My Friend, the Incurable
Howdo you do? Or, as Oscar Wilde preferred it, How do you think? It is so much more interesting. Tell me, if you can, spontaneously, freely, about your thoughts, reveal your personality, and we shall enjoy a most engaging conversation, as charming as any good novel or essay. Speak about yourself; people do this so much better than when they discuss others. To me the most enchanting reading has always been literature of Personality, such as subjective lyrics or chatty essays of the Montaigne category; but I am particularly interested in Letters and Memoirs, where the writer reaches transparency, unless he deliberately uses his pen as a masque for self-concealment, as is the case, to my mind, inDe Profundis. True, an artist reveals his best in his artistic creation; you discover autobiographical contours of Goethe in Faust and Werther; Tolstoy’s restless searchings are mirrored in Besukhov, in Levin, in Nekhludov; Zarathustra andEcce Homoallow you a glimpse into the very crater of Vesuvius-Nietzsche. Yet through this medium you see the artist in his royal garb, so to speak, in his regalia; he seldom appears to you in his unceremonious morning-gown and slippers, to let you contemplate him not at hisbestbut in his quotidian intimate aspect. Exceptions? I admit a legion.
To be sure, Francois Villon[1]wore no stage array. His childish frankness and spontaneity account for the fact that he is to this very day an outcast amongbon tonsalons, and even Robert Louis Stevenson stooped to condemn him. Of course he is a disgrace for the fraternity of writers: a thief, a robber, a murderer, a tramp, a debauchee, who possessed less tact than even his by-no-means puritanic confrère, Rabelais, and chanted most exquisite verses on most base topics. Villon is not in the least detached from his poetry: he is it, his very life was a song, a ballad. Filthy fifteenth century Paris, licentious monks, mercenary courtesans, tavern sages, knights of the road and candidates of the gibbet—in such an atmosphere the poet breathed, lived, and sang in the old picturesque French. Every adventure, every experience, impression, and emotion, Villon reflected in a ballad or a rondel, with equal beauty and sincerity; with equal compassion and loyalty he chanted to his religious mother and to the faded courtesan, to the duck-thiefand to the creaking gibbet; and he poured a world of tender humor and sympathy into his greatestBallade des Pendus, an epitaph for himself and his companions expecting to be hanged. You may love him, you may condemn him, but you cannot deny his absolute truthfulness, for his soul is unreservedly denuded, a quivering, appealing, humane soul.
[1]The Poems of Francois Villon, translated by H. DeVere Stacpoole. [John Lane Company, New York.]
Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!
Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!
Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!
Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!
Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.
A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!
Villon is justly called “the father of French poetry”; his influence has been felt for nearly five centuries, from Rabelais to Verhaeren. Indeed, in the savage cosmic rhythm of the “enormous” Belgian I often hear the echo of the medieval “Pauvre Villon.” Verhaeren.... I must close my eyes when I think of this Titan. You cannot gauge him, you cannot see him in his entirety: an Atlas, bigger than our planet, detached from it. I think Verhaeren has been best loved, and perhaps best understood in Russia,—a land where realities are looked upon as symbols, else life would become a horrible absurdity. There he is endeared as the lyricist of the modern soul rent with eternal contradictions in the great task of transvaluation of values: a mystic with no God, a prophet with no blessing, a positivist without faith in man, a socialist without a political program, an anarchist without “action,” an urbanite longing for his village, a villager craving for the city. Verhaeren destroys rather than creates, wills rather than believes, yearns rather than attains. His movement lacks gracefulness; his attack, firmness; his flight, lightness; his love, tenderness; his architecture is without system, his system without method. And the more profound, the more palpitating and irresistible is the chaos of his titanic images heaped in masses, the more sincere are his wails, the more burning his tears. I think it was the admirable French critic, René Ghil, who observed that to Verhaeren the world appears as if in a flash of lightning, in an enormous, exaggerated form, and as such he embodies it in his work—also exaggerated, also enormous; that his poetry resembles the genius of Rodin hewing his Balzac out of marble and powerful dreams.
How differently is Verhaeren conceived in the Teutonic mind! The Austrian poet, Stefan Zweig,[2]has written an interesting book on the Belgian, an elaborate study of his personality and works, which substantiates my claim that people speak much more successfully about themselves than about others. Herr Zweig appreciates Verhaeren highly (and let me tell you sub rosa, my friend, that his general estimation of the Poet is but a pale echoing of the brilliant Léon Bazalgette in his bookLes célébrités d’aujourd hui); he considers him the greatest poet living, he names himtheEuropean poet in the same sense as Whitman istheAmerican poet. Soon, however,he falls into the Teutonic fallacy of preciseness-by-all-means, of violently accurate definitions whichmustsuit the facts, else—desto schlimmer für die Fakten. He wishes us to believe with him that Verhaeren is the poet of socialism, of democracy, that he has proclaimed his great Aye to contemporary life, with its greed, factories, and smoke; that a poet who wants “to be necessary to our time must feel that everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful.” Thus with the German skill in fencing with Hegelian dialectics the critic endeavors to persuade us that Verhaeren must needs love modern life in all its aspects, that he is enraptured with all manifestations of contemporary spirit, from the urban “multitude” to that most hideous platitude, the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Zweig has utterly failed to see that Verhaeren does not feel the present, the contemporary, that he lives spiritually in the past and in the future, while the fleeting present is for him but asymbol, an alphabet of monstrous hieroglyphs, the mysteries of which he interprets prophetically. Has he not expressed his endless despair and maddening grief over the tragedy of the all-absorbing monster-city? Has the world not been to him a Golgotha, “an eternal illusion”? To Mr. Zweig Verhaeren is a happy, satisfied lover of all and everything. The poet and the painter, Maximilian Voloshin (one of whose poems appeared inThe Little Review), relates his impression of the Belgian: “When you see him for the first time you notice before anything else a deep furrow cleaving his brow, resembling two wide-spread wings of a flying bird. This furrow is himself. In it is his sorrow, his flight.” I wonder whether Mr. Zweig has observed the furrow; or did he deliberately overlook it in order to save his “structure”?
[2]Emile Verhaeren, by Stefan Zweig. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]
Yes, my friend, people seldom succeed in their attempt to interpret others. Would you classify biographies as literature of personality? Perhaps in the sense that they reveal the personality of the biographer, but then it depends upon the value of that personality. Here is an instance. The brother of Parnell writes his Memoirs[3], bringing forth a mass of details and anecdotes of “Charley’s” life. Charles Parnell has always been a fascinating personality to me. Long ago I heard a lecturer speaking on the great Irishman before a European audience of revolutionists; the listeners (by no means Irish!) were enchanted with the figure of the unique leader, with his powerful individuality and skillful strategy. I have pondered many a time over his portrait revealing the mysterious face of a medieval sorcerer, and have looked forward to a work that would help me in gaining a clearer idea of the “uncrowned King of Ireland.” His brother’s memoirs gave me a wealth of information about their family pedigree and about each individual member(their number is considerable), particularly about the writer’s business undertakings. About Charles Parnell I have learned numerous external facts and figures, but his intrinsic self is as little known to me now as before. Of what value is such a book which succeeds merely in introducing to you Mr. John Howard, an Irish gentleman of no particular interest?
[3]Charles Steward Parnell: A Memoir, by his brother, John Howard Parnell. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
It is totally different when you are confronted with such a wonderful individuality as Romain Rolland[4]. Apparently it is a book of essays on Berlioz, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, D’Indy, Strauss, Debussy, and on some aspects of modern music; in reality you come to know the rich personality of Rolland and the reactions of his sensitive, graceful soul on the musical productions of our best-known composers. I am delighted with his influence on my views; not that he has altered them: musical opinions do not let themselves be proved or disproved; but he hasenhancedmy attitudes, he has made me admire my favorites more profoundly and hate my torturers more thoroughly. Do not let your Editor know that Brahms’s symphonies prove as indigestible to Rolland as they have been to your humble Incurable. It is the reading of such a book that offers me the joy of looking into a great soul, and it reminds me of the exalted experience I have had in reading Wilde’sIntentions, or the essays of Przybyszewsky and Arthur Symons.
The unceremonious self-revealment of a great man, of which I spoke in the beginning, does not always appeal to my aesthetic sense. At times my feeling of delicacy is scalded at the sight of a repulsive negligee. It has painfully irritated me to read Dostoevsky’s letters[5]in the English translation: would that the Russians kept their dirty linen at home. The book reveals a petty tragedy of a great personality; eternal want, indebtedness, whimpering, small jealousy, narrowness, intolerance. We learn how most of his books were written in a hurry, under pressure of need, the author being aware of their inadequacy; we learn of his petty envy towards Turgeniev, his slighting of Tolstoy, his bigoted hatred of everything liberal, European, his sturdy opposition to the revolutionists, his obsequious demeanor before high officials. With the exception of a few bright spots, the pages produce the nauseating effect of a pathological museum. Such a pity.
Come, now, friend:How do you think?
Ibn Gabirol.
[4]Musicians of To-Day, by Romain Rolland. [Henry Holt Company, New York.]
[5]Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky.[The Macmillan Company, New York.]