To think of Huysmans is to be led towards an aspect of style not to be passed over. To say that the artist in words is expressing a new vision of the world and seeking the designations for things as he sees them, is a large part of the truth, and, I would say, perhaps the most important part of it. For most of us, I suppose (as I know it has been for me), our vision of Nature has been largely, though by no means entirely, constituted by pictures we have seen, by poems we have read, that left an abiding memory. That is to say that Nature comes to us through an atmosphere which is the emanation of supreme artists who once thrilled us. But we are here concerned with the process of the artist’s work and not with his æsthetic influence. The artist finds that words have a rich content of their own, they are alive and they flourish or decay. They send out connecting threads in every direction, they throb with meaning that ever changes and reverberates afar. The writer is not always, or often, merely preparing a catalogue raisonné of things, he is an artist and his pigments are words. Often he merely takes his suggestions from the things of the world and makes his own pictures without any real resemblance to the scene it is supposed to depict. Dujardin tells us that he once took Huysmans to a Wagner concert; he scarcely listened to the music, but he was fascinated by the programme the attendant handed to him; he went home to write a brilliant page on “Tannhäuser.” Mallarmé, on the other hand, was soaked in music; to him music was the voice of the world, and it was the aim of poetry to express the world by itself becoming music; he stood on a height like a pioneer and looked towards the Promised Land, trying to catch intimations of a new sensibility and a future art, but a great master of language, like Huysmans, he never was. Huysmans has written superb pages about Gustave Moreau and Félicien Rops, thinking, no doubt, that he was revealing supreme artists (though we need not follow too closely the fashion of depreciating either of those artists), but he was really only attracted to their programmes and therein experiencing a stimulus that chanced to be peculiarly fitted for drawing out his own special art. Baudelaire would have written less gorgeously, but he would have produced a more final critical estimate.
Yet even the greatest writers are affected by the intoxication of mere words in the artistry of language. Shakespeare is, constantly, and, not content with “making the green one red,” he must needs at the same time “the multitudinous seas incarnadine.” It is conspicuous in Keats (as Leigh Hunt, perhaps his first sensitively acute critic, clearly explained), and often, as in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” where he seemed to be concerned with beautiful things, he was really concerned with beautiful words. In that way he is sometimes rather misleading for the too youthful reader; “porphyry” seemed to me a marvellous substance when as a boy of twelve I read of it in Keats, and I imagine that Keats himself would have been surprised, had he lived long enough to walk to St. Thomas’s Hospital over the new London Bridge, when told that he was treading a granite that was porphyritic. I recall how Verlaine would sometimes repeat in varying tones some rather unfamiliar word, rolling it round and round in his mouth, sucking it like a sweetmeat, licking the sound into the shape that pleased him; some people may perhaps have found a little bizarre the single words (“Green,” for example) which he sometimes made the title of a song, but if they adopt the preliminary Verlainian process they may understand how he had fitted such words to music and meaning.
The most obviously beautiful things in the world of Nature are birds and flowers and the stones we call precious. But the attitude of the poet in the presence of Nature is precisely that of Huysmans in the presence of art: it is the programme that interests him. Of birds the knowledge of poets generally is of the most generalised and elementary kind; they are the laughing-stock of the ornithologist; they are only a stage removed from the standpoint of the painter who was introducing a tree into his landscape and when asked what tree, replied, “Oh, just the ordinary tree.” Even Goethe mistook the finches by the roadside for larks. The poet, one may be sure, even to-day seldom carries in his pocket the little “Führer durch unsere Vogelwelt” of Bernhard Hoffmann, and has probably never so much as heard of it. Of flowers his knowledge seems to be limited by the quality of the flower’s name. I have long cherished an exquisite and quite common English wild-flower, but have never come across a poem about it, for its unattractive name is the stitchwort, and it is only lately that even in prose it has met (from Mr. Salt) with due appreciation. As regards precious stones the same may be said, and in the galleries of the Geological Museum it has hardly seemed to me that, among the few visitors, there were poets (unless I chanced to bring one myself) to brood over all that beauty. It is the word and its inner reverberation with which the poet is really concerned, even sometimes perhaps deliberately. When Milton misused the word “eglantine” one realises the unconscious appeal to him of the name and one cannot feel quite sure that it was altogether unconscious. Coleridge has been solemnly reproved for speaking of the “loud” bassoon. But it was to the timbre of the word, not of the instrument, that Coleridge was responding, and had he been informed that the bassoon is not loud, I doubt not he would have replied: “Well, if it is not loud it ought to be.” On the plane on which Coleridge moved “the loud bassoon” was absolutely right. We see that the artist in speech moves among words rather than among things. Originally, it is true, words are closely related to things, but in their far reverberation they have become enriched by many associations, saturated with many colours; they have acquired a life of their own, moving on another plane than that of things, and it is on that plane that the artist in words is, as an artist, concerned with them.
It thus comes about that the artist in words, like the artist in pigments, is perpetually passing between two planes—the plane of new vision and the plane of new creation. He is sometimes remoulding the external world and sometimes the internal world; sometimes, by predilection, lingering more on one plane than on the other plane. The artist in words is not irresistibly drawn to the exact study of things or moved by the strong love of Nature. The poets who describe Nature most minutely and most faithfully are not usually the great poets. That is intelligible because the poet—even the poet in the wide sense who also uses prose—is primarily the instrument of human emotion and not of scientific observation. Yet that poet possesses immense resources of strength who in early life has stored within him the minute knowledge of some field of the actual external world.[[65]] One may doubt, indeed, whether there has been any supreme poet, from Homer on, who has not had this inner reservoir of sensitive impressions to draw from. The youthful Shakespeare who wrote the poems, with their minute descriptions, was not a great poet, as the youthful Marlowe was, but he was storing up the material which, when he had developed into a great poet, he could draw on at need with a careless and assured hand. Without such reservoirs, the novelists also would never attain to that touch of the poet which, beyond their story-telling power, can stir our hearts. “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is the name of a great modern book, but every novelist during part of his time has been a Ulysses on a perilous voyage of adventure for that far home. One thinks of George Eliot and her early intimacy with the life of country people, of Hardy who had acquired so acute a sensitivity to the sounds of Nature, of Conrad who had caught the flashes of penetrating vision which came to the sailor on deck; and in so far as they move away into scenes where they cannot draw from those ancient reservoirs, the adventures of these artists, however brilliant they may become, lose their power of intimate appeal. The most extravagant example of this to-day is the Spanish novelist Blasco Ibañez, who wrote of the Valencian huerta that had saturated his youth in novels that were penetrating and poignant, and then turned to writing for the cosmopolitan crowd novels about anything, that were completely negligible.
We grow familiar in time with the style of the great writers, and when we read them we translate them easily and unconsciously, as we translate a foreign language we are familiar with; we understand the vocabulary because we have learnt to know the special seal of the creative person who moulded the vocabulary. But at the outset the great writer may be almost as unintelligible to us as though he were writing in a language we had never learnt. In the now remote days when “Leaves of Grass” was a new book in the world, few who looked into it for the first time, however honestly, but were repelled and perhaps even violently repelled, and it is hard to realise now that once those who fell on Swinburne’s “Poems and Ballads” saw at first only picturesque hieroglyphics to which they had no key. But even to-day how many there are who find Proust unreadable and Joyce unintelligible. Until we find the door and the clue the new writer remains obscure. Therein lies the truth of Landor’s saying that the poet must himself create the beings who are to enjoy his Paradise.
For most of those who deliberately seek to learn to write, words seem generally to be felt as of less importance than the art of arranging them. It is thus that the learner in writing tends to become the devoted student of grammar and syntax whom we came across at the outset. That is indeed a tendency which always increases. Civilisation develops with a conscious adhesion to formal order, and the writer—writing by fashion or by ambition and not by divine right of creative instinct—follows the course of civilisation. It is an unfortunate tendency, for those whom it affects conquer by their number. As we know, writing that is real is not learnt that way. Just as the solar system was not made in accordance with the astronomer’s laws, so writing is not made by the laws of grammar. Astronomer and grammarian alike can only come in at the end, to give a generalised description of what usually happens in the respective fields it pleases them to explore. When a new comet, cosmic or literary, enters their sky, it is their descriptions which have to be readjusted, and not the comet. There seems to be no more pronounced mark of the decadence of a people and its literature than a servile and rigid subserviency to rule. It can only make for ossification, for anchylosis, for petrification, all the milestones on the road of death. In every age of democratic plebeianism, where each man thinks he is as good a writer as the others, and takes his laws from the others, having no laws of his own nature, it is down this steep path that men, in a flock, inevitably run.
We may find an illustration of the plebeian anchylosis of advancing civilisation in the minor matter of spelling. We cannot, it is true, overlook the fact that writing is read and that its appearance cannot be quite disregarded. Yet, ultimately, it appeals to the ear, and spelling can have little to do with style. The laws of spelling, properly speaking, are few or none, and in the great ages men have understood this and boldly acted accordingly. They exercised a fine personal discretion in the matter and permitted without question a wide range of variation. Shakespeare, as we know, even spelt his own name in several different ways, all equally correct. When that great old Elizabethan mariner, Sir Martin Frobisher, entered on one of his rare and hazardous adventures with the pen, he created spelling absolutely afresh, in the spirit of simple heroism with which he was always ready to sail out into strange seas. His epistolary adventures are, certainly, more interesting than admirable, but we have no reason to suppose that the distinguished persons to whom these letters were addressed viewed them with any disdain. More anæmic ages cannot endure creative vitality even in spelling, and so it comes about that in periods when everything beautiful and handmade gives place to manufactured articles made wholesale, uniform, and cheap, the same principles are applied to words, and spelling becomes a mechanic trade. We must have our spelling uniform, even if uniformly bad.[[66]] Just as the man who, having out of sheer ignorance eaten the wrong end of his asparagus, was thenceforth compelled to declare that he preferred that end, so it is with our race in the matter of spelling; our ancestors, by chance or by ignorance, tended to adopt certain forms of spelling and we, their children, are forced to declare that we prefer those forms. Thus we have not only lost all individuality in spelling, but we pride ourselves on our loss and magnify our anchylosis. In England it has become almost impossible to flex our stiffened mental joints sufficiently to press out a single letter, in America it is almost impossible to extend them enough to admit that letter. It is convenient, we say, to be rigid and formal in these things, and therewith we are content; it matters little to us that we have thereby killed the life of our words and only gained the conveniency of death. It would be likewise convenient, no doubt, if men and women could be turned into rigid geometrical diagrams,—as indeed our legislators sometimes seem to think that they already are,—but we should pay by yielding up all the infinite variations, the beautiful sinuosities, that had once made up life.
There can be no doubt that in the much greater matter of style we have paid heavily for the attainment of our slavish adherence to mechanical rules, however convenient, however inevitable. The beautiful incorrection, as we are now compelled to regard it, that so often marked the great and even the small writers of the seventeenth century, has been lost, for all can now write what any find it easy to read, what none have any consuming desire to read. But when Sir Thomas Browne wrote his “Religio Medici” it was with an art made up of obedience to personal law and abandonment to free inspiration which still ravishes us. It is extraordinary how far indifference or incorrection of style may be carried and yet remain completely adequate even to complex and subtle ends. Pepys wrote his “Diary,” at the outset of a life full of strenuous work and not a little pleasure, with a rare devotion indeed, but with a concision and carelessness, a single eye on the fact itself, and an extraordinary absence of self-consciousness which rob it of all claim to possess what we conventionally term style. Yet in this vehicle he has perfectly conveyed not merely the most vividly realised and delightfully detailed picture of a past age ever achieved in any language, but he has, moreover, painted a psychological portrait of himself which for its serenely impartial justice, its subtle gradations, its bold juxtapositions of colours, has all the qualities of the finest Velasquez. There is no style here, we say, merely the diarist, writing with careless poignant vitality for his own eye, and yet no style that we could conceive would be better fitted, or so well fitted, for the miracle that has here been effected.
The personal freedom of Browne led up to splendour, and that of Pepys to clarity. But while splendour is not the whole of writing, neither, although one returns to it again and again, is clarity. Here we come from another side on to a point we had already reached. Bergson, in reply to the question: “Comment doivent écrire les Philosophes?” lets fall some observations, which, as he himself remarks, concern other writers beside philosophers. A technical word, he remarks, even a word invented for the occasion or used in a special sense, is always in its place provided the instructed reader—though the difficulty, as he fails to point out, is to be sure of possessing this instructed reader—accepts it so easily as not even to notice it, and he proceeds to say that in philosophic prose, and in all prose, and indeed in all the arts, “the perfect expression is that which has come so naturally, or rather so necessarily, by virtue of so imperious a predestination, that we do not pause before it, but go straight on to what it seeks to express, as though it were blended with the idea; it became invisible by force of being transparent.”[[67]] That is well said. Bergson also is on the side of clarity. Yet I do not feel that that is all there is to say. Style is not a sheet of glass in which the only thing that matters is the absence of flaws. Bergson’s own style is not so diaphanous that one never pauses to admire its quality, nor, as a hostile critic (Edouard Dujardin) has shown, is it always so clear as to be transparent. The dancer in prose as well as in verse—philosopher or whatever he may be—must reveal all his limbs through the garment he wears; yet the garment must have its own proper beauty, and there is a failure of art, a failure of revelation, if it possesses no beauty. Style indeed is not really a mere invisible transparent medium, it is not really a garment, but, as Gourmont said, the very thought itself. It is the miraculous transubstantiation of a spiritual body, given to us in the only form in which we may receive and absorb that body, and unless its clarity is balanced by its beauty it is not adequate to sustain that most high function. No doubt, if we lean on one side more than the other, it is clarity rather than beauty which we should choose, for on the other side we may have, indeed, a Sir Thomas Browne, and there we are conscious not so much of a transubstantiation as of a garment, with thick embroidery, indeed, and glistening jewels, but we are not always sure that much is hidden beneath. A step further and we reach D’Annunzio, a splendid mask with nothing beneath, just as in the streets of Rome one may sometimes meet a Franciscan friar with a head superb as a Roman Emperor’s and yet, one divines, it means nothing. The Italian writer, it is significant to note, chose so ostentatiously magnificent a name as Gabriele D’Annunzio to conceal a real name which was nothing. The great angels of annunciation create the beauty of their own real names. Who now finds Shakespeare ridiculous? And how lovely a name is Keats!
As a part of the harmony of art, which is necessarily made out of conflict, we have to view that perpetual seeming alternation between the two planes—the plane of vision and the plane of creation, the form within and the garment that clothes it—which may sometimes distract the artist himself. The prophet Jeremiah once said (and modern prophets have doubtless had occasion to recognise the truth of his remark) that he seemed to the people round him only as “one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument.” But he failed to understand that it was only through this quality of voice and instrument that his lamentations had any vital force or even any being, and that if the poem goes the message goes. Indeed, that is true of all his fellow prophets of the Old Testament and the New who have fascinated mankind with the sound of those harps that they had once hung by the waters of Babylon. The whole Bible, we may be very sure, would have long ago been forgotten by all but a few intelligent archæologists, if men had not heard in it, again and again and again, “one that hath a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument.” Socrates said that philosophy was simply music. But the same might be said of religion. The divine dance of satyrs and nymphs to the sound of pipes—it is the symbol of life which in one form or another has floated before human eyes from the days of the sculptors of Greek bas-reliefs to the men of our own day who catch the glimpse of new harmonies in the pages of “L’Esprit Nouveau.” We cannot but follow the piper that knows how to play, even to our own destruction. There may be much that is objectionable about Man. But he has that engaging trait. And the world will end when he has lost it.