It was in the first week of August, 1914. The crowd on the seafront was
outwardly as gay as ever, only buying up the evening papers with a little
more eagerness than usual to read the exciting news from Belgium. We had
not had time to realize what war meant. Some one held out a paper to me
and said, quite casually, “I see Lemaître’s dead.” This event seemed
to me for the moment bigger than the war itself. At any rate it came
more intimately home to me. The world in an uproar, nations toppling to
ruin, millions of men in arms—these are only vague mental pictures. They
disquiet the imagination, but are not to be realized by it. The death
of your favourite author, the spiritual companion and solace of half a
lifetime, is of an infinitely sharper reality, and you feel it as though
it were a physical pang.
Lemaître died where, whenever he could, he had lived, at Tavers in the
Loiret, the heart of France. He was always writing about Tavers, though
he never named it by its name. In describing the far-off cruises of Loti
and the indefatigable touristry of Bourget he says:—“There is somewhere
a big orchard that goes down to a brook edged with willows and poplars.
It is for me the most beautiful landscape in the world, for I love
it, and it knows me.” To understand Lemaître you must keep that little
_vignette_ affectionately in your mind, as he did. M. Henry Bordeaux,
in his charming little monograph “Jules Lemaître,” rightly insists upon
Lemaître’s passionate love for his native countryside. But you never
can tell; his insistence seems only to have bored a recent reviewer of
the book. “The insistence on Lemaître’s patriotism and on his being
‘l’homme de sa terre’ is a little wearying; of course he was ‘l’homme de
sa terre,’ but he was many other things, or we should never have heard
of him.” As who should say, of course Cyrano had a nose, but he had many
other things, or we should never have heard of him. But Cyrano’s nose was
a conspicuous feature, and, if we are not told of it, we shall not fully
understand Cyrano. So with Lemaître’s love of his countryside by the
Loire.
It made him, to begin with, an incorrigible stay-at-home. In this, as
in so many other things, he was a typical Frenchman. We English, born
roamers as we are, take for granted the educative influence of travel.
Places and people, we know by elementary experience, are only to be
realized by being seen on the spot. Lemaître thought otherwise. Why, he
asked, need I go to England? I can get all England out of Dickens and
George Eliot and my friend Bourget’s “Impressions de Voyage.” And then he
drew a picture of England, as he confidently believed it to be, that is
about as “like it” as, say, the average untravelled Englishman’s notion
of Tavers. He was never tired of quoting a passage of the “Imitation”
about the variety of changing sky and scene. But a cloistered monk is not
exactly an authority on this subject.
Again, the fact that Lemaître was “l’homme de sa terre” is of vital
literary importance; it affected not only the spirit, but the actual
direction of his criticism. It inclined him to ignore or to misapprehend
those features in a foreign author that precisely marked how he also,
in his turn, was the man of his countryside, and that very different
from the banks of the Loire. Some of his comments on Shakespeare, for
instance, are of a Gallicism almost Voltairean. And it fostered illusions
like that which possessed him about the “Northern literatures”—Ibsen,
Hauptmann, Strindberg, and so forth—that they were mere belated imitators
of the French romantics. The fact that Lemaître was essentially a man of
his province involved the fact that his criticism now and then was also
provincial.
Indeed, his very provincialism heightened his enjoyment of Paris and
sharpened his sense of Parisianism. Things which the born Parisian takes
for granted were delightful novelties for him, challenging observation
and analysis. “Il est,” said Degas, “toujours bien content d’être à
Paris.” He was “bien content” because he was “the young man from the
country,” the man from Tavers. The phenomenon is familiar all the world
over.
Further, the fact that Lemaître remained “l’homme de sa terre,” still
getting his clothes from the village tailor, never so much at home as
among the farmers, country schoolmasters, and peasants he had known
from his infancy, gives a quite peculiar savour to his remarks on “le
monde”—the great fashionable scene, which he describes and analyses, to
be sure, as a philosopher, but as a philosopher who is, consciously and
indeed defiantly, an “outsider.”
These are all integral parts of Lemaître’s critical individuality.
Without them he would have been another man altogether—a point so
obvious to all lovers of Lemaître that it would never have occurred to
me to mention it, had it not been for our reviewer’s weariness of being
reminded that he was “l’homme de sa terre.” Evidently the reviewer
cannot forgive Lemaître for his treatment of the “décadents” and the
“symbolistes,” and other cranks. “Think of the people Lemaître missed.”
The people include, it seems, Moréas, Laforgue, Samain, and Rimbaud.
Well, after thinking of these people, many of us will be resigned to
“missing” them with Lemaître.
It is odd that the reviewer, while hunting for objections to Lemaître’s
criticism, as criticism, should have “missed” the really valid one—that
it is often not so much critical as “high fantastical.” Lemaître was
apt to be carried away by his imagination, and to run through a varied
assortment of comparisons, associations, and parallels that coloured
rather than cleared the issue. The rigorist Croce has, in passing,
laid his finger upon this. He quotes Lemaître on Corneille. Polyeucte,
says the critic, recalls at once “St. Paul, Huss, Calvin, and Prince
Kropotkine,” and awakes “the same curiosity as a Russian Nihilist, of the
kind to be seen in Paris in bygone years, in some _brasserie_ ... of whom
the whisper went round that at St. Petersburg he had killed a general or
a prefect of police.” Croce dismisses this sort of thing as _ricami di
fantasia_, and certainly, from the point of view of strict criticism, it
is a weakness of Lemaître’s.
After all, however (as the counsel in “Pickwick” pleaded about something
else), it is an amiable weakness; it makes him such incomparably good
reading! Heaven forbid that I should reopen the old stupid, stale
controversy about “impressionist” and “judicial” criticism; but it is
obvious that the one sort does explicitly acknowledge and glory in
what is implicit in the other—the individual temperament and talent of
the critic himself. If the “impressionist” who gives free play to his
temperament is apt sometimes to get out of bounds—to be substituting
_ricami di fantasia_ for strict analysis—he may be all the more
stimulating to the reader. He may be giving the reader not scrupulous
criticism, but something better. It all depends, of course, on the
temperament and the talent. Lemaître’s _ricami di fantasia_ are part, if
not the best part, of his charm.