A Japanese dressing-gown, the ideality of whose tissue delights me, some
fresh honey and milk set by this couch hung with royal fringes; and
having partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack, my great
python crawling about after a two months' fast. I tie up a guinea-pig to
the _tabouret_, pure Louis XV., the little beast struggles and squeaks,
the snake, his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the
oscillations...now he strikes; and with what exquisite gourmandise he
lubricates and swallows.
Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is playing a Gregorian chant,
that beautiful hymn, the "Vexilla Regis," by Saint Fortunatus, the great
poet of the Middle Ages. And, having turned over the leaves of "Les
Fêtes Galantes," I sit down to write.
My original intention was to write some thirty or forty stories varying
from thirty to three hundred lines in length. The nature of these
stories is easy to imagine: there was the youth who wandered by night
into a witches' sabbath, and was disputed for by the witches, young and
old. There was the light o' love who went into the desert to tempt the
holy man; but he died as he yielded; his arms stiffened by some miracle,
and she was unable to free herself; she died of starvation, as her
bondage loosened in decay. I had increased my difficulties by adopting
as part of my task the introduction of all sorts of elaborate, and in
many cases extravagantly composed metres, and I had begun to feel that I
was working in sand, I could make no progress, the house I was raising
crumbled and fell away on every side. These stories had one merit: they
were all, so far as I can remember, perfectly constructed. For the art
of telling a story clearly and dramatically, _selon les procédés de M.
Scribe_, I had thoroughly learnt from old M. Duval, the author of a
hundred and sixty plays, written in collaboration with more than a
hundred of the best writers of his day, including the master himself,
Gautier. I frequently met M. Duval at breakfast at a neighbouring
_café_, and our conversation turned on _l'exposition de la pièce,
préparer la situation, nous aurons des larmes_, etc. One day, as I sat
waiting for him, I took up the _Voltaire_. It contained an article by M.
Zola. _Naturalisme, la vérité, la science,_ were repeated some
half-a-dozen times. Hardly able to believe my eyes, I read that you
should write, with as little imagination as possible, that plot in a
novel or in a play was illiterate and puerile, and that the art of M.
Scribe was an art of strings and wires, etc. I rose up from breakfast,
ordered my coffee, and stirred the sugar, a little dizzy, like one who
has received a violent blow on the head.
Echo-augury! Words heard in an unexpected quarter, but applying
marvellously well to the besetting difficulty of the moment. The reader
who has followed me so far will remember the instant effect the word
"Shelley" had upon me in childhood, and how it called into existence a
train of feeling that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many
years, until it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the
reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of
the word "France" awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final
ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led
to the creation of a mental existence.
And now for a third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and
inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the
new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled,
and I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile
eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any
semblance of life, passionless in all their passion.
I had read a few chapters of the "Assommoir," as it appeared in _La
République des Lettres_; I had cried, "ridiculous, abominable," only
because it is characteristic of me to instantly form an opinion and
assume at once a violent attitude. But now I bought up the back numbers
of the _Voltaire_, and I looked forward to the weekly exposition of the
new faith with febrile eagerness. The great zeal with which the new
master continued his propaganda, and the marvellous way in which
subjects the most diverse, passing events, political, social, religious,
were caught up and turned into arguments for, or proof of the truth of
naturalism astonished me wholly. The idea of a new art based upon
science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on
imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern
life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a
new creed in a new civilisation, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb
before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the
ambition. In my fevered fancy I saw a new race of writers that would
arise, and with the aid of the novel would continue to a more glorious
and legitimate conclusion the work that the prophets had begun; and at
each development of the theory of the new art and its universal
applicability, my wonder increased and my admiration choked me. If any
one should be tempted to turn to the books themselves to seek an
explanation of this wild ecstasy, he would find nothing--as well drink
the dregs of yesterday's champagne. One is lying before me now, and as I
glance through the pages listlessly I say, "Only the simple crude
statements of a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision."
Still, although eager and anxious for the fray, I did not see how I was
to participate in it. I was not a novelist, not yet a dramatic author,
and the possibility of a naturalistic poet seemed to me not a little
doubtful. I had clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be
for ever banished; there were to be no harps and lutes in our heaven,
only drums; and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the
simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen,
sounded, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to
whisper), not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had
declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly
naturalistic; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so
important a branch of literature as poetry, no matter how contemptible
he might think it. If he could find nothing to praise, he must at least
condemn. At last the expected article came. It was all that could be
desired by one in my fever of mind. Hugo's claims had been previously
disproven, but now Banville and Gautier were declared to be warmed-up
dishes of the ancient world; Baudelaire was a naturalist, but he had
been spoilt by the romantic influence of his generation. _Cependant_
there were indications of the naturalistic movement even in poetry. I
trembled with excitement, I could not read fast enough. Coppée had
striven to simplify language; he had versified the street cries,
_Achetez la France, le Soir, le Rappel_; he had sought to give utterance
to humble sentiments as in "Le Petit Epicier de Montrouge," the little
grocer _qui cassait le sucre avec mélancolie_; Richepin had boldly and
frankly adopted the language of the people in all its superb crudity.
All this was, however, preparatory and tentative. We are waiting for our
poet, he who will sing to us fearlessly of the rude industry of dustmen
and the comestible glories of the market-places. The subjects are to
hand, the formula alone is wanting.
The prospect dazzled me; I tried to calm myself. Had I the stuff in me
to win and to wear these bays, this stupendous laurel crown?--bays,
laurel crown, a distinct _souvenir_ of Parnassus, but there is no modern
equivalent, I must strive to invent a new one, in the meantime let me
think. True it is that Swinburne was before me with the "Romantiques."
The hymn to Proserpine and Dolores are wonderful lyrical versions of
Mdlle. de Maupin. In form the Leper is old English, the colouring is
Baudelaire, but the rude industry of the dustmen and the comestible
glories of the market-place shall be mine. _A bas "Les Roses de
Minuit"_!
I felt the "naturalisation" of the "Roses of Midnight" would prove a
difficult task. I soon found it an impossible one, and I laid the poems
aside and commenced a volume redolent of the delights of Bougival and
Ville d'Avray. This book was to be entitled "Poems of 'Flesh and
Blood.'"
"_Elle mit son plus beau chapeau, son chapeau bleu_" ...and then? Why,
then picking up her skirt she threads her way through the crowded
streets, reads the advertisements on the walls, hails the omnibus,
inquires at the _concierge's_ loge, murmurs as she goes upstairs, "_Que
c'est haut le cinquième_," and then? Why, the door opens, and she
cries, "_Je t'aime_"
But it was the idea of the new æstheticism--the new art corresponding to
modern, as ancient art corresponded to ancient life--that captivated me,
that led me away, and not a substantial knowledge of the work done by
the naturalists. I had read the "Assommoir," and had been much impressed
by its pyramid size, strength, height, and decorative grandeur, and also
by the immense harmonic development of the idea; and the fugal treatment
of the different scenes had seemed to me astonishingly new--the
washhouse, for example: the fight motive is indicated, then follows the
development of side issues, then comes the fight motive explained; it is
broken off short, it flutters through a web of progressive detail, the
fight motive is again taken up, and now it is worked out in all its
fulness; it is worked up to _crescendo_, another side issue is
introduced, and again the theme is given forth. And I marvelled greatly
at the lordly, river-like roll of the narrative, sometimes widening out
into lakes and shallowing meres, but never stagnating in fen or
marshlands. The language, too, which I did not then recognise as the
weak point, being little more than a boiling down of Chateaubriand and
Flaubert, spiced with Goncourt, delighted me with its novelty, its
richness, its force. Nor did I then even roughly suspect that the very
qualities which set my admiration in a blaze wilder than wildfire, being
precisely those that had won the victory for the romantic school forty
years before, were very antagonistic to those claimed for the new art; I
was deceived, as was all my generation, by a certain externality, an
outer skin, a nearness, _un approchement_; in a word, by a substitution
of Paris for the distant and exotic backgrounds so beloved of the
romantic school. I did not know then, as I do now, that art is eternal,
that it is only the artist that changes, and that the two great
divisions--the only possible divisions--are: those who have talent, and
those who have no talent. But I do not regret my errors, my follies; it
is not well to know at once of the limitations of life and things. I
should be less than nothing had it not been for my enthusiasms; they
were the saving clause in my life.
But although I am apt to love too dearly the art of my day, and to the
disparagement of that of other days, I did not fall into the fatal
mistake of placing the realistic writers of 1877 side by side with and
on the same plane of intellectual vision as the great Balzac; I felt
that that vast immemorial mind rose above them all, like a mountain
above the highest tower.
And, strange to say, it was Gautier that introduced me to Balzac; for
mention is made in the wonderful preface to "Les Fleurs du Mal" of
Seraphita: Seraphita, Seraphitus; which is it?--woman or man? Should
Wilfred or Mona be the possessor? A new Mdlle. de Maupin, with royal
lily and aureole, cloud-capped mountains, great gulfs of sea-water
flowing up and reflecting as in a mirror the steep cliff's side; the
straight white feet are set thereon, the obscuring weft of flesh is
torn, and the pure, strange soul continues its mystical exhortations.
Then the radiant vision, a white glory, the last outburst and
manifestation, the trumpets of the apocalypse, the colour of heaven, the
closing of this stupendous allegory--Seraphita lying dead in the rays of
the first sun of the nineteenth century.
I, therefore, had begun, as it were, to read Balzac backwards; instead
of beginning with the plain, simple, earthly tragedy of the Père Goriot,
I first knelt in a beautiful but distant coigne of the great world of
his genius--Seraphita. Certain _nuances_ of soul are characteristic of
certain latitudes, and what subtle instinct led him to Norway in quest
of this fervent soul? The instincts of genius are unfathomable? but he
who has known the white northern women with their pure spiritual eyes,
will aver that instinct led him aright. I have known one, one whom I
used to call Seraphita; Coppée knew her too, and that exquisite volume,
"L'Exilé," so Seraphita-like in the keen blonde passion of its verse,
was written to her, and each poem was sent to her as it was written.
Where is she now, that flower of northern snow, once seen for a season
in Paris? Has she returned to her native northern solitudes, great gulfs
of sea water, mountain rock, and pine?
Balzac's genius is in his titles as heaven is in its stars: "Melmoth
Reconcilié," "Jesus-Christ en Flandres," "Le Revers d'un Grand Homme,"
"La Cousine Bette." I read somewhere not very long ago, that Balzac was
the greatest thinker that had appeared in France since Pascal. Of
Pascal's claim to be a great thinker I confess I cannot judge. No man is
greater than the age he lives in, and, therefore, to talk to us, the
legitimate children of the nineteenth century, of logical proofs of the
existence of God strikes us in just the same light as the logical proof
of the existence of Jupiter Ammon. "Les Pensées" could appear to me only
as infinitely childish; the form is no doubt superb, but tiresome and
sterile to one of such modern and exotic taste as myself. Still, I
accept thankfully, in its sense of two hundred years, the compliment
paid to Balzac; but I would add that personally he seems to me to have
shown greater wings of mind than any artist that ever lived. I am aware
that this last statement will make many cry "fool" and hiss
"Shakespeare"! But I am not putting forward these criticisms
axiomatically, but only as the expressions of an individual taste, and
interesting so far as they reveal to the reader the different
developments and the progress of my mind. It might prove a little
tiresome, but it would no doubt "look well," in the sense that going to
church "looks well," if I were to write in here ten pages of praise of
our national bard. I must, however, resist the temptation to "look
well"; a confession is interesting in proportion to the amount of truth
it contains, and I will, therefore, state frankly I never derived any
profit whatsoever, and very little pleasure from the reading of the
great plays. The beauty of the verse! Yes; he who loved Shelley so well
as I could not fail to hear the melody of--
"Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy."
Is not such music as this enough? Of course, but I am a sensualist in
literature. I may see perfectly well that this or that book is a work of
genius, but if it doesn't "fetch me," it doesn't concern me, and I
forget its very existence. What leaves me cold to-day will madden me
to-morrow. With me literature is a question of sense, intellectual sense
if you will, but sense all the same, and ruled by the same
caprices--those of the flesh? Now we enter on very subtle distinctions.
No doubt that there is the brain-judgment and the sense-judgment of a
work of art. And it will be noticed that these two forces of
discrimination exist sometimes almost independently of each other, in
rare and radiant instances confounded and blended in one immense and
unique love. Who has not been, unless perhaps some dusty old pedant,
thrilled and driven to pleasure by the action of a book that penetrates
to and speaks to you of your most present and most intimate emotions.
This is of course pure sensualism; but to take a less marked stage. Why
should Marlowe enchant me? why should he delight and awake enthusiasm in
me, while Shakespeare leaves me cold? The mind that can understand one
can understand the other, but there are affinities in literature
corresponding to, and very analogous to, sexual affinities--the same
unreasoned attractions, the same pleasures, the same lassitudes. Those
we have loved most we are most indifferent to. Shelley, Gautier, Zola,
Flaubert, Goncourt! how I have loved you all; and now I could not, would
not, read you again. How womanly, how capricious; but even a capricious
woman is constant, if not faithful to her _amant de cœur_. And so with
me; of those I have loved deeply there is but one that still may thrill
me with the old passion, with the first ecstasy--it is Balzac. Upon that
rock I built my church, and his great and valid talent saved me often
from destruction, saved me from the shoaling waters of new æstheticisms,
the putrid mud of naturalism, and the faint and sickly surf of the
symbolists. Thinking of him, I could not forget that it is the spirit
and not the flesh that is eternal; that, as it was thought that in the
first instance gave man speech, so to the end it shall still be thought
that shall make speech beautiful and rememberable. The grandeur and
sublimity of Balzac's thoughts seem to me to rise to the loftiest
heights, and his range is limitless; there is no passion he has not
touched, and what is more marvellous, he has given to each in art a
place equivalent to the place it occupies in nature; his intense and
penetrating sympathy for human life and all that concerns it enabled him
to surround the humblest subjects with awe and crown them with the light
of tragedy. There are some, particularly those who can understand
neither and can read but one, who will object to any comparison being
drawn between the Dramatist and the Novelist; but I confess that I--if
the inherent superiority of verse over prose, which I admit
unhesitatingly, be waived--that I fail, utterly fail to see in what
Shakespeare is greater than Balzac. The range of the poet's thought is
of necessity not so wide, and his concessions must needs be greater than
the novelist's. On these points we will cry quits, and come at once to
the vital question--the creation. Is Lucien inferior to Hamlet? Is
Eugénie Grandet inferior to Desdemona? Is her father inferior to
Shylock? Is Macbeth inferior to Vautrin? Can it be said that the
apothecary in the "Cousine Bette," or the Baron Hulot, or the Cousine
Bette herself is inferior to anything the brain of man has ever
conceived? And it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare has had three
hundred years and the advantage of stage representation to impress his
characters on the sluggish mind of the world; and as mental impressions
are governed by the same laws of gravitation as atoms, our realisation
of Falstaff must of necessity be more vivid than any character in
contemporary literature, although it were equally great. And so far as
epigram and aphorism are concerned, and here I speak with absolute
sincerity and conviction, the work of the novelist seems to me richer
than that of the dramatist. Who shall forget those terrible words of the
poor life-weary orphan in the boarding-house? Speaking of Vautrin she
says, "His look frightens me as if he put his hand on my dress"; and
another epigram from the same book, "Woman's virtue is man's greatest
invention." Find me anything in La Rochefoucauld that goes more
incisively to the truth of things. One more; here I can give the exact
words: "_La gloire est le soleil des morts_." It would be easy to
compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all "Maximes" and
"Pensées," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and
shallow.
Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading
culminated in the "Comédie Humaine." I no doubt fluttered through some
scores of other books, of prose and verse, sipping a little honey, but
he alone left any important or lasting impression upon my mind. The rest
was like walnuts and wine, an agreeable aftertaste.
But notwithstanding all this reading I can lay no claim to scholarship
of any kind; for save life I could never learn anything correctly. I am
a student only of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets, and alcoves. I have
read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I
remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and
my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave
inquietude,--study as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering
of ideas taken in flight. But in me the impulse is so original to
frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the
breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring
from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is
in me the generating force; without this what invention I have is thin
and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly,
as it did in the composition of my unfortunate "Roses of Midnight."
Men and women, oh the strength of the living faces! conversation, oh the
magic of it! It is a fabulous river of gold where the precious metal is
washed up without stint for all to take, to take as much as he can
carry. Two old ladies discussing the peerage? Much may be learned, it is
gold; poets and wits, then it is fountains whose spray solidifies into
jewels, and every herb and plant is begemmed with the sparkle of the
diamond and the glow of the ruby.
I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the "Nouvelle
Athènes." What is the "Nouvelle Athènes"? He who would know anything of
my life must know something of the academy of the fine arts. Not the
official stupidity you read of in the daily papers, but the real French
academy, the _café_. The "Nouvelle Athènes" is a _café_ on the Place
Pigale. Ah! the morning idlenesses and the long evenings when life was
but a summer illusion, the grey moonlights on the Place where we used
to stand on the pavements, the shutters clanging up behind us, loath to
separate, thinking of what we had left said, and how much better we
might have enforced our arguments. Dead and scattered are all those who
used to assemble there, and those years and our home, for it was our
home, live only in a few pictures and a few pages of prose. The same old
story, the vanquished only are victorious; and though unacknowledged,
though unknown, the influence of the "Nouvelle Athènes" is inveterate in
the artistic thought of the nineteenth century.
How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth. With what
strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear,--see the white
face of that _café_, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching
up to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of
those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass
door of the _café_ grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the
smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter,
the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o'clock the
fragrant odour of absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends
from the kitchen; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of
cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer. A partition, rising a few feet or
more over the hats, separates the glass front from the main body of the
_café_. The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and
æstheticised till two o'clock in the morning. But who is that man? he
whose prominent eyes flash with excitement. That is Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam. The last or the supposed last of the great family. He is
telling that girl a story--that fair girl with heavy eyelids, stupid and
sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished and interested, and he is
striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to him. "Spain--the night is
fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange trees, you know--a
midnight of stars and dreams. Now and then the silence is broken by the
sentries challenging--that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are
the challenges given; the town is in the hands of the French; it is
under martial law. But now an officer passes down a certain garden, a
Spaniard disguised as a French officer; from the balcony the family--one
of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a thousand
years, long before the conquest of the Moors--watches him. Well
then"--Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is
falling over his face--he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in
the opening of the story, and he is striving in English to "scamp," in
French to _escamoter_. "The family are watching, death if he is caught,
if he fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague
sound attracts the sentry, he turns; all is lost. The Spaniard is
seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French
general is a man of iron." (Villiers laughs, a short, hesitating laugh
that is characteristic of him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain
way), "man of iron; not only he declares that the spy must be beheaded,
but also the entire family--a man of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no you
cannot, it is impossible for you to understand the enormity of the
calamity--a thousand years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard
alone could--there is no one here, ha, ha, I was forgetting--the utter
extinction of a great family of the name, the oldest and noblest of all
the families in Spain, it is not easy to understand that, no, not easy
here in the 'Nouvelle Athènes'--ha, ha, one must belong to a great
family to understand, ha, ha.
"The father beseeches, he begs that one member may be spared to continue
the name--the youngest son--that is all; if he could be saved, the rest
what matter; death is nothing to a Spaniard; the family, the name, a
thousand years of name is everything. The general is, you know, a 'man
of iron.' 'Yes, one member of your family shall be respited, but on one
condition.' To the agonised family conditions are as nothing. But they
don't know the man of iron is determined to make a terrible example, and
they cry, 'Any conditions.' 'He who is respited must serve as
executioner to the others.' Great is the doom; you understand; but after
all the name must be saved. Then in the family council the father goes
to his youngest son and says, 'I have been a good father to you, my son;
I have always been a kind father, have I not? answer me; I have never
refused you anything. Now you will not fail us, you will prove yourself
worthy of the great name you bear. Remember your great ancestor who
defeated the Moors, remember.'" (Villiers strives to get in a little
local colour, but his knowledge of Spanish names and history is limited,
and he in a certain sense fails.) "Then the mother comes to her son and
says, 'My son, I have been a good mother, I have always loved you; say
you will not desert us in this hour of our great need.' Then the little
sister comes, and the whole family kneels down and appeals to the
horror-stricken boy....
"'He will not prove himself unworthy of our name,' cries the father.
'Now, my son, courage, take the axe firmly, do what I ask you, courage,
strike straight.' The father's head falls into the sawdust, the blood
all over the white beard; then comes the elder brother, and then another
brother; and then, oh, the little sister was almost more than he could
bear, and the mother had to whisper, 'Remember your promise to your
father, to your dead father.' The mother laid her head on the block, but
he could not strike. 'Be not the first coward of our name, strike;
remember your promise to us all,' and her head was struck off."
"And the son," the girl asks, "what became of him?"
"He never was seen, save at night, walking, a solitary man, beneath the
walls of his castle in Granada."
"And whom did he marry?"
"He never married."