Part 2

Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take _King Lear_ and take _Père Goriot._ Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose.

So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic."

[Illustration: dessin de C.B.]

II

Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style? To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says, "expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which--apart from that--is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter, the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat--all, without exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the point where faultless technique leaves off.

Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty," and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance, Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius, but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than _The Pit and the Pendulum_ and _The Cask of Amontillado_ of Poe; they are more than analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' _Contes Cruels,_ such as his _Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne_ and _Les amants de Tolède._ And--what is more astonishing in his prose than in any of the writers I have mentioned--is his satire; a satire which is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais and of Swift.

Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical, ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a mystification, and a fantastic genius--such as that of Baudelaire and of Poe--can never resist it when opportunity offers.

Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, _épris des hauteurs,_ as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a reprobate--and so cast out of God's sight.

"For, till the thunder in the trumpet be, Soul may divide from body, but not we One from another; I hold thee with my hand, I let mine eyes have all their will of thee, I seal myself upon thee with my might, Abiding alway out of all men's sight Until God loosen over sea and land The thunder of the trumpets of the night."

I am certain Baudelaire must have read the poems of John Keats; for there are certain characteristics in the versification, and in the using of images of both poets. Keats had something feminine and twisted in his mind, made up out of unhealthy nerves--which are utterly lacking in Baudelaire--but which it is now the fashion to call decadent; Keats being more than a decadent, but certainly decadent in such a line as--

"One faint eternal eventide of gems,"

which might have been written, in jewelled French, by Mallarmé. I give one of his sonnets, a perverse and perverted one, made by a fine technical feat out of two recurrent rhymes:

"Ses purs ongles très-haut dédiant leur onyx, L'angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadaphore, Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore

Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore, (Car le maître est allé puiser des fleurs au Styx Avec ce seul objet dont le néant s'honore.)

Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or Agonise selon peut-être le décor Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,

Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor Que, dans l'oubli formé par le cadre, se fixe De scintillations sitôt le septuor."

Keats luxuriates; like Baudelaire, in the details of physical discomfort, in all their grotesque horror, as when, in sleeplessness--how often these two overstrung and over-nervous poets must have had sleepless nights!--

"We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft, And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil."

He is neo-Latin, again like Baudelaire, in his insistence on the physical sensations of his lovers, the bodily translations of emotion. In Venus, leaning over Adonis, he notes:

"When her lips and eyes Were closed in sullen moisture, and quick sighs Came vexed and panting through her nostrils small."

And, in another line, he writes:

"By the moist languor of thy breathing face."

Lycius, in _Lamia:_

"Sick to lose The amorous promise of her lone complain, Swooned murmuring of love, and pale with pain;"

and all that trembling and swooning of his lovers, which English critics have found unmanly, would at all events be very much at home in modern French poetry, where love is again, as it was to Catullus and Propertius, a sickness, an entrancing madness, a poisoning. To find anything like it, like this utter subtlety of expression, we must go back to the Elizabethan Age, and then look forward, and find, beyond Keats, traces of it in Rossetti and in Morris's _The Defence of Guinevere;_ as, for instance, in some of the Queen's lines:

"Listen, suppose your turn were come to die, And you were quite alone and very weak; Yea, laid a dying while very mightily

The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak Of river through your broad lands running well; Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be, I shall not tell you, you must somehow tell

Of your own strengths and mightiness; here, see!' Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, At foot of your familiar bed to see

A great God's angel standing, with such dyes, Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands, Hold out two ways, light from the inner skies

Showing him well, and making his commands Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too, Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue, Wavy and long, and one cut short and red: No man could tell the better of the two.

After a shivering half-hour you said: 'God help! Heaven's colour, the blue'; and he said, 'Hell!' Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

And cry to all good men that loved you well, 'Ah, Christ! If only I had known, known, known;' Launcelot went away, then I could tell,

Like wisest men, how all things would be, moan, And roll and hurt myself, and long to die, And yet fear much to die for what was sown.

Nevertheless you, O Sir Gawaine, lie, Whatever may have happened through these years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie."

All these rough, harsh _terza-rime_ lines are wonderful enough in their nakedness of sensations--sensations of heat, of hell, of heaven, of colours, of death, of life, of moans, and of lies. It is, in a sense, as far as such experiments go, a return to the Middle Ages; to what was exotic in them and strange and narcotic. Only here, as in _Les Litanies de Satan_ of Baudelaire--to which they have some remote likeness--there are no interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, on these hot, impassioned scenes.

Rossetti says somewhere that no modern poet, and that few poets of any century, ever compressed into so small a space so much imaginative material as he himself always did; and this, I conceive, partly, also, from that almost child-like imagination of his, for all its intellectual subtlety, that dominated him to such an extent that to tell him anything of a specially tragic or pathetic nature was cruel, so vividly did he realize every situation; and also because of his wonderful saying in regard to his own way of weaving an abominable line at the end of one of his finest sonnets into a sublime one:

"Life touching lips with Immortality:"

that the line he had used before belonged to the class of phrase absolutely forbidden in poetry. "It is intellectually incestuous poetry seeking to beget its emotional offspring on its own identity; whereas the present line gives only the momentary contact with the immortal which results from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-conscious element of it."

Now, to me, both Keats before him and Baudelaire in his own generation, had the same excessive sense of, concentration. "To load every rift with ore:" that, to Keats, was the essential thing; and it meant to pack the verse with poetry so that every line should be heavy with the stuff of the imagination: the phrase I have given being a rebuke to Shelley, significant of the art of both poets. Fox as Keats, almost in the same degree as Baudelaire, worked on every inch of his surface, so perhaps no poets ever put so much poetic detail into so small a space, with, as I have said, the exception of Rossetti. And, as a matter of fact, when we examine the question with scrupulous care, it must be said that both Baudelaire and Keats are often metrically slipshod.

One of Wagner's ideas, in regard to the artistic faculty was, receptivity; the impulse to impart only what comes when these impressions fill the mind "to an ecstatic excess;" and the two forms of the artist: the feminine, who recoils from life, and the masculine, who absorbs life. From this follows, in the case of creative artists such as Baudelaire, the necessity to convey to others as vividly and intelligibly, as far as possible, what his own mind's eye had seen. Then one has to seize everything from which one can wring its secret--its secret for us and for no one else. And all this, and in fact the whole of our existence, is partly the conflict within us of the man with the woman, the male and the female energies that strive always:

"Here nature is, alive and untamed, Unafraid and unashamed; Here man knows woman with the greed Of Adam's wonder, the primal need."

And, in these fundamental lines of Blake:

"What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of gratified Desire. What is it women do in men require? The lineaments of gratified Desire."

And, again, in these more primeval and more essentially animal lines of Rossetti:

"O my love, O Love--snake of Eden! (_And O the bower and the hour!_) O to-day and the day to come after! Loose me, love--give way to my laughter!

Lo! two babes for Eve and for Adam! (_And O the bower and the hour!_) Lo, sweet snake, the travail and treasure-- Two men-children born for their pleasure!

The first is Cain and the second Abel: (_Eden bower's in flower_) The soul of one shall be made thy brother, And thy tongue shall lap the blood of the other. (_And O the bower and the hour!_)."

Baudelaire, in _De l'essence de rire,_ wrote: "The Romantic School, or, one might say in preference, the Satanical School, has certainly understood the primordial law of laughter. All the melodramatic villains, all those who are cursed, damned, fatally marked with a rictus of the lips that extends to the ears, are in the pure orthodoxy of laughter. For the rest, they are for the most part illegitimate sons of the famous Melmoth the Wanderer, the great Satanic creation of Maturin. What can one conceive of as greater, as more powerful, in regard to our humanity than this pale and bored Melmoth? He is a living contradiction; that is why his frozen laughter freezes and wrenches the entrails."

Distinctly the most remarkable of the British triumvirate which in the early part of the century won a momentary fame as the school of horror, Maturin is much less known to the readers of to-day than either Monk Lewis or Mrs. Radcliffe. Thanks to Balzac, who did _Melmoth_ the honour of a loan in _Melmoth réconcilié,_ Maturin has attained a certain fame in France--which, indeed, he still retains. _Melmoth_ has to-day in France something of that reputation which has kept alive another English book, _Vathek._ Did not Balzac, in a moment of indiscriminating enthusiasm, couple the _Melmoth_ of Maturin with the _Don Juan_ of Molière, the _Faust_ of Goethe, the _Manfred_ of Byron--_grandes images tracées par les plus grands génies de l'Europe?_ In other words, Maturin had his day of fame, in which even men like Scott and Byron were led into a sympathetic exaggeration. There's one exception. That Coleridge was hostile, possibly unjust, is likely enough. It should be mentioned that in 1816 the Drury Lane Committee, who had, reasonably enough, rejected a play by Coleridge, accepted a monstrous production of Maturin's named _Bertram._ The _gros bon mélodrame,_ as Balzac calls it, was a great success. "It is all sound and fury, signifying nothing," said Kean, who acted in it; and Kean, who knew his public, realized that that was why it succeeded. The play was printed, and ran through seven editions, sinking finally to the condition of a chap-book, in which its horrors were to be had for sixpence. On this pretentious work Coleridge--for what reasons we need not inquire--took the trouble to write an article, or, as it was phrased, to make an attack. To this Maturin wrote a violent reply, which the good advice of Scott prevented him from publishing. It is curious at the present day to read the letter in which Scott urges upon Maturin the wisdom of silence--not because he is likely to get the worst of the battle, but, among other reasons, because "Coleridge's work has been little read or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever--certainly no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion of many, therefore, you will be resenting an injury of which they are unacquainted with the existence."

The episode is both comic and instructive. Coleridge and Maturin! Scott urging on Maturin the charity of mercy to Coleridge, as--"Coleridge has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, to continue to be a favourite with the public!" Poor Maturin, far from continuing to be a favourite with the public, outlived his reputation in the course of a somewhat short life. He died at the age of forty-three. Like the hero of Baudelaire's whimsical and delicious little tale _La Fanfarlo,_ he preferred artifice to nature, especially when it was unnecessary. Such is the significant gossip which we have about the personality of Maturin--gossip which brings out clearly the deliberate eccentricity which marks his work, which one sees also in the foppish affected and lackadaisical creature who looks at the reader as if he were admiring himself before his mirror.

The word "genius," indeed, is too lofty an epithet to use regarding a man of great talent certainly, but of nothing more than erratic and melodramatic talent. _Melmoth the Wanderer_ is in parts very thrilling; its Elizabethan feast of horrors has a savour as of a lesser Tourneur. But it is interesting only in parts, and at its best it never comes near the effect which the great masters of the grotesque and terrible--Hoffmann, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam--have known how to produce. A freak of construction, which no artist could have been guilty of, sends us wandering from story to story in a very maze of underplots and episodes and interpolations. Six separate stories are told--all in parenthesis--and the greater part of the book is contained .within inverted commas. What is fine in it is the vivid, feverish way in which, from time to time, some story of horror or mystery is forced home to one's sensations. It is the art of the nightmare, and it has none of the supremacy in that line of the _Contes Drolatiques_ of Balzac. But certain scenes in the monastery and in the prisons of the Inquisition--an attempted escape, a scene where an immured wretch fights the reptiles in the darkness--are full of a certain kind of power. That escape, for instance, with its consequences, is decidedly gruesome, decidedly exciting; but compare it with Dumas, with the escape of Monte Cristo; compare it with the yet finer narrative of Casanova--the unsurpassed model of all such narratives in fiction. Where Casanova and Dumas produce their effect by a simple statement--a record of external events from which one realizes, as one could realize in no other way, all the emotions and sensations of the persons who were undergoing such experiences--Maturin seeks his effect, and produces it, but in a much lesser degree, by a sort of excited psychology, an exclamatory insistence on sensation and emotion. _Melmoth the Wanderer_ is only the object of our historical curiosity. We have, indeed, and shall always have, "lovers of dark romance."

III

I

Baudelaire's genius is satanical; he has in a sense the vision of Satan. He sees in the past the lusts of the Borgias the sins and vices of the Renaissance; the rare virtues that flourish like flowers and weeds, in brothels and in garrets. He sees the vanity of the world with finer modern tastes than Solomon; for his imagination is abnormal, and divinely normal. In this age of infamous shames he has no shame. His flesh endures, his intellect is flawless. He chooses his own pleasures delicately, sensitively, as he gathers his exotic _Fleurs du Mal,_ in itself a world, neither a _Divina Commedia_ nor _Une Comédie Humaine,_ but a world of his own fashioning.

His vividly imaginative passion, with his instincts of inspiration, are aided by a determined will, a selfreserve, an intensity of conception, an implacable insolence, an accurate sense of the exact value of every word. In the Biblical sense he might have said of his own verse: "It is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh." The work, as the man, is subtle, strange, complex, morbid, enigmatical, refined, paradoxical, spiritual, animal. To him a scent means more than a sunset, a perfume more than a flower, the tempting demons more than the unseductive angels. He loves luxury as he loves wine; a picture of Manet's as a woman's fan.

[Illustration: BAUDELAIRE, DESIGNED BY HIMSELF, 1848]

Fascinated by sin, he is never the dupe of his emotions; he sees sin as the Original Sin; he studies sin as he studies evil, with a stem logic; he finds in horror a kind of attractiveness, as Poe had found it; rarely in hideous things, save when his sense of what I call a moralist makes him moralize, as in his terrible poem, _Une Charogne._ He has pity for misery, hate for progress. He is analytic, he is a learned casuist, whom I can compare with the formidable Spanish Jesuit, Thomas Sanchez, who wrote the Latin _Aphorismi Matrimonio_ (1629).

His soul swims on music played on no human instrument, but on strings that the Devil pulls, to which certain living puppets dance in grotesque fashion, to unheard-of rhythms, to the sound of violins strummed on by evil spirits in Witches' Sabbats. Some swing in the air, as hanged dead people on gallows, and, as their bones rattle in the wind, one sees Judas Iscariot, risen out of Hell for an instant's gratification, as he grimaces on these grimacing visages.

_Les fleurs du mal_ is the most curious, subtle, fascinating, and extraordinary creation of an entire world ever fashioned in modern ages. Baudelaire paints vice and degradation of the utmost depth, with cynicism and with pity, as in the poem I have referred to, where the cult of the corpse is the sensuality of ascetism, or the ascetism of sensuality: the mania of fakirs; material by passion, Christian by perversity.

And, in a sense, he is our modern Catullus; in his furies, his negations, his outcries, his Paganism, his inconceivable passion for woman's flesh; yet Lesbia is for ever Lesbia. Still, Baudelaire in his _Franciscae meae_ _Laudes,_ and with less sting but with as much sensual sense of the splendour of sex, gives a magnificent Latin eulogy of a learned and pious modiste, that ends:

"Patera gemmis corusca, Panis salsus, mollis esca, Divinum vinum, Francisca."

And he praises the Decadent Latin language in these words: "Dans cette merveilleuse langue, le solécisme et le barbarisme me paraissent rendre les négligences forcés d'une passion qui s'oublie et se moque des règles."