No More Learning

To his knowledge of antique art and
literature he had added his personal im-
pressions of many lands, many peoples, and
many religions. Now he became intimately
acquainted with agitated, worldly Paris;
and she repelled him.
His circumstances aided to depress him.
His parents had never understood his im-
LECONTE DE LISLE
practical aspirations; and possibly the deter-
mined self-repression evident in his poems
results in part from his lack of home sympathy. Soon after his
arrival in Paris, he earnestly supported an insurrection of slaves in
his island home. This rash generosity provoked his father to stop
his allowance; and he was obliged to teach for his living.
The remainder of his life was outwardly uneventful,- its chief
events the distinctions which gradually came to him. Created an
officer of the Legion of Honor, in 1886 he was chosen to the French
Academy as the successor of Victor Hugo. Nine years earlier, when
defeated, he had proudly declared that the vote received from Hugo
meant as much to him as election. From 1873 until his death in 1894
he was assistant librarian at the Library of the Luxembourg; and
there, in the fine old Palace set in the ancient garden, he drew con-
genial friends about him and spoke with the authority of a master to
young disciples in poetry.

-


## p. 8953 (#581) ###########################################

CHARLES MARIE RENÉ LECONTE DE LISLE
8953
He first became known for skillful translations of Homer, Theo-
critus, Horace, and Sophocles, for which he was not well paid. But
the reputation they brought him induced Napoleon III. to offer him
a handsome pension if he would dedicate his work to the Prince
Imperial. This De Lisle refused to do; and he was then granted a
pension of three hundred francs a month, which he drew until the
fall of the Empire. With a brilliant group of young poets, who,
surfeited with the exaggerated romanticism which had had its day,
were seeking finer, more artistic forins of expression, he published
(Le Parnasse Contemporain (Modern Parnassus), several volumes of
verse, which gained its authors the title of Parnassians, and consti-
tuted theirs a distinct school of poetry. Its primary tenet was the
impersonality of art. The Parnassians maintained that Rousseau-like
confessions of joys and sins and sufferings- egotistic demands for
sympathy — should not be thrust upon the public. They agreed that
the emotional element in poetry did not mean individual vagaries,
but universal human experience expressed with all possible beauty
and delicacy of form, and with convincing truth. This creed was
abused; but unquestionably (Le Parnasse Contemporain' refined pub-
lic taste and inspired poets with more definite ideals.
Among the first to note De Lisle's merit was Sainte-Beuve, who
gave a reception in his honor, and introduced him to the poet La-
prade; from whom, as from Gautier, he learned a lesson of vivid
description, and of the exquisite precision which, as Brunetière says,
makes his verse as imperishable as marble.
He was too painstaking a craftsman to compose rapidly; and even
after they were written, the Poèmes Antiques) awaited a publisher
for several years. From its appearance in 1852, this volume received
distinguished treatment from critics and fellow-poets. In it, as in
(Poèmes et Poésies (1854), Poèmes Barbares' (1862), — to which the
Academy awarded the Jean Regnard prize of ten thousand francs,-
and Poèmes Tragiques) (1884), De Lisle sought his theme in the re-
mote; for he had a bitterly disillusioned spirit, and knew the solitary
suffering of a nature unfitted for modern society. It was because he
was tortured by self-consciousness that this first of the Impassives »
longed to forget himself, and make his poems an impersonal reflec-
tion of universal life. Hence the relief with which his imagination
escapes to the mere physical sensation of brute creation. Hence the
glowing power with which he draws the dying lion, the sleeping con-
dor, and the stealthy beasts of the jungle.
Because he could not bear the imperfection of his actual envi-
ronment, he searched in Greece and India, in the far north and
in southern seas, among primitive savages as in ancient art, for a
nourishing dream of beauty. He loved the simple, positive beauty of
>>


## p. 8954 (#582) ###########################################

8954
CHARLES MARIE RENÉ LECONTE DE LISLE
color and form in the outward world. He is the poet of nature;
not Nature personified, but rather a great resistless energy which was
one day to absorb him. Beauty was his only religion; for his mod-
ern science forbade him faith, while making him crave truth at all
costs. He was savant as well as poet, whose researches led him, in
spite of his own wishes, to regard all religions as transitory stages in
human development. Like Renan, he had sympathy for the underly-
ing ideal of each; and his imagination helped him to tenporary self-
forgetfulness in each, although he could find nothing final.
THE MANCHY
From Poèmes Barbares)
LOTHED in your filmy muslin gown,
Every Sunday morning, you
Would come in your manchy of bamboo
Down the footpaths to the town.
C
The church-bell rang out noisily;
The salt breeze waved the lofty cane;
The sun shook out a golden rain
On the savannah's grassy sea.
With rings on wrist and ankle flat,
And yellow kerchief on the crown,
Your two telingas carried down
Your litter of Manila mat.
Slim, in tunics white, they sang
As 'neath the pole of bamboo bent,
With hands upon their hips, they went
Steadily by the long Etang.
Past banks where Creoles used to come
To smoke their ancient pipes; past bands
Of blacks disporting on the sands
To the sound of the Madagascar drum.
The tamarind's breath was on the air;
Out in the glittering surf the flocks
Of birds swung through the billow's shocks
And plunged beneath the foaming blare.


## p. 8955 (#583) ###########################################

CHARLES MARIE RENÉ LECONTE DE LISLE
8955
While hung — your sandal loosed - the tips
Of one pink foot at the manchy's side,
In the shade of the letchi branching wide
With fruit less purple than your lips;
While like a flower, a butterfly
Of blue and scarlet fluttered on
Your skin an instant, and was gone,
Leaving his colors in good-by.
We saw between the cambric's mist
Your earrings on the pillows lain;
While your long lashes veiled in vain
Your eyes of sombre amethyst.
'Twas thus you came, those mornings sweet,
With grace so gentle, to High Mass,
Borne slowly down the mountain pass
By your faithful Hindoos' steady feet.
But now where our dry sand-bar gleams
Beneath the dog-grass near the sea,
You rest with dead ones dear to me,
O charm of my first tender dreams!
PAN
From Poèmes Antiques)
R
OISTERING Pan, the Arcadian shepherd's god,
Crested like ram and like the wild goat shod,
Makes soft complaint upon his oaten horn.
When hill and valley turn to gold with morn,
He wanders joying with the dancing band
Of nymphs across the moss and flowering land.
The lynx-skin clothes his back; his brows are crowned
With hyacinth and crocus interwound,
And with his glee the echoes long rejoice.
The barefoot nymphs assemble at the voice,
And lightly by the crystal fountain's side,
Surrounding Pan in rhythmic circles glide.
In vine-bound grottoes, in remote retreats,
At noon the god sleeps out the parching heats
Beside some hidden brook, below the domes
Of swaying oaks, where sunlight never comes.


## p. 8956 (#584) ###########################################

8956
CHARLES MARIE RENÉ LECONTE DE LISLE
But when the night, with starry girdle bound,
Wafts her long veils across the blue profound,
Pan, passion-flushed, tracks through the shadowy glade
In swift pursuit the nimble-footed maid;
Clasps her in flight, and with exulting cries
Through the white moonlight carries off his prize.
THE BULLS
From Poèmes Barbares)
T.
HE sea's broad desert makes a bar of gold
Against the blue of heaven's unruffled fold.
Alone, a roseate loiterer in the sky
Wreathes like a languid reptile stretched on high
Above the surging of the mountain-chain.
O'er the savannah breathes a dreamy strain
To where the bulls, with massive horns high dressed
And shining coat, deep eye and muscled breast,
Crop at their will the salt grass of the coast.
Two negroes of Antongil, still engrossed
In the long day's dull stupor, at their ease
With chin in hands and elbows on their knees,
Smoke their black pipes. But in the changing sky
The herd's fierce chieftain scents the nightfall nigh,
Lifts his square muzzle flecked with silver foam
And bellows o'er the sea his summons home.
Translations made for (A Library of the World's Best Literature,) by Thomas
Walsh.


## p. 8957 (#585) ###########################################

8957
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
(1866–)
new
KNE of the younger school of English literary workers, who
stand for the newer methods and aims, is Richard Le Gal-
lienne, of repute as poet and essayist. Born in Liverpool
in 1866, he got his education at the college of that city; then came
to London and took the position of secretary to Wilson Barrett, the
actor-playwright, holding it for several years. Later he became
literary critic of the London Star, and by
his writing for this and other publications
became identified with the
in art
and letters,- one of the fellowship of the
younger literati.
Le Gallienne has done, prose and verse,
nearly a dozen volumes already; a consider-
able literary baggage for so young a man.
Prose Fancies in two series, contain the
main qualities of his essay work: grace,
poetry, sometimes running into sentiment-
ality, something of preciosity in seeking for
the fine phrase, delicate fancy, and now and
then genuine tenderness and beauty. The RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
faults seem partly those of immaturity,
partly due to a tendency to pose. Retrospective Reviews' and (The
Book-Bills of Narcissus) are further illustrations of his style and con-
tent; the latter being a decidedly happy piece of whimsy. By far
the strongest prose work Le Gallienne has done is his Religion of a
Literary Man'; full of suggestive and thoughtful things, testifying
to wide reading, and revealing the more earnest side of the man.
A critical work of value is Le Gallienne's "George Meredith: Some
Characteristics,' on the whole the most perceptive appreciation of the
great novelist that has appeared. The latest prose work, “The Quest
of the Golden Girl,' which describes the adventures of a young man
who goes a-seeking the ideal feminine, to find her in a happy mar-
riage, has charm and many poetic touches, though marked by sins
against both æsthetics and ethics. It is very autobiographic, too, -
this being a characteristic of Le Gallienne in all he writes, -a
— а
tendency pushed to the limit of taste. That he has attraction in
the essay when at his best, cannot be denied; and in the main he



## p. 8958 (#586) ###########################################

8958
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
expresses the romantic, chivalric, ideal aspects of life. His blemishes
are not fundamental.
In his books of verse - English Poems,' My Lady's Sonnets,'
(Robert Louis Stevenson, and Other Poems - Le Gallienne exhibits
the modern phenomenon of a writer of romantic impulse striving to
be realistic withal. This is illustrated in his poems which have
London for motive; and in truth some of his most virile conceptions
are those describing the streets and sights of the mighty English
capital. But most readers will like best his purely fanciful or dain-
tily imaginative verse, playful yet tender, with song in it and the
smile that is not far from tears.
In fine, Richard Le Gallienne may be regarded as a pleasing writer
and a promising one, who is likely to rid himself of certain man-
nerisms and lose himself entirely in the art which beyond doubt he
loves.
DEDICATION
From “Prose Fancies) (Second Series). Copyright 1895, by Stone & Kimball,
Chicago
Pºok
OOR are the gifts of the poet, -
Nothing but words!
The gifts of kings are gold,
Silver and Alocks and herds,
Garments of strange, soft silk,
Feathers of wonderful birds,
Jewels and precious stones,
And horses white as the milk,-
These are the gifts of kings;
But the gifts that the poet brings
Are nothing but words.
Forty thousand words!
Take them,
a gift of flies!
Words that should have been birds,
Words that should have been flowers,
Words that should have been stars
In the eternal skies.
Forty thousand words!
Forty thousand tears —
All out of two sad eyes.


## p. 8959 (#587) ###########################################

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
8959
A SEAPORT IN THE MOON
From Prose Fancies) (Second Series). Copyright 1895, by Stone & Kimball,
Chicago
N°
-
O ONE is so hopelessly wrong about the stars as the astrono-
mer; and I trust that you never pay any attention to his
remarks on the moon. He knows as much about the
moon as a coiffeur knows of the dreams of the fair lady whose
beautiful neck he makes still more beautiful. There is but one
opinion upon the moon,- namely, our own. And if you think
that science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science
makes of things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play
of pistil and stamen; our most fascinating poetry and art is
«degeneration”; and human life, generally speaking, is sufficiently
explained by the carbon compounds. ” God-a-mercy! if science
“.
!
makes such grotesque blunders about radiant matters right under
its nose, how can one think of taking its opinion upon matters
so remote as the stars — or even the moon, which is compara-
tively near at hand ?
Science says that the moon is a dead world; a cosmic ship
littered with the skeletons of its crew, and from which every rat
of vitality has long since escaped. It is the ghost that rises
from its tomb every night to haunt its faithless lover, the world.
It is a country of ancient silver mines, unworked for centuries.
You may see the gaping mouths of the dark old shafts through
your telescopes. You may even see the rusting pit tackle, the
ruinous engine-houses, and the idle pick and shovel. Or you
may say that it is counterfeit silver, coined to take in the young
fools who love to gaze upon it. It is, so to speak, a bad half-a-
crown.
As you will! but I am of Endymion's belief —and no one was
ever more intimate with the moon. For me the moon is a coun-
try of great seaports, whither all the ships of our dreams come
home. From all quarters of the world, every day of the week,
there are ships sailing to the moon. They are the ships that sail
just when and where you please. You take your passage on that
condition. And it is ridiculous to think for what a trifle the cap-
tain will take you on so long a journey. If you want to come
back, just to take an excursion and no more, just to take a lighted
look at those coasts of rose and pearl, he will ask no more than
a glass or two of bright wine; - indeed, when the captain is very


## p. 8960 (#588) ###########################################

8960
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
kind, a flower will take you there and back in no time; if you
want to stay whole days there, but still come back dreamy and
strange, you may take a little dark root and smoke it in a silver
pipe, or you may drink a little phial of poppy-juice, and thus you
shall find the Lands of Heart's Desire; but if you are wise and
would stay in that land forever, the terms are even easier,-a
little powder shaken into a phial of water, a little piece of lead
no bigger than a pea and a farthing's worth of explosive fire,
and thus also you are in the Land of Heart's Desire forever.
I dreamed last night that I stood on the blustering windy
wharf, and the dark ship was there.
ere. It was impatient, like all of
us, to leave the world. Its funnels belched black smoke, its
engines throbbed against the quay like arms that were eager to
strike and be done, and a bell was beating impatient summons
to be gone. The dark captain stood ready on the bridge, and he
looked into each of our faces as we passed on board. «Is it for
the long voyage ? ” he said. “Yes! the long voyage,” I said; and
his stern eyes seemed to soften as I answered.
At last we were all aboard, and in the twinkling of an eye
were out of sight of land. Yet, once afloat, it seemed as though
we should never reach our port in the moon. So it seemed to
me as I lay awake in my little cabin, listening to the patient
thud and throb of the great screws beating in the ship's side like
a human heart.
Talking with my fellow voyagers, I was surprised to find that
we were not all volunteers. Some in fact complained pitifully.
They ad, they said, been going about their business a day or
two before, and suddenly a mysterious captain had laid hold of
them, and pressed them to sail this unknown sea. Thus, without
a word of warning they had been compelled to leave behind them
all they held dear. This, one felt, was
This, one felt, was a little hard of the cap-
tain; but those of us whose position was exactly the reverse
who had friends on the other side, all whose hopes indeed were
invested there — were too selfishly expectant of port to be severe
on the captain who was taking us thither.
There were three friends I had especially set out to see: two
young lovers who had emigrated to those colonies in the moon
just after their marriage; and there was another. What a sur-
prise it would be to all three! for I had written no letter to say
I was coming. Indeed, it was just a sudden impulse, the pistol
flash of a long desire.


## p. 8961 (#589) ###########################################

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
8961
I tried to imagine what the town would be like in which they
were now living. I asked the captain, and he answered with a
sad smile that it would be just exactly as I cared to dream it.
“Oh, well then,” I thought, I know what it will be like.
There shall be a great restless tossing estuary, with Atlantic winds
forever ruffling the sails of busy ships,- ships coming home with
laughter, ships leaving home with sad sea-gull cries of farewell.
And the shaggy tossing water shall be bounded on either bank
with high granite walls, and on one bank shall be a fretted spire
soaring, with a jangle of bells, from amid a tangle of masts, and
underneath the bells and the masts shall go streets rising up from
the strand; streets full of faces, and sweet with the smell of tar
and the sea. O captain, will it be morning or night when we
come to my city? In the morning my city is like a sea-blown
rose; in the night it is bright as a sailor's star.
“If it be early morning, what shall I do? I will run to the
house in which my friends lie in happy sleep, never to be parted
again, and kiss my hand to their shrouded window; and then I
will run on and on till the city is behind and the sweetness of
country lanes is about me, and I will gather flowers as I run,
from sheer wantonness of joy, and then at last, fushed and
breathless, I will stand beneath her window. I shall stand and
listen, and I shall hear her breathing right through the heavy
curtains; and the hushed garden and the sleeping house will bid
me keep silence, but I shall cry a great cry up to the morning
star, and say, “No, I will not keep silence. Mine is the voice she
listens for in her sleep. She will wakė again for no voice but
mine. Dear one, awake; the morning of all mornings has come ! ) »
As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from
the great canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty
of all the eyes that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears
of all those eyes; like a silvered bowl brimming with the tears
of dead lovers she seems. Yes, there are seaports in the moon;
there are ships to take us there.
XV-561


## p. 8962 (#590) ###########################################

8962
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
ESSAY-WRITING
From (Retrospective Reviews)
TH
the essay.
(
HE necessity of giving pleasure to the writer is paramount;
for in no form of literature is it so true that both the
sowing and the reaping must be in gladness. This is, of
course, true more or less of all writing; but especially true of
The essay writer must be pleased with himself, his
theme, and the world. The moment he loses his amour propre,
his inspiration flags. “When in disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes,” the poet is often stung to write his finest poems; but not
so the essayist. The jug of wine, the loaf of bread, the volume
of old verses, a garrulous fire (and metaphorically speaking, a
cheering bundle from Romeike), are the necessary conditions of
his art.
Facts to the essayist are indeed but thin excuses for his
covertly talking about himself. Few essayists have the courage
to say outright, like Whitman, “Myself I sing,” or even with the
French critic, "I propose to talk of myself, apropos of Shake-
speare, Molière, Hugo, etc. ”: they still keep up the decency
of pretending that they are to talk about the trivial subject
with which they label each new chapter of The Story of My
Heart. )
The essayist, though he need not be learned, must have read
and generally picked up a good deal; his mind must be stored
with a motley collection of recollections and associations, which
before he makes magic of them may well seem the merest rub-
bish. His mind, in fact, is like a boy's pocket, stuffed with dis-
carded treasures of which his elders are not worthy: string,
marbles, peg-tops, strange shells, bits of colored pebble, a few
old coins of no value at the numismatist's; treasures strictly
personal to himself, a chaos of which — with glee he knows it-
none can make a cosmos but himself.
It is not till it has
been realized that in and for itself learning is merely absurd, and
solely valuable so far as the writer is concerned for the artistic
use to be made of it, does the essayist become possible. In
short, the essayist's great gift, whether playing on the surface
like a merry flame, or operating beneath as an unseen leaven, is
humor. Humor, more even than religion, will save us from ten
thousand snares.
-


## p. 8963 (#591) ###########################################

8963
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAITRE
(1853-)
)
He history of French literature,” says a fine observer, “is
that of the perpetual storming of Paris by a handful of
young adventurers, whose object is to demolish the exist-
ing formulæ of an always incomplete art, and to enthrone themselves
victoriously in a new edifice which they propose to build upon
the
ruins. But 10 sooner has one set of innovators achieved success than
another band begins to attack the victors of yesterday; and so battle
follows battle, and revolution revolution. ” Thus have appeared in
turn the classicists, the romanticists, the
naturalists, the Parnassians, the mystics, the
symbolists, the decadents, the neo-Catholics,
with the schismatics from each new cult.
In such an environment, criticism must
not only flourish but become a fine art.
From Boileau to Sainte-Beuve, from Mon-
taigne to Jules Janin, the line of literary
critics is rich in shining names. In our own
day, the objective and the subjective school
of criticism has each its able adherents
and proselytizers. Of the objective or scien-
tific method, M. Brunetière may be called
the foremost exemplar, the great Darwinian.
LEMAITRE
Of the subjective or imaginative camp, the
Renanists, M. Jules Lemaître is the authoritative interpreter, unless
the charming and subtle Anatole France may be allowed an equal
rank.

“As it seems to me," writes M. France, criticism, like philosophy, like his-
tory, is in a way a novel, for the use of cautious and earnest minds; as every
novel, rightly understood, becomes an autobiography. The good critic is he
who makes you comprehend the adventures of his own soul in the midst of
masterpieces. There can be no objective criticism, as there can be no object-
ive art. Whoever imagines that he puts into his work anything whatever
except himself is the victim of illusion. We can never get outside ourselves.
We are imprisoned for life, as it were, in our own personality. Let
us then make the best of it,— which is to admit with a good grace our lament-
able state, and to acknowledge that we are talking about ourselves whenever


## p. 8964 (#592) ###########################################

8964
FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
we have not the strength of mind not to talk at all. To be entirely candid the
critic ought to say, “Gentlemen, it is my intention to speak about my attitude
towards Shakespeare, Racine, Pascal, or Goethe. They furnish me a very
good excuse. ) » To which Lemaitre himself adds: “A critic inevitably puts his
temperament and his personal conception of life into his commentaries; for it
is with his own mind that he deals with other men's minds. Criticism is in
reality a representation of the world, which is as personal, as relative, as base-
less, and therefore as interesting, as that representation in any other branch
of literature. ”
Jules Lemaître was born at Vennecy, Department of the Loire, in
1853. He was educated for the profession of teaching; graduating
with high honors from the École Normale in 1875, and filling the
chair of rhetoric at Havre for the next five years. Two years in
Algiers and a year at Besançon prepared him for a professorship
in the faculty of Grenoble. But the Muse would have her own. In
another year he resigned the safe dignity of the scholar's chair for
the uncertain shelter of the author's garret. He had already pub-
lished two volumes of poems - described by the reviewers as verses
of the rhymer rather than the poet — and a few essays and stories,
which obtained him a hearing in the Revue Bleue. In the course of
three months he contributed three critical reviews on Renan, Ohnet,
and Zola. The freshness, the insight, and the daring frankness of
these papers conquered a place for him. A year or two later he was
appointed dramatic critic to the Journal des Débats. Indefatigably
industrious, he wrote critical essays, dramatic reviews, poems, stories,
novels, and plays; and grew constantly in the favor of the public.
Six volumes of his critical essays have been collected under the title
(Les Contemporains' (Men of the Time), and two volumes of dra-
matic criticism called “Impressions de Théâtre. His method is one of
extreme directness and simplicity; he is the most vivacious of cen-
sors, and so dexterous and accomplished is his use of the elegant
tongue to which he had the good fortune to be born, that his fellow-
critics call him the virtuoso. ”
They criticize him, moreover, on the ground that he is inconclus-
ive, having no «absolute shall,” but presenting many points of view,
,
and leaving the reader to form his own conclusions, a process, as
Bagehot says, intensely painful to the multitude. He is accused of
inconsistency, of cynicism, and of indifference. To these allegations
he replies, in effect, that consistency is the vice of little minds, that
the candid observer cannot help taking a judicial interest in both
sides, and that in a world of illusions there is danger in finality.
M. Lemaître scored Ohnet without mercy, as the apostle of smug
routine and things allowed”; he arraigned Zola for misconceiving
life; and he is unsparing to offenses against literature. His attacks


## p. 8965 (#593) ###########################################

FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
8965
are the more formidable for their very grace and lightness. Yet
he is one of the kindest of accusers, and he thus describes his own
feeling: -
«To an author who has ever given me this immense pleasure [of sincere
and able work] I am ready to pardon much. It is certainly a mark of stu-
pidity to say to a critic who seems to you unduly severe toward a writer
whom you love, (Attempt his work yourself — and see! ! But I could wish
that that critic would say it to himself! Of course I acknowledge that authors,
on their part, have too often a somewhat unintelligent contempt for critics.
I have known a novelist to maintain, with less esprit than assurance, that the
least of novelists and dramatists is greater than the first of critics and histori-
ans; and that, for example, the purveyor to the Petit Journal carries off the
prize from M. Taine, who invents no stories. This young man did not know
even that there are many kinds of invention. I bear him no ill-will on that
account. It enters into the definition of a good critic, to comprehend more
things than a young novelist, and to be more indulgent. Thus it is in a
spirit of sympathy and charity that we should approach such of our contem-
poraries as are not wholly beneath criticism. First we should analyze the
impression we receive from a book; then try to define the author, describe
his style, show what is permanent, what he seeks from preference, what the
world means to him, what are his opinions on life, what the kind and degree
of his sensibility,– in fact, how his brain is made! We should try to deter-
mine, according to the impression we receive from him, what is the impres-
sion he himself received from things. Thus we may arrive at so complete
an identification with the author that although his faults cause us pain, real
pain, we shall yet see how he allowed himself to fall into them, and how his
defects make a part of himself, so that they will appear at first inevitable,
and soon better than excusable - amusing. ”
»
ON THE INFLUENCE OF RECENT NORTHERN LITERATURE
From (Les Contemporains)
O
NCE more the Saxons and Germans, the Thracians and peo-
ples of snow-covered Thule, have conquered Gaul: an im-
portant but not a surprising event.
One of our most pardonable faults is acknowledged to be a
certain coquettish yet generous intellectual hospitality. As soon
as a Frenchman has succeeded in acquiring not alone national
and classical culture, but European culture as well, it is marvel-
ous to see how, at one stroke, he sets himself free from all liter-
ary chauvinism. At this point the most serious clasp hands, so
to speak, with the most frivolous; with the class emancipated
from prejudices in favor of clean linen, as well as with those


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(C
-
who, to use an expression henceforth symbolical, are “laundered
in London. ”
It is evident that Renan, for instance, who as a matter of fact
understood only superficially contemporary French literature, was
always dominated by German science and genius, and placed
Goethe, and even Herder, above all that is best among us.
Taine also concludes that we have nothing comparable not only
to Shakespeare, — we must grant him this, — but to contempora-
neous English poets and novelists.
While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the South-
Spain and Italy - attracted us, for the past two centuries we
have been captivated by the literature of the North.
This attraction has had its accessions and its intervals; but
our last attack of septentriomania shows itself particularly violent
and prolonged, for it still endures. It began I think about a
,
dozen years ago, in the revolution against the so-called “natural-
ist” brutalities and pretensions, and in the taste, now perhaps
partially forgotten, for George Eliot.
At this time M. Edmond Schérer and M. Émile Montégut
vied with each other in demonstrating in profound and eloquent
essays that George Eliot far surpassed all our realistic novelists.
Since then M. de Voguë has magnificently revealed to us
Tolstoi and Dostoiewski; and compared with them, again, our poor
romancers are but dust in the balance. All the world worshiped
the Russian gospel, and set itself to “tolstoiser. ” At the same
time the « Théâtre Libre » set before us the dramas of Dostoiew.
ski. Finally Ibsen had his turn of apotheosis, and all his later
plays were translated. We have seen at the theatres, beside the
plays of these two writers, those of the Norwegian Björnson,
the German Hauptmann, the Swede Strindberg, and the Belgian
Maeterlinck. The fury and intolerance of admiration on the part
of young men and certain women for these products of the North
is hardly to be imagined. “Yes,” they say, “these polar souls
truly speak to our souls; they penetrate them deeply; they stir
them to their profoundest depths. ” And I read with melancholy
this page of M. de Voguë, in the preface of his Russian Ro-
mance': — «There has been created in our day, wider than the
preferences of coteries or national prejudice, a European spirit,-
a fund of culture, ideas, and tendencies common to all intelligent
societies. We find this spirit, the same in essence, the same in
impressionability, in London, Petersburg, Rome, and Berlin. But
»
(


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as yet it eludes us; the literature and philosophy of our rivals
make conquest of us but slowly: we are not imparting it, we are
towed along by it more or less successfully. But to follow is
not to guide; - the prevailing ideas which are transforming Eu-
rope no longer emanate from the French soul. ”
Possibly this may be because they issued from that soul fifty
years ago!
(
I must here premise that in speaking of the works of George
Eliot, George Sand, and some other authors, it is necessarily from
a somewhat remote reading of them, and from impressions imme-
diately following that reading. . I shall consider solely
on what ground these novelists stand; what are the dominating
ideas, the guiding sentiments, what the substratum of their
works.
That which strikes us in these romances [of George Eliot], all
of them being histories of conscience, is the constant moral pre-
occupation by which every page is marked, as well as the con-
stant cordial and observant sympathy with the most humble and
ordinary phases of human life. To consider, in passing, this
second characteristic only: it is indubitably to be found, with a
fullness that leaves nothing to be desired, in the works of George
Sand.
Read La Mare au Diable? [The Devil's Pool],
La Petite Fadette! [Little Fadette), François le Champi,'
you will find as much robust and charming good-nature, as sin-
cere a liking for simple life and homely details, as much delight
and skill in making us feel the essential interest and dignity of
a human soul, its environment and social condition, as in the
writings of the George beyond the Channel.
There is no more,
for that I believe to be impossible.
Let us pass on to
Ibsen.
Save in two or three instances, where he seems
to defy his own visions, and to jeer at them, the dramas of
Ibsen are crises of conscience, histories of revolt, and struggles
towards moral enfranchisement. That which he preaches or
dreams is the love of truth, the hatred of falsehood. Sometimes
it is the reaction of the pagan conception of life against the
Christian conception; of the joy of living,” as he terms it,
against religious melancholy. It is, beyond and above all else,
that which has been called individualism. It is the assertion of
the rights of the individual conscience against written laws which
do not provide for individual cases; against social conventions


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FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
>
often hypocritical, and respecting appearances only. Often too
it is the redemption and purification of suffering. It is, in our
relations with others, the exercise of individual compassion, the
pardon of certain sins which phariseeism never pardons. It is in
marriage the perfect union of souls,— a union based only upon
the liberty and absolute sincerity of husband and wife, and the
entire understanding and appreciation each has of the other. It
is, in short, the conformity of life to the ideal — an ideal which
Ibsen rarely defines in set terms; in which is to be found some-
thing of antique naturalism, something of judicial and haughty
evangelicism, of aristocratic dilettantism, and covering all, a film
of pessimism.
I can make these definitions no more precise than Ibsen him-
self does. But it is undeniably into a general sentiment of revolt
that the elements of which his "dream” is composed resolve
themselves. He is in fact a mighty rebel, a malcontent, at odds
with his own genius. Now, in the work of these Northern men,
is there not the very substance of the early romances of George
Sand ? If I name her anew, it is because she had a marvelous
gift of receptivity, and because she reflected all the ideas and
chimeras of her time. She had already told us, long before
these others spoke, that marriage is an oppressive institution if it
be not the union of two free wills, and if woman be not treated
as a moral being. Already we had heard from her of the con-
Alict of religious and civil law with that other and greater law,
not inscribed on Tables of Stone. And already among us the
rights of the individual had been declared to be opposed to those
of society.
We listened to these sayings as long ago as 1830, and I doubt
if even then they were entirely new.
I admit that I have not re-read the eighty volumes of George
Sand, but I know their contents, and have been long imbued
with their spirit. I open her first romance and I read the pro-
test of Indiana. Indiana is Ibsen's Nora. She flees from Colonel
Delmare in the same mood that drives Nora out of Helmer's
house. That which Nora goes to seek, Indiana meets. Indiana
espousing Ralph in the presence of Nature and of God is Nora
after her Aight finding the husband of her soul, and choosing
him in her freedom.
If Henrik Ibsen is not found complete, as to his ideas, in
George Sand, it is in the dramas of Dumas fils — preceding, let


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it be remembered, those of the Norwegian writer - that we shall
finally discover him.
The protest of the individual against law, of the moral senti-
ments of the heart against the moral code and worldly conven-
tionality,—this is the very soul of most of the dramas of M.
Dumas. Only, while the revolts of Ibsen are against law and
society in general, the insurrections of M. Dumas strike almost
always at some particular article of the civil code or of social
prejudice. And I do not see that this limitation is necessarily
an inferiority.
Let us go on to the Russian novelists, to Tolstoi and to Dos-
toiewski. M. de Voguë tells us that they are distinguished from
our realists by two traits:-
«First, the vague, undefined Russian spirit draws its life from
all philosophies and all vagaries. It pauses now in nihilism and
pessimism. A superficial reader might sometimes confound Tol-
stoi and Flaubert. But Tolstoi's nihilism is never accepted with-
out revolt; this spirit is never impenitent; we constantly listen to
its groanings and searchings, and it finally redeems and saves
itself by love, love more or less active in Tolstoi and Tourgé-
nief, in Dostoiewski refined and introspective until it becomes a
painful passion. Second, equally with sympathy the distinctive
characteristic of these realists is the comprehension of that which
lies beneath and surrounds life. In them the study of the real
is pressed more closely than ever before. They seem imprisoned
within its limits, and yet they meditate upon the invisible. Be-
yond the known, which they describe minutely, they accord a
secret study to the unknown, which they suspect.
ages of their creation are disquieted concerning the universal
mystery; and no matter how absorbed they may appear in the
drama of the moment, they lend an ear to the murmur of ab-
stract ideas — the ideas which people the profound atmosphere
where breathe the creations of Tourgénief, Tolstoi, and Dosto-
iewski. ”
“The things lying below life” of which these Russians talk
- what is meant by these ? Do they concern those obscure
and fatal powers of the flesh, those hereditary and physiological
instincts that govern us without our knowledge ? But this con-
stitutes nearly half of Balzac, and the whole of M. Zola. And
“the environment of life”? Does this mean the influences of the
domestic surroundings? Who has better known and expressed
The person-
((


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FRANÇOIS ÉLIE JULES LEMAÎTRE
these than the author of the Comédie Humaine,' or the author
of Madame Bovary'? Or should we accord to these foreigners
alone the privilege of knowing how to render «the environment
of life”? Should we say that “while the French novelist selects,
separates a character or an act from the chaos of beings and
actions, to study the isolated subject of his choice, the Russian,
dominated by the feeling of universal interdependence, does not
sever the thousand ties which attach a man, a deed, a thought,
to the total sum of the world, and does not forget that each is
constituted by all ” ?
I recognize and I admire the abounding fullness, almost equal-
ing that of life itself, in that complex romance, “War and Peace”;
but have we not novels corresponding to the complexities of the
world, in which the interweaving of moral and material things
answers to that of reality, and which also contain in an equal
degree the all of life? I say, after due reflection, that all this
is true of Les Misérables,' and perhaps more profoundly so of
"L'Éducation Sentimentale. And after all, what is this disquiet-
'
ude of universal mystery, of which the honor of discovery is
exclusively ascribed to the Slav novelists? This mystery ” can
only be that of our destiny, of our souls, of God, of the origin
and end of the universe. But who does not know that nearly
all our writers, from 1825 to 1850 especially, professed themselves
as disquieted over these things? Of this disquietude Victor
Hugo is full; he overflows with it.
If it is said that what is meant is less a philosophical dis-
quiet than a feeling of the formidable unknown which surrounds
us, a feeling which is perhaps evoked by some accidental sensa-
tion, I answer that I quite understand that there are moments
when this thought alone — that one is in the world, and that the
world exists, appears utterly incomprehensible and strikes us
dumb. But in the first place, this astonishment at living, this
sort of “sacred horror,” is inconsistent in its very nature with
any expression at all except the briefest, and can be prolonged
only by repeating itself. In the second place, we had assuredly
experienced this mysterious shudder before we ever opened a
Russian or Norwegian book. Tolstoi's phrase “The eternal
silence of infinite space affrights me,” is one which does not
date from yesterday.
If, then, all that we admire in the recent writers of the North
was already ours, how does it happen that, visible in them, it


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8971
I am
appears to so many of us new and original? Is it because
these writers are greater artists than ours, their literary form
superior to that of our poets and novelists? The question seems
to me insoluble: for he alone could discern the exact value of
literary form who should comprehend all the languages of Europe
as profoundly as he comprehends his own; that is, sufficiently
to perceive in its most delicate shades that which constitutes the
style of each writer. This, I imagine, can never be; for I find
that the most learned and accomplished of foreign linguists never
arrive at the power of feeling as we do the phrase of a Flaubert
or a Renan. The incapacity is made evident by their classifica-
tion of our authors, where they put together without discrimina-
tion the great and the inferior. In the same way the style of
foreign writers must always to a great extent escape us.
inclined to believe that a man may know several languages well,
but only one profoundly. It is certain that neither Eliot, nor
Ibsen, nor Tolstoi will ever afford to us that kind or degree of
pleasure which is aroused in us by the literary form of our own
great authors.
Norway has interminable winters almost without day, alter-
nating with short and violent summers almost without night:
marvelous conditions either for the slow and patient working
out of one's inner visions, or for the sudden and overpowering
impulses of passion.
London, compared with which Paris is but a pretty little town,
is the capital of effort and will; and an English fog seems to me
an excellent atmosphere for reflection. I have never
steppe; but to picture it to the eye of the mind, I multiply in
my imagination the melancholy stretches of heath, the pools and
woods of Sologne in winter.
To understand their literature we must add to these physical
characteristics the Past of Norway, England, and Russia; their
traditions, their public and private manners, their religions, and
the furrows traced by them all in the Norwegian, English, and
Russian brain.
Briefly, it may be said that the writers of the North return
to us (and this is the secret of their charm) the substance of
our own literature of forty or fifty years ago, modified, renewed,
and enriched by its passage through minds notably different
from our own. In rethinking our thoughts, they rediscover them
seen
a
for us.


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.
more
They have, it seems to me, less art than we, less knowledge
of the rules of composition. Such works as Middlemarch' are
discouraging by their prolixity. Eight days of constant reading
are necessary for War and Peace'; and such dimensions are in
themselves inartistic.
Furthermore, I am by no means persuaded that these writers
have more emotion than ours: certainly they have no
general ideas. But they have to a greater degree than we the
perception of the inner religious life.
More patient than we; not perhaps more penetrating, but
capable of greater persistence, if I may say so, in meditation and
observation; more able than we to dispense with diversions,-
they address themselves to readers who have less need than we of
being amused. The long and monotonous conversations of Ibsen,
his indefatigable accumulation of familiar details, at first over-
whelm us, but little by little envelop us, and form around each
of his dramas an atmosphere peculiar to itself, by which the
appearance of truth in the characters is greatly augmented. We
see them living their slow mysterious lives. They are intensely
serious: and they exhibit this peculiarity,- that all the incidents
of their existence stir their soul's depths, and reveal these depths
to us; that their domestic dramas become dramas of conscience
in which their whole spiritual life is involved. A woman who
finds that her husband does not understand her, or that her
son is attacked by an incurable malady, instantly asks herself if
Martin Luther was not too conservative, whether paganism or
Christianity is really right, and if all our laws do not rest upon
falsehood and hypocrisy.
Perhaps the author forgets that these questions, absorbing
when discussed by a great philosopher or poet, can be solved only
in commonplace fashion by narrow townspeople and well-meaning
clergymen. Perhaps too he surfeits us with the restless meta-
physics of ordinary humanity, and its tendency to philosophize.
But as it is really his own thought that he thus translates, it is
possible after all to take in it a true and lively interest.
One dominating idea in the romances of George Eliot is the
idea of responsibility, accepted in its most rigid sense: the idea
that no act is indifferent or inoffensive; that all have infinite con-
sequences, and reverberations either within or without our own
souls, and that thus we are always more responsible, or responsi-
ble for more, than we realize. The consequence of this idea is


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8973
.
a moral surveillance constantly exercised by her characters over
themselves, or by the author over her characters. Most of them
hold the idea of sin, and of an inner life at least as fully devel-
oped as the life of their social relations. They make frequent
examinations of conscience; they repent, they improve. Certainly
all this is more
rare in
our romances, doubtless because it is
more rare in our conduct. I have noticed, on the other hand,
that George Sand's heroes almost never repent. If Mauprat ad-
vances in goodness, it is in virtue of his love for Edmée, and
not as the result of probing for his sins. Others learn the les-
sons of events, and grow better through experience. The nobler
characters of Sand and Hugo dwell more upon the happiness of
humanity than upon their own moral perfection. I grant at once
that they are inconsequent persons, apt to begin at the wrong
end of things, and that their gospel is often a gospel of revolu-
tion.
I must of course admit that the realism of these foreigners is
more chaste than ours has been. The deeds of the flesh hold
small place in their works, for which I willingly praise them. I
observe, however, that if the actual state of things in France is
less unblushing than it is made to appear in some of our realistic
novels, it is surely, throughout Europe, less refined than English
and Russian romances would lead us to believe. We are more
frank in these matters. I do not know that this is a mark of
superiority; but our realism, more sensual perhaps, is also more
disenchanting. Northern writers surely do not recoil from depict-
ing the suffering, cruelty, and squalor of human life; but it can-
not be denied that they diminish their own power by avoiding a
certain class of infamies. They do not tell the whole truth. You
will never find in them such pages as certain of those of Flau-
bert or Maupassant. They are well able to show us the world as
infinitely sad and pitiful; but hesitate to exhibit it as simply dis-
gusting, which nevertheless it often is. Their pessimism is never
as radical as they pretend.
This prudishness, this reserve, this incurable scrupulousness is
explained by that religious spirit with which they are still im-
pregnated; and thus we arrive at this truism, that the differences
of literatures are rooted in the fundamental differences of race.
The books of Ibsen and Eliot remain, in spite of the intel-
lectual emancipation of these writers, Protestant books. For to
abandon, after unrestricted examination, as Eliot and Ibsen have


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8974
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-
done, a religion of which unrestricted examination is an inherent
attribute, is not, properly speaking, to abandon at all. Only that
can be really thrown off which is really a yoke: insurrection is
only veritably made against a religion which interdicts freedom of
spirit. In the other religions one may remain by expanding them.
It is only where prohibition is radical that schism can be abso-
lute. That which Protestant liberty forbids is not intellectual
enfranchisement, but if I may say so, enfranchisement of language
and manner. Among Protestant peoples, where the faithful soul
depends only upon his conscience, and allows no intermediary
between himself and God, the universal habits of thought and
discussion which result, cause a mingling of religious sentiment
and anxiety in all their literature,- even profane,- and unbe-
lievers retain at least the manner and tone of believers. On the
contrary, among us emancipated Catholics—or even practicing
Catholics whom sacramental confession absolves in part from the
care of administering our own conscience - there is a religious
or rather ecclesiastical literature with which we are but little
acquainted, and a literature entirely profane and laic; each one
playing its own part. To certain reflections on the inner nature
of souls, certain bits of moral casuistry, certain effusions of reli-
gious sentiment, which strike us in Eliot and Ibsen, we could
find analogous examples only in the works of priests and monks,
whom we ignore, or in Bossuet, Lacordaire, or Veuillot, where it
does not occur to us to look for them. Our two literatures do
not mingle, and thereby the secular loses something of moral
depth.
Finally, we see in what measure these foreigners have been of
service to us. We have welcomed their idealism through weari-
ness or disgust with naturalism. It is true that they have led us
to put more exactness and sincerity into the expression of ideas
and sentiments which were formerly familiar to us; to give pre-
cision to our romanticism, and at the same time to moderate our
realism.
But once again, if we have heartily and readily accepted this
foreign literature, is it not proved that in reality we possess, if
not the cosmopolitan spirit, at least the cosmopolitan manners ?
An Englishman travels over the whole world, and remains every-
where an Englishman. We do not quit our own firesides; but
from this corner we adapt ourselves without difficulty to the
moods and manner of thought of all nations, even the most


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remote. Yes! ours are the writers whom I term the true cos.
mopolitans; for a cosmopolitan — that is to say, a European -- lit-
erature should be common and intelligible to all the people of
Europe, and can only become cosmopolitan by the order, sym-
metry, and lucidity which have for centuries been accepted as our
national qualities. They are so still; as is proved by the large
human sympathy which we are to-day supposing that we discover
among foreigners, but which nevertheless has always been one of
our most eminent characteristics. We love to approve; ours is
perhaps the only nation disposed to prefer others to itself.