Homme, libre penseur! te crois-tu seul pensant
Dans ce monde où la vie éclate en toute chose?
Des forces que tu tiens ta liberté dispose,
Mais de tous tes conseils l'univers est absent.
Respecte dans la bête un esprit agissant:
Chaque fleur est une âme à la Nature éclose;
Un mystère d'amour dans le métal repose;
"Tout est sensible!" Et tout sur ton être est puissant.
Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t'épie!
A la matière même un verbe est attaché ...
Ne la fais pas servir à quelque usage impie!
Souvent dans l'être obscur habite un Dieu caché;
Et comme un œil naissant couvert par ses paupières,
Un pur esprit s'accroît sous l'écorce des pierres!
But in the other sonnets, in _Artémis,_ which I have quoted, in _El
Desdichado, Myrtho,_ and the rest, he would seem to be deliberately
obscure; or at least, his obscurity results, to some extent, from the
state of mind which he describes in _Le Rêve et la Vie:_ "I then saw,
vaguely drifting into form, plastic images of antiquity, which outlined
themselves, became definite, and seemed to represent symbols, of which
I only seized the idea with difficulty." Nothing could more precisely
represent the impression made by these sonnets, in which, for the first
time in French, words are used as the ingredients of an evocation, as
themselves not merely colour and sound, but symbol. Here are words
which create an atmosphere by the actual suggestive quality of their
syllables, as, according to the theory of Mallarmé, they should do;
as, in the recent attempts of the Symbolists, writer after writer has
endeavoured to lure them into doing. Persuaded, as Gérard was, of the
sensitive unity of all nature, he was able to trace resemblances where
others saw only divergences; and the setting together of unfamiliar
and apparently alien things, which comes so strangely upon us in his
verse, was perhaps an actual sight of what it is our misfortune not
to see. His genius, to which madness had come as the liberating, the
precipitating, spirit, disengaging its finer essence, consisted in a
power of materialising vision, whatever is most volatile and unseizable
in vision and without losing the sense of mystery, or that quality
which gives its charm to the intangible. Madness, then, in him, had
lit up, as if by lightning-flashes, the hidden links of distant and
divergent things; perhaps in somewhat the same manner as that in which
a similarly new, startling, perhaps over-true sight of things is gained
by the artificial stimulation of haschisch, opium, and those other
drugs by which vision is produced deliberately, and the soul, sitting
safe within the perilous circle of its own magic, looks out on the
panorama which either rises out of the darkness before it, or drifts
from itself into the darkness. The very imagery of these sonnets is
the imagery which is known to all dreamers of bought dreams. _Rose au
cœur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule; le Temple au péristyle immense;
la grotte où nage la syrène:_ the dreamer of bought dreams has seen
them all. But no one before Gérard realised that such things as these
might be the basis of almost a new æsthetics. Did he himself realise
all that he had done, or was it left for Mallarmé to theorise upon what
Gérard had but divined?
That he made the discovery, there is no doubt; and we owe to the
fortunate accident of madness one of the foundations of what may be
called the practical æsthetics of Symbolism. Look again at that sonnet
_Artémis,_ and you will see in it not only the method of Mallarmé, but
much of the most intimate manner of Verlaine. The first four lines,
with their fluid rhythm, their repetitions and echoes, their delicate
evasions, might have been written by Verlaine; in the later part the
firmness of the rhythms and the jewelled significance of the words are
like Mallarmé at his finest, so that in a single sonnet we may fairly
claim to see a fore-shadowing of the styles of Mallarmé and Verlaine
at once. With Verlaine the resemblance goes, perhaps, no further; with
Mallarmé it goes to the very roots, the whole man being, certainly, his
style.
Gérard de Nerval, then, had divined, before all the world, that poetry
should be a miracle; not a hymn to beauty, nor the description of
beauty, nor beauty's mirror; but beauty itself, the colour, fragrance,
and form of the imagined flower, as it blossoms again out of the page.
Vision, the over-powering vision, had come to him beyond, if not
against, his will; and he knew that vision is the root out of which the
flower must grow. Vision had taught him symbol, and he knew that it is
by symbol alone that the flower can take visible form. He knew that
the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd,
and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness
is not a necessary virtue. So it was with disdain, as well as with
confidence, that he allowed these sonnets to be overheard. It was
enough for him to say:
J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la syrène;
and to speak, it might be, the siren's language, remembering her. "It
will be my last madness," he wrote, "to believe myself a poet: let
criticism cure me of it." Criticism, in his own day, even Gautier's
criticism, could but be disconcerted by a novelty so unexampled. It
is only now that the best critics in France are beginning to realise
how great in themselves, and how great in their influence, are these
sonnets, which, forgotten by the world for nearly fifty years, have all
the while been secretly bringing new æsthetics into French poetry.