Inevitably, the religious life of such a temperament would not be constant: Protestantism the Huguenot youth found to be cold; his test of the ceremonial worship of Romanism satisfied him only for a little; at last his faith was doubt.
Loti’s direct disregard of the interests of conventional life, in favor of nature-children, constitutes one of his greatest literary charms. Freshness, simplicity of viewpoint, naïve boyishness of spirit—these excel all the accomplishments of the stylist’s art in an author whose style is as subtle as gossamer, as varicolored as the evening sea he painted with supernal beauty.
In all his work Loti greatly prefers description above dialogue. “Long and quiet stretches of writing” abound, but their minuteness leaves us unwearied, and though he repeats and re-repeats we are conjured into accepting his pictures as ever new.
In style, in delicacy of nature-feeling, where in all literature will you find aught to excel this passage from Mon frère Yves?
“Even the nights were luminous. When all was slumbering in heavy immobility, in dead silence, the stars shone out above, more dazzling than in any other region of earth, and the sea also was illumined from beneath. There was a sort of immense gleam diffused over the waters; the lightest motion, such as the slow gliding of the boat, or a shark darting after it, brought out upon the warm eddies flashes like the color of a fire-fly. Then, over the great phosphorescent mirror of the deep, there were millions of wild flames—they were like little lamps lighting themselves everywhere, burning mysteriously for a second or two, then dying out. These nights were swooning with heat, full of phosphorescence; and in all this dim immensity light was brooding, and all these seas held latent life, in a rudimentary state, as did formerly the gloomy waters of the primeval world.”
As in the foregoing, so in the following, see how this necromancer of words accomplishes the impossible—“the planks of the ship” are the only solid, palpable substances in this atmospheric delicacy from Pecheur d’Islande (An Iceland Fisherman):
“Outside it was daylight, perpetual daylight. But it was a pale, pale light, resembling nothing else; it threw dim reflections over everything, as of a dead sun, and beyond these, all was an immense void without color; everything outside the planks of the ship seeming diaphanous, impalpable, unreal.
“The eye could scarcely distinguish the sea. First it took on the aspect of a sort of trembling mirror, with no image reflected in it; as it spread further it seemed to become a vaporous plain, and beyond this there was nothing—no outline nor horizon.
“The damp freshness of the air was more intense, more penetrating, than actual cold; and in breathing it one was conscious of a taste of brine. All was calm, and it was no longer raining; above, formless, colorless clouds seemed to hold that latent, unexplained light; one could see plainly, while conscious all the time that it was night, and all these pallors were of no shade that can be named.”
This is not description—it is miracle; it is, in the fine phrase of M. Doumic, “evocation;” it is music, color, subtlety, spirit, all thrown upon the soul’s retina and sensed in some magic manner that refuses to be classified. No one but a pantheist, sensitive to all the moods of nature—and especially those of that abysmal enigma, the sea—could have evoked such visions, such realities, where other eyes see—water.