Part 3
“Art,” he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache.... Now, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double personification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents, besides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies after Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa, Murillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.”
Bertrand’s book is one of the documents that must be studied by any historian of the grotesque who would trace the re-awakening of a spirit in art that had dozed during the eighteenth century, a spirit quite different from that of Hogarth, with which it is sometimes confounded. Bertrand’s was not the noble, the sublime conception of the grotesque that ruled the finer drawings and much of the poetry of William Blake. It was akin to that whose love of a gargoyle brought it to life and sent Quasimodo to haunt the dark and winding stairs of the towers of Notre Dame. Bertrand contrasts Rembrandt and Callot, but does not see that in the mind of the man “who consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature” there is the essence of the feeling for the grotesque, which, in such men as Callot, having forgotten its origins, too often becomes mere sport, shadows flung on a wall by a will-o’-the-wisp instead of by a philosopher’s lamp. But in _Gaspard de la Nuit_ this feeling is groping towards consciousness, recognising its food in the etchings alike of Rembrandt and of Callot, of Salvator and of Durer, noticing the more obvious differences between them, but as yet incapable of a more sensitive distinction. It is interesting to notice that he takes suggestions from the Breughel[2] whose wild and energetic picture made Flaubert, ten years later, set to work on _The Temptation of St. Anthony_.
Bertrand’s book is made up of six series of fantasies, labelled “Flemish School,” “Old Paris,” “The Chronicles,” like the rooms in a picture-gallery. The usual form of the pieces is that of a small number of carefully balanced paragraphs, mostly single sentences, sometimes linked by refrains of movement or meaning. Some have minute prologues and epilogues. Some are like prose-ballades, finished by an _envoi_. Few cover more than two or three pages in a small book of large type. Each one is complete in itself, and built of a firm, noun-ful prose, richer in colour than in subtlety.
They were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible, a man elusive, _fugace_, who could not settle in one place or in one mood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the nearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a hunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his chase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no models for the gait of his soul.
Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else. His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet. He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes of the moon.
This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries:
“LE CLAIR DE LUNE. “‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez Et priez pour les trépassés.’ --_Le cri du crieur de nuit._
“Oh! qu’il est doux, quand l’heure tremble au clocher, la nuit, de regarder la lune qui a le nez fait comme un carolus d’or!
“Deux ladres se lamentaient sous ma fenêtre, un chien hurlait dans le carrefour, et le grillon de mon foyer vaticinait tout bas.
“Mais bientôt mon oreille n’interrogea plus qu’un silence profond. Les lépreux étaient rentrés dans leurs chenils, aux coups de Jacquemart qui battait sa femme.
“Le chien avait enfilé une venelle, devant les pertuisanes du guet enrouillé par la pluie et morfondu par la bise.
“Et le grillon s’était endormi, dès que la dernière bluette avait éteint sa dernière lueur dans la cendre de la cheminée.
“Et moi, il me semblait,--tant la fièvre est incohérente,--que la lune, grimant sa face, me tirait la langue comme un pendu!”
“MOONLIGHT. “‘Wake, men who sleep, And pray for the dead.’ --_Cry of the night-watchman._
“Oh! how pleasant it is, when the hour trembles in the belfry, at night, to look at the moon, whose nose is shaped like a golden carolus![3]
“Two lepers were complaining under my window, a dog was howling at the cross-ways, and the cricket on my hearth was prophesying in a whisper.
“But soon my ear no longer questioned anything but a profound silence. The lepers had gone back into their kennels, at the sound of Jacquemart beating his wife.[4]
“The dog had fled away up an alley, before the halberds of the watch, rain-soaked, and wind-frozen.
“And the cricket had fallen asleep, as soon as the last spark had put out its last glimmer in the ashes of the fire-place.
“And, as for me, it seemed to me--fever is so incoherent--that the moon, wrinkling her face, put out her tongue at me like a man who has been hanged.”
The moon put out her tongue at her faithful admirer, and helped him neither to honey-dew nor to the milk of Paradise. His biographers do not agree as to the way he lived during his few remaining years. Sainte-Beuve says that he was a private secretary, and that he wrote in various inconspicuous newspapers. M. Séché, to whom we owe a great deal of new information, thinks that these employments are not likely to have held Bertrand for long. About 1835, he found in Eugène Renduel a publisher for _Gaspard de la Nuit_. He sold the right to print an edition of 800 copies, of which 300 were to be called “Keepsake Fantastique,” for the sum of 150 francs. The money was paid and the manuscript was put into the publisher’s desk, where, for some reason or other, it remained for a very long time. Its publication was promised from year to year. In a letter written to David d’Angers, in 1837, Bertrand says: “_Gaspard de la Nuit_, ce livre de mes douces prédilections, où j’ai essayé de créer un nouveau genre de prose, attend le bon vouloir d’Eugène Renduel pour paraître enfin cet automne....” Bertrand did not make the gallant figure in poverty that was made, for example, by Richard Steele, who turned bailiffs into liveried footmen, as Whistler is said to have done more recently; but once, at least, he showed a smiling face to misfortune, even if the smile was a little awry. In 1840, the book being still unpublished, he called on his publisher and left a sonnet on him, as an ordinary person might leave a visiting-card. A more charming protest against procrastination was surely never written:
“Quand le raisin est mûr, par un ciel clair et doux, Dès l’aube, à mi-coteau rit une foule étrange: C’est qu’alors dans la vigne, et non plus dans la grange, Maîtres et serviteurs, joyeux, s’assemblent tous.
A votre huis, clos encor, je heurte. Dormez vous? Le matin vous éveille, éveillant sa voix d’ange, Mon compère, chacun en ce temps-ci vendange; Nous avons une vigne--eh bien, vendangeons nous!
Mon livre est cette vigne, où, présent de l’automne, La grappe d’or attend pour couler dans la tonne, Que le pressoir noueux crie enfin avec bruit.
J’invite mes voisins, convoqués sans trompettes, A s’armer promptement de paniers, de serpettes. Qu’ils tournent le feuillet; sous le pampre est le fruit.”
Six months later Bertrand was dead. At least once he had known for several months the inside of a public hospital. He was attacked by phthisis. David d’Angers obtained a grant of 300 francs for him and the promise of a post as librarian; but he was not to leave the hospital again. David, who was himself ill, did all that could be done for him, sent him oranges, and made portraits of him before and after death, and saw to it that his grave-clothes were not of the coarseness deemed fitting for the bodies of the poor. David alone followed his bier, and, no doubt, supplied Sainte-Beuve with the material for his picture (in the introduction to the first edition of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, published in 1842 by Victor Pavie, who bought the rights from Renduel for the sum originally paid):--“It was the eve of Ascension; a terrible storm was rumbling; the Mass for the dead had been spoken, and the funeral procession did not come. The priest had ended by leaving; the only friend present watched the abandoned remains. At the end of the chapel a sister of charity was decorating an altar with garlands for the next day’s feast.”
So ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this way and that, without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and whirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand’s life was that of the real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his head is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are full of magnificent things. Bertrand was like a man trying to speak high poetry when his enemy has him by the throat. He saw, and wrote, and wrestled, in a breath; his achievement was scarcely recognised till he was overthrown. And that achievement, such as it was, that little flame he contrived to light before going out himself, kindled a greater, and in its brighter luminosity almost became invisible. But when we look back from the _Petits Poèmes en Prose_ to this little book that suggested their creation, we find that it is not without an independent interest, personal as well as historical. Bertrand himself was somebody, and no book so well as his lets us share the day-dreams of 1830.
1911.
ALPHONSE DAUDET
ALPHONSE DAUDET
Daudet’s was the scintillant, flamelike vitality that makes its possessor the youngest in whatever company he may find himself. Anatole France writes of him that he believes no human creature ever loved nature and art with a more ardent and more generous affection, or enjoyed the universe with more delight, more force, and more tenderness. Even in old age and suffering, he brought merriment with him when he limped into the big room that Edmond de Goncourt called his “grenier,” and kept for talk and friendship. If the room had been sad or silent, it woke to laughter when this invalid came in and began to speak. Men felt themselves more alive in his presence. This vitality is different from the physical and mental momentum of a Balzac. It is a lambent flame rather than a conflagration; light without heat. It scorched no one, not even Daudet himself, who made it into a public entertainer. He could use it at will; it did not impel him into a restless activity. I can imagine that indolent people felt ill at ease with Balzac in the room, as if from a fear that he might go off like a dynamite bomb. Daudet’s vitality was gentle, and insinuated itself into his listeners’ veins, so that when they left they had the pleasant sensation of having themselves been more than usually vivacious. “I have missed my vocation,” he said; “I should have been a merchant of happiness.” It was a vocation that he had not missed. A merchant of happiness was precisely what he was, since one kind of happiness is a childish enjoyment of everything that may occur. Children run about all day, without forethought, and play at being all sorts of things, and chatter and fall asleep, still chattering, in the middle of a sentence. They wake next morning to perform a variation ever so blithe on yesterday’s performance. Daudet lived just so, and was able to share his life with other people.
_Le Petit Chose_ is the story of his childhood. It is the tale of a little boy whose father is an unsuccessful man of business, a little boy with a parrot and a dream of Robinson Crusoe, who is transplanted from his south to a northern manufacturing town, a child who becomes an usher in a school where his youth and his poverty make him butt of boys and masters alike, where he writes love-letters for a gymnastic instructor, and suffers in his stead for their success, a child who goes to Paris at seventeen to join his brother in poverty and hope, and to write a poem about blue butterflies. The book is almost true to history, except that, unlike Daudet, _le Petit Chose_ ends as partner in a china shop, regretfully resigning his blue butterflies to marry the daughter of the china shop’s proprietor. The real tale of his shyness and pathetic adventures, that Daudet was never tired of telling, since it was his own, goes on in other books. There is in them all a _joie d’écrire_ as much as _joie de vivre_. He rejoices in every misfortune of his childhood, because, in describing it, he finds an opportunity for life as a young man. His life as a child had been told to himself as a fairy tale. He had told ingenious lies to excuse his truant days on the river, killing off a Pope to hide, in his family’s excitement, his lateness for a meal. He told lies to himself to excuse the sordid appearances of his existence, and now he had a chance of telling lies again, and so living another romance. Daudet’s writing was always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied indefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Coppée, a disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the memory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he writes, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades as if they were yesterday’s, as indeed they might be. Even when he tries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is irrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or pleasure is the more enjoyable. Either is an aid to living, and perhaps the former gives life a keener taste.
Men of this kind do not spend their vitality altogether for nothing. More than others they need affection and applause. A face of disapproval in their audience is enough to wither their wings, and they ask for goodwill, if only to help them to continue the performance. _Le Petit Chose_, like most of Daudet’s work, like his life, and his other representations of his life, conversational or on paper, is an appeal to be loved. He asks to be seen as he sees himself, and asks very successfully. It is this, I think, that makes it easy to forgive him his sins against pure art; this that accounts for his friends’ love of him, and also for the popular success that made him feel a little uncomfortable among them. His greed of affection made him not very fastidious; he was glad to be loved by his baker as well as by Edmond de Goncourt.
Daudet acquired the habit of being lovable. He made his own life into a fairy tale, and, since it was the surest way to gratitude, soon found it difficult to see the lives of others in any different way. He copied his men and women from nature, as he said, but each one of them readily became _le Petit Chose_, and he his affectionate, rose-spectacled biographer. When his novels are laid aside, and we look at their backs, we forget their extraordinary observation, and see characters exaggerated by a man who is anxious to persuade; and when these characters have faded away into framed drawings like those taken from back numbers of _Punch_, we remember little of the books but a spirit that asks love and gives it, is ready to understand more than there is to be understood, and to make excuses for those who are without them. We think of Daudet as the tenderest possible biographer for ourselves, and at the same time feel a little shrinking from the idea of being exhibited with such emphasis. Some of the novels, with which we are not here particularly concerned, do their best to dispel the atmosphere of rose-leaves and sunshine, involving us in a swift and keen analysis of unkind and unpleasant motives. But when we close even these, little is left of them but their author’s charm, and the memory of those incidents or descriptions, in which, freed from the burden of an ambitious task, he loosens the bridle of his romancing vitality.
His books are not so consistent as his character. They are always most satisfactory when most directly concerned with it. This is partly because he wrote of himself in anecdotes, and his inspiration was facile and short-winded rather than persevering. The effects he secures in his writings are the same as those he won in conversation, snatches of colour and feeling, like the studies in an artist’s notebook, often better than when repainted into pictures. Ambition perhaps obstructed his talent in setting it to do other men’s work, however well he may have been able to do it. He was not a novelist, although he made himself one. His big books, in which he describes many lives and kinds of life, are already being sieved out by time, and the work by which his name will be remembered is reducing itself to his real and imaginary reminiscences and his short stories. In these he does not mingle contradictory ingredients; while his novels, even the best, are too much like battle-grounds between Queen Mab and Zola.
In his short stories he is perfectly at ease. His talent was no eagle for long flights, but one of his own blue butterflies. It flew far only with effort, and tired as it flew, drooping its wings or flapping them irregularly. But in the short tales no flight was so long as to tire it. It was happy and at ease, opened its wings with grace, and as it dropped, folded them with all imaginable delicacy. In the _Contes du Lundi_ he reconciled his powers and his ambition. He was a romancer, a _conteur_, a _causeur_, and romantic anecdotes refuse to be fettered to a strict and steady veracity. He wished to be a painter after nature, to be accurate, to be real, to be mistaken for reality. There are moments, but only moments, when the two kinds of truth, that these powers and this ambition severally suggest, coalesce in a truth that is charming and, at the same time, almost photographic. In the novels the truth disintegrated into opposing masses. In short stories he was able to combine them. His brief, flashing sketches, with their curious air of stereoscopic perspective, are seldom in the least unreal. Yet, poignant little things, unforgettable, however slight, they are not the probabilities of life but its possibilities. They are the lies that ought to be true. The story of the Alsatian schoolmaster, or that of the siege of Berlin, with the old colonel, in his worn uniform, standing on the balcony to welcome the victorious French, and seeing instead the Uhlans of the advance guard, and hearing the triumphal march of Schubert, as the Prussians enter Paris; all these minute things are too dramatic, too pathetic, not to be allowed their moment of existence. Daudet writes them, and they bring tears to our eyes, tears that, unfortunately, we must submit to a rather cruel analysis.
Tears, and also laughter. Daudet with his firm belief in the ultimate victory of all good and pleasant people, and the corresponding punishment of the bad and unkind, enjoyed, like many happy-minded men, a highly developed faculty of pity. It was one of his means of being alive, and this man, who “died of having loved life too well,” neglected none of the exercises that made his nerves tingle and his heart beat. He lived in being sorry for people and things, and he lived in being glad. Another group of his short stories is made up of pure fairy tales that dance before the eyes, their words running and tripping after each other, like a band of elves on midsummer’s eve. They are southern tales of old Provence that he read in the grasshopper’s library under the blue sky, where the librarians sing all day, and there are gossamers for bookmarks. Their heartsome feeling is that of the old song:
“Sur le pont d’Avignon Tout le monde danse en rond.”
Even when he brings the elves to town, as in _Un Réveillon dans le Marais_, when, into the old courtyard of the mansion that has been turned into a mineral water factory, he introduces cavaliers and ladies of the ancient time, fairies now, being dead so long, he brings with them half a memory of the farandole, and makes them drunk with seltzer.
Laughter and tears; it is by these that we remember Daudet. His art is that of wearing his heart on his sleeve. “Here,” he seems to say, “is a sad tale to make you cry (I cried myself in making it), and here is a merry one to make you laugh (my pen quivered with merriment as I wrote it down for you).” Laughter and tears tempted him perhaps too strongly. He was accustomed to tell his stories many times before he wrote them. They shaped themselves, like folktales, in successive recitations, until the inessentials fell away from them and they won economical and immediate effects. The danger of such a manner of composition is a confusion of ends. The only safe audience for a writer is that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our consciousness, signs now and again his knowledge that such and such an expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an incomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open, whose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art. Its values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of laughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become more important to us than they should. How can the jocund tale be bad that made you laugh? How can that sad one fail that sent your kerchief to your eyes? There may be imperfections in them; yes, but by removing them, I must be careful not to lose that laughter or those tears. And so, almost inevitably, the tears and laughter come to seem the ends of art instead of its by-products. And they are not the wistful tears that dew the eyelashes before a perfect work, nor the impersonal laughter that rings out like a spring song because some man has made a new thing well for the eternal gods to see.