THOUGHTS IN A STRAND LODGING
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
pester 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 accompanied 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, and of the husband whom she was obliged to
leave; we have bid each other good-night, she has gone up the creaky
staircase. 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. I am 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._"
Yes it is indeed curious, and I will not spoil the piquancy of the moral by
a comment. No comment would help those to see who have eyes to see, no
comment would give sight to the hopelessly blind. Goncourt's statement is
eloquent and suggestive enough; I leave it a naked simple truth; but I
would put by its side another naked simple truth. This: If in England the
public prosecutor does not seek to override 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, Shelley, and
George Moore; 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. Baudelaire was wrong: that dog was a ----.
* * * * *
When I read Balzac's stories of Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempré, I often
think of Hadrian and the Antinous. I wonder if Balzac did dream 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 is the
present to the past! I hate with my whole soul this London lodging, and all
that concerns it--Emma, and eggs and bacon, the fat lascivious landlady and
her lascivious daughter; I am sick 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 weak leaf, it will flutter out of sight presently.
I am sick of everything; I wish I were back in Paris; I am sick of reading;
I have nothing to read. Flaubert bores me. What nonsense has been talked
about him! Impersonal! Nonsense, he is the most personal writer I know.
That odious pessimism! How sick I am of it, it never ceases, it is lugged
in _à tout dropos_, 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 some exquisite and powerful liqueur.
"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 mural, 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:--
FORGOTTEN PAGES
"Since Maria left me to go to another star--which? Orion, Altair, or thou,
green Venus? I have always cherished solitude. What long days I have passed
alone with my cat. By alone, I mean without a material being, and my cat is
a mystical companion--a spirit. I can, therefore, say that I have passed
whole days alone with my cat, and, alone with one of the last authors of
the Latin decadence; for since that white creature is no more, strangely
and singularly I have loved all that the word _fall_ expresses. In
such wise that my favourite season of the year is the last weary days of
summer, which immediately precede autumn, and the hour I choose to walk in
is when the sun rests before disappearing, with rays of yellow copper on
the grey walls and red copper on the tiles. In the same way the literature
that my soul demands--a sad voluptuousness--is the dying poetry of the last
moments of Rome, but before it has breathed at all the rejuvenating
approach of the barbarians, or has begun to stammer the infantile Latin of
the first Christian poetry.
"I was reading, therefore, one of those dear poems (whose paint has more
charm for me than the blush of youth), had plunged one hand into the fur of
the pure animal, when a barrel organ sang languidly and melancholy beneath
my window. It played in the great alley of poplars, whose leaves appear to
me yellow, even in the spring-tide, since Maria passed there with the tall
candles for the last time. The instrument is the saddest, yes, truly; the
piano scintillates, the violin opens the torn soul to the light, but the
barrel-organ, in the twilight of remembrance, made me dream despairingly.
Now it murmurs an air joyously vulgar which awakens joy in the heart of the
suburbs, an air old-fashioned and commonplace. Why do its flourishes go to
my soul, and make me weep like a romantic ballad? I listen, imbibing it
slowly, and I do not throw a penny out of the window for fear of moving
from my place, and seeing that the instrument is not singing itself.
II
"The old Saxony clock, which is slow, and which strikes thirteen amid its
flowers and gods, to whom did it belong? Thinkest that it came from Saxony
by the mail coaches of old time?
"(Singular shadows hang about the worn-out panes.)
"And thy Venetian mirror, deep as a cold fountain in its banks of gilt
work; what is reflected there? Ah! I am sure that more than one woman
bathed there in her beauty's sin; and, perhaps, if I looked long enough, I
should see a naked phantom.
"Wicked one, thou often sayest wicked things.
"(I see the spiders' webs above the lofty windows.)
"Our wardrobe is very old; see how the fire reddens its sad panels! the
weary curtains are as old, and the tapestry on the arm-chairs stripped of
paint, and the old engravings, and all these old things. Does it not seem
to thee that even these blue birds are discoloured by time?
"(Dream not of the spiders' webs that tremble above the lofty windows.)
"Thou lovest all that, and that is why I live by thee. When one of my poems
appeared, didst thou not desire, my sister, whose looks are full of
yesterdays, the words, the grace of faded things? New objects displease
thee; thee also do they frighten with their loud boldness, and thou feelest
as if thou shouldest use them--a difficult thing indeed to do, for thou
hast no taste for action.
"Come, close thy old German almanack that thou readest with attention,
though it appeared more than a hundred years ago, and the Kings it
announces are all dead, and, lying on this antique carpet, my head leaned
upon thy charitable knees, on the pale robe, oh! calm child, I will speak
with thee for hours; there are no fields, and the streets are empty, I will
speak to thee of our furniture.
"Thou art abstracted?
"(The spiders' webs are shivering above the lofty windows.)"
To argue about these forgotten pages would be futile. We, the "ten superior
persons scattered through the universe" think these prose poems the
concrete essence, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art,
others, those in the stalls, will judge them to be the aberrations of a
refined mind, distorted with hatred of the commonplace; the pit will
immediately declare them to be nonsense, and will return with satisfaction
to the last leading article in the daily paper.
* * * * *
"_J'ai fait mes adieux à ma mère et je viens pour vous faire les
miens_ and other absurdities by Ponson du Terrail amused us many a year
in France, and in later days similar bad grammar by Georges Ohnet has not
been lost upon us, but neither Ponson du Terrail nor Georges Ohnet sought
literary suffrage, such a thing could not be in France, but in England,
Rider Haggard, whose literary atrocities are more atrocious than his
accounts of slaughter, receives the attention of leading journals and
writes about the revival of Romance. As it is as difficult to write the
worst as the best conceivable sentence, I take this one and place it for
its greater glory in my less remarkable prose:--
"_As we gazed on the beauties thus revealed by Good, a spirit of
emulation filled our breasts, and we set to work to get ourselves up as
well as we could._"
A return to romance! a return to the animal, say I.
* * * * *
One thing that cannot be denied to the realists: a constant and intense
desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have
done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they
have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created,
how they have remodelled and refashioned the language in their untiring
striving for intensity of expression for the very osmazome of art, I am
lost in ultimate wonder and admiration. What Hugo did for French verse,
Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola, and Huysmans have done for French prose. No more
literary school than the realists has ever existed, and I do not except
even the Elizabethans. And for this our failures are more interesting than
the vulgar successes of our opponents; for when we fall into the sterile
and distorted, it is through our noble and incurable hatred of the
commonplace of all that is popular.
The healthy school is played out in England; all that could be said has
been said; the successors of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot have no
ideal, and consequently no language; what can be more pudding than the
language of Mr. Hardy, and he is typical of a dozen other writers, Mr.
Besant, Mr. Murray, Mr. Crawford? The reason of this heaviness of thought
and expression is that the avenues are closed, no new subject matter is
introduced, the language of English fiction has therefore run stagnant. But
if the realists should catch favour in England the English tongue may be
saved from dissolution, for with the new subjects they would introduce, new
forms of language would arise.
* * * * *
I wonder why murder is considered less immoral than fornication in
literature?
* * * * *
I feel that it is almost impossible for the same ear to seize music so
widely differing as Milton's blank verse and Hugo's alexandrines, and it
seems to me especially strange that critics varying in degree from Matthew
Arnold to the obscure paragraphist, never seem even remotely to suspect,
when they passionately declare that English blank verse is a more perfect
and complete poetic instrument than French alexandrines, that the
imperfections which they aver are inherent in the latter exist only in
their British ears, impervious to a thousand subtleties. Mr. Matthew Arnold
does not hesitate to say that the regular rhyming of the lines is
monotonous. To my ear every line is different; there is as much variation
in Charles V.'s soliloquy as in Hamlet's; but be this as it may, it is not
unworthy of the inmates of Hanwell for critics to inveigh against _la,
rime pleine_, that which is instinctive in the language as accent in
ours, that which is the very genius of the language.
But the principle has been exaggerated, deformed, caricatured until some of
the most modern verse is little more than a series of puns--in art as in
life the charm lies in the unexpected, and it is annoying to know that the
only thought of _every_ poet is to couple _les murs_ with _des
fruits trop mûrs_, and that no break in the absolute richness of sound
is to be hoped for. Gustave Kahn whose beautiful volume "Les Palais
Nomades" I have read with the keenest delight, was the first to recognise
that an unfailing use of _la rime pleine_ might become cloying and
satiating, and that, by avoiding it sometimes and markedly and maliciously
choosing in preference a simple assonance, new and subtle music might be
produced.
"Les Palais Nomades" is a really beautiful book, and it is free from all
the faults that make an absolute and supreme enjoyment of great poetry an
impossibility. For it is in the first place free from those pests and
parasites of artistic work--ideas. Of all literary qualities the creation
of ideas is the most fugitive. Think of the fate of an author who puts
forward a new idea to-morrow in a book, in a play, in a poem. The new idea
is seized upon, it becomes common property, it is dragged through newspaper
articles, magazine articles, through books, it is repeated in clubs,
drawing-rooms; it is bandied about the corners of streets; in a week it is
wearisome, in a month it is an abomination. Who has not felt a sickening
feeling come over him when he hears such phrases as "To be or not to be,
that is the question"? Shakespeare was really great when he wrote "Music to
hear, why hearest thou music sadly?" not when he wrote, "The apparel oft
proclaims the man." Could he be freed from his ideas what a poet we should
have! Therefore, let those who have taken firsts at Oxford devote their
intolerable leisure to preparing an edition from which everything
resembling an idea shall be firmly excluded. We might then shut up our
Marlowes and our Beaumonts and resume our reading of the bard, and these
witless beings would confer happiness on many, and crown themselves with
truly immortal bays. See the fellows! their fingers catch at scanty wisps
of hair, the lamps are burning, the long pens are poised, and idea after
idea is hurled out of existence.
Gustave Kahn took counsel of the past, and he has successfully avoided
everything that even a hostile critic might be tempted to term an idea; for
this I am grateful to him. Nor is his volume a collection of miscellaneous
verses bound together. He has chosen a certain sequence of emotions; the
circumstances out of which these emotions have sprung are given in a short
prose note. "Les Palais Nomades" is therefore a novel in essence;
description and analysis are eliminated, and only the moments when life
grows lyrical with suffering are recorded; recorded in many varying metres
conforming only to the play of the emotion, for, unlike many who, having
once discovered a tune, apply it promiscuously to every subject they treat,
Kahn adapts his melody to the emotion he is giving expression to, with the
same propriety and grace as Nature distributes perfume to her flowers. For
an example of magical transition of tone I turn to _Intermède_.
"Chère apparence viens aux couchants illuminés
Veux-tu mieux des matins albes et calmes
Les soirs et les matins ont des calmes rosâtres
Les eaux ont des manteaux de cristal irisé
Et des rythmes de calmes palmes
Et l'air évoque de calmes musique de pâtres.
* * * * *
Viens sous des tendelets aux fleuves souriants
Aux lilas pâlis des nuits d'Orient
Aux glauques étendues à falbalas d'argent
A l'oasis des baisers urgents
Seulement vit le voile aux seuls Orients.
* * * * *
Quel que soit le spectacle et quelle que soit la rame
Et quelle que soit la voix qui s'affame et brame,
L'oublié du lointain des jours chatouille et serre,
Le lotos de l'oubli s'est fané dans mes serres,
Cependant tu m'aimais à jamais?
Adieu pour jamais."
The repetitions of Edgar Poe seem hard and mechanical after this, so
exquisite and evanescent is the rhythm, and the intonations come as sweetly
and suddenly as a gust of perfume; it is as the vibration of a fairy
orchestra, flute and violin disappearing in a silver mist; but the clouds
break, and all the enchantment of a spring garden appears in a shaft of
sudden sunlight.
"L'éphémère idole, au frisson du printemps,
Sentant des renouveaux éclore,
Le guèpa de satins si lointains et d'antan
Rose exilés des flores!
"Le jardin rima ses branches de lilas;
Aux murs, les roses tremières;
La terre étala, pour fêter les las,
Des divans vert lumière;
"Des rires ailés peuplèrent le jardin;
Souriants des caresses brèves,
Des oiseaux joyeux, jaunes, incarnadins
Vibrèrent aux ciels de rêve."
But to the devil with literature, I am sick of it; who the deuce cares if
Gustave Kahn writes well or badly. Yesterday I met a chappie whose views of
life coincide with mine. "A ripping good dinner," he says; "get a skinful
of champagne inside you, go to bed when it is light, and get up when you
are rested." This seems to me as concise as it is admirable; indeed there
is little to add to it ... a note or two concerning women might come in,
but I don't know, "a skinful of champagne" implies everything.
Each century has its special ideal, the ideal of the nineteenth is a young
man. The seventeenth century is only woman--see the tapestries, the
delightful goddesses who have discarded their hoops and heels to appear in
still more delightful nakedness, the noble woods, the tall castles, with
the hunters looking round; no servile archaeology chills the fancy, it is
but a delightful whim; and this treatment of antiquity is the highest proof
of the genius of the seventeenth century. See the Fragonards--the ladies in
high-peaked bodices, their little ankles showing amid the snow of the
petticoats. Up they go; you can almost hear their light false voices into
the summer of the leaves, where Loves are garlanded even as of roses. Masks
and arrows are everywhere, all the machinery of light and gracious days. In
the Watteaus the note is more pensive; there is satin and sunset, plausive
gestures and reluctance--false reluctance; the guitar is tinkling, and
exquisite are the notes in the languid evening; and there is the Pierrot,
that marvellous white animal, sensual and witty and glad, the soul of the
century--ankles and epigrams everywhere, for love was not then sentimental,
it was false and a little cruel; see the furniture and the polished floor,
and the tapestries with whose delicate tints and decorations the high hair
blends, the footstool and the heel and the calf of the leg that is
withdrawn, showing in the shadows of the lace; look at the satin of the
bodices, the fan outspread, the wigs so adorably false, the knee-breeches,
the buckles on the shoes, how false; adorable little comedy, adorably
mendacious; and how sweet it is to feast on these sweet lies, it is a
divine delight to us, wearied with the hideous sincerity of newspapers.
Then it was the man who knelt at the woman's feet, it was the man who
pleaded and the woman who acceded; but in our century the place of the man
is changed, it is he who holds the fan, it is he who is besought; and if
one were to dream of continuing the tradition of Watteau and Fragonard in
the nineteenth century, he would have to take note of and meditate deeply
and profoundly on this, as he sought to formulate and synthesize the erotic
spirit of our age.
The position of a young man in the nineteenth century is the most enviable
that has ever fallen to the lot of any human creature. He is the rare bird,
and is fêted, flattered, adored. The sweetest words are addressed to him,
the most loving looks are poured upon him. The young man can do no wrong.
Every house is open to him, and the best of everything is laid before him;
girls dispute the right to serve him; they come to him with cake and wine,
they sit circle-wise and listen to him, and when one is fortunate to get
him alone she will hang round his neck, she will propose to him, and will
take his refusal kindly and without resentment. They will not let him stoop
to tie up his shoe lace, but will rush and simultaneously claim the right
to attend on him. To represent in a novel a girl proposing marriage to a
man would be deemed unnatural, but nothing is more common; there are few
young men who have not received at least a dozen offers, nay, more; it is
characteristic, it has become instinctive for girls to choose, and they
prefer men not to make love to them; and every young man who knows his
business avoids making advances, knowing well that it will only put the
girl off.
In a society so constituted, what a delightful opening there is for a young
man. He would have to waltz perfectly, play tennis fairly, the latest novel
would suffice for literary attainments; billiards, shooting, and hunting,
would not come in amiss, for he must not be considered a useless being by
men; not that women are much influenced by the opinion of men in their
choice of favourites, but the reflex action of the heart, although not so
marked as that of the stomach, exists and must be kept in view, besides a
man who would succeed with women, must succeed with men; the real Lovelace
is loved by all. Like gravitation, love draws all things. Our young man
would have to be five feet eleven, or six feet, broad shoulders, light
brown hair, deep eyes, soft and suggestive, broad shoulders, a thin neck,
long delicate hands, a high instep. His nose should be straight, his face
oval and small, he must be clean about the hips, and his movements must be
naturally caressing. He comes into the ball-room, his shoulders well back,
he stretches his hand to the hostess, he looks at her earnestly (it is
characteristic of him to think of the hostess first, he is in her house,
the house is well-furnished, and is suggestive of excellent meats and
wines). He can read through the slim woman whose black hair, a-glitter with
diamonds, contrasts with her white satin; an old man is talking to her, she
dances with him, and she refused a young man a moment before. This is a bad
sign; our Lovelace knows it; there is a stout woman of thirty-five, who is
looking at him, red satin bodice, doubtful taste. He looks away; a little
blonde woman fixes her eyes on him, she looks as innocent as a child;
instinctively our Lovelace turns to his host. "Who is that little blonde
woman over there, the right hand corner?" he asks. "Ah, that is Lady ----."
"Will you introduce me?" "Certainly." Lovelace has made up his mind. Then
there is a young oldish girl, richly dressed; "I hear her people have a
nice house in a hunting country, I will dance with her, and take the mother
into supper, and, if I can get a moment, will have a pleasant talk with the
father in the evening."
In manner Lovelace is facile and easy; he never says no, it is always yes,
ask him what you will; but he only does what he has made up his mind it is
his advantage to do. Apparently he is an embodiment of all that is
unselfish, for he knows that after he has helped himself, it is advisable
to help some one else, and thereby make a friend who, on a future occasion,
will be useful to him. Put a violinist into a room filled with violins, and
he will try every one. Lovelace will put each woman aside so quietly that
she is often only half aware that she has been put aside. Her life is
broken; she is content that it should be broken. The real genius for love
lies not in getting into, but getting out of love.
* * * * *
I have noticed that there are times when every second woman likes you. Is
love, then, a magnetism which we sometimes possess and exercise
unconsciously, and sometimes do not possess?