This book might well close here. I have addressed Past and Present. I could trust the reader’s insight to discern the Future. I have given pride of place to the representatives of the Past95 to show how the modern spirit proceeds through Analysis. It decomposes the human compound, studying in turn: the Soul in its passions, ideally distinct from temperament; then Feeling in the movements of that impassioned Soul; and finally, Sensation. I have then indicated how, after this immense labour, the modern spirit seeks through Synthesis to reconstruct what Analysis had sundered. This attempt remains incomplete. It is the very task of the Littérature de Tout à l’heure.
At the turn of the century, we witnessed two geniuses—Goethe and Chateaubriand—rising like the negative and positive poles of Thought: Science and Mysticism. Then come spirits one dare not call secondary, yet who are not the stars of first magnitude in this century’s firmament. They apply the laws of passional psychology to living beings and discover human truth. They ennoble Art, which is to become religious. They restore majesty to the instrument of Poetry—the Verse. They conceive the notion of the Literary Monument and foresee conscience joining with inspiration to govern and fortify it. They recover a poetry of primordial man, intimate with the heart of nature, whose silent language again becomes legible to them. They locate the human refuge within man himself, in his interior life. They unveil the marvellous aspect, the metaphysical expression of this interior life that doubles upon itself. They return to the simplicity of legends whilst sustaining verse in its lyrical element and rendering it fitter to carry thoughts transmuted into ideas. Victor Hugo, that clearing house of all innovations, adding nothing of his own, lends them the force of law. Balzac and Wagner, the twin luminaries of the century, restore fundamental Art to its natural wellsprings through Science, emancipate formal Art by identifying Fiction as its essential element, establish the principle of compositional unity, lay the bedrock of reality for the artwork of the future, achieve the union of all artistic forms governed by Action, synthesise observations and experiences within Fiction, and fuse mysticism with sensualism through artistic expression. Poe and Baudelaire establish as dogmas two truths that shall brook no heretics amongst true poets: conscious and concentrated genius, and the lyrical sense of Science. They prohibit abandoning anything to chance in artistic work. They prescribe for Beauty a singular melancholy, logical and magnificent. They express the inexpressible and demonstrate how poetry can embrace psychology by exaggerating the “mysterious, satanic, horrible, and anguishing features of the soul whilst almost refraining from describing them, thereby magnifying them and allowing their sombre and splendid terror its full weight”96. Through their very example, they prove that true poetry is the Ideal. They institute in art the fundamental notion of the Exceptional and discover modern verse. With Flaubert and M. Leconte de Lisle, they stand as the final sentinels of that sorrowful vigil preceding the joyous feast of Art, master at last of all its powers. Flaubert establishes the prose of general ideas. Sainte-Beuve invents, for expressing the shadings of sentiment, the principle of personal language. M. Leconte de Lisle, like Flaubert in prose, establishes the verse-language of general ideas; like Flaubert too, sounds the return to Origins, and both, through their plaint more intense yet aesthetically finer than their predecessors’, inaugurate consolation through Beauty, germ of an aesthetic religion. M. Théodore de Banville restores Art’s authentic character, which is Joy; assigns Poetry its law in the Ode and its governor in Rhyme; first articulates that Theatre is merely the Ode in dialogue. Messrs de Goncourt and Barbey d’Aurevilly, each distinctively—beyond personal language, attained by both—examine Modernity through Physiognomy: the latter through art serving Catholic religion, the former through art independent of all religion.
The Littérature de Tout à l’heure is synthetic. It aspires to evoke the whole man through the whole of Art. Now this Synthesis stands more than half-achieved through the efforts I have summarised. It stands wholly achieved if to these efforts we join those of these Poets: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé.97
Yet perhaps one desires to know how the new generation, these latest arrivals, propose in turn to advance the Great Work.
This I shall outline as concisely as possible.
Léon Hennique Novel 