Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.
Don't you hear the resonance of the tolling bells in Chopin's _Funeral
March_? Your sorrow grows crescendo as you proceed, recalling Massenet's
_Elégie_:
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;
Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
When I think of Paul Verlaine I invariably recall Oscar Wilde, despite
or because of the abysmal dissimilarity of the two personalities. The
sincere, ingenuous, all-loving child Paul, and the thoroughly
artificial, paradoxical Oscar; the typical Bohemian with the
criminal-face like that of Dostoevsky, and the salon-idol, the refined
and gorgeous bearer of the sun-flower. Fate had somewhat reconciled the
two contrasts. Both had been "sinners," both were condemned by society
and imprisoned, both had "repented"--one in _De Profundis_ where the
haughty humility of the self-enamored artist stirs us with its
artificial beauty; the other in the primitive-Christian--nay,
Catholic--_Sagesse_:
_Mon Dieu m'a dit: Mon fils, il faut m'aimer ...._
Some months ago in reviewing Edmond Lepelletier's voluminous book,
(_Paul Verlaine: His Life and Work_) I remarked that the Poet of
Absinthe and Violets was still awaiting his Boswell. My view has not
changed after reading Wilfrid Thorley's monograph on Verlaine; but my
wish for an adequate biography of the signer of _Romances sans Paroles_
has now become counterbalanced by an earnest prayer that the memory of
the poet may be saved from such indelicate manipulators as Mr. Thorley.
Why this respectable Englishman should have attempted to treat the life
of the most wayward French poet since Villon can be explained by no
other reason than that it was a case of "made to order." When a
Velasquez is pierced by a fanatical suffragette the whole civilized
world is roused to indignation; but when an honest philistine
unceremoniously puffs his cheap smoke into the face of a dead poet there
is not a single protest against that sort of vandalism. Fear of the
editor's blue pencil restrains me from putting my attitude more
outspokenly.
A conscientious compilator would have found sufficient material for an
unpretentious sketch of the life of Verlaine and for an appreciation of
his works. Lepelletier gives an amazing mass of facts and personal
reminiscences (you may ignore his naive interpretations); Arthur Symons
in _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_ has a masterpiece essay on
Verlaine, not to mention a number of other French and English writers
who have given us glimpses of the imperceptible image of the
poet--writers who _knew what they were taking about_. Mr. Thorley has
made use of various sources, but in a peculiar way. He fished out the
anecdotal scraps, the piquant details, the filthy hints, and patched up
a caricature-portrait of a lewd, perverse "undesirable," whose poetry (I
quote reluctantly) "was born solely of the genitals," whose "life is but
the trite old story of the emotions developed at the expense of domestic
peace and civic order; of art for art's sake made to condone the manner
of its begetting, and the trend of its appeal; of the hushed
acquiescence in emotion as a sacred thing, whatever the quality of the
impulse from which it ripens or the level of ideas on which it feeds."
Out of the ninety-odd pages of stuff seventy-nine are devoted to
"biography" sufficiently spicy to make any toothless old rake chuckle;
the rest is given over to "criticism"--a mutilated melange of some of
the views of Symons, George Moore, and others, flavored with the
compilator's own commonplaces. I quote from the closing lines:
A specious and high-sounding phrase has been invented to excuse
the perversities of imaginative genius by speaking of its
achievement as a "conquest of new realms for the spirit." But the
worth of such acquisitions depends on the nature of the
territory, and if it be, morally, a malarial swamp conducive only
to a human type found subversive in our normal world, it will
always appear to the English mind that we shall do well to forego
the new kingdom and to withhold our homage from its
discoverer.... That "nice is nasty, nasty nice," and the creative
artist the sole arbiter, must be hotly opposed so long as a
social conscience survives.
And this was written in Anno Domini 1914!
A sense of fairness urges me to rehabilitate the "English mind" by
recalling a passage from Mr. Thorley's compatriot, Arthur Symons:
The artist, it cannot be too clearly understood, has no more part
in society than a monk in domestic life: he cannot be judged by
its rules, he can be neither praised nor blamed for his
acceptance or rejection of its conventions. Social rules are made
by normal people for normal people, and the man of genius is
fundamentally abnormal.
It is high time that this axiom became a truism and that we cease to
measure the artist with the yard-stick of conventional morality. "L'art,
mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même," sang Verlaine, and
somewhere else he reveals a bit of that self with his usual sincerity:
I believe, and I sin in thought as in action; I believe, and I
repent in thought, if no more. Or again, I believe, and I am a
good Christian at this moment; I believe, and I am a bad
Christian the instant after. The remembrance, the hope, the
invocation of a sin delights me, with or without remorse,
sometimes under the very form of sin, and hedged with all its
natural consequences.... This delight ... it pleases us to put to
paper and publish more or less well expressed: we consign it, in
short, into literary form, forgetting all religious ideas, or not
letting one of them escape us. Can any one in good faith condemn
us as poets? A hundred times no.
"And, indeed, I should echo, a hundred times no!" exclaims the
Englishman, Arthur Symons.
I cannot resist the temptation of quoting the happiest definition of
Verlaine's personality written by Charles Morice back in 1888:
The soul of an immortal child, that is the soul of Verlaine, with
all the privileges and all the perils of so being: with the
sudden despair so easily distracted, the vivid gaieties without a
cause, the excessive suspicions and the excessive confidences,
the whims so easily outwearied, the deaf and blind infatuations,
with, especially, the unceasing renewal of impressions in the
incorruptible integrity of personal vision and sensation. Years,
influences, teachings, may pass over a temperament such as this,
may irritate it, may fatigue it; transform it, never--never so
much as to alter that particular unity which consists in a
dualism, in the division of forces between the longing after what
is evil and the adoration of what is good; or rather, in the
antagonism of spirit and flesh....
I have not mentioned the most striking "feature" of Mr. Thorley's ...
production--the appendix. Six of Verlaine's poems are translated by him
for the benefit of those who do not understand French "intimately." "To
offer them to other readers, would, of course, be an impertinence," he
modestly admits. Impertinence is not the word for that outrage. I have
experienced physical pain at the sight of the Hunnish sacrilege
committed by this well-wishing moralist. The poet, for whom "De la
musique avant toute chose; De la musique encore et toujours!" who had
pleaded, "Car nous voulons la nuance encore, Pas la couleur, rien que
la nuance!" has been mercilessly crucified in the form of
quasi-Tennysonian, taffy-like verses. One recalls with gratitude the
careful albeit pale translations of Gertrude Hall, who at least had the
sense of æsthetic propriety in endeavoring to remain true to the
master's meter and rhythm.
* * * * *
From Tolstoy's diary in 1855:
... a great, a stupendous idea, to the realization of which I
feel myself capable of devoting all my life. The idea is the
foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of
mankind--_the religion of Jesus, but purified from dogma and
mysticism; a practical religion, not promising bliss in future,
but giving happiness on earth_.... To work consciously for _the
union on earth_ by religion....
From a letter to the poet Fet in 1898:
I am so different to things of this life that life becomes
uninteresting.... I hope you will love me though I be black.
From the fragment _There are no guilty people_:
There was a time when I tried to change my position which was not
in harmony with my conscience, but the conditions created by the
past, by my family and its claims upon me, were so complicated
that I did not know how to free myself. I had not the strength.
Now that I am over eighty and have become feeble I have given up
trying to free myself. Strange to say, as my feebleness increases
I realize more and more strongly the wrongfulness of my position,
and it grows more and more intolerable to me.
On his death-bed at the railroad station Astapovo, November, 1910:
I am tired of this world of men.
Tolstoy's failure was inevitable, for he had approached life with the
uncompromising logic of a child or a god. For fifty years he preached
his religion, and during all that time he remained splendidly
inconsistent. He opposed private property and proceeded to live on his
estate; he had denounced marriage and was a father to thirteen children.
Notwithstanding his deadly hatred for the Russian government, he
bitterly denounced the liberals and the revolutionists for their
"un-Christian" ways of fighting the enemy; but his greatest
contradiction, to the joy of the intellectual world, consisted in the
victory of the artist over the moralist as manifested in his numerous
novels and plays.
The work of Edward Garnett is conscientious and is, to my knowledge, the
best short biography of Tolstoy. It was a happy idea to discard the
traditional portrait and use a reproduction of Kramskoy's painting,
which dates back to the sixties, if I am not mistaken. It is when
looking at this portrait, a great piece of art in itself, that we
envisage the author of _War and Peace_. A few words from the description
of Tolstoy's face by P. A. Terzeyeonvo:
His face was a true peasant's face: simple, rustic, with a broad
nose, a weather-beaten skin, and thick overhanging brows, from
beneath which small, keen, grey eyes peered sharply forth.... One
instantly divines in Tolstoy a man of the highest society--with
polished, unconstrained manners.
... On the one hand an insatiable thirst for power over people,
and on the other an unconquerable ardor for inward purity and the
sweetness of meekness....
In this chain of seething, imperious instincts linked with
delicate spiritual organization lies the profound tragicness of
Tolstoy's personality.
Mr. Garnett succeeds in giving the quintessence of Tolstoy's works and
teachings in less than a hundred pages. Like most of the Russian's
eulogistic biographers, Mr. Garnett has not escaped the fallacy of
exaggerating the moral power that Tolstoy exercised over the government.
To say that the Czar and his ministers "dared not touch" the outspoken
anarchist and heretic "out of dread of Europe--nay, of Russia," is to
reveal one's ignorance of the brazen defiance displayed by Muscovite
autocrats in regard to public opinion. As the Germans put it: "Herr
Kossack, schämen Sie sich!" Tolstoy, as a matter of fact, had helped to
check the revolutionary spirit of his compatriots in a greater degree
than the tyrannic persecutions of Von-Plehve. Had he not appealed time
and again to embrace his doctrine of Non-Resistance? Had he not
denounced the revolutionists as violent prototypes of their hangers?
Could the government see any danger in a man who wrote in _The Times_
during the revolution of 1905: "To free oneself from the government it
is only necessary to abstain from participating in it and supporting it.
Our consciousness of the law of God demands from us only one thing:
moral self-perfection, i. e., the liberation of oneself from all those
weaknesses and vices which make one the slave of governments and the
participation in their crimes"? Another tragic contradiction of the
restless soul of the anarchist who, despite himself, renders aid to the
despots.
--Alexander S. Kaun.
INTROSPECTION
_Chance_, by Joseph Conrad. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York.]
Did you ever take supper in the apartments of a dear bachelor friend, on
a night when the wind howled outside the window, and the rain beat
against the pane? And after the satisfying meal, whose perfect
appointment made you forget all save the luxury of living, did you
retire to the spacious living room, and after accepting an aromatic
Havana, stretch your feet out to the crackling log fire, and as the
smoke from your cigar crawled upward listen to the philosophical
analyses of your cultured host on that marvelously simple and profoundly
complex servant and master of man, the human mind? Of such an evening is
the atmosphere of _Chance_. Not academically deep, but deep from the
standpoint of a full life and an active intelligence.
Everyone loves to analyze his fellow creatures. Some do it well, some do
it badly, but we all do it. Conrad does it masterfully. There doesn't
seem to be a type which holds a mystery for him. The village pillar; the
frail, ill-fated maid; the buxsom housewife; the silent captain ashore
and afloat; the opinionated, retired old gentleman; the cynical,
good-natured man of thirty-five; the flat, tintless fraud. Into the
mental realm of all these he makes expeditions long and short. His
characters live. They mingle good and bad, and, as strong characters
should, weave for themselves a charming story of love, adventure, trial,
and victory, never trite, and always surprising. It is a tale built of
character studies and garnished with odd conjective philosophy.
Our new acquaintance paused, then added meditatively:
"Queer man. As if it made any difference. Queer man."
"It's certainly unwise to admit any sort of responsibility for
our actions, whose consequences we are never able to foresee,"
remarked Marlow by way of assent.
"The consequence of his action was that I got a ship," said the
other. "That could not do much harm," he added with a laugh which
argued a probably unconscious contempt of general ideas.
But Marlow was not put off. He was patient and reflective. He had
been at sea many years and I verily believe he liked sea-life
because upon the whole it is favourable to reflection. I am
speaking of the now nearly vanished sea-life under sail. To those
who may be surprised at the statement I will point out that this
life secured for the mind of him who embraced it the inestimable
advantages of solitude and silence. Marlow had the habit of
pursuing general ideas in a peculiar manner, between jest and
earnest.
"Oh, I wouldn't suggest," he said, "that your namesake, Mr.
Powell, the Shipping Master, had done you much harm. Such was
hardly his intention. And even if it had been he would not have
had the power. He was but a man, and the incapacity to achieve
anything distinctly good or evil is inherent in our earthly
condition. Mediocrity is our mark. And perhaps it's just as well,
since, for the most part, we cannot be certain of the effect of
our actions."
"I don't know about the effect," the other stood up to Marlow
manfully. "What effect did you expect anyhow? I tell you he did
something uncommonly kind."
"He did what he could," Marlow retorted gently, "and on his own
showing that was not a very great deal. I cannot help thinking
that there was some malice in the way he seized the opportunity
to serve you. He managed to make you uncomfortable. You wanted to
go to sea, but he jumped on the chance of accommodating your
desire with a vengeance. I am inclined to think your cheek
alarmed him. And this was an excellent occasion to suppress you
altogether. For if you accepted he was relieved of you with every
appearance of humanity, and if you made objections (after
requesting his assistance, mind you) it was open to him to drop
you as a sort of impostor. You might have had to decline that
berth for some very valid reason. From sheer necessity, perhaps.
The notice was too uncommonly short. But under the circumstances
you'd have covered yourself with ignominy."
Our new friend knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
There is something about Conrad which gives a warm feeling about the
heart. A certain fineness of humor, a certain fullness of sympathy. He
never mixes his similes; they always take the same tone and the same
color. For instance:
I took a piece of cake and went out to bribe the Fyne dog into
some sort of self-control. His sharp, comical yapping was
unbearable, like stabs through one's brain, and Fyne's deeply
modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than
the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger minstrel on
a popular beach. Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low,
sepulchral tones when I appeared. The dog became at once wildly
demonstrative, half-strangling himself in his collar, his eyes
and tongue hanging out in the excess of his uncomprehensible
affection for me. This was before he caught sight of the cake in
my hand. A series of vertical springs high up in the air
followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his
interest in everything else.
No, this illustration is not of Conrad's finest, but in a homely way it
illustrates a deep sympathy with life, which this strong worker and
writer gives in such bountiful measure in all his literature; and, to
quote an eminent writer, "Literature and Conrad are interchangeable
terms."
--Henry Blackman Sell.
AN AMERICAN NOVEL
_Clark's Field_, by Robert Herrick. [Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston.]
It was but the other day that Mr. Herrick told us what he thought about
the American novel. Those who read the trenchant article found not only
a criticism of our machine-like fictionists and their half-baked
methods, but also a sturdy conviction that the day was surely
approaching when we should demand and receive a truer and more vital
presentation of our national life in our literature. And if Mr. Herrick,
long since tagged an apostate to our national creed of turgid optimism,
believes this, we can safely trust to his cool vision and be glad that
the tide has turned. The rich human material lies ready at hand, and the
audience is fast growing intelligent and discriminating. As yet,
however, "we await the writer or writers keen enough to perceive the
opportunity, powerful enough to interest the public in what it has been
unwilling to heed, and of course endowed with sufficient insight to
comprehend our big new world."
Whatever may be said for our other novelists, surely not one of them can
exhibit a mingling of the powers of insight and artistry equal to that
of Robert Herrick. His work from the beginning has been an honest and
incisive attempt to interpret our life in its peculiar and universal
aspects, in spite of the clamor of the public at his tearing away of the
veils of sentimentality and prudery. The errors into which he fell were
due to the ardor of his spiritual vision, which drove him into an
impassioned taking of sides. He has emerged from that stage into what
his critics call his "old manner," a more objective treatment of his
material. But in the process of change something was lost--the element
of flaming intensity which gave the reader a similar capacity to feel.
In this latest performance, as well as in _One Woman's Life_, he is
always cool, clear-sighted, and admirably efficient in the task he sets
himself; but never passionate. On the contrary, despite the pervading
atmosphere of earnestness, he often assumes a playful satiric tone,
mordant but not bitter,--a method well suited to his matter and purpose.
_Clark's Field_ tells the story of the influence of property upon the
human beings who own it and hope to reap gold from its increasing value.
All that is left of the great Clark farm is a fifty-acre field in a
growing New England town, bequeathed jointly to the two brothers, Edward
and Samuel, the former of whom has emigrated to the West and wholly
disappeared from the ken of his relatives. So at first the tale is of
the baleful influence of expectation delayed again and again: in the
case of Samuel who cannot sell the land because of his brother's
half-interest, and who in consequence sinks into a sodden inertia; in
his son's disintegration into a lazy and drunken "Vet"; in his sister
Addie's sordid and pathetic sally into life resulting in the birth of
another human being destined to taste of the fruit of their tree and to
find it, one day, very bitter.
The greater portion of the novel, then, deals with the influence of the
realized wealth upon the unformed, colorless little girl, Adelle, the
last of the Clarks. It is a masterly piece of work--the gradual
development of the pale rooming-house drudge into the silly and insolent
woman of fashion, and slowly but certainly into a human being with a
soul. Less promising stuff for a heroine neither fate nor Mr. Herrick
could have chosen; the latter delights in ample admissions throughout
the book of Adelle's lack of beauty, brains, and charm. Yet he is always
sufficiently temperate to escape the danger of caricature. Adelle is a
convincing figure. The slow dawning upon her consciousness of the power
of money, her "magic lamp" which she need only rub to gratify any
desire, is followed by swift and constant use of the new weapon. It
brings her a fresh assurance, a few scatter-brained friends, some
stylish clothes, and, at length, a callow youth for a husband. It never
brings her contact with a real person or friendship with a stimulating
individual; nor can it save her from the failure of her marriage, nor
compensate her for the death of her little boy.
Adelle's story, then, turns out to be what we least expected it,--a
hopeful one. It leaves us with almost a sense of security, for is she
not one of those who can "derive good from her mistakes," and therefore
"the safest sort of human being to raise in this garden plot of souls"?
And although we are still saddled with "that absurd code of inheritance
and property rights that the Anglo-Saxon peoples have preserved from
their ancient tribal days in the gloomy forests of the lower Rhine," the
situation is not without hope, since it has yielded a man of the judge's
type, in whom the beauty of a past idealism is coupled with the
freshness of a new vision of responsibility.
To hark back to the recent article in _The Yale Review_, we believe that
Mr. Herrick himself has given us an American novel--thoroughly American
in situation, character, treatment, and even in philosophy. We, as a
people, are beginning to suspect our boastful optimism as we become
aware of the sordidness beneath the fair exterior of our glorious
civilization. And in accordance with the western temperament, the
awareness of wrong leads not to bitter cynicism but to sturdy efforts
toward amelioration. Such, then, is the spirit of _Clark's Field_--a
hopefulness in the power of courage, and labor, and a growing sense of
social responsibility to move mounds that seem to have become immovable
mountains through a tenacious fostering of tradition.
--Marguerite Swawite.
THE "SAVAGE" PAINTERS
_Cubists and Post Impressionism_, by Arthur Jerome Eddy. [A. C.
McClurg and Company, Chicago.]