Part 2
Besides this fundamental morality of a work of art, it may hold other moralities which are also not without their influence. Codes of values may themselves be the material of artistic creation. A code of values foreign to the speaker may enter into the moment of conscious life that is his work of art. Plato and Socrates were different men with different moralities. The Socrates of Plato’s Dialogues, however Platonized, is not Plato, and, as well as the fundamental morality of those dialogues, the morality of those speeches which are supposed to be Socratic has its separate influence upon us. Anatole France plays with the Abbé Jérôme Coignard, and with Jacques Tournebroche, and beside the morality of _La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque_ we are offered these other moralities included in it and ruled by it.
There would seem to be little else but morality in art, and its influence would seem to be so largely as to be almost exclusively moral. But observe what actually happens. Have you not noticed, in reading a book, that you insensibly pick out and offer to your digestion those of the accidental moralities in it that seem to be cousins of your own. You linger over the sayings of Coignard, if you feel that in some mood or other you could have said them. You accept with gratitude the follies, the humours of M. Bergeret, if you recognise in him a kinship, however distant, with yourself. In listening to a play you side, at least in simpler moods, with the character whose code of values approximates to that by which you are in the habit of weighing your actions and those of others. These minor judgments are independent of your judgment of the work of art, though here too a similar instinct bids you prefer those artists in whom you recognise, let us say, the full development of some one possibility that your personality contains. And, since our temperament thus picks and chooses among the moralities that art offers, because it is like Paracelsus’ alchemist, situate in the stomach of man, digesting the food that is good for him and rejecting the poison, art does not so much alter our morality as increase our consciousness of it. It is an individualising influence on morality, essentially hostile to the averaging of codes of values. It seeks uniqueness, not uniformity, and so does not so much spread moralities abroad as cherish and grow to their full strength the moralities it finds among its listeners. In this sentence the moralists and the artists for art’s sake come to an understanding.
Leaving now the question of its moral influence, let me give an example, of the simplest nature, to show what I mean by the conscious living that is art. I find one in the following exquisite poem, “The Happy Child,” by William Davies:
“I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick, But not one like the child did pick.
I heard the pack-hounds in green park, But not one like the child heard bark.
I heard this day bird after bird, But not one like the child has heard.
A hundred butterflies saw I, But not one like the child saw fly.
I saw the horses roll in grass, But no horse like the child saw pass.
My world this day has lovely been, But not like what the child has seen.”
Rossetti believed that “Poetry should seem to the hearer to have been always present to his thought, but never before heard,” and the statement that this has been accomplished (so just, sometimes, is popular instinct) is the commonest praise accorded to individual works of art. Many of Mr. Davies’ readers must have said, rightly, but, critically speaking, with imperfect accuracy, “Now that expresses what I have always felt.” They should have said, “That enables me to feel what I always could have felt.” For they have never truly felt it. That wistful, regretful moment, now articulate, was carried unhappily past them in the general flux of incompletely conscious life. They suspected a possibility of feeling something, of knowing what they dimly felt, but it eluded them in the tangled currents of the stream, and they did not detain it, _know_ it, and make it part of themselves. Mr. Davies has not so allowed it to escape; he warily netted it in his consciousness, _learnt_ it accurately and fully, and wrote that poem, thus isolating it for ever from unconsciousness. And we, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of the work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories behind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness such a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately with our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it, an increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The conscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as self-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not self but other people’s eyes. It implies a new reading of the Delphic command, γνῶθι σεαυτόν. It does not mean Know thy opinions only, nor yet, Know what are thy desires, but Know thy life, not thy biography but thy living, thine innumerable acts of life.
I took my example from a short poem of extreme simplicity, and, as I have again and again in this essay spoken of “moments” of conscious life, a scrupulous reader might well conclude that I concerned myself only with what is commonly known as lyrical art, or that I should presently offer a proof of Croce’s theory that all art is essentially lyrical. I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in believing, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion, that all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic conception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation shall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for this reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to himself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be representative of more than one moment, it would be representative of more than one man. It would not be homogeneous, and could not be beautiful. This applies not only to a song or a picture, but to those works of art which are in appearance the most elaborate, the least uniform, the least determined by a single moment. A play, whose reading or performance may occupy hours, during which a number of characters whom we accept provisionally as human, as separate entities, live imaginary lives before us, is, no less than a song, the result of becoming completely conscious of a single moment. The duration of the reading is in no way affected by the duration of the moment of life that set the author playing with his marionettes. A moment of life such as would, for a poet, become articulate in a song, may require from a playwright that he represent it to himself in persons talking, a clash of personalities, a breaking of personalities by destiny, a series of events explicable within itself, not resembling any one moment of his life, but in their totality representing his means of _knowing_ a moment, and the means he offers us whereby, as nearly as we may, we shall share that knowing. When a play is not the artist’s learning a moment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building at dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be empty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion. Passage of time, intricacy of construction, apparent multiplicity of imagined lives do not affect the question.
John Masefield did not by a sudden effort of genius conceive “Nan,” scenes, persons, and dialogue in a moment. One moment, however, determined its conception, and implied all that is in the play. Let me, with deference, suggest what may have happened. He heard a story that affected him with a mixture of emotions. If he had not been an artist, he would probably have done no more than repeat the story to others as it was told to him, and wonder idly if it produced the same mixture of emotions in them. Instead, he lingered with it, and let the unconscious flux flow on unobserved while he brooded over this one emotional moment, becoming more and more clearly conscious of the emotions it contained as they, in the formative processes of his mind, came to be represented by persons and actions and words. His mind was not making but discovering, following the implications of the original emotional moment, careful only to be true to that, and rejecting proffered representations solely on account of their inaccuracy. His skill was shown only in so dealing with the flood of representations that no one particle of it should contradict another, should hamper the full realisation of that moment. His greatness was shown in the profundity with which he realised that moment, and the depth to which he could follow its implications.
Therein, by the way, is suggested the criterion of greatness that is contained in the doctrine that art is for life’s sake. The theory of art for art’s sake left its holders at a loss before the question “Is no man greater than another, if his works are beautiful, if he is an equally skilful artist?” They knew that he was, but their theory could not tell them why, and they had to take refuge in cynicism. The theory of art for “morality’s” sake was no more satisfying. It suggested that the greatest artist was he who preached the most good, and so left its holders in speechless difficulty before a comparison of Rossetti and Dr. Watts. The theory of art for life’s sake has a clear answer, and offers a valid test. That man is the greatest artist who makes us the most profoundly conscious of life. Shakespeare is set above Herrick, who was a better technician, and Leonardo above Murillo, who painted more devotional subjects, on grounds with which men, neither as artists nor as moralists, need quarrel.
Art for Art’s sake was a battle-cry, and, to understand it, we had to understand what those who used it fought. Art for Life’s sake is also a battle-cry, though it includes in those four words a suggestion not only of the function of art but of its nature. Let us review the enemies we attack with those words upon our lips. What do we fight against? What are the misunderstandings which in our time encourage the production of false, of secondary art, and obscure the excellence of the finest?
We fight first against a political valuation of art, that imagines poetry, pictures and music as auxiliaries in the reconstruction or conservation of the state, and judges them by their efficiency as political pamphlets.
We fight secondly against an educational valuation of art, that judges works of art by the accuracy of the facts they happen to embody, the accuracy of the pictures they paint of this or that form of life, the clearness with which they illustrate generalisations.
We fight thirdly against the valuation of art by its technical skill, by the beauty that is a universal condition of its being. These things cannot afford a scale of comparison for works of art, but only a guarantee that they are worthy of judgment. We should not fight against this valuation if it showed itself in practice capable of so useful an office. It is, however, not sufficiently selective, but allows itself to be tricked by things built in imitation of perfect building, things whose form is not identical with their content, things which manifest more skill than vitality. This, our old ally, since it made our battle possible, is now our subtlest enemy.
Our battle is far from being easy, for we fight not to kill but to make captive, and it is easier and safer to fight to kill. We fight not to destroy those valuations, but to destroy their pre-eminence. Recognising (1) that a work of art has a political, comparable to its moral, influence, (2) that it always embodies knowledge, (3) that it is nothing if it does not wake in us the feeling that we are near the achievement of the beautiful, we wish to deny none of these facts, but to prevent any one of them from being taken as the foundation of a criterion of art. We wish to set over them a criterion of art that shall include them all. Above technique, above opinion, above information, we set life, of the special kind that is here described, whose conscious vitality is to unconscious vitality what living is to existence.
What, then, do we ask ourselves after experiencing a work of art.
We ask one thing only, though, perhaps, in many forms: Has it given us an increased consciousness of life, or has it merely had in view one or other of those valuations whose supreme authority we reject? Is its title to the name of art merely that it is an illustration of a doctrine that has elbowed out the doctrine it illustrates, merely that it gives us a clear idea how some people live, merely that it has a skin-deep appearance of unity? Or is it a piece of conscious life, separated watchfully from the flux of living, a piece of _knowing_ carried out by the artist, which we are allowed to share? Does it give us a new possession by making us aware of something we possess. We do not ask an artist for opinions, for facts, for skill, alone. We have the right to ask for more. We ask him for ourselves; we ask him for life. “Poetry enriches the blood of the world” by the practice it affords of living consciously. Vain learning, opinion, skill, impoverish it. We ask from an artist opportunities of conscious living, which, taken as they come, multiply the possibilities of their recurrence, turn us into artists, and help us to contract the habit of being alive.
1912.
ALOYSIUS BERTRAND: A ROMANTIC OF 1830
ALOYSIUS BERTRAND: A ROMANTIC OF 1830
In the preface to _Petits Poèmes en Prose_, Baudelaire makes respectful reference to a little-known book: “J’ai une petite confession à vous faire. C’est en feuilletant pour la vingtième fois au moins, le fameux _Gaspard de la Nuit_, d’Aloysius Bertrand (un livre connu de vous, de moi et de quelques-uns de nos amis, n’a-t-il pas tous les droits à être appelé fameux?), que l’idée m’est venue de tenter quelque chose d’analogue, et d’appliquer à la description de la vie moderne, ou plutot d’_une_ vie moderne et plus abstraite, le procédé qu’il avait appliqué à la peinture de la vie ancienne, si étrangement pittoresque.” He speaks of Bertrand as “mon mystérieux et brillant modèle,” though, remembering the teaching of Poe, he adds that he is ashamed to have made something so different from _Gaspard de la Nuit_, since he holds that the highest honour of a poet is to accomplish exactly what he set out to perform. A writer who wrote prose poems good enough to be read “twenty times at least” by Baudelaire, good enough to suggest an imitation, a writer but for whom the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ would not have been written, or would have been written differently, is more than a literary curiosity. I was led to examine his book, and, presently, to find an interest in the man himself as well as in his accomplishment. M. Anatole France was good enough to direct me in my search for information. My friend, M. Champion, of the Quai Malaquais, generously put his bibliographical knowledge at my disposal. The files of forgotten magazines and newspapers and essays by Sainte-Beuve, Charles Asselineau, and M. Leon Séché combined to build in my mind a portrait of this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here and there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality.
* * * * *
Louis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later preferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, at Céva, in Piedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child of that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in the _Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle_. His mother was an Italian, his father a Frenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery letter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as “only a patriot of 1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out his blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.” At the age of seven the young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned in youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read Hugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the modern Dijon into a mediæval city of dreams.
Early in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper, _Le Provincial_, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It endured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to it, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered form, was printed in _Gaspard de la Nuit_. The paper was not unnoticed in Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he found some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless, with rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read aloud from them.
Two portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by Victor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “... a tall, thin young man of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather wretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather uncivilised....”
Victor Pavie says: “His awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated costume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly escaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained fire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his face, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat uncivilised taciturnity....”
Beside these pictures let me print Bertrand’s portrait of the imaginary Gaspard de la Nuit: “A poor devil whose exterior announced nothing but poverty and suffering. I had already noticed in the garden his frayed overcoat, buttoned to the chin, his shapeless hat that never brush had brushed, his hair long as a weeping-willow, combed like a thicket, his fleshless hands like ossuaries, his mocking, wretched, and sickly face; and my conjectures had charitably placed him among those itinerant artists, violin-players and portrait-painters, whom an insatiable hunger and an unquenchable thirst condemn to travel the world in the footsteps of the Wandering Jew....” It is different from the portraits of himself, but not more different than would be such a Germanicised caricature as might have been made by Hoffmann.
Bertrand’s life in Paris was hidden from the celebrated men whom he met at Nodier’s evening receptions and in Sainte-Beuve’s study. He showed himself for a moment, recited some of his verses “d’une voix sautillante,” and disappeared. He had no money, and probably suffered from that lack of confidence which can only be removed by a banking account. Sainte-Beuve, who saw him two or three times and gave him a copy of the _Consolations_, with the inscription “Mon ami Bertrand,” speaks of him threading lonely streets with the air of Pierre Gringoire, the out-at-elbows poet of _Notre Dame de Paris_. He paints what must be an imaginary portrait of the young and penniless genius leaning on the window-sill of his garret, “talking for long hours with the pale gilliflowers of the roof.”
Unable to earn a living in Paris, he went back to Dijon in 1830, where he contributed to a Liberal newspaper, _Le Patriote de la Côte-d’Or_. In spite of his poverty, his blood was young and proud, and as he walked the streets of Dijon he must have felt himself a representative of that exuberant young Parisian manhood that was putting _Hernani_ on the stage and sending _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ to the press. A rival paper jeered at him, and he was able to reply: “Je préfère vos dédains à vos suffrages,” and to quote a letter from Victor Hugo to explain his independence. Hugo had written: “Je lis vos vers en cercle d’amis, comme je lis André Chenier, Lamartine et Alfred de Vigny: il est impossible de posséder à un plus haut point les secrets de la facture.” With such a testimonial in his pocket he need not care for the scorn or the approval of a provincial journalist.
At this time his Liberalism was as ardent as his youth. Asselineau quotes a fiery article praying for war, bloody war, against the Holy Alliance: “It is time to throw the dice on a drum; and, should we all perish, the honour of France and of liberty shall perish not.” But, as was not unnatural, he presently left France and liberty to take care of themselves, and, full of new plans for literary achievement, returned hopefully to Paris, where he was joined by his mother and sister. He was again unable to earn a living. The last lines of a piteous letter written to Antoine de Latour in September 1833, show how miserable was his condition:
“Si je te disais que je suis au point de n’avoir bientôt plus de chaussures, que ma redingote est usée, je t’apprendrais là le dernier de mes soucis: ma mère et ma sœur manquent de tout dans une mansarde de l’hôtel des Etats-Unis qui n’est pas payée. Qu’est ce pour toi qu’une soixantaine de francs (mon Dieu, à quelle humiliation le malheur me contraint!). Quelques pièces d’argent dans une bourse, pour nous c’est un mois de loger, c’est du pain!
“Et je te dois déjà cinquante francs! J’en pleure de rage. Mon camarade de collège!!! “Je cherche une place de correcteur d’épreuves dans une imprimerie.”
It is not known whether the money was sent him, nor whether he found employment as a proof-reader.
In such poverty, in such dejection, he put together the book that preserves his memory, dreaming, when he could forget his empty stomach and the holes in his shoes, of the prose that Baudelaire was to imagine after him, “une prose poétique, musicale sans rhythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience.” He would not, perhaps, have thought of sudden starts of conscience, for his was a simpler soul than Baudelaire’s, and he never felt that the portrait he was drawing might be only the portrait of a portrait. He was born in 1807 and not in 1821, and, with the Romantic joy in colour and local colour, he had more than the Romantic simplicity. His fantasies are prefaced by quotations, and these are taken from Scott, Hugo, Byron, folk-song, the Fathers of the Church, Scottish ballads, Charles Nodier, old chronicles, Lope de Vega, Fenimore Cooper, the cries of the night watchmen, Lamartine, Coleridge, Chateaubriand, a medley of the Romantics and the writers and things that they admired. They sometimes mistook the picturesque for the beautiful, and so did Bertrand. He was a man who thought with his eyes. He was not an analyst.
So far indeed did his visual conception of life carry him that he represents, better than any other French writer, the tendency, new at that time, to identify literature with painting. Hoffmann, in Germany, had written _Fantasy-pieces after the manner of Callot_. Leigh Hunt, in England, amused himself, in _Imagination and Fancy_, by cutting little bits out of Spenser and proposing them as subjects to the ghosts of Titian and Rubens. Bertrand used words like oil-colours, and in _Gaspard de la Nuit: fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot_, wrote what, if he had had a palette and brush, he might very well have painted. If he thought through his eyes, his eyes had been trained by the painters, and he was proud to offer his book as a series of engravings after imaginary pictures, or etchings from plates that had never been bitten.