historian of the grotesque who would trace the re-awakening of a spirit
in art that had dozed during the eighteenth century, a spirit quite
different from that of Hogarth, with which it is sometimes confounded.
Bertrand’s was not the noble, the sublime conception of the grotesque
that ruled the finer drawings and much of the poetry of William Blake.
It was akin to that whose love of a gargoyle brought it to life and
sent Quasimodo to haunt the dark and winding stairs of the towers of
Notre Dame. Bertrand contrasts Rembrandt and Callot, but does not see
that in the mind of the man “who consumes himself in penetrating the
mysterious symbols of nature” there is the essence of the feeling for
the grotesque, which, in such men as Callot, having forgotten its
origins, too often becomes mere sport, shadows flung on a wall by a
will-o’-the-wisp instead of by a philosopher’s lamp. But in _Gaspard
de la Nuit_ this feeling is groping towards consciousness, recognising
its food in the etchings alike of Rembrandt and of Callot, of Salvator
and of Durer, noticing the more obvious differences between them, but
as yet incapable of a more sensitive distinction. It is interesting to
notice that he takes suggestions from the Breughel[2] whose wild and
energetic picture made Flaubert, ten years later, set to work on _The
Temptation of St. Anthony_.
Bertrand’s book is made up of six series of fantasies, labelled
“Flemish School,” “Old Paris,” “The Chronicles,” like the rooms in a
picture-gallery. The usual form of the pieces is that of a small number
of carefully balanced paragraphs, mostly single sentences, sometimes
linked by refrains of movement or meaning. Some have minute prologues
and epilogues. Some are like prose-ballades, finished by an _envoi_.
Few cover more than two or three pages in a small book of large type.
Each one is complete in itself, and built of a firm, noun-ful prose,
richer in colour than in subtlety.
They were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible,
a man elusive, _fugace_, who could not settle in one place or in one
mood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the
nearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a
hunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his
chase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no
models for the gait of his soul.
Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble
personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming
that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else.
His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet.
He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all
he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of
dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams
with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a
cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights
while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as
Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in
his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their
phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a
Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait
by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old
Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to
keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered
him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes
of the moon.
This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries:
“LE CLAIR DE LUNE.
“‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez
Et priez pour les trépassés.’
--_Le cri du crieur de nuit._
“Oh! qu’il est doux, quand l’heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de
regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d’or!
“Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre, un chien hurlait dans le
carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas.
“Mais bientôt mon oreille n’interrogea plus qu’un silence profond. Les
lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui
battait sa femme.
“Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet
enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise.
“Et le grillon s’était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette avait
éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée.
“Et moi, il me semblait,--tant la fièvre est incohérente,--que la lune,
grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!”
“MOONLIGHT.
“‘Wake, men who sleep,
And pray for the dead.’
--_Cry of the night-watchman._
“Oh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at
night, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden
carolus![3]
“Two lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the
cross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper.
“But soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence.
The lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart
beating his wife.[4]
“The dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch,
rain-soaked, and wind-frozen.
“And the cricket had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark had put
out its last glimmer in the ashes of the fire-place.
“And, as for me, it seemed to me--fever is so incoherent--that the
moon, wrinkling her face, put out her tongue at me like a man who has
been hanged.”
The moon put out her tongue at her faithful admirer, and helped him
neither to honey-dew nor to the milk of Paradise. His biographers
do not agree as to the way he lived during his few remaining years.
Sainte-Beuve says that he was a private secretary, and that he wrote
in various inconspicuous newspapers. M. Séché, to whom we owe a great
deal of new information, thinks that these employments are not likely
to have held Bertrand for long. About 1835, he found in Eugène Renduel
a publisher for _Gaspard de la Nuit_. He sold the right to print
an edition of 800 copies, of which 300 were to be called “Keepsake
Fantastique,” for the sum of 150 francs. The money was paid and the
manuscript was put into the publisher’s desk, where, for some reason
or other, it remained for a very long time. Its publication was
promised from year to year. In a letter written to David d’Angers, in
1837, Bertrand says: “_Gaspard de la Nuit_, ce livre de mes douces
prédilections, où j’ai essayé de créer un nouveau genre de prose,
attend le bon vouloir d’Eugène Renduel pour paraître enfin cet
automne....” Bertrand did not make the gallant figure in poverty that
was made, for example, by Richard Steele, who turned bailiffs into
liveried footmen, as Whistler is said to have done more recently; but
once, at least, he showed a smiling face to misfortune, even if the
smile was a little awry. In 1840, the book being still unpublished,
he called on his publisher and left a sonnet on him, as an ordinary
person might leave a visiting-card. A more charming protest against
procrastination was surely never written:
“Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux,
Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange:
C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,
Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.
A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?
Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange,
Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;
Nous avons une vigne--eh bien, vendangeons nous!
Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne,
La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne,
Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.
J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes,
A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.
Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.”
Six months later Bertrand was dead. At least once he had known for
several months the inside of a public hospital. He was attacked by
phthisis. David d’Angers obtained a grant of 300 francs for him and the
promise of a post as librarian; but he was not to leave the hospital
again. David, who was himself ill, did all that could be done for him,
sent him oranges, and made portraits of him before and after death,
and saw to it that his grave-clothes were not of the coarseness deemed
fitting for the bodies of the poor. David alone followed his bier,
and, no doubt, supplied Sainte-Beuve with the material for his picture
(in the introduction to the first edition of _Gaspard de la Nuit_,
published in 1842 by Victor Pavie, who bought the rights from Renduel
for the sum originally paid):--“It was the eve of Ascension; a terrible
storm was rumbling; the Mass for the dead had been spoken, and the
funeral procession did not come. The priest had ended by leaving; the
only friend present watched the abandoned remains. At the end of the
chapel a sister of charity was decorating an altar with garlands for
the next day’s feast.”
So ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this
way and that, without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and
whirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand’s life was that of
the real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his
head is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are
full of magnificent things. Bertrand was like a man trying to speak
high poetry when his enemy has him by the throat. He saw, and wrote,
and wrestled, in a breath; his achievement was scarcely recognised
till he was overthrown. And that achievement, such as it was, that
little flame he contrived to light before going out himself, kindled a
greater, and in its brighter luminosity almost became invisible. But
when we look back from the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ to this little
book that suggested their creation, we find that it is not without an
independent interest, personal as well as historical. Bertrand himself
was somebody, and no book so well as his lets us share the day-dreams
of 1830.
1911.
ALPHONSE DAUDET
ALPHONSE DAUDET
Daudet’s was the scintillant, flamelike vitality that makes its
possessor the youngest in whatever company he may find himself.
Anatole France writes of him that he believes no human creature ever
loved nature and art with a more ardent and more generous affection,
or enjoyed the universe with more delight, more force, and more
tenderness. Even in old age and suffering, he brought merriment with
him when he limped into the big room that Edmond de Goncourt called his
“grenier,” and kept for talk and friendship. If the room had been sad
or silent, it woke to laughter when this invalid came in and began to
speak. Men felt themselves more alive in his presence. This vitality
is different from the physical and mental momentum of a Balzac. It is
a lambent flame rather than a conflagration; light without heat. It
scorched no one, not even Daudet himself, who made it into a public
entertainer. He could use it at will; it did not impel him into a
restless activity. I can imagine that indolent people felt ill at ease
with Balzac in the room, as if from a fear that he might go off like
a dynamite bomb. Daudet’s vitality was gentle, and insinuated itself
into his listeners’ veins, so that when they left they had the pleasant
sensation of having themselves been more than usually vivacious. “I
have missed my vocation,” he said; “I should have been a merchant of
happiness.” It was a vocation that he had not missed. A merchant of
happiness was precisely what he was, since one kind of happiness is a
childish enjoyment of everything that may occur. Children run about
all day, without forethought, and play at being all sorts of things,
and chatter and fall asleep, still chattering, in the middle of a
sentence. They wake next morning to perform a variation ever so blithe
on yesterday’s performance. Daudet lived just so, and was able to share
his life with other people.
_Le Petit Chose_ is the story of his childhood. It is the tale of a
little boy whose father is an unsuccessful man of business, a little
boy with a parrot and a dream of Robinson Crusoe, who is transplanted
from his south to a northern manufacturing town, a child who becomes
an usher in a school where his youth and his poverty make him butt of
boys and masters alike, where he writes love-letters for a gymnastic
instructor, and suffers in his stead for their success, a child who
goes to Paris at seventeen to join his brother in poverty and hope,
and to write a poem about blue butterflies. The book is almost true
to history, except that, unlike Daudet, _le Petit Chose_ ends as
partner in a china shop, regretfully resigning his blue butterflies to
marry the daughter of the china shop’s proprietor. The real tale of
his shyness and pathetic adventures, that Daudet was never tired of
telling, since it was his own, goes on in other books. There is in them
all a _joie d’écrire_ as much as _joie de vivre_. He rejoices in every
misfortune of his childhood, because, in describing it, he finds an
opportunity for life as a young man. His life as a child had been told
to himself as a fairy tale. He had told ingenious lies to excuse his
truant days on the river, killing off a Pope to hide, in his family’s
excitement, his lateness for a meal. He told lies to himself to excuse
the sordid appearances of his existence, and now he had a chance of
telling lies again, and so living another romance. Daudet’s writing
was always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied
indefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Coppée,
a disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the
memory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he
writes, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades
as if they were yesterday’s, as indeed they might be. Even when he
tries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is
irrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or
pleasure is the more enjoyable. Either is an aid to living, and perhaps
the former gives life a keener taste.
Men of this kind do not spend their vitality altogether for nothing.
More than others they need affection and applause. A face of
disapproval in their audience is enough to wither their wings, and they
ask for goodwill, if only to help them to continue the performance.
_Le Petit Chose_, like most of Daudet’s work, like his life, and his
other representations of his life, conversational or on paper, is an
appeal to be loved. He asks to be seen as he sees himself, and asks
very successfully. It is this, I think, that makes it easy to forgive
him his sins against pure art; this that accounts for his friends’ love
of him, and also for the popular success that made him feel a little
uncomfortable among them. His greed of affection made him not very
fastidious; he was glad to be loved by his baker as well as by Edmond
de Goncourt.
Daudet acquired the habit of being lovable. He made his own life into
a fairy tale, and, since it was the surest way to gratitude, soon
found it difficult to see the lives of others in any different way.
He copied his men and women from nature, as he said, but each one
of them readily became _le Petit Chose_, and he his affectionate,
rose-spectacled biographer. When his novels are laid aside, and we
look at their backs, we forget their extraordinary observation, and
see characters exaggerated by a man who is anxious to persuade; and
when these characters have faded away into framed drawings like those
taken from back numbers of _Punch_, we remember little of the books
but a spirit that asks love and gives it, is ready to understand more
than there is to be understood, and to make excuses for those who are
without them. We think of Daudet as the tenderest possible biographer
for ourselves, and at the same time feel a little shrinking from the
idea of being exhibited with such emphasis. Some of the novels, with
which we are not here particularly concerned, do their best to dispel
the atmosphere of rose-leaves and sunshine, involving us in a swift and
keen analysis of unkind and unpleasant motives. But when we close even
these, little is left of them but their author’s charm, and the memory
of those incidents or descriptions, in which, freed from the burden of
an ambitious task, he loosens the bridle of his romancing vitality.
His books are not so consistent as his character. They are always most
satisfactory when most directly concerned with it. This is partly
because he wrote of himself in anecdotes, and his inspiration was
facile and short-winded rather than persevering. The effects he secures
in his writings are the same as those he won in conversation, snatches
of colour and feeling, like the studies in an artist’s notebook,
often better than when repainted into pictures. Ambition perhaps
obstructed his talent in setting it to do other men’s work, however
well he may have been able to do it. He was not a novelist, although he
made himself one. His big books, in which he describes many lives and
kinds of life, are already being sieved out by time, and the work by
which his name will be remembered is reducing itself to his real and
imaginary reminiscences and his short stories. In these he does not
mingle contradictory ingredients; while his novels, even the best, are
too much like battle-grounds between Queen Mab and Zola.
In his short stories he is perfectly at ease. His talent was no eagle
for long flights, but one of his own blue butterflies. It flew far only
with effort, and tired as it flew, drooping its wings or flapping them
irregularly. But in the short tales no flight was so long as to tire
it. It was happy and at ease, opened its wings with grace, and as it
dropped, folded them with all imaginable delicacy. In the _Contes du
Lundi_ he reconciled his powers and his ambition. He was a romancer, a
_conteur_, a _causeur_, and romantic anecdotes refuse to be fettered
to a strict and steady veracity. He wished to be a painter after
nature, to be accurate, to be real, to be mistaken for reality. There
are moments, but only moments, when the two kinds of truth, that these
powers and this ambition severally suggest, coalesce in a truth that
is charming and, at the same time, almost photographic. In the novels
the truth disintegrated into opposing masses. In short stories he was
able to combine them. His brief, flashing sketches, with their curious
air of stereoscopic perspective, are seldom in the least unreal. Yet,
poignant little things, unforgettable, however slight, they are not
the probabilities of life but its possibilities. They are the lies
that ought to be true. The story of the Alsatian schoolmaster, or that
of the siege of Berlin, with the old colonel, in his worn uniform,
standing on the balcony to welcome the victorious French, and seeing
instead the Uhlans of the advance guard, and hearing the triumphal
march of Schubert, as the Prussians enter Paris; all these minute
things are too dramatic, too pathetic, not to be allowed their moment
of existence. Daudet writes them, and they bring tears to our eyes,
tears that, unfortunately, we must submit to a rather cruel analysis.
Tears, and also laughter. Daudet with his firm belief in the ultimate
victory of all good and pleasant people, and the corresponding
punishment of the bad and unkind, enjoyed, like many happy-minded
men, a highly developed faculty of pity. It was one of his means of
being alive, and this man, who “died of having loved life too well,”
neglected none of the exercises that made his nerves tingle and his
heart beat. He lived in being sorry for people and things, and he
lived in being glad. Another group of his short stories is made up
of pure fairy tales that dance before the eyes, their words running
and tripping after each other, like a band of elves on midsummer’s
eve. They are southern tales of old Provence that he read in the
grasshopper’s library under the blue sky, where the librarians sing all
day, and there are gossamers for bookmarks. Their heartsome feeling is
that of the old song:
“Sur le pont d’Avignon
Tout le monde danse en rond.”
Even when he brings the elves to town, as in _Un Réveillon dans le
Marais_, when, into the old courtyard of the mansion that has been
turned into a mineral water factory, he introduces cavaliers and ladies
of the ancient time, fairies now, being dead so long, he brings with
them half a memory of the farandole, and makes them drunk with seltzer.
Laughter and tears; it is by these that we remember Daudet. His art
is that of wearing his heart on his sleeve. “Here,” he seems to say,
“is a sad tale to make you cry (I cried myself in making it), and
here is a merry one to make you laugh (my pen quivered with merriment
as I wrote it down for you).” Laughter and tears tempted him perhaps
too strongly. He was accustomed to tell his stories many times before
he wrote them. They shaped themselves, like folktales, in successive
recitations, until the inessentials fell away from them and they won
economical and immediate effects. The danger of such a manner of
composition is a confusion of ends. The only safe audience for a writer
is that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our
consciousness, signs now and again his knowledge that such and such
an expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an
incomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open,
whose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art.
Its values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of
laughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become
more important to us than they should. How can the jocund tale be bad
that made you laugh? How can that sad one fail that sent your kerchief
to your eyes? There may be imperfections in them; yes, but by removing
them, I must be careful not to lose that laughter or those tears. And
so, almost inevitably, the tears and laughter come to seem the ends of
art instead of its by-products. And they are not the wistful tears that
dew the eyelashes before a perfect work, nor the impersonal laughter
that rings out like a spring song because some man has made a new thing
well for the eternal gods to see.
Most Frenchmen are performers; and the Frenchman from the south is he
who wins the greatest joy from his performance. I remember a big bare
studio in the Boulevard Vaugirard, where a crowd of students, poets,
sculptors, painters, and their women, used to be merry together and
drink coffee (if there was coke for the stove), and eat Olibet biscuits
(if there was money to buy them). Among us were two curly-headed
Provençals, whose voices had a more persuasive abandon than ours to
whatever they wished to say. There was a balcony in the studio with a
ladder fastened to it, so that the artist might climb to his bed. One
of the Provençals used to stand up, leaning on the ladder, and sing us
old songs of his country, while his friend sat on the lower steps and
dropped the deeper notes of a silver flute into their proper places
in the melody. The songs were sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. More
than once, when some pathetic tune or words made his audience weep, I
have seen the flute-player, unable to restrain his happiness, caper
about the studio with his instrument. Something of Daudet was in the
flute-player and something of the flute-player in Daudet.
1909.
THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE
THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE
Some writers seem to represent single moods of life. Most men grow
from childhood to old age, passing from illusion to disillusion (in
which illusion does no more than turn its coat), then to resignation
(a kind of agnostic attitude towards their own sensations), and,
finally, perhaps, end in the most obstinate illusion of all. But there
are writers who seem to stop at this or that point in the road, to
take up their stand there, and to date from that resting-place all
the monologues that they allow humanity to overhear. The work of the
greatest artists is sent off from every post-office on the journey, or,
if their work is done in age, it holds proof that they have travelled
all the way. Coppée hesitates on the brow of that hill from which
can be seen for the last time the sunlit country of youth. Already
disillusioned, he looks back, and spends his life in regretting the
past. All his work has a retrospective glamour, and where he writes
joyously of the present, it is easy to feel that the joy is a religious
joy, and that his work is a memorial rite, re-enacting something that
has long since faded away.
He took this attitude when very young. There are, indeed, men whose
eyes have always been turned back, men whose earliest memory is a
regret for the memory earlier still that they have lost. In the
prologue to _Le Reliquaire_, published in 1866, he wrote: