I'm sure you don't. That isn't all. There are dictionaries and
lexicons, not only German, English, French, Italian, Russian, and
Spanish, but also Hebrew, Persian, Magyar, Chinese, Zend, Sanscrit,
Hindustani, Negro dialects, French argot, Portuguese, American slang,
and Pennsylvania Dutch.
And what are those curious pamphlets?
He lifted a few and read off the titles:
A study of the brain of the late Major J.W. Powell.
A study of the anatomic relations of the optic nerve to the accessory
cavities of the nose.
On regeneration in the pigmented skin of the frog and on the character
of the chromatophores.
The chondrocranium of an embryo pig.
Morphology of the parthogenetic development of amphitrite.
Note on the influence of castration on the weight of the brain and
spinal cord in the albino rat.
There are, he added solemnly, many strange words in these pamphlets,
not readily to be found elsewhere.
Now Peter pointed to the pile of note-books on the table.
These are my note-books. I have ranged Paris for my material. For days
I have walked in the Passage des Panoramas and the Rue St. Honoré,
making lists of every object in the windows. In the case of books I
have described the bindings. I have stopped before the shops of fruit
vendors, antique dealers, undertakers, jewellers, and fashioners of
artificial flowers. I have spent so much time in the Galeries Lafayette
and the Bon Marché that I have probably been mistaken for a shoplifter.
These books are full of results. What do you think of it?
But what is all this for?
For my work, of course. For my work.
I can't imagine, I began almost in a whisper, I was so astonished, what
you do, what you are going to do. Are you writing an encyclopedia?
No, my intention is not to define or describe, but to enumerate. Life
is made up of a collection of objects, and the mere citation of them is
sufficient to give the reader a sense of form and colour, atmosphere
and _style_. And form, style, manner in literature are everything;
subject is nothing. Nothing whatever, he added impressively, after
a pause. Do you know what Buffon wrote: Style is the only passport
to posterity. It is not range of information, nor mastery of some
little known branch of science, nor yet novelty of matter, that will
insure immortality. Recall the great writers, Théophile Gautier, Jules
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris Huysmans, Oscar Wilde: they all used this
method, catalogues, catalogues, catalogues! All great art is a matter
of cataloguing life, summing it up in a list of objects. This is so
true that the commercial catalogues themselves are almost works of
art. Their only flaw is that they pause to describe. If it only listed
objects, without defining them, a dealer's catalogue would be as
precious as a book by Gautier.
During this discourse, George Moore, the orange cat, had been wandering
around, rather restlessly, occasionally gazing at Peter with a
semi-quizzical expression and an absurd cock of the ears. At some point
or other, however, he had evidently arrived at the conclusion that this
extra display of emotion on the part of his human companion boded him
no evil and, having satisfied himself in this regard, he leaped lightly
to the mantelshelf, circled his enormous bulk miraculously around three
or four times on the limited space at his disposal, and sank into a
profound slumber when, probably, with dreams of garrets full of lazy
mice, his ears and his tail, which depended a foot below the shelf,
began to twitch.
Peter continued to talk: d'Aurevilly wrote his books in different
coloured inks. It was a wonderful idea. Black ink would never do to
describe certain scenes, certain objects. I can imagine an entire book
written in purple, or green, or blood-red, but the best book would
be written in many colours. Consider, for a moment, the distinction
between purple and violet, shades which are cousins: the one suggests
the most violent passions or something royal or papal, the other a
nunnery or a widow, or a being bereft of any capacity for passion.
Henry James should write his books in white ink on white paper and, by
a system of analogy, you can very well see that Rider Haggard should
write his books in white ink on black paper. Pale ideas, obviously
expressed. Gold! Think what you could do with gold! If silence is
golden, surely the periods, the commas, the semicolons, and dashes
should be of gold. But not only the stops could gleam and shine; whole
silent pages might glitter. And blue, bright blue; what more suggestive
colour for the writer than bright blue?
Not only should manuscripts be written in multi-coloured inks, but
they should be written on multi-coloured papers, and then they should
be printed in multi-coloured inks on multi-coloured papers. The art
of book-making, in the sense that the making of a book is part of its
authorship, part of its creation, is not even begun.
The sculptor is not satisfied with moulding his idea in clay; he
gives it final form in marble or malachite or jade or bronze. Many an
author, however, having completed work on his manuscript, is content
to allow his publisher to choose the paper, the ink, the binding,
the typography: all, obviously, part of the author's task. It is the
publisher's wish, no doubt, to issue the book as cheaply as possible,
and to this end he will make as many books after the same model as he
practicably can. But every book should have a different appearance from
every other book. Every book should have the aspect to which its ideas
give birth. The form of the material should dictate the form of the
binding. Who but a fool, for example, would print and bind Lavengro
and Roderick Hudson in a similar manner? And yet that is just what
publishers will do if they are let alone.
Peter had become so excited that he had awakened George Moore, who now
descended from the mantelpiece and sought the seclusion of a couch in
the corner where, after a few abortive licks at his left hind-leg, and
a pretence of scrubbing his ears, he again settled into sleep. As for
me, I listened, entranced, and as the night before I had discovered
Paris, it seemed to me now that I was discovering the secrets of the
writer's craft and I determined to go forth in the morning with a
note-book, jotting down the names of every object I encountered.
I must have been somewhat bewildered for I repeated a question I had
asked before:
Have you written anything yet?
Not yet.... I am collecting my materials. It may take me considerably
longer to collect what I shall require for a very short book.
What is the book to be about?
Van Vechten, Van Vechten, you are not following me! he cried, and he
again began to walk up and down the little room. What is the book to be
about? Why, it is to be about the names of the things I have collected.
It is to be about three hundred pages, he added triumphantly. That is
what it is to be about, about three hundred pages, three hundred pages
of colour and style and lists, lists of objects, all jumbled artfully.
There isn't a moral, or an idea, or a plot, or even a character.
There's to be no propaganda or preaching, or violence, or emotion, or
even humour. I am not trying to imitate Dickens or Dostoevsky. They
did not write books; they wrote newspapers. Art eliminates all such
rubbish. Art has nothing to do with ideas. Art is abstract. When art
becomes concrete it is no longer art. Thank God, I know what I want
to do! Thank God, I haven't wasted my time admiring hack work! Thank
God, I can start in at once constructing a masterpiece! Why a list of
passengers sailing on the Kronprinz Wilhelm is more nearly a work of
art than a novel by Thomas Hardy! What is there in that? Anybody can
do it. Where is the arrangement, the colour, the form? Hardy merely
photographs life!
But aren't you trying to photograph still life?
Peter's face was almost purple; I thought he would burst a blood-vessel.
Don't you understand that perfumes and reaping-machines are never to be
found together in real life? That is art, making a pattern, dragging
unfamiliar words and colours and sounds together until they form a
pattern, a beautiful pattern. An Aubusson carpet is art, and it is
assuredly not a photograph of still life.... Art....
I don't know how much more of this there was but, when Peter finally
stopped talking, the sunlight was streaming in through the window.
_Chapter IV_
It was many days before I saw Peter again. I met other men and women.
I visited the Louvre and at first stood humbly in the Salon Carré
before the Monna Lisa and in the long corridor of the Venus de Milo; a
little later, I became thuriferous before Sandro Botticelli's frescoes
from the Villa Lemmi and Watteau's Pierrot. I made a pilgrimage to
the Luxembourg Gallery and read Huysmans's evocation of the picture
before Moreau's Salome. I sat in the tiny old Roman arena, Lutetia's
amphitheatre, constructed in the second or third century, and conjured
up visions of lions and Christian virgins. I drank tea at the Pavilion
d'Armenonville in the Bois and I bought silk handkerchiefs of many
colours at the Galeries Lafayette. I began to carry my small change
in a pig-skin purse and I learned to look out for bad money. Every
morning I called for mail at the American Express Company in the Rue
Scribe. I ate little wild strawberries with Crème d'Isigny. I bought
old copies of l'Assiette au Beurre on the quais and new copies of Le
Sourire at kiosques. I heard Werther at the Opéra-Comique and I saw
Lina Cavalieri in Thaïs at the Opéra. I made journeys to Versailles,
Saint Cloud, and Fontainebleau. I inspected the little hotel in the
Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde died and I paid my respects to his
tomb in Père-Lachaise. The fig-leaf was missing from the heroic figure
on the monument. It had been stolen, the cemetery-guard informed me,
par une jeune miss anglaise, who desired a souvenir. I drank champagne
cocktails, sitting on a stool, at the American bar in the Grand Hotel.
I drank whisky and soda, ate salted nuts, and talked with English
racing men at Henry's bar, under the delightful brown and yellow
mural decorations, exploiting ladies of the 1880 period with bangs,
and dresses with bustles, and over-drapings, and buttons down the
front. I enjoyed long bus rides and I purchased plays in the arcades
of the Odéon. I went to the races at Chantilly. I drank cocktails at
Louis's bar in the Rue Racine. Louis Doerr, the patron, had worked
as a bar-man in Chicago and understood the secrets of American mixed
drinks. Doubtless, he could have made a Fireman's Shirt. He divided
his time between his little bar and his atelier, where he gave boxing
lessons to the students of the quarter. When he was teaching the manly
art, Madame Doerr manipulated the shaker. I attended services at Les
Hannetons and Maurice's Bar and I strolled through the Musée de Cluny,
where I bought postcards of chastity belts and instruments of torture.
I read Maupassant in the Parc Monceau. I took in the naughty revues at
Parisiana, the Ba-ta-clan, and the Folies-Bergère. I purchased many
English and American novels in the Tauchnitz edition and I discovered
a miniature shop in the Rue de Furstenberg, where elegant reprints of
bawdy eighteenth century French romances might be procured. I climbed
to the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, particularly to observe a
chimère which was said to resemble me, and I ascended the Tour Eiffel
in an elevator. I consumed hors d'œuvres at the Brasserie Universelle.
I attended a band concert in the Tuileries Gardens. I dined with Olive
Fremstad at the Mercedes and Olive Fremstad dined with me at the Café
d'Harcourt. I heard Salome at the Châtelet, Richard Strauss conducting,
with Emmy Destinn as the protagonist in a modest costume, trimmed with
fur, which had been designed, it was announced, by the Emperor of
Germany. I discovered the Restaurant Cou-Cou, which I have described
in The Merry-Go-Round, and I made pilgrimages to the Rat Mort, the
Nouvelle Athènes, and the Elysée Montmartre, sacred to the memory of
George Moore. They appeared to have altered since he confessed as
a young man. I stood on a table at the Bal Tabarin and watched the
quadrille, the pas de quatre, concluding with the grand écart, which
was once sinister and wicked but which has come, through the portentous
solemnity with which tradition has invested it, to have almost a
religious significance. I learned to drink Amer Picon, grenadine, and
white absinthe. I waited three hours in the street before Liane de
Pougy's hotel in the Rue de la Néva to see that famous beauty emerge to
take her drive, and I waited nearly as long at the stage-door of the
Opéra-Comique for a glimpse of the exquisite Regina Badet. I embarked
on one of the joyous little Seine boats and I went slumming in the
Place d'Italie, La Villette, a suburb associated in the memory with the
name of Yvette Guilbert, and Belleville. I saw that very funny farce,
Vous n'avez rien à declarer at the Nouveautés. In the Place des Vosges,
I admired the old brick houses, among the few that Napoleon and the
Baron Haussmann spared in their deracination of Paris. On days when I
felt poor, I dined with the cochers at some marchand de vins. On days
when I felt rich, I dined with the cocottes at the Café de Paris. I
examined the collection of impressionist paintings at the house of
Monsieur Durand-Ruel, No. 37, Rue de Rome, and the vast accumulation of
unfinished sketches for a museum of teratology at the house of Gustave
Moreau, No. 14, Rue de La Rochefoucauld, room after room of unicorns,
Messalinas, muses, magi, Salomes, sphinxes, argonauts, centaurs, mystic
flowers, chimerae, Semeles, hydras, Magdalens, griffins, Circes,
ticpolongas, and crusaders. I drank tea in the Ceylonese tea-room in
the Rue Caumartin, where coffee-hued Orientals with combs in their hair
waited on the tables. I gazed longingly into the show-windows of the
shops where Toledo cigarette-cases, Bohemian garnets, and Venetian
glass goblets were offered for sale. I bought a pair of blue velvet
workman's trousers, a béret, and a pair of canvas shoes at Au Pays, 162
Faubourg St. Martin. I often enjoyed my chocolate and omelet at the
Café de la Régence, where everybody plays chess or checkers and has
played chess or checkers for a century or two, and where the actors
of the Comédie Française, which is just across the Place, frequently,
during a rehearsal, come in their make-up for lunch. I learned the
meaning of flic, gigolette, maquereau, tapette, and rigolo. I purchased
a dirty silk scarf and a pair of Louis XV brass candlesticks, which
I still possess, in the Marché du Temple. I tasted babas au rhum,
napoléons, and palmiers. I ordered a suit, which I never wore, from a
French tailor for 150 francs. I bought some Brittany ware in an old
shop back of Notre-Dame. I admired the fifteenth century apocalyptic
glass in the Sainte-Chapelle and the thirteenth century glass in the
Cathedral at Chartres. I learned that demi-tasse is an American word,
that Sparkling Burgundy is an American drink, and that I did not like
French beer. I stayed away from the receptions at the American embassy.
I was devout in Saint Sulpice, the Russian Church in the Rue Daru,
Saint Germain-des-Prés, Saint Eustache, Sacré-Cœur, and Saint Jacques,
and I attended a wedding at the Madeleine, which reminded me that Bel
Ami had been married there. I passed pleasant evenings at the Boîte à
Fursy, on the Rue Pigalle, and Les Noctambules, on the Rue Champollion.
I learned to speak easily of Mayol, Eve Lavallière, Dranem, Ernest la
Jeunesse, Colette Willy, Max Dearly, Charles-Henry Hirsch, Lantelme,
André Gide, and Jeanne Bloch. I saw Clemenceau, Edward VII, and the
King of Greece. I nibbled toasted scones at a tea-shop on the Rue
de Rivoli. I met the Steins. In short, you will observe that I did
everything that young Americans do when they go to Paris.
On a certain afternoon, early in June, I found myself sitting at a
table in the Café de la Paix with Englewood Jennings and Frederic
Richards, two of my new friends. Richards is a famous person today and
even then he was somebody. He had a habit of sketching, wherever he
might be, on a sheet of paper at a desk at the Hotel Continental or on
a program at the theatre. He drew quick and telling likenesses in a few
lines of figures or objects that pleased him, absent-mindedly signed
them, and then tossed them aside. This habit of his was so well-known
that he was almost invariably followed by admirers of his work, who
snapped up his sketches as soon as he had disappeared. I saw a good
collection of them, drawn on the stationery of hotels from Hamburg
to Taormina, and even on meat paper, go at auction in London a year
or so ago for £1,000. When I knew him, Richards was a blond giant,
careless of everything except his appearance. Jennings was an American
socialist from Harvard who was ranging Europe to interview Jean Jaurès,
Giovanni Papini, and Karl Liebknecht. He was exceedingly eccentric in
his dress, had steel-grey eyes, the longest, sharpest nose I have ever
seen, and wore glasses framed in tortoise-shell.
It had become my custom to pass two hours of every afternoon on
this busy corner, first ordering tea with two brioches, and later
a succession of absinthes, which I drank with sugar and water. In
time I learned to do without the sugar, just as eventually I might
have learned, in all probability, to do without the water, had I
not been compelled to do without the absinthe[1]. I was enjoying my
third pernod while my companions were dallying with whisky and soda.
We were gossiping, and where in the world can one gossip to better
advantage than on this busy corner, where every passerby offers a new
opportunity? But, occasionally, the conversation slipped into alien
channels.
How can the artist, Jennings, for instance, was asking, know that
he is inspired, when neither the public nor the critics recognize
inspiration? The question is equally interesting asked backwards. As
a matter of fact, the artist is sometimes conscious that he is doing
one thing, while he is acclaimed and appreciated for doing another.
Columbus did not set out to discover America. Yes, there is often
an accidental quality in great art and oftener still there is an
accidental appreciation of it. In one sense art is curiously bound up
with its own epoch, but appreciation or depreciation of its relation to
that epoch may come in another generation. The judgment of posterity
may be cruel to contemporary genius. In a few years we may decide
that Richard Strauss is only another Liszt and Stravinsky, another
Rubinstein.
Inspiration! Richards shrugged his broad shepherd's plaid shoulders.
Inspiration! Artists, critics, public, clever men, and philistines
monotonously employ that word, but it seems to me that art is created
through memory out of experience, combined with a capacity for feeling
and expressing experience, and depending on the artist's physical
condition at the time when he is at work.
Are you, I asked, one of those who believes that a novelist must be
unfaithful to his wife before he can write a fine novel, that a girl
should have an amour with a prize-fighter before she can play Juliet,
and that a musician must be a pederast before he can construct a great
symphony?
Richards laughed.
No, he replied, I am not, but that theory is very popular. How many
times I have heard it thundered forth! As a matter of fact, there is
a certain amount of truth in it, the germ, indeed, of a great truth,
for some emotional experience is essential to the artist, but why
particularize? Each as he may!
I know a man, I went on, who doesn't believe that experience has
anything to do with art at all. He thinks art is a matter of
arrangement and order and form.
His art then, broke in Jennings, is epistemological rather than
inspirational.
But what does he arrange? queried Richards. Surely incidents and
emotions.
Not at all. He arranges objects, abstractions: colours and
reaping-machines, perfumes and toys.
Long ago I read a book like that, Jennings went on. It was called
Imperial Purple and it purported to be a history of the Roman Empire
or the Roman Emperors. It was a strangely amusing book, rather like a
clot of blood on a daisy or a faded pomegranate flower in a glass of
buttermilk.
At this period, I avidly collected labels. Who wrote it? I asked.
I don't remember, but your description of your friend recalls the book.
What is the name of your friend's book?
He hasn't written a book yet.