To be the representative of logic among an assembly of poets is a difficult role and has its inconveniences. There is the risk of being taken too seriously and consequently of feeling bound to treat literature in grave tones. Gravity is not necessary for the expression of what we believe is truth; irony agreeably seasons the moral decoction; pepper is needed in this camomile. Scornfully to affirm is a sure enough way of not being the dupe of even one's own affirmations. This is practicable in literature, for here all is uncertain and art itself doubtless is but a game where we philosophically deceive each other. That is why it is good to smile.
Louis Dumur rarely smiles. But if, having now gained more indulgence and some rights to real bitterness, he wished to smile so as to excuse and amuse himself, it seems that the whole assembly of poets would protest, astonished and perhaps scandalized. So, by habit and logic, he remains grave.
He is logic itself. He can observe, combine, deduce; his novels, dramas, poems are of a solid construction whose balanced architecture delights by the skillful symmetry of curves, everything directed towards a central dome whither the eye is severely drawn. He is clever and strong enough, when charmed with error, not to abandon it except after having driven it to a corner, with its extremest consequences, and sufficiently master of himself not to confess his error, but even to defend it with all the ingenuities of argument. Such is his system of French verse based on tonic accent; it is true that the result, often deficient, for languages themselves have a quite imperious logic, was occasionally felicitous and unexpected, with hexameters like this.
L'orgueilleuse paresse des nuits, des parfums et des seins.(Tr. 39)
It is towards the theater that Dumur seems definitely to have turned his intellectual activity. The first pages of his plays cut (I do not speak ofRembrandt, a purely dramatic history, in the grand style and with vast unfolding), and one is surprised by a renovated setting, retouched words, and a light of conventional realism, an arrangement of things and beings under a new cloak and fresh varnish,—but as we go on, the author affirms that in this sad scenic landscape, valid speech will be heard and that a puff of wind turning to tempest will ruin the planting.
The screen, with its new cloth, is so arranged that, its banality destroyed by degrees, beings and things stripped by a caprice of lightning, nothing is left standing but the idea, naked or veiled in its sole, essential mysteriousness.
This old-new setting, then, is the simplest and most available, where the neutral imagination of a throng of eyewitnesses can, with the least effort, place a mental combat whose arms are the accessories of the theater.
A man journeys through the world bearing with him a coffer that contains free natal earth; he carries his love. But a day falls when he is crushed by his love. In the hour of this catastrophe, another man understands, he takes from him the woman who is breaking his arms. To love is to saddle oneself with an imperious burden up to the very moment when, ceasing to be free, one ceases to be strong.La Motte de terreexplains this lucidly and forcefully. It is the work of a writer thoroughly master of his natural gifts, shaping them with an ease and that air of domination which easily subdues ideas. It happens that a work may be superior to the man and to his very intelligence, but by very little. Though it be little and an innocent untruth, it is a humiliating spectacle and provokes scorn more than the written avowal of the most frightful and complete mediocrity in the brain that gave it birth. The man of worth is always superior to his creation, for his desire is too vast ever to be filled, his love too miraculous ever to be met.
La Nébuleuseis a poem of lovely and deep perspective, where, symbolized by artless beings, are seen the successive generations of men following each other uncomprehendingly, almost undiscerningly, so different are their souls, and always summed up, to the moment of their decline, by the child, the future, the "nebula," whose birth, finally confirmed, brings death, under its morning clearness, to the faded smiles of the aged stars. And, the vision ended, it is urged that this morrow, which is becoming today, will be altogether like its dead brothers, and that in short there is nothing new in the spectacle which amuses the dead years leaning
Sur les balcons du Ciel en robes surannées.(Tr. 40)
But this "nothingness" has no importance for the human atoms that form and determine it; it is the delightful newness that we breathe and of which we live. The new! The new! And let each intelligence, though short-lived, affirm his will to exist, and to be dissimilar to all antecedent or surrounding manifestations, and let each nebula aspire to the character of a star whose light shall be distinct and clear among other lights.
All this I have read in the text and in the silences of the dialogue, for when the work of art is the development of an idea, the very spaces between lines answer whoever can question them.
Dumur is disposed to create a philosophical theater, a theater of ideas, and also to renew theroman à these, forPauline ou la Liberté de l'amouris a serious work, arranged with skill, thought out in an original manner and implying a rare intellectual worth.
There are few dramatists among the newcomers, I mean fervent observers of the human drama, endowed with that large sympathy which urges the writer to fraternize with all modes and forms of life. To some the people's actions seem unimportant, perhaps because they lack that spirit of philosophic generalization which elevates the humblest happenings to the height of a tragedy. Others have and confess the tendency to simplify everything. They observe and compare facts only to extract summaries and quintessences from them; they have qualms and shame at narrating the mechanisms so often described: they set up soul portraits, keeping of physical anatomy only the materiality necessary to hold the play of colors. Such an art, beside having the disadvantage of being disliked by the reading public (which desires that it be told stories, and which demands it of the newcomer) is the sign of an evident and too disdainful absence of passion. But the dramatist is an impassioned being, a mad lover of life and of the present life, not the things of yesterday, dead representations whose faded decorations are recognizable in lead coffins, but beings of today with all their beauty and animal grossness, their mysterious souls, their true blood that will flow from a heart and not from a swollen bladder, if stabbed in the fifth act.
Georges Eekhoud is a dramatist, a passionate soul, a quaffer of life and of blood.
His sympathies are multifarious and diverse; he loves everything. "Nourish thyself with all that has life." Obeying the biblical word, he gathers strength from all the repasts the world offers him, he assimilates the tender or the harsh wildness of peasants or sailors with as much sureness as the most deliberate and hypocritical psychology of creatures drunk with civilization, the disquieting infamy of eccentric loves and the nobility of consecrated passions, the brutal sport of clumsy popular customs and the delicate perversion of certain adolescent souls. He makes no choice, but understands everything because he loves everything.
Nevertheless, whether voluntarily or whether fixed to the natal soil by social necessities, he has limited the field of his fantastic pursuits to the very limits of old Flanders. This agrees marvelously with his genius, which is Flemish, excessive in his sentimental raptures as in his debauches, Phillippe de Champaigne or Jordaens, drawing out lean faces dramatized by the eyes of the fixed idea or displaying all the red irruptions of joyous flesh. Eekhoud, then, is a representative writer of a race, or of a moment of this race. This is important to assure permanence to a work, and a place in the literary histories.
Cycle patibulaireandMes communionsseem the two books of Eekhoud where this impassioned man cries his charities, angers, compassions, scorns and loves most clearly and loudly, he himself the third book of that marvelous trilogy whose two first have for title, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren.
Playing a little on the word, I have called him "dramatist," in defiance of the etymologies and usages, although he has never written for the theater; but we divine a genius essentially dramatic by the way in which his narratives are planned and as though miraculously balanced to the sudden changes, the return to their true nature of characters maddened by passion.
He has the genius for sudden changes. A character: then life presses down and the character bends; a new weight straightens and sets him up according to his original truth. It is the very essence of psychological drama, and if the setting shares in the human modifications, the work assumes an air of finality and plenitude, giving an impression of unforseen art by the accepted logic of natural simplicities. This might be a system of composition (not however deficient), but not here: the whisperings of the instinct are hearkened to and welcomed; the necessity of the catastrophe is thrust upon this lucid mind (who has not dulled his mirror by breathing upon it), and he clearly relates the consequences of the seismic movement of the human soul. There are good examples of this art in the tales of Balzac:El Verdugois only a succession of sudden changes, but too concise: Eekhoud'sle Coq Rouge, just as dramatic, has a much deeper analysis and then is unveiled with grandeur, like a lovely land-scape' effortlessly transformed by the play of clouds and the luminous space.
Equally grand, though with a cruel beauty, is the tragic story simply calledUne mauvaise rencontrewhere is seen the heroic transfiguration of the piteous soul of a weak vagrant, overpowered by the strength of a gesture of love and, under the imperious magnetism of the word, blossomed martyr, a stream of pure blood rushing miraculously from the putrefied veins of the social carrion. Later on Mauxgraves enjoys and dies of the terror of having beheld his words realized to their very supreme convulsion, and the red cravat of the predestined become the steel garrote which cuts the white neck in two.
In a novel of Balzac is a rapid, confused episode, which will recall this tragedy to genealogists of ideas. Through hatred of humanity, M. de Grandville has given a note for a thousand francs to a ragpicker, so as to turn him into a drunkard, an idler, a thief; when he returns to his home, he learns that his natural son has just been arrested for theft; it is only romantic. This same anecdote, minus the conclusion, is found inA Rebourswhere des Esseintes acts, but on a young blackguard, nearly like M. de Grandville and through a motive of malignant scepticism. Here is a possible tree of Jesse, but which I declare unauthentic, for the tragic perversity of Eekhoud, chimera or screech-owl, is an original and sincere monster.
If sincerity is a merit, it is doubtless not an absolute literary merit. Art is well pleased with falsehood and no one is particular to confess either his "communions" or his repulsions; but by sincerity I here understand the artistic disinterestedness which acts so that the writer, unafraid of terrifying the average brain or of vexing certain friends or masters, disrobes his thought with the calm wantonness of the extreme innocence of perfect vice—or of passion. Eekhoud's "communions" are impassioned; he eagerly sits down to table and having nourished himself on charity, anger, pity and scorn, having tasted all the love elixirs piously formed by his hate, he rises, drunks but not fed, with the future joys.
The author ofMystère des Foulesstrongly recalls Balzac; he has his power and dispersive force. Like Balzac, but to a much smaller extent, he wrote, while very young, execrable books where no one could have forseen the future genius of an intelligence truly cyclical;la Force du malis no more in the germ inle Thé chez Mirandathanle Pere GoriotinJane la Pâleorle Vicaire des Ardennes.Paul Adam, nevertheless, is a precocious person, but there are limits to precocity especially in a writer destined to narrate life exactly as he sees and feels it. It was needful that the education of the senses should have had time to mature and that experience should have fortified the mind in the art of comparisons and choice, the association and disassociation of ideas. A novelist still needs a large erudition and all kinds of ideas that are solidly acquired, but slowly and by chance, by the good will of things and the favorableness of events.
Today Paul Adam is in all his radiance and on the very eve of glory. Each of his gestures, each pace of his brings him nearer to the bomb-ketch ready to explode, and if he withstands the qualing from the thunderclap, he will be king and master. By this bomb-ketch, I do not mean the great mob, but that large public, already selected, which, insensible to pure art, nevertheless demands that its romantic emotions be served enrobed in true literary style, original, strongly perfumed, of long dough cleverly kneaded, and in a form new enough to surprise and charm. This was Balzac's public; it is the public which Paul Adam seems on the point of reconquering. The novel of maimers (I omit three or four masters whom I have not to judge here) is fallen lower than ever since the century and a half when it was brought from England. Neglecting observation, style, imagination and especially ideas, which were rather general than particular, the fictionists who took up the trade of telling stories, have brought fiction to such a point of disrepute that an intelligent man, mindful of employing his leisure in a manner worthy of his intelligence, no longer dares open one of these books, which even the quay book-stalls rebel against and dam up against the yellow current. Paul Adam certainly has suffered through this convulsion of scorn: the lettered men and women, badly informed, have long supposed that his books were like all the rest. They are different.
First by style: Paul Adam uses a language that is vigorous, concise, full of images; new to the point of inaugurating syntactic forms. By observation: his keen glance pierces like a wasp sting through things and souls; like the new photography, he reads through skins and caskets. By the imagination, which permits him to evoke and vivify the most diverse, characteristic and personal beings, he has, like Balzac, the genius not only of giving life to his characters, but personality, of making them true individuals, all well-endowed with an individual soul: inla Force du Mal, a young girl is placed so sharply under our eyes that she becomes unforgettable; her character, unfortunately, too abruptly summed up, wavers at the end. By fecundity, finally: fecundity not only linear and of the nature of cleared fields, but of works whose slightest are still works.
He has undertaken two great romantic epopees which his ardent bold spirit will perfect to the condition of monuments,l'Epoqueandles Volontés merveilleuses. He works alone, like a swarm, and at the first ray of sunshine, the bee ideas rush tumultously forth and disperse across the vast fields of life.
Paul Adam is a magnificient spectacle.
He was a young man of savage and unexpected originality, a diseased genius and, quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane and in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form and not the quality of the intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume and all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe.
Such was the adventure of the amazing stranger, self-adorned with this romantic pseudonym: Comte de Lautréamont. He was born at Montevideo in April, 1846, and died at the age of twenty-eight, having published theChants de MaldororandPoésies,a collection of thoughts and critical notes of a literature less exasperated and even, here and there, too wise. We know nothing of his brief life: he seems to have had no literary connection, the numerous friends apostrophized in his dedications bearing names that have remained secrets.
TheChants de Maldororis a long poem in prose whose six first chants only were written. It is probable that Lautréamont, though living, would not have continued them. We feel, in proportion as we finish the reading of the volume, that consciousness is going, going—and when it returns to him, several months before his death, he composes thePoésies, where, among very curious passages, is revealed the state of mind of a dying man who repeats, while disfiguring them in fever, his most distant memories, that is to say, for this infant, the teachings of his professors!
A motive the more why these chants surprise. It was a magnificent, almost inexplicable stroke of genius. Unique this book will remain, and henceforth it remains added to the list of works which, to the exclusion of all classicism, forms the scanty library and the sole literature admissible to those minds, oddly amiss, that are denied the joys, less rare, of common things and conventional morality.
The worth of theChants de Maldororis not in pure imagination: fierce, demoniac, disordered or exasperated with arrogance in crazy visions, it terrifies rather than charms; then, even in unconsciousness, there are influences that can be determined. "O Nights of Young," the author exclaims in his verses, "what sleep you have cost me!" And here and there he is swayed by the romantic extravagances of such English fictionists as were still read in his time, Anne Radcliffe and Maturin (whom Balzac esteemed), Byron, also by the medical reports on eroticism, and finally by the bible. He certainly had read widely, and the only author he never quotes, Flaubert, must never have been far from his reach.
This worth I would like to make known, consists, I believe, in the novelty and originality of the images and metaphors, by their abundance, the sequence logically arranged like a poem, as in the magnificent description of a shipwreck, where all the verses (although no typographie artifice betokens them) end thus: "The ship in distress fires cannon shots of alarm; but it founders slowly ... majestically." So, too, the litanies of the Ancient Ocean: "Ancient Ocean, your waters are bitter. I greet you, Ancient Ocean. Ancient Ocean, O great celibate, when you course the solemn solitudes of your phlegmatic realms ... I greet you, Ancient Ocean." Here are other images: "like a corner, as far as the eye can reach, where shivering cranes deliberate much, and soar sturdily in winter athwart the silence." And this terrifying invocation: silk-eyed octopus. To describe men he uses expressions of a Homeric suggestiveness: narrow-shouldered men, ugly-headed men, lousy-haired men, the man with pupils of jasper, red-shanked men. Others have a violence magnificently obscene: "He returns to his terrified attitude and continues to watch, with a nervous trembling, the male hunt, and the great lips of the vagina of gloom, whence ceaselessly flow, like a river, immense dark spermatazoae which take their flight in the desolate ether, concealing entire nature with the vast unfolding of their bat wings, and the solitary legions of octopuses, saturnine and doleful at watching these hollow inexpressible fulgurations." (1868: so that one cannot class them as phrases fancied from some print of Odilon Redon). But what a theme, on the other hand, what a story for the master of retrograde forms, of fear and the amorphous stirrings of beings that are near—and what a book, written, we might say, to tempt him!
Here is a passage, at once quite characteristic of Lautréamont's talent and of his mental malady:
"With slow steps the brother of the blood-sucker (Maldoror) marched through the forest.... Then he cried: 'Man, when you come upon a dead dog, pressed against a milldam so as to prevent it from issuing, go not like the others, and take with your hands the worms that flow from his swollen belly, considering it with astonishment, opening a knife, and then cutting a great number of them from the body, as you repeat that you too will be no more than this dog. What mystery seek you? Neither I nor the four fins of the sea bear of the Northern Seas have succeeded in solving the problem of life.... Who is this being, near the horizon, that fearlessly approaches, with troubled oblique bounds? And what majesty blended with serene gentleness! His gaze, though kind, is piercing. His enormous eyelids play with the breeze and appear alive. He is unknown to me. My body trembles as he fixes his monstrous eyes on me. Something like a dazzling aureole of light plays around him.... How fair he is.... You should be powerful, for you have a form more than human, sad as the universe, beautiful as suicide.... How! ... it is you, toad!... great toad ... unfortunate toad!... Pardon!... What do you on this earth where are the accursed? But what have you done with your viscous fetid pustules to have such a sweet air? I saw you when you descended from above, poor toad! I was thinking of infinity, and at the same time of my weakness.... Since then you have appeared to me monarch of the ponds and marshes! Covered with a glory which belongs only to God, you have departed thence, leaving me consoled, but my staggering reason founders before such grandeur.... Fold your white wings and gaze not from on high with those troubled eyes." The toad rests on its hind legs (which resemble those of a man) and, while the slugs, woodles, and snails flee at the sight of their mortal enemy, gives utterance to those words: "Hearken, Maldoror. Notice my figure, calm as a mirror.... I am but a simple dweller of the reeds, 'tis true, but thanks to your own contact, taking of good only what is in yourself, my reason has grown and I can converse with you.... As for myself, I should prefer to have protruding eyes, my body lacking feet and hands, to have killed a man, than to be as you are. For I hate you! Adieu, then, hope not to find again the toad in your passage. You have been the cause of my death. I leave for eternity, to implore pardon for you."
"With slow steps the brother of the blood-sucker (Maldoror) marched through the forest.... Then he cried: 'Man, when you come upon a dead dog, pressed against a milldam so as to prevent it from issuing, go not like the others, and take with your hands the worms that flow from his swollen belly, considering it with astonishment, opening a knife, and then cutting a great number of them from the body, as you repeat that you too will be no more than this dog. What mystery seek you? Neither I nor the four fins of the sea bear of the Northern Seas have succeeded in solving the problem of life.... Who is this being, near the horizon, that fearlessly approaches, with troubled oblique bounds? And what majesty blended with serene gentleness! His gaze, though kind, is piercing. His enormous eyelids play with the breeze and appear alive. He is unknown to me. My body trembles as he fixes his monstrous eyes on me. Something like a dazzling aureole of light plays around him.... How fair he is.... You should be powerful, for you have a form more than human, sad as the universe, beautiful as suicide.... How! ... it is you, toad!... great toad ... unfortunate toad!... Pardon!... What do you on this earth where are the accursed? But what have you done with your viscous fetid pustules to have such a sweet air? I saw you when you descended from above, poor toad! I was thinking of infinity, and at the same time of my weakness.... Since then you have appeared to me monarch of the ponds and marshes! Covered with a glory which belongs only to God, you have departed thence, leaving me consoled, but my staggering reason founders before such grandeur.... Fold your white wings and gaze not from on high with those troubled eyes." The toad rests on its hind legs (which resemble those of a man) and, while the slugs, woodles, and snails flee at the sight of their mortal enemy, gives utterance to those words: "Hearken, Maldoror. Notice my figure, calm as a mirror.... I am but a simple dweller of the reeds, 'tis true, but thanks to your own contact, taking of good only what is in yourself, my reason has grown and I can converse with you.... As for myself, I should prefer to have protruding eyes, my body lacking feet and hands, to have killed a man, than to be as you are. For I hate you! Adieu, then, hope not to find again the toad in your passage. You have been the cause of my death. I leave for eternity, to implore pardon for you."
Alienists, had they studied this book, would have classified the author among those aspiring to pass for persecuted persons: in the world he only sees himself and God—and God thwarts him. But we might also inquire whether Lautréamont is not a superior ironist, a man forced by a precious scorn for mankind to feign a madness whose incoherence is wiser and more beautiful than the average reason. There is the madness of pride; there is the delirium of mediocrity. How many balanced and honest pages, of good and clear literature, would I not give for this, for these words and phrases under which he seems to have wished to inter reason herself! The following is taken from the singularPoésies:
"The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusions, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the innoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience, cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks, simoom of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pédéraste, phenomena of the aquarium and the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camelias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness and scorning himself with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies, vague vistas that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin and their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin and Dumasfils, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania,—before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us and bows us down." Maldoror (or Lautréamont) seems to have judged himself in making himself apostrophised thus by his enigmatic Toad: "Your spirit is so diseased that it perceives nothing; and you deem it natural each time there issues from your mouth words that are senseless, though full of an infernal grandeur."
"The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusions, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the innoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience, cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devil-fish, sharks, simoom of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anaemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pédéraste, phenomena of the aquarium and the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, ordure, that which does not think like a child, desolation, the intellectual manchineel trees, perfumed cankers, stalks of the camelias, the guilt of a writer rolling down the slope of nothingness and scorning himself with joyous cries, remorse, hypocrisies, vague vistas that grind one in their imperceptible gearing, the serious spittles on inviolate maxims, vermin and their insinuating titillations, stupid prefaces like those of Cromwell, Mademoiselle de Maupin and Dumasfils, decaying, helplessness, blasphemies, suffocation, stifling, mania,—before these unclean charnel houses, which I blush to name, it is at last time to react against whatever disgusts us and bows us down." Maldoror (or Lautréamont) seems to have judged himself in making himself apostrophised thus by his enigmatic Toad: "Your spirit is so diseased that it perceives nothing; and you deem it natural each time there issues from your mouth words that are senseless, though full of an infernal grandeur."
Laforge, in the course of a reading, sketched some notes regarding Corbière which, though not printed, are nevertheless definitive, as for instance:
"Bohemian of the Ocean—picaresque and tramp—breaking down, concise, driving his verse with a whip—strident as the cry of gulls, and like them never wearied—without aestheticism—nothing of poetry or verse, hardly of literature—sensual, he never reveals the flesh—a blackguard and Byronic creature—alway the crisp word—there is not another artist in verse more freed of poetic language—he has a trade without plastic interest—the interest, the effect is in the whip stroke, the dry-point, the pun, the friskiness, the romantic abruptness— he wishes to be indefinable, uncataloguable, to be neither loved nor hated; in short, declassed from every latitude, every custom hither and beyond the Pyrenees."
This doubtless is the truth: Corbière all his life was dominated and led by the demon of contradiction. He supposed that one must be differentiated from men by thoughts and acts exactly contrary to the thoughts and acts of the mass of men; there is much of the willful in his originality; he labored at it as women labor over their complexion during long afternoons between sky and earth, and when he disembarked, it was to draw broadsides of stupefaction. Dandyism à la Baudelaire.
But a nature cannot be developed except in the sense of its instincts and inclinations. Corbière had inherently to be something of what he became, the Don Juan of singularity; it is the only woman he loves; he mocks the other with the clever phrase "the eterna madame."
Corbière has much wit, wit at the same time of the Montmartre wine-shop and of the blade of past times. His talent is formed of the braggart spirit, uncouth and humbug, of a bad impudent taste, of genius thrusts. He has the drunken air, but he is only laboriously clumsy; to make absurd chaplets, he shapes from miraculous, rolled pebbles works of a secular patience, but in the dizaine he leaves the little stone of the sea quite naked and rough, because at bottom he loves the sea with a great naiveté and because his folly for paradoxical things gives way, from time to time, to an intoxication of poetry and beauty.
Among the never ordinary verses ofAmours jaunes, are many that are admirable, but admirable with an air so equivocal, so specious, that we do not always enjoy them at the first meeting; then we judge that Tristan Corbière is, like Laforgue, a little his disciple, one of those undeniable, unclassable talents which are strange and precious exceptions in the history of literature—singular even in a gallery of oddities.
Here are two little poems of Tristan Corbière, forgotten even by the last publisher of theAmours jaunes:
PARIS NOCTURNEC'est la mer;—calme plat—Et la grande maréeAvec un grondement lointain s'est retirée....Le flot va revenir se roulant dans son bruit.Entendez-vous gratter les crabes de la nuit.C'est le Styx asséché: le chiffonier Diogène,La lanterne à la main, s'en vient avec sans-gêne.Le long du ruisseau noir, les poètes perversPêchent: leur crâne creux leur sert de boîte à vers.C'est le champ: pour glaner les impures charpiesS'abat le vol tournant des hideuses harpies;Le lapin de gouttière, à l'affût des rongeurs.Fuit les fils de Bondy, nocturnes vendangeurs.C'est la mort: la police gît.—En haut l'amourFait sa sieste, en tétant la viande d'un bras lourdOû le baiser éteint laisse sa plaque rouge.L'heure est seule. Écoutez. Pas un rêve ne bouge.C'est la vie: écoutez, la source vive chanteL'éternelle chanson sur la tête gluanteD'un dieu marin tirant ses membres nus et vertsSur le lit de la Morgue ... et les yeux grands ouverts.PARIS DIURNEVois aux deux le grand rond de cuivre rouge luire,Immense casserole où le bon Dieu fait cuireLa manne, l'arlequin, l'éternel plat du jour.C'est trempé de sueur et c'est trempé d'amour.Les laridons en cercle attendent prés du four,On entend vaguement la chair rance bruire,Et les soiffards aussi sont là, tendant leur buire,Les marmiteux grelotte en attendant son tour.Crois-tu que le soleil frit donc pour tout le mondeCes gras graillons grouillants qu'un torrent d'or inonde?Non, le bouillon de chien tombe sur nous du ciel.Eux sont sous le rayon et nous sous la gouttière.A nous le pot au noir qui froidit sans lumière.Notre substance à nous, c'est notre poche à fiel.(Tr. 41)
Born at Morlaix in 1845, Tristan returned there in 1875 to die of inflammation of the lungs. He was the son (others say the nephew) of the sea romancer, Edouard Corbière, author ofNégrier, whose violent love for the things of the sea had such a strong influence upon the poet. ThisNégrier, by Edouard Corbière, captain on a long-voyage vessel, 1832, 2 vol. in-8, is a quite interesting tale of maritime adventures. The fourth chapter of the first part, entitledPrisons d'Angleterre, (the convict ships) contains the most curious details about the habits of the prisoners, about the loves of thecorvetteswith the "forts-a-bras"—in one place, the author says, where "there was only one sex." The preface of this novel reveals a spirit that is very proud and very disdainful of the public: the same spirit with some talent and a sharper nervousness,—you have Tristan Corbière.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born at Charleville, October 20, 1854, and from the most tender age showed traits of the most insupportable blackguardism. His brief stay in Paris was in 1870-71. He followed Verlaine in England, then in Belgium. After the little misunderstanding which separated them, Rimbaud roved through the world, followed the most diverse trades, a soldier in the army of Holland, ticket taker at Stockholm in the Loisset circus, contractor in the Isle of Cyprus, trader at Harrar, then at Cape Guardafui, in Africa, where a friend of M. Vittorio Pico saw him, applying himself to the fur trade. It is likely that, scorning all that lacks brutal gratification, savage adventure, the violent life, this poet, singular among all, willingly renounced poetry. None of the authentic pieces ofReliquaireseem more recent than 1873; although he did not die before the end of 1891. The verses of his extreme youth are weak, but from the age of seventeen Rimbaud acquired originality, and his work will endure, at least by virtue of phenomena. He is often obscure, bizarre and absurd. Of sincerity nothing, with a woman's character, a girl's, inherently wicked and even savage, Rimbaud has that kind of talent which interests without pleasing. In his works are pages which give the impression of beauty one feels before a pustulous toad, a good-looking syphillitic woman, or the Chateau-Rouge at eleven o'clock in the evening.Les Pauvres â l'èglise, les Premières Communionspossess an uncommon quality of infamy and blasphemy.Les Assisandle Bateau ivre,—there we have the excellent Rimbaud, and I detest neitherOraison du soirnorles Chercheuses de Poux.He was somebody after all, since genius ennobles even baseness. He was a poet. Some verses of his have remained living almost in the state of ordinary speech:
Avec l'assentiment des grands héliotropes.(Tr. 42)
Some stanzas ofBateau ivrebelong to true and great poetry:
Et dès lors je me suis baigné dans le poèmeDe la mer, infusé d'astres et latescent,Dévorant les azurs verts où, flottaison blêmeEt ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend,Où, teignant tout à coup les bleuités, déliresEt rythmes lents sous les rutilements du jour,Plus fortes que l'alcool, plus vastes que vos lyres,Fermentent les rousseurs amères de l'amour.(Tr. 43)
The whole poem marches: all of Rimbaud's poems march, and inles Illuminationsthere are marvelous belly dances.
It is a pity that his life, so poorly known, was not the truevita abscondita; what is known disgusts from what can be understood of it. Rimbaud was like those women whom we are not surprised to learn have taken to religion in some house of shame; but what revolts still more is that he seems to have been a jealous and passionate mistress: here the aberration becomes debauched, being sentimental. Senancour, the man who has spoken most freely of love, says of these inharmonious liaisons where the female falls so low that she has no name except in the dirtiest slang:
"When in a very particular situation, the need results in a minute of misconduct, we can perhaps pardon men totally vulgar, or at least banish its memory; but how understand that which becomes a habit, an attachment? The fault may have been accidental; but that which is joined to this act of brutality, that which is not unforseen, becomes ignoble. If even a passion capable of troubling the head and almost of depriving one of liberty, has often left an ineffaceable stain, what disgust will not a consent given in cold-blood inspire? Intimacy in this manner, that is the height of shame, the irremediable infamy."
But the intelligence, conscious or unconscious, though not having all rights, has the right of all absolutions.
... Qui sait si le genieN'est pas une de vos vertus,(Tr. 44)
monsters, whether you are called Rimbaud,—or Verlaine?
Like all writers who have achieved an understanding of life, Francis Poictevin, though a born novelist, promptly renounced the novel. He knows that everything happens, that a fact in itself is not more interesting than another fact and that the manners of expression alone have significance.
I recall something to this effect reported by Sarcey apropos of the lamentable Murger: "About gave him a subject for a novel; he made nothing of it. He was decidedly a sluggard." It is very difficult to persuade certain old men—old or young—that there are nosubjects; there is only asubjectin literature, and that he who writes, and all literature, that is to say all philosophy, can arise equally from the cry of a run-over dog as from Faust's exclamations as he questions Nature: "Where seize thee, O infinite Nature? And thou, Breasts?"
The author ofTout Basand ofPresque,like any other person, could have arranged his meditations in dialogues, order his sentiments into chapters divided at random, insinuate through pseudo-living characters a bit of gesticulating life and have them express, by the act of kneeling on the flag-stones of some familiar church, the virtue of an unrecognized creed: in short, write "the novel of mysticism" and popularize the practice of mental prayer for the "literary journals." By this means his books would have gained him a popularity which certainly he now lacks, for few writers among those whose talent is evident are so little esteemed, less known and less discussed. Poictevin disdains all artifice save the artifice of style, a snare into which we are content to fall. Whether he notes the delicacies of a flower, a little girl's attitude, the grace of a madonna, or the cold and quite hard purity of Catherine de Gênes, he wins us with sure strokes, by that very preciosity with which some clumsily reproach him. This preciosity is rigorously personal. Apart from all groups, as remote from Huysmans as from Mallarmé, the author ofTout Basworks, one would say, in a cell, an ideal cell he carries with him while traveling; and there, standing, often kneeling, he pours out his poems and prayers in phrases that have the unique musical quality of a Byzantine organ. Less phrases than vibrations, vibrations so peculiar that few souls find themselves attuned. Music of Gregorian plain-chant, such as one listens to in a sumptuous Flemish church, with sudden fugues of exalted prayer that soar aloft towards the high lines and hurl themselves against the painted vaults, kindling old stained-glass windows, illuming the lines of the darkened cross with love. The mystic monk, the true mystic, Fra Angelico, and Bonaventura a little, live again in the pages ofPresquewith its chatoyant spirituality, more than in all the pseudo-mystic literature of our time. Would not the author ofRecordare sanctae crucisfind more satisfaction in this prayer than in the patronizing and fructiferous deductions; "Here below the Christ appears the most adorable, most absorbed figure of the eternal substance, scented with all virtues; a figure with dulcet blues, the burning clear yellows of topaz or chrysanthemum, the blood-red hues of future glories. And despite my daily relapses, I compel myself, according to Jesus' word to the Samaritan, to adoration in spirit and in truth," Poictevin has entered the "Garden of all the flowerings" of which Saint Bonaventura sang,
(Crux deliciarum hortusIn quo florent omnia....)(Tr. 45)
and kneeling, he has kissed the heart of roses whose rosary is of blood,—the blood of the great torment. While Morning, fair-haired youth, delivers moist adolescence to folly-driven women, he goes towards a priestly peace, to masses of solitude, and one of the graces gathered is that his soul becomes impregnated with the "interior light,claritas caritas."
It is the essential point. Mere phrases, yes; but the phrases are no more than the attire and reserve of his art. He has felt, dreamed or thought before speaking; especially has he loved: and some of his, metaphors leap like a fervent prayer, like one of the cries of Saint Theresa.
He strives clearly to reach the bottom, to penetrate even the vital center of the hortensia's umbel. Everywhere he seeks—and finds—the soul. No one is less a rhetorician than this stylist, for the rhetorician is he who clothes the solid common things with garments fit to sustain all the vulgarity of bedizenings, while Poictevin ever diaphanizes a phantom, a rainbow, an illusion, an azalea flower, thus: "Would a hand of a consumptive in the contraction of its quasi-diaphaneity, leaning, not lazily, but which no longer is conscious, seem to warn, less exalted than before and indulgently returned?"
Yes, how subtle it is!—and why not write "like everybody"?
Alas! that is forbidden him,—because he is a mystic, because he feels new rapports between man and God, and because, veiled in the dolorous perfection of a form where grace becomes pearled in minutiae, Poictevin is a spontaneous writer. How many things, doubtless, has he never transcribed, afraid of not having discovered the exact expression, the unique and very rare, the unedited!
Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,—and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,—and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.
Disciple of Goncourt, from whom he further sharpened his precious style of writing, Francis Poictevin by degrees refined himself to immateriality. And that is just his genius, the expression of the immaterial and the inexpressible: he invented the mysticism of style.
In 1891 I wrote as follows apropos of theCahiers d'André Walter, an anonymous work: "The diary is a form of good literature and perhaps the best for some extremely subjective minds. De Maupassant would make nothing of it. For him the world is like the cover of a billiard table; he notes the meetings of the balls and stops when the balls stop, for if there is no further material movement to be perceived, there is nothing more to be said, The subjective soul feeds on itself through the reserve of its stored sensations; and, by an occult chemistry, by unconscious combinations whose numbers approach infinity, those sensations, often of a faraway past time, become changed and are multiplied in ideas. Then are narrated, not anecdotes, but the very anecdotes of oneself, the only kind that can often be retold, if one has the talent and gift to vary their appearances. In this way has the author of these copy books worked and thus will he work again. His is a romantic and philosophic mind, of the lineage of Goethe. One of these years, when he will have recognized the helplessness of thought against the onward course of things, its social uselessness, the scorn it inspires in that mass of corpuscles named society, indignation will seize him, and since action, though illusive, is forever closed to him, he will wake armed with irony. This oddly enough, is a writer's finishing touch; it is the co-efficient of his soul's worth. The theory of the novel, stated in a note of page 120 is of more than mediocre interest; we must hope that the author upon occasion will recollect it. As for the present book, it is ingenuous and delicate, the revealer of a fine intelligence. It seems the condensation of a whole youth of study, dreams and sentiment, of a tortuous, timorous youth. This reflection (p. 142) rather well sums up André Walter's state of mind: 'O, the emotion when one is quite near to happiness, when one has but to touch it,—and passes on.'"
There is a certain pleasure in not having been deceived in one's first judgment of the first book of an unknown person. Now that André Gide has, after several intelligent works, become one of the most luminous of the Church's Levites, with the flames of intelligence and grace quite visible around his brow and in his eyes, the time nears when bold discoverers will discuss his genius, and, since he fares forth and advances, sound the trumpets of the advancing column. He deserves the glory, if anyone merits it (glory is always unjust) since to the originality of talent the master of minds willed that in this singular being should be joined an originality of soul. It is a gift rare enough to justify speaking of it.
A writer's talent is often nothing but the terrible faculty of retelling, in phrases that seem beautiful, the eternal clamors of mediocre humanity. Even gigantic geniuses, like Victor Hugo or Adam de Saint-Victor were destined to utter an admirable music whose grandeur consists in concealing the immense emptiness of the deserts: their soul is like the formless docile soul of deserts and crowds; they love, think, and desire the loves, thoughts, desires of all men and of all beasts; poets, they magnificently declaim what is not worth the trouble of being thought.
The human species, doubtless, in its entire aspect of a hive or colony, is only superior to the bison species or the king-fisher, because we are a part of it; here and there man is a sorry automaton; but his superiority lies in his ability to attain consciousness; a small number reach this stage. To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that one no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,—while social fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul,—and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which André Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they wish to express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar and almost understood, as parchments are seen and read above sealed glass cases.
But all this is related inPaludes, a story, as is known, "of animals living in dusky caverns, and which lose their sight through never being used"; it is also, with a more intimate charm than in theVoyage d' Urien, the ingenuous story of a very complicated, very intellectual and very original soul.