Criticism is a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their
direction. It is concerned with them only as force, and it is concerned
only with force in its kind and degree.
The aim of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of
a writer; and in order to do this, its first business must be to find
out where he is different from all other writers. It is the delight of
the critic to praise; but praise is scarcely a part of his duty. He may
often seem to find himself obliged to condemn; yet condemnation is
hardly a necessary part of his office. What we ask of him is, that he
should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves: trace
what in us is a whim or leaning to its remote home or center of gravity,
and explain why we are affected in this way or that way by this or that
writer. He studies origins in effects, and must know himself, and be
able to allow for his own mental and emotional variations, if he is to
do more than give us the records of his likes and dislikes. He must have
the passion of the lover, and be enamored of every form of beauty; and,
like the lover, not of all equally, but with a general allowance of
those least to his liking. He will do well to be not without a touch of
intolerance: that intolerance which, in the lover of the best, is an act
of justice against the second-rate. The second-rate may perhaps have
some reason for existence: that is doubtful; but the danger of the
second-rate, if it is accepted "on its own merits," as people say, is
that it may come to be taken for the thing it resembles, as a wavering
image in water resembles the rock which it reflects.
Dryden, a poet who was even greater as a critic than as a poet, said,
"True judgment in poetry, like that in painting, takes a view of the
whole together, whether it be good or not; and where the beauties are
more than the faults, concludes for the poet against the little judge."
Here, in this decision, as to the proportions of merit and demerit in a
work, is the critic's first task; it is one that is often overlooked by
careful analysts, careless of what substance they are analyzing. What
has been called the historical method is responsible for a great deal of
these post-mortem dissections. How often do we not see learned persons
engaged in this dismal occupation, not even conscious that they are
fumbling among the bones and sinews of the dead. Such critics will
examine the signs of life with equal gravity in living insignificances.
But to the true critic a living insignificance is already dead.
And so, as in a dead man all the virtues go for nothing, no merit, no
number of merits, of a secondary kind, in a writer who has been adjudged
"not to exist," can avail anything. The critic concerns himself only
with such as do exist. One of these, it may be, exists for a single book
out of many books, a single poem out of many volumes of verse; an essay,
an epigram, the preface to a book, a song out of a play. No perfect
thing is too small for eternal recollection. But there are other writers
who, though they have never condensed all their quality into any quite
final achievement, live by a kind of bulk, live because there is in them
something living, which refuses to go out. It is in his judgment of
these two classes of writers, the measure of his skill in finding vital
energy concentrated or diffused, in a cell or throughout an organism,
that the critic is most likely to show his own quality. Charles Lamb is
one of the greatest critics of Shakespeare, but the infallibility of his
instinct as a critic is shown, not so much when he writes better about
_Lear_ than any one had ever written about _Lear_, but when he reveals
to us, for the first time, the secret of Ford, the mainspring of
Webster.
Criticism, when it is not mere talk about literature, concerns itself
with the first principles of human nature and with fundamental ideas.
There is a quite valuable kind of critic to whom a book is merely a
book, who is interested in things only as they become words, in emotions
only as they add fine raptures to printed pages. To such critics we owe
rules and systems; when they tabulate or elucidate meter or any
principle of form they are doing a humble but useful service to artists.
Their comments on books are often pleasant reading, sometimes turning
into a kind of literature, essays which we are content to read for their
own charm. But there is hardly anything idler than literary criticism
which is a mere describing and comparing of books, a mere praise and
blame of this and that writer and his work. When Coleridge writes a
criticism of Shakespeare, he is giving us his deepest philosophy, in a
manner in which we can best apprehend it. Criticism with Goethe is part
of his view of the world, his judgment of human nature, and of society.
With Pater, criticism is quickened meditation; with Matthew Arnold, a
form of moral instruction or mental satire. Lamb said in his criticism
more of what he had to say of "what God and man is," with more gravity
and more intensity, than in any other part of his work.
And thus it is that, while there is a great mass of valuable criticism
done by critics who were only critics, the most valuable criticism of
all, the only quite essential criticism, has been done by creative
writers, for the most part poets. The criticism of a philosopher,
Aristotle's, comes next to that of the poets, but is never that winged
thing which criticism, as well as poetry, can be in the hands of a poet.
Aristotle is the mathematician of criticism, while Coleridge is the high
priest.
When Dryden said "poets themselves are the most proper, though, I
conclude, not the only critics," he was stating a fact which many prose
persons have tried, though vainly, to dispute. Baudelaire, in a famous
passage of his essay on Wagner, has said with his invariable exactitude,
"It would be a wholly new event in the history of the arts if a critic
were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of every psychic law, a
monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets become naturally,
inevitably, critics. I pity the poets who are guided solely by instinct;
they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former there
must come a crisis when they would think out their art, discover the
obscure laws in consequence of which they have produced, and draw from
this study a series of precepts whose divine purpose is infallibility in
poetic production. It would be impossible for a critic to become a poet,
and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic." And in England
we have had few good poets who have not on occasion shown themselves
good critics. What is perhaps strange is, that they have put some of
their criticism into verse, and made it into poetry. From the days when
Lydgate affirmed of Chaucer that "he of English in making was the best,"
to the days when Landor declared of Browning:
"Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk'd along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse;"
down, indeed, to the present days, when Swinburne has repaid Landor all
his praise of poets, almost every English poet has been generously just
to his contemporaries, and almost every poet has found the exact word of
definition, of revelation, which the prose critics were laboriously
hunting for, or still more laboriously writing round. To take a single
example, could anything be more actually critical, in the severest sense
of the word, than these lines of Shelley on Coleridge, lines which are
not less admirable as verse than as criticism?
You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
Those seven lines are not merely good criticism: they are final; they
leave nothing more to be said. Criticism, at such a height, is no longer
mere reasoning; it has the absolute sanction of intuition.
And, it will be found, the criticism of poets, not only such as is
expressed, deliberately or by the way, in verse, but such as is set down
by them in essays, or in letters, however carefully or casually, remains
the most valuable criticism of poetry which we can get; and, similarly,
the opinion of men of genius on their own work and on their own form of
art, whatever it may be, is of more value than all the theories made by
"little judges." The occasional notes and sayings of such men as Blake
and Rossetti are often of more essential quality than their more ordered
and elaborate comments. The essence they contain is undiluted. They are
what is remembered over from a state of inspiration; and they are to be
received as reports are received from eye-witnesses, whose honesty has
already proved itself in authentic deeds.
The _Biographia Literaria_ is the greatest book of criticism in English,
and one of the most annoying books in any language. The thought of
Coleridge has to be pursued across stones, ditches, and morasses; with
haste, lingering, and disappointment; it turns back, loses itself,
fetches wide circuits, and comes to no visible end. But you must follow
it step by step; and if you are ceaselessly attentive, will be
ceaselessly rewarded.
When Coleridge says, in this book, that "the ultimate end of criticism
is much more to establish the principle of writing than to furnish rules
how to pass judgment on what has been written by others," he is defining
that form of criticism in which he is supreme among critics. Lamb can be
more instant in the detection of beauty; Pater can make over again an
image or likeness of that beauty which he defines, with more sensitive
precision; but no one has ever gone deeper down into the substance of
creation itself, or more nearly reached that unknown point where
creation begins. As poet, he knows; as philosopher, he understands; and
thus, as critic, he can explain almost the origin of creation.
THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN
LITERATURE
The latest movement in European literature has been called by many
names, none of them quite exact or comprehensive--Decadence, Symbolism,
Impressionism, for instance. It is easy to dispute over words, and we
shall find that Verlaine objects to being called a Decadent, Maeterlinck
to being called a Symbolist, Huysmans to being called an Impressionist.
These terms, as it happens, have been adopted as the badge of little
separate cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries
of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and exhaust their ingenuities in
theorizing over the works they can not write. But, taken frankly as
epithets which express their own meaning, both Impressionism and
Symbolism convey some notion of that new kind of literature which is
perhaps more broadly characterized by the word Decadence. The most
representative literature of the day--the writing which appeals to,
which has done so much to form, the younger generation--is certainly not
classic, nor has it any relation with that old antithesis of the
Classic, the Romantic. After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it
has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities
that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence: an intense
self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an
over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral
perversity. If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art--those
qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the
supreme qualities--then this representative literature of to-day,
interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful
and interesting disease.
Healthy we can not call it, and healthy it does not wish to be
considered. The Goncourts, in their prefaces, in their _Journal_, are
always insisting on their own pet malady, _la névrose._ It is in their
work too, that Huysmans notes with delight _le style tacheté et
faisandé_--high-flavored and spotted with corruption--which he himself
possesses in the highest degree. "Having desire without light,
curiosity, without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, by ways traced
by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the high places to an
unknown God, who is the God of darkness"--that is how Ernest Hello, in
one of his apocalyptic moments, characterizes the nineteenth century.
And this unreason of the soul--of which Hello himself is so curious a
victim--this unstable equilibrium, which has overbalanced so many
brilliant intelligences into one form or another of spiritual confusion,
is but another form of the _maladie fin de siècle._ For its very
disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilization
grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of
action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It
reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society; its
very artificiality is a way of I being true to nature: simplicity,
sanity, proportion--the classic qualities--how much do we possess them
in our life, our surroundings, that we should look to find them in our
literature--so evidently the literature of a decadence?
Taking the word Decadence, then, as most precisely expressing the
general sense of the newest movement in literature, we find that the
terms Impressionism and Symbolism define correctly enough the two main
branches of that movement. Now Impressionist and Symbolist have more in
common than either supposes; both are really working on the same
hypothesis, applied in different directions. What both seek is not
general truth merely, but _vérité vraie_, the very essence of
truth--the truth of appearances to the senses, of the visible world to
the eyes that see it; and the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual
vision. The Impressionist, in literature as in painting, would flash
upon you in a new, sudden way so exact an image of what you have just
seen, just as you have seen it, that you may say, as a young American
sculptor, a pupil of Rodin, said to me on seeing for the first time a
picture of Whistler's, "Whistler seems to think his picture upon
canvas--and there it is!" Or you may find, with Sainte-Beuve, writing of
Goncourt, the "soul of the landscape"--the soul of whatever corner of
the visible world has to be realized. The Symbolist, in this new, sudden
way, would I flash upon you the "soul" of that which can be apprehended
only by the soul--the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meaning
of things evident. And naturally, necessarily, this endeavor after a
perfect truth to one's impression, to one's intuition--perhaps an
impossible endeavor--has brought with it, in its revolt from ready-made
impressions and conclusions, a revolt from the ready-made of language,
from the bondage of traditional form, of a form become rigid. In France,
where this movement began and has mainly flourished, it is Goncourt who
was the first to invent a style in prose really new, impressionistic, a
style which was itself almost sensation. It is Verlaine who has invented
such another new style in verse.
The work of the brothers De Goncourt--twelve novels, eleven or twelve
studies in the history of the eighteenth century, six or seven books
about art, the art mainly of the eighteenth century and of Japan, two
plays, some volumes of letters and of fragments, and a _Journal_ in six
volumes--is perhaps, in its intention and its consequences, the most
revolutionary of the century. No one has ever tried so deliberately to
do something new as the Goncourts; and the final word in the summing up
which the survivor has placed at the head of the _Préfaces et
Manifestes_ is a word which speaks of _tentatives, enfin, où les deux
frères ont à faire du neuf, ont fait leurs efforts pour doter les
diverses branches de la littérature de quelque chose que n'avaient
point songé à trouver leurs prédécesseurs._ And in the preface to
_Chérie_, in that pathetic passage which tells of the two brothers (one
mortally stricken, and within a few months of death) taking their daily
walk in the Bois de Boulogne, there is a definite demand on posterity.
"The search after _reality_ in literature, the resurrection of
eighteenth-century art, the triumph of _Japonisme_--are not these," said
Jules, "the three great literary and artistic movements of the second
half of the nineteenth century? And it is we who brought them about,
these three movements. Well, when one has done that, it is difficult
indeed not to be _somebody_ in the future." Nor, even, is this all. What
the Goncourts have done is to specialize vision, so to speak, and to
subtilize language to the point of rendering every detail in just the
form and color of the actual impression. Edmond de Goncourt once said to
me--varying, if I remember rightly, an expression he had put into the
_Journal_--"My brother and I invented an opera-glass: the young people
nowadays are taking it out of our hands."
An opera-glass--a special, unique way of seeing things--that is what the
Goncourts have brought to bear upon the common things about us; and it
is here that they have done the "something new," here more than
anywhere. They have never sought "to see life steadily, and see it
whole:" their vision has always been somewhat feverish, with the
diseased sharpness of over-excited nerves. "We do not hide from
ourselves that we have been passionate, nervous creatures, unhealthily
impressionable," confesses the _Journal._ But it is this morbid
intensity in seeing and seizing things that has helped to form that
marvelous style--"a style perhaps too ambitious of impossibilities," as
they admit--a style which inherits some of its color from Gautier, some
of its fine outline from Flaubert, but which has brought light and
shadow into the color, which has softened outline in the magic of
atmosphere. With them words are not merely color and sound, they live.
That search after _l'image peinte, l'épithète rare_, is not (as with
Flaubert) a search after harmony of phrase for its own sake; it is a
desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the impression of the
moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life. And so, in
analysis as in description, they have found a way of noting the fine
shades; they have broken the outline of the conventional novel in
chapters, with its continuous story, in order to indicate--sometimes in
a chapter of half a page--this and that revealing moment, this or that
significant attitude or accident or sensation. For the placid traditions
of French prose they have had but little respect; their aim has been but
one, that of having (as M. Edmond de Goncourt tells us in the preface to
_Chérie_) "une langue rendant nos idées, nos sensations, nos
figurations des hommes et des choses, d'une façon distincte de celui-ci
ou de celui-là, une langue personnelle, une langue portant notre
signature."
What Goncourt has done in prose--inventing absolutely a new way of
saying things, to correspond with that new way of seeing things which he
has found--Verlaine has done in verse. In a famous poem, _Art
Poétique_, he has himself defined his own ideal of the poetic art:
_Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance!
Oh! la Nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!_
Music first of all and before all, he insists; and then, not color, but
_la nuance_, the last fine shade. Poetry is to be something vague,
intangible, evanescent, a winged soul in flight "toward other skies and
other loves." To express the inexpressible he speaks of beautiful eyes
behind a veil, of the palpitating sunlight of noon, of the blue swarm of
clear stars in a cool autumn sky; and the verse in which he makes this
confession of faith has the exquisite troubled beauty--_sans rien en lui
qui pèse ou qui pose_--which he commends as the essential quality of
verse. In a later poem of poetical counsel he tells us that art should,
first of all, be absolutely clear, absolutely sincere: _L'art mes
enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même._ The two poems, with their
seven years' interval--an interval which means so much in the life of a
man like Verlaine--give us all that there is of theory in the work of
the least theoretical, the most really instinctive, of poetical
innovators. Verlaine's poetry has varied with his life; always in
excess--now furiously sensual, now feverishly devout--he has been
constant only to himself, to his own self-contradictions. For, with all
the violence, turmoil and disorder of a life which is almost the life of
a modern Villon, Paul Verlaine has always retained that childlike
simplicity, and, in his verse, which has been his confessional, that
fine sincerity, of which Villon may be thought to have set the example
in literature.
Beginning his career as a Parnassian with the _Poèmes Saturniens_,
Verlaine becomes himself, in the _Fêtes Galantes_, caprices after
Watteau, followed, a year later, by _La Bonne Chanson_, a happy record
of too confident a lover's happiness. _Romances sans Paroles_, in which
the poetry of Impressionism reaches its very highest point, is more
_tourmenté_, goes deeper, becomes more poignantly personal. It is the
poetry of sensation, of evocation; poetry which paints as well as sings,
and which paints as Whistler paints, seeming to think the colors and
outlines upon the canvas, to think them only, and they are there. The
mere magic of words--words which evoke pictures, which recall
sensations--can go no further; and in his next book, _Sagesse_,
published after seven years' wanderings and sufferings, there is a
graver manner of more deeply personal confession--that "sincerity, and
the impression of the moment followed to the letter," which he has
defined in a prose criticism on himself as his main preference in regard
to style. "Sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the
letter," mark the rest of Verlaine's work, whether the sentiment be that
of passionate friendship, as in _Amour_; of love, human and divine, as
in _Bonheur_; of the mere lust of the flesh, as in _Parallèlement_ and
_Chansons pour Elle._ In his very latest verse the quality of simplicity
has become exaggerated, has become, at times, childish; the once
exquisite depravity of style has lost some of its distinction; there is
no longer the same delicately vivid "impression of the moment" to
render. Yet the very closeness with which it follows a lamentable career
gives a curious interest to even the worst of Verlaine's work. And how
unique, how unsurpassable in its kind, is the best! "_Et tout le reste
est littérature!_" was the cry, supreme and contemptuous, of that early
_Art Poétique_; and, compared with Verlaine at his best, all other
contemporary work in verse seems not yet disenfranchised from mere
"literature." To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to
fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a
human soul: that is the ideal of Decadence, and it is what Paul Verlaine
has achieved.
And certainly, so far as achievement goes, no other poet of the actual
group in France can be named beside him or near him. But in Stéphane
Mallarmé, with his supreme pose as the supreme poet, and his two or
three pieces of exquisite verse and delicately artificial prose to show
by way of result, we have--the prophet and pontiff of the movement, the
mystical and theoretical leader of the great emancipation. No one has
ever dreamed such beautiful, impossible dreams as Mallarmé; no one has
ever so possessed his soul in the contemplation of masterpieces to come.
All his life he has been haunted by the desire to create, not so much
something new in literature, as a literature which should itself be a
new art. He has dreamed of a work into which all the arts should enter,
and achieve themselves by a mutual interdependence--a harmonizing of all
the arts into one supreme art--and he has theorized with infinite
subtlety over the possibilities of doing the impossible. Every Tuesday
for the last twenty years he has talked more fascinatingly, more
suggestively, than any one else has ever done, in that little room in
the Rue de Rome, to that little group of eager young poets. "A seeker
after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or
not at all," he has carried his contempt for the usual, the
conventional, beyond the point of literary expression, into the domain
of practical affairs. Until the publication, quite recently, of a
selection of _Vers et Prose_, it was only possible to get his poems in a
limited and expensive edition, lithographed in facsimile of his own
clear and elegant handwriting. An aristocrat of letters, Mallarmé has
always looked with intense disdain on the indiscriminate accident of
universal suffrage. He has wished neither to be read nor to be
understood by the bourgeois intelligence, and it is with some
deliberateness of intention that he has made both issues impossible.
Catulle Mendès defines him admirably as "a difficult author," and in
his latest period he has succeeded in becoming absolutely
unintelligible. His early poems, _L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Herodiade_,
for example, and some exquisite sonnets, and one or two fragments of
perfectly polished verse, are written in a language which has nothing in
common with every-day language--symbol within symbol, image within
image; but symbol and image achieve themselves in expression without
seeming to call for the necessity of a key. The latest poems (in which
punctuation is sometimes entirely suppressed, for our further
bewilderment) consist merely of a sequence of symbols, in which every
word must be taken in a sense with which its ordinary significance has
nothing to do. Mallarmé's contortion of the French language, so far as
mere style is concerned, is curiously similar to the kind of depravation
which was undergone by the Latin language in its decadence. It is,
indeed, in part a reversion to Latin phraseology, to the Latin
construction, and it has made, of the clear and flowing French language,
something irregular, unquiet, expressive, with sudden surprising
felicities, with nervous starts and lapses, with new capacities for the
exact noting of sensation. Alike to the ordinary and to the scholarly
reader, it is painful, intolerable; a jargon, a massacre. Supremely
self-confident, and backed, certainly, by an ardent following of the
younger generation, Mallarmé goes on his way, experimenting more and
more audaciously, having achieved by this time, at all events, a style
wholly his own. Yet the _chef-d'œvre inconnu_ seems no nearer
completion, the impossible seems no more likely to be done. The two or
three beautiful fragments remain, and we still hear the voice in the Rue
de Rome.
Probably it is as a voice, an influence, that Mallarmé will be
remembered. His personal magnetism has had a great deal to do with the
making of the very newest French literature; few literary beginners in
Paris have been able to escape the rewards and punishments of his
contact, his suggestion. One of the young poets who form that delightful
Tuesday evening coterie said to me the other day, "We owe much to
Mallarmé, but he has kept us all back three years." That is where the
danger of so inspiring, so helping a personality comes in. The work even
of Henri de Regnier, who is the best of the disciples, has not entirely
got clear from the influence that has shown his fine talent the way to
develop. Perhaps it is in the verse of men who are not exactly following
in the counsel of the master--who might disown him, whom he might
disown--that one sees most clearly the outcome of his theories, the
actual consequences of his practise. In regard to the construction of
verse, Mallarmé has always remained faithful to the traditional
syllabic measurement; but the freak or the discovery of _le vers libre_
is certainly the natural consequence of his experiments upon the
elasticity of rhythm, upon the power of resistance of the cæsura. _Le
vers libre_ in the hands of most of the experimenters becomes merely
rhymeless irregular prose. I never really understood the charm that may
be found in this apparent structureless rhythm until I heard, not long
since, Dujardin read aloud the as yet unpublished conclusion of a
dramatic poem in several parts. It was rhymed, but rhymed with some
irregularity, and the rhythm was purely and simply a vocal effect. The
rhythm came and went as the spirit moved. You might deny that it was
rhythm at all; and yet, read as I heard it read, in a sort of slow
chant, it produced on me the effect of really beautiful verse. But _vers
libres_ in the hands of a sciolist are the most intolerably easy and
annoying of poetical exercises. Even in the case of _Le Pèlerin
Passionné_ I can not see the justification of what is merely regular
syllabic verse lengthened or shortened arbitrarily, with the Alexandrine
always evident in the background as the foot-rule of the new metre. In
this hazardous experiment Jean Moréas, whose real talent lies in quite
another direction, has brought nothing into literature but an example of
deliberate singularity for singularity's sake. I seem to find the
measure of the man in a remark I once heard him make in a _café_, where
we were discussing the technique of meter: "You, Verlaine!" he cried,
leaning across the table, "have only written lines of sixteen syllables;
I have written lines of twenty syllables!" And turning to me, he asked
anxiously if Swinburne had ever done that--had written a line of twenty
syllables.
That is indeed the measure of the man, and it points a criticism upon
not a few of the busy little _littérateurs_ who are founding new
_revues_ every other week in Paris. These people have nothing to say,
but they are resolved to say something, and to say it in the newest
mode. They are Impressionists because it is the fashion, Symbolists
because it is the vogue, Decadents because Decadence is in the very air
of the cafés. And so, in their manner, they are mile-posts on the way
of this new movement, telling how far it has gone. But to find a new
personality, a new way of seeing things, among the young writers who are
starting up on every hand, we must turn from Paris to Brussels--to the
so-called Belgian Shakespeare, Maurice Maeterlinck.
In truth, Maeterlinck is not a Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan violence
of his first play is of the school of Webster and Tourneur rather than
of Shakespeare. As a dramatist he has but one note, that of fear; he has
but one method, that of repetition.
The window, looking out upon the unseen--an open door, as in
_L'Intruse_, through which Death, the intruder, may come invisibly--how
typical of the new kind of symbolistic and impressionistic drama which
Maeterlinck has invented! I say invented, a little rashly. The real
discoverer of this new kind of drama was that strange, inspiring,
incomplete man of genius whom Maeterlinck, above all others, delights to
honor, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Imagine a combination of Swift, of Poe,
and of Coleridge, and you will have some idea of the extraordinary,
impossible poet and cynic who, after a life of brilliant failure, has
left a series of unfinished works in every kind of literature; among the
finished achievements one volume of short stories, _Contes Cruels_,
which is an absolute masterpiece. Yet, apart from this, it was the
misfortune of Villiers never to attain the height of his imaginings, and
even _Axël_, the work of a lifetime, is an achievement only half
achieved. Only half achieved, or achieved only in the work of others;
for, in its mystical intention, its remoteness from any kind of outward
reality, _Axël_ is undoubtedly the origin of the symbolistic drama.
This drama, in Villiers, is of pure symbol, of sheer poetry. It has an
exalted eloquence which we find in none of his followers. As Maeterlinck
has developed it, it is a drama which appeals directly to the
sensations--sometimes crudely, sometimes subtly--playing its variations
upon the very nerves themselves. The "vague spiritual fear" which it
creates out of our nervous apprehension is unlike anything that has ever
been done before, even by Hoffman, even by Poe. It is an effect of
atmosphere--an atmosphere in which outlines change and become
mysterious, in which a word quietly uttered makes one start, in which
all one's mental activity becomes concentrated on something, one knows
not what, something slow, creeping, terrifying, which comes nearer and
nearer, an impending nightmare.
As an experiment in a new kind of drama, these curious plays do not seem
to exactly achieve themselves on the stage; it is difficult to imagine
how they could ever be made so impressive, when thus externalized, as
they are when all is left to the imagination. _L'Intruse_, for instance,
seemed, as one saw it acted, too faint in outline, with too little
carrying power for scenic effect. But Maeterlinck is by no means anxious
to be considered merely or mainly as a dramatist. A brooding poet, a
mystic, a contemplative spectator of the comedy of death--that is how he
presents himself to us in his work; and the introduction which he has
prefixed to his translation of _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles_, of
Ruysbroeck l'Admirable, shows how deeply he has studied the mystical
writers of all ages, and how much akin to theirs is his own temper.
Plato and Plotinus, Saint Bernard and Jacob Boehm, Coleridge and
Novalis--he knows them all, and it is with a sort of reverence that he
sets himself to the task of translating the astonishing Flemish mystic
of the thirteenth century, known till now only by the fragments
translated into French by Ernest Hollo from a sixteenth-century Latin
version. This translation and this introduction help to explain the real
character of Maeterlinck's dramatic work--dramatic as to form, by a sort
of accident, but essentially mystical.
Partly akin to Maeterlinck by race, more completely alien from him in
temper than it is possible to express, Joris Karl Huysmans demands a
prominent place in any record of the Decadent movement. His work, like
that of the Goncourts, is largely determined by the _maladie fin de
siècle_--the diseased nerves that, in his case, have given a curious
personal quality of pessimism to his outlook on the world, his view of
life. Part of his work--_Marthe, Les Sœurs Vatard, En Ménage, À
Vau-l'Eau_--is a minute and searching study of the minor discomforts,
the commonplace miseries of life, as seen by a peevishly disordered
vision, delighting, for its own self-torture, in the insistent
contemplation of human stupidity, of the sordid in existence. Yet these
books do but lead up to the unique masterpiece, the astonishing caprice
of _À Rebours_, in which he has concentrated all that is delicately
depraved, all that is beautifully, curiously poisonous, in modern art.
_À Rebours_ is the history of a typical Decadent--a study, indeed,
after a real man, but a study which seizes the type rather than the
personality. In the sensations and ideas of Des Esseintes we see the
sensations and ideas of the effeminate, over-civilized, deliberately
abnormal creature who is the last product of our society: partly the
father, partly the offspring, of the perverse art that he adores. Des
Esseintes creates for his solace, in the wilderness of a barren and
profoundly uncomfortable world, an artificial paradise. His Thébaïde
raffinée is furnished elaborately for candle-light, equipped with the
pictures, the books, that satisfy his sense of the exquisitely abnormal.
He delights in the Latin of Apuleius and Petronius, in the French of
Baudelaire, Goncourt, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Villiers; in the pictures of
Gustave Moreau, of Odilon Redon. He delights in the beauty of strange,
unnatural flowers, in the melodic combination of scents, in the imagined
harmonies of the sense of taste. And at last, exhausted by these
spiritual and sensory debauches in the delights of the artificial, he is
left (as we close the book) with a brief, doubtful choice before
him--madness or death, or else a return to nature, to the normal life.
Since _À Rebours_, Huysmans has written one other remarkable book,
_Là-Bas_, a study in the hysteria and mystical corruption of
contemporary Black Magic. But it is on that one exceptional achievement,
_À Rebours_, that his fame will rest; it is there that he has expressed
not merely himself, but an epoch. And he has done so in a style which
carries the modern experiments upon language to their furthest
development. Formed upon Goncourt and Flaubert, it has sought for
novelty, _l'image peinte_, the exactitude of color, the forcible
precision of epithet, wherever words, images, or epithets are
to be found. Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis,
wearying in its splendor, it is--especially in regard to things
seen--extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's
palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very
perversity that Huysmans' work--so fascinating, so repellent, so
instinctively artificial--comes to represent, as the work of no other
writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the
Decadent movement in literature.