"Sick to lose
The amorous promise of her lone complain,
Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;"
and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English
critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home
in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus
and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To
find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we
must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find,
beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's _The Defence of
Guinevere;_ as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines:
"Listen, suppose your turn were come to die,
And you were quite alone and very weak;
Yea, laid a dying while very mightily
The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak
Of river through your broad lands running well;
Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:
'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be,
I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell
Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!'
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes,
At foot of your familiar bed to see
A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,
Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,
Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies
Showing him well, and making his commands
Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,
Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;
And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,
Wavy and long, and one cut short and red:
No man could tell the better of the two.
After a shivering half-hour you said:
'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!'
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,
And cry to all good men that loved you well,
'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;'
Launcelot went away, then I could tell,
Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan,
And roll and hurt myself, and long to die,
And yet fear much to die for what was sown.
Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie,
Whatever may have happened through these years,
God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie."
All these rough, harsh _terza-rime_ lines are wonderful enough in their
nakedness of sensations--sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of
colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense,
as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was
exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in _Les Litanies
de Satan_ of Baudelaire--to which they have some remote likeness--there
are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these
hot, impassioned scenes.
Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any
century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative
material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly,
also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its
intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to
tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel,
so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his
wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line
at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one:
"Life touching lips with Immortality:"
that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase
absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry
seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas
the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal
which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious
element of it."
Now, to me, both Keats before him and Baudelaire in his own
generation, had the same excessive sense of, concentration. "To load
every rift with ore:" that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it
meant to pack the verse with poetry so that every line should be heavy
with the stuff of the imagination: the phrase I have given being a
rebuke to Shelley, significant of the art of both poets. Fox as Keats,
almost in the same degree as Baudelaire, worked on every inch of his
surface, so perhaps no poets ever put so much poetic detail into so
small a space, with, as I have said, the exception of Rossetti. And, as
a matter of fact, when we examine the question with scrupulous care,
it must be said that both Baudelaire and Keats are often metrically
slipshod.
One of Wagner's ideas, in regard to the artistic faculty was,
receptivity; the impulse to impart only what comes when these
impressions fill the mind "to an ecstatic excess;" and the two forms
of the artist: the feminine, who recoils from life, and the masculine,
who absorbs life. From this follows, in the case of creative artists
such as Baudelaire, the necessity to convey to others as vividly
and intelligibly, as far as possible, what his own mind's eye had
seen. Then one has to seize everything from which one can wring its
secret--its secret for us and for no one else. And all this, and in
fact the whole of our existence, is partly the conflict within us of
the man with the woman, the male and the female energies that strive
always:
"Here nature is, alive and untamed,
Unafraid and unashamed;
Here man knows woman with the greed
Of Adam's wonder, the primal need."
And, in these fundamental lines of Blake:
"What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified Desire."
And, again, in these more primeval and more essentially animal lines of
Rossetti:
"O my love, O Love--snake of Eden!
(_And O the bower and the hour!_)
O to-day and the day to come after!
Loose me, love--give way to my laughter!
Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam!
(_And O the bower and the hour!_)
Lo, sweet snake, the travail and treasure--
Two men-children born for their pleasure!
The first is Cain and the second Abel:
(_Eden bower's in flower_)
The soul of one shall be made thy brother,
And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other.
(_And O the bower and the hour!_)."
Baudelaire, in _De l'essence de rire,_ wrote: "The Romantic School,
or, one might say in preference, the Satanical School, has certainly
understood the primordial law of laughter. All the melodramatic
villains, all those who are cursed, damned, fatally marked with a
rictus of the lips that extends to the ears, are in the pure orthodoxy
of laughter. For the rest, they are for the most part illegitimate
sons of the famous Melmoth the Wanderer, the great Satanic creation
of Maturin. What can one conceive of as greater, as more powerful, in
regard to our humanity than this pale and bored Melmoth? He is a living
contradiction; that is why his frozen laughter freezes and wrenches
the entrails."
Distinctly the most remarkable of the British triumvirate which in the
early part of the century won a momentary fame as the school of horror,
Maturin is much less known to the readers of to-day than either Monk
Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe. Thanks to Balzac, who did _Melmoth_ the honour
of a loan in _Melmoth réconcilié,_ Maturin has attained a certain
fame in France--which, indeed, he still retains. _Melmoth_ has to-day
in France something of that reputation which has kept alive another
English book, _Vathek._ Did not Balzac, in a moment of indiscriminating
enthusiasm, couple the _Melmoth_ of Maturin with the _Don Juan_ of
Molière, the _Faust_ of Goethe, the _Manfred_ of Byron--_grandes images
tracées par les plus grands génies de l'Europe?_ In other words,
Maturin had his day of fame, in which even men like Scott and Byron
were led into a sympathetic exaggeration. There's one exception. That
Coleridge was hostile, possibly unjust, is likely enough. It should be
mentioned that in 1816 the Drury Lane Committee, who had, reasonably
enough, rejected a play by Coleridge, accepted a monstrous production
of Maturin's named _Bertram._ The _gros bon mélodrame,_ as Balzac
calls it, was a great success. "It is all sound and fury, signifying
nothing," said Kean, who acted in it; and Kean, who knew his public,
realized that that was why it succeeded. The play was printed, and
ran through seven editions, sinking finally to the condition of a
chap-book, in which its horrors were to be had for sixpence. On this
pretentious work Coleridge--for what reasons we need not inquire--took
the trouble to write an article, or, as it was phrased, to make an
attack. To this Maturin wrote a violent reply, which the good advice
of Scott prevented him from publishing. It is curious at the present
day to read the letter in which Scott urges upon Maturin the wisdom of
silence--not because he is likely to get the worst of the battle, but,
among other reasons, because "Coleridge's work has been little read
or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever--certainly
no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion of
many, therefore, you will be resenting an injury of which they are
unacquainted with the existence."
The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott
urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as--"Coleridge
has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust,
to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far
from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his
reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age
of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious
little tale _La Fanfarlo,_ he preferred artifice to nature, especially
when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have
about the personality of Maturin--gossip which brings out clearly the
deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in
the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader
as if he were admiring himself before his mirror.
The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding
a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic
and melodramatic talent. _Melmoth the Wanderer_ is in parts very
thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser
Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it
never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque
and terrible--Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam--have known how
to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been
guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of
underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are
told--all in parenthesis--and the greater part of the book is contained
.within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish
way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is
forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and
it has none of the supremacy in that line of the _Contes Drolatiques_
of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons
of the Inquisition--an attempted escape, a scene where an immured
wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness--are full of a certain
kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is
decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas,
with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer
narrative of Casanova--the unsurpassed model of all such narratives
in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple
statement--a record of external events from which one realizes, as
one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of
the persons who were undergoing such experiences--Maturin seeks his
effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of
excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion.
_Melmoth the Wanderer_ is only the object of our historical curiosity.
We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance."