Here we have, translated for the first time into English, an extraordinary essay by Teodor de Wyzewa on Count Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, originally published in La Revue indépendante in 1886. Writing while Villiers still lived—though in considerable poverty and obscurity—Wyzewa offers a penetrating psychological portrait that seeks to explain both the brilliance and the commercial failure of one of French literature’s most enigmatic figures.
Wyzewa’s central thesis is audacious: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s artistic temperament, his philosophical insights, and even his inability to achieve worldly success all stem from his being, in essence, a displaced aristocrat—a prince born into an age of democracy. This “princely” nature, Wyzewa argues, manifests in three defining characteristics: an unshakeable conviction of innate superiority, a gift for command, and—crucially—a constitutional inability to engage in sustained practical action.
The essay traces how this aristocratic temperament shaped Villiers’ evolution as both philosopher and artist. Beginning with his early fascination with Hegelian philosophy, Wyzewa shows how Villiers transcended mere academic metaphysics to arrive at a profound idealism reminiscent of Plato: the conviction that the mind alone exists, that reality consists of our ideas, and that “to understand is the reflection of creating.” This philosophy, far from being abstract doctrine, permeated Villiers’ artistic vision, leading him to create tales populated by superhuman beings—proud knights, omniscient mages, women of uncanny majesty—moving through heroic dreamscapes.
Wyzewa’s analysis of Villiers’ style is particularly insightful. He identifies both a sublime lyrical mode, unmatched in French prose for its musical richness, and a devastatingly ironic voice that mocks modern materialism by adopting the solemn tones once reserved for noble convictions. Yet Villiers’ works, Wyzewa acknowledges, often appear flawed and disordered to contemporary readers—not through artistic failure, but because they emerge from a sensibility fundamentally alien to democratic modernity.
The essay concludes with a poignant reflection on Villiers’ fate: condemned to “the grinding life of the journalist” yet sovereign of “the magnificent feudal empire of his princely imagination.” Wyzewa’s portrait, both sympathetic and unflinching, remains one of the most provocative interpretations of this singular writer who stood, in his own words, determined not to build the palace of his dreams upon the “thankless soil” of the modern world.
❦
Ancient earth, I shall not build
the palace of my dreams
upon thy thankless soil...
(Count de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Axël, V.)
For over twenty years, Count de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam has endured in Paris the grinding life of the man of letters and journalist. He languished long in near-total obscurity, until a recent article by M. Bergerat in Le Figaro brought his existence to the notice of society on both continents and helped shift a few editions of his novel, L’Ève future. Yet neither L’Ève future, nor the two volumes collecting his Tales, nor the dramas he managed to mount in our theatres have achieved any genuine success. The discerning elite amongst the educated public have too great a fondness for well-wrought, clearly-defined works to appreciate writings devoid of balance, littered with interminable digressions, and of such a nature that one can never tell whether the author speaks in earnest or in jest. The young symbolist writers, meanwhile, fault M. de Villiers for his somewhat wilted romantic idealism, his weakness for mystification, and the tedium of his lyrical flights.
All admirably just criticisms, for all their seeming diversity. Yet they cannot alter the fact that M. de Villiers possesses over those sound and balanced writers whom the public prefers, over our distinguished dramatists, over our young symbolists (sympathetic though they are in so many ways), and indeed over M. Bergerat himself, one positive superiority—unfortunate for him though it may be: that alone amongst them all, alone perhaps in Europe, and in all likelihood the last of his line, Count de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is a Prince.
I
In bygone ages, after the collapse of Roman civilisation, when new races burst upon the stage of history, physical vigour was the sole instrument needed in the struggle for survival, and the most vigorous men imposed themselves, by natural law, as masters of the emerging tribes. They became chieftains, charged with directing battles and apportioning spoils. They acquired the distinctive qualities of command, along with the special privileges their functions demanded. They wed the daughters of other chieftains; they passed on to their offspring, together with the qualities and privileges they had won, an instinctive hunger for dominion and a sharpened sense of their inborn superiority. Thus, over centuries, a caste of nobles and princes took shape.
When later the conditions of existence shifted—when physical vigour had to be tempered with prudent counsel—the princes, further refined through generations of selective breeding, splendidly donned new virtues. Now they were the mind of their peoples; they contemplated far-reaching designs; they schooled themselves to anticipate events, to read men’s hearts, whilst leaving the business of practical execution to lesser hands.
In time, the personal ambitions of kings stripped them of political power. Yet they remained no less distinct; indeed, their distinctiveness only deepened through the new, seemingly disinterested nature of their pursuits. Whilst other men toiled away at the wearisome business of trade, politics, or warfare, the princes displayed their subtle refinements around the sovereign prince in a thousand graceful complications of court etiquette.
Another century arrived, bringing with it the charms of salon conversation, the perfumed smiles of young ladies, the familiar yet respectful flatteries of artists. As the weight of practical affairs and immediate personal action grew ever more burdensome for the rest of mankind, the princes retreated further from common tumults, taking sanctuary in more rarefied occupations. They preserved, nonetheless, their lofty appetite for dominion; if they ceded power to others, it was through indulgence, through ennui, always with the mental reservation of reclaiming it ere long. They knew themselves a superior breed, untouched by the sordid necessities that shackle ordinary mortals. Yet they had lost—through centuries of desuetude, though they scarcely suspected it—the capacity for action in the real world: not action in generous, fitful spurts, but sustained action, dogged accomplishment, resistance. They had become constitutionally unfit for these things.
The salon life in which they now diverted themselves had erected for them a universe already distinct from the common world, still tethered to reality, yet by the slenderest of threads, floating as it were above it. Only in this rarefied sphere could their otherwise useless gifts find expression, whilst ancient privileges and the condescending protection of rulers saw to their material needs.
Then came, after centuries of preparation, the ultimate storm, and the thread that still bound these elevated souls to the world of our realities snapped forever. This was the grand advent of democracy—a terrible struggle in close quarters, where victory belonged to those most capable of immediate, relentless action, unhampered by ancestral scruples. The princes were an inconvenient redundancy: they were suppressed. Some met rather abrupt ends; others saw their privileges revoked, their estates confiscated, and above all, that elegant and princely sphere—which they had created by and for themselves, the sole arena where they could indulge their agreeable taste for a life of busy idleness—utterly destroyed.
The scions of feudal houses bowed to the new dispensation. They endeavoured to unlearn the qualities of their blood—a Herculean labour, but they prevailed. They rejoined common humanity: behold them now as merchants, diplomats, military officers, all on their own merits and in free competition. They married into bourgeois families, capitalising on the fading lustre of their titles. The wealthiest amongst them petitioned the sovereign people for legislative appointments, offering modest financial contributions in return.
But those qualities that had for centuries distinguished the nobility as a race apart were now forfeit. They had embraced the wants of common men; they had spurned their natural superiority and thereby lost it. They had ceased to be princes and become citizens, absorbed into the vast, sheltering embrace of Universal Suffrage.
Nevertheless, the extinction of a race—whether by insecticide, guillotine, or ballot box—is never instantaneous. When enterprising colonists exterminate, for sport, some harmless species in the fragrant plains of that land called Geography, invariably a few specimens of the doomed race escape the slaughter, concealed in some gorge, or having fled to hidden wastes at the first alarm. They will not accept their new superfluity; they struggle to persist within the transformed order. In these final representatives, the racial traits grow ever more intricate and exquisite; then they perish, the world refusing any quarter to these belated anomalies.
In like manner, we might imagine that, despite our democracies’ best efforts, certain individuals of the princely race have survived the general ruin, preserving in some forgotten corner of the world their race’s peculiar qualities: princes by legitimate descent, or else because the brilliant glamour of a feudal name, impressed upon their infant minds, transfused into their veins that coveted blood and anointed them with nobility’s seal more surely than generations might have done.
We might further imagine that life’s vagaries bring one such phenomenon to Paris, sprouted from the mysterious soil of some remote Brittany. This prince, thrust into Parisian life, will be poor—either arriving penniless or squandering, in his tragic ignorance of modern ways, whatever capital he brought. He too will attempt, no doubt, to shed his racial traits, recognising their danger. But should he fail, should the call of blood prove irresistible, the princely qualities of his soul will only intensify through friction with the alien world around him.
And this, perhaps, is how he will live amongst us.
The defining traits of his race, consolidated within him, will be an unshakeable conviction of his native superiority, a gift for command, and a constitutional inability to act or achieve. Desiring power, he will initially engage with our world of realities; but being fundamentally other, lacking our needs and customs, things will strike him quite differently than they strike us. He will dismiss the immediate and practical to chase remote causes and recondite theoretical explanations. He will survey the world with a philosopher’s eye, constructing theories about the concatenation of phenomena, their metaphysical import, their ultimate sources. This theoretical bent will be reinforced by mounting revulsion at what he observes—for will he not see a world fashioned for men utterly foreign to his nature?
This scornful disgust for mundane affairs will swell irresistibly within the prince’s soul. Philosophy will have drawn him to meditate upon the origin and destiny of beings; yet he will recognise in the life surrounding him the ancient ideals his forebears championed, now mocked and desecrated. Through an imperious chivalric impulse, he will champion these traditions anew, as he might once have defended a maiden vilely wronged in the fabled kingdoms of romance. In the name of religion and the ideal, he will proclaim his disdain for modern scepticism. Yet too proud and noble to voice this disdain as crude invective, he will wield against base realities the weapon of princely irony.
All the while, his weariness with this world will deepen; and since he harbours an innate need to live differently—a life of refinement and distinction, uniquely his own—he will construct at will, above our world of realities, a new and sovereign realm where he alone shall rule. Whilst other men wear themselves out chasing luxury, wealth, or glory, he will effortlessly command—despite his threadbare coat and shabby quarters—all those exquisite satisfactions he knows to be his birthright: whether by creating, once and for all, the perfect illusion of some palace where he lingers in a queen’s languorous embrace, or by endlessly varying his fantasies, living each fully, savouring always the delights of princely existence.
He shall be a visionary: yet since he creates his dreams deliberately, in all their coherent sequence, he shall be an artist. The artist is one who can create a life. Yet the prince, even should cruel necessity compel him to write, will never become a productive artist, a true writer. For art demands not only a mind capable of creating life, but equally the faculty to realise that created life externally: it entails manual labour, the craft of composition—and the prince’s soul will forever prove unfit for such work. His books will lack all composition: a predetermined plan, a rigorously followed order—these require cold blood, the subjugation of one’s creation from the outset to practical ends. Neither will the prince prove capable of regular production. Unconsciously, he will harbour contempt for transcribing his dreams—and besides, will it not always pain him to descend from the enchanted realm he inhabits, to deform and peddle his precious joys? He will endlessly meditate upon gigantic schemes, a work at last worthy of him, encompassing every subject—yet he will fail to realise any of these grand promises (1). He will suddenly sense their insufficiency: already some new dream will have beguiled him, and the old visions will seem drained of colour. True writers train themselves to believe the work they labour over is excellent and sacred; he will see in it only a despicable matter of trade—and yet he will wish this business worthy of himself, treated magnificently. He will exhaust himself in endless revisions, never satisfied, perceiving all too keenly the gulf between the written thing and the envisioned dream. And then, after a thousand books sketched, resumed, left incomplete, the prince—if he has not starved to death, if he has escaped the asylum cells forever gaping along his path—will end his literary career supplying daily gossip items for some morning paper: having at last understood that all trades are equally facile, equally futile, that forcing the reflection of one’s soul upon people whom it merely inconveniences is pointless, and that, decidedly, nothing can be done with this world. He will reign joyously in spheres open to him alone, with occasional moments when, turning back towards our agitations, he will let out a peal of laughter and feel immense bewilderment at his own existence.
II
Count Villiers de l’Isle-Adam was, from the first, seduced by theoretical speculation. In the sole published volume of his novel Isis, in 1863, he was already expounding a strikingly original conception of modern life. Himself barely twenty, he instructed young men in the art of success: through dissembling inner feelings, through relentless action, through shrewd analysis of neighbouring souls. And beneath these general precepts lay observations of extraordinary subtlety, an evident instinctive grasp of human motives. Yet general theories about society cannot, alone, satisfy a nobly engaged soul. They touch too intimately upon philosophy: they lead inexorably to the ultimate questions of being and reality. Stendhal could pursue throughout his works a practical philosophy of existence—but only because he had first discovered, in the empiricists’ accommodating doctrine, a secure foundation for his moral precepts. M. de Villiers had found no such satisfying solutions in the doctrines of his education: he was driven to seek them himself. From these early years he acquired a philosophical curiosity he would never relinquish.
Into the deepest reaches of metaphysics he plunged with indomitable ardour: to the poets of the Parnassian school, with whom he first consorted, he appeared a philosopher. His impatient temperament, his perpetual need to create, permitted him little varied reading, and I imagine that amongst the works of earlier philosophers, Hegel’s alone were known to him (2). But the volumes of the Logic, then translated rather wretchedly by M. Véra, seem to have enthralled him at the time. He cites with admiration, in several passages of Isis, the name and views of the German scholastic. He recognises therein the ultimate synthesis of philosophies: he declares himself Hegelian.
Hegel’s doctrine is quite forgotten today. I cannot say what marvels M. de Villiers’s predestined soul perceived in it. In essence, this doctrine represents a valuable attempt to construct a complete system of the sciences, yet a priori, arbitrarily, through a facile method of little real consequence. For Hegel, the universe is an endless parallelism of opposites, a vast becoming, constituted by the twin modes of thesis and antithesis. Mysterious reality unfolds in dual aspect: in the primary realm of logic, the antinomy of Being and Non-Being; in the subsequent realm of our knowledge, Spirit and Nature; and then, relationships ingeniously established between the various degrees of these evolving appearances. For all that, a classification rather than a doctrine, leaving the very ground of things in its full, fated mystery.
M. de Villiers was nonetheless dazzled by this conception of science. He sought to pursue and apply it in a new work, Claire Lenoir; he endeavoured to interpret it as it had revealed itself to him. One character, a professed Hegelian, thus expounds the Master’s theories: First, the world we know through ordinary experience is not reality. The fatal inadequacy of our organs condemns us to perpetual error.—To worship God and resign ourselves to mystery?—But what is God, save the idea we form of Him? God is merely my mind’s projection, as are all things. I cannot escape my own mind.—But what of other men? In reality there are no other men: I am the Species, knowing the Species only through myself. I am the point through which the Idea of the Polyp-Humanity finds expression.—And illness, death? These too are nothing. The Species outlives the individual we believe ourselves to be, whom alone death touches… Spirit is the Universe’s foundation. To understand is the reflection of creating (3).
Such a conception of the universe would scarcely have pleased Hegel, coming from a disciple. The subtle and ingenious system-builder would have disdainfully referred it to his predecessor Fichte, who would himself have swiftly recognised the positive, psychological, decidedly un-Fichtean character of these propositions. The truth is that Count Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, aspiring to be Hegelian, yet ignorant of earlier philosophies, and through the sole grace of blessed natural intuition, has transcended Hegelian scholasticism, as indeed all the impoverished modern metaphysics, to penetrate to reality’s ultimate depths. He has erected a personal doctrine, serious, decisive, which only Plato before him—prince of utopian aristocracies, Plato who divined all things—had divined.
The mind never departs from itself. The universe we believe real consists of our ideas, and our ideas are our soul’s creation. Our soul alone therefore lives; it is the whole of Reality—yet constrained, to know itself, to pour forth in manifold and ceaseless ideas. To live is to create ideas; to rejoice is to feel oneself creating them. What we call our personal self, bounded by an organism, opposed to the not-self—illusion; and we perish through the fatal habit of believing it real. We have imagined certain of our ideas more real than others: we have confined ourselves to creating these alone. And the natural joy of free creation has been lost to us. Willingly we have limited our soul: now become slaves and playthings of illusory desires, rather than conceiving all things—our person, the world—as the laughing, eternal daughters of our thought.
Is this not Plato’s prisoner, projecting upon his cave walls the reflection of himself, henceforth condemned to self-ignorance, wholly absorbed in the anguished vision of these pallid phantoms? Is this not the nous, sole reality, imprisoned beneath the malign appearances of personal character and cruel desires? Is this not the conception that imposes itself, through elementary logic, upon minds somewhat detached from selfish interests, capable merely of severing the hereditary bond that enslaves us to the snare of our realities? Is this not the only philosophy available to a prince whose soul, having acquired the need for a different reality, can impartially judge the deception of all objective appearances?
And M. de Villiers develops this marvellous theory throughout his works. He makes it flower triumphantly, beneath the splendid pageantry of regal music, in the fourth act of his recent drama, Axel:
“So here you are, ripe for the supreme ordeal… You’re nothing but a child who knows mere words… and you would renounce your own Ideal for this vile secret?… No. Today must be vanquished, through simple and virginal Humanity, the twin illusion of gold and love… Man, if you cease to limit a thing within yourself—that is, to desire it—if thereby you withdraw from it, it will come to you, feminine, as water comes to fill the space offered in the hollow of your hand. For you possess the real being of all things in your pure will, and you are the god you can become…
“So you cling tightly to yourself?” the old Mage continues… “Fulfil yourself in the light!… You are only what you think: think yourself eternal, then… Don’t you feel your imperishable being shine beyond all nights?… You believe you’re learning—you’re finding yourself again: the universe is merely a pretext for this unfolding of all consciousness.—Where is your limit, within it? Where is its limit, within you?… Here you are now, incarnate, beneath veils of organism, in a prison of relationships—Attracted by the magnets of Desire… if you yield to them, you thicken the penetrating bonds that envelop you… Be privation! Renounce! Free yourself… Thus you will annul within yourself, around yourself, every limit! And, forever forgetful of what was the illusion of yourself—free at last from your being—you will become again—pure spirit, distinct essence, in the Absolute Spirit, the very consort of what you call Deity. What do the living live on, if not mirages—base hopes, forever disappointed?… Each time you love, you die by that much… Never again project, then, except upon the Uncreated Light, the sum of your acts and thoughts… You are a god who has forgotten. Know thyself!”
And here returns the astonishing aphorism, epitome of all philosophy, already pronounced in Claire Lenoir: To understand is the reflection of creating.
Readily, in his books, M. de Villiers exalts the miraculous arts of magic and all the scorned artifice of thaumaturges. This might seem a new doctrine, founded upon belief in that objective reality just now expelled. But clearly, for M. de Villiers, hermetic laws are as real—no more so—as the catalogued laws of our sciences; he has grasped the infinite possibility of all ideas, and that scientific laws become risible unless seen purely as provisional, convenient formulae sanctioning the majority of customary appearances. The soul alone exists, supreme arbiter of existences. And henceforth, M. de Villiers will no longer exhaust himself seeking a practical philosophy of modern society. Like the proud and regal Tullia Fabiana, he has been able, at the cost of temporal desires readily renounced, to lift the great, secularly thickened veil of maternal Isis. He has read, in the goddess’s dark eyes and beneath the dazzling bands of her raven hair, the contemptible vanity of illusory realities. He will henceforth contemplate the pale eternal visage—or else divert his free creative power in conceiving loftier humanities: knowing himself to be, immortally, the sovereign prince of Realities.
III
The exceptional qualities of his race and temperament drove the Comte de Villiers to flee the commonplace world and build for himself, through the free play of his mind, a world more worthy of him—and thereby more real. His philosophical inquiries led him down this same path, their conclusions likewise springing from his singular nature. Without pause he gave birth to princely tales, inhabited the lives of his imagined characters, and surrendered joyfully to the creation of superhuman universes. As for his subjects? He gladly took his own philosophical theories as themes. M. de Villiers’ novels and tales are, in the main, symbolic. Yet their symbolic import is hardly their sole object. They bear no resemblance to those symbolic tales by other writers, narratives expressly invented to illustrate doctrines. In M. de Villiers’ work, the story matters for its own sake: it is a tale truly lived and told, though conceived—perhaps unconsciously—under the influence of a doctrine it comes to embody. Philosophy was never for M. de Villiers a profession or an idle pastime. It had transformed within his soul the whole aspect of life. Thus was he able to be at once artist and philosopher, as Plato had been before him. He could inhabit the events and thoughts he narrated whilst steeping them in his metaphysics. And what beings emerged from this recreation? Superhuman creatures, towering immeasurably above our small common souls, moving through heroic dreamscapes in attitudes of grandeur. Young women of uncanny majesty, wedding the mysterious beauty of their pale flesh to perfect and omnipotent knowledge. Robed mages, masters of the arcane. Knights of exquisite pride. This magnification of character—which lends M. de Villiers’ tales the superficial appearance of outmoded melodrama—is in his case legitimate, artistic, the only mode suited to his mind’s inherent cast. For M. de Villiers is a prince adrift in our democracies. Those distant passionate heroisms he readily grasps as real. Our modern vision of things is alien to him. Instinctively he creates souls like his own—perfectly noble and pure, contemptuous of vulgar desires, driven to action by the imperatives of an elevated superiority. With exemplary artistic honesty, he presents in his tales the sole universe he has been able to observe.
Shall we examine briefly some of these tales? A woman of magnificent heart has long endured life as companion to a worthy merchant. She has bowed to the pettiness of bourgeois existence; she has kept the household books with scrupulous care. Yet one evening, beneath the glittering infinity of stars, rebellion seizes this unrecognised noble heart. She burns with shame for years squandered on trivial concerns: she longs to flee, to venture far from the world, finally to let the mysterious blossoms of her soul unfold in solitude. She confesses to her stupefied husband her desire to leave; she holds firm; she senses happiness within reach; she departs. And whilst the worthy tradesman finds swift consolation—after all, it’s simply a matter of hiring a new bookkeeper—behold, the wife returns to the cursed hearth. Her hope for salvation has proved vain: her soul has too long borne the weight of sordid bourgeois illusions; she sees that henceforth the Eden of finer realities must remain barred to her. Thus ends the beautiful dream, too noble: the merchant’s wife returns to her ledgers, doomed never to forget the paradise glimpsed, never to enter it.
The ambitious and magnificent Akëdysséril, sovereign of the iridescent Indies, returns triumphant to her usurped realm amid jubilant nations. She has decreed the death of a young royal couple, yet wished them to die in ecstasy, locked in immortal embrace. She discovers that the aged priest entrusted with their execution kept them apart for months: they perished in isolation, denied the solace of languorous caresses. The proud victor blazes with indignation at such disobedience. Then the ancient, all-knowing mage reveals to her the superior rapture of the vanished young lovers. They died bearing the endless joy of anticipation, the infinite illusions that fulfilment would have shattered. They knew the supreme bliss of perpetual longing, and death granted them the only complete and enduring consummation. Such was the price of their immortal dazzlement of joy.
A young woman refuses to abandon the brilliant life of desires: she flees the convent where she was confined and ventures forth toward enticing mysteries. Meanwhile, a young man likewise forsakes the wild rapture of ataraxia, lured by golden dreams. And in a cavern dripping with fabulous jewels, amid the enchantment of crimson gold, the maiden and youth suddenly behold one another. Passionate intoxication engulfs their merged souls; they exchange a gaze for all eternity; the lust for gold, the lust for power—both are conquered in their hearts by love’s overwhelming tide. Surrounded by this glittering feast for their desires, the lovers grasp desire’s ultimate futility: in death they shall taste the only true joy, a blessed death in one another’s arms. Oh! Only there, in the sepulchral realm of impersonality, shall their souls find beneficent joy, whilst this spurned and wicked treasure sleeps forever.
Such are these glorious subjects; but how does he tell them? A sway comparable to Hegel’s appears to have been long exerted over M. de Villiers by the American Poe. He frequently intended, I believe, to emulate the Histoires extraordinaires; and numerous passages in Claire Lenoir and the Contes cruels betray this ambition. Yet Poe’s nature differed too profoundly from his own to permit real imitation. Edgar Poe, for all his undeniable genius, remained an American and a bourgeois. He composed his tales with cool calculation, never succumbing to their hallucinatory power beforehand. He sought to instil in readers’ souls an impression of terror or desolation through specific, defined techniques: the systematic emphasis on a detail that suddenly swells to flood the attention; the cunning manufacture of dread through shocks and gaps in the flow of ideas; every word, with admirable practical intent, crafted to serve the total effect; and something like a series of brilliant devices wedded to the device of sustained musical sonority, purposefully sepulchral. How different are M. de Villiers’ narrative methods! Concern for composition evaporates: those carefully laid plans require cool detachment, immunity from the complete illusion of the projected events. Besides, M. de Villiers’ designs are so grand and unprecedented that he inevitably fails to shape his work to fit them. And then, that obvious and unremitting hallucination: M. de Villiers dissolves into his characters; he lives their inner life; he ceases to be a writer crafting books and becomes instead one dazzled by his own visions. This produces an unfortunate imbalance in the narrative machinery; endless digressions unrelated to the original subject, yet into which the author plunges, drawing us with him according to his dreams’ free whim. From this—and from certain failings inherent in his princely nature—springs an inability to make us relive that existence which overwhelms him with its intensity. The result: seven-volume novels forever incomplete, colossal dramas where scattered scenes of superb tragedy drown, for the audience, in the general impression of a work both diffuse and ill-proportioned.
M. de Villiers’ magnificent tales and dramas fail to live for us as tales and dramas. The reason lies principally in the princely character of his artistic temperament. He sees and grasps the world otherwise; and we cannot recreate it as he does, for this world has vanished from our modern sight. We can barely reconstruct his portraits of inferior, vulgar types: even here his peculiar vision loads them with ridiculous traits we ourselves would never observe in them; we see caricature where the author meant to convey his unvarnished observations. All because these works were not written for us—they achieve their full power only for the princely soul that created them. Yet even those works that seem most badly constructed and eccentric preserve an extraordinary savour of reality and life. First, because M. de Villiers—though the stories he witnesses differ from ours—sees them with such clarity and completeness that he succeeds, against all odds, in conveying their reflection to us. Moreover, his unwavering faith in the reality of his tales enables him to capture myriad arresting details we readily perceive and find enchanting: a gesture of dress or bearing, a subtle shade in the setting—things that elude writers working from predetermined schemes, things that grant us, at least in the story’s trappings, a vivid illusion. Yet these trappings are not all that moves us in these curious narratives. An undeniable, mysterious phenomenon takes hold. We sense our inability to recreate the authentic life the author envisioned: yet we feel an impression of extraordinary intensity, unlike anything we experience reading novels meant for us. And when we endeavour to pierce this mystery, the source of our aesthetic pleasure reveals itself. If M. de Villiers’ narratives live for us despite our inability to recreate them, it is because they are clothed in a style so prodigious that it alone suffices to convey the impression of life.
IV
M. de Villiers’ style seems at first glance constructed from invariable devices: those long sentences, punctuated by parenthetical asides and explanations; that grave, rather monotonous conclusion which, through its solemn drawing-out of words, echoes the classical periods of Bossuet and Chateaubriand.
Yet one soon perceives how profoundly his style transforms itself, depending on whether it serves to voice the grand passions of legend and philosophy’s profound questions, or to satirise modern society. M. de Villiers commands at once a lyrical and an ironic style. M. Bergerat recently proclaimed him the most notorious of hoaxers. Some of Bonhomet’s quips possess all the amusing value of drawing-room gossip. His novels, tales and dissertations brim with sallies whose sole purpose is to entertain. Yet even these trifles acquire in his hands their own distinction: an elegant, quasi-philosophical bearing that makes them less immediately comic, yet more genuinely amusing than our vaudevillists’ absurdities.
But M. de Villiers’ authentic irony resides neither in Bonhomet’s preposterous aphorisms, nor in those one- or two-verse poems he perpetrates, nor in his laments for cherished crimes. He has trained upon his contemporaries, their morals and creeds, a far more pitiless eye; indeed, I believe he has perfected a form of artistic irony entirely his own. What does he satirise? This brave new world, so alien to his race’s innate needs; those self-satisfied contentments where vulgar comfort suffices; the acclaim bestowed upon supposed progress, which merely intensifies and multiplies desire; the complacencies of our shallow, beatific philosophies, and our universal acquiescence to illusory realities.
He mocks these venerated institutions as only a spirit that has glimpsed their pettiness can mock. He stands too far above them to demean himself with invective; and he finds them sufficiently absurd to need no exaggeration, unlike our celebrated humourists. He has simply held up what he mocks to the light of what he values. He has echoed our petty vanities without alteration, merely adopting the tone once reserved for yesterday’s noble convictions. Thus with perfect gravity, as though demonstrating theological proofs, he has uttered the platitudes and negations we now share. Or else he has pursued modern theories to their logical conclusions and proclaimed them, earnestly, with prophetic severity—striking home with these masterly thrusts to some of us, whilst the majority, so saturated with the new spirit they can no longer perceive its absurdity, find this mockery from another age baffling.
Yet M. de Villiers’ true glory, the aspect through which his aristocratic nature’s grandeur genuinely reveals itself, lies in the magnificent music of his impassioned prose. His irony might arguably derive from Poe, or more likely Swift and certain English satirists; his lyrical style remains incomparable. This is no longer, as in Poe’s prose poems, a sonorous yet monotonous harmony, less attuned to emotion’s subtleties than designed as melodramatic accompaniment to events.
Only Thomas de Quincey has attempted such varied verbal melody; he has even achieved fuller expression of emotion’s phases; yet Quincey’s melody lacks the richness and resonance of M. de Villiers’, who remains unquestionably the supreme poet of the French language. The few verses he published astonish through their harmonic—if not rhythmic—variety, through their determination to modulate music according to feeling’s contours. And then those stanzas of veiled, tender, distant delicacy. M. de Villiers grasped early that poetry, being music, must, like its instrumental counterpart, break free from the narrow forms tradition had imposed. He abandoned poems in regular verse and rhyme. He invested prose with the power to generate emotion through sonorous sequences of rhythm and syllable. And he fashioned a prose of stately or exquisite harmony, preserving always that imperishable character of aristocratic ceremony, yet modulating, beneath the general continuity of tone, into passages now desolate and cruel, now like gossamer flights through sultry nights.
Seldom—except for purely musical effect—does he pause for description. Yet because he inhabits with fierce intensity the worlds he creates, he captures in his sentences the very spirit of place and circumstance. He eschews cataloguing sensations and their sequence: he records only vital details; through these he conjures the complete vision, clothing them in music calibrated to the precise emotion they inspire (4). This musical quality in M. de Villiers’ works is, through some unconscious gift, so perfectly matched to his subjects’ demands that one might profitably compile a lexicon of his sonorities paired with the specific emotions they convey. I cannot, in these hasty notes, even outline such valuable work. But I commend it to those young people burning to become poets: they sense the inadequacy of current poetic forms, yet flail about in futile protest, failing to see that the fault in our poetic language, as in our musical language, lies not in antiquated formulae but in imprecise vocabulary, even as our emotions grow ever more refined, manifold and distinct.
Count Villiers de l’Isle-Adam shall prove, I believe, France’s greatest poet. To express emotions through verbal music he was manifestly destined by his nature’s and lineage’s particular gifts. Early estranged from quotidian reality, he had ascended to philosophy, and since he pursued philosophical questions to satisfy his own curiosity, the theories he discovered moved him. Likewise, the stories he told moved him, for he told them to himself, to slake his inborn thirst for a higher existence. He was transported by his soul’s visions, rather than compelling his soul, as writers do, to dream for public consumption. Therefore, in recording his dreams, perhaps unwittingly, he must have saturated his writing with the emotion that possessed him. This explains why his stories, despite their flaws, their departure from literary convention, and though we cannot fully enter them as narratives, still affect us beyond words. The sinuous music of his sentences, perfectly matched to their matter, reveals through its spell a glimpse of that higher realm the poet inhabits.
Upon a royal stage, amid magnificent and changing sets, M. de Villiers performs for himself alone, remote from us, the sublime dramas of an intense, transcendent and complete existence. We are not admitted to the spectacle; our own wilful poverty has barred the door. Yet whilst most of us, like proper democrats, turn away with a shrug from this theatre’s bolted entrance, a few, still drawn to those forbidden noble longings, press their ears against the walls. And these few catch, drifting faintly from that invisible stage, a marvellous music that slowly permeates their being and claims them forever: the orchestra accompanying the drama within. And the harmonies it strikes ring out so warm and splendid and charged with eloquent tenderness that through them we divine the magnificent play. A fever of passion summons in our hearts those scenes—diminished though they are, and how pale!—those scenes enacted beyond, amid the changing sets, in that royal theatre from which we are barred.
V
M. de Villiers is a prince—the last vestige of a vanished race, cast adrift in our levelling age. I have endeavoured to show, however briefly and incompletely, that the evolution of his mind and work can only be explained through the princely qualities of his temperament. He has contemplated the philosophies and dreamt the romances that a prince alone might contemplate and dream. He has regarded our epoch, our pursuits, as only a prince might regard them. And though his writings possess the glorious richness of sovereign music, they often appear to us flawed, disordered, bizarre—for M. de Villiers is a being unlike ourselves, constitutionally unable to accommodate our needs or adopt our habits; for he is, quite simply, a Prince.
This distinction has at least saved him from joining those poets christened the Accursed. Whilst exemplary artists exhausted themselves producing perfect works for an ideal public, suffering to see their efforts thwarted—both by the impossibility of attaining perfect form and by the absence, anywhere in their orbit, of the desired audience—the Prince, creating for himself alone, secure in the magnificent sense of his otherworldly difference, could abandon himself without reserve to the spell of unbounded visions. He has known, legitimately and ceaselessly, the twin supreme delights of disdain and vitality: triumphant sovereign of a radiant realm, elsewhere, towering above our risible vanities.
It is said that M. de Villiers once, prompted by a legitimate sense of his birthright, pursued some throne thrown open to bidders by the accidents of history. I fancy that power would have tethered him, if only temporarily, to our reality. He would have applied himself to reigning—which is to say, to embodying within his dominion the noblest, wisest, and most sublimely disinterested of rulers. Perhaps he might even have accomplished, in our epoch, the stupefying feat of authentic monarchy. Yet I believe that Fortune, in condemning him to endure amongst us the grinding life of the journalist, has conferred upon him the sovereignty most befitting his nature. The truth is that the modern world has no use for kings: nobility, wisdom, disinterestedness—what good are such virtues when they have become obsolete? Monarchy requires the consent of subjects, the preservation of essential inequalities—maintained all the more rigorously as these disparities widen. M. le Comte de Villiers, raised to such an onerous dignity, would quickly have tired of his thankless burden. His kingdom, now, belonged no longer to this world fashioned for the new breed of men. Instead, he has claimed the realm that suited his soul—the magnificent feudal empire, eternally resplendent, of his princely imagination.
❦
Notes:
1. In his private life too, he would cling to prodigious hopes of sudden fortune, devising vast schemes with such tireless devotion that he scarcely had time to suffer the sting of disillusion.
2. Souls capable of summoning life within themselves, without pause, do not read—indeed, they cannot read; for reading is suited only to those unable to find, within themselves, a ceaseless spring of vitality.
3. Claire Lenoir, passim.
4. Consider, as examples chosen at random from countless marvels, the depiction of a conflagration in Le Désir d’être un homme, the portrayal of an imperial banquet in Vox Populi, the rendering of a ball in that masterpiece L’Amour suprême; and finally, carved from the dazzling symphonic finale of Axel, a geography, an evocation of alluring regions, conjured there through the magical artifice of an image at once perfectly precise and surrounded by that ambient harmony which expresses the particular spell of dreamed-of lands.
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Léon Hennique Novel 