Les fleurs du mal, 1857.
Les fleurs du mal, 1857.
Certain of these Flowers of Evil are poisonous; some are grown in the hotbeds of Hell; some have the perfume of a serpentine girl's skin; some the odour of woman's flesh. Certain spirits are intoxicated by these accursed flowers, to save themselves from the too much horror of their vices, from the worse torture of their violated virtues. And a cruel imagination has fashioned these naked images of the Seven Deadly Sins, eternally regretful of their first fall; that smile not even in Hell, in whose flames they writhe. One conceives them there and between the sun and the earth; in the air, carried by the winds; aware of their infernal inheritance. They surge like demons out of the Middle Ages; they are incapable of imagining God's justice.
Baudelaire dramatizes these living images of his spirit and of his imagination, these fabulous creatures of his inspiration, these macabre ghosts, in a fashion utterly different from that of other tragedians—Shakespeare, and Aristophanes in his satirical Tragedies, his lyrical Comedies; yet in the same sense of being the writer where beauty marries unvirginally the sons of ancient Chaos.
In these pages swarm (in his words) all the corruptions and all the scepticisms; ignoble criminals without convictions, detestable hags that gamble, the cats that are like men's mistresses; Harpagon; the exquisite, barbarous, divine, implacable, mysterious Madonna of the Spanish style; the old men; the drunkards, the assassins, the lovers (their deaths and lives); the owls; the vampires whose kisses raise from the grave the corpse of its own self; the Irremediable that assails its origin: Conscience in Evil! There is an almost Christ-like poem on his Passion,Le reniement de Saint-Pierre,an almost Satanic denunciation of God inAbel and Cain,and with them the Evil Monk, an enigmatical symbol of Baudelaire's soul, of his work, of all that his eyes love and hate. Certain of these creatures play in travesties, dance in ballets. For all the Arts are transformed, transfigured, transplanted out of their natural forms to pass in magnificent state across the stage: the stage with the abyss of Hell in front of it.
"Sensualist" (I quote a critic), "but the most profound of sensualists, and, furious of being no more than that, he goes, in his sensation, to the extreme limit, to the mysterious gate of infinity against which he knocks, yet knows not how to open, with rage he contracts his tongue in the vain effort." Yet centuries before him Dante entered Hell, traversed it in imagination from its endless beginning to its endless end; returned to earth to write, for the spirit of Beatrice and for the world, thatDivina Commedia,of which in Verona certain women said:
"Lo, he that strolls to Hell and backAt will I Behold him, how Hell's reekHas crisped his beard and singed his cheek."
It is Baudelaire who, in Hell as in earth, finds a certain Satan in such modern hearts as his; that even modern art has an essentially demoniacal tendency; that the infernal pact of man increases daily, as if the Devil whispered in his ear certain sardonic secrets. Here in such satanic and romantic atmosphere one hears dissonances, the discords of the instruments in the Sabbats, the howlings of irony, the vengeance of the vanquished.
I give one sentence of Gautier's on Baudelaire. "This poet ofLes fleurs du malloved what one wrongly calls the style of decadence, which is no other thing than the arrival of art at this extreme point of maturity that determined in their oblique suns the civilizations that aged: a style ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades and of rarities, turning for ever backward the limits of the language, using technical vocabularies, taking colours from all the palettes, notes from all the keyboards, striving to render one's thought in what is most ineffable, and form in its most vague and evasive contours, listening so as to translate them, the subtle confidences of neurosis, the passionate confessions of ancient passions in their depravity and the bizarre hallucinations of the fixed idea." He adds: "In regard to his verse there is the language already veined in the greenness of decomposition, the tainted language of the later Roman Empire, and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School, the last form of Greek art fallen in delinquencies." See how perfectly the phrasela langue de faisandéesuits the exotic style of Baudelaire!
Yet, tainted as the style is from time to time, never was the man himself tainted: he who in modern verse gave first of all an unknown taste to sensations; he who painted vice in all its shame; whose most savorous verses are perfumed as with subtle aromas; whose women are bestial, rouged, sterile, bodies without souls; whoseLitanies de Satanhave that cold irony which he alone possessed in its extremity, in these so-called impious lines which reveal, under whatever disguise, his belief in a mathematical superiority established by God from all eternity, and whose least infraction is punished by certain chastisements, in this world as in the next.
I can imagine Baudelaire in his hours of nocturnal terrors, sleepless in a hired woman's bed, saying to himself these words of Marlowe'sSatan:
"Why, this is Hell, nor can I out of it!"
in accents of eternal despair wrenched from the lips of the Arch Fiend. And the genius of Baudelaire, I can but think, was as much haunted as Marlowe's with, in Lamb's words, "a wandering in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, approaching the dark gulf near enough to look in."
Has Baudelairel'amour du mal pour le mal?In a certain sense, yes; in a certain sense, no. He believes in evil as in Satan and God—the primitive forces that govern worlds: the eternal enemies. He sees the germs of evil everywhere, few of the seeds of virtue. He sees pass before him the world's drama: he is one of the actors, he plays his parts cynically, ironically. He speaks in rhythmic cadences.
But, above all, he watches the dancers; these also are elemental; and the tragic fact is that the dancers dance for their living. For their living, for their pleasure, for the pleasure of pleasing others. So passes the fantastic part of their existence, from the savage who dances silent dances—for, indeed, all dancers are silent—but without music, to the dancer who dances for us on the stage, who turns always to the sound of music. There is an equal magic in the dance and in song; both have their varied rhythms; both, to use an image, the rhythmic beating of our hearts. It is imagined that dancing and music were the oldest of the arts. Rhythm has rightly been called the soul of dancing; both are instinctive.
The greatest French poet after Villon, the most disreputable and the most creative poet in French literature, the greatest artist in French verse, and, after Verlaine, the most passionate, perverse, lyrical, visionary, and intoxicating of modern poets, comes Baudelaire, infinitely more perverse, morbid, exotic than these other poets. In his verse there is a deliberate science of sensual perversity, which has something almost monachal in its accentuation of vice with horror, in its passionate devotion to passions. Baudelaire brings every complication of taste, the exasperation of perfumes, the irritant of cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption to the creation and adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served before a veiled altar. There is no confession, no absolution, not a prayer is permitted which is not set down in the ritual. With Verlaine, however often love may pass into sensuality, to whatever length sensuality may be hurried, sensuality is never more than the malady of love.
The great epoch in French literature which preceded this epoch was that of the offshoot of Romanticism which produced Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola, and Leconte de Lisle. Even Baudelaire, in whom the spirit is always an uneasy guest at the orgy of life, had a certain theory of Realism which tortures many of his poems into strange, metallic shapes and fills them with irritative odours, and disturbs them with a too deliberate rhetoric of the flesh. Flaubert, the greatest novelist after Balzac, the only impeccable novelist who ever lived, was resolute to be the creator of a world in which art—formal art—was the only escape from the burden of reality. It was he who wrote to Baudelaire, who had sent himLes fleurs du mal: "I devoured your volume from one end to another, read it over and over again, verse by verse, word by word, and all I can say is it pleases and enchants me. You overwhelm me with your colours. What I admire most in your book is its perfect art. You praise flesh without loving it."
There is something Oriental in Baudelaire's genius; a nostalgia that never left him after he had seen the East: there where one finds hot-midnights, feverish days, strange sensations; for only the East, when one has lived in it, can excite one's vision to a point of ardent ecstasy. He is the first modern poet who gave to a calculated scheme of versification a kind of secret and sacred joy. He is before all things the artist, always sure of his form. And his rarefied imagination aided him enormously not only in the perfecting of his verse and prose, but in making him create the criticism of modern art.
Next after Villon, Baudelaire is the poet of Paris. Like a damned soul (to use one of his imaginary images) he wanders at nights, an actualnoctambule,alone or with Villiers, Gautier, in remote quarters, sits in cafés, goes to casinos, theRat Mort."The Wind of Prostitution" (I quote his words) torments him, the sight of hospitals, of gambling houses, the miserable creatures one comes on in certain quarters, even the fantastic glitter of lamplights. All this he needs: a kind of intense curiosity, of excitement, in his fréquentation of these streets, comes over him, like one who has taken opium. And this is only one part of his life, he who lived and died solitary, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth,le mauvais moinsof his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.
He is the first who ever related things in the modulated tone of the confessional and never assumed an inspired air. The first also who brings into modern literature the chagrin that bites at our existence like serpents. He admits to his diabolical taste, not quite exceptional in him; one finds it in Petronius, Rabelais, Balzac. In spite of his magnificentLitanies de Satan,he is no more of the satanical school than Byron. Yet both have the same sardonic irony, the delight of mystification, of deliberately irritating solemn people's convictions. Both, who died tragically young, had their hours of sadness, when one doubts and denies everything; passionately regretting youth, turning away, in sinister moods, in solitude, from that too intense self-knowledge that, like a mirror, shows the wrinkles on our cheeks.
Baudelaire, whose acquaintance with English was perfect, was thrilled in 1846 when he read certain pages of Poe; he seemed to see in his prose a certain similarity in words and thoughts, even in ideas, as if he himself had written some of them; these pages of a prose-writer whom he named "the master of the horrible, the prince of mystery." For four years he set himself to the arduous task of translating the prose of a man of genius, whom he certainly discovered for France and for French readers. And his translation is so wonderful that it is far and away finer than a marvellous original. His first translation was printed inLe Liberté de Penséein July, 1848, and he only finished his translations at the end of sixteen years. In 1852 theRevue de Parisprinted hisEdgar Allan Poe; sa vie et ses ouvrages.His translations came in this order:Histoires extraordinaires(1856, which I have before me);Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires(1857, which I also possess);Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym(1858);Euréka(1864);Histoires grotesques et sérieuses(1865).
One knows the fury with which (in 1855) he set himself the prodigious task of translating one of Poe's stories every day; which, to one's amazement, he actually did. Always he rages over his proofs, over those printers' devils, an accursed race; every proof is sent back to the printing press, revised; underlined, covered in the margins with imperative objurgations, written with an angry hand and accentuated with notes of exclamation. Swinburne shared the same fate. He writes to Chatto a violent letter on the incompetence of printers: "their scandalous negligence," "ruinous and really disgraceful blunders," "numberless wilful errors," written in a state of perfect frenzy. "These damned printers," he cries at them, as Baudelaire did; "who have done their utmost to disfigure my book. The appearance of the pages is disgraceful—a chaos." And he actually writes one letter to complain of a dropped comma!
TheNotes nouvelles sur Edgar Poeof 1857 are infinitely finer than those of 1856. He begins with:Littérature de décadence!and with a paradox, of his invention, of the Sphynx without an enigma.Genus irritabile vatum!a Latin phrase for the irritable race of artists, is irrefutable, and certainly irrefutable are all Baudelaire's arguments, divinations, revelations of Poe's genius and of Poe's defects.
Poe's genius has been generally misunderstood. He gave himself to many forms of misconception: by his eccentricities, his caprices, his fantastic follies, his natural insolence, his passionate excitations (mostly imaginary), his delinquencies in regard to morals, his over-acute sensibility, his exasperating way of exasperating the general public he hated, his analysing problems that had defied any living writer's ingenuity to have compassed (as in his detective stories); above all, his almost utter alienation from that world he lived in, dreamed in, never worshipped, died in.
And he remains still a kind of enigma; in spite of the fact that the most minute details of his life are known, and that he never outlived his reputation. Yes, enigmatical in various points: as to his not giving even the breath of life to the few ghosts of women who cross his pages; of never diving very deeply into any heart but his own. Are not most of his men malign, perverse, atrocious, abnormal, never quite normal, evocations of himself? From Dupin to Fortunato, from the Man in the Crowd to the Man in the Pit, from Prince Prospero to Usher, are not theserevenants,in the French sense?
There is something demoniacal in his imagination; for Poe never, I might say, almost never, lets his readers have an instant's rest; any more than the Devil lets his subjects have any actual surcease of torment. Yet, as there is a gulf between Good and Evil, no one, by any chance, falls into the abyss.
Poe, of course, writes with his nerves, and therefore only nervous writers have ever understood him. It is Baudelaire, the most nervous of modern writers, who says of Poe that no one, before him, had affirmed imperturbably the natural wickedness of man. Yet this statement is a paradox; a lesser paradox is that man is originally perverse; for all are notnés marques pour le mal?
Poe is not a great critic; he says certain unforgettable things, with even an anticipation of the work of later writers. "I know," he says, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music—I mean of the tme musical expression. Give it any undue decision—imbue it with any very determinate tone—and you deprive it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character" Where he is great is where he writes: "I have a pure contempt for mere prejudice and conventionality;" and mostly where he defines himself. "Nor is there an instance to be discovered, among all I have published, of my having set forth, either in praise or censure, a single opinion upon any critical topic of moment, without attempting, at least, to give it authority by something that wore the semblance of a reason."
His fault is that he is too lenient to woman poets who never merited that name and to men of mere talent; yet he annihilates many undeserved reputations; perhaps, after all, "thrice slain." No one pointed out the errors in Mrs. Browning's verses as he did; her affectations such as "God's possibles;" her often inefficient rhythm; her incredibly bad rhymes. Yet, for all this, he, whose ear as a poet was almost perfect, made the vile rhyme of "vista" with "sister," that raised the righteous wrath of Rossetti.
In his essay on Hawthorne, he warns one from a certain heresy. "The deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as an allegory, is a very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome." But it is on pages 196-198 of hisMarginaliathat he gives his final statement in regard to Verse, the Novel, and the Short Story; so far as these questions have any finality. As, for instance, how the highest genius uses his powers in "the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour." As for the Story, it has this immense advantage over a novel that its brevity adds to the intensity of the effect; that "Beauty can be better treated in the poem, but that one can use terror and passion and horror as artistic means." Poe was a master of the grotesque, of the extraordinary, never of the passionate.
There is an unholy magic in some of his verse and prose; in his hallucinations, so real and so unreal; his hysterics, his sense of the contradiction between the nerves and the spirit; in his scientific analyses of terrible, foreseen effects, where generally the man of whom he writes is driven into evil ways. For did he not state this axiom: "A good writer has always his last line in view when he has written his first line?" This certainly was part of hismétier,made of combinations and of calculations.
I read somewhere, "There is nothing wonderful in 'The Raven.'" It is really atour de force;even if the metre is not invented, he invented the inner double rhymes, and the technique is flawless. It has Black Magic in it; the unreality of an intoxication; a juggler's skill; it will be always his most famous poem. In his analysis of these verses, does not Poe undervalue the inspiration that created them? Yes, by an amusing vanity. And, as Baudelaire says: "A little charlatanism is always permitted to a man of genius, and it doesn't suit him badly. It is like the rouge on the cheeks of a woman actually fair, a new form of seasoning for the spirit."
There was too much of the woman in the making of Poe, manly as he was in every sense. He had no strength of will, was drawn from seduction to seduction; had not enough grip on his constitution to live wisely, to live well. He drifted, let himself be drifted. He had no intention of ruining himself, yet ruined he was, and there was nothing that could have saved him. Call it his fate or his evil star, he was doomed inevitably to an early death.Pas de chance!Yes—let one suppose—had he himself chosen the form of his death, he might have desired to die like the sick women in his pages—mourant de maux bizarres.
Baudelaire, the most scrupulous of the men of letters of our age, spent his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a marvellous original. Often an enigma to himself, much of his life and of his adventures and of his experiences remain enigmatical. I shall choose one instance out of many; that is to say, what was the original of his dedication ofL'HeautimoromenosinLes Fleurs du Mal, and of his dedication ofLes paradis artificielsto a woman whose initials are J. G. F.?
The poem was first printed inL 'Artiste, May 10, 1857, together with two other poems, all equally strange, extraordinary, and enigmatical:Franciscae Meae Laudes,andL'Irrémédiable.The Latin verses, composed, not in the manner of Catullus, but in a metre that belongs to the late Decadent poets of the Middle Ages, are as magnificent as inspired, and are written really in modern Latin. This is the Dedication:Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote.The verses are musical and luxurious. He sings of this delicious woman who absolves one's sins, who has drunk of the waters of Lethe, who has spoken as a star, who has learned what is vile, who has been in his hunger an hostel, in his night a torch, and who has given him divine wine. The second, that has the woman's initials, is founded, as to its name, on the comedy of Terence,The Self-Tormentor,where, in fact, the part of Menedemas, the self-tormentor, rises to almost tragic earnestness, and reminds one occasionally of Shakespeare'sTimon of Athens.Nor are Baudelaire's verses less tragic. It is the fiercest confession in the whole of his poems in regard to himself and to women. He strikes her with hate, cannot satiate his thirst of her lips; is a discord in her voracious irony that bites and shakes himself; she is in his voice, in his blood (like poison), and he is her sinister mirror. He is the wound and the knife, the limbs, and the wheel; he is of his own heart the vampire condemned in utter abandonment to an eternal laughter.
The third is a hideous nightmare when Idea and Form and Being fall into the Styx, where a bewitched wretch fumbles in a place filled with reptiles; where a damned man descends without a lamp eternal staircases on which he has no hold; and these are symbols of an irremediable fortune which makes one think that the Devil always does whatever he intends to do. At the end a heart becomes his mirror; and before the Pit of Truth shines an infernal and ironical lighthouse, that flashes with satanical glances and is:La conscience dans le mal!
InLes fleurs du mal(1857), a copy of which, signed in Baudelaire's handwriting, is before me on the desk where I write these lines, I find that the two first poems I have mentioned follow each other in pages 123-127, and I feel certainly inclined to attribute those three poems to the same inspiration. Compare, for example, "Puits de vérité" withPiscina plena virtutis;"Dans un Styx bourbeux" withSicat beneficum Lethe;"Tailler les eaux de la souffrance" withLabris vocem redde mutis!"Au fond d'un cauchemar énorme" with "Je suis de mon cœur le vampire." And, "Je suis le sinister miroir" with "Qu'un cœur devenu son miroir." Compare also the dedication to the Latin verses "A une modiste érudite et dévote" with, in the dedication ofLes paradis,"une qui tourne maintenant tous ses regards vers le ciel." His reason for writing Latin verses for and to a dressmaker is evident enough: a deliberate deviation from the truth, a piece of sublime casuistry. One must also note this sentence: "Le calembour lui-même, quand il traverse ces pédantesques bégaiements, ne joue-t-il pas la grâce sauvage et baroque de l'enfance?" And again, when he writes: "Words, taken in quite a new acceptation of their meaning, reveal the charming uneasiness of the Barbarian of the North who kneels before a Roman Beauty;" this sentence certainly is only comprehensible if one realizes that it was written for J. G. F. Finally, take these two lines, which seem to prove satisfactorily the truth of my attribution:
In nocte mea taberna.Flambeau des grâces sataniques.
I return to my copy ofLes paradis artificiels(1860). The dedication to J. G. F. begins: "Ma chère amie,Common-sense tells us that terrestrial things have but a faint existence, and that actual reality is found only in dreams. Woman is fatally suggestive; she lives with another life than her proper one; she lives spiritually in the imaginations that she haunts.
Les paradis artificiels, 1861.
Les paradis artificiels, 1861.
"Besides, it seems to me there is little enough reason why this dedication should be understood. Is it even necessary, for the writer's satisfaction, that any kind of book ought to be understood, except by him or by her for whom it has been composed? Is it, indeed, indispensable that it has been written forany one?I have, for my part, so little taste for the living world that, like certain sensible and stay-at-home women who send, I am told, their letters to imaginary friends by the post, I would willingly write only for the dead.
"But it is not to a dead woman that I dedicate this little book; it is to one who, though ill, is always active and living in me, and who now turns her eyes in the direction of the skies, that realm of so many transfigurations. For, just as in the case of a redoubtable drug, a living being enjoys the privilege of being able to draw new and subtle pleasures even from sorrow, from catastrophe, and from fatality.
"You will see in this narrative a man who walks in a sombre and solitary fashion, plunged in the moving flood of multitudes, sending his heart and his thoughts to a far-off Electra who so long ago wiped his sweating forehead andrefreshed his lips parched by fever;and you will divine the gratitude of another Orestes, whose nightmares you have so often watched over, and whose unendurable slumbers you dissipated, with a light and tender hand."
I have to say that in the last sentences I have translated Baudelaire uses "tu" instead of "vous," and that he does the same in his Latin verses and in the verses next after it. The question still remains: who was the woman of the initials?
What is certainly not a solution of the unfathomable mystery of this enigmatical woman, but which is, in a certain sense, a clue, I find on pages 55-67 of the book I have referred to, a narrative that seems more than likely to have been hers. He says this to make one understand better the mixture of dreams and hallucinations in haschisch, as having been sent him by a woman: "It is a woman, rather a mature woman, curious, of an excitable spirit, who, having yielded to the temptation of using the drug, describes her visions." These are superb and fantastic visions, written by an imaginative, sensitive, and suggestive woman. She begins: "However bizarre and astonishing are these sensations that intoxicated my folly for twelve hours (twelve or twenty? I don't know which) I shall never return to them. The spiritual excitement is too vivid, the fatigue too much to endure, and, to say all, in this childish enchantment I find something criminal." She adds: "I have heard that the enthusiasm of poets and of creators is not unlike what I have experienced, in spite of the fact that I have always imagined that such men whose delight is to move us ought to be of a really calm temperament; but if poetical delirium has any resemblance with what a little teaspoon full of drugged jam has given me, I think that all such pleasures cost dear to poets, and it is not without a certain prosaic satisfaction that I return to real life."
In these sentences Baudelaire gives one a certain clue as to the identity of this woman. "But, above all, observe that in this woman's story the hallucination is of a bastard kind, and whose reason of being is to be an exterior spectacle; the mind is no more than a mirror where the surrounding environment is transformed in an extraordinary fashion. Besides, we see intervene what I must call the moral hallucination: the subject believes he is subjected to an expiation, but the feminine temperament, which is little accustomed to analysis, does not permit itself to note the singularly optimistic character of this hallucination. The benevolent regard of the Olympian Divinities is poetized by a kind of varnish essentiallyhaschischin.I cannot say that this woman has escaped from the sense of remorse; but that her thoughts, momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and of regret, have returned to their former sensibility."
I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by the same woman to whomLe paradisis dedicated. Like Orestes, he might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: "And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, how I keep the watches of the night—how often I bewail my hapless sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. G. F.'s?
In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed:Théophile Gautier, par Charles Baudelaire;a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: "Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French language, even l'Argot.
Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac.
"Not for the first," he says, in hisStudy of Shakespeare,"and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.
"'I have been many a time astonished that to pass for an observer should be Balzac's great title to fame. To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary. All his characters are gifted with the ardour of life which animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. From the highest of the aristocracy to the lowest of the mob, all the actors in hisHuman Comedyare keener after living, more active and cunning in their struggles, more staunch in endurance of misfortune, more ravenous in enjoyment, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself. And as all beings of the outer world presented themselves to his mind's eye in a strong relief and with a telling expression, he has given a convulsive action to his figures; he has blackened their shadows and intensified their fights. Besides, his prodigious love of detail, the outcome of an immoderate ambition to see everything, to bring everything to fight, to guess everything, to make others guess everything, obliged him to set down more forcibly the principal fines so as to preserve the perspective of the whole. He reminds me of some fines of those etchers who are never satisfied with the biting-in of their outlines, and transform into very ravines the main scratches of the plate. From this astonishing natural disposition of mind wonderful results have been produced. But this disposition is generally defined as Balzac's great fault. More properly speaking, it is exactly his great distinctive quality. But who can boast of being so happily gifted, and of being able to apply a method which may permit him to invest—and that with a sure hand—what is purely trivial with splendour and imperial purple? Who can do this? Now, he who does not, to speak the truth, does no great thing.'"
"T am far from sure," said Paul Verlaine to me in Paris, "that the philosophy of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam will not one day become the formula of our century." Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the belief common to all Eastern mystics. And there is in everything he wrote a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and deliberate, which seems to me to be the natural consequences of his intellectual pride. It is part of his curiosity in souls—as in the equally sinister curiosity of Baudelaire—to prefer the complex to the simple, the perverse to the straightforward, the ambiguous to either. His heroes are incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies are the shock of spirit against matter, the temptation of spirit by spiritual evil. They are on the margins of a wisdom too great for their capacity; they are haunted by dark powers, instincts of ambiguous passions. And in the women his genius created there is the immortal weariness of beauty; they are enigmas to themselves; they desire, and know not why they refrain; they do good and evil with the lifting of an eyelid, and are guilty and innocent of all the sins of the earth.
Autograph letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859.
Autograph letter of Baudelaire to Monsieur de Broise, 1859.
Villiers wrote these significant sentences in the preface toLa Révolte(1870): "One ought to write for the entire world. Besides, what does justice matter to us? He who from his very birth does not contain in himself his proper glory shall never know the real significance of this word." In the literature of the fantastic there are few higher names than that of the Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam—a writer whose singular personality and work render him perhaps the most extraordinary figure in the contemporary world of letters. The descendant of a Breton house of fabulous antiquity, his life has been, like his works, a paradox, and an enigma. He has lived, as he says somewhere, "par politesse," ceaselessly experimenting upon life, perhaps a little too consciously, with too studied an extravagance of attitude, but at least brilliantly, and with dramatic contrasts. An immense consciousness of his own genius, a pride of race, a contempt, artistic and aristocratic, of the common herd, and, more especially, of thebourgeoismultitude of letters and of life: it is to moods of mind like these, permanent with him, that we must look for the source of that violent andvoulueccentricity which mars so much of his work, and gives to all of it so disdainful an air. It is unfortunate, I think, when an artist condescends so far as to take notice of the Philistine element in which an impartial Providence has placed him. These good people we have always with us, and I question if any spiritual arms are of avail against them. They are impervious, impalpable; they do not know when they are hit. But to Villiers "les gens de sens commun" are an incessant preoccupation. He is aware of his failure of temper, and writes at the head of a polemical preface,Genus irritabile vatum.
In considering the work of Villiers I am brought face to face with a writer who seems to be made up of contradictions. Any theory, if it be at all precise, must proceed by making exceptions. Here is a writer who is at once a transcendentalist and a man of the world, a cynic and a believer in the things of the spirit. He is now Swift, now Bernadin de St. Pierre, now Baudelaire or Heine. In reading him you pass from exaltation to buffoonery with the turn of a page, and are never quite sure whether he is speaking seriously or in jest. Above all, everywhere there is irony; and the irony is of so fine a point, and glances in so many directions, that your judgment is distracted, interrupted, contradicted, and confused in a whirlwind of conflicting impressions.
Villiers has written much. The volume ofContes cruels(published in 1880) includes, I believe, work, of many periods; it contains specimens of every style its author has attempted, and in every kind the best work that he has done. The book as a whole is a masterpiece, and almost every separate tale is a masterpiece. I can think of no other collection of tales in any language on which so various and finely gifted a nature has lavished itself; none with so wide a gamut of feeling, none which is so Protean a manifestation of genius. TheTalesof Edgar Poe alone surpass it in sheer effect, theTwice-Told Talesof Hawthorne alone approach it in variety of delicate sensation; both, compared with its shifting and iridescent play of colours, are but studies in monochrome. Around this supreme work we may group the other volumes.La révolte,a drama in one act in prose, represented at the Vaudeville, May 6th, 1870, has something of the touch of certainContes cruels; it is, at least, not unworthy of a place near them.L'Ève future(1886), that most immense and ferocious of pleasantries, is simply one of the scientific burlesques of theContesswollen out into a huge volume, where it is likely to die of plethora. The volume of the same year, called after its first taleL'Amour suprême,attempts to be a second set ofContes Cruels;it has nothing of their distinction, except inAkëdysséril. Tribulat Bonhomet,which appeared in 1887—"une bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, couleur du siècle," as the author has called it—is largely made up of an "Étude physiologique" published in 1867. In the two later volumes,Histoires insolites(1888) andNouveaux contes cruels(1889), there are occasional glimpses of the early mastery, as in the fascinating horror ofLa torture par l'espérance,and the delicate cynicism ofLes amies de pension.As for the prose drama in five acts,Le Nouveau Monde(1876), which had the honour of gaining a prize—"une médaille honorifique, une somme de dix mille francs même, d'autres seductions encore"—there is little in it of the true Villiers; a play with striking effects, no doubt, movement, surprises, a grandiose air; but what would you have of a "prize poem"? It was acted at one of the theatres at Paris in 1883, under the auspices of the dilettante Comte d'Orsay, and it had a very gratifying "literary" success. Such, omitting the early works, of which I have every first edition, and the numerous volumes of which the titles and no more have been published, are the works we have before us from which to study "peut-être le seul des hommes de notre génération qui ait eu en lui l'étincelle du génie"—as Catulle Mendès, ever generous in his literary appreciation of friend and foe, has said in that charming book,La légende du Parnasse contemporaine.I shall speak chiefly of theContes cruels,and I shall try to classify them after a fashion, in order to approach one after another the various sides of this multiform and manysided genius.
First and before all, Villiers is a humorist, and he is a humorist who has no limitations, who has command of every style, who has essayed every branch of the literature of the fantastic. There are some halfdozen of tales—all contained in theContes cruels—which, for certain of the rarest qualities of writing—subtleties, delicate perversities, exquisite complexities of irony essentially modern—can be compared, so far as I know, with nothing outside thePetits poèmes en proseof Baudelaire.Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, Maryelle, Sentimentalisme, Le convive des dernières fêtes, La Reine Ysabeau—one might add the solitary poem inserted, jewel amid jewels, amongst the prose—these pieces, with which one or two others have affinities of style though not of temper, constitute a distinct division of Villiers' work. They are all, more or less, studies in modern love, supersubtie and yet perfectly finished little studies, so light in touch, manipulated with so delicate a finesse, so exquisite and unerring in tact, that the most monstrous paradoxes, the most incredible assumptions of cynicism, become possible, become acceptable. Of them all I think the masterpiece isLes demoiselles de Bienfilâtre;and it is one of the most perfect little works of art in the world. The mockery of the thing is elemental; cynicism touches its zenith. It becomes tender, it becomes sublime. A perversion simply monstrous appears, in the infantine simplicity of its presentment, touching, credible, heroic. The edge of laughter is skirted by the finest of inches; and, as a last charm, one perceives, through the irony itself—the celestial, the elementary irony—a faint and sweet perfume as of a perverted odour of sanctity. The style has the delicacy of the etcher's needle. From beginning to end every word has been calculated, and every word is an inspiration. No other tale quite equals this supreme achievement; but inMaryelle,inSentimentalisme,and the others there is the same note, and a perfection often only less absolute.MaryelleandSentimentalismeare both studies in a special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate lightness of the style—the gentle, well-bred,disengagedtone of araconteurwithout reserve or after-thought, or with all that scrupulously hid—there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other side of cynicism.La Reine YsabeauandLe Convive des Dernières Fêtessound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, and fatality is unrolled before our eyes—the something enigmatical in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points akin to it, is the strange tale ofLe Convive des Dernières Fêtes,perhaps, after the more epic chronicle ofLa Reine Ysabeau,the finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the samefrissonin the latter part ofTribulat Bonhomet,and in the marvellous little study in the supernaturalL'Intersigne,one of the most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror—distinct and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind—is but one among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the samebizarrerie—the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C., and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves—scenes which have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a sarcastic smile.
What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the fantastic edifice of his work.
The group of tales I have been considering reveals the humorist in his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist, and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose or preoccupation. In the pseudo-scientific burlesques, and the kindred satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic Muse has given place to "Laughter holding both his sides;" absurdity caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are barbed, and they fly not quite at random. "L'Esprit du siècle," says Villiers, "ne l'oublions pas, est aux machines." And it is in the mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means of comedy, and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate plan of "an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh," make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of advertisement (Affichage Céleste), and describe in all its detail and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius Bottom,La machine à gloire,a mechanical contrivance for obtaining dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces. Familiar words take new meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme, an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of the scientific burlesques,L'Ève future,it is almost impossible to tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the "très-illustre inventeur américain, M. Edison," of anartificial woman!No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of "poor humanity," has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it; the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls.
So far we have had the humorist, a humorist who appears to be cynic to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities ofLes demoiselles de Bienfilâtreand the scientific hilarity ofLa machine à gloire.But we have now to take account of one of those "exceptions" of which I spoke—work which has nothing of the humorist in it, work in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality and all the virtues.Virginie et Paulis a-story of young love comparable only with that yet lovelier story, the magical chapter, inRichard Feverel.This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their little moment of lovers' chat, full of the poetry of the most homely and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses—;per amica silentia lunæ—and there is not a wrong note in it, no exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and charming little romance ofL'Inconnueis another of these tales of ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers' hearts, and with a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated, style.L'Amour Suprême,a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma of tender and etherealized affection—an adoring and almost mystic love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative ofVéra,which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem ofAkëdysséril—transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched, for all its remoteness, with the human note—in this epic fragment, considered in France, I believe, to be, in style at least, Villiers' masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!—think for a moment ofLes demoiselles de Bienfilâtre,ofL'Analyse chimique du dernier soupir!What, then, are we to believe? Has Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irréconciliable opposites? Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in a word, is the true Villiers? "For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is he."
The question is not a difficult one to answer; it depends upon an elementary knowledge of the nature of that perfectly intelligible being, the cynic. The typical cynic is essentially a tender-hearted, sensitive idealist; his cynicism is in the first instance a recoil, then, very often, a disguise. Most of us come into the world without any very great expectations, not looking for especial loftiness in our neighbours, not very much shocked if every one's devotion to the ideal is not on a level with, perhaps, ours. We go on our way, if not exactly "rejoicing," at least without positive discomfort. Here and there, however, a soul nurtured on dreams and nourished in the scorn of compromise finds its way among men and demands of them perfection. There is no response to the demand. Entranced by an inaccessible ideal, the poor soul finds that its devotion poisons for it all the wells of earth. And this is the birth of what we call a cynic. The cynic's progress is various, and seldom in a straight fine. It is significant to find that inRévolte,one of Villiers' comparatively early works, the irony has a perfectly serious point, and aims directly at social abuses. The tableau is a scene, an episode, taken straight from life, a piece of the closest actuality; there is no display, no exaggeration, all is simple and straightforward as truth. The laughter in it is the broken-hearted laughter, sadder than tears, of the poet, the dreamer, before the spectacle of the world. It is obviously the work of one who is a mocker through his very passion for right and good, his sense of the infinite disproportion of things. Less obviously, but indeed quite really, is the enormous and almost aimless mockery of some of these tales of his the reverse of a love of men and a devotion to the good and the beautiful. Cynicism is a quality that develops, and when we find it planted in the brain of a humorist there is simply no accounting for the transformations through which it may run. Thus the gulf which seems to separateLes demoiselles de BienfilâtrefromL'inconnueis, after all, nothing but a series of steps. Nor is it possible for one who judges art as art to regret this series of steps; for it is precisely his cynicism that has become the "note," the rarest quality, of this man of passionate and lofty genius; it is as a cynic that he will live—a cynic who can be pitiless and tender, Rabelaisian and Heinesque, but imaginative, but fantastically poetical, always.