STYLE. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1888. Reprinted
1889 in Appreciations.
THE RENAISSANCE. Third Edition. Macmillan. Contents:
Two Early French Stories.
Pico della Mirandola.
Sandro Botticelli.
Luca della Robbia.
The Poetry of Michelangelo.
Leonardo da Vinci.
The School of Giorgione. See 1877.
Joachim du Bellay.
Winckelmann.
Conclusion.
1889.
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in August, 1889.
Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.
*GIORDANO BRUNO. Appeared in Fortnightly Review in August, 1889. (Not
included in the 1910 Macmillan Library Edition, but published
separately online at Project Gutenberg and www.ajdrake.com/etexts.)
APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE. Published 1889 by Macmillan.
Contents:
Style. See 1888.
Wordsworth. See 1874.
Coleridge. See 1866.
Charles Lamb. See 1878.
Sir Thomas Browne. See 1886.
Love's Labours Lost. See 1878.
Measure for Measure. See 1874.
Shakespeare's English Kings.
*Aesthetic Poetry. See 1868.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. See 1883.
Postscript. See under "Romanticism," 1876.
1890.
ART NOTES IN NORTHERN ITALY. Appeared in New Review in November, 1890.
Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in November, 1890.
Appeared in Fortnightly Review in December, 1890. Reprinted 1895 in
Miscellaneous Studies.
APPRECIATIONS. Second edition. Macmillan. Contents as in first
edition of 1889, but omitting Aesthetic Poetry and including a paper
on Feuillet's "La Morte" (See 1886).
1892.
THE GENIUS OF PLATO. Appeared in Contemporary Review in February,
1892. Reprinted 1893 as Chapter VI of Plato and Platonism.
A CHAPTER ON PLATO. Appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in May, 1892.
Reprinted 1893 as Chapter I of Plato and Platonism.
LACEDAEMON. Appeared in Contemporary Review in June, 1892. Reprinted
1893 as Chapter VIII of Plato and Platonism.
EMERALD UTHWART. Appeared in New Review in June and July, 1892.
Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.
RAPHAEL. Delivered as a lecture at Oxford in August, 1892. Appeared
in Fortnightly Review in October, 1892. Reprinted 1895 in
Miscellaneous Studies.
1893.
APOLLO IN PICARDY. Appeared in Harper's Magazine in November, 1893.
Reprinted 1895 in Miscellaneous Studies.
PLATO AND PLATONISM. Published 1893 by Macmillan. Included, as
Chapters 1, 6, and 8, papers which had already appeared in Magazines
in 1892. Contents:
1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion.
2. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest.
3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number.
4. Plato and Socrates.
5. Plato and the Sophists.
6. The Genius of Plato.
7. The Doctrine of Plato--
I. The Theory of Ideas.
II. Dialectic.
8. Lacedaemon.
9. The Republic.
10. Plato's Aesthetics.
1894.
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN. Appeared in Contemporary Review in
February, 1894. Reprinted 1895 in Greek Studies.
SOME GREAT CHURCHES IN FRANCE. 1) NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS; 2) VÉZELAY.
Appeared in Nineteenth Century in March and June, 1894. Reprinted
1895 in Miscellaneous Studies as two separate essays.
PASCAL. Written for delivery as a lecture at Oxford in July, 1894.
Appeared in Contemporary Review in December, 1894. Reprinted 1895 in
Miscellaneous Studies.
1895.
GREEK STUDIES. Published 1895 by Macmillan. Contents:
A Study of Dionysus. See 1876.
The Bacchanals of Euripides. See 1878.
The Myth of Demeter and Persephone. See 1875.
Hippolytus Veiled. See 1889.
The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture. See 1880:
1) The Heroic Age of Greek Art.
2) The Age of Graven Images.
The Marbles of Aegina. See 1880.
The Age of Athletic Prizemen. See 1894.
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE*
FOR one born in eighteen hundred and three much was recently become
incredible that had at least warmed the imagination even of the
sceptical eighteenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the
Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a hope,
in the sphere of practice. And the mental parallel was drawn by
Heine. In the mental world too a great outlook had lately been cut
off. After Kant's criticism of the mind, its pretensions to pass
beyond the limits of individual experience seemed as dead as those of
old French royalty. And Kant did but furnish its innermost theoretic
force to a more general criticism, which had withdrawn from every
department of action, underlying principles once thought eternal. A
time of disillusion followed. The typical personality of the day was
Obermann, the very genius of ennui, a Frenchman disabused even of
patriotism, who has hardly strength enough to die.
[12] More energetic souls, however, would recover themselves, and
find some way of making the best of a changed world. Art: the
passions, above all, the ecstasy and sorrow of love: a purely
empirical knowledge of nature and man: these still remained, at least
for pastime, in a world of which it was no longer proposed to
calculate the remoter issues:--art, passion, science, however, in a
somewhat novel attitude towards the practical interests of life. The
désillusionné, who had found in Kant's negations the last word
concerning an unseen world, and is living, on the morrow of the
Revolution, under a monarchy made out of hand, might seem cut off
from certain ancient natural hopes, and will demand, from what is to
interest him at all, something in the way of artificial stimulus. He
has lost that sense of large proportion in things, that all-embracing
prospect of life as a whole (from end to end of time and space, it
had seemed), the utmost expanse of which was afforded from a
cathedral tower of the Middle Age: by the church of the thirteenth
century, that is to say, with its consequent aptitude for the
co-ordination of human effort. Deprived of that exhilarating yet
pacific outlook, imprisoned now in the narrow cell of its own
subjective experience, the action of a powerful nature will be
intense, but exclusive and peculiar. It will come to art, or
science, to the experience of life itself, not as to portions of
human nature's daily food, but as to [13] something that must be, by
the circumstances of the case, exceptional; almost as men turn in
despair to gambling or narcotics, and in a little while the narcotic,
the game of chance or skill, is valued for its own sake. The
vocation of the artist, of the student of life or books, will be
realised with something--say! of fanaticism, as an end in itself,
unrelated, unassociated. The science he turns to will be a science
of crudest fact; the passion extravagant, a passionate love of
passion, varied through all the exotic phases of French fiction as
inaugurated by Balzac; the art exaggerated, in matter or form, or
both, as in Hugo or Baudelaire. The development of these conditions
is the mental story of the nineteenth century, especially as
exemplified in France.
In no century would Prosper Mérimée have been a theologian or
metaphysician. But that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity,
was in the air, and conspiring with what was of like tendency in
himself made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the
passive ennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry
conviction of the littleness of the world around; it was as if man's
fatal limitations constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the
French call bêtise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was
constitutional in him and in the age with an incident of his earliest
years. Corrected for some childish fault, in passionate distress, he
overhears a half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined,
[14] in a moment, never again to give credit--to be for ever on his
guard, especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite
unreserved, certainly, he never was again. Almost everywhere he
could detect the hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the
apparent surface of things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be
the proper complement thereto, on his part. In his infallible self-
possession, you might even fancy him a mere man of the world, with a
special aptitude for matters of fact. Though indifferent in
politics, he rises to social, to political eminence; but all the
while he is feeding all his scholarly curiosity, his imagination, the
very eye, with the, to him ever delightful, relieving, reassuring
spectacle, of those straightforward forces in human nature, which are
also matters of fact. There is the formula of Mérimée! the
enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and women
wherever it could be found; himself carrying ever, as a mask, the
conventional attire of the modern world--carrying it with an
infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that, too, were an all-sufficient
end in itself. With a natural gift for words, for expression, it
will be his literary function to draw back the veil of time from the
true greatness of old Roman character; the veil of modern habit from
the primitive energy of the creatures of his fancy, as the Lettres à
une Inconnue discovered to general gaze, after his death, a certain
depth of [15] passionate force which had surprised him in himself.
And how forcible will be their outlines in an otherwise insignificant
world! Fundamental belief gone, in almost all of us, at least some
relics of it remain--queries, echoes, reactions, after-thoughts; and
they help to make an atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, hazy perhaps,
yet with many secrets of soothing light and shade, associating more
definite objects to each other by a perspective pleasant to the
inward eye against a hopefully receding background of remoter and
ever remoter possibilities. Not so with Mérimée! For him the
fundamental criticism has nothing more than it can do; and there are
no half-lights. The last traces of hypothesis, of supposition, are
evaporated. Sylla, the false Demetrius, Carmen, Colomba, that
impassioned self within himself, have no atmosphere. Painfully
distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they
stand, like solitary mountain forms on some hard, perfectly
transparent day. What Mérimée gets around his singularly
sculpturesque creations is neither more nor less than empty space.
So disparate are his writings that at first sight you might fancy
them only the random efforts of a man of pleasure or affairs, who,
turning to this or that for the relief of a vacant hour, discovers to
his surprise a workable literary gift, of whose scope, however, he is
not precisely aware. His sixteen volumes nevertheless range
themselves in three compact groups. There are his letters [16] --
those Lettres à une Inconnue, and his letters to the librarian
Panizzi, revealing him in somewhat close contact with political
intrigue. But in this age of novelists, it is as a writer of novels,
and of fiction in the form of highly descriptive drama, that he will
count for most:--Colomba, for instance, by its intellectual depth of
motive, its firmly conceived structure, by the faultlessness of its
execution, vindicating the function of the novel as no tawdry light
literature, but in very deed a fine art. The Chronique du Règne de
Charles IX., an unusually successful specimen of historical romance,
links his imaginative work to the third group of Mérimée's writings,
his historical essays. One resource of the disabused soul of our
century, as we saw, would be the empirical study of facts, the
empirical science of nature and man, surviving all dead metaphysical
philosophies. Mérimée, perhaps, may have had in him the making of a
master of such science, disinterested, patient, exact: scalpel in
hand, we may fancy, he would have penetrated far. But quite
certainly he had something of genius for the exact study of history,
for the pursuit of exact truth, with a keenness of scent as if that
alone existed, in some special area of historic fact, to be
determined by his own peculiar mental preferences. Power here too
again,--the crude power of men and women which mocks, while it makes
its use of, average human nature: it was the magic function of
history to put one in living [17] contact with that. To weigh the
purely physiognomic import of the memoir, of the pamphlet saved by
chance, the letter, the anecdote, the very gossip by which one came
face to face with energetic personalities: there lay the true
business of the historic student, not in that pretended theoretic
interpretation of events by their mechanic causes, with which he
dupes others if not invariably himself. In the great hero of the
Social War, in Sylla, studied, indeed, through his environment, but
only so far as that was in dynamic contact with himself, you saw,
without any manner of doubt, on one side, the solitary height of
human genius; on the other, though on the seemingly so heroic stage
of antique Roman story, the wholly inexpressive level of the humanity
of every day, the spectacle of man's eternal bêtise. Fascinated,
like a veritable son of the old pagan Renaissance, by the grandeur,
the concentration, the satiric hardness of ancient Roman character,
it is to Russia nevertheless that he most readily turns--youthful
Russia, whose native force, still unbelittled by our western
civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of a more dignified
civilisation to come. It was as if old Rome itself were here again;
as, occasionally, a new quarry is laid open of what was thought long
since exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde antique.
Mérimée, indeed, was not the first to discern the fitness for
imaginative service of the career of "the false Demetrius," pretended
[18] son of Ivan the Terrible; but he alone seeks its utmost force in
a calm, matter-of-fact carefully ascertained presentment of the naked
events. Yes! In the last years of the Valois, when its fierce
passions seemed to be bursting France to pieces, you might have seen,
far away beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one of those Valois
princes had become king, a display more effective still of
exceptional courage and cunning, of horror in circumstance, of
bêtise, of course, of bêtise and a slavish capacity of being duped,
in average mankind: all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite court-
ceremonial. And Mérimée's style, simple and unconcerned, but with
the eye ever on its object, lends itself perfectly to such purpose--
to an almost phlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all their crude
natural colouring, as if he but held up to view, as a piece of
evidence, some harshly dyed oriental carpet from the sumptuous floor
of the Kremlin, on which blood had fallen.
A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and incident, Mérimée
valued, as if it had been personal property of his, every extant
relic of it in the art that had been most expressive of its genius--
architecture. In that grandiose art of building, the most national,
the most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in the stable conditions
of life, there were historic documents hardly less clearly legible
than the manuscript chronicle. By the mouth of those stately
Romanesque [19] churches, scattered in so many strongly characterised
varieties over the soil of France, above all in the hot, half-pagan
south, the people of empire still protested, as he understood,
against what must seem a smaller race. The Gothic enthusiasm indeed
was already born, and he shared it--felt intelligently the
fascination of the Pointed Style, but only as a further
transformation of old Roman structure; the round arch is for him
still the great architectural form, la forme noble, because it was to
be seen in the monuments of antiquity. Romanesque, Gothic, the
manner of the Renaissance, of Lewis the Fourteenth:--they were all,
as in a written record, in the old abbey church of Saint-Savin, of
which Mérimée was instructed to draw up a report. Again, it was as
if to his concentrated attention through many months that deserted
sanctuary of Benedict were the only thing on earth. Its beauties,
its peculiarities, its odd military features, its faded mural
paintings, are no merely picturesque matter for the pencil he could
use so well, but the lively record of a human society. With what
appetite! with all the animation of George Sand's Mauprat, he tells
the story of romantic violence having its way there, defiant of law,
so late as the year 1611; of the family of robber nobles perched, as
abbots in commendam, in those sacred places. That grey, pensive old
church in the little valley of Poitou, was for a time like Santa
Maria del Fiore to [20] Michelangelo, the mistress of his affections-
-of a practical affection; for the result of his elaborate report was
the Government grant which saved the place from ruin. In
architecture, certainly, he had what for that day was nothing less
than intuition--an intuitive sense, above all, of its logic, of the
necessity which draws into one all minor changes, as elements in a
reasonable development. And his care for it, his curiosity about it,
were symptomatic of his own genius. Structure, proportion, design, a
sort of architectural coherency: that was the aim of his method in
the art of literature, in that form of it, especially, which he will
live by, in fiction.
As historian and archaeologist, as a man of erudition turned artist,
he is well seen in the Chronique du Règne de Charles IX., by which we
pass naturally from Mérimée's critical or scientific work to the
products of his imagination. What economy in the use of a large
antiquarian knowledge! what an instinct amid a hundred details, for
the detail that carries physiognomy in it, that really tells! And
again what outline, what absolute clarity of outline! For the
historian of that puzzling age which centres in the "Eve of Saint
Bartholomew," outward events themselves seem obscured by the
vagueness of motive of the actors in them. But Mérimée, disposing of
them as an artist, not in love with half-lights, compels events and
actors alike to the clearness he [21] desired; takes his side without
hesitation; and makes his hero a Huguenot of pure blood, allowing its
charm, in that charming youth, even to Huguenot piety. And as for
the incidents--however freely it may be undermined by historic doubt,
all reaches a perfectly firm surface, at least for the eye of the
reader. The Chronicle of Charles the Ninth is like a series of
masterly drawings in illustration of a period--the period in which
two other masters of French fiction have found their opportunity,
mainly by the development of its actual historic characters. Those
characters--Catherine de Medicis and the rest--Mérimée, with
significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside, preferring to think
of them as essentially commonplace. For him the interest lies in the
creatures of his own will, who carry in them, however, so lightly! a
learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that of Dumas. He knows
with like completeness the mere fashions of the time--how courtier
and soldier dressed themselves, and the large movements of the
desperate game which fate or chance was playing with those pretty
pieces. Comparing that favourite century of the French Renaissance
with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energetic passions in
the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only perhaps!) of
general happiness. "Assassination," he observes, as if with regret,
"is no longer a part of our manners." In fact, the duel, and the
whole [22] morality of the duel, which does but enforce a certain
regularity on assassination, what has been well called le sentiment
du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then the disposition of
refined existence. It was, indeed, very different, and is, in
Mérimée's romance. In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the
promptings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusion with
that sentiment du fer. Amid his ingenuous blushes, his prayers, and
plentiful tears between-while, it is a part of his very sex. With
his delightful, fresh-blown air, he is for ever tossing the sheath
from the sword, but always as if into bright natural sunshine. A
winsome, yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys his
pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into Mérimée's one quite
cheerful book.
Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it presents are but
the accidents of a particular age, and not like the mental conditions
in which Mérimée was most apt to look for the spectacle of human
power, allied to madness or disease in the individual. For him, at
least, it was the office of fiction to carry one into a different if
not a better world than that actually around us; and if the Chronicle
of Charles the Ninth provided an escape from the tame circumstances
of contemporary life into an impassioned past, Colomba is a measure
of the resources for mental alteration which may be found even in the
modern age. There was a corner of [23] the French Empire, in the
manners of which assassination still had a large part.
"The beauty of Corsica," says Mérimée, "is grave and sad. The aspect
of the capital does but augment the impression caused by the solitude
that surrounds it. There is no movement in the streets. You hear
there none of the laughter, the singing, the loud talking, common in
the towns of Italy. Sometimes, under the shadow of a tree on the
promenade, a dozen armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking
on at the game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those who walk
the pavement are all strangers: the islanders stand at their doors:
every one seems to be on the watch, like a falcon on its nest. All
around the gulf there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it,
bleached mountains. Not a habitation! Only, here and there, on the
heights about the town, certain white constructions detach themselves
from the background of green. They are funeral chapels or family
tombs."
Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as Mérimée here describes
it, is like the national passion of the Corsican--that morbid
personal pride, usurping the place even of grief for the dead, which
centuries of traditional violence had concentrated into an all-
absorbing passion for bloodshed, for bloody revenges, in collusion
with the natural wildness, and the wild social condition of the
island still unaffected even by the finer [24] ethics of the duel.
The supremacy of that passion is well indicated by the cry, put into
the mouth of a young man in the presence of the corpse of his father
deceased in the course of nature--a young man meant to be
commonplace. "Ah! Would thou hadst died malamorte--by violence! We
might have avenged thee!"
In Colomba, Mérimée's best known creation, it is united to a
singularly wholesome type of personal beauty, a natural grace of
manner which is irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting
every circumstance to its design; and presents itself as a kind of
genius, allied to fatal disease of mind. The interest of Mérimée's
book is that it allows us to watch the action of this malignant power
on Colomba's brother, Orso della Robbia, as it discovers, rouses,
concentrates to the leaping-point, in the somewhat weakly diffused
nature of the youth, the dormant elements of a dark humour akin to
her own. Two years after his father's murder, presumably at the
instigation of his ancestral enemies, the young lieutenant is
returning home in the company of two humorously conventional English
people, himself now half Parisianised, with an immense natural
cheerfulness, and willing to believe an account of the crime which
relieves those hated Barricini of all complicity in its guilt. But
from the first, Colomba, with "voice soft and musical," is at his
side, gathering every accident and echo and circumstance, the very
lightest circumstance, [25] into the chain of necessity which draws
him to the action every one at home expects of him as the head of his
race. He is not unaware. Her very silence on the matter speaks so
plainly. "You are forming me!" he admits. "Well! 'Hot shot, or cold
steel!'--you see I have not forgotten my Corsican." More and more,
as he goes on his way with her, he finds himself accessible to the
damning thoughts he has so long combated. In horror, he tries to
disperse them by the memory of his comrades in the regiment, the
drawing-rooms of Paris, the English lady who has promised to be his
bride, and will shortly visit him in the humble manoir of his
ancestors. From his first step among them the villagers of
Pietranera, divided already into two rival camps, are watching him in
suspense--Pietranera, perched among those deep forests where the
stifled sense of violent death is everywhere. Colomba places in his
hands the little chest which contains the father's shirt covered with
great spots of blood. "Behold the lead that struck him!" and she
laid on the shirt two rusted bullets. "Orso! you will avenge him!"
She embraces him with a kind of madness, kisses wildly the bullets
and the shirt, leaves him with the terrible relics already exerting
their mystic power upon him. It is as if in the nineteenth century a
girl, amid Christian habits, had gone back to that primitive old
pagan version of the story of the Grail, which [26] identifies it not
with the Most Precious Blood, but only with the blood of a murdered
relation crying for vengeance. Awake at last in his old chamber at
Pietranera, the house of the Barricini at the other end of the
square, with its rival tower and rudely carved escutcheons, stares
him in the face. His ancestral enemy is there, an aged man now, but
with two well-grown sons, like two stupid dumb animals, whose
innocent blood will soon be on his so oddly lighted conscience. At
times, his better hope seemed to lie in picking a quarrel and killing
at least in fair fight, one of these two stupid dumb animals; with
rude ill-suppressed laughter one day, as they overhear Colomba's
violent utterances at a funeral feast, for she is a renowned
improvisatrice. "Your father is an old man," he finds himself
saying, "I could crush with my hands. 'Tis for you I am destined,
for you and your brother!" And if it is by course of nature that the
old man dies not long after the murder of these sons (self-provoked
after all), dies a fugitive at Pisa, as it happens, by an odd
accident, in the presence of Colomba, no violent death by Orso's own
hand could have been more to her mind. In that last hard page of
Mérimée's story, mere dramatic propriety itself for a moment seems to
plead for the forgiveness, which from Joseph and his brethren to the
present day, as we know, has been as winning in story as in actual
life. Such dramatic propriety, however, was by no means [27] in
Mérimée's way. "What I must have is the hand that fired the shot,"
she had sung, "the eye that guided it; aye! and the mind moreover--
the mind, which had conceived the deed!" And now, it is in idiotic
terror, a fugitive from Orso's vengeance, that the last of the
Barricini is dying.
Exaggerated art! you think. But it was precisely such exaggerated
art, intense, unrelieved, an art of fierce colours, that is needed by
those who are seeking in art, as I said of Mérimée, a kind of
artificial stimulus. And if his style is still impeccably correct,
cold-blooded, impersonal, as impersonal as that of Scott himself, it
does but conduce the better to his one exclusive aim. It is like the
polish of the stiletto Colomba carried always under her mantle, or
the beauty of the fire-arms, that beauty coming of nice adaptation to
purpose, which she understood so well--a task characteristic also of
Mérimée himself, a sort of fanatic joy in the perfect pistol-shot, at
its height in the singular story he has translated from the Russian
of Pouchkine. Those raw colours he preferred; Spanish, Oriental,
African, perhaps, irritant certainly to cisalpine eyes, he
undoubtedly attained the colouring you associate with sun-stroke,
only possible under a sun in which dead things rot quickly.
Pity and terror, we know, go to the making of the essential tragic
sense. In Mérimée, certainly, we have all its terror, but without
the [28] pity. Saint-Clair, the consent of his mistress barely
attained at last, rushes madly on self-destruction, that he may die
with the taste of his great love fresh on his lips. All the
grotesque accidents of violent death he records with visual
exactness, and no pains to relieve them; the ironic indifference, for
instance, with which, on the scaffold or the battle-field, a man will
seem to grin foolishly at the ugly rents through which his life has
passed. Seldom or never has the mere pen of a writer taken us so
close to the cannon's mouth as in the Taking of the Redoubt, while
Matteo Falcone--twenty-five short pages--is perhaps the cruellest
story in the world.
Colomba, that strange, fanatic being, who has a code of action, of
self-respect, a conscience, all to herself, who with all her virginal
charm only does not make you hate her, is, in truth, the type of a
sort of humanity Mérimée found it pleasant to dream of--a humanity as
alien as the animals, with whose moral affinities to man his
imaginative work is often directly concerned. Were they so alien,
after all? Were there not survivals of the old wild creatures in the
gentlest, the politest of us? Stories that told of sudden freaks of
gentle, polite natures, straight back, not into Paradise, were always
welcome to men's fancies; and that could only be because they found a
psychologic truth in them. With much success, with a credibility
insured by his literary tact, Mérimée tried his own hand at such
stories: unfrocked the [29] bear in the amorous young Lithuanian
noble, the wolf in the revolting peasant of the Middle Age. There
were survivals surely in himself, in that stealthy presentment of his
favourite themes, in his own art. You seem to find your hand on a
serpent, in reading him.
In such survivals, indeed, you see the operation of his favourite
motive, the sense of wild power, under a sort of mask, or assumed
habit, realised as the very genius of nature itself; and that
interest, with some superstitions closely allied to it, the belief in
the vampire, for instance, is evidenced especially in certain
pretended Illyrian compositions--prose translations, the reader was
to understand, of more or less ancient popular ballads; La Guzla, he
called the volume, The Lyre, as we might say; only that the
instrument of the Illyrian minstrel had but one string. Artistic
deception, a trick of which there is something in the historic
romance as such, in a book like his own Chronicle of Charles the
Ninth, was always welcome to Mérimée; it was part of the machinery of
his rooted habit of intellectual reserve. A master of irony also, in
Madame Lucrezia he seems to wish to expose his own method cynically;
to explain his art--how he takes you in--as a clever, confident
conjuror might do. So properly were the readers of La Guzla taken in
that he followed up his success in that line by the Theatre of Clara
Gazul, purporting to be from a rare Spanish original, the work [30]
of a nun, who, under tame, conventual reading, had felt the touch of
mundane, of physical passions; had become a dramatic poet, and
herself a powerful actress. It may dawn on you in reading her that
Mérimée was a kind of Webster, but with the superficial mildness of
our nineteenth century. At the bottom of the true drama there is
ever, logically at least, the ballad: the ballad dealing in a kind of
short-hand (or, say! in grand, simple, universal outlines) with those
passions, crimes, mistakes, which have a kind of fatality in them, a
kind of necessity to come to the surface of the human mind, if not to
the surface of our experience, as in the case of some frankly
supernatural incidents which Mérimée re-handled. Whether human love
or hatred has had most to do in shaping the universal fancy that the
dead come back, I cannot say. Certainly that old ballad literature
has instances in plenty, in which the voice, the hand, the brief
visit from the grave, is a natural response to the cry of the human
creature. That ghosts should return, as they do so often in
Mérimée's fiction, is but a sort of natural justice. Only, in
Mérimée's prose ballads, in those admirable, short, ballad-like
stories, where every word tells, of which he was a master, almost the
inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts--a vampire tribe--
and never come to do people good; congruously with the mental
constitution of the writer, which, alike in fact and fiction, [31]
could hardly have horror enough--theme after theme. Mérimée himself
emphasises this almost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to
one of his volumes of short stories some letters on a matter of fact-
-a Spanish bull-fight, in which those old Romans, he regretted, might
seem, decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In
truth, Mérimée was the unconscious parent of much we may think of
dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there
were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred,
and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of
maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies.
Mérimée, a literary artist, was not a man who used two words where
one would do better, and he shines especially in those brief
compositions which, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his
wonderful faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his
work, in which there is not a touch but counts. That is an art of
which there are few examples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or
slipshod, literary language hardly lending itself to the
concentration of thought and expression, which are of the essence of
such writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you wish to know
what art of that kind can come to, read Mérimée's little romances;
best of all, perhaps, La Vénus d'Ille and Arsène Guillot. The former
is a modern version of the beautiful old story of the Ring given to
Venus, given to her, in [32] this case, by a somewhat sordid creature
of the nineteenth century, whom she looks on with more than disdain.
The strange outline of the Canigou, one of the most imposing outlying
heights of the Pyrenees, down the mysterious slopes of which the
traveller has made his way towards nightfall into the great plain of
Toulouse, forms an impressive background, congruous with the many
relics of irrepressible old paganism there, but in entire contrast to
the bourgeois comfort of the place where his journey is to end, the
abode of an aged antiquary, loud and bright just now with the
celebration of a vulgar worldly marriage. In the midst of this well-
being, prosaic in spite of the neighbourhood, in spite of the pretty
old wedding customs, morsels of that local colour in which Mérimée
delights, the old pagan powers are supposed to reveal themselves once
more (malignantly, of course), in the person of a magnificent bronze
statue of Venus recently unearthed in the antiquary's garden. On her
finger, by ill-luck, the coarse young bridegroom on the morning of
his marriage places for a moment the bridal ring only too effectually
(the bronze hand closes, like a wilful living one, upon it), and
dies, you are to understand, in her angry metallic embraces on his
marriage night. From the first, indeed, she had seemed bent on
crushing out men's degenerate bodies and souls, though the
supernatural horror of the tale is adroitly made credible by a
certain vagueness in the [33] events, which covers a quite natural
account of the bridegroom's mysterious death.
The intellectual charm of literary work so thoroughly designed as
Mérimée's depends in part on the sense as you read, hastily perhaps,
perhaps in need of patience, that you are dealing with a composition,
the full secret of which is only to be attained in the last
paragraph, that with the last word in mind you will retrace your
steps, more than once (it may be) noting then the minuter structure,
also the natural or wrought flowers by the way. Nowhere is such
method better illustrated than by another of Mérimée's quintessential
pieces, Arsène Guillotand here for once with a conclusion ethically
acceptable also. Mérimée loved surprises in human nature, but it is
not often that he surprises us by tenderness or generosity of
character, as another master of French fiction, M. Octave Feuillet,
is apt to do; and the simple pathos of Arsène Guillot gives it a
unique place in Mérimée's writings. It may be said, indeed, that
only an essentially pitiful nature could have told the exquisitely
cruel story of Matteo Falcone precisely as Mérimée has told it; and
those who knew him testify abundantly to his own capacity for
generous friendship. He was no more wanting than others in those
natural sympathies (sending tears to the eyes at the sight of
suffering age or childhood) which happily are no extraordinary
component in men's natures. It was, perhaps, no fitting return for a
[34] friendship of over thirty years to publish posthumously those
Lettres à une Inconnue, which reveal that reserved, sensitive, self-
centred nature, a little pusillanimously in the power, at the
disposition of another. For just there lies the interest, the
psychological interest, of those letters. An amateur of power, of
the spectacle of power and force, followed minutely but without
sensibility on his part, with a kind of cynic pride rather for the
mainspring of his method, both of thought and expression, you find
him here taken by surprise at last, and somewhat humbled, by an
unsuspected force of affection in himself. His correspondent,
unknown but for these letters except just by name, figures in them
as, in truth, a being only too much like himself, seen from one side;
reflects his taciturnity, his touchiness, his incredulity except for
self-torment. Agitated, dissatisfied, he is wrestling in her with
himself, his own difficult qualities. He demands from her a freedom,
a frankness, he would have been the last to grant. It is by first
thoughts, of course, that what is forcible and effective in human
nature, the force, therefore, of carnal love, discovers itself; and
for her first thoughts Mérimée is always pleading, but always
complaining that he gets only her second thoughts; the thoughts, that
is, of a reserved, self-limiting nature, well under the yoke of
convention, like his own. Strange conjunction! At the beginning of
the correspondence he seems to have been [35] seeking only a fine
intellectual companionship; the lady, perhaps, looking for something
warmer. Towards such companionship that likeness to himself in her
might have been helpful, but was not enough of a complement to his
own nature to be anything but an obstruction in love; and it is to
that, little by little, that his humour turns. He--the
Megalopsychus, as Aristotle defines him--acquires all the lover's
humble habits: himself displays all the tricks of love, its
casuistries, its exigency, its superstitions, aye! even its
vulgarities; involves with the significance of his own genius the
mere hazards and inconsequence of a perhaps average nature; but too
late in the day--the years. After the attractions and repulsions of
half a lifetime, they are but friends, and might forget to be that,
but for his death, clearly presaged in his last weak, touching
letter, just two hours before. There, too, had been the blind and
naked force of nature and circumstance, surprising him in the
uncontrollable movements of his own so carefully guarded heart.
The intimacy, the effusion, the so freely exposed personality of
those letters does but emphasise the fact that impersonality was, in
literary art, Mérimée's central aim. Personality versus
impersonality in art:--how much or how little of one's self one may
put into one's work: whether anything at all of it: whether one can
put there anything else:--is clearly a far-reaching and complex
question. Serviceable as [36] the basis of a precautionary maxim
towards the conduct of our work, self-effacement, or impersonality,
in literary or artistic creation, is, perhaps, after all, as little
possible as a strict realism. "It has always been my rule to put
nothing of myself into my works," says another great master of French
prose, Gustave Flaubert; but, luckily as we may think, he often
failed in thus effacing himself, as he too was aware. "It has always
been my rule to put nothing of myself into my works" (to be
disinterested in his literary creations, so to speak), "yet I have
put much of myself into them": and where he failed Mérimée succeeded.
There they stand--Carmen, Colomba, the "False" Demetrius--as detached
from him as from each other, with no more filial likeness to their
maker than if they were the work of another person. And to his
method of conception, Mérimée's much-praised literary style, his
method of expression, is strictly conformable--impersonal in its
beauty, the perfection of nobody's style--thus vindicating anew by
its very impersonality that much worn, but not untrue saying, that
the style is the man:--a man, impassible, unfamiliar, impeccable,
veiling a deep sense of what is forcible, nay, terrible, in things,
under the sort of personal pride that makes a man a nice observer of
all that is most conventional. Essentially unlike other people, he
is always fastidiously in the fashion--an expert in all the little,
half- [37] contemptuous elegances of which it is capable. Mérimée's
superb self-effacement, his impersonality, is itself but an effective
personal trait, and, transferred to art, becomes a markedly peculiar
quality of literary beauty. For, in truth, this creature of
disillusion who had no care for half-lights, and, like his creations,
had no atmosphere about him, gifted as he was with pure mind, with
the quality which secures flawless literary structure, had, on the
other hand, nothing of what we call soul in literature:--hence, also,
that singular harshness in his ideal, as if, in theological language,
he were incapable of grace. He has none of those subjectivities,
colourings, peculiarities of mental refraction, which necessitate
varieties of style--could we spare such?--and render the perfections
of it no merely negative qualities. There are masters of French
prose whose art has begun where the art of Mérimée leaves off.
NOTES
11. *A lecture delivered at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, and at
the London Institution. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Dec.
1890, and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
RAPHAEL*
[38] By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he
produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the
suavity of his life, some would add in the "opportunity" of his early
death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the
good fortune, of genius. Yet, if we follow the actual growth of his
powers, within their proper framework, the age of the Renaissance--an
age of which we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, and found
perhaps its chief enjoyment in the attitude of the scholar, in the
enthusiastic acquisition of knowledge for its own sake:--if we thus
view Raphael and his works in their environment we shall find even
his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his
own patient disposal of the means at hand. Facile master as he may
seem, as indeed he is, he is also one of the world's typical
scholars, with [39] Plato, and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton. The
formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: genius by
accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius--
triumphant power of genius.
Urbino, where this prince of the Renaissance was born in 1483, year
also of the birth of Luther, leader of the other great movement of
that age, the Reformation--Urbino, under its dukes of the house of
Montefeltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of native
artistic faculty from the first a willing learner. The gloomy old
fortress of the feudal masters of the town had been replaced, in
those later years of the Quattro-cento, by a consummate monument of
Quattro-cento taste, a museum of ancient and modern art, the owners
of which lived there, gallantly at home, amid the choicer flowers of
living humanity. The ducal palace was, in fact, become nothing less
than a school of ambitious youth in all the accomplishments alike of
war and peace. Raphael's connexion with it seems to have become
intimate, and from the first its influence must have overflowed so
small a place. In the case of the lucky Raphael, for once, the
actual conditions of early life had been suitable, propitious,
accordant to what one's imagination would have required for the
childhood of the man. He was born amid the art he was, not to
transform, but to perfect, by a thousand reverential retouchings. In
no palace, however, but [40] in a modest abode, still shown,
containing the workshop of his father, Giovanni Santi. But here,
too, though in frugal form, art, the arts, were present. A store of
artistic objects was, or had recently been, made there, and now
especially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures in the old
Umbrian manner. In quiet nooks of the Apennines Giovanni's works
remain; and there is one of them, worth study, in spite of what
critics say of its crudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its
immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a
delicate grace, it wins you nevertheless to return again and again,
and ponder, by a sincere expression of sorrow, profound, yet
resigned, be the cause what it may, among all the many causes of
sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity, human or divine. But if
you keep in mind when looking at it the facts of Raphael's childhood,
you will recognise in his father's picture, not the anticipated
sorrow of the "Mater Dolorosa" over the dead son, but the grief of a
simple household over the mother herself taken early from it. That
may have been the first picture the eyes of the world's great painter
of Madonnas rested on; and if he stood diligently before it to copy,
and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no disloyalty to his
original, refined, improved, substituted,--substituted himself, in
fact, his finer self--he had already struck the persistent note of
his career. As with his age, it is [41] his vocation, ardent worker
as he is, to enjoy himself--to enjoy himself amiably, and to find his
chief enjoyment in the attitude of a scholar. And one by one, one
after another, his masters, the very greatest of them, go to school
to him.
It was so especially with the artist of whom Raphael first became
certainly a learner--Perugino. Giovanni Santi had died in Raphael's
childhood, too early to have been in any direct sense his teacher.
The lad, however, from one and another, had learned much, when, with
his share of the patrimony in hand, enough to keep him, but not to
tempt him from scholarly ways, he came to Perugia, hoping still
further to improve himself. He was in his eighteenth year, and how
he looked just then you may see in a drawing of his own in the
University Galleries, of somewhat stronger mould than less genuine
likenesses may lead you to expect. There is something of a fighter
in the way in which the nose springs from the brow between the wide-
set, meditative eyes. A strenuous lad! capable of plodding, if you
dare apply that word to labour so impassioned as his--to any labour
whatever done at Perugia, centre of the dreamiest Apennine scenery.
Its various elements (one hardly knows whether one is thinking of
Italian nature or of Raphael's art in recounting them), the richly-
planted lowlands, the sensitive mountain lines in flight one beyond
the other into clear distance, the cool yet glowing atmosphere, [42]
the romantic morsels of architecture, which lend to the entire scene
I know not what expression of reposeful antiquity, arrange themselves
here as for set purpose of pictorial effect, and have gone with
little change into his painted backgrounds. In the midst of it, on
titanic old Roman and Etruscan foundations, the later Gothic town had
piled itself along the lines of a gigantic land of rock, stretched
out from the last slope of the Apennines into the plain. Between its
fingers steep dark lanes wind down into the olive gardens; on the
finger-tips military and monastic builders had perched their towns.
A place as fantastic in its attractiveness as the human life which
then surged up and down in it in contrast to the peaceful scene
around. The Baglioni who ruled there had brought certain tendencies
of that age to a typical completeness of expression, veiling crime--
crime, it might seem, for its own sake, a whole octave of fantastic
crime--not merely under brilliant fashions and comely persons, but
under fashions and persons, an outward presentment of life and of
themselves, which had a kind of immaculate grace and discretion about
them, as if Raphael himself had already brought his unerring gift of
selection to bear upon it all for motives of art. With life in those
streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work of his masters,
with the mere exercises of his fellow-students, his hand rearranges,
refines, renews, as if by simple contact; [43] but it is met here
half-way in its renewing office by some special aptitude for such
grace in the subject itself. Seemingly innocent, full of natural
gaiety, eternally youthful, those seven and more deadly sins,
embodied and attired in just the jaunty dress then worn, enter now
and afterwards as spectators, or assistants, into many a sacred
foreground and background among the friends and kinsmen of the Holy
Family, among the very angels, gazing, conversing, standing firmly
and unashamed. During his apprenticeship at Perugia Raphael visited
and left his work in more modest places round about, along those
seductive mountain or lowland roads, and copied for one of them
Perugino's "Marriage of the Virgin" significantly, did it by many
degrees better, with a very novel effect of motion everywhere, and
with that grace which natural motion evokes, introducing for a temple
in the background a lovely bit of his friend Bramante's sort of
architecture, the true Renaissance or perfected Quattro-cento
architecture. He goes on building a whole lordly new city of the
like as he paints to the end of his life. The subject, we may note,
as we leave Perugia in Raphael's company, had been suggested by the
famous mystic treasure of its cathedral church, the marriage ring of
the Blessed Virgin herself.
Raphael's copy had been made for the little old Apennine town of
Città di Castello; and another place he visits at this time is still
more [44] effective in the development of his genius. About his
twentieth year he comes to Siena--that other rocky Titan's hand, just
lifted out of the surface of the plain. It is the most grandiose
place he has yet seen; it has not forgotten that it was once the
rival of Florence; and here the patient scholar passes under an
influence of somewhat larger scope than Perugino's. Perugino's
pictures are for the most part religious contemplations, painted and
made visible, to accompany the action of divine service--a visible
pattern to priests, attendants, worshippers, of what the course of
their invisible thoughts should be at those holy functions. Learning
in the workshop of Perugino to produce the like--such works as the
Ansidei Madonna--to produce them very much better than his master,
Raphael was already become a freeman of the most strictly religious
school of Italian art, the so devout Umbrian soul finding there its
purest expression, still untroubled by the naturalism, the
intellectualism, the antique paganism, then astir in the artistic
soul everywhere else in Italy. The lovely work of Perugino, very
lovely at its best, of the early Raphael also, is in fact
"conservative," and at various points slightly behind its day, though
not unpleasantly. In Perugino's allegoric frescoes of the Cambio,
the Hall of the Money-changers, for instance, under the mystic rule
of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their place indeed
side by side with the figures of the New [45] Testament, but are no
Romans or Greeks, neither are the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them,
warrior, sage, king, precisely of Perugino's own time and place, but
still contemplations only, after the manner of the personages in his
church-work; or, say, dreams--monastic dreams--thin, do-nothing
creatures, conjured from sky and cloud. Perugino clearly never broke
through the meditative circle of the Middle Age.
Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period at Rome, exhibits
a wonderful narrative power in painting; and the secret of that
power--the power of developing a story in a picture, or series of
pictures--may be traced back from him to Pinturicchio, as that
painter worked on those vast, well-lighted walls of the cathedral
library at Siena, at the great series of frescoes illustrative of the
life of Pope Pius the Second. It had been a brilliant personal
history, in contact now and again with certain remarkable public
events--a career religious yet mundane, you scarcely know which, so
natural is the blending of lights, of interest in it. How unlike the
Peruginesque conception of life in its almost perverse other-
worldliness, which Raphael now leaves behind him, but, like a true
scholar, will not forget. Pinturicchio then had invited his
remarkable young friend hither, "to assist him by his counsels," who,
however, pupil-wise, after his habit also learns much as he thus
assists. He stands depicted there in person in the scene [46] of the
canonisation of Saint Catherine; and though his actual share in the
work is not to be defined, connoisseurs have felt his intellectual
presence, not at one place only, in touches at once finer and more
forcible than were usual in the steady-going, somewhat Teutonic,
Pinturicchio, Raphael's elder by thirty years. The meek scholar you
see again, with his tentative sketches and suggestions, had more than
learned his lesson; through all its changes that flexible
intelligence loses nothing; does but add continually to its store.
Henceforward Raphael will be able to tell a story in a picture,
better, with a truer economy, with surer judgment, more naturally and
easily than any one else.
And here at Siena, of all Italian towns perhaps most deeply impressed
with medieval character--an impress it still retains--grotesque,
parti-coloured--parti-coloured, so to speak, in its genius--Satanic,
yet devout of humour, as depicted in its old chronicles, and
beautiful withal, dignified; it is here that Raphael becomes for the
first time aware of that old pagan world, which had already come to
be so much for the art-schools of Italy. There were points, as we
saw, at which the school of Perugia was behind its day. Amid those
intensely Gothic surroundings in the cathedral library where
Pinturicchio worked, stood, as it remained till recently, unashamed
there, a marble group of the three Graces--an average Roman work in
[47] effect--the sort of thing we are used to. That, perhaps, is the
only reason why for our part, except with an effort, we find it
conventional or even tame. For the youthful Raphael, on the other
hand, at that moment, antiquity, as with "the dew of herbs," seemed
therein "to awake and sing" out of the dust, in all its sincerity,
its cheerfulness and natural charm. He has turned it into a picture;
has helped to make his original only too familiar, perhaps, placing
the three sisters against his own favourite, so unclassic, Umbrian
background indeed, but with no trace of the Peruginesque ascetic,
Gothic meagreness in themselves; emphasising rather, with a hearty
acceptance, the nude, the flesh; making the limbs, in fact, a little
heavy. It was but one gleam he had caught just there in medieval
Siena of that large pagan world he was, not so long afterwards, more
completely than others to make his own. And when somewhat later
he painted the exquisite, still Peruginesque, Apollo and Marsyas,
semi-medieval habits again asserted themselves with delightfully
blent effects. It might almost pass for a parable--that little
picture in the Louvre--of the contention between classic art and the
romantic, superseded in the person of Marsyas, a homely, quaintly
poetical young monk, surely! Only, Apollo himself also is clearly of
the same brotherhood; has a touch, in truth, of Heine's fancied
Apollo "in exile," who, Christianity now triumphing, has served as
[48] a hired shepherd, or hidden himself under the cowl in a
cloister; and Raphael, as if at work on choir-book or missal, still
applies symbolical gilding for natural sunlight. It is as if he
wished to proclaim amid newer lights--this scholar who never forgot a
lesson--his loyal pupilage to Perugino, and retained still something
of medieval stiffness, of the monastic thoughts also, that were born
and lingered in places like Borgo San Sepolcro or Città di Castello.
Chef-d'oeuvre! you might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremulous, half-
convinced, monkish treatment of that after all damnable pagan world.
And our own generation certainly, with kindred tastes, loving or
wishing to love pagan art as sincerely as did the people of the
Renaissance, and medieval art as well, would accept, of course, of
work conceived in that so seductively mixed manner, ten per cent of
even Raphael's later, purely classical presentments.
That picture was suggested by a fine old intaglio in the Medicean
collection at Florence, was painted, therefore, after Raphael's
coming thither, and therefore also a survival with him of a style
limited, immature, literally provincial; for in the phase on which he
had now entered he is under the influence of style in its most fully
determined sense, of what might be called the thorough-bass of the
pictorial art, of a fully realised intellectual system in regard to
its processes, well tested by experiment, upon a survey [49] of all
the conditions and various applications of it--of style as understood
by Da Vinci, then at work in Florence. Raphael's sojourn there
extends from his twenty-first to his twenty-fifth year. He came with
flattering recommendations from the Court of Urbino; was admitted as
an equal by the masters of his craft, being already in demand for
work, then and ever since duly prized; was, in fact, already famous,
though he alone is unaware--is in his own opinion still but a
learner, and as a learner yields himself meekly, systematically to
influence; would learn from Francia, whom he visits at Bologna; from
the earlier naturalistic works of Masolino and Masaccio; from the
solemn prophetic work of the venerable dominican, Bartolommeo,
disciple of Savonarola. And he has already habitually this strange
effect, not only on the whole body of his juniors, but on those whose
manner had been long since formed; they lose something of themselves
by contact with him, as if they went to school again.
Bartolommeo, Da Vinci, were masters certainly of what we call "the
ideal" in art. Yet for Raphael, so loyal hitherto to the traditions
of Umbrian art, to its heavy weight of hieratic tradition, dealing
still somewhat conventionally with a limited, non-natural matter--for
Raphael to come from Siena, Perugia, Urbino, to sharp-witted,
practical, masterful Florence was in immediate effect a transition
from reverie to [50] realities--to a world of facts. Those masters
of the ideal were for him, in the first instance, masters also of
realism, as we say. Henceforth, to the end, he will be the analyst,
the faithful reporter, in his work, of what he sees. He will realise
the function of style as exemplified in the practice of Da Vinci,
face to face with the world of nature and man as they are; selecting
from, asserting one's self in a transcript of its veritable data;
like drawing to like there, in obedience to the master's preference
for the embodiment of the creative form within him. Portrait-art had
been nowhere in the school of Perugino, but it was the triumph of the
school of Florence. And here a faithful analyst of what he sees, yet
lifting it withal, unconsciously, inevitably, recomposing,
glorifying, Raphael too becomes, of course, a painter of portraits.
We may foresee them already in masterly series, from Maddalena Doni,
a kind of younger, more virginal sister of La Gioconda, to cardinals
and popes--to that most sensitive of all portraits, the "Violin-
player," if it be really his. But then, on the other hand, the
influence of such portraiture will be felt also in his inventive
work, in a certain reality there, a certain convincing loyalty to
experience and observation. In his most elevated religious work he
will still keep, for security at least, close to nature, and the
truth of nature. His modelling of the visible surface is lovely
because he understands, can see the hidden causes [51] of momentary
action in the face, the hands--how men and animals are really made
and kept alive. Set side by side, then, with that portrait of
Maddalena Doni, as forming together a measure of what he has learned
at Florence, the "Madonna del Gran Duca," which still remains there.
Call it on revision, and without hesitation, the loveliest of his
Madonnas, perhaps of all Madonnas; and let it stand as representative
of as many as fifty or sixty types of that subject, onwards to the
Sixtine Madonna, in all the triumphancy of his later days at Rome.
Observe the veritable atmosphere about it, the grand composition of
the drapery, the magic relief, the sweetness and dignity of the human
hands and faces, the noble tenderness of Mary's gesture, the unity of
the thing with itself, the faultless exclusion of all that does not
belong to its main purpose; it is like a single, simple axiomatic
thought. Note withal the novelty of its effect on the mind, and you
will see that this master of style (that's a consummate example of
what is meant by style) has been still a willing scholar in the hands
of Da Vinci. But then, with what ease also, and simplicity, and a
sort of natural success not his!
It was in his twenty-fifth year that Raphael came to the city of the
popes, Michelangelo being already in high favour there. For the
remaining years of his life he paces the same streets with that grim
artist, who was so great a [52] contrast with himself, and for the
first time his attitude towards a gift different from his own is not
that of a scholar, but that of a rival. If he did not become the
scholar of Michelangelo, it would be difficult, on the other hand, to
trace anywhere in Michelangelo's work the counter influence usual
with those who had influenced him. It was as if he desired to add to
the strength of Michelangelo that sweetness which at first sight
seems to be wanting there. Ex forti dulcedo: and in the study of
Michelangelo certainly it is enjoyable to detect, if we may, sweet
savours amid the wonderful strength, the strangeness and potency of
what he pours forth for us: with Raphael, conversely, something of a
relief to find in the suavity of that so softly moving, tuneful
existence, an assertion of strength. There was the promise of it, as
you remember, in his very look as he saw himself at eighteen; and you
know that the lesson, the prophecy of those holy women and children
he has made his own, is that "the meek shall possess." So, when we
see him at Rome at last, in that atmosphere of greatness, of the
strong, he too is found putting forth strength, adding that element
in due proportion to the mere sweetness and charm of his genius; yet
a sort of strength, after all, still congruous with the line of
development that genius has hitherto taken, the special strength of
the scholar and his proper reward, a purely cerebral strength [53]
the strength, the power of an immense understanding.
Now the life of Raphael at Rome seems as we read of it hasty and
perplexed, full of undertakings, of vast works not always to be
completed, of almost impossible demands on his industry, in a world
of breathless competition, amid a great company of spectators, for
great rewards. You seem to lose him, feel he may have lost himself,
in the multiplicity of his engagements; might fancy that, wealthy,
variously decorated, a courtier, cardinal in petto, he was "serving
tables." But, you know, he was forcing into this brief space of
years (he died at thirty-seven) more than the natural business of the
larger part of a long life; and one way of getting some kind of
clearness into it, is to distinguish the various divergent outlooks
or applications, and group the results of that immense intelligence,
that still untroubled, flawlessly operating, completely informed
understanding, that purely cerebral power, acting through his
executive, inventive or creative gifts, through the eye and the hand
with its command of visible colour and form. In that way you may
follow him along many various roads till brain and eye and hand
suddenly fail in the very midst of his work--along many various
roads, but you can follow him along each of them distinctly.
At the end of one of them is the Galatea, and in quite a different
form of industry, the datum [54] for the beginnings of a great
literary work of pure erudition. Coming to the capital of
Christendom, he comes also for the first time under the full
influence of the antique world, pagan art, pagan life, and is
henceforth an enthusiastic archaeologist. On his first coming to
Rome a papal bull had authorised him to inspect all ancient marbles,
inscriptions, and the like, with a view to their adaptation in new
buildings then proposed. A consequent close acquaintance with
antiquity, with the very touch of it, blossomed literally in his
brain, and, under his facile hand, in artistic creations, of which
the Galatea is indeed the consummation. But the frescoes of the
Farnese palace, with a hundred minor designs, find their place along
that line of his artistic activity; they do not exhaust his knowledge
of antiquity, his interest in and control of it. The mere fragments
of it that still cling to his memory would have composed, had he
lived longer, a monumental illustrated survey of the monuments of
ancient Rome.
To revive something of the proportionable spirit at least of antique
building in the architecture of the present, came naturally to
Raphael as the son of his age; and at the end of another of those
roads of diverse activity stands Saint Peter's, though unfinished.
What a proof again of that immense intelligence, by which, as I said,
the element of strength supplemented the element of mere sweetness
and charm in his [55] work, that at the age of thirty, known hitherto
only as a painter, at the dying request of the venerable Bramante
himself, he should have been chosen to succeed him as the director of
that vast enterprise! And if little in the great church, as we see
it, is directly due to him, yet we must not forget that his work in
the Vatican also was partly that of an architect. In the Loggie, or
open galleries of the Vatican, the last and most delicate effects of
Quattro-cento taste come from his hand, in that peculiar arabesque
decoration which goes by his name.
Saint Peter's, as you know, had an indirect connexion with the
Teutonic reformation. When Leo X. pushed so far the sale of
indulgences to the overthrow of Luther's Catholicism, it was done
after all for the not entirely selfish purpose of providing funds to
build the metropolitan church of Christendom with the assistance of
Raphael; and yet, upon another of those diverse outways of his so
versatile intelligence, at the close of which we behold his
unfinished picture of the Transfiguration, what has been called
Raphael's Bible finds its place--that series of biblical scenes in
the Loggie of the Vatican. And here, while he has shown that he
could do something of Michelangelo's work a little more soothingly
than he, this graceful Roman Catholic rivals also what is perhaps
best in the work of the rude German reformer--of Luther, who came to
Rome about this very [56] time, to find nothing admirable there.
Place along with them the Cartoons, and observe that in this phase of
his artistic labour, as Luther printed his vernacular German version
of the Scriptures, so Raphael is popularising them for an even larger
world; he brings the simple, to their great delight, face to face
with the Bible as it is, in all its variety of incident, after they
had so long had to content themselves with but fragments of it, as
presented in the symbolism and in the brief lections of the Liturgy:-
-Biblia Pauperum, in a hundred forms of reproduction, though designed
for popes and princes.
But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of those divergent
ways, glows his painted philosophy in the Parnassus and the School of
Athens, with their numerous accessories. In the execution of those
works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood him in good stead;
and here, above all, is the pledge of his immense understanding, at
work on its own natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, the
apprehension, the transmission to others of complex and difficult
ideas. We have here, in fact, the sort of intelligence to be found
in Lessing, in Herder, in Hegel, in those who, by the instrumentality
of an organised philosophic system, have comprehended in one view or
vision what poetry has been, or what Greek philosophy, as great
complex dynamic facts in the world. But then, with the artist of the
sixteenth century, [57] this synoptic intellectual power worked in
perfect identity with the pictorial imagination and a magic hand. By
him large theoretic conceptions are addressed, so to speak, to the
intelligence of the eye. There had been efforts at such abstract or
theoretic painting before, or say rather, leagues behind him. Modern
efforts, again, we know, and not in Germany alone, to do the like for
that larger survey of such matters which belongs to the philosophy of
our own century; but for one or many reasons they have seemed only to
prove the incapacity of philosophy to be expressed in terms of art.
They have seemed, in short, so far, not fit to be seen literally--
those ideas of culture, religion, and the like. Yet Plato, as you
know, supposed a kind of visible loveliness about ideas. Well! in
Raphael, painted ideas, painted and visible philosophy, are for once
as beautiful as Plato thought they must be, if one truly apprehended
them. For note, above all, that with all his wealth of antiquarian
knowledge in detail, and with a perfect technique, it is after all
the beauty, the grace of poetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious
faith that he thus records.
Of religious faith also. The Disputa, in which, under the form of a
council representative of all ages, he embodies the idea of theology,
divinarum rerum notitia, as constantly resident in the Catholic
Church, ranks with the "Parnassus" and the "School of Athens," if it
does not rather [58] close another of his long lines of intellectual
travail--a series of compositions, partly symbolic, partly
historical, in which the "Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison," the
"Expulsion of the Huns," and the "Coronation of Charlemagne," find
their places; and by which, painting in the great official chambers
of the Vatican, Raphael asserts, interprets the power and charm of
the Catholic ideal as realised in history. A scholar, a student of
the visible world, of the natural man, yet even more ardently of the
books, the art, the life of the old pagan world, the age of the
Renaissance, through all its varied activity, had, in spite of the
weakened hold of Catholicism on the critical intellect, been still
under its influence, the glow of it, as a religious ideal, and in the
presence of Raphael you cannot think it a mere after-glow.
Independently, that is, of less or more evidence for it, the whole
creed of the Middle Age, as a scheme of the world as it should be, as
we should be glad to find it, was still welcome to the heart, the
imagination. Now, in Raphael, all the various conditions of that age
discover themselves as characteristics of a vivid personal genius,
which may be said therefore to be conterminous with the genius of the
Renaissance itself. For him, then, in the breadth of his immense
cosmopolitan intelligence, for Raphael, who had done in part the work
of Luther also, the Catholic Church--through all its phases, as
reflected in its visible local centre, [59] the papacy--is alive
still as of old, one and continuous, and still true to itself. Ah!
what is local and visible, as you know, counts for so much with the
artistic temper!
Old friends, or old foes with but new faces, events repeating
themselves, as his large, clear, synoptic vision can detect, the
invading King of France, Louis XII., appears as Attila: Leo X. as Leo
I.: and he thinks of, he sees, at one and the same moment, the
coronation of Charlemagne and the interview of Pope Leo with Francis
I., as a dutiful son of the Church: of the deliverance of Leo X. from
prison, and the deliverance of St. Peter.
I have abstained from anything like description of Raphael's pictures
in speaking of him and his work, have aimed rather at preparing you
to look at his work for yourselves, by a sketch of his life, and
therein especially, as most appropriate to this place, of Raphael as
a scholar. And now if, in closing, I commend one of his pictures in
particular to your imagination or memory,, your purpose to see it, or
see it again, it will not be the Transfiguration nor the Sixtine
Madonna, nor even the "Madonna del Gran Duca," but the picture we
have in London--the Ansidei, or Blenheim, Madonna. I find there, at
first sight, with something of the pleasure one has in a proposition
of Euclid, a sense of the power of the understanding, in the economy
with which he has reduced his material to the [60] simplest terms,
has disentangled and detached its various elements. He is painting
in Florence, but for Perugia, and sends it a specimen of its own old
art--Mary and the babe enthroned, with St. Nicolas and the Baptist in
attendance on either side. The kind of thing people there had
already seen so many times, but done better, in a sense not to be
measured by degrees, with a wholly original freedom and life and
grace, though he perhaps is unaware, done better as a whole, because
better in every minute particular, than ever before. The scrupulous
scholar, aged twenty-three, is now indeed a master; but still goes
carefully. Note, therefore, how much mere exclusion counts for in
the positive effect of his work. There is a saying that the true
artist is known best by what he omits. Yes, because the whole
question of good taste is involved precisely in such jealous
omission. Note this, for instance, in the familiar Apennine
background, with its blue hills and brown towns, faultless, for once-
-for once only--and observe, in the Umbrian pictures around, how
often such background is marred by grotesque, natural, or
architectural detail, by incongruous or childish incident. In this
cool, pearl-grey, quiet place, where colour tells for double--the
jewelled cope, the painted book in the hand of Mary, the chaplet of
red coral--one is reminded that among all classical writers Raphael's
preference was for the faultless Virgil. How orderly, how divinely
[61] clean and sweet the flesh, the vesture, the floor, the earth and
sky! Ah, say rather the hand, the method of the painter! There is
an unmistakeable pledge of strength, of movement and animation in the
cast of the Baptist's countenance, but reserved, repressed. Strange,
Raphael has given him a staff of transparent crystal. Keep then to
that picture as the embodied formula of Raphael's genius. Amid all
he has here already achieved, full, we may think, of the quiet
assurance of what is to come, his attitude is still that of the
scholar; he seems still to be saying, before all things, from first
to last, "I am utterly purposed that I will not offend."
NOTES
38. *A lecture delivered to the University Extension Students,
Oxford, 2 August, 1892. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Oct.
1892, and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
PASCAL*
[62] ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century, two opposite views
of a question, upon which neither Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope,
had spoken with authority--the question as to the amount of freedom
left to man by the overpowering work of divine grace upon him--had
seemed likely for a moment to divide the Roman Church into two rival
sects. In the diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed
itself into a mere personal quarrel between the Jesuit Fathers and
the religious community of Port-Royal, and might have been forgotten
but for the intervention of a new writer in whom French literature
made more than a new step. It became at once, as if by a new
creation, what it has remained--a pattern of absolutely unencumbered
expressiveness.
In 1656 Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under the form of
"Letters to a Provincial by one of his Friends," put forth a series
of [63] pamphlets in which all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit
Fathers was laid bare to the profit of their opponents. At the
moment the quarrel turned on the proposed censure of Antoine Arnauld
by the Sorbonne, by the University of Paris as a religious body.
Pascal, intimate, like many another fine intellect of the day, with
the Port-Royalists, was Arnauld's friend, and it belonged to the
ardour of his genius, at least as he was then, to be a very active
friend. He took up the pen as other chivalrous gentlemen of the day
took up the sword, and showed himself a master of the art of fence
therewith. His delicate exercise of himself with that weapon was
nothing less than a revelation to all the world of the capabilities,
the true genius of the French language in prose.
Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his detachment of
soul from all but the greatest matters, may be surprised, when they
turn to the "Letters," to find him treating questions, as serious for
the friends he was defending as for their adversaries, ironically,
with a but half-veiled disdain for them, or an affected humility at
being unskilled in them and no theologian. He does not allow us to
forget that he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us,
almost avowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, and unreal
distinctions and suppositions that can never be verified. The world
in general, indeed, se paye des paroles. That saying belongs to
Pascal, and [64] he uses it with reference to the Jesuits and their
favourite expression of "sufficient grace." In the earliest
"Letters" he creates in us a feeling that, however orthodox one's
intention, it is scarcely possible to speak of the matters then so
abundantly discussed by religious people without heresy at some
unguarded point. The suspected proposition of Arnauld, it is
admitted by one of his foes, "would be Catholic in the mouth of any
one but M. Arnauld." "The truth," as it lay between Arnauld and his
opponents, is a thing so delicate that "pour peu qu'on s'en retire,
on tombe dans l'erreur; mais cette erreur est si déliée, que, pour
peu qu'on s'en éloigne, on se trouve dans la vérité."
Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the curiosity, with
which such distinctions are drawn, by Pascal's friends as well as by
their foes, only the impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian
by profession, all too intimate in laying down the law of the things
he deals with--the things "which eye hath not seen" pressing into the
secrets of God's sublime commerce with men, in which, it may be, He
differs with every single human soul, by forms of thought adapted
from the poorest sort of men's dealings with each other, from the
trader, or the attorney. Pascal notes too the "impious buffooneries"
of his opponents. The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them to
promote geniality of temper in the debate. But of such failures--
failures of taste, of respect towards one's [65] own point of view--
the world is ever unamiably aware; and in the "Letters" there is much
to move the self-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal
describes his experiences, while he went from one authority to
another to find out what was really meant by the distinction between
grace "sufficient," grace "efficacious," grace "active," grace
"victorious." He heard, for instance, that all men have sufficient
grace to do God's will; but it is not always prochain, not always at
hand, at the moment of temptation to do otherwise. So far, then,
Pascal's charges are those which may seem to lie ready to hand
against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language,
that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very
fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully
chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite
meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere
generated by professional divines.
Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais and
Montaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outright
with the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh--
well, at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to know
their own business. It is we, the laity, he would urge, who are
serious, and disinterested, because sincerely interested, in these
great questionings. Jalousie de métier, the reader may suspect, has
something to do with [66] the Professional leaders on both sides of
the controversy; but at the actual turn controversy took just then,
it was against the Jesuit Fathers that Pascal's charges came home in
full force. And their sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with
men of the world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of self-
respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the
undignified faults, in a word, of essentially little people when they
interfere in great matters--faults promoted in the direction of the
consciences of women and children, weak concessions to weak people
who want to be saved in some easy way quite other than Pascal's high,
fine, chivalrous way of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what
one thinks with the glove thrown down. He supposes a Jansenist to
turn upon his opponent who uses the term "sufficient" grace, while
really meaning, as he alleges, insufficient, with the words:--"Your
explanation would be odious to men of the world. They speak more
sincerely than you on matters of far less importance than this."
With the world, Pascal, in the "Provincial Letters," had immediate
success. "All the world," we read in his friend's supposed reply to
the second "Letter," "sees them; all the world understands them. Men
of the world find them agreeable, and even women intelligible." A
century later Voltaire found them very agreeable. The spirit in
which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, may remind us of
the "Apology" of [67] Socrates; the style which secured them
immediate access to people who, as a rule, find the subjects there
treated hopelessly dry, reminds us of the "Apologia" of Newman.
The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents may be, is
expressiveness. It is mastered in proportion to the justice, the
nicety with which words balance or match their meaning, and their
writer succeeds in saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe or
florid, simple or complex. Pascal was a master of style because, as
his sister tells us, recording his earliest years, he had a wonderful
natural facility à dire ce qu'il voulait en la manière qu'il voulait.
Facit indignatio versus. The indignation which caused Pascal to
write the "Letters" was of a supercilious kind, and what he willed to
say in them led to the development of all those qualities that are
summed up in the French term l'esprit. Voltaire declared that the
best comedies of Molière n'ont pas plus de sel que les premières
lettres. "Vos maximes," Pascal assures the Jesuit Fathers, "ont je
ne sais quoi de divertissant, qui réjouit toujours le monde," and
they lose nothing of that character in his handling of them, so much
so that it was clear from the first that the world in general would
never ask whether Pascal had been quite fair to his opponents:
"N'êtes-vous donc pas ridicules, mes Pères? Qu'on satisfait au
précepte d'ouïr la messe en entendant quatre quarts de messe à la
fois de différents prêtres!" When [68] you have the like of that it
is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'y porte davantage qu'une
disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attend et ce qu'on voit.
He has "salt" also, of another kind. He drives straight at the
Jesuits, for instance, rather than at those who do but copy them,
because, as he tells us: Les choses valent toujours mieux dans leur
source. What equity of expression, how brief, how untranslateable!
And the "Letters" abound in such things.
But to his comparison of Pascal with Molière, Voltaire added that
Bossuet n'a rien de plus sublime que les dernières. And in truth the
more serious note of the impassioned servant of religion whose lips
have been touched with altar-fire, whose seriousness came to be like
some incurable malady, a visitation of God, as people used to say, is
presently struck when, in the natural course of his argument, his
thoughts are carried, from a mere passage of arms between one man or
one class of men and another, deep down to those awful encounters of
the individual soul with itself which are formulated in the eternal
problem of predestination.
In their doctrine of "sufficient grace" the Jesuits had presented a
view of the conflict of good and evil in the soul, which is
honourable to God and encouraging to man, and which has catholicity
on its face. All to whom entrance into the Church, through its
formal ministries, [69] lies open are truly called of God, while
beyond it stretches the ocean of "His uncovenanted mercies." That is
a doctrine for the many, for those whose position in the religious
life is mediocrity, who so far as themselves or others can discern
have nothing about them of eternal or necessary or irresistible
reprobation, or of the eternal condition opposite to that.
The so-called Jansenist doctrine, on the other hand, of [ ]+ but
irresistible grace was the appropriate view of the Port-Royalists,
high-pitched, eager souls as they were, and of their friend Pascal
himself, however much in his turn he might refine upon it. Whether
or not, as a matter of fact, upon which, as distinct from matters of
faith, an infallible pope can be mistaken, the dreary old Dutch
bishop Jansenius had really taught Jansenism, the Port-Royalists had
found in his "Augustinus" an incentive to devotion, and were avowedly
his adherents. In that somewhat gloomy, that too deeply impressed,
that fanatical age, they were the Calvinists of the Roman Catholic
Church, maintaining, emphasising in it a view, a tradition, really
constant in it from St. Augustin, from St. Paul himself. It is a
merit of Pascal, his literary merit, to have given a very fine-toned
expression to that doctrine, though mainly in the way of a criticism
of its opponents, to one side or aspect of an eternal controversy,
eternally suspended, as representing two opposite aspects of
experience [70] itself. Calvin and Arminius, Jansen and Molina sum
up, in fact, respectively, like the respective adherents of the
freedom or of the necessity of the human will, in the more general
question of moral philosophy, two opposed, two counter trains of
phenomena actually observable by us in human action, too large and
complex a matter, as it is, to be embodied or summed up in any one
single proposition or idea.
There are moments of one's own life, aspects of the life of others,
of which the conclusion that the will is free seems to be the only--
is the natural or reasonable--account. Yet those very moments on
reflexion, on second thoughts, present themselves again, as but links
in a chain, in an all-embracing network of chains. In all education
we assume, in some inexplicable combination, at once the freedom and
the necessity of the subject of it. And who on a survey of life from
outside would willingly lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating
interests, for which the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are
our respective points of view? How significant become the details we
might otherwise pass by almost unobserved, but to which we are put on
the alert by the abstract query whether a man be indeed a freeman or
a slave, as we watch from aside his devious course, his struggles,
his final tragedy or triumph. So much value at least there may be in
problems insoluble in themselves, such as that great controversy of
Pascal's day [71] between Jesuit and Jansenist. And here again who
would forego, in the spectacle of the religious history of the human
soul, the aspects, the details which the doctrines of universal and
particular grace respectively embody? The Jesuit doctrine of
sufficient grace is certainly, to use the familiar expression, a very
pleasant doctrine conducive to the due feeding of the whole flock of
Christ, as being, as assuming them to be, what they really are, at
the worst, God's silly sheep. It has something in it congruous with
the rising of the physical sun on the evil and on the good, while the
wheat and the tares grow naturally, peacefully together. But how
pleasant also the opposite doctrine, how true, how truly descriptive
of certain distinguished, magnifical, or elect souls, vessels of
election, épris des hauteurs, as we see them pass across the world's
stage, as if led on by a kind of thirst for God! Its necessary
counterpart, of course, we may find, at least dramatically true of
some; we can name them in history, perhaps from our own experience;
souls of whom it seems but an obvious story to tell that they seemed
to be in love with eternal death, to have borne on them from the
first signs of reprobation. Of certain quite visibly elect souls, at
all events, the theory of irresistible grace might seem the almost
necessary explanation. Most reasonable, most natural, most truly is
it descriptive of Pascal himself.
[72] So far, indeed, up to the year 1656, Pascal's annus mirabilis,
the year of the "Letters," the world had been allowed to see only one
side of him. Early in life he had achieved brilliant overtures in
the abstract sciences, and, inheriting much of the quality of a fine
gentleman, he figures, with his trenchant manner, never at a loss, as
a quite secular person, stirred on occasion to take part in a
religious debate. But it is after the grand fashion of the mundane
quarrels of that day, the age of the sentiment of personal honour, in
which it was so natural for the good-natured Jesuits, stirring all
Pascal's satiric power, to excuse as well as they could the act de
tuer pour un simple médisance. The Church was still an estate of the
realm with all the obligations of the noblesse, and it was still
something worse than bad taste, it was dangerous to express religious
doubts. About the Catholic religion, as he conceived it, Pascal
displays the assured attitude of an ancient Crusader. He has the
full courage of his opinions, and by his elegant easy gallantry in
speaking for it he gives to religion then and now a kind of dignity
it had lost with other controversialists in the eyes of the world.
There is abundant gaiety also in the "Letters." He quotes from
Tertullian to the effect that c'est proprement à la vérité qu'il
appartient de rire parce qu'elle est gaie, et de se jouer de ses
ennemis parce qu'elle est assurée de sa victoire. For he could find
quotations to his purpose from recondite writers, [73] though he was
not a man of erudition; like a man of the world again, he read
little, but that absorbingly, was the master of two authors,
Epictetus and Montaigne, and, as appeared afterwards, of the
Scriptures in the Vulgate.
So far, his imposing carriage of himself intellectually might lead us
to suspect that the forced humilities of his later years are
indirectly a discovery of what seems one leading quality of the
natural man in him, a pride that could be quite fierce on occasion.
And, like another rich young man whom Jesus loved, he lacked nothing
to make the world also love and confide in, as it already flattered,
him. He turned from it, decided to live a single life. Was it the
mere oddity of genius? Or its last fine dainty touch of difference
from ordinary people and their motives? Or that sanctity of which,
in some cases, the world itself instinctively feels the distinction,
though it shrinks from the true explanation of it? Certainly, all
things considered, on the morrow of the "Letters," Blaise Pascal, at
the age of thirty-three, had a brilliant worldly future before him,
had he cared duly to wait upon, to serve it. To develop the already
considerable position of his family among the gentry of Auvergne
would have been to follow the way of his time, in which so many noble
names had been founded on professional talents. Increasingly,
however, from early youth, he had been the subject of a malady so
hopeless [74] and inexplicable that in that superstitious age some
fancied it the result of a malign spell in infancy. Gradually, the
world almost loses sight of him, hears at last, some time after it
had looked for that event, that he had died, of course very piously,
among those sombre people, his friends and relations of Port-Royal,
with whom he had taken refuge, and seemed already to have been buried
alive. And in the year 1670, not till eight years after his death,
the "Pensées" appeared--"Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et sur
quelques autres sujets"--or rather a selection from those "Thoughts"
by the Port-Royalists, still in fear of consequences to the
struggling Jansenist party, anxious to present Pascal's doctrine as
far as possible in conformity with the Jesuit sense, as also to
divert the vaguer parts of it more entirely into their own. The
incomparable words were altered, the order changed or lost, the
thoughts themselves omitted or retrenched. Written in short
intervals of relief from suffering, they were contributions to a
large and methodical work--"Pensées de M. Pascal sur la Religion et
sur quelques autres sujets"--on a good many things besides, as the
reader finds, on many of the great things of this world which seemed
to him to come in contact or competition with religion. In the true
version of the "Thoughts," edited at last by Faugère, in 1844, from
Pascal's own MSS., in the National Library, they group themselves
into certain definite trains [75] of speculation and study. But it
is still, nevertheless, as isolated thoughts, as inspirations, so to
call them, penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark, summarising what
seemed hopelessly confused, sticking fast in men's memories, floating
lightly, or going far, that they have left so deep a mark in
literature. For again the manner, also, their style precisely
becomes them. The merits of Pascal's style, indeed, as of the French
language itself, still is to say beaucoup de choses en peu de mots;
and the brevity, the discerning edge, the impassioned concentration
of the language are here one with the ardent immediate apprehensions
of his spirit.
One of the literary merits of the "Provincial Letters" is that they
are really like letters; they are essentially a conversation by
writing with other persons. What we have in the "Thoughts" is the
conversation of the writer with himself, with himself and with God,
or rather concerning Him, for He is, in Pascal's favourite phrase
from the Vulgate, Deus absconditus, He who never directly shows
Himself. Choses de coeur the "Thoughts" are, indeed those of an
individual, though they seem to have determined the very outlines of
a great subject for all other persons. In Pascal, at the summit of
the Puy de Dôme in his native Auvergne, experimenting on the weight
of the invisible air, proving it to be ever all around by its
effects, we are presented with one of the more pleasing [76] aspects
of his earlier, more wholesome, open-air life. In the great work of
which the "Thoughts" are the first head, Pascal conceived himself to
be doing something of the same kind in the spiritual order by a
demonstration of this other invisible world all around us, with its
really ponderable forces, its movement, its attractions and
repulsions, the world of grace, unseen, but, as he thinks, the one
only hypothesis that can explain the experienced, admitted facts.
Whether or not he was fixing permanently in the "Pensées" the
outlines, the principles, of a great system of assent, of conviction,
for acceptance by the intellect, he was certainly fixing these with
all the imaginative depth and sufficiency of Shakespeare himself, the
fancied opposites, the attitudes, the necessary forms of pathos,+ of a
great tragedy in the heart, the soul, the essential human tragedy, as
typical and central in its expression here, as Hamlet--what the soul
passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness, or with
those offended mysterious powers that may really occupy it--or when
confronted with the thought of what are called the "four last things"
it yields this way or that. What might have passed with all its
fiery ways for an esprit de secte et de cabale is now revealed amid
the disputes not of a single generation but of eternal ones, by the
light of a phenomenal storm of blinding and blasting inspirations.
[77] Observe, he is not a sceptic converted, a returned infidel, but
is seen there as if at the very centre of a perpetually maintained
tragic crisis holding the faith steadfastly, but amid the well-poised
points of essential doubt all around him and it. It is no mere calm
supersession of a state of doubt by a state of faith; the doubts
never die, they are only just kept down in a perpetual agonia.
Everywhere in the "Letters" he had seemed so great a master--a master
of himself--never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with so
light a heart: in the great Atlantean travail of the "Thoughts" his
feet sometimes "are almost gone." In his soul's agony, theological
abstractions seem to become personal powers. It was as if just below
the surface of the green undulations, the stately woods, of his own
strange country of Auvergne, the volcanic fires had suddenly
discovered themselves anew. In truth into his typical diagnosis, as
it may seem, of the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not
merely the personal feelings, the temperament of an individual, but
his malady also, a physical malady. Great genius, we know, has the
power of elevating, transmuting, serving itself by the accidental
conditions about it, however unpromising--poverty, and the like. It
was certainly so with Pascal's long-continued physical sufferings.
That aigreur, which is part of the native colour of Pascal's genius,
is reinforced in the [78] "Pensées" by insupportable languor,
alternating with supportable pain, as he died little by little
through the eight years of their composition. They are essentially
the utterance of a soul malade--a soul of great genius, whose malady
became a new quality of that genius, perfecting it thus, by its very
defect, as a type on the intellectual stage, and thereby guiding,
reassuring sympathetically, manning by a sense of good company that
large class of persons who are malade in the same way. "La maladie
est l'état naturel des Chrétiens," says Pascal himself. And we
concede that every one of us more or less is ailing thus, as another
has told us that life itself is a disease of the spirit.
From Port-Royal also came, about the year 1670, a painful book, the
"Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or living
death, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive
of disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed,
we are now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration,
those sudden passing torments, but of something analogous to them in
Pascal's genius and work. Well! the light cast indirectly on the
literary work of Pascal by Mme. Périer's "Life" is of a similar kind.
It is a veritable chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have
truly a beauty for experts, the beauty which belongs to all refined
cases even of cerebral disturbance. That he should [79] have sought
relief from his singular wretchedness, in that sombre company, is
like the second stroke of tragedy upon him. At moments Pascal
becomes almost a sectarian, and seems to pass out of the genial broad
heaven of the Catholic Church. He had lent himself in those last
years to a kind of pieties which do not make a winning picture, which
always have about them, even when they show themselves in men
physically strong, something of the small compass of the sick-
chamber. His medieval or oriental self-tortures, all the painful
efforts at absolute detachment, a perverse asceticism taking all
there still was to spare from the denuded and suffering body, might
well, you may think, have died with him, but are here recorded,
chiefly by way of showing the world, the Jesuits, that the
Jansenists, too, had a saint quite after their mind.
But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness in those minute
pieties, they have their signification as a testimony to the
wholeness of Pascal's assent, the entirety of his submission, his
immense sincerity, the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith. The
seventeenth century presents survivals of the gloomy mental habits of
the Middle Age, but for the most part of a somewhat theatrical kind,
imitations of Francis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators. In
Pascal they are original, and have all their seriousness. Que je
n'en sois [80] jamais séparé--pas séparé éternellement, he repeats,
or makes that strange sort of MS. amulet, of which his sister tells
us, repeat for him. Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not
Thy Holy Spirit from me. It is table rase he is trying to make of
himself, that He might reign there absolutely alone, who, however, as
he was bound to think, had made and blest all those things he
declined to accept. Deeper and deeper, then, he retreated into the
renuncient life. He could not, had he wished, deprive himself of
that his greatest gift--literally a gift he might have thought it not
to be buried but accounted for--the gift of le beau dire, of writing
beautifully. "Il avoit renoncé depuis longtemps aux sciences
purement humains." To him who had known them so well, and as if by
intuition, those abstract and perdurable forms of service might well
have seemed a part of "the Lord's doing, marvellous in our eyes," as
his favourite Psalm cxix., the psalm des petites heures, the cxviii.
of the Vulgate, says.* These, too, he counts now as but a variety of
le néant and vanity of things. He no longer records, therefore, the
mathematical aperçus that may visit him; and in his scruples, his
suspicions of' visible beauty, he interests us as precisely an
inversion of what is called the aesthetic life.
[81] Yet his faith, as in the days of the Middle Age, had been
supported, rewarded, by what he believed to be visible miracle among
the strange lights and shades of that retired place. Pascal's niece,
the daughter of Madame Périer, a girl ten years of age, suffered from
a disease of the eyes pronounced to be incurable. The disease was a
peculiarly distressing one, the sort of affliction which, falling on
a young child, may lead one to question the presence of divine
justice in the world, makes one long that miracles were possible.
Well! Pascal, for one, believed that on occasion that profound
aspiration had been followed up by the power desired. A thorn from
the crown of Jesus, as was believed, had been lately brought to the
Port-Royal du Faubourg S. Jacques in Paris, and was one day applied
devoutly to the eye of the suffering child. What followed was an
immediate and complete cure, fully attested by experts. Ah! Thou
hast given him his heart's desire: and hast not denied him the
request of his lips. Pascal, and the young girl herself, faithfully
to the end of a long life, believed the circumstances to have been
miraculous. Otherwise, we do not see that Pascal was ever permitted
to enjoy (so to speak) the religion for which he had exchanged so
much; that the sense of acceptance, of assurance, had come to him;
that for him the Spouse had ever penetrated the veil of the ordinary
routine of the means of grace; [82] nothing that corresponded as a
matter of clear personal intercourse of the very senses to the
greatness of his surrender--who had emptied himself of all other
things. Besides, there was some not wholly-explained delay in his
reception, in those his last days, of the Sacrament. It was brought
to him just in time--"Voici celui que vous avez tant désiré!"--the
ministrant says to the dying man. Pascal was then aged thirty-nine--
an age you may remember fancifully noted as fatal to genius.
Pascal's "Thoughts," then, we shall not rightly measure but as the
outcome, the utterance, of a soul diseased, a soul permanently ill at
ease. We find in their constant tension something of insomnia, of
that sleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful condition of
mind in a human body. Sometimes they are cries, cries of obscure
pain rather than thoughts--those great fine sayings which seem to
betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of
nature, of humanity, just beneath one's feet or at one's side.
Reading them, so modern still are those thoughts, so rich and various
in suggestion, that one seems to witness the mental seed-sowing of
the next two centuries, and perhaps more, as to those matters with
which he concerns himself. Intuitions of a religious genius, they
may well be taken also as the final considerations of the natural
man, as a religious inquirer on doubt and faith, and their place in
[83] things. Listen now to some of these "Thoughts" taken at random:
taken at first for their brevity. Peu de chose nous console, parce
que peu de chose nous afflige. Par l'espace l'univers me comprend et
m'engloutit comme un point: par la pensée je le comprends. Things
like these put us en route with Pascal. Toutes les bonnes maximes
sont dans le monde: on ne manque que de les appliquer. The great
ascetic was always hard on amusements, on mere pastimes: Le
divertissement nous amuse, one and all of us, et nous fait arriver
insensiblement à la mort. Nous perdons encore la vie avec joie,
pourvu qu'on en parle. On ne peut faire une bonne physionomie (in a
portrait) qu'en accordant toutes nos contrariétés. L'homme n'est
qu'un roseau, le plus foible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau
pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser.
Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand
l'univers l'écraseroit, l'homme seroit encore plus noble que se qui
le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a
sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien. It is not thought by which that
excels, but the convincing force of imagination which sublimates its
very triteness. Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée.
There, then, you have at random the sort of stuff of which the
"Pensees" are made. Let me now briefly indicate, also by quotation
again, some of the main leading tendencies in them. La chose la plus
importante à toute la vie c'est la [84] choix du métier: le hasard en
dispose. There we recognise the manner of thought of Montaigne. Now
one of the leading interests in the study of Pascal is to trace the
influence upon him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century.
Pascal's "Thoughts" we shall never understand unless we realise the
under-texture in them of Montaigne's very phrases, the fascination
the "Essays" had for Pascal in his capacity of one of the children of
light, as giving a veritable compte rendu of the Satanic course of
this world since the Fall, set forth with all the persuasiveness, the
power and charm, all the gifts of Satan, the veritable light on
things he has at his disposal.
Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the paradoxical
character of man and his experience. The old headings under which
the Port-Royalist editors grouped the "Thoughts" recall the titles of
Montaigne's "Essays"--"Of the Disproportion of Man," and the like. As
strongly as Montaigne he delights in asserting the relative, local,
ephemeral and merely provisional character of our ideas of law, vice,
virtue, happiness, and so forth. Comme la mode fait l'agrément aussi
fait-elle la justice. La justice et la vérité sont deux pointes si
subtiles, que nos instruments sont trop mousses pour y toucher
exactement. Bien suivant la seule raison n'est juste de soi: tout
branle avec le temps. Sometimes he strikes the express accent of
Montaigne: Ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont
[85] au bord fuient. Le langage est pareil de tous côtés. Il faut
avoir un point fixe pour en juger. Le port juge ceux qui sont dans
un vaisseau, mais où prendrons-nous un port dans la morale? At times
he seems to forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not of
the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant places. Qu'il
(man) se regarde comme égaré dans ce canton détourné de la nature, et
de ce petit cachot où il se trouve logé, qu'il apprenne the earth, et
soi-même à son juste prix. Il ffre, mais elle est ployable à tous
sens; et ainsi il n'y en a point. Un même sens change selon les
paroles qui l'expriment. He has touches even of what he calls the
malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. Rien que la médiocrité
n'est bon, he says,--épris des hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was--
C'est sortir de l'humanité que de sortir du milieu; la grandeur de
l'âme humaine consiste à savoir s'y tenir. Rien ne fortifie plus le
pyrrhonisme--that is ever his word for scepticism--que ce qu'il y en
a qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens: si tous étaient ils auraient tort.
You may even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat Satanic
intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lâcheté, of the
human heart, so that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a
pernicious study for those who have a native tendency to corruption.
The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency of
man, his strange [86] blending of meanness with ancient greatness,
the caprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the
issue of his existence--that is what the study of Montaigne had
enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience. But
then he passes at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's
apprehension. That prospect of man and the world, undulant,
capricious, inconsistent, contemptible, lâche, full of contradiction,
with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible to law, upon which,
after all, Montaigne looks out with a complacency so entire, fills
Pascal with terror. It is the world on the morrow of a great
catastrophe, the casual forces of which have by no means spent
themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which we are a part, with its
thousand dislocations, is precisely what we might expect as resultant
from the Fall of Man, with consequences in full working still. It
presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though with beams of
redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributed somewhat
capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all, can
have but an ill time of it here. Under the tragic éclairs of divine
wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating,
sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens out for
one in Montaigne's "Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh
precipices, of threatening heights and depths--the depths of his own
nothingness. Vanity: nothingness: these [87] are his catchwords:
Nous sommes incapables et du vrai et du bien; nous sommes tous
condamnés. Ce qui y paraît (i.e., what we see in the world) ne
marque ni une exclusion totale ni une présence manifeste de divinité,
mais la présence d'un Dieu qui se cache: (Deus absconditus, that is a
recurrent favourite thought of his) tout porte ce caractère. In this
world of abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to their
extremes. All or nothing; for him real morality will be nothing
short of sanctity. En Jésus Christ toutes les contradictions sont
accordées. Yet what difficulties again in the religion of Christ!
Nulle autre religion n'a proposé de se haïr. La seule religion
contraire à la nature, contraire au sens commun, est la seule qui ait
toujours été.