1
This is the problem of one who lost the whole world and gained his own
soul.
"I like to arrange my life as if it were a novel," wrote Gérard de
Nerval, and, indeed, it is somewhat difficult to disentangle the
precise facts of an existence which was never quite conscious where
began and where ended that "overflowing of dreams into real life," of
which he speaks. "I do not ask of God," he said, "that he should change
anything in events themselves, but that he should change me in regard
to things, so that I might have the power to create my own universe
about me, to govern my dreams, instead of enduring them." The prayer
was not granted, in its entirety; and the tragedy of his life lay in
the vain endeavour to hold back the irresistible empire of the unseen,
which it was the joy of his life to summon about him. Briefly, we
know that Gérard Labrunie (the name de Nerval was taken from a little
piece of property, worth some 1500 francs, which he liked to imagine
had always been in the possession of his family) was born at Paris,
May 22, 1808. His father was surgeon-major; his mother died before he
was old enough to remember her, following the _Grande Armée_ on the
Russian campaign; and Gérard was brought up, largely under the care of
a studious and erratic uncle, in a little village called Montagny, near
Ermenonville. He was a precocious schoolboy, and by the age of eighteen
had published six little collections of verses. It was during one of
his holidays that he saw, for the first and last time, the young girl
whom he calls Adrienne, and whom, under many names, he loved to the
end of his life. One evening she had come from the château to dance
with the young peasant girls on the grass. She had danced with Gérard,
he had kissed her cheek, he had crowned her hair with laurels, he had
heard her sing an old song telling of the sorrows of a princess whom
her father had shut in a tower because she had loved. To Gérard it
seemed that already he remembered her, and certainly he was never to
forget her. After-wards, he heard that Adrienne had taken the veil;
then, that she was dead. To one who had realised that it is "we, the
living, who walk in a world of phantoms," death could not exclude hope;
and when, many years later, he fell seriously and fantastically in love
with a little actress called Jenny Colon, it was because he seemed to
have found, in that blonde and very human person, the re-incarnation of
the blonde Adrienne.
Meanwhile Gérard was living in Paris, among his friends the Romantics,
writing and living in an equally desultory fashion. _Le bon Gérard_
was the best loved, and, in his time, not the least famous, of the
company. He led, by choice, now in Paris, now across Europe, the life
of a vagabond, and more persistently than others of his friends who
were driven to it by need. At that time, when it was the aim of every
one to be as eccentric as possible, the eccentricities of Gérard's life
and thought seemed, on the whole, less noticeable than those of many
really quite normal persons. But with Gérard there was no pose; and
when, one day, he was found in the Palais-Royal, leading a lobster
at the end of a blue ribbon (because, he said, it does not bark, and
knows the secrets of the sea), the visionary had simply lost control of
his visions, and had to be sent to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Montmartre.
He entered March 21, 1841, and came out, apparently well again, on
the 21st of November. It would seem that this first access of madness
was, to some extent, the consequence of the final rupture with Jenny
Colon; on June 5, 1842, she died and it was partly in order to put as
many leagues of the earth as possible between him and that memory that
Gérard set out, at the end of 1842, for the East. It was also in order
to prove to the world, by his consciousness of external things, that
he had recovered his reason. While he was in Syria, he once more fell
in love with a new incarnation of Adrienne, a young Druse, Saléma, the
daughter of a Sheikh of Lebanon; and it seems to have been almost by
accident that he did not marry her. He returned to Paris at the end
of 1843 or the beginning of 1844, and for the next few years he lived
mostly in Paris, writing charming, graceful, remarkably sane articles
and books and wandering about the streets, by day and night, in a
perpetual dream from which, now and again, he was somewhat rudely
awakened. When, in the spring of 1853, he went to see Heine, for whom
he was doing an admirable prose translation of his poems, and told him
he had come to return the money he had received in advance, because
the times were accomplished, and the end of the world, announced by
the Apocalypse, was at hand, Heine sent for a cab, and Gérard found
himself at Dr. Dubois' asylum, where he remained two months. It was on
coming out of the asylum that he wrote _Sylvie,_ a delightful idyl,
chiefly autobiographical, one of his three actual achievements. On
August 27, 1853, he had to be taken to Dr. Blanche's asylum at Passy,
where he remained till May 27, 1854. Thither, after a month or two
spent in Germany, he returned on August 8, and on October 19 he came
out for the last time, manifestly uncured. He was now engaged on the
narrative of his own madness, and the first part of _Le Rêve et la Vie_
appeared in the _Revue de Paris_ of January I, 1855. On the 20th he
came into the office of the review, and showed Gautier and Maxime du
Camp an apron-string which he was carrying in his pocket. "It is the
girdle," he said, "that Madame de Maintenon wore when she had _Esther_
performed at Saint-Cyr." On the 24th he wrote to a friend: "Come and
prove my identity at the police-station of the Châtelet." The night
before he had been working at his manuscript in a pot-house of Les
Halles, and had been arrested as a vagabond. He was used to such little
misadventures, but he complained of the difficulty of writing. "I set
off after an idea," he said, "and lose myself; I am hours in finding
my way back. Do you know I can scarcely write twenty lines a day, the
darkness comes about me so close!" He took out the apron-string. "It
is the garter of the Queen of Sheba," he said. The snow was freezing
on the ground, and on the night of the 25th, at three in the morning,
the landlord of a "penny doss" in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, a
filthy alley lying between the quays and the Rue de Rivoli, heard
some one knocking at the door, but did not open, on account of the
cold. At dawn, the body of Gérard de Nerval was found hanging by the
apron-string to a bar of the window.
It is not necessary to exaggerate the importance of the half-dozen
volumes which make up the works of Gérard de Nerval. He was not a
great writer; he had moments of greatness; and it is the particular
quality of these moments which is of interest for us. There is the
entertaining, but not more than entertaining, _Voyage en Orient;_ there
is the estimable translation of _Faust,_ and the admirable versions
from Heine; there are the volumes of short stories and sketches, of
which even _Les Illuminés,_ in spite of the promise of its title, is
little more than an agreeable compilation. But there remain three
compositions: the sonnets, _Le Rêve et la Vie,_ and _Sylvie;_ of which
_Sylvie_ is the most objectively achieved, a wandering idyl, full of
pastoral delight, and containing some folk-songs of Valois, two of
which have been translated by Rossetti; _Le Rêve et la Vie_ being the
most intensely personal, a narrative of madness, unique as madness
itself; and the sonnets, a kind of miracle, which may be held to have
created something at least of the method of the later Symbolist. These
three compositions, in which alone Gérard is his finest self, all
belong to the periods when he was, in the eyes of the world, actually
mad. The sonnets belong to two of these periods, _Le Rêve et la Vie_ to
the last; _Sylvie_ was written in the short interval between the two
attacks in the early part of 1853. We have thus the case of a writer,
graceful and elegant when he is sane, but only inspired, only really
wise, passionate, collected, only really master of himself, when he
is insane. It may be worth looking at a few of the points which so
suggestive a problem presents to us.
2
Gérard de Nerval lived the transfigured inner life of the dreamer. "I
was very tired of life!" he says. And like so many dreamers, who have
all the luminous darkness of the universe in their brains, he found
his most precious and uninterrupted solitude in the crowded and more
sordid streets of great cities. He who had loved the Queen of Sheba,
and seen the seven Elohims dividing the world, could find nothing more
tolerable in mortal conditions, when he was truly aware of them, than
the company of the meanest of mankind, in whom poverty and vice, and
the hard pressure of civilisation, still leave some of the original
vivacity of the human comedy. The real world seeming to be always so
far from him, and a sort of terror of the gulfs holding him, in spite
of himself, to its flying skirts, he found something at all events
realisable, concrete, in these drinkers of Les Halles, these vagabonds
of the Place du Carrousel, among whom he so often sought refuge. It was
literally, in part, a refuge. During the day he could sleep, but night
wakened him, and that restlessness, which the night draws out in those
who are really under lunar influences, set his feet wandering, if only
in order that his mind might wander the less. The sun, as he mentions,
never appears in dreams; but, with the approach of night, is not every
one a little readier to believe in the mystery lurking behind the world?
Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'épie!
he writes in one of his great sonnets; and that fear of the invisible
watchfulness of nature was never absent from him. It is one of the
terrors of human existence that we may be led at once to seek and so
shun solitude; unable to bear the mortal pressure if its embrace,
unable to endure the nostalgia of its absence. "I think man's happiest
when he forgets himself," says an Elizabethan dramatist; and, with
Gérard, there was Adrienne to forget, and Jenny Colon the actress,
and the Queen of Sheba. But to have drunk of the cup of dreams is to
have drunk of the cup of eternal memory. The past, and, as it seemed
to him, the future were continually with him; only the present fled
continually from under his feet. It was only by the effort of this
contact with people who lived so sincerely in the day, the minute,
that he could find even a temporary foothold. With them, at least, he
could hold back all the stars, and the darkness beyond them, and the
interminable approach and disappearance of all the ages, if only for
the space between tavern and tavern, where he could open his eyes on so
frank an abandonment to the common drunkenness of most people in this
world, here for once really living the symbolic intoxication of their
ignorance.
Like so many dreamers of illimitable dreams, it was the fate of
Gérard to incarnate his ideal in the person of an actress. The fatal
transfiguration of the footlights, in which reality and the artificial
change places with so fantastic a regularity, has drawn many moths into
its flame, and will draw more, as long as men persist in demanding
illusion of what is real, and reality in what is illusion. The Jenny
Colons of the world are very simple, very real, if one will but refrain
from assuming them to be a mystery. But it is the penalty of all
imaginative lovers to create for themselves the veil which hides from
them the features of the beloved. It is their privilege, for it is
incomparably more entrancing to fancy oneself in love with Isis than
to know that one is in love with Manon Lescaut. The picture of Gérard,
after many hesitations, revealing to the astonished Jenny that she is
the incarnation of another, the shadow of a dream, that she has been
Adrienne and is about to be the Queen of Sheba; her very human little
cry of pure incomprehension, _Mais vous ne m'aimez pas!_ and her
prompt refuge in the arms of the _jeune premier ridé,_ if it were not
of the acutest pathos, would certainly be of the most quintessential
comedy. For Gérard, so sharp an awakening was but like the passage from
one state to another, across that little bridge of one step which lies
between heaven and hell, to which he was so used in his dreams. It gave
permanency to the trivial, crystallising it, in another than Stendhal's
sense; and when death came, changing mere human memory into the terms
of eternity, the darkness of the spiritual world was lit with a new
star, which was henceforth the wandering, desolate guide of so many
visions. The tragic figure of Aurélia, which comes and goes through
all the labyrinths of dream, is now seen always "as if lit up by a
lightning-flash, pale and dying, hurried away by dark horsemen."
The dream or doctrine of the re-incarnation of souls, which has given
so much consolation to so many questioners of eternity, was for
Gérard (need we doubt?) a dream rather than a doctrine, but one of
those dreams which are nearer to a man than his breath. "This vague
and hopeless love," he writes in _Sylvie,_ "inspired by an actress,
which night by night took hold of me at the hour of the performance,
leaving me only at the hour of sleep, had its germ in the recollection
of Adrienne, flower of the night, unfolding under the pale rays of
the moon, rosy and blonde phantom, gliding over the green grass, half
bathed in white mist.... To love a nun under the form of an actress!
... and if it were the very same! It is enough to drive one mad!" Yes,
_il y a de quoi devenir fou,_ as Gérard had found; but there was also,
in this intimate sense of the unity, perpetuity, and harmoniously
recurring rhythm of nature, not a little of the inner substance
of wisdom. It was a dream, perhaps refracted from some broken,
illuminating angle by which madness catches unseen light, that revealed
to him the meaning of his own superstition, fatality, malady: "During
my sleep, I had a marvelous vision. It seemed to me that the goddess
appeared before me, saying to me: 'I am the same as Mary, the same as
thy mother, the same also whom, under all forms, thou hast always
loved. At each of thine ordeals I have dropt yet one more of the masks
with which I veil my countenance, and soon thou shalt see me as I am!'"
And in perhaps his finest sonnet, the mysterious _Artémis,_ we have,
under other symbols, and with the deliberate inconsequence of these
sonnets, the comfort and despair of the same faith.
La Treizième revient... C'est encor la première;
Et c'est toujours la seule,--ou c'est le seul moment:
Car es-tu reine, ô toi! la première ou dernière?
Es-tu roi, toi le seul ou le dernier amant?...
Aimez qui vous aima du berceau dans la bière;
Celle que j'aimai seul m'aime encor tendrement;
C'est la mort--ou la morte ... Ô délice! ô tourment!
La Rose qu'elle tient, c'est la Rose trémière.
Sainte napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux,
Rose au cœur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule;
As-tu trouvé ta croix dans le désert cieux?
Roses blanches, tombez! vous insultez nos dieux:
Tombez, fantômes blancs, de votre ciel qui brûle:
--La Sainte de l'abîme est plus sainte à mes yeux!
Who has not often meditated, above all what artist, on the slightness,
after all, of the link which holds our faculties together in that sober
health of the brain which we call reason? Are there not moments when
that link seems to be worn down to so fine a tenuity that the wing of
a passing dream might suffice to snap it? The consciousness seems,
as it were, to expand and contract at once, into something too wide
for the universe, and too narrow for the thought of self to find room
within it. Is it that the sense of identity is about to evaporate,
annihilating all, or is it that a more profound identity, the identity
of the whole sentient universe, has been at last realised? Leaving the
concrete world on these brief voyages, the fear is that we may not have
strength to return, or that we may lose the way back. Every artist
lives a double life, in which he is for the most part conscious of the
illusions of the imagination. He is conscious also of the illusions of
the nerves, which he shares with every man of imaginative mind. Nights
of insomnia, days of anxious waiting, the sudden shock of an event, and
one of these common disturbances may be enough to jangle the tuneless
bells of one's nerves. The artist can distinguish these causes of
certain of his moods from those other causes which come to him because
he is an artist, and are properly concerned with that invention which
is his own function. Yet is there not some danger that he may come
to confuse one with the other, that he may "lose the thread" which
conducts him through the intricacies of the inner world?
The supreme artist, certainly, is the furthest of all men from this
danger; for he is the supreme intelligence. Like Dante, he can pass
through hell unsinged. With him, imagination is vision; when he looks
into the darkness, he sees. The vague dreamer, the insecure artist and
the uncertain mystic at once, sees only shadows, not recognising their
outlines. He is mastered by the images which have come at his call; he
has not the power which chains them for his slaves. "The kingdom of
Heaven suffers violence," and the dreamer who has gone tremblingly into
the darkness is in peril at the hands of those very real phantoms who
are the reflection of his fear.
The madness of Gérard de Nerval, whatever physiological reasons may
be rightly given for its outbreak, subsidence, and return, I take to
have been essentially due to the weakness and not the excess of his
visionary quality, to the insufficiency of his imaginative energy, and
to his lack of spiritual discipline. He was an unsystematic mystic;
his "Tower of Babel in two hundred volumes," that medley of books of
religion, science, astrology, history, travel, which he thought would
have rejoiced the heart of Pico della Mirandola, of Meursius, or of
Nicholas of Cusa, was truly, as he says, "enough to drive a wise man
mad." "Why not also," he adds, "enough to make a madman wise?" But
precisely because it was this _amas bizarre,_ this jumble of the
perilous secrets in which wisdom is so often folly, and folly so often
wisdom. He speaks vaguely of the Cabbala; the Cabbala would have been
safety to him, as the Catholic Church would have been, or any other
reasoned scheme of things. Wavering among intuitions, ignorances,
half-truths, shadows of falsehood, now audacious, now hesitating,
he was blown hither and thither by conflicting winds, a prey to the
indefinite.
_Le Rêve et la Vie,_ the last fragments of which were found in his
pockets after his suicide, scrawled on scraps of paper, interrupted
with Cabbalistic signs and "a demonstration of the Immaculate
Conception by geometry," is a narrative of a madman's visions by the
madman himself, yet showing, as Gautier says, "cold reason seated
by the bedside of hot fever, hallucination analysing itself by a
supreme philosophic effort." What is curious, yet after all natural,
is that part of the narrative seems to be contemporaneous with what
it describes, and part subsequent to it; so that it is not as when De
Quincey says to us, such or such was the opium-dream that I had on such
a night; but as if the opium-dreamer had begun to write down his dream
while he was yet within its coils. "The descent into hell," he calls it
twice; yet does he not also write: "At times I imagined that my force
and my activity were doubled; it seemed to me that I knew everything,
understood everything; and imagination brought me infinite pleasures.
Now that I have recovered what men call reason, must I not regret
having lost them?" But he had not lost them; he was still in that state
of double consciousness which he describes in one of his visions,
when, seeing people dressed in white, "I was astonished," he says, "to
see them all dressed in white; yet it seemed to me that this was an
optical illusion." His cosmical visions are at times so magnificent
that he seems to be creating myths; and it is with a worthy ingenuity
that he plays the part he imagines to be assigned to him in his astral
influences.
"First of all I imagined that the persons collected in the garden (of
the madhouse) all had some influence on the stars, and that the one who
always walked round and round in a circle regulated the course of the
sun. An old man, who was brought there at certain hours of the day, and
who made knots as he consulted his watch, seemed to me to be charged
with the notation of the course of the hours. I attributed to myself an
influence over the course of the moon, and I believed that this star
had been struck by the thunderbolt of the Most High, which had traced
on its face the imprint of the mask which I had observed.
"I attributed a mystical signification to the conversations of the
warders and of my companions. It seemed to me that they were the
representatives of all the races of the earth, and that we had
undertaken between us to re-arrange the course of the stars, and to
give a wider development to the system. An error, in my opinion, had
crept into the general combination of numbers, and thence came all the
ills of humanity. I believed also that the celestial spirits had taken
human forms, and assisted at this general congress, seeming though they
did to be concerned with but ordinary occupations. My own part seemed
to me to be the re-establishment of universal harmony by Cabbalistic
art, and I had to seek a solution by evoking the occult forces of
various religions."
So far we have, no doubt, the confusions of madness, in which what may
indeed be the symbol is taken for the thing itself. But now observe
what follows:
"I seemed to myself a hero living under the very eyes of the gods;
everything in nature assumed new aspects, and secret voices came to me
from the plants, the trees, animals, the meanest insects, to warn and
to encourage me. The words of my companions had mysterious messages,
the sense of which I alone understood; things without form and without
life lent themselves to the designs of my mind; out of combinations
of stones, the figures of angles, crevices, or openings, the shape of
leaves, out of colours, odours, and sounds, I saw unknown harmonies
come forth. 'How is it,' I said to myself, 'that I can possibly have
lived so long outside Nature, without identifying myself with her!
All things five, all things are in motion, all things correspond; the
magnetic rays emanating from myself or others traverse without obstacle
the infinite chain of created things: a transparent network covers the
world, whose loose threads communicate more and more closely with the
planets and the stars. Now a captive upon the earth, I hold converse
with the starry choir, which is feelingly a part of my joys and
sorrows.'"
To have thus realised that central secret of the mystics, from
Pythagoras 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 Swedenborg has
systematised in his doctrine of "correspondences"; does it matter very
much that he arrived at it by way of the obscure and fatal initiation
of madness? Truth, and especially that soul of truth which is poetry,
may be reached by many roads; and a road is not necessarily misleading
because it is dangerous or forbidden. Here is one who has gazed at
light till it has blinded him; and for us all that is important is
that he has seen something, not that his eyesight has been too weak
to endure the pressure of light overflowing the world from beyond the
world.
3
And here we arrive at the fundamental principle which is at once
the substance and the æsthetics of the sonnets "composed," as he
explains, "in that state of meditation which the Germans would call
supernaturalistic.'" In one, which I will quote, he is explicit, and
seems to state a doctrine.