Axel is both difficult and illuminative reading. It is in four acts with nine scenes. Each act or part is respectively entitled: The Religious World, The Tragic World, The Occult World, The Passional World. The poet had not known Wagner and his Tetralogy for naught. Sara is a superb creation—but not on the boards, in the disillusioning, depoetizing, troubled, and malarial air of the stage! It was a mistake to play Axël in Paris. Its solemn act of rejection of life al the moment "when life becomes ideal" is hardly fitting for the theatre. A drama to be played by poets before a parterre of poets! Arthur Symons has noticed with his accustomed acuity that "the modern drama under the democratic influence of Ibsen, the positive influence of Dumas fils, has limited itself to the expression of temperaments in the one case, of theoretic intelligences in the other, in as nearly as possible the words which the average man would use for the statement of his emotions and ideas. The form, that is, is degraded below the level of the characters whom it attempts to express."
It is a point well taken, though I feel inclined to rebel at the pinning down of form to language alone. Ibsen's terseness—and remember we only see him in the cold light of Mr. Archer's translations—is one of his merits; but his form, his dramatic form, is not alone in his text, but in the serene and ordered procession of his dramatic action. Villiers is more poetically eloquent than the Ibsen of the prose dramas. But as logical or as dramatic—!
Mr. Symons adds, "La Révolte, which seems to anticipate A Doll's House, shows us an aristocratic Ibsen, touching reality with a certain disdain, certainly with far less skill, certainly with far more beauty." For me in a play of character the beauty that appeals is not purely verbal. It is the beauty of character quâ character, and the beauty of events marshalled like a great sequence of mysterious music, humming with the indefinable harmonies of life. Ibsen makes this music; so does Gerhart Hauptmann. Axël is noble drama, despite its formal shortcoming, its dream-like quality. Many went begging to Villiers, and few came away empty-handed. Prodigal in genius, he was prodigal in giving.
This poet, like most poets, loathed mediocrity. He sought the exceptional, the complex soul. "A chacun son infini," he said; and in Axel he cries: "As for living, our servants will do that for us! As at the play in a central stall, one sits out so as not to disturb one's neighbours—out of courtesy, in a word—some play written in a wearisome style of which one does not like the subject, so I lived, out of politeness." Here is the gauge cast disdainfully to those who forever pelt us with sweet phrases about loving our neighbour, about altruism, sympathy, and social obligations—all the self-illuding, socialistic cant, in a word, that rankles in the breast of the solitary proud man and poisons the mind of the weak. Villiers is the exorcist of the real, the bearer of the ideal, wrote De Gourmont, himself a poetic individualist. And he sums up, "Villiers knew all forms of intellectual intoxication."
Villiers associated much with Richard Wagner, and with Baudelaire was an ardent upholder of the new music during the troubled times of the Tannhäuser fiasco. He played the piano, knew the Ring by heart—no mean feat—and set Baudelaire's poems to music, anticipating Charles Martin Loeffler by nearly a half-century. Of one of them the music is said to be still extant. It is the poem with this couplet:—
Our beds shall be scented with sweetest perfume, Our divans be as cool and dark as the tomb.
Probably the most lifelike, verbal portrait of Wagner is that of Villiers's. In a memorable passage, which I commend to Mr. Finck as testimony with which to snub recalcitrant clergymen and others, Villiers notes Wagner's violent disclaimer that his Parsifal was merely the work of the artist and not of the believing Christian. "Why, if I did not feel in my inmost soul the living light and love of that Christian faith, my works ... would be the works of a liar and an ape. My art is my prayer." Thus Villiers reports Wagner—Wagner, whose marvellous soul changed colour every moment, like one of those exquisite flying fishes which paint the air and waters of the tropics.
In 1861, at Baudelaire's home, Villiers met Richard Wagner. It was at a period of great depression for that master. Villiers speaks of the interview as the most memorable of his life. "Wagner, with his high, remarkable forehead, almost terrifying in its development; his deep blue eyes, with their slow, steady, magnetic glance; his thin, strongly marked features, changing from one shade of pallor to another; his imperious hooked nose; his delicate, thin-lipped, unsatisfied, ironic mouth; his exceedingly strong, projecting, and pointed chin—seemed to Villiers like the archangel of celestial combat." A rare little band, composed of Wagner, Villiers, Baudelaire, and Catulle Mendès, often walked the town after midnight. Once they were down along a dreary street which ends at the Quai Saint-Eustache, and there Wagner pointed out to them the window of a garret at the top of a very high house. In it he said he almost starved, despaired, even meditated suicide. Villiers was a Wagnerian among Wagnerians. He paraphrased in words his impressions of the German's music, and some of these were published in Catulle Mendès's Revue Fantaisiste. He visited Wagner at Triebchen, near Lucerne, in Switzerland, although he was so poor that he had to walk part of the distance.
One of Villiers's characters was Triboulat Bonhomet. This was the man who was so avid of new sensations in music that he cruelly slew swans. During the autumn of 1879 Villiers was at Bayreuth in company with Judith Gautier and Catulle Mendès, and gave a reading from his works before a lot of crowned heads, Wagner and Liszt included. He read some of the curious adventures of Bonhomet, and was surprised to hear his audience laugh, at first quietly, at last unrestrainedly. At last the tempest of laughter rose so high that the reader ceased and cast a glance full of vague suspicion round his, audience. The Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who sat beside him, touched his shoulder and pointed to a person sitting just opposite them. Villiers, with a little sharp cry, dropped the manuscript from his trembling fingers and gave evident signs of lively terror. There in front of him, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women, gazing at him with shining eyes, his enormous mouth opened in stentorian laughter, his huge hands leading applause, was Dr. Triboulat Bonhomet himself, flesh and bone. It was Franz Liszt!
From the very first line of the manuscript, in which Villiers had minutely described the doctor, the whole audience had been struck by the resemblance between the great pianist and Triboulat Bonhomet, and as the description went on the likeness increased—dress, gestures, habits, all bore a striking similarity. One person alone did not perceive the identity, and he laughed louder than the rest—Liszt himself. Finally the reading had to be stopped on account of the general hilarity, but Liszt was never told of the joke.