or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or incident--is the
representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific
personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.”
Let me attach to these another quotation from the same essay, to
illustrate his use of the word “soul,” the keyword of his belief:
“Mind and soul;--hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction
is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes
in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an
instance of preponderating soul embarrassed, at a loss, in an era
of preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul
is a fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing
language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of,
with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some
inexplicable inspiration.”
When we talk of words it is, if possible, better to talk in terms of
speech than thus indirectly in terms liable to debate, of the nature
of man, which, in this case at least, have led a careful writer into
inaccuracy. Blake was neither embarrassed nor at a loss. He thought
all the rest of the world was. A sort of diffidence would not allow
Pater to admit that he was thinking neither of soul nor of mind but
of a quality in Blake’s language, a quality markedly less evident in
the work of his contemporaries. Whenever Pater uses the word soul in
this sense he is thinking of the magical power in contradistinction
from the practical power of words. Blake’s words say more by what
they carry with them in suggestive atmosphere, than by what they
say. His speech is highly _potential_; and when Pater talks of soul
in literature he is talking of the potential element in the language
of literature, the element so noticeable in the language of his own
works. His insistence on truth, not only in the merely kinetic speech,
the thing said, but also in the potential speech that gives the thing
said its atmospherical particularity, distinguished his own work, and
deeply influenced the writers who followed him--Wilde, Dowson, perhaps
Mr. Yeats, at least in his prose, certainly Mr. Arthur Symons. It was
an indigenous spring of the tendency that, in France, has been called
Symbolist, with which the last of the younger writers I have mentioned
definitely allied himself. Pater’s expressed admirations for modern
French books are only such as suggest his ignorance of the best writers
in a later generation than that of Flaubert, who was, of course, not
twenty years his senior. He does not seem to have read those younger
men whose ideas so closely resembled his own, so closely that Frenchmen
often claim Pater’s most obvious disciple[7] for a pupil of the school
of Mallarmé.
With his care in the use of words, he had also a care for structure,
and for similar reasons. He says, as in a cruder way Poe had said long
before, but not with such close significance:
“The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes,
in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple
sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural
member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity
with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right way when
it tends towards that.”
Those words embody in technical wisdom the profoundest understanding of
the aims of art and of the nature of artistic creation.
His practice was not quite on the level of his theory. His details
sometimes fail to preserve a unity of tone and rhythm with the whole
of which they are a part. Sometimes too, the effort to preserve that
unity compels the whole to a chafing monotone. An over-zealous pursuit
of accuracy sometimes allowed those careful sentences to encumber
themselves with adjectival burs, and a too visual method of composition
sometimes cost them their harmony with the music it was their business
to maintain, and even brought that music to an abrupt stop. “Pater,”
Mr. Benson says, who knew him, “when he had arranged his notes, began
to write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in
these spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then
the whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again
be filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his
own expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the
effect....” Such a method, however careful the writer might be to make
continual appeal to his ear, could not but allow the eye to assume too
great a share in that collaboration in which ear should be the sole
dictator and eye the ear’s obedient servant. It would make it difficult
to reject pleasant, exact phrases put in on those alternate lines, even
if they made the sentences top-heavy with their own distinguished,
highly specialised meaning. They would make this top-heaviness hard to
perceive, and, if perceived, erroneously attributable to the visible
crowding and elaboration of the written page. The setting up in print,
while useful as a guide to the general outline, would only confirm
these sentences in their condition. Nobody who has tried to read Pater
aloud can be without instances when the reading became difficult,
breathless, impossible, even while the words demanded admiration for
their subtle accuracy and perfect choice. Let me give no more than two
examples of the awkward constructions Pater allowed himself. I shall
take them from the least decorative of his works, from a book actually
written for oral delivery. On page 35 of _Plato and Platonism_[8] there
is this sentence:
“From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek
religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formulæ, _Pure
Being_, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and
suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal
ball, as he says; ‘The Absolute’; ‘The One’; passed to his
fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of
philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience
of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men.”
Now there are 37 words in 8 clauses, needing 5 commas and 3 semi-colons
to make up the subject of that sentence. The underlining of the words
_Pure Being_ seems to me a manifest concession to the eye.
On page 32 of the same book there is a characteristic construction
partly due to a wish to preserve in his writing, tapestried as it might
be, a flavour of conversational speech, and, for all that, dependent on
the visibility of print, demanding a swift review of the beginning of
the sentence as the reader arrives at its end:
“That which _is_, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing
at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides and the
Eleatic School were much preoccupied with the determination of the
thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.”
Such sentences are blemishes, not because of inaccuracy, for their
accuracy is their excuse, but because they trouble our reception of
the whole, as a whole, by drawing too much attention to themselves.
With all his care for shapely building, for unity of impression,
he could not avoid occasional over-insistence on details, rather
pleasant than otherwise, unlike the troubling halts of his failures
in sentence-making. Indeed, I am not sure that we can describe as a
fault what was characteristic of a whole manner of vision, and due
not to carelessness but to the peculiar gift of a rare intimacy of
imagination. In his imaginary portraits (which include not only the
book of that name, but “Emerald Uthwart,” “The Child in the House,”
“Apollo in Picardy,” “Gaston de Latour,” “Marius the Epicurean,”
and, less obviously, most of his critical work) we can observe his
way of laying hold of small, separate facts, and expanding them, as
Gaston expanded the poems of Ronsard, “to the full measure of their
intention.” His was never a sweeping, large-rhythmed, narrative
imagination; I fancy, even, that Pater felt a danger of losing himself
when he had to say that something happened, and more than once, when
his characters were compelled to significant, visible action, he did
indeed lose himself ... for a sentence or two it is as if not Pater
spoke but another. There was a danger of things happening in _Gaston
de Latour_, the most lovable of his books. For seven chapters Pater
put them off, and then, as they crowded up on the horizon, and became
imminent, he laid the story aside before they could overwhelm him and
carry him off his feet.[9]
Pater’s imagination loved not action but intellectual circumstance,
and the significance not of deeds but of the promise of deeds yet
unperformed. The story of Marius, the story of Gaston, as far as it
had been carried, was the story of exceptional character in particular
intellectual environment; and for us, perhaps, the interest lies as
much in the one as in the other. When I think of the second of those
two books, I think less of that scrupulous, finely strung youth than of
Montaigne, whose portrait, in the old tower above his open house, seems
to me at least equally important. Now to offer the reader a choice
between the part and the whole is not the way of the perfect artist.
Again, it is idle to say that the narrative of “Marius the Epicurean”
is broken by the inclusion of that lovely rendering of the tale of
Cupid and Psyche. It is idle to point to that tale as an interruption,
when there is nothing for it to interrupt, nothing that is not already
in repose. In Pater’s books it is the reader who moves from one
contemplation to another, and, in “Marius,” quite naturally, from Pisa
and the boy’s education there, and his friendship with Flavian, to the
tale they read together on hot Italian afternoons.
In a way the inclusion of that tale is an illustration on a large
scale of Pater’s invariable manner of using detail. It was the work of
another man, and, before placing it in his book, Pater made it his own
by translating it into a prose which, if purposely and also necessarily
a little different from that of the rest of the book, was yet his.
Just so smaller details, fragments of observation of external nature,
for example, are not directly set upon the page, with no more than the
imprint of the hands that plucked them to give them a spurious unity
with the rest. They are all translated, idiomatically, until they are
so wholly his that it seems he has looked within for them and not
without. The light through the arched windows of the old church, the
spires of London, the burial vault of the Dukes of Rosenmold: these
things are so intimately imagined, so completely veiled in Pater’s mood
that when we recognise them in life we accuse ourselves of plagiarism
because we cannot see them other than as he saw them, and they come to
us, almost, as remembered sentences.
“The Golden Book” takes its place in “Marius” as a single touch in the
portrait of a time: a fragment, carefully chosen, of the local colour
of ideas. Just so Pater uses details more minute. Irrelevant as they
may seem, to a careless observer, irrelevant as perhaps they were
before he had translated them, they help in the painting of the mood of
a man, as that story in the painting of a mood of the ancient world,
in each case a mood of Pater’s own, half borrowed from, half lent to,
man or world. This mutual creation is like that which happens in the
contemplation of a work of art. It is criticism, and, even when Pater
is not criticising what are known as works of art, he is criticising
not the world, or a period or a man, but works of art he has already
made, privately, for himself. He used “the finer sort of memory,
bringing its object to mind with a quiet clearness, yet, as sometimes
happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary
retrospect.” He believed that criticism was a form of creation: for him
it was often a second stage of creation, for he had given artistic form
to his material before, in contemplation of it, he began the criticism
that he offers us in its place. I do not know that this is, accurately
speaking, possible, but it is at least a fable that very fairly
represents the process whereby, in Pater’s books, life comes to seem at
once so ordered, so tapestried, so aloof and yet so intimately known.
I speak there of life in general, of the flux without, a turmoil
until it has been arrested by one of those personal acts of artistic
creation which it is the function of art to make more frequent, more
habitual. The turbulent nature of the flux itself is disguised alike
in his critical and his more obviously imaginative work. For his
critical essays tend always to become imaginary portraits, no less
than his studies in Greek mythology. They are not portraits of men
as Pater believed them to be, but reproductions of their aspect in
sudden side-lights that change them, specialise them, and for those
readers who are vainly looking for a general view, simplify them a
little too far. But what sometimes seems to be the reduction of a
complex personality to a simple formula--Michelangelo, for example, to
the repeated _ex forti dulcedo_--is not so intended. It is rather the
reduction of a personality to the expression of a single mood. There is
warp and woof in Pater’s essays, and the shuttle must thread parallel
lines and not a maze as it weaves what is meant less as the portrait
of a man than as the pattern of a mood. Pater never sacrificed his
own personality to his nominal subject. He sacrificed his sitter, not
himself. Nothing is more remarkable in _Marius the Epicurean_ (where it
would have been easier to disclaim the writer’s own time, to waive the
centuries that separated him from his supposed material) than Pater’s
resolute modernity. He will not allow us to forget the distinction in
circumstances that makes so subtle the relation between subject and
object. He will strip off nothing that has been brought him by the
years between Marius and himself. Deliberately, he sees Marius with
eyes enriched by those centuries, and, with the later knowledge that
can compare Apuleius to Swift or to Théophile Gautier, takes pleasure
in a reference to Wilhelm Meister and remarks that Marius thinks in
the vein of St. Augustine. And so, caring more for the point of view
from which he sees them than for the actual objects, that can be seen
a thousand ways, he has no wish to “say the last word” on Lamb, on
Pico, on Sir Thomas Browne. He does say it, however, on those men in
those moods, or, more truly, on the moods in which he saw them. We
often leave an essay of Pater’s with a new appreciation of someone
else; but that is not because Pater has told us anything, but because,
in reproducing the mood of his essay we have given ourselves a mood
in which that other, Botticelli, Ronsard, Giorgione, can be more than
usually significant.
Thus, though it is as a critic that Pater lives and will live, it is
as a critic of a kind that he may almost be said to have invented.
His criticism is aesthetic and personal. Though compelled to offer a
profusion of theories, he is impatient of them, submits himself to a
work of art, and criticises that work not by showing what he feels,
but by a reproduction of the mood which that work induces in him. His
criticism, always indirect, is always creative, since the reproduction
of a mood, unlike the recording of opinions, is itself a work of art.
It has the validity of his own temperament and circumstances, lyrical
as opposed to abstract truth. We can never say of him that he was
wrong, unless in the theories that he could not avoid but considered
unimportant. We can only say that he was different--from ourselves,
from someone else. We read this critic as we read a poet, collaborating
with him in the reproduction of a mood, in the searching knowledge of
the fragment of life that was coloured for him by this or that book
or picture. The book or picture becomes a secondary matter, and the
first is the rapid light, the weighty atmosphere that he had made his
own. After reading him I remember his words on Montaigne: “A mind for
which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as a general
conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal
experience.”
1912.
REMY DE GOURMONT
REMY DE GOURMONT
I
M. de Gourmont lives on the fourth floor of an old house in the Rue
des Saints-Pères. A copper chain hangs as bell-rope to his door. The
rare visitor, for it is well known that for many years he has been a
solitary and seldom receives even his friends, pulls the chain and
waits. The door opens a few inches, ready to be closed immediately,
by a man of middle size, in a monk’s brown robe, with a small, round,
grey felt cap. The robe is fastened with silver buckles, in which are
set large blue stones. The admitted visitor walks through a passage
into a room whose walls are covered with books. In the shadow at the
back of the room is a loaded table. Another table, with a sloping
desk upon it, juts out from the window. M. de Gourmont sits in a big
chair before the desk, placing his visitor on the opposite side of
the table, with the light falling on his face so that he can observe
his slightest expression. In conversation he often disguises his face
with his hand, but now and again looks openly and directly at his
visitor. His eyes are always questioning, and almost always kindly.
His face was beautiful in the youth of the flesh, and is now beautiful
in the age of the mind, for there is no dead line in it, no wrinkle,
no minute feature not vitalised by intellectual activity. The nose
is full and sensitive, with markedly curved nostrils. There is a
little satiric beard. The eyebrows lift towards the temples, as in
most men of imagination. The eyes are weighted below, as in most men
of critical thought. The two characteristics are, in M. de Gourmont,
as in his work, most noticeable together. The lower lip, very full,
does not pout, but falls curtain-like towards the chin. It is the lip
of a sensualist, and yet of one whose sensuality has not clogged but
stimulated the digestive processes of his brain. Omar might have had
such a lip, if he had been capable not only of his garlands of roses,
but also of the essays of Montaigne.
He was born in a château in Normandy on 4th April 1858. Among his
ancestors was Gilles de Gourmont, a learned printer and engraver of
the fifteenth century. He has himself collected old woodcuts, and in
_L’Ymagier_ amused himself by setting the most ancient specimens of
the craft, among which he is proud to show some examples of the work
of his family, side by side with drawings by Whistler and Gauguin. He
came to Paris in 1883, when he obtained a post in the Bibliothèque
Nationale. Huysmans was “sous-chef de bureau à la direction de la
Sûreté générale,” and M. de Gourmont, who made his acquaintance through
the dedication of a book, used to call for him between four and five
of the afternoon, and walk with him across the river to a café, that
has since disappeared, where he listened to the older man’s rather
savage characterisations of men, women, movements and books. A few
years later he was held to be lacking in patriotism, and relieved of
his post on account of an article urging the necessity of Franco-German
agreement. He wrote incessantly. _Merlette_, a rather naïve and awkward
little novel, published in 1886, did not promise the work he was to
do. It was no more than an exercise, well done, but no more, the
work of a good brain as yet uncertain of its personal impulse. But
about this time he was caught in the stream of a movement for which
he had been waiting, for which, indeed, the art of his time had been
waiting, the movement that was introduced to English readers by Mr.
Arthur Symons’s admirable series of critical portraits.[10] In 1890 he
published _Sixtine_, dedicated to Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who had died
the year before. In 1892 appeared _Le Latin Mystique_, a book on the
Latin poets of the Middle Ages. He has always been “a delicate amateur
of the curiosities of beauty,” though the character that Mr. Symons
gave him has since become very inadequate. He edited Gérard de Nerval,
_Aucassin et Nicolette_, and Rutebeuf’s _La Miracle de Théophile_,
and wrote _Lilith_, 1892, and _Théodat_, a dramatic poem in prose
that was produced by my friend M. Paul Fort at the Théâtre d’Art on
December 11th of the same year. Several other curious works of this
period were united later in _Le Pèlerin du Silence_. I extract from the
bibliography by M. van Bever, printed in _Poètes d’aujourd’hui_, a
list of the more important books that have followed these very various
beginnings: _Le Livre des Masques_, 1896; _Les Chevaux de Diomède_,
1897; _Le II^{me} Livre des Masques_, 1898; _Esthétique de la langue
française_, 1899; _La Culture des Idées_, 1900; _Le Chemin de Velours_,
1902; _Le Problème du Style_, 1902; _Physique de l’Amour_, 1903;
_Une Nuit au Luxembourg_, 1906; besides four volumes of literary and
philosophical criticism, and four volumes of comment on contemporary
events.
All this mass of work is vitalised by a single motive. Even the
divisions of criticism and creation (whose border line is very dim)
are made actually one by a desire common to both of them, a desire not
expressed in them, but satisfied, a desire for intellectual freedom.
The motto for the whole is written in _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_:
“L’exercice de la pensée est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeu soit
libre et harmonieux.” I am reminded of this sentence again and again
in thinking of M. de Gourmont and his books. There must be no loss of
self-command, none of the grimaces and the awkward movements of the
fanatic, the man with whom thought plays. The thinker must be superior
to his thought. He must make it his plaything instead of being sport
for it. His eyes must be clear, not hallucinated; his arms his own,
not swung with the exaggerated gestures of the preacher moved beyond
himself by his own words. M. de Gourmont seems less an artist than a
man determined to conquer his obsessions, working them out one by one
as they assail him, in order to regain his freedom. It is a fortunate
accident that he works them out by expressing them, twisting into
garlands the brambles that impede his way.
II