they become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, with all his keen
practical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outside
that house of dreams in which the only real things were the things of
the imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind of
existence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world,
and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but one
world, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contented
prisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy.
The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energy
of beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis;
for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life,
that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which the
senses are messengers from the outer world, from which they can but
bring disquieting tidings.
The whole of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even
self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be
a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where
everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet who
has written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness of
loving or of being loved, the honour of defeat, the help and comfort of
nature or of action. But here all energy is concentrated on the one
ecstasy, and this exists for its own sake, and the desire of it is like
thirst, which returns after every partial satisfaction. The desire of
beauty, the love of love, can but be a form of martyrdom when, as with
Rossetti, there is also the desire of possession.
Circumstances have very little to do with the making of a poet's
temperament or vision, and it would be enough to point to Christina
Rossetti, who was hardly more in the country than her brother, but to
whom a blade of grass was enough to summon the whole country about her,
and whose poetry is full of the sense of growing things. Rossetti
instinctively saw faces, and only faces, and he would have seen them if
he had lived in the loneliest countryside, and he would never have
learned to distinguish between oats and barley if he had had fields of
them about his door from childhood. It was in the beauty of women, and
chiefly in the mysterious beauty of faces, that Rossetti found the
supreme embodiment of beauty; and it was in the love of women, and not
in any more abstract love, of God, of nature, or of ideas, that he found
the supreme revelation of love.
With this narrowness, with this intensity, he has rendered in his
painting as in his poetry one ideal, one obsession. He calls what is
really the House of Love _The House of Life_, and this is because the
house of love was literally to him the house of life. There is no mystic
to whom love has not seemed to be the essence or ultimate expression of
the soul. Rossetti's whole work is a parable of this belief, and it is a
parable written with his life-blood. Of beauty he has said, 'I drew it
in as simply as my breath,' but, as the desire of beauty possessed him,
as he laboured to create it over again, with rebellious words or
colours, always too vague for him when they were most precise, never the
precise embodiment of a dream, the pursuit turned to a labour and the
labour to a pain. Part of what hypnotises us in this work is, no doubt,
that sense of personal tragedy which comes to us out of its elaborate
beauty: the eternal tragedy of those who have loved the absolute in
beauty too well, and with too mortal a thirst.
1904.
A NOTE ON THE GENIUS OF THOMAS HARDY
He has a kind of naked face, in which you see the brain always working,
with an almost painful simplicity--just saved from being painful by a
humorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind of
intellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings of
fate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His
view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel,
not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not,
as with Meredith, man's and woman's at once. He sees all that is
irresponsible for good and evil in a woman's character, all that is
unreliable in her brain and will, all that is alluring in her
variability. He is her apologist, but always with a certain reserve of
private judgment. No one has created more attractive women, women whom
a man would have been more likely to love, or more likely to regret
loving. _Jude the Obscure_ is perhaps the most unbiased consideration of
the more complicated questions of sex which we can find in English
fiction. At the same time, there is almost no passion in his work,
neither the author nor any of his characters ever seeming able to pass
beyond the state of curiosity, the most intellectually interesting of
limitations, under the influence of any emotion. In his feeling for
nature, curiosity sometimes seems to broaden into a more intimate kind
of communion. The heath, the village with its peasants, the change of
every hour among the fields and on the roads, mean more to him, in a
sense, than even the spectacle of man and woman in their blind, and
painful, and absorbing struggle for existence. His knowledge of woman
confirms him in a suspension of judgment; his knowledge of nature brings
him nearer to the unchanging and consoling element in the world. All the
quite happy entertainment which he gets out of life comes to him from
his contemplation of the peasant, as himself a rooted part of the earth,
translating the dumbness of the fields into humour. His peasants have
been compared with Shakespeare's; that is, because he has the
Shakespearean sense of their placid vegetation by the side of hurrying
animal life, to which they act the part of chorus, with an unconscious
wisdom in their close, narrow, and undistracted view of things.
In his verse there is something brooding, obscure, tremulous,
half-inarticulate, as he meditates over man, nature, and destiny:
Nature, 'waking by touch alone,' and Fate, who sees and feels. In _The
Mother Mourns_, a strange, dreary, ironical song of science, Nature
laments that her best achievement, man, has become discontented with her
in his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering of
a hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set at
wide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear like
a knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of
sleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorry
for man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a poet who is sorry
for Nature, who feels the earth and its roots, as if he had sap in his
veins instead of blood, and could get closer than any other man to the
things of the earth.
Who else could have written this crabbed, subtle, strangely impressive
poem?
AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor;
On this scene enter--winged, horned, and spined--
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands.
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
--My guests parade my new-penned ink,
Or bang at the lamp-glass, whirl, and sink.
'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
No such drama has been written in verse since Browning, and the people
of the drama are condensed to almost as pregnant an utterance as _Adam,
Lilith, and Eve_.
Why is it that there are so few novels which can be read twice, while
all good poetry can be read over and over? Is it something inherent in
the form, one of the reasons in nature why a novel cannot be of the
same supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that it
will never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here and
there calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric,
while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is
always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants.
To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read _Lavengro_ but
not _Romola_. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above all a
story-teller, and whose stories are of the kind that rouse suspense and
satisfy it, can be read more than once, and never be quite without
novelty. There is often, in his books, too much story, as in _The Mayor
of Casterbridge_, where the plot extends into almost inextricable
entanglements; and yet that is precisely one of the books that can be
re-read. Is it on account of that concealed poetry, never absent though
often unseen, which gives to these fantastic or real histories a meaning
beyond the meaning of the facts, beneath it like an under-current,
around it like an atmosphere? Facts, once known, are done with; stories
of mere action gallop through the brain and are gone; but in Hardy
there is a vision or interpretation, a sense of life as a growth out of
the earth, and as much a mystery between soil and sky as the corn is,
which will draw men back to the stories with an interest which outlasts
their interest in the story.
It is a little difficult to get accustomed to Hardy, or to do him
justice without doing him more than justice. He is always right, always
a seer, when he is writing about 'the seasons in their moods, morning
and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate
things.' (What gravity and intimacy in his numbering of them!) He is
always right, always faultless in matter and style, when he is showing
that 'the impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic
life than the pachydermatous king.' But he requires a certain amount of
emotion to shake off the lethargy natural to his style, and when he has
merely a dull fact to mention he says it like this: 'He reclined on his
couch in the sitting-room, and extinguished the light.' In the next
sentence, where he is interested in expressing the impalpable emotion
of the situation, we get this faultless and uncommon use of words: 'The
night came in, and took up its place there, unconcerned and indifferent;
the night which had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now
digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the happiness of a
thousand other people with as little disturbance or change of mien.'
No one has ever studied so scrupulously as Hardy the effect of emotion
on inanimate things, or has ever seen emotion so visually in people. For
instance: 'Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was
flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole.'
But so intense is his preoccupation with these visual effects that he
sometimes cannot resist noting a minute appearance, though in the very
moment of assuring us that the person looking on did not see it. 'She
hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so
large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like
the object lens of a microscope.' And it is this power of seeing to
excess, and being limited to sight which is often strangely revealing,
that leaves him at times helpless before the naked words that a
situation supremely seen demands for its completion. The one failure in
what is perhaps his masterpiece, _The Return of the Native_, is in the
words put into the mouth of Eustacia and Yeobright in the perfectly
imagined scene before the mirror, a scene which should be the
culminating scene of the book; and it is, all but the words: the words
are crackle and tinsel.
What is it, then, that makes up the main part of the value and
fascination of Hardy, and how is it that what at first seem, and may
well be, defects, uncouthnesses, bits of formal preaching, grotesque
ironies of event and idea, come at last to seem either good in
themselves or good where they are, a part of the man if not of the
artist? One begins by reading for the story, and the story is of an
attaching interest. Here is a story-teller of the good old kind, a
story-teller whose plot is enough to hold his readers. With this point
no doubt many readers stop and are content. But go on, and next after
the story-teller one comes on the philosopher. He is dejected and a
little sinister, and may check your pleasure in his narrative if you
are too attentive to his criticism of it. But a new meaning comes into
the facts as you observe his attitude towards them, and you may be well
content to stop and be fed with thoughts by the philosopher. But if you
go further still you will find, at the very last, the poet, and you need
look for nothing beyond. I am inclined to question if any novelist has
been more truly a poet without ceasing to be in the true sense a
novelist. The poetry of Hardy's novels is a poetry of roots, and it is a
voice of the earth. He seems often to be closer to the earth (which is
at times, as in _The Return of the Native_, the chief person, or the
chorus, of the story) than to men and women, and to see men and women
out of the eyes of wild creatures, and out of the weeds and stones of
the heath. How often, and for how profound a reason, does he not show us
to ourselves, not as we or our fellows see us, but out of the continual
observation of humanity which goes on in the wary and inquiring eyes of
birds, the meditative and indifferent regard of cattle, and the
deprecating aloofness and inspection of sheep?
1907.
LÉON CLADEL
I hope that the life of Léon Cladel by his daughter Judith, which
Lemerre has brought out in a pleasant volume, will do something for the
fame of one of the most original writers of our time. Cladel had the
good fortune to be recognised in his lifetime by those whose approval
mattered most, beginning with Baudelaire, who discovered him before he
had printed his first book, and helped to teach him the craft of
letters. But so exceptional an artist could never be popular, though he
worked in living stuff and put the whole savour of his countryside into
his tragic and passionate stories. A peasant, who writes about peasants
and poor people, with a curiosity of style which not only packs his
vocabulary with difficult words, old or local, and with unheard of
rhythms, chosen to give voice to some never yet articulated emotion, but
which drives him into oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very
shape of his accents! A page of Cladel has a certain visible
uncouthness, and at first this seems in keeping with his matter; but the
uncouthness, when you look into it, turns out to be itself a refinement,
and what has seemed a confused whirl, an improvisation, to be the result
really of reiterated labour, whose whole aim has been to bring the
spontaneity of the first impulse back into the laboriously finished
work.
In this just, sensitive, and admirable book, written by one who has
inherited a not less passionate curiosity about life, but with more
patience in waiting upon it, watching it, noting its surprises, we have
a simple and sufficient commentary upon the books and upon the man. The
narrative has warmth and reserve, and is at once tender and
clear-sighted. _J'entrevois nettement_, she says with truth, _combien
seront précieux pour les futurs historiens de la littérature du xix^e
siècle, les mémoires tracés au contact immédiat de l'artiste, exposés de
ses faits et gestes particuliers, de ses origines, de la germination de
ses croyances et de son talent; ses critiques à venir y trouveront de_
_solides matériaux, ses admirateurs un aliment à leur piété et les
philosophes un des aspects de l'Âme française._ The man is shown to us,
_les élans de cette âme toujours grondante et fulgurante comme une
forge, et les nuances de ce fiévreux visage d'apôtre, brun, fin et
sinueux_, and we see the inevitable growth, out of the hard soil of
Quercy and out of the fertilising contact of Paris and Baudelaire, of
this whole literature, these books no less astonishing than their
titles: _Ompdrailles-le-Tombeau-des-Lutteurs_, _Celui de la
Croix-aux-Boeufs_, _La Fête Votive de Saint-Bartholomée-Porte-Glaive_.
The very titles are an excitement. I can remember how mysterious and
alluring they used to seem to me when I first saw them on the cover of
what was perhaps his best book, _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_.
It is by one of the stories, and the shortest, in _Les Va-Nu-Pieds_,
that I remember Cladel. I read it when I was a boy, and I cannot think
of it now without a shiver. It is called _L'Hercule_, and it is about a
Sandow of the streets, a professional strong man, who kills himself by
an over-strain; it is not a story at all, it is the record of an
incident, and there is only the strong man in it and his friend the
zany, who makes the jokes while the strong man juggles with bars and
cannon-balls. It is all told in a breath, without a pause, as if some
one who had just seen it poured it out in a flood of hot words. Such
vehemence, such pity, such a sense of the cruelty of the spectacle of a
man driven to death like a beast, for a few pence and the pleasure of a
few children; such an evocation of the sun and the streets and this
sordid tragic thing happening to the sound of drum and cymbals; such a
vision in sunlight of a barbarous and ridiculous and horrible accident,
lifted by the telling of it into a new and unforgettable beauty, I have
never felt or seen in any other story of a like grotesque tragedy. It
realises an ideal, it does for once what many artists have tried and
failed to do; it wrings the last drop of agony out of that subject which
it is so easy to make pathetic and effective. Dickens could not have
done it, Bret Harte could not have done it, Kipling could not do it:
Cladel did it only once, with this perfection.
Something like it he did over and over again, with unflagging vehemence,
with splendid variations, in stories of peasants and wrestlers and
thieves and prostitutes. They are all, as his daughter says, epic; she
calls them Homeric, but there is none of the Homeric simplicity in this
tumult of coloured and clotted speech, in which the language is tortured
to make it speak. The comparison with Rabelais is nearer. _La recherche
du terme vivant, sa mise en valeur et en saveur, la surabondance des
vocables puisés à toutes sources ... la condensation de l'action autour
de ces quelques motifs éternels de l'épopée: combat, ripaille, palabre
et luxure_, there, as she sees justly, are links with Rabelais.
Goncourt, himself always aiming at an impossible closeness of written to
spoken speech, noted with admiration _la vraie photographie de la parole
avec ses tours, ses abbréviations ses ellipses, son essoufflement
presque_. Speech out of breath, that is what Cladel's is always; his
words, never the likely ones, do not so much speak as cry, gesticulate,
overtake one another. _L'âme de Léon Cladel_, says his daughter, _était
dans un constant et flamboyant automne_. Something of the colour and
fever of autumn is in all he wrote. Another writer since Cladel, who has
probably never heard of him, has made heroes of peasants and vagabonds.
But Maxim Gorki makes heroes of them, consciously, with a mental
self-assertion, giving them ideas which he has found in Nietzsche.
Cladel put into all his people some of his own passionate way of seeing
'scarlet,' to use Barbey d'Aurevilly's epithet: _un rural écarlate_.
Vehement and voluminous, he overflowed: his whole aim as an artist, as a
pupil of Baudelaire, was to concentrate, to hold himself back; and the
effort added impetus to the checked overflow. To the realists he seemed
merely extravagant; he saw certainly what they could not see; and his
romance was always a fruit of the soil. The artist in him, seeming to be
in conflict with the peasant, fortified, clarified the peasant,
extracted from that hard soil a rare fruit. You see in his face an
extraordinary mingling of the peasant, the visionary, and the dandy: the
long hair and beard, the sensitive mouth and nose, the fierce brooding
eyes, in which wildness and delicacy, strength and a kind of
stealthiness, seem to be grafted on an inflexible peasant stock.
1906.
HENRIK IBSEN
'Everything which I have created as a poet,' Ibsen said in a letter,
'has had its origin in a frame of mind and a situation in life; I never
wrote because I had, as they say, found a good subject.' Yet his chief
aim as a dramatist has been to set character in independent action, and
to stand aside, reserving his judgment. 'The method, the technique of
the construction,' he says, speaking of what is probably his
masterpiece, _Ghosts_, 'in itself entirely precludes the author's
appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in
the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real.' That, at
his moment of most perfect balance, was his intention; that was what he
achieved in an astonishing way. But his whole life was a development;
and we see him moving from point to point, deliberately, and yet
inevitably; reaching the goal which it was his triumph to reach, then
going beyond the goal, because movement in any direction was a necessity
of his nature.
In Ibsen's letters we shall find invaluable help in the study of this
character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none
the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard,
crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow,
precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed
himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense
of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he hated
and resembled.
His creed, as man and as artist, was the cultivation, the realisation of
self. In quite another sense that, too, was the creed of Nietzsche; but
what in Nietzsche was pride, the pride of individual energy, in Ibsen
was a kind of humility, or a practical deduction from the fact that only
by giving complete expression to oneself can one produce the finest
work. Duty to oneself: that was how he looked upon it; and though, in a
letter to Björnson, he affirmed, as the highest praise, 'his life was
his best work,' to himself it was the building-up of the artist in him
that he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moral
fervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of the
abundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed his
force, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times an
uneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makes
the most of his gold by scraping up every farthing?
'The great thing,' he says in a letter of advice, 'is to hedge about
what is one's own, to keep it free and clear from everything outside
that has no connexion with it.' He bids Brandes cultivate 'a genuine,
full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what
concerns you as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else
as non-existent.' Yet he goes on to talk about 'benefiting society,' is
conscious of the weight which such a conviction or compromise lays upon
him, and yet cannot get rid of the burden, as Nietzsche does. He has
less courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back from
a complete realisation of his own doctrine because he has so much
worldly wisdom and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds.