Léon Hennique Novel

What remains to be done is trifling compared to the immense labour already achieved. Yet this last step—ever the hardest to take—demands tranquillity and conviction. If the new artists appear less assiduous than their forebears, we must consider whether present circumstances favour artistic endeavour as much as those of old. Before bringing to light for our seldom-seen reader what we are creating, then, let us first illuminate how we create it, and what influences vex or ease our labours…

The challenge before us: to squeeze an entire volume into scarcely more than a few paragraphs.

Let me dispatch the social influences at once, if only to clear them from our path, though they do signify. We must acknowledge the perpetual spectre of war, the petty torments of universal militarism, the necessity of breaking off mid-hemistich to fulfill “one’s twenty-eight days of military instruction”. We must reckon with the tumults of the street as well, for the creaking governmental machinery has never produced such din with its endless parade of newspapers, elections, and ministerial upheavals. Add to this that the raucous despotism of commerce has expelled Beauty from the public mind, while industry⁹⁸ has slaughtered whatever silence politics might have spared. Consider how our present age appears when viewed from these various perspectives and set against the Restoration, the July Monarchy, or the Second Empire.

As for moral influences, I distil them all to the temptation of “Success.” I speak not of Glory—that conception has vanished from the earth. I should hardly venture to say “fame.”

What we call Success now yields merely Notoriety, a grotesque phenomenon and an equally grotesque term, though Success once signified the coinage of glory and is scarcely French in its current usage. Yet this is all that remains to us, and besides notoriety brings wealth, honours, pleasures of every stripe if it finds one still in the radiant flush of youth, and so forth. But who enjoyed glory under the Restoration? Chateaubriand, Lamartine… Under the July Monarchy? Victor Hugo… Under the Second Empire, who commanded fame? Gautier, Sainte-Beuve… During the early years of the Third Republic? Messieurs de Goncourt, Leconte de Lisle, Zola… And in our present day, who can claim to possess notoriety? Messieurs Daudet, Ohnet…

Beyond this outward clamour, which the Poet may escape by forging sanctuary within his soul through sheer volition, and beyond this pleasant slide towards mediocrity, which his adamantine devotion to Beauty empowers him to resist, there remain the sentimental and intellectual influences, graver and more pressing still. These divide naturally into the religious and philosophical, the scientific and artistic.

Since religion fled the churches, it roams the streets. Not long ago, Montmartre boasted a Catholic brasserie where sacred verse was declaimed. There are nocturnal hours when the Boulevard grows mystical. It grows pessimistic too. None of which prevents it from becoming deliriously merry at other hours, deeper into the night. And these are the very same young gentlemen, elegant and robust—almost to a man—who are by turns mystical, pessimistic and merry, occasionally all at once. In matters of religious and philosophical doctrine, precious few amongst these youths possess any rigorous understanding.

From the liturgy they retain splendid vocables: monstrance, ciborium, and suchlike. Some preserve from Spencer, Mill, Schopenhauer, Comte, Darwin, a smattering of terminology. How rare are those who truly grasp their subject, who seek not to brandish and parade a discourse whose sole virtue lies in its pompous syllables and fashionable archaisms. Rarer still are those who penetrate to the core, who have immersed themselves in these theologies and metaphysics and made them the foundation of their thought, the sustenance of their ideas, the firm and coherent fabric of their aesthetic expression. Nevertheless, all submit to this dual influence, both the trivial and the profound alike. It is an influence ancient as humanity itself, yet never before raised to such a pitch, it would seem. I speak of the influence of Mysticism and Philosophy.

Science and Its Claims. Once upon a time, Art and Science dwelt in worlds apart from one another, and if by rare chance an artist like Leonardo happened also to be a scientist, neither pursuit ever encroached upon or corrupted the other. Then the eighteenth century came and muddled everything, drawing the two poles closer together. Yet Art still reigned supreme, treating Science as nothing more than its lady’s maid. One thinks of Buffon lending his lace cuffs to Nature. Today the tables have turned. Caught in the strange confusion born of colliding formulas and the formidable obstacles that stand between the artist and the consummate work of art, Art has shed its old disdain for Science, and the Artist now eagerly seeks the advice of the Scientist. Science has exploited this opening to colonise Art, Literature especially. Literary criticism finds itself rather patronised by its scientific counterpart. Some would have us believe that scientists’ conclusions and their most intriguing experiments⁹⁹ in the science of tones and colours will eventually do away with the perilous caprices of instinct.

I find this unconvincing and regard the artist’s submission to any laws save those of instinct tempered by conscience as far more perilous than all the hazards of intuition. What could be more dispiriting for Art, more demeaning, than to think the scientist might gauge a work of genius with his sightless compass and render his definitive and irrevocable judgment, branding it either Beautiful or Ugly? When Raffaëlli observes that geometric forms are “preemptively fixed and cannot accommodate the boundless diversity of individual temperaments“, he offers a principle I would readily apply to those scientific systems that presume to measure artistic beauty. For “art begins where passion begins,” and here we discover the very threshold beyond which geometry cannot venture.

These scientific anxieties, these assurances from scientist to poet of immunity from error, prove especially unsettling at this particular moment, when Literature finds itself moved by a conspicuous tendency in the visual arts towards synthesising all arts within each individual art. Recognising in this vision its own deepest yearnings, Literature wonders whether accepting science in its role as a source of support might not be the wiser course…

— I needn’t revisit Wagner, whose musical drama I have already shown to unite all artistic forms. The entirety of modern French music, to keep to this single point (César Franck, Ernest Réyer, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet in his early works), takes Wagner as its starting point, following with varying success the traditions he founded, responding with varying fidelity to his momentum. Yet long before Wagner arrived on the scene, music had already begun to intuit that its destiny lay in union with Poetry. Music’s very nature, virtually indistinguishable from pure sensation, makes it the mother of dreams. When Berlioz worked to appropriate for himself something of the power native to painting, when Wagner yoked music to dramatic Action, each merely intensified and made conscious this inherent suggestive force.

In an article on the new literature, M. Brunetière observes how architecture, painting and music have successively held sway over literature, setting its tone and furnishing its ideal. The Classicists, intent on expressing the very soul, would have preferred architecture—that noble, spiritual art which makes use of the senses as sparingly as possible. The Romantics, captivated by the picturesque, and the Naturalists by the external face of things, would naturally have gravitated towards painting. Indeed, it’s striking that two painters, Courbet and Manet, inaugurated the naturalist movement. Finally, the Decadents or Symbolists, who arrived to articulate the inner essence of beings and things, would salute music as the art lying nearest to their cherished ideal. M. Brunetière makes the observation that most decadent verse collections bear titles borrowed from the musical lexicon, among them Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles, Laforgue’s Complaintes, and Moréas’s Cantilènes.

There’s considerable truth in this scheme, though I believe it contains its share of the arbitrary. For one thing, architecture, itself a miraculous synthesis of the Arts, is, depending on its various ‘orders’, as willingly sensual and sentimental as it is spiritual. Furthermore, it strikes me that the Classicists were no more particularly drawn to architecture than to any other art. All that M. Brunetière says about Romantic and Naturalist predilections for painting rings historically true. Yet I would have him consider this: the new poets do indeed passionately cherish the art of beautiful sounds, but this has not caused them to forsake the art of beautiful colours.

True, Verlaine in his art poétique enjoins “music above all else“, yet he also expressly champions “nuance“. And whilst the title Romances sans paroles would seem to reinforce M. Brunetière’s theory, it would be undermined by numerous pieces within that very collection that evoke paintings, as well as by the Eaux-fortes and Paysages tristes in the Poèmes Saturniens. If Moréas penned Cantilènes, Poictevin penned Paysages, and Moréas himself wrote Les Syrtes and is preparing Iconostases. De Régnier gave us Sites. Yet these piecemeal arguments carry little weight either way.

More telling observations. I freely concede that music is indeed the art which, after poetry itself, affords certain poets of this hour their most intense pleasures, though significantly this comes at a moment when music itself has drawn nearer to poetry generally and to painting particularly. Poetry appears to have grasped music at the very instant music appears to have grasped poetry. Might they not share a common ideal, one that each finds its particular means inadequate to attain?

And consider this besides: it’s the loftiest, purest, most lyrical music we cherish. Towards Meyerbeer and Rossini we display the cool detachment shown by the Romantics, and I know scarcely anyone amongst us who waxes enthusiastic over Gounod. What we worship in Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner corresponds exactly to what we worship in our beloved poets, just as it does to what we admire in Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Besnard, Odilon Redon, Eugène Carrière, Cazin, Rapin, Monticelli, and the Primitives. This same quality is what certain other poets of this hour savour in these painters even more profoundly than in these musicians. In truth, these three distinct appearances are but different embodiments of the same ideal.

Moreover, if Music enthrals us more profoundly and universally than Painting, it’s because the former is at once more remote and more intimate, in greater proximity to the wellspring and terminus of feelings and sensations than the latter. Line and colour fix themselves and defy time, whereas sound, barely breathed forth, surrenders to it. It lives through dying, and therein lies a magnificent symbol. Yet it transcends itself, penetrating silence to its innermost sanctuaries and rousing the echo there. It remains ever a summons towards something unknown, something mysterious—an exhalation, an effusion of the soul. And all returns to it. This ephemeral thing voices eternity and in doing so becomes the measure for things of grander ambition. It is by this measure that a painting achieves harmony and a poem achieves melody. Where Painting bears witness to reality, Music aspires beyond it. Through music the soul takes wing from itself and recovers self-awareness in the solid silence of painting.

Now, in these very days, inheritors of so many bygone days, does it not appear that human genius aches with an immense longing to flee itself? Anywhere out of the world! This cry belongs to our age, and it’s far more than a cry: it’s the supreme law of Supreme Art. This “beyond the world”—meaning “beyond space and time”—conjures the perfect theatre where Fiction, at last worthy of its name, shall disport itself, fiction truly fashioned by man and recalling nothing of this place. Yet it is music alone that can make such a leap beyond earthly boundaries—music, that spiritual illumination which, revealing nothing, makes all things visible.

It voices both the ultimate yearnings of an aged humanity, weary of existence and the changeless horizon, straining towards infinity, whilst offering this same humanity the means to renew itself through the realities of the impossible, through life beyond life, through all that vibrates unseen, gesturing toward illuminations that surpass mortal understanding. Small wonder, then, in an epoch imperiously beckoned by all these distances, if Art contemplates with heightened satisfaction that aspect of itself which pledges most surely to reach them.

And more! Music contains all things within itself, and can accomplish even the painter’s art. Through sound alone it conjures landscapes within dreams. Poetry, likewise a sonorous art, can paint only through sounds, and how natural that it should seek this secret from music… Yet haven’t these two forms of Art, Verse and Note, always somehow circled one another? Could even the Romantics themselves—I mean the greatest—paint except through musical symbolism? The Naturalists, to cleave more closely to painting alone, were obliged to abandon Verse altogether! Orpheus sang…

Yet even as music and poetry strive to supplement one another or to fuse, an analogous impulse compels Painting to forge, within its own confines, new means—musical and poetical—of achieving harmony and dream. Nowhere is this tendency more manifest than in those masters I have named. To them we must add M. Monet, of whom I can say, without falling into the pretentious banality of “art criticism”, that he truly makes colour sing. We must include as well M. Raffaëlli, that modernist and self-styled characterist who reads in a face the meaning of its physiognomy and in a stance the significance of its gesture, along with Messieurs Fantin-Latour, Ribot… Not one of these painters oversteps the providential boundaries or assigns his art a goal beyond its natural reach. All preserve the most legitimate regard for a craft whose secrets they have plumbed more profoundly than any before them. Yet to the utmost of their powers, they push back these goals to approach more closely that essence at once unique yet common to all beauty. They stretch these boundaries; they bid these secrets carry them further, ever further still. And it is often with admirable simplicity—simplicity, that seal of certainty—that they renew an art seemingly imprisoned within sacred walls built by ancient masterpieces, that they stir the immutable and bestow upon the supremely precise the charm of the indefinite, upon the instantaneous something like successive layers and returns, upon the immediate a dreamlike distance.

Consider Monticelli, whose very name embodies the most egregious injustice of our age. He may well be the greatest of all painters, though his works are palmed off as counterfeit Diaz. When Monticelli paints us a lion, what do we see? At first, in this wizardry of blazing, seemingly hurled colours, one perceives nothing but violence that assaults the eye. But look more intently and, if I may put it thus, listen. One sees these tawny fires come to terms, accord with one another, compose an ensemble, a symphony in brass, whilst binding them together, like a guiding thread of themes, runs the modelling, itself expressed purely through colour. Recall suddenly that this is indeed a lion, and understanding breaks upon us like dawn. Monticelli has perceived and reveals to us the profound and unmistakable analogy between the beast’s pelt and its ferocity, and without granting the creature the hackneyed menacing gesture of naïve illustration, he has simply made the terrible tones of that savage coat roar.

M. Eugène Carrière presents us with altogether different yet equally persuasive evidence. M. Carrière, the artist most disputed by official criticism—no doubt because he brings the most precious innovations—has been struck by the error into which we are misled by the effects of immediacy, by full daylight, by the high noons of distance. He has come to believe that very little is required for painting, and he reduces everything—colour and character alike—to unity. To see more truly, he stands back from his subject; he lets intervene between his eyes and nature that exactitude of distance which, in the realm of forms, might stand for the justice that duration brings to the realm of morals and events. He catches the human face at that moment when attenuated forms are about to declare themselves, when they still retain the joy of what might yet become. By this means he banishes from every mind the pretension of fixing nature and lending it an air of tangibility. We are commanded instead to believe that these forms have remained mobile on the canvas, as they were in life, whilst taking on the spectral accent of an apparition. Carrière unveils, though he seems to veil. He translates appearance into the dream of reality it harbours. From this appearance he draws forth what naturally suggests itself, yet what genius alone can penetrate, namely the reality of age and visage. This he expresses through mysterious touches which guard against saying everything, for if they did, the soul, bereft of any further hope of desire, would be less fulfilled than cheated. Instead, these touches intimate rather than explain. The consummate artist has embedded in his very means of expression the symbol of that expression itself, in this palette of whites and greys, these vaporous substances, these solidities never robbed of lightness. And the setting, whatever it might be, dissolves as mere pretext of furniture or walls, retaining only its harmonious essence: the relationships and intervals between tones. Thus, in what you might take for a familiar theatre, the young master’s sublime artistry establishes—as remote as possible from primary visibilities, beyond time and place—a scene of eternity: light itself! Within this light, and like all else governed by the laws of logical luminous progression, the human figure is born, hovers, wavers, gains definition, finally thrums with life, so vital indeed that you might step aside to let it pass, so ready does it seem to emerge from the frame where only the atmosphere it breathes, which is not your own, contains it. It would emerge, imposing upon you its vision of soul laid bare through the captured secret of the laws by which Nature renders itself in visible form.

Need I dwell upon how Monticelli is musical and metaphysically poetical, how M. Carrière is a poet through the sheer intensity of his painter’s vision? I might equally have shown how M. Gustave Moreau elevates painting through the poem, revealing the contemplative truth of humanity’s great moments in a form unmarked by the particularity of date. Similarly, I might have shown how M. Puvis de Chavannes transcends the entire modern cycle of painting and reconnects with the primitives through a shared feeling for an ideal rather than through imitation. Yet this fundamental distinction must be preserved: their mysticism led them to the Art of Religion, whilst his leads to the Religion of Art.¹⁰⁰.

Here is the common law governing all artistic endeavour in our time: Art circles back to its wellsprings, and as it was one at the beginning, so it now re-enters the primal path of Unity, where Music, Painting and Poetry—triple reflection of the same central radiance—grow ever more alike as they approach this point from which expansion began, this goal, now, of concentration.

This impulse has made itself felt in sculpture as well. M. Rodin, that extraordinary symphonist of the passions, together with M. Antokolsky, that portraitist who captures humanity at its most psychologically revelatory moments, are leading this Art back towards music and poetry, even as ingenious essayists propose to enrich it further with the advantages of polychromy.

Even Architecture, that immemorial mother of all the Arts, that primordial art, prepares to erect the Temple worthy of housing the feast of total reunion. Here, let me be the first to speak of someone unknown. Much has been made of this century’s failure to leave its mark on Architecture¹⁰¹. Could a century of scattered attempts at spiritual fraternity—whilst the analytical struggle raged on—possibly conceive architectural innovation, when the fundamental purpose of any monument is to shelter peace and union? Today, with conditions transformed and vision clarified, what yesterday would have proved impossible now becomes achievable. Thus a young man, guided by no revelation save the lightning of his own genius and his understanding of art beyond and despite academic conventions, has created a synthetic and modern architectural order. Albert Trachsel, too, has returned to the origins, letting himself be guided by an increasingly simplified magnification of the human form within the monument. Yet he has not lost the modern sensibility in this great journey. His work is characterized by an immobile majesty, timelessly ancient yet dating from nowhere, all the while preserving the elegance and—dare I say—the velocity of our own age. To see these monuments standing may remain merely the hope of this generation. Who will declare: the time has come? At least we shall see the vision realised¹⁰².

Now, the Poet watches all these efforts—so perfectly aligned with his own desires—with trembling heart. He feels obscurely that an immense burden has been laid upon him. Poetry, nearer than any art to the wellspring of all arts, which is Thought itself, could only enter the supreme contest of all human forms of Beauty on condition that it reign. The theatre—where doubtless, should this civilisation not crumble too soon, the rite of aesthetic Religion will be performed—belongs first and foremost to the Poet. But how can one speak of the theatre! This art, for all the talent lavished upon it by the writers whose noble efforts I have acknowledged¹⁰³, is lost. Yet to theatre is promised the supreme Feast. But countless revolutions will surely be needed before the glimpsed miracle becomes reality, before the radiant aesthetic syllogism whose clear premises Wagner merely established can reach its conclusion. (Such matters lie too far ahead for treatment in this necessarily preliminary and general book).

At the very least, to prepare himself for the formidable honour to come, the Poet feels duty-bound to achieve within himself, within his art itself, a Synthesis that symbolises the final Synthesis ordained by the progressive evolution of the aesthetic idea, and stands amazed and grieved that his conditions of existence in the world should be worse than ever before.

I mean the present conditions of literary life, both material and moral.

We are told, not without some justification, that these have never been easier. What we call literature has become market merchandise, bought and sold like any other commodity. Publishers and directors (of journals and theatres) are remarkably accommodating. The written line commands good payment almost everywhere… And so, barring madness or miracle, no man of letters in our time need starve. Or so we are assured.

To argue the point would be sheer folly! — Better to leave certain things unsaid. The very idea of trafficking in poetry offends against honour itself. Yet this position strikes many as archaic and mythical, particularly in a society that congratulates itself on its liberalism whilst having embraced its own mediocrity, that prides itself on good sense whilst having taken leave of its senses… — The practice itself flies in the face of reason, now that the rue du Sentier has become the final arbiter of art no less than commerce, now that art itself has been reduced to trade. Those who pay the piper call the tune. Since the rue du Sentier holds the purse strings, the rue du Sentier claims the privilege of instructing poets in matters of taste. And they permit themselves to be governed thus? What choice have they, as subjects of that sovereign, the Public! But public taste—what is it, really? What drives it at bottom? Corruption, greed, folly and caprice—there’s your answer. Which is why Poets, not all blessed with private fortunes, must either debase themselves as dancing bears or fairground curiosities to catch the crowd’s eye, or else accept hack work made doubly vexing by the public’s ever-shifting fancies, work that belongs more to some trade in elegant trifles than to Art. Thus is precious time squandered, with genius degrading itself in vulgarities it cannot touch without contamination, time stolen from the work that would require our every waking moment, from art which, as the saying goes, is long whilst life… and so forth. — The upshot being that this new comfort in literary life suits only the Mediocre.

Let us not be deceived into mistaking for a genuine artistic renaissance the critics’ enthusiasm for what they term—and the very vocabulary used ought to disclose everything to us—”avant-garde literature”. I won’t impugn the expertise or good faith of these critics. I merely suggest they cannot say what stands in need of being said, that their acclaim manufactures hollow reputations for real talents. How much better the “obscurantism” of the old critics who, whilst building solid reputations for spurious talents, at least kept their hands off what they would have desecrated! Certain praise simply confirms and enshrines worthlessness; certain abuse is the smoke that proves the fire.

As ill fortune would have it, the critics¹⁰⁴ have cultivated in the rue du Sentier a taste for novelty. Hand in hand with “the arrival of democracy in literature”, this appetite for refinement, elegance and poetic flourish has gone wretchedly to seed. Nearly every book published these last ten years—the dreary ones, I mean—fairly reeks of affectation. What a miserable business! What a ludicrous state of affairs! Barracks-room elegance, the bagman’s notion of breeding, pageboys’ livery on grooms, drawing-room talk in the servants’ hall… The air has grown that much heavier for poets who sometimes fancy themselves living amongst a tribe of apes…