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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

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-

-Title: Egoists

-       A Book of Supermen

-

-Author: James Huneker

-

-Release Date: November 25, 2014 [EBook #47454]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EGOISTS ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org

-(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)

-

-

-

-

+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47454 ***

 

 EGOISTS,

 

@@ -8761,365 +8731,5 @@ Emerson wrote them.
 

 End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

 

-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EGOISTS ***

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+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47454 ***

diff --git a/47454/47454-h/47454-h.htm b/47454/47454-h/47454-h.htm
index d3c5ef6..4240b5f 100644
--- a/47454/47454-h/47454-h.htm
+++ b/47454/47454-h/47454-h.htm
@@ -119,42 +119,7 @@ v:link {color: #800000; text-decoration: none; }
 <body>

 

 

-<pre>

-

-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-Title: Egoists

-       A Book of Supermen

-

-Author: James Huneker

-

-Release Date: November 25, 2014 [EBook #47454]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EGOISTS ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org

-(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)

-

-

-

-

-

-

-</pre>

+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47454 ***</div>

 

 

 <div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">

@@ -8930,379 +8895,7 @@ Emerson wrote them.</p>
 

 

 

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

-

-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EGOISTS ***

-

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+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47454 ***</div>

 

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+{

+  "DATA": {

+    "CREDIT": "Produced by Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)"

+  }

+}

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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

+

+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

+

+Title: Egoists

+       A Book of Supermen

+

+Author: James Huneker

+

+Release Date: November 25, 2014 [EBook #47454]

+

+Language: English

+

+Character set encoding: UTF-8

+

+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EGOISTS ***

+

+

+

+

+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org

+(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)

+

+

+

+

+

+EGOISTS,

+

+A BOOK OF SUPERMEN

+

+

+STENDHAL, BAUDELAIRE, FLAUBERT, ANATOLE FRANCE,

+

+HUYSMANS, BARRÈS, NIETZSCHE, BLAKE, IBSEN,

+

+STIRNER, AND ERNEST HELLO

+

+

+BY

+

+JAMES HUNEKER

+

+

+WITH PORTRAIT OF STENDHAL; UNPUBLISHED LETTER OF

+

+FLAUBERT; AND ORIGINAL PROOF PAGE OF MADAME BOVARY

+

+

+NEW YORK

+

+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

+

+1909

+

+

+

+[Illustration: Henry Beyle-Stendhal--Redrawn by Edwin B. Child

+from a crayon portrait.]

+

+

+TO

+

+DR. GEORG BRANDES

+

+

+

+"Leb' Ich, wenn andere leben?"--Goethe

+

+

+The studies gathered here first appeared in _Scribner's

+Magazine_, the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American

+Review_, the _New York Times_, and the _New York Sun_.

+

+

+

+

+CONTENTS

+

+       I. A Sentimental Education: Henry Beyle-Stendhal

+      II. The Baudelaire Legend

+     III. The Real Flaubert

+      IV. Anatole France

+       V. The Pessimists' Progress: J.-K. Huysmans

+      VI. The Evolution of an Egoist: Maurice Barrès

+     VII. Phases of Nietzsche

+

+            I. The Will to Suffer

+           II. Nietzsche's Apostasy

+          III. Antichrist?

+

+    VIII. Mystics

+

+            I. Ernest Hello

+           II. "Mad Naked Blake"

+          III. Francis Poictevin

+           IV. The Road to Damascus

+            V. From an Ivory Tower

+

+      IX. Ibsen

+       X. Max Stirner

+

+

+

+I

+

+A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

+

+HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+The fanciful notion that psychical delicacy is accompanied by a

+corresponding physical exterior should have received a death-blow

+in the presence of Henry Beyle, better known as Stendhal. Chopin,

+Shelley, Byron and Cardinal Newman did not in personal appearance

+contradict their verse, prose and music; but Stendhal, possessing an

+exquisite sensibility, was, as Hector Berlioz cruelly wrote in his

+Memoirs: "A little pot-bellied man with a spiteful smile, who tried to

+look grave." Sainte-Beuve is more explicit. "Physically his figure,

+though not short, soon grew thick-set and heavy, his neck short and

+full-blooded. His fleshy face was framed in dark curly hair and

+whiskers, which before his death were assisted by art. His forehead

+was fine: the nose turned up, and somewhat Calmuck in shape. His lower

+lip, which projected a little, betrayed his tendency to scoff. His eyes

+were rather small but very bright, deeply set in their cavities, and

+pleasing when he smiled. His hands, of which he was proud, were small

+and daintily shaped. In the last years of his life he grew heavy and

+apoplectic. But he always took great pains to conceal the symptoms of

+physical decay even from his own friends."

+

+Henri Monnier, who caricatured him, apparently in a gross manner,

+denied that he had departed far from his model. Some one said that

+Stendhal looked like an apothecary--Homais, presumably, or M.

+Prudhomme. His maternal grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, assured him when

+a youth that he was ugly, but he consolingly added that no one would

+reproach him for his ugliness. The piercing and brilliant eye that

+like a mountain lake could be both still and stormy, his eloquent and

+ironical mouth, pugnacious bearing, Celtic profile, big shoulders, and

+well-modelled leg made an ensemble, if not alluring, at least striking.

+No man with a face capable of a hundred shades of expression can be

+ugly. Furthermore, Stendhal was a charming _causeur_, bold, copious,

+witty. With his conversation, he drolly remarked, he paid his way into

+society. And this demigod or monster, as he was alternately named by

+his admirers and enemies, could be the most impassioned of lovers. His

+life long he was in love; Prosper Mérimée declares he never encountered

+such furious devotion to love. It was his master passion. Not Napoleon,

+not his personal ambitions, not even Italy, were such factors in

+Stendhal's life as his attachments. His career was a sentimental

+education. This ugly man with the undistinguished features was a

+haughty cavalier, an intellectual Don Juan, a tender, sighing swain, a

+sensualist, and ever lyric where the feminine was concerned. But once

+seated, pen in hand, the wise, worldly cynic was again master. "My head

+is a magic-lantern," he said. And his literary style is on the surface

+as unattractive as were the features of the man; the inner ear for the

+rhythms and sonorities of prose was missing. That is the first paradox

+in the Beyle-Stendhal case.

+

+Few writers in the nineteenth century were more neglected; yet, what

+a chain of great critics his work begot. Commencing with Goethe in

+1818, who, after reading Rome, Naples, and Florence, wrote that the

+Frenchman attracted and repulsed him, interested and annoyed him, but

+it was impossible to separate himself from the book until its last

+page. What makes the opinion remarkable is that Goethe calmly noted

+Stendhal's plagiarism of his own Italian Journey. About 1831 Goethe

+was given Le Rouge et le Noir and told Eckermann of its worth in warm

+terms. After Goethe another world-hero praised Stendhal's La Chartreuse

+de Parme: Balzac literally exploded a bouquet of pyrotechnics, calling

+the novel a masterpiece of observation, and extolling the Waterloo

+picture. Sainte-Beuve was more cautious. He dubbed Stendhal a "romantic

+hussar," and said that he was devoid of invention; a literary Uhlan,

+for men of letters, not for the public. Shortly after his sudden

+death, M. Bussière wrote in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of Stendhal's

+"clandestine celebrity." Taine's trumpet-call in 1857 proclaimed him

+as the great psychologue of his century. And later, in his English

+Literature, Taine wrote: "His talents and ideas were premature,

+his admirable divinations not understood. Under the exterior of a

+conversationalist and a man of the world Stendhal explained the most

+esoteric mechanisms--a scientist who noted, decomposed, deduced;

+he first marked the fundamental causes of nationality, climate,

+temperament; he was the naturalist who classified and weighed forces

+and taught us to open our eyes." Taine was deeply influenced by

+Stendhal; read carefully his Italian Pilgrimage, and afterward Thomas

+Graindorge. He so persistently preached Stendhalism--_beylisme_, as its

+author preferred to term his vagrant philosophy--that Sainte-Beuve

+reproved him. Melchior de Vogüé said that Stendhal's heart had been

+fabricated under the Directory and from the same wood as Barras and

+Talleyrand. Brunetière saw in him the perfect expression of romantic

+and anti-social individualism. Caro spoke of his "serious blague,"

+while Victor Hugo found him "somniferous." But Mérimée, though openly

+disavowing discipleship, acknowledged privately the abiding impression

+made upon him by the companionship of Beyle. 'Much of Mérimée is

+Stendhal better composed, better written.

+

+About 1880 Zola, searching a literary pedigree for his newly-born

+Naturalism, pitched upon Stendhal to head the movement. The first

+Romantic--he employed the term Romanticism before the rest--the first

+literary Impressionist, the initiator of Individualism, Stendhal forged

+many formulas, was a matrix of _genres_, literary and psychologic. Paul

+Bourget's Essays in Contemporary Psychology definitely placed Beyle in

+the niche he now occupies. This was in 1883. Since then the swelling

+chorus headed by Tolstoy, Georg Brandes, and the amiable fanatics who

+exhumed at Grenoble his posthumous work, have given to the study of

+Stendhal fresh life. We see how much Nietzsche owed to Stendhal; see

+in Dostoïevsky's Raskolnikow-Crime and Punishment--a Russian Julien

+Sorel; note that Bourget, from Le Disciple to Sensations d'Italie,

+is compounded of his forerunner, the dilettante and cosmopolitan who

+wrote Promenades dans Rome and Lamiel. What would Maurice Barrès and

+his "culte du Moi" have been without Stendhal--who employed before him

+the famous phrase "deracination"? Amiel, sick-willed thinker, did not

+alone invent: "A landscape is a state of soul"; Stendhal had spoken of

+a landscape not alone sufficing; it needs a moral or historic interest.

+Before Schopenhauer he described Beauty as a promise of happiness; and

+he invented the romance of the petty European Principality. Meredith

+followed him, as Robert Louis Stevenson in his Prince Otto patterned

+after Meredith. The painter-novelist Fromentin mellowed Stendhal's

+procedure; and dare we conceive of Meredith or Henry James composing

+their work without having had a complete cognizance of Beyle-Stendhal?

+The Egoist is _beylisme_ of a superior artistry; while in America Henry

+B. Fuller shows sympathy for Beyle in his Chevalier Pensieri-Vani and

+its sequel. Surely the Prorege of Arcopia had read the Chartreuse.

+And with Edith Wharton the Stendhal touch is not absent. In England,

+after the dull essay by Hayward (prefixed to E. P. Robbin's excellent

+translation of Chartreuse), Maurice Hewlett contributed an eloquent

+introduction to a new edition of the Chartreuse and calls him "a man

+cloaked in ice and fire." Anna Hampton Brewster was possibly the first

+American essayist to introduce to us Stendhal in her St. Martin's

+Summer. Saintsbury, Dowden, Benjamin Wells, Count Lützow have since

+written of him; and in Germany the Stendhal cult is growing, thanks to

+Arthur Schurig, L. Spach, and Friedrick von Oppeln-Bronikowski.

+

+It has been mistaken criticism to range Beyle as only a "literary"

+man. He despised the profession of literature, remarking that he wrote

+as one smokes a cigar. His diaries and letters, the testimony of

+his biographer, Colomb, and his friend Mérimée, betray this pose--a

+greater poser and _mystificateur_ it would be difficult to find. He

+laboured like a slave over his material, and if he affected to take

+the Civil Code as his model of style it nettled him, nevertheless,

+when anyone decried his prose. His friend Jacquemont spoke of his

+detestable style of a grocer; Balzac called him to account for his

+carelessness. Flattered, astounded, as was Stendhal by the panegyric

+of Balzac, his letter of thanks shows that the reproof cut deeply. He

+abused Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, and George Sand for their highly

+coloured imagery and flowing manner. He even jeered at Balzac, saying

+that if he--Beyle--had written "It snows in my heart," or some such

+romantic figure, Balzac would then have praised his style.

+

+Thanks to the labours of Casimir Stryienski and his colleagues,

+we may study the different drafts Stendhal made of his novels. He

+seldom improved by recasting. The truth is that his dry, naked

+method of narration, despite its clumsiness, despite the absence of

+plan, is excellently adapted to the expression of his ideas. He is a

+psychologue. He deals with soul-stuff. An eighteenth-century man in

+his general ideas and feelings, he followed the seventeenth century

+and Montesquieu; he derives from Montaigne and Chamfort, and his

+philosophy is coloured by a study of Condillac, Hobbes, Helvétius,

+Cabanis, Destutt Tracy, and Machiavelli. He is a descendant of Diderot

+and the Encyclopædists, a _philosophe_ of the salons, a _petit maître_,

+a materialist for whom nothing exists but his ideas and sensations.

+A French epicurean, his pendulum swings between love and war--the

+adoration of energy and the adoration of pleasure. What complicates

+his problem is the mixture of warrior and psychologist. That the man

+who followed Napoleon through several of his campaigns, serving

+successfully as a practical commissary and fighter, should have been

+an adorer of women, was less strange than that he should have proved

+to be the possessor of such vibrating sensibility. Jules Lemaitre sees

+him as "a grand man of action paralysed little by little because of

+his incomparable analysis." Yet he never betrayed unreadiness when

+confronted by peril. He read Voltaire and Plato during the burning

+of Moscow--which he described as a beautiful spectacle--and he never

+failed to present himself before his kinsman and patron, Marshal Daru,

+with a clean-shaved face, even when the Grand Army was a mass of

+stragglers.

+

+"You are a man of heart," said Daru, Frenchman in that phrase. When

+Napoleon demanded five millions of francs from a German province,

+Stendhal--who adopted this pen-name from the archæologist Winckelmann's

+birthplace, a Prussian town--raised seven millions and was in

+consequence execrated by the people. Napoleon asked on receiving the

+money the name of the agent, adding, "_c'est bien!_" We are constrained

+to believe Mérimée's assertion that Stendhal was the soul of honour,

+and incapable of baseness, after this proof. At a time when plunder was

+the order of the day's doings, the poor young aide-de-camp could have

+pocketed with ease at least a million of the excess tax. He did not do

+this, nor did he, in his letters or memoirs, betray any remorse for his

+honesty.

+

+Sainte-Beuve said that Beyle was the dupe of his fear of being duped.

+This was confirmed by Mérimée in the concise little study prefixed

+to the Correspondence. It is doubtful if these two men were drawn to

+each other save by a certain contemptuous way of viewing mankind.

+Stendhal was the more sentimental of the pair; he frequently reproached

+Mérimée for his cold heart. He had also a greater sense of humour.

+That each distrusted the other is not to be denied. Augustin Filon,

+in his _brochure_ on Mérimée, said that "the influence exercised by

+Stendhal on Mérimée during the decisive years in which his literary

+eclecticism was formed, was considerable, even more than Mérimée

+himself was aware." But the author of Carmen was a much finer artist.

+The Danish critic, Georg Brandes, has described Beyle's relation to

+Balzac as "that of the reflective to the observant mind; of the thinker

+in art to the seer. We see into the hearts of Balzac's characters,

+into the 'dark-red mill of passion' which is the motive force of their

+action; Beyle's characters receive their impulse from the head, the

+'open light-and-sound chamber'; the reason being that Beyle was a

+logician, and Balzac a man of an effusively rich animal nature. Beyle

+stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position as Leonardo da Vinci

+to Michaelangelo. Hugo's plastic imagination creates a supernaturally

+colossal and muscular humanity fixed in an eternal attitude of struggle

+and suffering; Beyle's mysterious, complicated, refined intellect

+produces a small series of male and female portraits, which exercise

+an almost magic fascination on us with their far-away, enigmatic

+expressions, and their sweet, wicked smile. Beyle is the metaphysician

+among the French authors of his day, as Leonardo was the metaphysician

+among the great painters of the Renaissance."

+

+According to Bourget, Beyle's advent into letters marked the "tragic

+dawn of pessimism." But is it precise to call him a pessimist? He was

+of too vigorous a temper, too healthy in body, to be classed with the

+decadents. His was the soul of a sixteenth-century Italian, one who had

+read and practised the cheerful scepticism of Montaigne. As he served

+bravely when a soldier, so, stout and subtle in after life, he waged

+war with the blue devils--his chief foe. Disease weakened his physique,

+weakened his mentality, yet he fought life to its dull end. He was

+pursued by the secret police, and this led him to all sorts of comical

+disguises and pseudonyms. And to the last he experienced a childish

+delight in the invention of odd names for himself.

+

+Félix Fénéon, in speaking of Arthur Rimbaud, asserted that his work

+was, perhaps, "outside of literature." This, with some modification,

+may be said of Beyle. His stories are always interesting; they may

+ramble and halt, digress and wander into strange places; but the

+psychologic vision of the writer never weakens. His chief concern is

+the mind or soul of his characters. He hitches his kite to earth, yet

+there is the paper air-ship floating above you, lending a touch of the

+ideal to his most matter-of-fact tales. He uses both the microscope

+and scalpel. He writes, as has been too often said, indifferently; his

+formal sense is nearly _nil_; much of his art criticism mere gossip;

+he has little feeling for colour; yet he describes a soul and its

+manifold movements in precise terms, and while he is at furthest remove

+from symbolism, he often has an irritating spiritual suggestiveness.

+The analogue here to plastic art--he, the least plastic of writers--is

+unescapable. Stendhal, whatever else he may be, is an incomparable

+etcher of character. His acid phrases "bite" his arbitrary lines

+deeply; the sharp contrasts of black and white enable him to portray,

+without the fiery-hued rhetoric of either Chateaubriand or Hugo,

+the finest split shades of thought and emotion. Never colour, only

+_nuance_--and the slash and sweep of a drastic imagination.

+

+He was an inveterate illusionist in all that concerned himself; even

+with himself he was not always sincere--and he usually wrote of

+himself. His many books are a masquerade behind which one discerns the

+posture of the mocker, the sensibility of a reversed idealist, and the

+spirit of a bitter analyst. This sensibility must not be confounded

+with the _sensibilité_ of a Maurice de Guérin. Rather it is the morbid

+sensitiveness of a Swift combined with an unusual receptivity to

+sentimental and artistic impressions. Professor Walter Raleigh thus,

+describes the sensibility of those times: "The sensibility that came

+into vogue during the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than

+its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated

+enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of

+unsubstantial grief." Vanity ruled in Stendhal. Who shall say how much

+his unyielding spirit suffered because of his poverty, his enormous

+ambitions? His motto might have been: Blessed are the proud of spirit,

+for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth. He wrote in 1819: "I have

+had three passions in my life. Ambition--1800-1811; love for a woman

+who deceived me, 1811-1818; and in 1818 a new passion." But then he

+was ever on the verge of a new passion, ever deceived--at least he

+believed himself to be--and he, the fearless theoretician of passion,

+often was, he has admitted, in practice the timid amateur. He planned

+the attack upon a woman's heart as a general plans the taking of an

+enemy's citadel. He wrote L'Amour for himself. He defined the rules of

+the game, but shivered when he saw the battle-field. Magnificent he was

+in precept, though not always in action. He was for this reason never

+_blasé_, despite continual grumblings over his _ennui_. In his later

+years at Cività Vecchia he yearned for companionship like a girl, and,

+a despiser of Paris and the Parisians, he suffered from the nostalgia

+of the boulevard. He adored Milan and the Milanese, yet Italy finally

+proved too much for his nerves; _J'ai tant vu le soleil_, he confessed.

+Contradictory and fantastic, he hated all authority. Mérimée puts

+down to the account of the sour old abbé Raillane, who taught him,

+the distaste he entertained for the Church of Rome. Yet he enjoyed

+its æsthetic side. He was its admirer his life long, notwithstanding

+his gibes and irreligious jests, just as he was a Frenchman by reason

+of his capacity for reaction under depressing circumstances. But how

+account for his monstrous hatred for his father? The elder Beyle was

+penurious and as hard as flint. He nearly starved his son, for whom he

+had no affection. Henry could not see him salute his mother without

+loathing him. She read Dante in the original, and her son assured

+himself that there was Italian blood on her side of the house. The

+youth's hatred, too, of his aunt Séraphie almost became a mania. It

+has possibly enriched fiction by the portrait of Gina of the resilient

+temperament, the delicious Duchess of Sanseverina. All that she is, his

+aunt Séraphie was not, and with characteristic perversity he makes her

+enamoured of her nephew Fabrice del Dongo. Did he not say that parents

+are our first enemies when we enter the world?

+

+His criticisms of music and painting are chiefly interesting for what

+they tell us of his temperament. He called himself "observer of the

+human heart," and was taken by a cautious listener for a police spy.

+He seldom signed the same name twice to his letters. He delighted to

+boast of various avocations; little wonder the Milanese police drove

+him out of the city. He said that to be a good philosopher one must be

+_sec_, and without illusions. Perspicacious, romantic, delicate in his

+attitude toward women, he could be rough, violent, and suspicious. He

+scandalised George Sand, delighted Alfred de Musset; Madame Lamartine

+refused to receive him in her drawing-room at Rome. His intercourse

+with Byron was pleasant. He disliked Walter Scott and called him

+a hypocrite--possibly because there is no freedom in his love

+descriptions. Lord Byron in a long letter expostulated with Stendhal,

+defending his good friend, Scott; but Stendhal never quite believed in

+the poet's sincerity--indeed, suspecting himself, he suspected other

+men's motives. He had stage-fright when he first met Byron--whom he

+worshipped. A tremulous soul his, in a rude envelope. At Venice he

+might have made the acquaintance of young Arthur Schopenhauer and

+Leopardi, but he was too much interested in the place to care for new

+faces.

+

+He said that without passion there is neither virtue nor vice. (Taine

+made a variation on this theme.) A dagger-thrust is a dignified gesture

+when prompted by passion. After the Napoleonic disaster, Stendhal had

+lost all his hopes of referment; he kept his temper admirably, though

+occasionally calling his old chief bad names. It was a period of the

+flat, stale, platitudinous, and bourgeois. "In the nineteenth century

+one must be either a monster or a sheep," wrote Beyle to Byron. A

+patriot is either a dolt or a rogue! My country is where there are most

+people like me--Cosmopolis! The only excuse for God is that he does

+not exist! Verse was invented to aid the memory! A volume of maxims,

+witty and immoral, might be gathered from the writings of Stendhal

+that would equal Rivarol and Rochefoucauld. "I require three or four

+cubic feet of new ideas per day, as a steamboat requires coal," he

+told Romain Colomb. What energy, what lassitude this man possessed! He

+spoke English--though he wrote it imperfectly--and Italian; the latter

+excellently because of his long residence in Italy.

+

+Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, described Stendhal as "that

+remarkable man who, with a Napoleonic _tempo_, traversed _his_ Europe,

+in fact several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and

+discoverer thereof. It has required two generations to overtake him

+one way or other; to divine long afterward some of the riddles that

+perplexed and enraptured him--this strange Epicurean and man of

+interrogation, the last great psychologist of France." He also spoke of

+him as "Stendhal, who has, perhaps, had the most profound eyes and ears

+of any Frenchman of this century."

+

+Stendhal said that Shakespeare knew the human heart better than Racine;

+yet despite his English preferences, Stendhal is a psychologist of the

+_Racinien_ school. When an English company of players went to Paris in

+1822, Stendhal defended them by pen and in person. He was chagrined

+that his fellow-countrymen should hiss Othello or The School for

+Scandal. He despised _chauvinisme_, he the ideal globe-trotter. And

+he was contradictory enough to have understood Tennyson's "That man's

+the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best." He scornfully

+remarked that in 1819 Parisian literary logic could be summed up thus:

+"This man does not agree with me, therefore he is a fool; he criticises

+my book, he is my enemy; therefore a thief, an assassin, a brigand, and

+forger." Narrow-mindedness must never be imputed to Stendhal. Nor was

+he a modest man--modesty that virtue of the mediocre.

+

+How much Tolstoy thought of the Frenchman may be found in his

+declaration that all he knew about war he learned first from Stendhal.

+"I will speak of him only as the author of the Chartreuse de Parme and

+Le Rouge et le Noir. These are two great, inimitable works of art.

+I am indebted for much to Stendhal. He taught me to understand war.

+Read once more in the Chartreuse de Parme his account of the battle

+of Waterloo. Who before him had so described war--that is, as it is

+in reality?" In 1854 they said Balzac and Hugo; in 1886, Balzac and

+Stendhal. Some day it may be Stendhal and Tolstoy. The Russian with

+his slow, patient amassing of little facts but follows Stendhal's

+chaplet of anecdotes. The latter said that the novel should be a

+mirror that moves along the highway; a novel, he writes elsewhere, is

+like a bow--the violin which gives out the sound is the soul of the

+reader. And Goncourt assimilated this method with surprising results.

+Stendhal first etched the soul of the new Superman, the exalted young

+man and woman--Julien Sorel and Matilde de la Môle. They are both

+immoralists. Exceptional souls, in real life they might have seen the

+inside of a prison. Stendhal is the original of the one; the other is

+the source of latter-day feminine souls in revolt, the souls of Ibsen

+and Strindberg. Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Marivaux he has

+remoulded--Valmont is a prototype of Julien Sorel.

+

+J. J. Weiss has said that profound immorality is probably an attribute

+common to all great observers of human nature. It would require a

+devil's advocate of unusual acuity to prove Stendhal a moral man or

+writer. His philosophy is materialistic. He wrote for the "happy

+few" and longed for a hundred readers, and wished his readers to be

+those amiable, unhappy souls who are neither moral nor hypocritical.

+His egoism brought him no surcease from boredom. His diaries and

+letters and memoirs, so rich in general ideas, are valuable for the

+student of human nature. The publication of his correspondence was

+a revelation--a very sincere, human Stendhal came into view. His

+cosmopolitanism is unaffected; his chapters are mosaics of facts and

+sensations; his manner of narrative is, as Bourget says, a method of

+discovery as well as of exposition. His heroes and heroines delve into

+their motives, note their ideas and sensations. With a few exceptions,

+modern romancers, novelists, psychologists of fiction seem shallow

+after Stendhal. Taine confesses to reading Le Rouge et le Noir between

+thirty and forty times. Stendhal disliked America; to him all things

+democratic were abhorrent. He loathed the mass, upheld the class; an

+individualist and aristocrat like Ibsen, he would not recognize the

+doctrine of equality. The French Revolution was useful only because

+it evolved a strong man--Napoleon. America, being democratic, would

+therefore never produce art, tragedy, music, or romantic love.

+

+It is the fate of some men to exist only as a source of inspiration

+for their fellow-artists. Shelley is the poet's poet, Meredith the

+novelist's novelist, and Stendhal a storehouse for psychologues.

+His virile spirit, in these times of vapid socialistic theories,

+is a sparkling and sinister pool wherein all may dip and be

+refreshed--perhaps poisoned. He is not orthodox as thinker or artist;

+but it is a truism that the wicked of a century ago may be the saints

+of to-morrow. To read him is to increase one's wisdom; he is dangerous

+only to fools. Like Schopenhauer and Ibsen, he did not flatter his

+public; now he has his own public. And nothing would have amused this

+charming and cynical man more than the knowledge of his canonisation

+in the church of world literature. He gayly predicted that he would be

+understood about 1880-1900; but his impertinent shadow projects far

+into the twentieth century. Will he be read in 1935? he has asked. Why

+not? A monument is to be erected to him in Paris. Rodin has designed

+the medallion portrait.

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+The labours, during the past twenty years, of Casimir Stryienski,

+François de Nion, L. Bélugon, Arthur Chuquet, Henry Cordier, Pierre

+Brun, Ricciotto Canudo, Octave Uzanne, Hugues Rebell--to quote the

+names of a few devoted Stendhalians--have enabled us to decipher

+Stendhal's troubled life. M. Stryienski unearthed at Grenoble a mass

+of manuscript, journals, tales, half-finished novels, and they have

+been published. Was there any reason to doubt the existence of a

+Stendhal Club after the appearance of those two interesting books,

+Soirées du Stendhal Club, by Stryienski? The compact little study in

+the series, Les Grands Ecrivains Français, by Edouard Rod, and Colomb's

+biographical notice at the head of Armance, and Stryienski's Etude

+Biographique are the principal references for Stendhal students. And

+this, too, despite the evident lack of sympathy in the case of M. Rod.

+It is a minute, painstaking _étude_, containing much fair criticism;

+fervent Stendhalians need to be reminded of their master's defects

+and of the danger of self-dupery. If Stendhal were alive, he would be

+the first to mock at his disciples' enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of the

+_parvenu_, as he puts it. (He ill concealed his own in the presence of

+pictorial master-pieces or the ballets of Viganò.) Rod, after admitting

+the wide influence of Stendhal upon the generations that followed him,

+patronisingly concludes by a quotation: "Les petits livres ont leurs

+destinées." What, then, does he call great, if Le Rouge et le Noir and

+La Chartreuse de Parme are "little books"?

+

+Marie-Henry Beyle was born at Grenoble, Dauphiny, January 23, 1783. He

+died at Paris, March 23, 1842, stricken on the Rue Neuve des Capucines

+by apoplexy. Colomb had his dying friend carried to his lodgings. He

+was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, followed there by Mérimée, Colomb,

+and one other. Upon his monument is an epitaph composed a short time

+before he died. It is in Italian and reads: Arrigo Beyle, Milanese.

+_Scrisse, Amò, Visse_. Ann. 59. M.2. Mori 2. 23 Marzo. MDCCCXLII.

+(Harry Beyle, Milanese. Wrote, Loved, Lived. 59 years and 2 months. He

+died at 2 A.M. on the 23rd of March, 1842.) This bit of mystification

+was quite in line with Beyle's career. As he was baptised the English

+Henry, he preferred to be known in death as the Milanese Harry. Pierre

+Brun says that there was a transposition in the order of _Scrisse, Amò,

+Visse_; it should read the reverse. The sculptor David d'Angers made a

+medallion of the writer in 1825. It is reproduced in the Rod monograph,

+and his son designed another for the tomb. This singular epitaph of a

+singular man did not escape the eyes of his enemies. Charles Monselet

+called him a renegade to his family and country; which is uncritical

+tomfoolery. Stendhal was a citizen of the world--and to the last a

+Frenchman. And not one of his cavilling contemporaries risked his life

+with such unconcern as did this same Beyle in the Napoleonic campaigns.

+Mérimée has drawn for us the best portrait of Stendhal, Colomb, his

+earliest companion, wrote the most gossipy life. Stryienski, however,

+has demonstrated that Colomb attenuated, even erased many expressions

+of Stendhal's, and that he also attempted to portray his hero in

+fairer colours. But deep-dyed Stendhalians will not have their master

+transformed into a tame cat of the Parisian salons. His wickedness is

+his chief attraction, they think. An oft-quoted saying of Stendhal's

+has been, Stryienski shows, tampered with: "A party of eight or ten

+agreeable persons," said Stendhal, "where the conversation is gay and

+anecdotic, and where weak punch is handed around at half past twelve,

+is the place where I enjoy myself the most. There, in my element, I

+infinitely prefer hearing others talk to talking myself. I readily sink

+back into the silence of happiness; and if I talk, it is only to pay my

+ticket of admission." What Stendhal wrote was this: "Un salon de huit

+ou dix personnes dont toutes les femmes ont eu les amants," etc. The

+touch is unmistakable.

+

+Henry was educated at the Ecole Centrale of Grenoble. When he was

+ten years of age, Louis XVI was executed, and the precocious boy,

+to annoy his father, displayed undisguised glee at the news. He

+served the mass, an altar-boy at the Convent of the Propagation, and

+revealed unpleasant traits of character. His father he called by a

+shocking name, but the death of his mother, when he was seven, he

+never forgot. He loved her in true Stendhalian style. His maiden aunt

+Séraphie ruled the house of the elder Beyle, and Henry's two sisters,

+Pauline--the favourite of her brother--and Zenaïde, most tyrannically.

+His young existence was a cruel battle with his elders, excepting his

+worthy grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, an _esprit fort_ of the approved

+eighteenth-century variety. On his book-shelves Henry found Voltaire,

+Rousseau, d'Holbach, and eagerly absorbed them. A great-aunt taught

+him that the pride of the Spaniard was the best quality of a man.

+When he heard of his aunt's death, he threw himself on his knees and

+passionately thanked the God in whom he had never believed. His father,

+Chérubin-Joseph Beyle, was chevalier of the Legion of Honor and his

+family of old though not noble stock. Its sympathies were aristocratic,

+royalist, while Henry--certainly not a radical in politics--loved to

+annoy his father by his Jacobin opinions. He in turn was ridiculed

+by the Dauphinois when he called himself de Stendhal. Not a lovable

+boy, certainly, and, it is said, scarcely a moral one. At school they

+nick-named him "la Tour ambulante," because of his thick-set figure. He

+preferred mathematics to all other studies, as he contemplated entering

+l'Ecole Polytechnique. November 10, 1799, found him in Paris with

+letters for his cousins Daru. They proved friendly. He was afterward,

+through the influence of Pierre Daru, minister of war, made lieutenant

+of cavalry, commissary and auditor of the Council of State. He served

+in the Italian campaign, following Napoleon through the Saint Bernard

+pass two days later. Aide-de-camp of General Michaud, he displayed

+_sang-froid_ under fire. He was present at Jena and Wagram, and asked,

+during a day of fierce fighting, "Is that all?" War and love only

+provoked from this nonchalant person the same question. He was always

+disappointed by reality; and, as Rod adds, "Is that all?" might be

+the _leit motiv_ of his life. Forced by sickness to retire to Vienna,

+he was at the top-notch of his life in Paris and Milan, 1810-1812. He

+left a brilliant position to rejoin the Emperor in Russia. In 1830

+he was nominated consul at Trieste; but Metternich objected because

+of Stendhal's reputation as a political intrigant in Milan, ten

+years earlier--a reputation he never deserved. He was sent to Cività

+Vecchia, where he led a dull existence, punctuated by trips to Rome,

+and, at long intervals, to Paris. From 1814 to 1820 he lived in Milan,

+and in love, a friend of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, Monti. The police

+drove him back to Paris, and he says it was the deadliest blow to his

+happiness. For a decade he remained here, leading the life of a man

+around town, a sublimated gossip, dilettante, surface idler; withal, a

+hard worker. A sybarite on an inadequate income, he was ever the man of

+action. Embroiled in feminine intrigues, sanguine, clairvoyant, and

+a sentimentalist, he seldom contemplated marriage. Once, at Cività

+Vecchia, a young woman of bourgeois extraction tempted him by her large

+_dot_; but inquiries made at Grenoble killed his chances. Indeed, he

+was not the stuff from which the ideal husband is moulded. He did

+not entertain a high opinion of matrimony. He said that the Germans

+had a mania for marriage, an institution which is servitude for men.

+On a trip down the Rhône, in 1833, he met George Sand and Alfred de

+Musset going to Italy--to that Venice which was the poet's Waterloo

+and Pagello's victory. Stendhal behaved so madly, so boisterously,

+and uttered such paradoxes that he offended Madame Dudevant-Sand, who

+openly expressed her distaste for him, though admiring his brilliancy.

+De Musset had a pretty talent for sketching and drew Stendhal dancing

+at the inn before a servant. It is full of verve. He also wrote some

+verse about the French consul at Cività Vecchia:

+

+    "Où Stendhal, cet esprit charmant,

+         Remplissait si dévotement

+         Sa sinécure."

+

+Sinecure it was, though _ennui_ ruled; but he had his memories, and

+Rome was not far away. In 1832, while at San Pietro in Montorio,

+he bethought himself of his age. Fifty years would soon arrive. He

+determined to write his memoirs. And we have the Vie de Henri Brulard,

+Souvenirs d'Egotisme, and the Journal (1801-1814). In their numerous

+pages--for he was an indefatigable graphomaniac--may be found the

+thousand and one experiences in love, war, diplomacy that made up his

+life. His boasted impassibility, like Flaubert's, does not survive the

+test of these letters and intimate confessions. Mérimée, too, wrote

+to Jenny Dacquin without his accustomed mask. Stendhal is the most

+personal of writers; each novel is Henry Beyle in various situations,

+making various and familiar gestures.

+

+His presence was welcome in a dozen salons of Paris. He preferred,

+however, a box at la Scala, listening to Rossini or watching a Viganò

+ballet, near his beloved Angela. But after seven years Milan was

+closed to him, and as he was known in a restricted circle at Paris

+as a writer of power, originality, and as an authority on music and

+painting, he returned there in 1821. He frequented the salon of Destutt

+de Tracy, whose ideology and philosophic writings he admired. There he

+saw General Lafayette and wrote maliciously of this hero, who, though

+seventy-five, was in love with a Portuguese girl of nineteen. The same

+desire to startle that animated Baudelaire kept Beyle in hot water. He

+was a visitor at the home of Madame Cabanis, of M. Cuvier, of Madame

+Ancelot, Baron Gérard, and Castellane, and on Sundays, at the salon of

+Etienne Délacluze, the art critic of the _Débats_, and a daily visitor

+at Madame Pasta's. He disliked, in his emphatic style, Victor Cousin,

+Thiers, and his host Délacluze. For Beyle to dislike a man was to

+announce the fact to the four winds of heaven, and he usually did so

+with a brace of bon-mots that set all Paris laughing. Naturally, his

+enemies retaliated. Some disagreeable things were said of him, though

+none quite so sharp as the remark made by a certain Madame Céline: "Ah!

+I see M. Beyle is wearing a new coat. Madame Pasta must have had a

+benefit." This witticism was believed, because of the long friendship

+between the Italian _cantatrice_ and the young Frenchman. He occupied a

+small apartment in the same building, though it is said the attachment

+was platonic.

+

+In 1800 he met, at Milan, Signora Angela Pietragrua. He loved her.

+Eleven years later, when he returned to Italy, this love was revived.

+He burst into tears when he saw her again. _Quello è il chinese!_

+explained the massive Angela to her father. Even that lovetap did not

+disconcert the furnace-like affection of Henry. This Angela made him

+miserable by her coquetries. The feminine characters in his novels

+and tales are drawn from life. His essay on Love is a _centaine_

+of experiences crystallised into maxims and epigrams. This man of

+too expansive heart, who confessed to trepidation in the presence

+of a woman he loved, displayed surprising delicacy. Where he could

+not respect, he could not love. His sensibility was easily hurt; he

+abhorred the absence of taste. Love was for him a mixture of moonshine,

+_esprit_, and physical beauty. A very human man, Henry Beyle, though

+he never viewed woman exactly from the same angle as did Dante; or,

+perhaps, his many Beatrices proved geese.

+

+Stryienski relates that, on their return from Italy in 1860, Napoleon

+III and the Empress Eugénie visited Grenoble and, in the municipal

+library, saw a portrait of Stendhal. "But that is M. Beyle, is it

+not?" cried the Empress. "How comes his portrait here?" "He was born

+at Grenoble," responded Gariel, the librarian. She remembered him,

+this amusing mature friend of her girlhood. The daughters of Madame de

+Montijo, Eugénie and Paca, met Beyle through Mérimée, who was intimate

+with their mother. The two girls liked him; he spun for them his best

+yarns, he initiated them into new games; in a word, he was a welcome

+guest in the household, and there are two letters in the possession of

+Auguste Cordier, one addressed to Beyle by E. Guzman y Palafox dated

+December, 1839, when the future Empress of the French was thirteen;

+the other from her sister Paca, both affectionate and of a charm. The

+episode was a pleasant one in the life of Beyle.

+

+Mérimée also arranged a meeting between Victor Hugo and Beyle in

+1829 or 1830. Sainte-Beuve was present, and in a letter to Albert

+Collignon, published in _Vie littéraire_, 1874, he writes of the pair

+as two savage cats, their hair bristling, both on the defensive. Hugo

+knew that Beyle was an enemy of poetry, of the lyric, of the "ideal."

+The ice was not broken during the evening. Beyle had an antipathy

+for Hugo, Hugo thoroughly disliked Beyle. And if we had the choice

+to-day between talking with Hugo or Beyle, is there any doubt as to the

+selection?--Beyle the _raconteur_ of his day. He was too clear-sighted

+to harbour any illusions concerning literary folk. Praise from one's

+colleagues is a brevet of resemblance, he has written. Doesn't this

+sound like old Dr. Johnson's "The reciprocal civility of authors is one

+of the most risible scenes in the farce of life"?

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+Prosper Mérimée has told us that his friend and master, Henry

+Stendhal-Beyle, was wedded to the old-fashioned theory: a man should

+not be in a woman's company longer than five minutes without making

+love; granting, of course, that the woman is pretty and pleasing.

+This idea Stendhal had imbibed when a soldier in the Napoleonic

+campaign. It was hussar tactics of the First Empire. "Attack, attack,

+attack," he cries. His book De l'Amour practically sets forth the

+theory; but like most theoreticians, Stendhal was timid in action.

+He was a sentimentalist--he the pretended cynic and _blasé_ man of

+the world. Mérimée acknowledges that much of his own and Stendhal's

+impassibility was pure posing. Nevertheless, with the exceptions of

+Goethe and Byron, no writer of eminence in the last century enjoyed

+such a sentimental education as Stendhal. At Weimar the passionate

+pilgrim may see a small plaque which contains portraits of the women

+beloved by Goethe--omitting Frederike Brion. True to the compass of

+Teutonic sentimentality, Goethe's mother heads the list. Then follow

+the names of Cornelia, Kätchen Schönkopf, Lotte Buff, Lili Schönemann,

+Corona Schröter, Frau von Stein, Christiane Vulpius--later Frau von

+Goethe--Bettina von Arnim, Minna Herzlieb, and Marianne v. Willemer;

+with their respective birth and death dates. Several other names

+might have been added, notably that of the Polish _pianiste_ Goethe

+encountered at Marienbad. The collection is fair-sized, even for a poet

+who lived as long as Goethe and one who reproached Balzac with digging

+from a woman's heart each of his novels. To both Goethe and Stendhal

+the epigram of George Meredith might be applied: "Men may have rounded

+Seraglio Point. They have not yet doubled Cape Turk."

+

+The wonder is that thus far no devoted Stendhalian has prepared a

+similar _carton_ with the names and pictures of their master's--dare

+we say?--victims. Stendhal loved many women, and like Goethe his

+first love was his mother. For him she was the most precious image

+of all, and he was jealous of his father. This was at the age of

+seven; but the precocity of the boy and his exaggerated sensibility

+must be remembered--which later brought him so much unhappiness

+and so little joy. A casual examination of the list of his loves,

+reciprocated or spurned, would make a companion to that of Weimar.

+Their names are Mélanie Guilbert-Louason, Angela Pietragrua, Mlle.

+Beretter, the Countess Palffy, Menta, Elisa, Livia B., Madame Azur,

+Mina de Grisheim, Mme. Jules, and _la petite_ P. The number he loved

+without consolation was still larger. Despite his hussar manœuvres,

+Stendhal was easily rebuffed. It is odd that Goethe's and Stendhal's

+fair ones, upon whom they poured poems and novels, did not die--that

+is, immediately--on being deserted. Goethe relieved the pain of many

+partings by writing a poem or a play and seeking fresh faces. Stendhal

+did the same--substituting a novel or a study or innumerable letters

+for poems and plays. He believed that one nail drove out another;

+which is very soothing to masculine vanity. But did any woman break

+her heart because of his fickleness? Frau von Stein of all the women

+loved by Goethe probably took his defection seriously. She didn't kill

+herself, however. He wounded many a heart, yet the majority of his

+loves married, and apparently happily. Stendhal, ugly as he was, slew

+his hundreds; they recovered after he had passed on to fresh conquests;

+a fact that he, with his accustomed sincerity, did not fail to note.

+Yet this same gallant was among the few in the early years of the

+nineteenth century to declare for the enfranchisement, physical and

+spiritual, of woman. He was a _féministe_. But, in reality, his theory

+of love resembled that of the writer who said that "it was simple and

+brief, like a pressure of the hand between sympathetic persons, or a

+gay luncheon between two friends of which a pleasant memory remains, if

+not also a gentle gratitude toward the companion." I quote from memory.

+

+It was at Rome that he first resolved to tell the story of his life.

+In the dust he traced the initials of the beloved ones. In his book he

+omitted no details. His motto was: _la vérité toute nue_. If he has not

+spared himself, he has not spared others. What can the critics, who

+recently blamed George Moore for his plain speech in his memoirs, say

+to Stendhal's journals and La Vie de Henri Brulard? Many of the names

+were at first given with initials or asterisks; Mérimée burned the

+letters Stendhal sent him, and regretted the act. But the Stendhalians,

+the young enthusiasts of the Stendhal Club, have supplied the missing

+names--those of men and women who have been dead half a century and

+more.

+

+De l'Amour, Stendhal's remarkable study of the love-passion, is

+marred by the attempt to imprison a sentiment behind the bars of a

+mathematical formula. He had inherited from his study of Condillac,

+Helvétius, Tracy, Chamfort the desire for a rigid schematology, for

+geometrical demonstration. The word "logic" was always on the tip of

+his tongue, and he probably would have come to blows with Professor

+Jowett for his dictum, uttered at the close of a lecture: "Logic is

+neither an art nor a science, but a dodge." Love for Stendhal was

+without a Beyond. It was a matter of the senses entirely. The soul

+counted for little, manners for much. A sentimental epicurean, he

+is the artistic descendant of Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, both by

+tradition and temperament. Stendhal fell into the mistake of the

+metaphysician in setting up numerous categorical traps to snare his

+subject. They are artificial, and yet bear a resemblance to certain

+Schopenhauerian theories. Both men practised what they did not preach.

+"Beauty is a promise of happiness," wrote Stendhal, and it was so

+effective that Baudelaire rewrote it with a slight variation. The

+"crystallisation" formula of Stendhal occurred to him while down in a

+salt mine near Salzburg. He saw an elm twig covered with sparkling salt

+crystals, and he used it as an image to express the love that discerns

+in the beloved one all perfections. There are several crystallisations

+during the course of "true love." His book is more autobiographical

+than scientific; that the writer gleaned the facts from his own

+heart-experiences adds to the value and veracity of the work. As a

+catechism for lovers, it is unique; and it was so well received that

+from 1822 to 1833 there were exactly seventeen copies sold. But it

+has been plundered by other writers without acknowledgment. Stendhal

+and Schopenhauer could have shaken hands on the score of their

+unpopularity--and about 1880 on their sudden recrudescence.

+

+With all his display of worldly wisdom Stendhal really loved but three

+times in his life; this statement may shock some of his disciples

+who see in him a second Casanova, but a study of his life will prove

+it. He had gone to Paris with the established conviction that he must

+become a Don Juan. That was--comical or shocking as it may sound--his

+projected profession. Experience soon showed him other aspects. He

+was too refined, too tender-hearted, to indulge in the conventional

+dissipations of adolescent mankind. The lunar ray of sentiment was in

+his brain; if he couldn't idealise a woman, he would leave her. It was

+his misfortune, the lady's fortune--whoever she might have been--and

+the world's good luck that he never was married. As a husband he would

+have been a glorious failure. Mélanie Guilbert-Louason was an actress

+in Paris, who, after keeping him on tenter-hooks of jealousy, accepted

+his addresses. He couldn't marry her, because the allowance made by

+his father did not suffice for himself; besides, she had a daughter

+by a former marriage. He confesses that lack of money was the chief

+reason for his timidity with women; a millionaire, he might have been

+a conquering and detestable hero. Like Frédéric Moreau in L'Education

+Sentimentale, Stendhal always feared interruption from a stronger

+suitor, and his fears were usually verified. But he went with Guilbert

+to Marseilles, where she was acting, and to support himself took a

+position in a commercial house. That for him meant a grand passion; he

+loathed business. She married a Russian, Baskow by name. Stendhal was

+inconsolable for weeks. How he would have applauded the ironical cry

+of Jules Laforgue's Hamlet: "Stability! stability! thy name is Woman."

+Although he passed his days embroidering upon the canvas of the Eternal

+Masculine portraits of the secular sex, Stendhal first said, denying a

+certain French king, that women never vary.

+

+He fell into abysmal depths of love with Angela Pietragrua at Milan.

+He was a dashing soldier, and if Angela deceived him he was youthful

+enough to stand the shock. Eleven years later he revisited Milan

+and wept when he saw Angela again. He often wept copiously, a relic

+possibly of eighteenth-century sensibilities. Angela did not weep.

+She, however, was sufficiently touched to start a fresh affair with

+her faithful Frenchman. He did not always enjoy smooth sailing. There

+were a dozen women that either scorned him or else remained unconscious

+of his sentiments. One memory remained with him to the last--recall

+his cry of loneliness to Romain Colomb when languishing as a French

+consul at Cività Vecchia: "I am perishing for want of love!" He thought

+doubtless of Métilde, wife of General Dembowsky, who from 1818 to 1824

+(let us not concern ourselves if these dates coincide with or overlap

+other love-affairs; Stendhal was very versatile) neither encouraged

+nor discouraged at Milan the ardent exile. So infatuated was he that

+he neglected his chances with the actress Viganò, and also with the

+Countess Kassera. Madame Dembowsky, who afterward did not prove so

+cruel to the conspirator Ugo Foscolo, allowed Stendhal the inestimable

+privilege of kissing her hand. He sighed like a schoolboy and trailed

+after the heartless one from Milan to Florence, from Florence to Rome.

+The gossip that he was the lover in Paris of the singer Pasta caused

+the Dembowsky to deny him hope. He was sincerely attached to her. Had

+she said "Kill yourself," he would have done so. Yes, such a romantic

+he was. She was born Viscontini and separated from a brutal soldier

+of a husband. Her cousin, Madame Traversi, was an obstacle in this

+unhappy passion of Stendhal's. She hated him. Métilde died at the

+age of thirty-eight, in 1825. Because of her he had replied to Mile.

+Viganò--when she asked him: "Beyle, they say that you are in love with

+me!" "They are fooling you." For this he was never forgiven. It is

+a characteristic note of Stendhalian frankness--Stendhal, who never

+deceived anyone but himself. Here is a brace of his amiable sayings on

+the subject of Woman:--

+

+"La fidélité des femmes dans le mariage, lorsqu'il n'y a pas d'amour,

+est probablement une chose contre nature."

+

+"La seule chose que je voie à blâmer dans la pudeur, c'est de conduire

+à l'habitude de mentir."

+

+

+

+IV

+

+

+A promenader of souls and cities, Stendhal was a letter-writer of

+formidable patience; his published correspondence is enormous. How

+enormous may be seen in the three volumes published at Paris by Charles

+Bosse, the pages of which number 1,386. These letters begin in 1800,

+when Stendhal was a precocious youth of seventeen, and end 1842, a few

+days before his death. There are more than 700 of them, and he must

+have written more--probably several thousand; for we know that Mérimée

+destroyed nearly all his correspondence with Stendhal, and we read of

+300 written to a Milanese lady--his one grand, because unsuccessful,

+passion. But a few of these are included, the remainder doubtless

+having been burned for prudence' sake. The earliest edition of the

+Stendhal letters appeared in 1855, edited by Prosper Mérimée, with an

+introduction by the author of Carmen. The present edition is edited by

+two devoted Stendhalians, Ad. Paupe and P. A. Cheramy. It comprises

+all the earlier correspondence, the letters printed in the Souvenirs

+d'Egotisme (1892), some letters never before published, Lettres Intimes

+(1892), and letters published in the first series of Soirées du

+Stendhal Club (1905). There are also letters from the archives of the

+Ministers of the Interior, of War, and of Foreign Affairs--altogether a

+complete collection, though ugly in appearance, resembling a volume of

+Congressional reports, but valuable to the Stendhal student.

+

+For the first time the names of his correspondents appear in full.

+Mérimée suppressed most of them or gave only the initials. We learn

+who these correspondents were, and there is a general key for the

+deciphering of the curious names Stendhal bestowed upon them--he was

+a wag and a mystifier in this respect. His own signature was seldom

+twice alike. A list is given and reaches the number of one hundred and

+seventy-nine pseudonyms. Maurice Barrès has written a gentle preface

+rather in the air, which he entitled: Stendhal's Sentiment of Honour.

+One passage is worthy of quotation. Barrès asserts that Stendhal never

+asked whether a sentiment or an act was useful or fecund, but whether

+it testified to a thrilling energy. Since the pragmatists are claiming

+the Frenchman as one of their own, this statement may prove revelatory.

+

+The first volume is devoted to his years of apprenticeship (1800-1806)

+and his active life (1808-1814). The majority of the letters are

+addressed to his sister, Pauline Beyle, at Grenoble, a sympathetic

+soul. With the gravity of a young, green philosopher, he addresses to

+her homilies by the yard. Sixty instructing twenty! He tells her what

+to read, principally the eighteenth century philosophers: Rousseau,

+Voltaire, Helvétius, Tracy, Locke--amusing and highly moral reading

+for a lass--and he never wearies of praising Shakespeare. "I am a

+Romantic," he says elsewhere; "that is, I prefer Shakespeare to

+Racine, Byron to Boileau." This worldly-wise youth must have bored his

+sister. She understood him, however, and as her life at home with a

+disagreeable and avaricious father was not happy, her correspondence

+with brother Henry must have been a consolation. He does not scruple to

+call his father hard names, and recommends his sister not to marry for

+love but for a comfortable home. She actually did both. Edouard Mounier

+is another correspondent; also Félix Faure, born in Stendhal's city,

+Grenoble. We learn much of the Napoleonic campaigns in which Stendhal

+served, particularly of the burning of Moscow and the disastrous

+retreat of the French army. Related by an eye-witness whose style is

+concise, whose power of observation is extraordinary, these letters

+possess historic value.

+

+All Paris and Milan are in the second volume, The Man of the World and

+the Dilettante (1815-1830); while The Public Functionary and Novelist

+are the themes of volume three (1830-1842). The friends with whom

+Stendhal corresponded were Guizot, Thiers, Balzac, Byron, Walter Scott,

+Sainte-Beuve, and many distinguished noblemen and men of affairs. He

+had friends in London, Thomas Moore and Sutton-Sharp among the rest;

+and he visited England several times. Baron Mareste and Romain Colomb

+were confidants. Stendhal, with an irony that never deserted him, wrote

+obituary notices of himself because Jules Janin had jestingly remarked

+that when Stendhal died he would furnish plenty of good material for

+the necrologists. The articles in guise of letters sent to M. Stritch

+of the _German Review_, London, are tedious reading; besides, there are

+too many of them.

+

+As a man whose ears and eyes were very close to the whirring of

+contemporary events, his descriptions of Napoleon and Byron are

+peculiarly interesting. At first Napoleon had been a demi-god, then he

+was reviled because with the Corsican's downfall he lost his chances

+for the future. He had witnessed the coronation and did not forget

+that Talma had given the young Bonaparte free tickets to the Comédie

+Française; also that Pope Pius VII. pronounced Latin Italian fashion,

+thus: _Spiritous sanctous_. As the Emperor passed by on horseback,

+cheered by the mobs, "he smiled his smile of the theatre, in which one

+shows the teeth, but with eyes that smile not." Stendhal tells us that

+the Emperor had forehead and nose in an unbroken line, a common trait

+in certain parts of France, he adds.

+

+He first encountered Byron in the year 1812, at Milan. It was in

+a box of the Scala. He was overcome by the beauty of the poet, by

+his graciousness. Here we see Stendhal, no longer a soldier or a

+cynic, but a man of sensibility, almost a hero-worshipper. Byron was

+agreeable. They met often. When Byron's physician and secretary,

+Polidori, was arrested by the Milan secret police, Stendhal relates

+that the Englishman's rage was appalling. Byron resembled Napoleon,

+declared Stendhal, in his marble wrath. Another time the French author

+advised Byron, who lived at a distance from the opera house, to take

+a carriage, as after midnight walking was dangerous in Milan. Coldly

+though politely Byron asked for some indication of his route and then,

+during a painful silence, he left poor Stendhal staring after him as he

+hobbled away in the darkness. Such human touches are worth more than

+the letters in which the literature of the day is discussed.

+

+Ten years later, from Genoa (1823), Byron wrote Stendhal, whom he

+apparently liked, thanking him for a notice he had read of himself in

+the latter's book, Rome, Naples, et Florence. Supreme master of the

+anecdote, these letters may serve as an introduction to Stendhal's

+works, though we wish for more of the tender epistles. However, in

+The Diary, the Journal and the Life of Henri Brulard, one may find

+copious and frank confessions of Stendhal's love-life. So little of

+the literary man was in him that at the close of his career, when he

+had received the Legion of Honor, he was indignant because this was

+bestowed upon him not in his capacity of public functionary but as a

+man of letters. Adolphe Paupe, the editor of this bulky correspondence

+--and who knows how much more material there may be in the Grenoble

+archives!--fittingly closes his brief introduction with a quotation

+from a writer the antipodes of Stendhal, the parabolic Barbey

+d'Aurevilly, who, after calling the correspondence "adorable," adds

+that it possesses the unheard-of charm of Stendhal's other books, a

+charm which is inexhaustible. Notwithstanding this eloquence, I prefer

+the old edition compiled by Mérimée. There is such a thing as too much

+Stendhal, although every scrap of his writing may be sacred to his

+disciples.

+

+I am glad, therefore, to note in the second series of the Soirées du

+Stendhal Club, that the principal Stendhalian--or Beyliste, as some

+name themselves--Casimir Stryienski, shows a disposition to mock at the

+antics of over-heated Stendhalians. M. Stryienski, who has been called

+by Paul Bourget "the man of affairs of the Beyliste family," dislikes

+the idea of a Stendhal cult and wonders how the ironic and humorous

+Beyle would have treated the worshippers who wish to make of him a

+mystic god--which is the proper critical attitude. Beyle-Stendhal would

+have been the first man to overthrow any altar erected to his worship.

+The second series, collated by Stryienski and Paul Arbelet, is hardly

+as novel as the first. The most important article is devoted to the

+question whether Stendhal dedicated to Napoleon his History of Painting

+(mostly borrowed from Lanzi's book). The 1817 dedication is enigmatic;

+it might have meant Napoleon, or Louis XVIII., or the Czar Alexander

+of Russia. M. Arbelet holds to the latter, as Stendhal was so poor

+that he hoped for a position as preceptor in Russia and thought by the

+ambiguity of his dedication to catch the favourable eye of the Czar.

+Napoleon was at Saint Helena and a hateful king was on the throne of

+France. Let all three be duped, said to himself the merry Stendhal.

+That is Arbelet's theory. When in 1854 a new edition of the history

+appeared, it was headed by a touching, almost tearful dedication to the

+exile at Saint Helena! Stendhal's executor, Romain Colomb, had found

+it among the papers of the dead author, and as Napoleon was dead he

+published it. Evidently Stendhal had written several, and for politic

+reasons had selected the misleading one of the 1817 edition. Recall

+Beethoven's magnificent rage when he tore into pieces the dedicatory

+page of his Eroica Symphony, on hearing that his hero, Napoleon, had

+crowned himself Emperor. Quite Stendhalian this, Machiavellian, and

+also time-serving. No doubt he smiled his wicked smile--with tongue

+in cheek--at the trick, and no doubt his true disciples applaud it.

+He was the Superman of his day, one who bothered little with moral

+obligations. His favourite device was a line of verse from an old

+opera bouffe: "_Vengo adesso di Cosmopoli_"; and what has a true

+cosmopolitan, a promenader of cities and prober of souls, in common

+with such a bourgeois virtue as truth-telling? If, as Metchnikoff

+asserts, a man is no older than his arteries, then a thinker is only

+as old as his curiosity. Beyle was ever curious, impertinently so--the

+Paul Pry of psychologists.

+

+

+

+V

+

+

+His cult grows apace, and like all cults will be overdone. First

+France, then Italy, and now Germany has succumbed to the novels,

+memoirs, and delightful gossiping books of travel written by the

+Frenchman from Grenoble. But what a literary and artistic gold-mine

+his letters, papers, manuscripts of unfinished novels have proved to

+men like Casimir Stryienski and the rest. Even in 1909 the Stendhal

+excavators are busy with their pickers and stealers. Literary Paris

+becomes enthusiastic when a new batch of correspondence is unearthed

+at Grenoble or elsewhere. Recently a _cahier_--incomplete to be

+sure, but indubitably Stendhal's--was found and printed. It was a

+section of the famous journal exhumed in the library of Grenoble by

+Stryienski during 1888. Published in the _Mercure de France_, it bore

+the title of Fin du Tour d'Italie en 1811. It consists of brief, almost

+breathless notes upon Naples, its music, customs, streets, inhabitants.

+References to Ancona, to the author's second sojourn in Milan, and

+to his numerous lady-loves--each one of whom he lashed himself into

+believing unique--are therein. He placed Mozart and Cimarosa above all

+other composers, and Shakespeare above Racine. Naturally the man who

+loved Mozart was bound to adore Raphael and Correggio. Lombard and

+Florentine masters he rated higher than the Dutch. Indeed, he abhorred

+Rembrandt and Rubens almost as much as William Blake abhorred them,

+though not for the same reason. Despite his perverse and whimsical

+spirit, Stendhal was, in the larger sense, all of a piece. His likes

+and dislikes in art are so many witnesses to the unity of his character.

+

+Maurice Barrès relates that at the age of twenty he was in Rome,

+where he met in the Villa Medici its director, M. Hébert, the painter

+(died 1908), who promptly asked the young Frenchman: "Do you admire

+Stendhal?" and proceeded to explain that the writer of La Chartreuse de

+Parme was his cousin, and once consul at Cività Vecchia, although he

+spent most of his time in Rome. Stendhal's Promenades had offended the

+Pope, so these visits were really stolen ones. Bored to death in the

+stuffy little town where he represented the French Government, Stendhal

+had been reproved more than once for the dilatory performance of his

+duties. Hébert, after warning Barrès not to study him too deeply,

+described him as an old gentleman of exceeding but capricious _esprit_.

+He roamed among the picture galleries, exclaiming joyously before some

+old Greek marble or knitting his brows in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael

+was more to his taste than Michaelangelo, as might have been expected

+from one who went wild over the ballets Viganò. Another anecdote is one

+that reveals the malicious, almost simian trickiness of Beyle-Stendhal.

+An English lady, a traveller bent on taking notes for a book about

+Paris, was shown around the city by Stendhal. Seriously, and with

+his usual courtesy, he gave her an enormous amount of misinformation,

+misnaming public buildings, churches, the Louvre, its pictures, and

+nicknaming well-known personages. All this with the hope that she

+would reproduce it in print. Not very _spirituel_, this performance

+of M. Beyle. He was an admirer of English folk and their literature,

+and corresponded in a grotesque sort of English with several prominent

+men and women in London. We find him writing a congratulatory letter

+to Thomas Moore on his Lalla Rookh, complacently remarking that the

+ingrained Hebraism of English character and literature made the

+production of such an exotic poem all the more wonderful. Though he

+could praise the gew-gaws and tinsel of Moore's mock Orientalism, he

+openly despised the limpidity of Lamartine's elegiac verse and the

+rhythmic illuminated thunder of Victor Hugo.

+

+It is not generally known that Stendhal's friend and disciple, Prosper

+Mérimée, left an anonymous book, of which there are not many examples,

+though it has been partially reprinted. It is entitled "H. B. [Henry

+Beyle], par un des quarante, avec un frontispice stupéfiant dessiné

+et gravé. Eleutheropolis, l'an 1864 du mensonge Nazaréen." Now, there

+is a "stupefying" drawing, a project for a statue, by Félicien Rops,

+the etcher. It depicts the new world-city of Eleutheropolis--a

+Paris raised to the seventh heaven of cosmopolitanism--with Stendhal

+set in its midst. Rops was evidently contented to take the little

+pot-bellied caricature of Henri Monnier, which Monnier declared was

+not exaggerated, and put it on a pedestal. In his familiar and amusing

+manner the illustrator shows us multitudes from every quarter of the

+globe travelling by every known method of conveyance. The idea of

+teeming nationalities is evoked. All sorts and conditions of men and

+women are hurrying to pay their homage to Stendhal, who, hat in hand,

+stomach advancing, legs absurdly curving, umbrella under his arm,

+and his ironical lips compressed, contemplates with his accustomed

+imperturbability these ardent idolators. He seems to say: "I predicted

+that I should be understood about 1880."

+

+But if this cartoon of Rops is amusing, the contents of Mérimée's book

+are equally so, both amusing and blasphemous. Stendhal and Mérimée got

+on fairly well together. Mérimée tells what he thought of Stendhal.

+There are shocking passages and witty. An atheist, more because of

+political reasons than religious, Stendhal relates a story about the

+death of God from heart disease. Since that time the cosmical machine,

+he asserted, has been in the hands of his son, an inexperienced youth

+who, not being an engineer, reversed the levers; hence the disorder in

+matters mundane.

+

+To prove how out of tune was Stendhal with his times, we have only

+to read his definitions of romanticism and classicism in his Racine

+et Shakespeare. He wrote: "Romanticism is the art of presenting to

+people literary works which in the actual state of their habitudes

+and beliefs are capable of giving the greatest possible pleasure;

+classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting literature which

+gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers." He

+also proclaimed as a corollary to this that every dead classic had

+at one time been a live romantic. Yet he was far from sympathising,

+both romantic and realist as he was, with the 1830 romantic movement.

+Nor did he suspect its potential historical significance; or his own

+possible significance, despite his clairvoyant prediction. He disliked

+Hugo, ignored Berlioz, and had no opinion at all on the genius of

+Delacroix. The painters of 1830, that we knew half a century later as

+the Barbizon school, he never mentions. We may imagine him abusing the

+impressionists in his choleric vein. His appreciations of art, while

+sound--who dare flout Raphael and Correggio?--are narrow. The immense

+claims made continually by the Stendhalians for their master are

+balked by evidences of a provincial spirit. Yes; he, the first of the

+cosmopolitans, the indefatigable globe-trotter, keenest of observers

+of the human heart, man without a country--he has said, "My country is

+where there are most people like me"--was often as blindly prejudiced

+as a dweller in an obscure hamlet. And doesn't this epigram contradict

+his idea of the proud, lonely man of genius? It may seem to; in reality

+he was not like a Nietzschian, but a sociable, pleasure-loving man,

+seldom putting to the test his theories of individualism. He always

+sought the human quality; the passions of humanity were the prime

+things of existence for him. A landscape, no matter how lovely, must

+have a human or a historic interest. The fiercest assassin in the

+Trastevere district was at least a man of action and not a sheep.

+"Without passion there is neither virtue nor vice," he preached.

+Therefore he greatly lauded Benvenuto Cellini. He loathed democracy

+and a democratic form of government. Brains, not votes, should rule a

+nation. He sneered at America as being hopelessly utilitarian.

+

+In the preface to his History of Italian Painting he quoted Alfieri:

+"My only reason for writing was that my gloomy age afforded me no other

+occupation." From Cività Vecchia he wrote: "It's awful: women here

+have only one idea, a new Parisian hat. No poetry here or tolerable

+company--except with prisoners; with whom, as French Consul, I cannot

+possibly seek friendship." To kill the ennui of his existence he either

+slipped into Rome for a week or else wrote reams of "copy," most of

+which he never saw in print. Among certain intellectual circles in

+Paris he was known and applauded as a man of taste, a dilettante of

+the seven arts, though his lack of original invention occasionally got

+him into scrapes. Stendhal might have echoed Molière's "Je prends mon

+bien où je le trouve"; but he would not have forgotten to remind the

+dramatic poet that the very witticism was borrowed from Cyrano.

+

+Stryienski's Soirées du Stendhal Club actually presents for the

+delectation of the Stendhalians parallel columns from Lanzi and

+Stendhal--so proud are the true believers of the fold that even such

+evidences of plagiarism do not disconcert them. The cribbing occurs in

+the general reflections devoted to the Renaissance. It is as plain as

+a pikestaff. Notwithstanding, we can read Stendhal with more interest

+than the original. His lively spirit adorns Lanzi's laborious pages.

+

+Beyle's joke about the "reversed engines of Christianity," quoted by

+Mérimée, and his implacable dislike of the Jesuits (as may be seen in

+his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir--in those days the Yellow Peril

+was the Jesuits), did not dull his perception of what the papacy had

+done for art in Italy. He nearly approaches eloquence in his Philosophy

+of Art (which Taine appreciated and profited by) when writing of the

+popes of the Renaissance. He does not fail to note the vivifying and

+reforming influence of the Church at this period upon the brutality

+and lusts of the nobility and upon poets and painters. Adoring Raphael

+as much as he did Napoleon and Byron, he declared that Raphael

+failed in _chiaroscuro_ and vaunted the superiority of Correggio in

+this particular. But he did not deign to mention Rembrandt. Nothing

+Germanic or Northern pleased him. He was a Latin among Latins, and

+his passion for Italy and the Italians was not assumed. He had asked

+of his executor that he be buried in the little Protestant cemetery

+at Rome. Then he changed his mind and ordered that the cemetery of

+Andilly, near Montmorency, be his last resting-place. But the fates,

+that burn into ashes the fairest fruits of man's ambitions, dropped

+Stendhal's remains in the cemetery of Montmartre, Paris, where still

+stands the prosaic tomb with its falsification of the writer's birth.

+His epitaph he doubtless discovered when fabricating his life of Haydn.

+In the composer's case it runs: "Veni, scripsi, vixi." And when we

+consider the fact that his happiest years were in Milan, that there

+lived the object of his deepest affection, Angela Pietragrua, this

+inscription was as sincere as the majority of such marble ingenuities

+in post-mortem politeness.

+

+With all his critical limitations, Stendhal never gave vent to such

+ineptitudes as Tolstoy regarding Shakespeare. The Russian, who has

+spent the latter half of his life bewailing the earlier and more

+brilliant part, would have been abhorrent to the Frenchman, who died as

+he had lived, impenitent. Stendhal was a man, not a purveyor of words,

+or a maker of images. Not poetic, yet he did not fail to value Dante

+and Angelo. Virile, cynical, sensual, the greatest master of psychology

+of his age, he believed in action rather than thought. Literature he

+pretended to detest. Not a spinner of cobwebs, he left no definite

+system; it remained for Taine to gather together the loose strands of

+his sane, strong ideas and formulate them. He saw the world clearly,

+without sentiment--he, the most sentimental of men--and he had a horror

+of German mole-hill metaphysics. The eighteenth century with its hard

+logic, its deification of Reason, its picturesque atheism, enlisted

+Beyle's sympathies. Socialism was for him anathema.

+

+Love and art were his watchwords. His love of art was on a sound basis.

+Joyous, charming music like Mozart's, Rossini's, Cimarosa's, appealed

+to him; and Correggio, with his sensuous colouring and voluptuous

+design, was his favourite painter. He was complex, but he was not

+morbid. The artistic progenitor of a long line of analysts, supermen,

+criminals, and æsthetic ninnies, he probably would have disclaimed the

+entire crowd, including the faithful Stendhalians, because the latter

+have so widely departed from his canons of simplicity and sunniness in

+art.

+

+But Stendhal left the soul out of his scheme of life; never did he

+knock at the gate of her dwelling-place. Believing with Napoleon

+that because the surgeon's scalpel did not lay bare any trace of the

+soul, there was none, Stendhal practically denied her existence. For

+this reason his windows do not open upon eternity. They command fair,

+charming prospects. Has he not written: "J'ai recherché avec une

+sensibilité exquise la vue des beaux paysages.... Les paysages étaient

+comme un archet qui jouait sur mon âme"? He meant his nerves, not his

+soul. Spiritual overtones are not sounded in his work. A materialist

+(a singularly unhappy home and maladroit education are to blame for

+much of his errors in after life), he was, at least, no hypocrite. He

+loved beautiful art, women, landscapes, brave feats. He confesses, in

+a letter to Colomb, dated November 25, 1817, to planning a History of

+Energy in Italy (both Taine and Barrès later transposed the theme to

+France with varying results). A tissue of contradictions, he somehow or

+other emerges from the mists and artistic embroilments of the earlier

+half of the last century a robust, soldierly, yet curious, subtle

+and enigmatic figure. It is best to employ in describing him his own

+favourite definition--he was "different." And has he not said that

+difference engenders hatred?

+

+

+

+VI

+

+

+In his brilliant and much-abused book, A Rebours, the late J.-K.

+Huysmans describes the antics of a feeble-brained young nobleman who,

+having saturated himself with Baedeker's London, the novels of Dickens,

+English roast beef and ale, came to the comical conclusion that he

+might be disappointed if he crossed the Channel, so after a few hours

+spent within the hospitable walls of a Parisian English bar he gathered

+up his plaids, traps, walking-stick, and calmly returned to his home

+near the French capital. He had travelled to England in an easy-chair,

+as mentioned by Goldsmith--better after all than not travelling at all.

+Circumstances condemn many of us to this mode of motion, which comes

+well within the definition of our great-grandfathers, who called it The

+Pleasures of the Imagination.

+

+But there are, luckily for them, many who are not compelled to assist

+at this intellectual Barmecide's feast. They go and they come, and no

+man says them nay. Whether they see as much as those who voyaged in the

+more leisurely manner of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

+is open to doubt. Europe or Asia through a car-window is only a series

+of rapidly dissolving slides, pictures that live for brief seconds.

+Modern travel is impressionistic. Nature viewed through a nebulous

+blur. Our grandfathers, if they didn't go as far as their descendants,

+contrived to see more, to see a lot of delightful little things, note

+a myriad of minute traits of the country through which they paced at

+such a snail's gait. Nowadays we hurriedly glance at the names of

+railroad stations. The ideal method of locomotion is really that of the

+pedestrian--shanks'-mare ought to be popular. Vernon Lee spoke thus of

+our hero: "'Tis the mode of travelling that constituted the delight and

+matured the genius of Stendhal, king of cosmopolitans and grand master

+of the psychologic novel."

+

+It is interesting to turn back and flutter the pages of that

+perennially delightful book, Promenades dans Rome. Italy may truthfully

+be said to have been engraved upon the author's heart. Under the

+heading Manner of Travelling From Paris to Rome, dated March 25, 1828,

+he tells his readers, few but fit, how he made that wonderful trip.

+

+One of the best ways, writes Stendhal, is to take a post-chaise,

+or a _calèche_, light and made in Vienna. Carry little baggage. It

+only means vexation at the various custom-houses, bother with the

+police--who treat all travellers as spies or suspected persons--and

+it will surely attract bandits. Besides, prices are instantly doubled

+when a post-chaise arrives. There is the mail-coach. It rolls along

+comfortably. In its capacious interior one may sleep, watch the

+scenery, converse, or read. You can go to Béfort or Basel if you desire

+to pass the north of la Suisse, or to Pontarlier or Ferney, if desirous

+of reaching the Simplon. You may take the mail to Lyons or Grenoble,

+and pass by Mont Cenis; or until Draguignan if you wish to escape the

+mountains and enter Italy by the beautiful highway, the work of M. de

+Chabral. You arrive at Nice and pass on to Genoa. This is the ideal

+route for scenery.

+

+But, continues Stendhal, the most expeditious and the interesting

+way, the one he usually took, begins with a forty-eight hour ride in

+the diligence as far as Béfort; a carriage for which you pay a dozen

+francs will conduct you to Basel. Once there you may take a diligence

+for Lucerne--that singular and dangerous lake, the theatre of William

+Tell's exploits, remarks Stendhal impressively (they believed in the

+Tell legend, those innocent times)--and attain Altdorf. Here Tell and

+the apple will arouse your imagination. Then Italy may be entered by

+Saint Gothard, Bellinzona, Como, and Milan. _Via_ the Simplon was

+more to the taste of our writer. He often took the diligence, which

+at Basel went to Bern; arriving in the Rhône valley by way of Louèche

+and Tourtemagne, he would find his baggage, which had gone around by

+Lausanne, Saint Maurice, and Sion. He tells us that the conductor of

+the excellent diligence plying between Lausanne and Domo d'Ossola was a

+superior man; a glimpse of his calm Swiss features drives away all fear

+of danger. For ten years three times a week this conductor has passed

+the Simplon. He did not encounter avalanches. Anyhow, the Simplon route

+is less dangerous than Mont Cenis; there are fewer precipices and the

+edge of the road is bordered by trees; if the horses ran away the

+coach would not be overturned into the abyss. And since the opening of

+the Simplon route, Stendhal gravely notes, only forty travellers have

+perished, nine of them unhappy Italian soldiers returning from Russia.

+Are not these details of a savoury simplicity, like the faded odour of

+sandal-wood which meets your nostrils when you open some old secretary

+of your grandparents?

+

+Kept by a man from Lyons was a fine inn on the Simplon route in those

+days. Stendhal never failed to record where could be found good

+wines, cooking, and clean sheets. He usually paid twelve francs for a

+carriage to Domo d'Ossola, Lac Majeur (Lago Maggiore) _vis-à-vis_ to

+the Borromean Islands. Four hours in a boat to Sesto Calende, and five

+hours in a fast coach--behold, Milan! Or you can reach Milan _via_

+Varese. Milan to Mantua in the regular diligence. Thence to Bologna by

+a carriage, there the mail-coach. You go to Rome by the superb routes

+of Ancona and Loreto. You must pay thirty or thirty-five francs on the

+coach between Milan and Bologna. Stendhal assures us that he often

+found good company in the carriages that traverse the distance from

+Bologna to Florence. It took two days to cover twenty leagues and cost

+twenty francs. From Florence to Rome he consumed four or five days,

+going by Perugia in preference to Siena. Once he travelled in company

+with three priests, of whom he was suspicious until the ice was broken;

+then with joyous anecdotes they passed the time, and he is surprised to

+find these clerical men, who said their prayers openly three times a

+day without being embarrassed by the presence of strangers, were very

+human, very companionable. With his accustomed naïve expression of

+pleasure, he writes that they saved him considerable annoyance at the

+custom-house.

+

+And to-day, eighty years later, we take a train _de luxe_ at Paris

+and in thirty hours we are in the Eternal City. It is swifter, more

+comfortable, and safer, our way of travelling, than Stendhal's, but

+that we see as much as he did we greatly doubt. The motor-car is an

+improvement on the mail-coach and the express train; you may, if you

+will, travel leisurely and privately from Paris to Rome. Or, why not

+hire a stout little carriage and go through Tuscany in an old-fashioned

+manner as did the Chevalier de Pensieri-Vani! Few may hope to store as

+many memories as Stendhal, yet we should see more than the occupants of

+railroad drawing-rooms that whiz by us on the road to Rome.

+

+

+

+VII

+

+

+Even in our days of hasty production the numerous books of Stendhal

+provoke respectful consideration. What leisure they had in the first

+half of the last century! What patience was shown by the industrious

+man who worked to ward off _ennui_! He must have written twenty-five

+volumes. In 1906 the _Mercure de France_ printed nineteen newly

+discovered letters to his London friend, Sutton Sharpe (Beyle visited

+London occasionally; he corresponded with Thomas Moore the poet, and

+once he spent an evening at a club in the company of the humourist

+Theodore Hook). But the titles of many of his books suffice; the

+majority of them are negligible. Who wishes to read his lives of

+Rossini, Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio? His life of Napoleon, posthumously

+published in 1876, is of more interest; Beyle had seen his subject

+in the flesh and blood. His Racine et Shakespeare is worth while for

+the Stendhalian; none but the fanatical kind would care to read the

+History of Painting in Italy. There is the Correspondence, capital

+diversion, ringing with Stendhalian wit and prejudice; and Promenades

+dans Rome is a classic; not inferior are Mémoires d'un Touriste, or

+Rome, Naples, et Florence. Indeed, the influence of the Promenades has

+been pronounced. His three finished novels are Armance, Le Rouge et

+le Noir--which does not derive its title from the gambling game, but

+opposes the sword and the soutane, red and black--and La Chartreuse de

+Parme. The short stories show him at his best, his form being enforced

+to concision, his style suiting the brief passionate recitals of

+love, crime, intrigue, and adventure--for the most part, old Italian

+anecdotes recast; as the Italian tales of Hewlett are influenced by

+Stendhal. L'Abbesse de Castro could hardly have been better done by

+Mérimée. In the same volume are Les Cenci, Vittoria Accoramboni,

+Vanina Vanini, and La Duchesse de Palliano, all replete with dramatic

+excitement and charged with Italian atmosphere. San Francesca a Ripa is

+a thrilling tale; so are the stories contained in Nouvelles Inédites,

+Féder (le Mari d'Argent), Le Juif (Filippo Ebreo)--the latter Balzac

+might have signed; and the unfinished novel, Le Chasseur Vert, which

+was at first given three other titles: Leuwen, l'Orange de Malte, Les

+Bois de Prémol. It promised to be a rival to Le Rouge et le Noir.

+Lucien Leuwen, the young cavalry officer, is Stendhal himself, and he

+is, like Julien Sorel, the first progenitor of a long line in French

+fiction; disillusioned youths who, after the electric storms caused

+by the Napoleonic apparition, end in the sultry dilettantism of Jean,

+duc d'Esseintes of Huysmans' A Rebours and in the pages of Maurice

+Barrès. From Beyle to Huysmans is not such a remote modulation as might

+be imagined. Nor are those sick souls, Goncourt, Charles Demailly

+and Coriolis, without the taint of _beylisme_. Lucien Leuwen is a

+highly organized young man who goes to a small provincial town where

+his happiness, his one love-affair, is wrecked by the malice of his

+companions. There is a sincerer strain in the book than in some of its

+predecessors.

+

+Armance, Stendhal's first attempt at fiction, is unpleasant; the theme

+is an impossible one--pathology obtrudes its ugly head. Yet, Armance

+de Zohilhoff is a creature who interests; she was sketched from life,

+Stendhal tells us, a companion to a lady of left-handed rank. She is an

+unhappy girl and her marriage to a _babilan_, Octave de Malivert, is a

+tragedy. Lamiel, a posthumous novel, published by Casimir Stryienski in

+1888, contains an _avant-propos_ by Stendhal dated from Cività Vecchia,

+May 25, 1840. (His prefaces are masterpieces of sly humour and ironical

+malice.) It is a very disagreeable fiction--Lamiel is the criminal

+woman with all the stigmata described by Lombroso in his Female

+Delinquent. She is wonderfully portrayed with her cruelty, coldness,

+and ferocity. She, too, like her creator, exclaimed, "Is that all?"

+after her first bought experience in love. She becomes attached to a

+scoundrel from the galleys, and sets fire to a palace to avenge his

+death. She is burned to cinders. A hunchback doctor, Sansfin by name,

+might have stepped from a page of Le Sage.

+

+The Stendhal heroines betray their paternity. Madame de Renal, who

+sacrifices all for Julien Sorel, is the softest-hearted, most womanly

+of his characters. She is of the same sweet, maternal type as Madame

+Arnoux in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, though more impulsive.

+Her love passages with Julien are the most original in French

+fiction. Mathilde de la Môle, pedant, frigid, perverse, snobbish,

+has nevertheless fighting blood in her veins. Lamiel is a caricature

+of her. What could be more evocative of Salome than her kneeling

+before Julien's severed head? Clelia Conti in the Chartreuse is like

+the conventional heroine of Italian romance. She is too sentimental,

+too prudish with her vow and its sophistical evasion. The queen of

+Stendhal women is Gina, _la duchesse_ Sanseverina. She makes one of the

+immortal quartet in nineteenth-century fiction--the other three being

+Valérie Marneffe, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karénina. Perhaps if Madame

+de Chasteller in Le Chasseur Vert had been a finished portrait, she

+might have ranked after Gina in interest. That lovable lady, with the

+morals of a _grande dame_ out of the Italian Renaissance, will never

+die. She embodies all the energy, tantalizing charm, and paradox of

+Beyle. And a more vital woman has not swept through literature since

+the Elizabethans. At one time he dreamed of conquering the theatre.

+Adolphe Brisson saw the _ébauches_ for several plays; at least fifteen

+scenarios or the beginnings of them have been found in his literary

+remains. Nothing came of his efforts to become a second Molière.

+

+Zola places Le Rouge et le Noir above La Chartreuse de Parme; so does

+Rod. The first novel is more sombre, more tragic; it contains masterly

+characterisations, but it is depressing and in spots duller than the

+Chartreuse. Its author was too absorbed in his own ego to become a

+master-historian of manners. Yet what a book is the Chartreuse for a

+long day. What etched landscapes are in it--notably the descriptions

+of Lake Como! What evocations of enchanting summer afternoons in

+Italy floating down the mirror-like stream under a blue sky, with the

+entrancing Duchess! The episodes of Parmesan court intrigue are models

+of observation and irony. Beyle's pen was never more delightful, it

+drips honey and gall. He is master of dramatic situations; witness the

+great scene in which the old Duke, Count Mosca, and Gina participate.

+At the close you hear the whirring of the theatre curtain. Count

+Mosca, it is said, was a portrait of Metternich; rather it was

+Stendhal's friend, Count de Saurau. In sooth, he is also very much like

+Stendhal--Stendhal humbly awaiting orders from the woman he loves.

+That Mosca was a tremendous scoundrel we need not doubt; yet, like

+Metternich and Bismarck, he could be cynical enough to play the game

+honestly. Despite the rusty melodramatic machinery of the book, its

+passionate silhouettes, its Pellico prisons, its noble bandit, its

+poisons, its hair-breadth escapes, duels and assassinations--these we

+must accept as the slag of Beyle's genius--there is ore rich enough in

+it to compensate us for the _longueurs_.

+

+Of his disquisition, De l'Amour, with its famous theory of

+"crystallisation," much could be written. Not founded on a basic

+physiological truth as is Schopenhauer's doctrine of love, Beyle's is

+wider in scope. It deals more with manners than fundamentals. It is

+a manual of tactics in the art of love by a superior strategist. His

+knowledge of woman on the social side, at least, is unparalleled. His

+definitions and classifications are keener, deeper than Michelet's or

+Balzac's. "Femmes! femmes! vous êtes bien toujours les mêmes," he cries

+in a letter to a fair correspondent. It is a quotidian truth that few

+before him had the courage or clairvoyancy to enunciate. Crowded with

+crisp epigrams and worldly philosophy, this book on Love may be studied

+without exhausting its wisdom and machiavellianism.

+

+Stendhal as an art or musical critic cannot be taken seriously, though

+he says some illuminating things; embedded in platitudes may be

+found shrewd _aperçus_ and flashes of insight; but the trail of the

+"gifted amateur" is over them all. At a time when Beethoven was in the

+ascendant, when Berlioz--who hailed from the environs of Grenoble--was

+in the throes of the "new music," when Bach had been rediscovered,

+Beyle prattles of Cimarosa. He provoked Berlioz with his praise of

+Rossini--"les plus irritantes stupidités sur la musique, dont il

+croyait avoir le secret," wrote Berlioz of the Rossini biography.

+Lavoix went further: "Ecrivain d'esprit ... fanfaron d'ignorance en

+musique." Poor Stendhal! He had no _flair_ for the various artistic

+movements about him, although he had unwittingly originated several.

+He praised Goethe and Schiller, yet never mentioned Bach, Beethoven,

+Chopin; music for him meant operatic music, some other "divine

+adventure" to fill in the background of conversation. Conversation!

+In that art he was virtuoso. To dine alone was a crime in his eyes. A

+_gourmet_, he cared more for talk than eating. He could not make up his

+mind about Weber's Freischütz, and Meyerbeer he did not very much like;

+"he is said to be the first pianist of Europe," he wrote; at the time,

+Liszt and Thalberg were disputing the kingdom of the keyboard. It was

+Stendhal, so the story goes, who once annoyed Liszt at a _musicale_ in

+Rome by exclaiming in his most elliptical style: "Mon cher Liszt, pray

+give us your _usual_ improvisation this evening!"

+

+As a plagiarist Stendhal was a success. He "adapted" from Goethe,

+translated entire pages from the _Edinburgh Review_, and the

+material of his history of Painting in Italy he pilfered from Lanzi.

+More barefaced still was his wholesale appropriation of Carpani's

+Haydine, which he coolly made over into French as a life of Haydn.

+The Italian author protested in a Paduan journal, _Giornale dell'

+Italiana Letteratura_, calling Stendhal by his absurd pen-name:

+"M. Louis-Alexander-César Bombet, _soi-disant_ Français auteur des

+Haydine." The original book appeared in 1812 at Milan. Stendhal

+published his plagiarism at Paris, 1814, but asserted that it had been

+written in 1808. He did not stop at mere piracy, for in 1816 and in an

+open letter to the _Constitutionnel_ he fabricated a brother for the

+aforesaid Bombet and wrote an indignant denial of the facts. He spoke

+of César Bombet as an invalid incapable of defending his good name.

+The life of Mozart is a very free adaptation from Schlichtegroll's.

+When Shakespeare, Handel, and Richard Wagner plundered, they plundered

+magnificently; in comparison, Stendhal's stealings are absurd.

+

+Irritating as are his inconsistencies, his prankishness, his bombastic

+affectations, and pretensions to a superior immorality, Stendhal's

+is nevertheless an enduring figure in French literature. His power

+is now felt in Germany, where it is augmented by Nietzsche's

+popularity--Nietzsche, who, after Mérimée, was Stendhal's greatest

+pupil. Pascal had his "abyss," Stendhal had his fear of _ennui_--it

+was almost pathologic, this obsession of boredom. One side of his

+many-sided nature was akin to Pepys, a French Pepys, who chronicled

+immortal small-beer. However, it is his heart's history that will make

+this protean old faun eternally youthful. As a prose artist he does

+not count for much. But in the current of his swift, clear narrative

+and under the spell of his dry magic and peptonized concision we do

+not miss the peacock graces and coloured splendours of Flaubert or

+Chateaubriand. Stendhal delivers himself of a story rapidly; he is all

+sinew. And he is the most seductive spiller of souls since Saint-Simon.

+

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+For the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who

+dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden

+times when they gossipped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption,

+of the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways,

+Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism--alas! into what faded limbo

+have they vanished. Poe, too, Poe whom we saw in fancy reeling from

+Richmond to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New

+York. Those familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all

+such jerry-built spooks. We now know Poe to have been a man suffering

+at the time of his death from cerebral lesion, a man who drank at

+intervals and but little. Dr. Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling

+superstition about De Quincey's opium-eating. He has demonstrated that

+no man could have lived so long--De Quincey was nearly seventy-five

+at his death--and worked so hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand

+drops of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore, the

+English essayist's description of the drug's effects is inexact. He

+was seldom sleepy--a sure sign, asserts Dr. Guerrier, that he was

+not altogether enslaved by the drug habit. Sprightly in old age, his

+powers of labour were prolonged until past three-score and ten. His

+imagination needed little opium to produce the famous Confessions.

+Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at the _première_ of

+Hernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And Rousseau has

+been white-washed. So they are disappearing, those literary legends,

+until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear, old-fashioned,

+disreputable men of genius!

+

+But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This

+French poet himself has suffered more from the friendly malignant

+biographer and Parisian chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the

+curs out of the cemetery? asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold

+on Poe. A few years later his own cemetery was invaded and the world

+was put in possession of the Baudelaire legend; that legend of the

+atrabilious, irritable poet, dandy, maniac, his hair dyed green,

+spouting blasphemies; that grim, despairing image of a Diabolic, a

+libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime du Camp was much to blame for

+the promulgation of these tales--witness his Souvenirs Littéraires.

+However, it may be confessed that part of the Baudelaire legend was

+created by Charles Baudelaire. In the history of literature it is

+difficult to parallel such a deliberate piece of self-stultification.

+Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine, who imitated him, drew

+for the astonishment or disedification of the world like unflattering

+portraits. Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered at times from

+acute cortical irritation. And, notwithstanding his desperate effort to

+realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who had said that no

+man can bare his heart quite naked; there will be always something held

+back, something false too ostentatiously thrust forward. The grimace,

+the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul

+of man and the sharp reality of published confessions. Baudelaire was

+no more exception to this rule than St. Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, or

+Huysmans; though he was as frank as any of them, as we may see in the

+recently printed diary, Mon cœur mis à nu (Posthumous Works, Société

+du Mercure de France); and in the Journal, Fusées, Letters, and other

+fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians.

+

+To smash legends, Eugène Crépet's biographical study, first printed in

+1887, has been republished with new notes by his son, Jacques Crépet.

+This is an exceedingly valuable contribution to Baudelaire lore; a

+dispassionate life, however, has yet to be written, a noble task for

+some young poet who will disentangle the conflicting lies originated

+by Baudelaire--that tragic comedian--from the truth and thus save him

+from himself. The new Crépet volume is really but a series of notes;

+there are some letters addressed to the poet by the distinguished men

+of his day, supplementing the rather disappointing volume of Letters,

+1841-1866, published in 1908. There are also documents in the legal

+prosecution of Baudelaire, with memories of him by Charles Asselineau,

+Léon Cladel, Camille Lemonnier, and others.

+

+In November, 1850, Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert found themselves

+at the French Ambassador's, Constantinople. The two friends had taken

+a trip in the Orient which later bore fruit in Salammbô. General

+Aupick, the representative of the French Government, received the

+young men cordially; they were presented to his wife, Madame Aupick.

+She was the mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired of Du Camp,

+rather anxiously: "My son has talent, has he not?" Unhappy because her

+second marriage, a brilliant one, had set her son against her, the poor

+woman welcomed from such a source confirmation of her eccentric boy's

+gifts. Du Camp tells the much-discussed story of a quarrel between the

+youthful Charles and his stepfather, a quarrel that began at table.

+There were guests present. After some words Charles bounded at the

+General's throat and sought to strangle him. He was promptly boxed on

+the ears and succumbed to a nervous spasm. A delightful anecdote, one

+that fills with joy psychiatrists in search of a theory of genius and

+degeneration. Charles was given some money and put on board a ship

+sailing to East India. He became a cattle-dealer in the British army,

+and returned to France years afterward with a _Vénus noire_, to whom

+he addressed extravagant poems! All this according to Du Camp. Here

+is another tale, a comical one. Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris,

+and his hair was violently green. Du Camp said nothing. Angered by

+this indifference, Baudelaire asked: "You find nothing abnormal about

+me?" "No," was the answer. "But my hair--it is green!" "That is not

+singular, _mon cher_ Baudelaire; every one has hair more or less green

+in Paris." Disappointed in not creating a sensation, Baudelaire went to

+a café, gulped down two large bottles of Burgundy, and asked the waiter

+to remove the water, as water was a disagreeable sight for him; then

+he went away in a rage. It is a pity to doubt this green hair legend;

+presently a man of genius will not be able to enjoy an epileptic fit

+in peace--as does a banker or a beggar. We are told that St. Paul,

+Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostoïevsky were epileptoids; yet

+we do not encounter men of this rare kind among the inmates of asylums.

+Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.

+

+The joke of the green hair has been disposed of by Crépet. Baudelaire's

+hair thinning after an illness, he had his head shaved and painted

+with salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to escape baldness. At

+the time when he had embarked for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not

+seventeen, but twenty, years of age. Du Camp said he was seventeen when

+he attacked General Aupick. The dinner could not have taken place at

+Lyons because the Aupick family had left that city six years before the

+date given by Du Camp. Charles was provided with five thousand francs

+for his expenses, instead of twenty--Du Camp's version--and he never

+was a beef-drover in the British army, for a good reason--he never

+reached India. Instead, he disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and

+after a short stay was seized by homesickness and returned to France,

+being absent about ten months. But, like Flaubert, on his return home

+Baudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East; out there he had

+yearned for Paris. Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire saying to him with

+a grimace: "I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung

+up by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of

+glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find

+at the same time: strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious." Is

+it necessary to add that Baudelaire, notorious in Paris for his love

+of cats, dedicating poems to cats, would never have perpetrated such

+revolting cruelty?

+

+Another misconception, a critical one, is the case of Poe and

+Baudelaire. The young Frenchman first became infatuated with Poe's

+writings in 1846 or 1847--he gives these two dates, though several

+stories of Poe had been translated into French as early as 1841 or

+1842; L'Orang-Outang was the first, which we know as The Murders in

+the Rue Morgue; Madame Meunier also adapted several Poe stories for

+the reviews. Baudelaire's labours as a translator lasted over ten

+years. That he assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe, is a commonplace

+of literary gossip. But that Poe had overwhelming influence in the

+formation of his poetic genius is not the truth. Yet we find such an

+acute critic as the late Edmund Clarence Stedman writing, "Poe's chief

+influence upon Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry." It is

+precisely the reverse. Poe's influence affected Baudelaire's prose,

+notably in the disjointed confessions, Mon cœur mis à nu, which

+recall the American writer's Marginalia. The bulk of the poetry in Les

+Fleurs de Mal was written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though not

+published in book form until 1857. But in 1855 some of the poems saw

+the light in the _Revue des deux Mondes_, while many of them had been

+put forth a decade or fifteen years before as fugitive verse in various

+magazines. Stedman was not the first to make this mistake. In Bayard

+Taylor's The Echo Club we find on page 24 this criticism: "There was a

+congenital twist about Poe.. .. Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have

+been trying to surpass him by increasing the dose; but his muse is the

+natural Pythia, inheriting her convulsions, while they eat all sorts

+of insane roots to produce theirs." This must have been written about

+1872, and after reading it one would fancy Poe and Baudelaire were

+rhapsodic wrigglers on the poetic tripod, whereas their poetry is often

+reserved, even glacial. Baudelaire, like Poe, sometimes "built his

+nests with the birds of Night," and that was enough to condemn the work

+of both men with critics of the didactic school.

+

+Once, when Baudelaire heard that an American man-of-letters (?) was in

+Paris, he secured an introduction and called. Eagerly inquiring after

+Poe, he learned that he was not considered a genteel person in America.

+Baudelaire withdrew, muttering maledictions. Enthusiastic poet!

+Charming literary person! But the American, whoever he was, represented

+public opinion at the time. To-day criticisms of Poe are vitiated by

+the desire to make him an angel. It is to be doubted whether without

+his barren environment and hard fortunes we should have had Poe at all.

+He had to dig down deeper into the pit of his personality to reach

+the central core of his music. But every ardent young soul entering

+"literature" begins by a vindication of Poe's character. Poe was a man,

+and he is now a classic. He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire.

+In both the sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. The pair

+loved to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries. Both were

+implacable pessimists. Both were educated in affluence, and both had to

+face unprepared the hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of their

+poetic work will show that their only common ideal was the worship of

+an exotic beauty. Their artistic methods of expression were totally

+dissimilar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like temperament which

+vibrated in the presence of strange subjects. Above all he was obsessed

+by sex. Woman, as angel of destruction, is the keynote of his poems.

+Poe was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the dusty

+highways of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me,"

+could never have been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have

+pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the

+Dantesque horrors of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in "Femmes

+Damnées":

+

+    Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes.

+

+Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin's vast

+sinister mezzotints:

+

+    J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal

+    Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore,

+    Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal

+    Une miraculeuse aurore;

+

+    J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal

+    Un être, qui n'était que lumière, or et gaze,

+    Terrasser l'énorme Satan;

+    Mais mon cœur que jamais ne visite l'extase,

+    Est un théâtre où l'on attend

+    Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de gaze.

+

+Professor Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and

+Baudelaire: "Both authors--Poe and De Quincey--fell short of Baudelaire

+himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have

+a superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament and

+affection for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror."

+Poe is without passion, except a passion for the _macabre_; for what

+Huysmans calls "The October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a

+gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire which shakes

+your nerves yet stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a

+poet, he was no match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual

+prestidigitation. The mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious

+detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights

+into the cosmical blue, the Poe the prophet and mystic--in these the

+American was more versatile than his French translator. That Baudelaire

+said, "Evil, be thou my good," is doubtless true. He proved all things

+and found them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a worshipper

+of Satan for the sake of paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish

+to us--in his heart he was a believer. His was "an infinite reverse

+aspiration," and mixed up with his pose was a disgust for vice, for

+life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called

+him the Kamtschatka of Romanticism; its remotest hyperborean peak.

+Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as Naturalism; but Baudelaire is

+alive, and is read. His glistening phosphorescent trail is over French

+poetry and he is the begetter of a school:--Verlaine, Villiers de

+l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Verhaeren, and

+many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who

+was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be

+the opposite of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong

+with the world."

+

+When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they all came

+from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of Rousseau

+--"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But there is

+more of Byron and Petrus Borel--a forgotten mad poet--in Baudelaire;

+though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau reactionary,

+sported the workingman's blouse, shaved his head, shouldered a musket,

+went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling the

+proletarian "Brother!" (oh, Baudelaire!) and, as the Goncourts recorded

+in their diary, had the head of a maniac. How seriously we may take

+this swing of the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of the poet's at

+the time of the Revolution: "Come," he said, "let us go shoot General

+Aupick!" It was his stepfather that he thought of, not the eternal

+principles of Liberty. This may be a false anecdote; many were foisted

+upon Baudelaire. For example, his exclamations at cafés or in public

+places, such as: "Have you ever eaten a baby? I find it pleasing to

+the palate!" or, "The night I killed my father!" Naturally people

+stared and Baudelaire was happy--he had startled the bourgeois. The

+cannibalistic idea he may have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet,

+for this French poet knew English literature.

+

+Gautier compares the poems to a certain tale of Hawthorne's in which

+there is a garden of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his

+laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; he never descended into the

+mud and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged his

+soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France says, "a divine poet." How

+childish, yet how touching is his resolution--he wrote in his diary

+of prayer's dynamic force--when he was penniless, in debt, threatened

+with imprisonment, sick, nauseated with sin: "To make every morning

+my prayer to God, the reservoir of all force, and all justice; to my

+father, to Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors." (Evidently, Maurice

+Barrès encountered here his theory of Intercessors.) Baudelaire loved

+the memory of his father as much as Stendhal hated his. His mother he

+became reconciled with after the death of General Aupick, in 1857. He

+felt in 1862 that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for

+he wrote: "I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. To-day

+imbecility's wing fanned me as it passed." The sense of the vertiginous

+gulf was abiding with him; read his poem, "Pascal avait son gouffre."

+

+In preferring the Baudelaire translations of Poe to the original--and

+they give the impression of being original works--Stedman agreed with

+Asselineau that the French is more concise than the English. The

+prose of Poe and Baudelaire is clear, sober, rhythmic; Baudelaire's

+is more lapidary, finer in contour, richer coloured, more supple,

+though without the "honey and tiger's blood" of Barbey d'Aurevilly's.

+Baudelaire's soul was patiently built up as a fabulous bird might

+build its nest--bits of straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades

+of black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray

+of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of

+incense and verdigris, despairing hearts and music and the abomination

+of desolation for ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery

+of the seven sorrows. He loved the clouds .... _les nuages ...

+là bas_ ... It was _là bas_ with him even in the tortures of his

+wretched love-life. Corruption and death were ever floating in his

+consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw everywhere the hidden

+skeleton. Félicien Rops has best interpreted Baudelaire: the etcher

+and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too, is a Baudelarian. If

+there could be such an anomaly as a native wood-note evil, it would

+be the lyric and astringent voice of this poet. His sensibility was

+both catholic and morbid, though he could be frigid in the face of the

+most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a man for whom the visible word

+existed; if Gautier was pagan, Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from

+mediæval days. The spirit ruled, and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw

+God." A Manichean in his worship of evil, he nevertheless abased his

+soul: "Oh! Lord God! Give me the force and courage to contemplate my

+heart and my body without disgust," he prays: But as some one remarked

+to Rochefoucauld, "Where you end, Christianity begins."

+

+Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma,

+which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and

+glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire painted in his sultry

+music the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted,

+too, the great nocturnal silences of the soul.

+

+_Pacem summam tenent!_ He never reached peace on the heights. Let us

+admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel

+is too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us is none the less

+unfathomable. Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium.

+To affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffmann, James Thomson,

+Coleridge, and the rest of the sombre choir does not explain him; he

+is, perhaps, nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others--strains

+of the metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are to be discovered

+in him. The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bi-location,

+are only too easy to diagnose; but the remedy? _Hypocrite lecteur--mon

+semblable--mon frère!_ When the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his

+poetic production be considered, together with its disquieting,

+nervous, vibrating qualities, it is not surprising that Victor Hugo

+wrote to the poet: "You invest the heaven of art with we know not what

+deadly rays; you create a new shudder." Hugo could have said that he

+turned Art into an Inferno. Baudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry.

+In his heaven of fire, glass, and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer.

+"A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, that did love beauty

+only...." sang Tennyson.

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+As long ago as 1869 and in our "barbarous gas-lit country," as

+Baudelaire named the land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which

+this poet was described as "unique and as interesting as Hamlet. He is

+that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet--a poet in the midst of

+things that have disordered his spirit--a poet excessively developed

+in his taste for and by beauty ... very responsive to the ideal, very

+greedy of sensation." A better description of Baudelaire does not

+exist. The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout

+the disordered symphony of the poet's life.

+

+He was, later, revealed to American readers by Henry James. This was in

+1878, when appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists.

+Previous to that there had been some desultory discussion, a few

+essays in the magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Professor

+James Albert Harrison of the University of Virginia. But Mr. James

+had the ear of a cultured public. He denounced the Frenchman for his

+reprehensible taste, though he did not mention his beautiful verse or

+his originality in the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes,

+was not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve,

+introduced Poe as a great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire's

+letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841-1866.)

+Perhaps Mr. Dick Minim and his projected Academy of Criticism might

+make clear these devious problems.

+

+The Etudes Critiques of Edmond Schérer were collected in 1863. In

+them we find this unhappy, uncritical judgment: "Baudelaire, lui, n'a

+rien, ni le cœur, ni l'esprit, ni l'idée, ni le mot, ni la raison,

+ni la fantaisie, ni la verve, ni même la facture ... son unique titre

+c'est d'avoir contribué à créer l'esthétique de la débauche." It is

+not our intention to dilate upon the injustice of this criticism. It

+is Baudelaire the critic of æsthetics in whom we are interested. Yet

+I cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of Schérer had been

+transformed into affirmations, only justice would have been accorded

+Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet, the most original of his century,

+but also a critic of the first rank, one who welcomed Richard Wagner

+when Paris hooted him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played

+the rôle of the envious; one who fought for Edouard Manet, Leconte

+de Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Delacroix; fought with pen for

+the modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Daumier, Félicien Rops,

+Gavarni, and Constantin Guys. He literally identified himself with

+De Quincey and Poe, translating them so wonderfully well that some

+unpatriotic critics like the French better than the originals. So much

+was Baudelaire absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted the

+translator would meet the same fate as the American poet. A singular,

+vigorous spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry with its "icy ecstasy"

+is profound and harmonic, whose criticism is penetrated by a catholic

+quality, who anticipated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools

+and environments, preferring to isolate the man and study him uniquely.

+He would have subscribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: "I have

+never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of

+criticism but the noble pleasure of praising." The Frenchman has said

+that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is

+impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.

+

+Théophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les

+Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire

+as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier's

+gifts as an essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an

+incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hôtel Pimodan about 1844. In this

+Hôtel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His

+fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters,

+poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day--that is, carefully selected

+ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Mérimée, and others whose verve

+or genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this

+cave of forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured

+the same sort of scenes that were supposed to occur weekly at the

+Pimodan. Gautier eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred

+artistic souls, where the beautiful Jewess Maryx, who had posed for Ary

+Scheffer's Mignon and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, met the superb

+Mme. Sabatier, the only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original

+of that extraordinary group of Clésinger's--the sculptor and son-in-law

+of George Sand--la Femme au Serpent, a Salammbô _à la mode_ in marble.

+Hasheesh was eaten, so Gautier writes, by Boissard and by Baudelaire.

+As for the creator of Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such

+nonsense. He had to work for his living at journalism, and he died

+in harness an irreproachable father, while the unhappy Baudelaire,

+the inheritor of an intense, unstable temperament, soon devoured his

+patrimony of 75,000 francs and for the remaining years of his life was

+between the devil of his dusky Jenny Duval and the deep sea of debt.

+

+It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less

+wicked than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire

+encountered Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and

+encouraged the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We

+have seen an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent

+of about the same order as Thackeray's, with a superadded note of the

+horrific--that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baudelaire

+admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations

+of Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces

+of a painter's technique; also how to compose a palette--a rather

+meaningless phrase nowadays. At least he did not write of the arts

+without some technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic

+disciple, and when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846,

+1855, and 1859, the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to

+the training and knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.

+

+The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor

+spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are

+the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot's. Mr.

+Saintsbury, after Mr. Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire

+among the English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism

+observed too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds,

+"to read a criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by

+no means a sure method of recognizing the picture afterward." Now,

+word-painting was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his

+friend Gautier, with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh

+impossible feat of competing in his verbal descriptions with the

+certitudes of canvas and marble. And if he with his verbal imagination

+did not entirely succeed, how could a less adept manipulator of the

+vocabulary? We do not agree with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine

+too much when the imagination is that of a poet. Baudelaire divined

+the work of the artist and set it down scrupulously in prose of

+rectitude. He did not paint pictures in prose. He did not divagate.

+He did not overburden his pages with technical terms. But the spirit

+he did disengage in a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical

+schools were a cross for him to bear, and he bore all his learning

+lightly. Like a true critic, he judged more by form than theme. There

+are no types; there is only life, he had cried before Jules Laforgue.

+He was ever for art-for-art, yet, having breadth of comprehension

+and a Heine-like capacity for seeing both sides of his own nature

+and its idiosyncrasies, he could write: "The puerile utopia of the

+school of art for art, in excluding morality, and often even passion,

+was necessarily sterile. All literature which refuses to advance

+fraternally between science and philosophy is a homicidal and a

+suicidal literature."

+

+Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than

+of music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of

+democracy, of the démocratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental

+fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation

+the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades.

+These things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the

+Dresden uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary

+étude. Brave lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the

+region of the ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles

+soon vanished. He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly

+and injustice of abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of

+paradoxes, he dedicated a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but

+he would not have contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in

+art the democrat is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were

+against Victor Hugo and Delacroix." And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of

+opals, blood, and evil swamp-flowers, can never be savoured by the mob.

+

+In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in

+the Louvre he enjoyed in company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of

+the latter's preferences. He was also attracted to El Greco--not an

+unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own

+genius. Goya he has written of in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his

+touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his nerves ruined by abuse of

+drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination or those by his

+friend Rousseau were more beautiful than Nature herself. The country,

+he declared, was odious. Like Whistler, whom he often met--see the

+Hommage à Delacroix by Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler,

+Baudelaire, Manet, Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacroix, Cordier,

+Duranty the critic, and De Balleroy--he could not help showing his

+aversion to "foolish sunsets." In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain

+had entered too much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of

+poetry, criticism and fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo,

+is the literary progenitor of Jean, Due d'Esseintes, of Huysmans's

+A Rebours. Huysmans modelled at first himself on Baudelaire. His Le

+Drageoir aux Epices is a continuation of Petits Poèmes en Prose. And

+to Baudelaire's account must be laid much artificial morbid writing.

+Despite his pursuit of perfection in form, his influence has been

+too often baneful to impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of

+Gallic Byronism, and high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no

+extravagance, absurd or terrible, that he did not commit, from etching

+a four-part fugue on ice to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In

+his criticism alone was he the sane, logical Frenchman. And while he

+did not live to see the success of the Impressionist group, he would

+have surely acclaimed their theories and practice. Was he not an

+impressionist himself?

+

+As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so Delacroix quite overflowed

+his æsthetic consciousness. Read Volume II. of his collected works,

+Curiosités Esthétiques, which contains his Salons; also his essay,

+De l'Essence du Rire (worthy to be placed side by side with George

+Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and foreign, are

+considered in two chapters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire

+was as conscientious as Gautier. He toiled around miles of mediocre

+canvas, saying an encouraging word to the less talented, boiling

+over with holy indignation, glacial irony, before the rash usurpers

+occupying the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with

+promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the largesse of his admiration.

+He smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernef, and only shook his head

+over the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed William

+Hausoullier, now so little known. He praised Devéria, Chasseriau--who

+waited years before he came into his own; his preferred landscapists

+were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Scheffer

+and the "apes of sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth,

+Cruikshank, Pinelli and Breughel proclaim his versatility of vision. In

+his essay Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics

+to recognize the peculiar quality named "modernity," that nervous,

+naked vibration which informs the novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's

+L'Education Sentimentale, and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and

+Raffaelli with their evocations of a new, nervous Paris. It is in his

+Volume III., entitled, L'Art Romantique, that so many things dear to

+the new century were then subjects of furious quarrels. This book

+contains much just and brilliant writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to

+praise Wagner in Germany in 1876, but dangerous at Paris in 1861 to

+declare war on Wagner's critics. This Baudelaire did.

+

+The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial.

+In a letter to Théophile Thoré, the art critic (Letters, p. 361), we

+find Baudelaire defending his friend from the accusation that his

+pictures were _pastiches_ of Goya. He wrote: "Manet has never seen

+Goya, never El Greco; he was never in the Pourtalés Gallery." Which may

+have been true at the time, 1864, but Manet visited Madrid and spent

+much time studying Velasquez and abusing Spanish cookery. (Consider,

+too, Goya's Balcony with Girls and Manet's famous Balcony.) Raging

+at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this same epistle:

+"They accuse even me of imitating Edgar Poe.... Do you know why I

+so patiently translated Poe? _Because he resembled me._" The poet

+italicised these words. With stupefaction, therefore, he admired the

+mysterious coincidences of Manet's work with that of Goya and El Greco.

+

+He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone.

+Recall his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work. "You

+complain about attacks, but are you the first to endure them? Have you

+more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by

+derision. And in order not to make you too proud I must tell you that

+they are models, each in his way, and in a very rich world, while _you

+are only the first in the decrepitude of your art._" (Letters, p. 436.)

+

+Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able to

+revisit the glimpses of the Champs Elysées at the autumn Salons? What

+would he think of Cézanne? Odilon Redon he would understand, for he is

+the transposer of Baudelairianism to terms of design and colour. And

+perhaps the poet whose verse is saturated with tropical hues--he, when

+young, sailed in southern seas--might appreciate the monstrous debauch

+of form and colour in the Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin.

+

+Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his

+verse. He is _par excellence_ the poet of æsthetics. To Daumier he

+inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, to Delacroix

+(Sur Le Tasse en Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Rêve Parisien), to an

+unknown master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a Watteau à rebours, is

+seen in Un Voyage à Cy there; while in Les Phares this poet of ideal,

+spleen, music, and perfume shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da

+Vinci, Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, Delacroix--"Delacroix,

+lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges." And what could be more exquisite

+than his quatrain to Lola de Valence, a poetic inscription for the

+picture of Edouard Manet, with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as

+Verlaine: Le charme inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir! Heine called

+himself the last of the Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and the

+last of the Romantics was the many-sided Charles Baudelaire.

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+He was born at Paris April 9, 1821 (Flaubert's birth year), and not

+April 21st as Gautier has it. His father was Joseph Francis Baudelaire,

+or Beaudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art

+lover, his taste was apparent in the home he made for his second wife,

+Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan and the daughter of a military

+officer. There was a considerable difference in the years of this pair;

+the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of

+their only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one

+son, Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis,

+though a steady man of business. That great neurosis, called Commerce,

+has its mental wrecks, too, but no one pays attention; only when the

+poet falls by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other

+soul-hunters seeking for victims. After the death of Baudelaire's

+father, the widow, within a year, married the handsome, ambitious

+Aupick, then _chef de bataillon_, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with

+the Legion of Honour, and later general and ambassador to Madrid,

+Constantinople, and London. Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but

+unlike most children of genius, he was a scholar and won brilliant

+honours at school. His step-father was proud of him. From the Royal

+College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris,

+but was expelled in 1839. Troubles soon began at home for him. He

+was irascible, vain, very precocious, and given to dissipation. He

+quarrelled with General Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was

+to blame, she has confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the

+flush of her second love. He could not forget, or forgive what he

+called her infidelity to the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was

+inconsolable. The good bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said

+that Charles was a little crazy--second marriages usually bring woe in

+their train. "When a mother has such a son, she doesn't remarry," said

+the young poet. Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes,

+Dufais. He wrote in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs ...

+all victims of terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations.

+His grand-father on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his

+mother's family presumably Norman, but not much is known of her

+forbears. Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother

+was stricken. He also believed that his instability of temperament--and

+he studied his "case" as would a surgeon--was the result of his

+parents' disparity in years.

+

+After his return from the East, where he did not learn English, as has

+been said--his mother taught him as a boy to converse in and write

+the language--he came into his little inheritance, about fifteen

+thousand dollars. Two years later he was so heavily in debt that his

+family asked for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had

+been swindled, being young and green. How had he squandered his money?

+Not exactly on opera-glasses, like Gérard de Nerval, but on clothes,

+pictures, furniture, books. The remnant was set aside to pay his debts.

+Charles would be both poet and dandy. He dressed expensively but

+soberly, in the English fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing

+hue of his habiliments black. In height he was medium, his eyes brown,

+searching, luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens'";

+nostrils palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual, the jaw

+strong and square. His hair was black, curly, and glossy, his forehead

+high, square, white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is

+there, what Catulle Mendès nicknamed him: His Excellence, Monseigneur

+Brummel! Later he was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de

+N. S. le Diable; or the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven

+face of the mock priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning

+sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better

+know the worthlessness of temptation." In the heyday of his blood he

+was perverse and deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the

+Byronic notion that _ennui_ could be best cured by dissipation; in sin

+Baudelaire found the saddest of all tasks. Mendès laughs at the legend

+of Baudelaire's violence, of his being given to explosive phrases.

+Despite Gautier's stories about the Hôtel Pimodan and its club of

+hasheesh-eaters, M. Mendès denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the

+hemp. What the majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits

+of literary workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing

+verse--and there is no mental toil comparable to it--cannot drink, or

+indulge in opium, without the inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned

+ideas of "inspiration," spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden

+bolt from heaven, are delusions still hugged by the world. To be told

+that Chopin filed at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy

+forged his thunderbolts, that Manet toiled like a labourer on the

+dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to poetic work,

+that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, is a disillusion for the

+sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from Jupiter's skull to the

+desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balzac and Flaubert did not

+encourage this fancy. Work literally killed Poe, as it killed Jules

+de Goncourt, Flaubert, and Daudet. Maupassant went insane because

+he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked and

+worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was

+flawed--Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves--from the

+start, he was _détraqué_; but that his entire life was one huge debauch

+is a nightmare of the moral police in some white cotton night-cap

+country.

+

+His period of mental production was not brief or barren. He was a

+student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by

+the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies

+was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write

+so well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real

+name--which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an

+aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of

+a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual

+interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left

+a hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like

+Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the

+expressiveness of art.

+

+Women played a commanding rôle in his life. They always do with any

+poet worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging

+this as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the

+individual. The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the

+East resolves itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met

+her in Paris, after he had been in the East. She sang at a café-concert

+in Paris. She was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not

+intelligent, not good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of

+half his inspiration. To her were addressed those marvellous evocations

+of the Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious mornings on strange

+far-away seas and "superb Byzant" domes that devils built. Baudelaire

+is the poet of perfumes; he is also the patron saint of _ennui_. No one

+has so chanted the praise of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do

+other souls on music, he has sung. As he grew older he seemed to hunt

+for more acrid odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase

+the carving of which transports us, but from which the head is quickly

+averted. Jeanne, whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was

+a sorceress. But she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left

+her a dozen times only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a

+strong nervous line and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. They are

+not prepossessing. In her rapid decline, she was not allowed to want;

+Madame Aupick paying her expenses in the hospital. A sordid history.

+She was a veritable flower of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like

+music, would be colourless, scentless, if it sounded no dissonances.

+Fancy art reduced to the beatific and banal chord of C major!

+

+He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier, a reigning beauty,

+at whose salon artistic Paris assembled. She had been christened by

+Gautier _Madame la Présidente_, and her sumptuous beauty was portrayed

+by Ricard in his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love.

+They soon parted. Again a riddle that the published letters hardly

+solve. One letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had tried to be

+faithful, and failed. He could not extort from his exhausted soul the

+sentiment; but he put its music on paper. His most seductive lyrics

+were addressed to Madame Sabatier: "A la très chère, à la très-belle,"

+a hymn saturated with love. Music, spleen, perfumes--"colour, sound,

+perfumes call to each other as deep to deep; perfumes like the flesh

+of children, soft as hautboys, green like the meadows"--criminals,

+outcasts, the charm of childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and

+rebellion, Eastern landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, the

+true companions of lonely poets; haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and

+gloomier dawns--Paris in a hundred phases--these and many other themes

+this strange-souled poet, this "Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris

+has celebrated in finely wrought verse and profound phrases. In a

+single line he contrives atmosphere; the very shape of his sentence,

+the ring of the syllables, arouses the deepest emotion. A master of

+harmonic undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in

+making their music more fluid, more singing, more vapourous--all young

+French poets pass through their Baudelarian green-sickness--but he

+alone knows the secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, which

+have the resistance of bronze; and of the despairing music that flames

+from the mouths of lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He is

+the supreme master of irony and troubled voluptuousness.

+

+Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic

+arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his

+emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as

+mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul,

+to use the phrase of Père Lacordaire. (Curiously enough, he actually

+contemplated, in 1861, becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant

+seat in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded him from this

+folly.) Recall Baudelaire's prayer: "Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me

+the grace to produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that

+I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn."

+Individualist, egoist, anarchist, his only thought was of letters.

+Jules Laforgue thus described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hindoo, Yankee,

+Episcopal, alchemist." Yes, an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes

+he created. He was of Gothic imagination, and could have said with

+Rolla: _Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux._ He had an

+unassuaged thirst for the absolute. The human soul was his stage, he

+its interpreting orchestra.

+

+In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by the devoted

+Poulet-Malassis, who afterward went into bankruptcy--a warning to

+publishers with a taste for fine literature. The titles contemplated

+were Limbes, or Lesbiennes. Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know.

+These poems were suppressed on account of six, and poet and publisher

+summoned. As the municipal government had made a particular ass of

+itself in the prosecution of Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary,

+the Baudelaire matter was disposed of in haste. He was condemned to

+a fine of three hundred francs, a fine which was never paid, as the

+objectionable poems were removed. They were printed in the Belgian

+edition, and may be read in the new volume of Œuvres Posthumes.

+

+Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book

+was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge

+from the trial with flying colours; to be classed as one who wrote

+objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress back

+of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugénie, also the

+Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those polished

+intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had taken a

+hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this form with

+a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found in these

+miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject and

+lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who had

+discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one of his poems

+he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of

+staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence

+of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilised by Huysmans

+in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there

+is nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude

+of artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental

+note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason

+is there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than

+Poe. His range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a

+poet, though his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of

+life. Brother to pitiable wanderers, there is, nevertheless, no trace

+of cant, no "Russian pity" _à la_ Dostoïevsky, no humanitarian or

+socialistic rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist. He hated

+the sentimental sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its

+"bath of multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles

+Lamb we find the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the

+desert? or, cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully

+alone?"

+

+His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser, a more

+significant essay than Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth;

+Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's

+career. Wagner sent a brief, hearty letter of thanks to the critic

+and made his acquaintance. To Wagner Baudelaire introduced a young

+Wagnerian, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is included

+in the volume of Crépet; but there are no letters published from

+Baudelaire to Franz Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar I saw

+at the Liszt house several from Baudelaire which should have been

+included in the Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his reforms as

+he understood Wagner's. The German composer admired the French poet,

+and his Kundry, of the sultry second act, Parsifal, has a Baudelairian

+hue, especially in the temptation scene.

+

+The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been steadily, rather, unsteadily,

+going downhill; a desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He went

+out only after dark, he haunted the exterior boulevards, associated

+with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without

+hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for this aristocrat of

+life and letters. Most sorrowful of sinners, his morose delectation

+scourged his nerves and extorted the darkest music from his lyre. He

+fled to Brussels, there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He

+gave a few lectures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to forget, and

+forgot to work. He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country

+where the trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there

+is no conversation. He, the brilliant _causeur_, the chief _blaguer_

+of a circle in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the

+rôle of a listener--this most _spirituel_ among artists found himself

+a failure in the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind

+ourselves that Baudelaire was the creator of most of the paradoxes

+attributed, not only to Whistler, but to an entire school--if one may

+employ such a phrase. The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his

+cutting enunciation, his power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his

+love of the artificial, have been copied by the æsthetic blades of

+our day. He it was who first taunted Nature with being an imitator of

+art, with being always the same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the

+quotidian eating and drinking! And as pessimist, too, he led the mode.

+Baudelaire, like Flaubert, grasped the murky torch of pessimism once

+held by Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, and Sénancour. Doubtless all

+this stemmed from Byronism. To-day it is all as stale as Byronism.

+

+His health failed rapidly, and he didn't have money enough to pay for

+doctor's prescriptions; he owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur,

+where he was visiting the father-in-law of Félicien Rops (March, 1866),

+he suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels.

+His mother, who lived at Honfleur, in mourning for her husband, came

+to his aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia

+set in. He could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight

+of himself in the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger.

+His friends rallied, and they were among the most distinguished

+people in Paris, the _élite_ of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two

+playing Wagner on the piano--which must have added a fresh _nuance_ to

+death--and they brought him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers

+and music to the last. He could not bear the sight of his mother; she

+revived in him some painful memories, but that passed, and he clamoured

+for her when she was absent. If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or

+Manet, he smiled. Madame Sabatier came; so did the Manets. And with a

+fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon

+eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.

+

+Barbey d'Aurevilly, himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old

+attitudes of literature!), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du

+Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot

+of the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans.) Baudelaire had the

+latter course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted spiritual

+suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but the

+slight cut in his throat looked so ugly that he went no farther.) His

+soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and evil. That at

+the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his God is not a

+subject of comment. He was an extraordinary poet with a bad conscience,

+who lived miserably and was buried with honours. Then it was that his

+worth was discovered (funeral orations over a genius are a species of

+public staircase wit). His reputation waxes with the years. He is an

+exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him Swinburne has chanted

+Ave Atque Vale:

+

+    Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,

+    Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?

+

+

+

+

+III

+

+THE REAL FLAUBERT

+

+    Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

+    And did he stop and speak to you....

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+It was some time in the late spring or early summer of 1879. I was

+going through the Chaussée d'Antin when a huge man, a terrific old

+man, passed me. His long straggling gray hair hung low. His red face

+was that of a soldier or a sheik, and was divided by drooping white

+moustaches. A trumpet was his voice, and he gesticulated freely

+to the friend who accompanied him. I did not look at him with any

+particular interest until some one behind me--if he be dead now may

+he be eternally blest!--exclaimed: "C'est Flaubert!" Then I stared;

+for though I had not read Madame Bovary I adored the verbal music of

+Salammbô, secretly believing, however, that it had been written by

+Melchior, one of the three Wise Kings who journeyed under the beckoning

+star of Bethlehem--how else account for its planturous Asiatic prose,

+for its evocations of a vanished past? But I knew the name of

+Flaubert, that magic collocation of letters, and I gazed at him. He

+returned my glance from prominent eyeballs, the colour of the pupil a

+bit of faded blue sky. He did not smile. He was too tender-hearted,

+despite his appreciation of the absurd. Besides, he knew, He, too, had

+been young and foolish. He, too, had worn a velvet coat and a comical

+cap, and had dreamed. I must have been a ridiculous spectacle. My hair

+was longer than my technique. I was studying Chopin or lunar rainbows

+then--I have forgotten which--and fancied that to be an artist one

+must dress like a cross between a brigand and a studio model. But I

+was happy. Perhaps Flaubert knew this, for he resisted the temptation

+to smile. And then he passed from my view. To be frank, I was not very

+much impressed, because earlier in the day I had seen Paul de Cassagnac

+and that famous duellist was romantic-looking, which the old Colossus

+of Croisset was not. When I returned to the Batignolles I told the

+_concièrge_ of my day's outing.

+

+"Ah!" he remarked, "M. Flaubert! M. Paul de Cassagnac!--a great man,

+Monsieur P-paul!" He stuttered a little. Now I only remember "M.

+Flaubert," with his eyes like a bit of faded blue sky. Was it a dream?

+Was it Flaubert? Did some stranger cruelly deceive me? But I'll never

+relinquish the memory of my glorious mirage.

+

+Where was he going, Gustave Flaubert, on that sunny afternoon? It was

+at the time when Jules Ferry appointed him an assistant-librarian at

+the Mazarine; _hors cadre_, a sinecure, a veiled pension with 3,000

+francs a year; a charity, as the great writer bitterly complained. He

+was poor. He had given up, without a murmur, his entire fortune to his

+niece, then Madame Caroline Commainville, and through the influence

+of Turgenev and a few others this position had been created for him.

+He had no duties, yet he insisted on arriving at his post as early as

+half-past seven in the morning. He planned later that the government

+should be reimbursed for its outlay. His brother, Dr. Achille Flaubert,

+of Rouen, gave him a similar allowance, so the unhappy man had enough

+to live upon. Perhaps he was going to the Gare Saint-Lazare to take a

+train for Croisset; perhaps he was starting for Ancient Corinth--I

+thought--to see once more his Salammbô veiled by the sacred Zaïmph; or

+he might have been on the point of departing for Taprobana, the Ceylon

+of the antique world; that island whose very name he repeated with the

+same pleasure as did the old woman the blessed name of "Mesopotamia."

+

+[Illustration: Fac-simile of an unpublished Flaubert letter.]

+

+Taprobana! Taprobana! would cry Gustave Flaubert, to the despair of

+his friends. He was a man in love with beautiful sounds. He filled

+his books with them and with beautiful pictures. You must go to

+Beethoven or Liszt for a like variety in rhythms; the Flaubertian

+prose rhythms change in every sentence, like a landscape alternately

+swept by sunlight or shadowed by clouds. They vary with the moods

+and movements of the characters. They are music for ear and eye. And

+they can never be translated. He is poet, painter, and composer,

+and he is the most artistic of novelists. If his work is deficient in

+sentiment; if he fails to strike the chords of pity of Dostoïevsky,

+Turgenev, and Tolstoy; if he lacks the teeming variety of Balzac, he

+is superior to them all as an artist. Because of his stern theories of

+art, he renounced the facile victories of sentimentalism. He does not

+invite his readers to smile or weep with him. He is not a manipulator

+of marionettes. And he can compress in a page more than Balzac in a

+volume. In part he derives from Chateaubriand, Gautier, and Hugo, and

+he was a lover of Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. His psychology

+is simple; he believed that character should express itself by action.

+His landscapes in the Dutch, "tight," miniature style, or the large,

+luminous, "loose" manner of Hobbema; or again full of the silver

+repose of Claude and the dark romantic beauty of Rousseau--witness

+the forest of Fontainebleau in Sentimental Education--are ravishing.

+He has painted interiors incomparably--this novel is filled with

+them: balls, café-life, political meetings, receptions, ladies in

+their drawing-rooms, Meissonier-like virtuosity in details or the

+bourgeois elegance of Alfred Stevens. As a portraitist Flaubert recalls

+Velasquez, Rembrandt, or Hals, and not a little of the _diablerie_ to

+be found in the Flemish masters of grotesque. Emma Bovary is the most

+perfectly finished portrait in fiction and Frédéric Moreau is nearly

+as lifelike--the eternal middle-class Young Man. Madame Arnoux,

+chiefly rendered by marvellous evasions, is in the clear-obscure of

+Rembrandt. Homais stands alone, a subject the delineation of which

+Swift would have envied. And Rosannette Bron--the truest record of her

+class ever depicted, and during the same decade that saw the odious

+sentimental and false Camille. Or Salome in Hérodias, that vision,

+cruel, feline, exquisite, which lesser writers have sought vainly to

+imitate. (Gustave Moreau alone transposed her to paint--Moreau, too,

+was a cenobite of art.) Or Félicité in Trois Contes. Or the perpetual

+journalist, Hussonet, the swaggering politician, Regimbart, Pellerin,

+the dilettante painter, the socialist, Sénecal, and Arnoux, the

+immortal charlatan. Whatever subject Flaubert attacked, a masterpiece

+emerged. He left few books; each represents the pinnacle of its

+_genre_: Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, Hérodias, Bouvard

+and Pécuchet--this last-named an epitome of human stupidity. Not an

+original philosophic intellect, nevertheless a philosophy has been

+drawn from Flaubert's work by the brilliant French philosopher Jules

+Gaultier, who defines _Bovaryisme_ as that tendency in mankind to

+appear other than it is; a tendency which is an important factor in

+our mental and social evolution. Without illusions mankind would take

+to the trees, the abode, we are told, of our prehistoric arboreal

+ancestors. Nevertheless, Emma Bovary as a philosophic symbol would have

+greatly astonished Gustave Flaubert.

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+"Since Goethe," might be a capital title for an essay on the epics

+that were written after the death of the noblest German of them

+all. The list would be small. In France there are only the rather

+barren rhetorical exercise of Edgar Quinet's Ahasvérus, the surging

+insurrectionary poems of Hugo, and the faultlessly frigid performance

+of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such heroic power and proportions as

+Faust there is not, except Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Antony, which

+is so impregnated by the Faustian spirit--though poles apart from

+the German poem in its development--that, when we hear the youthful

+Gustave was a passionate admirer and student of Goethe, even addressing

+a long poem in alexandrines to his memory, we are not surprised. The

+real Flaubert is only beginning to be revealed. His four volumes of

+correspondence, his single volume of letters addressed to George Sand,

+and the recently published letters to his niece Caroline--now Madame

+Franklin Grout of Antibes--have shown us a very different Flaubert

+from the legend chiefly created by Maxime du Camp. Dr. Félix Dumesnil,

+in his remarkable study, has told us of the Rouen master's neurasthenia

+and has utterly disproved Du Camp's malicious yarns about epilepsy.

+Above all, Flaubert's devotion to Goethe and the recent publication of

+the first version of his Saint Antony have presented a novel picture

+of his personality. We now know that, striving to become impersonal

+in art, he is personal and present in every page he ever wrote;

+furthermore that, despite his incessant clamours and complaints, he, in

+reality, loved his galley-like, self-imposed labours.

+

+The Temptation of Saint Antony is the only modern poem of epical

+largeness that may be classed with Brand or Zarathustra. It recalls

+at times the Second Part of Faust in its sweep and grandeur, in its

+grandiose visions; but though it is superior in verbal beauty it

+falls short of Goethe in its presentation of the problems of human

+will. Faust is a man who wills; Antony is static, not dynamic; the

+one is tempted by the Devil and succumbs, but does not lose his soul;

+Flaubert's hermit resists the Devil at his subtlest, yet we do not feel

+that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust's. Ideas are the

+heroes in Flaubert's prose epic. Saint Antony is a metaphysical drama,

+not a human one like Faust; nevertheless, to Faust alone may we compare

+it.

+

+Flaubert was born at Rouen, December 12, 1821, where he died May 18,

+1880. That he practically passed his years at Croisset, his mother's

+home, below Rouen facing the Seine, and in his study toiling like

+a titan over his books, should be recorded in every text-book of

+literature. For he is the patron-saint of all true literary men. He

+had a comfortable income. He thought, talked, lived literature. His

+friends Du Camp, Louis Bouilhet, Turgenev, Taine, Baudelaire, Zola,

+the Goncourts, Daudet, Renan, Maupassant, Henry James, have testified

+to his absorption in his art. It is almost touching in these times when

+a man goes into the writing business as if vending tripe, to recall

+the example of Flaubert for whom art was more sacred than religion.

+Naturally, he has been proved by the madhouse doctors to have been half

+cracked. Perhaps he was not as sane as a stockbroker, but it takes all

+sorts to make a world and a writer of Flaubert's rank should not be

+weighed in the same scales with, say, a successful politician.

+

+He was endowed with a nervous temperament, though up to his

+twenty-second year he was as handsome and as free from sickness as a

+god. He was very tall and his eyes were sea-green. A nervous crisis

+supervened and at wide intervals returned. It was almost fatal for

+Gustave. He became pessimistic and afraid of life. However, the talk

+of his habitual truculent pessimism has been exaggerated. Naturally

+optimistic, with a powerful constitution and a stout heart, he worked

+like the Trojan he was. His pessimism came with the years during his

+boyhood--Byronic literary spleen was in the air. He was a grumbler

+and rather overdid the peevish pose. As Zola asked: "What if he had

+been forced to earn his living by writing?" But, even in his blackest

+moods, he was glad to see his friends at Croisset, glad to go up to

+Paris for recreation. His letters, so free, fluent, explosive, give

+us the true Flaubert who childishly roared yet was so hearty, so

+friendly, so loving to his mother, niece, and intimates. His heredity

+was puzzling. His father was, like Baudelaire's grandfather, of

+Champenois stock; bourgeois, steady, a renowned surgeon. From him

+Gustave inherited his taste for all that pertained to medicine and

+science. Recall his escapades as a boy when he would peep for hours

+into the dissecting-room of the Rouen hospital. Such matters fascinated

+him. He knew more about the theory and practice of medicine than

+many professional men. An air of mortality exhales from his pages.

+He is in Madame Bovary the keen soul-surgeon. His love of a quiet,

+sober existence came to him from his father. He clung to one house

+for nearly a half century. He has said that one must live like a

+bourgeois and think like an artist; to be ascetic in life and violent

+in art--that was a Flaubert maxim. "I live only in my ideas," he

+wrote. But from the mother's side, a Norman and aristocrat she was, he

+inherited his love of art, his disdain for philistines, his adventurous

+disposition--transposed because of his malady to the cerebral region,

+to his imagination. He boasted Canadian blood, "red skin," he called

+it, but that was merely a mystification. The dissonance of temperament

+made itself felt early. He was the man of Goethe with two spirits

+struggling within him. Dual in temperament, he swung from an almost

+barbaric Romanticism to a cruel analysis of life that made him the

+pontiff of the Realistic school. He hated realism, yet an inner

+force set him to the disagreeable task of writing Madame Bovary and

+Sentimental Education--the latter, with its daylight atmosphere, the

+supreme exemplar of realism in fiction. So was it with his interior

+life. He was a mystic who no longer believed. These dislocations of

+his personality he combated all his life, and his books show with what

+success. "Flaubert," wrote Turgenev, his closest friend, to George

+Sand, "has tenacity without energy, just as he has self-love without

+vanity." But what tenacity!

+

+Touching on the question of epilepsy, a careful reading of Dumesnil

+convinces anyone, but the neurologist with a fixed idea, that Flaubert

+was not a sufferer from genuine epilepsy. Not that there is any

+reason why epilepsy and genius should be divorced; we know in many

+cases the contrary is the reverse. Take the case of Dostoïevsky--his

+epilepsy was one of the most fruitful of motives in his stories.

+Nearly all his heroes and heroines are attainted. (Read The Idiot or

+the Karamsoff Brothers.) But Flaubert's epilepsy was arranged for

+him by Du Camp, who thought that by calling him an epilept in his

+untrustworthy Memoirs he would belittle Flaubert. And he did, for in

+his time the now celebrated--and discredited--theory of genius and

+its correlation with the falling-sickness had not been propounded.

+Flaubert had hystero-neurasthenia. He was rheumatic, asthmatic,

+predisposed to arterio-sclerosis and apoplexy. He died of an apoplectic

+stroke. His early nervous fits were without the _aura_ of epilepsy;

+he did not froth at the mouth nor were there muscular contractions;

+not even at his death. Dr. Tourneaux, who hastened to aid him in the

+absence of his regular physician, Dr. Fortin, denied the rumours of

+epilepsy that were so gaily spread by that sublime old gossip, Edmond

+de Goncourt, also by Zola and Du Camp. The contraction of Flaubert's

+hands was caused by the rigidity of death; most conclusive of all

+evidence against the epileptic theory is the fact that during his

+occasional fits Gustave never lost consciousness. Nor did he suffer

+from any attacks before he had attained his majority, whereas epilepsy

+usually begins at an early age. He studied with intense zeal his malady

+and in a dozen letters refers to it, tickets its symptoms, tells of

+plans to escape the crises, and altogether, has furnished students

+of pathology many examples of nerve-exhaustion and its mitigation.

+His first attacks began at Pont-Audemar, in 1843. In 1849 he had a

+fresh attack. His trip to the Orient relieved him. He was a Viking, a

+full-blooded man, who scorned sensible hygiene; he took no exercise

+beyond a walk in the morning, a walk in the evening on his terrace,

+and in summer an occasional swim in the Seine. He ate copiously, was

+moderate in drinking, smoked fifteen or twenty pipes a day, abused

+black coffee, and for months at a stretch worked fifteen hours out of

+the twenty-four at his desk. He warned his disciple, Guy de Maupassant,

+against too much boating as being destructive of mental productivity.

+After Nietzsche read this he wrote: "Sedentary application is the

+very sin against the Holy Ghost. Only thoughts won by walking are

+valuable." In 1870 another crisis was brought on by protracted labours

+over the revision of the definitive version of the Saint Antony. His

+travels in Normandy, in the East, his visits to London (1851) and

+to Righi-Kaltbad, together with sojourns in Paris--where he had a

+little apartment--make up the itinerary of his fifty-eight years. Is

+it any wonder that he died of apoplexy, stricken at his desk, he of a

+violently sanguine temperament, bull-necked, and the blood always in

+his face?

+

+Maurice Spronck, who took too seriously the saying of Flaubert--a lover

+of extravagant paradox--thinks the writer had a cerebral lesion, which

+he called _audition colorée_. It is a malady peculiar to imaginative

+natures, which transposes tone to colour, or odour to sound. As this

+"malady" may be found in poets from the dawn of creation, "coloured

+audition" must be a necessary quality of art. Flaubert took pains to

+exaggerate his speech when in company with the Goncourts. He suspected

+their diary-keeping weakness and he humoured it by telling fibs about

+his work. "I have finished my book, the cadence of the last paragraph

+has been found. Now I shall write it." Aghast were the brothers at

+the idea of an author beginning his book backward. Flaubert boasted

+that the colour of Salammbô was purple. Sentimental Education (a

+bad title, as Turgenev wrote him; Withered Fruits, his first title,

+would have been better) was gray, and Madame Bovary was for him like

+the colouring of certain mouldy wood-vermin. The Goncourts solemnly

+swallowed all this, as did M. Spronck. Which moved Anatole France to

+exclaim: "Oh these young clinicians!"

+

+But what is all this when compared with the magnificent idiocy of Du

+Camp, who asserted that if Flaubert had not suffered from epilepsy

+_he would have become a genius! Hénaurme!_ as the man who made such

+masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Temptation of

+Saint Antony, the Three Tales, Bouvard et Pécuchet, had a comical

+habit of exclaiming. Enormous, too, was Guy de Maupassant's manner

+of avenging his master's memory. In the final edition--eight volumes

+long--Maupassant, with the unerring eye of hatred, affixed an

+introduction to Bouvard et Pécuchet. Therein he printed Maxime du

+Camp's letters to Flaubert during the period when Madame Bovary was

+appearing in the _Revue de Paris_. Du Camp was one of its editors.

+He urged Flaubert to cut the novel--the concision of which is so

+admirable, the organic quality of which is absolute. Worse still

+remains. If Flaubert couldn't perform the operation himself, then the

+aforesaid Du Camp would hire some experienced hack to do it for the

+sensitive author; wounded vanity Du Camp believed to be the cause of

+indignant remonstrances. They eliminated the scene of the agricultural

+fair and the operation on the hostler's foot--one scene as marvellous

+as a _genre_ painting by Teniers with its study of the old farm

+servant, and psychologically more profound; the other necessary to

+the development of the story. Thus Madame Bovary was slaughtered

+serially by a man ignorant of art, that Madame Bovary which is one of

+the glories of French literature, as Mr. James truly says. Flaubert

+scribbled on Du Camp's letters another of his favourite expletives,

+_Gigantesque!_ Flaubert never forgave him, but they were apparently

+reconciled years later. Du Camp went into the Academy; Flaubert refused

+to consider a candidacy, though Victor Hugo--wittily nicknamed by Jules

+Laforgue "Aristides the Just"--urged him to do so. Even the mighty

+Balzac was too avid of glory and gold for Flaubert, to whom art and its

+consolations were all-sufficing.

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+Bouvard et Pécuchet was never finished. Its increasing demands killed

+Flaubert. In his desk were found many cahiers of notes taken to

+illustrate the fatuity of mankind, its stupidity, its _bêtise_. He was

+as pitiless as Swift or Schopenhauer in his contempt for low ideals

+and vulgar pretensions, for the very bourgeois from whom he sprung. In

+the collection we find this gem of wisdom uttered by Louis Napoleon in

+1865: "The richness of a country depends on its general prosperity." To

+it should be included the Homais-like dictum of Maxime du Camp that

+if Flaubert had not been an epilept he would have been a genius! Or,

+the following hospital criticism; Flaubert was denied creative ability!

+Who has denied it to him? Homais alone in his supreme asininity should

+be a beacon-light of warning for any one of these inept critics.

+Flaubert once wrote: "I am reading books on hygiene; how comical they

+are! What impertinence these physicians have! What asses for the

+most part they are!" And he, the son of a celebrated surgeon and the

+brother of another, a medical student himself, might have made Homais a

+psychiatrist instead of a druggist, if he had lived longer.

+

+Du Camp--who, clever and witty as well as inexact and reckless in

+statement, was a man given to envies and literary jealousies--never got

+over Flaubert's startling success with Madame Bovary. He once wrote

+a fanciful epitaph for Louise Colet, a French woman of mediocrity,

+the "Muse" of Flaubert, a general trouble-breeder and a recipient

+of Flaubert's correspondence. The Colet had embroiled herself with

+De Musset and published a spiteful romance in which poor Flaubert

+was the villain. This the Du Camp inscription: "Here lies the woman

+who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset ridiculous,

+calumniated Gustave Flaubert, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr:

+Requiescat in pace." A like epitaph suggests itself for Maxime du Camp:

+_Hic jacet_ the man who slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving

+friend Gustave Flaubert, and was snuffed out of critical existence by

+Guy de Maupassant.

+

+The massive-shouldered Hercules, Flaubert, a Hercules spinning prose

+for his exacting Dejanira of art, was called unintelligent by Anatole

+France. He had not, it is true, the subtle critical brain and thorough

+scholarship of M. France; yet Flaubert was learned. Brunetière

+even taxed him with an excess of erudition. But his multitudinous

+conversation, his lack of logic, his rather gross sense of humour, are

+not to be found in his work. Without that work, without Salammbô, for

+example, should we have had the pleasure, thrice-distilled, of reading

+Anatole France's Thaïs? (See a single instance in the definitive

+edition Temptation, page 115, the episode of the Gymnosophist.) All

+revivals of the antique world are unsatisfactory at best, whether

+Chateaubriand's Martyrs, or the unsubstantial lath and plaster of

+Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, or the flabbiness and fustian of Quo

+Vadis. The most perfect attempt is Salammbô, an opera in words, and its

+battlements of purple prose were riddled by Sainte-Beuve, by Froehner,

+and lately by Maurice Pézard--who has proved to his own satisfaction

+that Flaubert was sadly amiss in his Punic archæology. Well, who cares

+if he was incorrect in details? His partially successful reconstruction

+of an epoch is admitted, though the human element is somewhat

+obliterated. Flaubert was bound to be more Carthaginian than Carthage.

+

+After the scandal caused by the prosecution of Madame Bovary Flaubert

+was afraid to publish his 1856, second version of Saint Antony. He had

+been advised by the sapient Du Camp to cast the manuscript into the

+fire, after a reading before Bouilhet and Du Camp lasting thirty-three

+hours. He refused. This was in September, 1849. Du Camp declares that

+he asked him to essay "the Delaunay affair" meaning the Delamarre

+story. This Flaubert did, and the result was the priceless history

+of Charles and Emma Bovary. D'Aurevilly attacked the book viciously;

+Baudelaire defended it. Later Turgenev wrote to Flaubert: "After all

+you are Flaubert!" George Sand was a motherly consoler. Their letters

+are delightful. She did not quite understand the bluff, naïve Gustave,

+she who composed so flowingly, and could turn on or off her prose

+like the tap of a kitchen hydrant (the simile is her own). How could

+she fathom the tormented desire of her friend for perfection, for the

+blending of idea and image, for the eternal pursuit of the right word,

+the shapely sentence, the cadenced _coda_ of a paragraph? And of the

+larger demands of style, of the subtle tone of a page, a chapter, a

+book, why should this fluent and graceful writer, called George Sand,

+concern herself with such superfluities! It was always _O altitudo_ in

+art with Flaubert--the most copious, careless of correspondents. He had

+set for himself an impossible standard of perfection and an ideal of

+impersonality neither of which he realized. But there is no outward

+sign of conflict in his work; all trace of the labour bestowed upon his

+paragraphs is absent. His style is simple, direct, large, above all,

+clear, the clarity of classic prose.

+

+His declaiming aloud his sentences has been adduced to prove his

+absence of sanity. Beethoven, too, was pronounced crazy by his various

+landladies because he sang and howled in his voice of a composer his

+compositions in the making. Flaubert was the possessor of an accurate

+musical ear; not without justice did Coppée call him the "Beethoven

+of French prose." His sense of rhythm was acute; he carried it so

+far that he would sacrifice grammar to rhythmic flow. He tested his

+sentences aloud. Once in his apartment, Rue Murillo, overlooking Parc

+Monceau, he rehearsed a page of a new book for hours. Belated coachmen,

+noting the open windows, hearing an outrageous vocal noise, concluded

+that a musical soiree was in progress. Gradually the street filled on

+either side with carriages in search of passengers. But the guests

+never emerged from the house. In the early morning the lights were

+extinguished and the oaths of the disappointed ones must have been

+heard by Flaubert.

+

+He would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts. His

+bump of scrupulousness was large. In twenty pages he sometimes saved

+three or four from destruction. He did not become, however, as

+captious as Balzac in the handling of proofs. A martyr of style, he

+was not altogether an enameller in precious stones, not a patient

+mosaic-maker, superimposing here and there a precious verbal jewel.

+First, the image, and then its appropriate garb; sometimes image and

+phrase were born simultaneously, as was the case with Richard Wagner.

+These extraordinary things may happen to men of genius, who are neither

+opium-eaters nor lunatics. The idea that Flaubert was ever addicted to

+drugs--beyond the quinine with which his good father dosed him after

+the fashion of those days--is ridiculous. The gorgeous visions of Saint

+Antony are the results of stupendous preparatory studies, a stupendous

+power of fantasy, and a stupendous concentration. Opium superinduces

+visions, but not the power and faculty of attention to record them in

+terms of literature for forty years. George Saintsbury has pronounced

+Saint Antony the most perfect specimen of dream literature extant. And

+because of its precision in details, its architectonic, its deep-hued

+waking hallucinations.

+

+Flaubert was a very nervous man, "as hysterical as an old woman," said

+Dr. Hardy of the hospital Saint-Louis, but neither mad nor epileptic.

+His mental development was not arrested in his youth, as asserted by

+Du Camp; he had arranged his life from the time he decided to become

+a writer. He was one with the exotic painter, Gustave Moreau, in his

+abhorrence of the mob. He was a poet who wrote a perfect prose, not

+prose-poetry. Enamoured of the antique, of the Orient, of mystical

+subjects, he spent a lifetime in the elaboration of his beloved

+themes. That he was obsessed by them is merely to say that he was the

+possessor of mental energy and artistic gifts. He was not happy. He

+never brought his interior and exterior lives into complete harmony. An

+unparalleled observer, an imaginative genius, he was a child outside

+the realm of art. Soft of heart, he raised his niece as a daughter;

+a loving son, he would console himself after his mother's death by

+looking at the dresses she once wore. Flaubert a sentimentalist! He

+outlived his family and his friends, save a few; death was never far

+away from his thoughts; he would weep over his souvenirs. At Croisset I

+have talked with the faithful Colange, whose card reads: "E. Colange,

+ex-cook of Gustave Flaubert!" The affection of the novelist for cats

+and dogs, he told me, was marked. The study pavilion is to-day a

+Flaubert Memorial. The parent house is gone, and in 1901 there was

+a distillery on the grounds, which is now a printing establishment.

+Flaubert cherished the notion that Pascal had once stopped in the old

+Croisset homestead; that Abbé Prévost had written Manon Lescaut within

+its walls. He had many such old-fashioned and darling _tics_, and he is

+to be envied them.

+

+Since Madame Bovary French fiction, for the most part, has been

+Flaubert with variations. His influence is still incalculable. François

+Coppée wrote: "By the extent and the magnificence of his prose, Gustave

+Flaubert equals Bossuet and Chateaubriand. He is destined to become a

+great classic. And several centuries hence--everything perishes--when

+the French language shall have become only a dead language, candidates

+for the bachelor's degree will be able to obtain it only by expounding

+(along with the famous exordium, He Who Reigns in the Heavens, etc.,

+or The Departure of the Swallows, of René) the portrait of Catharine

+le Roux, the farm servant, in Madame Bovary, or the episode of the

+Crucified Lions in Salammbô."

+

+

+

+IV

+

+

+With the critical taste that uncovers bare the bones of the dead I have

+no concern, nor shall I enter the way which would lead me into the

+dusty region of professional ethics. Every portrait painter from Titian

+to John Sargent, from Velasquez to Zuloaga, has had a model. Novelists

+are no less honest when they build their characters upon human beings

+they have known and studied, whether their name be Fielding or Balzac

+or Flaubert.

+

+The curiosity which seeks to unveil the anonymity of a novelist's

+personages may not be exactly laudable; it is yet excusable. I am

+reminded of its existence by a certain Parisian journalist who, acting

+upon information that appeared in the pages of a well-known French

+literary review, went to Normandy in search of the real Emma Bovary.

+Once called wicked, the novel has been pronounced as moral as a

+Sunday-school tract. Thackeray admired its style, but deplored, with

+his accustomed streak of sentimentalism, the cold-blooded analysis

+which hunted Emma to an ignominious grave. Yet the author of Vanity

+Fair did not hesitate to pursue through many chapters his mercurial

+Rebecca Sharp.

+

+The story of Emma Bovary would hardly attract, if published in the

+daily news columns, much attention nowadays. A good-looking young

+provincial woman tires of her honest, slow-going husband. She reads

+silly novels, as do thousands of silly married girls to-day. Emma lived

+in a little town not far from Rouen. Flaubert named it Yonville. We

+read that Emma flirted with a country squire who in order to escape

+eloping with the romantic goose suddenly disappeared. She consoled

+herself with a young law student, but when he tired of her the

+consequences were lamentable. Harassed by debt, Emma took poison. Her

+stupid husband, a hard-working district doctor, was aghast at her death

+and puzzled by the ruin which followed fast at its heels. He found it

+all out, even the love-letters of the squire. He died suddenly.

+

+A sordid tale, but perfectly told and remarkable not only for the

+fidelity of the landscapes, the chaste restraint of the style, but

+also because there are half a dozen marvellously executed characters,

+several of which have entered into the living current of French speech.

+Homais, the vainglorious, yet human and likable Homais, is a synonym

+for pedantic bragging mediocrity. He is a druggist. He would have

+made an ideal politician. He stands for a shallow "modernity" but is

+more superstitious than a mediæval sexton. Flaubert's novel left an

+indelible mark in French fiction and philosophy. Even Balzac did not

+create a Homais.

+

+Now comes the curious part of the story. It was the transcription

+of a real occurrence. Flaubert did not invent it. In a town near

+Rouen named Ry there was once a young physician, Louis Delamarre. He

+originally hailed from Catenay, where his father practised medicine.

+In the novel Ry is called Yonville. Delamarre paid his addresses to

+Delphine Couturier, who in 1843 was twenty-three years of age. She was

+comely, had a bright though superficial mind, spoke in a pretentious

+manner, and over-dressed. From her father she inherited her vanity

+and the desire to appear as occupying a more exalted position than

+she did. The elder Couturier owned a farm, though heavily mortgaged,

+at Vieux-Château. He was a close-fisted Norman anxious to marry off

+his daughters--Emma had a sister. He objected to the advances of the

+youthful physician, chiefly because he saw no great match for his girl.

+Herein the tale diverges from life.

+

+But love laughs at farmers as well as locksmiths, and by a ruse worthy

+of Paul de Kock, Delphine, by feigning maternity, got the parental

+permission. She soon regretted her marriage. The husband, Louis, was

+prosaic. He earned the daily bread and butter of the household, and

+even economised so that his pretty wife could buy fallals and foolish

+books. She hired a servant and had her day at home--Fridays. No one

+visited her. She was only an unimportant spouse of a poverty-stricken

+country doctor. At Saint-Germain des Essours there still lives an

+octogenarian peasant woman once the domestic of the Delamarres-Bovarys.

+She said, when asked to describe her mistress: "Heavens, but she was

+pretty. Face, figure, hair, all were beautiful."

+

+In Ry there was a druggist named Jouanne. He is the original Homais.

+Delphine's, or rather Emma Bovary's, first admirer was a law clerk,

+Louis Bottet. He is described as a small, impatient, alert old man

+at the time of his death. The faithless Rodolphe--what a name for

+sentimental melodrama--was really a proprietor named Campion. He lost

+his farm and revenue after Emma's death and went to America to make

+his fortune. Unsuccessful, he returned to Paris, and about 1852 shot

+himself on the boulevard. Who may deny, after this, that truth is

+stranger than Flaubert's fiction?

+

+The good, sensible old Abbé Boumisien, who advised Emma Bovary, when

+she came to him for spiritual consolation, to consult her doctor

+husband, was, in reality, an Abbé Lafortune. The irony of events is

+set forth in sinister relief by the epitaph which the real Emma's

+husband had carved on her tomb: "She was a good mother, a good wife."

+Gossips of Ry aver that after the truth came to Dr. Delamarre he took

+a slow poison. But this seems turning the screw a trifle too far. Mme.

+Delamarre, or Emma Bovary, was buried in the graveyard of the only

+church at Ry. To-day the tomb is no longer in existence. She died March

+6, 1848. The inhabitants still show the church,--the porch of which

+was too narrow to allow the passage of unlucky Emma's coffin--the

+house of her husband, and the apothecary shop of M. Homais. The latter

+survived for many years the unhappy heroine, who stole the poison that

+killed her from his stock. A delightful touch of Homais-like humour was

+displayed--one that exonerated Flaubert from the charge of exaggeration

+in portraying Homais--when the novel appeared. The characters were at

+once recognized, both in Rouen and Ry. This druggist, Jouanne-Homais,

+was flattered at the lengthy study of himself, of course missing its

+relentless ironic strokes. He regretted openly that the author had not

+consulted him; for, said he, "I could have given him many points about

+which he knew nothing." The epitaph which the real Homais composed for

+the tomb of his wife--surely you can never forget her after reading the

+novel--is magnificent in its bombast. Flaubert knew his man.

+

+The distinguished writer is a sober narrator of facts. His is not a

+domain of delicate thrills. His women are neither doves nor devils.

+He does not paint those acrobats of the soul so dear to psychological

+fiction. Despite his pretended impassibility, he is tender-hearted;

+the pity he felt for his characters is not effusively expressed. But

+the larger rhythms of humanity are ever present. If he had been hard of

+heart, he would have related the Bovary tale as it happened in life.

+Charles Bovary finds the love-letters and meets Rodolphe. Nothing

+happens. The real Charles never knew of the real Emma's treachery.

+Madame d'Epinay was not far amiss when she wrote: "The profession of

+woman is very hard."

+

+

+

+V

+

+

+No less a masterpiece than Don Quixote has been cited in critical

+comparison with Madame Bovary. Flaubert was called the Cervantes who

+had ridiculed from the field the Romantic School. This irritated him,

+for he never posed as a realist; indeed, he confessed that he had

+intended to mock the Realistic School--then headed by Champfleury--in

+his Bovary. The very name of this book would arouse a storm of abuse

+from him. He knew that he had more than one book in him, he believed

+better books; the indifference of the public to Sentimental Education

+and the Temptation he never understood. Much astonishment was

+expressed, after the appearance of Bovary, that such a mature work of

+art should have been the author's first. But Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms

+did not permit their juvenile efforts to see the light; the same

+was the case with Flaubert. In 1835--he was fourteen at the time--he

+wrote Mort du Duc de Guise; in 1836 another historical study. Short

+stories in the style of Hoffmann, with thrilling titles, such as Rage

+et Impuissance, Le Rêve d'Enfer (1837), and a psychologic effort,

+Agonies (dedicated to Alfred le Poittevin--as are both versions of

+the Temptation; Alfred's sister later became the mother of Guy de

+Maupassant): all these exercises, as is a Dance of Death, are still in

+manuscript. But in 1839 a scenario of a mystery bearing the cryptic

+title of Smarh was written; and this with Novembre, and a study of

+Rabelais, and Nuit de Don Juan, have been published in the definitive

+edition; with a record of travels in Normandy. The Memoirs of a Madman

+appeared a few years ago in a Parisian magazine. It was a youthful

+effort. There is also in the collection of Madame Grout a 300-page

+manuscript (1843-1845) named L'Education Sentimentale--vaguely inspired

+by Wilhelm Meister--which has nothing in common with his novel of the

+same name published in 1869.

+

+Flaubert's taste in the matter of titles was lamentable. He made a

+scenario for a tale called Spiral, and he often asserted that he

+hankered to write in marmoreal prose the Combat of Thermopylae;

+he meditated, too, a novel the scene and characters laid in the

+Second Empire, and dilated upon the beauty of a portrait executed in

+microscopic detail of that immortal character, M. le Préfet. We might

+have had a second Homais if he had made this project a reality. He told

+Turgenev that he had another idea, a sort of modern Matron of Ephesus

+--in the Temptation there is an episode that suggests the Ephesus.

+He did not lack invention and he was an extremely rapid writer--but

+his artistic conscience was morbidly sensitive. It pained him to see

+Zola throwing his better self to the dogs in his noisy, inartistic

+novels--in which, he said, was neither poetry nor art. And he wrote

+this opinion to Zola, who promptly called him an idiot. In that correct

+but colourless book of Faguet's on Flaubert, the critic makes note

+of all the novelist's grammatical errors and reaches the conclusion

+that he was a stylist unique, but not careful in his grammar. Now,

+while this is piffling pedantry, the facts are in Faguet's favour;

+Faguet, who holds the critical scales nicely, as he always does,

+though listlessly. But in the handling of such a robust, red-blooded

+subject as Flaubert the college professor was hardly a wise selection.

+The Faguet study is clear and painstaking but not sympathetic. Mr.

+James has praised it, possibly because Faguet agrees with him as to

+the psychology of Sentimental Education. Not a study, Faguet's, for

+Flaubertians, who see the faults of their Saint Polycarp--his favourite

+self-appellation--and love him for his all-too-human imperfections.

+

+In 1845 Flaubert, on a visit to Italy, stopped at Genoa. There, in the

+Palace Balbi-Senarega--and not at the Doria, as Du Camp wrote, with

+his accustomed carelessness--the young Frenchman saw an old picture by

+Breughel (probably by Pieter the Younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that

+represents a temptation of Saint Antony. It is hardly a masterpiece,

+this Breughel, and is dingy in colour. But Flaubert, who loved the

+grotesque, procured an engraving of this picture and it hung in his

+study at Croisset until the day of his death. It was the spring-board

+of his own Temptation. The germ may be found in his mystery, Smarh,

+with its Demon and metaphysical colouring. Breughel set into motion the

+mental machinery of the Temptation that never stopped whirring until

+1874. The first _brouillon_ of the Temptation was begun May 24, 1848,

+and finished September 12, 1849. It numbered 540 pages of manuscript.

+Set aside for Bovary, Flaubert took up the draft again and made the

+second version in 1856. When he had done with it, the manuscript was

+reduced to 193 pages. Not satisfied, he returned to the work in 1872,

+and when ready for publication in 1874 the number of pages were 136.

+He even then cut, from ten chapters, three. Last year the French

+world read the second version of 1856 and was astonished to find it

+so different from the definitive one of 1874. The critical sobriety

+and courage of Flaubert were vindicated. In 1849, reading to Bouilhet

+and Du Camp, he had been advised to burn the stuff; instead he boiled

+it down for the 1856 version. To Turgenev he had submitted the 1872

+draft, and thus it came that this wonderful coloured-panorama of

+philosophy, this Gulliver-like travelling amid the master ideas of the

+antique and the early Christian worlds, was published.

+

+All the youthful romantic Flaubert--the "spouter" of blazing phrases,

+the lover of jewelled words, of monstrous and picturesque ideas and

+situations--is in the first turbulent version of the Temptation. In

+the later version he is more critical and historical. Flaubert had

+grown intellectually as his emotions had cooled with the years. The

+first Temptation is romantic and religious; the 1874 version cooler

+and more sceptical. Dramatic, arranged more theatrically than the

+first, the author's affection for mysticism, the East, and the classic

+world shows more in this version. Psychologic gradations of character

+and events are clearer in the second version. I cannot agree with

+Louis Bertrand, who edited the 1856 version, that it is superior in

+interest to the 1874 version. It is a novelty, but Flaubert was never

+so much the surgeon as when he operated upon his own manuscript. He

+often hesitated, he always suffered, and he never flinched when his

+mind was finally satisfied. Faguet calls the Temptation an abstract

+pessimistic novel. He also complains that the philosophic ideas are not

+novel; a new philosophy would be a veritable phoenix. Why should they

+be? Flaubert does not enunciate a new philosophy. He is the artist

+who shows us apocalyptic visions of all philosophies, all schools,

+ethical systems, cultures, religions. The gods from every land defile

+by and are each in turn swept away by the relentless Button-Moulder,

+Oblivion. There was a talking and amusing pig in the first version;

+he is not present in the second--possibly because Flaubert discovered

+that it was not Saint Antony of Egypt, but Saint Antony of Padua, who

+had a pig. (Rops has remembered the animal in his etching of Flaubert's

+Antony.) The Antony of 1856 has a more modern soul; the second reveals

+the determinism of Flaubert. He is phlegmatic, almost stupid, a supine

+Faust incapable of self-irony. Everything revolves about him--the

+multi-coloured splendours of Alexandria, of the Queen of Sheba; Satan,

+Death and Luxury, Hilarion, Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana tempt

+him; upon his ears fall the enchanting phrases of the eternal dialogue

+between Sphinx and Chimera--we dream of the Songs of Solomon when

+reading: "Je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus larges, des

+plaisirs inéprouvés"; the speech of the Chimera. Flaubert knew the Old

+Testament rhythms and beauty of phrase; witness this speech of Death's:

+"et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des panaches, des drapeaux,

+des harnais d'or...." You seem to overhear the golden trumpets of

+Bayreuth.

+

+The demon retires baffled at the end of the first version. He is

+diabolic and not a little theatrical. The Devil of 1874 is more

+artful. He shows Antony the Cosmos, but he is not the victor in the

+duel. The new Antony studies the protean forms of life and at the

+end is ravished by the sight of protoplasm. "O bliss!" he cries, and

+longs to be transformed into every species of energy, "to be matter."

+Then the dawn comes up like the uplifted curtains of a tabernacle

+--Flaubert's image--and in the very disc of the sun shines the face

+of Jesus Christ. "Antony makes the sign of the cross and resumes his

+prayers." Thus ends the 1874 edition, ends a book of irony, dreams,

+and sumptuous landscapes. A sense of the nothingness of human thought,

+human endeavour, assails the reader, for he has traversed all the

+metaphysical and religious ideas of the ages, has viewed all the

+gods, idols, demi-gods, ghosts, heresies, and heresiarchs; Jupiter on

+his throne and the early warring Christian sects vanish into smoke,

+crumble into the gulf of _Néant_. A vivid episode was omitted in the

+definitive version. At the close of the gods' procession the Saviour

+appears. He is old, white-haired, and weary from the burden of the

+cross and the sins of mankind. Some mock him; He is reproached by

+kings for propounding the equality of the poor; but by the majority

+He is unrecognised; and, spurned, the Son of Man falls into the dust

+of life. A poignant page, the spirit of which may be recognised in

+some latter-day French pictures and in the eloquent phrases of Jehan

+Rictus. M. Bertrand has pointed out that the 1849 version of the

+Temptation contains colour and imagery similar to the Légendes des

+Siècles, though written ten years before Hugo's poem. The Temptation

+of Saint Antony was neither a popular nor a critical success in 1874.

+France realises that in Flaubert's prose epic she has a masterpiece of

+intellectual power, profound irony, and unsurpassed beauty. The reader

+is alternately reminded of the Apocalypse, of Dante's grim visions, and

+of the second Faust.

+

+[Illustration: Corrected proof page of Madame Bovary,

+produced from the original manuscript.]

+

+Almost numberless are the studies of Flaubert's method in composing

+his books. A small library could be filled by books about his style.

+We have seen the reproductions of the various drafts that he made in

+the description of Emma Bovary's visit to Rouen. Armand Weil, with

+a patience that is itself Flaubertian, has shown us the variations

+in the manuscript of Salammbô (see, _Revue Universitaire_, April 15,

+1902). Yet, compared with Balzac's spider-haunted, scribbled-over

+proofs, Flaubert's seem virginal of corrections. The one reproduced

+here is from two pages of original manuscript that I was lucky enough

+to secure at Paris in 1903. They contain instructions to the printer,

+as may be seen, and demonstrate Flaubert's sharp eye; in every instance

+his changes are an improvement. One of the arguments in favour of the

+last version of the Temptation is its shrinkage in bulk from the 1856

+manuscript. The letter, hitherto unpublished--for it will not be found

+in the six volumes of the Correspondence--is possibly addressed to

+his niece, Caroline Hamard. Unusual for Flaubert is the absence of

+any date; he was scrupulous in giving hour, day, month, and year,

+in his letters. The princess referred to is the Princess Mathilde

+Bonaparte-Demidoff, the patron of artists and literary men, an admirer

+of Flaubert's. He often dined with her at Saint-Gratien. Madame Pasca

+the actress was also a friend and visited Croisset when he fractured

+his leg. He had a genius for friendships with both women and men. His

+mother, often telling him that his devotion to style had dried up his

+natural affections, admitted that he had a bigger heart than head. And,

+after all, this motherly estimate gives us the measure of the real

+Flaubert.

+

+

+

+

+IV

+

+ANATOLE FRANCE

+

+I

+

+In the first part of that great, human Book, dear to all good

+Pantagruelists, is this picture: "From the Tower Anatole to the

+Messembrine were faire spacious galleries, all coloured over and

+painted with the ancient prowesses, histories and descriptions of the

+world." The Tower Anatole is part of the architecture of the Abbey

+of Thélème, in common with the other towers named, Artick, Calaer,

+Hesperia, and Caiere.

+

+For lovers of the exquisite and whimsical artist, Anatole France, a

+comparison to Rabelais may not appear strained. Anatole, the man, has

+written much that contains, as did the gracious Tower Anatole, "faire

+spacious galleries ... painted with ancient ... histories." He has

+in his veins some infusion of the literary blood of that "bon gros

+libertin," Rabelais, a figure in French literature who refuses to be

+budged from his commanding position, notwithstanding the combined

+prestige of Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and

+Balzac. And the gentle Anatole has a pinch of Rabelais's _esprit

+gaulois_, which may be found in both Balzac and Maupassant.

+

+To call France a sceptic is to state a common-place. But he is so

+many other things that he bewilders. The spiritual stepson of Renan,

+a partial inheritor of his gifts of irony and pity, and a continuator

+of the elder master's diverse and undulating style, France displays

+affinities to Heine, Aristophanes, Charles Lamb, Epicurus, Sterne, and

+Voltaire. The "glue of unanimity"--to use an expression of the old

+pedantic Budæus--has united the widely disparate qualities of his

+personality. His outlook upon life is the outlook of Anatole France.

+His vast learning is worn with an air almost mocking. After the bricks

+and mortar of the realists, after the lyric pessimism of the morally

+and politically disillusioned generation following the Franco-German

+war, his genius comes in the nature of a consoling apparition. Like his

+own Dr. Trublet, in Histoire Comique, he can say: "_Je tiens boutique

+de mensonges. Je soulage, je console. Peut-il consoler et soulager sans

+mentir?_" And he does deceive us with the resources of his art, with

+the waving of his lithe wand which transforms whales into weasels,

+mosques into cathedrals.

+

+Perhaps too much stress has been set upon his irony. Ironic he is with

+a sinuosity that yields only to Renan. It is irony rather in the shape

+of the idea, than in its presentation; atmospheric is it rather than

+surface antithesis, or the witty inversion of a moral order; he is a

+man of sentiment, Shandeàn sentiment as it is at times. But the note we

+always hear, if distantly reverberant, is the note of pity. To be all

+irony is to mask one's humanity; and to accuse Anatole France of the

+lack of humanity is to convict oneself of critical colour-blindness.

+His writings abound in sympathetic overtones. His pity is without

+Olympian condescension. He is a most lovable man in the presence of the

+eternal spectacle of human stupidity and guile. It is not alone that he

+pardons, but also that he seeks to comprehend. Not emulating the cold

+surgeon's eye of a Flaubert, it is with the kindly vision of a priest

+he studies the maladies of our soul. In him there is an ecclesiastical

+_fond_. He forgives because he understands. And after his tenderest

+benediction he sometimes smiles; it may be a smile of irony; yet it is

+seldom cruel. He is an adroit determinist, yet sets no store by the

+logical faculties. Man is not a reasoning animal, he says, and human

+reason is often a mirage.

+

+But to label him with sentimentalism _à la russe_--the Russian pity

+that stems from Dickens--would shock him into an outburst. Conceive

+him, then, as a man to whom all emotional extravagance is foreign; as

+a detester of rhetoric, of declamation, of the phrase facile; as a

+thinker who assembles within the temple of his creations every extreme

+in thought, manners, sentiment, and belief, yet contrives to fuse this

+chaos by the force of his sober style. His is a style more linear than

+coloured, more for the eye than the ear; a style so pellucid that one

+views it suspiciously--it may conceal in its clear, profound depths

+strange secrets, as does some mountain lake in the shine of the sun.

+Even the simplest art may have its veils.

+

+In the matter of clarity, Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John

+Henry Newman, and if this same clarity was at one time a conventional

+quality of French prose, it is rarer in these days. Never syncopated,

+moving at a moderate _tempo_, smooth in his transitions, replete with

+sensitive rejections, crystalline in his diction, a lover and a master

+of large luminous words, limpid and delicate and felicitous, the very

+marrow of the man is in his unique style. Few writers swim so easily

+under such a heavy burden of erudition. A loving student of books, his

+knowledge is precise, his range wide in many literatures. He is a true

+humanist. He loves learning for itself, loves words, treasures them,

+fondles them, burnishes them anew to their old meanings--though he

+has never tarried in the half-way house of epigram. But, over all, his

+love of humanity sheds a steady glow. Without marked dramatic sense,

+he nevertheless surprises mankind at its minute daily acts. And these

+he renders for us as candidly "as snow in the sunshine"; as the old

+Dutch painters stir our nerves by a simple shaft of light passing

+through a half-open door, upon an old woman polishing her spectacles.

+M. France sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, notes them

+with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artist. He deals with

+ideas so vitally that they become human; yet his characters are never

+abstractions, nor serve as pallid allegories; they are all alive, from

+Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the Foro Romano of

+Sur la Pierre Blanche. He can depict a cat or a dog with fidelity; his

+dog Riquet bids fair to live in French literature. He is an interpreter

+of life, not after the manner of the novelist, but of life viewed

+through the temperament of a tolerant poet and philosopher.

+

+This modern thinker, who has shed the despotism of the positivist

+dogma, boasts the soul of a chameleon. He understands, he loves,

+Christianity with a knowledge and a fervour that surprise until one

+measures the depth of his affection for the antique world. To further

+confuse our perceptions, he exhibits a sympathy for Hebraic lore that

+can only be set down to a remote lineage. He has rifled the Talmud for

+its forgotten stories; he delights in juxtaposing the cultured Greek

+and the strenuous Paul; he adores the contrast of Mary Magdalen with

+the pampered Roman matron. Add to this a familiarity with the proceeds

+of latter-day science, astronomy in particular, with the scholastic

+speculation of the Renaissance, mediæval piety, and the Pyrrhonism

+of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are these contradictory

+elements, so many angles are there exposed to numerous cultures, so

+many surfaces avid for impressions, that we end in admiring the

+exercise of a magic which blends into a happy synthesis such a variety

+of moral dissonances, such moral preciosity. It is magic--though there

+are moments when we regard the operation as intellectual legerdemain

+of a superior kind. We suspect dupery. But the humour of France is

+not the least of his miraculous solvents; it is his humour that often

+transforms a doubtful campaign into a radiant victory. We see him, the

+protagonist of his own psychical drama, dancing on a tight rope in the

+airiest manner, capering deliciously in the void, and quite like a

+prestidigitator bidding us doubt the existence of his rope.

+

+His life long, Renan, despite his famous phrase, "the mania of

+certitude," was pursued by the idea of an absolute. He cried for

+proofs. To Berthelot he wrote: "I am eager for mathematics." It

+promised finality. As he aged, he was contented to seek an atmosphere

+of moral feeling; though he declared that "the real is a vast outrage

+on the ideal." He tremulously participated in the ritual of social

+life, and in the worship of the unknown god. He at last felt that

+Nature abhorred an absolute; that Being was ever a Becoming; that

+religion and philosophy are the result of a partial misunderstanding.

+All is relative, and the soul of man must ever feed upon chimeras! The

+Breton harp of Renan became sadly unstrung amid the shallow thunders of

+agnostic Paris.

+

+But France, his eyes quite open and smiling, gayly Pagan Anatole, does

+not demand proofs. He rejoices in a philosophic indifference, he

+has the gift of paradox. To Renan's plea for the rigid realities of

+mathematics, he might ask, with Ibsen, whether two and two do not make

+five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne's "What Know I?" he opposes

+Rabelais's "Do What Thou Wilt!" And then he adorns the wheel of Ixion

+with garlands.

+

+He believes in the belief of God. He swears by the gods of all times

+and climes. His is the cosmical soul. A man who unites in his tales

+something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyère's Characters, and the

+Lucian Dialogues, with faint flavours of Racine and La Fontaine, may be

+pardoned his polygraphic faiths. With Baudelaire he knows the tremours

+of the believing atheist; with Baudelaire he would restrain any show

+of irreverence before an idol, be it wooden or bronze. It might be the

+unknown god!--as Baudelaire once cried.

+

+This pleasing chromatism in beliefs, a belief in all and none, is not a

+new phenomenon. The classical world of thought has several matches for

+Anatole France, from the followers of Aristippus to the Sophists. But

+there is a specific note of individuality, a _roulade_ quite Anatolian

+in the Frenchman's writings. No one but this accomplished Parisian

+sceptic could have framed The Opinions of Jérôme Coignard and his

+wholly delightful scheme for a Bureau of Vanity; "man is an animal with

+a musket," he declares; Sylvestre Bonnard and M. Bergeret are new with

+a dynamic novelty.

+

+As Walter Pater was accused of a silky dilettanteism, so France, as

+much a Cyrenaic as the English writer, was nevertheless forced to step

+down from his ivory tower to the dusty streets and there demonstrate

+his sincerity by battling for his convictions. After the imbecile

+Dreyfus affair had rolled away, there was little talk in Paris of

+Anatole France, Epicurean. He was saluted with every variety of abuse,

+but this amateur of fine sensations had forever settled the charge of

+morose aloofness, of voluptuous cynicism. (Though to-day he is regarded

+with a certain suspicion by all camps.) At a similar point where the

+endurance of Ernest Renan had failed him, Anatole France proved his

+own faith. Renan during the black days of the Commune retired to

+Versailles, there to meditate upon the shamelessness of the brute,

+Caliban, with his lowest instincts unleashed. But France believes in

+the people, he has said that the future belongs to Caliban, and he

+would scout his master's conception of the Tyrant-Sage, a conception

+that Nietzsche partially transposed later to the ecstatic key of the

+Superman. M. France would probably advocate the head-chopping of such

+wise monster-despots. An aristocrat by culture and fastidiousness, he

+is without an _arrière-pensée_ of the snobbery of the intellect, of the

+cerebral exaltation displayed by Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts.

+

+When France published his early verse--his début was as a poet and

+Parnassian poet--Catulle Mendès divined the man. He wrote, "I can

+never think of Anatole France ... without fancying I see a young

+Alexandrian poet of the second century, a Christian, doubtless, who is

+more than half Jew, above all a neoplatonist, and further a pure theist

+deeply imbued with the teachings of Basilides and Valentinus, and

+the Perfumes of the Orphic poems of some recent rhetorician, in whom

+subtlety was pushed to mysticism and philosophy to the threshold of the

+Kabbalah."

+

+Some critics have accused him of not being able to build a book. He

+knows the rhythms of poems, but he "does not know" the harmony of

+essences, said the late Bernard Lazare; he is an excellent Parnassian

+but a mediocre philosopher: he is a charming _raconteur_, but he

+cannot compose a book. Precise in details, diffuse in ensembles, clear

+and confused, neat and ambiguous, continued M. Lazare, he searches

+his object in concentric circles. Furthermore, he has the soul of a

+Greek in the decadence, and the voice of a Sistine Chapel singer--pure

+and irresolute. To all this admission may be made without fear of

+decomposing the picture which France has set up before us of his own

+personality--a picture, however, he does not himself hesitate to efface

+from the canvas whenever his perversity prompts. He is all that his

+critic asserts and much more. It is this moral eclecticism, this jumble

+of opposites, this violent contrast of traits, and these apparently

+irreconcilable elements of his character, which appal, interest, yet

+make him so human. But his art never swerves; it records invariably

+the fluctuations of his spirit, a spirit at once desultory, savant, and

+subtle, records all in a style, concrete and clairvoyant.

+

+His books are not so much novels as chronicles of designedly simple

+structure; his essays are confessions; his confessions, a blending of

+the naïve and the corrupt, for there are corroding properties in these

+novel persuasive disenchantments. Upon the robust of faith Anatole

+France makes no more impression than do Augustine, Saint Teresa, the

+Imitation of Christ, or the Provincial Letters. Such _nuances_ of

+scepticism as his are for those who love the comedies of belief and

+disbelief. Not possessing the Huysmans intensity of temperament, France

+will never be betrayed into such affirmations; Huysmans, who dropped

+like a ripe plum into the basket of the ecclesiastical fruit-gatherer.

+France will never lose his balance in the fumes of a personal

+conversion. Of Plato himself he would ask: "What is Truth?" and if

+Pilate posed the same question, France would reply by handing him his

+Jardin d'Epicure--a veritable breviary of scepticism. In Socrates he

+would discover a congenial companion; yet he might mischievously allude

+to Montaigne "concerning cats," or quote Aristotle on the form of hats.

+A wilful child of philosophy and _belles-lettres_, he may be always

+expected to say the startling.

+

+Be humble! he exhorts. Be without intellectual pride! for the days of

+man, who is naught but a bit of animated pottery, are brief, and he

+vanishes like a spark. Thus Job--Anatole. Be humble! Even virtue may

+be unduly praised: "Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, we

+must recognise that it is concupiscence which makes saints. Without

+it there is no repentance, and it is repentance which makes saints."

+To become a saint one must have been first a sinner. He quotes, as

+an example, the conduct of the blessed Pelagia, who accomplished her

+pilgrimage to Rome by rather unconventional means. Here, too, we

+recognise the amiable casuistry of Anatole--Voltaire. And there is

+something of Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly's piety of imagination

+with impiety of thought, in France's pronouncement. He is a Chrysostom

+reversed; from his golden mouth issue spiritual blasphemies.

+

+Mr. Henry James has said that the province of art is "all life, all

+feeling, all observation, all vision." According to this rubric,

+France is a profound artist. He plays with the appearances of life,

+occasionally lifting the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood of

+his spectators by the sight of Buddha's shadow in some grim cavern

+beyond. He has the Gallic tact of adorning the blank spaces of theory

+and the ugly spots of reality. A student of Kant in his denial of the

+objective, we can never picture him as following Königsberg's sage

+in his admiration of the starry heavens and the moral law. Both are

+relative, would be the report of the Frenchman. But, if he is sceptical

+about things tangible, he is apt to dash off at a tangent and proclaim

+the existence of that "school of drums kept by the angels," which the

+hallucinated Arthur Rimbaud heard and beheld. His method of surprising

+life, despite his ingenuous manner, is sometimes as oblique as that of

+Jules Laforgue. And, in the words of Pater, his is "one of the happiest

+temperaments coming to an understanding with the most depressing of

+theories."

+

+For faith he yearns. He humbles himself beneath the humblest. He

+excels in picturing the splendours of the simple soul; yet faith has

+not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He admires the golden

+filigree of the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him. He stands

+at the portals of Paradise; there he lingers. He stoops to some rare

+and richly coloured feather. He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty,

+but he will not listen to the whirring of the wings from which it has

+fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France

+has in him something of Petronius and not a little of Saint Francis.

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+Born to the literary life, one of the elect whose career is at once

+a beacon of hope and despair for the less gifted or less fortunate,

+Anatole François Thibault first saw the heart of Paris in the year

+1844. The son of a bookseller, Noël France Thibault, his childhood was

+spent in and around his father's book-shop, No. 9 du quai Voltaire,

+and his juvenile memories are clustered about books. There are many

+faithful pictures of old libraries and book-worms in his novels. He has

+a moiety of that Oriental blood which is said to have tinctured the

+blood of Montaigne, Charles Lamb, and Cardinal Newman. The delightful

+Livre de Mon Ami gives his readers many glimpses of his early days.

+Told with incomparable naïveté and verve, we feel in its pages the

+charm of the writer's personality. A portrait of the youthful Anatole

+reveals his excessive sensibility. His head was large, the brow was

+too broad for the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm mouth

+contradict the possible weakness in the lower part of the face. It

+was in the eyes, however, that the future of the child might have

+been discerned--they were lustrous, beautiful in shape, with the

+fulness that argued eloquence and imagination. He was, he tells us,

+a strange boy, whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second St.

+Simon Stylites, and, later, the author of a history of France in fifty

+volumes. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre and Suzanne in

+this memoir. His tenderness of touch and power of evoking the fairies

+of childhood are to be seen in Abeille. The further development of the

+boy may be followed in Pierre Nozière. In college life, he was not a

+shining figure, like many another budding genius. He loved Virgil and

+Sophocles, and his professors of the Stanislas College averred that

+he was too much given to day-dreaming and preoccupied with matters

+not set forth in the curriculum, to benefit by their instruction.

+But he had wise parents--he has paid them admirable tributes of his

+love--who gave him his own way. After some further study in L'Ecole

+des Chartes, he launched himself into literature through the medium

+of a little essay, La Légende de Sainte Radégonde, reine de France.

+This was in 1859. Followed nine years later a study of Alfred de

+Vigny, and in 1873 Les Poëmes dorées attracted the attention of the

+Parnassian group then under the austere leadership of Leconte de Lisle.

+Les Noces Corinthiennes established for him a solid reputation with

+such men as Catulle Mendès, Xavier de Ricard, and De Lisle. For this

+last-named poet young France exhibited a certain disrespect--the elder

+was irritable, jealous of his dignity, and exacted absolute obedience

+from his neophytes; unluckily a species of animosity arose between the

+pair. When, in 1874, he accepted a post in the Library of the Senate,

+Leconte de Lisle made his displeasure so heavily felt that France

+soon resigned. But he had his revenge in an article which appeared

+in _Le Temps_, and one that put the pompous academician into a fury.

+Catulle Mendès sang the praises of the early France poems: "Les Noces

+Corinthiennes alone would have sufficed to place him in the first rank,

+and to preserve his name from the shipwreck of oblivion," declared M.

+Mendès.

+

+In 1881, with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard he won the attention of

+the reading world, a crown from the Academy, and the honour of being

+translated into a half-dozen languages. From that time he became an

+important figure in literary Paris, while his reputation was further

+fortified by his criticisms of books--vagrom criticism, yet charged

+with charm and learning. He followed Jules Claretie on _Le Temps_,

+and there he wrote for five years (1886-1891) the _critiques_, which

+appeared later in four volumes, entitled La Vie Littéraire. Georg

+Brandes had said that, in the strict sense of the word, M. France is

+not a great critic. But Anatole France has said this before him. He

+despises pretentious official criticism, the criticism that distributes

+good and bad marks to authors in a pedagogic fashion. He may not be so

+"objective" as his one-time adversary, Ferdinand Brunetière, but he is

+certainly more convincing.

+

+The quarrel, a famous one in its day, seems rather faded in our days

+of critical indifference. After his clever formula, that there is no

+such thing as objective criticism, that all criticism but records the

+adventures of one's soul among the masterpieces, France was attacked

+by Brunetière--of whom the ever-acute Mr. James once remarked that

+his "intelligence has not kept pace with his learning." Those critical

+watchwords, "subjective" and "objective," are things of yester-year,

+and one hopes, forever. But in this instance there was much ink spilt,

+witty on the part of France, deadly earnest from the pen of Brunetière.

+The former annihilated his adversary by the mode metaphysical. He

+demonstrated that in the matter of judgment we are prisoners of our

+ideas, and he also formed a school that has hardly done him justice,

+for every impressionistic value is not necessarily valid. It is easy

+to send one's soul boating among masterpieces and call the result

+"criticism"; the danger lies in the contingency that one may not boast

+the power of artistic navigation possessed by Anatole France, a master

+steersman in the deeps and shallows of literature.

+

+His own critical contributions are notable. Studies of Chateaubriand,

+Flaubert, Renan, Balzac, Zola, Pascal, Villiers de l'Isle Adam,

+Barbey d'Aurevilly, Rabelais, Hamlet, Baudelaire, George Sand, Paul

+Verlaine--a masterpiece of intuition and sympathy this last--and many

+others, vivify and adorn all they touch. A critic such as Sainte-Beuve,

+or Taine, or Brandes, France is not; but he exercises an unfailing

+spell in everything he signs. His "august vagabondage"--the phrase is

+Mr. Whibley's--through the land of letters has proved a boon to all

+students.

+

+In 1897 he was received at the Académie Française, as the successor

+of Ferdinand de Lesseps. His addresses at the tombs of Zola and Renan

+are matters of history. As a public speaker, France has not the fiery

+eloquence of Jean Jaurès or Laurent Tailhade, but he displays a cool

+magnetism all his own. And he is absolutely fearless.

+

+It is not through lack of technique that the structure of the France

+novels is so simple, his tales plotless, in the ordinary meaning of

+the word. Elaborate formal architecture he does not affect. The novel

+in the hands of Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola would seem to

+have reached its apogee as a canvas upon which to paint a picture of

+manners. In the sociological novel, the old theatrical climaxes are

+absent, the old recipes for cooking character find no place. Even the

+love motive is not paramount. The genesis of this form may be found in

+Balzac, in whom all the modern fiction is rooted. Certain premonitions

+of the _genre_ are also encountered in L'Education Sentimentale of

+Flaubert, with its wide gray horizons, its vague murmurs of the

+immemorial mobs of vast cities, its presentation of undistinguished men

+and women. Truly democratic fiction, by a master who hated democracy

+with creative results.

+

+Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Edouard Estaunie, Rosny (the brothers

+Bex), René Bazin, Bertrand, and the astonishing Paul Adam are in

+the van of this new movement of fiction with ideas, endeavouring to

+exorcise the "demon of staleness." French fiction in the last decade

+of the past century saw the death of the naturalistic school. Paris

+had become a thrice-told tale, signifying the wearisome "triangle"

+and the chronicling of flat beer. Something new had to be evolved.

+Lo! the sociological novel, which discarded the familiar machinery of

+fiction, rather than miss the new spirit. It is unnecessary to add that

+in America the fiction of ideas has not been, thus far, of prosperous

+growth; indeed, it is viewed with suspicion.

+

+Loosely stated, the fiction of Anatole France may be divided into

+three kinds: fantastic, philosophic, and realistic. This arbitrary

+grouping need not be taken literally; in any one of his tales we may

+encounter all three qualities. For example, there is much that is

+fantastic, philosophic, real, in that moving and wholly human narrative

+of Sylvestre Bonnard. France's familiarity with cabalistic and exotic

+literatures, his deep love and comprehension of the Latin and Greek

+classics, his knowledge of mediæval legends and learning, coupled with

+his command of supple speech, enable him to project upon a ground-plan

+of simple narrative extraordinary variations.

+

+The full flowering of France's knowledge and imagination in things

+patristic and archæologic is to be seen in Thaïs, a masterpiece of

+colour and construction. Thaïs is that courtesan of Alexandrin,

+renowned for her beauty, wit, and wickedness, who was converted by the

+holy Paphnutius, saint and hermit of the Thebaïd. How the devil finally

+dislodges from the heart of Paphnutius its accumulation of virtue, is

+told in an incomparable manner. If Flaubert was pleased by the first

+offering of his pupil, Guy de Maupassant, (Boule de Suif), what would

+he not have said after reading Thaïs? The ending of the wretched monk,

+following his spiritual victories as a holy man perched on a pillar--a

+memory of the author's youthful dream--is lamentable. He loves Thaïs,

+who dies; and thenceforth he is condemned to wander, a vampire in this

+world, a devil in the next. A monument of erudition, thick with pages

+of jewelled prose, Thaïs is a book to be savoured slowly and never

+forgotten. It is the direct parent of Pierre Loüys's Aphrodite, and

+later evocations of the antique world.

+

+Of great emotional intensity is Histoire Comique (1903). It is a study

+of the histrionic temperament, and full of the major miseries and

+petty triumphs of stage life. It also contains a startling incident,

+the suicide of a lovelorn actor. The conclusion is violent and morbid.

+The nature of the average actress has never been etched with such

+acrid precision. There are various tableaux of behind and before the

+footlights; a rehearsal, an actor's funeral, and the life of the

+greenroom. Set forth in his most disinterested style, M. France shows

+us that he can handle with ease so-called "objective" fiction. His

+Doctor Trublet is a new France incarnation, wonderful and kindly old

+consoler that he is. He is attached as house physician to the Odéon,

+and to him the comedians come for advice. He ministers to them body and

+soul. His discourse is Socratic. He has wit and wisdom. And he displays

+the motives of the heroine so that we seem to gaze through an open

+window. As vital as Sylvestre Bonnard, as Bergeret, Trublet is truly an

+avatar of Anatole France. Histoire Comique! The title is a rare jest

+aimed at mundane and bohemian vanity.

+

+Passing Jocaste et le Chat maigre, and Le Puits de Sainte-Claire, we

+come to L'Etui de Nacre, a volume of tales published in 1892. This

+book may be selected as typical of a certain side of its author, a

+side in which his fantasy and historic sense meet on equal terms. The

+most celebrated is Le Procurateur de Judée, who is none other than

+Pontius Pilate, old, disillusioned of public ambition, and grumbling,

+as do many retired public officers, at the ingratitude of governments

+and princes. To his friend he confesses finally, after his memory

+has been vainly prompted, that he has no recollection of Jesus, a

+certain anarchistic prophet of Judea, condemned by him to death. His

+final phrases give us, as in the flare of lightning, the withering,

+double-edged irony of the author. He has quite forgotten the tremendous

+events that occurred in Jerusalem; forgotten, too, is Jesus. Not all

+the stories that follow, not the pious records of Sainte Euphrosine, of

+Sainte Oliverie et Liberetta, of Amyeus and Celestin, of Scolastica,

+can rob the reader of this first cruel impression. In Balthasar the

+narratives are of a superior quality. Nothing could be better, for

+example, than the recital of the Ethiopian king who sought the love

+of Balkis, Queen of Sheba, was accepted, after proofs of his bravery,

+and then quietly forgotten. He studies the secrets of the spheres,

+and when Balkis, repenting of her behaviour, seeks Balthasar anew, it

+is too late. He has discovered the star of Bethlehem which leads him

+straightway to the crib in company with Gaspar and Melchior, there to

+worship the King of Kings. Powerful, too, in its fantastic evocation is

+La Fille de Lilith, which relates the adventure of a modern Parisian

+with a deathless daughter of Adam's first wife, Lilith, so named in the

+Talmud. Laeta Acilia tells us one of France's best anecdotes about a

+Roman matron residing at Marseilles during the reign of Tiberius. She

+encounters Mary Magdalen, who almost converts the woman by a promise

+of children, long desired. The conclusion is touching. It discloses

+admirably the psychology of the two women. L'Oeuf Rouge is a tale

+of Cæsarian madness, and the bizarre Le Réséda du Curé is so simply

+related that we are disarmed by the style.

+

+A graceful collection is that called Clio, illustrated in the highly

+decorative manner of Mucha. Possibly the first is the best, a story

+of Homer. Some confess a preference for a Gaulish recital of the

+times when Cæsar went to Britain. Napoleon, too, is in the list.

+An interesting discussion of Napoleon and the Napoleonic legend is

+in a full-fledged novel, The Red Lily. "Napoleon," says one of its

+characters, "was violent and frivolous; therefore profoundly human....

+He desired with singular force, all that most men esteem and desire. He

+had the illusions which he gave to the people. He believed in glory.

+He retained always the infantile gravity which finds pleasure in

+playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence which makes

+good military men. It is this vulgar grandeur which makes heroes, and

+Napoleon is the perfect hero. His brain never surpassed his hand--that

+hand, small and beautiful, which crumpled the world.... Napoleon lacked

+interior life.... He lived from the outside." In the art of attenuating

+great reputations Anatole France has had few superiors.

+

+This novel displeased his many admirers, who pretend to see in it the

+influence of Paul Bourget. Yet it is a memorable book. Paul Verlaine is

+depicted in it with freshness, that poet Paul, and his childish soul so

+ironically, yet so lovingly distilled by his critic. There are glimpses

+of Florence, of Paris; the study of an English girl-poet will arouse

+pleasant memories of a lady well known to Italian, Parisian, and London

+art life. And there is the sculptor, Jacques Dechartres, who may be a

+mask, among many others of M. France. But Chouiette-Verlaine is the

+lode-stone of the novel.

+

+Where the ingenuity and mental flexibility, not to say historical

+mimicry, of France are seen at their supreme, is in La Rôtisserie de la

+Reine Pédauque. Jacques Tournebroche, or Turnspit, is an assistant in

+the cook-shop of his father, in old Paris. He is of a studious mind,

+and becomes the pupil of the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, "who despises men

+with tenderness," a figure that might have stepped out of Rabelais,

+though baked and tempered in the refining fires of M. France's

+imagination. Such a man! Such an ecclesiastic! He adores his maker and

+admires His manifold creations, especially wine, women, and song. He

+has more than his share of human weakness, and yet you wonder why he

+has not been canonised for his adorable traits. He is a glutton and a

+wine-bibber, a susceptible heart, a pious and deeply versed man. Nor

+must the rascally friar be forgotten, surely a memory of Rabelais's

+Friar Jhon. There are scenes in this chronicle that would have made

+envious the elder Dumas; scenes of swashbuckling, feasting, and

+bloodshed. There is an astrologer who has about him the atmosphere of

+the black art with its imps and salamanders, and an ancient Jew who

+is the Hebraic law personified. So lifelike is Jérôme Coignard that

+a book of his opinions was bound to follow. His whilom pupil Jacques

+is supposed to be its editor. Le Jardin d'Epicure and Sur la Pierre

+Blanche (1905) are an excuse for the opinions of M. France on many

+topics--religion, politics, science, and social life.

+

+Not-withstanding their loose construction, they are never inchoate.

+That the ideas put forth may astound by their perversity, their

+novelty, their nihilism, their note of cosmic pessimism, is not to

+be denied. Our earth, "a miserable small star," is a drop of mud

+swimming in space, its inhabitants mere specks, whose doings are not

+of importance in the larger curves of the universe's destiny. Every

+illustration, geological, astronomical, and mathematical, is brought to

+bear upon this thesis--the littleness of man and the uselessness of his

+existence. But France loves this harassed animal, man, and never fails

+to show his love. Interspersed with moralising are recitals of rare

+beauty, Gallion and Par la Porte de Corne ou par la Porte d'Ivoire.

+Here the classic scholar, that is the base of France's temperament,

+fairly shines.

+

+In the four volumes of Histoire Contemporaine we meet a new Anatole

+France, one who has deserted his old attitude of Parnassian

+impassibility for a suave anarchism, one who enters the arena of

+contemporaneous life bent on slaughter, though his weapon is the

+keen blade, never the rude battle-axe of polemics. It is his first

+venture in the fiction of sociology; properly speaking, it is the

+psychology of the masses, not exactly as Paul Adam handles it in his

+striking and tempestuous Les Lions (a book Balzacian in its fury of

+execution), but with the graver temper of the philosopher. He paints

+for us a provincial university town with its intrigues, religious,

+political, and social. The first of the series is L'Orme du Mail;

+follow Le Mannequin d'Osier, L'Anneau d'Améthyste, and Monsieur

+Bergeret à Paris (1901). The loop that ensnares this quartet of novels

+is the simple motive of ecclesiastical ambition. Not since Ferdinand

+Fabre's L'Abbé Tigrane has French literature had such portraits of

+the priesthood; Zola's ecclesiastics are ill-natured caricatures. The

+Cardinal Archbishop, Abbé Lataigne, and the lifelike Abbé Guitrel,

+with the silent, though none the less desperate, fight for the vacant

+bishopric of Turcoing--these are the three men who with Bergeret carry

+the story on their shoulders. About them circle the entire diocese

+and the tepid life of a university town. Yet anything further from

+melodramatic machinations cannot be imagined. Even the clerics of

+Balzac seem exaggerated in comparison. The protagonist is a professor,

+a master of conference of the University Faculty, a worthy man and

+earnest, though by no means of an exalted talent. He has the misfortune

+of being married to a worldly woman who does not attempt to understand

+him, much less to love him. She deceives him. The discovery of this

+deceit is an episode the most curious in fiction. It would be diverting

+if it were not painful. It reveals in Bergeret the preponderance of

+the man of thought over the man of action. His pupil and false friend

+is a classical scholar, therefore the affair might have been worse!

+And he is given the scholar's excuse as a plea for forgiveness! But

+hesitating as appears Bergeret, he utilises his wife's treachery as a

+springboard from which to fly his miserable household. Henceforth, with

+his devoted sister and daughter, he philosophises at ease and becomes

+a Dreyfusard. His dog Riquet is the recipient of his deepest thoughts.

+His monologues in the presence of this animal are the best in the book.

+

+There are many characters in this serene and bitter tragi-comedy. A

+contempt, almost monastic, peeps out in the treatment of his women.

+They are often detestable. They behave as if an empire was at stake,

+though it is only a conspiracy whereby Abbé Guitrel is made Bishop

+of Turcoing. France always displays more pity for the frankly sinful

+woman than for the frivolous woman of fashion. There is also a subplot,

+the effort of a young Hebrew snob, Bonmont by name (Guttenberg,

+originally), to get into the exclusive hunting set of the Duc de Brécé.

+This hunt-button wins for the diplomatic Abbé Guitrel his coveted see.

+M. France is unequalled in his portrayal of the modern French-Hebrew

+millionaire, the Wallsteins and Bonmonts. He draws them without

+_parti-pris_. His prefect, the easy-going, cynical Worms-Clavelin,

+with his secret contempt of Jews and Gentiles alike, and his wife who

+collects ecclesiastical bric-à-brac, are executed by a great painter

+of character. He exposes with merciless impartiality a mob of men

+and women in high life. But his aristocrats are no better than his

+ecclesiastics or bankers. There is a comic Orléanist conspiracy. There

+are happenings that set your hair on end, and a cynicism at times which

+forces one to regret that the author left his study to mingle with the

+world. Nor is the strain relieved when poor Bergeret goes to Paris;

+there he is enmeshed by the Dreyfus party. There he comes upon stormy

+days, though high ideals never desert him. He is as placid in the face

+of contemptuous epithets and opprobrious newspaper attacks as he was

+calm when stones were hurled at his windows in the provinces. A man

+obsessed by general ideas, he is lovable and never a bore, though M.

+Faguet and several other critics have cried him stupid. In the "fire

+of the footlights" M. Bergeret pales. For the drama M. France has no

+particular voice, though he has written several charming playlets. Even

+the superior acting of Guitry could not make of Crainquibille much more

+than a touching episode.

+

+There is enough characterisation and incident in Histoire Contemporaine

+to ballast a half-dozen novelists with material. And there are

+treasures of humour and pathos. The success of the series has been

+awe-inspiring; indeed, awe-inspiring is the success of all the France

+books, and at a time when Parisian prophets of woe are lamenting the

+decline of literature. Nevertheless, here is a man who writes like an

+artist, whose work, web and woof, is literature, whose themes, with few

+exceptions, are not of the popular kind, whose politics are violently

+opposed to current superstition, whose very form is hybrid; yet he

+sells, and has sold, in the hundreds of thousands. Literature cannot be

+called moribund in the face of such a result. His is a case that sets

+one speculating without undue emphasis upon a certain superiority of

+French taste over English in the matter of fiction.

+

+The Life of Jeanne d'Arc (1908), a work of scholarship and mixed

+prejudices, does not, I am forced to admit, unduly interest me. Whether

+the astonishing statements set forth therein are true is a question

+that may concern Mr. Lang, but hardly the lovers of the real Anatole.

+The Isle of Penguins (1908) gave him back to us in all his original

+glory.

+

+An art, ironical, easy, fugitive, divinely untrammelled, divinely

+artificial, which, like a pure flame, blazes forth in an unclouded

+heaven ... _la gay a scienza_; light feet; wit; fire; grace; the dance

+of the stars; the tremor of southern light; the smooth sea--these

+Nietzschean phrases might serve as an epigraph for the work of that

+apostle of innocence and experience, Anatole France.

+

+

+

+

+V

+

+THE PESSIMIST'S PROGRESS

+

+J.-K. HUYSMANS

+

+    "Ah! Seigneur, donnez-moi la force et le courage

+    De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans dégoût."

+                                      --BAUDELAIRE.

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+Joris-Karl Huysmans has been called mystic, naturalist, critic,

+aristocrat of the intellect; he was all these, a mandarin of letters

+and a pessimist besides--no matter what other qualities persist

+throughout his work, pessimism is never absent; his firmament is

+clotted with black stars. He had a mediæval monk's contempt for

+existence, contempt for the mangy flock of mediocrity; yet his genius

+drove him to describe its crass ugliness in phrases of incomparable

+and enamelled prose. It is something of a paradox that this man of

+picturesque piety should have lived to be the accredited interpreter,

+the distiller of its quintessence, of that elusive quality,

+"modernity." The "intensest vision of the modern world," as Havelock

+Ellis puts it, Huysmans unites to the endowment of a painter the power

+of a rare psychologist, superimposed upon a lycanthropic nature. A

+collective title for his books might be borrowed from Zola: My Hatreds.

+He hated life and its eternal _bêtise_. His theme, with variations,

+is a strangling Ennui. With those devoted sons of Mother Church,

+Charles Baudelaire, Barbey D'Aurevilly, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and

+Paul Verlaine, eccentric sons whose actions so often dismayed their

+fellow worshippers of less genius, Huysmans has been affiliated. He

+was not a poet or, indeed, a man of overwhelming imagination. But he

+had the verbal imagination. He did not possess the novelist's talent.

+His was not the flamboyant genius of Barbey, nor had he the fantastic

+invention of Villiers. He seems closer to Baudelaire, rather by reason

+of his ironic, critical temperament than because of his creative gifts.

+Baudelaire's oriflamme, embroidered with preciously devised letters of

+gold, reads: Spleen and Ideal; upon the emblematic banner of Huysmans

+this motto is Spleen. His work at times seems like a prolongation in

+prose of Baudelaire's. And by reason of his exacerbated temper he

+became the most personal writer of his generation. He belonged to no

+school, and avoided, after his beginnings, all literary groups.

+

+He is recording-secretary of the petty miseries and ironies of the

+life about him. Over ugliness he becomes almost lyric. "The world

+is a forest of differences." His pen, when he depicts an attack of

+dyspepsia or neuralgia, or the nervous distaste of a hypochondriac

+for meeting people, is like the triple sting of a hornet. He is

+the prose singer of neurasthenia, a Hamlet doubting his digestion,

+a Schopenhauer of the cook-shops. When he paints the _nuance_ of

+rage and disgust that assails a middle-aged man at the sight of a

+burnt mutton-chop, his phrases are unforgettable. The tragedy of

+the gastric juices he has limned with a fulness of expression that

+almost lifts pathology to the dignity of art. A descendant of Flemish

+painters, sculptors, architects (Huysmans of Mechlin, the Antwerp-born

+painter of the seventeenth century, is said to be a forebear), he

+inherited their powers of envisaging exterior life; those painters

+for whom flowers, vegetable markets, butcher-shops, tiny gentle Dutch

+landscapes, gray skies, skies of rutilant flames, and homely details

+were surfaces to be passionately and faithfully rendered. This vision

+he has interpreted with pen instead of brush. He is a virtuoso of the

+phrase. He is a performer on the single string of self. He knows the

+sultry enharmonics of passion. He never improvises, he observes. All

+is willed and conscious, the cold-fire scrutiny of a trained eye,

+one keen to note the ignoble or any deviation from the normal. His

+pages are often sterile and smell of the lamp, but he has the candour

+of his chimera. Well has Remy de Gourmont called him an eye. In his

+prose, he sacrifices rhythmic variety and tone to colour. His rhythms

+are massive, his colour at times a furious fanfare of scarlet. Every

+word, like a note in a musical score, has its value and position. He

+intoxicates because of his marvellous speech, but he seldom charms.

+It is a sort of sinister verbal magic that steals upon one as this

+ancient mariner from the lower moral deeps of Paris fixes you with his

+glittering eye, and in his strangely modulated language tells tales of

+blasphemy and fish-wives' tales of a half-forgotten river below the bed

+of the Seine, of dull cafés and dreary suburbs, of bored men and stupid

+women, of sordid, opulent souls, souls spongy and voluptuous, mean

+lives and meaner alleys--such an epic of ennui, mediocrity, bizarre

+sins, and neurotic, superstitious creatures was never given the world

+until Huysmans wrote Les Sœurs Vatard and A Rebours. Entire vanished

+districts of Paris may be reconstructed from his chapters. Zola

+declared, when Guy de Maupassant and Huysmans appeared side by side in

+Les Soirées de Médan, that the latter was the realist.

+

+The unity of form and substance in Huysmans is a distinguishing trait.

+He had early mastered literary technique, and the handling of his

+themes varies but little. There are, however, two or three typical

+varieties of description which may be quoted as illustrations of his

+etched and jewel-like prose. A cow hangs outside a butcher-shop:

+

+As in a hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass.

+Veins shot out on every side like the trails of bindweed; dishevelled

+branch-work extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of

+entrails unfurled their violent-tinted corollas, and big clusters of

+fat stood out, a sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh.

+

+Surely a subject for Snyders or Jan Steen.

+

+Léon Bloy somewhere describes Huysmans's treatment of the French

+language as "dragging his images by the heels or the hair up and down

+the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax." Huysmans, in A Rebours,

+had called M. Bloy "an enraged pamphleteer whose style was at once

+exasperated and precious." And can magnificence of phrase in evoking a

+picture go further than the following which shows us Gustave Moreau's

+Salome:

+

+In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of

+this church, Salome, her left arm extended in a gesture of command,

+her bent right arm holding on the level of the face a great lotus,

+advances slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who

+crouches on the floor. With collected, almost anguished countenance,

+she begins the lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses

+of the aged Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of

+the whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her

+skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal

+robes sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold, the

+jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone, bursts

+into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned,

+tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling wings, marbled with

+carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered with steel blue, streaked

+with peacock green.

+

+Gautier,--who was for Huysmans only a prodigious reflector--Flaubert,

+Goncourt, could not have excelled this verbal painting, this bronze and

+baroque prose, which is both precise and of a splendour. Huysmans can

+describe a herring as would a great master of sumptuous still-life:

+

+Thy garment is the palette of setting suns, the rust of old copper,

+the brown gilt of Cordovan leather, the sandal and saffron tints of

+the autumn foliage. When I contemplate thy coat of mail I think of

+Rembrandt's pictures. I see again his superb heads, his sunny flesh,

+his gleaming jewels on black velvet. I see again his rays of light in

+the night, his trailing gold in the shade, the dawning of suns through

+dark arches.

+

+Or this invocation when Huysmans had begun to experience that shifting

+of moral emotion which we call his "conversion"--he was a Roman

+Catholic born, therefore was not converted; he but reverted to his

+early faith:

+

+Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who

+desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the

+night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient

+faith.

+

+His method is not the recital of events, but the description of a

+situation; a scene, not a narration, but large tableaux. Action there

+is little; he is more static than dynamic. His characters, like

+Goncourt's, suffer from paralysis of the will, from hyperæsthesia.

+The soul in its primordial darkness interests him, and he describes

+it with the same penetrating prose as he does the carcass of an

+animal. He is a luminous mystic who speaks in terms of extravagant

+naturalism. A physiologist of the soul, at times his soul dwelt in

+a boulevard. His violent, vivid style so excellent in setting forth

+coloured sensations is equally admirable in the construction of

+metaphors which make concrete the abstract. There is the element of

+the grotesque, of the old, ribald Fleming, in Huysmans, though without

+a trace of hearty Flemish humour. He once said that the memory of the

+inventor of card-playing ought to be blessed, the game kept closed

+the mouths of imbeciles. Nor is the pepper of sophistry absent. He

+sculptures his ideas. He is both morose and fulgurating. He squanders

+his emotions with polychromatic resignation unlike a Saint Augustine

+or a Newman; yet we are not deeply moved by his soul-experiences. It

+is not vibrating sincerity that we miss; it would be wrong to question

+his return to Catholicism. He is more convincing than Tolstoy; for

+one thing, there was no dissonance between his daily life and his

+writings, after the publication of En Route. Lucid as is his manner,

+clairvoyant as the exposition of his soul at the feet of God, there

+is, nevertheless, an absence of unction, of tenderness, which repels.

+Sympathy and tenderness are _bourgeois_ virtues for Huysmans. Too

+complicated to admire, even recognise, the sane or the simple, he

+remained the morbid carper after he entered La Trappe and Solesmes.

+As an oblate, his fastidiousness was wounded by the minor annoyances

+of a severe regimen; his stomach always ailed him. Perhaps to his weak

+digestion and a neuralgic tendency we owe the bitterness and pessimism

+of his art. He was not a normal man. He loathed the inevitable

+discords of life with a startling intensity. The venomous salt of his

+wit he sprinkles over the raw turpitude of men and women. Woman for

+him was not of the planetary sex, but either a stupid or a vicious

+creature; sometimes both. Impassible as he was, he could be shocked

+into a species of sub-acid eloquence if the theme were the inutility

+of mankind. No Hebraic prophet ever launched such poignant phrases of

+disgust and horror at the world and its works. His favourite reading

+was in the mystics, à Kempis, Saint Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and

+the Flemish Ruysbroeck.

+

+In a new edition of A Rebours he has told us that he was not pious as

+a youth, having been educated not at a religious school. A Rebours

+came out in 1884, and it was in July, 1892, at the age of forty-four,

+that he went to La Trappe de Notre-Dame d'lgny, situated near Fismes,

+and the Aisne and Marne. He confessed that he could not discover,

+during the eight intervening years, why he swerved to the Church of

+Rome. Diminution of vital energy was not the chief reason for his

+reversion. The operations of divine grace in Huysmans's case may be

+dated back to A Rebours. The modulation by the way of art was not a

+difficult one. And he had the good taste of giving us his experiences

+in the guise of art. It is the history of a conversion, though he is,

+without doubt, the Durtal of the books. The final explosion of grace

+after years of unconscious mining, the definite illumination on some

+unknown Road to Damascus, took place between the appearance of Là Bas

+and En Route. We are spared the _technique_ of faith reawakened. It had

+become part of his cerebral tissue. We are shown a Durtal, believer;

+also a Durtal profoundly disgusted with the oily, rancid food of La

+Trappe, and with the faces of some of his companions, and a Durtal who

+puffs surreptitious cigarettes. At Lourdes, in his last book, he is the

+same Durtal-Huysmans, grumbling at the odours of unwashed bodies, at

+the perspiring crowds, at the ignorance and cupidity of the shrine's

+guardians. A pessimist to the end. And for that reason he has often

+outraged the sensibilities of his coreligionists, who questioned his

+sincerity after such an exclamation as: "How like a rind of lard I

+must look!" uttered when he carried a dripping candle in a religious

+procession. But through the dreary mists of doubtings and black fogs of

+unfaith the lamp of the Church, a shining point, drew to it from his

+chilly ecstasies this hedonist. Like Taine and Nietzsche, he craved for

+some haven of refuge to escape the whirring wings of Wotan's ravens.

+And in the pale woven air he saw the cross of Christ.

+

+Leslie Stephen wrote of Pascal: "Eminent critics have puzzled

+themselves as to whether Pascal was a sceptic or a genuine believer,

+having, I suppose, convinced themselves, by some process not obvious

+to me, that there is an incompatibility between the two characters."

+Huysmans may have been both sceptic and believer, but the dry fervour

+of the later books betrays a man who willingly humiliates and

+depreciates the intellect for the greater glory of God. Abbé Mugnier

+says that his sincerity is itself the form of his talent. His portrait

+of Simon the swineherd in En Route is mortifying to humans with proud

+stomachs; Huysmans penetrates the husks and filth and sees only a

+God-intoxicated soul. Here is, indeed, the "treasure of the humble."

+At first, religion with Durtal was æsthetic, the beauty of Gothic

+architecture, the pyx that ardently shines, the bells that boom, the

+odours of frankincense that rolled through the nave of some old vast

+cathedral with flame-coloured windows. In L'Oblat the feeling has

+widened and deepened. The walls of life have fallen asunder, the soul

+glows in the twilight of the subliminal self, glows with a spiritual

+phosphorescence. Huysmans is nearer, though not face to face with, God.

+The object of his prayer is the Virgin Mary; to the hem of her robe he

+clings like a frightened child at its mother's dress. All this may have

+been auto-suggestion, or the result of the "will to believe," according

+to the formula of Professor William James, yet it was satisfying to

+Huysmans, whose life was singularly lonely.

+

+He was born on February 5, 1848, in Paris, and died in that city on

+May 12, 1907. Christened Charles-Marie-George, he signed his books

+Joris-Karl. He was educated at the Lyceum Saint-Louis. His family

+originally resided at Breda, Holland. His father was lithographer and

+painter. His mother was of Burgundian stock and boasted a sculptor

+in her ancestral line. Huysmans came fairly by his love of art. He

+contemplated the profession of law; but, at the age of twenty, he

+entered the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained until 1897,

+a model, unassuming official, fond of first editions, posters, rare

+prints, and a few intimates. He went then to live at Ligugé, but

+returned to Paris after the expulsion of the Benedictines. He was

+elected first president of the Academy Goncourt, April 7, 1900. He was

+nominated chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and given the rosette

+of officer by Briand, though Huysmans begged that he should have no

+military honours at his funeral. It was for his excellent work as a

+civil servant that he was decorated, and not as a man of letters. At

+the time of his death, his reputation had suffered an eclipse; he was

+distrusted both by Catholics and free-thinkers. But he never wavered.

+Attacked by a cancerous malady, he suffered the atrocious martyrdom

+of his favourite Saint Lydwine. Léon Daudet, François Coppée, and

+Lucien Descaves were his unwearying attendants. At the last, he could

+still read the prayers for the dying. He was buried in his Benedictine

+habit. But what an artist perished in the making of an amateur monk!

+

+"His face," said an English friend, "with the sensitive, luminous

+eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire's portrait, the face of a resigned

+and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity of the

+divine order, but has no wish to make improper use of his discovery.

+He gave me the impression of a cat, courteous, perfectly polite, most

+amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot out his claws at the least

+word." (Huysmans, like Baudelaire, was fond of cats). When I saw him

+five years ago in Paris, I was struck by the essentially Semitic

+contour of his head--some legacy of remote ancestors from the far-away

+Meuse.

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+As a critic of painting Huysmans revealed himself the possessor of

+a temperament that was positively ferocious in the presence of an

+unsympathetic canvas. His vocabulary and peculiar gift of invective

+were then exercised with astounding verbal if not critical results.

+Singularly narrow in his judgments for a man of his general culture,

+his intensity of vision concentrated itself upon a few painters

+and etchers; during the latter part of his life only religious art

+interested him, as had the exotic and monstrous in earlier years. And

+even in the former sphere he restricted his admiration, rather say

+idolatry, to a few men; he sought for character, an ascetic type of

+character, the lean and meagre Saviours and saints of the Flemish

+primitives arousing in him a fire almost fanatical. Between a Roger Van

+der Weyden and a Giorgione there would be little doubt as to Huysmans's

+choice; the golden colour-music of the great Venetian harmonist would

+have reached deaf ears. His Flemish ancestry told in his æsthetic

+tastes. He once said that he preferred a Leipsic man to a Marseilles

+man, "the big, phlegmatic, taciturn Germans to the gesticulating and

+rhetorical people of the south."

+

+Huysmans never betrayed the slightest interest in doctrines of

+equality; for him, as for Baudelaire, socialism, the education of the

+masses, or democratic prophylactics were hateful. The virus of the

+"exceptional soul" was in his veins. Nothing was more horrible to

+him than the idea of universal religion, universal speech, universal

+government, with their concomitant universal monotony. The world is

+ugly enough without the ugliness of universal sameness. Variety alone

+makes this globe bearable. He did not believe in art for the multitude,

+and the tableau of a billion humans bellowing to the moon the hymn of

+universal brotherhood made him shiver--as well it might. Tolstoy and

+his semi-idiotic mujik, to whom Beethoven was impossible, aroused in

+Huysmans righteous indignation. Art is for those who have the brains

+and patience to understand it. It is not a free port of entry for poet

+and philistine alike. To it, though many are called, few are chosen. So

+is it with religion. That marvellous specimen of psychology, En Route,

+gave more offence to Roman Catholics than it did to sectarians of other

+faiths. Huysmans was a mystic, and to his temperament, as taut as a

+finely attuned fiddle, the easy-going methods of the average worshipper

+were absolutely blasphemous. So he could write in En Route: "And

+he--Durtal--called to mind orators petted like tenors, Monsabré, Didon,

+those Coquelins of the Church, and, lower yet than those products of

+the Catholic training school, that bellicose booby the Abbé d'Hulst."

+That same abbé lived to see the writer repentant and, himself, not only

+to forgive, but to write eulogistic words of the man who had abused him.

+

+L'Art Moderne was published between covers in 1883. It deals with

+the official salons of 1879, 1880-81 and the exposition of the

+Independents, 1880-81. The appendix, 1882, contains thumbnail sketches

+of Caillebotte, whose bequest to the Luxembourg of impressionistic

+paintings, including Manet's Olympe, stirred all artistic and

+inartistic Paris; Gauguin, Mlle. Morisot, Guillaumin, Renoir, Pissaro,

+Sisley, Claude Monet, "the marine painter _par excellence_"; Manet,

+Roll, Redon, all men then fighting the stream of popular and academic

+disfavour. Since Charles Baudelaire's Salons, no volume on the current

+Paris exhibitions has appeared of such solid knowledge and literary

+power as Huysmans's. Admitting his marked prejudices, his numerous

+dogmatic utterances, there is nevertheless an attractive artistic

+quality backed up by the writer's stubborn convictions that persuade

+where the more liberal and brilliant Théophile Gautier never does.

+"Théo," who said that if he pitched his sentences in the air they

+always fell on their feet, like a cat, leaned heavily on his verbal

+magic. But even in that particular he is no match for Huysmans, who,

+boasting the blood of Fleming painters, sculptors, and architects, uses

+his pen as an artist his brush. Take another bit from his study of

+Moreau's Salome:

+

+"A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath innumerable

+arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled

+with varicoloured bricks, set with mosaics, encrusted with lapis-lazuli

+and sardonyx in a palace like the basilica of an architecture at once

+Mussulman and Byzantine. In the centre of the tabernacle surmounting

+the altars, fronted with rows of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch

+Herod, the tiara on his head, his legs pressed together, his hands on

+his knees. His face was yellow, parchmentlike, annulated with wrinkles,

+withered by age; his long beard floated like a cloud on the jewelled

+stars that constellated the robe of netted gold across his breast.

+Around this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose of a Hindu

+god, perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of vapour, pierced, as by

+the phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious stones set

+in the sides of the throne; then the vapour mounted, unrolling itself

+beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled with the powdered gold

+of great sun-rays fallen from the dome."... And of Salome he writes:

+"In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des

+Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman

+Salome that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing girl ...

+she had become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess

+of immortal Hysteria; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,

+insensible Beast, poisoning like Helen of old all that go near her, all

+that look upon her, all that she touches."

+

+Not only is there an evocation of material splendour in the above

+passages taken from A Rebours, but a note of cenobitic contempt for

+woman's beauty, which sounds throughout the books of Huysmans. It may

+be heard at its deepest in his study of Félicien Rops, the Belgian

+etcher and painter, who interpreted Baudelaire's _femmes damnées_.

+Rops, too, regarded woman in the light of a destroyer, a being banned

+by the early fathers of the Church, the matrix of sin. Huysmans's

+incomparable study of Rops--whose great powers have never been fully

+recognized because of his erotic and diabolic subjects--may be found in

+his Certains (1889).

+

+In his description of the Independent exposition (1880) to which

+Degas, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, Forain, and others sent

+canvases, Huysmans drifts into literary criticism; he saw analogies

+between the paintings of the realists, impressionists, and the modern

+men of fiction, Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola. "Have not," he asks, "the

+Goncourts fixed in a style deliberate and personal, the most ephemeral

+of sensations, the most fugacious of _nuances_?" So, too, have Manet,

+Monet, Pissaro, Raffaelli. Nor does he hesitate to make the avowal,

+still incomprehensible for those who are deceived by the prodigious

+blaring of critical trumpets, that Baudelaire is a true poet of genius;

+and that the _chef d'œuvre_ of fiction is Flaubert's L'Education

+Sentimentale. Naturally Edgar Degas is the only psychological

+interpreter of latter-day life. There is also a careful analysis

+of Manet's masterpiece, the Bar at the Folies-Bergères. Huysmans

+recognised Manet's indebtedness to Goya.

+

+Certains is a valuable volume. Therein are Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave

+Moreau, Degas, Bartholomé, Raffaelli, Stevens, Tissot, Wagner--the

+painter, not the composer; Huysmans admits but one form in music, the

+Plain Chant--Cézanne, Chéret, Whistler--which true to the tradition

+of Parisian carelessness is spelled "Wisthler," as Liszt years before

+was called "Litz"--Rops, Jan Luyken, Millet, Goya, Turner, Bianchi,

+and other men. He gives to Millet his just meed of praise, no more--he

+views him as a designer rather than as a great painter. We get Huysmans

+in his quintessence. Scattered through his novels--if one may dare to

+ascribe this title to such an amorphous form--there are eloquent and

+burning pages devoted to various painters, but not with the amplitude

+and cool science displayed in his studies of Degas, Moreau, Rops, The

+Monster in Art--a monstrous subject masterfully handled--and Whistler.

+He literally discovered Degas, and in future books on rhetoric surely

+Huysmans's descriptions of Degas's old workwomen sponging their creased

+backs cannot be excluded without doing violence to the expressive

+powers of the French language. His eye mirrored the most minute

+details--in that he was Dutch-Flemish; the same merciless scrutiny

+is pursued in the life of the soul--he was Flemish and Spanish:

+Ruysbroeck and St. John of the Cross, mystics both, with an amazing

+sense of the realistic.

+

+Without a spacious imagination, Huysmans was a man of the subtlest

+sensibilities. There is a wealth of critical divination in his studies

+of Moreau and Whistler. Twenty or thirty years ago it was not so easy

+to range these two enigmas. Huysmans did so, and, in company with Degas

+and Rops, placed them so definitely that critics have paraphrased his

+ideas ever since. Baudelaire had recognised the glacial genius of

+Rops; Huysmans definitely consecrated it in Certains. For Huysmans the

+theme of love aroused his mordant wit--Flaubert, Goncourt, Baudelaire

+were all summoned at one time or another in their respective careers

+to answer the charge of poisoning public morals! And what malicious

+commentaries were drawn and etched by the versatile Rops.

+

+Extraordinary as are Rops's delineations of Satan, the prose of

+Huysmans is not less graphic in interpreting the etched plate. In

+De Tout (1901) there is, literally, a little about everything. Not

+only are several unknown quarters of Paris sketched with a surprising

+freshness, but Huysmans goes far afield for his themes. He studies

+sleeping-cars and the sleepy city Bruges, the aquarium at Berlin--"most

+fastidious and most ugly"--the Gobelins, Quentin Matsys at Antwerp;

+but whether in illustrating with his pen the mobs at Lourdes or the

+intimate habits of a Parisian café, he never fails to achieve the exact

+phrase that illuminates. Nor is it all crass realism. His eye, the eye

+of a visionary as well as of a painter, penetrates to the marrow of the

+soul.

+

+A Rebours is the history of a decadent soul in search of an earthly

+paradise. His palace of art is near Paris, and in it the Duc des

+Esseintes assembles all that is rare, perverse, beautiful, morbid, and

+crazy in modern art and literature. A Rebours is in reality a very

+precious work of criticism by a distinguished critical temperament,

+written in a prose jewelled and shining, sharp as a Damascene dagger.

+This French writer's admiration for Moreau has been mentioned. Luyken

+comes in for his share; the bizarre Luyken of Amsterdam (1649-1712).

+Odilon Redon, the lithographer and illustrator of Poe, is lauded by Des

+Esseintes. Redon's work is not lacking in subtlety, and it is sometimes

+disagreeable; possibly the latter quality is aimed at by the painter.

+Redon certainly had in Poe a congenial subject; in Baudelaire also, for

+he has accomplished some shivering plates commemorating Fleurs du Mal.

+

+Not such intractable reading as L'Oblat, withal difficult enough,

+is The Cathedral, which abounds in glorious chapters devoted to

+ecclesiastical painting, sculpture, and architecture. "It"--the

+Cathedral--"was as slender and colourless as Roger Van der Weyden's

+Virgins, who are so fragile, so ethereal, that they might blow away

+were they not held down to earth by the weight of their brocades

+and trains," is a passage in this storehouse of curious liturgical

+learning. Matsys, Memling, Dierck Bouts, Van der Weyden, painted great

+religious pictures because they possessed a naïve faith. Nowadays your

+painter has no faith; better, then, stick like Degas to ballet-girls

+and not soil canvas with profane burlesques. Always extreme, Huysmans

+jumped from the worldly audacities of Manet to the rebellious Christ

+of Grünewald. Van Eyck touched him where Van Dyck did not. He

+disliked the "supersensual and sublimated Virgins of Cologne," and

+pronounced Botticelli's Virgins masquerading Venuses. The Van der

+Weyden triptych of the Nativity in the old museum, Berlin, filled him

+with raptures, pious and æsthetic. The "theatrical crucifixions, the

+fleshly coarseness of Rubens" are naught when compared to the early

+Flemings. His pages on Rembrandt are admirable reading, "Rembrandt,

+who had the soul of a Judaising Protestant ... with his serious but

+fervid wit, his genius for concentration, for getting a spot of the

+essence of sunlight into the heart of darkness ... has accomplished

+great results; and in his Biblical scenes has spoken a language which

+no one before him had attempted to lisp." As Huysmans loathed the

+rancid and voluptuous "sacred" music of Gounod and other comic-opera

+writers of masses and hymns in the Church, so he abominated the modern

+"sacred" painters. James Tissot and Munkacsy come in for a critical

+flagellation. What could be more dazzling than his account of a certain

+stained-glass window in his beloved Cathedral at Chartres:

+

+"Up there high in the air, as they might be Salamanders, human beings,

+with faces ablaze and robes on fire, dwelt in a firmament of glory;

+but these conflagrations were enclosed and limited by an incombustible

+frame of darker glass which set off the youthful and radiant joy of

+the flames by the contrast of melancholy, the suggestion of the more

+serious and aged aspect presented by gloomy colouring. The bugle-cry

+of red, the limpid confidence of white, the repeated hallelujahs of

+yellow, the virginal glory of blue, all the quivering crucible of glass

+was dimmed as it neared this border dyed with rusty red, the tawny

+hues of sauces, the harsh purples of sandstone, bottle green, tinder

+brown, fuliginous blacks, and ashy grays." Not even Arthur Rimbaud,

+in his half-jesting sonnet on the "Vowels," indulged in such daring

+colour symbolism as Huysmans. For a specimen of his most fulgurating

+style read his Camïeu in Red, in a little volume edited by Mr. Howells

+entitled Pastels in Prose, and translated by Stuart Merrill.

+

+"To be rich, very rich, and found in Paris in face of the triumphal

+ambulance, the Luxembourg, a public museum of contemporary painting!"

+he cries in one of his essays. He was the critic of Modernity, as

+Degas is its painter, Goncourt its exponent in fiction, Paul Bourget

+its psychologist. He lashes himself into a fine rage over the enormous

+prices paid some years ago by New York millionaires for the work of

+such artists as Bouguereau, Dubufe, Gérôme, Constant, Rosa Bonheur,

+Knaus, Meissonier. The Christ before Pilate, sold for 600,000 francs,

+sets him fulminating against its painter. "Cet indigent décor brossé

+par le Brésilien de la piété, par le rastaquouère de la peinture, par

+Munkacsy."

+

+Joris-Karl Huysmans should have been a painter; his indubitable gift

+for form and colour were by some trick of nature or circumstance

+transposed to literature. So he brought to the criticism of pictures an

+eye abnormal in its keenness, and to this was superadded an abnormal

+power of expression.

+

+After reading his Three Primitives you may be tempted to visit Colmar,

+where hang in the museum several paintings by Mathias Grünewald, who is

+the chief theme of the French writer's book. Colmar is not difficult

+to reach if you are in Paris, or pass through Strasburg. It is a town

+of over 35,000 inhabitants, the capital of Upper Alsace and about

+forty miles from Strasburg. There are several admirable specimens of

+the Rhenish school there, Van Eyck and Martin Schongauer (born 1450

+in Colmar), the great engraver. His statue by Bartholdi is in the

+town, and, as Huysmans rather delicately puts it, is an "emetic for

+the eyes." He always wrote what he thought, and notwithstanding the

+odour of sanctity in which he departed this life, his name and his

+books are still anathema to many of his fellow Catholics. But as to the

+quality of this last study there can be no mistake. It is masterly,

+revealing the various Huysmanses we admire: the mystic, the realist,

+the penetrating critic of art, and the magnificent tamer of language.

+Hallucinated by his phrases, you see cathedrals arise from the mist

+and swim so close to you that you discern every detail before the

+vision vanishes; or some cruel and bloody canvas of the semi-demoniacal

+Grünewald, on which a hideous Christ is crucified, surrounded by

+scowling faces. The swiftness in executing the verbal portrait allows

+you no time to wonder over the method; the evocation is complete, and

+afterward you realise the magic of Huysmans.

+

+In his Là Bas he described the Grünewald Crucifixion, once in the

+Cassel Museum, now at Carlsruhe. A tragic realism invests this work of

+Grünewald, who is otherwise a very unequal painter. Huysmans puzzled

+over the Bavarian, who was probably born at Aschaffenburg. Sundvart,

+Waagen, Goutzwiller, and Passavant have written of him. He was born

+about 1450 and died about 1530. He lived his later years in Mayence,

+lonely and misanthropic. Every one speaks of Dürer, the Cranachs,

+Schongauer, Holbein, but even during his lifetime Grünewald was not

+famous. To-day he is esteemed by those for whom the German and Belgian

+Primitives mean more than all Italian art. There is a bitterness, a

+pessimism, a delight in torture for the sake of torture in Grünewald's

+treatment of sacred subjects that must have shocked his more easy-going

+contemporaries. Huysmans, as is his wont, does not spare us in his

+recital of the horrors of that Colmar Crucifixion. For me the one now

+at Carlsruhe suffices. It causes a shudder, and some echo of the agony

+of the Passion permeates that solemn scene. Grünewald must have been a

+painter of fierce and exalted temperament. His Christs are ugly--the

+ugliness symbolical of the sins of the world;--this doctrine was upheld

+by Tertullian and Cyprian, Cyril and St. Justin.

+

+And the cadaverous flesh tones! Such is his fidelity, a fidelity

+almost pathologic, that two such eminent men as Charcot and Richet

+testified, after study, to the too painful verity of this early

+German's brushwork. He depicted with shocking realism the malady known

+as St. Anthony's Fire, and a still more pathological interpretation

+by Huysmans follows. But he warmly praises the fainting mother,

+one of the noble figures in German art. We allude now to the Colmar

+Crucifixion, with its curious introduction of St. John the Baptist in

+Golgotha, and the dark landscape through which runs a gloomy river.

+Fainting Mary, the mother of Christ, is upheld by the disciple John.

+There is a mysterious figure of a girl, an ugly but sorrowful face, and

+the lamb bearing the cross is at the foot of the cross. Audacious is

+the entire composition. It wounds the soul, and that is what Grünewald

+wished. His harsh nature saw in the crucifixion not a pious symbol but

+the death of a god, an unjust death. So he fulminates upon his canvas

+his hatred of the outrage. How tender he can be we see in this Virgin.

+

+On the back of this polyptique are a Resurrection and Annunciation.

+The latter is bad. The former is a dynamic picture representing Christ

+in a vast aureole arising to the sky, His guards tumbled over at the

+side of the tomb. There is an explosion of luminosity. Christ's face

+is radiant; He displays his palms upward, pierced by the nails. The

+floating aerial effect and the draperies are wonderfully handled. The

+museum wherein hang these works was formerly a convent of nuns, founded

+in 1232, and in 1849 turned into a museum. Huysmans rages, of course,

+over the change.

+

+He finds among the Grünewalds at Colmar--there are nine in all--a St.

+Anthony bearded, that reminds him of a Father Hecker born in Holland.

+What a simile, made by a man who probably never saw the American

+priest, except pictured!

+

+He visits Frankfort-on-the-Main, and afterward, characteristically

+pouring his vials of wrath upon this New Jerusalem, he visits the

+Staedel Museum and goes into ecstasies over that lovely head of a young

+woman called the Florentine, by an unknown master. Though he admires

+the Van der Weyden, the Bouts, and the Virgin of Van Eyck, he really

+has eyes only for this exquisite, vicious androgynous creature and

+for the Virgin by the Master of Flémalle. After a vivid description

+of the Florentine Cybele he inquires into her artistic paternity,

+waving aside the suggestion that one of the Venezianos painted her.

+But which one? There are over eleven, according to Lanzi. Huysmans

+will not allow Botticelli's name to be mentioned, though he discerns

+certain Botticellian qualities. But he has never forgiven Botticelli

+for painting the Virgin looking like the Venus, and he hates the

+paganism of the Renaissance with an early Christian fervour. (Fancy the

+later Joris-Karl Huysmans and the early Walter Pater in a discussion

+about the Renaissance.) Huysmans himself was a Primitive. Much that he

+wrote would have been understood in the Middle Ages. The old Adam in

+this Fleming, however, comes to the surface as he conjectures the name

+of the enigmatic heroine. Is it that Giulia Farnese, called "Giulia

+la bella"--_puritas impuritatis_--who became the favourite of Pope

+Alexander VI.? If it is--and then Huysmans writes some pages of perfect

+prose which suggest joyful depravity, as depraved as the people he

+paints with such marvellous colour and precision. It is a peep behind

+the scenes of a pagan Christian Rome.

+

+The Master of Flémalle, whose Virgin he describes at the close of this

+volume, was the Jacques Daret born in the early years of the fifteenth

+century, a fellow student of Roger van der Weyden under Campin at

+Tournay. We confess that, while we enjoy the verbal rhapsodies of the

+author, we were not carried away by this stately Virgin and Child by

+Daret, though there are many Darets that once passed as the work of

+Roger van der Weyden. It has not the sweet melancholy, this picture,

+of Hans Memlinc's Madonnas, and the Van Eyck in the same gallery,

+as well as the Van der Weyden, are both worth a trip across Europe

+to gaze upon. However, on the note of a rapt devotion Huysmans ends

+his book. The first edition, illustrated, was published in 1905, by

+Vanier-Messein. But there is a new (1908) edition, published by Plon,

+at Paris, and called Trois Eglises et Trois Primitifs. This latter is

+not illustrated. The three churches discussed are Notre Dame de Paris

+and its symbolism, Saint Germain-l'Auxerrois, and Saint Merry.

+

+Poor, unhappy, suffering Huysmans! He trod the Road to Damascus on foot

+and not in a pleasant motor-car like several of his successors. The

+intimate side of the man, so hidden by him, is now being revealed to us

+by his friends. Recently, in the _Revue de Paris_, Mme. Myriam Harry,

+the writer of The Conquest of Jerusalem, tells us of her friendship

+with Huysmans, with a rather sentimental anecdote about his weeping

+over a dead love. When she met him he was already attainted with

+the malady which tortured him to the end. A lifetime sufferer from

+neuralgia and dyspepsia, he was half blind for a few months before

+his death. He touchingly alludes to his illness as both a punishment

+and a reparation for things he wrote in his Lourdes. In a letter

+dated January 5, 1907, he avows that nothing is more dangerous than

+to celebrate sorrow; all his books celebrate the physical miseries of

+life, the sorrows of the soul. Humbly this great writer admits that he

+must pay for the pages of that cruel book, the life of Sainte-Lydwine.

+The disease he so often described came to him at last and slew him.

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+To traverse the books of Huysmans is a true pessimistic progress; from

+Le Drageoir aux Epices (1874) to Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), the

+note, at times shrill, often profound, is never one of dulcification.

+The first book, a veritable little box of spices, was modelled on

+Baudelaire's Poèmes en Prose, but revealed to the acute critic a new

+personal shade. Its plainness is Gallic. That amusing, ironic sketch,

+L'Extase, gives us a key-note to the writer's disillusioned soul.

+Marthe (1876) caused a sensation. It was speedily suppressed. La

+Fille Elise and Nana the public could endure; but the cold-blooded

+delineation of vice in this first novel was too much for the Parisian,

+who likes a display of sentiment or sympathy in the treatment of

+unsavoury themes. Now, sympathy for sin or suffering is missing in

+Huysmans. Slow veils of pity never descend upon his sufferers. Like

+a surgeon who will show you a "beautiful disease," a "classic case,"

+he exposed the life of the wretched Marthe, and, while he called a

+cat a cat, he forgot that certain truths are unfit for polite ears

+accustomed to the rotten-ripe Dumas _fils_, or the thrice-brutal Zola.

+It was in Marthe that Huysmans proclaimed his adherence to naturalism

+in these memorable words: "I write what I see, what I feel, and what I

+have experienced, and I write it as well as I can: that is all." This

+rubric he adhered to his life long, despite his change of spiritual

+base. He also said that there are writers who have talent, and others

+who have not talent. All schools, groups, cliques, whether romantic or

+naturalistic or decadent, need not count.

+

+It was 1880 before Huysmans was again heard from, this time in

+collaboration with Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique,

+and Paul Alexis. Les Soirées de Médan was the inappropriate title of

+a book of interesting tales. Huysmans's contribution, Sac au Dos, is

+a story of the Franco-Prussian war that would have pleased Stendhal

+by its sardonic humour. The hero never reaches the front, but spends

+his time in hospitals, and the nearest he gets to the glory of war

+is a chronic stomach-ache. The variations on this ignoble motive

+showed the malice of Huysmans. War is not hell, he says in effect, but

+dysentery is; how often a petty ailing has unmade a heroic soul. Yet in

+the Brussels edition of this story there was published the following

+verse--the author seldom wrote poetry; he was hardly a poet, but as

+indicating certain religious preoccupations it is worth repeating:

+

+    "O croix qui veux l'austère, ô chair qui veux le doux,

+    O monde, ô évangile, immortels adversaires,

+    Les plus grands ennemis sont plus d'accord que vous,

+    Et les pôles du ciel ne sont pas plus contraires.

+    On monte dans le ciel par un chemin de pleurs,

+    Mais, que leur amertume a de douceurs divines!

+    On descend aux enfers par un chemin de fleurs,

+    Mais hélas! que ces fleurs nous préparent d'épines!

+    La fleur qui, dans un jour, sèche et s'épanouit,

+    Les bulles d'air et d'eau qu'un petit souffle casse,

+    Une ombre qui paraît et qui s'évanouit

+    Nous représentent bien comme le monde passe."

+

+Naturally, in the face of Maupassant's brilliant Boule de Suif,

+Huysmans's sly attack on patriotism was overlooked. Croquis Parisiens

+(1880) contains specimens of Huysmans's astounding virtuosity.

+No one before has ever described sundry aspects of Paris with

+such verisimilitude--that Paris he said was, because of the

+Americans, fast becoming a "sinister Chicago." Balls, cafés, bars,

+omnibus-conductors, washerwomen, chestnut-sellers, hairdressers,

+remote landscapes and corners of the city, cabarets, la Bièvre,

+the underground river, with prose paraphrases of music, perfumes,

+flowers--Huysmans astonishes by his prodigality of epithet and justness

+of observation. What Manet, Pissaro, Raffaelli, Forain, were doing

+with oil and pastel and pencil, he accomplished with his pen. A Vau

+l'Eau followed in 1882. It is considered the typical Huysmans tale,

+and some see in Jean Folantin its unhappy hero, obsessed by the desire

+for a juicy beefsteak, the prototype of Durtal. Folantin is a poor

+employee in the Ministry who must exist on his annual salary of fifteen

+hundred francs. He haunts cheap restaurants, lives in cheap lodgings,

+is seedy and sour, with the nerves of a voluptuary. His sense of smell

+makes his life a nightmare. The sordid recital would be comical but

+that it is so villainously real. It is an Odyssey of a dyspeptic.

+Dickens would have set us laughing over the woes of this Folantin,

+or Dostoïevsky would have made us weep--as he did in Poor Folk. But

+Huysmans has no time for tears or laughter; he must register his truth,

+and at the end an odor of stale cheese exhales from the printed page.

+Wretched Monsieur Folantin. Of the official life so clearly presented

+in some of Maupassant's tales, we get little; Huysmans is too much

+preoccupied with Folantin's stomach troubles. In the same volume,

+though published first in 1887, is Un Dilemme, which is a pitiful

+tale of a girl abandoned. Huysmans, while he came under the influence

+of L'Education Sentimentale, seems to have taken as a _leit motiv_

+the idiotic antics of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet. This pair of

+mediocre maniacs were his models for mankind at large. Les Sœurs

+Vatard (1879), praised so warmly by Zola in The Experimental Novel,

+is not a novel, but kaleidoscopic Parisian pictures of intimate low

+life, executed with consummate finish, and closeness to fact. The two

+sisters Vatard, Céline and Désirée, with their love affairs, fill a

+large volume. There are minute descriptions of proletarian interiors,

+sewing-shops full of perspiring girls, railroad-yards, locomotives, and

+a gingerbread fair. The men are impudent scamps, bullies, _souteneurs_,

+the women either weak or vulgar. Veracity there often is and an air

+of reality--though these swaggerers and simpletons are silhouettes,

+not half as vital as Zola's Lise or Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux. But

+atmosphere, _toujours_ atmosphere--of that Huysmans is the compeller.

+Not a disagreeable scene, smell, or sound does he spare his readers.

+And how many _genre_ pictures he paints for us in this book.

+

+We reach _bourgeois_ life with En Ménage (1881). André and Cyprien the

+novelist and painter are not so individual as, say, old _père_ Vatard

+in the preceding story. They but serve as stalking horses for Huysmans

+to show the stupid miseries of the married state; that whether a man

+is or is not married he will regret it. Love is the supreme poison of

+life. André is deceived by his wife, Cyprien lives lawlessly. Neither

+one is contented. The novel is careful in workmanship; it is like

+Goncourt and Flaubert, both gray and masterful. But it leaves a bad

+taste in the mouth. Like the early Christian fathers, Huysmans had a

+conception of Woman, "the eternal feminine of the eternal simpleton,"

+which is hardly ennobling. The painter Cyprien is said to be a portrait

+of the author.

+

+A Rebours appeared at the psychologic moment. Decadence was in the

+air. Either you were a decadent or violently opposed to the movement.

+Verlaine had consecrated the word--hardly an expressive one. The

+depraved young Jean, Duke of Esseintes, greedy of exotic sensations,

+who figures as the hero of this gorgeous prose mosaic, is said to be

+the portrait of a Parisian poet, and a fashionable dilettante of art

+painted by Whistler. But there is more of Huysmans--the exquisite

+literary critic that is Huysmans--in the work. If, as Henry James

+remarks: "When you have no taste you have no discretion--which is

+the conscience of taste," then Huysmans must be acclaimed a man of

+unexampled tact. His handling of a well-nigh impossible theme, his

+"technical heroism," above all, his soul-searching tactics in that

+wonderful Chapter VII, when Des Esseintes, suffering from the malady

+of the infinite, proceeds to examine his conscience and portrays for

+us the most fluctuating shades of belief and feeling--his touch here

+is sure, and casuistically immoral, as "all art is immoral for the

+inartistic." The chief value of the book for future generations of

+critics lies in Chapters XII and XIV. Huysmans's literary and artistic

+preferences are catalogued with delicacy and erudition. More Byzantine

+than Byzance, A Rebours is a storehouse of art treasures, and it was

+once the battle-field of the literary élite. It is a history of the

+artistic decadent, the man of disdainful inquietudes who searches for

+an earthly artificial paradise. The mouth orchestra which, by the

+aid of various liquors, gives to the tongue sensations analogous to

+music; the flowers and perfume concerts, the mechanical landscape,

+the mock sea--all these are mystifications. Huysmans the _farceur_,

+the Jules Verne of æsthetics, is enjoying himself. His liquor

+symphony he borrowed from La Chimie du Goût by Polycarpe Poncelet;

+from Zola, perhaps, his concert of flowers. As for the originality

+of these diversions, we may turn to Goethe and find in his Triumph

+der Empfindsamkeit the mechanical landscape of the Prince, who can

+enjoy sunlight or moonlight at will. He has also a doll to whom he

+sighs, rhapsodises, and passes in its silent company hours of rapture.

+Villiers de l'Isle Adam evidently read Goethe: see his Eve of the

+Future. All of which shows the folly of certain critics who recognise

+in Huysmans the prime exemplar of the decadent--that much misunderstood

+word. But how about Goethe? A Rebours, notwithstanding Huysmans's

+later pilgrimage to Canossa, he never excelled. It is his most personal

+achievement. It also contains the most beautiful writing of this

+Paganini of prose.

+

+En Rade (1887) did not attract much attention. It is not dull; on

+the contrary, it is very Huysmansish. But it is not a subject that

+enthralls. Jacques Maries and his wife have lost their money. They go

+into the country to live cheaply. The author's detestation of nature

+was apparently the motive for writing the book. There are fantastic

+dreams worthy of H. G. Wells, and realistic descriptions of a calf's

+birth and a cat's agony; the last two named prove the one-time disciple

+of Zola had not lost his vision; the truth is, Zola's method is

+melodramatic, romantic, vague, when compared to Huysmans's implacable

+manner of etching petty facts.

+

+But in Là-Bas he takes a leap across the ditch of naturalism and

+reaches another, if not more delectable, territory. This was in 1891.

+A new manifesto must be made--the Goncourts had printed a bookful.

+Symbolism, not naturalism, is now the shibboleth. Huysmans declares

+that:

+

+      It is essential to preserve the veracity of the document,

+      the precision of detail, the fibrous and nervous language

+      of Realism, but it is equally essential to become the

+      well-digger of the soul, and not to attempt to explain

+      what is mysterious by mental maladies.... It is essential,

+      in a word, to follow the great toad so deeply dug out

+      by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel

+      pathway in the air, another road by which we may reach the

+      Beyond, to achieve thus a Spiritual naturalism.

+

+And by a curious, a bizarre route Durtal, the everlasting Durtal,

+sought to achieve spiritually--a spirituality _à rebours_, for it was

+by devil-worship and the study of Gilles de Rais of ill-fame, that

+he reached his goal. We also study church bells, _incubi_, satanism,

+demons, witches, sacrileges of a _raffiné_ sort; indeed, an enormous

+amount of occult lumber is dumped into the book, which is indigestible

+on that account. Diabolic lore _à la_ Jules Dubois and other modern

+magi is profuse. That wicked lady, who is far from credible, Madame

+Chantelouve, flits through various chapters. Her final disappearance,

+one hopes "below"--like the devils in the pantomime--is received by

+Durtal and the reader with a sigh of relief. She is quite the vilest

+character in French fiction, and, as Stendhal would say, her only

+excuse is that she never existed. The Black Mass is painted by an

+artist adroit in the manipulation of the sombre and magnificent.

+

+Là-Bas proved a prophetic weather-vane. En Route in 1895 did not

+astonish those who had been studying the spiritual fluctuations of

+Huysmans. Behold the miracle! He is a believing Christian. Wisely the

+antecedent causes were tacitly avoided. "I believe," said Durtal,

+simply. Of superior interest is his struggle up the ladder to

+perfection. This painful feat is slowly accomplished in La Cathédrale

+(1898), L'Oblat (1903), and Lourdes (1906). And it must be confessed

+that the more pious grew Huysmans the less artist he--as might have

+been expected. What is his art to a man who is concerned not with the

+things of this world? He never lost his acerbity, or his faculty for

+the phrase magical, though his sense of proportion gradually vanished.

+Luckily, he is not saccharine like the majority of writers on religious

+topics. Ferdinand Brunetière complained that Flaubert was unbearably

+erudite in his three short stories--echoing what Sainte-Beuve had said

+of Salammbô years before. What must he have thought of that astonishing

+Cathedral, with its chapters on the symbolism of architecture,

+sculpture, gems, flowers (Sir Thomas Browne and his quincunxes are

+fairly beaten from the field), vestments, sacred vessels of the

+altar, and a multitude of mysterious things, hieroglyphics, and dark

+liturgical riddles? There are ravishing pages, though none so solemn

+and moving as the description of the _De profundis_ and _Dies iræ_ in

+En Route.

+

+It may prove profitable for the student after reading La Cathédrale to

+take up Walter Pater's unfinished story, Gaston De Latour, and read

+the description therein of the Chartres Cathedral. There are pages of

+exquisitely felt prose, but Huysmans sees more and tells what he sees

+in less musical though more lapidary phrases.

+

+For anyone except the trailer after strange souls The Oblate is an

+affliction. Madame Bavoil, with her _notre ami_, is a chattering

+nuisance, withal a worthy creature. Durtal is always in the dumps. He

+speaks much of interior peace, but he gives the impression of a man

+sitting painfully amidst spiritual brambles. Perhaps he felt that for

+him after his Golgotha are the sweet-singing flames of Purgatory. We

+are not sorry when he returns to Paris. As for the book on Lourdes, it

+is like an open wound. A whiff from the operating-room of a hospital

+comes to you. We are edified by the childlike faith with which Huysmans

+accepts the report of cures that would stagger the most perfervid

+Christian Scientist. His Saint-Lydwine is hard reading, written by a

+man whose mysticism was a matter of rigid definition, a thing to be

+weighed and felt and verbally proved. Fleming-like, he is less melodist

+than harmonist--and such acrid harmonies, polyphonic variations, and

+fuguelike flights to the other side of good and evil.

+

+George Moore was the first English critic to recognise Huysmans. He

+wrote that "a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of

+exquisite and powerful liquor." Frankly, it was his conversion that

+focussed upon Huysmans so much attention. No one may remain isolated

+in his century. He has never been a favourite with the larger Parisian

+public; rather, a curiosity, a spiritual ogre turned saint. And the

+saintship has been hotly disputed. Abbé Mugnier and Dom A. du Bourg,

+the prior of Sainte-Marie, since his death, have written eloquently

+about his conversion, his life as an oblate, and his edifying death.

+Huysmans refused anæsthetics because he wished to suffer for his life

+of sin, above all suffer for his early writings. Need it be added that,

+like Tolstoy, he repudiated absolutely his first books? Huysmans Intime

+is the title of the recollections of both Dom du Bourg and Henry Céard.

+His literary executors destroyed many manuscripts. He left his money

+principally to charities.

+

+Huysmans was not a man possessing what are so vaguely denominated

+"general ideas." He was never interested in the chess-play of

+metaphysics, politics, or science. He was a specialist, one who

+had ransacked libraries for curious details, despoiled perfumers'

+catalogues for their odourous vocables, pored over technical

+dictionaries for odd-coloured words, and studied cook-books for savoury

+terms. His gamut of sensations began at the violet ray. He was a

+perverse aristocrat who descended to the gutter there to analyse the

+various stratifications of filth; when he returned to his ivory cell,

+he had discovered, not humanity, but an anodyne, the love of God.

+Thenceforth, he was interested in one thing--the saving of the soul of

+Joris-Karl Huysmans, and being a marvellous verbal artist, his recital

+of the event startled us, fascinated us. Renan once wrote of Amiel: "He

+speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, as if these

+things were realities." Let us rather imitate Sainte-Beuve, who said:

+"You may not cease to be a sceptic after reading Pascal, but you must

+cease to treat believers with contempt." And this injunction is not

+difficult to obey in the case of Huysmans, for whom the things derided

+by Renan were the profoundest realities of his troubled life.

+

+

+

+

+VI

+

+THE EVOLUTION OF AN EGOIST

+

+MAURICE BARRÈS

+

+

+Once upon a time a youth, slim, dark, and delicate, lived in a tower.

+This tower was composed of ivory--the youth sat within its walls,

+tapestried by most subtle art, and studied his soul. As in a mirror, a

+fantastic mirror of opal and gold, he searched his soul and noted its

+faintest music, its strangest modulations, its transmutation of joy

+into melancholy; he saw its grace and its corruption. These matters he

+registered in his "little mirrors of sincerity." And he was happy in an

+ivory tower and far away from the world, with its rumours of dulness,

+feeble crimes, and flat triumphs. After some years the young man

+wearied of the mirror, with his spotted soul cruelly pictured therein;

+wearied of the tower of ivory and its alien solitudes; so he opened its

+carved doors and went into the woods, where he found a deep pool of

+water. It was very small, very clear, and reflected his face, reflected

+on its quivering surface his unstable soul. But soon other images of

+the world appeared above the pool: men's faces and women's, and the

+shapes of earth and sky. Then Narcissus, who was young, whose soul was

+sensitive, forgot the ivory tower and the magic pool, and merged his

+own soul into the soul of his people.

+

+Maurice Barrès is the name of the youth, and he is now a member of the

+Académie Française. His evolution from the Ivory tower of Egoism to the

+broad meadows of life is not an insoluble enigma; his books and his

+active career offer many revelations of a fascinating, though often

+baffling, personality. His passionate curiosity in all that concerns

+the moral nature of his fellow man lends to his work its own touch of

+universality; otherwise it would not be untrue to say that the one

+Barrès passion is love of his native land. "France" is engraved on his

+heart; France and not the name of a woman. This may be regarded as a

+grave shortcoming by the sex.

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+Paul Bourget has said of him: "Among the young people who have

+entered literature since 1880 Maurice Barrès is certainly the most

+celebrated.... One must see other than a decadent or a dilettante in

+this analyst ... the most original who has appeared since Baudelaire."

+Bourget said much more about the young writer, then in his twenties,

+who in 1887 startled Paris with a curious, morbid, ironical, witty

+book, a production neither fiction nor fact. This book was called Sous

+l'Œil des Barbares. It made a sensation. He was born on the 22nd

+of September, 1862, at Charmes-sur-Moselle (Vosges), and received a

+classical education at the Nancy (old capital of Lorraine) Lyceum.

+Of good family--among his ancestors he could boast some military

+men--he early absorbed a love for his native province, a love that

+later was to become a species of soil-worship. His health not strong

+at any time, and nervous of temperament, he nevertheless moved on

+Paris, for the inevitable siege of which all romantic readers of Balzac

+dream during their school-days. "_A nous deux!_" muttered Rastignac,

+shaking his fist at the city spread below him. _A nous deux!_ exclaim

+countless youngsters ever since. Maurice, however, was not that sort of

+Romantic. He meant to conquer Paris, but in a unique way; he detested

+melodrama. He removed to the capital in 1882. His first literary

+efforts had appeared in the _Journal de la Meurthe et des Vosges_; he

+could see as a boy the Vosges Mountains; and Alsace, not far away,

+was in the clutches of the hated enemy. In Paris he wrote for several

+minor reviews, met distinguished men like Leconte de Lisle, Rodenbach,

+Valade, Rollinat; and his Parisian début was in _La Jeune France_, with

+a short story entitled Le Chemin de l'institut (April, 1882). Ernest

+Gaubert, who has given us these details, says that, despite Leconte

+de Lisle's hearty support, Mme. Adam refused an essay of Barrès as

+unworthy of the _Nouvelle Revue_. In 1884 appeared a mad little review,

+_Les Taches d'Encre_, irregular in publication. Despite its literary

+quality, the young editor displayed some knowledge of the tactics of

+"new" journalism. When Morin was assassinated by Mme. Clovis Hugues,

+sandwich men paraded the boulevards carrying on their boards this

+inscription: "Morin reads no longer _Les Taches d'Encre!_" Perseverance

+such as this should have been rewarded; but little _Ink-spots_ quickly

+disappeared. Barrès founded a new review in 1886, _Les Chroniques_,

+in company with some brilliant men. Jules Claretie about this time

+remarked, "Make a note of the name of Maurice Barrès. I prophesy

+that it will become famous." Barrès had discovered that Rastignac's

+pugnacious methods were obsolete in the battle with Paris, though

+there was no folly he would be incapable of committing if he only

+could attract attention--even to walking the boulevards in the guise

+of primeval man. Far removed as his exquisite art now is from this

+blustering desire for publicity, this threat, uttered in jest or not,

+is significant. Maurice Barrès has since stripped his soul bare for the

+world's ire or edification.

+

+Wonder-children do not always pursue their natural vocation. Pascal

+was miraculously endowed as a mathematician; he ended a master

+of French prose, a hallucinated, wretched man. Franz Liszt was a

+prodigy, but aspired to the glory of Beethoven. Raphael was a painting

+prodigy, and luckily died so young that he had not time to change

+his profession. Swinburne wrote faultless verse as a youth. He is a

+_prosateur_ to-day. Maurice Barrès was born a metaphysician; he has

+the metaphysical faculty as some men a fiddle hand. He might say with

+Prosper Mérimée, "Metaphysic pleases me because it is never-ending."

+But not as Kant, Condillac, or William James--to name men of widely

+disparate systems--did the precocious thinker plan objectively. The

+proper study of Maurice Barrès was Maurice Barrès, and he vivisected

+his Ego as calmly as a surgeon trepanning a living skull. He boldly

+proclaimed the _culte du moi_, proclaimed his disdain for the

+barbarians who impinged upon his _I_. To study and note the fleeting

+shapes of his soul--in his case a protean psyche--was the one thing

+worth doing in a life of mediocrity. And this new variation of the

+eternal hatred for the _bourgeois_ contained no menaces levelled at any

+class, no groans of disgust _à la_ Huysmans. Imperturbable, with an icy

+indifference, Barrès pursued his fastidious way. What we hate we fight,

+what we despise we avoid. Barrès merely despised the other Egos around

+him, and entering his ivory tower he bolted the door; but on reaching

+the roof did not fail to sound his horn announcing to an eager world

+that the miracle had come to pass--Maurice Barrès was discovered by

+Maurice Barrès.

+

+Egoism as a religion is hardly a new thing. It began with the first

+sentient male human. It has since preserved the species, discovered

+the "inferiority" of women, made civilisation, and founded the fine

+arts. Any attempt to displace the Ego in the social system has only

+resulted in inverting the social pyramid. Love our neighbour as ourself

+is trouble-breeding; but we must first love ourself as a precaution

+that our neighbour will not suffer both in body and in mind. The

+interrogation posed on the horizon of our consciousness, regarding

+the perfectibility of mankind, is best answered by a definition of

+socialism as that religion which proves all men to be equally stupid.

+Do not let us confound the ideas of progress and perfectibility. Since

+man first realised himself as man, first said, I am I, there has been

+no progress. No art has progressed. Science is a perpetual rediscovery.

+And what modern thinker has taught anything new?

+

+Life is a circle. We are imprisoned, in the cage of our personality.

+Each human creates his own picture of the world, re-creates it each

+day. These are the commonplaces of metaphysics; Schopenhauer has

+presented some of them to us in tempting garb.

+

+Compare the definitions of Man made by Pascal and Cabanis. Man, said

+Pascal, is but a reed, the feeblest of created things; yet a reed which

+thinks. Man, declared the materialistic Cabanis, is a digestive tube--a

+statement that provoked the melodious indignation of Lacordaire.

+What am I? asks Barrès; _je suis un instant d'une chose immortelle_.

+And this instant of an immortal thing has buried within it something

+eternal of which the individual has only the usufruct. (Goncourt

+wrote, "What is life? The usufruct of an aggregation of molecules.")

+Before him Sénancour in Obermann--the reveries of a sick, hermetic

+soul--studied his malady, but offered no prophylactic. Amiel was so

+lymphatic of will that he doubted his own doubts, doubted all but

+his dreams. He, too, had fed at Hegel's ideologic banquet, where the

+verbal viands snared the souls of guests. But Barrès was too sprightly

+a spirit to remain a mystagogue. Diverse and contradictory as are his

+several souls, he did not utterly succumb to the spirit of analysis.

+Whether he was poison-proof or not to the venom that slew the peace

+of the unhappy Amiel (that bonze of mysticism), the young Lorrainer

+never lacked elasticity or spontaneity, never ceased to react after

+his protracted plunges into the dark pools of his subliminal self. And

+his volitional powers were not paralysed. Possessing a sensibility as

+delicate and vibrating as Benjamin Constant, he has had the courage to

+study its fevers, its disorders, its subtleties. He knew that there

+were many young men like him, not only in France, but throughout the

+world, highly organised, with less bone and sinew than nerves--exposed

+nerves; egoistic souls, weak of will. We are sick, this generation of

+young men, exclaimed Barrès; sick from the lying assurances of science,

+sick from the false promises of politicians. There must be a remedy.

+One among ms must immolate himself, study the malady, seek its cure. I,

+Maurice Barrès, shall be the mirror reflecting the fleeting changes of

+my environment, social and psychical. I repudiate the transcendental

+indifference of Renan; I will weigh my sensations as in a scale; I

+shall not fear to proclaim the result. Amiel, a Protestant Hamlet (as

+Bourget so finely says), believes that every landscape is a state of

+soul. My soul is full of landscapes. Therein all may enter and find

+their true selves.

+

+All this, and much more, Barrès sang in his fluid, swift, and supple

+prose, without a vestige of the dogmatic. He did not write either to

+prove or to convince, only to describe his interior life. He did not

+believe, neither did he despair. There is a spiritual malice in his

+egoism that removes it far from the windy cosmos of Walt Whitman or

+the vitriolic vanity of D'Annunzio. In his fugue-like flights down the

+corridor of his metaphysics, he never neglects to drop some poetic

+rose, some precious pearl of sentiment. His little book, true spiritual

+memoirs, aroused both wrath and laughter. The wits set to work. He was

+called a dandy of psychology, nicknamed _Mlle. Renan_, pronounced a

+psychical harlequin, a masquerader of the emotions; he was told that,

+like Chateaubriand, he wore his heart in a sling. Anatole France, while

+recognising the eloquent art of this young man, spoke of the "perverse

+idealist" which is Maurice Barrès. His philosophy was pronounced a

+perverted pyrrhonism, the quintessence of self-worship. A _Vita Nuova_

+of egoism had been born.

+

+But the dandy did not falter. He has said that one never conquers the

+intellectual suffrages of those who precede us in life; he made his

+appeal to young France. And what was the balm in Gilead offered by

+this new doctor of metaphysics? None but a Frenchman at the end of the

+last century could have conceived the Barrèsian plan of soul-saving.

+In Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, the

+union of Roman Catholic mysticism and blasphemy has proved to many

+a stumbling-stone. These poets were believers, yet Manicheans; they

+worshipped at two shrines; evil was their greater good. Barrès plucked

+several leaves from their breviaries. He proposed to school his soul

+by a rigid adherence to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius

+Loyola. With the mechanism of this Catholic moralist he would train

+his Ego, cure it of its spiritual dryness--that malady so feared by

+St. Theresa--and arouse it from its apathy. He would deliver us from a

+Renan-ridden school.

+

+This scholastic fervour urged Barrès to reinstate man in the centre of

+the universe, a position from which he had been routed by science. It

+was a pious, mediæval idea. He did not, however, assert the bankruptcy

+of science, but the bankruptcy of pessimism. His book is metaphysical

+autobiography, a Gallic transposition of Goethe's Wahrheit und

+Dichtung. We may now see that his concentrated egoism had definite aims

+and was not the conceit of a callow Romantic.

+

+Barrès imbibed from the Parnassian poetic group his artistic

+remoteness. His ivory tower is a borrowed phrase made by Sainte-Beuve

+about De Vigny. But his mercurial soul could not be imprisoned long by

+frigid theories of impeccable art--of art for art's sake. _My soul!_

+that alone is worth studying, cried Maurice. John Henry Newman said the

+same in a different and more modest dialectic. The voice of the French

+youth is shriller, it is sometimes in falsetto; yet there is no denying

+its fundamental sincerity of pitch. And he has the trick of light

+verbal fence beloved of his race. He is the comedian among moralists.

+His is neither the frozen eclecticism of Victor Cousin, nor the rigid

+determinism of Taine. Yet he is a partial descendant of the Renan he

+flouts, and of Taine--above all, of Stendhal and Voltaire. In his early

+days if one had christened him _Mlle. Stendhal_, there would have been

+less to retract. Plus a delicious style, he is a masked, slightly

+feminine variation of the great mystifier who wrote La Chartreuse

+de Parme, leaving out the Chartreuse. At times the preoccupation of

+Barrès with the moral law approaches the borderland of the abnormal.

+Like Jules Laforgue, his intelligence and his sensibility are closely

+wedded. He is a sentimental ironist with a taste for self-mockery, a

+Heine-like humour. He had a sense of humour, even when he wore the

+_panache_ of General Boulanger, and opposed the Dreyfus proceedings. It

+may rescue from the critical executioner who follows in the footsteps

+of all thinkers, many of his pages.

+

+A dilettante, an amateur--yes! But so was Goethe in his Olympus,

+so Stendhal in his Cosmopolis. He elected at first to view the

+spectacle of life, to study it from afar, and by the _tempo_ of his

+own sensibility. Not the tonic egoism of Thoreau this; it has served

+its turn nevertheless in France. Afferent, centripetal, and other

+forbidding terms, have been bestowed upon his system; while for the

+majority this word egoism has a meaning that implies our most selfish

+instincts. If, however, interposes Bourget, you consider the word as

+a formula, then the angle of view is altered; if Barrès had said in

+one jet, "Nothing is more precious for a man than to guard intact his

+convictions, his passions, his ideal, his individuality," those who

+misjudged this courageous apostle of egoism, this fervent prober of the

+human soul, might have modified their opinions--and would probably have

+passed him by. It was the enigmatic message, the strained symbolism,

+of which Barrès delivered himself, that puzzled both critics and

+public. Robert Schumann once propounded a question concerning the

+Chopin Scherzo: "How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in

+dark veils?" Now Barrès, who is far from being a spiritual _blagueur_,

+suggests this puzzle of Schumann. His employment, without a _nuance_

+of mockery, of the devotional machinery so marvellously devised by

+that captain of souls, Ignatius Loyola, was rather disquieting,

+notwithstanding its very practical application to the daily needs

+of the spirit. Ernest Hello, transported by such a spectacle, may

+not have been far astray when he wrote of the nineteenth century as

+"having desire without light, curiosity without wisdom, seeking God by

+strange ways, ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense

+upon the high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness."

+Ernest Renan was evidently aimed at, but the bolt easily wings that

+metaphysical bird of gay plumage, Maurice Barrès.

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+He has published over a dozen volumes and numerous brochures, political

+and "psychothérapie," many addresses, and one comedy, Une Journée

+Parlementaire. He calls his books metaphysical fiction, the adventures

+of a contemplative young man's mind. Paul Bourget is the psychologist

+pure and complex; Barrès has--rather, had--such a contempt for action

+on the "earthly plane," that at the head of each chapter of his

+"idealogies" he prefixed a _résumé_, a concordance of the events that

+were supposed to take place, leaving us free to savour the prose,

+enjoy the fine-spun formal texture, and marvel at the contrapuntal

+involutions of the hero's intellect. Naturally a reader, hungry for

+facts, must perish of famine in this rarefied æsthetic desert, the

+background of which is occasionally diversified by a sensuality

+that may be dainty, yet is disturbing because of its disinterested

+portrayment. The Eternal Feminine is not unsung in the Barrès novels.

+Woman for his imagination is a creature exquisitely fashioned,

+hardly an odalisque, nor yet the symbol of depravity we encounter in

+Huysmans. She is a "phantom of delight"; but that she has a soul we

+beg to doubt. Barrès almost endowed her with one in the case of his

+Bérénice; and Bérénice died very young. A young man, with various

+names, traverses these pages. Like the Durtal, or Des Esseintes, or

+Folantin, of Huysmans, who is always Huysmans, the hero of Barrès is

+always Barrès. In the first of the trilogy--of which A Free Man and

+The Garden of Bérénice are the other two--we find Philippe escaping

+through seclusion and revery the barbarians, his adversaries. The

+Adversary--portentous title for the stranger who grazes our sensitive

+epidermis--is the being who impedes or misleads a spirit in search of

+itself. If he deflects us from our destiny, he is the enemy. It may be

+well to recall at this juncture Stendhal, who avowed that our first

+enemies are our parents, an idea many an insurgent boy has asserted

+when his father was not present.

+

+Seek peace and happiness with the conviction that they are never to be

+found; felicity must be in the experiment, not in the result. Be ardent

+and sceptical. Here Philippe touches hands with the lulling Cyrenaicism

+of Walter Pater. And Barrès might have sat for one of Pater's imaginary

+portraits. But it is too pretty to last, such a dream as this, in a

+world wherein work and sorrow rule. He is not an ascetic, Philippe.

+He eats rare beefsteaks, smokes black Havanas, clothes himself in

+easy-fitting garments, and analyses with cordial sincerity his

+multi-coloured soul. (And oh! the colours of it; oh! its fluctuating

+forms!) The young person invades his privacy--a solitary in Paris is an

+incredible concept. Together they make journeys "conducted by the sun."

+She is dreamlike until we read, "Cependant elle le suivait de loin,

+délicate et de hanches merveilleuses"--which delicious and dislocated

+phrase is admired by lovers of Goncourt syntax, but must be shocking to

+the old-fashioned who prefer the classic line and balance of Bossuet.

+

+Nothing happens. Everything happens. Philippe makes the stations

+of the cross of earthly disillusionment. He weighs love, he weighs

+literature--"all these books are but pigeon-holes in which I classify

+my ideas concerning myself, their titles serve only as the labels of

+the different portions of my appetite." Irony is his ivory tower, his

+refuge from the banalities of his contemporaries. Henceforth he will

+enjoy his Ego. It sounds at moments like Bunthorne transposed to a more

+intense tonality.

+

+But even beefsteaks, cigars, wine, and philosophy pall. He craves a

+mind that will echo his, craves a mental duo, in which the clash of

+character and opposition of temperaments will evoke pleasing cerebral

+music. In this dissatisfaction with his solitude we may detect the

+first rift in the lute of his egoism. He finds an old friend, Simon

+by name, and after some preliminary sentimental philandering at the

+seashore, in the company of two young ladies, the pair agree to lead

+a monastic life. To Lorraine they retire and draft a code of diurnal

+obligations. "We are never so happy as when in exaltation," and "The

+pleasure of exaltation is greatly enhanced by the analysis of it."

+Their souls are fortified and engineered by the stern practices of

+Loyola. The woman idea occasionally penetrates to their cells. It

+distracts them--"woman, who has always possessed the annoying art of

+making imbeciles loquacious." Notwithstanding these wraiths of feminine

+fancy, Philippe finds himself almost cheerful. His despondent moods

+have vanished. He quarrels, of course, with Simon, who is dry, an

+_esprit fort_.

+

+The Intercessors now appear, the intellectual saints who act as

+intermediaries between impressionable, bruised natures and the

+Infinite. They are the near neighbours of God, for they are the men

+who have experienced an unusual number of sensations. Philippe admits

+that his temperament oscillates between languor and ecstasy. Benjamin

+Constant and Sainte-Beuve are the two "Saints" of Sensibility who aid

+the youths in their self-analysis; rather a startling devolution from

+the Imitation of Christ and Ignatius Loyola. Tiring, finally, of this

+sterile analysis, and discovering that the neurasthenic Simon is not a

+companion-soul, Philippe, very illogically yet very naturally, resolves

+that he must bathe himself in new sensations, and proceeds to Venice.

+We accompany him willingly, for this poet who handles prose as Chopin

+the pianoforte, tells us of his soul in Venice, and we are soothed when

+he speaks of the art of John Bellini, of Titian, Veronese, above all of

+Tiepolo, "who was too much a sceptic to be bitter.... His conceptions

+have that lassitude which follows pleasure, a lassitude preferred by

+epicureans to pleasure itself." Graceful, melancholy Tiepolo. This

+Venetian episode is rare reading.

+

+The last of the trilogy is The Garden of Bérénice. It is the best

+of the three in human interest, and its melancholy-sweet landscapes

+exhale a charm that is nearly new in French literature; something

+analogous may be found in Slavic music, or in the _Intimiste_ school

+of painting. Several of these landscapes are redolent of Watteau:

+tender, doleful, sensuous, their twilights filled with vague figures,

+languidly joying in the mood of the moment. The impressionism which

+permeates this book is a veritable lustration for those weary of

+commonplace modern fiction. Not since has Barrès excelled this idyl

+of the little Bérénice and her slowly awakening consciousness to

+beauty, aroused by an old, half-forgotten museum in meridional France.

+At Arles, encompassed by the memory of a dead man, she loves her

+donkey, her symbolic ducks, and Philippe, who divines her adolescent

+sorrow, her yearning spirit, her unfulfilled dreams. Her garden upon

+the immemorial and paludian plains of Arles is threaded by silver

+waters, illuminated by copper sunsets, their tones reverberating from

+her robes. Something of Maeterlinck's stammering, girlish, questioning

+Mélisande is in Bérénice. Maeterlinckian, too, is the statement that

+"For an accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue--that between

+our two Egos, the momentary Ego we are, and the ideal Ego toward which

+we strive." Bérénice would marry Philippe. We hold our breath, hoping

+that his tyrant Ego may relax, and that, off guard, he may snatch with

+fearful joy the chance to gain this childlike creature. Alas! there is

+a certain M. Martin, who is Philippe's political adversary--Philippe

+is a candidate for the legislature; he is become practical; in the

+heat of his philosophic egoism he finds that if a generous negation is

+good waiting ground, wealth and the participation in political affairs

+is a better one. M. Martin covets the hand of Bérénice. He repels

+her because he is an engineer, a man of positive, practical spirit,

+who would drain the marshes in Bérénice's garden of their beautiful

+miasmas, and build healthy houses for happy people. To Philippe he is

+the "adversary" who despises the contemplative life. "He had a habit

+of saying, 'Do you take me for a dreamer?' as one should say, 'Do you

+take me for an idiot?'" Philippe, nevertheless, more solicitous of his

+Ego than of his affections, advises Bérénice to marry M. Martin. This

+she does, and dies like a flower in a cellar. She is a lovely memory

+for our young idealist, who in voluptuous accents rhapsodises about

+her as did Sterne over his dead donkey. Sensibility, all this, to the

+very ultima Thule of egoism. Then, Philippe obtains the concession of

+a suburban hippodrome. Poor Bérénice! _Pauvre Petite_--_Secousse_! The

+name of this book was to have been _Qualis artifex pereo_! And there is

+a fitting Neronic tang to its cruel and sentimental episodes that would

+have justified the title. But for Barrès, it has a Goethian quality;

+"all is true, nothing exact."

+

+In 1892 was published The Enemy of Law, a book of violent anarchical

+impulse and lyric disorder. It is still Philippe, though under another

+name, André, who approves of a bomb launched by the hand of an

+anarchist, and because of the printed expression of his sympathy he is

+sent to prison for a few months. A Free Man, he endures his punishment

+philosophically, winning the friendship of a young Frenchwoman, an

+_exaltee_, and also of a little Russian princess, a silhouette of Marie

+Bashkirtseff, and an unmistakable blood-relative of Stendhal's Lamiel.

+After his liberation André makes sentimental pilgrimages with one or

+the other, finally with both of his friends, to Germany and elsewhere.

+A shaggy dog, Velu, figures largely in these pages, and we are treated

+to some disquisitions on canine psychology. Nor are the sketches of

+Saint-Simon, Fourier, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Ludwig of

+Bavaria, the Wagnerian idealist, particularly novel. They but reveal

+the nascent social sympathies of Barrès, who was at the law-despising

+period of his development. His little princess has a touch of Bérénice,

+coupled with a Calmuck disregard of the _convenances_; she loves

+the "warm smell of stables" and does not fear worldly criticism of

+her conduct; the trio vanish in a too Gallic, too rose-coloured

+perspective. A volume of protest, The Enemy of Law served its turn,

+though here the phrase--clear, alert, suave--of his earlier books is

+transformed to a style charged with flame and acid. The moral appears

+to be dangerous, as well as diverting--develop your instincts to the

+uttermost, give satisfaction to your sensibility; then must you attain

+the perfection of your Ego, and therefore will not attenuate the purity

+of your race. The Russian princess, we are assured, carried with her

+the ideas of antique morality.

+

+In the second trilogy--Du Sang, de la Volupté, et de la Mort; Amori

+et Dolori Sacrum; and Les Amitiés Françaises--we begin an itinerary

+which embraces parts of Italy, Spain, Germany, France, particularly

+Lorraine. Barrès must be ranked among those travellers of acute

+vision and æsthetic culture who in their wanderings disengage the

+soul of a city, of a country. France, from Count de Caylus and the

+Abbé Barthélémy (Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis) to Stendhal, Taine, and

+Bourget, has given birth to many distinguished examples. The first of

+the new group, Blood, Pleasure, and Death--a sensational title for a

+work so rich and consoling in substance--is a collection of essays and

+tales. The same young man describes his æsthetic and moral impressions

+before the masterpieces of Angelo and Vinci, or the tombs, cathedrals,

+and palaces of Italy and Spain. Cordova is visited, the gardens of

+Lombardy, Ravenna, Parma--Stendhal's beloved city--Siena, Pisa; there

+are love episodes in diaphanous keys. Barrès, ever magnanimous in his

+critical judgments, pays tribute to the memory of his dead friends,

+Jules Tellier and Marie Bashkirtseff. He understood her soul, though

+afterward cooled when he discovered the reality of the Bashkirtseff

+legend. (He speaks of the house in which she died as 6 Rue de Prony;

+Marie died at 30 Rue Ampère.) In the succeeding volume, consecrated

+to love and sorrow, the soul of Venice, the soul of a dead city, is

+woven with souvenirs of Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, Musset, George

+Sand, Taine, Léopold Robert the painter-suicide, Théophile Gautier,

+and Richard Wagner. The magic of these prose-dreams is not that of an

+artist merely revelling in description; Pierre Loti, for instance,

+writes with no philosophy but that of the disenchanted; he is a more

+luscious Sénancour; D'Annunzio has made of Venice a golden monument

+to his gigantic pride as poet. Not so Barrès. The image of death and

+decay, the recollections of the imperial and mighty past aroused by his

+pen are as so many chords in his egoistic philosophy: Venice guarded

+its Ego from the barbarians; from the dead we learn the secret of

+life. The note of revolt which sounded so drastically in The Enemy of

+Law is absent here; in that story Barrès, mindful of Auguste Comte

+and Ibsen, asserted that the dead poisoned the living. The motive of

+reverence for the soil, for the past, the motive of traditionalism,

+is beginning to be overheard. In French Friendships, he takes his

+little son Philippe to Joan of Arc's country and enforces the lesson

+of patriotism. In his Le Voyage de Sparte, the same spirit is present.

+He is the man from Lorraine at Corinth, Eleusis, or Athens, humble

+and solicitous for the soul of his race, eager to extract a moral

+benefit from the past. He studies the Antigone of Sophocles, the Helen

+of Goethe. He also praises his master, the classical scholar, Louis

+Ménard. Barrès has, in a period when France seems bent on burning its

+historical ships, destroying precious relics of its past, blown the

+trumpet of alarm; not the destructive blast of Nietzsche, but one that

+calls "Spare our dead!" Little wonder Bourget pronounced him the most

+efficacious servitor, at the present hour, of France the eternal. Force

+and spiritual fecundity Barrès demands of himself; force and spiritual

+fecundity he demands from France. And, like the vague insistent

+thrumming of the _tympani_, a ground bass in some symphonic poem,

+the idea of nationalism is gradually disclosed as we decipher these

+palimpsests of egoism.

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+The art of Barrès till this juncture had been of a smoky enchantment,

+many-hued, of shifting shapes, often tenuous, sometimes opaque, yet

+ever graceful, ever fascinating. Whether he was a great spiritual force

+or only an amazing protean acrobat, coquetting with the _Zeitgeist_,

+his admirers and enemies had not agreed upon. He had further clouded

+public opinion by becoming a Boulangist deputy from Nancy, and his

+apparition in the Chamber must have been as bizarre as would have been

+Shelley's in Parliament. Barrès but followed the illustrious lead of

+Hugo, Lamartine, Lamennais. His friends were moved to astonishment. The

+hater of the law, the defender in the press of Chambige, the Algerian

+homicide, this writer of "precious" literature, among the political

+opportunists! Yet he sat as a deputy from 1889 to 1893, and proved

+himself a resourceful debater; in the chemistry of his personality

+patriotism had been at last precipitated.

+

+His second trilogy of books was his most artistic gift to French

+literature. But with the advent, in 1897, of Les Déracinés (The

+Uprooted) a sharp change in style may be noted. It is the sociological

+novel in all its thorny efflorescence. Diction is no longer in the

+foreground. Vanished the velvety rhetoric, the musical phrase, the

+nervous prose of many facets. Sharp in contour and siccant, every

+paragraph is packed with ideas. The Uprooted is formidable reading,

+but we at least touch the rough edges of reality. Men and women

+show familiar gestures; the prizes run for are human; we are in a

+dense atmosphere of intrigue, political and personal; Flaubert's

+Frédéric Moreau, the young man of confused ideas and feeble volition,

+once more appears as a cork in the whirlpool of modern Paris. The

+iconoclast that is in the heart of this poet is rampant. He smashes

+institutions, though his criticism is often constructive. He strives

+to expand the national soul, strives to combat cynicism, and he urges

+decentralisation as the sole remedy for the canker that he believes is

+blighting France. Bourget holds that "Society is the functioning of

+a federation of organisms of which the individual is the cell"; that

+functioning, says Barrès, is ill served by the violent uprooting of

+the human organism from its earth. A man best develops in his native

+province. His deracination begins with the education that sends him

+to Paris, there to lose his originality. The individual can flourish

+only in the land where the mysterious forces of heredity operate, make

+richer his Ego, and create solidarity--that necromantic word which, in

+the hands of social preachers, has become a glittering and illuding

+talisman. A tree does not grow upward unless its roots plunge deeply

+into the soil. A wise administrator attaches the animal to the pasture

+that suits it. (But Barrès himself still lives in Paris.)

+

+This nationalism of Barrès is not to be confounded with the perfidious

+slogan of the politicians; it is a national symbol for many youth

+of his land. Nor is Barrès affiliated with some extreme modes of

+socialism--socialism, that daydream of a retired green-grocer who

+sports a cultivated taste for dominoes and penny philanthropy. To those

+who demand progress, he asks, Progressing toward what? Rather let us

+face the setting sun. Do not repudiate the past. Hold to our dead. They

+realise for us the continuity of which we are the ephemeral expression.

+The cult of the "I" is truly the cult of the dead. Egoism must not be

+construed as the average selfishness of humanity; the higher egoism

+is the art--Barrès artist, always--of canalising one's Ego for the

+happiness of others. Out of the Barrès nationalism has grown a mortuary

+philosophy; we see him rather too fond of culling the flowers in the

+cemetery as he takes his evening stroll. When a young man he was

+obsessed by the vision of death. His logic is sometimes audaciously

+romantic; he paints ideas in a dangerously seductive style; and he is

+sometimes carried away by the electric energy which agitates his not

+too robust physique. This cult of the dead, while not morbid, smacks

+nevertheless of the Chinese. Our past need not be in a graveyard, and

+one agrees with Jean Dolent that man is surely matter, but that his

+soul is his own work.

+

+Latterly the patriotism of Barrès is beginning to assume an unpleasant

+tinge. In his azure, _chauvinisme_ is the ugliest cloud. He loves the

+fatal word "revenge." In the Service of Germany presents a pitiable

+picture of a young Alsatian forced to military service in the German

+army. It is not pleasing, and the rage of Barrès will be voted laudable

+until we recall the stories by Frenchmen of the horrors of French

+military life. He upholds France for the French. It is a noble idea,

+but it leads to narrowness and fanatical outbreaks. His influence

+was great from 1888 to 1893 among the young men. It abated, to be

+renewed in 1896 and 1897. It reached its apogee a few years ago. The

+Rousseau-like cry, "Back to the soil!" made of Barrès an idol in

+several camps. His election to the Academy, filling the vacancy caused

+by the death of the poet De Hérédia, was the consecrating seal of a

+genius who has the gift of projecting his sympathies in many different

+directions, only to retrieve as by miraculous tentacles the richest

+moral and æsthetic nourishment. We should not forget to add, that by

+the numerous early Barrèsians, the Academician is now looked upon as a

+backslider from the cause of philosophic anarchy.

+

+The determinism of Taine stems in Germany and his theory of environment

+has been effectively utilised by Barrès. In The Uprooted, the argument

+is driven home by the story of seven young Lorrainers who descend upon

+Paris to capture it. Their Professor Bouteiller (said to be a portrait

+of Barrès's old master Burdeau at Nancy) has educated them as if

+"they might some day be called upon to do without a mother-country."

+Paris is a vast maw which swallows them. They are disorganised by

+transplantation. (What young American would be, we wonder?) Some

+drift into anarchy, one to the scaffold because of a murder; all are

+_arrivistes_; and the centre figure, Sturel, is a failure because he

+cannot reconcile himself to new, harsh conditions. They blame their

+professor. He diverted the sap of their nationalism into strange

+channels. A few "arrive," though not in every instance by laudable

+methods. One is a scholar. The account of his interview with Taine and

+Taine's conversation with him is another evidence of the intellectual

+mimicry latent in Barrès. He had astonished us earlier by his

+recrudescence of Renan's very fashion of speech and ideas; literally a

+feat of literary prestidigitation. There are love, political intrigue,

+and a dramatic assassination--the general conception of which recalls

+to us the fact that Barrès once sat at the knees of Bourget, and had

+read that master's novel, Le Disciple. A striking episode is that

+of the meeting of the seven friends at the tomb of Napoleon, there

+to meditate upon his grandeur and to pledge themselves to follow

+his illustrious example. "Professor of Energy" he is denominated. A

+Professor of Spiritual Energy is certainly Maurice Barrès. In another

+scene Taine demonstrates the theory of nationalism by the parable of

+a certain plane tree in the Square of the Invalides. For the average

+lover of French fiction The Uprooted must prove trying. It is, with

+its two companions in this trilogy of The Novel of National Energy, a

+social document, rather than a romance. It embodies so clearly a whole

+cross-section of earnest French youths' moral life, that--with L'Appel

+au Soldat, and Leurs Figures, its sequels--it may be consulted in the

+future for a veridic account of the decade it describes. One seems

+to lean from a window and watch the agitation of the populace which

+swarmed about General Boulanger; or to peep through keyholes and see

+the end of that unfortunate victim of treachery and an ill-disciplined

+temperament. Barrès later reviles the friends of Boulanger who deserted

+him, by his delineation of the Panama scandal. Yet it is all as dry

+as a parliamentary blue-book. After finishing these three novels, the

+impression created is that the flaw in the careers of four or five of

+the seven young men from Lorraine was not due to their uprooting, but

+to their lack of moral backbone.

+

+Paris is no more difficult a social medium to navigate in than New

+York; the French capital has been the battlefield of all French genius;

+but neither in New York nor in Paris can a young man face the conflict

+so loaded down with the burden of general ideas and with so scant

+a moral outfit as possessed by these same young men. The Lorraine

+band--is it a possible case? No doubt. Nevertheless, if its members had

+remained at Nancy they might have been shipwrecked for the same reason.

+Why does not M. Barrès show his cards? The Kingdom on the table!

+cries Hilda Wangel to her Masterbuilder. Love of the natal soil does

+not make a complete man; some of the greatest patriots have been the

+greatest scoundrels. M. Bourget sums up the situation more lucidly than

+M. Barrès, who is in such a hurry to mould citizens that he omits an

+essential quality from his programme--God (or character, moral force,

+if you prefer other terms). Now, when a rationalistic philosopher

+considers God as an intellectual abstraction, he is not illogical.

+Scepticism is his stock in trade. But can Maurice Barrès elude the

+issue? Can he handle the tools of such pious workmen as Loyola, De

+Sales, and Thomas à Kempis, for the building of his soul, and calmly

+overlook the inspiration of those masons of men? It is one of the

+defects of dilettanteism that it furnishes a _point d'appui_ for the

+liberated spirit to see-saw between free-will and determinism, between

+the Lord of Hosts and the Lucifer of Negation. Paul Bourget feels this

+spiritual dissonance. Has he not said that the day may come when Barrès

+may repeat the phrase of Michelet: _Je ne me peux passer de Dieu!_

+Has Maurice Barrès already plodded the same penitential route without

+indulging in an elliptical flight to a new artificial paradise?

+

+If his moral evolution, so insistently claimed by his disciples,

+has been of a zigzag nature, if _lacunæ_ abound in his system and

+paradoxical _vues d'ensemble_ often distract, yet logical evolution

+there has been--from the maddest, romantic individualism to a

+well-defined solidarity--and without attenuation of the dignity and

+utility of the Individual in the scheme of collectivism. The Individual

+is the Salt of the State. The Individual leavens the mass politic.

+Numbers will never supplant the value, psychic or economic, of the

+Individual. Emerson and Matthew Arnold said all this before Barrès.

+Incomparable artist as is Maurice Barrès, we still must demand of him:

+"In Vishnu-land what Avatar!"

+

+

+

+

+VII

+

+PHASES OF NIETZSCHE

+

+

+

+I

+

+THE WILL TO SUFFER

+

+

+Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that "the greatest

+man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he

+who corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule

+which is poor because it won't work both ways. All master reformers,

+heretics, and rebels were at first great corrupters. It is a prime

+necessity in their propaganda. Aristophanes and Arius, Mohammed and

+Napoleon, Montaigne and Rabelais, Paul and Augustine, Luther and

+Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner,

+Kant and Schopenhauer--here are a few names of men who undermined the

+current beliefs and practices of their times, whether for good or evil.

+Rousseau has been accused of being the greatest corrupter in history;

+yet to him we may owe the Constitution of the United States. Pascal,

+in prose of unequalled limpidity, denounced the Jesuits as corrupting

+youth. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an "intellectual" and a

+philosophic anarch, once wrote to Nietzsche: "I, too, love Pascal. But

+even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal.

+Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but

+they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with

+notes themselves. The best edition is that of the Jesuits," Were not

+Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting

+for Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn't much matter whether one

+considers a great man as a regenerator or a corrupter. Napoleon was

+called the latter by Taine after he had been saluted as demigod by

+his idolatrous contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ

+much from his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, though

+borrowing his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the one sincere

+friendship of his lonely life, Richard Wagner's. We know the most

+objective philosophies are tinged by the individual temperaments of

+their makers, and perhaps the chief characteristic of all philosophers

+is their unphilosophic contempt for their fellow-thinkers. Nietzsche

+displayed this trait; so did Richard Wagner--who was in a lesser

+fashion an amateur philosopher, his system adorned by plumes borrowed

+from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopenhauer was

+endowed with a more powerful intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche.

+He "corrupted" them both. He was materialist enough to echo the

+epigram attributed to Fontenelle: To be happy a man must have a good

+stomach and a wicked heart.

+

+Friedrich Nietzsche was more poet than original thinker. Merely to say

+Nay! to all existing institutions is not to give birth to a mighty

+idea, though the gesture is brave. He substituted for Schopenhauer's

+"Will to Live"--(an ingenious variation of Kant's "Thing in Itself")

+the "Will to Power"; which phrase is mere verbal juggling. The late

+Eduard von Hartmann built his house of philosophy in the fog of the

+Unconscious; Nietzsche, despising Darwin as a dull grubber, returned

+unknowingly to the very land of metaphysics he thought he had fled

+forever. He was always the theologian--_toujours séminariste_, as they

+said of Renan. Theology was in his blood. It stiffened his bones.

+Abusing Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, he was

+himself an exponent of a theological odium of the virulent sort, as

+may be seen in his thundering polemics. He held a brief for the other

+side of good and evil; but a man can't so easily empty his veins of the

+theologic blood of his forebears. It was his Nessus shirt and ended

+by consuming him. He had the romantic cult of great men, yet sneered

+at Carlyle for his Titanism. He believed in human perfectibility. He

+borrowed his Superman partly from the classic pantheon, partly from

+the hierarchy of Christian saints--or perhaps from the very Cross he

+vituperated. The only Christian, he was fond of saying, died on the

+Cross. The only Nietzschian, one might reply, passed away when crumbled

+the brilliant brain of Nietzsche. Saturated with the culture of Goethe,

+his Superman was sent ballooning aloft by the poetic afflatus of

+Nietzsche.

+

+He was an apparition possible only in modern and rationalistic

+Protestant Germany. Like a voice from the Middle Ages he has stirred

+the profound phlegm and spiritual indifference of his fellow

+countrymen. But he has in him more of Savonarola than Luther--Luther,

+who was for him the apotheosis of all that is hateful in the German

+character: the self-satisfied philistinism, sensuality, beer and

+tobacco, unresponsiveness to all the finer issues of existence, pious

+tactlessness and harsh dogmatism.

+

+His truth is enclosed in a transcendental vacuum. Whether he had

+Galton's science of Eugenics in his mind when he modelled his

+Zarathustra we need not concern ourselves. His revaluation of

+moral values has not shaken morality to its centre. He challenged

+superficial conventional morality, but the ultimate pillars of faith

+still stand. He reminds us of William Blake when he writes: "The

+path to one's heaven ever leads through the voluptuousness of one's

+own hell." And his psychical resemblance to Pascal is striking. Both

+men were physically debilitated; their nervous systems, overwhelmed

+by the burdens they imposed upon them, made their days and nights

+a continuous agony. The Nietzschian philosophy may be negligible,

+but the psychological aspects of this singularly versatile,

+fascinating, and contradictory nature are not. His "Will to Power"

+in his own case resolves itself into the will to suffer. Compared

+to his, Schopenhauer's pessimism is the good-natured grumbling of a

+healthy, witty man, with a tremendous vital temperament. Nietzsche

+was delicate from youth. His experiences in the Franco-Prussian war

+harmed him. Headache, eye trouble, a weak stomach, coupled with his

+abuse of intellectual work, and, toward the last, indulgence in

+narcotics for insomnia, all coloured his philosophy. The personal

+bias was unescapable, and this bias favoured sickness, not health.

+Hence his frantic apotheosis of health, the dance and laughter, and

+his admiration for Bizet's Carmen. Hence his constant employment of

+joyful imagery, of bold defiance to the sober workaday world. His

+famous injunction: "Be hard!" was meant for his own unhappy soul, ever

+nearing, like Pascal's, the abyss of black melancholy.

+

+While we believe that too much stress has been laid upon the

+pathologic side of Pascal's and Nietzsche's characters, there is no

+evading the fact that both seemed tinged with what Kurt Eisner calls

+_psychopathia spiritualis_. The references to suffering in Nietzsche's

+books are significant. There is a vibrating accent of personal sorrow

+on every page. He lived in an inferno, mental and physical. We are

+given to praising Robert Louis Stevenson for his cheerfulness in the

+dire straits of his illness. He was a mere amateur of misery, a

+professional invalid, in comparison with Nietzsche. And how cruel was

+the German poet to himself. He tied his soul to a stake and recorded

+the poignant sensations of his spiritual _auto-da-fé_. At the close of

+his sane days we find him taking a dolorous pride in his capacity for

+suffering. "It is great affliction only--that long, slow affliction in

+which we are burned as it were with green wood, which takes time--that

+compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depth and divest

+ourselves of all trust, all good nature, glossing, gentleness.... I

+doubt whether such affliction improves us; but I know that it deepens

+us.... Oh, how repugnant to one henceforth is gratification, coarse,

+dull, drab-coloured gratification, as usually understood by those who

+enjoy life!... Profound suffering makes noble; it separates. ... There

+are free, insolent minds that would fain conceal and deny that at

+the bottom they are disjointed, incurable souls--it is the case with

+Hamlet." Nietzsche has the morbidly introspective Hamlet temper, and

+Pascal has been called the Christian Hamlet.

+

+We read in Overbeck's recollections that Nietzsche manifested deep

+interest in the personality of Pascal. Both hated hypocrisy. But

+the German thinker saw in the Frenchman of genius only a Christian

+who hugged his chains, one who for his faith suffered "a continuous

+suicide of reason." (Has not Nietzsche himself also said hard things

+about Reason?) "One is punished best by one's virtues" ... or, "He

+who fights with monsters, let him be careful lest he thereby become

+a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also

+gaze into thee." This last is unquestionably a reminiscence of Pascal.

+He could not endure with equanimity Pascal's _sacrifizio dell'

+intelletto_, not realizing that the Frenchman felt beneath his feet

+the solid globe of faith. He discerned the Puritan in Pascal, though

+failing to recognise the Puritan in himself. Despite his praise of

+the Dionysian element in art and life, a puritan was buried in the

+nerves of Nietzsche. He never could tolerate the common bourgeois joys.

+Wine, Woman, Song, and their poets, were his detestations. Yet he

+hated Puritanism in Protestant Christianity. "The dangerous thrill of

+repentance spasms, the vivisection of conscience," he contemns; "even

+in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty." He wrote

+to Brandes: "Physically, too, I lived for years in the neighbourhood

+of death. This was my great piece of good fortune; I forgot myself. I

+outlived myself--a shedding of the skin." Pascal also knew the sting of

+the flesh and brain. From the time he had an escape from sudden death,

+he was conscious of an abyss at his side. "Men of genius," he wrote,

+"have their heads higher but their feet lower than the rest of us."

+With Nietzsche there was a darker _nuance_ of pain; he speaks somewhere

+of "the philtre of the great Circe of mingled pleasure and cruelty."

+His soul was a mysterious palimpsest. The heart has its reasons, cried

+Pascal; of Nietzsche's heart the last word has not been written.

+

+His criticism of Pascal was not clement. He said: "In Goethe the

+superabundance becomes creative, in Flaubert the hatred; Flaubert,

+a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive judgment

+at bottom.... He tortured himself when he composed, quite as Pascal

+tortured himself when he thought." Yes, but Nietzsche was as fierce

+a hater as Pascal or Flaubert. He set up for Christianity a straw

+adversary and proceeded to demolish it. He forgot that, as Francis

+Thompson has it: "It is the severed head that makes the Seraph."

+Nietzsche would not look higher than the mud around the pedestal. He,

+poor sufferer, was not genuinely impersonal. His tragedy was his sick

+soul and body. "If a man cannot sing as he carries his cross, he had

+better drop it," advises Havelock Ellis. Nietzsche bore a terrible

+cross--like the men staggering with their chimeras in Baudelaire's

+poem--but he did not bear it with equanimity. We must not be deceived

+by his desperate gayety. As a married man he would never have enjoyed,

+as did John Stuart Mill, spiritual henpeckery. He was afraid of life,

+this dazzling Zarathustra, who went on Icarus-wings close to the sun.

+He could speak of women thus: "We think woman deep--why? Because we

+never find any foundation in her. Woman is not even shallow." Or,

+"Woman would like to believe that love can do all--it is a superstition

+peculiar to herself. Alas! he who knows the heart finds out how poor,

+helpless, pretentious, and liable to error even the best, the deepest

+love is--how it rather destroys than saves."

+

+_Der Dichter spricht!_ Also the bachelor. Once a Hilda of the younger

+generation, Lou Salomé by name, came knocking at the door of the poet's

+heart. It was in vain. The wings of a great happiness touched his brow

+as it passed, No wonder he wrote: "The desert grows; woe to him who

+hides deserts"; "Woman unlearns the fear of man"; "Thou goest to women!

+Remember thy whip." (Always this resounding motive of cruelty.) "Thy

+soul will be dead even sooner than thy body"; "Once spirit became God;

+then it became man; and now it is becoming mob"; "And many a one who

+went into the desert and suffered thirst with the camels, merely did

+not care to sit around the cistern with dirty camel-drivers." Here is

+the aristocratic radical.

+

+It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess the capacity for noble

+indignation; but Nietzsche was obsessed by his indignations. His voice,

+that golden poet's voice, becomes too often shrill, cracked, and

+falsetto. Voltaire has remarked that the first man who compared a woman

+to a rose was a poet, the second a fool. In his attitude toward Woman,

+Nietzsche was neither fool nor poet; but he never called her a rose.

+Nor was he a cynic; he saw too clearly for that, and he had suffered.

+Suffering, however, should have been a bond with women. Despite his

+cruel utterances he enjoyed several ideal friendships with cultivated

+women. "There is no happy life for woman--the advantage that the world

+offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice," wrote Mr. Howells. Gossip

+has whispered that he was hopelessly in love with Cosima Wagner. A

+charming theme for a psychological novel. So was Von Bülow, once--until

+he married her; so, Anton Rubinstein. Both abused Wagner's music;

+Von Bülow after he became an advocate of Brahms; Rubinstein always.

+Nietzsche, just before 1876, experienced the pangs of a Wagnerian

+reactionary. A pretty commentary this upon masculine mental superiority

+if one woman (even such a remarkable creature as Cosima) could upset

+the stanchest convictions of these three men. And convictions, asserted

+Nietzsche, are prisons. He contrived to escape from many intellectual

+prisons. Cosima had proved the one inflexible jailer.

+

+Merciless to himself, he did not spare others. Of Altruism, with its

+fundamental contradictions, he wrote:

+

+      A being capable of purely altruistic actions alone is more

+      fabulous than the Phœnix. Never has a man done anything

+      solely for others, and without any personal motive; how

+      could the Ego act without Ego? ... Suppose a man wished

+      to do and to will everything for others, nothing for

+      himself, the latter would be impossible, for the very good

+      reason that he must do very much for himself, in order to

+      do anything at all for others. Moreover, it presupposes

+      that the other is egoist enough constantly to accept

+      these sacrifices made for him; so that the men of love and

+      self-sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence

+      of loveless egoists who are incapable of self-sacrifice.

+      In order to subsist, the highest morality must positively

+      enforce the existence of immorality.--(Menschliches, I,

+      137-8).

+

+"Nietzsche's criticism on this point," remarks Professor Seth Pattison,

+"must be accepted as conclusive. Every theory which attempts to

+divorce the ethical end from the personality of the moral agent must

+necessarily fall into this vicious circle; in a sense, the moral centre

+and the moral motive must always ultimately be self, the satisfaction

+of the self, the perfection of the self. The altruistic virtues, and

+self-sacrifice in general, can only enter into the moral ideal so far

+as they minister to the realisation of what is recognised to be the

+highest type of manhood, the self which finds its own in all men's

+good. Apart from this, self-sacrifice, self-mortification for its

+own sake, would be a mere negation, and, as such, of no moral value

+whatever."

+

+Hasn't this the familiar ring of Max Stirner and his doctrine of the

+Ego?

+

+Nietzsche with Pascal would have assented that "illness is the natural

+state of the true Christian." There was in both thinkers a tendency

+toward self-laceration of the conscience. "Il faut s'abêtir," wrote

+Pascal; and Nietzsche's pride vanished in the hot fire of suffering.

+The Pascal injunction to stupefy ourselves was not to imitate the

+beasts of the field, but was a counsel of humility. Montaigne in his

+essay on Raymond de Sebonde wrote before Pascal concerning the danger

+of overwrought sensibility; (Il nous faut abestir pour nous assagir,

+is the original old French). It would have been wise for Nietzsche to

+follow Pascal's advice. "We live alone, we die alone," sorrowfully

+wrote the greatest religious force of the past century, Cardinal Newman

+(a transposition of Pascal's "Nous mourrons seuls"). Nietzsche was the

+loneliest of poets. He lived on the heights and paid the penalty, like

+other exalted searchers after the vanished vase of the ideal.

+

+

+

+II

+

+NIETZSCHE'S APOSTASY

+

+

+Although Macaulay called Horace Walpole a "wretched fribble," that

+gossip knew a trick or two in fancy fencing. "Oh," he wrote, "I am sick

+of visions and systems that shove one another aside and come again like

+figures in a moving picture." This was the outburst of a man called

+insincere and fickle, but frank in this instance. Issuing from the

+mouth of Friedrich Nietzsche this cry of the entertaining, shallow

+Walpole would have been curiously apposite. The unhappy German poet

+and philosopher suffered during his intellectual life from the "moving

+pictures" of other men's visions and systems, and when he finally

+escaped them all and evoked his own dream-world his brain became

+over-clouded and he passed away "trailing clouds of glory." It is an

+imperative necessity for certain natures to change their opinions, to

+slough, as sloughs a snake its skin, their master ideas. Renan went

+still further when he asserted that all essayists contradict themselves

+sometime during their life.

+

+With Nietzsche the apparent contradictions of his Wagner-worship and

+Wagner-hatred may be explained if we closely examine the concepts

+of his first work of importance, The Birth of Tragedy. It was a

+misfortune that his bitterest book, The Wagner Case, should have

+been first translated into English, for Wagner is our music-maker

+now, and the rude assaults of Nietzsche fall upon deaf ears; while

+those who had read the earlier essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,

+were both puzzled and outraged. Certainly the man who could thus

+flout what he once adored must have been mad. This was the popular

+verdict, a facile and unjust verdict. What Nietzsche first postulated

+as to the nature of music he returned to at the close of his life;

+the mighty personality of Richard Wagner had deflected the stream

+of his thought for a few years. But as early as 1872 doubts began

+to trouble his sensitive conscience--this was before his pamphlet

+Richard Wagner in Bayreuth--and his notebooks of that period were sown

+with question-marks. In the interesting correspondence with Dr. Georg

+Brandes, who literally revealed to Europe the genius of Nietzsche, we

+find this significant passage:

+

+      I was the first to distil a sort of unity out of the two

+      [Schopenhauer and Wagner].... All the Wagnerians are

+      disciples of Schopenhauer. Things were different when I

+      was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who clung

+      to Wagner, and "Wagner and Hegel" was still the cry in the

+      '50s.

+

+Nietzsche might have added the name of the philosopher Feuerbach.

+Wagner's English apologist, Ashton Ellis, repudiates the common belief

+that Wagner refashioned the latter part of the Ring so as to introduce

+in it his newly acquired Schopenhauerian ideas. Wagner was always

+a pessimist, declares Mr. Ellis; Schopenhauer but confirmed him in

+his theories. Wagner, like Nietzsche, was too often a weathercock. A

+second-rate poet and philosopher, he stands chiefly for his magnificent

+music. Nietzsche or any other _polemiker_ cannot change the map of

+music by fulminating against Wagner. Time may prove his true foe--the

+devouring years that always show such hostility to music of the

+theatre, music that is not pure music.

+

+The spirit of the letter to Brandes quoted above may be found in

+Nietzsche Contra Wagner (The Case of Wagner, page 72). Nietzsche wrote:

+

+      I similarly interpreted Wagner's music in my own way

+      as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of

+      soul.... It is obvious what I misunderstood, it is

+      obvious in like manner what I bestowed upon Wagner and

+      Schopenhauer--myself.

+

+He read his own enthusiasms, his Hellenic ideals, into the least Greek

+among composers. Wagner himself was at first pleased, also not a little

+nonplussed by the idolatry of Nietzsche. Remember that this young

+philologist was a musician as well as a brilliant scholar.

+

+Following Schopenhauer in his main contention that music is a

+presentative, not a representative art; the noumenon, not the

+phenomenon--as are, for instance, painting and sculpture--Nietzsche

+held that the unity of music is undeniable. There is no dualism,

+such as instrumental music and vocal music. Sung music is only music

+presented by a sonorous vocal organ; the words are negligible. A poem

+may be a starting-point for the composer, yet in poetry there is

+not the potentiality of tone (this does not naturally refer to the

+literary tone-quality of music). From a non-musical thing music cannot

+be evolved. There is only absolute music. Its beginning is absolute.

+All other is a masquerading. The dramatic singer is a monstrosity--the

+actual words of Nietzsche. Opera is a debased genre. We almost expect

+the author to deny, as denied Hanslick, music any content whatsoever.

+But this he does not. He is too much the Romantic. For him the poem

+of Tristan was but the "vapour" of the music. Music is the archetype

+of the arts. It is the essence of Greek tragedy and therefore

+pessimistic. Tragedy is pessimism. The two faces of the Greek art he

+calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses. One is the Classic,

+the other the Romantic; calm beauty as opposed to bacchantic ecstasy.

+Wagner, Nietzsche identified with the Dionysian element, and he was

+not far wrong; but Greek? The passionate welter of this new music

+stirred Nietzsche's excitable young nerves. He was, like many of his

+contemporaries, swept away in the boiling flood of the Wagnerian sea.

+It appeared to him, the profound Greek scholar, as a recrudescence of

+Dionysian joy. Instead, it was the topmost crest of the dying waves of

+Romanticism. Nietzsche later realised this fact. To Brandes he wrote:

+

+Your German romanticism has made me reflect how the whole movement

+only attained its goal in music (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner,

+Brahms); in literature it stopped short with a huge promise--the French

+were more fortunate. I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be

+a Romanticist. Without music life would be a mistake.... With regard to

+the effect of Tristan I could tell you strange things. A good dose of

+mental torture strikes me as an excellent tonic before a meal of Wagner.

+

+Nietzsche loved Wagner the man more than Wagner the musician. The news

+of Wagner's death in 1883 was a terrible blow for him. He wrote Frau

+Wagner a letter of condolence, which was answered from Bayreuth by her

+daughter Daniela von Bülow. (See the newly published Overbeck Letters.)

+

+Nothing could be more unfair than to ascribe to Nietzsche petty

+motives in his breaking off with Wagner. There were minor differences,

+but it was Parsifal and its drift toward Rome, that shocked the

+former disciple. What he wrote of Wagner and Wagnerism may be

+interpreted according to one's own views, but the Parsifal criticism

+is sound. That parody of the Roman Catholic ceremonial and ideas,

+and the glorification of its psychopathic hero, with the consequent

+degradation of the idea of womanhood, Nietzsche saw and denounced.

+"I despise everyone who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on

+morals," he cried. To-day his denunciations are recognised by wise

+folk as wisdom. He first heard Carmen in Genoa, November 27, 1881.

+To his exacerbated nerves its rich southern melodies were soothing.

+He overpraised the opera--which is a sparkling compound of Gounod

+and Spanish gypsy airs; an _olla podrida_ as regards style. He knew

+that this was bonbon music compared with Wagner. And the confession

+was wrung from his lips: "We must first be Wagnerians." Thus, as he

+escaped from Schopenhauer's pessimism, he plucked from his heart his

+affection for Wagner. He had become Zarathustra. He painted Wagner as

+an "ideal monster," but the severing of the friendship cost Nietzsche

+his happiness. An extraordinary mountain-mania attacked him on the

+heights of the upper Engadine. All that he had once admired he now

+hated. He had a positive genius for hatred, even more so than Huysmans;

+both writers were bilious melancholics, and both were alike in the

+display of heavy-handed irony. With Nietzsche's "ears for quarter

+tones"--as he told Brandes--it would have been far better for him to

+remain with Peter Gast in Italy, while the latter was writing that

+long-contemplated study on Chopin. Nietzsche loved the music of the

+Pole who had introduced into the heavy monochrome of German harmonies

+an exotic and chromatic gamut of colours.

+

+If Wagner erred in his belief that it was the drama not the music which

+ruled in his own compositions (for his talk about the welding of the

+different arts is an æsthetic nightmare), why should not Nietzsche

+have made a mistake in ascribing to Wagner his own exalted ideals?

+Wagner's music is the Wagner music drama. That is a commonplace of

+criticism--though not at Bayreuth. Nietzsche taught the supremacy of

+tone in his early book. He detested so-called musical realism. These

+two men became friends through a series of mutual misunderstandings.

+When Nietzsche discovered that music and philosophy had naught in

+common--and he had hoped that Wagner's would prove the solvent--he

+cooled off in his faith. It was less an apostasy than we believe.

+Despite his eloquent affirmation of Wagnerism, Nietzsche was never

+in his innermost soul a Wagnerian. Nor yet was he insincere. This may

+seem paradoxical. He had felt the "pull" of Wagner's genius, and,

+as in the case of his Schopenhauer worship, he temporarily lost his

+critical bearings. This accounts for his bitterness when he found the

+feet of his idol to be clay. He was lashing his own bare soul in each

+scarifying phrase he applied to Wagner. He saw the free young Siegfried

+become the old Siegfried in the manacles of determinism and pessimism;

+then followed Parsifal and Wagner's apostasy--Nietzsche believed Wagner

+was going back to Christianity. There is more consistency in the case

+of Friedrich Nietzsche than has been acknowledged by the Wagnerians.

+He, the philosopher of decadence and romanticism, could have said

+to Wagner as Baudelaire to Manet: "You are only the first in the

+decrepitude of your art."

+

+If Nietzsche considered the poem a vaporous background for the

+passionate musical mosaic of Tristan and Isolde, what would he

+have thought if he could have heard the tonal interpretation of

+his Also Sprach Zarathustra, as conceived by the mathematical and

+emotional brain of Richard Strauss? I recall the eagerness with

+which I asked an impossible question of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche

+when at the Nietzsche-Archive, Weimar, in 1904: Is this tone-poem

+by Richard Strauss truly Nietzschean? Her tact did not succeed in

+quite veiling a hint of dubiety, though the noble sister of the dead

+philosopher was too tender-hearted to suggest a formal criticism of

+the composer's imposing sound-palace. It is not, however, difficult

+to imagine Nietzsche, alive, glaring in dismay and with "embellished

+indignation" as he hears the dance theme in Zarathustra. Nor would he

+be less surprised if he had suddenly forced upon his consciousness a

+performance of Claude Debussy's mooning, mystic, _triste_ Pélléas et

+Mélisande, with its invertebrate charm, its innocuous sensuousness,

+its absence of thematic material, its perverse harmonies, its lack of

+rhythmic variety, and its faded sweetness, like that evoked by musty,

+quaint tapestry in languid motion. (Debussy might have delved deeper

+into churchly modes and for novelty's sake even employed pneumes to

+lend his score a still more venerable aspect. Certainly his tonalities

+are on the other side of diatonic and chromatic. Why not call them

+_pneumatic_ scales?) Surely Nietzsche could not have refrained from

+exclaiming: Ah! the pathos of distance! Ah! what musical sins thou must

+take upon thee, Richard Wagner! Strauss and Debussy are the legitimate

+fruits of thy evil tree of music!

+

+Miserably happy poet, like one of those Oriental wonder-workers dancing

+in ecstasy on white-hot sword-blades, the tears all the while streaming

+down his cheeks as he proclaims his new gospel of joy: "_Il faut

+méditerraniser la musique._" Alas! the pathos of Nietzsche's reality.

+Reality for this self-tortured Hamlet-soul was a spiritual crucifixion

+and a spiritual tragedy.

+

+

+

+

+III

+

+ANTICHRIST?

+

+

+The penalty of misrepresentation and misinterpretation seems to

+be attached to every new idea that comes to birth through the

+utterances of genius. At first with Wagner it was the "noise-making

+Wagner"--whereas he is a master of plangent harmonies. Ibsen, we

+were told, couldn't write a play. His dramatic technique is nearly

+faultless; in reality, with its unities there is a suspicion of the

+academic in it and a perilous approach to the Chinese ivory mechanism

+of Scribe. And paint, Paris asserted, the late Edouard Manet could

+not. It was precisely his almost miraculous manipulation of paint that

+sets this artist apart from his fellows. The same tactless rating

+of Friedrich Nietzsche has prevailed in the general critical and

+popular imagination. Nietzsche has become the bugaboo of timid folk.

+He has been denounced as the Antichrist; yet he has been the subject

+of a discriminating study in such a conservative magazine as the

+_Catholic World_. Thanks to the conception of some writers, Nietzsche

+and the Nietzschians are gigantic brutes, a combination of Genghis

+Khan and Bismarck, terrifying apparitions wearing mustachios like

+yataghans, eyes rolling in frenzy, with a philosophy that ranged from

+pitch-and-toss to manslaughter, and with a consuming atheism as a side

+attraction. Need we protest that this is Nietzsche misread, Nietzsche

+butchered to make a stupid novelist's holiday.

+

+Ideas to be vitally effective must, like scenery, be run on during the

+exact act of the contemporary drama. The aristocratic individualism of

+Nietzsche came at a happy moment when the stage was bare yet encumbered

+with the débris of socialistic theories left over from the storm that

+first swept all Europe in 1848. It was necessary that the pendulum

+should swing in another direction. The small voice of Max Stirner--who,

+as the French would say, imitated Nietzsche in advance--was swallowed

+in the universal gabble of sentimental humanitarianism preached from

+pulpits and barricades. Nietzsche's appearance marked one of those

+precise psychological moments when the rehabilitation of an old idea in

+a new garment of glittering rhetoric would resemble a new dispensation.

+For over a decade now the fame and writings of the Saxon-born

+philosopher have traversed the intellectual life of the Continent. He

+was translated into a dozen languages, he was expounded, schools sprang

+up and his disciples fought furious battles in his name. His doctrines,

+because of their dynamic revolutionary quality, were impudently annexed

+by men whose principles would have been abhorrent to the unfortunate

+thinker. Nietzsche, who his life long had attacked socialism in its

+myriad shapes, was captured by the socialists. However, the regression

+of the wave of admiration has begun not only in Germany but in France,

+once his greatest stronghold. The real Nietzsche, undimmed by violent

+partisanship and equally violent antagonism, has emerged. No longer is

+he a bogey man, not a creature of blood and iron, not a constructive or

+an academic philosopher, but simply a brilliant and suggestive thinker

+who, because of the nature of his genius, could never have erected

+an elaborate philosophic system, and a writer not quite as dangerous

+to established religion and morals as some critics would have us

+believe. He most prided himself on his common sense, on his "realism,"

+as contradistinguished from the cobweb-spinning idealisms of his

+philosophic predecessors.

+

+Early in 1908 a book was published at Jena entitled Franz Overbeck

+and Friedrich Nietzsche, by Carl Albrecht Bernouilli. In it at great

+length and with clearness was described the friendship of Overbeck--a

+well-known church historian and culture-novelist, born at St.

+Petersburg of German and English parents--and Nietzsche during their

+Basel period. Interesting is the story of his relations with Richard

+Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Renaissance. As a

+youth Nietzsche had won the praises of both Rietschl and Burckhardt for

+his essay on Theognis. This was before 1869, in which year at the age

+of twenty-six he took his doctor's degree and accepted the chair of

+classical philology at Basel. His friend Overbeck noted his dangerously

+rapid intellectual development and does not fail to record, what has

+never been acknowledged by the dyed-in-the-wool Nietzschians, that the

+"Master" had read and inwardly digested Max Stirner's anarchistic work,

+The Ego and His Own. Not only is this long-denied fact set forth, but

+Overbeck, in a careful analysis, reaches the positive conclusion that,

+notwithstanding his profound erudition, his richly endowed nature,

+Friedrich Nietzsche is not one of the world's great men; that in his

+mad endeavour to carve himself into the semblance of his own Superman

+he wrecked brain and body.

+

+The sad irony of this book lies in the fact that the sister of

+Nietzsche, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, who nursed the poet-philosopher

+from the time of his breakdown in 1888 till his death in 1900; who

+for twenty years has by pen and personally made such a successful

+propaganda for his ideas, was in at least three letters--for the first

+time published by Bernouilli--insulted grievously by her brother.

+This posthumous hatred as expressed in the acrid prose of Nietzsche

+is terribly disenchanting. He calls her a meddlesome woman without a

+particle of understanding of his ideals. He declares that she martyred

+him, made him ridiculous, and in the last letter he wrote her, dated

+December, 1886, he wonders at the enigma of fate that made two persons

+of such different temperaments blood-relatives. Bernouilli, the

+editor of these Overbeck letters, adds insult to injury by calling

+the unselfish, noble-minded sister and biographer of her brother a

+tyrannical and not very intellectual person, who often wounded her

+brother with her advice and criticism.

+

+Peter Gast doubts the authenticity of these letters, for, as he

+truthfully points out, the love of Nietzsche for his sister, as

+evidenced by an ample correspondence, was great. We recall the touching

+exclamation of the sick philosopher when once at his sister's house in

+Weimar he saw her weeping: "Don't cry, little sister, we are all so

+happy now." That "now" had a sinister significance, for the brilliant

+thinker was quite helpless and incapable of reading through the page

+of a book, though he was never the lunatic pictured by some of his

+opponents. A deep melancholy had settled upon his soul and he died

+without enjoying the light of a returned reason. It has not occurred to

+German critics that these letters even if genuine are the product of a

+diseased imagination. Nietzsche became a very suspicious man after his

+break with Wagner. He suffered from the mania of persecution. He hated

+mankind and fled to the heights of Sils-Maria to escape what Poe aptly

+described as the "tyranny of the human face."

+

+The first thing that occurs to one after reading Beyond Good and

+Evil is that Nietzsche is more French than German. It is well known

+that his favourites were the _pensée_ writers, Pascal, La Bruyère,

+La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Chamfort, Vauvenargues. A peripatetic

+because of chronic ill health--he had the nerves of a Shelley and the

+stomach of a Carlyle--his ideas were jotted down during his long

+walks in the Engadine. Naturally they assumed the form of aphorisms,

+epigrams, _jeux d'esprit_. With his increasing illness came the

+inability to write more than a few pages of connected thoughts. His

+best period was between the years 1877 and 1882. He had attacked

+Schopenhauer; he wished to be free to go up to the "heights" unimpeded

+by the baggage of other men's ideas. It was with disquietude that his

+friends witnessed the growing self-exaltation that may be noted in the

+rhapsodical Zarathustra.

+

+He felt the ground sinking under him--his pride of intellect Luciferian

+in intensity--and his latter works were a desperate challenge to his

+darkening brain and the world that refused to recognize his value.

+

+Nietzsche had the true ascetic's temperament. He lived the life of

+a strenuous saint, and his Beyond Good and Evil might land us in

+a barren desert, where austerity would rule our daily conduct. To

+become a Superman one must renounce the world. It was the easy-going,

+down-at-the-heel morality of the world, its carrying water on both

+shoulders, that stirred the wrath of this earnest man of blameless

+life and provoked from him so much brilliant and fascinating prose.

+He wrote a swift, golden German. He was a stylist. The great culture

+hero of his day, nourished on Latin and Greek, he waged war against the

+moral ideas of his generation and ruined his intellect in the unequal

+conflict. He turned on himself and rended his soul into shreds rather

+than join in the affirmations of recognised faith. Yet what eloquent,

+touching pages he has devoted to the founder of the Christian religion.

+His last signature in the letter to Brandes reveals the preoccupation

+of his memory with the religion he despised. Nietzsche made the great

+renunciation of inherited faith and committed spiritual suicide.

+Libraries are filled with the works of his commentators, eager to make

+of him what he was not. He has been shamelessly exploited. He has

+been called the forerunner of Pragmatism. He was a poet, an artist,

+who saw life as a gorgeously spun dream, not as a dreary phalanstery.

+He belonged rather to Goethe and Faust than to Schopenhauer or the

+positivists. Hellenism was his first and last love.

+

+The correspondence between Nietzsche and his famulus, the musician

+Peter Gast--whose real name is Heinrich Kôselitz--from 1876 to 1889,

+appeared last autumn and comprises 278 letters. Another Nietzsche

+appears--gentle, suffering, as usual still hopeful. He loves Italy;

+at the end, Turin is his favourite city. There is little except in

+the final communication to show a mind cracking asunder. No doubt

+this correspondence was given to the world as an offset to the

+Overbeck-Bernouilli letters.

+

+Leslie Stephen declared that no one ever wrote a dull autobiography,

+and risking a bull, added, "The very dulness would be interesting." Yet

+one is not afraid to maintain that Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography

+is rather a disappointment; possibly because too much was expected.

+It should not be forgotten that Nietzsche, when at Wagner's villa

+Triebschen, near Lucerne, read and corrected Wagner's autobiography,

+which is yet to see the light of publication. He seems to have violated

+certain confidences, for he was the first--that is, in latter years--to

+revive the story of Wagner's blood relationship to his stepfather,

+Ludwig Geyer. In Leipsic this was a thrice-told tale. Moreover, he

+warned us to be suspicious of great men's autobiographies and then

+wrote one himself, wrote it in three weeks, beginning October 15, 1888,

+the forty-fourth anniversary of his birth, and ending with difficulty

+November 4. It rings sincere, and was composed at white heat, but

+unhappily for this present curious generation of Nietzsche readers it

+tells very little that is new.

+

+Notwithstanding Nietzsche's wish that the book should not exceed in

+price over a mark and a half, a limited edition de luxe has been put

+forth with the acquiescence of the Nietzsche archive, Weimar, and at

+a high price. This edition is limited to 1,250 copies. It is clearly

+printed, but the decorative element is rather bizarre. Henry Van

+de Velde of the Weimar Art School is the designer of the title and

+ornaments. Raoul Richter, professor at the Leipsic University, has

+written a few appreciative words at the close.

+

+Nietzsche was at Turin, November, 1888. There he wrote the following

+to Professor Georg Brandes, the celebrated Copenhagen critic: "I

+have now revealed myself with a cynicism that will become historical.

+The book is called Ecce Homo and is against everything Christian....

+I am after all the first psychologist of Christianity, and like the

+old artillerist I am, I can bring forward cannon of which no opponent

+of Christianity has even suspected the existence.... I lay down my

+oath that in two years we shall have the whole earth in convulsions.

+I am a fatality. Guess who it is that comes off worst in Ecce Homo?

+The Germans! I have said awful things to them." This was the "golden

+autumn" of his life, as he confessed to his sister Elizabeth. In a

+little over four weeks from the date of the letter to Brandes Nietzsche

+went mad, after a stroke of apoplexy in Turin. The collapse must have

+taken place between January 1 and 3, 1889. Brandes received a card

+signed "The Crucified One"; Overbeck, his old friend at Basel, was also

+agitated by a few lines in which Nietzsche proclaimed himself the King

+of Kings; while to Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth was sent a communication

+which read, "Ariadne, I love you! Dionysos." Like Tolstoy, Nietzsche

+suffered from theomania and prophecy madness.

+

+These details are not in the autobiography but may be found in Dr.

+Mügge's excellent study just published, Nietzsche, His Life and Work.

+Overbeck started for Turin and there found his poor old companion

+giving away his money, dancing, singing, declaiming verse, and playing

+snatches of crazy music on the pianoforte. He was taken back to

+Basel and was gentle on the trip except that in the Saint-Gothard

+tunnel he sang a poem of his, "An der Brücke," which appears in the

+autobiography. His mother brought him from Switzerland to Naumburg;

+thence to Dr. Binswanger's establishment at Jena. Later he lived in his

+sister's home at Upper Weimar, and from the balcony, where he spent

+his days, he could see a beautiful landscape. He was melancholy rather

+than mad, never violent--this his sister has personally assured me--and

+occasionally surprised those about him by flashes of memory; but full

+consciousness was not to be again enjoyed by him. Overwork, chloral,

+and despair at the "conspiracy of silence" caused his brain to crumble.

+He had attained his "Great Noon," Zarathustra's Noon, during the

+closing days of 1888. In August, 1900, came the euthanasia for which he

+had longed.

+

+There is internal evidence that the autobiography was written under

+exalted nervous conditions. The aura of insanity hovers about its

+pages. Yet Nietzsche has seldom said so many brilliant, ironical, and

+savage things. He melts over memories of Wagner, the one friendship

+of a life crowded with friends and cursed by solitude. He sets out to

+smash Christianity, but he expressed the hope that the book would fall

+into the hands of the intellectual élite. He divides his theme into

+the following heads: Why I Am So Clever: Why I Am So Sage: Why I Write

+Such Good Books: Why I Am a Fatality. (You recall here the letter to

+Brandes.) He ranges from the abuse of bad German cookery to Kantian

+metaphysics. He calls Ibsen the typical old maid and denounces him as

+the creator of the "Emancipated Woman." Yes, he does insult Germany

+and the Germans, but no worse than in earlier books; and certainly not

+so effectively as did Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer. In calling the

+Germans the "Chinese of Europe" he but repeated the words of Goncourt

+in Charles Demailly. He speaks of Liszt as one "who surpasses all

+musicians by the noble accents of his orchestration" (vague phrase);

+and depreciates Schumann's "Manfred." He, Nietzsche, had composed a

+counter overture which Von Bülow declared extraordinary. True, Von

+Bülow did call it something of the sort, with the advice to throw it

+into the dust-bin as being an insult to good music. He analyses his

+recent readings of Baudelaire--whose diary touched him deeply--of

+Stendhal, Bourget, Maupassant, Anatole France, and others. Best of all,

+he minutely analyses the mental processes of his books from The Birth

+of Tragedy to The Wagner Case. He declares Zarathustra a dithyramb of

+solitude and purity, and proudly boasts that the Superman builds his

+nest in the trees of the future.

+

+What a master of invective! He often descends to the street in his

+tongue-lashing, as, for instance, when he groups "shopkeepers,

+Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats." Woman is

+always the enemy. The only way to tame her is to make her a mother.

+As for female suffrage, he sets it down to psychological disorders.

+He is a _nuance_, and is the first German to understand women! Alas!

+And not the last man who will repeat this speech surely hailing from

+the Stone Age. He seems rather proud of his double personality, and

+hints at a third. Oddly enough, Nietzsche asked that his Ecce Homo

+(the title proves his constant preoccupation with Christianity) be

+translated into French by Strindberg, the Swedish poet and the first

+dramatist to incorporate into his plays the Nietzschian philosophy,

+or what he conceived to be such. (Daniel Lesueur has written of the

+various adaptations for gorillas of a teaching that really demands from

+man the utmost that is in him.) Nietzsche was a hater of Christianity;

+above all of Christian morals, but he was a brave and honest fighter.

+He raged at George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Carlyle for their

+half-heartedness. To give up the belief in Christ and His mission

+meant for Nietzsche to drop the moral system, to transvalue old moral

+values. This, he truthfully asserted, George Eliot and Spencer had not

+the courage to do. He did not skulk behind such masks as the Higher

+Criticism, Modernism, or quacksalver Christian socialism. Compromise

+was abhorrent to him. His Superman, with its echoes of Wagner's

+Siegfried, Ibsen's Brand, Stendhal's wicked heroes, the Renaissance

+Borgias, the second Faust of Goethe, and not a little of Hamlet, is

+a monster of perfection that may some day become a demigod for a new

+religion--and no worse than contemporary mud-gods manufactured daily.

+Nietzsche's particular virtue, even for the orthodox, is that though

+he assails their faith he also puts to rout with the fiery blasts of

+his rhetoric all the belly-gods, the false-culture gods, the gods who

+"heal," and other "ghosts"--as Max Stirner calls them. But to every

+generation its truths (or lies).

+

+A recently published anecdote of Ibsen quotes a statement of his _a

+propos_ of Brand. "The whole drama is only meant as irony. For the man

+who wants all or nothing is certainly crazy." Well, Friedrich Nietzsche

+was such a man. No half-way parleyings. Fight the Bogey. Don't go

+around. He went more serenely than did Brand to his ice cathedral on

+the heights. His prayer uttered years before came true: "Give me, ye

+gods, give me madness! Madness to make me believe at last in myself."

+

+Nietzsche is the most dynamically emotional writer of his

+times. He sums up an epoch. He is the expiring voice of the old

+nineteenth-century romanticism in philosophy. His message to unborn

+generations we may easily leave to those unborn, and enjoy the wit, the

+profound criticisms of life, the bewildering gamut of his ideas; above

+all, pity the tragic blotting out of such a vivid intellectual life.

+

+

+

+

+VIII

+

+MYSTICS

+

+

+

+

+I

+

+ERNEST HELLO

+

+

+It occurred in the beautiful gardens of the Paris exposition during

+that summer of 1867 when Glory and France were synonymous expressions.

+To the music, cynical and voluptuous, of Offenbach and Strauss the

+world enjoyed itself, applauding equally Renan's latest book and

+Thérésa's vulgarity; amused by Ponson de Terrail's fatuous indecencies

+and speaking of Proudhon in the same breath. Bismarck and his Prussians

+seemed far away. Babel or Pompeii? The tower of the Second Empire

+reached to the clouds; below, the people danced on the edge of the

+crater. A time for prophets and their lamentations. Jeremiah walked in

+the gardens. He was a terrible man, with sombre fatidical gaze, eyes

+in which were the smothered fires of hatred. His thin hair waved in

+the wind. He said to his friends: "I come from the Tuileries Palace;

+it is not yet consumed; the Barbarians delay their coming. What is

+Attila doing?" He passed. "A madman!" exclaimed a companion to Henri

+Lasserre. "Not in the least," replied that writer. "He is Ernest

+Hello." After reading this episode as related by Hello's friend and

+editor, the disquieting figure is evoked of that son of Hanan, who

+prowled through the streets of the holy city in the year A.D. 62 crying

+aloud: "Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!" The prophecy of Hello was realized

+in a few years. Attila came and Attila went, and after his departure

+the polemical writer, who could be both a spouting volcano and a subtle

+doctor of theology, wrote his masterpiece, L'Homme, a remarkable book,

+a seed-bearing book.

+

+Why is there so little known of Ernest Hello? He was born 1828, died

+1885, and was a voluminous author, who wrote much for the _Univers_ and

+other periodicals and passed away as he had lived, fighting in harness

+for the truths of his religion. Possibly the less sensitive texture of

+Louis Veuillot's mind and character threw the talents of Hello into

+shadow; perhaps his avowed hatred of mediocrity, his Old Testament

+power of vituperation, and his apocalyptic style militated against his

+acceptance by the majority of Roman Catholic readers. Notwithstanding

+his gifts as a writer and thinker, Hello was never popular, and it is

+only a few years ago that his works began to be republished. Let us

+hasten to add that they are rich in suggestion for lovers of apologetic

+or hortatory literature.

+

+It was Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont who sent me to the amazing

+Hello. In A Rebours Huysmans discusses him with Léon Bloy, Barbey

+d'Aurevilly, and Ozanam. "Hello is a cunning engineer of the soul, a

+skilful watchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism

+of a passion and to explain the play of a wheel work." United to his

+power of analysis there is the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet and the

+tortured ingenuity of a master of style. A little John of Patmos, one

+who, complex and precious, is a sort of epileptic mystic--vindictive,

+proud, a despiser of the commonplace. All these things was Hello

+to Huysmans, who did not seem to relish him very much. De Gourmont

+described him as one who believed with genius. A believing genius he

+was, Ernest Hello, and his genius, his dynamic faith--apart from any

+consideration of his qualities as a prose artist or his extraordinary

+powers of analysis. Without his faith, which was, one is tempted to

+add, his thematic material, he might have been a huge force vainly

+flapping his wings in the void, or, as Lasserre puts it, he was

+impatient with God because of His infinite patience. He longed to

+see Him strike dumb the enemies of His revealed word. He lived in a

+continuous thunder-storm of the spirit. He was a mystic, yet a warrior

+on the fighting line of the church militant.

+

+Joachim of Flora has written: "The true ascetic counts nothing his

+own save his harp." Hello, less subjective than Newman, less lyric

+though a "son of thunder," counted but the harp of his faith. All

+else he cast away. And this faith was published to the heathen with

+the hot rhetoric of a propagandist. The nations must be aroused from

+their slumber. He whirls his readers off their feet by the torrential

+flow of his argument. He never winds calmly into his subject, but

+smites vehemently the opening bars of his hardy discourse. He writes

+pure, untroubled prose at times, the line, if agitated, unbroken,

+the balance of sound and sense perfect. But too often he employs a

+staccato, declamatory, tropical, inflated style which recalls Victor

+Hugo at his worst; the short sentence; the single paragraph; the

+vicious abuse of antithesis; if it were not for the subject-matter

+whole pages might masquerade as the explosive mannerisms of Hugo.

+"Christianity is _naturally_ impossible. However, it exists. Therefore

+it is supernatural!" This is Hello logic. Or, speaking of St. Joseph

+of Cupertino: "If he had not existed, no one could have invented

+him," which is a very witty inversion of Voltaire's celebrated _mot_.

+God-intoxicated as were St. Francis of Assisi or Père Ratisbonne,

+Hello was not; when absent from the tripod of vaticination he was a

+meek, loving man; then the walls of his _Turris eburnea_ echoed the

+inevitable: _Ora pro nobis!_ Even when the soul seems empty, it may,

+like a hollow shell, murmur of eternity. Hello's faith was in the

+fourth spiritual dimension. It demanded the affirmation of his virile

+intellect and the concurrence of his overarching emotional temperament.

+

+In the black-and-white sketch by Vallotton he resembles both Remenyi,

+the Hungarian violin virtuoso, and Louise Michel, the anarchist.

+The brow is vast, the expression exalted, the mouth belligerent,

+disputatious, and the chin slightly receding. One would say a man of

+violent passions, in equilibrium unsteady, a skirter of abysses, a good

+hater--did he not once propose a History of Hatred? Yet how submissive

+he was to papal decrees; many of his books contain instead of a preface

+his act of submission to Catholic dogma. More so than Huysmans was

+he a mediæval man. For him modern science did not exist. The Angelic

+Doctor will outlive Darwin, he cried, and the powers and principalities

+of darkness are as active in these days as in the age when the saints

+of the desert warred with the demons of doubt and concupiscence. "To

+wring from man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof of Satan's

+greatest power," was a sentiment of Père Ravignan to which Hello would

+have heartily subscribed. He detested Renan--_Renan, voilà l'ennemi!_

+Jeremy Taylor's vision of hell as an abode crowded with a million dead

+dogs would not be too severe a punishment for that silken sophist,

+whose writings are the veriest flotsam and jetsam of a disordered

+spiritual life. Hello has written eloquent pages about Hugo, whose

+poetry he admired, whose ideas he combated. Napoleon was a genius, but

+a foe of God.

+

+Shakespeare for him vacillated between obscenity and melancholy; Hamlet

+was a character hardly sounded by Hello; doubt was a psychological

+impossibility to one of his faith. He was convinced that the John of

+the Apocalyptic books was not John the Presbyter, nor any one of the

+five Johns of the Johannic writings, but John the Apostle. He has often

+the colour of Bossuet's moral indignation. A master of theological

+odium, his favourite denunciation was "Horma, Anathema, Anathème,

+Amen!" His favourite symbol of confusion is Babel--Paris. He loved,

+among many saints, Denys the Areopagite; he extolled the study of St.

+Thomas Aquinas. To the unhappy Abbé de Lamenais's Paroles d'un Croyant

+(1834), he opposed his own Paroles de Dieu. He could have, phrase for

+phrase, book for book, retorted with tenfold interest to Nietzsche's

+vilification of Christianity. Society will again become a theocracy,

+else pay the penalty in anarchy. One moment beating his breast, he

+cries aloud: "_Maranatha! Maranatha!_ Our Lord is at hand!" The next

+we find him with the icy contemptuousness of a mystic quoting from

+the Admirable Ruysbroeck (a thirteenth-century mystic whom he had

+translated, whose writings influenced Huysmans, and at one period of

+his development, Maurice Maeterlinck) these brave words: "Needs must

+I rejoice beyond the age, though the world has horror of my joy, and

+its grossness cannot understand what I say." Notwithstanding this

+aloofness, there are some who after reading Ernest Hello's Man may

+agree with Havelock Ellis: "Hello is the real psychologist of the

+century, not Stendhal."

+

+It is indeed a work of penetrating criticism and clairvoyance, this

+study of man, of life. Read his analysis of the Miser and you will

+recall Plautus or Molière. He has something of Saint-Simon's power in

+presenting a finished portrait and La Bruyère's cameo concision. He

+is reactionary in all that concerns modern æsthetics or the natural

+sciences. There is but one science, the knowledge of God. Avoiding the

+devious webs of metaphysics, he sets before us his ideas with a crystal

+clarity. Despite its religious bias, L'Homme may be recommended as a

+book for mundane minds. Nor is Le Siècle to be missed. Those views

+of the world, of men and women, are written by a shrewd observer and

+a profound thinker. Philosophie et Athéisme is just what its title

+foretells--a battering-ram of dialectic. The scholastic learning of

+Hello is enormous. He had at his back the Bible, the patristic writers,

+the schoolmen, and all the moderns from De Maistre to Father Faber.

+He execrated Modernism. Physionomies de Saintes, Angelo de Foligno,

+and half a dozen other volumes prove how versed he was in Holy Writ.

+"The Scriptures are an abysm," he declared. He wrote short stories,

+Contes extraordinaires, which display excellent workmanship, no little

+fantasy, yet are rather slow reading. In literature Hello was a belated

+romantic, a Don Quixote of the ideal who charged ferociously the

+windmills of indifference.

+

+In 1881 he was a collaborator with an American religious publication

+called _Propagateur Catholique_ (I give the French title because

+I do not know whether it was published here or in Canada). His

+contributions were incorporated later in his Words of God. I confess

+to knowing little of Hello but his works, the Life by Lasserre being

+out of print. Impressive as is his genius, it is often repellent,

+because love of his fellow-man is not a dominant part of it. The

+central flame burns brightly, fiercely; the tiny taper of charity is

+often missing. With his beloved Ruysbroeck (Rusbrock, he names him)

+he seems to be muttering too often a disdainful adieu to his gross

+and ignorant brethren as if abandoning them to their lies and ruin.

+However, his translation of this same Ruysbroeck is a genuine accession

+to contemplative literature. And perhaps, if one too hastily criticises

+the almost elemental faith of Hello and its rude assaults of the

+portals of pride, luxury, and worldliness, perhaps the old wisdom may

+cruelly rebound upon his detractors: "Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non

+est Deus."

+

+

+

+

+II

+

+"MAD, NAKED BLAKE"

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+Perhaps the best criticism ever uttered offhand about the art of

+William Blake was Rodin's, who, when shown some facsimiles of Blake's

+drawings by brilliant Arthur Symons with the explanation that Blake

+"used literally to see those figures, they are not mere inventions,"

+replied: "Yes. He saw them once; he should have seen them three or

+four times." And this acute summing up of Blake's gravest defect is

+further strengthened by a remark made by one of his most sympathetic

+commentators, Laurence Binyon. Blake once said: "The lavish praise I

+have received from all quarters for invention and drawing has generally

+been accompanied by this: 'He can conceive, but he cannot execute.'

+This absurd assertion has done and may still do me the greatest

+mischief." Now comments Mr. Binyon: "In spite of the artist's protest

+this continues to be the current criticism on Blake's work; and yet

+the truth lies rather on the other side. It is not so much in his

+execution as in the failure to mature his conceptions that his defect

+is to be found." Again: "His temperament unfitted him for success in

+carrying his work further; his want was not lack of skill, but lack

+of patience." If this sounds paradoxical we find Symons admitting

+that Rodin had hit the nail on the head. "There, it seems to me, is

+the fundamental truth about the art of Blake; it is a record of vision

+which has not been thoroughly mastered even as vision."

+

+Notwithstanding the neglect to which Blake was subjected during

+his lifetime and the misunderstanding ever since his death of his

+extraordinary and imaginative designs, poetry, and vaticinations, it

+is disquieting to see how books about Blake are beginning to pile

+up. He may even prove as popular as Ibsen. A certain form of genius

+serves as a starting-point for critical performances. Blake is the

+most admirable example, though Whitman and Browning are in the same

+class. Called cryptic by their own, they are too well understood by a

+later generation. Wagner once swam in the consciousness of the elect;

+and he was understood. Baudelaire understood him, so Liszt. Wagner

+to-day is the property of the man in the street, who whistles him,

+and Ibsen is already painfully yielding up his precious secrets to

+relentless "expounding" torturers. As for Maeterlinck, he is become a

+mere byword in literary clubs, where they discuss his Bee in company

+with the latest Shaw epigram. "Even caviare, it seems, may become a

+little flyblown," exclaims Mr. Dowden. Everything is being explained.

+Oh, happy age! Who once wrote: "A hundred fanatics are found to a

+theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric

+problem"?

+

+Yet we may be too rash. Blake's prophetic books are still cloudy

+nightmares, for all but the elect, and not Swinburne, Gilchrist,

+Tatham, Richard Garnett, Ellis, Binyon, Yeats, Symons, Graham

+Robertson, Alfred Story, Maclagan and Russell, Elizabeth Luther Cary

+and the others--for there are others and there will be others--can

+wring from these fragments more than an occasional meaning or music.

+But in ten years he may be the pontiff of a new dispensation. Symons

+has been wise in the handling of his material. After a general and

+comprehensive study of Blake he brings forward some new records

+from contemporary sources--extracts from the diary, letters and

+reminiscences of Henry Crabb Robinson; from A Father's Memoir of His

+Child, by Benjamin Heath Malkin; from Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary

+(1820); Blake's horoscope, obituary notice, extract from Varley's

+Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828); a biographical sketch of Blake by J.

+T. Smith (1828), and Allan Cunningham's life of Blake (1830). In a

+word, for those who cannot spare the time to investigate the various

+and sundry Blakian exegetics, Symons's book is the best because most

+condensed. It is the Blake question summed up by a supple hand and a

+sympathetic spirit. It is inscribed to Auguste Rodin in the following

+happy and significant phrase: "To Auguste Rodin, whose work is the

+marriage of heaven and hell."

+

+

+II

+

+

+William Blake must have been the happiest man that ever lived; not

+the doubtful happiness of a fool's paradise, but a sharply defined

+ecstasy that was his companion from his earliest years to his very

+death-bed; that bed on which he passed away "singing of the things

+he saw in heaven," to the tune of his own improvised strange music.

+He seems to have been the solitary man in art history who really

+fulfilled Walter Pater's test of success in life: "To burn always

+with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Blake easily

+maintained it. His face shone with it. Withal he was outwardly sane

+in matters of mundane conduct, sensitive and quick to resent any

+personal affront, and by no means one of those awful prophets going

+about proclaiming their self-imposed mission. An amiable man, quick

+to fly into and out of a passion, a gentleman exquisite in manners,

+he impressed those who met him as an unqualified genius. Charles Lamb

+has told us of him; so have others. I possess an engraving of his head

+after Linnell's miniature, and while his Irish paternity has never

+been thoroughly established--Yeats calls him an Irishman--there can

+be little doubt of his Celtic origin. His is the head of a poet, a

+patriot, a priest..The brow is lofty and wide, the hair flamelike in

+its upcurling. The eyes are marvellous--true windows of a soul vividly

+aware of its pricelessness; the mystic eye and the eye of the prophet

+about to thunder upon the perverse heads of his times. The full lips

+and massive chin make up the ensemble of a singularly noble, inspired,

+and well-balanced head. Symmetry is its keynote. A God-kindled face.

+One looks in vain for any indication of the madman--Blake was called

+mad during his lifetime, and ever since he has been considered mad by

+the world. Yet he was never mad as were John Martin and Wiertz the

+Belgian, or as often seems Odilon Redon, who has been called--heaven

+knows why!--the "French Blake." The poet Cowper said to Blake: "Oh,

+that I were insane always.... Can you not make me truly insane?...

+You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us--over us all--mad

+as a refuge from unbelief--from Bacon, Newton, and Locke." The arid

+atheism of his century was doubtless a contributory cause to the

+exasperation of Blake's nerves. He believed himself a Christian despite

+his heterodox sayings, and his belief is literal and profound. A true

+Citizen of Eternity, as Yeats named him, and with all his lack of

+academic training, what a giant he was among the Fuselis, Bartolozzis,

+Stothards, Schiavonettis, and the other successful mediocrities.

+

+His life was spent in ignoble surroundings, an almost anonymous life,

+though a happy one because of its illuminating purpose and flashes of

+golden fire. Blake was born in London (1757) and died in London (1827).

+He was the son of a hosier, whose real name was not O'Neill, as some

+have maintained. The boy, at the age of fourteen, was apprenticed to

+Ryland the engraver, but the sight of his master's face caused him

+to shudder and he refused to work under him, giving as a reason that

+Ryland would be hanged some day. And so he was, for counterfeiting.

+The abnormally sensitive little chap then went to the engraver Basire,

+with whom he remained a year. His precocity was noteworthy. In 1773

+he put forth as a pretended copy of Michaelangelo a design which he

+called Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion. At that early

+age he had already begun to mix up Biblical characters and events with

+the life about him. The Bible saturated his imagination; it was not a

+dead record for him, but a living, growing organism that overlapped

+the spiritual England of his day. The grotesqueness of his titles, the

+mingling of the familiar with the exotic--the sublime and the absurd

+are seldom asunder in Blake--sacred with secular, were the results

+of his acquaintance with the Scriptures at a period when other boys

+were rolling hoops or flying kites. Blake could never have been a

+boy, in the ordinary sense; yet he was to the last day of his life a

+child in the naïveté of his vision. "I am ever the new-born child," he

+might have said, as did Goethe to Herder. At the age of four he said

+God put his face in the window, and he ran screaming to his parents

+to bear witness to the happening. He had seen a tree bright with

+angels at Peckham Rye, and his life long he held converse with the

+spirits of Moses, Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. He

+adored Michaelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer and Swedenborg completed the

+conquest--perhaps the unsettlement--of his intellect. He hated Titian,

+Rubens, and Rembrandt. They were sensualists, they did not in their art

+lay the emphasis upon drawing, and as we shall see presently, drawing

+was the chief factor for Blake, colour being a humble handmaiden.

+

+In 1782 Blake married for love Catharine Boucher, or Boutcher, of whom

+Mr. Swinburne has said that she "deserves remembrance as about the

+most perfect wife on record." She was uneducated, but learned to read

+and write, and later proved an inestimable helpmate for the struggling

+and unpractical Blake. She bound his books and coloured some of his

+illustrations. She bore long poverty uncomplainingly, one is tempted

+to say with enthusiasm. Once only she faltered. Blake had his own

+notions about certain Old Testament customs, and he, it is said on the

+authority of a gossip, had proposed to add another wife to the poor

+little household. Mrs. Blake wept and the matter was dropped. Other

+gossip avers that the Adamite in Blake manifested itself in a not

+infrequent desire to cast aside garments and to sit in paradisiacal

+innocence. Whether these stories were the invention of malicious

+associates or were true, one thing is certain: Blake was capable of

+anything for which he could find a Biblical precedent. In the matter

+of the unconventional he was the _Urvater_ of English rebels. Shelley,

+Byron, Swinburne were timid amateurs compared to this man, who with a

+terrific energy translated his thoughts into art. He was not the idle

+dreamer of an empty day nor a mooning mystic. His energy was electric.

+It sounds a clarion note in his verse and prose, it reveals itself in

+the fiery swirlings of his line, a line swift and personal. He has

+been named by some one a heretic in the Church of Swedenborg; but like

+a latter-day rebel--Nietzsche, who renounced Schopenhauer--Blake soon

+renounced Swedenborg. But Michelangelo remained a deity for him, and in

+his designs the influence of Angelo is paramount.

+

+Blake might be called an English Primitive. He stems from the

+Florentines, but _à la gauche_. The bar sinister on his artistic

+coat of arms is the lack of fundamental training. He had a Gothic

+imagination, but his dreams lack architectonics. Goethe, too, had

+dreams, and we are the richer by Faust. And no doubt there are in his

+works phrases that Nietzsche has seemed to repeat. It is the fashion

+just now to trace every idea of Nietzsche to some one else. The truth

+is that the language of rebellion through the ages is the same. The

+mere gesture of revolt, as typified in the uplifted threatening arm of

+a Cain, a Prometheus, a Julian the Apostate, is no more conventional

+than the phraseology of the heretic. How many of them have written

+"inspired" bibles, from Mahomet to Zarathustra. Blake, his tumultuous

+imagination afire--remember that the artist doubled the poet in his

+amazing and versatile soul--poured forth for years his "sacred" books,

+his prophecies, his denouncements of his fellow-man. It was all sincere

+righteous indignation; but the method of his speech is obscure; the

+Mormon books of revelation are miracles of clarity in comparison. Let

+us leave these singular prophecies of Blake to the mystics. One thing

+is sure--he has affected many poets and thinkers. There are things in

+The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Shaw might have said had not Blake

+forestalled him. Such is the cruelty of genius.

+

+Symons makes apt comparison between Blake and Nietzsche: "There is

+nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices ... vices in the

+natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world."

+This might have appeared over Nietzsche's signature in Beyond Good

+and Evil. And the following in his marginalia to Reynolds--Sir Joshua

+always professed a high regard for the genius of Blake. "The Enquiry

+in England is not whether a man has Talents and Genius, but whether he

+is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass." The vocabulary of rebellion

+is the same. Still more bitter is his speech about holiness: "The fool

+shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven, let him be ever so pious."

+Blake glorified passion, which for him was the highest form of human

+energy. His tragic scrolls, emotional arabesques, are testimony to his

+high and subtle temperament. The intellect he worshipped. Of pride

+we cannot have too much! As a lyric poet it is too late in the day to

+reiterate that he is a peer in the "holy church of English literature."

+The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience have given him a place

+in the anthologies and made him known to readers who have never heard

+of him as a pictorial genius. "Tiger, tiger, burning bright, In the

+forests of the night," is recited by sweet school-misses and pondered

+for its philosophy by their masters. And has Keats ever fashioned a

+lovelier image than: "Let thy west wind sleep on the lake; spread

+silence with thy glimmering eyes and wash the dusk with silver"?

+Whatever he may not be, William Blake is a great singer.

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+William Butler Yeats in his Ideas of Good and Evil has said some

+notable things about Blake. He calls him a realist of the imagination

+and first pointed out the analogy between Blake and Nietzsche. "When

+one reads Blake it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain

+of beauty was blown into our faces." And "he was a symbolist who had

+to invent his symbols." Well, what great artist does not? Wagner

+did; also Ibsen and Maeterlinck. Blake was much troubled over the

+imagination. It was the "spirit" for him in this "vegetable universe,"

+the Holy Ghost. All art that sets forth with any fulness the outward

+vesture of things is prompted by the "rotten rags of memory." That

+is why he loathed Rubens, why he seemingly slurs the forms of men

+and things in his eagerness to portray the essential. Needless to

+add, the essential for him was the soul. He believed in goading the

+imagination to vision--though not with opium--and we are led through

+a dream-world of his own fashioning, one in which his creatures bear

+little correspondence to earthly types. His illustrations to the

+Book of Job, to Dante, to Young's Night Thoughts bear witness to the

+intensity of his vision, though flesh and blood halts betimes in

+following these vast decorative whirls of flame bearing myriad souls in

+blasts that traverse the very firmament. The "divine awkwardness" of

+his Adam and Eve and the "Ancient of Days" recall something that might

+be a marionette and yet an angelic being. To Blake they were angels;

+of that there can be no doubt; but we of less fervent imagination may

+ask as did Hotspur of Glendower, who had boasted that he could "call

+spirits from the vasty deep." "Why, so can I, or so can any man. But

+will they come when you do call for them?" quoth the gallant Percy. We

+are, the majority of us, as unimaginative as Hotspur. Blake summoned

+his spirits; to him they appeared; to quote his own magnificent

+utterance, "The stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with

+their tears"; but we, alas! see neither stars nor spears nor tears,

+only eccentric draughtsmanship and bizarre designs. Yet, after Blake,

+Doré's Dante illustrations are commonplace; even Botticelli's seem

+ornamental. Such is the genius of the Englishman that on the thither

+side of his shadowy conceptions there shine intermittently pictures

+of a No Man's Land, testifying to a burning fantasy hampered by human

+tools. He suggests the supernatural. "How do you know," he asks, "but

+every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed

+by your senses five?" Of him Ruskin has said: "In expressing conditions

+of glaring and flickering light Blake is greater than Rembrandt." With

+Dante he went to the nethermost hell. His warring attributes tease and

+attract us. For the more human side we commend Blake's seventeen wood

+engravings to Thornton's Virgil. They are not so rich as Bewick's,

+but we must remember that it was Blake's first essay with knife and

+box-wood--he was really a practised copper engraver--and the effects

+he produced are wonderful. What could be more powerful in such a tiny

+space than the moon eclipse and the black forest illustrating the

+lines, "Or when the moon, by wizard charm'd, foreshows Bloodstained in

+foul eclipse, impending woes!" And the dim sunsets, the low, friendly

+sky in the other plates!

+

+Blake's gospel of art may be given in his own words: "The great and

+golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct,

+sharp and wiry the boundary line the more perfect the work of art;

+and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak

+imitation, plagiarism and bungling." He abominated the nacreous flesh

+tones of Titian, Correggio, or Rubens. Reflected lights are sinful.

+The silhouette betrays the soul of the master. Swinburne in several

+eloquent pages has instituted a comparison between Walt Whitman and

+William Blake. (In the first edition of "William Blake: A Critical

+Essay," 1868.) Both men were radicals. "The words of either strike

+deep and run wide and soar high." What would have happened to Blake if

+he had gone to Italy and studied the works of the masters--for he was

+truly ignorant of an entire hemisphere of art? Turner has made us see

+his dreams of a gorgeous world; Blake, as through a scarce opened door,

+gives us a breathless glimpse of a supernal territory, whether heaven

+or hell, or both, we dare not aver. Italy might have calmed him, tamed

+him, banished his arrogance--as it did Goethe's. Suppose that Walt

+Whitman had written poems instead of magical and haunting headlines.

+And if Browning had made clear the devious ways of Sordello--what then?

+"What porridge had John Keats?" We should have missed the sharp savour

+of the real Blake, the real Whitman, the real Browning. And what a

+number of interesting critical books would have remained unwritten.

+"Oh, never star was lost here but it arose afar." What Coleridge wrote

+of his son Hartley might serve for Blake: "Exquisitely wild, an utter

+visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of

+his own making. He alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings I

+never saw one so utterly naked of self." Naked of self! William Blake,

+unselfish egoist, stands before us in three words.

+

+

+

+

+III

+

+FRANCIS POICTEVIN

+

+

+There is a memorable passage in A Rebours, the transcription of which,

+by Mr. George Moore, may be helpful in understanding the work of that

+rare literary artist, Francis Poictevin. "The poem in prose," wrote

+Huysmans, "handled by an alchemist of genius, should contain the

+quintessence, the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and

+the superfluous description of which it suppresses ... the adjective

+placed in such an ingenious and definite way that it could not be

+legally dispossessed of its place, that the reader would dream for

+whole weeks together over its meaning, at once precise and multiple;

+affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the

+souls revealed by the light of the unique epithet. The novel thus

+understood, thus condensed into one or two pages, would be a communion

+of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual

+collaboration by consent between ten superior persons scattered through

+the universe, a delectation offered to the most refined and accessible

+only to them."

+

+This aristocratic theory of art was long ago propounded by Poe in

+regard to the short poem. Huysmans transposed the idea to the key of

+fiction while describing the essential prose of Mallarmé; but some

+years before the author of A Rebours wrote his ideal book on decadence

+a modest young Frenchman had put into practice the delightfully

+impracticable theories of the prose poem. This writer was Francis

+Poictevin (born at Paris, 1854). Many there were, beginning with Edgar

+Poe and Louis Bertrand, who had essayed the form, at its best extremely

+difficult, at its worst too tempting to facile conquests: Baudelaire,

+Huysmans in his Le Drageoir aux Epices; Daudet, De Banville, Villiers

+de l'Isle Adam, Maurice de Guérin, and how many others! During the

+decade of the eighties the world of literature seemed to be fabricating

+poems in prose. Pale youths upon whose brows descended aureoles at

+twilight, sought fame in this ivory miniature carving addressed to the

+"ten superior persons" very much scattered over the globe. But like

+most peptonic products, the brain as does the stomach, finally refuses

+to accept as nourishment artificial concoctions too heavily flavoured

+with midnight oil. The world which is gross prefers its literature by

+the gross, and though it has been said that all the great exterior

+novels have been written, the majority of readers continue to read

+long-winded stories dealing with manners and, of course, the eternal

+conquest of an uninteresting female by a mediocre male. Aiming at

+instantaneity of pictorial and musical effect--as a picture become

+lyrical--the poets who fashioned their prose into artistic rhythms and

+colours and tones ended by exhausting the patience of a public rapidly

+losing its faculty of attention.

+

+Possibly these things may account for the neglect of a writer and

+thinker of such delicacy and originality as Poictevin, but he was

+always caviare even to the consumers of literary caviar. But he had

+a small audience in Paris, and after his first book appeared--one

+hesitates to call it a novel--Daudet saluted it with the praise that

+Sainte-Beuve--the Sainte-Beuve of Volupté and Port-Royal--would have

+been delighted with La Robe du Moine. Here is a list of Poictevin's

+works and the years of their publication until 1894. Please note their

+significant and extraordinary names: La Robe du Moine, 1882; Ludine,

+1883; Songes, 1884; Petitan, 1885; Seuls, 1886; Paysages et Nouveaux

+Songes, 1888; Derniers Songes, 1888; Double, 1889; Presque, 1891;

+Heures, 1892; Tout Bas, 1893; Ombres, 1894.

+

+A collective title for them might be Nuances; Poictevin searches

+the last nuance of sensations and ideas. He is a remote pupil of

+Goncourt, and superior to his master in his power of recording the

+impalpable. (Compare any of his books with the Madame Gervaisais of

+Goncourt; the latter is mysticism very much in the concrete.) At the

+same time he recalls Amiel, Maurice de Guérin, Walter Pater, and

+Coventry Patmore. A mystical pantheist in his worship of nature, he

+is a mystic in his adoration of God. This intensity of vision in the

+case of Poictevin did not lead to the depravities, exquisite and

+morose, of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the brilliant outrageous Barbey

+d'Aurevilly. With his soul of ermine Poictevin is characterised by De

+Gourmont as the inventor of the mysticism of style. Once he saluted

+Edmond de Goncourt as the Velasquez of the French language, and that

+master, not to be outdone in politeness, told Poictevin that his prose

+could boast its "victories over the invisible." If by this Goncourt

+meant making the invisible visible, rendering in prose of crepuscular

+subtlety moods recondite, then it was not an exaggerated compliment.

+In such spiritual performances Poictevin resembles Lafcadio Hearn

+in his airiest gossamer-webbed phrases. A true, not a professional

+symbolist, the French _prosateur_ sounds Debussy twilight harmonies.

+His speech at times glistens with the hues of a dragon-fly zigzagging

+in the sunshine. In the tenuous exaltation of his thought he evokes the

+ineffable deity, circled by faint glory. To compass his picture he does

+not hesitate to break the classic mould of French syntax while using

+all manners of strange-fangled vocables to attain effects that remind

+one of the clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Indeed, a mystic style is his,

+beside which most writers seem heavy-handed and obvious.

+

+Original in his form, in the bizarre architecture of his paragraphs,

+pages, chapters, he abolishes the old endings, cadences, chapter

+headings. Nor, except at the beginning of his career, does he portray

+a definite hero or heroine. Even names are avoided. "He" or "she"

+suffices to indicate the sex. Action there is little. Story he has

+none to tell; by contrast Henry James is epical. Exteriority does

+not interest Poictevin, who is nevertheless a landscape painter;

+intimate and charming. His young man and young woman visit Mentone,

+the Pyrenees, Brittany, along the Rhine--a favourite resort--Holland,

+Luchon, Montreux, and Switzerland, generally. His palette is

+marvellously complicated. We should call him an impressionist but that

+the phrase is become banal. Poictevin deals in subtle grays. He often

+writes _gris-iris_. His portraits swim in a mysterious atmosphere as do

+Eugène Carrière's. His fluid, undulating prose records landscapes in

+the manner of Theocritus.

+

+The tiny repercussions of the spirit that is reacted upon by life

+are Whistlerian notations in the gamut of this artist's instrument.

+Evocation, not description; evocation, not narration; always evocation,

+yet there is a harmonious ensemble; he returns to his theme after

+capriciously circling about it as does a Hungarian gypsy when

+improvising upon the heart-strings of his auditors. Verlaine once

+addressed a poem to Poictevin the first line of which runs: "Toujours

+mécontent de son œuvre." Maurice Barrès evidently had read Seuls

+before he wrote Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891). The young woman in

+Poictevin's tale has the same feverish languors; her male companion,

+though not the egoist of Barrès, is a very modern person, slightly

+consumptive; one of whom it may be asked, in the words of Poictevin:

+"Is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of

+sadness?" In their room hang portraits of Baudelaire and the Curé

+d'Ars. Odder still is the monk, P. Martin. Martin is the name of the

+"adversary" in The Garden of Bérénice. And the episode of the dog's

+death! Huysmans, too, must have admired Poictevin's descriptions of the

+Grünewald Christ at Colmar, and of the portrait of the Young Florentine

+in the Stadel Museum at Frankfort. It would be instructive to compare

+the differing opinions of the two critics concerning this last-named

+picture.

+

+A mirror, Poictevin's soul reflects the moods of landscapes. Without

+dogmatism he could say with St. Anselm that he would rather go to hell

+sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single transgression. To his

+tender temperament even the reading of Pascal brought shadows of doubt.

+A persistent dreamer, the world for him is but the garment investing

+God. Flowers, stars, the wind that weeps in little corners, the placid

+bosom of lonely lakes, far-away mountains and their mystic silhouettes,

+the Rhine and its many curvings, the clamour of cities and the joy of

+the green grass, are his themes. Life with its frantic gestures is

+quite inutile. Let it be avoided. You turn after reading Poictevin

+to the Minoration of Emile Hennequin: "Let all that is be no more.

+Let glances fade and the vivacity of gestures fall. Let us be humble,

+soft, and slow. Let us love without passion, and let us exchange

+weary caresses." Or hear the tragic cry of Ephraim Mikhael: "Ah! to

+see behind me no longer, on the lake of Eternity, the implacable wake

+of Time." "Poictevin's men and women," once wrote Aline Gorren in a

+memorable study of French symbolism, "are subordinate to these wider

+curves of wave and sky; they come and go, emerging from their setting

+briefly and fading into it again; they have no personality apart from

+it; and amid the world symbols of the heavens in marshalled movements

+and the thousand reeded winds, they in their human symbols are allowed

+to seem, as they are, proportionately small. They are possessed as

+are clouds, waters, trees, but no more than clouds, waters, trees, of

+a baffling significance, forever a riddle to itself. They have bowed

+attitudes; the weight of the mystery they carry on their shoulders."

+

+The humanity that secretly evaporates when the prose poet notes the

+attrition of two souls is shed upon his landscapes with their sonorous

+silences. A picture of the life contemplative, of the adventures of

+timorous gentle souls in search of spiritual adventures, set before

+us in a style of sublimated preciosity by an orchestra of sensations

+that has been condensed to the string quartet, the dreams of Francis

+Poictevin--does he not speak of the human forehead as a dream dome?

+--are not the least consoling of his century. He is the white-robed

+acolyte among mystics of modern literature.

+

+

+

+

+IV

+

+THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

+

+

+Religious conversion and its psychology have furnished the world's

+library with many volumes. Perfectly understood in the ages of

+faith, the subject is for modern thinkers susceptible of realistic

+explanation. Only we pave the way now by a psychological course instead

+of the ancient doctrine of Grace Abounding. Nor do we confound the

+irresistible desire of certain temperaments to spill their innermost

+thoughts, with what is called conversion. There was Rousseau, who

+confessed things that the world would be better without having heard.

+He was not converted. Tolstoy, believing that primitive Christianity

+is almost lost to his fellow beings, preaches what he thinks is the

+real faith. Yet he was converted. He had been, he said, a terrible

+transgressor. The grace of God gave sight to his sin-saturated

+eyeballs. Is there the slightest analogy between his case and that

+of Cardinal Newman? John Henry Newman had led a spotless life before

+he left the Anglican fold. Nevertheless he was a convert. And Saint

+Augustine, the pattern of all self-confessors, the classic case, may

+be compared to John Bunyan or to Saint Paul! Professor William James,

+who with his admirable impartiality has scrutinized the psychological

+topsy-turvy we name conversion, has not missed the commonplace fact

+that every man as to details varies, but at base the psychical

+machinery is controlled by the same motor impulses. _A chacun son

+infini._

+

+Some natures reveal a mania for confession. Dostoïevsky's men and

+women continually tell what they have thought, what crimes they have

+committed. It was an epileptic obsession with this unhappy Russian

+writer. Paul Verlaine sang blithely of his ghastly life, and Baudelaire

+did not spare himself. So it would seem that the inability of certain

+natures to keep their most precious secrets is also the keynote of

+religious confessions. But let us not muddle this with the sincerity

+or insincerity of the change. Leslie Stephen has said that it did not

+matter much whether Pascal was sincere, and instanced the Pascal wager

+(_le pari de Pascal_) as evidence of the great thinker's casuistry. It

+is better to believe and be on the safe side than be damned if you do

+not believe; for if there is no hereafter your believing that there is

+will not matter one way or the other. This is the substance of Pascal's

+wager, and it must be admitted that the ardent upholder of Jansenism

+and the opponent of the Jesuits proved himself an excellent pupil of

+the latter when he framed his famous proposition.

+

+Among the converts who have become almost notorious in France during

+the last two decades are Ferdinand Brunetière, François Coppée, Paul

+Verlaine, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. But it must not be forgotten that

+if the quartette trod the Road to Damascus they were all returning to

+their early City of Faith. They had been baptized Roman Catholics. All

+four had strayed. And widely different reasons brought them back to

+their mother Church. We need not dwell now on the case of Villiers de

+l'Isle Adam, as his was a death-bed repentance; nor with Paul Bourget,

+a Catholic born and on the side of his faith since the publication of

+Cosmopolis. As for Maurice Barrès, he may be a Mohammedan for all we

+care. He will always stand, spiritually, on his head.

+

+The stir in literary and religious circles over Huysmans's trilogy,

+En Route, La Cathédrale, and L'Oblat, must have influenced the

+succeeding generation of French writers. Of a sudden sad young rakes

+who spouted verse in the æsthetic taverns of the Left Bank fell to

+writing religious verse. Mary Queen of Heaven became their shibboleth.

+They invented new sins so that they might repent in a novel fashion.

+They lacked the delicious lyric gift of Verlaine and the tremendous

+enfolding moral earnestness of Huysmans to make themselves believed.

+One, however, has emerged from the rest, and his book, Du Diable à

+Dieu (From the Devil to God), has crossed the twenty-five thousand

+mark; perhaps it is further by this time. The author is an authentic

+poet, Adolphe Retté. For his confessions the lately deceased François

+Coppée wrote a dignified and sympathetic preface. Retté's place in

+contemporary poetry is high. Since Verlaine we hardly dare to think

+of another poet of such charm, verve, originality. An anarchist with

+Sebastien Faure and Jean Grave, a Socialist of all brands, a lighted

+lyric torch among the insurrectionists, a symbolist, a writer of "free

+verse" (which is hedged in by more rules, though unformulated and

+unwritten, than the stiffest academic production of Boileau), Adolphe

+Retté led the life of an individualist poet; precisely the sort of

+life at which pulpit-pounders could point and cry: "There, there is

+your æsthetic poet, your man of feeling, of finer feelings than his

+neighbours! Behold to what base uses he has put this gift! See him

+wallowing with the swine!" And, practically, these words Retté has

+employed in speaking of himself. He insulted religion in the boulevard

+journals; he hailed with joy the separation of Church and State. He

+wrote not too decent novels, though his verse is feathered with the

+purest pinions. He treated his wife badly, neglecting her for the

+inevitable Other Woman. (What a banal example this is, after all.) He

+once, so he tells us to his horror, maltreated the poor woman because

+of her piety. Typical, you will say. Then why confess it in several

+hundred pages of rhythmic prose, why rehearse for gaping, indifferent

+Paris the threadbare, sordid tale? Paris, too, so cynical on the

+subject of conversions, and also very suspicious of such a spiritual

+_bouleversement_ as Retté's! "No, it won't do, Huysmans is to blame,"

+exclaimed many.

+

+Yet this conversion--literally one, for he was educated in a Protestant

+college--is sincere. He means every word he says; and if he is

+copiously rhetorical, set it all down to the literary temperament. He

+wrote not only with the approval of his spiritual counsellor, but also

+for the same reason as Saint Augustine or Bunyan. Newman's confession

+was an Apologia, an answer to Kingsley's challenge. With Huysmans, he

+is such a consummate artist that we could imagine him plotting ahead

+his cycle of novels (if novels they are); from Là-Bas to Lourdes the

+spiritual modulation is harmonious. Now, M. Retté (he was born in 1863

+in Paris of an Ardennaise family), while he has sung in his melodious

+voice many alluring songs, while he has shown the impressions wrought

+upon his spirit by Walt Whitman and Richard Wagner, there is little

+in the rich extravagance of his love for nature or the occasional

+Vergilian silver calm of his verse--he can sound more than one chord

+on his poetic keyboard--to prepare us for the great plunge into the

+healing waters of faith. A pagan nature shows in his early work, apart

+from the hatred and contempt he later displayed toward religion. How

+did it all come about? He has related it in this book, and we are free

+to confess that, though we must not challenge the author's sincerity,

+his manner is far from reassuring. He is of the brood of Baudelaire.

+

+Huysmans frankly gave up the riddle in his own case. Atavism may have

+had its way; he had relatives who were in convents; a pessimism that

+drove him from the world also contributed its share in the change.

+Personally Huysmans prefers to set it down to the mercy and grace of

+God--which is the simplest definition after all. When we are through

+with these self-accusing men; when professional psychology is tired of

+inventing new terminologies, then let us do as did Huysmans--go back to

+the profoundest of all the psychologists, the pioneers of the moderns,

+Saint Theresa--what actual, virile magnificence is in her Castle of

+the Soul--Saint John of the Cross, and Ruysbroeck. They are mystics

+possessing a fierce faith; and without faith a mystic is like a moon

+without the sun. Adolphe Retté knows the great Spanish mystics and

+quotes them almost as liberally as Huysmans. But with a difference. He

+has read Huysmans too closely; books breed books, ideas and moods beget

+moods and ideas. We are quite safe in saying that if En Route had not

+been written, Retté's Du Diable à Dieu could not have appeared in its

+present shape. The similarity is both external and internal. John of

+the Cross had his Night Obscure, so has M. Retté; Huysmans, however,

+showed him the way. Retté holds an obstinate dialogue with the Devil

+(who is a capitalized creature). Consult the wonderful fifth chapter

+in En Route. Naturally there must be a certain resemblance in these

+spiritual adventures when the Evil One captures the outposts of the

+soul and makes sudden savage dashes into its depths. Retté's style is

+not in the least like Huysmans's. It is more fluent, swifter, and more

+staccato. You skim his pages; in Huysmans you recognise the distilled

+remorse; you move as in a penitential procession, the rhythms grave,

+the eyes dazzled by the vision divine, the voice lowly chanting. Not so

+Retté, who glibly discourses on sacred territory, who is terribly at

+ease in Zion.

+

+Almost gayly he recounts his misdeeds. He pelts his former associates

+with hard names. He pities Anatole France for his socialistic

+affinities. All that formerly attracted him is anathema. Even the

+mysterious lady with the dark eyes is castigated. She is not a

+truth-teller. She does not now understand the protean soul of her poet.

+_Retro me Sathanas!_ It is very exhilarating. The Gallic soul in its

+most resilient humour is on view. See it rebound! Watch it ascend on

+high, buoyed by delicious phrases, asking sweet pardon; then it falls

+to earth abusing its satanic adversary with sinister energy. At times

+we overhear the honeyed accents, the silky tones of Renan. It is he,

+not Retté, who exclaims: _Mais quelles douces larmes!_ Ah! Renan--also

+a cork soul! The Imitation is much dwelt upon--the influence of

+Huysmans has been incalculable in this. And we forgive M. Retté his

+theatricalism for the lovely French paraphrase he has made of Salve

+Regina. But on the whole we prefer En Route. The starting-point of

+Retté's change was reading some verse in the Purgatory of the Divine

+Comedy. A literary conversion? Possibly, yet none the less complete.

+All roads lead to Rome, and the Road to Damascus may be achieved from

+many devious side paths. But in writing with such engaging frankness

+the memoirs of his soul we wish that Retté had more carefully followed

+the closing sentence of his brilliant little book: _Non nobis, Domine,

+non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!_

+

+

+

+

+V

+

+FROM AN IVORY TOWER

+

+

+"Their impatience," was the answer once given by Cardinal Newman to

+the question, What is the chief fault of heresiarchs? In this category

+Walter Pater never could have been included, for his life was a long

+patience. As Newman sought patiently for the evidences of faith, so

+Pater sought for beauty, that beauty of thought and expression, of

+which his work is a supreme exemplar in modern English literature.

+Flaubert, a man of genius with whom he was in sympathy, toiled no

+harder for the perfect utterance of his ideas than did this retiring

+Oxford man of letters. And, like his happy account of Raphael's growth,

+Pater was himself a "genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek

+scholarship into genius."

+

+Walter Pater's intimate life was once almost legendary. We heard

+more of him a quarter of a century ago than yesterday. This does not

+mean that his vogue has declined; on the contrary, he is a force at

+the present such as he never was either at Oxford or London. But

+of the living man, notwithstanding his shyness, stray notes crept

+into print. He wrote occasional reviews. He had disciples. He had

+adversaries who deplored his--admittedly remote--immoral influence

+upon impressionable, "slim, gilt souls"; he had critics who detected

+the truffle of evil in savouring his exotic style. When he died,

+in 1894, the air was cleared by his devoted friends, Edmund Gosse,

+Lionel Johnson, William Sharp, Arthur Symons, and some of his Oxford

+associates, Dr. Bussell and Mr. Shadwell. It was proved without a

+possibility of doubt that the popular conception of the man was far

+from the reality; that the real Pater was a plain liver and an austere

+thinker; that he was not the impassive Mandarin of literature pictured

+by some; that the hedonism, epicureanism, cyrenaicism of which he had

+been vaguely accused had been a confounding of intellectual substances,

+a slipshod method of thought he abhorred; that his entire career had

+been spent in the pursuit of an æsthetic and moral perfection and its

+embodiment in prose of a rarely individual and haunting music. Recall

+his half-petulant, half-ironical exclamation of disgust to Mr. Gosse:

+"I wish they wouldn't call me a 'hedonist'; it produces such a bad

+effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." He would have

+been quite in accord with Paul Bourget's dictum that "there is no such

+thing as health, or the contrary, in the world of the soul"; Bourget,

+who, lecturing later at Oxford, pronounced Walter Pater "un parfait

+prosateur."

+

+Despite the attempt to chain him to the chariots of the Pre-Raphaelite

+brotherhood, Pater, like Chopin, during the Romantic turmoil, stood

+aloof from the heat and dust of its battles. He was at first deeply

+influenced by Goethe and Ruskin, and was a friend of Swinburne's; he

+wrote of the Morris poetry; but his was not the polemical cast of mind.

+The love of spiritual combat, the holy zeal of John Henry Newman, of

+Keble, of Hurrell Froude, were not in his bones. And so his scholar's

+life, the measured existence of a recluse, was uneventful; but measured

+by the results, what a vivid, intense, life it was. There is, however,

+very little to tell of Walter Pater. His was the interior life. In his

+books is his life--hasn't some one said that all great literature is

+autobiographical?

+

+There are articles by the late William Sharp and by George Moore. The

+former in Some Personal Recollections of Walter Pater, written in 1894,

+gave a vivid picture of the man, though it remained for Mr. Moore

+to discover his ugly face and some peculiar minor characteristics.

+Sharp met Pater in 1880 at the house of George T. Robinson, in Gower

+Street, that delightful meeting-place of gifted people. Miss A.

+Mary F. Robinson, now Mme. Duclaux, was the tutelary genius. She

+introduced Sharp to Pater. The blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, was

+of the party. Pater at that time was a man of medium height, stooping

+slightly, heavily built, with a Dutch or Flemish cast of features, a

+pale complexion, a heavy moustache--"a possible Bismarck, a Bismarck

+who had become a dreamer," adds the keen observer. A friendship was

+struck up between the pair. Pater came out of his shell, talked

+wittily, paradoxically, and later at Oxford showed his youthful

+admirer the poetic side of his singularly complex nature. There are

+conversations recorded and letters printed which would have added to

+the value of Mr. Benson's memoir.

+

+Mr. Moore's recollections are slighter, though extremely engaging.

+Above all, with his trained eye of a painter, he sketches for us

+another view of Pater, one not quite so attractive. Mr. Moore saw a

+very ugly man--"it was like looking at a leaden man, an uncouth figure,

+badly moulded, moulded out of lead, a large, uncouth head, the head

+of a clergyman,... a large, overarching skull, and small eyes; they

+always seemed afraid of you, and they shifted quickly. There seemed

+to be a want of candour in Pater's face,... an abnormal fear of his

+listener and himself. There was little hair on the great skull, and his

+skull and his eyes reminded me a little of the French poet Verlaine, a

+sort of domesticated Verlaine, a Protestant Verlaine." His eyes were

+green-gray, and in middle life he wore a brilliant apple-green tie and

+the inevitable top-hat and frock coat of an urban Englishman. In one of

+his early essays Max Beerbohm thus describes Pater: "a small, thick,

+rock-faced man, whose top-hat and gloves of _bright_ dog skin struck

+one of the many discords in that little city of learning and laughter.

+The serried bristles of his mustachio made for him a false-military

+air." Pater is said to have come of Dutch stock. Mr. Benson declares

+that it has not been proved. He had the amiable fancy that he may

+have had in his veins some of the blood of Jean Baptiste Pater, the

+painter. His father was born in New York. He went to England, and near

+London in 1839 Walter Horatio, his second son, was born. To The Child

+in the House and Emerald Uthwart, both "imaginary portraits," we may

+go for the early life of Pater, as Marius is the idealized record of

+his young manhood. When a child he was fond of playing Bishop, and

+the bent of his mind was churchly, further fostered by his sojourn at

+Canterbury. He matriculated at Oxford in 1858 as a commoner of Queen's

+College, where he was graduated after being coached by Jowett, who

+said to his pupil, "I think you have a mind that will come to great

+eminence." Years afterward the Master of Balliol seems to have changed

+his opinion, possibly urged thereto by the parody of Pater as Mr. Rose

+by Mr. Mallock in The New Republic. Jowett spoke of Pater as "the

+demoralizing moralizer," while Mr. Freeman could see naught in him but

+"the mere conjurer of words and phrases." Others have denounced his

+"pulpy magnificence of style," and Max Beerbohm declared that Pater

+wrote English as if it were a dead language; possibly an Irish echo

+of Pater's own assertion that English should be written as a learned

+language.

+

+He became a Fellow of Brasenose, and Oxford--with the exception of

+a few years spent in London, and his regular annual summer visits

+to Italy, France, and Germany, where he took long walks and studied

+the churches and art galleries--became his home. Contradictory

+legends still float in the air regarding his absorbed demeanour, his

+extreme sociability, his companionable humour, his chilly manner,

+his charming home, his barely furnished room, with the bowl of dried

+rose leaves; his sympathies, antipathies, nervousness, and baldness,

+and, like Baudelaire, of his love of cats, and a host of mutually

+exclusive qualities. Mr. Zangwill relates that he told Pater he had

+discovered a pun in one of his essays. Thereat, great embarrassment on

+Pater's part. Symons, who knew him intimately, tells of his reading

+the dictionary--that "pianoforte of writers," as Mr. Walter Raleigh

+cleverly names it--for the opposite reason that Gautier did, i.e.,

+that he might learn what words to avoid. Another time Symons asked him

+the meaning of a terrible sentence, Ruskinian in length and involution.

+Pater carefully scanned the page, and after a few minutes said with

+a sigh of relief: "Ah, I see the printer has omitted a dash." Yet,

+with all this meticulous precision, Pater was a man with an individual

+style, and not a mere stylist. What he said was of more importance than

+the saying of it.

+

+The portraits of Pater are, so his friends declare, unlike him. He had

+irregular features, and his jaw was prognathic; but there was great

+variety of expression, and the eyes, set deeply in the head, glowed

+with a jewelled fire when he was deeply aroused. In Mr. Greenslet's

+wholly admirable appreciation, there is a portrait executed by the

+unfortunate Simeon Solomon, and dated 1872. There is in Mosher's

+edition of the Guardian Essays a copy of Will Rothenstein's study,

+a characteristic piece of work, though Mr. Benson says it is not

+considered a resemblance. And I have a picture, a half-tone, from some

+magazine, the original evidently photographic, that shows a Pater much

+more powerful in expression than the others, and without a hint of the

+ambiguous that lurks in Rothenstein's drawing and Moore's pen portrait.

+Pater never married. Like Newman, he had a talent for friendship. As

+with Newman, Keble, that beautiful soul, made a deep impression on him,

+and, again like Newman, to use his own words, he went his way "like one

+on a secret errand."

+

+And the Pater style! Matthew Arnold on a certain occasion advised

+Frederic Harrison to "flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless

+would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. Pater is a

+dangerous guide for students. This theme of style, so admirably

+vivified in Mr. Walter Raleigh's monograph, was worn threadbare during

+the days when Pater was slowly producing one book every few years--he

+wrote five in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two a year,

+thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The principal

+accusation brought against the Pater method of work and the Pater

+style is that it is lacking in spontaneity, in a familiar phrase,

+"it is not natural." But a "natural" style, so called, appears not

+more than a half dozen times in its full flowering during the course

+of a century. The French write all but faultless prose. To match

+Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France, we must go to Ruskin, Pater, and

+Newman. When we say: "Let us write simple, straightforward English,"

+we are setting a standard that has been reached of late years only by

+Thackeray, Newman, and few besides. There are as many victims of the

+"natural English" formula as there are of the artificial formula of a

+Pater or a Stevenson. The former write careless, flabby, colourless,

+undistinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the

+vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the _cliché_ is king

+of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of "fine

+writing," are more easily detected.

+

+Now, properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural" style.

+Even Newman confesses to laborious days, though he wrote with the idea

+uppermost, and with no thought of the style. Renan, perfect master,

+disliked the idea of teaching "style"--as if it could be taught!--yet

+he worked over his manuscripts. We all know the Flaubert case. With

+Pater one must not rush to the conclusion that because he produced

+slowly and with infinite pains, he was all artificiality. Prose for

+him was a fine art. He would no more have used a phrase coined by

+another man than he would have worn his hat. He embroidered upon the

+canvas of his ideas the grave and lovely phrases we envy and admire.

+Prose--"cette ancienne et très jalouse chose," as it was called by

+Stéphane Mallarmé--was for Pater at once a pattern and a cadence,

+a picture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid "poetic-prose," the

+great stillness of his style--atmospheric, languorous, sounding sweet

+undertones--is always in the rhythm of prose. Speed is absent; the

+_tempo_ is usually lenten; brilliance is not pursued; but there is

+a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp and power. The sentences uncoil

+their many-coloured lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal

+imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that

+occasionally confuses; for compensation we are given newly orchestrated

+harmonies, as mordant, as salient, and as strange as some chords in

+the music of Chopin, Debussy and Richard Strauss. Sane it always

+is--simple seldom. And, as Symons observes: "Under the soft and musical

+phrases an inexorable logic hides itself, sometimes only too well.

+Link is added silently but faultlessly to link; the argument marches,

+carrying you with it, while you fancy you are only listening to the

+music with which it keeps step." It is very personal, and while it

+does not make melody for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the

+idea it clothes. Read aloud Ruskin and then apply the same vocal

+test--Flaubert's procedure--to Pater, and the magnificence of the

+older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will

+make it captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, more

+subtle, and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in

+eloquence slightly muffled, his last manner hinted that he had sought

+for newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, employing his own

+words concerning another theme: "It is a beauty wrought from within,...

+the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic

+reveries and exquisite passions."

+

+The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Browne's richer, there

+are deeper organ tones in De Quincey's, Ruskin's excels in effects,

+rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is subtler, more sinuous,

+more felicitous, and in its essence consummately intense. Morbid it

+sometimes is, and its rich polyphony palls if you are not in the

+mood; and in greater measure than the prose of the other masters,

+for the world is older and Pater was weary of life. But a suggestion

+of morbidity may be found in the writings of every great writer from

+Plato to Dante, from Shakespeare to Goethe; it is the faint spice of

+mortality that lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all literatures.

+Beautiful art has been challenged as corrupting. There may be a grain

+of truth in the charge. But man cannot live by wisdom alone, so art

+was invented to console, disquiet, and arouse him. Whenever a poet

+appears he is straightway accused of tampering with the moral code;

+it is mediocrity's mode of adjusting violent mental disproportions.

+But persecution never harmed a genuine talent, and the accusations

+against the art of Pater only provoked from him such beautiful books

+as Imaginary Portraits, Marius the Epicurean, and Plato and Platonism.

+Therefore let us be grateful to the memory of his enemies.

+

+There is another Pater, a Pater far removed from the one who wove such

+silken and coloured phrases. If he sometimes recalls Keats in the

+rich texture of his prose, he can also suggest the aridity of Herbert

+Spencer. There are early essays of his that are as cold, as logically

+adamant, and as tortuous as sentences from the Synthetic Philosophy.

+Pater was a metaphysician before he became an artist. Luckily for us,

+his tendency to bald theorising was subdued by the broad humanism of

+his temperament. There are not many "purple patches" in his prose,

+"purple" in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no "fringes of the north

+star" style, to use South's mocking expression. He never wrote in sheer

+display. For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern

+drama he betrayed no sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider

+his essays on Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, setting aside

+those finely wrought masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione,

+and Botticelli. As Mr. Benson puts it, Pater was not a modern

+scientific or archæological critic, but the fact that Morelli has

+proved the Concert of Giorgione not to be by that master, or that Vinci

+is not all Pater says he is, does not vitiate the essential values of

+his criticism.

+

+Like Maurice Barrès, Pater was an egoist of the higher type; he

+seldom left the twilight of his _tour d'ivoire_; yet his work is

+human and concrete to the core. Nothing interested him so much as the

+human quality in art. This he ever sought to disengage. Pater was a

+deeply religious nature _au fond_, perhaps addicted a trifle to moral

+preciosity, and, as 'Mr. Greenslet says, a lyrical pantheist. His

+essay on Pascal, without plumbing the ethical depths as does Leslie

+Stephen's study of the same thinker, gives us a fair measure of his

+own religious feelings. A pagan with Anatole France in his worship

+of Greek art and literature, his profounder Northern temperament, a

+Spartan temperament, strove for spiritual things, for the vision of

+things behind the veil. The Paters had been Roman Catholic for many

+generations; his father was not, and he was raised in the Church of

+England. But the ritual of the older Church was for him a source of

+delight and consolation. Mr. Benson deserves unstinted praise for his

+denunciation of the pseudo-Paterians, the self-styled disciples, who,

+totally misinterpreting Pater's pure philosophy of life, translated

+the more ephemeral phases of his cyrenaicism into the grosser terms

+of a gaudy æsthetic. These defections pained the thinker, whose

+study of Plato had extorted praise from Jowett. He even withdrew the

+much-admired conclusion of The Renaissance because of the wilful

+misconstructions put upon it. He never achieved the ataraxia of his

+beloved master. And Oxford was grudging of her favour to him long after

+the world had acclaimed his genius. Sensitive he was, though Mr. Gosse

+denies the stories of his suffering from harsh criticism; but there

+were some forms of criticism that he could not overlook. Books like his

+Plato and Marius the Epicurean were adequate answers to detractors.

+Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work;

+too much the artist for art's sake, he may never trouble the greater

+currents of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers,

+the critic whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer

+of a polyphonic prose-music that recalls the performance of harmonious

+adagio within the sonorous spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the

+windows of which filters alien daylight. It was a favourite contention

+of his that all the arts constantly aspire toward the condition of

+music. This idea is the keynote of his poetic scheme, the keynote of

+Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius, carried

+his life long "in his bosom across a crowded public place--his own

+soul."

+

+

+

+

+IX

+

+IBSEN

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+Henrik Ibsen was the best-hated artist of the nineteenth century. The

+reason is simple: He was, himself, the arch-hater of his age. Yet,

+granting this, the Norwegian dramatist aroused in his contemporaries a

+wrath that would have been remarkable even if emanating from the fiery

+pit of politics; in the comparatively serene field of æsthetics such

+overwhelming attacks from the critics of nearly every European nation

+testified to the singular power displayed by this poet. Richard Wagner

+was not so abused; the theatre of his early operations was confined to

+Germany, the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris a unique exception. Wagner,

+too, did everything that was possible to provoke antagonism. He scored

+his critics in speech and pamphlet. He gave back as hard names as he

+received. Ibsen never answered, either in print or by the mouth of

+friends, the outrageous allegations brought against him. Indeed, his

+disciples often darkened the issue by their unsolicited, uncritical

+championship.

+

+In Edouard Manet, the revolutionary Parisian painter and head of the

+so-called impressionist movement--himself not altogether deserving

+the appellation--we have an analogous case to Wagner's. Ridicule,

+calumny, vituperation, pursued him for many years. But Paris was the

+principal scene of his struggles; Paris mocked him, not all Europe.

+Even the indignation aroused by Nietzsche was a comparatively local

+affair. Wagner is the only man who approaches Ibsen in the massiveness

+of his martyrdom. Yet Wagner had consolations for his opponents. His

+music-drama, so rich in colour and rhythmic beauty, his romantic

+themes, his appeal to the eye, his friendship with Ludwig of Bavaria,

+at times placated his fiercest detractors. Manet painted one or two

+successes for the official Salon; Nietzsche's brilliant style and

+faculty for coining poetic images were acclaimed, his philosophy

+declared detestable. Yes, fine phrases may make fine psychologues.

+Robert Browning never felt the heavy hand of public opinion as did

+Ibsen. We must go back to the days of Byron and Shelley for an example

+of such uncontrollable and unanimous condemnation. But, again, Ibsen

+tops them all as victim of storms that blew from every quarter:

+Norway to Austria, England to Italy, Russia to America. There were no

+mitigating circumstances in his _lèse-majesté_ against popular taste.

+No musical rhyme, scenic splendour, or rhythmic prose, acted as an

+emotional buffer between him and his audiences. His social dramas were

+condemned as the sordid, heartless productions of a mediocre poet, who

+wittingly debased our moral currency. And as they did not offer as

+bribes the amatory intrigue, the witty dialogue, the sensual arabesques

+of the French stage, or the stilted rhetoric and heroic postures of the

+German, they were assailed from every critical watch-tower in Europe.

+Ibsen was a stranger, Ibsen was disdainfully silent, therefore Ibsen

+must be annihilated. Possibly if he had, like Wagner, explained his

+dramas, we should have had confusion thrice confounded.

+

+The day after his death the entire civilised world wrote of him as the

+great man he was: great man, great artist, great moralist. And A Doll's

+House only saw the light in 1879--so potent a creator of critical

+perspective is Death. There were, naturally, many dissonant opinions

+in this symphony of praise. Yet how different it all read from the

+opinions of a decade ago. Adverse criticism, especially in America,

+was vitiated by the fact that Ibsen the dramatist was hardly known

+here. Ibsen was eagerly read, but seldom played; and rarely played as

+he should be. He is first the dramatist. His are not closet dramas

+to be leisurely digested by lamp-light; conceived for the theatre,

+actuality their key-note, his characters are pale abstractions on the

+printed page--not to mention the inevitable distortions to be found

+in the closest translation. We are all eager to tell what we think of

+him. But do we know him? Do we know him as do the goers of Berlin,

+or St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Vienna, or Munich? And do we realise

+his technical prowess? In almost every city of Europe Ibsen is in the

+regular repertory. He is given at intervals with Shakespeare, Schiller,

+Dumas, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Grillparzer, Hervieu, Sudermann, and

+with the younger dramatists. That is the true test. Not the isolated

+divinity of a handful of worshippers, with an esoteric message, his

+plays are interpreted by skilled actors and not for the untrained if

+enthusiastic amateur. There is no longer Ibsenism on the Continent;

+Ibsen is recognised as the greatest dramatist since Racine and Molière.

+Cults claim him no more, and therefore the critical point of view at

+the time of his death had entirely shifted. His works are played in

+every European language and have been translated into the Japanese.

+

+The mixed blood in the veins of Ibsen may account for his temperament;

+he was more Danish than Norwegian, and there were German and Scotch

+strains in his ancestry. Such obscure forces of heredity doubtless

+played a rôle in his career. Norwegian in his love of freedom, Danish

+in his artistic bent, his philosophic cast of mind was wholly Teutonic.

+Add to these a possible theologic prepossession derived from the

+Scotch, a dramatic technique in which Scribe and Sophocles are not

+absent, and we have to deal with a disquieting problem. Ibsen was a

+mystery to his friends and foes. Hence the avidity with which he is

+claimed by idealists, realists, socialists, anarchists, symbolists,

+by evangelical folk, and by agnostics. There were in him many

+contradictory elements. Denounced as a pessimist, all his great plays

+have, notwithstanding, an unmistakable message of hope, from Brand to

+When We Dead Awake. An idealist he is, but one who has realised the

+futility of dreams; like all world-satirists, he castigates to purify.

+His realism is largely a matter of surfaces, and if we care to look

+we may find the symbol lodged in the most prosaic of his pieces. His

+anarchy consists in a firm adherence to the doctrine of individualism;

+Emerson and Thoreau are of his spiritual kin. In both there is the

+contempt for mob-rule, mob-opinion; for both the minority is the true

+rational unit; and with both there is a certain aloofness from mankind.

+Yet we do not denounce Emerson or Thoreau as enemies of the people. To

+be candid, Ibsen's belief in the rights of the individual is rather

+naïve and antiquated, belonging as it does to the tempestuous period of

+'48. Max Stirner was far in advance of the playwright in his political

+and menacing egoism; while Nietzsche, who loathed democracy, makes

+Ibsen's aristocracy timid by comparison.

+

+Ibsen can hardly be called a philosophic anarch, for the body of

+doctrine, either political or moral, deducible from his plays is so

+perplexing by reason of its continual affirmation and negation, so

+blurred by the kaleidoscopic clash of character, that one can only fuse

+these mutually exclusive qualities by realising him as a dramatist

+who has created a microcosmic world; in a word, we must look upon the

+man as a creator of dramatic character not as a theorist. And his

+characters have all the logical illogicality of life.

+

+Several traits emerge from this welter of cross-purposes and action.

+Individualism is a leading motive from the first to the last play;

+a strong sense of moral responsibility--an oppressive sense, one is

+tempted to add--is blended with a curious flavour of Calvinism, in

+which are traces of predestination. A more singular equipment for a

+modern dramatist is barely conceivable. Soon we discover that Ibsen

+is playing with the antique dramatic counters under another name.

+Free-will and determinism--what are these but the very breath of

+classic tragedy! In one of his rare moments of expansion he said: "Many

+things and much upon which my later work has turned--the contradiction

+between endowment and desire, between capacity and will, at once the

+entire tragedy and comedy of mankind--may here be dimly discerned."

+Moral responsibility evaded is a favourite theme of his. No Furies of

+the Greek drama pursued their victims with such relentless vengeance as

+pursues the unhappy wretches of Ibsen. In Ghosts, the old scriptural

+wisdom concerning the sins of parents is vividly expounded, though

+the heredity doctrine is sadly overworked. As in other plays of his,

+there were false meanings read into the interpretation; the realism of

+Ghosts is negligible; the symbol looms large in every scene. Search

+Ibsen throughout and it will be found that his subject-matter is

+fundamentally the same as that of all great masters of tragedy. It is

+his novel manner of presentation, his transposition of themes hitherto

+treated epically, to the narrow, unheroic scale of middle-class family

+life that blinded critics to his true significance. This tuning down

+of the heroic, this reversal of the old æsthetic order extorted bitter

+remonstrances. If we kill the ideal in art and life, what have we

+left? was the cry. But Ibsen attacks false as well as true ideals and

+does not always desert us after stripping us of our self-respect. A

+poet of doubt he is, who seldom attempts a solution; but he is also a

+puritan--a positivist puritan--and his scourgings are an equivalent for

+that _katharsis_, in the absence of which Aristotle denied the title of

+tragedy.

+

+Consider, then, how Ibsen was misunderstood. Setting aside the

+historical and poetic works, we are confronted in the social plays

+by the average man and woman of every-day life. They live, as a

+rule, in mediocre circumstances; they are harried by the necessities

+of quotidian existence. Has this undistinguished _bourgeoisie_ the

+potentialities of romance, of tragedy, of beauty? Wait, says Ibsen, and

+you will see your own soul, the souls of the man and woman who jostle

+you in the street, the same soul in palace or hovel, that orchestra of

+cerebral sensations, the human soul. And it is the truth he speaks. We

+follow with growing uneasiness his exposition of a soul. The spectacle

+is not pleasing. In his own magical but charmless way the souls of

+his people are turned inside out during an evening. No monologues, no

+long speeches, no familiar machinery of the drama, are employed. But

+the miracle is there. You face yourself. Is it any wonder that public

+and critic alike waged war against this showman of souls, this new

+psychologist of the unflattering, this past master of disillusionment?

+For centuries poets, tragic and comic, satiric and lyric, have been

+exalting, teasing, mocking, and lulling mankind. When Aristophanes

+flayed his victims he sang a merry tune; Shakespeare, with Olympian

+amiability, portrayed saint and sinner alike to the accompaniment of a

+divine music. But Ibsen does not cajole, amuse, or bribe with either

+just or specious illusions. He is determined to tell the truth of our

+microcosmic baseness. The truth is his shibboleth. And when enounced

+its sound is not unlike the chanting of a _Nox Irae_. He lifted the

+ugly to heroic heights; the ignoble he analysed with the cold ardour of

+a moral biologist--the ignoble, that "sublime of the lower slopes," as

+Flaubert has it.

+

+This psychological method was another rock of offence. Why transform

+the playhouse into a school of metaphysics? But Ibsen is not a

+metaphysician and his characters are never abstractions; instead, they

+are very lively humans. They offend those who believe the theatre to

+be a place of sentimentality or clowning; these same Ibsen men and

+women offend the lovers of Shakespeare and the classics. We know they

+are real, yet we dislike them as we dislike animals trained to imitate

+humanity too closely. The simian gestures cause a feeling of repulsion

+in both cases; surely we are not of such stock! And we move away. So

+do we sometimes turn from the Ibsen stage when human souls are made to

+go through a series of sorrowful evolutions by their stern trainer. To

+what purpose such revelations? Is it art? Is not our ideal of a nobler

+humanity shaken?

+

+Ibsen's report of the human soul as he sees it is his right, the

+immemorial right of priest, prophet, or artist. All our life is a huge

+lie if this right be denied; from the Preacher to Schopenhauer, from

+Æschylus to Molière, the man who reveals, in parable or as in a mirror,

+the soul of his fellow-being is a man who is a benefactor of his kind,

+if he be not a cynical spirit that denies. Ibsen is a satirist of a

+superior degree; he has the gift of creating a _Weltspiegel_ in which

+we see the shape of our souls. He is never the cynic, though he has

+portrayed the cynic in his plays. He has too much moral earnestness

+to view the world merely as a vile jest. That he is an artist is

+acknowledged. And for the ideals dear to us which he so savagely

+attacks, he so clears the air about some old familiar, mist-haunted

+ideal of duty, that we wonder if we have hitherto mistaken its meaning.

+

+From being denounced as a corrupter of youth, an anarch of letters, a

+debaser of current moral coin, we have learned to view him as a force

+making for righteousness, as a master of his craft, and as a creator

+of a large gallery of remarkably vivid human characters. We know now

+that many modern dramatists have carried their pails to this vast

+northern lake and from its pine-hemmed and sombre waters have secretly

+drawn sparkling inspiration.

+

+The truth is that Ibsen can be no longer denied--we exclude the

+wilfully blind--by critic or public. He is too big a man to be locked

+up in a library as if he were full of vague forbidden wickedness. When

+competently interpreted he is never offensive; the scenes to which the

+critics refer as smacking of sex are mildness itself compared to the

+doings of Sardou's lascivious marionettes. In the theatrical sense his

+are not sex plays, as are those of Dumas the younger. He discusses

+woman as a social as well as a psychical problem. Any picture of love

+is tolerated so it be frankly sentimental; but let Ibsen mention the

+word sex and there is a call to arms by the moral policemen of the

+drama. Thus, by some critical hocus-pocus the world was led for years

+to believe that this lofty thinker, moralist, and satirist concealed

+an immoral teacher. It is an old trick of the enemy to place upon an

+author's shoulders the doings and sayings of his mimic people. Ibsen

+was fathered with all the sins of his characters. Instead of being

+studied from life, they were, so many averred, the result of a morbid

+brain, the brain of a pessimist and a hater of his kind.

+

+We have seen that Ibsen offended by his disregard of academic dramatic

+attitudes. His personages are ordinary, yet like Browning's meanest

+soul they have a human side to show us. The inherent stuff of his plays

+is tragic; but the hero and heroine do not stamp, stalk, or spout blank

+verse; it is the tragedy of life without the sop of sentiment usually

+administered by second-rate poets. Missing the colour and decoration,

+the pretty music, and the eternal simper of the sensual, we naturally

+turn our back on such a writer. If he knows souls, he certainly

+does not understand the box-office. This for the negative side. On

+the positive, the apparent baldness of the narrative, the ugliness

+of his men and women, their utterance of ideas foreign to cramped,

+convention-ridden lives, mortify us immeasurably. The tale always ends

+badly or sadly. And when one of his characters begins to talk about the

+"joy of life," it is the gloom of life that is evoked. The women--and

+here is the shock to our masculine vanity--the women assert themselves

+too much, telling men that they are not what they believe themselves

+to be. Lastly, the form of the Ibsen play is compact with ideas and

+emotion. We usually don't go to the theatre to think or to feel. With

+Ibsen we must think, and think closely; we must feel--worse still, be

+thrilled to our marrow by the spectacle of our own spiritual skeletons.

+No marvellous music is there to heal the wounded nerves as in Tristan

+and Isolde; no prophylactic for the merciless acid of the dissector.

+We either breathe a rarefied atmosphere in his Brand and in When We

+Dead Awake, or else, in the social drama, the air is so dense with

+the intensity of the closely wrought moods that we gasp as if in the

+chamber of a diving-bell. Human, all too human!

+

+Protean in his mental and spiritual activities, a hater of

+shams--religious, political, and social shams--more symbolist

+than realist, in assent with Goethe that no material is unfit for

+poetic treatment, the substance of Ibsen's morality consists in his

+declaration that men to be free must first free themselves. Once, in

+addressing a group of Norwegian workmen, he told them that man must

+ennoble himself, he must _will_ himself free; "to will is to have

+to will," as he says in Emperor and Galilean. Yet in Peer Gynt he

+declares "to be oneself is to slay oneself." Surely all this is not

+very radical. He wrote to Georg Brandes, that the State was the foe

+of the individual; therefore the State must go. But the revolution

+must be one of the spirit. Ibsen ever despised socialism, and after

+his mortification over the fiasco of the Paris Commune he had never a

+good word for that vain legend: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Brandes

+relates that while Ibsen wished--in one of his poems--to place a

+torpedo under the social ark, there was also a time when he longed to

+use the knout on the willing slaves of a despised social system.

+

+Perhaps the main cause of Ibsen's offending is his irony. The

+world forgives much, irony never, for irony is the ivory tower of

+the intellectual, the last refuge of the original. It is not the

+intellectual irony of Meredith, nor the playful irony of Anatole

+France, but a veiled corrosive irony that causes you to tread

+suspiciously every yard of his dramatic domain. The "second intention,"

+the secondary dialogue, spoken of by Maeterlinck, in the Ibsen plays is

+very disconcerting to those who prefer their drama free from enigma.

+Otherwise his dialogue is a model for future dramatists. It is clarity

+itself and, closely woven, it has the characteristic accents of nature.

+Read, we feel its gripping logic; spoken by an actor, it tingles with

+vitality.

+

+For the student there is a fascination in the cohesiveness of these

+dramas. Ibsen's mind was like a lens; it focussed the refracted,

+scattered, and broken lights of opinions and theories of his day upon

+the contracted space of his stage. In a fluid state the ideas that

+crystallised in his prose series are to be found in his earliest work;

+there is a remorseless fastening of link to link in the march-like

+movement of his plays. Their author seems to delight in battering down

+in Ghosts what he had preached in A Doll's House; The Enemy of the

+People exalted the individual man, though Ghosts taught that a certain

+kind of personal liberty is deadly; The Wild Duck, which follows, is

+another puzzle, for in it the misguided idealist is pilloried for

+destroying homes by his truth-telling, dangerous tongue; Rosmersholm

+follows with its portrayal of lonely souls; and the danger of filling

+old bottles with the fermenting wines of new ideas is set forth; in

+The Lady from the Sea free-will, the will to love, is lauded, though

+Rebekka West and Rosmersholm perished because of their exercise of this

+same will; Hedda Gabler shows the converse of Ellida Wangel's "will

+to power." Hedda is a creature wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns

+us again, for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead your own

+life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it leads to a catastrophe which

+wrecks a household. This game of contradiction is continued in The

+Master-Builder, a most potent exposition of human motives. Solness is

+sick-brained because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, the "younger

+generation," a Hedda Gabler _à rebours_, that he so feared would come

+knocking at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, arouses his

+slumbering self; curiously enough, if the ordinary standards of success

+be adduced, he goes to his destruction when he again climbs the dizzy

+spire. In John Gabriel Borkman the allegory is clearer. Sacrificing

+love to a base ambition, to "commercialism," Borkman at the close of

+his great and miserable life discovers that he has committed the one

+unpardonable offence: he has slain the love-life in the woman he loved,

+and for the sake of gold. So he is a failure, and, like Peer Gynt, he

+is ready for the Button-Moulder with his refuse-heap, who lies in wait

+for all cowardly and incomplete souls. The Epilogue returns to the

+mountains, the Ibsen symbol of freedom, and there we learn for the

+last time that love is greater than art, that love is life. And the

+dead of life awake.

+

+The immorality of these plays is so well concealed that only abnormal

+moralists detect it. It may be admitted that Ibsen, like Shakespeare,

+manifests a preference for the man who fails. What is new is the art

+with which this idea is developed. The Ibsen play begins where other

+plays end. The form is the "amplified catastrophe" of Sophocles. After

+marriage the curtain is rung up on the true drama of life, therefore

+marriage is a theme which constantly preoccupies this modern poet.

+He regards it from all sides, asking whether "by self-surrender,

+self-realisation may be achieved." His speech delivered once before

+a ladies' club at Christiania proves that he is not a champion of

+latter-day woman's rights. "The women will solve the question of

+mankind, but they must do so as mothers." Yet Nora Helmer, when she

+slammed the door of her doll's home, caused an echo in the heart of

+every intelligent woman in Christendom. It is not necessary now to ask

+whether a woman would, or should, desert her children; Nora's departure

+was only the symbol of her liberty, the gesture of a newly awakened

+individuality. Ibsen did not preach--as innocent persons of both sexes

+and all anti-Ibsenites believe--that woman should throw overboard

+her duties; this is an absurd construction. As well argue that the

+example of Othello must set jealous husbands smothering their wives.

+A Doll's House enacted has caused no more evil than Othello. It was

+the plea for woman as a human being, neither more nor less than man,

+which the dramatist made. Our withers must have been well wrung, for

+it aroused a whirlwind of wrath, and henceforth the house-key became

+the symbol of feminine supremacy. Yet in his lovely drama of pity and

+resignation, Little Eyolf, the tenderest from his pen, the poet set up

+a counter-figure to Nora, demonstrating the duties parents owe their

+children.

+

+Without exaggeration, he may be said to have discovered for the stage

+the modern woman. No longer the sleek cat of the drawing-room, or the

+bayadere of luxury, or the wild outlaw of society, the "emancipated"

+Ibsen woman is the sensible woman, the womanly woman, bearing a not

+remote resemblance to the old-fashioned woman, who calmly accepts her

+share of the burdens and responsibilities of life, single or wedded,

+though she insists on her rights as a human being, and without a touch

+of the heroic or the supra-sentimental. Ibsen should not be held

+responsible for the caricatures of womanhood evolved by his disciples.

+When a woman evades her responsibilities, when she is frivolous or

+evil, an exponent of the "life-lie" in matrimony, then Ibsen grimly

+paints her portrait, and we denounce him as cynical for telling the

+truth. And truth is seldom a welcome guest. But he knows that a fiddle

+can be mended and a bell not; and in placing his surgeon-like finger

+on the sorest spot of our social life, he sounds this bell, and when

+it rings cracked he coldly announces the fact. But his attitude toward

+marriage is not without its mystery. In Love's Comedy his hero and

+heroine part, fearing the inevitable shipwreck in the union of two

+poetic hearts without the necessary means of a prosaic subsistence.

+In the later plays, marriage for gain, for home, for anything but

+love, brings upon its victims the severest consequences; John Gabriel

+Borkman, Hedda, Dora, Mrs. Alving, Allmers, Rubek, are examples. The

+idea of man's cruelty to man or woman, or woman's cruelty to woman or

+man, lashes him into a fury. Then he becomes Ibsen the Berserker.

+

+Therefore let us beware the pitfalls dug by some Ibsen exegetists; the

+genius of the dramatist is too vast and versatile to be pinned down to

+a single formula. If you believe that he is dangerous to young people,

+let it be admitted--but so are Thackeray, Balzac, and Hugo. So is any

+strong thinker. Ibsen is a powerful dissolvent for an imagination

+clogged by theories of life, low ideals, and the facile materialism

+that exalts the letter but slays the spirit. He is a foe to compromise,

+a hater of the half-way, the roundabout, the weak-willed, above all,

+a hater of the truckling politician--he is a very Torquemada to

+politicians. At the best there is ethical grandeur in his conceptions,

+and if the moral stress is unduly felt, if he tears asunder the veil

+of our beloved illusions and shows us as we are, it is because of his

+righteous indignation against the platitudinous hypocrisy of modern

+life. His unvarying code is: "So to conduct one's life as to realise

+oneself." Withal an artist, not the evangelist of a new gospel, not

+the social reformer, not the exponent of science in the drama. These

+titles have been thrust upon him by his overheated admirers. He never

+posed as a prophet. He is poet, psychologist, skald, dramatist, not

+always a soothsayer. The artist in him preserved him from the fate

+of the didactic Tolstoy. With the Russian he shares the faculty of

+emptying souls. Ibsen, who vaguely recalls Stendhal in his clear-eyed

+vision and dry irony, is without a trace of the Frenchman's cynicism

+or dilettantism. Like all dramatists of the first rank, the Norwegian

+has in him much of the seer, yet he always avoided the pontifical tone;

+he may be a sphinx, but he never plays the oracle. His categorical

+imperative, however, "All or nothing," does not bear the strain of

+experience. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at such an intolerable

+tension. The very illusions he seeks to destroy would be supplanted by

+others. Man exists because of his illusions. Without the "life-lie" he

+would perish in the mire. His illusions are his heritage from aeons

+of ancestors. The classic view considered man as the centre of the

+universe; that position has been ruthlessly altered by science--we are

+now only tiny points of consciousness in unthinkable space. Isolated

+then, true children of our inconsiderable planet, we have in us traces

+of our predecessors. True, one may be disheartened by the pictures of

+unheroic meanness and petty corruption, the ill-disguised instincts

+of ape and tiger, in the prose plays, even to the extent of calling

+them--as did M. Melchior de Vogüé, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet--a

+grotesque Iliad of Nihilism. But we need not despair. If Ibsen seemed

+to say for a period, "Evil, be thou my good," his final words in the

+Epilogue are those of pity and peace: _Pax vobiscum!_

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+This old man with the head and hair of an electrified Schopenhauer

+and the torso of a giant, his temperament coinciding with his curt,

+imperious name, left behind him twenty-six plays, one or more in

+manuscript. A volume of very subjective poems concludes this long

+list; among the dramas are at least three of heroic proportion and

+length. Ibsen was born at Skien, Norway, 1828. His forebears were

+Danish, German, Scotch, and Norwegian. His father, a man of means,

+failed in business, and at the age of eight the little Henrik had to

+face poverty. His schooling was of the slightest. He was not much

+of a classical scholar and soon he was apprenticed to an apothecary

+at Grimstad, the very name of which evokes a vision of gloominess.

+He did not prove a success as a druggist, as he spent his spare

+time reading and caricaturing his neighbours. His verse-making was

+desultory, his accustomed mien an unhappy combination of Hamlet and

+Byron; his misanthropy at this period recalls that of the young

+Schopenhauer. His favourite reading was poetry and history, and he had

+a predilection for sketching and conjuring tricks. It might be pointed

+out that here in the raw were the aptitudes of a future dramatist:

+poetry, pictures, illusion. In the year 1850 Ibsen published his

+first drama, derived from poring over Sallust and Cicero. It was a

+creditable effort of youth, and to the discerning it promised well for

+his literary future. He was gifted, without doubt, and from the first

+he sounded the tocsin of revolt. Pessimistic and rebellious his poems

+were; he had tasted misery, his home was an unhappy one--there was

+little love in it for him--and his earliest memories were clustered

+about the town jail, the hospital, and the lunatic asylum. These

+images were no doubt the cause of his bitter and desperate frame of

+mind; grinding poverty, the poverty of a third-rate provincial town

+in Norway, was the climax of his misery. And then, too, the scenery,

+rugged and noble, and the climate, depressing for months, all had

+their effect upon his sensitive imagination. From the start, certain

+conceptions of woman took root in his mind and reappear in nearly all

+his dramas. Catalina's wife, Aurelia, and the vestal Furia, who are

+reincarnated in the Dagny and Hjordis of his Vikings, reappear in A

+Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and at the last in When We Dead Awake. One

+is the eternal womanly, the others the destructive feminine principle,

+woman the conqueror. As Catalina is a rebel against circumstances, so

+are Maja and the sculptor in the Epilogue of 1899. There is almost

+a half century of uninterrupted composition during which this group

+of men and women disport themselves. Brand, a poetic rather than an

+acting drama, is no exception; Brand and the Sheriff, Agnes and Gerda.

+These types are cunningly varied, their traits so concealed as to be

+recognised only after careful study. But the characteristics of each

+are alike. The monotony of this procedure is redeemed by the unity

+of conception--Ibsen is the reflective poet, the poet who conceives

+the idea and then clothes it, therein differing from Shakespeare and

+Goethe, to whom form and idea are simultaneously born.

+

+In March, 1850, he went to Christiania and entered Heltberg's school

+as a preparation for the university. His studies were brief. He became

+involved in a boyish revolutionary outburst--in company with his

+life-long friend, the good-hearted Björnstjerne Björnson, who helped

+him many times--and while nothing serious occurred, it caused the

+young man to effervesce with literary plans and the new ideas of his

+times. The Warrior's Tomb, his second play, was accepted and actually

+performed at the Christiania theatre. The author gave up his university

+dreams and began to earn a rude living by his pen. He embarked in

+newspaper enterprises which failed. An extremist politically, he soon

+made a crop of enemies, the wisest crop a strong character can raise;

+but he often worked on an empty stomach in consequence. The metal of

+the man showed from the first: endure defeat, but no compromise!

+He went to Bergen in 1851 and was appointed theatre poet at a small

+salary; this comprised a travelling stipend. Ibsen saw the Copenhagen

+and Dresden theatres with excellent results. His eyes were opened to

+the possibilities of his craft, and on his return he proved a zealous

+stage manager. He composed, in 1853, St. John's Night, which was played

+at his theatre, and in 1857 Fru Inger of Oesträtt was written. It is

+old-fashioned in form, but singularly lifelike in characterization and

+fruitful in situations. The story is semi-historical. In the Lady Inger

+we see a foreshadowing of his strong, vengeful women. Olaf Liljekrans

+need not detain us. The Vikings (1858) is a sterling specimen of

+drama, in which legend and history are artfully blended. The Feast of

+Solhaug (1857) was very successful in its treatment of the saga, and is

+comparatively cheerful.

+

+Ibsen left Bergen to take the position of director at the Norwegian

+Theatre, Christiania. He remained there until 1862, staging all

+manner of plays, from Shakespeare to Scribe. The value of these years

+was incalculable in his technical development. A poet born and by

+self-discipline developed, he was now master of a difficult art, an

+art that later he never lost, even when, weary of the conventional

+comedy of manners, he sought to spiritualize the form and give us the

+psychology of commonplace souls. It may be noted that, despite the

+violinist Ole Bull's generous support, the new theatre endured only

+five years. More than passing stress should be laid upon this formative

+period. His experience of these silent years was bitter, but rich

+in spiritual recompense. After some difficulty in securing a paltry

+pension from his government, Ibsen was enabled to leave Norway, which

+had become a charnel-house to him since the Danish war with Germany,

+and with his young wife he went to Rome. Thenceforth his was a gypsy

+career. He lived in Rome, in Dresden, in Munich, and again in Rome. He

+spent his summers in the Austrian Tyrol, at Sorrento, and occasionally

+in his own land. His was a self-imposed exile, and he did not return

+to Christiania to reside permanently until an old, but famous man.

+Silent, unsociable, a man of harsh moods, he was to those who knew him

+an upright character, an ideal husband and father. His married life had

+no history, a sure sign of happiness, for he was well mated. Yet one

+feels that, despite his wealth, his renown, existence was for him a

+_via dolorosa_. Ever the solitary dreamer, he wrote a play about every

+two or three years, and from the very beginning of his exile the effect

+in Norway was like unto the explosion of a bomb-shell. Not wasting time

+in answering his critics, it was nevertheless remarked that each new

+piece was a veiled reply to slanderous criticism. Ghosts was absolutely

+intended as an answer to the attacks upon A Doll's House; here is

+what Nora would have become if she had been a dutiful wife, declares

+Ibsen, in effect; and we see Mrs. Alving in her motherly agonies. The

+counterblast to the criticism of Ghosts was An Enemy of the People; Dr.

+Stockman is easily detected as a partial portrait of Ibsen.

+

+Georg Brandes, to whom the poet owes many ideas as well as sound

+criticism, said that early in his life a lyric Pegasus had been killed

+under Ibsen This striking hint of his sacrifice is supplemented by

+a letter in which he compared the education of a poet to that of a

+dancing bear. The bear is tied in a brewer's vat and a slow fire is

+built under the vat; the wretched animal is then forced to dance. Life

+forces the poet to dance by means quite as painful; he dances and

+the tears roll down his cheeks all the while. Ibsen forsook poetry

+for prose and--the dividing line never to be recrossed is clearly

+indicated between Emperor and Galilean and The Pillars of Society--he

+bestowed upon his country three specimens of his poetic genius. As

+Italy fructified the genius of Goethe, so it touched as with a glowing

+coal the lips of the young Northman. Brand, a noble epic, startled and

+horrified Norway. In Rome Ibsen regained his equilibrium. He saw his

+country and countrymen more sanely, more steadily, though there is a

+terrible fund of bitterness in this dramatic poem. The local politics

+of Christiania no longer irritated him, and in the hot, beautiful

+South he dreamed of the North, of his beloved fiords and mountains, of

+ice and avalanche, of troll and saga. Luckily for those who have not

+mastered Norwegian, C. H. Herford's translation of Brand exists, and,

+while the translator deplores his sins of omission, it is a work--as

+are the English versions of the prose plays by William Archer--that

+gives one an excellent idea of the original. In Brand (1866) Ibsen is

+at his furthest extremity from compromise. This clergyman sacrifices

+his mother, his wife, his child, his own life, to a frosty ideal: "All

+or nothing." He is implacable in his ire against worldliness, in his

+contempt of churchmen that believe in half-way measures. He perishes

+on the heights as a voice proclaims, "He is the God of Love." Greatly

+imaginative, charged with spiritual spleen and wisdom, Brand at once

+placed Ibsen among the mighty.

+

+He followed it with a new Odyssey of his soul, the amazing Peer Gynt

+(1867), in which his humour, hitherto a latent quality, his fantasy,

+bold invention, and the poetic evocation of the faithful, exquisite

+Solveig, are further testimony to his breadth of resource. Peer Gynt

+is all that Brand was not: whimsical, worldly, fantastic, weak-willed,

+not so vicious as perverse; he is very selfish, one who was to himself

+sufficient, therefore a failure. The will, if it frees, may also kill.

+It killed the soul of Peer. There are pages of unflagging humour,

+poetry, and observation; scene dissolves into scene; Peer travels over

+half the earth, is rich, is successful, is poor; and at the end meets

+the Button-Moulder, that ironical shadow who tells him what he has

+become. We hear the Boyg, the spirit of compromise, with its huge,

+deadly, coiling lengths, gruffly bid Peer to "go around." Facts of life

+are to be slunk about, never to be faced. Peer comes to harbour in the

+arms of his deserted Solveig. The resounding sarcasm, the ferociousness

+of the attack on all the idols of the national cavern, raised a storm

+in Norway that did not abate for years. Ibsen was again a target for

+the bolts of critical and public hatred. Peer Gynt is the Scandinavian

+Faust.

+

+Having purged his soul of this perilous stuff, the poet, in 1873,

+finished his double drama Emperor and Galilean, not a success

+dramatically, but a strong, interesting work for the library, though it

+saw the footlights at Berlin, Leipsic, and Christiania. The apostate

+Emperor Julian is the protagonist. We discern Ibsen the mystic

+philosopher longing for his Third Kingdom.

+

+After a silence of four years The Pillars of Society appeared. Like

+its predecessor in the same _genre_, The Young Men's League, it is

+a prose drama, a study of manners, and a scathing arraignment of

+civic dishonesty. All the rancour of its author against the bourgeois

+hypocrisy of his countrymen comes to the surface; as in The Young Men's

+League the vacillating nature of the shallow politician is laid bare.

+It seems a trifle banal now, though the canvas is large, the figures

+animated. One recalls Augier without his Gallic _esprit_, rather than

+the later Ibsen. A Doll's House was once a household word, as was

+Ghosts (1881). There is no need now to retell the story of either

+play. Ghosts, in particular, has an antique quality, the _dénouement_

+leaves us shivering. It may be set down as the strongest play of the

+nineteenth century, and also the most harrowing. Its intensity borders

+on the hallucinatory. We involuntarily recall the last act of Tristan

+and Isolde or the final movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic symphony.

+It is the shrill discord between the mediocre creatures involved and

+the ghastly punishment meted out to the innocent that agitates and

+depresses us. Here are human souls illuminated as if by a lightning

+flash; we long for the anticipated thunder. It does not sound. The

+drama ends in silence--one of those pauses (Ibsen employs the pause

+as does a musical composer) which leaves the spectator unstrung. The

+helpless sense of hovering about the edge of a bottomless gulf is

+engendered by this play. No man could have written it but Ibsen, and we

+hope that no man will ever attempt a parallel performance, for such art

+modulates across the borderland of the pathologic.

+

+The Wild Duck (1884) followed An Enemy of the People (1882). It is the

+most puzzling of the prose dramas except The Master-Builder, for in it

+Ibsen deliberately mocks himself and his ideals. It is, nevertheless,

+a profoundly human and moving work. Gina Ekdal, the wholesome,

+sensible wife of Ekdal, the charlatan photographer--a _revenant_ of

+Peer Gynt--has been called a feminine Sancho Panza. Gregers Werle,

+the meddlesome truth-teller; Relling--a sardonic incarnation of

+the author--who believes in feeding humanity on the "life-lie" to

+maintain its courage; the tiny Hedwig, sweetest and freshest of Ibsen's

+girls--these form a memorable _ensemble_. And how the piece plays!

+Humour and pathos alternate, while the symbol is not so remote that

+an average audience need miss its meaning. The end is cruel. Ibsen is

+often cruel, with the passionless indifference of the serene Buddha.

+But he is ever logical. Nora must leave her husband's house--a "happy

+ending" would be ridiculous--and Hedwig must be sacrificed instead of

+the wild duck, or her fool of a father. There is a battalion of minor

+characters in the Ibsen plays who recall Dickens by their grotesque,

+sympathetic physiognomies. To deny this dramatist humour is to miss a

+third of his qualities. His is not the ventripotent humour of Rabelais

+or Cervantes; it seldom leaves us without the feeling that the poet is

+slyly laughing at us, not with us, though in the early comedies there

+are many broad and telling strokes.

+

+Rosmersholm (1886) is a study of two temperaments. Rebekka West

+is another malevolent portrait in his gallery of dangerous and

+antipathetic women. She ruins Rosmersholm, ruins herself, because she

+does not discover this true self until too late. The play illustrates

+the extraordinary technique of the master. It seems to have been

+written backward; until the third act we are not aware that the

+peaceful home of the Rosmersholms is the battle-field of a malignant

+soul. The Lady from the Sea (1888) illustrates the thesis that love

+must be free. The allegory is rather strained and in performance the

+play lacks poetic glamour. Hedda Gabler (1890) is a masterpiece. A more

+selfish, vicious, cold nature than Hedda's never stepped from the page

+of a Russian novel--Becky Sharp and Madame Marneffe are lovable persons

+in comparison. She is not in the slightest degree like the stage

+"adventuress," but is a magnificent example of egoism magnificently

+delineated and is the true sister in fiction of Julien Sorel. That she

+is dramatically worth the while is beside the question. Her ending by a

+pistol shot is justice itself; alive she fascinates as does some exotic

+reptile. She is representative of her species, the loveless woman, the

+petty hater, a Lady Macbeth reversed. Ibsen has studied her with the

+same care and curiosity he bestowed upon the homely Gina Ekdal.

+

+His Master-Builder (1892) is the beginning of the last cycle. A true

+interior drama, we enter here into the region of the symbolical.

+With Ibsen the symbol is always an image, never an abstraction, a

+state of sensibility, not a formula, and the student may winnow many

+examples from The Pretenders (1864), with its "kingship" idea, to the

+Epilogue. Solness stands on the heights only to perish, but in the full

+possession of his soul. Hilda Wangel is one of the most perplexing

+characters to realise in the modern theatre. She, with her cruelty

+and loveliness of perfect youth, is the work of a sorcerer who holds

+us spellbound while the souls he has created by his black art slowly

+betray themselves. It may be said that all this is not the art of

+the normal theatre. Very true. It more nearly resembles a dramatic

+confessional with a hidden auditory bewitched into listening to secrets

+never suspected of the humanity that hedges us about in street or

+home. Ibsen is clairvoyant. He takes the most familiar material and

+holds it in the light of his imagination; straightway we see a new

+world, a northern dance of death, like the ferocious pictures of his

+fellow-countryman, the painter Edvard Munch.

+

+Little Eyolf (1894) is fairly plain reading, with some fine overtones

+of suffering and self-abnegation. Its lesson is wholly satisfying.

+John Gabriel Borkman (1896), written at an age when most poets show

+declining power, is another monument to the vigour and genius of Ibsen.

+The story winds about the shattered career of a financier. There is a

+secondary plot, in which the parental curses come home to roost--the

+son, carefully reared to wipe away the stain from his father's name,

+prefers Paris and a rollicking life. The desolation under this

+roof-tree is almost epical: two sisters in deadly antagonism, a

+blasted man, the old wolf, whose footfalls in the chamber above become

+absolutely sinister as the play progresses, are made to face the hard

+logic of their misspent lives. The doctrine of compensation has never

+had such an exponent as Ibsen.

+

+In the last of his published plays, When We Dead Awake (1899), we find

+earlier and familiar themes developed at moments with contrapuntal

+mastery. Rubek, the sculptor, has aroused a love that he never dared to

+face. He married the wrong woman. His early dream, the inspiration of

+his master work, he has lost. His art withers. And when he meets his

+Irene, her mind is full of wandering ghosts. To the heights, to the

+same peaks that Brand climbed, they both must mount, and there they are

+destroyed, as was Brand, by an avalanche. Eros is the triumphant god of

+the aged magician.

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+It must be apparent to those who have not read or seen the Ibsen

+plays that, despite this huddled and foreshortened account, they

+are in essence quite different from what has been reported of them.

+Idealistic, symbolistic, moral, and ennobling, the Ibsen drama was

+so vilified by malice and ignorance that its very name was a portent

+of evil. Mad or wicked Ibsen is not. His scheme of life and morals

+is often oblique and paradoxical, his interpretation of truths so

+elliptical that we are confused. But he is essentially sound. He

+believes in the moral continuity of the universe. His astounding energy

+is a moral energy. Salvation by good works is his burden. The chief

+thing is to be strong in your faith. He despises the weak, not the

+strong sinner. His Supermen are the bankrupts of romantic heroism.

+His strong man is frequently wrong-headed; but the weakling works the

+real mischief. Never admit you are beaten. Begin at the bottom twenty

+times, and when the top is achieved die, or else look for loftier peaks

+to climb. Ibsen exalts strength. His "ice-church" is chilly; the lungs

+drink in with difficulty the buffeting breezes on his heights; yet how

+bracing, how inspiring, is this austere place of worship. Bad as is

+mankind, Ibsen, who was ever in advance of his contemporaries, believed

+in its possibility for betterment. Here the optimist speaks. Brand's

+spiritual pride is his downfall; nevertheless, Ibsen, an aristocratic

+thinker, believes that of pride one cannot have too much. He recognised

+the selfish and hollow foundation of all "humanitarian" movements.

+He is a sign-post for the twentieth century when the aristocratic of

+spirit must enter into combat with the herd instinct of a depressing

+socialism. His influence has been tremendous. His plays teem with the

+general ideas of his century. His chief value lies in the beauty of

+his art; his is the rare case of the master-singer rounding a long

+life with his master works. He brought to the theatre new ideas; he

+changed forever the dramatic map of Europe; he originated a new method

+of surprising life, capturing it and forcing it to give up a moiety of

+its mystery for the uses of a difficult and recondite art. He fashioned

+character anew. And he pushed resolutely into the mist that surrounded

+the human soul, his Diogenes lantern glimmering, his brave, lonely

+heart undaunted by the silence and the solitude. His message? Who shall

+say? He asks questions, and, patterning after nature, he seldom answers

+them. When his ideas sicken and die--he asserted that the greatest

+truth outlives its usefulness in time, and it may not be denied that

+his drama is a dissolvent; already the early plays are in historical

+twilight and the woman question of his day is for us something quite

+different--his art will endure. Henrik Ibsen was a man of heroic

+fortitude. His plays are a bold and stimulating spectacle for the

+spirit. Should we ask more of a dramatic poet?

+

+

+

+

+X

+

+MAX STIRNER

+

+

+

+I

+

+

+In 1888 John Henry Mackay, the Scottish-German poet, while at the

+British Museum reading Lange's History of Materialism, encountered

+the name of Max Stirner and a brief criticism of his forgotten book,

+Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Only One and His Property; in

+French translated L'Unique et sa Propriété, and in the first English

+translation more aptly and euphoniously entitled The Ego and His Own).

+His curiosity excited, Mackay, who is an anarchist, procured after

+some difficulty a copy of the work, and so greatly was he stirred

+that for ten years he gave himself up to the study of Stirner and his

+teachings, and after incredible painstaking published in 1898 the

+story of his life. (Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk: John Henry

+Mackay.) To Mackay's labours we owe all we know of a man who was as

+absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed. But

+some advanced spirits had read Stirner's book, the most revolutionary

+ever written, and had felt its influence. Let us name two: Henrik

+Ibsen and Frederick Nietzsche. Though the name of Stirner is not quoted

+by Nietzsche, he nevertheless recommended Stirner to a favourite pupil

+of his, Professor Baumgartner at Basel University. This was in 1874.

+

+One hot August afternoon in the year 1896 at Bayreuth, I was standing

+in the Marktplatz when a member of the Wagner Theatre pointed out to me

+a house opposite, at the corner of the Maximilianstrasse, and said: "Do

+you see that house with the double gables? A man was born there whose

+name will be green when Jean Paul and Richard Wagner are forgotten."

+It was too large a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name.

+"Max Stirner," he replied. "The crazy Hegelian," I retorted. "You have

+read him, then?" "No; but you haven't read Nordau." It was true. All

+fire and flame at that time for Nietzsche, I did not realise that the

+poet and rhapsodist had forerunners. My friend sniffed at Nietzsche's

+name; Nietzsche for him was an aristocrat, not an Individualist--in

+reality, a lyric expounder of Bismarck's gospel of blood and iron.

+Wagner's adversary would, with Renan, place mankind under the yoke of

+a more exacting tyranny than Socialism, the tyranny of Culture, of the

+Superman. Ibsen, who had studied both Kierkegaard and Stirner--witness

+Brand and Peer Gynt--Ibsen was much nearer to the champion of the Ego

+than Nietzsche. Yet it is the dithyrambic author of Zarathustra who is

+responsible, with Mackay, for the recrudescence of Stirner's teachings.

+

+Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner its prophet, or, if

+you will, its philosopher. Later I secured the book, which had been

+reprinted in the cheap edition of Reclam (1882). It seemed colourless,

+or rather gray, set against the glory and gorgeous rhetoric of

+Nietzsche. I could not see then what I saw a decade later--that

+Nietzsche had used Stirner as a springboard, as a point of departure,

+and that the Individual had vastly different meanings to those diverse

+temperaments. But Stirner displayed the courage of an explorer in

+search of the north pole of the Ego.

+

+The man whose theories would make a _tabula rasa_ of civilisation, was

+born at Bayreuth, October 25, 1806, and died at Berlin June 25, 1856.

+His right name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, Max Stirner being a nickname

+bestowed upon him by his lively comrades in Berlin because of his very

+high and massive forehead. His father was a maker of wind instruments,

+who died six months after his son's birth. His mother remarried, and

+his stepfather proved a kind protector. Nothing of external importance

+occurred in the life of Max Stirner that might place him apart from his

+fellow-students. He was very industrious over his books at Bayreuth,

+and when he became a student at the Berlin University he attended the

+lectures regularly, preparing himself for a teacher's profession. He

+mastered the classics, modern philosophy, and modern languages. But

+he did not win a doctor's degree; just before examinations his mother

+became ill with a mental malady (a fact his critics have noted) and

+the son dutifully gave up everything so as to be near her. After her

+death he married a girl who died within a short time. Later, in 1843,

+his second wife was Marie Dähnhardt, a very "advanced" young woman, who

+came from Schwerin to Berlin to lead a "free" life. She met Stirner

+in the Hippel circle, at a Weinstube in the Friedrichstrasse, where

+radical young thinkers gathered: Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Karl Marx,

+Moses Hess, Jordan, Julius Faucher, and other stormy insurgents. She

+had, it is said, about 10,000 thalers. She was married with the ring

+wrenched from a witness's purse--her bridegroom had forgotten to

+provide one. He was not a practical man; if he had been he would hardly

+have written The Ego and His Own.

+

+It was finished between the years 1843 and 1845; the latter date it

+was published. It created a stir, though the censor did not seriously

+interfere with it; its attacks on the prevailing government were

+veiled. In Germany rebellion on the psychic plane expresses itself in

+metaphysics; in Poland and Russia music is the safer medium. Feuerbach,

+Hess, and Szeliga answered Stirner's terrible arraignment of society,

+but men's thoughts were interested elsewhere, and with the revolt

+of 1848 Stirner was quite effaced. He had taught for five years in

+a fashionable school for young ladies; he had written for several

+periodicals, and translated extracts from the works of Say and Adam

+Smith.

+

+After his book appeared, his relations with his wife became uneasy.

+Late in 1846 or early in 1847 she left him and went to London, where

+she supported herself by writing; later she inherited a small sum from

+a sister, visited Australia, married a labourer there, and became a

+washerwoman. In 1897 Mackay wrote to her in London, asking her for

+some facts in the life of her husband. She replied tartly that she was

+not willing to revive her past; that her husband had been too much of

+an egotist to keep friends, and was "very sly." This was all he could

+extort from the woman, who evidently had never understood her husband

+and execrated his memory, probably because her little fortune was

+swallowed up by their mutual improvidence. Another appeal only elicited

+the answer that "Mary Smith is preparing for death"--she had become a

+Roman Catholic. It is the irony of things in general that his book is

+dedicated to "My Sweetheart, Marie Dähnhardt."

+

+Stirner, after being deserted, led a precarious existence. The old

+jolly crowd at Hippel's seldom saw him. He was in prison twice for

+debt--free Prussia--and often lacked bread. He, the exponent of

+Egoism, of philosophic anarchy, starved because of his pride. He was

+in all matters save his theories a moderate man, eating and drinking

+temperately, living frugally. Unassuming in manners, he could hold his

+own in debate--and Hippel's appears to have been a rude, debating

+society--yet one who avoided life rather than mastered it. He was of

+medium height, ruddy, and his eyes deep-blue. His hands were white,

+slender, "aristocratic," writes Mackay. Certainly not the figure of

+a stalwart shatterer of conventions, not the ideal iconoclast; above

+all, without a touch of the melodrama of communistic anarchy, with its

+black flags, its propaganda by force, its idolatry of assassinations,

+bomb-throwing, killing of fat, harmless policemen, and its sentimental

+gabble about Fraternity. Stirner hated the word Equality; he knew it

+was a lie, knew that all men are born unequal, as no two grains of sand

+on earth ever are or ever will be alike. He was a solitary. And thus he

+died at the age of fifty. A few of his former companions heard of his

+neglected condition and buried him. Nearly a half century later Mackay,

+with the co-operation of Hans von Bülow, affixed a commemorative tablet

+on the house where he last lived, Phillipstrasse 19, Berlin, and alone

+Mackay placed a slab to mark his grave in the Sophienkirchhof.

+

+It is to the poet of the Letzte Erkentniss, with its stirring line,

+"Doch bin ich mein," that I owe the above scanty details of the most

+thorough-going Nihilist who ever penned his disbelief in religion,

+humanity, society, the family. He rejects them all. We have no genuine

+portrait of this insurrectionist--he preferred personal insurrection

+to general revolution; the latter, he asserted, brought in its train

+either Socialism or a tyrant--except a sketch hastily made by

+Friedrich Engels, the revolutionist, for Mackay. It is not reassuring.

+Stirner looks like an old-fashioned German and timid pedagogue, high

+coat-collar, spectacles, clean-shaven face, and all. This valiant enemy

+of the State, of socialism, was, perhaps, only brave on paper. But his

+icy, relentless, epigrammatic style is in the end more gripping than

+the spectacular, volcanic, whirling utterances of Nietzsche. Nietzsche

+lives in an ivory tower and is an aristocrat. Into Stirner's land

+all are welcome. That is, if men have the will to rebel, and if they

+despise the sentimentality of mob rule. The Ego and His Own is the most

+drastic criticism of socialism thus far presented.

+

+

+

+II

+

+

+For those who love to think of the visible universe as a cosy corner

+of God's footstool, there is something bleak and terrifying in the

+isolated position of man since science has postulated him as an

+infinitesimal bubble on an unimportant planet. The soul shrinks as our

+conception of outer space widens. Thomas Hardy describes the sensation

+as "ghastly." There is said to be no purpose, no design in all the

+gleaming phantasmagoria revealed by the astronomer's glass; while on

+our globe we are a brother to lizards, bacteria furnish our motor

+force, and our brain is but a subtly fashioned mirror, composed of

+neuronic filaments, a sort of "darkroom" in which is somehow pictured

+the life without. Well, we admit, for the sake of the argument, that

+we banish God from the firmament, substituting a superior mechanism;

+we admit our descent from star-dust and apes, we know that we have no

+free will, because man, like the unicellular organisms, "gives to every

+stimulus without an inevitable response." That, of course, settles all

+moral obligations. But we had hoped, we of the old sentimental brigade,

+that all things being thus adjusted we could live with our fellow man

+in (comparative) peace, cheating him only in a legitimate business

+way, and loving our neighbour better than ourselves (in public). Ibsen

+had jostled our self-satisfaction sadly, but some obliging critic

+had discovered his formula--a pessimistic decadent--and with bare

+verbal bones we worried the old white-haired mastiff of Norway. Only

+a decadent It is an easy word to speak and it means nothing. With

+Nietzsche the case was simpler. We couldn't read him because he was a

+madman; but he at least was an aristocrat who held the _bourgeois_ in

+contempt, and he also held a brief for culture. Ah! when we are young

+we are altruists; as Thackeray says, "Youths go to balls; men go to

+dinners."

+

+But along comes this dreadful Stirner, who cries out: Hypocrites all

+of you. You are not altruists, but selfish persons, who, self-illuded,

+believe yourselves to be disinterested. Be Egoists. Confess the truth

+in the secrecy of your mean, little souls. We are all Egotists. Be

+Egoists. There is no truth but my truth. No world but my world. I

+am I. And then Stirner waves away God, State, society, the family,

+morals, mankind, leaving only the "hateful" Ego. The cosmos is frosty

+and inhuman, and old Mother Earth no longer offers us her bosom as a

+reclining-place. Stirner has so decreed it. We are suspended between

+heaven and earth, like Mahomet's coffin, hermetically sealed in Self.

+Instead of "smiting the chord of self," we must reorchestrate the chord

+that it may give out richer music. (Perhaps the Higher Egoism which

+often leads to low selfishness.)

+

+Nevertheless, there is an honesty in the words of Max Stirner. We are

+weary of the crying in the market-place, "Lo! Christ is risen," only

+to find an old nostrum tricked out in socialistic phrases; and fine

+phrases make fine feathers for these gentlemen who offer the millennium

+in one hand and perfect peace in the other. Stirner is the frankest

+thinker of his century. He does not soften his propositions, harsh ones

+for most of us, with promises, but pursues his thought with ferocious

+logic to its covert. There is no such hybrid with him as Christian

+Socialism, no dodging issues. He is a Teutonic Childe Roland who to

+the dark tower comes, but instead of blowing his horn--as Nietzsche

+did--he blows up the tower itself. Such an iconoclast has never before

+put pen to paper. He is so sincere in his scorn of all we hold dear

+that he is refreshing. Nietzsche's flashing epigrammatic blade often

+snaps after it is fleshed; the grim, cruel Stirner, after he makes a

+jab at his opponent, twists the steel in the wound. Having no mercy for

+himself, he has no mercy for others. He is never a hypocrite. He erects

+no altars to known or unknown gods. Humanity, he says, has become the

+Moloch to-day to which everything is sacrificed. Humanity--that is,

+the State, perhaps, even the socialistic state (the most terrible yoke

+of all for the individual soul). This assumed love of humanity, this

+sacrifice of our own personality, are the blights of modern life. The

+Ego has too long been suppressed by ideas, sacred ideas of religion,

+state, family, law, morals. The conceptual question, "What is Man?"

+must be changed to "Who is Man?" I am the owner of my might, and I am

+so when I know myself as _unique_.

+

+Stirner is not a communist--so long confounded with anarchs--he does

+not believe in force. That element came into the world with the advent

+of Bakounine and Russian nihilism. Stirner would replace society

+by groups; property would be held, money would be a circulating

+medium; the present compulsory system would be voluntary instead of

+involuntary. Unlike his great contemporary, Joseph Proudhon, Stirner

+is not a constructive philosopher. Indeed, he is no philosopher. A

+moralist (or immoralist), an _Ethiker_, his book is a defence of

+Egoism, of the submerged rights of the Ego, and in these piping times

+of peace and fraternal humbug, when every nation, every man embraces

+his neighbour preparatory to disembowelling him in commerce or war,

+Max Stirner's words are like a trumpet-blast. And many Jericho-built

+walls go down before these ringing tones. His doctrine is the Fourth

+Dimension of ethics. That his book will be more dangerous than a

+million bombs, if misapprehended, is no reason why it should not be

+read. Its author can no more be held responsible for its misreading

+than the orthodox faiths for their backsliders. Nietzsche has been

+wofully misunderstood; Nietzsche, the despiser of mob rule, has been

+acclaimed a very Attila--instead of which he is a culture-philosopher,

+one who insists that reform must be first spiritual. Individualism

+for him means only an end to culture. Stirner is not a metaphysician;

+he is too much realist. He is really a topsy-turvy Hegelian, a

+political pyrrhonist. His Ego is his Categorical Imperative. And if the

+Individual loses his value, what is his _raison d'être_ for existence?

+What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses

+his own Ego? Make your value felt, cries Stirner. The minority may

+occasionally err, but the majority is always in the wrong. Egoism must

+not be misinterpreted as petty selfishness or as an excuse to do wrong.

+Life will be ennobled and sweeter if we respect ourselves. "There is

+no sinner and no sinful egoism.... Do not call men sinful; and _they

+are not_" Freedom is not a goal. "Free--from what? Oh! what is there

+that cannot be shaken off? The yoke of serfdom, of sovereignty, of

+aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the desires and passions;

+yes, even the dominion of one's own will, of self-will, for the

+completest self-denial is nothing but freedom--freedom, to wit, from

+self-determination, from one's own self." This has an ascetic tang,

+and indicates that to compass our complete Ego the road travelled will

+be as thorny as any saint's of old. Where does Woman come into this

+scheme? There is no Woman, only a human Ego. Humanity is a convenient

+fiction to harry the individualist. So, society, family are the clamps

+that compress the soul of woman. If woman is to be free she must first

+be an individual, an Ego. In America, to talk of female suffrage is to

+propound the paradox of the masters attacking their slaves; yet female

+suffrage might prove a good thing--it might demonstrate the _reductio

+ad absurdum_ of the administration of the present ballot system.

+

+Our wail over our neighbour's soul is simply the wail of a busybody.

+Mind your own business! is the pregnant device of the new Egoism.

+Puritanism is not morality, but a psychic disorder.

+

+Stirner, in his way, teaches that the Kingdom of God is within you.

+That man will ever be sufficiently perfected to become his own master

+is a dreamer's dream. Yet let us dream it. At least by that road we

+make for righteousness. But let us drop all cant about brotherly love

+and self-sacrifice. Let us love ourselves (respect our Ego), that we

+may learn to respect our brother; self-sacrifice means doing something

+that we believe to be good for our souls, therefore _egotism_--the

+higher _egotism_, withal _egotism_. As for going to the people--the

+Russian phrase--let the people forget themselves as a collective body,

+tribe, or group, and each man and woman develop his or her Ego. In

+Russia "going to the people" may have been sincere--in America it is a

+trick to catch, not souls, but votes.

+

+"The time is not far distant when it will be impossible for any proud,

+free, independent spirit to call himself a socialist, since he would

+be classed with those wretched toadies and worshippers of success who

+even now lie on their knees before every workingman and lick his hands

+simply because he is a workingman."

+

+John Henry Mackay spoke these words in a book of his. Did not

+Campanella, in an unforgettable sonnet, sing, "The people is a beast of

+muddy brain that knows not its own strength.... With its own hands it

+ties and gags itself"?

+

+

+

+III

+

+

+The Ego and His Own is divided into two parts: first, The Man; second,

+I. Its motto should be, "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own

+bones." But Walt Whitman's pronouncement had not been made, and Stirner

+was forced to fall back on Goethe--Goethe, the grand Immoralist of his

+epoch, wise and wicked Goethe, from whom flows all that is modern. "I

+place my all on Nothing" ("Ich hab' Mein Sach' auf Nichts gestellt,"

+in the joyous poem Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!) is Stirner's keynote

+to his Egoistic symphony. The hateful I, as Pascal called it, caused

+Zola, a solid egotist himself, to assert that the English were the most

+egotistic of races because their I in their tongue was but a single

+letter, while the French employed two, and not capitalised unless

+beginning a sentence. Stirner must have admired the English, as his I

+was the sole counter in his philosophy. His Ego and not the family is

+the unit of the social life. In antique times, when men were really

+the young, not the ancient, it was a world of reality. Men enjoyed the

+material. With Christianity came the rule of the spirit; ideas were

+become sacred, with the concepts of God, Goodness, Sin, Salvation.

+After Rousseau and the French Revolution humanity was enthroned, and

+the State became our oppressor. Our first enemies are our parents, our

+educators. It follows, then, that the only criterion of life is my Ego.

+Without my Ego I could not apprehend existence. Altruism is a pretty

+disguise for egotism. No one is or can be disinterested. He gives up

+one thing for another because the other seems better, nobler to him.

+Egotism! The ascetic renounces the pleasures of life because in his

+eyes renunciation is nobler than enjoyment. Egotism again! "You are to

+benefit yourself, and you are not to seek your benefit," cries Stirner.

+Explain the paradox! The one sure thing of life is the Ego. Therefore,

+"I am not you, but I'll use you if you are agreeable to me." Not to

+God, not to man, must be given the glory. "I'll keep the glory myself."

+What is Humanity but an abstraction? I am Humanity. Therefore the State

+is a monster that devours its children. It must not dictate to me.

+"The State and I are enemies." The State is a spook. A spook, too, is

+freedom. What is freedom? Who is free? The world belongs to all, but

+_all_ are _I_. I alone am individual proprietor.

+

+Property is conditioned by might. What I have is mine. "Whoever knows

+how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property." Stirner

+would have held that property was not only nine but ten points of the

+law. This is Pragmatism with a vengeance. He repudiates all laws;

+repudiates competition, for persons are not the subject of competition,

+but "things" are; therefore if you are without "things" how can you

+compete? Persons are free, not "things." The world, therefore, is not

+"free." Socialism is but a further screwing up of the State machine

+to limit the individual. Socialism is a new god, a new abstraction

+to tyrannise over the Ego. And remember that Stirner is not speaking

+of the metaphysical Ego of Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, but of your I,

+my I, the political, the social I, the economic I of every man and

+woman. Stirner spun no metaphysical cobwebs. He reared no lofty cloud

+palaces. He did not bring from Asia its pessimism, as did Schopenhauer;

+nor deny reality, as did Berkeley. He was a foe to general ideas. He

+was an implacable realist. Yet while he denies the existence of an

+Absolute, of a Deity, State, Categorical Imperative, he nevertheless

+had not shaken himself free from Hegelianism (he is Extreme Left as a

+Hegelian), for he erected his I as an Absolute, though only dealing

+with it in its relations to society. Now, nature abhors an absolute.

+Everything is relative. So we shall see presently that with Stirner,

+too, his I is not so independent as he imagines.

+

+He says "crimes spring from fixed ideas." The Church, State, the

+Family, Morals, are fixed ideas. "Atheists are pious people." They

+reject one fiction only to cling to many old ones. Liberty for the

+people is not my liberty. Socrates was a fool in that he conceded to

+the Athenians the right to condemn him. Proudhon said (rather, Brisson

+before him), "Property is theft." Theft from whom? From society? But

+society is not the sole proprietor. Pauperism is the valuelessness of

+Me. The State and pauperism are the same. Communism, Socialism abolish

+private property and push us back into Collectivism. The individual is

+enslaved by the machinery of the State or by socialism. Your Ego is not

+free if you allow your vices or virtues to enslave it. The intellect

+has too long ruled, says Stirner; it is the will (not Schopenhauer's

+Will to Live, or Nietzsche's Will to Power, but the sum of our activity

+expressed by an act of volition; old-fashioned will, in a word) to

+exercise itself to the utmost. Nothing compulsory, all voluntary. Do

+what you will. _Fay ce que vouldras_, as Rabelais has it in his Abbey

+of Thélème. Not "Know thyself," but get the value out of yourself. Make

+your value felt. The poor are to blame for the rich. Our art to-day

+is the only art possible, and therefore real at the time. We are at

+every moment all we can be. There is no such thing as sin. It is an

+invention to keep imprisoned the will of our Ego. And as mankind is

+forced to believe theoretically in the evil of sin, yet commit it in

+its daily life, hypocrisy and crime are engendered. If the concept of

+sin had never been used as a club over the weak-minded, there would be

+no sinners--i.e., wicked people. The individual is himself the world's

+history. The world is my picture. There is no other Ego but mine. Louis

+XIV. said, "_L'Etat, c'est moi_"; I say, "_l'Univers, c'est moi._" John

+Stuart Mill wrote in his famous essay on liberty that "Society has now

+got the better of the individual."

+

+Rousseau is to blame for the "Social Contract" and the "Equality"

+nonsense that has poisoned more than one nation's political ideas. The

+minority is always in the right, declared Ibsen, as opposed to Comte's

+"Submission is the base of perfection." "Liberty means responsibility.

+That is why most men dread it" (Bernard Shaw). "Nature does not seem

+to have made man for independence" (Vauvenargues). "What can give a

+man liberty? Will, his own will, and it gives power, which is better

+than liberty" (Turgenev). To have the will to be responsible for one's

+self, advises Nietzsche. "I am what I am" (Brand). "To thyself be

+sufficient" (Peer Gynt). Both men failed, for their freedom kills. To

+thine own self be true. God is within you. Best of all is Lord Acton's

+dictum that "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is of

+itself the highest political end." To will is to have to will (Ibsen).

+My truth is the truth (Stirner). Mortal has made the immortal, says

+the Rig Veda. Nothing is greater than I (Bhagavat Gita). I am that I

+am (the Avesta, also Exodus). Taine wrote, "Nature is in reality a

+tapestry of which we see the reverse side. This is why we try to turn

+it." Hierarchy, oligarchy, both forms submerge the Ego. J. S. Mill

+demanded: "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test

+of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" Bakounine

+in his fragmentary essay on God and the State feared the domination of

+science quite as much as an autocracy. "Politics is the madness of the

+many for the gain of the few," Pope asserted. Read Spinoza, The Citizen

+and the State (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus). Or Oscar Wilde's

+epigram: "Charity creates a multitude of sins." "I am not poor enough

+to give alms," says Nietzsche. But Max Beerbohm has wittily said--and

+his words contain as much wisdom as wit--that "If he would have his

+ideas realised, the Socialist must first kill the Snob."

+

+Science tells us that our _I_ is really a _We_; a colony of cells, an

+orchestra of inherited instincts. We have not even free will, or at

+least only in a limited sense. We are an instrument played upon by our

+heredity and our environment. The cell, then, is the unit, not the Ego.

+Very well, Stirner would exclaim (if he had lived after Darwin and

+1859), the cell is my cell, not yours! Away with other cells! But such

+an autonomous gospel is surely a phantasm. Stirner saw a ghost. He,

+too, in his proud Individualism was an aristocrat. No man may separate

+himself from the tradition of his race unless to incur the penalty of a

+sterile isolation. The solitary is the abnormal man. Man is gregarious.

+Man is a political animal. Even Stirner recognises that man is not man

+without society.

+

+In practice he would not have agreed with Havelock Ellis that "all

+the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding

+on." Stirner, sentimental, henpecked, myopic Berlin professor, was

+too actively engaged in wholesale criticism--that is, destruction of

+society, with all its props and standards, its hidden selfishness

+and heartlessness--to bother with theories of reconstruction. His

+disciples have remedied the omission. In the United States, for

+example, Benjamin R. Tucker, a follower of Josiah Warren, teaches a

+practical and philosophical form of Individualism. He is an Anarch

+who believes in passive resistance. Stirner speaks, though vaguely,

+of a Union of Egoists, a Verein, where all would rule all, where

+man, through self-mastery, would be his own master. ("In those days

+there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in

+his own eyes.") Indeed, his notions as to Property and Money--"it

+will always be money"--sound suspiciously like those of our "captains

+of industry." Might conquers Right. He has brought to bear the most

+blazing light-rays upon the shifts and evasions of those who decry

+Egoism, who are what he calls "involuntary," not voluntary, egotists.

+Their motives are shown to the bone. Your Sir Willoughby Patternes

+are not real Egoists, but only half-hearted, selfish weaklings. The

+true egotist is the altruist, says Stirner; yet Leibnitz was right; so

+was Dr. Pangloss. This is the best of possible worlds. Any other is

+not conceivable for man, who is at the top of his zoological series.

+(Though Quinton has made the statement that birds followed the mammal.)

+We are all "spectres of the dust," and to live on an overcrowded planet

+we must follow the advice of the Boyg: "Go roundabout!" Compromise

+is the only sane attitude. The world is not, will never be, to the

+strong of arm or spirit, as Nietzsche believes. The race is to the

+mediocre. The survival of the fittest means survival of the weakest.

+Society shields and upholds the feeble. Mediocrity rules, let Carlyle

+or Nietzsche thunder to the contrary. It was the perception of these

+facts that drove Stirner to formulate his theories in The Ego and His

+Own. He was poor, a failure, and despised by his wife. He lived under

+a dull, brutal régime. The Individual was naught, the State all. His

+book was his great revenge. It was the efflorescence of his Ego. It

+was his romance, his dream of an ideal world, his Platonic republic.

+Philosophy is more a matter of man's temperament than some suppose.

+And philosophers often live by opposites. Schopenhauer preached

+asceticism, but hardly led an ascetic life; Nietzsche's injunctions to

+become Immoralists and Supermen were but the buttressing up of a will

+diseased, by the needs of a man who suffered his life long from morbid

+sensibility. James Walker's suggestion that "We will not allow the

+world to wait for the Superman. We are the Supermen," is a convincing

+criticism of Nietzscheism. I am Unique. Never again will this

+aggregation of atoms stand on earth. Therefore I must be free. I will

+myself free. (It is spiritual liberty that only counts.) But my I must

+not be of the kind described by the madhouse doctor in Peer Gynt: "Each

+one shuts himself up in the barrel of self. In the self-fermentation

+he dives to the bottom; with the self-bung he seals it hermetically."

+The increased self-responsibility of life in an Egoist Union would

+prevent the world from ever entering into such ideal anarchy (an-arch,

+i.e., without government). There is too much of renunciation in the

+absolute freedom of the will--that is its final, if paradoxical,

+implication--for mankind. Our Utopias are secretly based on Chance.

+Deny Chance in our existence and life would be without salt. Man is not

+a perfectible animal; not on this side of eternity. He fears the new

+and therefore clings to his old beliefs. To each his own chimera. He

+has not grown mentally or physically since the Sumerians--or a million

+years before the Sumerians. The squirrel in the revolving cage thinks

+it is progressing; Man is in a revolving cage. He goes round but he

+does not progress. Man is not a logical animal. He is governed by his

+emotions, his affective life. He lives by his illusions. His brains are

+an accident, possibly from overnutrition as De Gourmont has declared.

+To fancy him capable of existing in a community where all will be

+selfgoverned is a poet's vision. That way the millennium lies, or the

+High Noon of Nietzsche. And would the world be happier if it ever did

+attain this condition?

+

+The English translation of The Ego and His Own, by Stephen T. Byington,

+is admirable; it is that of a philologist and a versatile scholar.

+Stirner's form is open to criticism. It is vermicular. His thought is

+sometimes confused; he sees so many sides of his theme, embroiders

+it with so many variations, that he repeats himself. He has neither

+the crystalline brilliance nor the poetic glamour of Nietzsche. But

+he left behind him a veritable breviary of destruction, a striking

+and dangerous book. It is dangerous in every sense of the word--to

+socialism, to politicians, to hypocrisy. It asserts the dignity of the

+Individual, not his debasement.

+

+"Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be

+reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each

+man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the

+hundred of thousands, of the party, of the section to which we belong,

+and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or the South?"

+

+Herbert Spencer did not write these words, nor Max Stirner. Ralph Waldo

+Emerson wrote them.

+

+

+

+

+

+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Egoists, A Book of Supermen, by James Huneker.

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+<pre>

+

+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

+

+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

+

+Title: Egoists

+       A Book of Supermen

+

+Author: James Huneker

+

+Release Date: November 25, 2014 [EBook #47454]

+

+Language: English

+

+Character set encoding: UTF-8

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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EGOISTS ***

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+(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.)

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+

+</pre>

+

+

+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">

+<img src="images/huneker_cover.jpg" width="550" alt="" />

+</div>

+

+<h1>EGOISTS,</h1>

+

+<h2>A BOOK OF SUPERMEN</h2>

+<hr class="r5" />

+

+<h4>STENDHAL, BAUDELAIRE, FLAUBERT, ANATOLE FRANCE,</h4>

+

+<h4>HUYSMANS, BARRÈS, NIETZSCHE, BLAKE, IBSEN,</h4>

+

+<h4>STIRNER, AND ERNEST HELLO</h4>

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+<h3>BY</h3>

+

+<h2>JAMES HUNEKER</h2>

+

+

+<p style="font-size: 0.7em; text-align: center;">WITH PORTRAIT OF STENDHAL; UNPUBLISHED LETTER OF<br />

+FLAUBERT; AND ORIGINAL PROOF PAGE OF MADAME BOVARY</p>

+

+

+<h5>NEW YORK</h5>

+

+<h5>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h5>

+

+<h5>1909</h5>

+

+

+<hr class="full" />

+

+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">

+<img src="images/huneker_stendhal02_02.jpg" width="500" alt="" />

+<p class="caption">Henry Beyle &mdash; Stendhal &mdash; Redrawn by Edwin B. Child

+from a crayon portrait.</p>

+</div>

+

+<hr class="tb" />

+<h5>TO</h5>

+

+<h5>DR. GEORG BRANDES</h5>

+

+

+<h5>"Leb' Ich, wenn andere leben?"&mdash;Goethe</h5>

+

+<blockquote>

+<p>The studies gathered here first appeared in <i>Scribner's

+Magazine</i>, the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, the <i>North American

+Review</i>, the <i>New York Times</i>, and the <i>New York Sun</i>.</p>

+</blockquote>

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h5>CONTENTS</h5>

+

+<div class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">

+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="">

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left"><a href="#I">A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION: HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left"><a href="#II">THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left"><a href="#III">THE REAL FLAUBERT</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left"><a href="#IV">ANATOLE FRANCE</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left"><a href="#V">THE PESSIMISTS' PROGRESS: J.-K. HUYSMANS</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VI.</td><td align="left"><a href="#VI">THE EVOLUTION OF AN EGOIST: MAURICE BARRÈS</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VII.</td><td align="left"><a href="#VII">PHASES OF NIETZSCHE</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left"><a href="#THE_WILL_TO_SUFFER">THE WILL TO SUFFER</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left"><a href="#NIETZSCHES_APOSTASY">NIETZSCHE'S APOSTASY</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left"><a href="#ANTICHRIST">ANTICHRIST?</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">VIII.</td><td align="left"><a href="#VIII">MYSTICS</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">I.</td><td align="left"><a href="#ERNEST_HELLO">ERNEST HELLO</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">II.</td><td align="left"><a href="#MAD_NAKED_BLAKE">"MAD NAKED BLAKE"</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">III.</td><td align="left"><a href="#FRANCIS_POICTEVIN">FRANCIS POICTEVIN</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IV.</td><td align="left"><a href="#THE_ROAD_TO_DAMASCUS">THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">V.</td><td align="left"><a href="#FROM_AN_IVORY_TOWER">FROM AN IVORY TOWER</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">IX.</td><td align="left"><a href="#IX">IBSEN</a></td></tr>

+<tr><td align="left"></td><td align="right">X.</td><td align="left"><a href="#X">MAX STIRNER</a></td></tr>

+</table></div>

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+

+<h3><a id="I"></a>I</h3>

+

+<h4>A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION</h4>

+

+<h4>HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL</h4>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>The fanciful notion that psychical delicacy is accompanied by a

+corresponding physical exterior should have received a death-blow

+in the presence of Henry Beyle, better known as Stendhal. Chopin,

+Shelley, Byron and Cardinal Newman did not in personal appearance

+contradict their verse, prose and music; but Stendhal, possessing an

+exquisite sensibility, was, as Hector Berlioz cruelly wrote in his

+Memoirs: "A little pot-bellied man with a spiteful smile, who tried to

+look grave." Sainte-Beuve is more explicit. "Physically his figure,

+though not short, soon grew thick-set and heavy, his neck short and

+full-blooded. His fleshy face was framed in dark curly hair and

+whiskers, which before his death were assisted by art. His forehead

+was fine: the nose turned up, and somewhat Calmuck in shape. His lower

+lip, which projected a little, betrayed his tendency to scoff. His eyes

+were rather small but very bright, deeply set in their cavities, and

+pleasing when he smiled. His hands, of which he was proud, were small

+and daintily shaped. In the last years of his life he grew heavy and

+apoplectic. But he always took great pains to conceal the symptoms of

+physical decay even from his own friends."</p>

+

+<p>Henri Monnier, who caricatured him, apparently in a gross manner,

+denied that he had departed far from his model. Some one said that

+Stendhal looked like an apothecary&mdash;Homais, presumably, or M.

+Prudhomme. His maternal grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, assured him when

+a youth that he was ugly, but he consolingly added that no one would

+reproach him for his ugliness. The piercing and brilliant eye that

+like a mountain lake could be both still and stormy, his eloquent and

+ironical mouth, pugnacious bearing, Celtic profile, big shoulders, and

+well-modelled leg made an ensemble, if not alluring, at least striking.

+No man with a face capable of a hundred shades of expression can be

+ugly. Furthermore, Stendhal was a charming <i>causeur</i>, bold, copious,

+witty. With his conversation, he drolly remarked, he paid his way into

+society. And this demigod or monster, as he was alternately named by

+his admirers and enemies, could be the most impassioned of lovers. His

+life long he was in love; Prosper Mérimée declares he never encountered

+such furious devotion to love. It was his master passion. Not Napoleon,

+not his personal ambitions, not even Italy, were such factors in

+Stendhal's life as his attachments. His career was a sentimental

+education. This ugly man with the undistinguished features was a

+haughty cavalier, an intellectual Don Juan, a tender, sighing swain, a

+sensualist, and ever lyric where the feminine was concerned. But once

+seated, pen in hand, the wise, worldly cynic was again master. "My head

+is a magic-lantern," he said. And his literary style is on the surface

+as unattractive as were the features of the man; the inner ear for the

+rhythms and sonorities of prose was missing. That is the first paradox

+in the Beyle-Stendhal case.</p>

+

+<p>Few writers in the nineteenth century were more neglected; yet, what

+a chain of great critics his work begot. Commencing with Goethe in

+1818, who, after reading Rome, Naples, and Florence, wrote that the

+Frenchman attracted and repulsed him, interested and annoyed him, but

+it was impossible to separate himself from the book until its last

+page. What makes the opinion remarkable is that Goethe calmly noted

+Stendhal's plagiarism of his own Italian Journey. About 1831 Goethe

+was given Le Rouge et le Noir and told Eckermann of its worth in warm

+terms. After Goethe another world-hero praised Stendhal's La Chartreuse

+de Parme: Balzac literally exploded a bouquet of pyrotechnics, calling

+the novel a masterpiece of observation, and extolling the Waterloo

+picture. Sainte-Beuve was more cautious. He dubbed Stendhal a "romantic

+hussar," and said that he was devoid of invention; a literary Uhlan,

+for men of letters, not for the public. Shortly after his sudden

+death, M. Bussière wrote in the <i>Revue des Deux Mondes</i> of Stendhal's

+"clandestine celebrity." Taine's trumpet-call in 1857 proclaimed him

+as the great psychologue of his century. And later, in his English

+Literature, Taine wrote: "His talents and ideas were premature,

+his admirable divinations not understood. Under the exterior of a

+conversationalist and a man of the world Stendhal explained the most

+esoteric mechanisms&mdash;a scientist who noted, decomposed, deduced;

+he first marked the fundamental causes of nationality, climate,

+temperament; he was the naturalist who classified and weighed forces

+and taught us to open our eyes." Taine was deeply influenced by

+Stendhal; read carefully his Italian Pilgrimage, and afterward Thomas

+Graindorge. He so persistently preached Stendhalism&mdash;<i>beylisme</i>, as its

+author preferred to term his vagrant philosophy&mdash;that Sainte-Beuve

+reproved him. Melchior de Vogüé said that Stendhal's heart had been

+fabricated under the Directory and from the same wood as Barras and

+Talleyrand. Brunetière saw in him the perfect expression of romantic

+and anti-social individualism. Caro spoke of his "serious blague,"

+while Victor Hugo found him "somniferous." But Mérimée, though openly

+disavowing discipleship, acknowledged privately the abiding impression

+made upon him by the companionship of Beyle. 'Much of Mérimée is

+Stendhal better composed, better written.</p>

+

+<p>About 1880 Zola, searching a literary pedigree for his newly-born

+Naturalism, pitched upon Stendhal to head the movement. The first

+Romantic&mdash;he employed the term Romanticism before the rest&mdash;the first

+literary Impressionist, the initiator of Individualism, Stendhal forged

+many formulas, was a matrix of <i>genres</i>, literary and psychologic. Paul

+Bourget's Essays in Contemporary Psychology definitely placed Beyle in

+the niche he now occupies. This was in 1883. Since then the swelling

+chorus headed by Tolstoy, Georg Brandes, and the amiable fanatics who

+exhumed at Grenoble his posthumous work, have given to the study of

+Stendhal fresh life. We see how much Nietzsche owed to Stendhal; see

+in Dostoïevsky's Raskolnikow-Crime and Punishment&mdash;a Russian Julien

+Sorel; note that Bourget, from Le Disciple to Sensations d'Italie,

+is compounded of his forerunner, the dilettante and cosmopolitan who

+wrote Promenades dans Rome and Lamiel. What would Maurice Barrès and

+his "culte du Moi" have been without Stendhal&mdash;who employed before him

+the famous phrase "deracination"? Amiel, sick-willed thinker, did not

+alone invent: "A landscape is a state of soul"; Stendhal had spoken of

+a landscape not alone sufficing; it needs a moral or historic interest.

+Before Schopenhauer he described Beauty as a promise of happiness; and

+he invented the romance of the petty European Principality. Meredith

+followed him, as Robert Louis Stevenson in his Prince Otto patterned

+after Meredith. The painter-novelist Fromentin mellowed Stendhal's

+procedure; and dare we conceive of Meredith or Henry James composing

+their work without having had a complete cognizance of Beyle-Stendhal?

+The Egoist is <i>beylisme</i> of a superior artistry; while in America Henry

+B. Fuller shows sympathy for Beyle in his Chevalier Pensieri-Vani and

+its sequel. Surely the Prorege of Arcopia had read the Chartreuse.

+And with Edith Wharton the Stendhal touch is not absent. In England,

+after the dull essay by Hayward (prefixed to E. P. Robbin's excellent

+translation of Chartreuse), Maurice Hewlett contributed an eloquent

+introduction to a new edition of the Chartreuse and calls him "a man

+cloaked in ice and fire." Anna Hampton Brewster was possibly the first

+American essayist to introduce to us Stendhal in her St. Martin's

+Summer. Saintsbury, Dowden, Benjamin Wells, Count Lützow have since

+written of him; and in Germany the Stendhal cult is growing, thanks to

+Arthur Schurig, L. Spach, and Friedrick von Oppeln-Bronikowski.</p>

+

+<p>It has been mistaken criticism to range Beyle as only a "literary"

+man. He despised the profession of literature, remarking that he wrote

+as one smokes a cigar. His diaries and letters, the testimony of

+his biographer, Colomb, and his friend Mérimée, betray this pose&mdash;a

+greater poser and <i>mystificateur</i> it would be difficult to find. He

+laboured like a slave over his material, and if he affected to take

+the Civil Code as his model of style it nettled him, nevertheless,

+when anyone decried his prose. His friend Jacquemont spoke of his

+detestable style of a grocer; Balzac called him to account for his

+carelessness. Flattered, astounded, as was Stendhal by the panegyric

+of Balzac, his letter of thanks shows that the reproof cut deeply. He

+abused Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, and George Sand for their highly

+coloured imagery and flowing manner. He even jeered at Balzac, saying

+that if he&mdash;Beyle&mdash;had written "It snows in my heart," or some such

+romantic figure, Balzac would then have praised his style.</p>

+

+<p>Thanks to the labours of Casimir Stryienski and his colleagues,

+we may study the different drafts Stendhal made of his novels. He

+seldom improved by recasting. The truth is that his dry, naked

+method of narration, despite its clumsiness, despite the absence of

+plan, is excellently adapted to the expression of his ideas. He is a

+psychologue. He deals with soul-stuff. An eighteenth-century man in

+his general ideas and feelings, he followed the seventeenth century

+and Montesquieu; he derives from Montaigne and Chamfort, and his

+philosophy is coloured by a study of Condillac, Hobbes, Helvétius,

+Cabanis, Destutt Tracy, and Machiavelli. He is a descendant of Diderot

+and the Encyclopædists, a <i>philosophe</i> of the salons, a <i>petit maître</i>,

+a materialist for whom nothing exists but his ideas and sensations.

+A French epicurean, his pendulum swings between love and war&mdash;the

+adoration of energy and the adoration of pleasure. What complicates

+his problem is the mixture of warrior and psychologist. That the man

+who followed Napoleon through several of his campaigns, serving

+successfully as a practical commissary and fighter, should have been

+an adorer of women, was less strange than that he should have proved

+to be the possessor of such vibrating sensibility. Jules Lemaitre sees

+him as "a grand man of action paralysed little by little because of

+his incomparable analysis." Yet he never betrayed unreadiness when

+confronted by peril. He read Voltaire and Plato during the burning

+of Moscow&mdash;which he described as a beautiful spectacle&mdash;and he never

+failed to present himself before his kinsman and patron, Marshal Daru,

+with a clean-shaved face, even when the Grand Army was a mass of

+stragglers.</p>

+

+<p>"You are a man of heart," said Daru, Frenchman in that phrase. When

+Napoleon demanded five millions of francs from a German province,

+Stendhal&mdash;who adopted this pen-name from the archæologist Winckelmann's

+birthplace, a Prussian town&mdash;raised seven millions and was in

+consequence execrated by the people. Napoleon asked on receiving the

+money the name of the agent, adding, "<i>c'est bien!</i>" We are constrained

+to believe Mérimée's assertion that Stendhal was the soul of honour,

+and incapable of baseness, after this proof. At a time when plunder was

+the order of the day's doings, the poor young aide-de-camp could have

+pocketed with ease at least a million of the excess tax. He did not do

+this, nor did he, in his letters or memoirs, betray any remorse for his

+honesty.</p>

+

+<p>Sainte-Beuve said that Beyle was the dupe of his fear of being duped.

+This was confirmed by Mérimée in the concise little study prefixed

+to the Correspondence. It is doubtful if these two men were drawn to

+each other save by a certain contemptuous way of viewing mankind.

+Stendhal was the more sentimental of the pair; he frequently reproached

+Mérimée for his cold heart. He had also a greater sense of humour.

+That each distrusted the other is not to be denied. Augustin Filon,

+in his <i>brochure</i> on Mérimée, said that "the influence exercised by

+Stendhal on Mérimée during the decisive years in which his literary

+eclecticism was formed, was considerable, even more than Mérimée

+himself was aware." But the author of Carmen was a much finer artist.

+The Danish critic, Georg Brandes, has described Beyle's relation to

+Balzac as "that of the reflective to the observant mind; of the thinker

+in art to the seer. We see into the hearts of Balzac's characters,

+into the 'dark-red mill of passion' which is the motive force of their

+action; Beyle's characters receive their impulse from the head, the

+'open light-and-sound chamber'; the reason being that Beyle was a

+logician, and Balzac a man of an effusively rich animal nature. Beyle

+stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position as Leonardo da Vinci

+to Michaelangelo. Hugo's plastic imagination creates a supernaturally

+colossal and muscular humanity fixed in an eternal attitude of struggle

+and suffering; Beyle's mysterious, complicated, refined intellect

+produces a small series of male and female portraits, which exercise

+an almost magic fascination on us with their far-away, enigmatic

+expressions, and their sweet, wicked smile. Beyle is the metaphysician

+among the French authors of his day, as Leonardo was the metaphysician

+among the great painters of the Renaissance."</p>

+

+<p>According to Bourget, Beyle's advent into letters marked the "tragic

+dawn of pessimism." But is it precise to call him a pessimist? He was

+of too vigorous a temper, too healthy in body, to be classed with the

+decadents. His was the soul of a sixteenth-century Italian, one who had

+read and practised the cheerful scepticism of Montaigne. As he served

+bravely when a soldier, so, stout and subtle in after life, he waged

+war with the blue devils&mdash;his chief foe. Disease weakened his physique,

+weakened his mentality, yet he fought life to its dull end. He was

+pursued by the secret police, and this led him to all sorts of comical

+disguises and pseudonyms. And to the last he experienced a childish

+delight in the invention of odd names for himself.</p>

+

+<p>Félix Fénéon, in speaking of Arthur Rimbaud, asserted that his work

+was, perhaps, "outside of literature." This, with some modification,

+may be said of Beyle. His stories are always interesting; they may

+ramble and halt, digress and wander into strange places; but the

+psychologic vision of the writer never weakens. His chief concern is

+the mind or soul of his characters. He hitches his kite to earth, yet

+there is the paper air-ship floating above you, lending a touch of the

+ideal to his most matter-of-fact tales. He uses both the microscope

+and scalpel. He writes, as has been too often said, indifferently; his

+formal sense is nearly <i>nil</i>; much of his art criticism mere gossip;

+he has little feeling for colour; yet he describes a soul and its

+manifold movements in precise terms, and while he is at furthest remove

+from symbolism, he often has an irritating spiritual suggestiveness.

+The analogue here to plastic art&mdash;he, the least plastic of writers&mdash;is

+unescapable. Stendhal, whatever else he may be, is an incomparable

+etcher of character. His acid phrases "bite" his arbitrary lines

+deeply; the sharp contrasts of black and white enable him to portray,

+without the fiery-hued rhetoric of either Chateaubriand or Hugo,

+the finest split shades of thought and emotion. Never colour, only

+<i>nuance</i>&mdash;and the slash and sweep of a drastic imagination.</p>

+

+<p>He was an inveterate illusionist in all that concerned himself; even

+with himself he was not always sincere&mdash;and he usually wrote of

+himself. His many books are a masquerade behind which one discerns the

+posture of the mocker, the sensibility of a reversed idealist, and the

+spirit of a bitter analyst. This sensibility must not be confounded

+with the <i>sensibilité</i> of a Maurice de Guérin. Rather it is the morbid

+sensitiveness of a Swift combined with an unusual receptivity to

+sentimental and artistic impressions. Professor Walter Raleigh thus,

+describes the sensibility of those times: "The sensibility that came

+into vogue during the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than

+its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated

+enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of

+unsubstantial grief." Vanity ruled in Stendhal. Who shall say how much

+his unyielding spirit suffered because of his poverty, his enormous

+ambitions? His motto might have been: Blessed are the proud of spirit,

+for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth. He wrote in 1819: "I have

+had three passions in my life. Ambition&mdash;1800-1811; love for a woman

+who deceived me, 1811-1818; and in 1818 a new passion." But then he

+was ever on the verge of a new passion, ever deceived&mdash;at least he

+believed himself to be&mdash;and he, the fearless theoretician of passion,

+often was, he has admitted, in practice the timid amateur. He planned

+the attack upon a woman's heart as a general plans the taking of an

+enemy's citadel. He wrote L'Amour for himself. He defined the rules of

+the game, but shivered when he saw the battle-field. Magnificent he was

+in precept, though not always in action. He was for this reason never

+<i>blasé</i>, despite continual grumblings over his <i>ennui</i>. In his later

+years at Cività Vecchia he yearned for companionship like a girl, and,

+a despiser of Paris and the Parisians, he suffered from the nostalgia

+of the boulevard. He adored Milan and the Milanese, yet Italy finally

+proved too much for his nerves; <i>J'ai tant vu le soleil</i>, he confessed.

+Contradictory and fantastic, he hated all authority. Mérimée puts

+down to the account of the sour old abbé Raillane, who taught him,

+the distaste he entertained for the Church of Rome. Yet he enjoyed

+its æsthetic side. He was its admirer his life long, notwithstanding

+his gibes and irreligious jests, just as he was a Frenchman by reason

+of his capacity for reaction under depressing circumstances. But how

+account for his monstrous hatred for his father? The elder Beyle was

+penurious and as hard as flint. He nearly starved his son, for whom he

+had no affection. Henry could not see him salute his mother without

+loathing him. She read Dante in the original, and her son assured

+himself that there was Italian blood on her side of the house. The

+youth's hatred, too, of his aunt Séraphie almost became a mania. It

+has possibly enriched fiction by the portrait of Gina of the resilient

+temperament, the delicious Duchess of Sanseverina. All that she is, his

+aunt Séraphie was not, and with characteristic perversity he makes her

+enamoured of her nephew Fabrice del Dongo. Did he not say that parents

+are our first enemies when we enter the world?</p>

+

+<p>His criticisms of music and painting are chiefly interesting for what

+they tell us of his temperament. He called himself "observer of the

+human heart," and was taken by a cautious listener for a police spy.

+He seldom signed the same name twice to his letters. He delighted to

+boast of various avocations; little wonder the Milanese police drove

+him out of the city. He said that to be a good philosopher one must be

+<i>sec</i>, and without illusions. Perspicacious, romantic, delicate in his

+attitude toward women, he could be rough, violent, and suspicious. He

+scandalised George Sand, delighted Alfred de Musset; Madame Lamartine

+refused to receive him in her drawing-room at Rome. His intercourse

+with Byron was pleasant. He disliked Walter Scott and called him

+a hypocrite&mdash;possibly because there is no freedom in his love

+descriptions. Lord Byron in a long letter expostulated with Stendhal,

+defending his good friend, Scott; but Stendhal never quite believed in

+the poet's sincerity&mdash;indeed, suspecting himself, he suspected other

+men's motives. He had stage-fright when he first met Byron&mdash;whom he

+worshipped. A tremulous soul his, in a rude envelope. At Venice he

+might have made the acquaintance of young Arthur Schopenhauer and

+Leopardi, but he was too much interested in the place to care for new

+faces.</p>

+

+<p>He said that without passion there is neither virtue nor vice. (Taine

+made a variation on this theme.) A dagger-thrust is a dignified gesture

+when prompted by passion. After the Napoleonic disaster, Stendhal had

+lost all his hopes of referment; he kept his temper admirably, though

+occasionally calling his old chief bad names. It was a period of the

+flat, stale, platitudinous, and bourgeois. "In the nineteenth century

+one must be either a monster or a sheep," wrote Beyle to Byron. A

+patriot is either a dolt or a rogue! My country is where there are most

+people like me&mdash;Cosmopolis! The only excuse for God is that he does

+not exist! Verse was invented to aid the memory! A volume of maxims,

+witty and immoral, might be gathered from the writings of Stendhal

+that would equal Rivarol and Rochefoucauld. "I require three or four

+cubic feet of new ideas per day, as a steamboat requires coal," he

+told Romain Colomb. What energy, what lassitude this man possessed! He

+spoke English&mdash;though he wrote it imperfectly&mdash;and Italian; the latter

+excellently because of his long residence in Italy.</p>

+

+<p>Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, described Stendhal as "that

+remarkable man who, with a Napoleonic <i>tempo</i>, traversed <i>his</i> Europe,

+in fact several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and

+discoverer thereof. It has required two generations to overtake him

+one way or other; to divine long afterward some of the riddles that

+perplexed and enraptured him&mdash;this strange Epicurean and man of

+interrogation, the last great psychologist of France." He also spoke of

+him as "Stendhal, who has, perhaps, had the most profound eyes and ears

+of any Frenchman of this century."</p>

+

+<p>Stendhal said that Shakespeare knew the human heart better than Racine;

+yet despite his English preferences, Stendhal is a psychologist of the

+<i>Racinien</i> school. When an English company of players went to Paris in

+1822, Stendhal defended them by pen and in person. He was chagrined

+that his fellow-countrymen should hiss Othello or The School for

+Scandal. He despised <i>chauvinisme</i>, he the ideal globe-trotter. And

+he was contradictory enough to have understood Tennyson's "That man's

+the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best." He scornfully

+remarked that in 1819 Parisian literary logic could be summed up thus:

+"This man does not agree with me, therefore he is a fool; he criticises

+my book, he is my enemy; therefore a thief, an assassin, a brigand, and

+forger." Narrow-mindedness must never be imputed to Stendhal. Nor was

+he a modest man&mdash;modesty that virtue of the mediocre.</p>

+

+<p>How much Tolstoy thought of the Frenchman may be found in his

+declaration that all he knew about war he learned first from Stendhal.

+"I will speak of him only as the author of the Chartreuse de Parme and

+Le Rouge et le Noir. These are two great, inimitable works of art.

+I am indebted for much to Stendhal. He taught me to understand war.

+Read once more in the Chartreuse de Parme his account of the battle

+of Waterloo. Who before him had so described war&mdash;that is, as it is

+in reality?" In 1854 they said Balzac and Hugo; in 1886, Balzac and

+Stendhal. Some day it may be Stendhal and Tolstoy. The Russian with

+his slow, patient amassing of little facts but follows Stendhal's

+chaplet of anecdotes. The latter said that the novel should be a

+mirror that moves along the highway; a novel, he writes elsewhere, is

+like a bow&mdash;the violin which gives out the sound is the soul of the

+reader. And Goncourt assimilated this method with surprising results.

+Stendhal first etched the soul of the new Superman, the exalted young

+man and woman&mdash;Julien Sorel and Matilde de la Môle. They are both

+immoralists. Exceptional souls, in real life they might have seen the

+inside of a prison. Stendhal is the original of the one; the other is

+the source of latter-day feminine souls in revolt, the souls of Ibsen

+and Strindberg. Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Marivaux he has

+remoulded&mdash;Valmont is a prototype of Julien Sorel.</p>

+

+<p>J. J. Weiss has said that profound immorality is probably an attribute

+common to all great observers of human nature. It would require a

+devil's advocate of unusual acuity to prove Stendhal a moral man or

+writer. His philosophy is materialistic. He wrote for the "happy

+few" and longed for a hundred readers, and wished his readers to be

+those amiable, unhappy souls who are neither moral nor hypocritical.

+His egoism brought him no surcease from boredom. His diaries and

+letters and memoirs, so rich in general ideas, are valuable for the

+student of human nature. The publication of his correspondence was

+a revelation&mdash;a very sincere, human Stendhal came into view. His

+cosmopolitanism is unaffected; his chapters are mosaics of facts and

+sensations; his manner of narrative is, as Bourget says, a method of

+discovery as well as of exposition. His heroes and heroines delve into

+their motives, note their ideas and sensations. With a few exceptions,

+modern romancers, novelists, psychologists of fiction seem shallow

+after Stendhal. Taine confesses to reading Le Rouge et le Noir between

+thirty and forty times. Stendhal disliked America; to him all things

+democratic were abhorrent. He loathed the mass, upheld the class; an

+individualist and aristocrat like Ibsen, he would not recognize the

+doctrine of equality. The French Revolution was useful only because

+it evolved a strong man&mdash;Napoleon. America, being democratic, would

+therefore never produce art, tragedy, music, or romantic love.</p>

+

+<p>It is the fate of some men to exist only as a source of inspiration

+for their fellow-artists. Shelley is the poet's poet, Meredith the

+novelist's novelist, and Stendhal a storehouse for psychologues.

+His virile spirit, in these times of vapid socialistic theories,

+is a sparkling and sinister pool wherein all may dip and be

+refreshed&mdash;perhaps poisoned. He is not orthodox as thinker or artist;

+but it is a truism that the wicked of a century ago may be the saints

+of to-morrow. To read him is to increase one's wisdom; he is dangerous

+only to fools. Like Schopenhauer and Ibsen, he did not flatter his

+public; now he has his own public. And nothing would have amused this

+charming and cynical man more than the knowledge of his canonisation

+in the church of world literature. He gayly predicted that he would be

+understood about 1880-1900; but his impertinent shadow projects far

+into the twentieth century. Will he be read in 1935? he has asked. Why

+not? A monument is to be erected to him in Paris. Rodin has designed

+the medallion portrait.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>The labours, during the past twenty years, of Casimir Stryienski,

+François de Nion, L. Bélugon, Arthur Chuquet, Henry Cordier, Pierre

+Brun, Ricciotto Canudo, Octave Uzanne, Hugues Rebell&mdash;to quote the

+names of a few devoted Stendhalians&mdash;have enabled us to decipher

+Stendhal's troubled life. M. Stryienski unearthed at Grenoble a mass

+of manuscript, journals, tales, half-finished novels, and they have

+been published. Was there any reason to doubt the existence of a

+Stendhal Club after the appearance of those two interesting books,

+Soirées du Stendhal Club, by Stryienski? The compact little study in

+the series, Les Grands Ecrivains Français, by Edouard Rod, and Colomb's

+biographical notice at the head of Armance, and Stryienski's Etude

+Biographique are the principal references for Stendhal students. And

+this, too, despite the evident lack of sympathy in the case of M. Rod.

+It is a minute, painstaking <i>étude</i>, containing much fair criticism;

+fervent Stendhalians need to be reminded of their master's defects

+and of the danger of self-dupery. If Stendhal were alive, he would be

+the first to mock at his disciples' enthusiasm&mdash;the enthusiasm of the

+<i>parvenu</i>, as he puts it. (He ill concealed his own in the presence of

+pictorial master-pieces or the ballets of Viganò.) Rod, after admitting

+the wide influence of Stendhal upon the generations that followed him,

+patronisingly concludes by a quotation: "Les petits livres ont leurs

+destinées." What, then, does he call great, if Le Rouge et le Noir and

+La Chartreuse de Parme are "little books"?</p>

+

+<p>Marie-Henry Beyle was born at Grenoble, Dauphiny, January 23, 1783. He

+died at Paris, March 23, 1842, stricken on the Rue Neuve des Capucines

+by apoplexy. Colomb had his dying friend carried to his lodgings. He

+was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, followed there by Mérimée, Colomb,

+and one other. Upon his monument is an epitaph composed a short time

+before he died. It is in Italian and reads: Arrigo Beyle, Milanese.

+<i>Scrisse, Amò, Visse</i>. Ann. 59. M.2. Mori 2. 23 Marzo. MDCCCXLII.

+(Harry Beyle, Milanese. Wrote, Loved, Lived. 59 years and 2 months. He

+died at 2 A.M. on the 23rd of March, 1842.) This bit of mystification

+was quite in line with Beyle's career. As he was baptised the English

+Henry, he preferred to be known in death as the Milanese Harry. Pierre

+Brun says that there was a transposition in the order of <i>Scrisse, Amò,

+Visse</i>; it should read the reverse. The sculptor David d'Angers made a

+medallion of the writer in 1825. It is reproduced in the Rod monograph,

+and his son designed another for the tomb. This singular epitaph of a

+singular man did not escape the eyes of his enemies. Charles Monselet

+called him a renegade to his family and country; which is uncritical

+tomfoolery. Stendhal was a citizen of the world&mdash;and to the last a

+Frenchman. And not one of his cavilling contemporaries risked his life

+with such unconcern as did this same Beyle in the Napoleonic campaigns.

+Mérimée has drawn for us the best portrait of Stendhal, Colomb, his

+earliest companion, wrote the most gossipy life. Stryienski, however,

+has demonstrated that Colomb attenuated, even erased many expressions

+of Stendhal's, and that he also attempted to portray his hero in

+fairer colours. But deep-dyed Stendhalians will not have their master

+transformed into a tame cat of the Parisian salons. His wickedness is

+his chief attraction, they think. An oft-quoted saying of Stendhal's

+has been, Stryienski shows, tampered with: "A party of eight or ten

+agreeable persons," said Stendhal, "where the conversation is gay and

+anecdotic, and where weak punch is handed around at half past twelve,

+is the place where I enjoy myself the most. There, in my element, I

+infinitely prefer hearing others talk to talking myself. I readily sink

+back into the silence of happiness; and if I talk, it is only to pay my

+ticket of admission." What Stendhal wrote was this: "Un salon de huit

+ou dix personnes dont toutes les femmes ont eu les amants," etc. The

+touch is unmistakable.</p>

+

+<p>Henry was educated at the Ecole Centrale of Grenoble. When he was

+ten years of age, Louis XVI was executed, and the precocious boy,

+to annoy his father, displayed undisguised glee at the news. He

+served the mass, an altar-boy at the Convent of the Propagation, and

+revealed unpleasant traits of character. His father he called by a

+shocking name, but the death of his mother, when he was seven, he

+never forgot. He loved her in true Stendhalian style. His maiden aunt

+Séraphie ruled the house of the elder Beyle, and Henry's two sisters,

+Pauline&mdash;the favourite of her brother&mdash;and Zenaïde, most tyrannically.

+His young existence was a cruel battle with his elders, excepting his

+worthy grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, an <i>esprit fort</i> of the approved

+eighteenth-century variety. On his book-shelves Henry found Voltaire,

+Rousseau, d'Holbach, and eagerly absorbed them. A great-aunt taught

+him that the pride of the Spaniard was the best quality of a man.

+When he heard of his aunt's death, he threw himself on his knees and

+passionately thanked the God in whom he had never believed. His father,

+Chérubin-Joseph Beyle, was chevalier of the Legion of Honor and his

+family of old though not noble stock. Its sympathies were aristocratic,

+royalist, while Henry&mdash;certainly not a radical in politics&mdash;loved to

+annoy his father by his Jacobin opinions. He in turn was ridiculed

+by the Dauphinois when he called himself de Stendhal. Not a lovable

+boy, certainly, and, it is said, scarcely a moral one. At school they

+nick-named him "la Tour ambulante," because of his thick-set figure. He

+preferred mathematics to all other studies, as he contemplated entering

+l'Ecole Polytechnique. November 10, 1799, found him in Paris with

+letters for his cousins Daru. They proved friendly. He was afterward,

+through the influence of Pierre Daru, minister of war, made lieutenant

+of cavalry, commissary and auditor of the Council of State. He served

+in the Italian campaign, following Napoleon through the Saint Bernard

+pass two days later. Aide-de-camp of General Michaud, he displayed

+<i>sang-froid</i> under fire. He was present at Jena and Wagram, and asked,

+during a day of fierce fighting, "Is that all?" War and love only

+provoked from this nonchalant person the same question. He was always

+disappointed by reality; and, as Rod adds, "Is that all?" might be

+the <i>leit motiv</i> of his life. Forced by sickness to retire to Vienna,

+he was at the top-notch of his life in Paris and Milan, 1810-1812. He

+left a brilliant position to rejoin the Emperor in Russia. In 1830

+he was nominated consul at Trieste; but Metternich objected because

+of Stendhal's reputation as a political intrigant in Milan, ten

+years earlier&mdash;a reputation he never deserved. He was sent to Cività

+Vecchia, where he led a dull existence, punctuated by trips to Rome,

+and, at long intervals, to Paris. From 1814 to 1820 he lived in Milan,

+and in love, a friend of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, Monti. The police

+drove him back to Paris, and he says it was the deadliest blow to his

+happiness. For a decade he remained here, leading the life of a man

+around town, a sublimated gossip, dilettante, surface idler; withal, a

+hard worker. A sybarite on an inadequate income, he was ever the man of

+action. Embroiled in feminine intrigues, sanguine, clairvoyant, and

+a sentimentalist, he seldom contemplated marriage. Once, at Cività

+Vecchia, a young woman of bourgeois extraction tempted him by her large

+<i>dot</i>; but inquiries made at Grenoble killed his chances. Indeed, he

+was not the stuff from which the ideal husband is moulded. He did

+not entertain a high opinion of matrimony. He said that the Germans

+had a mania for marriage, an institution which is servitude for men.

+On a trip down the Rhône, in 1833, he met George Sand and Alfred de

+Musset going to Italy&mdash;to that Venice which was the poet's Waterloo

+and Pagello's victory. Stendhal behaved so madly, so boisterously,

+and uttered such paradoxes that he offended Madame Dudevant-Sand, who

+openly expressed her distaste for him, though admiring his brilliancy.

+De Musset had a pretty talent for sketching and drew Stendhal dancing

+at the inn before a servant. It is full of verve. He also wrote some

+verse about the French consul at Cività Vecchia:</p>

+

+<p style="margin-left: 15%;">

+"Où Stendhal, cet esprit charmant,<br />

+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Remplissait si dévotement</span><br />

+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Sa sinécure."</span><br />

+</p>

+

+<p>Sinecure it was, though <i>ennui</i> ruled; but he had his memories, and

+Rome was not far away. In 1832, while at San Pietro in Montorio,

+he bethought himself of his age. Fifty years would soon arrive. He

+determined to write his memoirs. And we have the Vie de Henri Brulard,

+Souvenirs d'Egotisme, and the Journal (1801-1814). In their numerous

+pages&mdash;for he was an indefatigable graphomaniac&mdash;may be found the

+thousand and one experiences in love, war, diplomacy that made up his

+life. His boasted impassibility, like Flaubert's, does not survive the

+test of these letters and intimate confessions. Mérimée, too, wrote

+to Jenny Dacquin without his accustomed mask. Stendhal is the most

+personal of writers; each novel is Henry Beyle in various situations,

+making various and familiar gestures.</p>

+

+<p>His presence was welcome in a dozen salons of Paris. He preferred,

+however, a box at la Scala, listening to Rossini or watching a Viganò

+ballet, near his beloved Angela. But after seven years Milan was

+closed to him, and as he was known in a restricted circle at Paris

+as a writer of power, originality, and as an authority on music and

+painting, he returned there in 1821. He frequented the salon of Destutt

+de Tracy, whose ideology and philosophic writings he admired. There he

+saw General Lafayette and wrote maliciously of this hero, who, though

+seventy-five, was in love with a Portuguese girl of nineteen. The same

+desire to startle that animated Baudelaire kept Beyle in hot water. He

+was a visitor at the home of Madame Cabanis, of M. Cuvier, of Madame

+Ancelot, Baron Gérard, and Castellane, and on Sundays, at the salon of

+Etienne Délacluze, the art critic of the <i>Débats</i>, and a daily visitor

+at Madame Pasta's. He disliked, in his emphatic style, Victor Cousin,

+Thiers, and his host Délacluze. For Beyle to dislike a man was to

+announce the fact to the four winds of heaven, and he usually did so

+with a brace of bon-mots that set all Paris laughing. Naturally, his

+enemies retaliated. Some disagreeable things were said of him, though

+none quite so sharp as the remark made by a certain Madame Céline: "Ah!

+I see M. Beyle is wearing a new coat. Madame Pasta must have had a

+benefit." This witticism was believed, because of the long friendship

+between the Italian <i>cantatrice</i> and the young Frenchman. He occupied a

+small apartment in the same building, though it is said the attachment

+was platonic.</p>

+

+<p>In 1800 he met, at Milan, Signora Angela Pietragrua. He loved her.

+Eleven years later, when he returned to Italy, this love was revived.

+He burst into tears when he saw her again. <i>Quello è il chinese!</i>

+explained the massive Angela to her father. Even that lovetap did not

+disconcert the furnace-like affection of Henry. This Angela made him

+miserable by her coquetries. The feminine characters in his novels

+and tales are drawn from life. His essay on Love is a <i>centaine</i>

+of experiences crystallised into maxims and epigrams. This man of

+too expansive heart, who confessed to trepidation in the presence

+of a woman he loved, displayed surprising delicacy. Where he could

+not respect, he could not love. His sensibility was easily hurt; he

+abhorred the absence of taste. Love was for him a mixture of moonshine,

+<i>esprit</i>, and physical beauty. A very human man, Henry Beyle, though

+he never viewed woman exactly from the same angle as did Dante; or,

+perhaps, his many Beatrices proved geese.</p>

+

+<p>Stryienski relates that, on their return from Italy in 1860, Napoleon

+III and the Empress Eugénie visited Grenoble and, in the municipal

+library, saw a portrait of Stendhal. "But that is M. Beyle, is it

+not?" cried the Empress. "How comes his portrait here?" "He was born

+at Grenoble," responded Gariel, the librarian. She remembered him,

+this amusing mature friend of her girlhood. The daughters of Madame de

+Montijo, Eugénie and Paca, met Beyle through Mérimée, who was intimate

+with their mother. The two girls liked him; he spun for them his best

+yarns, he initiated them into new games; in a word, he was a welcome

+guest in the household, and there are two letters in the possession of

+Auguste Cordier, one addressed to Beyle by E. Guzman y Palafox dated

+December, 1839, when the future Empress of the French was thirteen;

+the other from her sister Paca, both affectionate and of a charm. The

+episode was a pleasant one in the life of Beyle.</p>

+

+<p>Mérimée also arranged a meeting between Victor Hugo and Beyle in

+1829 or 1830. Sainte-Beuve was present, and in a letter to Albert

+Collignon, published in <i>Vie littéraire</i>, 1874, he writes of the pair

+as two savage cats, their hair bristling, both on the defensive. Hugo

+knew that Beyle was an enemy of poetry, of the lyric, of the "ideal."

+The ice was not broken during the evening. Beyle had an antipathy

+for Hugo, Hugo thoroughly disliked Beyle. And if we had the choice

+to-day between talking with Hugo or Beyle, is there any doubt as to the

+selection?&mdash;Beyle the <i>raconteur</i> of his day. He was too clear-sighted

+to harbour any illusions concerning literary folk. Praise from one's

+colleagues is a brevet of resemblance, he has written. Doesn't this

+sound like old Dr. Johnson's "The reciprocal civility of authors is one

+of the most risible scenes in the farce of life"?</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>Prosper Mérimée has told us that his friend and master, Henry

+Stendhal-Beyle, was wedded to the old-fashioned theory: a man should

+not be in a woman's company longer than five minutes without making

+love; granting, of course, that the woman is pretty and pleasing.

+This idea Stendhal had imbibed when a soldier in the Napoleonic

+campaign. It was hussar tactics of the First Empire. "Attack, attack,

+attack," he cries. His book De l'Amour practically sets forth the

+theory; but like most theoreticians, Stendhal was timid in action.

+He was a sentimentalist&mdash;he the pretended cynic and <i>blasé</i> man of

+the world. Mérimée acknowledges that much of his own and Stendhal's

+impassibility was pure posing. Nevertheless, with the exceptions of

+Goethe and Byron, no writer of eminence in the last century enjoyed

+such a sentimental education as Stendhal. At Weimar the passionate

+pilgrim may see a small plaque which contains portraits of the women

+beloved by Goethe&mdash;omitting Frederike Brion. True to the compass of

+Teutonic sentimentality, Goethe's mother heads the list. Then follow

+the names of Cornelia, Kätchen Schönkopf, Lotte Buff, Lili Schönemann,

+Corona Schröter, Frau von Stein, Christiane Vulpius&mdash;later Frau von

+Goethe&mdash;Bettina von Arnim, Minna Herzlieb, and Marianne v. Willemer;

+with their respective birth and death dates. Several other names

+might have been added, notably that of the Polish <i>pianiste</i> Goethe

+encountered at Marienbad. The collection is fair-sized, even for a poet

+who lived as long as Goethe and one who reproached Balzac with digging

+from a woman's heart each of his novels. To both Goethe and Stendhal

+the epigram of George Meredith might be applied: "Men may have rounded

+Seraglio Point. They have not yet doubled Cape Turk."</p>

+

+<p>The wonder is that thus far no devoted Stendhalian has prepared a

+similar <i>carton</i> with the names and pictures of their master's&mdash;dare

+we say?&mdash;victims. Stendhal loved many women, and like Goethe his

+first love was his mother. For him she was the most precious image

+of all, and he was jealous of his father. This was at the age of

+seven; but the precocity of the boy and his exaggerated sensibility

+must be remembered&mdash;which later brought him so much unhappiness

+and so little joy. A casual examination of the list of his loves,

+reciprocated or spurned, would make a companion to that of Weimar.

+Their names are Mélanie Guilbert-Louason, Angela Pietragrua, Mlle.

+Beretter, the Countess Palffy, Menta, Elisa, Livia B., Madame Azur,

+Mina de Grisheim, Mme. Jules, and <i>la petite</i> P. The number he loved

+without consolation was still larger. Despite his hussar manœuvres,

+Stendhal was easily rebuffed. It is odd that Goethe's and Stendhal's

+fair ones, upon whom they poured poems and novels, did not die&mdash;that

+is, immediately&mdash;on being deserted. Goethe relieved the pain of many

+partings by writing a poem or a play and seeking fresh faces. Stendhal

+did the same&mdash;substituting a novel or a study or innumerable letters

+for poems and plays. He believed that one nail drove out another;

+which is very soothing to masculine vanity. But did any woman break

+her heart because of his fickleness? Frau von Stein of all the women

+loved by Goethe probably took his defection seriously. She didn't kill

+herself, however. He wounded many a heart, yet the majority of his

+loves married, and apparently happily. Stendhal, ugly as he was, slew

+his hundreds; they recovered after he had passed on to fresh conquests;

+a fact that he, with his accustomed sincerity, did not fail to note.

+Yet this same gallant was among the few in the early years of the

+nineteenth century to declare for the enfranchisement, physical and

+spiritual, of woman. He was a <i>féministe</i>. But, in reality, his theory

+of love resembled that of the writer who said that "it was simple and

+brief, like a pressure of the hand between sympathetic persons, or a

+gay luncheon between two friends of which a pleasant memory remains, if

+not also a gentle gratitude toward the companion." I quote from memory.</p>

+

+<p>It was at Rome that he first resolved to tell the story of his life.

+In the dust he traced the initials of the beloved ones. In his book he

+omitted no details. His motto was: <i>la vérité toute nue</i>. If he has not

+spared himself, he has not spared others. What can the critics, who

+recently blamed George Moore for his plain speech in his memoirs, say

+to Stendhal's journals and La Vie de Henri Brulard? Many of the names

+were at first given with initials or asterisks; Mérimée burned the

+letters Stendhal sent him, and regretted the act. But the Stendhalians,

+the young enthusiasts of the Stendhal Club, have supplied the missing

+names&mdash;those of men and women who have been dead half a century and

+more.</p>

+

+<p>De l'Amour, Stendhal's remarkable study of the love-passion, is

+marred by the attempt to imprison a sentiment behind the bars of a

+mathematical formula. He had inherited from his study of Condillac,

+Helvétius, Tracy, Chamfort the desire for a rigid schematology, for

+geometrical demonstration. The word "logic" was always on the tip of

+his tongue, and he probably would have come to blows with Professor

+Jowett for his dictum, uttered at the close of a lecture: "Logic is

+neither an art nor a science, but a dodge." Love for Stendhal was

+without a Beyond. It was a matter of the senses entirely. The soul

+counted for little, manners for much. A sentimental epicurean, he

+is the artistic descendant of Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, both by

+tradition and temperament. Stendhal fell into the mistake of the

+metaphysician in setting up numerous categorical traps to snare his

+subject. They are artificial, and yet bear a resemblance to certain

+Schopenhauerian theories. Both men practised what they did not preach.

+"Beauty is a promise of happiness," wrote Stendhal, and it was so

+effective that Baudelaire rewrote it with a slight variation. The

+"crystallisation" formula of Stendhal occurred to him while down in a

+salt mine near Salzburg. He saw an elm twig covered with sparkling salt

+crystals, and he used it as an image to express the love that discerns

+in the beloved one all perfections. There are several crystallisations

+during the course of "true love." His book is more autobiographical

+than scientific; that the writer gleaned the facts from his own

+heart-experiences adds to the value and veracity of the work. As a

+catechism for lovers, it is unique; and it was so well received that

+from 1822 to 1833 there were exactly seventeen copies sold. But it

+has been plundered by other writers without acknowledgment. Stendhal

+and Schopenhauer could have shaken hands on the score of their

+unpopularity&mdash;and about 1880 on their sudden recrudescence.</p>

+

+<p>With all his display of worldly wisdom Stendhal really loved but three

+times in his life; this statement may shock some of his disciples

+who see in him a second Casanova, but a study of his life will prove

+it. He had gone to Paris with the established conviction that he must

+become a Don Juan. That was&mdash;comical or shocking as it may sound&mdash;his

+projected profession. Experience soon showed him other aspects. He

+was too refined, too tender-hearted, to indulge in the conventional

+dissipations of adolescent mankind. The lunar ray of sentiment was in

+his brain; if he couldn't idealise a woman, he would leave her. It was

+his misfortune, the lady's fortune&mdash;whoever she might have been&mdash;and

+the world's good luck that he never was married. As a husband he would

+have been a glorious failure. Mélanie Guilbert-Louason was an actress

+in Paris, who, after keeping him on tenter-hooks of jealousy, accepted

+his addresses. He couldn't marry her, because the allowance made by

+his father did not suffice for himself; besides, she had a daughter

+by a former marriage. He confesses that lack of money was the chief

+reason for his timidity with women; a millionaire, he might have been

+a conquering and detestable hero. Like Frédéric Moreau in L'Education

+Sentimentale, Stendhal always feared interruption from a stronger

+suitor, and his fears were usually verified. But he went with Guilbert

+to Marseilles, where she was acting, and to support himself took a

+position in a commercial house. That for him meant a grand passion; he

+loathed business. She married a Russian, Baskow by name. Stendhal was

+inconsolable for weeks. How he would have applauded the ironical cry

+of Jules Laforgue's Hamlet: "Stability! stability! thy name is Woman."

+Although he passed his days embroidering upon the canvas of the Eternal

+Masculine portraits of the secular sex, Stendhal first said, denying a

+certain French king, that women never vary.</p>

+

+<p>He fell into abysmal depths of love with Angela Pietragrua at Milan.

+He was a dashing soldier, and if Angela deceived him he was youthful

+enough to stand the shock. Eleven years later he revisited Milan

+and wept when he saw Angela again. He often wept copiously, a relic

+possibly of eighteenth-century sensibilities. Angela did not weep.

+She, however, was sufficiently touched to start a fresh affair with

+her faithful Frenchman. He did not always enjoy smooth sailing. There

+were a dozen women that either scorned him or else remained unconscious

+of his sentiments. One memory remained with him to the last&mdash;recall

+his cry of loneliness to Romain Colomb when languishing as a French

+consul at Cività Vecchia: "I am perishing for want of love!" He thought

+doubtless of Métilde, wife of General Dembowsky, who from 1818 to 1824

+(let us not concern ourselves if these dates coincide with or overlap

+other love-affairs; Stendhal was very versatile) neither encouraged

+nor discouraged at Milan the ardent exile. So infatuated was he that

+he neglected his chances with the actress Viganò, and also with the

+Countess Kassera. Madame Dembowsky, who afterward did not prove so

+cruel to the conspirator Ugo Foscolo, allowed Stendhal the inestimable

+privilege of kissing her hand. He sighed like a schoolboy and trailed

+after the heartless one from Milan to Florence, from Florence to Rome.

+The gossip that he was the lover in Paris of the singer Pasta caused

+the Dembowsky to deny him hope. He was sincerely attached to her. Had

+she said "Kill yourself," he would have done so. Yes, such a romantic

+he was. She was born Viscontini and separated from a brutal soldier

+of a husband. Her cousin, Madame Traversi, was an obstacle in this

+unhappy passion of Stendhal's. She hated him. Métilde died at the

+age of thirty-eight, in 1825. Because of her he had replied to Mile.

+Viganò&mdash;when she asked him: "Beyle, they say that you are in love with

+me!" "They are fooling you." For this he was never forgiven. It is

+a characteristic note of Stendhalian frankness&mdash;Stendhal, who never

+deceived anyone but himself. Here is a brace of his amiable sayings on

+the subject of Woman:&mdash;</p>

+

+<p>"La fidélité des femmes dans le mariage, lorsqu'il n'y a pas d'amour,

+est probablement une chose contre nature."</p>

+

+<p>"La seule chose que je voie à blâmer dans la pudeur, c'est de conduire

+à l'habitude de mentir."</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>IV</h5>

+

+

+<p>A promenader of souls and cities, Stendhal was a letter-writer of

+formidable patience; his published correspondence is enormous. How

+enormous may be seen in the three volumes published at Paris by Charles

+Bosse, the pages of which number 1,386. These letters begin in 1800,

+when Stendhal was a precocious youth of seventeen, and end 1842, a few

+days before his death. There are more than 700 of them, and he must

+have written more&mdash;probably several thousand; for we know that Mérimée

+destroyed nearly all his correspondence with Stendhal, and we read of

+300 written to a Milanese lady&mdash;his one grand, because unsuccessful,

+passion. But a few of these are included, the remainder doubtless

+having been burned for prudence' sake. The earliest edition of the

+Stendhal letters appeared in 1855, edited by Prosper Mérimée, with an

+introduction by the author of Carmen. The present edition is edited by

+two devoted Stendhalians, Ad. Paupe and P. A. Cheramy. It comprises

+all the earlier correspondence, the letters printed in the Souvenirs

+d'Egotisme (1892), some letters never before published, Lettres Intimes

+(1892), and letters published in the first series of Soirées du

+Stendhal Club (1905). There are also letters from the archives of the

+Ministers of the Interior, of War, and of Foreign Affairs&mdash;altogether a

+complete collection, though ugly in appearance, resembling a volume of

+Congressional reports, but valuable to the Stendhal student.</p>

+

+<p>For the first time the names of his correspondents appear in full.

+Mérimée suppressed most of them or gave only the initials. We learn

+who these correspondents were, and there is a general key for the

+deciphering of the curious names Stendhal bestowed upon them&mdash;he was

+a wag and a mystifier in this respect. His own signature was seldom

+twice alike. A list is given and reaches the number of one hundred and

+seventy-nine pseudonyms. Maurice Barrès has written a gentle preface

+rather in the air, which he entitled: Stendhal's Sentiment of Honour.

+One passage is worthy of quotation. Barrès asserts that Stendhal never

+asked whether a sentiment or an act was useful or fecund, but whether

+it testified to a thrilling energy. Since the pragmatists are claiming

+the Frenchman as one of their own, this statement may prove revelatory.</p>

+

+<p>The first volume is devoted to his years of apprenticeship (1800-1806)

+and his active life (1808-1814). The majority of the letters are

+addressed to his sister, Pauline Beyle, at Grenoble, a sympathetic

+soul. With the gravity of a young, green philosopher, he addresses to

+her homilies by the yard. Sixty instructing twenty! He tells her what

+to read, principally the eighteenth century philosophers: Rousseau,

+Voltaire, Helvétius, Tracy, Locke&mdash;amusing and highly moral reading

+for a lass&mdash;and he never wearies of praising Shakespeare. "I am a

+Romantic," he says elsewhere; "that is, I prefer Shakespeare to

+Racine, Byron to Boileau." This worldly-wise youth must have bored his

+sister. She understood him, however, and as her life at home with a

+disagreeable and avaricious father was not happy, her correspondence

+with brother Henry must have been a consolation. He does not scruple to

+call his father hard names, and recommends his sister not to marry for

+love but for a comfortable home. She actually did both. Edouard Mounier

+is another correspondent; also Félix Faure, born in Stendhal's city,

+Grenoble. We learn much of the Napoleonic campaigns in which Stendhal

+served, particularly of the burning of Moscow and the disastrous

+retreat of the French army. Related by an eye-witness whose style is

+concise, whose power of observation is extraordinary, these letters

+possess historic value.</p>

+

+<p>All Paris and Milan are in the second volume, The Man of the World and

+the Dilettante (1815-1830); while The Public Functionary and Novelist

+are the themes of volume three (1830-1842). The friends with whom

+Stendhal corresponded were Guizot, Thiers, Balzac, Byron, Walter Scott,

+Sainte-Beuve, and many distinguished noblemen and men of affairs. He

+had friends in London, Thomas Moore and Sutton-Sharp among the rest;

+and he visited England several times. Baron Mareste and Romain Colomb

+were confidants. Stendhal, with an irony that never deserted him, wrote

+obituary notices of himself because Jules Janin had jestingly remarked

+that when Stendhal died he would furnish plenty of good material for

+the necrologists. The articles in guise of letters sent to M. Stritch

+of the <i>German Review</i>, London, are tedious reading; besides, there are

+too many of them.</p>

+

+<p>As a man whose ears and eyes were very close to the whirring of

+contemporary events, his descriptions of Napoleon and Byron are

+peculiarly interesting. At first Napoleon had been a demi-god, then he

+was reviled because with the Corsican's downfall he lost his chances

+for the future. He had witnessed the coronation and did not forget

+that Talma had given the young Bonaparte free tickets to the Comédie

+Française; also that Pope Pius VII. pronounced Latin Italian fashion,

+thus: <i>Spiritous sanctous</i>. As the Emperor passed by on horseback,

+cheered by the mobs, "he smiled his smile of the theatre, in which one

+shows the teeth, but with eyes that smile not." Stendhal tells us that

+the Emperor had forehead and nose in an unbroken line, a common trait

+in certain parts of France, he adds.</p>

+

+<p>He first encountered Byron in the year 1812, at Milan. It was in

+a box of the Scala. He was overcome by the beauty of the poet, by

+his graciousness. Here we see Stendhal, no longer a soldier or a

+cynic, but a man of sensibility, almost a hero-worshipper. Byron was

+agreeable. They met often. When Byron's physician and secretary,

+Polidori, was arrested by the Milan secret police, Stendhal relates

+that the Englishman's rage was appalling. Byron resembled Napoleon,

+declared Stendhal, in his marble wrath. Another time the French author

+advised Byron, who lived at a distance from the opera house, to take

+a carriage, as after midnight walking was dangerous in Milan. Coldly

+though politely Byron asked for some indication of his route and then,

+during a painful silence, he left poor Stendhal staring after him as he

+hobbled away in the darkness. Such human touches are worth more than

+the letters in which the literature of the day is discussed.</p>

+

+<p>Ten years later, from Genoa (1823), Byron wrote Stendhal, whom he

+apparently liked, thanking him for a notice he had read of himself in

+the latter's book, Rome, Naples, et Florence. Supreme master of the

+anecdote, these letters may serve as an introduction to Stendhal's

+works, though we wish for more of the tender epistles. However, in

+The Diary, the Journal and the Life of Henri Brulard, one may find

+copious and frank confessions of Stendhal's love-life. So little of

+the literary man was in him that at the close of his career, when he

+had received the Legion of Honor, he was indignant because this was

+bestowed upon him not in his capacity of public functionary but as a

+man of letters. Adolphe Paupe, the editor of this bulky correspondence

+&mdash;and who knows how much more material there may be in the Grenoble

+archives!&mdash;fittingly closes his brief introduction with a quotation

+from a writer the antipodes of Stendhal, the parabolic Barbey

+d'Aurevilly, who, after calling the correspondence "adorable," adds

+that it possesses the unheard-of charm of Stendhal's other books, a

+charm which is inexhaustible. Notwithstanding this eloquence, I prefer

+the old edition compiled by Mérimée. There is such a thing as too much

+Stendhal, although every scrap of his writing may be sacred to his

+disciples.</p>

+

+<p>I am glad, therefore, to note in the second series of the Soirées du

+Stendhal Club, that the principal Stendhalian&mdash;or Beyliste, as some

+name themselves&mdash;Casimir Stryienski, shows a disposition to mock at the

+antics of over-heated Stendhalians. M. Stryienski, who has been called

+by Paul Bourget "the man of affairs of the Beyliste family," dislikes

+the idea of a Stendhal cult and wonders how the ironic and humorous

+Beyle would have treated the worshippers who wish to make of him a

+mystic god&mdash;which is the proper critical attitude. Beyle-Stendhal would

+have been the first man to overthrow any altar erected to his worship.

+The second series, collated by Stryienski and Paul Arbelet, is hardly

+as novel as the first. The most important article is devoted to the

+question whether Stendhal dedicated to Napoleon his History of Painting

+(mostly borrowed from Lanzi's book). The 1817 dedication is enigmatic;

+it might have meant Napoleon, or Louis XVIII., or the Czar Alexander

+of Russia. M. Arbelet holds to the latter, as Stendhal was so poor

+that he hoped for a position as preceptor in Russia and thought by the

+ambiguity of his dedication to catch the favourable eye of the Czar.

+Napoleon was at Saint Helena and a hateful king was on the throne of

+France. Let all three be duped, said to himself the merry Stendhal.

+That is Arbelet's theory. When in 1854 a new edition of the history

+appeared, it was headed by a touching, almost tearful dedication to the

+exile at Saint Helena! Stendhal's executor, Romain Colomb, had found

+it among the papers of the dead author, and as Napoleon was dead he

+published it. Evidently Stendhal had written several, and for politic

+reasons had selected the misleading one of the 1817 edition. Recall

+Beethoven's magnificent rage when he tore into pieces the dedicatory

+page of his Eroica Symphony, on hearing that his hero, Napoleon, had

+crowned himself Emperor. Quite Stendhalian this, Machiavellian, and

+also time-serving. No doubt he smiled his wicked smile&mdash;with tongue

+in cheek&mdash;at the trick, and no doubt his true disciples applaud it.

+He was the Superman of his day, one who bothered little with moral

+obligations. His favourite device was a line of verse from an old

+opera bouffe: "<i>Vengo adesso di Cosmopoli</i>"; and what has a true

+cosmopolitan, a promenader of cities and prober of souls, in common

+with such a bourgeois virtue as truth-telling? If, as Metchnikoff

+asserts, a man is no older than his arteries, then a thinker is only

+as old as his curiosity. Beyle was ever curious, impertinently so&mdash;the

+Paul Pry of psychologists.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>V</h5>

+

+

+<p>His cult grows apace, and like all cults will be overdone. First

+France, then Italy, and now Germany has succumbed to the novels,

+memoirs, and delightful gossiping books of travel written by the

+Frenchman from Grenoble. But what a literary and artistic gold-mine

+his letters, papers, manuscripts of unfinished novels have proved to

+men like Casimir Stryienski and the rest. Even in 1909 the Stendhal

+excavators are busy with their pickers and stealers. Literary Paris

+becomes enthusiastic when a new batch of correspondence is unearthed

+at Grenoble or elsewhere. Recently a <i>cahier</i>&mdash;incomplete to be

+sure, but indubitably Stendhal's&mdash;was found and printed. It was a

+section of the famous journal exhumed in the library of Grenoble by

+Stryienski during 1888. Published in the <i>Mercure de France</i>, it bore

+the title of Fin du Tour d'Italie en 1811. It consists of brief, almost

+breathless notes upon Naples, its music, customs, streets, inhabitants.

+References to Ancona, to the author's second sojourn in Milan, and

+to his numerous lady-loves&mdash;each one of whom he lashed himself into

+believing unique&mdash;are therein. He placed Mozart and Cimarosa above all

+other composers, and Shakespeare above Racine. Naturally the man who

+loved Mozart was bound to adore Raphael and Correggio. Lombard and

+Florentine masters he rated higher than the Dutch. Indeed, he abhorred

+Rembrandt and Rubens almost as much as William Blake abhorred them,

+though not for the same reason. Despite his perverse and whimsical

+spirit, Stendhal was, in the larger sense, all of a piece. His likes

+and dislikes in art are so many witnesses to the unity of his character.</p>

+

+<p>Maurice Barrès relates that at the age of twenty he was in Rome,

+where he met in the Villa Medici its director, M. Hébert, the painter

+(died 1908), who promptly asked the young Frenchman: "Do you admire

+Stendhal?" and proceeded to explain that the writer of La Chartreuse de

+Parme was his cousin, and once consul at Cività Vecchia, although he

+spent most of his time in Rome. Stendhal's Promenades had offended the

+Pope, so these visits were really stolen ones. Bored to death in the

+stuffy little town where he represented the French Government, Stendhal

+had been reproved more than once for the dilatory performance of his

+duties. Hébert, after warning Barrès not to study him too deeply,

+described him as an old gentleman of exceeding but capricious <i>esprit</i>.

+He roamed among the picture galleries, exclaiming joyously before some

+old Greek marble or knitting his brows in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael

+was more to his taste than Michaelangelo, as might have been expected

+from one who went wild over the ballets Viganò. Another anecdote is one

+that reveals the malicious, almost simian trickiness of Beyle-Stendhal.

+An English lady, a traveller bent on taking notes for a book about

+Paris, was shown around the city by Stendhal. Seriously, and with

+his usual courtesy, he gave her an enormous amount of misinformation,

+misnaming public buildings, churches, the Louvre, its pictures, and

+nicknaming well-known personages. All this with the hope that she

+would reproduce it in print. Not very <i>spirituel</i>, this performance

+of M. Beyle. He was an admirer of English folk and their literature,

+and corresponded in a grotesque sort of English with several prominent

+men and women in London. We find him writing a congratulatory letter

+to Thomas Moore on his Lalla Rookh, complacently remarking that the

+ingrained Hebraism of English character and literature made the

+production of such an exotic poem all the more wonderful. Though he

+could praise the gew-gaws and tinsel of Moore's mock Orientalism, he

+openly despised the limpidity of Lamartine's elegiac verse and the

+rhythmic illuminated thunder of Victor Hugo.</p>

+

+<p>It is not generally known that Stendhal's friend and disciple, Prosper

+Mérimée, left an anonymous book, of which there are not many examples,

+though it has been partially reprinted. It is entitled "H. B. [Henry

+Beyle], par un des quarante, avec un frontispice stupéfiant dessiné

+et gravé. Eleutheropolis, l'an 1864 du mensonge Nazaréen." Now, there

+is a "stupefying" drawing, a project for a statue, by Félicien Rops,

+the etcher. It depicts the new world-city of Eleutheropolis&mdash;a

+Paris raised to the seventh heaven of cosmopolitanism&mdash;with Stendhal

+set in its midst. Rops was evidently contented to take the little

+pot-bellied caricature of Henri Monnier, which Monnier declared was

+not exaggerated, and put it on a pedestal. In his familiar and amusing

+manner the illustrator shows us multitudes from every quarter of the

+globe travelling by every known method of conveyance. The idea of

+teeming nationalities is evoked. All sorts and conditions of men and

+women are hurrying to pay their homage to Stendhal, who, hat in hand,

+stomach advancing, legs absurdly curving, umbrella under his arm,

+and his ironical lips compressed, contemplates with his accustomed

+imperturbability these ardent idolators. He seems to say: "I predicted

+that I should be understood about 1880."</p>

+

+<p>But if this cartoon of Rops is amusing, the contents of Mérimée's book

+are equally so, both amusing and blasphemous. Stendhal and Mérimée got

+on fairly well together. Mérimée tells what he thought of Stendhal.

+There are shocking passages and witty. An atheist, more because of

+political reasons than religious, Stendhal relates a story about the

+death of God from heart disease. Since that time the cosmical machine,

+he asserted, has been in the hands of his son, an inexperienced youth

+who, not being an engineer, reversed the levers; hence the disorder in

+matters mundane.</p>

+

+<p>To prove how out of tune was Stendhal with his times, we have only

+to read his definitions of romanticism and classicism in his Racine

+et Shakespeare. He wrote: "Romanticism is the art of presenting to

+people literary works which in the actual state of their habitudes

+and beliefs are capable of giving the greatest possible pleasure;

+classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting literature which

+gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers." He

+also proclaimed as a corollary to this that every dead classic had

+at one time been a live romantic. Yet he was far from sympathising,

+both romantic and realist as he was, with the 1830 romantic movement.

+Nor did he suspect its potential historical significance; or his own

+possible significance, despite his clairvoyant prediction. He disliked

+Hugo, ignored Berlioz, and had no opinion at all on the genius of

+Delacroix. The painters of 1830, that we knew half a century later as

+the Barbizon school, he never mentions. We may imagine him abusing the

+impressionists in his choleric vein. His appreciations of art, while

+sound&mdash;who dare flout Raphael and Correggio?&mdash;are narrow. The immense

+claims made continually by the Stendhalians for their master are

+balked by evidences of a provincial spirit. Yes; he, the first of the

+cosmopolitans, the indefatigable globe-trotter, keenest of observers

+of the human heart, man without a country&mdash;he has said, "My country is

+where there are most people like me"&mdash;was often as blindly prejudiced

+as a dweller in an obscure hamlet. And doesn't this epigram contradict

+his idea of the proud, lonely man of genius? It may seem to; in reality

+he was not like a Nietzschian, but a sociable, pleasure-loving man,

+seldom putting to the test his theories of individualism. He always

+sought the human quality; the passions of humanity were the prime

+things of existence for him. A landscape, no matter how lovely, must

+have a human or a historic interest. The fiercest assassin in the

+Trastevere district was at least a man of action and not a sheep.

+"Without passion there is neither virtue nor vice," he preached.

+Therefore he greatly lauded Benvenuto Cellini. He loathed democracy

+and a democratic form of government. Brains, not votes, should rule a

+nation. He sneered at America as being hopelessly utilitarian.</p>

+

+<p>In the preface to his History of Italian Painting he quoted Alfieri:

+"My only reason for writing was that my gloomy age afforded me no other

+occupation." From Cività Vecchia he wrote: "It's awful: women here

+have only one idea, a new Parisian hat. No poetry here or tolerable

+company&mdash;except with prisoners; with whom, as French Consul, I cannot

+possibly seek friendship." To kill the ennui of his existence he either

+slipped into Rome for a week or else wrote reams of "copy," most of

+which he never saw in print. Among certain intellectual circles in

+Paris he was known and applauded as a man of taste, a dilettante of

+the seven arts, though his lack of original invention occasionally got

+him into scrapes. Stendhal might have echoed Molière's "Je prends mon

+bien où je le trouve"; but he would not have forgotten to remind the

+dramatic poet that the very witticism was borrowed from Cyrano.</p>

+

+<p>Stryienski's Soirées du Stendhal Club actually presents for the

+delectation of the Stendhalians parallel columns from Lanzi and

+Stendhal&mdash;so proud are the true believers of the fold that even such

+evidences of plagiarism do not disconcert them. The cribbing occurs in

+the general reflections devoted to the Renaissance. It is as plain as

+a pikestaff. Notwithstanding, we can read Stendhal with more interest

+than the original. His lively spirit adorns Lanzi's laborious pages.</p>

+

+<p>Beyle's joke about the "reversed engines of Christianity," quoted by

+Mérimée, and his implacable dislike of the Jesuits (as may be seen in

+his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir&mdash;in those days the Yellow Peril

+was the Jesuits), did not dull his perception of what the papacy had

+done for art in Italy. He nearly approaches eloquence in his Philosophy

+of Art (which Taine appreciated and profited by) when writing of the

+popes of the Renaissance. He does not fail to note the vivifying and

+reforming influence of the Church at this period upon the brutality

+and lusts of the nobility and upon poets and painters. Adoring Raphael

+as much as he did Napoleon and Byron, he declared that Raphael

+failed in <i>chiaroscuro</i> and vaunted the superiority of Correggio in

+this particular. But he did not deign to mention Rembrandt. Nothing

+Germanic or Northern pleased him. He was a Latin among Latins, and

+his passion for Italy and the Italians was not assumed. He had asked

+of his executor that he be buried in the little Protestant cemetery

+at Rome. Then he changed his mind and ordered that the cemetery of

+Andilly, near Montmorency, be his last resting-place. But the fates,

+that burn into ashes the fairest fruits of man's ambitions, dropped

+Stendhal's remains in the cemetery of Montmartre, Paris, where still

+stands the prosaic tomb with its falsification of the writer's birth.

+His epitaph he doubtless discovered when fabricating his life of Haydn.

+In the composer's case it runs: "Veni, scripsi, vixi." And when we

+consider the fact that his happiest years were in Milan, that there

+lived the object of his deepest affection, Angela Pietragrua, this

+inscription was as sincere as the majority of such marble ingenuities

+in post-mortem politeness.</p>

+

+<p>With all his critical limitations, Stendhal never gave vent to such

+ineptitudes as Tolstoy regarding Shakespeare. The Russian, who has

+spent the latter half of his life bewailing the earlier and more

+brilliant part, would have been abhorrent to the Frenchman, who died as

+he had lived, impenitent. Stendhal was a man, not a purveyor of words,

+or a maker of images. Not poetic, yet he did not fail to value Dante

+and Angelo. Virile, cynical, sensual, the greatest master of psychology

+of his age, he believed in action rather than thought. Literature he

+pretended to detest. Not a spinner of cobwebs, he left no definite

+system; it remained for Taine to gather together the loose strands of

+his sane, strong ideas and formulate them. He saw the world clearly,

+without sentiment&mdash;he, the most sentimental of men&mdash;and he had a horror

+of German mole-hill metaphysics. The eighteenth century with its hard

+logic, its deification of Reason, its picturesque atheism, enlisted

+Beyle's sympathies. Socialism was for him anathema.</p>

+

+<p>Love and art were his watchwords. His love of art was on a sound basis.

+Joyous, charming music like Mozart's, Rossini's, Cimarosa's, appealed

+to him; and Correggio, with his sensuous colouring and voluptuous

+design, was his favourite painter. He was complex, but he was not

+morbid. The artistic progenitor of a long line of analysts, supermen,

+criminals, and æsthetic ninnies, he probably would have disclaimed the

+entire crowd, including the faithful Stendhalians, because the latter

+have so widely departed from his canons of simplicity and sunniness in

+art.</p>

+

+<p>But Stendhal left the soul out of his scheme of life; never did he

+knock at the gate of her dwelling-place. Believing with Napoleon

+that because the surgeon's scalpel did not lay bare any trace of the

+soul, there was none, Stendhal practically denied her existence. For

+this reason his windows do not open upon eternity. They command fair,

+charming prospects. Has he not written: "J'ai recherché avec une

+sensibilité exquise la vue des beaux paysages.... Les paysages étaient

+comme un archet qui jouait sur mon âme"? He meant his nerves, not his

+soul. Spiritual overtones are not sounded in his work. A materialist

+(a singularly unhappy home and maladroit education are to blame for

+much of his errors in after life), he was, at least, no hypocrite. He

+loved beautiful art, women, landscapes, brave feats. He confesses, in

+a letter to Colomb, dated November 25, 1817, to planning a History of

+Energy in Italy (both Taine and Barrès later transposed the theme to

+France with varying results). A tissue of contradictions, he somehow or

+other emerges from the mists and artistic embroilments of the earlier

+half of the last century a robust, soldierly, yet curious, subtle

+and enigmatic figure. It is best to employ in describing him his own

+favourite definition&mdash;he was "different." And has he not said that

+difference engenders hatred?</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>VI</h5>

+

+

+<p>In his brilliant and much-abused book, A Rebours, the late J.-K.

+Huysmans describes the antics of a feeble-brained young nobleman who,

+having saturated himself with Baedeker's London, the novels of Dickens,

+English roast beef and ale, came to the comical conclusion that he

+might be disappointed if he crossed the Channel, so after a few hours

+spent within the hospitable walls of a Parisian English bar he gathered

+up his plaids, traps, walking-stick, and calmly returned to his home

+near the French capital. He had travelled to England in an easy-chair,

+as mentioned by Goldsmith&mdash;better after all than not travelling at all.

+Circumstances condemn many of us to this mode of motion, which comes

+well within the definition of our great-grandfathers, who called it The

+Pleasures of the Imagination.</p>

+

+<p>But there are, luckily for them, many who are not compelled to assist

+at this intellectual Barmecide's feast. They go and they come, and no

+man says them nay. Whether they see as much as those who voyaged in the

+more leisurely manner of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

+is open to doubt. Europe or Asia through a car-window is only a series

+of rapidly dissolving slides, pictures that live for brief seconds.

+Modern travel is impressionistic. Nature viewed through a nebulous

+blur. Our grandfathers, if they didn't go as far as their descendants,

+contrived to see more, to see a lot of delightful little things, note

+a myriad of minute traits of the country through which they paced at

+such a snail's gait. Nowadays we hurriedly glance at the names of

+railroad stations. The ideal method of locomotion is really that of the

+pedestrian&mdash;shanks'-mare ought to be popular. Vernon Lee spoke thus of

+our hero: "'Tis the mode of travelling that constituted the delight and

+matured the genius of Stendhal, king of cosmopolitans and grand master

+of the psychologic novel."</p>

+

+<p>It is interesting to turn back and flutter the pages of that

+perennially delightful book, Promenades dans Rome. Italy may truthfully

+be said to have been engraved upon the author's heart. Under the

+heading Manner of Travelling From Paris to Rome, dated March 25, 1828,

+he tells his readers, few but fit, how he made that wonderful trip.</p>

+

+<p>One of the best ways, writes Stendhal, is to take a post-chaise,

+or a <i>calèche</i>, light and made in Vienna. Carry little baggage. It

+only means vexation at the various custom-houses, bother with the

+police&mdash;who treat all travellers as spies or suspected persons&mdash;and

+it will surely attract bandits. Besides, prices are instantly doubled

+when a post-chaise arrives. There is the mail-coach. It rolls along

+comfortably. In its capacious interior one may sleep, watch the

+scenery, converse, or read. You can go to Béfort or Basel if you desire

+to pass the north of la Suisse, or to Pontarlier or Ferney, if desirous

+of reaching the Simplon. You may take the mail to Lyons or Grenoble,

+and pass by Mont Cenis; or until Draguignan if you wish to escape the

+mountains and enter Italy by the beautiful highway, the work of M. de

+Chabral. You arrive at Nice and pass on to Genoa. This is the ideal

+route for scenery.</p>

+

+<p>But, continues Stendhal, the most expeditious and the interesting

+way, the one he usually took, begins with a forty-eight hour ride in

+the diligence as far as Béfort; a carriage for which you pay a dozen

+francs will conduct you to Basel. Once there you may take a diligence

+for Lucerne&mdash;that singular and dangerous lake, the theatre of William

+Tell's exploits, remarks Stendhal impressively (they believed in the

+Tell legend, those innocent times)&mdash;and attain Altdorf. Here Tell and

+the apple will arouse your imagination. Then Italy may be entered by

+Saint Gothard, Bellinzona, Como, and Milan. <i>Via</i> the Simplon was

+more to the taste of our writer. He often took the diligence, which

+at Basel went to Bern; arriving in the Rhône valley by way of Louèche

+and Tourtemagne, he would find his baggage, which had gone around by

+Lausanne, Saint Maurice, and Sion. He tells us that the conductor of

+the excellent diligence plying between Lausanne and Domo d'Ossola was a

+superior man; a glimpse of his calm Swiss features drives away all fear

+of danger. For ten years three times a week this conductor has passed

+the Simplon. He did not encounter avalanches. Anyhow, the Simplon route

+is less dangerous than Mont Cenis; there are fewer precipices and the

+edge of the road is bordered by trees; if the horses ran away the

+coach would not be overturned into the abyss. And since the opening of

+the Simplon route, Stendhal gravely notes, only forty travellers have

+perished, nine of them unhappy Italian soldiers returning from Russia.

+Are not these details of a savoury simplicity, like the faded odour of

+sandal-wood which meets your nostrils when you open some old secretary

+of your grandparents?</p>

+

+<p>Kept by a man from Lyons was a fine inn on the Simplon route in those

+days. Stendhal never failed to record where could be found good

+wines, cooking, and clean sheets. He usually paid twelve francs for a

+carriage to Domo d'Ossola, Lac Majeur (Lago Maggiore) <i>vis-à-vis</i> to

+the Borromean Islands. Four hours in a boat to Sesto Calende, and five

+hours in a fast coach&mdash;behold, Milan! Or you can reach Milan <i>via</i>

+Varese. Milan to Mantua in the regular diligence. Thence to Bologna by

+a carriage, there the mail-coach. You go to Rome by the superb routes

+of Ancona and Loreto. You must pay thirty or thirty-five francs on the

+coach between Milan and Bologna. Stendhal assures us that he often

+found good company in the carriages that traverse the distance from

+Bologna to Florence. It took two days to cover twenty leagues and cost

+twenty francs. From Florence to Rome he consumed four or five days,

+going by Perugia in preference to Siena. Once he travelled in company

+with three priests, of whom he was suspicious until the ice was broken;

+then with joyous anecdotes they passed the time, and he is surprised to

+find these clerical men, who said their prayers openly three times a

+day without being embarrassed by the presence of strangers, were very

+human, very companionable. With his accustomed naïve expression of

+pleasure, he writes that they saved him considerable annoyance at the

+custom-house.</p>

+

+<p>And to-day, eighty years later, we take a train <i>de luxe</i> at Paris

+and in thirty hours we are in the Eternal City. It is swifter, more

+comfortable, and safer, our way of travelling, than Stendhal's, but

+that we see as much as he did we greatly doubt. The motor-car is an

+improvement on the mail-coach and the express train; you may, if you

+will, travel leisurely and privately from Paris to Rome. Or, why not

+hire a stout little carriage and go through Tuscany in an old-fashioned

+manner as did the Chevalier de Pensieri-Vani! Few may hope to store as

+many memories as Stendhal, yet we should see more than the occupants of

+railroad drawing-rooms that whiz by us on the road to Rome.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>VII</h5>

+

+

+<p>Even in our days of hasty production the numerous books of Stendhal

+provoke respectful consideration. What leisure they had in the first

+half of the last century! What patience was shown by the industrious

+man who worked to ward off <i>ennui</i>! He must have written twenty-five

+volumes. In 1906 the <i>Mercure de France</i> printed nineteen newly

+discovered letters to his London friend, Sutton Sharpe (Beyle visited

+London occasionally; he corresponded with Thomas Moore the poet, and

+once he spent an evening at a club in the company of the humourist

+Theodore Hook). But the titles of many of his books suffice; the

+majority of them are negligible. Who wishes to read his lives of

+Rossini, Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio? His life of Napoleon, posthumously

+published in 1876, is of more interest; Beyle had seen his subject

+in the flesh and blood. His Racine et Shakespeare is worth while for

+the Stendhalian; none but the fanatical kind would care to read the

+History of Painting in Italy. There is the Correspondence, capital

+diversion, ringing with Stendhalian wit and prejudice; and Promenades

+dans Rome is a classic; not inferior are Mémoires d'un Touriste, or

+Rome, Naples, et Florence. Indeed, the influence of the Promenades has

+been pronounced. His three finished novels are Armance, Le Rouge et

+le Noir&mdash;which does not derive its title from the gambling game, but

+opposes the sword and the soutane, red and black&mdash;and La Chartreuse de

+Parme. The short stories show him at his best, his form being enforced

+to concision, his style suiting the brief passionate recitals of

+love, crime, intrigue, and adventure&mdash;for the most part, old Italian

+anecdotes recast; as the Italian tales of Hewlett are influenced by

+Stendhal. L'Abbesse de Castro could hardly have been better done by

+Mérimée. In the same volume are Les Cenci, Vittoria Accoramboni,

+Vanina Vanini, and La Duchesse de Palliano, all replete with dramatic

+excitement and charged with Italian atmosphere. San Francesca a Ripa is

+a thrilling tale; so are the stories contained in Nouvelles Inédites,

+Féder (le Mari d'Argent), Le Juif (Filippo Ebreo)&mdash;the latter Balzac

+might have signed; and the unfinished novel, Le Chasseur Vert, which

+was at first given three other titles: Leuwen, l'Orange de Malte, Les

+Bois de Prémol. It promised to be a rival to Le Rouge et le Noir.

+Lucien Leuwen, the young cavalry officer, is Stendhal himself, and he

+is, like Julien Sorel, the first progenitor of a long line in French

+fiction; disillusioned youths who, after the electric storms caused

+by the Napoleonic apparition, end in the sultry dilettantism of Jean,

+duc d'Esseintes of Huysmans' A Rebours and in the pages of Maurice

+Barrès. From Beyle to Huysmans is not such a remote modulation as might

+be imagined. Nor are those sick souls, Goncourt, Charles Demailly

+and Coriolis, without the taint of <i>beylisme</i>. Lucien Leuwen is a

+highly organized young man who goes to a small provincial town where

+his happiness, his one love-affair, is wrecked by the malice of his

+companions. There is a sincerer strain in the book than in some of its

+predecessors.</p>

+

+<p>Armance, Stendhal's first attempt at fiction, is unpleasant; the theme

+is an impossible one&mdash;pathology obtrudes its ugly head. Yet, Armance

+de Zohilhoff is a creature who interests; she was sketched from life,

+Stendhal tells us, a companion to a lady of left-handed rank. She is an

+unhappy girl and her marriage to a <i>babilan</i>, Octave de Malivert, is a

+tragedy. Lamiel, a posthumous novel, published by Casimir Stryienski in

+1888, contains an <i>avant-propos</i> by Stendhal dated from Cività Vecchia,

+May 25, 1840. (His prefaces are masterpieces of sly humour and ironical

+malice.) It is a very disagreeable fiction&mdash;Lamiel is the criminal

+woman with all the stigmata described by Lombroso in his Female

+Delinquent. She is wonderfully portrayed with her cruelty, coldness,

+and ferocity. She, too, like her creator, exclaimed, "Is that all?"

+after her first bought experience in love. She becomes attached to a

+scoundrel from the galleys, and sets fire to a palace to avenge his

+death. She is burned to cinders. A hunchback doctor, Sansfin by name,

+might have stepped from a page of Le Sage.</p>

+

+<p>The Stendhal heroines betray their paternity. Madame de Renal, who

+sacrifices all for Julien Sorel, is the softest-hearted, most womanly

+of his characters. She is of the same sweet, maternal type as Madame

+Arnoux in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, though more impulsive.

+Her love passages with Julien are the most original in French

+fiction. Mathilde de la Môle, pedant, frigid, perverse, snobbish,

+has nevertheless fighting blood in her veins. Lamiel is a caricature

+of her. What could be more evocative of Salome than her kneeling

+before Julien's severed head? Clelia Conti in the Chartreuse is like

+the conventional heroine of Italian romance. She is too sentimental,

+too prudish with her vow and its sophistical evasion. The queen of

+Stendhal women is Gina, <i>la duchesse</i> Sanseverina. She makes one of the

+immortal quartet in nineteenth-century fiction&mdash;the other three being

+Valérie Marneffe, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karénina. Perhaps if Madame

+de Chasteller in Le Chasseur Vert had been a finished portrait, she

+might have ranked after Gina in interest. That lovable lady, with the

+morals of a <i>grande dame</i> out of the Italian Renaissance, will never

+die. She embodies all the energy, tantalizing charm, and paradox of

+Beyle. And a more vital woman has not swept through literature since

+the Elizabethans. At one time he dreamed of conquering the theatre.

+Adolphe Brisson saw the <i>ébauches</i> for several plays; at least fifteen

+scenarios or the beginnings of them have been found in his literary

+remains. Nothing came of his efforts to become a second Molière.</p>

+

+<p>Zola places Le Rouge et le Noir above La Chartreuse de Parme; so does

+Rod. The first novel is more sombre, more tragic; it contains masterly

+characterisations, but it is depressing and in spots duller than the

+Chartreuse. Its author was too absorbed in his own ego to become a

+master-historian of manners. Yet what a book is the Chartreuse for a

+long day. What etched landscapes are in it&mdash;notably the descriptions

+of Lake Como! What evocations of enchanting summer afternoons in

+Italy floating down the mirror-like stream under a blue sky, with the

+entrancing Duchess! The episodes of Parmesan court intrigue are models

+of observation and irony. Beyle's pen was never more delightful, it

+drips honey and gall. He is master of dramatic situations; witness the

+great scene in which the old Duke, Count Mosca, and Gina participate.

+At the close you hear the whirring of the theatre curtain. Count

+Mosca, it is said, was a portrait of Metternich; rather it was

+Stendhal's friend, Count de Saurau. In sooth, he is also very much like

+Stendhal&mdash;Stendhal humbly awaiting orders from the woman he loves.

+That Mosca was a tremendous scoundrel we need not doubt; yet, like

+Metternich and Bismarck, he could be cynical enough to play the game

+honestly. Despite the rusty melodramatic machinery of the book, its

+passionate silhouettes, its Pellico prisons, its noble bandit, its

+poisons, its hair-breadth escapes, duels and assassinations&mdash;these we

+must accept as the slag of Beyle's genius&mdash;there is ore rich enough in

+it to compensate us for the <i>longueurs</i>.</p>

+

+<p>Of his disquisition, De l'Amour, with its famous theory of

+"crystallisation," much could be written. Not founded on a basic

+physiological truth as is Schopenhauer's doctrine of love, Beyle's is

+wider in scope. It deals more with manners than fundamentals. It is

+a manual of tactics in the art of love by a superior strategist. His

+knowledge of woman on the social side, at least, is unparalleled. His

+definitions and classifications are keener, deeper than Michelet's or

+Balzac's. "Femmes! femmes! vous êtes bien toujours les mêmes," he cries

+in a letter to a fair correspondent. It is a quotidian truth that few

+before him had the courage or clairvoyancy to enunciate. Crowded with

+crisp epigrams and worldly philosophy, this book on Love may be studied

+without exhausting its wisdom and machiavellianism.</p>

+

+<p>Stendhal as an art or musical critic cannot be taken seriously, though

+he says some illuminating things; embedded in platitudes may be

+found shrewd <i>aperçus</i> and flashes of insight; but the trail of the

+"gifted amateur" is over them all. At a time when Beethoven was in the

+ascendant, when Berlioz&mdash;who hailed from the environs of Grenoble&mdash;was

+in the throes of the "new music," when Bach had been rediscovered,

+Beyle prattles of Cimarosa. He provoked Berlioz with his praise of

+Rossini&mdash;"les plus irritantes stupidités sur la musique, dont il

+croyait avoir le secret," wrote Berlioz of the Rossini biography.

+Lavoix went further: "Ecrivain d'esprit ... fanfaron d'ignorance en

+musique." Poor Stendhal! He had no <i>flair</i> for the various artistic

+movements about him, although he had unwittingly originated several.

+He praised Goethe and Schiller, yet never mentioned Bach, Beethoven,

+Chopin; music for him meant operatic music, some other "divine

+adventure" to fill in the background of conversation. Conversation!

+In that art he was virtuoso. To dine alone was a crime in his eyes. A

+<i>gourmet</i>, he cared more for talk than eating. He could not make up his

+mind about Weber's Freischütz, and Meyerbeer he did not very much like;

+"he is said to be the first pianist of Europe," he wrote; at the time,

+Liszt and Thalberg were disputing the kingdom of the keyboard. It was

+Stendhal, so the story goes, who once annoyed Liszt at a <i>musicale</i> in

+Rome by exclaiming in his most elliptical style: "Mon cher Liszt, pray

+give us your <i>usual</i> improvisation this evening!"</p>

+

+<p>As a plagiarist Stendhal was a success. He "adapted" from Goethe,

+translated entire pages from the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>, and the

+material of his history of Painting in Italy he pilfered from Lanzi.

+More barefaced still was his wholesale appropriation of Carpani's

+Haydine, which he coolly made over into French as a life of Haydn.

+The Italian author protested in a Paduan journal, <i>Giornale dell'

+Italiana Letteratura</i>, calling Stendhal by his absurd pen-name:

+"M. Louis-Alexander-César Bombet, <i>soi-disant</i> Français auteur des

+Haydine." The original book appeared in 1812 at Milan. Stendhal

+published his plagiarism at Paris, 1814, but asserted that it had been

+written in 1808. He did not stop at mere piracy, for in 1816 and in an

+open letter to the <i>Constitutionnel</i> he fabricated a brother for the

+aforesaid Bombet and wrote an indignant denial of the facts. He spoke

+of César Bombet as an invalid incapable of defending his good name.

+The life of Mozart is a very free adaptation from Schlichtegroll's.

+When Shakespeare, Handel, and Richard Wagner plundered, they plundered

+magnificently; in comparison, Stendhal's stealings are absurd.</p>

+

+<p>Irritating as are his inconsistencies, his prankishness, his bombastic

+affectations, and pretensions to a superior immorality, Stendhal's

+is nevertheless an enduring figure in French literature. His power

+is now felt in Germany, where it is augmented by Nietzsche's

+popularity&mdash;Nietzsche, who, after Mérimée, was Stendhal's greatest

+pupil. Pascal had his "abyss," Stendhal had his fear of <i>ennui</i>&mdash;it

+was almost pathologic, this obsession of boredom. One side of his

+many-sided nature was akin to Pepys, a French Pepys, who chronicled

+immortal small-beer. However, it is his heart's history that will make

+this protean old faun eternally youthful. As a prose artist he does

+not count for much. But in the current of his swift, clear narrative

+and under the spell of his dry magic and peptonized concision we do

+not miss the peacock graces and coloured splendours of Flaubert or

+Chateaubriand. Stendhal delivers himself of a story rapidly; he is all

+sinew. And he is the most seductive spiller of souls since Saint-Simon.</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="II" id="II">II</a></h4>

+

+

+<h4>THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND</h4>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>For the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who

+dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden

+times when they gossipped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption,

+of the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways,

+Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism&mdash;alas! into what faded limbo

+have they vanished. Poe, too, Poe whom we saw in fancy reeling from

+Richmond to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New

+York. Those familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all

+such jerry-built spooks. We now know Poe to have been a man suffering

+at the time of his death from cerebral lesion, a man who drank at

+intervals and but little. Dr. Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling

+superstition about De Quincey's opium-eating. He has demonstrated that

+no man could have lived so long&mdash;De Quincey was nearly seventy-five

+at his death&mdash;and worked so hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand

+drops of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore, the

+English essayist's description of the drug's effects is inexact. He

+was seldom sleepy&mdash;a sure sign, asserts Dr. Guerrier, that he was

+not altogether enslaved by the drug habit. Sprightly in old age, his

+powers of labour were prolonged until past three-score and ten. His

+imagination needed little opium to produce the famous Confessions.

+Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at the <i>première</i> of

+Hernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And Rousseau has

+been white-washed. So they are disappearing, those literary legends,

+until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear, old-fashioned,

+disreputable men of genius!</p>

+

+<p>But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This

+French poet himself has suffered more from the friendly malignant

+biographer and Parisian chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the

+curs out of the cemetery? asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold

+on Poe. A few years later his own cemetery was invaded and the world

+was put in possession of the Baudelaire legend; that legend of the

+atrabilious, irritable poet, dandy, maniac, his hair dyed green,

+spouting blasphemies; that grim, despairing image of a Diabolic, a

+libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime du Camp was much to blame for

+the promulgation of these tales&mdash;witness his Souvenirs Littéraires.

+However, it may be confessed that part of the Baudelaire legend was

+created by Charles Baudelaire. In the history of literature it is

+difficult to parallel such a deliberate piece of self-stultification.

+Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine, who imitated him, drew

+for the astonishment or disedification of the world like unflattering

+portraits. Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered at times from

+acute cortical irritation. And, notwithstanding his desperate effort to

+realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who had said that no

+man can bare his heart quite naked; there will be always something held

+back, something false too ostentatiously thrust forward. The grimace,

+the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul

+of man and the sharp reality of published confessions. Baudelaire was

+no more exception to this rule than St. Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, or

+Huysmans; though he was as frank as any of them, as we may see in the

+recently printed diary, Mon cœur mis à nu (Posthumous Works, Société

+du Mercure de France); and in the Journal, Fusées, Letters, and other

+fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians.</p>

+

+<p>To smash legends, Eugène Crépet's biographical study, first printed in

+1887, has been republished with new notes by his son, Jacques Crépet.

+This is an exceedingly valuable contribution to Baudelaire lore; a

+dispassionate life, however, has yet to be written, a noble task for

+some young poet who will disentangle the conflicting lies originated

+by Baudelaire&mdash;that tragic comedian&mdash;from the truth and thus save him

+from himself. The new Crépet volume is really but a series of notes;

+there are some letters addressed to the poet by the distinguished men

+of his day, supplementing the rather disappointing volume of Letters,

+1841-1866, published in 1908. There are also documents in the legal

+prosecution of Baudelaire, with memories of him by Charles Asselineau,

+Léon Cladel, Camille Lemonnier, and others.</p>

+

+<p>In November, 1850, Maxime du Camp and Gustave Flaubert found themselves

+at the French Ambassador's, Constantinople. The two friends had taken

+a trip in the Orient which later bore fruit in Salammbô. General

+Aupick, the representative of the French Government, received the

+young men cordially; they were presented to his wife, Madame Aupick.

+She was the mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired of Du Camp,

+rather anxiously: "My son has talent, has he not?" Unhappy because her

+second marriage, a brilliant one, had set her son against her, the poor

+woman welcomed from such a source confirmation of her eccentric boy's

+gifts. Du Camp tells the much-discussed story of a quarrel between the

+youthful Charles and his stepfather, a quarrel that began at table.

+There were guests present. After some words Charles bounded at the

+General's throat and sought to strangle him. He was promptly boxed on

+the ears and succumbed to a nervous spasm. A delightful anecdote, one

+that fills with joy psychiatrists in search of a theory of genius and

+degeneration. Charles was given some money and put on board a ship

+sailing to East India. He became a cattle-dealer in the British army,

+and returned to France years afterward with a <i>Vénus noire</i>, to whom

+he addressed extravagant poems! All this according to Du Camp. Here

+is another tale, a comical one. Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris,

+and his hair was violently green. Du Camp said nothing. Angered by

+this indifference, Baudelaire asked: "You find nothing abnormal about

+me?" "No," was the answer. "But my hair&mdash;it is green!" "That is not

+singular, <i>mon cher</i> Baudelaire; every one has hair more or less green

+in Paris." Disappointed in not creating a sensation, Baudelaire went to

+a café, gulped down two large bottles of Burgundy, and asked the waiter

+to remove the water, as water was a disagreeable sight for him; then

+he went away in a rage. It is a pity to doubt this green hair legend;

+presently a man of genius will not be able to enjoy an epileptic fit

+in peace&mdash;as does a banker or a beggar. We are told that St. Paul,

+Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, Dostoïevsky were epileptoids; yet

+we do not encounter men of this rare kind among the inmates of asylums.

+Even Baudelaire had his sane moments.</p>

+

+<p>The joke of the green hair has been disposed of by Crépet. Baudelaire's

+hair thinning after an illness, he had his head shaved and painted

+with salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to escape baldness. At

+the time when he had embarked for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not

+seventeen, but twenty, years of age. Du Camp said he was seventeen when

+he attacked General Aupick. The dinner could not have taken place at

+Lyons because the Aupick family had left that city six years before the

+date given by Du Camp. Charles was provided with five thousand francs

+for his expenses, instead of twenty&mdash;Du Camp's version&mdash;and he never

+was a beef-drover in the British army, for a good reason&mdash;he never

+reached India. Instead, he disembarked at the Isle of Bourbon, and

+after a short stay was seized by homesickness and returned to France,

+being absent about ten months. But, like Flaubert, on his return home

+Baudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the East; out there he had

+yearned for Paris. Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire saying to him with

+a grimace: "I love Wagner; but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung

+up by his tail outside of a window, and trying to stick to the panes of

+glass with its claws. There is an odd grating on the glass which I find

+at the same time: strange, irritating, and singularly harmonious." Is

+it necessary to add that Baudelaire, notorious in Paris for his love

+of cats, dedicating poems to cats, would never have perpetrated such

+revolting cruelty?</p>

+

+<p>Another misconception, a critical one, is the case of Poe and

+Baudelaire. The young Frenchman first became infatuated with Poe's

+writings in 1846 or 1847&mdash;he gives these two dates, though several

+stories of Poe had been translated into French as early as 1841 or

+1842; L'Orang-Outang was the first, which we know as The Murders in

+the Rue Morgue; Madame Meunier also adapted several Poe stories for

+the reviews. Baudelaire's labours as a translator lasted over ten

+years. That he assimilated Poe, that he idolized Poe, is a commonplace

+of literary gossip. But that Poe had overwhelming influence in the

+formation of his poetic genius is not the truth. Yet we find such an

+acute critic as the late Edmund Clarence Stedman writing, "Poe's chief

+influence upon Baudelaire's own production relates to poetry." It is

+precisely the reverse. Poe's influence affected Baudelaire's prose,

+notably in the disjointed confessions, Mon cœur mis à nu, which

+recall the American writer's Marginalia. The bulk of the poetry in Les

+Fleurs de Mal was written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though not

+published in book form until 1857. But in 1855 some of the poems saw

+the light in the <i>Revue des deux Mondes</i>, while many of them had been

+put forth a decade or fifteen years before as fugitive verse in various

+magazines. Stedman was not the first to make this mistake. In Bayard

+Taylor's The Echo Club we find on page 24 this criticism: "There was a

+congenital twist about Poe.. .. Baudelaire and Swinburne after him have

+been trying to surpass him by increasing the dose; but his muse is the

+natural Pythia, inheriting her convulsions, while they eat all sorts

+of insane roots to produce theirs." This must have been written about

+1872, and after reading it one would fancy Poe and Baudelaire were

+rhapsodic wrigglers on the poetic tripod, whereas their poetry is often

+reserved, even glacial. Baudelaire, like Poe, sometimes "built his

+nests with the birds of Night," and that was enough to condemn the work

+of both men with critics of the didactic school.</p>

+

+<p>Once, when Baudelaire heard that an American man-of-letters (?) was in

+Paris, he secured an introduction and called. Eagerly inquiring after

+Poe, he learned that he was not considered a genteel person in America.

+Baudelaire withdrew, muttering maledictions. Enthusiastic poet!

+Charming literary person! But the American, whoever he was, represented

+public opinion at the time. To-day criticisms of Poe are vitiated by

+the desire to make him an angel. It is to be doubted whether without

+his barren environment and hard fortunes we should have had Poe at all.

+He had to dig down deeper into the pit of his personality to reach

+the central core of his music. But every ardent young soul entering

+"literature" begins by a vindication of Poe's character. Poe was a man,

+and he is now a classic. He was a half-charlatan as was Baudelaire.

+In both the sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. The pair

+loved to mystify, to play pranks on their contemporaries. Both were

+implacable pessimists. Both were educated in affluence, and both had to

+face unprepared the hardships of life. The hastiest comparison of their

+poetic work will show that their only common ideal was the worship of

+an exotic beauty. Their artistic methods of expression were totally

+dissimilar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like temperament which

+vibrated in the presence of strange subjects. Above all he was obsessed

+by sex. Woman, as angel of destruction, is the keynote of his poems.

+Poe was almost sexless. His aerial creatures never footed the dusty

+highways of the world. His lovely lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me,"

+could never have been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would never have

+pardoned the "fulgurant" grandeur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the

+Dantesque horrors of that "deep wide music of lost souls" in "Femmes

+Damnées":</p>

+

+<p style="margin-left: 15%;">

+Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes.<br />

+</p>

+

+<p>Or this, which might serve as a text for one of John Martin's vast

+sinister mezzotints:</p>

+

+<p style="margin-left: 15%;">

+J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal<br />

+Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore,<br />

+Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal<br />

+Une miraculeuse aurore;<br />

+<br />

+J'ai vu parfois au fond d'un théâtre banal<br />

+Un être, qui n'était que lumière, or et gaze,<br />

+Terrasser l'énorme Satan;<br />

+Mais mon cœur que jamais ne visite l'extase,<br />

+Est un théâtre où l'on attend<br />

+Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de gaze.<br />

+</p>

+

+<p>Professor Saintsbury thus sums up the differences between Poe and

+Baudelaire: "Both authors&mdash;Poe and De Quincey&mdash;fell short of Baudelaire

+himself as regards depth and fulness of passion, but both have

+a superficial likeness to him in eccentricity of temperament and

+affection for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque and horror."

+Poe is without passion, except a passion for the <i>macabre</i>; for what

+Huysmans calls "The October of the sensations"; whereas, there is a

+gulf of despair and terror and humanity in Baudelaire which shakes

+your nerves yet stimulates the imagination. However, profounder as a

+poet, he was no match for Poe in what might be termed intellectual

+prestidigitation. The mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious

+detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe of the swift flights

+into the cosmical blue, the Poe the prophet and mystic&mdash;in these the

+American was more versatile than his French translator. That Baudelaire

+said, "Evil, be thou my good," is doubtless true. He proved all things

+and found them vanity. He is the poet of original sin, a worshipper

+of Satan for the sake of paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish

+to us&mdash;in his heart he was a believer. His was "an infinite reverse

+aspiration," and mixed up with his pose was a disgust for vice, for

+life itself. He was the last of the Romanticists; Sainte-Beuve called

+him the Kamtschatka of Romanticism; its remotest hyperborean peak.

+Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as Naturalism; but Baudelaire is

+alive, and is read. His glistening phosphorescent trail is over French

+poetry and he is the begetter of a school:&mdash;Verlaine, Villiers de

+l'Isle Adam, Carducci, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Verhaeren, and

+many of the youthful crew. He affected Swinburne, and in Huysmans, who

+was not a poet, his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto might be

+the opposite of Browning's lines: "The Devil is in heaven. All's wrong

+with the world."</p>

+

+<p>When Goethe said of Hugo and the Romanticists that they all came

+from Chateaubriand, he should have substituted the name of Rousseau

+&mdash;"Romanticism, it is Rousseau," exclaims Pierre Lasserre. But there is

+more of Byron and Petrus Borel&mdash;a forgotten mad poet&mdash;in Baudelaire;

+though, for a brief period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau reactionary,

+sported the workingman's blouse, shaved his head, shouldered a musket,

+went to the barricades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling the

+proletarian "Brother!" (oh, Baudelaire!) and, as the Goncourts recorded

+in their diary, had the head of a maniac. How seriously we may take

+this swing of the pendulum is to be noted in a speech of the poet's at

+the time of the Revolution: "Come," he said, "let us go shoot General

+Aupick!" It was his stepfather that he thought of, not the eternal

+principles of Liberty. This may be a false anecdote; many were foisted

+upon Baudelaire. For example, his exclamations at cafés or in public

+places, such as: "Have you ever eaten a baby? I find it pleasing to

+the palate!" or, "The night I killed my father!" Naturally people

+stared and Baudelaire was happy&mdash;he had startled the bourgeois. The

+cannibalistic idea he may have borrowed from Swift's amusing pamphlet,

+for this French poet knew English literature.</p>

+

+<p>Gautier compares the poems to a certain tale of Hawthorne's in which

+there is a garden of poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in his

+laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; he never descended into the

+mud and sin of the street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged his

+soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France says, "a divine poet." How

+childish, yet how touching is his resolution&mdash;he wrote in his diary

+of prayer's dynamic force&mdash;when he was penniless, in debt, threatened

+with imprisonment, sick, nauseated with sin: "To make every morning

+my prayer to God, the reservoir of all force, and all justice; to my

+father, to Mariette, and to Poe as intercessors." (Evidently, Maurice

+Barrès encountered here his theory of Intercessors.) Baudelaire loved

+the memory of his father as much as Stendhal hated his. His mother he

+became reconciled with after the death of General Aupick, in 1857. He

+felt in 1862 that his own intellectual eclipse was approaching, for

+he wrote: "I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror. To-day

+imbecility's wing fanned me as it passed." The sense of the vertiginous

+gulf was abiding with him; read his poem, "Pascal avait son gouffre."</p>

+

+<p>In preferring the Baudelaire translations of Poe to the original&mdash;and

+they give the impression of being original works&mdash;Stedman agreed with

+Asselineau that the French is more concise than the English. The

+prose of Poe and Baudelaire is clear, sober, rhythmic; Baudelaire's

+is more lapidary, finer in contour, richer coloured, more supple,

+though without the "honey and tiger's blood" of Barbey d'Aurevilly's.

+Baudelaire's soul was patiently built up as a fabulous bird might

+build its nest&mdash;bits of straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades

+of black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding dreams, a spray

+of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a gleam of blue sky, arabesques of

+incense and verdigris, despairing hearts and music and the abomination

+of desolation for ground-tones. But this soul-nest is also a cemetery

+of the seven sorrows. He loved the clouds .... <i>les nuages ...

+là bas</i> ... It was <i>là bas</i> with him even in the tortures of his

+wretched love-life. Corruption and death were ever floating in his

+consciousness. He was like Flaubert, who saw everywhere the hidden

+skeleton. Félicien Rops has best interpreted Baudelaire: the etcher

+and poet were closely knit spirits. Rodin, too, is a Baudelarian. If

+there could be such an anomaly as a native wood-note evil, it would

+be the lyric and astringent voice of this poet. His sensibility was

+both catholic and morbid, though he could be frigid in the face of the

+most disconcerting misfortunes. He was a man for whom the visible word

+existed; if Gautier was pagan, Baudelaire was a strayed spirit from

+mediæval days. The spirit ruled, and, as Paul Bourget said, "he saw

+God." A Manichean in his worship of evil, he nevertheless abased his

+soul: "Oh! Lord God! Give me the force and courage to contemplate my

+heart and my body without disgust," he prays: But as some one remarked

+to Rochefoucauld, "Where you end, Christianity begins."</p>

+

+<p>Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the borders of a poetic Maremma,

+which every miasma of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and

+glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baudelaire painted in his sultry

+music the profundities of abysms, the vastness of space. He painted,

+too, the great nocturnal silences of the soul.</p>

+

+<p><i>Pacem summam tenent!</i> He never reached peace on the heights. Let us

+admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel

+is too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the enigma for us is none the less

+unfathomable. Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled delirium.

+To affiliate him with Poe, De Quincey, Hoffmann, James Thomson,

+Coleridge, and the rest of the sombre choir does not explain him; he

+is, perhaps, nearer Donne and Villon than any of the others&mdash;strains

+of the metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are to be discovered

+in him. The disharmony of brain and body, the spiritual bi-location,

+are only too easy to diagnose; but the remedy? <i>Hypocrite lecteur&mdash;mon

+semblable&mdash;mon frère!</i> When the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his

+poetic production be considered, together with its disquieting,

+nervous, vibrating qualities, it is not surprising that Victor Hugo

+wrote to the poet: "You invest the heaven of art with we know not what

+deadly rays; you create a new shudder." Hugo could have said that he

+turned Art into an Inferno. Baudelaire is the evil archangel of poetry.

+In his heaven of fire, glass, and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer.

+"A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, that did love beauty

+only...." sang Tennyson.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>As long ago as 1869 and in our "barbarous gas-lit country," as

+Baudelaire named the land of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which

+this poet was described as "unique and as interesting as Hamlet. He is

+that rare and unknown being, a genuine poet&mdash;a poet in the midst of

+things that have disordered his spirit&mdash;a poet excessively developed

+in his taste for and by beauty ... very responsive to the ideal, very

+greedy of sensation." A better description of Baudelaire does not

+exist. The Hamlet-motive, particularly, is one that sounded throughout

+the disordered symphony of the poet's life.</p>

+

+<p>He was, later, revealed to American readers by Henry James. This was in

+1878, when appeared the first edition of French Poets and Novelists.

+Previous to that there had been some desultory discussion, a few

+essays in the magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic paper by Professor

+James Albert Harrison of the University of Virginia. But Mr. James

+had the ear of a cultured public. He denounced the Frenchman for his

+reprehensible taste, though he did not mention his beautiful verse or

+his originality in the matter of criticism. Baudelaire, in his eyes,

+was not only immoral, but he had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve,

+introduced Poe as a great man to the French nation. (See Baudelaire's

+letter to Sainte-Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841-1866.)

+Perhaps Mr. Dick Minim and his projected Academy of Criticism might

+make clear these devious problems.</p>

+

+<p>The Etudes Critiques of Edmond Schérer were collected in 1863. In

+them we find this unhappy, uncritical judgment: "Baudelaire, lui, n'a

+rien, ni le cœur, ni l'esprit, ni l'idée, ni le mot, ni la raison,

+ni la fantaisie, ni la verve, ni même la facture ... son unique titre

+c'est d'avoir contribué à créer l'esthétique de la débauche." It is

+not our intention to dilate upon the injustice of this criticism. It

+is Baudelaire the critic of æsthetics in whom we are interested. Yet

+I cannot forbear saying that if all the negations of Schérer had been

+transformed into affirmations, only justice would have been accorded

+Baudelaire, who was not alone a poet, the most original of his century,

+but also a critic of the first rank, one who welcomed Richard Wagner

+when Paris hooted him and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played

+the rôle of the envious; one who fought for Edouard Manet, Leconte

+de Lisle, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Delacroix; fought with pen for

+the modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, Daumier, Félicien Rops,

+Gavarni, and Constantin Guys. He literally identified himself with

+De Quincey and Poe, translating them so wonderfully well that some

+unpatriotic critics like the French better than the originals. So much

+was Baudelaire absorbed in Poe that a writer of his times asserted the

+translator would meet the same fate as the American poet. A singular,

+vigorous spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry with its "icy ecstasy"

+is profound and harmonic, whose criticism is penetrated by a catholic

+quality, who anticipated modern critics in his abhorrence of schools

+and environments, preferring to isolate the man and study him uniquely.

+He would have subscribed to Swinburne's generous pronouncement: "I have

+never been able to see what should attract man to the profession of

+criticism but the noble pleasure of praising." The Frenchman has said

+that it would be impossible for a critic to become a poet; and it is

+impossible for a poet not to contain a critic.</p>

+

+<p>Théophile Gautier's study prefixed to the definitive edition of Les

+Fleurs du Mal is not only the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire

+as man and genius, but it is also the high-water mark of Gautier's

+gifts as an essayist. We learn therein how the young Charles, an

+incorrigible dandy, came to visit Hôtel Pimodan about 1844. In this

+Hôtel Pimodan a dilettante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His

+fantastically decorated apartments were frequented by the painters,

+poets, sculptors, romancers, of the day&mdash;that is, carefully selected

+ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Mérimée, and others whose verve

+or genius gave them the privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this

+cave of forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de Chagrin pictured

+the same sort of scenes that were supposed to occur weekly at the

+Pimodan. Gautier eloquently describes the meeting of these kindred

+artistic souls, where the beautiful Jewess Maryx, who had posed for Ary

+Scheffer's Mignon and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, met the superb

+Mme. Sabatier, the only woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original

+of that extraordinary group of Clésinger's&mdash;the sculptor and son-in-law

+of George Sand&mdash;la Femme au Serpent, a Salammbô <i>à la mode</i> in marble.

+Hasheesh was eaten, so Gautier writes, by Boissard and by Baudelaire.

+As for the creator of Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too robust for such

+nonsense. He had to work for his living at journalism, and he died

+in harness an irreproachable father, while the unhappy Baudelaire,

+the inheritor of an intense, unstable temperament, soon devoured his

+patrimony of 75,000 francs and for the remaining years of his life was

+between the devil of his dusky Jenny Duval and the deep sea of debt.</p>

+

+<p>It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which were no doubt much less

+wicked than the participants would have us believe, that Baudelaire

+encountered Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, who made his portrait, and

+encouraged the fashionable young fellow to continue his art studies. We

+have seen an album containing sketches by the poet. They betray talent

+of about the same order as Thackeray's, with a superadded note of the

+horrific&mdash;that favourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baudelaire

+admired Thackeray, and when the Englishman praised the illustrations

+of Guys, he was delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the commonplaces

+of a painter's technique; also how to compose a palette&mdash;a rather

+meaningless phrase nowadays. At least he did not write of the arts

+without some technical experience. Delacroix took up his enthusiastic

+disciple, and when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 1845, 1846,

+1855, and 1859, the praise and blame they evoked were testimonies to

+the training and knowledge of their author. A new spirit had been born.</p>

+

+<p>The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were coupled. Neither academic nor

+spouting the jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baudelaire are

+the production of a humanist. Some would put them above Diderot's. Mr.

+Saintsbury, after Mr. Swinburne the warmest advocate of Baudelaire

+among the English, thinks that the French poet in his picture criticism

+observed too little and imagined too much. "In other words," he adds,

+"to read a criticism of Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by

+no means a sure method of recognizing the picture afterward." Now,

+word-painting was the very thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his

+friend Gautier, with the plastic style, who attempted the well-nigh

+impossible feat of competing in his verbal descriptions with the

+certitudes of canvas and marble. And if he with his verbal imagination

+did not entirely succeed, how could a less adept manipulator of the

+vocabulary? We do not agree with Mr. Saintsbury. No one can imagine

+too much when the imagination is that of a poet. Baudelaire divined

+the work of the artist and set it down scrupulously in prose of

+rectitude. He did not paint pictures in prose. He did not divagate.

+He did not overburden his pages with technical terms. But the spirit

+he did disengage in a few swift phrases. The polemics of historical

+schools were a cross for him to bear, and he bore all his learning

+lightly. Like a true critic, he judged more by form than theme. There

+are no types; there is only life, he had cried before Jules Laforgue.

+He was ever for art-for-art, yet, having breadth of comprehension

+and a Heine-like capacity for seeing both sides of his own nature

+and its idiosyncrasies, he could write: "The puerile utopia of the

+school of art for art, in excluding morality, and often even passion,

+was necessarily sterile. All literature which refuses to advance

+fraternally between science and philosophy is a homicidal and a

+suicidal literature."</p>

+

+<p>Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of the plastic arts than

+of music and literature. Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of

+democracy, of the démocratisation of the arts, of all the sentimental

+fuss and fuddle of a pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 agitation

+the former dandy of 1840 put on a blouse and spoke of barricades.

+These things were in the air. Wagner rang the alarm-bells during the

+Dresden uprising. Chopin wrote for the pianoforte a revolutionary

+étude. Brave lads! Poets and musicians fight their battles best in the

+region of the ideal. Baudelaire's little attack of the equality-measles

+soon vanished. He lectured his brother poets and artists on the folly

+and injustice of abusing or despising the bourgeois (being a man of

+paradoxes, he dedicated a volume of his Salons to the bourgeois), but

+he would not have contradicted Mr. George Moore for declaring that "in

+art the democrat is always reactionary. In 1830 the democrats were

+against Victor Hugo and Delacroix." And Les Fleurs du Mal, that book of

+opals, blood, and evil swamp-flowers, can never be savoured by the mob.</p>

+

+<p>In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury speaks of the promenades in

+the Louvre he enjoyed in company with Baudelaire. Bronzino was one of

+the latter's preferences. He was also attracted to El Greco&mdash;not an

+unnatural admiration, considering the sombre extravagance of his own

+genius. Goya he has written of in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his

+touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his nerves ruined by abuse of

+drink and drugs, the landscapes of his imagination or those by his

+friend Rousseau were more beautiful than Nature herself. The country,

+he declared, was odious. Like Whistler, whom he often met&mdash;see the

+Hommage à Delacroix by Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler,

+Baudelaire, Manet, Bracquemond the etcher, Legros, Delacroix, Cordier,

+Duranty the critic, and De Balleroy&mdash;he could not help showing his

+aversion to "foolish sunsets." In a word, Baudelaire, into whose brain

+had entered too much moonlight, was the father of a lunar school of

+poetry, criticism and fiction. His Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo,

+is the literary progenitor of Jean, Due d'Esseintes, of Huysmans's

+A Rebours. Huysmans modelled at first himself on Baudelaire. His Le

+Drageoir aux Epices is a continuation of Petits Poèmes en Prose. And

+to Baudelaire's account must be laid much artificial morbid writing.

+Despite his pursuit of perfection in form, his influence has been

+too often baneful to impressionable artists in embryo. A lover of

+Gallic Byronism, and high-priest of the Satanic school, there was no

+extravagance, absurd or terrible, that he did not commit, from etching

+a four-part fugue on ice to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In

+his criticism alone was he the sane, logical Frenchman. And while he

+did not live to see the success of the Impressionist group, he would

+have surely acclaimed their theories and practice. Was he not an

+impressionist himself?</p>

+

+<p>As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so Delacroix quite overflowed

+his æsthetic consciousness. Read Volume II. of his collected works,

+Curiosités Esthétiques, which contains his Salons; also his essay,

+De l'Essence du Rire (worthy to be placed side by side with George

+Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, French and foreign, are

+considered in two chapters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire

+was as conscientious as Gautier. He toiled around miles of mediocre

+canvas, saying an encouraging word to the less talented, boiling

+over with holy indignation, glacial irony, before the rash usurpers

+occupying the seats of the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with

+promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the largesse of his admiration.

+He smiled at the platitudes of Horace Vernef, and only shook his head

+over the Schnetzes and other artisans of the day. He welcomed William

+Hausoullier, now so little known. He praised Devéria, Chasseriau&mdash;who

+waited years before he came into his own; his preferred landscapists

+were Corot, Rousseau and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Scheffer

+and the "apes of sentiment"; while his discussions of Hogarth,

+Cruikshank, Pinelli and Breughel proclaim his versatility of vision. In

+his essay Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he was the first among critics

+to recognize the peculiar quality named "modernity," that nervous,

+naked vibration which informs the novels of Goncourt, Flaubert's

+L'Education Sentimentale, and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and

+Raffaelli with their evocations of a new, nervous Paris. It is in his

+Volume III., entitled, L'Art Romantique, that so many things dear to

+the new century were then subjects of furious quarrels. This book

+contains much just and brilliant writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to

+praise Wagner in Germany in 1876, but dangerous at Paris in 1861 to

+declare war on Wagner's critics. This Baudelaire did.</p>

+

+<p>The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard Manet were exceedingly cordial.

+In a letter to Théophile Thoré, the art critic (Letters, p. 361), we

+find Baudelaire defending his friend from the accusation that his

+pictures were <i>pastiches</i> of Goya. He wrote: "Manet has never seen

+Goya, never El Greco; he was never in the Pourtalés Gallery." Which may

+have been true at the time, 1864, but Manet visited Madrid and spent

+much time studying Velasquez and abusing Spanish cookery. (Consider,

+too, Goya's Balcony with Girls and Manet's famous Balcony.) Raging

+at the charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this same epistle:

+"They accuse even me of imitating Edgar Poe.... Do you know why I

+so patiently translated Poe? <i>Because he resembled me.</i>" The poet

+italicised these words. With stupefaction, therefore, he admired the

+mysterious coincidences of Manet's work with that of Goya and El Greco.</p>

+

+<p>He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him in a paternal and severe tone.

+Recall his reproof when urging the painter to exhibit his work. "You

+complain about attacks, but are you the first to endure them? Have you

+more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? They were not killed by

+derision. And in order not to make you too proud I must tell you that

+they are models, each in his way, and in a very rich world, while <i>you

+are only the first in the decrepitude of your art.</i>" (Letters, p. 436.)</p>

+

+<p>Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic words if he were able to

+revisit the glimpses of the Champs Elysées at the autumn Salons? What

+would he think of Cézanne? Odilon Redon he would understand, for he is

+the transposer of Baudelairianism to terms of design and colour. And

+perhaps the poet whose verse is saturated with tropical hues&mdash;he, when

+young, sailed in southern seas&mdash;might appreciate the monstrous debauch

+of form and colour in the Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin.</p>

+

+<p>Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial themes may be noted in his

+verse. He is <i>par excellence</i> the poet of æsthetics. To Daumier he

+inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Ernest Christophe, to Delacroix

+(Sur Le Tasse en Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Rêve Parisien), to an

+unknown master (Une Martyre); and Watteau, a Watteau à rebours, is

+seen in Un Voyage à Cy there; while in Les Phares this poet of ideal,

+spleen, music, and perfume shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da

+Vinci, Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, Delacroix&mdash;"Delacroix,

+lac de sang hanté des mauvais anges." And what could be more exquisite

+than his quatrain to Lola de Valence, a poetic inscription for the

+picture of Edouard Manet, with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as

+Verlaine: Le charme inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir! Heine called

+himself the last of the Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and the

+last of the Romantics was the many-sided Charles Baudelaire.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>He was born at Paris April 9, 1821 (Flaubert's birth year), and not

+April 21st as Gautier has it. His father was Joseph Francis Baudelaire,

+or Beaudelaire, who occupied a government position. A cultivated art

+lover, his taste was apparent in the home he made for his second wife,

+Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan and the daughter of a military

+officer. There was a considerable difference in the years of this pair;

+the mother was twenty-seven, the father sixty-two, at the birth of

+their only child. By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had one

+son, Claude, who, like his half-brother Charles, died of paralysis,

+though a steady man of business. That great neurosis, called Commerce,

+has its mental wrecks, too, but no one pays attention; only when the

+poet falls by the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists and other

+soul-hunters seeking for victims. After the death of Baudelaire's

+father, the widow, within a year, married the handsome, ambitious

+Aupick, then <i>chef de bataillon</i>, lieutenant-colonel, decorated with

+the Legion of Honour, and later general and ambassador to Madrid,

+Constantinople, and London. Charles was a nervous, frail youth, but

+unlike most children of genius, he was a scholar and won brilliant

+honours at school. His step-father was proud of him. From the Royal

+College of Lyons, Charles went to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris,

+but was expelled in 1839. Troubles soon began at home for him. He

+was irascible, vain, very precocious, and given to dissipation. He

+quarrelled with General Aupick, and disdained his mother. But she was

+to blame, she has confessed; she had quite forgotten the boy in the

+flush of her second love. He could not forget, or forgive what he

+called her infidelity to the memory of his father. Hamlet-like, he was

+inconsolable. The good bishop of Montpellier, who knew the family, said

+that Charles was a little crazy&mdash;second marriages usually bring woe in

+their train. "When a mother has such a son, she doesn't remarry," said

+the young poet. Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or sometimes,

+Dufais. He wrote in his journal: "My ancestors, idiots or maniacs ...

+all victims of terrible passions"; which was one of his exaggerations.

+His grand-father on the paternal side was a Champenois peasant, his

+mother's family presumably Norman, but not much is known of her

+forbears. Charles believed himself lost from the time his half-brother

+was stricken. He also believed that his instability of temperament&mdash;and

+he studied his "case" as would a surgeon&mdash;was the result of his

+parents' disparity in years.</p>

+

+<p>After his return from the East, where he did not learn English, as has

+been said&mdash;his mother taught him as a boy to converse in and write

+the language&mdash;he came into his little inheritance, about fifteen

+thousand dollars. Two years later he was so heavily in debt that his

+family asked for a guardian on the ground of incompetency. He had

+been swindled, being young and green. How had he squandered his money?

+Not exactly on opera-glasses, like Gérard de Nerval, but on clothes,

+pictures, furniture, books. The remnant was set aside to pay his debts.

+Charles would be both poet and dandy. He dressed expensively but

+soberly, in the English fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing

+hue of his habiliments black. In height he was medium, his eyes brown,

+searching, luminous, the eye of a nyctalops, "eyes like ravens'";

+nostrils palpitating, cleft chin, mouth expressive, sensual, the jaw

+strong and square. His hair was black, curly, and glossy, his forehead

+high, square, white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a beard; he is

+there, what Catulle Mendès nicknamed him: His Excellence, Monseigneur

+Brummel! Later he was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de

+N. S. le Diable; or the Baudelaire of George Moore: "the clean-shaven

+face of the mock priest, the slow cold eyes and the sharp cunning

+sneer of the cynical libertine who will be tempted that he may better

+know the worthlessness of temptation." In the heyday of his blood he

+was perverse and deliberate. Let us credit him with contradicting the

+Byronic notion that <i>ennui</i> could be best cured by dissipation; in sin

+Baudelaire found the saddest of all tasks. Mendès laughs at the legend

+of Baudelaire's violence, of his being given to explosive phrases.

+Despite Gautier's stories about the Hôtel Pimodan and its club of

+hasheesh-eaters, M. Mendès denies that Baudelaire was a victim of the

+hemp. What the majority of mankind does not know concerning the habits

+of literary workers is this prime fact: men who work hard, writing

+verse&mdash;and there is no mental toil comparable to it&mdash;cannot drink, or

+indulge in opium, without the inevitable collapse. The old-fashioned

+ideas of "inspiration," spontaneity, easy improvisation, the sudden

+bolt from heaven, are delusions still hugged by the world. To be told

+that Chopin filed at his music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy

+forged his thunderbolts, that Manet toiled like a labourer on the

+dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his devotion to poetic work,

+that Gautier was a hard-working journalist, is a disillusion for the

+sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged from Jupiter's skull to the

+desk of the poet is a pretty fancy; but Balzac and Flaubert did not

+encourage this fancy. Work literally killed Poe, as it killed Jules

+de Goncourt, Flaubert, and Daudet. Maupassant went insane because

+he would work and he would play the same day. Baudelaire worked and

+worried. His debts haunted him his life long. His constitution was

+flawed&mdash;Sainte-Beuve told him that he had worn out his nerves&mdash;from the

+start, he was <i>détraqué</i>; but that his entire life was one huge debauch

+is a nightmare of the moral police in some white cotton night-cap

+country.</p>

+

+<p>His period of mental production was not brief or barren. He was a

+student. Du Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is disproved by

+the variety and quality of his published work. His range of sympathies

+was large. His mistake, in the eyes of his colleagues, was to write

+so well about the seven arts. Versatility is seldom given its real

+name&mdash;which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was one of the elect, an

+aristocrat, who dealt with the quintessence of art; his delicate air of

+a bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated voice, aroused unusual

+interest and admiration. He was a humanist of distinction; he has left

+a hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the decadence. Baudelaire, like

+Chopin, made more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher intensity the

+expressiveness of art.</p>

+

+<p>Women played a commanding rôle in his life. They always do with any

+poet worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging

+this as Baudelaire. Yet he was in love more with Woman than the

+individual. The legend of the beautiful creature he brought from the

+East resolves itself into the dismal affair with Jeanne Duval. He met

+her in Paris, after he had been in the East. She sang at a café-concert

+in Paris. She was more brown than black. She was not handsome, not

+intelligent, not good; yet he idealized her, for she was the source of

+half his inspiration. To her were addressed those marvellous evocations

+of the Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious mornings on strange

+far-away seas and "superb Byzant" domes that devils built. Baudelaire

+is the poet of perfumes; he is also the patron saint of <i>ennui</i>. No one

+has so chanted the praise of odours. His soul swims on perfume as do

+other souls on music, he has sung. As he grew older he seemed to hunt

+for more acrid odours; he often presents an elaborately chased vase

+the carving of which transports us, but from which the head is quickly

+averted. Jeanne, whom he never loved, no matter what may be said, was

+a sorceress. But she was impossible; she robbed, betrayed him; he left

+her a dozen times only to return. He was a capital draughtsman with a

+strong nervous line and made many pen-and-ink drawings of her. They are

+not prepossessing. In her rapid decline, she was not allowed to want;

+Madame Aupick paying her expenses in the hospital. A sordid history.

+She was a veritable flower of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, like

+music, would be colourless, scentless, if it sounded no dissonances.

+Fancy art reduced to the beatific and banal chord of C major!</p>

+

+<p>He fell in love with the celebrated Madame Sabatier, a reigning beauty,

+at whose salon artistic Paris assembled. She had been christened by

+Gautier <i>Madame la Présidente</i>, and her sumptuous beauty was portrayed

+by Ricard in his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baudelaire's love.

+They soon parted. Again a riddle that the published letters hardly

+solve. One letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had tried to be

+faithful, and failed. He could not extort from his exhausted soul the

+sentiment; but he put its music on paper. His most seductive lyrics

+were addressed to Madame Sabatier: "A la très chère, à la très-belle,"

+a hymn saturated with love. Music, spleen, perfumes&mdash;"colour, sound,

+perfumes call to each other as deep to deep; perfumes like the flesh

+of children, soft as hautboys, green like the meadows"&mdash;criminals,

+outcasts, the charm of childhood, the horrors of love, pride, and

+rebellion, Eastern landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, the

+true companions of lonely poets; haunted clocks, shivering dusks, and

+gloomier dawns&mdash;Paris in a hundred phases&mdash;these and many other themes

+this strange-souled poet, this "Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris

+has celebrated in finely wrought verse and profound phrases. In a

+single line he contrives atmosphere; the very shape of his sentence,

+the ring of the syllables, arouses the deepest emotion. A master of

+harmonic undertones is Baudelaire. His successors have excelled him in

+making their music more fluid, more singing, more vapourous&mdash;all young

+French poets pass through their Baudelarian green-sickness&mdash;but he

+alone knows the secrets of moulding those metallic, free sonnets, which

+have the resistance of bronze; and of the despairing music that flames

+from the mouths of lost souls trembling on the wharves of hell. He is

+the supreme master of irony and troubled voluptuousness.</p>

+

+<p>Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved rather than sang; the plastic

+arts spoke to his soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, his

+emotions transformed themselves into ideas. Bourget classified him as

+mystic, libertine, and analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul,

+to use the phrase of Père Lacordaire. (Curiously enough, he actually

+contemplated, in 1861, becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant

+seat in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve dissuaded him from this

+folly.) Recall Baudelaire's prayer: "Thou, O Lord, my God, grant me

+the grace to produce some fine lines which will prove to myself that

+I am not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those I contemn."

+Individualist, egoist, anarchist, his only thought was of letters.

+Jules Laforgue thus described Baudelaire: "Cat, Hindoo, Yankee,

+Episcopal, alchemist." Yes, an alchemist who suffocated in the fumes

+he created. He was of Gothic imagination, and could have said with

+Rolla: <i>Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.</i> He had an

+unassuaged thirst for the absolute. The human soul was his stage, he

+its interpreting orchestra.</p>

+

+<p>In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published by the devoted

+Poulet-Malassis, who afterward went into bankruptcy&mdash;a warning to

+publishers with a taste for fine literature. The titles contemplated

+were Limbes, or Lesbiennes. Hippolyte Babou suggested the one we know.

+These poems were suppressed on account of six, and poet and publisher

+summoned. As the municipal government had made a particular ass of

+itself in the prosecution of Gustave Flaubert and his Madame Bovary,

+the Baudelaire matter was disposed of in haste. He was condemned to

+a fine of three hundred francs, a fine which was never paid, as the

+objectionable poems were removed. They were printed in the Belgian

+edition, and may be read in the new volume of Œuvres Posthumes.</p>

+

+<p>Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, for he knew that his book

+was dramatic in expression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to emerge

+from the trial with flying colours; to be classed as one who wrote

+objectionable literature was a shock. "Flaubert had the Empress back

+of him," he complained; which was true; the Empress Eugénie, also the

+Princess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put forth those polished

+intaglios called Poems in Prose, for the form of which he had taken a

+hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. He filled this form with

+a new content; not alone pictures, but moods, are to be found in these

+miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a tenderness for the abject and

+lowly, a revelation of sensibility that surprised those critics who had

+discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of evil. In one of his poems

+he described a landscape of metal, of marble and water; a babel of

+staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, surrounded by the silence

+of eternity. This depressing yet magical dream was utilised by Huysmans

+in his A Rebours. But in the tiny landscapes of the Prose Poems there

+is nothing rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate attitude

+of artificiality is dropped. He is human. Not that the deep fundamental

+note of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the eternal diapason

+is there even when least overheard. Baudelaire is more human than

+Poe. His range of sympathy is wider. In this he transcends him as a

+poet, though his subject-matter often issues from the very dregs of

+life. Brother to pitiable wanderers, there is, nevertheless, no trace

+of cant, no "Russian pity" <i>à la</i> Dostoïevsky, no humanitarian or

+socialistic rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist. He hated

+the sentimental sapping of altruism. His prose-poem, Crowds, with its

+"bath of multitude," may have been suggested by Poe; but in Charles

+Lamb we find the idea: "Are there no solitudes out of caves and the

+desert? or, cannot the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel frightfully

+alone?"</p>

+

+<p>His best critical work is the Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser, a more

+significant essay than Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth;

+Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more critical period in Wagner's

+career. Wagner sent a brief, hearty letter of thanks to the critic

+and made his acquaintance. To Wagner Baudelaire introduced a young

+Wagnerian, Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is included

+in the volume of Crépet; but there are no letters published from

+Baudelaire to Franz Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar I saw

+at the Liszt house several from Baudelaire which should have been

+included in the Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his reforms as

+he understood Wagner's. The German composer admired the French poet,

+and his Kundry, of the sultry second act, Parsifal, has a Baudelairian

+hue, especially in the temptation scene.</p>

+

+<p>The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been steadily, rather, unsteadily,

+going downhill; a desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He went

+out only after dark, he haunted the exterior boulevards, associated

+with birds of nocturnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate without

+hunger, as he has said. A woeful decadence for this aristocrat of

+life and letters. Most sorrowful of sinners, his morose delectation

+scourged his nerves and extorted the darkest music from his lyre. He

+fled to Brussels, there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. He

+gave a few lectures, and met Rops, Lemonnier, drank to forget, and

+forgot to work. He abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A country

+where the trees are black, the flowers without odour, and where there

+is no conversation. He, the brilliant <i>causeur</i>, the chief <i>blaguer</i>

+of a circle in which young James McNeill Whistler was reduced to the

+rôle of a listener&mdash;this most <i>spirituel</i> among artists found himself

+a failure in the Belgian capital. It may not be amiss to remind

+ourselves that Baudelaire was the creator of most of the paradoxes

+attributed, not only to Whistler, but to an entire school&mdash;if one may

+employ such a phrase. The frozen imperturbability of the poet, his

+cutting enunciation, his power of blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his

+love of the artificial, have been copied by the æsthetic blades of

+our day. He it was who first taunted Nature with being an imitator of

+art, with being always the same. Oh, the imitative sunsets! Oh, the

+quotidian eating and drinking! And as pessimist, too, he led the mode.

+Baudelaire, like Flaubert, grasped the murky torch of pessimism once

+held by Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, and Sénancour. Doubtless all

+this stemmed from Byronism. To-day it is all as stale as Byronism.</p>

+

+<p>His health failed rapidly, and he didn't have money enough to pay for

+doctor's prescriptions; he owed for the room in his hotel. At Namur,

+where he was visiting the father-in-law of Félicien Rops (March, 1866),

+he suffered from an attack of paralysis. He was removed to Brussels.

+His mother, who lived at Honfleur, in mourning for her husband, came

+to his aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sanatorium. Aphasia

+set in. He could only ejaculate a mild oath, and when he caught sight

+of himself in the mirror he would bow pleasantly as if to a stranger.

+His friends rallied, and they were among the most distinguished

+people in Paris, the <i>élite</i> of souls. Ladies visited him, one or two

+playing Wagner on the piano&mdash;which must have added a fresh <i>nuance</i> to

+death&mdash;and they brought him flowers. He expressed his love for flowers

+and music to the last. He could not bear the sight of his mother; she

+revived in him some painful memories, but that passed, and he clamoured

+for her when she was absent. If anyone mentioned the names of Wagner or

+Manet, he smiled. Madame Sabatier came; so did the Manets. And with a

+fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible window opening upon

+eternity, he died, August 31, 1867, aged forty-six.</p>

+

+<p>Barbey d'Aurevilly, himself a Satanist and dandy (oh, those comical old

+attitudes of literature!), had prophesied that the author of Fleurs du

+Mal would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot

+of the cross. (Later he said the same of Huysmans.) Baudelaire had the

+latter course forced upon him by fate after he had attempted spiritual

+suicide for how many years? (He once tried actual suicide, but the

+slight cut in his throat looked so ugly that he went no farther.) His

+soul had been a battle-field for the powers of good and evil. That at

+the end he brought the wreck of both soul and body to his God is not a

+subject of comment. He was an extraordinary poet with a bad conscience,

+who lived miserably and was buried with honours. Then it was that his

+worth was discovered (funeral orations over a genius are a species of

+public staircase wit). His reputation waxes with the years. He is an

+exotic gem in the crown of French poetry. Of him Swinburne has chanted

+Ave Atque Vale:</p>

+

+<p style="margin-left: 15%;">

+Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,<br />

+Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?<br />

+</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="III" id="III">III</a></h4>

+

+<h4>THE REAL FLAUBERT</h4>

+

+<p style="margin-left: 40%;">

+Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,<br />

+And did he stop and speak to you....<br />

+</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>It was some time in the late spring or early summer of 1879. I was

+going through the Chaussée d'Antin when a huge man, a terrific old

+man, passed me. His long straggling gray hair hung low. His red face

+was that of a soldier or a sheik, and was divided by drooping white

+moustaches. A trumpet was his voice, and he gesticulated freely

+to the friend who accompanied him. I did not look at him with any

+particular interest until some one behind me&mdash;if he be dead now may

+he be eternally blest!&mdash;exclaimed: "C'est Flaubert!" Then I stared;

+for though I had not read Madame Bovary I adored the verbal music of

+Salammbô, secretly believing, however, that it had been written by

+Melchior, one of the three Wise Kings who journeyed under the beckoning

+star of Bethlehem&mdash;how else account for its planturous Asiatic prose,

+for its evocations of a vanished past? But I knew the name of

+Flaubert, that magic collocation of letters, and I gazed at him. He

+returned my glance from prominent eyeballs, the colour of the pupil a

+bit of faded blue sky. He did not smile. He was too tender-hearted,

+despite his appreciation of the absurd. Besides, he knew, He, too, had

+been young and foolish. He, too, had worn a velvet coat and a comical

+cap, and had dreamed. I must have been a ridiculous spectacle. My hair

+was longer than my technique. I was studying Chopin or lunar rainbows

+then&mdash;I have forgotten which&mdash;and fancied that to be an artist one

+must dress like a cross between a brigand and a studio model. But I

+was happy. Perhaps Flaubert knew this, for he resisted the temptation

+to smile. And then he passed from my view. To be frank, I was not very

+much impressed, because earlier in the day I had seen Paul de Cassagnac

+and that famous duellist was romantic-looking, which the old Colossus

+of Croisset was not. When I returned to the Batignolles I told the

+<i>concièrge</i> of my day's outing.</p>

+

+<p>"Ah!" he remarked, "M. Flaubert! M. Paul de Cassagnac!&mdash;a great man,

+Monsieur P-paul!" He stuttered a little. Now I only remember "M.

+Flaubert," with his eyes like a bit of faded blue sky. Was it a dream?

+Was it Flaubert? Did some stranger cruelly deceive me? But I'll never

+relinquish the memory of my glorious mirage.</p>

+

+<p>Where was he going, Gustave Flaubert, on that sunny afternoon? It was

+at the time when Jules Ferry appointed him an assistant-librarian at

+the Mazarine; <i>hors cadre</i>, a sinecure, a veiled pension with 3,000

+francs a year; a charity, as the great writer bitterly complained. He

+was poor. He had given up, without a murmur, his entire fortune to his

+niece, then Madame Caroline Commainville, and through the influence

+of Turgenev and a few others this position had been created for him.

+He had no duties, yet he insisted on arriving at his post as early as

+half-past seven in the morning. He planned later that the government

+should be reimbursed for its outlay. His brother, Dr. Achille Flaubert,

+of Rouen, gave him a similar allowance, so the unhappy man had enough

+to live upon. Perhaps he was going to the Gare Saint-Lazare to take a

+train for Croisset; perhaps he was starting for Ancient Corinth&mdash;I

+thought&mdash;to see once more his Salammbô veiled by the sacred Zaïmph; or

+he might have been on the point of departing for Taprobana, the Ceylon

+of the antique world; that island whose very name he repeated with the

+same pleasure as did the old woman the blessed name of "Mesopotamia."</p>

+<hr class="r5" />

+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">

+<img src="images/huneker_fac_flaubert_letter02.jpg" width="500" alt="" />

+<p class="caption">Fac-simile of an unpublished Flaubert letter.</p>

+</div>

+<hr class="r5" />

+<p>Taprobana! Taprobana! would cry Gustave Flaubert, to the despair of

+his friends. He was a man in love with beautiful sounds. He filled

+his books with them and with beautiful pictures. You must go to

+Beethoven or Liszt for a like variety in rhythms; the Flaubertian

+prose rhythms change in every sentence, like a landscape alternately

+swept by sunlight or shadowed by clouds. They vary with the moods

+and movements of the characters. They are music for ear and eye. And

+they can never be translated. He is poet, painter, and composer,

+and he is the most artistic of novelists. If his work is deficient in

+sentiment; if he fails to strike the chords of pity of Dostoïevsky,

+Turgenev, and Tolstoy; if he lacks the teeming variety of Balzac, he

+is superior to them all as an artist. Because of his stern theories of

+art, he renounced the facile victories of sentimentalism. He does not

+invite his readers to smile or weep with him. He is not a manipulator

+of marionettes. And he can compress in a page more than Balzac in a

+volume. In part he derives from Chateaubriand, Gautier, and Hugo, and

+he was a lover of Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. His psychology

+is simple; he believed that character should express itself by action.

+His landscapes in the Dutch, "tight," miniature style, or the large,

+luminous, "loose" manner of Hobbema; or again full of the silver

+repose of Claude and the dark romantic beauty of Rousseau&mdash;witness

+the forest of Fontainebleau in Sentimental Education&mdash;are ravishing.

+He has painted interiors incomparably&mdash;this novel is filled with

+them: balls, café-life, political meetings, receptions, ladies in

+their drawing-rooms, Meissonier-like virtuosity in details or the

+bourgeois elegance of Alfred Stevens. As a portraitist Flaubert recalls

+Velasquez, Rembrandt, or Hals, and not a little of the <i>diablerie</i> to

+be found in the Flemish masters of grotesque. Emma Bovary is the most

+perfectly finished portrait in fiction and Frédéric Moreau is nearly

+as lifelike&mdash;the eternal middle-class Young Man. Madame Arnoux,

+chiefly rendered by marvellous evasions, is in the clear-obscure of

+Rembrandt. Homais stands alone, a subject the delineation of which

+Swift would have envied. And Rosannette Bron&mdash;the truest record of her

+class ever depicted, and during the same decade that saw the odious

+sentimental and false Camille. Or Salome in Hérodias, that vision,

+cruel, feline, exquisite, which lesser writers have sought vainly to

+imitate. (Gustave Moreau alone transposed her to paint&mdash;Moreau, too,

+was a cenobite of art.) Or Félicité in Trois Contes. Or the perpetual

+journalist, Hussonet, the swaggering politician, Regimbart, Pellerin,

+the dilettante painter, the socialist, Sénecal, and Arnoux, the

+immortal charlatan. Whatever subject Flaubert attacked, a masterpiece

+emerged. He left few books; each represents the pinnacle of its

+<i>genre</i>: Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, Hérodias, Bouvard

+and Pécuchet&mdash;this last-named an epitome of human stupidity. Not an

+original philosophic intellect, nevertheless a philosophy has been

+drawn from Flaubert's work by the brilliant French philosopher Jules

+Gaultier, who defines <i>Bovaryisme</i> as that tendency in mankind to

+appear other than it is; a tendency which is an important factor in

+our mental and social evolution. Without illusions mankind would take

+to the trees, the abode, we are told, of our prehistoric arboreal

+ancestors. Nevertheless, Emma Bovary as a philosophic symbol would have

+greatly astonished Gustave Flaubert.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>"Since Goethe," might be a capital title for an essay on the epics

+that were written after the death of the noblest German of them

+all. The list would be small. In France there are only the rather

+barren rhetorical exercise of Edgar Quinet's Ahasvérus, the surging

+insurrectionary poems of Hugo, and the faultlessly frigid performance

+of Leconte de Lisle. But a work of such heroic power and proportions as

+Faust there is not, except Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Antony, which

+is so impregnated by the Faustian spirit&mdash;though poles apart from

+the German poem in its development&mdash;that, when we hear the youthful

+Gustave was a passionate admirer and student of Goethe, even addressing

+a long poem in alexandrines to his memory, we are not surprised. The

+real Flaubert is only beginning to be revealed. His four volumes of

+correspondence, his single volume of letters addressed to George Sand,

+and the recently published letters to his niece Caroline&mdash;now Madame

+Franklin Grout of Antibes&mdash;have shown us a very different Flaubert

+from the legend chiefly created by Maxime du Camp. Dr. Félix Dumesnil,

+in his remarkable study, has told us of the Rouen master's neurasthenia

+and has utterly disproved Du Camp's malicious yarns about epilepsy.

+Above all, Flaubert's devotion to Goethe and the recent publication of

+the first version of his Saint Antony have presented a novel picture

+of his personality. We now know that, striving to become impersonal

+in art, he is personal and present in every page he ever wrote;

+furthermore that, despite his incessant clamours and complaints, he, in

+reality, loved his galley-like, self-imposed labours.</p>

+

+<p>The Temptation of Saint Antony is the only modern poem of epical

+largeness that may be classed with Brand or Zarathustra. It recalls

+at times the Second Part of Faust in its sweep and grandeur, in its

+grandiose visions; but though it is superior in verbal beauty it

+falls short of Goethe in its presentation of the problems of human

+will. Faust is a man who wills; Antony is static, not dynamic; the

+one is tempted by the Devil and succumbs, but does not lose his soul;

+Flaubert's hermit resists the Devil at his subtlest, yet we do not feel

+that his soul is as much worth the saving as Faust's. Ideas are the

+heroes in Flaubert's prose epic. Saint Antony is a metaphysical drama,

+not a human one like Faust; nevertheless, to Faust alone may we compare

+it.</p>

+

+<p>Flaubert was born at Rouen, December 12, 1821, where he died May 18,

+1880. That he practically passed his years at Croisset, his mother's

+home, below Rouen facing the Seine, and in his study toiling like

+a titan over his books, should be recorded in every text-book of

+literature. For he is the patron-saint of all true literary men. He

+had a comfortable income. He thought, talked, lived literature. His

+friends Du Camp, Louis Bouilhet, Turgenev, Taine, Baudelaire, Zola,

+the Goncourts, Daudet, Renan, Maupassant, Henry James, have testified

+to his absorption in his art. It is almost touching in these times when

+a man goes into the writing business as if vending tripe, to recall

+the example of Flaubert for whom art was more sacred than religion.

+Naturally, he has been proved by the madhouse doctors to have been half

+cracked. Perhaps he was not as sane as a stockbroker, but it takes all

+sorts to make a world and a writer of Flaubert's rank should not be

+weighed in the same scales with, say, a successful politician.</p>

+

+<p>He was endowed with a nervous temperament, though up to his

+twenty-second year he was as handsome and as free from sickness as a

+god. He was very tall and his eyes were sea-green. A nervous crisis

+supervened and at wide intervals returned. It was almost fatal for

+Gustave. He became pessimistic and afraid of life. However, the talk

+of his habitual truculent pessimism has been exaggerated. Naturally

+optimistic, with a powerful constitution and a stout heart, he worked

+like the Trojan he was. His pessimism came with the years during his

+boyhood&mdash;Byronic literary spleen was in the air. He was a grumbler

+and rather overdid the peevish pose. As Zola asked: "What if he had

+been forced to earn his living by writing?" But, even in his blackest

+moods, he was glad to see his friends at Croisset, glad to go up to

+Paris for recreation. His letters, so free, fluent, explosive, give

+us the true Flaubert who childishly roared yet was so hearty, so

+friendly, so loving to his mother, niece, and intimates. His heredity

+was puzzling. His father was, like Baudelaire's grandfather, of

+Champenois stock; bourgeois, steady, a renowned surgeon. From him

+Gustave inherited his taste for all that pertained to medicine and

+science. Recall his escapades as a boy when he would peep for hours

+into the dissecting-room of the Rouen hospital. Such matters fascinated

+him. He knew more about the theory and practice of medicine than

+many professional men. An air of mortality exhales from his pages.

+He is in Madame Bovary the keen soul-surgeon. His love of a quiet,

+sober existence came to him from his father. He clung to one house

+for nearly a half century. He has said that one must live like a

+bourgeois and think like an artist; to be ascetic in life and violent

+in art&mdash;that was a Flaubert maxim. "I live only in my ideas," he

+wrote. But from the mother's side, a Norman and aristocrat she was, he

+inherited his love of art, his disdain for philistines, his adventurous

+disposition&mdash;transposed because of his malady to the cerebral region,

+to his imagination. He boasted Canadian blood, "red skin," he called

+it, but that was merely a mystification. The dissonance of temperament

+made itself felt early. He was the man of Goethe with two spirits

+struggling within him. Dual in temperament, he swung from an almost

+barbaric Romanticism to a cruel analysis of life that made him the

+pontiff of the Realistic school. He hated realism, yet an inner

+force set him to the disagreeable task of writing Madame Bovary and

+Sentimental Education&mdash;the latter, with its daylight atmosphere, the

+supreme exemplar of realism in fiction. So was it with his interior

+life. He was a mystic who no longer believed. These dislocations of

+his personality he combated all his life, and his books show with what

+success. "Flaubert," wrote Turgenev, his closest friend, to George

+Sand, "has tenacity without energy, just as he has self-love without

+vanity." But what tenacity!</p>

+

+<p>Touching on the question of epilepsy, a careful reading of Dumesnil

+convinces anyone, but the neurologist with a fixed idea, that Flaubert

+was not a sufferer from genuine epilepsy. Not that there is any

+reason why epilepsy and genius should be divorced; we know in many

+cases the contrary is the reverse. Take the case of Dostoïevsky&mdash;his

+epilepsy was one of the most fruitful of motives in his stories.

+Nearly all his heroes and heroines are attainted. (Read The Idiot or

+the Karamsoff Brothers.) But Flaubert's epilepsy was arranged for

+him by Du Camp, who thought that by calling him an epilept in his

+untrustworthy Memoirs he would belittle Flaubert. And he did, for in

+his time the now celebrated&mdash;and discredited&mdash;theory of genius and

+its correlation with the falling-sickness had not been propounded.

+Flaubert had hystero-neurasthenia. He was rheumatic, asthmatic,

+predisposed to arterio-sclerosis and apoplexy. He died of an apoplectic

+stroke. His early nervous fits were without the <i>aura</i> of epilepsy;

+he did not froth at the mouth nor were there muscular contractions;

+not even at his death. Dr. Tourneaux, who hastened to aid him in the

+absence of his regular physician, Dr. Fortin, denied the rumours of

+epilepsy that were so gaily spread by that sublime old gossip, Edmond

+de Goncourt, also by Zola and Du Camp. The contraction of Flaubert's

+hands was caused by the rigidity of death; most conclusive of all

+evidence against the epileptic theory is the fact that during his

+occasional fits Gustave never lost consciousness. Nor did he suffer

+from any attacks before he had attained his majority, whereas epilepsy

+usually begins at an early age. He studied with intense zeal his malady

+and in a dozen letters refers to it, tickets its symptoms, tells of

+plans to escape the crises, and altogether, has furnished students

+of pathology many examples of nerve-exhaustion and its mitigation.

+His first attacks began at Pont-Audemar, in 1843. In 1849 he had a

+fresh attack. His trip to the Orient relieved him. He was a Viking, a

+full-blooded man, who scorned sensible hygiene; he took no exercise

+beyond a walk in the morning, a walk in the evening on his terrace,

+and in summer an occasional swim in the Seine. He ate copiously, was

+moderate in drinking, smoked fifteen or twenty pipes a day, abused

+black coffee, and for months at a stretch worked fifteen hours out of

+the twenty-four at his desk. He warned his disciple, Guy de Maupassant,

+against too much boating as being destructive of mental productivity.

+After Nietzsche read this he wrote: "Sedentary application is the

+very sin against the Holy Ghost. Only thoughts won by walking are

+valuable." In 1870 another crisis was brought on by protracted labours

+over the revision of the definitive version of the Saint Antony. His

+travels in Normandy, in the East, his visits to London (1851) and

+to Righi-Kaltbad, together with sojourns in Paris&mdash;where he had a

+little apartment&mdash;make up the itinerary of his fifty-eight years. Is

+it any wonder that he died of apoplexy, stricken at his desk, he of a

+violently sanguine temperament, bull-necked, and the blood always in

+his face?</p>

+

+<p>Maurice Spronck, who took too seriously the saying of Flaubert&mdash;a lover

+of extravagant paradox&mdash;thinks the writer had a cerebral lesion, which

+he called <i>audition colorée</i>. It is a malady peculiar to imaginative

+natures, which transposes tone to colour, or odour to sound. As this

+"malady" may be found in poets from the dawn of creation, "coloured

+audition" must be a necessary quality of art. Flaubert took pains to

+exaggerate his speech when in company with the Goncourts. He suspected

+their diary-keeping weakness and he humoured it by telling fibs about

+his work. "I have finished my book, the cadence of the last paragraph

+has been found. Now I shall write it." Aghast were the brothers at

+the idea of an author beginning his book backward. Flaubert boasted

+that the colour of Salammbô was purple. Sentimental Education (a

+bad title, as Turgenev wrote him; Withered Fruits, his first title,

+would have been better) was gray, and Madame Bovary was for him like

+the colouring of certain mouldy wood-vermin. The Goncourts solemnly

+swallowed all this, as did M. Spronck. Which moved Anatole France to

+exclaim: "Oh these young clinicians!"</p>

+

+<p>But what is all this when compared with the magnificent idiocy of Du

+Camp, who asserted that if Flaubert had not suffered from epilepsy

+<i>he would have become a genius! Hénaurme!</i> as the man who made such

+masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Temptation of

+Saint Antony, the Three Tales, Bouvard et Pécuchet, had a comical

+habit of exclaiming. Enormous, too, was Guy de Maupassant's manner

+of avenging his master's memory. In the final edition&mdash;eight volumes

+long&mdash;Maupassant, with the unerring eye of hatred, affixed an

+introduction to Bouvard et Pécuchet. Therein he printed Maxime du

+Camp's letters to Flaubert during the period when Madame Bovary was

+appearing in the <i>Revue de Paris</i>. Du Camp was one of its editors.

+He urged Flaubert to cut the novel&mdash;the concision of which is so

+admirable, the organic quality of which is absolute. Worse still

+remains. If Flaubert couldn't perform the operation himself, then the

+aforesaid Du Camp would hire some experienced hack to do it for the

+sensitive author; wounded vanity Du Camp believed to be the cause of

+indignant remonstrances. They eliminated the scene of the agricultural

+fair and the operation on the hostler's foot&mdash;one scene as marvellous

+as a <i>genre</i> painting by Teniers with its study of the old farm

+servant, and psychologically more profound; the other necessary to

+the development of the story. Thus Madame Bovary was slaughtered

+serially by a man ignorant of art, that Madame Bovary which is one of

+the glories of French literature, as Mr. James truly says. Flaubert

+scribbled on Du Camp's letters another of his favourite expletives,

+<i>Gigantesque!</i> Flaubert never forgave him, but they were apparently

+reconciled years later. Du Camp went into the Academy; Flaubert refused

+to consider a candidacy, though Victor Hugo&mdash;wittily nicknamed by Jules

+Laforgue "Aristides the Just"&mdash;urged him to do so. Even the mighty

+Balzac was too avid of glory and gold for Flaubert, to whom art and its

+consolations were all-sufficing.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>Bouvard et Pécuchet was never finished. Its increasing demands killed

+Flaubert. In his desk were found many cahiers of notes taken to

+illustrate the fatuity of mankind, its stupidity, its <i>bêtise</i>. He was

+as pitiless as Swift or Schopenhauer in his contempt for low ideals

+and vulgar pretensions, for the very bourgeois from whom he sprung. In

+the collection we find this gem of wisdom uttered by Louis Napoleon in

+1865: "The richness of a country depends on its general prosperity." To

+it should be included the Homais-like dictum of Maxime du Camp that

+if Flaubert had not been an epilept he would have been a genius! Or,

+the following hospital criticism; Flaubert was denied creative ability!

+Who has denied it to him? Homais alone in his supreme asininity should

+be a beacon-light of warning for any one of these inept critics.

+Flaubert once wrote: "I am reading books on hygiene; how comical they

+are! What impertinence these physicians have! What asses for the

+most part they are!" And he, the son of a celebrated surgeon and the

+brother of another, a medical student himself, might have made Homais a

+psychiatrist instead of a druggist, if he had lived longer.</p>

+

+<p>Du Camp&mdash;who, clever and witty as well as inexact and reckless in

+statement, was a man given to envies and literary jealousies&mdash;never got

+over Flaubert's startling success with Madame Bovary. He once wrote

+a fanciful epitaph for Louise Colet, a French woman of mediocrity,

+the "Muse" of Flaubert, a general trouble-breeder and a recipient

+of Flaubert's correspondence. The Colet had embroiled herself with

+De Musset and published a spiteful romance in which poor Flaubert

+was the villain. This the Du Camp inscription: "Here lies the woman

+who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset ridiculous,

+calumniated Gustave Flaubert, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr:

+Requiescat in pace." A like epitaph suggests itself for Maxime du Camp:

+<i>Hic jacet</i> the man who slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving

+friend Gustave Flaubert, and was snuffed out of critical existence by

+Guy de Maupassant.</p>

+

+<p>The massive-shouldered Hercules, Flaubert, a Hercules spinning prose

+for his exacting Dejanira of art, was called unintelligent by Anatole

+France. He had not, it is true, the subtle critical brain and thorough

+scholarship of M. France; yet Flaubert was learned. Brunetière

+even taxed him with an excess of erudition. But his multitudinous

+conversation, his lack of logic, his rather gross sense of humour, are

+not to be found in his work. Without that work, without Salammbô, for

+example, should we have had the pleasure, thrice-distilled, of reading

+Anatole France's Thaïs? (See a single instance in the definitive

+edition Temptation, page 115, the episode of the Gymnosophist.) All

+revivals of the antique world are unsatisfactory at best, whether

+Chateaubriand's Martyrs, or the unsubstantial lath and plaster of

+Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, or the flabbiness and fustian of Quo

+Vadis. The most perfect attempt is Salammbô, an opera in words, and its

+battlements of purple prose were riddled by Sainte-Beuve, by Froehner,

+and lately by Maurice Pézard&mdash;who has proved to his own satisfaction

+that Flaubert was sadly amiss in his Punic archæology. Well, who cares

+if he was incorrect in details? His partially successful reconstruction

+of an epoch is admitted, though the human element is somewhat

+obliterated. Flaubert was bound to be more Carthaginian than Carthage.</p>

+

+<p>After the scandal caused by the prosecution of Madame Bovary Flaubert

+was afraid to publish his 1856, second version of Saint Antony. He had

+been advised by the sapient Du Camp to cast the manuscript into the

+fire, after a reading before Bouilhet and Du Camp lasting thirty-three

+hours. He refused. This was in September, 1849. Du Camp declares that

+he asked him to essay "the Delaunay affair" meaning the Delamarre

+story. This Flaubert did, and the result was the priceless history

+of Charles and Emma Bovary. D'Aurevilly attacked the book viciously;

+Baudelaire defended it. Later Turgenev wrote to Flaubert: "After all

+you are Flaubert!" George Sand was a motherly consoler. Their letters

+are delightful. She did not quite understand the bluff, naïve Gustave,

+she who composed so flowingly, and could turn on or off her prose

+like the tap of a kitchen hydrant (the simile is her own). How could

+she fathom the tormented desire of her friend for perfection, for the

+blending of idea and image, for the eternal pursuit of the right word,

+the shapely sentence, the cadenced <i>coda</i> of a paragraph? And of the

+larger demands of style, of the subtle tone of a page, a chapter, a

+book, why should this fluent and graceful writer, called George Sand,

+concern herself with such superfluities! It was always <i>O altitudo</i> in

+art with Flaubert&mdash;the most copious, careless of correspondents. He had

+set for himself an impossible standard of perfection and an ideal of

+impersonality neither of which he realized. But there is no outward

+sign of conflict in his work; all trace of the labour bestowed upon his

+paragraphs is absent. His style is simple, direct, large, above all,

+clear, the clarity of classic prose.</p>

+

+<p>His declaiming aloud his sentences has been adduced to prove his

+absence of sanity. Beethoven, too, was pronounced crazy by his various

+landladies because he sang and howled in his voice of a composer his

+compositions in the making. Flaubert was the possessor of an accurate

+musical ear; not without justice did Coppée call him the "Beethoven

+of French prose." His sense of rhythm was acute; he carried it so

+far that he would sacrifice grammar to rhythmic flow. He tested his

+sentences aloud. Once in his apartment, Rue Murillo, overlooking Parc

+Monceau, he rehearsed a page of a new book for hours. Belated coachmen,

+noting the open windows, hearing an outrageous vocal noise, concluded

+that a musical soiree was in progress. Gradually the street filled on

+either side with carriages in search of passengers. But the guests

+never emerged from the house. In the early morning the lights were

+extinguished and the oaths of the disappointed ones must have been

+heard by Flaubert.</p>

+

+<p>He would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts. His

+bump of scrupulousness was large. In twenty pages he sometimes saved

+three or four from destruction. He did not become, however, as

+captious as Balzac in the handling of proofs. A martyr of style, he

+was not altogether an enameller in precious stones, not a patient

+mosaic-maker, superimposing here and there a precious verbal jewel.

+First, the image, and then its appropriate garb; sometimes image and

+phrase were born simultaneously, as was the case with Richard Wagner.

+These extraordinary things may happen to men of genius, who are neither

+opium-eaters nor lunatics. The idea that Flaubert was ever addicted to

+drugs&mdash;beyond the quinine with which his good father dosed him after

+the fashion of those days&mdash;is ridiculous. The gorgeous visions of Saint

+Antony are the results of stupendous preparatory studies, a stupendous

+power of fantasy, and a stupendous concentration. Opium superinduces

+visions, but not the power and faculty of attention to record them in

+terms of literature for forty years. George Saintsbury has pronounced

+Saint Antony the most perfect specimen of dream literature extant. And

+because of its precision in details, its architectonic, its deep-hued

+waking hallucinations.</p>

+

+<p>Flaubert was a very nervous man, "as hysterical as an old woman," said

+Dr. Hardy of the hospital Saint-Louis, but neither mad nor epileptic.

+His mental development was not arrested in his youth, as asserted by

+Du Camp; he had arranged his life from the time he decided to become

+a writer. He was one with the exotic painter, Gustave Moreau, in his

+abhorrence of the mob. He was a poet who wrote a perfect prose, not

+prose-poetry. Enamoured of the antique, of the Orient, of mystical

+subjects, he spent a lifetime in the elaboration of his beloved

+themes. That he was obsessed by them is merely to say that he was the

+possessor of mental energy and artistic gifts. He was not happy. He

+never brought his interior and exterior lives into complete harmony. An

+unparalleled observer, an imaginative genius, he was a child outside

+the realm of art. Soft of heart, he raised his niece as a daughter;

+a loving son, he would console himself after his mother's death by

+looking at the dresses she once wore. Flaubert a sentimentalist! He

+outlived his family and his friends, save a few; death was never far

+away from his thoughts; he would weep over his souvenirs. At Croisset I

+have talked with the faithful Colange, whose card reads: "E. Colange,

+ex-cook of Gustave Flaubert!" The affection of the novelist for cats

+and dogs, he told me, was marked. The study pavilion is to-day a

+Flaubert Memorial. The parent house is gone, and in 1901 there was

+a distillery on the grounds, which is now a printing establishment.

+Flaubert cherished the notion that Pascal had once stopped in the old

+Croisset homestead; that Abbé Prévost had written Manon Lescaut within

+its walls. He had many such old-fashioned and darling <i>tics</i>, and he is

+to be envied them.</p>

+

+<p>Since Madame Bovary French fiction, for the most part, has been

+Flaubert with variations. His influence is still incalculable. François

+Coppée wrote: "By the extent and the magnificence of his prose, Gustave

+Flaubert equals Bossuet and Chateaubriand. He is destined to become a

+great classic. And several centuries hence&mdash;everything perishes&mdash;when

+the French language shall have become only a dead language, candidates

+for the bachelor's degree will be able to obtain it only by expounding

+(along with the famous exordium, He Who Reigns in the Heavens, etc.,

+or The Departure of the Swallows, of René) the portrait of Catharine

+le Roux, the farm servant, in Madame Bovary, or the episode of the

+Crucified Lions in Salammbô."</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>IV</h5>

+

+

+<p>With the critical taste that uncovers bare the bones of the dead I have

+no concern, nor shall I enter the way which would lead me into the

+dusty region of professional ethics. Every portrait painter from Titian

+to John Sargent, from Velasquez to Zuloaga, has had a model. Novelists

+are no less honest when they build their characters upon human beings

+they have known and studied, whether their name be Fielding or Balzac

+or Flaubert.</p>

+

+<p>The curiosity which seeks to unveil the anonymity of a novelist's

+personages may not be exactly laudable; it is yet excusable. I am

+reminded of its existence by a certain Parisian journalist who, acting

+upon information that appeared in the pages of a well-known French

+literary review, went to Normandy in search of the real Emma Bovary.

+Once called wicked, the novel has been pronounced as moral as a

+Sunday-school tract. Thackeray admired its style, but deplored, with

+his accustomed streak of sentimentalism, the cold-blooded analysis

+which hunted Emma to an ignominious grave. Yet the author of Vanity

+Fair did not hesitate to pursue through many chapters his mercurial

+Rebecca Sharp.</p>

+

+<p>The story of Emma Bovary would hardly attract, if published in the

+daily news columns, much attention nowadays. A good-looking young

+provincial woman tires of her honest, slow-going husband. She reads

+silly novels, as do thousands of silly married girls to-day. Emma lived

+in a little town not far from Rouen. Flaubert named it Yonville. We

+read that Emma flirted with a country squire who in order to escape

+eloping with the romantic goose suddenly disappeared. She consoled

+herself with a young law student, but when he tired of her the

+consequences were lamentable. Harassed by debt, Emma took poison. Her

+stupid husband, a hard-working district doctor, was aghast at her death

+and puzzled by the ruin which followed fast at its heels. He found it

+all out, even the love-letters of the squire. He died suddenly.</p>

+

+<p>A sordid tale, but perfectly told and remarkable not only for the

+fidelity of the landscapes, the chaste restraint of the style, but

+also because there are half a dozen marvellously executed characters,

+several of which have entered into the living current of French speech.

+Homais, the vainglorious, yet human and likable Homais, is a synonym

+for pedantic bragging mediocrity. He is a druggist. He would have

+made an ideal politician. He stands for a shallow "modernity" but is

+more superstitious than a mediæval sexton. Flaubert's novel left an

+indelible mark in French fiction and philosophy. Even Balzac did not

+create a Homais.</p>

+

+<p>Now comes the curious part of the story. It was the transcription

+of a real occurrence. Flaubert did not invent it. In a town near

+Rouen named Ry there was once a young physician, Louis Delamarre. He

+originally hailed from Catenay, where his father practised medicine.

+In the novel Ry is called Yonville. Delamarre paid his addresses to

+Delphine Couturier, who in 1843 was twenty-three years of age. She was

+comely, had a bright though superficial mind, spoke in a pretentious

+manner, and over-dressed. From her father she inherited her vanity

+and the desire to appear as occupying a more exalted position than

+she did. The elder Couturier owned a farm, though heavily mortgaged,

+at Vieux-Château. He was a close-fisted Norman anxious to marry off

+his daughters&mdash;Emma had a sister. He objected to the advances of the

+youthful physician, chiefly because he saw no great match for his girl.

+Herein the tale diverges from life.</p>

+

+<p>But love laughs at farmers as well as locksmiths, and by a ruse worthy

+of Paul de Kock, Delphine, by feigning maternity, got the parental

+permission. She soon regretted her marriage. The husband, Louis, was

+prosaic. He earned the daily bread and butter of the household, and

+even economised so that his pretty wife could buy fallals and foolish

+books. She hired a servant and had her day at home&mdash;Fridays. No one

+visited her. She was only an unimportant spouse of a poverty-stricken

+country doctor. At Saint-Germain des Essours there still lives an

+octogenarian peasant woman once the domestic of the Delamarres-Bovarys.

+She said, when asked to describe her mistress: "Heavens, but she was

+pretty. Face, figure, hair, all were beautiful."</p>

+

+<p>In Ry there was a druggist named Jouanne. He is the original Homais.

+Delphine's, or rather Emma Bovary's, first admirer was a law clerk,

+Louis Bottet. He is described as a small, impatient, alert old man

+at the time of his death. The faithless Rodolphe&mdash;what a name for

+sentimental melodrama&mdash;was really a proprietor named Campion. He lost

+his farm and revenue after Emma's death and went to America to make

+his fortune. Unsuccessful, he returned to Paris, and about 1852 shot

+himself on the boulevard. Who may deny, after this, that truth is

+stranger than Flaubert's fiction?</p>

+

+<p>The good, sensible old Abbé Boumisien, who advised Emma Bovary, when

+she came to him for spiritual consolation, to consult her doctor

+husband, was, in reality, an Abbé Lafortune. The irony of events is

+set forth in sinister relief by the epitaph which the real Emma's

+husband had carved on her tomb: "She was a good mother, a good wife."

+Gossips of Ry aver that after the truth came to Dr. Delamarre he took

+a slow poison. But this seems turning the screw a trifle too far. Mme.

+Delamarre, or Emma Bovary, was buried in the graveyard of the only

+church at Ry. To-day the tomb is no longer in existence. She died March

+6, 1848. The inhabitants still show the church,&mdash;the porch of which

+was too narrow to allow the passage of unlucky Emma's coffin&mdash;the

+house of her husband, and the apothecary shop of M. Homais. The latter

+survived for many years the unhappy heroine, who stole the poison that

+killed her from his stock. A delightful touch of Homais-like humour was

+displayed&mdash;one that exonerated Flaubert from the charge of exaggeration

+in portraying Homais&mdash;when the novel appeared. The characters were at

+once recognized, both in Rouen and Ry. This druggist, Jouanne-Homais,

+was flattered at the lengthy study of himself, of course missing its

+relentless ironic strokes. He regretted openly that the author had not

+consulted him; for, said he, "I could have given him many points about

+which he knew nothing." The epitaph which the real Homais composed for

+the tomb of his wife&mdash;surely you can never forget her after reading the

+novel&mdash;is magnificent in its bombast. Flaubert knew his man.</p>

+

+<p>The distinguished writer is a sober narrator of facts. His is not a

+domain of delicate thrills. His women are neither doves nor devils.

+He does not paint those acrobats of the soul so dear to psychological

+fiction. Despite his pretended impassibility, he is tender-hearted;

+the pity he felt for his characters is not effusively expressed. But

+the larger rhythms of humanity are ever present. If he had been hard of

+heart, he would have related the Bovary tale as it happened in life.

+Charles Bovary finds the love-letters and meets Rodolphe. Nothing

+happens. The real Charles never knew of the real Emma's treachery.

+Madame d'Epinay was not far amiss when she wrote: "The profession of

+woman is very hard."</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>V</h5>

+

+

+<p>No less a masterpiece than Don Quixote has been cited in critical

+comparison with Madame Bovary. Flaubert was called the Cervantes who

+had ridiculed from the field the Romantic School. This irritated him,

+for he never posed as a realist; indeed, he confessed that he had

+intended to mock the Realistic School&mdash;then headed by Champfleury&mdash;in

+his Bovary. The very name of this book would arouse a storm of abuse

+from him. He knew that he had more than one book in him, he believed

+better books; the indifference of the public to Sentimental Education

+and the Temptation he never understood. Much astonishment was

+expressed, after the appearance of Bovary, that such a mature work of

+art should have been the author's first. But Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms

+did not permit their juvenile efforts to see the light; the same

+was the case with Flaubert. In 1835&mdash;he was fourteen at the time&mdash;he

+wrote Mort du Duc de Guise; in 1836 another historical study. Short

+stories in the style of Hoffmann, with thrilling titles, such as Rage

+et Impuissance, Le Rêve d'Enfer (1837), and a psychologic effort,

+Agonies (dedicated to Alfred le Poittevin&mdash;as are both versions of

+the Temptation; Alfred's sister later became the mother of Guy de

+Maupassant): all these exercises, as is a Dance of Death, are still in

+manuscript. But in 1839 a scenario of a mystery bearing the cryptic

+title of Smarh was written; and this with Novembre, and a study of

+Rabelais, and Nuit de Don Juan, have been published in the definitive

+edition; with a record of travels in Normandy. The Memoirs of a Madman

+appeared a few years ago in a Parisian magazine. It was a youthful

+effort. There is also in the collection of Madame Grout a 300-page

+manuscript (1843-1845) named L'Education Sentimentale&mdash;vaguely inspired

+by Wilhelm Meister&mdash;which has nothing in common with his novel of the

+same name published in 1869.</p>

+

+<p>Flaubert's taste in the matter of titles was lamentable. He made a

+scenario for a tale called Spiral, and he often asserted that he

+hankered to write in marmoreal prose the Combat of Thermopylae;

+he meditated, too, a novel the scene and characters laid in the

+Second Empire, and dilated upon the beauty of a portrait executed in

+microscopic detail of that immortal character, M. le Préfet. We might

+have had a second Homais if he had made this project a reality. He told

+Turgenev that he had another idea, a sort of modern Matron of Ephesus

+&mdash;in the Temptation there is an episode that suggests the Ephesus.

+He did not lack invention and he was an extremely rapid writer&mdash;but

+his artistic conscience was morbidly sensitive. It pained him to see

+Zola throwing his better self to the dogs in his noisy, inartistic

+novels&mdash;in which, he said, was neither poetry nor art. And he wrote

+this opinion to Zola, who promptly called him an idiot. In that correct

+but colourless book of Faguet's on Flaubert, the critic makes note

+of all the novelist's grammatical errors and reaches the conclusion

+that he was a stylist unique, but not careful in his grammar. Now,

+while this is piffling pedantry, the facts are in Faguet's favour;

+Faguet, who holds the critical scales nicely, as he always does,

+though listlessly. But in the handling of such a robust, red-blooded

+subject as Flaubert the college professor was hardly a wise selection.

+The Faguet study is clear and painstaking but not sympathetic. Mr.

+James has praised it, possibly because Faguet agrees with him as to

+the psychology of Sentimental Education. Not a study, Faguet's, for

+Flaubertians, who see the faults of their Saint Polycarp&mdash;his favourite

+self-appellation&mdash;and love him for his all-too-human imperfections.</p>

+

+<p>In 1845 Flaubert, on a visit to Italy, stopped at Genoa. There, in the

+Palace Balbi-Senarega&mdash;and not at the Doria, as Du Camp wrote, with

+his accustomed carelessness&mdash;the young Frenchman saw an old picture by

+Breughel (probably by Pieter the Younger, surnamed Hell-Breughel) that

+represents a temptation of Saint Antony. It is hardly a masterpiece,

+this Breughel, and is dingy in colour. But Flaubert, who loved the

+grotesque, procured an engraving of this picture and it hung in his

+study at Croisset until the day of his death. It was the spring-board

+of his own Temptation. The germ may be found in his mystery, Smarh,

+with its Demon and metaphysical colouring. Breughel set into motion the

+mental machinery of the Temptation that never stopped whirring until

+1874. The first <i>brouillon</i> of the Temptation was begun May 24, 1848,

+and finished September 12, 1849. It numbered 540 pages of manuscript.

+Set aside for Bovary, Flaubert took up the draft again and made the

+second version in 1856. When he had done with it, the manuscript was

+reduced to 193 pages. Not satisfied, he returned to the work in 1872,

+and when ready for publication in 1874 the number of pages were 136.

+He even then cut, from ten chapters, three. Last year the French

+world read the second version of 1856 and was astonished to find it

+so different from the definitive one of 1874. The critical sobriety

+and courage of Flaubert were vindicated. In 1849, reading to Bouilhet

+and Du Camp, he had been advised to burn the stuff; instead he boiled

+it down for the 1856 version. To Turgenev he had submitted the 1872

+draft, and thus it came that this wonderful coloured-panorama of

+philosophy, this Gulliver-like travelling amid the master ideas of the

+antique and the early Christian worlds, was published.</p>

+

+<p>All the youthful romantic Flaubert&mdash;the "spouter" of blazing phrases,

+the lover of jewelled words, of monstrous and picturesque ideas and

+situations&mdash;is in the first turbulent version of the Temptation. In

+the later version he is more critical and historical. Flaubert had

+grown intellectually as his emotions had cooled with the years. The

+first Temptation is romantic and religious; the 1874 version cooler

+and more sceptical. Dramatic, arranged more theatrically than the

+first, the author's affection for mysticism, the East, and the classic

+world shows more in this version. Psychologic gradations of character

+and events are clearer in the second version. I cannot agree with

+Louis Bertrand, who edited the 1856 version, that it is superior in

+interest to the 1874 version. It is a novelty, but Flaubert was never

+so much the surgeon as when he operated upon his own manuscript. He

+often hesitated, he always suffered, and he never flinched when his

+mind was finally satisfied. Faguet calls the Temptation an abstract

+pessimistic novel. He also complains that the philosophic ideas are not

+novel; a new philosophy would be a veritable phoenix. Why should they

+be? Flaubert does not enunciate a new philosophy. He is the artist

+who shows us apocalyptic visions of all philosophies, all schools,

+ethical systems, cultures, religions. The gods from every land defile

+by and are each in turn swept away by the relentless Button-Moulder,

+Oblivion. There was a talking and amusing pig in the first version;

+he is not present in the second&mdash;possibly because Flaubert discovered

+that it was not Saint Antony of Egypt, but Saint Antony of Padua, who

+had a pig. (Rops has remembered the animal in his etching of Flaubert's

+Antony.) The Antony of 1856 has a more modern soul; the second reveals

+the determinism of Flaubert. He is phlegmatic, almost stupid, a supine

+Faust incapable of self-irony. Everything revolves about him&mdash;the

+multi-coloured splendours of Alexandria, of the Queen of Sheba; Satan,

+Death and Luxury, Hilarion, Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana tempt

+him; upon his ears fall the enchanting phrases of the eternal dialogue

+between Sphinx and Chimera&mdash;we dream of the Songs of Solomon when

+reading: "Je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus larges, des

+plaisirs inéprouvés"; the speech of the Chimera. Flaubert knew the Old

+Testament rhythms and beauty of phrase; witness this speech of Death's:

+"et on fait la guerre avec de la musique, des panaches, des drapeaux,

+des harnais d'or...." You seem to overhear the golden trumpets of

+Bayreuth.</p>

+

+<p>The demon retires baffled at the end of the first version. He is

+diabolic and not a little theatrical. The Devil of 1874 is more

+artful. He shows Antony the Cosmos, but he is not the victor in the

+duel. The new Antony studies the protean forms of life and at the

+end is ravished by the sight of protoplasm. "O bliss!" he cries, and

+longs to be transformed into every species of energy, "to be matter."

+Then the dawn comes up like the uplifted curtains of a tabernacle

+&mdash;Flaubert's image&mdash;and in the very disc of the sun shines the face

+of Jesus Christ. "Antony makes the sign of the cross and resumes his

+prayers." Thus ends the 1874 edition, ends a book of irony, dreams,

+and sumptuous landscapes. A sense of the nothingness of human thought,

+human endeavour, assails the reader, for he has traversed all the

+metaphysical and religious ideas of the ages, has viewed all the

+gods, idols, demi-gods, ghosts, heresies, and heresiarchs; Jupiter on

+his throne and the early warring Christian sects vanish into smoke,

+crumble into the gulf of <i>Néant</i>. A vivid episode was omitted in the

+definitive version. At the close of the gods' procession the Saviour

+appears. He is old, white-haired, and weary from the burden of the

+cross and the sins of mankind. Some mock him; He is reproached by

+kings for propounding the equality of the poor; but by the majority

+He is unrecognised; and, spurned, the Son of Man falls into the dust

+of life. A poignant page, the spirit of which may be recognised in

+some latter-day French pictures and in the eloquent phrases of Jehan

+Rictus. M. Bertrand has pointed out that the 1849 version of the

+Temptation contains colour and imagery similar to the Légendes des

+Siècles, though written ten years before Hugo's poem. The Temptation

+of Saint Antony was neither a popular nor a critical success in 1874.

+France realises that in Flaubert's prose epic she has a masterpiece of

+intellectual power, profound irony, and unsurpassed beauty. The reader

+is alternately reminded of the Apocalypse, of Dante's grim visions, and

+of the second Faust.</p>

+<hr class="r5" />

+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">

+<img src="images/huneker_bovary_proof.jpg" width="650" alt="" />

+<p class="caption">Corrected proof page of Madame Bovary,

+ produced from the original manuscript.</p>

+</div>

+<hr class="r5" />

+

+<p>Almost numberless are the studies of Flaubert's method in composing

+his books. A small library could be filled by books about his style.

+We have seen the reproductions of the various drafts that he made in

+the description of Emma Bovary's visit to Rouen. Armand Weil, with

+a patience that is itself Flaubertian, has shown us the variations

+in the manuscript of Salammbô (see, <i>Revue Universitaire</i>, April 15,

+1902). Yet, compared with Balzac's spider-haunted, scribbled-over

+proofs, Flaubert's seem virginal of corrections. The one reproduced

+here is from two pages of original manuscript that I was lucky enough

+to secure at Paris in 1903. They contain instructions to the printer,

+as may be seen, and demonstrate Flaubert's sharp eye; in every instance

+his changes are an improvement. One of the arguments in favour of the

+last version of the Temptation is its shrinkage in bulk from the 1856

+manuscript. The letter, hitherto unpublished&mdash;for it will not be found

+in the six volumes of the Correspondence&mdash;is possibly addressed to

+his niece, Caroline Hamard. Unusual for Flaubert is the absence of

+any date; he was scrupulous in giving hour, day, month, and year,

+in his letters. The princess referred to is the Princess Mathilde

+Bonaparte-Demidoff, the patron of artists and literary men, an admirer

+of Flaubert's. He often dined with her at Saint-Gratien. Madame Pasca

+the actress was also a friend and visited Croisset when he fractured

+his leg. He had a genius for friendships with both women and men. His

+mother, often telling him that his devotion to style had dried up his

+natural affections, admitted that he had a bigger heart than head. And,

+after all, this motherly estimate gives us the measure of the real

+Flaubert.</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="IV" id="IV">IV</a></h4>

+

+<h4>ANATOLE FRANCE</h4>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+<p>In the first part of that great, human Book, dear to all good

+Pantagruelists, is this picture: "From the Tower Anatole to the

+Messembrine were faire spacious galleries, all coloured over and

+painted with the ancient prowesses, histories and descriptions of the

+world." The Tower Anatole is part of the architecture of the Abbey

+of Thélème, in common with the other towers named, Artick, Calaer,

+Hesperia, and Caiere.</p>

+

+<p>For lovers of the exquisite and whimsical artist, Anatole France, a

+comparison to Rabelais may not appear strained. Anatole, the man, has

+written much that contains, as did the gracious Tower Anatole, "faire

+spacious galleries ... painted with ancient ... histories." He has

+in his veins some infusion of the literary blood of that "bon gros

+libertin," Rabelais, a figure in French literature who refuses to be

+budged from his commanding position, notwithstanding the combined

+prestige of Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Hugo, and

+Balzac. And the gentle Anatole has a pinch of Rabelais's <i>esprit

+gaulois</i>, which may be found in both Balzac and Maupassant.</p>

+

+<p>To call France a sceptic is to state a common-place. But he is so

+many other things that he bewilders. The spiritual stepson of Renan,

+a partial inheritor of his gifts of irony and pity, and a continuator

+of the elder master's diverse and undulating style, France displays

+affinities to Heine, Aristophanes, Charles Lamb, Epicurus, Sterne, and

+Voltaire. The "glue of unanimity"&mdash;to use an expression of the old

+pedantic Budæus&mdash;has united the widely disparate qualities of his

+personality. His outlook upon life is the outlook of Anatole France.

+His vast learning is worn with an air almost mocking. After the bricks

+and mortar of the realists, after the lyric pessimism of the morally

+and politically disillusioned generation following the Franco-German

+war, his genius comes in the nature of a consoling apparition. Like his

+own Dr. Trublet, in Histoire Comique, he can say: "<i>Je tiens boutique

+de mensonges. Je soulage, je console. Peut-il consoler et soulager sans

+mentir?</i>" And he does deceive us with the resources of his art, with

+the waving of his lithe wand which transforms whales into weasels,

+mosques into cathedrals.</p>

+

+<p>Perhaps too much stress has been set upon his irony. Ironic he is with

+a sinuosity that yields only to Renan. It is irony rather in the shape

+of the idea, than in its presentation; atmospheric is it rather than

+surface antithesis, or the witty inversion of a moral order; he is a

+man of sentiment, Shandeàn sentiment as it is at times. But the note we

+always hear, if distantly reverberant, is the note of pity. To be all

+irony is to mask one's humanity; and to accuse Anatole France of the

+lack of humanity is to convict oneself of critical colour-blindness.

+His writings abound in sympathetic overtones. His pity is without

+Olympian condescension. He is a most lovable man in the presence of the

+eternal spectacle of human stupidity and guile. It is not alone that he

+pardons, but also that he seeks to comprehend. Not emulating the cold

+surgeon's eye of a Flaubert, it is with the kindly vision of a priest

+he studies the maladies of our soul. In him there is an ecclesiastical

+<i>fond</i>. He forgives because he understands. And after his tenderest

+benediction he sometimes smiles; it may be a smile of irony; yet it is

+seldom cruel. He is an adroit determinist, yet sets no store by the

+logical faculties. Man is not a reasoning animal, he says, and human

+reason is often a mirage.</p>

+

+<p>But to label him with sentimentalism <i>à la russe</i>&mdash;the Russian pity

+that stems from Dickens&mdash;would shock him into an outburst. Conceive

+him, then, as a man to whom all emotional extravagance is foreign; as

+a detester of rhetoric, of declamation, of the phrase facile; as a

+thinker who assembles within the temple of his creations every extreme

+in thought, manners, sentiment, and belief, yet contrives to fuse this

+chaos by the force of his sober style. His is a style more linear than

+coloured, more for the eye than the ear; a style so pellucid that one

+views it suspiciously&mdash;it may conceal in its clear, profound depths

+strange secrets, as does some mountain lake in the shine of the sun.

+Even the simplest art may have its veils.</p>

+

+<p>In the matter of clarity, Anatole France is the equal of Renan and John

+Henry Newman, and if this same clarity was at one time a conventional

+quality of French prose, it is rarer in these days. Never syncopated,

+moving at a moderate <i>tempo</i>, smooth in his transitions, replete with

+sensitive rejections, crystalline in his diction, a lover and a master

+of large luminous words, limpid and delicate and felicitous, the very

+marrow of the man is in his unique style. Few writers swim so easily

+under such a heavy burden of erudition. A loving student of books, his

+knowledge is precise, his range wide in many literatures. He is a true

+humanist. He loves learning for itself, loves words, treasures them,

+fondles them, burnishes them anew to their old meanings&mdash;though he

+has never tarried in the half-way house of epigram. But, over all, his

+love of humanity sheds a steady glow. Without marked dramatic sense,

+he nevertheless surprises mankind at its minute daily acts. And these

+he renders for us as candidly "as snow in the sunshine"; as the old

+Dutch painters stir our nerves by a simple shaft of light passing

+through a half-open door, upon an old woman polishing her spectacles.

+M. France sees and notes many gestures, inutile or tragic, notes them

+with the enthralling simplicity of a complicated artist. He deals with

+ideas so vitally that they become human; yet his characters are never

+abstractions, nor serve as pallid allegories; they are all alive, from

+Sylvestre Bonnard to the group that meets to chat in the Foro Romano of

+Sur la Pierre Blanche. He can depict a cat or a dog with fidelity; his

+dog Riquet bids fair to live in French literature. He is an interpreter

+of life, not after the manner of the novelist, but of life viewed

+through the temperament of a tolerant poet and philosopher.</p>

+

+<p>This modern thinker, who has shed the despotism of the positivist

+dogma, boasts the soul of a chameleon. He understands, he loves,

+Christianity with a knowledge and a fervour that surprise until one

+measures the depth of his affection for the antique world. To further

+confuse our perceptions, he exhibits a sympathy for Hebraic lore that

+can only be set down to a remote lineage. He has rifled the Talmud for

+its forgotten stories; he delights in juxtaposing the cultured Greek

+and the strenuous Paul; he adores the contrast of Mary Magdalen with

+the pampered Roman matron. Add to this a familiarity with the proceeds

+of latter-day science, astronomy in particular, with the scholastic

+speculation of the Renaissance, mediæval piety, and the Pyrrhonism

+of a boulevard philosopher. So commingled are these contradictory

+elements, so many angles are there exposed to numerous cultures, so

+many surfaces avid for impressions, that we end in admiring the

+exercise of a magic which blends into a happy synthesis such a variety

+of moral dissonances, such moral preciosity. It is magic&mdash;though there

+are moments when we regard the operation as intellectual legerdemain

+of a superior kind. We suspect dupery. But the humour of France is

+not the least of his miraculous solvents; it is his humour that often

+transforms a doubtful campaign into a radiant victory. We see him, the

+protagonist of his own psychical drama, dancing on a tight rope in the

+airiest manner, capering deliciously in the void, and quite like a

+prestidigitator bidding us doubt the existence of his rope.</p>

+

+<p>His life long, Renan, despite his famous phrase, "the mania of

+certitude," was pursued by the idea of an absolute. He cried for

+proofs. To Berthelot he wrote: "I am eager for mathematics." It

+promised finality. As he aged, he was contented to seek an atmosphere

+of moral feeling; though he declared that "the real is a vast outrage

+on the ideal." He tremulously participated in the ritual of social

+life, and in the worship of the unknown god. He at last felt that

+Nature abhorred an absolute; that Being was ever a Becoming; that

+religion and philosophy are the result of a partial misunderstanding.

+All is relative, and the soul of man must ever feed upon chimeras! The

+Breton harp of Renan became sadly unstrung amid the shallow thunders of

+agnostic Paris.</p>

+

+<p>But France, his eyes quite open and smiling, gayly Pagan Anatole, does

+not demand proofs. He rejoices in a philosophic indifference, he

+has the gift of paradox. To Renan's plea for the rigid realities of

+mathematics, he might ask, with Ibsen, whether two and two do not make

+five on the planet Jupiter! To Montaigne's "What Know I?" he opposes

+Rabelais's "Do What Thou Wilt!" And then he adorns the wheel of Ixion

+with garlands.</p>

+

+<p>He believes in the belief of God. He swears by the gods of all times

+and climes. His is the cosmical soul. A man who unites in his tales

+something of the Mimes of Herondas, La Bruyère's Characters, and the

+Lucian Dialogues, with faint flavours of Racine and La Fontaine, may be

+pardoned his polygraphic faiths. With Baudelaire he knows the tremours

+of the believing atheist; with Baudelaire he would restrain any show

+of irreverence before an idol, be it wooden or bronze. It might be the

+unknown god!&mdash;as Baudelaire once cried.</p>

+

+<p>This pleasing chromatism in beliefs, a belief in all and none, is not a

+new phenomenon. The classical world of thought has several matches for

+Anatole France, from the followers of Aristippus to the Sophists. But

+there is a specific note of individuality, a <i>roulade</i> quite Anatolian

+in the Frenchman's writings. No one but this accomplished Parisian

+sceptic could have framed The Opinions of Jérôme Coignard and his

+wholly delightful scheme for a Bureau of Vanity; "man is an animal with

+a musket," he declares; Sylvestre Bonnard and M. Bergeret are new with

+a dynamic novelty.</p>

+

+<p>As Walter Pater was accused of a silky dilettanteism, so France, as

+much a Cyrenaic as the English writer, was nevertheless forced to step

+down from his ivory tower to the dusty streets and there demonstrate

+his sincerity by battling for his convictions. After the imbecile

+Dreyfus affair had rolled away, there was little talk in Paris of

+Anatole France, Epicurean. He was saluted with every variety of abuse,

+but this amateur of fine sensations had forever settled the charge of

+morose aloofness, of voluptuous cynicism. (Though to-day he is regarded

+with a certain suspicion by all camps.) At a similar point where the

+endurance of Ernest Renan had failed him, Anatole France proved his

+own faith. Renan during the black days of the Commune retired to

+Versailles, there to meditate upon the shamelessness of the brute,

+Caliban, with his lowest instincts unleashed. But France believes in

+the people, he has said that the future belongs to Caliban, and he

+would scout his master's conception of the Tyrant-Sage, a conception

+that Nietzsche partially transposed later to the ecstatic key of the

+Superman. M. France would probably advocate the head-chopping of such

+wise monster-despots. An aristocrat by culture and fastidiousness, he

+is without an <i>arrière-pensée</i> of the snobbery of the intellect, of the

+cerebral exaltation displayed by Hugo, Baudelaire, and the Goncourts.</p>

+

+<p>When France published his early verse&mdash;his début was as a poet and

+Parnassian poet&mdash;Catulle Mendès divined the man. He wrote, "I can

+never think of Anatole France ... without fancying I see a young

+Alexandrian poet of the second century, a Christian, doubtless, who is

+more than half Jew, above all a neoplatonist, and further a pure theist

+deeply imbued with the teachings of Basilides and Valentinus, and

+the Perfumes of the Orphic poems of some recent rhetorician, in whom

+subtlety was pushed to mysticism and philosophy to the threshold of the

+Kabbalah."</p>

+

+<p>Some critics have accused him of not being able to build a book. He

+knows the rhythms of poems, but he "does not know" the harmony of

+essences, said the late Bernard Lazare; he is an excellent Parnassian

+but a mediocre philosopher: he is a charming <i>raconteur</i>, but he

+cannot compose a book. Precise in details, diffuse in ensembles, clear

+and confused, neat and ambiguous, continued M. Lazare, he searches

+his object in concentric circles. Furthermore, he has the soul of a

+Greek in the decadence, and the voice of a Sistine Chapel singer&mdash;pure

+and irresolute. To all this admission may be made without fear of

+decomposing the picture which France has set up before us of his own

+personality&mdash;a picture, however, he does not himself hesitate to efface

+from the canvas whenever his perversity prompts. He is all that his

+critic asserts and much more. It is this moral eclecticism, this jumble

+of opposites, this violent contrast of traits, and these apparently

+irreconcilable elements of his character, which appal, interest, yet

+make him so human. But his art never swerves; it records invariably

+the fluctuations of his spirit, a spirit at once desultory, savant, and

+subtle, records all in a style, concrete and clairvoyant.</p>

+

+<p>His books are not so much novels as chronicles of designedly simple

+structure; his essays are confessions; his confessions, a blending of

+the naïve and the corrupt, for there are corroding properties in these

+novel persuasive disenchantments. Upon the robust of faith Anatole

+France makes no more impression than do Augustine, Saint Teresa, the

+Imitation of Christ, or the Provincial Letters. Such <i>nuances</i> of

+scepticism as his are for those who love the comedies of belief and

+disbelief. Not possessing the Huysmans intensity of temperament, France

+will never be betrayed into such affirmations; Huysmans, who dropped

+like a ripe plum into the basket of the ecclesiastical fruit-gatherer.

+France will never lose his balance in the fumes of a personal

+conversion. Of Plato himself he would ask: "What is Truth?" and if

+Pilate posed the same question, France would reply by handing him his

+Jardin d'Epicure&mdash;a veritable breviary of scepticism. In Socrates he

+would discover a congenial companion; yet he might mischievously allude

+to Montaigne "concerning cats," or quote Aristotle on the form of hats.

+A wilful child of philosophy and <i>belles-lettres</i>, he may be always

+expected to say the startling.</p>

+

+<p>Be humble! he exhorts. Be without intellectual pride! for the days of

+man, who is naught but a bit of animated pottery, are brief, and he

+vanishes like a spark. Thus Job&mdash;Anatole. Be humble! Even virtue may

+be unduly praised: "Since it is overcoming which constitutes merit, we

+must recognise that it is concupiscence which makes saints. Without

+it there is no repentance, and it is repentance which makes saints."

+To become a saint one must have been first a sinner. He quotes, as

+an example, the conduct of the blessed Pelagia, who accomplished her

+pilgrimage to Rome by rather unconventional means. Here, too, we

+recognise the amiable casuistry of Anatole&mdash;Voltaire. And there is

+something of Baudelaire and Barbey d'Aurevilly's piety of imagination

+with impiety of thought, in France's pronouncement. He is a Chrysostom

+reversed; from his golden mouth issue spiritual blasphemies.</p>

+

+<p>Mr. Henry James has said that the province of art is "all life, all

+feeling, all observation, all vision." According to this rubric,

+France is a profound artist. He plays with the appearances of life,

+occasionally lifting the edge of the curtain to curdle the blood of

+his spectators by the sight of Buddha's shadow in some grim cavern

+beyond. He has the Gallic tact of adorning the blank spaces of theory

+and the ugly spots of reality. A student of Kant in his denial of the

+objective, we can never picture him as following Königsberg's sage

+in his admiration of the starry heavens and the moral law. Both are

+relative, would be the report of the Frenchman. But, if he is sceptical

+about things tangible, he is apt to dash off at a tangent and proclaim

+the existence of that "school of drums kept by the angels," which the

+hallucinated Arthur Rimbaud heard and beheld. His method of surprising

+life, despite his ingenuous manner, is sometimes as oblique as that of

+Jules Laforgue. And, in the words of Pater, his is "one of the happiest

+temperaments coming to an understanding with the most depressing of

+theories."</p>

+

+<p>For faith he yearns. He humbles himself beneath the humblest. He

+excels in picturing the splendours of the simple soul; yet faith has

+not anointed his intellect with its chrism. He admires the golden

+filigree of the ciborium; its spiritual essence escapes him. He stands

+at the portals of Paradise; there he lingers. He stoops to some rare

+and richly coloured feather. He eloquently vaunts its fabulous beauty,

+but he will not listen to the whirring of the wings from which it has

+fallen. Pagan in his irony, his pity wholly Christian, Anatole France

+has in him something of Petronius and not a little of Saint Francis.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>Born to the literary life, one of the elect whose career is at once

+a beacon of hope and despair for the less gifted or less fortunate,

+Anatole François Thibault first saw the heart of Paris in the year

+1844. The son of a bookseller, Noël France Thibault, his childhood was

+spent in and around his father's book-shop, No. 9 du quai Voltaire,

+and his juvenile memories are clustered about books. There are many

+faithful pictures of old libraries and book-worms in his novels. He has

+a moiety of that Oriental blood which is said to have tinctured the

+blood of Montaigne, Charles Lamb, and Cardinal Newman. The delightful

+Livre de Mon Ami gives his readers many glimpses of his early days.

+Told with incomparable naïveté and verve, we feel in its pages the

+charm of the writer's personality. A portrait of the youthful Anatole

+reveals his excessive sensibility. His head was large, the brow was

+too broad for the feminine chin, though the long nose and firm mouth

+contradict the possible weakness in the lower part of the face. It

+was in the eyes, however, that the future of the child might have

+been discerned&mdash;they were lustrous, beautiful in shape, with the

+fulness that argued eloquence and imagination. He was, he tells us,

+a strange boy, whose chief ambition was to be a saint, a second St.

+Simon Stylites, and, later, the author of a history of France in fifty

+volumes. Fascinating are the chapters devoted to Pierre and Suzanne in

+this memoir. His tenderness of touch and power of evoking the fairies

+of childhood are to be seen in Abeille. The further development of the

+boy may be followed in Pierre Nozière. In college life, he was not a

+shining figure, like many another budding genius. He loved Virgil and

+Sophocles, and his professors of the Stanislas College averred that

+he was too much given to day-dreaming and preoccupied with matters

+not set forth in the curriculum, to benefit by their instruction.

+But he had wise parents&mdash;he has paid them admirable tributes of his

+love&mdash;who gave him his own way. After some further study in L'Ecole

+des Chartes, he launched himself into literature through the medium

+of a little essay, La Légende de Sainte Radégonde, reine de France.

+This was in 1859. Followed nine years later a study of Alfred de

+Vigny, and in 1873 Les Poëmes dorées attracted the attention of the

+Parnassian group then under the austere leadership of Leconte de Lisle.

+Les Noces Corinthiennes established for him a solid reputation with

+such men as Catulle Mendès, Xavier de Ricard, and De Lisle. For this

+last-named poet young France exhibited a certain disrespect&mdash;the elder

+was irritable, jealous of his dignity, and exacted absolute obedience

+from his neophytes; unluckily a species of animosity arose between the

+pair. When, in 1874, he accepted a post in the Library of the Senate,

+Leconte de Lisle made his displeasure so heavily felt that France

+soon resigned. But he had his revenge in an article which appeared

+in <i>Le Temps</i>, and one that put the pompous academician into a fury.

+Catulle Mendès sang the praises of the early France poems: "Les Noces

+Corinthiennes alone would have sufficed to place him in the first rank,

+and to preserve his name from the shipwreck of oblivion," declared M.

+Mendès.</p>

+

+<p>In 1881, with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard he won the attention of

+the reading world, a crown from the Academy, and the honour of being

+translated into a half-dozen languages. From that time he became an

+important figure in literary Paris, while his reputation was further

+fortified by his criticisms of books&mdash;vagrom criticism, yet charged

+with charm and learning. He followed Jules Claretie on <i>Le Temps</i>,

+and there he wrote for five years (1886-1891) the <i>critiques</i>, which

+appeared later in four volumes, entitled La Vie Littéraire. Georg

+Brandes had said that, in the strict sense of the word, M. France is

+not a great critic. But Anatole France has said this before him. He

+despises pretentious official criticism, the criticism that distributes

+good and bad marks to authors in a pedagogic fashion. He may not be so

+"objective" as his one-time adversary, Ferdinand Brunetière, but he is

+certainly more convincing.</p>

+

+<p>The quarrel, a famous one in its day, seems rather faded in our days

+of critical indifference. After his clever formula, that there is no

+such thing as objective criticism, that all criticism but records the

+adventures of one's soul among the masterpieces, France was attacked

+by Brunetière&mdash;of whom the ever-acute Mr. James once remarked that

+his "intelligence has not kept pace with his learning." Those critical

+watchwords, "subjective" and "objective," are things of yester-year,

+and one hopes, forever. But in this instance there was much ink spilt,

+witty on the part of France, deadly earnest from the pen of Brunetière.

+The former annihilated his adversary by the mode metaphysical. He

+demonstrated that in the matter of judgment we are prisoners of our

+ideas, and he also formed a school that has hardly done him justice,

+for every impressionistic value is not necessarily valid. It is easy

+to send one's soul boating among masterpieces and call the result

+"criticism"; the danger lies in the contingency that one may not boast

+the power of artistic navigation possessed by Anatole France, a master

+steersman in the deeps and shallows of literature.</p>

+

+<p>His own critical contributions are notable. Studies of Chateaubriand,

+Flaubert, Renan, Balzac, Zola, Pascal, Villiers de l'Isle Adam,

+Barbey d'Aurevilly, Rabelais, Hamlet, Baudelaire, George Sand, Paul

+Verlaine&mdash;a masterpiece of intuition and sympathy this last&mdash;and many

+others, vivify and adorn all they touch. A critic such as Sainte-Beuve,

+or Taine, or Brandes, France is not; but he exercises an unfailing

+spell in everything he signs. His "august vagabondage"&mdash;the phrase is

+Mr. Whibley's&mdash;through the land of letters has proved a boon to all

+students.</p>

+

+<p>In 1897 he was received at the Académie Française, as the successor

+of Ferdinand de Lesseps. His addresses at the tombs of Zola and Renan

+are matters of history. As a public speaker, France has not the fiery

+eloquence of Jean Jaurès or Laurent Tailhade, but he displays a cool

+magnetism all his own. And he is absolutely fearless.</p>

+

+<p>It is not through lack of technique that the structure of the France

+novels is so simple, his tales plotless, in the ordinary meaning of

+the word. Elaborate formal architecture he does not affect. The novel

+in the hands of Balzac, Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola would seem to

+have reached its apogee as a canvas upon which to paint a picture of

+manners. In the sociological novel, the old theatrical climaxes are

+absent, the old recipes for cooking character find no place. Even the

+love motive is not paramount. The genesis of this form may be found in

+Balzac, in whom all the modern fiction is rooted. Certain premonitions

+of the <i>genre</i> are also encountered in L'Education Sentimentale of

+Flaubert, with its wide gray horizons, its vague murmurs of the

+immemorial mobs of vast cities, its presentation of undistinguished men

+and women. Truly democratic fiction, by a master who hated democracy

+with creative results.</p>

+

+<p>Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Edouard Estaunie, Rosny (the brothers

+Bex), René Bazin, Bertrand, and the astonishing Paul Adam are in

+the van of this new movement of fiction with ideas, endeavouring to

+exorcise the "demon of staleness." French fiction in the last decade

+of the past century saw the death of the naturalistic school. Paris

+had become a thrice-told tale, signifying the wearisome "triangle"

+and the chronicling of flat beer. Something new had to be evolved.

+Lo! the sociological novel, which discarded the familiar machinery of

+fiction, rather than miss the new spirit. It is unnecessary to add that

+in America the fiction of ideas has not been, thus far, of prosperous

+growth; indeed, it is viewed with suspicion.</p>

+

+<p>Loosely stated, the fiction of Anatole France may be divided into

+three kinds: fantastic, philosophic, and realistic. This arbitrary

+grouping need not be taken literally; in any one of his tales we may

+encounter all three qualities. For example, there is much that is

+fantastic, philosophic, real, in that moving and wholly human narrative

+of Sylvestre Bonnard. France's familiarity with cabalistic and exotic

+literatures, his deep love and comprehension of the Latin and Greek

+classics, his knowledge of mediæval legends and learning, coupled with

+his command of supple speech, enable him to project upon a ground-plan

+of simple narrative extraordinary variations.</p>

+

+<p>The full flowering of France's knowledge and imagination in things

+patristic and archæologic is to be seen in Thaïs, a masterpiece of

+colour and construction. Thaïs is that courtesan of Alexandrin,

+renowned for her beauty, wit, and wickedness, who was converted by the

+holy Paphnutius, saint and hermit of the Thebaïd. How the devil finally

+dislodges from the heart of Paphnutius its accumulation of virtue, is

+told in an incomparable manner. If Flaubert was pleased by the first

+offering of his pupil, Guy de Maupassant, (Boule de Suif), what would

+he not have said after reading Thaïs? The ending of the wretched monk,

+following his spiritual victories as a holy man perched on a pillar&mdash;a

+memory of the author's youthful dream&mdash;is lamentable. He loves Thaïs,

+who dies; and thenceforth he is condemned to wander, a vampire in this

+world, a devil in the next. A monument of erudition, thick with pages

+of jewelled prose, Thaïs is a book to be savoured slowly and never

+forgotten. It is the direct parent of Pierre Loüys's Aphrodite, and

+later evocations of the antique world.</p>

+

+<p>Of great emotional intensity is Histoire Comique (1903). It is a study

+of the histrionic temperament, and full of the major miseries and

+petty triumphs of stage life. It also contains a startling incident,

+the suicide of a lovelorn actor. The conclusion is violent and morbid.

+The nature of the average actress has never been etched with such

+acrid precision. There are various tableaux of behind and before the

+footlights; a rehearsal, an actor's funeral, and the life of the

+greenroom. Set forth in his most disinterested style, M. France shows

+us that he can handle with ease so-called "objective" fiction. His

+Doctor Trublet is a new France incarnation, wonderful and kindly old

+consoler that he is. He is attached as house physician to the Odéon,

+and to him the comedians come for advice. He ministers to them body and

+soul. His discourse is Socratic. He has wit and wisdom. And he displays

+the motives of the heroine so that we seem to gaze through an open

+window. As vital as Sylvestre Bonnard, as Bergeret, Trublet is truly an

+avatar of Anatole France. Histoire Comique! The title is a rare jest

+aimed at mundane and bohemian vanity.</p>

+

+<p>Passing Jocaste et le Chat maigre, and Le Puits de Sainte-Claire, we

+come to L'Etui de Nacre, a volume of tales published in 1892. This

+book may be selected as typical of a certain side of its author, a

+side in which his fantasy and historic sense meet on equal terms. The

+most celebrated is Le Procurateur de Judée, who is none other than

+Pontius Pilate, old, disillusioned of public ambition, and grumbling,

+as do many retired public officers, at the ingratitude of governments

+and princes. To his friend he confesses finally, after his memory

+has been vainly prompted, that he has no recollection of Jesus, a

+certain anarchistic prophet of Judea, condemned by him to death. His

+final phrases give us, as in the flare of lightning, the withering,

+double-edged irony of the author. He has quite forgotten the tremendous

+events that occurred in Jerusalem; forgotten, too, is Jesus. Not all

+the stories that follow, not the pious records of Sainte Euphrosine, of

+Sainte Oliverie et Liberetta, of Amyeus and Celestin, of Scolastica,

+can rob the reader of this first cruel impression. In Balthasar the

+narratives are of a superior quality. Nothing could be better, for

+example, than the recital of the Ethiopian king who sought the love

+of Balkis, Queen of Sheba, was accepted, after proofs of his bravery,

+and then quietly forgotten. He studies the secrets of the spheres,

+and when Balkis, repenting of her behaviour, seeks Balthasar anew, it

+is too late. He has discovered the star of Bethlehem which leads him

+straightway to the crib in company with Gaspar and Melchior, there to

+worship the King of Kings. Powerful, too, in its fantastic evocation is

+La Fille de Lilith, which relates the adventure of a modern Parisian

+with a deathless daughter of Adam's first wife, Lilith, so named in the

+Talmud. Laeta Acilia tells us one of France's best anecdotes about a

+Roman matron residing at Marseilles during the reign of Tiberius. She

+encounters Mary Magdalen, who almost converts the woman by a promise

+of children, long desired. The conclusion is touching. It discloses

+admirably the psychology of the two women. L'Oeuf Rouge is a tale

+of Cæsarian madness, and the bizarre Le Réséda du Curé is so simply

+related that we are disarmed by the style.</p>

+

+<p>A graceful collection is that called Clio, illustrated in the highly

+decorative manner of Mucha. Possibly the first is the best, a story

+of Homer. Some confess a preference for a Gaulish recital of the

+times when Cæsar went to Britain. Napoleon, too, is in the list.

+An interesting discussion of Napoleon and the Napoleonic legend is

+in a full-fledged novel, The Red Lily. "Napoleon," says one of its

+characters, "was violent and frivolous; therefore profoundly human....

+He desired with singular force, all that most men esteem and desire. He

+had the illusions which he gave to the people. He believed in glory.

+He retained always the infantile gravity which finds pleasure in

+playing with swords and drums, and the sort of innocence which makes

+good military men. It is this vulgar grandeur which makes heroes, and

+Napoleon is the perfect hero. His brain never surpassed his hand&mdash;that

+hand, small and beautiful, which crumpled the world.... Napoleon lacked

+interior life.... He lived from the outside." In the art of attenuating

+great reputations Anatole France has had few superiors.</p>

+

+<p>This novel displeased his many admirers, who pretend to see in it the

+influence of Paul Bourget. Yet it is a memorable book. Paul Verlaine is

+depicted in it with freshness, that poet Paul, and his childish soul so

+ironically, yet so lovingly distilled by his critic. There are glimpses

+of Florence, of Paris; the study of an English girl-poet will arouse

+pleasant memories of a lady well known to Italian, Parisian, and London

+art life. And there is the sculptor, Jacques Dechartres, who may be a

+mask, among many others of M. France. But Chouiette-Verlaine is the

+lode-stone of the novel.</p>

+

+<p>Where the ingenuity and mental flexibility, not to say historical

+mimicry, of France are seen at their supreme, is in La Rôtisserie de la

+Reine Pédauque. Jacques Tournebroche, or Turnspit, is an assistant in

+the cook-shop of his father, in old Paris. He is of a studious mind,

+and becomes the pupil of the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, "who despises men

+with tenderness," a figure that might have stepped out of Rabelais,

+though baked and tempered in the refining fires of M. France's

+imagination. Such a man! Such an ecclesiastic! He adores his maker and

+admires His manifold creations, especially wine, women, and song. He

+has more than his share of human weakness, and yet you wonder why he

+has not been canonised for his adorable traits. He is a glutton and a

+wine-bibber, a susceptible heart, a pious and deeply versed man. Nor

+must the rascally friar be forgotten, surely a memory of Rabelais's

+Friar Jhon. There are scenes in this chronicle that would have made

+envious the elder Dumas; scenes of swashbuckling, feasting, and

+bloodshed. There is an astrologer who has about him the atmosphere of

+the black art with its imps and salamanders, and an ancient Jew who

+is the Hebraic law personified. So lifelike is Jérôme Coignard that

+a book of his opinions was bound to follow. His whilom pupil Jacques

+is supposed to be its editor. Le Jardin d'Epicure and Sur la Pierre

+Blanche (1905) are an excuse for the opinions of M. France on many

+topics&mdash;religion, politics, science, and social life.</p>

+

+<p>Not-withstanding their loose construction, they are never inchoate.

+That the ideas put forth may astound by their perversity, their

+novelty, their nihilism, their note of cosmic pessimism, is not to

+be denied. Our earth, "a miserable small star," is a drop of mud

+swimming in space, its inhabitants mere specks, whose doings are not

+of importance in the larger curves of the universe's destiny. Every

+illustration, geological, astronomical, and mathematical, is brought to

+bear upon this thesis&mdash;the littleness of man and the uselessness of his

+existence. But France loves this harassed animal, man, and never fails

+to show his love. Interspersed with moralising are recitals of rare

+beauty, Gallion and Par la Porte de Corne ou par la Porte d'Ivoire.

+Here the classic scholar, that is the base of France's temperament,

+fairly shines.</p>

+

+<p>In the four volumes of Histoire Contemporaine we meet a new Anatole

+France, one who has deserted his old attitude of Parnassian

+impassibility for a suave anarchism, one who enters the arena of

+contemporaneous life bent on slaughter, though his weapon is the

+keen blade, never the rude battle-axe of polemics. It is his first

+venture in the fiction of sociology; properly speaking, it is the

+psychology of the masses, not exactly as Paul Adam handles it in his

+striking and tempestuous Les Lions (a book Balzacian in its fury of

+execution), but with the graver temper of the philosopher. He paints

+for us a provincial university town with its intrigues, religious,

+political, and social. The first of the series is L'Orme du Mail;

+follow Le Mannequin d'Osier, L'Anneau d'Améthyste, and Monsieur

+Bergeret à Paris (1901). The loop that ensnares this quartet of novels

+is the simple motive of ecclesiastical ambition. Not since Ferdinand

+Fabre's L'Abbé Tigrane has French literature had such portraits of

+the priesthood; Zola's ecclesiastics are ill-natured caricatures. The

+Cardinal Archbishop, Abbé Lataigne, and the lifelike Abbé Guitrel,

+with the silent, though none the less desperate, fight for the vacant

+bishopric of Turcoing&mdash;these are the three men who with Bergeret carry

+the story on their shoulders. About them circle the entire diocese

+and the tepid life of a university town. Yet anything further from

+melodramatic machinations cannot be imagined. Even the clerics of

+Balzac seem exaggerated in comparison. The protagonist is a professor,

+a master of conference of the University Faculty, a worthy man and

+earnest, though by no means of an exalted talent. He has the misfortune

+of being married to a worldly woman who does not attempt to understand

+him, much less to love him. She deceives him. The discovery of this

+deceit is an episode the most curious in fiction. It would be diverting

+if it were not painful. It reveals in Bergeret the preponderance of

+the man of thought over the man of action. His pupil and false friend

+is a classical scholar, therefore the affair might have been worse!

+And he is given the scholar's excuse as a plea for forgiveness! But

+hesitating as appears Bergeret, he utilises his wife's treachery as a

+springboard from which to fly his miserable household. Henceforth, with

+his devoted sister and daughter, he philosophises at ease and becomes

+a Dreyfusard. His dog Riquet is the recipient of his deepest thoughts.

+His monologues in the presence of this animal are the best in the book.</p>

+

+<p>There are many characters in this serene and bitter tragi-comedy. A

+contempt, almost monastic, peeps out in the treatment of his women.

+They are often detestable. They behave as if an empire was at stake,

+though it is only a conspiracy whereby Abbé Guitrel is made Bishop

+of Turcoing. France always displays more pity for the frankly sinful

+woman than for the frivolous woman of fashion. There is also a subplot,

+the effort of a young Hebrew snob, Bonmont by name (Guttenberg,

+originally), to get into the exclusive hunting set of the Duc de Brécé.

+This hunt-button wins for the diplomatic Abbé Guitrel his coveted see.

+M. France is unequalled in his portrayal of the modern French-Hebrew

+millionaire, the Wallsteins and Bonmonts. He draws them without

+<i>parti-pris</i>. His prefect, the easy-going, cynical Worms-Clavelin,

+with his secret contempt of Jews and Gentiles alike, and his wife who

+collects ecclesiastical bric-à-brac, are executed by a great painter

+of character. He exposes with merciless impartiality a mob of men

+and women in high life. But his aristocrats are no better than his

+ecclesiastics or bankers. There is a comic Orléanist conspiracy. There

+are happenings that set your hair on end, and a cynicism at times which

+forces one to regret that the author left his study to mingle with the

+world. Nor is the strain relieved when poor Bergeret goes to Paris;

+there he is enmeshed by the Dreyfus party. There he comes upon stormy

+days, though high ideals never desert him. He is as placid in the face

+of contemptuous epithets and opprobrious newspaper attacks as he was

+calm when stones were hurled at his windows in the provinces. A man

+obsessed by general ideas, he is lovable and never a bore, though M.

+Faguet and several other critics have cried him stupid. In the "fire

+of the footlights" M. Bergeret pales. For the drama M. France has no

+particular voice, though he has written several charming playlets. Even

+the superior acting of Guitry could not make of Crainquibille much more

+than a touching episode.</p>

+

+<p>There is enough characterisation and incident in Histoire Contemporaine

+to ballast a half-dozen novelists with material. And there are

+treasures of humour and pathos. The success of the series has been

+awe-inspiring; indeed, awe-inspiring is the success of all the France

+books, and at a time when Parisian prophets of woe are lamenting the

+decline of literature. Nevertheless, here is a man who writes like an

+artist, whose work, web and woof, is literature, whose themes, with few

+exceptions, are not of the popular kind, whose politics are violently

+opposed to current superstition, whose very form is hybrid; yet he

+sells, and has sold, in the hundreds of thousands. Literature cannot be

+called moribund in the face of such a result. His is a case that sets

+one speculating without undue emphasis upon a certain superiority of

+French taste over English in the matter of fiction.</p>

+

+<p>The Life of Jeanne d'Arc (1908), a work of scholarship and mixed

+prejudices, does not, I am forced to admit, unduly interest me. Whether

+the astonishing statements set forth therein are true is a question

+that may concern Mr. Lang, but hardly the lovers of the real Anatole.

+The Isle of Penguins (1908) gave him back to us in all his original

+glory.</p>

+

+<p>An art, ironical, easy, fugitive, divinely untrammelled, divinely

+artificial, which, like a pure flame, blazes forth in an unclouded

+heaven ... <i>la gay a scienza</i>; light feet; wit; fire; grace; the dance

+of the stars; the tremor of southern light; the smooth sea&mdash;these

+Nietzschean phrases might serve as an epigraph for the work of that

+apostle of innocence and experience, Anatole France.</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="V" id="V">V</a></h4>

+

+<h4>THE PESSIMIST'S PROGRESS</h4>

+

+<h4>J.-K. HUYSMANS</h4>

+

+<p style="margin-left: 30%;">

+"Ah! Seigneur, donnez-moi la force et le courage<br />

+De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans dégoût."<br />

+<span style="margin-left: 40%; font-size: 0.8em;">&mdash;BAUDELAIRE.</span><br />

+</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>Joris-Karl Huysmans has been called mystic, naturalist, critic,

+aristocrat of the intellect; he was all these, a mandarin of letters

+and a pessimist besides&mdash;no matter what other qualities persist

+throughout his work, pessimism is never absent; his firmament is

+clotted with black stars. He had a mediæval monk's contempt for

+existence, contempt for the mangy flock of mediocrity; yet his genius

+drove him to describe its crass ugliness in phrases of incomparable

+and enamelled prose. It is something of a paradox that this man of

+picturesque piety should have lived to be the accredited interpreter,

+the distiller of its quintessence, of that elusive quality,

+"modernity." The "intensest vision of the modern world," as Havelock

+Ellis puts it, Huysmans unites to the endowment of a painter the power

+of a rare psychologist, superimposed upon a lycanthropic nature. A

+collective title for his books might be borrowed from Zola: My Hatreds.

+He hated life and its eternal <i>bêtise</i>. His theme, with variations,

+is a strangling Ennui. With those devoted sons of Mother Church,

+Charles Baudelaire, Barbey D'Aurevilly, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, and

+Paul Verlaine, eccentric sons whose actions so often dismayed their

+fellow worshippers of less genius, Huysmans has been affiliated. He

+was not a poet or, indeed, a man of overwhelming imagination. But he

+had the verbal imagination. He did not possess the novelist's talent.

+His was not the flamboyant genius of Barbey, nor had he the fantastic

+invention of Villiers. He seems closer to Baudelaire, rather by reason

+of his ironic, critical temperament than because of his creative gifts.

+Baudelaire's oriflamme, embroidered with preciously devised letters of

+gold, reads: Spleen and Ideal; upon the emblematic banner of Huysmans

+this motto is Spleen. His work at times seems like a prolongation in

+prose of Baudelaire's. And by reason of his exacerbated temper he

+became the most personal writer of his generation. He belonged to no

+school, and avoided, after his beginnings, all literary groups.</p>

+

+<p>He is recording-secretary of the petty miseries and ironies of the

+life about him. Over ugliness he becomes almost lyric. "The world

+is a forest of differences." His pen, when he depicts an attack of

+dyspepsia or neuralgia, or the nervous distaste of a hypochondriac

+for meeting people, is like the triple sting of a hornet. He is

+the prose singer of neurasthenia, a Hamlet doubting his digestion,

+a Schopenhauer of the cook-shops. When he paints the <i>nuance</i> of

+rage and disgust that assails a middle-aged man at the sight of a

+burnt mutton-chop, his phrases are unforgettable. The tragedy of

+the gastric juices he has limned with a fulness of expression that

+almost lifts pathology to the dignity of art. A descendant of Flemish

+painters, sculptors, architects (Huysmans of Mechlin, the Antwerp-born

+painter of the seventeenth century, is said to be a forebear), he

+inherited their powers of envisaging exterior life; those painters

+for whom flowers, vegetable markets, butcher-shops, tiny gentle Dutch

+landscapes, gray skies, skies of rutilant flames, and homely details

+were surfaces to be passionately and faithfully rendered. This vision

+he has interpreted with pen instead of brush. He is a virtuoso of the

+phrase. He is a performer on the single string of self. He knows the

+sultry enharmonics of passion. He never improvises, he observes. All

+is willed and conscious, the cold-fire scrutiny of a trained eye,

+one keen to note the ignoble or any deviation from the normal. His

+pages are often sterile and smell of the lamp, but he has the candour

+of his chimera. Well has Remy de Gourmont called him an eye. In his

+prose, he sacrifices rhythmic variety and tone to colour. His rhythms

+are massive, his colour at times a furious fanfare of scarlet. Every

+word, like a note in a musical score, has its value and position. He

+intoxicates because of his marvellous speech, but he seldom charms.

+It is a sort of sinister verbal magic that steals upon one as this

+ancient mariner from the lower moral deeps of Paris fixes you with his

+glittering eye, and in his strangely modulated language tells tales of

+blasphemy and fish-wives' tales of a half-forgotten river below the bed

+of the Seine, of dull cafés and dreary suburbs, of bored men and stupid

+women, of sordid, opulent souls, souls spongy and voluptuous, mean

+lives and meaner alleys&mdash;such an epic of ennui, mediocrity, bizarre

+sins, and neurotic, superstitious creatures was never given the world

+until Huysmans wrote Les Sœurs Vatard and A Rebours. Entire vanished

+districts of Paris may be reconstructed from his chapters. Zola

+declared, when Guy de Maupassant and Huysmans appeared side by side in

+Les Soirées de Médan, that the latter was the realist.</p>

+

+<p>The unity of form and substance in Huysmans is a distinguishing trait.

+He had early mastered literary technique, and the handling of his

+themes varies but little. There are, however, two or three typical

+varieties of description which may be quoted as illustrations of his

+etched and jewel-like prose. A cow hangs outside a butcher-shop:</p>

+

+<p>As in a hothouse, a marvellous vegetation flourished in the carcass.

+Veins shot out on every side like the trails of bindweed; dishevelled

+branch-work extended itself along the body, an efflorescence of

+entrails unfurled their violent-tinted corollas, and big clusters of

+fat stood out, a sharp white, against the red medley of quivering flesh.</p>

+

+<p>Surely a subject for Snyders or Jan Steen.</p>

+

+<p>Léon Bloy somewhere describes Huysmans's treatment of the French

+language as "dragging his images by the heels or the hair up and down

+the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax." Huysmans, in A Rebours,

+had called M. Bloy "an enraged pamphleteer whose style was at once

+exasperated and precious." And can magnificence of phrase in evoking a

+picture go further than the following which shows us Gustave Moreau's

+Salome:</p>

+

+<p>In the perverse odour of perfumes, in the overheated atmosphere of

+this church, Salome, her left arm extended in a gesture of command,

+her bent right arm holding on the level of the face a great lotus,

+advances slowly to the sound of a guitar, thrummed by a woman who

+crouches on the floor. With collected, almost anguished countenance,

+she begins the lascivious dance that should waken the sleeping senses

+of the aged Herod; her breasts undulate, become rigid at the contact of

+the whirling necklets; diamonds sparkle on the dead whiteness of her

+skin, her bracelets, girdles, rings, shoot sparks; on her triumphal

+robes sewn with pearls, flowered with silver, sheeted with gold, the

+jewelled breast-plate, whose every stitch is a precious stone, bursts

+into flame, scatters in snakes of fire, swarms on the ivory-toned,

+tea-rose flesh, like splendid insects with dazzling wings, marbled with

+carmine, dotted with morning gold, diapered with steel blue, streaked

+with peacock green.</p>

+

+<p>Gautier,&mdash;who was for Huysmans only a prodigious reflector&mdash;Flaubert,

+Goncourt, could not have excelled this verbal painting, this bronze and

+baroque prose, which is both precise and of a splendour. Huysmans can

+describe a herring as would a great master of sumptuous still-life:</p>

+

+<p>Thy garment is the palette of setting suns, the rust of old copper,

+the brown gilt of Cordovan leather, the sandal and saffron tints of

+the autumn foliage. When I contemplate thy coat of mail I think of

+Rembrandt's pictures. I see again his superb heads, his sunny flesh,

+his gleaming jewels on black velvet. I see again his rays of light in

+the night, his trailing gold in the shade, the dawning of suns through

+dark arches.</p>

+

+<p>Or this invocation when Huysmans had begun to experience that shifting

+of moral emotion which we call his "conversion"&mdash;he was a Roman

+Catholic born, therefore was not converted; he but reverted to his

+early faith:</p>

+

+<p>Take pity, O Lord, on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who

+desires to believe, on the convict of life who embarks alone, in the

+night, beneath a sky no longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient

+faith.</p>

+

+<p>His method is not the recital of events, but the description of a

+situation; a scene, not a narration, but large tableaux. Action there

+is little; he is more static than dynamic. His characters, like

+Goncourt's, suffer from paralysis of the will, from hyperæsthesia.

+The soul in its primordial darkness interests him, and he describes

+it with the same penetrating prose as he does the carcass of an

+animal. He is a luminous mystic who speaks in terms of extravagant

+naturalism. A physiologist of the soul, at times his soul dwelt in

+a boulevard. His violent, vivid style so excellent in setting forth

+coloured sensations is equally admirable in the construction of

+metaphors which make concrete the abstract. There is the element of

+the grotesque, of the old, ribald Fleming, in Huysmans, though without

+a trace of hearty Flemish humour. He once said that the memory of the

+inventor of card-playing ought to be blessed, the game kept closed

+the mouths of imbeciles. Nor is the pepper of sophistry absent. He

+sculptures his ideas. He is both morose and fulgurating. He squanders

+his emotions with polychromatic resignation unlike a Saint Augustine

+or a Newman; yet we are not deeply moved by his soul-experiences. It

+is not vibrating sincerity that we miss; it would be wrong to question

+his return to Catholicism. He is more convincing than Tolstoy; for

+one thing, there was no dissonance between his daily life and his

+writings, after the publication of En Route. Lucid as is his manner,

+clairvoyant as the exposition of his soul at the feet of God, there

+is, nevertheless, an absence of unction, of tenderness, which repels.

+Sympathy and tenderness are <i>bourgeois</i> virtues for Huysmans. Too

+complicated to admire, even recognise, the sane or the simple, he

+remained the morbid carper after he entered La Trappe and Solesmes.

+As an oblate, his fastidiousness was wounded by the minor annoyances

+of a severe regimen; his stomach always ailed him. Perhaps to his weak

+digestion and a neuralgic tendency we owe the bitterness and pessimism

+of his art. He was not a normal man. He loathed the inevitable

+discords of life with a startling intensity. The venomous salt of his

+wit he sprinkles over the raw turpitude of men and women. Woman for

+him was not of the planetary sex, but either a stupid or a vicious

+creature; sometimes both. Impassible as he was, he could be shocked

+into a species of sub-acid eloquence if the theme were the inutility

+of mankind. No Hebraic prophet ever launched such poignant phrases of

+disgust and horror at the world and its works. His favourite reading

+was in the mystics, à Kempis, Saint Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and

+the Flemish Ruysbroeck.</p>

+

+<p>In a new edition of A Rebours he has told us that he was not pious as

+a youth, having been educated not at a religious school. A Rebours

+came out in 1884, and it was in July, 1892, at the age of forty-four,

+that he went to La Trappe de Notre-Dame d'lgny, situated near Fismes,

+and the Aisne and Marne. He confessed that he could not discover,

+during the eight intervening years, why he swerved to the Church of

+Rome. Diminution of vital energy was not the chief reason for his

+reversion. The operations of divine grace in Huysmans's case may be

+dated back to A Rebours. The modulation by the way of art was not a

+difficult one. And he had the good taste of giving us his experiences

+in the guise of art. It is the history of a conversion, though he is,

+without doubt, the Durtal of the books. The final explosion of grace

+after years of unconscious mining, the definite illumination on some

+unknown Road to Damascus, took place between the appearance of Là Bas

+and En Route. We are spared the <i>technique</i> of faith reawakened. It had

+become part of his cerebral tissue. We are shown a Durtal, believer;

+also a Durtal profoundly disgusted with the oily, rancid food of La

+Trappe, and with the faces of some of his companions, and a Durtal who

+puffs surreptitious cigarettes. At Lourdes, in his last book, he is the

+same Durtal-Huysmans, grumbling at the odours of unwashed bodies, at

+the perspiring crowds, at the ignorance and cupidity of the shrine's

+guardians. A pessimist to the end. And for that reason he has often

+outraged the sensibilities of his coreligionists, who questioned his

+sincerity after such an exclamation as: "How like a rind of lard I

+must look!" uttered when he carried a dripping candle in a religious

+procession. But through the dreary mists of doubtings and black fogs of

+unfaith the lamp of the Church, a shining point, drew to it from his

+chilly ecstasies this hedonist. Like Taine and Nietzsche, he craved for

+some haven of refuge to escape the whirring wings of Wotan's ravens.

+And in the pale woven air he saw the cross of Christ.</p>

+

+<p>Leslie Stephen wrote of Pascal: "Eminent critics have puzzled

+themselves as to whether Pascal was a sceptic or a genuine believer,

+having, I suppose, convinced themselves, by some process not obvious

+to me, that there is an incompatibility between the two characters."

+Huysmans may have been both sceptic and believer, but the dry fervour

+of the later books betrays a man who willingly humiliates and

+depreciates the intellect for the greater glory of God. Abbé Mugnier

+says that his sincerity is itself the form of his talent. His portrait

+of Simon the swineherd in En Route is mortifying to humans with proud

+stomachs; Huysmans penetrates the husks and filth and sees only a

+God-intoxicated soul. Here is, indeed, the "treasure of the humble."

+At first, religion with Durtal was æsthetic, the beauty of Gothic

+architecture, the pyx that ardently shines, the bells that boom, the

+odours of frankincense that rolled through the nave of some old vast

+cathedral with flame-coloured windows. In L'Oblat the feeling has

+widened and deepened. The walls of life have fallen asunder, the soul

+glows in the twilight of the subliminal self, glows with a spiritual

+phosphorescence. Huysmans is nearer, though not face to face with, God.

+The object of his prayer is the Virgin Mary; to the hem of her robe he

+clings like a frightened child at its mother's dress. All this may have

+been auto-suggestion, or the result of the "will to believe," according

+to the formula of Professor William James, yet it was satisfying to

+Huysmans, whose life was singularly lonely.</p>

+

+<p>He was born on February 5, 1848, in Paris, and died in that city on

+May 12, 1907. Christened Charles-Marie-George, he signed his books

+Joris-Karl. He was educated at the Lyceum Saint-Louis. His family

+originally resided at Breda, Holland. His father was lithographer and

+painter. His mother was of Burgundian stock and boasted a sculptor

+in her ancestral line. Huysmans came fairly by his love of art. He

+contemplated the profession of law; but, at the age of twenty, he

+entered the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained until 1897,

+a model, unassuming official, fond of first editions, posters, rare

+prints, and a few intimates. He went then to live at Ligugé, but

+returned to Paris after the expulsion of the Benedictines. He was

+elected first president of the Academy Goncourt, April 7, 1900. He was

+nominated chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and given the rosette

+of officer by Briand, though Huysmans begged that he should have no

+military honours at his funeral. It was for his excellent work as a

+civil servant that he was decorated, and not as a man of letters. At

+the time of his death, his reputation had suffered an eclipse; he was

+distrusted both by Catholics and free-thinkers. But he never wavered.

+Attacked by a cancerous malady, he suffered the atrocious martyrdom

+of his favourite Saint Lydwine. Léon Daudet, François Coppée, and

+Lucien Descaves were his unwearying attendants. At the last, he could

+still read the prayers for the dying. He was buried in his Benedictine

+habit. But what an artist perished in the making of an amateur monk!</p>

+

+<p>"His face," said an English friend, "with the sensitive, luminous

+eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire's portrait, the face of a resigned

+and benevolent Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity of the

+divine order, but has no wish to make improper use of his discovery.

+He gave me the impression of a cat, courteous, perfectly polite, most

+amiable, but all nerves, ready to shoot out his claws at the least

+word." (Huysmans, like Baudelaire, was fond of cats). When I saw him

+five years ago in Paris, I was struck by the essentially Semitic

+contour of his head&mdash;some legacy of remote ancestors from the far-away

+Meuse.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>As a critic of painting Huysmans revealed himself the possessor of

+a temperament that was positively ferocious in the presence of an

+unsympathetic canvas. His vocabulary and peculiar gift of invective

+were then exercised with astounding verbal if not critical results.

+Singularly narrow in his judgments for a man of his general culture,

+his intensity of vision concentrated itself upon a few painters

+and etchers; during the latter part of his life only religious art

+interested him, as had the exotic and monstrous in earlier years. And

+even in the former sphere he restricted his admiration, rather say

+idolatry, to a few men; he sought for character, an ascetic type of

+character, the lean and meagre Saviours and saints of the Flemish

+primitives arousing in him a fire almost fanatical. Between a Roger Van

+der Weyden and a Giorgione there would be little doubt as to Huysmans's

+choice; the golden colour-music of the great Venetian harmonist would

+have reached deaf ears. His Flemish ancestry told in his æsthetic

+tastes. He once said that he preferred a Leipsic man to a Marseilles

+man, "the big, phlegmatic, taciturn Germans to the gesticulating and

+rhetorical people of the south."</p>

+

+<p>Huysmans never betrayed the slightest interest in doctrines of

+equality; for him, as for Baudelaire, socialism, the education of the

+masses, or democratic prophylactics were hateful. The virus of the

+"exceptional soul" was in his veins. Nothing was more horrible to

+him than the idea of universal religion, universal speech, universal

+government, with their concomitant universal monotony. The world is

+ugly enough without the ugliness of universal sameness. Variety alone

+makes this globe bearable. He did not believe in art for the multitude,

+and the tableau of a billion humans bellowing to the moon the hymn of

+universal brotherhood made him shiver&mdash;as well it might. Tolstoy and

+his semi-idiotic mujik, to whom Beethoven was impossible, aroused in

+Huysmans righteous indignation. Art is for those who have the brains

+and patience to understand it. It is not a free port of entry for poet

+and philistine alike. To it, though many are called, few are chosen. So

+is it with religion. That marvellous specimen of psychology, En Route,

+gave more offence to Roman Catholics than it did to sectarians of other

+faiths. Huysmans was a mystic, and to his temperament, as taut as a

+finely attuned fiddle, the easy-going methods of the average worshipper

+were absolutely blasphemous. So he could write in En Route: "And

+he&mdash;Durtal&mdash;called to mind orators petted like tenors, Monsabré, Didon,

+those Coquelins of the Church, and, lower yet than those products of

+the Catholic training school, that bellicose booby the Abbé d'Hulst."

+That same abbé lived to see the writer repentant and, himself, not only

+to forgive, but to write eulogistic words of the man who had abused him.</p>

+

+<p>L'Art Moderne was published between covers in 1883. It deals with

+the official salons of 1879, 1880-81 and the exposition of the

+Independents, 1880-81. The appendix, 1882, contains thumbnail sketches

+of Caillebotte, whose bequest to the Luxembourg of impressionistic

+paintings, including Manet's Olympe, stirred all artistic and

+inartistic Paris; Gauguin, Mlle. Morisot, Guillaumin, Renoir, Pissaro,

+Sisley, Claude Monet, "the marine painter <i>par excellence</i>"; Manet,

+Roll, Redon, all men then fighting the stream of popular and academic

+disfavour. Since Charles Baudelaire's Salons, no volume on the current

+Paris exhibitions has appeared of such solid knowledge and literary

+power as Huysmans's. Admitting his marked prejudices, his numerous

+dogmatic utterances, there is nevertheless an attractive artistic

+quality backed up by the writer's stubborn convictions that persuade

+where the more liberal and brilliant Théophile Gautier never does.

+"Théo," who said that if he pitched his sentences in the air they

+always fell on their feet, like a cat, leaned heavily on his verbal

+magic. But even in that particular he is no match for Huysmans, who,

+boasting the blood of Fleming painters, sculptors, and architects, uses

+his pen as an artist his brush. Take another bit from his study of

+Moreau's Salome:</p>

+

+<p>"A throne, like the high altar of a cathedral, rose beneath innumerable

+arches springing from columns, thick-set as Roman pillars, enamelled

+with varicoloured bricks, set with mosaics, encrusted with lapis-lazuli

+and sardonyx in a palace like the basilica of an architecture at once

+Mussulman and Byzantine. In the centre of the tabernacle surmounting

+the altars, fronted with rows of circular steps, sat the Tetrarch

+Herod, the tiara on his head, his legs pressed together, his hands on

+his knees. His face was yellow, parchmentlike, annulated with wrinkles,

+withered by age; his long beard floated like a cloud on the jewelled

+stars that constellated the robe of netted gold across his breast.

+Around this statue, motionless, frozen in the sacred pose of a Hindu

+god, perfumes burned, throwing out clouds of vapour, pierced, as by

+the phosphorescent eyes of animals, by the fire of precious stones set

+in the sides of the throne; then the vapour mounted, unrolling itself

+beneath arches where the blue smoke mingled with the powdered gold

+of great sun-rays fallen from the dome."... And of Salome he writes:

+"In the work of Gustave Moreau, conceived on no Scriptural data, Des

+Esseintes saw at last the realisation of the strange, superhuman

+Salome that he had dreamed. She was no more the mere dancing girl ...

+she had become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess

+of immortal Hysteria; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible,

+insensible Beast, poisoning like Helen of old all that go near her, all

+that look upon her, all that she touches."</p>

+

+<p>Not only is there an evocation of material splendour in the above

+passages taken from A Rebours, but a note of cenobitic contempt for

+woman's beauty, which sounds throughout the books of Huysmans. It may

+be heard at its deepest in his study of Félicien Rops, the Belgian

+etcher and painter, who interpreted Baudelaire's <i>femmes damnées</i>.

+Rops, too, regarded woman in the light of a destroyer, a being banned

+by the early fathers of the Church, the matrix of sin. Huysmans's

+incomparable study of Rops&mdash;whose great powers have never been fully

+recognized because of his erotic and diabolic subjects&mdash;may be found in

+his Certains (1889).</p>

+

+<p>In his description of the Independent exposition (1880) to which

+Degas, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, Forain, and others sent

+canvases, Huysmans drifts into literary criticism; he saw analogies

+between the paintings of the realists, impressionists, and the modern

+men of fiction, Flaubert, Goncourt, Zola. "Have not," he asks, "the

+Goncourts fixed in a style deliberate and personal, the most ephemeral

+of sensations, the most fugacious of <i>nuances</i>?" So, too, have Manet,

+Monet, Pissaro, Raffaelli. Nor does he hesitate to make the avowal,

+still incomprehensible for those who are deceived by the prodigious

+blaring of critical trumpets, that Baudelaire is a true poet of genius;

+and that the <i>chef d'œuvre</i> of fiction is Flaubert's L'Education

+Sentimentale. Naturally Edgar Degas is the only psychological

+interpreter of latter-day life. There is also a careful analysis

+of Manet's masterpiece, the Bar at the Folies-Bergères. Huysmans

+recognised Manet's indebtedness to Goya.</p>

+

+<p>Certains is a valuable volume. Therein are Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave

+Moreau, Degas, Bartholomé, Raffaelli, Stevens, Tissot, Wagner&mdash;the

+painter, not the composer; Huysmans admits but one form in music, the

+Plain Chant&mdash;Cézanne, Chéret, Whistler&mdash;which true to the tradition

+of Parisian carelessness is spelled "Wisthler," as Liszt years before

+was called "Litz"&mdash;Rops, Jan Luyken, Millet, Goya, Turner, Bianchi,

+and other men. He gives to Millet his just meed of praise, no more&mdash;he

+views him as a designer rather than as a great painter. We get Huysmans

+in his quintessence. Scattered through his novels&mdash;if one may dare to

+ascribe this title to such an amorphous form&mdash;there are eloquent and

+burning pages devoted to various painters, but not with the amplitude

+and cool science displayed in his studies of Degas, Moreau, Rops, The

+Monster in Art&mdash;a monstrous subject masterfully handled&mdash;and Whistler.

+He literally discovered Degas, and in future books on rhetoric surely

+Huysmans's descriptions of Degas's old workwomen sponging their creased

+backs cannot be excluded without doing violence to the expressive

+powers of the French language. His eye mirrored the most minute

+details&mdash;in that he was Dutch-Flemish; the same merciless scrutiny

+is pursued in the life of the soul&mdash;he was Flemish and Spanish:

+Ruysbroeck and St. John of the Cross, mystics both, with an amazing

+sense of the realistic.</p>

+

+<p>Without a spacious imagination, Huysmans was a man of the subtlest

+sensibilities. There is a wealth of critical divination in his studies

+of Moreau and Whistler. Twenty or thirty years ago it was not so easy

+to range these two enigmas. Huysmans did so, and, in company with Degas

+and Rops, placed them so definitely that critics have paraphrased his

+ideas ever since. Baudelaire had recognised the glacial genius of

+Rops; Huysmans definitely consecrated it in Certains. For Huysmans the

+theme of love aroused his mordant wit&mdash;Flaubert, Goncourt, Baudelaire

+were all summoned at one time or another in their respective careers

+to answer the charge of poisoning public morals! And what malicious

+commentaries were drawn and etched by the versatile Rops.</p>

+

+<p>Extraordinary as are Rops's delineations of Satan, the prose of

+Huysmans is not less graphic in interpreting the etched plate. In

+De Tout (1901) there is, literally, a little about everything. Not

+only are several unknown quarters of Paris sketched with a surprising

+freshness, but Huysmans goes far afield for his themes. He studies

+sleeping-cars and the sleepy city Bruges, the aquarium at Berlin&mdash;"most

+fastidious and most ugly"&mdash;the Gobelins, Quentin Matsys at Antwerp;

+but whether in illustrating with his pen the mobs at Lourdes or the

+intimate habits of a Parisian café, he never fails to achieve the exact

+phrase that illuminates. Nor is it all crass realism. His eye, the eye

+of a visionary as well as of a painter, penetrates to the marrow of the

+soul.</p>

+

+<p>A Rebours is the history of a decadent soul in search of an earthly

+paradise. His palace of art is near Paris, and in it the Duc des

+Esseintes assembles all that is rare, perverse, beautiful, morbid, and

+crazy in modern art and literature. A Rebours is in reality a very

+precious work of criticism by a distinguished critical temperament,

+written in a prose jewelled and shining, sharp as a Damascene dagger.

+This French writer's admiration for Moreau has been mentioned. Luyken

+comes in for his share; the bizarre Luyken of Amsterdam (1649-1712).

+Odilon Redon, the lithographer and illustrator of Poe, is lauded by Des

+Esseintes. Redon's work is not lacking in subtlety, and it is sometimes

+disagreeable; possibly the latter quality is aimed at by the painter.

+Redon certainly had in Poe a congenial subject; in Baudelaire also, for

+he has accomplished some shivering plates commemorating Fleurs du Mal.</p>

+

+<p>Not such intractable reading as L'Oblat, withal difficult enough,

+is The Cathedral, which abounds in glorious chapters devoted to

+ecclesiastical painting, sculpture, and architecture. "It"&mdash;the

+Cathedral&mdash;"was as slender and colourless as Roger Van der Weyden's

+Virgins, who are so fragile, so ethereal, that they might blow away

+were they not held down to earth by the weight of their brocades

+and trains," is a passage in this storehouse of curious liturgical

+learning. Matsys, Memling, Dierck Bouts, Van der Weyden, painted great

+religious pictures because they possessed a naïve faith. Nowadays your

+painter has no faith; better, then, stick like Degas to ballet-girls

+and not soil canvas with profane burlesques. Always extreme, Huysmans

+jumped from the worldly audacities of Manet to the rebellious Christ

+of Grünewald. Van Eyck touched him where Van Dyck did not. He

+disliked the "supersensual and sublimated Virgins of Cologne," and

+pronounced Botticelli's Virgins masquerading Venuses. The Van der

+Weyden triptych of the Nativity in the old museum, Berlin, filled him

+with raptures, pious and æsthetic. The "theatrical crucifixions, the

+fleshly coarseness of Rubens" are naught when compared to the early

+Flemings. His pages on Rembrandt are admirable reading, "Rembrandt,

+who had the soul of a Judaising Protestant ... with his serious but

+fervid wit, his genius for concentration, for getting a spot of the

+essence of sunlight into the heart of darkness ... has accomplished

+great results; and in his Biblical scenes has spoken a language which

+no one before him had attempted to lisp." As Huysmans loathed the

+rancid and voluptuous "sacred" music of Gounod and other comic-opera

+writers of masses and hymns in the Church, so he abominated the modern

+"sacred" painters. James Tissot and Munkacsy come in for a critical

+flagellation. What could be more dazzling than his account of a certain

+stained-glass window in his beloved Cathedral at Chartres:</p>

+

+<p>"Up there high in the air, as they might be Salamanders, human beings,

+with faces ablaze and robes on fire, dwelt in a firmament of glory;

+but these conflagrations were enclosed and limited by an incombustible

+frame of darker glass which set off the youthful and radiant joy of

+the flames by the contrast of melancholy, the suggestion of the more

+serious and aged aspect presented by gloomy colouring. The bugle-cry

+of red, the limpid confidence of white, the repeated hallelujahs of

+yellow, the virginal glory of blue, all the quivering crucible of glass

+was dimmed as it neared this border dyed with rusty red, the tawny

+hues of sauces, the harsh purples of sandstone, bottle green, tinder

+brown, fuliginous blacks, and ashy grays." Not even Arthur Rimbaud,

+in his half-jesting sonnet on the "Vowels," indulged in such daring

+colour symbolism as Huysmans. For a specimen of his most fulgurating

+style read his Camïeu in Red, in a little volume edited by Mr. Howells

+entitled Pastels in Prose, and translated by Stuart Merrill.</p>

+

+<p>"To be rich, very rich, and found in Paris in face of the triumphal

+ambulance, the Luxembourg, a public museum of contemporary painting!"

+he cries in one of his essays. He was the critic of Modernity, as

+Degas is its painter, Goncourt its exponent in fiction, Paul Bourget

+its psychologist. He lashes himself into a fine rage over the enormous

+prices paid some years ago by New York millionaires for the work of

+such artists as Bouguereau, Dubufe, Gérôme, Constant, Rosa Bonheur,

+Knaus, Meissonier. The Christ before Pilate, sold for 600,000 francs,

+sets him fulminating against its painter. "Cet indigent décor brossé

+par le Brésilien de la piété, par le rastaquouère de la peinture, par

+Munkacsy."</p>

+

+<p>Joris-Karl Huysmans should have been a painter; his indubitable gift

+for form and colour were by some trick of nature or circumstance

+transposed to literature. So he brought to the criticism of pictures an

+eye abnormal in its keenness, and to this was superadded an abnormal

+power of expression.</p>

+

+<p>After reading his Three Primitives you may be tempted to visit Colmar,

+where hang in the museum several paintings by Mathias Grünewald, who is

+the chief theme of the French writer's book. Colmar is not difficult

+to reach if you are in Paris, or pass through Strasburg. It is a town

+of over 35,000 inhabitants, the capital of Upper Alsace and about

+forty miles from Strasburg. There are several admirable specimens of

+the Rhenish school there, Van Eyck and Martin Schongauer (born 1450

+in Colmar), the great engraver. His statue by Bartholdi is in the

+town, and, as Huysmans rather delicately puts it, is an "emetic for

+the eyes." He always wrote what he thought, and notwithstanding the

+odour of sanctity in which he departed this life, his name and his

+books are still anathema to many of his fellow Catholics. But as to the

+quality of this last study there can be no mistake. It is masterly,

+revealing the various Huysmanses we admire: the mystic, the realist,

+the penetrating critic of art, and the magnificent tamer of language.

+Hallucinated by his phrases, you see cathedrals arise from the mist

+and swim so close to you that you discern every detail before the

+vision vanishes; or some cruel and bloody canvas of the semi-demoniacal

+Grünewald, on which a hideous Christ is crucified, surrounded by

+scowling faces. The swiftness in executing the verbal portrait allows

+you no time to wonder over the method; the evocation is complete, and

+afterward you realise the magic of Huysmans.</p>

+

+<p>In his Là Bas he described the Grünewald Crucifixion, once in the

+Cassel Museum, now at Carlsruhe. A tragic realism invests this work of

+Grünewald, who is otherwise a very unequal painter. Huysmans puzzled

+over the Bavarian, who was probably born at Aschaffenburg. Sundvart,

+Waagen, Goutzwiller, and Passavant have written of him. He was born

+about 1450 and died about 1530. He lived his later years in Mayence,

+lonely and misanthropic. Every one speaks of Dürer, the Cranachs,

+Schongauer, Holbein, but even during his lifetime Grünewald was not

+famous. To-day he is esteemed by those for whom the German and Belgian

+Primitives mean more than all Italian art. There is a bitterness, a

+pessimism, a delight in torture for the sake of torture in Grünewald's

+treatment of sacred subjects that must have shocked his more easy-going

+contemporaries. Huysmans, as is his wont, does not spare us in his

+recital of the horrors of that Colmar Crucifixion. For me the one now

+at Carlsruhe suffices. It causes a shudder, and some echo of the agony

+of the Passion permeates that solemn scene. Grünewald must have been a

+painter of fierce and exalted temperament. His Christs are ugly&mdash;the

+ugliness symbolical of the sins of the world;&mdash;this doctrine was upheld

+by Tertullian and Cyprian, Cyril and St. Justin.</p>

+

+<p>And the cadaverous flesh tones! Such is his fidelity, a fidelity

+almost pathologic, that two such eminent men as Charcot and Richet

+testified, after study, to the too painful verity of this early

+German's brushwork. He depicted with shocking realism the malady known

+as St. Anthony's Fire, and a still more pathological interpretation

+by Huysmans follows. But he warmly praises the fainting mother,

+one of the noble figures in German art. We allude now to the Colmar

+Crucifixion, with its curious introduction of St. John the Baptist in

+Golgotha, and the dark landscape through which runs a gloomy river.

+Fainting Mary, the mother of Christ, is upheld by the disciple John.

+There is a mysterious figure of a girl, an ugly but sorrowful face, and

+the lamb bearing the cross is at the foot of the cross. Audacious is

+the entire composition. It wounds the soul, and that is what Grünewald

+wished. His harsh nature saw in the crucifixion not a pious symbol but

+the death of a god, an unjust death. So he fulminates upon his canvas

+his hatred of the outrage. How tender he can be we see in this Virgin.</p>

+

+<p>On the back of this polyptique are a Resurrection and Annunciation.

+The latter is bad. The former is a dynamic picture representing Christ

+in a vast aureole arising to the sky, His guards tumbled over at the

+side of the tomb. There is an explosion of luminosity. Christ's face

+is radiant; He displays his palms upward, pierced by the nails. The

+floating aerial effect and the draperies are wonderfully handled. The

+museum wherein hang these works was formerly a convent of nuns, founded

+in 1232, and in 1849 turned into a museum. Huysmans rages, of course,

+over the change.</p>

+

+<p>He finds among the Grünewalds at Colmar&mdash;there are nine in all&mdash;a St.

+Anthony bearded, that reminds him of a Father Hecker born in Holland.

+What a simile, made by a man who probably never saw the American

+priest, except pictured!</p>

+

+<p>He visits Frankfort-on-the-Main, and afterward, characteristically

+pouring his vials of wrath upon this New Jerusalem, he visits the

+Staedel Museum and goes into ecstasies over that lovely head of a young

+woman called the Florentine, by an unknown master. Though he admires

+the Van der Weyden, the Bouts, and the Virgin of Van Eyck, he really

+has eyes only for this exquisite, vicious androgynous creature and

+for the Virgin by the Master of Flémalle. After a vivid description

+of the Florentine Cybele he inquires into her artistic paternity,

+waving aside the suggestion that one of the Venezianos painted her.

+But which one? There are over eleven, according to Lanzi. Huysmans

+will not allow Botticelli's name to be mentioned, though he discerns

+certain Botticellian qualities. But he has never forgiven Botticelli

+for painting the Virgin looking like the Venus, and he hates the

+paganism of the Renaissance with an early Christian fervour. (Fancy the

+later Joris-Karl Huysmans and the early Walter Pater in a discussion

+about the Renaissance.) Huysmans himself was a Primitive. Much that he

+wrote would have been understood in the Middle Ages. The old Adam in

+this Fleming, however, comes to the surface as he conjectures the name

+of the enigmatic heroine. Is it that Giulia Farnese, called "Giulia

+la bella"&mdash;<i>puritas impuritatis</i>&mdash;who became the favourite of Pope

+Alexander VI.? If it is&mdash;and then Huysmans writes some pages of perfect

+prose which suggest joyful depravity, as depraved as the people he

+paints with such marvellous colour and precision. It is a peep behind

+the scenes of a pagan Christian Rome.</p>

+

+<p>The Master of Flémalle, whose Virgin he describes at the close of this

+volume, was the Jacques Daret born in the early years of the fifteenth

+century, a fellow student of Roger van der Weyden under Campin at

+Tournay. We confess that, while we enjoy the verbal rhapsodies of the

+author, we were not carried away by this stately Virgin and Child by

+Daret, though there are many Darets that once passed as the work of

+Roger van der Weyden. It has not the sweet melancholy, this picture,

+of Hans Memlinc's Madonnas, and the Van Eyck in the same gallery,

+as well as the Van der Weyden, are both worth a trip across Europe

+to gaze upon. However, on the note of a rapt devotion Huysmans ends

+his book. The first edition, illustrated, was published in 1905, by

+Vanier-Messein. But there is a new (1908) edition, published by Plon,

+at Paris, and called Trois Eglises et Trois Primitifs. This latter is

+not illustrated. The three churches discussed are Notre Dame de Paris

+and its symbolism, Saint Germain-l'Auxerrois, and Saint Merry.</p>

+

+<p>Poor, unhappy, suffering Huysmans! He trod the Road to Damascus on foot

+and not in a pleasant motor-car like several of his successors. The

+intimate side of the man, so hidden by him, is now being revealed to us

+by his friends. Recently, in the <i>Revue de Paris</i>, Mme. Myriam Harry,

+the writer of The Conquest of Jerusalem, tells us of her friendship

+with Huysmans, with a rather sentimental anecdote about his weeping

+over a dead love. When she met him he was already attainted with

+the malady which tortured him to the end. A lifetime sufferer from

+neuralgia and dyspepsia, he was half blind for a few months before

+his death. He touchingly alludes to his illness as both a punishment

+and a reparation for things he wrote in his Lourdes. In a letter

+dated January 5, 1907, he avows that nothing is more dangerous than

+to celebrate sorrow; all his books celebrate the physical miseries of

+life, the sorrows of the soul. Humbly this great writer admits that he

+must pay for the pages of that cruel book, the life of Sainte-Lydwine.

+The disease he so often described came to him at last and slew him.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>To traverse the books of Huysmans is a true pessimistic progress; from

+Le Drageoir aux Epices (1874) to Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), the

+note, at times shrill, often profound, is never one of dulcification.

+The first book, a veritable little box of spices, was modelled on

+Baudelaire's Poèmes en Prose, but revealed to the acute critic a new

+personal shade. Its plainness is Gallic. That amusing, ironic sketch,

+L'Extase, gives us a key-note to the writer's disillusioned soul.

+Marthe (1876) caused a sensation. It was speedily suppressed. La

+Fille Elise and Nana the public could endure; but the cold-blooded

+delineation of vice in this first novel was too much for the Parisian,

+who likes a display of sentiment or sympathy in the treatment of

+unsavoury themes. Now, sympathy for sin or suffering is missing in

+Huysmans. Slow veils of pity never descend upon his sufferers. Like

+a surgeon who will show you a "beautiful disease," a "classic case,"

+he exposed the life of the wretched Marthe, and, while he called a

+cat a cat, he forgot that certain truths are unfit for polite ears

+accustomed to the rotten-ripe Dumas <i>fils</i>, or the thrice-brutal Zola.

+It was in Marthe that Huysmans proclaimed his adherence to naturalism

+in these memorable words: "I write what I see, what I feel, and what I

+have experienced, and I write it as well as I can: that is all." This

+rubric he adhered to his life long, despite his change of spiritual

+base. He also said that there are writers who have talent, and others

+who have not talent. All schools, groups, cliques, whether romantic or

+naturalistic or decadent, need not count.</p>

+

+<p>It was 1880 before Huysmans was again heard from, this time in

+collaboration with Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique,

+and Paul Alexis. Les Soirées de Médan was the inappropriate title of

+a book of interesting tales. Huysmans's contribution, Sac au Dos, is

+a story of the Franco-Prussian war that would have pleased Stendhal

+by its sardonic humour. The hero never reaches the front, but spends

+his time in hospitals, and the nearest he gets to the glory of war

+is a chronic stomach-ache. The variations on this ignoble motive

+showed the malice of Huysmans. War is not hell, he says in effect, but

+dysentery is; how often a petty ailing has unmade a heroic soul. Yet in

+the Brussels edition of this story there was published the following

+verse&mdash;the author seldom wrote poetry; he was hardly a poet, but as

+indicating certain religious preoccupations it is worth repeating:</p>

+

+<p style="margin-left: 15%;">

+"O croix qui veux l'austère, ô chair qui veux le doux,<br />

+O monde, ô évangile, immortels adversaires,<br />

+Les plus grands ennemis sont plus d'accord que vous,<br />

+Et les pôles du ciel ne sont pas plus contraires.<br />

+On monte dans le ciel par un chemin de pleurs,<br />

+Mais, que leur amertume a de douceurs divines!<br />

+On descend aux enfers par un chemin de fleurs,<br />

+Mais hélas! que ces fleurs nous préparent d'épines!<br />

+La fleur qui, dans un jour, sèche et s'épanouit,<br />

+Les bulles d'air et d'eau qu'un petit souffle casse,<br />

+Une ombre qui paraît et qui s'évanouit<br />

+Nous représentent bien comme le monde passe."<br />

+</p>

+

+<p>Naturally, in the face of Maupassant's brilliant Boule de Suif,

+Huysmans's sly attack on patriotism was overlooked. Croquis Parisiens

+(1880) contains specimens of Huysmans's astounding virtuosity.

+No one before has ever described sundry aspects of Paris with

+such verisimilitude&mdash;that Paris he said was, because of the

+Americans, fast becoming a "sinister Chicago." Balls, cafés, bars,

+omnibus-conductors, washerwomen, chestnut-sellers, hairdressers,

+remote landscapes and corners of the city, cabarets, la Bièvre,

+the underground river, with prose paraphrases of music, perfumes,

+flowers&mdash;Huysmans astonishes by his prodigality of epithet and justness

+of observation. What Manet, Pissaro, Raffaelli, Forain, were doing

+with oil and pastel and pencil, he accomplished with his pen. A Vau

+l'Eau followed in 1882. It is considered the typical Huysmans tale,

+and some see in Jean Folantin its unhappy hero, obsessed by the desire

+for a juicy beefsteak, the prototype of Durtal. Folantin is a poor

+employee in the Ministry who must exist on his annual salary of fifteen

+hundred francs. He haunts cheap restaurants, lives in cheap lodgings,

+is seedy and sour, with the nerves of a voluptuary. His sense of smell

+makes his life a nightmare. The sordid recital would be comical but

+that it is so villainously real. It is an Odyssey of a dyspeptic.

+Dickens would have set us laughing over the woes of this Folantin,

+or Dostoïevsky would have made us weep&mdash;as he did in Poor Folk. But

+Huysmans has no time for tears or laughter; he must register his truth,

+and at the end an odor of stale cheese exhales from the printed page.

+Wretched Monsieur Folantin. Of the official life so clearly presented

+in some of Maupassant's tales, we get little; Huysmans is too much

+preoccupied with Folantin's stomach troubles. In the same volume,

+though published first in 1887, is Un Dilemme, which is a pitiful

+tale of a girl abandoned. Huysmans, while he came under the influence

+of L'Education Sentimentale, seems to have taken as a <i>leit motiv</i>

+the idiotic antics of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet. This pair of

+mediocre maniacs were his models for mankind at large. Les Sœurs

+Vatard (1879), praised so warmly by Zola in The Experimental Novel,

+is not a novel, but kaleidoscopic Parisian pictures of intimate low

+life, executed with consummate finish, and closeness to fact. The two

+sisters Vatard, Céline and Désirée, with their love affairs, fill a

+large volume. There are minute descriptions of proletarian interiors,

+sewing-shops full of perspiring girls, railroad-yards, locomotives, and

+a gingerbread fair. The men are impudent scamps, bullies, <i>souteneurs</i>,

+the women either weak or vulgar. Veracity there often is and an air

+of reality&mdash;though these swaggerers and simpletons are silhouettes,

+not half as vital as Zola's Lise or Goncourt's Germinie Lacerteux. But

+atmosphere, <i>toujours</i> atmosphere&mdash;of that Huysmans is the compeller.

+Not a disagreeable scene, smell, or sound does he spare his readers.

+And how many <i>genre</i> pictures he paints for us in this book.</p>

+

+<p>We reach <i>bourgeois</i> life with En Ménage (1881). André and Cyprien the

+novelist and painter are not so individual as, say, old <i>père</i> Vatard

+in the preceding story. They but serve as stalking horses for Huysmans

+to show the stupid miseries of the married state; that whether a man

+is or is not married he will regret it. Love is the supreme poison of

+life. André is deceived by his wife, Cyprien lives lawlessly. Neither

+one is contented. The novel is careful in workmanship; it is like

+Goncourt and Flaubert, both gray and masterful. But it leaves a bad

+taste in the mouth. Like the early Christian fathers, Huysmans had a

+conception of Woman, "the eternal feminine of the eternal simpleton,"

+which is hardly ennobling. The painter Cyprien is said to be a portrait

+of the author.</p>

+

+<p>A Rebours appeared at the psychologic moment. Decadence was in the

+air. Either you were a decadent or violently opposed to the movement.

+Verlaine had consecrated the word&mdash;hardly an expressive one. The

+depraved young Jean, Duke of Esseintes, greedy of exotic sensations,

+who figures as the hero of this gorgeous prose mosaic, is said to be

+the portrait of a Parisian poet, and a fashionable dilettante of art

+painted by Whistler. But there is more of Huysmans&mdash;the exquisite

+literary critic that is Huysmans&mdash;in the work. If, as Henry James

+remarks: "When you have no taste you have no discretion&mdash;which is

+the conscience of taste," then Huysmans must be acclaimed a man of

+unexampled tact. His handling of a well-nigh impossible theme, his

+"technical heroism," above all, his soul-searching tactics in that

+wonderful Chapter VII, when Des Esseintes, suffering from the malady

+of the infinite, proceeds to examine his conscience and portrays for

+us the most fluctuating shades of belief and feeling&mdash;his touch here

+is sure, and casuistically immoral, as "all art is immoral for the

+inartistic." The chief value of the book for future generations of

+critics lies in Chapters XII and XIV. Huysmans's literary and artistic

+preferences are catalogued with delicacy and erudition. More Byzantine

+than Byzance, A Rebours is a storehouse of art treasures, and it was

+once the battle-field of the literary élite. It is a history of the

+artistic decadent, the man of disdainful inquietudes who searches for

+an earthly artificial paradise. The mouth orchestra which, by the

+aid of various liquors, gives to the tongue sensations analogous to

+music; the flowers and perfume concerts, the mechanical landscape,

+the mock sea&mdash;all these are mystifications. Huysmans the <i>farceur</i>,

+the Jules Verne of æsthetics, is enjoying himself. His liquor

+symphony he borrowed from La Chimie du Goût by Polycarpe Poncelet;

+from Zola, perhaps, his concert of flowers. As for the originality

+of these diversions, we may turn to Goethe and find in his Triumph

+der Empfindsamkeit the mechanical landscape of the Prince, who can

+enjoy sunlight or moonlight at will. He has also a doll to whom he

+sighs, rhapsodises, and passes in its silent company hours of rapture.

+Villiers de l'Isle Adam evidently read Goethe: see his Eve of the

+Future. All of which shows the folly of certain critics who recognise

+in Huysmans the prime exemplar of the decadent&mdash;that much misunderstood

+word. But how about Goethe? A Rebours, notwithstanding Huysmans's

+later pilgrimage to Canossa, he never excelled. It is his most personal

+achievement. It also contains the most beautiful writing of this

+Paganini of prose.</p>

+

+<p>En Rade (1887) did not attract much attention. It is not dull; on

+the contrary, it is very Huysmansish. But it is not a subject that

+enthralls. Jacques Maries and his wife have lost their money. They go

+into the country to live cheaply. The author's detestation of nature

+was apparently the motive for writing the book. There are fantastic

+dreams worthy of H. G. Wells, and realistic descriptions of a calf's

+birth and a cat's agony; the last two named prove the one-time disciple

+of Zola had not lost his vision; the truth is, Zola's method is

+melodramatic, romantic, vague, when compared to Huysmans's implacable

+manner of etching petty facts.</p>

+

+<p>But in Là-Bas he takes a leap across the ditch of naturalism and

+reaches another, if not more delectable, territory. This was in 1891.

+A new manifesto must be made&mdash;the Goncourts had printed a bookful.

+Symbolism, not naturalism, is now the shibboleth. Huysmans declares

+that:</p>

+

+<blockquote>

+

+<p>It is essential to preserve the veracity of the document,

+the precision of detail, the fibrous and nervous language

+of Realism, but it is equally essential to become the

+well-digger of the soul, and not to attempt to explain

+what is mysterious by mental maladies.... It is essential,

+in a word, to follow the great toad so deeply dug out

+by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a parallel

+pathway in the air, another road by which we may reach the

+Beyond, to achieve thus a Spiritual naturalism.</p></blockquote>

+

+<p>And by a curious, a bizarre route Durtal, the everlasting Durtal,

+sought to achieve spiritually&mdash;a spirituality <i>à rebours</i>, for it was

+by devil-worship and the study of Gilles de Rais of ill-fame, that

+he reached his goal. We also study church bells, <i>incubi</i>, satanism,

+demons, witches, sacrileges of a <i>raffiné</i> sort; indeed, an enormous

+amount of occult lumber is dumped into the book, which is indigestible

+on that account. Diabolic lore <i>à la</i> Jules Dubois and other modern

+magi is profuse. That wicked lady, who is far from credible, Madame

+Chantelouve, flits through various chapters. Her final disappearance,

+one hopes "below"&mdash;like the devils in the pantomime&mdash;is received by

+Durtal and the reader with a sigh of relief. She is quite the vilest

+character in French fiction, and, as Stendhal would say, her only

+excuse is that she never existed. The Black Mass is painted by an

+artist adroit in the manipulation of the sombre and magnificent.</p>

+

+<p>Là-Bas proved a prophetic weather-vane. En Route in 1895 did not

+astonish those who had been studying the spiritual fluctuations of

+Huysmans. Behold the miracle! He is a believing Christian. Wisely the

+antecedent causes were tacitly avoided. "I believe," said Durtal,

+simply. Of superior interest is his struggle up the ladder to

+perfection. This painful feat is slowly accomplished in La Cathédrale

+(1898), L'Oblat (1903), and Lourdes (1906). And it must be confessed

+that the more pious grew Huysmans the less artist he&mdash;as might have

+been expected. What is his art to a man who is concerned not with the

+things of this world? He never lost his acerbity, or his faculty for

+the phrase magical, though his sense of proportion gradually vanished.

+Luckily, he is not saccharine like the majority of writers on religious

+topics. Ferdinand Brunetière complained that Flaubert was unbearably

+erudite in his three short stories&mdash;echoing what Sainte-Beuve had said

+of Salammbô years before. What must he have thought of that astonishing

+Cathedral, with its chapters on the symbolism of architecture,

+sculpture, gems, flowers (Sir Thomas Browne and his quincunxes are

+fairly beaten from the field), vestments, sacred vessels of the

+altar, and a multitude of mysterious things, hieroglyphics, and dark

+liturgical riddles? There are ravishing pages, though none so solemn

+and moving as the description of the <i>De profundis</i> and <i>Dies iræ</i> in

+En Route.</p>

+

+<p>It may prove profitable for the student after reading La Cathédrale to

+take up Walter Pater's unfinished story, Gaston De Latour, and read

+the description therein of the Chartres Cathedral. There are pages of

+exquisitely felt prose, but Huysmans sees more and tells what he sees

+in less musical though more lapidary phrases.</p>

+

+<p>For anyone except the trailer after strange souls The Oblate is an

+affliction. Madame Bavoil, with her <i>notre ami</i>, is a chattering

+nuisance, withal a worthy creature. Durtal is always in the dumps. He

+speaks much of interior peace, but he gives the impression of a man

+sitting painfully amidst spiritual brambles. Perhaps he felt that for

+him after his Golgotha are the sweet-singing flames of Purgatory. We

+are not sorry when he returns to Paris. As for the book on Lourdes, it

+is like an open wound. A whiff from the operating-room of a hospital

+comes to you. We are edified by the childlike faith with which Huysmans

+accepts the report of cures that would stagger the most perfervid

+Christian Scientist. His Saint-Lydwine is hard reading, written by a

+man whose mysticism was a matter of rigid definition, a thing to be

+weighed and felt and verbally proved. Fleming-like, he is less melodist

+than harmonist&mdash;and such acrid harmonies, polyphonic variations, and

+fuguelike flights to the other side of good and evil.</p>

+

+<p>George Moore was the first English critic to recognise Huysmans. He

+wrote that "a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of

+exquisite and powerful liquor." Frankly, it was his conversion that

+focussed upon Huysmans so much attention. No one may remain isolated

+in his century. He has never been a favourite with the larger Parisian

+public; rather, a curiosity, a spiritual ogre turned saint. And the

+saintship has been hotly disputed. Abbé Mugnier and Dom A. du Bourg,

+the prior of Sainte-Marie, since his death, have written eloquently

+about his conversion, his life as an oblate, and his edifying death.

+Huysmans refused anæsthetics because he wished to suffer for his life

+of sin, above all suffer for his early writings. Need it be added that,

+like Tolstoy, he repudiated absolutely his first books? Huysmans Intime

+is the title of the recollections of both Dom du Bourg and Henry Céard.

+His literary executors destroyed many manuscripts. He left his money

+principally to charities.</p>

+

+<p>Huysmans was not a man possessing what are so vaguely denominated

+"general ideas." He was never interested in the chess-play of

+metaphysics, politics, or science. He was a specialist, one who

+had ransacked libraries for curious details, despoiled perfumers'

+catalogues for their odourous vocables, pored over technical

+dictionaries for odd-coloured words, and studied cook-books for savoury

+terms. His gamut of sensations began at the violet ray. He was a

+perverse aristocrat who descended to the gutter there to analyse the

+various stratifications of filth; when he returned to his ivory cell,

+he had discovered, not humanity, but an anodyne, the love of God.

+Thenceforth, he was interested in one thing&mdash;the saving of the soul of

+Joris-Karl Huysmans, and being a marvellous verbal artist, his recital

+of the event startled us, fascinated us. Renan once wrote of Amiel: "He

+speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, as if these

+things were realities." Let us rather imitate Sainte-Beuve, who said:

+"You may not cease to be a sceptic after reading Pascal, but you must

+cease to treat believers with contempt." And this injunction is not

+difficult to obey in the case of Huysmans, for whom the things derided

+by Renan were the profoundest realities of his troubled life.</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="VI" id="VI">VI</a></h4>

+

+<h4>THE EVOLUTION OF AN EGOIST</h4>

+

+<h4>MAURICE BARRÈS</h4>

+

+

+<p>Once upon a time a youth, slim, dark, and delicate, lived in a tower.

+This tower was composed of ivory&mdash;the youth sat within its walls,

+tapestried by most subtle art, and studied his soul. As in a mirror, a

+fantastic mirror of opal and gold, he searched his soul and noted its

+faintest music, its strangest modulations, its transmutation of joy

+into melancholy; he saw its grace and its corruption. These matters he

+registered in his "little mirrors of sincerity." And he was happy in an

+ivory tower and far away from the world, with its rumours of dulness,

+feeble crimes, and flat triumphs. After some years the young man

+wearied of the mirror, with his spotted soul cruelly pictured therein;

+wearied of the tower of ivory and its alien solitudes; so he opened its

+carved doors and went into the woods, where he found a deep pool of

+water. It was very small, very clear, and reflected his face, reflected

+on its quivering surface his unstable soul. But soon other images of

+the world appeared above the pool: men's faces and women's, and the

+shapes of earth and sky. Then Narcissus, who was young, whose soul was

+sensitive, forgot the ivory tower and the magic pool, and merged his

+own soul into the soul of his people.</p>

+

+<p>Maurice Barrès is the name of the youth, and he is now a member of the

+Académie Française. His evolution from the Ivory tower of Egoism to the

+broad meadows of life is not an insoluble enigma; his books and his

+active career offer many revelations of a fascinating, though often

+baffling, personality. His passionate curiosity in all that concerns

+the moral nature of his fellow man lends to his work its own touch of

+universality; otherwise it would not be untrue to say that the one

+Barrès passion is love of his native land. "France" is engraved on his

+heart; France and not the name of a woman. This may be regarded as a

+grave shortcoming by the sex.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>Paul Bourget has said of him: "Among the young people who have

+entered literature since 1880 Maurice Barrès is certainly the most

+celebrated.... One must see other than a decadent or a dilettante in

+this analyst ... the most original who has appeared since Baudelaire."

+Bourget said much more about the young writer, then in his twenties,

+who in 1887 startled Paris with a curious, morbid, ironical, witty

+book, a production neither fiction nor fact. This book was called Sous

+l'Œil des Barbares. It made a sensation. He was born on the 22nd

+of September, 1862, at Charmes-sur-Moselle (Vosges), and received a

+classical education at the Nancy (old capital of Lorraine) Lyceum.

+Of good family&mdash;among his ancestors he could boast some military

+men&mdash;he early absorbed a love for his native province, a love that

+later was to become a species of soil-worship. His health not strong

+at any time, and nervous of temperament, he nevertheless moved on

+Paris, for the inevitable siege of which all romantic readers of Balzac

+dream during their school-days. "<i>A nous deux!</i>" muttered Rastignac,

+shaking his fist at the city spread below him. <i>A nous deux!</i> exclaim

+countless youngsters ever since. Maurice, however, was not that sort of

+Romantic. He meant to conquer Paris, but in a unique way; he detested

+melodrama. He removed to the capital in 1882. His first literary

+efforts had appeared in the <i>Journal de la Meurthe et des Vosges</i>; he

+could see as a boy the Vosges Mountains; and Alsace, not far away,

+was in the clutches of the hated enemy. In Paris he wrote for several

+minor reviews, met distinguished men like Leconte de Lisle, Rodenbach,

+Valade, Rollinat; and his Parisian début was in <i>La Jeune France</i>, with

+a short story entitled Le Chemin de l'institut (April, 1882). Ernest

+Gaubert, who has given us these details, says that, despite Leconte

+de Lisle's hearty support, Mme. Adam refused an essay of Barrès as

+unworthy of the <i>Nouvelle Revue</i>. In 1884 appeared a mad little review,

+<i>Les Taches d'Encre</i>, irregular in publication. Despite its literary

+quality, the young editor displayed some knowledge of the tactics of

+"new" journalism. When Morin was assassinated by Mme. Clovis Hugues,

+sandwich men paraded the boulevards carrying on their boards this

+inscription: "Morin reads no longer <i>Les Taches d'Encre!</i>" Perseverance

+such as this should have been rewarded; but little <i>Ink-spots</i> quickly

+disappeared. Barrès founded a new review in 1886, <i>Les Chroniques</i>,

+in company with some brilliant men. Jules Claretie about this time

+remarked, "Make a note of the name of Maurice Barrès. I prophesy

+that it will become famous." Barrès had discovered that Rastignac's

+pugnacious methods were obsolete in the battle with Paris, though

+there was no folly he would be incapable of committing if he only

+could attract attention&mdash;even to walking the boulevards in the guise

+of primeval man. Far removed as his exquisite art now is from this

+blustering desire for publicity, this threat, uttered in jest or not,

+is significant. Maurice Barrès has since stripped his soul bare for the

+world's ire or edification.</p>

+

+<p>Wonder-children do not always pursue their natural vocation. Pascal

+was miraculously endowed as a mathematician; he ended a master

+of French prose, a hallucinated, wretched man. Franz Liszt was a

+prodigy, but aspired to the glory of Beethoven. Raphael was a painting

+prodigy, and luckily died so young that he had not time to change

+his profession. Swinburne wrote faultless verse as a youth. He is a

+<i>prosateur</i> to-day. Maurice Barrès was born a metaphysician; he has

+the metaphysical faculty as some men a fiddle hand. He might say with

+Prosper Mérimée, "Metaphysic pleases me because it is never-ending."

+But not as Kant, Condillac, or William James&mdash;to name men of widely

+disparate systems&mdash;did the precocious thinker plan objectively. The

+proper study of Maurice Barrès was Maurice Barrès, and he vivisected

+his Ego as calmly as a surgeon trepanning a living skull. He boldly

+proclaimed the <i>culte du moi</i>, proclaimed his disdain for the

+barbarians who impinged upon his <i>I</i>. To study and note the fleeting

+shapes of his soul&mdash;in his case a protean psyche&mdash;was the one thing

+worth doing in a life of mediocrity. And this new variation of the

+eternal hatred for the <i>bourgeois</i> contained no menaces levelled at any

+class, no groans of disgust <i>à la</i> Huysmans. Imperturbable, with an icy

+indifference, Barrès pursued his fastidious way. What we hate we fight,

+what we despise we avoid. Barrès merely despised the other Egos around

+him, and entering his ivory tower he bolted the door; but on reaching

+the roof did not fail to sound his horn announcing to an eager world

+that the miracle had come to pass&mdash;Maurice Barrès was discovered by

+Maurice Barrès.</p>

+

+<p>Egoism as a religion is hardly a new thing. It began with the first

+sentient male human. It has since preserved the species, discovered

+the "inferiority" of women, made civilisation, and founded the fine

+arts. Any attempt to displace the Ego in the social system has only

+resulted in inverting the social pyramid. Love our neighbour as ourself

+is trouble-breeding; but we must first love ourself as a precaution

+that our neighbour will not suffer both in body and in mind. The

+interrogation posed on the horizon of our consciousness, regarding

+the perfectibility of mankind, is best answered by a definition of

+socialism as that religion which proves all men to be equally stupid.

+Do not let us confound the ideas of progress and perfectibility. Since

+man first realised himself as man, first said, I am I, there has been

+no progress. No art has progressed. Science is a perpetual rediscovery.

+And what modern thinker has taught anything new?</p>

+

+<p>Life is a circle. We are imprisoned, in the cage of our personality.

+Each human creates his own picture of the world, re-creates it each

+day. These are the commonplaces of metaphysics; Schopenhauer has

+presented some of them to us in tempting garb.</p>

+

+<p>Compare the definitions of Man made by Pascal and Cabanis. Man, said

+Pascal, is but a reed, the feeblest of created things; yet a reed which

+thinks. Man, declared the materialistic Cabanis, is a digestive tube&mdash;a

+statement that provoked the melodious indignation of Lacordaire.

+What am I? asks Barrès; <i>je suis un instant d'une chose immortelle</i>.

+And this instant of an immortal thing has buried within it something

+eternal of which the individual has only the usufruct. (Goncourt

+wrote, "What is life? The usufruct of an aggregation of molecules.")

+Before him Sénancour in Obermann&mdash;the reveries of a sick, hermetic

+soul&mdash;studied his malady, but offered no prophylactic. Amiel was so

+lymphatic of will that he doubted his own doubts, doubted all but

+his dreams. He, too, had fed at Hegel's ideologic banquet, where the

+verbal viands snared the souls of guests. But Barrès was too sprightly

+a spirit to remain a mystagogue. Diverse and contradictory as are his

+several souls, he did not utterly succumb to the spirit of analysis.

+Whether he was poison-proof or not to the venom that slew the peace

+of the unhappy Amiel (that bonze of mysticism), the young Lorrainer

+never lacked elasticity or spontaneity, never ceased to react after

+his protracted plunges into the dark pools of his subliminal self. And

+his volitional powers were not paralysed. Possessing a sensibility as

+delicate and vibrating as Benjamin Constant, he has had the courage to

+study its fevers, its disorders, its subtleties. He knew that there

+were many young men like him, not only in France, but throughout the

+world, highly organised, with less bone and sinew than nerves&mdash;exposed

+nerves; egoistic souls, weak of will. We are sick, this generation of

+young men, exclaimed Barrès; sick from the lying assurances of science,

+sick from the false promises of politicians. There must be a remedy.

+One among ms must immolate himself, study the malady, seek its cure. I,

+Maurice Barrès, shall be the mirror reflecting the fleeting changes of

+my environment, social and psychical. I repudiate the transcendental

+indifference of Renan; I will weigh my sensations as in a scale; I

+shall not fear to proclaim the result. Amiel, a Protestant Hamlet (as

+Bourget so finely says), believes that every landscape is a state of

+soul. My soul is full of landscapes. Therein all may enter and find

+their true selves.</p>

+

+<p>All this, and much more, Barrès sang in his fluid, swift, and supple

+prose, without a vestige of the dogmatic. He did not write either to

+prove or to convince, only to describe his interior life. He did not

+believe, neither did he despair. There is a spiritual malice in his

+egoism that removes it far from the windy cosmos of Walt Whitman or

+the vitriolic vanity of D'Annunzio. In his fugue-like flights down the

+corridor of his metaphysics, he never neglects to drop some poetic

+rose, some precious pearl of sentiment. His little book, true spiritual

+memoirs, aroused both wrath and laughter. The wits set to work. He was

+called a dandy of psychology, nicknamed <i>Mlle. Renan</i>, pronounced a

+psychical harlequin, a masquerader of the emotions; he was told that,

+like Chateaubriand, he wore his heart in a sling. Anatole France, while

+recognising the eloquent art of this young man, spoke of the "perverse

+idealist" which is Maurice Barrès. His philosophy was pronounced a

+perverted pyrrhonism, the quintessence of self-worship. A <i>Vita Nuova</i>

+of egoism had been born.</p>

+

+<p>But the dandy did not falter. He has said that one never conquers the

+intellectual suffrages of those who precede us in life; he made his

+appeal to young France. And what was the balm in Gilead offered by

+this new doctor of metaphysics? None but a Frenchman at the end of the

+last century could have conceived the Barrèsian plan of soul-saving.

+In Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam, the

+union of Roman Catholic mysticism and blasphemy has proved to many

+a stumbling-stone. These poets were believers, yet Manicheans; they

+worshipped at two shrines; evil was their greater good. Barrès plucked

+several leaves from their breviaries. He proposed to school his soul

+by a rigid adherence to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius

+Loyola. With the mechanism of this Catholic moralist he would train

+his Ego, cure it of its spiritual dryness&mdash;that malady so feared by

+St. Theresa&mdash;and arouse it from its apathy. He would deliver us from a

+Renan-ridden school.</p>

+

+<p>This scholastic fervour urged Barrès to reinstate man in the centre of

+the universe, a position from which he had been routed by science. It

+was a pious, mediæval idea. He did not, however, assert the bankruptcy

+of science, but the bankruptcy of pessimism. His book is metaphysical

+autobiography, a Gallic transposition of Goethe's Wahrheit und

+Dichtung. We may now see that his concentrated egoism had definite aims

+and was not the conceit of a callow Romantic.</p>

+

+<p>Barrès imbibed from the Parnassian poetic group his artistic

+remoteness. His ivory tower is a borrowed phrase made by Sainte-Beuve

+about De Vigny. But his mercurial soul could not be imprisoned long by

+frigid theories of impeccable art&mdash;of art for art's sake. <i>My soul!</i>

+that alone is worth studying, cried Maurice. John Henry Newman said the

+same in a different and more modest dialectic. The voice of the French

+youth is shriller, it is sometimes in falsetto; yet there is no denying

+its fundamental sincerity of pitch. And he has the trick of light

+verbal fence beloved of his race. He is the comedian among moralists.

+His is neither the frozen eclecticism of Victor Cousin, nor the rigid

+determinism of Taine. Yet he is a partial descendant of the Renan he

+flouts, and of Taine&mdash;above all, of Stendhal and Voltaire. In his early

+days if one had christened him <i>Mlle. Stendhal</i>, there would have been

+less to retract. Plus a delicious style, he is a masked, slightly

+feminine variation of the great mystifier who wrote La Chartreuse

+de Parme, leaving out the Chartreuse. At times the preoccupation of

+Barrès with the moral law approaches the borderland of the abnormal.

+Like Jules Laforgue, his intelligence and his sensibility are closely

+wedded. He is a sentimental ironist with a taste for self-mockery, a

+Heine-like humour. He had a sense of humour, even when he wore the

+<i>panache</i> of General Boulanger, and opposed the Dreyfus proceedings. It

+may rescue from the critical executioner who follows in the footsteps

+of all thinkers, many of his pages.</p>

+

+<p>A dilettante, an amateur&mdash;yes! But so was Goethe in his Olympus,

+so Stendhal in his Cosmopolis. He elected at first to view the

+spectacle of life, to study it from afar, and by the <i>tempo</i> of his

+own sensibility. Not the tonic egoism of Thoreau this; it has served

+its turn nevertheless in France. Afferent, centripetal, and other

+forbidding terms, have been bestowed upon his system; while for the

+majority this word egoism has a meaning that implies our most selfish

+instincts. If, however, interposes Bourget, you consider the word as

+a formula, then the angle of view is altered; if Barrès had said in

+one jet, "Nothing is more precious for a man than to guard intact his

+convictions, his passions, his ideal, his individuality," those who

+misjudged this courageous apostle of egoism, this fervent prober of the

+human soul, might have modified their opinions&mdash;and would probably have

+passed him by. It was the enigmatic message, the strained symbolism,

+of which Barrès delivered himself, that puzzled both critics and

+public. Robert Schumann once propounded a question concerning the

+Chopin Scherzo: "How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in

+dark veils?" Now Barrès, who is far from being a spiritual <i>blagueur</i>,

+suggests this puzzle of Schumann. His employment, without a <i>nuance</i>

+of mockery, of the devotional machinery so marvellously devised by

+that captain of souls, Ignatius Loyola, was rather disquieting,

+notwithstanding its very practical application to the daily needs

+of the spirit. Ernest Hello, transported by such a spectacle, may

+not have been far astray when he wrote of the nineteenth century as

+"having desire without light, curiosity without wisdom, seeking God by

+strange ways, ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense

+upon the high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness."

+Ernest Renan was evidently aimed at, but the bolt easily wings that

+metaphysical bird of gay plumage, Maurice Barrès.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>He has published over a dozen volumes and numerous brochures, political

+and "psychothérapie," many addresses, and one comedy, Une Journée

+Parlementaire. He calls his books metaphysical fiction, the adventures

+of a contemplative young man's mind. Paul Bourget is the psychologist

+pure and complex; Barrès has&mdash;rather, had&mdash;such a contempt for action

+on the "earthly plane," that at the head of each chapter of his

+"idealogies" he prefixed a <i>résumé</i>, a concordance of the events that

+were supposed to take place, leaving us free to savour the prose,

+enjoy the fine-spun formal texture, and marvel at the contrapuntal

+involutions of the hero's intellect. Naturally a reader, hungry for

+facts, must perish of famine in this rarefied æsthetic desert, the

+background of which is occasionally diversified by a sensuality

+that may be dainty, yet is disturbing because of its disinterested

+portrayment. The Eternal Feminine is not unsung in the Barrès novels.

+Woman for his imagination is a creature exquisitely fashioned,

+hardly an odalisque, nor yet the symbol of depravity we encounter in

+Huysmans. She is a "phantom of delight"; but that she has a soul we

+beg to doubt. Barrès almost endowed her with one in the case of his

+Bérénice; and Bérénice died very young. A young man, with various

+names, traverses these pages. Like the Durtal, or Des Esseintes, or

+Folantin, of Huysmans, who is always Huysmans, the hero of Barrès is

+always Barrès. In the first of the trilogy&mdash;of which A Free Man and

+The Garden of Bérénice are the other two&mdash;we find Philippe escaping

+through seclusion and revery the barbarians, his adversaries. The

+Adversary&mdash;portentous title for the stranger who grazes our sensitive

+epidermis&mdash;is the being who impedes or misleads a spirit in search of

+itself. If he deflects us from our destiny, he is the enemy. It may be

+well to recall at this juncture Stendhal, who avowed that our first

+enemies are our parents, an idea many an insurgent boy has asserted

+when his father was not present.</p>

+

+<p>Seek peace and happiness with the conviction that they are never to be

+found; felicity must be in the experiment, not in the result. Be ardent

+and sceptical. Here Philippe touches hands with the lulling Cyrenaicism

+of Walter Pater. And Barrès might have sat for one of Pater's imaginary

+portraits. But it is too pretty to last, such a dream as this, in a

+world wherein work and sorrow rule. He is not an ascetic, Philippe.

+He eats rare beefsteaks, smokes black Havanas, clothes himself in

+easy-fitting garments, and analyses with cordial sincerity his

+multi-coloured soul. (And oh! the colours of it; oh! its fluctuating

+forms!) The young person invades his privacy&mdash;a solitary in Paris is an

+incredible concept. Together they make journeys "conducted by the sun."

+She is dreamlike until we read, "Cependant elle le suivait de loin,

+délicate et de hanches merveilleuses"&mdash;which delicious and dislocated

+phrase is admired by lovers of Goncourt syntax, but must be shocking to

+the old-fashioned who prefer the classic line and balance of Bossuet.</p>

+

+<p>Nothing happens. Everything happens. Philippe makes the stations

+of the cross of earthly disillusionment. He weighs love, he weighs

+literature&mdash;"all these books are but pigeon-holes in which I classify

+my ideas concerning myself, their titles serve only as the labels of

+the different portions of my appetite." Irony is his ivory tower, his

+refuge from the banalities of his contemporaries. Henceforth he will

+enjoy his Ego. It sounds at moments like Bunthorne transposed to a more

+intense tonality.</p>

+

+<p>But even beefsteaks, cigars, wine, and philosophy pall. He craves a

+mind that will echo his, craves a mental duo, in which the clash of

+character and opposition of temperaments will evoke pleasing cerebral

+music. In this dissatisfaction with his solitude we may detect the

+first rift in the lute of his egoism. He finds an old friend, Simon

+by name, and after some preliminary sentimental philandering at the

+seashore, in the company of two young ladies, the pair agree to lead

+a monastic life. To Lorraine they retire and draft a code of diurnal

+obligations. "We are never so happy as when in exaltation," and "The

+pleasure of exaltation is greatly enhanced by the analysis of it."

+Their souls are fortified and engineered by the stern practices of

+Loyola. The woman idea occasionally penetrates to their cells. It

+distracts them&mdash;"woman, who has always possessed the annoying art of

+making imbeciles loquacious." Notwithstanding these wraiths of feminine

+fancy, Philippe finds himself almost cheerful. His despondent moods

+have vanished. He quarrels, of course, with Simon, who is dry, an

+<i>esprit fort</i>.</p>

+

+<p>The Intercessors now appear, the intellectual saints who act as

+intermediaries between impressionable, bruised natures and the

+Infinite. They are the near neighbours of God, for they are the men

+who have experienced an unusual number of sensations. Philippe admits

+that his temperament oscillates between languor and ecstasy. Benjamin

+Constant and Sainte-Beuve are the two "Saints" of Sensibility who aid

+the youths in their self-analysis; rather a startling devolution from

+the Imitation of Christ and Ignatius Loyola. Tiring, finally, of this

+sterile analysis, and discovering that the neurasthenic Simon is not a

+companion-soul, Philippe, very illogically yet very naturally, resolves

+that he must bathe himself in new sensations, and proceeds to Venice.

+We accompany him willingly, for this poet who handles prose as Chopin

+the pianoforte, tells us of his soul in Venice, and we are soothed when

+he speaks of the art of John Bellini, of Titian, Veronese, above all of

+Tiepolo, "who was too much a sceptic to be bitter.... His conceptions

+have that lassitude which follows pleasure, a lassitude preferred by

+epicureans to pleasure itself." Graceful, melancholy Tiepolo. This

+Venetian episode is rare reading.</p>

+

+<p>The last of the trilogy is The Garden of Bérénice. It is the best

+of the three in human interest, and its melancholy-sweet landscapes

+exhale a charm that is nearly new in French literature; something

+analogous may be found in Slavic music, or in the <i>Intimiste</i> school

+of painting. Several of these landscapes are redolent of Watteau:

+tender, doleful, sensuous, their twilights filled with vague figures,

+languidly joying in the mood of the moment. The impressionism which

+permeates this book is a veritable lustration for those weary of

+commonplace modern fiction. Not since has Barrès excelled this idyl

+of the little Bérénice and her slowly awakening consciousness to

+beauty, aroused by an old, half-forgotten museum in meridional France.

+At Arles, encompassed by the memory of a dead man, she loves her

+donkey, her symbolic ducks, and Philippe, who divines her adolescent

+sorrow, her yearning spirit, her unfulfilled dreams. Her garden upon

+the immemorial and paludian plains of Arles is threaded by silver

+waters, illuminated by copper sunsets, their tones reverberating from

+her robes. Something of Maeterlinck's stammering, girlish, questioning

+Mélisande is in Bérénice. Maeterlinckian, too, is the statement that

+"For an accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue&mdash;that between

+our two Egos, the momentary Ego we are, and the ideal Ego toward which

+we strive." Bérénice would marry Philippe. We hold our breath, hoping

+that his tyrant Ego may relax, and that, off guard, he may snatch with

+fearful joy the chance to gain this childlike creature. Alas! there is

+a certain M. Martin, who is Philippe's political adversary&mdash;Philippe

+is a candidate for the legislature; he is become practical; in the

+heat of his philosophic egoism he finds that if a generous negation is

+good waiting ground, wealth and the participation in political affairs

+is a better one. M. Martin covets the hand of Bérénice. He repels

+her because he is an engineer, a man of positive, practical spirit,

+who would drain the marshes in Bérénice's garden of their beautiful

+miasmas, and build healthy houses for happy people. To Philippe he is

+the "adversary" who despises the contemplative life. "He had a habit

+of saying, 'Do you take me for a dreamer?' as one should say, 'Do you

+take me for an idiot?'" Philippe, nevertheless, more solicitous of his

+Ego than of his affections, advises Bérénice to marry M. Martin. This

+she does, and dies like a flower in a cellar. She is a lovely memory

+for our young idealist, who in voluptuous accents rhapsodises about

+her as did Sterne over his dead donkey. Sensibility, all this, to the

+very ultima Thule of egoism. Then, Philippe obtains the concession of

+a suburban hippodrome. Poor Bérénice! <i>Pauvre Petite</i>&mdash;<i>Secousse</i>! The

+name of this book was to have been <i>Qualis artifex pereo</i>! And there is

+a fitting Neronic tang to its cruel and sentimental episodes that would

+have justified the title. But for Barrès, it has a Goethian quality;

+"all is true, nothing exact."</p>

+

+<p>In 1892 was published The Enemy of Law, a book of violent anarchical

+impulse and lyric disorder. It is still Philippe, though under another

+name, André, who approves of a bomb launched by the hand of an

+anarchist, and because of the printed expression of his sympathy he is

+sent to prison for a few months. A Free Man, he endures his punishment

+philosophically, winning the friendship of a young Frenchwoman, an

+<i>exaltee</i>, and also of a little Russian princess, a silhouette of Marie

+Bashkirtseff, and an unmistakable blood-relative of Stendhal's Lamiel.

+After his liberation André makes sentimental pilgrimages with one or

+the other, finally with both of his friends, to Germany and elsewhere.

+A shaggy dog, Velu, figures largely in these pages, and we are treated

+to some disquisitions on canine psychology. Nor are the sketches of

+Saint-Simon, Fourier, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Ludwig of

+Bavaria, the Wagnerian idealist, particularly novel. They but reveal

+the nascent social sympathies of Barrès, who was at the law-despising

+period of his development. His little princess has a touch of Bérénice,

+coupled with a Calmuck disregard of the <i>convenances</i>; she loves

+the "warm smell of stables" and does not fear worldly criticism of

+her conduct; the trio vanish in a too Gallic, too rose-coloured

+perspective. A volume of protest, The Enemy of Law served its turn,

+though here the phrase&mdash;clear, alert, suave&mdash;of his earlier books is

+transformed to a style charged with flame and acid. The moral appears

+to be dangerous, as well as diverting&mdash;develop your instincts to the

+uttermost, give satisfaction to your sensibility; then must you attain

+the perfection of your Ego, and therefore will not attenuate the purity

+of your race. The Russian princess, we are assured, carried with her

+the ideas of antique morality.</p>

+

+<p>In the second trilogy&mdash;Du Sang, de la Volupté, et de la Mort; Amori

+et Dolori Sacrum; and Les Amitiés Françaises&mdash;we begin an itinerary

+which embraces parts of Italy, Spain, Germany, France, particularly

+Lorraine. Barrès must be ranked among those travellers of acute

+vision and æsthetic culture who in their wanderings disengage the

+soul of a city, of a country. France, from Count de Caylus and the

+Abbé Barthélémy (Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis) to Stendhal, Taine, and

+Bourget, has given birth to many distinguished examples. The first of

+the new group, Blood, Pleasure, and Death&mdash;a sensational title for a

+work so rich and consoling in substance&mdash;is a collection of essays and

+tales. The same young man describes his æsthetic and moral impressions

+before the masterpieces of Angelo and Vinci, or the tombs, cathedrals,

+and palaces of Italy and Spain. Cordova is visited, the gardens of

+Lombardy, Ravenna, Parma&mdash;Stendhal's beloved city&mdash;Siena, Pisa; there

+are love episodes in diaphanous keys. Barrès, ever magnanimous in his

+critical judgments, pays tribute to the memory of his dead friends,

+Jules Tellier and Marie Bashkirtseff. He understood her soul, though

+afterward cooled when he discovered the reality of the Bashkirtseff

+legend. (He speaks of the house in which she died as 6 Rue de Prony;

+Marie died at 30 Rue Ampère.) In the succeeding volume, consecrated

+to love and sorrow, the soul of Venice, the soul of a dead city, is

+woven with souvenirs of Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand, Musset, George

+Sand, Taine, Léopold Robert the painter-suicide, Théophile Gautier,

+and Richard Wagner. The magic of these prose-dreams is not that of an

+artist merely revelling in description; Pierre Loti, for instance,

+writes with no philosophy but that of the disenchanted; he is a more

+luscious Sénancour; D'Annunzio has made of Venice a golden monument

+to his gigantic pride as poet. Not so Barrès. The image of death and

+decay, the recollections of the imperial and mighty past aroused by his

+pen are as so many chords in his egoistic philosophy: Venice guarded

+its Ego from the barbarians; from the dead we learn the secret of

+life. The note of revolt which sounded so drastically in The Enemy of

+Law is absent here; in that story Barrès, mindful of Auguste Comte

+and Ibsen, asserted that the dead poisoned the living. The motive of

+reverence for the soil, for the past, the motive of traditionalism,

+is beginning to be overheard. In French Friendships, he takes his

+little son Philippe to Joan of Arc's country and enforces the lesson

+of patriotism. In his Le Voyage de Sparte, the same spirit is present.

+He is the man from Lorraine at Corinth, Eleusis, or Athens, humble

+and solicitous for the soul of his race, eager to extract a moral

+benefit from the past. He studies the Antigone of Sophocles, the Helen

+of Goethe. He also praises his master, the classical scholar, Louis

+Ménard. Barrès has, in a period when France seems bent on burning its

+historical ships, destroying precious relics of its past, blown the

+trumpet of alarm; not the destructive blast of Nietzsche, but one that

+calls "Spare our dead!" Little wonder Bourget pronounced him the most

+efficacious servitor, at the present hour, of France the eternal. Force

+and spiritual fecundity Barrès demands of himself; force and spiritual

+fecundity he demands from France. And, like the vague insistent

+thrumming of the <i>tympani</i>, a ground bass in some symphonic poem,

+the idea of nationalism is gradually disclosed as we decipher these

+palimpsests of egoism.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>The art of Barrès till this juncture had been of a smoky enchantment,

+many-hued, of shifting shapes, often tenuous, sometimes opaque, yet

+ever graceful, ever fascinating. Whether he was a great spiritual force

+or only an amazing protean acrobat, coquetting with the <i>Zeitgeist</i>,

+his admirers and enemies had not agreed upon. He had further clouded

+public opinion by becoming a Boulangist deputy from Nancy, and his

+apparition in the Chamber must have been as bizarre as would have been

+Shelley's in Parliament. Barrès but followed the illustrious lead of

+Hugo, Lamartine, Lamennais. His friends were moved to astonishment. The

+hater of the law, the defender in the press of Chambige, the Algerian

+homicide, this writer of "precious" literature, among the political

+opportunists! Yet he sat as a deputy from 1889 to 1893, and proved

+himself a resourceful debater; in the chemistry of his personality

+patriotism had been at last precipitated.</p>

+

+<p>His second trilogy of books was his most artistic gift to French

+literature. But with the advent, in 1897, of Les Déracinés (The

+Uprooted) a sharp change in style may be noted. It is the sociological

+novel in all its thorny efflorescence. Diction is no longer in the

+foreground. Vanished the velvety rhetoric, the musical phrase, the

+nervous prose of many facets. Sharp in contour and siccant, every

+paragraph is packed with ideas. The Uprooted is formidable reading,

+but we at least touch the rough edges of reality. Men and women

+show familiar gestures; the prizes run for are human; we are in a

+dense atmosphere of intrigue, political and personal; Flaubert's

+Frédéric Moreau, the young man of confused ideas and feeble volition,

+once more appears as a cork in the whirlpool of modern Paris. The

+iconoclast that is in the heart of this poet is rampant. He smashes

+institutions, though his criticism is often constructive. He strives

+to expand the national soul, strives to combat cynicism, and he urges

+decentralisation as the sole remedy for the canker that he believes is

+blighting France. Bourget holds that "Society is the functioning of

+a federation of organisms of which the individual is the cell"; that

+functioning, says Barrès, is ill served by the violent uprooting of

+the human organism from its earth. A man best develops in his native

+province. His deracination begins with the education that sends him

+to Paris, there to lose his originality. The individual can flourish

+only in the land where the mysterious forces of heredity operate, make

+richer his Ego, and create solidarity&mdash;that necromantic word which, in

+the hands of social preachers, has become a glittering and illuding

+talisman. A tree does not grow upward unless its roots plunge deeply

+into the soil. A wise administrator attaches the animal to the pasture

+that suits it. (But Barrès himself still lives in Paris.)</p>

+

+<p>This nationalism of Barrès is not to be confounded with the perfidious

+slogan of the politicians; it is a national symbol for many youth

+of his land. Nor is Barrès affiliated with some extreme modes of

+socialism&mdash;socialism, that daydream of a retired green-grocer who

+sports a cultivated taste for dominoes and penny philanthropy. To those

+who demand progress, he asks, Progressing toward what? Rather let us

+face the setting sun. Do not repudiate the past. Hold to our dead. They

+realise for us the continuity of which we are the ephemeral expression.

+The cult of the "I" is truly the cult of the dead. Egoism must not be

+construed as the average selfishness of humanity; the higher egoism

+is the art&mdash;Barrès artist, always&mdash;of canalising one's Ego for the

+happiness of others. Out of the Barrès nationalism has grown a mortuary

+philosophy; we see him rather too fond of culling the flowers in the

+cemetery as he takes his evening stroll. When a young man he was

+obsessed by the vision of death. His logic is sometimes audaciously

+romantic; he paints ideas in a dangerously seductive style; and he is

+sometimes carried away by the electric energy which agitates his not

+too robust physique. This cult of the dead, while not morbid, smacks

+nevertheless of the Chinese. Our past need not be in a graveyard, and

+one agrees with Jean Dolent that man is surely matter, but that his

+soul is his own work.</p>

+

+<p>Latterly the patriotism of Barrès is beginning to assume an unpleasant

+tinge. In his azure, <i>chauvinisme</i> is the ugliest cloud. He loves the

+fatal word "revenge." In the Service of Germany presents a pitiable

+picture of a young Alsatian forced to military service in the German

+army. It is not pleasing, and the rage of Barrès will be voted laudable

+until we recall the stories by Frenchmen of the horrors of French

+military life. He upholds France for the French. It is a noble idea,

+but it leads to narrowness and fanatical outbreaks. His influence

+was great from 1888 to 1893 among the young men. It abated, to be

+renewed in 1896 and 1897. It reached its apogee a few years ago. The

+Rousseau-like cry, "Back to the soil!" made of Barrès an idol in

+several camps. His election to the Academy, filling the vacancy caused

+by the death of the poet De Hérédia, was the consecrating seal of a

+genius who has the gift of projecting his sympathies in many different

+directions, only to retrieve as by miraculous tentacles the richest

+moral and æsthetic nourishment. We should not forget to add, that by

+the numerous early Barrèsians, the Academician is now looked upon as a

+backslider from the cause of philosophic anarchy.</p>

+

+<p>The determinism of Taine stems in Germany and his theory of environment

+has been effectively utilised by Barrès. In The Uprooted, the argument

+is driven home by the story of seven young Lorrainers who descend upon

+Paris to capture it. Their Professor Bouteiller (said to be a portrait

+of Barrès's old master Burdeau at Nancy) has educated them as if

+"they might some day be called upon to do without a mother-country."

+Paris is a vast maw which swallows them. They are disorganised by

+transplantation. (What young American would be, we wonder?) Some

+drift into anarchy, one to the scaffold because of a murder; all are

+<i>arrivistes</i>; and the centre figure, Sturel, is a failure because he

+cannot reconcile himself to new, harsh conditions. They blame their

+professor. He diverted the sap of their nationalism into strange

+channels. A few "arrive," though not in every instance by laudable

+methods. One is a scholar. The account of his interview with Taine and

+Taine's conversation with him is another evidence of the intellectual

+mimicry latent in Barrès. He had astonished us earlier by his

+recrudescence of Renan's very fashion of speech and ideas; literally a

+feat of literary prestidigitation. There are love, political intrigue,

+and a dramatic assassination&mdash;the general conception of which recalls

+to us the fact that Barrès once sat at the knees of Bourget, and had

+read that master's novel, Le Disciple. A striking episode is that

+of the meeting of the seven friends at the tomb of Napoleon, there

+to meditate upon his grandeur and to pledge themselves to follow

+his illustrious example. "Professor of Energy" he is denominated. A

+Professor of Spiritual Energy is certainly Maurice Barrès. In another

+scene Taine demonstrates the theory of nationalism by the parable of

+a certain plane tree in the Square of the Invalides. For the average

+lover of French fiction The Uprooted must prove trying. It is, with

+its two companions in this trilogy of The Novel of National Energy, a

+social document, rather than a romance. It embodies so clearly a whole

+cross-section of earnest French youths' moral life, that&mdash;with L'Appel

+au Soldat, and Leurs Figures, its sequels&mdash;it may be consulted in the

+future for a veridic account of the decade it describes. One seems

+to lean from a window and watch the agitation of the populace which

+swarmed about General Boulanger; or to peep through keyholes and see

+the end of that unfortunate victim of treachery and an ill-disciplined

+temperament. Barrès later reviles the friends of Boulanger who deserted

+him, by his delineation of the Panama scandal. Yet it is all as dry

+as a parliamentary blue-book. After finishing these three novels, the

+impression created is that the flaw in the careers of four or five of

+the seven young men from Lorraine was not due to their uprooting, but

+to their lack of moral backbone.</p>

+

+<p>Paris is no more difficult a social medium to navigate in than New

+York; the French capital has been the battlefield of all French genius;

+but neither in New York nor in Paris can a young man face the conflict

+so loaded down with the burden of general ideas and with so scant

+a moral outfit as possessed by these same young men. The Lorraine

+band&mdash;is it a possible case? No doubt. Nevertheless, if its members had

+remained at Nancy they might have been shipwrecked for the same reason.

+Why does not M. Barrès show his cards? The Kingdom on the table!

+cries Hilda Wangel to her Masterbuilder. Love of the natal soil does

+not make a complete man; some of the greatest patriots have been the

+greatest scoundrels. M. Bourget sums up the situation more lucidly than

+M. Barrès, who is in such a hurry to mould citizens that he omits an

+essential quality from his programme&mdash;God (or character, moral force,

+if you prefer other terms). Now, when a rationalistic philosopher

+considers God as an intellectual abstraction, he is not illogical.

+Scepticism is his stock in trade. But can Maurice Barrès elude the

+issue? Can he handle the tools of such pious workmen as Loyola, De

+Sales, and Thomas à Kempis, for the building of his soul, and calmly

+overlook the inspiration of those masons of men? It is one of the

+defects of dilettanteism that it furnishes a <i>point d'appui</i> for the

+liberated spirit to see-saw between free-will and determinism, between

+the Lord of Hosts and the Lucifer of Negation. Paul Bourget feels this

+spiritual dissonance. Has he not said that the day may come when Barrès

+may repeat the phrase of Michelet: <i>Je ne me peux passer de Dieu!</i>

+Has Maurice Barrès already plodded the same penitential route without

+indulging in an elliptical flight to a new artificial paradise?</p>

+

+<p>If his moral evolution, so insistently claimed by his disciples,

+has been of a zigzag nature, if <i>lacunæ</i> abound in his system and

+paradoxical <i>vues d'ensemble</i> often distract, yet logical evolution

+there has been&mdash;from the maddest, romantic individualism to a

+well-defined solidarity&mdash;and without attenuation of the dignity and

+utility of the Individual in the scheme of collectivism. The Individual

+is the Salt of the State. The Individual leavens the mass politic.

+Numbers will never supplant the value, psychic or economic, of the

+Individual. Emerson and Matthew Arnold said all this before Barrès.

+Incomparable artist as is Maurice Barrès, we still must demand of him:

+"In Vishnu-land what Avatar!"</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="VII" id="VII">VII</a></h4>

+

+<h4>PHASES OF NIETZSCHE</h4>

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="THE_WILL_TO_SUFFER"></a>THE WILL TO SUFFER</h5>

+

+

+<p>Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that "the greatest

+man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he

+who corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule

+which is poor because it won't work both ways. All master reformers,

+heretics, and rebels were at first great corrupters. It is a prime

+necessity in their propaganda. Aristophanes and Arius, Mohammed and

+Napoleon, Montaigne and Rabelais, Paul and Augustine, Luther and

+Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner,

+Kant and Schopenhauer&mdash;here are a few names of men who undermined the

+current beliefs and practices of their times, whether for good or evil.

+Rousseau has been accused of being the greatest corrupter in history;

+yet to him we may owe the Constitution of the United States. Pascal,

+in prose of unequalled limpidity, denounced the Jesuits as corrupting

+youth. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an "intellectual" and a

+philosophic anarch, once wrote to Nietzsche: "I, too, love Pascal. But

+even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal.

+Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but

+they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with

+notes themselves. The best edition is that of the Jesuits," Were not

+Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting

+for Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn't much matter whether one

+considers a great man as a regenerator or a corrupter. Napoleon was

+called the latter by Taine after he had been saluted as demigod by

+his idolatrous contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ

+much from his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, though

+borrowing his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the one sincere

+friendship of his lonely life, Richard Wagner's. We know the most

+objective philosophies are tinged by the individual temperaments of

+their makers, and perhaps the chief characteristic of all philosophers

+is their unphilosophic contempt for their fellow-thinkers. Nietzsche

+displayed this trait; so did Richard Wagner&mdash;who was in a lesser

+fashion an amateur philosopher, his system adorned by plumes borrowed

+from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopenhauer was

+endowed with a more powerful intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche.

+He "corrupted" them both. He was materialist enough to echo the

+epigram attributed to Fontenelle: To be happy a man must have a good

+stomach and a wicked heart.</p>

+

+<p>Friedrich Nietzsche was more poet than original thinker. Merely to say

+Nay! to all existing institutions is not to give birth to a mighty

+idea, though the gesture is brave. He substituted for Schopenhauer's

+"Will to Live"&mdash;(an ingenious variation of Kant's "Thing in Itself")

+the "Will to Power"; which phrase is mere verbal juggling. The late

+Eduard von Hartmann built his house of philosophy in the fog of the

+Unconscious; Nietzsche, despising Darwin as a dull grubber, returned

+unknowingly to the very land of metaphysics he thought he had fled

+forever. He was always the theologian&mdash;<i>toujours séminariste</i>, as they

+said of Renan. Theology was in his blood. It stiffened his bones.

+Abusing Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, he was

+himself an exponent of a theological odium of the virulent sort, as

+may be seen in his thundering polemics. He held a brief for the other

+side of good and evil; but a man can't so easily empty his veins of the

+theologic blood of his forebears. It was his Nessus shirt and ended

+by consuming him. He had the romantic cult of great men, yet sneered

+at Carlyle for his Titanism. He believed in human perfectibility. He

+borrowed his Superman partly from the classic pantheon, partly from

+the hierarchy of Christian saints&mdash;or perhaps from the very Cross he

+vituperated. The only Christian, he was fond of saying, died on the

+Cross. The only Nietzschian, one might reply, passed away when crumbled

+the brilliant brain of Nietzsche. Saturated with the culture of Goethe,

+his Superman was sent ballooning aloft by the poetic afflatus of

+Nietzsche.</p>

+

+<p>He was an apparition possible only in modern and rationalistic

+Protestant Germany. Like a voice from the Middle Ages he has stirred

+the profound phlegm and spiritual indifference of his fellow

+countrymen. But he has in him more of Savonarola than Luther&mdash;Luther,

+who was for him the apotheosis of all that is hateful in the German

+character: the self-satisfied philistinism, sensuality, beer and

+tobacco, unresponsiveness to all the finer issues of existence, pious

+tactlessness and harsh dogmatism.</p>

+

+<p>His truth is enclosed in a transcendental vacuum. Whether he had

+Galton's science of Eugenics in his mind when he modelled his

+Zarathustra we need not concern ourselves. His revaluation of

+moral values has not shaken morality to its centre. He challenged

+superficial conventional morality, but the ultimate pillars of faith

+still stand. He reminds us of William Blake when he writes: "The

+path to one's heaven ever leads through the voluptuousness of one's

+own hell." And his psychical resemblance to Pascal is striking. Both

+men were physically debilitated; their nervous systems, overwhelmed

+by the burdens they imposed upon them, made their days and nights

+a continuous agony. The Nietzschian philosophy may be negligible,

+but the psychological aspects of this singularly versatile,

+fascinating, and contradictory nature are not. His "Will to Power"

+in his own case resolves itself into the will to suffer. Compared

+to his, Schopenhauer's pessimism is the good-natured grumbling of a

+healthy, witty man, with a tremendous vital temperament. Nietzsche

+was delicate from youth. His experiences in the Franco-Prussian war

+harmed him. Headache, eye trouble, a weak stomach, coupled with his

+abuse of intellectual work, and, toward the last, indulgence in

+narcotics for insomnia, all coloured his philosophy. The personal

+bias was unescapable, and this bias favoured sickness, not health.

+Hence his frantic apotheosis of health, the dance and laughter, and

+his admiration for Bizet's Carmen. Hence his constant employment of

+joyful imagery, of bold defiance to the sober workaday world. His

+famous injunction: "Be hard!" was meant for his own unhappy soul, ever

+nearing, like Pascal's, the abyss of black melancholy.</p>

+

+<p>While we believe that too much stress has been laid upon the

+pathologic side of Pascal's and Nietzsche's characters, there is no

+evading the fact that both seemed tinged with what Kurt Eisner calls

+<i>psychopathia spiritualis</i>. The references to suffering in Nietzsche's

+books are significant. There is a vibrating accent of personal sorrow

+on every page. He lived in an inferno, mental and physical. We are

+given to praising Robert Louis Stevenson for his cheerfulness in the

+dire straits of his illness. He was a mere amateur of misery, a

+professional invalid, in comparison with Nietzsche. And how cruel was

+the German poet to himself. He tied his soul to a stake and recorded

+the poignant sensations of his spiritual <i>auto-da-fé</i>. At the close of

+his sane days we find him taking a dolorous pride in his capacity for

+suffering. "It is great affliction only&mdash;that long, slow affliction in

+which we are burned as it were with green wood, which takes time&mdash;that

+compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depth and divest

+ourselves of all trust, all good nature, glossing, gentleness.... I

+doubt whether such affliction improves us; but I know that it deepens

+us.... Oh, how repugnant to one henceforth is gratification, coarse,

+dull, drab-coloured gratification, as usually understood by those who

+enjoy life!... Profound suffering makes noble; it separates. ... There

+are free, insolent minds that would fain conceal and deny that at

+the bottom they are disjointed, incurable souls&mdash;it is the case with

+Hamlet." Nietzsche has the morbidly introspective Hamlet temper, and

+Pascal has been called the Christian Hamlet.</p>

+

+<p>We read in Overbeck's recollections that Nietzsche manifested deep

+interest in the personality of Pascal. Both hated hypocrisy. But

+the German thinker saw in the Frenchman of genius only a Christian

+who hugged his chains, one who for his faith suffered "a continuous

+suicide of reason." (Has not Nietzsche himself also said hard things

+about Reason?) "One is punished best by one's virtues" ... or, "He

+who fights with monsters, let him be careful lest he thereby become

+a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also

+gaze into thee." This last is unquestionably a reminiscence of Pascal.

+He could not endure with equanimity Pascal's <i>sacrifizio dell'

+intelletto</i>, not realizing that the Frenchman felt beneath his feet

+the solid globe of faith. He discerned the Puritan in Pascal, though

+failing to recognise the Puritan in himself. Despite his praise of

+the Dionysian element in art and life, a puritan was buried in the

+nerves of Nietzsche. He never could tolerate the common bourgeois joys.

+Wine, Woman, Song, and their poets, were his detestations. Yet he

+hated Puritanism in Protestant Christianity. "The dangerous thrill of

+repentance spasms, the vivisection of conscience," he contemns; "even

+in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty." He wrote

+to Brandes: "Physically, too, I lived for years in the neighbourhood

+of death. This was my great piece of good fortune; I forgot myself. I

+outlived myself&mdash;a shedding of the skin." Pascal also knew the sting of

+the flesh and brain. From the time he had an escape from sudden death,

+he was conscious of an abyss at his side. "Men of genius," he wrote,

+"have their heads higher but their feet lower than the rest of us."

+With Nietzsche there was a darker <i>nuance</i> of pain; he speaks somewhere

+of "the philtre of the great Circe of mingled pleasure and cruelty."

+His soul was a mysterious palimpsest. The heart has its reasons, cried

+Pascal; of Nietzsche's heart the last word has not been written.</p>

+

+<p>His criticism of Pascal was not clement. He said: "In Goethe the

+superabundance becomes creative, in Flaubert the hatred; Flaubert,

+a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive judgment

+at bottom.... He tortured himself when he composed, quite as Pascal

+tortured himself when he thought." Yes, but Nietzsche was as fierce

+a hater as Pascal or Flaubert. He set up for Christianity a straw

+adversary and proceeded to demolish it. He forgot that, as Francis

+Thompson has it: "It is the severed head that makes the Seraph."

+Nietzsche would not look higher than the mud around the pedestal. He,

+poor sufferer, was not genuinely impersonal. His tragedy was his sick

+soul and body. "If a man cannot sing as he carries his cross, he had

+better drop it," advises Havelock Ellis. Nietzsche bore a terrible

+cross&mdash;like the men staggering with their chimeras in Baudelaire's

+poem&mdash;but he did not bear it with equanimity. We must not be deceived

+by his desperate gayety. As a married man he would never have enjoyed,

+as did John Stuart Mill, spiritual henpeckery. He was afraid of life,

+this dazzling Zarathustra, who went on Icarus-wings close to the sun.

+He could speak of women thus: "We think woman deep&mdash;why? Because we

+never find any foundation in her. Woman is not even shallow." Or,

+"Woman would like to believe that love can do all&mdash;it is a superstition

+peculiar to herself. Alas! he who knows the heart finds out how poor,

+helpless, pretentious, and liable to error even the best, the deepest

+love is&mdash;how it rather destroys than saves."</p>

+

+<p><i>Der Dichter spricht!</i> Also the bachelor. Once a Hilda of the younger

+generation, Lou Salomé by name, came knocking at the door of the poet's

+heart. It was in vain. The wings of a great happiness touched his brow

+as it passed, No wonder he wrote: "The desert grows; woe to him who

+hides deserts"; "Woman unlearns the fear of man"; "Thou goest to women!

+Remember thy whip." (Always this resounding motive of cruelty.) "Thy

+soul will be dead even sooner than thy body"; "Once spirit became God;

+then it became man; and now it is becoming mob"; "And many a one who

+went into the desert and suffered thirst with the camels, merely did

+not care to sit around the cistern with dirty camel-drivers." Here is

+the aristocratic radical.</p>

+

+<p>It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess the capacity for noble

+indignation; but Nietzsche was obsessed by his indignations. His voice,

+that golden poet's voice, becomes too often shrill, cracked, and

+falsetto. Voltaire has remarked that the first man who compared a woman

+to a rose was a poet, the second a fool. In his attitude toward Woman,

+Nietzsche was neither fool nor poet; but he never called her a rose.

+Nor was he a cynic; he saw too clearly for that, and he had suffered.

+Suffering, however, should have been a bond with women. Despite his

+cruel utterances he enjoyed several ideal friendships with cultivated

+women. "There is no happy life for woman&mdash;the advantage that the world

+offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice," wrote Mr. Howells. Gossip

+has whispered that he was hopelessly in love with Cosima Wagner. A

+charming theme for a psychological novel. So was Von Bülow, once&mdash;until

+he married her; so, Anton Rubinstein. Both abused Wagner's music;

+Von Bülow after he became an advocate of Brahms; Rubinstein always.

+Nietzsche, just before 1876, experienced the pangs of a Wagnerian

+reactionary. A pretty commentary this upon masculine mental superiority

+if one woman (even such a remarkable creature as Cosima) could upset

+the stanchest convictions of these three men. And convictions, asserted

+Nietzsche, are prisons. He contrived to escape from many intellectual

+prisons. Cosima had proved the one inflexible jailer.</p>

+

+<p>Merciless to himself, he did not spare others. Of Altruism, with its

+fundamental contradictions, he wrote:</p>

+

+<blockquote>

+

+<p>A being capable of purely altruistic actions alone is more

+fabulous than the Phœnix. Never has a man done anything

+solely for others, and without any personal motive; how

+could the Ego act without Ego? ... Suppose a man wished

+to do and to will everything for others, nothing for

+himself, the latter would be impossible, for the very good

+reason that he must do very much for himself, in order to

+do anything at all for others. Moreover, it presupposes

+that the other is egoist enough constantly to accept

+these sacrifices made for him; so that the men of love and

+self-sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence

+of loveless egoists who are incapable of self-sacrifice.

+In order to subsist, the highest morality must positively

+enforce the existence of immorality.&mdash;(Menschliches, I,

+137-8).</p></blockquote>

+

+<p>"Nietzsche's criticism on this point," remarks Professor Seth Pattison,

+"must be accepted as conclusive. Every theory which attempts to

+divorce the ethical end from the personality of the moral agent must

+necessarily fall into this vicious circle; in a sense, the moral centre

+and the moral motive must always ultimately be self, the satisfaction

+of the self, the perfection of the self. The altruistic virtues, and

+self-sacrifice in general, can only enter into the moral ideal so far

+as they minister to the realisation of what is recognised to be the

+highest type of manhood, the self which finds its own in all men's

+good. Apart from this, self-sacrifice, self-mortification for its

+own sake, would be a mere negation, and, as such, of no moral value

+whatever."</p>

+

+<p>Hasn't this the familiar ring of Max Stirner and his doctrine of the

+Ego?</p>

+

+<p>Nietzsche with Pascal would have assented that "illness is the natural

+state of the true Christian." There was in both thinkers a tendency

+toward self-laceration of the conscience. "Il faut s'abêtir," wrote

+Pascal; and Nietzsche's pride vanished in the hot fire of suffering.

+The Pascal injunction to stupefy ourselves was not to imitate the

+beasts of the field, but was a counsel of humility. Montaigne in his

+essay on Raymond de Sebonde wrote before Pascal concerning the danger

+of overwrought sensibility; (Il nous faut abestir pour nous assagir,

+is the original old French). It would have been wise for Nietzsche to

+follow Pascal's advice. "We live alone, we die alone," sorrowfully

+wrote the greatest religious force of the past century, Cardinal Newman

+(a transposition of Pascal's "Nous mourrons seuls"). Nietzsche was the

+loneliest of poets. He lived on the heights and paid the penalty, like

+other exalted searchers after the vanished vase of the ideal.</p>

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="NIETZSCHES_APOSTASY"></a>NIETZSCHE'S APOSTASY</h5>

+

+

+<p>Although Macaulay called Horace Walpole a "wretched fribble," that

+gossip knew a trick or two in fancy fencing. "Oh," he wrote, "I am sick

+of visions and systems that shove one another aside and come again like

+figures in a moving picture." This was the outburst of a man called

+insincere and fickle, but frank in this instance. Issuing from the

+mouth of Friedrich Nietzsche this cry of the entertaining, shallow

+Walpole would have been curiously apposite. The unhappy German poet

+and philosopher suffered during his intellectual life from the "moving

+pictures" of other men's visions and systems, and when he finally

+escaped them all and evoked his own dream-world his brain became

+over-clouded and he passed away "trailing clouds of glory." It is an

+imperative necessity for certain natures to change their opinions, to

+slough, as sloughs a snake its skin, their master ideas. Renan went

+still further when he asserted that all essayists contradict themselves

+sometime during their life.</p>

+

+<p>With Nietzsche the apparent contradictions of his Wagner-worship and

+Wagner-hatred may be explained if we closely examine the concepts

+of his first work of importance, The Birth of Tragedy. It was a

+misfortune that his bitterest book, The Wagner Case, should have

+been first translated into English, for Wagner is our music-maker

+now, and the rude assaults of Nietzsche fall upon deaf ears; while

+those who had read the earlier essay, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,

+were both puzzled and outraged. Certainly the man who could thus

+flout what he once adored must have been mad. This was the popular

+verdict, a facile and unjust verdict. What Nietzsche first postulated

+as to the nature of music he returned to at the close of his life;

+the mighty personality of Richard Wagner had deflected the stream

+of his thought for a few years. But as early as 1872 doubts began

+to trouble his sensitive conscience&mdash;this was before his pamphlet

+Richard Wagner in Bayreuth&mdash;and his notebooks of that period were sown

+with question-marks. In the interesting correspondence with Dr. Georg

+Brandes, who literally revealed to Europe the genius of Nietzsche, we

+find this significant passage:</p>

+

+<blockquote>

+

+<p>I was the first to distil a sort of unity out of the two

+[Schopenhauer and Wagner].... All the Wagnerians are

+disciples of Schopenhauer. Things were different when I

+was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who clung

+to Wagner, and "Wagner and Hegel" was still the cry in the

+'50s.</p></blockquote>

+

+<p>Nietzsche might have added the name of the philosopher Feuerbach.

+Wagner's English apologist, Ashton Ellis, repudiates the common belief

+that Wagner refashioned the latter part of the Ring so as to introduce

+in it his newly acquired Schopenhauerian ideas. Wagner was always

+a pessimist, declares Mr. Ellis; Schopenhauer but confirmed him in

+his theories. Wagner, like Nietzsche, was too often a weathercock. A

+second-rate poet and philosopher, he stands chiefly for his magnificent

+music. Nietzsche or any other <i>polemiker</i> cannot change the map of

+music by fulminating against Wagner. Time may prove his true foe&mdash;the

+devouring years that always show such hostility to music of the

+theatre, music that is not pure music.</p>

+

+<p>The spirit of the letter to Brandes quoted above may be found in

+Nietzsche Contra Wagner (The Case of Wagner, page 72). Nietzsche wrote:</p>

+

+<blockquote>

+

+<p>I similarly interpreted Wagner's music in my own way

+as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of

+soul.... It is obvious what I misunderstood, it is

+obvious in like manner what I bestowed upon Wagner and

+Schopenhauer&mdash;myself.</p></blockquote>

+

+<p>He read his own enthusiasms, his Hellenic ideals, into the least Greek

+among composers. Wagner himself was at first pleased, also not a little

+nonplussed by the idolatry of Nietzsche. Remember that this young

+philologist was a musician as well as a brilliant scholar.</p>

+

+<p>Following Schopenhauer in his main contention that music is a

+presentative, not a representative art; the noumenon, not the

+phenomenon&mdash;as are, for instance, painting and sculpture&mdash;Nietzsche

+held that the unity of music is undeniable. There is no dualism,

+such as instrumental music and vocal music. Sung music is only music

+presented by a sonorous vocal organ; the words are negligible. A poem

+may be a starting-point for the composer, yet in poetry there is

+not the potentiality of tone (this does not naturally refer to the

+literary tone-quality of music). From a non-musical thing music cannot

+be evolved. There is only absolute music. Its beginning is absolute.

+All other is a masquerading. The dramatic singer is a monstrosity&mdash;the

+actual words of Nietzsche. Opera is a debased genre. We almost expect

+the author to deny, as denied Hanslick, music any content whatsoever.

+But this he does not. He is too much the Romantic. For him the poem

+of Tristan was but the "vapour" of the music. Music is the archetype

+of the arts. It is the essence of Greek tragedy and therefore

+pessimistic. Tragedy is pessimism. The two faces of the Greek art he

+calls the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses. One is the Classic,

+the other the Romantic; calm beauty as opposed to bacchantic ecstasy.

+Wagner, Nietzsche identified with the Dionysian element, and he was

+not far wrong; but Greek? The passionate welter of this new music

+stirred Nietzsche's excitable young nerves. He was, like many of his

+contemporaries, swept away in the boiling flood of the Wagnerian sea.

+It appeared to him, the profound Greek scholar, as a recrudescence of

+Dionysian joy. Instead, it was the topmost crest of the dying waves of

+Romanticism. Nietzsche later realised this fact. To Brandes he wrote:</p>

+

+<p>Your German romanticism has made me reflect how the whole movement

+only attained its goal in music (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner,

+Brahms); in literature it stopped short with a huge promise&mdash;the French

+were more fortunate. I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be

+a Romanticist. Without music life would be a mistake.... With regard to

+the effect of Tristan I could tell you strange things. A good dose of

+mental torture strikes me as an excellent tonic before a meal of Wagner.</p>

+

+<p>Nietzsche loved Wagner the man more than Wagner the musician. The news

+of Wagner's death in 1883 was a terrible blow for him. He wrote Frau

+Wagner a letter of condolence, which was answered from Bayreuth by her

+daughter Daniela von Bülow. (See the newly published Overbeck Letters.)</p>

+

+<p>Nothing could be more unfair than to ascribe to Nietzsche petty

+motives in his breaking off with Wagner. There were minor differences,

+but it was Parsifal and its drift toward Rome, that shocked the

+former disciple. What he wrote of Wagner and Wagnerism may be

+interpreted according to one's own views, but the Parsifal criticism

+is sound. That parody of the Roman Catholic ceremonial and ideas,

+and the glorification of its psychopathic hero, with the consequent

+degradation of the idea of womanhood, Nietzsche saw and denounced.

+"I despise everyone who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on

+morals," he cried. To-day his denunciations are recognised by wise

+folk as wisdom. He first heard Carmen in Genoa, November 27, 1881.

+To his exacerbated nerves its rich southern melodies were soothing.

+He overpraised the opera&mdash;which is a sparkling compound of Gounod

+and Spanish gypsy airs; an <i>olla podrida</i> as regards style. He knew

+that this was bonbon music compared with Wagner. And the confession

+was wrung from his lips: "We must first be Wagnerians." Thus, as he

+escaped from Schopenhauer's pessimism, he plucked from his heart his

+affection for Wagner. He had become Zarathustra. He painted Wagner as

+an "ideal monster," but the severing of the friendship cost Nietzsche

+his happiness. An extraordinary mountain-mania attacked him on the

+heights of the upper Engadine. All that he had once admired he now

+hated. He had a positive genius for hatred, even more so than Huysmans;

+both writers were bilious melancholics, and both were alike in the

+display of heavy-handed irony. With Nietzsche's "ears for quarter

+tones"&mdash;as he told Brandes&mdash;it would have been far better for him to

+remain with Peter Gast in Italy, while the latter was writing that

+long-contemplated study on Chopin. Nietzsche loved the music of the

+Pole who had introduced into the heavy monochrome of German harmonies

+an exotic and chromatic gamut of colours.</p>

+

+<p>If Wagner erred in his belief that it was the drama not the music which

+ruled in his own compositions (for his talk about the welding of the

+different arts is an æsthetic nightmare), why should not Nietzsche

+have made a mistake in ascribing to Wagner his own exalted ideals?

+Wagner's music is the Wagner music drama. That is a commonplace of

+criticism&mdash;though not at Bayreuth. Nietzsche taught the supremacy of

+tone in his early book. He detested so-called musical realism. These

+two men became friends through a series of mutual misunderstandings.

+When Nietzsche discovered that music and philosophy had naught in

+common&mdash;and he had hoped that Wagner's would prove the solvent&mdash;he

+cooled off in his faith. It was less an apostasy than we believe.

+Despite his eloquent affirmation of Wagnerism, Nietzsche was never

+in his innermost soul a Wagnerian. Nor yet was he insincere. This may

+seem paradoxical. He had felt the "pull" of Wagner's genius, and,

+as in the case of his Schopenhauer worship, he temporarily lost his

+critical bearings. This accounts for his bitterness when he found the

+feet of his idol to be clay. He was lashing his own bare soul in each

+scarifying phrase he applied to Wagner. He saw the free young Siegfried

+become the old Siegfried in the manacles of determinism and pessimism;

+then followed Parsifal and Wagner's apostasy&mdash;Nietzsche believed Wagner

+was going back to Christianity. There is more consistency in the case

+of Friedrich Nietzsche than has been acknowledged by the Wagnerians.

+He, the philosopher of decadence and romanticism, could have said

+to Wagner as Baudelaire to Manet: "You are only the first in the

+decrepitude of your art."</p>

+

+<p>If Nietzsche considered the poem a vaporous background for the

+passionate musical mosaic of Tristan and Isolde, what would he

+have thought if he could have heard the tonal interpretation of

+his Also Sprach Zarathustra, as conceived by the mathematical and

+emotional brain of Richard Strauss? I recall the eagerness with

+which I asked an impossible question of Frau Foerster-Nietzsche

+when at the Nietzsche-Archive, Weimar, in 1904: Is this tone-poem

+by Richard Strauss truly Nietzschean? Her tact did not succeed in

+quite veiling a hint of dubiety, though the noble sister of the dead

+philosopher was too tender-hearted to suggest a formal criticism of

+the composer's imposing sound-palace. It is not, however, difficult

+to imagine Nietzsche, alive, glaring in dismay and with "embellished

+indignation" as he hears the dance theme in Zarathustra. Nor would he

+be less surprised if he had suddenly forced upon his consciousness a

+performance of Claude Debussy's mooning, mystic, <i>triste</i> Pélléas et

+Mélisande, with its invertebrate charm, its innocuous sensuousness,

+its absence of thematic material, its perverse harmonies, its lack of

+rhythmic variety, and its faded sweetness, like that evoked by musty,

+quaint tapestry in languid motion. (Debussy might have delved deeper

+into churchly modes and for novelty's sake even employed pneumes to

+lend his score a still more venerable aspect. Certainly his tonalities

+are on the other side of diatonic and chromatic. Why not call them

+<i>pneumatic</i> scales?) Surely Nietzsche could not have refrained from

+exclaiming: Ah! the pathos of distance! Ah! what musical sins thou must

+take upon thee, Richard Wagner! Strauss and Debussy are the legitimate

+fruits of thy evil tree of music!</p>

+

+<p>Miserably happy poet, like one of those Oriental wonder-workers dancing

+in ecstasy on white-hot sword-blades, the tears all the while streaming

+down his cheeks as he proclaims his new gospel of joy: "<i>Il faut

+méditerraniser la musique.</i>" Alas! the pathos of Nietzsche's reality.

+Reality for this self-tortured Hamlet-soul was a spiritual crucifixion

+and a spiritual tragedy.</p>

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="ANTICHRIST"></a>ANTICHRIST?</h5>

+

+

+<p>The penalty of misrepresentation and misinterpretation seems to

+be attached to every new idea that comes to birth through the

+utterances of genius. At first with Wagner it was the "noise-making

+Wagner"&mdash;whereas he is a master of plangent harmonies. Ibsen, we

+were told, couldn't write a play. His dramatic technique is nearly

+faultless; in reality, with its unities there is a suspicion of the

+academic in it and a perilous approach to the Chinese ivory mechanism

+of Scribe. And paint, Paris asserted, the late Edouard Manet could

+not. It was precisely his almost miraculous manipulation of paint that

+sets this artist apart from his fellows. The same tactless rating

+of Friedrich Nietzsche has prevailed in the general critical and

+popular imagination. Nietzsche has become the bugaboo of timid folk.

+He has been denounced as the Antichrist; yet he has been the subject

+of a discriminating study in such a conservative magazine as the

+<i>Catholic World</i>. Thanks to the conception of some writers, Nietzsche

+and the Nietzschians are gigantic brutes, a combination of Genghis

+Khan and Bismarck, terrifying apparitions wearing mustachios like

+yataghans, eyes rolling in frenzy, with a philosophy that ranged from

+pitch-and-toss to manslaughter, and with a consuming atheism as a side

+attraction. Need we protest that this is Nietzsche misread, Nietzsche

+butchered to make a stupid novelist's holiday.</p>

+

+<p>Ideas to be vitally effective must, like scenery, be run on during the

+exact act of the contemporary drama. The aristocratic individualism of

+Nietzsche came at a happy moment when the stage was bare yet encumbered

+with the débris of socialistic theories left over from the storm that

+first swept all Europe in 1848. It was necessary that the pendulum

+should swing in another direction. The small voice of Max Stirner&mdash;who,

+as the French would say, imitated Nietzsche in advance&mdash;was swallowed

+in the universal gabble of sentimental humanitarianism preached from

+pulpits and barricades. Nietzsche's appearance marked one of those

+precise psychological moments when the rehabilitation of an old idea in

+a new garment of glittering rhetoric would resemble a new dispensation.

+For over a decade now the fame and writings of the Saxon-born

+philosopher have traversed the intellectual life of the Continent. He

+was translated into a dozen languages, he was expounded, schools sprang

+up and his disciples fought furious battles in his name. His doctrines,

+because of their dynamic revolutionary quality, were impudently annexed

+by men whose principles would have been abhorrent to the unfortunate

+thinker. Nietzsche, who his life long had attacked socialism in its

+myriad shapes, was captured by the socialists. However, the regression

+of the wave of admiration has begun not only in Germany but in France,

+once his greatest stronghold. The real Nietzsche, undimmed by violent

+partisanship and equally violent antagonism, has emerged. No longer is

+he a bogey man, not a creature of blood and iron, not a constructive or

+an academic philosopher, but simply a brilliant and suggestive thinker

+who, because of the nature of his genius, could never have erected

+an elaborate philosophic system, and a writer not quite as dangerous

+to established religion and morals as some critics would have us

+believe. He most prided himself on his common sense, on his "realism,"

+as contradistinguished from the cobweb-spinning idealisms of his

+philosophic predecessors.</p>

+

+<p>Early in 1908 a book was published at Jena entitled Franz Overbeck

+and Friedrich Nietzsche, by Carl Albrecht Bernouilli. In it at great

+length and with clearness was described the friendship of Overbeck&mdash;a

+well-known church historian and culture-novelist, born at St.

+Petersburg of German and English parents&mdash;and Nietzsche during their

+Basel period. Interesting is the story of his relations with Richard

+Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Renaissance. As a

+youth Nietzsche had won the praises of both Rietschl and Burckhardt for

+his essay on Theognis. This was before 1869, in which year at the age

+of twenty-six he took his doctor's degree and accepted the chair of

+classical philology at Basel. His friend Overbeck noted his dangerously

+rapid intellectual development and does not fail to record, what has

+never been acknowledged by the dyed-in-the-wool Nietzschians, that the

+"Master" had read and inwardly digested Max Stirner's anarchistic work,

+The Ego and His Own. Not only is this long-denied fact set forth, but

+Overbeck, in a careful analysis, reaches the positive conclusion that,

+notwithstanding his profound erudition, his richly endowed nature,

+Friedrich Nietzsche is not one of the world's great men; that in his

+mad endeavour to carve himself into the semblance of his own Superman

+he wrecked brain and body.</p>

+

+<p>The sad irony of this book lies in the fact that the sister of

+Nietzsche, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, who nursed the poet-philosopher

+from the time of his breakdown in 1888 till his death in 1900; who

+for twenty years has by pen and personally made such a successful

+propaganda for his ideas, was in at least three letters&mdash;for the first

+time published by Bernouilli&mdash;insulted grievously by her brother.

+This posthumous hatred as expressed in the acrid prose of Nietzsche

+is terribly disenchanting. He calls her a meddlesome woman without a

+particle of understanding of his ideals. He declares that she martyred

+him, made him ridiculous, and in the last letter he wrote her, dated

+December, 1886, he wonders at the enigma of fate that made two persons

+of such different temperaments blood-relatives. Bernouilli, the

+editor of these Overbeck letters, adds insult to injury by calling

+the unselfish, noble-minded sister and biographer of her brother a

+tyrannical and not very intellectual person, who often wounded her

+brother with her advice and criticism.</p>

+

+<p>Peter Gast doubts the authenticity of these letters, for, as he

+truthfully points out, the love of Nietzsche for his sister, as

+evidenced by an ample correspondence, was great. We recall the touching

+exclamation of the sick philosopher when once at his sister's house in

+Weimar he saw her weeping: "Don't cry, little sister, we are all so

+happy now." That "now" had a sinister significance, for the brilliant

+thinker was quite helpless and incapable of reading through the page

+of a book, though he was never the lunatic pictured by some of his

+opponents. A deep melancholy had settled upon his soul and he died

+without enjoying the light of a returned reason. It has not occurred to

+German critics that these letters even if genuine are the product of a

+diseased imagination. Nietzsche became a very suspicious man after his

+break with Wagner. He suffered from the mania of persecution. He hated

+mankind and fled to the heights of Sils-Maria to escape what Poe aptly

+described as the "tyranny of the human face."</p>

+

+<p>The first thing that occurs to one after reading Beyond Good and

+Evil is that Nietzsche is more French than German. It is well known

+that his favourites were the <i>pensée</i> writers, Pascal, La Bruyère,

+La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Chamfort, Vauvenargues. A peripatetic

+because of chronic ill health&mdash;he had the nerves of a Shelley and the

+stomach of a Carlyle&mdash;his ideas were jotted down during his long

+walks in the Engadine. Naturally they assumed the form of aphorisms,

+epigrams, <i>jeux d'esprit</i>. With his increasing illness came the

+inability to write more than a few pages of connected thoughts. His

+best period was between the years 1877 and 1882. He had attacked

+Schopenhauer; he wished to be free to go up to the "heights" unimpeded

+by the baggage of other men's ideas. It was with disquietude that his

+friends witnessed the growing self-exaltation that may be noted in the

+rhapsodical Zarathustra.</p>

+

+<p>He felt the ground sinking under him&mdash;his pride of intellect Luciferian

+in intensity&mdash;and his latter works were a desperate challenge to his

+darkening brain and the world that refused to recognize his value.</p>

+

+<p>Nietzsche had the true ascetic's temperament. He lived the life of

+a strenuous saint, and his Beyond Good and Evil might land us in

+a barren desert, where austerity would rule our daily conduct. To

+become a Superman one must renounce the world. It was the easy-going,

+down-at-the-heel morality of the world, its carrying water on both

+shoulders, that stirred the wrath of this earnest man of blameless

+life and provoked from him so much brilliant and fascinating prose.

+He wrote a swift, golden German. He was a stylist. The great culture

+hero of his day, nourished on Latin and Greek, he waged war against the

+moral ideas of his generation and ruined his intellect in the unequal

+conflict. He turned on himself and rended his soul into shreds rather

+than join in the affirmations of recognised faith. Yet what eloquent,

+touching pages he has devoted to the founder of the Christian religion.

+His last signature in the letter to Brandes reveals the preoccupation

+of his memory with the religion he despised. Nietzsche made the great

+renunciation of inherited faith and committed spiritual suicide.

+Libraries are filled with the works of his commentators, eager to make

+of him what he was not. He has been shamelessly exploited. He has

+been called the forerunner of Pragmatism. He was a poet, an artist,

+who saw life as a gorgeously spun dream, not as a dreary phalanstery.

+He belonged rather to Goethe and Faust than to Schopenhauer or the

+positivists. Hellenism was his first and last love.</p>

+

+<p>The correspondence between Nietzsche and his famulus, the musician

+Peter Gast&mdash;whose real name is Heinrich Kôselitz&mdash;from 1876 to 1889,

+appeared last autumn and comprises 278 letters. Another Nietzsche

+appears&mdash;gentle, suffering, as usual still hopeful. He loves Italy;

+at the end, Turin is his favourite city. There is little except in

+the final communication to show a mind cracking asunder. No doubt

+this correspondence was given to the world as an offset to the

+Overbeck-Bernouilli letters.</p>

+

+<p>Leslie Stephen declared that no one ever wrote a dull autobiography,

+and risking a bull, added, "The very dulness would be interesting." Yet

+one is not afraid to maintain that Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography

+is rather a disappointment; possibly because too much was expected.

+It should not be forgotten that Nietzsche, when at Wagner's villa

+Triebschen, near Lucerne, read and corrected Wagner's autobiography,

+which is yet to see the light of publication. He seems to have violated

+certain confidences, for he was the first&mdash;that is, in latter years&mdash;to

+revive the story of Wagner's blood relationship to his stepfather,

+Ludwig Geyer. In Leipsic this was a thrice-told tale. Moreover, he

+warned us to be suspicious of great men's autobiographies and then

+wrote one himself, wrote it in three weeks, beginning October 15, 1888,

+the forty-fourth anniversary of his birth, and ending with difficulty

+November 4. It rings sincere, and was composed at white heat, but

+unhappily for this present curious generation of Nietzsche readers it

+tells very little that is new.</p>

+

+<p>Notwithstanding Nietzsche's wish that the book should not exceed in

+price over a mark and a half, a limited edition de luxe has been put

+forth with the acquiescence of the Nietzsche archive, Weimar, and at

+a high price. This edition is limited to 1,250 copies. It is clearly

+printed, but the decorative element is rather bizarre. Henry Van

+de Velde of the Weimar Art School is the designer of the title and

+ornaments. Raoul Richter, professor at the Leipsic University, has

+written a few appreciative words at the close.</p>

+

+<p>Nietzsche was at Turin, November, 1888. There he wrote the following

+to Professor Georg Brandes, the celebrated Copenhagen critic: "I

+have now revealed myself with a cynicism that will become historical.

+The book is called Ecce Homo and is against everything Christian....

+I am after all the first psychologist of Christianity, and like the

+old artillerist I am, I can bring forward cannon of which no opponent

+of Christianity has even suspected the existence.... I lay down my

+oath that in two years we shall have the whole earth in convulsions.

+I am a fatality. Guess who it is that comes off worst in Ecce Homo?

+The Germans! I have said awful things to them." This was the "golden

+autumn" of his life, as he confessed to his sister Elizabeth. In a

+little over four weeks from the date of the letter to Brandes Nietzsche

+went mad, after a stroke of apoplexy in Turin. The collapse must have

+taken place between January 1 and 3, 1889. Brandes received a card

+signed "The Crucified One"; Overbeck, his old friend at Basel, was also

+agitated by a few lines in which Nietzsche proclaimed himself the King

+of Kings; while to Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth was sent a communication

+which read, "Ariadne, I love you! Dionysos." Like Tolstoy, Nietzsche

+suffered from theomania and prophecy madness.</p>

+

+<p>These details are not in the autobiography but may be found in Dr.

+Mügge's excellent study just published, Nietzsche, His Life and Work.

+Overbeck started for Turin and there found his poor old companion

+giving away his money, dancing, singing, declaiming verse, and playing

+snatches of crazy music on the pianoforte. He was taken back to

+Basel and was gentle on the trip except that in the Saint-Gothard

+tunnel he sang a poem of his, "An der Brücke," which appears in the

+autobiography. His mother brought him from Switzerland to Naumburg;

+thence to Dr. Binswanger's establishment at Jena. Later he lived in his

+sister's home at Upper Weimar, and from the balcony, where he spent

+his days, he could see a beautiful landscape. He was melancholy rather

+than mad, never violent&mdash;this his sister has personally assured me&mdash;and

+occasionally surprised those about him by flashes of memory; but full

+consciousness was not to be again enjoyed by him. Overwork, chloral,

+and despair at the "conspiracy of silence" caused his brain to crumble.

+He had attained his "Great Noon," Zarathustra's Noon, during the

+closing days of 1888. In August, 1900, came the euthanasia for which he

+had longed.</p>

+

+<p>There is internal evidence that the autobiography was written under

+exalted nervous conditions. The aura of insanity hovers about its

+pages. Yet Nietzsche has seldom said so many brilliant, ironical, and

+savage things. He melts over memories of Wagner, the one friendship

+of a life crowded with friends and cursed by solitude. He sets out to

+smash Christianity, but he expressed the hope that the book would fall

+into the hands of the intellectual élite. He divides his theme into

+the following heads: Why I Am So Clever: Why I Am So Sage: Why I Write

+Such Good Books: Why I Am a Fatality. (You recall here the letter to

+Brandes.) He ranges from the abuse of bad German cookery to Kantian

+metaphysics. He calls Ibsen the typical old maid and denounces him as

+the creator of the "Emancipated Woman." Yes, he does insult Germany

+and the Germans, but no worse than in earlier books; and certainly not

+so effectively as did Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer. In calling the

+Germans the "Chinese of Europe" he but repeated the words of Goncourt

+in Charles Demailly. He speaks of Liszt as one "who surpasses all

+musicians by the noble accents of his orchestration" (vague phrase);

+and depreciates Schumann's "Manfred." He, Nietzsche, had composed a

+counter overture which Von Bülow declared extraordinary. True, Von

+Bülow did call it something of the sort, with the advice to throw it

+into the dust-bin as being an insult to good music. He analyses his

+recent readings of Baudelaire&mdash;whose diary touched him deeply&mdash;of

+Stendhal, Bourget, Maupassant, Anatole France, and others. Best of all,

+he minutely analyses the mental processes of his books from The Birth

+of Tragedy to The Wagner Case. He declares Zarathustra a dithyramb of

+solitude and purity, and proudly boasts that the Superman builds his

+nest in the trees of the future.</p>

+

+<p>What a master of invective! He often descends to the street in his

+tongue-lashing, as, for instance, when he groups "shopkeepers,

+Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats." Woman is

+always the enemy. The only way to tame her is to make her a mother.

+As for female suffrage, he sets it down to psychological disorders.

+He is a <i>nuance</i>, and is the first German to understand women! Alas!

+And not the last man who will repeat this speech surely hailing from

+the Stone Age. He seems rather proud of his double personality, and

+hints at a third. Oddly enough, Nietzsche asked that his Ecce Homo

+(the title proves his constant preoccupation with Christianity) be

+translated into French by Strindberg, the Swedish poet and the first

+dramatist to incorporate into his plays the Nietzschian philosophy,

+or what he conceived to be such. (Daniel Lesueur has written of the

+various adaptations for gorillas of a teaching that really demands from

+man the utmost that is in him.) Nietzsche was a hater of Christianity;

+above all of Christian morals, but he was a brave and honest fighter.

+He raged at George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Carlyle for their

+half-heartedness. To give up the belief in Christ and His mission

+meant for Nietzsche to drop the moral system, to transvalue old moral

+values. This, he truthfully asserted, George Eliot and Spencer had not

+the courage to do. He did not skulk behind such masks as the Higher

+Criticism, Modernism, or quacksalver Christian socialism. Compromise

+was abhorrent to him. His Superman, with its echoes of Wagner's

+Siegfried, Ibsen's Brand, Stendhal's wicked heroes, the Renaissance

+Borgias, the second Faust of Goethe, and not a little of Hamlet, is

+a monster of perfection that may some day become a demigod for a new

+religion&mdash;and no worse than contemporary mud-gods manufactured daily.

+Nietzsche's particular virtue, even for the orthodox, is that though

+he assails their faith he also puts to rout with the fiery blasts of

+his rhetoric all the belly-gods, the false-culture gods, the gods who

+"heal," and other "ghosts"&mdash;as Max Stirner calls them. But to every

+generation its truths (or lies).</p>

+

+<p>A recently published anecdote of Ibsen quotes a statement of his <i>a

+propos</i> of Brand. "The whole drama is only meant as irony. For the man

+who wants all or nothing is certainly crazy." Well, Friedrich Nietzsche

+was such a man. No half-way parleyings. Fight the Bogey. Don't go

+around. He went more serenely than did Brand to his ice cathedral on

+the heights. His prayer uttered years before came true: "Give me, ye

+gods, give me madness! Madness to make me believe at last in myself."</p>

+

+<p>Nietzsche is the most dynamically emotional writer of his

+times. He sums up an epoch. He is the expiring voice of the old

+nineteenth-century romanticism in philosophy. His message to unborn

+generations we may easily leave to those unborn, and enjoy the wit, the

+profound criticisms of life, the bewildering gamut of his ideas; above

+all, pity the tragic blotting out of such a vivid intellectual life.</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="VIII" id="VIII">VIII</a></h4>

+

+<h4>MYSTICS</h4>

+

+

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="ERNEST_HELLO"></a>ERNEST HELLO</h5>

+

+

+<p>It occurred in the beautiful gardens of the Paris exposition during

+that summer of 1867 when Glory and France were synonymous expressions.

+To the music, cynical and voluptuous, of Offenbach and Strauss the

+world enjoyed itself, applauding equally Renan's latest book and

+Thérésa's vulgarity; amused by Ponson de Terrail's fatuous indecencies

+and speaking of Proudhon in the same breath. Bismarck and his Prussians

+seemed far away. Babel or Pompeii? The tower of the Second Empire

+reached to the clouds; below, the people danced on the edge of the

+crater. A time for prophets and their lamentations. Jeremiah walked in

+the gardens. He was a terrible man, with sombre fatidical gaze, eyes

+in which were the smothered fires of hatred. His thin hair waved in

+the wind. He said to his friends: "I come from the Tuileries Palace;

+it is not yet consumed; the Barbarians delay their coming. What is

+Attila doing?" He passed. "A madman!" exclaimed a companion to Henri

+Lasserre. "Not in the least," replied that writer. "He is Ernest

+Hello." After reading this episode as related by Hello's friend and

+editor, the disquieting figure is evoked of that son of Hanan, who

+prowled through the streets of the holy city in the year A.D. 62 crying

+aloud: "Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!" The prophecy of Hello was realized

+in a few years. Attila came and Attila went, and after his departure

+the polemical writer, who could be both a spouting volcano and a subtle

+doctor of theology, wrote his masterpiece, L'Homme, a remarkable book,

+a seed-bearing book.</p>

+

+<p>Why is there so little known of Ernest Hello? He was born 1828, died

+1885, and was a voluminous author, who wrote much for the <i>Univers</i> and

+other periodicals and passed away as he had lived, fighting in harness

+for the truths of his religion. Possibly the less sensitive texture of

+Louis Veuillot's mind and character threw the talents of Hello into

+shadow; perhaps his avowed hatred of mediocrity, his Old Testament

+power of vituperation, and his apocalyptic style militated against his

+acceptance by the majority of Roman Catholic readers. Notwithstanding

+his gifts as a writer and thinker, Hello was never popular, and it is

+only a few years ago that his works began to be republished. Let us

+hasten to add that they are rich in suggestion for lovers of apologetic

+or hortatory literature.</p>

+

+<p>It was Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont who sent me to the amazing

+Hello. In A Rebours Huysmans discusses him with Léon Bloy, Barbey

+d'Aurevilly, and Ozanam. "Hello is a cunning engineer of the soul, a

+skilful watchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism

+of a passion and to explain the play of a wheel work." United to his

+power of analysis there is the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet and the

+tortured ingenuity of a master of style. A little John of Patmos, one

+who, complex and precious, is a sort of epileptic mystic&mdash;vindictive,

+proud, a despiser of the commonplace. All these things was Hello

+to Huysmans, who did not seem to relish him very much. De Gourmont

+described him as one who believed with genius. A believing genius he

+was, Ernest Hello, and his genius, his dynamic faith&mdash;apart from any

+consideration of his qualities as a prose artist or his extraordinary

+powers of analysis. Without his faith, which was, one is tempted to

+add, his thematic material, he might have been a huge force vainly

+flapping his wings in the void, or, as Lasserre puts it, he was

+impatient with God because of His infinite patience. He longed to

+see Him strike dumb the enemies of His revealed word. He lived in a

+continuous thunder-storm of the spirit. He was a mystic, yet a warrior

+on the fighting line of the church militant.</p>

+

+<p>Joachim of Flora has written: "The true ascetic counts nothing his

+own save his harp." Hello, less subjective than Newman, less lyric

+though a "son of thunder," counted but the harp of his faith. All

+else he cast away. And this faith was published to the heathen with

+the hot rhetoric of a propagandist. The nations must be aroused from

+their slumber. He whirls his readers off their feet by the torrential

+flow of his argument. He never winds calmly into his subject, but

+smites vehemently the opening bars of his hardy discourse. He writes

+pure, untroubled prose at times, the line, if agitated, unbroken,

+the balance of sound and sense perfect. But too often he employs a

+staccato, declamatory, tropical, inflated style which recalls Victor

+Hugo at his worst; the short sentence; the single paragraph; the

+vicious abuse of antithesis; if it were not for the subject-matter

+whole pages might masquerade as the explosive mannerisms of Hugo.

+"Christianity is <i>naturally</i> impossible. However, it exists. Therefore

+it is supernatural!" This is Hello logic. Or, speaking of St. Joseph

+of Cupertino: "If he had not existed, no one could have invented

+him," which is a very witty inversion of Voltaire's celebrated <i>mot</i>.

+God-intoxicated as were St. Francis of Assisi or Père Ratisbonne,

+Hello was not; when absent from the tripod of vaticination he was a

+meek, loving man; then the walls of his <i>Turris eburnea</i> echoed the

+inevitable: <i>Ora pro nobis!</i> Even when the soul seems empty, it may,

+like a hollow shell, murmur of eternity. Hello's faith was in the

+fourth spiritual dimension. It demanded the affirmation of his virile

+intellect and the concurrence of his overarching emotional temperament.</p>

+

+<p>In the black-and-white sketch by Vallotton he resembles both Remenyi,

+the Hungarian violin virtuoso, and Louise Michel, the anarchist.

+The brow is vast, the expression exalted, the mouth belligerent,

+disputatious, and the chin slightly receding. One would say a man of

+violent passions, in equilibrium unsteady, a skirter of abysses, a good

+hater&mdash;did he not once propose a History of Hatred? Yet how submissive

+he was to papal decrees; many of his books contain instead of a preface

+his act of submission to Catholic dogma. More so than Huysmans was

+he a mediæval man. For him modern science did not exist. The Angelic

+Doctor will outlive Darwin, he cried, and the powers and principalities

+of darkness are as active in these days as in the age when the saints

+of the desert warred with the demons of doubt and concupiscence. "To

+wring from man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof of Satan's

+greatest power," was a sentiment of Père Ravignan to which Hello would

+have heartily subscribed. He detested Renan&mdash;<i>Renan, voilà l'ennemi!</i>

+Jeremy Taylor's vision of hell as an abode crowded with a million dead

+dogs would not be too severe a punishment for that silken sophist,

+whose writings are the veriest flotsam and jetsam of a disordered

+spiritual life. Hello has written eloquent pages about Hugo, whose

+poetry he admired, whose ideas he combated. Napoleon was a genius, but

+a foe of God.</p>

+

+<p>Shakespeare for him vacillated between obscenity and melancholy; Hamlet

+was a character hardly sounded by Hello; doubt was a psychological

+impossibility to one of his faith. He was convinced that the John of

+the Apocalyptic books was not John the Presbyter, nor any one of the

+five Johns of the Johannic writings, but John the Apostle. He has often

+the colour of Bossuet's moral indignation. A master of theological

+odium, his favourite denunciation was "Horma, Anathema, Anathème,

+Amen!" His favourite symbol of confusion is Babel&mdash;Paris. He loved,

+among many saints, Denys the Areopagite; he extolled the study of St.

+Thomas Aquinas. To the unhappy Abbé de Lamenais's Paroles d'un Croyant

+(1834), he opposed his own Paroles de Dieu. He could have, phrase for

+phrase, book for book, retorted with tenfold interest to Nietzsche's

+vilification of Christianity. Society will again become a theocracy,

+else pay the penalty in anarchy. One moment beating his breast, he

+cries aloud: "<i>Maranatha! Maranatha!</i> Our Lord is at hand!" The next

+we find him with the icy contemptuousness of a mystic quoting from

+the Admirable Ruysbroeck (a thirteenth-century mystic whom he had

+translated, whose writings influenced Huysmans, and at one period of

+his development, Maurice Maeterlinck) these brave words: "Needs must

+I rejoice beyond the age, though the world has horror of my joy, and

+its grossness cannot understand what I say." Notwithstanding this

+aloofness, there are some who after reading Ernest Hello's Man may

+agree with Havelock Ellis: "Hello is the real psychologist of the

+century, not Stendhal."</p>

+

+<p>It is indeed a work of penetrating criticism and clairvoyance, this

+study of man, of life. Read his analysis of the Miser and you will

+recall Plautus or Molière. He has something of Saint-Simon's power in

+presenting a finished portrait and La Bruyère's cameo concision. He

+is reactionary in all that concerns modern æsthetics or the natural

+sciences. There is but one science, the knowledge of God. Avoiding the

+devious webs of metaphysics, he sets before us his ideas with a crystal

+clarity. Despite its religious bias, L'Homme may be recommended as a

+book for mundane minds. Nor is Le Siècle to be missed. Those views

+of the world, of men and women, are written by a shrewd observer and

+a profound thinker. Philosophie et Athéisme is just what its title

+foretells&mdash;a battering-ram of dialectic. The scholastic learning of

+Hello is enormous. He had at his back the Bible, the patristic writers,

+the schoolmen, and all the moderns from De Maistre to Father Faber.

+He execrated Modernism. Physionomies de Saintes, Angelo de Foligno,

+and half a dozen other volumes prove how versed he was in Holy Writ.

+"The Scriptures are an abysm," he declared. He wrote short stories,

+Contes extraordinaires, which display excellent workmanship, no little

+fantasy, yet are rather slow reading. In literature Hello was a belated

+romantic, a Don Quixote of the ideal who charged ferociously the

+windmills of indifference.</p>

+

+<p>In 1881 he was a collaborator with an American religious publication

+called <i>Propagateur Catholique</i> (I give the French title because

+I do not know whether it was published here or in Canada). His

+contributions were incorporated later in his Words of God. I confess

+to knowing little of Hello but his works, the Life by Lasserre being

+out of print. Impressive as is his genius, it is often repellent,

+because love of his fellow-man is not a dominant part of it. The

+central flame burns brightly, fiercely; the tiny taper of charity is

+often missing. With his beloved Ruysbroeck (Rusbrock, he names him)

+he seems to be muttering too often a disdainful adieu to his gross

+and ignorant brethren as if abandoning them to their lies and ruin.

+However, his translation of this same Ruysbroeck is a genuine accession

+to contemplative literature. And perhaps, if one too hastily criticises

+the almost elemental faith of Hello and its rude assaults of the

+portals of pride, luxury, and worldliness, perhaps the old wisdom may

+cruelly rebound upon his detractors: "Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non

+est Deus."</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="MAD_NAKED_BLAKE"></a>"MAD, NAKED BLAKE"</h5>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>Perhaps the best criticism ever uttered offhand about the art of

+William Blake was Rodin's, who, when shown some facsimiles of Blake's

+drawings by brilliant Arthur Symons with the explanation that Blake

+"used literally to see those figures, they are not mere inventions,"

+replied: "Yes. He saw them once; he should have seen them three or

+four times." And this acute summing up of Blake's gravest defect is

+further strengthened by a remark made by one of his most sympathetic

+commentators, Laurence Binyon. Blake once said: "The lavish praise I

+have received from all quarters for invention and drawing has generally

+been accompanied by this: 'He can conceive, but he cannot execute.'

+This absurd assertion has done and may still do me the greatest

+mischief." Now comments Mr. Binyon: "In spite of the artist's protest

+this continues to be the current criticism on Blake's work; and yet

+the truth lies rather on the other side. It is not so much in his

+execution as in the failure to mature his conceptions that his defect

+is to be found." Again: "His temperament unfitted him for success in

+carrying his work further; his want was not lack of skill, but lack

+of patience." If this sounds paradoxical we find Symons admitting

+that Rodin had hit the nail on the head. "There, it seems to me, is

+the fundamental truth about the art of Blake; it is a record of vision

+which has not been thoroughly mastered even as vision."</p>

+

+<p>Notwithstanding the neglect to which Blake was subjected during

+his lifetime and the misunderstanding ever since his death of his

+extraordinary and imaginative designs, poetry, and vaticinations, it

+is disquieting to see how books about Blake are beginning to pile

+up. He may even prove as popular as Ibsen. A certain form of genius

+serves as a starting-point for critical performances. Blake is the

+most admirable example, though Whitman and Browning are in the same

+class. Called cryptic by their own, they are too well understood by a

+later generation. Wagner once swam in the consciousness of the elect;

+and he was understood. Baudelaire understood him, so Liszt. Wagner

+to-day is the property of the man in the street, who whistles him,

+and Ibsen is already painfully yielding up his precious secrets to

+relentless "expounding" torturers. As for Maeterlinck, he is become a

+mere byword in literary clubs, where they discuss his Bee in company

+with the latest Shaw epigram. "Even caviare, it seems, may become a

+little flyblown," exclaims Mr. Dowden. Everything is being explained.

+Oh, happy age! Who once wrote: "A hundred fanatics are found to a

+theological or metaphysical statement, but not one for a geometric

+problem"?</p>

+

+<p>Yet we may be too rash. Blake's prophetic books are still cloudy

+nightmares, for all but the elect, and not Swinburne, Gilchrist,

+Tatham, Richard Garnett, Ellis, Binyon, Yeats, Symons, Graham

+Robertson, Alfred Story, Maclagan and Russell, Elizabeth Luther Cary

+and the others&mdash;for there are others and there will be others&mdash;can

+wring from these fragments more than an occasional meaning or music.

+But in ten years he may be the pontiff of a new dispensation. Symons

+has been wise in the handling of his material. After a general and

+comprehensive study of Blake he brings forward some new records

+from contemporary sources&mdash;extracts from the diary, letters and

+reminiscences of Henry Crabb Robinson; from A Father's Memoir of His

+Child, by Benjamin Heath Malkin; from Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary

+(1820); Blake's horoscope, obituary notice, extract from Varley's

+Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828); a biographical sketch of Blake by J.

+T. Smith (1828), and Allan Cunningham's life of Blake (1830). In a

+word, for those who cannot spare the time to investigate the various

+and sundry Blakian exegetics, Symons's book is the best because most

+condensed. It is the Blake question summed up by a supple hand and a

+sympathetic spirit. It is inscribed to Auguste Rodin in the following

+happy and significant phrase: "To Auguste Rodin, whose work is the

+marriage of heaven and hell."</p>

+

+

+<p>II</p>

+

+

+<p>William Blake must have been the happiest man that ever lived; not

+the doubtful happiness of a fool's paradise, but a sharply defined

+ecstasy that was his companion from his earliest years to his very

+death-bed; that bed on which he passed away "singing of the things

+he saw in heaven," to the tune of his own improvised strange music.

+He seems to have been the solitary man in art history who really

+fulfilled Walter Pater's test of success in life: "To burn always

+with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Blake easily

+maintained it. His face shone with it. Withal he was outwardly sane

+in matters of mundane conduct, sensitive and quick to resent any

+personal affront, and by no means one of those awful prophets going

+about proclaiming their self-imposed mission. An amiable man, quick

+to fly into and out of a passion, a gentleman exquisite in manners,

+he impressed those who met him as an unqualified genius. Charles Lamb

+has told us of him; so have others. I possess an engraving of his head

+after Linnell's miniature, and while his Irish paternity has never

+been thoroughly established&mdash;Yeats calls him an Irishman&mdash;there can

+be little doubt of his Celtic origin. His is the head of a poet, a

+patriot, a priest..The brow is lofty and wide, the hair flamelike in

+its upcurling. The eyes are marvellous&mdash;true windows of a soul vividly

+aware of its pricelessness; the mystic eye and the eye of the prophet

+about to thunder upon the perverse heads of his times. The full lips

+and massive chin make up the ensemble of a singularly noble, inspired,

+and well-balanced head. Symmetry is its keynote. A God-kindled face.

+One looks in vain for any indication of the madman&mdash;Blake was called

+mad during his lifetime, and ever since he has been considered mad by

+the world. Yet he was never mad as were John Martin and Wiertz the

+Belgian, or as often seems Odilon Redon, who has been called&mdash;heaven

+knows why!&mdash;the "French Blake." The poet Cowper said to Blake: "Oh,

+that I were insane always.... Can you not make me truly insane?...

+You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us&mdash;over us all&mdash;mad

+as a refuge from unbelief&mdash;from Bacon, Newton, and Locke." The arid

+atheism of his century was doubtless a contributory cause to the

+exasperation of Blake's nerves. He believed himself a Christian despite

+his heterodox sayings, and his belief is literal and profound. A true

+Citizen of Eternity, as Yeats named him, and with all his lack of

+academic training, what a giant he was among the Fuselis, Bartolozzis,

+Stothards, Schiavonettis, and the other successful mediocrities.</p>

+

+<p>His life was spent in ignoble surroundings, an almost anonymous life,

+though a happy one because of its illuminating purpose and flashes of

+golden fire. Blake was born in London (1757) and died in London (1827).

+He was the son of a hosier, whose real name was not O'Neill, as some

+have maintained. The boy, at the age of fourteen, was apprenticed to

+Ryland the engraver, but the sight of his master's face caused him

+to shudder and he refused to work under him, giving as a reason that

+Ryland would be hanged some day. And so he was, for counterfeiting.

+The abnormally sensitive little chap then went to the engraver Basire,

+with whom he remained a year. His precocity was noteworthy. In 1773

+he put forth as a pretended copy of Michaelangelo a design which he

+called Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion. At that early

+age he had already begun to mix up Biblical characters and events with

+the life about him. The Bible saturated his imagination; it was not a

+dead record for him, but a living, growing organism that overlapped

+the spiritual England of his day. The grotesqueness of his titles, the

+mingling of the familiar with the exotic&mdash;the sublime and the absurd

+are seldom asunder in Blake&mdash;sacred with secular, were the results

+of his acquaintance with the Scriptures at a period when other boys

+were rolling hoops or flying kites. Blake could never have been a

+boy, in the ordinary sense; yet he was to the last day of his life a

+child in the naïveté of his vision. "I am ever the new-born child," he

+might have said, as did Goethe to Herder. At the age of four he said

+God put his face in the window, and he ran screaming to his parents

+to bear witness to the happening. He had seen a tree bright with

+angels at Peckham Rye, and his life long he held converse with the

+spirits of Moses, Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. He

+adored Michaelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer and Swedenborg completed the

+conquest&mdash;perhaps the unsettlement&mdash;of his intellect. He hated Titian,

+Rubens, and Rembrandt. They were sensualists, they did not in their art

+lay the emphasis upon drawing, and as we shall see presently, drawing

+was the chief factor for Blake, colour being a humble handmaiden.</p>

+

+<p>In 1782 Blake married for love Catharine Boucher, or Boutcher, of whom

+Mr. Swinburne has said that she "deserves remembrance as about the

+most perfect wife on record." She was uneducated, but learned to read

+and write, and later proved an inestimable helpmate for the struggling

+and unpractical Blake. She bound his books and coloured some of his

+illustrations. She bore long poverty uncomplainingly, one is tempted

+to say with enthusiasm. Once only she faltered. Blake had his own

+notions about certain Old Testament customs, and he, it is said on the

+authority of a gossip, had proposed to add another wife to the poor

+little household. Mrs. Blake wept and the matter was dropped. Other

+gossip avers that the Adamite in Blake manifested itself in a not

+infrequent desire to cast aside garments and to sit in paradisiacal

+innocence. Whether these stories were the invention of malicious

+associates or were true, one thing is certain: Blake was capable of

+anything for which he could find a Biblical precedent. In the matter

+of the unconventional he was the <i>Urvater</i> of English rebels. Shelley,

+Byron, Swinburne were timid amateurs compared to this man, who with a

+terrific energy translated his thoughts into art. He was not the idle

+dreamer of an empty day nor a mooning mystic. His energy was electric.

+It sounds a clarion note in his verse and prose, it reveals itself in

+the fiery swirlings of his line, a line swift and personal. He has

+been named by some one a heretic in the Church of Swedenborg; but like

+a latter-day rebel&mdash;Nietzsche, who renounced Schopenhauer&mdash;Blake soon

+renounced Swedenborg. But Michelangelo remained a deity for him, and in

+his designs the influence of Angelo is paramount.</p>

+

+<p>Blake might be called an English Primitive. He stems from the

+Florentines, but <i>à la gauche</i>. The bar sinister on his artistic

+coat of arms is the lack of fundamental training. He had a Gothic

+imagination, but his dreams lack architectonics. Goethe, too, had

+dreams, and we are the richer by Faust. And no doubt there are in his

+works phrases that Nietzsche has seemed to repeat. It is the fashion

+just now to trace every idea of Nietzsche to some one else. The truth

+is that the language of rebellion through the ages is the same. The

+mere gesture of revolt, as typified in the uplifted threatening arm of

+a Cain, a Prometheus, a Julian the Apostate, is no more conventional

+than the phraseology of the heretic. How many of them have written

+"inspired" bibles, from Mahomet to Zarathustra. Blake, his tumultuous

+imagination afire&mdash;remember that the artist doubled the poet in his

+amazing and versatile soul&mdash;poured forth for years his "sacred" books,

+his prophecies, his denouncements of his fellow-man. It was all sincere

+righteous indignation; but the method of his speech is obscure; the

+Mormon books of revelation are miracles of clarity in comparison. Let

+us leave these singular prophecies of Blake to the mystics. One thing

+is sure&mdash;he has affected many poets and thinkers. There are things in

+The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Shaw might have said had not Blake

+forestalled him. Such is the cruelty of genius.</p>

+

+<p>Symons makes apt comparison between Blake and Nietzsche: "There is

+nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices ... vices in the

+natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world."

+This might have appeared over Nietzsche's signature in Beyond Good

+and Evil. And the following in his marginalia to Reynolds&mdash;Sir Joshua

+always professed a high regard for the genius of Blake. "The Enquiry

+in England is not whether a man has Talents and Genius, but whether he

+is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass." The vocabulary of rebellion

+is the same. Still more bitter is his speech about holiness: "The fool

+shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven, let him be ever so pious."

+Blake glorified passion, which for him was the highest form of human

+energy. His tragic scrolls, emotional arabesques, are testimony to his

+high and subtle temperament. The intellect he worshipped. Of pride

+we cannot have too much! As a lyric poet it is too late in the day to

+reiterate that he is a peer in the "holy church of English literature."

+The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience have given him a place

+in the anthologies and made him known to readers who have never heard

+of him as a pictorial genius. "Tiger, tiger, burning bright, In the

+forests of the night," is recited by sweet school-misses and pondered

+for its philosophy by their masters. And has Keats ever fashioned a

+lovelier image than: "Let thy west wind sleep on the lake; spread

+silence with thy glimmering eyes and wash the dusk with silver"?

+Whatever he may not be, William Blake is a great singer.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>William Butler Yeats in his Ideas of Good and Evil has said some

+notable things about Blake. He calls him a realist of the imagination

+and first pointed out the analogy between Blake and Nietzsche. "When

+one reads Blake it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain

+of beauty was blown into our faces." And "he was a symbolist who had

+to invent his symbols." Well, what great artist does not? Wagner

+did; also Ibsen and Maeterlinck. Blake was much troubled over the

+imagination. It was the "spirit" for him in this "vegetable universe,"

+the Holy Ghost. All art that sets forth with any fulness the outward

+vesture of things is prompted by the "rotten rags of memory." That

+is why he loathed Rubens, why he seemingly slurs the forms of men

+and things in his eagerness to portray the essential. Needless to

+add, the essential for him was the soul. He believed in goading the

+imagination to vision&mdash;though not with opium&mdash;and we are led through

+a dream-world of his own fashioning, one in which his creatures bear

+little correspondence to earthly types. His illustrations to the

+Book of Job, to Dante, to Young's Night Thoughts bear witness to the

+intensity of his vision, though flesh and blood halts betimes in

+following these vast decorative whirls of flame bearing myriad souls in

+blasts that traverse the very firmament. The "divine awkwardness" of

+his Adam and Eve and the "Ancient of Days" recall something that might

+be a marionette and yet an angelic being. To Blake they were angels;

+of that there can be no doubt; but we of less fervent imagination may

+ask as did Hotspur of Glendower, who had boasted that he could "call

+spirits from the vasty deep." "Why, so can I, or so can any man. But

+will they come when you do call for them?" quoth the gallant Percy. We

+are, the majority of us, as unimaginative as Hotspur. Blake summoned

+his spirits; to him they appeared; to quote his own magnificent

+utterance, "The stars threw down their spears, and watered heaven with

+their tears"; but we, alas! see neither stars nor spears nor tears,

+only eccentric draughtsmanship and bizarre designs. Yet, after Blake,

+Doré's Dante illustrations are commonplace; even Botticelli's seem

+ornamental. Such is the genius of the Englishman that on the thither

+side of his shadowy conceptions there shine intermittently pictures

+of a No Man's Land, testifying to a burning fantasy hampered by human

+tools. He suggests the supernatural. "How do you know," he asks, "but

+every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed

+by your senses five?" Of him Ruskin has said: "In expressing conditions

+of glaring and flickering light Blake is greater than Rembrandt." With

+Dante he went to the nethermost hell. His warring attributes tease and

+attract us. For the more human side we commend Blake's seventeen wood

+engravings to Thornton's Virgil. They are not so rich as Bewick's,

+but we must remember that it was Blake's first essay with knife and

+box-wood&mdash;he was really a practised copper engraver&mdash;and the effects

+he produced are wonderful. What could be more powerful in such a tiny

+space than the moon eclipse and the black forest illustrating the

+lines, "Or when the moon, by wizard charm'd, foreshows Bloodstained in

+foul eclipse, impending woes!" And the dim sunsets, the low, friendly

+sky in the other plates!</p>

+

+<p>Blake's gospel of art may be given in his own words: "The great and

+golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct,

+sharp and wiry the boundary line the more perfect the work of art;

+and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak

+imitation, plagiarism and bungling." He abominated the nacreous flesh

+tones of Titian, Correggio, or Rubens. Reflected lights are sinful.

+The silhouette betrays the soul of the master. Swinburne in several

+eloquent pages has instituted a comparison between Walt Whitman and

+William Blake. (In the first edition of "William Blake: A Critical

+Essay," 1868.) Both men were radicals. "The words of either strike

+deep and run wide and soar high." What would have happened to Blake if

+he had gone to Italy and studied the works of the masters&mdash;for he was

+truly ignorant of an entire hemisphere of art? Turner has made us see

+his dreams of a gorgeous world; Blake, as through a scarce opened door,

+gives us a breathless glimpse of a supernal territory, whether heaven

+or hell, or both, we dare not aver. Italy might have calmed him, tamed

+him, banished his arrogance&mdash;as it did Goethe's. Suppose that Walt

+Whitman had written poems instead of magical and haunting headlines.

+And if Browning had made clear the devious ways of Sordello&mdash;what then?

+"What porridge had John Keats?" We should have missed the sharp savour

+of the real Blake, the real Whitman, the real Browning. And what a

+number of interesting critical books would have remained unwritten.

+"Oh, never star was lost here but it arose afar." What Coleridge wrote

+of his son Hartley might serve for Blake: "Exquisitely wild, an utter

+visionary, like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of

+his own making. He alone is a light of his own. Of all human beings I

+never saw one so utterly naked of self." Naked of self! William Blake,

+unselfish egoist, stands before us in three words.</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="FRANCIS_POICTEVIN"></a>FRANCIS POICTEVIN</h5>

+

+

+<p>There is a memorable passage in A Rebours, the transcription of which,

+by Mr. George Moore, may be helpful in understanding the work of that

+rare literary artist, Francis Poictevin. "The poem in prose," wrote

+Huysmans, "handled by an alchemist of genius, should contain the

+quintessence, the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and

+the superfluous description of which it suppresses ... the adjective

+placed in such an ingenious and definite way that it could not be

+legally dispossessed of its place, that the reader would dream for

+whole weeks together over its meaning, at once precise and multiple;

+affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the

+souls revealed by the light of the unique epithet. The novel thus

+understood, thus condensed into one or two pages, would be a communion

+of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual

+collaboration by consent between ten superior persons scattered through

+the universe, a delectation offered to the most refined and accessible

+only to them."</p>

+

+<p>This aristocratic theory of art was long ago propounded by Poe in

+regard to the short poem. Huysmans transposed the idea to the key of

+fiction while describing the essential prose of Mallarmé; but some

+years before the author of A Rebours wrote his ideal book on decadence

+a modest young Frenchman had put into practice the delightfully

+impracticable theories of the prose poem. This writer was Francis

+Poictevin (born at Paris, 1854). Many there were, beginning with Edgar

+Poe and Louis Bertrand, who had essayed the form, at its best extremely

+difficult, at its worst too tempting to facile conquests: Baudelaire,

+Huysmans in his Le Drageoir aux Epices; Daudet, De Banville, Villiers

+de l'Isle Adam, Maurice de Guérin, and how many others! During the

+decade of the eighties the world of literature seemed to be fabricating

+poems in prose. Pale youths upon whose brows descended aureoles at

+twilight, sought fame in this ivory miniature carving addressed to the

+"ten superior persons" very much scattered over the globe. But like

+most peptonic products, the brain as does the stomach, finally refuses

+to accept as nourishment artificial concoctions too heavily flavoured

+with midnight oil. The world which is gross prefers its literature by

+the gross, and though it has been said that all the great exterior

+novels have been written, the majority of readers continue to read

+long-winded stories dealing with manners and, of course, the eternal

+conquest of an uninteresting female by a mediocre male. Aiming at

+instantaneity of pictorial and musical effect&mdash;as a picture become

+lyrical&mdash;the poets who fashioned their prose into artistic rhythms and

+colours and tones ended by exhausting the patience of a public rapidly

+losing its faculty of attention.</p>

+

+<p>Possibly these things may account for the neglect of a writer and

+thinker of such delicacy and originality as Poictevin, but he was

+always caviare even to the consumers of literary caviar. But he had

+a small audience in Paris, and after his first book appeared&mdash;one

+hesitates to call it a novel&mdash;Daudet saluted it with the praise that

+Sainte-Beuve&mdash;the Sainte-Beuve of Volupté and Port-Royal&mdash;would have

+been delighted with La Robe du Moine. Here is a list of Poictevin's

+works and the years of their publication until 1894. Please note their

+significant and extraordinary names: La Robe du Moine, 1882; Ludine,

+1883; Songes, 1884; Petitan, 1885; Seuls, 1886; Paysages et Nouveaux

+Songes, 1888; Derniers Songes, 1888; Double, 1889; Presque, 1891;

+Heures, 1892; Tout Bas, 1893; Ombres, 1894.</p>

+

+<p>A collective title for them might be Nuances; Poictevin searches

+the last nuance of sensations and ideas. He is a remote pupil of

+Goncourt, and superior to his master in his power of recording the

+impalpable. (Compare any of his books with the Madame Gervaisais of

+Goncourt; the latter is mysticism very much in the concrete.) At the

+same time he recalls Amiel, Maurice de Guérin, Walter Pater, and

+Coventry Patmore. A mystical pantheist in his worship of nature, he

+is a mystic in his adoration of God. This intensity of vision in the

+case of Poictevin did not lead to the depravities, exquisite and

+morose, of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the brilliant outrageous Barbey

+d'Aurevilly. With his soul of ermine Poictevin is characterised by De

+Gourmont as the inventor of the mysticism of style. Once he saluted

+Edmond de Goncourt as the Velasquez of the French language, and that

+master, not to be outdone in politeness, told Poictevin that his prose

+could boast its "victories over the invisible." If by this Goncourt

+meant making the invisible visible, rendering in prose of crepuscular

+subtlety moods recondite, then it was not an exaggerated compliment.

+In such spiritual performances Poictevin resembles Lafcadio Hearn

+in his airiest gossamer-webbed phrases. A true, not a professional

+symbolist, the French <i>prosateur</i> sounds Debussy twilight harmonies.

+His speech at times glistens with the hues of a dragon-fly zigzagging

+in the sunshine. In the tenuous exaltation of his thought he evokes the

+ineffable deity, circled by faint glory. To compass his picture he does

+not hesitate to break the classic mould of French syntax while using

+all manners of strange-fangled vocables to attain effects that remind

+one of the clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Indeed, a mystic style is his,

+beside which most writers seem heavy-handed and obvious.</p>

+

+<p>Original in his form, in the bizarre architecture of his paragraphs,

+pages, chapters, he abolishes the old endings, cadences, chapter

+headings. Nor, except at the beginning of his career, does he portray

+a definite hero or heroine. Even names are avoided. "He" or "she"

+suffices to indicate the sex. Action there is little. Story he has

+none to tell; by contrast Henry James is epical. Exteriority does

+not interest Poictevin, who is nevertheless a landscape painter;

+intimate and charming. His young man and young woman visit Mentone,

+the Pyrenees, Brittany, along the Rhine&mdash;a favourite resort&mdash;Holland,

+Luchon, Montreux, and Switzerland, generally. His palette is

+marvellously complicated. We should call him an impressionist but that

+the phrase is become banal. Poictevin deals in subtle grays. He often

+writes <i>gris-iris</i>. His portraits swim in a mysterious atmosphere as do

+Eugène Carrière's. His fluid, undulating prose records landscapes in

+the manner of Theocritus.</p>

+

+<p>The tiny repercussions of the spirit that is reacted upon by life

+are Whistlerian notations in the gamut of this artist's instrument.

+Evocation, not description; evocation, not narration; always evocation,

+yet there is a harmonious ensemble; he returns to his theme after

+capriciously circling about it as does a Hungarian gypsy when

+improvising upon the heart-strings of his auditors. Verlaine once

+addressed a poem to Poictevin the first line of which runs: "Toujours

+mécontent de son œuvre." Maurice Barrès evidently had read Seuls

+before he wrote Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891). The young woman in

+Poictevin's tale has the same feverish languors; her male companion,

+though not the egoist of Barrès, is a very modern person, slightly

+consumptive; one of whom it may be asked, in the words of Poictevin:

+"Is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of

+sadness?" In their room hang portraits of Baudelaire and the Curé

+d'Ars. Odder still is the monk, P. Martin. Martin is the name of the

+"adversary" in The Garden of Bérénice. And the episode of the dog's

+death! Huysmans, too, must have admired Poictevin's descriptions of the

+Grünewald Christ at Colmar, and of the portrait of the Young Florentine

+in the Stadel Museum at Frankfort. It would be instructive to compare

+the differing opinions of the two critics concerning this last-named

+picture.</p>

+

+<p>A mirror, Poictevin's soul reflects the moods of landscapes. Without

+dogmatism he could say with St. Anselm that he would rather go to hell

+sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single transgression. To his

+tender temperament even the reading of Pascal brought shadows of doubt.

+A persistent dreamer, the world for him is but the garment investing

+God. Flowers, stars, the wind that weeps in little corners, the placid

+bosom of lonely lakes, far-away mountains and their mystic silhouettes,

+the Rhine and its many curvings, the clamour of cities and the joy of

+the green grass, are his themes. Life with its frantic gestures is

+quite inutile. Let it be avoided. You turn after reading Poictevin

+to the Minoration of Emile Hennequin: "Let all that is be no more.

+Let glances fade and the vivacity of gestures fall. Let us be humble,

+soft, and slow. Let us love without passion, and let us exchange

+weary caresses." Or hear the tragic cry of Ephraim Mikhael: "Ah! to

+see behind me no longer, on the lake of Eternity, the implacable wake

+of Time." "Poictevin's men and women," once wrote Aline Gorren in a

+memorable study of French symbolism, "are subordinate to these wider

+curves of wave and sky; they come and go, emerging from their setting

+briefly and fading into it again; they have no personality apart from

+it; and amid the world symbols of the heavens in marshalled movements

+and the thousand reeded winds, they in their human symbols are allowed

+to seem, as they are, proportionately small. They are possessed as

+are clouds, waters, trees, but no more than clouds, waters, trees, of

+a baffling significance, forever a riddle to itself. They have bowed

+attitudes; the weight of the mystery they carry on their shoulders."</p>

+

+<p>The humanity that secretly evaporates when the prose poet notes the

+attrition of two souls is shed upon his landscapes with their sonorous

+silences. A picture of the life contemplative, of the adventures of

+timorous gentle souls in search of spiritual adventures, set before

+us in a style of sublimated preciosity by an orchestra of sensations

+that has been condensed to the string quartet, the dreams of Francis

+Poictevin&mdash;does he not speak of the human forehead as a dream dome?

+&mdash;are not the least consoling of his century. He is the white-robed

+acolyte among mystics of modern literature.</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+<h5>IV</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="THE_ROAD_TO_DAMASCUS"></a>THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS</h5>

+

+

+<p>Religious conversion and its psychology have furnished the world's

+library with many volumes. Perfectly understood in the ages of

+faith, the subject is for modern thinkers susceptible of realistic

+explanation. Only we pave the way now by a psychological course instead

+of the ancient doctrine of Grace Abounding. Nor do we confound the

+irresistible desire of certain temperaments to spill their innermost

+thoughts, with what is called conversion. There was Rousseau, who

+confessed things that the world would be better without having heard.

+He was not converted. Tolstoy, believing that primitive Christianity

+is almost lost to his fellow beings, preaches what he thinks is the

+real faith. Yet he was converted. He had been, he said, a terrible

+transgressor. The grace of God gave sight to his sin-saturated

+eyeballs. Is there the slightest analogy between his case and that

+of Cardinal Newman? John Henry Newman had led a spotless life before

+he left the Anglican fold. Nevertheless he was a convert. And Saint

+Augustine, the pattern of all self-confessors, the classic case, may

+be compared to John Bunyan or to Saint Paul! Professor William James,

+who with his admirable impartiality has scrutinized the psychological

+topsy-turvy we name conversion, has not missed the commonplace fact

+that every man as to details varies, but at base the psychical

+machinery is controlled by the same motor impulses. <i>A chacun son

+infini.</i></p>

+

+<p>Some natures reveal a mania for confession. Dostoïevsky's men and

+women continually tell what they have thought, what crimes they have

+committed. It was an epileptic obsession with this unhappy Russian

+writer. Paul Verlaine sang blithely of his ghastly life, and Baudelaire

+did not spare himself. So it would seem that the inability of certain

+natures to keep their most precious secrets is also the keynote of

+religious confessions. But let us not muddle this with the sincerity

+or insincerity of the change. Leslie Stephen has said that it did not

+matter much whether Pascal was sincere, and instanced the Pascal wager

+(<i>le pari de Pascal</i>) as evidence of the great thinker's casuistry. It

+is better to believe and be on the safe side than be damned if you do

+not believe; for if there is no hereafter your believing that there is

+will not matter one way or the other. This is the substance of Pascal's

+wager, and it must be admitted that the ardent upholder of Jansenism

+and the opponent of the Jesuits proved himself an excellent pupil of

+the latter when he framed his famous proposition.</p>

+

+<p>Among the converts who have become almost notorious in France during

+the last two decades are Ferdinand Brunetière, François Coppée, Paul

+Verlaine, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. But it must not be forgotten that

+if the quartette trod the Road to Damascus they were all returning to

+their early City of Faith. They had been baptized Roman Catholics. All

+four had strayed. And widely different reasons brought them back to

+their mother Church. We need not dwell now on the case of Villiers de

+l'Isle Adam, as his was a death-bed repentance; nor with Paul Bourget,

+a Catholic born and on the side of his faith since the publication of

+Cosmopolis. As for Maurice Barrès, he may be a Mohammedan for all we

+care. He will always stand, spiritually, on his head.</p>

+

+<p>The stir in literary and religious circles over Huysmans's trilogy,

+En Route, La Cathédrale, and L'Oblat, must have influenced the

+succeeding generation of French writers. Of a sudden sad young rakes

+who spouted verse in the æsthetic taverns of the Left Bank fell to

+writing religious verse. Mary Queen of Heaven became their shibboleth.

+They invented new sins so that they might repent in a novel fashion.

+They lacked the delicious lyric gift of Verlaine and the tremendous

+enfolding moral earnestness of Huysmans to make themselves believed.

+One, however, has emerged from the rest, and his book, Du Diable à

+Dieu (From the Devil to God), has crossed the twenty-five thousand

+mark; perhaps it is further by this time. The author is an authentic

+poet, Adolphe Retté. For his confessions the lately deceased François

+Coppée wrote a dignified and sympathetic preface. Retté's place in

+contemporary poetry is high. Since Verlaine we hardly dare to think

+of another poet of such charm, verve, originality. An anarchist with

+Sebastien Faure and Jean Grave, a Socialist of all brands, a lighted

+lyric torch among the insurrectionists, a symbolist, a writer of "free

+verse" (which is hedged in by more rules, though unformulated and

+unwritten, than the stiffest academic production of Boileau), Adolphe

+Retté led the life of an individualist poet; precisely the sort of

+life at which pulpit-pounders could point and cry: "There, there is

+your æsthetic poet, your man of feeling, of finer feelings than his

+neighbours! Behold to what base uses he has put this gift! See him

+wallowing with the swine!" And, practically, these words Retté has

+employed in speaking of himself. He insulted religion in the boulevard

+journals; he hailed with joy the separation of Church and State. He

+wrote not too decent novels, though his verse is feathered with the

+purest pinions. He treated his wife badly, neglecting her for the

+inevitable Other Woman. (What a banal example this is, after all.) He

+once, so he tells us to his horror, maltreated the poor woman because

+of her piety. Typical, you will say. Then why confess it in several

+hundred pages of rhythmic prose, why rehearse for gaping, indifferent

+Paris the threadbare, sordid tale? Paris, too, so cynical on the

+subject of conversions, and also very suspicious of such a spiritual

+<i>bouleversement</i> as Retté's! "No, it won't do, Huysmans is to blame,"

+exclaimed many.</p>

+

+<p>Yet this conversion&mdash;literally one, for he was educated in a Protestant

+college&mdash;is sincere. He means every word he says; and if he is

+copiously rhetorical, set it all down to the literary temperament. He

+wrote not only with the approval of his spiritual counsellor, but also

+for the same reason as Saint Augustine or Bunyan. Newman's confession

+was an Apologia, an answer to Kingsley's challenge. With Huysmans, he

+is such a consummate artist that we could imagine him plotting ahead

+his cycle of novels (if novels they are); from Là-Bas to Lourdes the

+spiritual modulation is harmonious. Now, M. Retté (he was born in 1863

+in Paris of an Ardennaise family), while he has sung in his melodious

+voice many alluring songs, while he has shown the impressions wrought

+upon his spirit by Walt Whitman and Richard Wagner, there is little

+in the rich extravagance of his love for nature or the occasional

+Vergilian silver calm of his verse&mdash;he can sound more than one chord

+on his poetic keyboard&mdash;to prepare us for the great plunge into the

+healing waters of faith. A pagan nature shows in his early work, apart

+from the hatred and contempt he later displayed toward religion. How

+did it all come about? He has related it in this book, and we are free

+to confess that, though we must not challenge the author's sincerity,

+his manner is far from reassuring. He is of the brood of Baudelaire.</p>

+

+<p>Huysmans frankly gave up the riddle in his own case. Atavism may have

+had its way; he had relatives who were in convents; a pessimism that

+drove him from the world also contributed its share in the change.

+Personally Huysmans prefers to set it down to the mercy and grace of

+God&mdash;which is the simplest definition after all. When we are through

+with these self-accusing men; when professional psychology is tired of

+inventing new terminologies, then let us do as did Huysmans&mdash;go back to

+the profoundest of all the psychologists, the pioneers of the moderns,

+Saint Theresa&mdash;what actual, virile magnificence is in her Castle of

+the Soul&mdash;Saint John of the Cross, and Ruysbroeck. They are mystics

+possessing a fierce faith; and without faith a mystic is like a moon

+without the sun. Adolphe Retté knows the great Spanish mystics and

+quotes them almost as liberally as Huysmans. But with a difference. He

+has read Huysmans too closely; books breed books, ideas and moods beget

+moods and ideas. We are quite safe in saying that if En Route had not

+been written, Retté's Du Diable à Dieu could not have appeared in its

+present shape. The similarity is both external and internal. John of

+the Cross had his Night Obscure, so has M. Retté; Huysmans, however,

+showed him the way. Retté holds an obstinate dialogue with the Devil

+(who is a capitalized creature). Consult the wonderful fifth chapter

+in En Route. Naturally there must be a certain resemblance in these

+spiritual adventures when the Evil One captures the outposts of the

+soul and makes sudden savage dashes into its depths. Retté's style is

+not in the least like Huysmans's. It is more fluent, swifter, and more

+staccato. You skim his pages; in Huysmans you recognise the distilled

+remorse; you move as in a penitential procession, the rhythms grave,

+the eyes dazzled by the vision divine, the voice lowly chanting. Not so

+Retté, who glibly discourses on sacred territory, who is terribly at

+ease in Zion.</p>

+

+<p>Almost gayly he recounts his misdeeds. He pelts his former associates

+with hard names. He pities Anatole France for his socialistic

+affinities. All that formerly attracted him is anathema. Even the

+mysterious lady with the dark eyes is castigated. She is not a

+truth-teller. She does not now understand the protean soul of her poet.

+<i>Retro me Sathanas!</i> It is very exhilarating. The Gallic soul in its

+most resilient humour is on view. See it rebound! Watch it ascend on

+high, buoyed by delicious phrases, asking sweet pardon; then it falls

+to earth abusing its satanic adversary with sinister energy. At times

+we overhear the honeyed accents, the silky tones of Renan. It is he,

+not Retté, who exclaims: <i>Mais quelles douces larmes!</i> Ah! Renan&mdash;also

+a cork soul! The Imitation is much dwelt upon&mdash;the influence of

+Huysmans has been incalculable in this. And we forgive M. Retté his

+theatricalism for the lovely French paraphrase he has made of Salve

+Regina. But on the whole we prefer En Route. The starting-point of

+Retté's change was reading some verse in the Purgatory of the Divine

+Comedy. A literary conversion? Possibly, yet none the less complete.

+All roads lead to Rome, and the Road to Damascus may be achieved from

+many devious side paths. But in writing with such engaging frankness

+the memoirs of his soul we wish that Retté had more carefully followed

+the closing sentence of his brilliant little book: <i>Non nobis, Domine,

+non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!</i></p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="r5" />

+<h5>V</h5>

+

+<h5><a id="FROM_AN_IVORY_TOWER"></a>FROM AN IVORY TOWER</h5>

+

+

+<p>"Their impatience," was the answer once given by Cardinal Newman to

+the question, What is the chief fault of heresiarchs? In this category

+Walter Pater never could have been included, for his life was a long

+patience. As Newman sought patiently for the evidences of faith, so

+Pater sought for beauty, that beauty of thought and expression, of

+which his work is a supreme exemplar in modern English literature.

+Flaubert, a man of genius with whom he was in sympathy, toiled no

+harder for the perfect utterance of his ideas than did this retiring

+Oxford man of letters. And, like his happy account of Raphael's growth,

+Pater was himself a "genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek

+scholarship into genius."</p>

+

+<p>Walter Pater's intimate life was once almost legendary. We heard

+more of him a quarter of a century ago than yesterday. This does not

+mean that his vogue has declined; on the contrary, he is a force at

+the present such as he never was either at Oxford or London. But

+of the living man, notwithstanding his shyness, stray notes crept

+into print. He wrote occasional reviews. He had disciples. He had

+adversaries who deplored his&mdash;admittedly remote&mdash;immoral influence

+upon impressionable, "slim, gilt souls"; he had critics who detected

+the truffle of evil in savouring his exotic style. When he died,

+in 1894, the air was cleared by his devoted friends, Edmund Gosse,

+Lionel Johnson, William Sharp, Arthur Symons, and some of his Oxford

+associates, Dr. Bussell and Mr. Shadwell. It was proved without a

+possibility of doubt that the popular conception of the man was far

+from the reality; that the real Pater was a plain liver and an austere

+thinker; that he was not the impassive Mandarin of literature pictured

+by some; that the hedonism, epicureanism, cyrenaicism of which he had

+been vaguely accused had been a confounding of intellectual substances,

+a slipshod method of thought he abhorred; that his entire career had

+been spent in the pursuit of an æsthetic and moral perfection and its

+embodiment in prose of a rarely individual and haunting music. Recall

+his half-petulant, half-ironical exclamation of disgust to Mr. Gosse:

+"I wish they wouldn't call me a 'hedonist'; it produces such a bad

+effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." He would have

+been quite in accord with Paul Bourget's dictum that "there is no such

+thing as health, or the contrary, in the world of the soul"; Bourget,

+who, lecturing later at Oxford, pronounced Walter Pater "un parfait

+prosateur."</p>

+

+<p>Despite the attempt to chain him to the chariots of the Pre-Raphaelite

+brotherhood, Pater, like Chopin, during the Romantic turmoil, stood

+aloof from the heat and dust of its battles. He was at first deeply

+influenced by Goethe and Ruskin, and was a friend of Swinburne's; he

+wrote of the Morris poetry; but his was not the polemical cast of mind.

+The love of spiritual combat, the holy zeal of John Henry Newman, of

+Keble, of Hurrell Froude, were not in his bones. And so his scholar's

+life, the measured existence of a recluse, was uneventful; but measured

+by the results, what a vivid, intense, life it was. There is, however,

+very little to tell of Walter Pater. His was the interior life. In his

+books is his life&mdash;hasn't some one said that all great literature is

+autobiographical?</p>

+

+<p>There are articles by the late William Sharp and by George Moore. The

+former in Some Personal Recollections of Walter Pater, written in 1894,

+gave a vivid picture of the man, though it remained for Mr. Moore

+to discover his ugly face and some peculiar minor characteristics.

+Sharp met Pater in 1880 at the house of George T. Robinson, in Gower

+Street, that delightful meeting-place of gifted people. Miss A.

+Mary F. Robinson, now Mme. Duclaux, was the tutelary genius. She

+introduced Sharp to Pater. The blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, was

+of the party. Pater at that time was a man of medium height, stooping

+slightly, heavily built, with a Dutch or Flemish cast of features, a

+pale complexion, a heavy moustache&mdash;"a possible Bismarck, a Bismarck

+who had become a dreamer," adds the keen observer. A friendship was

+struck up between the pair. Pater came out of his shell, talked

+wittily, paradoxically, and later at Oxford showed his youthful

+admirer the poetic side of his singularly complex nature. There are

+conversations recorded and letters printed which would have added to

+the value of Mr. Benson's memoir.</p>

+

+<p>Mr. Moore's recollections are slighter, though extremely engaging.

+Above all, with his trained eye of a painter, he sketches for us

+another view of Pater, one not quite so attractive. Mr. Moore saw a

+very ugly man&mdash;"it was like looking at a leaden man, an uncouth figure,

+badly moulded, moulded out of lead, a large, uncouth head, the head

+of a clergyman,... a large, overarching skull, and small eyes; they

+always seemed afraid of you, and they shifted quickly. There seemed

+to be a want of candour in Pater's face,... an abnormal fear of his

+listener and himself. There was little hair on the great skull, and his

+skull and his eyes reminded me a little of the French poet Verlaine, a

+sort of domesticated Verlaine, a Protestant Verlaine." His eyes were

+green-gray, and in middle life he wore a brilliant apple-green tie and

+the inevitable top-hat and frock coat of an urban Englishman. In one of

+his early essays Max Beerbohm thus describes Pater: "a small, thick,

+rock-faced man, whose top-hat and gloves of <i>bright</i> dog skin struck

+one of the many discords in that little city of learning and laughter.

+The serried bristles of his mustachio made for him a false-military

+air." Pater is said to have come of Dutch stock. Mr. Benson declares

+that it has not been proved. He had the amiable fancy that he may

+have had in his veins some of the blood of Jean Baptiste Pater, the

+painter. His father was born in New York. He went to England, and near

+London in 1839 Walter Horatio, his second son, was born. To The Child

+in the House and Emerald Uthwart, both "imaginary portraits," we may

+go for the early life of Pater, as Marius is the idealized record of

+his young manhood. When a child he was fond of playing Bishop, and

+the bent of his mind was churchly, further fostered by his sojourn at

+Canterbury. He matriculated at Oxford in 1858 as a commoner of Queen's

+College, where he was graduated after being coached by Jowett, who

+said to his pupil, "I think you have a mind that will come to great

+eminence." Years afterward the Master of Balliol seems to have changed

+his opinion, possibly urged thereto by the parody of Pater as Mr. Rose

+by Mr. Mallock in The New Republic. Jowett spoke of Pater as "the

+demoralizing moralizer," while Mr. Freeman could see naught in him but

+"the mere conjurer of words and phrases." Others have denounced his

+"pulpy magnificence of style," and Max Beerbohm declared that Pater

+wrote English as if it were a dead language; possibly an Irish echo

+of Pater's own assertion that English should be written as a learned

+language.</p>

+

+<p>He became a Fellow of Brasenose, and Oxford&mdash;with the exception of

+a few years spent in London, and his regular annual summer visits

+to Italy, France, and Germany, where he took long walks and studied

+the churches and art galleries&mdash;became his home. Contradictory

+legends still float in the air regarding his absorbed demeanour, his

+extreme sociability, his companionable humour, his chilly manner,

+his charming home, his barely furnished room, with the bowl of dried

+rose leaves; his sympathies, antipathies, nervousness, and baldness,

+and, like Baudelaire, of his love of cats, and a host of mutually

+exclusive qualities. Mr. Zangwill relates that he told Pater he had

+discovered a pun in one of his essays. Thereat, great embarrassment on

+Pater's part. Symons, who knew him intimately, tells of his reading

+the dictionary&mdash;that "pianoforte of writers," as Mr. Walter Raleigh

+cleverly names it&mdash;for the opposite reason that Gautier did, i.e.,

+that he might learn what words to avoid. Another time Symons asked him

+the meaning of a terrible sentence, Ruskinian in length and involution.

+Pater carefully scanned the page, and after a few minutes said with

+a sigh of relief: "Ah, I see the printer has omitted a dash." Yet,

+with all this meticulous precision, Pater was a man with an individual

+style, and not a mere stylist. What he said was of more importance than

+the saying of it.</p>

+

+<p>The portraits of Pater are, so his friends declare, unlike him. He had

+irregular features, and his jaw was prognathic; but there was great

+variety of expression, and the eyes, set deeply in the head, glowed

+with a jewelled fire when he was deeply aroused. In Mr. Greenslet's

+wholly admirable appreciation, there is a portrait executed by the

+unfortunate Simeon Solomon, and dated 1872. There is in Mosher's

+edition of the Guardian Essays a copy of Will Rothenstein's study,

+a characteristic piece of work, though Mr. Benson says it is not

+considered a resemblance. And I have a picture, a half-tone, from some

+magazine, the original evidently photographic, that shows a Pater much

+more powerful in expression than the others, and without a hint of the

+ambiguous that lurks in Rothenstein's drawing and Moore's pen portrait.

+Pater never married. Like Newman, he had a talent for friendship. As

+with Newman, Keble, that beautiful soul, made a deep impression on him,

+and, again like Newman, to use his own words, he went his way "like one

+on a secret errand."</p>

+

+<p>And the Pater style! Matthew Arnold on a certain occasion advised

+Frederic Harrison to "flee Carlylese as the very devil," and doubtless

+would have given the same advice regarding Paterese. Pater is a

+dangerous guide for students. This theme of style, so admirably

+vivified in Mr. Walter Raleigh's monograph, was worn threadbare during

+the days when Pater was slowly producing one book every few years&mdash;he

+wrote five in twenty years, at the rate of an essay or two a year,

+thus matching Flaubert in his tormented production. The principal

+accusation brought against the Pater method of work and the Pater

+style is that it is lacking in spontaneity, in a familiar phrase,

+"it is not natural." But a "natural" style, so called, appears not

+more than a half dozen times in its full flowering during the course

+of a century. The French write all but faultless prose. To match

+Flaubert, Renan, or Anatole France, we must go to Ruskin, Pater, and

+Newman. When we say: "Let us write simple, straightforward English,"

+we are setting a standard that has been reached of late years only by

+Thackeray, Newman, and few besides. There are as many victims of the

+"natural English" formula as there are of the artificial formula of a

+Pater or a Stevenson. The former write careless, flabby, colourless,

+undistinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the

+vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the <i>cliché</i> is king

+of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of "fine

+writing," are more easily detected.</p>

+

+<p>Now, properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural" style.

+Even Newman confesses to laborious days, though he wrote with the idea

+uppermost, and with no thought of the style. Renan, perfect master,

+disliked the idea of teaching "style"&mdash;as if it could be taught!&mdash;yet

+he worked over his manuscripts. We all know the Flaubert case. With

+Pater one must not rush to the conclusion that because he produced

+slowly and with infinite pains, he was all artificiality. Prose for

+him was a fine art. He would no more have used a phrase coined by

+another man than he would have worn his hat. He embroidered upon the

+canvas of his ideas the grave and lovely phrases we envy and admire.

+Prose&mdash;"cette ancienne et très jalouse chose," as it was called by

+Stéphane Mallarmé&mdash;was for Pater at once a pattern and a cadence,

+a picture and a song. Never suggesting hybrid "poetic-prose," the

+great stillness of his style&mdash;atmospheric, languorous, sounding sweet

+undertones&mdash;is always in the rhythm of prose. Speed is absent; the

+<i>tempo</i> is usually lenten; brilliance is not pursued; but there is

+a hieratic, almost episcopal, pomp and power. The sentences uncoil

+their many-coloured lengths; there are echoes, repercussions, tonal

+imagery, and melodic evocation; there is clause within clause that

+occasionally confuses; for compensation we are given newly orchestrated

+harmonies, as mordant, as salient, and as strange as some chords in

+the music of Chopin, Debussy and Richard Strauss. Sane it always

+is&mdash;simple seldom. And, as Symons observes: "Under the soft and musical

+phrases an inexorable logic hides itself, sometimes only too well.

+Link is added silently but faultlessly to link; the argument marches,

+carrying you with it, while you fancy you are only listening to the

+music with which it keeps step." It is very personal, and while it

+does not make melody for every ear, it is exquisitely adapted to the

+idea it clothes. Read aloud Ruskin and then apply the same vocal

+test&mdash;Flaubert's procedure&mdash;to Pater, and the magnificence of the

+older man will conquer your ear by storm; but Pater, like Newman, will

+make it captive in a persuasive snare more delicately varied, more

+subtle, and with modulations more enchanting. Never oratorical, in

+eloquence slightly muffled, his last manner hinted that he had sought

+for newer combinations. Of his prose we may say, employing his own

+words concerning another theme: "It is a beauty wrought from within,...

+the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic

+reveries and exquisite passions."</p>

+

+<p>The prose of Jeremy Taylor is more impassioned, Browne's richer, there

+are deeper organ tones in De Quincey's, Ruskin's excels in effects,

+rhythmic and sonorous; but the prose of Pater is subtler, more sinuous,

+more felicitous, and in its essence consummately intense. Morbid it

+sometimes is, and its rich polyphony palls if you are not in the

+mood; and in greater measure than the prose of the other masters,

+for the world is older and Pater was weary of life. But a suggestion

+of morbidity may be found in the writings of every great writer from

+Plato to Dante, from Shakespeare to Goethe; it is the faint spice of

+mortality that lends a stimulating if sharp perfume to all literatures.

+Beautiful art has been challenged as corrupting. There may be a grain

+of truth in the charge. But man cannot live by wisdom alone, so art

+was invented to console, disquiet, and arouse him. Whenever a poet

+appears he is straightway accused of tampering with the moral code;

+it is mediocrity's mode of adjusting violent mental disproportions.

+But persecution never harmed a genuine talent, and the accusations

+against the art of Pater only provoked from him such beautiful books

+as Imaginary Portraits, Marius the Epicurean, and Plato and Platonism.

+Therefore let us be grateful to the memory of his enemies.</p>

+

+<p>There is another Pater, a Pater far removed from the one who wove such

+silken and coloured phrases. If he sometimes recalls Keats in the

+rich texture of his prose, he can also suggest the aridity of Herbert

+Spencer. There are early essays of his that are as cold, as logically

+adamant, and as tortuous as sentences from the Synthetic Philosophy.

+Pater was a metaphysician before he became an artist. Luckily for us,

+his tendency to bald theorising was subdued by the broad humanism of

+his temperament. There are not many "purple patches" in his prose,

+"purple" in the De Quincey or Ruskin manner; no "fringes of the north

+star" style, to use South's mocking expression. He never wrote in sheer

+display. For the boorish rhetoric and apish attitudes of much modern

+drama he betrayed no sympathy. His critical range is catholic. Consider

+his essays on Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Winckelmann, setting aside

+those finely wrought masterpieces, the studies of Da Vinci, Giorgione,

+and Botticelli. As Mr. Benson puts it, Pater was not a modern

+scientific or archæological critic, but the fact that Morelli has

+proved the Concert of Giorgione not to be by that master, or that Vinci

+is not all Pater says he is, does not vitiate the essential values of

+his criticism.</p>

+

+<p>Like Maurice Barrès, Pater was an egoist of the higher type; he

+seldom left the twilight of his <i>tour d'ivoire</i>; yet his work is

+human and concrete to the core. Nothing interested him so much as the

+human quality in art. This he ever sought to disengage. Pater was a

+deeply religious nature <i>au fond</i>, perhaps addicted a trifle to moral

+preciosity, and, as 'Mr. Greenslet says, a lyrical pantheist. His

+essay on Pascal, without plumbing the ethical depths as does Leslie

+Stephen's study of the same thinker, gives us a fair measure of his

+own religious feelings. A pagan with Anatole France in his worship

+of Greek art and literature, his profounder Northern temperament, a

+Spartan temperament, strove for spiritual things, for the vision of

+things behind the veil. The Paters had been Roman Catholic for many

+generations; his father was not, and he was raised in the Church of

+England. But the ritual of the older Church was for him a source of

+delight and consolation. Mr. Benson deserves unstinted praise for his

+denunciation of the pseudo-Paterians, the self-styled disciples, who,

+totally misinterpreting Pater's pure philosophy of life, translated

+the more ephemeral phases of his cyrenaicism into the grosser terms

+of a gaudy æsthetic. These defections pained the thinker, whose

+study of Plato had extorted praise from Jowett. He even withdrew the

+much-admired conclusion of The Renaissance because of the wilful

+misconstructions put upon it. He never achieved the ataraxia of his

+beloved master. And Oxford was grudging of her favour to him long after

+the world had acclaimed his genius. Sensitive he was, though Mr. Gosse

+denies the stories of his suffering from harsh criticism; but there

+were some forms of criticism that he could not overlook. Books like his

+Plato and Marius the Epicurean were adequate answers to detractors.

+Somewhat cloistered in his attitude toward the normal world of work;

+too much the artist for art's sake, he may never trouble the greater

+currents of literature; but he will always be a writer for writers,

+the critic whose vision pierces the shell of appearances, the composer

+of a polyphonic prose-music that recalls the performance of harmonious

+adagio within the sonorous spaces of a Gothic cathedral, through the

+windows of which filters alien daylight. It was a favourite contention

+of his that all the arts constantly aspire toward the condition of

+music. This idea is the keynote of his poetic scheme, the keynote of

+Walter Pater, mystic and musician, who, like his own Marius, carried

+his life long "in his bosom across a crowded public place&mdash;his own

+soul."</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="IX" id="IX">IX</a></h4>

+

+<h4>IBSEN</h4>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>Henrik Ibsen was the best-hated artist of the nineteenth century. The

+reason is simple: He was, himself, the arch-hater of his age. Yet,

+granting this, the Norwegian dramatist aroused in his contemporaries a

+wrath that would have been remarkable even if emanating from the fiery

+pit of politics; in the comparatively serene field of æsthetics such

+overwhelming attacks from the critics of nearly every European nation

+testified to the singular power displayed by this poet. Richard Wagner

+was not so abused; the theatre of his early operations was confined to

+Germany, the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris a unique exception. Wagner,

+too, did everything that was possible to provoke antagonism. He scored

+his critics in speech and pamphlet. He gave back as hard names as he

+received. Ibsen never answered, either in print or by the mouth of

+friends, the outrageous allegations brought against him. Indeed, his

+disciples often darkened the issue by their unsolicited, uncritical

+championship.</p>

+

+<p>In Edouard Manet, the revolutionary Parisian painter and head of the

+so-called impressionist movement&mdash;himself not altogether deserving

+the appellation&mdash;we have an analogous case to Wagner's. Ridicule,

+calumny, vituperation, pursued him for many years. But Paris was the

+principal scene of his struggles; Paris mocked him, not all Europe.

+Even the indignation aroused by Nietzsche was a comparatively local

+affair. Wagner is the only man who approaches Ibsen in the massiveness

+of his martyrdom. Yet Wagner had consolations for his opponents. His

+music-drama, so rich in colour and rhythmic beauty, his romantic

+themes, his appeal to the eye, his friendship with Ludwig of Bavaria,

+at times placated his fiercest detractors. Manet painted one or two

+successes for the official Salon; Nietzsche's brilliant style and

+faculty for coining poetic images were acclaimed, his philosophy

+declared detestable. Yes, fine phrases may make fine psychologues.

+Robert Browning never felt the heavy hand of public opinion as did

+Ibsen. We must go back to the days of Byron and Shelley for an example

+of such uncontrollable and unanimous condemnation. But, again, Ibsen

+tops them all as victim of storms that blew from every quarter:

+Norway to Austria, England to Italy, Russia to America. There were no

+mitigating circumstances in his <i>lèse-majesté</i> against popular taste.

+No musical rhyme, scenic splendour, or rhythmic prose, acted as an

+emotional buffer between him and his audiences. His social dramas were

+condemned as the sordid, heartless productions of a mediocre poet, who

+wittingly debased our moral currency. And as they did not offer as

+bribes the amatory intrigue, the witty dialogue, the sensual arabesques

+of the French stage, or the stilted rhetoric and heroic postures of the

+German, they were assailed from every critical watch-tower in Europe.

+Ibsen was a stranger, Ibsen was disdainfully silent, therefore Ibsen

+must be annihilated. Possibly if he had, like Wagner, explained his

+dramas, we should have had confusion thrice confounded.</p>

+

+<p>The day after his death the entire civilised world wrote of him as the

+great man he was: great man, great artist, great moralist. And A Doll's

+House only saw the light in 1879&mdash;so potent a creator of critical

+perspective is Death. There were, naturally, many dissonant opinions

+in this symphony of praise. Yet how different it all read from the

+opinions of a decade ago. Adverse criticism, especially in America,

+was vitiated by the fact that Ibsen the dramatist was hardly known

+here. Ibsen was eagerly read, but seldom played; and rarely played as

+he should be. He is first the dramatist. His are not closet dramas

+to be leisurely digested by lamp-light; conceived for the theatre,

+actuality their key-note, his characters are pale abstractions on the

+printed page&mdash;not to mention the inevitable distortions to be found

+in the closest translation. We are all eager to tell what we think of

+him. But do we know him? Do we know him as do the goers of Berlin,

+or St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Vienna, or Munich? And do we realise

+his technical prowess? In almost every city of Europe Ibsen is in the

+regular repertory. He is given at intervals with Shakespeare, Schiller,

+Dumas, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Grillparzer, Hervieu, Sudermann, and

+with the younger dramatists. That is the true test. Not the isolated

+divinity of a handful of worshippers, with an esoteric message, his

+plays are interpreted by skilled actors and not for the untrained if

+enthusiastic amateur. There is no longer Ibsenism on the Continent;

+Ibsen is recognised as the greatest dramatist since Racine and Molière.

+Cults claim him no more, and therefore the critical point of view at

+the time of his death had entirely shifted. His works are played in

+every European language and have been translated into the Japanese.</p>

+

+<p>The mixed blood in the veins of Ibsen may account for his temperament;

+he was more Danish than Norwegian, and there were German and Scotch

+strains in his ancestry. Such obscure forces of heredity doubtless

+played a rôle in his career. Norwegian in his love of freedom, Danish

+in his artistic bent, his philosophic cast of mind was wholly Teutonic.

+Add to these a possible theologic prepossession derived from the

+Scotch, a dramatic technique in which Scribe and Sophocles are not

+absent, and we have to deal with a disquieting problem. Ibsen was a

+mystery to his friends and foes. Hence the avidity with which he is

+claimed by idealists, realists, socialists, anarchists, symbolists,

+by evangelical folk, and by agnostics. There were in him many

+contradictory elements. Denounced as a pessimist, all his great plays

+have, notwithstanding, an unmistakable message of hope, from Brand to

+When We Dead Awake. An idealist he is, but one who has realised the

+futility of dreams; like all world-satirists, he castigates to purify.

+His realism is largely a matter of surfaces, and if we care to look

+we may find the symbol lodged in the most prosaic of his pieces. His

+anarchy consists in a firm adherence to the doctrine of individualism;

+Emerson and Thoreau are of his spiritual kin. In both there is the

+contempt for mob-rule, mob-opinion; for both the minority is the true

+rational unit; and with both there is a certain aloofness from mankind.

+Yet we do not denounce Emerson or Thoreau as enemies of the people. To

+be candid, Ibsen's belief in the rights of the individual is rather

+naïve and antiquated, belonging as it does to the tempestuous period of

+'48. Max Stirner was far in advance of the playwright in his political

+and menacing egoism; while Nietzsche, who loathed democracy, makes

+Ibsen's aristocracy timid by comparison.</p>

+

+<p>Ibsen can hardly be called a philosophic anarch, for the body of

+doctrine, either political or moral, deducible from his plays is so

+perplexing by reason of its continual affirmation and negation, so

+blurred by the kaleidoscopic clash of character, that one can only fuse

+these mutually exclusive qualities by realising him as a dramatist

+who has created a microcosmic world; in a word, we must look upon the

+man as a creator of dramatic character not as a theorist. And his

+characters have all the logical illogicality of life.</p>

+

+<p>Several traits emerge from this welter of cross-purposes and action.

+Individualism is a leading motive from the first to the last play;

+a strong sense of moral responsibility&mdash;an oppressive sense, one is

+tempted to add&mdash;is blended with a curious flavour of Calvinism, in

+which are traces of predestination. A more singular equipment for a

+modern dramatist is barely conceivable. Soon we discover that Ibsen

+is playing with the antique dramatic counters under another name.

+Free-will and determinism&mdash;what are these but the very breath of

+classic tragedy! In one of his rare moments of expansion he said: "Many

+things and much upon which my later work has turned&mdash;the contradiction

+between endowment and desire, between capacity and will, at once the

+entire tragedy and comedy of mankind&mdash;may here be dimly discerned."

+Moral responsibility evaded is a favourite theme of his. No Furies of

+the Greek drama pursued their victims with such relentless vengeance as

+pursues the unhappy wretches of Ibsen. In Ghosts, the old scriptural

+wisdom concerning the sins of parents is vividly expounded, though

+the heredity doctrine is sadly overworked. As in other plays of his,

+there were false meanings read into the interpretation; the realism of

+Ghosts is negligible; the symbol looms large in every scene. Search

+Ibsen throughout and it will be found that his subject-matter is

+fundamentally the same as that of all great masters of tragedy. It is

+his novel manner of presentation, his transposition of themes hitherto

+treated epically, to the narrow, unheroic scale of middle-class family

+life that blinded critics to his true significance. This tuning down

+of the heroic, this reversal of the old æsthetic order extorted bitter

+remonstrances. If we kill the ideal in art and life, what have we

+left? was the cry. But Ibsen attacks false as well as true ideals and

+does not always desert us after stripping us of our self-respect. A

+poet of doubt he is, who seldom attempts a solution; but he is also a

+puritan&mdash;a positivist puritan&mdash;and his scourgings are an equivalent for

+that <i>katharsis</i>, in the absence of which Aristotle denied the title of

+tragedy.</p>

+

+<p>Consider, then, how Ibsen was misunderstood. Setting aside the

+historical and poetic works, we are confronted in the social plays

+by the average man and woman of every-day life. They live, as a

+rule, in mediocre circumstances; they are harried by the necessities

+of quotidian existence. Has this undistinguished <i>bourgeoisie</i> the

+potentialities of romance, of tragedy, of beauty? Wait, says Ibsen, and

+you will see your own soul, the souls of the man and woman who jostle

+you in the street, the same soul in palace or hovel, that orchestra of

+cerebral sensations, the human soul. And it is the truth he speaks. We

+follow with growing uneasiness his exposition of a soul. The spectacle

+is not pleasing. In his own magical but charmless way the souls of

+his people are turned inside out during an evening. No monologues, no

+long speeches, no familiar machinery of the drama, are employed. But

+the miracle is there. You face yourself. Is it any wonder that public

+and critic alike waged war against this showman of souls, this new

+psychologist of the unflattering, this past master of disillusionment?

+For centuries poets, tragic and comic, satiric and lyric, have been

+exalting, teasing, mocking, and lulling mankind. When Aristophanes

+flayed his victims he sang a merry tune; Shakespeare, with Olympian

+amiability, portrayed saint and sinner alike to the accompaniment of a

+divine music. But Ibsen does not cajole, amuse, or bribe with either

+just or specious illusions. He is determined to tell the truth of our

+microcosmic baseness. The truth is his shibboleth. And when enounced

+its sound is not unlike the chanting of a <i>Nox Irae</i>. He lifted the

+ugly to heroic heights; the ignoble he analysed with the cold ardour of

+a moral biologist&mdash;the ignoble, that "sublime of the lower slopes," as

+Flaubert has it.</p>

+

+<p>This psychological method was another rock of offence. Why transform

+the playhouse into a school of metaphysics? But Ibsen is not a

+metaphysician and his characters are never abstractions; instead, they

+are very lively humans. They offend those who believe the theatre to

+be a place of sentimentality or clowning; these same Ibsen men and

+women offend the lovers of Shakespeare and the classics. We know they

+are real, yet we dislike them as we dislike animals trained to imitate

+humanity too closely. The simian gestures cause a feeling of repulsion

+in both cases; surely we are not of such stock! And we move away. So

+do we sometimes turn from the Ibsen stage when human souls are made to

+go through a series of sorrowful evolutions by their stern trainer. To

+what purpose such revelations? Is it art? Is not our ideal of a nobler

+humanity shaken?</p>

+

+<p>Ibsen's report of the human soul as he sees it is his right, the

+immemorial right of priest, prophet, or artist. All our life is a huge

+lie if this right be denied; from the Preacher to Schopenhauer, from

+Æschylus to Molière, the man who reveals, in parable or as in a mirror,

+the soul of his fellow-being is a man who is a benefactor of his kind,

+if he be not a cynical spirit that denies. Ibsen is a satirist of a

+superior degree; he has the gift of creating a <i>Weltspiegel</i> in which

+we see the shape of our souls. He is never the cynic, though he has

+portrayed the cynic in his plays. He has too much moral earnestness

+to view the world merely as a vile jest. That he is an artist is

+acknowledged. And for the ideals dear to us which he so savagely

+attacks, he so clears the air about some old familiar, mist-haunted

+ideal of duty, that we wonder if we have hitherto mistaken its meaning.</p>

+

+<p>From being denounced as a corrupter of youth, an anarch of letters, a

+debaser of current moral coin, we have learned to view him as a force

+making for righteousness, as a master of his craft, and as a creator

+of a large gallery of remarkably vivid human characters. We know now

+that many modern dramatists have carried their pails to this vast

+northern lake and from its pine-hemmed and sombre waters have secretly

+drawn sparkling inspiration.</p>

+

+<p>The truth is that Ibsen can be no longer denied&mdash;we exclude the

+wilfully blind&mdash;by critic or public. He is too big a man to be locked

+up in a library as if he were full of vague forbidden wickedness. When

+competently interpreted he is never offensive; the scenes to which the

+critics refer as smacking of sex are mildness itself compared to the

+doings of Sardou's lascivious marionettes. In the theatrical sense his

+are not sex plays, as are those of Dumas the younger. He discusses

+woman as a social as well as a psychical problem. Any picture of love

+is tolerated so it be frankly sentimental; but let Ibsen mention the

+word sex and there is a call to arms by the moral policemen of the

+drama. Thus, by some critical hocus-pocus the world was led for years

+to believe that this lofty thinker, moralist, and satirist concealed

+an immoral teacher. It is an old trick of the enemy to place upon an

+author's shoulders the doings and sayings of his mimic people. Ibsen

+was fathered with all the sins of his characters. Instead of being

+studied from life, they were, so many averred, the result of a morbid

+brain, the brain of a pessimist and a hater of his kind.</p>

+

+<p>We have seen that Ibsen offended by his disregard of academic dramatic

+attitudes. His personages are ordinary, yet like Browning's meanest

+soul they have a human side to show us. The inherent stuff of his plays

+is tragic; but the hero and heroine do not stamp, stalk, or spout blank

+verse; it is the tragedy of life without the sop of sentiment usually

+administered by second-rate poets. Missing the colour and decoration,

+the pretty music, and the eternal simper of the sensual, we naturally

+turn our back on such a writer. If he knows souls, he certainly

+does not understand the box-office. This for the negative side. On

+the positive, the apparent baldness of the narrative, the ugliness

+of his men and women, their utterance of ideas foreign to cramped,

+convention-ridden lives, mortify us immeasurably. The tale always ends

+badly or sadly. And when one of his characters begins to talk about the

+"joy of life," it is the gloom of life that is evoked. The women&mdash;and

+here is the shock to our masculine vanity&mdash;the women assert themselves

+too much, telling men that they are not what they believe themselves

+to be. Lastly, the form of the Ibsen play is compact with ideas and

+emotion. We usually don't go to the theatre to think or to feel. With

+Ibsen we must think, and think closely; we must feel&mdash;worse still, be

+thrilled to our marrow by the spectacle of our own spiritual skeletons.

+No marvellous music is there to heal the wounded nerves as in Tristan

+and Isolde; no prophylactic for the merciless acid of the dissector.

+We either breathe a rarefied atmosphere in his Brand and in When We

+Dead Awake, or else, in the social drama, the air is so dense with

+the intensity of the closely wrought moods that we gasp as if in the

+chamber of a diving-bell. Human, all too human!</p>

+

+<p>Protean in his mental and spiritual activities, a hater of

+shams&mdash;religious, political, and social shams&mdash;more symbolist

+than realist, in assent with Goethe that no material is unfit for

+poetic treatment, the substance of Ibsen's morality consists in his

+declaration that men to be free must first free themselves. Once, in

+addressing a group of Norwegian workmen, he told them that man must

+ennoble himself, he must <i>will</i> himself free; "to will is to have

+to will," as he says in Emperor and Galilean. Yet in Peer Gynt he

+declares "to be oneself is to slay oneself." Surely all this is not

+very radical. He wrote to Georg Brandes, that the State was the foe

+of the individual; therefore the State must go. But the revolution

+must be one of the spirit. Ibsen ever despised socialism, and after

+his mortification over the fiasco of the Paris Commune he had never a

+good word for that vain legend: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Brandes

+relates that while Ibsen wished&mdash;in one of his poems&mdash;to place a

+torpedo under the social ark, there was also a time when he longed to

+use the knout on the willing slaves of a despised social system.</p>

+

+<p>Perhaps the main cause of Ibsen's offending is his irony. The

+world forgives much, irony never, for irony is the ivory tower of

+the intellectual, the last refuge of the original. It is not the

+intellectual irony of Meredith, nor the playful irony of Anatole

+France, but a veiled corrosive irony that causes you to tread

+suspiciously every yard of his dramatic domain. The "second intention,"

+the secondary dialogue, spoken of by Maeterlinck, in the Ibsen plays is

+very disconcerting to those who prefer their drama free from enigma.

+Otherwise his dialogue is a model for future dramatists. It is clarity

+itself and, closely woven, it has the characteristic accents of nature.

+Read, we feel its gripping logic; spoken by an actor, it tingles with

+vitality.</p>

+

+<p>For the student there is a fascination in the cohesiveness of these

+dramas. Ibsen's mind was like a lens; it focussed the refracted,

+scattered, and broken lights of opinions and theories of his day upon

+the contracted space of his stage. In a fluid state the ideas that

+crystallised in his prose series are to be found in his earliest work;

+there is a remorseless fastening of link to link in the march-like

+movement of his plays. Their author seems to delight in battering down

+in Ghosts what he had preached in A Doll's House; The Enemy of the

+People exalted the individual man, though Ghosts taught that a certain

+kind of personal liberty is deadly; The Wild Duck, which follows, is

+another puzzle, for in it the misguided idealist is pilloried for

+destroying homes by his truth-telling, dangerous tongue; Rosmersholm

+follows with its portrayal of lonely souls; and the danger of filling

+old bottles with the fermenting wines of new ideas is set forth; in

+The Lady from the Sea free-will, the will to love, is lauded, though

+Rebekka West and Rosmersholm perished because of their exercise of this

+same will; Hedda Gabler shows the converse of Ellida Wangel's "will

+to power." Hedda is a creature wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns

+us again, for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead your own

+life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it leads to a catastrophe which

+wrecks a household. This game of contradiction is continued in The

+Master-Builder, a most potent exposition of human motives. Solness is

+sick-brained because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, the "younger

+generation," a Hedda Gabler <i>à rebours</i>, that he so feared would come

+knocking at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, arouses his

+slumbering self; curiously enough, if the ordinary standards of success

+be adduced, he goes to his destruction when he again climbs the dizzy

+spire. In John Gabriel Borkman the allegory is clearer. Sacrificing

+love to a base ambition, to "commercialism," Borkman at the close of

+his great and miserable life discovers that he has committed the one

+unpardonable offence: he has slain the love-life in the woman he loved,

+and for the sake of gold. So he is a failure, and, like Peer Gynt, he

+is ready for the Button-Moulder with his refuse-heap, who lies in wait

+for all cowardly and incomplete souls. The Epilogue returns to the

+mountains, the Ibsen symbol of freedom, and there we learn for the

+last time that love is greater than art, that love is life. And the

+dead of life awake.</p>

+

+<p>The immorality of these plays is so well concealed that only abnormal

+moralists detect it. It may be admitted that Ibsen, like Shakespeare,

+manifests a preference for the man who fails. What is new is the art

+with which this idea is developed. The Ibsen play begins where other

+plays end. The form is the "amplified catastrophe" of Sophocles. After

+marriage the curtain is rung up on the true drama of life, therefore

+marriage is a theme which constantly preoccupies this modern poet.

+He regards it from all sides, asking whether "by self-surrender,

+self-realisation may be achieved." His speech delivered once before

+a ladies' club at Christiania proves that he is not a champion of

+latter-day woman's rights. "The women will solve the question of

+mankind, but they must do so as mothers." Yet Nora Helmer, when she

+slammed the door of her doll's home, caused an echo in the heart of

+every intelligent woman in Christendom. It is not necessary now to ask

+whether a woman would, or should, desert her children; Nora's departure

+was only the symbol of her liberty, the gesture of a newly awakened

+individuality. Ibsen did not preach&mdash;as innocent persons of both sexes

+and all anti-Ibsenites believe&mdash;that woman should throw overboard

+her duties; this is an absurd construction. As well argue that the

+example of Othello must set jealous husbands smothering their wives.

+A Doll's House enacted has caused no more evil than Othello. It was

+the plea for woman as a human being, neither more nor less than man,

+which the dramatist made. Our withers must have been well wrung, for

+it aroused a whirlwind of wrath, and henceforth the house-key became

+the symbol of feminine supremacy. Yet in his lovely drama of pity and

+resignation, Little Eyolf, the tenderest from his pen, the poet set up

+a counter-figure to Nora, demonstrating the duties parents owe their

+children.</p>

+

+<p>Without exaggeration, he may be said to have discovered for the stage

+the modern woman. No longer the sleek cat of the drawing-room, or the

+bayadere of luxury, or the wild outlaw of society, the "emancipated"

+Ibsen woman is the sensible woman, the womanly woman, bearing a not

+remote resemblance to the old-fashioned woman, who calmly accepts her

+share of the burdens and responsibilities of life, single or wedded,

+though she insists on her rights as a human being, and without a touch

+of the heroic or the supra-sentimental. Ibsen should not be held

+responsible for the caricatures of womanhood evolved by his disciples.

+When a woman evades her responsibilities, when she is frivolous or

+evil, an exponent of the "life-lie" in matrimony, then Ibsen grimly

+paints her portrait, and we denounce him as cynical for telling the

+truth. And truth is seldom a welcome guest. But he knows that a fiddle

+can be mended and a bell not; and in placing his surgeon-like finger

+on the sorest spot of our social life, he sounds this bell, and when

+it rings cracked he coldly announces the fact. But his attitude toward

+marriage is not without its mystery. In Love's Comedy his hero and

+heroine part, fearing the inevitable shipwreck in the union of two

+poetic hearts without the necessary means of a prosaic subsistence.

+In the later plays, marriage for gain, for home, for anything but

+love, brings upon its victims the severest consequences; John Gabriel

+Borkman, Hedda, Dora, Mrs. Alving, Allmers, Rubek, are examples. The

+idea of man's cruelty to man or woman, or woman's cruelty to woman or

+man, lashes him into a fury. Then he becomes Ibsen the Berserker.</p>

+

+<p>Therefore let us beware the pitfalls dug by some Ibsen exegetists; the

+genius of the dramatist is too vast and versatile to be pinned down to

+a single formula. If you believe that he is dangerous to young people,

+let it be admitted&mdash;but so are Thackeray, Balzac, and Hugo. So is any

+strong thinker. Ibsen is a powerful dissolvent for an imagination

+clogged by theories of life, low ideals, and the facile materialism

+that exalts the letter but slays the spirit. He is a foe to compromise,

+a hater of the half-way, the roundabout, the weak-willed, above all,

+a hater of the truckling politician&mdash;he is a very Torquemada to

+politicians. At the best there is ethical grandeur in his conceptions,

+and if the moral stress is unduly felt, if he tears asunder the veil

+of our beloved illusions and shows us as we are, it is because of his

+righteous indignation against the platitudinous hypocrisy of modern

+life. His unvarying code is: "So to conduct one's life as to realise

+oneself." Withal an artist, not the evangelist of a new gospel, not

+the social reformer, not the exponent of science in the drama. These

+titles have been thrust upon him by his overheated admirers. He never

+posed as a prophet. He is poet, psychologist, skald, dramatist, not

+always a soothsayer. The artist in him preserved him from the fate

+of the didactic Tolstoy. With the Russian he shares the faculty of

+emptying souls. Ibsen, who vaguely recalls Stendhal in his clear-eyed

+vision and dry irony, is without a trace of the Frenchman's cynicism

+or dilettantism. Like all dramatists of the first rank, the Norwegian

+has in him much of the seer, yet he always avoided the pontifical tone;

+he may be a sphinx, but he never plays the oracle. His categorical

+imperative, however, "All or nothing," does not bear the strain of

+experience. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at such an intolerable

+tension. The very illusions he seeks to destroy would be supplanted by

+others. Man exists because of his illusions. Without the "life-lie" he

+would perish in the mire. His illusions are his heritage from aeons

+of ancestors. The classic view considered man as the centre of the

+universe; that position has been ruthlessly altered by science&mdash;we are

+now only tiny points of consciousness in unthinkable space. Isolated

+then, true children of our inconsiderable planet, we have in us traces

+of our predecessors. True, one may be disheartened by the pictures of

+unheroic meanness and petty corruption, the ill-disguised instincts

+of ape and tiger, in the prose plays, even to the extent of calling

+them&mdash;as did M. Melchior de Vogüé, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet&mdash;a

+grotesque Iliad of Nihilism. But we need not despair. If Ibsen seemed

+to say for a period, "Evil, be thou my good," his final words in the

+Epilogue are those of pity and peace: <i>Pax vobiscum!</i></p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>This old man with the head and hair of an electrified Schopenhauer

+and the torso of a giant, his temperament coinciding with his curt,

+imperious name, left behind him twenty-six plays, one or more in

+manuscript. A volume of very subjective poems concludes this long

+list; among the dramas are at least three of heroic proportion and

+length. Ibsen was born at Skien, Norway, 1828. His forebears were

+Danish, German, Scotch, and Norwegian. His father, a man of means,

+failed in business, and at the age of eight the little Henrik had to

+face poverty. His schooling was of the slightest. He was not much

+of a classical scholar and soon he was apprenticed to an apothecary

+at Grimstad, the very name of which evokes a vision of gloominess.

+He did not prove a success as a druggist, as he spent his spare

+time reading and caricaturing his neighbours. His verse-making was

+desultory, his accustomed mien an unhappy combination of Hamlet and

+Byron; his misanthropy at this period recalls that of the young

+Schopenhauer. His favourite reading was poetry and history, and he had

+a predilection for sketching and conjuring tricks. It might be pointed

+out that here in the raw were the aptitudes of a future dramatist:

+poetry, pictures, illusion. In the year 1850 Ibsen published his

+first drama, derived from poring over Sallust and Cicero. It was a

+creditable effort of youth, and to the discerning it promised well for

+his literary future. He was gifted, without doubt, and from the first

+he sounded the tocsin of revolt. Pessimistic and rebellious his poems

+were; he had tasted misery, his home was an unhappy one&mdash;there was

+little love in it for him&mdash;and his earliest memories were clustered

+about the town jail, the hospital, and the lunatic asylum. These

+images were no doubt the cause of his bitter and desperate frame of

+mind; grinding poverty, the poverty of a third-rate provincial town

+in Norway, was the climax of his misery. And then, too, the scenery,

+rugged and noble, and the climate, depressing for months, all had

+their effect upon his sensitive imagination. From the start, certain

+conceptions of woman took root in his mind and reappear in nearly all

+his dramas. Catalina's wife, Aurelia, and the vestal Furia, who are

+reincarnated in the Dagny and Hjordis of his Vikings, reappear in A

+Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and at the last in When We Dead Awake. One

+is the eternal womanly, the others the destructive feminine principle,

+woman the conqueror. As Catalina is a rebel against circumstances, so

+are Maja and the sculptor in the Epilogue of 1899. There is almost

+a half century of uninterrupted composition during which this group

+of men and women disport themselves. Brand, a poetic rather than an

+acting drama, is no exception; Brand and the Sheriff, Agnes and Gerda.

+These types are cunningly varied, their traits so concealed as to be

+recognised only after careful study. But the characteristics of each

+are alike. The monotony of this procedure is redeemed by the unity

+of conception&mdash;Ibsen is the reflective poet, the poet who conceives

+the idea and then clothes it, therein differing from Shakespeare and

+Goethe, to whom form and idea are simultaneously born.</p>

+

+<p>In March, 1850, he went to Christiania and entered Heltberg's school

+as a preparation for the university. His studies were brief. He became

+involved in a boyish revolutionary outburst&mdash;in company with his

+life-long friend, the good-hearted Björnstjerne Björnson, who helped

+him many times&mdash;and while nothing serious occurred, it caused the

+young man to effervesce with literary plans and the new ideas of his

+times. The Warrior's Tomb, his second play, was accepted and actually

+performed at the Christiania theatre. The author gave up his university

+dreams and began to earn a rude living by his pen. He embarked in

+newspaper enterprises which failed. An extremist politically, he soon

+made a crop of enemies, the wisest crop a strong character can raise;

+but he often worked on an empty stomach in consequence. The metal of

+the man showed from the first: endure defeat, but no compromise!

+He went to Bergen in 1851 and was appointed theatre poet at a small

+salary; this comprised a travelling stipend. Ibsen saw the Copenhagen

+and Dresden theatres with excellent results. His eyes were opened to

+the possibilities of his craft, and on his return he proved a zealous

+stage manager. He composed, in 1853, St. John's Night, which was played

+at his theatre, and in 1857 Fru Inger of Oesträtt was written. It is

+old-fashioned in form, but singularly lifelike in characterization and

+fruitful in situations. The story is semi-historical. In the Lady Inger

+we see a foreshadowing of his strong, vengeful women. Olaf Liljekrans

+need not detain us. The Vikings (1858) is a sterling specimen of

+drama, in which legend and history are artfully blended. The Feast of

+Solhaug (1857) was very successful in its treatment of the saga, and is

+comparatively cheerful.</p>

+

+<p>Ibsen left Bergen to take the position of director at the Norwegian

+Theatre, Christiania. He remained there until 1862, staging all

+manner of plays, from Shakespeare to Scribe. The value of these years

+was incalculable in his technical development. A poet born and by

+self-discipline developed, he was now master of a difficult art, an

+art that later he never lost, even when, weary of the conventional

+comedy of manners, he sought to spiritualize the form and give us the

+psychology of commonplace souls. It may be noted that, despite the

+violinist Ole Bull's generous support, the new theatre endured only

+five years. More than passing stress should be laid upon this formative

+period. His experience of these silent years was bitter, but rich

+in spiritual recompense. After some difficulty in securing a paltry

+pension from his government, Ibsen was enabled to leave Norway, which

+had become a charnel-house to him since the Danish war with Germany,

+and with his young wife he went to Rome. Thenceforth his was a gypsy

+career. He lived in Rome, in Dresden, in Munich, and again in Rome. He

+spent his summers in the Austrian Tyrol, at Sorrento, and occasionally

+in his own land. His was a self-imposed exile, and he did not return

+to Christiania to reside permanently until an old, but famous man.

+Silent, unsociable, a man of harsh moods, he was to those who knew him

+an upright character, an ideal husband and father. His married life had

+no history, a sure sign of happiness, for he was well mated. Yet one

+feels that, despite his wealth, his renown, existence was for him a

+<i>via dolorosa</i>. Ever the solitary dreamer, he wrote a play about every

+two or three years, and from the very beginning of his exile the effect

+in Norway was like unto the explosion of a bomb-shell. Not wasting time

+in answering his critics, it was nevertheless remarked that each new

+piece was a veiled reply to slanderous criticism. Ghosts was absolutely

+intended as an answer to the attacks upon A Doll's House; here is

+what Nora would have become if she had been a dutiful wife, declares

+Ibsen, in effect; and we see Mrs. Alving in her motherly agonies. The

+counterblast to the criticism of Ghosts was An Enemy of the People; Dr.

+Stockman is easily detected as a partial portrait of Ibsen.</p>

+

+<p>Georg Brandes, to whom the poet owes many ideas as well as sound

+criticism, said that early in his life a lyric Pegasus had been killed

+under Ibsen This striking hint of his sacrifice is supplemented by

+a letter in which he compared the education of a poet to that of a

+dancing bear. The bear is tied in a brewer's vat and a slow fire is

+built under the vat; the wretched animal is then forced to dance. Life

+forces the poet to dance by means quite as painful; he dances and

+the tears roll down his cheeks all the while. Ibsen forsook poetry

+for prose and&mdash;the dividing line never to be recrossed is clearly

+indicated between Emperor and Galilean and The Pillars of Society&mdash;he

+bestowed upon his country three specimens of his poetic genius. As

+Italy fructified the genius of Goethe, so it touched as with a glowing

+coal the lips of the young Northman. Brand, a noble epic, startled and

+horrified Norway. In Rome Ibsen regained his equilibrium. He saw his

+country and countrymen more sanely, more steadily, though there is a

+terrible fund of bitterness in this dramatic poem. The local politics

+of Christiania no longer irritated him, and in the hot, beautiful

+South he dreamed of the North, of his beloved fiords and mountains, of

+ice and avalanche, of troll and saga. Luckily for those who have not

+mastered Norwegian, C. H. Herford's translation of Brand exists, and,

+while the translator deplores his sins of omission, it is a work&mdash;as

+are the English versions of the prose plays by William Archer&mdash;that

+gives one an excellent idea of the original. In Brand (1866) Ibsen is

+at his furthest extremity from compromise. This clergyman sacrifices

+his mother, his wife, his child, his own life, to a frosty ideal: "All

+or nothing." He is implacable in his ire against worldliness, in his

+contempt of churchmen that believe in half-way measures. He perishes

+on the heights as a voice proclaims, "He is the God of Love." Greatly

+imaginative, charged with spiritual spleen and wisdom, Brand at once

+placed Ibsen among the mighty.</p>

+

+<p>He followed it with a new Odyssey of his soul, the amazing Peer Gynt

+(1867), in which his humour, hitherto a latent quality, his fantasy,

+bold invention, and the poetic evocation of the faithful, exquisite

+Solveig, are further testimony to his breadth of resource. Peer Gynt

+is all that Brand was not: whimsical, worldly, fantastic, weak-willed,

+not so vicious as perverse; he is very selfish, one who was to himself

+sufficient, therefore a failure. The will, if it frees, may also kill.

+It killed the soul of Peer. There are pages of unflagging humour,

+poetry, and observation; scene dissolves into scene; Peer travels over

+half the earth, is rich, is successful, is poor; and at the end meets

+the Button-Moulder, that ironical shadow who tells him what he has

+become. We hear the Boyg, the spirit of compromise, with its huge,

+deadly, coiling lengths, gruffly bid Peer to "go around." Facts of life

+are to be slunk about, never to be faced. Peer comes to harbour in the

+arms of his deserted Solveig. The resounding sarcasm, the ferociousness

+of the attack on all the idols of the national cavern, raised a storm

+in Norway that did not abate for years. Ibsen was again a target for

+the bolts of critical and public hatred. Peer Gynt is the Scandinavian

+Faust.</p>

+

+<p>Having purged his soul of this perilous stuff, the poet, in 1873,

+finished his double drama Emperor and Galilean, not a success

+dramatically, but a strong, interesting work for the library, though it

+saw the footlights at Berlin, Leipsic, and Christiania. The apostate

+Emperor Julian is the protagonist. We discern Ibsen the mystic

+philosopher longing for his Third Kingdom.</p>

+

+<p>After a silence of four years The Pillars of Society appeared. Like

+its predecessor in the same <i>genre</i>, The Young Men's League, it is

+a prose drama, a study of manners, and a scathing arraignment of

+civic dishonesty. All the rancour of its author against the bourgeois

+hypocrisy of his countrymen comes to the surface; as in The Young Men's

+League the vacillating nature of the shallow politician is laid bare.

+It seems a trifle banal now, though the canvas is large, the figures

+animated. One recalls Augier without his Gallic <i>esprit</i>, rather than

+the later Ibsen. A Doll's House was once a household word, as was

+Ghosts (1881). There is no need now to retell the story of either

+play. Ghosts, in particular, has an antique quality, the <i>dénouement</i>

+leaves us shivering. It may be set down as the strongest play of the

+nineteenth century, and also the most harrowing. Its intensity borders

+on the hallucinatory. We involuntarily recall the last act of Tristan

+and Isolde or the final movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic symphony.

+It is the shrill discord between the mediocre creatures involved and

+the ghastly punishment meted out to the innocent that agitates and

+depresses us. Here are human souls illuminated as if by a lightning

+flash; we long for the anticipated thunder. It does not sound. The

+drama ends in silence&mdash;one of those pauses (Ibsen employs the pause

+as does a musical composer) which leaves the spectator unstrung. The

+helpless sense of hovering about the edge of a bottomless gulf is

+engendered by this play. No man could have written it but Ibsen, and we

+hope that no man will ever attempt a parallel performance, for such art

+modulates across the borderland of the pathologic.</p>

+

+<p>The Wild Duck (1884) followed An Enemy of the People (1882). It is the

+most puzzling of the prose dramas except The Master-Builder, for in it

+Ibsen deliberately mocks himself and his ideals. It is, nevertheless,

+a profoundly human and moving work. Gina Ekdal, the wholesome,

+sensible wife of Ekdal, the charlatan photographer&mdash;a <i>revenant</i> of

+Peer Gynt&mdash;has been called a feminine Sancho Panza. Gregers Werle,

+the meddlesome truth-teller; Relling&mdash;a sardonic incarnation of

+the author&mdash;who believes in feeding humanity on the "life-lie" to

+maintain its courage; the tiny Hedwig, sweetest and freshest of Ibsen's

+girls&mdash;these form a memorable <i>ensemble</i>. And how the piece plays!

+Humour and pathos alternate, while the symbol is not so remote that

+an average audience need miss its meaning. The end is cruel. Ibsen is

+often cruel, with the passionless indifference of the serene Buddha.

+But he is ever logical. Nora must leave her husband's house&mdash;a "happy

+ending" would be ridiculous&mdash;and Hedwig must be sacrificed instead of

+the wild duck, or her fool of a father. There is a battalion of minor

+characters in the Ibsen plays who recall Dickens by their grotesque,

+sympathetic physiognomies. To deny this dramatist humour is to miss a

+third of his qualities. His is not the ventripotent humour of Rabelais

+or Cervantes; it seldom leaves us without the feeling that the poet is

+slyly laughing at us, not with us, though in the early comedies there

+are many broad and telling strokes.</p>

+

+<p>Rosmersholm (1886) is a study of two temperaments. Rebekka West

+is another malevolent portrait in his gallery of dangerous and

+antipathetic women. She ruins Rosmersholm, ruins herself, because she

+does not discover this true self until too late. The play illustrates

+the extraordinary technique of the master. It seems to have been

+written backward; until the third act we are not aware that the

+peaceful home of the Rosmersholms is the battle-field of a malignant

+soul. The Lady from the Sea (1888) illustrates the thesis that love

+must be free. The allegory is rather strained and in performance the

+play lacks poetic glamour. Hedda Gabler (1890) is a masterpiece. A more

+selfish, vicious, cold nature than Hedda's never stepped from the page

+of a Russian novel&mdash;Becky Sharp and Madame Marneffe are lovable persons

+in comparison. She is not in the slightest degree like the stage

+"adventuress," but is a magnificent example of egoism magnificently

+delineated and is the true sister in fiction of Julien Sorel. That she

+is dramatically worth the while is beside the question. Her ending by a

+pistol shot is justice itself; alive she fascinates as does some exotic

+reptile. She is representative of her species, the loveless woman, the

+petty hater, a Lady Macbeth reversed. Ibsen has studied her with the

+same care and curiosity he bestowed upon the homely Gina Ekdal.</p>

+

+<p>His Master-Builder (1892) is the beginning of the last cycle. A true

+interior drama, we enter here into the region of the symbolical.

+With Ibsen the symbol is always an image, never an abstraction, a

+state of sensibility, not a formula, and the student may winnow many

+examples from The Pretenders (1864), with its "kingship" idea, to the

+Epilogue. Solness stands on the heights only to perish, but in the full

+possession of his soul. Hilda Wangel is one of the most perplexing

+characters to realise in the modern theatre. She, with her cruelty

+and loveliness of perfect youth, is the work of a sorcerer who holds

+us spellbound while the souls he has created by his black art slowly

+betray themselves. It may be said that all this is not the art of

+the normal theatre. Very true. It more nearly resembles a dramatic

+confessional with a hidden auditory bewitched into listening to secrets

+never suspected of the humanity that hedges us about in street or

+home. Ibsen is clairvoyant. He takes the most familiar material and

+holds it in the light of his imagination; straightway we see a new

+world, a northern dance of death, like the ferocious pictures of his

+fellow-countryman, the painter Edvard Munch.</p>

+

+<p>Little Eyolf (1894) is fairly plain reading, with some fine overtones

+of suffering and self-abnegation. Its lesson is wholly satisfying.

+John Gabriel Borkman (1896), written at an age when most poets show

+declining power, is another monument to the vigour and genius of Ibsen.

+The story winds about the shattered career of a financier. There is a

+secondary plot, in which the parental curses come home to roost&mdash;the

+son, carefully reared to wipe away the stain from his father's name,

+prefers Paris and a rollicking life. The desolation under this

+roof-tree is almost epical: two sisters in deadly antagonism, a

+blasted man, the old wolf, whose footfalls in the chamber above become

+absolutely sinister as the play progresses, are made to face the hard

+logic of their misspent lives. The doctrine of compensation has never

+had such an exponent as Ibsen.</p>

+

+<p>In the last of his published plays, When We Dead Awake (1899), we find

+earlier and familiar themes developed at moments with contrapuntal

+mastery. Rubek, the sculptor, has aroused a love that he never dared to

+face. He married the wrong woman. His early dream, the inspiration of

+his master work, he has lost. His art withers. And when he meets his

+Irene, her mind is full of wandering ghosts. To the heights, to the

+same peaks that Brand climbed, they both must mount, and there they are

+destroyed, as was Brand, by an avalanche. Eros is the triumphant god of

+the aged magician.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>It must be apparent to those who have not read or seen the Ibsen

+plays that, despite this huddled and foreshortened account, they

+are in essence quite different from what has been reported of them.

+Idealistic, symbolistic, moral, and ennobling, the Ibsen drama was

+so vilified by malice and ignorance that its very name was a portent

+of evil. Mad or wicked Ibsen is not. His scheme of life and morals

+is often oblique and paradoxical, his interpretation of truths so

+elliptical that we are confused. But he is essentially sound. He

+believes in the moral continuity of the universe. His astounding energy

+is a moral energy. Salvation by good works is his burden. The chief

+thing is to be strong in your faith. He despises the weak, not the

+strong sinner. His Supermen are the bankrupts of romantic heroism.

+His strong man is frequently wrong-headed; but the weakling works the

+real mischief. Never admit you are beaten. Begin at the bottom twenty

+times, and when the top is achieved die, or else look for loftier peaks

+to climb. Ibsen exalts strength. His "ice-church" is chilly; the lungs

+drink in with difficulty the buffeting breezes on his heights; yet how

+bracing, how inspiring, is this austere place of worship. Bad as is

+mankind, Ibsen, who was ever in advance of his contemporaries, believed

+in its possibility for betterment. Here the optimist speaks. Brand's

+spiritual pride is his downfall; nevertheless, Ibsen, an aristocratic

+thinker, believes that of pride one cannot have too much. He recognised

+the selfish and hollow foundation of all "humanitarian" movements.

+He is a sign-post for the twentieth century when the aristocratic of

+spirit must enter into combat with the herd instinct of a depressing

+socialism. His influence has been tremendous. His plays teem with the

+general ideas of his century. His chief value lies in the beauty of

+his art; his is the rare case of the master-singer rounding a long

+life with his master works. He brought to the theatre new ideas; he

+changed forever the dramatic map of Europe; he originated a new method

+of surprising life, capturing it and forcing it to give up a moiety of

+its mystery for the uses of a difficult and recondite art. He fashioned

+character anew. And he pushed resolutely into the mist that surrounded

+the human soul, his Diogenes lantern glimmering, his brave, lonely

+heart undaunted by the silence and the solitude. His message? Who shall

+say? He asks questions, and, patterning after nature, he seldom answers

+them. When his ideas sicken and die&mdash;he asserted that the greatest

+truth outlives its usefulness in time, and it may not be denied that

+his drama is a dissolvent; already the early plays are in historical

+twilight and the woman question of his day is for us something quite

+different&mdash;his art will endure. Henrik Ibsen was a man of heroic

+fortitude. His plays are a bold and stimulating spectacle for the

+spirit. Should we ask more of a dramatic poet?</p>

+

+

+

+<hr class="chap" />

+<h4><a name="X" id="X">X</a></h4>

+

+<h4>MAX STIRNER</h4>

+

+

+

+<h5>I</h5>

+

+

+<p>In 1888 John Henry Mackay, the Scottish-German poet, while at the

+British Museum reading Lange's History of Materialism, encountered

+the name of Max Stirner and a brief criticism of his forgotten book,

+Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Only One and His Property; in

+French translated L'Unique et sa Propriété, and in the first English

+translation more aptly and euphoniously entitled The Ego and His Own).

+His curiosity excited, Mackay, who is an anarchist, procured after

+some difficulty a copy of the work, and so greatly was he stirred

+that for ten years he gave himself up to the study of Stirner and his

+teachings, and after incredible painstaking published in 1898 the

+story of his life. (Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk: John Henry

+Mackay.) To Mackay's labours we owe all we know of a man who was as

+absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed. But

+some advanced spirits had read Stirner's book, the most revolutionary

+ever written, and had felt its influence. Let us name two: Henrik

+Ibsen and Frederick Nietzsche. Though the name of Stirner is not quoted

+by Nietzsche, he nevertheless recommended Stirner to a favourite pupil

+of his, Professor Baumgartner at Basel University. This was in 1874.</p>

+

+<p>One hot August afternoon in the year 1896 at Bayreuth, I was standing

+in the Marktplatz when a member of the Wagner Theatre pointed out to me

+a house opposite, at the corner of the Maximilianstrasse, and said: "Do

+you see that house with the double gables? A man was born there whose

+name will be green when Jean Paul and Richard Wagner are forgotten."

+It was too large a draught upon my credulity, so I asked the name.

+"Max Stirner," he replied. "The crazy Hegelian," I retorted. "You have

+read him, then?" "No; but you haven't read Nordau." It was true. All

+fire and flame at that time for Nietzsche, I did not realise that the

+poet and rhapsodist had forerunners. My friend sniffed at Nietzsche's

+name; Nietzsche for him was an aristocrat, not an Individualist&mdash;in

+reality, a lyric expounder of Bismarck's gospel of blood and iron.

+Wagner's adversary would, with Renan, place mankind under the yoke of

+a more exacting tyranny than Socialism, the tyranny of Culture, of the

+Superman. Ibsen, who had studied both Kierkegaard and Stirner&mdash;witness

+Brand and Peer Gynt&mdash;Ibsen was much nearer to the champion of the Ego

+than Nietzsche. Yet it is the dithyrambic author of Zarathustra who is

+responsible, with Mackay, for the recrudescence of Stirner's teachings.</p>

+

+<p>Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner its prophet, or, if

+you will, its philosopher. Later I secured the book, which had been

+reprinted in the cheap edition of Reclam (1882). It seemed colourless,

+or rather gray, set against the glory and gorgeous rhetoric of

+Nietzsche. I could not see then what I saw a decade later&mdash;that

+Nietzsche had used Stirner as a springboard, as a point of departure,

+and that the Individual had vastly different meanings to those diverse

+temperaments. But Stirner displayed the courage of an explorer in

+search of the north pole of the Ego.</p>

+

+<p>The man whose theories would make a <i>tabula rasa</i> of civilisation, was

+born at Bayreuth, October 25, 1806, and died at Berlin June 25, 1856.

+His right name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, Max Stirner being a nickname

+bestowed upon him by his lively comrades in Berlin because of his very

+high and massive forehead. His father was a maker of wind instruments,

+who died six months after his son's birth. His mother remarried, and

+his stepfather proved a kind protector. Nothing of external importance

+occurred in the life of Max Stirner that might place him apart from his

+fellow-students. He was very industrious over his books at Bayreuth,

+and when he became a student at the Berlin University he attended the

+lectures regularly, preparing himself for a teacher's profession. He

+mastered the classics, modern philosophy, and modern languages. But

+he did not win a doctor's degree; just before examinations his mother

+became ill with a mental malady (a fact his critics have noted) and

+the son dutifully gave up everything so as to be near her. After her

+death he married a girl who died within a short time. Later, in 1843,

+his second wife was Marie Dähnhardt, a very "advanced" young woman, who

+came from Schwerin to Berlin to lead a "free" life. She met Stirner

+in the Hippel circle, at a Weinstube in the Friedrichstrasse, where

+radical young thinkers gathered: Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Karl Marx,

+Moses Hess, Jordan, Julius Faucher, and other stormy insurgents. She

+had, it is said, about 10,000 thalers. She was married with the ring

+wrenched from a witness's purse&mdash;her bridegroom had forgotten to

+provide one. He was not a practical man; if he had been he would hardly

+have written The Ego and His Own.</p>

+

+<p>It was finished between the years 1843 and 1845; the latter date it

+was published. It created a stir, though the censor did not seriously

+interfere with it; its attacks on the prevailing government were

+veiled. In Germany rebellion on the psychic plane expresses itself in

+metaphysics; in Poland and Russia music is the safer medium. Feuerbach,

+Hess, and Szeliga answered Stirner's terrible arraignment of society,

+but men's thoughts were interested elsewhere, and with the revolt

+of 1848 Stirner was quite effaced. He had taught for five years in

+a fashionable school for young ladies; he had written for several

+periodicals, and translated extracts from the works of Say and Adam

+Smith.</p>

+

+<p>After his book appeared, his relations with his wife became uneasy.

+Late in 1846 or early in 1847 she left him and went to London, where

+she supported herself by writing; later she inherited a small sum from

+a sister, visited Australia, married a labourer there, and became a

+washerwoman. In 1897 Mackay wrote to her in London, asking her for

+some facts in the life of her husband. She replied tartly that she was

+not willing to revive her past; that her husband had been too much of

+an egotist to keep friends, and was "very sly." This was all he could

+extort from the woman, who evidently had never understood her husband

+and execrated his memory, probably because her little fortune was

+swallowed up by their mutual improvidence. Another appeal only elicited

+the answer that "Mary Smith is preparing for death"&mdash;she had become a

+Roman Catholic. It is the irony of things in general that his book is

+dedicated to "My Sweetheart, Marie Dähnhardt."</p>

+

+<p>Stirner, after being deserted, led a precarious existence. The old

+jolly crowd at Hippel's seldom saw him. He was in prison twice for

+debt&mdash;free Prussia&mdash;and often lacked bread. He, the exponent of

+Egoism, of philosophic anarchy, starved because of his pride. He was

+in all matters save his theories a moderate man, eating and drinking

+temperately, living frugally. Unassuming in manners, he could hold his

+own in debate&mdash;and Hippel's appears to have been a rude, debating

+society&mdash;yet one who avoided life rather than mastered it. He was of

+medium height, ruddy, and his eyes deep-blue. His hands were white,

+slender, "aristocratic," writes Mackay. Certainly not the figure of

+a stalwart shatterer of conventions, not the ideal iconoclast; above

+all, without a touch of the melodrama of communistic anarchy, with its

+black flags, its propaganda by force, its idolatry of assassinations,

+bomb-throwing, killing of fat, harmless policemen, and its sentimental

+gabble about Fraternity. Stirner hated the word Equality; he knew it

+was a lie, knew that all men are born unequal, as no two grains of sand

+on earth ever are or ever will be alike. He was a solitary. And thus he

+died at the age of fifty. A few of his former companions heard of his

+neglected condition and buried him. Nearly a half century later Mackay,

+with the co-operation of Hans von Bülow, affixed a commemorative tablet

+on the house where he last lived, Phillipstrasse 19, Berlin, and alone

+Mackay placed a slab to mark his grave in the Sophienkirchhof.</p>

+

+<p>It is to the poet of the Letzte Erkentniss, with its stirring line,

+"Doch bin ich mein," that I owe the above scanty details of the most

+thorough-going Nihilist who ever penned his disbelief in religion,

+humanity, society, the family. He rejects them all. We have no genuine

+portrait of this insurrectionist&mdash;he preferred personal insurrection

+to general revolution; the latter, he asserted, brought in its train

+either Socialism or a tyrant&mdash;except a sketch hastily made by

+Friedrich Engels, the revolutionist, for Mackay. It is not reassuring.

+Stirner looks like an old-fashioned German and timid pedagogue, high

+coat-collar, spectacles, clean-shaven face, and all. This valiant enemy

+of the State, of socialism, was, perhaps, only brave on paper. But his

+icy, relentless, epigrammatic style is in the end more gripping than

+the spectacular, volcanic, whirling utterances of Nietzsche. Nietzsche

+lives in an ivory tower and is an aristocrat. Into Stirner's land

+all are welcome. That is, if men have the will to rebel, and if they

+despise the sentimentality of mob rule. The Ego and His Own is the most

+drastic criticism of socialism thus far presented.</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>II</h5>

+

+

+<p>For those who love to think of the visible universe as a cosy corner

+of God's footstool, there is something bleak and terrifying in the

+isolated position of man since science has postulated him as an

+infinitesimal bubble on an unimportant planet. The soul shrinks as our

+conception of outer space widens. Thomas Hardy describes the sensation

+as "ghastly." There is said to be no purpose, no design in all the

+gleaming phantasmagoria revealed by the astronomer's glass; while on

+our globe we are a brother to lizards, bacteria furnish our motor

+force, and our brain is but a subtly fashioned mirror, composed of

+neuronic filaments, a sort of "darkroom" in which is somehow pictured

+the life without. Well, we admit, for the sake of the argument, that

+we banish God from the firmament, substituting a superior mechanism;

+we admit our descent from star-dust and apes, we know that we have no

+free will, because man, like the unicellular organisms, "gives to every

+stimulus without an inevitable response." That, of course, settles all

+moral obligations. But we had hoped, we of the old sentimental brigade,

+that all things being thus adjusted we could live with our fellow man

+in (comparative) peace, cheating him only in a legitimate business

+way, and loving our neighbour better than ourselves (in public). Ibsen

+had jostled our self-satisfaction sadly, but some obliging critic

+had discovered his formula&mdash;a pessimistic decadent&mdash;and with bare

+verbal bones we worried the old white-haired mastiff of Norway. Only

+a decadent It is an easy word to speak and it means nothing. With

+Nietzsche the case was simpler. We couldn't read him because he was a

+madman; but he at least was an aristocrat who held the <i>bourgeois</i> in

+contempt, and he also held a brief for culture. Ah! when we are young

+we are altruists; as Thackeray says, "Youths go to balls; men go to

+dinners."</p>

+

+<p>But along comes this dreadful Stirner, who cries out: Hypocrites all

+of you. You are not altruists, but selfish persons, who, self-illuded,

+believe yourselves to be disinterested. Be Egoists. Confess the truth

+in the secrecy of your mean, little souls. We are all Egotists. Be

+Egoists. There is no truth but my truth. No world but my world. I

+am I. And then Stirner waves away God, State, society, the family,

+morals, mankind, leaving only the "hateful" Ego. The cosmos is frosty

+and inhuman, and old Mother Earth no longer offers us her bosom as a

+reclining-place. Stirner has so decreed it. We are suspended between

+heaven and earth, like Mahomet's coffin, hermetically sealed in Self.

+Instead of "smiting the chord of self," we must reorchestrate the chord

+that it may give out richer music. (Perhaps the Higher Egoism which

+often leads to low selfishness.)</p>

+

+<p>Nevertheless, there is an honesty in the words of Max Stirner. We are

+weary of the crying in the market-place, "Lo! Christ is risen," only

+to find an old nostrum tricked out in socialistic phrases; and fine

+phrases make fine feathers for these gentlemen who offer the millennium

+in one hand and perfect peace in the other. Stirner is the frankest

+thinker of his century. He does not soften his propositions, harsh ones

+for most of us, with promises, but pursues his thought with ferocious

+logic to its covert. There is no such hybrid with him as Christian

+Socialism, no dodging issues. He is a Teutonic Childe Roland who to

+the dark tower comes, but instead of blowing his horn&mdash;as Nietzsche

+did&mdash;he blows up the tower itself. Such an iconoclast has never before

+put pen to paper. He is so sincere in his scorn of all we hold dear

+that he is refreshing. Nietzsche's flashing epigrammatic blade often

+snaps after it is fleshed; the grim, cruel Stirner, after he makes a

+jab at his opponent, twists the steel in the wound. Having no mercy for

+himself, he has no mercy for others. He is never a hypocrite. He erects

+no altars to known or unknown gods. Humanity, he says, has become the

+Moloch to-day to which everything is sacrificed. Humanity&mdash;that is,

+the State, perhaps, even the socialistic state (the most terrible yoke

+of all for the individual soul). This assumed love of humanity, this

+sacrifice of our own personality, are the blights of modern life. The

+Ego has too long been suppressed by ideas, sacred ideas of religion,

+state, family, law, morals. The conceptual question, "What is Man?"

+must be changed to "Who is Man?" I am the owner of my might, and I am

+so when I know myself as <i>unique</i>.</p>

+

+<p>Stirner is not a communist&mdash;so long confounded with anarchs&mdash;he does

+not believe in force. That element came into the world with the advent

+of Bakounine and Russian nihilism. Stirner would replace society

+by groups; property would be held, money would be a circulating

+medium; the present compulsory system would be voluntary instead of

+involuntary. Unlike his great contemporary, Joseph Proudhon, Stirner

+is not a constructive philosopher. Indeed, he is no philosopher. A

+moralist (or immoralist), an <i>Ethiker</i>, his book is a defence of

+Egoism, of the submerged rights of the Ego, and in these piping times

+of peace and fraternal humbug, when every nation, every man embraces

+his neighbour preparatory to disembowelling him in commerce or war,

+Max Stirner's words are like a trumpet-blast. And many Jericho-built

+walls go down before these ringing tones. His doctrine is the Fourth

+Dimension of ethics. That his book will be more dangerous than a

+million bombs, if misapprehended, is no reason why it should not be

+read. Its author can no more be held responsible for its misreading

+than the orthodox faiths for their backsliders. Nietzsche has been

+wofully misunderstood; Nietzsche, the despiser of mob rule, has been

+acclaimed a very Attila&mdash;instead of which he is a culture-philosopher,

+one who insists that reform must be first spiritual. Individualism

+for him means only an end to culture. Stirner is not a metaphysician;

+he is too much realist. He is really a topsy-turvy Hegelian, a

+political pyrrhonist. His Ego is his Categorical Imperative. And if the

+Individual loses his value, what is his <i>raison d'être</i> for existence?

+What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses

+his own Ego? Make your value felt, cries Stirner. The minority may

+occasionally err, but the majority is always in the wrong. Egoism must

+not be misinterpreted as petty selfishness or as an excuse to do wrong.

+Life will be ennobled and sweeter if we respect ourselves. "There is

+no sinner and no sinful egoism.... Do not call men sinful; and <i>they

+are not</i>" Freedom is not a goal. "Free&mdash;from what? Oh! what is there

+that cannot be shaken off? The yoke of serfdom, of sovereignty, of

+aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the desires and passions;

+yes, even the dominion of one's own will, of self-will, for the

+completest self-denial is nothing but freedom&mdash;freedom, to wit, from

+self-determination, from one's own self." This has an ascetic tang,

+and indicates that to compass our complete Ego the road travelled will

+be as thorny as any saint's of old. Where does Woman come into this

+scheme? There is no Woman, only a human Ego. Humanity is a convenient

+fiction to harry the individualist. So, society, family are the clamps

+that compress the soul of woman. If woman is to be free she must first

+be an individual, an Ego. In America, to talk of female suffrage is to

+propound the paradox of the masters attacking their slaves; yet female

+suffrage might prove a good thing&mdash;it might demonstrate the <i>reductio

+ad absurdum</i> of the administration of the present ballot system.</p>

+

+<p>Our wail over our neighbour's soul is simply the wail of a busybody.

+Mind your own business! is the pregnant device of the new Egoism.

+Puritanism is not morality, but a psychic disorder.</p>

+

+<p>Stirner, in his way, teaches that the Kingdom of God is within you.

+That man will ever be sufficiently perfected to become his own master

+is a dreamer's dream. Yet let us dream it. At least by that road we

+make for righteousness. But let us drop all cant about brotherly love

+and self-sacrifice. Let us love ourselves (respect our Ego), that we

+may learn to respect our brother; self-sacrifice means doing something

+that we believe to be good for our souls, therefore <i>egotism</i>&mdash;the

+higher <i>egotism</i>, withal <i>egotism</i>. As for going to the people&mdash;the

+Russian phrase&mdash;let the people forget themselves as a collective body,

+tribe, or group, and each man and woman develop his or her Ego. In

+Russia "going to the people" may have been sincere&mdash;in America it is a

+trick to catch, not souls, but votes.</p>

+

+<p>"The time is not far distant when it will be impossible for any proud,

+free, independent spirit to call himself a socialist, since he would

+be classed with those wretched toadies and worshippers of success who

+even now lie on their knees before every workingman and lick his hands

+simply because he is a workingman."</p>

+

+<p>John Henry Mackay spoke these words in a book of his. Did not

+Campanella, in an unforgettable sonnet, sing, "The people is a beast of

+muddy brain that knows not its own strength.... With its own hands it

+ties and gags itself"?</p>

+

+

+

+<h5>III</h5>

+

+

+<p>The Ego and His Own is divided into two parts: first, The Man; second,

+I. Its motto should be, "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own

+bones." But Walt Whitman's pronouncement had not been made, and Stirner

+was forced to fall back on Goethe&mdash;Goethe, the grand Immoralist of his

+epoch, wise and wicked Goethe, from whom flows all that is modern. "I

+place my all on Nothing" ("Ich hab' Mein Sach' auf Nichts gestellt,"

+in the joyous poem Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!) is Stirner's keynote

+to his Egoistic symphony. The hateful I, as Pascal called it, caused

+Zola, a solid egotist himself, to assert that the English were the most

+egotistic of races because their I in their tongue was but a single

+letter, while the French employed two, and not capitalised unless

+beginning a sentence. Stirner must have admired the English, as his I

+was the sole counter in his philosophy. His Ego and not the family is

+the unit of the social life. In antique times, when men were really

+the young, not the ancient, it was a world of reality. Men enjoyed the

+material. With Christianity came the rule of the spirit; ideas were

+become sacred, with the concepts of God, Goodness, Sin, Salvation.

+After Rousseau and the French Revolution humanity was enthroned, and

+the State became our oppressor. Our first enemies are our parents, our

+educators. It follows, then, that the only criterion of life is my Ego.

+Without my Ego I could not apprehend existence. Altruism is a pretty

+disguise for egotism. No one is or can be disinterested. He gives up

+one thing for another because the other seems better, nobler to him.

+Egotism! The ascetic renounces the pleasures of life because in his

+eyes renunciation is nobler than enjoyment. Egotism again! "You are to

+benefit yourself, and you are not to seek your benefit," cries Stirner.

+Explain the paradox! The one sure thing of life is the Ego. Therefore,

+"I am not you, but I'll use you if you are agreeable to me." Not to

+God, not to man, must be given the glory. "I'll keep the glory myself."

+What is Humanity but an abstraction? I am Humanity. Therefore the State

+is a monster that devours its children. It must not dictate to me.

+"The State and I are enemies." The State is a spook. A spook, too, is

+freedom. What is freedom? Who is free? The world belongs to all, but

+<i>all</i> are <i>I</i>. I alone am individual proprietor.</p>

+

+<p>Property is conditioned by might. What I have is mine. "Whoever knows

+how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property." Stirner

+would have held that property was not only nine but ten points of the

+law. This is Pragmatism with a vengeance. He repudiates all laws;

+repudiates competition, for persons are not the subject of competition,

+but "things" are; therefore if you are without "things" how can you

+compete? Persons are free, not "things." The world, therefore, is not

+"free." Socialism is but a further screwing up of the State machine

+to limit the individual. Socialism is a new god, a new abstraction

+to tyrannise over the Ego. And remember that Stirner is not speaking

+of the metaphysical Ego of Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, but of your I,

+my I, the political, the social I, the economic I of every man and

+woman. Stirner spun no metaphysical cobwebs. He reared no lofty cloud

+palaces. He did not bring from Asia its pessimism, as did Schopenhauer;

+nor deny reality, as did Berkeley. He was a foe to general ideas. He

+was an implacable realist. Yet while he denies the existence of an

+Absolute, of a Deity, State, Categorical Imperative, he nevertheless

+had not shaken himself free from Hegelianism (he is Extreme Left as a

+Hegelian), for he erected his I as an Absolute, though only dealing

+with it in its relations to society. Now, nature abhors an absolute.

+Everything is relative. So we shall see presently that with Stirner,

+too, his I is not so independent as he imagines.</p>

+

+<p>He says "crimes spring from fixed ideas." The Church, State, the

+Family, Morals, are fixed ideas. "Atheists are pious people." They

+reject one fiction only to cling to many old ones. Liberty for the

+people is not my liberty. Socrates was a fool in that he conceded to

+the Athenians the right to condemn him. Proudhon said (rather, Brisson

+before him), "Property is theft." Theft from whom? From society? But

+society is not the sole proprietor. Pauperism is the valuelessness of

+Me. The State and pauperism are the same. Communism, Socialism abolish

+private property and push us back into Collectivism. The individual is

+enslaved by the machinery of the State or by socialism. Your Ego is not

+free if you allow your vices or virtues to enslave it. The intellect

+has too long ruled, says Stirner; it is the will (not Schopenhauer's

+Will to Live, or Nietzsche's Will to Power, but the sum of our activity

+expressed by an act of volition; old-fashioned will, in a word) to

+exercise itself to the utmost. Nothing compulsory, all voluntary. Do

+what you will. <i>Fay ce que vouldras</i>, as Rabelais has it in his Abbey

+of Thélème. Not "Know thyself," but get the value out of yourself. Make

+your value felt. The poor are to blame for the rich. Our art to-day

+is the only art possible, and therefore real at the time. We are at

+every moment all we can be. There is no such thing as sin. It is an

+invention to keep imprisoned the will of our Ego. And as mankind is

+forced to believe theoretically in the evil of sin, yet commit it in

+its daily life, hypocrisy and crime are engendered. If the concept of

+sin had never been used as a club over the weak-minded, there would be

+no sinners&mdash;i.e., wicked people. The individual is himself the world's

+history. The world is my picture. There is no other Ego but mine. Louis

+XIV. said, "<i>L'Etat, c'est moi</i>"; I say, "<i>l'Univers, c'est moi.</i>" John

+Stuart Mill wrote in his famous essay on liberty that "Society has now

+got the better of the individual."</p>

+

+<p>Rousseau is to blame for the "Social Contract" and the "Equality"

+nonsense that has poisoned more than one nation's political ideas. The

+minority is always in the right, declared Ibsen, as opposed to Comte's

+"Submission is the base of perfection." "Liberty means responsibility.

+That is why most men dread it" (Bernard Shaw). "Nature does not seem

+to have made man for independence" (Vauvenargues). "What can give a

+man liberty? Will, his own will, and it gives power, which is better

+than liberty" (Turgenev). To have the will to be responsible for one's

+self, advises Nietzsche. "I am what I am" (Brand). "To thyself be

+sufficient" (Peer Gynt). Both men failed, for their freedom kills. To

+thine own self be true. God is within you. Best of all is Lord Acton's

+dictum that "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is of

+itself the highest political end." To will is to have to will (Ibsen).

+My truth is the truth (Stirner). Mortal has made the immortal, says

+the Rig Veda. Nothing is greater than I (Bhagavat Gita). I am that I

+am (the Avesta, also Exodus). Taine wrote, "Nature is in reality a

+tapestry of which we see the reverse side. This is why we try to turn

+it." Hierarchy, oligarchy, both forms submerge the Ego. J. S. Mill

+demanded: "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test

+of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" Bakounine

+in his fragmentary essay on God and the State feared the domination of

+science quite as much as an autocracy. "Politics is the madness of the

+many for the gain of the few," Pope asserted. Read Spinoza, The Citizen

+and the State (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus). Or Oscar Wilde's

+epigram: "Charity creates a multitude of sins." "I am not poor enough

+to give alms," says Nietzsche. But Max Beerbohm has wittily said&mdash;and

+his words contain as much wisdom as wit&mdash;that "If he would have his

+ideas realised, the Socialist must first kill the Snob."</p>

+

+<p>Science tells us that our <i>I</i> is really a <i>We</i>; a colony of cells, an

+orchestra of inherited instincts. We have not even free will, or at

+least only in a limited sense. We are an instrument played upon by our

+heredity and our environment. The cell, then, is the unit, not the Ego.

+Very well, Stirner would exclaim (if he had lived after Darwin and

+1859), the cell is my cell, not yours! Away with other cells! But such

+an autonomous gospel is surely a phantasm. Stirner saw a ghost. He,

+too, in his proud Individualism was an aristocrat. No man may separate

+himself from the tradition of his race unless to incur the penalty of a

+sterile isolation. The solitary is the abnormal man. Man is gregarious.

+Man is a political animal. Even Stirner recognises that man is not man

+without society.</p>

+

+<p>In practice he would not have agreed with Havelock Ellis that "all

+the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding

+on." Stirner, sentimental, henpecked, myopic Berlin professor, was

+too actively engaged in wholesale criticism&mdash;that is, destruction of

+society, with all its props and standards, its hidden selfishness

+and heartlessness&mdash;to bother with theories of reconstruction. His

+disciples have remedied the omission. In the United States, for

+example, Benjamin R. Tucker, a follower of Josiah Warren, teaches a

+practical and philosophical form of Individualism. He is an Anarch

+who believes in passive resistance. Stirner speaks, though vaguely,

+of a Union of Egoists, a Verein, where all would rule all, where

+man, through self-mastery, would be his own master. ("In those days

+there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in

+his own eyes.") Indeed, his notions as to Property and Money&mdash;"it

+will always be money"&mdash;sound suspiciously like those of our "captains

+of industry." Might conquers Right. He has brought to bear the most

+blazing light-rays upon the shifts and evasions of those who decry

+Egoism, who are what he calls "involuntary," not voluntary, egotists.

+Their motives are shown to the bone. Your Sir Willoughby Patternes

+are not real Egoists, but only half-hearted, selfish weaklings. The

+true egotist is the altruist, says Stirner; yet Leibnitz was right; so

+was Dr. Pangloss. This is the best of possible worlds. Any other is

+not conceivable for man, who is at the top of his zoological series.

+(Though Quinton has made the statement that birds followed the mammal.)

+We are all "spectres of the dust," and to live on an overcrowded planet

+we must follow the advice of the Boyg: "Go roundabout!" Compromise

+is the only sane attitude. The world is not, will never be, to the

+strong of arm or spirit, as Nietzsche believes. The race is to the

+mediocre. The survival of the fittest means survival of the weakest.

+Society shields and upholds the feeble. Mediocrity rules, let Carlyle

+or Nietzsche thunder to the contrary. It was the perception of these

+facts that drove Stirner to formulate his theories in The Ego and His

+Own. He was poor, a failure, and despised by his wife. He lived under

+a dull, brutal régime. The Individual was naught, the State all. His

+book was his great revenge. It was the efflorescence of his Ego. It

+was his romance, his dream of an ideal world, his Platonic republic.

+Philosophy is more a matter of man's temperament than some suppose.

+And philosophers often live by opposites. Schopenhauer preached

+asceticism, but hardly led an ascetic life; Nietzsche's injunctions to

+become Immoralists and Supermen were but the buttressing up of a will

+diseased, by the needs of a man who suffered his life long from morbid

+sensibility. James Walker's suggestion that "We will not allow the

+world to wait for the Superman. We are the Supermen," is a convincing

+criticism of Nietzscheism. I am Unique. Never again will this

+aggregation of atoms stand on earth. Therefore I must be free. I will

+myself free. (It is spiritual liberty that only counts.) But my I must

+not be of the kind described by the madhouse doctor in Peer Gynt: "Each

+one shuts himself up in the barrel of self. In the self-fermentation

+he dives to the bottom; with the self-bung he seals it hermetically."

+The increased self-responsibility of life in an Egoist Union would

+prevent the world from ever entering into such ideal anarchy (an-arch,

+i.e., without government). There is too much of renunciation in the

+absolute freedom of the will&mdash;that is its final, if paradoxical,

+implication&mdash;for mankind. Our Utopias are secretly based on Chance.

+Deny Chance in our existence and life would be without salt. Man is not

+a perfectible animal; not on this side of eternity. He fears the new

+and therefore clings to his old beliefs. To each his own chimera. He

+has not grown mentally or physically since the Sumerians&mdash;or a million

+years before the Sumerians. The squirrel in the revolving cage thinks

+it is progressing; Man is in a revolving cage. He goes round but he

+does not progress. Man is not a logical animal. He is governed by his

+emotions, his affective life. He lives by his illusions. His brains are

+an accident, possibly from overnutrition as De Gourmont has declared.

+To fancy him capable of existing in a community where all will be

+selfgoverned is a poet's vision. That way the millennium lies, or the

+High Noon of Nietzsche. And would the world be happier if it ever did

+attain this condition?</p>

+

+<p>The English translation of The Ego and His Own, by Stephen T. Byington,

+is admirable; it is that of a philologist and a versatile scholar.

+Stirner's form is open to criticism. It is vermicular. His thought is

+sometimes confused; he sees so many sides of his theme, embroiders

+it with so many variations, that he repeats himself. He has neither

+the crystalline brilliance nor the poetic glamour of Nietzsche. But

+he left behind him a veritable breviary of destruction, a striking

+and dangerous book. It is dangerous in every sense of the word&mdash;to

+socialism, to politicians, to hypocrisy. It asserts the dignity of the

+Individual, not his debasement.</p>

+

+<p>"Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be

+reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each

+man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the

+hundred of thousands, of the party, of the section to which we belong,

+and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or the South?"</p>

+

+<p>Herbert Spencer did not write these words, nor Max Stirner. Ralph Waldo

+Emerson wrote them.</p>

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+<pre>

+

+

+

+

+

+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Egoists, by James Huneker

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