Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, not only the surroundings, the sense of time, and locality, but the whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists because his mind is nearer to what is creative in the poet's mind than that of any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poets. Take King Lear and take Père Goriot. Goriot is a Lear at heart; and he suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely when Lear grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that he comes so close to us and is so recognizable. Lear may exchange his crown for a fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every bank-note that his daughter robs him of. In that definiteness, that new power of "stationary" emotion in a firm and material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose.
So it is Baudelaire who has said this fundamental thing on the problem of artist and critic: "It would be a wholly new event in the history of the arts if a critic were to turn himself into a poet, a reversal of every psychic law, a monstrosity; on the other hand, all great poets become naturally, inevitably, critics. I pity the critics who are guided solely by instinct; they seem to me incomplete. In the spiritual life of the former there must be a crisis when they would think out their art, discover the obscure laws in consequence of which they have produced, and draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine purpose is infallibility in poetic construction. It would be prodigious for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to contain a critic."
Jeanne Duval by C. Baudelaire
II
Has any writer ever explained the exact meaning of the word Style? To me nothing is more difficult. Technique, that is quite a different affair. The essence of good style might be, as Pater says, "expressiveness," as, for instance, in Pascal's style, which—apart from that—is the purest style of any French writer. It is no paradox to state this fact: without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth considering in any art; the violinist, the pianist, the painter, the poet, the novelist, the rope-dancer, the acrobat—all, without exception, if they lapse from technique lapse from perfection. I have often taken Ysaye as the type of the artist, not because he is faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the point where faultless technique leaves off.
Art, said Aristotle, should always have "a continual slight novelty," and his meaning is that art should never astonish. Take, for instance, Balzac, Villiers, Poe, and Baudelaire; only one part of their genius, but a most sinister one, is the desire to astonish. There is, to me, nothing more astonishing in prose fiction than The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado of Poe; they are more than analysis, though this is pushed to the highest point of analysis; they have in them a slow, poisonous and cruel logic; equalled only, and at times surpassed in their imagination, by certain of Villiers' Contes Cruels, such as his Demoiselles de Bien Filâtre, L'Intersigne and Les amants de Tolède. And—what is more astonishing in his prose than in any of the writers I have mentioned—is his satire; a satire which is the revenge of beauty on ugliness; and therefore the only laughter of our time which is fundamental, as fundamental as that of Rabelais and of Swift.
Baudelaire, when he astonishes, is never satirical: sardonical, ironical, coldly cruel, irritating, and persistent. This form of astonishment is an inveterate part of the man's sensitive and susceptible nature. It is concentrated, inimical, a kind of juggling or fencing; a form of contradiction, of mystification; and a deliberate desire of causing bewilderment. The Philistine can never pardon a mystification, and a fantastic genius—such as that of Baudelaire and of Poe—can never resist it when opportunity offers.
Had he but been one of those "elect souls, vessels of election, épris des hauteurs, as we see them pass across the world's stage, as if led on by a kind of thirst for God!" (I quote Pater's words on Pascal) his sombre soul might have attained an ultimate peace; a peace beyond all understanding. This was cruelly denied him. He, I imagine, believed in God; thirsted for God: neither was his belief confirmed nor his thirst assuaged. He might, for all I know, have thought himself a reprobate—and so cast out of God's sight.
"For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,
Soul may divide from body, but not we
One from another; I hold thee with my hand,
I let mine eyes have all their will of thee,
I seal myself upon thee with my might,
Abiding alway out of all men's sight
Until God loosen over sea and land
The thunder of the trumpets of the night."