Dramatis Personæ

by Arthur Symons

The visit of Paul Verlaine, too—unofficial, unadvertised, as it was—seemed to be significant of much. In the first place, it showed, as in the case of Zola, a readiness on the part of some not unimportant section of the public to overlook either personal or literary scandal connected with a man of letters who has done really remarkable work. But the interest of Verlaine's visit was much more purely literary than that of Zola; his reception was in no sense a concession to success, but entirely a tribute to the genius of a poet.

I find that William Watson published only one tiny volume of verse, the barren burlesque of The Eloping Angels, which should never have been printed, and a book of prose, Excursions in Criticism, the criticism and the style being alike as immature and unbalanced as his verse is generally mature and accomplished; while Mr. Le Gallienne has forsaken the domesticity of the muse, to officiate, in The Religion of a Literary Man, as the Canon Farrar of the younger generation. The most really poetic of the younger poets, W. B. Yeats, who has yet to be "discovered" by the average critic and the average reader, has this year published a new volume of verse, The Countess Kathleen, as well as a book of prose stories, The Celtic Twilight, and, in conjunction with Edwin J. Ellis, a laborious study in the mysticism of William Blake. Yeats' work, alone among recent work in verse, has the imaginative quality of vision; it has the true Celtic charm and mystery; and while such admirable verse as Watson's, such glowing verse as Thompson's, are both superior, on purely technical grounds, to Yeats', neither has the spontaneous outflow of the somewhat untrained singing-voice of the younger poet.

Another writer of verse who has not yet been estimated at his proper value, John Davidson, has also published a new book of poems, Fleet Street Eclogues, and a book of prose, A Random Itinerary. It is difficult to do justice to Davidson, for he never does justice to himself. His verse is always vivid and striking; at its best it has a delightful quality of fantastic humor and quaint extravagance; but it is singularly uneven, and never, in my opinion, at its best in purely modern subjects. The Random Itinerary is a whole series of happy accidents; but there are gaps in the series. Davidson strikes one as a man who might do almost anything; why, then, does he not do it?

Now, these paradoxical digressions have brought me back to the question of Zola and Moore, and of the realistic novel. Moore's were based on no theories; Zola's on certain theories, really a view of humanity which he adopted as a formula: "Nature seen through a temperament;" a definition supposed to be his definition of all art; which it most certainly is not. Yet nothing, certainly, could be more exact and expressive as a definition of the art of Huysmans.

Zola has made up his mind that he will say everything without omitting a single item; so that his vision is the vision of the mediocre man; and his way of finding out in a slang dictionary that a filthy idea can be expressed by an ingeniously filthy phrase in Argot, is by no means desirable. Every one knows two sentences in that supreme masterpiece, Madame Bovary, how that detail, brought in without the slightest emphasis of the husband turning his back at the very instant when his wife dies, is a detail of immense psychological value; it indicates to us, at the very beginning of the book, just the character of the man about whom we are to read so much. Zola would have taken at least two pages to say that, and, after all, he would not have said it.

Compare with any of Zola's novels the amazingly clever novel of Moore, A Mummer's Wife, which goes with several other novels which are—well—manqués, in spite of their ability, their independence, their unquestionable merits of various kinds. A Mummers Wife is admirably put together, admirably planned and shaped; the whole composition of the book is masterly. The style may drag, but not the action; the construction of a sentence may be uncertain, but not the construction of a character. The actor and his wife are really living people; we see them in their surroundings, and we see every detail of those surroundings. Here, of course, he would never have made Zola's stupid mistake; but can one imagine for a moment—I certainly can not—the writer of this novel writing, creating, (if I may dare use the word) two such sentences of Flaubert, which I quote in their original? "Huit jours après, comme elle étendait du linge dans sa cour, elle fut prise d'un crachement de sang, et le lendemain, tandis que Charles avait le dos tourné pour fermer le rideau de la fenêtre, elle dit: 'Ah! Mon Dieu!' poussa un soupir et s'évanouit. Ella était morte."

George Moore's Modern Painting is full of injustices, brutality and ignorances; but it is full also of the most generous justice, the most discriminating sympathy, and the genuine knowledge of the painter. It is hastily thought out, hastily written; but here, in these vivid, direct, unscrupulously logical pages, you will find some of the secrets of the art of painting, let out, so to speak, by an intelligence all sensation, which has soaked them up without knowing it. Yet, having begun by trying to paint, and having failed in painting, and so set himself to the arduous task of being a prose-writer, he is often, in spite of his painter's accuracy as to "values" and "technique" and so on, unreliable.

For, being neither creative as a novelist nor as a critic, he has nothing, as a matter of course, of two among many essential qualities: vision and divination. Take, for instance, a few pages anywhere in L'Art Romanesque of Baudelaire, or from his prose on Delacroix, on Constantine Guys, on Wagner, on Daumier, on Whistler, on Flaubert, and on Balzac—where he is always supreme and consummate, "fiery and final"—and place these beside any chosen pages of Moore's prose on either Balzac or on Whistler, and you will see all the difference in the world: as I have said above, between the creative and the uncreative criticism.

Had Walter Pater devoted himself exclusively to art criticism, there is no doubt that, in a sense, he would have been a great art critic. There are essays scattered throughout his work, as in the Botticelli where he first introduces Botticelli to the modern world, as in the Leonardo da Vinci—in which the simplest words take color from each other by the cunning accident of their placing in the sentences, the subtle spiritual fire kindling from word to word creates a masterpiece, a miracle in which all is inspiration, all is certainty, all is evocation, and which, in the famous page on La Gioconda, rises to the height of actually lyrical prose—in which the essential principles of the art of painting are divined and interpreted with extraordinary subtlety. In the same sense all that Whistler has written about painting deserves to be taken seriously, and read with understanding. Written in French, and signed by Baudelaire, his truths, and paradoxes reflecting truths, would have been realized for what they are. He fought for himself, and spared no form of stupidity: for, in Whistler, apart from his malice, his poisonous angers, taste was carried to the point of genius, and became creative.

George Moore's literary career has been singularly interesting; his character as a writer is very curious. A man who respects his art, who is devoted to literature, who has a French eye for form, he seems condemned to produce work which is always spotted with imperfection. All his life he has been seeking a style, and he has not yet found one. At times he drops into style as if by accident, and then he drops style as if by design. He has a passionate delight in the beauty of good prose; he has an ear for the magic of phrases; his words catch at times a troubled expressive charm; yet he has never attained ease in writing, and he is capable of astounding incorrectness—the incorrectness of a man who knows better, who is not careless and yet who can not help himself. Yet the author of A Mummer's Wife, of The Confessions of a Young Man, of Impressions and Opinions, has more narrowly escaped being a great writer than even he himself, perhaps, is aware.