The French have a phrase “la beauté du verbe” by which they would
express a something in the sound and in the arrangement of words which
supplements whatever mere thought those words were intended to express.
It is evident that no definition of this beauty can be given, but it is
also evident that without it letters would not exist. How it arises we
cannot explain, yet the process is familiar to us in everything we do
when we are attempting to fulfil an impulse towards whatever is good.
An integration not of many small things but of an infinite series of
infinitely small things build up the perfect gesture, the perfect line,
the perfect intonation, and the perfect phrase. So indeed are all
things significant built up: every tone of the voice, every arrangement
of landscape or of notes in music which awake us and reveal the things
beyond. But when one says that this is especially true of perfect
expression one means that sometimes, rarely, the integration achieves a
steadfast and sufficient formula. The mind is satisfied rather than
replete. It asks no more; and if it desires to enjoy further the
pleasure such completion has given it, it does not attempt to prolong
or to develop the pleasure under which it has leapt; it is content to
wait a while and to return, knowing well that it has here a treasure
laid up for ever.
All this may be expressed in two words: the Classical Spirit. That is
Classic of which it is true that the enjoyment is sufficient when it is
terminated and that in the enjoyment of it an entity is revealed.
When men propose to bequeath to their fellows work of so supreme a kind
it is to be noticed that they choose by instinct a certain material.
It has been said that the material in which he works affects the
achievement of the artist: it is truer to say that it helps him. A man
designing a sculpture in marble knows very well what he is about to do.
A man attempting the exact and restrained rendering of tragedy upon the
stage does not choose the stage as one among many methods, he is drawn
to it: he needs it; the audience, the light, the evening, the very
slope of the boards, all minister to his efforts. And so a man
determined to produce the greatest things in verse takes up by nature
exact and thoughtful words and finds that their rhythm, their
combination, and their sound turn under his hand to something greater
than he himself at first intended; he becomes a creator, and his name
is linked with the name of a masterpiece. The material in which he has
worked is hard; the price he has paid is an exceeding effect; the
reward he has earned is permanence.
José de Heredia was an artist of this kind. The mass of the verse he
produced, or rather published, was small. It might have been very
large. It is not (as a foolish modern affectation will sometimes
pretend) necessary to the endurance or even the excellence of work that
it should be the product of exceptional moments; nor is it even true
(as the wise Ancients believed) that great length of time must always
mature it. But the small volume of Heredia’s legacy to European letters
does argue this at least in the poet, that he passionately loved
perfection and that, finding himself able to achieve it (for perfection
can be achieved) but now and then, he chose only to be remembered by
the contentment which, now and then, his own genius had given him.
He worked upon verse as men work upon the harder metals; all that he
did was chiselled very finely, then sawn to an exact configuration and
at last inlaid, for when he published his completed volume it is true
to say that every piece fitted in with the sound of one before and of
one after. He was careful in the heroic degree.
His blood and descent are worthy of notice. He was a Spaniard,
inheriting from the first Conquerors of the New World, nor was it
remarkable to those who have received a proper enthusiasm for the
classical spirit that the energy and even the violence natural to such
a lineage should express themselves in the coldest and the most exalted
form when, for the second time, a member of the family attempted verse.
It is in the essence of that spirit that it alone can dare to be
disciplined. It never doubts the motive power that will impel it; it is
afraid, if anything, of an excess of power, and consciously imposes
upon itself the limits which give it form.
Heredia in his person expressed the activity which impelled him, for he
was strong, brown, erect, a rapid walker, and a man whose voice was
perpetually modulated in resonant and powerful tones. In his last years
during his administration of the Library at the Arsenal this vitality
of his took on an aspect of good nature very charming and very
fruitful. His organization of the place was thorough, his knowledge of
the readers intimate. He refused the manuscripts of none, he advised,
laughed, and consoled. His criticism was sure. Several, notably Marcel
Prevost, were launched by his authority. The same deep security of
literary judgment which had permitted him to chastise and to perfect
his impeccable sonnets into their final form permitted him also to hold
up before his eyes, grasp, and judge the work of every other man.
His frailty, as must always be the frailty of such men, was
fastidiousness. The same sensitive consciousness which is said to have
all but lost us the Aeneid, and which certainly all but lost us the
Apologia, dominated his otherwise vigorous soul. It is more than forty
years since his first verse, written just upon achieving his majority,
appeared in the old _Revue de Paris_ and in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. It was not till 1893 that he collected in one volume the
scattered sonnets of his youth and middle age: the collection won him
somewhat tardily his chair in the Academy. There is irony in the
reminiscence that the man he defeated in that election was Zola.
All the great men who saluted his advent are dead. Théophile Gautier,
who first established his fame; Hugo, who addressed to him, perhaps,
that vigorous appeal in which strict labour is deified, and the medal
and the marble bust are shown to outlive the greatest glories, are
sometimes quoted as the last among the great French writers.
The immediate future will show that the stream of French excellence in
this department, as in any other of human activity, is full, deep, and
steady. The work of Heredia will help to prove it. He was a Spaniard,
and a Colonial Spaniard. No other nation, perhaps, except the modern
French, so inherit the romantic appetite of the later Roman Empire as
to be able to mould and absorb every exterior element of excellence. It
is remarkable that at the same moment Paris contemplated the funeral of
the Italian de Brazza and the death of the Cuban Heredia. It is
probable that those of us who are still young will live to see either
name at the head of a new tradition. Heredia proved it possible not so
much to imitate as to recapture the secure tradition of an older time.
Perhaps the truest generalization that can be made with regard to the
French people is to say that they especially in Western Europe (whose
quality it is ever to transform itself but never to die) discover new
springs of vitality after every period of defeat and aridity which they
are compelled to cross. Heredia will prove in the near future a capital
example of this power. He will increase silently in reputation until
we, in old age, shall be surprised to find our sons and grandsons
taking him for granted and speaking of him as one speaks of the
Majores, of the permanent lights of poetry.