Baudelaire, whose acquaintance with English was perfect, was thrilled
in 1846 when he read certain pages of Poe; he seemed to see in his
prose a certain similarity in words and thoughts, even in ideas, as
if he himself had written some of them; these pages of a prose-writer
whom he named "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery."
For four years he set himself to the arduous task of translating the
prose of a man of genius, whom he certainly discovered for France and
for French readers. And his translation is so wonderful that it is far
and away finer than a marvellous original. His first translation was
printed in _Le Liberté de Pensée_ in July, 1848, and he only finished
his translations at the end of sixteen years. In 1852 the _Revue de
Paris_ printed his _Edgar Allan Poe; sa vie et ses ouvrages._ His
translations came in this order: _Histoires extraordinaires_ (1856,
which I have before me); _Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires_ (1857,
which I also possess); _Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym_ (1858); _Euréka_
(1864); _Histoires grotesques et sérieuses_ (1865).
One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious
task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's
amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over
those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to
the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with
imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated
with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes
to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their
scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders,"
"numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy.
"These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have
done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is
disgraceful--a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of
a dropped comma!
The _Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe_ of 1857 are infinitely finer than
those of 1856. He begins with: _Littérature de décadence!_ and with
a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma. _Genus
irritabile vatum!_ a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is
irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments,
divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects.
Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to
many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his
fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations
(mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his
over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the
general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any
living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective
stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he
lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in.
And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the
most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived
his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not
giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross
his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are
not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite
normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in
the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not
these _revenants,_ in the French sense?
There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I
might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any
more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of
torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any
chance, falls into the abyss.
Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous
writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of
modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed
imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a
paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all
are not _nés marques pour le mal?_
Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with
even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "_I know,_" he
says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music--I mean of
the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision--imbue it with
any very determinate tone--and you deprive it at once of its ethereal,
its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great
is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and
conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an
instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set
forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical
topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by
something that wore the semblance of a reason."
His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited
that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved
reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out
the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such
as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad
rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect,
made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous
wrath of Rossetti.
In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The
deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an
allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's
ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his
not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of his
_Marginalia_ that he gives his final statement in regard to Verse,
the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any
finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in
"the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might
be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage
over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect;
that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use
terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of
the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate.
There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his
hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the
contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific
analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom
he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom:
"A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written
his first line?" This certainly was part of his _métier,_ made of
combinations and of calculations.
I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It
is really a _tour de force;_ even if the metre is not invented, he
invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It
has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's
skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these
verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes,
by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism
is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly.
It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form
of seasoning for the spirit."
There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was
in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction
to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely,
to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention
of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that
could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was
doomed inevitably to an early death. _Pas de chance!_ Yes--let one
suppose--had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have
desired to die like the sick women in his pages--_mourant de maux
bizarres._
Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent
his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French
poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose
becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and
surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better
than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his
life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical.
I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the
original of his dedication of _L'Heautimoromenos_ in _Les Fleurs du
Mal_, and of his dedication of _Les paradis artificiels_ to a woman
whose initials are J. G. F.?
The poem was first printed in _L 'Artiste_, May 10, 1857, together with
two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical:
_Franciscae Meae Laudes,_ and _L'Irrémédiable._ The Latin verses,
composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs
to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent
as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the
Dedication: _Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote._ The
verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who
absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has
spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his
hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine
wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its
name, on the comedy of Terence, _The Self-Tormentor,_ where, in fact,
the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic
earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare's _Timon of
Athens._ Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest
confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women.
He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a
discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in
his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror.
He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his
own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal
laughter.
The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall
into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with
reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases
on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable
fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he
intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the
Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes
with satanical glances and is: _La conscience dans le mal!_
In _Les fleurs du mal_ (1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's
handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find
that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages
123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems
to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" with
_Piscina plena virtutis;_ "Dans un Styx bourbeux" with _Sicat beneficum
Lethe;_ "Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" with _Labris vocem redde
mutis!_ "Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le
vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu
son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une
modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication of _Les paradis,_
"une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason
for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough:
a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry.
One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il
traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce
sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words,
taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming
uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman
Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes
that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which
seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution:
_In nocte mea taberna._
_Flambeau des grâces sataniques._
I return to my copy of _Les paradis artificiels_ (1860). The dedication
to J. G. F. begins: "_Ma chère amie,_ Common-sense tells us that
terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality
is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives
with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the
imaginations that she haunts.
[Illustration: Frontpage Les paradis artificiels]
"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this
dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the
writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood,
except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed,
indispensable that it has been written for _any one?_ I have, for my
part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible
and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary
friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead.
"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is
to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now
turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many
transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a
living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle
pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality.
"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and
solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending
his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped
his sweating forehead and _refreshed his lips parched by fever;_ and
you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares
you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you
dissipated, with a light and tender hand."
I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire
uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin
verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who
was the woman of the initials?
What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of
this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue,
I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative
that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make
one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in
haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather
a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded
to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are
superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive,
and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are
these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or
twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual
excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say
all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds:
"I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not
unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always
imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a
really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance
with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think
that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a
certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life."
In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the
identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's
story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being
is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror
where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary
fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral
hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation,
but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis,
does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of
this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities
is poetized by a kind of varnish essentially _haschischin._ I cannot
say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that
her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of
regret, have returned to their former sensibility."
I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical
casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but
not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra,
to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by
the same woman to whom _Le paradis_ is dedicated. Like Orestes, he
might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered
father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words:
"And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now,
how I keep the watches of the night--how often I bewail my hapless
sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given
of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of
lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J.
G. F.'s?
In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: _Théophile Gautier, par Charles
Baudelaire;_ a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as
only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was
capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier
asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant:
"Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French
language, even l'_Argot._
Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he
ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave
it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac.
"Not for the first," he says, in his _Study of Shakespeare,_ "and
probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well
as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words,
to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented
fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the
more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of
Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition
and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing
could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in
my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.
"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer
should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that
it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary.
All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated
himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the
highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in
his _Human Comedy_ are keener after living, more active and cunning in
their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous
in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real
world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the
very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle
with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the
outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief
and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his
figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights.
Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate
ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess
everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down
more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of
the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never
satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into
very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing
natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But
this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More
properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But
who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a
method which may permit him to invest--and that with a sure hand--what
is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this?
Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'"
V
"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the
philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the
formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the
belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he
wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which
seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride.
It is part of his curiosity in souls--as in the equally sinister
curiosity of Baudelaire--to prefer the complex to the simple, the
perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes
are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock
of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil.
They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they
are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the
women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty;
they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they
refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are
guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth.
[Illustration: manuscript]
Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface to _La
Révolte_ (1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides,
what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does
not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the
real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic
there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam--a writer whose singular personality and work render him
perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of
letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his
life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived,
as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting
upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an
extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic
contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race,
a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more
especially, of the _bourgeois_ multitude of letters and of life: it
is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look
for the source of that violent and _voulu_ eccentricity which mars so
much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is
unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take
notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has
placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question
if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious,
impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les
gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of
his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface,
_Genus irritabile vatum._
In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a
writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it
be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer
who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and
a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin
de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from
exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite
sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere
there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in
so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted,
contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions.
Villiers has written much. The volume of _Contes cruels_ (published
in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains
specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind
the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece,
and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no
other collection of tales in any language on which so various and
finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut
of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. The
_Tales_ of Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, the _Twice-Told
Tales_ of Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation;
both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are
but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the
other volumes. _La révolte,_ a drama in one act in prose, represented
at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of
certain _Contes cruels_; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place
near them. _L'Ève future_ (1886), that most immense and ferocious
of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of the
_Contes_ swollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of
plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first tale
_L'Amour suprême,_ attempts to be a second set of _Contes Cruels;_ it
has nothing of their distinction, except in _Akëdysséril. Tribulat
Bonhomet,_ which appeared in 1887--"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre,
couleur du siècle," as the author has called it--is largely made up of
an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes,
_Histoires insolites_ (1888) and _Nouveaux contes cruels_ (1889), there
are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating
horror of _La torture par l'espérance,_ and the delicate cynicism
of _Les amies de pension._ As for the prose drama in five acts, _Le
Nouveau Monde_ (1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize--"une
médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres
seductions encore"--there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play
with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air;
but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of
the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante
Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such,
omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the
numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published,
are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le
seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du
génie"--as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation
of friend and foe, has said in that charming book, _La légende du
Parnasse contemporaine._ I shall speak chiefly of the _Contes cruels,_
and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach
one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided
genius.
First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist
who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has
essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. There are
some halfdozen of tales--all contained in the _Contes cruels_--which,
for certain of the rarest qualities of writing--subtleties, delicate
perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern--can
be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside the _Petits poèmes
en prose_ of Baudelaire. _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, Maryelle,
Sentimentalisme, Le convive des dernières fêtes, La Reine Ysabeau_--one
might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the
prose--these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of
style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of Villiers'
work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtie
and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch,
manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring
in tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible
assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them
all I think the masterpiece is _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre;_ and
it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The
mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It
becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous
appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching,
credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest
of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony
itself--the celestial, the elementary irony--a faint and sweet perfume
as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the
etcher's needle. From beginning to end every word has been calculated,
and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this
supreme achievement; but in _Maryelle,_ in _Sentimentalisme,_ and
the others there is the same note, and a perfection often only less
absolute. _Maryelle_ and _Sentimentalisme_ are both studies in a
special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of
fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest
precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The
experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and
tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate
lightness of the style--the gentle, well-bred, _disengaged_ tone of
a _raconteur_ without reserve or after-thought, or with all that
scrupulously hid--there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and
intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in
spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other
side of cynicism. _La Reine Ysabeau_ and _Le Convive des Dernières
Fêtes_ sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost
by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of
the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance,
and fatality is unrolled before our eyes--the something enigmatical
in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness.
Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this
incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis
of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and
every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points
akin to it, is the strange tale of _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes,_
perhaps, after the more epic chronicle of _La Reine Ysabeau,_ the
finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale
is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying
episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It
is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive
shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the
same _frisson_ in the latter part of _Tribulat Bonhomet,_ and in the
marvellous little study in the supernatural _L'Intersigne,_ one of the
most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due
to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror--distinct
and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind--is but one
among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a
whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the
same _bizarrerie_--the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine
Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C.,
and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged
with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the
touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric
light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves--scenes which
have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with
average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed
their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one
is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of
exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony
is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard
who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a
sarcastic smile.
What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on
the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer;
I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the
fantastic edifice of his work.
The group of tales I have been considering reveals the humorist in
his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal
mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist,
and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose or
preoccupation. In the pseudo-scientific burlesques, and the kindred
satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic
Muse has given place to "Laughter holding both his sides;" absurdity
caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and
in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are
barbed, and they fly not quite at random. "L'Esprit du siècle," says
Villiers, "ne l'oublions pas, est aux machines." And it is in the
mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and
unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used
these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant
wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes
deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means
of comedy, and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and
bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate
plan of "an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh,"
make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of
advertisement (_Affichage Céleste_), and describe in all its detail
and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius
Bottom, _La machine à gloire,_ a mechanical contrivance for obtaining
dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important
institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are
at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety
of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces. Familiar words take new
meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime
before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words
and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble
into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there
is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme,
an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond
laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of
the scientific burlesques, _L'Ève future,_ it is almost impossible to
tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole
thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully
elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the
"très-illustre inventeur américain, M. Edison," of an _artificial
woman!_ No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of "poor
humanity," has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human
nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of
man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it;
the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls.
So far we have had the humorist, a humorist who appears to be cynic
to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities of _Les
demoiselles de Bienfilâtre_ and the scientific hilarity of _La machine
à gloire._ But we have now to take account of one of those "exceptions"
of which I spoke--work which has nothing of the humorist in it, work
in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality
and all the virtues. _Virginie et Paul_ is a-story of young love
comparable only with that yet lovelier story, the magical chapter, in
_Richard Feverel._ This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their
little moment of lovers' chat, full of the poetry of the most homely
and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely
true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every
word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses--;
_per amica silentia lunæ_--and there is not a wrong note in it, no
exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and
charming little romance of _L'Inconnue_ is another of these tales of
ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers' hearts, and with
a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated, style.
_L'Amour Suprême,_ a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma
of tender and etherealized affection--an adoring and almost mystic
love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative of
_Véra,_ which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again
this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem
of _Akëdysséril_--transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a
tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched,
for all its remoteness, with the human note--in this epic fragment,
considered in France, I believe, to be, in style at least, Villiers'
masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that
we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!--think
for a moment of _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre,_ of _L'Analyse
chimique du dernier soupir!_ What, then, are we to believe? Has
Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irréconciliable opposites?
Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in
a word, is the true Villiers? "For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is
he."
The question is not a difficult one to answer; it depends upon an
elementary knowledge of the nature of that perfectly intelligible
being, the cynic. The typical cynic is essentially a tender-hearted,
sensitive idealist; his cynicism is in the first instance a recoil,
then, very often, a disguise. Most of us come into the world without
any very great expectations, not looking for especial loftiness in
our neighbours, not very much shocked if every one's devotion to the
ideal is not on a level with, perhaps, ours. We go on our way, if not
exactly "rejoicing," at least without positive discomfort. Here and
there, however, a soul nurtured on dreams and nourished in the scorn
of compromise finds its way among men and demands of them perfection.
There is no response to the demand. Entranced by an inaccessible ideal,
the poor soul finds that its devotion poisons for it all the wells
of earth. And this is the birth of what we call a cynic. The cynic's
progress is various, and seldom in a straight fine. It is significant
to find that in _Révolte,_ one of Villiers' comparatively early
works, the irony has a perfectly serious point, and aims directly at
social abuses. The tableau is a scene, an episode, taken straight
from life, a piece of the closest actuality; there is no display, no
exaggeration, all is simple and straightforward as truth. The laughter
in it is the broken-hearted laughter, sadder than tears, of the poet,
the dreamer, before the spectacle of the world. It is obviously
the work of one who is a mocker through his very passion for right
and good, his sense of the infinite disproportion of things. Less
obviously, but indeed quite really, is the enormous and almost aimless
mockery of some of these tales of his the reverse of a love of men
and a devotion to the good and the beautiful. Cynicism is a quality
that develops, and when we find it planted in the brain of a humorist
there is simply no accounting for the transformations through which
it may run. Thus the gulf which seems to separate _Les demoiselles de
Bienfilâtre_ from _L'inconnue_ is, after all, nothing but a series of
steps. Nor is it possible for one who judges art as art to regret this
series of steps; for it is precisely his cynicism that has become the
"note," the rarest quality, of this man of passionate and lofty genius;
it is as a cynic that he will live--a cynic who can be pitiless and
tender, Rabelaisian and Heinesque, but imaginative, but fantastically
poetical, always.
[Illustration: GUSTAVE COURBET, 1848]
_Les paradis artificiels: opium et haschisch_ (1860), which I have
before me, is the most wonderful book that Baudelaire ever wrote.
It has that astonishing logic which he possessed supremely, which
unravels, with infinite precautions, every spider's web of this
seductive drug, which enslaves the imagination, which changes the will,
which turns sounds into colours, colours into sounds; which annihilates
space and time; and, often at its crises, even one's own individuality.
To Baudelaire, as to me, it has, and had, the divinity of a sorcerous,
a dangerous, an insidious mistress. It produces morbid effects on one's
senses; wakens mysterious visions in our half-closed eyes. And this,
like every form of intoxication, is mysterious, malign, satanical,
diabolical. And, subjugated by it, part of oneself is dominated, so
that, in Baudelaire's words: _Il a vouloir faire l'ange, il est devenu
une bête._
With some this poison carries them to the verge of the abyss, over
which one looks fascinated by the abrupt horror of the void. In some
their ideas congeal: even to the point of imagining oneself "a fragment
of thinking ice." One sits, as in a theatre, seeing a drama acted on
the stage, where one's senses perceive subtle impressions, but vague,
unreal, ghost-like; where at moments one's eyes envisage the infinite.
"Then," says Baudelaire, "the grammar, the arid grammar itself,
becomes something like an evoked sorcery, the words are alive again in
flesh and in blood, the substantive, in its substantial majesty, the
adjective, a transparent vestment that clothes it and colours it like
a glacis, and the verb, angel of movement, that gives the swing to the
phrase."
With the hallucinations all exterior forms take on singular aspects;
are deformed and transformed. Then come the transpositions of ideas,
with unaccountable analogies that penetrate the spirit. Even music,
heard or unheard, can seem voluptuous and sensual. It is Baudelaire who
speaks now, evokes an enchantment: "The idea of an evaporation, slow,
successive, eternal, takes hold of your spirit, and you soon apply this
idea to' your proper thoughts, to your way of thinking. By a singular
equivocation, by a kind of transportation, or of an intellectual _quid
pro quo,_ you find yourself evaporating, and you attribute to your pipe
(in which you feel yourself crouching and heaped together like tobacco)
the strange faculty of _smoking yourself_." The instant becomes
eternity; one is lucid at intervals; the hallucination is sudden,
perfect, and fatal. One feels an excessive thirst; one subsides into
that strange state that the Orientals call _Kief._
Certainly haschisch has a more vehement effect on one than opium; it
is more troubling, more ecstatic, more malign, malignant, insinuating,
more evocative, more visionary, more unseizable; it lifts one across
infinite horizons, it carries us passionately over the passionate
waves of seas in storms--of unknown storms on unseen seas--into not
even eternities, nor into chaos, nor into Heaven nor into Hell
(though these may whirl before one's vision), but into incredible
existences, over which no magician rules, over which no witch presides.
It can separate ourselves from ourselves; change our very shapes into
shapeless images; drown us in the deep depths of annihilation, out of
which we slowly emerge; bury us under the oldest roots of the earth;
give us death in life and life in death; give us sleep that is not
sleep, and waking dreams that are not waking dreams. There is nothing,
human or inhuman, moral or immoral, that this drug cannot give us.
Yet, all the time, we know not what it takes from us; nor what deadly
exchange we may have to give; nor what intoxication can be produced
beyond its intoxication; nor if, as with Coleridge, who took opium, it
might not become "almost a habit of the Soul."
Imagine a universe in disorder, peopled by strange beings, that have
no relation with each other, whose speech one supposes is jargon;
where such houses as there are are built in different ways--none with
straight lines, many in triangles; where the animals are unlike ours,
some smaller than ants; where there are no churches, no apparent
streets; but innumerable brothels. When one sees fires the smoke goes
downward; flames leap out of the soil and turn into living serpents.
Now one sees a serpent return into his proper flame. There seem to be
no gods, nor idols nor priests nor shrines.
The seas storm the skies and swallow up Hell; and all that lives and
all that dies seems indistinguishable. Suppose that--in an opium
dream--Satan turns God. The soil might wither at his touch; Lesbians
lament the loss of Lesbianism; and the word of God be abolished.
I have used the word vehement in regard to Haschisch. It violates the
imagination, ravishes the senses; can disturb one physically; but
never, if taken in measure, prove destructive. This green drug can
create unheard-of excitations, exasperations; can create contagious
laughter, evoke comical images, supernatural and fantastic.
Now take a world created by Opium. The soil wavers, moves always,
in void space; a soil in which no seed nor weed grows. The men and
women are veiled--none see their faces. There is light, but neither
sun nor stars nor night. The houses have no windows; inside are no
mirrors; but everywhere opium dens; everywhere the smoke--incessant--of
pipes; everywhere a stench produced by opium and by their moral
degradation. The streets are thick with grass; such animals as
there are are stupefied. In fact, this inexorably moving world that
has no foundations exhales--worse than pestilence--an inexplicable
stupefaction.
And, symbolical as it must be, these excitable poisons are to a
certainty one of the most terrible means employed by the Prince of
the Powers of the Air to enslave deplorable humanity; but by no means
to give him, what the drug can give him, the monstrous sense of the
suddenness of space and time, as if one were hurled between them by two
opposing whirlwinds.
Now appears suddenly the Women--furious, formidable--one calls
Mephistophila, who having gazed on the Medusa becomes Medusa; who,
rouged and pale as the dead, gives one the idea of that eternal minute
which must be hell. Her very name trails like a coffin-lid. Abnormal,
she is sinister. She is one of my hallucinations. Can she ever count
the countless sins she has committed? Occult, she adores the Arcana.
Her kisses on women's lips are cruel. Perhaps she is the modern
Messalina. _Elle est l'impératrice blême d'un macabre Lesbos._
She admits--I give here simply her confessions--to no abominations, nor
does she specialize her vices. As certain of her damnation as of her
existence--real, imaginary--she lives and loves and lies and forgives.
She knows she has abandoned herself to all the impossible desires
endured by such souls as hers, who expect annihilation. _Elle est la
reine, pas présente, mais acceptée, de la cour des miracles femelles du
Mal._
She is not of those the Furies hate eternally, nor has she knowledge
of man's mingled fates; yet certain Circes have shown her how to weave
webs of spiritual spiders; she knows not where those are that turn the
Wheels of Destiny. Whirlwinds have shaken her in her perfumed room as
she lies in perfumed garments, considering her nakedness as sacred:
she the impure, never the pure! She is so tired of having ravished
souls from bodies and bodies from souls, that all she desires is sleep,
sleep without dreams. Did sleep ever come to those who most desired it?
Messalina, Helen of Troy, Faustina knew this; dust has closed their
lips, the very dust they have trodden under foot, the dust that knows
not whither it is drifting: none thinking of the inevitable end.
Has not this poisonous drug shown to me, as to her, shadows hot from
hell? Not the shadows the sun casts on our figures as we walk on
the grass; not the moon's shadows that make mockery of us; but the
veritable heat and fire and flame and fumes of uttermost hell.
In her eyes persists an ardent and violent life, hateful and bestial.
Depraved by insensible sensations, she imagines Caligula before her
and maledictions not her own. I know her now in vision--she is more
insatiable than Death--more ravenous after ravishment than Life. No
vampire, no Lamia, she knows not that her body has been drenched with
so many poisons that her breath might poison a man with one kiss. And
now, now, her eyes are so weary, her eyeballs ache with such tortured
nerves, that she desires nothing--nothing at all.
In the very essence of Haschisch I find a disordered Demon whose
insanities make one's very flesh ache. Under his power symbols
speak--you can become yourself a living symbol. Under its magic you can
imagine black magic, and music can speak your passion: for is not music
as passionate as man's love for woman, as a woman's love for a man?
It can turn your rhythm into its rhythm, can change every word into a
sound, a word into a note of music: it cannot change the substance of
your soul.
Finally, the drugged man admires himself inordinately; he condemns
himself, he glorifies himself; he realizes his condemnation; he becomes
the centre of the universe, certain of his virtue as of his genius.
Then, in a stupendous irony, he cries: _Je suis devenu Dieu!_ One
instant after he projects himself out of himself, as if the will of an
intoxicated man had an efficacious virtue, and cries, with a cry that
might strike down the scattered angels from the ways of the sky: _Je
suis un Dieu!_
One of Baudelaire's profoundest sayings is: "Every perfect debauch
has need of a perfect leisure: _Toute débauche parfaite a besoin d'un
parfait loisir"_ He gives his definition of the magic that imposes
on haschisch its infernal stigmata; of the soul that sells itself in
detail; of the frantic taste for this adorable poison of the man whose
soul he had chosen for these experiments, his own soul; of how finally
this hazardous spirit, driven, without being aware of it, to the edge
of hell, testifies of its original grandeur.