Felicite perdue, ou l'ame en pleurs se noie!
O lumiere, o fratcheur des monts calmes et bleus,
Des coteaux et des bois feuillages onduleux,
Aubes d'un jour divin, chants des mers fortunees,
Florissante vigueur de mes belles annees...
Vous vivez, vous chantez, vous palpitez encor,
Saintes realites, dans vos horizons d'or!
Mais, o nature, o ciel, flois sacres, monts sublimes,
Bois dont les vents amis sont murmurer les cimes,
Formes de l'ideal, magnifiques aux yeux,
Vous avez disparu de mon coeur oublieux!
Et voici que, lasse de voluptes ameres,
Haletant du desir de mes mille chimeres,
Helas! j'ai desappris les hymnes d'autrefois,
Et que mes dieux trahis n'entendent plus ma voix._
This is a note more often heard, perhaps, in English than in French
poetry. It is the lament of Wordsworth for the "visionary gleam" that
has fled, for "the glory and the dream" that fade into the light of
common day.
Leconte de Lisle is unsparing with the results of his erudition, and
this probably confirms the popular notion of his remoteness. Here,
however, returning for a moment to Landor, we may observe that he is
never so close-packed and never so cryptic as the author of _Chrysaor_
and _Gunlaug_. What Leconte de Lisle has to tell us about mysterious
Oriental sages and mythical Scandinavian heroes may be unfamiliar to the
reader, but is never rendered obscure by his mode of narration. Nothing
could be less within our ordinary range of experience than the adventure
of _Le Barde de Temrah_, who arrives at dawn from a palace of the Finns,
in a chariot drawn by two white buffaloes; but Leconte de Lisle recounts
it voluminously, in clear, loud language which leaves no sense of doubt
on the listener's mind as to what exactly happened.
His Indian studies became less precise in the _Poemes Barbares_ than
they had been in the early _Poemes Antiques_; perhaps under the stress
of greater knowledge. But he had been from early youth personally
acquainted with the Indian landscapes which he describes. With the
ancient Sanscrit literature, I suppose he had mainly an acquaintance
through translations, of which those by Burnouf may have inspired him
most. Whether, if he had lived to read Professor Jacobi's proof that
Valmiki was a historical character, and the author in its original form
of the earliest and greatest epic of India, the _Ramayana_, Leconte de
Lisle would have been annoyed to remember that he had treated Valmiki as
a mythical person, symbolically devoured by white ants, it is impossible
to say. Probably not, for he only chose these ancient instances to
illustrate from the contemplative serenity of Brahmanism his own calm
devotion to the eternal principle of beauty.
_Bhagavat! Bhagavat! Essence des Essences,_
_Source de la beaute, fleuve des Renaissances,_
_Lumiere qui fait vivre et mourir a la fois._
Probably no other European poet has interpreted with so much exactitude,
because with so intense a sympathy, the cosmogony and mythology of the
Puranas, with their mystic genealogies of gods and kings.
The harmony and sonorous fullness of the verse of Leconte de Lisle were
noted from the first, even by those who had least sympathy with the
subjects of it. He achieved the extreme--we may almost say the
excessive--purity of his language by a tireless study of the Greeks and
of the great French poets of the seventeenth century, with whom he had a
remarkable sympathy at a time when they were generally in disfavour. His
passion for the art of Racine may be compared with the close attention
which Keats gave to the versification of Dryden. He greatly venerated
the genius of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps the only contemporary poet of
France who exercised any influence over the style of Leconte de Lisle.
It is difficult to define in what that influence consisted; the two men
had essentially as little resemblance as Reims Cathedral has to the
Parthenon, Victor Hugo being as extravagantly Gothic as Leconte de Lisle
was Attic. But the younger poet was undoubtedly fascinated by the
tumultuous cadences of his more various, and, we must admit, more
prodigious predecessor. They agreed, moreover, in appealing to the ear
rather than to the eye. Verlaine has described Leconte de Lisle's
insistence on the vocal harmonies of verse, and he adds: "When he
recited his own poems, a lofty emotion seemed to vibrate through his
whole noble figure, and his auditors were drawn to him by an
irresistible sympathy." It must have been a wonderful experience to hear
him, for instance, chant the iron _terze rime_ of _Le Jugement de
Konor_, or the voluptuous languor of _Nourmahal_.
Much has been said about the sculpturesque character of Leconte de
Lisle's poems. But a comparison of them to friezes of figures carved out
of white marble scarcely does justice to their colour, though it may
indicate the stability of their form. It would be more accurate to
compare them to the shapes covered with thin ivory and ornamented with
gold and jewels, in which the Greeks, and even Pheidias himself,
delighted. The _Poemes Antiques_ are, in fact, chryselephantine. But
Leconte de Lisle was a painter also, and perhaps the chief difference
to be observed between the early compositions and the _Poemes Barbares_
consists in the pictorial abundance of the latter. His descriptions have
the character of broadly-brushed cartoons of scenes which are usually
exotic, as of some Puvis de Chavannes who had made a leisurely voyage in
Orient seas. Leconte de Lisle floods his canvas with light, and his
favourite colours are white and golden yellow; even his fiercest
tragedies are luminous. India he sees not as prosaic travellers have
seen it, but in a blaze of dazzling splendour:
_Tes fleuves sont pareils aux pythons lumineux_
_Qui sur les palmiers verts enroulent leurs beaux noeuds;_
_Ils glissent au detour de tes belles collines_
_En guirlandes d'argent, d'azur, de perles fines._
It is natural that a nature so eminently in harmony with the visual
world, and so pagan in all its instincts, should be indifferent or even
hostile to Christianity. His stoic genius, solidly based on the faiths
of India and of Hellas, finds the virtues of humility and of tender
resignation contemptible. In the very remarkable dialogue, _Hypatie et
Cyrille_, Leconte de Lisle defines, with the voice of the Neoplatonist,
his own conception of religious truth. It is one in which _Le vil
Galileen_ has neither part nor lot. We have to recognize in his temper a
complete disdain of all the consolations of the Christian faith, or
rather an inability to conceive in what they consist, and no phenomenon
in literature is more curious than that, after a single generation,
French poetry should have returned to the aggressive piety which strikes
an English reader as so incomprehensible in M. Francis Jammes and in M.
Paul Claudel. But poetry has many mansions.
The person of Leconte de Lisle is described to us as characteristic of
his work. He was very handsome, with a haughty carriage of the head on a
neck "as pure and as solid as a column of marble." A monocle, which
never left his right eye, gave a modern touch to an aspect which might
else have been too rigorously antique. A droll little pseudo-anecdote,
set by Theodore de Banville in his inimitable amalgam of wit and fancy,
illuminates the effect which Leconte de Lisle produced upon his
contemporaries. I take it from that delicious volume, too little
remembered to-day, the _Camees Parisiens_, of 1873:
Leconte de Lisle was walking with AEschylus one day, in the ideal
fatherland of tragedy, when, while he was conversing with the old
hero of Salamis and of Platea, he suddenly observed that his
companion was so bald that a tortoise might easily mistake his
skull for a polished rock. Not wishing, therefore, to humiliate the
titanic genius, and yet not able without regret to give up an
ornament the indispensable beauty of which was obvious, he made up
his mind to be totally bald in front, while retaining on the back
of his head the silken and curly wealth of an Apollonian
_chevelure_.
It was perhaps in the course of these walks with AEschylus that Leconte
de Lisle formed the habit of spelling Clytemnestre "Klytaimnestra." The
austerities of his orthography attracted a great deal of attention, and
cannot be said to have succeeded in remoulding French or spelling.
People continue to write "Cain," although the poet insisted on "Kain,"
and even, in his sternest moments, on "Qain." He believed that his text
gained picturesqueness, and even exactitude of impression, by those
curious archaisms. They are, at least, characteristic of the movement of
his mind, and the reader who is offended by them must have come to the
reading with a determination to be displeased. His vocabulary is more
difficult; and sometimes, it must be confessed, more questionable. He
uses, without explanation or introduction, the most extraordinary terms.
Ancient Roman emperors are said to have shown their largess by putting
real pearls into the dishes which they set before their guests. This was
generous; but the guest who broke his tooth upon a gift must have wished
that the pearl had been more conventionally bestowed upon him. So the
reader of Leconte de Lisle may be excused if he resents the sudden
apparition of such strange words as "bobres," "bigaylles," and
"pennbaz" in the text of this charming poet.
In spite of these eccentricities, which are in fact quite superficial,
and in spite of a suspicion of pedantry which occasionally holds the
reader's attention at arm's length, there is no French poet of our day
more worthy of the attention of a serious English student. Leconte de
Lisle cultivated the art of poetry with the most strenuous dignity and
impersonality. He had a great reverence for the French language, and not
a little of the zeal of the classic writers of the seventeenth century
who aimed at the technical perfection of literature. He is lucid and
direct almost beyond parallel. In England, among those who approach
French literature with more enthusiasm than judgment, there is a
tendency to plunge at once into what is fashionable for the moment on
the Boulevard Saint Michel. We have seen British girls and boys
affecting to appreciate Verlaine, and even Mallarme, without having the
smallest acquaintance with Racine or Alfred de Vigny. It is pure
snobisme to pretend to admire Prose pour Des Esseintes when you are
unable to construe Montaigne. For all such foreign folly, the rigorous
versification, the pure and lucid language, and the luminous fancy of
Leconte de Lisle may be recommended as a medicine.
TWO FRENCH CRITICS
EMILE FAGUET--REMY DE GOURMONT
The importance of literary criticism in the higher education of a race
has been recognized in no country in the world except France. Elsewhere
there have arisen critics of less, or more, or even of extreme merit,
but nowhere else has there been a systematic training in literature
which has embraced a whole generation, and has been intimately combined
with ethics. The line of action which Matthew Arnold vainly and
pathetically urged on the Anglo-Saxon world has been unobtrusively but
most effectively taken by France for now more than half a century. When
the acrid and ridiculous controversy between the Classical and the
Romantic schools died down, criticism in France became at once more
reasonable and more exact. The fatuous formula which has infected all
races, and is not yet extirpated in this country--the "I do not like
you, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell"--passed into desuetude. It
was implicitly recognized that it is your duty, if you express a view,
to be able to "tell" on what principles it is founded. In fact, if we
concentrate our attention on the progress of French professional
criticism, we see it becoming steadily more philosophical and less
empirical.
But about 1875, after the period of Taine and Renan, and, in a quite
other field, after that of Gautier and Paul de Saint Victor, we find
criticism in Paris rapidly tending in two important directions, becoming
on the one hand more and more exact, almost scientific, on the other
daringly personal and impressionist. Ferdinand Brunetiere, who was a man
of extraordinary force of character, gave a colour to the whole scheme
of literary instruction throughout France. He resisted the idea that
literature was merely an entertainment or a pastime. He asserted that it
was the crown and apex of a virile education, and he declared its aim to
be the maintenance and progress of morality. With Brunetiere everything
was a question of morals. He was a strong man, and a fighting man; he
enjoyed disputation and snuffed the breath of battle. He advanced the
impersonality of literature and stamped on the pride of authors. In the
year 1900, an observer glancing round professorial circles had to admit
that the influence of Brunetiere had become paramount. His arbitrary
theory of the _evolution des genres_, founded on Herbert Spencer and
Darwin, and applied to the study of literature, pervaded the schools.
But the vehement tradition of Brunetiere was undermined from the first
by his two greatest rivals, Anatole France and Jules Lemaitre, whose
character was the exact opposite of his. They were "impressionist"
critics, occupied with their own personal adventures among books, and
not actively concerned with ethics. Their influence, especially that of
Lemaitre, since Anatole France retired from criticism before the close
of the century, tempered what was rigid and insensitive in the
too-vehement dogmatism of Brunetiere, but they did not form a camp
distinct from his. The sodality of the French Academy kept them together
in a certain happy harmony, in spite of their contrast of character.
Brunetiere died in 1906, Lemaitre in 1914; the effect of the one upon
education, of the other upon social culture, had been immense, but it
had not advanced since 1900. With the new century, new forces had come
into prominence, and of the two most important of these we speak to-day.
It was the fate of France to lose, within a few months, the two most
prominent critics of the period succeeding that of which I have just
spoken. The death of Emile Faguet and of Remy de Gourmont marks another
stage in the progress of criticism, and closes another chapter in its
history. That their methods and modes of life were excessively
different; that their efforts, if not hostile, were persistently
opposed; that one was the most professorial of professors, the other the
freest of free lances; that each, in a word, desired to be what the
other was not; adds a piquancy to the task of considering them side by
side. The first thing we perceive, in such a parallel, is the
superficial contrast; the second is the innate similitude, so developed
that these spirits in opposition are found in reality to represent, in a
sort of inimical unison, the whole attitude towards literature of the
generation in which they flourished. Their almost simultaneous
disappearance leaves the field clear for other procedures under their
guidance. In the extremely copious published writings of these two
eminent men the name of each of them will scarcely be found. They
worked, in their intense and fervid spheres, out of sight of one
another. But, now both are dead, it is interesting to see how close to
each other they were in their essential attitude, and how typical their
activity is of the period between 1895 and 1915.
If anyone should rashly engage to write the life of Emile Faguet, he
would find himself limited to the task of composing what the critic
himself, in speaking of Montaigne, calls "the memoirs of a man who never
had any occupation but thinking." Through the whole of a life which
approached the term of threescore years and ten, Faguet was absorbed,
more perhaps than any other man of his time, in the contemplation of the
printed page. He said of himself, "I have never stopped reading, except
to write, nor writing, except to read." In any other country but France,
this preoccupation would have led to dreariness and pedantry, if not to
a permanent and sterile isolation. But in France purely literary
criticism, the examination and constant re-examination of the classics
of the nation, takes an honoured and a vivid place in the education of
the young. The literary teaching of the schools is one of the moral and
intellectual forces of the France of to-day, and Faguet, who was the
very type, and almost the exaggeration, of that tendency in teaching,
was preserved from pedantry by the immense sympathy which surrounded
him. His capacity for comprehending books, and for making others
comprehend them, found response from a grateful and thirsty multitude of
students.
Emile Faguet was born, on the 17th of December, 1847, at La
Roche-sur-Yon, in Vendee, where his father was professor at the local
lycee. M. Victor Faguet, who had received a prize for a translation of
Sophocles into verse, nourished high academic ambitions for his son.
From the noiseless annals of the future critic's childhood a single
anecdote has been preserved, namely that, when he was a schoolboy, he
solemnly promised his father that he would become a member of the French
Academy. All his energy was centred towards that aim. He passed through
the regular course which attends young men who study for the
professoriate in France, and at last he became a professor himself at
Bordeaux, and then in Paris. But in that career, as Dr. Johnson
sententiously observed, "Unnumber'd suppliants croud Preferment's Gate,"
and at thirty-five Emile Faguet was still quite undistinguished. He saw
his juniors, and in particular Lemaitre and Brunetiere, speed far in
front of him, but he showed neither impatience nor ill-temper. Gradually
he became a writer, but it was not until 1885 that his _Les Grands
Maitres du XVIe Siecle_ attracted the attention of the public. He
began to be famous at the age of forty, when his _Etudes Litteraires sur
le XIXe Siecle_, clear, well arranged, amusing and informing, proved
to French readers that here was a provider of substantial literature,
always intelligent, never tiresome, who was exactly to their taste. From
that time forth the remaining thirty years of Faguet's life extended
themselves in a ceaseless cheerful industry of lecturing, writing, and
interpreting, which bore fruit in a whole library of published books,
perhaps surpassing in bulk what is known as the "output" of any other
mortal man.
Though ever more concerned with ideas than with persons, Faguet did not
disdain, in happy, brief, and salient lines, to sketch the authors who
had written the books he analysed. Let us attempt a portrait of himself
as he appeared in the later years of his life. No one ever less achieved
the conventional type of academician. His person was little known in
society, for he scarcely ever dined out. He had so long been a
provincial professor that he never threw off a country look. In sober
fact, Emile Faguet, with his brusque, stiff movements, his rough brush
of a black moustache, and his conscientious walk, looked more like a
non-commissioned officer in mufti than an ornament of the Institut. He
was active in the streets, stumping along with an umbrella always
pressed under his arm; on his round head there posed for ever a kind of
ancient billycock hat. He had a supreme disdain for dress, and for the
newspapers which made jokes about his clothing. He lived in a little
stuffy apartment in the Rue Monge--on the fifth storey, if I remember
right. He was an old bachelor, and the visitor, cordially welcomed to
his rooms, was struck by the chaos of books--chairs, tables, the floor
itself being covered with volumes, drowned in printed matter. Just space
enough swept out to hold the author's paper and ink was the only oasis
in the desert of books. I remember that, at the height of his fame and
prosperity, there was no artificial light in his rooms. That army of his
publications was marshalled by the sole aid of a couple of candles.
Everything about him, but especially the frank dark eyes lifted in his
ingenuous face, breathed an air of unaffected probity and simplicity,
and of a kind of softly hurrying sense that life was so short, and there
were so many books to read and to write, that there could be no time
left for nonsense.
His image will long recur to the inner vision of his friends, as he went
marching to his lecture or to his newspaper-office, nonchalant and easy,
with his hands in his pockets, his elbow squeezing that enormous
umbrella to his side. In the evening he would go, inelegantly dressed,
in the same loosely martial way, to the theatre, for which he had an
inordinate affection. He was not a "first-nighter," but dropped in to
see a new piece whenever he wanted copy for his _feuilleton_. His
lectures, it is reported, were familiar and conversational, with
frequent repetition and copious quotation, the whole poured out as a man
tells a story which he intimately knows, with an inexhaustible flow of
thoughts and facts. Sometimes he was so vivacious as to be a little
paradoxical, and led a laugh against himself. He stood before his
students, formidable only in his erudition, easy of approach, austere
and gay. His congested rooms in the Rue Monge were open to any young
inquirer, but it was observed that Faguet never asked what the name of
his visitor was, but how old he was. The younger the student, the less
dogmatic was the professor, but the more familiar, abundant,
sympathetic. It was noticeable in all his relations, with young and old
alike, that Faguet's one aim invariably seemed to be honestly to make
his interlocutor comprehend the matter in hand.
Some recollections of the outer presence of Emile Faguet should not be
without value to us in fixing the character of his inner life, the
spirit which pervaded his profuse and honest labour. No one in the
history of literature has been more distinguished for intellectual
probity; and no one has cared less for appearances, or for the
glorification of his own character and cleverness. His value as a critic
consists primarily in his capacity for thoroughly understanding what
each author under consideration meant by this or that expression of his
art. Faguet does not allow himself to be stung into eloquence by the
touch of a master-mind, as Lemaitre does, nor does he fly off from his
subject on the wings of an imperative suggestion, like Anatole France,
but he sticks close to the matter in hand, so close that he reaches
comprehension by becoming absorbed in it. There is no writer on
literature who has ever crept so completely into the skin of each old
author as Faguet has done. He makes the dry bones live; he resuscitates
the dead, and revives in them all that was essential in their original
life, all that was really vital in them, even if it be ultimately to
condemn the taste or the tendency exhibited. The first object with him
is to vivify; to analyse and dissect come next.
He was open to all impressions, and he was particularly admirable in his
periodical surveys of the four great centuries of French verse and
prose, because of his unflagging open-mindedness. He saw the living
thread of literary history, running, a pulsating stream, from Rabelais
to Flaubert. He had followed it so often, up and down, this way and
that, that no curve of it, no backwater was unfamiliar to him. Lassitude
is as unknown to Faguet as it was to Shelley's "Skylark." His curiosity
is always awake; no shadow of satiety ever comes near him. He was a
Titan in his way, but never a "weary Titan"; he never felt "the orb of
his fate," though it embraced so much, to be "too vast." The more
elaborate or complex an author was, the more actively and ingeniously
Faguet penetrated his work, smoothing out the complexities, throwing
light into every dark corner. But it is very proper to notice that even
where he devotes himself with what seems the most absorbing care to the
investigation of a particular mind, he is always essentially detached
from it, always ready to quit one tenement of genius and adapt himself
with alacrity to another, like a soldier-crab, whose tender extremity
will fit itself to any shell-habitation.