Dramatis Personæ

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

BY

ARTHUR SYMONS

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOOBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Although it would be presumptuous to introduce the work of Arthur Symons, a word or two about this particular collection may not be out of place. A number of these essays have appeared in representative American and English periodicals, but their preservation here needs no apology as they have already earned a meritorious place in the bibliography of English criticism. The publisher believes, also, that the critical reader must realize the futility of any attempt to correct discrepancies due to the death of contemporaries, or augmentations to their work, lest the essays as originally conceived by the author suffer in spirit.

CONTENTS

[CONRAD]
[MAURICE MAETERLINCK]
[EMILY BRONTË]
[ON ENGLISH AND FRENCH FICTION]
[ON CRITICISM]
[THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE]
[THE ROSSETTIS]
[CONFESSIONS AND COMMENTS]
[FRANCIS THOMPSON]
[COVENTRY PATMORE]
[SIR WILLIAM WATSON]
[EMIL VERHAEREN]
[A NEGLECTED GENIUS: SIR RICHARD BURTON]
[EDGAR SALTUS]
[RECOLLECTIONS OF RÉJANE]
[THE RUSSIAN BALLETS]
[ON HAMLET AND HAMLETS]
[LEONARDO DA VINCI]
[IMPRESSIONISTIC WRITING]
[PARADOXES ON POETS]

DRAMATIS PERS0NÆ

[CONRAD]

"The Earth is a Temple where there is going on a Mystery Play, childish and poignant, ridiculous and awful enough in all conscience."

I

Conrad's inexplicable mind has created for itself a secret world to live in, some corner stealthily hidden away from view, among impenetrable forests, on the banks of untraveled rivers. From that corner, like a spider in his web, he throws out tentacles into the darkness; he gathers in his spoils, he collects them like a miser, stripping from them their dreams and visions to decorate his web magnificently. He chooses among them, and sends out into the world shadowy messengers, for the troubling of the peace of man, self-satisfied in his ignorance of the invisible. At the center of his web sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with a calm and cynical ferocity; "that particular field whose mission is to jog the memories of men, lest they should forget the meaning of life." Behind that sarcasm crouches some ghastly influence, outside humanity, some powerful devil, invisible, poisonous, irresistible, spawning evil for his delight. They guard this secret corner of the world with mists and delusions, so that very few of those to whom the shadowy messengers have revealed themselves can come nearer than the outer edge of it.

Beyond and below this obscure realm, beyond and below human nature itself, Conrad is seen through the veil of the persons of his drama, living a hidden, exasperated life. And it is by his sympathy with these unpermitted things, the "aggravated witch-dance" in his brain, that Conrad is severed from all material associations, as if stupendously uncivilized, consumed by a continual protest, an insatiable thirst, unsatisfied to be condemned to the mere exercise of a prodigious genius.

Conrad's depth of wisdom must trouble and terrify those who read him for entertainment. There are few secrets in the mind of men or in the pitiless heart of nature that he has not captured and made his plaything. He calls up all the dreams and illusions by which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly naked. He is the master of dreams, the interpreter of illusions, the chronicler of memory. He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of every vice or crime. He calls up before him all the injustices that have come to birth out of ignorance and self-love. He shows how failure is success, and success failure, and that the sinner can be saved. His meanest creatures have in them a touch of honor, of honesty, or of heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness, a mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem. And in all this there is no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outside nature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civilization, are equal and indifferent.

Reality, to Conrad, is non-existent; he sees through it into a realm of illusion of the unknown: a world that is comforting and bewildering, filled with ghosts and devils, a world of holy terror. Always is there some suggestion of a dark region, within and around one; the consciousness that "They made a whole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwells within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body."

"This awful activity of mind" is seen at work on every page, torturing familiar words into strange meanings, clutching at cobwebs, in a continual despair before the unknown. Something must be found, in the most unlikely quarter; a word, a hint, something unsaid but guessed at in a gesture, a change of face. "He turned upon me his eyes suddenly amazed and full of pain, with a bewildered, startled face, as though he had tumbled down from a star." There is a mental crisis in that look: the unknown has suddenly opened.

Memory, that inner voice, stealthy, an inveterate follower; memory, Conrad has found out, is the great secret, the ecstasy and despair which weave the texture of life. A motto from Amiel in one of his books faintly suggests it: "Qui de nous n'a eu sa terre promise, son jour d'extase et sa fin en exil?" And the book, Almayer's Folly, his first, a rare and significant book, is just that. An Outcast of the Islands has the despairing motto from Calderon, that better is it for a man had he never been born. Lord Jim is the soul's tragedy, ending after a long dim suffusion in clouds, in a great sunset, sudden and final glory. No man lives wholly in his day; every hour of these suspensive and foreboding days and nights is a part of the past or of the future. Even in a splendid moment, a crisis, like the love scene of Nina and Dain in the woods, there is no forgetfulness. "In the sublime vanity of her kind she was thinking already of moulding a god out of the clay at her feet. ... He spoke of his forefathers." Lord Jim, as he dies, remembers why he is letting himself be killed, and in that remembrance tastes heaven. How is it that no one except Conrad has got to this hidden depth, where the soul really lives and dies, where, in an almost perpetual concealment, it works out its plan, its own fate? Tolstoy, Hawthorne, know something of it; but the one turns aside into moral tracts, and the other to shadows and things spiritual. Conrad gives us the soul's own dream of itself, as if a novelist of adventure had turned Neo-Platonist.

A woman once spoke to me in a phrase I have never forgotten, of Conrad's sullen subjective vision. Sullen is a fine word for the aspect under which he sees land and sea; sullen clouds, a sullen sea. And some of that quality has come to form part of his mind, which is protesting, supremely conscious. He is never indifferent to his people, rarely kind. He sees them for the most part as they reveal themselves in suffering. Now and then he gives them the full price, the glory, but rarely in this life, or for more than a moment. How can those who live in suspense, between memory and foreboding, ever be happy, except for some little permitted while? The world for those who live in it, is a damp forest, where savagery and civilization meet, and in vain try to mingle. Only the sea, when they are out of sight of land, sometimes gives them freedom.

It is strange but true that Conrad's men are more subtly comprehended and more magnificent than his women. There are few men who are seen full length, and many of them are nameless shadows. Aissa and Nina in the earliest books have the fierce charm of the unknown. In Lord Jim there is only one glimpse of the painful mystery of a woman's ignorant heart. In Nostromo the women are secondary, hardly alive; there is no woman in The Nigger of the Narcissus, nor in Typhoon, nor in Youth. There are some women, slightly seen, in Tales of Unrest, and only one of them, the woman of The Return, is actually characterized.

Is there not something of an achievement in this stern rejection of the obvious love-story, the material of almost every novel? Not in a single tale, even when a man dies of regret for a woman, is the woman prominent in the action. Almayer, and not Nina, is the center of the book named after him. And yet Nina is strange, mysterious, enchanting, as no other woman is to be. Afterward they are thrust back out of the story; they come and go like spinners of Destiny, unconscious, ignorant, turning idle wheels, like the two women knitting black wool in the waiting room of the Trading Company's office, "guarding the door of Darkness."

Now, can we conjecture why a woman has never been the center of any of these stories? Conrad chooses his tools and his materials; he realizes that men are the best materials for his tools. It is only men who can be represented heroically upon the stage of life; who can be seen adventuring doggedly, irresistibly, by sheer will and purpose; it is only given to men to attain a visible glory of achievement. He sees woman as a parasite or an idol, one of the illusions of men. He asks wonderingly how the world can look at them. He shows men fearing them, hating them, captivated, helpless, cruel, conquering. He rarely indicates a great passion between man and woman; his men are passionate after fame, power, success; they embrace the sea in a love-wrestle; they wander down unsounded rivers and succumb to "the spell of the wilderness;" they are gigantic in failure and triumph; they are the children of the mightiness of the earth; but their love is the love of the impossible. What room is there, in this unlimited world, for women? "Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lets ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it."

There is Karain, "clothed in the vision of unavoidable success," flying before a shadow, comforting himself with the certainty of a charm. There is Kurtz, who returns to barbarism, and Tuan Jim with his sacrifice of life to honor, and even the dying nigger steersman who, shot through by a spear, looks once on his master, "and the intimate profundity of that look which he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment." It is with this agonizing clearness, this pitiless mercy, that Conrad shows us human beings. He loves them for their discontent, for their revolt against reality, for their failure, their atonement, their triumphs. And he loves them best because their love is the love of the impossible; he loves them because they are part of the unknown.

And so, it is Lord Jim in which his genius has attained its zenith with Karain and Heart of Darkness close after it. Consider the marvelous art, the suspense, the evasion of definite statement, the overpowering profundity of it. To begin with, there is the trick, one of Conrad's inextricable tricks of art, by which suspense is scarcely concerned with action, but with a gradually revealed knowledge of what might have happened in the making of a man. Take an instance in Nostromo. There is Doctor Monyngham who comes in at the beginning of the book comes and goes briefly up to the three hundredth page; and then suddenly, à propos of nothing, the whole history of his troubles, the whole explanation of what has seemed mysterious to him, is given in four pages; whereupon the last sentence, four pages back, is caught up and continued with the words: "That is why he hobbled in distress in the Casa Gould on that morning." Now why is there this kind of hesitation? Why is a disguise kept up so long and thrown off for no apparent reason? It is merely one of his secrets, which is entirely his own; but another of them he has learned from Balzac: the method of doubling or trebling the interest by setting action within action, as a picture is set within a frame. In Youth the man who is telling the story to more or less indifferent hearers, times his narrative with a kind of refrain. ... "Pass the bottle," he says whenever a pause seems to be necessary; and, as the tale is ending, the final harmony is struck by an unexpected and satisfying chord: "He drank.... He drank again."

To find a greater novel than Lord Jim, we might have to go back to Don Quixote. Like that immortal masterpiece, it is more than a novel; it is life itself, and it is a criticism of life. Like Don Quixote, Lord Jim, in his followings of a dream, encounters many rough handlings. He has the same egoism, isolation, and conviction; the same interrupting world about him, the same contempt of reality, the same unconsciousness of the nature of windmills. In Marlow, he has quite a modern Sancho Panza, disillusioned, but following his master. Certainly this narrator of Jim's failures and successes represents them under the obscure guidance of "a strange and melancholy illusion, evolved half-unconsciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be visions of remote unattainable truth, seen dimly." He is a soul "drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in himself." That illusion is suddenly put to the test; he fails, he goes into the cloud, emerges out of it, is struck gloriously dead.

In Lord Jim Conrad has revealed, more finally than elsewhere, his ideal: the ideal of an applauded heroism, the necessity of adding to one's own conviction the world's acceptance and acclamation. In this stupendous work, what secret of humanity is left untold? Only told, is too definite a word. Here is Conrad's creed, his statement of things as they are:

It is when we try to grapple with another man's need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," says some one in the book, one of the many types and illustrations of men who have fallen into a dream, all with some original sin to proclaim or conceal or justify, men of honor, tottering phantoms clinging to a foul existence, one crowding on another, disappearing, unrealized. All have their place, literally or symbolically, in the slow working-out of the salvation of Tuan Jim. Amazing they may be, but Jim "approaching greatness as genuine as any man ever achieved," with the shame of his "jump" from a sinking ship and his last fearless jump "into the unknown," his last "extraordinary success," when, in one proud and unflinching glance, he beholds "the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side": amazing he may be, but a masterpiece, proved, authentic, justifying Man.

Next after this triumph, Karain is the greatest. It is mysterious, a thing that haunts one by its extreme fascination; and in this, as in all Conrad, there is the trial of life: first the trial, then the failure, finally (but not quite always) the redemption. "As to Karain, nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all—failure and death; but his quality was to appear clothed in the illusion of unavoidable success." And on what a gorgeous and barbaric and changing stage is this obscure tragedy of the soul enacted! There is in it grave splendor. In Conrad's imagination three villages on a narrow plain become a great empire and their ruler a monarch.

To read Conrad is to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness. Karain is full of mystery, Heart of Darkness of an unholy magic. "The fascination of the abomination—you know," the teller of the story says for him, and "droll thing life is." The whole narrative is an evocation of that "stillness of an implacable brooding over an incalculable intention," and of the monstrous Kurtz who has been bewitched by the "heavy mute spell of the wilderness that seems to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions; and this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspiration." And it all ends with the cry: "The horror! The horror!" called out in his last despair by a dying man. Gloomy, tremendous, this has a deeper, because more inexplicable, agony than the tragedy of Karain. Here, the darkness is unbroken; there is no remedy; body and soul are drawn slowly and inevitably down under the yielding and pestilent swamp. The failure seems irretrievable. We see nature casting out one who had gone beyond nature. We see "the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of a soul" that, in its last moment of earthly existence, had peeped over the edge of the gulf, with a stare "that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe."

With Nostromo we get a new manner and new scenery. The scene is laid in Colombia, the Nuevo Granada of the Spaniards, and the silver mine is its center, and around that fatal treasure-house the whole action moves. The Spanish streets, glittering with heat, with their cool patios, peopled by the Indians, the "whites," a cross between Spanish and native, the Italians, the English, the Indian girls with long dark hair, the Mozenitas with golden combs, are seen under strong sunlight with a vivid actuality more accentuated than in any other of Conrad's scenes. A sinister masquerade is going on in the streets, very unreal and very real. There is the lingering death of Decoud on a deserted island ("he died from solitude, the enemy known to few on this earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand"); the horrible agonies of Hirsch; the vile survival of Doctor Monyngham. It is by profound and futile seriousness that these persons and events take on an air of irony, and are so comic as they endure the pains of tragedy.

This strange novel is oddly constructed. It is a narrative in which episode follows episode with little apparent connection. The first half is a lengthy explanation of what the second part is to put into action. It drags and seems endless, and might be defined by a sentence out of the book, where some one "recognized a wearisome impressiveness in the pompous manner of his narrative." Suddenly, with Nostromo's first actualized adventure the story begins, the interest awakens, and it is only now that Nostromo himself becomes actual. He has been suggested by hints, indicated in faint outline. We have been told of his power and influence, we see the admiration which surrounds him, but the man walks veiled. His vanity, evident at the first, becomes colossal: "The man remained astonishingly simple in the jealous greatness of his conceit." Then, as he awakens one morning under the sky, he rises "as natural and free from evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and unconscious wild beast." The figure greatens in his allegiance to the shining spectre of the treasure, which makes him afraid because "he belonged body and soul to the unlawfulness of his audacity." His death is accidental, but, in Conrad's merciful last words, he has, after his death, the "greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of his successes. In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Caegadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love."

II

Conrad's first fame was made by his sea-novels, and the sea is never quite out of any of his books. Who, before or since, could have evoked this picture of heat, stillness and solitude?

In Typhoon we are cast into the midst of a terrible outrage of the destructive force of nature:

something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind; it isolates one from one's kind. ... The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had an appalling helplessness; she pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. ... The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob! hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon. ... At last she rose slowly, staggering, as if she had to lift a mountain with her bows.

There have been many writers about the sea, but only Conrad has loved it with so profound and yet untrustful a love. His storms have sublimity, made out of intense attention to detail, often trivial or ludicrous, but heightened into tragedy by the shifting floor and changing background on which is represented the vast struggle of man with the powers of nature. And as he loves the earth only in its extravagances, so he loves the sea most in storm, where love and fear mingle. The tropics, the Malay Archipelago, and the sea in a continual tempest, the ship suffering through a typhoon, or burning itself out on the waters: these are his scenes, these he cherishes in his faithful and unquiet memory. How much is memory, how much is imagination, no one need know or care. They are one; he does not distinguish between them.

Once, in one of the pages of Lord Jim, Conrad has confessed himself with perfect frankness. He represents himself receiving a packet of letters which are to tell him the last news of Lord Jim. He goes to the window and draws the heavy curtains.

The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over. No more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the forests as solemn as temples, in the hot quest for the Ever-undiscovered Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour was striking! No more! No more!—but the opened packet under the lamp brought back the sounds, the visions, the very savor of the past—a multitude of fading faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away upon the shores of distant seas under a passionate and unconsoling sunshine. He sighed and sat down to read.

That is the confession of one who, of foreign race, is an alien, solitary among his memories.

III

Conrad's stories have no plots, and they do not need them. They are a series of studies in temperaments, deduced from slight incidents; studies in emotion, with hardly a rag to hold together the one or two scraps of action, out of which they are woven. A spider hanging by one leg to his web, or sitting motionless outside it: that is the image of some of these tales, which are made to terrify, bewilder and grip you. No plot ever made a thing so vital as Lord Jim, where there is no plot; merely episodes, explanations, two or three events only significant for the inner meaning by which they are darkened or illuminated. I would call this invention, creation; the evasion of what is needless in the plots of most novels. But Conrad has said, of course, the right thing, in a parenthesis: "It had that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection, which is the last word of the highest art."

Conrad conceals his astonishing invention under many disguises. What has seemed to some to be untidy in construction will be found to be a mere matter of subtlety, a skilful arresting of the attention, a diverting of it by a new interest thrust in sideways. Lord Jim is a model of intelligent disarray.

In the strict sense Conrad is not a novelist: he writes by instinct. And his art is unlike the art of every other novelist. For instance, Meredith or Stendhal make great things out of surface material; they give us life through its accidents, one brilliantly, the other with scrupulous care. Conrad uses detail as illustrations of his ideas, as veils of life, not as any essential part of it. The allusion to him is more real than the fact; and, when he deals with the low or trivial, with Mr. Verloc's dubious shop in the backstreet, it is always a symbol.

Conrad, writing in English, does not always think in English. For, in this man, who is pure Polish, there is a brooding mind, an exalted soul, a fearless intelligence, a merciful judgment. And he has voyaged through many seas of the soul, in which he finds that fascination, the fascination of fear, splendor, and uncertainty, which the water that surrounds the earth had to give him. And he has made for himself a style which is personal, unique, naked English, and which brings into English literature an audacious and profound English speech.

In his sarcasm Conrad is elemental. He is a fatalist, and might say with Sidi Ali Ismayem, in the Malay Annals: "It is necessary that what has been ordained should take place in all creatures." But in his fatalism there is a furious revolt against all those evils that must be accepted, those material and mental miseries that will never be removed. His hatred of rule, measure, progress, civilization is unbounded. He sits and laughs with an inhuman laughter, outside the crowd, in a chair of wisdom; and his mockery, persuaded of the incurable horrors of existence, can achieve monstrosity, both logical and ghastly.

In the "simple tale" of The Secret Agent, which is a story of horror, in our London of to-day, the central motive is the same as that of the other romances: memory as Nemesis. The man comes to his death because he can not get a visible fear out of his eyes; and the woman kills him because she can not get a more terrible, more actual thing, which she has not seen, but which has been thrust into her brain, out of her eyes. "That particular fiend" drives him into a cruel blunder and her into a madness, a murder, a suicide, which combine into one chain, link after link, inevitably.

The blood-thirstiness of Conrad's "simple story" of modern life, a horror as profound as that of Poe, and manipulated with the same careful and attentive skill, is no form of cruelty, but of cold observation. What is common enough among the half-civilized population of that Malay Peninsula, which forms so much of the material of the earlier novels, has to be transported, by a choice of subject and the search for what is horrible in it, when life comes to be studied in a modern city. The interest is still in the almost less civilized savagery of the Anarchists; and it is around the problem of blood-shedding that the whole story revolves. The same lust of slaughter, brought from Asia to Europe, seems cruder and less interesting as material. There the atmosphere veiled what the gaslight of the disreputable shop and its back-parlor do but make more visible. It is an experiment in realism which comes dangerously near to being sensational, only just avoids it.

The whole question depends upon whether the material horror surpasses that horror of the soul which is never absent from it; whether the dreadful picture of the woman's hand holding the carving-knife, seen reflected on the ceiling by the husband in the last conscious moment before death, is more evident to us than the man's sluggish acquiescence in his crime and the woman's slow intoxication by memory into a crime more direct and perhaps more excusable. It seems, while you are reading it, impossible that the intellect should overcome the pang given to the senses; and yet, on reflection, there is the same mind seen at work, more ruthlessly, more despairingly than ever, turning the soul inside out, in the outwardly "respectable" couple who commit murder, because they "refrained from going to the bottom of facts and motives." Conrad has made a horrible, forgivable, admirable work of art out of a bright tin can, a befouled shovel, and a stained carving knife. He has made of these three domestic objects the symbols of that destroying element, "red in tooth and claw," which turns the wheel on which the world is broken.

[MAURICE MAETERLINCK]

I

Often, mostly at night, a wheel of memory seems to turn in my head like a kaleidoscope, flashing out the pictures and the visions of my own that I keep there. The same wheel turned in my head when I was in Dieppe with Charles Conder, and it turned into these verses:

There's a tune burns, bums in my head,
And I hear it beat to the sound of my feet,
For that was the tune we used to walk to
In the days that are over and dead.
Another tune turns under and over.
And it turns in my brain as I think again
Of the days that are dead, and the ways she walks now,
To the self-same tune, with her lover.

I see, for instance, Mallarmé, with his exquisite manner of welcome, as he opens the door to me on the fourth floor of the Rue de Rome; I hear Jean Moréas thunder out some verses of his own to a waitress in a Bouillon Duval, whose name was Celimène, who pretended to understand them; Stuart Mérill at the Rue Ballier, Henri de Regnier silent under his eye-glass in one of the rooms of the Mercerie de France; Maurice Maeterlinck in all the hurry of a departure, between two portmanteaux. That was, I suppose, one of the most surprising meetings I ever had; for, as a matter of fact, one night in Fountain Court, it was in 1894—I was equally surprised when I opened his Alladine et Palamides which he had sent me with a dedication. After that time I saw him, during several years, fairly often in Paris and once in Rome, in 1903, when one performance was given of his Joyzelle—the most unsatisfactory performance I ever saw, and of certainly an unsatisfactory play. Nervous as he always was—he used, for one thing, to keep a loaded revolver always beside him in his bedroom—he shirked the occasion and went to Naples. I have never forgotten the afternoon when he read to me in his house in Paris whole pages of Monna Vanna. After I had left the house, I said to a certain lady who was with me: "Rhetoric, nothing but rhetoric! It may be obviously dramatic; but the worst of it is, all the magic and mystery of his earlier plays had vanished: there is logic rather than life."

It is very unfortunate for a man to be compared to Shakespeare even by his enemies, when he is only twenty-seven and has time before him. That is what has happened to Maurice Maeterlinck. Two years ago the poet of Serres Chaudes was known to only a small circle of amateurs of the new; he was known as a young Belgian of curious talent who had published a small volume of vague poems in monotone. On the appearance of La Princesse maleine, in the early part of 1890, Maeterlinck had an unexpected "greatness thrust upon him" by a flaming article of Octave Mirbeau, the author of that striking novel Sébastian Roch in the Figaro of August 24th. "Maurice Maeterlinck," said this uncompromising enthusiast,

"nous a donné l'oeuvre la plus géniale de ce temps, et la plus extraordinaire et la plus naive aussi, comparable—et oserai-je le dire?—supérieure en beauté à ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans Shakespeare.... plus tragique que 'Macbeth,' plus extraordinaire de pensée que 'Hamlet.'"

In short, there was no Shakespearean merit in which La Princesse Maleine was lacking, and it followed that the author of La Princesse Maleine was the Shakespeare of our age—the Belgian Shakespeare. The merits of Maeterlinck were widely discussed in France and Belgium, and it was not long before the five-act drama was followed by two pieces, each in one act, called L'Intruse and Les Aveugles. In May, 1891, L'Intruse was given by the Théâtre d'Art at the Vaudeville on the occasion of the benefit of Paul Verlaine and Paul Gauguin.

He is not entirely the initiator of this impressionistic drama; first in order of talent, he is second in order of time to another Belgian, Charles van Lerberghe, to whom Les Aveugles is dedicated. It was Van Lerberghe (in Les Flaireurs, for example) who discovered the effect which might be obtained on the stage by certain appeals to the sense of hearing and of sight, newly directed and with new intentions. But what is crude and even distracting in Les Flaireurs becomes an exquisite subtlety in L'Intruse. In La Princesse Maleine, in L'Intruse, in Les Aveugles, in Les Sept Princesses, Maeterlinck has but one note, that of fear—the "vague spiritual fear" of imaginative childhood, of excited nerves, of morbid apprehension. In La Princesse Maleine there is a certain amount of action—action which is certainly meant to reinvest the terrors of Macbeth and of Lear. In L'Intruse and Les Aveugles the scene is stationary, the action but reflected upon the stage, as if from some other plane. In Les Sept Princesses the action, such as it is, is "such stuff as dreams are made of," and is literally, in great part, seen through a window. From first to last it is not the play, but the atmosphere of the play, that is "the thing." In the creation of this atmosphere Maeterlinck shows his particular skill; it is here that he communicates to us the nouveau frisson, here that he does what no one has done before.

La Princesse Maleine, it is said, was written for a theater of marionettes, and it is, certainly, with the effect of marionettes that these sudden, exclamatory people come and go. Maleine, Hjalmar, Uglyane—these are no characters, these are no realizable persons; they are a mask of shadows, a dance of silhouettes behind the white sheet of the "Chat Noir," and they have the fantastic charm of these enigmatical semblances—"luminous, gem-like, ghost-like"—with, also, their somewhat mechanical eeriness. Maeterlinck has recorded his intellectual debt to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, but it was not from the author of Axel that he learned his method. The personages of Maeterlinck—are only too eloquent, too volubly poetical. In their mystical aim Villiers and Maeterlinck are at one; in their method there is all the difference in the world. This is how Sara, in Axel, speaks:—

Songe! Des coeurs condamnés à ce supplice de pas m'aimer! ne sont-ils pas assez infortunés d'être d'une telle nature?

But Maleine has nothing more impressive to say than this:—

Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! comme je suis malade! Et je ne sais pas ce que j'ai;—et personne ne sait ce que le médecin ne sait pas ce que j'ai; ma nourrice ne sait pas ce que j'ai; Hjalmar ne sait pas ce que j'ai.

That these repetitions lend themselves to parody is obvious; that they are sometimes ridiculous is certain; but the principle which underlies them is at the root of much of the finest Eastern poetry—notably in the Bible. The charm and the impressiveness of monotony is one of the secrets of the East; we see it in their literature, in their dances, we hear it in their music. The desire of the West is after variety, but as variety is the most tiring of all excesses, we are in the mood for welcoming an experiment in monotone. And therein lies the originality, therein also the success of Maeterlinck.

In comparing the author of La Princesse Maleine with Shakespeare, Mirbeau probably accepted for a moment the traditional Shakespeare of grotesque horror and violent buffoonery. There is in Maleine something which might be called Elizabethan—though it is Elizabethan of the school of Webster and Tourneur rather than of Shakespeare. But in L'Intruse and Les Aveugles the spiritual terror and physical apprehension which are common to all Maeterlinck's work have changed, have become more interior. The art of both pieces consists in the subtle gradations of terror, the slow, creeping progress of the nightmare of apprehension. Nothing quite like it has been done before—not even by Poe, not even by Villiers. A brooding poet, a mystic, a contemplative spectator of the comedy of death—that is how Maeterlinck presents himself to us in his work, and the introduction which he has prefixed to his translation of L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles of Ruysbroeck l'Admirable shows how deeply he has studied the mystical writers of all ages, and how much akin to theirs is his own temper. Plato and Plotinus, Saint Bernard and Jacob Boehme, Coleridge and Novalis—he knows them all, and it is with a sort of reverence that he sets himself to the task of translating the astonishing Flemish mystic of the thirteenth century, known till now only by the fragments translated into French by Ernest Hello from a sixteenth-century Latin version. This translation and this introduction help to explain the real character of Maeterlinck's dramatic work—dramatic as to form, by a sort of accident, but essentially mystical. As a dramatist Maeterlinck has but one note—that of fear; he has but one method—that of repetition. This is no equipment for a Shakespeare, and it will probably be some time before Maeterlinck can recover from the literary damage of so incredible a misnomer.

In the preface to the first volume of the collected edition, which should be read with attention by all who are interested in knowing Maeterlinck's opinion of his own work, we are told:—

Quant aux deux petites pièces... je voudrais qu'il n'y eut aucun malentendu à leur endroit. Ce n'est pas parce qu'elles sont postérieures qu'il y faudrait chercher une évolution ou un nouveau désir. Ce sont, à proprement parler, de petits jeux de scène, de courts poèmes du genre assez malheureusement appelé "opéra-comique" destinés à fournir, aux musiciens qui les avaient demandés, un thème convenable à des développements lyriques. Ils ne prétendent à rien d'avantage, et l'on se méprendrait sur mes intentions si l'on y voulait trouver par surcroit de grandes arrière-pensées morales ou philosophiques.

Maeterlinck may be taken at his word, and, if we take him at his word, we shall be the less disappointed. The two new plays are slight; they have neither the subtlety of meaning nor the strangeness of atmosphere which gives their quality of beauty and force to Pelléas et Mélisande and to Les Aveugles. Soeur Béatrice is a dramatic version of the legend which Davidson told effectively in theBallad of a Nun; Ariane et Barbe-Bleue is a new reading of the legend of Blue-Beard. Both are written in verse, although printed as prose. It may be remembered that Maeterlinck once admitted that La Princesse Maleine was meant to be a kind of verse libre, and that he had originally intended to print it as verse. As it stands now it is certainly not verse in any real sense, where—as Soeur Béatrice is written throughout on the basis of the Alexandrine, although without rhyme. The mute e is, as in most modern French verse, sometimes sounded and sometimes not sounded; short lines are frequently interspersed among the lines of twelve syllables. Here are a few lines, taken at random, and printed as verse;—

Tu ne me réponds pas? Je n'entends pas ton souffle...
Et tes genoux fléchissent.... Viens, viens,
n'attendons pas
Que l'aurore envieuse tende ses pièges d'or
Par les chemins d'azur qui mènent au bonheur.

That is perfectly regular twelve-syllable verse with the exception of the second line, where the final ent of fléchissent is slurred. Twelve-syllable unrhymed verse is almost as disconcerting and unknown in English as in French, but it has been used, with splendid effect, by Blake, and it is a metre of infinite possibilities. The metre of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (as Maeterlinck has finally decided to call it) is vaguer and more capricious; some of it is in twelve-syllable verse, some in irregular verse, and some in what can not be called verse at all. Take, for instance:—

Il parait qu'on pleurait dans les rues.—Pourquoi est-elle venue? On m'a dit qu'elle avait son idée. Il n'aura pas celle-ci.

The form in French is not, to our ears, successfully achieved; it seems to take a hesitating step upon the road which Paul Fort, in his Ballades Françaises has tramped along so vigorously, but in so doubtful a direction. Fort has published several volumes, which have been much praised by many of the younger critics, in which verse is printed as verse—verse which is sometimes rhymed and sometimes unrhymed, sometimes regular and sometimes irregular; and along with this verse there is a great deal of merely rhythmical prose, which is not more like verse than any page of Salammbo, or À Rebours, or L'Étui de Nacre. Now it seems to us that this indiscriminate mingling of prose and verse is for the good neither of prose nor of verse. It is a breaking down of limits without any conquest of new country. The mere printing of verse as prose, which Maeterlinck has favored, seems to us a travesty unworthy of a writer of beautiful prose or of beautiful verse.

Le Temple Enseveli is by no means equal, as literature or as philosophy, to Le Trésor des Humbles, or even to La Sagesse et la Destinée, but it is, like everything which Maeterlinck writes, full of brooding honesty of thought and of a grave moral beauty of feeling. It is the work of a thinker who "waits patiently," like a Christian upon divine grace, upon the secret voices which come to us out of the deepest places in our nature. He is absolutely open-minded, his trust and his skepticism are alike an homage to truth. If what he has to say to us is not always "la sagesse même," it is at least the speech of one who has sought after wisdom more heedfully than any other writer of our time.

Le Double Jardin is a collection of essays which form a kind of postscript to Le Temple Enseveli. They are somewhat less abstract, perhaps a little more casual, than the essays in that book, and are concerned with subjects as varied as The Wrath of the Bee, The Motor-Car, and Old-fashioned Flowers. Maeterlinck has never written anything in prose more graceful, more homely, and more human than some of these pages, particularly those on flowers. In The Leaf of Olive and in Death and the Crown he carries speculation beyond the limits of our knowledge, and "thinks nobly," not of the soul alone, but also of the intelligence of man in its conflict with the deadly, unintelligent oppositions of the natural forces of the world. Such pages are fortifying, and we can not but be grateful for what is plausible in their encouragement. But the larger part of the book is made up of notes by the way, which have all the more charm because they are not too systematically arranged.

All, it is true, have some link of mutual relation, and proceed from a common center. It is curious to see this harmonizing instinct at work in the present arrangement of the essay now called Éloge de l'Épée. The main part of this essay was published in the Figaro in 1902 under the title La Défense de l'Épée. In the Figaro it began with a merely topical reference:—

L'autre jour, dans un article charmant, Alfred Capus prévoyait la fin de l'honneur, du moins de "l'honneur salle d'armes" et des instruments qui le protègent.

Then followed two paragraphs questioning, a little vaguely,

si nous vivions dans une société qui nous protège suffisamment pour nous enlever, en toutes circonstances, le droit le plus doux et le plus cher à l'instinct de l'homme—celui de se faire justice à soi-même.

In the essay as we now read it the topical reference has disappeared, and more than three pages are occupied by a discussion of abstract right, of essential justice, which seems to set, strangely and unexpectedly, a solid foundation under a structure not visibly resting on any foundation sufficient for its support. As the essay now stands it has its place in a system of which it becomes one more illustration.

Few of the essays in this book will be read with more interest than that on The Modern Drama. It is a development of the ideas already suggested by Maeterlinck in two prefaces. In asking where, under the conditions of modern life, and in the expression of modern ideas, we can find that background of beauty and of mystery which was like a natural atmosphere to Sophocles and to Shakespeare, he is asking, not indeed answering, a question which is being asked just now by all serious thinkers who are concerned with the present and the future of the drama. This suggestive essay should be contrasted and compared with a not less suggestive, but more audaciously affirmative essay, De l'Évolution du Théâtre, given as a lecture by André Gide, and reprinted at the beginning of the volume containing his two latest plays Saul and Le Roi Candaule. Everything that Gide writes is full of honest, subtle and unusual thought, and this consideration of the modern drama, though it asks more questions, not answering them, seems also to answer a few of the questions asked by Maeterlinck.

II

Le Trésor des Humbles is in some respects the most important, as it is certainly the most purely beautiful, of Maeterlinck's works. Limiting himself as he did in his plays to the rendering of certain sensations, and to the rendering of these in the most disembodied way possible, he did not permit himself to indulge either in the weight of wisdom or the adornment of beauty, each of which would have seemed to him (perhaps wrongly) as an intrusion. Those web-like plays, a very spider's work of filminess, allowed you to divine behind them one who was after all a philosopher rather than a playwright. The philosopher could but be divined, he was never seen. In these essays he has dropped the disguise of his many masks. Speaking without intermediary, he speaks more directly, with a more absolute abandonment of every convention of human reserve, except the reserve of an extreme fastidiousness in the choice of words simple enough and sincere enough to convey exactly his meaning, more spontaneously, it would seem, than any writer since Emerson. From Emerson he has certainly learned much; he has found, for instance, the precise form in which to say what he has to say, in little essays, not, indeed, so disconnected as Emerson's, but with a like care to say something very definite in every sentence, so that that sentence might stand by itself, without its context, as something more than a mere part of a paragraph. But his philosophical system, though it has its essential links with the great mystical system, which has developed itself through many manifestations, from Plotinus and Porphyry downward, is very much his own, and owes little to anything but his own meditation; and whether his subject is La Beauté Intérieure or Les Femmes, Les Avertis or Le Tragique Quotidien, it is with the same wisdom, certainty and beauty that he speaks. The book might well become the favorite reading of those persons to whom beauty must come with a certain dogmatism, if it is to be accepted for what it is. It reveals the inner life, with a simplicity which would seem the most obvious if it were not the rarest of qualities. It denies nothing, but it asserts many things, and it asserts nothing which has not been really seen.

In the preface to the first volume of his Théâtre, Maeterlinck takes us very simply into his confidence, and explains to us some of his intentions and some of his methods. He sees in La Princesse Maleine one quality, and one only: "une certaine harmonie épouvantée et sombre." The other plays, up to Aglavaine et Sélysette, "présentent une humanité et des sentiments plus précis, en proie à des forces aussi inconnues, mais un peu mieux dessinées." These unknown forces, "au fond desquelles on trouve l'idée du Dieu chrétien, mêlée à celle de la fatalité antique," are realized, for the most part, under the form of death. A fragile, suffering, ignorant humanity is represented struggling through a brief existence under the terror and apprehension of death. It is this conception of life which gives these plays their atmosphere, indeed their chief value. For, as we are rightly told, the primary element of poetry is

l'idée que la poète se fait de l'inconnu dans lequel flottent les êtres et les choses qu'il évoque, du mystère qui les domine et les juge et qui préside à leurs destinées.

This idea it no longer seems to him possible to represent honestly by the idea of death, and he asks: What is there to take its place?

Pour mon humble part, après les petits drames que j'ai énumérés plus haut, il m'a semblé loyal et sage d'écarter la mort de ce trône auquel il n'est pas certain qu'elle ait droit. Déjà, dans le dernier, que je n'ai pas nommé parmi les autres, dans "Aglavaine et Sélysette," j'aurais voulu qu'elle cédât à l'amour, à la sagesse ou au bonheur une part de sa puissance. Elle ne m'a pas obéi, et j'attends, avec la plupart des poètes de mon temps, qu'une autre force se révèle.

There is a fine and serious simplicity in these avowals, which show the intellectual honesty of Maeterlinck's dramatic work, its basis in philosophical thought. He is not merely a playwright who has found a method, he is a thinker who has to express his own conception of the universe, and therefore concerns literature. He finds that conception changing, and, for the moment, he stands aside, waiting. "The man who never alters his opinion," said Blake, "is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

Aglavaine et Sélysette is the most beautiful play that Maeterlinck has yet written; it is as beautiful as Le Trésor des Humbles. Hitherto, in his dramatic prose, he has deliberately refrained from that explicit beauty of phrase which is to be found in almost every sentence of the essays. Implicit beauty there has been from the first, a beauty of reverie in which the close lips of his shadowy people seem afraid to do more than whisper a few vague words, mere hints of whatever dreams and thoughts had come to them out of the darkness. But of the elaborate beauty of the essays, in which an extreme simplicity becomes more ornate than any adornment, there has been, until now, almost nothing. In Aglavaine et Sélysette we have not merely beauty of conception and atmosphere, but writing which is beautiful in itself, and in which meditation achieves its own right to exist, not merely because it carries out that conception, or forms that atmosphere. And at the same time the very essence of the drama has been yet further spiritualized. Maeterlinck has always realized, better than any one else, the significance, in life and art, of mystery. He has realized how unsearchable is the darkness out of which we have but just stepped, and the darkness into which we are about to pass. And he has realized how the thought and sense of that twofold darkness invade the little space of light in which, for a moment, we move; the depth to which they shadow our steps, even in that moment's partial escape. But in some of his plays he would seem to have apprehended this mystery as a thing merely or mainly terrifying—the actual physical darkness surrounding blind men, the actual physical approach of death as a stealthy intruder into our midst; he has shown us people huddled at a window, out of which they almost feared to look, or beating at a door, the opening of which they dreaded. Fear shivers through these plays, creeping across our nerves like a damp mist coiling up out of a valley. And there is beauty certainly in this "vague spiritual fear;" but certainly a lower kind of beauty than that which gives its supreme pathos to Aglavaine et Sélysette. Here is mystery which is also pure beauty, in these delicate approaches of intellectual pathos, in which suffering and death and error become transformed into something almost happy, so full is it of strange light.

And, with this spiritualizing of the very substance of what had always been so fully a drama of things unseen, there comes, as we have said, a freer abandonment to the instinctive desire of the artist to write beautifully. Having realized that one need not be afraid of beauty, he is not afraid to let soul speak to soul in language worthy of both. And, curiously, at the same time he becomes more familiar, more human. Sélysette is quite the most natural character that Maeterlinck has ever drawn, as Aglavaine is the most noble. Méléandre is, perhaps, more shadowy than ever, but that is because he is deliberately subordinated in the composition, which is concerned only with the action upon one another of the two women. He suffers the action of these forces, does not himself act; standing between them as man stands between the calling of the intellectual and the emotional life, between the simplicity of daily existence, in which he is good, affectionate, happy, and the perhaps "immoral" heightening of that existence which is somewhat disastrously possible in the achievement of his dreams. In this play, which touches so beautifully and so profoundly on so many questions, this eternal question is restated; of course, not answered. To answer it would be to find the missing word in the great enigma; and to Maeterlinck, who can believe in nothing which is not mystery, it is of the essence of his philosophy not to answer his own question.

[EMILY BRONTË]

It is one hundred years to a month—I write in August—that Emily Brontë was born; she was born in August, 1818, and died December 19th, 1848, at the age of thirty. The stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman in whom there is seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness. She required no passionate experience to endow her with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is alive in the earth. Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, Wuthering Heights, is one long outcry. Rossetti in 1854 wrote: "I've been greatly interested in Wuthering Heights, the first novel I've read for an age, and the best (as regards power and style only) for two ages, except Sidonia. But it is a fiend of a book. The action is laid in hell—only it seems places and people have English names there." He is not altogether right in what he says, and yet there is hell in the heart of Heathcliff, that magnificent and malevolent gypsy, who, to my mind, can only be compared with Borrow's creations in Lavengro and The Romany Rye—such as the immortal Jasper Petilengro and the immoral Ursula—and with the lesser creations of Meredith's in The Adventures of Harry Richmond (in spite of the savage and piteous and fascinating Kiomi—I have seen a young gypsy girl of this name the other day, tragical).

When Charlotte says of Emily that what "her mind had gathered of the real concerning the people around her was too exclusively confined to their tragic and terrible traits, out of which she created Earnshaw and Catherine, and that having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done," there is no doubt that on the whole she is right. For these spirits are relentless and implacable, fallen and lost spirits, and it is only in this amazing novel that I find maledictions and curses and cries of anguish and writhings of agony and raptures of delight and passionate supplications, such as only abnormal creatures could contrive to express, and within the bounded space of the moors, made sad by somber sunrises and glad by radiant sunsets. It is sad colored and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the clouds that hang generally above it a rare and sunny beauty comes into the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendor.

In the passionately tragic genius of Emily I find a primitive nature-worship; so strangely primitive that that wonderful scene of mad recrimination between the dying Catherine and the repentant Heathcliff, when she cries "I forgive you! Forgive me!" and he answers: "Kiss me again; and don't let me see your eyes. I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours? How can I?" is almost comparable with a passage in Macbeth where Banquo speaks of "the temple-haunting Martlet" and its loved masonry which preludes Lady Macbeth's entrance from under the buttresses as the delicate air bears witness to the incarnate murder that swarms, snake-like, hidden under grass. Something of Emily's saturnine humor comes into the mouth of the Calvinistic farm-servant, whose jests are as grim and as deadly and as plague-like as the snow-storms that make winter unendurable.

Yes, this creator has, in herself and in her imagination, something solitary and sorrowful—that of a woman who lived, literally, alone—and whose genius had no scorn. She, who believed in the indestructible God within herself, was silenced forever; herself and her genius which had moved as a wind and moved as the sea in tumult and moved as the thunderclouds in fury upon the tragical and perilous waters of passion that surround "the topless towers" of Wuthering Heights.

In one who, like Emily Brontë, was always dying of too much life, one can imagine the sensitive reticences, the glowing eyes, and the strain of the vehemences of that inner fire that fed on itself, which gave her her taciturnity. "It is useless to ask her; you get no answers. The awful point was that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health."

"The spirit inexorable to the flesh:" there is the whole secret of what in her life was her genius. Alone with herself—with her soul and her body—she allows herself no respite: for she was always of an unresting nature. So in the words of Pater—who told me of his enormous admiration for her prose—"we are all condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis; we have our interval and then our place knows us no more." How she spent these "intervals" must be forever unknown. Not in high passions, I imagine, nor in wisdom, nor in care for material things; but in moods of passion, in intellectual excitement, in an inexhaustible curiosity, in an ironical contemplation "of the counted pulses of a variegated, dramatic life." But never, I am certain, was she ever capable—as she watches the weaving and unweaving of herself—of the base corruption of what his existence was to Beardsley. "That he should be so honest with his fear," I have written of him, "that he should sit down before its face and study it feature by feature: that he should never turn aside his eyes for more than one instant, make no attempt to escape, but sit at home with it, travel with it, see it in his mirror, taste it in the sacrament: that is the marvellous thing, and the sign of his fundamental sincerity in life and art."

Emily Brontë's passionate and daring genius attains this utmost limit of tragedy, and with this a sense—an extreme sense—of the mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry as certainly in her lyrical prose; a quality which distinguishes such prose and verse from all that is but a little lower than the highest. Her genius is somber in the sense that Webster's is, but much less dramatic. Neither his tragedies nor her novel are well-constructed; and in her case something is certainly lacking; for her narrative is dominated by sheer chance, and guided by mere accident. And I think that she, with her sleepless imagination, might have said as the child Giovanni in Webster's Tragedy says: "I have not slept these six nights. When do the dead walk?" and is answered: "When God shall please." When in disguise she sings of the useless rebellions of the earth, rarely has a more poignant cry been wrenched out of "a soul on the rack"—that is to say since Santa Teresa sang:—

A soul in God hidden from sin,
What more desires for thee remain,
Save but to love, and love again
And, all on flame, with love within,
Love on, and turn to love again?

than this stanza:

O! dreadful is the shock—intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think
again,
The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain.

At times there is a tragic sublimity in her imagination, which gathers together, as it were, the winds from the world's four quarters, that howled in winter nights across the moor around the house she lived in. Indeed the very storm of her genius hovers in the air between things sublime and things hideous. "There never was such a thunderstorm of a play," said Swinburne on Cyril Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy. I am inclined to add: "There never was such a thunderstorm of a novel as Wuthering Heights." And it is blood-stained with the blood of the roses of sunsets; the heavy atmosphere is sultry as the hush and heat and awe of midnoon; sad visions appear with tragic countenances, fugitives try in vain to escape from the insane brooding of their consciences. And there are serviceable shadows; implacable self-devotions and implacable cruelties; vengeances unassuaged; and a kind of unscrupulous ferocity is seen not only in Heathcliff but in one of his victims. And there are startling scenes and sentences that, once impressed on the memory, are unforgettable: as scarlet flowers of evil and as poisonous weeds they take root in one.

[ON ENGLISH AND FRENCH FICTION]

I

Certainly the modern English novel begins with that elaborate masterpiece, Tom Jones, of Henry Fielding. And it seems to me that his genius is contained, on the whole, in that one book; in which he creates living people; the very soil is living. His hero is the typical sullen, selfish, base-born, stupid, sensual, easily seduced and adventurous youth, with whom his creator is mightily amused. The very Prefaces are full of humorous wisdom; copied, I suppose, from Montaigne. The typically wicked woman is painted almost as Hogarth might have painted her. It is quite possible that she may have a few touches, here and there, of Lady Wishfort, who, wrote Meredith, "is unmatched for the vigour and pointedness of the tongue. It spins along with a final ring, like the voice of Nature in a fury, and is, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated fishwife."

Fielding has a strong sense of the vigilant comic, which is the genius of thoughtful laughter, but never serving as a public advocate. Contempt can not be entertained by comic intelligence. Blifil is essentially the grossly and basely animal creature, who is also a villain, and who has his part in the plot; indeed one scandalous scene in which he is discovered is laughable in the purely comic sense.

Jonathan Wild presents a case of peculiar distinction, when that man of eminent greatness remarks on the unfairness of a trial in which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of the opposite party; yet it is immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his own "party" should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into a villain's ratiocination, as in Lady Booby's exclamation when Joseph defends himself: "Your virtue! I shall never survive it!" Fielding can be equally satiric and comic: can raise laughter but never move pity. And it is as he evokes great spirits that Meredith cries: "O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Molière! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when you do call."

After Fielding comes Thackeray, and his Vanity Fair is the second masterpiece in modern fiction. It is the work of a man of the world, keenly observant of all the follies and virtues and vices and crimes and splendors, of crimes and of failures, of his neither moral nor immoral Fair. He takes his title from John Bunyan; but in originality he is almost equal with Fielding. "As the Manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards, and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place." Such is the moral, if you like; at any rate the whole Show "is accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated with the author's own candles." At the end the Finis: "Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

There is no question that Becky Sharp is not derived from Balzac's Lisbeth in La Cousine Bette, but at what a distance, when once you think of the greatest of all novelists, who has the fortune to be French, and of Thackeray, who has the fortune (at times the misfortune) of being English. When we thing of Becky she startles us by her cynical entrance: she inherits from her parents bad qualities. Her first epigram sums her up. "Revenge may be wicked, but it's natural. I'm no angel." She fascinates Lord Pitt, Rawdon Crawley and Lord Steyne in a way Lisbeth never does. Lisbeth's fascination is that of the evil-doer; she is envious, spiteful, malicious, a lying hypocrite; always deliberately bent on having her own way, always for evil purposes: so that she, in her sinister effrontery, causes the ruin of many of the lives she thrives on, feigns to help, deludes; only, she never deludes as Valérie Marnette does. We have only to say: "Valérie!" and the woman is before us. As for Valérie: "Elle était belle comme sont belles les femmes assez belles, pour être belles en dormant;" a sentence certainly lyrical. Lisbeth's character has "Une dose du mordant parisien." Unmarried, she is monstrous, her snares are inevitable, her dissimulation impenetrable. But she is never given a scene so consummately achieved in its sordid and voluptuous tragedy as the scene in Vanity Fair when Rawdon enters his house at midnight, and finds Becky dressed in a brilliant toilet, her arms and her fingers sparkling with bracelets and rings, and the brilliants in her breast which Steyne had given her. "He had her hand in his, and was bowing to kiss it, when Becky started up with a faint scream as she caught sight of Rawdon's white face." And, as the writer adds, with an entire sense of the tragic and comic drama that is over: "All her lies and her schemes, all her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and all her genius had come to this bankruptcy."

I have never had any actual admiration for the novels of George Eliot; she had her passing fame, her popularity, her success; people compared her prose—wrongly—with the poetry of Mrs. Browning; and, as for her attempts at verse, the less said of them the better. In favor of my opinion I quote this scathing sentence of Swinburne: "Having no taste for the dissection of dolls, I shall leave Daniel Deronda in his natural place above the ragshop door; and having no ear for the melodies of a Jew's harp, I shall leave the Spanish Gypsy to perform on that instrument to such audience as she may collect." Certainly Charlotte Brontë excelled George Eliot in almost every quality; the latter having, perhaps, more knowledge and culture, but not for a moment comparable with Charlotte's purity of passion, depth and fervor of feeling, inspiration, imagination and a most masterly style.

As for her Romola, I find it almost an elaborate failure in the endeavor to create the atmosphere of the period of Savonarola—that amazing age when the greatest spirits of the world were alive and producing works of unsurpassable genius—and in her too anatomical demonstration of the varying vices and virtues of Tito: for she has none of that strange subtlety that a writer of novels must possess to delineate how this human soul may pass in the course of decomposition into some irremediable ruin. She is too much of the moralist to be able to present this character as a necessary and natural figure, such as far greater writers have had no difficulty in doing. She presents him—rather after the fashion of George Sand, as a fearful and warning example. Think, for a moment,—the comparison is all but impossible,—of this attempt at characterization with Browning's Guido Franceschini; for in his two monologues every nerve of the mind is touched by the patient scalpel, every joint and vein of the subtle and intricate spirit laid bare and divided. Compare this also with Cenci: the comparison has been made by Swinburne, with an equal praise of two masterpieces, The Cenci of Shelley and The Ring and the Book of Browning. Both Cenci and Franceschini are cunningly drawn and colored so as to be absolute models of the highest form of realism: as cunningly colored and drawn as the immortal creation of Madame Bovary.

Take, for instance, the character of Rochester in Jane Eyre. It is incomparable of its kind; an absolutely conceived living being, who has enough nerves and enough passion to more or less extinguish the various male characters in George Eliot's novels. That Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, the finest of her novels, can be moved to any sense but that of bitter disgust and sickening disdain by a thing—I will not write, a man—of Stephen Guest's character, is a lamentable and an ugly case of shameful failure; for as Swinburne says, "The last word of realism has surely been spoken, the last abyss of cynicism has surely been sounded and laid bare." And I am glad to note here that he dismisses her with this reference to three great French writers; using, of course, his invariable ironical paradoxes. "For a higher view and a more cheery aspect of the sex, we must turn back to those gentler teachers, those more flattering painters of our own—Laclos, Stendhal and Merrimée; we must take up La Double Méprise—or Le Rouge et le Noir—or Les Liaisons Dangereuses."

The genius of George Meredith is unquestionable; he was as great a creator, in fact a greater creator, than any other English novelist; yet his fascination is not, I think, quite explicable. Not since the Elizabethans have we had so flame-like a life possessing the wanton body of a style. Our literature has not a more vividly entertaining book than The Shaving of Shagpat—I have the rare first edition of 1856 in my possession—nor has the soul of a style been lost more spectacularly. And with this fantastic, learned, poetic, passionate, intelligent style, a style which might have lent itself so well to the making of Elizabethan drama, Meredith has set himself the task of writing novels of contemporary life; nor can it be wondered that every novel of his breaks every rule which could possibly be laid down for the writing of a novel. Why has his prose so irresistible a fascination for so many of us, as it certainly has? I find Meredith breaking every canon of what are to me the laws of the novel; and yet I read him in preference to any other novelist.

Meredith first conceives that the novelist's prime study is human nature and his first duty to be true to it. Moreover, being an artist, he is not content with simple observations; there must be creation, the imaginative fusion of the mass of observed fact. The philosophy of his seeking is only another name for intuition, analysis, imaginative thought. He has comprehension of a character from height to depth through that "eye of steady flame," which he attributes to Shakespeare, and which may be defined in every great artist. He sees it, he beholds a complete nature, at once and in entirety. His task is to make others see what he sees. But this can not be done at a stroke. It must be done little by little, touch upon touch, light upon shade, shade upon light. The completeness, as seen by the seer or creator—the term is the same—must be microscopically investigated, divided into its component parts, produced piece by piece, and connected visibly. It is this that is meant when we talk of analysis; and the antithesis between analysis and creation is hardly so sheer as it seems. Partly through a selection of appropriate action, partly through the revealing casual speech, the imagined character takes palpable form: finally it does, or it should, live and breathe before the reader with some likeness of the hue and breadth of actual life. But there is a step farther, and it is this step that Meredith is strenuous to take. You have the flesh, animate it with spirit, with soul. If this is an unworthy aim, condemn Shakespeare. This is Meredith's, and it is this and no other consummation that he prays for in demanding philosophy in fiction.

The main peculiarity of Meredith's style is this: he thinks, to begin with, before writing—a singular thing, one must observe, for the present day. Then, having certain definite thoughts to express, and thoughts frequently of a difficult remoteness, he is careful to employ words of a rich and fruitful significance, made richer and more fruitful by a studied and uncommon arrangement. His sentences are architectural; and it is natural in reading him to cry out at the strangeness. Strange, certainly; often obscure, often tantalizing; more often magnificent and somber and strong and passionate, his wit is perhaps too fantastical, too remote, too allusive; partly because it is subtly ironical; perhaps most of all because it is shrewdly stinging to our prejudices. Still, everywhere, the poet, struggling against the bondage of prose, flings himself on every opportunity of evading his bondage. It is thus by the very quality that is his distraction—perhaps because he always writes English as if it were a learned language—that Meredith holds us, by the intensity of his vision of a world which is not our world, by the energy of genius which has done so much to achieve the impossible.

II

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 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 a novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poet. Take King Lear and take Père Goriot. Goriot is a Lear at heart, and he suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely where Lear grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy mountain of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust about all his fibers. Lear may exchange his crown for the fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every bank-note that his daughters rob 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.

The genius of prose is essentially different from the "genius of poetry;" and that is the reason why writers like De Quincy and Ruskin trespassed, as thieves do, on forbidden ground. It is much better to pick forbidden fruit and to eat thereof, and be as stealthy as the traveler in Blake's deliciously wicked poem who steals from the unloved lover the woman he loves:

Soon after she has gone from me
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.

The moral of it is "Never seek to sell thy love;" but such writers as those I have referred to tread fallen fruit ruthlessly under foot and therefore ought to be thrust out of the garden they have robbed. Both tried to write prose as if they were writing verse, and both failed; Ruskin ruined by his fatal facility and De Quincy by his cultivating eloquence in rhetoric. Certain prose writers have written lyrical prose, because their genius at times drove them to do so, and with an absolute success. One finds such passages in Shakespeare and Blake and Pater and Lamb; in certain pages of Balzac and of Flaubert and of Meredith and of Conrad. Yet, in what I must call lyrical prose, there is a certain rhythm, but not that of rhymed verse; that is to say, if the inspiration were the same, the mediums are different: the rhythm of prose that has no meter and the rhythm of verse that has meter.

Take, for instance, Peacock, who was neither a great prose writer nor a great poet, but whose novels are unique in English, and are among the most scholarly, original and entertaining prose writings of the century.

A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wide for selfish bigots, let his page
Which charms the chosen spirits of the time
Fold itself up for the serener clime
Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation.

So Shelley praises him, who was certainly aware of Peacock's clever scraps of rhyming that are like no other verse; the masterpiece being the comically heroic War-Song of Dinar Valor, which the author defines as "the quintessence of all war songs that were ever written, and the sum and substances of all the appetences, tendencies and consequences of military." This learned wit, his satire upon the vulgarity of progress (in which he is one with Baudelaire and one with Meredith) are more continuously present in his prose than in his verse; yet his characters are caricatures, they speak a language that is not ours; they are given sensational adventures, often comical in the extreme; and in these pages plenty of nonsense and of laughter and of satire and of serious prose with an undercurrent of bitter cynicism. He treats all his creatures cruelly, and I can not help seeing the reason why Richard Garnett admired his prose so much: that there is something curiously alike and unlike in their humor.

Garnett himself told me, as I always thought, that The Twilight of the Gods was far and away the best book he had written. In France Marcel Schwob and André Gide have done certain things comparable in their way with these learned inventions, these ironic "criticisms of life," these irreverent classical burlesques in which religion, morality, learning, and all civilization's conventions, are turned topsy-turvy, and presented in the ridiculousness of their unaccustomed attitude. But no modern man in England has done anything remotely comparable with them, and neither Schwob nor André Gide has heaped mockery so high as in Abdullah the Adite, and remained as sure a master of all the reticences of art and manners. This learned mockery has an undefinable quality, macabre, diabolical, a witchcraft of its own, which I can find in no other writer.

To return to the question of rhythm, the rhythm of prose, for one thing, is physiological, the rhythm of poetry is musical. There is in every play of Ibsen a rhythm perfect of its kind, but it is the physiological rhythm of prose. The rhythm of a play of Shakespeare speaks to the blood like wine or music: it is with exultation, with intoxication, that we see or read Antony and Cleopatra or even Richard II; it gives us exactly the same intoxication and the same exultation when we hear Vladimir de Pachmann play the piano, when we hear Wagner's Tristan. But the rhythm of a play of Ibsen is like that of a diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental exaltation of a problem solved.

III

Is not a criticism of primary ideas, the only kind of criticism, when one considers it, that is really worth writing? A critic may tell us that So-an-So has written a charming book, that it is the best of his charming books, that it is better or worse than another book by another writer with whom we see no necessity to compare him, that it is, in short, an "addition to literature;" well and good, here is some one's opinion, perhaps right, perhaps wrong; not very important if right, not easy to disprove if wrong. But let him tell us, in noting the precise quality of À Rebours, and its precise divergence from the tradition of naturalism: "Il ne s'agissait plus tant de faire entrer dans l'art, par la représentation, l'extériorité brute, que de tirer de cette extériorité même des motifs de rêve et de la révélation intérieure;" let him tell us in discussing the question of literary sincerity that a certain writer "est sincère, non parce qu'il avoue toute sa pensée, mais parce qu'il pense tout son aveu:" has he not added to the very substance of our thought, or touched that substance with new light?

The curious thing in regard to Benjamin Constant is that there was not a single interest, out of the many that occupied his life, which he did not destroy by some inconsequence of action, for no reason in the world, apparently, except some irrational necessity of doing exactly the opposite of what he ought to have done, of what he wanted to do. So he creates Adolphe so much of himself in it, and makes him say, in a memorable sentence, "Je me reposais, pour ainsi dire, dans l'indifference des autres, de la fatigue de son amour." He was never tired of listening to himself, and the acute interest of his Journal consists in the absolute sincerity of its confessions, and at the same time the scrutinizing self-consciousness of every word that is written down. "Il y a en moi deux personnes, dont l'en observe l'autre." So cold-hearted is he that when perhaps his best friend, Mademoiselle Talma, is dying, he spends day and night by her bedside, overwhelmed with grief; and he writes in his Journal: "Y étudie la mort." So out of this distressing kind of reality which afflicts the artist, he creates his art, Adolphe, a masterpiece of psychological narrative, from which the modern novel of analysis may have been said to have arisen, which is simply a human document in which he has told us the story of his liaison with the writer of Corinne. She made him suffer for he writes: "Tous les volcans sont moins flamboyants qu'elle." He suffers, as his hero does, because he can neither be intensely absorbed, nor, for one moment, indifferent; that very spirit of analysis which would seem to throw some doubt on the sincerity of his passion, does but intensify the acuteness with which he feels it. It is the turning of the sword in a wound. He sums up and typifies the artistic temperament at its acutest point of weakness; the temperament which can neither resist, nor dominate, nor even wholly succumb to, emotion; which is forever seeking its own hurt, with the persistence almost of mania; which, if it ruins other lives in the pursuit, as is supposed, of artistic purposes, gains at all events no personal satisfaction out of the bargain; except, indeed, when one has written Adolphe, the satisfaction of having lived unhappily for more than sixty years, and left behind one a hundred pages that are still read with admiration, sixty years afterward.

Flaubert, possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, gave himself to superhuman labors for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that adjective. And the desperate certitude in his spirit always was: "Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but one—one form, one mode—to express all I want to say." He desired, above all things, impersonality; and yet, in spite of the fact that he is the most impersonal of novelists, the artist is always felt; for as Pater said: "his subjectivity must and will color the incidents, as his very bodily eye selects the aspects of things." Yet again, in spite of the fact that Flaubert did keep Madame Bovary at a great distance from himself, we find in these pages the analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and observed in surroundings of the most extraordinary kind. He creates Emma cruelly, morbidly, marvelously; he creates in her, as Baudelaire says, the adulterous woman with a depraved imagination. "Elle se donne" he writes, "magnifiquement, généreusement, d'une manière toute masculine, à des drôles qui ne sont pas ses égaux, exactement comme les poètes se livrent a des drôlesses."

As Flaubert invented the rhythm of every sentence I choose this one from the novel I have referred to, this magnificently tragic sentence: "Et Emma se mit à rire, d'un rire atroce, frénétique, désespéré, croient voir la face hideuse du misérable qui se dressait dans les ténèbres éternelles comme un épouvantent." Aeschylus might have put such words as these on the lying and crying lips of Clytemnestra in her atrocious speech after she has slain Agamemnon. With this compare a sentence I translate from Petrus Bórel. "I have often heard that certain insects were made for the amusement of children: perhaps man also was created for the same pleasures of superior beings, who delight in torturing him, and disport themselves in his groans." This is a sentence which might almost have been written by Hardy, so clearly does it state, in an image like one of his own, the very center of his philosophy. Take, for example, these sentences in The Return of the Native: "Yet, upon the whole, neither the man nor the woman lost dignity by sudden death. Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic histories with a catastrophic dash."

Swinburne, who invariably overpraises Victor Hugo, overpraises his atrocious novel L'Homme qui rit. But I forgive him everything when he writes such Baudelairean sentences as these:

Bakilphedro, who plays the part of devil, is a bastard begotten by Iago upon his sister, Madame de Merteuil; having something of both, but diminished and degraded; wanting, for instance, the deep daemonic calm of their lifelong patience. He has too much heat of discontent, too much fever and fire, to know their perfect peace of spirit, the equable element of their souls, the quiet of mind in which they live and work out their work at leisure. He does not sin at rest, there is somewhat of fume and fret in his wickedness. There is the peace of the devil, which passeth all understanding.

Certainly, for an absolutely diabolical dissection of three equally infamous characters, this is unsurpassable. Iago is not entirely malignant, nor is he abjectly vile, nor is he utterly dishonest: he is supreme in evil, and almost as far above vice as he is beyond virtue. He has not even a fleshly desire for Desdemona: yet he is the impassioned villain who "spins the plot." Can one conceive, as Swinburne conjectures, "something of Iago's attitude in hell—of his unalterable and indomitable posture for all eternity?" As for Madame Merteuil she is, in Les Liaisons dangereuses, not only a counterfoil for Valmont, but a spirit of almost inconceivable malignity; yet she is not as abnormal as Iago. She has a sublime lack of virtue, with an immense sense of her seductiveness. There is no grandeur in her evil, as there is in Valmont's. In the longest letter she writes, that Baudelaire praises, she confesses herself with so curious a shamelessness as to intrigue one. In composing this for her Laclos shows the most sinister side of his genius. He shows her sterility, her depraved imagination, her deceit and her dissimulations: rarely the humiliations she has endured. As she is resolved on the ruin of Valmont she writes in this fashion: "Séduite par votre réputation, il me semblait que vous manquiez à ma gloire; je brûlais de vous combattre corps à corps." She is not even a criminal, not even the symbol of one of the poisonous women of the Renaissance, who smiled complacently after an assassination. Her nature is perverted by the lack of the intoxication of crime. The imagination which stands to her in the place of virtue has brought its revenge, and for her, too, there is only the release of death.

"Tout les livres sont immoraux," wrote Baudelaire in his notes on this book: certainly a sweeping paradox, for there is much less immorality in Laclos' novel than in Rabelais or in Swift or in Aristophanes. Still as he wrote this book in the time of the French Revolution, there was more than enough of hell-creating material in the age of Robespierre and Marat and Danton and Mirabeau, who wrote the infamous Erotika Biblion. It is amusing to note that in Perlet-Malassis's reprint in 1866 the writer of a preface dated 1832 says: "Le style de Mirabeau, par cette vive puissance de la pensée que resplendit de son propre éclat sans rien emprunter aux ornements de l'art, s'élève dans cet ouvrage jusqu'aux beautés les plus sublimes." Exactly a year before Mirabeau's book appeared Laclos printed his novel; and, for what I must call the sublimity of casuistry, here is one consummate sentence of Valmont's. "Je ne sortais de ses bras que pour tomber à ses genoux, pour lui jurer un amour éternel, et, il faut tout avouer, je pensais ce que je disais."

IV

George Borrow has always had a curious fascination for me: for this man, half Cornish and half French, with his peculiar kind of genius—such as one generally finds in mixed blood—is both creative and inventive, normal and abnormal, perverse and unpassionate, obscure and grimly humorous. I was very young when I read his masterpiece Lavengro (1851) in its original three volumes, from which I got my first taste for a sort of gypsy element in literature. The reading of that book did many things for me. It absorbed me from the first page with a curiously personal appeal, as of some one akin to me: the appeal, I suppose, to what was wild in my blood.

What Borrow really creates is a by no means undiscovered world: I mean the world of the Gypsies; yet he is the first to discover their peculiar characteristics, their savagery and uncivilization; he gives them life, in their tents, on the road, along the hedges; he makes them speak, in their pure and corrupted dialects, much as they always speak, but nearly always with something of Borrow in them. They are imaginative: he gives them part of his imagination. They are not subtle, nor is he; they are not complex, he at times is complex; he paints their morality and immorality almost as Hogarth might have done.

In regard to the sense of fear, you find it in Shakespeare, in Balzac, everywhere; but never I think more intensely than in the chapters in Lavengro describing Borrow's paroxysm of fear in the dingle. There is nothing of the kind, in any language, equal to those pages of Borrow; they go deep down into some "obscure night of the soul;" they are abnormal. It is "the screaming horror" that takes possession of him.

The evil one was upon me; the inscrutable horror which I had felt from boyhood had once more taken possession of me. I uttered wild cries. I sat down with my back against a thorn-bush; the thorns entered my flesh, and when I felt them, I pressed harder against the bush: I thought the pain of the flesh might in some degree counteract the mental agony; presently I felt them no longer—the power of the mental horror was so great that it was impossible, with that upon me, to feel my pain from the thorns.

Borrow writes as if civilization did not exist, and he obtains, in his indirect way, an extraordinary directness. Really the most artificial of writers, he is always true to that "peculiar mind and system of nerves" of which he was so well aware, and which drove him into all sorts of cunning ways of telling the truth, and making it at once bewildering and convincing.

I have often wondered why Robert Louis Stevenson was almost invariably looked on as a man of genius. He had touches of it, certainly; and therein lies part of the secret of his captivating the heart; why, quite by himself, he ranks with writers like Thoreau and with Dumas (one for a certain seductiveness of manner, the other for his extravagant passion for miraculous adventures); and why he appeals to us, not only from his curious charm as a literary vagrant—to some of us an irresistible charm—and from the exhilaration of the blood which he causes in us, and from the actual fever of his prose, and for his inhuman sense of life's whimsical distresses, of its cruelties and maladies and confusions, but from a certain gypsy and wayward grace, so like a woman's, that can thrill to the blood often more instantly than in the presence of the august perfection of classic beauty.

His style, as he admits, is never wholly original; a "sedulous ape," as he once humorously named himself, that aped the styles of Baudelaire and Hawthorne and Lamb and Hazlitt; and that never, except rarely and by certain happy accidents in his rejection of words and using some of them as if no one had ever used them before, attains the inevitable perfection of Baudelaire's prose style, nor the quintessential and exultant and tragic style of Lamb, which has, beyond any writer preeminent for charm, salt and sting; nor Montaigne's malign trickery of style, his roving imagination, his preoccupation with himself, who said so splendidly: "I have no other end in writing but to discover myself, who also shall peradventure be another thing to-morrow."

As in a tragic drama so in a tragic novel we must not forbid an artist in fiction to set before us strange instances of inconsistency and eccentricity in conduct as well as in action; but we require of him that he should make us feel such aberrations to be as clearly inevitable as they are certainly exceptional. Balzac has done that and Flaubert and Goncourt and Maupassant and Conrad. All these, at their greatest, are inevitable; only no novelist is ever consistently great. Reade's Griffith Gaunt is not, as he ought to have been, inevitable; for what is tragic and pathetic and eccentric in his character is flawed by the writer's failure in showing what ought to have been the intolerable and irresistible force of the temptation; his art is an act of envy, therefore a base act, and has none of the grandeur of Othello's jealousy, which makes one love him the more for that, more even because he is unconscious of Iago's poisoned tongue. Leontes excites our repulsion: he is a coward, selfish and deluded and ignoble.

At his finest I find in Charles Reade certain adventures almost worthy of Dumas; only he never had that overflowing negro-like genius of the French novelist; who can be tedious at times, and can write very badly when he likes, for he never had much of a style. Yet, with all his suspense and the suddenness of his vivid action and of the living conversation of furiously living creatures, he does really carry us along in an amazing way; equally in the tragic figure Edmund Dantès as in those of d'Artagnan and Aramis and Porthos. Among Reade's many faults is the inability to blot when he ought to have blotted, to abstain, as he too often did not, from ostentation and self-praise, by the fact that he can not always get far enough away from what to him was the pernicious atmosphere of the stage.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is partly made out of Wilde himself, partly out of two other men, both of whom are alive. Not being creative he was cruel enough to mix his somewhat poisonous color after the fashion of an impressionistic painter, and so to give a treble reflection of three different temperaments instead of giving one. In any case, as Pater wrote: "Dorian himself, though a quite unsuccessful experiment in Epicureanism, in life as a fine art, is (till his inward spoiling takes visible effect suddenly, and in a moment, at the end of his story) a beautiful creature."

His peculiar kind of beauty might be imaged by a strangely colored Eastern vessel, and hidden within it, a few delicate young serpents. For he has something of the coiled up life of the serpents, in his poisonous sins; sins he communicates to others, ruining their youthful lives with no deliberate malice, but simply because he can not help it. He has no sense of shame, even in his most ignoble nights. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face; but secret vices can not be concealed; one sees them in the mere ironical curl of sinister lips, or in the enigmatical lifting of an eyelid. He has made the devil's bargain, but not in the sense in which Faustus sells his soul to Satan; yet he is always entangled in the painted sins, the more and more hideous aspects, of his intolerably accusing portrait, taken, certainly, in Wilde's usual manner, from La Peau de Chagrin of Balzac; only, and therein lies the immense difference, the man's life never shrinks, but the very lines and colors of his painted image shrivel, until the thing itself—the thing he has come to hate as one hates hell—has its revenge.

A passion for caprice, a whimsical Irish temperament, a love of art for art's sake—it is in such qualities as these that I find the origin of the beautiful force of estheticism, the exquisite echoes of the poems, the subtle decadence of Dorian Gray, and the paradoxical truths, the perverted common sense of the Intentions. Certainly, as Pater realized, Wilde, with his hatred of the bourgeois seriousness of dull people, has always taken refuge from commonplace in irony. Life, to him, even when he is most frivolous, ought not to be realism, but a following after art: a provoking enough phrase for those who are lost to the sense of suggestiveness. He is conscious of the charm of grateful echoes, and is always original in his quotations.

In Wilde we see a great spectacular intellect, to which, at last, pity and terror have come in their own person, and no longer as puppets in a play. In its sight, human life has always been something created on the stage; a comedy in which it is the wise man's part to sit aside and laugh, but in which he may also disdainfully take part, as in a carnival, under any mask. The unbiased, scornful intellect, to which humanity has never been a burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside and laugh, and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is nothing left desirable in illusion. Having seen, as the artist sees, further than morality, but with so partial an eyesight as to have overlooked it on the way, it has come at length to discover morality, in the only way left possible, for itself. And, like most of those who have "thought themselves weary," have made the adventure of putting thought into action, it has had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own inevitable expense. And now, having so newly become acquainted with what is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the arrangements of mortal affairs, it has gone, not unnaturally, to an extreme, and taken on the one hand, humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more than their just valuation in matters of art. It is that old instinct of the intellect; the necessity to carry things to their farthest point of development, to be more logical than either art or life, two very wayward and illogical things, in which conclusions do not always follow from premises.

Swinburne's Love's Cross Currents appeared originally under what is now its sub-title A Year's Letters, in a weekly periodical, long since extinct, called The Tattler, from August 25th to December 29th, 1877. It was written under the pseudonym of Mrs. Horace Manners, and was preceded by a letter "To the Author," supposed to come from some unnamed publisher or literary adviser, who returns her manuscript to the lady with much faultfinding on the ground of morality. The letter ends:

I recommend you, therefore, to suppress, or even to destroy, this book, for two reasons: It is a false picture of domestic life in England, because it suggests as possible the chance that a married lady may prefer some chance stranger to her husband, which is palpably and demonstrably absurd. It is also, as far as I can see, deficient in purpose and significance. Morality, I need not add, is the soul of art; a picture, poem, or story must be judged by the lesson it conveys. If it strengthens our hold upon fact, if it heightens our love of truth, if it rekindles our ardour for the right, it is admissible as good; if not, what shall we say of it?

The two final sentences of the first chapter, now omitted, are amusing enough to seem characteristic: "For the worldling's sneer may silence religion, but philanthropy is a tough fox and dies hard. The pietist may subside on attack into actual sermonising, and thence into a dumb agony of appeal against what he hears—the impotence of sincere disgust; but infinite coarse chaff will not shut up the natural lecturer; he snuffs sharply at all implied objection, and comes up to time again, gasping, verbose and resolute." But is there not a certain needless loss in the omission of two or three of the piquant passages in French? One is on the woman of sixty who "seule sait mettre du fard moral sans jurer avec." There is another passage in French which comes out of page 220; it is not clear why, for it is sprightly enough, as this is also, which drops out of page 175: "Ce sang répandu, voyez-vous, mon enfant, c'était la monnaie de sa vertu." I said I should have preferred it without the small change. "'Mais, avec de la grosse monnaie on n'achète jamais rien qui vaille,' she said placidly." Then follows, as we now have it: "C'était décidément une femme forte." Such, so slight, and at times so uncalled for, are the changes in this "disinterment" of "so early an attempt in the great art of fiction or creation."

In defending the form of his story in letters, Swinburne invokes the names of Richardson and Laclos and "the giant genius of Balzac." But the Mémoires des deux jeunes Mariées is full of firm reality, Pamela is full of patient analysis, and Les Liaisons dangereuses is full of reality, analysis, and a hard brilliant genius for psychology. Swinburne may have found in Laclos a little of his cynicism, though for that he need have gone no further than Stendhal, who is referred to in these pages, significantly. Some one says of some one: "I'd as soon read the Chartreuse de Parme as listen to her talk long; it is Stendhal diluted and transmuted." But neither in Laclos nor in Stendhal did he find that great novelist's gift which both have: that passion for life, and for the unraveling of the threads of life. His people and their doings are spectral, lunar; all the more so because their names are "Redgie," Frank, and only rarely Amicia; and because they talk schoolboy slang as schoolboys and French drawing-room slang as elderly people. They are presented by brilliant descriptive or satiric touches; they say the cleverest things of one another; they have a ghostly likeness to real people which one would be surprised that Swinburne should ever have tried to get, had he not repeated the same hopeless experiment in his modern play The Sisters, which sacrifices every possible charm of poetry or deep feeling to such a semblance; to so mere a mimicry of every-day speech and manners. There is more reality in any mere Félise or Fragoletta than in the plausible polite letter-writers. It is impossible to care what they are doing or have done; not easy indeed, without close reading, to find out; and, while there is hardly a sentence which we can not read with pleasure for its literary savor, its prim ironic elegance, there is not a page which we turn with the faintest thrill of curiosity. A novel which lacks interest may have every formal merit of writing, but it can not have merit as a novel. The novel professes to show us men and women, alive and in action: the one thing vitally interesting to men and women.

[ON CRITICISM]

Criticism is a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their direction. It is concerned with them only as force, and it is concerned only with force in its kind and degree.

The aim of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of a writer; and in order to do this, its first business must be to find out where he is different from all other writers. It is the delight of the critic to praise; but praise is scarcely a part of his duty. He may often seem to find himself obliged to condemn; yet condemnation is hardly a necessary part of his office. What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves: trace what in us is a whim or leaning to its remote home or center of gravity, and explain why we are affected in this way or that way by this or that writer. He studies origins in effects, and must know himself, and be able to allow for his own mental and emotional variations, if he is to do more than give us the records of his likes and dislikes. He must have the passion of the lover, and be enamored of every form of beauty; and, like the lover, not of all equally, but with a general allowance of those least to his liking. He will do well to be not without a touch of intolerance: that intolerance which, in the lover of the best, is an act of justice against the second-rate. The second-rate may perhaps have some reason for existence: that is doubtful; but the danger of the second-rate, if it is accepted "on its own merits," as people say, is that it may come to be taken for the thing it resembles, as a wavering image in water resembles the rock which it reflects.

Dryden, a poet who was even greater as a critic than as a poet, said, "True judgment in poetry, like that in painting, takes a view of the whole together, whether it be good or not; and where the beauties are more than the faults, concludes for the poet against the little judge." Here, in this decision, as to the proportions of merit and demerit in a work, is the critic's first task; it is one that is often overlooked by careful analysts, careless of what substance they are analyzing. What has been called the historical method is responsible for a great deal of these post-mortem dissections. How often do we not see learned persons engaged in this dismal occupation, not even conscious that they are fumbling among the bones and sinews of the dead. Such critics will examine the signs of life with equal gravity in living insignificances. But to the true critic a living insignificance is already dead.

And so, as in a dead man all the virtues go for nothing, no merit, no number of merits, of a secondary kind, in a writer who has been adjudged "not to exist," can avail anything. The critic concerns himself only with such as do exist. One of these, it may be, exists for a single book out of many books, a single poem out of many volumes of verse; an essay, an epigram, the preface to a book, a song out of a play. No perfect thing is too small for eternal recollection. But there are other writers who, though they have never condensed all their quality into any quite final achievement, live by a kind of bulk, live because there is in them something living, which refuses to go out. It is in his judgment of these two classes of writers, the measure of his skill in finding vital energy concentrated or diffused, in a cell or throughout an organism, that the critic is most likely to show his own quality. Charles Lamb is one of the greatest critics of Shakespeare, but the infallibility of his instinct as a critic is shown, not so much when he writes better about Lear than any one had ever written about Lear, but when he reveals to us, for the first time, the secret of Ford, the mainspring of Webster.

Criticism, when it is not mere talk about literature, concerns itself with the first principles of human nature and with fundamental ideas. There is a quite valuable kind of critic to whom a book is merely a book, who is interested in things only as they become words, in emotions only as they add fine raptures to printed pages. To such critics we owe rules and systems; when they tabulate or elucidate meter or any principle of form they are doing a humble but useful service to artists. Their comments on books are often pleasant reading, sometimes turning into a kind of literature, essays which we are content to read for their own charm. But there is hardly anything idler than literary criticism which is a mere describing and comparing of books, a mere praise and blame of this and that writer and his work. When Coleridge writes a criticism of Shakespeare, he is giving us his deepest philosophy, in a manner in which we can best apprehend it. Criticism with Goethe is part of his view of the world, his judgment of human nature, and of society. With Pater, criticism is quickened meditation; with Matthew Arnold, a form of moral instruction or mental satire. Lamb said in his criticism more of what he had to say of "what God and man is," with more gravity and more intensity, than in any other part of his work.

And thus it is that, while there is a great mass of valuable criticism done by critics who were only critics, the most valuable criticism of all, the only quite essential criticism, has been done by creative writers, for the most part poets. The criticism of a philosopher, Aristotle's, comes next to that of the poets, but is never that winged thing which criticism, as well as poetry, can be in the hands of a poet. Aristotle is the mathematician of criticism, while Coleridge is the high priest.

When Dryden said "poets themselves are the most proper, though, I conclude, not the only critics," he was stating a fact which many prose persons have tried, though vainly, to dispute. Baudelaire, in a famous passage of his essay on Wagner, has said with his invariable exactitude, "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 poets who are guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former there must come 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 production. It would be impossible for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic." And in England we have had few good poets who have not on occasion shown themselves good critics. What is perhaps strange is, that they have put some of their criticism into verse, and made it into poetry. From the days when Lydgate affirmed of Chaucer that "he of English in making was the best," to the days when Landor declared of Browning:

"Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk'd along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse;"

down, indeed, to the present days, when Swinburne has repaid Landor all his praise of poets, almost every English poet has been generously just to his contemporaries, and almost every poet has found the exact word of definition, of revelation, which the prose critics were laboriously hunting for, or still more laboriously writing round. To take a single example, could anything be more actually critical, in the severest sense of the word, than these lines of Shelley on Coleridge, lines which are not less admirable as verse than as criticism?

You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.

Those seven lines are not merely good criticism: they are final; they leave nothing more to be said. Criticism, at such a height, is no longer mere reasoning; it has the absolute sanction of intuition.

And, it will be found, the criticism of poets, not only such as is expressed, deliberately or by the way, in verse, but such as is set down by them in essays, or in letters, however carefully or casually, remains the most valuable criticism of poetry which we can get; and, similarly, the opinion of men of genius on their own work and on their own form of art, whatever it may be, is of more value than all the theories made by "little judges." The occasional notes and sayings of such men as Blake and Rossetti are often of more essential quality than their more ordered and elaborate comments. The essence they contain is undiluted. They are what is remembered over from a state of inspiration; and they are to be received as reports are received from eye-witnesses, whose honesty has already proved itself in authentic deeds.

The Biographia Literaria is the greatest book of criticism in English, and one of the most annoying books in any language. The thought of Coleridge has to be pursued across stones, ditches, and morasses; with haste, lingering, and disappointment; it turns back, loses itself, fetches wide circuits, and comes to no visible end. But you must follow it step by step; and if you are ceaselessly attentive, will be ceaselessly rewarded.

When Coleridge says, in this book, that "the ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principle of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others," he is defining that form of criticism in which he is supreme among critics. Lamb can be more instant in the detection of beauty; Pater can make over again an image or likeness of that beauty which he defines, with more sensitive precision; but no one has ever gone deeper down into the substance of creation itself, or more nearly reached that unknown point where creation begins. As poet, he knows; as philosopher, he understands; and thus, as critic, he can explain almost the origin of creation.

[THE DECADENT MOVEMENT IN
LITERATURE]

The latest movement in European literature has been called by many names, none of them quite exact or comprehensive—Decadence, Symbolism, Impressionism, for instance. It is easy to dispute over words, and we shall find that Verlaine objects to being called a Decadent, Maeterlinck to being called a Symbolist, Huysmans to being called an Impressionist. These terms, as it happens, have been adopted as the badge of little separate cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and exhaust their ingenuities in theorizing over the works they can not write. But, taken frankly as epithets which express their own meaning, both Impressionism and Symbolism convey some notion of that new kind of literature which is perhaps more broadly characterized by the word Decadence. The most representative literature of the day—the writing which appeals to, which has done so much to form, the younger generation—is certainly not classic, nor has it any relation with that old antithesis of the Classic, the Romantic. After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence: an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity. If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art—those qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the supreme qualities—then this representative literature of to-day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease.

Healthy we can not call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered. The Goncourts, in their prefaces, in their Journal, are always insisting on their own pet malady, la névrose. It is in their work too, that Huysmans notes with delight le style tacheté et faisandé—high-flavored and spotted with corruption—which he himself possesses in the highest degree. "Having desire without light, curiosity, without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, by ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness"—that is how Ernest Hello, in one of his apocalyptic moments, characterizes the nineteenth century. And this unreason of the soul—of which Hello himself is so curious a victim—this unstable equilibrium, which has overbalanced so many brilliant intelligences into one form or another of spiritual confusion, is but another form of the maladie fin de siècle. For its very disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilization grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It reflects all the moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society; its very artificiality is a way of I being true to nature: simplicity, sanity, proportion—the classic qualities—how much do we possess them in our life, our surroundings, that we should look to find them in our literature—so evidently the literature of a decadence?

Taking the word Decadence, then, as most precisely expressing the general sense of the newest movement in literature, we find that the terms Impressionism and Symbolism define correctly enough the two main branches of that movement. Now Impressionist and Symbolist have more in common than either supposes; both are really working on the same hypothesis, applied in different directions. What both seek is not general truth merely, but vérité vraie, the very essence of truth—the truth of appearances to the senses, of the visible world to the eyes that see it; and the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual vision. The Impressionist, in literature as in painting, would flash upon you in a new, sudden way so exact an image of what you have just seen, just as you have seen it, that you may say, as a young American sculptor, a pupil of Rodin, said to me on seeing for the first time a picture of Whistler's, "Whistler seems to think his picture upon canvas—and there it is!" Or you may find, with Sainte-Beuve, writing of Goncourt, the "soul of the landscape"—the soul of whatever corner of the visible world has to be realized. The Symbolist, in this new, sudden way, would I flash upon you the "soul" of that which can be apprehended only by the soul—the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meaning of things evident. And naturally, necessarily, this endeavor after a perfect truth to one's impression, to one's intuition—perhaps an impossible endeavor—has brought with it, in its revolt from ready-made impressions and conclusions, a revolt from the ready-made of language, from the bondage of traditional form, of a form become rigid. In France, where this movement began and has mainly flourished, it is Goncourt who was the first to invent a style in prose really new, impressionistic, a style which was itself almost sensation. It is Verlaine who has invented such another new style in verse.

The work of the brothers De Goncourt—twelve novels, eleven or twelve studies in the history of the eighteenth century, six or seven books about art, the art mainly of the eighteenth century and of Japan, two plays, some volumes of letters and of fragments, and a Journal in six volumes—is perhaps, in its intention and its consequences, the most revolutionary of the century. No one has ever tried so deliberately to do something new as the Goncourts; and the final word in the summing up which the survivor has placed at the head of the Préfaces et Manifestes is a word which speaks of tentatives, enfin, où les deux frères ont à faire du neuf, ont fait leurs efforts pour doter les diverses branches de la littérature de quelque chose que n'avaient point songé à trouver leurs prédécesseurs. And in the preface to Chérie, in that pathetic passage which tells of the two brothers (one mortally stricken, and within a few months of death) taking their daily walk in the Bois de Boulogne, there is a definite demand on posterity. "The search after reality in literature, the resurrection of eighteenth-century art, the triumph of Japonisme—are not these," said Jules, "the three great literary and artistic movements of the second half of the nineteenth century? And it is we who brought them about, these three movements. Well, when one has done that, it is difficult indeed not to be somebody in the future." Nor, even, is this all. What the Goncourts have done is to specialize vision, so to speak, and to subtilize language to the point of rendering every detail in just the form and color of the actual impression. Edmond de Goncourt once said to me—varying, if I remember rightly, an expression he had put into the Journal—"My brother and I invented an opera-glass: the young people nowadays are taking it out of our hands."

An opera-glass—a special, unique way of seeing things—that is what the Goncourts have brought to bear upon the common things about us; and it is here that they have done the "something new," here more than anywhere. They have never sought "to see life steadily, and see it whole:" their vision has always been somewhat feverish, with the diseased sharpness of over-excited nerves. "We do not hide from ourselves that we have been passionate, nervous creatures, unhealthily impressionable," confesses the Journal. But it is this morbid intensity in seeing and seizing things that has helped to form that marvelous style—"a style perhaps too ambitious of impossibilities," as they admit—a style which inherits some of its color from Gautier, some of its fine outline from Flaubert, but which has brought light and shadow into the color, which has softened outline in the magic of atmosphere. With them words are not merely color and sound, they live. That search after l'image peinte, l'épithète rare, is not (as with Flaubert) a search after harmony of phrase for its own sake; it is a desperate endeavor to give sensation, to flash the impression of the moment, to preserve the very heat and motion of life. And so, in analysis as in description, they have found a way of noting the fine shades; they have broken the outline of the conventional novel in chapters, with its continuous story, in order to indicate—sometimes in a chapter of half a page—this and that revealing moment, this or that significant attitude or accident or sensation. For the placid traditions of French prose they have had but little respect; their aim has been but one, that of having (as M. Edmond de Goncourt tells us in the preface to Chérie) "une langue rendant nos idées, nos sensations, nos figurations des hommes et des choses, d'une façon distincte de celui-ci ou de celui-là, une langue personnelle, une langue portant notre signature."

What Goncourt has done in prose—inventing absolutely a new way of saying things, to correspond with that new way of seeing things which he has found—Verlaine has done in verse. In a famous poem, Art Poétique, he has himself defined his own ideal of the poetic art:

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance!
Oh! la Nuance seule fiance
Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor!

Music first of all and before all, he insists; and then, not color, but la nuance, the last fine shade. Poetry is to be something vague, intangible, evanescent, a winged soul in flight "toward other skies and other loves." To express the inexpressible he speaks of beautiful eyes behind a veil, of the palpitating sunlight of noon, of the blue swarm of clear stars in a cool autumn sky; and the verse in which he makes this confession of faith has the exquisite troubled beauty—sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose—which he commends as the essential quality of verse. In a later poem of poetical counsel he tells us that art should, first of all, be absolutely clear, absolutely sincere: L'art mes enfants, c'est d'être absolument soi-même. The two poems, with their seven years' interval—an interval which means so much in the life of a man like Verlaine—give us all that there is of theory in the work of the least theoretical, the most really instinctive, of poetical innovators. Verlaine's poetry has varied with his life; always in excess—now furiously sensual, now feverishly devout—he has been constant only to himself, to his own self-contradictions. For, with all the violence, turmoil and disorder of a life which is almost the life of a modern Villon, Paul Verlaine has always retained that childlike simplicity, and, in his verse, which has been his confessional, that fine sincerity, of which Villon may be thought to have set the example in literature.

Beginning his career as a Parnassian with the Poèmes Saturniens, Verlaine becomes himself, in the Fêtes Galantes, caprices after Watteau, followed, a year later, by La Bonne Chanson, a happy record of too confident a lover's happiness. Romances sans Paroles, in which the poetry of Impressionism reaches its very highest point, is more tourmenté, goes deeper, becomes more poignantly personal. It is the poetry of sensation, of evocation; poetry which paints as well as sings, and which paints as Whistler paints, seeming to think the colors and outlines upon the canvas, to think them only, and they are there. The mere magic of words—words which evoke pictures, which recall sensations—can go no further; and in his next book, Sagesse, published after seven years' wanderings and sufferings, there is a graver manner of more deeply personal confession—that "sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the letter," which he has defined in a prose criticism on himself as his main preference in regard to style. "Sincerity, and the impression of the moment followed to the letter," mark the rest of Verlaine's work, whether the sentiment be that of passionate friendship, as in Amour; of love, human and divine, as in Bonheur; of the mere lust of the flesh, as in Parallèlement and Chansons pour Elle. In his very latest verse the quality of simplicity has become exaggerated, has become, at times, childish; the once exquisite depravity of style has lost some of its distinction; there is no longer the same delicately vivid "impression of the moment" to render. Yet the very closeness with which it follows a lamentable career gives a curious interest to even the worst of Verlaine's work. And how unique, how unsurpassable in its kind, is the best! "Et tout le reste est littérature!" was the cry, supreme and contemptuous, of that early Art Poétique; and, compared with Verlaine at his best, all other contemporary work in verse seems not yet disenfranchised from mere "literature." To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul: that is the ideal of Decadence, and it is what Paul Verlaine has achieved.

And certainly, so far as achievement goes, no other poet of the actual group in France can be named beside him or near him. But in Stéphane Mallarmé, with his supreme pose as the supreme poet, and his two or three pieces of exquisite verse and delicately artificial prose to show by way of result, we have—the prophet and pontiff of the movement, the mystical and theoretical leader of the great emancipation. No one has ever dreamed such beautiful, impossible dreams as Mallarmé; no one has ever so possessed his soul in the contemplation of masterpieces to come. All his life he has been haunted by the desire to create, not so much something new in literature, as a literature which should itself be a new art. He has dreamed of a work into which all the arts should enter, and achieve themselves by a mutual interdependence—a harmonizing of all the arts into one supreme art—and he has theorized with infinite subtlety over the possibilities of doing the impossible. Every Tuesday for the last twenty years he has talked more fascinatingly, more suggestively, than any one else has ever done, in that little room in the Rue de Rome, to that little group of eager young poets. "A seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all," he has carried his contempt for the usual, the conventional, beyond the point of literary expression, into the domain of practical affairs. Until the publication, quite recently, of a selection of Vers et Prose, it was only possible to get his poems in a limited and expensive edition, lithographed in facsimile of his own clear and elegant handwriting. An aristocrat of letters, Mallarmé has always looked with intense disdain on the indiscriminate accident of universal suffrage. He has wished neither to be read nor to be understood by the bourgeois intelligence, and it is with some deliberateness of intention that he has made both issues impossible. Catulle Mendès defines him admirably as "a difficult author," and in his latest period he has succeeded in becoming absolutely unintelligible. His early poems, L'Après-midi d'un Faune, Herodiade, for example, and some exquisite sonnets, and one or two fragments of perfectly polished verse, are written in a language which has nothing in common with every-day language—symbol within symbol, image within image; but symbol and image achieve themselves in expression without seeming to call for the necessity of a key. The latest poems (in which punctuation is sometimes entirely suppressed, for our further bewilderment) consist merely of a sequence of symbols, in which every word must be taken in a sense with which its ordinary significance has nothing to do. Mallarmé's contortion of the French language, so far as mere style is concerned, is curiously similar to the kind of depravation which was undergone by the Latin language in its decadence. It is, indeed, in part a reversion to Latin phraseology, to the Latin construction, and it has made, of the clear and flowing French language, something irregular, unquiet, expressive, with sudden surprising felicities, with nervous starts and lapses, with new capacities for the exact noting of sensation. Alike to the ordinary and to the scholarly reader, it is painful, intolerable; a jargon, a massacre. Supremely self-confident, and backed, certainly, by an ardent following of the younger generation, Mallarmé goes on his way, experimenting more and more audaciously, having achieved by this time, at all events, a style wholly his own. Yet the chef-d'œvre inconnu seems no nearer completion, the impossible seems no more likely to be done. The two or three beautiful fragments remain, and we still hear the voice in the Rue de Rome.

Probably it is as a voice, an influence, that Mallarmé will be remembered. His personal magnetism has had a great deal to do with the making of the very newest French literature; few literary beginners in Paris have been able to escape the rewards and punishments of his contact, his suggestion. One of the young poets who form that delightful Tuesday evening coterie said to me the other day, "We owe much to Mallarmé, but he has kept us all back three years." That is where the danger of so inspiring, so helping a personality comes in. The work even of Henri de Regnier, who is the best of the disciples, has not entirely got clear from the influence that has shown his fine talent the way to develop. Perhaps it is in the verse of men who are not exactly following in the counsel of the master—who might disown him, whom he might disown—that one sees most clearly the outcome of his theories, the actual consequences of his practise. In regard to the construction of verse, Mallarmé has always remained faithful to the traditional syllabic measurement; but the freak or the discovery of le vers libre is certainly the natural consequence of his experiments upon the elasticity of rhythm, upon the power of resistance of the cæsura. Le vers libre in the hands of most of the experimenters becomes merely rhymeless irregular prose. I never really understood the charm that may be found in this apparent structureless rhythm until I heard, not long since, Dujardin read aloud the as yet unpublished conclusion of a dramatic poem in several parts. It was rhymed, but rhymed with some irregularity, and the rhythm was purely and simply a vocal effect. The rhythm came and went as the spirit moved. You might deny that it was rhythm at all; and yet, read as I heard it read, in a sort of slow chant, it produced on me the effect of really beautiful verse. But vers libres in the hands of a sciolist are the most intolerably easy and annoying of poetical exercises. Even in the case of Le Pèlerin Passionné I can not see the justification of what is merely regular syllabic verse lengthened or shortened arbitrarily, with the Alexandrine always evident in the background as the foot-rule of the new metre. In this hazardous experiment Jean Moréas, whose real talent lies in quite another direction, has brought nothing into literature but an example of deliberate singularity for singularity's sake. I seem to find the measure of the man in a remark I once heard him make in a café, where we were discussing the technique of meter: "You, Verlaine!" he cried, leaning across the table, "have only written lines of sixteen syllables; I have written lines of twenty syllables!" And turning to me, he asked anxiously if Swinburne had ever done that—had written a line of twenty syllables.

That is indeed the measure of the man, and it points a criticism upon not a few of the busy little littérateurs who are founding new revues every other week in Paris. These people have nothing to say, but they are resolved to say something, and to say it in the newest mode. They are Impressionists because it is the fashion, Symbolists because it is the vogue, Decadents because Decadence is in the very air of the cafés. And so, in their manner, they are mile-posts on the way of this new movement, telling how far it has gone. But to find a new personality, a new way of seeing things, among the young writers who are starting up on every hand, we must turn from Paris to Brussels—to the so-called Belgian Shakespeare, Maurice Maeterlinck.

In truth, Maeterlinck is not a Shakespeare, and the Elizabethan violence of his first play is of the school of Webster and Tourneur rather than of Shakespeare. As a dramatist he has but one note, that of fear; he has but one method, that of repetition.

The window, looking out upon the unseen—an open door, as in L'Intruse, through which Death, the intruder, may come invisibly—how typical of the new kind of symbolistic and impressionistic drama which Maeterlinck has invented! I say invented, a little rashly. The real discoverer of this new kind of drama was that strange, inspiring, incomplete man of genius whom Maeterlinck, above all others, delights to honor, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Imagine a combination of Swift, of Poe, and of Coleridge, and you will have some idea of the extraordinary, impossible poet and cynic who, after a life of brilliant failure, has left a series of unfinished works in every kind of literature; among the finished achievements one volume of short stories, Contes Cruels, which is an absolute masterpiece. Yet, apart from this, it was the misfortune of Villiers never to attain the height of his imaginings, and even Axël, the work of a lifetime, is an achievement only half achieved. Only half achieved, or achieved only in the work of others; for, in its mystical intention, its remoteness from any kind of outward reality, Axël is undoubtedly the origin of the symbolistic drama. This drama, in Villiers, is of pure symbol, of sheer poetry. It has an exalted eloquence which we find in none of his followers. As Maeterlinck has developed it, it is a drama which appeals directly to the sensations—sometimes crudely, sometimes subtly—playing its variations upon the very nerves themselves. The "vague spiritual fear" which it creates out of our nervous apprehension is unlike anything that has ever been done before, even by Hoffman, even by Poe. It is an effect of atmosphere—an atmosphere in which outlines change and become mysterious, in which a word quietly uttered makes one start, in which all one's mental activity becomes concentrated on something, one knows not what, something slow, creeping, terrifying, which comes nearer and nearer, an impending nightmare.

As an experiment in a new kind of drama, these curious plays do not seem to exactly achieve themselves on the stage; it is difficult to imagine how they could ever be made so impressive, when thus externalized, as they are when all is left to the imagination. L'Intruse, for instance, seemed, as one saw it acted, too faint in outline, with too little carrying power for scenic effect. But Maeterlinck is by no means anxious to be considered merely or mainly as a dramatist. A brooding poet, a mystic, a contemplative spectator of the comedy of death—that is how he presents himself to us in his work; and the introduction which he has prefixed to his translation of L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, of Ruysbroeck l'Admirable, shows how deeply he has studied the mystical writers of all ages, and how much akin to theirs is his own temper. Plato and Plotinus, Saint Bernard and Jacob Boehm, Coleridge and Novalis—he knows them all, and it is with a sort of reverence that he sets himself to the task of translating the astonishing Flemish mystic of the thirteenth century, known till now only by the fragments translated into French by Ernest Hollo from a sixteenth-century Latin version. This translation and this introduction help to explain the real character of Maeterlinck's dramatic work—dramatic as to form, by a sort of accident, but essentially mystical.

Partly akin to Maeterlinck by race, more completely alien from him in temper than it is possible to express, Joris Karl Huysmans demands a prominent place in any record of the Decadent movement. His work, like that of the Goncourts, is largely determined by the maladie fin de siècle—the diseased nerves that, in his case, have given a curious personal quality of pessimism to his outlook on the world, his view of life. Part of his work—Marthe, Les Sœurs Vatard, En Ménage, À Vau-l'Eau—is a minute and searching study of the minor discomforts, the commonplace miseries of life, as seen by a peevishly disordered vision, delighting, for its own self-torture, in the insistent contemplation of human stupidity, of the sordid in existence. Yet these books do but lead up to the unique masterpiece, the astonishing caprice of À Rebours, in which he has concentrated all that is delicately depraved, all that is beautifully, curiously poisonous, in modern art. À Rebours is the history of a typical Decadent—a study, indeed, after a real man, but a study which seizes the type rather than the personality. In the sensations and ideas of Des Esseintes we see the sensations and ideas of the effeminate, over-civilized, deliberately abnormal creature who is the last product of our society: partly the father, partly the offspring, of the perverse art that he adores. Des Esseintes creates for his solace, in the wilderness of a barren and profoundly uncomfortable world, an artificial paradise. His Thébaïde raffinée is furnished elaborately for candle-light, equipped with the pictures, the books, that satisfy his sense of the exquisitely abnormal. He delights in the Latin of Apuleius and Petronius, in the French of Baudelaire, Goncourt, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Villiers; in the pictures of Gustave Moreau, of Odilon Redon. He delights in the beauty of strange, unnatural flowers, in the melodic combination of scents, in the imagined harmonies of the sense of taste. And at last, exhausted by these spiritual and sensory debauches in the delights of the artificial, he is left (as we close the book) with a brief, doubtful choice before him—madness or death, or else a return to nature, to the normal life.

Since À Rebours, Huysmans has written one other remarkable book, Là-Bas, a study in the hysteria and mystical corruption of contemporary Black Magic. But it is on that one exceptional achievement, À Rebours, that his fame will rest; it is there that he has expressed not merely himself, but an epoch. And he has done so in a style which carries the modern experiments upon language to their furthest development. Formed upon Goncourt and Flaubert, it has sought for novelty, l'image peinte, the exactitude of color, the forcible precision of epithet, wherever words, images, or epithets are to be found. Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is—especially in regard to things seen—extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans' work—so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial—comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature.

[THE ROSSETTIS]

William Michael Rossetti, who has just died, survived his brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, by thirty-seven years, dying at the age of eighty-nine. Not really a man of letters, in the essential sense, his verse, as Gabriel said, "Always going back on the old track," he had a certain talent of his own; for he edited an excellent edition of Blake's Poems, and a creditable edition of Shelley, the first critical edition of his poems.

He was the first Englishman who ever dared to print a Selection from Whitman's Leaves of Grass,—in 1868; and, in spite of having to exclude such passages as he considered indecent, the whole book was a valuable contribution to our literature.

There is no question that Michael was not invaluable to Gabriel; indeed, during the whole of the tragic and wonderful life of that man of supreme genius; not only because he dedicated his Poems of 1870 to one "who had given them the first brotherly hearing;" not only because, had not Michael been with him at the British Museum on the ever-memorable and unforgettable date of April 30, 1847, he had never bought the imperishable MS. Book of Blake, borrowing for this purchase ten shillings from his brother; but also because when Rossetti, after his wife's death, had his manuscript volume of poems exhumed in October, 1869, he did the right thing, both in his impetuous act in burying them beside his dead wife and in his silence with his brother—who was really aware of the event—so that his own tortured nerves might have some respite.

Still, I have never forgotten how passionately Eleanore Duse said to me, in 1900:

Rossetti's eyes desire some feverish thing, but the mouth and chin hesitate in pursuit. All Rossetti is in that story of his MS. buried in his wife's coffin. He could do it, he could repent of it; but he should have gone and taken it back himself: he sent his friends.

In one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's invaluable notes on Poetry, he tells us that to him "the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love." That Rossetti, whose face indicated voluptuousness brooding thoughtfully over destiny, was intensely sensitive, is true; and this made him a sort of medium to forces seen and unseen. Yet, I think, he wanted in life more than most men of such genius as he had wanted. For, as Watts-Dunton said: "He was the slave of his imagination—an imagination of a power and dominance such as I have never seen equalled. Of his vividness, no artistic expression of his can give any notion. He had not the smallest command over it." That is one of the reasons why, with all his affection for his brother Michael, the chasm between them was immense—a chasm no dragon-created bridge could ever span; Gabriel had in him, perhaps, too much of "chasm-fire": his genius was too flame-fledged for earth's eternity, to have ever had one wing of it broken by an enemy's shaft.

No modern poet ever had anything like the same grasp upon whatever is essential in poetry that Rossetti had; for all that he wrote or said about Art has in it an absolute rightness of judgment; and, with these, as absolutely, an intellectual sanity. Here is one principle of artistic creation stated with instantaneous certainty: "Conception, fundamental brain work, that is what makes the difference in all art. Work your metal as much as you like, but first take care that the gold was worth working." But it is, strangely enough, that at the beginning of a review of Hake's Parables and Tales he says the final, the inevitable words on creation and on what lies in the artist's mind before the act of creation:

The first and highest is that where the work has been all mentally "cartooned," as it were, beforehand by a process intensely conscious, but patient and silent—an occult evolution of life: then follows the glory of wielding words, and we see the hand of Dante, as the hand of Michelangelo—or almost as that quickening hand which Michelangelo has dared to embody—sweep from left to right, fiery and final.

In 1862, Rossetti took possession of his famous house, 10 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived to the end of his life, and whose joint occupants were, for a certain length of time, George Meredith, Swinburne and William Michael Rossetti, who left the house in 1874, the year in which he married Lucy Madox Brown.

That four men of individualities so utterly different, and, in some senses, aggressive, or at least assertive, should have been able to live together in closeness of continuous intimacy, from which there was hardly an escape, was barely conceivable. Yet it was in this house that Swinburne wrote many of his Poems Ballads, part of his book on Blake and his masterpiece, Atalanta in Calydon. There Meredith finished his masterpiece in the matter of tragic and passionate verse, Modern Love. There is nothing like it in the whole of English poetry, nor did he ever achieve so magnificent a vivisection of the heart in verse as in these pages—in which he created a wonderful style, acid, stinging, bitter-sweet, poignant—where these self-torturing and cruel lovers weave the amazing web of their disillusions as they struggle, open-eyed, against the blindness of passion.

The poem laughs while it cries.

Swinburne, who was, I think, on the whole, less susceptible in regard to abusive attacks on his books than Meredith or Rossetti, vindicates himself, and superbly, in the pamphlet I have before me: Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866). He has been accused of indecency and immorality and perversity; and is amazed to find that Anactoria "has excited, among the chaste and candid critics of the day, or hour, or minute, a more vehement reputation, a more virtuous horror, a more passionate appeal, than any other of my writing. I am evidently not virtuous enough to understand them. I thank Heaven that I am not. Ma corruption rougirait de leur pudeur."

In regard to Laus Veneris, I turn for a moment to W. M. Rossetti's Swinburne's Poems and Ballads: A criticism (1866) which, on the whole, is uncommonly well written, to one of those passages where he betrays a kind of Puritanism in his Italian blood; saying that the opening lines were, apart from any question of sentiment, much overdone. "That is a situation (and there are many such in Swinburne's writings) which we would much rather see touched off with the reticence of a Tennyson: he would probably have given one epithet, or, at the utmost, one line, to it, and it would at least equally have haunted the memory." I turn from this to Swinburne on Tennyson, as for instance: "At times, of course, his song was then as sweet as ever it has sounded since; but he could never make sure of singing right for more than a few minutes or stanzas." And—what is certainly true—that Vivien's impurity is eclipsed by her incredible and incomparable vulgarity. "She is such a sordid creature as plucks men passing by the sleeve."

Now the actual origin of Laus Veneris came about when Swinburne, with Rossetti, bought the first edition of Fitzgerald's wonderful version of Omar Khayyam. "We invested," Swinburne writes, "in hardly less than six-penny-worth apiece, and on returning to the stall next day, for more, found that we had sent up the market to the sinfully extravagant price of two-pence, an imposition which evoked from Rossetti a fervent and impressive remonstrance." Swinburne went down to stay with Meredith in the country with the priceless book; and, before lunch, they read, alternately, stanza after stanza. The result was that, after lunch, Swinburne went to his room and came down to Meredith's study with his invariable blue paper and wrote there and then thirteen stanzas of Veneris, that end with the lines:

Till when the spool is finished, lo I see
His web, reeled off, curls and goes out like steam.

His only invention was the certainly cunning one of inserting a rhyme after the second line of each stanza, which is not in the version.

Swinburne's re-creation of the immortal legend of Venus and her Knight, certainly—though certainly unknown to W. M. Rossetti—owes also much of its origin from Swinburne's inordinate admiration of Les Fleurs du Mal, by Baudelaire. Its origin, in a certain sense only; that is of the influence of one poet on the other. For, as he says:

It was not till my poem was completed that I received from the hands of its author the admirable pamphlet of Charles Baudelaire on Wagner's Tannhauser. If anyone desires to see, expressed in better words than I can command, the conception of the mediæval Venus which it was my aim to put into verse, let him turn to the magnificent passage in which Baudelaire describes the fallen goddess, grown diabolic among eyes that would not accept her as divine.

I need not reiterate the extraordinary influence that Baudelaire always had on Swinburne; seen most of all in Poems and Ballads and recurring at intervals in later volumes of his verse. Both had in their genius, a certain abnormality, a certain perversity, a certain love of depravity in the highest sense of the word.

Swinburne, who had a fashion of overpraising many writers, such as Hugo, so that his prose is often extravagant and the criticism as unbalanced as the praise, dedicated his finest book, "William Blake," to W. M. Rossetti, in words whose almost strained sense of humility—a way really in which he often showed the intensity of his pride—makes one wonder how he could have said: "I can but bring you brass for the gold you send me; but between equals and friends there can be no question of barter. Like Diomed, I take what I am given and offer what I have." What Swinburne had—his genius—he never gave away lavishly; here he is much too lavish. "There is a joy in praising" might have been written for him, and he communicates to us, as few writers do, his own sense of joy in beauty. It is quite possible to be annoyed by many of the things he has said, not only about literature, but also about religion, and morals and politics. But he has never said anything on any of these subjects which is not generous, and high-minded, and, at least for the moment, passionately and absolutely sincere.

It is almost cruel to have to test one sentence of the man of talent with one sentence of the man of genius. I chose these from the Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition they wrote together in 1868, which I have before me, in the form of a printed pamphlet. "If everybody tells me that the picture of A, of which this pamphlet says nothing, merits criticism, or that the picture of B, praised for color, claims praise on the score of drawing also, I shall have no difficulty in admitting the probable correctness of these remarks; but, if he adds that I am blamable for the omissions, I shall feel entitled to reply that A's picture and B's draughtsmanship were not and indeed never were in the bond."

How honestly that is written and how prosaically, "Pale as from poison, with the blood drawn back from her very lips, agonized in face and limbs with the labor and the fierce contention of old love with new, of a daughter's love with a bride's, the fatal figure of Medea pauses a little on the funereal verge of the wood of death, in act to pour a blood-like liquid into the soft opal-coloured hollow of a shell." How princely that praise of Sandys rings in one's ears, lyrical prose that quickens the blood! But the greater marvel to me is that Swinburne in his Miscellanies, of 1866, should have quoted two sentences of Rossetti on Shakespeare's Sonnets and ended by saying: "These words themselves deserve to put on immortality: there are none truer or nobler, wiser or more memorable in the whole historic range of highest criticism." I can only imagine it as that of an arrow in flight: only, it loses the mark.

It was when Christina Rossetti was living at 30 Torrington Square that I spent several entrancing hours with her. She had still traces of her Italian beauty; but all the loveliness had gone out of her, so subtly and so delicately painted by Gabriel when she was young. The moment she entered, dressed simply and severely, she bowed, almost curtsied, with that old-fashioned charm that since her time has gone mostly out of the world. Her face lit up when she spoke of Gabriel: for between them was always love and admiration. His genius, to her, both as a poet and a painter, invariably received her elaborate and unstinted praise.

She told me that Gabriel had said to her: "The Convent Threshold is a very splendid piece of feminine ascetic passion; and, to me, one of your greatest poems is that on France after the Siege—To-Day for me." And that Swinburne specially loved Passing away, saith the world, passing away. It always seems to me that as she had read Leopardi and Baudelaire, the thought of death had for her the same fascination; only it is not the fascination of attraction, as with the one, nor repulsion, as with the other, but of interest, sad but scarcely unquiet interest in what the dead are doing underground, in their memories, if memory they have, of the world they have left.

Yet this fact is of curious interest, knowing the purity of her imagination, that when Swinburne sent her his Atalanta in Calydon she crossed out in ink one line:

"The supreme evil, God."

Swinburne himself told me of his amazement and amusement when he happened to turn to this page while he was looking through the copy he had sent her.

It was one of Gabriel Rossetti's glories to paint luxurious women, surrounded by every form of luxury. And some of them are set to pose in Eastern garments, with caskets in their hands and flames about them, looking out with unsearchable eyes. His colors, before they began to have, like his forms, an exaggeration, a blurred vision which gave him the need of repainting, of depriving his figures of life, were as if charmed into their own places; they took on at times some strange and stealthy and startling ardors of paint, with a subtle fury.

By his fiery imagination, his restless energy, he created a world: curious, astonishing, at first sight; strange, morbid, and subtly beautiful. Everything he made was chiefly for his own pleasure; he had a contempt for the outside world, and his life was so given up to beauty, in search for it and in finding of it, that one can but say not only that his life was passion consumed by passion, as his nerves became more and more his tyrants (tyrants, indeed, these were, more formidable and more alluring and more tempting than even the nerves confess), but also that, to put it in the words of Walter Pater: "To him life is a crisis at every moment."

There was in him, as in many artists, the lust of the eyes. And as others feasted their lust on elemental things, as in Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, as in Whistler's Valparaiso, as in the Olympia of Manet, as in a Décors de Ballet of Degas, so did Rossetti upon other regions than theirs. He had neither the evasive and instinctive genius of Whistler, nor Turner's tremendous sweep of vision, nor the creative and fiercely imaginative genius of Manet. But he had his own way of feasting on forms and visions more sensuous, more nervously passionate, more occult, perhaps, than theirs.

Yet, as his intentions overpower him, as he becomes the slave and no longer the master of his dreams, his pictures become no longer symbolic. They become idols. Venus, growing more and more Asiatic as the moon's crescent begins to glitter above her head, and her name changes from Aphrodite into Astarte, loses all the freshness of the waves from which she was born, and her own sorcery hardens into a wooden image painted to be the object of savage worship.

Dreams are no longer content to be turned into waking realities, taking the color of the daylight, that they may be visible to our eyes, but they remain lunar, spectral, a dark and unintelligible menace.

[CONFESSIONS AND COMMENTS]

I

I met George Moore, during a feverish winter I spent in Paris in 1890, at the house of Doctor John Chapman, 46 Avenue Kleber; who at one time, before he settled there, had been the Proprietor and then Editor of The Westminster Review. In his review appeared in 1886 Pater's wonderful and fascinating essay on Coleridge; in 1887 his penetrating and revealing essay on Wincklemann. "He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motives and tendencies."

At that time I had heard a good deal of Moore; I had read very few of his novels; these I had found to be entertaining, realistic, and decadent; and certainly founded on modern French fiction. He made little or no impression on me on that occasion; he was Irish and amusing. Our conversation was probably on Paris and France and French prose. He gave me his address, King's Bench Walk, Inner Temple, and asked me to call on him after my return to London.

I was born, "like a fiend hid in a cloud," cruel, nervous, excitable, passionate, restless, never quite human, never quite normal and, from the fact that I have never known what it was to have a home, as most children know it, my life has been in many ways a wonderful, in certain ways a tragic one: an existence, indeed, so inexplicable even to myself, that I can not fathom it. If I have been a vagabond, and have never been able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.

When I came up to London, in 1889, I was fortunate enough to take one room in a narrow street, named Fountain Court. In 1821 Blake left South Molton Street for Fountain Court, where he remained for the rest of his life. The side window looked down through an opening between the houses, showing the river and the hills beyond; Blake worked at a table facing the window. At that time I had only seen the Temple; so that when I entered it for the first time in my life, to call on Moore, I was seized by a sudden fascination which never left me. I questioned him as to the chances I might have of finding rooms there; he wisely advised me to look at the outside of the window of the barber's shop, where notices of vacant flats were put up. Finally I saw: "Fountain Court: rooms to let." I immediately made all the necessary inquiries; and found myself in March, 1871, entire possessor of the top flat, which had a stone balcony from which I looked down on a wide open court, with a stone fountain in the middle. I lived there for ten years. My most intimate friends were, first and foremost, Yeats, then Moore: all three of us being of Celtic origin.

My intercourse with Moore was mostly at night; that is, when I was not wandering in foreign countries or absorbed in much more animal and passionate affairs. I dedicated to him Studies in Two Literatures 1897; the dedication was written in Rome, which begins: "My dear Moore, Do you remember, at the time when we were both living in the Temple, and our talks used to begin with midnight, and go on until the first glimmerings of dawn shivered among the trees, yours and mine; do you remember how often we have discussed, well, I suppose, everything which I speak of in these studies in the two literatures which we both chiefly care about." It ends: "I think of our conversations now in Rome, where, as in those old times in the Temple, I still look out of my window on a fountain in a square; only, here, I have the Pantheon to look at, on the other side of my fountain."

George Moore, whose Pagan Poems were a mixture of atrociously rhymed sensations, abnormal and monstrous, decadent and depraved, not without a sense of luxury and of color, and yet nothing more than feverish fancies and delirious dreams, has in some way fashioned a French sonnet which is an evident imitation of Mallarmé's. Only, between these writers is, as it were, an abyss. It has been Mallarmé's distinction to have always aspired after an impossible liberation of the soul of literature from what is fretting and constraining in "the body of that death" which is the mere literature of words. Finally come his "last period"—after the jewels of Hérodiade, which scattered and recaptured sudden fire,—in which his spirit wandered in an opaque darkness; as for instance, in the sonnet, made miraculously out of the repetition of two rhymes—"onyx lampadophore"—or, by preference, one that begins:

Une dentelle s'abolit.

Here, then, is Moore's sonnet to Edouard Dujardin.

La chair est bonne de l'alose
Plus fine que celle du bar,
Mais la Loire est loin et je n'ose
Abandonner Pierre Abélard.
Je suis un esclave de l'art;
La sage Héloise se pose
Sans robe, sans coiffe et sans fard,
Et j'oublie aisément l'alose.
Mais je vois la claire maison—
Arbres, pelouses et statue.
Du jardin, j'entend ta leçon:
Raison qui sauve, foi qui tue,
Autels éclabousses du son
Que verse une idole abattue.

I find in Moore's Confessions these sentences: "A year passed; a year of art and dissipation—one part art, two parts dissipation. And we thought there was something very thrilling in leaving the Rue de la Gaieté, returning to my home to dress, and presenting our spotless selves to the élite. And we succeeded very well, as indeed all young men do who waltz perfectly and avoid making love to the wrong woman." I should have preferred to read those sentences in French rather than in English; they are essentially Parisian and of the grands Boulevards; only, the end of the last sentence must have been suggested from some cynical phrase written by Balzac. Add to this the egoism of the Irishman: after that, what more do we need in the way of comparisons?

That Balzac is the greatest, the most profound, thinker in French literature after Blaise Pascal, is certain. Only, he had a more creative genius than any novelist, a genius unsurpassable and unsurpassed; in proof of which—if such a proof were actually required—I give these sentences of Baudelaire translated by Swinburne. "To me it had always seemed that it was his chief merit to be a visionary, and a passionate visionary; all his characters are gifted with the ardours of life which animated himself. In a word, every one in Balzac, down to the very scullions, has genius. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. It is actually Balzac himself." Somewhere, he compares Shakespeare with Balzac; and adds: "Balzac asserts, and Balzac cannot blunder or lie. He has that wonderful wisdom, never at fault on its own ground, which made him not simply the chief of dramatic story, but also the great master of morals."

No critic could for one instant apply to any of George Moore's novels the phrase of "grand spiritual realism." A realist he always has been; a realist, who, having founded himself on French novelists, has really, in certain senses, brought something utterly new into English fiction. Luckily, he is Irish; luckily, he lived the best years of his youth in Paris. His prose shows the intense labor with which he produced every chapter of every novel; in fact, there is too much of the laborious mind in all his books. He was right in saying in Avowals: "Real literature is concerned with description of life and thoughts of life rather than with acts. He must write about the whole of life and not about parts of life, and he must write truth and not lies." The first sentence expresses the writer's sense of his own prose in his novels: and yet there is always a lot of vivid action in them. Only the greatest novelists have written about the whole of life: Balzac, Tolstoi, Cervantes, for instance; but the fact is that Balzac is always good to reread, but not Tolstoi: I couple two giants. Goriot, Valérie Marneffe, Pons, Landsch are called up before us after the same manner as Othello or Don Quixote; Balzac stakes all on one creation, exactly as Shakespeare stakes all in one creation.

Writing on Joseph Conrad, I referred to one of his tricks—which seem inextricable tricks of art—which he learned from Balzac: the method, which he uses in Youth, of doubling or trebling the interest by setting action within action, as certain pictures are set within certain frames. It is astonishing to find the influence Balzac had on Conrad, partly when suspense is scarcely concerned with action, partly in his involved manner of relating events. In Balzac I often find that some of his tales, like Conrad's, grow downwards out of an episode at the end; in some the end is told first, the beginning next—which was a method Poe often used—and last of all in the middle; for instance, in Honorine.

Writing of Zola I said:

Zola has defined art, very aptly, as nature seen through a temperament. The art of Zola is nature seen through a formula. He observes, indeed, with astonishing closeness, but he observes in support of preconceived ideas. And so powerful is his imagination that he has created a whole world which has no existence anywhere but in his own brain, and he has placed there imaginary beings, so much more logical than life, in the midst of surroundings which are themselves so real as to lend almost a semblance of reality to the embodied formulas who inhabit them.

As I have said that George Moore might be supposed to be a lineal descendant of Zola, it seems to me that in many ways his method is almost the same as Zola's; only, they have different theories; both observe with immense persistence; but their manner of observation, after all, is only that of the man in the street; while, on the contrary, the Goncourts create with their nerves, with their sensations, with their noting of the sensations, with the complex curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct. The strange woman in La Faustin is one of Goncourt's most fascinating creations: Germinie Lacerteux, his most sordidly depraved animal; and in the Preface to that novel, in 1864, they were right in saying: "Aujourd'hui que le Roman s'élargit et grandit, qu'il commence à être la grande forme sérieuse, passionnée, vivante, de l'Étude littéraire et de enquête sociale, qu'il devient, par l'analyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine." They were the first, I believe, to invent an entirely new form, a breaking-up of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are generally disconnected, and sometimes no more than six sentences: as, for instance, in that perverse, decadent, delicately depraved study of the stages in the education of the young Parisian girl, Chérie (for all its "immodesty") was an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies. Only, when I have to choose, after Balzac, the most wonderfully created woman in any novel, the vision of Emma Bovary starts before me—a woman, as I have said somewhere (with none of the passionate certainty of Charles Baudelaire) who is half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; her trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-hand pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality.

I have always had a great admiration of Camille Lemonnier, who brought something rare, exotic and furiously animal into Flemish prose; as in his masterpiece, Un Mâle, where he reveals in an astonishing fashion those peasants who are so brutal, yet so subtly and rudely apprehended, in their instincts: these peasants who are the most elemental of human beings. He has none of Hardy's sinister and dejected vision of life; who often seems closer to the earth than to men and women, and who sees women and men out of the eyes of wild creatures; whose peasants have been compared with Shakespeare's. Lemonnier's women and men have in them something mysterious, dramatic, tragic: in their loves and hatreds, in their crimes and joys, they have something of the mysterious force which germinates in the furrows which they turn.

Pater, who hated every form of noise and of extravagance, who disliked whatever seemed to him either sordid or morbid, guarded himself from all these and from many other things by the wary humor that protects the sensitive. So, in his reviews of Wilde and of Moore, he is always very much on his guard as to the manner of expounding his individual opinions; saying of Wilde that his Dorian Gray "may fairly claim to go with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same kind, done—probably—in more or less conscious imitation of it." So in praising Moore's clever book, he refers to his "French intuitiveness and gaillardise;" saying that he is "a very animating guide to the things he loves, and in particular to the modern painting of France," that (here he uses his wary humor) "these chapters have, by their very conviction, their perverse conviction, a way of arousing the general reader, lost perhaps in the sleep of conventional ideas," that, to and with "the reader may now judge fairly of Moore's manner of writing; may think perhaps there is something in it of the manner of the artists he writes of."

One of the most original pictures of Degas is L'Absinthe, which represents Desboutins in the café of the Nouvelle Athènes seated beside a woman. Moore says "Desboutins always came to the café alone, as did Manet, Degas, Darentz. Desboutins is thinking of his dry points; the woman is incapable of thought. If questioned about her life she would probably answer, Je suis à la coule." To my mind Degas gives in this picture, in a more modern way than Manet, an equal vision of reality. Desboutins, the Bohemian painter, sits there in a mood of grim dissatisfaction; he is just as living as the depraved woman who sits beside him—before the glass of absinthe that shines like an enormous and sea-green jewel—with eyes in which much of her shameful earthiness is betrayed, without malice, without pity.

I open at random, the pages of Confessions of a Young Man where there is a reference to the café of the Nouvelle Athènes, Place Pigalle; where the writer confesses more of himself than on any other page of his book.

I am a student of ball rooms, bar rooms, streets and alcoves. I have read very little; but all I read I can turn to account, and all I read I remember. To read freely, extensively, has always been my ambition, and my utter inability to study has always been to me a subject of grave inquietude,—study, as contrasted with a general and haphazard gathering of ideas taken in flight. But in me, the impulse is so original to frequent the haunts of men that it is irresistible, conversation is the breath of my nostrils, I watch the movement of life, and my ideas spring from it uncalled for, as buds from branches. Contact with the world is in me the generating force; without it what invention I have is thin and sterile, and it grows thinner rapidly, until it dies away utterly, as it did in the composition of my unfortunate Roses of Midnight.

I turn from those sentences to Casanova, whose Memoirs are one of the most wonderful autobiographies in the world; who, always passionate after sensations, confesses, in his confessions, the most shameless things that have ever been written: one to whom woman was, indeed, the most important thing in the world, but to whom nothing in the world was indifferent. He was, as he professes, always in love—at least, with something. Being of origin Venetian and Spanish, he had none of the cold blooded libertinism of Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses of Laclos. Baudelaire, in two of his sweeping Paradoxes, said of this book: "Ce livre, s'il brûle, ne peut brûler qu'à la manière de la glace. Tous les livres sont immoraux." Casanova, himself, is the primitive type of the Immoralist, in certain senses of the abnormal Immoralist. His latest reincarnation is an André Gide's L'Immoraliste; a book perverse and unpassionate.

Now, let us return to the modern writer's Confessions. Whether Moore has read the whole of Casanova or not, there are curiously similar touches in both these writers; as, for instance, in the word "alcoves, streets, ballrooms." Instead of the modern "barrooms" use the word cafés. One essential difference is that Casanova had a passion for books: the more essential one is, that Casanova was born to be a vagabond and a Wanderer over almost the whole of Europe, that he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth, and that he had sinned with all his body—leaving, naturally, the soul out of the question.

Every great artist has tasted the sweet poison of the Forbidden Fruit. The Serpent, the most "subtile" of all the Beasts, gave an apple he had gathered from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to Eve; she having eaten it and having given one to Adam, both saw they were naked, and, with nakedness, Sin entered into the World. Now, what was stolen from the Garden of God has, ever since, been the one temptation which it is almost impossible to resist. For instance Shakespeare stole from Marlowe, Milton stole from Shakespeare, Keats stole from Virgil, Swinburne stole from Baudelaire and Crashaw, Browning stole from Donne; as for Wagner, having stolen a motet from Vittorio which he used, almost note for note in Parsifal, also from Palestrina and his school, and from Berlioz and from Liszt, it is impossible to say what he did not steal. Oscar Wilde stripped, as far as he could, all the fruit he could gather from the orchards of half a dozen French novelists; besides those of Poe and of Pater. Gabrielle d'Annunzio has stolen as thoroughly as Wilde; in fact, the whole contents of certain short stories. As for George Moore, he has been guilty of as many thefts as these; only he has concealed his thefts with more stealth. Henry James said to some one of my acquaintance: "Moore has an absolute genius for picking other men's brains." That saying is as final as it is fundamental.

Rossetti said: "There ought to be always, double of oneself, the self-critic, who should be one always with the poet." The legend of the Doppelgänger haunted him; the result of which is How They Met Themselves, where two lovers wandering in a wood come on their doubles, apparitions who, casting their perilous eyes on them sidewise, vanish. It is mysterious and menacing. Pater uses the same symbol: three knights as they hear the night-hawk, are confronted by their own images, but with blood, all three of them, fresh upon the brow, or in the mouth. "It were well to draw the sword, be one's enemy carnal or spiritual; even devils, as all men know, taking flight at its white glitter through the air. Out flashed the brave youths' swords, still with mimic counter-motion, upon nothing—upon the empty darkness before them." These revenants are ghost-like and flame-like: they are the symbols of good and evil; the symbols of the haunting of one uneasy conscience. Balzac, Blake, Hawthorne, saw them in visions; the moderns, such as Maupassant and Moore, must always ignore them.

The novel and the prose play are the two great imaginative forms which prose has invented for itself. 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. And, in any case, the prose play, the novel, come into being as exceptions and are invented by men who can not write plays in verse. Only in the novel and the prose play does prose become free to create, free to develop to the utmost limits of its vitality. Perhaps the highest merit of prose consists in this, that it allows us to think in words. But art, in verse, being strictly and supremely on art, begins by transforming. Indeed, there is no form of art which is not an attempt to capture life, to create life over again.

The rhythm of poetry is musical; the rhythm of prose is physiological. For this reason Ibsen's prose is like that of a diagram in Euclid; it is the rhythm of logic, and it produces in us the purely mental exaltation of a problem solved. Swinburne, writing on Wilkie Collins's Armadale, declares that the heroine who dies of her own will by her own crime, had an American or a Frenchman introduced her, no acclamation would have been too vehement to express their gratitude! "But neither Feuillet nor Hawthorne could have composed and constructed such a story; the ingenuity spent on it may possibly be perverse, but is certainly superb." As I have never read one line of Feuillet I am no judge of his merit as a novelist. Hawthorne had a magical imagination, a passion for "handling sin" purely; he was haunted by what is obscure and abnormal in that illusive region which exists on the confines of evil and good; his opinion of woman was that she "was plucked out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her." Sin and the Soul, those are the problems he has always before him; Sin, as our punishment; the Soul, in its essence, mist-like and intangible. He uses his belief in witchcraft with admirable effect, the dim mystery which clings about haunted houses, the fantastic gambols of the soul itself, under what seems like the devil's own promptings.

In the whole of Moore's prose there is no such magic, no such mystery, no such diabolism; he is not so lacking in imagination as in style. He has always been, with impressive inaccuracy, described as the English Zola; at the outset of his career he gained a certain notoriety not unlike Zola's; his novels are not based on theories, as some of Zola's are. Moore always knew how to make a cunning plot, to make some of his compositions masterly, and how to construct his characters—which, to a certain extent, are living people, really existent, as their surroundings. As I say further on: "Compare with any of Zola's novels the amazingly clever novel of Moore, A Mummer's Wife, which goes with several other novels which are—well—manqués, in spite of their ability, their independence, their unquestionable merits of various kinds." The style always drags more than the action. Vivid, sensual, not sensuous, often perverse, never passionate; written with a curious sense of wickedness, of immorality, of vice; extraordinary at times in some of the scenes he evokes in one or several chapters; always with the French element; his prose exotic, morbid, cruel, as cruel as this catsuit of the passions, has in it a certain scorn and contempt of mediocrities, which can be delivered with the force of a sledge-hammer that strikes an anvil and shoots forth sparks.

II

George Moore has been described, with impressive inaccuracy, as the English Zola. At what was practically the outset of his career he gained a certain notoriety; which did him good, by calling public attention to an unknown name; it did him harm, by attaching to that name a certain stigma. In a certainly remote year, but a year we all of us remember, there were strange signs in the literary Zodiac. There had been a distinctly new growth in the short story, and along with the short story ("poisonous honey stolen from France") came a new license in dealing imaginatively with life, almost permitting the Englishman to contend with the writers of other nations on their own ground; permitting him, that is to say, to represent life as it really is. Foreign influences, certainly, had begun to have more and more effect upon the making of such literature as is produced in England nowadays; we had a certain acceptance of Ibsen, a popular personal welcome of Zola, and literary homage paid to Verlaine. What do these facts really mean? It is certain that they mean something.

The visit of Zola, for instance—how impossible that would have been a little while ago! A little while ago we were opening the prison doors for the publishers who had ventured to bring out translations of Nana and La Terre; now we open the doors of the Guildhall for the author of Nana and La Terre; and the same pens, with the same jubilance, chronicle both incidents. To the spectator of the comedy of life all this is merely amusing; but to the actor in the tragic comedy of letters it means a whole new repertoire. Not so very many years ago George Moore was the only novelist in England who insisted on the novelist's right to be true to life, even when life is unpleasant and immoral; and he was attacked on all sides.

The visit of Paul Verlaine, too—unofficial, unadvertised, as it was—seemed to be significant of much. In the first place, it showed, as in the case of Zola, a readiness on the part of some not unimportant section of the public to overlook either personal or literary scandal connected with a man of letters who has done really remarkable work. But the interest of Verlaine's visit was much more purely literary than that of Zola; his reception was in no sense a concession to success, but entirely a tribute to the genius of a poet.

I find that William Watson published only one tiny volume of verse, the barren burlesque of The Eloping Angels, which should never have been printed, and a book of prose, Excursions in Criticism, the criticism and the style being alike as immature and unbalanced as his verse is generally mature and accomplished; while Mr. Le Gallienne has forsaken the domesticity of the muse, to officiate, in The Religion of a Literary Man, as the Canon Farrar of the younger generation. The most really poetic of the younger poets, W. B. Yeats, who has yet to be "discovered" by the average critic and the average reader, has this year published a new volume of verse, The Countess Kathleen, as well as a book of prose stories, The Celtic Twilight, and, in conjunction with Edwin J. Ellis, a laborious study in the mysticism of William Blake. Yeats' work, alone among recent work in verse, has the imaginative quality of vision; it has the true Celtic charm and mystery; and while such admirable verse as Watson's, such glowing verse as Thompson's, are both superior, on purely technical grounds, to Yeats', neither has the spontaneous outflow of the somewhat untrained singing-voice of the younger poet.

Another writer of verse who has not yet been estimated at his proper value, John Davidson, has also published a new book of poems, Fleet Street Eclogues, and a book of prose, A Random Itinerary. It is difficult to do justice to Davidson, for he never does justice to himself. His verse is always vivid and striking; at its best it has a delightful quality of fantastic humor and quaint extravagance; but it is singularly uneven, and never, in my opinion, at its best in purely modern subjects. The Random Itinerary is a whole series of happy accidents; but there are gaps in the series. Davidson strikes one as a man who might do almost anything; why, then, does he not do it?

Now, these paradoxical digressions have brought me back to the question of Zola and Moore, and of the realistic novel. Moore's were based on no theories; Zola's on certain theories, really a view of humanity which he adopted as a formula: "Nature seen through a temperament;" a definition supposed to be his definition of all art; which it most certainly is not. Yet nothing, certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans.

Zola has made up his mind that he will say everything without omitting a single item; so that his vision is the vision of the mediocre man; and his way of finding out in a slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by an ingeniously filthy phrase in Argot, is by no means desirable. Every one knows two sentences in that supreme masterpiece, Madame Bovary, how that detail, brought in without the slightest emphasis of the husband turning his back at the very instant when his wife dies, is a detail of immense psychological value; it indicates to us, at the very beginning of the book, just the character of the man about whom we are to read so much. Zola would have taken at least two pages to say that, and, after all, he would not have said it.

Compare with any of Zola's novels the amazingly clever novel of Moore, A Mummer's Wife, which goes with several other novels which are—well—manqués, in spite of their ability, their independence, their unquestionable merits of various kinds. A Mummers Wife is admirably put together, admirably planned and shaped; the whole composition of the book is masterly. The style may drag, but not the action; the construction of a sentence may be uncertain, but not the construction of a character. The actor and his wife are really living people; we see them in their surroundings, and we see every detail of those surroundings. Here, of course, he would never have made Zola's stupid mistake; but can one imagine for a moment—I certainly can not—the writer of this novel writing, creating, (if I may dare use the word) two such sentences of Flaubert, which I quote in their original? "Huit jours après, comme elle étendait du linge dans sa cour, elle fut prise d'un crachement de sang, et le lendemain, tandis que Charles avait le dos tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit: 'Ah! Mon Dieu!' poussa un soupir et s'évanouit. Ella était morte."

George Moore's Modern Painting is full of injustices, brutality and ignorances; but it is full also of the most generous justice, the most discriminating sympathy, and the genuine knowledge of the painter. It is hastily thought out, hastily written; but here, in these vivid, direct, unscrupulously logical pages, you will find some of the secrets of the art of painting, let out, so to speak, by an intelligence all sensation, which has soaked them up without knowing it. Yet, having begun by trying to paint, and having failed in painting, and so set himself to the arduous task of being a prose-writer, he is often, in spite of his painter's accuracy as to "values" and "technique" and so on, unreliable.

For, being neither creative as a novelist nor as a critic, he has nothing, as a matter of course, of two among many essential qualities: vision and divination. Take, for instance, a few pages anywhere in L'Art Romanesque of Baudelaire, or from his prose on Delacroix, on Constantine Guys, on Wagner, on Daumier, on Whistler, on Flaubert, and on Balzac—where he is always supreme and consummate, "fiery and final"—and place these beside any chosen pages of Moore's prose on either Balzac or on Whistler, and you will see all the difference in the world: as I have said above, between the creative and the uncreative criticism.

Had Walter Pater devoted himself exclusively to art criticism, there is no doubt that, in a sense, he would have been a great art critic. There are essays scattered throughout his work, as in the Botticelli where he first introduces Botticelli to the modern world, as in the Leonardo da Vinci—in which the simplest words take color from each other by the cunning accident of their placing in the sentences, the subtle spiritual fire kindling from word to word creates a masterpiece, a miracle in which all is inspiration, all is certainty, all is evocation, and which, in the famous page on La Gioconda, rises to the height of actually lyrical prose—in which the essential principles of the art of painting are divined and interpreted with extraordinary subtlety. In the same sense all that Whistler has written about painting deserves to be taken seriously, and read with understanding. Written in French, and signed by Baudelaire, his truths, and paradoxes reflecting truths, would have been realized for what they are. He fought for himself, and spared no form of stupidity: for, in Whistler, apart from his malice, his poisonous angers, taste was carried to the point of genius, and became creative.

George Moore's literary career has been singularly interesting; his character as a writer is very curious. A man who respects his art, who is devoted to literature, who has a French eye for form, he seems condemned to produce work which is always spotted with imperfection. All his life he has been seeking a style, and he has not yet found one. At times he drops into style as if by accident, and then he drops style as if by design. He has a passionate delight in the beauty of good prose; he has an ear for the magic of phrases; his words catch at times a troubled expressive charm; yet he has never attained ease in writing, and he is capable of astounding incorrectness—the incorrectness of a man who knows better, who is not careless and yet who can not help himself. Yet the author of A Mummer's Wife, of The Confessions of a Young Man, of Impressions and Opinions, has more narrowly escaped being a great writer than even he himself, perhaps, is aware.

[FRANCIS THOMPSON]

I

If Crashaw, Shelley, Donne, Marvell, Patmore and some other poets had not existed, Francis Thompson would be a poet of remarkable novelty. Not that originality, in the strictest sense, is always essential to the making of a poet. There have been poets who have so absolutely lived in another age, whose whole soul has been so completely absorbed by a fashion of writing, perhaps a single writer, belonging to an earlier century, that their work has been an actual reincarnation of this particular time or writer. Chatterton, for instance, remains one of the finest of English poets, entirely on account of poems which were so deliberately imitative as to have been passed off as transcripts from old manuscripts. Again, it is possible to be deftly and legitimately eclectic, as was Milton, for example. Milton had, in an extraordinary degree, the gift of assimilating all that he found, all that he borrowed. Often, indeed, he improved his borrowed goods; but always he worked them into the pattern of his own stuff, he made them part of himself; and wisdom is justified of her children. Now Thompson, though he affects certain periods, is not so absorbed in any one as to have found his soul by losing it; nor is he a dainty borrower from all, taking his good things wheresoever he finds them. Rather, he has been impressed by certain styles, in themselves incompatible, indeed implying the negation of one another—that of Crashaw, for instance, and that of Patmore—and he has deliberately mixed them, against the very nature of things. Thus his work, with all its splendors, has the impress of no individuality; it is a splendor of rags and patches, a very masque of anarchy. A new poet announces himself by his new way of seeing things, his new way of feeling things; Thompson comes to us a cloudy visionary, a rapturous sentimentalist, in whom emotion means colored words, and sight the opportunity for a bedazzlement.

The opening section of the book Love in Dian's Lap is an experiment in Platonic love. The experiment is in itself interesting, though here perhaps a little too deliberate; in its bloodless ecstasy it recalls Epipsychidion, which is certainly one of the several models on which it has been formed; it has, too, a finely extravagant courtliness, which belongs to an older school of verse as here:—

Yet I have felt what terrors may consort
In women's cheeks, the Graces' soft resort;
My hand hath shook at gentle hands' access,
And trembled at the waving of a tress;
My blood known panic fear, and fled dismayed,
Where ladies' eyes have set their ambuscade.
The rustle of a robe hath been to me
The very rattle of love's musketry;
Although my heart hath beat the loud advance,
I have recoiled before a challenging glance,
Proved gay alarms where warlike ribbons dance.
And from it all, this knowledge have I got,—
The whole, that others have, is less than they have not;
All which makes other women noted fair,
Unnoted would remain and overshone in her.

Finer, in yet a different style, is the poem To a Poet Breaking Silence, of which we may quote the opening lines:—

Too wearily had we and song
Been left to look and left to long,
Yea, song and we to long and look,
Since thine acquainted feet forsook
The mountain where the Muses hymn
For Sinai and the Seraphim.
Now in both the mountains' shine
Dress thy countenance, twice divine!
From Moses and the Muses draw
The Tables of thy double Law!
His rod-born fount and Castaly
Let the one rock bring forth for thee,
Renewing so from either spring
The songs that both thy countries sing:
Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long,
Thou should'st forget thy native song,
And mar thy mortal melodies
With broken stammer of the skies.

Next after these poems of spiritual love come certain odes and lyrical pieces: one To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster, modeled, as to form, on Marvell's great ode: A Judgment in Heaven, in which we are permitted to see the angels "as they pelted each other with handfuls of stars"—the most clotted and inchoate poem in the volume; together with A Corymbus for Autumn and The Hound of Heaven which are the finest things Thompson has done. Here, with all his extravagance, which passes from the sublime to the ridiculous with all the composure of a madman, Thompson has grappled with splendid subjects splendidly. He can, it is true, say:—

Against the red throb of the sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat;

but he can also say (with a solemn imagery which has its precise meaning as well as its large utterance):—

I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity,
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again;
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.

Here, as ever, Thompson indulges in his passion for polysyllables—"the splendent might of thy conflagrate fancies," for example; but forced words are less out of place in poems which, in the best sense of the word, are rhapsodies, than in poems such as those on children, which fill the last section of the book, and in which one may read of "a silvern segregation, globed complete," of "derelict trinkets of the darling young," and so forth. The last piece of all, To Monica Thought Dying, is written in downright imitation of Patmore; but how far is it, in its straining after fine effects of sound, its straining after fine effects of pathos, from the perfect justice of expression which Patmore has found in such poems as The Toys and Poor Child! for an equally perfect sentiment of the pathetic! That a writer who at his best is so fiery and exuberant should ever take Patmore for a model, should really try to catch even his tricks of expression, is very curious, and shows, as much as any other single characteristic, the somewhat external quality of Thompson's inspiration. A poet with an individuality to express, seeking for an individual form of expression, could scarcely, one fancies, have been drawn by any natural affinity so far away from himself and his main habitudes. Grashaw and Patmore—we come back to the old antagonism—can a man serve two such masters? Imagine Patmore rewriting, according to his own standard of composition, The Flaming Heart, or Crashaw treating in his own way the theme of Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore! Here and there, too, in Thompson's work, are reminiscences of Rossetti; as here:—

Yea, in that ultimate heart's occult abode
To lie as in an oubliette of God.

And the influence of Shelley is felt from the first line to the last. Yet, in spite of all this, Thompson has something, unquestionably, of "fine frenzy," not always quite under his own control; he amazes by his audacity, and delights by the violence with which he would fain storm Parnassus. His verse has generally fervor, a certain lyric glow, a certain magnificence; it has abundant fancy, and its measure of swift imagination. But the feast he spreads for us is a very Trimalchio's feast—the heaped profusion, the vaunting prodigality, which brings a surfeit; and, unlike Trimalchio, it could not be said of him Omnia domi nascuntur.

Verse, unless it is in some measure ecstasy, can not be poetry. But it does not follow that in verse the most fervid ecstasy is the best poetry. If, indeed, for "fervid" be substituted "fervidly expressed," it is quite the contrary. Coventry Patmore has pointed out that the sign of great art is peace, a peace which comes of the serene, angelic triumph over mortal tumults, and those less essential raptures which are after all flames of the earth's center. Francis Thompson has the ecstasy; but unfortunately he has not realized that ecstasy, if it is to be communicated from the soul to the soul, and not merely from the mouth to the ear, must be whispered, not shouted.

If a man's style is the man—his innermost self, as we may suppose, revealing itself in the very words he uses—Thompson, in a more special sense than almost any other writer, is seen in his language. He is that strange phenomenon, a verbal intelligence. He thinks in words, he receives his emotions and sensations from words, and the rapture which he certainly attains is a rapture of the disembodied word. It is not that his verse is without meaning, that in taking care of the sound he allows the sense (poor orphan!) to take care of itself. He has a meaning, but that meaning, if it has not a purely verbal origin, is at all events allowed to develop under the direct suggestion of the words which present themselves to interpret it. His consciousness is dominated by its own means of expression. And what is most curious of all is that, while Thompson has a quite recognizable manner, he has not achieved a really personal style. He has learned much, not always with wisdom, and in crowding together Cowley, Crashaw, Donne, Patmore, to name but a few of many, he has not remembered that to begin a poem in the manner of Crashaw, and to end it in the manner of Patmore, is not the same thing as fusing two alien substances into a single new substance. Styles he has, but not style. This very possession by the word has, perhaps, hindered him from attaining it. Fine style, the style in which every word is perfect, rises beautifully out of a depth into which words have never stretched down their roots. Intellect and emotion are the molders of style. A profound thought, a profound emotion, speaks as if it were unconscious of words; only when it speaks as if unconscious of words do the supreme words issue from its lips. Ornament may come afterward: you can not begin with ornament. Thompson, however, begins with ornament.

Unhappily, too, Thompson's verse is certainly fatiguing to read, and one of the reasons why it is so fatiguing is that the thought that is in it does not progress; it remains stationary. About the fragile life which cries somewhere in its center he builds up walls of many colored bricks, immuring his idea, hiding it, stifling it. How are we to read an ode of many pages in which there is no development, not even movement? Stanza is heaped upon stanza, page is piled upon page, and we end where we began. The writer has said endless things about something but never the thing itself. Poetry consists in saying the thing itself.

But this is not the only reason why it is fatiguing to read Thompson's verse. To read it is too much like jolting in a springless cart over a plowed field, about noontide, on a hot summer day. His lines, of which this is typical,—

Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia's grape,

are so packed with words that each line detains the reader. Not merely does Thompson prefer the line to the stanza or the paragraph, he prefers the word to the line. He has failed to remember that while two and two make four, four are not necessarily better than two—that because red is brighter than gray, red is not necessarily the better color to use whenever one wants to use a color. He hears the brass in the orchestra sounding out loudly over the strings and he therefore suppresses the strings. He has a bold and prolific fancy, and he pampers his fancy; yet prodigality is not abundance, nor profusion taste. He is without reticence, which he looks upon as stint or as penury. Having invited his guests to his feast, he loads their plates with more than they can eat, forcing it upon them under the impression that to do otherwise is to be lacking in hospitality.

Yet, after all, the feast is there—Trimalchio's if you will, but certainly not a Barmecide's. Thompson has a remarkable talent, he has a singular mastery of verse, as the success of his books is not alone in proving. Never has the seventeenth-century phrasing been so exactly repeated as in some of his poems. Never have Patmore's odes been more scrupulously rewritten, cadence for cadence; Thompson's fancy is untiring, if sometimes it tires the reader; he has, not exactly at command, but not beyond reach, an eager imagination. No one can cause a more vaguely ardent feeling in the sympathetic reader, a feeling made up of admiration and of astonishment in perhaps equal portions. There are times when the fire in him bums clear through its enveloping veils of smoke, and he writes passages of real splendor. Why then does he for the most part wrap himself so willingly in the smoke?

II

In Francis Thompson's first volume of poems, I pointed out some of the sources of the so-called originality of all that highly colored verse—Crashaw, Shelley, Donne, Marvell, Patmore, Rossetti—and I expressed a doubt whether a writer who could allow himself to be so singularly influenced by such singularly different writers could be really, in the full sense of the term, a new poet. The book before me confirms my doubt. Thompson is careful to inform his readers that "this poem, though new in the sense of being now for the first time printed, was written some four years ago, about the same date as the Hound of Heaven in my former volume." Still, as he takes the responsibility of printing it, and of issuing it by itself, it may reasonably be assumed that he has written nothing since which he considers to be of higher quality.

The book consists of one long and obscure rhapsody in two parts. Why it should ever begin, or end, or be thus divided, is not obvious, nor, indeed, is the separate significance of most of the separate pages. It begins in a lilt of this kind:—

The leaves dance, the leaves sing,
The leaves dance in the breath of Spring.
I bid them dance,
I bid them sing,
For the limpid glance
Of my ladyling;
For the gift to the Spring of a dewier spring,
For God's good grace of this ladyling!

But the rhythm soon becomes graver, the lines charged with a more heavily consonnated burden of sound, as, for instance, in the opening of the second part:—

And now, thou elder nursling of the nest,
Ere all the intertangled west
Be one magnificence
Of multitudinous blossoms that o'er-run
The flaming brazen bowl o' the burnished sun
Which they do flower from
How shall I 'stablish thy memorial?

"I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech," the writer adds, with more immediate and far-reaching truth than he intends. Thompson wilfully refuses to speak his fellows' speech, in order to speak a polysyllabic speech, made up out of all the periods of the English language—a speech which no one, certainly, has employed in just such a manner before, but which, all the same, does not become really individual. It remains, rather, a patchwork garb, flaming in all the colors, tricked out with barbaric jewels, and, for all its emphatic splendor, suggesting the second-hand dealer's.

In such a poem as The Hound of Heaven, in Thompson's former volume, there was a certain substratum of fine meaning, not obscured, or at all events not concealed, by a cloud of stormy words. But here I find no sufficing undercurrent of thought, passion, or reverie, nothing but fine fragments, splendid lines, glowing images. And of such fragments, however brilliant in themselves, no fine poetry can consist. Thompson declares of himself and his verse, with a really fervid sense of his own ardor: