PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING: STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE.
1909
EDGAR ALLAN POE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1910
THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN. 1911
OSCAR WILDE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1912
PORTRAITS
AND
SPECULATIONS
BY
ARTHUR RANSOME
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1913
_Copyright_
TO
JOHN MASEFIELD
NOTE
Of the Essays in this book, “Art for Life’s Sake” appeared in _The
English Review_; “The Poetry of Yone Noguchi,”[1] “Remy de Gourmont,”
and “Aloysius Bertrand” in _The Fortnightly Review_; “Kinetic and
Potential Speech,” in _The Oxford and Cambridge Review_. The papers
on Daudet and Coppée were prefixed to collections of stories by these
writers: I thank the publishers, Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack, for
permission to reproduce them here.
CONTENTS
PAGE
ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE 1
ALOYSIUS BERTRAND 35
ALPHONSE DAUDET 57
THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE 71
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 87
WALTER PATER 129
REMY DE GOURMONT 161
THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI 187
KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH 207
ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE
ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE
It is not yet fifty years since one or two men of genius, followed
presently by a score of men of talent, noisier, shriller in voice than
themselves, preached a theory of art new in this country, shocking to
our prejudices at that time, and imported from some French artists and
from a German philosopher. This was the doctrine of art for art’s sake.
Baudelaire had written: “Poetry ... has no other end than itself; it
can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly
worthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely
for the pleasure of writing a poem.” Whistler, that butterfly of
letters, who had borrowed his sting from the wasp, directed it with gay
despair against the granite face of the British public. Rossetti and,
with certain qualifications, Pater, illustrated the theory in their
practice, as Whistler did also; and Wilde, a little later than they,
remarked: “All art is quite useless,” and “There is no such thing as a
moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That
is all.”
With this doctrine of art for art’s sake we are now dissatisfied. We
object to it, not for the sake of “morality,” against which it was
partly directed, nor yet for the sake of “nature,” but for the sake of
art, whose function it limits rather than glorifies. We have seen the
school of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the
banner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the
nineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner,
with words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined
the procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is
over, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him.
Yet the demonstration was successful; its promoters, who stitched
the banner with gaiety, hope, and defiance, themselves painted and
wrote fine things, and men are working to-day whose work would have
been impossible if, in the course of its march, that small, daring
procession had not walked seven times round a city of Jericho and blown
silver trumpets under its walls.
Some battle-cries are no more than an irrelevant but inspiriting noise.
Most of them, however, are related to something fought for, (St. George
and Merry England!), something that, it is hoped, will superintend
the fight (God with us!), or something that is fought against (A bas
Marat!). The knight who shouted, “Two red roses across the moon” on a
sultry day when--
“... the battle was scattered from hill to hill
From the windmill to the watermill.”
may have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not
incomprehensible to himself, and “Art for Art’s sake!” forty and fifty
years ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the
early Victorians who then survived, was something very different for
the men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude
towards art in general. We must first understand what they fought
against before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their
battle-cry.
They fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought,
secondly, against “nature” ... against, that is to say, a crude
conception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put
that crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he
who looked at a picture could find something in the external world,
by its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would
be a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of
external things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and,
on the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is
an essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted
into discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a
solution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who
read this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art’s
relation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion,
though, in justice to the artists for art’s sake, I must point out
that their revolt was not against “morality” alone. When we hear
Wilde’s gay proclamation that “Life imitates Art far more than Art
imitates Life,” we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more
serious, that “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all
pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,” and that
the artist “in all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his
own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at
his service, and to him is nought refused.” We must not imagine that
the revolt was merely playful.
Against “nature” and against “morality.” In an age when the painter of
“Derby Day” assisted Ruskin by saying that he could not “see anything
of the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of
“Battersea Bridge,” they upheld the superiority of art to “nature.”
In an age when Dickens was praised for his reforms of the workhouse
and blamed for his love of low life, when novelists were judged by the
deeds, no, by the manners of the persons of their fiction, when poets
were judged by their private lives, they protested the irrelevance
of all such things to the question at issue, which was the goodness
or badness of the work of art to be judged. We must not blame their
formula, but the ideas against which it was directed, for the bad
manners, the morality that they hoped would be regarded as immorality,
for the unpublishable private lives, that were the excesses after
victory. We may, perhaps, smile as we observe how accurately they
balance those other excesses against which they were a reaction.
The question, no longer how to conquer, became how to use the victory,
and we had the common spectacle of veterans and retired camp-followers
trying to live up to the battle-cry of their youth, and, unable to
free themselves from the habit of their excesses, committing these
excesses with less and less gusto and more and more skill. But skill,
even so acquired, is not valueless. The battle-cry, after opening a
primrose path to charlatans, after turning “morality” into “immorality”
as a spectre ruling over art, remained the stimulus to an improved
technique, a scrupulousness, an economy of effect, a delicacy in
the handling of material, a care for melody and counterpoint, an
intolerance of careless workmanship, for which for a long time it will
be our privilege to be grateful.
Art, however, cannot live by perfection of technique alone, nor yet by
the repetition of remembered excesses. A new generation of artists,
working in a new environment, inspired by new aims, and threatened
by new dangers, requires a new formula, or a restatement of the old.
These artists of our own generation look at the faded banner with the
remains of reverence, or, in their dislike of the mistakes it made
possible, with a suspicion of contempt. In the turbulence of valuations
in this century, in the different, sharply defined attitudes of men
on such questions as property, labour, capital, the position of women
in the State, marriage, education, or the Church, they see a herd of
conflicting moralities. Involved in one or other of these conflicts,
perhaps in many of them, they cannot but believe, suspect, or hope that
art also must speak for or against, as tribune or as patrician, as
Churchman or as secularist, and, if the conflict be important to them,
the excellence of an artist must seem to be determined, at least in
part, by the views that he expresses. How then can art “have nothing to
do with morality”? They are, however, sufficiently critical to see that
it is possible that a work of art may be good for a democrat, bad for
an aristocrat, and yet, somehow, good in itself. Was there something in
“Art for Art’s sake” after all?
Of the men whose names I mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay
one had founded his views on those of a philosopher, and so, whatever
may be his rank among those dogmatists, we are able to examine the
background of reasoning on which he saw his own dogmatic statements. It
is in that reasoning, and not in the cheerful taunts of the battlefield
that we are likely to learn how it was that the formula of “Art for
Art’s sake” seemed to be justified, and how it is that the formula is
fundamentally inadequate. Baudelaire’s proclamation, Pater’s practice,
Whistler’s blue-feathered, silver-tipped darts point us to no analysis.
The analysis that made Wilde’s paradoxes possible is open to our view
in the pages of Kant.
Now Kant said that what was called beautiful was the object of a
delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate
reference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far
from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our
judgment. Upon our judgment of what? The beautiful. How many crimes
has that word committed, how many discussions it has obscured, how
many it has closed at the very moment of their fertility. Not the
least of its knaveries has been this substitution of a condition of
art for the function of art, which, as I hope to show, is life itself.
A work of art suggests the achievement of the beautiful. That may be
its immediate object. It is not its ultimate object. It may be an
essential condition. It is not a function. Art for art’s sake means the
substitution of condition for function, and, as the beautiful can never
be a function of anything, the implicit denial that art has a function
at all. “All art is quite useless.”
But that is not what we believe. And the reason why the theorists of
art for art’s sake were both right and wrong was that they did not want
art for the sake of anything irrelevant to the artistic phenomenon, but
were a little ungenerous in their interpretation of that phenomenon.
They saw that moralities, private lives, reforms, interests, had
nothing to do with the attempted achievement of the condition of the
beautiful, but, having seen that, forgot, in their hurry for battle,
that the work of art persists beyond this achievement or attempted
achievement; forgot that, will he nill he, the artist’s work cannot
but bear the impress of his personality, and forgot that through that
fact all the things they wished to rule out of the discussion had their
rightful place in it.
The question is, what is their rightful place? And to answer it we must
first satisfy ourselves as to the nature of the artistic phenomenon.
A work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom, for
purposes of reference, I shall call the speaker and the listener. But,
before it is a collaboration, a re-creation, in which form we commonly
know it, it is an independent act performed by the speaker alone. He,
as first creator, isolates some from the flux of impressions in which
he lives. It is as if he were to arrest that flux, and momentarily to
stop its flow. He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses,
and, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in
the dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his
existence. This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world,
the universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory,
clearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to
have a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which
itself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. The
resulting clarity is as if he had suddenly stopped the cross-currents
of a stream, and the stream, losing the opaqueness of its tangled
motion, had become crystal. He isolates that moment by surrounding
it with his own consciousness, while other moments fly past taking
with them shreds of that tattered veil, no more.... There is a choice
of moments, and because the choice is not reasonable, but determined
by the moment itself, the speaker feels himself inspired. That which
attracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and
hold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad
others with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is
a moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture,
words, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such. Two bars
are heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a
jumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost
of an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... These things are pledges.
He seizes them and, warily, lest he lose them, listens for the rest
of the melody, watchfully draws out of the flood the figure whose
gesture had seemed to be the moment itself, pieces the brittle words
together, and shapes the picture in his brain. He allows the moment
to redeem the pledge it has given, his care being not to impede it by
forestalling its further appearance with something contradictory to
the original fragment, something that the character of that fragment
has not determined. He seeks only to be true to the original promise,
and the good artist is known by the fact that it is impossible to tell
with what he began, the bad artist by the fragment he has surrounded
with baser metal that does not ring with its note, or the phantom whose
vitality he has blurred by clothing it with flesh uninformed by its
peculiar vitality.
The process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is
a process of finding out. He is engaged in _knowing_ the uttermost
implications of the fragment of impression caught by him from the flux
of unconscious or semi-conscious life. He is making the whole of that
impression his own by his profound, his complete consciousness of it.
That is why the artist can never understand those people, not artists,
who ask him how he can prefer art to life; imitation to the real thing.
He cannot believe that such people mean what they say. In his humility
he assumes that they too have the modesty to admit to themselves that
their life is unconscious, or semi-conscious, and he believes that this
process of _knowing_, of becoming conscious, is the intensest form of
living that there is.
Then, when the work of art is as we know it, we, the listener,
collaborate with that other artist, the speaker, and from what he has
said, in stone, music, paint or words, try to reconstruct the fragment
of life that he has made his own and to share his consciousness of
it. Accurately speaking, this is impossible. We become conscious of a
moment of life different from his. We cannot give his words the precise
atmosphere they had for him, we cannot see with exactly his eyes, or
hear with his ears, we are without his private and individual memory.
We can but be inaccurate translators. We can, however, perceive,
uncertainly, that he has been successful himself in allowing a moment
of life to redeem the pledge it had given him, that his work does not
contradict itself, and so is true to the original inspiration bedded
in it or clothed by it. And this perception suggests to us that, if it
were possible, we should find, certainly, what we already believe, that
his share in the collaboration is perfect. We then say that a work of
art is beautiful; the wistfulness with which we sometimes say it, the
tears that sometimes dim our eyes as we close a book or turn from a
picture that we believe to be beautiful, and the sadness that has often
been associated with the name of beauty, are due to the half-conscious
knowledge that our share in the collaboration is imperfect, since we
can never stand exactly where he stood.
Our judgment of the beautiful then depends on our belief that, were
certain unalterable facts altered in the constitution of the universe
and of ourselves, we should be sharing a perfect expression, an
expression, that is to say, in perfect unity with itself. Art then for
art’s sake, perfection of expression first. But what is this expression
in perfect unity with itself, but a moment of conscious living,
isolated from all else, lifted from the unconscious flux and given
us--to live?
Let us rewrite the half-obliterated formula. Let us write it now: Art
for Life’s sake, and raise a party cry from its momentary usefulness
into a proud suggestion of the noble function of art. This function is
not merely to teach us how to act, as was supposed by the old critics,
who recommended Homer for the heroism of his heroes, though, as we
shall see, they were not wholly wrong, nor yet merely to teach us
how to order our lives, though it may do that by suggestion. Art is
itself life. Its function is to increase our consciousness of life,
to make us more than wise or sensitive, to transform us from beings
overwhelmed by the powerful stream of unconscious living to beings
dominating that stream, to change us from objects acted upon by life
to joyful collaborators in that reaction. By its means we become
conscious gainers by life’s procreative activity. No longer hiding
our faces from that muddied storm that sweeps irresistibly from the
future to the past, a medley of confused figures, a babel of cries of
joy, of laughter, of sorrow, of pain, by its means we lift our heads,
and, learning from the isolation of moments in eternity, to imagine
the isolation of all such moments, we conquer that storm, and accept
pain, joy, laughter or sorrow, with equal gratitude, in our continually
realised desire to feel ourselves alive.
Let us examine from this point of view the fundamental quarrel between
the theorists of “Art for Art’s sake” and the moralists. What are their
respective beliefs?
_The Moralist._--The noblest end of being is to be good. All human
activities must serve this end or be pernicious. Art, the most
eloquent, the most powerful of pleaders, cannot, without violating the
trust that humanity puts in her, turn devil’s advocate. Let the artist
be as skilful an artist as he can, but let him make a right use of his
excellence. In peace we ask no more of a good shot than that he hit
the bull’s eye of a target. But we live in times of war between the
hosts of good and of evil. The fight is to the death, and we admire the
good shot if he fire from among the ranks of angels, and fear him if we
see that his skill is at the service of our opponents, who in age-long
battle have shown themselves merciless and strong.
_The Artist for Art’s sake._--Morality in art is an accident of no
importance. We hear the battle of which you speak, but do not take
part in it, though we listen sometimes to the music of its trumpets
far away, and see the red glow it throws up to the sky. But morality
concerns our circumstances or possible circumstances, and so has
nothing to do with the beautiful, which is art’s sole concern. A work
of art that declares its sympathy with one or other party to your
battle is one whose creator has looked aside to ends other than beauty.
It is therefore a failure as a work of art. Art must not be limited to
edifying subjects. There is nothing that may not become beautiful in
the hands of an artist. Church and lupanar, angel and courtesan, are of
equal value in his eyes. They are material, no more, and he will not
tolerate that morality should hamper him by dictating the choice or
use of his material. A work of art is independent of morality.
_To these two we reply, believing that art is for life’s sake._--When
a man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality,
ask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled
to admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he
attributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in
each individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and
his environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the
code of values that is his will be one of the determining influences
on an artist’s vision of life. If, perchance, he is so uncritical as
to believe that he has nothing to do with morality, that belief will
itself share in giving his work a moral value. There is no escape
from morality in art. If, therefore, we choose to consider ourselves
as one of a band of people whose moralities are more or less similar,
and to regard their average morality, their average code of values as
important, we shall be perfectly justified in judging art by what we
suppose to be its effect on that average morality. But we must not
forget that we are then regarding artists as a regiment from which we
are engaged in picking out the traitors and the loyalists--and that it
is a regiment whose immediate business is not war, a regiment which
does not know that it is enlisted.
Let us now consider the nature of the moral influence which the speaker
exerts upon the listener. It will not be surprising if we find that it
has a direct bearing upon the point under discussion.
The artist whose act of conscious living is the work of art cannot
alter his personality without disloyalty to the moment of life that
under his hands is simultaneously becoming conscious and becoming
expression. His personality, and with it his morality, is already
involved; any dishonesty blurs his vision, and the crystal whose
increasing clarity was his delight becomes for ever opaque. Here and
nowhere else must we find the origin of the artist’s distrust of
morality. He means by it not “morality,” but any morality other than
his own at the time of artistic creation or _knowing_. A work of art
is always the expression of _a_ morality, the morality of its creator
at the moment when he began its creation, a morality that has ceased
to exist, since its creator has been changed to a greater or less
degree by the very fact of its creation. Returning to our metaphor
of speaker and listener, we may say that the listener, who tries as
nearly as possible to share the moment of conscious life that was the
speaker’s, to stand where he stood, and think what he thought, does, in
contemplation of the work of art, share to some extent in the morality,
that momentary morality we have described, of another man.
Besides this fundamental morality of a work of art, it may hold other
moralities which are also not without their influence. Codes of values
may themselves be the material of artistic creation. A code of values
foreign to the speaker may enter into the moment of conscious life
that is his work of art. Plato and Socrates were different men with
different moralities. The Socrates of Plato’s Dialogues, however
Platonized, is not Plato, and, as well as the fundamental morality of
those dialogues, the morality of those speeches which are supposed
to be Socratic has its separate influence upon us. Anatole France
plays with the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, and with Jacques Tournebroche,
and beside the morality of _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_ we are
offered these other moralities included in it and ruled by it.
There would seem to be little else but morality in art, and its
influence would seem to be so largely as to be almost exclusively
moral. But observe what actually happens. Have you not noticed,
in reading a book, that you insensibly pick out and offer to your
digestion those of the accidental moralities in it that seem to be
cousins of your own. You linger over the sayings of Coignard, if
you feel that in some mood or other you could have said them. You
accept with gratitude the follies, the humours of M. Bergeret, if
you recognise in him a kinship, however distant, with yourself. In
listening to a play you side, at least in simpler moods, with the
character whose code of values approximates to that by which you are
in the habit of weighing your actions and those of others. These minor
judgments are independent of your judgment of the work of art, though
here too a similar instinct bids you prefer those artists in whom you
recognise, let us say, the full development of some one possibility
that your personality contains. And, since our temperament thus picks
and chooses among the moralities that art offers, because it is like
Paracelsus’ alchemist, situate in the stomach of man, digesting the
food that is good for him and rejecting the poison, art does not so
much alter our morality as increase our consciousness of it. It is
an individualising influence on morality, essentially hostile to the
averaging of codes of values. It seeks uniqueness, not uniformity, and
so does not so much spread moralities abroad as cherish and grow to
their full strength the moralities it finds among its listeners. In
this sentence the moralists and the artists for art’s sake come to an
understanding.
Leaving now the question of its moral influence, let me give an
example, of the simplest nature, to show what I mean by the conscious
living that is art. I find one in the following exquisite poem, “The
Happy Child,” by William Davies:
“I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick,
But not one like the child did pick.
I heard the pack-hounds in green park,
But not one like the child heard bark.
I heard this day bird after bird,
But not one like the child has heard.
A hundred butterflies saw I,
But not one like the child saw fly.
I saw the horses roll in grass,
But no horse like the child saw pass.
My world this day has lovely been,
But not like what the child has seen.”
Rossetti believed that “Poetry should seem to the hearer to have
been always present to his thought, but never before heard,” and
the statement that this has been accomplished (so just, sometimes,
is popular instinct) is the commonest praise accorded to individual
works of art. Many of Mr. Davies’ readers must have said, rightly,
but, critically speaking, with imperfect accuracy, “Now that expresses
what I have always felt.” They should have said, “That enables me
to feel what I always could have felt.” For they have never truly
felt it. That wistful, regretful moment, now articulate, was carried
unhappily past them in the general flux of incompletely conscious
life. They suspected a possibility of feeling something, of knowing
what they dimly felt, but it eluded them in the tangled currents of
the stream, and they did not detain it, _know_ it, and make it part
of themselves. Mr. Davies has not so allowed it to escape; he warily
netted it in his consciousness, _learnt_ it accurately and fully, and
wrote that poem, thus isolating it for ever from unconsciousness. And
we, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of
the work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories
behind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness
such a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately
with our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it,
an increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The
conscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as
self-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not
self but other people’s eyes. It implies a new reading of the Delphic
command, γνῶθι σεαυτόν. It does not mean Know thy opinions only, nor
yet, Know what are thy desires, but Know thy life, not thy biography
but thy living, thine innumerable acts of life.
I took my example from a short poem of extreme simplicity, and, as I
have again and again in this essay spoken of “moments” of conscious
life, a scrupulous reader might well conclude that I concerned myself
only with what is commonly known as lyrical art, or that I should
presently offer a proof of Croce’s theory that all art is essentially
lyrical. I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in
believing, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion,
that all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic
conception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation
shall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for
this reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to
himself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be
representative of more than one moment, it would be representative
of more than one man. It would not be homogeneous, and could not be
beautiful. This applies not only to a song or a picture, but to those
works of art which are in appearance the most elaborate, the least
uniform, the least determined by a single moment. A play, whose reading
or performance may occupy hours, during which a number of characters
whom we accept provisionally as human, as separate entities, live
imaginary lives before us, is, no less than a song, the result of
becoming completely conscious of a single moment. The duration of the
reading is in no way affected by the duration of the moment of life
that set the author playing with his marionettes. A moment of life such
as would, for a poet, become articulate in a song, may require from a
playwright that he represent it to himself in persons talking, a clash
of personalities, a breaking of personalities by destiny, a series
of events explicable within itself, not resembling any one moment of
his life, but in their totality representing his means of _knowing_ a
moment, and the means he offers us whereby, as nearly as we may, we
shall share that knowing. When a play is not the artist’s learning a
moment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building
at dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be
empty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion.
Passage of time, intricacy of construction, apparent multiplicity of
imagined lives do not affect the question.
John Masefield did not by a sudden effort of genius conceive “Nan,”
scenes, persons, and dialogue in a moment. One moment, however,
determined its conception, and implied all that is in the play. Let me,
with deference, suggest what may have happened. He heard a story that
affected him with a mixture of emotions. If he had not been an artist,
he would probably have done no more than repeat the story to others as
it was told to him, and wonder idly if it produced the same mixture of
emotions in them. Instead, he lingered with it, and let the unconscious
flux flow on unobserved while he brooded over this one emotional
moment, becoming more and more clearly conscious of the emotions it
contained as they, in the formative processes of his mind, came to be
represented by persons and actions and words. His mind was not making
but discovering, following the implications of the original emotional
moment, careful only to be true to that, and rejecting proffered
representations solely on account of their inaccuracy. His skill was
shown only in so dealing with the flood of representations that no
one particle of it should contradict another, should hamper the full
realisation of that moment. His greatness was shown in the profundity
with which he realised that moment, and the depth to which he could
follow its implications.
Therein, by the way, is suggested the criterion of greatness that is
contained in the doctrine that art is for life’s sake. The theory of
art for art’s sake left its holders at a loss before the question “Is
no man greater than another, if his works are beautiful, if he is an
equally skilful artist?” They knew that he was, but their theory could
not tell them why, and they had to take refuge in cynicism. The theory
of art for “morality’s” sake was no more satisfying. It suggested that
the greatest artist was he who preached the most good, and so left its
holders in speechless difficulty before a comparison of Rossetti and
Dr. Watts. The theory of art for life’s sake has a clear answer, and
offers a valid test. That man is the greatest artist who makes us the
most profoundly conscious of life. Shakespeare is set above Herrick,
who was a better technician, and Leonardo above Murillo, who painted
more devotional subjects, on grounds with which men, neither as
artists nor as moralists, need quarrel.
Art for Art’s sake was a battle-cry, and, to understand it, we had
to understand what those who used it fought. Art for Life’s sake is
also a battle-cry, though it includes in those four words a suggestion
not only of the function of art but of its nature. Let us review the
enemies we attack with those words upon our lips. What do we fight
against? What are the misunderstandings which in our time encourage the
production of false, of secondary art, and obscure the excellence of
the finest?
We fight first against a political valuation of art, that imagines
poetry, pictures and music as auxiliaries in the reconstruction or
conservation of the state, and judges them by their efficiency as
political pamphlets.
We fight secondly against an educational valuation of art, that judges
works of art by the accuracy of the facts they happen to embody, the
accuracy of the pictures they paint of this or that form of life, the
clearness with which they illustrate generalisations.
We fight thirdly against the valuation of art by its technical skill,
by the beauty that is a universal condition of its being. These things
cannot afford a scale of comparison for works of art, but only a
guarantee that they are worthy of judgment. We should not fight against
this valuation if it showed itself in practice capable of so useful an
office. It is, however, not sufficiently selective, but allows itself
to be tricked by things built in imitation of perfect building, things
whose form is not identical with their content, things which manifest
more skill than vitality. This, our old ally, since it made our battle
possible, is now our subtlest enemy.
Our battle is far from being easy, for we fight not to kill but to
make captive, and it is easier and safer to fight to kill. We fight
not to destroy those valuations, but to destroy their pre-eminence.
Recognising (1) that a work of art has a political, comparable to its
moral, influence, (2) that it always embodies knowledge, (3) that it
is nothing if it does not wake in us the feeling that we are near the
achievement of the beautiful, we wish to deny none of these facts,
but to prevent any one of them from being taken as the foundation
of a criterion of art. We wish to set over them a criterion of art
that shall include them all. Above technique, above opinion, above
information, we set life, of the special kind that is here described,
whose conscious vitality is to unconscious vitality what living is to
existence.
What, then, do we ask ourselves after experiencing a work of art.
We ask one thing only, though, perhaps, in many forms: Has it given
us an increased consciousness of life, or has it merely had in view
one or other of those valuations whose supreme authority we reject?
Is its title to the name of art merely that it is an illustration of
a doctrine that has elbowed out the doctrine it illustrates, merely
that it gives us a clear idea how some people live, merely that it
has a skin-deep appearance of unity? Or is it a piece of conscious
life, separated watchfully from the flux of living, a piece of
_knowing_ carried out by the artist, which we are allowed to share?
Does it give us a new possession by making us aware of something we
possess. We do not ask an artist for opinions, for facts, for skill,
alone. We have the right to ask for more. We ask him for ourselves;
we ask him for life. “Poetry enriches the blood of the world” by the
practice it affords of living consciously. Vain learning, opinion,
skill, impoverish it. We ask from an artist opportunities of conscious
living, which, taken as they come, multiply the possibilities of their
recurrence, turn us into artists, and help us to contract the habit of
being alive.
1912.
ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:
A ROMANTIC OF 1830
ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:
A ROMANTIC OF 1830
In the preface to _Petits Poèmes en Prose_, Baudelaire makes respectful
reference to a little-known book: “J’ai une petite confession à vous
faire. C’est en feuilletant pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux
_Gaspard de la Nuit_, d’Aloysius Bertrand (un livre connu de vous, de
moi et de quelques-uns de nos amis, n’a-t-il pas tous les droits à
être appelé fameux?), que l’idée m’est venue de tenter quelque chose
d’analogue, et d’appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou
plutot d’_une_ vie moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu’il avait
appliqué à la peinture de la vie ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.”
He speaks of Bertrand as “mon mystérieux et brillant modèle,” though,
remembering the teaching of Poe, he adds that he is ashamed to have
made something so different from _Gaspard de la Nuit_, since he holds
that the highest honour of a poet is to accomplish exactly what he
set out to perform. A writer who wrote prose poems good enough to be
read “twenty times at least” by Baudelaire, good enough to suggest an
imitation, a writer but for whom the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ would not
have been written, or would have been written differently, is more than
a literary curiosity. I was led to examine his book, and, presently, to
find an interest in the man himself as well as in his accomplishment.
M. Anatole France was good enough to direct me in my search for
information. My friend, M. Champion, of the Quai Malaquais, generously
put his bibliographical knowledge at my disposal. The files of
forgotten magazines and newspapers and essays by Sainte-Beuve, Charles
Asselineau, and M. Leon Séché combined to build in my mind a portrait
of this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here
and there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality.
* * * * *
Louis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later
preferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, at Céva, in
Piedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child
of that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in the _Confession
d’un Enfant du Siècle_. His mother was an Italian, his father a
Frenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery
letter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as “only a patriot of
1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out
his blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty
years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.” At the age of seven
the young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned
in youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read
Hugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the
modern Dijon into a mediæval city of dreams.
Early in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper, _Le
Provincial_, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It
endured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to
it, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered
form, was printed in _Gaspard de la Nuit_. The paper was not unnoticed
in Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he
found some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless,
with rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read
aloud from them.
Two portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by
Victor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “... a tall, thin young
man of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively
little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather
wretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather
uncivilised....”
Victor Pavie says: “His awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated
costume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly
escaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained
fire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his
face, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat
uncivilised taciturnity....”
Beside these pictures let me print Bertrand’s portrait of the imaginary
Gaspard de la Nuit: “A poor devil whose exterior announced nothing but
poverty and suffering. I had already noticed in the garden his frayed
overcoat, buttoned to the chin, his shapeless hat that never brush had
brushed, his hair long as a weeping-willow, combed like a thicket, his
fleshless hands like ossuaries, his mocking, wretched, and sickly face;
and my conjectures had charitably placed him among those itinerant
artists, violin-players and portrait-painters, whom an insatiable
hunger and an unquenchable thirst condemn to travel the world in the
footsteps of the Wandering Jew....” It is different from the portraits
of himself, but not more different than would be such a Germanicised
caricature as might have been made by Hoffmann.
Bertrand’s life in Paris was hidden from the celebrated men whom he
met at Nodier’s evening receptions and in Sainte-Beuve’s study. He
showed himself for a moment, recited some of his verses “d’une voix
sautillante,” and disappeared. He had no money, and probably suffered
from that lack of confidence which can only be removed by a banking
account. Sainte-Beuve, who saw him two or three times and gave him a
copy of the _Consolations_, with the inscription “Mon ami Bertrand,”
speaks of him threading lonely streets with the air of Pierre
Gringoire, the out-at-elbows poet of _Notre Dame de Paris_. He paints
what must be an imaginary portrait of the young and penniless genius
leaning on the window-sill of his garret, “talking for long hours with
the pale gilliflowers of the roof.”
Unable to earn a living in Paris, he went back to Dijon in 1830, where
he contributed to a Liberal newspaper, _Le Patriote de la Côte-d’Or_.
In spite of his poverty, his blood was young and proud, and as he
walked the streets of Dijon he must have felt himself a representative
of that exuberant young Parisian manhood that was putting _Hernani_
on the stage and sending _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ to the press. A
rival paper jeered at him, and he was able to reply: “Je préfère vos
dédains à vos suffrages,” and to quote a letter from Victor Hugo to
explain his independence. Hugo had written: “Je lis vos vers en cercle
d’amis, comme je lis André Chenier, Lamartine et Alfred de Vigny: il
est impossible de posséder à un plus haut point les secrets de la
facture.” With such a testimonial in his pocket he need not care for
the scorn or the approval of a provincial journalist.
At this time his Liberalism was as ardent as his youth. Asselineau
quotes a fiery article praying for war, bloody war, against the Holy
Alliance: “It is time to throw the dice on a drum; and, should we all
perish, the honour of France and of liberty shall perish not.” But, as
was not unnatural, he presently left France and liberty to take care of
themselves, and, full of new plans for literary achievement, returned
hopefully to Paris, where he was joined by his mother and sister. He
was again unable to earn a living. The last lines of a piteous letter
written to Antoine de Latour in September 1833, show how miserable was
his condition:
“Si je te disais que je suis au point de n’avoir bientôt plus de
chaussures, que ma redingote est usée, je t’apprendrais là le
dernier de mes soucis: ma mère et ma sœur manquent de tout dans
une mansarde de l’hôtel des Etats-Unis qui n’est pas payée. Qu’est
ce pour toi qu’une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, à quelle
humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pièces d’argent
dans une bourse, pour nous c’est un mois de loger, c’est du pain!
“Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage.
Mon camarade de collège!!!
“Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.”
It is not known whether the money was sent him, nor whether he found
employment as a proof-reader.
In such poverty, in such dejection, he put together the book that
preserves his memory, dreaming, when he could forget his empty stomach
and the holes in his shoes, of the prose that Baudelaire was to
imagine after him, “une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans
rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements
lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de
la conscience.” He would not, perhaps, have thought of sudden starts
of conscience, for his was a simpler soul than Baudelaire’s, and he
never felt that the portrait he was drawing might be only the portrait
of a portrait. He was born in 1807 and not in 1821, and, with the
Romantic joy in colour and local colour, he had more than the Romantic
simplicity. His fantasies are prefaced by quotations, and these are
taken from Scott, Hugo, Byron, folk-song, the Fathers of the Church,
Scottish ballads, Charles Nodier, old chronicles, Lope de Vega,
Fenimore Cooper, the cries of the night watchmen, Lamartine, Coleridge,
Chateaubriand, a medley of the Romantics and the writers and things
that they admired. They sometimes mistook the picturesque for the
beautiful, and so did Bertrand. He was a man who thought with his eyes.
He was not an analyst.
So far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he
represents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at
that time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany,
had written _Fantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot_. Leigh Hunt,
in England, amused himself, in _Imagination and Fancy_, by cutting
little bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the
ghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours,
and in _Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et
de Callot_, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might
very well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had
been trained by the painters, and he was proud to offer his book as a
series of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates
that had never been bitten.
“Art,” he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it
is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image
of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is
the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his
retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes
his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of
beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in
penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other
hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the
square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his
carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache....
Now, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double
personification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents,
besides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies
after Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel
de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa,
Murillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.”