Part 19

A collective title for them might be Nuances; Poictevin searches the last nuance of sensations and ideas. He is a remote pupil of Goncourt, and superior to his master in his power of recording the impalpable. (Compare any of his books with the Madame Gervaisais of Goncourt; the latter is mysticism very much in the concrete.) At the same time he recalls Amiel, Maurice de Guérin, Walter Pater, and Coventry Patmore. A mystical pantheist in his worship of nature, he is a mystic in his adoration of God. This intensity of vision in the case of Poictevin did not lead to the depravities, exquisite and morose, of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the brilliant outrageous Barbey d'Aurevilly. With his soul of ermine Poictevin is characterised by De Gourmont as the inventor of the mysticism of style. Once he saluted Edmond de Goncourt as the Velasquez of the French language, and that master, not to be outdone in politeness, told Poictevin that his prose could boast its "victories over the invisible." If by this Goncourt meant making the invisible visible, rendering in prose of crepuscular subtlety moods recondite, then it was not an exaggerated compliment. In such spiritual performances Poictevin resembles Lafcadio Hearn in his airiest gossamer-webbed phrases. A true, not a professional symbolist, the French _prosateur_ sounds Debussy twilight harmonies. His speech at times glistens with the hues of a dragon-fly zigzagging in the sunshine. In the tenuous exaltation of his thought he evokes the ineffable deity, circled by faint glory. To compass his picture he does not hesitate to break the classic mould of French syntax while using all manners of strange-fangled vocables to attain effects that remind one of the clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Indeed, a mystic style is his, beside which most writers seem heavy-handed and obvious.

Original in his form, in the bizarre architecture of his paragraphs, pages, chapters, he abolishes the old endings, cadences, chapter headings. Nor, except at the beginning of his career, does he portray a definite hero or heroine. Even names are avoided. "He" or "she" suffices to indicate the sex. Action there is little. Story he has none to tell; by contrast Henry James is epical. Exteriority does not interest Poictevin, who is nevertheless a landscape painter; intimate and charming. His young man and young woman visit Mentone, the Pyrenees, Brittany, along the Rhine--a favourite resort--Holland, Luchon, Montreux, and Switzerland, generally. His palette is marvellously complicated. We should call him an impressionist but that the phrase is become banal. Poictevin deals in subtle grays. He often writes _gris-iris_. His portraits swim in a mysterious atmosphere as do Eugène Carrière's. His fluid, undulating prose records landscapes in the manner of Theocritus.

The tiny repercussions of the spirit that is reacted upon by life are Whistlerian notations in the gamut of this artist's instrument. Evocation, not description; evocation, not narration; always evocation, yet there is a harmonious ensemble; he returns to his theme after capriciously circling about it as does a Hungarian gypsy when improvising upon the heart-strings of his auditors. Verlaine once addressed a poem to Poictevin the first line of which runs: "Toujours mécontent de son œuvre." Maurice Barrès evidently had read Seuls before he wrote Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891). The young woman in Poictevin's tale has the same feverish languors; her male companion, though not the egoist of Barrès, is a very modern person, slightly consumptive; one of whom it may be asked, in the words of Poictevin: "Is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of sadness?" In their room hang portraits of Baudelaire and the Curé d'Ars. Odder still is the monk, P. Martin. Martin is the name of the "adversary" in The Garden of Bérénice. And the episode of the dog's death! Huysmans, too, must have admired Poictevin's descriptions of the Grünewald Christ at Colmar, and of the portrait of the Young Florentine in the Stadel Museum at Frankfort. It would be instructive to compare the differing opinions of the two critics concerning this last-named picture.

A mirror, Poictevin's soul reflects the moods of landscapes. Without dogmatism he could say with St. Anselm that he would rather go to hell sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single transgression. To his tender temperament even the reading of Pascal brought shadows of doubt. A persistent dreamer, the world for him is but the garment investing God. Flowers, stars, the wind that weeps in little corners, the placid bosom of lonely lakes, far-away mountains and their mystic silhouettes, the Rhine and its many curvings, the clamour of cities and the joy of the green grass, are his themes. Life with its frantic gestures is quite inutile. Let it be avoided. You turn after reading Poictevin to the Minoration of Emile Hennequin: "Let all that is be no more. Let glances fade and the vivacity of gestures fall. Let us be humble, soft, and slow. Let us love without passion, and let us exchange weary caresses." Or hear the tragic cry of Ephraim Mikhael: "Ah! to see behind me no longer, on the lake of Eternity, the implacable wake of Time." "Poictevin's men and women," once wrote Aline Gorren in a memorable study of French symbolism, "are subordinate to these wider curves of wave and sky; they come and go, emerging from their setting briefly and fading into it again; they have no personality apart from it; and amid the world symbols of the heavens in marshalled movements and the thousand reeded winds, they in their human symbols are allowed to seem, as they are, proportionately small. They are possessed as are clouds, waters, trees, but no more than clouds, waters, trees, of a baffling significance, forever a riddle to itself. They have bowed attitudes; the weight of the mystery they carry on their shoulders."

The humanity that secretly evaporates when the prose poet notes the attrition of two souls is shed upon his landscapes with their sonorous silences. A picture of the life contemplative, of the adventures of timorous gentle souls in search of spiritual adventures, set before us in a style of sublimated preciosity by an orchestra of sensations that has been condensed to the string quartet, the dreams of Francis Poictevin--does he not speak of the human forehead as a dream dome? --are not the least consoling of his century. He is the white-robed acolyte among mystics of modern literature.

IV

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

Religious conversion and its psychology have furnished the world's library with many volumes. Perfectly understood in the ages of faith, the subject is for modern thinkers susceptible of realistic explanation. Only we pave the way now by a psychological course instead of the ancient doctrine of Grace Abounding. Nor do we confound the irresistible desire of certain temperaments to spill their innermost thoughts, with what is called conversion. There was Rousseau, who confessed things that the world would be better without having heard. He was not converted. Tolstoy, believing that primitive Christianity is almost lost to his fellow beings, preaches what he thinks is the real faith. Yet he was converted. He had been, he said, a terrible transgressor. The grace of God gave sight to his sin-saturated eyeballs. Is there the slightest analogy between his case and that of Cardinal Newman? John Henry Newman had led a spotless life before he left the Anglican fold. Nevertheless he was a convert. And Saint Augustine, the pattern of all self-confessors, the classic case, may be compared to John Bunyan or to Saint Paul! Professor William James, who with his admirable impartiality has scrutinized the psychological topsy-turvy we name conversion, has not missed the commonplace fact that every man as to details varies, but at base the psychical machinery is controlled by the same motor impulses. _A chacun son infini._

Some natures reveal a mania for confession. Dostoïevsky's men and women continually tell what they have thought, what crimes they have committed. It was an epileptic obsession with this unhappy Russian writer. Paul Verlaine sang blithely of his ghastly life, and Baudelaire did not spare himself. So it would seem that the inability of certain natures to keep their most precious secrets is also the keynote of religious confessions. But let us not muddle this with the sincerity or insincerity of the change. Leslie Stephen has said that it did not matter much whether Pascal was sincere, and instanced the Pascal wager (_le pari de Pascal_) as evidence of the great thinker's casuistry. It is better to believe and be on the safe side than be damned if you do not believe; for if there is no hereafter your believing that there is will not matter one way or the other. This is the substance of Pascal's wager, and it must be admitted that the ardent upholder of Jansenism and the opponent of the Jesuits proved himself an excellent pupil of the latter when he framed his famous proposition.

Among the converts who have become almost notorious in France during the last two decades are Ferdinand Brunetière, François Coppée, Paul Verlaine, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. But it must not be forgotten that if the quartette trod the Road to Damascus they were all returning to their early City of Faith. They had been baptized Roman Catholics. All four had strayed. And widely different reasons brought them back to their mother Church. We need not dwell now on the case of Villiers de l'Isle Adam, as his was a death-bed repentance; nor with Paul Bourget, a Catholic born and on the side of his faith since the publication of Cosmopolis. As for Maurice Barrès, he may be a Mohammedan for all we care. He will always stand, spiritually, on his head.

The stir in literary and religious circles over Huysmans's trilogy, En Route, La Cathédrale, and L'Oblat, must have influenced the succeeding generation of French writers. Of a sudden sad young rakes who spouted verse in the æsthetic taverns of the Left Bank fell to writing religious verse. Mary Queen of Heaven became their shibboleth. They invented new sins so that they might repent in a novel fashion. They lacked the delicious lyric gift of Verlaine and the tremendous enfolding moral earnestness of Huysmans to make themselves believed. One, however, has emerged from the rest, and his book, Du Diable à Dieu (From the Devil to God), has crossed the twenty-five thousand mark; perhaps it is further by this time. The author is an authentic poet, Adolphe Retté. For his confessions the lately deceased François Coppée wrote a dignified and sympathetic preface. Retté's place in contemporary poetry is high. Since Verlaine we hardly dare to think of another poet of such charm, verve, originality. An anarchist with Sebastien Faure and Jean Grave, a Socialist of all brands, a lighted lyric torch among the insurrectionists, a symbolist, a writer of "free verse" (which is hedged in by more rules, though unformulated and unwritten, than the stiffest academic production of Boileau), Adolphe Retté led the life of an individualist poet; precisely the sort of life at which pulpit-pounders could point and cry: "There, there is your æsthetic poet, your man of feeling, of finer feelings than his neighbours! Behold to what base uses he has put this gift! See him wallowing with the swine!" And, practically, these words Retté has employed in speaking of himself. He insulted religion in the boulevard journals; he hailed with joy the separation of Church and State. He wrote not too decent novels, though his verse is feathered with the purest pinions. He treated his wife badly, neglecting her for the inevitable Other Woman. (What a banal example this is, after all.) He once, so he tells us to his horror, maltreated the poor woman because of her piety. Typical, you will say. Then why confess it in several hundred pages of rhythmic prose, why rehearse for gaping, indifferent Paris the threadbare, sordid tale? Paris, too, so cynical on the subject of conversions, and also very suspicious of such a spiritual _bouleversement_ as Retté's! "No, it won't do, Huysmans is to blame," exclaimed many.

Yet this conversion--literally one, for he was educated in a Protestant college--is sincere. He means every word he says; and if he is copiously rhetorical, set it all down to the literary temperament. He wrote not only with the approval of his spiritual counsellor, but also for the same reason as Saint Augustine or Bunyan. Newman's confession was an Apologia, an answer to Kingsley's challenge. With Huysmans, he is such a consummate artist that we could imagine him plotting ahead his cycle of novels (if novels they are); from Là-Bas to Lourdes the spiritual modulation is harmonious. Now, M. Retté (he was born in 1863 in Paris of an Ardennaise family), while he has sung in his melodious voice many alluring songs, while he has shown the impressions wrought upon his spirit by Walt Whitman and Richard Wagner, there is little in the rich extravagance of his love for nature or the occasional Vergilian silver calm of his verse--he can sound more than one chord on his poetic keyboard--to prepare us for the great plunge into the healing waters of faith. A pagan nature shows in his early work, apart from the hatred and contempt he later displayed toward religion. How did it all come about? He has related it in this book, and we are free to confess that, though we must not challenge the author's sincerity, his manner is far from reassuring. He is of the brood of Baudelaire.

Huysmans frankly gave up the riddle in his own case. Atavism may have had its way; he had relatives who were in convents; a pessimism that drove him from the world also contributed its share in the change. Personally Huysmans prefers to set it down to the mercy and grace of God--which is the simplest definition after all. When we are through with these self-accusing men; when professional psychology is tired of inventing new terminologies, then let us do as did Huysmans--go back to the profoundest of all the psychologists, the pioneers of the moderns, Saint Theresa--what actual, virile magnificence is in her Castle of the Soul--Saint John of the Cross, and Ruysbroeck. They are mystics possessing a fierce faith; and without faith a mystic is like a moon without the sun. Adolphe Retté knows the great Spanish mystics and quotes them almost as liberally as Huysmans. But with a difference. He has read Huysmans too closely; books breed books, ideas and moods beget moods and ideas. We are quite safe in saying that if En Route had not been written, Retté's Du Diable à Dieu could not have appeared in its present shape. The similarity is both external and internal. John of the Cross had his Night Obscure, so has M. Retté; Huysmans, however, showed him the way. Retté holds an obstinate dialogue with the Devil (who is a capitalized creature). Consult the wonderful fifth chapter in En Route. Naturally there must be a certain resemblance in these spiritual adventures when the Evil One captures the outposts of the soul and makes sudden savage dashes into its depths. Retté's style is not in the least like Huysmans's. It is more fluent, swifter, and more staccato. You skim his pages; in Huysmans you recognise the distilled remorse; you move as in a penitential procession, the rhythms grave, the eyes dazzled by the vision divine, the voice lowly chanting. Not so Retté, who glibly discourses on sacred territory, who is terribly at ease in Zion.

Almost gayly he recounts his misdeeds. He pelts his former associates with hard names. He pities Anatole France for his socialistic affinities. All that formerly attracted him is anathema. Even the mysterious lady with the dark eyes is castigated. She is not a truth-teller. She does not now understand the protean soul of her poet. _Retro me Sathanas!_ It is very exhilarating. The Gallic soul in its most resilient humour is on view. See it rebound! Watch it ascend on high, buoyed by delicious phrases, asking sweet pardon; then it falls to earth abusing its satanic adversary with sinister energy. At times we overhear the honeyed accents, the silky tones of Renan. It is he, not Retté, who exclaims: _Mais quelles douces larmes!_ Ah! Renan--also a cork soul! The Imitation is much dwelt upon--the influence of Huysmans has been incalculable in this. And we forgive M. Retté his theatricalism for the lovely French paraphrase he has made of Salve Regina. But on the whole we prefer En Route. The starting-point of Retté's change was reading some verse in the Purgatory of the Divine Comedy. A literary conversion? Possibly, yet none the less complete. All roads lead to Rome, and the Road to Damascus may be achieved from many devious side paths. But in writing with such engaging frankness the memoirs of his soul we wish that Retté had more carefully followed the closing sentence of his brilliant little book: _Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam!_

V

FROM AN IVORY TOWER

"Their impatience," was the answer once given by Cardinal Newman to the question, What is the chief fault of heresiarchs? In this category Walter Pater never could have been included, for his life was a long patience. As Newman sought patiently for the evidences of faith, so Pater sought for beauty, that beauty of thought and expression, of which his work is a supreme exemplar in modern English literature. Flaubert, a man of genius with whom he was in sympathy, toiled no harder for the perfect utterance of his ideas than did this retiring Oxford man of letters. And, like his happy account of Raphael's growth, Pater was himself a "genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius."

Walter Pater's intimate life was once almost legendary. We heard more of him a quarter of a century ago than yesterday. This does not mean that his vogue has declined; on the contrary, he is a force at the present such as he never was either at Oxford or London. But of the living man, notwithstanding his shyness, stray notes crept into print. He wrote occasional reviews. He had disciples. He had adversaries who deplored his--admittedly remote--immoral influence upon impressionable, "slim, gilt souls"; he had critics who detected the truffle of evil in savouring his exotic style. When he died, in 1894, the air was cleared by his devoted friends, Edmund Gosse, Lionel Johnson, William Sharp, Arthur Symons, and some of his Oxford associates, Dr. Bussell and Mr. Shadwell. It was proved without a possibility of doubt that the popular conception of the man was far from the reality; that the real Pater was a plain liver and an austere thinker; that he was not the impassive Mandarin of literature pictured by some; that the hedonism, epicureanism, cyrenaicism of which he had been vaguely accused had been a confounding of intellectual substances, a slipshod method of thought he abhorred; that his entire career had been spent in the pursuit of an æsthetic and moral perfection and its embodiment in prose of a rarely individual and haunting music. Recall his half-petulant, half-ironical exclamation of disgust to Mr. Gosse: "I wish they wouldn't call me a 'hedonist'; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." He would have been quite in accord with Paul Bourget's dictum that "there is no such thing as health, or the contrary, in the world of the soul"; Bourget, who, lecturing later at Oxford, pronounced Walter Pater "un parfait prosateur."

Despite the attempt to chain him to the chariots of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Pater, like Chopin, during the Romantic turmoil, stood aloof from the heat and dust of its battles. He was at first deeply influenced by Goethe and Ruskin, and was a friend of Swinburne's; he wrote of the Morris poetry; but his was not the polemical cast of mind. The love of spiritual combat, the holy zeal of John Henry Newman, of Keble, of Hurrell Froude, were not in his bones. And so his scholar's life, the measured existence of a recluse, was uneventful; but measured by the results, what a vivid, intense, life it was. There is, however, very little to tell of Walter Pater. His was the interior life. In his books is his life--hasn't some one said that all great literature is autobiographical?

There are articles by the late William Sharp and by George Moore. The former in Some Personal Recollections of Walter Pater, written in 1894, gave a vivid picture of the man, though it remained for Mr. Moore to discover his ugly face and some peculiar minor characteristics. Sharp met Pater in 1880 at the house of George T. Robinson, in Gower Street, that delightful meeting-place of gifted people. Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, now Mme. Duclaux, was the tutelary genius. She introduced Sharp to Pater. The blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, was of the party. Pater at that time was a man of medium height, stooping slightly, heavily built, with a Dutch or Flemish cast of features, a pale complexion, a heavy moustache--"a possible Bismarck, a Bismarck who had become a dreamer," adds the keen observer. A friendship was struck up between the pair. Pater came out of his shell, talked wittily, paradoxically, and later at Oxford showed his youthful admirer the poetic side of his singularly complex nature. There are conversations recorded and letters printed which would have added to the value of Mr. Benson's memoir.