That story of the Arabian Nights, which is at the same time a true story, the life of Rimbaud, has been told, for the first time, in the extravagant but valuable book of an anarchist of letters, who writes under the name of Paterne Berrichon, and who has since married Rimbaud's sister.La Vie de Jean-Arthur Rimbaudis full of curiosity for those who have been mystified by I know not what legends, invented to give wonder to a career itself more wonderful than any of the inventions. The man who died at Marseilles, at the Hospital of the Conception, on March 10 1891, at the age of thirty-seven,négociant,as the register of his death describes him, was a writer of genius, an innovator in verse and prose, who had written all his poetry by the age of nineteen, and all his prose by a year or two later. He had given up literature to travel hither and thither, first in Europe, then in Africa; he had been an engineer, a leader of caravans, a merchant of precious merchandise. And this man, who had never written down a line after those astonishing early experiments, was heard, in his last delirium, talking of precisely such visions as those which had haunted his youth, and using, says his sister, "expressions of a singular and penetrating charm" to render these sensations of visionary countries. Here certainly is one of the most curious problems of literature: is it a problem of which we can discover the secret?
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born at Charleville, in the Ardennes, October 28, 1854. His father, of whom he saw little, was a captain in the army; his mother, of peasant origin, was severe, rigid and unsympathetic. At school he was an unwilling but brilliant scholar, and by his fifteenth year was well acquainted with Latin literature and intimately with French literature. It was in that year that he began to write poems from the first curiously original: eleven poems dating from that year are to be found in his collected works. When he was sixteen he decided that he had had enough of school, and enough of home. Only Paris existed: he must go to Paris. The first time he went without a ticket; he spent, indeed, fifteen days in Paris, but he spent them in Mazas, from which he was released and restored to his home by his schoolmaster. The second time, a few days later, he sold his watch, which paid for his railway ticket. This time he threw himself on the hospitality of André Gill, a painter and verse-writer, of some little notoriety then, whose address he had happened to come across. The uninvited guest was not welcomed, and after some penniless days in Paris he tramped back to Charleville. The third time (he had waited five months, writing poems, and discontented to be only writing poems) he made his way to Paris on foot, in a heat of revolutionary sympathy, to offer himself to the insurgents of the Commune. Again he had to return on foot. Finally, having learnt with difficulty that a man is not taken at his own valuation until he has proved his right to be so accepted, he sent up the manuscript of his poems to Verlaine. The manuscript containedLe Bateau Ivre, Les Premières Communions, Ma Bohème, Roman, Les Effarés,and, indeed, all but a few of the poems he ever wrote. Verlaine was overwhelmed with delight, and invited him to Paris. A local admirer lent him the money to get there, and from October, 1871, to July, 1872, he was Verlaine's guest.
The boy of seventeen, already a perfectly original poet, and beginning to be an equally original prose-writer, astonished the whole Parnasse, Banville, Hugo himself. On Verlaine his influence was more profound. The meeting brought about one of those lamentable and admirable disasters which make and unmake careers. Verlaine has told us in hisConfessionsthat, "in the beginning, there was no question of any sort of affection or sympathy between two natures so different as that of the poet of theAssisand mine, but simply of an extreme admiration and astonishment before this boy of sixteen, who had already written things, as Fénéon has excellently said, 'perhaps outside literature.'" This admiration and astonishment passed gradually into a more personal feeling, and it was under the influence of Rimbaud that the long vagabondage of Verlaine's life began. The two poets wandered together through Belgium, England, and again Belgium, from July, 1872, to August, 1873, when there occurred that tragic parting at Brussels which left Verlaine a prisoner for eighteen months, and sent Rimbaud back to his family. He had already written all the poetry and prose that he was ever to write, and in 1873 he printed at BrusselsUne Saison en Enfer.It was the only book he himself ever gave to the press, and no sooner was it printed than he destroyed the whole edition, with the exception of a few copies, of which only Verlaine's copy, I believe, still exists. Soon began new wanderings, with their invariable return to the starting-point of Charleville: a few days in Paris, a year in England, four months in Stuttgart (where he was visited by Verlaine), Italy, France again, Vienna, Java, Holland, Sweden, Egypt, Cyprus, Abyssinia, and then nothing but Africa, until the final return to France. He had been a teacher of French in England, a seller of key-rings in the streets of Paris, had unloaded vessels in the ports, and helped to gather in the harvest in the country; he had been a volunteer in the Dutch army, a military engineer, a trader; and now physical sciences had begun to attract his insatiable curiosity, and dreams of the fabulous East began to resolve themselves into dreams of a romantic commerce with the real East. He became a merchant of coffee, perfumes, ivory, and gold, in the interior of Africa; then an explorer, a predecessor, and in his own regions, of Marchand. After twelve years' wandering and exposure in Africa he was attacked by a malady of the knee, which rapidly became worse. He was transported first to Aden, then to Marseilles, where, in May, 1891, his leg was amputated. Further complications set in. He insisted, first, on being removed to his home, then on being taken back to Marseilles. His sufferings were an intolerable torment, and more cruel to him was the torment of his desire to live. He died inch by inch, fighting every inch; and his sister's quiet narrative of those last months is agonising. He died at Marseilles in November, "prophesying," says his sister, and repeating, "Allah Kerim! Allah Kerim!"
The secret of Rimbaud, I think, and the reason why he was able to do the unique thing in literature which he did, and then to disappear quietly and become a legend in the East, is that his mind was not the mind of the artist but of the man of action. He was a dreamer, but all his dreams were discoveries. To him it was an identical act of his temperament to write the sonnet of theVowelsand to trade in ivory and frankincense with the Arabs. He lived with all his faculties at every instant of his life, abandoning himself to himself with a confidence which was at once his strength and (looking at things less absolutely) his weakness. To the student of success, and what is relative in achievement, he illustrates the danger of one's over-possession by one's own genius, just as aptly as the saint in the cloister does, or the mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world, or the spilt wisdom of the drunkard. The artist who is above all, things an artist cultivates a little choice corner of himself with elaborate care; he brings miraculous flowers to growth there, but the rest of the garden is but mown grass or tangled bushes. That is why many excellent writers very many painters, and most musicians are so tedious on any subject but their own. Is it not tempting, does it not seem a devotion rather than a superstition, to worship the golden chalice in which the wine has been made God, as if the chalice were the reality, and the Real Presence the symbol? The artist, who is only an artist, circumscribes his intelligence into almost such a fiction, as he reverences the work of his own hands. But there are certain natures (great or small, Shakespeare or Rimbaud, it makes no difference) to whom the work is nothing; the act of working, everything. Rimbaud was a small, narrow, hard, precipitate nature, which had the will to live, and nothing but the will to live; and his verses, and his follies, and his wanderings, and his traffickings were but the breathing of different hours in his day.
That is why he is so swift, definite, and quickly exhausted in vision; why he had his few things to say, each an action with consequences. He invents new ways of saying things, not because he is a learned artist, but because he is burning to say them, and he has none of the hesitations of knowledge. He leaps right over or through the conventions that had been standing in everybody's way; he has no time to go round, and no respect for trespass-boards, and so he becomes theenfant terribleof literature, playing pranks (as in that sonnet of theVowels),knocking down barriers for the mere amusement of the thing, getting all the possible advantage of his barbarisms in mind and conduct. And so, in life, he is first of all conspicuous as a disorderly liver, a révolter against morals as against prosody, though we may imagine that, in his heart, morals meant as little to him, one way or the other, as prosody. Later on, his revolt seems to be against civilisation itself, as he disappears into the deserts of Africa. And it is, if you like, a revolt against civilisation, but the revolt is instinctive, a need of the organism; it is not doctrinal, cynical, a conviction, a sentiment.
Always, as he saysrêvant univers fantastiques,he is conscious of the danger as well as the ecstasy of that divine imitation; for he says: "My life will always be too vast to be given up wholly to force and beauty."J'attends Dieu avec gourmandise,he cries, in a fine rapture; and then, sadly enough: "I have created all the feasts, all the triumphs, all the dramas of the world. I have set myself to invent new flowers, a new flesh, a new language. I have fancied that I have attained supernatural power. Well, I have now only to put my imagination and my memories in the grave. What a fine artist's and story-teller's fame thrown away!" See how completely he is conscious, and how completely he is at the mercy, of that hallucinatory rage of vision, vision to him being always force, power, creation, which, on some of his pages, seems to become sheer madness, and on others a kind of wild but absolute insight. He will be silent, he tells us, as to all that he contains within his mind, "greedy as the sea," for otherwise poets and visionaries would envy him his fantastic wealth. And, in thatNuit d'Enfer,which does not bear that title in vain, he exalts himself as a kind of saviour; he is in the circle of pride in Dante's hell, and he has lost all sense of limit, really believes himself to be "no one and some one." Then, in theAlchimie du Verbe,he becomes the analyst of his own hallucinations. "I believe in all the enchantments," he tells us; "I invented the colour of the vowels; A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green. I regulated the form and the movement of every consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had invented a poetic language accessible, one day or another, to every shade of meaning. I reserved to myself the right of translation."[1]
Coincidence or origin, it has lately been pointed out that Rimbaud may formerly have seen an old ABC book in which the vowels are coloured for the most part as his are (A, black; E, white; I, red; O, blue; U, green). In the little illustrative pictures around them some are oddly in keeping with the image of Rimbaud.
"... I accustomed myself to simple hallucination: I saw, quite frankly, a mosque in place of a factory, a school of drums kept by the angels, post-chaises on the roads of heaven, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; the title of a vaudeville raised up horrors before me. Then I explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of words! I ended by finding something sacred in the disorder of my mind." Then he makes the great discovery. Action, one sees, this fraudulent and insistent will to live, has been at the root of all these mental and verbal orgies, in which he has been wasting the "very substance of his thought." Well, "action," he discovers, "is not life, but a way of spoiling something." Even this is a form of enervation, and must be rejected from the absolute.Mon devoir m'est remis. Il ne faut plus songer à cela. Je suis réellement d'outre-tombe, et pas de commissions.
It is for the absolute that he seeks, always; the absolute which the great artist, with his careful wisdom, has renounced seeking. And, he is content with nothing less; hence his own contempt for what he has done, after all, so easily; for what has come to him, perhaps through his impatience, but imperfectly. He is a dreamer in whom dream is swift, hard in outline, coming suddenly and going suddenly, a real thing, but seen only in passing. Visions rush past him, he cannot arrest them; they rush forth from him, he cannot restrain their haste to be gone, as he creates them in the mere indiscriminate idleness of energy. And so this seeker after the absolute leaves but a broken medley of fragments, into each of which he has put a little of his personality, which he is forever dramatising, by multiplying one facet, so to speak, after another. Very genuinely, he is now a beaten and wandering ship, flying in a sort of intoxication before the wind, over undiscovered seas; now a starving child outside a baker's window, in the very ecstasy of hunger; nowla victime et la petite épouseof the first communion; now:
Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien;Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,Par la Nature, heureux comme avec une femme!
He catches at verse, at prose, invents a sort ofvers librebefore any one else, not quite knowing what to do with it, invents a quite new way of writing prose, which Laforgue will turn to account later on; and having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his own and the next generation are to busy themselves with developing, he gives up writing, as an inadequate form, to which he is also inadequate.
What, then, is the actual value of Rimbaud's work, in verse and prose, apart from its relative values of so many kinds? I think, considerable; though it will probably come to rest on two or three pieces of verse, and a still vaguer accomplishment in prose. He brought into French verse something of that "gipsy way of going with nature, as with a woman"; a very young, very crude, very defiant and sometimes very masterly sense of just these real things which are too close to us to be seen by most people with any clearness. He could render physical sensation, of the subtlest kind, without making any compromise with language, forcing language to speak straight, taming it as one would tame a dangerous animal. And he kneaded prose as he kneaded verse, making it a disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical thing. In verse, he pointed the way to certain new splendours, as to certain newnaïvetés;there is theBateau Ivre,without which we might never have had Verlaine'sCrimen Amoris.And, intertangled with what is ingenuous, and with what is splendid, there is a certain irony, which comes into that youthful work as if youth were already reminiscent of itself, so conscious is it that youth is youth, and that youth is passing.
In all these ways, Rimbaud had his influence upon Verlaine, and his influence upon Verlaine was above all the influence of the man of action upon the man of sensation; the influence of what is simple, narrow, emphatic, upon what is subtle, complex, growing. Verlaine's rich, sensitive nature was just then trying to realise itself. Just because it had such delicate possibilities, because there were so many directions in which it could grow, it was not at first quite sure of its way. Rimbaud came into the life and, art of Verlaine, troubling both, with that trouble which reveals a man to himself. Having helped to make Verlaine a great poet, he could go. Note that he himself could never have developed: writing had been one of his discoveries; he could but make other discoveries, personal ones. Even in literature he had his future; but his future was Verlaine.
[1]Here is the famous sonnet, which must be taken, as it was meant, without undue seriousness, and yet as something more than a mere joke.VOYELLESA noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes.A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantesQui bombillent autour des puanteurs cruelles,Golfe d'ombre; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,I Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles;I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres bellesIDans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des ridesQue l'alchemie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;O, suprême clairon plein de strideurs étranges,Silences traversés des mondes et des Anges;—O l'Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!
[1]Here is the famous sonnet, which must be taken, as it was meant, without undue seriousness, and yet as something more than a mere joke.
VOYELLESA noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes.A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantesQui bombillent autour des puanteurs cruelles,Golfe d'ombre; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,I Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles;I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres bellesIDans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,Paix des pâtis semés d'animaux, paix des ridesQue l'alchemie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;O, suprême clairon plein de strideurs étranges,Silences traversés des mondes et des Anges;—O l'Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!
Jules Laforgue was born at Montevideo, of Breton parents, August 20, 1860. He died in Paris in 1887, two days before his twenty-seventh birthday. From 1880 to 1886 he had been reader to the Empress Augusta at Berlin. He married only a few months before his death.D'allures?says M. Gustave Kahn,fort correctes, de hauts gibus, des cravates sobres, des vestons anglais, des pardessus clergymans, et de par les nécessités, un parapluie immuablement placé sous le bras.His portraits show us a clean-shaved, reticent face, betraying little. With such a personality anecdotes have but small chance of appropriating those details by which expansive natures express themselves to the world. We know nothing about Laforgue which his work is not better able to tell us, even now that we have all his notes, unfinished fragments, and the letters of an almost virginalnaïvetéwhich he wrote to the woman whom he was going to marry. His entire work, apart from these additions, is contained in two small volumes, one of prose, theMoralités Légendaires,the other of verse,Les Complaintes, Limitation de Notre-Dame la Lune,and a few other pieces, all published during the last three years of his life.
The prose and verse of Laforgue, scrupulously correct, but with a new manner of correctness, owe more than any one has realised to the half-unconscious prose and verse of Rimbaud. Verse and prose are alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious. It is reallyvers libre,but at the same time correct verse, beforevers librehad been invented. And it carries, as far as that theory has ever been carried, the theory which demands an instantaneous notation (Whistler, let us say) of the figure or landscape which one, has been accustomed to define with such rigorous exactitude. Verse, always elegant, is broken up into a kind of mockery of prose.
Encore un de mes pierrots mort;Mort d'un chronique orphelinisme;C'était un cœur plein de dandysmeLunaire, en un drôle de corps;
he will say to us, with a familiarity of manner, as of one talking languidly, in a low voice, the lips always teased into a slightly bitter smile; and he will pass suddenly into the ironical lilt of
Hotel garniDe l'infini,Sphinx et JocondeDes défunts mondes;
and from that into this solemn and smiling end of one of his last poems, his own epitaph, if you will:
Il prit froid l'autre automne,S'étant attardi vers les peines des cors,Sur la fin d'un beau jour.Oh! ce fut pour vos cors, et ce fut pour l'automne,Qu'il nous montra qu' "on meurt d'amour!"On ne le verra plus aux fêtes nationales,S'enfermer dans l'Histoire et tirer les verrous,Il vint trop tard, il est reparti sans scandale;O vous qui m'écoutez, rentrez chacun chez vous.
The old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all banished, on a theory as self-denying as that which permitted Degas to dispense with recognisable beauty in his figures. Here, if ever, is modern verse, verse which dispenses with so many of the privileges of poetry, for an ideal quite of its own. It is, after all, a very self-conscious ideal, becoming artificial through its extreme naturalness; for in poetry it is not "natural" to say things quite so much in the manner of the moment, with however ironical an intention.
The prose of theMoralités Légendairesis perhaps even more of a discovery. Finding its origin, as I have pointed out, in the experimental prose of Rimbaud, it carries that manner to a singular perfection. Disarticulated, abstract, mathematically lyrical, it gives expression, in its icy ecstasy, to a very subtle criticism of the universe, with a surprising irony of cosmical vision. We learn from books of mediæval magic that the embraces of the devil are of a coldness so intense that it may be called, by an allowable figure of speech, fiery. Everything may be as strongly its opposite as itself, and that is why this balanced, chill, colloquial style of Laforgue has, in the paradox of its intensity, the essential heat of the most obviously emotional prose. The prose is more patient than the verse, with its more compassionate laughter at universal experience. It can laugh as seriously, as profoundly, as in that graveyard monologue of Hamlet, Laforgue's Hamlet, who, Maeterlinck ventures to say, "is at moments more Hamlet than the Hamlet of Shakespeare." Let me translate a few sentences from it.
"Perhaps I have still twenty or thirty years to live, and I shall pass that way like the others. Like the others? O Totality, the misery of being there no longer! Ah! I would like to set out to-morrow, and search all through the world for the most adamantine processes of embalming. They, too, were, the little people of History, learning to read, trimming their nails, lighting the dirty lamp every evening, in love, gluttonous, vain, fond of compliments, handshakes, and kisses, living on bell-tower gossip, saying, 'What sort of weather shall we have to-morrow? Winter has really come.... We have had no plums this year.' Ah! everything is good, if it would not come to an end. And thou, Silence, pardon the Earth; the little madcap hardly knows what she is doing; on the day of the great summing-up of consciousness before the Ideal, she will be labelled with a pitifulidemin the column of the miniature evolutions of the Unique Evolution, in the column of négligeable quantities ...". "To die! Evidently, one dies without knowing it, as, every night, one enters upon sleep. One has no consciousness of the passing of the last lucid thought into sleep, into swooning, into death. Evidently. But to be no more, to be here no more, to be ours no more! Not even to be able, any more, to press against one's human heart, some idle afternoon, the ancient sadness contained in one little chord on the piano!"
In these always "lunar" parodies,Salomé, Lohengrin, Fils de Parsifal, Persée et Andromède,each a kind of metaphysical myth, he realises thatla créature va hardiment à être cérébrale, anti-naturelle,and he has invented these fantastic puppets with an almost Japanese art of spiritual dislocation. They are, in part, a way of taking one's revenge upon science, by an ironical borrowing of its very terms, which dance in his prose and verse, derisively, at the end of a string.
In his acceptance of the fragility of things as actually a principle of art, Laforgue is a sort of transformed Watteau, showing his disdain for the world which fascinates him, in quite a different way. He has constructed his own world, lunar and actual, speaking slang and astronomy, with a constant disengaging of the visionary aspect, under which frivolity becomes an escape from the arrogance of a still more temporary mode of being, the world as it appears to the sober majority. He is terribly conscious of daily life, cannot omit, mentally, a single hour of the day; and his flight to the moon is in sheer desperation. He sees what he calls l'Inconscientin every gesture, but he cannot see it without these gestures. And he sees, not only as an imposition, but as a conquest, the possibilities for art which come from the sickly modern being, with his clothes, his nerves: the mere fact that he flowers from the soil of his epoch.
It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys. There is in it all the restlessness of modern life, the haste to escape from whatever weighs too heavily on the liberty of the moment, that capricious liberty which demands only room enough to hurry itself weary. It is distressingly conscious of the unhappiness of mortality, but it plays, somewhat uneasily, at a disdainful indifference. And it is out of these elements of caprice, fear, contempt, linked together by an embracing laughter, that it makes its existence.
Il n'y a pas de type, il y a la vie,Laforgue replies to those who come to him with classical ideals.Votre idéal est bien vite magnifiquement submergé,in life itself, which should form its own art, an art deliberately ephemeral, with the attaching pathos of passing things. There is a great pity at the root of this art of Laforgue: self-pity, which extends, with the artistic sympathy, through mere clearness of vision, across the world. His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as "the laughter of the soul," is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot,Pierrot lunaire,and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman's patter. As it is part of his manner not to distinguish between irony and pity, or even belief, we need not attempt to do so. Heine should teach us to understand at least so much of a poet who could not otherwise resemble him less. In Laforgue, sentiment is squeezed out of the world before one begins to play at ball with it.
And so, of the two, he is the more hopeless. He has invented a new manner of being René or Werther: an inflexible politeness towards man, woman, and destiny. He composes love-poems hat in hand, and smiles with an exasperating tolerance before all the transformations of the eternal feminine. He is very conscious of death, but hisblagueof death is, above all things, gentlemanly. He will not permit himself, at any moment, the luxury of dropping the mask: not at any moment.
Read thisAutre Complainte de Lord Pierrot,with the singular pity of its cruelty, before such an imagined dropping of the mask:
Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!Nous lui dirons d'abord, de mon air le moins froid:"La somme des angles d'un triangle, chère âme,Est égale à deux droits."Et si ce cri lui part: "Dieu de Dieu que je t'aime!""Dieu reconnaîtra les siens." Ou piquée au vif:"Mes claviers out du cœur, tu sera mon seul thème."Moi' "Tout est relatif."De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:"Ah! tu ne m'aime pas; tant d'autres sont jaloux!"Et moi, d'un œil qui vers l'Inconscient s'emballe:"Merci, pas mal; et vous?"Jouons au plus fidèle!"—A quoi bon, ô Nature!"Autant à qui perd gagne." Alors, autre couplet."Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j'en suis sûre.""Après vous, s'il vous plaît."Enfins, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,Douce; feignant de n'en pas croire encor mes yeux,J'aurai un: "Ah çà, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!C'était donc sérieux?"
And yet one realises, if one but reads him attentively enough, how much suffering and despair, and resignation to what is, after all, the inevitable, are hidden away under this disguise, and also why this disguise is possible. Laforgue died at twenty-seven: he had been a dying man all his life, and his work has the fatal evasiveness of those who shrink from remembering the one thing which they are unable to forget. Coming as he does after Rimbaud, turning the divination of the other into theories, into achieved results, he is the eternally grown up, mature to the point of self-negation, as the other is the eternalenfant terrible.He thinks intensely about life, seeing what is automatic, pathetically ludicrous in it, almost as one might who has no part in the comedy. He has the double advantage, for his art, of being condemned to death, and of being, in the admirable phrase of Villiers, "one of those who come into the world with a ray of moonlight in their brains."
The secret of things which is just beyond the most subtle words, the secret of the expressive silences, has always been clearer to Maeterlinck than to most people; and, in his plays, he has elaborated an art of sensitive, taciturn, and at the same time highly ornamental simplicity, which has come nearer than any other art to being the voice of silence. To Maeterlinck the theatre has been, for the most part, no more than one of the disguises by which he can express himself, and with his book of meditations on the inner life,Le Trésor des Humbles,he may seem to have dropped his disguise.
All art hates the vague; not the mysterious, but the vague; two opposites very commonly confused, as the secret with the obscure, the infinite with the indefinite. And the artist who is also a mystic hates the vague with a more profound hatred than any other artist. Thus Maeterlinck, endeavouring to clothe mystical conceptions in concrete form, has invented a drama so precise, so curt, so arbitrary in its limits, that it can safely be confided to the masks and feigned voices of marionettes. His theatre of artificial beings, who are at once more ghostly and more mechanical than the living actors whom we are accustomed to see, in so curious a parody of life, moving with a certain freedom of action across the stage, may be taken as itself a symbol of the aspect under which what we fantastically term "real life" presents itself to the mystic. Are we not all puppets, in a theatre of marionettes, in which the parts we play, the dresses we wear, the very emotion whose dominance gives its express form to our faces, have all been chosen for us; in which I, it may be, with curled hair and a Spanish cloak, play the romantic lover, sorely against my will, while you, a "fair penitent" for no repented sin, pass quietly under a nun's habit? And as our parts have been chosen for us, cur motions controlled from behind the curtain, so the words we seem to speak are but spoken through us, and we do but utter fragments of some elaborate invention, planned for larger ends than our personal display or convenience, but to which, all the same, we are in a humble degree necessary. This symbolical theatre, its very existence being a symbol, has perplexed many minds, to some of whom it has seemed puerile, a child's mystification of small words and repetitions, a thing of attitudes and omissions; while others, yet more unwisely, have compared it with the violent, rhetorical, most human drama of the Elizabethans, with Shakespeare himself, to whom all the world was a stage, and the stage all this world, certainly. A sentence, already famous, of theTrésor des Humbles,will tell you what it signifies to Maeterlinck himself.
"I have, come to believe," he writes, inLe Tragique Quotidien,"that an old man seated in his armchair, waiting quietly under the lamplight, listening without knowing it to all the eternal laws which reign about his house, interpreting without understanding it all that there is in the silence of doors and windows, and in the little voice of light, enduring the presence of his soul and of his destiny, bowing his head a little, without suspecting that all the powers of the earth intervene and stand on guard in the room like attentive servants, not knowing that the sun itself suspends above the abyss the little table on which he rests his elbow, and that there is not a star in the sky nor a force in the soul which is indifferent to the motion of a falling eyelid or a rising thought—I have come to believe that this motionless old man lived really a more profound, human, and universal life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who gains a victory, or the husband who 'avenges his honour.'"
That, it seems to me, says all there is to be said of the intention of this drama which Maeterlinck has evoked; and, of its style, this other sentence, which I take from the same essay: "It is only the words that at first sight seem useless which really count in a work."
This drama, then, is a drama founded on philosophical ideas, apprehended emotionally; on the sense of the mystery of the universe, of the weakness of humanity, that sense which Pascal expressed when he said:Ce qui m'étonne le plus est de voir que tout le monde n'est pas étonné de sa faiblesse;with an acute feeling of the pathetic ignorance in which the souls nearest to one another look out upon their neighbours. It is a drama in which the interest is concentrated on vague people, who are little parts of the universal consciousness, their strange names being but the pseudonyms of obscure passions, intimate emotions. They have the fascination which we find in the eyes of certain pictures, so much more real and disquieting, so much more permanent with us, than living people. And they have the touching simplicity of children; they are always children in their ignorance of themselves, of one another, and of fate. And, because they are so disembodied of the more trivial accidents of life, they give themselves without limitation to whatever passionate instinct possesses them. I do not know a more passionate love-scene than that scene in the wood beside the fountain, where Pelléas and Mélisande confess the strange burden which has come upon them. When the soul gives itself absolutely to love, all the barriers of the world are burnt away, and all its wisdom and subtlety are as incense poured on a flame. Morality, too, is burnt away, no longer exists, any more than it does for children or for God.
Maeterlinck has realised, better than any one else, the significance, in life and art, of mystery. He has realised how unsearchable is the darkness out of which we have but just stepped, and the darkness into which we are about to pass. And he has realised how the thought and sense of that twofold darkness invade the little space of light in which, for a moment, we move; the depth to which they shadow our steps, even in that moment's partial escape. But in some of his plays he would seem to have apprehended this mystery as a thing merely or mainly terrifying; the actual physical darkness sur-rounding blind men, the actual physical approach of death as the intruder; he has shown us people huddled at a window, out of which they are almost afraid to look, or beating at a door, the opening of which they dread. Fear shivers through these plays, creeping across our nerves like a damp mist coiling up out of a valley. And there is beauty, certainly, in this "vague spiritual fear"; but a less obvious kind of beauty than that which gives its profound pathos toAglavaine et Sélysette,the one play written since the writing of the essays. Here is mystery, which is also pure beauty, in these delicate approaches of intellectual pathos, in which suffering and death and error become transformed into something almost happy, so full is it of strange light.
And the aim of Maeterlinck, in his plays, is not only to render the soul and the soul's atmosphere, but to reveal this strangeness, pity, and beauty through beautiful pictures. No dramatist has ever been so careful that his scenes should be in themselves beautiful, or has made the actual space of forest, tower, or seashore so emotionally significant. He has realised, after Wagner, that the art of the stage is the art of pictorial beauty, of the correspondence in rhythm between the speakers, their words, and their surroundings. He has seen how, in this way, and in this way alone, the emotion, which it is but a part of the poetic drama to express, can be at once intensified and purified.
It is only after hinting at many of the things which he had to say in these plays, which have, after all, been a kind of subterfuge, that Maeterlinck has cared, or been able, to speak with the direct utterance of the essays. And what may seem curious is that this prose of the essays, which is the prose of a doctrine, is incomparably more beautiful than the prose of the plays, which was the prose of an art. Holding on this point a different opinion from one who was, in many senses, his master, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, he did not admit that beauty of words, or even any expressed beauty of thoughts, had its place in spoken dialogue, even though it was not two living actors speaking to one another on the stage, but a soul speaking to a soul and imagined speaking through the mouths of marionettes. But that beauty of phrase which makes the profound and sometimes obscure pages ofAxëlshine as with the crossing fire of jewels, rejoices us, though with a softer, a more equable, radiance, in the pages of these essays, in which every sentence has the in-dwelling beauty of an intellectual emotion, preserved at the same height of tranquil ecstasy from first page to last. There is a sort of religious calm in these deliberate sentences, into which the writer has known how to introduce that divine monotony which is one of the accomplishments of great style. Never has simplicity been more ornate or a fine beauty more visible through its self-concealment.
But, after all, the claim upon us of this book is not the claim of a work of art, but of a doctrine, and more than that, of a system. Belonging, as he does, to the eternal hierarchy, the unbroken succession, of the mystics, Maeterlinck has apprehended what is essential in the mystical doctrine with a more profound comprehension, and thus more systematically, than any mystic of recent times. He has many points of resemblance with Emerson, on whom he has written an essay which is properly an exposition of his own personal ideas; but Emerson, who proclaimed the supreme guidance of the inner light, the supreme necessity of trusting instinct, of honouring emotion, did but proclaim all this, not without a certain anti-mystical vagueness: Maeterlinck has systematised it. A more profound mystic than Emerson, he has greater command of that which comes to him unawares, is less at the mercy of visiting angels.
Also, it may be said that he surrenders himself to them more absolutely, with less reserve and discretion; and, as he has infinite leisure, his contemplation being subject to no limits of time, he is ready to follow them on unknown rounds, to any distance, in any direction, ready also to rest in any wayside inn, without fearing that he will have lost the road on the morrow.
This old gospel, of which Maeterlinck is the new voice, has been quietly waiting until certain bankruptcies, the bankruptcy of Science, of the Positive Philosophies, should allow it full credit. Considering the length even of time, it has not had an unreasonable space of waiting; and remember that it takes time but little into account. We have seen many little gospels demanding of every emotion, of every instinct, "its certificate at the hand of some respectable authority." Without confidence in themselves or in things, and led by Science, which is as if one were led by one's note-book, they demand a reasonable explanation of every mystery. Not finding that explanation, they reject the mystery; which is as if the fly on the wheel rejected the wheel because it was hidden from his eyes by the dust of its own raising.
The mystic is at once the proudest and the humblest of men. He is as a child who resigns himself to the guidance of an unseen hand, the hand of one walking by his side; he resigns himself with the child's humility. And he has the pride of the humble, a pride manifesting itself in the calm rejection of every accepted map of the roads, of every offer of assistance, of every painted signpost pointing out the smoothest ways on which to travel. He demands no authority for the unseen hand whose fingers he feels upon his wrist. He conceives of life, not, indeed, so much as a road on which one walks, very much at one's own discretion, but as a blown and wandering ship, surrounded by a sea from which there is no glimpse of land; and he conceives that to the currents of that sea he may safely trust himself. Let his hand, indeed, be on the rudder, there will be no miracle worked for him; it is enough miracle that the sea should be there, and the ship, and he himself. He will never know why his hand should turn the rudder this way rather than that.
Jacob Boehme has said, very subtly, "that man does not perceive the truth but God perceives the truth in man"; that is, that whatever we perceive or do is not perceived or done consciously by us, but unconsciously through us. Our business, then, is to tend that "inner light" by which most mystics have symbolised that which at once guides us in time and attaches us to eternity. This inner light is no miraculous descent of the Holy Spirit, but the perfectly natural, though it may finally be overcoming, ascent of the spirit within us. The spirit, in all men, being but a ray of the universal fight, it can, by careful tending, by the removal of all obstruction, the cleansing of the vessel, the trimming of the wick, as it were, be increased, made to burn with a steadier, a brighter flame. In the last rapture it may become dazzling, may blind the watcher with excess of light, shutting him in within the circle of transfiguration, whose extreme radiance will leave all the rest of the world henceforth one darkness.
All mystics being concerned with what is divine in life, with the laws which apply equally to time and eternity, it may happen to one to concern himself chiefly with time seen under the aspect of eternity, to another to concern himself rather with eternity seen under the aspect of time. Thus many mystics have occupied themselves, very profitably, with showing how natural, how explicable on their own terms, are the mysteries of life; the whole aim of Maeterlinck is to show how mysterious all life is, "what an astonishing thing it is, merely to live." What he had pointed out to us, with certain solemn gestures, in his plays, he sets himself now to affirm, slowly, fully, with that "confidence in mystery" of which he speaks. Because "there is not an hour without its familiar miracles and its ineffable suggestions," he sets himself to show us these miracles and these meanings where others have not always sought or found them, in women, in children, in the theatre. He seems to touch, at one moment or another, whether he is discussingLa Beauté IntérieureorLe Tragique Quotidien,on all of these hours, and there is no hour so dark that his touch does not illuminate it.
And it is characteristic of him, of his "confidence in mystery," that he speaks always without raising his voice, without surprise or triumph, or the air of having said anything more than the simplest observation. He speaks, not as if he knew more than others, or had sought out more elaborate secrets, but as if he had listened more attentively.
Loving most those writers "whose works are nearest to silence," he begins his book, significantly, with an essay on Silence, an essay which, like all these essays, has the reserve, the expressive reticence, of those "active silences" of which he succeeds in revealing a few of the secrets. "Souls," he tells us, "are weighed in silence, as gold and silver are weighed in pure water, and the words which we pronounce have no meaning except through the silence in which they are bathed. We seek to know that we may learn not to know"; knowledge, that which can be known by the pure reason, metaphysics, "indispensable" on this side of the "frontiers," being after all precisely what is least essential to us, since least essentially ourselves. "We possess a self more profound and more boundless than the self of the passions or of pure reason.... There comes a moment when the phenomena of our customary consciousness, what we may call the consciousness of the passions or of our normal relationships, no longer mean anything to us, no longer touch our real life. I admit that this consciousness is often interesting in its way, and that it is often necessary to know it thoroughly. But it is a surface plant, and its roots fear the great central fire of our being. I may commit a crime without the least breath stirring the tiniest flame of this fire; and, on the other hand, the crossing of a single glance, a thought which never comes into being, a minute which passes without the utterance of a word, may rouse it into terrible agitations in the depths of its retreat, and cause it to overflow upon my life. Our soul does not judge as we judge; it is a capricious and hidden thing. It can be reached by a breath and unconscious of a tempest. Let us find out what reaches it; everything is there, for it is there that we ourselves are."
And it is towards this point that all the words of this book tend. Maeterlinck, unlike most men ("What is man but a God who is afraid?"), is not "miserly of immortal things." He utters the most divine secrets without fear, betraying certain hiding-places of the soul in those most nearly inaccessible retreats which lie nearest to us. All that he says we know already; we may deny it, but we know it. It is what we are not often at leisure enough with ourselves, sincere enough with ourselves, to realise; what we often dare not realise; but, when he says it, we know that it is true, and our knowledge of it is his warrant for saying it. He is what he is precisely because he tells us nothing which we do not already know, or it may be, what we have known and forgotten. The mystic, let it be remembered, has nothing in common with the moralist. He speaks only to those who are already prepared to listen to him, and he is indifferent to the "practical" effect which these or others may draw from his words. A young and profound mystic of our day has figured the influence of wise words upon the foolish and headstrong as "torches thrown into a burning city." The mystic knows well that it is not always the soul of the drunkard or the blasphemer which is farthest from the eternal beauty. He is concerned only with that soul of the soul, that life of life, with which the day's doings have so little to do; itself a mystery, and at home only among those supreme mysteries which surround it like an atmosphere. It is not always that he cares that his message, or his vision, may be as clear to others as it is to himself. But, because he is an artist, and not only a philosopher, Maeterlinck has taken especial pains that not a word of his may go astray, and there is not a word of this book which needs to be read twice, in order that it may be understood, by the least trained of attentive readers. It is, indeed, as he calls it, "The Treasure of the Lowly."
Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in the measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and deadening its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its apprehension of the unknown. Knowing so much less than nothing, for we are entrapped in smiling and many-coloured appearances, our life may seem to be but a little space of leisure, in which it will be the necessary business of each of us to speculate on what is so rapidly becoming the past and so rapidly becoming the future, that scarcely existing present which is after all our only possession. Yet, as the present passes from us, hardly to be enjoyed except as memory or as hope, and only with an at best partial recognition of the uncertainty or inutility of both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now and then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance, and to some perception of where it is leading us. To live through a single day with that overpowering consciousness of our real position, which, in the moments in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding light or the thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of his senses. It is our hesitations, the excuses of our hearts, the compromises of our intelligence, which save us. We can forget so much, we can bear suspense with so fortunate an evasion of its real issues; we are so admirably finite.
And so there is a great, silent conspiracy between us to forget death; all our lives are spent in busily forgetting death. That is why we are active about so many things which we know to be unimportant; why we are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for the company of our fellow-creatures. Allowing ourselves, for the most part, to be but vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art; each a forgetfulness, each a symbol of creation; religion being the creation of a new heaven, passion the creation of a new earth, and art, in its mingling of heaven and earth, the creation of heaven out of earth. Each is a kind of sublime selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having each an incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate attainment, however, in his lower moments, he may serve God in action, or do the will of his mistress, or minister to men by showing them a little beauty. But it is, before all things, an escape: and the prophets who have redeemed the world, and the artists who have made the world beautiful, and the lovers who have quickened the pulses of the world, have really, whether they knew it or not, been fleeing from the certainty of one thought: that we have, all of us, only our one day; and from the dread of that other thought: that the day, however used, must after all be wasted.
The fear of death is not cowardice; it is, rather, an intellectual dissatisfaction with an enigma which has been presented to us, and which can be solved only when its solution is of no further use. All we have to ask of death is the meaning of life, and we are waiting all through life to ask that question. That life should be happy or unhappy, as those words are used, means so very little; and the heightening or lessening of the general felicity of the world means so little to any individual. There is something almost vulgar in happiness which does not become joy, and joy is an ecstasy which can rarely be maintained in the soul for more than the moment during which we recognize that it is not sorrow. Only very young people want to be happy. What we all want is to be quite sure that there is something which makes it worth while to go on living, in what seems to us our best way, at our finest intensity; something beyond the mere fact that we are satisfying a sort of inner logic (which may be quite faulty) and that we get our best makeshift for happiness on that so hazardous assumption.
Well, the doctrine of Mysticism, with which all this symbolical literature has so much to do, of which it is all so much the expression, presents us, not with a guide for conduct, not with a plan for our happiness, not with an explanation of any mystery, but with a theory of life which makes us familiar with mystery, and which seems to harmonise those instincts which make for religion, passion, and art, freeing us at once of a great bondage. The final uncertainty remains, but we seem to knock less helplessly at closed doors, coming so much closer to the once terrifying eternity of things about us, as we come to look upon these things as shadows, through which we have our shadowy passage. "For in the particular acts of human life," Plotinus tells us, "it is not the interior soul and the true man, but the exterior shadow of the man alone, which laments and weeps, performing his part on the earth as in a more ample and extended scene, in which many shadows of souls and phantom scenes appear." And as we realise the identity of a poem, a prayer, or a kiss, in that spiritual universe which we are weaving for ourselves, each out of a thread of the great fabric; as we realise the infinite insignificance of action, its immense distance from the current of life; as we realise the delight of feeling ourselves carried onward by forces which it is our wisdom to obey; it is at least with a certain relief that we turn to an ancient doctrine, so much the more likely to be true because it has so much the air of a dream. On this theory alone does all life become worth living, all art worth making, all worship worth offering. And because it might slay as well as save, because the freedom of its sweet captivity might so easily become deadly to the fool, because that is the hardest path to walk in where you are told only, walk well; it is perhaps the only counsel of perfection which can ever really mean much to the artist.
The essays contained in this book are not intended to give information. They are concerned with ideas rather than with facts; each is a study of a problem, only in part a literary one, in which I have endeavoured to consider writers as personalities under the action of spiritual forces, or as themselves so many forces. But it has seemed to me that readers have a right to demand information in regard to writers who are so often likely to be unfamiliar to them. I have, therefore, given a bibliography of the works of each writer with whom I have dealt, and I have added a number of notes, giving various particulars which I think are likely to be useful in fixing more definitely the personal characteristics of these writers.
(1799-1850)
La Comédie Humaine
Scènes de la Vie Privée
Préface. La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,1829;Le Bal de Sceaux,1829;Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées,1841;La Bourse,1832;Modeste Mignon,1844;Un Début dans la vie,1842;Albert Savarus,1842;La Vendetta,1830;La Paix du ménage,1829;Madame Firmiani,1832;Étude de femme,1830;La Fausse maîtresse,1842;Une Fille d'Eve,1838;Le Message,1832;La Grenadière,1832;La Femme abandonnée,1832;Honorine,1843;Beatrix,1838;Gobseck,1830;La Femme de trente ans,1834;La Père Goriot,1834;Le Colonel Chabert,1832;La Messe de l'Athée,1836;L'Interdiction,1836; LeContrat de mariage,1835; Autreétude de femme,1839; LaGrande Bretêche,1832.
Scènes de la vie de Province
Ursule Mirouët,1841;Eugénie Grandet,1833;Le Lys dans la vallée, 1835;Pierrette,1839;Le Curé de Tours, 1832;La Ménage d'un garçon,1842;L'illustre Gaudissart,1833;La Muse du département,1843;Le Vieille fille, 1836;Le Cabinet des Antiques,1837;Les Illusions Perdues,1836.
Scènes de la Vie Parisienne
Ferragus,1833;Là Duchesse de Langeais,1834;La Fille aux yeux d'or,1834;La Grandeur et la Décadence de César Birotteau,1837;La Maison Nucingen,1837;Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes,1838;Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan,1839;Facino Cane,1836;Sarrasine,1830;Pierre Grassou,1839;La Cousine Bette,1846;Le Cousin Pons,1847;Un Prince de la Bohème,1839;Gaudissart II,1844;Les Employés,1836;Les Comédiens sans le savoir,1845;Les Petits Bourgeois,1845.
Scènes de la Vie Militaire
Les Chouans,1827;Une Passion dans le désert,1830.
Scènes de la Vie Politique
Un Épisode sous la Terreur,1831;Une Ténébreuse Affaire,1841;Z. Marcos,1840;L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine,1847;Le Député d'Arcis.
Scènes de la Vie de Campagne
Le Médecin de campagne,1832;Le Curé de village,1837;Les Paysans,1845.
Études Philosophiques
La Peau de Chagrin,1830;Jésus-Christ en Flandres,1831;Melmoth réconcilié,1835;Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu,1832;Gambara,1837;Massimilla Doni,1839;La Recherche de l'Absolu,1834;L'Enfant Maudit,1831;Les Maranas,1832;Adieu,1830;Le Réquisitionnaire,1831;El Verdugo,1829;Un Drame au bord de la mer,1834;L'Auberge rouge,1831; L'Élixir de longue vie,1830;Maître Cornélius,1831;Catherine de Médicis,1836;Les Proscrits,1831;Louis Lambert,1832;Séraphita,1833.
Études Analytiques
La Physiologie du mariage,1829;Petites misères de la vie conjugale.
Théâtre
Vautrin, Drame5Actes,1840;Les Ressources de Quinola, Comédie5Actes,1842;Paméla Giraud, Drame5Actes,1843;La Marâtre, Drame5Actes,1848;La Faiseur (Mercadet), Comédie5Actes,1851;Les Contes Drolatiques,1832, 1833, 1839.
(1803-1870)
La Guzla,1827;La Jacquerie,1828;Le Chronique du Temps de Charles IX,1829;La Vase Etrusque,1829;Vénus d'Ille,1837;Colomba,1846;Carmen,1845;Lokis,1869;Mateo Falcone,1876;Mélanges Historiques et Littéraires,1855;Les Cosaques d'Autrefois,1865;Étude sur les Arts au Moyen-Age,1875;Les Faux Démétrius,1853;Étude sur l'Histoire Romaine,1844;Histoire de Dom Pedro,1848;Lettres à une Inconnue,1874.
(1808-1855)
Napoléon et la France Guerrière, élégies nationales,1826;La mort de Talma,1826;L'Académie, ou les Membres Introuvables, comédie satirique en vers,1826;Napoléon et Talma, élégies nationales nouvelles,1826;M. Dentscourt, ou le Cuisinier Grand Homme,1826;Elégies Nationales et Satires Politiques,1827;Faust, tragédie de Goethe,1828 (suivi du secondFaust,1840);Couronne Poétique de Béranger,1828;Le Peuple, ode,1830;Poésies Allemandes, Morceaux choisis et traduits,1830;Choix de Poésies de Ronsard et de Régnier,1830;Nos Adieux à la Chambre de Députés de Van1830, 1831;Lénore, traduite de Burger,1835;Piquilo, opéra comique(with Dumas), 1837; l'Alchimiste, drame en vers(with Dumas), 1839;Léo Burckhardt, drame en prose(with Dumas), 1839;Scènes de la Vie Orientale,2 vols., 1848-1850;Les Monténégrins, opéra comique(with Alboize), 1849;Le Chariot d'Enfant, drame en vers(with Méry), 1850;Les Nuits du Ramazan,1850;Voyage en Orient,1851;L'Imagier de Harlem, légende en prose et en vers(with Méry and Bernard Lopez), 1852;Contes et Facéties,1852;Lorely, souvenirs d'Allemagne,1852;Les Illuminés,1852;Petits Châteaux de Bohème,1853;Les Filles du Feu,1854;Misanthropie et Repentir, drame de Kotzebue,1855;La Bohème galante,1855;Le Rêve et la Vie; Aurélia,1855;Le Marquis de Fayolle(with E. Gorges), 1856;Œuvres Complètes,6 vols. (1,Les Deux Faust de Goethe;2, 3,Voyage en Orient;4,Les Illuminés, Les Faux Saulniers;5,Le Rêve et la Vie, Les Filles du Feu, La Bohème galante;6,Poésies Complètes),1867.
The sonnets, written at different periods and published for the first time in the collection of 1854, "Les Filles du Feu," which also contains "Sylvie," were reprinted in the volume ofPoésies Complètes,where they are imbedded in the midst of deplorable juvenilia. All, or almost all, of the verse worth preserving was collected, in 1897, by that delicate amateur of the curiosities of beauty, M. Remy de Gourmont, in a tiny volume calledLes Chimères,which contains the six sonnets of "Les Chimères," the sonnet called "Vers Dorés," the five sonnets of "Le Christ aux Oliviers," and, in facsimile of the autograph, the lyric called "Les Cydalises." The true facts of the life of Gérard have been told for the first time, from original documents, by Mme. Arvède Barine, in two excellent articles in theRevue des Deux Mondes,October 15 and November 1, 1897, since reprinted inLes Névrosés,1898.
(1811-1872)
Les Poésies,1830;Albertus, ou l'âme et le péché,1833;Les Jeunes-France,1833;Mademoiselle de Maupin,1835;Fortunio,1838.
La Comédie de la Mort,1838;Tras les Montes,1839;Une Larme du Diable,1839;Gisèle, ballet,1841;Une Voyage en Espagne,1843;Le Péri, ballet,1843;Les Grotesques,1844.
Une Nuit de Cléopâtre,1845;Premières Poésies,1845;Zigzags,1845;Le Tricorne Enchanté,1845;La Turquie,1846.
La Juive de Constantine, drama,1846;Jean et Jeannette,1846;Le Roi Candaule,1847.
Les Roués innocents,1847;Histoire des Peintres,1847;Regardez, mais n'y touche pas,1847;Les Fêtes de Madrid,1847;Partie carrée,1851;Italia,1852; LesÉmaux et Camées,1852; L'ArtModerne,1859;Les Beaux ArtsenEurope,1852;Caprices et Zigzags,1852; ArioMarcella,1852; LesBeaux-arts en Europe,1855;Constantinople,1854;Théâtre de poche,1855; LeRoman de la Momie,1856;Jettatura,1857;Avatar, 1857;Sakountala, Ballet,1858; Honoré de Balzac, 1859; Les Fosses, 1860;Trésors d'Art de la Russie,1860-1863;Histoire de l'art théâtrale en France depuis vingt-cinq ans,1860; LeCapitaine Fracasse,1863; LesDieux et les Demi-Dieux de la peintre,1863;Poésies nouvelles,1863;Loin de Paris,1864;La Belle Jenny,1864;Voyage en Russie,1865;Spirite,1866;Le Palais pompéien de l'Avenue Montaigne,1866;Rapport sur le progrès des Lettres,1868;Ménagère intime,1869;La Nature chez Elle,1870;Tableaux de Siege,1871;Théâtre,1872;Portraits Contemporaines,1874;Histoire du Romantisme,1874;Portraits et Souvenirs littéraires,1875;Poésies complètes,1876: 2 vols.;L'Orient,1877;Fusins et eaux-Fortes,1880;Tableaux à la Plume,1880;Mademoiselle Daphné,1881; Guide del'Amateur au Musés du Louvre.1882;Souvenirs de Théâtre d'Art et de critique,1883.
(1821-1880)
Madame Bovary,1857;Salammbô,1863;La Tentation de Saint Antoine,1874;L'Education Sentimentale,1870;Trois Contes,1877;Bouvard et Pécuchet,1881;Le Candidat,1874;Par les Champs et par les Grèves,1886;Lettres à George Sand,1884;Correspondances,1887-1893.
(1821-1867)
Salon de1845, 1845;Salon de1846, 1846;Histoires Extraordinaires, traduit de Poe,1856;Nouvelle Histoires Extraordinaires,1857;Les Fleurs du Mal,1857;Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe),1858;Théophile Gautier,1859;Les Paradis Artificiels: Opium et Haschisch,1860;Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris,1861;Euréka: Poe,1864;Histoires Grotesques: Poe,1865;Les Épaves de Charles Baudelaire,1866.
(1822-1896; 1830-1870)
En18, 1851;Salon de1852, 1852;La Lorette,1853;Mystères des Théâtres,1853;La revolution dans les Mœurs,1854;Histoire de la Société Française pendant la Revolution,1854;Histoire de la Société Française pendant la Directoire,1855;Le Peinture à l'Exposition de Paris de1855, 1855;Une Voiture des Masques,1856;Les Actrices,1856;Sophie Arnauld,1857;Portraits intimes du XVIII Siècle,1857-1858;Histoire de Marie Antoinette,1858;L'Art du XVIII Siècle,1859-1875;Les Hommes de Lettres,1860;Les Maîtresses de Louis VI,1860;Sœur Philomène,1861;Les Femmes au XVIII Siècle,1864;Renée Mauperin,1864;Germinie Lacerteux,1864;Idées et Sensations,1860;Manette Salomon,1867;Madame Gervaisais,1869;Gavarni,1873;La Patrie en Danger,1879;L'Amour au XVIII Siècle,1873;La du Barry,1875;Madame de Pompadour,1878;La Duchesse de la Châteauroux,1879;Pages retrouvées,1886;Journal des Goncourts,1887-1896, 9 Vols.;Préfaces et manifestes littéraires,1888;L'Italie d'hier,1894;Edmond de Goncourt: Catalogue raisonée de l'œuvre peinte, dessiné et gravé d'Antoine Watteau,1873;Catalogue de l'œuvre de P. Proudhon,1876;La Fille Élisa,1879;Les Frères Zemganno,1879;La Maison d'un Artiste,1881;La Faustin,1882;La Saint-Hubert,1882;Chérie,1884;Germinie Lacerteux, pièce,1888;Mademoiselle Clairon,1890;Outamoro, le peintre des maisons vertes,1891;La Guimard,1893;A bas le progrès,1893;Hokouseï,1896.
(1838-1889)
Premières Poésies,1859;Isis,1862;Elën,1864;Morgane,1865;Claire Lenoir(in theRevue des Lettres et des Arts),1867;L'Evasion,1870;La Révolte,1870;Azraël,1878;Le Nouveau Monde,1880;Contes Cruels,1880;L'Eve Future,1886;Akëdysséril,1886;L'Amour Suprême,1886;Tribulat Bonhomet,1887;Histoires Insolites,1888;Nouveaux Contes Cruels,1889; Axël, 1890; Chez les Passants, 1890;Propos d'Au-delà,1893;Histoires Souveraines,1899 (a selection).
Among works announced, but never published, it may be interesting to mention:Seid, William de Strally, Faust, Poésies Nouvelles (Intermèdes; Gog; Ave, Mater Victa; Poésies diverses), La Tentation sur la Montagne, Le Vieux de la Montagne, L'Adoration des Mages, Méditations Littéraires, Mélanges, Théâtre(2 vols.),Documents sur les Règnes de Charles VI. et de Charles VII., L'Illusionisme, De la Connaissance de l'Utile, L'Exégèse Divine.
A sympathetic, but slightly vague, Life of Villiers was written by his cousin, Vicomte Robert du Pontavice de Heussey:Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,1893; it was translated into English by Lady Mary Lloyd, 1894. See Verlaine'sPoètes Maudits,1884, and his biography of Villiers inLes Hommes d'Aujourd'hui,the series of penny biographies, with caricature portraits, published by Vanier; also Mallarmé'sVilliers de l'Isle-Adam,the reprint of a lecture given at Brussels a few months after Villiers, death.La Révoltewas translated by Mrs. Theresa Barclay in theFortnightly Review,December, 1897, and acted in London by the New Stage Club in 1906. I have translated a little poem,Aveu,from the interlude of verse in theContes CruelscalledChant d'Amour,inDays and Nights,1889. An article of mine, the first, I believe, to be written on Villiers in English, appeared in theWoman's Worldin 1889; another in theIllustrated London Newsin 1891.
(1835-1892)
Les Martyrs Ridicules. Preface par Charles Baudelaire,1862;Pierre Patient,1862;L'Amour Romantique,1882;Le Deuxième Mystère de l'Incarnation,1883;Le Bouscassié,1889;La Fête-Votive de Saint Bartholomée Porte-Glaive,1872;Les Vas-nu-Pieds,1874;Celui de la Croix-aux-Bœufs,1878;Bonshommes,1879;Ompdrailles Le Tombeau des Lutteurs,1879;N'a q'un Œil,1885;Tity Foyssac IV,1886;Petits Chiens de Léon Cladel,1879;Par Devant Notaire,1880;Crête-Rouge,1880;Six Morceaux de la Littérature,1880;Kerkades Garde-Barrière,1884;Urbains et Ruraux,1884;Léon Cladel et ses Kyrielle des Chiens,1885;Héros et Pantins,1885;Quelques Sires,1885;Mi-Diable,1886;Gueux de Marque,1887;Effigies d'Inconnus,1888;Raca,1888;Seize Morceaux de Littérature,1889;L'ancien,1889;Juive-Errante,1897.
(1840-1902)
LesRougon-Macquart,1871-1893;La Fortune des Rougons,1871;La Curée,1872;Le Ventre de Paris,1873;La Conquête de Pluisans,1874;La Faute de l'abbé Mouret,1875;Son Excellence Eugène Rougon,1876;L'Assommoir,1876;Une Page d'Amour,1878;Nana,1880;Pot.-Bouille,1882;Au Bonheur des Dames,1883;La Joie de Vivre,1884;Madeleine Fer at,1885;La Confession de Claude,1886;Contes à Ninon,1891;Nouveaux Contes à Ninon,1874;Le Capitaine Burle,1883;La joie de vivre,1884;Les Mystères de Marseilles,1885;Mes Haines,1866;Le Roman Expérimental,1881;Nos Auteurs dramatiques,1881;Documents littéraires,1881;Une Compagne,1882.Théâtre: Thérèse Raquin, Les Héritiers Rabourdin, La Bouton de Rose,1890;L'Argent,1891;L'Attaque du Moulin,1890;La Bête Humaine,1890; LaDébâcle,1892;Le Doctor Pascal,1893;Germinie,1885; Mon Salon, 1886; Lenaturalisme au Théâtre,1889;L'Œuvre,1886;Le Rêve,1892;Paris, 1898;Rome,1896;Lourdes,1894;Fécondité,1899;Travail,1901;Vérité, 1903.
(1842-1898)
Le Corbeau(traduit de Poe), 1875;La Dernière Mode,1875; L'Après-Midi d'un Faune,1876;Le Vathek de Beckford,1876;Petite Philologie à l'Usage des Classes et du Monde: Les Mots Anglais,1877;Poésies Complètes(photogravées sur le manuscrit), 1887;Les Poèmes de Poe,1888;Le Ten o'Clock de M. Whistler,1888;Pages,1891;Les Miens: Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,1892;Vers et Prose,1892;La Musique et les Lettres(Oxford, Cambridge), 1894;Divagations,1897;Poésies,1899.
See, on this difficult subject, Edmund Gosse,Questions at Issue,1893, in which will be found the first study of Mallarmé that appeared in English; and Vittorio Pica,Letteratura d'Eccezione,1899, which contains a carefully-documented study of more than a hundred pages. There is a translation of the poem called "Fleurs" in Mr. John Gray'sSilverpoints,1893, and translations of "Hérodiade" and three shorter poems will be found in the first volume of my collected poems. Several of the poems in prose have been translated into English; my translation of the "Plainte d'Automne," contained in this volume, was made in momentary forgetfulness that the same poem in prose had already been translated by Mr. George Moore inConfessions of a Young Man.Mr. Moore also translated "Le Phénomène Futur" in theSavoy,July, 1896.
(1844-1896)
Poèmes Saturniens,1866;Fêtes Galantes,1869;La Bonne Chanson,1870;Romances sans Paroles,1874;Sagesse,1881;Les Poètes Maudits,1884;Jadis et Naguère,1884;Les Mémoires d'un Veuf,1886;Louise Leclercq(suivi deLe Poteau, Pierre Duchatelet, Madame Aubin),1887;Amour,1888;Parallèlement,1889;Dédicaces,1890;Bonheur,1891;Mes Hôpitaux,1891; Chansonspour Elle,1891;Liturgies Intimes,1892;Mes Prisons,1893;Odes en son Honneur,1893;Elégies,1893;Quinze Jours en Hollande,1894;Dans les Limbes,1894;Epigrammes,1894;Confessions,1895;Chair, 1896;Invectives,1896;Voyage en France d'un Français(posthumous), 1907.
The complete works of Verlaine are now published in six volumes at the Librairie Léon Vanier (now Messein); the text is very incorrectly printed, and it is still necessary to refer to the earlier editions in separate volumes.A Choix de Poésies,1891, with a preface by François Coppée, and a reproduction of Carrière's admirable portrait, is published in one volume by Charpentier; the series ofHommes d'Aujourd'huicontains twenty-seven biographical notices by Verlaine; and a considerable number of poems and prose articles exists, scattered in various magazines, some of them English, such as theSenate;in some cases the articles themselves are translated into English, such as "My Visit to London," in theSavoyfor April, 1896, and "Notes on England: Myself as a French Master," and "Shakespeare and Racine," in theFortnightly Reviewfor July, 1894, and September, 1894. The first English translation in verse from Verlaine is Arthur O'Shaughnessy's rendering of "Clair de Lune" inFêtes Galantes,under the title "Pastel," inSongs of a Worker,1881. A volume of translations in verse,Poems of Verlaine,by Gertrude Hall, was published in America in 1895. In Mr. John Gray'sSilverpoints,1893, there are translations of "Parsifal," "A Crucifix," "Le Chevalier Malheur," "Spleen," "Clair de Lune," "Mon Dieu m'a dit," and "Green."