Léon Hennique Novel

“In abstraction, dream and symbol.”

M. Taine

Until Science finally arrives at its inevitable destination in Mysticism, the intuitions of Dream forge ahead, already celebrating this marriage—still to come yet already sealed—between Religious and Scientific sensibility in an aesthetic celebration where humanity’s profound desire to reunite all its powers through a return to original simplicity reaches its apotheosis.

This return to simplicity is the whole of Art. Genius, like Love and like Death, consists in liberating from accidents, habits, prejudices, conventions and all contingencies that element of eternity and unity which shines beyond appearances, deep within every human essence.

The singular, unity—here is the affirmative, divine number. The plural decomposes and negates. Great artistic ages speak of Art. Mediocre ages speak of the arts. Great ages dawn and close societies: first the Poet takes in the world at a single glance, with a single thought, and what he conceives, he expresses in a single gesture. Then details claim his attention, and expression shifts from the simultaneous to the successive. For this analytical task, the Poet—once also guide of men and priest—fragments his own being, steps down from the throne, abandons the altar: the Poet becomes the artist. But the artist too gradually splinters; the sublime symbol of the Lyre grows antiquated, preserves an archaic resonance in the silent music of verse, then vanishes altogether, and the artist dwindles into the craftsman of literature, the craftsman of music, the craftsman of painting. This is the age of division and mediocrity. But gradually analysis, exhausted by its own enterprise, permits the craftsman to recall the artist, and the artist, peering into remotest antiquity, catches sight of the Poet’s quasi-divine form. Then a great new and ultimate age is born, and as analysis had fragmented Art into the arts, synthesis restores Art to its primitive, central Unity. Still, we must reckon with those ephemeral elements that make up life—with space and time. Space and time inevitably split Art into two camps: the arithmetical camp of Poetry and Music, the geometrical camp of Painting, Architecture and Sculpture. To fuse both camps into perfect unity, to return sound and light to the single, primordial vibration—this is a superhuman conception, impossible save in God. Yet both camps represent twin effects of the same ideal radiance. They share a twofold unity—of cause and effect, of origin and end—a twofold unity, one might say, at once central and peripheral, within the common consciousness of the Poet and his witnesses. For these periods of artistic concentration coincide, providentially, with the twilight of gospels, and the Poet resumes his priestly office from humanity’s dawn; what Musician and Painter articulate in these moments of synthesis is the bedrock of all human longing and belief; it is humanity itself in the threefold reality of thought, feeling and sensation: the Musician’s word and the Painter’s word affirm the same truths, and in the sublime image the Poet impresses upon minds through the senses, the boundaries of immediate artistic expression dissolve—Verse conjures faces and landscapes before the listening soul; Colour summons poems and symphonies before the watching eye. Synthesis in Thought, in Idea and in Expression. Metaphysical Art. Aesthetic religion, the ultimate religion. Nevertheless, each Art must remain itself, mirroring through symbolic means, as it were, the effects of its sister arts. These means we shall examine for literary art—the others lie beyond my province.

Restricting ourselves, then, to our precise subject, let us observe: that the great Analysis of the last three centuries now commands this age to embrace the logical imperative of synthesis; that having studied man successively in his soul, in his sentiments, and in his sensations through a literature of precision that borrowed its methods almost entirely from the geometric arts (which are fixed and static), the work of the new poets is, in essence, to EVOKE THE WHOLE OF MAN THROUGH THE WHOLE OF ART—preserving, naturally, the virtues of the geometric arts, whilst enriching them with poetry’s distinctive resources and those of the other arithmetic arts, which are sequential, fluid, and ever-shifting: the law of Rhythms succeeding the law of Proportions; that Analysis necessarily had to immobilise its singular object, arrest it, and thereby express it, whereas Synthesis, to render its threefold object, must seize it alive, in its composite unity, in its very movement, and can therefore only suggest it through the shadings and notations of literary form; that classical Analysis, studying the soul’s elements in isolation, romantic Analysis, studying the elements of feeling in themselves, naturalist Analysis, studying the elements of sensation in themselves, could each be satisfied with expressing their particular object as extracted from its surroundings—but Synthesis cannot lodge itself in pure psychology of passion, nor in pure sentimental drama, nor in pure observation of the immediate world before us, for in each domain it would equally risk abandoning Synthesis to relapse into Analysis: hence the manifest necessity for symbolic Fiction, emancipated from both geography and history.

Analysis has been sorrowful, for it is the spirit’s exile, the splitting of the inheritance; it compels us to forget eternal Truth and forces Art to replace it with fragmentary, temporal truths; it is, ultimately, Art’s abdication of its rights to Beauty, its duties towards Beauty. Synthesis restores the spirit to its native ground, reunites the inheritance, summons Art back to Truth and likewise to Beauty. The synthesis of Art is THE JOYOUS DREAM OF BEAUTIFUL TRUTH.

(Here let us append, without troubling over smooth transitions, several observations vital to grasping both this formula and the concluding passages that follow.)

Thus your duty, Poet, and your right, form one indivisible, inalienable whole. It is your own joy (and thereby you wondrously embody the duties and rights of every human being, which are to find happiness). Yes, to satisfy yourself, to draw forth from within the book you long to read—where your heart would flower, where your spirit would find fulfilment—your own joy. Yet remember, since you wield an instrument of artifice to recreate nature—artifice, which is to say intelligence—you are bound to intellectual nobility, and your joy must be of the mind. Otherwise, how much more fitting than any work of art would be the simple freshness of young flesh in water, or the frivolity of wine and game! Yet even your sensual pleasures must find their satisfaction through your art’s creation, for none of your actions can exist save through the convergence of all your essential powers: everything depends upon the atmosphere’s hue where this essence of yours, from wherever it springs, elects its home.

Be both miner and goldsmith of your own gold. Before you feign and write, before you exercise imagination and aesthetic sense, know where to anchor yourself in reason; think before you sing—let your beauty be the splendid veil of your truth. And this thought of yours—never state it baldly. Through plays of light and shadow let it perpetually seem to reveal itself whilst escaping, endlessly enlarging such gaps to marvel the attentive and receptive reader who follows you to the final full stop, where it will burst forth magnificently whilst still preserving the subtle aura of fruitful ambiguity, so that those spirits who have accompanied you find themselves rewarded with the tremulous joy of what feels like discovery, the illusory hope of a certainty that shall never arrive, and the reality of exquisite doubt.

Thus protected by this initial wisdom of eschewing precision, you shall venture further, Poet, through your own intuitions kept independent, further along even purely rational paths than the most systematic philosophers—and your pen shall become your talisman for discovering truth. When they accuse you of obscurity and complexity, answer that words are thought’s clothing, and all clothing veils; that the grander the thought, the more it requires veiling, as we shield with glass the flames of torches and suns—yet the veil conceals only slightly, the better to reveal more, and more surely.

Never to conclude. This law, the supreme law of Art—the finest have missed it: Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle. Sainte-Beuve understood it.

This charge of obscurity hurled at the new poets is nothing but vulgar impertinence—one that people might spare themselves through simple adherence to the elementary rules of courtesy. When you visit someone, conversing with them and listening, must you not set aside your personal troubles and outside attachments? Must you not meet them with mind and heart swept clean of your own habits and memories—accepting, for instance, whatever lighting or décor they have chosen? Reading is a spiritual visit, and courtesy demands that readers traverse whatever corridors and antechambers the author has designed to reach his thought. My spirit resides in my book, and I arrange and adorn my dwelling as I see fit. Yet my pleasure and caprice flow logically from my temperament: if that temperament favours twilight’s tender mercies over the harsh glare of noon, what gives you the right to object? You wouldn’t dream of expressing astonishment at my ‘eccentricities’ if you wouldd only consider that crossing my threshold binds you to observe my customs and suspend your own. After all, my door swings both ways—as does my book.

This right to originality, to the New, is so fundamental that even that most beloved of poets, Alfred de Musset, when attempting to define Poetry itself, establishes it at the outset:

Chasser tout souvenir et fixer la pensée

[Banish all memory and fix the mind].

This duty incumbent upon the Poet—to banish memory so as to better contemplate his own thought—becomes equally binding upon the reader who would contemplate the Poet’s thought in turn.

The manifold ideas that run parallel or perpendicular to the central conception must harmonise within the total music, must play variations on the theme, must accompany the melody.

Never should one strain at the work. Nothing matters more than preserving the freshness of first impression; and just as manual labour coarsens the hands, intellectual labour too often warps the mind—and warped minds breed only corrupt works. Hence verses fare better when written by moon’s indolent light than by the lamp’s industrious glare. Better to intimate the idea as it lived before any attempt at execution than to render it through labour’s inevitable distortions: assault an idea with too much direct force and you inevitably shatter it. Yet work all the harder beforehand, that you might work less in the moment of creation: blacken page upon page with analysis to ascend to synthesis—then strive to forget them once you have arrived.

The artwork stands as a negotiation between the artist’s temperament and nature itself.

It must therefore present two faces: one natural and esoteric, the other human and exoteric.

Yet this humanity isn’t synonymous with pity—with that evangelical sentimentality, whether English (Dickens) or Russian (Dostoevsky), that values a single tear from a child’s eye above all the works of genius. We speak instead of a higher humanity, even if prouder, less tender yet stronger—that somnambulant quality of existence which these very novelists, to their glory and our delight, have so miraculously captured.

Nothing new can be uttered in a virgin language: such a tongue would be utterly barbarous, incapable of inflection or modulation. As languages age, they acquire—along with that phosphorescence of decomposing matter—that subtle pliancy which permits ideas to slip into minds less crudely prised open. This explains why formal neologisms, rather than enriching a language (save in vanishingly rare instances), impoverish it, and why the accomplished writer shuns such pointless violence. He knows that literary language comprises a modest stock of beautiful words, yet words of inexhaustible wealth through the echoes and harmonic interplay of their syllables. He knows that beyond mere meaning, assonance and alliteration forge musical phrases of wondrous novelty and boundless suggestion—resources infinitely more precious than inventing some precise, fixed grammatical arrangement of meaningful sounds. This miraculous resource enables artistic form to become the very symbol of the symbol, wherein metaphysical fact fulfils itself in beauty. The writer knows too that within words themselves, in their very meanings, a kind of intimate neologism emerges through verbal marriages, through shifts from literal to figurative, through returns to etymological roots. Thus the word revolves beneath our intellectual touch like a geometric solid furnished with angles and facets—revealing, according to our chosen perspective, only certain faces whilst keeping others shadowed. For myself, I cherish words aged to extremity, those resembling worn medallions, indistinct and smooth. They have drawn near to language’s fundamental elements, and the elementary beauty of their syllables better serves—without snagging the eye on particular details—those arrangements within the grand musical phrase I mentioned, that phrase echoing the ample Latin and French period which unfurls in order and magnificence, collecting along its course, like colouring tributaries, its suggestive dependent clauses. — But naturally this language, long shaped to the form and genius of the mind and race it moulds, this gorgeously aged and exquisitely decayed tongue, shares almost nothing with the vulgar idiom of streets and newspapers—yet it commands every last treasure in the national hoard of expression. The accomplished writer masters the classical tongues, knows medieval language, and doesn’t even scorn borrowing from provincial dialects—so wonderfully French, so logical, so nimble.

The bloom has faded from our national traditions. Yet anyone may still plunder the cosmopolitan herbarium of legends for those admirable pretexts for fiction it harbours. Pretexts for fiction, I say, for to take these legends wholesale and merely polish them up may be a worthy, even exquisite exercise, but it yields no work of art.

Shakespeare’s audience believed in witches, Homer’s in gods. Our own believes only in nature’s forces: hence we must seek out nature’s most secret recesses to hear divine voices and diabolic incantations.

The occult sciences constitute one of Art’s chief foundations. Every true Poet is an initiate by instinct. When he reads the grimoires, they awaken secrets whose virtual knowledge has always been his.

The physical and psychic fever to which modern life has brought us is, for writers, at once a mighty resource and a terrible danger. We bring things to fruition faster than our fathers did, but we see far more things demanding fruition than they ever glimpsed. Spiritual serenity eludes us save at the price of unceasing creations that remain unfinished—projects, rough sketches at most—and this condition of imperfection, this sort of resignation one must maintain to produce any work at all, strikes the best amongst us as an almost shameful sacrifice. How we envy those Alexandrians, busy with their secondary subtleties, or those Tang dynasty Chinese poets who savoured without pride such artless delights:

Les fleurs tombent et les oiseaux s’envolent!
[The flowers fall and the birds take wing!]]

An elementary truth, yet worth restating: vital emotion and aesthetic emotion are two distinct things (though destined to merge ultimately). Life is the raw material harbouring aesthetic possibility; Art is Life wrought according to certain chosen interpretations. Picture this: a painting of a wounded nude. If lust or pity stirs you first, either you lack the artist’s eye or the work lacks artistry. If your eyes delight first, if then your mind awakens and your feelings and sensations follow suit—solely because your whole being resonates—you have experienced genuine artistic emotion. Art has addressed you in its native tongue, which here means line and colour, and your inner life has entered into joyous communion with the vital sense conveyed through Art’s own signs. So too in literature. Unless the living beauty of words first beguiles you—that triumphant and meaningful beauty which annexes to the writer’s soul and his readers’ a province of Life, a province till then bereft of meaning—the work fails as art or you fail as audience, however graceful or grave the fancy involved or the problem posed. This is why Illustration in painting and Narrative in literature meet Art’s requirements only under the most particular and exacting conditions—and belong to it, in truth, but rarely. Doubtless they remain necessary, like virtually all drawing-room music, to that vast majority whose entire cerebral life boils down to three elements: lust, sentiment, and curiosity.

This public curiosity—especially regarding matters amorous—becomes downright voyeuristic in the theatre. Contemporary theatre reaches its crowning effect when it displays before a packed house precisely what should never be witnessed: the tender vows, the stolen kisses.

And yet Art does immortalise Life’s very tremor—but a life at once concentrated and glorified in its cerebral realm. Which is why every artist must shun the servile copying of surfaces, and the poet must embrace the necessity of symbol. Only through symbol can that intensity of living which no mere transcription could capture be distilled and evoked. Living Truth remains Art’s aim, nourishment, and glory—though not the immediate Truth of vulgar sincerity, the truth of the witness box, the newspaper report, or even the passionate psychological probe.

Joy in art is not mirth. Joy is solemn, in harmony with all life’s manifestations; and if it must forbid any, better laughter than tears. Joy has wings, it soars—yet never without revealing, if only to mark the heights attained, the eternal earth far below, itself made beautiful by all that receding space. Joy resonates between Light and Truth, their common ground, partaking of both. Joy, in sum, is ideally human within the spiritual terms of our humanity.

Woman in Art! She is both object and aim. She lends Joy its wings, on condition she may clip them too, and Joy wouldn’t have Woman otherwise than she is, blessing those forms that make the soul weep and the female creature that makes us yearn for the angel. Never forgetting that the angel’s soul often transfigures these divinely animal forms, this lovely vessel from which the dream that once despaired now drinks its consoling draught.

If somewhere in Art’s universal museum, Poet, a poem exists—Painter, a canvas—that utterly satisfies your hunger for ideal beauty, then cross your arms: your work is done. The artist is one for whom every great work of art throws open a door upon the unknown—never sets a boundary stone.

Which is why this present book (perhaps worth writing for what I will call historical reasons). We both know, you and I, to what hesitant stammerings tête-à-tête would reduce it, and how much I have left unsaid that had to remain unspoken. You know too how many false pages must, through personal frailty or iron necessity, accompany the one true page, the page this book still announces and ordains—you know, you understand, and you forgive.

These observations gloss the future prologue to the work, the vestibule of that literary monument which a poet of our time dreams of raising—destined in all its parts (parts he might enumerate and which, echoing and recalling one another, transform a succession of books into a single book, and indeed conceal within their arabesques one unique book, distilled and composed from the essential portions of each diverse volume). Let us now indicate, in practical terms, taking this prologue as our example, not the idea’s flowering in the mind, but the successive process of its realisation: for once the idea has thrilled into being—whether through the nuances it summons or through any of the developments that fantasy offers up in advance—the Poet, to endow his Dream with logical eternity, first scrutinises its meaning in rational terms, then submits it to his imagination in the guise of an image, and finally selects the colours and sounds through which, by way of that image, he will reach thought itself.