Pierre Loti is a cosmopolitan. Halévy was a Parisian, Maupassant was a Norman acclimated to the habitudes of Paris, and Daudet carried with him throughout all his experiences in the French capital the dreamy soul of Provence; but Loti is essentially a modern. Man of the world, not alone by temperament but by reason of wide journeyings afield and minglings with men and women of all lands, he typifies the spirit of to-day in French literature as few other writers have done. He is a poetic idealist, or, perhaps more precisely, an idealistic realist, writing at a time when realism was most potent in France.
The externals of Loti’s life are soon recounted. Louis Marie Julien Viaud was born in Rochefort, January 14, 1850, the same year that gave Maupassant to the world of art. The name “Loti” is an invented derivative of that seductive tropical flower, the lotus, and therefore was not his by inheritance, but the affectionate gift of his South Sea enchantress, Queen Pomaré, of Tahiti, when the young naval officer visited the island in 1872.
The frail, prim, sensitive child described with so much self-insight in his autobiographic Le Roman d’un enfant not only inbreathed his love for the sea in salt-scented Rochefort, but dreamed incessantly of the far-off lands he was destined to visit. These visions were stimulated, if not inspired, by early reading, and by the letters of an older brother who had long been in the navy. So at seventeen we naturally find him a midshipman, and in due course ensign and lieutenant, serving with distinguished bravery—as his Cross of the Legion of Honor testifies—in the Tonquin campaign, when France must needs re-subdue her protectorates in Asia.
M. Loti’s later life has been spent mostly ashore, serving in the Admiralty, yet the cravings of boyhood have been indulged so often as might be, and foreign lands, by preference oriental, visited year by year.
In 1891 M. Loti was elected to that all-coveted distinction, membership in the Academy, where he occupies the chair once honored by Racine and Scribe.
Loti’s portraits show us a Gallic face, a short, pointed beard, tired, melancholy eyes, and a general air of earnestness not quite substantiated by his pleasure-loving life. In stature somewhat below medium height, in form slender, he early gave himself to those bodily exercises which once caused a professional acrobat to wonder why our author had not begun his gymnastics early enough to turn his steel-like muscles to spectacular account!
So much for the more patent facts of his life. But how to make just presentment of his mental and spiritual traits I do not know, for the task gave pause even to Loti himself.
He never learned to write; his gift was native. With reading he had at first small commerce, preferring to turn page after page in human hearts, and to read deep in the tome of his own nature of bewildering variety. A composite is Loti—almost a chameleon, not only entering into the multi-life of lands and peoples where he chances to sojourn, but taking on their colors, and even their garbs and customs. But of this somewhat more in due order.
Here is a character inextricable from his work, much of which is autobiographical, since in most of his twenty-seven volumes the author himself appears either thinly disguised under some sobriquet, or frankly named in propria persona. So while we are at no time at a loss for material wherewith to make up an estimate, this material is both embarrassingly rich and—contradictory. Still, no one can mistake the main-travelled roads in this life, they are bold and distinct.
Loti wrote little verse, but he was a poet. He moved in the upper layers of feeling—feeling for nature, for animals, for man, for woman—and always he was the idealistic, though not the ideal lover. His sympathies were positively unquenchable, and each new passion found him fresh, tender, elemental—and as sincere as the temporary lover can be. In elemental, primitive folk he found his personal loves and his fictive characters; in the death of a little bird or in the lives of two cats he centred a genuine interest; in the moods of the uncompassed sea he felt a vast concern.