Some take pleasure, an awkward testimony of a piously troubled
admiration, in saying and even in basing a paradoxical study on the
saying: "Villiers de L' Isle-Adam was neither of his country nor time."
This seems preposterous, for a superior man, a great writer is, in
fine, by his very genius, one of the syntheses of his race and epoch,
the representative of a momentary humanity, the brain and mouth of a
whole tribe and not a fugitive monster. Like Chateaubriand, his brother
in race and fame, Villiers was the man of the moment, and of a solemn
moment. Both, with differing views and under diverse appearances,
recreated the soul of the choice spirits of a period; from one arose
romantic Catholicism and that respect for the old traditional stones;
and from the other, the idealistic dream and that cult of antique
interior beauty. But the one was yet the proud ancestor of our savage
individualism; and the other taught us that the life around is the
only clay to be shaped. Villiers belonged to his time to such a degree
that all his masterpieces are dreams solidly based on science and
modern metaphysics, like _l'Ève Future_ or _Tribulat Bonhomet_, that
enormous, admirable and tragic piece of buffoonery, where all the gifts
of the dreamer, ironist and philosopher come to converge, so as to form
perhaps the most original creation of the century.
This point cleared, we declare that Villiers, being of prodigious
complexity, naturally lends himself to contradictory interpretations.
He was everything, a new Goethe, but if less conscious and less
perfect, keener, more artful, more mysterious, more human, and more
familiar. He is always among us and in us, by his work and by the
influence of his work, which exultantly goes through the best of the
writers and artists of the actual hour. He has reopened the gates of
the beyond, closed with what a crash we remember, and through these
gates a whole generation was hurled to infinity. The ecclesiastic
hierarchy numbers among her clerks, by the side of the exorcists,
the porters, they who must open the door of the sanctuary to all the
well-intentioned. Villiers exercised these two functions for us: he was
the exorcist of the real arid the porter of the ideal.
Complex, but we may see a double spirit in him. There were two
essentially dissimilar writers in him, the romanticist and the ironist.
The romanticist was the first to come to birth and the last to die:
_Elen_ and _Morgane; Akedysseril_ and _Axel._ Villiers, the ironist,
author of _Tribulat Bonhomet_, is intermediate between these two
romantic phases; _l'Ève future_ should be described as a mixture of
these two so diverse elements, for the book with its overwhelming irony
is also a book of love.
Villiers at once realized himself by fancy and irony, making his fancy
ironic, when life disgusted him even with fancy. No one has been more
subjective. His characters are created with particles of his soul,
raised, in the same way as a mystery, to the state of authentic,
complete souls. If it is a dialogue, he will cause a certain character
to utter philosophies quite above his normal understanding of things.
In _Axel_, the abbess speaks of hell as Villiers might have spoken
of Hegelianism, whose deceptions he learned towards the end, after
having accepted its large certitudes in the beginning: "It is done! the
child already experiences the ravishment and intoxications of Hell!"
He experienced them: as a Baudelairian, he loved blasphemy for its
occult effects, the immense risk of a pleasure taken at the expense
of God himself. Sacrilege is in acts, blasphemy in words. He believed
in words more than in realities, which are but the tangible shadows
of words, for it is quite evident, and by a very simple syllogism,
that if there is no thought in the absence of words, no more is there
matter in the absence of thought. He believed in the power of words to
the point of superstition. The only visible corrections of the second
over the first text of Axel, for example, consist in the adjunction
of words of a special ending, as when, to evoke an ecclesiastic and
conventual society, he uses _proditoire, prémonitoire, satisfactoire_,
and _fruition, collaudation_, etc. This very sense of the mystic powers
of syllabic articulation stimulates him towards the quest of names as
strange as _le Desservant de l'office des Morts_, a church function
which never existed unless at the monastery of Saint Apollodora; or
_l'Homme-qui-marche-sous-terre_, a name no Indian carried outside of
the scenes of the _Nouveau-Monde_.
In a very old rough draft of a page belonging perhaps to _l'Ève future_
he has thus defined the _real_:
"Now I say that the Real has its degrees of being. A thing is so much
more or less real for us as it interests us more or less, since a thing
that interested us not at all would for us be as if it were not--that
is to say, much less, though physical, than an unreal thing that
interested us.
"The Real for us, then, is only what touches the senses or the mind;
and according to the degree of intensity with which this sole _real_,
which we can judge and name, affects us, we class in our mind the
degree of being more or less rich in content as it seems to strike us,
and it is consequentlyy legitimate to say that it is realized.
"The _idea_ is the only control we have of _reality._"
Again:
"And on the top of a distant pine, solitary in the midst of a far-off
glade, I heard the nightingale--unique voice of that silence....
"'Poetic' landscapes almost invariably leave me quite cold, seeing
that for every serious man the most suggestive medium for ideas really
poetic is no other than four walls, a table and silence. Those who do
not carry within them the soul of everything the world can show them,
will do well to watch it: they will not recognize it, each thing being
beautiful only according to the thought of him who gazes at it and
reflects it in himself. Faith is essential in poetry as in religion,
and faith has no need of seeing with corporeal eyes to contemplate that
which it recognizes much better in itself...."
Such ideas were many times, under multiple forms, always new, expressed
by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam in his works. Without going as far as
Berkeley's pure negations, which nevertheless are but the extreme
logic of subjective idealism, he admitted in his conception of life,
on the same plan, the Interior and the Exterior, Spirit and Matter,
with a very visible tendency to give the first term domination over
the second. For him the idea of _progress_ was never anything but
a subject for jest, together with the nonsense of the humanitarian
positivists who teach, reversed mythology, that terrestrial paradise, a
superstition if we assign it the past, becomes the sole legitimate hope
if we place it in the future.
On the contrary, he makes a protagonist (Edison doubtless) say in a
short fragment of an old manuscript of _l'Ève future_:
"We are in the ripe age of Humanity, that is all I Soon will come the
senility and decrepitude of this strange polyp, and the evolution
accomplished, his mortal return to the mysterious laboratory where
all the Ghosts eternally work their experiments, by grace of _some
unquestionable necessity_."
And in this last word, Villiers mocks his belief in God. Was he
Christian? He became one towards the end of his life: thus he knew all
the forms of intellectual intoxication.