Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style?
To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a
different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says,
"expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which--apart
from that--is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox
to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is
worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter,
the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat--all, without
exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I
have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is
faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the
point where faultless technique leaves off.
Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty,"
and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance,
Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius,
but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to
me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than _The Pit and the
Pendulum_ and _The Cask of Amontillado_ of Poe; they are more than
analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they
have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at
times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' _Contes
Cruels,_ such as his _Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne_ and
_Les amants de Tolède._ And--what is more astonishing in his prose than
in any of the writers I have mentioned--is his satire; a satire which
is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter
of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais
and of Swift.
Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical,
ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of
astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and
susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or
fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate
desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a
mystification, and a fantastic genius--such as that of Baudelaire and
of Poe--can never resist it when opportunity offers.
Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, _épris
des hauteurs,_ as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led
on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his
sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all
understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed
in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his
thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a
reprobate--and so cast out of God's sight.
"For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,
Soul may divide from body, but not we
One from another; I hold thee with my hand,
I let mine eyes have all their will of thee,
I seal myself upon thee with my might,
Abiding alway out of all men's sight
Until God loosen over sea and land
The thunder of the trumpets of the night."
I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for
there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the
using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted
in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves--which are utterly lacking
in Baudelaire--but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats
being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as--
"One faint eternal eventide of gems,"
which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I
give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine
technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes:
"Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx,
L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore,
Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix
Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore
Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx
Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore,
(Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.)
Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or
Agonise selon peut-être le décor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,
Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor
Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe
De scintillations sitôt le septuor."
Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical
discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in
sleeplessness--how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets
must have had sleepless nights!--
"We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil."
He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the
physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion.
In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes:
"When her lips and eyes
Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs
Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small."
And, in another line, he writes:
"By the moist languor of thy breathing face."