by Walter Pater
A centre, come from wheresoe’er you will,
A whole without dependence or defect,
Made for itself, and happy in itself,
Perfect contentment, Unity entire.
A POET WITH SOMETHING TO SAY
THE PALL MALL GAZETTE, MARCH 33, 1889
THE student of modern literature, turning to the spectacle of our modern life, notes there a variety and complexity which seem to defy the limitations of verse structure, as if more and more any large record of humanity must necessarily be in prose. Yet there is certainly abundant proof that the beauty and sorrow of the world can still kindle satisfying verse, in a volume recently published under the significant title of “Nights and Days,” being, in effect, concentrations, powerfully dramatic, of what we call the light and shadow of life; although, with Art, as Mr. Symons conceives —
Since, of man with trouble born to death She sings, her song is less of Days than Nights.
Readers of contemporary verse who may regret in much of it, amid an admirable achievement of poetic form, a certain lack of poetic matter, will find substance here — abundant poetic substance, developing, as by its own organic force, the poetic forms proper to it, with natural vigour.
Mr. Symons’s themes, then, are almost exclusively those of the present day, studied, as must needs happen with a very young writer, rather through literature than life; through the literature, however, which is most in touch with the actual life around us. “J’aime passionnément la passion,” he might say with Stendhal: and in two main forms. The reader of Dante will remember those words of La Pia in the “Purgatorio,” so dramatic in their brevity that they have seemed to interpret many a problematic scene of pictorial art. Shape their exacter meaning as we may, they record an instance of human passion, under the influence of some intellectual subtlety in the air, going to its end by paths round-about. Love’s casuistries, impassioned satiety, love’s inversion into cruelty, are experiences even more characteristic of our late day than of Dante’s somewhat sophisticated middle age; and it is just this complexion of sentiment — a grand passion, entangled in scruples, refinements, after-thoughts, reserved, repressed, but none the less masterful for that, conserving all its energies for expression in some unexpected way — that Mr. Symons presents, with unmistakable insight, in one group of his poems, at the head of which we should place “An Act of Mercy” — odd and remote, mercy’s self turned malignant — or “A Revenge,” or, perhaps, in long-drawn sonnet-series, “A Lover’s Progress” — progress, one half at least, in merely intellectual fineness, as if love had heard “All the Yea and Nay of life,” and taken his degree, in some school of metaphysical philosophy. Like the hero in his own “Interlude of Helena and Faustus,” the modern lover, as Mr. Symons conceives him, claims to have seen in their fulness The workings of the world Plato but dreamt of. He welcomes, as an added source of interest in the study of it, the curious subtlety to which the human soul has come even in its passions.
“Thy speech hath not the largeness of my sires,” says Helena to Faustus; but this “largeness” Mr. Symons attains in just the converse of this remotely conceived, exotic, casuistical passion, in that rural tragedy, the tragedy of the poor generally (the tyranny of love, here too, sometimes turning to cruelty), in a group of poignant stories, told with unflinching dramatic sincerity, which is not afraid of the smallest incident that has the suggestion of true feeling in it. The elementary passions of men and women in their exclusive strength, the fierce, vengeful sense of outraged honour in the humble, wild hunger, in mortal conflict with the ideal of homely dignity, as Crabbe or Wordsworth understood it, and, beyond these miserable, ragged ends of existence, the white dawn possible for humanity, for “Esther Bray,” for “Red Bredbury,” for “Margery of the Fens,” whose wronged honour and affection has made her a witch —
Go, and leave me alone. I’m past your help, I shall lie,
As she lay, through the night, and at morn, as she went in the rain, I shall die.
Go, and leave me alone. Let me die as I lived. But oh,
If the wind wouldn’t cry and wail with the baby’s cry as I got And this too, the tragedy of the poor as it must always be with us, finds its still more harshly satiric inverse in certain poems, like “A Café Singer,” and other Parisian grotesques, for the delineation of the deepest tragedy of all, underlying that world of sickly gaslight and artificial flowers which apes the tuberose conventionalities of the ultra-refined; often with a touch of lunacy about it, or the partial lunacy of narcotism—” the soul at pawn” — or that violent religious reaction which is like a narcotic. These very modern notes also are made to contribute their gloom to the dramatic effect of life in these poems.
Set over against this impressively painted series of nights and days, often forbidding, a faith in the eternal value of art is throughout maintained;
Art alone
Changeless among the changing made; as amply compensating for all other defects in the poet’s finding of things; though on what grounds we hardly see, except his own deep, unaffected sense of it Its witness to eternal beauty comes in directly, as nature itself, with tranquillising influence, contrives to do in this volume, in interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, upon those hot, impassioned scenes. Yet close as art comes in these very poems, for example, to the lives of men, to interpret the beauty and sorrow there, Mr. Symons is anxious to disavow any practical pretension to alter or affect the nature of things thereby: —
“She probes an ancient wound yet brings no balm.”
And yet pity ( who that reads can doubt it? ) is a large constituent of this writer’s temper, — natural pity, contending with the somewhat artificial modern preference for telling and leaving a story in all its harsh, unrelieved effect The appeal of a pale, smitten face has perhaps never been rendered more touchingly than in “A Village Mariana.”
The complex, perhaps too matterful, soul of our century has found in Mr. Browning, and some other excellent modern English poets, the capacity for dealing masterfully with it, excepting only that it has been too much for their perfect lucidity of mind, or at least of style, so that they take a good deal of time to read. In an age of excellent poets, people sometimes speculate wherein any new and original force in poetry may be thought likely to reveal itself; and some may have thought that just as, for a poet after Dryden, nothing was left but correctness, and thereupon the genius of Pope became correct, with a correctness which made him profoundly original; so the cachet of a new-born poetry for ourselves may lie precisely in that gift of lucidity, given a genuine grapple with difficult matter. The finer pieces in this volume, certainly, any poet of our day might be glad to own, for their substance, their dramatic hold on life, their fine scholarship; and they have this eminent merit, among many fine qualities of style, — readers need fear no difficulty in them. In this new poet the rich poetic vintage of our time has run clear at last
IT IS THYSELF
THE PALL MALL GAZETTE, APRIL 15, 1889
“One knocked at the Beloved’s door: and a Voice asked from within, Who is there? and he answered, It is I. And the door was not opened. And after a year he returned and knocked again at the door. And again the Voice asked, Who is there? and he said, It is Thyself! And the door was opened to him.”
THE author of this volume, who, with those pretty words on its title-page, seems modestly to disavow that difference from other people on which poets are apt to pride themselves, is, we judge, a Russian, of French culture, who, taken with a love of the English genius, has turned to that somewhat antique phase of our poetry which has ceased to be altogether vernacular, and has learned to write therein like an Englishman; certainly, with much genuine insight and sympathy. The best of those pieces, indeed, might find their place in an anthology of the later Elizabethan or early Jacobean muse, in a certain mood, half serious, half playful, not without a grain of satire. Mr. Raffalovich has mastered many of its quaint charms, its trick, especially, of seizing, in the lit
tle graces of actual life, of dress for instance, the poetic touch.
There are no colours that have sworn
Such bitter enmity
But may be reconciled and worn,
My dearest one, by thee.
Thy wearing shall do wonders
For those same colours summer links,
But man more tasteful sunders:
The purplest blues, the crudest pinks.
I know that yellows unsubdued
The crabbed reds repel,
But thou, quite heedless of their feud,
Their violence canst quell.
Thy wearing shall make harmless
Magenta, mauve, and green, shot through
With purple, nor quite charmless
Thy flag-like sporting of bright blue.
No bolder than a brilliant morn
On thy victorious way,
No less thyself thou canst adorn
Than can a summer’s day.
There is surely a pleasant vein of true poetry in that, akin to Herrick.
This brief collection, in short, with no titles except that general one, making it all the easier to sip at it lightly, is really a series of pleasant afterthoughts on human life, in what may be called its spring colours. It indicates, indeed, so true a sense of what is rightly attractive in trifles, that really poetic touch in the mere toys of life which suggest or is suggested by the living undercurrent of its deepest feelings that we doubt whether the author has found in English verse the proper scope for his talents. To add to the great body of English literature is not the natural function of a foreigner, however clever; but rather the critical one of reporting, of making known at home or abroad the real flowers, as distinguished from many imitation ones, the real graces of existence, to be gathered in the more fortunate regions of that English civilisation, which Parisians and Russians (Mr. Raffalovich being not alone in his preference) are said just now so greatly to affect.
FABRE’S “TOUSSAINT GALABRU”
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, APRIL, 1889
M FABRE’S recent novel, Toussaint Galabru, is not to be recommended to readers seeking first acquaintance with his works, but will charm those who already know them. In Les Courbezon, and Lucifer, ranking, it may be thought, above even L’Abbé Tigrane, in a series of stories, worthy to accompany those remarkable books, he has made his own, and conveys to us, a district of France, gloomy in spite of its almonds, its oil and wine, but certainly grandiose. The large towns, the sparse hamlets, the wide landscape, of the Cevennes, are, for his books (the list of which, thanks to the application of a somewhat fastidious writer, is becoming a long one), what Alsace is to Messrs. Erckmann-Chatrian; and as with these pleasant writers, as must needs be the result of such faithfulness to a single locality in a world like our modern one, Fabre’s interest is ever in the humbler children of its soil — the earthy strength of their passions, their pleasures with all the natural radiancy of those of children, and, of course far more numerous, their pains. What distinguishes him from those Alsatian writers, what constitutes his distinction in the abstract, is his recognition ‘of the religious, the catholic, ideal, intervening masterfully throughout the picture he presents of life, as the only mode of poetry realisable by the poor, and, although it may do a great deal more beside, certainly doing the work of poetry effectively. That ideal, with its weighty sanctions, brings into full relief all the primitive, recusant, militant force of half-regenerate nature. Les Courbezon, certainly, displays the passions of the peasant, with a power of realism (to give that name to what is only the directest use of imaginative skill ) worthy of M. Zola at his best. And then, there is nothing in Fabre to shock the most scrupulous conscience, the daintiest taste.
Every traveller to Italy has felt the charm of those roomy sacristies, admitted to which for the inspection of some ancient tomb or fresco, one is presently overcome by their reverend quiet; the people coming and going there, devout or at least on devout business, — their voices at half-pitch, not without a touch of humour in what seems to express, like a picture, the best side, the really ideal side, midway between the altar and the home, of the ecclesiastical life. Just such an interior, with many a shrewd study of clerical faces, rust yet essentially honest, ambitious but for the most part wonderfully controlled, is afforded by the pen of Ferdinand Fabre.
And the passions he treats of in priests are strictly clerical — most often their ambitions: not the errant humours of the mere man in the priest, but movements of spirit properly incidental to the clerical type itself. Turning to those peasant types, at first sight so strongly contrasted with it, he shows great acquaintance again with the sources, the effects, of average human feeling: but it will still be, in contact — in contact, as its conscience, its better mind, its ideal — with the institutions of religion: these peasants, one feels, are the chantres in their village churches. So, of this latest book, the true hero is not the strange being who actually lends it his name, a character disappearing, surely, even from those remote valleys — the wizard, who, if he has no mysterious powers, has a mysterious influence, with a soul of good in his evil, often helping the miserable by power of sympathy where doctor and priest are of no avail, the enemy, because in a sense a real rival, of M. le Curé. No! the hero is not Toussaint Galabru, but another striking clerical personage, whose portrait Fabre here adds to his gallery. From the first pages, where, still a schoolboy, Baptistin is helping to make the coffin of the defunct maire, lying down in it at his father’s bidding, being already of the same stature with that dignitary, to test its capacity — from that time to the end, where he leads a grand impromptu function, in which the Sacraments are taken, across the snowy hills on Christmas night, to the dying sorcerer, we see him clearly, and understand — understand the real unity of the career of this creature of nature, who is also so true a priest. To the last, indeed, the Abbé knows more of the quails, the varied bird-life of the Cevennes, than of the life of souls. Still, even with him, droll Baptistin Nizerolles, the priesthood, honestly taken, is spiritually a success. Of belief, certainly, he has plenty; and be it through faith, or tact, or mere esprit de corps, has more self-restraint, more truth to nature, a more watchful and general charity than his parishioners. The rude lips and hands seem graced when men need it most with something of angelic tones, of an angelic touch.
The reader will naturally look in such a writer for a graphic, an impressive, a discreet style — not in vain. M. Fabre is a writer who has a fine sense of his words.
CORRESPONDANCE DE GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
THE ATHENÆUM, AUGUST 3, 1889
Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert. Deuxième Série (1850-54). (Paris, Charpentier.)
THE second volume of Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence, just now published, is even richer than the first, alike in those counsels of literary art Flaubert was pre-eminently fitted to give, and in lights, direct and indirect, on his own work. The letters belong to a short period in his life, from his twenty-eighth to his thirty-second year (1850-54), during which he was an exceptionally expansive correspondent, but otherwise chiefly occupied in the composition of ‘Madame Bovary,’ a work of immense labour, as also of great and original genius. The more systematic student might draw from these letters many an interesting paragraph to add, by way of foot-notes, to that impressive book.
The earlier letters find Flaubert still in the East, recording abundantly those half-savage notes of ancient civilisation which are in sympathy with the fierce natural colouring of the country he loved so well. The author of ‘Salammbô’ and ‘Herodias’ is to be detected already in this lively vignette from an Oriental square: —
“Nothing is more graceful than the spectacle of all those men [the Dervishes] waltzing, with their great petticoats twisted, their ecstatic faces lifted to the sky. They turn, without a moment’s pause, for about an hour. One of them assured us that, if he were not obliged to hold his hands above his head, he could turn for six hours continuously.”
Even here,
then, it is the calm of the East which expresses itself — the calm, perhaps the emptiness, of the Oriental, of which he has fixed the type in the following sketch: —
“I have seen certain dancing girls, who balanced themselves with the regularity of a palm tree. Their eyes, of a profound depth, express calm only — nothing but the calm, the emptiness, of the desert. It is the same with the men. What admirable heads! heads which seem to be turning over within them the grandest thoughts in the world. But tap on them! and there will be only the empty beer-glass, the deserted sepulchre. Whence then the majesty of their external form? of what does it really hold? Of the absence, I should reply, of all passion. They have the beauty of the ruminating ox, of the greyhound in its race, the floating eagle — that sentiment of fatality which is fulfilled in these. A conviction of the nothingness of man gives to all they do, their looks, their attitudes, a resigned but grandiose character. Their loose and easy raiment, lending itself freely to every movement of the body, is always in closest accord with the wearer and his functions; with the sky, too, by its colour: and then the sun! There is an immense ennui there in the sun, which consumes everything.”
But it is as brief essays in literary criticism that these letters are most effective. Exquisitely personal essays, self-explanatory, or by way of confession, written almost exclusively to one person — a perfectly sympathetic friend, engaged like the writer in serious literary work — they possess almost the unity, the connected current of a book. It is to Madame - X., however, that Flaubert makes this cynical admission about women:
“What I reproach in women, above all, is their need of poetisation, of forcing poetry into things. A man may be in love with his laundress, but will know that she is stupid, though he may not enjoy her company the less. But if a woman loves her inferior, he is straightway an unrecognised genius, a superior soul, or the like. And to such a degree does this innate disposition to see crooked prevail, that woman can perceive neither truth when they encounter it, nor beauty where it really exists. This fault is the true cause of the deceptions of which they so often complain. To require oranges of apple trees is a common malady with them.”
