LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 Class 
 
STUDIES IN FOREIGN LITERATURE 
 
All rights reserved 
 
STUDIES IN 
 FOREIGN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 VIRGINIA M. .CRAWFORD 
 
 LONDON 
 DUCKWORTH b 5 CO 
 
 3 HENRIETTA STREET COVENT GARDEN 
 
 W.C. 
 
REAMS nOO^l 
 
 FiVst Published, 1899 
 Re-issued, 1908 
 
die? 
 
 The essays on Verhaeren .and on Maeter- 
 linck appeared in their original form in 
 the Fortnightly Review^ and are reprinted 
 here, after considerable revision, with the 
 kind consent of the editor. My thanks 
 are also due to the editor of Cosmopolis 
 for permission to reproduce the essay on 
 D'Annunzio, and to the editors of the 
 Contemporary Review and the Month for 
 allowing me to republish the essays respec- 
 tively on Daudet and on Sienkiewicz. 
 
 213162 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PRESENT DECADENCE IN FRANCE 
 
 I 
 
 CYRANO DE BERGERAC .... 
 
 . 27 
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET .... 
 
 . 49 
 
 J. K. HUYSMANS ..... 
 
 . . 78 
 
 EMILE VERHAEREN . .... 
 
 106 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK .... 
 
 • 139 
 
 A SINGER OF BRUGES .... 
 
 . 175 
 
 GABRIELE d'aNNUNZIO .... 
 
 . 186 
 
 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO .... 
 
 . 219 
 
 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 . 248 
 
 WAR AND PEACE ..... 
 
 . 276 
 
THE PRESENT DECADENCE IN FRANCE 
 
 It is impossible not to believe in the existence 
 of some absolute standard of taste, some 
 unerring criterion by which the good and the 
 bad in art may be appraised. For the critic, 
 as for the theologian, some dogmatic basis 
 which it were impious to undermine would 
 appear to be a necessity. Yet when we 
 seek for the evidence of such a standard in 
 practical criticism, it would seem to be non- 
 existent. I know of nothing so arbitrary and 
 illogical as the criticisms on art and literature 
 which appear in the daily papers, save only the 
 still wilder freaks perpetrated by untrammelled 
 public opinion. Who can explain why Marie 
 Corelli, whom even the critics are agreed in 
 accepting as the type of all that is unliterary 
 and meretricious, should command a larger sale 
 for her novels than any living English writer ? 
 
2 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 Surely no one will venture to assert that 
 circulation is a test of literary achievement ? 
 Jude the Obscure obtained a wider publicity 
 than any of its predecessors, yet it was unmis- 
 takably the worst book that Mr. Hardy has 
 ever written. Mrs. Humphry Ward, we know, 
 was approved by Mr. Gladstone, and the critics 
 are never weary of dwelling on her serious and 
 painstaking qualities, on her unimpeachable 
 morality. Yet Mrs. Ward is no more an 
 artist than is Marie Corelli, and the popularity 
 enjoyed by both goes to prove the undiscerning 
 quality of public admiration when we remember 
 that contemporaneously it has cost George 
 Meredith nearly half a century of labour to 
 achieve a general reputation at all. The public 
 may not have discovered it, but none the less 
 Richard Feverel is one of the few beautiful 
 novels in the English language. 
 
 It is this unreasonableness of public opinion 
 in matters of art that has led some critics to 
 declare in their haste that — as far at least as the 
 English nation is concerned — art must be bad 
 if it is to be popular. But the problem cannot 
 fairly be disposed of in this summary fashion. 
 
IN FRANCE 3 
 
 Else why is it that no painter of recent years 
 has been more popular than Millais, indis- 
 putably one of the greatest of all our English 
 painters ? Why is it that no play is so certain 
 of a prolonged success as a great Shakespeare 
 revival? There is a continual and growing 
 demand for the very best music, and a Beethoven 
 symphony to-day will attract as large an 
 audience as a ballad concert. These assuredly 
 are reliable tests of a cultivated artistic sense. 
 Yet, once again, when we bear in mind that the 
 same public has never accorded the rightful 
 measure of recognition to Swinburne, or to 
 Coventry Patmore, or to John Keats ; and when 
 we remember further that Rudyard Kipling, 
 alone of living poets, has been able to realise 
 a fortune by his verse, we are ready to turn 
 aside in despair from so baffling a contro- 
 versy. 
 
 Were I tempted to generalise on this sub- 
 ject, I would say that no one who receives 
 instantaneous recognition in England is ever 
 deserving of lasting fame. It is our intuitions 
 that are at fault ; our deliberate judgments are 
 less liable to ross error. It is only what is 
 
THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 superficial and commonplace and obvious — 
 something that corresponds to the familiar 
 emotions of the average mind — that rivets the 
 immediate attention of the multitude. A 
 great work of art — even for those most 
 susceptible to its influence — creeps gradually 
 into our life, endearing itself by degrees to our 
 inmost consciousness, ever revealing fresh 
 secrets of truth and beauty. Even where our 
 ultimate discernment is to be relied on, our 
 immediate impressions may be quite untrust- 
 worthy. The supreme test of a book is not 
 whether we sit up half the night to finish it, 
 but whether we turn to it again and again. 
 It stands therefore to reason that the reviews 
 of books published on the day of issue are, 
 for the most part, entirely valueless. They 
 are the outcome of hasty writing and undigested 
 reading, and they tend to build up a body of 
 false opinion whose destruction must be left 
 to ' the slow processes of time. Sometimes it 
 happens that we neglect our men of genius until 
 long after their death ; at other times we awake 
 to a consciousness of their influence on life just 
 when that influence is becoming a thing of the 
 
IN FRANCE 5 
 
 past. Our chronology is at fault, and we worship 
 genius in writers in their decadence just as we 
 applaud singers past their prime. When Ibsen 
 wrote Ghosts and The Doll's House, and that 
 most symbolical of all his plays, The Wild 
 Duck, the English public knew nothing of him. 
 Fashion had not turned in the direction of 
 Norwegian drama. To-day we welcome with 
 reverential awe the gloomy incoherent produc- 
 tions of his embittered old age. It is some- 
 thing of the same kind that we are doing in 
 reference to contemporary French literature. 
 Slowly we have come to realise that in the 
 middle of the present century there was a 
 grandeur of conception and a power of execu- 
 tion among imaginative French writers which 
 our English novelists have never been able to 
 equal. And the admiration which was due 
 then, we lavish to-day. There has never been 
 a time when French authors have been so widely 
 studied, so freely translated as at the present. 
 Not an editor of a serious magazine but feels 
 that an article on the newest French poet or 
 novelist forms an essential feature of his 
 monthly equipment. It is as indispensable as 
 
6 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 soup at a dinner-party. Unfortunately for 
 our powers of discernment, not for long years 
 has France been so poor in great men as at the 
 present moment. She is passing through one 
 of those periods of decadence and disease which 
 have recurred more than once in her history. 
 In politics, as well as in art and in literature, the 
 need of a master hand is making itself felt. 
 The great names which, in the middle of the 
 century, made of Paris the Mecca of the artistic 
 world, have passed away, and they have left no 
 successors. Of this the British public remains 
 all unconscious, and the study and admiration 
 which thirty years ago we might have bestowed 
 with advantage on Balzac and Flaubert, on 
 Theophile Gautier and the de Goncourts, we 
 bestow to-day in foolish abundance on Marcel 
 Prevost and Anatole France, on Bourget and 
 
 " Gyp." 
 
 The glamour with which, unconsciously, we 
 are wont to invest all that is French in art and 
 in literature makes it difficult to realise the 
 extent to which France is shorn of her former 
 glory. With the death last year of Puvis de 
 Chavannes the generation of her great painters 
 
IN FRANCE 7 
 
 came to an end. When Daudet died a few 
 months previously, his death seemed to mark 
 the final disappearance of the past generation 
 of her great writers. Daudet himself — as I 
 have tried to show in this volume — was not a 
 great writer. At his best he was not more than 
 a charming raconteur ', but he belonged to the 
 period of greatness, a period that began with 
 the romantics and died out in naturalism ; he 
 had imbibed something at least of its spirit ; 
 his house had been the daily rendez-vous of 
 men of genius ; he himself had been the inti- 
 mate friend of Turgenev and Zola and the 
 de Goncourts and many more. So it was 
 perhaps excusable that his death should have 
 called forth an outburst of laudatory lamenta- 
 tion, for which his personal gifts gave no 
 warrant. He was a last link with a literary 
 generation whom all France had reason to 
 mourn. Of his intimates Zola alone remains, 
 and Zola is no longer a living force in litera- 
 ture. To-day we may seek in vain for 
 transcendent merit. Putting aside the young 
 Franco-Belgian school, whose inspiration is in 
 no way due to French sources, even though 
 
8 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 its members have elected to express themselves 
 in the French language, and putting aside 
 J. K. Huysmans, who, if he can be considered 
 a Frenchman, is certainly a Frenchman of 
 Dutch parentage, and who looms, a solitary 
 mystical figure, above all his contemporaries, 
 what is there in French literature of the pre- 
 sent day beyond a flippant cleverness, and a 
 desperate straining after effect? In a period 
 of decadence man's artistic sense becomes as 
 unbalanced as his moral sense. He loses his 
 appreciation of what is sane and pure and true, 
 and he craves for what is novel and sensational 
 and meretricious. In France to-day, whether 
 in art and in literature or in the drama, loud 
 and garish effects are sought after ; the desire 
 is to startle rather than to please ; and the most 
 improbable and outre situations call forth the 
 N. loudest applause. Readers of Maeterlinck will 
 remember how, in one of the most illuminative 
 of his essays, he observes that a great artist 
 will refrain from painting scenes such as 
 Marius destroying the Cimbri or the assassina- 
 tion of the Duke of Guise because he has 
 realised that the psychology of murder and of 
 
 J 
 
IN FRANCE 9 
 
 victory is elementary and exceptional, and 
 throws no light on the eternal mystery of life. 
 It is of this fundamental ' truth that artists 
 and novelists seem to be unconscious to-day. 
 They ' place all the interest of their works in 
 the violence of the anecdote which they re- 
 produce.' And so we have the sanguinary 
 horrors that hang year after year on the walls 
 of the Salon ; we have plays like Cyrano de 
 Bergerac enjoying a phenomenal popularity ; 
 and we have a succession of novels depicting 
 all that is most false and temporary and sensa- 
 tional in the society life of Paris eagerly 
 devoured by readers on either side of the 
 Channel. A sublime artist such as Turgenev 
 is left unread and unhonoured, while critics 
 enter into heated controversy over the rival 
 merits of men whose very names will scarcely 
 survive into the coming century. 
 
 We are all of us apt to be infected, in a 
 measure, with the tastes and enthusiasms of our 
 generation. It is only by comparing the objects 
 of our immediate admiration with works of 
 proved artistic merit that we can hope to arrive 
 at a true estimate of their value. I confess that 
 
io THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 it was re-reading Turgenev's On the Eve in the 
 very perfect translation that Mrs. Garnett has 
 achieved for us, that forced upon me a fresh 
 conviction of the artistic worthlessness of much 
 that is accepted as admirable in the French 
 fiction of to-day. And nothing seems to me to 
 prove more conclusively the decadence of French 
 taste than that in Paris, for so many years the 
 adopted home of the Russian novelist, his fame 
 should so quickly have fallen into abeyance, 
 and that his work should be quite unfamiliar 
 to the rising literary generation. That he 
 should be equally unknown to the great mass 
 of the British reading public is but one more 
 proof that on questions of foreign literature we 
 are content to follow the taste of the boule- 
 vards. And yet there has seldom been a 
 story-teller so perfect in all respects as Tur- 
 genev. There is an entire unity of interest in 
 his novels ; they progress on simple, flowing 
 lines ; and on every page we discover fresh 
 beauties of thought and diction. I know of 
 no writer at once so profound and so slight, so 
 full of deep feeling for those capable of dis- 
 cerning it, so pellucidly clear for those who 
 
IN FRANCE ii 
 
 merely ask to be amused. On the Eve is a 
 story of daily life in a Russian family, but not 
 for an instant does it sink into a mere record 
 of domesticity. Straightway, in the opening 
 chapter, in the talk of the two men, Turgenev 
 plunges into the whole mystery of life, into its 
 essential principles. It gives the note to the 
 whole book, and it is done with an inimitable 
 lightness of touch. Even where he is appa- 
 rently dealing with the trivial and the common- 
 place, he brings all into harmony with his 
 essential purpose. He is able, in a few half- 
 enigmatical phrases, to confer on Uvar 
 Ivanovitch, the fat, somnolent cousin of the 
 Stahov family, a strange spiritual significance. 
 Think what such a portrait would have been 
 traced by the pen of a Zola ! But in Tur- 
 genev's picture of the fat man there is nothing 
 repulsive — rather an impressive sense of latent 
 power, a vision of the great Russian people, 
 which is still sleeping, and whose nature we in 
 the West have never fathomed. 
 
 And Elena ! Where else have we so delight- 
 ful a heroine? She is a wonderful study of 
 pure passionate girl nature, of one whose eyes are 
 
12 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 opened through love to the full comprehension 
 of life. Turgenev has chosen to delineate the 
 most difficult moment of all — the dawning of 
 womanhood in a virgin soul under the stress 
 of a great emotion — and his psychology is so 
 sure, so unerring, that we gaze into the depths 
 of Elena's soul as into a clear pool. The 
 little retrospect of her girlhood — and, as a rule, 
 there is nothing more tedious in novels — is 
 unrivalled in its delicate unfolding of character. 
 Elena is drawn on human, not on heroic lines ; 
 Turgenev had no need to paint her as a type 
 of perfect womanhood. She captivates us by 
 her transparent honesty, her noble aspirations ; 
 and the very faults of her youth, her pride, 
 her intolerance of pettiness, her utter disregard 
 of conventional prudence, only endear her to 
 us the more. Her love for Insarov is the one 
 real and true thing in her home circle, and so 
 it sweeps all before it. No carefully concerted 
 complications are allowed to intervene between 
 her desire and its realisation. Turgenev was 
 too great an artist to stoop to trivial contri- 
 vances for heightening the interest of his story. 
 There are other suitors for Elena's hand — 
 
IN FRANCE 13 
 
 Shubin, Bersenyev, and the practical Kurnatov- 
 sky — but they do not fight duels or hatch 
 vengeful plots in the approved style of melo- 
 drama. They submit to fate, as the vast 
 majority of mankind submits under similar 
 circumstances. The volatile Shubin turns off 
 his disappointment with a jest, and Bersenyev 
 toils for the success of his friend and rival, 
 realising that, in his own words, c to put 
 oneself in the second place is the whole signi- 
 ficance of our life.' Of Insarov himself it has 
 been customary to speak as one of Turgenev's 
 few artistic failures. None of Turgenev's 
 male characters, with the exception perhaps of 
 Basarovj can compare in creative force with his 
 women. He was essentially a delineator of 
 feminine nature. But as far as Insarov is 
 concerned, I think he is precisely what the 
 Russian novelist intended him to be. Insarov 
 is no hero — save in Elena's imagination — and 
 Turgenev is fully aware of it. He has put 
 into Shubin's mouth an accurate estimate of 
 his character. It is far more true to feminine 
 nature that Elena should have flung away her 
 life and her home for one who, in all the 
 
i 4 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 qualities of the soul, was vastly her inferior. 
 But in the white heat of her love she was able 
 to kindle a corresponding glow in his heart; and 
 it is on the lover of Elena, and not on the rigid 
 narrow-souled patriot, that we finally bestow our 
 sympathy. The tragedy of the closing scene 
 is lessened by the tender beauty of the Venetian 
 setting. It is not the intention of the novelist 
 to harrow our feelings, but rather to show us 
 the fundamental tragedy of life with all the 
 compensations that love and youth and beauty 
 bestow upon it. 
 
 Every one can see at a glance how simple 
 and how sane the story is. It captivates by its 
 transparent truth ; it has no violent effects to 
 offer to jaded literary appetites. Une Nichee 
 de Gentilshommes even more than On the Eve 
 is a tragedy of daily life. It is pervaded by a 
 sense of Lisa's passion for Lavretski, but there 
 is no adventure, no crisis, no result. For a 
 brief moment the souls of Lavretski and of 
 Lisa are brought face to face — then the) ^rift 
 apart, severed by their consciences, Lisa to a 
 convent, Lavretski to a solitary old age. The 
 conclusion would be almost banal were it not 
 
IN FRANCE 15 
 
 so convincingly true. Every character in the 
 book, even to the least important, is portrayed 
 with a rare delicacy of perception. Lisa her- 
 self is a more ethereal creation than Elena — we 
 realise her less, but to many she will appeal 
 almost more. Where Elena boldly seizes life 
 with both hands, and accepts at once its joys 
 and its sorrows, Lisa shrinks back and turns 
 aside and guards her virginal purity to the 
 end. They stand as types of two opposing 
 ideals of womanhood — the active and the 
 passive. They are true for all time, more 
 true even than Shakespeare's women, and to 
 have created them is the test of the pre- 
 eminent artist. 
 
 Re-reading Turgenev after a lapse of many 
 years, nothing has impressed me so much as 
 the unique distinction he acquired through 
 that very simplicity of style, which in earlier 
 years one regarded almost as a defect. In 
 truth, it is his simplicity which stands in the 
 way jf his popularity. To the average reader, 
 his style is bare and chill. He never con- 
 descends to be gracefully ornate ; above all, he 
 is never grandiloquent. It requires a certain 
 
16 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 measure of literary appreciation to discover 
 that his simplicity is not the result of poverty 
 of imagination, but that it is the outcome of 
 the very highest art. Take the chapter in On 
 the Eve, which is devoted to the apparently 
 trivial episode of the expedition to Tsaritsino, 
 one of those troublesome parties de plaisir on 
 which Anna Vassilyevna set her heart at stated 
 intervals. The picnic passes off in a perfectly 
 prosaic manner, and related by the ordinary 
 novelist, it would have absolutely no signifi- 
 cance. But Turgenev, while confining himself 
 within the limits of an almost bald recital, 
 describes the scene with such delicate irony, 
 with such illuminating conviction, that the 
 discerning reader would not sacrifice a page of 
 it. Only a great artist can dare to be so 
 natural, so unadorned, so neglectful of all the 
 little resources of his profession. It is un- 
 deniable that Turgenev arrives at more vivid 
 effects, at a more convincing presentation by 
 his reticence of speech than novelists who 
 exhaust all the technical possibilities of their 
 craft. Gabriele D'Annunzio, for example, will 
 surround his central love-motive with a wealth 
 
IN FRANCE 17 
 
 of sensual detail intended to enhance the effect 
 of the passion. But is there anything in the 
 Trionfo del la Morte re ore convincing than 
 Lisa's love for Lavretski, or Elena's passionate 
 self-surrender to Insarov? And yet in each 
 case the climax is described in but a few lines, 
 with an absolute chastity of expression. Un- 
 happily, the novel-reading public does not 
 see this, and longs for literary frills and fur- 
 belows, just as the average Englishwoman does 
 not see that the simplest frock confectioned by 
 a great Paris modiste is of higher value than 
 the most sumptuous satin gown from Regent 
 Street. 
 
 There are critics who treat Turgenev as a 
 political pamphleteer, and extract his views 
 on Nihilism and on the future of his country 
 from the characters in his novels. So, too, 
 there are distinguished critics of Dante who 
 seem to overlook the fact that the Florentine 
 was perhaps the greatest poet of all time, in 
 their anxiety to establish his precise opinion 
 concerning some unimportant political event of 
 his day. In either case, the attempt is exceed- 
 ingly futile. I venture to think Turgenev's 
 
18 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 political views are a matter of small import, 
 and so I prefer On the Eve and A House of 
 Gentlefolk to Virgin Soil or Fathers and Sons. 
 What is essential is that he was an admirable 
 artist and a most perfect tale-teller, with a 
 facility derived perhaps from the East, that 
 East which still exercises so potent an influence 
 over the Slav race. Would that French tale- 
 tellers of to-day would take the great Scythian 
 as their model ! But he is too sane, too simple 
 for public taste in a period of decadence. Nor, 
 indeed, even if they would, is there any one in 
 France to-day who could write as Turgenev 
 wrote. Artists reproduce what is highest and 
 noblest and most ideal in the aspirations of 
 their time and nation. Great literatures belong 
 to periods of ardent faith, of a passionate love 
 of liberty, of national growth and expansion. 
 If a people's aspirations are centred even for a 
 time on base and unworthy objects, great 
 artists will be sought for in vain. And so, in 
 the place of the giants of a previous generation, 
 we find installed to-day as popular favourites 
 the authors of Aphrodite and Demi-Vierges^ and 
 L'Annee de Clarisse. 
 
IN FRANCE 19 
 
 Paul Adam, perhaps better than any one else, 
 may stand as a type of the second-rate French 
 novelist of the moment. He produces a novel 
 with great regularity every three months. 
 He made his debut some years ago as a writer 
 in the de Goncourt style, in language so bizarre 
 and involved as to be almost incomprehensible. 
 To-day he has somewhat modified his linguistic 
 methods, and not long ago he achieved a con- 
 siderable success with U Annee de Clarisse. It 
 is, I frankly admit, the only volume of Paul 
 Adam that has come into my hands. It is 
 sufficient for my purpose. From a cursory 
 perusal, I confess to have retained no impres- 
 sions save those of bewilderment and disgust. 
 The book professes to describe a year in the 
 life of a little third-rate actress engaged at 
 some French watering-place. It is a history of 
 her amours, her toilettes, and the doings of her 
 petite chienne Love. Into the story, pele-mele, 
 without any sort of order or sequence, the 
 author has flung the most outre and sensational 
 episodes in his repertory ; duels, bull-fights, 
 scenes in a mad-house, mingled with all the 
 cabals, jealousies, and sordid intrigues of stage- 
 
20 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 life. There are a bewildering number of 
 characters, but there is no attempt at character- 
 isation. For all practical purposes, the book 
 has no beginning and no end, and no con- 
 ceivable reason for having been written save 
 that of piling one horror on another, of un- 
 masking vice in all its repulsive details, of 
 surpassing its predecessors in vulgarity. It is 
 for these very reasons that V Annee de Clarisse 
 has been welcomed in Paris as M. Paul Adam's 
 most noteworthy production. 
 
 One looks round almost in vain for 
 symptoms of a coming revival. Huysmans 
 alone stands aloft, a strange prophetic figure ; 
 but it is barely half a decade since Huysmans 
 himself trod the road to Damascus, and it is 
 yet too early to sum up his ultimate influence 
 on his nation's literature. Hitherto, so far 
 as I know, he has called up no imitators. 
 Maeterlinck, who has been, after Huysmans, 
 the greatest exponent of the Symbolist move- 
 ment, seemed at one time likely to herald a 
 new dramatic era in Paris. But Maeterlinck 
 is in no sense a Frenchman, and already his 
 influence in the French capital is on the wane. 
 
IN FRANCE 21 
 
 The sudden enthusiasm he called forth was 
 but the caprice of a moment among a people 
 who, even more than the Athenians of old, 
 are ever clamouring for some new thing. A 
 study of the pages of the Mercure de France^ 
 that happy hunting-ground of les jeunes, hardly 
 convinces one of the creative genius of the 
 rising literary generation. They have more 
 audacity than talent, and their imaginative 
 gifts lead them at times into very questionable 
 fields. For the rest, the accepted representa- 
 tives of French fiction pursue their accustomed 
 course with no prospect of any change. Zola, 
 having brought to a close his wearisome 
 Trilogy, which emphasised all the artistic faults 
 of his earlier work, has plunged into a new 
 and lengthy novel of serious purpose, with the 
 unpromising title of Fecondite. M. Bourget 
 still adheres to his elaborate studies of con- 
 jugal infidelity in aristocratic circles, widely 
 read by the society of which he writes. M. 
 Pierre Loti has published some charming and 
 vivid impressions of the Holy Land ; but even 
 amid the stirring thoughts that a visit to 
 Jerusalem must call up in the minds of the 
 
22 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 least impressionable among us, he has not been 
 able to escape from the obsession of his own 
 blase personality, which in so many disguises 
 has been the centre of all his books. Yet in 
 Ratnuntcho, his recent idyl of the Basque 
 country, it is but fair to say that he has struck 
 once again a deeper human note, the note 
 which will make Pecheurs d'Islande live when 
 all the Aziyades, and Fatougayes, and Madame 
 Chrysan themes of his volumes of travel are 
 long since forgotten. Loti, more than almost 
 any one, has all his life been a seeker after 
 what is novel and bizarre ; and his art has con- 
 sisted mainly in drawing a piquant contrast 
 between the ennui bred of his own hyper- 
 civilisation, and the primitive emotions of the 
 women of strange races with whom he has 
 entered into ephemeral relations. Yet, there 
 are pages which show beyond a doubt that in 
 Loti there is something deeper than a mere 
 facile gift for description ; and that, had he 
 passed his literary apprenticeship in a more 
 robust school than is to be found in France at 
 present, he might have turned his talents to 
 higher purpose. 
 
IN FRANCE 23 
 
 Here and there, it is true, attempts are being 
 made — doubtless in good faith — to cast out the 
 extravagant and the unreal, and to paint once 
 again the simple scenes of man's daily existence. 
 The attempt has been made, among others, by 
 M. Anatole France, that prince of dilettant- 
 ism, whose habitual assumption of a refined 
 scepticism has unhappily given the tone to 
 young writers of far slenderer gifts than his 
 own. In VOrme du Mail, vaunted to the 
 skies by his friends, M. France has essayed 
 to reproduce the atmosphere, the sentiment, 
 the poetry of a narrow provincial and cathedral 
 city. But how thin and trivial and incon- 
 clusive is the result ! Not for one moment 
 does he penetrate beneath the outer crust of 
 petty interests — the jealousies between the 
 Bishop and the Prefer,, between clerical and 
 anti-clerical. It is the work of a man unin- 
 spired by any noble ideal, bereft of all large 
 humanity. Flaubert would have made of 
 the subject a study of convincing veracity. 
 Turgenev would have transformed it into an 
 exquisite idyl. As it is, UOrme du Mail 
 seems to me almost unreadably dull. 
 
24 THE PRESENT DECADENCE 
 
 I have sometimes thought that women are 
 largely to blame for the present decadence in 
 literary taste, which in France has followed 
 closely upon the general inclusion of women 
 into the ranks of the reading public. The 
 taste of the idle woman of the upper and 
 middle classes cannot fail to exercise a deter- 
 mining influence in the book market. She is 
 the prop of the circulating library, that 
 approved method for the rapid dissemination 
 of inferior literature. Women have never 
 been great readers of Balzac or of Flaubert ; 
 very few could pass an examination in the 
 characters of the Comedie Humaine ; but they 
 are insatiable readers of Bourget and Marcel 
 Prevost. And in this respect, Englishwomen 
 are no whit superior to their French sisters. 
 A book has only to be in French, and to be 
 what is usually spoken of as * improper,' in 
 order to be read with an avidity which its 
 merits do not in the least warrant, and which 
 would probably not be aroused by English 
 novels of an equally low literary level. It 
 requires no courage to be audacious when so- 
 called ' audacity ' is the one thing needful to 
 
IN FRANCE 25 
 
 ensure the success of an otherwise worthless 
 book. The market for foreign books in 
 England is exceedingly large, and French 
 writers are, more and more, addressing them- 
 selves to a cosmopolitan audience. Thus, 
 blame from beyond the sea would prove as 
 potent a deterrent as blame from home. 
 Hitherto, we in England have given direct 
 encouragement to the most decadent of recent 
 tendencies in French literature, and we have been 
 curiously unappreciative of those great quali- 
 ties which placed her earlier novelists far above 
 our own. With a Pharisaism not altogether 
 strange to us, we have prided ourselves in public 
 on the purity of our own literature, whilst feasting 
 in private on the pruriency of our neighbour's. 
 
 It is pleasant to remember that France, 
 more than any other nation, is endowed with 
 an inexhaustible recuperative power. Over 
 and over again she has emerged triumphant 
 from disasters that might well have over- 
 whelmed a people of less buoyant temperament. 
 It is as true of her in an artistic as in a 
 political sense. To-day, she may possess no 
 
26 DECADENCE IN FRANCE 
 
 men of transcendent merit ; but for aught we 
 know, she may already be on the eve of a new 
 Renaissance, which in the early years of the 
 coming century may restore to her her pre- 
 eminence in art and in letters. The reason- 
 able and logical explanations which are forth- 
 coming to account for recognised social pheno- 
 mena only cover a very small part of the 
 ground when the question at issue is the 
 existence or absence of great men. In the 
 birth of genius there enters an element far 
 beyond human understanding. Who can ex- 
 plain the sudden appearance of a Dante or a 
 Shakespeare ? Even at the present day French 
 critics uphold, not unworthily, her saner 
 traditions ; and with M. Brunetiere and M. de 
 Vogue on the one hand, and M. Jules Lemaitre 
 on the other, we have the assurance of sound 
 and serious literary criticism which cannot fail 
 to bear fruit. And so I refrain from gloomy 
 predictions ; and while chronicling with regret 
 that for the moment her craftsmen show 
 themselves so destitute of talent, I continue to 
 cherish an indulgent affection for all that comes 
 to us from the French nation. 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 It is a suggestive fact for all who make a study 
 of French literature that the year in which the 
 long Dreyfus agitation reached its climax is 
 also that in which Edmond Rostand attained to 
 an unprecedented success with his play Cyrano 
 de Bergerac. Dreyfus and Cyrano give the 
 note of the past year in France ; nothing else 
 will survive. The same public that hissed 
 Zola and cheered Ester hazy outside the Palais 
 de Justice has applauded Cyrano night after 
 night all through the year at the Porte St. 
 Martin theatre. The two manifestations are 
 but different aspects of one and the same 
 popular conviction. The sentiment which 
 permeates M. Rostand's drama, and which 
 Cyrano sums up with his dying breath in the 
 exclamation * Mon panache ! ' is identical with 
 that which has driven the French General Staff 
 to shield, at all costs, the so-called * honour of 
 
 27 
 
28 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 the army.' In either case we are dealing with 
 the expression of one of the fundamental 
 characteristics of the French nation, with the 
 outcome of the triumph of militarism. On 
 the stage we see it in its romantic, chivalrous 
 setting; in the Court of Law in its modern 
 materialistic results. 
 
 This — and not, as people have assumed, its 
 transcendent literary merit — is the true ex- 
 planation of the popularity enjoyed by M. 
 Rostand's play. Its chief claim on our atten- 
 tion lies in the fact that it appeared at so 
 apropos a moment. Our literature, of necessity, 
 is the expression of our national ideals and 
 aspirations ; and in painting the supremacy of a 
 fantastic militarism, tinged with c romantic' 
 idealism, M. Rostand has been the mouthpiece 
 of all the frustrated desire after military ascen- 
 dency which has fretted the Third Republic 
 throughout its existence. On his patriotic 
 side every Frenchman nurses something of the 
 Cyrano spirit. The love of military glory lies 
 at the very root of his character. Henri iv. 
 and Napoleon are the true heroes of his choice. 
 The triumph of the panache^ the flaunting of 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 29 
 
 the white plume unsullied in the face of a dis- 
 comfited foe, for this the French people has 
 sighed in vain during thirty years on the field 
 of international politics, and this it has ac- 
 claimed with frenzy when glorified on the 
 dramatic stage. Cyrano de Bergerac has 
 appealed to the whole nation, and it has found 
 an echo in every French heart. Even austere 
 critics like M. E. Faguet have so far lost their 
 sense of proportion as to pronounce it the 
 finest dramatic poem of the last half-century, 
 and it has been hailed on every side as the 
 herald of a new dramatic dawn. 
 
 But all this does not necessarily make 
 Cyrano a masterpiece, any more than the most 
 successful music-hall ditty ever sung is neces- 
 sarily good music. Indeed, had it been in 
 truth a great play, its success would have 
 been far less rapid than has been the case. 
 For a great play means surely one that appeals 
 to our highest intelligence, to our deepest 
 moral conscience. It is a play whose whole 
 significance could not possibly be grasped at 
 first sight by the ordinary theatre-going public 
 — else were the intelligence of the ordinary 
 
 UNJVLRSITY J 
 of J 
 
30 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 public on a par with that of the author — and 
 which would certainly give rise to much 
 searching controversy concerning its intention 
 and execution. If Hamlet could be thrust 
 suddenly, without the magic of Shakespeare's 
 name, on the British public, does any one 
 believe for a moment that it would enjoy 
 instantaneous and universal recognition as a 
 work of supreme genius ? Ibsen is the nearest 
 approach to Shakespeare that the contemporary 
 world can show, and we all know how Ibsen 
 has been derided and misinterpreted, and what 
 a limited measure of popular recognition has 
 been accorded to his plays when they have been 
 placed upon the stage. Maeterlinck has fared 
 even worse ; and when from time to time some 
 discerning manager has given material form to 
 his delicate spiritual evocations, the attempt 
 has earned little more from the general public 
 than an amiable toleration. In many quarters 
 his mystical dramas have merely excited 
 derision as grotesque and meaningless panto- 
 mime. Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeter- 
 linck, alone of modern dramatists, and on lines 
 far removed from one another, have attempted 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 31 
 
 to widen the narrow sphere of dramatic action, 
 to abandon the external and the circumstantial, 
 and to bring upon the stage the eternal 
 mystery of life. They have probed, each in 
 his own way, far deeper than any of their con- 
 temporaries, into the secrets of the human soul, 
 into that spiritual region which lies so close 
 behind the visible surface of life, but of whose 
 very existence so few of us seem conscious. 
 They alone can claim to have pointed the way 
 towards a new period of dramatic efflorescence ; 
 and if, indeed, the coming century were 
 destined to usher in a great dramatic revival, I 
 do not see how its exponents could fail to owe 
 much to the genius of the Fleming and the 
 Norseman. I honestly believe that a time will 
 come when Ghosts and 'The Wild Duck on the 
 one hand, and La Princesse Maleine on the 
 other, will enjoy as full a measure of popular 
 appreciation as has been bestowed in our own 
 day on the plays of Robertson or Pinero. It 
 is impossible not to believe that the world will 
 some day awake to the beauty of writing so 
 truthful and so convincing. But our public 
 taste must first undergo a long period of 
 
32 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 educational enlightenment. Meanwhile, it is 
 perhaps inevitable that we should attempt to 
 discern the germs of that dramatic renaissance 
 which, in a dim way, we all feel to be needful, 
 in works like The Second Mrs. 'Tanqueray and 
 Cyrano de Bergerac. 
 
 It may then be taken for granted that M. 
 Rostand has not produced a work of any 
 revolutionary tendency. Cyrano marks no 
 turning-point in the history of dramatic litera- 
 ture. What M. Rostand has accomplished has 
 been pointed out by M. Jules Lemaitre in an 
 article which is the one piece of sane and sober 
 criticism that has appeared on the subject 
 during the past year. ' Cyrano >,' writes the 
 most accomplished of contemporary French 
 critics, ' prolongs and combines with originality 
 and brilliancy three centuries of fantastic 
 comedy and moral grace of a very French 
 order.' The play is, in a sense, a recapitula- 
 tion of everything that has inspired the French 
 stage from its first inception ; it has affinities 
 with the work of every playwright from Cor- 
 neille to the elder Dumas. It is not a psycho- 
 logical play ; it does not profess to touch on 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 33 
 
 any of the deeper tragedies of human existence, 
 and so it cannot be classed, for good or evil, 
 among the characteristic products of our later 
 nineteenth century. Its interest is entirely 
 retrospective ; it carries us back to a time 
 beloved of novelists and dramatists — the time 
 of Richelieu and Louis xiii. With the plot 
 every one is familiar. It rests on an antithesis 
 — on the nobility of Cyrano's soul contrasted 
 with the plainness of his person, on the delicacy 
 of his passion counterbalanced by the abnormal 
 length of his nose. Even here M. Rostand 
 cannot claim to originality of conception, for 
 in making use of startling contradictions in the 
 character of his hero as the pivot of his drama 
 he is merely following in the footsteps of 
 Victor Hugo. 
 
 From the very outset of the play it becomes 
 clear that the spectator has been borne aloft 
 into the realms of etherealised romance. The 
 piece is rightly described as a heroic comedy, 
 for it marks the very acme of the sentimental 
 heroism of the early years of the seventeenth 
 century — the sentiment which inspired Mile, de 
 Scuderi's Pays du 'Tendre, and which had its 
 
34 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 most graceful and emotional advocates among 
 the habitues of the Hotel de Rambouillet. From 
 that standpoint — and M. Rostand's greatest 
 merit is that he adopts the standpoint with an 
 unerring effect — nothing could be more noble 
 and beautiful, nothing more attendrissant than 
 Cyrano's love for his cousin Roxane. It seems 
 brutal to suggest that a little honest common- 
 sense could have put an end, at a stroke, to 
 the heartrending situation, and that Cyrano and 
 his cousin might have enjoyed fourteen years 
 of conjugal happiness with a perfectly clear 
 conscience. For then we should have lost the 
 dying Alexandrines, and the final wave of mon 
 panache, in which the artificial motif of the 
 drama finds its supreme expression. 
 
 For my part, the worship of the panache 
 presents few attractions, and so I have not been 
 able to feel that admiration for the character of 
 Cyrano which has been so freely bestowed by 
 the French nation. The whole motif of the 
 play is to me radically false, and consequently 
 lacking in any permanent interest. Yet it 
 were unfair to deny that Rostand himself has 
 realised the complex character of his hero 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 35 
 
 thoroughly, and has drawn him in vigorous 
 and unmistakable lines. His heroism may 
 frequently verge on the ridiculous ; but, at least, 
 he is a personage of flesh and blood, and he 
 represents an ideal which, in a society imbued 
 with militarism, exercises an unfailing fascina- 
 tion. He is a first cousin to d'Artagnan, 
 pre-eminent among all ' bretteurs et menteurs 
 sans vergogne,' with a voluptuous melancholy 
 superimposed, which adds incalculably to his 
 popularity. And for d'Artagnan, most 
 readers of Dumas have a warm corner in their 
 hearts. So I can conceive that Cyrano, boaster 
 and brawler though he be, will be treasured up 
 by many as an attractive type of human sinner. 
 He will live, as most of Dickens' characters 
 live, thanks to the fact that he is a caricature 
 rather than a portrait ; that he is all on the 
 surface, without atmosphere and without mys- 
 tery, and is therefore perfectly comprehensible 
 to the average intelligence. To conclude, 
 however, from the definiteness with which 
 Cyrano stands before us, that the author can 
 lay claim to skill as a delineator of character, 
 would be a very grave mistake. There is no 
 
36 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 characterisation in any of M. Rostand's earlier 
 work ; and putting aside Cyrano, there is none 
 in the play by which he has made his reputa- 
 tion. Ragueneau merely supplies the comic 
 element which, in one form or another, is con- 
 sidered an indispensable adjunct of every play. 
 And his confectioner's shop serves as an 
 effective variety in the scenes. De Bret, de 
 Guiche, the duenna, the friar, are all conceived 
 on conventional stage lines ; they are mechani- 
 cal puppets, with no personality of their own, 
 contrived in order to help forward the action 
 of the play. Roxane is a nonentity, a precieuse 
 who is captivated first by the beaux yeux of 
 Christian, and then by the high-flown senti- 
 ments of Cyrano. That she should have 
 remained a widow for fourteen years out of 
 devotion to the dead Christian, strikes one 
 rather as an inexplicable caprice than an act of 
 heroic devotion, so little does she convey any 
 sense of passion in the fourth Act. Of de 
 Neuvillette there is nothing to say ; he is with- 
 out life or soul ; and yet for any one who is 
 alive to the hidden workings of the human 
 character there should have been much to 
 attract and inspire in a study of a silent, sensi- 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 37 
 
 tive youth realising that the love of his life is 
 being dragged from him by some magnetic 
 influence, of whose nature he is ignorant. But 
 amid the din and the bustle and the fighting 
 which make up the first four acts of the comedy, 
 there is neither time nor space for gazing into 
 the human soul, for penetrating the mysteries 
 of the human heart. M. Rostand has not 
 attempted the task ; all his energies have been 
 concentrated on the outward adornment of his 
 central figure. 
 
 Yet in spite of this very serious lack, M. 
 Rostand possesses many qualifications for 
 writing a play of the type of Cyrano de Ber- 
 gerac, steeped as it is in seventeenth century 
 romanticism. For the first time his talents 
 have full scope, and his very defects are not 
 without their value. M. Rostand is not a 
 great poet ; there is not a line that will live 
 either in La Princesse Lointaine or in La 
 Samaritaine. But he possesses in a high 
 degree a capacity for facile versification, the 
 talent for expressing anything and everything 
 in rhyme. He is full of buoyant spirits ; he 
 has the southern gift for florid expansiveness 
 of expression. There are affinities between 
 
38 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 his nature and Daudet's, a touch of gay insou- 
 ciance and irrepressible verve which recalls 
 the early work of the author of Tartarin. 
 The inherent dignity of the Alexandrine is 
 smoothed down by the dramatist into some- 
 thing almost frivolous in its easy flow. The 
 characters positively chatter in twelve-syllable 
 verse. As a poet he has always been tinged 
 with 'preciosity' — in La Samaritaine it jars 
 upon the reader almost in every line — but in 
 the present instance to be ' precious ' in his 
 choice of language is to be in harmony with 
 his subject. His ingenious conceits and ex- 
 aggerated metaphors — so happily described 
 by Lemaitre as 'd'un mauvais gout delectable,' 
 run riot on every page. Cyrano's famous 
 tirade to de Guiche on his own nose is a 
 tour de force in audacious repartee and long- 
 drawn-out humour, which entitles the author 
 to a foremost place as a writer — not of poetry 
 — but of mock heroics. And no one will 
 deny to the ballad of the Cadets de Gascogne 
 a great measure of that swing and rhythm 
 and jovial characteristic sentiment of which 
 French poetry has perhaps fewer examples 
 than English, and which we ourselves value 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 39 
 
 at so exorbitant a rate in the poems of 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling. So, too, his admirers 
 would certainly be able to pick out a score and 
 more of passages written with a jingling 
 dexterity and ready Gallic wit which are not 
 without their charm. He is an adept at quick 
 retort, flinging the ball of repartee backwards 
 and forwards with an enviable promptitude. 
 But when we come to the passages in the play 
 on which M. Rostand's claims as a serious 
 poet would naturally rest — the dying lines 
 spoken by Cyrano, the long-drawn-out balcony 
 episode, the last scene between Roxane and de 
 Neuvillette on the battle-field — the artificiality 
 both of sentiment and language excludes the 
 author from any right to a place in the front 
 rank. I fail to discern either depth, or 
 grandeur, or passion in his verse. I know 
 all that has been written in France by dis- 
 tinguished critics of the grace and beauty of 
 Cyrano's appeal to Roxane from beneath the 
 balcony. The scene when read leaves me 
 absolutely unmoved, and on the stage it is 
 intolerably lengthy. Compare it for an instant 
 — as every English reader instinctively does 
 compare it — to the balcony scene in Romeo 
 
40 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 and Juliet^ and the superficial sentimentality 
 of the one stands convicted by the passion of 
 the other. Even when the long preliminary 
 interchange of elegant futilities is over, and 
 Cyrano is supposed to be pouring out his 
 heart for the first and only time to the love 
 of his life, the author cannot rise above the 
 language of a petit-maitre. His conventional 
 mannerisms still cling around him, stifling the 
 ring of true passion. There is nothing in the 
 whole passage more convincing than the rather 
 graceful fancy about the jessamine spray — 
 
 1 Car tu trembles ! car j'ai senti, que tu le veuilles 
 Ou non, le tremblement adore de ta main 
 Descendre tout le long des branches du jasmin ! ' 
 
 Nothing more soul-stirring than the string 
 of ingenious conceits on the significance of a 
 kiss, culminating in the much quoted line — 
 1 Un point rose qu'on met sur l'i du verbe aimer.' 
 Compare it, in its elaborate preciosity, with 
 Romeo's parting word to Juliet — 
 
 ' 1 would I were thy bird.' 
 
 And Juliet's reply — 
 
 ' Sweet, so would I. 
 Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.' 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 41 
 
 And we are saved from any further danger 
 of mistaking the tinsel for pure gold. 
 
 After the fourth Act, which slips at its close 
 into something perilously resembling melo- 
 drama, we find ourselves back in the fifth 
 Act in the rarefied atmosphere of an exalted 
 romanticism. The worldly Roxane has mourned 
 her lover for fourteen years in a Paris convent 
 — a few conventional stage nuns compounded 
 of primness and simplicity are introduced to 
 lend an air of reality to the scene — and the 
 faithful Cyrano comes every Saturday to give 
 her the gossip of the week. On this occasion, 
 in an unnaturally deliberate manner, Roxane 
 never looks at her old friend in order that she 
 may not discover till the crucial moment that 
 he has had his head cut open by a log of wood 
 dropped on it by an enemy. Roxane gives 
 him to read the last letter written to her by 
 Christian, which for fourteen years she has 
 carried daily next her heart ; and Cyrano, not 
 to be outdone in fidelity, remembers every word 
 of it — after fourteen years ! — and recites it aloud 
 in the dusk. And Roxane, penetrated by his 
 voice, discovers the truth, discovers that it is 
 he, and not Christian, who wrote the letter, and 
 
42 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 that by loving the writer she has unconsciously 
 been loving him. Then it is time for Cyrano 
 to die. His friends hurry in ; he says every- 
 thing that there is to say when you wish to die 
 in as impressive a manner as possible ; he 
 stands with his back to a tree making wild 
 passes at imaginary foes, ' les Compromis, les 
 Prejuges, les Lachetes,' and draws his last 
 breath after assuring his audience that he 
 will appear at the gates of heaven without a 
 stain on ' mon panache ' ! It is, more than any- 
 thing else, this final tableau that has evoked 
 the delirious enthusiasm of the French nation. 
 Cyrano, in his death, is symbolical of all that 
 France aspires after, all to which she is con- 
 scious that she has not attained. The unreality, 
 the grotesqueness of the scene pass unheeded, 
 and in a period of decheance, and disappoint- 
 ment, and wounded vanity the French people 
 derive consolation from the dramatic repre- 
 sentation of their national ideals. To them, 
 Cyrano will remain a great play, because through 
 Cyrano they have spoken to the world. 
 
 La Princesse Lointaine, produced some four 
 years ago by Sarah Bernhardt at the Renais- 
 sance Theatre, is written in a not less romantic 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 43 
 
 vein, but with the military motif entirely 
 excluded. It is an attempt to resuscitate 
 the spirit that produced the Crusades and 
 the Courts of Love and all the tender emotional 
 ideals of mediaeval chivalry. The troubadour, 
 JofFroy Rudel, is sick of love for the Princess 
 Melissinde of Tripoli, of whose wondrous 
 beauty pilgrims have brought word to France. 
 He starts on the long journey in search of 
 her, and arrives in a dying condition before 
 Tripoli. His friend Bertrand undertakes to 
 plead his cause with the Princess, and she 
 mistakes Bertrand for the troubadour himself, 
 whose songs in her honour have touched her 
 heart. For a brief moment they resolve to 
 live for each other and to forget Rudel ; then 
 nobler instincts prevail, and they hurry to the 
 ship, and the poet dies happy in his lady's 
 arms. Bertrand joins the Crusade, and Melis- 
 sinde retires to Mount Carmel. The little 
 play is not without charm and grace, but it 
 represents a state of feeling too remote from 
 actual conditions for it to appeal to a French 
 public, and, unlike Cyrano, it has no connecting 
 link with modern idols. In manner it is too 
 purely imitative, and the artificiality of the 
 
44 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 inspiration is everywhere apparent, while the 
 author had not acquired that mastery of the 
 technique of his craft to which a certain 
 share in the success of the later play must 
 be attributed. Whatever the cause, La Prin- 
 cesse Lointaine excited but little interest, and 
 it was reserved to Cyrano to lift the young 
 poet of a sudden to the very pinnacle of 
 social success. 
 
 It follows from all I have said that M. 
 Rostand's play will never be greatly appre- 
 ciated by foreign readers. In Italy, where 
 the artistic instincts of the public are far 
 more trustworthy than with us, it has been 
 received with coldness and indiiFerence. In 
 England, as we habitually take our drama, 
 our art and our fiction from Paris, so we 
 were prepared also to take Cyrano^ and many 
 of us hastened to acclaim it as a great and 
 noble work of art. As the French have not 
 discovered for themselves that Cyrano is not 
 a great play, it was hardly to be expected 
 that our English critics should discover it 
 for them. Mr. Gosse bestowed upon it the 
 sanction of his deliberate approval ; and a critic 
 in the Nineteenth Century, with a rashness of 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 45 
 
 which I think he must already repent, declared 
 it to be one of the most remarkable plays 
 ever seen on any stage in any age, and that 
 nothing in Corneille, Racine, Moliere, or 
 Victor Hugo deserved to be placed on the 
 same level. We still assume in public that 
 M. Rostand's play is a masterpiece, but in 
 reality its actual success on this side of the 
 channel was of short duration. Honest 
 people admitted that they found it tedious 
 on the stage, and I do not imagine that its 
 readers have been numerous outside a small 
 literary coterie. 
 
 But there is an aspect of what may be 
 termed the Cyrano craze, not without interest 
 for ourselves. In France the military chauvin- 
 ism of the moment declares itself in heroic 
 comedy ; in England a corresponding senti- 
 ment finds expression in military ballads. If 
 France has her Rostand craze, we have our 
 Kipling craze. Neither has its origin in a 
 love of art or of literature. Within the last few 
 years a great wave of Imperialism, gathering 
 force as it advanced, has passed over the 
 country. And with this spread of Imperialist 
 ideas there has synchronised among us an out- 
 
46 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 burst of patriotic and political and military 
 song in which the aspirations of the nation 
 find an outlet. Mr. Newbolt has sung our 
 fleet in Admirals All \ books of the nature 
 of Fitchett's Fights for the Flag, which appeal 
 frankly to the fighting instincts of the people, 
 have sold literally by the tens of thousands ; 
 and, above all, Tommy Atkins has found a 
 poetic champion in the person of Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling. I am not myself quite sure whether 
 Mr. Kipling is cause or effect — whether we 
 are Imperialist because we are nourished on 
 Barrack-room Ballads ; or whether, being Im- 
 perialist, the ballads appeal to us with such 
 soul-stirring effect. But it is indisputable 
 that one of the notes of the lighter literature 
 of our day is a militant patriotism which 
 cannot fail to exercise an influence on the 
 public mind. We have been told with so 
 much emphasis, and on so many occasions, 
 that Mr. Kipling's poems are literature, that 
 it is clear there must still be a lingering doubt 
 in many minds as to whether, after all, they 
 are not merely music-hall ditties. But grant- 
 ing they are literature, granting Cyrano de 
 
CYRANO DE BERGERAC 47 
 
 Bergerac is literature, are they of the litera- 
 ture that will live permanently in the history 
 of a nation? Here, I think, the answer is in 
 the negative. It is always difficult to appraise 
 works of the moment at their true value, but 
 it may almost be taken as a guiding rule that 
 posterity will never endorse the enthusiastic 
 verdicts of contemporaries. People will admire 
 a patriotic song for reasons similar to those 
 which prompt them to admire a hymn, reasons 
 which have no relation whatever to the artistic 
 value of the verse. And it is where matters 
 entirely extraneous to art are allowed to modify 
 our artistic opinions, that the latter are most 
 certain to stand in need of subsequent revision. 
 It is quite conceivable that earlier in the century 
 ' Ye Mariners of England ' and ' The Burial of 
 Sir John Moore ' excited as much lavish com- 
 mendation as the ' Recessional ' or the lines on 
 ' Bobs ' excite to-day. It may even be that 
 Dibdin and Wolfe were held in many circles 
 in greater esteem than Shelley or Keats. Have 
 we confirmed the judgments of our ancestors? 
 And will our grandchildren confirm our own 
 when they realise that towards the close of 
 
48 CYRANO DE BERGERAC 
 
 the nineteenth century Mr. Rudyard Kipling 
 was held in higher honour by the great British 
 public than Algernon Swinburne? I take it 
 that patriotic poetry, like historical painting, 
 must usually occupy a rather humble place in 
 the artistic scale. I distinguish here between 
 patriotism and love of liberty, between the 
 glorification of your own country at the expense 
 of another, and the aspiration on behalf of your 
 country of a measure of freedom without which 
 there can be no national growth. The one is 
 merely an extended egotism ; the other is one of 
 the most powerful instincts that rule humanity. 
 Unfortunately, it is a chauvinistic patriotism 
 which prevails in England and France to-day, 
 and experience goes to prove that chauvinism 
 is not productive of permanent works of art. 
 And so I believe that to a future generation 
 the poems of Mr. Kipling in England, and the 
 plays of M. Rostand in France, will be interest- 
 ing, not as illustrative of the Art of the century, 
 but as exemplifying the fascination exercised 
 over the public mind by those who have the 
 good fortune to interpret the transitory emo- 
 tions of their time and their country. 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 The friend of Flaubert and Turgenev, of the 
 de Goncourts and de Maupassant, Alphonse 
 Daudet survived all his contemporaries in 
 literature save only Zola. He was but fifty- 
 seven at his death, yet even in his lifetime he 
 had come to be numbered with a past genera- 
 tion of writers. Literary ideals in Paris are 
 swift in their growth, still swifter in their 
 decay. Daudet knew nothing of symbolism 
 or of mysticism ; he never wrote a single 
 psychological page. Thus he belongs unmis- 
 takably to the middle, and not to the close, of 
 our century. By his natural gifts he might 
 have identified himself either with realism or 
 with romanticism, for he combined to an un- 
 usual extent a keen imaginative sense with a 
 remarkable power of observation. And indeed 
 he has frequently been claimed as an adherent 
 
50 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 by the exponents of both these rival schools of 
 thought. In reality Daudet belonged to no 
 definite school of fiction, nor has he left any 
 disciples. He was a subtle blend of the 
 Provencal and the Parisian, and the main 
 characteristics of his writing could neither be 
 taught nor acquired. Of himself Daudet used 
 to speak as an improvisator, a troubadour. 
 He was endowed as a birthright with the 
 Provencal gift of song ; and although the 
 author of Les Prunes and Les Amoureuses 
 wrote few verses after his twentieth year, it is 
 his lyrical gift that permeates his prose with 
 much of its undeniable grace. In his youth a 
 dreamer and a poet, and a passionate lover of 
 all that is beautiful in life, he became in later 
 years more and more absorbed in the study of 
 human existence amid the hideous accessories 
 and the demoralising influences of a great city. 
 The naturalist movement laid its spell upon 
 him as upon most of his contemporaries, and 
 for a time he deliberately drilled his vagrant 
 fancies to the tedious reproduction of aspects 
 of life with which his essential nature was 
 entirely out of harmony. Yet in spite of this 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 51 
 
 lamentable misconception of his art, he re- 
 mained to the end of his life a true Meridional, 
 with all the vivacity, the bonhomie, the irre- 
 pressible optimism of the sunny southern 
 temperament. 
 
 In a nature so volatile as that of Daudet, it 
 is not easy to analyse clearly the component 
 parts, nor of writing so various as that of 
 the Lettres de mon Moulin and — let us say — 
 Les Rois en Exit, to indicate the permanent 
 characteristics. Contrasts lie generally more 
 on the surface than points of contact. But 
 taking Daudet's work as a whole, I am inclined 
 to say that his greatest gift was his gift of 
 pleasing, of all literary qualities at once the 
 most impalpable and the most real. At his 
 best he was so charming a writer that he almost 
 became a great one. The most sordid subjects 
 are invested by him with a certain grace ; the 
 most unworthy character depicted by his pen 
 retains an irresistible claim upon our affections. 
 With the uncritical world Daudet enjoyed a 
 popularity to which neither a Flaubert nor a 
 Balzac has ever attained. His novels ran 
 quickly through dozens of editions ; wealth 
 
52 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 came as the final seal to his triumph. And 
 yet it would not be fair to say that he did not 
 wholly deserve the European success that he 
 enjoyed. Although the result may have been 
 unequal, Daudet was at all times a diligent and 
 conscientious writer, giving of his best, and not 
 — consciously at least — playing to the gallery. 
 In his early garret days in Paris, with starvation 
 held barely at arm's length, he persistently 
 refused to earn an easy competence by prosti- 
 tuting his pen to boulevard journalism, nor 
 would he ever risk deterioration in the literary 
 form of the Contes that de Villemessant gladly 
 accepted for the Figaro by recklessly multiply- 
 ing their production. The charm reflected in 
 his works lay in the man himself, and earned for 
 him a host of friends and an unclouded domestic 
 life — it lay in his open, sunny, inconsequent, 
 southern nature, with his quick sympathies, his 
 irony at once forcible and delicate, his ready 
 tears. It lay in the spontaneousness of his 
 talent, in his Provencal gift of improvisation. 
 One seems to feel, at least in his earlier work, 
 that he wrote from the very necessities of his 
 nature, as the lark sings, unencumbered by 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 53 
 
 theories concerning his art or by doctrinaire 
 views on methods of composition. And it lay, 
 too, in what was an essential characteristic of 
 his nature, his rapid alternation of mood. 
 Take even the slightest of his Contes, La 
 Chevre de M. Seguin or Les Vieux in the Lettres 
 de mon Moulin^ or any of his sketches of the 
 Franco-Prussian War. Within a few pages 
 he is in turn sad, gay, sentimental, ironical, 
 pathetic, and one mood glides into the next 
 without jar or friction. And so he seldom 
 wearies his readers, their attention is always 
 kept on the alert ; one reads with a constant 
 pleasing sense of the unexpected in thought or 
 phrase. Daudet all through his life was an 
 attractive personality, and the popularity of 
 his books was inextricably bound up with 
 himself. His very appearance accorded with 
 the popular ideal of a bohemian genius. His 
 well-cut features, his large liquid eyes, his black 
 hair falling in loose locks over his forehead, 
 locks which not even the official request of the 
 Due de Morny could induce him to cut, 
 rendered him a conspicuously interesting figure. 
 His life-size portrait by Carriere, the refined, 
 
54 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 melancholy face gazing out of a brown mist, 
 was one of the sensations of the Champ de Mars 
 Exhibition some half-dozen years ago. Daudet 
 was always the spoilt child of fortune. The 
 miseries of his childhood passed lightly over his 
 genial nature, and his early struggles in Paris, 
 if acute, were at least of short duration ; for the 
 young poet was only in his twenty-first year 
 when de Morny, acting at the request of the 
 Empress, offered him a post in one of the 
 Ministerial offices. From that time his liveli- 
 hood was assured, and his verses, his good 
 looks, and an Empress's patronage quickly laid 
 the foundation of his thirty years' successful 
 career as a novelist. 
 
 Judged simply as a charming and successful 
 writer of Contes, Daudet deserves all the praise 
 that has been bestowed upon him ; but if he is 
 to be compared with the great creative novelists 
 of the century — with Tolstoi, or with Turgenev, 
 with Balzac, or with Flaubert — it becomes at 
 once apparent that he stands on a lower plane. 
 The mere suggestion of such comparison 
 would be ludicrous were it not that the novelist 
 himself in later life came to regard his vocation 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 55 
 
 as a delineator of mceurs Parisiennes with so 
 much solemnity, and that the outside world is 
 apt to judge of a man's merit purely by the 
 measure of his success. To many estimable 
 persons the fact that Tartarin de Tarascon has 
 sold by the hundred thousand, whereas the 
 Education Sentimentale has never attained to 
 popular recognition at all, appears as an 
 irrefragable proof that the former is the greater 
 book of the two. Daudet's limitations were 
 the inevitable outcome of his qualities. All his 
 work is on the surface. He sees all the colour, 
 none of the mystery of life. He never once 
 penetrates to its hidden meanings. Take his 
 pathos, perhaps with the ordinary public the 
 most popular of all his attributes. It is the 
 pathos of a facile, emotional temperament 
 quickly stirred to sorrow by those obvious 
 calamities in life which appeal to even the least 
 impressionable of onlookers. To Daudet his 
 pathos was true and real, and it was invariably 
 expressed with a charming ingenuousness ; but 
 it would be idle to pretend that he penetrated 
 to — indeed, that he was ever conscious of — 
 the intimate tragedy of life. A facile brilliancy 
 
56 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 of style is hardly compatible with a divining 
 sense of le dessous des choses. If the eye is 
 attracted and retained by external features, it 
 stands to reason that it cannot also pierce 
 beneath the surface. Daudet excelled in con- 
 veying impressions with extraordinary vivid- 
 ness. Nothing escaped his keen southern eye, 
 his quick perceptions : the smallest detail was 
 transferred with enthusiasm to his page. He 
 belonged to the plein air school of impres- 
 sionists. He loved garish colours and startling 
 contrasts and hard sunshine. He was content 
 to paint what he saw, without troubling himself 
 as to its possible hidden significance. Readers 
 of Numa Roumestan will remember the opening 
 chapter describing the great public fete in the 
 amphitheatre at Aps, Numa himself the central 
 figure on the platform. Daudet gloried in 
 such a scene. The dust, the glare, the crowd, 
 the noisy applause of his beloved Provencaux are 
 reproduced with an inimitable verve. He is 
 carried away by what he himself termed Tenflure 
 meridionak^ of which he was not ashamed to 
 own that he had his share. 
 
 Daudet lives entirely in the present. His 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 57 
 
 subjects are all chosen from contemporary 
 French life. There is no trace in his writing 
 of classic culture, or even of a general acquaint- 
 ance with the literature of his own or of any- 
 other country. He relies for his material 
 entirely upon his eyes. He notes what he sees, 
 and he constructs his novels from the stores he 
 has accumulated. The result is to give a 
 curiously scattered, detached impression of life 
 seen entirely from the outside. All his char- 
 acters are constructed on the same principle. 
 Their outer characteristics, their appearance, 
 their attitudes, their gestures are painted with 
 vivid realism ; every personage has his dis- 
 tinguishing trait ; we are shown their actions 
 at certain moments in their lives ; we are 
 familiar with their talk, their colloquialisms, 
 their patois ; but of their hidden life, of the 
 motives which impel their conduct, of their 
 spiritual consciousness we know literally no- 
 thing. The marvellous growth of the human 
 soul swayed this way and that by intangible 
 ever-contending influences is as a closed book 
 to Daudet. Having conceived his characters 
 under a certain aspect, he presents them under 
 
58 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 the same aspect to the end of the chapter. 
 M. Jules Lemaitre somewhere describes them 
 as ' de veridiques et vivantes marionnettes, , and 
 the phrase has always remained in my mind as 
 a peculiarly happy one. They are puppets of 
 which M. Daudet himself pulls the strings. 
 Yet, strange to say, it is by his characters that 
 he has become most famous. Bompard, Delo- 
 belle, Tartarin have been for years household 
 names in France, and form part of the literary 
 stock-in-trade of every journalist. The fact 
 is a testimony to Daudet' s gift for seizing the 
 predominant external trait in a man's character, 
 and placing it in so vivid a light that the most 
 obtuse reader cannot fail to carry away the 
 desired impression. In other words, Daudet 
 was a caricaturist, not a character-painter ; and 
 Tartarin de Tarascon, the most notorious of his 
 creations, was the most obvious caricature of 
 them all. To have introduced the infinite 
 gradations of light and shade that go to make 
 up a real human portrait would, in his case, 
 have been merely to blur his outline, and 
 deprive his work of what has proved to be its 
 most effective claim on popular admiration. 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 59 
 
 But it is surely needless to point out how 
 wofully his novels suffer as works of art from 
 this very elementary method of procedure. As 
 Daudet has never conceived his characters as a 
 harmonious whole, with their external visible 
 actions as the inevitable outcome of hidden 
 spiritual influences, so he has found it impos- 
 sible to maintain a due harmony in their 
 conduct at such times as he presents them 
 before the reader. We ask ourselves why 
 Le Nabab should allow himself to be so easily 
 befooled by the financiers of the Caisse Terri- 
 toriale when he had made an immense fortune 
 mainly by his own courage and cunning, or 
 why little patient Desiree Delobelle after years 
 of self-sacrificing toil should make a foolish 
 attempt to drown herself. We should like to 
 understand why the stolid hard-headed Astier 
 Rehu, after facing with fortitude his public 
 exposure before the Academy, should have felt 
 impelled to commit suicide owing to the 
 venomous attack made upon him in private by 
 his wife, with whom for years he had lived in 
 virtual estrangement; or why Queen Frederique, 
 so dignified in her downfall, should suddenly 
 
60 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 have forgotten herself so far as to strike her 
 husband's valet in the face. I do not suggest 
 that these evident inconsistencies are contrary 
 to all human possibility — our daily life is made 
 up of inconsistencies — but surely in a novel the 
 hidden causes contributing to the unexpected 
 should at least be indicated. Daudet leaves it 
 to the reader to supply the missing links at his 
 discretion. 
 
 Alphonse Daudet's writings divide them- 
 selves naturally into two categories : in the first 
 we have the Provencal and autobiographical 
 series, consisting of the majority of his short 
 stories, Jack, Le Petit Chose, and the Tartarin 
 volumes ; and in the second the mceurs Pari- 
 siennes, starting with Fromont Jeune et Risler 
 Aine, and passing through Le Nabab, Les Rois 
 en Exil, Numa Roumestan, and Sapho, up to 
 Ulmmortel. I should like to prophesy that if 
 Daudet be read at all in the future, it will be 
 for the sake of the earlier Provencal stories, 
 and not for the novels on Parisian life by 
 which mainly he made his fortune. In Pro- 
 vence he was at home ; his natural gifts had 
 full play ; the very mistral had an invigorating 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 61 
 
 effect upon him. To the end of his life he 
 turned lovingly to ' notre beau Midi ou Ton 
 chante, ou Ton danse, le Midi du vent, du 
 soleil, du mirage, de tout ce qui poetise et 
 elargit la vie.' And as a young man, as often 
 as it was possible, he would tear himself away 
 from Paris, and revel for a few weeks in the 
 society of Mistral, and the little band of 
 Provencal poets who surrounded him. At 
 such times he was like a Highlander treading 
 once again his native heather, and everything 
 he wrote in the mental exhilaration produced 
 by a sense of his native air still fresh upon him 
 seems to me to possess an infectious gaiety not 
 to be found in his other works. It is only in 
 his Contes, first published in the Figaro, and sub- 
 sequently collected under the titles of Lettres 
 de mon Moulin, Femmes d' Artistes, Contes du 
 Lundi, etc., that the real unspoilt Daudet is to 
 be found. One asks oneself in despair how the 
 author of such charming trifles as La Mule du 
 Pape or Le Roman du Chaperon Rouge could 
 ever have forced himself to write with infinite 
 drudgery Les Rois en Exil or Le Nabab. 
 Daudet, as much as any of his contemporaries, 
 
62 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 set the fashion for the short story, and within 
 their slender limits these early fruits of his 
 boyish fancy are perfect in form. Full of an 
 exquisite sensibility, a quaintness of conception, 
 their greatest charm is still their absolute 
 spontaneousness. They are the facile creation 
 of a gay and sympathetic imagination, con- 
 structed from the slightest materials. Some- 
 times there is no pretence at a story or 
 incident, the author simply paints a picture 
 which stands out in luminous colours, as in 
 Les Fieux, a glimpse of an old married couple 
 waited on by two little orphans in blue ; or in 
 Les Deux Auberges^ the one silent and deserted, 
 the other crowded and noisy. Occasionally he 
 may be trivial, but he is never banal, never 
 commonplace, and the little stories seem to 
 retain a perennial freshness of sentiment. 
 
 In the later Contes the imagination is less 
 vagrant, and the author has drawn more freely 
 upon his personal experiences. Many of his 
 stories deal with Algiers, where Daudet spent 
 a winter for the sake of his health, and where 
 his passion for Southern colouring received a 
 strong impetus, and many are suggested by the 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 63 
 
 events of the Franco-German War. Even 
 here the quaintly humorous note is not alto- 
 gether wanting, as in the frivolous little tale 
 of Les Petit s Pates, carried all the way to 
 Versailles on a day of insurrection ; but the 
 stories, written as they were for a daily paper, 
 come to reflect more and more the melancholy 
 feelings of the time. Daudet had already learned 
 the value of pathos in fiction. Le Petit Chose 
 triumphed by its tears ; and even to-day, in 
 spite of its morbid sentimentality and the 
 obvious amateurishness in the treatment — it 
 was the first long book on which Daudet had 
 embarked — it is still possible to read with 
 pleasure all the early chapters, the naive recital 
 of the woes that befell the poor little poet as 
 pion in a French college. There is a growing 
 tendency to dwell on the sad and ignoble side 
 of human life, yet, happily, he can never see life 
 wholly en noir. Take the little sketch of 
 Arthur, the drunken husband who squanders 
 his money and beats his wife on Saturday 
 nights. Zola and his imitators would have 
 seen nothing beyond the brutal fact, and would 
 have depicted wife and children permanently 
 
64 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 abrutis by hunger and ill-treatment. Daudet, 
 on the contrary, realised that to even the most 
 squalid home there come moments of peace 
 and relaxation ; and so he adds a half-comic, 
 half-pathetic scene of the drunkard on Sunday 
 afternoon singing sentimental songs on the 
 balcony for the entertainment of admiring 
 neighbours and his relenting wife. It seems 
 to me a characteristic example of his attitude 
 towards his art. 
 
 Daudet's friendship with Zola, and his tem- 
 porary adhesion to the principles inculcated 
 by the Medan school, exercised the most fatal 
 results on his artistic career. Endowed by 
 nature with a charming talent for improvising 
 graceful fancies, the novelist came to persuade 
 himself that his vocation in art lay in the 
 laborious reproduction of life in its most 
 material features. And so he launched into his 
 long series of mceurs Parisiennes, in each of 
 which a certain phase of Parisian life, the one 
 more repulsive than the other, is elaborately 
 and scrupulously portrayed. In his later life 
 there was nothing he was more proud of than 
 his endless notebooks — the bricks and mortar 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 65 
 
 with which his literary palaces were to be built. 
 It became a mania with him to accumulate 
 descriptions, thoughts, anecdotes, names, with 
 a view to future production. It was his boast 
 that his characters were all taken from life, and 
 were studied sur le vif, and were in no sense 
 the creation of his own imagination. It is 
 difficult to conceive of a more lamentable mis- 
 conception. Daudet deliberately did his utmost 
 to smother his natural optimistic temperament 
 beneath the dead weight of realistic pessimism. 
 He crowded his pages with rogues and vaga- 
 bonds, with fortune-hunters and intrigantes. 
 The hideous corruption lying close behind a 
 brilliant civilisation, the secret vices of the 
 great, the unblushing rapacity of the poor, the 
 effrontery of all in the ruthless struggle for 
 wealth and power, became to him absorbing 
 subjects of study. It is in Le Nabab> and its 
 immediate successor, Les Rois en Exit, that the 
 evil effects of this unfortunate development are 
 to be seen in their most destructive form. 
 Even at the time, the success of these volumes 
 was mainly a succes de scandale^ and to-day it 
 is difficult to conceive of any one reading them 
 
66 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 for pleasure. Properly speaking, neither is a 
 novel at all ; neither has any unity of interest 
 or of action. They are chapters, bien docu- 
 ments > of Parisian social history of the day. 
 Each consists of a series of descriptive passages, 
 of pictures crowded with characters and over- 
 laden with detail, of incidents strung together 
 by the very slightest connecting thread. 
 
 In Turgenev's published correspondence 
 there is a remark referring to the publication 
 of Le Nabab. ' I think,' the Russian novelist 
 writes to a friend, ' 1 shall make up my mind 
 to write him a truthful letter/ And then, on 
 second thoughts, remembering how sensitive 
 his brother-novelist was to adverse criticism, 
 he adds : ' Perhaps, after all, I shall do nothing 
 of the kind.' It is not difficult to imagine the 
 line of criticism that the creator of 'Lisa' would 
 have adopted towards his friend, whom he so 
 clearly saw to be launched on a disastrous 
 track. I am fully aware that there are pages 
 of description in these volumes which have 
 called forth the enthusiastic admiration of dis- 
 tinguished French critics by their conscientious 
 exactitude, their convincing truth. Daudet 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 67 
 
 has been at great pains to hunt up curious and 
 little-known developments of Paris life, such 
 as the Agence Tom Levis, the house in which 
 Elysee Meraut had lived for eighteen years, 
 the church of the Franciscan fathers, and has 
 painted them with elaborate and even startling 
 wal semblance. But these lengthy descriptions 
 have, as a rule, the very slenderest connection 
 with the main story, and by their number 
 and prolixity they become intolerably weari- 
 some. 
 
 Their very vividness and accuracy are pro- 
 ductive of a sense of disproportion ; as much 
 emphasis is given to the most insignificant 
 detail as to the central figure. Everything is 
 placed in the forefront of the picture, in the 
 full glare of the light. There is no apprecia- 
 tion of values, no fading away into the distance, 
 no gradation of tone. In the end the rapid 
 succession of one impression after another 
 fatigues the eye, as it is fatigued by a revolving 
 kaleidoscope. And when all is said, the 
 fundamental question arises, whether the sub- 
 ject has been the least worthy of treatment. 
 The private vices of dethroned monarchs, the 
 
68 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 mass of avarice and corruption that seethes 
 round the successful parvenu — why need we 
 pry into one or the other ? They have no real 
 bearing on the problems of human life. They 
 do not touch any of the fundamental chords 
 of the human heart. At best they are but the 
 accidental and abnormal product of an artificial 
 society. Even Sapho, with all its faults, can 
 claim a far stronger justification for its exis- 
 tence. In it, Daudet describes a certain phase 
 in the relations between man and woman 
 which must have had its counterpart in every 
 age. But for the two volumes we have been 
 examining, it is difficult to find any justifica- 
 tion. The characters are almost uniformly 
 sordid and despicable ; it is only here and 
 there — in the affection of Le Nabab for his 
 aged mother, or in the relations of Queen 
 Frederique to her afflicted little son — that we 
 can gain a glimpse of the Daudet who wrote 
 Lettres de mon Moulin. Over all the rest, the 
 curse of so-called realism lies heavily. 
 
 It is pleasant to remember that this was only 
 a phase in the novelist's career. A great deal 
 of the evil influence had been flung off" a 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 69 
 
 couple of years later, when Daudet published 
 Numa Roumestan. Here he is back again in 
 his natural element ; for the book, though 
 nominally belonging to the mceurs Parisiennes 
 series, deals almost exclusively with his beloved 
 Midi. And of all Daudet's more ambitious 
 efforts, it is in my opinion the only novel that 
 can still be read with any real enjoyment. In 
 a sense Numa is the complement to 'Tar tar in ; 
 the one is the caricature, the other the reality. 
 Of Tartarin, what can be said that has not been 
 said a hundred times ? It was written in the 
 exuberance of the novelist's youth, but it 
 appeals to men of every age. It has been the 
 source of genuine merriment to hundreds of 
 thousands of readers. For myself, I must 
 confess that literary caricature has as a rule no 
 attraction, and Tar tar in sur les Alpes I have 
 never been able to accomplish. But the 
 Aventures Prodigieuses, in spite of a strong 
 previous prejudice against it, vanquished me 
 by its irresistible verve, and by the delightful 
 air of conviction which invests the absurd 
 story with all the importance of a historical 
 narrative. The broad farce is relieved by 
 
70 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 many touches of delicate irony, and by charm- 
 ing first impressions of the semi-tropical 
 Algerian scenery, which made so vivid an 
 impression on the young traveller. Like a 
 true Provencal, Daudet is himself carried away 
 by the irresistible tendency of his brain 
 towards exaggeration. As the story advances 
 he trades more and more recklessly on the 
 gullibility of his readers, piling up marvel 
 upon marvel, until at length the culminating 
 point is reached, when the irrepressible camel 
 pursues the train that conveys the hero from 
 Marseilles home to Tarascon, and shares in 
 the welcome at the station. ' Une noble bete/ 
 says Tar tar in calmly. ' Elle m'a vu tuer tous 
 mes lions/ 
 
 Having thus delivered his soul over Tar tar in, 
 Daudet was able to paint a real sober picture of 
 the Meridional in Numa Roumestan. ' L'Homme 
 du Midi/ he remarks in the Aventures Prodi- 
 gieuses, ' ne ment pas, il se trompe, II ne dit pas 
 toujours la verite, mais il croit la dire. Son men- 
 songe a lui ce n'est pas du mensonge, c'est une es- 
 pece de mirage.' Numa Roumestan seems to have 
 been written in illustration of the aphorism, 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 71 
 
 and certainly Daudet has never come so close 
 to real character-drawing as in his description 
 of the c grand Meridional/ his talents and his 
 weaknesses, his easy good-nature, his colossal 
 egotism, his utter untrustworthiness. He has 
 a thorough grip of his subject, and he enters 
 into it with all the zest of his earlier manner. 
 For many years Numa was accepted as a kindly 
 caricature of Gambetta. In reality Daudet was 
 deliberately painting an unkind portrait of 
 himself with his little weaknesses enlarged into 
 vices, and his own marriage, which was so 
 conspicuous a success, turned to failure. For 
 there can be no doubt that Rosalie, with her 
 serious well-balanced northern temperament and 
 her admirable virtues, is none other than Mme. 
 Daudet, who kept a restraining hand on her 
 husband's prodigalities, and changed the gay 
 casual bohemian into the hard-working pere de 
 famille. It is no doubt because the story of 
 Numa came home to him so closely that he has 
 been able to invest it with a human interest far 
 above that of his other books. The problem of 
 the fusion of North and South, which lies at the 
 root of so many of the apparent inconsistencies 
 
72 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 in the French character, was strongly exempli- 
 fied in his own household, and to the novelist 
 it naturally suggested much interesting specu- 
 lation. Mme. Daudet was a woman of unusual 
 culture, and herself a critic to whose judgment 
 her husband constantly referred. That his 
 marriage was a singularly happy one is the 
 testimony of all their friends. But it seems to 
 me a question whether the life of a prosperous 
 bourgeois which, thanks in a great measure to 
 his wife's admirable supervision, the novelist 
 was enabled to lead, served the higher interests 
 of his art, whether it might not have pros- 
 pered better in a garret of the Quartier Latin, 
 or better still, in some Provencal village, and 
 whether all the circumstances of his marriage 
 did not interpose a barrier between him and 
 that Provencal life from which he drew all his 
 best inspiration. The tendency of the milieu 
 in which his later life was spent was to place the 
 novelist's work on too high a plane and to urge 
 him into methods of composition quite foreign 
 to his natural bent, with the inevitable result of 
 a great loss in spontaneity and grace, his two 
 most valuable qualities. And in this tendency 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 73 
 
 I cannot but feel that Mme. Daudet had her 
 share of responsibility. Something of all this 
 may have lain at the back of the novelist's 
 mind when after twenty years of married life 
 he wrote his Numa Roumestan, holding the 
 balance as between man and wife with a scrupu- 
 lous care throughout the story. Yet it is clear 
 that at heart the sympathies of the author are 
 all with his florid hero ; and his ill-doings, if 
 unsparingly chronicled, are treated with a light- 
 ness of touch which is in thorough keeping 
 with the theme. The episode of the * tam- 
 bourinaire ' and Hortense's foolish devotion to 
 Valmajour are somewhat in the Tartar in spirit ; 
 but in his very best manner are the pages 
 describing the Provencal warehouse in Paris 
 ' aux produits du Midi/ where the patois, the 
 noise, the disorder recalled the South, and 
 where all the Meridionaux of the quarter 
 forgathered, feeling themselves at home ' un peu 
 comme en foire de Beaucaire.' Through the 
 elaborate and rapturous enumeration of the 
 goods, from the green olives to the celebrated 
 brandade de niorue, piled on the shelves of the 
 Mefre establishment, one feels that nostalgia 
 
74 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 for the South which caused Daudet to take an 
 intense delight in this little oasis of popular 
 Provencal life dropped down in the arid desert 
 of Parisian boulevards. 
 
 During the last ten or twelve years of his 
 life Daudet wrote little. The chronic pain of 
 an incurable disease which rendered all exertion 
 irksome explains this decline in literary activity. 
 But his name was kept prominently before the 
 public by the great controversy concerning his 
 attitude towards the Academy, a controversy 
 the echoes of which lingered around his death- 
 bed. To Englishmen the quarrel savours 
 somewhat of a storm in a teacup, but for the 
 average Frenchman, before whose eyes the Aca- 
 demy looms in majestic proportions, the publi- 
 cation of U Immortel became an event of almost 
 national importance. Whether Daudet's atti- 
 tude was the result of mere petulant caprice or 
 of definite conviction, he certainly allowed his 
 natural bonhomie to forsake him when he held 
 up to grotesque ridicule the petty weaknesses 
 of forty estimable citizens. V Immortel is 
 written throughout in a very mechant mood; 
 and apart from the special circumstances of its 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 75 
 
 production, it has already become very tedious 
 reading. The prejudice is too bitter, the sar- 
 casm too unmeasured, and the whole assumption 
 on which the main attack is based — i.e. the 
 possibility of a scholar in Astier Rehu's position 
 being the dupe of a whole series of historical 
 forgeries — is in the highest degree improbable. 
 From the literary standpoint L'lmmortel is 
 a failure, as novels with too obvious a purpose 
 are apt to be. But in the end it is probable 
 that Daudet's reputation was enhanced by his 
 revolt against national conventionality ; for the 
 Academy could have given him nothing that he 
 did not already enjoy, and his refusal to seat him- 
 self among the Immortals adorned him, in the 
 eyes at least of foreigners, with a halo of disin- 
 terestedness, not, I fear, altogether merited. 
 
 A year or two before his death Daudet 
 broke silence with La Petite Paroisse. It was 
 almost like listening to the voice of some 
 previous generation, and the book was received 
 with a certain reverent curiosity. It cannot be 
 said to have added to the author's reputation. 
 The story is long, rather confused, deficient in 
 clearness of outline. Yet it is interesting as 
 
76 ALPHONSE DAUDET 
 
 indicating a definite rupture with the naturalist 
 school, accompanied by a widened appreciation 
 of human life, a more charitable interpretation 
 of human motive. Lydie Fenigan, the heroine, 
 is an attempt at a psychological study — not 
 very successful in its results, for it is equally 
 difficult to understand why she eloped with the 
 little prince, and why she came back to her 
 husband. That the attempt should have been 
 made seems to show that malgre lui Daudet had 
 become infected with some of the new literary 
 ideals that had grown up around him. And 
 the book indicates further an acquiescence, if 
 nothing more, in that revival of religious belief 
 which, in one form or another, has been one 
 of the distinctive notes of French literature 
 during the last few years. The instinctive 
 optimism of his youth had crystallised into a 
 benevolent philosophy of life, and a merely 
 superficial agnosticism had fallen away before a 
 dawning sense of the mystery of life. 
 
 The glamour with which Daudet was in- 
 vested at the time of his death has faded away, 
 and it is possible to arrive at a due estimate of 
 his permanent place in literature. We cannot 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET 77 
 
 honestly persuade ourselves that it will be a 
 high one. Yet it is impossible to arrive at the 
 conviction without a feeling of sadness and 
 regret. Daudet was brilliantly successful ; he 
 was one of the most popular novelists of his 
 day ; he made a large fortune ; he could afford 
 at the last to despise the Academy. For the 
 majority of men such a career means every- 
 thing that the world can give ; for others it is 
 perfectly compatible with failure — failure in all 
 that makes for permanent fame. And it is 
 just here that Daudet has failed. I cannot rid 
 myself of the impression that he ought to have 
 written far better books than he did, something 
 at least, apart from Tartarin de Tarascon^ which 
 might have survived into the coming century. 
 But he never penetrated beyond the trivialities 
 of life. And it is more than probable that the 
 higher estimate of his natural powers is based 
 on a misconception, and the sense of disappoint- 
 ment may merely be due to the fact that the 
 judgment of maturer years cannot endorse the 
 uncritical admiration of youth. It is always 
 baffling to be brought face to face with the 
 objects of an early veneration. 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 In the history of a human soul there are times 
 of stress and times of lull ; there are days of 
 fiery combat followed by long months of 
 seeming inertia and spiritual torpor. It was 
 of the former that M. Huysmans wrote in 
 En Route, perhaps the most extraordinary book 
 of recent years. In La Cathedrale he has led 
 his pilgrim Durtal by slow and deliberate 
 steps through the intermediate stage that 
 divides his repentance at La Trappe from his 
 entrance into the Benedictine monastery of 
 Solesmes. It is a period of introspection and 
 orientation, of patient self-communing and 
 silent longing, a period that must come to 
 every soul if the work of conversion and 
 illumination is to be a permanent one. Its 
 interest is purely subjective ; there is no action, 
 no incident, hardly any characterisation. It 
 
 78 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 79 
 
 belongs to M. Huysmans alone to create a 
 novel from such a lack of external circumstance. 
 I doubt whether any other living writer would 
 have ventured on so apparently thankless a 
 task. Of necessity the dramatic element which 
 played so large a part in En Route is entirely 
 absent from its sequel. The great fight 
 between faith and unfaith is over ; and as far as 
 the outside world is concerned, the curtain 
 might well have been rung down on the victor. 
 But to Huysmans as to Maeterlinck, and 
 indeed to all whose gaze would penetrate 
 beneath life's surface, the real tragedy of our 
 existence only begins there where external 
 adventures and dangers cease, and the silent 
 hidden life of the dreamer and the mystic 
 possesses a charm and a value denied to that of 
 the man of action. 
 
 For my own part, I am filled with a sense of 
 gratitude towards M. Huysmans for having 
 given us La Cathedrale. It is full of beautiful 
 writing, of wonderful descriptive pages, of 
 delicate appreciations, of spiritual insight into 
 Christian symbolism. It opens up unsuspected 
 vistas of thought, and invests even familiar 
 
8o J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 objects with a new and profound significance. 
 For lovers of religious and Catholic art, for 
 students of architecture, for all whose souls 
 have been touched however lightly by the 
 remote beauty of mysticism, almost every page 
 will appear endowed with a gentle deliberate 
 charm. Yet it is difficult to believe that the 
 book will ever enjoy a wide popularity with 
 the general English public. Its very form as 
 fiction will tell against it. Rightly or wrongly, 
 the average novel-reader does expect a certain 
 play of incident, a pretence at least at plot, and 
 in La Cathedrale he will find neither. Even 
 the incomparable Mme. Bavoil, through whose 
 intervention the reader in the early chapters 
 looks for some relaxation from the strenuous 
 purpose of the author, is kept sternly in the 
 domestic background of the Abbe Gevresin's 
 lodging. Anticipating amusement, I can con- 
 ceive that he will pronounce many of Huysmans' 
 most beautiful pages intolerably tedious. And 
 it must be admitted that these are often strung 
 together with a clumsiness which it is surprising 
 to find in a literary artist of M. Huysmans' 
 experience. His transitions are carelessly 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 81 
 
 effected, and the little incidents that seemingly 
 malgre lui he is forced to introduce serve 
 merely as so many pegs on which to hang his 
 erudite disquisitions. With an over-prodigal 
 hand he pours out before the reader his 
 treasures of mediaeval lore, the strange medley 
 of learning that he has acquired by long glean- 
 ing in the by-paths of the world's history. It 
 would be easy to prove that M. Huysmans 
 might have constructed a more effective book 
 from out of the vast storehouse of his knowledge. 
 But even in the somewhat disjointed state in 
 which he has elected to give his work to the 
 world, there are treasures of thought, of 
 description, of learning which silence criticism. 
 No writer can equal M. Huysmans in sheer 
 descriptive power. Flaubert produced an in- 
 comparable effect by his deliberate detailed 
 pictures, his unrivalled skill in the choice of 
 an appropriate adjective. Zola merely sees 
 the obvious and superficial, and enumerates 
 his points like the items in a catalogue. But 
 Huysmans seizes at once the spiritual and the 
 material ; he identifies himself with his subject, " 
 he breathes its atmosphere, and not a detail of 
 
82 J. K. HQYSMANS 
 
 the physical features escapes him. Perhaps it 
 was a sub-conscious knowledge of his own 
 power that led him to Chartres, where he found 
 in the Cathedral a subject worthy of his pen. 
 It is to Chartres that he conveys his hero in 
 company with the Abbe Gevresin, and through- 
 out the book the Cathedral — its history, its 
 architecture, its symbolism — is intimately inter- 
 woven with Durtal's soul's progress. Thanks 
 to M. Huysmans, Chartres will henceforth live 
 in our imaginations as it has never lived before. 
 To bring a great work of art within the under- 
 standing of the multitude, to make it a living 
 reality to those whose eyes have never been glad- 
 dened by its vision, is surely a creative act second 
 only to that of the original creators. With an 
 ecstasy born of faith, the author has steeped 
 himself in the atmosphere of the sacred pile. 
 To him it is a poem in stone, a sublime prayer 
 come down to us from the Middle Ages, a 
 living monument to the faith of the past. He 
 hurries thither at early dawn in order to see 
 the morning light steal through the forest of 
 slender pillars, and he spends long hours in 
 solitary contemplation of its marvellous sculp- 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 83 
 
 tured porches. He singles out its beauties 
 one by one — its statues, its stone traceries, the 
 tender vivid blue of its incomparable windows 
 — and he describes each detail with the elaborate 
 precision that he acquired from his early- 
 training in the naturalist school. But per- 
 meating all he discerns the mystery of faith, 
 the presence of the unseen, the mystic influence 
 of the Blessed Virgin to whose worship the 
 Cathedral is dedicated. No saint shares in her 
 honours ; no hallowed bones rest beneath the 
 pavement of her temple ; to Mary alone, to 
 the two miraculous Madonnas of Notre-Dame 
 de Sous-Terre, and Notre-Dame du Pilier, her 
 suppliant worshippers turn for consolation. 
 Among these Durtal comes to be numbered ; 
 with Verlaine he registers the vow, ' Je ne veux 
 plus aimer que ma mere Marie ' ; and devotion 
 to the Virgin — who in the religion of the pious 
 Frenchman occupies much the same place as 
 his own mother fills in his family afFections — 
 becomes inextricably mingled with his aesthetic 
 reveries on line and colour. 
 
 Gothic architecture to Huysmans is the 
 purest, noblest expression in stone of man's 
 
84 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 aspirations towards the divine. Its pointed 
 archways, its tall, slender spires spring heaven- 
 ward like tender, confident, audacious prayers. 
 
 ' Romanesque,' he writes, ' is the La Trappe 
 of architecture ; it gives shelter to austere 
 Orders, to sombre convents, to men who kneel 
 on ashes chanting penitential psalms in plaintive 
 voices, with heads bowed low. . . . From its 
 Asiatic origin Romanesque has retained some- 
 thing of the pre-Christian era ; within its walls 
 man prays to the implacable Adonai rather 
 than to the charitable Child, the tender Mother. 
 Gothic architecture, on the other hand, is less 
 timid, more concerned with the Second and 
 Third Persons of the Trinity and with the 
 Virgin ; it shelters Orders that are less rigorous 
 and more artistic ; beneath its roof prostrate 
 figures rise up, lowered eyes are raised, and 
 sepulchral voices grow seraphic.' 
 
 In a word, Romanesque for Huysmans typi- 
 fies the Old Testament, and Gothic the New. 
 And of all the marvellous Gothic cathedrals 
 dotted over France, the Cathedral of Chartres, 
 c une blonde aux yeux bleus,' appeals to him as 
 the most devotional, the most etherealised in 
 its beauty. After long pages of c architectural 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 85 
 
 exegesis/ he sums up his impressions of the 
 lofty interior in an outburst of rapturous devo- 
 tion — 
 
 'Elle se spiritualisait, se faisait toute ame 
 toute priere, lorsqu'elle s'elancait vers le 
 Seigneur pour le rejoindre ; legere et gracile, 
 presque imponderable, elle etait l'expression la 
 plus magnifique de la beaute qui s'evade de sa 
 gangue terrestre, de la beaute qui se seraphise. 
 Elle etait grele et pale comme ces Vierges de 
 Roger van der Weyden qui sont si filiformes, 
 si fluettes, qu'elles s'envoleraient si elles 
 n'etaient en quelque sorte retenues ici-bas par 
 le poids de leurs brocarts et de leurs traines/ 
 
 Many will be tempted to read La Cathedrale 
 solely for the sake of the beautiful descriptive 
 passages which abound in its pages. And from 
 that point of view alone the book is infinitely 
 worth reading. And yet the descriptions of 
 Chartres are subsidiary in intention to the 
 description of Durtal's state of soul, and the 
 great moral purpose of the book is of higher 
 import than its aesthetic qualities. In its 
 spiritual aspect, if not in all its material details, 
 La Cathedrale is a chapter in an autobiography 
 as truthful and as penetrating as any of the 
 
86 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 great confessions which remain for all time 
 among the most fascinating and instructive of 
 human documents. No one in discussing, let 
 us say, the Confessions of St. Augustine, would 
 restrict himself solely to the literary aspect of 
 the work, and to do so in the case of Huysmans 
 would be not less ineffectual. La Bas, En 
 Route, and La Cathe'drale form the veracious 
 history of a soul's conversion from materialism 
 of the grossest kind to faith of a high spiritual 
 order. And the story has been told by one of 
 the greatest literary artists of the day. It is 
 here that its almost unique value becomes 
 evident. In it we are brought face to face with 
 the essential truths of life presented in their 
 most convincing aspect. If, as it is sometimes 
 alleged, genius is neither more nor less than a 
 capacity for perfect honesty of thought and 
 expression, the writers of great autobiography 
 — their names can be counted on the ringers of 
 one hand — cannot fall short of genius. For to 
 be honest about oneself is of all gifts the most 
 rare. Even Cellini's candid and fascinating 
 Vita is written with a touch of bravado, and 
 the Memoires of Jean Jacques Rousseau have 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 87 
 
 more than a touch of assumed sentimentalism. 
 St. Augustine shares perhaps with St. Teresa 
 the palm of supreme excellence in the sphere of 
 spiritual revelations. Both were giants of the 
 intellectual as well as of the spiritual life. 
 Many of the mystical saints have manifested 
 their interior life as an act of obedience anck 
 humility, but only a few possessed, in addition ^ 
 to purity of intention, those gifts of mind 
 without which the gifts of the spirit cannot be 
 made intelligible to the outside world. In 
 J. K. Huysmans the necessary qualities are 
 combined in a singularly high degree. He / 
 possesses an amazing, and to me an incompre- 
 hensible, capacity for squandering his soul on 
 paper, for gauging the idiosyncrasies of his own 
 temperament, for seizing his most fugitive 
 emotions and pigeon-holing them for future 
 literary use. That, in his three autobiographical 
 volumes, he should have screened his identity 
 behind the convenient mask of fiction, does not 
 detract in any way from the sincerity of his 
 work. Nowhere has he attempted to build up 
 a personalty around the figure of Durtal, to 
 create a character for him by the aid of artistic 
 
88 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 embellishments. From first to last he writes 
 of himself, from his own point of view, and the 
 sense of his identity with his hero is so strong, 
 that we might almost believe the personal 
 pronoun had been replaced by the fictitious 
 name only on the eve of publication. 
 
 Many readers of En Route declared them- 
 selves sceptical as to the reality of the author's 
 reconciliation with the Catholic Church, of 
 which the book professes to be the record. 
 They maintained that the religious attitude 
 was a mere pose adopted for artistic effect. 
 The extraordinarily dramatic treatment of purely 
 spiritual experiences afforded perhaps some 
 superficial excuse for so fundamentally false a 
 view. I do not think that any reader could 
 fall into the same error after reading La 
 Cathedrale. Faith — vivid, unquestioning, 
 mediaeval — is stamped on every page. It is 
 full from beginning to end of that sense of 
 finality that comes to the human soul after a 
 long wrestle with the withering torments of 
 unbelief. It is altogether more humane, more 
 charitable than its predecessor, less prolific in 
 bitter sarcasm and rash judgments against all 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 89 
 
 who fall short of the spiritual ideals of the 
 neophyte. The patient study of which the 
 book gives evidence — it is the outcome of 
 three years' labour — could only have been 
 voluntarily undertaken by one drawn irre- 
 sistibly to such subjects by the magnetism of 
 faith. Huysmans' soul is one that could never 
 have accommodated itself to a purely negative 
 creed. Religion alone could save him from 
 incurable melancholy. All his life he has 
 suffered from a veritable craving after the 
 supernatural and a crushing sense of the misery 
 of our material existence. In his most un- 
 believing period, with that curious perversity 
 of the intellect which frequently prompts men 
 to cling to the most petty superstitions after 
 they have thrown off all so-called ' orthodox " 
 belief, he flung himself for a time into the 
 study of Satanism, Magic, and those varied 
 spiritualistic phenomena from which a jaded 
 Parisian public seeks to gain some new excite- 
 ment, hoping to find relief from the intolerable 
 tedium of his days. The very excesses of his 
 sensual life can be explained as a blind striving 
 after the unattainable. Then grace came to 
 
90 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 him, and he turned once more to the Catholic 
 faith of his childhood. Of the struggle that 
 ensued between the spirit and the flesh the 
 most elaborate and convincing picture is drawn 
 in En Route. All convention, all reticence is 
 cast aside, and the naked soul of the sinner is 
 exhibited in a hand-to-hand struggle with the 
 forces of evil that his own vicious life has 
 drawn upon him. The recital fills one with a 
 sense of awe, of the grandeur of life's combat, 
 such a sense as comes to one before the Last 
 Judgment in the Sistine. And over all there is 
 the conviction, subtly conveyed, that of himself, 
 Durtal, timid, hesitating, even reluctant, could 
 have effected nothing ; that he would have been 
 helpless before the torrent of temptations that 
 assailed him had he not been borne forward by 
 some irresistible force, some compelling power, 
 the ( yet not I ' of the apostle. For, in truth, 
 Durtal himself is a sorry hero, who enlists our 
 sympathies only by the candour and humility 
 of his miserable revelations. True, there is in 
 him no touch of self-glorification, none of the 
 morbid vanity of the reformed drunkard ' testi- 
 fying ' to the excesses of his unregenerate state. 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 91 
 
 But even in La Cat he dr ale, when he has fought 
 the great fight and has reached a haven of 
 comparative calm and security, he is at best 
 plodding, conscientious, humble, but never 
 heroic. There is a want of robustness about 
 him which, I confess, fills me at times with an 
 unreasonable irritation. For, in reality, Durtal 
 is an accurate study of human nature painted 
 with the patient fidelity of Van Eyck ; and his 
 very frailty brings into prominent relief the 
 doctrine of sanctification by grace, which is the 
 underlying ' motif' of the whole autobiography. 
 From his first revolt against materialism it is 
 Christianity in its most mystical aspect that has 
 attracted Durtal. He spurns the utilitarianism 
 that has crept into much of the so-called 
 Christianity of the present day. He is even 
 bitterly and uncharitably intolerant of prim 
 piety, of the worldly compromises of a ' bour- 
 geoisie devote/ of religious observances per- 
 formed in a narrow and Pharisaic spirit. His 
 soul yearns after the highest life, the fullest 
 comprehension of the Infinite. He is not a 
 mystic, but he is a keen-sighted and sym- 
 pathetic student of mysticism. He has made 
 
92 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 a prolonged and critical study of the mystical 
 writings of the Middle Ages, of St. Bernard 
 and St. John of the Cross, of St. Gertrude and 
 St. Angela, and of his own mediaeval country- 
 man the Admirable Ruysbroeck, from whom 
 Maeterlinck also has drawn many of the purest 
 thoughts in Le Tresor des Humbles. The lives 
 of the mystical saints appeal to him in- 
 tensely, and he paints them with a passion of 
 sympathy which brings out* at once their 
 spiritual grandeur and their touching human 
 weakness. I look forward eagerly to that life 
 of Blessed Lid^ine which he has repeatedly 
 foreshadowed. Indeed, I would like a whole 
 series of lives of saints from his pen. They 
 would be full of supernatural grace and pas- 
 sionate human feeling, far indeed removed 
 from the edifying lay-figure of the conventional 
 hagiographer, for whom he has so profound a 
 contempt. Take his little sketch of the almost 
 unknown Dutch Carmelite of the seventeenth 
 century, Marie Marguerite des Anges, whose 
 life of amazing mortification was crowned after 
 death by a miracle. She appears before us as 
 real, as true, as palpable in Huysmans' few 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 93 
 
 ecstatic pages as if her life had been passed on 
 our own plane of daily existence, instead of in a 
 spiritual atmosphere of which most of us can v 
 form simply no conception at all. To Huys- 
 mans the contemplative life is the highest good, 
 the most complete realisation of the end for 
 which man is created. For him, as for the 
 mystic, the spiritual life alone is real, and 
 present, and actual ; the material life, that 
 which we realise by our senses, is dim and tem- 
 porary and of no account. Monasticism, the 
 life of the cloister, where alone the contem- 
 plative life can flourish, hovers unceasingly 
 before his vision as the ultimate goal. Both 
 his latest books are penetrated by the sense of 
 its beauty, of its extraordinary fascination. 
 He brings it before the reader in a way that 
 no great novelist has done before, that no \ 
 English novelist has ever attempted. Here, 
 in modern industrial England we have en- 
 tirely lost sight of the spiritual value of the / 
 ascetic life — and a life of contemplation is of 
 necessity founded on the rock-bed of asceti- 
 cism — oblivious that the greatest wisdom and 
 the purest knowledge have come down to us 
 
94 J- K. HUYSMANS 
 
 through no other channel. We are apt to talk 
 of monasticism as though it were some exploded 
 fallacy of a superstitious past instead of its 
 being the natural expression of one of the most 
 profound and permanent cravings of human 
 nature. We see the external triviality, the 
 superficial narrowness of the religious life, and 
 we entirely fail to see its hidden significance, 
 the great underlying truths of which the 
 material acts are but the outward expression. 
 The life of the soldier in its daily round of 
 drill and guard-duty and rigid discipline would 
 appear equally petty and futile, were it not 
 within the comprehension of us all that it con- 
 stitutes an essential preparation for deeds of 
 heroism on the battle-field. So the daily life 
 of the monk or nun, the prayer, the silence, 
 the mortifications are an essential preparation 
 for that more intimate union with the Divine 
 which is of the essence of all mysticism. And 
 to the true soldier, as to the true religious, the 
 imposed privations and the daily discipline are 
 joyfully borne as the appointed means towards 
 a supreme end. 
 
 To Huysmans alone among modern novelists 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 95 
 
 there has come this unique comprehension of 
 all that is concealed behind the wall of the 
 cloister. He is as keenly alive to the refined 
 spirituality that distinguishes communities of 
 women as to the more robust virtues of the 
 male Orders. Nor is his admiration based 
 upon a romantic and imaginary conception of 
 cloistered life. His fundamental realism does 
 not fail him even here. He notes the coarse 
 chapped hands and plain freckled faces of some 
 humble Franciscan Sisters, in whose chapel he 
 has gone to pray, and at La Trappe there is 
 no attempt to gloss over the repulsive physical 
 details inseparable from a life of extreme toil 
 and mortification. If in his picture of ' le frere 
 Simeon/ the strongest and the most astounding 
 thing he has ever accomplished, he has ven- 
 tured for an instant to lift the veil that shrouds 
 the regions of spiritual ecstasy from the eyes of 
 an unbelieving generation, he has none the less 
 noted with an almost savage fidelity the un- 
 savoury surroundings of the swineherd's daily 
 life. It is the essential beauty of a life of 
 prayer and renunciation that appeals to him. 
 He has steeped himself in the sentiment of the 
 
96 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 Middle Ages; he has familiarised himself with 
 the most ecstatic revelations of conventual 
 visionaries until the veiled arcana of the relig- 
 ious life stand revealed before him. It is only 
 possible to mention the description of Notre 
 Dame de FAtre in En Route, for it would be 
 impossible to speak in adequate terms of pages 
 so eloquent, so intimate, so filled with spiritual 
 enlightenment. In La Cathedrale the peniten- 
 tial ideal of Trappist austerity has given place 
 to the gentler, more cultivated, ideal of Bene- 
 dictine learning. It is the Benedictines who 
 have preserved for us the glorious traditions of 
 plain-chant ; it is in their convents and monas- 
 teries alone that the Divine Office is rendered 
 with all the solemnity, all the measured beauty 
 of which it is capable. The incomparable 
 liturgy of the Church is the subject of their 
 constant solicitude. They have been the zeal- 
 ous guardians of religious art in music, in 
 painting, in architecture ; and they have declined 
 to countenance the singeries musicales and 
 tawdry decoration which an irreligious age has 
 introduced into the Sanctuary. To Durtal, a 
 student and a recluse, whose aesthetic tastes are 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 97 
 
 inextricably mingled with his religious aspir- 
 ations, the Order of St. Benedict presents fea- 
 tures of irresistible attractiveness. As he says 
 of himself in La Cathedrale: * He had nothing 
 else in his favour, but at least he could plead a 
 passionate love of mysticism and of the liturgy, 
 of plain-chant and of cathedrals ! Truthfully, 
 and without self-deception, he could say, 
 M Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house 
 and the place where Thy glory dwelleth." ' In 
 a Benedictine monastery, if anywhere, he may 
 find peace for his tortured soul, and a rule of 
 life not too austere for his poor shattered body. 
 Slowly he feels himself drawn, as by invisible 
 cords, until in the closing pages of his book he 
 stands on the threshold of Solesmes. UOblat 
 is already announced, but it probably will not 
 be given to the world until M. Huysmans has 
 definitely severed himself from his Parisian life. 
 Personally, I hope it may be so ; for a study of 
 monastic life in the present day, written with 
 an inside knowledge, not, as is usually the case, 
 by some renegade monk, but by one gifted 
 with all the spiritual and artistic qualifications 
 for such a task, would certainly prove a docu- 
 
98 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 ment of the highest human interest. It may be 
 reserved for M. Huysmans to carry forward 
 with his pen that revival of monasticism in 
 France which Lacordaire, preaching to all Paris 
 from the pulpit of Notre Dame in the pro- 
 scribed white robes of the Dominican, initiated 
 by his penetrating eloquence and the magnetism 
 of his personal example. 
 
 The conversion of M. Huysmans is no isolated 
 episode in the history of contemporary French 
 literature. Whether or no it heralds, as many 
 have assumed, the dawn of a Christian renais- 
 sance in France, it may unquestionably be held 
 to indicate a revolt against materialism, both in 
 faith and in literature. Verlaine and Huysmans, 
 Ferdinand Brunetiere and Francois Coppee 
 have each in turn, and according to the measure 
 of his abilities, borne witness to one and the 
 same truth. They have, one and all, deliber- 
 ately altered their attitude towards life, and 
 have publicly burned the gods whom they pre- 
 viously adored. Naturalism in art and mater- 
 ialism in religion have outlived their day in 
 Paris, and the swing of the pendulum is now 
 set in the contrary direction. Men have 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 99 
 
 wearied of mere exteriority, of faithful photo- 
 graphic reproduction, and they have wearied 
 above all of the attitude of mind which can 
 only perceive the sordid and repulsive side of 
 life. Amid the strange tangle of vague 
 religious aspirations and fantastic spiritualistic 
 beliefs with which all classes in Paris seem to 
 be infected at the present time, we can discern 
 a real craving after the invisible, a longing for 
 closer union with the spiritual forces of exist- 
 ence. It is on these lines alone that we can 
 hope for the revival of literature from the 
 present condition of national decadence. Litera- 
 ture is in the main true to life just in so far as 
 it marks the eternal correspondence between 
 the seen and the unseen ; and to-day we are 
 learning to realise afresh the value of symbolism 
 as a means of bringing home this correspond- 
 ence to the world's intelligence. In France it 
 seems to me at least possible that this revolt 
 against materialism may crystallise into a definite 
 revival of Catholic faith. French literature has 
 always represented within its boundaries the 
 two extremes of a licentious paganism and the 
 expression of an intense Christian spirituality. 
 
ioo J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 The literary level of purely devotional writing 
 has usually been very much higher in France 
 than in other countries, Spain alone, perhaps, 
 excepted. The pagan and the Christian ele- 
 ment in literature dominate each other in turn 
 in succeeding waves of national emotion. In the 
 earlier years of the present century there oc- 
 curred an unexpected recrudescence of Christian 
 faith when Chateaubriand gave the signal with 
 his Genie du Christianisme y and De Maistre 
 and Lamartine, Lamennais and Montalembert 
 devoted their pens with a passionate energy 
 to the service of the Church. To-day, under 
 altered conditions, and on a somewhat wider basis, 
 the same phenomenon may repeat itself; and 
 the symbolist movement, with the author of 
 En Route as its most penetrating exponent, 
 may mark the advent of a new period of 
 spiritual efflorescence on Gallic soil. 
 
 To the critic M. Huysmans' art presents many 
 conflicting qualities. We shall understand it 
 better if we bear in mind that he is, by early train- 
 ing, a realist. Zola, who makes no mistakes, 
 except in literature, always knew that Huys- 
 mans, and not Maupassant, was the man of genius. 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 101 
 
 To-day, freeing himself from the shackles of 
 the naturalist school, he transfers to the spiritual 
 plane all the accuracy, the conscientiousness, the 
 powers of observation which he acquired in the 
 past. He penetrates to the spiritual meaning 
 of life with the same unerring precision as 
 in former years he painted external features. 
 There are even times when old associations 
 are so strong upon him that he seems to take 
 pleasure in applying ignoble words to spiritual 
 purposes with a jarring effect. It is one of the 
 few blots on a style at once singularly har- 
 monious and extraordinarily terse and daring. 
 Symbolism, that most elusive of studies, he 
 reduces to an exact science. He has mastered it 
 in all its details, all its ramifications. He 
 enters exhaustively into the symbolism of 
 numbers and of gems, of colours and scents, of 
 beasts and birds, and he tabulates the con- 
 flicting theories of saints and of scholars. That 
 on a subject so suggestive and so beautiful 
 he should have ended by wearying the reader 
 with a mass of ill-arranged detail is a matter of 
 very real regret. He has possessed himself by 
 much reading of a vast store of rare and some- 
 
102 J. K. HUYSMANS 
 
 what fantastic information, pigeon-holed ready 
 for use. But, like Zola, he lacks discrimination 
 in the use of his material ; he keeps nothing back, 
 forgetful that the reader's appetite may not be 
 as exorbitant as his own. The superficial critic 
 will probably condemn his habit of intercalating 
 in his narrative long pages which have no direct 
 connection with his subject. D'Annunzio sins 
 in the same way. It is a proceeding that 
 violates the accepted canons of literary con- 
 struction of our day. But if canons are 
 violated with good results, where is the evil ? 
 The proceeding becomes rather an affirmation 
 of a new law. And the long criticism of Fra 
 Angelico in La Cathedrale, though at first 
 sight it may annoy us as a digression, grows 
 upon us by degrees, until we come to see that 
 it lights up the book as one of the beauti- 
 ful windows at Chartres lights up the dim 
 interior. 
 
 I would like to take leave of M. Huysmans 
 in one of his happier, more imaginative, moods. 
 His is a dark, strenuous soul, to whom even 
 the full light of Christian faith brings but a 
 small share of that ' holy joy/ of which Francis 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 103 
 
 of Assisi will always remain the most exquisite 
 type. But in La Cathedrale we see traces of a 
 melting pessimism, of softened judgments, of 
 gleams of radiance penetrating the natural 
 gloom of his soul. Here, on the eve of his 
 departure for Solesmes, are the words in which 
 he sums up his impressions of Chartres, the 
 home of the Blessed Virgin, whose very fea- 
 tures he seeks to trace in the mystic beauty of 
 the interior : — 
 
 { Eh bien, moi, qui ne suis point un vision- 
 naire et qui dois avoir recours a mon imagination 
 pour me la figurer, il me semble que je Taper cois 
 dans les contours, dans l'expression meme de 
 la cathedrale ; les traits sont un peu brouilles 
 dans le pale eblouissement de la grande rose 
 qui flamboie derriere sa tete, telle qu'un nimbe. 
 Elle sourit et ses yeux, tout en lumiere, ont 
 l'incomparable eclat de ces clairs saphirs qui 
 eclairent l'entree de la ntf. Son corps fluide 
 s'effuse en une robe candide de flammes, rayee 
 de cannelures, cotelee, ainsi que la jupe de la 
 fausse Berthe. Son visage a une blancheur qui 
 se nacre, et la chevelure, comme tissee par un 
 rouet de soleil, vole en des fils d'or ; Elle est 
 
 UN!Vc_rtSITY 
 
 OF 
 
io 4 J- K. HUYSMANS 
 
 FEpouse du Cantique : " Pulchra ut lima, electa 
 ut sol." La basilique ou Elle reside et qui se 
 confond avec Elle s'illumine de ses graces ; les 
 gemmes des verrieres chantent ses vertus ; les 
 colonnes minces et freles qui s'elancent d'un 
 jet, des dalles jusques aux combles, decelent ses 
 aspirations et ses desirs ; le pave raconte son 
 humilite ; les voutes qui se reunissent, de 
 meme qu'un dais, au-dessus d'Elle, narrent sa 
 charite ; les pierres et les vitres repetent ses 
 antiennes ; et il n'est pas jusqu'a l'aspect belli- 
 queux de quelques details du sanctuaire, jusqu'a 
 cette tournure chevaleresque rappelant les 
 Croisades, avec les lames d'epees et les bouc- 
 liers des fenetres et des roses, le casque des 
 ogives, les cottes de maille du clocher vieux, les 
 treillis de fer de certains carreaux, qui n'evo- 
 quent le souvenir du capitule de Prime et de 
 l'antienne de Laudes de son petit office, qui ne 
 traduise le M terribilis ut castrorum acies ordi- 
 nata " qui ne relate cette privaute qu'EUe 
 possede, quand Elle le veut, d'etre "ainsi qu'une 
 armee rangee en bataille, terrible." 
 
 4 Mais Elle ne le veut pas souvent ici, je 
 crois ; aussi cette cathedrale est-elle surtout le 
 
J. K. HUYSMANS 105 
 
 reflet de son inepuisable mansuetude, l'echo de 
 son impartible gloire ! ' 
 
 We see in this beautiful passage the benefi- 
 cent influence exercised by the great Gothic 
 cathedral on the soul of the novelist. His six 
 months at Chartres were spent in a spiritual 
 ecstasy. Even in those moments of prostra- 
 tion, by which the fidelity of every soul is 
 tested, he is conscious at Chartres of some 
 tender spiritual protection which saves him from 
 the lowest depths of desolation. He is lifted 
 up out of the region of petty personal miseries 
 which in the early pages of En Route were seen 
 to paralyse his soul, and he lives in a new 
 world — a world of dreams and aspiration and 
 mystical beauty. There is a long spiritual 
 pilgrimage between the Black Mass in La Bas 
 and the Communion in the crypt of Chartres. 
 The two noblest emotions of which the soul of 
 M. Huysmans is capable — religious faith and \ 
 artistic enjoyment — find their highest expres- 
 sion combined within the grey walls of the 
 Cathedral. At Chartres his soul is at peace. 
 The book gives us a new sense of the magical 
 force of Beauty, of the eternal power of Truth. / 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 In a bi-lingual country literature must always 
 suffer grave disadvantages. It lacks a national 
 entity, and hence it fails in a measure to 
 excite popular enthusiasm, or to achieve inter- 
 national recognition. Until quite recently 
 Belgium might have been cited as a case in 
 point. How many of us previous to the 
 moment, some five years ago, when the fame 
 of Maurice Maeterlinck first drifted across 
 the North Sea, realised that the kingdom of 
 King Leopold could lay claim to a distinc- 
 tively national school of contemporary litera- 
 ture ? Her Flemish writers were studied only 
 by their own section of the nation, their 
 very existence unsuspected by foreigners ; her 
 French writers, when not overshadowed by 
 the artistic pre-eminence of her Gallic neigh- 
 bour, were apt to find themselves appropriated 
 by the latter and carelessly numbered in the 
 
 106 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 107 
 
 ranks of her own literary sons. If to-day 
 Belgium has openly triumphed over all these 
 drawbacks, and if the young school of Franco- 
 Belgian poets and dramatists has established 
 for itself a European reputation, the fact is 
 in itself the best possible testimony to the 
 life and the vigour of a movement that can 
 point to the names of Maeterlinck and 
 Lemonnier, of Verhaeren and Rodenbach on 
 its roll of members. 
 
 Had the brilliant group of young writers 
 who for the last fifteen years have found their 
 chief rallying-ground in the pages of L! Art 
 Moderne resided, not in Brussels, but in 
 Paris, it is certain that their fame would have 
 spread far more rapidly than has been the 
 case. They have represented ' Young Belgium ' 
 not only with spirit and talent, but even with 
 genius ; they have led the van of a move- 
 ment against meaningless conventionalities and 
 Academic precision both in prose and poetry ; 
 they have allied themselves with enthusiasm 
 with Les Jeunes of the French capital ; they 
 were the defenders of the Impressionists in 
 Art years before Impressionism had been 
 
108 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 adopted as the shibboleth of the cultured, 
 while in their own country identifying them- 
 selves with the rising talent of Fernand Knopff, 
 of Henry de Greux, and of Van Rysselberghe ; 
 and they have themselves in literature earned 
 in turn the epithets of c parnassien ' and ' sym- 
 bolist/ and doubtless, too, of decadent. Like 
 the vanguard of every movement, whether 
 political, literary, or scientific, they have had 
 desperate rivalries and bitter enmities ; quon- 
 dam friends have quarrelled, old alliances have 
 been broken, and organs have succeeded one 
 another with bewildering rapidity — La Jeune 
 Belgique, La Wallonie> La Societe Nouvelle, La 
 Basoche, L? Art 'Jeune — as each seceding faction 
 has felt the need of a representative mouth- 
 piece. Such episodes are the natural accom- 
 paniments of any young, free, and spontaneous 
 movement, liberating itself from clogging 
 shackles, and falling into inevitable extra- 
 vagances in the process of finding its own 
 feet and realising its own necessary limitations. 
 And even the extravagances should be wel- 
 comed with a sympathetic indulgence if we 
 would arrive at an understanding of the true 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 109 
 
 inwardness of a movement of which they are 
 but the accidental exteriorities. 
 
 From its first inception the name of Emile 
 Verhaeren, so familiar in Brussels and in Paris, 
 so little known comparatively on this side of 
 the Channel, has been intimately associated 
 with what we may call the new Belgian 
 literary school. For many years he has been 
 accepted as one of its most brilliant leaders. 
 As a student at Louvain towards the year 
 1880, Verhaeren founded, in conjunction with 
 his friend and present publisher, E. Deman, 
 a militant little sheet, La Semaine, which 
 was very quickly suppressed by the University 
 authorities. Hardly had he settled in Brussels 
 a year or two later, with a view to studying 
 for the legal profession, than he definitely 
 renounced the law and flung himself with all 
 the ardour of a highly-strung temperament 
 into the literary movement of the capital. 
 From that day to this his pen has never been 
 idle. The pages of U Art Moderne and of 
 contemporary periodicals bear witness both 
 to his diligence as a critic and to the sanity 
 and generosity of his literary appreciations. 
 
no EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 In art, Monet and Renoir awakened his early 
 enthusiasm ; specimens of his more mature 
 and detailed art criticism are to be found in 
 two small volumes dedicated respectively to 
 the painting of Fernand Knopff and J. Hey- 
 mans. But it is emphatically as a poet and 
 not as a prosateur that Verhaeren has made 
 his name. Year by year he has issued in 
 rapid succession a series of c plaquettes,' slim 
 quarto volumes of verse, printed on rough- 
 tinted paper, and now, for the most part, 
 long out of print. I give them in the order 
 of their publication : the very names are full 
 of a weird suggestiveness — Les Flamandes, 
 Les Moines, Les Soirs, Les Debacles, Les 
 Flambeaux Noirs, Les dpparus dans mes 
 Chemins y Les Campagnes Hallucinees, Les Vil- 
 lages Illusoires, Les Villes 'Tentaculaires, and, 
 within the last year, a drama, Les Aubes} 
 The soul's growth of the poet may be traced 
 throughout the series, and his life's history 
 is laid bare to those who would read. 
 
 As certainly as Maeterlinck is the represen- 
 
 1 Recently translated into English by Mr. Arthur Symons under the 
 title The Daivn (Duckworth). 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN m 
 
 tative dramatist of his country at the close of 
 this nineteenth century, so is Verhaeren the 
 representative lyric poet. It is impossible to 
 avoid bringing the two names into constant 
 juxtaposition. Both men are the product of 
 one and the same literary movement, and 
 both are characteristic of their age and their 
 country. Verhaeren, though to-day only in 
 his forty -fourth year, has been in turn 
 materialist and symbolist, the poet of blind 
 revolt and the poet of mystical faith, the 
 passionate lover of beauty and the morbid 
 delineator of life in its most hideous aspects. 
 But throughout the ever-varying emotions of 
 an intense and poetic temperament, capable 
 of appreciating at one moment the purest 
 and most ecstatic joys, and at another of 
 wallowing in the blackest and most unrelent- 
 ing misery, we can trace the strong and lasting 
 influences of his early surroundings and his 
 Flemish birthright. Born at St. Amand, not 
 far from Antwerp, his boyhood was spent on 
 the mist-laden banks of the Scheldt, in the 
 midst of that flat, wide-spreading, dyke-bound 
 Flemish landscape, * la verte immensite des 
 
ii2 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 plaines et des plaines,' which possesses indeed 
 a beauty and a poetry of its own, but is also 
 pervaded by a haunting melancholy. It is a 
 landscape to render a thoughtful boy still 
 more thoughtful and dreamy, to develop in 
 him a love of silence, of immensity, of austere 
 beauty, and to encourage him to penetrate 
 by slow degrees into the hidden secrets of 
 nature, the great mystical lessons of life. All 
 these characteristics have been Verhaeren's 
 throughout his career, marking him off as 
 Flemish by birth. Yet there are in his com- 
 plex nature other characteristics — his nervous 
 temperament, his gloomy outlook on life, his 
 instinctive sense of colour — which would lead 
 one to suppose, and there is nothing extra- 
 vagant in the supposition, that there is a 
 streak of Spanish blood in his veins. To his 
 century, or rather to this latter end of our 
 nineteenth century, belong his intense sub- 
 jectivity, his lack of moral reticence, his 
 morbid love of self-analysis, amounting at 
 times almost to insanity. The eternal * Moi ' 
 of the supreme egotist dominates too many 
 of his pages, yet so pathetic are his revela- 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 113 
 
 tions, so soul-stirring the pictures he paints 
 in glowing language of his soul's suffering, 
 that the sternest moralist must fain forgive 
 him a self-concentration turned to so artistic 
 an account. As a poet he is gifted with an 
 almost extravagant imagination, a passion for 
 harmonious sounds, a vivid power of snatching 
 fleeting impressions, of reproducing rapid 
 action, of painting a gesture ; and to these 
 he has added of recent years an exquisite 
 sense of the mystical beauty of life, and a 
 subtle gift of symbolical representation. His 
 friend and critic, Albert Mockel, hails him 
 as the c poete du paroxysme,' a term which 
 admirably renders the leading characteristic 
 of one period of his life, but which only 
 recognises a single and, in my opinion, by 
 no means the highest aspect of his poetical 
 faculties. But without having passed his 
 poems in review, it is not easy to arrive at 
 any true estimate of his genius. 
 
 Curiously enough, Verhaeren started on his 
 literary career as a materialist. There is a 
 Zolaesque quality about some of his early 
 work ; and in Les Flamandes, his first pub- 
 
 H 
 
ii4 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 lished volume of verse, there are descriptive 
 poems of Flemish village life that read like 
 a page of Germinal. He sees with that 
 passion for detail which has never left him, 
 and he reproduces with a faithful accuracy and 
 with a vigour of language that commands our 
 admiration, but he prefers to linger over the 
 least attractive aspects of peasant life, its 
 coarse brutality and superabundant flesh and 
 drunken revelling. His Flamandes are the 
 women that Rubens painted ; his village scenes 
 those that we are familiar with in the canvases 
 of Jan Steen ; but, as a rule, without atmo- 
 sphere, without inspiration, and so without 
 charm. Happily, the materialistic stage did 
 not last long, and there are already glimpses 
 of higher things in Les Moines, the outcome 
 of a visit to a Trappist Monastery in Hainault. 
 Verhaeren's monks are solid, square-shouldered 
 Flemish peasants, strong and fiery, triumphing 
 over their animal passions, or again, simple, 
 benign, and placid, 'les amants naifs de« la 
 Tres-Sainte Vierge.' But he is mainly in- 
 spired by memories of the mighty abbots 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 115 
 
 and priors of the Middle Ages, the rivals of 
 kings and barons, the civilisers of nations, 
 ' Abatteurs d'heresie a larges coups de croix.' 
 The life of the modern recluse is too uniform 
 and cramped for his taste ; he loves space and 
 size, and giant sins and boundless repentance, 
 and his sympathies are only really aroused by 
 something vast, mighty, infinite. So, too, 
 he loves the outward pomp and dignity of 
 ecclesiastical functions as representative of the 
 universality of the power of the Church. In 
 spite of a certain monotony of form, Les 
 Moines is full of beautiful and sonorous 
 rhymes and subtle observation of line and 
 colour. But even so the young poet does 
 not penetrate far below the picturesque ex- 
 teriorities of cloistered life, of the cowled monks 
 in choir and cell. Of the hidden mystical life, 
 the life of prayer and renouncement so mar- 
 vellously shadowed forth in En Route, we find 
 traces only here and there. Yet it is only fair 
 to remember that Les Moines belongs emphati- 
 cally to the apprentice stage of the poet's career, 
 and as such it is full of power and promise. 
 
n6 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 A chasm, both moral and intellectual, seems 
 to divide all Verhaeren's previous work 
 from Les Debacles and Les Flambeaux Noirs, 
 published some years later. It is these power- 
 ful, gloomy, and lurid volumes which have 
 earned for their author the epithet of ' poete 
 du paroxysme,' and which by many of his 
 admirers are regarded as indicating the high- 
 water mark of his genius. I confess that I 
 have never been able to share this view. I 
 prefer to regard these years of despair and 
 gloom in the life of the poet as a transitional 
 period, years of Sturm und Drang through 
 which he had to pass in order to rid himself 
 of his early materialism before passing into 
 the higher stage of mystical communion with 
 nature, which is the prevailing note of Les 
 Villages Illusoires. Les Debacles seems to me 
 to mark a stage, not a result, and it had for 
 its external cause a prolonged nervous crisis, 
 the result of ill-health. From the moral point 
 of view the volume is utterly morbid, hysteri- 
 cal, and self-centred, the outcry of a suffering 
 soul in desperate revolt against fate. For the 
 time at least the black cloud of despair has 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 117 
 
 descended upon him. In his own words, he 
 is c immensement emmaillote d'ennui ' ; * le 
 neant' reigns supreme. He rakes over all 
 the emotions of his being, only to discover no 
 cause for hope. He calls upon himself to 
 triumph over his despair, only to fall back 
 more deeply into the slough. His imaginings 
 become those of a maniac — 
 
 1 Quand je suis seul le soir, soudainement par fois, 
 Je sens pleurer sur moi l'ceil blanc de la folic' 
 
 He describes his own corpse rotting in the 
 grave ; he longs to be an idol in a Benares 
 temple before whom fanatics prostrate them- 
 selves ; or again, a monk in a ' cloitre de fer/ 
 his erotic passions crushed by inhuman penance. 
 In Les Flambeaux Noirs the element of mad- 
 ness becomes still further intensified, and the 
 poet grows more and more incoherent. His 
 weird ballad of ' La Dame en Noir des Carre- 
 fours ' is practically a glorification of prostitu- 
 tion, and is characteristic of the morbidly 
 unhealthy side of his genius. His hallucinations 
 find their most poetic expression in a tragic 
 poem with the constant refrain — 
 
 'Je suis l'hallucine de la foret des Nombres,' 
 
n8 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 full of the wild and tangled imagery of an 
 
 intellect tottering on the borders of lunacy. 
 
 While revelling in his sufferings and his 
 
 passions and his pride, he turns from time to 
 
 time with longing eyes to the externals of 
 
 religion, to the aesthetic calm of cathedral 
 
 aisles, to the harmony of slow chanting in 
 
 dark chapels, to visions of flaring candles and 
 
 mitred abbots and golden monstrances, to the 
 
 peace of midnight vigils, and in some exquisite 
 
 lines he has himself recourse to prayer in a 
 
 moment of hope which he believes to be 
 
 vain : — 
 
 * La nuit d'hiver eleve au ciel son pur calice, 
 Et je leve mon cceur aussi, mon cceur nocturne, 
 Seigneur, mon cceur ! vers ton pale infini vide, 
 Et neanmoins je sais que rien n'en pourra l'urne 
 Combler, et que rien n'est dont ce cceur meurt avide ; 
 Et je te sais mensonge et mes levres te prient. 
 Et mes genoux ; je sais et tes grandes mains closes 
 Et tes grands yeux fermes aux desespoirs qui crient 
 Et que e'est moi qui seul me reve dans les choses ; 
 Ayez pitie, Seigneur, de ma toute demence 
 J'ai besoin de pleurer mon mal vers ton silence ! 
 
 La nuit d'hiver eleve au ciel son pur calice/ 
 
 But in spite of all his extravagances and 
 incoherencies, it would be absurd to deny 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 119 
 
 that as poetry, which after all is the main 
 point, Les Debacles marks a distinct advance 
 on its predecessors. It can show an exuberant 
 wealth of imagery, a freedom from conven- 
 tional restraints, and a widening of the horizon 
 of life over which the imagination can roam. 
 In form, too, Verhaeren has developed many 
 of what have remained as his special charac- 
 teristics ; his bold handling of the ' vers libre ' 
 in preference to more Academic forms, his 
 predilection for polysyllabic rhymes, his haunt- 
 ing rhythmical effects obtained by an artful 
 repetition and manipulation of alliterative 
 phrases. Les Flamandes and Les Moines con- 
 tained but two aspects of human existence, 
 to which the poet restricted himself; in Les 
 Debacles he flings himself into the primary 
 emotions of life, taking the whole scale of 
 human experiences within his grasp,; and if 
 the result is not always edifying or beautiful 
 or harmonious, yet we feel grateful to the 
 poet for being true to his own self, and true, 
 in great measure, to life. But as the ripe 
 product of Verhaeren's mature genius, I must 
 once more decline to accept Les Debacles. 
 
120 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 It is a positive relief to escape from these 
 gloomy pages into the purer and clearer 
 atmosphere of Les Apparus dans mes Chemins. 
 The volume indeed opens in the minor key 
 with renewed visions of the melancholy land- 
 scape in which the poet's soul has hibernated 
 so long, and renewed lamentations over the 
 death-like bondage from which there seems 
 no escape. A series of symbolical figures 
 passes before his eyes, c Celui de l'Horizon,' 
 * La Fatigue/ * Le Savoir/ and finally, ' Celui 
 du Rien/ a poem at once so grotesque, so 
 ghastly, and so hopelessly incoherent, that it 
 reads like the lurid visions of a delirium tremens 
 patient. Verhaeren is frequently coarse, but 
 in this instance he passes all bounds. Then 
 suddenly the clouds of despondency roll a- 
 sunder, and the sunshine of hope irradiates 
 the landscape in the beautiful poem c Saint- 
 Georges/ So vivid is the picture of the 
 radiant knight sweeping down from heaven 
 in all the panoply of war to the deliverance 
 of the suffering soul below, so joyous and 
 triumphant is the rhythm of the short resonant 
 lines, so tender the gratitude of the soul 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 121 
 
 dragged forth from its slough of despond, 
 that the poem must surely commemorate 
 some spiritual crisis in the life of the poet 
 himself, some sudden awakening to the infinite 
 possibilities of human existence. It was a 
 charming and felicitous fancy to symbolise 
 his conception of hope in the warlike figure 
 of the legendary saint who triumphs by cour- 
 age and purity over the dragon of sin and 
 despair. No English poet, to my knowledge, 
 has paid such graceful and reverent homage to 
 our national saint — 
 
 1 Ouverte en tout a coup parmi les brumes 
 Une Avenue ! 
 
 Et Saint Georges, fermentant d'ors, 
 
 Avec des ecumes de plumes 
 
 Au chaufrein tors de son cheval sans mors 
 
 Descend. 
 
 II sait de quels lointains je viens, 
 
 Avec quelles brumes dans le cerveau 
 
 Avec quels signes de couteau 
 
 En croix noire sur la pensee, 
 
 Avec quelle derision de biens, 
 
 Avec quelle puissance depensee 
 
 Avec quelle colere et quel masque et quelle folie 
 
 Sur de la honte et de la lie ! 
 
 J'ai ete lache et je me suis enfui 
 
122 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 Du monde en un grand moi futile ; 
 J'ai souleve sous des plafonds de nuit 
 Les marbres d'or d'une science hostile 
 Vers un sommet barre d'oracles noirs. 
 
 L'aube ouvre un beau conseil de confiance 
 
 Et qui l'ecoute est le sauve 
 
 De son marais, ou nul peche ne fut jamais lave. 
 
 Le Saint Georges, cuirasse clair 
 
 A traverse par bonds de flamme 
 
 Le doux matin parmi mon ame ; 
 
 II etait jeune et beau de foi, 
 
 II se pencha d'autant plus bas vers moi 
 
 Qu'il me voyait plus a genoux ; 
 
 Comme un intime et pur cordial d'or 
 
 II m'a rempli de son essor 
 
 Et tendrement d'un effroi doux ; 
 
 Devant sa vision altiere 
 
 J'ai mis en sa pale main fiere 
 
 Le sang epars de toute ma douleur ; 
 
 Et lui s'en est alle m'imposant la vaillance 
 
 Et sur le front la marque en croix d'or de sa lance 
 
 Droit vers son Dieu, avec mon cceur. 
 
 The same spirit of freshly awakened hope 
 pervades the subsequent poems of the volume. 
 The whole landscape is changed, or rather, 
 it is gazed upon with changed eyes. The 
 plain is bathed in sunshine ; the north winds 
 have fled, and the poet meets in his wanderings 
 with tender saint-like figures, blue-robed Mercy, 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 123 
 
 and white Virtue, and pensive Love, who talk 
 to him with — 
 
 'De belles voix douces et consolantes 
 Comrae leurs robes et leurs mantes 
 Long-tombantes et longuement calmantes.' 
 
 The lines are illustrative of the hypnotically 
 soothing effect of harmoniously repeated sounds, 
 an effect in the use of which both Verhaeren 
 and Maeterlinck are past masters. 
 
 In another poem the poet meets with his 
 Angel Guardian, pure and calm, the hem of 
 her robe embroidered with the three theo- 
 logical virtues, seated in the midst of luxurious 
 blossoms. He lingers lovingly in some of the 
 most exquisite lines he has penned over the 
 sunny garden landscape, gay with bright 
 flowers and green sward and butterflies, sym- 
 bolical of the new life that has dawned in his 
 soul. Thus it becomes evident that Verhaeren 
 is tentatively launching his skiff on the deep 
 waters of mysticism. He has come to see 
 that the relation of man's conscience to life 
 is all-important, and that the outward and 
 visible manifestations of nature are mainly 
 beautiful and interesting in so far as they give 
 
124 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 evidence of their inward and spiritual meaning. 
 For the mystic the realities of life fade into 
 the background ; the spiritualities are omni- 
 present. Verhaeren's mysticism, however, is 
 neither theological nor ascetic, nor, it must 
 be confessed, very profound — rather it is the 
 graceful sympathetic mysticism of the dreamer, 
 whose tender susceptibilities are being con- 
 tinually jarred by the material brutalities of 
 life, and who turns for consolation to joys 
 and appreciations of which the uninitiated can 
 have no perception. There is no conversion 
 — to use the hackneyed phrase — in all this ; 
 it is the natural development of the poetic 
 temperament purged by a period of suffering. 
 Yet Les Apparus dans mes Chemins undoubtedly 
 marks a turning-point in the poet's life. 
 Henceforth he gazes outwards rather than 
 inwards, and his genius takes a wider flight. 
 
 The work which the poet himself, I believe, 
 regards as his most noteworthy production, is a 
 Trilogy consisting of two volumes of verse, Les 
 Campagnes Hallucinees and Les Villes Tentacu- 
 laires y and his recently published drama Les 
 Aubes. It is his longest and most ambitious effort, 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 125 
 
 written throughout in a tragic and prophetic 
 spirit, and undoubtedly contains much admir- 
 able and striking work. But for my own 
 part, with all due respect for the Trilogy, 
 I prefer Verhaeren in his lighter moods — 
 moods which have already produced L* Alma- 
 nack and Les Villages Illusoires, and still more 
 recently, a volume entitled Heures Claires. 
 Yet even at his gayest there is an unmistak- 
 able strain of melancholy running through 
 everything that falls from the pen of the 
 Flemish poet. A distinctive note of many of 
 his later poems is the sense of death by which 
 they are pervaded ; of death and of madness, 
 which lurk in the darkening landscape, and to 
 which sooner or later man falls a helpless prey. 
 Death is ever relentless, merciless, omnipotent ; 
 nothing can avail against her, not even c La 
 Sainte Vierge,' to whom the peasants turn in 
 their despair. It is here that Verhaeren and 
 Maeterlinck approximate most nearly to one 
 another. To both the spirit world has become 
 the real, the dominant world, and man in his 
 material form, in his outward and visible 
 being, is the mere sport of the infinite and 
 
126 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 immeasurable forces which surround him, which 
 he feels dominating his life, but of whose per- 
 sonality he remains necessarily in ignorance. 
 Freewill becomes almost blotted out from life ; 
 we are all at the mercy of these dimly perceived 
 influences, and more often the evil triumphs 
 over the good. Yet there is Beauty in life to 
 save us from despair — abstract Beauty, invin- 
 cible in her strength and soul-satisfying in her 
 manifestations. Beauty is nature, undefiled by 
 man, the virgin plain which the Ville Hentacu- 
 laire, or modern industrialism, is eating up. 
 Man's works for the most part are evil ; he is 
 fallen humanity, with material instincts, a lust 
 for gold and animal passions. Yet he is 
 possessed of a soul, and those who will may 
 commune with Nature, and so rise to some 
 measure of appreciation of the higher mystical 
 life. Verhaeren points no moral in all this — 
 the poet is not concerned with results — he 
 simply paints life as it appears to him, and 
 would disclaim responsibility for the sadness 
 of his pictures. For himself, he finds his 
 happiness in the conviction that a benign spirit 
 from beyond the grave watches over and directs 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 127 
 
 his life. He feels her hand in his hand, her 
 robes brush past him, her eyes gaze into his, 
 and the forlorn hopelessness of his former life 
 is transformed into an energising passion of 
 love and gratitude. 
 
 Such, in very inadequate outline, is the poet's 
 later attitude towards life. To this period 
 belongs Les Villages Illusoires, which has always 
 seemed to me at once the most beautiful and 
 powerful of his works, most full of true poetical 
 feeling. But I advance the opinion, not without 
 diffidence, for I find that it is not shared by his 
 admirers among les jeunes either of Paris or of 
 Brussels, to whom he appeals most strongly as 
 the poet of revolt, in blind conflict with fate. 
 Such a mood, however, is as a rule unsym- 
 pathetic to the English temperament, and I still 
 think that when the English public rises to an 
 appreciation of Verhaeren it is Les Villages 
 Illusoires rather than Les Debacles or the 
 Trilogy that will be best appreciated on this 
 side of the Channel. In painting these illusory 
 villages, his symbolism finds its most perfect ex- 
 pression. With delicate art and with a wonder- 
 fully minute appreciation of the conditions of 
 
128 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 labour, he selects the humble toilers of the 
 plains as symbols of the primary truths of life. 
 Many of the poems are protests against selfish, 
 narrow, and materialistic aims. He writes 
 with bitter scorn of the Carpenter who settles 
 all the problems of life by rule and line, and 
 can realise nothing outside his own petty mathe- 
 matical calculations. Les Phheurs gives a 
 weird picture, full of suggestive teaching, of 
 the fishermen fishing with bent backs in stag- 
 nant waters through the misty night. So 
 absorbed are they, each in his own selfish 
 labours, that though side by side, they never 
 see one another, or speak to one another, or 
 help one another. Of the enthusiasts and vision- 
 aries, the idealists of this world, even though 
 their labours be barren and their dreams im- 
 practicable, Verhaeren writes with a note of 
 triumphant tenderness. We find it in the 
 beautiful and pathetic poem of the Ferryman 
 rowing vainly against time and tide in answer 
 to a distant voice from the clouds, and again 
 in more dramatic form in the Bell-ringer wildly 
 tolling his bell in the tower when the church is 
 in flames. It is one of the poet's finest word- 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 129 
 
 pictures, this of the old man, a martyr to duty, 
 the flames 'les crins rouges de l'incendie' en- 
 circling the tower until with a crash he is buried 
 in the ruins. Here is a finely-conceived inci- 
 dent of the conflagration : — 
 
 *Le vieux sonneur sonne si fort qu'il peut 
 Comme si les flammes brulaient son Dieu. 
 
 Lcs corneilles et les hiboux 
 
 Passent avec de longs cris fous 
 
 Cognant leurs tetes aux fenetres fermees 
 
 Brulant leur vol dans la fumee 
 
 Battus d'effroi, casses d'essors 
 
 Et tout a coup, parmi les houles de la foule 
 
 S'abattant morts.' 
 
 Most profound of all in conception, and most 
 illustrative of the mystical optimism of the 
 poet's later mood, is Les Cordiers. Stepping 
 always backwards, twisting the pale hemp in 
 endless strands, the rope-maker seems to draw 
 down upon himself the horizons of life, and 
 reads the past, the present, and the future : the 
 wild, free passionate life of the past crowned by 
 1 la mort folle et splendide ' ; the present, with its 
 materialism, its pride of intellect, its miracles 
 of mechanical invention replacing the miracles of 
 Faith ; and the future, a double golden staircase 
 
130 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 of Hope and of Science leading upwards to 
 where Faith unseals the eyes of all, and all are 
 united in a universal peace. 
 
 In melodious rhythmical verse nothing, it 
 seems to me, surpasses Verhaeren's word-pictures 
 of the elements, giving to each its peculiar quality 
 of mournful beauty, whether he sings of the 
 rain — 
 
 'La pluie, 
 La longue pluie avec ses ongles gris,' 
 
 or of c The fierce wind of November/ or of the 
 
 infinite heavy monotony of a fall of snow — 
 
 'La neige tombe indiscontinument 
 Comme une lente et longue et pauvre laine 
 Parmi la morne et longue et pauvre plaine 
 Froide d'amour, chaude de haine.' 
 
 English versions of all these studies of nature 
 are to be found in a little volume of trans- 
 lations from Verhaeren from the pen of Miss 
 Alma Strettell — translations which convey the 
 spirit and the rhythm of the French with a 
 rare felicity. Here is a picture of the Flemish 
 landscape taken from the poem 'La Pluie/ from 
 which scarcely anything of the haunting power 
 of the original is lacking — 
 
 'The rivers through each rotten dyke that yields 
 Discharge their swollen wave upon the fields, 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 131 
 
 Where coils of drowned hay 
 
 Float far away; 
 
 And the wild breeze 
 
 Buffets the alders and the walnut trees; 
 
 Knee-deep in water great black oxen stand, 
 
 Lifting their bellowings sinister on high 
 
 To the distorted sky ; 
 
 As now the night creeps onward, all the land, 
 
 Thicket and plain, 
 
 Grows cumbered with her clinging shades immense, 
 
 And still there is the rain, 
 
 The long, long rain, 
 
 Like soot, so fine and dense.' 
 
 But Verhaeren's finest poem in this strain is 
 
 c Le Silence/ showing the boundless stretch of 
 
 heather-grown plain, over which hovers a silence 
 
 that can be felt. Nothing has broken it since 
 
 the last thunderstorm of summer. Here and 
 
 there a church bell tolls, here and there a 
 
 waggon creeps slowly past. I quote again from 
 
 Miss Strettell's admirable translation — 
 
 'But not a sound is strong enough to rend 
 That space intense and dead.' 
 
 So overwhelming is the sense of silence, that 
 those who fall beneath its spell come to regard 
 it as a living force — 
 
 'Old shepherds, whom their hundred years have worn 
 To things all dislocate and out of gear, 
 And their old dogs, ragged, tired-out, and torn, 
 
132 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 Oft watch It on the soundless lowlands near, 
 
 Or downs of gold beflecked with shadows flight, 
 
 Sit down immensely there beside the night. 
 
 Then, at the curves and corners of the mere, 
 
 The waters creep with fear ; 
 
 The heather veils itself, grows wan and white ; 
 
 All the leaves listen upon all the bushes 
 
 And the incendiary sunset hushes 
 
 Before Its face his cries of brandished light.' 
 
 ' Le Silence ' is further interesting as bringing the 
 author into direct comparison with his friend 
 and compatriot the late Georges Rodenbach, 
 whose volume of verse, Le Regne du Silence, 
 had a considerable success in Paris, and whose 
 admirers frequently placed him on a level with 
 Verhaeren, and even with Maeterlinck. In 
 such a judgment I cannot for a moment 
 concur. After the broad sweep of Verhaeren's 
 poetry and the temerity of his images there is 
 something essentially timid, restricted, even 
 'precious,' about Rodenbach's elegant boudoir 
 verses, graceful and ingenious as they fre- 
 quently are, and I venture to say that in the 
 whole of his volume on Silence there is nothing 
 half so penetrating or convincing as Verhaeren's 
 one exquisite rhythmical poem. 
 
 The leading motive of both Les Campagnes 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 133 
 
 Hallucinees and Les Villes Tentaculaires is the 
 destruction of the former by the latter. The 
 constant inroads of the town on the country 
 are as a nightmare to the poet's soul. He fore- 
 sees that, stretching out its loathsome tentacles, 
 the city will suck in and devour bit by bit the 
 vast plain that he loves so well, and that in 
 these later volumes he mourns over as over the 
 body of a dead friend — 
 
 'La plaine est morne et lasse et ne se defend plus, 
 La plaine est morne et lasse et la ville la mange.' 
 
 In modern industrialism, with its factories and 
 chimneys and railways and crowded docks, he 
 can see nothing but what is hideous and revolt- 
 ing. He passes in review, one after the other, 
 the features of a modern town — the theatre, 
 the Bourse, the sailors' quarter — and he paints 
 each in lurid colours, working himself up into 
 a frenzy of eloquent denunciation. There is 
 much that is incoherent in the volume, much, 
 too, that is overstrained and laboured, as 
 though Verhaeren himself had wearied over 
 his subject, while here and there he becomes 
 positively grotesque. Once or twice only he 
 melts into a gentler mood in his descriptions, 
 
134 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 clear and vivid as an outline drawing, of the 
 statues that adorn the town — monk and soldier, 
 apostle and bourgeois, the individuality of each 
 indicated with exquisite perception. The long 
 poem ' La Revoke ' is a veritable tour deforce, and 
 brings his denunciation of la ville tentaculaire 
 to a climax. The misery, the vice suddenly 
 explode, and revolution sweeps all before it. 
 At such a moment Verhaeren has all the 
 dramatic instincts of Victor Hugo, whom he 
 curiously resembles. The rush of the maddened 
 people, the lust for blood, the sack of churches, 
 the torches with tongues of flame setting fire 
 to the buildings, oppress the reader with an 
 irresistible sense of reality. Anarchy lives in 
 his powerful lines ; it is a dramatic moment 
 rendered with infinite art. 
 
 Curiously enough, the dramatic instinct which 
 is so conspicuous a trait in many of his shorter 
 poems seems to have forsaken the poet as soon 
 as he turned his attention to a professedly 
 dramatic work. At best, Les Aubes is a play to 
 be read in the library ; I cannot believe that it 
 could ever pass successfully through the test of 
 a theatrical performance. It is entirely lacking 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 135 
 
 in any magnetic quality. I must confess, too, 
 that the precise intention of the play escapes 
 me. The situation seems to be that of the 
 Paris Commune — the enemy outside the gates 
 of Oppidomagne, and the populace in revolt 
 within. The town has eaten up the country, 
 and there is famine in the land. The tribune, 
 Jacques Herenien, the friend of the people, 
 personifies the new Justice, which is to be the 
 salvation of nations. He opens the gates of 
 the city to the enemy, who make common 
 cause with the people against their rulers ; but 
 in the temporary disorder that ensues Herenien 
 is slain. The victory demanded a victim, 
 and it is over the grave of the leader that a 
 new era dawns for humanity. Presumably, 
 the poet intends to herald some Socialistic 
 millennium, but it is not easy to discern on what 
 he bases his hopes. The play has all the possi- 
 bilities of a great dramatic situation ; it has 
 here and there fine and vigorous lines, and it is 
 written round a central conception, which clearly 
 appeals strongly to the author, yet it never for a 
 moment takes hold of the reader. Perhaps, 
 also, a want of unity in the form — for the 
 
 UNIVLHST 
 
 of 
 
136 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 author not only alternates between prose and 
 verse, but between blank verse and rhymed — is 
 partly responsible for the sense of disappoint- 
 ment with which, I am afraid, even Verhaeren's 
 most enthusiastic admirers must have received 
 his venture into the dramatic field. 
 
 Concerning the idiosyncrasies of Verhaeren's 
 style, it would be easy to be captiously critical, 
 and doubtless there is much in the form of his 
 poems to which that august body the French 
 Academy would sternly take exception. If 
 a rhyme possesses the required sound, the 
 Belgian poet does not trouble himself about 
 spelling and terminations, or about the due 
 balancing of masculine and feminine rhymes. 
 It has often been alleged against him, possibly 
 with some truth, that in point of fact he has 
 no ear for the niceties of French prosody ; and 
 that if he has shown all his life a preference 
 for ' vers libre,' it is because he is incapable 
 of wielding the more delicate and highly 
 finished weapon. He has a passion for 
 sonorous and many-syllabled adjectives, more 
 especially for those ending in ' aire ' and c oire,' 
 such as 'diamentaire,' ' myriadaire,' 'ostenta- 
 
EMILE VERHAEREN 137 
 
 toire,' and where the French language fails him 
 he does not hesitate to enrich her vocabulary 
 according to his needs. So, too, he takes 
 liberties with his syntax, and makes effective 
 use of such phrases as ' la souvent maison de 
 ma tristesse ' and 'le tout-a-coup Saint Georges/ 
 But in spite of all that pedantic critics can 
 allege against him, the fact remains that Ver- 
 haeren is a most skilful manipulator of the 
 French tongue. He commands a ceaseless flow 
 of sonorous and harmonious language, a rich 
 vocabulary, and a rare gift for bold and pic- 
 turesque imagery. In his hands the i vers libre ' 
 becomes a marvellously flexible instrument for 
 the use of his somewhat fantastic genius. He 
 stands to-day in the plenitude of his gifts, on 
 the threshold of a high reputation, and it may 
 well be that his best work lies still before 
 him. Any attempt, therefore, to assign him 
 a permanent place in the literary ranks of the 
 age would be vain and premature ; yet there 
 can, I think, be no doubt that in virtue both 
 of the nobility of his language and the wide 
 sweep of his imagination he is entitled to a 
 very high rank among contemporary poets. 
 
138 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 I should like to say that he is something more 
 than a poet ; that he is also a thinker. He 
 appeals at once to the intellect and to the 
 imagination ; his poems bear the impress of 
 personal suffering and personal knowledge ; 
 and they are full of suggestive thoughts on 
 the eternal problems that arrest the attention 
 of mankind. In a word, Emile Verhaeren is 
 intensely human, both in his joys and sorrows, 
 in his hopes and his despair, and it is this 
 near sense of comradeship which evokes in the 
 reader a strong personal sympathy for the 
 man, in addition to the homage due to him 
 as a poet. 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 The literary world would be taken by surprise 
 were one of our contemporary English play- 
 wrights — Mr. Pinero, let us say, or Mr. 
 H. A. Jones — to undertake to instruct us in 
 the philosophy of life. What have they to do 
 with the mystery of existence? Yet nothing 
 has seemed less surprising than that Maurice 
 Maeterlinck should have wandered from the 
 dramatic stage into the realms of contemplative 
 thought. There is no abyss between the 
 Petits Drames pour Marionnettes and La Sagesse 
 et la Bestinee. The synthesis of Aglavaine et 
 Selysette is contained in Le Tresor des Humbles. 
 This simple fact seems to differentiate M. 
 Maeterlinck's genius more clearly than any 
 other from that of his contemporaries in the 
 dramatic art. Maeterlinck is a dreamer and 
 a thinker more than a writer of plays, a 
 
 139 
 
140 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 searcher after truth rather than a delineator 
 of circumstance. If we are to understand 
 him at all — his aims, his ideals, his attitude 
 towards his art — we must look at his work 
 as a whole, and seek in the pages of his prose 
 essays for the clue with which to unravel the 
 mystical riddles of U Intruse and Les Aveugles. 
 On me, I confess, few books have exercised 
 so great a fascination as Le Tresor des Humbles. 
 It is emphatically not a volume to be skimmed 
 through hastily and flung aside. Rather it is 
 a book deserving of an exquisite binding, to 
 be kept by one, that it may be studied leisurely 
 and at one's ease, emptying one's mind of the 
 bustling materialism of life. And under these 
 conditions the reader may find himself trans- 
 ported to a new world full of mystical wonders, 
 whose very existence hitherto he has only half 
 suspected, now brought as it were within his 
 grasp. I do not suggest that Maeterlinck is 
 a profound and original thinker — rather he is 
 a man of exceedingly sensitive perceptions, 
 carefully and rightly cultivated, who from his 
 childhood upwards has stood a step nearer to 
 the unseen realities of life than the majority 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 141 
 
 of his compeers. He is a poet gifted with 
 a spark of the divine flame, but he is also 
 a scholar for whom the great writers and 
 teachers of the past hold marvellous secrets 
 and eternal truths to be mastered only by- 
 humble study. Thus he possesses the charm 
 of a wide and sympathetic culture in addition 
 to the attraction of his own poetic gifts. And, 
 above all, he possesses the incomparable gift 
 of style — delicate, pellucid, harmonious, and 
 yet with a strange tenacity of power, a haunt- 
 ing rhythm, and when requisite, an admirable 
 cleanness of outline. Maeterlinck does not 
 for an instant conceal — and hence the charge 
 of undue plagiarism that has sometimes been 
 levelled against him cannot, I think, be fairly 
 maintained — the various sources from which 
 he has gleaned those intellectual riches which 
 he has assimilated with such happy results. 
 He tells us frankly and gratefully in these 
 prose essays how he has sat at the feet of 
 Plato and Plotinus, of Marcus Aurelius and 
 Carlyle ; how he has absorbed the mysticism 
 of paganism and the mysticism of Christianity ; 
 how he has lingered lovingly in the pure 
 
i 4 2 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 contemplative atmosphere of the Admirable 
 Ruysbroeck and his contemporaries, has fami- 
 liarised himself with the intellectual concep- 
 tions of Novalis, and has felt at home in the 
 gentle domestic transcendentalism of Emerson, 
 c the kindly morning shepherd of pale fields 
 green with a new-born optimism/ He is 
 indeed an eclectic in spiritual matters, clinging 
 to no school, and identifying himself with no 
 prophet. On a foundation of Neo-Platonism, 
 buttressed by Buddhist lore, he has laid a 
 goodly layer of mediaeval mysticism of the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and has 
 superimposed a sympathetic acquaintance with 
 the random philosophic speculations of the 
 last two centuries, together with a special 
 knowledge of the most recent spiritualistic 
 phenomena and trend of thought. Yet there 
 is nothing either half-digested or fragmentary 
 in the ethical outcome of so catholic a course 
 of study. Maeterlinck has a wonderful gift 
 of facile assimilation ; and to however many 
 sources we may be pleased to trace his philo- 
 sophy, the fact remains that he is at once 
 intensely individual and essentially modern, 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 143 
 
 a characteristic product of this fast-expiring 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 Thus it is only by accident, as it were, that 
 Maeterlinck is a dramatist ; it is with the 
 mystical side of life alone that he really con- 
 cerns himself ; and he does so because for him, 
 as for every soul gifted with a sense of the 
 unseen, no other side of life is worth troubling 
 about. For him the palpable material objects 
 of the universe are unimportant unrealities ; 
 the hidden impalpable influences that surround 
 us constitute the real facts of our existence. 
 All else is vanity, mere futility. That which 
 he sees with his eyes, and hears with his ears, 
 is for him of no account ; his whole conscious- 
 ness is absorbed in a tense effort to realise 
 ever more clearly that which is unseen and 
 unspoken. In life, as in death, we are at the 
 mercy of forces which from all eternity have 
 shaped our destinies. We do nothing of our 
 own freewill even when we think ourselves 
 most free, and never less than in all matters 
 concerned with Love. For the most part, we 
 remain voluntarily blind to these great truths ; 
 we prefer to ignore them ; we are afraid to face 
 
H4 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 them. Yet each of us is possessed of a soul — 
 the divine sense of the spiritual in life — and if 
 we would we might all live in far closer union 
 than we do with these occult influences, and 
 with open inquiring eyes might gaze far deeper 
 into their mysterious depths. This closer union 
 with the unseen does not fall to the share of 
 the worldly-wise or the self-seeker, or even of 
 the intellectually endowed. It is the reward 
 of pure and honest and patient striving. It is 
 the treasure of the lowly. The very first 
 condition of attaining to it is silence ; and, as 
 a rule, there is nothing that we banish more 
 ruthlessly from our lives. It is curious to 
 note how this realisation of the beauty and 
 value of silence, learned perhaps in the midst 
 of the widespreading, melancholy Flemish 
 landscape, has come to be a characteristic 
 note of the Franco- Belgian school. Maeter- 
 linck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, each return to 
 it again and again. Speech, Maeterlinck tells 
 us in the first of these essays, is never the 
 medium of communication of our real and 
 inmost thoughts. Silence alone can transmit 
 them from soul to soul. We talk to fill up 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 145 
 
 the blanks in life ; we talk when we feel our- 
 selves far removed from the realities of exist- 
 ence, or when we wish to shroud our souls 
 from the penetrating eye of our neighbour. 
 This thought recurs frequently in Maeter- 
 linck's dramatic writings. In the pathetic 
 little play Alladine et Palomides, the reader 
 will remember how when Astolaine, standing 
 at a distance, declares to her father that she 
 no longer loves Palomides, Ablamore calls her 
 to him, reminding her that mere words have 
 no meaning when souls cannot reach one 
 another. 'II y a un moment/ he says, ' ou 
 les ames se touchent et savent tout sans que 
 Ton ait besoin de remuer les levres.' Then 
 he gazes into his daughter's eyes and reads 
 there what she had intended to hide from 
 him — that she still loves Palomides. So, too, 
 in Ulntruse the weird impression is forced 
 upon the spectator that it is in the prolonged 
 silences rather than in the words uttered that 
 the action develops itself. 
 
 Silence, according to Maeterlinck, is so 
 truth compelling, so illuminative, that few 
 of us have the courage to face it ; yet without 
 
 K 
 
146 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 silence there can be no interchange of thought, 
 no true life, no growth of the soul. He dis- 
 tinguishes, it is true, between active and passive 
 silence, between a mere somnolent quiescent 
 state similar to sleep, and that silence, pregnant 
 with profound meaning, in which souls stand 
 revealed. But this active silence may spring 
 up at any moment from the passive state, and 
 hence our instinctive dread of silence, and most 
 especially of silence in companionship, The 
 most illuminating silence of all, and the most 
 irresistible, is the Silence of Death. Which of 
 us, however petty our souls, can stand un- 
 moved before it ? Stated with all the force 
 of resonant reiteration in which our mystic 
 loves to indulge, such assertions read at first 
 sight like some strange new doctrine. Yet 
 who among us has not realised for himself 
 that a sympathetic silence between friends is 
 one of the truest tests of friendship, while it 
 is a mere commonplace to assert the inadequacy 
 of speech in those rare moments when we are 
 brought face to face with the primary truths 
 of life. Maeterlinck simply sees farther into 
 the mystery than we could ever have seen for 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 147 
 
 ourselves, and he describes what he sees with 
 luminous felicity. Much of the trivial and 
 tawdry vulgarity of modern life may well be 
 due to our persistent neglect of the great 
 lesson that the Sages of old both preached 
 and practised concerning the golden value of 
 silence ? 
 
 Death, as every reader of Maeterlinck 
 knows, is for him a never-failing subject of 
 contemplation. In one form or another, the 
 sense of death, of its nearness, its swift approach, 
 penetrates everything that the dramatist has 
 written. For him death is not the end, but 
 the culminating point of life, the mould, as 
 he expresses it, into which our life runs. In 
 L'Intruse, Les Sept Princesses, Inter ieur> and 
 La Mort de Tintagiles, death dominates the 
 stage ; there is no action, properly speaking, 
 independently of the ghostly visitor. In La 
 Princesse Maleine, cast on somewhat more con- 
 ventional lines — the play that Mr. Hall Caine 
 could not bring himself to criticise seriously 
 because it had been compared by Octave 
 Mirbeau to Macbeth, a comparison so obvious 
 that it would c sauter aux yeux ' of the veriest 
 
148 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 schoolboy — everything is subordinated to the 
 long-drawn-out murder of the princess in what 
 is surely one of the most haunting and powerful 
 scenes ever penned by an author of twenty-five. 
 And even in Pelleas et Melisande^ and in the 
 later Aglavaine et Selysette, both of which are 
 cast in a lighter mood of almost tender gaiety, 
 the wings of death hover relentlessly in the 
 surrounding shadows. So it is in Le Fresor 
 des Humbles. The haunting presence makes 
 itself felt on every side, even though disguised 
 under a multiplicity of symbols. In an 
 admirable page — a sermon on pure Christianity 
 — Maeterlinck writes of death, ' the great 
 reconciler.' But he is perhaps most happy of 
 all in a wonderful chapter, beautiful in its 
 tender pathos, on ' Les Avertis,' those who are 
 predestined to an early grave. Nowhere is 
 his gentle, mystical suggestiveness more con- 
 vincing than here, in his presentment of these 
 young souls, the conscious victims of a 
 precocious doom, that all foresee, but that none 
 dare speak of, passing swiftly and silently 
 through life, keeping apart from the healthy 
 throng, the vision of death shining out of their 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 149 
 
 clear eyes. The whole idea, it may be argued 
 with reason, is a mere poetic fancy ; but, in 
 the words of Aglavaine to Meleandre, c c'est 
 avoir si peu de chose que d'avoir^raison ' ; and 
 few, I think, after reading Maeterlinck's limpid 
 prose, will care to maintain that life is not the 
 richer for the fancy, if indeed it be nothing 
 more. 
 
 There is, however, a more cheerful side to 
 Maeterlinck's mysticism, a gentle optimism, 
 the outcome probably of his inherited Catholi- 
 cism, and a simple faith in a regenerated 
 humanity in which one may detect the influence 
 of the pure other-worldliness of Ruysbroeck. 
 The chapter on 'La Bonte Invisible,' an 
 ardent plea for the encouragement within us 
 of those secret instincts which make for good- 
 ness, but which the outer, material world seems 
 to take a pleasure in crushing, is written in his 
 happiest mood, and is inspired by an exquisite 
 refinement of perception. He dwells em- 
 phatically on the regenerating influence that 
 souls may mutually exercise over each other by 
 the mere fact that at a certain moment they 
 * ont ete bonnes ensemble ' — surely a beautiful 
 
150 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 thought. And he accords a generous recogni- 
 tion to the spiritual supremacy of the female 
 sex. Woman, Maeterlinck declares, is more 
 amenable to Fate than man, and never fights 
 sincerely against it. She dwells closer to the 
 feet of the Inevitable, and knows better than 
 man its familiar paths. She possesses, too, a 
 nobler and fuller conception of love. For her, 
 ideal love is always eternal, and the lowest of 
 wantons remains susceptible to its purifying in- 
 fluence, and may be lifted to marvellous heights 
 of self-abnegation by a spark of the divine 
 flame. Hence it is chiefly in communion with 
 woman that, of a sudden, there flashes across 
 man c a clear presentiment of a life that does 
 not always run on parallel lines with our 
 visible life,' and it is often a woman's kindly 
 hand that unlocks for him the portals of 
 mystical truth. I confess that I follow him with 
 less sympathy in the chapter on * La Morale 
 Mystique,' in which he attempts a more detailed 
 explanation of the ideal life that exists within 
 each of us, and maintains that our spiritual 
 existence is absolutely untouched and uncon- 
 taminated by our material acts, for which 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 151 
 
 indeed our higher nature is not to be held in 
 any way responsible. Here Maeterlinck most 
 decidedly parts company with his favourite 
 Ruysbroeck, and identifies himself with one of 
 the many mystical heresies of the Middle Ages. 
 It is the carrying to an extreme conclusion of 
 the doctrine of Quietism. ' The soul,' he says, 
 ' will feel no shame for that which she has not 
 done, and she will remain pure in the midst of 
 some terrible murder.' And again, ' A man 
 may have committed all the crimes held to be 
 most vile, and yet the blackest of them may 
 not have tarnished for a single instant the 
 atmosphere of fragrance and of immaterial 
 purity that surrounds him.' It is perhaps as 
 well that he confesses a little later that in this 
 matter of * spiritual sins,' and of our soul's 
 ultimate responsibility, he does not feel com- 
 petent to speak ; that he, and we, can as yet 
 only see • as in a glass darkly/ and that all save 
 those few who have scaled the mystical heights 
 must wait for further light. 
 
 In his most recent work, La Sagesse et la 
 Destinee, Maeterlinck has attempted to go a 
 step further than in his earlier essays ; to weave 
 
152 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 all his delicate perceptions of the hidden life 
 into a logical whole. He preaches a form of 
 spiritualised stoicism, a moral philosophy which, 
 though abjuring dogmatic Christianity, is none 
 the less founded on Christian ethics and 
 sentiment. His attitude towards life has 
 become modified in more than one respect. 
 The tinge of an almost Eastern fatalism that 
 lay over all the preceding volume has dis- 
 appeared from the later one. Destiny is no 
 longer the arbiter of man's fortunes ; it can be 
 won over, modified, frustrated even, by wisdom. 
 Maeterlinck reiterates that the interior life 
 alone is of importance ; that external catastrophes 
 are of no account save in the influence they 
 exert on our souls. If we are crushed by them, 
 if we learn no lessons from them, they have 
 been of no avail. What man calls destiny 
 is frequently only his own weakness or 
 ignorance to which he falls a victim. There 
 is, our author asserts, no such thing as interior 
 fatality. c Wisdom possesses the willpower to 
 rectify all that does not deal a deathblow to 
 the body.' He points to CEdipus as a man 
 conquered by destiny, to Marcus Aurelius as 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 153 
 
 one lifted above misfortune by wisdom. It is 
 not in the power of destiny to prevent the soul 
 from transforming each single affliction into 
 thoughts, feelings, and treasure which shall 
 remain inviolate. And so the reader is brought 
 to the consideration of the mission of suffering 
 in life. The wise man, we are told, suffers 
 with the rest, for suffering is one of the 
 elements in wisdom. He suffers perhaps more 
 than most men, for his nature is more complete. 
 But he understands that it is not suffering that 
 he should seek to avoid, but the discouragement 
 and the fetters that it brings to those who receive 
 it like a taskmaster instead of as a messenger 
 sent foward by a higher power whom a bend 
 in the road hides from our view. Yet, having 
 brought the reader thus far along the Christian 
 road, Maeterlinck stops short of any general 
 recognition of asceticism as a regenerating 
 force. A certain joie de vivre pierces through 
 his austere moralising, and he protests against 
 any curtailment of man's natural faculties for 
 earthly happiness. 
 
 Begun, we are told, as a simple essay of a 
 few pages, La Sagesse et la Destinee expanded 
 
154 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 by slow accretions into a well-filled volume. 
 Its literary form has suffered not a little in 
 the process. Taken as a whole, there is a want 
 of clear outline in the scheme of the work. 
 The author is discursive, disconnected, and 
 eager to record every thought as it floats 
 upwards to the surface of his brain without 
 always waiting to harmonise it with previously 
 recorded impressions. The wonderful charm 
 of Le Tresor des Humbles lies partly in its 
 detached quality ; it is full of an unexpected 
 suggestiveness ; it binds the reader to no 
 system, but it opens up endless vistas for 
 private exploration. In the later volume, on 
 the other hand, the reader is a little fatigued 
 by attempting to follow through many windings 
 a train of thought of which the- connecting 
 links have not always, I fancy, been very 
 distinct to the author himself. Taken as a 
 philosophy of life, the book lies open to much 
 wide discussion ; it is perhaps more fair to 
 accept it gratefully as a yet further instalment 
 of those tender, subtle, and suggestive thoughts 
 on life with which the dramatist has enriched 
 almost every page of his writing. A delightful 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 155 
 
 feature of the book is to be found in the 
 wealth of illustrations with which the author 
 elucidates his theories, and in the clear applica- 
 tion he gives of certain truths which in their 
 general acceptation are almost trite, but which 
 come home to us with an unsuspected force 
 from the new aspect with which he invests 
 them. Here and there Maeterlinck has seemed 
 to me to suggest points of contact with another 
 thinker and dreamer on life's mysteries — a 
 thinker far more profound if endowed with 
 more limited sympathies — and there are pages 
 in La Sagesse et la Destinee which in their 
 detached philosophy of thought remind one of 
 those paragraphs of delicate cultured wisdom 
 which the late Mr. Coventry Patmore collected 
 under the title of The Rod, the Root, and the 
 Flower. But where Maeterlinck is confessedly 
 still a searcher after knowledge, a patient 
 unraveller of the tangled web of life, Patmore 
 writes as one holding in his hand the key that 
 unlocks the portals of universal truth. 
 
 So far I have attempted very imperfectly to 
 indicate Maeterlinck's general attitude towards 
 life. There springs from it naturally his special 
 
156 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 attitude towards literature and his conception 
 of the part that literature should play in our 
 existence. It has been the secondary object of 
 these essays to clear up whatever of mystery 
 may have been felt by his readers to obscure 
 the raison d'etre of his own dramatic writings. 
 For Maeterlinck the highest function of art 
 and of literature lies in the revelation of the 
 existence of our hidden life, in the crystalli- 
 sation in concrete form of fleeting, impalpable 
 truths, in the making visible that which we 
 cannot see. Thus art and literature — no dis- 
 tinction can be drawn between them — should 
 be more intimately concerned with the mys- 
 terious secret instincts of the soul than with 
 the conceptions of the intellect, or even with 
 the primary emotions of the heart. The great 
 poets of the human race have ever been a 
 powerful medium through which average 
 humanity has gained such knowledge of the 
 divine as we have hitherto acquired. By them 
 the horizon of the human soul has been 
 enlarged. Maeterlinck holds it as clearly 
 established that at certain ages in the history 
 of humanity, man's nearness to the unseen has 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 157 
 
 been closer than at others — in ancient Egypt, 
 in ancient India, in Europe during the two 
 mystical centuries of the Middle Ages, and, he 
 might surely have added, in the Ireland that 
 gave us her national folklore. At such times, 
 he tells us in his essay on the 'Awakening 
 of the Soul,' it would seem as though ' hu- 
 manity were on the point of lifting, however 
 slightly, the crushing burden of matter. . . . 
 Men stand nearer to themselves and nearer to 
 one another ; they see and love one another 
 with a more solemn earnestness, a more inti- 
 mate fellowship. They understand all things 
 — children, women, animals, plants, inanimate 
 objects — with a greater depth, a more pitiful 
 tenderness.' Such periods have always been 
 prolific in a glorious art, an imperishable litera- 
 ture. ' The statues and paintings and writings 
 these men have left us may not be perfect, but 
 a mysterious power and a secret charm that I 
 cannot define are imprisoned within them, and 
 bestow upon them a perpetual youth.' In this 
 category he would certainly include the three 
 authors whose writings he has translated and 
 edited, and on whom he contributes luminous 
 
158 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 essays to this volume : Emerson, Novalis, and 
 his own mediaeval fellow-countryman, the 
 Admirable Ruysbroeck. All three, he tells us, 
 have penetrated far beyond the recognised 
 circles of ordinary human consciousness, and 
 each has discovered for himself new and strange 
 truths — Ruysbroeck amid the blue heights 
 of the soul, Emerson in the more accessible 
 regions of the heart, Novalis in the domain of 
 the intellect — truths which have made life 
 richer for us all. On the other hand, Maeter- 
 linck is obliged to admit that in certain cen- 
 turies which have been undeniably distinguished 
 by the pre-eminent perfection of their artistic 
 expression, the soul has been shrouded in dark- 
 ness, and intellect and beauty have'; been allowed 
 to reign supreme. Such, roughly speaking, 
 was the case in the periods marked by the 
 great classic literatures of Greece and of Rome, 
 and in modern times by that of France. Per- 
 fect as their literary form may have been, some- 
 thing, he maintains, is missing, an indefinable 
 mystery at once tender and penetrating, which 
 endears to our hearts works of less regular 
 beauty. He indicates his meaning more clearly 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 159 
 
 by a reference to Racine. Admitting, he says, 
 that Racine is the infallible poet of the feminine 
 heart, who would dare to maintain that he has 
 ever advanced a single pace towards the femi- 
 nine soul ? What could we reply if we were 
 questioned concerning the souls of Andromache 
 or even of Britannicus? The characters in 
 Racine's plays have no depths beyond what is 
 conveyed by their own words. They have no 
 * invisible principle/ The criticism, it must be 
 confessed, is absolutely convincing, and it has 
 for us the further interest of clearly differen- 
 tiating the French poet from our own Shake- 
 speare. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear are all 
 quoted in these essays as filled with ' the mys- 
 terious chant of the infinite, the threatening 
 silence of souls and of gods, eternity thunder- 
 ing on the horizon, fate and fatality perceived 
 interiorly without any one being able to say 
 by what signs they have been recognised/ 
 There is no sense of the mystery of life in the 
 classical authors of France. 
 
 It is upon a fresh period of spiritual efflores- 
 cence and nearness to the unseen that, accord- 
 ing to Maeterlinck, we are entering to-day, a 
 
160 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 period in which the dominion of the soul will 
 expand, and it will stand revealed in all its 
 strange strength. He believes that in the near 
 future our souls will be able to hold communion 
 together without the intermediate aid of the 
 senses ; and that a transcendental psychology, of 
 which we have at present no conception, will 
 make clear to us the relations that, unsuspected 
 by man, have ever existed between them. 
 Rendered thus into plain and prosaic English, 
 the mystical expectation does not, I admit, 
 commend itself to the average reader by any 
 inherent probability. For Maeterlinck, how- 
 ever, the promise of this spiritual renaissance is 
 to be seen on every side : not only in the 
 general revolt against materialism and in the 
 renewed attention bestowed upon occult laws 
 and upon all spiritualistic phenomena, such as 
 magnetism, telepathy, and levitation, but also 
 in the most modern of music, in the pictures of 
 certain artists, and in a new and nascent litera- 
 ture, the summits of which are illuminated by 
 a strange glow. Elect souls have long realised 
 that there is a tragedy in our daily life far more 
 profound and in far closer harmony with our 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 161 
 
 real selves than the tragedy that lies in great 
 adventure. Nay, more, that the true tragedy 
 of life — normal, profound, and universal — pro- 
 bably only begins at the point at which external 
 adventures, dangers, and sufferings have ceased. 
 For them, and emphatically for Maeterlinck 
 himself, normal states of feeling and living are 
 of far greater interest, and are adorned with a 
 far more exquisite beauty than exceptional con- 
 ditions and violent emotions. Hence a great 
 artist no longer paints battle-scenes and assas- 
 sinations, because the psychology of victory and 
 of murder is elementary and exceptional, and 
 because the futile uproar of a deed of violence 
 stifles the timid inner voice of men and of 
 things. Rather he will choose a peaceful land- 
 scape, an open doorway, hands lying at rest, 
 because by means of such subjects he can add 
 to our consciousness of life. So it is with 
 poets, with musicians, and with all really great 
 novelists. Dramatic art alone, in modern times, 
 Maeterlinck affirms, has remained untouched 
 by this sense of the hidden meaning of life, and 
 hence the drama exists as an anachronism in 
 this final decade of the nineteenth century. 
 
1 62 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 ' When I go to the theatre/ he writes in Le 
 Tragique Quotidien, c it is as though I found 
 myself for a few hours back among my ancestors 
 who indulged in a conception of life at once 
 simple, arid, and brutal, of which I have scarcely 
 any recollection, and in which I certainly have 
 no share. I see there a betrayed husband kill- 
 ing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, a son 
 avenging his father, a father slaughtering his 
 children, children putting their father to death, 
 murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned 
 citizens ; in a word, all the traditional fine 
 sentiment, but, alas ! how superficial and how 
 material ! . . . I came in the hope of seeing 
 some portion of life traced back to its fountain- 
 head and to its mysteries by connecting links 
 that I have neither the power nor the oppor- 
 tunity of perceiving every day. I came in the 
 hope of perceiving for a few moments the 
 beauty and grandeur and solemnity of my own 
 humble daily life, and of being shown that in- 
 definable presence, power, or God that ever 
 dwells with me in my chamber. I anticipated 
 a few, at least, of those higher and better 
 moments which I experience unconsciously in 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 163 
 
 the midst of my dreariest hours ; whereas, in 
 most cases, I have merely gazed at a man who 
 informs me at great length why he is jealous, 
 why he has given poison, or why he intends to 
 kill himself.' 
 
 Thus Maeterlinck, as we learn from this 
 beautiful passage, aspires after nothing less 
 than a complete reconstruction of the modern 
 drama. In the near future, even on the stage, 
 he hopes to see life in its material manifesta- 
 tions strictly subordinated to its spiritual sub- 
 consciousness. Plot and action are to be 
 relegated to an entirely secondary position ; the 
 stage is to be swept clear of cheap trickery and 
 superficial effects ; and the eternal mystery of 
 life is to rise up in an almost palpable sense 
 before the spectator. In reply to sceptical 
 doubts as to the practicability of his ideal, the 
 young dramatist points to ' the august daily 
 life of a Hamlet, who has the time to live 
 inasmuch as he does not act,' and to the deep 
 mystical sense underlying the words and acts of 
 Hilda and Solness in The Master-builder as 
 unique examples of that which he is striving 
 after. And he reminds us, too, that the most 
 
1 64 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 celebrated of |the great Greek tragedies are 
 almost entirely devoid of action. In his own 
 plays he has rushed, with youthful ardour, and 
 in a noble spirit of revolt against convention- 
 ality, to a hitherto undreamt-of extreme of 
 immobility, in order that the immaterial may un- 
 mistakably transpire ; and those who have argued 
 from this that Maeterlinck never seriously 
 intended his dramas for representation on the 
 stage have entirely failed to grasp his attitude 
 towards his art. In Ulntruse, Les Sept Prin- 
 cesses^ Les Aveugles^ there is, theatrically speak- 
 ing, no plot or action whatever ; but it is this 
 very absence of material manifestation which 
 allows the impalpable forces of Death and 
 Darkness and Silence to make themselves felt 
 with such solemn and haunting effect. Even in 
 La Princesse Maleine, which to a certain extent 
 follows the recognised canons of dramatic art, 
 and which the author would probably readily 
 admit to have been written when his Shake- 
 speare fever was hot upon him, the action is 
 strangely subordinated to what perhaps I can 
 best describe as the state of atmospheric con- 
 sciousness. We feel with extraordinary inten- 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 165 
 
 sity, piercing, as it were, the slight framework 
 of dialogue, the pure love of Maleine and the 
 Prince, the guilty love of Queen Anne and 
 King Hjalmar, the conviction of all-pervading 
 calamity advancing with swift strides, the death 
 of Maleine, the remorseful madness of the 
 King, the horror of sin, the irrevocable doom 
 closing in on the haunted palace. And yet, 
 how simple the phrasing, how elementary the 
 construction, and how tenderly human the love 
 passages between Maleine and her betrothed. 
 Side by side with the indispensable dialogue 
 there runs another, and it is this second 
 unspoken dialogue which appeals so irresistibly 
 to our inner consciousness. 
 
 It is because the dramatic aspirations of M. 
 Maeterlinck seem to me so clear and unmistak- 
 able that I found myself unable to adopt as 
 satisfactory the rendering of Telle as et Meli- 
 sande given in London last summer by 
 Mr. Forbes Robertson. Mr. Mackail's trans- 
 lation, it is true, was prosaic, and here and 
 there painfully colloquial ; but it was, in the 
 main, the presentment of the play which 
 seemed to me to rob it of well-nigh all that 
 
1 66 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 differentiates a play by Maeterlinck from one 
 by every other dramatic author of our day. 
 Produced with a scenic splendour and an ela- 
 boration of detail in accordance with the 
 orthodox traditions of the English stage, this 
 most charming of love idyls became little more 
 than a drama of domestic intrigue, with here 
 and there episodes of almost childish triviality. 
 Its weird, elusive beauty seemed to shrivel up 
 in contact with the material accessories of the 
 stage. Golaud became the conventional jealous 
 husband ; little Yniold — the innocent elf-child, 
 who brings a ray of sunshine into the gloomy 
 castle — developed into the precocious enfant ter- 
 rible of domestic farce ; and Melisande herself, 
 tender, ethereal, and, above all, inconsciente, gave 
 proof in Mrs. Patrick Campbell's hands of a 
 hitherto unsuspected cousinship to the intri- 
 gante, to the woman with an unknown past who 
 wrecks the happiness of a noble family. That 
 the play was put upon the stage with the most 
 loyal and conscientious desire to do honour to 
 a great playwright there can be no shadow of a 
 doubt. Yet I cannot believe that it was for 
 no more than this that our author has worked 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 167 
 
 out all his theories of dramatic art. The very 
 essence of the play, the beautiful symbolism 
 that underlies every phrase, seemed to have 
 vanished into space. Pelleas alone appeared to 
 be conscious of the hidden, unseen influences 
 which should pierce through the enclosing 
 envelope of the spoken word. But admirable 
 as Mr. Harvey's acting was in the love scene 
 of the Fourth Act, I question whether his 
 reading was not wrong, whether the scene 
 should not have been played throughout on 
 a level of tender soul-communion rather than 
 of passionate human emotion. Else there were 
 no truth in the spiritual revelation that came 
 later to Golaud when he exclaimed remorse- 
 fully, * J'ai tue sans raison . . . . ils s'etaient 
 embrasses comme des petits enfants.' 
 
 When M. Lugne Poe and the Theatre de 
 TQEuvre played Hint ruse and Pelleas et Meli- 
 sande with dim lights, and lengthy silences, and 
 slow, rhythmical movements, and — in the case 
 of Pelleas — with a gauze veil stretched across 
 the stage between the actors and the audience, 
 certain of the effects may have been crude and 
 a little incongruous, but the general impression 
 
1 68 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 conveyed was one of fascinating mystery and 
 spiritual penetration. The audience may have 
 smiled here and there at the artless simplicity 
 of the technique and the total absence of stage- 
 craft, but at least the beautiful cadence of the 
 lines was preserved, the rhythmical progression 
 of the action was felt, and the spoken word 
 was pregnant with almost portentous meaning. 
 And so, imperfect as the presentment may have 
 been, I have no hesitation in believing that it 
 was closer to the essential mind of the master 
 than the elaborately-staged representation at 
 the Prince of Wales' Theatre. 
 
 In Aglavaine et Selysette, the latest of his 
 works, and written subsequently to the essays, 
 Maeterlinck seems to me to have gone a step 
 farther than in his preceding dramas; for 
 he has not only attempted to reproduce cer- 
 tain states of consciousness, but he has placed 
 in the mouths of his characters the definite 
 expression of his own ethical conceptions. 
 The 'motif' — one of the elementary problems 
 of human existence — is invested by him 
 with a wonderfully fresh aspect. Meleandre 
 loves his gentle child -wife Selysette, but 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 169 
 
 he also loves the wise, cultured, deep-souled 
 Aglavaine. Aglavaine comes on a visit to the 
 castle, reciprocating Meleandre's affection, and 
 determined to love Selysette as a sister. The 
 child-wife Selysette, who has never yet awaked 
 to the consciousness of her own soul, because, 
 in childish dread, she has never dared to listen 
 to its voice, resolves to love Aglavaine for her 
 husband's sake ; and he, on his side, looks for- 
 ward to a life of perfect felicity between the 
 two ladies. So every one schemes to perpetuate 
 this triangular idyl. But natural forces and 
 instincts prove too powerful. Platonic friend- 
 ship does not give to Meleandre and Aglavaine 
 the happiness they crave for ; and Selysette, 
 her soul stirred into active being by the crisis, 
 fights down her natural jealousy, only to fall a 
 victim to incurable sadness on realising that 
 her own love fails to fill her husband's life. 
 The two women rival each other in generosity ; 
 but Fate will not be baulked of his prey. Into 
 the mouth of Aglavaine the poet has put all 
 the mystic thoughts on life and love and the 
 soul which he himself preaches in Le 'Tresor des 
 Humbles ; and yet, with a gentle irony, we apcr^U ak y 
 
 If f- '*\ , 
 
170 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 made to feel that it is the wise and superior 
 Aglavaine, in the face of her noble determina- 
 tion that they shall all be true to their higher 
 selves, who, in point of fact, wrecks the life of 
 her friends. The souls of Aglavaine and Sely- 
 sette commune through silence ; they read each 
 other's thoughts in their eyes ; and Selysette 
 grows in physical beauty as her soul expands. 
 There are no incidents in the play — even the 
 death of Selysette in the last act is indicated 
 rather than related — and the dialogue unrolled 
 before us simply reveals the inward growth and 
 manifestation to one another of the pure souls 
 of the three actors. We are transported, as it 
 were, into the region of the immaterial, into an 
 exquisite spiritual fairyland, from which the 
 gross materialism of the exterior world is 
 banished. It is all very beautiful ; but is it 
 life ? In the gallery of sweet, shadowy women 
 that Maeterlinck is evolving from his poet's 
 brain, none, I think — not even Maleine or 
 Melisande — quite equals in tender pathos the 
 child Selysette, whose baby soul is suddenly 
 forced into maturity by the crisis in her life, 
 and whose delicate frame succumbs to the 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 171 
 
 burden over which her soul, sanctified by 
 suffering, and strong in its new enlightenment, 
 rejoices to the end. 
 
 Bearing in mind the nobility of the ideal 
 that Maeterlinck has set before himself, and 
 the fact that he has only attained to his thirty- 
 sixth year, it seems more than probable that 
 his great masterpiece still lies before him, and 
 that the dramas he has already given us do not 
 contain the ultimate expression of his genius. 
 Their merit, in truth, does not lie in their 
 mature perfection either of form or of thought ; 
 rather, they appeal to me in their tender, some- 
 what fragmentary beauty, as exquisite tentative 
 efforts after a conception too vast and too 
 elusive to be imprisoned in concrete shape by 
 the soul that has perceived it. They are like 
 the beautiful chalk studies, suggestive of much 
 loveliness in their very incompleteness, which 
 a great artist will make in preparation for some 
 mighty work of art, destined, perchance, never 
 to see the light. In Maeterlinck's case, how- 
 ever, standing as he does on the threshold of 
 maturity, there is every reason to anticipate the 
 full fruition of his great gifts ; and even if the 
 
1 72 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 highest hopes of his friends were destined to 
 disappointment, nothing, happily, could rob us 
 of that which we already possess. From the 
 first he has been a leader in the great revolt 
 against materialism, which surely, whether in 
 art or in religion, has been the distinctive 
 feature of this final decade of the nineteenth 
 century. He has given us a series of dream- 
 like idyls inspired by a tender perception of 
 the beauty of life, and he has propounded a 
 new theory of dramatic art in a volume of 
 exquisite suggestiveness. To say upon the 
 stage what has never been said before ; to con- 
 vey impressions which no dramatic author had 
 attempted to reduce within the compass of eye 
 and ear ; to dispense deliberately with all those 
 external aids and mechanical contrivances which 
 have come to be regarded as essential attributes 
 of dramatic representation, in order that the 
 spiritual significance of the action may the 
 more effectively dominate the merely external 
 presentment, — all this Maeterlinck has essayed. 
 I do not contend that the dramatic art of the 
 future will necessarily be moulded on the 
 Maeterlinck model ; but honour and gratitude 
 
MAURICE MAETERLINCK 173 
 
 should be the meed of one who has proved, even 
 tentatively, that Dumas and Sardou, Jones and 
 Pinero have not exhausted the possibilities of 
 modern stage-craft. If the power of symbolism 
 is more fully recognised ; if a more spiritual con- 
 ception of the function of the drama is begin- 
 ning to take shape in men's minds ; if they 
 are learning to grasp that as in poetry and in 
 fiction, so also on the stage, the outward and 
 visible semblance must be in close correspon- 
 dence with some hidden invisible truth, it is 
 largely to Maurice Maeterlinck that these 
 things are due. For us, in England, his teaching 
 is of no little moment, whether we apply it to 
 contemporary drama or to the still wider field 
 of fiction. In everything, indeed, that Maeter- 
 linck pleads for in his essays, English literature 
 of the present day is lamentably deficient. A 
 vivid, instinctive perception of the spirituality 
 of life cannot be numbered among our robust 
 British virtues. We have neither the idealism 
 of the Slav, nor the poetry of the Celt, nor the 
 refined perceptions of the Latin races. We 
 love exteriorities, we revel in photographic 
 delineations of domestic interiors, and we have 
 
174 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 barely emerged from the backwash of the 
 French naturalist movement. And so the in- 
 fluence upon us of the Flemish dramatist can- 
 not fail to be illuminating, and the growing 
 appreciation of his work among us is of happy 
 augury for our literary future. 
 
A SINGER OF BRUGES 
 
 A charming writer, spellbound by the most 
 fascinating of old-world cities, Georges Roden- 
 bach cherished no higher ambition than that 
 of linking his name irrevocably with that of 
 Bruges la Morte. Every page that he wrote, 
 whether in prose or verse, was a fresh testi- 
 mony to a devotion that neither time nor 
 distance could diminish. It was in the first 
 years of his manhood that the young Belgian 
 student forsook his native plains for the more 
 vibrant air of Paris, where he quickly made 
 for himself a name as a writer of refined, 
 melodious verse, tinged with a graceful melan- 
 choly, and dignified by a sense of form. Yet 
 in spirit he dwelt all his life in the silent, 
 sleeping city, with belfry and beguinage, with 
 Gothic churches and deserted streets, and green, 
 stagnant waters. He had identified himself 
 
 176 
 
i 7 6 A SINGER OF BRUGES 
 
 with its history, its art, its glorious past, its 
 present decay. Like all the writers of the 
 Franco - Belgian school, Rodenbach had a 
 passion for silence, and Bruges is pre-eminently 
 the City of Silence. To Bruges he turned for 
 all his inspiration ; his illustrations, his similes 
 were drawn from its characteristic features ; 
 its atmosphere pervades his pages ; its canals 
 and buildings provide a background for his 
 romances. And, very fittingly, it was to Bruges 
 that his remains were borne for interment 
 when, in December of last year, death brought 
 his career to a sudden and premature close. 
 
 Rodenbach's imagination demanded no wider 
 sphere than that supplied by the familiar 
 features of a Flemish landscape, a Flemish 
 interior. And amid all that was Flemish, no- 
 thing attracted him more than the beauty of 
 the Beguinages, that most characteristic of all 
 the institutions of his country. Every traveller 
 in Belgium will recall those quaint Gothic 
 enclosures on the outskirts of many of the 
 mediaeval cities where communities of women 
 live in a semi-cloistral retirement. The long 
 rows of little Gothic dwellings in which two or 
 
A SINGER OF BRUGES 177 
 
 four Beguines usually reside together, facing a 
 central grass-plot, have much of the austere 
 charm of an Oxford quadrangle. Every 
 Beguinage is a model of Flemish neatness and 
 cleanliness, and a certain air of homely com- 
 fort replaces the chill bareness of the ordinary 
 convent. Beguines are not nuns ; they are free 
 to come and go, to visit their friends, to dis- 
 pose of their own handiwork. But they live 
 together under a common rule, worship in the 
 community chapel, and enjoy the consideration 
 of their worldly neighbours. For the pious, 
 solitary spinster of the Flemish middle classes 
 the Beguinage provides at once a home and a 
 vocation. To the simple, mediaeval charm of the 
 life Rodenbach was acutely sensitive ; he loved 
 to dwell on the quiet, monotonous existence of 
 the Beguines, divided between prayer and inno- 
 cent gaiety and the making of the beautiful 
 lace for which the Flemish people have always 
 shown so great an aptitude. In each of his 
 books in turn the Beguinages play a part. It 
 is a Beguine, Sceur Gudule, who is the heroine 
 of the little one-act play entitled Le Voile, which 
 was his sole contribution to dramatic literature, 
 
 M 
 
178 A SINGER OF BRUGES 
 
 and which was acted with success at the Theatre 
 Francais ; and in his Musee de Beguines, a 
 volume of short sketches, he has aimed at paint- 
 ing their daily life in a spirit of tender homage. 
 Yet he has not been able to refrain here and 
 there from insinuating into the minds of his 
 heroines thoughts and associations more in 
 accordance with his own mental attitude as a 
 sceptic and a man of the world than with the 
 solid piety of the Flemish women. 
 
 Rodenbach's poetry is descriptive and elegiac, 
 rarely lyrical, and at times he drifted into a 
 didactic vein. He sang, by preference, of 
 silence and twilight, of stagnant waters and 
 limpid eyes, of a decaying life. His attitude 
 towards his art was entirely subjective. He 
 himself described the colour of his mind in 
 one of his poems when he wrote, 
 
 ' Le gris des ciels du Nord dans mon ame est reste.' 
 
 Like the Flemish painters of old, he had a 
 keen sense of the beauty of humble domestic 
 interiors, of twilight behind muslin curtains, 
 of the tender glow of a night-light in a 
 sickroom, of the soothing joy of a familiar 
 
A SINGER OF BRUGES 179 
 
 chamber to a troubled soul. His verses are full 
 of the significance of the vie des chambres, and 
 the simplest domestic object — a mirror, a faded 
 bouquet — would suggest to him vague arm- 
 chair reveries on life. He always wrote in a 
 minor key, and on me, I confess, the effect is 
 rather monotonous. Nor, in my opinion, does 
 his undeniable grace and refinement sufficiently 
 atone for the thinness of his sentiment, for the 
 limited range of his muse. He made, it is true, 
 immense strides between his first boyish pro- 
 ductions and his two later volumes of verse, 
 Le Regne du Silence and Les Vies Encloses, on 
 which his reputation as a poet mainly rests ; 
 but even in these his simplicity is too artificial, 
 his phrasing too ' precious.' He made the 
 mistake of deliberately studying to acquire a 
 literary manner which should express his indi- 
 viduality, one that should be recognisable to 
 all his readers. In Paris, however, he has 
 always enjoyed a higher reputation as a poet 
 than his friend and college contemporary, Emile 
 Verhaeren, a judgment in which I do not for a 
 moment concur. It is founded mainly, I think, 
 on the circumstance that Rodenbach has almost 
 
i8o A SINGER OF BRUGES 
 
 entirely eschewed * vers libre,' which has never 
 been a sympathetic medium to the average 
 Gallic mind, and that he has shown himself 
 carefully observant of the niceties of French 
 prosody. The French nation has so profound 
 a respect for the orthodox traditions of French 
 poetry, that they would always give the pre- 
 ference to a minor poet who rigidly observed 
 them rather than to a greater poet who 
 occasionally set them at defiance. 
 
 A want of robustness was M. Rodenbach's 
 main defect. His talents were all of a rather 
 effeminate order. He lingered too long in 
 the close atmosphere of his spotless interiors 
 and of his low-lying, water-girt city. And the 
 reader who accompanies him, captivated by the 
 transparent elegance of his style, pines instinc- 
 tively before long for the fresh breezes of a 
 heather -clad hillside. As a result of his 
 persistent study of a decaying life, however 
 beautiful in its decay, and of his unwearied 
 efforts to catch at the subtle significance of 
 manifestations wholly unimportant in them- 
 selves, there is an ever-increasing tendency in 
 his writing to unhealthy, morbid imaginings. 
 
A SINGER OF BRUGES 18 1 
 
 This is mainly true of his prose works. Often 
 he possesses a charming fancy ; at other times 
 his sentiment is radically false, even repulsive. 
 He creates a constant contrast, which has some- 
 times a piquant, but more often a jarring effect, 
 between his own somewhat blase and artificial 
 sentiments gathered on the Paris boulevards, 
 and his recollections of the peaceful home of his 
 childhood. Bruges la Morte is full of exquisite, 
 descriptive pages. Rodenbach has reproduced 
 the atmosphere of the ancient city as it has 
 never been reproduced before. But for many 
 readers the charm of the book will be entirely 
 vitiated by the thread of sordid, sexual passion 
 that runs through it. The conception of the 
 bereaved widower tracking a woman of no 
 character through the silent streets, owing to a 
 fancied resemblance she bore to his dead wife, 
 deriving a sort of vicarious satisfaction from 
 her society, and, finally, his fancy turned to 
 loathing, strangling her with a tress of his 
 dead wife's hair, is, from every point of view, 
 intensely unpleasant. It is a matter of very 
 real regret that the poet should have allowed 
 his fancy to stray into such questionable paths. 
 
i82 A SINGER OF BRUGES 
 
 That he could produce work of an entirely 
 different tendency may be seen in this same 
 volume in his delightful portrait of Barbe, 
 the stern, old Flemish servant, who is clearly 
 sketched from life. 
 
 As fiction, Le Carillonneur, one of Roden- 
 bach's latest works, is a more ambitious effort 
 than any of its predecessors. For the first 
 time the author supplied a definite plot, a series 
 of characters, and a certain unity of purpose. 
 In both La Vocation and Bruges la Morte he 
 had dealt with little more than a single episode. 
 The hero of Le Carillonneur, Joris Borluut, 
 architect and bellringer, is a type of the medi- 
 aeval city, standing aside from the rush of 
 modern industrial life. He lives in a world of 
 dreams of his own creation, clinging to his native 
 town with a passionate devotion. It is from 
 a noble civic pride, and lest the time-honoured 
 office of carillonneur should fall into unworthy 
 hands, that he takes on himself the duty of 
 playing the carillon on Sundays and holidays. 
 For what would Bruges be without its carillon 
 ringing out the old Flemish noels over the 
 somnolent city ? Borluut's real life's work lies 
 
A SINGER OF BRUGES 183 
 
 in the restoration of the crumbling mediaeval 
 buildings of Bruges, religiously preserving 
 their time-stained beauty. He is thus identified 
 with the great Gothic revival to which we owe 
 much of the beauty of Bruges to-day, and with 
 the Flemish national movement as opposed to 
 the French and Walloon interest, which has 
 been one of the determining factors in the 
 social life of Belgium during the last twenty 
 years. Joris is loved by two sisters, daughters 
 of Van Hulle the antiquary, another typical 
 citizen of Bruges ; by Barbe, violent and 
 passionate, with pale face and blood-red lips, 
 inherited from some far-off Spanish ancestor ; 
 and by Godelieve, placid and gentle, with high 
 forehead, limpid eyes, and hair the colour of 
 honey, like the Flemish Eves of Van Eyck 
 and Memling. They are the outcome of the 
 northern and the southern blood that have 
 flowed side by side ever since Alva and his 
 Spaniards held Flanders against the Reformers. 
 Godelieve gives herself to Joris in the absence 
 of Barbe, his wife ; and the author, who cannot 
 refrain from mingling religious and sexual 
 emotions, describes her as committing this deed 
 
1 84 A SINGER OF BRUGES 
 
 of treachery in a fervour of religious exaltation. 
 It is an act inconceivable in a woman repre- 
 sented to us as gifted with a sweet and pure 
 nature, and the whole episode jars on the 
 reader's feelings. There follows the long 
 repentance of Godelieve, culminating in the 
 picturesque procession of penitents at Furnes, 
 and the long expiation of Borluut, who has 
 sacrificed his work and his love for his native 
 town to two successive passions, neither of 
 which brings him bliss. The story ends in 
 gloom, black and unrelenting. The novelist 
 was infected with the pessimism so prevalent 
 in French intellectual circles at the present 
 day ; and although the Catholicism of his nation 
 clung around him, and he retained to the end 
 a sense of its symbolical beauty, it hardly sub- 
 sisted in sufficiently robust form to save him 
 from the tendencies of his generation. If 
 Rodenbach eschewed materialism, it was be- 
 cause he perceived its total lack of any artistic 
 quality, and he toyed with mysticism, realising 
 that a sense of the unseen gave atmosphere 
 to literary painting. At the time of his 
 death he was still comparatively a young 
 
A SINGER OF BRUGES 185 
 
 man, but it is probably doing him no in- 
 justice to assume that he had already arrived 
 at the maturity of his powers. Judging him 
 from a wider standard than that of his own 
 immediate circle of admirers, it is impossible 
 to deny that he was lacking in all the more 
 virile qualities that go to make a great artist. 
 He belonged, by the limitations of his muse, 
 to the ranks of the ' minor ' poets ; and it is 
 only fair to add that he himself would have 
 been the first to admit the justice of the classifi- 
 cation. He had neither Verhaeren's passionate 
 yearning after a high ideal, nor Maeterlinck's 
 swift insight into the spiritual significance of 
 life. The most real thing within him was his 
 love of Bruges ; and a single passion, of so 
 necessarily Platonic a nature, can scarcely be 
 held sufficient to supply literary inspiration for 
 a lifetime. Yet, as the singer of Bruges, he 
 was so full of a tender charm, an exquisite 
 appreciation, that his popularity in Paris as a 
 boudoir-poet needs no explanation. 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 The love-motive in Italy predominates in life 
 to an extent that sober northern natures cannot 
 easily understand. Love, to the average Italian, 
 is the aim and object of all his aspirations. Not 
 alone the passion of a lifetime, but the most 
 trivial caprice of the moment, is allowed to 
 absorb his faculties, to intrude upon his business 
 engagements, to fill his mind to the exclusion 
 of every other consideration. No one, I think, 
 can have lived in Italy, and have come in con- 
 tact with the Italian people, without having been 
 struck by this fundamental characteristic of 
 Southern and Latin nature. And if it be true 
 of men who are compelled, to some extent at 
 least, to lead a life of mental and physical 
 activity, it is still more true of the Italian 
 woman, to whom, as a rule, intellectual 
 pleasures are entirely unknown, and in whom 
 the emotional temperament develops without 
 
 186 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 187 
 
 restraint. In Italian fiction of the present day 
 the love-motive is as predominant as in life. 
 Italian novels are essentially voluptuous in tone. 
 They treat of love in all its manifestations, and, 
 as a rule, they treat of nothing else. Many 
 years have passed since Manzoni wrote his 
 tender and ever-charming historical romance ; 
 but Manzoni founded no school of fiction, 
 and / Promessi Sposi will continue to occupy a 
 unique place in the history of Italian literature. 
 I do not think that either the religious or the 
 historical novel has any success in the peninsula 
 to-day, and, as far as I know, the adventure 
 story, pure and simple, does not exist at all. 
 
 Gabriele D'Annunzio, the greatest of living 
 Italian novelists, shares in the characteristics of 
 his nation and his time. To me he always 
 appears as an essential product of modern I taly, 
 in spite of all his cosmopolitan culture. He is 
 probably the most acute interpreter of the sex 
 emotions of the century. His knowledge is 
 infinite, his imagination true, his license of 
 analysis unrivalled. Ruthless as a surgeon, 
 with the delicate perceptions of an artist, he 
 lays bare, through long pages of flowing rhyth- 
 
188 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 mical writing, the most hidden secrets of the 
 heart, the most subtle manifestations of desire. 
 In certain directions he has carried the psy- 
 chological novel as far as it is possible for it 
 to go. He is a consummate artist, a marvel- 
 lous moulder and manipulator of the Italian 
 language. But with all his power, with all his 
 genius — for I think it is no exaggeration to use 
 the word — D'Annunzio can only look on life 
 through the medium of sex emotion. Love, 
 passion, the attitude of man towards woman, 
 of woman towards man, absorbs all his atten- 
 tion. For him life possesses no mightier 
 secrets, no further problems. And hence, 
 even at its very best, his work is singularly 
 one-sided. Convincingly true within its own 
 limits, it becomes essentially false as a represen- 
 tation of human life in its widest aspects. A 
 single novel of D'Annunzio fills the reader 
 with amazed rapture. A course of D'Annunzio 
 produces an inevitable reaction, and I can 
 understand its awakening in many readers a 
 sense of nausea. 
 
 To appreciate his attitude towards his art 
 we must bear in mind that the most funda- 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 189 
 
 mental trait in D'Annunzio's character is his 
 paganism. It is an essentially Italian attribute. 
 All through the history of Italian literature we 
 may trace a pagan strain, an intimate connec- 
 tion with the classic literature of the past. It 
 lay at the root of the whole great movement of 
 the Renaissance. Eighteen centuries of Chris- 
 tianity have only crusted it over, and have 
 never wholly eliminated it, and in D'Annunzio 
 this old pagan spirit has burst out afresh. He 
 is not only an Italian, but a Roman, a passionate 
 worshipper of the city of the Caesars, and Rome 
 in certain aspects is still the most pagan city 
 in Europe. D'Annunzio is wholly unaffected 
 by the tender perfume of Christian sentiment, 
 else had he never penned his startling para- 
 phrases of the gospel parables. He possesses 
 almost as a birthright that easy familiarity 
 with the classic literature of his Latin fore- 
 fathers, which to men of an alien race nothing 
 but the highest scholarship can give. He has 
 steeped himself in the art, the literature, the 
 sentiment of the sixteenth century. For him 
 beauty is the highest good, and happiness the 
 highest goal. Christian ethics, in all matters 
 
190 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 concerned with love, simply do not exist for 
 him. He is less immoral than devoid of all 
 sense of morality. He is a passionate lover of 
 the beautiful, a marvellous virtuoso, a singularly 
 sensitive observer of nature. His books are 
 full of the most exquisite descriptive pages ; 
 they are aglow with the warm Italian atmo- 
 sphere. But he does not love nature for her 
 own sake, as Wordsworth loved her. To him 
 the budding spring, the cries of the swallow 
 in its swift whirling flight, the silence of the 
 mid-day heat, all whisper of human passions 
 and human joys. Take, in the latest of his 
 novels, the Vergini delle Rocce, the episode of 
 the almond-blossom, a silvery cloud on the bare 
 hillside, the first gift of spring, with which the 
 hero piles his carriage as an offering to the 
 three sisters whose hearts he deliberately plans 
 to capture. The scene is permeated with the 
 ineffable charm of a soft February day in 
 Southern Italy, nevertheless the reader feels 
 that the essential beauty of the almond-blossom 
 lies in its symbolism of the new life that — 
 thanks to the arrival of Cantelmo — is about to 
 dawn for the three half-cloistered ladies of Tri- 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 191 
 
 gento. Or turn in Ulnnocente to the descrip- 
 tion of the nightingale's song at Villalilla, to 
 which Tullio and Giuliana listen hand in hand 
 at the close of their long day of reconciliation 
 and resuscitated love. 
 
 * From the first notes it resembled an out- 
 burst of jubilant melody, a cascade of trills 
 which fell upon the air with a sound as of 
 pearls rebounding from the glass of a har- 
 monica. Then there came a pause. A brilliant 
 warbling arose, prolonged to a marvellous 
 length, as if in a trial of strength, in a mood of 
 defiance, as a challenge to an unknown rival. 
 A second pause. A theme of three notes, like 
 an interrogative phrase, passed through a chain 
 of dainty variations, repeating the timid request 
 five or six times, modulated as though on a 
 slender flute of reed, on a pastoral pipe. A 
 third pause. The song became an elegy ; it 
 changed to a minor key, grew soft as a sigh, 
 faint as a sob, full of the sadness of a solitary 
 lover, a heartfelt longing, a vain expectation ; 
 it burst forth into a final appeal, startling, 
 shrill as a cry of agony ; then it died away. 
 Another and a more solemn pause. Then a 
 
192 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 new note was heard, which sounded as though 
 it could not issue from the same throat, it was 
 so humble, timid, mournful ; it resembled so 
 closely the chirping of newly hatched birds, the 
 twitter of baby sparrows ; then with a mar- 
 vellous volubility this ingenuous accent changed 
 into a progression of notes, ever faster and 
 faster, which sparkled in a flight of trills, 
 vibrated in clearest warbling, soared aloft in 
 audacious passages, now fainter, now louder, 
 rising to soprano heights. The songster was 
 intoxicated by his own song. With pauses 
 almost imperceptible, in which the notes had 
 barely time to die away, he poured out his 
 delirium in an ever-varying melody, passionate 
 and tender, soft and clear, playful and grave, 
 and interrupted now by faint sobs, by piteous 
 lamentations, and again by sudden lyrical out- 
 bursts, by a supreme invocation.' 
 
 It appeals so passionately to the author, and 
 he describes it so penetratingly, not merely for 
 the beauty of the melody in itself, but because 
 he could read into the song the intricate 
 emotions by which Tullio and his wife had 
 been swayed during the day. The nightingale 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 193 
 
 had said all that words failed to express. I 
 seem to feel that without lovers listening, the 
 song of the bird would not have been trans- 
 ferred to the page. 
 
 Music, the most personal and the most 
 emotional of all the arts, possesses for D'An- 
 nunzio a haunting power. It plays a part in 
 each of his novels in turn. It is by music that 
 lovers converse ; it is through music that the 
 depth of their passion is revealed to the reader. 
 Maria Ferres plays Bach and Scarlatti to 
 Andrea Sperelli in the days when, even to her- 
 self, she does not admit the dawning passion of 
 her love ; and Ippolita and Giorgio Aurispa 
 spend long hours over the score of ' Tristan 
 and Isolde,' and afford the novelist an excuse 
 for a dozen brilliant pages of analysis of the 
 most marvellous drama of sex emotion ever 
 interpreted by music. But there is a yet more 
 intimate connection in D'Annunzio's case 
 between the art of writing and the art of 
 music. It is from music that he obtains one 
 of his most characteristic effects of style. 
 As in music a motive will recur at seem- 
 ingly inevitable intervals, so D'Annunzio will 
 
194 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 deliberately repeat a phrase, sometimes with 
 variations, but more often in the identical 
 words, in order to bring the reader back to a 
 previous impression, to a recurrent train of 
 thought. The little pen-portrait of the dead 
 uncle in the 'Trionfo della Morte is repeated 
 at least three times in exactly the same words. 
 The intention is to bring before the reader the 
 features of Demetrio as they appeared to 
 Giorgio, and it is always under one and the 
 same aspect that a familiar face reappears to us. 
 In the Vergini delle Rocce we have a line of 
 landscape painting — the colour of the arid soil 
 is compared to the mane of a lion — which is 
 woven into the narrative again and again. 
 How far this trespassing on the domain of a 
 sister art is legitimate is a fair subject for dis- 
 cussion. The device is one which, in in- 
 experienced hands, might rapidly degenerate 
 into an intolerable affectation ; but D'Annunzio 
 has so unerring a pen, so delicate a perception 
 of values, that in his hands it appeals to us as 
 singularly happy. 
 
 D'Annunzio, like Maeterlinck, is one of the 
 precocious geniuses of the age. He is only, I 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 195 
 
 believe, in his thirty-fifth year, and has there- 
 fore barely passed that * earlier climacteric' in 
 a man's career, from which he may measure the 
 hopes of the future by the triumphs of the 
 past. Yet, instead of pressing forward to new 
 and greater victories, I am tempted to predict 
 that the Italian novelist has already given of his 
 best to the world. Before he was twenty he 
 had published two slim volumes of passionate 
 melodious verse, the Canto Nuovo and the Inter- 
 mezzo di Rime, which placed him at a bound 
 far above all his contemporaries, the veteran 
 Carducci alone perhaps excepted. These were 
 followed almost immediately by a small collec- 
 tion of short stories, // Libro delle Vergini, and 
 by further poems ; and then, at longer intervals, 
 by his novels — II Piacere in 1889, Ulnnocente 
 and Giovanni Episcopo in 1892, the Trionfo 
 della Morte in 1894, and two years later the 
 Vergini delle Rocce. In La Citta Morta, which 
 not even the acting of Sarah Bernhardt could 
 galvanise into life when it was performed at the 
 ' Renaissance ' theatre a twelvemonth ago, we 
 have at once his latest completed work, and his 
 first effort at dramatic writing. The Vergini 
 
196 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 delle Rocce is not complete in itself; it forms 
 but the first part of a romantic trilogy, 
 / Romanzi del Giglio, the later volumes of 
 which have still to appear. The three novels, 
 77 Piacere, IJ Innocente y and the 'Trionfo della 
 Morte, also constitute a series of three, and 
 have been classified by their author as ' 1 
 Romanzi delle Rose. ' They are entirely uncon- 
 nected as regards incident or characters, yet 
 they are bound together by a certain unity of 
 purpose and conception. They represent the 
 very best fruit of D'Annunzio's genius ; of 
 them we can judge as of a completed whole ; 
 and it is on them, I believe, that D'Annunzio's 
 fame as a novelist will ultimately rest. 
 
 D'Annunzio has stood for the hero of each 
 of these three novels. And as the other male 
 characters in his books are very few in number, 
 and are entirely subordinate to the central 
 figure, it is no exaggeration to say that the 
 novelist has never intimately studied or repro- 
 duced any member of his own sex save himself. 
 This single type, then, which figures under 
 slightly varying aspects as Andrea Sperelli in 
 // Piacere, Tullio Hermil in Ulnnocente, 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 197 
 
 Georgio Aurispa in the 'Trionfo, and, I may 
 add, as Claudio Cantelmo in the Vergini delle 
 Rocce, represents a young Italian, sensual rather 
 than passionate, abnormally sensitive, intensely 
 egotistic, absorbed in his own intricate emo- 
 tions, and with a mania for self-analysis. He is 
 1 idealistic, analytical, and sophistical/ He is 
 entirely wanting in all spontaneousness, recti- 
 tude, and simplicity of nature. He is invariably 
 the descendant of a great race fallen on evil days, 
 the degenerate bearer of a once glorious name. 
 Sometimes, as in the Trionfo della Morte y he is 
 physically weak ; even his qualities are, as a 
 rule, those of an effete race, and at times he 
 hovers on the borders of lunacy, suicide, and 
 crime. 
 
 * I was, in a word/ says Tullio Hermil of 
 himself, c a violent and impassioned consciente, 
 in whom the hypertrophy of certain cerebral 
 centres rendered impossible the necessary co- 
 ordination of the spirit with normal life. A 
 most acute watcher over myself, I yet possessed 
 all the impulses of primitive, undisciplined 
 nature. More than once I had been tempted 
 by sudden criminal suggestions. More than 
 
198 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 once I had surprised myself in the spontaneous 
 uprising of some cruel instinct.' 
 
 Yet, he is represented as retaining a certain 
 dignity of soul through his worship of the 
 beautiful : c the conception of beauty is the axis 
 of his inner being, round which all the passions 
 gravitate,' and the delicacy of his intellectual 
 perceptions and the refinement of his taste 
 remain undimmed by his moral depravity. 
 
 The type is first presented to us in 77 Piacere 
 under the title of Count Andrea Sperelli. 
 Sperelli is a Roman poet of noble birth in the 
 first years of manhood. He is a disciple of 
 Beauty, a believer in Art for Art's sake, a 
 passionate devotee of the fourteenth century. 
 He also worships his native Rome — the Rome 
 of the Renaissance, of the Villa Medici, the 
 steps of the Trinita, the Pincian Hill — and the 
 mysterious fascination of Rome is subtly indi- 
 cated. With much power of minute obser- 
 vation, with a few pages of exquisite descriptive 
 writing, when the scene is transferred to the 
 villa at Schifanoja, II Piacere is, on the whole, 
 I think, a wearisome book. It is essentially the 
 work of a clever but immature writer, eager to 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 199 
 
 display his knowledge of the world ; it is crude, 
 
 cynical, and pretentious, overweighted with 
 
 classical allusions and artistic disquisitions, and 
 
 with an irritating assumption of cosmopolitan 
 
 omniscience imitated from a certain school of 
 
 French novelists. Sperelli merely repels by his 
 
 morbid cravings, his cynical egotism, his entire 
 
 absorption in self. In its relation of external 
 
 incidents the story is almost commonplace — for 
 
 the life of a young man of fashion varies but 
 
 little in Paris, Rome, or London — but on its 
 
 psychological side it compels our admiration by 
 
 the daring analysis of the emotions of the hero, 
 
 of the mental sufferings he lays up for himself, 
 
 of the irreparable void in a life dedicated solely 
 
 to pleasure. There is but one character in the 
 
 book with a touch of real nobility, the gentle, 
 
 melancholy Maria Ferres, who struggles with 
 
 her dawning love for Sperelli through long 
 
 pages of a delightful journal — a masterpiece of 
 
 feminine idealism and weakness. But for the 
 
 rest, it is simply a revelation of pitiful human 
 
 depravity which no art can idealise. 
 
 In the two years that elapsed between the 
 publication of II Piacere and Ulnnocente 
 
200 GABR1ELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 D'Annunzio seems to have sprung into the 
 plenitude of his great gifts. In the former 
 novel there is promise, in the latter fulfilment. 
 For me, L! Innocent e is the one really great book 
 that D'Annunzio has written. Both in con- 
 ception and in construction it seems to me 
 unquestionably superior even to the Trionfo 
 della Morte. It was written — D'Annunzio him- 
 self makes no secret of it — under the influence 
 of Tolstoi. A new conception of human 
 suffering, a new realisation of the dignity of 
 the human soul, seem to have come to him 
 through the pages of War and Peace. His 
 outlook on life has widened and deepened ; he 
 has rid himself in part at least of the clogging 
 limitations of a materialist creed. The interest 
 of the book is purely psychological. It tells 
 of one of those silent tragedies in life, all the 
 more intense and overwhelming because they 
 are unrelieved by any outward manifestation. 
 It is a prolonged study of two souls in their 
 relation to one another — their sins and suffer- 
 ings, their brief pathetic joys, and their long, 
 weary expiation. There is perfect unity of 
 interest throughout. There are no minor 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 201 
 
 threads to withdraw the reader's attention from 
 the main tragedy ; we are told nothing of how 
 these people live, of their position, their wealth, 
 their friends. But we follow instead the evo- 
 lution of their attitude towards one another, of 
 Giuliana's attitude towards Tullio, of Tullio's 
 feelings towards his wife Giuliana. We are 
 told — indeed, it is Tullio himself who relates 
 the story, and the first person renders it all the 
 more convincing — of his conjugal infidelities, of 
 his debasing passion for Teresa RafFo, which 
 dragged him away even from the sickbed of 
 his wife, but Teresa herself never appears. 
 We are told of Giuliana's sudden emotional 
 frailty in relation to Filippo Arborio, but 
 Filippo himself flits as a mere shadow through 
 the pages, and we are never shown the lovers 
 together. It is the effect of such actions on 
 the inmost soul, not the actions themselves, 
 that D'Annunzio paints. And the painting is 
 so intensely true that the book, with all its 
 crudeness of expression and occasional coarse- 
 ness of thought, becomes convincingly moral. 
 Inevitably, without the advent of any external 
 circumstance, any dragged-in calamity, husband 
 
202 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 and wife reap what they have sown. Tullio 
 begins with a long course of studied neglect 
 towards his beautiful wife, whom, with a refine- 
 ment of marital cruelty, he treats with exquisite 
 courtesy as a friend, a confidante, a sister, as 
 one who could understand and appreciate his 
 moral weakness. In the intensity of his 
 perversion he soothes his conscience with 
 the reflection that moral greatness being the 
 outcome of violent grief nobly borne, his wife 
 could never have attained to the heroic virtue 
 which is her crowning glory save through the 
 sufferings that he himself has imposed upon 
 her. And for years Giuliana bears her solitude 
 with heroic abnegation, silently, bravely, even 
 tenderly. But at length, stung apparently into 
 anger by continued neglect — and here, I confess, 
 the psychology does not appear to me quite 
 convincing — she finds a brief consolation in the 
 love of Filippo Arborio. Tullio, at the 
 moment when a sudden return of affection has 
 brought him to his wife's feet, discovers that 
 Giuliana is to become the mother of a child 
 of which he is not the father. Nothing 
 D'Annunzio has ever written is more impres- 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 203 
 
 sive than the attitude of the two guilty souls 
 towards each other with this appalling calamity 
 overhanging them. Love for his wife, family 
 pride, respect for his aged mother, a sense of 
 his own original guilt, and, it must be added, a 
 merely sensual craving for the beautiful woman 
 he had so long neglected, all combine to keep 
 the man silent, and the long martyrdom of the 
 waiting months is drawn out in sickening and 
 convincing detail. And the final murder of 
 V innocent e^ the hapless bastard child, that 
 threatens by its mere presence to render 
 conjugal life a daily torture, is effected so artisti- 
 cally — we forgive him the borrowing of the 
 idea from Guy de Maupassant — that once 
 again it is not the outward aspect of the unsus- 
 pected crime, but its inner significance, that 
 arrests the reader. 
 
 The gloom of this tragic story is rendered 
 all the more intense by the contrast with the 
 background of warm Italian sunshine and 
 peaceful rural existence which fills in the 
 picture. It is pathetically true to life that 
 Tullio's aged mother and his brother Federigo, 
 whose first care is for the happiness of the 
 
2o 4 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 young couple, should remain absolutely blind to 
 the tragedy that is being enacted before their 
 very eyes, Federigo is D'Annunzio's sole 
 attempt to paint a man of high moral character 
 and lovable disposition ; and Federigo, with 
 his appreciation of simple pleasures and his 
 placid faith in a ' new ' religion, is inspired by 
 Tolstoi. So, too, is the fine old peasant 
 Giovanni di Scordio, whose Slav characteristics 
 have a curiously unreal effect in the Italian 
 setting. The digression affords the author an 
 opportunity for much harmonious writing on 
 the solemn beauties of nature, but his grasp on 
 either character is lacking in firmness. One 
 feels that he is tentatively groping after an 
 ideal whose beauty indeed attracts him, but 
 which eludes his full comprehension. And a 
 comparison with Tolstoi being thus forced 
 upon us, it is interesting to note how differ- 
 ently, had he written such a story as Ulnno- 
 cente, he would have conceived the denoue- 
 ment. Without question, he would have 
 effected the ultimate reunion and the mutual 
 forgiveness of husband and wife through the 
 instrumentality of the child. In its presence 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 205 
 
 the past would have been blotted out in a 
 noble, all-embracing pardon. For the Slav, 
 with his mystical fatalism, such heights of self- 
 abnegation do not offer insuperable obstacles ; 
 for the sensual, clear-sighted Latin, with his 
 acute but petty feelings, they are unattainable. 
 D'Annunzio spent five years working at the 
 Trionfo della Morte. By universal consent in 
 France and Italy it has been acclaimed as the 
 greatest of his achievements. It was the Trionfo 
 which first gained for its author the enthusiastic 
 patronage of M. de Vogue, most orthodox of 
 critics, and it was the Trionfo which was the first 
 of D' Annunzio's novels to appear in an English 
 version. Certainly it is the largest of his works 
 both in point of size and of conception, and 
 for this very reason it displays his weaknesses 
 and his limitations as well as his strength. He 
 has fallen into the prevailing fashion of 
 making of a novel a peg on which to hang 
 his views on every subject, a counter on which 
 to display all his intellectual wares, however 
 incongruous. The cosmopolitanism of his cul- 
 ture shows itself as a serious blot on the artistic 
 unity of his treatment. We have Tolstoi on 
 
206 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 one page, Maeterlinck on another, and, alas, 
 Zola on a third. Yet these are but the acci- 
 dental accessories of the story, the ornaments 
 with which he has overloaded his scheme. In 
 its central idea it is purely D'Annunzian, and, 
 like all its predecessors, it consists simply in the 
 history of a man and a woman in relation to one 
 another. The opening conversation between 
 Georgio Aurispa and Ippolita gives the note of 
 the whole book — the subtle struggle between 
 hatred and desire in a purely sensual love. It 
 is a theme in which the author's insight into 
 the intricacies of human passion has full play. 
 In the Trionfo the hero has advanced a stage 
 further in his career of self-indulgence than 
 in either of the preceding volumes. He is 
 cynical, sarcastic, suspicious, bound hand and 
 foot by his physical cravings, and yet rebelling 
 fiercely against the chains he has forged for 
 himself. His demands are insatiable ; he 
 exacts of Ippolita the entire surrender of mind 
 and of soul. 
 
 1 How much of you do I possess ? ' he asks. 
 
 * Everything.' 
 
 ' Nothing, or almost nothing. I do not 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 207 
 
 possess that which I crave for. You are a 
 stranger to me. Like every other human 
 creature, you conceal within yourself a world 
 that to me is impenetrable, and the most ardent 
 passion can never reveal it to me. Of your 
 sensations, of your sentiments, of your thoughts 
 I know only the smallest part. Speech is an 
 imperfect sign. The soul is intransmittable. 
 You cannot give me your soul.' 
 
 The conviction of his helplessness drives him 
 into brutality, into cruelty at least of speech. 
 And slowly but inevitably the 'sudden criminal 
 suggestions ' by which Tullio Hermil felt him- 
 self to be from time to time invaded, crystallise 
 in Giorgio into a definite homicidal mania. 
 His uncle Demetrio, from whom he has in- 
 herited his fortune and his musical tastes, the 
 uncle who was the sole joy of his youth, com- 
 mitted suicide, and in his spiritual identification 
 of himself with his uncle suicide becomes his 
 inevitable goal. He realises that he is ill, 
 morally ill, verging at times upon insanity, and 
 he has a blind hope that a true and strong love, 
 un amore sano e forte, may restore his moral 
 balance. So he and Ippolita take up their 
 
208 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 abode in a hermitage on the shores of the 
 Adriatic, where his security of possession will 
 be absolute and uncontested. This Vita Nuova, 
 this new life, is in its outward aspects a delight- 
 ful love idyl passed amid orange and olive 
 groves by the soothing, ever-changing sea, with 
 harvesting and grape gathering, with girls 
 singing amid the golden furze, peasant women 
 spinning by their cottage doors, and long 
 processions winding through the valley to 
 the neighbouring shrine. Yet from the first it 
 fails to accomplish for Giorgio what he had 
 hoped for. After the first two weeks he 
 notes : ' Nothing in me is changed. Always 
 the same anxiety, the same unrest, the same 
 discontent. We are hardly at the beginning, 
 and yet I already foresee the end.' In his 
 craving for new sensations he is filled with 
 ascetic aspirations, and believes himself pos- 
 sessed of all the necessary qualities for a life of 
 renunciation save only the indispensable gift of 
 faith. It irritates him to see how Ippolita's 
 physical nature expands under the influence of 
 the bracing air, the indolent life. Having 
 deliberately cut her off from all outside inter- 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 209 
 
 ests, he is revolted because her tastes and 
 desires grow daily more puerile. He is mor- 
 bidly jealous of her exuberant vitality, her 
 frank joie de vivre. They have never been 
 united by the bonds of real affection. Relent- 
 lessly his love turns to physical repulsion ; the 
 thought of the future fills him with black 
 despair. Meanwhile Ippolita realises the change 
 that has come over her lover, and blindly she 
 puts forth all her feminine fascinations to bind 
 him ever more closely to her. Feeling her 
 participation in his inner life growing fainter, 
 she devotes all her energies to asserting her 
 sensual dominion. Thus she seals her doom, 
 and the book closes in murder and suicide. 
 
 It is impossible to refer in detail to the many 
 incidents and interpolations, quite irrelevant for 
 the most part to the main action of the story, that 
 D'Annunzio has been tempted to include in the 
 Trionfo. It is curious that in one of his latest 
 and most mature books a strain of naturalism 
 should have appeared. For his whole literary 
 attitude has been a constant protest against the 
 supremacy of mere exteriority. Yet in the 
 'Trionfo della Morte there is at times a gra- 
 
210 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 tuitous revelling in sordid details which leaves 
 an exceedingly unpleasant impression. Take, 
 for example, the piteous portrait of the little, 
 old Aunt Gioconda, steeped in piety and 
 addicted to greediness. There is not a touch 
 of human pity in the description, not the 
 smallest endeavour to show the pathetic human 
 soul behind the repulsive exterior. The noto- 
 rious chapter on the pilgrimage to Casalbordino 
 is a mere tour de force in horrors piled one on 
 the other. Nothing in Zola's Lourdes ap- 
 proaches it in coarseness and in revolting detail ; 
 it is without a single redeeming feature. There 
 has always existed a very wide license of speech in 
 Italian literature, the outcome, I imagine, of its 
 pagan strain, and of such license D'Annunzio, 
 in the 'Trionfo, has taken a more unsparing 
 advantage than in any of his previous works. 
 Happily, there is another tendency in this 
 many-sided book, a tendency for the first time 
 towards symbolism, towards a mystical inter- 
 pretation of life. Within the scope of his 
 literary studies D'Annunzio has clearly included 
 the Franco-Belgian school. In his descriptions 
 of the peasant life around San Vito he is pene- 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 211 
 
 trated by a sense of the dignity of humble toil, 
 of the sanctity of primitive sorrows, of the 
 deep spiritual significance that lies behind child- 
 like beliefs and old-time superstitions. The 
 weird episode of the dying baby sucked by 
 vampires, and that no exorcisms can release, 
 recalls in its haunting sense of approaching 
 death a scene from Ulntruse. And there is the 
 scene of the drowned boy and his mother's 
 outburst of lyrical grief, which is extraordinarily 
 dramatic in its intensity of feeling. 
 
 As an interlude in the writing of romances, 
 of which a whole new series is already advertised 
 for publication in the near future, D'Annunzio 
 has produced a play. The amiable ambition to 
 attain to dramatic success is one that he shares 
 with almost every poet and novelist of the 
 present day. Unfortunately, the Citta Morta 
 has proved as little dramatic as the stage-works of 
 poets and novelists are apt to be. All his force, 
 all his intuitive capacity for seizing an instantan- 
 eous effect, seem to have forsaken our author as 
 soon as he found himself at work in an unaccus- 
 tomed medium. He has set himself as an ideal 
 to be purely Greek in conception and in feeling. 
 
212 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 He has transported a quartette of modern 
 Italians to the thirsty plains of Argolis, with a 
 background of Mycenaean tombs and frag- 
 mentary temples. He has conceived an inces- 
 tuous passion, and has provided a blind heroine, 
 who combines the parts of prophetess and of 
 chorus. With such material he has essayed to 
 build up a tragedy. Unhappily, an almost 
 grotesque feeling of unreality pervades the 
 whole play. The characters are little more 
 than lay-figures performing automatic move- 
 ments. There is really nothing save their names 
 by which to distinguish Alessandro from Leon- 
 ardo, both of whom entertain a hopeless passion 
 for Bianca Maria, the sister of Leonardo. And 
 of Bianca Maria herself I have tried in vain to 
 arrive at any sort of realisation. The whole 
 treatment of the situation is entirely undramatic 
 in the modern sense of the word. Possibly 
 D'Annunzio would tell us that such was his 
 intention. But there should at least be a gran- 
 deur of conception, a nobility of outline, and a 
 harmonious rhythm of movement to compen- 
 sate for the lack. Here and there glowing 
 descriptive passages have been placed in the 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 213 
 
 mouths of the actors, and an almost physical 
 sense of noonday heat has been brought home 
 to the reader. Here and there the self-effacing, 
 spiritually-enlightened Anna, the blind wife of 
 Alessandro, calls to mind one of Maeterlinck's 
 shadowy, ethereal heroines. But there is 
 scarcely a scene which carries with it a sense of 
 conviction. All through the drama the reader 
 is conscious of the artificiality of the present- 
 ment, of the undisguised imitation of this writer 
 and of that ; in a word, of the unrealised am- 
 bition to re-create the atmosphere of the great 
 Greek tragedies. 
 
 Not a little of D'Annunzio's failure as a 
 dramatist may be attributed to his attitude 
 towards women, and to the role he has assigned 
 to them in his social presentment. Let me say 
 at once that he has not created a single feminine 
 character of intrinsic interest, not one that stirs 
 our deeper feelings. His failure in this respect 
 — surely one of the most serious that can be 
 brought home to a novelist — is no mere acci- 
 dent. It has its origin deep down in the 
 recesses of his nature. D'Annunzio accepts to 
 the full the conventional view of the female 
 
2i 4 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 sex that is still prevalent among the Latin 
 nations. Woman exists for man, for his plea- 
 sures, his domestic comfort, often for his ruin; 
 but she has no independent life, no separate 
 entity, no ideals apart from those of sexual 
 love. No higher possibilities for the sex have 
 entered the mind of the novelist ; even religion, 
 save as a conventional accessory, is denied to 
 her. Women must be gentle, tender, sub- 
 missive, anticipating in all things the wishes of 
 their lord. Giuliana's one fault was her act of 
 rebellion against the role which Tullio, without 
 the slightest justification, had imposed upon 
 her ; and unconsciously it is upon Giuliana, and 
 not upon Tullio, that the responsibility of the 
 catastrophe is made to lie. Morally, the women 
 are in most cases far superior to the men, or 
 at least to the one type of man that the author 
 gives us. Yet they are expected to sacrifice 
 themselves unhesitatingly to the hysteric pas- 
 sions of the hero. The truth is, D'Annunzio is 
 so absorbed in self-analysis, so occupied with 
 events in their intimate relation to his own 
 soul, his own wellbeing, that he has not a 
 moment in which to study humanity from an 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 215 
 
 objective point of view. In a word, he never 
 really paints character at all. As we have seen, 
 there is not a single clearly defined, well- 
 thought-out portrait in his whole series of 
 novels, not one that will live in our memory. 
 The hero is always himself ; the heroine is only 
 shown to us in her relation toward the hero. 
 The secondary figures are but vague shadows, 
 or are indicated merely as the individual units 
 in a certain general impression which the author 
 wishes to produce. Thus the whole Montaga 
 family is created in order to convey a sense of 
 hovering insanity ; the peasantry around San 
 Vito illustrate the effects of a mystical super- 
 stition ; but in neither case does any character 
 possess a definite individuality apart from the 
 central conception. Somehow we seem to miss 
 characterisation less in D'Annunzio than we 
 should in any other author, but the fact remains 
 that it is not there. He is entirely destitute of 
 wide human sympathies ; he seems to regard 
 even his own creations with a cynical indiffer- 
 ence which alienates from his own person the 
 sympathies of the reader. He has not a word 
 of pity for the fate of Maria Ferres, who ruins 
 
216 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 herself for Sperelli ; or for Ippolita, who is in 
 every sense the victim of Aurispa ; or for the 
 three shadowy sisters of Trigento, waiting in 
 their stately, melancholy palace for the advent 
 of some fairy prince, women who remind me 
 of nothing so forcibly as of delicate peaches on 
 a garden wall waiting till the passer-by shall 
 pluck and devour. This incapacity to regard 
 life from the standpoint of each of his char- 
 acters in turn constitutes one of D'Annunzio's 
 gravest limitations. It seems to me to be of 
 itself sufficient to deprive him of the right to 
 be classed among the great constructive novel- 
 ists of our time. We have been told that 
 D'Annunzio is the centre of a new renaissance, 
 the herald of a new dawn, the founder of a 
 new school in the history of Italian literature.^ 
 I cannot for a moment think that he is all this.< 
 Rather he is the most brilliant flower of decad- 
 ence, a beautiful poisonous growth ; the product, 
 like his own heroes, of a great nation fallen 
 upon evil days. His writing destroys, it does 
 not build up. It could not inspire a great cause 
 or stimulate to high spiritual ideals. Yet, put- 
 ting aside all ethical considerations, D' Annunzio 
 
GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 217 
 
 has perpetrated a great and lasting literary 
 work for his country. He has given the 
 seal of permanency to the work initiated by 
 Carducci, who was the first in our own day to 
 rescue Italian lyrical poetry from the trivialities 
 into which it had fallen by uniting a vigorous 
 passionate spirit to the majestic forms of 
 classic literature. To D'Annunzio is due the 
 evolution of an Italian style. He has moulded 
 his native language into a more perfect and 
 more flexible instrument than when it first 
 came into his hands. He has drawn from it 
 unsuspected richness of form and colour. It 
 has been the object of his daily study, of his 
 ceaseless endeavour. And the result is a 
 delight in rhythmical cadence, in flowing har- 
 monies, in suavity of diction. He has gone 
 for his models to classical sources, and he 
 seems to me to have added much of the terse 
 dignity of Latin to the florid grace of modern 
 Italian. In Ulnnocente^ and again in the Ver- 
 gini delle Rocce, his writing is at its very best ; 
 in the Trionfo della Morte there are here and 
 there traces of over-elaboration, of a too deter- 
 mined effort to excel. He is happiest in his 
 
 UNIVL-H^ITY 
 
 C A| ,ro^V 
 
2i 8 GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 
 
 less ambitious moments, in his descriptions 
 of nature, luminous as the Italian atmosphere. 
 Sometimes with absolute simplicity of treat- 
 ment he stamps an ineffaceable impression on 
 the brain. Take the few lines on Orvieto in 
 the Trionfo : — 
 
 1 On the summit of a marlstone rock, above 
 a melancholy valley, a city so silent as to 
 appear uninhabited : — windows closed, grey 
 alleys, in which the grass grows ; a Capuchin 
 friar crossing a piazza ; a bishop descending 
 from a closed carriage in front of a hospital 
 with a decrepit man-servant at the door ; a 
 tower against a white, rainy sky ; a clock 
 slowly striking the hours ; suddenly, at the end 
 of a street, a miracle — the Cathedral/ 
 
 There is in his writing a subtle quality to 
 which no extract, and, above all, no translation, 
 can do justice, an exquisite fluidity which carries 
 the reader forward in a rhythmical progression. 
 And it is for D'Annunzio's sense of style that 
 we forgive him his sins of omission. 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 Critics have questioned whether fiction is not 
 a medium uncongenial to the Italian tempera- 
 ment, a mould into which the talent of the 
 country will never freely flow. In poetry, in 
 drama, in opera, the aesthetic aspirations of 
 Italy have always found the fullest expression. 
 In imaginative gifts she has never been lacking ; 
 but, until quite recently, they had not been 
 devoted to the weaving of prose romance, or to 
 the delineation of domestic morals. Through- 
 out the middle of the century, when in France 
 and England, in Germany and Russia, the pro- 
 duction of fiction was taking on itself such 
 wide proportions as to threaten to submerge all 
 other branches of literary achievement, Italy 
 remained practically silent. Earlier in the 
 century, Manzoni had written the first, and in 
 many respects, still the greatest of modern 
 Italian novels, and had stepped forthwith into 
 
 219 
 
220 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 the front rank of European men of letters. 
 But Manzoni was by profession a poet and a 
 dramatist, and it was almost by accident that 
 he wrote the novel which has made his name 
 famous ; it is noteworthy that he never wrote 
 a second. It is only in our own day, only 
 within the last twenty years, that a body of 
 Italian novelists has risen up ; and numerous 
 and talented as its members are, they have 
 founded no distinctive school of Italian fiction. 
 Such a thing does not exist, has never existed. 
 We find in Italian fiction traces of all the 
 influences — romantic, idealistic, naturalist, 
 realist, psychological — which have moulded the 
 fiction of France during the last half century. 
 Many examples might be summarily described 
 as French novels written in Italian. It is as 
 though Italian writers, filled with a sympathetic 
 admiration for the achievements of their trans- 
 alpine neighbours, had deliberately set them- 
 selves to imitate and equal that which, left to 
 their own resources, they had never been able 
 to initiate. Even in the delineation of his 
 native Sicily, Verga has followed many of the 
 methods of the realists. Matilde Serao and 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 221 
 
 F. de Roberto, while penetrated through and 
 through with the voluptuousness which seems 
 to form a component part of the very air of 
 Italy, have based their novels mainly on situa- 
 tions with which French fiction has made us 
 wearisomely familiar. There is singularly 
 little character-drawing in Italian fiction, if we 
 except the delineation of men and women 
 under the influence of sexual passion in their 
 relation one to the other. There is nothing of 
 the mystery, nothing of the near sense of the 
 spiritual in life, which make the fascination of 
 Slav literature. In a word, Italian fiction has 
 a very narrow scope ; in substance it has little 
 originality ; and it does not, in any convincing 
 fashion, portray the essential characteristics of 
 the nation. 
 
 Happily, above the rank and file of Italian 
 novelists there have appeared two or three who 
 have effected all that brilliant talents can effect 
 to supplement the lack of a national ideal in 
 the sphere of romance. At the present time, 
 two men are conspicuous as representing, in 
 the essential features of their work, two per- 
 manent tendencies in Italian literature — ten- 
 
222 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 dencies which are necessarily antagonistic, but 
 which have existed side by side from the days 
 of Dante and Boccaccio. Both men are poets ; 
 and although from the circumstances of the 
 modern literary market it is as novelists that 
 they have attained to European fame, their 
 talents as writers of fiction are none the less 
 subordinate to their gifts as writers of verse. 
 Of the place occupied by D'Annunzio I have 
 spoken already. He is the representative of 
 the pagan element in the Italian character ; 
 his forerunners are Boccaccio and Benvenuto 
 Cellini and Titian ; his immediate predecessor 
 is Carducci. Fogazzaro is an idealist and a 
 Christian ; he represents the revolt against a 
 materialistic conception of life. He has 
 affinities with Petrarch and with the Umbrian 
 school, and in more recent times with Manzoni 
 and Silvio Pellico. Everywhere he paints the 
 triumph of faith, and patriotism, and ideal love 
 over the desires of the senses. Everywhere, 
 on the contrary, D'Annunzio paints the triumph 
 of passion over duty. To the author of 
 L'Innocente, human passion — the desire of the 
 man for the woman — is the most invincible 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 223 
 
 thing in life ; to the author of Daniele Cortis it 
 is one of the feeblest. If D'Annunzio seems to 
 us more intimately representative of what we 
 have come to regard as a characteristically 
 Italian conception of life, it is mainly because, in 
 Italy as in France, the ideals of a certain section 
 of society have received undue recognition 
 from the prominence conferred upon them by 
 novelists. To judge of all Italian society from 
 the novels of D'Annunzio or Matilde Serao 
 were almost as misleading as to judge of all 
 France from the pages of Paul Bourget. 
 
 Fogazzaro attracts us by all those qualities 
 in which his great rival is deficient. His out- 
 look on life is wide and sane and sympathetic. 
 He is a dreamer, and in his writing there is 
 frequently a tinge of melancholy, inseparable 
 from the capacity for dreaming ; but his idealism 
 is real and robust, and pervades all life within 
 his vision, even to the horizon. I seem to feel 
 that for him the colour of life must be mauve, 
 pure and translucent, and a little chill. He 
 has his full share of the spirit of patriotism, 
 which has been a distinctive note of Italian 
 literature during the present century. Italian 
 
224 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 unity was the dream of all romantic minds long 
 before it became a political reality, and freedom 
 from foreign despotism was felt to be an essen- 
 tial condition of intellectual achievement. In 
 one respect at least, Fogazzaro is, as far as 
 I know, unique among contemporary Italian 
 writers. His sympathies, where they are not 
 purely Italian, are Teutonic, and not French. 
 His attitude is one of tacit protest against the 
 preponderating influence of France in the in- 
 tellectual life of his countrymen. For himself, ^ 
 he turns to Germany, and in the sentimentalism 
 of the German character he discerns a won- 
 derful charm. All through his books there 
 are traces of his familiarity with the German 
 literature of the present century, and there is 
 no extravagance in the supposition that he has 
 frequently derived inspiration from it. His 
 very qualities are of a German order. His 
 mind is refined, cultivated, a little deliberate. 
 His work is never hurried ; he observes care- 
 fully and sympathetically ; and he reproduces 
 with a detailed accuracy. But we must not 
 seek in Fogazzaro's pages that passionate sense 
 of beauty, that glow and warmth as of hot 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 225 
 
 southern sunshine, which constitutes the irre- 
 sistible attraction of D'Annunzio. To turn 
 from one to the other is like passing from the 
 luxurious boudoir of a woman of fashion to the 
 bare simplicity of the convent parlour. Fogaz- 
 zaro's feeling for his favourite Valsolda, which 
 he has commemorated both in prose and verse, 
 is rather one of quiet intimate affection — the 
 affection of a lifetime — than a passionate 
 identification of self with a scene of over- 
 mastering beauty. And so his descriptions 
 of scenery, though we are conscious that they 
 were felt by him, are not felt by us. We can- 
 not realise the mountains that Franco and 
 Luisa gazed upon from the loggia of their villa 
 — although the author has described them to 
 us a dozen times — as we realise the hillside 
 clad in golden broom that stretched upwards 
 behind the hermitage by the Adriatic where 
 Giorgio and Ippolita sought in vain for happi- 
 ness. The vivifying quality is absent. - 
 
 Fogazzaro, on the other hand, possesses a 
 considerable power of characterisation. There 
 is perhaps a tendency in his portraits to cari- 
 cature ; he seizes, above all, the oddities in each 
 
 \ 
 
226 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 individual, and dwells upon them with an 
 indulgent satire. He seems to have laboured 
 under the disadvantage of an admiration for 
 Dickens. But he has presented his readers 
 with a wide variety of types, each studied con- 
 scientiously, and, above all, he has shown some- 
 thing more than their mere surface distinctions. 
 One of his greatest charms is his humanity. 
 Nothing that affects the happiness of man is 
 beneath his notice. He regards his neighbours 
 with a benevolent and cordial philosophy ; he 
 penetrates their motives, and describes their 
 actions in a spirit of kindly toleration, yet not 
 without, here and there, the salt of a caustic 
 * wit. Note the tenderness with which, in the 
 Piccolo Mondo Antico, he has drawn the ludi- 
 crous pathetic figure of * La Pasotti ' — her 
 deafness, her terror of her husband, her un- 
 quenchable goodness of heart — making her 
 lovable in spite of all her annoying absurdities, 
 and contrast her with D'Annunzio's brutal 
 picture of the old aunt Gioconda in the Trionfo 
 dell a Morte. You see at a glance the funda- 
 mental difference between the pagan and the 
 Christian outlook on life. It is not a question 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 227 
 
 of insight — in both cases the women are drawn 
 with a convincing reality, an elaboration of 
 detail — it is a question of the attitude of the 
 author towards human nature. D'Annunzio 
 sees only the repulsive exterior, and turns aside, 
 pitiless, his love of beauty outraged. Fogaz- 
 zaro penetrates to the soul, and his own soul 
 responds to the spiritual forces he discerns 
 there. 
 
 It has been customary to speak of Daniele 
 Cortis as being indisputably Fogazzaro's most 
 remarkable work. In my opinion, it is in the 
 Piccolo Mondo Antico that we see his talents in 
 their most attractive development. The book 
 is not without faults, but it is full of charm. 
 It is long, but never wearisome. It should be 
 read at leisure, in order that none of its delicate 
 qualities may be overlooked. The Piccolo 
 Mondo Antico^ into which the author introduces 
 his readers, is the ' little old world ' of the Val- 
 solda and other remote Alpine valleys lying 
 round Lugano. It is a district into which, even 
 to-day, the modern spirit of hurry and unrest 
 has scarcely penetrated ; and Fogazzaro's story 
 carries us back to the middle of the century, to 
 
4 
 
 228 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 the last years of Austrian domination. Un- 
 fortunately, the dialogue is written in great 
 measure in the special dialect of these southern 
 slopes of the Alps, a bewildering mixture of 
 French and Italian, which is almost incompre- 
 hensible to the foreigner. It is probably for 
 this reason that the novel is so little known 
 beyond the frontiers of Italy. It can hardly 
 be read with full appreciation by any one who 
 has not some previous acquaintance with local 
 modes of speech. The author's own position 
 in the matter has been adopted with full de- 
 liberation. He has laid it down as a literary 
 precept that, whereas it is manifestly an error 
 to make imaginary characters talk in pure 
 Tuscan, without reference to the province from 
 which they may come, it is equally a mistake to 
 reproduce dialect — as Scott reproduced it — in 
 all its native barbarity. A middle course must 
 be chosen by which the genius of the dialect 
 may be preserved without outrage to the 
 cultured ear. His attitude is interesting in 
 view of the fact that hitherto Tuscan alone has 
 been considered worthy to rank as a written 
 language, and the very efforts made to preserve 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 229 
 
 its purity are responsible to a certain extent for 
 the artificiality of the Italian literary language, 
 which differs so widely from the vocabulary of 
 daily speech. Manzoni, it will be remembered, 
 did not make any of the characters in / Pro- 
 messi Sposi speak in dialect ; but even Manzoni, 
 as Dr. Garnett has reminded us in his Italian 
 Literature, found it necessary to give his ro- 
 mance a thorough revision in order to bring its 
 diction nearer to the Tuscan standard, There 
 can be no doubt that his writing lost something 
 of its natural vigour in the process. Fogaz- 
 zaro's story gains, on the other hand, in vivid- 
 ness and individuality, and in a certain bonhomie 
 which seems to spring from the rustic familiarity 
 of his colloquial style, but it is not to be 
 expected that his innovation should be popular 
 among foreign readers. 
 
 Superficially, there is a noteworthy resemblance 
 in sentiment between Manzoni and Fogazzaro. 
 In their broad outlook on life, in patriotism, 
 in religious faith, in intimate comprehension of 
 the life of the Italian peasantry, they stand side 
 by side. The Manzonian feeling is specially 
 observable in Piccolo Mondo Antico y from the 
 
2 3 o ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 fact that it deals with the same Alpine district 
 as / Promessi Sposi, and even a space of two 
 hundred and fifty years brings but small 
 changes to remote Italian villages. Yet in 
 no sense can Fogazzaro be called an imitator 
 of his great predecessor. His work is essenti- 
 ally his own, and in the field of fiction it 
 covers many aspects of life on which Manzoni 
 never touched. The story of Ticcolo Mondo 
 Antko is very simple ; there is hardly any plot. 
 In the opening chapter we learn that Don 
 Franco Maironi, a young man of noble family, 
 loves Luisa Rigey, a young girl of beauty 
 and refinement, but his inferior in station. The 
 marriage is celebrated in secret ; Don Franco 
 is disowned by his aristocratic grandmother ; 
 and the young couple take up their abode in 
 an idyllic villa in the Valsolda with an uncle 
 of the bride. The remainder of the book is 
 concerned with the subtle influence of man 
 and wife on each other, and of their environ- 
 ment on both. The time is in the stirring 
 years between 1850 and i860, when hatred 
 of Austria in Lombardy and the Venetian 
 provinces was at its height, and when a noble 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 231 
 
 enthusiasm for freedom and unity inspired the 
 Italian youth of the day. Don Franco has 
 the artistic temperament, impulsive, enthusi- 
 astic, of quick sympathies, but lacking in 
 energy and perseverance. He is gifted with 
 a facile instinctive faith which accommodates 
 itself easily to his daily habits, and allows him 
 to follow his natural impulses, which are for 
 the most part good. He dreams of liberty 
 and national glory, and is content meanwhile to 
 waste his life cultivating his garden under 
 Austrian rule. Luisa is of much stronger mental 
 fibre than her husband, much more intellectual, 
 with an upright independent nature that clings 
 to right and justice for their own sake, and 
 to whom religious faith is not so much 
 antagonistic as superfluous. The incompati- 
 bility of temperament of husband and wife 
 soon shows itself. Franco is shocked by 
 Luisa's freethinking tendencies, as well as 
 secretly humiliated by her intellectual superi- 
 ority, and Luisa is disedified by her husband's 
 amiable inconsistencies of conduct. Even the 
 little daughter Maria, to whom both are pas- 
 sionately attached, threatens to become a source 
 
232 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 of domestic discord. For myself, I regret 
 that in a work whose great charm lies in its 
 delicate appreciation of half-tones, in its delib- 
 erate portraiture of the little things, the little 
 interests that go to make up the sum of life, 
 a catastrophe so gratuitous and so violent as 
 the drowning of the child should have been 
 introduced merely as a means of bringing to 
 a climax the relations between the parents. It 
 is the volatile Franco with his optimistic 
 nature and his firm faith in a future life who 
 bears the trial best, and derives strength from 
 it ; whereas Luisa, who had evolved for herself 
 a somewhat rationalistic conception of the 
 worlds justice, is crushed by what appears to 
 her the horrible injustice of depriving her of 
 her child. Husband and wife drift apart, and 
 Luisa finds her only consolation in seeking for 
 intercourse with her little daughter through 
 spiritualistic media. In this latter portion of 
 the story I am inclined to think the author 
 has allowed his moral convictions to override 
 his artistic perceptions. He feels that the 
 believing husband ought to bear tribulation 
 better than the unbelieving wife, and so he sets 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 233 
 
 himself to prove that such was the case. But 
 neither the despondency of Luisa nor the 
 superior virtue of Franco is quite convincing. 
 Neither the one nor the other is in entire 
 harmony with our previous conceptions of the 
 characters concerned. The transformation in 
 Franco is too abrupt ; and we feel that, quite 
 apart from supernatural motives, Luisa's own 
 nobility of character might have saved her 
 from the morbid excesses of her grief. Happily, 
 in the end her love for her husband is allowed 
 to triumph over her despair, for her coldness 
 is of the head and not of the heart, and the 
 book closes on a charmingly conceived recon- 
 ciliation on the eve of Franco's enrolment as 
 a volunteer in the war against Austria. Know- 
 ing as we do that the author's personal 
 sympathies are wholly on the side of his hero, 
 it is pleasant to note the sympathetic under- 
 standing with which, in the earlier chapters 
 at least, the personality of the heroine has been 
 drawn. Unlike the conventional Italian women 
 of romance, she is endowed with some measure 
 at least of intellectual perception, and with 
 an understanding of the undeveloped possi- 
 
234 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 bilities of life for her sex, outside the narrow 
 circle of husband, and lover, and children. 
 She is refined and high-principled, and the 
 somewhat assertive element in her nature has 
 in it no taint of masculinity. She is not 
 without points of contact with Elena, the 
 heroine of Daniele Cortis, but she is more 
 interesting, more lovable, and will remain, I 
 think, Fogazzaro's most successful feminine 
 creation. Yet the fullest charm of the story- 
 lies neither in Franco nor yet in Luisa, but 
 rather in the picture painted by Fogazzaro of 
 the human society of his remote Alpine valley. 
 If he fails in landscape drawing, he excels in 
 conveying a sense of the atmosphere that en- 
 velops his characters. He sees all the poetry 
 that permeates the lives of his circle of village 
 card-players, of the petty little society of cus- 
 tom-house officers and attorneys and priests 
 that clusters round the Marchesa Maironi. 
 He has a keen appreciation of the monotonous 
 sedentary life which is the normal fate of 
 dwellers in these regions — nothing in all the 
 book is more admirable than his long descrip- 
 tion of the tench-fishers sitting day after day 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 235 
 
 in solitary contemplation over their rods round 
 the lake — yet he is intensely sensitive to the 
 vivifying effect of some breath from the great 
 outer world which, from time to time, sweeps 
 through the valleys. In his portrait of the 
 benign old uncle Piero, indicated in a few slight 
 touches, we are made conscious of a spiritual 
 presence exercising a silent and beneficent influ- 
 ence on all who come within the radius of 
 his vision. Piero symbolises the whole tend- 
 ency of Fogazzaro's writing, which is to depict 
 the modulating power of spiritual forces 
 over the merely animal tendencies of human 
 nature. All through Ticcolo Mondo Antico 
 there is no question of illicit passion — perhaps 
 we have fallen here on the true explanation 
 of its restricted popularity among novel-readers 
 — yet no one can honestly assert that the 
 author is in consequence* less true to the facts 
 of the life that he depicts. His idealism is 
 of a quasi-religious character ; it does not 
 carry him up into heights from which the real 
 conditions of life become invisible. But both 
 he and his characters dwell in the pure bracing 
 air of the mountain, and there is something 
 
236 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 of its crystalline quality between the covers of 
 his book. 
 
 It was a conviction of the poverty of his 
 country in the sphere of fiction, and of her 
 entire dependence on foreign writers, that first 
 moved the young poet, author of Miranda, 
 a sentimental poetical tale, and of Valsolda, 
 a collection of descriptive and lyrical verses, 
 to turn his attention to romance. Lecturing 
 at Vicenza in 1872, Fogazzaro had bewailed 
 the necessity in which Italy found herself of 
 begging the daily bread of fiction from foreign 
 hands, and moreover of receiving from them 
 bread which was not only unpalatable, but 
 unwholesome. It was not till some years later 
 that he himself entered the lists with his novel, 
 Malonibra, which excited at once an eager 
 controversy among critics. Viewed in the 
 light of his later work, it is surprising that 
 this first effort should have called forth so 
 much favourable notice ; for its inferiority not 
 only to Piccolo Mondo Antico, but also to 
 Daniele Cortis, is immeasurable. The fact 
 offers one more proof — if proof were needed — 
 of the low ebb to which Italian literature had 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 237 
 
 fallen some twenty years ago. The most 
 obvious fault of Malombra is its amateurish- 
 ness. It is not lacking in interest, and it 
 gives evidence of unusual imaginative qualities, 
 but it is unsatisfactory both in conception and 
 execution. It is a medley of sentiments which 
 the reader is never able to unravel. The 
 author seems to have flung pell-mell into the 
 book all the material at his disposal as though 
 he were writing the one story of his lifetime, 
 and were anxious to keep nothing back. There 
 is no order, no sequence, no due sense of pro- 
 gression, and the reader, in spite of the well- 
 maintained interest of the plot, grows weary 
 and impatient. If, on the one hand, there is 
 a love of melodramatic mystery in the concep- 
 tion of the gloomy castle by the lake, its 
 ghost-haunted chambers and its eccentric owner, 
 which recalls the Byronic ideals of the early 
 century, we have, on the other, more strongly 
 than in any of Fogazzaro's later works, evi- 
 dences of purely Teutonic inspiration. It is 
 clear that he had not, at that time, digested 
 and assimilated the various influences which, 
 in his later work, detract nothing from his 
 
238 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 originality, while giving to his writing the 
 pleasant flavour of a refined culture. In oppo- 
 sition to his Italian heroine, Marina Crusnelli 
 di Malombra, he has placed his German heroine, 
 Edith, a typically serious and virtuous Teutonic 
 maiden, and between the two vacillates his 
 rather ineffectual literary hero Silla, whose 
 reflections on life seem to suggest at times 
 an autobiographical source. If passion draws 
 Silla into the arms of Marina, love and grati- 
 tude lead him back to the feet of Edith. 
 Curiously enough, the German Edith, as far 
 as I am aware, is the only one of Fogazzaro's 
 heroines that fulfils his ideal of feminine per- 
 fection. His own countrywomen appear to 
 him rather as causes of temptation than as 
 sources of inspiration. Luisa and Elena are 
 both lacking in religious principle, and are 
 only kept in the paths of virtue by the restrain- 
 ing influence respectively of Franco and of 
 Cortis. And Marina, from the first, is clearly 
 the Temptress incarnate. Marina lives in the 
 haunted castle with her recluse uncle, and has 
 already inveigled Silla into an anonymous 
 literary correspondence before fate brings him 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 239 
 
 to reside with her under her uncle's roof. 
 Then she insults him, and the relations of the 
 pair go through the conventional fluctuations 
 of passion and loathing. Marina's ill-regulated 
 mind has been rendered further unbalanced by 
 the discovery of some relics of an insane grand- 
 mother who had been imprisoned in the castle 
 for many years. Marina believes herself to be 
 a re-incarnation of the mad Cecilia. She too, 
 in the end, develops actual madness, and the 
 novel ends with a sensational tragedy. It is 
 in the climax that the main fault of the story 
 lies. As a ' motif/ lunacy seems to me supremely 
 inartistic in a romance ; it is outside character, 
 outside even of humanity, and once the insanity 
 is established, the psychological interest is at an 
 end. It should only be introduced — as in 
 Jane Eyre — in its influence on the lives of 
 others ; the victim himself can never be other, 
 from an artistic point of view, than an object 
 of repulsion. 
 
 The only novel Fogazzaro has written which, 
 strictly speaking, can be described as a roman 
 de mceurs is Daniele Cortis, perhaps the best 
 known of all his works. In it Fogazzaro has 
 
2 4 o ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 met the French novelists, so to speak, on their 
 own ground. The theme is one that might 
 have commended itself either to Bourget or to 
 Daudet in his later years. Around the con- 
 ventional situation of French fiction — a beauti- 
 ful woman placed between her husband and her 
 lover — the author has woven a study of Italian 
 political life, of the official and financial society 
 that clusters round Montecitorio. But the 
 treatment of the theme differs fundamentally 
 from that of his French contemporaries. From 
 first to last the book is a protest against mater- 
 ialism, against the subjection of Will to Passion. 
 In feeling it is purely idealist and sentimental. 
 It is not fair to regard Daniele Cortis merely as 
 an edifying tract, as a treatise in favour of the 
 sanctity of the marriage tie — Fogazzaro is too 
 accomplished an artist to thrust his moral down 
 the throats of his readers — but it is undeniable 
 that the book has a distinctly religious aim. 
 In it the author has emphasised the principles 
 which he has professed all through his literary 
 career. He has put himself into direct opposi- 
 tion to the tendencies both of his time and 
 his nation, tendencies of which D'Annunzio is 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 241 
 
 the most able exponent, and to which Verga, 
 Matilde Serao, de Roberti, and others have all 
 subscribed. It is here that his main claim to 
 distinction lies. It must have demanded no 
 little courage to take up so intransigeant 
 an attitude in moral questions, and to maintain 
 it unflinchingly to the end. Even the sternest 
 director of souls would have hesitated before 
 banishing Elena to Yokohama with her husband 
 under the circumstances. But the author never 
 vacillates. If we feel — as I think the reader 
 inevitably does feel — that throughout Daniele 
 Cortis artistic considerations have been in a 
 measure subordinated to what Fogazzaro has 
 held to be the moral necessities of the case, 
 it merely goes to prove that, charming and 
 accomplished novelist as he is, he yet lacks 
 the supreme artistic gift by which moral truths 
 are rendered irresistibly convincing and beauti- 
 ful to the average intelligence. We are all 
 apt to be bored by the eternal verities instilled 
 into us in our childhood. There is a super- 
 ficial staleness about them which alienates our 
 immediate sympathies. It is far easier for a 
 novelist to excite interest on behalf of the 
 
 Q 
 
242 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 transgressors, under special and plausible cir- 
 cumstances, of the great laws that bind Christian 
 society, than to uphold convincingly the neces- 
 sity for such laws. People's imaginations are 
 fired much more quickly by the exceptional 
 and accidental than by the normal and familiar. 
 Half the secret of the popularity of fiction lies 
 in this fact. It is only the supreme artists — 
 Flaubert and Balzac, Turgenev and Tolstoi — 
 who have declined to cater for man's super- 
 ficial craving for entertainment, and who have 
 painted humanity by the light of the great 
 eternal truths of life. For their reward they 
 have never attained to so-called c popular ' 
 recognition. Fogazzaro can scarcely be num- 
 bered with one of these ; yet, in virtue of the 
 serious and honest purpose of his work, he may 
 rightly claim our indulgence for faulty details 
 of execution. 
 
 Although the central motif of the novel is 
 the relation in which the heroine Elena stands 
 to her husband, the Barone di Santa Giulia, on 
 the one side, and to her cousin Daniele Cortis 
 on the other, the author covers far wider 
 ground than in the conventional roman pas- 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 243 
 
 sionnel. He possesses the art of introducing a 
 great many minor motives into his picture 
 without blurring the general effect. His talent 
 for character drawing is displayed in the care- 
 ful portrayal of the circle of worldly, gossiping, 
 kind-hearted friends, who surround Elena and 
 her mother, but he scarcely seems to me as 
 happy as in his delineation of humbler folk. 
 Then there is a study of Elena's uncle Lao, a 
 somewhal original type of hypochondriac, who 
 can forget his ailments sufficiently to cultivate 
 a very chivalrous devotion to his unhappy 
 niece. There is a charm and a sincerity in the 
 affection that binds uncle and niece which are 
 somehow lacking in the relations between 
 Elena and her cousin. Cortis is a rising poli- 
 tician, a member of the Italian Chamber, and a 
 good deal of space is given to his political 
 views and to the parliamentary situation of the 
 moment. It comes almost with a shock of 
 surprise to find politics and social subjects even 
 mentioned in an Italian novel. We gather 
 that Cortis has democratic tendencies, and that 
 his political sympathies are with the small body 
 of Liberal Catholics whose organ is the Ras- 
 
244 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 segna Nazionale. He is represented as the type 
 of man, rare in real life in Italy, and rarer still 
 in fiction, who does not allow his career to be 
 dominated by the passion of the moment. In 
 the midst of his love for Elena he remembers 
 the claims of his constituents ; and when he 
 loses her for ever, he telegraphs to his sup- 
 porters in Rome that he is entirely at their 
 service. It is very praiseworthy no doubt, but 
 somehow we cannot feel attracted by the man. 
 There is in Cortis, as in many admirable people 
 in real life, a touch of the prig. Honest and 
 upright he may be, but he is also self-righteous. 
 All through the book he makes discreet love 
 to his married cousin, deceiving both himself 
 and her as to whither they are tending ; yet 
 when the crisis is reached, it is with an almost 
 unctuous virtue that he recalls her to a sense of 
 her conjugal duty. Perhaps the only occasion 
 when we can really feel for him is in the first 
 scene between him and his mother at Lugano 
 — he, cold, tortured, dignified ; she, hypocriti- 
 cally pathetic. Madame Cortis had left her 
 husband a few years after Daniele's birth, and 
 her son had always believed her to be dead. 
 Suddenly she writes to him from Lugano ; and 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 245 
 
 the young politician, driven to visit her by a 
 sense of filial duty, finds her living under 
 squalid and suspicious circumstances in a fifth- 
 rate villa. The scene is admirable — no doubt 
 one of those which caused the Italian critic 
 Nencioni to declare that Fogazzaro's real 
 talents lay in the direction of the drama. His 
 dialogue at such times is commendably crisp and 
 vigorous, and in the merely technical qualities 
 of his work he has made palpable progress 
 since the days when he wrote Malombra. 
 Perhaps his more recent tendency is to put 
 too stern a restraint upon himself. The style 
 of Daniele Cortis is singularly reticent and 
 chill, almost dry. In his latest novel Fogazzaro 
 scarcely ever describes ; he merely relates. Even 
 Rome, strange to say, excites no emotions with- 
 in him, and although it is the scene of a large 
 portion of his story, he vouchsafes scarcely a 
 line to the Eternal City. His heroine Elena 
 is not very heroic, nor is she particularly attrac- 
 tive by her qualities, but she possesses the 
 charm of her intense femininity. All through 
 the book she vacillates between her sense 
 of duty on the one side, and her love for 
 her cousin on the other ; and although it is 
 
246 ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 
 
 undeniable that the greater portion of human 
 life is spent in a chronic state of vacillation, in 
 a vain effort after a workable compromise, we 
 are apt to demand in our fiction that the 
 characters should be above all things logical. 
 No one is logical in real life, yet a semblance 
 of logic seems essential in order to give reality 
 to an imaginary personage. It says much for 
 the author's skill in portraiture, and for his 
 discernment of the true forces that go to make 
 up character, that his helpless, storm-tossed 
 heroine should be as real and comprehensible 
 as she is. In the end Elena acts in accordance 
 with the author's idealistic conception of con- 
 jugal duty. She has a feminine capacity for 
 self-sacrifice, and having deliberately sacrificed 
 her own happiness, together with that of Cortis 
 and of her uncle, she sails for Yokohama with 
 her husband, who has never made any secret of 
 his indifference to her person. With her de- 
 parture Fogazzaro wisely brings his story to 
 a close — he would surely have had to repent 
 of his idealism had he been obliged to record 
 the havoc it must have wrought in this prosaic 
 world in the lives of all concerned. 
 
ANTONIO FOGAZZARO 247 
 
 To read the novels of Antonio Fogazzaro 
 and Gabriele D'Annunzio is to read the best 
 that Italian fiction can offer in two opposing 
 realms of thought. The two men stand poles 
 asunder — between them lies the whole field of 
 contemporary Italian literature. I will not 
 attempt to weigh their merits in the balance; 
 nor will I attempt the yet more futile task of 
 foretelling their influence on the literary future 
 of their country. What is essential is to realise 
 that they are the latest expression of unchang- 
 ing forces in the national life of Italy. They 
 counteract and complement one another ; they 
 can never be assimilated. To-day paganism is 
 triumphant in art, as it was triumphant in the 
 days of the Renaissance, and the most skilled 
 artificers in painting, in poetry, in music are 
 drawn within the radius of its potent fascin- 
 ations. But for those of us who love Chartres 
 Cathedral and Fra Angelico, the Divina Corn- 
 media, and the Imitation of Christ, the old taunt 
 that Christian Faith is destructive of true art 
 can bear no meaning, and we are content to 
 wait until the swing of the pendulum shall be 
 set in the opposite direction. 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 In attempting to form a critical estimate of a 
 foreign writer, there is nothing so difficult as to 
 arrive at any just appreciation of his position in 
 relation to the literary development of his own 
 country. We are apt, from sheer ignorance, 
 to regard him too exclusively from the stand- 
 point of our own literary ideals, and not 
 sufficiently from that of the country to which 
 he belongs. Too often he appears to us, gazing 
 from afar, as a solitary shining star, when in 
 reality he is but one of a cluster of constel- 
 lations. Every one will admit, in principle, 
 that some considerable knowledge of the lan- 
 guage, the literature, the history, the popular 
 characteristics of a nation is needful, before a 
 fair estimate of any individual author can be 
 arrived at. And yet we are all of us guilty at 
 times of basing our assertions on the most 
 slender stock of general information. For every 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 249 
 
 thousand persons who read the plays of Henrik 
 Ibsen with a certain measure of intelligent 
 appreciation, and pronounce judgment upon 
 him with an assumption of dogmatic infalli- 
 bility, there is probably scarcely one who could 
 give the barest outline of the history of Scandi- 
 navian literature even during the present cen- 
 tury ; certainly not one who can read the 
 dramatist in the original. True, if we refrained 
 from expressing an opinion concerning foreign 
 writers until we knew as much as, let us say, 
 Taine knew of England before he wrote his 
 History of English Literature, or, we may fairly 
 add, as Dr. Garnett knows of Italian literature 
 to-day, we should most of us be silent for a 
 lifetime. But it is at least becoming and 
 wholesome to remember our limitations, and to 
 bear in mind that at best our criticisms are apt 
 to be hasty and one-sided and spasmodic, and 
 that they run great risk of being gravely 
 deficient in a sense of proportion. 
 
 This is specially the case when we come to 
 deal with Slav literature. For the nations of 
 Western Europe the great Slav race is still, in 
 a sense, enveloped in mystery. In faith, in 
 
 
250 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 history, in temperament, its people are far 
 removed from ourselves. Their ideals differ 
 widely from our own ; their future contains 
 the promise of boundless possibilities, which as 
 a rival race we do not always contemplate with 
 equanimity ; and their life, as it stands revealed 
 to us by their literature, impresses us mainly 
 with a sense of its remoteness, almost of its 
 unreality. It is this very mystery which gives 
 to Slav literature a portion of its charm in the 
 eyes of Western readers. Through its pages 
 we learn to realise — partially, no doubt, and 
 without due proportion — a race, dreamy, emo- 
 tional, idealistic, full of a passionate faith and 
 patriotism, not wholly emancipated from Asiatic 
 fatalism, and with an under-current of melan- 
 choly, which, brought into contact with Western 
 civilisation, frequently changes to blackest pessi- 
 mism and unbelief. A deep chasm, that no 
 bridge can span, seems to separate the Slav 
 from the sturdy Teuton, from the sensual, 
 concrete Latin. Tolstoi and Turgenev, Gogol 
 and Dostoievsky have indeed revealed much 
 to us, and more may be learned from the mar- 
 vellous treasures of Slav folk-lore, which are 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 251 
 
 being gathered together by patient labour, and 
 brought within the reach even of English 
 readers. And yet for me there will always 
 remain some subtle, intangible element in 
 Slav nature which penetrates through Slav 
 literature, some elusive quality which seems to 
 defy the intelligence of the Western critic and 
 to render abortive all efforts to grasp in its 
 entirety the spirit of the race. 
 
 Something of this intangibility envelopes 
 the personality of Henry k Sienkiewicz. He 
 is not only a Slav, but a Pole, and within the 
 wide circle of the Slav nations the Poles have 
 many characteristics of their own. They alone 
 form a Catholic community in the midst of 
 orthodox environment. They alone, the first 
 of the Slav nations to emerge from barbarism 
 and to embrace Christianity, have fallen back 
 in the midst of that great uprising and spread- 
 ing of the Slav race which constitutes one of 
 the greatest historical facts of the nineteenth 
 century. The possessors of many attractive 
 qualities, the Poles have shown themselves 
 singularly lacking in the gift of self-govern- 
 ment. Unprotected by any natural boundaries, 
 
252 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 they have long ceased to represent a political 
 or geographical entity. And yet the Polish 
 nation still lives ; its language survives, and it 
 can claim to possess an art and a literature 
 illustrative of its highest aspirations. To-day 
 its most distinguished representative is the 
 novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz. He may be 
 accepted in a sense as the type of the modern 
 intellectual Pole. By birth and by education a 
 Catholic, an aristocrat and a conservative, he 
 has not wholly escaped the intellectual scepti- 
 cism of our time. A great traveller, a student 
 of social conditions under many and varied 
 circumstances, his mental attitude is that of an 
 onlooker rather than of an actor in life. He 
 has no philosophy to propound, no convictions 
 to preach ; with his own mind in a state of 
 suspense, he works as a painter rather than as 
 a teacher and writer. In spite of his remark- 
 able abilities, amounting almost to genius, and 
 his undoubted industry, there is not a little of 
 the dilettante in his attitude towards life ; but 
 the attitude is perhaps rather an intellectual 
 pose than the outcome of the limitations of his 
 nature. To a keen sense of the beautiful and 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 253 
 
 a luxuriant and romantic imagination he adds a 
 true and sympathetic appreciation of peasant 
 life. Yet he is in no sense a democrat. His 
 sympathy is that of the artist who sees the 
 beauty of simple, laborious lives and the 
 pathos of silent sufFering. If in his writings 
 he has glorified both the noble and the peasant, 
 it is because his own nation appeals to him 
 more vividly than any other, and the Polish 
 people consists mainly of an exclusive and 
 inefficient aristocracy and a vast, inarticulate 
 peasantry. To their faults and their fail- 
 ings, as well as to their sterling qualities and 
 their pervading charm, he has shown himself 
 uniformly sensitive. 
 
 It was by his short stories and his studies of 
 peasant life that Sienkiewicz first made his 
 reputation in Poland. Unfortunately, in their 
 very slightness of form and their delicate 
 felicity of language, they present special diffi- 
 culties to the translator ; and Mr. Jeremiah 
 Curtin, in spite of all his enthusiasm for his 
 author, cannot be said to have carried out his 
 task in an adequate manner. In his passion 
 for literalness his version is frequently obscure, 
 
254 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 and his phrases rough and unpolished. Hence, 
 without any acquaintance with the Polish lan- 
 guage, it is impossible to express more than a 
 tentative opinion concerning these essentially 
 national studies. Polish critics have lavished 
 what to English readers must seem almost 
 extravagant praise upon their truth, their 
 pathos, their marvellous insight into the life 
 of the people. I must confess that the strange, 
 weird little tale, Tanko the Musician, over 
 which all Poland sobbed and raved when it 
 was first published, some twenty years ago, 
 disappointed me not a little. I am perhaps 
 hard-hearted enough to think that the pathos 
 of childhood has been considerably overdone in 
 modern literature. And our power of sym- 
 pathy being, after all, very limited, this story 
 of a poor, little, half-witted peasant child is 
 perhaps too remote from our ordinary English 
 experience to touch us in any very convincing 
 fashion. The language, moreover, has been 
 robbed by translation of well nigh all its 
 beauty. Yet all who would learn to penetrate 
 into the life of the Polish people, to fathom 
 something of Slav nature in its primitive sim- 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 255 
 
 plicity, will find much that is suggestive in the 
 short sketches which in the English version have 
 been gathered together in the volumes entitled 
 lanko the Musician and Hania. In their rather 
 obvious pathos, their quick sympathy with 
 humble joys and sorrows, and their tone here 
 and there of humorous scepticism, they have 
 not a little in common with Alphonse Daudet's 
 early contes, the Lettres de mon Moulin. As 
 we read such tales as Bartek the Victor or The 
 Organist of Ponikla the Polish peasant seems to 
 emerge before us from his obscurity and take 
 on real flesh and blood. But Sienkiewicz is 
 capable of striking a far deeper note than 
 Daudet reveals. In Charcoal Studies, perhaps 
 the most famous of his shorter works, in the 
 story of the downfall of Repa and his wife, 
 there is all the tragedy of a great drama hidden 
 away beneath sordid circumstance. Sienkiewicz 
 is intensely sensitive to the passion of inarticu- 
 late grief; but, with true artistic sense, he 
 restrains himself in these tales of peasant life 
 within the limits of a simple, unadorned narra- 
 tive. Here is a word-picture of the woman 
 returning home after a futile effort to intercede 
 
256 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 with the authorities on behalf of her husband. 
 There is a haunting quality in the scene : — 
 
 * But Repa's wife ? Peasants when they 
 suffer merely suffer, nothing more. This 
 woman in the strong hand of misfortune was 
 simply like a bird tormented by a vicious child. 
 She went forward ; the wind drove her ; sweat 
 flowed from her forehead ; and that was the 
 whole history. At times, when the child who 
 was sick opened his mouth and began to pant, 
 as if ready to die, she called to him, <c Yasek, 
 Oh Yasek, my heart ! " And she pressed her 
 lips of a mother to the heated forehead of the 
 little one. She passed the pre-Reformation 
 Church, and went on into the field till she 
 stopped on a sudden — a drunken peasant was 
 coming toward her.' 
 
 As a historical novelist it is not possible to 
 classify Sienkiewicz in any school. By his 
 luxuriant imagination, his buoyant optimism, 
 and by the faith, the patriotism, and the love 
 of chivalry that illuminate his pages, he belongs 
 to the romantics. But he is a realist in the 
 veracity of his descriptions, in the grim reality 
 of his battle scenes, and in his relentless pictures 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 257 
 
 of war and all its attendant horrors. With 
 all his patriotism he is never blind to Polish 
 faults. In his great historical trilogy, 1 the 
 outcome of eight years' labour, he shows us 
 Polish nature at its best — idealistic, passionately 
 patriotic, instinct with Catholic faith, splen- 
 didly courageous, yet at the same time petty, 
 unreliable, jealous, and somehow accomplishing 
 little of permanent value. He deals with one 
 of the most critical periods in Polish history — 
 the latter half of the seventeenth century — 
 when Poland was assailed in turn by Cossack 
 and Tartar, by Turk and Swede, a period at 
 once of crushing blows and splendid victories. 
 Yet with all the fighting and fury, all the faith 
 and patriotism of these years, they lead up 
 inevitably to Poland's final defeat and ultimate 
 partition. Sienkiewicz himself is haunted by 
 a sense of what in another novel he has termed 
 ' l'improductivite Slave.' It is clear to writer 
 and reader alike that something essential is 
 lacking in this charming, emotional, inconse- 
 quent people ; and the sense of this lack, in 
 
 1 With Fire and Sword, 1 vol. ; The Deluge , 2 vols. ; Pan 
 Michael, 1 vol. 
 
 R 
 
258 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 which in a measure Sienkiewicz feels himself 
 to participate, gives an under-currrent of 
 melancholy to all his writing. 
 
 There is nothing conventional in his treat- 
 ment of historical themes. He has created a 
 veritable Round Table of famous knights, 
 each with his special characteristics and his 
 long roll of doughty deeds : the terrible Kmita 
 and Pan Michael, surnamed 'the little knight/ 
 the Falstaffian Zagloba, the soldier-prior Kor- 
 detski, and the pious Pan Longin, who dies 
 like St. Sebastian. In Azya and in Bogun we 
 have types of Go ssark ferocity and cunning, and 
 above these imaginary characters there tower the 
 great historical figures, drawn in bold, effective 
 outline : John Sobieski, the saviour of his country 
 and of Europe ; the Ruooia n leader Hmelnitski, 
 who worked such ruin for Poland ; the saintly 
 king Yan Kasimir ; and the arch-traitor Prince 
 Radziwill, who intrigued with Sweden against 
 his country's independence. Sienkiewicz's heroes 
 are real flesh and blood, men of wild courage 
 and unrestrained passions, capable at once of 
 heroic self-sacrifice and of the most implacable 
 vengeance. They do not effect miraculous 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 259 
 
 escapes from every danger according to the 
 approved methods of heroes of romance ; 
 rather, they die the death of valiant warriors 
 on the battlefield. And their women-folk, 
 whether they be stately and tender-hearted as 
 Olenka, the heroine of The Deluge, or intrepid 
 and impulsive as Basia, the fitting wife of Pan 
 Michael, follow their husbands in camp or 
 fortress, and share to the full in the fortunes of 
 war, even to being sold as slaves into Turkish 
 harems, the worst of all fates that awaited the 
 Christian women of those regions in moments 
 of defeat. Sienkiewicz never falls into the 
 snare of putting nineteenth century sentiments 
 on to seventeenth century lips. There was no 
 pity in those days either for heretics or traitors, 
 and the author shows none. Even after his 
 conversion, Kmita, the wild hero of The Deluge, 
 puts his enemy Kuklinovski to a slow and 
 horrible death, and gloats over his sufferings, 
 and rides away content, with a prayer on his 
 lips. He ruthlessly lets loose his Tartar 
 hordes on unoffending German and Protestant 
 villages to slay and plunder to their full, 
 though for long months he had held them in 
 
260 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 check from touching a Catholic or a Pole. 
 And he repeats his Aves in the midst of the 
 slaughter, feeling that he is doing the Lord's 
 work. It is difficult, with our highly devel- 
 oped humanitarianism, to put ourselves in 
 this frame of mind. That the author should 
 have done so is a testimony to his skill as a 
 writer of romance ; for I have not the small- 
 est doubt that it is absolutely true to the times 
 of which he is writing. Probably also, in spite 
 of Tolstoi's propaganda of the doctrine of 
 non-resistance to evil, the principles of uni- 
 versal toleration are not as yet very widely 
 diffused throughout the countries of Eastern 
 Europe. 
 
 'The Deluge, in spite of its really inordinate 
 length, is the most spirited and the most 
 engrossing of the historical tales. The book 
 opens with a charming picture of Olenka, the 
 heroine, sitting among her spinning maidens in 
 her ancestral home — a picture of peace — then 
 all the rest of the book tells of war and adven- 
 ture. Briefly put, it recounts the invasion 
 of Poland by Charles Gustavus of Sweden, the 
 treachery of some of the Polish nobles, and 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 261 
 
 the final expulsion of the Swedes through a 
 great uprising of the whole nation in defence 
 of their land and their faith. When Poland 
 already lay prostrate beneath the Swedish heel, 
 the invaders, in an evil moment for themselves, 
 decided to occupy the great shrine of Our 
 Lady of Chenstohova in the fortress-church 
 of Yasna Gora. At once Polish faith was 
 aflame ; devotion to the shrine effected what 
 even patriotism had failed to accomplish ; and 
 the almost miraculous defence of the fortress- 
 church against overwhelming odds proved the 
 turning-point in the war. The chapters telling 
 of the siege are written with a splendid spirit 
 and enthusiasm. For once the author has 
 abandoned his half-critical, half-sceptical atti- 
 tude towards life, and has allowed himself to 
 be carried away by the romance of his subject. 
 He writes in the fullest sympathy with the 
 robust Catholic faith of his forefathers. In 
 this connection it is possible to draw a very 
 instructive parallel between the attitude of 
 mind of the Polish novelist and that of two 
 contemporary writers of fiction — Zola and 
 Gabriele D'Annunzio. All three have described 
 
262 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 a popular pilgrimage to a shrine of the Blessed 
 Virgin — Zola in Lourdes, D'Annunzio in what 
 I can only describe as a singularly repulsive 
 chapter of the Trionfo delta Morte, and 
 Sienkiewicz in The Deluge. In all three cases 
 the external facts are absolutely identical ; we 
 have the same crowds of the poor and the 
 afflicted, the same frenzy of devotion concen- 
 trated upon a wonder-working shrine. But 
 whereas the two Latin authors can see nothing 
 but what is gross and repulsive in the merely 
 physical aspects of the phenomenon, the Slav 
 writer sees the same facts in all their spiritual 
 significance, transformed and illuminated by 
 faith. Materialism has not penetrated into 
 Poland, and Sienkiewicz puts on human actions 
 their natural interpretation, instead of distorting 
 them, as is the fashion among the disciples of 
 the so-called naturalist school, into illustrations 
 of their own narrow and perverted theories. 
 
 In Without Dogma we are transported into a 
 very different world. Rightly, I think, it has 
 been accepted as the author's ablest work, and 
 to many the subject will appeal as one of 
 engrossing interest. On me, I confess, the 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 263 
 
 book, with all its brilliant cleverness, made a 
 somewhat melancholy impression. It is the 
 history of a modern sceptic without faith or 
 morals, a man incapable of action, morbid, 
 egotistic, pitiless to others, but with mar- 
 vellously acute sensibilities. He is, in a word, 
 a Slav version of D' Annunzio's decadent Italian 
 heroes. Leo Ploszowski, who relates the 
 story in the first person, has been accepted 
 without much justification as a portrait of the 
 novelist himself — certainly a malicious one, 
 for Ploszowski is described as rendered sterile 
 through scepticism, cursed with what he him- 
 self has termed * l'improductivite Slave/ whereas 
 Sienkiewicz has justified his life by his work. 
 Portrait or no portrait, the author has clearly 
 intended to unite in the person of his hero the 
 opposing elements which have gone to build up 
 his own life. Ploszowski stands midway between 
 Paganism and Christianity, attracted and re- 
 pelled in turn by one and the other. To the 
 beauties of both he is acutely sensitive ; the ulti- 
 mate choice is never made. The dilemma, at 
 once ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic, possesses 
 a singular, and doubtless a personal fascination 
 
264 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 for the Polish novelist ; for, under altered con- 
 ditions, it forms the groundwork of his Roman 
 story, Quo Vadis. Ploszowski is merely the 
 modern equivalent of Petronius. Petronius 
 was the most exquisite product of the dying 
 pagan world brought into contact with nascent 
 Christianity ; Ploszowski is the latest product 
 of a recrudescent paganism, ready to spring up 
 wherever the Christian ideal has grown faint. 
 The conflict between the flesh and the spirit, 
 between paganism and faith, between the 
 philosophy of beauty and the doctrines of 
 Christ, is in all essentials the same, whether the 
 battlefield be modern Europe or ancient Rome. 
 And yet, happily, eighteen centuries of Chris- 
 tianity cannot be flung off by the mere wish ; 
 Christian ethics have penetrated too deeply 
 into our consciences through many generations. 
 We cannot, if we would, put ourselves wholly 
 back into the spirit of ancient Hellas. At 
 its best the attempt is but a pose, a graceful 
 affectation, which does not really correspond to 
 the inmost needs of our modern natures. At 
 its worst it is a mere cloak for sensual mater- 
 ialism. Sienkiewicz has put this truth into 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 265 
 
 words that seem to me worth quoting, for 
 they show that he himself has never been 
 wholly carried away by the specious arguments 
 which he places on the lips of his hero. 
 
 ' It seems to me/ he writes, ' that a Christian 
 soul, though the spring of faith be dried up 
 within him, cannot live altogether on the 
 mere beauty of form. . . . We are beings of a 
 different culture. Our souls are full of Gothic 
 arches, pinnacles, twisted traceries that we can- 
 not shake off, and of which Greek minds knew 
 nothing. Our minds shoot upward ; theirs, 
 full of repose and simplicity, rested nearer the 
 earth. Those of us in whom the spirit of 
 Hellas beats more powerfully, consider the 
 beautiful a necessity of life, and search after it 
 eagerly, but they instinctively demand that 
 Aspasia should have the eyes of Dante's 
 Beatrice. A similar longing is planted within 
 me. When I think of it, that a beautiful 
 human animal like Laura belongs to me, and 
 will belong as long as I wish it, a twofold joy 
 gets hold of me — the joy of the man and the 
 delight of the artist ; and yet there is a want, 
 a something missing. On the altar of my 
 
266 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 Greek temple there is a marble goddess ; but 
 my Gothic shrine is empty/ 
 
 If the author has given to paganism the 
 ascendency in the case of Ploszowski, he has 
 caused Christianity to triumph in the person 
 of the hero's cousin Aniela. Briefly, the 
 book is the history of the spiritual combat 
 between the two. A marriage has been arranged 
 between them by their respective families, and 
 Aniela has already betrayed her readiness to be 
 wooed, when, impelled partly by circumstances, 
 partly by his own indolent egotism and by a 
 temporary enslavement to a beautiful American 
 in Rome, Ploszowski rejects the proposed 
 alliance in an insulting manner. Aniela, for 
 financial and family reasons, marries a man 
 quite unworthy of her, and immediately the 
 dormant passion in Ploszowski awakes, and he 
 hurries back to his ancestral home with the 
 deliberate purpose of overcoming Aniela's 
 scruples and winning her for himself. The 
 cousinship, the temporary absence of the 
 husband, and the fact that Aniela as the guest 
 of his aunt is living under his own roof, give 
 him every advantage of circumstance. But 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 267 
 
 the weapons on which he mainly relies in his 
 cold-blooded scheme are his own intellectual 
 superiority, and an assumption of a wider moral 
 understanding and enfranchisement from anti- 
 quated superstitions. It is a situation that has 
 been frequently depicted in modern French 
 fiction, but, as a rule, with an entirely different 
 denouement. The comparison is interesting as 
 emphasising one of the many points of differ- 
 ence between the ethical ideals of the Slav and 
 the Latin races. According to the contempo- 
 rary French novelist — to M. Bourget, let us 
 say — Aniela would have been compelled to 
 yield to Ploszowski as to some superior force ; 
 his worldly philosophy and his somewhat hollow 
 protestations would have triumphed over her 
 scruples, for the simple reason that there would 
 have been nothing in her nature capable of 
 opposing an inflexible resistance. It would be 
 inconceivable to M. Bourget and his school that 
 a beautiful woman could resist. Sienkiewicz, 
 who treats the situation not only with exceed- 
 ing elaboration of detail, but with an almost 
 painful familiarity with the baser workings of 
 a man's perverted imagination, approaches his 
 
268 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 heroine from an entirely different standpoint. 
 He belongs to a nation whose women have been 
 as celebrated for their faith and their virtue as 
 for their personal charms ; and if he insists, as 
 he has insisted, on the force of the temptation ; 
 if he has provided Aniela with every worldly 
 excuse for giving herself to the man she has 
 always loved, it is only to bring out more 
 emphatically the strength of her powers of 
 resistance. He is conscious all through — and 
 the thoughtful reader is conscious with him — 
 that, being the woman she is, Aniela can never 
 yield. All Ploszowski's specious arguments, all 
 his eloquence, all his intellectual superiority fall 
 to the ground before Aniela's simple statement : 
 ' Everything may be proved in some way or 
 other ; but when we do wrong, our conscience 
 tells us, cc It is wrong, wrong," and nothing can 
 convince it to the contrary.' Conscience is 
 invincible. The story ends with the entry, 
 c Aniela died this morning.' And Aniela's 
 resistance is frankly founded by the author on 
 her religious faith, on the invincible strength of 
 purity which Christianity alone has developed, 
 but which does exist to-day in the normally 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 269 
 
 constituted woman. It is one of those essential 
 truths which modern novelists, with all their 
 boasted psychology, have lost sight of. Aniela 
 is a type : M. Bourget's women remain ab- 
 normal exceptions. And what I have said of 
 the heroine of Without Dogma is true of well 
 nigh all Sienkiewicz's heroines. We escape 
 entirely in his books from the neurotic, hysteri- 
 cal women who have been allowed to hold the 
 field unchallenged in much recent fiction, and 
 still more in recent drama. Sceptic as Sienkie- 
 wicz frequently shows himself, he has no scepti- 
 cism where women are concerned. His female 
 characters are all heathy, normal women, neither 
 prudes nor wantons, women of warm hearts 
 and simple, strong passions, and generally of 
 unswerving fidelity. It is probably fair to 
 assume that he has painted them as, in the 
 main, he has known them in his own country, 
 and his experience has not been without influ- 
 ence on his whole attitude towards life. I 
 emphasise the point, as it has been customary 
 to identify his views in every particular with 
 those of Ploszowski rather than with those of 
 Aniela. I think myself they must be identi- 
 
270 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 fled with neither ; rather both extremes indicate 
 the two points between which the pendulum of 
 his mind swings. He writes, as I have said, 
 with his mind in suspense, and he seldom takes 
 upon himself the duty of pointing a definite 
 moral. 
 
 Quo Vadis is the only one of Sienkiewicz's 
 books with a clearly didactic aim, and artisti- 
 cally it has suffered not a little from the 
 fact. Nevertheless, it is by ghio Vadis that his 
 European — as distinct from his Polish — reputa- 
 tion has mainly been made. Stories of early 
 Christian times have, not unnaturally, always 
 enjoyed a wide popularity. The planting of 
 Christianity in Rome, and the final absorption 
 of the great Roman Empire within the Chris- 
 tian commonwealth, is probably the most 
 stupendous fact in all history. Hence it is 
 not surprising that Sienkiewicz's novel, dealing, 
 not without considerable power, with some of 
 the momentous years of the struggle, should 
 have carried his reputation through Europe 
 far more quickly than any of his previous 
 romances. Written but a couple of years ago, 
 it has already been translated into almost every 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 271 
 
 European language. Nevertheless, I should 
 not for a moment put Quo Vadis on the same 
 literary level as Without Dogma, or as some 
 of the early Polish tales. It is in the main a 
 study of mere exteriority ; it is a rich mosaic 
 elaborately pieced together bit by bit. Written 
 after much conscientious research, it lacks as a 
 romance both grace and spontaneity. It con- 
 tains little characterisation, and very little of 
 that sympathetic identification of the author with 
 his subject which constitutes one of the main 
 charms of his national romances. Sienkiewicz 
 has himself been overburdened at times with 
 his own learning, and having laboriously ac- 
 quired it, he has not had the fortitude to deny 
 himself the pleasure of inflicting it on his 
 readers. It was impossible for him to fling 
 himself into the life of the ancient Romans 
 with the verve and energy with which he treats 
 of the Polish heroes who were his own direct 
 ancestors. Moreover, the modern world is so 
 impressed with the stateliness of the Roman 
 character, that it is singularly difficult for us to 
 realise the civis romanus in his moments of ease 
 and mirth. All this necessarily militates 
 
272 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 against the success of the book as a work of 
 art. But with these limitations I am ready to 
 admit that much of the story is exceedingly 
 interesting. For all who love Rome of the 
 present day, the resuscitation beneath the hand 
 of the novelist of the ancient city, of which 
 to-day we can only see a few glorious frag- 
 ments, possesses a wonderful charm. One 
 would give a great deal to view the busy Forum, 
 the stately crowds passing to and from the 
 Capitol, the undimmed glory of the temples 
 which rise before one's mental vision as one 
 peruses Sienkiewicz's pages. He has chosen 
 as the moment of his story the reign of Nero 
 with all its excesses and debauchery, and the 
 arrival of St. Peter and St. Paul in the city. 
 As in Without Dogma, he has sought his effects 
 in strong contrasts placed side by side. On 
 the one hand tyranny and violence, lust and 
 luxury, the grimly grotesque figure of Nero 
 looming over all ; on the other, meekness and 
 longsuffering and the teachings of Christ. 
 The decadence of Rome heralds the dawn of 
 modern Europe. There is no glossing over 
 the state of Roman society in the first century. 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 273 
 
 Sienkiewicz grapples with it boldly, and with- 
 out unduly emphasising gross details, the facts 
 are plainly stated with all the honesty which is 
 one of his greatest merits. Without the early 
 chapters, describing in luxuriant detail the 
 magnificence of the Roman palaces and the 
 wild orgies that took place in them, the reader 
 could not have appreciated the full horror of 
 the burning of the city, and the subsequent 
 persecution of the Christians. Without the 
 pagan love of Petronius for Eunice, he would 
 not have perceived so clearly the spiritual bond 
 that united Vinicius to Lygia. It is character- 
 istic of our author that of all the personages 
 he introduces, it is Petronius alone who seems 
 to appeal to him, and who, consequently, 
 appeals also to us. Petronius, the man of the 
 world, the arbiter elegantiarum of his day, the 
 most exquisite type of refined paganism, a life- 
 long worshipper of beauty, nevertheless wavers 
 before Christianity, and dimly perceives its 
 mysterious power, and thus he is brought 
 within the sphere of our nineteenth century 
 sympathies. For the rest, Lygia is the con- 
 ventional Christian maiden of fiction, whose 
 
274 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 fate it is to be saved from the lions, and no 
 one else stands out from the crowded picture 
 with any distinctness. 
 
 These three series of books taken together 
 — the historical romances, §)uo Vadis and 
 Without Dogma — show the broad sweep of 
 Sienkiewicz's talents. He has not only done 
 admirable work, but he has done a great deal 
 of it. I have not touched on the innumerable 
 descriptions of nature scattered through his 
 pages, which are held by his countrymen to 
 constitute one of his highest claims to fame, 
 because it is impossible to judge of them ade- 
 quately in the only translations we possess. 
 But all can appreciate his skill in human por- 
 traiture. He has created a veritable picture 
 gallery, not only of Polish knights and ladies, 
 but of men and women in every rank of life, 
 who stand out from the canvas in clear, crisp 
 outline. He has made the silent, inarticulate 
 Polish peasant human and comprehensible to 
 readers living thousands of miles away. As a 
 story-teller, pure and simple, he deserves very 
 high rank. And the atmosphere of his books 
 is, in the main, pure and wholesome. He has 
 escaped all contact with the naturalist school of 
 
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 275 
 
 France — already, happily, a thing of the past 
 — and in an age when an assumption of cosmo- 
 politanism has come to be regarded as a proof 
 of superior culture in writers of fiction he has 
 had the courage to remain frankly Polish in 
 his sympathies and predilections. His weak- 
 ness lies in the tinge of dilettantism that infects 
 much of his work. His attitude towards life 
 is tentative and uncertain ; he has never frankly 
 taken up a position either on one side or the 
 other. If his books have gained in elaborate- 
 ness of analysis and in a sympathetic apprecia- 
 tion of life under very varying aspects, they 
 have certainly lost in robustness and vigour. 
 Undoubtedly, the strongest and truest emotion 
 of which Sienkiewicz is capable is his patriotism, 
 and it is by his patriotism that he will live. 
 He has written of life in all ages and in many 
 lands, but I venture to think it is only on 
 Polish soil and dealing with Polish nature that 
 he can claim to be an artist of the first rank. 
 It will not be as the author of Quo Vadis^ but 
 rather as the interpreter of the genius and the 
 aspirations of a now vanished nation, that his 
 name will be honoured in the future. 
 
WAR AND PEACE 
 
 When Tolstoi wrote War and Peace, he wrote 
 the great prose epic of the nineteenth century. 
 It is only from Russia that such an epic could 
 come. It is only the Slav race that in our 
 own day could provide the material for a 
 work at once so vast in its proportions and so 
 heroic in its incidents. War and Peace pre- 
 sents all the characteristics of the true epic ; 
 it is an imaginative work based on a great 
 national upheaval, permeated by an intense 
 patriotism. It is something much more than 
 an historical romance. It has given voice to 
 a national ideal, and it has placed on permanent 
 record in a popular form the deeds of valour 
 on which the power of an Empire is based. 
 Tolstoi has celebrated the first emergence of 
 his country from Asiatic barbarism, the first 
 entry of the great Slav Empire into the con- 
 clave of European nations. He has painted 
 
 276 
 
WAR AND PEACE 277 
 
 a war which in magnitude both actual and 
 potential far outweighs any other war of 
 modern times, and he has painted it in all its 
 far-reaching effects on the life and develop- 
 ment of the people, in all its spiritual signi- 
 ficance. And this history of his nation is 
 typified in the life-history of a number of 
 imaginary personages, men and women so 
 real and so human, that they break down the 
 barriers that divide race from race, and render 
 intelligible to the outside world a national life 
 of strongly marked characteristics. Surely in 
 such a scheme there is something little short 
 of Homeric. 
 
 War and Peace, though it occupied many 
 years in writing, belongs in its entirety to the 
 earlier portion of the novelist's career. The 
 first chapters appeared in serial form in 1865, 
 and it was ten years later before he published 
 his second great novel, Anna Karenina. The 
 period of composition coincided with years 
 of doubt, and inquiry, and mental growth in 
 the life of the author, years that led up to the 
 final evolution of his later philosophy of life, 
 the philosophy founded on the words, * Resist 
 
278 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 not Evil.' Towards the close of his epic there 
 are indications that his theories have taken 
 on a more definite shape, but throughout the 
 greater part of the work they exist only in a 
 latent condition.. They give colour and atmo- 
 sphere to his pictures and life ; they give vigour 
 to his grasp of social problems, but they are 
 subordinate to the artistic intention. In War 
 and Teace Tolstoi writes as an artist, not as 
 a teacher, whereas since the publication of 
 Anna Karenina he has written as a teacher, 
 and his artistic gifts have been subordinate to 
 his moral aims. We have heard so much of 
 late years of the Count in his role of reformer 
 and moralist and preacher of a new Chris- 
 tianity, that we are apt to forget that he is 
 also, and indeed primarily, a great artist. 
 War and Peace, like Anna Karenina, is, above 
 all, a superb work of art, and it is surely 
 worth while putting aside for the moment 
 those philosophic considerations that spring 
 from his writings to inquire into the special 
 gifts of perception and style and construction 
 which entitle him to a foremost place among 
 the imaginative writers of the century. 
 
WAR AND PEACE 279 
 
 It is customary to place War and Peace as 
 a work of art on a lower level than its successor. 
 In reality, no comparison is possible between 
 them. Anna Karenina takes undisputed rank 
 among the half-dozen greatest novels of the 
 century. War and Peace must be judged by 
 an entirely different standard. The very title 
 itself — unless we accept it as a presumptuous 
 misnomer — is a guarantee that the book is 
 something more than a roman de mceurs. If 
 we once accept the view that it is an epic 
 and not a novel, the main accusation brought 
 against it, its inordinate length, falls to the 
 ground. For an epic is of necessity long. 
 The Iliad y The jEneid, The Divina Commedia, 
 are all of exceeding length. True, in War 
 and Peace there are certain longueurs with 
 which all but the most enthusiastic disciples 
 of Tolstoi would gladly dispense, pages of 
 philosophy, most of which are omitted in the 
 French translation, and descriptive interludes 
 such as the hunting episodes at Otradnoe, 
 which do not help forward the story in any 
 appreciable manner. Yet bearing in mind 
 the vast scope of the enterprise — the present- 
 
2 8o WAR AND PEACE 
 
 ment of a great nation in war-time and in 
 peace — there are few scenes which do not 
 complete in one direction or another the 
 author's scheme. 
 
 Again, we can dispense with unity of interest 
 more easily in a prose epic than in a novel, 
 although it must be admitted that the greatest 
 of novelists have frequently selected the widest 
 canvases for their themes, and that Tolstoi 
 himself in Anna Karenina has given us con- 
 currently two threads of interest, with no 
 necessary connection between them, in the 
 love story, on the one hand, of Vronski and 
 Anna, and on the other of Levine and Kitty. 
 An epic gives us a certain march of events 
 seen both in their general effects and in their 
 individual application. This is precisely what 
 Tolstoi has done in War and Peace. There 
 is no plot properly so called. He takes us 
 from the drawing-room to the battlefield, and 
 back again to the peaceful routine of country- 
 house life. He conducts us through several cam- 
 paigns, and shows how in the brief intervals of 
 peace the nation returned with avidity to its 
 normal occupations. The history of the various 
 
WAR AND PEACE 281 
 
 characters introduced is closely interwoven with 
 the course of public affairs ; each is treated in 
 turn. Thus the reader roams necessarily over 
 an exceedingly wide field. There are centres of 
 interest in different parts of the Russian Empire, 
 bound together by very slender threads ; there is 
 the circle of society at Moscow and the circle at 
 St. Petersburg ; there are at least three heroes, 
 Pierre Besukov, Nicolas Rostov, and Prince 
 Andre ; and if there is but one heroine, Natasha 
 — for who can approach Natasha in interest ? — 
 there are several other ladies, Sonia, Elena 
 Besukov, and the Princess Marie, who each 
 claim a considerable share of our attention. 
 Side by side with the fictitious characters 
 there is a long list of historical personages — the 
 Emperor and his entourage and all the generals 
 and aides-de-camp who figure in the campaign. 
 This numerous company is handled by the 
 author with an amazing freedom and sureness 
 of touch. Each one is endowed with an indi- 
 vidual humanity, with an elaborate network of 
 qualities and emotions, the threads of which 
 are never allowed to tangle. Nothing could 
 be more admirable in technique than the 
 
282 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 opening chapter in which the elegant crowd 
 that thronged the salons of Anna Pavlovna at 
 her evening party is introduced to the reader. 
 The inane futility of society gossip is laid 
 bare, but it is done without a sneer, with a 
 wide toleration and comprehension of human 
 frailty. I cannot refrain from contrasting the 
 scene with the presentment of society given 
 to us recently in The Ambassador. In Mrs. 
 Craigie's play but a single motive, social 
 jealousy, inspires the whole of the dialogue, 
 which quickly wearies by the automatic 
 brilliancy of the repartee and the monotony 
 of the type presented. In Tolstoi's dialogue, 
 under practically identical circumstances, the 
 identity of every speaker is preserved in the 
 delicate give-and-take of refined social inter- 
 course, and the cross currents of love, jealousy, 
 vanity, curiosity, each find a place. 
 
 The trait which more than any other seems 
 to me to distinguish Tolstoi from the success- 
 ful French novelists of the day is, that whereas 
 their first effort is to explain their characters 
 to their readers, to make them logical, to 
 account for all their actions, Tolstoi realises 
 
WAR AND PEACE 283 
 
 from the first that human nature can never 
 be explained in its entirety ; that behind all 
 that can be seen and accounted for there lie 
 unseen forces which may act at times with 
 volcanic results. He realises that every human 
 soul is to a great extent, to the outside world, 
 a terra incognita, that it is wrapped in mystery, 
 that the element of certainty in respect to it 
 is in very small proportion to the element of 
 uncertainty. It is just because Tolstoi pro- 
 fesses to understand so much less than the 
 average novelist that we know that he under- 
 stands so much more ; he does not attempt 
 the impossible, but he throws flashes of light 
 into the prevailing darkness ; and what he 
 reveals to us, he reveals with all the more 
 convincing effect because of the surrounding 
 gloom. 
 
 What is true of his character- drawing is 
 equally true of his pictures of war. The 
 ordinary military historian is ready to point 
 out how every operation, every manoeuvre, is 
 the result of some carefully prepared plan. 
 He reduces the science of war to a mathema- 
 tical calculation, and affects at least to believe 
 
284 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 that a general holds his army in the palm of 
 his hand to do with it as he lists. For Tolstoi 
 war is, above all things, the clashing of blind 
 forces ; and a great battle is a catastrophe pre- 
 cipitated, not by the deliberate scheming of 
 tacticians, but by the resistless action of vast 
 bodies of men, impelled to butcher one another 
 by some common sentiment. How much and 
 how little a general can direct the process of 
 events in war may be seen from his description 
 of the great Russian General Bagration on the 
 field of Austerlitz : — 
 
 c He (Prince Andre) was very surprised to 
 see that in reality Prince Bagration did not 
 give any orders, and contented himself with 
 trying to show that his general intentions were 
 in perfect accord with what in reality was the 
 simple result of the force of circumstances, of 
 the will of his subordinates, and of the caprices 
 of chance. And yet, in spite of the turn 
 events were taking, quite outside the range of 
 his anticipations, Prince Andre was obliged to 
 admit that his tactful demeanour made his pre- 
 sence of the highest value. The very sight of 
 him gave renewed self-possession to those who 
 
WAR AND PEACE 285 
 
 had approached him with agitated counten- 
 ances. Officials and soldiers saluted him gaily, 
 and vied with one another in displaying their 
 courage in his presence/ 
 
 A thousand unexpected chances intervene 
 between plans and their execution. Soldiers — 
 even German soldiers — are not machines, and 
 the battlefield is not a chess-board, and high 
 above all the proposals of man there hovers 
 inexorable fate, which plays in the Slav imagina- 
 tion of to-day almost as commanding a role as 
 in the Greek imagination of old. And so 
 Tolstoi does not attempt to account for that 
 which is unaccountable ; but he conveys a sense 
 of the grandeur and the awfulness of war, and 
 of the helplessness of the individual units 
 engaged in it, with far greater effect than the 
 most competent expert on military tactics could 
 achieve. He sees it, not only in its physical 
 aspects, but in its moral and historical signifi- 
 cance, and the least impressionable of readers 
 must carry away from his epic a fuller and 
 truer conception of war than he had before. 
 For myself, I confess that I have never been 
 able to follow intelligently the description of a 
 
 
286 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 campaign in any history. For me, Tolstoi 
 alone possesses the art of making military 
 operations both comprehensible and attractive. 
 And one of the reasons is his wonderful faculty 
 for disintegrating an army, for making us 
 realise individually the human atoms of which 
 it is composed, instead of allowing us to regard 
 it merely as a compact mass of human material. 
 We see each of his characters under fire in 
 turn — Prince Andre, Pierre, the two Rostov 
 brothers — and the emotions of each are de- 
 picted with searching discernment. The cour- 
 age, the bonhomie, the endurance of the Russian 
 soldier are brought out in a hundred instances. 
 Tolstoi's usual method in dealing with a cam- 
 paign is to give, on the one hand, a general 
 impression in a few broad decisive lines ; and, 
 on the other, to fill in the picture here and 
 there with a number of detached personal 
 experiences, sometimes trivial in themselves, 
 but related in great detail, and invariably 
 selected to bring out the human side of the 
 situation. In this way the campaign of 1805, 
 with all its complicated manoeuvres, leading up to 
 the battle of Austerlitz, which forms the central 
 
WAR AND PEACE 287 
 
 episode of the first volume, is rendered extra- 
 ordinarily dramatic. We have a series of 
 photographic views of the Emperor Alexander, 
 of Kutusov, of Bagration ; and we follow in 
 turn the fortunes of Nicholas Rostov and Prince 
 Andre on the battlefield, culminating in the 
 meeting of Rostov with the Russian Emperor 
 in the moment of defeat, and the interview of 
 Andre with Napoleon in the hour of his 
 triumph. 
 
 The whole of the third volume centres round 
 the battle of Borodino and the burning of Mos- 
 cow. The appalling nature of the event, and 
 the vastness of the issues at stake, inspire the 
 author with a passionate defence of his country. 
 He shows us how the calamity worked in the 
 end for good, and how it marked a turning- 
 point in the history of the Empire. He makes 
 us realise that the invasion of Russia by a 
 foreign foe, and the destruction of her capital, 
 depended on something far deeper than the 
 personal ambition of Napoleon, or the jealousies 
 and blundering of the Russian headquarter staff. 
 He shows us the inevitableness of the French 
 retreat, their helplessness in the face of Russian 
 
288 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 patriotism, which, in their work of mere 
 aggression, they could oppose with no corre- 
 sponding sentiment. He devotes many pages 
 to the philosophy of Borodino — a battle con- 
 cerning which military critics have never 
 arrived at an agreement — and sums up the 
 meaning of the fight in a paragraph, instinct 
 with his wide vision of life : — 
 
 ■ The victory which the Russians won at 
 Borodino . . . was one of those victories 
 which force upon the soul of the aggressor the 
 double conviction of the moral superiority of 
 his adversary and of his own weakness. The 
 French invading army was like some wild beast 
 that had burst its chains, and had received a 
 mortal wound in its flank ; it knew that it was 
 hurrying to its death, but the momentum 
 had been given, and at all risks it was bound 
 to reach Moscow. The Russian army, on the 
 other hand, although twice as weak, was driven 
 inexorably into further resistance. There at 
 Moscow, still bleeding from the wounds of 
 Borodino, its renewed efforts resulted inevit- 
 ably in the flight of Napoleon, in his retreat 
 by the same road along which he had advanced, 
 
WAR AND PEACE 289 
 
 in the almost total loss of the 500,000 men 
 who had followed him, and in the destruction 
 of Napoleonic France, upon whom there had 
 descended at Borodino the hand of an adver- 
 sary, possessed of superior moral worth ! ' 
 
 Mingled with the fate of the Empire we 
 have the fate of the main characters of the 
 book. Princess Marie is driven from her 
 home at Lissy-Gory by the invaders ; and 
 the Rostov family takes part in the flight from 
 Moscow, which resulted in Napoleon waiting 
 in vain at the gates of the city for the Boyars 
 to come and do obeisance before him. Much 
 of the campaign is related through the personal 
 experiences of Prince Andre Bolkonski and 
 Pierre Besukov. They represent the military 
 and the civil element in the great struggle for 
 national liberty. Prince Andre, a typical 
 soldier, intelligent, self-confident, and a little 
 hard, is wounded at Borodino ; and we have a 
 long description of his sufferings, of his treat- 
 ment in the ambulance tent, of his sensations 
 during the retreat. But side by side with the 
 realistic details there is the thread of his spiri- 
 tual experiences, which we are never allowed to 
 
 T 
 
290 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 lose sight of. Pain, suffering, the near 
 approach of death, are all appointed means of 
 spiritual enlightenment. Bit by bit the 
 mystery of life becomes revealed to the 
 wounded officer, as he is jolted in his travel- 
 ling carriage out of Moscow, in that hasty 
 flight of a whole city at the approach of the 
 invader, or as he lies at night on his camp-bed 
 in his temporary halting-places. The infinite 
 pettiness of this life is made plain to him ; he 
 becomes detached from all earthly interests, 
 and a strange and radiant sense of wellbeing 
 takes possession of his soul. His resentment 
 against Natasha is at an end, and it is she who 
 sits by his side and ministers to his wants while 
 he awaits the advent of death. The luminous 
 pages describing the last supreme struggle are 
 as full of spiritual consciousness as an essay by 
 Maeterlinck ; the majesty of death reigns over 
 all, so imposing that the personal grief of 
 sister and of 'fiancee is hushed before it, and they 
 await the inevitable in silence. Only a supreme 
 artist could have disentangled the essential 
 meaning of events from out of the strife and 
 turmoil of a campaign ; and from the artistic 
 
WAR AND PEACE 291 
 
 point of view, Tolstoi has written nothing 
 more admirable than these pages. 
 
 Pierre Besukov is in all respects the opposite 
 of his friend Prince Andre. In him Tolstoi 
 has combined many of the essential character- 
 istics of the Slav race, and he is the mouth- 
 piece of Tolstoi's most cherished convictions 
 on life and morals. We feel that between 
 Pierre and the author there is on many points 
 so complete an assimilation of ideas as to 
 confer upon the former something of an 
 autobiographical interest. It is through him 
 that the great moral lessons of the book are 
 taught. For a hero, he is a strange clumsy 
 figure ; but we realise from the first that behind 
 his apparent timidity there lies a latent energy 
 which in due time will take effect. He is full 
 of faults, he is careless, selfish, addicted to drink 
 and gambling ; but in his nature there are 
 infinite possibilities of goodness and gentleness 
 and all-embracing charity, without which, as 
 the author teaches us, there can be no true 
 greatness. Pierre is a dreamer, and while 
 pondering over the mystery of life he stumbles 
 badly in his temporal affairs. He drifts, he 
 
292 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 hardly knows why, into a marriage with Elena 
 Kuragine, the most beautiful woman in St. 
 Petersburg. He does not love her, but her 
 beauty has appealed to his lower instincts, and 
 his will is paralysed by a sense of the fatality 
 of life. Tolstoi describes the scenes preceding 
 the betrothal with an almost brutal candour ; 
 we know that hundreds of marriages are made 
 so, but no one save Tolstoi has shown the 
 repulsive features so clearly through the gilding 
 of conventional society. The marriage turns 
 out a ghastly failure ; Pierre fights a duel with 
 his wife's lover ; and in a moment of blind rage, 
 to which his great physical strength renders 
 him liable, he almost threatens to kill Elena 
 herself. Travelling from Moscow to St. 
 Petersburg, he is detained at a posting-house, 
 and falls into conversation with one Basdaiev, 
 a Freemason. Basdaiev, with unerring candour, 
 tells Pierre some home truths ; and we feel that 
 the questions he puts to him were questions 
 that Tolstoi must have asked of himself at a 
 certain stage of his career, and have felt him- 
 self unable to supply the answer. 
 
 ' If you look with horror on your life/ 
 
WAR AND PEACE 293 
 
 declares Basdaiev, ' change it, purify yourself, 
 and as fast as you succeed in reforming your- 
 self you will learn to know wisdom. How 
 have you spent your life? In orgies, in 
 debauchery, in immorality, taking everything 
 from society and giving nothing in exchange. 
 How have you spent the fortune that you 
 inherited? What have you done for your 
 neighbour? Have you given a thought to 
 your tens of thousands of serfs? Have you 
 come to their assistance either morally or 
 materially ? No ! you know you have not. 
 You have merely profited by their labour to 
 lead a corrupt existence. You have spent your 
 life in idleness.' 
 
 This conversation is a first turning-point in 
 Pierre's career. Henceforward, although in 
 many respects he leads the same life as before, 
 continuing to drink and gamble and frequent 
 low company, he never again is able to stifle 
 the inner voice of conscience. He becomes a 
 Freemason ; he practises philanthropy ; he 
 tries to ameliorate the condition of his serfs. 
 It is of no avail. He cannot rid himself of his 
 evil habits ; and, above all, he cannot rid him- 
 
294 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 self of the hideous incubus of his marriage and 
 of the false position in which he is placed by 
 his wife's conduct. His chivalrous love for 
 Natasha is the one bright spot in his life of 
 failure and disappointment. It is only when 
 Elena dies, when the great national crisis of 
 1 8 1 2 opens his eyes to much to which he had 
 been blind before, and, finally, when he lives in 
 daily intimacy with Karataiev, during the long 
 weeks when he is dragged as a prisoner in the 
 rear of the French army, that his spiritual con- 
 version is definitely effected. Karataiev, even 
 more than Pierre, is a character difficult for 
 the Western mind to grasp. He is a typical 
 Russian peasant, with all the simplicity and 
 affectionate goodness and strong religious faith 
 of his class at its best. He combines absolute 
 stoicism under suffering with an imperturbable 
 gaiety of mind. * Why make yourself miser- 
 able ? ' he asks Pierre, as they lie side by side 
 on the floor of the crowded prison. f We 
 suffer an hour, and we live a century/ His 
 insensibility to material wants is not the insen- 
 sibility which pertains to a lower order of 
 nature ; he has acquired it, because he has 
 
WAR AND PEACE 295 
 
 raised himself above that which is temporary 
 and unessential in life. His days in prison are 
 spent in little acts of unostentatious kindness ; 
 his charity is all-embracing ; he does not even 
 neglect a stray cur that has crept in among 
 the prisoners. When he dies — shot down by 
 the French because he is too weak to follow 
 the retreating army — he dies in silence, with 
 an expression of grave serenity in his eyes. 
 Tolstoi is penetrated by a sense of the beauty 
 of Karataiev's nature. The little peasant 
 moves through the pages of War and Peace as 
 though crowned with a halo ; and he seems to 
 belong, not to our materialistic nineteenth 
 century, but rather to the same plane of spiri- 
 tual existence as the band of ecstatic Franciscans 
 who gathered round the Saint of Assisi in the 
 beautiful Umbrian plain. He personifies all 
 that the Count holds highest and best in human 
 nature ; and it is in keeping with the author's 
 whole attitude towards society that this supreme 
 example should be met with among the untaught 
 Russian peasantry. Karataiev has all the pas- 
 sive virtues ; pride and self-seeking have no 
 part in him. Pierre meets with him at a 
 
296 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 critical moment in his life, when the sufferings 
 he had gone through, and the horrors he had 
 witnessed, had filled his soul with despair, and 
 had extinguished his faith in God. Contact 
 with essential goodness is more persuasive than 
 any sermon, and Pierre learns from Karataiev 
 what no one else had been able to teach him. 
 It is as a prisoner, deprived not only of the 
 luxuries to which he was accustomed, but even 
 of the very necessaries of life, that he acquires 
 the peace of mind that he has sought for in 
 vain all his life. And he finds it in the renun- 
 ciation of the things of this world, in the renun- 
 ciation of his own will, and in the identification 
 of himself, his interests, his aspirations with 
 those of the great human family around him. 
 This is the moral teaching of War and Peace ; 
 but it is conveyed so eloquently in the progress 
 of the epic, in the gradual evolution of the 
 character of Besukov, that the author has no 
 need to enforce it by deliberate argument. It 
 pervades the whole story, and to it is owing a 
 portion at least of that lofty grandeur of con- 
 ception which gives to the work its unique 
 place in literature. 
 
WAR AND PEACE 297 
 
 If we wish to ascertain how much more than 
 a mere picture of a campaign Tolstoi has given 
 us, we may turn for comparison to a recent 
 military novel, which has deservedly attracted 
 considerable attention. I refer to Le Besastre 
 by the brothers Margueritte. It gives the 
 history of the Franco-German war up to the 
 fall of Metz, interwoven with a slight thread 
 of romance, and it is written throughout in a 
 tone of moderation, almost of bonhomie, which 
 one would not have expected to find under the 
 circumstances in a French author. Some of 
 the descriptions, that of the Emperor quitting 
 the army, and the cavalry charge at Gravelottes, 
 are admirable pieces of writing ; and we have a 
 gruesome, yet not overladen, picture of the 
 delays, the blunders, the incapacity which led 
 to the final capitulation of the French army. 
 The authors have had to contend with the ex- 
 ceptional difficulty of investing with a romantic 
 interest an uninterrupted series of military 
 disasters, disgraceful alike to the army and 
 the nation, and to have built up so readable 
 a narrative from such depressing material is 
 proof of no slight literary dexterity. Yet 
 
298 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 something indefinable is missing, something 
 that throws the halo of poetry over the scenes 
 in War and Peace, something that constitutes 
 the irresistible charm of Tolstoi's book. The 
 very obvious merits of Le Desastre only serve to 
 render the charm between it and War and Peace 
 the more marked : it is the immeasurable 
 difference between a work of genius and one of 
 painstaking merit. 
 
 But the book before us is not all war and 
 moral philosophy ; it has its lighter, almost its 
 frivolous side. Tolstoi's wide outlook on life 
 does not blind him to the details of domestic 
 life, to the characteristic futilities of social 
 intercourse. Not Jane Austen herself chronicles 
 the small talk of her characters with greater 
 zest and accuracy than the seer of Yasnaia 
 Poliana. Even so banal a subject as a girl's 
 first ball he invests with a delightfully fresh 
 aspect. The doings and sayings of quite young 
 people possess a special charm for him ; his 
 sympathy with their aspirations is complete and 
 intuitive ; and his description of the school- 
 room party in the Rostov mansion, their 
 quarrels and flirtations and innocent escapades, 
 
WAR AND PEACE 299 
 
 while written with no apparent motive save 
 that of the raconteur, serve as a valuable basis 
 for his masterly studies of character. He has 
 a wonderful faculty, a supreme gift in a novel- 
 ist, of winning our sympathies for his charac- 
 ters almost with a word. His few touches 
 describing Lisa Bolkonski, the c little princess ' 
 at Anna Pavlovna's evening party, her gay 
 smile, her childish manner, her bewitching 
 upper lip, with the slight down upon it, endear 
 her to us straightway. He paints her with all 
 the tenderness of one who knows that a great 
 tragedy is to befall her. Lisa in reality is an 
 uninteresting, frivolous little person, and Tolstoi 
 is quite conscious of the fact ; yet when she 
 dies in childbirth with a scared interrogative 
 expression on her upturned face, as though she 
 were asking of one and all, 'What have you 
 done to me ? ■ we understand, better perhaps 
 than we understood before, the capacity for 
 suffering that is inherent in even the most 
 trivial human soul. Another quite subsidiary 
 character, who yet is endowed with an extra- 
 ordinary charm, is Petia, the youngest member 
 of the Rostov family. He is simply a high- 
 
3 oo WAR AND PEACE 
 
 spirited schoolboy, who at sixteen, in the 
 terrible year of the taking of Moscow, per- 
 suades his reluctant parents to allow him to 
 enlist. Nothing in all the long battle scenes 
 brings home the horror of war more piercingly 
 than the little episode of the boy-soldier losing 
 his head in the excitement of his first skirmish, 
 and galloping wildly to his death. And his 
 mother's tears — though a mother's grief at the 
 loss of a son is the very commonplace of war — 
 affect us like some personal sorrow. 
 
 It is Tolstoi's intense humanity, his capacity 
 for putting himself in the place of each of his 
 characters in turn, for seeing life from their 
 point of view, that gives to them their appeal- 
 ing charm. They are so real, so like ourselves, 
 that we can enter into all their feelings, all their 
 follies and temptations. Of no one is this 
 more true than of Natasha, the most delightful 
 of heroines. We love her from the moment 
 of her first appearance on the stage, Natasha at 
 thirteen, in a short muslin frock, tearing into 
 her mother's drawing-room with a doll in her 
 arms ; or, again, at the big family banquet, 
 raising her shrill little voice to ask her mother 
 
WAR AND PEACE 301 
 
 down the long table, ' Mamma, what pudding 
 will there be ? ' And yet Natasha is far from 
 a model young lady. She flirts openly with 
 Denissov and her music-master ; she is engaged 
 first to Boris Droubetzkoi, her playmate, then 
 to Prince Andre ; and in the absence of the 
 latter during the period of betrothal, she 
 attempts to elope with the worthless Anatole 
 Kuragine in a wild fit of uncontrollable passion. 
 She nurses Prince Andre when he is wounded 
 with an absorbed devotion, and mourns him 
 sincerely ; yet but a few weeks later, urged on 
 by the irresistible needs of her nature, she is 
 giving definite encouragement to Pierre Besu- 
 kov. It is her intense naturalness, her virginal 
 candour, which save her from all blame. There 
 is a straightforward simplicity about the Rus- 
 sian character which is not to be met with 
 in our more sophisticated Western States. 
 Russians are far closer to primitive society than 
 we ; they have scarcely more than a century of 
 civilisation behind them. Natasha is an impul- 
 sive child, and she follows the dictates of her 
 untamed girlish nature, of her buoyant animal 
 spirits. Love is a necessity to her ; as a child 
 
302 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 she adored Sonia, her mother, her brothers, 
 and demanded constant proofs of their affection. 
 Her love for Prince Andre is genuine, but she 
 cannot endure his cold self-restraint, his appa- 
 rent indifference to her feelings ; she frets and 
 fumes at his absence ; and in a moment of 
 hysterical craving she is ready to give herself 
 to the handsome Anatole, who has appealed to 
 all her lower instincts. The sufferings and 
 the tragedy of 1 8 1 2 leave their mark on her, 
 as on every one, and it is a tamed and subdued 
 Natasha who marries Pierre in the end. But 
 even in marriage she is very far from imitating 
 the conventional type of the perfect wife. She 
 is frankly jealous and exigeante, and we learn 
 that she neglected all those outward charms 
 and accomplishments by which the prudent 
 spouse is supposed to hold her husband in 
 bondage. In this, however, she seems to act 
 in accordance with the Count's own views of 
 wifely conduct. For we are told with some 
 asperity that it would have appeared as ridicu- 
 lous to her husband as to herself had she 
 worried him with her elegant pretensions, and 
 that their happiness rested on something far 
 
WAR AND PEACE 303 
 
 more solid than the poetic charm that first 
 attracted Besukov to her. 
 
 How far Natasha fulfils Tolstoi's ideal of 
 womanhood I cannot say; but it is clear from 
 the way in which his pen lingers round her, 
 chronicling her most fugitive thoughts and 
 actions, that he entertains for her to the full 
 that indulgent affection that he has known how 
 to excite on her behalf in all his readers. It is 
 in a quite different spirit that he describes the 
 Princess Marie Bolkonski, the sister of Prince 
 Andre. She is drawn with a tender reverence, 
 for his model was his own mother. But even 
 Princess Marie is not idealised. We are told 
 that she had a wooden figure and walked on 
 her heels ; we are shown her plain face with 
 her hair drawn back from her forehead and her 
 blotchy complexion ; but her innate purity and 
 goodness transpires through it all, and her 
 beautiful smile makes up for every deficiency. 
 Even in the scene when Prince Basil comes to 
 ask her hand in marriage for his son Anatole — 
 for Princess Marie is an heiress, and Anatole has 
 run through his father's fortune — and her sister- 
 in-law dresses her up to receive her prospective 
 
30 4 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 lover, and renders her plainer than ever, her 
 refined distinction of soul carries her with 
 dignity through the ordeal. 
 
 The picture of life at Lissy-Gory in its 
 appalling monotony, the old Prince tyrannising 
 alike over daughter and dependants, and scar- 
 ing away possible visitors by the inflexible 
 rigidity of his demeanour, is as characteristically 
 true of one aspect of Russian provincial life in 
 the past as the gay and reckless hospitality of 
 the Rostov family at Otradnoe is true of 
 another. Through Princess Marie the reader 
 is brought in touch with one of the most 
 curious developments of Russian religious life, 
 the poor pilgrims whose days are spent wander- 
 ing from shrine to shrine, supported by the 
 arms of the faithful. Many of them are little 
 better than idle beggars, yet among them is to be 
 found much of the vague but sincere religious 
 sentiment which in England finds an outlet in the 
 dissenting bodies, but which in Russia can find 
 no free expression save within the recognised 
 boundaries of the Orthodox Church. Princess 
 Marie herself, a model of humility and good- 
 ness, deeply reverenced her humble friends ; 
 
WAR AND PEACE 305 
 
 she even kept a pilgrim's robe hidden away in 
 her cupboard, hoping some day to don it and 
 to share at once in their material privations 
 and their spiritual ecstasies. The scene when 
 Andre and Pierre come upon the Princess 
 giving tea to two representatives of ' God's 
 people ' in her s itting-room is so intensely 
 Slav in sentiment, that for us of Western 
 Europe it is like peeping into another world. 
 We know that it is painted from life, for 
 Count Tolstoi surrounds himself with these 
 humble pilgrims in his home in the country. 
 And if he does not always approve of the 
 forms in which religious zeal clothes itself in 
 Russia, he is in the fullest sympathy with the 
 spirit that inspires them, and he writes of 
 them with an unquestioning reverence. 
 
 There is no need for Tolstoi to award praise 
 or blame to his characters ; he never explains 
 when they should be deserving of either ; they 
 speak for themselves. His sinners are as human 
 as his saints ; and there is not one for whom, 
 almost unconsciously, he does not enlist some 
 measure of our sympathy. Often his silence 
 will enlighten as much as the speech of another. 
 
306 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 Of Elena he paints nothing save the beautiful 
 exterior ; we understand, without being told, 
 that her nature is rotten to the core, that there 
 is no soul to illuminate the exquisitely chiselled 
 mask of her face. Even to Dologhor and 
 Anatole he allows a few elementary virtues; 
 his sense of the universal frailty of mankind is 
 too keen for him to indulge in harsh judg- 
 ments. He sees with unerring perception the 
 double nature that is in each one of us. 
 Nothing is more masterly in its very slightness 
 than his analysis of the character of Prince 
 Basil, the father of Anatole and Elena. The 
 ordinary novelist would have shown him merely 
 as a worldly intriguer ; but somehow Tolstoi 
 makes us feel that there was in him some 
 subtle personal element which gave him dis- 
 tinction, and we are almost ready to forgive 
 him his unscrupulous scheming. Yet we know 
 that in his three worthless children he has the 
 punishment he deserves. 
 
 That the author of two such books as War 
 and Peace and Anna Karenina should have 
 relinquished novel- writing for any other work, 
 however engrossing and important, cannot but 
 
WAR AND PEACE 307 
 
 be a matter of regret for all lovers of romantic 
 literature. It is a sacrifice on the altar of duty 
 with which in this instance it is difficult to feel 
 in sympathy ; for Count Tolstoi takes his 
 place among the very greatest of novelists. 
 He may not possess the delicate pellucid charm 
 of a Turgenev, or the descriptive power of 
 a Flaubert ; he may not be a stylist like 
 Theophile Gautier, but none the less he is a 
 giant in the world of romance, such another 
 giant as Victor Hugo. Though in many 
 respects they stand poles asunder, both Hugo 
 and Tolstoi are endowed with a patriarchal 
 greatness which places them in a class apart in 
 their respective countries. And Les Miserables 
 has always seemed to me the one and only 
 novel which in imaginative power and vastness 
 of conception can claim to be judged by the 
 same standard as War and Peace. It also is 
 rather an epic than a romance. Each is the 
 fruit of a mighty brain, compared with which 
 the many clever little writers of to-day seem 
 puny indeed. By his literary work Count 
 Tolstoi belongs, together with Turgenev and 
 Gogol and Dostoievski, to that middle of the 
 
308 WAR AND PEACE 
 
 century which in Russia, as in France, was a 
 golden age in romantic literature. His friends 
 and contemporaries are dead, but the Count 
 still lives, a venerable bearded figure in the 
 garb of a moujik boldly preaching an inter- 
 pretation of Christianity carried to a logical 
 conclusion from which men in all ages have 
 shrunk. He has put behind him the writing 
 of romances as unworthy dilettantism, as a 
 dangerous tampering with the evil things in 
 our social system. And yet — so different are 
 the ultimate judgments of posterity from our 
 own, and from those of our contemporaries — 
 it may well be as the author of Anna Karenina, 
 and the writer of the greatest prose epic of 
 his century, that the would-be social reformer 
 will receive the permanent homage of man- 
 kind. 
 
 Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
Messrs. DUCKWORTH & CO.'S 
 
 NEW BOOKS. 
 
 LYTTELTON, THE HON. MRS. NEVILLE, 
 and WARD, MRS. HUMPHRY. 
 
 JOUBERT: A Selection from his Thoughts. 
 
 Translated by Katharine Lyttelton, with a Preface 
 by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Crown Zvo, pp. xlii. + 224. 
 With a specially designed cover, dull gold top, 5«y. net. 
 Limited Edition of Seventy - five Copies, printed 
 throughout upon Japanese Vellum, and bound in 
 parchment. Price £1, is. net. 
 
 Messrs. Duckworth & Co. have pleasure in announcing the 
 publication of the above translation of the Pensees dejoubert by 
 the Hon. Mrs. Neville Lyttelton, with a Preface by Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward. 
 
 Of Joubert (1754- 1824) Matthew Arnold {Essays in Criticism, 
 First Series) spoke thus : — ' With Joubert, the striving after a 
 consummate and attractive clearness of expression came from no 
 mere frivolous dislike of labour and inability for going deep, but 
 was a part of his native love of truth and perfection. The delight 
 of his life he found in truth, and in the satisfaction which the 
 enjoying of truth gives to the spirit ; and he thought the truth 
 was never really and worthily said so long as the least cloud, 
 clumsiness, and repulsiveness hung about the expression of it. . . . 
 He is the most prepossessing and convincing of witnesses to the 
 good of loving light. Because he sincerely loved light, and did 
 not prefer to it any little private darkness of his own, he found 
 light ; his eye was single, and therefore his whole body was full of 
 light. And because he was full of light, he was also full of 
 happiness. In spite of his infirmities, in spite of his sufferings, in 
 spite of his obscurity, he was the happiest man alive ; his life was 
 as charming as his thoughts. ' 
 
MODERN PLAYS 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON and N. ERICHSEN. 
 
 MESSRS. DUCKWORTH & CO. have pleasure in announcing 
 that they have arranged to issue a series of Modern Plays. 
 
 It is the aim of this series to represent, as widely as possible, 
 the activity of the modern drama — not confined to stage perform- 
 ance — in England and throughout the continent of Europe. It so 
 happens that, though translations seem to be more in demand 
 every day, the greater number of the Continental dramatists are at 
 present little known in this country. Among them will be found 
 predecessors and followers of Ibsen or Maeterlinck, as well as 
 others who reflect more independently the genius of their own 
 country. 
 
 Lovers Comedy, which marks a transition from the early romantic 
 to the later social plays, is the only important work of Ibsen's not 
 yet translated into English. The name of Strindberg, whose 
 position in Sweden may be compared to that of Ibsen in Norway, 
 will be almost new to the English public. Villiers' La Revolte is 
 a striking forecast of The DoWs House. Verhaeren is already 
 known here as one of the foremost of Belgian writers, who, like 
 Maeterlinck, uses the French tongue ; and Brieux is among 
 the most attractive of the younger native French dramatists. 
 Ostrovsky's The Storm, painting 'The Dark World, 5 is generally 
 recognised as the characteristic Russian drama. The Convert, by 
 Stepniak, will be specially interesting as its author's only dramatic 
 attempt. 
 
 The work of translation has been intrusted to English writers 
 specially conversant with the literatures represented, who, in many 
 cases, are already associated in the public mind with the authors 
 they are here interpreting. Every play will be translated in 
 extenso, and, if in verse, as nearly as possible in the original 
 metres. The volumes will contain brief introductions, biblio- 
 graphical and explanatory rather than critical, and such annota- 
 tions as may be necessary. 
 
 The volumes will be printed in small quarto, and they will cost, 
 as a rule, 2s. 6d. net. or 3s. 6d. net. each. 
 
 3 Henrietta Street, 
 
 Covent Garden, W.C. 
 
 1899. 
 
EARLY VOLUMES 
 
 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 'Les Aubes.'— Arthur Symons. 3*. 6d. net. 
 
 OSTROVSKY 
 
 * The Storm.'— Constance Garnett. 3*. 6d. net. 
 
 MAURICE MAETERLINCK 
 
 'Interieur.' — William Archer. 
 
 \ An ^° rt d ( e p T i nta ?" es ; ) ALFRED Sutro. V . 6A net. 
 
 * Alladine et Palomides. J 
 
 AUGUST STRINDBERG 
 
 'The Father' {Fadren). — N. Erichsen. 
 
 HENRIK IBSEN 
 
 1 Love's Comedy ' {Kjcerlighedens Komedie). 
 Prof. C. H. Herford. 
 
 VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM 
 ' La Revoke 
 
 /olte.'V 
 >ion.' / 
 
 .Theresa Barclay. 
 L Evasion. 
 
 SERGIUS STEPNIAK 
 
 'The Convert.'— Constance Garnett. 
 
 HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ 
 
 'On a Single Card.'— E. L. Voynich. 
 
 BRIEUX 
 
 'Les Bienfaiteurs.'— Lucas Malet. 
 
 Arrangements are also in progress with representative dramatists 
 of Germany, Spain, Italy, and other countries. Further transla- 
 tions have been promised by Dr. Garnett, Messrs. Walter 
 Leaf, Justin Huntly MacCarthy, G. A. Greene, etc. 
 
CLODD, EDWARD. 
 
 TOM TIT TOT. An Essay on Savage Philosophy 
 in Folk-Tale, by Edward Clodd, sometime President 
 of the Folk- Lore Society, Author of ' The Childhood 
 of the World,' ' The Story of Creation,' ' Pioneers of 
 Evolution,' etc. etc. Crown Svo, art canvas. $s. net. 
 
 Dealing with a venerable Suffolk version of Grimm's well-known ' Rumpelstiltskin,' 
 Mr. Clodd endeavours to show that the main incident in the story contains a world- 
 wide and much-varied superstition, which, confusing persons and things, has given 
 rise to a set of curious beliefs and customs. 
 
 Literature.—' A pleasant and useful introduction to the whole subject of folk-lore 
 inquiry.' 
 
 Times — * Mr. Clodd has collected a most interesting pot-pourri of folk-lore facts 
 more or less connected with the eponymous tale which forms the nominal subject of 
 these inquiries. All this makes very pleasant reading, as might have been antici- 
 pated from Mr. Clodd's reputation as a populariser. The variant of the old tale is by 
 far the most dramatic and vivid of all European versions. He has written an ex- 
 tremely interesting book, full to the brim of quaint pictures of savage philosophy and 
 peasant superstition.' 
 
 Daily Chronicle.— « Tom Tit Tot is the hero of a delightful East Anglian story in a 
 racy English dialect. It is one of the most helpful and stimulating handbooks on the 
 general subject of folk-lore mythology which we remember to have seen, and folk-lore 
 students will appreciate it as a masterly treatment of one of the principal groups of 
 folk-tale.' 
 
 St. James's Gazette.— 4 It will readily be believed that the book is packed with 
 erudition : what would, perhaps, be less easy to conceive is the very positive fact that 
 it is also full of the most excellent reading.' 
 
 Saturday Review.—' It is impossible in reading his fascinating chapters not to 
 admire the skill with which he has grouped his examples. It is all very interesting, 
 very clever, very erudite, and all these qualities are found in Mr. Clodd's writings. 
 There is solid matter carefully arranged, throughout a book which is, he tells us, 
 mainly designed for popular reading. Apart from its lighter side, enough has been 
 quoted to show that Mr. Clodd's book is well worth serious study even by those who 
 do not quite accept his estimate of folk-Iorist achievement.' 
 
 Manchester Guardian. — 'He has succeeded in producing a thoroughly readable 
 volume, which forms a handy resume of the more important aspects of folk-lore, and 
 ought to prove popular in the best sense of the word.' 
 
 Birmingham Gazette 'Mr. Clodd has performed a most valuable work for all 
 
 students of folk-lore, and his researches and facts entitle him to the warmest 
 appreciation.' 
 
 MARTYN, EDWARD, and MOORE, GEORGE. 
 
 THE HEATHER FIELD and MAEVE. 
 
 Two Plays by Edward Martyn, with an Introduction 
 by George Moore. Pott 4to. $s. 
 
FOURTEEN DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 MAp/WHK 
 
 
 
 
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