines change and become
mysterious, in which a word quietly uttered makes one start, in which
all one's mental activity becomes concentrated on something, one knows
not what, something slow, creeping, terrifying, which comes nearer and
nearer, an impending nightmare.

As an experiment in a new kind of drama, these curious plays do not seem
to exactly achieve themselves on the stage; it is difficult to imagine
how they could ever be made so impressive, when thus externalized, as
they are when all is left to the imagination. _L'Intruse_, for instance,
seemed, as one saw it acted, too faint in outline, with too little
carrying power for scenic effect. But Maeterlinck is by no means anxious
to be considered merely or mainly as a dramatist. A brooding poet, a
mystic, a contemplative spectator of the comedy of death--that is how he
presents himself to us in his work; and the introduction which he has
prefixed to his translation of _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles_, of
Ruysbroeck l'Admirable, shows how deeply he has studied the mystical
writers of all ages, and how much akin to theirs is his own temper.
Plato and Plotinus, Saint Bernard and Jacob Boehm, Coleridge and
Novalis--he knows them all, and it is with a sort of reverence that he
sets himself to the task of translating the astonishing Flemish mystic
of the thirteenth century, known till now only by the fragments
translated into French by Ernest Hollo from a sixteenth-century Latin
version. This translation and this introduction help to explain the real
character of Maeterlinck's dramatic work--dramatic as to form, by a sort
of accident, but essentially mystical.

Partly akin to Maeterlinck by race, more completely alien from him in
temper than it is possible to express, Joris Karl Huysmans demands a
prominent place in any record of the Decadent movement. His work, like
that of the Goncourts, is largely determined by the _maladie fin de
siècle_--the diseased nerves that, in his case, have given a curious
personal quality of pessimism to his outlook on the world, his view of
life. Part of his work--_Marthe, Les Sœurs Vatard, En Ménage, À
Vau-l'Eau_--is a minute and searching study of the minor discomforts,
the commonplace miseries of life, as seen by a peevishly disordered
vision, delighting, for its own self-torture, in the insistent
contemplation of human stupidity, of the sordid in existence. Yet these
books do but lead up to the unique masterpiece, the astonishing caprice
of _À Rebours_, in which he has concentrated all that is delicately
depraved, all that is beautifully, curiously poisonous, in modern art.
_À Rebours_ is the history of a typical Decadent--a study, indeed,
after a real man, but a study which seizes the type rather than the
personality. In the sensations and ideas of Des Esseintes we see the
sensations and ideas of the effeminate, over-civilized, deliberately
abnormal creature who is the last product of our society: partly the
father, partly the offspring, of the perverse art that he adores. Des
Esseintes creates for his solace, in the wilderness of a barren and
profoundly uncomfortable world, an artificial paradise. His Thébaïde
raffinée is furnished elaborately for candle-light, equipped with the
pictures, the books, that satisfy his sense of the exquisitely abnormal.
He delights in the Latin of Apuleius and Petronius, in the French of
Baudelaire, Goncourt, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Villiers; in the pictures of
Gustave Moreau, of Odilon Redon. He delights in the beauty of strange,
unnatural flowers, in the melodic combination of scents, in the imagined
harmonies of the sense of taste. And at last, exhausted by these
spiritual and sensory debauches in the delights of the artificial, he is
left (as we close the book) with a brief, doubtful choice before
him--madness or death, or else a return to nature, to the normal life.

Since _À Rebours_, Huysmans has written one other remarkable book,
_Là-Bas_, a study in the hysteria and mystical corruption of
contemporary Black Magic. But it is on that one exceptional achievement,
_À Rebours_, that his fame will rest; it is there that he has expressed
not merely himself, but an epoch. And he has done so in a style which
carries the modern experiments upon language to their furthest
development. Formed upon Goncourt and Flaubert, it has sought for
novelty, _l'image peinte_, the exactitude of color, the forcible
precision of epithet, wherever words, images, or epithets are
to be found. Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis,
wearying in its splendor, it is--especially in regard to things
seen--extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's
palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very
perversity that Huysmans' work--so fascinating, so repellent, so
instinctively artificial--comes to represent, as the work of no other
writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the
Decadent movement in literature.




THE ROSSETTIS


William Michael Rossetti, who has just died, survived his brother, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, by thirty-seven years, dying at the age of
eighty-nine. Not really a man of letters, in the essential sense, his
verse, as Gabriel said, "Always going back on the old track," he had a
certain talent of his own; for he edited an excellent edition of Blake's
Poems, and a creditable edition of Shelley, the first critical edition
of his poems.

He was the first Englishman who ever dared to print a Selection from
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_,--in 1868; and, in spite of having to
exclude such passages as he considered indecent, the whole book was a
valuable contribution to our literature.

There is no question that Michael was not invaluable to Gabriel; indeed,
during the whole of the tragic and wonderful life of that man of supreme
genius; not only because he dedicated his _Poems_ of 1870 to one "who
had given them the first brotherly hearing;" not only because, had not
Michael been with him at the British Museum on the ever-memorable and
unforgettable date of April 30, 1847, he had never bought the
imperishable _MS. Book of Blake_, borrowing for this purchase ten
shillings from his brother; but also because when Rossetti, after his
wife's death, had his manuscript volume of poems exhumed in October,
1869, he did the right thing, both in his impetuous act in burying them
beside his dead wife and in his silence with his brother--who was really
aware of the event--so that his own tortured nerves might have some
respite.

Still, I have never forgotten how passionately Eleanore Duse said to me,
in 1900:


Rossetti's eyes desire some feverish thing, but the mouth and chin
hesitate in pursuit. All Rossetti is in that story of his _MS._ buried
in his wife's coffin. He could do it, he could repent of it; but he
should have gone and taken it back himself: he sent his friends.


In one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's invaluable notes on Poetry, he tells
us that to him "the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human
love." That Rossetti, whose face indicated voluptuousness brooding
thoughtfully over destiny, was intensely sensitive, is true; and this
made him a sort of medium to forces seen and unseen. Yet, I think, he
wanted in life more than most men of such genius as he had wanted. For,
as Watts-Dunton said: "He was the slave of his imagination--an
imagination of a power and dominance such as I have never seen equalled.
Of his vividness, no artistic expression of his can give any notion. He
had not the smallest command over it." That is one of the reasons why,
with all his affection for his brother Michael, the chasm between them
was immense--a chasm no dragon-created bridge could ever span; Gabriel
had in him, perhaps, too much of "chasm-fire": his genius was too
flame-fledged for earth's eternity, to have ever had one wing of it
broken by an enemy's shaft.

No modern poet ever had anything like the same grasp upon whatever is
essential in poetry that Rossetti had; for all that he wrote or said
about Art has in it an absolute rightness of judgment; and, with these,
as absolutely, an intellectual sanity. Here is one principle of artistic
creation stated with instantaneous certainty: "Conception, _fundamental
brain work_, that is what makes the difference in all art. Work your
metal as much as you like, but first take care that the gold was worth
working." But it is, strangely enough, that at the beginning of a review
of Hake's _Parables and Tales_ he says the final, the inevitable words
on creation and on what lies in the artist's mind before the act of
creation:


The first and highest is that where the work has been all mentally
"cartooned," as it were, beforehand by a process intensely conscious,
but patient and silent--an occult evolution of life: then follows the
glory of wielding words, and we see the hand of Dante, as the hand of
Michelangelo--or almost as that quickening hand which Michelangelo has
dared to embody--sweep from left to right, fiery and final.


In 1862, Rossetti took possession of his famous house, 10 Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea, where he lived to the end of his life, and whose joint
occupants were, for a certain length of time, George Meredith, Swinburne
and William Michael Rossetti, who left the house in 1874, the year in
which he married Lucy Madox Brown.

That four men of individualities so utterly different, and, in some
senses, aggressive, or at least assertive, should have been able to live
together in closeness of continuous intimacy, from which there was
hardly an escape, was barely conceivable. Yet it was in this house that
Swinburne wrote many of his _Poems Ballads_, part of his book on Blake
and his masterpiece, _Atalanta in Calydon._ There Meredith finished his
masterpiece in the matter of tragic and passionate verse, _Modern Love._
There is nothing like it in the whole of English poetry, nor did he ever
achieve so magnificent a vivisection of the heart in verse as in these
pages--in which he created a wonderful style, acid, stinging,
bitter-sweet, poignant--where these self-torturing and cruel lovers
weave the amazing web of their disillusions as they struggle, open-eyed,
against the blindness of passion.

The poem laughs while it cries.

Swinburne, who was, I think, on the whole, less susceptible in regard to
abusive attacks on his books than Meredith or Rossetti, vindicates
himself, and superbly, in the pamphlet I have before me: _Notes on Poems
and Reviews_ (1866). He has been accused of indecency and immorality and
perversity; and is amazed to find that _Anactoria_ "has excited, among
the chaste and candid critics of the day, or hour, or minute, a more
vehement reputation, a more virtuous horror, a more passionate appeal,
than any other of my writing. I am evidently not virtuous enough to
understand them. I thank Heaven that I am not. _Ma corruption rougirait
de leur pudeur._"

In regard to _Laus Veneris_, I turn for a moment to W. M. Rossetti's
_Swinburne's Poems and Ballads: A criticism_ (1866) which, on the whole,
is uncommonly well written, to one of those passages where he betrays a
kind of Puritanism in his Italian blood; saying that the opening lines
were, apart from any question of sentiment, much overdone. "That is a
situation (and there are many such in Swinburne's writings) which we
would much rather see touched off with the reticence of a Tennyson: he
would probably have given one epithet, or, at the utmost, one line, to
it, and it would at least equally have haunted the memory." I turn from
this to Swinburne on Tennyson, as for instance: "At times, of course,
his song was then as sweet as ever it has sounded since; but he could
never make sure of singing right for more than a few minutes or
stanzas." And--what is certainly true--that Vivien's impurity is
eclipsed by her incredible and incomparable vulgarity. "She is such a
sordid creature as plucks men passing by the sleeve."

Now the actual origin of _Laus Veneris_ came about when Swinburne, with
Rossetti, bought the first edition of Fitzgerald's wonderful version of
_Omar Khayyam._ "We invested," Swinburne writes, "in hardly less than
six-penny-worth apiece, and on returning to the stall next day, for
more, found that we had sent up the market to the sinfully extravagant
price of two-pence, an imposition which evoked from Rossetti a fervent
and impressive remonstrance." Swinburne went down to stay with Meredith
in the country with the priceless book; and, before lunch, they read,
alternately, stanza after stanza. The result was that, after lunch,
Swinburne went to his room and came down to Meredith's study with his
invariable blue paper and wrote there and then thirteen stanzas of
_Veneris_, that end with the lines:


Till when the spool is finished, lo I see
His web, reeled off, curls and goes out like steam.


His only invention was the certainly cunning one of inserting a rhyme
after the second line of each stanza, which is not in the version.

Swinburne's re-creation of the immortal legend of Venus and her Knight,
certainly--though certainly unknown to W. M. Rossetti--owes also much of
its origin from Swinburne's inordinate admiration of _Les Fleurs du
Mal_, by Baudelaire. Its origin, in a certain sense only; that is of the
influence of one poet on the other. For, as he says:


It was not till my poem was completed that I received from the hands of
its author the admirable pamphlet of Charles Baudelaire on Wagner's
_Tannhauser._ If anyone desires to see, expressed in better words than I
can command, the conception of the mediæval Venus which it was my aim
to put into verse, let him turn to the magnificent passage in which
Baudelaire describes the fallen goddess, grown diabolic among eyes that
would not accept her as divine.


I need not reiterate the extraordinary influence that Baudelaire always
had on Swinburne; seen most of all in _Poems and Ballads_ and recurring
at intervals in later volumes of his verse. Both had in their genius, a
certain abnormality, a certain perversity, a certain love of depravity
in the highest sense of the word.

Swinburne, who had a fashion of overpraising many writers, such as Hugo,
so that his prose is often extravagant and the criticism as unbalanced
as the praise, dedicated his finest book, "_William Blake_," to W. M.
Rossetti, in words whose almost strained sense of humility--a way really
in which he often showed the intensity of his pride--makes one wonder
how he could have said: "I can but bring you brass for the gold you send
me; but between equals and friends there can be no question of barter.
Like Diomed, I take what I am given and offer what I have." What
Swinburne had--his genius--he never gave away lavishly; here he is much
too lavish. "There is a joy in praising" might have been written for
him, and he communicates to us, as few writers do, his own sense of joy
in beauty. It is quite possible to be annoyed by many of the things he
has said, not only about literature, but also about religion, and morals
and politics. But he has never said anything on any of these subjects
which is not generous, and high-minded, and, at least for the moment,
passionately and absolutely sincere.

It is almost cruel to have to test one sentence of the man of talent
with one sentence of the man of genius. I chose these from the _Notes on
the Royal Academy Exhibition_ they wrote together in 1868, which I have
before me, in the form of a printed pamphlet. "If everybody tells me
that the picture of A, of which this pamphlet says nothing, merits
criticism, or that the picture of B, praised for color, claims praise on
the score of drawing also, I shall have no difficulty in admitting the
probable correctness of these remarks; but, if he adds that I am
blamable for the omissions, I shall feel entitled to reply that A's
picture and B's draughtsmanship were not and indeed never were in the
bond."

How honestly that is written and how prosaically, "Pale as from poison,
with the blood drawn back from her very lips, agonized in face and limbs
with the labor and the fierce contention of old love with new, of a
daughter's love with a bride's, the fatal figure of Medea pauses a
little on the funereal verge of the wood of death, in act to pour a
blood-like liquid into the soft opal-coloured hollow of a shell." How
princely that praise of Sandys rings in one's ears, lyrical prose that
quickens the blood! But the greater marvel to me is that Swinburne in
his _Miscellanies_, of 1866, should have quoted two sentences of
Rossetti on Shakespeare's Sonnets and ended by saying: "These words
themselves deserve to put on immortality: there are none truer or
nobler, wiser or more memorable in the whole historic range of highest
criticism." I can only imagine it as that of an arrow in flight: only,
it loses the mark.

It was when Christina Rossetti was living at 30 Torrington Square that I
spent several entrancing hours with her. She had still traces of her
Italian beauty; but all the loveliness had gone out of her, so subtly
and so delicately painted by Gabriel when she was young. The moment she
entered, dressed simply and severely, she bowed, almost curtsied, with
that old-fashioned charm that since her time has gone mostly out of the
world. Her face lit up when she spoke of Gabriel: for between them was
always love and admiration. His genius, to her, both as a poet and a
painter, invariably received her elaborate and unstinted praise.

She told me that Gabriel had said to her: "_The Convent Threshold_ is a
very splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion; and, to me, one of your
greatest poems is that on France after the Siege--_To-Day for me._" And
that Swinburne specially loved _Passing away, saith the world, passing
away._ It always seems to me that as she had read Leopardi and
Baudelaire, the thought of death had for her the same fascination; only
it is not the fascination of attraction, as with the one, nor repulsion,
as with the other, but of interest, sad but scarcely unquiet interest in
what the dead are doing underground, in their memories, if memory they
have, of the world they have left.

Yet this fact is of curious interest, knowing the purity of her
imagination, that when Swinburne sent her his _Atalanta in Calydon_ she
crossed out in ink one line:


"_The supreme evil, God._"


Swinburne himself told me of his amazement and amusement when he
happened to turn to this page while he was looking through the copy he
had sent her.

It was one of Gabriel Rossetti's glories to paint luxurious women,
surrounded by every form of luxury. And some of them are set to pose in
Eastern garments, with caskets in their hands and flames about them,
looking out with unsearchable eyes. His colors, before they began to
have, like his forms, an exaggeration, a blurred vision which gave him
the need of repainting, of depriving his figures of life, were as if
charmed into their own places; they took on at times some strange and
stealthy and startling ardors of paint, with a subtle fury.

By his fiery imagination, his restless energy, he created a world:
curious, astonishing, at first sight; strange, morbid, and subtly
beautiful. Everything he made was chiefly for his own pleasure; he had a
contempt for the outside world, and his life was so given up to beauty,
in search for it and in finding of it, that one can but say not only
that his life was passion consumed by passion, as his nerves became more
and more his tyrants (tyrants, indeed, these were, more formidable and
more alluring and more tempting than even the nerves confess), but also
that, to put it in the words of Walter Pater: "To him life is a crisis
at every moment."

There was in him, as in many artists, the lust of the eyes. And as
others feasted their lust on elemental things, as in Turner's _Rain,
Steam and Speed_, as in Whistler's _Valparaiso_, as in the _Olympia_ of
Manet, as in a _Décors de Ballet_ of Degas, so did Rossetti upon other
regions than theirs. He had neither the evasive and instinctive genius
of Whistler, nor Turner's tremendous sweep of vision, nor the creative
and fiercely imaginative genius of Manet. But he had his own way of
feasting on forms and visions more sensuous, more nervously passionate,
more occult, perhaps, than theirs.

Yet, as his intentions overpower him, as he becomes the slave and no
longer the master of his dreams, his pictures become no longer symbolic.
They become idols. Venus, growing more and more Asiatic as the moon's
crescent begins to glitter above her head, and her name changes from
Aphrodite into Astarte, loses all the freshness of the waves from which
she was born, and her own sorcery hardens into a wooden image painted to
be the object of savage worship.

Dreams are no longer content to be turned into waking realities, taking
the color of the daylight, that they may be visible to our eyes, but
they remain lunar, spectral, a dark and unintelligible menace.




CONFESSIONS AND COMMENTS


I


I met George Moore, during a feverish winter I spent in Paris in 1890,
at the house of Doctor John Chapman, 46 Avenue Kleber; who at one time,
before he settled there, had been the Proprietor and then Editor of _The
Westminster Review._ In his review appeared in 1886 Pater's wonderful
and fascinating essay on Coleridge; in 1887 his penetrating and
revealing essay on Wincklemann. "He is the last fruit of the
Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motives and tendencies."

At that time I had heard a good deal of Moore; I had read very few of
his novels; these I had found to be entertaining, realistic, and
decadent; and certainly founded on modern French fiction. He made little
or no impression on me on that occasion; he was Irish and amusing. Our
conversation was probably on Paris and France and French prose. He gave
me his address, King's Bench Walk, Inner Temple, and asked me to call on
him after my return to London.

I was born, "like a fiend hid in a cloud," cruel, nervous, excitable,
passionate, restless, never quite human, never quite normal and, from
the fact that I have never known what it was to have a home, as most
children know it, my life has been in many ways a wonderful, in certain
ways a tragic one: an existence, indeed, so inexplicable even to myself,
that I can not fathom it. If I have been a vagabond, and have never been
able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have
no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many
prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has
cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.

When I came up to London, in 1889, I was fortunate enough to take one
room in a narrow street, named Fountain Court. In 1821 Blake left South
Molton Street for Fountain Court, where he remained for the rest of his
life. The side window looked down through an opening between the houses,
showing the river and the hills beyond; Blake worked at a table facing
the window. At that time I had only seen the Temple; so that when I
entered it for the first time in my life, to call on Moore, I was seized
by a sudden fascination which never left me. I questioned him as to the
chances I might have of finding rooms there; he wisely advised me to
look at the outside of the window of the barber's shop, where notices of
vacant flats were put up. Finally I saw: "Fountain Court: rooms to let."
I immediately made all the necessary inquiries; and found myself in
March, 1871, entire possessor of the top flat, which had a stone balcony
from which I looked down on a wide open court, with a stone fountain in
the middle. I lived there for ten years. My most intimate friends were,
first and foremost, Yeats, then Moore: all three of us being of Celtic
origin.

My intercourse with Moore was mostly at night; that is, when I was not
wandering in foreign countries or absorbed in much more animal and
passionate affairs. I dedicated to him _Studies in Two Literatures_
1897; the dedication was written in Rome, which begins: "My dear Moore,
Do you remember, at the time when we were both living in the Temple, and
our talks used to begin with midnight, and go on until the first
glimmerings of dawn shivered among the trees, yours and mine; do you
remember how often we have discussed, well, I suppose, everything which
I speak of in these studies in the two literatures which we both chiefly
care about." It ends: "I think of our conversations now in Rome, where,
as in those old times in the Temple, I still look out of my window on a
fountain in a square; only, here, I have the Pantheon to look at, on the
other side of my fountain."

George Moore, whose _Pagan Poems_ were a mixture of atrociously rhymed
sensations, abnormal and monstrous, decadent and depraved, not without a
sense of luxury and of color, and yet nothing more than feverish fancies
and delirious dreams, has in some way fashioned a French sonnet which is
an evident imitation of Mallarmé's. Only, between these writers is, as
it were, an abyss. It has been Mallarmé's distinction to have always
aspired after an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from
what is fretting and constraining in "the body of that death" which is
the mere literature of words. Finally come his "last period"--after the
jewels of Hérodiade, which scattered and recaptured sudden fire,--in
which his spirit wandered in an opaque darkness; as for instance, in the
sonnet, made miraculously out of the repetition of two rhymes--"onyx
lampadophore"--or, by preference, one that begins:


_Une dentelle s'abolit._


Here, then, is Moore's sonnet to Edouard Dujardin.


_La chair est bonne de l'alose
Plus fine que celle du bar,
Mais la Loire est loin et je n'ose
Abandonner Pierre Abélard._

_Je suis un esclave de l'art;
La sage Héloise se pose
Sans robe, sans coiffe et sans fard,
Et j'oublie aisément l'alose._

_Mais je vois la claire maison--
Arbres, pelouses et statue.
Du jardin, j'entend ta leçon:_

_Raison qui sauve, foi qui tue,
Autels éclabousses du son
Que verse une idole abattue._


I find in Moore's _Confessions_ these sentences: "A year passed; a year
of art and dissipation--one part art, two parts dissipation. And we
thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la
Gaieté, returning to my home to dress, and presenting our spotless
selves to the élite. And we succeeded very well, as indeed all young
men do who waltz perfectly and avoid making love to the wrong woman." I
should have preferred to read those sentences in French rather than in
English; they are essentially Parisian and of the _grands Boulevards_;
only, the end of the last sentence must have been suggested from some
cynical phrase written by Balzac. Add to this the egoism of the
Irishman: after that, what more do we need in the way of comparisons?

That Balzac is the greatest, the most profound, thinker in French
literature after Blaise Pascal, is certain. Only, he had a more creative
genius than any novelist, a genius unsurpassable and unsurpassed; in
proof of which--if such a proof were actually required--I give these
sentences of Baudelaire translated by Swinburne. "To me it had always
seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate
visionary; all his characters are gifted with the ardours of life which
animated himself. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very
scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with
will. It is actually Balzac himself." Somewhere, he compares Shakespeare
with Balzac; and adds: "Balzac asserts, and Balzac cannot blunder or
lie. He has that wonderful wisdom, never at fault on its own ground,
which made him not simply the chief of dramatic story, but also the
great master of morals."

No critic could for one instant apply to any of George Moore's novels
the phrase of "grand spiritual realism." A realist he always has been; a
realist, who, having founded himself on French novelists, has really, in
certain senses, brought something utterly new into English fiction.
Luckily, he is Irish; luckily, he lived the best years of his youth in
Paris. His prose shows the intense labor with which he produced every
chapter of every novel; in fact, there is too much of the laborious mind
in all his books. He was right in saying in _Avowals_: "Real literature
is concerned with description of life and thoughts of life rather than
with acts. He must write about the whole of life and not about parts of
life, and he must write truth and not lies." The first sentence
expresses the writer's sense of his own prose in his novels: and yet
there is always a lot of vivid action in them. Only the greatest
novelists have written about the whole of life: Balzac, Tolstoi,
Cervantes, for instance; but the fact is that Balzac is always good to
reread, but not Tolstoi: I couple two giants. Goriot, Valérie Marneffe,
Pons, Landsch are called up before us after the same manner as Othello
or Don Quixote; Balzac stakes all on one creation, exactly as
Shakespeare stakes all in one creation.

Writing on Joseph Conrad, I referred to one of his tricks--which seem
inextricable tricks of art--which he learned from Balzac: the method,
which he uses in _Youth_, of doubling or trebling the interest by
setting action within action, as certain pictures are set within certain
frames. It is astonishing to find the influence Balzac had on Conrad,
partly when suspense is scarcely concerned with action, partly in his
involved manner of relating events. In Balzac I often find that some of
his tales, like Conrad's, grow downwards out of an episode at the end;
in some the end is told first, the beginning next--which was a method
Poe often used--and last of all in the middle; for instance, in
_Honorine._

Writing of Zola I said:


Zola has defined art, very aptly, as nature seen through a temperament.
The art of Zola is nature seen through a formula. He observes, indeed,
with astonishing closeness, but he observes in support of preconceived
ideas. And so powerful is his imagination that he has created a whole
world which has no existence anywhere but in his own brain, and he has
placed there imaginary beings, so much more logical than life, in the
midst of surroundings which are themselves so real as to lend almost a
semblance of reality to the embodied formulas who inhabit them.


As I have said that George Moore might be supposed to be a lineal
descendant of Zola, it seems to me that in many ways his method is
almost the same as Zola's; only, they have different theories; both
observe with immense persistence; but their manner of observation, after
all, is only that of the man in the street; while, on the contrary, the
Goncourts create with their nerves, with their sensations, with their
noting of the sensations, with the complex curiosities of a delicately
depraved instinct. The strange woman in _La Faustin_ is one of
Goncourt's most fascinating creations: Germinie Lacerteux, his most
sordidly depraved animal; and in the Preface to that novel, in 1864,
they were right in saying: "_Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'élargit et
grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée,
vivante, de l'Étude littéraire et de enquête sociale, qu'il devient,
par l'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale
contemporaine._" They were the first, I believe, to invent an entirely
new form, a breaking-up of the plain, straightforward narrative into
chapters, which are generally disconnected, and sometimes no more than
six sentences: as, for instance, in that perverse, decadent, delicately
depraved study of the stages in the education of the young Parisian
girl, _Chérie_ (for all its "immodesty") was an admirable thing, and a
model for all such studies. Only, when I have to choose, after Balzac,
the most wonderfully created woman in any novel, the vision of Emma
Bovary starts before me--a woman, as I have said somewhere (with none of
the passionate certainty of Charles Baudelaire) who is half vulgar and
half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; her trivial desires, her
futile aspirations after second-hand pleasures and second-hand ideals,
give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out
of reality.

I have always had a great admiration of Camille Lemonnier, who brought
something rare, exotic and furiously animal into Flemish prose; as in
his masterpiece, _Un Mâle_, where he reveals in an astonishing fashion
those peasants who are so brutal, yet so subtly and rudely apprehended,
in their instincts: these peasants who are the most elemental of human
beings. He has none of Hardy's sinister and dejected vision of life; who
often seems closer to the earth than to men and women, and who sees
women and men out of the eyes of wild creatures; whose peasants have
been compared with Shakespeare's. Lemonnier's women and men have in them
something mysterious, dramatic, tragic: in their loves and hatreds, in
their crimes and joys, they have something of the mysterious force which
germinates in the furrows which they turn.

Pater, who hated every form of noise and of extravagance, who disliked
whatever seemed to him either sordid or morbid, guarded himself from all
these and from many other things by the wary humor that protects the
sensitive. So, in his reviews of Wilde and of Moore, he is always very
much on his guard as to the manner of expounding his individual
opinions; saying of Wilde that his _Dorian Gray_ "may fairly claim to go
with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same kind,
done--probably--in more or less conscious imitation of it." So in
praising Moore's clever book, he refers to his "French intuitiveness and
gaillardise;" saying that he is "a very animating guide to the things he
loves, and in particular to the modern painting of France," that (here
he uses his wary humor) "these chapters have, by their very conviction,
their perverse conviction, a way of arousing the general reader, lost
perhaps in the sleep of conventional ideas," that, to and with "the
reader may now judge fairly of Moore's manner of writing; may think
perhaps there is something in it of the manner of the artists he writes
of."

One of the most original pictures of Degas is _L'Absinthe_, which
represents Desboutins in the _café_ of the _Nouvelle Athènes_ seated
beside a woman. Moore says "Desboutins always came to the _café_ alone,
as did Manet, Degas, Darentz. Desboutins is thinking of his dry points;
the woman is incapable of thought. If questioned about her life she
would probably answer, _Je suis à la coule._" To my mind Degas gives in
this picture, in a more modern way than Manet, an equal vision of
reality. Desboutins, the Bohemian painter, sits there in a mood of grim
dissatisfaction; he is just as living as the depraved woman who sits
beside him--before the glass of absinthe that shines like an enormous
and sea-green jewel--with eyes in which much of her shameful earthiness
is betrayed, without malice, without pity.

I open at random, the pages of _Confessions of a Young Man_ where there
is a reference to the _café_ of the _Nouvelle Athènes_, Place Pigalle;
where the writer confesses more of himself than on any other page of his
book.


I am a student of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets and alcoves. I have
read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I
remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and
my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave
inquietude,--study, as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering
of ideas taken in flight. But in me, the impulse is so original to
frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the
breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring
from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is
in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and
sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it
did in the composition of my unfortunate _Roses of Midnight._


I turn from those sentences to Casanova, whose _Memoirs_ are one of the
most wonderful autobiographies in the world; who, always passionate
after sensations, confesses, in his confessions, the most shameless
things that have ever been written: one to whom woman was, indeed, the
most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was
indifferent. He was, as he professes, always in love--at least, with
something. Being of origin Venetian and Spanish, he had none of the cold
blooded libertinism of Valmont in _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_ of Laclos.
Baudelaire, in two of his sweeping Paradoxes, said of this book: "_Ce
livre, s'il brûle, ne peut brûler qu'à la manière de la glace. Tous
les livres sont immoraux._" Casanova, himself, is the primitive type of
the Immoralist, in certain senses of the abnormal Immoralist. His latest
reincarnation is an André Gide's _L'Immoraliste_; a book perverse and
unpassionate.

Now, let us return to the modern writer's Confessions. Whether Moore has
read the whole of Casanova or not, there are curiously similar touches
in both these writers; as, for instance, in the word "alcoves, streets,
ballrooms." Instead of the modern "barrooms" use the word _cafés._ One
essential difference is that Casanova had a passion for books: the more
essential one is, that Casanova was born to be a vagabond and a Wanderer
over almost the whole of Europe, that he had tasted all the forbidden
fruits of the earth, and that he had sinned with all his body--leaving,
naturally, the soul out of the question.

Every great artist has tasted the sweet poison of the Forbidden Fruit.
The Serpent, the most "subtile" of all the Beasts, gave an apple he had
gathered from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to Eve; she
having eaten it and having given one to Adam, both saw they were naked,
and, with nakedness, Sin entered into the World. Now, what was stolen
from the Garden of God has, ever since, been the one temptation which it
is almost impossible to resist. For instance Shakespeare stole from
Marlowe, Milton stole from Shakespeare, Keats stole from Virgil,
Swinburne stole from Baudelaire and Crashaw, Browning stole from Donne;
as for Wagner, having stolen a motet from Vittorio which he used, almost
note for note in _Parsifal_, also from Palestrina and his school, and
from Berlioz and from Liszt, it is impossible to say what he did not
steal. Oscar Wilde stripped, as far as he could, all the fruit he could
gather from the orchards of half a dozen French novelists; besides those
of Poe and of Pater. Gabrielle d'Annunzio has stolen as thoroughly as
Wilde; in fact, the whole contents of certain short stories. As for
George Moore, he has been guilty of as many thefts as these; only he has
concealed his thefts with more stealth. Henry James said to some one of
my acquaintance: "Moore has an absolute genius for picking other men's
brains." That saying is as final as it is fundamental.

Rossetti said: "There ought to be always, double of oneself, the
self-critic, who should be one always with the poet." The legend of the
Doppelgänger haunted him; the result of which is _How They Met
Themselves_, where two lovers wandering in a wood come on their doubles,
apparitions who, casting their perilous eyes on them sidewise, vanish.
It is mysterious and menacing. Pater uses the same symbol: three knights
as they hear the night-hawk, are confronted by their own images, but
with blood, all three of them, fresh upon the brow, or in the mouth. "It
were well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even
devils, as all men know, taking flight at its white glitter through the
air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with mimic
counter-motion, upon nothing--upon the empty darkness before them."
These revenants are ghost-like and flame-like: they are the symbols of
good and evil; the symbols of the haunting of one uneasy conscience.
Balzac, Blake, Hawthorne, saw them in visions; the moderns, such as
Maupassant and Moore, must always ignore them.

The novel and the prose play are the two great imaginative forms which
prose has invented for itself. Prose is the language of what we call
real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality
can be given. And, in any case, the prose play, the novel, come into
being as exceptions and are invented by men who can not write plays in
verse. Only in the novel and the prose play does prose become free to
create, free to develop to the utmost limits of its vitality. Perhaps
the highest merit of prose consists in this, that it allows us to think
in words. But art, in verse, being strictly and supremely on art, begins
by transforming. Indeed, there is no form of art which is not an attempt
to capture life, to create life over again.

The rhythm of poetry is musical; the rhythm of prose is physiological.
For this reason Ibsen's prose is like that of a diagram in Euclid; it is
the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental exaltation
of a problem solved. Swinburne, writing on Wilkie Collins's _Armadale_,
declares that the heroine who dies of her own will by her own crime, had
an American or a Frenchman introduced her, no acclamation would have
been too vehement to express their gratitude! "But neither Feuillet nor
Hawthorne could have composed and constructed such a story; the
ingenuity spent on it may possibly be perverse, but is certainly
superb." As I have never read one line of Feuillet I am no judge of his
merit as a novelist. Hawthorne had a magical imagination, a passion for
"handling sin" purely; he was haunted by what is obscure and abnormal in
that illusive region which exists on the confines of evil and good; his
opinion of woman was that she "was plucked out of a mystery, and had its
roots still clinging to her." Sin and the Soul, those are the problems
he has always before him; Sin, as our punishment; the Soul, in its
essence, mist-like and intangible. He uses his belief in witchcraft with
admirable effect, the dim mystery which clings about haunted houses, the
fantastic gambols of the soul itself, under what seems like the devil's
own promptings.

In the whole of Moore's prose there is no such magic, no such mystery,
no such diabolism; he is not so lacking in imagination as in style. He
has always been, with impressive inaccuracy, described as the English
Zola; at the outset of his career he gained a certain notoriety not
unlike Zola's; his novels are not based on theories, as some of Zola's
are. Moore always knew how to make a cunning plot, to make some of his
compositions masterly, and how to construct his characters--which, to a
certain extent, are living people, really existent, as their
surroundings. As I say further on: "Compare with any of Zola's novels
the amazingly clever novel of Moore, _A Mummer's Wife_, which goes with
several other novels which are--well--_manqués_, in spite of their
ability, their independence, their unquestionable merits of various
kinds." The style always drags more than the action. Vivid, sensual, not
sensuous, often perverse, never passionate; written with a curious sense
of wickedness, of immorality, of vice; extraordinary at times in some of
the scenes he evokes in one or several chapters; always with the French
element; his prose exotic, morbid, cruel, as cruel as this catsuit of
the passions, has in it a certain scorn and contempt of mediocrities,
which can be delivered with the force of a sledge-hammer that strikes an
anvil and shoots forth sparks.




II


George Moore has been described, with impressive inaccuracy, as the
English Zola. At what was practically the outset of his career he gained
a certain notoriety; which did him good, by calling public attention to
an unknown name; it did him harm, by attaching to that name a certain
stigma. In a certainly remote year, but a year we all of us remember,
there were strange signs in the literary Zodiac. There had been a
distinctly new growth in the short story, and along with the short story
("poisonous honey stolen from France") came a new license in dealing
imaginatively with life, almost permitting the Englishman to contend
with the writers of other nations on their own ground; permitting him,
that is to say, to represent life as it really is. Foreign influences,
certainly, had begun to have more and more effect upon the making of
such literature as is produced in England nowadays; we had a certain
acceptance of Ibsen, a popular personal welcome of Zola, and literary
homage paid to Verlaine. What do these facts really mean? It is certain
that they mean something.

The visit of Zola, for instance--how impossible that would have been a
little while ago! A little while ago we were opening the prison doors
for the publishers who had ventured to bring out translations of _Nana_
and _La Terre_; now we open the doors of the Guildhall for the author of
_Nana_ and _La Terre_; and the same pens, with the same jubilance,
chronicle both incidents. To the spectator of the comedy of life all
this is merely amusing; but to the actor in the tragic comedy of letters
it means a whole new _repertoire._ Not so very many years ago George
Moore was the only novelist in England who insisted on the novelist's
right to be true to life, even when life is unpleasant and immoral; and
he was attacked on all sides.

The visit of Paul Verlaine, too--unofficial, unadvertised, as it
was--seemed to be significant of much. In the first place, it showed, as
in the case of Zola, a readiness on the part of some not unimportant
section of the public to overlook either personal or literary scandal
connected with a man of letters who has done really remarkable work. But
the interest of Verlaine's visit was much more purely literary than that
of Zola; his reception was in no sense a concession to success, but
entirely a tribute to the genius of a poet.

I find that William Watson published only one tiny volume of verse, the
barren burlesque of _The Eloping Angels_, which should never have been
printed, and a book of prose, _Excursions in Criticism_, the criticism
and the style being alike as immature and unbalanced as his verse is
generally mature and accomplished; while Mr. Le Gallienne has forsaken
the domesticity of the muse, to officiate, in _The Religion of a
Literary Man_, as the Canon Farrar of the younger generation. The most
really poetic of the younger poets, W. B. Yeats, who has yet to be
"discovered" by the average critic and the average reader, has this year
published a new volume of verse, _The Countess Kathleen_, as well as a
book of prose stories, _The Celtic Twilight_, and, in conjunction with
Edwin J. Ellis, a laborious study in the mysticism of William Blake.
Yeats' work, alone among recent work in verse, has the imaginative
quality of vision; it has the true Celtic charm and mystery; and while
such admirable verse as Watson's, such glowing verse as Thompson's, are
both superior, on purely technical grounds, to Yeats', neither has the
spontaneous outflow of the somewhat untrained singing-voice of the
younger poet.

Another writer of verse who has not yet been estimated at his proper
value, John Davidson, has also published a new book of poems, _Fleet
Street Eclogues_, and a book of prose, _A Random Itinerary._ It is
difficult to do justice to Davidson, for he never does justice to
himself. His verse is always vivid and striking; at its best it has a
delightful quality of fantastic humor and quaint extravagance; but it is
singularly uneven, and never, in my opinion, at its best in purely
modern subjects. The _Random Itinerary_ is a whole series of happy
accidents; but there are gaps in the series. Davidson strikes one as a
man who might do almost anything; why, then, does he not do it?

Now, these paradoxical digressions have brought me back to the question
of Zola and Moore, and of the realistic novel. Moore's were based on no
theories; Zola's on certain theories, really a view of humanity which he
adopted as a formula: "Nature seen through a temperament;" a definition
supposed to be his definition of all art; which it most certainly is
not. Yet nothing, certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a
definition of the art of Huysmans.

Zola has made up his mind that he will say everything without omitting a
single item; so that his vision is the vision of the mediocre man; and
his way of finding out in a slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be
expressed by an ingeniously filthy phrase in _Argot_, is by no means
desirable. Every one knows two sentences in that supreme masterpiece,
_Madame Bovary_, how that detail, brought in without the slightest
emphasis of the husband turning his back at the very instant when his
wife dies, is a detail of immense psychological value; it indicates to
us, at the very beginning of the book, just the character of the man
about whom we are to read so much. Zola would have taken at least two
pages to say that, and, after all, he would not have said it.

Compare with any of Zola's novels the amazingly clever novel of Moore,
_A Mummer's Wife_, which goes with several other novels which
are--well--_manqués_, in spite of their ability, their independence,
their unquestionable merits of various kinds. _A Mummers Wife_ is
admirably put together, admirably planned and shaped; the whole
composition of the book is masterly. The style may drag, but not the
action; the construction of a sentence may be uncertain, but not the
construction of a character. The actor and his wife are really living
people; we see them in their surroundings, and we see every detail of
those surroundings. Here, of course, he would never have made Zola's
stupid mistake; but can one imagine for a moment--I certainly can
not--the writer of this novel writing, creating, (if I may dare use the
word) two such sentences of Flaubert, which I quote in their original?
"_Huit jours après, comme elle étendait du linge dans sa cour, elle
fut prise d'un crachement de sang, et le lendemain, tandis que Charles
avait le dos tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit:
'Ah! Mon Dieu!' poussa un soupir et s'évanouit. Ella était morte._"

George Moore's _Modern Painting_ is full of injustices, brutality and
ignorances; but it is full also of the most generous justice, the most
discriminating sympathy, and the genuine knowledge of the painter. It is
hastily thought out, hastily written; but here, in these vivid, direct,
unscrupulously logical pages, you will find some of the secrets of the
art of painting, let out, so to speak, by an intelligence all sensation,
which has soaked them up without knowing it. Yet, having begun by trying
to paint, and having failed in painting, and so set himself to the
arduous task of being a prose-writer, he is often, in spite of his
painter's accuracy as to "values" and "technique" and so on, unreliable.

For, being neither creative as a novelist nor as a critic, he has
nothing, as a matter of course, of two among many essential qualities:
vision and divination. Take, for instance, a few pages anywhere in
_L'Art Romanesque_ of Baudelaire, or from his prose on Delacroix, on
Constantine Guys, on Wagner, on Daumier, on Whistler, on Flaubert, and
on Balzac--where he is always supreme and consummate, "fiery and
final"--and place these beside any chosen pages of Moore's prose on
either Balzac or on Whistler, and you will see all the difference in the
world: as I have said above, between the creative and the uncreative
criticism.

Had Walter Pater devoted himself exclusively to art criticism, there is
no doubt that, in a sense, he would have been a great art critic. There
are essays scattered throughout his work, as in the Botticelli where he
first introduces Botticelli to the modern world, as in the Leonardo da
Vinci--in which the simplest words take color from each other by the
cunning accident of their placing in the sentences, the subtle spiritual
fire kindling from word to word creates a masterpiece, a miracle in
which all is inspiration, all is certainty, all is evocation, and which,
in the famous page on _La Gioconda_, rises to the height of actually
lyrical prose--in which the essential principles of the art of painting
are divined and interpreted with extraordinary subtlety. In the same
sense all that Whistler has written about painting deserves to be taken
seriously, and read with understanding. Written in French, and signed by
Baudelaire, his truths, and paradoxes reflecting truths, would have been
realized for what they are. He fought for himself, and spared no form of
stupidity: for, in Whistler, apart from his malice, his poisonous
angers, taste was carried to the point of genius, and became creative.

George Moore's literary career has been singularly interesting; his
character as a writer is very curious. A man who respects his art, who
is devoted to literature, who has a French eye for form, he seems
condemned to produce work which is always spotted with imperfection. All
his life he has been seeking a style, and he has not yet found one. At
times he drops into style as if by accident, and then he drops style as
if by design. He has a passionate delight in the beauty of good prose;
he has an ear for the magic of phrases; his words catch at times a
troubled expressive charm; yet he has never attained ease in writing,
and he is capable of astounding incorrectness--the incorrectness of a
man who knows better, who is not careless and yet who can not help
himself. Yet the author of _A Mummer's Wife_, of _The Confessions of a
Young Man_, of _Impressions and Opinions_, has more narrowly escaped
being a great writer than even he himself, perhaps, is aware.




FRANCIS THOMPSON


I


If Crashaw, Shelley, Donne, Marvell, Patmore and some other poets had
not existed, Francis Thompson would be a poet of remarkable novelty. Not
that originality, in the strictest sense, is always essential to the
making of a poet. There have been poets who have so absolutely lived in
another age, whose whole soul has been so completely absorbed by a
fashion of writing, perhaps a single writer, belonging to an earlier
century, that their work has been an actual reincarnation of this
particular time or writer. Chatterton, for instance, remains one of the
finest of English poets, entirely on account of poems which were so
deliberately imitative as to have been passed off as transcripts from
old manuscripts. Again, it is possible to be deftly and legitimately
eclectic, as was Milton, for example. Milton had, in an extraordinary
degree, the gift of assimilating all that he found, all that he
borrowed. Often, indeed, he improved his borrowed goods; but always he
worked them into the pattern of his own stuff, he made them part of
himself; and wisdom is justified of her children. Now Thompson, though
he affects certain periods, is not so absorbed in any one as to have
found his soul by losing it; nor is he a dainty borrower from all,
taking his good things wheresoever he finds them. Rather, he has been
impressed by certain styles, in themselves incompatible, indeed implying
the negation of one another--that of Crashaw, for instance, and that of
Patmore--and he has deliberately mixed them, against the very nature of
things. Thus his work, with all its splendors, has the impress of no
individuality; it is a splendor of rags and patches, a very masque of
anarchy. A new poet announces himself by his new way of seeing things,
his new way of feeling things; Thompson comes to us a cloudy visionary,
a rapturous sentimentalist, in whom emotion means colored words, and
sight the opportunity for a bedazzlement.

The opening section of the book _Love in Dian's_ Lap is an experiment in
Platonic love. The experiment is in itself interesting, though here
perhaps a little too deliberate; in its bloodless ecstasy it recalls
_Epipsychidion_, which is certainly one of the several models on which
it has been formed; it has, too, a finely extravagant courtliness, which
belongs to an older school of verse as here:--


Yet I have felt what terrors may consort
In women's cheeks, the Graces' soft resort;
My hand hath shook at gentle hands' access,
And trembled at the waving of a tress;
My blood known panic fear, and fled dismayed,
Where ladies' eyes have set their ambuscade.
The rustle of a robe hath been to me
The very rattle of love's musketry;
Although my heart hath beat the loud advance,
I have recoiled before a challenging glance,
Proved gay alarms where warlike ribbons dance.
And from it all, this knowledge have I got,--
The whole, that others have, is less than they have not;
All which makes other women noted fair,
Unnoted would remain and overshone in her.


Finer, in yet a different style, is the poem _To a Poet Breaking
Silence_, of which we may quote the opening lines:--


Too wearily had we and song
Been left to look and left to long,
Yea, song and we to long and look,
Since thine acquainted feet forsook
The mountain where the Muses hymn
For Sinai and the Seraphim.

Now in both the mountains' shine
Dress thy countenance, twice divine!
From Moses and the Muses draw
The Tables of thy double Law!
His rod-born fount and Castaly
Let the one rock bring forth for thee,
Renewing so from either spring
The songs that both thy countries sing:
Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long,
Thou should'st forget thy native song,
And mar thy mortal melodies
With broken stammer of the skies.


Next after these poems of spiritual love come certain odes and lyrical
pieces: one _To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster_, modeled, as to form,
on Marvell's great ode: _A Judgment in Heaven_, in which we are
permitted to see the angels "as they pelted each other with handfuls of
stars"--the most clotted and inchoate poem in the volume; together with
_A Corymbus for Autumn_ and _The Hound of Heaven_ which are the finest
things Thompson has done. Here, with all his extravagance, which passes
from the sublime to the ridiculous with all the composure of a madman,
Thompson has grappled with splendid subjects splendidly. He can, it is
true, say:--


Against the red throb of the sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat;


but he can also say (with a solemn imagery which has its precise meaning
as well as its large utterance):--


I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity,
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again;
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.


Here, as ever, Thompson indulges in his passion for polysyllables--"the
splendent might of thy conflagrate fancies," for example; but forced
words are less out of place in poems which, in the best sense of the
word, are rhapsodies, than in poems such as those on children, which
fill the last section of the book, and in which one may read of "a
silvern segregation, globed complete," of "derelict trinkets of the
darling young," and so forth. The last piece of all, _To Monica Thought
Dying_, is written in downright imitation of Patmore; but how far is it,
in its straining after fine effects of sound, its straining after fine
effects of pathos, from the perfect justice of expression which Patmore
has found in such poems as _The Toys_ and _Poor Child!_ for an equally
perfect sentiment of the pathetic! That a writer who at his best is so
fiery and exuberant should ever take Patmore for a model, should really
try to catch even his tricks of expression, is very curious, and shows,
as much as any other single characteristic, the somewhat external
quality of Thompson's inspiration. A poet with an individuality to
express, seeking for an individual form of expression, could scarcely,
one fancies, have been drawn by any natural affinity so far away from
himself and his main habitudes. Grashaw and Patmore--we come back to the
old antagonism--can a man serve two such masters? Imagine Patmore
rewriting, according to his own standard of composition, _The Flaming
Heart_, or Crashaw treating in his own way the theme of _Deliciae
Sapientiae de Amore!_ Here and there, too, in Thompson's work, are
reminiscences of Rossetti; as here:--


Yea, in that ultimate heart's occult abode
To lie as in an oubliette of God.


And the influence of Shelley is felt from the first line to the last.
Yet, in spite of all this, Thompson has something, unquestionably, of
"fine frenzy," not always quite under his own control; he amazes by his
audacity, and delights by the violence with which he would fain storm
Parnassus. His verse has generally fervor, a certain lyric glow, a
certain magnificence; it has abundant fancy, and its measure of swift
imagination. But the feast he spreads for us is a very Trimalchio's
feast--the heaped profusion, the vaunting prodigality, which brings a
surfeit; and, unlike Trimalchio, it could not be said of him _Omnia domi
nascuntur._

Verse, unless it is in some measure ecstasy, can not be poetry. But it
does not follow that in verse the most fervid ecstasy is the best
poetry. If, indeed, for "fervid" be substituted "fervidly expressed," it
is quite the contrary. Coventry Patmore has pointed out that the sign of
great art is peace, a peace which comes of the serene, angelic triumph
over mortal tumults, and those less essential raptures which are after
all flames of the earth's center. Francis Thompson has the ecstasy; but
unfortunately he has not realized that ecstasy, if it is to be
communicated from the soul to the soul, and not merely from the mouth to
the ear, must be whispered, not shouted.

If a man's style is the man--his innermost self, as we may suppose,
revealing itself in the very words he uses--Thompson, in a more special
sense than almost any other writer, is seen in his language. He is that
strange phenomenon, a verbal intelligence. He thinks in words, he
receives his emotions and sensations from words, and the rapture which
he certainly attains is a rapture of the disembodied word. It is not
that his verse is without meaning, that in taking care of the sound he
allows the sense (poor orphan!) to take care of itself. He has a
meaning, but that meaning, if it has not a purely verbal origin, is at
all events allowed to develop under the direct suggestion of the words
which present themselves to interpret it. His consciousness is dominated
by its own means of expression. And what is most curious of all is that,
while Thompson has a quite recognizable manner, he has not achieved a
really personal style. He has learned much, not always with wisdom, and
in crowding together Cowley, Crashaw, Donne, Patmore, to name but a few
of many, he has not remembered that to begin a poem in the manner of
Crashaw, and to end it in the manner of Patmore, is not the same thing
as fusing two alien substances into a single new substance. Styles he
has, but not style. This very possession by the word has, perhaps,
hindered him from attaining it. Fine style, the style in which every
word is perfect, rises beautifully out of a depth into which words have
never stretched down their roots. Intellect and emotion are the molders
of style. A profound thought, a profound emotion, speaks as if it were
unconscious of words; only when it speaks as if unconscious of words do
the supreme words issue from its lips. Ornament may come afterward: you
can not begin with ornament. Thompson, however, begins with ornament.

Unhappily, too, Thompson's verse is certainly fatiguing to read, and one
of the reasons why it is so fatiguing is that the thought that is in it
does not progress; it remains stationary. About the fragile life which
cries somewhere in its center he builds up walls of many colored bricks,
immuring his idea, hiding it, stifling it. How are we to read an ode of
many pages in which there is no development, not even movement? Stanza
is heaped upon stanza, page is piled upon page, and we end where we
began. The writer has said endless things about something but never the
thing itself. Poetry consists in saying the thing itself.

But this is not the only reason why it is fatiguing to read Thompson's
verse. To read it is too much like jolting in a springless cart over a
plowed field, about noontide, on a hot summer day. His lines, of which
this is typical,--


Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia's grape,


are so packed with words that each line detains the reader. Not merely
does Thompson prefer the line to the stanza or the paragraph, he prefers
the word to the line. He has failed to remember that while two and two
make four, four are not necessarily better than two--that because red is
brighter than gray, red is not necessarily the better color to use
whenever one wants to use a color. He hears the brass in the orchestra
sounding out loudly over the strings and he therefore suppresses the
strings. He has a bold and prolific fancy, and he pampers his fancy; yet
prodigality is not abundance, nor profusion taste. He is without
reticence, which he looks upon as stint or as penury. Having invited his
guests to his feast, he loads their plates with more than they can eat,
forcing it upon them under the impression that to do otherwise is to be
lacking in hospitality.

Yet, after all, the feast is there--Trimalchio's if you will, but
certainly not a Barmecide's. Thompson has a remarkable talent, he has a
singular mastery of verse, as the success of his books is not alone in
proving. Never has the seventeenth-century phrasing been so exactly
repeated as in some of his poems. Never have Patmore's odes been more
scrupulously rewritten, cadence for cadence; Thompson's fancy is
untiring, if sometimes it tires the reader; he has, not exactly at
command, but not beyond reach, an eager imagination. No one can cause a
more vaguely ardent feeling in the sympathetic reader, a feeling made up
of admiration and of astonishment in perhaps equal portions. There are
times when the fire in him bums clear through its enveloping veils of
smoke, and he writes passages of real splendor. Why then does he for the
most part wrap himself so willingly in the smoke?




II


In Francis Thompson's first volume of poems, I pointed out some of the
sources of the so-called originality of all that highly colored
verse--Crashaw, Shelley, Donne, Marvell, Patmore, Rossetti--and I
expressed a doubt whether a writer who could allow himself to be so
singularly influenced by such singularly different writers could be
really, in the full sense of the term, a new poet. The book before me
confirms my doubt. Thompson is careful to inform his readers that "this
poem, though new in the sense of being now for the first time printed,
was written some four years ago, about the same date as the _Hound of
Heaven_ in my former volume." Still, as he takes the responsibility of
printing it, and of issuing it by itself, it may reasonably be assumed
that he has written nothing since which he considers to be of higher
quality.

The book consists of one long and obscure rhapsody in two parts. Why it
should ever begin, or end, or be thus divided, is not obvious, nor,
indeed, is the separate significance of most of the separate pages. It
begins in a lilt of this kind:--


The leaves dance, the leaves sing,
The leaves dance in the breath of Spring.
I bid them dance,
I bid them sing,
For the limpid glance
Of my ladyling;
For the gift to the Spring of a dewier spring,
For God's good grace of this ladyling!


But the rhythm soon becomes graver, the lines charged with a more
heavily consonnated burden of sound, as, for instance, in the opening of
the second part:--


And now, thou elder nursling of the nest,
Ere all the intertangled west
Be one magnificence
Of multitudinous blossoms that o'er-run
The flaming brazen bowl o' the burnished sun
Which they do flower from
How shall I 'stablish _thy_ memorial?


"I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech," the writer adds, with
more immediate and far-reaching truth than he intends. Thompson wilfully
refuses to speak his fellows' speech, in order to speak a polysyllabic
speech, made up out of all the periods of the English language--a speech
which no one, certainly, has employed in just such a manner before, but
which, all the same, does not become really individual. It remains,
rather, a patchwork garb, flaming in all the colors, tricked out with
barbaric jewels, and, for all its emphatic splendor, suggesting the
second-hand dealer's.

In such a poem as _The Hound of Heaven_, in Thompson's former volume,
there was a certain substratum of fine meaning, not obscured, or at all
events not concealed, by a cloud of stormy words. But here I find no
sufficing undercurrent of thought, passion, or reverie, nothing but fine
fragments, splendid lines, glowing images. And of such fragments,
however brilliant in themselves, no fine poetry can consist. Thompson
declares of himself and his verse, with a really fervid sense of his own
ardor:


And are its plumes a burning bright array?
They burn for an unincarnated eye.
A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath
Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure,
Urges me glittering to aerial death,
I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour;
Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny
Obeying of my heart's impetuous might.


Scarcely could a single line express more concisely and more
significantly the truth about Thompson than one of these lines. "Urges
me glittering to aerial death:" how true that is in its confession of
that fatal vagueness of aim, showiness of equipment and the toppling
disaster of it all! Thompson has miscalculated his strength of flight.
He is for ever straining after the heights, and there are moments when
he seems to have reached them. But it is only that he has dazzled and
confused our sight by the trick of some unfamiliar magic. And his magic,
for the most part, is a magic of words. Those suggestions of a rare
poetic vision, which, from the first, seemed nebulous rather than
illuminated, have become little more than verbal sophistries. To have
transposed a phrase until it becomes


To Naiad it through the unfrothing air


satisfies him as though it had been a vision or an invention. The
frigid conceit of


The blushes on existence's pale face


satisfies him as though it were an imaginative conception. And
such combinations of words as


The very hues
Which their conflagrant elements effuse


satisfy him as being effects of appropriate poetic novelty. The _Poems_,
with all their faults, had suggestions of finer possibilities. In
_Sister-Songs_ none of these possibilities is realized. At the most it
is a sort of fantastic world of waters (shall we say, at Thompson's
suggestion?) where,


----like the phantasms of a poet pale,
The exquisite marvels sail:
Clarified silver; greens and azures frail
As if the colours sighed themselves away,
And blent in supersubtile interplay
As if they swooned into each other's arms;
Repured vermilion,
Like ear-tips 'gainst the sun;
And beings that, under night's swart pinion,
Make every wave upon the harbour bars
A beaten yolk of stars.
But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps,
Die out those lovely swarms;
And in the immense profound no creature glides or
creeps.


Francis Thompson's earlier volume of _Poems_ attracted perhaps an undue
amount of attention on account of its gorgeous and unusual qualities of
diction, and a certain exuberant and extravagant fervor of mood. These
are not indeed the characteristics of the highest kind of poetry, but
they are characteristics which impress uncritical persons as being of
the essence of poetic inspiration. To express a small thought by a large
word is always impressive, and a certain excitement in the manner of it
adds greatly to the effect of the performance. Thus, much writing which
is merely feverish and blustering becomes admired for the quality of its
defects, these defects being taken to be extraordinary merits; while
writing which has all the quietness of true perfection passes unobserved
or unrecognized. In particular it is forgotten that the expression of a
thought should be like a well-fitting suit of clothes, following closely
and gracefully the outlines of the body that informs it. Francis
Thompson, alike in his former work and in the work which he has just
brought out, is never content unless his thought is swathed in fold
after fold of variegated drapery, cut after no recognized fashion and
arranged on no consistent or indeed comprehensible plan. Take this
passage, for instance, on page three of _Sister-Songs_:


Now therefore, thou who bring'st the year to birth,
Who guid'st the bare and dabbled feet of May;
Sweet stem to that rose Christ, who from the earth
Suck'st our poor prayers, conveying them to Him;
Be aidant, tender Lady, to my lay!
Of thy two maidens somewhat must I say,
Ere shadowy twilight lashes, drooping, dim
Day's dreamy eyes from us;
Ere eve has struck and furled
The beamy-textured tent transpicuous,
Of webbed coerule wrought and woven calms,
Whence has paced forth the lambent-footed sun.


This is a fair, indeed a favorable, specimen of Thompson's way of
"Making familiar things seem strange." His vocabulary is for the most
part made up of an ingenious, and really novel, selection from the words
that other people are ignorant of, or perhaps avoid if they know them:
"battailously," for instance, or "illuminate and volute redundance,"
which will be found on a single page. He describes himself as a


Wantoner between the yet untreacherous claws
Of newly-whelped existence;


while on another page he tells us:


The hours I tread ooze memories of thee, sweet!


He sees "blossoms mince it on river swells," and notices when


All the fair
Frequence swayed in irised wavers.


All this is surely a very artificial and unnecessary and inelegant way
of expressing very ordinary matters. The same strain after a sort of
exterior heightening of expression appears on every page. Often the
language has a certain magnificence, and it is always employed in the
service of a luxurious fancy, which not infrequently rises to the point
of sheer imagination. But the whole book leaves no enduring impression
on the mind, only the visual memory of flooding words, splashing in
colored waves. As a piece of decoration, in this highly colored kind, it
has qualities of extraordinary brilliance and audacity. And at times,
becoming for a moment a little simpler than its wont, though still
fantastic and freakish, it will present us with an effect like that in
the following lines:


And thou, bright girl, not long shalt thou repeat
Idly the music from thy mother caught;
Not vainly has she wrought,
Not vainly from the cloudward-jetting turret
Of her aerial mind, for thy weak feet,
Let down the silken ladder of her thought.
She bare thee with a double pain,
Of the body and the spirit;
Thou thy fleshly weeds hast ta'en,
Thy diviner weeds inherit!

The precious streams which through thy young lips roll
Shall leave their lovely delta in thy soul.
Where sprites of so essential kind
Set their paces,
Surely they shall leave behind
The green traces
Of their sportance in the mind;
And thou shalt, ere we well may know it,
Turn that daintiness, a poet,--
Elfin-ring
Where sweet fancies foot and sing.


Such work as this comes strangely enough into the midst of contemporary
verse, concerned as that for the most part is with other ends, and
elaborated after quite another fashion. Always interesting, if never
quite satisfying; too crowded, too loaded, rather than, as with most
verse, meager and unfilled; curiously conceived, and still more
curiously wrought out; it holds a unique position in the poetic
literature of the day, if not, in Patmore's words concerning the earlier
volume of _Poems_, "in the prominent ranks of fame, with Cowley and
Crashaw." It is a book which no one else could have written, and in
which no one can fail to admire, with however many reservations, the
"illuminate and volute redundance" of an only too opulent talent.

For it is difficult to avoid the conviction that Thompson deliberately
rejects simplicity, and even, at times, with an elaborate and conscious
search after long and heavily colored words. There is in this book a
translation of Victor Hugo's _Ce qu'on entend sur la Montagne_, a well
known poem in the _Feuilles d'Automne._ In going carefully over
Thompson's version and comparing it word for word with the original, we
have found that where Victor Hugo--not a simple writer--is simple,
Thompson embroiders upon him, and that where he is not simple, Thompson
is always less so. For instance, in the very first couplet we have "let
your tread aspirant rise" for _monté_; a few lines below,


One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicensed to
muse,
Had drooped its wing above the beached margent of
the ooze,


for


----_un jour q'en rêve
Ma pensée abattit son vol sur une grève._


Further on,


The one was of the waters; a be-radiant hymnal
speech!


for


_L'une venait des mers; chant de gloire; hymne heureux!_


And finally,


And I made question of me, to what issues are we here,
Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this
ravelled gear,


in place of


_Et je me demandai pourquoi l'on est ici,
Quel peut être après tout le but de tout ceci._


What could be more significant than this heaping up of long and
extravagant and sometimes feeble words, instead of the direct language
of Hugo, who in this poem, though not without a certain rhetoric, says
exactly what he wants to say, and when, as in the last two lines quoted,
he thinks that an almost bald simplicity will be in place, sets down his
thoughts in terms of an almost bald simplicity? In this translation,
Thompson has betrayed himself; he has allowed his critics to see him at
work, substituting what is roundabout for what is straight-forward; what
is lengthy for what is brief; what is elaborated for what is simple. Has
not a similar process gone on in his own mind--how far consciously one
can not tell--during the writing of his original poems?




III


The news comes to me on a little black-edged card that Francis Thompson
died at dawn on November 13, 1907. He was a Roman Catholic, and we are
asked to pray for his soul. It was a light that death could not put out,
a torch that no wind could blow out in the darkness. From us indeed it
is now turned away, and that little corner of the world to which the
poet gives light is darkened.

For Francis Thompson was one of the few poets now or lately living in
whom there was some trace of that divine essence which we best symbolize
by fire. Emptiness he had and extravagances, but he was a poet, and he
had made of many influences a form of new beauty. Much of his speech,
which has a heaped imagery unique in our time, seems to have learned its
technique from an almost indiscriminate quarrying among old quarries,
and is sometimes so closely copied from that which was fantastically
precise in Crashaw, Donne, Vaughan, that we wonder why it was not a few
centuries ago that some one said:


Life is a coquetry
Of Death, which wearies me,
Too sure
Of the armour;

A tiring-room where I
Death's divers garments try,
Till fit
Some fashion sit.


No one since that time, when "conceits" could convey poetical substance,
has touched so daintily on plain words, giving by the touch some
transfiguring novelty. If it was a style learned, it was a style
perfectly acquired, and at times equal to its original.

Words and cadences must have had an intoxication for him, the
intoxication of the scholar; and "cloudy trophies" were continually
falling into his hands, and half through them, in his hurry to seize and
brandish them. He swung a rare incense in a censer of gold, under the
vault of a chapel where he had hung votive offerings. The incense half
obscures the offerings, and the dim figures of the saints painted on the
windows. As he bows there in the chapel he seems to himself to be in
"reverberant Eden-ways" or higher, at the throne of heaven, borne on
"plumes night-tinctured, englobed and cinctured of saints." Passing
beyond the world he finds strange shapes, full of pomp and wearing
strange crowns; but they are without outline, and his words disguise,
decorate, but do not reveal them.

When he chanted in his chapel of dreams, the airs were often airs which
he had learned from Crashaw and Patmore. They came to life again when he
used them, and he made for himself a music which was part strangely
familiar and part his own, almost bewilderingly. Such reed-notes and
such orchestration of sound were heard no where else; and people
listened to the music, entranced as by a new magic.

When he put these dreams and this music into verse, with a craft which
he had perfected for his own use, the poetry was for the most part a
splendid rhetoric, imaginative and passionless, as if the moods went by,
wrapped in purple, in a great procession. _The Hound of Heaven_ has the
harmonies of a symphony, and there are delicacies among its splendors,
and, among instants of falsely fanciful sentiment, such august moments
as this:


I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity,
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.


It is full of fine and significant symbolism, it is an elaborate pageant
of his own life, with all its miseries, heights, relapses, and flight
after some eternity; but, as he writes it, it turns intellectual, and
the voice is like that of one declaiming his confession. It was not thus
that Christina Rossetti let us overhear a few of the deepest secrets of
her soul.

The genius of Francis Thompson was oriental, exuberant in color woven
into elaborate patterns, and went draped in old silken robes that had
survived many dynasties. The spectacle of him was an enchantment; he
passed like a wild vagabond of the mind, dazzling our sight. He had no
message, but he dropped sentences by the way, cries of joy or pity, love
of children, worship of the Virgin and saints and of those who were
patron saints to him on earth; his voice was heard like a wandering
music, which no one heeded for what it said, in a strange tongue, but
which came troublingly into the mind, bringing it the solace of its old
recaptured melodies. Other poets of his time have had deeper things to
say, and a more flawless beauty; others have put more of their hearts
into their song; but no one has been a torch waved with so fitful a
splendor over the gulfs of our darkness.




COVENTRY PATMORE


The most austere poet of our time, Coventry Patmore, conceived of art as
a sort of abstract ecstasy, whose source, limit and end are that supreme
wisdom which is the innermost essence of love. Thus the whole of his
work, those "bitter, sweet, few and veiled" songs, which are the fruit
of two out of his seventy years, is love-poetry; and it is love-poetry
of a quite unique kind. In the earlier of his two books, _The Angel in
the House_, we see him, in the midst of a scientific generation (in
which it was supposed that by adding prose to poetry you doubled the
value of poetry) unable to escape the influence of his time, desperately
set on doing the wrong thing by design, yet unable to keep himself from
often doing the right thing by accident. In his later book, _The Unknown
Eros_, he has achieved the proper recognition of himself, the full
consciousness of the means to his own end; and it is by _The Unknown
Eros_ that he will love, if it is enough claim to immortality to have
written the most devout, subtle and sublimated love-poetry of our
century.

Patmore tells us in _The Angel in the House_ that it was his intention
to write


That hymn for which the whole world longs,
A worthy hymn in woman's praise.


But at that time his only conception of woman was the conception of
woman as the lady. Now poetry has nothing whatever to do with woman as
the lady; it is in the novel, the comedy of manners, that we expect the
society of ladies. Prose, in the novel and the drama, is at liberty to
concern itself with those secondary emotions which come into play in our
familiar intercourse with one another; with those conventions which are
the "evening dress" by which our varying temperaments seek the disguise
of an outward uniformity; with those details of life which are also, in
a sense, details of costume, and thus of value to the teller of a tale,
the actor on a stage. But the poet who endeavors to bring all this
machinery of prose into the narrow and self-sufficing limits of verse is
as fatally doomed to failure as the painter who works after photographs,
instead of from the living model. At the time when _The Angel_ was
written, the heresy of the novel in verse was in the air. Were there
not, before and after it, the magnificent failure of _Aurora Leigh_, the
ineffectual, always interesting, endeavors of Clough, and certain more
careful, more sensitive, never quite satisfactory, experiments of
Tennyson? Patmore went his own way, to a more ingenious failure than
any. _The Angel in the House_ is written with exquisite neatness,
occasional splendor; it is the very flower of the poetry of convention;
and is always lifting the trivialities and the ingenuities to which, for
the most part, it restricts itself, miraculously near to that height
which, now and again, in such lines as _The Revelation_, it fully
attains. But it is not here, it is in _The Unknown Eros_ alone, that
Patmore has given immortality to what is immortal in perishable things.

How could it be otherwise, when the whole force of the experiment lies
in the endeavor to say essentially unpoetical things in a poetical
manner?


Give me the power of saying things
Too simple and too sweet for words,


was his wise, reasonable, and afterward answered prayer. Was it after
the offering of such a prayer that he wrote of


Briggs,
Factotum, Footman, Butler, Groom?


But it is not merely of such "vulgar errors" as this that we have to
complain, it is of the very success, the indisputable achievement, of
all but the most admirable parts of the poem. The subtlety, the fineness
of analysis, the simplified complexity, of such things as _The Changed
Allegiance_, can scarcely be overpraised as studies in "the dreadful
heart of woman," from the point of view of a shrewd, kindly, somewhat
condescending, absolutely clear-eyed observer, so dispassionate that he
has not even the privilege of an illusion, so impartial that you do not
even do his fervor the compliment of believing it possible that his
perfect Honoria had, after all, defects. But in all this, admirable as
it is, there is nothing which could not have been as well said in prose.
It is the point of view of the egoist, of the "marrying man," to whom


Each beauty blossomed in the sight
Of tender personal regard.


Woman is observed always in reference to the man who fancies she may
prove worthy to be his "predestined mate," and it seems to him his
highest boast that he is


proud
To take his passion into church.


At its best, this is the poetry of "being in love," not of love; of
affection, not passion. Passion is a thing of flame, rarely burning
pure, or without danger to him that holds that wind-blown torch in his
hand; while affection, such as this legalized affection of _The Angel in
the House_, is a gentle and comfortable warmth, as of a hearth-side. It
is that excellent, not quite essential, kind of love which need endure
neither pain nor revolt; for it has conquered the world on the world's
terms.

Woman, as she is seen in _The Angel in the House_, is a delightful,
adorable, estimable, prettily capricious child; demonstrably finite,
capturable, a butterfly not yet Psyche. It is the severest judgment on
her poet that she is never a mystery to him. For all art is founded on
mystery, and to the poet, as to the child, the whole world is
mysterious. There are experts who tell me that this world, and life, and
the flowing of times past into times to come, are but a simple matter
after all: the jarring of this atom against that, a growth by explicable
degrees from a germ perhaps not altogether inexplicable. And there are
the experts in woman, who will explain to me the bright disarray of her
caprices, the strangeness of her moods, the unreason of her sway over
man; assuring me that she is mysterious only because she is not seen
through, and that she can never be seen through because into the depths
of emptiness one can see but a little distance. Not of such is the true
lover, the true poet. To him woman is as mysterious as the night of
stars, and all he learns of her is but to deepen the mystery which
surrounds her as with clouds. To him she is Fate, an unconscious part of
what is eternal in things; and, being the liveliest image of beauty, she
is to be reverenced for her beauty, as the saints are reverenced for
their virtue. What is it to me if you tell me that she is but the
creature of a day, prized for her briefness, as we prize flowers; loved
for her egoism, as we love infants; marveled at for the exquisite and
audacious completeness of her ignorance? Or what is it to me if you tell
me that she is all that a lady should be, infinitely perfect in
pettiness; and that her choice will reward the calculations of a
gentleman? If she is not a flame, devouring and illuminating, and if
your passion for her is not as another consuming and refining flame,
each rushing into either that both may be commingled in a brighter
ecstasy, you have not seen woman as it is the joy of the poet and the
lover to see her; and your fine distinctions, your disentangling of
sensations, your subtleties of interpretation, will be at the best but
of the subject of prose, revealing to me what is transitory in the
eternal rather than what is eternal in the transitory. The art of
Coventry Patmore, in _The Angel in the House_, is an art founded on this
scientific conception of woman. But the poet, who began by thinking of
woman as being at her best a perfect lady, ended by seeing her seated a
little higher than the angels, at the right hand of the Madonna, of whom
indeed she is a scarcely lower symbol. She who was a bright and
cherished toy in _The Angel in the House_ becomes in _The Unknown Eros_
pure spirit, the passionate sister of the pure idea. She is the mystical
rose of beauty, the female half of that harmony of opposites which is
God. She has other names, and is the Soul, the Church, the Madonna. To
be her servant is to be the servant of all right, the enemy of all
wrong; and therefore poems of fierce patriotism, and disdainful
condemnation of the foolish and vulgar who are the adversaries of God's
ordinances and man's, find their appropriate place among poems of tender
human pathos, of ecstatic human and divine love.

And she is now, at last, apprehended under her most essential aspect, as
the supreme mystery and her worship becomes an almost secret ritual, of
which none but the adepts can fathom the full significance.

Vision, in _The Unknown Eros_, is too swift, immediate and far-seeing to
be clouded by the delicate veils of dreams.


Give me the steady heat
Of thought wise, splendid, sweet,
Urged by the great, rejoicing wind that rings
With draught of unseen wings,
Making each phrase, for love and for delight,
Twinkle like Sirius on a frosty night:


that is his prayer, and it was not needful for him to


remain
Content to ask unlikely gifts in vain.


Out of this love-poetry all but the very essence of passion has been
consumed; and love is seen to be the supreme wisdom, even more than the
supreme delight. Apprehended on every side, and with the same
controlling ardor, those "frightful nuptials" of the Dove and Snake,
which are one of his allegories, lead upward, on the wings of an almost
aerial symbolism, to those all but inaccessible heights where mortal
love dies into that intense, self-abnegating, intellectual passion,
which we name the love of God.

At this height, at its very highest, his art becomes abstract ecstasy.
It was one of his contentions, in that beautiful book of prose, _Religio
Poetae_, in which thought is sustained throughout at almost the lyrical
pitch, that the highest art is not emotional, and that "the music of
Handel, the poetry of Aeschylus, and the architecture of the Parthenon
are appeals to a sublime good sense which takes scarcely any account of
'the emotions.'" Not the highest art only, but all art, if it is so much
as to come into existence, must be emotional; for it is only emotion
which puts life into the death-like slumber of words, of stones, of the
figures on a clef. But emotion may take any shape, may inform the least
likely of substances. Is not all music a kind of divine mathematics, and
is not mathematics itself a rapture to the true adept? To Patmore
abstract things were an emotion, became indeed the highest emotion of
which he was capable; and that joy, which he notes as the mark of fine
art, that peace, which to him was the sign of great art, themselves, the
most final of the emotions, interpenetrated for him the whole substance
of thought, aspiration, even argument. Never were arguments at once so
metaphysical and so mystical, so precise, analytic and passionate as
those "high arguments" which fill these pages with so thrilling a life.

The particular subtlety of Patmore's mysticism finds perhaps its
counterpart in the writings of certain of the Catholic mystics: it has
at once the clear-eyed dialectic of the Schoolmen and the august heat of
Saint Theresa. Here is passion which analyzes itself, and yet with so
passionate a complexity that it remains passion. Read, for instance,
that eulogy of "Pain," which is at once a lyric rapture, and betrays an
almost unholy depth of acquaintance with the hidden, tortuous and
delightful way of sensation. Read that song of songs, _Deliciae
Sapientiae de Amore_, which seems to speak, with the tongue of angels,
all the secrets of all those "to whom generous Love, by any name, is
dear." Read that other, interrupted song,


Building new bulwarks 'gainst the infinite,


"_Legem tuam dilexi._" Read those perhaps less quintessential dialogues
in which a personified Psyche seeks wisdom of Eros and the Pythoness.
And then, if you would realize how subtle an argument in verse may be,
how elegantly and happily expressed, and yet not approach, at its
highest climb, the point from which these other arguments in verse take
flight, turn to _The Angel in the House_ and read "The Changed
Allegiance." The difference is the difference between wisdom and worldly
wisdom: wisdom being the purified and most ardent emotion of the
intellect, and thus of the very essence of poetry; while worldly wisdom
is but the dispassionate ingenuity of the intelligence, and thus of not
so much as the highest substance of prose.

The word "glittering," which Patmore so frequently uses, and always with
words which soften its sharpness, may be applied, not unsuitably, to
much of his writing in this book: a "glittering peace" does indeed seem
to illuminate it. The writing throughout is classical, in a sense in
which perhaps no other writing of our time is classical. When he says of
the Virgin:


Therefore, holding a little thy soft breath,
Thou underwent'st the ceremony of death;


or, of the eternal paradox of love:


Tis but in such captivity
The unbounded Heavens know what they be;


when he cries:


O Love, that, like a rose,
Deckest my breast with beautiful repose;


or speaks of "this fond indignity, delight;" he is, though with an
entirely personal accent, writing in the purest classical tradition. He
was accustomed always, in his counsels to young writers, to reiterate
that saying of Aristotle, that in the language of poetry there should be
"a continual slight novelty;" and I remember that he would point to his
own work, with that legitimate pride in himself which was one of the
fierce satisfactions of his somewhat lonely and unacknowledged old age.
There is in every line of _The Unknown Eros_ that continual slight
novelty which makes classical poetry, certainly, classical. Learned in
every meter, Patmore never wrote but in one, the iambic: and there was a
similar restraint, a similar refusal of what was good, but not (as he
conceived) the highest good, all strangeness of beauty, all trouble,
curiosity, the splendor of excess, in the words and substance of his
writing. I find no exception even in that fiercely aristocratic
political verse, which is the very rapture of indignation and wrath
against such things as seemed to him worthy to be hated of God.

Like Landor, with whom he had other points of resemblance, Coventry
Patmore was a good hater. May one not say, like all great lovers? He
hated the mob, because he saw in it the "amorous and vehement drift of
Man's herd to hell." He hated Protestantism, because he saw in it a
weakening of the bonds of spiritual order. He hated the Protestantism of
modern art, its revolt against the tradition of the "true Church," the
many heresies of its many wanderings after a strange, perhaps forbidden,
beauty. Art was to him religion, as religion was to him the supreme art.
He was a mystic who found in Catholicism the sufficing symbols of those
beliefs which were the deepest emotions of his spirit. It was a
necessity to him to be dogmatic, and he gave to even his petulances the
irresistible sanction of the Church.

_Religio Poetae_ contains twenty-three short essays--many of them rather
sermons than essays--on such topics as "Peace in Life and Art, Ancient
and Modern Ideas of Purity, Emotional Art, Conscience, Distinction."
There is nothing which marks it as of the present but an occasional
personality, which we could wish absent, and a persistent habit of
self-quotation. There is absolutely no popular appeal, no extraneous
interest in the timeliness of subject, or the peculiarities of
treatment; nothing, in fact, to draw the notice of the average reader or
to engage his attention. To the average reader the book must be nothing
but the vainest speculation and the dullest theory. Yet, in many ways,
it is one of the most beautiful and notable works in prose that have
appeared in recent years. It is a book, argumentative as it is, which
one is not called on so much to agree with or dissent from as to ponder
over, and to accept, in a certain sense, for its own sake. Patmore is
one of the few surviving defenders of the faith, and that alone gives
him an interesting position among contemporary men of letters. He is a
Christian and a Catholic, that is to say the furthest logical
development of the dogmatic Christian; but he is also a mystic; and his
spiritual apprehensions are so vivid that he is never betrayed into
dogmatic narrowness without the absolution of an evident vision and
conviction. And, above all, he is a poet; one of the most essential
poets of our time, not on account of the dinner-table domesticities of
_The Angel in the House_, but by reason of the sublimated love-poetry of
_The Unknown Eros_, with its extraordinary subtlety of thought and
emotion, rendered with the faultless simplicity of an elaborate and
conscious art. His prose is everywhere the prose of a poet. Thought, in
him, is of the very substance of poetry, and is sustained throughout at
almost the lyrical pitch. There is, in these essays, a rarefied air as
of the mountain-tops of meditation; and the spirit of their pondering
over things, their sometimes remote contemplation, is always, in one
sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth, impassioned. Each essay
in itself may at once be said to be curiously incomplete or fragmentary,
and yet singularly well related as a part to a whole, the effect of
continuity coming from the fact that these are the occasional
considerations of a mind which, beyond that of most men, is consistent
and individual. Not less individual than the subject-matter is the
style, which in its gravity and sweetness, its fine, unforbidding
austerity, its smooth harmony--a harmony produced by the use of simple
words subtly--is unlike that of any contemporary writer, though much
akin to Patmore's own poetic style.

The subjects with which these essays deal may be grouped under three
heads: religion, art and woman. In all Patmore's attitude is intensely
conservative and aristocratic--fiercely contemptuous of popular idols
and ideals, whenever he condescends to notice them. The very daring and
very logical essay on "Christianity and Progress" is the clearest and
most cogent statement of Christianity as an aristocracy, in opposition
to the current modern view of it as a democracy, that has been made
since the democratic spirit made its way into the pulpit. "Let not such
as these," says Patmore,


exalt themselves against the great Masters of the experimental science
of Life, one of whom--St. Theresa, if I remember rightly--declares that
more good is done by one minute of reciprocal communion of love with God
than by the founding of fifty hospitals or of fifty churches.


It is from this point of view that Patmore writes:


Many people doubt whether Christianity has done much, or even anything,
for the "progress" of the human race as a race; and there is more to be
said in defence of such doubt than most good people suppose. Indeed, the
expression of this doubt is very widely considered as shocking and
irreligious; and as condemnatory of Christianity altogether. It is
considered to be equivalent to an assertion that Christianity has
hitherto proved a "failure." But some who do not consider that
Christianity has proved a failure, do, nevertheless, hold that it is
open to question whether the race, as a race, has been much affected by
it, and whether the external and visible evil and good which have come
of it do not pretty nearly balance one another.


It is with the same view of things, from the same standpoint, that Mr.
Patmore states his ideal of the poetic art, and condemns what he
considers the current misconception of the subject. "I may go further,"
he declares, in his vivacious attack on "Emotional Art,"


and say that no art can appeal "to the emotions only" with the faintest
hope of even the base success it aspires to. The pathos of such art (and
pathos is its greatest point) is wholly due to a more or less vivid
expression of a vague remorse at its divorce from truth and order. The
Dame aux Camelias sighs in all Chopin's music over her lost virtue,
which, however, she shows no anxiety to recover, and the characteristic
expression of the most recent and popular school of poetry and painting
is a ray of the same sickly and in the most part hypocritical homage to
virtue. Without some such homage even the dying and super-sensitive body
of "emotional art" loses its very faintest pretensions to the name of
art, and becomes the confessed carion of Offenbach's operas and the
music-hall. Atheism in art, as well as in life, has only to be pressed
to its last consequences in order to become ridiculous, no less than
disastrous; and the "ideal," in the absence of an idea or intellectual
reality, becomes the "realism" of the brothel and the shambles.


What, then, is the ideal, the proper substance and manner of poetry? It
is thus defined in another essay, which contends that "Bad Morality is
Bad Art:"


The poet, as a rule, should avoid religion altogether as a direct
subject. Law, the rectitude of humanity, should be his only subject, as,
from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a
true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music
of verse arises, not from infraction, but inflection of the law of the
set metre, so the greatest poets have been those the modulus of whose
verse has been most variously and delicately inflected, in
correspondence with feelings and passions which are the inflections of
moral law in their theme. Masculine law is always, however obscurely,
the theme of the true poet; the feeling and its correspondent rhythm,
its feminine inflection, without which the law has no sensitive or
poetic life. Art is thus constituted because it is the constitution of
life, all the grace and sweetness of which arise from inflection of law,
not from infraction of it, as bad men and bad poets fancy.


Again from the same standpoint, again with the same absolute and
aristocratic outlook on the world, does Patmore "sing of the nature of
woman"--the subject of his constant preoccupation as an artist, the one
sufficing subject to which he has devoted all his art. The modern woman,
one may suppose, is not likely to appreciate the precise manner in which
Patmore exalts her sex. It is far too logical, too reasonable, too
scrupulously according to nature; thus, for example, in a passage of
characteristically delicate wit:


It is "of faith" that the woman's claim to the honour of man lies in the
fact of her being the "weaker vessel." It would be of no use to prove
what every Christian man and woman is bound to believe, and what is,
indeed, obvious to the senses of any sane man or woman whatever. But a
few words of random comment on the text may, by adding to faith
knowledge, make man and woman--woman especially--more thankful than
before for those conditions which constitute the chief felicity of her
life and his, and which it is one of the chief triumphs of progress to
render ever more and more manifest. The happiest result of the "higher
education" of woman cannot fail to consist in the rendering of her
weakness more and more daintily conspicuous. How much sweeter to dry the
tears that flow because one cannot accede to some demonstrable fallacy
in her theory of variable stars, than to kiss her into conformity to the
dinner-hour or the fitness or unfitness of such-or-such a person to be
asked to a picnic! How much more dulcet the _dulcis Amaryllidis ira_
when Amaryllis knows Sophocles and Hegel by heart, than when her
accomplishments extend only to a moderate proficiency in French and the
pianoforte! It is a great consolation to reflect that, among all the
bewildering changes to which the world is subject, the character of
woman cannot be altered; and that, so long as she abstains from absolute
outrages against nature--such as divided skirts, freethinking,
tricycles, and Radicalism--neither Greek, nor conic sections, nor
political economy, nor cigarettes, nor athletics, can ever really do
other than enhance the charm of that sweet unreasonableness which
humbles the gods to the dust, and compels them to adore the lace below
the last hem of her brocade!


Such, then, and so consistent, is Patmore's attitude in matters of
religion, of art, and of the relation of man and woman. We are concerned
neither to defend nor to contend against it, admitting only that,
granted the premises (which, no doubt, can be taken on certain grave and
ancient warrants), the deductions from those premises are strictly
logical, and at the present day, as novel as they are logical. Patmore
is inclined to be petulant, and he occasionally rides a hobby-horse so
recklessly as to commit himself to incredible fallacies. But a book
which attains perfection has never yet been produced, and Patmore's is
close, very close indeed.




SIR WILLIAM WATSON


Why, I have sometimes asked myself, did not Pater say the right words on
a writer greater than Mérimée--George Meredith? I imagine that he
never admired his novels enough to try his hand on a subject not quite
his own. Certain books, I confess, ought to have been launched at the
British Philistine, like David's one convincing pebble, straight to the
forehead. I confess also (my own fault it was in regard to Meredith)
that to write about Carlyle, Swinburne or Meredith, without
unconsciously reproducing some tricks of manner, is a feat of which any
man might be proud.

_The Egoist_ is a wonderful book, and in its elemental comedy it
challenges Congreve and even Molière; but in the elemental tragedy of
certain parts of _Rhoda Fleming_ and _Richard Feverel_, he challenges
Webster, or almost Shakespeare. Yet the uncouthness that disfigures
certain pages in _Richard Feverel_ is a mere after-taste of Arabian
extravagance. It is a new kind of uncouthness that comes into prominence
in _The Egotist_--that exaggeration of qualities which one sees in the
later works of men who have a pronounced style, even in the case of
Browning. No prose writer of our time has written finer or viler English
than Meredith. It is a mistake to treat him as if he were stylist first,
and novelist afterward, as Flaubert might almost be said to be. Meredith
is a conscious artist always--as conscious as Goncourt, with whom he may
be compared for his experimental treatment of language, his attempt to
express what has never been expressed before by forcing words to say
more than they are used to say. Sometimes they give his message, but
ungraciously, like beaten slaves; sometimes the message seems to go
astray. That is why Englishmen, forgetting triumph after splendid
triumph of style, will sometimes tell you that Meredith can not write
English, just as Frenchmen gravely assure one another that the novels of
the Goncourts are written in any language but French.

That astonishing little volume, _Modern Love and Poems of the English
Roadside_, published in 1862, has never received anything like justice
except at the hands of such a fellow-craftsman as Swinburne. While I for
one can not but feel that Meredith works more naturally, with a freer
hand, in prose than in verse, that poem of _Modern Love_ seems to me
among the masterpieces of contemporary poetry. It is the most distinctly
modern poem ever written. There has been nothing like it in English
poetry: it brings into our literature something fundamentally new,
essentially modern. Side by side with this super-subtle study of passion
and sensation, we have the homely realism of "Juggling Jerry"--a poem
which can only be compared with Burns' "Jolly Beggars" for triumphant
success in perhaps the most difficult kind of literature.

So far I quote from an old article of mine, which was answered by
William Watson. Here is part of his answer, printed in _The Academy_:


Now I should like to ask, what has the British Philistine done that he
should have a book shied at his head in the way Mr. Symons thinks
desirable? As regards Meredith, it seems to me that the British
Philistine has been most exemplary in what he would call the discharge
of his duty. He has tried his very best to read Meredith, and has
failed; or he has read Meredith, but has failed in the attempt to enjoy
him. I fancy, however, that when Meredith's devotees speak of the
British Philistine, they really mean the vast majority of the public,
and it seems to me a little absurd, that because there is an author
whose writings the public are comparatively indifferent to, it should be
constantly assured that the only person not in the least responsible for
such indifference is the author. Other writers have achieved popularity
before Meredith. Perhaps the best proof of the futility of trying to
convert people into an attitude of admiration by "aiming" a book at them
is afforded by Meredith's novels themselves. They are, in Mr. Symons'
sense of the word, "aimed" at the British Philistine, if ever novels
were. He has been pelted through, I do not know how many, volumes--but
have the missiles converted him?


I leave all these questions unanswered, as they deserve no answer, after
Time's verdict on Meredith. Now, what was, and is, the place of Sir
William Watson in literature? The difference between literature and what
is preeminently literary may be clearly illustrated on examination of
his poems. No poems written in our time are more literary. They come to
us asking to be received on account of their legitimate lineal descent
from earlier poets, from Wordsworth and from Matthew Arnold for
instance. "If," says the writer, frankly--


If I be indeed
Their true descendant, as the veriest hind
May yet be sprung of kings, their lineaments
Will out, the signature of ancestry
Leap unobscured, and somewhat of themselves
In me, their lowly scion, live once more.


Many of the poems are about poets, or about books; some are purely
critical. And they are indeed, as they profess to be, in the tradition;
they strike no unfamiliar note to any ears acquainted with the music of
English poetry. Their range is limited, but within it they exhibit an
unquestionable mastery of a particular kind of technique. Few lines are
bad, all are careful, many are felicitous. Every poem has a certain
neatness and order about it. The spirit of the whole work is orderly,
reticent and dignified. Nothing has been left to chance, or to the
appeal of lawless splendors. An artist has been at work. At work on
what? At all events, not on the only really satisfactory material for
the poet--himself. Watson tells us that he has chosen the best of
himself for giving to the world:


I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness for a gift.


Well and good; but has he, in choosing among his selves, chosen really
the essential one, base or not base, ignoble or not ignoble? He has
chosen the self that loves good literature, thinks estimable thoughts,
feels decorous emotions, and sets all this into polished and poetical
verse. That is enough for the making of literary poetry, but not for
poetry which shall be literature.

Watson, in his study of the great writers, seems never to have realized
that what matters chiefly, what tells, is not the great phrase, but the
personality behind the phrase. He has learned from many writers to make
phrases almost as fine as those writers have made; his phrases are never
meaningless in themselves, and they can be exquisite in their form. But
the phrase, coming with nothing but its own significance behind it, a
rootless flower, deriving no life from the soil, fails to convey to us
more than an arid, unsatisfying kind of pleasure. There it is, a
detached thing; to be taken, you may say, for what it is worth; only,
live words will not be so taken. Compare Watson's "Ode to Autumn" with
the "Ode to Autumn" of Keats. The poem is one of Watson's best poems; it
is full of really poetical phraseology. But the ode of Keats means
something in every word, and it means Keats quite as much as autumn.
Watson's poem means neither autumn nor Watson; it represents Watson
setting himself to describe autumn.

Take his "Hymn to the Sea." It is a long piece of exultant rhetoric,
very finely imagined, full of admirable images; the most beautiful
similes are gathered and brought together to represent the sea's
multitudinous moods; but when the poem is finished, and you have admired
it at leisure, you do not feel that this poet loves the sea. The poetry
of Byron is assailable on many sides, but when he wrote those too
rhetorical lines, now hackneyed almost out of recognition, beginning--


Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!


he wrote out of his heart, as nearly as he could, and the lines, faulty
as they are, have remained alive ever since. Mr. Watson's verse is very
much better verse, but will--


Grant, O regal in bounty, a subtle and delicate largess,


come back to men's lips as often, or for as long
a time, as those faulty lines of Byron's?

In his "Apologia," Watson replies to those who have complained that he
has brought nothing new into poetry--


I bring nought new
Save as each noontide or each Spring is new.
Into an old and iterative world.


And he asks--


Is the Muse
Fall'n to a thing of Mode, that must each year
Supplant her derelict self of yesteryear?


But he declines to see that the new thing which every generation rightly
asks of every new poet is by no means "mode," or empty fashion of
writing, but the one essential thing, personality, which can never be
twice the same. The reason why you will not find any two poets writing
in the same way is that every genuine poet has to express himself in his
own way, whether it be by offering his own "baseness for a gift," like
Villon, or by building a new heaven and a new hell, like Dante. The
maker of literature puts this new thing into his work, in the mere act
of making it, and it stands out, as plainly as his signature, in every
line he writes. Not to find it is to have fallen upon work which is but
literary, "books made out of books." Walt Whitman thought that such
"pass away."

In that "Apologia" from which we have already quoted, Watson indignantly
denounces those who think "all Art is cold" if "an ardor not of Eros'
lips" is in it, and he attempts to indicate that state of vision in
which man may know--


A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality.


Does he then,


In silence, in the visionary mood,


reach this ecstatic state? If so, it has left no impression on his
poetry. In his poetry there is no vision, only speculation about vision;
no ecstasy, only a reasonable meditation. He speaks of God, "the Whole,"
the "cosmic descant," and the large words remain empty. In such poems as
_The Unknown God_ and _The Father of the Forest_ we seem to have been
taught a lesson, read out in a resonant, well controlled voice; nothing
has been flashed upon us, we have overheard nothing.

And, indeed, of how little of this poetry can we say, in the words of
Mill's great definition, that it has been overheard! Its qualities,
almost, though not quite, at the best, are the qualities of good
oratory. Watson began by writing epigrams, admirable of their kind, with
a more lyric nineteenth century handling of the sharp eighteenth century
weapon. The epigram lies at the root of his work--that is to say,
something essentially of the quality of prose. He is a Pope who has read
Keats. Oratory or the epigram come into his most characteristic
passages, as in the well known and much admired lines on the greatness
and littleness of man:


Magnificent out of the dust we came
And abject from the Spheres.


Now that, striking and effective as it is, is an antithetical ingenuity
which a really fine poet would have gone out of his way to avoid. It is
oratory, not poetry, and it would make good oratory, for there point has
need of all its sharpness; oratory is action.

It is through this oratorical quality of mind that Mr. Watson's style,
though so ordered and measurably, often leaves an impression of having
been deliberately heightened above the level of ordinary speech. The
great things in poetry are song at the core, but externally mere speech.
Think of some actual, anonymous Elizabethan song, and then read the
piece which Watson has called "Song in Imitation of the Elizabethans."
It is not merely that he has not captured the exact note of the period,
but rather copied the note of a later period; such lines as


Idly clanged the sullen portal,
Idly the sepulchral door,


are not direct speech, and can therefore never become pure song. They
are dressed in poetical phraseology, which is a very different thing.

It is curious to find this quality in a writer who is in every sense so
critical. Behind a great deal of Watson's work there is the critical
intelligence, not the poetical temperament. _Wordsworth's Grave_ is
written in discipleship to Matthew Arnold, and it is not Arnold when he
is at his best--the Arnold of _Sohrab and Rustum_ and _The Sick King in
Bokhara_--that Watson has approached, but that half poet, half prose
writer who wrote the Obermann poems. The foundation of those poems is
prose, and a great deal of their substance is no more than rhymed prose.
But at times the poet flashes out, transfiguring material and form for
the moment, before he drops back into prose again. Watson's work is more
on a level; he neither falls so low nor rises so high. But, even more
than with Arnold, the substance of it is criticism, and the thinking and
the style suggest the best kind of prose. Set the poem, with its finely
chosen epithets and phrases--"Impassioned quietude, Thou wast home, Thou
hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest, the frugal note of Gray," and
the like--beside Pater's essay on Wordsworth, and you will find many
points of resemblance, and not only in the echo of "impassioned
quietude" from Pater's "impassioned contemplation." Compare it with
Matthew Arnold's essay on Wordsworth and you will again find many points
of resemblance, not only in detail, which would not matter, but also in
the whole way of approaching and handling the subject. Does the rhyme
bring in any essential difference between specimens of fine prose and
this poem, so well thought out, so poetically expressed? There lies the
whole question, for if it does not bring such a difference, can it be
accepted as poetry, as an adequate kind of poetry?

Criticism, though it may find place in a poem (as in Shelley's Letter to
Maria Gisborne) can never be the basis of poetry. Pope tried to turn the
current of English poetry into this narrow channel, but the sea-force
soon had its way with the banks and dykes. Watson has tried to revive
that heresy; he has disguised its principles under new terms, but it
remains the same heresy. Poetry is even less a criticism of thought than
it is a "criticism of life," it must be at all points creation, creation
of life, creation of thought, if it is to be poetry in the true sense.

It is to Wordsworth, among many masters, that Watson tells us that he is
most indebted. Wordsworth is not always a safe master, and it is
apparently from him that Mr. Watson has accepted the main principles of
his blank verse. Wordsworth's blank verse was more often bad than good;
it was bad on principle, and good by the grace of a not infrequent
inspiration. At its best, it is not among the great specimens of blank
verse, or not for more than a very few lines at a time. It is without
vitality, it is without that freedom in beauty which can come from
vitality alone. Watson has learned from Wordsworth that it is possible
to write grave and impressive lines, sweeping up to fine perorations, in
which the pauses are measured, not by the vital pulses of the mood, but
by a conscious, cultivated method. Some of Wordsworth's blank verse "The
Prelude," though in itself tame and inefficient, takes hold of the
reader through a personal warmth which makes him almost forget that he
is reading verse at all. But we never feel personal warmth in Mr.
Watson; he succeeds or fails as an artificer, and as an artificer only.

It is probably not too much to say that there is not a cadence in his
verse which has not been heard before. By what miracle it is that out of
the same number and order of syllables no two cadences of Shakespeare
and of Browning, of Keats and of Herrick, of Crashaw and of Blake, can
be precisely matched no man knows or will ever know--least of all the
poet himself. He writes what comes to him, and he may work on his
writing until hardly a word of the original stuff remains; and with all
his care, or in spite of it, the thing turns doggedly into his own
manner of speech, and comes to us with a cadence that we have never
heard before. He may have read much or little, and it will make barely
an appreciable difference. The music that is not learned in books comes
from some unknown source which is as variable as the sea or the wind.
Music learned from books, however much beauty may be breathed into it by
the singer, keeps the taint of its source about it. It is by such music
that the literary artist, not the artist in literature, is known.

William Watson's _Odes and Other Poems_ is remarkable for precisely the
qualities which have distinguished his work since the time when, in
_Wordsworth's Grave_, he first elaborated a manner of his own. That
manner has some of the qualities of eighteenth century verse--its
sobriety, its strictness, its intellectual and critical interests; and
it also has certain of the richer and more emotional elements of the
nineteenth century revival of the Elizabethan passion, and splendor. The
reader is reminded of Gray, of Wordsworth, of Matthew Arnold, at moments
of Keats and of Rossetti. In spite of occasional and unaccountable
blemishes, Watson's work is, in the main, the most careful work of any
of the younger poets. Nor is it lacking in a poetic impulse. It does not
seem to us that this impulse is a very strong one, or one of special
originality, but it is there, undoubtedly; and Watson's verse, unlike
that of most of the people now writing, justifies its existence. Take,
for instance, these opening lines from the ode _To Arthur Christopher
Benson_:


In that grave shade august
That round your Eton clings,
To you the centuries must
Be visible corporate things
And the high Past appear
Affably real and near,
For all its grandiose airs, caught from the mien of
Kings.
The new age stands as yet
Half built against the sky
Open to every threat
Of storms that clamor by:
Scaffolding veils the walls,
And dim dust floats and falls,
As, moving to and fro, their tasks the masons ply.
But changeless and complete,
Rise unperturbed and vast,
Above our din and heat,
The turrets of the Past,
Mute as that city asleep,
Lulled with enchantments deep,
Far in Arabian dreamland built where all things
last.


The grave and equable sweep of this verse, so unlike most of the hot and
flurried rhyming of contemporaries, has the excellence of form which
gives adequate expression to a really poetic conception. Watson takes a
very serious view of things, except in a few attempts at satire or
playfulness, which are not quite fortunate either in idea or in
execution. He has the laudable desire to enter into competition with the
great masters on their own ground. And the result is by no means
ludicrous, as it would be with most people. Only it is a little as if
the accomplished copyist were to challenge comparison with the picture
which he has, after all, copied. Work done in the manner, and under the
influence, of previous writers may indeed, under certain circumstances,
attain the virtue of originality; but only under certain circumstances.
Chatterton, for instance, was original only when he copied, or when he
fancied he was copying; Keats was absolutely himself even at the period
when his form was entirely imitative. The personality of some men can
find no home in the present, can wear no dress of modern fashion; can
express itself only by a return to the ways of speech of an earlier age.
But this sort of spiritual nostalgia can only become effective when it
is a very deep and individual instinct, and not merely a general
literary sympathy. Watson has learned more from his masters than he has
brought to them. We have read his latest book with real appreciation of
its many admirable qualities, but, on closing it, we have no more
definite idea of Watson himself, of what he really is, apart from what
he chooses to express, than we had before opening it. And yet the
greater part of the book, in one sense, is quite personal. He tells us
what he thought of Stevenson's _Catriona_, how he felt in Richmond Park,
and of his friendly regard for one or two estimable men of letters. But
the real man, the real point of view, the outlook on life, the deeper
human sympathies: what do we learn of these? There is, indeed, one poem,
among the finest in the book, in which a touch of more acute personal
feeling gives a more intimate thrill to the verse--the poem called _Vita
Nuova_, of which we may quote the greater part:


O ancient streams, O far-descended woods
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls;
O hills and valleys that adorn yourselves
In solemn jubilation; winds and clouds,
Ocean and land in stormy nuptials clasped,
And all exuberant creatures that acclaim
The Earth's divine renewal: lo, I too
With yours would mingle somewhat of glad song.
I too have come through wintry terrors--yea,
Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul
Have come, and am delivered. Me the Spring
Me also, dimly with new life hath touched,
And with regenerate hope, the salt of life;
And I would dedicate these thankful tears
To whatsoever Power beneficent,
Veiled though his countenance, undivulged his thought,
Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth
Into the gracious air and vernal morn,
And suffers me to know my spirit a note
Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream
And voiceful mountain,--nay, a string, how jarred
And all but broken! of that lyre of life
Whereon himself, the master harp-player.
Resolving all its mortal dissonance
To one immortal and most perfect strain,
Harps without pause, building with song the world.


But this poem stands alone in the volume as an expression of very
interesting personal feeling, the rest being mainly concerned with
generalities.

Like all Watson's volumes of verse, these _Odes and Other Poems_ contain
some excellent literary criticism, conveyed in the neatest and briefest
fashion possible. In fact, Watson's verse is only too full of sane and
measured criticism--an excellent quality no doubt, but hardly one quite
compatible with poetry of a high order. But how fine, how exact, how
discriminating, is this piece of criticism, for instance, in verse!


Forget not, brother singer! that though Prose
Can never be too truthful or too wise,
Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose
Upon Truth's lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.


It was in the epigram that Watson first did finished work, and his most
typical work is certainly to be found in forms more or less akin to the
epigram; in the sonnet, for example. There are so many good sonnets in
this volume that choice is difficult; here is one called "Night on
Curbar Edge":


No echo of man's life pursues my ears;
Nothing disputes this Desolation's reign;
Change comes not, this dread temple to profane,
Where time by aeons reckons, not by years,
Its patient form one crag, sole stranded, rears,
Type of whate'er is destined to remain
While yon still host encamped on night's waste
plain
Keeps armed watch, a million quivering spears,
Hushed are the wild and wing'd lives of the moor;
The sleeping sheep nestle 'neath ruined wall,
Or unhewn stones in random concourse hurled;
Solitude, sleepless, listens at Fate's door;
And there is built and 'stablisht over all
Tremendous silence, older than the world.


The breadth of phrasing here is noticeable; and it is by such qualities
as this, as well as by the careful accuracy with which every note is
produced, that Watson is distinguished alike from older men of the type
of Alfred Austin, and from younger men of such varying capacities as
John Davidson and Yeats. If he has not the making of a great poet, he is
already an accomplished poet; and if he does not possess the highest
qualities, he possesses several of the secondary qualities in the
highest degree.

Watson's _Ode on the Day of Coronation of King Edward the Seventh_ is a
fine piece of verse writing, and can hardly fail to remind the reader of
great poetry. It is constructed with care, it flows, it has gravity, an
air of amplitude, many striking single lines, and its sentiments are
unexceptionable. When we read such lines as these:


All these, O King, from their seclusion dread,
And guarded palace of eternity,
Mix in thy pageant with phantasmal tread,
Hear the long waves of acclamation roll,
And with yet mightier silence marshal thee
To the awful throne thou hast inherited----


we feel that this is at least workman-like work, written by a man who
has studied great masters, and who takes himself and his art seriously.
There is not an undignified line in the whole poem, nor a break in the
slow, deliberate movement. Watson has style, he is never facile or
common. He has frequent felicities of phrase, but he subordinates
separate effects to the effect of the whole, and he is almost the only
living writer of verse of whom this could be said. His ode is
excellently made, from every external point of view. Yet, after reading
it over and over, with a full recognition of its technical qualities, we
are unable to accept it as genuine poetry, as the equal of the thing
which it resembles.

Great poetry is not often written for official occasions, but that it
can be so written we need only turn to Marvell's _Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell's Return from Ireland_ to realize. Watson looks instinctively
to public events for his inspiration, and there is something in his
temper of mind and of style which seems to set him naturally apart as a
commentator upon the destinies of nations. He has never put any vital
part of himself into his work; he has told us nothing of what he is when
he is not a writer. All his utterances have been themselves official,
the guarded statement of just so much of his own thoughts and feelings
as he cares to betray to the public. His kind is rather critical than
creative, and it was by his epigrams that he first attracted attention.
His technique is so accomplished that he seems very often to be thinking
only of what he is saying, when it is evident, on a closer examination,
that he is thinking much more of how he is saying it. For the poet who
concerns himself with public events this might seem to be a useful part
of his poetic equipment. Court ceremonies demand court dress.
Undoubtedly, but the art of the courtier requires him to forget that he
is dressed for an occasion, to forget everything but the occasion.
Throughout the whole of his coronation ode Watson never forgets that he
is celebrating an important ceremony. His costume is perfectly adjusted,
he wears it with grace and dignity; his elocution, as he delivers his
lines, is a model of clearness and discreet emphasis. Everything that he
says is perfectly appropriate; good taste can go no further. But the
occasion itself, the meaning, the emotion, of the occasion? That does
not come into the poem; the poem tells us all about it.

Now look at Marvell's ode, and forget for the moment that it is a
masterpiece of poetry. What a passion fires the hard, convincing
thought! How the mere logic holds the attention! Every word lives, and
the cadences (creating a new form for themselves) do but follow the
motions of the writer's bright, controlling energy. It is impossible to
read the lines aloud without a feeling of exultation. In Watson's ode
there is not a breath of life; what is said--admirable and sensible, and
at times poetically conceived as it is--comes with no impetus from the
mind that has conceived it coldly. And it is to be noted that, though
thought and expression are fitted together with great skill and
precision, the expression is always rather above the pitch of the
thought. Take these lines:


O doom of overlordships! to decay
First at the heart, the eye scarce dimmed at all;
Or perish of much cumber and array,
The burdening robe of empire, and its pall;
Or, of voluptuous hours the wanton prey;
Die of the poisons that most sweetly slay;
Or, from insensate height,
With prodigies, with light
Of trailing angers on the monstrous night,
Magnificently fall.


There we find expression strained to a point to which the thought has
not attained. In other words, we find rhetoric. Weight and resonance of
verse do but drag down and deafen that which they should uplift and
sound abroad, when, instead of being attendants upon greatness, they
attempt to replace it.




EMIL VERHAEREN


The poetry of Emile Verhaeren, more than that of any other modern poet,
is made directly out of the complaining voices of the nerves. Other
writers, certainly, have been indirectly indebted to the effect of
nerves on temperament, but Verhaeren seems to express only so much of a
temperament as finds its expression through their immediate medium. In
his early books _Les Flamandes, Les Moines_ (reprinted, with _Les Bords
de la Route_, containing earlier and later work, in the first of his two
volumes of collected poems), he began by a solid, heavily colored,
exterior manner of painting genre pictures in the Flemish style. Such
poems as "Les Paysans," with its fury of description, are like a Teniers
in verse; not Breughel has painted a kermesse with hotter colors, a more
complete abandonment to the sunlight, wine and gross passions of those
Flemish feasts. This first book, _Les Flamandes_, belongs to the
Naturalistic movement; but it has already as in the similar
commencements of Huysmans so ardent a love of color for its own sake,
color becoming lyrical, that one realizes how soon this absorption in
the daily life of farms, kitchens, stables, will give place to another
kind of interest. And in _Les Moines_, while there is still for the most
part the painting of exteriorities, a new sentiment, by no means the
religious sentiment, but an artistic interest in what is less material,
less assertive in things, finds for itself an entirely new scheme of
color. Here, for instance, was "Cuisson de Pain," in the first book:


_Dehors, les grands fournils chauffaient leurs braises
rouges,
Et deux par deux, du bout d'une planche, les gouges
Dans le ventre des fours engouffraient les pains mous.
Et les flammes, par les gueules s'ouvrant passage,
Comme une meute énorme et chaude de chiens roux,
Sautaient en rugissant leur mordre le visage._


But it is not until _Les Soirs_ that we find what was to be the really
individual style developing itself. It develops itself at first with a
certain heaviness. Here is a poet who writes in images: good; but the
images are larger than the ideas. Wishing to say that the hour was
struck, he says:


"_Seul un beffroi,
Immensément vêtu de nuit, cassait les heures._"


And, indeed, everything must be done _immensément._ The word is
repeated on every page, sometimes twice in a stanza. The effect of
monotony in rhythm, the significant, chiming recurrence of words, the
recoil of a line upon itself, the dwindling away or the heaping up of
sound in line after line, the shock of an unexpected cæsura, the delay
and the hastened speed of syllables: all these arts of a very conscious
technique are elaborated with somewhat too obvious an intention. There
is splendor, opulence, and, for the first time, "such stuff as dreams
are made of." Description is no longer made for its own sake; it becomes
metaphor. And this metaphor is entirely new. It may be called
exaggerated, affected even; but it is new, and it is expressive.


"_Les chiens du désespoir, les chiens du vent d'automne,
Mordent de leurs abois les échos noirs des soirs,
Et l'ombre, immensément, dans le vide, tâtonne
Vers la lune, mirée au clair des abreuvoirs._"


In _Les Débâcles_, a year later, this art of writing in colored and
audible metaphor, and on increasingly abstract and psychological
subjects, the sensations externalized, has become more master of itself,
and at the same time more immediately the servant of a more and more
feverish nervous organization.


"_Tu seras le fiévreux ployé, sur les fenêtres.
D'où l'on peut voir bondir la vie et ses chars d'or._"


And the contemplation of this _fiévreux_ is turned more and more in
upon itself, finding in its vision of the outer world only a mirrored
image of its own disasters. The sick man, looking down on his thin
fingers, can think of them only in this morbid, monastic way:


"_Mes doigts, touchez mon front et cherchez, là,
Les vers qui rongeront, un jour, de leur morsure,
Mes chairs; touchez mon front, mes maigres doigts,
voilà
Que mes veines déjà, comme une meurtrissure
Bleuâtre, étrangement, en font la tour, mes las
Et pauvres doigts--et que vos longs ongles malades
Battent, sinistrement, sur mes tempes, un glas,
Un pauvre glas, mes lents et mornes doigts!_"


Two years later, with _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, what was nervous has become
almost a sort of very conscious madness: the hand on one's own pulse,
the eyes watching themselves in the glass with an unswerving fixity, but
a breaking and twisting of the links of things, a doubling and division
of the mind's sight, which might be met with, less picturesquely, in
actual madness. There are two poems, "Le Roc" and "Les Livres," which
give, in a really terrifying way, the very movement of idea falling
apart from idea, sensation dragging after it sensation down the
crumbling staircase of the brain, which are the symptoms of the brain's
loss of self-control:


_C'est là que j'ai bâti mon âme,
--Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme?--
Mon âme hélas! maison d'ébène,
Où s'est fendu, sans bruit, un soir,
Le grand miroir de mon espoir._

_Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme,
En ce nocturne et angoissant domaine?
Serai-je seul avec mon orgueil noir,
Assis en un fauteuil de haine?
Serai-je seul, avec ma pâle hyperdulie,
Pour Notre-Dame, la Folie?_


In these poems of self-analysis, which is self-torture, there is
something lacerating, and at the same time bewildering, which conveys to
one the sense of all that is most solitary, picturesque and poignant in
the transformation of an intensely active and keen-sighted reason into
a thing of conflicting visionary moods. At times, as in the remarkable
study of London called "Les Villes," this fever of the brain looks
around it, and becomes a flame of angry and tumultuous epithet, licking
up and devouring what is most solid in exterior space. Again, as in "Les
Lois" and "Les Nombres," it becomes metaphysical, abstract, and law
towers up into a visible palace, number flowers into a forest:


_Je suis l'halluciné de la forêt des Nombres._


That art of presenting a thought like a picture, of which Verhaeren is
so accomplished a master, has become more subtle than ever; and


_ces tours de ronde de l'infini, le soir
Et ces courbes, et ces spirales,_


of for the most part menacing speculations in the void, take visible
form before us, with a kind of hallucination, communicated to us from
that (how far deliberate?) hallucination which has created them.
Gradually, in "Les Apparus dans mes Chemins," in "Les Campagnes
Hallucinées," in "Les Villages Illusoires," in "Les Villes
Tentaculaires," the hallucinations become entirely external: it is now
the country, the village, the town, that is to say, the whole organized
world, that agonizes among cloudy phantoms, and no longer a mere
individual, abnormal brain. And so he has at once gained a certain
relief from what had been felt to be too intimately a part of himself,
and has also surrendered to a more profound, because a more extended,
consciousness of human misery. Effacing himself, as he does, behind the
great spectacle of the world, as he sees it, with his visionary eyes, in
his own violent and lethargic country, he becomes a more hopeless part
of that conspiracy of the earth against what man has built out of the
earth, of what man has built out of the earth against the earth, which
he sees developing silently among the grass and bricks. All these books
are a sort of philosophy in symbols, symbols becoming more and more
definite: "Le Donneur de Mauvais Conseils," who drives up to the farm
gate:


_La vieille carriole en bois vert-pomine
Qui l'emmena, on ne sait d'où,
Une folle la garda avec son homme
Aux carrefours des chemins mous.
Le cheval paît l'herbe d'automne,
Près d'une mare monotone,
Dont l'eau malade réverbère
Le soir de pluie et de misère
Qui tombe en loques sur la terre_;


"Les Cordiers," the old man spinning his rope against the sky,
weaving the past into the future:


_Sur la route muette et régulière,
Les yeux fixés vers la lumière
Qui frôle en se couchant les clos et les maisons,
Le blanc cordier visionnaire,
Du fond du soir auréolaire,
Attire à lui les horizons_;


and, finally, the many-tentacled towns, drawing to themselves all the
strength and sap of the earth: "Les Spectacles, La Bourse, Le Bazar,"
the monstrous and material soul of towns.

Contrast these poems with those early poems, so brutal, so Flemish, if
you would see at a glance all the difference between the naturalistic
and the symbolistic treatment. The subject-matter is the same; the same
eye sees; there are the same


_vers bâtis comme une estrade
Pour la danse des mots et leurs belles parades._


But at first there is merely an eye that sees, and that takes the
visible world at its own valuation of itself. Later on, things are seen
but to be readjusted, to be set into relation with other, invisible
realities, of which they are no more than the wavering and tortured
reflection. And with this poet, in his later manner, everything becomes
symbol; the shop, the theater, the bank, no less than the old rope-maker
weaving the horizons together.


_Sur la Ville, d'où les affres flamboient,
Règnent, sans qu'on les voie,
Mais évidentes, les idées_:


as he can write, on the last page of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, which
points directly to _Les Aubes_, in which a sort of deliverance through
ideas is worked out.

Verhaeren's second play, _Le Cloitre_, is much finer in every way than
his first, _Les Aubes_, but it does not convince us that he is a
dramatist, in the strict sense of the word. The only French poet of the
present day who has really vivid energy, his energy is too feverish, too
spasmodic, too little under the control of a shaping intellect, to be of
precisely the quality required for the drama. The people of these brief
and fiery scenes are like little broken bits of the savage forces of the
world, working out their passionate issues under the quiet roofs of the
cloister. All their words are cries, coming out of a half-delirious
suffering; and these cries echo about the stage in an almost monotonous
conflict. It seems to us that the form which suits Verhaeren best is the
form which he has temporarily abandoned--a kind of fiery reverie, seen
finally in his last book, _Les Visages de la Vie_,


_Mon âme était anxieuse d'être elle-même
Elle s'illimitait en une âme suprême
Et violente, où l'univers se résumait;--_


as he says in one of the poems of that book; and in all these poems, "La
Foule, L'Ivresse, La Joie," and the rest, we see the poet sending his
soul into the universe and becoming a vehement voice for all that he
finds most passionate in it. It is, in its way, dramatizing of emotion,
but, if one may say so, an abstract dramatizing. It is the crowd, not
Dom Balthazar; joy itself, not some joyous human being for which he
finds words; and his merits and his defects make him a better spokesman
for disembodied than for embodied souls. Since the early period of
Flemish realism he has been, while making his language more and more
pictorial, making his interests more and more internal. He no longer
paints landscapes, but the scenery of the soul, and in the same vast and
colored images. He magnifies sensation until it becomes a sort of
hallucination of which he seems always to be the victim. Now all this is
so very personal, so clearly the vision of a not quite healthy
temperament, that his neurotic monks in the cloister, with their heated
and vehement speech, seem more like repetitions of a single type than
individual characters. But he has certainly come nearer to dramatic
characterization than in the _Shadowy Dawn_, and he has founded his play
on a more emotionally human basis; on a basis, it would seem, partly
suggested by the story which Browning tells in _Halbert and Hob._ And,
taken as a poem, it is full of vigorous, imaginative writing, in which
the religious passion finds eloquent speech. And, after all, is not this
one of the most interesting, and not even one of the least successful,
attempts at what a more extravagant imitator has lately called _La
tragédie intérieure?_ The actual tendency of art is certainly toward
an abandonment of the heroic and amusing adventures which constituted so
much of the art of the past, and a concentration upon whatever can be
surmised of that soul which these adventures must doubtless have left so
singularly indifferent. Ibsen has shown us destiny quietly at work in
suburban drawing-rooms, among people who have rarely anything
interesting to say, but whose least word becomes interesting because it
is seen to knit one more mesh in the net of destiny. Maeterlinck has
gone further, and shown us soul talking with soul, at first under almost
pseudo-romantic disguises, among Leonardo landscapes, then more and more
simply, as people who have no longer lost their crowns in a pool, but
who, in Aglavaine and Selysette, might be any of our acquaintances, if
we can imagine our acquaintances under a startling and revealing flash
of light. Verhaeren falls into the movement, trying to give a more
lyrical form to this new kind of drama, trying to give it a narrower and
fiercer intensity. What he has so far achieved is a melodrama of the
spirit, in which there is poetry, but also rhetoric. Will he finally be
able to find for himself a form in which the "inner tragedy" can be
externally presented without rhetoric? Then, perhaps, the poetry will
make its own drama.




A NEGLECTED GENIUS: SIR RICHARD
BURTON


I


One hundred years ago, on March 19th, 1821, Sir Richard Burton was born;
he died at Trieste on October 19th, 1890, in his seventieth year. He was
superstitious; the fact that he was born and that he died on the
nineteenth has its significance. On the night when he expired, as his
wife was saying prayers to him, a dog began that dreadful howl which the
superstitious say denotes a death. It was an evil omen; I have heard
long after midnight dogs howl in the streets of Constantinople; their
howling is only broken by the tapping of the bekjé's iron staff; it
sounds like loud wind or water far off, waning and waxing, and at times,
as it comes across the water from Stamboul, it is like a sound of
strings, plucked and scraped savagely by an orchestra of stringed
instruments.

In every age there have been I know not how many neglected men of
genius, undiscovered, misunderstood, mocked at in the fashion Jesus
Christ was mocked by the Jews, scorned as Dante was scorned when he was
exiled from Florence, called a madman as Blake used to be called,
censured as Swinburne was in 1866, for being "an unclean fiery imp of
the pit" and "the libidinous Laureate of a pack of satyrs;" so the
greatest as the least--the greatest whose names are always remembered
and the least whose names are invariably forgotten--have endured the
same prejudices; have been lapidated by the same stones; such stones as
Burton refers to when he writes in Mecca:


On the great festival day we stoned the Devil, each man with seven
stones washed in seven waters, and we said, while throwing the stones,
"In the name of Allah--and Allah is Almighty--I do this in hatred of the
Devil, and to his shame."


Burton was a great man, a great traveler and adventurer, who practically
led to the discovery of the sources of the Nile; a wonderful linguist,
he was acquainted with twenty-nine languages: he was a man of genius;
only, the fact is, he is not a great writer. Continually thwarted by the
English Government, he was debarred from some of the most famous
expeditions by the folly of his inferiors, who ignorantly supposed they
were his superiors; and, as Sir H. H. Johnston says in some of his
notes, not only was Burton treated unjustly, but his famous pilgrimage
to Mecca won him no explicit recognition from the Indian Government; his
great discoveries in Africa, Brazil, Syria and Trieste were never
appreciated; and, worst of all, he was refused the post of British
Minister in Morocco; it was persistently denied him. He adds: "Had he
gone there we might long since have known--what we do not know--the
realities of Morocco."

Still, when Burton went to India, I do not imagine he was likely to
suffer from any hostility on the part of the natives nor of the rulers.
Lord Clive, who, in Browning's words, "gave England India," which was
the result of his incredible victory in 1751 over the Nabob's army of
60,000 men, was never literally "loved" by the races of India; no more
than Sir Warren Hastings. Still, Clive had genius, which he showed in
the face of a bully he caught cheating at cards and in his mere shout at
him: "You did cheat, go to Hell!" Impeached for the splendid service he
had done in India he was acquitted in 1773; next year, having taken to
opium, his own hand dealt himself his own doom. So he revenged himself
on his country's ingratitude. So did Burton revenge himself--not in
deeds, but in words, words, if I may say so, that are stupendous. "I
struggled for forty-seven years, I distinguished myself honourably in
every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a 'Thank you,'
nor a single farthing. I translated a doubtful book in my old age, and I
immediately made sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of
England, we need never be without money."

Burton first met Swinburne in 1861 at Lord Houghton's house, who, having
given him _The Queen Mother_, said: "I bring you this book because the
author is coming here this evening, so that you may not quote him as an
absurdity to himself." In the summer of 1865 Swinburne saw a great deal
of Burton. These two men, externally so dissimilar, had taken (as
Swinburne said to me) a curious fancy, an absolute fascination, for each
other. Virile and a mysterious adventurer, Burton was Swinburne's senior
by sixteen years; one of those things that linked them together was
certainly their passionate love of literature. Burton had also--which
Swinburne might perhaps have envied--an almost unsurpassable gift for
translation, which he shows in his wonderful version of _The Arabian
Nights._ He used to say:


I have not only preserved the spirit of the original, but the
_mécanique._ I don't care a button about being prosecuted, and if the
matter comes to a fight, I will walk into court with my Bible and my
Shakespeare and my Rabelais under my arm, and prove to them that before
they condemn me, they must cut half of _them_ out, and not allow them to
be circulated to the public.


In his Foreword to the first volume of his Translation, dated
Wanderers' Club, August 15th, 1885, he says:


This work, laborious as it may appear, has been to me a labor of love,
an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long years of
official banishment to the luxurious and deadly deserts of Western
Africa, it proved truly a charm, a talisman against ennui and
despondency. The Jinn bore me at once to the land of my predilection,
Arabia. In what is obscure in the original there are traces of Petronius
Arbiter and of Rabelais; only, subtle corruption and covert
licentiousness are wholly absent.


Therefore, in order to show the wonderful quality of his translation, I
have chosen certain of his sentences, which literally bring back to me
all that I have felt of the heat, the odor and the fascination of the
East.


So I donned my mantilla, and, taking with me the old woman and the
slave-girl, I went to the Khan of the merchants. There I knocked at the
door and out came two white slave-girls, both young, high-bosomed
virgins, as they were Moons. They were melting a perfume whose like I
had never before smelt; and so sharp and subtle was the odor that it
made my senses drunken as with strong wine. I saw there also two great
censers each big as a mazzar bowl, flaming with aloes, nard, perfumes,
ambergris and honied scents; and the place was full of their fragrance.


The next quotation is from the Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinn:


He loosened the lid from the jar, he shook the vase to pour out whatever
might be inside. He found nothing in it; whereat he marvelled with an
exceeding marvel. But presently there came forth from the jar a smoke
which spread heavenwards into ether (whereat again he marvelled with
mighty marvel) and which trailed along earth's surface till presently,
having reached its full height, the thick vapors condensed, and became
an Ifrit, huge of bulk, whose crest touched the clouds when his feet
were on the ground.


I have before me Smithers' privately printed edition (1894) of _The
Carmina of Valerius Catullus now first completely Englished into Verse
and Prose, the Metrical Part by Capt. Sir Richard Burton, and the Prose
Portion by Leonard C. Smithe._ Burton is right in saying that "the
translator of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of tone,
manner and complexion will not neglect the frequent opportunities of
enriching his mother-tongue with novel and alien ornaments which shall
justify the accounted barbarisms until formally naturalized and adopted.
He must produce an honest and faithful copy, adding nought to the sense
or abating aught of its _cachet._" He ends his Foreword: "As discovery
is mostly my mania, I have hit upon a bastard-urging to indulge it, by a
presenting to the public of certain classics in the nude Roman poetry,
like the Arab, and of the same date."

Certainly Burton leaves out nothing of the nakedness that startles one
in the verse of Catullus: a nakedness that is as honest as daylight and
as shameless as night. When the text is obscene his translation retains
its obscenity; which, on the whole, is rare: for the genius of Catullus
is elemental, primitive, nervous, passionate, decadent in the modern
sense and in the modern sense perverse. In his rhymed version of the
Attis Burton has made a prodigious attempt to achieve the impossible.
Not being a poet, he was naturally unable to follow the rhythm--the
Galliambic metre, in which Catullus obtains variety of rhythm; for, as
Robinson Ellis says:


It remains unique as a wonderful expression of abnormal feeling in a
quasi-abnormal meter. Quasi-abnormal, however, only: for no poem of
Catullus follows stricter laws, or succeeds in conveying the idea of a
wild freedom under a more carefully masked regularity.


As one must inevitably compare two translations of the same original, I
have to point out that Burton's rendering is, both metrically and
technically, inaccurate; whereas, in another rendering, the translator
has at least preserved the exact metre, the exact scansion, and the
double endings at the end of every line; not, of course, in this case,
employing the double rhymes Swinburne used in his translation from
Aristophanes. These are Burton's first lines:--


O'er high deep seas in speedy ship his voyage Atys sped
Until he trod the Phrygian grove with hurried, eager
tread,
And as the gloomy tree-shorn stead, the she-God's
home he sought,
There sorely stung with fiery ire and madman's raging
thought,
Share he with sharpened flint the freight wherewith
his frame was fraught.


These are the first lines of the other version:--


Over ocean Attis sailing in a swift ship charioted
When he reached the Phrygian forests, and with rash
foot violently
Trod the dark and shadowy regions of the goddess,
wood-garlanded,
And with ravening madness ravished, and his reason
abandoning him,
Seized a pointed flint and sundered from his flesh his
virility.




II


Burton himself admitted that he was a devil; for, said he: "the Devil
entered into me at Oxford." Evidently, also, besides his mixture of
races, he was a mixture of the normal and the abnormal; he was perverse
and passionate; he was imaginative and cruel; he was easily stirred to
rage. Nearly six feet in height, he had, together with his broad
shoulders, the small hands and feet of the Orientals; he was Arab in his
prominent cheek-bones; he was gypsy in his terrible, magnetic eyes--the
sullen eyes of a stinging serpent. He had a deeply bronzed complexion, a
determined mouth, half-hidden by a black mustache, which hung down in a
peculiar fashion on both sides of his chin. This peculiarity I have
often seen in men of the wandering tribe in Spain and in Hungary.
Wherever he went he was welcomed by the gypsies; he shared with them
their horror of a corpse, of death-scene, and of graveyards. "He had the
same restlessness," wrote his wife, "which could stay nowhere long nor
own any spot on earth. Hagar Burton, a Gypsy woman, cast my horoscope,
in which she said: 'You will bear the name of our Tribe, and be right
proud of it. You will be as we are, but far greater than we.' I met
Richard two months later, in 1856, and was engaged to him." It is a
curious fact that John Varley, who cast Blake's horoscope in 1820, also
cast Burton's; who, as he says, had finished his _Zodiacal Physiognomy_
so as to prove that every man resembled after a fashion the sign under
which he was born. His figures are either human or bestial; some remind
me of those where men are represented in the form of animals in Giovanni
della Porta's _Fisonomia dell' Huomo_ (Venice, 1668), which is before me
as I write; Swinburne himself once showed to me his copy of the same
book. Nor have I ever forgotten his saying to me--in regard to Burton's
nervous fears: "The look of unspeakable horror in those eyes of his gave
him, at times, an almost unearthly appearance." He added: "This reminds
me of what Kiomi says in Meredith's novel: 'I'll dance if you talk of
dead people,' and so begins to dance and to whoop at the pitch of her
voice. I suppose both had the same reason for this force of fear: to
make the dead people hear." Then he flashed at me this unforgettable
phrase: "Burton had the jaw of a Devil and the brow of a God."

In one of his letters he says, I suppose by way of _persiflage_ in
regard to himself and Burton: "_En moi vous voyez Les Malheurs de la
Virtu, en lui Les Prospérités du Vice._" In any case, it is to
entertain Burton when he writes: "I have in hand a scheme of mixed verse
and prose--a sort of étude à la Balzac _plus_ the poetry--which I
flatter myself will be more offensive and objectionable to Britannia
than anything I have done: _Lesbia Brandon._ You see I have now a
character to keep up, and by the grace of Cotytto I will."

Swinburne began _Lesbia Brandon_ in 1859; he never finished it; what
remains of it consists of seventy-three galleys, numbered 25 to 97,
besides four unprinted chapters. The first, "A Character," was written
in 1864; "An Episode" in 1866; "Turris Eburnea" in 1886; "La Bohême
Dédorée" must have been written a year or two later. Mr. Gosse gives a
vivid description of Swinburne, who was living in 13, Great James
Street, and who was never weary of his unfinished novel, reading to him
parts of two chapters in June, 1877. "He read two long passages, the one
a ride over a moorland by night, the other the death of his heroine,
Lesbia Brandon. After reading aloud all these things with amazing
violence, he seemed quite exhausted." It is possible to decipher a few
sentences from two pages of his manuscript; first in "Turris Eburnea.
'Above the sheet, below the boudoir,' said the sage. Her ideal was
marriage, to which she clung, which revealed to astonished and admiring
friends the vitality of a dubious intellect within her. She had not even
the harlot's talent of discernment." This is Leonora Harley. In _La
Bohême Dédorée_ we read:


Two nights later Herbert received a note from Mr. Linley inviting him to
a private supper. Feverish from the contact of Mariani and hungry for a
chance of service, he felt not unwilling to win a little respite from
the vexation of patience. The sage had never found him more amenable to
the counsel he called reason. Miss Brandon had not lately crossed his
ways. Over their evening Leonora Harley guided with the due graces of
her professional art. It was not her fault if she could not help asking
her younger friend when he had last met a darker beauty: she had seen
him once with Lesbia.




III


In 1848 Burton determined to pass in India for an Oriental; the disguise
he assumed was that of a half-Arab, half-Iranian, thousands of whom can
be met along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. He set out on his
first pilgrimage as Mirza Abdulla the Bushiri, as a _buzzaz_, vendor of
fine linen, muslins and _bijouterie_; he was admitted to the harems, he
collected the information he required from the villagers; he won many
women's hearts, he spent his evenings in the mosques; and, after
innumerable adventures, he wended his way to Mecca. His account of this
adventure is thrilling. The first cry was: "Open the way for the Haji
who would enter the House!" Then:


Two stout Meccans, who stood below the door, raised me in their arms,
whilst a third drew me from above into the building. At the entrance I
was accosted by a youth of the Benu Shazban family, the true blood of
the El Hejaz. He held in his hand the huge silver-gilt padlock of the
Ka'abeh, and presently, taking his seat upon a kind of wooden press in
the left corner of the hall, he officially inquired my mother-nation and
other particulars. The replies were satisfactory, and the boy Mohammed
was authoritatively ordered to conduct me round the building and to
recite the prayers. I will not deny that, looking at the windowless
walls, the officials at the door, and a crowd of excited fanatics
below--


"And the place death, considering who I was,"

my feelings were those of the trapped-rat description, acknowledged by
the immortal nephew of his uncle Perez. A blunder, a hasty action, a
misjudged word, a prayer or bow, not strictly the right shibboleth, and
my bones would have whitened the desert sand. This did not, however,
prevent my carefully observing the scene during our long prayer, and
making a rough plan with a pencil upon my white _ihram._


After having seen the howling Dervishes in Scutari in Asia, I can
imagine Burton's excitement when in Cairo he suddenly left his stolid
English friends, joined in the shouting, gesticulating circle, and
behaved as if to the manner born: he held his diploma as a master
Dervish. In Scutari I felt the contagion of these dancers, where the
brain reels, and the body is almost swept into the orgy. I had all the
difficulty in the world from keeping back the woman who sat beside me
from leaping over the barrier and joining the Dervishes. In these I felt
the ultimate, because the most animal, the most irrational, the most
insane, form of Eastern ecstasy. It gave me an impression of witchcraft;
one might have been in Central Africa, or in some Saturnalia of
barbarians.

There can be no doubt that Burton always gives a vivid and virile
impression of his adventures; yet, as I have said before, something is
lacking in his prose; not the vital heat, but the vision of what is
equivalent to vital heat. I have before me a letter sent from Hyderabad
by Sarojini Naidu, who says: "All is hot and fierce and passionate,
ardent and unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and
love. And, do you know, the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from
my heart's blood, those quivering little birds are my soul made
incarnate music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into
aerial essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the 'Very You' that
part of me that incessantly and insolently, yes, and a little
deliberately, triumphs over that other part--a thing of nerves and
tissues that suffers and cries out, and that must die tomorrow perhaps,
or twenty years hence." In these sentences the whole passionate, exotic
and perfumed East flashes before me--a vision of delight and of
distresses--and, as it were, all that slumbers in their fiery blood.

"Not the fruit of experience," wrote Walter Pater, "but experience
itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given us of a
variegated dramatic life. To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame,
to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Alas, how few lives out
of the cloud-covered multitude of existences have burned always with
this flame! I have said somewhere that we can always, in this world, get
what we want if we will it intensely enough. So few people succeed
greatly because so few people can conceive a great end, and work toward
that without tiring and without deviating. The adventurer of whom I am
writing failed, over and over again, in spite of the fact that he
conceived and could have executed great ends: never by his own fault,
always by the fault of others.




IV


Richard Burton dedicated his literal version of the epic of Camões "To
the Prince of the Lyric Poets of his Day, Algernon Charles Swinburne."
He begins:


My dear Swinburne, accept the unequal exchange--my brass for your gold.
Your _Poems and Ballads_ began to teach the Philistine what might there
is in the music of language, and what marvel of lyric inspiration, far
subtler and more ethereal than poetry, means to the mind of man.


In return for this Swinburne dedicated to him _Poems and Ballads_,
Second Series.


Inscribed to Richard F. Burton in redemption of an old pledge and in
recognition of a friendship which I must always count among the highest
honors of my life.


It was nine years before then, when they were together in the south of
France, that Swinburne was seized by a severe illness; and, as he
assured me, it was Burton who, with more than a woman's care and
devotion, restored him to health. The pledge--it was not the covenant
sealed between the two greatest, the two most passionate, lovers in the
world, Iseult and Tristan, on the deck of that ship which was the ship
of Life, the ship of Death, in the mere drinking of wine out of a
flagon, which, being of the nature of a most sweet poison, consumed
their limbs and gave intoxication to their souls and to their
bodies--but a pledge in the wine Swinburne and Burton drank in the hot
sunshine:--


For life's helm rocks to windward and lee,
And time is as wind, and waves are we,
And song is as foam that the sea-waves fret,
Though the thought at its heart should be deep as the
sea.


It was in July, 1869, that Swinburne joined the Burtons and Mrs.
Sartoris at Vichy. As I have never forgotten Swinburne's wonderful
stories about Burton--besides those on Rossetti and Mazzini--I find in a
letter of his to his mother words he might really have altered.


If you had seen him, when the heat and the climb and the bothers of
travelling were too much for me--in the very hot weather--helping,
waiting on me--going out to get me books to read in bed--and always
kind, thoughtful, ready, and so bright and fresh that nothing but a
lizard (I suppose that is the most insensible thing going) could have
resisted his influence--I feel sure you would like him (you remember you
said you didn't) and then--love him, as I do. I never expect to see his
like again--but him I do hope to see again, and when the time comes to
see him at Damascus as H.B.M. Consul.


They traveled in carriages, went to Clermont-Ferrand, where Pascal was
born; then to Le Puy-en-Velay. In 1898 I stayed with the Countess De la
Tour in the Château de Chaméane, Puy de Dôme, and after leaving her I
went to Puy-en-Velay. I hated it, the Burtons did not. Stuck like a
limpet on a rock, the main part of the town seems to be clinging to the
side of the hill on which the monstrous statue desecrates the sky. At
night I saw its gilt crown merge into a star, but by day it is
intolerably conspicuous, and at last comes to have an irrational
fascination, leading one to the very corners where it can be seen best.
And always, do what you will, you can not get away from this statue. It
spoils the sky. The little cloister, with its ninth-century columns, is
the most delightful spot in Le Puy; only the intolerable statue from
which one can not escape showed me nature and humanity playing pranks
together, at their old game of parodying the ideal. This is Swinburne's
comment:--


Set far between the ridged and foamless waves
Of earth more fierce and fluctuant than the sea,
The fearless town of towers that hails and braves,
The heights that gild, the sun that brands Le Puy.


This year there has been a great Pardon at Le Puy. I have seen several
pilgrimages, in Moscow, for instance, at Serjevo, which is an annual
pilgrimage to the Troitsa Monastery, and in these people there was no
fervor, no excitement, but a dogged desire of doing something which they
had set out to do. They were mostly women, and they flung themselves
down on the ground; they lay there with their hands on their bundles,
themselves like big bundles of rags. How different a crowd from this
must have assembled at Le Puy; made so famous so many centuries ago by
the visitations of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, who left, in 1254, in
the Cathedral a little image of Horns and Isis. Then there was Jeanne
d'Arc, who in 1429 sent her mother there instead of herself, being much
too busy: she was on the way to Orléans.

As it is, Our Lady gets all the honors; only, there is a much older
Chapel of Saint Michael, which is perched on the sheer edge of a rock;
it is perhaps more original than any in France, with the exception of
the Chapel of Saint Bonizel in Avignon. When I stood there and looked
down from that great height I remembered--but with what a
difference!--Montserrat in Spain, where the monastery seemed a part of
the mountain; and from this narrow ledge between earth and heaven, a
mere foothold on a great rock, I looked up only at sheer peaks, and down
only into veiled chasms, or over mountainous walls to a great plain,
ridged as if the naked ribs of the earth were laid bare.




V


I have been assured, by many who knew him, that Richard Burton had a
vocabulary which was one of his inventions; a shameless one--as
shameless as the vocabularies invented by Paul Verlaine and by Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec, which are as vivid to me as when I heard their
utterance. These shared with Villiers de Isle-Adam that sardonic humor
which is not so much satire as the revenge of beauty on ugliness, the
persecution of the ugly: the only laughter of our generation which is as
fundamental as that of Rabelais and of Swift. Burton, who had much the
same contempt for women that Baudelaire imagined he had, only with that
fixed stare of his that disconcerted them, did all that with deliberate
malice. There was almost nothing in this world that he had not done,
exulted in, gloried in. Like Villiers, he could not pardon stupidity; to
both it was incomprehensible; both saw that stupidity is more criminal
than even vice, if only because stupidity is incurable, if only because
vice is curable. Burton, who found the Arabs, in their delicate
depravity, ironical--irony being their breath of life--might have said
with Villiers: "_L'Esprit du Siècle, ne l'oublions pas, est aux
machines._"

Every individual face has as many different expressions as the soul
behind it has moods; therefore, the artist's business is to create on
paper, or on his canvas, the image which was none of these, but which
those helped to make in his own soul. I see, as it were, surge before me
an image of Swinburne in his youth, when, with his passionate and pale
face, with its masses of fiery hair, he has almost the aspect of
Ucello's Galeazzo Malatesta. Burton's face has no actual beauty in it;
it reveals a tremendous animalism, an air of repressed ferocity, a
devilish fascination. There is almost a tortured magnificence in this
huge head, tragic and painful, with its mouth that aches with desire,
with those dilated nostrils that drink in I know not what strange
perfumes.




EDGAR SALTUS


Edgar Saltus owes much of his bizarre talent to his mixed origin, for he
is of Dutch and American extraction; indeed, for much of what I might
call his rather unholy genius. His pages exhale a kind of exotic and
often abnormal perfume of colors, color of sensations, of heats, of
crowded atmospheres. He gives his women baneful and baleful names, such
as Stella Sixmouth, Shorn Wyvell; these vampires and wicked creatures
who ruin men's lives as cruelly as they ruin their own. His men have
prodigious nerves, even more than his women; they commit all sorts of
crimes, assassinations, poisonings, out of sheer malice and out of
overexcited imaginations.

Of that most terrible of tragedies, the tragedy of a soul, he is for the
most part utterly unconscious; and the very abracadabra of his art is in
a sense--a curious enough and ultramodern sense--lifted from the
Elizabethan dramatists. In them--as in many of his pages--a fine
situation must have a murder in it, and some odious character removed by
another more stealthy kind of obliteration. But, when he gives one a
passing shudder, he leaves nothing behind it; yet in his perverted
characters there can be found sensitiveness, hallucinations, obsessions;
and some have that lassitude which is more than mere contempt. Some go
solemnly on the path of blood, with no returning by a way so thronged
with worse than memories. "No need for more crime," such men have cried,
and for such reasons reaped the bitter harvest of tormenting dreams.
Some have imagination that stands in the place of virtue; some, as in
the case of Lady Macbeth, still keep the sensation of blood on their
guilty hands.

_Mary of Magdala_ (1891) is a vain attempt to do what Flaubert had done
before Saltus in his _Hérodias_, and what Wilde has done after him in
_Salome_, a drama that has a strange not easily defined fascination,
which I can not dissociate from Beardsley's illustrations, in which what
is icily perverse in the dialogue (it can not be designated drama)
becomes in the ironical designs pictorial, a series of poses. To Wilde
passion was a thing to talk about with elaborate and colored words.
Salome is a doll, as many have imagined her, soulless, set in motion by
some pitiless destiny, personified momentarily by her mother; Herod is a
nodding mandarin in a Chinese grotesque.

In one page of Saltus's _Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impressions_ (1917) he
evokes, with his cynical sense of the immense disproportion of things in
this world and the next, the very innermost secret of Wilde. They dine
in a restaurant in London and Wilde reads his MS. "Suddenly his eyes
lifted, his mouth contracted, a spasm of pain--or was it dread?--had
gripped him, a moment only. I had looked away. I looked again. Before me
was a fat pauper, florid and over-dressed, who in the voice of an
immortal, was reading the fantasies of the damned. In his hand was a
manuscript, and we were supping on _Salome._"

_Mr. Incoul's Misfortune_ seems to have its origin in some strange story
of Poe's; for it gives one the sense of a monster, diabolical, inhuman,
malevolent and merciless, who, after a mock marriage, abnormally sets
himself to the devil's business of ruining his wife's lover's life, and
of giving his wife a sudden death in three hideous forms: a drug to make
her sleep, the gas turned on; and the door locked with "a nameless
instrument."

_The Truth about Tristan Varick_ (1888) is based on social problems of
the most unaccountable kind. It has something strangely convincing in
both conception and execution; it has suspense, ugly enough and uglier
crises; and that the unlucky Varick is supposed to be partially insane
is part of the finely woven plot, which is concerned with strange and
perilous incidents and accidents; and which is based on his passionate
pursuit of the ravishing Viola Raritan; the pursuit, really, of the
chimera of his imagination.

And among the hazards comes one, of an evil kind--such as I have often
experienced in foreign cities--that, in turning down one street instead
of the next, a man's existence, and not his only, may be thereby
changed. To have stopped one's rival's lying mouth and his lying life at
the same instant is to have done something original--it is done by a
poisoned pin's point. Then, this Orestes having found no Electra to
return his love, but finding her vile, he lets himself disappear out of
life in an almost incredible fashion, leaving the woman who never loved
him to say, "I will come to see him sentenced:" a sentence which writes
her down a modern Clytemnestra.

What Saltus says of Gonfallon can almost be said of Saltus: "With a set
of people that fancied themselves in possession of advanced views and
were still in the Middle Ages, he achieved the impossible: he not only
consoled, he flattered, he persuaded and fascinated as well." Saltus can
not console, he can sometimes persuade; but he can flatter and fascinate
his public, as with


A breeze of fame made manifest.


The novelist is the comedian of the pen: it is his duty to amuse, to
entertain--or else to hold his peace: to one in his trade nothing
imaginable comes amiss. It is not sin that appeals him, but the
consequences of sin; such as the fact that few sinners have ever turned
into saints. In a word, he writes with his nerves.

Take, for instance, _A Transaction of Hearts_ (1887), one of the
queerest novels ever written and written with a kind of deliberate
malice. Gonfallon, who becomes a bishop, falls passionately in love with
an ardent and insolent girl who is his wife's sister; and before her
beauty everything vanishes: virtue, genius, everything. "For a second
that was an eternity he was conscious of her emollient mouth on his, her
fingers intertwined with his own. For that second he really
lived--perhaps he really lived." One wonders why Saltus uses so many
ugly phrases--a kind of decadent French fashion of transposing words;
such as the one I have quoted, together with "Ruedelapaixia" (meant to
describe a dress), "Rafflesia, Mashed grasshoppers baked in saffron;"
phrases chosen at random which are too frequently scattered in much too
obvious a profusion over much too luxurious pages. I read somewhere that
Oscar Wilde said to Amélie Rives: "In Edgar Saltus's work passion
struggles with grammar on every page," which is certainly one of Wilde's
finest paradoxes. I "cap this"--as Dowson often said to me in jest--with
Léon Bloy's admirable phrase on Huysmans: "That he drags his images by
the heels or the hair upside down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified
syntax."

_Imperial Purple_ (1906) shows the zenith of Saltus's talent, not in
conceiving imaginary beings, but in giving modern conceptions of the
most amazing creatures in the Roman Decadence, and in lyrical prose,
which ought to have had for motto Victoria's stanza:--


_Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs,
En composant des acrostiches indolents,
D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse._


Only Saltus is not Tacitus, in spite of having delved into his
pages.




RECOLLECTIONS OF RÉJANE


NOTES ON THE ART OF THE GREAT FRENCH
ACTRESS


Meilhac's play, _Ma Cousine_, which owed most of its success, when it
was produced at the Variétés, October 27th, 1890, to the acting of
Réjane, is one of those essentially French plays which no ingenuity can
ever accommodate to an English soil. It is the finer spirit of farce, it
is meant to be taken as a kind of intellectual exercise; it is human
geometry for the masses. There are moments when the people of the play
are on the point of existing for themselves, and have to be brought
back, put severely in their places, made to fit their squares of the
pattern. The thing as a whole has no more resemblance to real life than
Latin verses have to a school-boy's conversation. Reality, that, after
all, probably holds us in it, comes into it accidentally, in the form of
detail, in little touches of character, little outbursts of temperament.
The rest is done after a plan, it is an entanglement by rule; it exists
because people have agreed to think that they like suspense; the
tantalization of curiosity on the stage. We see the knot tied by the
conjurer; we want to know what he will do with it. In France, and in
such a piece as _Ma Cousine_, the conjurer is master of his trade; he
gives us our illusions and our enlightenment in exactly the right doses.

And Réjane in this wittily artificial play suits herself perfectly to
her subject, becomes everything there is in the character of Riquette;
an actress who plays a comedy in real life, quite in the spirit of the
stage. She has to save the situation from being taken too seriously,
from becoming tragic: she has to take the audience into her confidence,
to assure them that it is all a joke. And so we see her constantly
overdoing her part, fooling openly. She does two things at once: the
artificial comedy, which is uppermost in the play, and the character
part which is implicit in it. And she is perfect in both.

The famous _Chahut_, which went electrically through Paris, when it was
first given, in all its audacity, shows us one side of her art. The
delicate by-plays with eyes and voice, or rather the voice and the
overhanging eyelid of the right eye, shows us another. She is always the
cleverest person on the stage. Her face in repose seems waiting for
every expression to quicken its own form of life. When the face is in
movement, one looks chiefly at the mouth, the thick, heavily painted
lips, which twist upward, and wrinkle into all kinds of earthly
subtleties. Her face is full of an experienced, sullen, chuckling
gaminerie, which seems, after all, to be holding back something: it has
a curious, vulgar undertone, a succulent and grossly joyous gurgle.




RÉJANE IN "MA COUSINE"


Here, in _Ma Cousine_, she abandons herself to all the frank and shady
humors of the thing with the absolute abandonment of the artist. It is
like a picture by Forain, made of the same material with the same
cynicism and with the same mastery of line.

_Ma Cousine_, on seeing it a second time, is frankly and not too
obviously amusing, a piece in which everybody plays at something, in
which Réjane plays at being an actress who has a part to act in real
life. "_Elle est impayable, cette Riquette!_" And it is with an
intensely conscious abandonment of herself that she renders this
good-hearted Cabotine, so worldly wise, so full of all the physical
virtues, turned Bohemian. She has, in this part, certain guttural and
nasal laughs, certain queer cries and shouts, which are after all a part
of her _métier_; she runs through her whole gamut of shrugs and winks
and nods. There is, of course, over again, the famous _Chahut_, in which
she summarizes the whole art of the Moulin-Rouge; there is her long
scene of pantomime, in which every gesture is at once vulgar and
distinguished, vulgarly rendered with distinction. There are other
audacities, all done with equal discretion.

I am not sure that Réjane is not at her best in this play: she has
certainly never been more herself in what one fancies to be herself.
There is all her ravishing gaminerie, her witty intelligence, her dash,
her piquancy, her impudence, her mastery. I find that her high spirits,
in this play, affect me like pathos: they run to a kind of emotion. I
compared her art with the art of Forain; I said that here was a picture,
made out of the same material, with the same cynicism, the same mastery
of line. She suggested, in her costume of the Second Act, a Beardsley
picture; there was the same kind of tragic grotesque, in which a kind of
ugliness became a kind of beauty. The whole performance was of the best
Parisian kind, with genius in one, admirably disciplined talent in all.




MELODRAMA WITH AN IDEA


Paul Hervieu's _La Course du Flambeau_, which was given by Réjane at
the Vaudeville, April 17th, 1901, is first of all a sentimental thesis.
It begins with an argument as to the duty of mother to child and of
child to mother. A character who apparently represents the author's
views declares life is a sort of _Lampadophoria_, or _La Course du
Flambeau_, in which it is the chief concern of each generation to hand
on the torch of life to the next generation. Sabine protests that the
duty is equal, and offers herself as an example. "I," she says, "stand
between mother and daughter; I love them myself; I could sacrifice
myself equally for either." Maravan replies: "You do not know yourself.
You do not know how good a mother you are, and I hope you will never
know how bad a daughter." The rest of the play is ingeniously
constructed to show, point by point, gradation by gradation, the
devotion of Sabine to her daughter and the readiness with which she will
sacrifice, not only herself, but her mother.

The only answer to the author's solution is to reinstate the problem in
terms of precisely contrary facts; we have another solution, which may
be made in terms no less inevitable. The play itself proves nothing, and
it seems to me that the writer's persistence in arguing the point in
action has given a somewhat needless and unnatural air of melodrama to
his piece. It is a melodrama with an idea, a clue, but it is none the
less a melodrama, because the idea and the clue are alike so arbitrary.
One is never left quietly alone with nature; the showman's hand is
always visible, around the corner of the curtain, pulling the strings.
Whenever one sees a human argument struggling to find its way through
the formal rhetoric of the speaker, it is the French equivalent of
sentiment.

The piece is really the comedy of a broken heart, and what Réjane has
to do is to represent all the stages of the slow process of heartbreak.
She does it as only a great artist could do; but she allows us to see
that she is acting. She does it consciously, deliberately, with method.

She has forced herself to become bourgeois; she takes upon herself the
bourgeois face and appearance, and also the bourgeois soul. The wit and
bewildering vulgarity have gone out of her, and a middle-class dignity
has taken their place. She shows us the stage picture of a mother
marvelously: that is to say, she interprets the play according to the
author's intentions; when she is most effective as an actress she is not
content with the simplicity of nature, as in the tirade in the third
act. She brings out the melodramatic points with the finest skill; but
the melodrama itself is a wilful divergency from nature; and she has few
chances to be her finest self. She proves the soundness of her art as an
actress by the ability to play such a part finely, seriously,
effectively. Her own temperament counts for nothing; it is not even a
hindrance: it is all the skill of a _métier_, the mastery of her art.




"MADAME SANS-GÊNE"


In 1893 Réjane created, at the Vaudeville, the woman whose part she had
to act, in _Madame Sans-Gêne._ For some reason unknown to me, Réjane
is best known in England by her performances in this thoroughly poor
play, which shows us Sardou working mechanically, and for character
effects of a superficial kind. There are none of the ideas, none of the
touches of nature of _La Parisienne_; none of the comic vitality of _Ma
Cousine_; none of the emotional quality of _Sapho._ It is full of
piquancies for acting, and Réjane makes the most of them. Her acting is
admirable, from beginning to end; it has her distinguished vulgarity;
her gross charm; she is everything that Sardou meant, and something
more.

But all that Sardou meant was not a very interesting thing, and Réjane
can not make it what it is not. She brightens her part, she does not
make a different thing of it. There were moments when it seemed to me as
if she played it with a certain fatigue. The thing is so artificial in
itself, and yet pretends to be nature; it is so palpably ingenious, so
frank an appeal to the stage! It has about it an absurd air of honest
simplicity, a pretense of being bourgeois in some worthy sense.

Réjane plays her game with the thing, shows her impeccable cleverness,
makes point after point, carries the audience with her. But I find
nowhere in it what seems to me her finest qualities, at most no more
than a suggestion of them. It is a picture painted so sweepingly that
every subtlety would be out of place in it. She plays it sweepingly,
with heavy contrasts, an undisguised exaggeration; one eye is always on
the audience. That is, no doubt, the way the piece should be played; but
I must complain of Sardou while I justify Réjane.




THE IRONIC COMEDY OF BECQUE


_La Parisienne_ of Henri Becque, like most of his plays, has never lost
its interest, like the topical plays of that period. It is a hard,
ironical piece of realism, founded on a keen observation of life and on
certain definite ideas. It is called a comedy, but there is no
straightforward fun in it, as in _Ma Cousine_, for instance; it has all
that transposed sadness which we call irony. It shows us rather a mean
gray world, rather contemptuously; and it leaves us with a bitter taste
in the mouth. That is, if one takes it seriously. Part of the actor's
art in such a piece is to prevent one from taking it too seriously.

Throughout Réjane is the faultless artist, and her acting is so much of
a piece that it is difficult to praise it in detail. A real woman lives
before one, seems to be overseen on the stage at certain moments of her
daily existence. We see her life going on, not, as with Duse, a profound
inner life, but the life of the character, a vivid, worldly life, hard,
selfish, calculating, deceiving naturally, naturally wary, the woman of
the world, the Parisian. Compare Clotilde with Sapho and you will see
two opposite types rendered with an equal skill; the woman in love, to
whom nothing else matters, and the woman with lovers, the (what shall I
say?) business woman of the emotions.

There is a moment near the beginning where Lafont asks Clotilde if she
has been to see her milliner or her dressmaker, and she answers
sarcastically: "Both!" Her face, as she submits to the question, has an
absurd stare, a stare of profound dissimulation, with something of a cat
who waits. Her whole character, her whole plan of campaign are in that
moment; they but show themselves more pointedly, later on, when her
nerves get the better of her through all the manifestations of her
impatience, up to the return into herself at the end of the second act,
when she stands motionless and speechless, while her lover entreats her,
upbraids her, finally insults her. Her face, her whole body, endures,
wearied into a desperate languor, seething with suppressed rage and
exasperation; at last, her whole body droops on itself, as if it Can no
longer stand upright. Throughout she speaks with that somewhat
discontented grumbling tone which she can make so expressive; she
empties her speech with little side shrugs of one shoulder, her sinister
right eye speaks a whole subtle language of its own. The only moments
throughout the play when I found anything to criticize are the few
moments of pathos, when she becomes Sarah at second hand.

After _La Parisienne_ came _Lolotte_, a one-act play of Meilhac and
Halévy. It is amusing, and it gives Réjane the opportunity of showing
us little samples of nearly all her talents. She is both canaille and
bonne fille; above all she is triumphantly, defiantly clever. Again I
was reminded of a Forain drawing: for here is an art which does
everything that it is possible to do with a given material, and what
more can one demand of an artist?




"LA ROBE ROUGE"


A greater contrast could hardly be imagined than that between these two
plays and Brieux's sombre argument in the drama _La Robe Rouge._ Unlike
_Les Avariés_, where the argument swamps the drama, _La Robe Rouge_ is
at once a good argument and a good play. There are perhaps too many
points at issue, and the story is perhaps too much broken into section,
but the whole thing takes hold of one, and, acted as it is acted by
Réjane, and her company, it seems to lift one out of the theater into
some actual place where people are talking and doing good or evil and
suffering and coming into conflict with great impersonal forces; where,
in fact, they are living. Without ever becoming literature, it comes, at
times, almost nearer to every-day reality than literature can permit
itself to come. There is not a good sentence in the play, or a sentence
that does not tell. It is the subject and the hard, unilluminated
handling of the subject that makes the play, and it is a model of that
form of drama which deals sternly with actual things. It gives a great
actress, who is concerned mainly with being true to nature, an
incomparable opportunity, and it gives opportunities to every member of
a good company. The second act tortures one precisely as such a scene in
court would torture one. Its art is the distressingly, overwhelmingly
real.

_La Robe Rouge_ is a play so full of solid and serious qualities that it
is not a little difficult not to exaggerate its merits or to praise it
for merits it does not possess. The play deals with vital questions, and
it does not deal with them, as Brieux is apt to do, in a merely
argumentative way. It is not only that abstract question: What is
justice? May the law not be capable of injustice? but the question of
conscience in the lawyer, the judge, the administration of which goes by
the name of justice. It is tragedy within tragedy. How extremely
admirably the whole thing acts, and how admirably it was acted! After
seeing this play, I realize what I have often wondered, that Réjane is
a great tragic actress, and that she can be tragic without being
grotesque. She never had a part in which she was so simple and so great.
When I read the play I found many passages of mere rhetoric in the part
of Zanetta; by her way of saying them Réjane turned them into simple
natural feeling. I can imagine Sarah saying some of these passages, and
making them marvelously effective. When Réjane says them they go
through you like a knife. After seeing La _Robe Rouge_, I am not sure
that of three great living actresses, Duse, Sarah, and Réjane, Réjane
is not, as a sheer actress, the greatest of the three.

Réjane has all the instincts, as I have said, of the human animal, of
the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilize. Réjane, in
_Sapho_ or in _Zaza_ for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving
and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable,
horribly human thing, whose direct appeal seizes you by the throat. In
_Sapho_ or _Zaza_ she speaks the language of the senses, no more; and
her acting reminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of
how the senses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in love.
It is like an accusing confirmation of some of one's guesses at truth,
before the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh.
Skepticism is no longer possible: the thing is before you, abominably
real, a disquieting and irrefutable thing, which speaks with its own
voice, as it has never spoken on the stage through any other actress.

In _Zaza_, a play made for Réjane by two playwrights who had set
themselves humbly to a task, the task of fitting her with a part, she is
seen doing _Sapho_ over again, with a difference. Zaza is a vulgar
woman, a woman without instruction or experience; she has not known
poets and been the model of a great sculptor; she comes straight from
the boards of a _café-concert_ to the kept woman's house in the
country. She has caught her lover vulgarly, to win a bet; and so, to the
end, you realize that she is, well, a woman who would do that. She has
no depth of passion, none of Sapho's roots in the earth; she has a
"beguin" for Dufresne, she will drop everything else for it, such as it
is, and she is capable of good hearty suffering. Réjane gives her to us
as she is, in all her commonness. The picture is full of humor; it is,
as I so often feel with Réjane, a Forain. Like Forain, she uses her
material without ever being absorbed by it, without relaxing her
impersonally artistic energy. In being Zaza, she is so far from being
herself (what is the self of a great actress?) that she has invented a
new way of walking, as well as new tones and grimaces. There is not an
effect in the play which she has not calculated; only, she has
calculated every effect so exactly that the calculation is not seen.
When you watch Jane Hading, you see her effects coming several seconds
before they are there; when they come, they come neatly, but with no
surprise in them, and therefore with no conviction. There lies all the
difference between the actress who is an actress equally by her
temperament and by her brain and the actress who has only the brain
(and, with Jane Hading, beauty) to rely on. Everything that Réjane can
think of she can do; thought translates itself instantly into feeling,
and the embodied impulse is before you.

When Réjane is Zaza, she acts and is the woman she acts; and you have
to think, before you remember how elaborate a science goes to the making
of that thrill which you are almost cruelly enjoying.




THE RUSSIAN BALLETS


I


The dance is life, animal life, having its own way passionately. Part of
that natural madness which men were once wise enough to include in
religion, it began with the worship of the disturbing deities, the gods
of ecstasy, for whom wantonness and wine, and all things in which energy
passes into evident excess, were sacred. From the first it has mimed the
instincts; but we lose ourselves in the boundless bewilderments of its
contradictions.

As the dancers dance, under the changing lights, so human, so remote, so
desirable, so evasive, coming and going to the sound of a thin heady
music which marks the rhythm of their movements like a kind of clinging
drapery, they seem to sum up in themselves the appeal of everything in
the world that is passing and colored and to be enjoyed. Realizing all
humanity to be but a mask of shadows, and this solid world an impromptu
stage as temporary as they, it is with a pathetic desire of some last
illusion, which shall deceive even ourselves, that we are consumed with
this hunger to create, to make something for ourselves, if at least the
same shadowy reality as that about us. The art of the ballet awaits us,
with its shadowy and real life, its power of letting humanity drift into
a rhythm so much of its own, and with ornament so much more generous
than its wont. And, as all this is symbolical, a series of living
symbols, it can but reach the brain through the eyes, in the visual and
imaginative way, so that the ballet concentrates in itself a great deal
of the modern ideal in matters of artistic impression.

I am avid of impressions and sensations; and in the Russian Ballet at
the Coliseum, certainly, there is a new impression of something not
easily to be seen elsewhere. I need not repeat that, in art, rhythm
means everything. And there can be a kind of rhythm even in scenery,
such as one sees on the stage. Convention, even here, as in all plastic
art, is founded on natural truth very closely studied. The rose is first
learned, in every wrinkle of its petals, petal by petal, before that
reality is elaborately departed from, in order that a new, abstract
beauty may be formed out of these outlines, all but those outlines being
left out.

So, in these Russian Ballets, so many of which are founded on ancient
legends, those who dance and mime and gesticulate have at once all that
is humanity and more than is in humanity. And their place there permits
them, without disturbing our critical sense of the probability of
things, to seem to assume a superhuman passion; for, in the Art of the
Ballet, reality must fade into illusion, and then illusion must return
into a kind of unreal reality.

The primitive and myth-making imagination of the Russians shows a
tendency to regard metaphors as real and to share these tendencies with
the savage, that is to say with the savagery that is in them, dependent
as they are on rudimentary emotions. Other races, too long civilized,
have accustomed themselves to the soul, to mystery. Russia, with
centuries of savagery behind it, still feels the earth about its roots,
and the thirst in it of the primitive animal. It has lost none of its
instincts, and it has just discovered the soul. So, in these enigmatical
dancers, the men and the women, who emerge before us, across the flaming
gulf of the footlights, who emerge as they never did in any ballet
created by Wagner, one finds the irresponsibility, the gaiety, the
sombreness, of creatures who exist on the stage for their own pleasure
and for the pleasure of pleasing us, and in them something large and
lyrical, as if the obscure forces of the earth half-awakened had begun
to speak. And these live, perhaps, an exasperated life--the life of the
spirit and of the senses--as no others do; a life to most people
inconceivable; to me, who have traveled in Russia, conceivable.

In what is abstract in Russian music there is human blood. It does not
plead and implore like Wagner's. It is more somber, less carnal, more
feverish, more unsatisfied in the desire of the flesh, more inhuman,
than the ballet music in _Parsifal._ Even in that music, though shafts
of light sometimes pierce the soul like a sword, there is none of the
peace of Bach; it has the unsatisfied desire of a kind of flesh of the
spirit. But in Tchaikovsky's music the violins run up and down the
scales like acrobats; and he can deform the rhythms of nature with the
caprices of half-civilized impulses. In your delight in finding any one
so alive, you are inclined to welcome him without reserve, and to forget
that a man of genius is not necessarily a great artist, and that, if he
is not a great artist, he is not a quite satisfactory man of genius.

When I heard his music in _The Enchanted Princess_ I was struck by the
contrast of this ballet music with the overture to _Francesca da Rimini_
I had heard years before. The red wind of hell, in which the lovers are
afloat, blows and subsides. There is a taste of sulphur in the mouth as
it ends, after the screams and spasms. Scrawls of hell-fire rush across
the violins into a sharpened agony; above all, not Dante's; always
hell-fire, not the souls of unhappy lovers who have loved too well.

Lydia Lopokova is certainly a perfect artist, whose dancing is a delight
to the eyes, as her miming appeals to the senses. She has passion, and
of an excitable kind; in a word, Russian passion. She can be delicious,
malicious, abrupt in certain movements when she walks; she has
daintiness and gaiety; her poses and poises are exquisite; there is an
amazing certainty in everything she does. A creature of sensitive
nerves, in whom the desire of perfection is the same as her desire for
fame, she is on the stage and off the stage essentially the same; and in
her conversations with me I find imagination, an unerring instinct, an
intense thirst for life and for her own art; she has _la joie de vivre._

Her technique, of course, is perfect; and, as in the case of every
artist, it is the result of tireless patience. Technique and the artist:
that is a question of interest to the student of every art. Without
technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth consideration in any
art. The rope-dancer or the acrobat must be perfect in technique before
he appears on the stage at all; in his case, a lapse from perfection
brings its own penalty, death perhaps; his art begins when his technique
is already perfect. Artists who deal in materials less fragile than
human life should have no less undeviating a sense of responsibility to
themselves and to art. So Ysaye seems to me the type of the artist, not
because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins to create
his art at the point where faultless technique leaves off.

Lubov Tchernicheva is a snake-like creature, beautiful and hieratic,
solemn; and in her aspect, as in her gestures, a kind of Russian
Cleopatra. Swinburne might have sung of her as he sang of the queen who
ruled the world and Antony:--


Her mouth is fragrant as a vine,
A vine with birds in all its boughs;
Serpent and scarab for a sign
Between the beauty of her brows
And the amorous deep lids divine.


And it is a revelation to our jaded imaginations of much less jaded
imaginations. These may be supposed to be characters in themselves of
little interest to the world in general; to have come by strange
accident from the ends of the world. Yet these are thrown into chosen
situations, apprehended in some delicate pauses of life; they have their
moments of passion thrown into relief in an exquisite way. To
discriminate them we need a cobweb of illusions, double and treble
reflections of the mind upon itself, with the artificial light of the
stage cast over them and, as it were, constructed and broken over this
or that chosen situation--on how fine a needle's point that little world
of passion is balanced!




II


Apart from the loveliness of _Manfred_--the almost aching loveliness of
Astarte--and the whole of the _Carnival, Kreisleriana_, and several
other pieces, I have never been able to admire Schumann's music. When I
wrote on Strauss I said that he has many moments in which he tries to
bring humor into music. Turn from the "Annie" motive in _Enoch Arden_ to
the "Eusebius" of the _Carnival_, and you will readily see all the
difference between two passages which it is quite possible to compare
with one another. The "Annie" motive is as pretty as can be; it is
adequate enough as a suggestion of the somewhat colorless heroine of
Tennyson's poem; but how lacking in distinction it is, if you but set it
beside the "Eusebius," in which music requires nothing but music to be
its own interpreter. But it is in his attempts at the grotesque that
Schumann seems at times actually to lead the way to Strauss. It is from
Schumann that Strauss has learned some of those hobbling rhythms, those
abrupt starts, as of a terrified peasant, by which he has sometimes
suggested his particular kind of humor in music.

Schumann, like Strauss, reminds me at one time of De Quincey or Sydney
Dobell, at another of Gustave Moreau or of Arnold Bocklin, and I know
that all these names have had their hour of worship. All have some of
the qualities which go to the making of great art; all, in different
ways, fail through lack of the vital quality of sincerity, the hard and
wiry line of rectitude and certainty. All are rhetorical, all produce
their effect by an effort external to the thing itself which they are
saying or singing or painting.

On seeing the _Carnival_ for the second time I am more than ever struck
by the fact that the ballet is a miracle of moving motion. In the dance
of Columbine and Harlequin--they danced and mimed like living
marionettes--I recalled vividly my impression on seeing a ballet, a
farce and the fragments of an opera performed by the marionettes at the
Costanzi Theatre in Rome. I was inclined to ask myself why we require
the intervention of any less perfect medium between the meaning of a
piece, as the audience conceived it, and that other meaning which it
derives from our reception of it. In those inspired pieces of living
painted wood I saw the illusion that I always desire to find, either in
the wings of the theater or from a stall. In our marionettes, then, we
get personified gesture, endless gesture, like all other forms of
emotion, generalized. The appeal in what seems to you those childish
maneuvers is to a finer, because to a more innately poetic sense of
things than the rationalistic appeal of very modern plays. If at times
we laugh--as one must in this ballet--it is with wonder at seeing
humanity so gay, heroic and untiring. There is the romantic suggestion
of magic in this beauty. So, in Harlequin, I find the personification of
grace, of _souplesse_, in his miming and dancing; and when he is
grotesque, I find a singular kind of beauty. A sinister gaiety pervades
the ballet; a malevolent undercurrent of subtle meanings gives one the
sense of an intricate intrigue; and I almost forgive the fact that the
music is German!

I am, on the whole, disappointed with the _Cleopatra_ ballet; for the
scenery certainly does not suggest Egypt; but, to my mind, suggests
rather the scenery used in Paris when I saw Alfred Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, a
symbolist farce, given under strange conditions. The action took place
in the land of nowhere; and the scenery was painted to represent by
adroit conventions temperate and torrid zones at once. Then there were
closed windows and a fireplace, containing an alchemist's crucible.
These were crudely symbolical, but those in the Coliseum were not. In
our search for sensation we have exhausted sensation; and, in that
theater, before a people who have perfected the fine shades to their
vanishing point, who have subtilized delicacy of perception into the
annihilation of the very senses through which we take in ecstasy, I
heard a literary Sans-culotte shriek for hours that unspeakable word of
the gutter which was the refrain of this comedy of masks. Just as the
seeker after pleasure whom pleasure has exhausted, so the seeker after
the material illusions of a literary artifice turns finally to that
first, subjugated, never quite exterminated element of cruelty which is
one of the links which bind us to the earth.

The Russians have cruelty enough, but not this kind of cruelty; they are
more complex than cruel, and why credit them with any real sense of
morality? They are gifted with a kind of sick curiosity which makes them
infinitely interesting to themselves. And--to concern myself again with
these Russian dancers--they live in a prodigious illusion; their life in
them is so tremendous that they are capable of imagining anything. And,
in the words of Gorki, "in every being who lives there is hidden a
vagabond more or less conscious of himself;" but--for all those who
revolt--he has one phrase: _l'Épouvante du mal de vivre._

Now, Lubov Tchernicheva, who looked Cleopatra and was dressed after
Cleopatra's fashion, had nothing whatever to do, except to be repellent
and attractive. She was given no chance to show that the queen she
represented was one of those diabolical creatures whose coquetry is all
the more dangerous because it is susceptible of passion; one in whom
passion was at times like a will-o'-the-wisp that is suddenly
extinguished after having given light to a conflagration.

_Scheherazade_ is barbaric and gorgeous in _décor_, and in costume
exotic and tragic and Oriental as the Russian music is; only, to me, the
music is not quite satisfying; it has rather an irritating effect on the
nerves. The dances are bewildering, intricate and elaborate, and
intensely alive with animal desire. It is really a riot in color, amid
an ever-moving crowd of revellers; in which Massine shows himself as the
personification of lust, as he makes--with furious and too convulsive
leaps in the air and with too obvious gestures and grimaces--frantic
love to Zobeide, mimed by Tchernicheva, who has the stateliness of a
princess, who glides mysteriously and is wonderful in the plastic
quality of her movements, which I can only image as that of a tiger-cat.

Carlo Goldoni has been compared as a great comic dramatist with Pietro
Longhi, who, in his amazingly amusing pictures, reflects also the
follies and revels and miseries of the period. Longhi used to tell
Goldoni that they--the painter and the playwright--were brethren in art;
and one of Goldoni's sonnets records this saying:--


_Longhi, tu che la mia musa sorella
Chiami del tuo pennel che cerca il vero._


It seems that their contemporaries were alive to the similar qualities
and the common aims of the two men; for Gasparo Gozzi drew a parallel
between them in a number of his Venetian _Gazzetta._

It struck me, as I saw the Goldoni ballet and heard the music of
Domenico Scarlatti, that all of the costumes and much of the effect of
the miming--which were the most delicious and capricious that I have
ever seen--had been designed after Longhi's paintings and drawings; for
in many of these he gives a wonderful sense of living motion; but
certainly nothing of what is abominably alive in the great and grim and
sardonic genius of Hogarth.

In Venice I have often spent delightful hours before, for instance, such
innumerable drawings of his as: painters at the easel, ballet girls with
castanets, maid-servants holding trays, music and dancing masters
(indeed, is not Enrico Cecchetti in the ballet a most admirable and most
Italian dancing master?), tavern-keepers, street musicians, beggars,
waiters; the old patrician lolling in his easy-chair and toying with a
fan; the cavaliere in their fantastic dresses; the women with their
towering head-dresses. The whole sense of Venice returned to me as I saw
Lydia Lopokova--always so bird-like, so like a butterfly with painted
wings, so witty in gestures, so absolutely an artist in every dance she
dances, in every mime she mimics, in her wild abandonment to the
excitement of these shifting scenes, where all these masked and unmasked
living puppets have fine nerves and delicate passions--putting powder on
the face of the Marquise Silvestra and mocking her behind her back. I
saw then Casanova's favorite haunts: the _ridotti_, the gambling-houses,
the _cafés_ in San Marco's, the carnivals, the masked balls, the
intrigues; the _traghetti_ where I seemed to see mysterious figures
flitting to and fro in wide miraculous _route_ beneath the light of
flickering flambeaux.

I see before me, as I write, the night when I went from the Giddecca to
the Teatro Rossini, where a company of excellent Italian comedians gave
one of Goldoni's comedies, and, as when the chatter in the gallery ends,
the chatter begins on the stage, I found for once the perfect illusion;
there is no difference between the one and the other. Voluble, living
Venice, with its unchanging attitude toward things, the prompt gaiety
and warmth of its temperament, finds equal expression in the gallery,
and in the interpretation of Goldoni, on that stage. Going to the
theater in Venice is like a fantastic overture to the play, and sets
one's mood properly in tune. You step into the gondola, which darts at
once across a space of half-lighted water, and turns down a narrow canal
between walls which seem to reach more than half-way to the stars. Here
and there a lamp shines from a bridge or at the water-gate of a house,
but with no more than enough light to make the darkness seen. You see in
flashes: an alley with people moving against the light, the shape of a
door or balcony, seen dimly and in a wholly new aspect, a dark
church-front, a bridge overhead, the water lapping against the green
stone of a wall which your elbow all but touches, a head thrust from a
window, the gondola that passes you, sliding gently and suddenly
alongside, and disappearing into an unseen quiet.

_Sadko_ is simply a magical and magnificent pantomime, and
Rimski-Korsakov's ballet music gives me the sense of the swirl and
confusion, of the bewilderments and infinite changes in the realm of the
sea-king. And, apart from the riotous Russian dancing, most of the
ballet is made of nervous gestures of the hands and arms, that have an
exciting effect on the nerves, and that recall to my memory certain
aspects of the sea; as when I saw a deadly sluggish sea, a venomous
serpent coil and uncoil inextricable folds; symbols of something
suddenly seen on the sea-surface in contrast with a wizard transmutation
of colors. But, most of all, one aspect of curdling thick green masses
of colors under a curdling green sea. In that instant I saw all the
beauty of corruption. Then the underworld became visible, close under
the sea: with palaces (like Poe's); streets, people, ruins; forests
thick with poisonous weeds, void spaces, strange shifting shapes:
symbols I could not fathom. Then came a stealthy, slow, insidious
heaving of the reluctant waves. Then, again, the surging and swaying;
and, always motionless, yet steadily changing in shape, the somber and
unholy underworld.

In Tchernicheva I saw an actual Princess of the Sea, gorgeously dressed,
and enchanting. Yet, all of the spectacle was not beautiful; it was
singularly inhuman and, at times, unnatural. Nothing but beauty should
exist on the stage. Visible beauty comes with the ballet, an abstract
thing; gesture adds pantomime, with which drama begins; and then words
bring in the speech by which life tries to tell its secret. Still, in
the two extremes, pantomime and the poetic drama, the appeal is to the
primary emotions, and with an economy and luxuriance of means, each of
which is in its own way inimitable. Pantomime addresses itself, by the
artful limitations of its craft, to universal human experiences, knowing
that the moment it departs from those broad lines it will become
unintelligible.

Pantomime, in its limited way, is no mere imitation of nature: it is a
transposition. It can appeal to the intellect for its comprehension,
and, like ballet, to the intellect through the eyes. To watch it is like
dreaming. And as I watched this ballet I felt myself drawn deep into an
opium-dream, as when I wrote of:


This crust, of which the rats have eaten part,
This pipe of opium; rage, remorse, despair;
This soul at pawn and this delirious heart.


Then, as the spell tightened closer and closer around me, I seemed to
have taken hashish, of which I wrote:--


Behold the image of my fear;
O rise not, move not, come not near!
That moment, when you turned your face,
A demon seemed to leap through space;
His gesture strangled me with fear.

Who said the world is but a mood
In the eternal thought of God?
I know it, real though it seem,
The phantom of a hashish dream
In that insomnia which is God.


Does not every one know that terrifying impossibility of speaking which
fastens one to the ground for the eternity of a second? Exactly that
sensation came over me, the same kind of suspense, seeming to hang over
the silent actors in the pantomime, giving them a nervous exaltation
which has its subtle, immediate effect upon us, in comic or tragic
situations.




III


The English theater with its unreal realism and its unimaginative
pretenses toward poetry left me untouched and unconvinced. I found the
beauty, the poetry, that I wanted only in two theaters, the Alhambra and
the Empire. The ballet seemed to me the subtlest of the visible arts,
and dancing a more significant speech than words. I could have said as
Verlaine said to me, in jest, coming away from the Alhambra: "_J'aime
Shakespeare, mais--j'aimes mieux le ballet!_" A ballet is simply a
picture in movement. It is a picture where the imitation of nature is
given by nature itself; where the figures of the composition are real,
and yet, by a very paradox of travesty, have a delightful, deliberate
air of unreality. It is a picture where the colors change, re-combine,
before one's eyes; where the outlines melt into one another, emerge, and
are again lost in the mazes of the dancing.

The most magical glimpse I ever caught of a ballet was from the road in
front, from the other side of the road, one night when two doors were
suddenly thrown open as I was passing. In the moment's interval before
the doors closed again I saw, in that odd, unexpected way, over the
heads of the audience, far off in a sort of blue mist, the whole stage,
its brilliant crowd drawn up in the last pose, just as the curtain was
beginning to go down.

I liked to see a ballet from the wings, a spectator, but in the midst of
the magic. To see a ballet from the wings is to lose all sense of
proportion, all knowledge of the piece as a whole, but, in return, it is
fruitful in happy accidents, in momentary points of view, in chance
felicities of light and movement and shade. It is almost to be in the
performance one's self, and yet passive, with the leisure to look about
one.

The front row of the stalls, on a first night, has a character of its
own. It is entirely filled by men, and the men who fill it have not come
simply from an abstract esthetic interest in the ballet. They have
friends on the other side of the footlights, and their friends on the
other side of the footlights will look down, the moment they come on, to
see who are in the front row, and who are standing by the bar on either
side. The standing room by the bar is the reserve of the first-nighters
with friends who could not get a seat in the front row. On such a night
the air is electrical. A running fire of glances crosses and re-crosses,
above the indifferent, accustomed heads of the gentlemen in the
orchestra; whom it amuses, none the less, to intercept an occasional
smile, to trace it home. On the faces of the men in the front row, what
difference in expression. Here is the eager, undisguised enthusiasm of
the novice, all eyes on one; here is the wary practised attention of the
man who has seen many first nights, and whose scarcely perceptible smile
reveals nothing, compromises nobody, rests on all.

And there is a charm, not wholly imaginary, in that form of illusion
known as make-up. To a face really charming it gives a new kind of
exciting savor; and it has, to the remnant of Puritan conscience that is
the heritage of us all, a certain sense of dangerous wickedness, the
delight of forbidden fruit. The very phrase, painted women, has come to
have an association of sin, and to have put paint on her cheeks, though
for the innocent necessities of her profession, gives to a woman a kind
of symbolic corruption. At once she seems to typify the sorceries and
entanglements of what is most deliberately enticing in her sex, with all
that is most subtle, least like nature, in her power of charm.
_Maquillage_, to be attractive, must, of course, be unnecessary.

The art of the ballet counts for much in the evolution of many favorite
effects of contemporary drawing, and not merely because Degas--who meant
to me everything when I was writing on the ballets, standing in the
wings, writing verses in which I was conscious of transgressing no law
or art in taking that scarcely touched material for new uses--has drawn
dancers, with his reserved, essentially classical mastery of form. By
its rapidity of flight within bounds, by its bird-like and flowerlike
caprices of color and motion, by that appeal to the imagination which
comes from its silence (to which music is but like an accompanying
shadow, so closely, so discreetly does it follow the feet of the
dancers), by its appeal to the eyes and to the senses, its adorable
artificiality, the ballet has tempted almost every draughtsman, as the
interiors of music-halls have also been singularly tempting, with their
extraordinary tricks of light, their suddenness of gesture, their
fantastic humanity. And pantomime, too, in the French and correct,
rather than in the English and incorrect sense of that word, has had its
significant influence. And the point of view is the point of view of
Pierrot--


"_Le subtil génie
De sa malice infinie
De poète-grimacier_"--


Verlaine's _Pierrot Gamin._

Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, is the only painter of _la
galanterie_ who has given seriousness to the elegance of that passing
moment, who has fixed that moment in an attitude which becomes eternal.
In a similar gravity in the treatment of "light" subjects, and for a
similar skill in giving them beauty and distinction, we must come down
to Degas. In Degas the ballet and the _café_ replace the Italian comedy
of masks and the afternoon conversation in a park. But in Degas there is
the same instantaneous notation of movement and the same choice and
strange richness of color; with a quite comparable fondness for seizing
what is true in artificial life, and for what is sad and serious in
humanity at play. But Watteau, unlike Degas, is never cruel.

Never, as Watteau, "a seeker after something in the world, that is there
in no satisfying measure or not at all," Degas, implacably _farouche_,
the inexorable observer of women's flesh, in the wings of music-halls,
in _café-concerts_, loves and hates and adores this strange mystery of
women's flesh which he evokes, often curiously poisonous, but always
with a caressing touch, a magic atmosphere that gives heat and life and
light to all his pictures. Where Renoir is pagan and sensual, Degas is
sensuous and a moralist. In the purity of his science, the perhaps
impurity of his passion, he is inimitable. Is not his style--for
painters have their own styles--the style of sensation--a style which is
almost entirely made of sensations? He flashes on our vision _vrai
vérité_ of things, the very essence of them--not so much the essence
of truth as of what appears in the visible world to the eyes that see
it.

No one ever painted _maquillage_ as he does, nor the strokes of light
that shine in a dancer's eyes, nor the silk of her rose-colored tights
that outline her nervous legs; nor the effects--sudden and certain--of
what I have seen for years from the stage: silhouettes and faces and
bodies and patches of light, a cigarette in a man's mouth; and, in the
wings, miracles of change, of caprice, of fantasy, and of what seems and
is not an endless motion of the dancers. I have always felt that the
rhythm of dancing is a kind of arrested music, which Degas has certainly
given us, as in the feet that poise, the silent waves of wandering sound
of the dancer's moving melody, and her magic. A man of singular, but not
universal, genius, Degas, his work being done, leaves behind him a sense
of intense regret; for he created a new art in painting, that is to say,
in painting the sex he adored, without pity and without malice.




ON HAMLET AND HAMLETS


I have seen many Hamlets. I have seen romantic, tragic, passionate,
morbid, enigmatical, over-subtle and over-exceptional Hamlets, the very
bells on the cap of "Fortune's fool." And as almost every actor has
acted this part, every one of them gives a different interpretation:
that is to say, from the time of Shakespeare to our own age. One knows
that Shakespeare, besides other of the dramatists, acted at least one
part, which seems to have surprised his audience: the Ghost in _Hamlet._
And as Shakespeare put more of his inner self into Hamlet's mouth than
into the mouth of any of his other characters, it is not to be forgotten
that perhaps the most wonderful prose in our language is spoken by
Hamlet in that famous scene with the Players. Take, for instance, this
speech:


I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, foregone
all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile
promontory, that most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
over-hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
admirable: in action how like an angel! in appearance how like a god!
The beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither,
though by your smiling you seem to say so.


If any prose is immortal, this is; and creative also, and imaginative,
and lyrical: it has vision, and it has the sense of the immense contrast
between "this majestical roof" and "this quintessence of dust" to which
we are all reduced at the end.

I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should
give one the impression of assisting at "a solemn music." The rhythm of
Shakespeare's art is not fundamentally different from that of Beethoven,
and _Romeo and Juliet_ is a suite, _Hamlet_ a symphony. To act either of
these plays with whatever qualities of another kind, and to fail in
producing this musical rhythm from beginning to end, is to fail in the
very foundation. It has been said that Shakespeare will sacrifice his
drama to his poetry, and even _Hamlet_ has been quoted against him. But
let _Hamlet_ be rightly acted, and whatever has seemed mere meditation
will be realized as a part of that thought which makes or waits on
action. The outlines of the tragedy are crude, irresistible melodrama,
still irresistible to the gallery; and the greatness of the play, though
it comes to us by means of its poetry, comes to us legitimately as a
growth out of melodrama.

I have often asked myself this question, when I have sat in the stalls
watching a play, and having to write about it: is the success of this
piece due to the playwright's skill or to the skill of the actors? Nor
is any question more difficult to answer than this; which Lamb certainly
does his best to answer in one of his underlined sentences, in regard to
the actor. "_He must be thinking all the while of his appearance,
because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it._"
And again when he says: "In fact, the things aimed at in theatrical
representations are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the form and the
gesture, and to give a more favorable hearing to what is spoken: it is
not what the character is, but how he looks; not what he says, but how
he speaks it." Was anything more fundamentally true ever said on what
the actor _ought_ to do? Lamb answered it again, in his instinctive
fashion of aiming his arrow straight at the mark, when he said of a
performance of Shakespeare in which there were two great actors, that
"it seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed
no distinct shape," but that "when the novelty is past, we find to our
cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and
brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood."

Every artist who has the sense of the sublime knows that the pure genius
is essentially silent, and that his revelation has in it more of vision
than of reality. For when he deigns to appear, he is constrained, under
penalty of extinction, to lessen himself so as to pass into the
Inaccessible. He creates; if he fails in creation, he is of necessity
condemned to the utter darkness. He is the ordinator of chaos: he calls
and disposes of the blind elements; and when we are uplifted in our
admiration before some sublime work, it is not that he creates an idea
in us: it is that, under the divine influence of the man of genius, this
idea, which was in us, obscure to itself, is reawakened.

I am confronted now with Villiers de l'Isle Adam in his conjectures in
regard to certain questions--never yet settled--in _Hamlet._ A modern
man of taste might ask what Shakespeare would have answered if the actor
who played Hamlet's part were to interrogate the Specter "escaped from
hideous Night" as to whether he had seen God's face, whether he wanted
to be concerned with, not the eternal mysteries, but with what he had
seen in hell and what he hated seeing on earth; and, if he had come only
to utter absurdities, really, why need he have died at all?

The Ghost, by the mere fact of being there, seems, at first sight, an
absurdity; but if he has really seen God and the Absolute and if he has
entered into them--which is impossible--the sublimity of his words might
seem to be superfluous; and yet the incoherencies that he utters are all
the more terrifying because of their incomprehensibility. "The secret of
the Absolute cannot be expressed with syntax, and therefore one cannot
ask the ghost to produce more than an _impression._" The Specter, for
Shakespeare, is not a human being: he is obsession. Had he wanted Hamlet
really to perceive the ghost and had he thought this dramatic effect
ought to seize on the imagination of the audience, it was because he was
certain that every one of them, in the ghost perceived by Hamlet, would
see the familiar ghost that actually haunts himself.

Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be" is a magnificent disavowal--on
the part of Shakespeare. And if one excuses the contradiction by
supposing that Hamlet tried to deliver himself from the obsession, to
doubt, one can only reply that he never doubts the Ghost itself, but the
nature of this ghost; for he says at the end of the second act:


The spirit I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
(As he is very potent with such spirits),
Abuses me to damn me.


Therefore if we compare the motive and the spirit of those sickly
phrases with those of the soliloquy, we shall realize that this has _no
relation whatsoever_ with the superstitious character of Hamlet; even
more so, because every single word of them is in flagrant contradiction
with the entire drama.

I have no intention of discussing either Mr. Martin Hervey's
representation of Hamlet or the somber and sinister Hamlet acted by
Josef Keinz in Berlin; or the performance of Tree, or of
Forbes-Robertson; or of any one's, with the exception of that given by
Edward Sothern. He is by no means the only Hamlet, for there are
always--to quote Browning--"points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the
Germans yet." Sothern had depth in his acting; and there was nothing
fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation,
in which no symbol, no figment of a German brain, no metaphysical Faust,
loomed before us, but a man more to be pitied and not less to be honored
than any man in Elsinore. Yet when one considers what Hamlet actually
was--and there is no getting at the depths of his mystery--one finds,
for one thing, a man too intensely restless to make up his mind on any
question of thought, of conduct, and that he does for the most part the
opposite of what he says. The pretense of madness is an almost
transparent pretense, and used often for a mere effect of malicious wit,
in the confusion of fools, or at the prompting of mere nerves. To me
Hamlet seems to be cursed with the veritable genius of inaction. Always
he is alone, even when he is in a crowd; he is the most sensitive of all
Shakespeare's creations; his nerves are jarred, when knaves would play
on him as one plays on an instrument; his blood is feverish, infected
with the dark melancholy that haunts him. Does he love Ophelia? I see in
him no passion for loving: to him passion is an abstract thing. In any
case, irresolution is baneful to him; irresolution that loses so many
chances, for which no one forgives himself. This Swinburne denies,
supposing that the signal characteristic of Hamlet's inmost nature "is
by no means irresolution or hesitation or any form of weakness, but
rather the strong conflux of contending forces;" adding, what is
certainly true, that the compulsory expedition of Hamlet to England and
his hot-headed daring prove to us his almost unscrupulous resolution in
time of practical need. Only, when all Hamlet's plans of revenge have
been executed, with the one exception of his unnecessary death, before
he utters his last immortal words "The rest is silence," the thought of
death to him is as if a veil had been withdrawn for an instant, the veil
which renders life possible, and, for that instant, he has seen.




LEONARDO DA VINCI


I


What counts, certainly, for much of what is so extraordinary in the
genius of Leonardo da Vinci--who died exactly five hundred years ago--is
the fact that the noble blood he inherited (the so-called dishonor that
hangs over his birth being in his case a singular honor) is curiously
like the stain of some strange color in one of his paintings; he being
the least of all men to whom there could be anything poisonous in the
exotic flowers of evil that germinated in Milan; where, as in Venice and
in Rome, moved a changeful people who, in the very midst of their
exquisite and cruel amusements, committed the most impossibly delicious
sins, and without the slightest stings of conscience. Savonarola, from
whom, in the last years of his life, Botticelli caught the contagion of
the monk's fanaticism, was then endeavoring to strip off one lovely veil
after another from the beauty of mortal things, rending them angrily;
for which, finally, he received the baptism of fire. Rodrigo Borgia--a
Spaniard born in Xàtiva--then Pope Alexander VI, was fortunate enough
to possess in his son, Cesare, a man of sinister genius--cruel,
passionate, ardent--who had the wonderful luck of persuading Leonardo to
wander with him in their wild journey over Central Italy in 1502, as his
chief engineer, and as inspector of strongholds. Not even the living
pages of Machiavelli can give us more than a glimpse of what those
conversations between two such flame-like creatures must have been; yet,
we are aware of Cesare being condemned by an evil fate, as evil as
Nero's, to be slain at the age of thirty-one, and of Leonardo, guided by
his good genius, living to the age of sixty-seven.

The science of the Renaissance was divided, as it were, by a thousand
refractions of things seen and unseen; so that when Leonardo, poring
over his crucibles, desires no alchemist's achievement, but the
achievement of the impossible, his vision is concentrated into infinite
experiences, known solely to himself; exactly as when, in his retirement
in the villa of the Melzi, his imagination is stirred feverishly as he
writes detached notes, as he dashes off rapid drawings; and always not
for other men's pleasure, but simply for his own; careless, as I think
few men of genius have ever been, of anything but the moment's work, the
instant's inspiration. And, what is also certain is that Da Vinci like
Shakespeare created, ambiguously for all the rest of the world, flesh
that is flesh and not flesh, bodies that are bodies and not bodies, by
something inexplicable in their genius; something nervous, magnetic,
overwhelming; and, to such an extent, that if one chooses to call to
mind the greatest men of genius who have existed, this painter and this
dramatist must take their places beside Aeschylus and beside Balzac.

Of Leonardo da Vinci, Pater has said: "Curiosity and the desire of
beauty--these are the two elementary forces in his genius; curiosity
often in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating in union
with it, a type of subtle and curious grace." Certainly the desire of
perfection is, in Da Vinci, organic; so much so that there remains in
him always the desire, as well as the aim, of attaining nothing less
than finality, which he achieves more finally than any of the other
Italian painters; and, mixed with all these, is that mystery which is
only one part of his magic.

Is all this mystery and beauty, then, only style, and acquired style?
Fortunate time, when style had become of such subtlety that it affects
us, to-day, as if it were actually a part of the soul! But was there
not, in Leonardo, a special quality, which goes some way to account for
this? Does it not happen to us, as we look at one of his mysterious
faces, to seem to distinguish, in the eyes reluctant to let out their
secret, some glimpse, not of the soul of _Monna Lisa_, nor of the Virgin
of the Rocks, but of our own retreating, elusive, not yet recognized
soul? Just so, I fancy, Leonardo may have revealed their own souls to
Luini and to Solario, and in such a way that for those men it was no
longer possible to see themselves without something of a new atmosphere
about them, the atmosphere of those which Leonardo had drawn to him out
of the wisdom of secret and eternal things. With men like Leonardo style
is, really, the soul, and their influence on others the influence of
those who have discovered a little more of the unknown, adding, as it
were, new faculties to the human soul.

Raphael, I have said elsewhere, could "correct" Michelangelo, could make
Michelangelo jealous; Raphael, who said of him that he "treats the Pope
as the King of France himself would not dare to treat him," that he goes
along the streets of Rome "like an executioner;" Raphael who for the
remaining years of his life paces the same streets with that grim
artist; of Raphael, may it not be asked: who in the Vatican has not
turned away from the stanza a little weary, as one turns aside out of
streets or rooms thronged with men and women, happy, vigorous, and
strangers: and has not gone back to the Sistine Chapel, and looked at
the ceiling on which Michelangelo has painted a world that is not this
world, men and women as magnificent as our dreams, and has not replunged
into that abyss with a great sense of relief, with a supreme
satisfaction?

Is this feeling of a kind of revulsion, before so many of his pictures,
really justifiable? Is it, I ask myself, reasonable to complain, as I
was obliged to complain in Rome, that his women have no strangeness in
their beauty: that they do not brood over mysteries, like _Monna Lisa?_
Might it not be equally reasonable to complain of the calm, unthinking
faces of Greek statues, in which the very disturbance of thought--not of
emotion--is blotted out, as it might be among beings too divine for any
meaner energy than that of mere existence, "ideal spectators" of all
that moves and is restless?




II


Two men of genius, in our own generation, have revealed for all time the
always inexplicable magic of Leonardo da Vinci: Walter Pater in his
prose and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his sonnet. It is impossible not to
quote this lyrical prose.


The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive
of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Here is
the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. All the thoughts and
experience of the world have been etched and moulded there in that which
they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the
animalism of peace, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages
with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the
Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among
which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and
learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and
keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and,
as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as
the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which
it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the
hands.


Rossetti, whose criticisms on poets are as direct and inevitable as his
finest verse, was always his own best critic. He who said finally: "The
life-blood of rhymed translation is this--that a good poem shall not be
turned into a bad one," was as finally right on himself, as he was on
others, in his unsurpassable revision of one of the most imaginative
sonnets ever written: "A Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione." Certainly no
poem of his shows more plainly the strength and wealth of the workman's
lavish yet studious hand. And, in this sonnet as in the one on Leonardo,
there is the absolute transfusion of a spirit that seemed incommunicable
from one master's hand to another's. Only in the Leonardo, which I shall
quote, there is none of the sovereign oppression of absolute beauty and
the nakedness of burning life that I find in the _Fête Champêtre._ For
in this divine picture the romantic spirit is born, and with it modern
art. Here we see Whistler and the Japanese: a picture content to be no
more than a picture: "an instant made eternity," a moment of color, of
atmosphere, of the noon's intense heat, of faultless circumstance. It is
a pause in music, and life itself waits, while men and women are for a
moment happy and content and without desire; these, content to be
beautiful and to be no more than a strain of music; to those others, who
are content to know only that the hour is music.

Here, then, is Rossetti's version of the beauty of mysterious peace
which broods over the _Virgin of the Rocks._


Mother, is this the darkness of the end,
The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea
Infinite imminent Eternity?
And does the death-pang by man's seed sustained
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend
Its silent prayer upon the Son, while he
Blesses the dead with his hand silently
To his long day which hours no more offend?

Mother of grace, the pass is difficult,
Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered souls
Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through.
Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols,
Whose peace abides in the dark avenue
Amid the bitterness of things occult.


So Leonardo, who said "that figure is not good which does not express
through its gestures the passions of its soul," becomes, more than any
painter, the painter of the soul. He has created, not only in the
_Gioconda_, a clairvoyant smile, which is the smile of mysterious wisdom
hidden in things; he has created the motion of great waters; he has
created types of beauty so exotic that they are fascinating only to
those who are drawn into the unmirrored depths of this dreamless mirror.
He invents a new form of landscape, subtle and sorcerous, and a whole
new movement for an equestrian statue; besides inventing--what did not
this miraculous man invent!--the first quite simple and natural
treatment of the Virgin and Child. So, as he was content to do nothing
as it had been done before, he creates in the _Gioconda_ a new art of
portrait painting; and, in her, so disquieting, that her eyes, as they
follow you persistently, seem to ask one knows not what impenetrable and
seductive question, on which all one's happiness might depend.
Mysterious and enigmatical as she is, there is in her face none of the
melancholy--which is part of the melancholy of Venice--that allures
one's senses in a famous picture in the Accademia; where, the feast
being over, and the wine drunk, something seems to possess the woman,
setting those pensive lines about her lips, which will smile again when
she has lifted her eyelids.




III


The sinister side of Leonardo da Vinci's genius leads him to the
execution of the most prodigious caricatures ever invented; that is to
say, before the malevolent and diabolical and macabre and malignant
creations in this genre of Goya. In his _Caprichos_ one sees the man's
immense arrogance, his destructive and constructive genius, his
rebellion--perhaps even more so than Leonardo's--against old tradition;
which he hated and violated. Dramatic, revolutionary, visionary in his
somber Spanish fashion, it seems to me that this--one of the supreme
forms of his art--is, in the same sense as Villon's _Grand Testament_,
his Last Testament: for in both poet and painter the nervous
magnificence seen equally in the verse and in the painting is created,
almost literally, out of their life-blood.

Only, in Leonardo, visions shape themselves into strange
perversities--not the pensive perversities of Perugino--and assume
aspects of evasive horrors, of the utmost ugliness, and are transformed
into aspects of beauty and of cruelty, as the artist wanders in the hot
streets of Florence to catch glimpses of strange hair and strange faces,
as he and they follow the sun's shadow. He seizes on them, furiously,
curiously, then he refines upon them, molding them to the fashion of his
own moods; but always with that unerring sense of beauty which he
possesses supremely--beauty, often enough, in its remoteness from actual
reality. With passion he tortures them into passionate shapes; with
cruelty he makes them grimace; abnormally sensitive (as Rodin often
enough was) he is pitiless on the people he comes in contact with,
setting ironical flames that circle round them as in Dante's Inferno,
where the two most famous lovers of all time, Francesca and Paolo,
endure the painted images of the fires of hell, eternally unconsumed.
When he seeks absolute beauty there are times when it is beyond the
world that he finds it; when he seeks ignominy, it is a breath blowing
from an invisible darkness which brings it to his nerves. In evoking
singular landscapes, he invents the _bizarre._ When he is concerned with
the tragic passions of difficult souls, he drags them suddenly out of
some obscure covering, and seems, in some of his extravagances, to set
them naked before us.

As it is Pater who says that inextricably mingled with those qualities
there is an element of mockery, "so that, whether in sorrow or scorn, he
caricatures Dante even," I am reminded of certain of Botticelli's
designs for Dante's _inferno_, in which I find the element of
caricature; as, for instance, when the second head grows on Dante's
shoulders, looking backward; as, in the face of Beatrice, which is
changed into a tragic mask, because in the poem she refrains from
smiling, lest the radiance of the seventh heaven, drawn into her eyes,
shall shrivel Dante into ashes.

Nearest to Leonardo in the sinister quality of his genius is El Greco. I
have never forgotten his _Dream of Philip II_, in the Escurial, where
there is a painted hell that suggests the fierce material hells of
Hieronymus von Bosch: a huge fanged mouth wide open, the damned seen
writhing in that red cavern, a lake of flame awaiting those beyond,
where the king, dressed in black, kneels at the side. It is almost a
vision of madness, and as if this tormented brain of the fanatic, who
built these prison walls about himself, and shut himself living into a
tomb-like cell, and dead into a more tomb-like crypt, had wrought itself
into the painter's brain; who would have found something not uncongenial
to himself in this mountainous place of dust and gray granite, in which
every line is rigid, every color ashen, in a kind of stony immobility
more terrible than any other of the images of death.

I am tempted to bring in here, by way of comparison with these two
artists, Jacques Callot, a painter of extraordinary genius, born at
Nancy, in Lorraine, in 1592; who, in many of his works, created over
again ancient dragons and devils: created them with the fury of an
invention that never rested. In his engraving of the hanged men there is
that strangeness in beauty which takes away much of the horror of the
actual thing; and in his monstrous and malignant _Fantasie_, where two
inhuman creatures--in all the splendor of caricature--grind I know not
what poison, in a wide-mouthed jar, plumed and demoniacal.

_La Tentation de Saint Antoine_, done in 1635, is stupendous. High in
the sky is the enormous figure of a reptile-faced Satan, who vomits out
of his mouth legions of evil spirits; he is winged with ferocious wings
that extend on both sides hugely; one of his clawed hands is chained,
the right hurls out lightning. There is Chaos in this composition; it is
imaginative in the highest degree of that satanical quality that
produces monstrosities. There are clawed creatures that swim in the air,
unicorns with stealthy glances. And, with his wonderful sense of design,
the saint is seen outside his cave, assailed by legions of naked women,
winged and wanton, shameless and shameful. And what is the aim, what is
the desire of these evil creatures? To seduce Saint Antony of the
Temptations.

Another picture painted on the same subject is that of Gruneweld in the
Cologne Museum, which represents a tortured creature who has floated
sheer off the earth in his agony, his face drawn inward, as it were,
with hideous pains; near him a crew of red and green devils, crab-like,
dragon-like, who squirm and gnaw and bark and claw at him, in an obscene
whirl and fierce orgy of onslaught. Below, a strange bar of sunset and
at the side a row of dripping trees; behind, a black sky almost
crackling with color. In some of the other monstrous pictures I saw
suggestions of Beardsley; as in the child who kisses the Virgin with
thrust-out lips; in those of Meister van S. Severin, in which I found a
conception of nature as unnatural and as rigid as that of the Japanese,
but turned hideous with hard German reality, as in the terrifying dolls
who are meant to be gracious in the Italian manner. And in this room I
was obliged to sit in the midst of a great heat, where blood drips from
all the walls, where tormented figures writhe among bright-colored
tormentors; where there is a riot of rich cloths, gold and jewels, of
unnatural beasts, of castles and meadows, in which there is nothing
exquisite; only an unending cruelty in things. The very colors cry out
at one; they grimace at you; a crucified thief bends back over the top
of the cross in his struggles; all around monsters spawn out of every
rock and cavern and there is hell fire.

To turn from these to the Cranachs in Vienna is to be in another world
of art: an art more purposely perverse, more curiously unnatural; but,
where his genius is shown at its greatest, is in an exquisite Judith
holding the head of Holofernes, which lies, open-eyed, all its red
arteries visible, painted delicately. She wears orange and red clothes,
with collars and laces, and slashed sleeves through which many rings are
seen on her fingers; she has a large red hat placed jauntily on her
head. She is all peach-blossom and soft, half-cruel sweetness with all
the wicked indifference of her long narrow eyes, the pink mouth and
dimpled chin. She is a somnambulist, and the sword she holds is scarcely
stained. There are two drops of blood on the table on which she rests
the great curled head with its open eyes; her fingers rest on the
forehead almost caressingly. She is _Monna Lisa_, become German and
bourgeoise, having certainly forgotten the mysterious secret of which
she still keeps the sign on her face.

Writing in Florence on Leonardo da Vinci I used by way of comparison two
Greek marbles I had seen in London; one, the head of an old man, which
is all energy and truth--comparable only in Greek work, with the drunken
woman in Munich, and, in modern art, with _La Vieille Heaulmière_ of
Rodin; the other, a woman's head, which ravishes the mind. The lips and
eyes have no expression by which one can remember them; but some
infinitely mysterious expression seems to flow through them as through
the eyes and lips of a woman's head by Leonardo. And all this reminds me
of certain unforgettable impressions; and, most of all, when in Bologna
I saw, in the Museo Civico, the spoils of Etruscan sepulchres, that
weighed on me heavily; and, at the same time, I felt an odor of death,
such as I had not even felt in Pompeii; where in so frightful a step
backward of twenty centuries, the mind reels, clutching at that somewhat
pacifying thought, for at least its momentary relief. Here were the
bodies of men and women, molded for ever in the gesture of their last
moment, and these rigid corpses are as vivid in their interrupted life
as the damp corpses in the morgue. In Bologna, as I was pursued by the
sight of the hairpins of dead women, there flashed on me this wonderful
sentence of Leonardo: "Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the
withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she
had twice been carried away."

But, as I walked back at night in those desolate streets--so essentially
desolate after the warmth of Naples--on my way back to the hotel where
Byron lived, before his evil genius hurried him to an early death, I
remembered these two sentences in his letters; one, when in Florence, he
returns from a picture-gallery "drunk with beauty"; one, where, as he
sees the painted face of a learned lady, he cries: "This is the kind of
face to go mad for, because it can not walk out of its frame." There, it
seems to me, that Byron, whose instinct was uncertain, has, by instinct,
in this sentence, anticipated a great saying of Whistler's. It was one
of his aims in portrait painting to establish a reasonable balance
between the man as he sits in the chair and the image of the man
reflected back to you from the canvas. "The one aim," he wrote, "of the
unsuspecting painter is to make his man 'stand out' from the
frame--never doubting that, on the contrary, he should, and in truth
absolutely does, stand within the frame--and at a distance behind it
equal to the distance at which the painter has seen it. The frame is,
indeed, the window through which the painter looks at his model, and
nothing could be more offensively inartistic than this brutal attempt to
thrust the model on the hither-side of this window!" He never proposed,
in a picture, to give you something which you could mistake for reality:
but frankly, a picture, a thing which was emphatically not nature,
because it was art; whereas, in Degas, the beauty is a part of truth, a
beauty which our eyes are too jaded to distinguish in the things about
us.

In the Ambrosiane in Milan, beside two wonderful portraits, once
attributed to Leonardo, and coming near to being worthy of him, are his
grotesque drawings that are astonishing in their science, truth and
naked beauty. Each is a quite possible, but horrible and abnormal,
exaggeration of one or another part of the face, which becomes bestial
and indeed almost incredible, without ceasing to be human. It is this
terrible seriousness that renders them so dreadful: old age, vice and
disease made visible.

In another room there are many of his miraculously beautiful
drawings--the loveliest drawings in the world. Note, for instance, the
delicious full face drawing of a child with an enchanting pout. The
women's faces are miracles. After these all drawings, and their method,
seem obvious. The perfect love and understanding with which he follows
the outline of a lovely cheek, or of a bestial snout; there is equal
beauty, because there is equal reverence, in each. After this the
Raphael cartoon (for the Vatican _School of Athens_) seems merely
skilful, a piece of consummate draughtsmanship; supremely adequate but
entirely without miracle.

In one of Leonardo's drawings in Florence there is a small Madonna and
Child that peeps sidewise in half reassured terror, as a huge griffin
with bat-like wings--stupendous in invention--descends suddenly from the
air to snatch up a lion wandering near them. This might perhaps have
been one of his many designs for the famous _Medusa--Aspecta Medusa_--in
the Uffizi; for to quote Pater's interpretation of this corpse-like
creation, "the fascination of corruption penetrates in every line its
exquisitely finished beauty. About the dainty lines of the cheek the bat
flies unheeded. The delicate snakes seem literally to strangle each
other in terrified struggle to escape the Medusa brain. The hue which
violent death brings with it is in the features." It is enough to
compare any grotesque or evil head in the finest of Beardsley's drawings
with Leonardo's head of Judas in the Windsor Library, or with one of
those malevolent and malignant heads full of the energy of the beasts he
represents and of insane fury which he scatters over the pages of his
sketchbook, to realize that, in Beardsley, the thing drawn must remain
ugly through all the beauty of the drawing and must hurt.

It hurts because he desires to hurt every one except himself, knowing,
all the time, that he was more hated than loved. Sin is to him a
diabolical beauty, not always divided against itself. Always in his work
is sin--Sin conscious of sin, of an inability to escape from itself;
transfigured often into ugliness and then transfigured from ugliness
back to beauty. Having no convictions, he can when he chooses make
patterns that assume the form of moral judgments.




IV


Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished _Saint Jerome_, in the Vatican at Rome,
is exactly like intarsia work; the ground almost black, the men and the
lion a light brown. This particular way of painting reminds me of the
intarsia work in the halls in Santo Spirito in Bergamo by Fra Damiano in
1520; done just one year after Leonardo died. Here, in this supple and
vigorous work in wood, I saw what could be done by a fine artist in the
handling of somewhat intractable material. The work was broad or minute
at will, with splendid masses and divisions of color in some designs
which seemed to represent the Deluge, sharp, clear, firmly outlined in
the patterns of streets and houses; full of rich color in the setting of
wood against wood, and at times almost as delicate as a Japanese design.
There was the head of John the Baptist laid on a stone slab, which was
like a drawing of Daumier. And, in the whole composition of the design,
with its two ovals set on each side like mirrors for the central horror,
there was perfect balance. San Acre, this superb intarsia work of Fra
Damiano, seemed a criticism on Lotto, the criticism of a thing,
comparatively humble in itself, but in itself wholly satisfying, upon
the failure of a more conspicuous endeavor, which has made its own place
in art, to satisfy certain primary demands which one may logically make
upon it.

In the Jerome, as in his finished work, one sees Leonardo's undeviating
devotion to the perfect achievement of everything to which he set his
hand; and how, after a long lapse of time, in the heat of the day, he
crosses Florence to mount the scaffold, adds two or three touches to a
single figure, and returns forthwith. Never did Michelangelo paint in
such various ways as Leonardo; for, in his frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel, art ceases to approach one directly, through this sense or that,
through color, or some fancied outlook of the soul; only, one seems to
be of the same vivid and eternal world as these meditative and joyous
beings, joyous even in hell, where the rapture of their torment broods
in eyes and limbs with the same energy as the rapture of God in
creation, of the women in disobedience.

Certainly, however, in the Jerome there is a glimpse of background in
which I find already the suggestion of the magical rocks of the _Virgin_
and of _Monna Lisa_; only it is sketched in green, and in it there are
gaunt brown rocks, which seem to open on another glimpse in yellow. All
of the outline is gaunt, both the saint and his rocky cave; only not the
lion, who is the most ample and living beast I have ever seen attendant
on any Jerome. All the lines are outlined; the painful but not grotesque
anatomy of the saint and of the sharp angles of the rocks, are painted
in dim, almost uniform, tones. Is the picture rhetorical, like the other
Saint Jeromes, or does it in some subtle fashion escape? It seems to me
to escape, retaining only the inevitable violence of gesture and the
agony of emotion in body and face; together with an immense dignity,
loneliness and obscure suffering.

Leonardo, who was in Venice in 1500, certainly must have seen Titian's
early _Annunciation_ in the Scuola di San Rocco; which is a rebuke to
Tintoretto's explosive _Crucifixion._ Before this picture it struck me
that Tintoretto is the Zola of painting. Here, in this immense drama of
paint, is a drama in which the central emotion is lacking; Christ is no
more than the robber who is being nailed to the cross or the robber
whose cross is being hoisted. Every part of the huge and bustling scene
has equal interest, equal intensity; and it is all an interest and
intensity of execution--which in its way is stupendous. But there is no
awe, no religious sense. The beauty of detail is enormous, the energy
overwhelming; but there is no nobility, no subtlety; it is a tumultuous
scene painted to cover a wall.

In the Old Pinakothek in Munich the finest piece of paint in the Gallery
is the _Scourging of Christ_ by Titian. The modern point of view, indeed
most modern art, has come out of it--equally in Watts and in Monticelli
and in the Impressionists. We see Titian breaking the achieved rules, at
the age of ninety, inventing an art absolutely new, a new way, a more
immediate way of rendering what he sees, with all that moving beauty of
life in action: lights, colors, and not forms merely, all in movement.
The depth and splendor of a moment are caught, with all the beauty of
every accident in which color comes or changes, and in the space of a
moment. Color is no longer set against color, each for itself, with its
own calm beauty; but each tone rushes with exquisite violence into the
embrace of another tone; there are fierce adulteries of color unheard of
till now. And a new, adorable, complete thing is born, which is to give
life to all the painting that is to come after it It seems as if paint
at last had thoroughly mastered its own language.

I have always believed that Giorgione, born in 1478, one year before the
birth of Titian, played in the development of Venetian Art a part
exactly the same as that played by Marlowe, born in the same year as
Shakespeare, in the history of tragic Drama. Shakespeare never forgot
Marlowe, Titian never forgot Giorgione; only the influence of his
predecessor on Shakespeare was a passing one; that of Giorgione on
Titian was, until he finally escaped from his influence, immense. It is
from Andrea del Verrocchio that Leonardo begins to learn the art of
painting; soon surpasses him; but, as Pater supposes, catches from him
his love of beautiful toys. Giorgione possesses perfection without
excess; Leonardo's absolute perfection often leads him into passionate
excesses. He adored hair; and certainly hair, mostly women's hair, is
the most mysterious of human things. No one ever experimented in more
amazing ways than he did; but his experiment in attempting to invent a
medium of using oils in the painting of frescoes failed him in what
might have been his masterpiece, _The Last Supper_, painted on the damp
wall of the refectory, oozing with mineral salts, of the Chaedo Vinciano
in Milan. One looks at it as through a veil, which Time seems to have
drawn over it, even when it is most cracked and chipped. Or it is as if
it had soaked inward, the plaster sullenly absorbing all the color and
all but the life. It is one of the few absolute things in the world,
still; here, for once, a painter who is the subtlest of painters has
done a great, objective thing, a thing in the grand style, supreme, and
yet with no loss of subtlety. It is in a sense the measure of his
greatness. It proves that the painter of _Monna Lisa_ means the power to
do anything.




IMPRESSIONISTIC WRITING


Impressionistic writing requires the union of several qualities; and to
possess all these qualities except one, no matter which, is to fail in
impressionistic writing. The first thing is to see, and with an eye
which sees all, and as if one's only business were to see; and then to
write, from a selecting memory, and as if one's only business were to
write. It is the interesting heresy of a particular kind of art to seek
truth before beauty; but in an impressionistic art concerned, as the art
of painting is, with the revelation, the re-creation, of a colored and
harmonious world, which (they tell us) owes its very existence to the
eyes which see it, truth is a quality which can be attained only by him
who seeks beauty before truth. The truth impressionist may be imagined
as saying: "Suppose I wish to give you an impression of the Luxembourg
Gardens, as I see them when I look out of my window, will it help to
call up in your mind the impression of those glimmering alleys and the
naked darkness of the trees, if I begin by telling you that I can count
seven cabs, half another at one end, and a horse's head at the other, in
the space between the corner of the Odéon and the houses on the
opposite side of the street; that there are four trees and three
lamp-posts on the pavement; and that I can read the words 'Chocolat
Menier,' in white letters, on a blue ground, upon the circular black
kiosk by the side of the second lamppost? I see those things, no doubt,
unconsciously, before my eye travels as far as the railings of the
garden; but are they any essential part of my memory of the scene
afterward?"

I have turned over page after page of clever, ingenious summarizing of
separate detail in a certain book, but I have found nowhere a page of
pure beauty; all is broken, jagged, troubled, in this restless search
after the broken and jagged outlines of things. It is all little bits of
the world seen without atmosphere, and, in spite of many passages which
endeavor to draw a moral from clouds, gas, flowers and darkness, seen
without sentiment. When the writer describes to us "the old gold and
scarlet of hanging meat; the metallic green of mature cabbages; the
wavering russet of piled potatoes; the sharp white of fly-bills, pasted
all awry;" we can not doubt that he has seen exactly what he describes,
exactly as he describes it, and, to a certain extent, we too see what he
describes to us. But he does not, as Huysmans does in the _Croquis
Parisiens_, absolutely force the sight of it upon us, so that we see it,
perhaps with horror, but in spite of ourselves we see it. Nor does he,
when some vague encounter on the road has called up in him a "sense of
the ruthless nullity of life, of the futile deception of effort, of
bitter revolt against the extinction of death, a yearning after faith in
a vague survival beyond," convey to us the impression which he has felt
in such a way that we, too, feel it, and feel it to be the revelation of
the inner meaning of just that landscape, just that significant moment.
He has but painted a landscape, set an inexpressive figure in the
background, and ticketed the frame with a motto which has nothing to do
with the composition.

In this book the writer has not, it seems to me, succeeded in his
intention; but I have a further fault to find with the intention itself.
It is one of the discreditable signs of the haste and heedlessness of
our time that artists are coming to content themselves, more and more,
with but sketching out their pictures, instead of devoting themselves to
the patient labor of painting them; and that they are anxious to invent
an excuse for their idleness by proclaiming the superiority of the
unfinished, instinctive first draught over the elaborated, scarcely
spontaneous work of finished art. A fine composition may, in the most
subtle and delicate sense, be slight: a picture of Whistler, for
example, a poem of Verlaine. To be slight, as Whistler, as Verlaine, is
slight, is to have refined away, by a process of ardent, often of
arduous, craftsmanship, all but what is most essential in outward form,
in intellectual substance. It is because a painter, a poet of this kind,
is able to fill every line, every word, with so intense a life, that he
can afford to dispense with that amplification, that reiterance, which
an artist of less passionate vitality must needs expend upon the
substance of his art. But it is so easy to be brief without being
concise; to leave one's work unfinished, simply because one has not the
energy to finish it! This book, like most experiments in writing prose
as if one were writing sonnets, is but a collection of notes, whose only
value is that they may some day be worked into the substance of a story
or an essay. It has not yet been proved--in spite of the many
interesting attempts which have been made, chiefly in France, in spite
of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, Baudelaire's _Petits Poèmes en Prose_, and
Mallarmé's jeweled fragments--that prose can, quite legitimately, be
written in this detached, poetic way, as if one were writing sonnets. It
seems to me that prose, just because it is prose, and not poetry--an art
of vaguer, more indeterminate form, of more wandering cadences--can
never restrict itself within those limits which give the precision of
its charm to verse, without losing charm, precision, and all the finer
qualities of its own freedom.

In France, as in England, there are two kinds of poetical reputation,
and in France these two kinds may be defined as the reputation of the
Latin Quarter and the reputation of the boulevards. In England a writer
like Francis Thompson was, after all, known to only a very narrow
circle, even though many, in that circle, looked on him as the most
really poetical poet of his generation. In France, Vielé-Griffin is
greatly admired by the younger men, quite as much, perhaps, as De
Régnier, but he is not read by the larger outside public which has, at
all events, heard of De Régnier. These fine shades of reputation are
not easily recognized by the foreigner; they have, indeed, nothing to do
with the question of actual merit; but they have, all the same, their
interest, if only as an indication of the condition and tendency of
public opinion.

If we go further, and try to compare the actual merit of the younger
French and English poets, we shall find some difficulty in coming to any
very definite conclusion. To certain enthusiasts for exotic things, it
has seemed as if the mere fact of a poem being written in French gives
it an interest which it could not have had if it had been written in
English. When the poem was written by Verlaine or by Mallarmé, yes; but
now that Verlaine and Mallarmé are gone? Well, there is still something
which gives, or seems to give, French verse an advantage over English.
The movement which began with Baudelaire, and culminated in Verlaine,
has provided, for every young man who is now writing French verse, a
very helpful kind of tradition, which leaves him singularly free within
certain definite artistic limits. It shows him, not a fixed model, but
the suggestion of innumerable ways in which to be himself. All modern
French verse is an attempt to speak straight, and at the same time to
speak beautifully. "_L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument
soi-même,_" said Verlaine, and all these poets who are writing vers
libre, and even those who are not writing _vers libre_, are content to
be absolutely themselves, and to leave externalities perhaps even too
much alone. What we see in England is exactly the contrary. We have had
our traditions, and we have worn them out, without discovering a new
form for ourselves. When we try to be personal in verse, the personal
emotion has to mold anew every means of expression, every time; and it
is rarely that we succeed in so difficult a task. For the most part we
write poems for the sake of writing poems, choosing something outside
ourselves to write about, and bringing it into permanent relation with
ourselves. Our English verse-writers offer us a ballad, a sonnet, an
eclogue; and it is a flower without a root, springing from no deep soil
in the soul. The verse is sometimes excellent verse, but it is not a
personal utterance; it is not a mood of a temperament, but something
outside a temperament. In France, it is true, we often get the
temperament and nothing else. And, in France, all these temperaments
seem stationary; they neither change nor develop; they remain
self-centered, and in time we become weary of seeing their pale
reflections of themselves. Here, we become weary of poets who see
everything in the world but themselves, and who have no personal hold
upon the universe without. Between the too narrowly personal and a too
generalized impersonality, there remains, in France and in England, a
little exquisite work, which is poetry. Is it important, or even
possible, to decide whether there is a little more of it to be found in
the books of English or of French poets?




PARADOXES ON POETS


The great period of English poetry begins half-way through the sixteenth
century, and lasts half-way into the seventeenth. In the poetry strictly
of the sixteenth century, before the drama had absorbed poetry into the
substance of its many energies, verse is used as speech, and becomes
song by way of speech. It was the age of youth, and rejoiced, as youth
does, in scarcely tried strength and in the choice of adventure. And it
was an adventure to write. Soldiers and voyagers, Sidney, Raleigh, led
the way as on horses and in ships. It is Raleigh, in the preface to a
deeply meditated "History of the World," who speaks gallantly of
"leisure to have made myself a fool in print." New worlds had been found
beyond the sea, and were to be had for the finding in all the regions of
the mind. There were buried worlds of the mind which had lately been dug
up, lands had been newly colonized, in Italy and in France; à kind of
second nature, it seemed to men in those days, which might be used not
less freely than nature itself. And, just as the Renaissance in Italy
was a new discovery of the mind, through a return to what had been found
out in antiquity and buried during the Middle Ages, so, in England,
poetry came to a consciousness of itself by way of what had already been
discovered by poets like Petrarch and Ronsard, and even their later apes
and mimics, Serafino or Desportes, among those spoils. Poetry had to be
reawakened, and these were the messengers of dawn. Once awakened, the
English tongue could but sing, for a while, to borrowed tunes; yet it
sang with its own voice, and the personal accent brought a new quality
into the song. Song-writers and sonnet-writers, when they happened to be
poets, found out themselves by the way, and not least when they thought
they were doing honor to a foreign ideal.

And it was an age of music. Music, too, had come from Italy, and had
found for once a home there. Music, singing and dancing made then, and
then only, the "merry England" of the phrase. And the words, growing out
of the same soil as the tunes, took equal root. Campion sums up for us a
whole period, and the song-books have preserved for us names, but for
them unknown, of perfect craftsmen in the two arts. Every man, by the
mere feeling and fashion of the time, took care


to write
Worthy the reading and the world's delight.


It was an age of personal utterance; and men spoke frankly, without
restraint, too nice choosing, or any of the timidities or exaggerations
of self-consciousness. The personal utterance might take any form;
whether Fulke Greville wrote "treatises" on the mind of man, or Drayton
pried into the family affairs of the fairies, or Samuel Daniel thought
out sonnets to Delia, or Lodge wantoned in cadences and caprices of the
senses. It might seem but to pass on an alien message, in as literal a
translation as it could compass of a French or Italian poem. In the hand
of a poet two things came into the version: magic, and the personal
utterance, if in no other way, through the medium of style.

Style, to the poets of the sixteenth century, was much of what went to
the making of that broad simplicity, that magnificently obvious
eloquence, which seems to us now to have the universal quality of the
greatest poetry. The poets of the nineteenth century are no nearer to
nature, though they seem more individual because they have made an art
of extracting rare emotions, and because they take themselves to pieces
more cunningly. Drayton's great sonnet is the epilogue, and Spenser's
great poem the epithalamium, for all lovers; but it needs another
Shelley to find out love in the labyrinth of "Epipsychidion." All that
is greatest in the poetry of the sixteenth century is open to all the
world, like a wood, or Arcadia, in which no road is fenced with
prohibitions, and the flowers are all for the picking.

And when, in the nineteenth century, poetry began again, it was to the
poets of the sixteenth century that the new poets looked back, finding
the pattern there for what they were making over again for themselves. A
few snatches from Elizabethan song-books were enough to direct the first
awakenings of song in Blake; Wordsworth found his gnomic and rational
style, as of a lofty prose, in Samuel Daniel; Keats rifled the best
sweets of Lodge's orchard; and Shelley found in the elegies of Michael
Drayton the model of his incomparable style of familiar speech in verse,
the style of the _Letter to Maris Gisborne._ Every reader of modern
verse will find something contemporary in even the oldest of these
poems; partly because modern verse is directly founded on this verse of
the sixteenth century, and partly because the greatest poetry is
contemporary with all ages.

Byron is to be judged by the whole mountainous mass of his world and not
by any fragment of colored or glittering spar which one's pick may have
extricated from the precipitous hillside. His world is a kind of natural
formation, high enough to climb, and wide enough to walk On. There is
hard climbing and heavy walking, but, once there, the air braces and the
view is wide.

In making a selection from this large and uneven mass of poetry, it is
difficult to do justice to a writer who was almost never a really good
writer of verse, except in a form of what he rightly defined as
"nondescript and ever-varying rhyme." The seriocomic ottava rima of _Don
Juan_ and _The Vision of Judgment_ is the only meter which Byron ever
completely mastered; and it is only in those unique poems, in which
Goethe detected, for the first time in modern poetry, a "classically
elegant comic style," that Byron is wholly able to express the new
quality which he brought into English literature in a wholly personal,
or at all satisfying, way. From the first he was a new force, but a
force unconscious of direction, with all the uncouthness of nature in
convulsions. He had a strong, direct, and passionate personality, but we
find him, even in the better parts of _Childe Harold_, putting rhetoric
in the place of that simplicity which he was afterward to discover by
accident, as in jest; we find him, throughout almost the whole of the
poetical romances, a mere masquerader in Eastern frippery, which is
scarcely the better because it happened to have been bought on the spot;
we find him, in his serious reflections, either quite sensible and quite
obvious, or, as in addresses to the ocean, and the like, straining on
tiptoe toward heights that can only be reached by wings. His lyric verse
was always without magic, and only now and then, and chiefly in the
lines beginning "When we two parted," was he able to turn speech into a
kind of emphatic and intense chant, into which poetry comes as a kind of
momentary suspension of the emphasis. His rendering of actual sensation,
as in parts of _Mazeppa_, is the nearest approach to poetry which he
made in those poems which were supposed to be the very voice of passion.
Everything that he wrote in blank verse, and consequently the whole of
the plays, is vitiated by his incapacity to handle that meter, or indeed
to distinguish it, in any vital or audible way, from prose. Now and
again personal feeling flung off the ill-fitting and constraining
clothes of rhetoric, and stood up naked; sentiments of resentment,
against his wife, or against the world, or against himself, made poetry
sometimes. Then, as it was to be under other conditions in the later
work, his flame is the burning of much dross: excellent food for flames.

And yet, out of all this writing which is hardly literature, this poetry
which is hardly verse, there comes, even to the reader of to-day, for
whom "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme" is as dead and buried
as Napoleon, some inexplicable thrill, appeal, potency; Byron still
lives, and we shall never cease to read almost his worst work, because
some warmth of his life comes through it. Almost everything that he
wrote was written for relief, and its effect on us is due to something
never actually said in it; it is a kind of wild dramatic speech of some
person in a play, whose words become weighty, tragic and pathetic
because of the fierce light thrown upon them by a significant character
and by transfiguring circumstances.

When Byron wrote to Murray, "You might as well want a midnight all stats
as rhyme all perfect," he was theorizing over his own failure to achieve
sustained excellence on any one level Luckily he carried the theory, in
his own downright way, into practise, and, in the "versified Aurora
Borealis" of the great comic poems, the defect turns into a quality, and
creates what is really a new poetical form. Byron is a heroical Buffoon,
the great jester of English poetry; and he is this because he is the
only English poet who is wholly buoyant, arrogant and irresponsible. "I
never know the word which will come next," he boasts, in _Don Juan_, and
for once, improvisation becomes a means to an end, almost an end in
itself. It is in the comic verse, strangely enough, that the first real
mastery over form shows itself: a genius for rhyme which becomes a new
music and decoration, as of cap and bells on the head of sober marching
verse, and a genius for plain statement which leaves prose behind in
mere fighting force, and glorifies fighting force with a divine natural
illumination.




THE END





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