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Title: Portraits and Speculations

Author: Arthur Ransome

Release date: August 4, 2021 [eBook #65992]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS ***

PORTRAITS AND SPECULATIONS




_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_


  A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING: STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE.
      1909

  EDGAR ALLAN POE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1910

  THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN. 1911

  OSCAR WILDE: A CRITICAL STUDY. 1912




  PORTRAITS

  AND

  SPECULATIONS

  BY

  ARTHUR RANSOME

  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
  1913




_Copyright_




  TO

  JOHN MASEFIELD




NOTE


Of the Essays in this book, “Art for Life’s Sake” appeared in _The
English Review_; “The Poetry of Yone Noguchi,”[1] “Remy de Gourmont,”
and “Aloysius Bertrand” in _The Fortnightly Review_; “Kinetic and
Potential Speech,” in _The Oxford and Cambridge Review_. The papers
on Daudet and Coppée were prefixed to collections of stories by these
writers: I thank the publishers, Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack, for
permission to reproduce them here.




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE
  ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE                                                  1

  ALOYSIUS BERTRAND                                                   35

  ALPHONSE DAUDET                                                     57

  THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE                                71

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE                                                 87

  WALTER PATER                                                       129

  REMY DE GOURMONT                                                   161

  THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI                                         187

  KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH                                       207




ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE




ART FOR LIFE’S SAKE


It is not yet fifty years since one or two men of genius, followed
presently by a score of men of talent, noisier, shriller in voice than
themselves, preached a theory of art new in this country, shocking to
our prejudices at that time, and imported from some French artists and
from a German philosopher. This was the doctrine of art for art’s sake.
Baudelaire had written: “Poetry ... has no other end than itself; it
can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly
worthy of the name of a poem, as that which has been written solely
for the pleasure of writing a poem.” Whistler, that butterfly of
letters, who had borrowed his sting from the wasp, directed it with gay
despair against the granite face of the British public. Rossetti and,
with certain qualifications, Pater, illustrated the theory in their
practice, as Whistler did also; and Wilde, a little later than they,
remarked: “All art is quite useless,” and “There is no such thing as a
moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That
is all.”

With this doctrine of art for art’s sake we are now dissatisfied. We
object to it, not for the sake of “morality,” against which it was
partly directed, nor yet for the sake of “nature,” but for the sake of
art, whose function it limits rather than glorifies. We have seen the
school of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the
banner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the
nineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner,
with words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined
the procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is
over, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him.
Yet the demonstration was successful; its promoters, who stitched
the banner with gaiety, hope, and defiance, themselves painted and
wrote fine things, and men are working to-day whose work would have
been impossible if, in the course of its march, that small, daring
procession had not walked seven times round a city of Jericho and blown
silver trumpets under its walls.

Some battle-cries are no more than an irrelevant but inspiriting noise.
Most of them, however, are related to something fought for, (St. George
and Merry England!), something that, it is hoped, will superintend
the fight (God with us!), or something that is fought against (A bas
Marat!). The knight who shouted, “Two red roses across the moon” on a
sultry day when--

   “... the battle was scattered from hill to hill
    From the windmill to the watermill.”

may have been incomprehensible to his enemies, but was not
incomprehensible to himself, and “Art for Art’s sake!” forty and fifty
years ago, a surprising, rather ridiculous phrase in the ears of the
early Victorians who then survived, was something very different for
the men who were fighting to destroy a petrified mental attitude
towards art in general. We must first understand what they fought
against before we have the right to speak of the meaning of their
battle-cry.

They fought, primarily, against a moral valuation of art. They fought,
secondly, against “nature” ... against, that is to say, a crude
conception of the relation between nature and art; against, to put
that crude conception in its crudest form, the supposition that he
who looked at a picture could find something in the external world,
by its resemblance to which the picture should be judged. It would
be a fascinating task to show that the too faithful imitation of
external things is an impediment to the highest functions of art, and,
on the other hand, that imitation in some kind, in some degree, is
an essential part of that function. But I do not wish to be tempted
into discussion of the true relation between art and nature, though a
solution of that problem will, perhaps, suggest itself to those who
read this paper to its end. I am here chiefly interested in art’s
relation to ourselves. Nature for the moment is outside the discussion,
though, in justice to the artists for art’s sake, I must point out
that their revolt was not against “morality” alone. When we hear
Wilde’s gay proclamation that “Life imitates Art far more than Art
imitates Life,” we must take care to hear also, from Whistler, more
serious, that “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all
pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music,” and that
the artist “in all that is dainty and lovable ... finds hints for his
own combinations, and thus is Nature ever his resource and always at
his service, and to him is nought refused.” We must not imagine that
the revolt was merely playful.

Against “nature” and against “morality.” In an age when the painter of
“Derby Day” assisted Ruskin by saying that he could not “see anything
of the true representation of water and atmosphere in the painting of
“Battersea Bridge,” they upheld the superiority of art to “nature.”
In an age when Dickens was praised for his reforms of the workhouse
and blamed for his love of low life, when novelists were judged by the
deeds, no, by the manners of the persons of their fiction, when poets
were judged by their private lives, they protested the irrelevance
of all such things to the question at issue, which was the goodness
or badness of the work of art to be judged. We must not blame their
formula, but the ideas against which it was directed, for the bad
manners, the morality that they hoped would be regarded as immorality,
for the unpublishable private lives, that were the excesses after
victory. We may, perhaps, smile as we observe how accurately they
balance those other excesses against which they were a reaction.

The question, no longer how to conquer, became how to use the victory,
and we had the common spectacle of veterans and retired camp-followers
trying to live up to the battle-cry of their youth, and, unable to
free themselves from the habit of their excesses, committing these
excesses with less and less gusto and more and more skill. But skill,
even so acquired, is not valueless. The battle-cry, after opening a
primrose path to charlatans, after turning “morality” into “immorality”
as a spectre ruling over art, remained the stimulus to an improved
technique, a scrupulousness, an economy of effect, a delicacy in
the handling of material, a care for melody and counterpoint, an
intolerance of careless workmanship, for which for a long time it will
be our privilege to be grateful.

Art, however, cannot live by perfection of technique alone, nor yet by
the repetition of remembered excesses. A new generation of artists,
working in a new environment, inspired by new aims, and threatened
by new dangers, requires a new formula, or a restatement of the old.
These artists of our own generation look at the faded banner with the
remains of reverence, or, in their dislike of the mistakes it made
possible, with a suspicion of contempt. In the turbulence of valuations
in this century, in the different, sharply defined attitudes of men
on such questions as property, labour, capital, the position of women
in the State, marriage, education, or the Church, they see a herd of
conflicting moralities. Involved in one or other of these conflicts,
perhaps in many of them, they cannot but believe, suspect, or hope that
art also must speak for or against, as tribune or as patrician, as
Churchman or as secularist, and, if the conflict be important to them,
the excellence of an artist must seem to be determined, at least in
part, by the views that he expresses. How then can art “have nothing to
do with morality”? They are, however, sufficiently critical to see that
it is possible that a work of art may be good for a democrat, bad for
an aristocrat, and yet, somehow, good in itself. Was there something in
“Art for Art’s sake” after all?

Of the men whose names I mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay
one had founded his views on those of a philosopher, and so, whatever
may be his rank among those dogmatists, we are able to examine the
background of reasoning on which he saw his own dogmatic statements. It
is in that reasoning, and not in the cheerful taunts of the battlefield
that we are likely to learn how it was that the formula of “Art for
Art’s sake” seemed to be justified, and how it is that the formula is
fundamentally inadequate. Baudelaire’s proclamation, Pater’s practice,
Whistler’s blue-feathered, silver-tipped darts point us to no analysis.
The analysis that made Wilde’s paradoxes possible is open to our view
in the pages of Kant.

Now Kant said that what was called beautiful was the object of a
delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate
reference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far
from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our
judgment. Upon our judgment of what? The beautiful. How many crimes
has that word committed, how many discussions it has obscured, how
many it has closed at the very moment of their fertility. Not the
least of its knaveries has been this substitution of a condition of
art for the function of art, which, as I hope to show, is life itself.
A work of art suggests the achievement of the beautiful. That may be
its immediate object. It is not its ultimate object. It may be an
essential condition. It is not a function. Art for art’s sake means the
substitution of condition for function, and, as the beautiful can never
be a function of anything, the implicit denial that art has a function
at all. “All art is quite useless.”

But that is not what we believe. And the reason why the theorists of
art for art’s sake were both right and wrong was that they did not want
art for the sake of anything irrelevant to the artistic phenomenon, but
were a little ungenerous in their interpretation of that phenomenon.
They saw that moralities, private lives, reforms, interests, had
nothing to do with the attempted achievement of the condition of the
beautiful, but, having seen that, forgot, in their hurry for battle,
that the work of art persists beyond this achievement or attempted
achievement; forgot that, will he nill he, the artist’s work cannot
but bear the impress of his personality, and forgot that through that
fact all the things they wished to rule out of the discussion had their
rightful place in it.

The question is, what is their rightful place? And to answer it we must
first satisfy ourselves as to the nature of the artistic phenomenon.

A work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom, for
purposes of reference, I shall call the speaker and the listener. But,
before it is a collaboration, a re-creation, in which form we commonly
know it, it is an independent act performed by the speaker alone. He,
as first creator, isolates some from the flux of impressions in which
he lives. It is as if he were to arrest that flux, and momentarily to
stop its flow. He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses,
and, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in
the dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his
existence. This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world,
the universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory,
clearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to
have a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which
itself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. The
resulting clarity is as if he had suddenly stopped the cross-currents
of a stream, and the stream, losing the opaqueness of its tangled
motion, had become crystal. He isolates that moment by surrounding
it with his own consciousness, while other moments fly past taking
with them shreds of that tattered veil, no more.... There is a choice
of moments, and because the choice is not reasonable, but determined
by the moment itself, the speaker feels himself inspired. That which
attracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and
hold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad
others with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is
a moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture,
words, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such. Two bars
are heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a
jumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost
of an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... These things are pledges.
He seizes them and, warily, lest he lose them, listens for the rest
of the melody, watchfully draws out of the flood the figure whose
gesture had seemed to be the moment itself, pieces the brittle words
together, and shapes the picture in his brain. He allows the moment
to redeem the pledge it has given, his care being not to impede it by
forestalling its further appearance with something contradictory to
the original fragment, something that the character of that fragment
has not determined. He seeks only to be true to the original promise,
and the good artist is known by the fact that it is impossible to tell
with what he began, the bad artist by the fragment he has surrounded
with baser metal that does not ring with its note, or the phantom whose
vitality he has blurred by clothing it with flesh uninformed by its
peculiar vitality.

The process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is
a process of finding out. He is engaged in _knowing_ the uttermost
implications of the fragment of impression caught by him from the flux
of unconscious or semi-conscious life. He is making the whole of that
impression his own by his profound, his complete consciousness of it.
That is why the artist can never understand those people, not artists,
who ask him how he can prefer art to life; imitation to the real thing.
He cannot believe that such people mean what they say. In his humility
he assumes that they too have the modesty to admit to themselves that
their life is unconscious, or semi-conscious, and he believes that this
process of _knowing_, of becoming conscious, is the intensest form of
living that there is.

Then, when the work of art is as we know it, we, the listener,
collaborate with that other artist, the speaker, and from what he has
said, in stone, music, paint or words, try to reconstruct the fragment
of life that he has made his own and to share his consciousness of
it. Accurately speaking, this is impossible. We become conscious of a
moment of life different from his. We cannot give his words the precise
atmosphere they had for him, we cannot see with exactly his eyes, or
hear with his ears, we are without his private and individual memory.
We can but be inaccurate translators. We can, however, perceive,
uncertainly, that he has been successful himself in allowing a moment
of life to redeem the pledge it had given him, that his work does not
contradict itself, and so is true to the original inspiration bedded
in it or clothed by it. And this perception suggests to us that, if it
were possible, we should find, certainly, what we already believe, that
his share in the collaboration is perfect. We then say that a work of
art is beautiful; the wistfulness with which we sometimes say it, the
tears that sometimes dim our eyes as we close a book or turn from a
picture that we believe to be beautiful, and the sadness that has often
been associated with the name of beauty, are due to the half-conscious
knowledge that our share in the collaboration is imperfect, since we
can never stand exactly where he stood.

Our judgment of the beautiful then depends on our belief that, were
certain unalterable facts altered in the constitution of the universe
and of ourselves, we should be sharing a perfect expression, an
expression, that is to say, in perfect unity with itself. Art then for
art’s sake, perfection of expression first. But what is this expression
in perfect unity with itself, but a moment of conscious living,
isolated from all else, lifted from the unconscious flux and given
us--to live?

Let us rewrite the half-obliterated formula. Let us write it now: Art
for Life’s sake, and raise a party cry from its momentary usefulness
into a proud suggestion of the noble function of art. This function is
not merely to teach us how to act, as was supposed by the old critics,
who recommended Homer for the heroism of his heroes, though, as we
shall see, they were not wholly wrong, nor yet merely to teach us
how to order our lives, though it may do that by suggestion. Art is
itself life. Its function is to increase our consciousness of life,
to make us more than wise or sensitive, to transform us from beings
overwhelmed by the powerful stream of unconscious living to beings
dominating that stream, to change us from objects acted upon by life
to joyful collaborators in that reaction. By its means we become
conscious gainers by life’s procreative activity. No longer hiding
our faces from that muddied storm that sweeps irresistibly from the
future to the past, a medley of confused figures, a babel of cries of
joy, of laughter, of sorrow, of pain, by its means we lift our heads,
and, learning from the isolation of moments in eternity, to imagine
the isolation of all such moments, we conquer that storm, and accept
pain, joy, laughter or sorrow, with equal gratitude, in our continually
realised desire to feel ourselves alive.

Let us examine from this point of view the fundamental quarrel between
the theorists of “Art for Art’s sake” and the moralists. What are their
respective beliefs?

_The Moralist._--The noblest end of being is to be good. All human
activities must serve this end or be pernicious. Art, the most
eloquent, the most powerful of pleaders, cannot, without violating the
trust that humanity puts in her, turn devil’s advocate. Let the artist
be as skilful an artist as he can, but let him make a right use of his
excellence. In peace we ask no more of a good shot than that he hit
the bull’s eye of a target. But we live in times of war between the
hosts of good and of evil. The fight is to the death, and we admire the
good shot if he fire from among the ranks of angels, and fear him if we
see that his skill is at the service of our opponents, who in age-long
battle have shown themselves merciless and strong.

_The Artist for Art’s sake._--Morality in art is an accident of no
importance. We hear the battle of which you speak, but do not take
part in it, though we listen sometimes to the music of its trumpets
far away, and see the red glow it throws up to the sky. But morality
concerns our circumstances or possible circumstances, and so has
nothing to do with the beautiful, which is art’s sole concern. A work
of art that declares its sympathy with one or other party to your
battle is one whose creator has looked aside to ends other than beauty.
It is therefore a failure as a work of art. Art must not be limited to
edifying subjects. There is nothing that may not become beautiful in
the hands of an artist. Church and lupanar, angel and courtesan, are of
equal value in his eyes. They are material, no more, and he will not
tolerate that morality should hamper him by dictating the choice or
use of his material. A work of art is independent of morality.

_To these two we reply, believing that art is for life’s sake._--When
a man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality,
ask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled
to admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he
attributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in
each individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and
his environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the
code of values that is his will be one of the determining influences
on an artist’s vision of life. If, perchance, he is so uncritical as
to believe that he has nothing to do with morality, that belief will
itself share in giving his work a moral value. There is no escape
from morality in art. If, therefore, we choose to consider ourselves
as one of a band of people whose moralities are more or less similar,
and to regard their average morality, their average code of values as
important, we shall be perfectly justified in judging art by what we
suppose to be its effect on that average morality. But we must not
forget that we are then regarding artists as a regiment from which we
are engaged in picking out the traitors and the loyalists--and that it
is a regiment whose immediate business is not war, a regiment which
does not know that it is enlisted.

Let us now consider the nature of the moral influence which the speaker
exerts upon the listener. It will not be surprising if we find that it
has a direct bearing upon the point under discussion.

The artist whose act of conscious living is the work of art cannot
alter his personality without disloyalty to the moment of life that
under his hands is simultaneously becoming conscious and becoming
expression. His personality, and with it his morality, is already
involved; any dishonesty blurs his vision, and the crystal whose
increasing clarity was his delight becomes for ever opaque. Here and
nowhere else must we find the origin of the artist’s distrust of
morality. He means by it not “morality,” but any morality other than
his own at the time of artistic creation or _knowing_. A work of art
is always the expression of _a_ morality, the morality of its creator
at the moment when he began its creation, a morality that has ceased
to exist, since its creator has been changed to a greater or less
degree by the very fact of its creation. Returning to our metaphor
of speaker and listener, we may say that the listener, who tries as
nearly as possible to share the moment of conscious life that was the
speaker’s, to stand where he stood, and think what he thought, does, in
contemplation of the work of art, share to some extent in the morality,
that momentary morality we have described, of another man.

Besides this fundamental morality of a work of art, it may hold other
moralities which are also not without their influence. Codes of values
may themselves be the material of artistic creation. A code of values
foreign to the speaker may enter into the moment of conscious life
that is his work of art. Plato and Socrates were different men with
different moralities. The Socrates of Plato’s Dialogues, however
Platonized, is not Plato, and, as well as the fundamental morality of
those dialogues, the morality of those speeches which are supposed
to be Socratic has its separate influence upon us. Anatole France
plays with the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, and with Jacques Tournebroche,
and beside the morality of _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_ we are
offered these other moralities included in it and ruled by it.

There would seem to be little else but morality in art, and its
influence would seem to be so largely as to be almost exclusively
moral. But observe what actually happens. Have you not noticed,
in reading a book, that you insensibly pick out and offer to your
digestion those of the accidental moralities in it that seem to be
cousins of your own. You linger over the sayings of Coignard, if
you feel that in some mood or other you could have said them. You
accept with gratitude the follies, the humours of M. Bergeret, if
you recognise in him a kinship, however distant, with yourself. In
listening to a play you side, at least in simpler moods, with the
character whose code of values approximates to that by which you are
in the habit of weighing your actions and those of others. These minor
judgments are independent of your judgment of the work of art, though
here too a similar instinct bids you prefer those artists in whom you
recognise, let us say, the full development of some one possibility
that your personality contains. And, since our temperament thus picks
and chooses among the moralities that art offers, because it is like
Paracelsus’ alchemist, situate in the stomach of man, digesting the
food that is good for him and rejecting the poison, art does not so
much alter our morality as increase our consciousness of it. It is
an individualising influence on morality, essentially hostile to the
averaging of codes of values. It seeks uniqueness, not uniformity, and
so does not so much spread moralities abroad as cherish and grow to
their full strength the moralities it finds among its listeners. In
this sentence the moralists and the artists for art’s sake come to an
understanding.

Leaving now the question of its moral influence, let me give an
example, of the simplest nature, to show what I mean by the conscious
living that is art. I find one in the following exquisite poem, “The
Happy Child,” by William Davies:

   “I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick,
    But not one like the child did pick.

    I heard the pack-hounds in green park,
    But not one like the child heard bark.

    I heard this day bird after bird,
    But not one like the child has heard.

    A hundred butterflies saw I,
    But not one like the child saw fly.

    I saw the horses roll in grass,
    But no horse like the child saw pass.

    My world this day has lovely been,
    But not like what the child has seen.”

Rossetti believed that “Poetry should seem to the hearer to have
been always present to his thought, but never before heard,” and
the statement that this has been accomplished (so just, sometimes,
is popular instinct) is the commonest praise accorded to individual
works of art. Many of Mr. Davies’ readers must have said, rightly,
but, critically speaking, with imperfect accuracy, “Now that expresses
what I have always felt.” They should have said, “That enables me
to feel what I always could have felt.” For they have never truly
felt it. That wistful, regretful moment, now articulate, was carried
unhappily past them in the general flux of incompletely conscious
life. They suspected a possibility of feeling something, of knowing
what they dimly felt, but it eluded them in the tangled currents of
the stream, and they did not detain it, _know_ it, and make it part
of themselves. Mr. Davies has not so allowed it to escape; he warily
netted it in his consciousness, _learnt_ it accurately and fully, and
wrote that poem, thus isolating it for ever from unconsciousness. And
we, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of
the work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories
behind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness
such a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately
with our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it,
an increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The
conscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as
self-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not
self but other people’s eyes. It implies a new reading of the Delphic
command, γνῶθι σεαυτόν. It does not mean Know thy opinions only, nor
yet, Know what are thy desires, but Know thy life, not thy biography
but thy living, thine innumerable acts of life.

I took my example from a short poem of extreme simplicity, and, as I
have again and again in this essay spoken of “moments” of conscious
life, a scrupulous reader might well conclude that I concerned myself
only with what is commonly known as lyrical art, or that I should
presently offer a proof of Croce’s theory that all art is essentially
lyrical. I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in
believing, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion,
that all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic
conception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation
shall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for
this reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to
himself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be
representative of more than one moment, it would be representative
of more than one man. It would not be homogeneous, and could not be
beautiful. This applies not only to a song or a picture, but to those
works of art which are in appearance the most elaborate, the least
uniform, the least determined by a single moment. A play, whose reading
or performance may occupy hours, during which a number of characters
whom we accept provisionally as human, as separate entities, live
imaginary lives before us, is, no less than a song, the result of
becoming completely conscious of a single moment. The duration of the
reading is in no way affected by the duration of the moment of life
that set the author playing with his marionettes. A moment of life such
as would, for a poet, become articulate in a song, may require from a
playwright that he represent it to himself in persons talking, a clash
of personalities, a breaking of personalities by destiny, a series
of events explicable within itself, not resembling any one moment of
his life, but in their totality representing his means of _knowing_ a
moment, and the means he offers us whereby, as nearly as we may, we
shall share that knowing. When a play is not the artist’s learning a
moment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building
at dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be
empty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion.
Passage of time, intricacy of construction, apparent multiplicity of
imagined lives do not affect the question.

John Masefield did not by a sudden effort of genius conceive “Nan,”
scenes, persons, and dialogue in a moment. One moment, however,
determined its conception, and implied all that is in the play. Let me,
with deference, suggest what may have happened. He heard a story that
affected him with a mixture of emotions. If he had not been an artist,
he would probably have done no more than repeat the story to others as
it was told to him, and wonder idly if it produced the same mixture of
emotions in them. Instead, he lingered with it, and let the unconscious
flux flow on unobserved while he brooded over this one emotional
moment, becoming more and more clearly conscious of the emotions it
contained as they, in the formative processes of his mind, came to be
represented by persons and actions and words. His mind was not making
but discovering, following the implications of the original emotional
moment, careful only to be true to that, and rejecting proffered
representations solely on account of their inaccuracy. His skill was
shown only in so dealing with the flood of representations that no
one particle of it should contradict another, should hamper the full
realisation of that moment. His greatness was shown in the profundity
with which he realised that moment, and the depth to which he could
follow its implications.

Therein, by the way, is suggested the criterion of greatness that is
contained in the doctrine that art is for life’s sake. The theory of
art for art’s sake left its holders at a loss before the question “Is
no man greater than another, if his works are beautiful, if he is an
equally skilful artist?” They knew that he was, but their theory could
not tell them why, and they had to take refuge in cynicism. The theory
of art for “morality’s” sake was no more satisfying. It suggested that
the greatest artist was he who preached the most good, and so left its
holders in speechless difficulty before a comparison of Rossetti and
Dr. Watts. The theory of art for life’s sake has a clear answer, and
offers a valid test. That man is the greatest artist who makes us the
most profoundly conscious of life. Shakespeare is set above Herrick,
who was a better technician, and Leonardo above Murillo, who painted
more devotional subjects, on grounds with which men, neither as
artists nor as moralists, need quarrel.

Art for Art’s sake was a battle-cry, and, to understand it, we had
to understand what those who used it fought. Art for Life’s sake is
also a battle-cry, though it includes in those four words a suggestion
not only of the function of art but of its nature. Let us review the
enemies we attack with those words upon our lips. What do we fight
against? What are the misunderstandings which in our time encourage the
production of false, of secondary art, and obscure the excellence of
the finest?

We fight first against a political valuation of art, that imagines
poetry, pictures and music as auxiliaries in the reconstruction or
conservation of the state, and judges them by their efficiency as
political pamphlets.

We fight secondly against an educational valuation of art, that judges
works of art by the accuracy of the facts they happen to embody, the
accuracy of the pictures they paint of this or that form of life, the
clearness with which they illustrate generalisations.

We fight thirdly against the valuation of art by its technical skill,
by the beauty that is a universal condition of its being. These things
cannot afford a scale of comparison for works of art, but only a
guarantee that they are worthy of judgment. We should not fight against
this valuation if it showed itself in practice capable of so useful an
office. It is, however, not sufficiently selective, but allows itself
to be tricked by things built in imitation of perfect building, things
whose form is not identical with their content, things which manifest
more skill than vitality. This, our old ally, since it made our battle
possible, is now our subtlest enemy.

Our battle is far from being easy, for we fight not to kill but to
make captive, and it is easier and safer to fight to kill. We fight
not to destroy those valuations, but to destroy their pre-eminence.
Recognising (1) that a work of art has a political, comparable to its
moral, influence, (2) that it always embodies knowledge, (3) that it
is nothing if it does not wake in us the feeling that we are near the
achievement of the beautiful, we wish to deny none of these facts,
but to prevent any one of them from being taken as the foundation
of a criterion of art. We wish to set over them a criterion of art
that shall include them all. Above technique, above opinion, above
information, we set life, of the special kind that is here described,
whose conscious vitality is to unconscious vitality what living is to
existence.

What, then, do we ask ourselves after experiencing a work of art.

We ask one thing only, though, perhaps, in many forms: Has it given
us an increased consciousness of life, or has it merely had in view
one or other of those valuations whose supreme authority we reject?
Is its title to the name of art merely that it is an illustration of
a doctrine that has elbowed out the doctrine it illustrates, merely
that it gives us a clear idea how some people live, merely that it
has a skin-deep appearance of unity? Or is it a piece of conscious
life, separated watchfully from the flux of living, a piece of
_knowing_ carried out by the artist, which we are allowed to share?
Does it give us a new possession by making us aware of something we
possess. We do not ask an artist for opinions, for facts, for skill,
alone. We have the right to ask for more. We ask him for ourselves;
we ask him for life. “Poetry enriches the blood of the world” by the
practice it affords of living consciously. Vain learning, opinion,
skill, impoverish it. We ask from an artist opportunities of conscious
living, which, taken as they come, multiply the possibilities of their
recurrence, turn us into artists, and help us to contract the habit of
being alive.

  1912.




  ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:
  A ROMANTIC OF 1830




  ALOYSIUS BERTRAND:
  A ROMANTIC OF 1830


In the preface to _Petits Poèmes en Prose_, Baudelaire makes respectful
reference to a little-known book: “J’ai une petite confession à vous
faire. C’est en feuilletant pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux
_Gaspard de la Nuit_, d’Aloysius Bertrand (un livre connu de vous, de
moi et de quelques-uns de nos amis, n’a-t-il pas tous les droits à
être appelé fameux?), que l’idée m’est venue de tenter quelque chose
d’analogue, et d’appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou
plutot d’_une_ vie moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu’il avait
appliqué à la peinture de la vie ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.”
He speaks of Bertrand as “mon mystérieux et brillant modèle,” though,
remembering the teaching of Poe, he adds that he is ashamed to have
made something so different from _Gaspard de la Nuit_, since he holds
that the highest honour of a poet is to accomplish exactly what he
set out to perform. A writer who wrote prose poems good enough to be
read “twenty times at least” by Baudelaire, good enough to suggest an
imitation, a writer but for whom the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ would not
have been written, or would have been written differently, is more than
a literary curiosity. I was led to examine his book, and, presently, to
find an interest in the man himself as well as in his accomplishment.
M. Anatole France was good enough to direct me in my search for
information. My friend, M. Champion, of the Quai Malaquais, generously
put his bibliographical knowledge at my disposal. The files of
forgotten magazines and newspapers and essays by Sainte-Beuve, Charles
Asselineau, and M. Leon Séché combined to build in my mind a portrait
of this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here
and there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality.

       *       *       *       *       *

Louis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later
preferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, at Céva, in
Piedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child
of that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in the _Confession
d’un Enfant du Siècle_. His mother was an Italian, his father a
Frenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery
letter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as “only a patriot of
1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out
his blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty
years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.” At the age of seven
the young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned
in youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read
Hugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the
modern Dijon into a mediæval city of dreams.

Early in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper, _Le
Provincial_, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It
endured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to
it, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered
form, was printed in _Gaspard de la Nuit_. The paper was not unnoticed
in Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he
found some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless,
with rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read
aloud from them.

Two portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by
Victor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “... a tall, thin young
man of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively
little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather
wretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather
uncivilised....”

Victor Pavie says: “His awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated
costume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly
escaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained
fire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his
face, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat
uncivilised taciturnity....”

Beside these pictures let me print Bertrand’s portrait of the imaginary
Gaspard de la Nuit: “A poor devil whose exterior announced nothing but
poverty and suffering. I had already noticed in the garden his frayed
overcoat, buttoned to the chin, his shapeless hat that never brush had
brushed, his hair long as a weeping-willow, combed like a thicket, his
fleshless hands like ossuaries, his mocking, wretched, and sickly face;
and my conjectures had charitably placed him among those itinerant
artists, violin-players and portrait-painters, whom an insatiable
hunger and an unquenchable thirst condemn to travel the world in the
footsteps of the Wandering Jew....” It is different from the portraits
of himself, but not more different than would be such a Germanicised
caricature as might have been made by Hoffmann.

Bertrand’s life in Paris was hidden from the celebrated men whom he
met at Nodier’s evening receptions and in Sainte-Beuve’s study. He
showed himself for a moment, recited some of his verses “d’une voix
sautillante,” and disappeared. He had no money, and probably suffered
from that lack of confidence which can only be removed by a banking
account. Sainte-Beuve, who saw him two or three times and gave him a
copy of the _Consolations_, with the inscription “Mon ami Bertrand,”
speaks of him threading lonely streets with the air of Pierre
Gringoire, the out-at-elbows poet of _Notre Dame de Paris_. He paints
what must be an imaginary portrait of the young and penniless genius
leaning on the window-sill of his garret, “talking for long hours with
the pale gilliflowers of the roof.”

Unable to earn a living in Paris, he went back to Dijon in 1830, where
he contributed to a Liberal newspaper, _Le Patriote de la Côte-d’Or_.
In spite of his poverty, his blood was young and proud, and as he
walked the streets of Dijon he must have felt himself a representative
of that exuberant young Parisian manhood that was putting _Hernani_
on the stage and sending _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ to the press. A
rival paper jeered at him, and he was able to reply: “Je préfère vos
dédains à vos suffrages,” and to quote a letter from Victor Hugo to
explain his independence. Hugo had written: “Je lis vos vers en cercle
d’amis, comme je lis André Chenier, Lamartine et Alfred de Vigny: il
est impossible de posséder à un plus haut point les secrets de la
facture.” With such a testimonial in his pocket he need not care for
the scorn or the approval of a provincial journalist.

At this time his Liberalism was as ardent as his youth. Asselineau
quotes a fiery article praying for war, bloody war, against the Holy
Alliance: “It is time to throw the dice on a drum; and, should we all
perish, the honour of France and of liberty shall perish not.” But, as
was not unnatural, he presently left France and liberty to take care of
themselves, and, full of new plans for literary achievement, returned
hopefully to Paris, where he was joined by his mother and sister. He
was again unable to earn a living. The last lines of a piteous letter
written to Antoine de Latour in September 1833, show how miserable was
his condition:

    “Si je te disais que je suis au point de n’avoir bientôt plus de
    chaussures, que ma redingote est usée, je t’apprendrais là le
    dernier de mes soucis: ma mère et ma sœur manquent de tout dans
    une mansarde de l’hôtel des Etats-Unis qui n’est pas payée. Qu’est
    ce pour toi qu’une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, à quelle
    humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pièces d’argent
    dans une bourse, pour nous c’est un mois de loger, c’est du pain!

   “Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage.
      Mon camarade de collège!!!
   “Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.”

It is not known whether the money was sent him, nor whether he found
employment as a proof-reader.

In such poverty, in such dejection, he put together the book that
preserves his memory, dreaming, when he could forget his empty stomach
and the holes in his shoes, of the prose that Baudelaire was to
imagine after him, “une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans
rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements
lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de
la conscience.” He would not, perhaps, have thought of sudden starts
of conscience, for his was a simpler soul than Baudelaire’s, and he
never felt that the portrait he was drawing might be only the portrait
of a portrait. He was born in 1807 and not in 1821, and, with the
Romantic joy in colour and local colour, he had more than the Romantic
simplicity. His fantasies are prefaced by quotations, and these are
taken from Scott, Hugo, Byron, folk-song, the Fathers of the Church,
Scottish ballads, Charles Nodier, old chronicles, Lope de Vega,
Fenimore Cooper, the cries of the night watchmen, Lamartine, Coleridge,
Chateaubriand, a medley of the Romantics and the writers and things
that they admired. They sometimes mistook the picturesque for the
beautiful, and so did Bertrand. He was a man who thought with his eyes.
He was not an analyst.

So far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he
represents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at
that time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany,
had written _Fantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot_. Leigh Hunt,
in England, amused himself, in _Imagination and Fancy_, by cutting
little bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the
ghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours,
and in _Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et
de Callot_, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might
very well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had
been trained by the painters, and he was proud to offer his book as a
series of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates
that had never been bitten.

“Art,” he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it
is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image
of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is
the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his
retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes
his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of
beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in
penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other
hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the
square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his
carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache....
Now, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double
personification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents,
besides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies
after Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel
de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa,
Murillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.”

Bertrand’s book is one of the documents that must be studied by any
historian of the grotesque who would trace the re-awakening of a spirit
in art that had dozed during the eighteenth century, a spirit quite
different from that of Hogarth, with which it is sometimes confounded.
Bertrand’s was not the noble, the sublime conception of the grotesque
that ruled the finer drawings and much of the poetry of William Blake.
It was akin to that whose love of a gargoyle brought it to life and
sent Quasimodo to haunt the dark and winding stairs of the towers of
Notre Dame. Bertrand contrasts Rembrandt and Callot, but does not see
that in the mind of the man “who consumes himself in penetrating the
mysterious symbols of nature” there is the essence of the feeling for
the grotesque, which, in such men as Callot, having forgotten its
origins, too often becomes mere sport, shadows flung on a wall by a
will-o’-the-wisp instead of by a philosopher’s lamp. But in _Gaspard
de la Nuit_ this feeling is groping towards consciousness, recognising
its food in the etchings alike of Rembrandt and of Callot, of Salvator
and of Durer, noticing the more obvious differences between them, but
as yet incapable of a more sensitive distinction. It is interesting to
notice that he takes suggestions from the Breughel[2] whose wild and
energetic picture made Flaubert, ten years later, set to work on _The
Temptation of St. Anthony_.

Bertrand’s book is made up of six series of fantasies, labelled
“Flemish School,” “Old Paris,” “The Chronicles,” like the rooms in a
picture-gallery. The usual form of the pieces is that of a small number
of carefully balanced paragraphs, mostly single sentences, sometimes
linked by refrains of movement or meaning. Some have minute prologues
and epilogues. Some are like prose-ballades, finished by an _envoi_.
Few cover more than two or three pages in a small book of large type.
Each one is complete in itself, and built of a firm, noun-ful prose,
richer in colour than in subtlety.

They were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible,
a man elusive, _fugace_, who could not settle in one place or in one
mood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the
nearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a
hunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his
chase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no
models for the gait of his soul.

Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble
personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming
that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else.
His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet.
He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all
he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of
dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams
with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a
cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights
while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as
Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in
his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their
phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a
Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait
by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old
Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to
keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered
him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes
of the moon.

This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries:

    “LE CLAIR DE LUNE.
        “‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez
          Et priez pour les trépassés.’
                   --_Le cri du crieur de nuit._

“Oh! qu’il est doux, quand l’heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de
regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d’or!

“Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre, un chien hurlait dans le
carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas.

“Mais bientôt mon oreille n’interrogea plus qu’un silence profond. Les
lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui
battait sa femme.

“Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet
enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise.

“Et le grillon s’était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette avait
éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée.

“Et moi, il me semblait,--tant la fièvre est incohérente,--que la lune,
grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!”

    “MOONLIGHT.
          “‘Wake, men who sleep,
            And pray for the dead.’
               --_Cry of the night-watchman._

“Oh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at
night, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden
carolus![3]

“Two lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the
cross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper.

“But soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence.
The lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart
beating his wife.[4]

“The dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch,
rain-soaked, and wind-frozen.

“And the cricket had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark had put
out its last glimmer in the ashes of the fire-place.

“And, as for me, it seemed to me--fever is so incoherent--that the
moon, wrinkling her face, put out her tongue at me like a man who has
been hanged.”

The moon put out her tongue at her faithful admirer, and helped him
neither to honey-dew nor to the milk of Paradise. His biographers
do not agree as to the way he lived during his few remaining years.
Sainte-Beuve says that he was a private secretary, and that he wrote
in various inconspicuous newspapers. M. Séché, to whom we owe a great
deal of new information, thinks that these employments are not likely
to have held Bertrand for long. About 1835, he found in Eugène Renduel
a publisher for _Gaspard de la Nuit_. He sold the right to print
an edition of 800 copies, of which 300 were to be called “Keepsake
Fantastique,” for the sum of 150 francs. The money was paid and the
manuscript was put into the publisher’s desk, where, for some reason
or other, it remained for a very long time. Its publication was
promised from year to year. In a letter written to David d’Angers, in
1837, Bertrand says: “_Gaspard de la Nuit_, ce livre de mes douces
prédilections, où j’ai essayé de créer un nouveau genre de prose,
attend le bon vouloir d’Eugène Renduel pour paraître enfin cet
automne....” Bertrand did not make the gallant figure in poverty that
was made, for example, by Richard Steele, who turned bailiffs into
liveried footmen, as Whistler is said to have done more recently; but
once, at least, he showed a smiling face to misfortune, even if the
smile was a little awry. In 1840, the book being still unpublished,
he called on his publisher and left a sonnet on him, as an ordinary
person might leave a visiting-card. A more charming protest against
procrastination was surely never written:

   “Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux,
    Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange:
    C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange,
    Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.

    A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous?
    Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange,
    Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange;
    Nous avons une vigne--eh bien, vendangeons nous!

    Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne,
    La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne,
    Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.

    J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes,
    A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes.
    Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.”

Six months later Bertrand was dead. At least once he had known for
several months the inside of a public hospital. He was attacked by
phthisis. David d’Angers obtained a grant of 300 francs for him and the
promise of a post as librarian; but he was not to leave the hospital
again. David, who was himself ill, did all that could be done for him,
sent him oranges, and made portraits of him before and after death,
and saw to it that his grave-clothes were not of the coarseness deemed
fitting for the bodies of the poor. David alone followed his bier,
and, no doubt, supplied Sainte-Beuve with the material for his picture
(in the introduction to the first edition of _Gaspard de la Nuit_,
published in 1842 by Victor Pavie, who bought the rights from Renduel
for the sum originally paid):--“It was the eve of Ascension; a terrible
storm was rumbling; the Mass for the dead had been spoken, and the
funeral procession did not come. The priest had ended by leaving; the
only friend present watched the abandoned remains. At the end of the
chapel a sister of charity was decorating an altar with garlands for
the next day’s feast.”

So ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this
way and that, without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and
whirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand’s life was that of
the real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his
head is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are
full of magnificent things. Bertrand was like a man trying to speak
high poetry when his enemy has him by the throat. He saw, and wrote,
and wrestled, in a breath; his achievement was scarcely recognised
till he was overthrown. And that achievement, such as it was, that
little flame he contrived to light before going out himself, kindled a
greater, and in its brighter luminosity almost became invisible. But
when we look back from the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ to this little
book that suggested their creation, we find that it is not without an
independent interest, personal as well as historical. Bertrand himself
was somebody, and no book so well as his lets us share the day-dreams
of 1830.

  1911.




ALPHONSE DAUDET




ALPHONSE DAUDET


Daudet’s was the scintillant, flamelike vitality that makes its
possessor the youngest in whatever company he may find himself.
Anatole France writes of him that he believes no human creature ever
loved nature and art with a more ardent and more generous affection,
or enjoyed the universe with more delight, more force, and more
tenderness. Even in old age and suffering, he brought merriment with
him when he limped into the big room that Edmond de Goncourt called his
“grenier,” and kept for talk and friendship. If the room had been sad
or silent, it woke to laughter when this invalid came in and began to
speak. Men felt themselves more alive in his presence. This vitality
is different from the physical and mental momentum of a Balzac. It is
a lambent flame rather than a conflagration; light without heat. It
scorched no one, not even Daudet himself, who made it into a public
entertainer. He could use it at will; it did not impel him into a
restless activity. I can imagine that indolent people felt ill at ease
with Balzac in the room, as if from a fear that he might go off like
a dynamite bomb. Daudet’s vitality was gentle, and insinuated itself
into his listeners’ veins, so that when they left they had the pleasant
sensation of having themselves been more than usually vivacious. “I
have missed my vocation,” he said; “I should have been a merchant of
happiness.” It was a vocation that he had not missed. A merchant of
happiness was precisely what he was, since one kind of happiness is a
childish enjoyment of everything that may occur. Children run about
all day, without forethought, and play at being all sorts of things,
and chatter and fall asleep, still chattering, in the middle of a
sentence. They wake next morning to perform a variation ever so blithe
on yesterday’s performance. Daudet lived just so, and was able to share
his life with other people.

_Le Petit Chose_ is the story of his childhood. It is the tale of a
little boy whose father is an unsuccessful man of business, a little
boy with a parrot and a dream of Robinson Crusoe, who is transplanted
from his south to a northern manufacturing town, a child who becomes
an usher in a school where his youth and his poverty make him butt of
boys and masters alike, where he writes love-letters for a gymnastic
instructor, and suffers in his stead for their success, a child who
goes to Paris at seventeen to join his brother in poverty and hope,
and to write a poem about blue butterflies. The book is almost true
to history, except that, unlike Daudet, _le Petit Chose_ ends as
partner in a china shop, regretfully resigning his blue butterflies to
marry the daughter of the china shop’s proprietor. The real tale of
his shyness and pathetic adventures, that Daudet was never tired of
telling, since it was his own, goes on in other books. There is in them
all a _joie d’écrire_ as much as _joie de vivre_. He rejoices in every
misfortune of his childhood, because, in describing it, he finds an
opportunity for life as a young man. His life as a child had been told
to himself as a fairy tale. He had told ingenious lies to excuse his
truant days on the river, killing off a Pope to hide, in his family’s
excitement, his lateness for a meal. He told lies to himself to excuse
the sordid appearances of his existence, and now he had a chance of
telling lies again, and so living another romance. Daudet’s writing
was always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied
indefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Coppée,
a disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the
memory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he
writes, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades
as if they were yesterday’s, as indeed they might be. Even when he
tries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is
irrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or
pleasure is the more enjoyable. Either is an aid to living, and perhaps
the former gives life a keener taste.

Men of this kind do not spend their vitality altogether for nothing.
More than others they need affection and applause. A face of
disapproval in their audience is enough to wither their wings, and they
ask for goodwill, if only to help them to continue the performance.
_Le Petit Chose_, like most of Daudet’s work, like his life, and his
other representations of his life, conversational or on paper, is an
appeal to be loved. He asks to be seen as he sees himself, and asks
very successfully. It is this, I think, that makes it easy to forgive
him his sins against pure art; this that accounts for his friends’ love
of him, and also for the popular success that made him feel a little
uncomfortable among them. His greed of affection made him not very
fastidious; he was glad to be loved by his baker as well as by Edmond
de Goncourt.

Daudet acquired the habit of being lovable. He made his own life into
a fairy tale, and, since it was the surest way to gratitude, soon
found it difficult to see the lives of others in any different way.
He copied his men and women from nature, as he said, but each one
of them readily became _le Petit Chose_, and he his affectionate,
rose-spectacled biographer. When his novels are laid aside, and we
look at their backs, we forget their extraordinary observation, and
see characters exaggerated by a man who is anxious to persuade; and
when these characters have faded away into framed drawings like those
taken from back numbers of _Punch_, we remember little of the books
but a spirit that asks love and gives it, is ready to understand more
than there is to be understood, and to make excuses for those who are
without them. We think of Daudet as the tenderest possible biographer
for ourselves, and at the same time feel a little shrinking from the
idea of being exhibited with such emphasis. Some of the novels, with
which we are not here particularly concerned, do their best to dispel
the atmosphere of rose-leaves and sunshine, involving us in a swift and
keen analysis of unkind and unpleasant motives. But when we close even
these, little is left of them but their author’s charm, and the memory
of those incidents or descriptions, in which, freed from the burden of
an ambitious task, he loosens the bridle of his romancing vitality.

His books are not so consistent as his character. They are always most
satisfactory when most directly concerned with it. This is partly
because he wrote of himself in anecdotes, and his inspiration was
facile and short-winded rather than persevering. The effects he secures
in his writings are the same as those he won in conversation, snatches
of colour and feeling, like the studies in an artist’s notebook,
often better than when repainted into pictures. Ambition perhaps
obstructed his talent in setting it to do other men’s work, however
well he may have been able to do it. He was not a novelist, although he
made himself one. His big books, in which he describes many lives and
kinds of life, are already being sieved out by time, and the work by
which his name will be remembered is reducing itself to his real and
imaginary reminiscences and his short stories. In these he does not
mingle contradictory ingredients; while his novels, even the best, are
too much like battle-grounds between Queen Mab and Zola.

In his short stories he is perfectly at ease. His talent was no eagle
for long flights, but one of his own blue butterflies. It flew far only
with effort, and tired as it flew, drooping its wings or flapping them
irregularly. But in the short tales no flight was so long as to tire
it. It was happy and at ease, opened its wings with grace, and as it
dropped, folded them with all imaginable delicacy. In the _Contes du
Lundi_ he reconciled his powers and his ambition. He was a romancer, a
_conteur_, a _causeur_, and romantic anecdotes refuse to be fettered
to a strict and steady veracity. He wished to be a painter after
nature, to be accurate, to be real, to be mistaken for reality. There
are moments, but only moments, when the two kinds of truth, that these
powers and this ambition severally suggest, coalesce in a truth that
is charming and, at the same time, almost photographic. In the novels
the truth disintegrated into opposing masses. In short stories he was
able to combine them. His brief, flashing sketches, with their curious
air of stereoscopic perspective, are seldom in the least unreal. Yet,
poignant little things, unforgettable, however slight, they are not
the probabilities of life but its possibilities. They are the lies
that ought to be true. The story of the Alsatian schoolmaster, or that
of the siege of Berlin, with the old colonel, in his worn uniform,
standing on the balcony to welcome the victorious French, and seeing
instead the Uhlans of the advance guard, and hearing the triumphal
march of Schubert, as the Prussians enter Paris; all these minute
things are too dramatic, too pathetic, not to be allowed their moment
of existence. Daudet writes them, and they bring tears to our eyes,
tears that, unfortunately, we must submit to a rather cruel analysis.

Tears, and also laughter. Daudet with his firm belief in the ultimate
victory of all good and pleasant people, and the corresponding
punishment of the bad and unkind, enjoyed, like many happy-minded
men, a highly developed faculty of pity. It was one of his means of
being alive, and this man, who “died of having loved life too well,”
neglected none of the exercises that made his nerves tingle and his
heart beat. He lived in being sorry for people and things, and he
lived in being glad. Another group of his short stories is made up
of pure fairy tales that dance before the eyes, their words running
and tripping after each other, like a band of elves on midsummer’s
eve. They are southern tales of old Provence that he read in the
grasshopper’s library under the blue sky, where the librarians sing all
day, and there are gossamers for bookmarks. Their heartsome feeling is
that of the old song:

   “Sur le pont d’Avignon
    Tout le monde danse en rond.”

Even when he brings the elves to town, as in _Un Réveillon dans le
Marais_, when, into the old courtyard of the mansion that has been
turned into a mineral water factory, he introduces cavaliers and ladies
of the ancient time, fairies now, being dead so long, he brings with
them half a memory of the farandole, and makes them drunk with seltzer.

Laughter and tears; it is by these that we remember Daudet. His art
is that of wearing his heart on his sleeve. “Here,” he seems to say,
“is a sad tale to make you cry (I cried myself in making it), and
here is a merry one to make you laugh (my pen quivered with merriment
as I wrote it down for you).” Laughter and tears tempted him perhaps
too strongly. He was accustomed to tell his stories many times before
he wrote them. They shaped themselves, like folktales, in successive
recitations, until the inessentials fell away from them and they won
economical and immediate effects. The danger of such a manner of
composition is a confusion of ends. The only safe audience for a writer
is that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our
consciousness, signs now and again his knowledge that such and such
an expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an
incomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open,
whose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art.
Its values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of
laughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become
more important to us than they should. How can the jocund tale be bad
that made you laugh? How can that sad one fail that sent your kerchief
to your eyes? There may be imperfections in them; yes, but by removing
them, I must be careful not to lose that laughter or those tears. And
so, almost inevitably, the tears and laughter come to seem the ends of
art instead of its by-products. And they are not the wistful tears that
dew the eyelashes before a perfect work, nor the impersonal laughter
that rings out like a spring song because some man has made a new thing
well for the eternal gods to see.

Most Frenchmen are performers; and the Frenchman from the south is he
who wins the greatest joy from his performance. I remember a big bare
studio in the Boulevard Vaugirard, where a crowd of students, poets,
sculptors, painters, and their women, used to be merry together and
drink coffee (if there was coke for the stove), and eat Olibet biscuits
(if there was money to buy them). Among us were two curly-headed
Provençals, whose voices had a more persuasive abandon than ours to
whatever they wished to say. There was a balcony in the studio with a
ladder fastened to it, so that the artist might climb to his bed. One
of the Provençals used to stand up, leaning on the ladder, and sing us
old songs of his country, while his friend sat on the lower steps and
dropped the deeper notes of a silver flute into their proper places
in the melody. The songs were sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. More
than once, when some pathetic tune or words made his audience weep, I
have seen the flute-player, unable to restrain his happiness, caper
about the studio with his instrument. Something of Daudet was in the
flute-player and something of the flute-player in Daudet.

  1909.




THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE




THE RETROSPECTION OF FRANÇOIS COPPÉE


Some writers seem to represent single moods of life. Most men grow
from childhood to old age, passing from illusion to disillusion (in
which illusion does no more than turn its coat), then to resignation
(a kind of agnostic attitude towards their own sensations), and,
finally, perhaps, end in the most obstinate illusion of all. But there
are writers who seem to stop at this or that point in the road, to
take up their stand there, and to date from that resting-place all
the monologues that they allow humanity to overhear. The work of the
greatest artists is sent off from every post-office on the journey, or,
if their work is done in age, it holds proof that they have travelled
all the way. Coppée hesitates on the brow of that hill from which
can be seen for the last time the sunlit country of youth. Already
disillusioned, he looks back, and spends his life in regretting the
past. All his work has a retrospective glamour, and where he writes
joyously of the present, it is easy to feel that the joy is a religious
joy, and that his work is a memorial rite, re-enacting something that
has long since faded away.

He took this attitude when very young. There are, indeed, men whose
eyes have always been turned back, men whose earliest memory is a
regret for the memory earlier still that they have lost. In the
prologue to _Le Reliquaire_, published in 1866, he wrote:

   “Et de même que, tous les soirs,
    Ils font autour du reliquaire
    Fumer les légers encensoirs.
    Dédaignant le douleur vulgaire
    Qui pousse des cris importuns,
    Dans ces poèmes je veux faire
    A tous mes beaux rêves défunts,
    A toutes mes chères reliques,
    Une chapelle de parfums
    Et de cierges mélancoliques.”

In building for his fair dead dreams a chapel of sad perfumes and
melancholy candles, he spent the better part of his life. His prose
was written later than his verse, but years did not alter the object of
his architecture.

He was sometimes assailed by other moods, but did not allow himself
to yield to them. He had succeeded young; it is possible that having
charmed already, he was half afraid of losing by any change the odour
and the essence impossible to analyse, in which he knew that he could
trust, and which, once at any rate, had been personal to himself. There
remain, however, the indications of occasional faith in mutability.
Sometimes he flung himself boldly in the direction whither life would
have taken him. But the feeling of boldness, of experiment, that
pervades, for example, _Le Coupable_, is enough to show that he was ill
at ease. The story is that of a man who leaves his mistress, a Parisian
grisette. She has a child, who, born in the gutter, grows up among the
vicious and finds his way to a penitentiary, and, at last, committing a
serious crime, is brought for judgment before his father. The father,
learning his identity, tells the whole story, and asks whether he
himself, rather than his son, is not the true _coupable_. Coppée finds
in it an opportunity for a study of society from below, for much close
and accurate description, and for a very searching account of the
reformatory system. It is a clever book, but somehow Coppée has dropped
out of it.

I do not mean that all Coppée’s best work is to be known by an
atmosphere of sentimental yearning for the past. His mood is much more
delicate. He writes as a man whose illusions are gone, but he does not
often cry aloud,

    “Hélas! les beaux jours sont finis.”

He only says that there have been fine days. By fine days he means days
of enthusiasm and of a simple heart. He has once walked with the world
far below his feet; but, now that its wisdom has risen over his head,
he cannot recover that old enthusiasm by pretending to be ignorant.
Knowing too much, his only care is to preserve as a touchstone the
memory of his lost unwisdom. He does not often more directly express
his regret. But it is a recognition of his regretfulness that makes his
stories bitter to the very young, half-conscious of their youth, and
pained by all that helps to waken them to simultaneous knowledge and
loss of it.

In _Toute une Jeunesse_ he confesses that his hero, “personnage
imaginaire dans une action imaginaire, sent la vie comme je la sentais
quand j’étais un enfant, et quand j’étais un jeune homme.” Much of
the imaginary action follows very closely the course of his own life,
and it is possible in reading it to watch the fine days and then the
gradual realisation that they had been fine. Amédée Violette, born in
a little flat in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, behind the gardens of
the Luxembourg, the son of a government clerk, loses his mother very
young, and grows up in loneliness, except for the little girls next
door. He goes to school in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, turning out
of the other. There is a plane-tree in the schoolyard, which allows
the schoolmaster to offer a garden on his prospectus. The assistant
masters are grotesque and wretched. The head of the principal is like
the terrestrial globe that stands on the desk in his study to impress
his pupils’ parents. Amédée grows up, spending fine evenings in long
walks through Paris with his father, the widower, who takes gradually
to absinthe for the sake of forgetfulness. He grows up in the quarter,
studies at the university, solitary in the midst of its gregarious
frivolity, partly from poverty, partly from love of the child with
whom he used to play. He leaves the university with a degree, and is
taken on in the same office as his father, as a supernumerary clerk.
So many hours a day disappear from his life, and he wakens only in the
evenings, which he spends in rhyming, and on Sundays when he writes
all day without leaving his room. He has a few friends who count him
almost a hermit. A young actor takes him to the Café de Séville in the
Boulevard Montmartre, where he introduces him to Paul Sillery, a poet
and editor of an unpopular review--Catulle Mendès, perhaps. The café is
full of men with beards, politicians, and men with hair, poets. Sillery
recognises a poet in him, and when the actor recites one of his poems
with success at a charity performance in a theatre, sends him to a
publisher--no doubt Lemerre, who published the Parnassians. His first
volume is printed and successful. He has come so far when his youth is
taken from him. His nearest friend betrays him, and he has to compel
him to marry the girl he has so long loved himself. He passes through
various more or less empty adventures. The Franco-Prussian war leaves
the girl a widow with a boy, and his friend’s last wish is that they
should marry. The wish is fulfilled: Amédée, married to a woman he has
loved from childhood, has a wife whose heart is buried with his friend.
It is all so different from its promises. The poet is left with the
consolation of his art, and the book ends: “Hélas! ta jeunesse est
finie, pauvre sentimental! Les feuilles tombent! Les feuilles tombent!”

The leaves fall on the paper as Coppée writes. It is always autumn in
his books, because he is always thinking of spring. But _Toute une
Jeunesse_ lets us into more of his secrets than this. It is full of
love for Paris, and obsessed by the contrast between rich and poor, or
rather between appearances and the other appearances they hide. Life
is very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you
open the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one
inside. You open that and find a blue. Within the blue is a scarlet
one again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final.
There is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an
unemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic
dream. Coppée is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability
than of his regret for particular yesterdays. He must put all he writes
of in the scarlet box. Paris for him is always the Paris of 1866. He
felt, he said, like Madame de Staël, “la nostalgie de son cher ruisseau
de la rue du Bac,” but the gutter he yearned for flowed in the days
when he was young. It is this that gives some of his work an appeal
that has nothing to do with its merit. For there are many to whom Paris
represents the days when they were young, many to whom the names tune
the pulses to a quick and joyous march, names like the rue Notre Dame
des Champs, twisting grey street, whose pavements still beat with the
airy tread of new generations of dreamers. It is the same throughout.
When he talks of buying books at the Odéon, we do not watch an old man
choosing what he wishes, and paying for it from a pocketful of money
that he has not counted. We see the Coppée of 1864, or ourselves of
ten years ago; boys, with the price of the book, and perhaps ten sous
for dinner, spending nevertheless an hour in looking at all the other
books on the stalls, and then buying the one for which we had come with
the swift manner of those who have walked straight to the bookshop,
and, having got what they want as expeditiously as possible, are going
straight off again. We see that dead Coppée, or ourselves, sitting
among the nurse-maids in the gardens opposite, cutting the leaves with
a clasp-knife from a fair. The Café de Seville, once a meeting-place
for men of beards and men of hair, is made a tryst for Coppée and his
dead youth. And when he says that for the Parisian the seasons come to
town, and that, in a green and rose sunset, he can find the autumn’s
morbid melancholy, and, in a sunny morning in the Luxembourg gardens,
all the divine joyousness of spring, we know of what Parisian he is
speaking.

His obsession by the contrast between rich and poor reduces to the
same sentiment. He does not hate the rich because they are rich; he is
only sorry for them if money has taken away from them something they
might have had in poverty. He is not sorry for the poor because they
are poor, but only if their poverty expresses the lack of something
that, with money, they think they might have had. He has come to regard
illusions as the only sterling coin. In the two contrasted tales of
“The Italian Organ” he seems to weigh rich and poor in opposite scales,
and to find a balance between them. One tune of the organ reminds a
poor clerk’s wife of the days before she married, when she was the
prettiest girl at the cheap dances, and Monsieur Fred, amusing himself,
filled her head with dreams. Riches have carried him away from her,
and she has grown paler, and married Jules with the stiff collar and
the india-rubber-cleaned gloves. It is very sad. Another tune reminds
the Countess of the days before she married, when as la Belle Adah of
the American Circus, she reigned in her own place. The Count fell in
love with her, pursued her, married her, and trained her to be a lady.
She spends her mornings in visiting institutions, and there is a vicar
waiting on her in the drawing-room. It is very sad. But the sorrow
of both these women is not for their riches or their poverty. It is
mourning for a life that can never be lived. Coppée’s love for the poor
is unlike Daudet’s. Daudet loves the poor because they are brave and
picturesque. Coppée sees in them the simpleness of heart and the power
of dreaming that were his when he was poor himself, that is to say,
when he was young. The poor invented Christianity.

Very little happens in Coppée’s short stories. In some of them nothing
happens at all. Things are remembered and set down, and from those
notes rises less a tale than the suggestion of a story that might have
been told. Now it is old Mother Bernu, who saw Marie Antoinette carried
to the guillotine in a white shirt, and is thrown up by a careless
Time to take the little Coppée out for walks. Now it is a couple of
old bachelors talking of might-have-beens. Now, “Mon Ami Meurtrier,”
a swaggering athletic clerk, is discovered to be the mildest of men,
attending to his mother’s lap-dog, and mixing good coffee. In most of
the stories it is more than usually evident that the author is the real
hero. “The White Frock” is the tale of a lame child whose only white
dress is worn at her first communion. All her friends wear a second
on their wedding days, and she will never be married. It is really
the tale of a man who passes daily through a little street, and, in
watching the street change, beards whiten, and children marry, sees his
own youth passing from him, and, in the little lame girl, a melancholy
piece of childhood’s jetsam whose dream will never be realised, never
be destroyed. There was a little boy who lived near the gardens of the
Luxembourg, and walked there in the spring, when the trees were caught
in a net of fluttering green, and in the summer heat, when those long
walks were patterned black and white with sun-thrown shadows, and in
the autumn, when the leaves were rusty gold, and fell to the ground to
make a pleasant trampling place for children’s feet, and in the winter,
when, over the round steel pond, the grey stone Queens of France looked
mournfully at the straight-fronted palace. He walked there, intimate
with all the moods of the garden, his eyes awake with possibilities,
rhyming verses that perhaps would never be published, and finding the
world a fairy-tale with so many ends from which to choose that it was
fortunate it would not finish soon. He was always alone there, in the
midst of the students, girls and nurse-maids. He and the sparrows
seemed to have the garden to themselves. The others did not seem to
matter. And this boy never left the study of François Coppée. If Coppée
looked up from his desk he was there, almost reproachful, a ghostly
boy with clear and truthful eyes, walking under the trees, in ragged
clothes, rhyming verses for himself. The wisdom of the world turned to
dross beside his golden ignorance, and the man who had grown up felt,
like the loiterer along the quays, a continuous pride and pain in
thinking of the days when the sunset had shone for him alone.

  1909.




FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE




FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

AN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION

_To I. C. R._


Philosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the
tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of
dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his
thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery,
on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring,
personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of
the body of a man. Its maker, when it is finished, would wish to wipe
the filings and the oil from his hands with a piece of cotton waste,
and, folding his arms, to watch it in independent activity. The reason
of this ambition is to be found neither in modesty, nor yet in vanity,
but in a ruling intellectual concept, the concept of absolute truth.
If the true is universally true, if a thing either _is_, or _is not_,
then the personality of the thinker either is grit in the wheels, or,
by the necessity of its presence and assistance, betrays the weakness
of the thought whose truth or untruth can in no way be affected by the
existence or non-existence of its discoverer. This Nietzsche resolutely
denied, and denied in two ways.

First, he denied the absolute nature of truth, asserting that the
word “true” was merely a title given by men to opinions, and that
the justice of its application was, in a broad sense, to be judged
pragmatically. A pragmatist before William James, he said: “The
falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is
here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The
question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving,
species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally
inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic
judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us; that
without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of
reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable,
without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers,
man could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a
renunciation of life, a negation of life.”[5]

Secondly, he denied that the personality of the thinker was a
disturbing factor in his thought. It was, on the contrary, the
guarantee that once at least that thought had been true. “Now
philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders; to
all later philosophers they are usually a single big mistake, and
to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths.... Therefore many
disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs....
Whoever, on the contrary, finds any pleasure at all in great men
finds pleasure also in all such systems, be they ever so erroneous,
for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal
touch and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the
philosopher, just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can
form conclusions as to the soil. _That_ mode of life, of viewing human
affairs at any rate, has existed once, and is therefore possible.” He
wrote that quite early in his career in his little book on early Greek
philosophy, a history like the dawn setting on fire the tips of the
distant mountains, then the nearer, and at last throwing on the ground
behind him the shadow of the observer. For Nietzsche, the mountain
peaks are those fragments of the crumbled systems which are personal
to their authors, and, even if refutable as philosophy are irrefutable
as particular and individual revelations. It is a delightful little
gathering of philosophers and, perhaps, more important than has yet
been admitted, in its promise of Nietzsche’s habit of thought, his
impatience of dialectic, his dislike of the Parmenidean mind, his trust
in the poetic, the particular. “What verse is to the poet,” he says,
“dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches at it in order
to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.” From this view
he never departed. In _Beyond Good and Evil_ he repeats his belief in
the personal character of thought: “In each cardinal problem there
speaks an unchangeable ‘I am this’; a thinker cannot learn anew about
man and woman, for instance, but can only learn fully--he can only
follow to the end what is ‘fixed’ about them in himself.” And again in
_Zarathustra_: “‘This is now my way--where is yours?’ Thus did I answer
those who asked me ‘the way.’ For _the_ way--it doth not exist.”

And so, for Nietzsche, truth is infinitely variable, minted afresh
by each man and dependent upon his image and superscription for a
guarantee of its particular validity. It was for this reason that
he despised the elaborate stage-play of reasoning. He believed that
to exhibit ideas in a white light and at a mean temperature, when
they offered themselves in the glow of the morning or in the heat of
noon, was to strip them of their credentials. He insisted that his
own thoughts were true in relation to himself, and preserved their
concreteness by way of preserving the conditions of their truth. He
refused the step from the concrete to the abstract as a step into
annihilation, and in this way identified himself with the poets. To
misunderstand him here is to misread him everywhere.

We are examining, then, in Friedrich Nietzsche a man whose view of
truth demanded the personal presence of the thinker as guarantee of
the thought. Consequently, though for reasons I have already given it
is usual on the part of philosophers and their critics to rule the
personality of a thinker out of a discussion of his thought, here,
at least, we are justified in glancing at a man’s character before
we examine the ideas that will help us to fill it out to approximate
verisimilitude.

Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, went mad in January 1889, and
died on August 25, 1900. His father was a country parson, simple,
upright, patriotic and monarchical. He found joy in the coincidence of
his son’s birthday with that of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and this
circumstance gave Nietzsche his names. His mother was a young woman of
high spirits and great physical energy, so exuberant and so lovable
as to be described as “a gorgeous savage” by her mother-in-law. His
father, “preordained to pay only a flying visit--a gracious reminder
of life rather than life itself,” died in his six and thirtieth year,
before Nietzsche was five. A grandmother, two aunts and his mother
presided over a pious happy childhood, from which he emerged as a model
schoolboy, laughably virtuous, walking slowly home in a rainstorm
in spite of his mother’s frenzied urging, and rebuking this urging
with pained austerity: “But, mamma, in the rules of the school it is
written, ‘On leaving school boys are forbidden to jump and run about
in the streets, but must walk quietly and decorously to their homes.’”
This sedateness persisted with him, although he could so completely
forget himself in playing with children, that when he was twenty-six
and a professor, he was laughed at and told he was only fourteen. He
always dressed with notable nicety. Though he said, with pride, that
he would rather be a satyr than a saint, he had a dignity that belongs
rather to holiness than to lust. Children and old women loved him. The
fruit-sellers in the Turin market-place hurried to pick out for him
their finest grapes. He had gentle manners, a beautiful voice, and a
profound sense of the politeness that an aristocrat owes to himself.
He clung to the legend that he was the descendant of Polish noblemen,
and was proud of being mistaken by Poles for a Pole, that Frenchman
among the Slavs. His favourite books were the courteous unruffled
French moralists of the seventeenth century, and the works of Stendhal,
who resembled them in wearing a sword and in his love of fine manners.

His precarious health gave him extreme sensitiveness to his physical
condition. He believed that clear thinking was only possible in dry air
and on hills. His highest praise for his work was that it was mountain
thought. He composed in the open air and in motion, and advised other
people to follow his example. “Remain seated as little as possible,
put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the
accompaniment of free bodily motion--nor in one in which even the
muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in
the intestines.”

He seized on Flaubert’s “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis,” with a
cry: “Here have I got you, you nihilist? A sedentary life is the real
sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking
have any value.”

He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that
“apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of
such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was one attracted by what was
detrimental to him, “as the cabbage attracts the vegetarian.” A healthy
man, on the other hand, enjoys what is good for him, possesses “the
will to health,” and “is strong enough to make everything turn to his
own advantage.” He found in convalescence “a pale delicate light and
a sunshine happiness,” “a feeling of bird-like freedom, prospect,
and haughtiness.” From the combination of his ill-health and his
healthiness (he was in youth at least physically robust), Nietzsche
learnt, he says, “to look upon healthier concepts and values from the
standpoint of the sick, and conversely to look down upon the secret
work of the instincts of decadence from the standpoint of him who is
laden and rich with the richness of life.” He mentions “the sweetness
and spirituality which is almost inseparable from extreme poverty of
blood and muscle,” and remembers the unusual dialectical clearness he
enjoyed while suffering from headache and nausea. He was more conscious
than most men that his body shared in the adventures of his brain.
When the idea of Eternal Recurrence came into his mind by the lake of
Silvaplana, high in the mountains, it was perhaps with some recognition
of this that, after scribbling it down on a sheet of paper, he added
the exultant postscript: “6000 feet beyond man and time!”

Such, sketched as briefly as possible, is the physiological background
on which we must set his work.

The greater part of that work (which fills seventeen volumes in the
English translation) is made up of short numbered paragraphs, arranged
under general headings. The lectures and poems are, indeed, the only
exceptions, for though _The Birth of Tragedy_, and the essays called
_Thoughts out of Season_, are less disintegrated than later books,
we can perceive, in their numbered sections, the promise of sections
shorter and continually shortening to the brief “Maxims and Missiles”
at the beginning of _The Twilight of the Idols_. Even _Thus Spake
Zarathustra_ was built in a similar manner, though disguised by
the rush of prophecy and a more definite general scheme. Nietzsche
allowed such constructive power as he had to atrophy. He was never a
systematic thinker, but, because his paragraphs are not such separate
and individual observations like those of Chamfort or Vauvenargues;
because they were often written in swift succession, one after another,
there is a dangerous possibility that in reading them we may feel we
are reading notes for a book which the author has not troubled to piece
together into the superficial form to which we are accustomed. We may
resent this, but we are more likely to grow weary of the constant
change of subject, of the staccato iteration of ideas without prologues
or epilogues to awaken slowly and lull again to repose our sluggish
brains. It is well to remember that we have learnt to read too fast,
and that Nietzsche foresaw our discomfort. “He that writeth in blood
doth not want to be read but learnt by heart.... It is no easy task
to understand unfamiliar blood. I hate the reading idlers.” We cease
to feel the superficial confusion and inconsistency of those ten
thousand paragraphs when we become better aware of the half-dozen
ideas that were the parents of that numerous family. We are then able
to trace a paragraph’s pedigree, and to place it in a larger scheme
than that of the volume in which it happens to be printed. No reader
of Nietzsche can have failed to notice that his books, different in
detail, different in application, yet often seem coincident with each
other. Nor is this due to chance repetitions that would betray an
uncritical improvisation. It is an accurate indication of Nietzsche’s
habit of mind. His books were gleanings, and, after his mature work
began, they were gleanings from fields almost uniformly sown. The
seasons varied and the sower’s arm was irregular in its swing, but
the harvest was always from a field that had been fertilised by a
fairly uniform mixture of ideas. The ideas of the pragmatic nature of
truth, of Eternal Recurrence, of the Will to Power, of the Superman,
and of master and servant morality, yield in book after book a new
crop of lesser ideas, applied, amplified, restricted or illustrated in
psychological observation. For this reason I do not intend, in what can
but be a short essay, any detailed criticism of Nietzsche’s books,
but rather to note the results of such criticism. The reading of his
books, unless it be impatient, careless, and unworthy, is a process of
discovering what were those half-dozen ideas that separated Nietzsche
from the thinkers of his time, stimulated his brain until at last it
broke, and during many years kept him in the lonely joyful ecstasy of
continual exploration.

“The first adherents of a creed do not prove anything against it,”
but they often so obscure it as to postpone its eventual utility.
Some of the half-dozen ideas I have mentioned have been so often
caricatured that it is extremely difficult to recognise them without
the exaggeration with which we have been made familiar. It is not
easy to state another man’s ideas. To fail is to do him an injury. To
succeed is not unlike taking the words out of his mouth, which is rude.
But I am neither a translator of Nietzsche nor an opponent. I wish to
understand, not to persuade. And, for understanding, such statement is
desirable.

Nietzsche neither escapes nor attempts to escape the contradictions
in the form of thought that make logic and life battledores to toss
laughter at each other like a shuttlecock. He is a determinist and
yet gives advice, the giving of which presupposes a belief in free
will and a possible choice. He seeks to influence others, and, in his
manner at least, forgets that the logical determinist should only allow
himself to say: “Circumstances compel me to make certain statements,
which, in the form of circumstances, may or may not share in the sum of
circumstances that compel you to actions and thoughts which in their
totality I cannot conceive.” That is not the view of his own activity
which dictates the eager vivid combination of argument and incantation
that makes Nietzsche’s books. He is free, in that he has the illusion
of freedom. The illusion of freedom is one of the determining
circumstances. Its effect is to make it unnecessary to remember in
practice that circumstances determine.

We need not therefore hesitate over the inconsistency apparent between
some of Nietzsche’s ideas. We do better to notice it as characteristic
of his thought, and simply to state his ideas, remembering, if we will,
that they belong to different circles of consciousness; some to that
wider circle that includes the universe and with it determinism, and
some to that smaller circle, concentric with the first, and including
only the area of practical activity. Let us be determinists first and
examine the Nietzschean universe.

The idea of Eternal Recurrence seems to have had for Nietzsche
something of the hypnotic character of those ideas that made Poe write
of his _Eureka_: “What I here propound is true: therefore it cannot
die;--or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will
‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” Indeed the idea itself is not
unlike that of Poe, who, untrained alike in philology and philosophy,
expressed himself in a manner that would have given Nietzsche exquisite
pain:

    “Guiding our imagination by that omniprevalent law of laws, the
    law of periodicity, we are not, indeed, more than justified in
    entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, indulging a hope--that
    the processes we have ventured to contemplate will be renewed for
    ever, and for ever, and for ever; a novel Universe swelling into
    existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of
    the Heart Divine?” (Poe’s _Eureka_.)

Now Nietzsche would not have spoken of a “Heart Divine,” even
explaining, as Poe did, that this heart was our own; but he did
contemplate a perpetually self-renewing Universe. Only--and herein
lay the importance of his idea to himself--he saw it renewing itself
in every detail, in every minutest action of the minutest of its
individual parts, at every moment of its cycle. Every moment of the
future being dependent upon and involved in the present moment, sooner
or later in the course of time there would come a moment similar in
every detail to a moment that had already existed, thus guaranteeing a
similar series of moments till it should recur, and so on. He said:

    “If the Universe may be conceived as a definite quantity of energy,
    as a definite number of centres of energy--and every other concept
    remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows therefrom that
    the Universe must go through a calculable number of combinations
    in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence. In
    infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must
    once have been realised; not only this, but it must have been
    realised an infinite number of times. And inasmuch as between
    every one of these combinations and its next recurrence, every
    other possible combination would necessarily have been undergone,
    and since every one of these combinations would determine the
    whole series in the same order, a circular movement of absolutely
    identical series is thus demonstrated; the Universe is thus shown
    to be a circular movement which has already repeated itself
    an infinite number of times, and which plays its game for all
    eternity.”

Nietzsche, hypnotised by this idea, believed it new, but there is a
clear suggestion of it in the third book of Lucretius’ poem:

   “Nam cum respicias immensi temporis omne
    Praeteritum spatium, tum motus materiai
    Multimodis quam sint, facile hoc adcredere possis,
    Semina saepe in eodem, ut nunc sunt, ordine posta
    Haec eadem, quibus e nunc nos sumus, ante fuisse:
    Nec memori tamen id quimus reprehendere mente:
    Inter enim jectast vitai pausa, vageque
    Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes.”

Lines which Mr. Cyril Bailey in his translation of Lucretius[6]
admirably renders as follows: “For when you look back over all the
lapse of immeasurable time that now is gone, and think how manifold are
the motions of matter, you could easily believe this too, that these
same seeds, whereof we now are made, have often been placed in the same
order as they are now; and yet we cannot recall that in our life’s
memory; for in between lies a break in life, and all the motions have
wandered everywhere far astray from sense.”

The character of Nietzsche’s thinking appears in his application of
this idea. It is for him “the great disciplinary thought,” and he
leaps the gulf between determinism and free will in the most careless
manner, to remark: “The question which thou shalt have to answer before
every deed that thou doest--Is this such a deed as I am prepared to
perform an infinite number of times?--is the best ballast.” It does
not matter to him at all that a determinist idea is to be used as a
standard of choice by a being whose free will he assumes. His thoughts
are all thoughts for himself to live with. He is conscious of them not
as abstractions, but particularly, as concrete things, combinations of
ideas with their effects. He is able to speak of Eternal Recurrence as
“the most oppressive thought,” and to consider “the means of enduring
it.” I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.

Moving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine
Nietzsche’s view of the world and man and man’s activity within this
eternally recurring universe. “The world,” he says, “as we know it, is
representation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could
know it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, ‘so full of
meaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in
its bosom,’ is the world that we unconsciously create.” In Nietzsche’s
world we come at once to the third of his ruling ideas (the first
being his idea of truth, the second, Eternal Recurrence). A regiment
of artillery, galloping to war, filled Nietzsche (who was at the
time serving as assistant to the field surgeon) with disgust at the
conception of a dull struggle for life that dictated most nineteenth
century thought. Schopenhauer, at that time still his master, had
supposed that the motive of man was the will to live. But, as the
regiment of artillery thundered to battle, Nietzsche answered, No; the
will to power, in which that other will may or may not be included.
Men are willing to risk existence; they are not ready to risk power,
unless in hope of increased intensity of power, or of an increased area
over which to exercise it.

But the Will to Power is to be found in races as well as in
individuals; it is the motive not of races only but of humanity.
Humanity wills to power, wills to the continual re-creation of itself
as a species ever more powerful; wills, as Nietzsche puts it, the
creation of the Superman. This is the fourth of his ideas. Here, again,
Nietzsche’s concrete habit of thought exposed him to misunderstanding,
not only by his disciples, but also by himself. He did not at first
imagine the Superman as a suddenly appearing demi-god whose path
was to be made smooth by the human sacrifices of the “down-goers.”
He saw him as the result of a long continued and conscious will to
power, working through many generations, and gradually evolving a
superior type. Much of his writing is devoted to making conscious this
particular application of the will. But the idea of a superior type
shone with such effulgence as to dazzle his eyes, and to blind him to
the slow evolution which he would never have denied. He could say with
Seannchan, the poet:

   “The stars had come so near me that I caught
    Their singing. It was praise of that great race
    That would be haughty, mirthful and white-bodied,
    With a high head, and open hand, and how,
    Laughing, it would take the mastery of the world.”

Supermen were no longer men, but something different. The long series
of gradually improving types vanished in the conception of their
result, itself to be improved upon, and it became possible for him to
speak of Man and Superman as two distinct beings, forgetting the series
of beings no less distinct implied by the development of one into the
other.

Here, too, it is profitable to notice how Nietzsche translated an idea
from speculation into life. The hypothesis of the future Superman
allowed him a noble view of friendship. He has often been compared
to Whitman, partly, no doubt, because the rhythmical _Zarathustra_
reminded his readers of the triumphant, unrhymed movement of the
sooth-saying _Leaves of Grass_. But his friendship is very different
from Whitman’s. Whitman’s the hand-grip, the smile at meeting, the
large tolerance, the collaboration in simple things; Nietzsche’s a
friendship more exacting. He would have thought Whitman’s friend a
neighbour, and he said, “Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the
friend. Let the friend be the festival of earth to you, and a foretaste
of the Superman,” and “Let the future and the farthest be the motive of
thy to-day; in thy friend shalt thou love the Superman as thy motive.”
A friend for Nietzsche was one who fulfilled desires that he could not
realise himself. Not the least profound of his observations was this:
“Our faith in others betrayeth wherein we would fain have faith in
ourselves.” His own friendship with Wagner provides a commentary of
fact. Begun in the belief that Wagner was bringing to earth such an
art as that of which Nietzsche dreamed, and ended in the disillusion
confirmed by “the preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness, and strong
pepper” in the first performances at Bayreuth, it was at once the
greatest inspiration and the greatest disappointment of his life.
Nietzsche, who had published _The Birth of Tragedy_ to serve Wagner,
wrote _The Case of Wagner_ to destroy him, or, perhaps, to cleanse
himself of a mistaken admiration. But listen to his clear-sighted
comment: “I gained an insight into the injustice of _idealism_, by
noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I
had cherished of him.”

Nietzsche’s fifth ruling idea is most clearly expressed in the book
that he wrote for his friend. He summed it up in the words Amor Fati,
the acceptance of life, be it what it might, a joyful “yea-saying”
to all its pronouncements, written in the most cruel facts though
they might be. Now this, as he pointed out, is the attitude of the
tragic artist, whose work is the expression not of pity but of a
proud acquiescence, an acquiescence that is an intellectual conquest.
He wished men to be artists in their attitude towards life, and
this desire brought his writings on art nearer to “the business and
bosoms of men” than the discreet distance from these things usually
preserved by aesthetic theory. His _Birth of Tragedy_ was not merely
an historical speculation, but offered for the criticism of life
words that Nietzsche applied for the moment to the criticism of art.
These words were “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” The latter word has
been persistently applied to Nietzsche himself, though he saw “in the
fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian
as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims.” What does he mean by this
antithetical conception? Let me answer by two quotations:

    1. “It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two
    art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in
    the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between
    the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of
    music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies
    were parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance,
    and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful
    births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which
    is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term ‘Art’; till
    at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they
    appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually
    generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic
    tragedy.”

    2. “In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts
    from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of
    every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities
    of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the
    living and conspicuous representatives of _two_ worlds of art which
    differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo
    stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the _principium
    individuationis_ through which alone the redemption in appearance
    is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus
    the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the
    Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things.”

He conceives these as “the separate art-worlds of dreamland and
drunkenness,” and makes for himself a parable about the Apollonian
artist in dreams and the Dionysian artist in ecstasies, comparable to
Blake’s poem of “The Mental Traveller,” in which there is just such an
alternation of conquest and captivity:

   “And if the babe is born a boy
      He’s given to a woman old,
    Who nails him down upon a rock,
      Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

    She binds iron thorns around his head,
      She pierces both his hands and feet,
    She cuts his heart out at his side,
      To make it feel both cold and heat.

    Her fingers number every nerve,
      Just as a miser counts his gold;
    She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
      And she grows young as he grows old.

    Till he becomes a bleeding youth,
      And she becomes a virgin bright;
    Then he rends up his manacles,
      And binds her down for his delight.”

It is a fine pictorial expression of the formative processes of
consciousness, the domination of the unconscious flux by the shaping of
the knowing intellect, and the escape of that flux, the overbalancing
of the intellect by the onrush of unrealised impressions. I do
not think it has or can have any deeper significance in aesthetic
criticism. It was, however, of considerable service to Nietzsche in the
criticism of life. In life, he would be, for the moment, a worshipper
of Dionysus, seeking less to control life than to live--because
Dionysus, he felt, was being a little neglected. In a “Dionysian age”
he would have left ecstasy below him and worshipped the placid Apollo,
shaping dreams untroubled by the turmoil in the valleys. In such an age
as that for which he hoped, such an age as that of Greek tragedy, he
would have stormed Olympus at the head of the Dionysian revellers, and
conquered the Dionysian ecstasy to bind it captive in the service of
Apollo.

There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good
and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of
truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not
man for them. He goes further, believing that they were made and
are continually being re-made _by_ man. “There is no such thing as
moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” which
interpretation a free and healthy man should make in accordance with
his own nature. The morality generally current in his time Nietzsche
believed to be slave morality, as opposed to aristocratic or ruler
morality, and he attributed its prevalence to the spreading of the
Christian religion. He believed that good was invented by those who
possessed it. “The judgment ‘good’ did _not_ originate among those to
whom goodness was shown. Much rather has it been the good themselves;
that is, the aristocratic, the powerful, the high-stationed, the
high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that
their actions were good: that is to say of the first order, in
contradistinction to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar, and the
plebeian.” The code of honour, the list of deeds that a gentleman
forbids himself, would, I suppose, be considered by Nietzsche as a
survival of this original morality. He weighs “moral interpretations”
of phenomena in the same scale as he weighs “truths,” asking, “Have
they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being?” His
hostility to Christianity may be traced to his answer to this question.
The replacement of the aristocratic judgment of actions done, by the
plebeian judgment on actions suffered, the substitution of the slave’s
point of view for that of the ruler, and its half-hearted adoption
by those who should rule were impediments to that ruling, and checks
to the will to power in which he recognised the mainspring of human
activity. He found then that the common morality was hostile to the
highest development of humanity, a frustration of its highest hopes
by hampering the will to power of “the highest men,” and proceeded
to call those who had ears to listen “beyond good and evil,” begging
them to make their own interpretation of phenomena, and not to accept
that of men whose submission to themselves should be part of their
natural ambition. The morality of “the small” is, he says, a handicap
to greater men, because “virtue for them is what maketh modest and
tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man’s
best domestic animal.” He delights accordingly in using as terms for
praise the words that “the small” use in condemnation. He speaks, for
example, of the “widespread heaven of clear _wicked_ spirituality,” a
spirituality beyond the good and evil of the tame. Yet he would not
abolish the tame, nor lighten their shackles. “For must there not be
that which is danced _over_, danced beyond? Must there not, for the
sake of the nimble, the nimblest--be moles and clumsy dwarfs?” It is
not Nietzsche’s fault that his books have stimulated “moles and clumsy
dwarfs” to the grotesque exercise of trying to dance over themselves.
He did not write for them, and told them so. He insisted at all times
that he wrote “for higher ones, stronger ones, more triumphant and
merrier, for such as are built squarely in body and soul.” And his
writings are intended to teach such “laughing lions” to “become what
they are,” unimpeded by the morality that a thousand hands offer them
from below. He has not the vain, foolish hope of doing away with
moralities, but asks each of his “higher men” to be true to his
own. If he goes “beyond good and evil,” he is to carry with him his
private scale of good and bad, with which he is to measure his deeds in
accordance with the will to power that leads him and his descendants to
a higher, a more laughing perfection.

After the brief statement of these ideas, we can examine with better
hope of understanding the general character of Nietzsche’s thought. It
was not “systematic” in the usual sense, but it seems to me foolish to
describe as “unsystematic” a method of thinking whose formula was as
simple as his. He used the ideas I have catalogued precisely as the
alchemists hoped to use the philosopher’s stone for the transmutation
of metals. Applying them severally or together to a very large number
of statements he noted the resulting reactions, and found that they
turned truisms into popular fallacies. His books accordingly became
corrections of Pseudodoxia. He saw, for example, that if the Will
to Power be substituted for the Will to Live, and Ruler for Slave
Morality, the common judgments of men on everything in the world that
is capable of moral interpretation are in some way changed. He was
not content to leave others to find out in what way. He called this
change a “transvaluation of values,” and wished thus to transvaluate
all values, and so to offer to other men and to himself a new
representation of the world in the light of his own ideas, a task so
Sisyphean that it is in itself a sufficient explanation of the collapse
of his brain. His madness was not promised by his work, any more than a
broken neck is promised by riding to hounds. Nor did the vivid summer
lightning of his mind destroy him or even threaten destruction. His
madness was a catastrophe, not the culmination of a disease. His method
of thought, the continual endless application of his ideas, allowed him
to think too fast. No sedate erection of a system kept his brain to a
normal speed. Its disaster was like that of an engine which “races,”
as engineers say, breaks its crankshaft, or so whirls its flywheel as
to allow it to satisfy its centrifugality. All men build worlds for
themselves, but they borrow from each other, and are content to fill
with hasty scene-painting the gaps in their construction. No man is
capable of building in innumerable fragments a world complete and
homogeneous. Nietzsche’s mind, working with frenzied, unchecked speed
in this perilous attempt, ran suddenly amok, and snapped, and with its
snapping his life ends. The automaton that fed and slept and was not
sure if it had written books, was not Nietzsche, though it prolonged
his physical existence. For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the
ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the
months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the
heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to
explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness
as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he
lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to
refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation.

Nietzsche’s applications of his ideas in book after book are not frigid
illustrations, but sentences, maxims, aphorisms, and observations
of great psychological subtlety, earning a place beside those of
La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, or Stendhal by the guarantee of a
scale of values peculiar to their author. I think it not impossible
that Nietzsche will one day be remembered chiefly as a psychologist
and moralist, a late nineteenth century representative of a great
tradition, and that the ideas which are now a noise in men’s ears,
and, misunderstood, obscure our views of him, will then be remarked
merely as explanatory of his psychology’s private and individual tone.
The Superman will be mentioned in a note appended to his observations
on friends and friendship, and his theory of the Will to Power tucked
away in small print for those who wish more clearly to understand his
remarks on self-development or war.

I have not spoken of Nietzsche as an artist. That prose, now
hammer-welded, now silver filigree, dancing, walking, running in
time with his ideas and moods, is not the least of his achievements.
When he wrote: “One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were
by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever
existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in
this language an incalculable distance behind us,” he was not far
from the truth. _Thus spake Zarathustra_, that Ossianic poem of a
hero of thought, _Ecce Homo_, in the self-assertion of which is not
only pride, but pride a little hurt that it should have so to assert
itself, those paragraphs of witty and profound psychology, the noble
essays on Schopenhauer and History, the muddled processional triumph of
_The Birth of Tragedy_; whatever be our view of his ideas, we cannot
but admire the artist who made these things. His very thought has an
aesthetic value, as he saw himself, due, no doubt, to its concreteness;
in reading his books we are translated to the tops of mountains, where
there is a dry wind, a warm sun, and snow not yet melted. Far below us
are valley and vineyard and a sea with no haze. Our lungs are so full
that we cannot commit “the sin against the Holy Spirit”; we cannot sit
still. There is dancing, there is singing in the air, and, as we turn
to more sedate philosophy, it is as if we were suddenly to leave sun,
wind, and valley for the cloistered dust of a dark room.

In his own eyes, however, Nietzsche the artist, like Nietzsche the
thinker, was the humble, reverent servant of Nietzsche the educator.
In childhood he made respectful word-portraits of his schoolmasters.
When he went to the universities, he said he was spending his time in
discovering the best means of teaching instead of in learning what was
usually taught in such places. His professorship was a symbol of his
life, and he only resigned it to sit on mountain tops and teach. No
man since Plato has had such a boundless dream of education. Milton
desiring his pupils to be good for peace and for war, strong men behind
their bows, skilful with the lute, learning to “repair the ruins of
their first parents by regaining to know God aright,” until “they
have confirmed and solidly united the whole body of their perfected
knowledge, like the last embattling of a Roman legion”: Ascham with his
longer list of exercises, “not only comely and decent, but also very
necessary for a courtly gentleman to use,” and his more detailed scheme
of learning: neither of these looked so far as he, neither of them
hoped to educate more than men of a city or of a nation, and for the
service of that limited community. Nietzsche dreamed of the education
of mankind in its highest men, and, where Milton and Ascham feared for
lack of teachers, he feared nothing so much as the scarcity of worthy
pupils. “Companions did the creating one seek, and children of _his_
hope, and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he
himself should first create them.”

In his early dissatisfaction with the educational methods of the German
universities, there was more than a mere pedagogic discontent. In his
attack on the pseudo-culture of such men as Strauss, in his exposure of
the abuse of history, in his farewell to “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he
learnt more and more clearly what it was that he was seeking. He sought
to educate “higher men” to be themselves, to free them from impediments
to their growth, and failing that, to let them perceive the impediments
and attack them, and so weaken the enemies long trained to devour them
should they show themselves. For his “higher men,” and for no others,
he found the ballast of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, to replace
the misleading strings of the morality of the downtrodden. For their
sakes he destroyed the divine right of the judgments of good and of
evil; theirs was to be the Amor Fati, the cheerful acceptance of life,
theirs the Dionysian ecstasy, and theirs the Apollonian calm. For them
he invented his watchword: “Man is something that is to be surpassed.”
He did not expect to find such pupils, but only to make their advent
possible, to prevent them from being strangled at birth. In the
meantime he spoke on to the empty benches, and, however extravagant,
daring, impossible his dream may have been, it is yet a privilege for
us to sit and listen in that school of phantom Titans.

I shall close this essay with a quotation that seems to me to sum up
in its final sentences all that is best in Nietzsche’s teaching, the
ultimate advice on which all his work is a commentary:

    “Ah! I have known noble ones who lost their highest hope. And then
    they disparaged all high hopes.

    Then lived they shamelessly in temporary pleasures, and beyond the
    day had hardly an aim.

    ‘Spirit is also voluptuousness,’ said they. Then broke the wings
    of their spirit; and now it creepeth about and defileth where it
    gnaweth.

    Once they thought of becoming heroes; but sensualists are they now.
    A trouble and a terror is a hero to them.

    But by my love and hope I conjure thee: cast not away the hero in
    thy soul! Maintain holy thy highest hope!”

The man who wrote this has been called irreverent, because his choice
of things to revere was not identical with his accuser’s. But in
these sentences there is proof of his reverence for something more
profound, more important to mankind, than churches, than submissions
to authority, a thing that men are not accustomed openly, if at all,
to reverence, that quest of the Holy Grail on which all men set out,
though most turn back, and very few pursue it till they die. It is a
quest whose goal is in each moment of seeking. Of this he was indeed
reverent, of the glowing cheek and kindled eye of intellectual youth,
of unsoiled ambition, of the flame alight before the altar of the
potential hero, who is alive for a little while in every man, and whose
continuance of life is the measure of each man’s nobility.

  1912.




WALTER PATER




WALTER PATER


Walter Pater was brought up at Enfield, where he was near London, and
knew from his earliest years “those quaint suburban pastorals” that
gather “a certain quality of grandeur from the background of the great
city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid
light on dome and bleached stone steeples.” Something of that weighty
atmosphere, and with it something of that rapid light, I find in his
work, whether he is writing of the Italians of the Renaissance, of
Montaigne, of the Greek philosophers, of the Dutch van Storck, or the
German Carl of Rosenmold.

The external facts of his life may be shortly dismissed. He “was fond,”
as a child, “of organising little processional pomps,” and a meeting
with Keble strengthened for a time his boyish resolve to enter the
Church. That part of his temperament which sought satisfaction in
such a course found it, perhaps, in the hieratic character of his
prose. He read Ruskin when he was nineteen, but his appreciations were
too independent of Ruskin’s sanction to allow us to recognise the
deep influence that is popularly attributed to the older man. Ruskin
believed that he had “discovered” Botticelli, but he first spoke of him
in the Oxford lectures of 1871, and Pater’s essay had been published in
the _Fortnightly Review_ the year before. Pater went from the King’s
School at Canterbury to Queen’s College, Oxford, took a Second Class in
the Final Classical Schools, and, in 1864, was elected to a fellowship
at Brasenose. He lived at Oxford thenceforward, with only occasional
periods of residence in London. In different long vacations he knew
Heidelberg, Dresden, and various parts of France, and, in 1869, four
years before the publication of _The Renaissance_, travelled in Italy.
He died at Oxford after a life of unhurried labour on July 30, 1894.

There are some words that one would never use in speaking of him. “Joy”
is one of them; “despair” is another. They would be represented by the
less exuberant “pleasure,” and the less violent “regret.” His was a
personality in half tones, lit by the pallid glow of a heavy sky, or by
the “peculiar daylight” he noticed in the church at Canterbury, that
daylight which “seemed to come from further than the light outside.”
Yet his mind was not without intensity, though this was expressed
more by its freedom of invasion than by any obvious hardness of line
or brilliance of colour. When he said, “I should be afraid to read
Kipling, lest he should come between me and my page next time I sat
down to write,” he was confessing an unnecessary carefulness. But his
very fear was not due to uncertainty of himself. It was that of the
jealous acolyte who will not expose the sacred glimmer of a votive
lamp to even momentary comparison with a flash of limelight, sure as
he may be of the lamp’s superior persistence, dignity, and, for him,
significance. Pater set a high value on his own personality, which in
a world of relative truth, was perhaps the only thing that he could
trust. He tended it, protected it from undue disturbance, even from
the contagion of others, fed it from time to time with victories ...
his essays are the carefully prepared conquests of other personalities
by his own ... and strengthened it always in the habit of a private
supremacy, a supremacy that neither sought nor needed external
acknowledgment.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his work, or,
more exactly, of the mental attitude reflected in his work, on the
literature of the end of the last century and of the beginning of our
own. He was a landmark in the history of consciously rhythmical prose,
the first English preacher (though very quietly) of the doctrine of
art for art’s sake, the exponent of an unusually precise technique,
the first example of a man whose life was consciously lived for art’s
sake; a man who, though he disguised the fact by many professions of
hedonism, found in art the finest means of living, and preferred,
with something of his childish love for processional pomps, to meet
life only when it came to him, decorous, arranged, unified to single
purposes, instead of with the medley of motives from which the artist
disentangles it.

His ideas have come to be more noticeable in other books than in his
own. He seemed to deprecate too exuberant agreement. He did not like to
stir his audience to an unbecoming enthusiasm. This is, perhaps, one
reason why he has seldom been considered as a thinker. But another
reason was more potent. “The sensible vehicle” of his expression almost
annulled his abstract thought. Pater is the best illustration of the
way in which ideas can be obliterated by the personality of which they
were a part. He has never been compared to Nietzsche. Yet no student of
Pater’s _ideas_ could avoid such a comparison, fantastic as it may seem
to those to whom it has not occurred to refuse, for critical purposes,
to adopt his attitude towards thought; to refuse, that is, “to assign
very little to the abstract thought and much to its sensible vehicle or
occasion.” Even this attitude, if we examine it closely, is not unlike
the Nietzschean demand for the personal touch in a theory before the
theory itself. Elsewhere the resemblance is clearer. In _Plato and
Platonism_ he says: “Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it
is not so much what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after
all really tells.” In smaller things he offers a parallel, strange from
one who lived as he lived, to Nietzsche’s outburst against sedentary
thinking: “It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that
promoted movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate
parturitions of the mind.” In more important things--things more
important to Nietzsche--Pater offers a similar aloof parallel, as if
from another planet. Before _The Birth of Tragedy_ was written, Pater
had distinguished Apollo and Dionysus, for his own purposes and in his
own way, as the particular deities of opposed artistic tendencies.
At one with Nietzsche in his conception of the relative nature of
truth, though he shrank from carrying it to battle _à l’outrance_,
he says almost what Nietzsche says of the evil influence of “the
ideal,” “the absolute,” on European thought, though, more eclectic,
incapable of partisanship, he does not let it disturb his admiration
of Plato. Mildly, as if it did not matter, he murmurs what Nietzsche
shouted: “The European mind will never be quite sane again....” And
he traces its insanity, as Nietzsche might have traced it, through
the Neo-Platonists, _The Imitation_, Spinoza, Descartes, Malebranche,
Leibnitz, Berkeley. “By one and all it is assumed, in the words of
Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable, is the note of
the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing steadily,
as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite unattainable)
condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by the
suppression of all the rule and outline of one’s own actual experience
and thought.” And, in his criticism of the Sophists, he shows that he
is aware, smilingly perhaps, of the theory of two moralities, one of
the ruler and another of the ruled. He says of the Sophists: “And if
old-fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better
than they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that
was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for
the control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent
to it, in regard to one’s self? ‘It will break up--this or that ethical
deposit in your mind, ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear,
when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the
vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such
presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to
know their place.’” This may seem like ironic criticism of Nietzsche
before the fact, but it has not been noticed as such, even by
Nietzscheans, and that is a proof of the completeness with which Pater
made negligible what he said, beside the manner, the personal quality,
of himself saying it.

Yet these and many other neglected ideas were of real importance to
the personality that obscures them now. Pater owed much of the slow
rhythm of his mind to his careful observation of his own philosophic
attitude. It is easy to talk of a battle in his mind between metaphysic
and art; but no such battle was fought. Pater never lost his interest
in philosophies, and that interest never interfered with his interest
in art, but was rather its ally, an essential element in the mental
temper of all his work. He shared Nietzsche’s dislike of dialectic,
because in approaching the condition of mathematical speculation
philosophy denudes itself of personality. He disliked, for example,
Spinoza’s Euclidean demonstrations, “the dry bones of which rattle in
one’s ears,” but was enabled to use finely, in _Sebastian van Storck_,
that one of Spinoza’s sayings in which the man seems to be epitomised:
“Whoso loveth God truly must not expect to be loved by him in return.”
“Philosophic truth,” for him, “consists in the philosophic temper.”
He finds that “perhaps the chief offence in Coleridge is an excess of
seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but
from a misconception of the perfect manner. There is a certain shade
of unconcern, the perfect manner of the eighteenth century, which
may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling of abstract
questions.... Humanity cannot afford to be too serious about them.”
That was said in the first of his printed papers. In the last book
of his that was published in his lifetime, he says of the essay: “It
provided him (Montaigne) with precisely the literary form necessary
to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable
not as a general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a
particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting faithfully
those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself
with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to
the very last asking: _Que scais-je?_ Who knows?--in the very spirit of
that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined
sense of one’s ignorance.” The essay, we must not forget, was the form
chosen by himself.

Nowhere does he better illustrate his conception of philosophic truth,
of the philosophic temper, than in that harmony of essays, written for
delivery as lectures, and printed as _Plato and Platonism_. Philosophy
clothes herself with humanity, or rather retains the clothes of which
dialectic would deprive her, and we watch her as a human being, are
nervous for her in the difficult places, as she threads her way through
the lives of men and the history of a nation. Pater is engaged in
portraiture, not in exposition, so humane has his subject become. The
three philosophers whose images are impressed upon the theories of
“the flux,” of “the one,” and of “number,” Heraclitus, Parmenides,
Pythagoras, are no longer outline drawings, like illustrations in a
classical dictionary, but coloured and modelled with something of
Blake’s enthusiastic vision, softened and quieted, till the enthusiasm
is like summer lightning behind the hills, clear and bright but without
menace for his general intention. Their portraits, inset in the “Plato”
like the vignettes that encircle the central picture in those old
engraved frontispieces, are curiously suggestive of paragraphs of
Nietzsche’s _Early Greek Philosophy_. They are ruled by just such a
conception of truth, but are without the spirit of proselytism, so
inconsistent with it, and yet so characteristic of the man who preached
rather than denounced his version of the Eternal Recurrence. It is
hard to know which is most admirable--the delicate disentangling of
Socrates from Plato, the clearly visualised picture of the Sophists
(there never was a book on philosophy so full of concrete vision),
the synthesis of Plato’s personality, lover, seer, observer, “who has
lingered too long in the brazier’s workshops” to be able to speak of
“dumb matter,” or the beautiful appreciation of the method of the
dialogues and of the often travestied aims of Socratean talk, which
represent both the “demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or
knowledge worthy of the name,” and Plato’s method of learning and
teaching, the essential quality of these conversations with himself
being their endlessness. Then there is the dream, to the making of
which has gone so much knowledge content to be hidden by the perfection
of its service, of the city of Lacedaemon in Sparta, so necessary a
prelude to the account of Plato’s dreamed republic. Finally, perhaps
because dearest to himself, there is the chapter on Plato’s aesthetics,
which, to Pater, were not what some have made them, but of immediate
import to men living their lives, and suggested a purpose, a hope “to
get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of
control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic
or impassioned acts.” It is, in a sense, a white heat of decorum
for which he asks, a scrupulousness, a patience which is “quite as
much as fire, of the mood of all true lovers.” He is really asking
for self-conscious life, for the kind of life that is only given by
art, whether by the contemplation of the work of artists or by the
private acts of artistic creation, which we all perform, more or less
often, and which are indeed processes of becoming conscious acts of
scrupulous, observant and comprehensive living. I can think of no book
better fitted to lead a student into philosophy, and I am not sure that
it is not also the best book with which to begin the study of Walter
Pater. It is certainly the book that made the most various demands upon
his personality.

More than any other writer of his time he was justified in speaking
of “the irrepressible conscience of art.” For many he is, I suppose,
chiefly interesting as the man who brought into English literary
workshops the craftsman’s creed of Flaubert. This importation of his
was not a mere translation and expansion of the few sentences from
Flaubert that appear in his essay on “Style.” Those sentences and his
comments upon them, do but form, in the structure of that essay, a
pendant to, an illustration of, Pater’s original remarks, which are
themselves a complete, if resolutely non-technical, exposition of
his own clearly comprehended methods. It is possible that Pater saw,
a little more circumspicuously than he, what it was that Flaubert
believed. At any rate that belief is here unified with the suggestions
of earlier writers, and given corollaries whose implication in it
Flaubert never troubled to see. The theory is, briefly stated, as
follows: Literature will fulfil the condition of all good art “by
finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the
term to its import.” Its first, indeed, accurately speaking, its only
object is truth, the exact fitting of words to meaning, which involves
the watchfulness over the whole that will guard details from being made
inexact by the reflected light of other details; and this involves
also a loving scholarship in the precise meanings and implications of
the words used.

He accepts De Quincey’s distinction between “the literature of power
and the literature of knowledge,” with the comment, “in the former
of which the composer gives us not fact, but his peculiar sense of
fact, whether past or present.” In the fine art of literature, the
identity sought between words and meaning is an identity between words
and the thing they represent in its private atmosphere, with its
particular meaning to the particular mind that thinks it. Throughout
his works is scattered evidence of the importance that Pater attributed
to this particularity of thought, dependent on the thinker and his
circumstances, the personality of thought which is really the guarantee
of its uniqueness, and in a sense, not only of its truth but of its
artistic rightness. In _The Child in the House_, for example:

    “In later years he came upon philosophies which occupied him much
    in the estimate of the proportion of the sensuous and the ideal
    elements in human knowledge, the relative parts they bear in it;
    and, in his intellectual scheme, was led to assign very little to
    the abstract thought, and much to its sensible vehicle or occasion.”

And, in the essay on “Style” we are considering:

    “... just in proportion as the writer’s aim, consciously or
    unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not
    of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist, his
    work _fine_ art....”

    “Literary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative
    or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or incident--is the
    representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific
    personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.”

Let me attach to these another quotation from the same essay, to
illustrate his use of the word “soul,” the keyword of his belief:

    “Mind and soul;--hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction
    is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes
    in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an
    instance of preponderating soul embarrassed, at a loss, in an era
    of preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul
    is a fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing
    language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of,
    with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some
    inexplicable inspiration.”

When we talk of words it is, if possible, better to talk in terms of
speech than thus indirectly in terms liable to debate, of the nature
of man, which, in this case at least, have led a careful writer into
inaccuracy. Blake was neither embarrassed nor at a loss. He thought
all the rest of the world was. A sort of diffidence would not allow
Pater to admit that he was thinking neither of soul nor of mind but
of a quality in Blake’s language, a quality markedly less evident in
the work of his contemporaries. Whenever Pater uses the word soul in
this sense he is thinking of the magical power in contradistinction
from the practical power of words. Blake’s words say more by what
they carry with them in suggestive atmosphere, than by what they
say. His speech is highly _potential_; and when Pater talks of soul
in literature he is talking of the potential element in the language
of literature, the element so noticeable in the language of his own
works. His insistence on truth, not only in the merely kinetic speech,
the thing said, but also in the potential speech that gives the thing
said its atmospherical particularity, distinguished his own work, and
deeply influenced the writers who followed him--Wilde, Dowson, perhaps
Mr. Yeats, at least in his prose, certainly Mr. Arthur Symons. It was
an indigenous spring of the tendency that, in France, has been called
Symbolist, with which the last of the younger writers I have mentioned
definitely allied himself. Pater’s expressed admirations for modern
French books are only such as suggest his ignorance of the best writers
in a later generation than that of Flaubert, who was, of course, not
twenty years his senior. He does not seem to have read those younger
men whose ideas so closely resembled his own, so closely that Frenchmen
often claim Pater’s most obvious disciple[7] for a pupil of the school
of Mallarmé.

With his care in the use of words, he had also a care for structure,
and for similar reasons. He says, as in a cruder way Poe had said long
before, but not with such close significance:

    “The term is right, and has its essential beauty, when it becomes,
    in a manner, what it signifies, as with the names of simple
    sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural
    member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity
    with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right way when
    it tends towards that.”

Those words embody in technical wisdom the profoundest understanding of
the aims of art and of the nature of artistic creation.

His practice was not quite on the level of his theory. His details
sometimes fail to preserve a unity of tone and rhythm with the whole
of which they are a part. Sometimes too, the effort to preserve that
unity compels the whole to a chafing monotone. An over-zealous pursuit
of accuracy sometimes allowed those careful sentences to encumber
themselves with adjectival burs, and a too visual method of composition
sometimes cost them their harmony with the music it was their business
to maintain, and even brought that music to an abrupt stop. “Pater,”
Mr. Benson says, who knew him, “when he had arranged his notes, began
to write on ruled paper, leaving the alternate lines blank; and in
these spaces he would insert new clauses and descriptive epithets. Then
the whole was re-copied, again on alternate lines, which would again
be filled; moreover, he often had an essay at this stage set up at his
own expense in print, that he might better be able to judge of the
effect....” Such a method, however careful the writer might be to make
continual appeal to his ear, could not but allow the eye to assume too
great a share in that collaboration in which ear should be the sole
dictator and eye the ear’s obedient servant. It would make it difficult
to reject pleasant, exact phrases put in on those alternate lines, even
if they made the sentences top-heavy with their own distinguished,
highly specialised meaning. They would make this top-heaviness hard to
perceive, and, if perceived, erroneously attributable to the visible
crowding and elaboration of the written page. The setting up in print,
while useful as a guide to the general outline, would only confirm
these sentences in their condition. Nobody who has tried to read Pater
aloud can be without instances when the reading became difficult,
breathless, impossible, even while the words demanded admiration for
their subtle accuracy and perfect choice. Let me give no more than two
examples of the awkward constructions Pater allowed himself. I shall
take them from the least decorative of his works, from a book actually
written for oral delivery. On page 35 of _Plato and Platonism_[8] there
is this sentence:

    “From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek
    religious poets, that most abstract and arid of formulæ, _Pure
    Being_, closed in indifferently on every side upon itself, and
    suspended in the midst of nothing, like a hard transparent crystal
    ball, as he says; ‘The Absolute’; ‘The One’; passed to his
    fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking, doubtless in the true spirit of
    philosophy, for the centre of the universe, of his own experience
    of it, for some common measure of the experience of all men.”

Now there are 37 words in 8 clauses, needing 5 commas and 3 semi-colons
to make up the subject of that sentence. The underlining of the words
_Pure Being_ seems to me a manifest concession to the eye.

On page 32 of the same book there is a characteristic construction
partly due to a wish to preserve in his writing, tapestried as it might
be, a flavour of conversational speech, and, for all that, dependent on
the visibility of print, demanding a swift review of the beginning of
the sentence as the reader arrives at its end:

    “That which _is_, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing
    at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides and the
    Eleatic School were much preoccupied with the determination of the
    thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.”

Such sentences are blemishes, not because of inaccuracy, for their
accuracy is their excuse, but because they trouble our reception of
the whole, as a whole, by drawing too much attention to themselves.

With all his care for shapely building, for unity of impression,
he could not avoid occasional over-insistence on details, rather
pleasant than otherwise, unlike the troubling halts of his failures
in sentence-making. Indeed, I am not sure that we can describe as a
fault what was characteristic of a whole manner of vision, and due
not to carelessness but to the peculiar gift of a rare intimacy of
imagination. In his imaginary portraits (which include not only the
book of that name, but “Emerald Uthwart,” “The Child in the House,”
“Apollo in Picardy,” “Gaston de Latour,” “Marius the Epicurean,”
and, less obviously, most of his critical work) we can observe his
way of laying hold of small, separate facts, and expanding them, as
Gaston expanded the poems of Ronsard, “to the full measure of their
intention.” His was never a sweeping, large-rhythmed, narrative
imagination; I fancy, even, that Pater felt a danger of losing himself
when he had to say that something happened, and more than once, when
his characters were compelled to significant, visible action, he did
indeed lose himself ... for a sentence or two it is as if not Pater
spoke but another. There was a danger of things happening in _Gaston
de Latour_, the most lovable of his books. For seven chapters Pater
put them off, and then, as they crowded up on the horizon, and became
imminent, he laid the story aside before they could overwhelm him and
carry him off his feet.[9]

Pater’s imagination loved not action but intellectual circumstance,
and the significance not of deeds but of the promise of deeds yet
unperformed. The story of Marius, the story of Gaston, as far as it
had been carried, was the story of exceptional character in particular
intellectual environment; and for us, perhaps, the interest lies as
much in the one as in the other. When I think of the second of those
two books, I think less of that scrupulous, finely strung youth than of
Montaigne, whose portrait, in the old tower above his open house, seems
to me at least equally important. Now to offer the reader a choice
between the part and the whole is not the way of the perfect artist.
Again, it is idle to say that the narrative of “Marius the Epicurean”
is broken by the inclusion of that lovely rendering of the tale of
Cupid and Psyche. It is idle to point to that tale as an interruption,
when there is nothing for it to interrupt, nothing that is not already
in repose. In Pater’s books it is the reader who moves from one
contemplation to another, and, in “Marius,” quite naturally, from Pisa
and the boy’s education there, and his friendship with Flavian, to the
tale they read together on hot Italian afternoons.

In a way the inclusion of that tale is an illustration on a large
scale of Pater’s invariable manner of using detail. It was the work of
another man, and, before placing it in his book, Pater made it his own
by translating it into a prose which, if purposely and also necessarily
a little different from that of the rest of the book, was yet his.
Just so smaller details, fragments of observation of external nature,
for example, are not directly set upon the page, with no more than the
imprint of the hands that plucked them to give them a spurious unity
with the rest. They are all translated, idiomatically, until they are
so wholly his that it seems he has looked within for them and not
without. The light through the arched windows of the old church, the
spires of London, the burial vault of the Dukes of Rosenmold: these
things are so intimately imagined, so completely veiled in Pater’s mood
that when we recognise them in life we accuse ourselves of plagiarism
because we cannot see them other than as he saw them, and they come to
us, almost, as remembered sentences.

“The Golden Book” takes its place in “Marius” as a single touch in the
portrait of a time: a fragment, carefully chosen, of the local colour
of ideas. Just so Pater uses details more minute. Irrelevant as they
may seem, to a careless observer, irrelevant as perhaps they were
before he had translated them, they help in the painting of the mood of
a man, as that story in the painting of a mood of the ancient world,
in each case a mood of Pater’s own, half borrowed from, half lent to,
man or world. This mutual creation is like that which happens in the
contemplation of a work of art. It is criticism, and, even when Pater
is not criticising what are known as works of art, he is criticising
not the world, or a period or a man, but works of art he has already
made, privately, for himself. He used “the finer sort of memory,
bringing its object to mind with a quiet clearness, yet, as sometimes
happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary
retrospect.” He believed that criticism was a form of creation: for him
it was often a second stage of creation, for he had given artistic form
to his material before, in contemplation of it, he began the criticism
that he offers us in its place. I do not know that this is, accurately
speaking, possible, but it is at least a fable that very fairly
represents the process whereby, in Pater’s books, life comes to seem at
once so ordered, so tapestried, so aloof and yet so intimately known.

I speak there of life in general, of the flux without, a turmoil
until it has been arrested by one of those personal acts of artistic
creation which it is the function of art to make more frequent, more
habitual. The turbulent nature of the flux itself is disguised alike
in his critical and his more obviously imaginative work. For his
critical essays tend always to become imaginary portraits, no less
than his studies in Greek mythology. They are not portraits of men
as Pater believed them to be, but reproductions of their aspect in
sudden side-lights that change them, specialise them, and for those
readers who are vainly looking for a general view, simplify them a
little too far. But what sometimes seems to be the reduction of a
complex personality to a simple formula--Michelangelo, for example, to
the repeated _ex forti dulcedo_--is not so intended. It is rather the
reduction of a personality to the expression of a single mood. There is
warp and woof in Pater’s essays, and the shuttle must thread parallel
lines and not a maze as it weaves what is meant less as the portrait
of a man than as the pattern of a mood. Pater never sacrificed his
own personality to his nominal subject. He sacrificed his sitter, not
himself. Nothing is more remarkable in _Marius the Epicurean_ (where it
would have been easier to disclaim the writer’s own time, to waive the
centuries that separated him from his supposed material) than Pater’s
resolute modernity. He will not allow us to forget the distinction in
circumstances that makes so subtle the relation between subject and
object. He will strip off nothing that has been brought him by the
years between Marius and himself. Deliberately, he sees Marius with
eyes enriched by those centuries, and, with the later knowledge that
can compare Apuleius to Swift or to Théophile Gautier, takes pleasure
in a reference to Wilhelm Meister and remarks that Marius thinks in
the vein of St. Augustine. And so, caring more for the point of view
from which he sees them than for the actual objects, that can be seen
a thousand ways, he has no wish to “say the last word” on Lamb, on
Pico, on Sir Thomas Browne. He does say it, however, on those men in
those moods, or, more truly, on the moods in which he saw them. We
often leave an essay of Pater’s with a new appreciation of someone
else; but that is not because Pater has told us anything, but because,
in reproducing the mood of his essay we have given ourselves a mood
in which that other, Botticelli, Ronsard, Giorgione, can be more than
usually significant.

Thus, though it is as a critic that Pater lives and will live, it is
as a critic of a kind that he may almost be said to have invented.
His criticism is aesthetic and personal. Though compelled to offer a
profusion of theories, he is impatient of them, submits himself to a
work of art, and criticises that work not by showing what he feels,
but by a reproduction of the mood which that work induces in him. His
criticism, always indirect, is always creative, since the reproduction
of a mood, unlike the recording of opinions, is itself a work of art.
It has the validity of his own temperament and circumstances, lyrical
as opposed to abstract truth. We can never say of him that he was
wrong, unless in the theories that he could not avoid but considered
unimportant. We can only say that he was different--from ourselves,
from someone else. We read this critic as we read a poet, collaborating
with him in the reproduction of a mood, in the searching knowledge of
the fragment of life that was coloured for him by this or that book
or picture. The book or picture becomes a secondary matter, and the
first is the rapid light, the weighty atmosphere that he had made his
own. After reading him I remember his words on Montaigne: “A mind for
which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as a general
conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal
experience.”

  1912.




REMY DE GOURMONT




REMY DE GOURMONT


I

M. de Gourmont lives on the fourth floor of an old house in the Rue
des Saints-Pères. A copper chain hangs as bell-rope to his door. The
rare visitor, for it is well known that for many years he has been a
solitary and seldom receives even his friends, pulls the chain and
waits. The door opens a few inches, ready to be closed immediately,
by a man of middle size, in a monk’s brown robe, with a small, round,
grey felt cap. The robe is fastened with silver buckles, in which are
set large blue stones. The admitted visitor walks through a passage
into a room whose walls are covered with books. In the shadow at the
back of the room is a loaded table. Another table, with a sloping
desk upon it, juts out from the window. M. de Gourmont sits in a big
chair before the desk, placing his visitor on the opposite side of
the table, with the light falling on his face so that he can observe
his slightest expression. In conversation he often disguises his face
with his hand, but now and again looks openly and directly at his
visitor. His eyes are always questioning, and almost always kindly.
His face was beautiful in the youth of the flesh, and is now beautiful
in the age of the mind, for there is no dead line in it, no wrinkle,
no minute feature not vitalised by intellectual activity. The nose
is full and sensitive, with markedly curved nostrils. There is a
little satiric beard. The eyebrows lift towards the temples, as in
most men of imagination. The eyes are weighted below, as in most men
of critical thought. The two characteristics are, in M. de Gourmont,
as in his work, most noticeable together. The lower lip, very full,
does not pout, but falls curtain-like towards the chin. It is the lip
of a sensualist, and yet of one whose sensuality has not clogged but
stimulated the digestive processes of his brain. Omar might have had
such a lip, if he had been capable not only of his garlands of roses,
but also of the essays of Montaigne.

He was born in a château in Normandy on 4th April 1858. Among his
ancestors was Gilles de Gourmont, a learned printer and engraver of
the fifteenth century. He has himself collected old woodcuts, and in
_L’Ymagier_ amused himself by setting the most ancient specimens of
the craft, among which he is proud to show some examples of the work
of his family, side by side with drawings by Whistler and Gauguin. He
came to Paris in 1883, when he obtained a post in the Bibliothèque
Nationale. Huysmans was “sous-chef de bureau à la direction de la
Sûreté générale,” and M. de Gourmont, who made his acquaintance through
the dedication of a book, used to call for him between four and five
of the afternoon, and walk with him across the river to a café, that
has since disappeared, where he listened to the older man’s rather
savage characterisations of men, women, movements and books. A few
years later he was held to be lacking in patriotism, and relieved of
his post on account of an article urging the necessity of Franco-German
agreement. He wrote incessantly. _Merlette_, a rather naïve and awkward
little novel, published in 1886, did not promise the work he was to
do. It was no more than an exercise, well done, but no more, the
work of a good brain as yet uncertain of its personal impulse. But
about this time he was caught in the stream of a movement for which
he had been waiting, for which, indeed, the art of his time had been
waiting, the movement that was introduced to English readers by Mr.
Arthur Symons’s admirable series of critical portraits.[10] In 1890 he
published _Sixtine_, dedicated to Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who had died
the year before. In 1892 appeared _Le Latin Mystique_, a book on the
Latin poets of the Middle Ages. He has always been “a delicate amateur
of the curiosities of beauty,” though the character that Mr. Symons
gave him has since become very inadequate. He edited Gérard de Nerval,
_Aucassin et Nicolette_, and Rutebeuf’s _La Miracle de Théophile_,
and wrote _Lilith_, 1892, and _Théodat_, a dramatic poem in prose
that was produced by my friend M. Paul Fort at the Théâtre d’Art on
December 11th of the same year. Several other curious works of this
period were united later in _Le Pèlerin du Silence_. I extract from the
bibliography by M. van Bever, printed in _Poètes d’aujourd’hui_, a
list of the more important books that have followed these very various
beginnings: _Le Livre des Masques_, 1896; _Les Chevaux de Diomède_,
1897; _Le II^{me} Livre des Masques_, 1898; _Esthétique de la langue
française_, 1899; _La Culture des Idées_, 1900; _Le Chemin de Velours_,
1902; _Le Problème du Style_, 1902; _Physique de l’Amour_, 1903;
_Une Nuit au Luxembourg_, 1906; besides four volumes of literary and
philosophical criticism, and four volumes of comment on contemporary
events.

All this mass of work is vitalised by a single motive. Even the
divisions of criticism and creation (whose border line is very dim)
are made actually one by a desire common to both of them, a desire not
expressed in them, but satisfied, a desire for intellectual freedom.
The motto for the whole is written in _Une Nuit au Luxembourg_:
“L’exercice de la pensée est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeu soit
libre et harmonieux.” I am reminded of this sentence again and again
in thinking of M. de Gourmont and his books. There must be no loss of
self-command, none of the grimaces and the awkward movements of the
fanatic, the man with whom thought plays. The thinker must be superior
to his thought. He must make it his plaything instead of being sport
for it. His eyes must be clear, not hallucinated; his arms his own,
not swung with the exaggerated gestures of the preacher moved beyond
himself by his own words. M. de Gourmont seems less an artist than a
man determined to conquer his obsessions, working them out one by one
as they assail him, in order to regain his freedom. It is a fortunate
accident that he works them out by expressing them, twisting into
garlands the brambles that impede his way.


II

M. de Gourmont almost immediately left the half-hearted realism
of _Merlette_, and, just as in his scientific writings he is more
profoundly scientific than the men of science, so in his works of
this period he carried to their uttermost limits the doctrines of
the symbolists. In his critical work the historian must look for the
manifestoes and polemics of the group that gathered in Mallarmé’s
rooms in the Rue de Rome. The theories are in _Idéalisme_, published
in 1893, and in such essays as his defence of Mallarmé, written
in 1898, and included in the _Promenades Littéraires_. Of their
practice he supplies plenty of examples. “Nommer un objet, c’est
supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du
bonheur de deviner peu à peu; le suggérer voilà le rêve.” Mallarmé
wrote that in 1891, and during the ’nineties Remy de Gourmont was
publishing mysterious little books of poetry and prose, of which
small limited editions were issued on rare paper, in curious covers,
with lithographed decorations as reticent as the writing. There is
the _Histoire tragique de la Princesse Phénissa expliquée en quatre
épisodes_, a play whose action might be seen through seven veils, a
play whose motive, never stated directly, is, perhaps, the destruction
of the future for the sake of the present. There is _Le Fantôme_, the
story of a _liaison_ between a man and a woman if you will, between the
intellect and the flesh if you will, that begins with such an anthem
as might have been sung by some of those strange beings whom Poe took
“into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets
and heartsease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.”
The man--is it a man?--who tells the story, ends with a regret for
something too real to be visible, something that is seen because it is
not visible: “Je me sentais froid, j’avais peur--car je la voyais, sans
pouvoir m’opposer à cette transformation doloureuse--je la voyais s’en
aller rejoindre le groupe des femmes indécises d’où mon amour l’avait
tirée--je la voyais redevenir le fantôme qu’elles sont toutes.” There
is _Le Livre des Litanies_, with its elaborate incantation, from which
I take the beginning and end:

    “Fleur hypocrite,

    “Fleur du silence.

    “Rose couleur de cuivre, plus frauduleuse que nos joies, rose
    couleur de cuivre, embaume-nous dans tes mensonges, fleur
    hypocrite, fleur du silence.

       *       *       *       *       *

    “Rose améthyste, étoile matinale, tendresse épiscopale, rose
    améthyste, tu dors sur des poitrines dévotes et douillettes, gemme
    offerte à Marie, ô gemme sacristine, fleur hypocrite, fleur du
    silence.

    “Rose cardinale, rose couleur du sang de l’Eglise romaine, rose
    cardinale, tu fais rêver les grands yeux des mignons et plus d’un
    t’épingla au nœud de sa jarretière, fleur hypocrite, fleur du
    silence.

    “Rose papale, rose arrosée des mains qui bénissent le monde, rose
    papale, ton cœur d’or est en cuivre, et les larmes qui perlent sur
    ta vaine corolle, ce sont les pleurs du Christ, fleur hypocrite,
    fleur du silence.

    “Fleur hypocrite,

    “Fleur du silence.”


III

These, and other things like them, made it possible for M. de Gourmont
to proceed in the discovery of himself. He drank his mood to the dregs,
leaving no untried experiment to clog his mind with a regret as he
moved on. “I have always been excessive,” he says; “I do not like to
stop half-way.” He follows each impulse as far as it will take him,
lest, by chance, he should leave some flower untasted in a bypath he
has seen but not explored. Unlike most authors, he never has to copy
himself, and does not feel bound, because he has written one book whose
prose is malachite green, to produce another of the same colour. “Un
artiste,” said Wilde, “ne recommence jamais deux fois la même chose
... ou bien c’est qu’il n’avait pas réussi.” The surest way to fail in
an experiment is to make it with a faint heart. M. de Gourmont always
burns his boats.

Some preoccupations, however boldly attacked, are not to be conquered
at a blow. The preoccupation of sex is unlike that of a theory of
art. Conquered again and again by expression, it returns with a new
face, a new mystery, a new power of building the intellect, a new
Gorgon to be seen in the mirror of art and decapitated. As the man
changes so does Medusa vary her attack, and so must he vary the manner
of her death. Now he will write a _Physique de l’Amour_, and, like
Schopenhauer, relieve himself of the problem of sex by reducing it to
its lowest terms. Now he will conquer it by the lyrical and concrete
expression of a novel or a poem. Sex continually disturbs him, but
the disturbance of the flesh is always, sooner or later, pacified by
the mind. All his later novels are, like _Sixtine_, “romans de la vie
cérébrale.” _Sixtine_ is the story of a writer’s courtship of a woman
no more subtle than himself, but far more ready with her subtlety. It
displays the workings of a man’s mind and the states of emotion through
which he passes, by including in the text, as they were written, the
stories and poems composed under the influence of the events. The man
is intensely analytic, afterwards. Emotion blurs the windows of his
brain, and cleans hers to a greater lucidity. He always knows what
he ought to have done. “Nul n’avait à un plus haut degré la présence
d’esprit du bas de l’escalier.” More than once the woman was his, if
he had known it before he left her. Finally, she is carried off by a
rival whose method he has himself suggested. The book is a tragedy
of self-consciousness, whose self-conscious heroine is a prize for
the only man who is ignorant of himself, and, in the blindness of
that ignorance, is able to act. But there is no need to analyse the
frameworks of M. de Gourmont’s novels. Frameworks matter very little.
They are all vitalised by an almost impatient knowledge of the subtlety
of a woman’s mind in moments of pursuit or flight, and the impotence of
a man whose brain seeks to be an honest mediator between itself and his
flesh. His men do not love like the heroes of ordinary books, and are
not in the least likely to suggest impossible ideals to maidens. They
are unfaithful in the flesh nearly always. They use one experience
as an anaesthetic for the pain they are undergoing in another. They
seek to be masters of themselves by knowledge, and are unhappy without
thinking of suicide on that account. Unhappiness no less than joy is
a thing to be known. They fail, not getting what they want, and are
victorious in understanding, with smiling lips, their non-success.


IV

One afternoon, in the Rue des Saints-Pères, M. de Gourmont confirmed
the impression already given me by his books and his eyebrows. “I
have always been both _romanesque_ and _critique_.” Side by side he
has built separate piles of books. While writing the curiosities
of symbolism that are collected in _Le Pèlerin du Silence_, he was
preparing the _Livres des Masques_, two series of short critical
portraits of the writers of his time, which, in the case of those
who survive, are as true to-day as when they were written. It has
been so throughout. In the one pile are little volumes of poetry like
_Les Saintes du Paradis_, and such romances as those we have been
discussing; in the other are works of science like the _Physique de
l’Amour_, books benevolently polemical like _Le Problème du Style_, and
collections of criticism in which an agile intelligence collaborates
with a wakeful sense of beauty.

In this critical work, as in what is more easily recognised as
creative, M. de Gourmont builds for freedom. He will be bound
neither by his own preoccupations nor by other men’s thoughts. It is
characteristic of him that his most personal essays in criticism are
“Dissociations of Ideas.” The dissociation of ideas is a method of
thought that separates the ideas put into double harness by tradition,
just as the chemist turns water into hydrogen and oxygen, with which,
severally, he can make other compounds. This, like most questions of
thought, is a question of words. Words are the liberators of ideas,
since without them ideas cannot escape from the flux of feeling into
independent life. They are also their gaolers, since they are terribly
cohesive, and married words cling together, binding in a lover’s
knot the ideas they represent. All men using words in combination
abet these marriages, though in doing so they are making bars of
iron for the prisons in which they speculate on the torn fragment of
sky that their window lets them perceive. Nothing is easier than,
by taking words and their associations as they are commonly used,
to strengthen the adherence of ideas to each other. Nothing needs a
more awakened intelligence than to weaken the bonds of such ideas
by separating the words that bind them. That is the method of M. de
Gourmont. He separates, for example, the idea of Stéphane Mallarmé
and that of “decadence,” the idea of glory and that of immortality,
the idea of success and that of beauty. It is, too, a dissociation of
ideas when he inquires into the value of education, these two ideas of
worth and knowledge being commonly allied. The method, or rather the
consciousness of the method, is fruitful in material for discussion,
though this advantage cannot weigh much with M. de Gourmont, whose
brain lacks neither motive power nor grist to grind. It is, for him, no
more than a recurrent cleaning of the glasses through which he looks at
the subjects of his speculation.

He speculates continually, and, if questions are insoluble, is not
content until he has so posed them as to show the reason of their
insolubility. He prefers a calm question mark to the more emotional
mark of exclamation, and is always happy when he can turn the second
into the first. He is extraordinarily thorough, moving always in mass
and taking everything with him, so that he has no footsteps to retrace
in order to pick up baggage left behind. Unlike Theseus, he unrolls no
clue of thread when he enters the cavern of Minotaur. He will come out
by a different way or not at all. The most powerful Minotaur of our
day does not dismay him. Confident in his own probity, he will walk
calmly among the men of science and bring an _Esthétique de la langue
française_, or a _Physique de l’Amour_, meat of unaccustomed richness,
to lay before their husk-fed deity.

In criticism, as in creation, he does not like things half-done. The
story of the origin of one of these books is the story of them all.
There is a foolish little work by M. Albalat, which professes to teach
style in twenty-seven lessons. M. de Gourmont read it and smiled; he
wrote an article, and still found something to smile at; he wrote a
book, _Le Problème du Style_, in which, mocking M. Albalat through a
hundred and fifty-two courteous pages, he showed, besides many other
things, that style is not to be taught in twenty-seven lessons, and,
indeed, is not to be taught at all. Then he felt free to smile at
something else.

M. de Gourmont is careful to say that he brought to the _Esthétique de
la langue française_, “ni lois, ni règles, ni principes peut-être; je
n’apporte rien qu’un sentiment esthétique assez violent et quelques
notions historiques: voilà ce que je jette au hasard dans la grande
cuve où fermente la langue de demain.” An aesthetic feeling and some
historical notions were sufficiently needed in the fermenting vat
where the old French language, in which there is hardly any Greek, is
being horribly adulterated with brainless translations of good French
made by Hellenists of the dictionary. M. de Gourmont is in love with
his language, but knows that she is rather vain and ready to wear all
kinds of borrowed plumes, whether or not they suit her. He would take
from her her imitation ostrich feathers, and would hide also all
ribbons from the London market, unless she first dye them until they
fall without discord into the scheme of colour that centuries have made
her own. Why write “high life,” for example, or “five o’clock,” or
“sleeping”? Why shock French and English alike by writing “Le Club de
Rugby” on a gate in Tours? A kingfisher in England flies very happily
as martin-pêcheur in France, and the language is not so sterile as to
be unable to breed words from its own stock for whatever needs a name.

_Physique de l’Amour; Essai sur l’instinct sexuel_, “qui n’est qu’un
essai, parce que la matière de son idée est immense, représente
pourtant une ambition: on voudrait agrandir la psychologie générale de
l’amour, la faire commencer au commencement même de l’activité mâle
et femelle, situer la vie sexuelle de l’homme dans le plan unique de
la sexualité universelle.” It is a book full of illustration, a vast
collection of facts, and throws into another fermenting vat than that
of language some sufficiently valuable ideas. It lessens the pride
of man, and, at the same time, gives him a desperate courage, as it
shows him that even in the eccentricities of his love-making he is not
alone, that the modesty of his women is a faint hesitation beside the
terrified flight of the she-mole, that his own superiority is but an
accident, and that he must hold himself fortunate in that nature does
not treat him like the male bee, and toss his mangled body disdainfully
to earth as soon as he has done her work. M. de Gourmont’s books do not
flatter humanity. They clear the eyes of the strong, and anger the weak
who cannot bear to listen to unpalatable truths.


V

M. de Gourmont’s most obvious quality is versatility, and though, as I
have tried to point out, it is not difficult to find a unity of cause
or intention in his most various expressions, his lofty and careless
pursuit of his inclinations, his life of thought for its own sake, has
probably cost him a wide and immediate recognition. That loss is not
his, but is borne by those who depend for their reading on the names
that float upward from the crowd. Even his admirers complain: some
that he has not given them more poems; others that his _Physique de
l’Amour_ stands alone on its shelf; others that a critic such as he
should have spent time on romances; others, again, that a writer of
such romances should have used any of his magnificent power in what
they cannot see to be creative work. M. de Gourmont is indifferent to
all alike, and sits aloft in the Rue des Saints-Pères, indulging his
mind with free and harmonious play.

In one of his books, far more than in the others, two at least of
his apparently opposite activities have come to work in unison.
All his romances, after and including _Sixtine_, are vitalised by
a never-sleeping intellect; but one in particular is a book whose
essence is both critical and romantic, a book of thought coloured like
a poem and moving with a delicate grace of narrative. _Une Nuit au
Luxembourg_[11] was published in 1906, and is the book that opens most
vistas in M. de Gourmont’s work. A god walks in the gardens behind the
Odéon, and a winter’s night is a summer’s morning, on which the young
journalist who has dared to say “My friend” to the luminous unknown in
the church of Saint-Sulpice, hears him proclaim the forgotten truth
that in one age his mother has been Mary, and in another Latona, and
the new truth that the gods are not immortal though their lives are
long. Flowers are in bloom where they walk, and three beautiful girls
greet them with divine amity. Most of the book is written in dialogue,
and in this ancient form, never filled with subtler essences, doubts
are born and become beliefs, beliefs become doubts and die, while
the sun shines, flowers are sweet, and girls’ lips soft to kiss.
Where there is God he will not have Love absent, and where Love is he
finds the most stimulating exercise for his brain. Ideas not new but
gathered from all the philosophers are given an aesthetic rather than a
scientific value, and are used like the tints on a palette. Indeed, the
book is a balanced composition in which each colour has its complement.
Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul, Christianity, the replenishment of the
earth by the Jews; it is impossible to close the book at any page
without finding the mind as it were upon a springboard and ready to
launch itself in delightful flight. There are many books that give a
specious sensation of intellectual business while we read them. There
are very few that leave, long after they are laid aside, stimuli to
independent activity.


VI

“Il ne faut pas chercher la vérité; mais devant un homme comprendre
quelle est sa vérité.” We must not seek in a man’s work for the truth,
since there are as many truths as brains; but it is worth while to
define an answer here and an answer there out of the many. What is the
answer of Remy de Gourmont? _Quelle est sa vérité?_ Of what kind is his
truth? Does he bring rosemary for remembrance or poppy for oblivion?
Not in what he says, but in the point from which he says it, we must
look for our indications. His life, like _Sixtine_, is a “roman de la
vie cérébrale.” It is the spectacle of a man whose conquests are won
by understanding. For him the escape of mysticism was inadequate, and
an invitation to cowardice. He would not abdicate, but, since those
empires are unstable whose boundaries are fixed, conquer continually.
The conquests of the mind are not won by neglect. It is not sufficient
to refuse to see. The conqueror must see so clearly that life blushes
before his sober eyes, and, understood, no longer dominates. Remy de
Gourmont has suffered and conquered his suffering in understanding
it. He would extend this dominion. He would realise all that happens
to him, books, a chance visitor, a meeting in the street, the liquid
bars of light across the muddy Seine. He would transmute all into the
mercurial matter of thought, until, at last impregnable, he should
see life from above, having trained his digestive powers to the same
perfection as his powers of reception. Although one of the Symbolists,
he has moved far from the starting-point assigned to that school by
Mr. Symons. His books are not “escapes from the thought of death.” The
thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow
to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious
game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind
against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important
to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured.
It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his
desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the
unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. His later
books have been the by-products of a more intimate labour. He has left
them by the road whose end he has not hoped to reach, whose pursuit
suffices him. They wake in the reader a desire which has nothing to
do with art. This desire--a desire for intellectual honesty--and with
that, perhaps, for intellectual gaiety, is the characteristic gift of
his work. It is never offered alone. He accompanies it with criticism,
with witty epilogues, serious dissertations, and licentious little
stories; but it is not so much for the sake of these things as for the
stimulus of that desire that we turn, and seldom in vain, to M. de
Gourmont’s books.

  1911.




THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI




THE POETRY OF YONE NOGUCHI


So-shi, a Chinese philosopher, dreamed that he was a butterfly, and, in
the moment of waking, asked himself: “Are you So-shi who has dreamed
that he was a butterfly, or are you a butterfly who is dreaming that he
is So-shi?” That question is continually repeated in the works of Yone
Noguchi, who seems, indeed, to have the freedom of two worlds, and to
find reality as often in one as in the other. Noguchi is for ever in
doubt of his own existence, suspicious of appearances, and searching
for the reality in things beyond touch or description. “My soul,” he
writes:

   “My soul, like a chilly winged fly, roams about the sadness-walled
        body, hunting for a casement to fly out.
    Lo, suddenly, an inspired bird flies upright into the atom-eyed sky!
    Alas, his reflection sinks far down into the mileless bottom of the
        mirrory rivulet!
    Is this world the solid being?--or a shadowy nothing?
    Is the form that flies up the real bird? or the figure that sinks
        down?”

And again:

   “The world is not my residence to the end!
    Alas, the moon has lost her way, harassed among the leaf-fellows on
        the darkling hill-top!
    Isn’t there chance for my flying out?”

The world is not too much with this poet of Japan who writes in our
language, and it is interesting to compare this symbolist of a nation
of conscious symbolists with the few men who in France and England have
turned an unconscious but almost universal practice into a theory of
poetry.[12]

But I must not, in my care for his work, pretend that the poet is the
immaterial floating fairy that he almost seems to be. “I have cast the
world,” he says, “and think me as nothing,

   “Yet I feel cold on snow-falling day,
    And happy on flower day.”

Let me, before saying more, set down such facts as I know about his
physical existence.

Yone Noguchi was born in Japan about 1876. He was in America before
he was twenty, and, in company with a few other Japanese students,
suffered extreme poverty, and the starvation which those who have not
tried it consider so efficacious a stimulant to the soul. He made some
friends among American writers, and stayed for a time with Joaquin
Miller. In 1897 he published _Seen and Unseen: or Monologues of a
Homeless Snail_, and in the next year _The Voice of the Valley_, a
little book inspired by a stay in the Yosemite. In 1902 he came to
England, and lived with Mr. Yoshio Markino (who had not then realised
himself and London in his water-colours) in poor lodgings in the
Brixton Road. From these lodgings he issued a sixteen-page pamphlet of
verse printed on brown paper, which drew such notice that the Unicorn
Press (an unfortunate little firm that published some very good books,
some bad ones, and died) produced a volume, called, like the pamphlet,
_From the Eastern Sea_, and containing, besides those sixteen pages
of poetry, other verses from the American books and a number of new
pieces. The cover of this edition was designed by Mr. Yoshio Markino.
I knew Noguchi at this time, and often walked with him along the
Embankment in the evenings, or under those “lamp-lights of web-like
streets bathed in the opiate mists,” that he and Yoshio Markino have
used so delicately in their several arts. I remember him as a small
man, though perhaps not noticeably small by Japanese standards, with
black hair less orderly and geometrical in growth than most Japanese
hair, and a face of extraordinary sensitiveness, high-browed but with
broadly set eyes, and a mouth like a woman’s, like that of a woman
controlling some almost tearful emotion. Even in the handling of a
cigarette, whose end he stripped of its paper so that the tobacco might
serve in the making of another (we were almost penniless in those
days), there was a delicacy that made it impossible not to recognise
that he was a man who lived more finely than most. His conversations
were of poetry, of the principles of the particular poetry he held
that it was his to write, and of the works of those English poets he
had read. “I hate your Longfellow,” he said, “and I love your Keats,”
and in contrasting the two he was, perhaps, defining to himself an
important tendency of his own.

He left London in 1903, and went to New York and then to Japan. He had
some difficulties there, difficulties, I believe, of misunderstanding
on the part of his own countrymen. He crossed to the mainland and
travelled in China for a year, and perhaps longer. In 1906 he published
_The Summer Cloud_ in Tokio, and, in June last year, he sent me a
two-volume book in a blue case with small ivory fastenings, printed by
the Valley Press in Kamakura. This book, _The Pilgrimage_, has been
issued in England by Mr. Elkin Mathews.

These five books do not contain a large body of verse, but they contain
verse whose interest for us is not concentrated in the nationality of
the writer. The title of the brown-paper pamphlet published in the
Brixton Road is _From the Eastern Sea_, “by Yone Noguchi (_Japanese_),”
but though that word aroused a careless curiosity, the curiosity was
turned into something more valuable by qualities less incidental. The
imagery of Noguchi’s verse is Japanese in feeling, just as the imagery
in Synge’s plays is Irish, and that of Verlaine’s poetry French, but
the imagery in any one of these three cases would have been worthless
if the man who used it had been merely Japanese, Irish, or French, and
not a man of genius with the gift of setting words free with living
breath. Our concern is not with the nationality of this writer, but
with his conception of the poet, and with his poetry.

Noguchi wrote his first book in 1896, and so had not read Mr. Arthur
Symons’ _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, which was issued three
years later. He would have found there an account of poets not unlike
himself, and of a poetry nearer than Keats’ to his own, and further
removed than Keats’ from that of the hated Longfellow.

Symons, writing of Verlaine, says: “Is not his whole art a delicate
waiting upon moods, with that perfect confidence in them as they
are, which is a large part of ordinary education to discourage in us,
and a large part of experience to repress? But to Verlaine, happily,
experience taught nothing; or rather it taught him only to cling the
more closely to those moods in whose succession lies the more intimate
part of our spiritual life.” Noguchi lives almost continuously in those
moods; experience with him is momentary rather than cumulative; and his
aim, expressed more than once in his verse, is only to keep himself a
vessel as clear as possible for the unsullied transference of those
moments from the bowl of life to that of art. It will not be difficult
to make from his verses a portrait of his ideal poet, and, in writing
of a man not yet very widely known, I believe I shall best be doing my
duty by him in quoting his own words as often as I can. In _The Poet_
he says:

   “The roses live by the eating of their own beauty and then die.
    His song is the funeral chant for his own death of every moment.”

And again, of himself:

   “I sing the song of my heart-strings, alone in the eternal muteness,
        in the face of God.”

And again:

   “The God-beloved man welcomes, respects as an honoured guest, his own
        soul and body in his solitude.
    Lo! the roses under the night dress themselves in silence, and
        expect no mortal applaud--content with that of their voiceless
        God.”

And again:

   “O, wash me and wash me again with thy light,
    And burn my body to a flame of soul!
    It is this moment that I conquer the intervention of flesh,
    And its rebellions that worked in me at unexpected time.
    It’s not too much to say I am a revelation or a wonder,
    Winging as a falcon into the breast of loveliness and air.”

And again:

                 “... What a bird
    Dreams in the moonlight is my dream,
    What a rose sings is my song.”

“O, to lose the world and gain a song,” he cries, and then, “I am glad
to be no-man to-day, with the laughter and dance of the sea soul.” His
thoughts fall like leaves in autumn “on the snowy cheeks of his paper.”
His is the poetry of self-abnegation, of identification of himself
with the world. His soul dances “on the silver strings” of the rain.
“We,” he sings, are “happy to be biographers of each other, I and a
bird.” He flies himself as a kite, to be lifted or let fall by the
winds that do not move at all those whose pride is in their sage and
measured footsteps on the ground.

In the last of his volumes there are a few specimens of Japanese
seventeen-syllabled verse, _hokku_, and in a note Noguchi writes that
such a poem “in Japanese mind, might be compared with a tiny star, I
dare say, carrying the whole sky at its back. It is like a slightly
open door, where you may steal into the realm of poesy. Its value
depends on how much it suggests. The Hokku poet’s chief aim is to
impress the reader with the high atmosphere in which he is living.”
The Hokku poet, like Noguchi, never writes of the thing about which
he is writing. The emotions he wishes to express are too subtle for
description in words, and can only be written of in the spaces between
the lines, just as between the petals of a flower we may find dreams
that the flower has never known, and the suggestions of something less
ponderable than the earth in which it had its roots. An example of
Hokku poetry will illustrate the method of all Noguchi’s:

   “Where the flowers sleep,
    Thank God! I shall sleep to-night.
    Oh, come, butterfly.”

That is valuable as a talisman rather than as a picture. It is a pearl
to be dissolved in the wine of a mood. Pearls are not wine, nor in
themselves to be thought of as drink, but there is a kind of magic in
the wine in which they are dissolved.

In Noguchi’s poems there is the co-operation between silence and speech
of which Carlyle was thinking when he wrote: “In a Symbol there is
concealment and yet revelation: here therefore by Silence and Speech
acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the Speech be
itself high, and the Silence fit and noble, how expressive will their
union be!” In many poems of the French symbolists the Speech is almost
meaningless, except in the Silence that is covered by its melody.
In Noguchi both Speech and Silence are full of a charm that we can
scarcely find in life but in fortunate rare moods. He writes:

   “I am stirring the waves of Reverie with my meaningless but
        wisdom-wreathed syllables.”

But he is incapable of denying his own charm to the carefully-worded
accompaniment of the Silence with which he is really concerned. He sees
the world with eyes too guileless not to make it alive, even when using
it as an invocation. He sees ideas too clearly not to make them, even
in a spell, independently vivid for his listeners. For an example of
the one take this picture:

   “Alas, the mother cow, with matron eyes, utters her bitter heart,
        kidnapped of her children by the curling gossamer mist!”

For an example of the other, this idea:

   “The Universe, too, has somewhere its shadow; but what about my
        songs?
    An there be no shadow, no echoing to the end--my broken-throated
        lute will never again be made whole.”

He is a poet whose flame has been so scrupulously tended as to flicker
with the slightest breath. He is as many-mooded as the combinations
between sunshine and shadow. His poetry actually _is_ the thing that
has induced a mood in him, trimmed of all that he has had to remove
for himself, and so made into something between nature and that pure
elevation of mind from which Noguchi feels. This quality of pale
flame-like emotion is common to all his poems, extraordinarily various
as they are.

Sometimes he speaks with grandeur, as in these lines:

   “When I am lost in the deep body of the mist on a hill,
    The universe seems built with me as its pillar!
    Am I the God upon the face of the deep, nay deepless deepness in the
        beginning?”

Sometimes wistfully:

   “Alas! my soul is like a paper lantern, its paste wetted off under
        the rain.
    _My love, wilt thou not come back to-night?_
    Lo, the snail at my door stealthily hides his horns.
    _Oh, put forth thy honourable horns for my sake!
    Where is Truth? Where is Light?_”

Sometimes questioning:

   “My poetry begins with the tireless songs of the cricket, on the lean
        grey-haired hill, in sober-faced evening.
    And the next page is Stillness----
    And what then, about the next to that?
    Alas, the God puts his universe-covering hand over its sheets!
    _Master, take off your hand for the humble servant!_
    Asked in vain:----
    How long for my meditation?”

But it is impossible with the quotations permissible in an article to
give an adequate presentment of a poet whose poems are so separate
that a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression. Noguchi has,
like Verlaine, escaped the wisdom of experience; his latest moods are
as sky-clear as his first, different though they are in technique and
in feeling. Each one of them is a glint of light from a diamond; it is
impossible, but in seeing innumerable glints together, satisfactorily
to perceive the diamond itself.

Noguchi’s technique is his own, though it would be possible to find
in reminiscent phrases suggestions of influence. A man using English
words with something of the surprising daring of the Irish peasants
on whose talk Mr. Synge modelled his prose, using them, too, like a
foreigner who has fallen in love with them, he is able to give them a
morning freshness newer and stranger than is given them (though the
words of all fine writers are newly discovered) by men whose ancestors
have bandied them about. He uses them in short and long lines that,
in his later books, learn more and more of rhythm. Rhyme he has not
attempted, and it would, I think, have hampered the butterfly-flash
of his verse from thought to thought. In _The Summer Cloud_ many of
the poems of his early books are altered to prose simply by the plan
of their printing. The type is differently set on the page and they
are called prose poems. I do not know what led Noguchi to make this
experiment, but it proved that the irregular, broken lines in which his
poems were originally published had a real power over the effect the
words produced. The spaces between the lines were a kind of thought
punctuation, and the mind needed these moments between the little,
breathless, scarcely-worded sighs that make his poems. In reading
them aloud it becomes clear that the ritual of the line-spacing was
more important than that of commas or full-stops. Noguchi’s songs are
like bird flights, timing themselves with the pulse of the mind that
follows them. His ideal is a poetry of pure suggestion whose melody
shall be of thought, capricious and uncertain as the mind, but only
with the mind’s caprice, the mind’s uncertainty. The following poem was
printed as prose in _The Summer Cloud_, and as it stands here in _The
Pilgrimage_.

   “Little Fairy,
    Little Fairy by a hearth,
    Flight in thine eyes,
    Hush on thy feet,
    Shall I go with thee up to Heaven
    By the road of the fire-flame?

    Little Fairy,
    Little Fairy by a river,
    Dance in thy heart,
    Longing at thy lips,
    Shall I go down with thee to “Far-Away,”
    Rolling over the singing bubbles?

    Little Fairy,
    Little Fairy by a poppy,
    Dream in thy hair,
    Solitude under thy wings,
    Shall I sleep with thee to-night in the golden cup
    Under the stars?”

It is easy, in reading it aloud, to recognise that its form is not
accidental, but follows, breath for breath, the movements of the mind.

But who shall analyse charm, or separate the tints of the opal? In
writing of Noguchi, I am writing of something that can only be defined
by itself. I can only take shred after shred from the cloak of gossamer
he has woven for himself, and only hope in doing so to persuade other
readers to buy his books and find for themselves a hundred shreds
as beautiful as these. The frontispiece to _The Pilgrimage_ is a
reproduction of a drawing by Utamaru, a thing of four pale colours and
a splash of black, and made as light as wind by curves as subtle and as
indefinable as those traced by worshipping stars round the object of
their adoration. I had forgotten that it is the picture of a girl, and
that fact is, indeed, as immaterial as the titles of Noguchi’s poems.
In looking at it, I forget not only its subject, but the book in which
it is, for this art, of poet or painter, Verlaine, Noguchi, Utamaru,
Whistler, frees us, infecting us with its own freedom, from the world
which is too much with us, for the exploration of that other world of
dream which, unless we, too, are children, is with us so fitfully, and
so seldom.

   “Beckoned by an appointed hand, unseen yet sure, in holy air
    We wander as a wind, silver and free,
    With one song in heart, we, the children of prayer.

    Our song is not of a city’s fall;
    No laughter of a kingdom bids our feet wait;
    Our heart is away, with sun, wind, and rain:
    We, the shadowy roamers on the holy highway.”

  1909.




KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH




KINETIC AND POTENTIAL SPEECH


Definitions, like mythologies, wear out. It is then important to
replace them. Aladdin’s wife had a choice, but we have none. We must
change our old lamps for new, or sit in the dark. A natural philosopher
who retained the mythological definition of thunder could not speak
of lightning to young men who had learnt of electricity without an
air of irrelevance of which he might be quite unconscious. Not so his
listeners, who would brush his explanations impatiently aside as soon
as they knew the beliefs on which he based them. Whenever historians
or critics seem irrelevant, we are safe in assuming a difference
between their definitions and our own. When they seem irrelevant to
many people beside ourselves, we can go further and assume that their
definitions are either worn out or not yet accepted. Sometimes, of
course, they are without definitions either old or new, but then they
need not trouble us, for they disappear like cuttle-fishes in the
darkness of their own ink. There is at the present day a widespread
dissatisfaction with historians of literature. It is impossible not to
feel that their dicta do not matter, that their sense of perspective
is wrong or uncertain, that their books are of no use to us except as
bibliographies. A new definition of literature is needed, that shall
give them some scale, some standard to which they can refer. For
without such standard or scale, they can do no more than gossip, or
judge poetry by its passion, by its sense, by its smoothness, or by
any other half-remembered scrap from a definition that is no longer
adequate.

If we would get rid of these irrelevancies, and write histories of
literature that shall deal with the matter of which they propose to
treat, we must find a new standard of values, and to find that we
must make a new definition. We must have a statement of the nature of
literature applicable not to the books of one nation of one time only,
but to those of all nations and of all times. It must supply us with
terms in which we can state the aims of widely different schools and
writers, with regard to their medium and not to any accidental quality.
If it is to do that we must escape from the prejudices of our own time
(which may be invisible to us) by seeking our formula in a definition
of the medium common to all writers, a statement of the function of
words in combination.

To make such a statement I have borrowed two epithets from the
terminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists
as kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted.
Potential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert.
Applying these terms to language, without attempting too strict
an analogy, I wish to define literature, or rather the medium of
literature, as a combination of kinetic with potential speech. In
this combination the two are coincident. There is no such thing in
literature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic
speech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless
prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain
discovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An
example of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not
think it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste
of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a
poem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between
kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination varies
with different works and the literature of different ages. There is no
literature to which it is impossible to apply the formula. Let us try
to clarify it by example and particularisation.

It may be asked, what of ballad poetry in which there is much so stated
as to approach purely kinetic speech? Does not the admitted power
of a sea-song, a song whose words are utterly trivial, disprove our
assertion? It does not; for to such songs or chanties the music to
which they are sung has given a quality of potential speech, without
which they would be worthless and speedily forgotten. In that case
the words and the melody respectively represent kinetic and potential
speech. It has been very truly said that a prima-donna can turn the
alphabet to poetry by the emotional power of her voice.

It may further be asked by any one who has not clearly apprehended my
meaning (and this would be more than excusable), Do I mean to suggest
that literature is not literature unless it contains a double meaning?
and, if so, do I not find in allegory the most perfect example of the
simultaneous existence of kinetic and potential speech? This would
indeed be a _reductio ad absurdum_. I must answer, that allegory
(though it may represent the result of an early guess at the nature of
art) is not necessarily poetry. There is, indeed, a gross and obvious
duality of meaning in such a work as _The Faërie Queene_. The tale
written on the paper enables us to reconstruct another. But that other
might have been written with no greater difficulty. It does not aid,
and may clog with external preoccupations, the tale that we sit down
to read. It is an impertinent shadow, a dog that keeps too closely at
our heels. Hazlitt rebukes those who think that the allegory of _The
Faërie Queene_ will bite them. We are more afraid that it will lick our
hands, and all we ask is, that it will allow itself to be forgotten.
An acrostic sonnet may be a good sonnet, but we are not likely to
perceive its excellence if we are intent upon the initial letters of
the lines. No; allegory may be a rude attempt to copy in things said
the duality of poetic speech. The old delight in conscious allegory may
be comparable to the modern delight in conscious symbolism. But we must
not forget for a moment that the resemblance is only one of analogy.
When Spenser writes of Mammon’s cave:

   “Both roof, and floor, and walls were all of gold
    But overgrown with rust and old decay,
    And hid in darkness that none could behold
    The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day
    Did never in that house itself display,
    But a faint shadow of uncertain light;
    Such as a lamp whose life doth fade away;
    Or as the moon clothéd with cloudy night,
    Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.”

When he writes thus, we do not, in our search for potential speech,
have to remember that he is writing of the love of money. Away with
such tedious recollections. The stanza is like a picture by Rembrandt
of an alchemist’s laboratory, where dusty alembic and smouldering
fire mean far more than themselves. The lines say something, but we
hear much for which they have not words. “The moon clothéd with cloudy
night,” is not richer in suggestion than that same description. Not in
the allegory but in the words themselves, their order and their melody,
must we find, if they are to be literature, that combination of kinetic
and potential speech.

Let me take another example of fine poetry, and show that it does
perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the
first stanza of Blake’s “The Tiger”:

   “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
    In the forests of the night,
    What immortal hand or eye
    Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four
lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The
kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed
tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and
on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the
phosphorescence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear.
And who shall speak in fit terms of its potentiality? That glowing
image, that surprised address; not in the enumeration of such things
shall we come upon its secret.

The test of a formula is, that it shall fit. It must enable us to
co-ordinate scattered knowledge, and throw into a clear perspective
the jumble of loose statements and scraps of information whose
value we cannot but recognise, although they have remained outside
previous schemes and done little more than disturb the equilibrium of
once-established theories. It is a comfort and a joy to a thinker when
he can say that a formula of his has almost been proposed by minds that
have approached his problem along roads other than his own. When he can
find statements, true in themselves but inadequate, pegging out, as
it were, the ground from which his formula has been dug, he can feel
that it is no mere chance that has given it a momentary appearance of
usefulness. He can speak of it with the solid confidence that it has
behind it the collaboration of his predecessors.

We can bring such confidence to the use of this formula of kinetic
and potential speech, for to whatever problem of literary theory or
phenomenon of the history of literature we apply it, we find that it
has been almost stated by those who have separately considered that
problem or phenomenon. It smelts the ore that they have dug, and forges
a weapon for the attack not of one problem, but of all.

For example; though kinetic speech may be translated without loss from
one language to another, potential speech would not be potential but
kinetic if we were able to express it otherwise than by itself. This is
what Shelley means when he denies the possibility of the translation
of poetry, though he does not perceive the full reason, but only that
the poetic quality of a poem is partly dependent on a succession
of inimitable sounds. His statement, incomplete though it is, is a
recognition of the duality of poetic speech. He does not for a moment
contend that we cannot render the meaning; he sees that the meaning is
not all. The body is one thing and the soul is another. If we leave the
soul behind we have nothing but dead matter, fit for manure or food.
Life, or poetry, delicate-footed, mysterious, gracious with knowledge
of her mystery, is passed away and we cannot recapture her.

Sometimes, indeed, she goes without our interference, and disappears
only because of our neglect. There are poems that many men cannot
perceive to be poetry. There are others, once poetry, now no longer
so. Let us apply our formula to these phenomena, and first to the
varying popularity of poetry, since our solution of this question will
help us in solving the other. We shall find that the nearer poetry
approaches to kinetic speech, the more easily is it apprehended by the
multitude. Kinetic speech secures its effects by the presentation of
facts, situations and stories, which are stuff not so fine as to slip
through the coarse meshes of the general understanding. This explains
the immediate and wide popularity of such poets as Longfellow, Scott,
and Macaulay. Because prose, as a rule, depends more nearly on its
kinetic than on its potential utterance, it is, as a rule, the more
widely read. When, as in the hands of some nineteenth century writers,
it emphasizes the potential element of speech it correspondingly
narrows its public. Whenever poetry of high potentiality is read by a
large public it will be found that its potential speech is condoned
for them or hidden from them by more than usually vigorous kinetic
speech. For potential speech secures its effects by suggestion. There
is a bloom on its wings that a callous retina does not perceive. It
is like a butterfly that has visited flowers and scatters their scent
in its flight. The scent and the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings
are more important than the direction or speed of its flying. It is
always easier for the public to say, how fast, or where it is going
than to notice these delicate things. The kinetic speech of a poem is
understood by all; the potential depends for its apprehension upon
the taste and knowledge of the reader. Words must have for us the
associations that they had for the poet. We must be able to see them
with his eyes, hear them with his ears, and taste their scents with
nostrils not dissimilar to his. In time these things change. Unpopular
poetry becomes quite popular, and indeed, no longer poetry, as it
loses, through usage or forgetfulness, its proximity to the condition
of potential speech. Accents are shifted from one to another syllable,
and we should be deaf to the melody if we were unable to replace them.
New meanings gather round the words, and they come back from later
travels disguised in strange perfumes. The kinetic speech may be
disturbed, but the potential has disappeared in a jargon of new sounds,
a quarrel of new memories, and a chaos of new odours. Sometimes indeed,
it is as if it had never existed.

In this light it is easy to understand the curious business of
criticism, and to formulate an account of what occurs when poetry dies,
or falls asleep like the princess in the wood, to be awakened after
two centuries by a critic’s kiss. The Elizabethan dramatists lost
their potential and were judged only by their kinetic speech during
the eighteenth century. They were considered coarse and bloody-minded,
because there is rapine and murder in their plays. Lamb restored to
them the potentiality they had lost and turned bleak rock to flowering
country. Spenser had become a mere monger of allegory, until Hazlitt
and Leigh Hunt reconstituted him poet by discovering for themselves
and others the attitude that restores to his kinetic its lost
potential speech. Writers of Wordsworth’s generation realised, at least
subconsciously, that a poem is not independent of knowledge. They tried
to help us by printing at the head of a poem information about the
circumstances of its conception. When a poet tells us that a sonnet was
composed “on Westminster Bridge” or “suggested by Mr. Westell’s views
of the caves, &c. in Yorkshire,” he is trying to ease for us the task
of aesthetic reproduction to which his poem is a stimulus. He is trying
to ensure that we shall approach it as he did, and hear as well as the
kinetic the potential speech that he values. There is a crudity about
such obvious assistance, and it would be quite insufficient without
the wider knowledge on which we draw unconsciously as we read. But the
crudity of those pitiable scraps of proffered information is not so
remarkable as the dulness of perception that can allow a man to demand
of a poem that it shall itself compel him accurately to enjoy it. It
is possible that much of the old poetry that now seems to us no more
than direct speech was once wrapped in a veil of suggestion. It is the
critic’s business to rediscover those forgotten veils and to restore to
the kinetic the magic of potential speech.

The formula of kinetic and potential speech illumines not only the
critic’s business but also that of the historian. It enables him to
link together in a single scheme the prose of Goldsmith with that of
Pater and the poetry of the eighteenth century with poetry, like that
of the Symbolists of the nineteenth, so different as to seem completely
unrelated. It enables him to explain a phenomenon that he has usually
alluded to as a mere curious accident, the fact that there have been
ages when poetry has been popular and others in which it has been the
possession of a few. It will, I think, be found that this periodicity
coincides with a general variation between kinetic and potential
speech. In the eighteenth century, when poetry was often rhymed prose,
when the common standard of poetry was good sense, when she gave advice
and said things, and did not seem to realise that there were things
she could not say, when, in short, the kinetic almost overwhelmed the
potential, then poetry was a popular form of literature. In other
ages, when poetry has approached the condition of potential speech
and so has needed for its appreciation such knowledge as that lately
discussed, it has not swelled the publisher’s purse so swiftly as forms
of literature that happened to be more nearly kinetic and so more
easily enjoyed.

The eighteenth century poets and the Symbolists alike come under our
definition and can be classed by the formula that depends upon it.
I have suggested that the eighteenth century poets cared mostly for
kinetic speech, and, indeed, carried their appreciation of it so high
as sometimes to forget that poetry could do anything but speak wisely
and well. Few schools have suffered a greater variety of imperfect
and bungling definitions than that of Symbolism. The Symbolist aims
have been described as “an escape from the thought of death,” and
“intimacy with spiritual things.” Nowhere has there been a definition
that has shown their relation to the aims of poetry in general. But,
when Mallarmé says: “Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts
de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à
peu; le suggérer, voilà le rêve,” he is saying, in other words, that
poetry depends on potential speech. The Symbolists sought to write
poetry that should be purely potential, and in the revision of certain
of his poems Mallarmé tried to eliminate bit by bit the whole structure
of kinetic speech that had been in them. The eighteenth century aims
carried to their extreme would have meant bad prose; the Symbolist
aims carried to their extreme would have meant (as they sometimes did)
unintelligibility. Poetry is made by a combination of kinetic with
potential speech. Eliminate either and the result is no longer poetry.

I do not propose the words kinetic and potential as terms of abuse or
praise, though in different ages there have been artists who would have
used them so. The eighteenth century poets would have used kinetic
as a term of praise; the Symbolists would have used it as a term
of abuse. The fact that different schools would have set different
values on the words is itself a proof that they may be serviceable
to historians and critics. Literature does indeed vary between these
extremes, its kinetic quality preserving it from nonsense, its
potential quality separating it from bad prose. Some sort of relevancy
would be discoverable in any history that set itself to trace these
variations. Some sort of relevancy is obvious in all criticism that
attempts (as all good criticism does) the enhancement of the potential
and the clarification of the kinetic element in such literature as
happens to be its subject. In any case, an adoption of the definition
of literature that this essay upholds would make ridiculous the
classification of books by their subjects and of writers by their
opinions, on which so many intellects have wasted time and vitality
worthy of a more profitable employment.

  1911.


  Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
  Edinburgh & London




FOOTNOTES


[1] After passing this note for press, I learn that this essay has been
reprinted at Tokyo in a new edition of Mr. Noguchi’s _The Pilgrimage_.

[2] For the reputation of Breughel d’Enfer is based on his imitations
of his father, Breughel le Vieux, to whom is attributed the _Temptation
of St. Anthony_ at Genoa.

[3] A piece of money coined by Charles VIII.

[4] Figures that strike the hour on the clock-tower at Dijon.

[5] The quotations in this essay are taken from Dr. Oscar Levy’s
admirable English edition of Nietzsche, translated by Drs. W. A.
Haussmann and M. A. Mügge, Messrs. Paul V. Cohn, Thomas Common, J.
M. Kennedy, A. M. Ludovici and H. B. Samuel, and Miss Helen Zimmern:
eighteen volumes published by Mr. T. N. Foulis.

[6] Clarendon Press. 1910.

[7] Oscar Wilde.

[8] These references are to the page-numbers in Messrs. Macmillan’s
library edition.

[9] His inability to tell a story was perhaps the reason of, or,
at least supplies a commentary upon, his readiness to admire the
narratives of M. Filon, Octave Feuillet, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and to
admire them, quite ingenuously, for the story’s sake, like the ordinary
reader of novels.

[10] _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, 1899.

[11] An English translation was published in 1912 by Messrs. Stephen
Swift.

[12] When I wrote this article I was still hypnotised, like the
symbolists themselves, with the idea that symbolism was a method. My
later article on kinetic and potential speech contains what I believe
to be a more accurate account of the significance of what is called
the “symbolist movement.” It did not turn a practice into a theory,
but merely emphasized one of the two inseparable functions of words
when combined in poetic speech, and emphasized it at the expense of the
other.

Japanese poets have always insisted on the potential element in poetic
speech. Its intensity has always been for them the test of a poem.
Noguchi, except in that he is a Japanese poet who happens to write in
English, is not an innovator but the heir to a long Japanese tradition.




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Inconsistent use of accent marks has not been remedied.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Page 167: A superscript is represented as ^{me}.



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