How very commonly we hear it remarked that such and such thoughts
are beyond the compass of words. I do not believe that any thought,
properly so called, is out of the reach of language. I fancy, rather,
that where difficulty in expression is experienced, there is, in the
intellect which experiences it, a want either of deliberateness or of
method. For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not
set down in words with even more distinctness than that with which
I conceived it: for thought is logicalized by the effort at written
composition. There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite
delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it
absolutely impossible to adapt language. Yet, so entire is my faith in
the power of words, that at times I have believed it possible to embody
even the evanescences of fancies such as I have described. Could one
actually do so, which would be to have done an original thing, such
words might have compelled the heaven into the earth.
Some of these qualities Baudelaire finds in Gautier; to my mind there
are many more of these strange and occult qualities to be found in
Baudelaire. I have said somewhere that there is no such thing, properly
speaking, as a "natural" style; and it is merely ignorance of the
mental process of writing which sometimes leads one to say that the
style of Swift is more natural than that of Ruskin. Pater said to me
at Oxford that his own _Imaginary Portraits_ seemed to him the best
written of his books, which he qualified by adding: "It seems to be the
most _natural_." I think then he was beginning to forget that it was
not natural to him to be natural.
Gautier had a way of using the world's dictionary, whose leaves, blown
by an unknown wind, always opened so as to let the exact word leap
out of the pages, adding the appropriate shades. Both writers had an
innate sense of "correspondences," and of a universal symbolism, where
the "sacredness" of every word defends one from using it in a profane
sense. To realize the central secret of the mystics, from Protagoras
onwards, the secret which the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes betrays in
its "As things are below, so are they above;" which Boehme has classed
in his teaching of "signatures;" and which Swedenborg has systematized
in his doctrine of "correspondences," one arrives at Gérard de Nerval,
whose cosmical visions are at times so magnificent that he seems to be
creating myths, as, after his descent into hell, he plays the part he
imagines assigned to him in his astral influences.
Among these comes Hoffmann. In his _Kreislerione,_ that Baudelaire read
in the French translation I have before me, printed in 1834, he says:
"The musician whose sense of music is conscious swims everywhere across
floods of harmony and melody. This is no vain image, nor an allegory
devoid of sense, such as composers use when they speak of colours, of
perfumes, of the rays of the sun that appear like concords." "Colour
speaks," says Baudelaire, "in a voice evocatory of sorcery; animals and
plants grimace; perfumes provoke correspondent thoughts and memories.
And when I think of Gautier's rapidity in solving all the problems of
style and of composition, I cannot help remembering a severe maxim that
he let fall before me in one of his conversations: 'Every writer who
fails to seize any idea, however subtle and unexpected he supposes it
to be, is not a writer. _L'Inexprimable n'existe pas._'"
It is either Delacroix or Baudelaire who wrote: "The writer who is
incapable of saying everything, who takes unawares and without having
enough material to give body to an idea, however subtle or strange or
unexpected he may suppose it to be, is not a writer." And one has to
beware of the sin of allegory, which spoils even Bunyan's prose. For
the deepest emotion raised in us by 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.
Then there is the heresy of instruction--_l'hérésie de
l'enseignement_--which Poe and Baudelaire and Swinburne consider
ruinous to art. Art for art's sake first of all; that a poem must be
written for the poem's sake simply, from whatever instinct we have
derived it; it matters nothing whether this be inspired by a prescient
ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, or by some of that loveliness
whose very elements appertain solely to eternity. Above all, Verlaine's
_Pas de couleur, rien que la nuance!_
The old war--not (as some would foolishly have it defined) a war
between facts and fancies, reason and romance, poetry and good sense,
but simply between imagination which apprehends the spirit of a thing
and the understanding which dissects the body of a fact--the strife
which can never be decided--was for Blake the most important question
possible. Poetry or art based on loyalty to science is exactly as
absurd (and no more) as science guided by art or poetry. Though,
indeed, Blake wrought his _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ into a form
of absolute magnificence, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine
thought and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which hells and
heavens change names and alternate through mutual annihilations, which
emit an illuminating, devouring, and unquenchable flame, he never
actually attained the incomparable power of condensing vapour into
tangible and malleable form, of helping us to handle air and measure
mist, which is so instantly perceptible in Balzac's genius, he who was
not "a prose Shakespeare" merely, but rather perhaps a Shakespeare in
all but the lyrical faculty.
Even when Baudelaire expresses his horror of life, of how abject the
world has become, how he himself is supposed to be "une anomalie," his
sense of his own superiority never leaves him. "Accursed," as I have
said, such abnormally gifted artists are, he declares his thirst of
glory, a diabolical thirst of fame and of all kinds of enjoyments--in
spite of his "awful temperament, all ruse and violence"--and can say:
"I desire to live and to have self-content. Something terrible says
to me _never,_ and some other thing says to me _try. Moi-même, le
boulevard m'effraye_."
Baudelaire's tragic sense of his isolation, of his intense misery,
of his series of failures, of his unendurable existence--it was and
was not life--in Brussels finds expression in this sentence, dated
September, 1865:
"Les gens qui ne sont pas exilés ne savent pas ce que sont les nerfs de
ceux sont cloués à l'étranger, sans communications et sans nouvelles."
What he says is the inevitable that has no explanation: simply the
inevitable that no man can escape. To be exiled from Paris proves to
be, practically, his death-stroke. And, in the last letter he ever
wrote, March 5, 1866, there is a sense of irony, of vexation, of
wounded pride, and in the last "sting in the tail of the honey" he
hisses:
"There is enough talent in these young writers; but what absurdities,
what exaggerations, and what youthful infatuations! Curiously, only a
few years ago I perceived these imitators whose tendencies alarmed me.
I know nothing of a more compromising nature than these: as for me, I
love nothing more than being alone. But this is not possible for me,
_et il paraît que l'école Baudelaire existe_."
And, to all appearances, it did; and what really annoyed Baudelaire was
the publication of Verlaine's _Poèmes saturniens_ and their praise by
Leconte de l'Isle, Banville, and Hugo; Hugo, whom he had come to hate.
It is with irony that he says of Hugo: "Je n'accepterais ni son génie,
ni sa fortune, s'il me fallait au même temps posséder ses énormes
ridicules."