Carlylese as the very devil,” and doubtless would have given the same
advice regarding Paterese. It is true Pater is dangerous for students.
This theme of style, so admirably vivified in Sir Walter Raleigh’s
monograph—the best we know of; Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on the
technical elements of style is too technical, valuable as it is—has
been worn threadbare from Aristotle to Renton and his Logic of Style.
Pater produced slowly—he wrote five books in twenty years, at the rate
of an essay or two every year, thus matching Flaubert in his tormented
production. The chief accusation brought against the Pater method of
working and his consequent style is its lack of spontaneity; it is not
a natural style. But a “natural style,” so called, is not encountered
in its full flowering more than a half dozen times during the course
of a century; perhaps that figure is an exaggeration. The French write
all but flawless prose. To match Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France we
must go to Ruskin, Newman, and Pater. When we say, “Let us write simple,
straightforward English,” we are setting a standard that has been reached
only by Thackeray, Newman, Arnold, and how few others? There are as many
victims of the “natural English” formula as there are of the “artificial”
formula of Pater and Stevenson. The first-named write careless, flabby,
colorless, undistinguished, lean commercial English, and pass unnoticed
in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the cliché is lord
of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of affected
“fine writing,” are more easily detected and denounced by purists,
pedants, and other sultry professorial persons. A master, Renan, disliked
the teaching of “style” per se—as if the secret could be imparted—yet
he toiled over his manuscripts. We recall the Flaubert case. With Pater
one should not rush to the conclusion, because he produced slowly, that
he was of an artificiality all compact. For him prose was a fine art. He
could no more have used a phrase coined by another than he could have
worn the other man’s hat. He embroidered upon the canvas of his themes
the grave and lovely phrases we so envy and admire. Prose—“cette ancienne
et très jalouse chose,” as it was described by Stéphane Mallarmé—for
Pater was at once a pattern and a cadence, a picture and a song. Never
suggesting hybrid “poetic-prose,” the stillness of his style—atmospheric,
languorous, sounding sweet undertones—is always in the true rhythm of
prose. Speed is absent. The tempo is usually lenten. Brilliancy is not
pursued; there is a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp. The sentences
uncoil their many-colored lengths; there are echoes, repercussions,
tonal imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that
occasionally confuse; for compensation we are given harmonies newly
orchestrated, as salient, as mordant, and as subtly rare as chords in the
music of Brahms or Debussy. Sane prose it always is; but seldom simple.
It is extremely personal, and while it may not make music for every ear,
it is exquisitely adapted to the idea it garbs. Read Ruskin aloud and
then apply the same vocal test to Pater, and the magnificent harmonies
of the older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman,
will make your ear captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied,
and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in eloquence
slightly muffled, the last manner of Pater hinted at newer combinations.
Of his prose we may say, quoting his own words concerning another theme:
“It is beauty wrought from within, ... the deposit, little cell by cell,
of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.”
The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Sir Thomas Browne’s
richer and full of flashing conceits; there are deeper organ tones in
De Quincey, and Ruskin excels in effects, rhythmic and sonorous; but
the prose of Pater is more sinuous, subtle, more felicitous, and in its
essence consummately intense. Morbid it is, sometimes, and its rich
polyphony palls if one is not in the mood, and in greater measure than
the prose of classic masters, for the world is older and Pater was often
weary of life. But suggestions of morbidity may be found in every writer
from Plato to Dante, from Dante to Shakespeare and Goethe. It is but the
faint spice of mortality which lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to
all literatures. Beautiful art is always challenged as corrupting. There
may be a grain of truth in the accusation. Man cannot live by wisdom
alone, so art was invented by him to console, to disquiet, to arouse.
Art may be a dangerous adventure and also an anodyne, like religion.
And unhappily we are losing our taste for adventuring amidst dangerous
ideas. Once deprived of moral self-determination, of the right of private
judgment, man soon relapses into a vegetable existence. Whenever a new
poet or philosopher appears he is straightway accused of tampering
with the moral currency. This is only mediocrity’s mode of adjusting
too marked mental disproportions. Difference engenders hatred. In this
period, when art and literature are violently despised and persecuted,
do not let us be frightened by the word “wicked.” For my part, as an old
practitioner in literary and artistic poisons, I have never encountered
a book or a picture or a sonata that was so immoral as to kill at twenty
paces. So let us cheer up, read Pater, Baudelaire, and the Bible—from
which they derive—and blench not before the dissonantal batteries of the
Neo-Scythian composers.
There is another Pater, one far removed from the weaver of colored silken
phrases. If he recalls the richness of Keats in the texture of his prose,
he can also suggest the aridity of Spencer. There are essays of his as
cold, as logically adamant, and as tortuous as sentences in the Synthetic
Philosophy. Luckily his tendency to abstract reasoning was subdued by
the humanism of his temper. There are not many “purple panels” in his
prose; “purple” in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no “fringes of the
north star” style. He never wrote in sheer display. For the boorish
rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern writing he betrayed no
sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider his essays on Lamb,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, not to mention those finely wrought
masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione, Botticelli, Joachim du
Bellay. Even the newly gathered minor essays, slight as they are in theme
and treatment, reveal the master.
Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work,
often the artist for art’s sake, he may never trouble the main currents
of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers, a critic for
critics. Little books may have their destiny. Pater was a thinker whose
vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer of a polyphonic
prose-music which echoes a harmonious adagio heard within the spaces of a
Gothic cathedral, through the multicolored windows of which filters alien
daylight. It was a favorite contention of his that all the arts aspire
toward the condition of music. This idea is the keynote of Walter Pater,
mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius the Epicurean, carried, his
life long, “in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul.” And
yet——!
BAUDELAIRE’S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER
When a well-known man dies in England they ask: What did he do? In
France: How did he do it? In the United States: How much did he leave?
But the Socialist in every land says: He didn’t do it! The poetic
production of Charles Baudelaire, if put to the same test questions,
might easily be conceived as evoking even more variety of responses.
Baudelaire has said that nations produce great men against their will.
While his position in the poetic firmament of France is that of a star
of the first magnitude, there are, nevertheless, dissidents, especially
among foreign critics, who either cannot or will not admit what is become
a truism in French criticism. And the critical literature concerning
the poet grows apace. His letters to his mother, recently published,
make a volume admirably calculated to illuminate the character of the
man. It contains a preface and notes by Jacques Crépet, who, it may be
remembered, assisted his father, Eugène Crépet, in the biographical
study of Baudelaire, a definitive study, one is tempted to add, for it
dissipated a lot of legends (most of them fabricated by the poet himself)
and put his house of life into some sort of order. Above all, it cleared
up the rather murky atmosphere of his relations with Jeanne Duval, his
Black Venus, who was in reality a young woman with hardly a moiety of
African blood in her veins. But she served as a peg for the poet upon
which to hang some of his most acrid and lovely verse, therefore she must
pass muster in any estimate of his disquieting genius.
Withal, the exegetical literature is not large. George Saintsbury
introduced him to English readers, although Algernon Charles Swinburne
had in practice, if not by precept, brought his “poisonous honey from
France”—Tennyson’s phrase. The Letters (1841-66) were published in 1907
by the _Mercure de France_, which also fathered a bulky volume devoted
to the posthumous works (1908). La Plume had in 1893 republished from
the Belgian edition the condemned pieces from Les Fleurs du Mal, with an
extraordinary frontispiece by the Belgian etcher, Armand Rassenfosse.
There are some poetic numbers in this rare plaque—eagerly sought for by
lovers of exotic literature—yet the majority of the pieces must be read
book in one hand, the other hand tightly closing the nostrils. These
suppressed poems are not the best Baudelairia. Féli Gautier’s illustrated
pamphlet (Editions de la Plume) is the most succinct account of the poet.
There is also a handy little volume by Alphonse Seché and Jules Bertaut,
garnered from various sources, yet of critical merit. And in 1917, during
the heat of conflict, Guillaume Apollinaire prefaced the definitive text
of the poems and said some pertinent things of Baudelaire. He calls the
poet the literary son of Choderlos de Laclos and Edgar Poe—a shuddering
combination, indeed.
The previous collection of Letters are of more general interest, for
they are addressed to his most distinguished contemporaries—painters,
poets, musicians—his friend Richard Wagner among the rest—men of
letters and aristocratic ladies. But in the Letters to his mother,
Mme. Aupick, the atmosphere is more dramatic, more intense. A duel is
fought from his school days to the year previous to his death; the duel
of a man, half crazed with alcohol and drugs, and a mother who failed
to understand the queer duckling of genius she had hatched out in her
first marriage. Demands for money fill the majority of these epistles.
Pleas for his poetic work also loom largely, but poverty is the leading
motive throughout. We catch more than a profile portrait of the mother;
it is not always winning or “motherly.” How could it be with such a son?
A half-Hamlet, he was jealous of his mother’s second husband. It was
one of the determining causes in his morbid growth. How has his case
so long escaped the psychiatrists of the psychoanalytic school? Albert
Mordell, in his Erotic Element in Literature, could have found him a
better subject than Stendhal for the Œdipus-complex. Notwithstanding his
Flowers of Evil, his diabolic and dandical poses, Baudelaire was not a
wicked-hearted man. Weak he was rather than depraved. And too curious of
certain matters. He did explore the subcellars of the soul, dive into
cesspools, and expose putrid sores. A scavenger poet, nevertheless a
great poet, the greatest since Hugo. To-day his successor to the purple
is Gabriele d’Annunzio.
There was decay in Baudelaire’s bones, a necrosis of the moral nature,
yet no more fervent believer among latter-day poets in God and his Mother
has penned their praises, except Verlaine. He did lay too much stress
on his admiration for Satan, an admiration well-nigh Manichean, but
he argued rightly when he said that one can’t believe in the Almighty
and not believe in the Adversary. Theologically speaking, this is an
inexpugnable position; in reality the world-experiences of the last five
years have uprooted a belief that Satan is bound and sealed in some
hellish solitude. Roaming about and seeking whom he may devour, would be
the consensus of opinion among pious folk. Baudelaire believed in the
devil because he had a personal devil. Hence his Litanies to Satan, later
imitated by Giosuè Carducci in his Hymn to Satan. “Salute, O Satana, O
ribellione, O forza vindice, Della ragione!” But in his Litanies the
French poet is more explicit; his refrain is “O Satan, prends pitié de ma
longue misère!” And this from the poet of De profundis clamavi and the
hymn, in Latin, to Saint Francis (Francisco meæ Laudes)!
A third person has a share in the new Letters, M. Ancelle, the advocate
and guardian of the errant Charles. Alternately cajoling and bullying,
the letters addressed him by his charge reveal a curious mentality. The
father of Baudelaire bequeathed his son about seventy-five thousand
francs, soon dissipated by the incipient dandy on pictures, furniture,
jewelry, bibelots, clothes, and light o’ loves; yet he seemed to think
that his guardian was robbing him, that his mother hated him. In the
mists and ecstasies of his wild life he saw nothing clearly—except his
shining visions, and being of an obstinate nature, he pinned these
visions to paper. The history of art can show few more laborious
workmen than Baudelaire; his was the technical heroism of which Henry
James speaks. Despite his drugs and drinks, he never ceased working,
the work of an intellectual galley-slave. He filed his poems. He wrote
criticism—Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Richard Wagner are specimens of
his critical clairvoyancy—read his Salons and his splendid tribute to
the genius of Wagner in his Music of the Future. Luck seemed against
him. Like Balzac, he was forever in debt. His mother came to the
rescue; his friends were worn out helping him across perilous pecuniary
quagmires. Then he fled to Belgium, a country he loathed, and celebrated
that loathing in distasteful verse, there to be stricken with general
paralysis, and later to be brought back to Paris, to die cared for by
the mother he believed inimical to him. The mystery is that he didn’t
succumb earlier in his life to the perpetual assaults on his health.
When his mother married the father of the poet, Joseph Francis
Baudelaire—or Beaudelaire—she was twenty-seven, her husband sixty-two. By
his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one son, Claude, who, like
his half-brother, Charles, died of paralysis. After the death of the
father the widow married within a year the handsome, ambitious Aupick,
then Chef de Bataillon, Lieutenant-Colonel, decorated with the Legion
of Honor, later General and Ambassador to Madrid, Constantinople, and
London. Charles was a frail, nervous youth, but, unlike most children of
genius, he was an excellent scholar and won brilliant prizes at college.
In this d’Annunzio resembled him. His stepfather was proud of him. From
the Royal College at Lyons Charles went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand,
Paris, but was expelled in 1839. (He was born in 1821, also the birth
year of Flaubert.) Troubles soon began at home. He disdained his mother
and quarrelled with General Aupick. She has confessed that she was
partially to blame; in the flush of her second love she had forgotten her
boy. He could not forget nor forgive what he called her infidelity to
the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The worthy
Bishop of Montpelier, an old family friend, said that Charles was a
little crazy; that second marriages usually bring woe in their train. The
young poet contented himself with muttering: “When a mother has such a
son she doesn’t remarry.” The reverse was probably the truth. He wrote in
his journal: “My ancestors idiots or maniacs ... all victims of terrible
passions”; which was another of his exaggerations. His father was a
student, a practical man, a steady-going bourgeois. On the paternal side
the grandfather of Charles was a Champenois peasant; his mother’s people
presumably were of Normandy, though little is known of her forebears.
Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother was stricken
with paralysis, as well he might. Like many others, Baudelaire was a
victim to a malady the origins of which were little known in his day. He
also believed that his own instability of temperament was the result of
the disparity of years in his parents.
In the heyday of his blood he was perverse. Let us credit him with
contradicting the Byronic notion that ennui can be best cured by evil
ways; sin, Baudelaire found the saddest of diversions. Despite Théophile
Gautier’s stories about the hashish club, Catulle Mendès denies that the
poet was addicted to the hemp habit. What the majority of mankind does
not know concerning the habits of literary workers is this prime fact:
that men who toil writing poetry—and there is no mental toil comparable
to it, not even the higher mathematics—cannot indulge in drink or opium
without speedy collapse. The old-fashioned ideas of “inspiration,”
spontaneity, easy improvisation, of the sudden bolt from heaven, are
delusions still hugged by the world. To be told that Chopin filed at his
music for years, that in his smithy Beethoven forged his thunderbolts in
the sweat of his sooty brows, that Manet slaved like a dock laborer, that
Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to work, may be a disillusion
for the sentimental. Yet such is the case. Minerva springing full-fledged
from Jupiter’s skull is a pretty fancy, but Balzac and Flaubert did not
encourage that fancy. Work literally killed them, as it killed Poe and
Jules de Goncourt. Maupassant went insane because he would work and he
would play the same day. Baudelaire worked and worried. His debts haunted
him. His constitution was undoubtedly flawed, but that his life was one
prolonged debauch is a nightmare of the moral police in some white cotton
night-cap country. These letters to his mother are the most human of
documents and they prove the contrary. Charles Baudelaire is the saddest
and the profoundest poet in modern literature.
* * * * *
Speaking of Nietzsche, I am reminded of the study by William M. Salter,
Nietzsche the Thinker, which happened to be published here at an
inopportune time (1917). It is the most satisfactory exposition of the
ideas of the great poet-philosopher, who, even if he did not create an
inclosed system, has given birth to original and suggestive ideas. Mr.
Salter has, of course, exploded the erroneous notion that Nietzsche was
persona grata with the Prussians. A letter in my possession, though not
addressed to me—alas! I have but one written to me—begins thus: “Woe to
the victors, for they shall be vanquished!” A veritable prophecy. This
was dated 1875, and alluded to the Franco-Prussian War, the consequences
of which sorrowed the soul of Nietzsche. The Salter book is testimony to
American scholarship; cogent, bold, brilliant, and conclusive.
THE TWO TEMPTATIONS
The two Temptations! Sounds melodramatic, doesn’t it? But it only refers
to the various versions of a great book. All good Flaubertians will
rejoice to learn that the earlier draft of Flaubert’s Temptation of St.
Antony, has been given a fitting English garb. This translation is made
from the 1849 and 1856 manuscripts, edited by Louis Bertrand, and is
by René Francis. The preface is by Sir Gaston Maspero, distinguished
archæologist, and there is also a prefatory note by Louis Bertrand. This
version must not be confounded with the definitive one of 1874, Englished
in superlative fashion by Lafcadio Hearn and published here in 1910.
The new and bulky volume, admirably printed and copiously illustrated,
is a literary curiosity without which no Flaubert collection would be
complete. To be sure, Flaubert translated is Flaubert traduced, for as
Arthur Symons has written, Flaubert is difficult to translate because he
has no fixed rhythm.
“His prose keeps step with no regular march music. He invents the rhythm
of every sentence; he changes his cadence with every mood or for the
convenience of every fact. He has no theory of beauty in form apart from
what it expresses. For him form is a living thing, the physical body of
thought, which it clothes and interprets. Compare the style,” continues
Mr. Symons, “of Flaubert in his books and you will find that each book
has its own rhythm, perfectly appropriate to its subject-matter. In
Chateaubriand, Gautier, even Baudelaire, the cadence is always the same;
the most exquisite word painting of Gautier can be translated rhythm
for rhythm without difficulty into English. Once you have mastered the
tune you have merely to go on; every verse will be the same.” Not so
with Flaubert. His is truly polyphonic prose—a phrase, by the way, that
Amy Lowell uses to describe an amorphous form of prose and poetry. When
I invented the combination years ago I meant only prose, what George
Saintsbury would call “numerous prose.” See his valuable critical History
of English Prose Rhythm.
While on a visit in 1845, Flaubert visited Genoa. There, in the Palace
Balbi-Senarega—not at the Doria, as Maxime du Camp wrote with his
accustomed carelessness—the French writer saw an old picture by Breughel
(probably Pieter the younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that represents
a Temptation of St. Antony. It is dingy in color and far from a
masterpiece. But Flaubert, who loved the grotesque, procured an engraving
of this picture, and it hung till the day of his death in his study at
Croisset, near Rouen. I have seen it, as it still hangs in the Flaubert
Museum there. This picture was the spring-board for his two Temptations.
Their germ may be found in his mystery play, Smarh, with its demon and
its metaphysical coloring. But Breughel surely set into motion the mental
machinery of the Temptation, which never stopped whirring till 1874.
The first draft of the Temptation was begun May 24, 1848, and finished
September 12, 1849. The manuscript numbered five hundred and forty
pages. Set aside for Madame Bovary, this draft was again taken up and
the second version was made in 1856; when finished the manuscript was
reduced to one hundred and ninety-three pages. Not satisfied, Flaubert
returned to the work in 1872, and when ready for publication in 1874 the
number of pages was one hundred and thirty-six; even then he cut out
from ten chapters, three. When a few years later the 1856 version was
given to the world French critics were astonished to find it so different
from the definitive version of 1874. The critical taste of Flaubert was
vindicated. His was true technical heroism. Reading in 1849 the earliest
version to his friends Bouilhet and Du Camp he had been bidden to burn
the stuff; instead he boiled it down into the 1856 version. To his
dearest friend, Ivan Turgénieff, he submitted his 1872 draft. Thus it
came that the wonderfully colored psychic and philosophic panorama, this
Gulliver-like excursion round and about the master-ideas and religions of
the antique and early Christian worlds was at last published.
All the youthful Flaubert, the “spouter” of blazing phrases, the lover
of jewelled words, of picturesque and monstrous ideas and situations
is in the first turbulent version of the Temptation; in the definitive
version he is more critical, historical. As his emotions cooled with
the years, Flaubert had grown intellectually. The first Temptation is
romantic, religious; the 1874 is better composed and sceptical. Arranged
more dramatically than the first, the author’s leanings toward Oriental
mysticism and the dominating ideas of the classic world are better
revealed in the last version. The psychological gradations of character
are more clearly indicated in this version. We cannot agree with Louis
Bertrand, editor of the 1856 version, that it is superior to the version
of 1874. It seems more novel, that’s all. Flaubert was never so much the
surgeon as when he operated upon this manuscript. He often hesitated, he
always suffered, but he never flinched when his mind was fully resolved.
It is for the student a subject of enthralling interest to follow the
slow growth of these various versions.
“Since Goethe,” would be a suggestive title for an essay on the various
epics written since his death. The list would not be large. In France
there are only the barren rhetorical exercises of Edgar Quinet’s
Ahasuerus, the insurrectionary poems of Hugo and the frigidly faultless
verse of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such profound depth and heroic
power as Faust there is not, except the Temptation of St. Antony, which
is impregnated by the Faustian spirit—though in its development poles
apart from the older poem—that we are not surprised when we learn that
the youthful Flaubert was a passionate admirer of Goethe, even addressing
to his memory a long poem in alexandrines. The Temptation is the only
poem—despite its prose it is poetic—that may be classed with Brand
or Zarathushtra. At times, in its sweep of execution and grandeur of
conception, it grazes certain episodes in Faust.