Why is there so little known of Ernest Hello? He was born 1828, died 1885, and was a voluminous author, who wrote much for theUniversand 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 isnaturallyimpossible. 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 celebratedmot. 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 hisTurris eburneaechoed 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 calledPropagateur 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."
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 theUrvaterof 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, butà 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.
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.
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 Frenchprosateursounds 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 writesgris-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.
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 spiritualbouleversementas 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!
"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 ofbrightdog 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 theclichéis 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; thetempois 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 histour 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 natureau 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."
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 hislèse-majestéagainst 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 thatkatharsis, 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 undistinguishedbourgeoisiethe 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 aNox 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.