III
Is not a criticism of primary ideas, the only kind of criticism, when one considers it, that is really worth writing? A critic may tell us that So-an-So has written a charming book, that it is the best of his charming books, that it is better or worse than another book by another writer with whom we see no necessity to compare him, that it is, in short, an "addition to literature;" well and good, here is some one's opinion, perhaps right, perhaps wrong; not very important if right, not easy to disprove if wrong. But let him tell us, in noting the precise quality of À Rebours, and its precise divergence from the tradition of naturalism: "Il ne s'agissait plus tant de faire entrer dans l'art, par la représentation, l'extériorité brute, que de tirer de cette extériorité même des motifs de rêve et de la révélation intérieure;" let him tell us in discussing the question of literary sincerity that a certain writer "est sincère, non parce qu'il avoue toute sa pensée, mais parce qu'il pense tout son aveu:" has he not added to the very substance of our thought, or touched that substance with new light?
The curious thing in regard to Benjamin Constant is that there was not a single interest, out of the many that occupied his life, which he did not destroy by some inconsequence of action, for no reason in the world, apparently, except some irrational necessity of doing exactly the opposite of what he ought to have done, of what he wanted to do. So he creates Adolphe so much of himself in it, and makes him say, in a memorable sentence, "Je me reposais, pour ainsi dire, dans l'indifference des autres, de la fatigue de son amour." He was never tired of listening to himself, and the acute interest of his Journal consists in the absolute sincerity of its confessions, and at the same time the scrutinizing self-consciousness of every word that is written down. "Il y a en moi deux personnes, dont l'en observe l'autre." So cold-hearted is he that when perhaps his best friend, Mademoiselle Talma, is dying, he spends day and night by her bedside, overwhelmed with grief; and he writes in his Journal: "Y étudie la mort." So out of this distressing kind of reality which afflicts the artist, he creates his art, Adolphe, a masterpiece of psychological narrative, from which the modern novel of analysis may have been said to have arisen, which is simply a human document in which he has told us the story of his liaison with the writer of Corinne. She made him suffer for he writes: "Tous les volcans sont moins flamboyants qu'elle." He suffers, as his hero does, because he can neither be intensely absorbed, nor, for one moment, indifferent; that very spirit of analysis which would seem to throw some doubt on the sincerity of his passion, does but intensify the acuteness with which he feels it. It is the turning of the sword in a wound. He sums up and typifies the artistic temperament at its acutest point of weakness; the temperament which can neither resist, nor dominate, nor even wholly succumb to, emotion; which is forever seeking its own hurt, with the persistence almost of mania; which, if it ruins other lives in the pursuit, as is supposed, of artistic purposes, gains at all events no personal satisfaction out of the bargain; except, indeed, when one has written Adolphe, the satisfaction of having lived unhappily for more than sixty years, and left behind one a hundred pages that are still read with admiration, sixty years afterward.
Flaubert, possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, gave himself to superhuman labors for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that adjective. And the desperate certitude in his spirit always was: "Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but one—one form, one mode—to express all I want to say." He desired, above all things, impersonality; and yet, in spite of the fact that he is the most impersonal of novelists, the artist is always felt; for as Pater said: "his subjectivity must and will color the incidents, as his very bodily eye selects the aspects of things." Yet again, in spite of the fact that Flaubert did keep Madame Bovary at a great distance from himself, we find in these pages the analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman, as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and observed in surroundings of the most extraordinary kind. He creates Emma cruelly, morbidly, marvelously; he creates in her, as Baudelaire says, the adulterous woman with a depraved imagination. "Elle se donne" he writes, "magnifiquement, généreusement, d'une manière toute masculine, à des drôles qui ne sont pas ses égaux, exactement comme les poètes se livrent a des drôlesses."
As Flaubert invented the rhythm of every sentence I choose this one from the novel I have referred to, this magnificently tragic sentence: "Et Emma se mit à rire, d'un rire atroce, frénétique, désespéré, croient voir la face hideuse du misérable qui se dressait dans les ténèbres éternelles comme un épouvantent." Aeschylus might have put such words as these on the lying and crying lips of Clytemnestra in her atrocious speech after she has slain Agamemnon. With this compare a sentence I translate from Petrus Bórel. "I have often heard that certain insects were made for the amusement of children: perhaps man also was created for the same pleasures of superior beings, who delight in torturing him, and disport themselves in his groans." This is a sentence which might almost have been written by Hardy, so clearly does it state, in an image like one of his own, the very center of his philosophy. Take, for example, these sentences in The Return of the Native: "Yet, upon the whole, neither the man nor the woman lost dignity by sudden death. Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic histories with a catastrophic dash."
Swinburne, who invariably overpraises Victor Hugo, overpraises his atrocious novel L'Homme qui rit. But I forgive him everything when he writes such Baudelairean sentences as these:
Bakilphedro, who plays the part of devil, is a bastard begotten by Iago upon his sister, Madame de Merteuil; having something of both, but diminished and degraded; wanting, for instance, the deep daemonic calm of their lifelong patience. He has too much heat of discontent, too much fever and fire, to know their perfect peace of spirit, the equable element of their souls, the quiet of mind in which they live and work out their work at leisure. He does not sin at rest, there is somewhat of fume and fret in his wickedness. There is the peace of the devil, which passeth all understanding.
Certainly, for an absolutely diabolical dissection of three equally infamous characters, this is unsurpassable. Iago is not entirely malignant, nor is he abjectly vile, nor is he utterly dishonest: he is supreme in evil, and almost as far above vice as he is beyond virtue. He has not even a fleshly desire for Desdemona: yet he is the impassioned villain who "spins the plot." Can one conceive, as Swinburne conjectures, "something of Iago's attitude in hell—of his unalterable and indomitable posture for all eternity?" As for Madame Merteuil she is, in Les Liaisons dangereuses, not only a counterfoil for Valmont, but a spirit of almost inconceivable malignity; yet she is not as abnormal as Iago. She has a sublime lack of virtue, with an immense sense of her seductiveness. There is no grandeur in her evil, as there is in Valmont's. In the longest letter she writes, that Baudelaire praises, she confesses herself with so curious a shamelessness as to intrigue one. In composing this for her Laclos shows the most sinister side of his genius. He shows her sterility, her depraved imagination, her deceit and her dissimulations: rarely the humiliations she has endured. As she is resolved on the ruin of Valmont she writes in this fashion: "Séduite par votre réputation, il me semblait que vous manquiez à ma gloire; je brûlais de vous combattre corps à corps." She is not even a criminal, not even the symbol of one of the poisonous women of the Renaissance, who smiled complacently after an assassination. Her nature is perverted by the lack of the intoxication of crime. The imagination which stands to her in the place of virtue has brought its revenge, and for her, too, there is only the release of death.
"Tout les livres sont immoraux," wrote Baudelaire in his notes on this book: certainly a sweeping paradox, for there is much less immorality in Laclos' novel than in Rabelais or in Swift or in Aristophanes. Still as he wrote this book in the time of the French Revolution, there was more than enough of hell-creating material in the age of Robespierre and Marat and Danton and Mirabeau, who wrote the infamous Erotika Biblion. It is amusing to note that in Perlet-Malassis's reprint in 1866 the writer of a preface dated 1832 says: "Le style de Mirabeau, par cette vive puissance de la pensée que resplendit de son propre éclat sans rien emprunter aux ornements de l'art, s'élève dans cet ouvrage jusqu'aux beautés les plus sublimes." Exactly a year before Mirabeau's book appeared Laclos printed his novel; and, for what I must call the sublimity of casuistry, here is one consummate sentence of Valmont's. "Je ne sortais de ses bras que pour tomber à ses genoux, pour lui jurer un amour éternel, et, il faut tout avouer, je pensais ce que je disais."