lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses of the aged
Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of the
whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her
skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal
robe, sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold,
the jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone,
bursts into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the
ivory-toned, tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling
wings, marbled with carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered
with steel-blue, streaked with peacock-green.
* * * * *
In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des
Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman
Salomé that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing-girl
who, with the corrupt torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire
from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating
body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a
king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the
goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among
many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has
hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,
insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to
her, all that look upon her, all that she touches.
It is in such a 'Palace of Art' that Des Esseintes would recreate his
already over-wrought body and brain, and the monotony of its seclusion
is only once broken by a single excursion into the world without. This
one episode of action, this one touch of realism, in a book given over
to the artificial, confined to a record of sensation, is a projected
voyage to London, a voyage that never occurs. Des Esseintes has been
reading Dickens, idly, to quiet his nerves, and the violent colours of
those ultra-British scenes and characters have imposed themselves upon
his imagination. Days of rain and fog complete the picture of that _pays
de brume et de boue_, and suddenly, stung by the unwonted desire for
change, he takes the train to Paris, resolved to distract himself by a
visit to London. Arrived in Paris before his time, he takes a cab to the
office of _Galignani's Messenger_, fancying himself, as the rain-drops
rattle on the roof and the mud splashes against the windows, already in
the midst of the immense city, its smoke and dirt. He reaches
_Galignani's Messenger_, and there, turning over Baedekers and Murrays,
loses himself in dreams of an imagined London. He buys a Baedeker, and,
to pass the time, enters the 'Bodéga' at the corner of the Rue de Rivoli
and the Rue Castiglione. The wine-cellar is crowded with Englishmen: he
sees, as he drinks his port, and listens to the unfamiliar accents, all
the characters of Dickens--a whole England of caricature; as he drinks
his Amontillado, the recollection of Poe puts a new horror into the
good-humoured faces about him. Leaving the 'Bodéga,' he steps out again
into the rain-swept street, regains his cab, and drives to the English
tavern of the Rue d'Amsterdam. He has just time for dinner, and he finds
a place beside the _insulaires_, with 'their porcelain eyes, their
crimson cheeks,' and orders a heavy English dinner, which he washes down
with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in
England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near,
he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion
of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion
await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a
chair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its atmosphere,
its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, were all about him?' The train
is due, but he does not stir. 'I have felt and seen,' he says to
himself, 'what I wanted to feel and see. I have been saturated with
English life all this time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy
change of place, these imperishable sensations.' So he gathers together
his luggage, and goes home again, resolving never to abandon the 'docile
phantasmagoria of the brain' for the mere realities of the actual world.
But his nervous malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and
brought him back so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by
hallucinations, haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid
exaltation of Berlioz, communicate themselves to him in the music that
besieges his brain. Obliged at last to send for a doctor, we find him,
at the end of the book, ordered back to Paris, to the normal life, the
normal conditions, with just that chance of escape from death or
madness. So suggestively, so instructively, closes the record of a
strange, attractive folly--in itself partly a serious ideal (which
indeed is Huysmans' own), partly the caricature of that ideal. Des
Esseintes, though studied from a real man, who is known to those who
know a certain kind of society in Paris, is a type rather than a man: he
is the offspring of the Decadent art that he adores, and this book a
sort of breviary for its worshippers. It has a place of its own in the
literature of the day, for it sums up, not only a talent, but a
spiritual epoch.
_A Rebours_ is a book that can only be written once, and since that date
Huysmans has published a short story, _Un Dilemme_ (1887), which is
merely a somewhat lengthy anecdote; two novels, _En Rade_ (1887) and
_Là-Bas_ (1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but neither
of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism, _Certains_
(1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on Félicien Rops, the
etcher of the fantastically erotic. _En Rade_ is a sort of deliberately
exaggerated record--vision rather than record--of the disillusions of a
country sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town
_névrose_. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven
out of nothing, and with no psychological value--the human part of the
book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation
of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the
country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but
the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with
the reader. _Là-Bas_ is a more artistic creation, on a more solid
foundation. It is a study of Satanism, a dexterous interweaving of the
history of Gilles de Retz (the traditional Bluebeard) with the
contemporary manifestations of the Black Art. 'The execration of
impotence, the hate of the mediocre--that is perhaps one of the most
indulgent definitions of Diabolism,' says Huysmans, somewhere in the
book, and it is on this side that one finds the link of connection with
the others of that series of pessimist studies in life. _Un naturalisme
spiritualiste_, he defines his own art at this point in its development;
and it is in somewhat the 'documentary' manner that he applies himself
to the study of these strange problems, half of hysteria, half of a real
mystical corruption that does actually exist in our midst. I do not
know whether the monstrous tableau of the Black Mass--so marvellously,
so revoltingly described in the central episode of the book--is still
enacted in our days, but I do know that all but the most horrible
practices of the sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet
performed, from time to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute.
The character of Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in
literature, to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is
successful would be to assume that the thing is possible, which one
hesitates to do. The book is even more disquieting, to the normal mind,
than _A Rebours_. But it is not, like that, the study of an exception
which has become a type. It is the study of an exception which does not
profess to be anything but a disease.
Huysmans' place in contemporary literature is not quite easy to
estimate. There is a danger of being too much attracted, or too much
repelled, by those qualities of deliberate singularity which make his
work, sincere expression as it is of his own personality, so artificial
and _recherché_ in itself. With his pronounced, exceptional
characteristics, it would have been impossible for him to write fiction
impersonally, or to range himself, for long, in any school, under any
master. Interrogated one day as to his opinion of Naturalism, he had but
to say in reply: _Au fond, il y a des écrivains qui ont du talent et
d'autres qui n'en ont pas, qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques,
décadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ça m'est égal! il s'agit pour moi
d'avoir du talent, et voilà tout!_ But, as we have seen, he has
undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he
has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in
_Le Drageoir à Epices_, we find such daring combinations as this
(_Camaïeu Rouge_)--_Cette fanfare de rouge m'étourdissait; cette gamme
d'une intensité furieuse, d'une violence inouïe, m'aveuglait._ Working
upon the foundation of Flaubert and of Goncourt, the two great modern
stylists, he has developed an intensely personal style of his own, in
which the sense of rhythm is entirely dominated by the sense of colour.
He manipulates the French language with a freedom sometimes barbarous,
'dragging his images by the heels or the hair' (in the admirable phrase
of Léon Bloy) 'up and down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified
syntax,' gaining, certainly, the effects at which he aims. He possesses,
in the highest degree, that _style tacheté et faisandé_--high-flavoured
and spotted with corruption--that he attributes to Goncourt and
Verlaine. And with this audacious and barbaric profusion of
words--chosen always for their colour and their vividly expressive
quality--he is able to describe the essentially modern aspects of things
as no one had ever described them before. No one before him had ever so
realised the perverse charm of the sordid, the perverse charm of the
artificial. Exceptional always, it is for such qualities as these,
rather than for the ordinary qualities of the novelist, that he is
remarkable. His stories are without incident, they are constructed to go
on until they stop, they are almost without characters. His psychology
is a matter of the sensations, and chiefly the visual sensations. The
moral nature is ignored, the emotions resolve themselves for the most
part into a sordid ennui, rising at times into a rage at existence. The
protagonist of every book is not so much a character as a bundle of
impressions and sensations--the vague outline of a single consciousness,
his own. But it is that single consciousness--in this morbidly personal
writer--with which we are concerned. For Huysmans' novels, with all
their strangeness, their charm, their repulsion, typical too, as they
are, of much beside himself, are certainly the expression of a
personality as remarkable as that of any contemporary writer.
1892.
TWO SYMBOLISTS
_Un livre comme je ne les aime pas_, says Mallarmé characteristically
(_ceux épars et privés d'architecture_) of this long expected first
volume of collected prose, _Divagations_, in which we find the prose
poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the
marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the
theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; _Richard Wagner:
rêverie d'un Poète français, Le Mystère dans les Lettres_; and, under
various titles, the surprising _Variations sur un Sujet_. The hesitation
of a lifetime having been, it would seem, overcome, we are at last able
to read Mallarmé's 'doctrine,' if not altogether as he would have us
read it. And we are at last able, without too much injustice, to judge
him as a writer of prose.
In saying that this volume is the most beautiful and the most valuable
which has found its way into my hands for I know not how long, I shall
not pretend to have read it with ease, or to have understood every word
of it. _D'exhiber les choses à un imperturbable premier plan, en
camelots, activés par la pression de l'instant, d'accord--écrire, dans
le cas pourquoi, indûment, sauf pour étaler la banalité; plutôt que
tendre le nuage, précieux, flottant sur l'intime gouffre de chaque
pensée, vu que vulgaire l'est ce à quoi on décerne, pas plus, un
caractère immédiat._ No, it has always been to that _labyrinthe illuminé
par des fleurs_ that Mallarmé has felt it due to their own dignity to
invite his readers. To their own dignity, and also to his. Mallarmé is
obscure, not so much because he writes differently as because he thinks
differently from other people. His mind is elliptical, and (relying on
the intelligence of his readers) he emphasises the effect of what is
unlike other people in his mind by resolutely ignoring even the links of
connection that exist between them. Never having aimed at popularity, he
has never needed, as most writers need, to make the first advances. He
has made neither intrusion upon nor concession to those who after all
need not read him. And when he has spoken he has not considered it
needful or seemly to listen in order that he might hear whether he was
heard. To the charge of obscurity he replies, with sufficient disdain,
that there are many who do not know how to read--except the newspapers,
he adds, in one of those disconcerting, oddly printed parentheses, which
make his work, to those who can rightly apprehend it, so full of wise
limitations, so safe from hasty or seemingly final conclusions. No one
in our time has more significantly vindicated the supreme right of the
artist in the aristocracy of letters; wilfully, perhaps, not always
wisely, but nobly, logically. Has not every artist shrunk from that
making of himself 'a motley to the view,' that handing over of his naked
soul to the laughter of the multitude? but who in our time has wrought
so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloud
on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdom
to hide their secret in the obscurity of double meanings or of what has
seemed meaningless; and might it not after all be the finest epitaph for
a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after the
writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed myself
to the crowd?
It has been the distinction of Mallarmé that he has always aspired after
an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting
and constraining in 'the body of that death,' which is the mere
literature of words. Words, he has realised, are of value only as
notations of the free breath of the spirit; words, therefore, must be
employed with an extreme care in their choice and adjustment, in setting
them to reflect and chime upon one another; yet least of all things for
their own sake, for the sake of what they can never, except by
suggestion, express. Thus an artificiality, even, in the use of
words--that seeming artificiality which comes from using words as if
they had never been used before, that chimerical search after the
virginity of language--is but the paradoxical outward sign of an extreme
discontent with even the best of their service. Writers who use words
fluently, seeming to disregard their importance, do so from an
unconscious confidence in their expressiveness, which the scrupulous
thinker, the precise dreamer, can never place in the most carefully
chosen among them. To evoke, by some elaborate, instantaneous magic of
language, without the formality of an after all impossible description;
to be, in fact, rather than to express; that is what Mallarmé has
consistently, and from the first, sought in verse and prose. And he has
sought this wandering, illusive, beckoning butterfly, the soul of
dreams, over more and more entangled ground; and it has led him into the
depths of many forests, far from the sunlight. He would be the last to
permit me to say that he has found what he sought; but (is it possible
to avoid saying?) how heroic a search, and what marvellous discoveries,
by the way!
Yes, all these, he admits perhaps proudly, are divagations, and the
secret, eternal, and only beauty is not yet found. Is it, perhaps, in a
mood, a momentary mood, really of discouragement, that he has consented
to the publication--the 'showing off,' within covers, as of goods in a
shop-window: it is his own image--of these fragmentary suggestions
towards a complete Æsthetic? Beautiful and invaluable I find them; here
and there final; and always, in form, hieratic.
Certain writers, in whom the artist's contempt for common things has
been carried to its utmost limit, should only be read in books of
beautiful and slightly unusual form. Perhaps of all modern writers
Villiers and Mallarmé have most carefully sought the most remote ideal,
and seem most to require some elaborate presentation to the reader.
Mallarmé, indeed, delighted in heaping up obstacles in the reader's way,
not only in the concealment of his meaning by style, but in a furtive,
fragmentary, and only too luxurious method of publication, which made it
difficult for most people to get his books at all, even for unlimited
money. Villiers, on the contrary, after publishing his first book, the
_Premières Poésies_ of 1859, in the delicate type of Perrin of Lyons, on
ribbed paper, with old gold covers, became careless as to how his books
appeared, and has to be read in a disorderly crowd of volumes, some of
them as hideous as the original edition of _L'Eve Future_, with its red
stars and streaks, its Apollo and Cupid and grey city landscape. It is
therefore with singular pleasure that one finds the two beautiful books
which have lately been published by M. Deman, the well-known publisher
of Rops: one, the fullest collection of Mallarmé's poems which has ever
been published, the other a selection of twenty stories by Villiers. The
Mallarmé is white and red, the poems printed in italics, a frontispiece
by Rops; the Villiers is a large square volume in shimmering dark green
and gold, with headpieces and tailpieces, in two tints, by Th. van
Rysselberghe. These scrolls and titles are done with a sort of reverent
self-suppression, as if, for once, decoration existed for a book and not
the book for the decoration, which is hardly the quality for which
modern decorators are most conspicuous.
In the _Poésies_ we have, no doubt, Mallarmé's final selection from his
own poems. Some of it is even new. The magnificent and mysterious
fragment of _Hérodiade_, his masterpiece, perhaps, is, though not indeed
completed, more than doubled in length by the addition of a long passage
on which he was at work almost to the time of his death. It is curious
to note that the new passage is written in exactly the style of the
older passage, though in the interval between the writing of the one and
the writing of the other Mallarmé had completely changed his style. By
an effort of will he had thought himself back into an earlier style, and
the two fragments join without an apparent seam. There were, it appears,
still a hymn or lyric spoken by St. John and a concluding monologue, to
be added to the poem; but we have at least the whole of the dialogue
between Hérodiade and the Nurse, certainly a poem sufficiently complete
in itself. The other new pieces are in the latest manner, mainly without
punctuation; they would scarcely be alluring, one imagines, even if
punctuated. In the course of a few centuries, I am convinced, every line
of Mallarmé will have become perfectly clear, as a corrupt Greek text
becomes clear in time. Even now a learned commentator could probably do
much to explain them, at the cost of a life-long labour; but scholars
only give up their lives to the difficult authors of a remote past.
Mallarmé can afford to wait; he will not be forgotten; and for us of the
present there are the clear and lovely early poems, so delightfully
brought together in the white and red book.
_L'insensibilité de l'azur et des pierres_: a serene and gem-like
quality, entirely his own, is in all these poems, in which a particular
kind of French verse realises its ideal. Mallarmé is the poet of a few,
a limited poet, perfect within his limits as the Chinese artist of his
own symbol. In a beautiful poem he compares himself to the painter of
tea-cups who spends his life in painting a strange flower
_Sur ses tasses de neige à la lune ravie_,
a flower which has perfumed his whole existence, since, as a child, he
had felt it graft itself upon the 'blue filigree of his soul.'
A very different image must be sought if we wish to sum up the
characteristics of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. An uncertain artist, he was
a man of passionate and lofty genius, and he has left us a great mass of
imperfect work, out of which we have to form for ourselves whatever
notion we can of a man greater than his work. My first impression, on
looking at the twenty stories which make up the present selection, was
that the selection had been badly made. Where is _Les Demoiselles de
Bienfilâtre_? I asked myself, remembering that little ironical
masterpiece; where is _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes_, with its
subtlety of horror; _Sentimentalisme_, with its tragic and tender
modernity; _La Reine Ysabeau_, with its sombre and taciturn intensity?
Story after story came into my mind, finer, it seemed to me, in the
artistic qualities of the story than many of those selected. Second
thoughts inclined me to think that the selection could scarcely have
been better. For it is a selection made after a plan, and it shows us,
not indeed always Villiers at his best as a story-teller, but,
throughout, Villiers at his highest point of elevation; the man whom we
are always trying to see through his work, and the man as he would have
seen himself. There is not a collection of stories in French of greater
nobility than these _Histoires Souveraines_ in which a regal pomp of
speech drapes a more than regal sovereignty of soul. The Villiers who
mocked mean things and attacked base things is no longer there; the
idealist is at home in his own world, among his ideals.
1897, 1899.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one
English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate
about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to
English readers: in the columns of the _Spectator_, it is amusing to
remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in
his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on
his death, _Ave atque Vale_. There have been occasional outbreaks of
irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally
mis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at random
in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up,
over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces of
the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?