“Art,” he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jacques Callot.... Rembrandt is the white-bearded philosopher who shuts himself up like a snail in his retreat, who absorbs his life in meditation and in prayer, who closes his eyes to gather himself together, who converses with spirits of beauty, of science, of wisdom, and of love, and consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature.... Callot, on the other hand, is the jolly, braggart soldier of foot, who peacocks in the square, makes a noise in the inn, swears only by his rapier and his carbine, and has no other care than the waxing of his moustache.... Now, the author of this book has envisaged art under this double personification, but he has not been too exclusive, and presents, besides fantasies in the manners of Rembrandt and of Callot, studies after Van Eyck, Lucas de Leyde, Albert Durer, Peeter Neef, Breughel de Velours, Breughel d’Enfer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dow, Salvator Rosa, Murillo, Fusely, and many other masters of different schools.”
Bertrand’s book is one of the documents that must be studied by any historian of the grotesque who would trace the re-awakening of a spirit in art that had dozed during the eighteenth century, a spirit quite different from that of Hogarth, with which it is sometimes confounded. Bertrand’s was not the noble, the sublime conception of the grotesque that ruled the finer drawings and much of the poetry of William Blake. It was akin to that whose love of a gargoyle brought it to life and sent Quasimodo to haunt the dark and winding stairs of the towers of Notre Dame. Bertrand contrasts Rembrandt and Callot, but does not see that in the mind of the man “who consumes himself in penetrating the mysterious symbols of nature” there is the essence of the feeling for the grotesque, which, in such men as Callot, having forgotten its origins, too often becomes mere sport, shadows flung on a wall by a will-o’-the-wisp instead of by a philosopher’s lamp. But in Gaspard de la Nuit this feeling is groping towards consciousness, recognising its food in the etchings alike of Rembrandt and of Callot, of Salvator and of Durer, noticing the more obvious differences between them, but as yet incapable of a more sensitive distinction. It is interesting to notice that he takes suggestions from the Breughel[2] whose wild and energetic picture made Flaubert, ten years later, set to work on The Temptation of St. Anthony.
Bertrand’s book is made up of six series of fantasies, labelled “Flemish School,” “Old Paris,” “The Chronicles,” like the rooms in a picture-gallery. The usual form of the pieces is that of a small number of carefully balanced paragraphs, mostly single sentences, sometimes linked by refrains of movement or meaning. Some have minute prologues and epilogues. Some are like prose-ballades, finished by an envoi. Few cover more than two or three pages in a small book of large type. Each one is complete in itself, and built of a firm, noun-ful prose, richer in colour than in subtlety.
They were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible, a man elusive, fugace, who could not settle in one place or in one mood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the nearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a hunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his chase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no models for the gait of his soul.
Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble personality. Like Leigh Hunt, he could write something quite charming that owed at least part of its charm to its neglect of something else. His was a poetical temperament rather than the temperament of a poet. He felt things and saw things, but never dominated them, so that all he could save in his difficult existence was a wonderful handful of dreams. He dreamt by day and by night, and caught a few of his dreams with their bright colours in two or three skilful paragraphs. In a cottage on the edge of a forest he read chronicles of monks and knights while the snow froze on the ground, or else, in such a study as Faustus might have used, pored upon Raymond Lully. He was surrounded in his dreams by ancient books, and looking far beyond and through their phantom leather backs, saw a black gondola in the Venetian night, or a Messire Blasius with double chin and worldly-wise eye, like a portrait by Van Eyck. He saw the old Paris of Hugo’s reconstruction, and the old Dijon that he rebuilt himself. Before his eyes the witches departed to keep their Sabbath with Satan. An Undine of German fairy story offered him her love, but, rich with dreams, he preferred to watch the changes of the moon.
This is perhaps one of the most characteristic of his reveries:
“Le Clair de Lune.
“‘Réveillez-vous gens qui dormez
Et priez pour les trépassés.’
—Le cri du crieur de nuit.