No, such literature is not the modern voice of society; popular opinion is not the true spirit of nations. A literature that refused to pander to the Barbarians would speak only for a society that has all but vanished, save for a vanishing elite who dwell beyond industry’s racket, politics’ bleating, the vapid applause of smart salons, and all that empty noise our dizzy, crumbling civilisation—whirling down the Maelstrom—has drummed up to dodge the hard work of quiet thought.
Yet the Barbarians’ banishment of the Poets drives them towards victory through the esoteric—a formula they can now safely proclaim, for silence itself has died. They are forced to retreat within Art and Genius’s God-given borders. This bankruptcy of Art and Genius in the world—what of it? Why should we care? It’s fate, and we would waste our breath trying to stop it. Besides, who wants to sit about calculating how long artworks and books might last? The poet doesn’t write merely for human memory; if no one understands him, he will survive.
“Then for whom,” they ask us, “and why do you write?”
The meadows would flower even without flocks to graze them—it’s their nature. Poets write first from this same glorious compulsion to fulfil their nature, to obey the universal law of natural expansion—and to earn their place in Eternity. As emanations of God, sparks flung from the Forge of All-Light, they must return. This is life’s universal law: God spills out of Himself through creation, draws Himself back through destruction, spills out again, draws back again, forever and ever. Analysis and Synthesis—the wheeling of blood in our veins and worlds in the Infinite, the wheeling of souls. These are God’s outward manifestations, sent forth to play their varied parts in the world’s luminous symphony. Follow the divine impulse, and a happy fate brings them home; defy it, and they are hurled from the orbit as darkness swells. When a poet creates, he simply traces his soul’s essential arc of light back to God—as does any soul that brings forth the conclusions to which its inner premises point. Besides, as the old truth has it, nothing perishes. No power can unmake what has been, and all that has been lives forever in its ripples through the great cosmic vibration. Poets create to clothe their dreams in eternity. Yet there’s a secondary matter: those who wield that tool of all education—the Word, the winged Word—seem called to teach. “Remember,” the moralists chide, “those younger brothers hungry for spiritual bread.” Their practical upshot? The Poet must stoop to everyone’s level, to the masses, the simple folk… What sophistry! Ancient writers could write for everyone because everyone—thanks to slavery—meant a handful of leisured elites. Even then, writers didn’t teach; they were concentrated distillations of prevailing tastes and beliefs, secretaries to their readers6, who never ventured beyond a single city’s walls and wouldn’t let their writers venture further either—witness Livy accused of Patavinity for not perfectly matching Roman stylistic fashion. But write literature for everyone today? What can that possibly mean? We print for all who can, in the mechanical sense, decode letters; we cannot write for all in this modern age where spiritual tribes multiply whilst digging ever deeper the moats between them. Neither ’89 nor ’92 changed this—at best they shuffled the classes about; the divisions remain. We still have aristocrats and peasants, though now they are the dilettanti versus the rest. Never mind that today’s aristocrats spring mostly from yesterday’s peasantry—they are just as thinly scattered under the new order as the old. Write for the Public! The phrase is nonsense—there is no Public. I have used the singular only as shorthand: there are publics, as many as there are human differences in wealth, work, bloodline, schooling, and so on, splitting and splitting again without end. Each microscopic tribe of readers forms its own public with its pet novelist, playwright, gossip columnist and critic, and between these publics flow currents of jealousy and scorn. Octave Feuillet’s readers look down their noses—quite rightly—at Alphonse Daudet’s; but Daudet’s lot can’t stop giggling at George Ohnet’s following, though I must admit the distinctions escape me. On a hurried day, too rushed to parse fine gradations of craft, I might lump both novelists together. Still, Ohnet’s readers preen themselves as aristocrats next to Fortuné du Boisgobey’s customers, and if you tell me that lot sneers at Montépin’s faithful, I won’t be the least bit shocked. Think on it: these classes form distinct nations within the nation, each rabidly patriotic to its own narrow cause, speaking tongues whose family resemblance has long since withered, cherishing ideals mutually unknowable or openly hostile, devoid of shared interests. They cannot even agree on their preferred brand of smut, the Gil Blas crowd being worlds apart from the Vie Parisienne set. And it’s here, in this cacophony of tongues, in this land destined to erect its own burlesque Babel—here, I say, in the dying gasps of nineteenth-century France, that they prate of writing for all! Yet these moralising counsellors have in mind, I suspect, less the whole of our contemporaries than that pitiful rabble who wallow in ignorance unpitied, and who might yet reward the poet with artless devotion and virgin gratitude. Write for the lowly, for simple souls… By all means, try! One may speak to them; one cannot write for them. It becomes mere charity work, all art fled—fit employment for the country parson or the suburban pedagogue, but hardly the Poet’s vocation. Here, one celebrated case proves singularly enlightening. Count Tolstoy, sublime creator of War and Peace, seized by that evangelical fervour which transforms him into a kind of freelance apostle and spiritual tutor to the moujiks, penned for them in their own idiom that grim tragedy The Power of Darkness, showing how remorse strips crime of all reward. The poet, having bent his whole genius to keeping within the most elementary feelings, might reasonably have expected comprehension from his chosen public. How mistaken! The moujiks showed only scorn for a criminal fool enough to turn himself in when he might have savoured his spoils. Perfectly logical, too; for staged morality, that mongrel bred from Fiction and Life, commands the authority of neither—lacking both the Sermon’s power to thrust God’s burning truth into benighted souls, and the Poem’s genuine grace, which rescues the spirit from its sordid daily grind and awakens that salutary yearning for natural liberty.
“Then write for the Select Few, those rare souls fit for elevation, write to raise them up. Each forms a circle’s centre; the benign influence spreads from hub to rim… Thus fulfils the writer his educator’s duty…”
What snare lies coiled in such accommodation? Let’s think: who are these anonymous Few so reverently invoked? Our betters, peers, or inferiors? If peers, no special effort is required—we are already on their plane: a poet writes for equals when he writes for himself. If betters, then we are the supplicants hoping for their manna; or rather, they embody our own Ideal, and our dearest hope is to merit their approval. Most likely, though, they are the third sort: decent minds a cut above the common run, unable to create but able to comprehend—and thus our equals, as Raphael has it: “To understand is to equal.” Yet with such minds (and how many exist?), haven’t we wandered leagues from those first injunctions: Write for all, write for the humble? We picture well-formed intellects with no need of our instruction; the sole means of “elevating” them is for the Poet to be utterly himself, to soar from his own being as high and far as his strength allows. His only gospel-duty is to make them crane their necks to catch sight of him. This, too, marks the limit of what we may justly demand as his contribution to humanity’s grand enterprise. For if the Poet interprets Beauty—and Beauty signals Truth—his human office is none other than to testify, as magnificently as his powers permit, to our species’ dignity. That this dignity remains ideal in poetry doesn’t mean it must forever shun practical expression. Base notions breed less readily in readers of Dante, Goethe or Balzac, than in devotees of Dumas or Sardou; Louis Lambert plants nobler seeds in the mind than Les Parents Pauvres7.
How could any imagination not guard against its flights—noble or otherwise—whilst still luminous with reflections from a great Thought? And so it is that round palaces and temples, humble dwellings show a certain decency in not affronting their august neighbours.
But the Poets of our day stand accused of a peculiar obscurity, an unnatural penchant for stylistic murk. Might we not ask our critics: are we alone to blame for this supposed delight in formal shadows? Do not these shadows deepen when set against the dreary clarities that line the pockets of Tom, Dick and Harry? Is there not perhaps nobility in this resolve—if resolve it be—to shun the applause of those who celebrate such vile corruptions? And might not the chief fault lie with the times into which these new poets were born?
Such reproaches, in any case, hardly ruffle them. They create with sincerity the work that justifies their existence and, more demanding than any critic, strive first to satisfy themselves. For whom is the work intended? A trifling question. Won’t it find those who seek it? Our true friends may well be at the antipodes: the printing press—that diabolic invention which has so ill-served humanity—will bear to them the books we wrote for them in writing for ourselves, and thus redeem some of its sins. And perhaps the grandchildren of those who now read us with distracted, wary eyes will understand us fully. If heredity can resolve our fleeting desires into deeds in our descendants, our evil thoughts into crimes, our virtuous impulses into good works, then from generation to generation it will resolve doubts into certainties and shadows into light.
Poets share something of the patience of that God of light whose genius they partake. Beyond all ephemeral ridicule, they remain humanity’s crowning glory. For should some emissary from Venus or Sirius come asking Earth’s inhabitants what does them most credit, mankind would soon take stock of their captains, their bankers, their politicians, even their scientists: what value have our bloody triumphs before the stars, our artificial treasures, our quarrels over opinions and borders—and who knows whether the denizens of other worlds haven’t achieved deeper scientific truths than ours? Fictions alone, with their daring intuitions, their harmonies, their splendid colours, afford the plenitude and certainty of spiritual joy—and mankind, seeking glory, could present to that distant messenger only their Poets.
Léon Hennique Novel 