Like all writers who have achieved an understanding of life, Francis
Poictevin, though a born novelist, promptly renounced the novel. He
knows that everything happens, that a fact in itself is not more
interesting than another fact and that the manners of expression alone
have significance.
I recall something to this effect reported by Sarcey apropos of the
lamentable Murger: "About gave him a subject for a novel; he made
nothing of it. He was decidedly a sluggard." It is very difficult to
persuade certain old men--old or young--that there are no _subjects_;
there is only a _subject_ in literature, and that he who writes, and
all literature, that is to say all philosophy, can arise equally from
the cry of a run-over dog as from Faust's exclamations as he questions
Nature: "Where seize thee, O infinite Nature? And thou, Breasts?"
The author of _Tout Bas_ and of _Presque,_ like any other person, could
have arranged his meditations in dialogues, order his sentiments into
chapters divided at random, insinuate through pseudo-living characters
a bit of gesticulating life and have them express, by the act of
kneeling on the flag-stones of some familiar church, the virtue of
an unrecognized creed: in short, write "the novel of mysticism" and
popularize the practice of mental prayer for the "literary journals."
By this means his books would have gained him a popularity which
certainly he now lacks, for few writers among those whose talent
is evident are so little esteemed, less known and less discussed.
Poictevin disdains all artifice save the artifice of style, a snare
into which we are content to fall. Whether he notes the delicacies of
a flower, a little girl's attitude, the grace of a madonna, or the
cold and quite hard purity of Catherine de Gênes, he wins us with sure
strokes, by that very preciosity with which some clumsily reproach
him. This preciosity is rigorously personal. Apart from all groups,
as remote from Huysmans as from Mallarmé, the author of _Tout Bas_
works, one would say, in a cell, an ideal cell he carries with him
while traveling; and there, standing, often kneeling, he pours out his
poems and prayers in phrases that have the unique musical quality of a
Byzantine organ. Less phrases than vibrations, vibrations so peculiar
that few souls find themselves attuned. Music of Gregorian plain-chant,
such as one listens to in a sumptuous Flemish church, with sudden
fugues of exalted prayer that soar aloft towards the high lines and
hurl themselves against the painted vaults, kindling old stained-glass
windows, illuming the lines of the darkened cross with love. The mystic
monk, the true mystic, Fra Angelico, and Bonaventura a little, live
again in the pages of _Presque_ with its chatoyant spirituality, more
than in all the pseudo-mystic literature of our time. Would not the
author of _Recordare sanctae crucis_ find more satisfaction in this
prayer than in the patronizing and fructiferous deductions; "Here
below the Christ appears the most adorable, most absorbed figure of
the eternal substance, scented with all virtues; a figure with dulcet
blues, the burning clear yellows of topaz or chrysanthemum, the
blood-red hues of future glories. And despite my daily relapses, I
compel myself, according to Jesus' word to the Samaritan, to adoration
in spirit and in truth," Poictevin has entered the "Garden of all the
flowerings" of which Saint Bonaventura sang,
(Crux deliciarum hortus
In quo florent omnia....)
(Tr. 45)
and kneeling, he has kissed the heart of roses whose rosary is of
blood,--the blood of the great torment. While Morning, fair-haired
youth, delivers moist adolescence to folly-driven women, he goes
towards a priestly peace, to masses of solitude, and one of the graces
gathered is that his soul becomes impregnated with the "interior light,
_claritas caritas_."
It is the essential point. Mere phrases, yes; but the phrases are no
more than the attire and reserve of his art. He has felt, dreamed or
thought before speaking; especially has he loved: and some of his,
metaphors leap like a fervent prayer, like one of the cries of Saint
Theresa.
He strives clearly to reach the bottom, to penetrate even the vital
center of the hortensia's umbel. Everywhere he seeks--and finds--the
soul. No one is less a rhetorician than this stylist, for the
rhetorician is he who clothes the solid common things with garments
fit to sustain all the vulgarity of bedizenings, while Poictevin
ever diaphanizes a phantom, a rainbow, an illusion, an azalea
flower, thus: "Would a hand of a consumptive in the contraction of
its quasi-diaphaneity, leaning, not lazily, but which no longer is
conscious, seem to warn, less exalted than before and indulgently
returned?"
Yes, how subtle it is!--and why not write "like everybody"?
Alas! that is forbidden him,--because he is a mystic, because he feels
new rapports between man and God, and because, veiled in the dolorous
perfection of a form where grace becomes pearled in minutiae, Poictevin
is a spontaneous writer. How many things, doubtless, has he never
transcribed, afraid of not having discovered the exact expression, the
unique and very rare, the unedited!
Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even
the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new
meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too
many half-lettered persons.
Disciple of Goncourt, from whom he further sharpened his precious
style of writing, Francis Poictevin by degrees refined himself to
immateriality. And that is just his genius, the expression of the
immaterial and the inexpressible: he invented the mysticism of style.