Awful Emma has undressed and put the last child away--stowed the last
child away in some mysterious and unapproachable corner that none knows
of but she; the fat landlady has ceased to loiter about my door, has
ceased to tempt me with offers of brandy and water, tea and toast, the
inducements that occur to her landlady's mind; the actress from the
Savoy has ceased to walk up and down the street with the young man who
accompanies her home from the theatre; she has ceased to linger on the
doorstep talking to him, her key has grated in the lock, she has come
upstairs, we have had our usual midnight conversation on the landing,
she has told me her latest hopes of obtaining a part, she has told me
of the husband whom she was obliged to leave; we have bidden each other
good-night; she has gone up the creaky staircase, and I have returned to
my room, littered with MS. and queer publications!...the night is hot
and heavy, but now a wind is blowing from the river, and listless and
lonely I open a book, the first book that comes to hand. It is _Le
Journal des Goncourts,_ p. 358, the end of a chapter:--
"_It is really curious that it should be the four men the most free from
all taint of handicraft and all base commercialism, the four pens the
most entirely devoted to art, that were arraigned before the public
prosecutor: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and ourselves_."
Goncourt's statement is suggestive, and I leave it uncommented on; but I
would put by its side another naked simple truth. That if in England the
public prosecutor does not seek to over-ride literature the means of
tyranny are not wanting, whether they be the tittle-tattle of the
nursery or the lady's drawing-room, or the shameless combinations
entered into by librarians.... In England as in France those who loved
literature the most purely, who were the least mercenary in their love,
were marked out for persecution, and all three were driven into exile.
Byron and Shelley, and Swinburne, he, too, who loved literature for its
own sake, was forced, amid cries of indignation and horror, to withdraw
his book from the reach of a public that was rooting then amid the
garbage of the Yelverton divorce case. I think of these facts and think
of Baudelaire's prose poem, that poem in which he tells how a dog will
run away howling if you hold to him a bottle of choice scent, but if you
offer him some putrid morsel picked out of some gutter hole, he will
sniff round it joyfully, and will seek to lick your hand for gratitude.
Baudelaire compared that dog to the public.
When I read Balzac's stories of Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempré, I often
think of Hadrian and the Antinous. I wonder if Balzac thought of
transposing the Roman Emperor and his favourite into modern life. It is
the kind of thing that Balzac would think of. No critic has ever noticed
this.
Sometimes, at night, when all is still, and I look out on that desolate
river, I think I shall go mad with grief, with wild regret for my
beautiful _appartement_ in _Rue de la Tour des Dames_. How different
the present from the past! I hate with my whole soul this London
lodging, and all that concerns it--Emma, and eggs and bacon, the
lascivious landlady and her lascivious daughter; I am weary of the
sentimental actress who lives upstairs, I swear I will never go out to
talk to her on the landing again. Then there is failure--I can do
nothing, nothing; my novel I know is worthless; my life is a leaf, it
will flutter out of sight. I am weary of everything, and wish I were
back in Paris. I am weary of reading, there is nothing to read, Flaubert
bores me. What nonsense has been talked about him! Impersonal! He is the
most personal writer. But his odious pessimism! How weary I am of it, it
never ceases, it is lugged in _à tout propos_, and the little lyrical
phrase with which he winds up every paragraph, how boring it is.
Happily, I have "A Rebours" to read, that prodigious book, that
beautiful mosaic. Huysmans is quite right, ideas are well enough until
you are twenty, afterwards only words are bearable...a new idea, what
can be more insipid--fit for members of parliament. Shall I go to bed?
No. I wish I had a volume of Verlaine, or something of Mallarmé's to
read--Mallarmé for preference. I remember Huysmans speaks of Mallarmé in
"A Rebours." In hours like these a page of Huysmans is as a dose of
opium, a glass of something exquisite and spirituous.
"The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism,
weakened by the age of ideas, overworn by the excess of syntax, sensible
only of the curiosity which fevers sick people, but nevertheless
hastening to explain everything in its decline, desirous of repairing
all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle
souvenirs of its suffering on its deathbed, is incarnate in Mallarmé in
most consummate and absolute fashion....
"The poem in prose is the form, above all others, they prefer; handled
by an alchemist of genius, it should contain in a state of meat the
entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous
description of which it suppresses...the adjective placed in such an
ingenious and definite way, that it could not be legally dispossessed of
its place, would open up such perspectives, that the reader would dream
for whole weeks together on its meaning at once precise and multiple,
affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the
souls of the characters revealed by the light of the unique epithet. The
novel thus understood, thus condensed into one or two pages, would be a
communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a
spiritual collaboration by consent between ten superior persons
scattered through the universe, a delectation offered to the most
refined, and accessible only to them."
Huysmans goes to my soul like a gold ornament of Byzantine workmanship:
there is in his style the yearning charm of arches, a sense of ritual,
the passion of the Gothic, of the window. Ah! in this hour of weariness
for one of Mallarmé's prose poems! Stay, I remember I have some numbers
of _La Vogue_, One of the numbers contains, I know, "Forgotten Pages;" I
will translate word for word, preserving the very rhythm, one or two of
these miniature marvels of diction:--
I