_A chacun son infini_
1
Count Philippe Auguste Mathias de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam was born at
St. Brieuc, in Brittany, November 28, 1838; he died at Paris, under the
care of the Frères Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, August 19, 1889. Even before
his death, his life had become a legend, and the legend is even now
not to be disentangled from the actual occurrences of an existence so
heroically visionary. The Don Quixote of idealism, it was not only in
philosophical terms that life, to him, was the dream, and the spiritual
world the reality; he lived his faith, enduring what others called
reality with contempt, whenever, for a moment, he becomes conscious of
it. The basis of the character of Villiers was pride, and it was pride
which covered more than the universe. And this pride, first of all,
was the pride of race.
Descendant of the original Rodolphe le Bel, Seigneur de Villiers
(1067), through Jean de Villiers and Maria de l'Isle and their son
Pierre the first Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
born in 1384, had been Marshal of France under Jean-sans-Peur, Duke
of Burgundy; he took Paris during the civil war, and after being
imprisoned in the Bastille, reconquered Pontoise from the English,
and helped to reconquer Paris. Another Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, born
in 1464, Grand Master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, defended
Rhodes against 200,000 Turks for a whole year, in lone of the most
famous sieges in history; it was he who obtained from Charles V. the
concession of the isle of Malta for his Order, henceforth the Order of
the Knights of Malta.
For Villiers, to whom time, after all, was but a metaphysical
abstraction, the age of the Crusaders had not passed. From a descendant
of the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the
nineteenth century demanded precisely the virtues which the sixteenth
century had demanded of that ancestor. And these virtues were all
summed up in one word, which, in its double significance, single to
him, covered the whole attitude of life: the word "nobility." No word
returns oftener to the lips in speaking of what is most characteristic
in his work, and to Villiers moral and spiritual nobility seemed but
the inevitable consequence of that other kind of nobility by which he
seemed to himself still a Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
It was his birthright.
To the aristocratic conception of things, nobility of soul is indeed a
birthright, and the pride with which this gift of nature is accepted
is a pride of exactly the opposite kind to that democratic pride
to which nobility of soul is a conquest, valuable in proportion to
its difficulty. This duality, always essentially aristocratic and
democratic, typically Eastern and Western also, finds its place in
every theory of religion, philosophy, and the ideal life. The pride
of _being,_ the pride of _becoming:_ these are the two ultimate
contradictions set before every idealist. Villiers' choice, inevitable
indeed, was significant. In this measure, it must always be the choice
of the artist, to whom, in his contemplation of life, the means is
often so much more important than the end. That nobility of soul which
comes without effort, which comes only with an unrelaxed diligence over
oneself, that I should be I: there can at least be no comparison of its
beauty with the stained and dusty onslaught on a never quite conquered
fort of the enemy, in a divided self. And, if it be permitted to choose
among degrees of sanctity, that, surely, is the highest in which a
natural genius for such things accepts its own attainment with the
simplicity of a birthright.
And the Catholicism of Villiers was also a part of his inheritance.
His ancestors had fought for the Church, and Catholicism was still
a pompous flag, under which it was possible to fight on behalf of
the spirit, against that materialism which is always, in one way or
another, atheist. Thus he dedicates one of his stories to the Pope,
chooses ecclesiastical splendours by preference among the many
splendours of the world which go to make up his stage-pictures, and is
learned in the subtleties of the Fathers. The Church is his favourite
symbol of austere intellectual beauty; one way, certainly, by which the
temptations of external matter may be vanquished, and a way, also, by
which the desire of worship may be satisfied.
But there was also, in his attitude towards the mysteries of the
spiritual world, that "forbidden" curiosity which had troubled the
obedience of the Templars, and which came to him, too, as a kind of
knightly quality. Whether or not he was actually a Cabbalist, questions
of magic began, at an early age, to preoccupy him, and, from the first
wild experiment of _Isis_ to the deliberate summing up of _Axël,_ the
"occult" world finds its way into most of his pages.
Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the belief common to all
Eastern mystics.[1] "Know, once for all, that there is for thee no
other universe than that conception thereof which is reflected at
the bottom of thy thoughts." "What is knowledge but a recognition?"
Therefore, "forgetting for ever that which was the illusion of
thyself," hasten to become "an intelligence freed from the bonds and
the desires of the present moment." "Become the flower of thyself! Thou
art but what thou thinkest: therefore think thyself eternal." "Man, if
thou cease to limit in thyself a thing, that is, to desire it, if, so
doing, thou withdraw thyself from it, it will follow thee, woman-like,
as the water fills the place that is offered to it in the hollow of the
hand. For thou possessest the real being of all things, in thy pure
will, and thou art the God that thou art able to become."
To have accepted the doctrine which thus finds expression in _Axël,_
is to have accepted this among others of its consequences: "Science
states, but does not explain: she is the oldest offspring of the
chimeras; all the chimeras, then, on the same terms as the world (the
oldest of them!), are _something more_ than nothing!" And in _Elën_
there is a fragment of conversation between two young students, which
has its significance also:
_"Goetze._ There's my philosopher in full flight to the
regions of the sublime! Happily we have Science, which is a
torch, dear mystic; we will analyse your sun, if the planet
does not burst into pieces sooner than it has any right to!
_Samuel._ Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will
end by coming to your knees.
_Goetze._ Before what?
_Samuel._ Before the darkness!"
Such avowals of ignorance are possible only from the height of a great
intellectual pride. Villiers' revolt against Science, so far as Science
is materialistic, and his passionate curiosity in that chimera's flight
towards the invisible, are one and the same impulse of a mind to which
only mind is interesting. _Toute cette vieille Extériorité, maligne,
compiquée, inflexible,_ that illusion which Science accepts for the one
reality: it must be the whole effort of one's consciousness to escape
from its entanglements, to dominate it, or to ignore it, and one's art
must be the building of an ideal world beyond its access, from which
one may indeed sally out, now and again, in a desperate enough attack
upon the illusions in the midst of which men live.
And just that, we find, makes up the work of Villiers, work which
divides itself roughly into two divisions: one, the ideal world, or the
ideal in the world (_Axël, Elën, Morgane, Isis,_ some of the _contes,_
and, intermediary, _La Révolte_); the other, satire, the mockery of
reality (_L'Eve Future,_ the _Contes Cruels, Tribulat Bonhomet_). It is
part of the originality of Villiers that the two divisions constantly
flow into one another; the idealist being never more the idealist than
in his buffooneries.
[1] "I am far from sure," wrote Verlaine, "that the philosophy of
Villiers will not one day become the formula of our century."
2
_Axël_ is the Symbolist drama, in all its uncompromising conflict with
the "modesty" of Nature and the limitations of the stage. It is the
drama of the soul, and at the same time it is the most pictorial of
dramas; I should define its manner as a kind of spiritual romanticism.
The earlier dramas, _Elën, Morgane,_ are fixed at somewhat the same
point in space; _La Révolte,_ which seems to anticipate _The Doll's
House,_ shows us an aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a certain
disdain, certainly with far less skill, certainly with far more beauty.
But _Axël,_ meditated over during a lifetime, shows us Villiers' ideal
of his own idealism.
The action takes place, it is true, in this century, but it takes
place in corners of the world into which the modern spirit has not
yet passed; this _Monastère de Religieuses-trinitaires, le cloître de
Sainte Appolodora, situé sur les confins du littoral de l'ancienne
Flandre française,_ and the _très vieux château fort, le burg
des margraves d'Auërsperg, isolé au milieu du Schwartzwald._ The
characters, Axël d'Auërsperg, Eve Sara Emmanuèle de Maupers, Maître
Janus, the Archidiacre, the Commandeur Kaspar d'Auërsperg, are at
once more and less than human beings: they are the types of different
ideals, and they are clothed with just enough humanity to give form to
what would otherwise remain disembodied spirit. The religious ideal,
the occult ideal, the worldly ideal, the passionate ideal, are all
presented, one after the other, in these dazzling and profound pages;
Axël is the disdainful choice from among them, the disdainful rejection
of life itself, of the whole illusion of life, "since infinity alone is
not a deception." And Sara? Sara is a superb part of that life which is
rejected, which she herself comes, not without reluctance, to reject.
In that motionless figure, during the whole of the first act silent but
for a single "No," and leaping into a moment's violent action as the
act closes, she is the haughtiest woman in literature. But she is a
woman, and she desires life, finding it in Axël. Pride, and the woman's
devotion to the man, aid her to take the last cold step with Axël, in
the transcendental giving up of life at the moment when life becomes
ideal.
And the play is written, throughout, with a curious solemnity, a
particular kind of eloquence, which makes no attempt to imitate the
level of the speech of every day, but which is a sort of ideal language
in which beauty is aimed at as exclusively as if it were written in
verse. The modern drama, under the democratic influence of Ibsen,
the positive influence of Dumas _fils,_ has limited itself to the
expression of temperaments in the one case, of theoretic intelligences
in the other, in as nearly as possible the words which the average man
would use for the statement of his emotions and ideas. The form, that
is, is degraded below the level of the characters whom it attempts to
express; for it is evident that the average man can articulate only a
small enough part of what he obscurely feels or thinks; and the theory
of Realism is that his emotions and ideas are to be given only in so
far as the words at his own command can give them. Villiers, choosing
to concern himself only with exceptional characters, and with them
only in the absolute, invents for them a more elaborate and a more
magnificent speech than they would naturally employ, the speech of
their thoughts, of their dreams.
And it is a world thought or dreamt in some more fortunate atmosphere
than that in which we live, that Villiers has created for the final
achievement of his abstract ideas. I do not doubt that he himself
always lived in it, through all the poverty of the precipitous Rue
des Martyrs. But it is in _Axël,_ and in _Axël_ only, that he has made
us also inhabitants of that world. Even in _Elën_ we are spectators,
watching a tragical fairy play (as if _Fantasio_ became suddenly in
deadly earnest), watching some one else's dreams. _Axël_ envelops us in
its own atmosphere; it is as if we found ourselves on a mountain top on
the other side of the clouds, and without surprise at finding ourselves
there.
The ideal, to Villiers, being the real, spiritual beauty being
the essential beauty, and material beauty its reflection, or its
revelation, it is with a sort of fury that he attacks the materialising
forces of the world: science, progress, the worldly emphasis on
"facts," on what is "positive," "serious," "respectable." Satire, with
him, is the revenge of beauty upon ugliness, the persecution of the
ugly; it is not merely social satire, it is a satire on the material
universe by one who believes in a spiritual universe. Thus it is the
only laughter of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that
of Swift or Rabelais. And this lacerating laughter of the idealist
is never surer in its aim than when it turns the arms of science
against itself, as in the vast buffoonery of _L'Eve Future._ A Parisian
wit, sharpened to a fineness of irony such as only wit which is also
philosophy can attain, brings in another method of attack; humour,
which is almost English, another; while again satire becomes tragic,
fantastic, macabre. In those enigmatic "tales of the grotesque and
arabesque," in which Villiers rivals Poe on his own ground, there is,
for the most part, a multiplicity of meaning which is, as it is meant
to be, disconcerting. I should not like to say how far Villiers does
not, sometimes, believe in his own magic.
It is characteristic of him, at all events, that he employs what we
call the supernatural alike in his works of pure idealism and in his
works of sheer satire. The moment the world ceased to be the stable
object, solidly encrusted with houses in brick and stone, which it is
to most of its so temporary inhabitants, Villiers was at home. When
he sought the absolute beauty, it was beyond the world that he found
it; when he sought horror, it was a breath blowing from an invisible
darkness which brought it to his nerves; when he desired to mock the
pretensions of knowledge of or ignorance, it was always with the unseen
that his tragic buffoonery made familiar.
There is, in everything which Villiers wrote, a strangeness, certainly
both instinctive and deliberate, which seems to me to be the natural
consequence of that intellectual pride which, as I have pointed out,
was at the basis of his character. He hated every kind of mediocrity:
therefore he chose to analyse exceptional souls, to construct
exceptional stories, to invent splendid names, and to evoke singular
landscapes. It was part of his curiosity in souls to prefer the complex
to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to
either. His heroes are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their
tragedies are the shock of spirit against matter, the invasion of
spirit by matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. They seek
the absolute, and find death; they seek wisdom, find love, and fall
into spiritual decay; they seek reality, and find crime; they seek
phantoms, and find themselves. They are on the borders of a wisdom too
great for their capacity; they are haunted by dark powers, instincts
of ambiguous passions; they are too lucid to be quite sane in their
extravagances; they have not quite systematically transposed their
dreams into actions And his heroines, when they are not, like _L'Eve
Future,_ the vitalised mechanism of an Edison, have the solemnity of
dead people, and a hieratic speech. _Songe, des cœurs condamnés à ce
supplice, de ne pas m'aimer!_ says Sara, in _Axël. Je ne l'aime pas,
ce jeune homme. Qu'ai-je donc fait à Dieu?_ says Elën. And their voice
is always like the voice of Elën: "I listened attentively to the sound
of her voice; it was tactiturn, subdued, like the murmur of the river
Lethe, flowing through the region of shadows." They have the immortal
weariness of beauty, they are enigmas to themselves, they desire, and
know not why they refrain, they do good and evil with the lifting of an
eyelid, and are innocent and guilty of all the sins of the earth.
And these strange inhabitants move in as strange a world. They are the
princes and châtelaines of ancient castles lost in the depths of the
Black Forest; they are the last descendants of a great race about to
come to an end; students of magic, who have the sharp and swift swords
of the soldier; enigmatic courtesans, at the table of strange feasts;
they find incalculable treasures, _tonnantes et sonnantes cataractes
d'or liquide,_ only to disdain them. All the pomp of the world
approaches them, that they may the better abnegate it, or that it may
ruin them to a deeper degree of their material hell. And we see them
always at the moment of a crisis, before the two ways of a decision,
hesitating in the entanglements of a great temptation. And this casuist
of souls will drag forth some horribly stunted or horribly overgrown
soul from under its obscure covering, setting it to dance naked before
our eyes. He has no mercy on those who have no mercy on themselves.
In the sense in which that word is ordinarily used, Villiers has no
pathos. This is enough to explain why he can never, in the phrase he
would have disliked so greatly, "touch the popular heart." His mind is
too abstract to contain pity, and it is in his lack of pity that he
seems to put himself outside humanity. _A chacun son infini,_ he has
said, and in the avidity of his search for the infinite he has no mercy
for the blind weakness which goes stumbling over the earth, without so
much as knowing that the sun and stars are overhead. He sees only the
gross multitude, the multitude which has the contentment of the slave.
He cannot pardon stupidity, for it is incomprehensible to him. He sees,
rightly, that stupidity is more criminal than vice; if only because
vice is curable, stupidity incurable. But he does not realise, as the
great novelists have realised, that stupidity can be pathetic, and that
there is not a peasant, nor even a self-satisfied bourgeois, in whom
the soul has not its part, in whose existence it is not possible to be
interested.
Contempt, noble as it may be, anger, righteous though it may be, cannot
be indulged in without a certain lack of sympathy; and lack of sympathy
comes from a lack of patient understanding. It is certain that the
destiny of the greater part of the human race is either infinitely
pathetic or infinitely ridiculous. Under which aspect, then, shall
that destiny, and those obscure fractions of humanity, be considered?
Villiers was too sincere an idealist, too absolute in his idealism, to
hesitate. "As for living," he cries, in that splendid phrase of _Axël,_
"our servants will do that for us!" And, in the _Contes Cruels,_ there
is this not less characteristic expression of what was always his
mental attitude: "As at the play, in a central stall, one sits out, so
as not to disturb one's neighbours--out of courtesy, in a word--some
play written in a wearisome style and of which one does not like the
subject, so I lived, out of politeness": _je vivais par politesse._
In this haughtiness towards life, in this disdain of ordinary human
motives and ordinary human beings, there is at once the distinction and
the weakness of Villiers. And he has himself pointed the moral against
himself in these words of the story which forms the epilogue to the
_Contes Cruels:_ "When the forehead alone contains the existence of a
man, that man is enlightened only from above his head; then his jealous
shadow, prostrate under him, draws him by the feet, that it may drag
him down into the invisible."
3
All his life Villiers was a poor man; though, all his life, he was
awaiting that fortune which he refused to anticipate by any mean
employment. During most of his life, he was practically an unknown man.
Greatly loved, ardently admired, by that inner circle of the men who
have made modern French literature, from Verlaine to Maeterlinck, he
was looked upon by most people as an amusing kind of madman, a little
dangerous, whose ideas, as they floated freely over the café-table, it
was at times highly profitable to steal. For Villiers talked his works
before writing them, and sometimes he talked them instead of writing
them, in his too royally spendthrift way. To those who knew him he
seemed genius itself, and would have seemed so if he had never written
a line; for he had the dangerous gift of a personality which seems to
have already achieved all that it so energetically contemplates. But
personality tells only within hands' reach; and Villiers failed even
to startle, failed even to exasperate, the general reader. That his
_Premières Poésies,_ published at I the age of nineteen, should have
brought him fame was hardly to be expected, remarkable, especially in
its ideas, as that book is. Nor was it to be expected of the enigmatic
fragment of a romance, _Isis_ (1862), anticipating, as it does, by so
long a period, the esoteric and spiritualistic romances which were to
have their vogue. But _Elën_ (1864) and _Morgane_ (1865), those two
poetic dramas in prose, so full of distinction, of spiritual rarity;
but two years later, _Claire Lenoir_ (afterwards incorporated in one
of his really great books, _Tribulat Bonhomet_), with its macabre
horror; but _La Révolte_ (1870), for Villiers so "actual," and which
had its moments of success when it was revived in 1896 at the Odéon;
but _Le Nouveau Monde_ (1880), a drama which, by some extraordinary
caprice, won a prize; but _Les Contes Cruels_ (1880), that collection
of masterpieces, in which the essentially French _conte_ is outdone
on its own ground! It was not till 1886 that Villiers ceased to be an
unknown writer, with the publication of that phosphorescent buffoonery
of science, that vast parody of humanity, _L'Eve Future. Tribulat
Bonhomet_ (which he himself denned as _bouffonnerie énorme et sombre,
couleur du siècle_) was to come, in its final form, and the superb poem
in prose _Akëdysséril;_ and then, more and more indifferent collections
of stories, in which Villiers, already dying, is but the shadow of
himself: _L'Amour Suprême_ (1886), _Histoires Insolites_ (1888),
_Nouveaux Contes Cruels_ (1888). He was correcting the proofs of _Axël_
when he died; the volume was published in 1890, followed by _Propos
d'au-delà,_ and a series of articles, _Chez les Passants._ Once dead,
the fame which had avoided him all his life began to follow him; he had
_une belle presse_ at his funeral.
Meanwhile, he had been preparing the spiritual atmosphere of the new
generation. Living among believers in the material world, he had been
declaring, not in vain, his belief in the world of the spirit; living
among Realists and Parnassians, he had been creating a new form of art,
the art of the Symbolist drama, and of Symbolism in fiction. He had
been lonely all his life, for he had been living in his own lifetime,
the life of the next generation. There was but one man among his
contemporaries to whom he could give, and from whom he could receive,
perfect sympathy. That man was Wagner. Gradually the younger men came
about him; at the end he was not lacking in disciples.
And after all, the last word of Villiers is faith; faith against the
evidence of the senses, against the negations of materialistic science,
against the monstrous paradox of progress, against his own pessimism
in the face of these formidable enemies. He affirms; he "believes in
soul, is very sure of God"; requires no witness to the spiritual world
of which he is always the inhabitant; and is content to lose his way
in the material world, brushing off its mud from time to time with a
disdainful gesture, as he goes on his way (to apply a significant word
of Pater) "like one on a secret errand."