of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from
what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers,
he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has
been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief
'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in
Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular
outlines of the earliest fragment, _Diaphanéité_, there is already the
substance which is to be clothed upon by beautiful and appropriate flesh
in the _Studies in the Renaissance_. Ruskin, I never heard him mention,
but I do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to concern
himself with beauty in art and literature, was at least a quickening
influence. Of De Quincey he spoke with an admiration which I had
difficulty in sharing, and I remember his showing me with pride a set of
his works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold lettering on the white
backs, and with the cinnamon edges which he was so fond of. Of Flaubert
we rarely met without speaking. He thought _Julien l'Hospitalier_ as
perfect as anything he had done. _L'Education Sentimentale_ was one of
the books which he advised me to read; that, and _Le Rouge et le Noir_
of Stendhal; and he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes in
the former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of the Goncourts he
spoke with admiration tempered by dislike. Their books often repelled
him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things
should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read
_Madame Gervaisais_, and he spoke of _Chérie_ (for all its 'immodesty')
as an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies.
Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to a window and said,
with a slow smile: 'That is where I get my Zolas.' He was always a
little on his guard in respect of books; and, just as he read Flaubert
and Goncourt because they were intellectual neighbours, so he could read
Zola for mere pastime, knowing that there would be nothing there to
distract him. I remember telling him about _The Story of an African
Farm_, and of the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating his
favourite formula: 'No doubt you are quite right; but I do not suppose I
shall ever read it.' And he explained to me that he was always writing
something, and that while he was writing he did not allow himself to
read anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, by bringing
a new current of emotion to bear upon him. He was quite content that his
mind should 'keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world'; it
was that prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole business as a
writer to remember, to perpetuate.
1906.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] In this same year he intended to follow the _Appreciations_ by a
volume of _Studies of Greek Remains_, in which he then meant to include
the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he had thought of putting
together a volume of 'theory,' which was to include the essay on Style.
In two or three years' time, he thought, _Gastom de Latour_ would be
finished.
THE GONCOURTS
My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May 1892. I remember my
immense curiosity about that 'House Beautiful,' at Auteuil, of which I
had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown
at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to some
friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with the usual
loosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck. He was wearing
a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could see the fine sweep
of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I thought him the most
distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever seen; for he had at once
the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and of that delicate artistic
genius which, with him, was so intimately a part of things beautiful and
distinguished. He had the eyes of an old eagle; a general air of
dignified collectedness; a rare, and a rarely charming, smile, which
came out, like a ray of sunshine, in the instinctive pleasure of having
said a witty or graceful thing to which one's response had been
immediate. When he took me indoors, into that house which was a museum,
I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the tenderness with which he
handled his treasures, touching them as if he loved them, with little,
unconscious murmurs: _Quel goût! quel goût!_ These rose-coloured rooms,
with their embroidered ceilings, were filled with cabinets of beautiful
things, Japanese carvings, and prints (the miraculous 'Plongeuses'!),
always in perfect condition (_Je cherche le beau_); albums had been made
for him in Japan, and in these he inserted prints, mounting others upon
silver and gold paper, which formed a sort of frame. He showed me his
eighteenth-century designs, among which I remember his pointing out one
(a Chardin, I think) as the first he had ever bought; he had been
sixteen at the time, and he bought it for twelve francs.
When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me all
his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions of
Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, of
the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with a
serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate;
and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain of the
_brouillard scandinave_, in which it seemed to him that France was
trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvais
brouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to
represent the only thing worth representing, _la vie vécue, la vraie
vérité_. As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing,
_l'optique_: out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have all
seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of
expressing it. 'There is a true thing I have said in my journal,' he
went on. 'The thing is, to find a lorgnette' (and he put up his hands to
his eyes, adjusting them carefully) 'through which to see things. My
brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it from
us.'
How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most
essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing,
literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in
the invention of this that they have invented that 'new language' of
which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained.
You remember that saying of Masson, the mask of Gautier, in _Charles
Demailly:_ 'I am a man for whom the visible world exists.' Well, that is
true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.
'The delicacies of fine literature,' that phrase of Pater always comes
into my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to me
the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in their
manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of their
books, to _Madame Gervaisais_, to _L'Art du XVIII Siècle_, to _Chérie_;
with a passing objection to what he called the 'immodesty' of this last
book, and a strong emphasis in the assertion that 'that was how it
seemed to him a book should be written.' I repeated this once to
Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what Pater's work was like;
and he lamented that his ignorance of English prevented him from what he
instinctively realised would be so intimate an enjoyment. Pater was of
course far more scrupulous, more limited, in his choice of epithet, less
feverish in his variations of cadence; and naturally so, for he dealt
with another subject-matter and was careful of another kind of truth.
But with both there was that passionately intent preoccupation with 'the
delicacies of fine literature'; both achieved a style of the most
personal sincerity: _tout grand écrivain de tous les temps_, said
Goncourt, _ne se reconnaît absolument qu'à cela, c'est qu'il a une
langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, est
signée, pour le lecteur lettré, comme si son nom était au bas de cette
page, de cette ligne_: and this style, in both, was accused, by the
'literary' criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial,
and therefore reprehensible.
It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid attributing
to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne his name
alone. That is an error which he himself would never have pardoned.
_Mon frère et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and in his
journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and
admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to
have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think,
had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity; for
the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in even
that excessively specialised world of their common observation, a yet
more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no doubt,
was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for the
qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live. It
has been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details of
human character, sensation, and circumstance, and also of the document,
the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to the
curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent
devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new
language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their
distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they have
been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to a deliberate
eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may,
perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was
their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as
peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in the
handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style.
Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegant
stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slight
novelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, very
distinguished writing.
It may be asserted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius, but
are perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our century. They
have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new weaknesses and
the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum up in themselves
certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at things, notions of
literary duty and artistic conscience, which have only lately become at
all actual, and some of which owe to them their very origin. To be not
merely novelists (inventing a new kind of novel), but historians; not
merely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and of
what was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating,
indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, the
eighteenth century, in France and in Japan; to collect pictures and
_bibelots_, beautiful things, always of the French and Japanese
eighteenth century: these excursions in so many directions, with their
audacities and their careful limitations, their bold novelty and their
scrupulous exactitude in detail, are characteristic of what is the
finest in the modern, conception of culture and the modern ideal in art.
Look, for instance, at the Goncourts' view of history. _Quand les
civilisations commencent, quand les peuples se forment, l'histoire est
drame ou geste.... Les siècles qui ont précédé notre siècle ne
demandaient à l'historien que le personnage de l'homme, et le portrait
de son génie.... Le XIX^e siècle demande l'homme qui était cet homme
d'État, cet homme de guerre, ce poète, ce peintre, ce grand homme de
science ou de métier. L'âme qui était en cet acteur, le coeur qui a
vécu derrière cet esprit, il les exige et les réclame; et s'il ne peut
recueillir tout cet être moral, toute la vie intérieure, il commande du
moins qu'on lui en apporte une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique._
From this theory, this conviction, came that marvellous series of
studies in the eighteenth century in France (_La Femme au XVIII^e
Siècle_, _Portraits intimes du XVIII^e Siècle_, _La du Barry_, and the
others), made entirely out of documents, autograph letters, scraps of
costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the
time, forming, as they justly say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman
vrai que la postérité appellera peut-être un jour l'histoire humaine_.
To be the bookworm and the magician; to give the actual documents, but
not to set barren fact by barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in
documents, to make them more living and more charming than the charm of
life itself: that is what the Goncourts have done. And it is through
this conception of history that they have found their way to that new
conception of the novel which has revolutionised the entire art of
fiction.
_Aujourd'hui_, they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie
Lacerteux_, _que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la
grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'étude littéraire et de
l'enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche
psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman
s'est imposé les études et les devoirs de la science, il pent en
revendiquer les libertés et les franchises_. _Le public aime les romans
faux_, is another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman est
un roman vrai_. But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood
by _un roman vrai_? The old notion of the novel was that it should be an
entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own sake;
a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to produce as
nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing having been
omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on oath; in a word, it
is the same as the old notion of history, _drame ou geste_. That is not
how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they conceive it should be
rendered. As in the study of history they seek mainly the _inédit_,
caring only to record that, so it is the _inédit_ of life that they
conceive to be the main concern, the real 'inner history.' And for them
the _inédit_ of life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is of
the sensations that they have resolved to be the historians; not of
action, nor of emotion, properly speaking, nor of moral conceptions, but
of an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses.
It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists for
whom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: the
sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina.
Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance,
trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that really
matters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually;
the method of the painter who accumulates detail on detail, in his
patient, many-sided observation of his subject, and then omits
everything which is not an essential part of the _ensemble_ which he
sees. Thus the new conception of what the real truth of things consists
in has brought with it, inevitably, an entirely new form, a breaking-up
of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are
generally quite disconnected, and sometimes of less than a page in
length. A very apt image for this new, curious manner of narrative has
been found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lemaître. _Un homme qui marche à
l'intérieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, apparaît
successivement à chaque fenêtre, et dans les intervalles nous échappe.
Ces fenêtres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. de Goncourt. Encore_, he
adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenêtres où l'homme que nous attendions
ne passe point_. That, certainly, is the danger of the method. No doubt
the Goncourts, in their passion for the _inédit_, leave out certain
things because they are obvious, even if they are obviously true and
obviously important; that is the defect of their quality. To represent
life by a series of moments, and to choose these moments for a certain
subtlety and rarity in them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these
the only perils which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There
are others, essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, first
of all, as we may see on every page of that miraculous _Journal_, which
will remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece of
human history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeing
life through the medium of diseased nerves. _Notre oeuvre entier_,
writes Edmond de Goncourt, _repose sur la maladie nerveuse; les
peintures de la maladie, nous les avons tirées de nous-mêmes, et, à
force de nous disséquer, nous sommes arrivés à une sensitivité
supra-aiguë que blessaient les infiniment petits de la vie_. This
unhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as
certain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision
of reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of
things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening the
acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one derives
from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrant
way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion of
time, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the subtler
poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it, fleetingly,
like Whistler; they do not render it in hard outline, like Flaubert,
like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world of the
Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fireworks at
Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in mirrors.
It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is choice, there
is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.
Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the
Goncourts, with those of Théophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said
to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and
also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but
it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or,
rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you
the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of
view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute,
distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as
an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see
them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate
attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in
which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture.
In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from
no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous
epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a
sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should
palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in
expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their
relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate
and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately
depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French
critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the
language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of
the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most wonderful
of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a new vision
of things, they have invented a new language.
1894, 1896.
COVENTRY PATMORE
There are two portraits of Coventry Patmore by Mr. Sargent. One, in the
National Portrait Gallery, gives us the man as he ordinarily was: the
straggling hair, the drooping eyelid, the large, loose-lipped mouth, the
long, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. But
the other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that;
gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that was
abrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstood
poet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than the
writer of _The Angel in the House_. Certainly an autocrat in the home,
impatient, intolerant, full of bracing intellectual scorn, not always
just, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all
human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable
omniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his
intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely
self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr.
Gosse says, in his admirable memoir:
Three things were in those days particularly noticeable in the head
of Coventry Patmore: the vast convex brows, arched with vision; the
bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid
permanently and humorously drooping; and the wilful, sensuous
mouth. These three seemed ever at war among themselves; they spoke
three different tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny
man of business, a man of vehement determination. It was the
harmony of these in apparently discordant contrast which made the
face so fascinating; the dwellers under this strange mask were
three, and the problem was how they contrived the common life.
That is a portrait which is also an interpretation, and many of the
pages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitely
fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of
those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the
merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book,
written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none a
more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of
what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's two
portraits, and a remarkable article by Mr. Frederick Greenwood,
published after the book, as a sort of appendix, which it completes on
the spiritual side.
To these portraits of Patmore I have nothing of importance to add; and I
have given my own estimate of Patmore as a poet in an essay published in
1897, in _Studies in Two Literatures_. But I should like to supplement
these various studies by a few supplementary notes, and the discussion
of a few points, chiefly technical, connected with his art as a poet. I
knew Patmore only during the last ten years of his life, and never with
any real intimacy; but as I have been turning over a little bundle of
his letters, written with a quill on greyish-blue paper, in the fine,
careless handwriting which had something of the distinction of the
writer, it seems to me that there are things in them characteristic
enough to be worth preserving.
The first letter in my bundle is not addressed to me, but to the friend
through whom I was afterwards to meet him, the kindest and most helpful
friend whom I or any man ever had, James Dykes Campbell. Two years
before, when I was twenty-one, I had written an _Introduction to the
Study of Browning_. Campbell had been at my elbow all the time,
encouraging and checking me; he would send back my proof-sheets in a
network of criticisms and suggestions, with my most eloquent passages
rigorously shorn, my pet eccentricities of phrase severely straightened.
At the beginning of 1888 Campbell sent the book to Patmore. His opinion,
when it came, seemed to me, at that time, crushing; it enraged me, I
know, not on my account, but on Browning's. I read it now with a clearer
understanding of what he meant, and it is interesting, certainly, as a
more outspoken and detailed opinion on Browning than Patmore ever
printed.