Léon Hennique Novel

To render this fiction directly, stripped of its unfolding complexities, would be no art at all. Such an approach could convey meaning only through bald statement, achieving no more power or beauty than the plain assertion: ‘Art is deliverance.’ What we must do instead is make that deliverance felt—unfurl those wings with syllables that at once catch the light playing white and silver across them and sound the supple, harmonious tremor of their plumes; give breath to those troubled, contradictory faces gathered round the mystical prisoner, each harbouring the same secret beneath every thought, every feature; make palpable within a single household how the spirit of affirmation and the spirit of denial contend with nearly equal strength; let the very cadence of words pulse with the heartbeats and imagined caresses of mother and son’s occult union; summon up between this man and the poet the whole living world of things that rises against the brilliant folly of one who thinks himself worldly-wise; and when the angel speaks, when the man speaks, let us recognise without announcement that here is a man’s voice, there an angel’s. We must, in short, convince that rare reader he has passed into a realm beyond the everyday and his own existence—for he now carries memories of a life unlived, believes his mind possesses some touchstone by which to know an angel’s voice. We must, in other words, lend truth the lustre of illusion.

Suggestion achieves what plain statement never can. It speaks the language of affinities—those hidden threads between soul and world. Rather than hold up a mirror to things, it slips inside them and becomes their voice. Never stale, always urgent and particular, suggestion gives words to what lives unspoken in the depths of things. It can make even a threadbare word strike the ear as though newly minted. Most vital of all, because it speaks from within what it describes, it speaks just as intimately within those who receive it: like sound calling forth echo, it awakens in the prepared mind a sense of the impossibly sayable. Scorning the dead conventions of workaday prose, it shuns the frigid precision of the laboratory; instead of naming a colour, it conjures the sensation—particular or universal—that the colour creates; it neither catalogues a flower nor mentions it in passing, but adds to the flower’s living presence the emotion it stirs. Through suggestion alone, a handful of lines can hold the endless shimmer and tangle of details that bald description would labour through pages to enumerate.

What’s more, suggestion—unlike bald expression, which so often batters language into submission or drains it of life—pays homage to our linguistic inheritance. It honours only those traditions that still pulse with vitality, resisting the impoverishment of our tongue, remembering Rabelais and the Troubadours who wielded words with such grace, demanding that readers rise to the full measure of language. Indeed, it honours language all the more deeply because it refuses mere habit or servitude, reaching back instead to the wellsprings of speech itself—to those primal laws that govern how the sound and colour of words answer to thought.

By this same law, the poet chooses the essential form—prose or verse. I have already hinted that the synthesis so many pursue by melting verse and prose into some nebulous hybrid might be better achieved through a union where each keeps its distinctive character while serving both the immediate moment and the larger design. Let me press the point further.

Verse, I have argued, is bounded by the measure of human breath: twelve syllables mark its natural limit. But verse is also—as I have observed—essentially a surge of exaltation, a flash of enthusiasm that neither can nor ought to last. Hence its need for prose. For a century now it has been clamouring for relief. Lamartine prophesied that verse would vanish altogether, that prose would eventually suffice for all literary expression. If anyone understood this, surely it was Lamartine—he who gorged himself on verse and must have felt the sustained lyrical pitch become unbearable. Yet no: verse will not vanish. It will simply cede more territory to prose, as is only right.

The route by which prose and verse have drawn together is plain enough. At almost the very moment when the Romantic poets began taking metrical liberties, loosening the corset of classical verse, Aloysius Bertrand was composing the first prose poems. Sainte-Beuve made verse more supple still, bending it towards prose—nearly tipping it over the brink. But then Baudelaire restored the grand lyrical line to full vigour. In Les Fleurs du mal, though, lyricism runs in slender, quintessential streams; here is poetry distilled, fewer arrows but each one sounding deeper, great verses that scarcely announce themselves yet echo into the distance. I sense between the individual pieces of Les Fleurs du mal vast unspoken intervals, an entire prose book that Baudelaire merely held in contemplation. And this same man who bound verse within lyrical limits was simultaneously writing the second generation of prose poems. The Parnassians drew the Poetics tight once more: but Paul Verlaine restored all the Romantic liberties and more besides, scattering caesuras everywhere, recreating halting rhythms—whilst also establishing the true distinction between verse and prose, the one synthesis, the other analysis. He went further still. In his verse tales¹³¹—L’Amoureuse du Diable, L’Impénitence finale—he blended lyricism with rhymed prose. This was the penultimate step that wanted taking, and what answer shall I receive if I ask: why set prose in rhyme? When the tone demands that we abandon lyricism, why not descend frankly to authentic prose? Frankly, yes, but not headlong—and here the prose poem serves admirably as harmonic bridge. One can imagine a book where, following the pulse of emotion, the style would fall from verse to prose and rise from prose to verse, with or without the prose poem as go-between, rocking itself, when employed, in rhythms that through alliteration and assonance would herald and summon Number and Rhyme until finally attaining them—and would seldom relinquish them without the warning of a gradual diminuendo, for calculated effect.

This weaving together of prose, prose poem and verse seemed almost ordained by the very subject of the poem I have sketched above. The widest arc of those parallel swings between thought and expression is traced by analytical prose at one extreme and the alexandrine measure at the other.

The alexandrine is the quintessential French verse. For all the protests against it, the line possesses infinite suppleness, equally apt for evoking the infinite and the finite. It accommodates every rhythm, even the irregular: what forbids us from making it stumble deliberately on mute syllables at nine or eleven beats, only to restore at the crucial moment the sonorous majesty of its full twelve? This verse is the complete organ, the entire orchestra; it sings as readily in the minor key as the major. And I speak of the alexandrine in its most consecrated form, the rhyming couplet, which offers no resistance to the ode, nor even to the fixed-form poem, where one can frame it with a system of shorter lines that rhyme internally with the grand verses and call to one another across the poem like musical motifs held in perfect governance by the richness and precision of the closing rhymes. Rhymes trace the luminous trajectory of every poem. Why choose them at random? Given that sounds possess tonal colour for any particular temperament, why not subordinate the entire rhyme scheme of the poem to a governing rhyme, whether opening or central?

Just as the poem is but a single sentence, so the verse is but a single word—and this is precisely the meaning of the verse’s capital letter, that initial which we must resist abolishing at all costs. But who could imagine a word severing itself from its sentence? The true verse, then, lives fully only where the poet’s will has set it. This is why we must condemn the proverbial verse—so quintessentially French, people suppose, and alas, they are hardly mistaken. The French temperament, through an excess of logic, suffers from aesthetic poverty. Our poetry is neither vague enough nor concentrated enough. Our vague poets slacken beyond measure; our concentrated poets constrict beyond endurance: Lamartine, Baudelaire. And this is what drove the Decadent movement, in its bid to endow French poetics with the virtues of English or German verse, to manhandle the Latin instrument. Yet even by exploiting our very failings, we can envision magnificent poems in our language, and here, most succinctly, is their design:

Extraordinarily vague verses hover about the idea, engaging it through its shifting meanings, orchestrated through successive and preparatory misreadings foreseen in advance and echoed afterwards in the surrounding prose, deferring complete meaning into the beautified radiance of a distant dawn. Then, once the essential atmosphere has been established, a sudden crystallisation of this dawn reveals the truth in a verse at once numerous and rich, yet precise—precise yet mysterious—which contains the entire poem on the strict condition that the whole poem be read. The idea then asserts itself through fresh developments, themselves concentrated by a return of that singular verse or merely one of its elements, perhaps a hemistich, and thus the entire work unfolds, now given over to the logical caprice of imagination, now held fast by the enchanted verse, serving as the capital, so to speak, of that realm at once so brief and so boundless: the work of art.