III
FRANCIS POICTEVIN
There is a memorable passage in A Rebours, the transcription of which, by Mr. George Moore, may be helpful in understanding the work of that rare literary artist, Francis Poictevin. "The poem in prose," wrote Huysmans, "handled by an alchemist of genius, should contain the quintessence, the entire strength of the novel, the long analysis and the superfluous description of which it suppresses ... the adjective placed in such an ingenious and definite way that it could not be legally dispossessed of its place, that the reader would dream for whole weeks together over its meaning, at once precise and multiple; affirm the present, reconstruct the past, divine the future of the souls revealed by the light of the unique epithet. The novel thus understood, thus condensed into one or two pages, would be a communion of thought between a magical writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration by consent between ten superior persons scattered through the universe, a delectation offered to the most refined and accessible only to them."
This aristocratic theory of art was long ago propounded by Poe in regard to the short poem. Huysmans transposed the idea to the key of fiction while describing the essential prose of Mallarmé; but some years before the author of A Rebours wrote his ideal book on decadence a modest young Frenchman had put into practice the delightfully impracticable theories of the prose poem. This writer was Francis Poictevin (born at Paris, 1854). Many there were, beginning with Edgar Poe and Louis Bertrand, who had essayed the form, at its best extremely difficult, at its worst too tempting to facile conquests: Baudelaire, Huysmans in his Le Drageoir aux Epices; Daudet, De Banville, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Maurice de Guérin, and how many others! During the decade of the eighties the world of literature seemed to be fabricating poems in prose. Pale youths upon whose brows descended aureoles at twilight, sought fame in this ivory miniature carving addressed to the "ten superior persons" very much scattered over the globe. But like most peptonic products, the brain as does the stomach, finally refuses to accept as nourishment artificial concoctions too heavily flavoured with midnight oil. The world which is gross prefers its literature by the gross, and though it has been said that all the great exterior novels have been written, the majority of readers continue to read long-winded stories dealing with manners and, of course, the eternal conquest of an uninteresting female by a mediocre male. Aiming at instantaneity of pictorial and musical effect—as a picture become lyrical—the poets who fashioned their prose into artistic rhythms and colours and tones ended by exhausting the patience of a public rapidly losing its faculty of attention.
Possibly these things may account for the neglect of a writer and thinker of such delicacy and originality as Poictevin, but he was always caviare even to the consumers of literary caviar. But he had a small audience in Paris, and after his first book appeared—one hesitates to call it a novel—Daudet saluted it with the praise that Sainte-Beuve—the Sainte-Beuve of Volupté and Port-Royal—would have been delighted with La Robe du Moine. Here is a list of Poictevin's works and the years of their publication until 1894. Please note their significant and extraordinary names: La Robe du Moine, 1882; Ludine, 1883; Songes, 1884; Petitan, 1885; Seuls, 1886; Paysages et Nouveaux Songes, 1888; Derniers Songes, 1888; Double, 1889; Presque, 1891; Heures, 1892; Tout Bas, 1893; Ombres, 1894.
A collective title for them might be Nuances; Poictevin searches the last nuance of sensations and ideas. He is a remote pupil of Goncourt, and superior to his master in his power of recording the impalpable. (Compare any of his books with the Madame Gervaisais of Goncourt; the latter is mysticism very much in the concrete.) At the same time he recalls Amiel, Maurice de Guérin, Walter Pater, and Coventry Patmore. A mystical pantheist in his worship of nature, he is a mystic in his adoration of God. This intensity of vision in the case of Poictevin did not lead to the depravities, exquisite and morose, of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the brilliant outrageous Barbey d'Aurevilly. With his soul of ermine Poictevin is characterised by De Gourmont as the inventor of the mysticism of style. Once he saluted Edmond de Goncourt as the Velasquez of the French language, and that master, not to be outdone in politeness, told Poictevin that his prose could boast its "victories over the invisible." If by this Goncourt meant making the invisible visible, rendering in prose of crepuscular subtlety moods recondite, then it was not an exaggerated compliment. In such spiritual performances Poictevin resembles Lafcadio Hearn in his airiest gossamer-webbed phrases. A true, not a professional symbolist, the French prosateur sounds Debussy twilight harmonies. His speech at times glistens with the hues of a dragon-fly zigzagging in the sunshine. In the tenuous exaltation of his thought he evokes the ineffable deity, circled by faint glory. To compass his picture he does not hesitate to break the classic mould of French syntax while using all manners of strange-fangled vocables to attain effects that remind one of the clear-obscure of Rembrandt. Indeed, a mystic style is his, beside which most writers seem heavy-handed and obvious.
Original in his form, in the bizarre architecture of his paragraphs, pages, chapters, he abolishes the old endings, cadences, chapter headings. Nor, except at the beginning of his career, does he portray a definite hero or heroine. Even names are avoided. "He" or "she" suffices to indicate the sex. Action there is little. Story he has none to tell; by contrast Henry James is epical. Exteriority does not interest Poictevin, who is nevertheless a landscape painter; intimate and charming. His young man and young woman visit Mentone, the Pyrenees, Brittany, along the Rhine—a favourite resort—Holland, Luchon, Montreux, and Switzerland, generally. His palette is marvellously complicated. We should call him an impressionist but that the phrase is become banal. Poictevin deals in subtle grays. He often writes gris-iris. His portraits swim in a mysterious atmosphere as do Eugène Carrière's. His fluid, undulating prose records landscapes in the manner of Theocritus.
The tiny repercussions of the spirit that is reacted upon by life are Whistlerian notations in the gamut of this artist's instrument. Evocation, not description; evocation, not narration; always evocation, yet there is a harmonious ensemble; he returns to his theme after capriciously circling about it as does a Hungarian gypsy when improvising upon the heart-strings of his auditors. Verlaine once addressed a poem to Poictevin the first line of which runs: "Toujours mécontent de son œuvre." Maurice Barrès evidently had read Seuls before he wrote Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891). The young woman in Poictevin's tale has the same feverish languors; her male companion, though not the egoist of Barrès, is a very modern person, slightly consumptive; one of whom it may be asked, in the words of Poictevin: "Is there anything sadder under the sun than a soul incapable of sadness?" In their room hang portraits of Baudelaire and the Curé d'Ars. Odder still is the monk, P. Martin. Martin is the name of the "adversary" in The Garden of Bérénice. And the episode of the dog's death! Huysmans, too, must have admired Poictevin's descriptions of the Grünewald Christ at Colmar, and of the portrait of the Young Florentine in the Stadel Museum at Frankfort. It would be instructive to compare the differing opinions of the two critics concerning this last-named picture.
A mirror, Poictevin's soul reflects the moods of landscapes. Without dogmatism he could say with St. Anselm that he would rather go to hell sinless than be in heaven smudged by a single transgression. To his tender temperament even the reading of Pascal brought shadows of doubt. A persistent dreamer, the world for him is but the garment investing God. Flowers, stars, the wind that weeps in little corners, the placid bosom of lonely lakes, far-away mountains and their mystic silhouettes, the Rhine and its many curvings, the clamour of cities and the joy of the green grass, are his themes. Life with its frantic gestures is quite inutile. Let it be avoided. You turn after reading Poictevin to the Minoration of Emile Hennequin: "Let all that is be no more. Let glances fade and the vivacity of gestures fall. Let us be humble, soft, and slow. Let us love without passion, and let us exchange weary caresses." Or hear the tragic cry of Ephraim Mikhael: "Ah! to see behind me no longer, on the lake of Eternity, the implacable wake of Time." "Poictevin's men and women," once wrote Aline Gorren in a memorable study of French symbolism, "are subordinate to these wider curves of wave and sky; they come and go, emerging from their setting briefly and fading into it again; they have no personality apart from it; and amid the world symbols of the heavens in marshalled movements and the thousand reeded winds, they in their human symbols are allowed to seem, as they are, proportionately small. They are possessed as are clouds, waters, trees, but no more than clouds, waters, trees, of a baffling significance, forever a riddle to itself. They have bowed attitudes; the weight of the mystery they carry on their shoulders."
The humanity that secretly evaporates when the prose poet notes the attrition of two souls is shed upon his landscapes with their sonorous silences. A picture of the life contemplative, of the adventures of timorous gentle souls in search of spiritual adventures, set before us in a style of sublimated preciosity by an orchestra of sensations that has been condensed to the string quartet, the dreams of Francis Poictevin—does he not speak of the human forehead as a dream dome? —are not the least consoling of his century. He is the white-robed acolyte among mystics of modern literature.