There is a memorable passage in A Rebours, the transcription of which,
by Mr. George Moore, may be helpful in understanding the work of that
rare literary artist, Francis Poictevin. "The poem in prose," wrote
Huysmans, "handled by an alchemist of genius, should contain the
quintessence, 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, that the reader would dream for
whole weeks together over its meaning, at once precise and multiple;
affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the
souls 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."
This aristocratic theory of art was long ago propounded by Poe in
regard to the short poem. Huysmans transposed the idea to the key of
fiction while describing the essential prose of Mallarmé; but some
years before the author of A Rebours wrote his ideal book on decadence
a modest young Frenchman had put into practice the delightfully
impracticable theories of the prose poem. This writer was Francis
Poictevin (born at Paris, 1854). Many there were, beginning with Edgar
Poe and Louis Bertrand, who had essayed the form, at its best extremely
difficult, at its worst too tempting to facile conquests: Baudelaire,
Huysmans in his Le Drageoir aux Epices; Daudet, De Banville, Villiers
de l'Isle Adam, Maurice de Guérin, and how many others! During the
decade of the eighties the world of literature seemed to be fabricating
poems in prose. Pale youths upon whose brows descended aureoles at
twilight, sought fame in this ivory miniature carving addressed to the
"ten superior persons" very much scattered over the globe. But like
most peptonic products, the brain as does the stomach, finally refuses
to accept as nourishment artificial concoctions too heavily flavoured
with midnight oil. The world which is gross prefers its literature by
the gross, and though it has been said that all the great exterior
novels have been written, the majority of readers continue to read
long-winded stories dealing with manners and, of course, the eternal
conquest of an uninteresting female by a mediocre male. Aiming at
instantaneity of pictorial and musical effect--as a picture become
lyrical--the poets who fashioned their prose into artistic rhythms and
colours and tones ended by exhausting the patience of a public rapidly
losing its faculty of attention.
Possibly these things may account for the neglect of a writer and
thinker of such delicacy and originality as Poictevin, but he was
always caviare even to the consumers of literary caviar. But he had
a small audience in Paris, and after his first book appeared--one
hesitates to call it a novel--Daudet saluted it with the praise that
Sainte-Beuve--the Sainte-Beuve of Volupté and Port-Royal--would have
been delighted with La Robe du Moine. Here is a list of Poictevin's
works and the years of their publication until 1894. Please note their
significant and extraordinary names: La Robe du Moine, 1882; Ludine,
1883; Songes, 1884; Petitan, 1885; Seuls, 1886; Paysages et Nouveaux
Songes, 1888; Derniers Songes, 1888; Double, 1889; Presque, 1891;
Heures, 1892; Tout Bas, 1893; Ombres, 1894.
A collective title for them might be Nuances; Poictevin searches
the last nuance of sensations and ideas. He is a remote pupil of
Goncourt, and superior to his master in his power of recording the
impalpable. (Compare any of his books with the Madame Gervaisais of
Goncourt; the latter is mysticism very much in the concrete.) At the
same time he recalls Amiel, Maurice de Guérin, Walter Pater, and
Coventry Patmore. A mystical pantheist in his worship of nature, he
is a mystic in his adoration of God. This intensity of vision in the
case of Poictevin did not lead to the depravities, exquisite and
morose, of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the brilliant outrageous Barbey
d'Aurevilly. With his soul of ermine Poictevin is characterised by De
Gourmont as the inventor of the mysticism of style. Once he saluted
Edmond de Goncourt as the Velasquez of the French language, and that
master, not to be outdone in politeness, told Poictevin that his prose
could boast its "victories over the invisible." If by this Goncourt
meant making the invisible visible, rendering in prose of crepuscular
subtlety moods recondite, then it was not an exaggerated compliment.
In such spiritual performances Poictevin resembles Lafcadio Hearn
in his airiest gossamer-webbed phrases. A true, not a professional
symbolist, the French _prosateur_ sounds Debussy twilight harmonies.
His speech at times glistens with the hues of a dragon-fly zigzagging
in the sunshine. In the tenuous exaltation of his thought he evokes the
ineffable deity, circled by faint glory. To compass his picture he does
not hesitate to break the classic mould of French syntax while using
all manners of strange-fangled vocables to attain effects that remind
one of the clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Indeed, a mystic style is his,
beside which most writers seem heavy-handed and obvious.
Original in his form, in the bizarre architecture of his paragraphs,
pages, chapters, he abolishes the old endings, cadences, chapter
headings. Nor, except at the beginning of his career, does he portray
a definite hero or heroine. Even names are avoided. "He" or "she"
suffices to indicate the sex. Action there is little. Story he has
none to tell; by contrast Henry James is epical. Exteriority does
not interest Poictevin, who is nevertheless a landscape painter;
intimate and charming. His young man and young woman visit Mentone,
the Pyrenees, Brittany, along the Rhine--a favourite resort--Holland,
Luchon, Montreux, and Switzerland, generally. His palette is
marvellously complicated. We should call him an impressionist but that
the phrase is become banal. Poictevin deals in subtle grays. He often
writes _gris-iris_. His portraits swim in a mysterious atmosphere as do
Eugène Carrière's. His fluid, undulating prose records landscapes in
the manner of Theocritus.
The tiny repercussions of the spirit that is reacted upon by life
are Whistlerian notations in the gamut of this artist's instrument.
Evocation, not description; evocation, not narration; always evocation,
yet there is a harmonious ensemble; he returns to his theme after
capriciously circling about it as does a Hungarian gypsy when
improvising upon the heart-strings of his auditors. Verlaine once
addressed a poem to Poictevin the first line of which runs: "Toujours
mécontent de son œuvre." Maurice Barrès evidently had read Seuls
before he wrote Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891). The young woman in
Poictevin's tale has the same feverish languors; her male companion,
though not the egoist of Barrès, is a very modern person, slightly
consumptive; one of whom it may be asked, in the words of Poictevin:
"Is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of
sadness?" In their room hang portraits of Baudelaire and the Curé
d'Ars. Odder still is the monk, P. Martin. Martin is the name of the
"adversary" in The Garden of Bérénice. And the episode of the dog's
death! Huysmans, too, must have admired Poictevin's descriptions of the
Grünewald Christ at Colmar, and of the portrait of the Young Florentine
in the Stadel Museum at Frankfort. It would be instructive to compare
the differing opinions of the two critics concerning this last-named
picture.
A mirror, Poictevin's soul reflects the moods of landscapes. Without
dogmatism he could say with St. Anselm that he would rather go to hell
sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single transgression. To his
tender temperament even the reading of Pascal brought shadows of doubt.
A persistent dreamer, the world for him is but the garment investing
God. Flowers, stars, the wind that weeps in little corners, the placid
bosom of lonely lakes, far-away mountains and their mystic silhouettes,
the Rhine and its many curvings, the clamour of cities and the joy of
the green grass, are his themes. Life with its frantic gestures is
quite inutile. Let it be avoided. You turn after reading Poictevin
to the Minoration of Emile Hennequin: "Let all that is be no more.
Let glances fade and the vivacity of gestures fall. Let us be humble,
soft, and slow. Let us love without passion, and let us exchange
weary caresses." Or hear the tragic cry of Ephraim Mikhael: "Ah! to
see behind me no longer, on the lake of Eternity, the implacable wake
of Time." "Poictevin's men and women," once wrote Aline Gorren in a
memorable study of French symbolism, "are subordinate to these wider
curves of wave and sky; they come and go, emerging from their setting
briefly and fading into it again; they have no personality apart from
it; and amid the world symbols of the heavens in marshalled movements
and the thousand reeded winds, they in their human symbols are allowed
to seem, as they are, proportionately small. They are possessed as
are clouds, waters, trees, but no more than clouds, waters, trees, of
a baffling significance, forever a riddle to itself. They have bowed
attitudes; the weight of the mystery they carry on their shoulders."
The humanity that secretly evaporates when the prose poet notes the
attrition of two souls is shed upon his landscapes with their sonorous
silences. A picture of the life contemplative, of the adventures of
timorous gentle souls in search of spiritual adventures, set before
us in a style of sublimated preciosity by an orchestra of sensations
that has been condensed to the string quartet, the dreams of Francis
Poictevin--does he not speak of the human forehead as a dream dome?
--are not the least consoling of his century. He is the white-robed
acolyte among mystics of modern literature.