PART II

ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM

CHATEAUBRIAND AND ROMANTICISM

[Chateaubriand and the French Revolution.]

THERE are some men who seem epitomes of their periods, of all the

weaknesses, strengths, ideals and follies and wisdoms of their times.

All the tangled skeins of different movements seem embroidered into

the pattern of a face; and that face is theirs. We seek in them the

years in which they lived, and are never disappointed. Sir Philip

Sidney means the age of Elizabeth, Dr. Johnson the common-sense English

eighteenth century, Rousseau the stirring of revolutionary France,

Goethe the awakening of Germany. Of these men was Chateaubriand. He

was born before the storm and died after it. He gathered up the best

of the things that were before the revolution, and handed them on to

the men who, when the revolution had left a new France, were to make

that new country the centre of European literature. Rousseau and the

Romantics meet in him. He wrote when France, her eyes still bright and

wide after the sight of blood, was seeking in religion for one thing,

at least, that might be covered by the tossing waves of revolution and

yet survive. Christianity in his finest story is the rock on which

his lovers break themselves. And Christianity was the first earthwork

attacked before the revolution, and the first reoccupied afterwards.

Chateaubriand stands curiously in the midst of the opposing elements.

Like Byron he was a patrician and a fighter. He too would have died

for freedom. But whereas Byron fought, contemptuously sometimes, for

revolutionaries, Chateaubriand fought against them.

When some of the ragged ones marched joyously down his street carrying

the heads of two of their enemies bleeding on the ends of pikes, he

cried at them, 'Brigands! Is this what you mean by Liberty?' and

declared that if he had had a gun he would have shot them down like

wolves. And if Chateaubriand had not been an aristocrat, he could never

so well have represented his times. He would have fought and written

as a revolutionist, instead of caring passionately for one party, and

pinning to it the ideals of the other, so claiming both for his own.

Everything that could make him one with his period and country was his.

After a childhood of severe repression, he had seen the fall of the

Bastille, and then sought liberty and the North-West Passage, coming

back from America to find the revolution successful against himself.

Could any man's life be so perfect an analogy of the meteor-like

progress of France? France also sought liberty and a North-West

Passage, quicker than all others; France also was to return and find

the ground aquiver beneath her feet.

[Illustration: JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU]

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau.]

After that she was to be mistress of Europe. The three stages of

Romanticism correspond with these three stages of France; the last that

of Hugo and Gautier and Dumas, the Romanticism of 1830, promised by

that of Chateaubriand, itself made possible by the unrestful writing

of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is impossible to understand any one of

the three without referring to the others. Rousseau was the son of a

watchmaker, in a day when superiority of intellect in a man of low

birth won him either neglect or the most insufferable patronage.

His mother died in bearing him, and his father, although he made a

second marriage, never mentioned her without tears. He seems to have

been a very simple-hearted man, and found such pleasure in romances

that he would sit up all night reading them to his little son, going

ashamedly to bed in the morning when the swallows began to call in

the eaves. These two traits in his father are characteristic of the

work of Rousseau himself. His life was spent in emphasising the

compatibility of low birth with lofty animation, and so in preparing

that democratisation of literature that generously attributes humanity

to men who are not gentlemen. Richardson gave him a suitable narrative

form for what he had to say, and _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is a novel in

letters whose hero is a poor tutor in love with his pupil. The book

is full of an emotional oratory so fresh and sincere that it seems as

if the ice of fifty years of passionless reasoning has suddenly broken

over the springs of the human heart. There is in it too an Ossianic

sharing of feelings with Nature, as if man had realised with the tears

in his eyes that he had not always lived in towns.

[The world of the Revolution.]

Chateaubriand had not Rousseau's birthright of handicap. He could not

feel the righteous energy of the watchmaker's son against a people who

did not know their own language and were yet in a position to employ

him as a footman. He was outside that quarrel. He left Rousseau's

social reform behind him on the threshold of his world, but had learnt

from him to carry his heart upon his sleeve, and to cry, like _Ossian_,

'The murmur of thy streams, O Lara! brings back the memory of the past.

The sound of thy woods, Garmallar, is lovely in mine ear.' He took with

him Rousseau's twin worships of passion and nature into the melancholy

turmoil that was waiting for him, sad with an unrest not of classes but

of a nation. He knew, like France, what it was to question everything

while standing firm upon nothing. In that maelstrom nothing seemed

fixed; there was nothing a man might grasp for a moment to keep his

head above the waters of infinite doubt. Everything seemed possible,

and much of the Romantic melancholy is a despairing cry for a little

impossibility from which at least there could be no escape. It is

one thing to question religion by the light of atheism, or atheism by

the light of religion; it is another thing, and far more terrible, to

question both while sure of neither, and to see not one word in all the

universe, not God, nor Man, nor State, nor Church, without a question

mark at its side, a ghastly reminder of uncertainty, like, in some old

engravings, the waiting figure of Death muffled in each man's shadow.

[_Atala._]

That was the world of the Revolution, a world whose permanent

instability had been suddenly made manifest by a violent removal of the

apparently stable crust. With the overturning of one mountain every

other shuddered in its bed, and seemed ready at any moment to shake

with crash and groan into the valleys. This was the world for whose

expression the face of Chateaubriand, nervous, passionate, the fire of

vision in his eye, the wind of chaos in his tempestuous hair, seems so

marvellously made. This was the world in which, like the spirit of his

age, he wrote the books the times expected because they were their own.

_Atala_ and _René_, but particularly _Atala_, seemed to be the old,

vague promises of Rousseau and _Ossian_, reaffirmed with the clarity

of a silver trumpet. Chactas and Atala, those savage lovers, who 'took

their way towards the star that never moves, guiding their steps by the

moss on the tree stems,' walked like young deities of light before

these people who had known the half-mummied courtesies of an eighteenth

century civilisation. 'She made him a cloak of the inner bark of the

ash, and mocassins of the musk rat's skin, and he set on her head a

wreath of blue mallows, and on her neck red berries of the azalea,

smiling as he did so to see how fair she was.' The world is young

again, and man has won his way back into Eden, conscious of sorrow,

conscious of evil, but alive and unafraid to be himself.

[Nature and emotion.]

Chateaubriand carried further than Rousseau the transfiguration of

nature by emotion, although in _Atala_ nature is still a stage effect,

subjected to its uses as illustration of the feelings of the humans in

the tale. Chateaubriand tunes up the elements with crash of thunder,

bright forked lightning, and fall of mighty tree, to the moment when,

in the supreme crisis the hand of Atala's God intervenes between the

lovers, and the bell of the forest hermitage sounds in the appropriate

silence. But in those vivid, fiery descriptions there is already

something besides the theatrical, a new generosity of sentiment that

was to let Barye make lions and tigers instead of what would once

have been rather impersonal decorations, and to allow Corot to give

landscapes their own personality without always seeking to impose on

them the irrelevant interest of human figures. Nature is never excluded

from the story, and when the action is less urgent the setting is given

a greater freedom. The lovers never meet on a studio background,

but are always seen with trees and rivers, and forest dawn and forest

night, more real than any that had been painted before. Chateaubriand

is never content to call a tree a tree or a bird a bird, but gives them

the dignity of their own names. Aurora no longer rises from her rosy

bed in the approved convention for the dawn, but a bar of gold shapes

itself in the east, the sparrow-hawks call from the rocks, and the

martens retire to the hollows of the elms.

[Illustration: FRANÇOIS RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND]

[Particularity in setting.]

It was through caring for his setting in this way that Chateaubriand

came as if by accident to the discovery of local colour. He wanted

his savages to love in the wilderness, and happening to have seen a

wilderness, reproduced it, and made his savages not merely savages but

Muskogees, fashioned their talk to fit their race, and made it quite

clear that this tale, at any rate, could not be imagined as passing

on the Mountains of the Moon. When the older story-tellers named a

locality they did little more than the Elizabethan stage managers, who

placed a label on the stage and expected it to be sufficient to conjure

up a forest or a battlefield. Chateaubriand, in making his writing

more completely pictorial, visualised his scenes in detail, and so

showed the Romantics the way to that close distinction between country

and country, age and age, race and race, that made the artists of the

nineteenth century richer than any who were before them in variety of

subject, and in the material of self-expression.

[Christianity.]

The Christianity of _Atala_ was the religion that Chateaubriand

offered to his country in _Le Génie du Christianisme_. I can never be

quite sure that it was his own, but in that amazing book, divided and

subdivided like an ancient treatise on some occult science, he showed

with passionate use of reasoning and erudition that Christianity was

not the ugly thing that it had been pictured by the eighteenth century

philosophers, and, more, that it at least was older than France,

and permanent in a world where kings, emperors, and republics swung

hither and thither like dead leaves in the wind. The teaching came to

Paris like a gospel. These people, anchorless as they were, were not

difficult converts, because they were eager to be converted, and to be

able, if only for a moment in their lives, to whisper, 'I believe' in

something other than uncertainty. All society became Christian for a

time, and when that time passed, the effects of the book did not all

pass with it. The artists of a younger generation had learned that

Christianity was the belief that had brought most loveliness into the

world, and that the Gods of Antiquity were not the only deities who

were favourable to beautiful things. The false taste of the end of the

eighteenth century had been pierced by Gothic spires, and through the

dull cloud of correct and half-hearted imitation showed again the

pinnacles and gargoyles and flying buttresses of the naïve and trustful

mediæval art. Atala joins hands with Nicolete, and links Victor Hugo

with the builders of Notre Dame.

[The art of Chateaubriand survives the battle in which it was used.]

There is little wonder that a writer who answered so fully the needs

of his own generation, and did so much to cut a way for the generation

to come, became instantly famous, immediately execrated. Chateaubriand

wrote: 'La polémique est mon allure naturelle.... Il me faut toujours

un adversaire, n'importe où.' In 1800 he had no difficulty in finding

them. But it takes two to make a quarrel. It would not have been

surprising if books that belonged so absolutely to the battles of their

times should have struck their blows, and been then forgotten for want

of opposition. Manifestations of the time spirit, and particularly

fighting manifestations, not infrequently manifest it only to the

time, and are worthless to future generations. _Atala_, after setting

in an uproar the Paris of 1802 is for us but a beautiful piece of

colour whose pattern has faded away. Unless we can feel with the men

of the dawn that we are tossing on mad waves, clutching at religion

as at a rock beneath the shifting waters, and breathlessly thankful

for any proof of its steadfastness and power: unless we can remember

with them the old love of drawing-rooms and bent knees and kisses on

gloved hands, and feel with them a passionate novelty in the love of

wild things in the open air; unless we can remember the tamed, docile

nature of the pastorals, and open our eyes upon a first view of any

sort of real country; unless, in a word, we can dream back a hundred

years, the beauty of _Atala_ is like that of an old battle-cry:--

'So he cried, as the fight grew thick at the noon,

_Two red roses across the moon_!'

The cry no longer calls to battle. The combatants are dead. The bugle

sounds to armies of white bones, and we who overhear it think only of

the skill of the trumpeter. And Chateaubriand had something in him

that was independent of his doctrines, independent of his enemies.

Flaubert, looking back to him over the years, saw in his books, when

the dust of their battles settled about them, early examples of a most

scrupulous technique. Chateaubriand the fighter, the man of his time,

was forgotten in the old master of a new prose. These books shaped in

the din of battle were models for men writing in a fat, quiet day of

peace. Then it was possible, the clangour no longer sounding in the

ears, to notice the mastery of form, the elaboration, carried so far

and no further, of the main idea into the significant detail that was

to make the idea alive; then became clear the economy that makes of

every fact a vivid illustration of some trait in the people of the

story, a heightening of the lights or a deepening of the shadows of the

tale.

SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM

SCOTT AND ROMANTICISM

[Scott's place in the romantic movement.]

THE genius of a man like Scott does not leap into the world a complete

and novel creation, like Minerva from the skull of Jupiter, ready

for battle, and accoutred in the armour that it never afterwards

forsakes. Nor does it with the strength of its own hand turn one world

into another, or the audience of Fielding and Smollett into that

of the Waverley Novels. The world is prepared for it; it finds its

weapons lying round its cradle, and works its miracle with the world's

co-operation.

Romanticism, although, in our indolence, we like to think of it as the

work of a single man, as a stream gushing from the hard rock at the

stroke of a Moses, was no conjuring trick, nor sudden invention, but a

force as old as story-telling. The rock had been built gradually over

it, and was as gradually taken away. It suits our convenience and the

pictorial inclination of our minds to imagine it as the work of one man

or two; but there is hardly need to remind ourselves of facts we have

so wilfully forgotten, and that, if we choose, we can trace without

difficulty a more diffuse as well as a more ancient origin of the

spring.

Romanticism was a movement too large and too various to be defined in

a paragraph, or to allow an essay on any single man to describe, even

in the art of story-telling, its several sources, and the innumerable

streams that flowed from them to fertilise the nineteenth century.

It carried with it liberty and toleration, liberty of expression and

toleration of all kinds of spiritual and physical vitality. It was

comparable with and related to the French Revolution. It allowed men

to see each other in their relations with the universe as well as with

each other, and made existence a thing about which it was possible

to be infinitely curious. Old desires for terror and fantasy and

magnificence arose in the most civilised of minds. Glamour was thrown

over the forest and the palace, and the modern and ancient worlds came

suddenly together, so that all the ages seemed to be contemporary and

all conditions of human life simultaneous and full of promise.

Scott was a part of this revivified world, and his importance in it

is not that of its inventor, but of the man who brought so many of

its qualities into the art of story-telling that his novels became a

secondary inspiration, and moved men as different as Hugo, Balzac, and

Dumas, to express themselves in narrative.

[Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT]

[Romanticism before the Waverley Novels.]

Before the writing of the Waverley Novels, Romanticism in English

narrative had shown itself but a stuttering and one-legged

abortion, remarkable only for its extravagances. It had not, except in

poetry, been humane enough to be literature. It had made only violent

gesticulations like a man shut up in a sack.

Horace Walpole, protesting, I suppose, against Fielding and Smollett,

had said that the 'great resources of fancy had been dammed up by a

strict adherence to common life,' while the older romances were 'all

imagination and improbability.' He had tried to combine the two in _The

Castle of Otranto_, a book in which portraits sigh and step down from

their canvases, dead hermits reappear as skeletons in sackcloth, and

gigantic ghosts in armour rise to heaven in a clap of thunder. These

eccentricities were efforts after the strangeness of all true romance,

and their instant popularity showed how ready people were for mystery

and ancient tale. Before Scott succeeded in doing what Walpole had

attempted, in writing a tale that should be strange but sane, ancient

but real, a crowd of novels, whose most attractive quality was their

'horridness,' had turned the heads of the young women who read them.

Miss Thorpe, in _Northanger Abbey_, says:

'My dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all

this morning? Have you gone on with _Udolpho_?'

'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the

black veil.'

'Are you indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is

behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?'

'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me: I would not

be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure

it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I

should like to spend my whole life in reading it, I assure you; if

it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for

all the world.'

'Dear creature, how much I am obliged to you; and when you have

finished _Udolpho_, we will read the Italian together; and I have

made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.'

'Have you indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?'

'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my

pocket-book. _Castle of Wolfenbach_, _Clermont_, _Mysterious

Warnings_, _Necromancer of the Black Forest_, _Midnight Bell_,

_Orphan of the Rhine_, and _Horrid Mysteries_. These will last us

some time.'

'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are

all horrid?'

'Yes, quite sure, for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews,

a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read

every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would be

delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you

can imagine.'

[Percy, _Ossian_, and Chatterton.]

These things were but the clothes of romantic story-telling, walking

bodiless about the world, while a poetry old enough to be astonishingly

new was nurturing the body that was to stretch them for itself.

Chatterton's ballads, imitations as they were, showed a sudden and

novel feeling for mediæval colouring. _Ossian_, that book of majestic

moments, carried imagination out again to stand between the wind and

the hill. Scott disliked its vagueness, but it helped in preparing his

world. Percy's _Reliques_, excused by their compiler on the frivolous

ground of antiquarian interest, brought the rough voice and rude style

of Sir Philip Sidney's blind beggar ringing across the centuries, and

in those old tales, whose rhymes clash like sword on targe, Scott found

the inspiration that Macpherson's disorderly, splendid flood swept down

on other men.

[Scott's life.]

Scott's life was no patchwork but woven on a single loom. He did not

turn suddenly in manhood to discover the colour of his life. It had

been his in babyhood. An old clergyman, a friend of his aunt, protested

that 'one may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as where that

child is,' while Walter Scott, aged three or four, shouted the ballad

of Hardyknute:--

'And he has ridden o'er muir and moss,

O'er hills and mony a glen,

When he came to a wounded knight

Making a heavy mane.

Here maun I lye, here maun I dye,

By treacherie's false guiles;

Witless I was that e'er gave faith

To wicked woman's smiles.'

As he grew older, he was able, like Froissart, to 'inquire of the truth

of the deeds of war and adventures' that were to be the background

of much of his work. He knew old Lowland gentlemen who had paid

blackmail to Rob Roy, was told of the '15 and the '45 by veterans who

had used their swords on those occasions, and heard of the executions

after Culloden from one who had seen at Carlisle the rebels' heads

above the Scottish Gate. The warlike knowledge of his childhood was

ripened and mellowed for story-telling by the enthusiasms of his

youth. Riding through the Lowland valleys collecting the border

minstrelsy, his good nature and pleasant way let him learn in a broad

acquaintanceship fashion the character of his countrymen. He had not

Balzac's deep-cutting analytic knowledge of men, but knew them as

a warm-hearted fellow of themselves. He knew them as one man knows

another, and not with the passionately speculative knowledge belonging

to a mind that contemplates them from another world. He did not analyse

them, but wrote of their doings with an unconscious externality that

very much simplified their motives and made them fit participators in

the sportsman-like life of his books.

[Scott and reality.]

Ballads and sagas and the historical reading to which they had given

their savour; a free open air life, and a broad, humorous understanding

of men; these were the things that Scott had behind him when Cervantes

moved him to write narrative, and when the gold that shines through

the dress of education in the stories of Maria Edgeworth made him

fall in love with local as well as historical colour, anxious to draw

his nation as she had drawn hers, and to paint Scottish character in

prose as Burns had painted it in verse. The historical character of his

work should not disguise from us its more vital qualities. Hazlitt,

whose keen eye was not to be put out by the gold and pomp of trappings

and armour, notices that Scott represents a return to the real. He

is noticing the most invigorating quality of Romanticism. Scott's

importance is not his because he wrote historical novels, but because

his historical novels were humane. He had found out, as Hazlitt says,

that 'there is no romance like the romance of real life.'

[His technique.]

'As for his technique, there is no need to praise him, who had so many

other virtues, for that of delicate craftsmanship, which he had not.

He was not a clever performer, but an honest one whose methods were no

more elaborate than himself. Dumas describes them in that chapter of

the _Histoire de mes Bêtes_ in which he discusses his own:--

'His plan was to be tedious, mortally tedious, often for half a

volume, sometimes for a volume.

'But during this volume he posed his characters; during this volume

he made so minute a description of their physiques, characters, and

habits; you learnt so well how they dressed, how they walked, how

they talked, that when, at the beginning of the second volume, one

of these characters found himself in some danger, you exclaimed to

yourself:

'"What, that poor gentleman in an applegreen coat, who limped as

he walked, and lisped as he talked, how is he going to get out of

that?"

'And you were very much astonished, after being bored for half a

volume, a volume, sometimes indeed for a volume and a half; you

were astonished to find that you were enormously concerned for the

gentleman who lisped in talking, limped in walking, and had an

applegreen coat.'

The sensation of reading a Waverley Novel is that of leaning on the

parapet of a bridge on a summer day, watching the sunlight on a twig

that lies motionless in a backwater. The day is so calm and the

sunlight so pleasant that we continue watching the twig for a time

quite disproportionate to the interest we feel in it, until, when it is

at last carried into the main current, we follow its swirling progress

down the stream, and are no more able to take our eyes from it than if

we were watching the drowning of ourselves.

[Improvisation.]

Scott knew very well the disadvantages of improvisation, of piling

up his interest and our own together. But he could work in no other

manner. He said: 'There is one way to give novelty, to depend for

success on the interest of a well contrived story. But, wo's me! that

requires thought, consideration--the writing out of a regular plan or

plot--above all, the adhering to one, which I can never do, for the

ideas rise as I write, and bear such a disproportioned extent to that

which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall

never be able to take the trouble.' His was a mind entirely different

from Poe's, or Mérimée's, or Flaubert's, those scrupulous technicians

with whom was the future of Romanticism, and it was an artistic virtue

in him to realise the fact, to proceed on his own course, leaving as he

went large, rough, incomparable things, as impressive as the boulder

stones of which the country people say that a giant threw them as he

passed.

[His character and work.]

His swift, confused writing gets its effect because he never asked

too much from it. He never tried to do anything with it beyond the

description of his characters and the telling of their story. He

had no need to catch an atmosphere by subtleties of language. His

conception of the beings and life of another age did not make them

different except in externals, from our own. He did not, like Gautier

or Flaubert, regard the past as a miraculous time in which it was

possible to be oneself, or in which true feeling was not veiled in

inexactitudes. Very simple himself, he did not feel in the present

those laxities of sensation or inexactitudes of expression that made

the past a place of refuge. He was not dissatisfied with life as he

found it, and was not disposed to alter it when he dressed it for a

masquerade. Nor was that difficult for him. His mind was full of the

stage properties of the past, and, as he walked about, he lived in any

time he chose and was the same in all of them. He lived with humanity

rather than in any particular half-century, and did not feel, like

Peacock, the need of dainty, careful movement in order not to break the

fabric he was building. _Maid Marian_ is the same story as _Ivanhoe_.

Scott seems to have stepped straight out of his story to write it,

Peacock to be looking a long way back, and building very skilfully

the replica of something he had never seen but in a peculiarly happy

vision. Scott is quite at home in his tale, and can treat it as rudely

as he likes. Peacock seems to be playing very warily on the fragile

keys of a spinet.

Sir Walter's fingers would have broken a spinet. His was no elaborately

patterned music threaded with the light delicacies of melody. He

struck big chords and used the loud pedal. His was the art of a Wagner

rather than that of a Scarlatti. 'The Big Bow-wow strain,' he wrote,

comparing himself with Jane Austen, 'I can do like any now going; but

the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and

characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the

sentiment, is denied to me.' 'One man can do but one thing. Universal

pretensions end in nothing.' Scott knew that jewellery-work was not

for him, and never tried his eyes by peering through the watchmaker's

glass. He saw life, as a short-sighted man sees a landscape, in its

essentials. He could spread over it what dress of detail he preferred,

and chose that which came readiest to his hand, flinging over humanity

the cloak of his boyish dreams. Humanity was not hampered by it, but

moves through his pages like a stout wind over a northern moor.

THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830

THE ROMANTICISM OF 1830

[The mingling of the arts.]

DUMAS in _La Femme au Collier de Velours_ thus describes Hoffmann's

room: 'It was the room of a genius at once capricious and picturesque,

for it had the air of a studio, a music-shop, and a study, all

together. There was a palette, brushes, and an easel, and on the easel

the beginnings of a sketch. There was a guitar, a violin, and a piano,

and on the piano an open sonata. There was pen, ink, and paper, and on

the paper the first scrawled lines of a ballad. Along the walls were

bows, arrows, and arbalests of the fifteenth century, sixteenth-century

drawings, seventeenth-century musical instruments, chests of all

times, tankards of all shapes, jugs of all kinds, and, lastly, glass

necklaces, feather fans, stuffed lizards, dried flowers, a whole world

of things, but a whole world not worth twenty-five silver thalers.'

That account, whether from hearsay, conjecture, or knowledge, I do

not know, is not only an admirable portrait of the room and brain of

an arch-romantic, but might serve as a parable of the Romanticism

of 1830. In that year Hugo's _Hernani_ was produced at the Comédie

Française, and the young men who battled with the Philistines for its

success were drawn from the studios as well as from the libraries,

and had their David in Théophile Gautier. Never before had the arts

been so inextricably entangled, had antiquarianism been so lively and

humane, had gems and worthless baubles been so confounded together.

Chateaubriand had reaffirmed the pictorial rights of literature.

Delacroix was painting pictures from Byron and from Dante, in bold,

predominant colours, very different from the lassitudinous livery

of the schools. There was a new generosity of sentiment responsible

for Corot's landscapes and Barye's beasts. The sudden widening of

knowledge and sympathy was expressed in the new broadness and courage

of technique, and the same forces that covered the palette with vivid

reds and blues, and compelled the sculptor to a virile handling of his

chisel, found outlet in words also. Writers, like painters, seized

the human, coloured, passionate elements in foreign literatures,

looking everywhere for the liberty and brilliance they desired. The

open-throated, sinewy, gladiatorial muse of Byron found here devoted

worshippers, and the spacious movements of Shakespeare, his people

alive and free, independent of the dramas in which for a few hours

in the Globe Theatre they had had a part to play, delighted men with

an outlook very different from, and hostile to, that of Voltaire,

although he had done his share in making their outlook possible.

[Illustration: VICTOR HUGO]

The studio and the study were very close together. Gautier, Hugo, and

Mérimée were all painters in their own right, and there is a difference

between the writers who have only seen life from a library, and those

who have seen it from behind an easel. The writer who has once felt

them can never forget the eye-delighting pleasures of the palette,

but composes in colour-schemes, and feels for the tints of words as

well as for their melody. The work of the Romantics was visualised

and coloured in a manner then new. It was almost shocking to men who

had been accustomed, as it were, to write in the severest monotone,

and to refuse, if indeed they had ever thought of it, such luxury of

realisation.

[Local colour.]

There is no need, except for the sake of the argument, to state the

fact that pictures are called up in a reader's mind by a careful

selection of details presented in a proper order. It is well known

that a few details correctly chosen have a more compelling power on

the imagination than a complete and catalogued description. These men,

writing pictorially, gave a new responsibility to single touches. It

became clear that visualisation was impossible unless observation

preceded it, and details accordingly took upon themselves the exigent

dignity of local colour. Local colour, from distinguishing between

places, was brought to mark the difference between times. Archæology

became suddenly of absorbing interest; its materials were more than

its materials; they were made the symbols of lives as real and as red

in the veins as those of the archæologists themselves. Notre Dame was

no longer to be expressed in a learned antiquarian paper, but in a

passionate book. And Victor Hugo visualising with the accuracy of a

poet, found that just as archæology meant little without life, so the

life was vapid without the archæology. Quasimodo shoves his hideous

face through a hole in order to be elected king of fools, but Hugo does

not allow that marvellous grimace to fill the picture. The hole must

be there as well, and so 'une vitre brisée à la jolie rosace audessus

de la porte laissa libre un cercle de pierre par lequel il fut convenu

que les concurrents passeraient la tête.' The setting is as important

as the head; humanity and its trappings are worthless by themselves,

and valuable only together. Here is the source of Realism, within

Romanticism itself. Indeed almost the whole development of the art in

the nineteenth century is due to this new care for the frame, and to

this new honesty in dealing with the man within it.

[The youth of the Romantics.]

An energetic simplicity of nature was needed for the fullest enjoyment

of these new conditions, and the greatest of the French Romantics were

almost like big interested children in their attitude towards life

and themselves. As soon as we find a Romantic like Mérimée, reserved,

subtle, a tender-hearted Machiavellian, we find a man who is to

dissociate himself from them sooner or later, and to produce something

different a little from the purely Romantic ideals. There is something

beautiful and inspiriting in the youth of the Romantics. I like to

think of Gautier, the olive-skinned boy from the studio in the rue

St. Louis, overcome with nervousness at the idea of touching the hand

of Hugo, himself only twenty-seven, sitting down and trembling like

a girl on the stairs before the master's door. And then the splendid

prank of Dumas, who, on the eve of revolution, went down into the

country like one of his own heroes, held up a town, and with a very

few friends obtained the submission of the governor, and captured an

arsenal for his party. They were boys, and some hostility was needed

for their uttermost delight. In England the battles of art are more

like squabbles, but in the Paris of 1830 it seemed as if the town were

divided into camps for the defence of classicism and the support of

the new ideas. It was as if each point of vantage had to be taken by

storm, and the great night of _Hernani_, when Hugo's supporters had

red tickets and a password--the Spanish word _hierro_, which means

'steel'--was the noblest memory in the life of at least one of Hugo's

enthusiastic lieutenants.

Such a joyous and vigorous thing was the Romanticism of 1830. It

touched story-telling through Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Gautier, and

Mérimée, of whom the first three, in turning from the theatre to the

art of narrative, found inspiration in Sir Walter Scott. Scott's

influence has been one of bulk rather than of quality on English

story-telling. But in France, instead of tracing his progeny in

insipid copies, we follow it through the bold variations of these

three powerful and original minds. Through them it returned to England

again. Balzac, as the most important of the three, in view of the

later developments of the novel, I have discussed in a separate

chapter. Gautier's Oriental and Antique inspiration, and Mérimée's

combination of ascetic narrative with vivid subject, are also themes

for separate and particular consideration. But Hugo and Dumas are so

generally representative of the Romantic movement in story-telling,

that in writing of them in this chapter I feel I am but filling in the

background already sketched for the others.

[The Preface to _Cromwell_.]

The theatre was, in 1830, the scene of the most decisive battle between

Romanticism and Classicism. The fight of the painters, of the poets,

of the story-tellers, seemed concentrated in the more obvious combat

of the dramatists, whose armies could see their enemies, and even come

to blows with them. And in Hugo's preface to _Cromwell_, that preface

which is now so much more interesting than the play that follows

it, he claims several things for the dramatist that by act if not by

argument he was later to claim for the artist in narrative. He demands

that the sublime and ridiculous should be together in literature

and, as in life, win their force from each other. The drama, and so

the novel, which also attempts in some sort a reproduction of human

existence, is not to be written on a single note. It is not to be

wholly sublime or wholly ridiculous, but both at once. The general in

his triumphal car is to be genuinely afraid of toppling over. And so,

in _Les Misérables_, the student's frolic is whole-heartedly described,

without in any way binding the author to make light of the sorrow of

Fantine when she finds that her own desertion is the merry surprise

at the end of it. The sublime will not be the less sublime for being

mingled with the grotesque, and so, in _Notre Dame de Paris_, the

deepest passion in the book is felt by a hideous and deformed dwarf,

and by this same dwarf rather than by any more obvious impersonation

of justice, the lascivious priest is flung from the tower. Looking up

in his agony, as he clings to the bending cornice his desperate hands

have clutched, he does not meet the eyes of some person of a grandeur

matching the moment, but sees the grotesque face of Quasimodo, utterly

indifferent to him, looking, like one of the gargoyles, over Paris,

with tears on his distorted cheeks.

In this same preface, too, Hugo justifies innovations in language,

very necessary for an art whose new won freedom was to let it explore

so much that was unknown. When the body changes, he asks, would you

keep the coat the same? Triumphantly appealing to history, he points

out that 'the language of Montaigne is no longer that of Rabelais, the

language of Pascal is no longer that of Montaigne, and the language of

Montesquieu is no longer that of Pascal.' He is justifying there the

coloured prose of Chateaubriand, the opulent vocabulary of Gautier, and

his own infinitely various effects in prose and verse.

[Victor Hugo on Scott.]

He was, until Sainte-Beuve took the work from his hands, at once

the leader and the defender of Romanticism. And, critic and artist,

severally and in the combination that we have grown accustomed to

expect in fulfilment of both these functions, his was too sovereign a

mind to adopt or borrow anything from another writer without knowing

very clearly what he intended to do with it. Writing of _Quentin

Durward_, he said: 'Après le roman pittoresque mais prosaïque de

Walter Scott il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus

complet encore selon nous. C'est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée,

pittoresque mais poètique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui

enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homère.' That romance is Victor Hugo's

own. His tremendous books are conceived in the manner of an epic

poet rather than of a novelist or a romancer. The relations of his

characters are not solely concerned with themselves but with some

large principle that animates the book in which they live. If he is

without Norns or Fates, if he sets his characters against a background

other than that of Destiny, he substitutes the power of the law or the

power of the sea, and illumines with a story not only the actors who

take part in it, but also the spirit of the Gothic or the spirit of

revolution.

[The Waverley Novels and Hugo's romances.]

To turn from the Waverley Novels to the romances of Hugo, is like

stepping from the open air into a vast amphitheatre whose enclosed

immensity is more overwhelming than the clear sky. Scott writes, on a

plain human level, tales that we can readily believe, chronicles that

are like private documents, or memoirs such as might have been written

by the ancestors of our own families. Hugo does not tell his tale from

the point of view of its actors, but puts them before us in a setting

far larger than the one they saw. Their petty adventures are but

threads chosen arbitrarily from a far more intricate design, and they

themselves but illustrations of some greater motion than any to which

in their own right they could aspire. There are hundreds of them, and

with our narrow powers of interest and attention we fasten on one or

two, like children choosing colours on a race-course, and follow them

to the end, while Hugo, with his godlike eye, sees them all as threads

in his pattern, poor, small lives, twisted in accordance with a design

beyond their comprehension. In Scott's open air we can live and breathe

and be content, and stand firmly with our feet upon the ground. In

Hugo's amphitheatre we see an ordered spectacle of life and death, and

are, as it were, present at the shapings of the ends of man.

[Illustration: ALEXANDRE DUMAS]

[Dumas on Scott.]

There is a much less terrible pleasure to be had from the works of

Dumas. Behind all Hugo's books is the solemnity, behind Dumas' the joy

of living, the _joie de vivre_--the French phrase, although identical,

seems better to express it. To compare Hugo's with Dumas' criticism of

the Scott novel is to see very clearly the difference in weight and

depth between the two men. Hugo sees in Scott the promise of another

and a greater kind of romance. Dumas sees only that it is possible

to improve on Scott's technique. He notices that Scott spends half

a volume or so in describing his characters before setting them in

action, and in his gay way justifies him by saying: 'Il n'y a pas de

feu sans fumée, il n'y a pas de soleil sans ombre. L'ennui, c'est

l'ombre; l'ennui c'est la fumée.' Sacrifice fifty pages of _ennui_

to the gods, and then away with your story. Dumas decides to improve

on this, to set his characters moving, and to pour his libations of

_ennui_ on the way. 'Commencer par l'intérêt, au lieu de commencer

par l'ennui; commencer par l'action, au lieu de commencer par la

préparation; parler des personnages après les avoir fait paraître, au

lieu de les faire paraître après avoir parlé d'eux.' This is not very

sublime, after the suggestion that Hugo won from the same subject; but

it produced '_Les Trois Mousquetaires_.' D'Artagnan is in a hubbub on

the first page, and the _ennui_ of description is given us so sparsely

that, watching for it chapter by chapter, we almost consider ourselves

swindled when we reach the last and are still without it. 'The purpose

of this tale is not to describe interiors,' Dumas petulantly ejaculates

when tired of talking about Cornelius' room in _La Tulipe Noire_. No;

certainly not; neither of rooms nor of men. Damn psychology, and hey

for full-blooded adventure. Dumas took a free stage for his duels and

headlong rides and gallant adventures and ingenious stratagems. His

men moved too fast not to feel themselves encumbered in a furnished

room; there was little point in describing a landscape for them,

since, before it was done, they were several leagues off in another;

too intricate furniture in their own heads would have cost them

hesitancies, unguarded stabs, and possible falls from a galloping horse.

[_Les Trois Mousquetaires._]

Dumas' novels are novels of the theatre. His first piece of work was

an attempt to make a melodrama out of _Ivanhoe_, and his best books

exhibit the art of Walter Scott modified by the rules of the stage.

The curtain rises on people moving about. It falls on a climax. The

action of all its scenes is in crescendo. Alter Scott to fit these

rules, and you have something like the form that Dumas for more than

half a century has imposed on non-psychological fiction. How admirably

he filled it himself. Those splendid fellows of his, whose cavalier way

fairly takes us off our feet, are not dead puppets made to wield toy

swords at the pulling of a string. There is something exuberant and

infectious even in the restraint of Athos. They are all alive, not with

an independent, almost hostile existence like that of the characters

of Balzac, but with a vitality they owe to their creator and to us,

the free coursing blood of boyish dreams. They are the things that at

one time or another we have set our hearts on being, the things that

Dumas actually was. Where they ride a jolly spirit goes with them,

and we know that Dumas had only to settle in a quiet village to turn

it into a place of gay and prosperous festivity. 'Madeleine,' says

D'Artagnan at the end of _Vingt Ans Après_, 'give me the room on the

first floor. I must keep up my dignity now that I am captain of the

musketeers. But always keep my room on the fifth floor; one never

knows what may happen.' Is not that just the attitude of Dumas, who

remarked upon his deathbed, 'I took twenty francs with me to Paris.

Well, I have kept them. There they are,' and pointed to his last louis

on the mantelpiece. In the flamboyant youthfulness of Dumas, who died

a boy at sixty-seven, and called Mazarin 'still young, for he was only

fifty-six,' is perhaps that characteristic that made Romanticism in

France so complete and satisfactory a Renaissance. When such men as he

were writing books the world had won its youth again.

BALZAC

BALZAC

[His vitality.]

BALZAC used to tell a story of his father, who, when asked to carve

a partridge, not knowing how to set about it, rolled up his sleeves,

gripped his knife and fork, and cut it in four with such energy as to

cleave the plate at the same time and embed the knife in the table.

That was the manner of setting about things natural to Balzac himself.

He was a 'joyous wild boar' of a man, with the build and strength

of a navvy. He was never ill. Gautier tells us that the habitual

expression of that powerful face was a kind of Rabelaisian glee. Now a

man who could write the _Comédie Humaine_ and look aside from it with

a Rabelaisian glee was perhaps the only kind of man who could have

attempted such a task without being turned, willy nilly, into a pedant.

[The conception of the _Comédie Humaine_.]

There was a logic, a completeness, in the groundwork of the scheme,

that would have sterilised the imagination of a man with less exuberant

vitality. Compare for a moment the _Comédie Humaine_ with the novels of

Sir Walter Scott. Scott meant to Balzac what Maria Edgeworth had meant

to himself. He had seen in her an attempt to paint Irish country and

character, and had decided to do the same for Scotland. Balzac after

those ten years of bad mediæval stories, those ten years of labour for

the Rachel of his own soul, saw in him an attempt to paint Scottish

country and character, and decided to do the same for France. But,

whereas Scott had been brought up on the _Reliques of English Poetry_,

and in the country of purple heather, grey rock, and leaping stream,

Balzac was nourished on philosophy and science, and spent his youth in

a Paris lodging. Scott saw men rather than kinds of man. Bailie Nicol

Jarvie is more Nicol Jarvie than Bailie. Balzac comes at life in a

much more scientific spirit. 'Does not Society make of man,' he asks,

as Chaucer has unconsciously asked before him, 'as many different men

as there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier,

a labourer, an administrator, an idler, a savant, a statesman, a

merchant, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a priest, are, though more

difficult to seize, as considerable as those that distinguish the wolf,

the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the sea-calf, the goat, etc.'

Balzac made up his mind to collect specimens of the social species,

not pressed and dried, like the old 'Characters' of the seventeenth

century, but exhibited alive and in their natural surroundings. He was

to make a world with the colour of contemporary France, an 'august lie,

true in its details,' a world complete in itself, a world in which

all the characters were to show the impress of that state of life to

which it should please Balzac to call them. That was the idea that

turned the Waverley Novels into the _Comédie Humaine_, that the idea

whose exposition by a less full-blooded professor would have been so

readily precise, so readily dull in its precision.

[Illustration: HONORÉ DE BALZAC]

[Physical energy and the task of writing.]

Now there are few harder tasks for a man of overflowing physical energy

than this, of covering innumerable sheets of paper with wriggling

unnatural lines traced with the end of a pen. It is likely to become

a torment; the feet cross and uncross, the fingers itch, the inkpot

flies across the room, and the energy defeats itself. There is the

legend of Scott's hand, covering sheet after sheet so swiftly and

with such regularity that it was painful to watch it; but Scott's was

not the bomb-like brute energy of Balzac. Balzac, to give life to

his scientific ideas, needed a more fiery vitality than Scott's, who

began and ended with merely human notions. The actual writing of his

books was proportionately more difficult for him. There was no mere

eccentricity in his habit of getting the sketches for his books set up

in type, and enlarging them from proofs in the middle of large sheets

of paper, covering the vast margins with the additions that were to

make the books themselves. It was a wise attempt to give himself the

same physical outlet as that enjoyed by the painter or sculptor, to

give himself something to pull about, something actual, something that

could be attacked, anything rather than the terrible silkworm spinning

of a single endless fibre. His energy would have been wasted in a

hundred ways unless, so far as was possible, he had fitted his work

to himself and himself to his work. Giant of concentration as he was,

he added cubits to his stature by taking thought. He made his writing

hours different from every one else's, wore a white frock something

like a monk's habit, and found in the drinking of enormous quantities

of coffee a stimulant as much theatrical as medicinal. These things

meant much to him, and his use of them was an action similar to that

of Poe's schoolboy, who, when guessing odd or even the marbles in his

playmate's hand, would imitate the expression of his adversary's face

and see what thoughts arose in his mind. The paraphernalia of work were

likely to induce the proper spirit. When all his fellow Parisians were

in bed, Balzac, gathering the voluminous white folds about his sturdy

person, and glancing at the coffee stewing on the fire, sat down to his

writing-table with the conviction of an alderman sitting down to a city

dinner. There could never be a doubt in his mind as to the purpose for

which he was there.

[Balzac's prose.]

This navvy-work of production had its influence on the character of

his writing. But it was never in Balzac's nature to have understood

Gautier's craftsman's delight in the polishing and chasing of

diminutive things. Balzac, the working machine, was simply enormous

energy so coaxed and trained as to produce an enormous output. The raw

material of his rich humanity passed through violent processes. It had

but small chance of any very delicate finish. Balzac thought in books

and in cycles of books, never in pages, paragraphs, or sentences.

Although he was much preoccupied with 'style,' envying the men whose

writing would be charming to the ear even if it meant nothing to the

mind, the best of his own prose is unbeautiful, rugged, fiercely

energetic, peculiarly his own, and therefore not to be grumbled at.

He would have liked to write finely, just as he would have liked _la

vie splendide_. But his mind, delivering pickaxe blows, or furiously

wrestling with great masses of material, could not clothe itself in

stately periods. Always, out of any splendour that he made for it,

shows a brown, brawny arm, and the splendour becomes an impertinence.

He had ideas on art, as he had ideas on science, but his was too large

a humanity to allow itself to be subordinate to either. He was too

full-blooded a man to be withered by a theory. He was too eager to say

what he had in his mouth to be patient in the modulation of his voice.

He was almost too much of a man to be an artist. To think of that man

fashioning small, perfect poems, who avowed that he wrote his _Contes

Drôlatiques_ because he happened to notice the fall in the French birth

rate, is to think of a Colossus tinkering at the mechanism of a watch.

[His proximity to life.]

Then, too, he had been too close to life to think of art for art's

sake. During the years that followed his setting up author in a garret,

he had watched the existence of those who are so near starvation that

they seem to make a living by sweeping the doorstep of Death. And,

at the same time that, walking out in the evenings, and following a

workman and his wife on their way home, he had been able to feel their

rags upon his back, and to walk with their broken shoes upon his feet,

he had also had his glimpses of _la vie splendide_, the more vivid, no

doubt, for their contrast with the sober realities he knew. To this

man, however great a writer he might become, life would always mean

more than books. It always did. He could cut short other people's

lamentations by saying, 'Well, but let us talk of real things; let us

talk of Eugénie Grandet,' but Eugénie Grandet, the miser's daughter,

interested him much more than the mere novel of that name. His people

never existed for the sake of his books, but always his books for the

sake of his people. He makes a story one-legged or humpbacked without

scruple, so long as by doing so he can make his reader see a man and

his circumstances exactly as they appeared to himself. He was not like

a pure artist, an instrument on which life played, producing beautiful

things. His concern with life was always positive. His world was not

a world of dream and patterned imagery, but, according to his mood,

was an elaborate piece of mechanism and he an impassioned mechanician,

or a zoological garden and he an impassioned zoologist. It is almost

matter for wonder that such a man should choose to express himself in

narrative.

[His conception of the novel.]

And yet the novel, as he conceived it, gave him the best of

opportunities for putting his results before the world. If we allow

ourselves to set all our attention on politics and finance and social

theory, we lose in life all but the smell of blue-books, and the grey

colour of Stock Exchange returns. If Balzac had written science, and

not stories, we should have only had the ideas of his novels without

that passionate presentment of concrete things that gives those ideas

their vitality. Indeed, the novels are far greater than the ideas, just

as the poetic, seeing man in Balzac was greater than the scientist.

Weariless in distinguishing man from man, type from type, specimen

from specimen, by the slightest indication of the clay, he was able

in novels, as he could never have done in works of science, to give

the colour of each man's life expressed in his actions, in his talk,

in his choice of clothes, in the furniture of his room. The action of

all novels, like that of all plays, is performed in the brain of the

reader or spectator. The novelist's and dramatist's characters are

like pieces on a chessboard, symbols of possibilities not obviously

expressed. In older fiction these possibilities were left so vague

that the reader could adopt any part he chose, without in the least

interfering with the story, independent as that was of personal

character. Never before Balzac made them had the chessmen assumed so

much of human detail. In his books they are no longer pegs of wood,

depending for their meanings on the reader's generosity, for their

adventures on the ingenuity of the author. They make their moves in

their own rights. The hero of a Balzac novel is not the reader, in

borrowed clothes, undergoing a series of quite arbitrary experiences.

He cannot be made to do what the author requires, but fills his own

suits, and has a private life. Balzac knows and makes his reader feel

that his characters have not leapt ready-made into the world to eat

and drink through a couple of hundred pages and vanish whence they

came. They have left their mark on things, and things have left their

mark on them. They have lived in pages where he has not seen them, and

Balzac never drags them to take a part in existences to which they do

not belong. I can remember no case where Balzac uses a stock scene, a

room, or a garden, or a valley that would do for anything. There was

only one room, one valley, one garden, where the characters could

have said those words, lost that money, or kissed those kisses, and

Balzac's stupendous energy is equal not only to pouring life into his

people, but also to forcing the particular scene upon his canvas with

such vivid strokes that every cobble seems to have a heart, and every

flower in a pot to sway its blossoms with the sun. Even in the short

stories, where he often follows gods that are not his own, writing of

madness like a Hoffmann, and of intrigue like a Boccaccio, his peculiar

genius is apparent in the environments. How carefully, in _La Messe

de l'Athée_, he works out the conditions of life that made the story

possible for its actors. And, in the longer novels, there is scarcely

a sentence unweighted with evidence that is of real import to him who

would truly understand the characters and happenings of the book. How

much does not the story of _Eugénie Grandet_ owe to that description of

the little money-getting, vine-growing town of Saumur, with its cobbled

streets, its old houses, its greedy faces watching the weather from the

house doors, the only proper setting for the narrow power of Goodman

Grandet, and the leaden monotony of his daughter's life?

[Balzac's world and that of Realism.]

Balzac's fierce determination that his lies should be true in their

details has often been remarked in claiming him as the first of the

French realists. And, indeed, others of his characteristics, his

interest in life as it is, the scientific bias that found its parody

in Zola, his fearlessness in choice of subject, his entire freedom

from classical ideals, are certainly attributes of realism. Realism

is ready, like Balzac, to deal with stock exchanges and bakeries and

all the side shops of civilisation; realism finds Greek Greek and not

an Elixir of Life; realism tries to see life as it is. But realism

(an impossible ideal) needs for its approximate attainment a man of

ordinary energy; and this Balzac was not. Balzac used Thor's hammer,

not one from the carpenter's shop. He lived like ten men and so do his

characters. A crossing-sweeper in a story by Balzac would wear out

his broom in half an hour, but the broom of a crossing-sweeper of de

Maupassant or Flaubert would be certain of an average life. Balzac's

world is not the world of realism, because it goes too fast, like a

clock without a pendulum, running at full speed. His world is more

alive than ours, and so are his men. They are demons, men carried to

the _n_th power. Fire runs in their veins instead of blood, and we

watch them with something like terror, as if we were peeping into hell.

They are superhuman like Balzac himself, and have become a kind of

lesser divinities. None but he would have dared 'to frame their fearful

symmetry.' None but they could so well have illustrated existence as

Balzac saw it.

[A new motive in fiction.]

And life, as this Rabelaisian Frenchman saw it, in the chaotic years of

the nineteenth century, was a terrible thing except to the blind and

the numbed, and to those who, like himself, possessed 'unconquerable

souls.' He found two primary motives in existence. Passion and the

production of children was one. He said that this was the only one.

But his life and his work made it clear that there was another, and

that this other was money. Money, the need of it, the spending of

it, fantastic but always acute plans for getting hold of it, like

that suggested in _Facino Cane_, filled his own life, and were not

banished even from his love-letters. His own obsession by debts and

business forced on him as a novelist a new way of looking at life,

and, through him, gave another outlook to story-telling. In the older

novels, Fielding's for example, rich were rich, and poor were poor,

and only to be changed from one to the other by some calamity or fairy

godmother of a coincidence. People were static; unless they turned

out to be Somebody's illegitimate son or rightful heir, their clothes

were not of a finer cut as they grew older, and if they ate off wooden

platters in the first chapter, they supped no more daintily in the

last. In romantic tales and fairy stories, a hero might cut his way

to fortune through dragons or piratical Turks; in the rogue novels he

might swindle a dinner, and after long switchbacking between twopence

and nothing, happen by accident upon a competence; he never, before

Balzac took him in hand, went grimly at life, closing his heart,

concentrating his energies, compelling even love to help him in his

steady climb from poverty to opulence. He left that to the villain,

and the story-teller took care that the villain eventually got his

deserts. The older novelists were vastly interested in the progress

of a love-affair; Balzac looks kindly at that, but his real interest

is in the progress of a financial superman. The wealth and poverty

of Balzac's characters is the quality that makes or breaks them. The

mainspring of their actions is the desire of getting on in life. What

is the tragedy of Eugénie Grandet, but money? What is the tragedy of

Père Goriot, but money? Eliminate wealth and poverty from either of

them and they cease to exist. If old Goriot had been rich and indulgent

to his daughters he would have been an estimable father; but he is

poor; his daughters must be luxurious, and so he is Père Goriot.

The story is that of Lear and his kingdom, translated into hundred

franc notes and lacking the Cordelia. Love, Wisdom, Gentleness are

inconsequent dreamers in a house of Mammon. They talk in window corners

and behind curtains, ashamed of their disinterestedness. They are like

the old gods banished from the temples, whispering in secret places in

the woods, and going abroad quietly in the twilight, while in the glare

of noon the clanking brazen giant strides heavily across the world.

'And underneath his feet, all scattered lay

Dead skulls and bones of men, whose life had gone astray.'

GAUTIER AND THE EAST

GAUTIER AND THE EAST

[The East as a means of expression.]

THE East is an invention of the nineteenth century. We have only

to look at the works of Voltaire or of Goldsmith to see that the

Orient did not exist before the time of the Romantic movement. To

early writers it meant nothing but polygamy, moguls, elephants, and

'bonzes,' and the eighteenth-century translation of the _Arabian

Nights_ did little more than supply an entertaining form to an ironical

philosopher. Even when it became the fashion to make imaginary

Orientals expose the follies of the West, the East had not yet become

alive for us. We find scarcely a hint in the hundred and twenty letters

of _The Citizen of the World_ that it meant more than a dialectical

expression for topsy-turvydom, a place to which you could refer as

to Lilliput or to Brobdingnag, useful like the _x_ of algebra in

illustrating the properties of other things. The first glimmerings of

discovery are in Beckford's _Vathek_, an extravagant book, belittled

by a schoolboyish humour--as when the Caliph plays football with the

rotund figure of the Indian Magician--but written by a man to whom the

East did really mean some sort of gorgeous dream.

For the East is not an expression of philosophy, or of geography, but

of temperament; it is a dream that has led many to leave their people

for its people, their homes for desert tents, in the effort to turn its

conventions into realities of life. Men have fallen in love with it, as

they have fallen in love with statues or with the beautiful women of

pictures. It means more than itself, like a man whom time has lifted

into Godhead. It has been given the compelling power of a religion. I

believe it was an invention made possible by the discovery of local

colour. With the emphasis of local colour came an emphasised difference

in places. Minds only mildly preferring one place to another when both

were vague, most vigorously preferred one or other place when both were

realised in vivid detail, and could be readily compared. Fastidious

minds seeking the stage-properties of expression could choose them in

the booths of all the world. Men who did not care for the settings of

their own lives were able to fill out their dim Arcadias with detail,

and vein their phantom goddesses with blood.

The East, when Gautier was growing up in the rich tastes of the

Romantic movement, was ready to supply the most delicious conventions.

Goethe had shown its possibilities. It was there like a many-coloured

curtain behind which he could build a world less entangled, less

unmanageable than his own. Its newness must not be forgotten in

considering his use of it, and in thinking of his use of Antiquity we

must remember that it was as novel as the East.

[The Antique.]

Now the Antique was one of the cudgels with which the Classicists tried

to beat the heads of the Romanticists in the battles of that time. It

did not mean to Gautier what it meant to them. Its metamorphosis was

simultaneous with the birth of the East, and had almost the same cause.

Insisting on local colour in places, the Romanticists insisted also on

local colour in humanity. Cromwell was to be allowed to say that he

had the parliament in his bag and the king in his pocket. Cæsar was to

be allowed to talk like a man and even to be one. So that for Gautier

Antiquity meant not a cold inhumanity that had been beautiful, but a

warm, full-blooded life that worshipped simple, energetic gods, and

found expression in a thousand ways other than the speech of blank

verse and heroic actions that had been so often represented in pictures

of an annoying timidity of colouring. The East and the Antique together

had been touched as if by magic, and turned from the abstract into the

concrete, from the heroic into the human, and so into the very material

for personal expression.

[The East and Arcadia.]

Gautier's attitude towards the East is not unlike that of the

Elizabethans towards Arcadia. Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, soldier,

and busy statesman, wrote in terms of shepherds, shepherdesses, and

shipwrecked princes, and worked in an ideal atmosphere where no cares

were greater than love, or a thorn in a lamb's foot. He, with

'A sweet attractive kinde of grace

A full assurance given by lookes,

Continual comfort in a face,

The lineaments of gospel bookes,'

seemed to belong to that Golden Age which has never been now, but

always long ago. And Gautier, busy writer of articles and travel-books,

massive and vividly alive, could not persuade himself to be Parisian

and contemporary. Nor would it be extravagant to compare him with the

pastoral writers of to-day, Celtic and Gaelic, who like him lift their

emotions into a simpler, more congenial atmosphere, and like him insist

continually on the local colour of their dreams. These writers, sitting

in London or in Edinburgh, hear, without moving from their comfortable

chairs, the cry of the curlew on the moor, and are transported to a

quiet bay, half enclosed by cliffs, 'in two white curves, like the

wings of the solander when she hollows them as she breasts the north

wind,' and under the spells of an intenser imagined life find their

own emotions more vivid and more easily expressed. Gautier, sitting in

Paris, sees the swallows fluttering about the roofs and flying south in

autumn.

'Je comprends tout ce qu'elles disent,

Car le poète est un oiseau;

Mais captif ses élans se brisent

Contre un invisible réseau!

Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes!

Comme dans le chant de Ruckert,

Pour voler, là-bas avec elles

Au soleil d'or, au printemps vert!'

That cry for wings is the keynote of his most passionately beautiful

work. When he is at his best; when he is not projecting young men with

a mathematical freedom of morals into a Western society; in those

moments when he is most himself, we hear clipped feathers beat against

the bars. He sought to escape from Paris to the Enchanted Islands, and

from the nineteenth century to the Golden Age. The Enchanted Islands

he had identified with the East, and the Golden Age was the time of

the Pharaohs or of the making of the Venus. As the Christian fingers

his crucifix and is able to kneel upon the footsteps of the throne,

so Gautier found talismans to help his dreams to their desires. A

mummy's foot, a marble hand took him to the times he loved, or half

revealed the perfections that reality refused. A curiosity shop was a

postern-gate to heaven, and a merchant of antiquities held St. Peter's

keys.

[The story-telling of dreams.]

His art is that of making his dreams come true. He is not an observer

of life, like Richardson, Fielding, or De Maupassant. He does not copy

the surface of contemporary existence; but cuts away all but passion,

and clothes that in symbols whose strangeness disentangled it and

helped him to make it real. Beautiful women step down to him from their

tapestries, and, living on drops of his blood, come back to him out of

their graves. The Princess Hermonthis claims her little foot that he

has bought as a paper-weight, and takes him to the tomb of the Pharaohs

and the pre-adamite kings sitting with their thousand peoples waiting

for the final day. The Pompeian harlot is brought alive by the love of

a youth for the imprint her perfect breasts have left in molten lava.

He is ill at ease in his most famous _Roman de la Momie_ until he has

finished with the Englishman and the doctor, and is translating the

scroll of papyrus buried three thousand years ago with Tahoser in the

sarcophagus.

[Illustration: THÉOPHILE GAUTIER]

[Gautier the man.]

But it is too easy to construct a man out of his work. It is more

interesting to compare the man of this world with the man he would

have liked to be, and the man he chose to express. Gautier was not

pure dreamer. Though the world of his art was as far from the world of

Paris, as the world of Mr. Yeats from the world of London or Dublin,

he was not a seer, or a poet between whom and reality hung a veil of

dreams. He was a solid man, one of whose proudest memories was a blow

that registered five hundred and thirty-two pounds on an automatic

instrument, the result of daily washing down five pounds of gory

mutton with three bottles of red Bordeaux. He was a Porthos, and the

Gautier of his stories, that gorgeous barbaric figure, was his boast,

cherished as Porthos cherished his dignity. The traits he loved in

himself were those that gave colour to his fiction. His olive skin, his

strength, his vitality, his scorn of the religion of sacrifice--these

were the details he caressed. He was never tired of insisting on

everything that helped in this Oriental and Antique projection of

himself. His hero in _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ exclaims: 'I am a man of

the Homeric times; the world where I live does not belong to me, and

I do not understand the society about me. Christ has not yet come for

me; I am as pagan as Alcibiades and Phidias.... I find the earth as

beautiful as heaven, and I think that perfection of form is virtue.

I love a statue better than a phantom, and full noon better than

twilight. Three things please me: gold, marble and purple, splendour,

solidity, colour.' When a reviewer described him as a being, 'fat,

jovial, and sanguinary,' he quotes the description with gratitude, and

explains gleefully that it refers to his taste for bull-fights. He

begins a book: 'People have often caricatured us, dressed like a Turk,

cross-legged on cushions.... The caricature is only an exaggeration

of the truth.' That was how he liked to think of himself, and how he

would like to be imagined. It is interesting to know that he was a

kindly bear of a man, who was always called by his Christian name, and

delighted in astonishing his friends with outbursts of genius served up

in a joyous obscenity.

He was not a man of wealth as his work suggests; but an extremely

industrious journalist. Like Balzac, he was proud of his prodigious

activity. He confesses that he wrote about three hundred volumes: but

that is the estimate of Porthos; his biographer puts the number at

sixty. From his twenty-fifth year he was an artist on a treadmill, and

only at every hundredth, or two hundredth, or three hundredth turn of

the wheel could he escape for a little and try to satisfy himself. That

is why his poems and shorter stories are the most perfect specimens of

his later work. He needed things that could be roughed out in a sitting

and carried about without risk until the time when he could work on

them again. He was able to hurry out of sight his dozen sheets for the

_Presse_ or the _Figaro_, sit down on his cushions, let his fingers run

through the long hair of a Persian cat, and turn over again and again

one of the minute Enamels or Cameos of his poetry. In so small a space

he could afford to be fastidious. He could take up the little thing

a week later, and a month after that, and file and polish it to his

content. It was the same with the stories. The story-telling Gautier

was a Gautier on holiday.

He was a complete man, and could, in active life, have twisted the

present if he had chosen. But he did not choose. As for politics,

'what does it matter whether one is ruled by a sabre, a sprinkler of

holy-water, or an umbrella?' He has been censured for this, but the

censure means no more than to say he was a perfect artist unfortunately

not interested in local government. One does not ask a shoemaker if his

soles and uppers are Socialist or only gentle Liberal. As for his own

life, he worked hard, brought up his children, but found his emotions

too intricate to please him. He had to separate them, and translate

them into terms of another time and place. Modernity rattled past him,

like the chariots of the king past the potter, who would not look up

from his wheel lest an ugly curve should throw awry the vessel he was

shaping. Gautier did his duty by this world and left it, discovering

for others what Baudelaire called 'the consolation of the arts,' and

finding peace himself in the less encumbered simplicity of his Ancient

and Oriental Arcadia.

[The flowers of the white narcissus.]

His work was the construction of a paradise for himself in which other

people are allowed to walk. His stories are a substitute for opium

and haschisch, and take us into a world like that of old romance and

myth, where we meet our own souls walking in strange clothes. 'Art,'

says Santayana, 'so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease

to be a disappointment.' We leave a volume of Gautier as we leave the

_Mabinogion_, or the _Morte Darthur_, or the _Volsunga Saga_, or a

book of fairy-tales. We have to readjust ourselves before meeting the

difficulties of life. But opposite Santayana's sentence we may set one

from Mahomet. 'If any man have two loaves, let him sell one, and buy

flowers of the white narcissus; for the one is food for the body and

the other is food for the soul.' And perhaps this art, where the world

is simplified into the conventions of a tapestry, by its intense appeal

to primitive emotions, may help us like a touchstone to distinguish

between the things to which more than lip-service is slavery, and the

things to which less than life-service is death.

POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE

POE AND THE NEW TECHNIQUE

[Self-conscious method.]

'IT is the curse,' says Poe, 'of a certain order of mind that it can

never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its ability to do a

thing. Not even is it content with doing it. It must both know and

show how it was done.' It is all very well to call it a curse; it is

the curse that gave us Leonardo's notebooks, Reynolds' Discourses,

and Stevenson's few essays on the art of writing; the curse that is

among the reasons of Leonardo's excellence, Reynolds' excellence,

Stevenson's excellence, and the excellence of Poe himself. It is the

curse that is the secret of all real knowledge of technique. The man

who is as interested in the way of doing a thing as in the thing when

done, is the man who is likely to put a new tool in the hands of his

fellow-craftsmen.

Poe's methods were such a delight to him that his works have an uncanny

atmosphere about them, as if he had not written them but had been

present, passionately observant and critical, while they were being

written by somebody else. More than once he used his pen to make a

new thing out of a discussion of an old one, and on these occasions

he dissects his own motives in so impersonal a manner that it is

difficult for the reader to remember that the author examining is in

any way connected with the author undergoing examination. _The Raven_,

for example, a profound piece of technique, is scarcely as profound,

and certainly not as surprising, as _The Philosophy of Composition_,

in which its construction is minutely analysed, and Poe callously

explains, as a matter of scientific rather than personal interest, that

the whole poem was built on the refrain 'Nevermore,' and that this

particular refrain was chosen on account of the sonority and ease of

_o_ and _r_ sounded together. It was inevitable that such a man busying

himself with story-telling should bring something new into the art.

[Illustration: WILLIAM GODWIN]

[William Godwin and _Caleb Williams_.]

Another story-teller, who, like Poe, was a philosopher and deeply

interested in technique, had existed before, and from him Poe had that

strengthening of his ideas that is given by outside confirmation. He

refers often to William Godwin, the author of _An Enquiry concerning

Political Justice_ and of several novels, among them one now most

undeservedly half forgotten, called _Caleb Williams_. It is seldom

possible to point to any one book as the sign-post of a literary

cross-roads, but there can be no doubt that in _Caleb Williams_ we see

the beginnings of self-conscious construction in story-telling. Of that

book Hazlitt wrote: 'No one ever began _Caleb Williams_ that did not

read it through: no one that ever read it could possibly forget it,

or speak of it after any length of time but with an impression as if

the events and feelings had been personal to himself.' And the author

not only had done this, but had known how it was done. It is usual to

say that Poe himself was the first to choose an effect and then plan a

story to produce it. But _Caleb Williams_ was published in 1794, and in

a preface to one of the later editions Godwin gave his methods away. On

him also lay that fruitful curse. He wrote: 'I formed a conception of a

book of fictitious adventure that should in some way be distinguished

by a very powerful interest. Pursuing this idea, I invented first the

third volume of my tale, then the second, and last of all the first.'

Godwin perhaps did not realise how revolutionary was his attitude,

and even Hazlitt, delighted as he was by their results, does not

seem to have noticed the novelty of his methods. But Poe, finding

Godwin's ideas of the very temper of his own, developed them logically

as far as they would go, and in two paragraphs that I am going to

quote, expressed in a final manner the principles of self-conscious

construction.

[The architecture of narrative.]

The first is taken from an essay on Hawthorne:

'A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he

has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but,

having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single

effect to be worked out, he then invents such incidents--he then

contrives such events as may best aid him in establishing this

preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the

outbringing of the effect, then he has failed in his first step.

In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which

the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established

design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is

at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates

it with a kindred art a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea

of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed.'

...

The second is more personal, and from _The Philosophy of Composition_:

'I prefer commencing with the consideration of an _effect_....

Keeping originality always in view, I say to myself, in the first

place, "Of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the

heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible,

what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen

a novel first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it

can be best wrought out by incident or tone--whether by ordinary

incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity

both of incident and tone--afterwards looking about me (or rather

within) for such combination of event and tone as shall best aid me

in the construction of the effect.'

[_The Masque of the Red Death._]

Here, of course, he is exaggerating actual fact to make his meaning

more clear; but I am sure that even the exaggeration is deliberate.

If he did not literally work in that way he certainly worked in that

spirit. A writer of Poe's fertility of imagination would be at least

biassed in choosing his effect by consideration of material already in

his head. But, the effect once chosen, he left nothing to chance. He

would never, like the older story-tellers, allow himself to be carried

away by a wave of his own emotion. He stands beside de Maupassant and

the conscious artists of the latter half of the nineteenth century. His

emotional material is never emptied carelessly in front of the reader.

Chosen scraps of it are laid before him, one by one, in a chosen order,

producing a more powerful effect than the unrestrained discharge of the

whole. The first sentences of one of his stories prepare its readers

for the atmosphere demanded by its conclusion. In _The Masque of the

Red Death_, for example, revolting horror is the emotion on which he

built. So, from the terrible opening lines, 'The Red Death had long

devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal and so

hideous. Blood was its Avatar and seal--the redness and the horror of

blood. There were sharp pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse

bleeding at the pores, with dissolution ...' to the end, 'And now was

acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in

the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed

hall of their revel, and died, each in the despairing posture of his

fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last

of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and

Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all,' we are led

on through consciously created disquietude and terror. How menacing

is the sentence that immediately follows the prelude: 'But the Prince

Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.' We feel at once that

the shadow of death is at his elbow.

[The detective stories.]

Perhaps Poe's technique is more easily examined in those of his tales

in which the same faculties that planned the construction supplied also

the motive. The three great detective stories, _The Purloined Letter_,

_The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, and _The Mystery of Marie Roget_,

are made of reasoning and built on curiosity, the very mainspring

of analysis. It is a profitable delight to take any one of these

stories, and, working backwards from the end to the beginning, to

follow the mind of the architect. Each of the tales states a difficulty

and secretes an explanation that is gradually to be reached by the

reader, who identifies the processes of his own mind with those of

the analytical Dupin. Starting always with the solution, we can watch

Poe refusing the slightest irrelevance, and at the same time artfully

piling up detail upon detail in exactly that order best calculated to

keep the secret, to heighten the curiosity, to disturb the peace of the

reader's mind, and to hold him in conjectural suspense until the end.

[Poe's mind.]

But it is easy, in considering the technique of Poe's stories, his

smiling refusal of 'inspiration,' his confident mastery over his

material, to let the brilliance of his analytical powers hide from

us his intimacy with the beautiful, the richness and vividness of

his imagination, and, particularly, the passionate character of his

mind. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was a man whose works were the result

of the energetic fusing of an emotional personality into moulds

designed by reason. Not all Leonardo's theories and calculations

would have sufficed to make a _Mona Lisa_. And if Poe had been merely

a skilled technician, like so many of his imitators, we should have

had from him only unbeautiful toys no less valueless than theirs. All

Poe's work depends, like all Leonardo's, on his power of retaining

the poetry, the energy of his material, after submitting it to his

constructive science, and then, when the moulds have been made, of

pouring it into them red-hot and fluid, as if in the primal vitality

of its conception. In those very detective stories, that seem built by

and of the coldest-blooded reason, what is it that makes them great

but Poe's absorbing passion for the manner of mind of their leading

character. Dupin is not a mere detective. He is not an analyst, but

analysis. He is the embodiment of the logical spirit in mankind, just

as Nicolete, in the old French tale, is the embodiment of the loving

spirit in womankind. It is for this reason that some have accused Dupin

and Nicolete of a lack of individuality. They are not individual, but

universal.

If we would understand the matter as well as the manner of his

stories, we must think of him as two men, and remember that the

same sensibility that served the man of anagrams, and ciphers, and

detective puzzles, served also the worshipper of beauty, and made him

tremble like a lover at the faintest whisper of her name. Delicately

balanced, alike as analyst and æsthete, he was moved profoundly by

the smallest circumstance. Just as a glass of wine was sufficient to

overturn his reason, so the least wind of suggestion stirred his brain

in a deep and surprising manner. Nothing that happened to him touched

him only on the surface. Everything dropped to the depths of him, and

sometimes returned enriched and recreated. Ideas that others would have

passed over became for him and for his readers powerful, haunting and

inevitable. Ideas of mesmerism, of hypnotism, and of madness, that have

been for so many lesser artists only the materials for foolishness,

were pregnant for him with wonderful effects and stories that, once

read, can never be forgotten. In _William Wilson_ he is using less

flippantly than Stevenson the idea of dual personality. In _The Oval

Portrait_, where a painter transfers the very soul of his lady to his

canvas, and, as the portrait seems to breathe alive, turns round to

find her dead, he is using the subtle, half-thought things that an

earlier writer would scarcely have felt, or, if he had, would have

brushed, like cobwebs, secretly aside.

[Illustration: EDGAR ALLAN POE]

[His failures.]

With a mind so sensitive, a coinage so rare, and a technique so

thorough, it is curious that he should so frequently have failed. And

yet, when we examine his failures they are not difficult to explain.

They are due in every case, saving only his attempts to be funny,

which are like hangman's jokes, to sudden rents in the veils of his

illusions, made by single impossible phrases whose impossibility

he seems to have been unable to recognise. I could give a hundred

examples, but perhaps none better than the excruciating line in an

otherwise beautiful poem, where he tells us that

'The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside.'

Lapses like that destroy like lightning flashes the mysterious

atmosphere he has been at pains to create. They are the penalty he had

to pay for being a citizen in a youthful democracy. Americans are never

safe from the pitfalls of a language that is older than their nation.

[His isolation.]

In the America of that time, Poe was like the little boy in the

grocer's shop, who, while the shopmen are busy with paper and string,

dreams of green meadows and scribbles verses on the sugar bags. Even

in Europe he would have been one of those men 'who live on islands in

the sea of souls.' There are some like Scott and Gautier who are always

called by their Christian names, and can talk unreservedly with a

thousand. There are others more aloof in mind of whom it is difficult

even to think with familiarity. It seems fitting enough to hear of

Scott as Walter or Wattie, and of Gautier as Théo, even in old age;

but who would have dared to call that man Tommy who heard in tavern

song some echo of the music of the spheres? There are men who cannot be

habitually good companions, and, when the talk is at its loudest, turn

from the crowd, pull aside the curtain, and look up to see the pale

moon far above the housetops. Such a man was Poe. He would have been

lonely even in the city of Europe where he could perhaps have found

three men of his own aloofness from the inessential, his own hatred

of the commonplace, his own intense belief in individualism. He was

extraordinarily lonely in America. His love of beauty, his elevation

of his work above its results in gold, were next to incomprehensible

by that people in that chaotic state of their development. Energetic

and wholly practical, fiercely busied with material advancement,

they could not understand his passionate, impractical, intellectual

existence. His biographer, a literary man, remembered not that he was

a great artist, but that he died through drink, not that he had made

beautiful things but that he had gained little money by doing so. In

the Poe who 'reeled across Broadway on the day of the publication of

_The Raven_,' in the Poe who died in an hospital, they forgot the

reality, and, in their hurry, found it easy to make a melodrama out of

a gentle and inoffensive life. Their traditional idea of Poe allows his

extravagances to represent him. It is as if we were to describe some

hills by saying there was a lightning flash between the peaks. I prefer

to think of the little cottage at Fordham, where he lived with his wife

and her mother, and their pets, parrots and bobolinks, a peaceful,

small citadel held by those three friends against the world. Throughout

Poe's harassed existence this note of gentleness and quiet is always

sounding somewhere below the discords of penury and suffering.

[His work.]

The result of his isolation, his poverty, his sensibility, and his

intellectual energy was a great deal of work of no value whatever, some

melancholy and beautiful verse, critical articles of a kind then new in

America, a philosophical poem, some tales of the same flavour as the

most delightful of Euclid's propositions, and some other stories that

can only be fully enjoyed by those who come to them with the reverence

and careful taste it is proper to bring to a glass of priceless wine.

It is by them chiefly that he will be remembered. They are a delicacy,

not a staple of food. They are not stories from which we can learn

life; but they are the key to strange knowledge of ourselves. They

leave us richer, not in facts but in emotions. We find our way with

their help into novel corners of sensation. They are like rare coloured

goblets or fantastic metal-work, and we find, often with surprise,

that we have waited for them. That is their vindication, that the test

between the valueless and the invaluable of the fantastic. There are

tales of twisted extravagance that stir us with no more emotion than is

given by an accidental or capricious decoration never felt or formed in

the depths of a man. But these stories, like those patterns, however

grotesque, that have once meant the world to a mind sensible to beauty,

have a more than momentary import. Like old melody, like elaborate and

beautiful dancing, like artificial light, like the sight of poison

or any other concentrated power, they are among the significant

experiences that are open to humanity.

HAWTHORNE AND MORAL ROMANCE

HAWTHORNE AND MORAL ROMANCE

[The essayist in story-telling.]

HAWTHORNE is one of the earliest story-tellers whom we remember as much

for himself as for his books. He is loved or hated, as an essayist is

loved or hated, without reference to the subjects on which he happened

to write. He wrote in a community for whom a writer was still so novel

as to possess some rags of the old splendours of the sage; an author

was something wonderful, and no mere business man. He had not to expect

any hostility in his reader, but rather a readiness to admire (of which

he seldom took advantage), and an eagerness to enjoy him for his own

sake. He could assume, as an essayist assumes when he dances naked

before his readers, that they were not there to scoff. He brought a

sweet ingenuous spirit into modern story-telling that would perhaps

have been impossible had he been writing for a more sophisticated

audience. We love him for it. He made books, he said, 'for his known

and unknown friends.' As he says it, he brings us all into the circle.

When we think of Fielding, Bunyan, or Cervantes, we think of _Tom

Jones_, _Pilgrim's Progress_, and _Don Quixote_; when we think of

_Elia_, _Table Talk_, and _The Scarlet Letter_, we think of Lamb,

Hazlitt, and Hawthorne.

[Hawthorne and Poe.]

This engaging, unsuspicious, essayistical attitude of his would have

been quite impossible to Poe; but we must remember that Hawthorne

and Poe, although contemporary, knew very different Americas. Poe's

birth was a kind of accident, and he approached America penniless, so

that she was a hostile place to him, a country of skinflint editors

and large terrible towns, from which to escape in books, and, as far

as possible, in life. He hated the New America, but he belonged to

her. Hawthorne belonged to the old. His family connected him with her

history; he was never at her mercy; as we learn from his rambling

prefaces, that would be intolerable in a less lovable writer, she was

endeared to him by a delightful boyhood, and did not refuse him a

peaceful youth of devotion to his art. She never treated him otherwise

than tenderly, and he did not leave her until as a representative of

her people, nor sought escape from her in books, except for those of

his shadowy creatures who could move with greater freedom in a less

bread-and-buttery fairyland.

[Illustration: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE]

[Hawthorne's life.]

His life, as we learn it from those prefaces and from his biographers,

was as gentle as the man himself. We read of quiet days of work in

a study from whose windows he could watch the sunlight through the

willow boughs; of days on the river with Thoreau in a canoe which

that angular reformer had built with his own hands; of meetings

with Emerson walking in the woods, 'with that pure intellectual gleam

diffused about his person like the garment of a shining one'; of

evenings before the red fire in a little room with white moonlight

bringing out the patterns on the carpet, weaving the tapestries

of dream that were next day to come alive upon the paper. These

people, who were to make the intellectual life of America, were not

American in the peace of their existence. Hawthorne, in the newest

of all countries, wrote 'in a clear, brown, twilight atmosphere.'

He was a lover of secondhand things, and so clothed things with his

imagination that all he touched was green with ivy. No contemporary or

even historical romances have about them such ancient tenderness and

legendary dusk as his. It is extraordinary to think that he was born

within two years of Poe. He thought 'the world was very weary, and

should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an

age-long nap.' America, at least, had a thousand other things to do,

but it was not until he had seen Europe that Hawthorne recognised the

fact.

[His notebooks.]

His notebooks reflect at the same time this quiet life and its

excitements, the stirring adventures of an artist in search of

perfection. He 'had settled down by the wayside of life like a man

under an enchantment.' None but the artist can know how happy such

enchantment is. He notices the flashing soles of a boy's bare feet

running past him in the wood, and 'a whirlwind, whirling the dried

leaves round in a circle, not very violently.' He writes one day, 'The

tops of the chestnut trees have a whitish appearance, they being, I

suppose, in bloom'; two days later, unsatisfied, he makes another

attempt to fit his words to his impression:--'The tops of the chestnut

trees are peculiarly rich, as if a more luscious sunshine were falling

on them than anywhere else, "Whitish," as above, don't express it.' One

of his biographers, himself no mean artist, suggests that Hawthorne's

must have been a dull existence, if in it such trifles were worthy of

note. But the frequency of such notes, interspersed by innumerable

sketches for stories, is not a sign of the poverty of Hawthorne's life

but of its opulence. For Hawthorne, busied always with dim things not

easily expressed, every walk was a treasure hunt that might supply some

phrase, some simile, that would give blood and sinew to the ghost of an

idea.

[The material of his work.]

His friends were as far removed from the ordinary as himself. He was

never 'bustled in the world of workaday.' Even his spell of life as

surveyor in the Customs was such that his description of it reads

not unlike Charles Lamb's recollections of the old clerks in the

South-Sea House. The Customs House was a place of sleep and cobwebs,

and the people in it, mostly retired sea-captains, 'partook of the

genius of the place.' 'Pour connaître l'homme,' says Stendhal, 'il

suffit de l'étudier soi-même; pour connaître les hommes, il faut les

pratiquer.' Hawthorne had never kept company with men; his nature

and his circumstances made him learn man from his own heart. He was

never hampered as a romancer by the kind of knowledge that would have

made him a novelist. He deals not with manners, for he had little

opportunity of studying them, nor with passions, for they had not

greatly troubled him, but with conscience. He plays upon the strings of

conscience, and, dusty as the instrument may be, his playing wakes an

echo.

Perhaps if he had been less personal, less lovable, we could not have

tolerated his tampering with those secret strings whose music is so

novel and so poignant. Certainly we would have found him intolerable

if he had been less serious. If he had jangled those fibres with a

laugh they would have given no response. If he had waked them with a

careless discord they would have broken. We can bear it because he is

Hawthorne; we listen to him because he is in earnest. All, in such

matters, depends upon the attitude of the artist. War, for example, is

a terrible thing in Tolstoy, a joyous thing in Dumas, and an ordinary

thing, neither terrible nor joyous, in Smollett. We take to ourselves

something of an artist's outlook, and sin is nothing to us unless we

hear of it from a man to whom it is momentous.

[Goya's 'Monk and Witch'.]