The Writer's Way in France [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512801323

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
PART I. The Creative Temperament
PART II. The Writer in Time
1. Obscure Beginnings
2. From Barbarism to Young Culture
3. The Vocation
4. The Enlightened Vocation
5. In the Age of Reason
6. From Rousseau to Proust
Postscript to Part II
PART III. Some Texts
1. Tristan; Perceval
2. Rimbaud
3. Proust’s Way
Appendices
I. Poetry of Light and Radiant Darkness
II. A Note on the Idea of Progress in Art
III. Some Pre-Critical Concepts
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Writer's Way in France

Robert Greer Cohn

The Writer's in France

Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press

© 1960 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-9751 Printed in the United States of America

To Henri Peyre

Contents

Preface

9

Introduction

11

PART I: The Creative Temperament

25

PART II: The Writer In Time 1. Obscure Beginnings

59

2. From Barbarism to Young Culture

69

3. The Vocation 4. The Enlightened

111 Vocation

129

j. In the Age of Reason

169

6. From Rousseau to Proust

186

Postscript to Part II

238

PART III: Some Texts 1. Tristan; Perceval

245

2. Rimbaud

267

3. Proust's Way

327

Appendices I. Poetry of Light and Radiant Darkness

409

II. A Note on the Idea of Progress in Art

421

III. Some Pre-critical Concepts

424

Bibliography

431

Index

437

Preface

This book is an attempt to bring out, through a fresh set of lenses, some keenly artistic and cognitive values of French literature which have been hitherto obscured or altogether hidden: first, by tracing the evolution of theme, imagery, style, genre via representative figures from the earliest known native origins to the crowning work of the Symbolists and, second, by the close elucidation, in terms of the general purview, of some selected texts. Obviously, there is intended here something quite different from the standard history, with its bias for spread and hospitality to the lesser lights, the idea being not at all to vie with the Lansons or the Castex and Surers but rather to supplement them in the direction of recent and original critical insights. Some explanation is due concerning the separate studies in the final section of the book. Since, given their scope,

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THE WRITER'S WAY IN FRANCE

only a few could be included in this single volume, they are offered as examples, with no pretensions at covering the various periods and styles. But it is my purpose to round out the project in time through a series of companion volumes, the earliest of which will be devoted to Montaigne, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau, Vigny, and Baudelaire. To Henri Peyre an inkling of my gratitude for his numerous kindnesses is expressed by the dedication on a previous page. It is no doubt slight tribute to add that if I acknowledged his masterly influence wherever it occurred my text would be dotted with his name: my feelings are better put by saying that he is an inspiring representative of French taste, thought, and idealism. Appreciative mention is likewise owed to several friends who helped me variously: Joseph Church, William Barrett; the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for making possible a year of uninterrupted work; and the late, brilliantly talented, and very much missed Walter Stone. For permission to quote a part of his "Castles and Distances" (Ceremony and Other Poems [Harcourt, Brace & Co.]) I am indebted to Richard Wilbur. There remains to be noted the close participation of Dorrit, my wife, in this enterprise, over the conception of which she hovered constantly, benignly like an Athena. Blessedly merciless critic and self-effacing noble encourager, without her the final product would have been considerably worse than it is. Poughkeepsie, N.Y. May, 1959 ROBERT G R E E R C O H N

Introduction

For several years, in the English-speaking countries, we have been witnessing the first signs of a gentle but evident decline in the influence of the New Critics. To interested observers both in and out of the universities, by now they seem to have gone too far in the direction of text for text's sake, so that the time appears to be ripe for a swing of the pendulum the other way. The full implications of this "other way" are still less than clear; for although it seems inevitable that there will be some form of return to the traditional—historical, even broadly biographical—approach, the question is: how far back? Another dimension or corollary aspect of the same problem is apt to arise at this junc-

12

THE WRITER'S WAY IN FRANCE

ture: where should the critic take his stand between the "impressionistic" appreciation of art and the scientific approach (linguistic, psychological, anthropological) of recent critics, including various "new" ones? In "The Frontiers of Criticism," T . S. Eliot has recently attempted, within modest limits, to define his own notions on the subject, alluding to and slightly revising his earlier views expressed in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Positively, he makes the scarcely startling but acceptable statement that the function of criticism is to enhance our enjoyment of literature; although he indicates a fuller sense of the word "enjoyment," he leaves to our imagination what this fuller sense might be. In a cautionary vein, he sees danger for literary criticism in its becoming too literary or impressionistic on the one side and on the other too critical, too exegetic or explanatory, in that tradition which began with Coleridge and is carried on by the scientific text-analysers of today. Eliot feels the latter menace to be the realer one for our epoch, though he admires some "brilliant" contributions by Lowes, Richards, Empson, and their disciples. His misgiving here likely stems from a professional diffidence on the part of a practising artist, who naturally has less interest than the full-time critic, academic or otherwise, in all sorts of statements about texts (Eliot himself in the talk puts an end to the notion that he is much more than a "workshop" critic; we will return to this point later on). One may question the very use of the word "frontier" as applied to a region which, however it may appear to the writer camped in the middle of his art, to the critic looks more like a familiar stamping-ground. And so, while finding himself in large agreement with the mellowing Eliot's quite reasonable position, still the critic is apt to find the sum of it slightly

Introduction

13

off-center; he wants to establish his own view of what a balanced position should be for our times, and even feels it is his specific business to do so. In any case, Eliot's very brief remarks on the subject, here and in previous essays, leave practically everything to be said.1 Mediating of this sort—finding the right balance for his particular public, between the art which is his main concern and any rational discipline (including scientific ones)— belongs, after all, to the literary critic and is in fact very close to the essence of his function, of which the primary dimension is precisely mediation, or matchmaking, between the creator's special expression and the common discourse of the public. The critic, in hypothetical distinction to both the all-out artist and the purely prosaic man of affairs, is a Janus-like figure with a twosided personality: he enjoys, on the one hand, a major endowment of artistic temperament and is in some sense a frustrated creative writer, of fiction or poetry; on the other hand, he has, far more than the true poet and even the artistic novelist, a considerable attachment to conformist society and its average expression. His way of integrating this divergent personality, of uniting the two horns of his career's dilemma into the magic potency of the unicorn, is through the catalyst of his craft. When a like alchemy ensues in those readers who, a step behind, are ready for it, the critic may confirm the efficaciousness of his work by a certain glow: le courant passe. The field of this function is quite varied, depending not only on the critic's penetrative powers of the moment but also on their area of application: he may limit himself 1

The reason I cite him is that he is a familiar reference point and, despite his modest disclaimer in the talk, a pioneer of die New Criticism so that his revisions are part of die pendulum swing in the other direction and possess some historical interest.

14

T H E W R I T E R ' S W A Y EN F R A N C E

to interpreting the sensibility of a single esthetic expression, one sonnet or short story, or he may describe and evaluate a national literature. (The audience to whom he addresses himself is equally varied, ranging from the general public to an authentic avant-garde.) Obviously, as the scope of his investigation grows in breadth, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the depth of feeling and perceptiveness which the critic can muster for individual studies. This failure of sensibility was the main target for Proust's recently published diatribe against Sainte-Beuve, and similar charges can be levelled against Hippolyte Taine's History of English Literature or Sartre's Qi£est-ce que la littérature?—not to mention historians like Lanson and Brunetière.2 Still, despite, or because of, the difficulties, the challenge is always there: how far can a critic go in combining a sensitivity to art rivalling the creator's with a literary historian's range and, further, with a scientist's or philosopher's faculty for rational analysis? In recent years, there have been some notable attempts at meeting this challenge.3 Behind the backs of insular 2 In all these cases my awareness of their deficiencies is coupled with genuine admiration for their remarkable qualities. Taine in particular deserves a better fate than the one assigned to him by current critical fashion (his chapter on Donne, for instance, goes far to anticipate the modern appreciation of the metaphysical poets). W e will have more to say on Sainte-Beuve in our Proust chapter. 8 Completely ignored by the public, as we know from the sales statistics. This is probably as it should be, though it certainly hurts. Incidentally, if ours is an Age or Criticism, as Randall Jarrell claims, it is permissible not to deplore the fact though we may deplore some shoddy aspects of it (the temptation to excessive modisnness is certainly rampant in our arriviste times). The increased activity is due in part, at least, to a long previous lag in serious criticism in America.

Introduction

15

figures like Leavis4 and Eliot, who have been particularly fashionable among those who yearn for a milder world or some comforting socially exclusive myth rather than more spiritual considerations,5 there is gradually appearing a new kind of critic, as yet unclassified, best exemplified in America by Auerbach, the later Blackmur, and Trilling. In their work we find little cautious talk of "frontiers:" the critic ventures as far toward the warm flowing South of his love for art or the chilly, rigid North of his reason as his integrating powers—or those of his readers in the more vital centers of our temperate zone—allow him. He borrows insights from various systematic disciplines (psychology, philosophy, anthropology, semantics), but substitutes fluid critical language for scientific jargon, inventing new terms and formulations when necessary. Taking inspiration from these pioneering senior contemporaries, this is what I propose to do in the present study: by bringing rationality to bear upon whatever artistic sensitivity I can claim, to then come up through the layers of what I have read over the years to adumbrate the essential spirit of the main tradition of French letters.® The procedure will be chronologically 'Relatively static ethical values determine in Leavis, and his disciples, a somewhat conventional, priggish, and rhetorical critical attitude. The leading Symbolists are dealt with in a reductionist spirit of devastating common sense and empiricism coupled with clique poise: smart, lit'ry, self-assured, informative, his views are very often beside the point of art 8 No doubt, the questing artist, and the rare comparable critic, would settle for such an attitude if "let be"; providentially, he is not. * Aside from reasons of personal limitation or preference and the obvious importance of the French tradition (which Churchill has called the seminal one of the West), there are certain advantages ill restricting a study of this kind to one national culture which, despite lively interchanges with others, possesses, as much as anything does, an authentic unity.

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THE WRITER'S WAY IN FRANCE

as follows: first, relying on some fresh thinking along the lines of modern psychology and philosophy, to begin with a definition of the creative temperament (Part I), since this is the truest common denominator among the writers of different eras (and even of the same era). This discussion of the essential nature of the literary artist (what he is, a statics) is followed by a survey of his main line of development (what he becomes, a dynamics) in one culture, the French. In this part of our study (Part II: The Writer in Time), we trace the essential variations of this temperament as, moving through the periods of French history, it expresses itself in its important modes—themes, rhythms, moods, genres, styles. Parts I and II together are an attempt to present something which is not philosophy (aesthetics), nor psychology, nor history of literature, nor a "science of literature," nor anything else but criticism, or what we may call "general criticism," a would-be responsible view of one literature which can provide a comprehensive background to the specific criticism of any given French text. The final test of the validity of the approach will be to elucidate, and enhance the reader's enjoyment of, a group of separate texts (Part III) examined and appreciated in intimate detail. This word "enjoyment" clearly calls for further scrutiny here. The role of mediator or matchmaker is a compoundedly ambiguous one—its motives are as mixed as its colors—and any enviable soul that can dispense with such services, in whatever context, certainly ought to do so. But the artist too is an intermediary of sorts, whether between the world and the reader or between the latter's selves,7 T

At the end of Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus, singing a little song of the busy go-between honeybee, comes to stand for the artist himself. His delight in double participation is represented knowingly by Eliot's Tiresias.

Introduction

17

and his conscience is less than pure, for he knows that by recording the merest word to describe a beautiful experience he is marring in some sense its ineffability. In spite of this he goes much farther and puts in the mouths of his creatures rational formulations very much like those of the critic,8 thereby very often pricking the bubble of some lovely, but outgrown, illusion. The critic, at a different level, does to the artist the questionable thing that the latter does to nature: he is always killing some joys and creating some others, among these last being the very human joy of knowing? But does criticism's act of possessive love go too far in betraying its better half? Does it, or at least a certain probing kind of it, destroy more than it creates? There is anguish in that doubt—until one remembers life's and honest art's power to resist our petty assaults. Dig, thrust, scratch as we will, we shall soon be blunting nothing but our fingernails. This childish gesture may arouse mere smiles on the part of the Eivig-Weiblicbe who may deign to embrace even the critic in her endless grace and mystery. And so ¿he dauntless critic must eventually accept himself with his various shortcomings; his next impulse should be to try to "make the best of it" by proceeding steadfastly toward the new challenge. T o this end, a considerable part of his life will be spent in the posture of Mallarmi's Hamlet: "He walks around reading in the book of himself" in the hope of surprising at its source a larger understanding of the nature of art. Usually critics are too busy earning their living by journal8 More, some Symbolists have gone far beyond the critics in their rational vision, stealing their thunder while the high priests of the autonomous text go on mumbling their puristic cant; it is now up to the critic to "take back his own" and retaliate by borrowing the petite sensation of his beloved enemy. 9 Implying nonspecialized, but advanced, general understanding.

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T H E WRITER'S WAY IN F R A N C E

ism or perhaps teaching to do very much of this sort of thing;10 perhaps they do not respect the artist in themselves sufficiently to take his processes very seriously. Whatever the reason, the fact is that critics, particularly in America, seldom go very far into such "pretentious" matters, and, loftily dismissing the efforts of men like Blackmur and Burke, generally prefer to maintain an easy conversational tone within the range, say, of the urbane businessman lunching at Longchamps (rather than the élite talk one might overhear in the Deux Magots), while leaving the ideational depths to the frogmen from the sciences. Armored in their special jargon, off the intrepid scientists go. Alas, given their rather unintuitive natures, they make their dives with blinkered goggles on, and surface with obviously partial accounts.11 1 0 In short, important criticism demands leisure comparable with that of the serious creation of fiction, and in America this is practically unthinkable because of the elusively in-between nature of the critic's calling, which confuses youthfully dynamic, well-meaning people to the extent that they are apt to be unclear as to his right to exist at all. This, incidentally, is why we have only a hazy concept of the man of letters. 1 1 Conversely, when artists try to speak of themselves or each other critically—in America recently we have had a spate of these thin, inbred pronouncements (O'Hara on Hemingway being merely the worst)—they tend to reassert ad nauseam and in garbled language the artist's natural bias against naked ideas. When they are practising critics to any extent (as opposed to potential ones, which all artists should be) it is obviously to the detriment of a major artistic expansion; thus Joyce said forthrightly to Frank Budgen: "I am a bad critic" (Frank Budgen, "Further Recollections of James Joyce," Partisan Review, Fall 1956, p. 539) and Mallarmé wrote only ideal criticism for himself. As for Tolstoy, the less said about his criticism, the better. Generally, criticism has the autonomy (implying fluid relations all around) of any manure institution; the critical pronouncements of true artists are apt to be diverting rather than serious, telling us more about the speaker than the subject; they may provide good hints which the critic can put to use,

Introduction

19

It remains that almost all orderly discussion of the writer's character—or of the character of genius—will be found on the library shelf labeled Psychology, with authors' names like Freud, Jung, Kretsehmer, Hitschmann, Bergler. Freud comes deservedly first. We have heard a great deal recently about the gifts of the Viennese master to both the creator and critic of literature, contributions to the exploration of the dream life, free association, stream of consciousness; enhancement of our awareness of symbols and of hidden motivation; dizzying insights into family relationships and the myths which were crucial to the molding of civilization. It will soon become evident that I agree with those contemporary minds who regard Freud, in the light of his intellectual daring and honesty, as being of an importance comparable with that of Hegel or Darwin in the creation of the present climate of thought, and I see no reason why literature should not profit from his vision to deepen the psychological insight which has been traditionally its own. But while communion with Freud need no longer be apologized for by men of letters—and it was encouraging to see the spurt in general acceptance of this truth during the recent Freud centenary—still, the fact remains that science and the criticism of art, though fruitfully interpenetrating, are distinct fields of endeavor." just as, in the other direction, the artist frequently borrows insights from less-gifted contemporaries. 1 2 As Philip Rahv has observed, in a recent talk, a given scientific discipline can at best offer one contributory technique among many to the critic. In his Idea of a Theatre, Francis Fergusson illustrates this by his deft use of the Oedipus complex as one of various illuminating approaches to a discussion of Hamlet. Our own view aims at a similar flexibility, always insisting at the same time that the different approaches used here are branches of one unified vision of "general criticism."

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T H E WRITER'S W A Y IN FRANCE

In disregarding this, Freud's followers, while no doubt worthy clinicians, have generally proven themselves clumsier than the self-critical and cultured master. It is to be hoped that the recent crushing response in literary quarters to Edmund Bergler's The Writer and Psychoanalysis will give pause to any such impatient and condescending attempts in the future. Now, although Freud himself, in spite of the many contradictions in his complex nature and in his writings, betrayed a real sympathy for the artistic personality—in Civilization and its Discontents he suggests that creativity alone offers some chance of a solution to the tangled problems of Eros in an advanced society—Ernst Kretschmer, partly building upon the master, goes a step farther and offers the best professionally psychological discussion of the artist's temperament I have yet encountered.18 With originality and flair he makes telling observations on the nature of genius, seeing it primarily as poetic, daemonic, and delicately describing its affinities with, and equally important differences from, madness; opposing it to the relatively flat routine of the ordinary man, but mindful too of the artist's steadying relations with the latter. Eventually, however, his clinical concerns lead him into an elaborate typology based on physical characteristics, and this leaves literature far behind.14 Some of his types, illuminating the aforementioned relationships, are pertinent to criticism, 13

The Psychology of Men of Genius. One sees little gain for literary insight in the knowledge that the mother of the author of Faust had a thickset build, with soft features, constituting a "pyknik" type associated with "cyclothymia"; as we shall see there is a more direct, adequate, and flexible approach to what is of literary interest, the nature of Goethe's temperament as reflected in his writings. 14

Introduction

21

such as his "cyclothymic"—"schizothymic" ("possessed" and "maker") polarity, but these notions need to be put in a more adequate context. When an attempt has been made to see the situation more wholly, such terms can be picked up and located with due credit to their inventors. In sum, what inevitably vitiates, in varying degree, all the psycho logical approaches I have examined, including those of Kretschmer and Jung, 1 5 is their partial nature, the insufficiency of their core vision, their premature proliferation into categories and types. These problems and shortcomings have recently been analyzed by René Wellek and Austin Warren in their monumental Theory of Literature (Chapter VIII, "Literature and Psychology"), and anyone interested in the subject can do no better than begin by consulting them. But Wellek and Warren have attempted—and succeeded—to present a roundup of the different approaches and do not themselves concentrate on crystallizing the vast material into one synthetic view, wherein each important type, mode, and polarity would fall into its necessary place and be related along the various axes to all the others. N o r are their theories demonstrated at length on actual texts and authors. That they have performed as well as they have 1 5 Jung's insistence (in Modern Man m Search of a Soul) on the "visionary" nature of creativity, Le., that valid art springs from a deeper truth rooted in the "collective unconscious" as opposed to neurotic fantasy, has been a useful corrective to the simplifications of some Freudians. But Jung's postulation of a mystic, somewhat nationalistic, group soul which overrides individuality in a onesided way, radically separates the artist from his art, giving the latter an excessive autonomy. Our own conception involves a dialectic between the group and individual realities, mediates somewhat between the Freudian emphasis on individual human problems of Eros and the Jungian perspective.

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THE WRITER'S WAY IN FRANCE

in the way of synthesis, considering the number of literatures drawn upon, constitutes a tour de force of scholarly criticism: we intend to return to them more than once. In France, where authentic men of letters have been known to flourish, for the past twenty years or so there has been a considerable new effort to bring about an ambitious criticism, with Bachelard, Blanchot, Poulet, Richard, and some dazzling young men writing in the reviews; perhaps the rangiest attempt at a synthetic approach on the part of a literary critic is Guy Michaud's Introduction à une science de la littérature, which when it drops the tentative part of the title promises, on the basis of his past achievements, to become a work of major importance. In its present form, Michaud's book eventually suffers from the same shortcomings of brittly scientific eclecticism that we found in the psychologists: there is an excessive splitting into headings and subheadings, with a paraphernalia of charts, Eastern mysticism, scholarly history of criticism, and Jungian character types (sanguine, hot, etc.). These types and references are all of interest, but they prematurely clutter up and hamper lucid thinking at those crucial early stages when what counts above all is to stay with the main problem until it can stand no more tension or attention and gives off all the phenomena in procession as a spontaneous emanation approximating that of life itself. This has always been the way of serious artistic creation. Moreover, in a domain of rational thought bordering on the critic's, it was the way of Hegel more than a hundred years ago; so that by now the time has certainly come to put what we have learned since, from Darwin, Freud, and the post-Hegelian philosophers, to strictly critical uses. If we can find not many types but one archetype of the writer, relating him to mankind in general, and

Introduction

23

then see all the emergingfigures—and,at some remove, the expressive modes—of literature as ordered variants of this archetype; if we can show how the first intense version of the type (initially a poet) develops rhythmically, dialectically toward and away from his prose opposite (initially an ordinary man) on his unending evolution toward the ideal unclassifiable artist or "myth-maker;" and how, in this becoming, his art at times splits into distinct branches, poetic, prosaic, and in-between forms, slowly refining into delicate subbranchings of expression by countless variations on a primordial theme, burgeoning here and there as the foliage of imagery, the fronds of finished passages, the seething, breathing bush of a whole rounded creation; if we can even begin to do this we shall have taken a considerable step towards a contemporary criticism worthy of recent efforts in sister domains: of Symbolism (Proust, Mallarmé, Joyce) in art, phenomenology in philosophy, Gestalt and existential psychology, and, as we are told, the new physics with its "unified field theories," que sats-je? True, any method, including the subtlest refinement conceivable of a post-Hegelian dialectic, remains a method, with the inherent limitations of systematic thought. Nor can we, ultimately, escape such limitations by any attempt to fuse a theory of literature with critical practise through a synthetic or phenomenological approach such as ours, by any pretensions—however flexible, however we may twist and turn through spirals of form and matter—to seize the wholler realities of art through the wilful extraction of its essences. But granting that essences are not all and perhaps even that, in his art as in his anatomy, "the deepest part of man is his skin" (Valéry), still, since the dilemma is eventually everyone's (including the artist), faute de mieux for all of us a stubborn initial effort of mind should

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THE WRITER'S WAY IN FRANCE

eventually prove rewarding. As we leave method behind, allowing it to become merely tacit, and move through the closer appreciation of texts towards the intricacies of living language, it will at least be with an enhanced sense of orientation: we may proceed with the confidence that we know where we are in the thickest part of the summer afternoon where "many a subtle branch . . . remains the true woods."

FART I The Creative Temperament

There is one major premise which will be presupposed, when not directly dealt with, in everything that follows: that the essential quality of serious art is its intensity, hence that the archetype of the creative writer is the poet, who is "daemonic," "inspired," before he is all the other things he must also be. We are obviously using the word poet, sometimes capitalized for this usage, in the larger traditional sense which would include the author of artistic prose. Some highly qualified readers hold the opposite view, namely, that the ideal artist is a calm, skilled craftsman,

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well-adjusted in his attitude and comportment toward his fellow men, an empirically minded realist with a broad experience of life as the average citizen knows it; or, to put it more provocatively, that he is "a blown-up version of the bourgeois" (Kretschmer). Such readers' preferences usually go to prose writers and they are apt to point, in defense of their view, to the lives and works of major novelists like Balzac, Dickens, or Tolstoy, and sooner or later Bach is bound to show up with his brood of forty children. It is our belief, though it will take more demonstrating than we can afford to cram into an introductory paragraph, that even these men can be said to be great to the extent of their intensity; that no amount of patient skill, indispensable as it is, can bring about the radical and orderly reshufflings which are accomplished in rare flashes of vision (Mallarmé's "moments de foudre") and bring about the unprecedented.1 We have grave doubts, moreover, about a formula such as the one which identifies Tolstoy as an "unalienated artist" and sets him in diametrical opposition to Dostoevsky or Kafka: is this the Tolstoy who said to Gorky, "If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about he is always thinking of his own death"? Even that most imperialistic of empiricists Balzac has been termed a poet and visionary, for example by Baudelaire, who should know, and more recently by Claudel; eventually critics like Albert Béguin have followed suit. Much the same epithets can be applied 1 Behind Mallarmé's view lies a long tradition beginning with Plato (Phaedrus) and passing through Cicero, the Neo-Platonic aestheticians of the Renaissance, and the Romantics (Schelling, Nerval, Coleridge), the transcendentalists, and Baudelaire, who repeatedly emphasizes the concentration, and resultant power, of genius (Delacroix, Wagner). Contemporaneously, there is Nietzsche's "Dionysian spirit," a powerful but rather disorderly version.

The Creative

Temperament

29

to any other of the classic figures of literature, for example, the august French tradition which is our particular concern: Villon, Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, Pascal, Racine, Molière, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust . . . We are going to consider them all in the second part of our study where we hope solidly to establish our initial point along with various others. We shall try to show how prose arises in its historical moment as a modification of the poetic attitude, usually sacrificing some, or much, intensity to broader patterns of creation, but occasionally, in the most interesting cases of all, maintaining an undiminished concentration of feeling over generous areas of art. So that if, to borrow a phrase from Wellek and Warren, "in the instances of good writers . . . we have to think of the writer as both 'maker' and 'possessed'," * it is clearly the second of these personae, the "possessed" or poetic one, who is the developmentally original and therefore essential artist as creator. On this provisional basis, at any rate, we are going to proceed, recalling our promise to start with the single and simple, getting around to the reservations later.* Op. cit. p. 79. Elsewhere they speak of "a synthesizing greatest type in which the struggle with the daemon has ended in triumph, an equilibrium of tensions . . . Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky" (p. 80). This dialectic is entirely acceptable to us but the equilibrium needs further questioning: to the extent that these figures remained active artists, it must always have been a very temporary one. s In his justly celebrated work of scholarly criticism, Mimesis, Erich Auerbach takes note of two broad tendencies in literature: the representation of deep, polyvalent, dynamic, monistic, poetic, religious reality (as in the Judaeo-Christian Bible) and the representation of broad, univalent, static, pluralistic, prosaic, secular reality as in the Homeric epics and classical antiquity generally. H e later notes the transformations and interpénétrations of these two 2

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Concerning this single archetype, Wellek and Warren mention the following (as one of the various approaches to literature and psychology): "The nature of literary genius has always attracted speculation. . . . The poet [tacitly assumed to be the writer] is the 'possessed', he is unlike other men, at once less and more; and the unconscious out of which he speaks is felt to be at once sub- and superrational" (p. 75). The only other mention they make of this approach is to quote T . S. Eliot, their apparent source: "The a r t i s t . . . is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries," he wrote in 1918. Later (in 1932), he returns to this theme of primitiveness in relation to the images "which may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they have come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer." Eliot, of course, has his own reasons for not peering into the depths, but there is no reason why the critic should shudder and abdicate with him (shudder, yes, but plunge in). What Wellek and Warren have provided in their "at once less and more" is a hint which goes straight to the heart of the matter, for it is a major aspect of the artist's essential rhythm. Now, calling upon our various meditative resources, rational, intuitive, and empirical, and considering alternately some hypothetical child who is spiritually sensitive to the point of genius and some ordinary child, we may hope to understand how this rhythmic difference came tendencies through the literary history of the West. My own less rangy and informed approach follows a similar dialectical Becoming (in France) but with a greater bias for art, hence an emphasis on the first of these two tendencies as opposed to Auerbach's obvious leaning to the prosaic, combined with a rather scientific or scholarly mode of presentation.

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about.4 During this first attempt, we shall be considering a theoretical entity without a chronological element, the temperament of a writer roughly as we would recognize him today. It is important to note that his relationship with the non-writer holds only for a fixed point of history and that as time goes on the ordinary man takes on, with certain modifications, the basic characteristics of the artistic type of a more primitive era. We will discuss these complex changes and cross-patterns in Part II: The Writer in Time. It should also be noted that we will at first speak in terms of undifferentiated creative genius, gradually adding the modes which define the artistic and specifically writerly forms of it. The ordinary child has largely mastered the knack of diverting its fear and aggression away from the objects of its love—for example, its parents—and thus begins to develop an active, unconsciously mobile, and, in a sense, "forgetful," character. This is a true accomplishment,5 if it is not overworked, if balanced with moments of "remembrance," of inwardness, of quiet communion between the divergent parts of the personality; if, in sum, the 4 Our child is based not only on the assumption that as the tree grows the twig was bent but further, empirically (in addition to some hints from personal experience), on various well-known revelations of artists too numerous to cite here: not a few will be invoked passim throughout our study in connection with the individual figures. French artists who have been particularly co-operative in revealing some key episodes from their early youth include Pascal, Rousseau, Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, Gide. "Bringing the simpler virtues of courage, militancy, optimism, steadfastness into the context of outer action; inwardly, however, fear of certain truths, dishonesty, and a low "tolerance for ambiguity."

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channelizing barriers have a certain porosity. But, on the whole, from the viewpoint of the artist such normal activity, whether of shouting, scrambling children in the play-yard or of the quietly scrambling grownups they become, will always appear as a kind of hypocrisy or dishonesty, Ibsen's "life lie," Sartre's mauvaise foi or the "unauthenticity" of the bourgeoisie, Heidegger's "oblivion of Being," or Mallarmé's "fear which metaphysical and claustral eternity has of itself other than as human consciousness" (Catholicisme); pathologically, it is "scatterbrained" distractedness, giddily going about the very opposite of E. M. Forster's "always connect." Conversely, the child with an intense inner life long keeps his negative and positive feelings (for example, toward his parents) in close communication, and thus develops a highly charged emotionality with inevitably some interpénétrations of pleasure in pain, love in hate, and so on.6 He has mixed feelings of all sorts, this child whom we are apt to call shy and difficult; the analyst would use the word "ambivalent." This will be the very flavor of his existence: in the music he listens to most there will be lacrimae rerum; it is serious music, his brother would say "sad." He has purely gay moments too, but such moods are as rare as they are intense, and usually incommunicable: the mixed state of mind remains, and will remain, characteristic.7 And so it is with the beautifully 8 T h e genius concentrates what may be the tendency of a large group or caste; there is some connection between French cultural accomplishment and the fact that so many Parisian children look tristful as they hop about on the sidewalks. 7 W e ought to point out that at the deepest level of his being the artist is no lover of pain for pain's sake, on the contrary his "ambivalence" expresses his attempt to deal with it and to purge himself of it (cf. Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"). If we make a

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truthful adults upon whose revelations we are largely dependent here: Tolstoy's intimations of sorrow behind every pleasing appearance of life, beginning with his earliest memories (Childhood) and culminating in The Death of Ivan llyich, are paralleled in Proust, from the boyhood of Jean Santeuil ("his sadness . . . seemed to him always inseparable from himself [and] his joy") through the self-cancelling emotions of the mature Marcel in his last-written volume. This essence of spirituality and honesty —the willingness to face the ambiguities and paradoxes of existence head-on—may go so far that a genius like Pascal will often express what seems to be total ambivalence: "Sickness is the natural state of Christians" (Sur le bon usage des maladies)-, or Shakespeare: "There lives within the very flame of love a kind of wick or snuff that will abate it" (Hamlet). 8 Provisionally, then, we may sum up by offering a working distinction which we will soon amend: we may say distinction between the human desire for pleasure and the need for pain ("necessary evil"), we may see that the very sensitive who, more than others, spontaneously fear and flee pain must also, more than others, need it recurrently to right their balance, hence the typical double-mood of the serious art work. The tension may be mild, expressing a compromise pleasure mingled with sorrow (elegiac) or, more rarely, a violent paying of the debt of suffering followed by the winning through to a moment of transcendent grace (as in Baudelaire's Une Charogne). Or fear and delight may Be closely blended into near-simultaneity, the exhilaration of passages of Bateau Ivre. Some few poems record the pure upper phase of the dialectic (see our later discussion of "poetry of light"). 8 Thus in his Confessions (Book VII, the Zulietta episode) Rousseau complains that, whereas nature had given him desires, it had poured a poison into his head to spoil them. Cf. Joyce's mention of 'a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear' (Ulysses)-, we might also cite Flaubert's "mourir ou aller a Paris" (Madame Bovary) and the very curve of his sentences with their rise and "chute plate" (Thibaudet).

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that the ordinary child's emotions follow the linear pattern of activity, which progresses; the genius's personality is apparently—on the social plane defined by ordinary people —circular, passive, turns upon itself, as is roughly implied in the term "introverted." (We must emphasize that this is on the outer, social plane only, because the inner life may be highly active while appearing as passivity to the others, as "daydreaming"). It is this turning-upon-self of emotion,9 following a mysterious damming process or "block," which creates psychic depth and intensity, and, ironically, this hidden activity will eventually burst forth into a higher form, as creativity, all the stronger for the delay. So that we may see why our terms of active and passive were merely provisional: they gravitate very quickly toward each other, dialectically, in actual life, and the pattern becomes increasingly difficult to follow.10 That is why we must now cut deep, in an initial analytic effort, to the barest and earliest distinctions; if we then follow closely the first hypothetical steps in the inner life of the genius-as-child, we shall be prepared, I think, to proceed in heightened awareness of what is happening as the adult writer develops toward creative maturity. Within the private world of his infancy, his spontaneous rhythm is a series of primitively pure rises and falls of 'Soon this will become self-understanding and, in some, selfanalysis. Communion with self becomes communion with selves, maintaining in adulthood a warm relationship with childhood and other subsequent versions of the inner being. 10 This is truest of the higher beings: thus Kretschmer's cyclothymia and schizothymia, which are roughly later modes of our circularity and linearity (but lack their generality), seem applicable at all only to humbler souls (Goethe's mother) than great artists are. One or the other tendency may predominate and influence an esthetic-poetic bent or a scientific-prosaic one, but to the extent of predominance the artist is inferior.

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emotion," each steep up-and-down wave followed by a prolonged exhaustion, emptiness of spirit. During his beginning encounters with existence, as reality puts pressure on the sensitive and introverted individual to accomplish certain outward duties, he finds himself lagging;12 for, the steeper the waves initially—whether caused by the concentration or by the greater born power of his psyche—the more difficult it is to tame them, and, secondly, the periods of exhaustion are apt to coincide with the outer world's demands for participation. But reality in the form, first, of the mother's punishments has the scandalous power to pain him m proportion as he lags, so that at long last he makes a desperate effort to catch up. When he does overcome his inertia, his action possesses an intensity proportionate to the desperateness of the effort. In the new frame of reference, of social reality, outer action, his basic type rhythm is thus established: following a prolonged lag, a very painful goading and an intense rise of performance accompanied by a rush of pleasure as he finds he can eventually catch up and act. The potential creator at this provisional high point momentarily feels superior, dayy.ling in his élan.1* And yet he knows, deep inside, that he began as a failure, a laggard, and soon learns (or remembers) in 11

Made pure or intense, at first, by the mysterious damming, checking element or "wound," and the resultant lag in addition to the natural quality of infantile emotion. 12 Actually, the first drama is between the child's psyche and itself, and his rhythm is probably established before any interpersonal outer communication. One may suspect that an early version of the original hurt occurred when the sensitive child was first dragged into life (Rank's "birth trauma"). But this cannot be demonstrated. 15 "Once going . . . I was more ardent and went further than any of the others; both hard to move and to hold back" (Rousseau, Confessions, Book I).

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addition that his sharp upward drive will be followed by an equal drop, retreat into self and a repetition of the cycle: intense inner life, lag and goading, intense action, withdrawal.14 This pattern will continue to repeat itself, under various guises and complications, into the artist's adult life. Moreover, although his particular emotional economy may add up its various phases to "come to the same thing" (or nearly so) as the ordinary man's quantitatively, he is now a good part of the time out of phase, at cross purposes with his neighbor, and will continue to be so recurrently throughout his career. He is a hare to the other man's tortoise.15 The completer pattern here is obviously a twodimensional one:18 vertically, extreme rises and drops; horizontally, lags and spurts. Because verticality here represents a spatial dimension (as on most simple graphs), it is the concrete and traditional summation of the creative rhythm. This simple rhythm is what we mean when we say that an artist is "daemonic," that his pattern of action is "vertical" or "extreme." And so he appears to us when in circulation, in daily life. On the one hand he will seem to suffer from an "inferiority complex," on the other he will strike us as terribly vain. On one side of the coin a 14 In terms of the mature vocation: a vision (intense inner life) which haunts (lag and goading) until feverishly recorded (intense action). See Faulkner's account in his recent interview in Writers at Work (Viking, 1958). 15 This is the normal relationship between writer and non-writer in a cultured, peacetime society; wars, Shriners' conventions, and the like, may bring momentary ironic upheavals and reversals of the whole pattern. 16 Based on an underlying tetrapolar pattern, or "double polarity." An exposition of this epistemological concept will be found in Appendix III. Although a full grasp of it is not necessary to an understanding of this book, reference is made to it passim in footnotes for those who may be interested.

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paragon, on the other a failure; pioneer and laggard, morally something of both angel and beast, at parties either "too shy or too boisterous" (Malcolm Cowley), prudent and calculating at one moment, at another going around banging his head like a baby, etc., through a whole list of cognate ambivalences. It is increasingly clear that our initial working distinction between active and passive has been surpassed, that the creator has, in his narrow way, something more of both modes than his counterpart; he is at once more penetrating, virile, form-creating, and more gently available and open to the world's various impressions.17 The shy, elusive, Protean creature who is Nobody-Everybody, a "man without qualities," periodically resolves, and at last perdurably, into an authoritative Somebody.18 An amusing corollary to this pattern is provided by Voltaire in his English Letters, concerning the Quaker Fox: "Fox believed himself to be inspired. He thought, consequently, that he ought to speak differently from other men. He began to tremble, to make contortions and grimaces, to hold back his breath, to expel it violently. . . . In a short time he acquired a great habit of inspiration." W e may be reminded that intense children occasionally sulk by holding their breath until they are blue, or that 17 Hence both sadistic and masochistic in his worse moments as in Baudelaire's L'HeautontimoroumSnos: '1 am the wound and the lmife." Since Rousseau is sometimes considered to be die single most influential writer in Western culture, his remarks on his own temperament are particularly pertinent: ". . . this heart, at once so proud and so tender, this effeminate and yet indomitable character, which, floating always between weakness and courage, softness and male virtue, has till the end put me in contradiction with myself." (Confesiions, Book I). 1 8 This complex entity is what Yeats means by the "mask," the newfangled temperament of the artist.

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Sartre's existential analysis of Baudelaire is based on the notion of the poet as an enfant boudeur (though Sartre is too patronizing in developing this idea). The word "inspiration," whether mystical or poetic or both, may thus take on a mild, mechanistic eighteenth-century light. It ought to be apparent by now that, since the gifted man is determined mainly by the greater concentration of his psychic energy, his difference is a very relative one; there is no radical break between him and the rest of mankind, but rather countless gradations which at some point (or points) appear to lead to a qualitative "leap," as in all other reality. The effect of environment can turn the concentration to negative, criminal or pathological, directions or can serve to enhance, or to neutralize, its force. The highest genius evidently represents an enhanced effect of outer circumstance on a favorable psychic disposition.19 So far in our study we have been concerned with undifferentiated creative capacity. All superior talent represents the peculiarly concentrated quality we have delineated, but there obviously exists a scale of modalities which, like the brilliance of color, is based on diminishing intensities corresponding to those of light (the reason for this metaphor will soon become clear). In terms of our previous distinctions we can now say that the presence of any of the various interrelated characteristics of the hypothetical ordinary temperament—such as the addiction to prematurely immutable values (base quantity, cash, pat 18 Among the favorable outer circumstances is immobilization or claustration; prisons (domestic or public), solitude, exile, and the sickbed are frequently encountered in die biographies of artists. There are many other environmental factors: patronage, climate, national development, and so forth.

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formulas, idées fixes, dogma), militancy, ready optimism, and other simple forms of will—reduces to that extent the creative intensity. Now, although such traits are present in all temperaments, including the most gifted, slight changes in proportion bring about results which, when examined more intimately, can no longer be arranged in a simple vertical hierarchy. Not only do these common characteristics shift the tone of the temperament down the scale, as the greyness added to color does, but they may generate a new (horizontal) dimension of differentiation similar to the change of hue: a spectrum of creative domains.30 This is the change which, in a very subtle way, characterizes the archetypal divergence of science from art.31 In the series of cognate polarities: synthesis-analysis; cyclothymiaschizothymia (Kretschmer); esprit de finesse-esprit de géométrie (Pascal); poetry (broad sense)-prose; artscience, the opposites are dialectically related and interpenetrate (as Pascal noted of his terms) to form any advanced creativity. And yet, despite thè seeming impartiality between the poles, one of them is ultimately, in an enlightened version, always seen to be the higher—for •example, in the Hegelian phenomenology. This preference is no doubt a-rational, but necessary to a final position. Our bias being for creativity here—and perhaps in any caseit follows that synthesis is, ultimately, generically higher 30

In our epistemological terms, we are making a double-polar distinction (involving a dialectic between four poles) between the lands of creativity; it would be possible, in a more theoretical context, to carry the distinction into polypolarity. 11 This distinction—the margin of concreteness, wholeness, free play, and mystery—would hold even in the most extreme imaginable, "asymptotic," borderline case, such as between some future version of Joyce and a scientific exegete of his work. Hence Flaubert, when he called art "the scientific form of life" in a loose moment of his Correspondance, went one crucial step too far.

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and more inclusive than analysis, poetry (broad sense) more so than prose, art than science. This means that we may add to our previous list of downgrading characteristics those which determine the scientific attitude:22 the tendency to categorize or type (modes of analysis), to whatever extent of predominance over the synthetic approach, brings about, in however small degree, the mentioned double-shift, downward and sideways. Here, then, begins the parting of the ways of the highest spirits of art and science.2* For example, the occasionally rigid, categorizing distinctions Sartre draws—such as between poetry and prose in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?— and the linear quality of his quest as expressed in his novels and plays not only make him a lesser artist as compared to, say, the Symbolists, but, more accurately, disqualify him as an artist to some extent and move him sideways to a neighboring scientific position, the imaginatively ideational (philosophic, etc.) one which is, as he has acknowledged of late, central to all his work.24 But the common source, as of light, emanates through both science and art, extending 28 Although in ordinary temperaments they are present in much lower, dialectically less developed form than in superior scientists, nonetheless this means that the ordinary mind is generically closer to science than to art. 23 Then, within art, now established as a generic frame of reference, prose diverges from poetry in the same way. Further, within poetry, didactic divides from lyric; within prose, flat realism departs from artistic prose; and so on. 24 The shift toward science is specifically dependent, to whatever extent, upon a bias for barriers, categories; the scientist usually separates, for example, rationality from its sensual matrix. The artist, although comparably intelligent, lucid, precise, insists on the integration of these realms. If we use the word "intuition" or "imagination" to indicate this fused intellectual-sensual way of knowing, we must be aware that it is not, in worthwhile artists, a lower faculty but a higher, a higher synthesis of faculties. Often

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from the extreme form of talent, which is keenly artistic, "poetic," ambitious, adventurous, through more "prosaic" forms of either domain. In the lower reaches, where visions disintegrate into fragmentary expressions through narrow specialization, the difference in spirit between the kinds of temperament is crudely clear. But the distinction between the seriously artistic and scientific temperament is generic: specifically, the highest form of scientific endeavor, as is recognized by men like Einstein and Broglie, has a pronouncedly artistic—"whole," fluid, imaginative, intuitivequality and may easily surpass in this respect prosaic kinds of artistry. Conversely, the best art far outclasses pedestrian forms of science in its analytic qualities. A secondary differentiation decides whether an artist will be literary, musical, visual, this depending on the relative development of the various faculties (seeing, hearing, feeling, certain mental qualities,38 and even muscular co-ordination) as well as sheer chance environment (caste, fashion, national tradition, and so on). M But these are often subtle distinctions, and the serious writer has real potentialities for other artistic expression, so that it is not certain in all cases what makes him choose the writer's path—indeed the choice often comes fairly late in life. But in die important artists have noticeable strains of "feminine" intuition traceable to a parent, usually female, but the strain produced no art until organized by more active resources in the son. Passive intuition became active, or artistic imagination. 28 For example, die particular development of die logical faculty (the dimension-generating part of the brain) helps determine a musical and mathematical bent; high I.Q., which is of comparatively little interest here, is probably rarer in painters. " For example, some regions have a strong literary tradition, some a musical; complex sociological factors can determine caste "inbreeding" (Kretschmer) for certain mental characteristics which are valuable to culture.

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most interesting cases the choice undoubtedly comes, eventually, because the literary form of genius is simply the most powerful, the most universal in effect, creating the seminal consciousness of the race and its expression. The reason for this pre-eminence of literature lies with its dialectical force, based on negation: not only does language negate nature, but literature re-negates language into art; whereas all the other arts work with relatively unearned natural values: beautiful sounds, colors, shapes, gestures. Literature accordingly subsumes a whole level of significant challenge in its inherent nature, such as is found in no other art.27 The musician or painter may invent other challenges or resistances, but none so meaningful as the forging of art from rational communication, keeping as reward for the additional effort much of the original ideational substance. However useful it is to straighten out one's values initially, this kind of argument soon becomes quibbling, since the distinctions are merely generic, applying at all clearly only to a few supreme examples. Let us insist on nothing more than this: that if we trace back through texts and authors to their original spirit we will eventually come to a common source,28 and that we now ought to move on in the opposite direction to see where this particular way may take us. 2 7 T h e musician must go outside of his own art and add words— as in opera—usually by another artist, the librettist. 2 8 This perspective could be dubbed "idealistic," though I hope not sentimentally so: the leavening that brings about culture by agitating vulnerable sensitivities is for me eventually mysterious, and, though it may be described by evolutionary concepts a la Darwin, a materialistic view can never explain why life bothered to act in this way. T h e leavening, which we identify with "spirit" in a non-sectarian sense, may have been implicit in matter f r o m the beginning but, again, why? B y refusing to name it "spirit" w e cannot shake the awesome fact of it.

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From our root drama, occurring initially between the inspired child and self (or simplest reality, or the mother), the future writer moves on to the well-known Oedipal phase,29 then, gradually, to the crises of puberty, of adolescence, of young manhood (including possibly marriage and physical fatherhood), of middle-age, and so on. This overall growth toward adulthood on the part of the writer roughly parallels that of other men, but with the aforementioned lag or "out-of-phaseness"; in its special way, the development passes through a series of chronologically more-or-less fixed crises, the problems of which emerge in greater or lesser disguise as dramatic moments of literary expression. Because of the lag, the authentic writer's attempt to achieve normal maturity is foredoomed to partial failure, a fertile failure, in the spirit of Keats's formula of negative capability.80 On the other hand, like Sisyphus, he must keep trying, and the extent of foredoomed effort is roughly the measure of his power as a creator. The maturity the writer eventually strives for in a conscious way—the goal of practically all men—may be defined as an active, outgoing, successful personality, capable of loving and being loved on a give-and-take basis with other men and women and growing in this richly involved situation towards the plenitude of ideal fatherhood, personal and 2 9 Despite our distrust of jargon, it would be mere coquetry to avoid the familiar term; if we are alert enough about its limitations it can only negligibly hinder our free movement in the realms of "finesse." 3 0 "There are certain defects which, when well put to use, shine more than virtue itself' (La Rochefoucauld).

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communal." But the generous measure of horizontal involvement implied in this life style is precisely what he is least good at, for he is often a step ahead or behind, or in a vertical or daemonic (angel and beast), relationship to his fellow-men whom he either hates and distrusts or else loves excessively, universally. Here we may easily think of the cases of Rousseau or Dostoevsky, in both of whom a particularly disturbing form of genius magnifies to our glance what is actually the pervasive condition of the entire seriously artistic caste. Moreover, in relation to the outgoing type whose emotions are energetically spent in physical or quasi-physical activity, the writer's feelings are long kept in strong interior commotion, and this pattern of strong emotionality, though somewhat mitigated, persists into later life, causing the writer to be, and often to appear, eternally young beneath his wrinkles.32 Another form of notable emotionality which stems from the writer's rhythm is found in the derivative rhythm of his sexual desire. There is now a considerable variation in this pattern among all men, but we may take as an approximation of the male cycle the traditional week, as authorities on the subject generally do. It seems certain from everything we know of him that in the genuine artist this male cycle is, with varying frequency, interrupted, disturbed by that same mysterious inner block or wound which caused 3 1 This ideal norm is that of our era, and though it is true that the norm shifts from age to age, yet it will do, roughly, for our composite picture of the writer in this first part. 32 Goethe's flashes of rejuvenescence are the classic illustration. Conversely, cf. Valery's remarks on "the very old man" in young poets, who derive an inconstant wisdom from the recurrent harshness of their fate; "young and yet very old" (Baudelaire, Spleen).

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his original lag:33 "Between the desire / And the spasm / Falls the Shadow" (T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men). In the context of his life's total rhythm, a cumulative version of his doubt and hesitation often brings about prolonged virginity. Although the resultant intensity of desire, reinforced by the delay, is very great, still the writer, perhaps having experienced the expression and its "shattering" (D. H. Lawrence, St. Maivr) aftereffect, possibly harried by a renewed sense of guilt or discouraged by some contretemps brought about by the out-of-phaseness and which he fears to be the sign of impotence (Stendhal),84 tries to sublimate his erotic expression to creativity.85 In this he may be helped by outer nature, which produces some physical aberrations (including, occasionally, "the writer's disease," syphilis), but generally it seems to be a matter of emotional make-up combined with social pressures. If the normal sexual act is a kind of partial death—a known, bounded violence purging the system for a rebirth of energy and resumption of the tempered rhythm of social activity—for the genius the drop following his creative-erotic (sublimated) expression is so violent as to take on some alarming aspects. This is no doubt the reason why so many inspired writers from Saint Paul to Dostoevsky have suffered from the mysterious epilepsy, the "falling sickness," which was then, in its predominantly negative aspect, really a distorted 33 Although aggravated by social prohibitions, the original hurt is clearly decisive since other men respond to these same pressures in a quite different way. 84 See "Stendhal: In Quest of Henri Beyle" by William Troy, Partisan Review (Jan.-Feb. 1942). 86 There is always some anti-natural element in this, as in all civilized behavior, hence repercussions. But there is a great variation in the pattern; some are able to conceal the effects better than others.

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version of the common human letdown following sexual joy. 36 Flaubert's controversial psychic illness, Joyce's anxiety fits, Nietzsche's depressions (cf. Mann's Doctor Faustus), Rousseau's unidentified nervous malady, were undoubtedly of a similar order. 37 W e must emphasize that these are sporadic manifestations, that even the majority 36 Here, to cite Freud ("Dostoevsky and Parricide"), "we have a glimpse of the identity of the underlying mechanism of instinctual discharge. Nor can that mechanism stand remote from the sexual processes, which are fundamentally of toxic origin: the earliest physicians described copulation as a minor epilepsy, and thus recognized in the sexual act a mitigation and adaptation of the epileptic method of discharging stimuli" (Collected Papers, V, 226). Freud emphasizes repeatedly the basic identity of the varying neurotic (as opposed to organic) manifestations such as epilepsy, hysteria, paranoia, megalomania, and we use the word "epilepsy" in this fluid sense in connection with the writers. These may include Boehme, Pascal, George Fox, Swedenborg, Byron, Swinburne. Also some inspired leaders, not primarily writers, like Buddha, Socrates, Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed, Napoleon, William Pitt. See John Ernest Bryant, Genius and Epilepsy. 37 Cf. Flaubert's "sickness of an epileptic nature . . . half-cataleptic torpors . . . states of exaltation . . . cyclothymic [rhythm of] work" (J. B. Pontalis, "La Maladie de Flaubert," Les Temps modernes, March-April 1954, p. 1647). A. Maurois and J. Starobinski suggest the link between the erotic problems and the nervous maladies of Proust and Rousseau, respectively (A la recherche de Marcel Proust, p. 23 and /.-/. Rousseau, pp. 251-56 and passim). Our notion of a single hyperbolic rhythm underlying these varying psychic manifestations is more fully suggested in Mann's Doctor Faustus. The radical polarization of mood which accompanies the extreme internalization of erotic forces may produce schizophrenia and, accordingly, Krtetschmer sees schizophrenia as the pathological counterpart of the highest genius. What effective genius apparently has which is lacking in its counterpart is the capacity to reverse the dynamic sublimating process and occasionally move downward and out instead of in and up, i.e., to actively shape its visions in terms of reality. Kretschmer's view has been confirmed recently by a paper by Dr. Peter Giovacchini read before the American Psychoanalytic Association.

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of the mentioned artists seem to have enjoyed, probably with increasing regularity as they matured, broadly normal sexual experience. Indeed, the capacity to communicate with, and be refreshed by, such simple expression gives stability to a continuing, vital production; the celibate life, conversely, is evidenced, when the danger of violent emotionality is averted through a rigid psychic economy, by a certain primness, timidity, and fussiness, even in writers so talented as Henry James.38 The painful downfall of the creative Eros is occasionally followed by a vestigial manifestation of the repressed sexuality, as Stephen Spender has observed with rare candor.89 In such instances, the pain may be understood as an attempt on the part of the system to bring the emotions back in line for sexual expression and is accordingly a kind of love-sickness.40 Most men, particularly in adolescence following prolonged sublimation of the sexual instinct, suffer from a similar love-sickness which sends them in pursuit of a mate. Writers may recognize their suffering (generally graver) for what it is—"certain melancholies the cause of which I know too well" (La Nausée)— but occasionally they dis58 It is likely that the sexual form of self-renewal is better for art than competitive, half-satisfying, activities of a dilettante or gourmet character. But there are excesses in both directions. 89 In "The Making of a Poem," Partisan Review (Summer 1946). 40 Thomas Mann associates not only love and sickness, but also both to decadence. The fervent sense of apocalypse in writers like Leconte de Lisle, Dostoevsky, et al, is rooted in a similarly disturbed eroticism, which, we now know, may more adequately reflect, or predict, the Zeitgeist than optimistic, normal temperaments. The tension reaches an unbearable point and still cannot be resolved, for the devil intervenes yet again, like the unrelenting Shadow of Elliot's Hollow Men, whence the anguishing sense of emptiness, rivate and political, and the hope for total change. Compare eats's The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."

Ç

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sodate it entirely from persons and see it as the precondition, rather, for what may be to a few the most intimate form of expression: poetry or the blissful experience of beauty. Thus T . S. Eliot comments sympathetically on the pre-creative breakdown of Housman.41 Whether even in these few instances such seemingly successful sublimation can be carried on indefinitely without destructive effect is a problem which offers little hope of solution. When the intense writer does express himself romantically or in a physical mode it is apt to be with the same excess;" romantically, he usually expects too much of the woman and is inevitably disappointed; she cannot possibly rise to the ideal creature—donna, sylphide, tender maternal muse—his frantic need got from his own feminine soul and who was born like Venus from a sea of sublime tears. Sexually, he is probably best characterized by the childlike, violent, and egocentric sensuality of Hugo's Satyr or Mallarmé's Faun:43 a half-beast, half-deity, obliviously treating himself to the ravishing of nature's Queen. Further, as a drastic counterweight to his radical sublimations, his daemonic persona (which is only a part of him) reveals a noticeable tendency to seek the "lower" aspects of sexual The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 138. 4 2 An excellent example of his romantic excessiveness is the protagonist's furious serio-comic pursuit of Emma Clery in Stephen Hero. Cf. Chateaubriand's René, who "gives too much" and sighs for a soul-mate taken from his own ribs. 4 8 This peculiarly triumphant voluptuousness is equally evoked in some love poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine as well as, more youthfully, potentially, in Rimbaud's Aube or Soleil et Chair. Our informed guess is based not only on such verbalizations—where there is that much smoke there must be occasionally a noteworthy feu de joie—but also on some passages in the private correspondence of a few writers like Swift, Mallarmé, Joyce. 41

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expression—as in Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer" with occasional ventures into less common "deviations" or modes of "perversity;" of this order are Dostoevsky's pathetic crime, Proust's, Gide's, or Verlaine's homosexuality, Rimbaud's active narcissism, Hugo's adulteries, and so on. Because of his fear of reprisal these acts may be repressed entirely, or almost so, with untold suffering inflicted upon self and others/5 At all events, we cannot afford to sit in judgment over the genius here, for he more than pays for any misdeeds by his gift of self. And since he overlaps with the rest of humanity in all directions, it would be wrongheaded to single him out for recriminations. Our entire point here is the hyperbolic nature of the writer's psychic rhythm, as attested to surprisingly often even in this realm where our knowledge is quite limited, especially for earlier periods. This exaggerated intensity can become very painful and destructive, and to a large extent the history of the writer's life and career may be seen as a series of sporadic attempts to reconcile, as Thomas Mann puts it, his creative personality with the "need to catch the eight o'clock bus." 46 It is as if he were striving to combine his rhythm with that of his normal brother on a master graph; he gradually tends to develop or, rather, become aware of two fragmentary 44 In this respect as in others the writer closely resembles most of his civilized coevals with, however, an added intensity. Confirmation comes from certain passages of Rousseau's Confessions, a well-known anecdote about Shakespeare, revelations by candid moderns like Leiris and Leautaud. 45 Within or without his art, the beauty of his singing alternates with self-punishing and sadistic expression (satiric, bitterly moralizing, even directly aggressive). 44 In an interview published in the New York Times, June 5, 1955. See also his essay, "The Artist and Society" (in The Seven Arts, F. Puma [ed.]) for a thorough discussion of this relationship.

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personalities which alternate and interpenetrate in a very elusive fashion—they often show up as characters in a n o v e l a n d his problem then becomes largely one of "integration." The end product, at that ideal point of a man's career when he is at the zenith of his powers, is, if not quite normal maturity, a kind of adumbration of it, syncopated, out-of-phase, always both more and less than the other, and this, the writer's maturity, composed of his created work plus his personality such as it is, we might conveniently identify as "ripeness" or "artistic fulfillment." To borrow a formula of T. S. Eliot, he has qua writer "nor youth nor age, / But as it were an after dinner sleep/ Dreaming of both," and it is this very failure to come of age which leaves the margin of freedom, slack, or play with which the writer's mind may mutate into new ways useful to the vision, or the myths, of the community/8 At the same time, despite the lag or alienation, the valid writer, as opposed to the chronic bohemian or the madman, insistently maintains a solid foothold in common sense reality or sanity, which are ultimately socially determined.49 He participates directly in many experiences and traditions of the group, in47 The examples are endless: some of the best known are Shem and Shaun, Leverkiihn and Zeitblom, Marion and Elinor Dashwood, Jacques and Antoine Thibaut. 4 8 The freedom which when validated creates fiction, when not may create wastefulness and insanity. Since the correspondence of slack and accepted creativity is never complete, the writer has a margin of dissipation and insanity, though the latter is seldom as noticeable as with Rousseau. 48 Although discernment begins with a negation, an awareness of difference, this does not mean that the writer's health is not eventually more important than his maladjustment and was not latent in him from the first. Lionel Trilling emphasizes this point in "Art and Neurosis," in The Liberal Imagination.

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eluding most importantly its language, and indirectly in others by artistic imitation (mimesis).50 The socially rooted part of him serves as his interpreter, the medium of his effort to communicate with his fellow-men. And so the new vision enters the community (which has been unknowingly yearning for it) by publication and, having worked its way into some well-established channels, is eventually accepted by other men as compensatory to their own overadjusted and rather level personalities, to thus vicariously satisfy repressed potentialities of the human spirit. These potentialities for the daemonic range from the religious vision and the spiritual adventure through minor triumphs of self gained by the abasement of others (as in comedy, satire) to the violently criminal and animalistic urge or the sort of primitive impulse Faulkner points to with his "Indians, children and idiots." The writer of genius has deep affinities with all of these but in a socially acceptable form, that of his literary expression. Because of the reassuring form and the ritual—reading, theatregoing, which mitigate the effect by seeming to split it among many—we can share in this experience without an excessive sense of guilt (in the case of the forbidden) or fear (in the case of the dangerous adventure, physical or spiritual). This is the essence of catharsis, purging, though the notion has been applied more particularly by Aristotle Mimesis is motivated by a desire to offset alienation by becoming one with the "others" while maintaining a certain distance. The difference between ordinary imitation, which is part of the common learning process, and artistic imitation is that the latter records its distance within the imitative form by distortion, the "new twist," (stylization, hyperbole, caricature) or catachresis. The greater the distance or distortion successfully imposed, the stronger die art. 50

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to one kind of adventure, the tragic one into the dark regions of the soul.51 Here too the writer's rosary of words directs us like the thread of Ariadne, and in this sense his social role (his form) is that of a spiritual father, a paraclete and guide such as was the eminent ghost who lead Dante through the tenebrous Inferno. 62 But he also guides us through Paradise, perhaps the lost kingdom of childhood innocence, perhaps, as Proust thought, through some glimmering vision of a purer, lovelier world. 63 T h e essence of the writer's role, viewed neutrally and grosso modoy is that he is by dint of his special rhythm (daemonic, in our modified sense) simply the Other (Joyce's Shem, Mann's Leverkuhn), the challengingly different brother and prodigal son, a fascinating man leading an eccentric existence but one clearly to be reckoned with. In this way he provides leavening, dialectical resistance, to the more prosaic members of society and, as described by 51 As in all homeopathic treatment there is the risk that the inoculation may prove virulent, as Saint-Evremond worriedly observed in De la tragédie ancienne et moderne. The method supposes a certain basic sturdiness. 62 Theorists from Plato to Mallarmé have seen this as the essential nature of music, which by its symmetry tames the primordial, archetypal danger of the sound which assailed the ear of the nascent enfant (see "On the Enjoyment of Listening to Music" by H. Kohut and S. Levarie in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XIX (1950), 64-87; also Mallarmé's essay, "Catholicism"). 53 In a humbler role, the artist merely diverts us, allowing us to share in risky adventures while, by a tone of "this really isn't so," maintaining a sense of detachment. More seriously, with a deeper identification on our part, he comforts us by telling us of things that were left undone, byways that were not taken, mysterious, enchanted gardens which we passed by, appealing lives we forebore to enter (Baudelaire's Passante, Klingsor's Indifférent are poignant examples of the last). He tells us of these, and consoles us for their loss, through the joy, often the soothing tears, of remembrance, reconciliation, atonement, and peace.

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Joyce, participates in a kind of crisscross morris dance with his smooth brother down through history. (This will be developed in Part II.) By his mere otherness, then, the writer makes the smooth ones suffer in a constructive way ("souffrir en mesure," Sartre), the way a parent may, or a marriage partner, or any other conscience. On the one hand, he confronts them with ideal truth, with new visions of what they could be and had not dared to be, or, on the other side of the coin, he reveals with pitiless honesty the hidden festering places in their souls which they need to cauterize (catharsis), homeopathically treat, before they can proceed confidently. Such suffering, with its concomitant, enlightened joy, is the catalyst of change, and the writer is the Mab-like midwife who, by alternating caresses and prods, helps the reader give birth to his new selves, shuffling off his outworn skins." His otherness negates the reader—as the latter negates him—to a new finding of his own identity; just as in Heidegger's conception, language, by its negating nature, allows the world to become. And when the suffering is deep enough and the joy correspondingly strong, as may happen with the greatest writers of them all who can humiliate us down to our marrow, we may speak of spiritual palingenesis, metamorphosis.55 8 1 The first person he helps in this way is himself; cf. Goethe: "true Rebirth," "I am changed down to my bones," and "daily shuffle off another skin." (Quoted in Barker Fairley's A Study of Goethe, pp. 121-22). 58 W e shall always find in such writers, as well as in a few interesting lesser ones, some initial experience of total humiliation, sometimes hidden, sometimes not; Sartre's "moi aussi j'étais de trop" (La Nausée), Malraux's central theme of humiliation in all his novels (leading to the rhythm of metamorphosis in his Voices of Silence)-, Pascal's sentiment du vide, all express that sense of "nothing to lean on" which may go back to parental neglect but is really

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The writer draws the moral force for this role from his own suffering at the hands of society (and life), caused by his eccentricity, his otherness.58 And since his talents are mental and spontaneously transcendent with an aggravated élan, he retaliates with the pen—for the unquestionable good of the group but with a steely penetration. In this sense, as we noted, he has momentarily become the strict, cultured parent. But at some point, soaring high above the usual parental zenith, he succeeds too well, and he is no doubt the first to become aware of that point, paling inwardly as the pen drops from his fingers and he begins the cringing season in hell as the humblest of all God's creatures. Not only does this occur at short range, but the finest writers—Rilke, Valéry, Mallarmé, Proust—have been known to suffer periods of spiritual aridity lasting for many years." All this time the mesuré brother has been moving along tortoise-fashion in the marathon for maturity; our man sleeps by the roadside, and has nightmares to boot. For each individual, the growth toward maturity is a development passing through a series of crises, beginning with the pre-Oedipal relation with the mother or father. All of these crises—this is true for all men—will persist into later life, telescoped one into the other, reminding us of the growth of a plant, shoot from within shoot. So that, for mysterious in origin. Joyce, who was profoundly hurt by the weakness of his father (but that is probably an attempt to account for the bottomless feeling), speaks fraternally of Shakespeare's total wound: "Belief in himself had been untimely killed . . ." (Ulysses). Cf. Kierkegaard, Kafka, et al. M He has obvious affinities with the sensitive minds of any minority group, who are strangers, exiles, others; Quinet's wandering Jew, Mann's Joseph, Joyce's Bloom and wandering Jew-Greek, Shem (Hebrew: "spirit"). 67 Kretschmer speaks of Goethe's "islands" of creativity.

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example, beneath the rich concern of the writer's relation with his father08 there is always the problem, which is our special rhythmic variation on everyman's problem of (good and) evil. Along with other sensitive men seeking for direct answers to the most elusive of enigmas, the writer is apt, if sectarian like Pascal or Baudelaire, to identify his pain and despair with original sin, his elation with a special grace. Otherwise, there are the pagan myths of Philoctetes, Hephaestus, and Prometheus to provide him—be he Goethe, Shelley, Laforgue, or Gide—with a general notion of a basic psychic wound resulting in a particular virtue.58 58 E. Hitschmann regards this relationship as the most crucial in the life of the genius ( Great Men [New York: International Universities Press, 1956]). 59 This general notion has been authoritatively discussed recently by Lionel Trilling ("Art and Neurosis" in The Liberal Imagination), Edmund Wilson (The Wound and the Bow), William Barrett ("Writers and Madness," Partisan Review [Jan.-Feb. 1947]), and others. Today, although he may look into Freud and Jung, the very last thing the artist will want to do is to go consult a psychoanalyst, for the good reason that the practising analyst, especially in America, is apt to regard his creative rhythm as a malady to be cured. In marginal cases, of the kind Bergler deals with, this may be so, and certainly anyone with any insight whatsoever into die creative condition can hardly afford to speak lightly of its dangers and problems.

PART II The Writer in Time

1. Obscure Beginnings

Up until this point we have been assuming a composite figure of the writer, roughly as we would recognize him today, without much consideration of the changes which he undergoes in historical time.1 Now, relying once more on the powers of meditation, with some additional hints from the anthropologists, let us peer dimly at the writer as he makes his first hypothetical appearances in the world, and then try to follow him along his way as he emerges into fuller view in France. The writer's evolution begins with the Origin of all. As far back as mind can hypothesize, there was always some 1 A brief discussion of the idea of progress in art will be found in Appendix II.

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expression rising out of the void 2—"In the Beginning was the Word"—and present-day science suggests that even in the tiniest particles of "inanimate" matter there seems to be some of that freedom or play which will develop through the higher structures of being into creative mentality.3 As we scan rapidly through the evolutionary hurly-burly, we find this expression rising up irrepressibly in countless cognate modes of being, each repeating, like a microcosm or monad, the first act of creation while spirally adding new levels, new powers, new organic retailorings, of form. The first recognizably mental mode of expression must have been thrown up by a chance mutation in the following pattern: Expression always comes about via the negation of the unexpressed, which, in relation to intellectual man, we call "nature." 4 At some point the natural psychic (Erotic) energy of some pioneer creature was negated or blocked in its usual flow, dammed up and released along a new, more elevated, channel as an expression from a higher—in all senses of the word—part or faculty. This may have been, for example, the first roar or whine of a mired or pitfall2 T h e void, nothingness, not-being, chance, will evolve together with being or expression into the higher structures as the pre-condition for further freedom, for change and growth. In a framework of epistemology, one would situate a polypolar dialectic of expression and void (adding dimensions such as form and matter, word and deed) at the outset. But here we are simplifying in order to proceed. 8 T h e use of "play" here is in the tradition of Heraclitus, Mallarmé, Nietzsche. Cf. Santayana's similar use of play in Realms of Being and Huizinga's Homo ludens. * This negation, the underside of freedom, is an emanation of the negative aspect of the original void or chance. Originally, the negation was of the void; cf. the later mode of black ink on blank page.

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trapped creature "wanting out." 0 With the ancestral animal we can readily imagine how the general Erotic energy, being frustrated in its expression as movement, was directed upward toward the oral zone, which had been partially erogenized early in connection with eating, to emerge as a self-consoling whine (and later, with luck, a simple expression of release at this new level: a cry of joy). 6 We imagine it very easily because every man knows the experience of the knotted stomach muscles, repressing sexual, or other violently kinetic, impulse, and the release at some higher level, often oral, or cerebral, or both combined. In this notion of damming we find, in an earlier mode, our concept (cf. Part I) of the "lag." 7 And when this same process spirals up into the evolving nervous and cere6 This trap is a first example of the rigid laws which make survival possible at successive stages of culture and art. From the shut-in women who made the earliest French poems {chansons de toile), through the mind-trapped "womanly" men who are caught in their aristocracy and cannot find their way back to the favors of nature or the shepherdess ( les pastourelles), these inner and often outer prisons dot the history of poets (Richard Coeur de Lion, Charles d'Orléans, Villon, Cervantes, Verlaine, Cassou . . .) and bring about the obsessive images of society as a prison in nineteenth and twentieth century literature (see Trilling: The Opposing Self). E.g., Byron's Prisoner of Chillon, Stendhal's Chartreuse, Kafka's Castle. Kafka's short story A Report to an Academy builds an amusing parable on the notion of the cage as an instrument of civilization. 8 André Spire has documented this oral-erotic aspect of esthetic language in Plaisir poétique et plaisir musculaire. Since oral eroticism (talking, gourmandise, osculation, etc.: "les plaisirs de la bouche") rises with civilization, to radically separate the writer from the rest of cultured men in this respect, as Bergler does, is to distort the whole picture. 7 W e thus understand Mann's and Novalis' notion that man is the "sick animal," an animal in turn a "sick vegetable," etc., but w e prefer a more neutral term than "sick," perhaps "frustrated."

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bral system of the higher animals (primates) and man, all development of the spirit will occur via this damming business, which creates, in place of a relatively kinetic, linear, unimpeded flow, a static and deepening reservoir of psychic intensity which will be eventually released through the expression of the higher emotions and thoughts. Relatively linear motion (bolting from the trap, pistonlike movement 8 of leg muscles) becomes relatively circular motion (as of a trapped creature) as motion gives way to emotion. In the former there is a decided, early, separation of positive and negative factors (for example, action and reaction), univalence, but, in the latter, positive and negative factors are long kept in close association and commingle; this is even truer of the higher emotions, which have a markedly ambivalent nature in their protracted early stages before their kinetic release. The whine already possessed some of this mixed quality; later, in a higher power, ambivalence became, as we saw, the determining difference between our genius and the ordinary man. Of course, we must picture this development as occurring over millions of years: we must imagine the nervous system branching, because of being checked or dammed at crucial nodes of the organism, and diverting its growth into increasingly delicate subbranches, eventually blossoming into the filigree of the brain with the resultant control of the throat muscles and, ultimately, vocal sound and articulation in primitive men. These nodes will have later equivalents in the crises—jelled into complexes—which dot the emo8 This in turn arose from a static "circular" source of energy, just as wheel movement may become piston movement. The sign of the T a o which is a whirlpool generating kinetic positive and negative expression (and implying a reverse movement, of kinetic back into static) is a profound symbol of the spirit. The whole is a kind of turbulence, a "sound and fury" which may signify something.

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tional growth of the writer. The stumbling or fumbling gesture, hesitation of all sorts, the stammering tongue, the delayed response (shyness, isolation, introversion), gingerliness, doubt, Hamletic gnawings of conscience, critical selfexamination, negative capability in the life-style, these blocks and frustrations will mark the left-hand side of the route of the writer's progress and continue to trip him up. At first he is scarcely distinguished from his fellow-men: for even with expression so primitive as the whine or exclamation of a rudimentary man, in order for it to serve as communication—a danger signal, a warning—there had to be, along with the mutation of an individual's pioneering genius, an at least potential degree of it in the rest of the community. Those tribes which had this group capacity obviously survived the pitfalls (Toynbee's challenge and response). This is the essence of the mysterious teacherpupil relationship: the pupil must have in his "head," in some strong sense of potentiality, whatever the teacher can profitably tell him." The type we are postulating here is the common ancestor of all mental or contemplative types, the distinctly writerly, as opposed to the teacherly, etc., type, emerging only much later in the history of man, just as even later the distinct kind of modern lyric poet will mark a further more delicate branching of the human spirit.10 All of the archetypes persist along with the new modes, for cultural growth has a simultaneous aspect like that of a plant, shoot from within shoot. When the divergent growth 9 With the distinct writer, even the most gifted "pupil" may take a lifetime (or more) to catch up and surpass. It was in this sense that Mann called Goethe a "pedagogue." 10 When speaking of mental development, the most adequate representation is not the outer form or the branch but its inner veinous system, a closed circuit that expands through new "dimensions" (our epistemological term).

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has proceeded a certain distance, the genius will be joined to the learning mass through a lengthening hierarchy of go-betweens.11 Along with Ernst Cassirer (Essay on Man, pp. 44-62) let us assume that the leap from the animal to the human state occurs through the new, rationally located, sense of the infinite. This arises precisely at one of our crucial nodes of growth by the frustration of a pre-rational infinite impulse and its diversion into a new, higher channel; the original impulse was an endless will to freedom, to the perfection of non-being, which was checked by whatever it is in living things that insists they survive.12 Then a similar block, which served to limit man's greed for all-out sexual expression of the now individualized—molded and driven— Eros (whether generally self-affirmative, "pushy," or, more specifically, sexual), proceeded, in a mutation (whether internally or constrained by the competitive drives of others) to divert this appetite to a higher form of "knowing." 18 Again, to take an even later example which is rather specific but useful for illustration, the renunciation of incestuous love with a parent is undoubtedly a key force in the engendering of the parental Person of religion. This figure possesses the quality of ineffability because the paths of, say, son and father remain forever parallel, never touching, thus generating a new "dimension" of infinite Eros. On the whole, infinite yearning is the basis for man's restless ex1 1 Down through less intense writers, critics, teachers successively less literary, and so on. 12 Freud's Thanatos or death-instinct versus the conservation instinct, Eros; the relation between the two is fundamentally ambiguous, dialectical ( N e w Introductory Lectures [ N e w York, 1933], pp. 145-48). 1 3 Hunger, sexual drive, and intellectual lust are successive derivative branches of the original libido.

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ploration and later his Faustian drives, his ever-renewed sense of the possible (serial sense, hypotheses, theories) as opposed to the merely concrete, and so on and on. Let us go back to the earliest of these mutations, the frustration of the pure passivity of a primitive creature," which awakening led eventually to movement, ambulation, and, by way of something like our pitfall, to the first oral expression, the origin of language. In prehuman man, this must have been, first, a few isolated groans and exclamations such as men still make upon arising and upon remembering themselves to be trapped in duties, and then a kind of appeasing babbling in its self-directed phase, later becoming a (partly) outward-directed chattering or scolding expressing pique and self-consolation. For an initial infantile narcissism we have, then, the substitution of orally expressed narcissism or even a faintly cerebral narcissism, because this development was tripped upwards from the general body toward the rudimentary mind." For practical purposes this defines the first human mental type, Homo sapiens, who will thenceforth emit a long drawn-out babble16 as a talisman, an endless rosary of sounds or words, welling up from a new dimension of the infinite, his everunsatisfied yearning to be left alone, to regain freedom of movement, and, ultimately, the total freedom of nonexistence, his almost deepest wish being to drop back and disappear into the void of the womb." He is the ancestor Vico and Joyce imagined a thunderclap here. The hand and the vocal organs grow dialectically with the brain; at the outset it is significant that they are located higher than the appetitive regions, just as man's erect posture is significant (cf. Ovid's Deucalion). 18 Cf. the babbling at the beginning of Firmegans Wake and near the beginning of the Bible in the Tower of Babel image. 17 The talisman may also be thought of as directed against the fear which drove him from his apathy. 14

15

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of the writer, a very engagé one, for his discovery will be of immense value to the tribe, at first enabling its members to maintain an erotic truce with themselves while they set about working,18 then developing into a new form of mild (and sometimes not-so-mild) erotic relationship between persons: language and all the derivative "media" of social intercourse.18 Through such indications, extrapolating backward, we dimly perceive our earliest prototype of the writer, emerging from and reintegrating with the mass of fellow-humans: writer caste and public henceforth will shuttle in and out through a kind of morris dance over the ages, weaving the fabric of civilization, spiritual on the one hand, material on the other. We shall follow the most important steps in this evolution, observing each new type as it emerges, each original artist coming up willy-nilly with a fresh way of seeing things, a new ideal or (and perhaps including) a vicarious expression of some instinct which has in its turn become de trop (our first example being the love of death). We will further note that when these fictions prove useful to the vision, or total myth, of the tribe, they are eventually 18 This notion of oral-erotic expression as consolation for work is Freud's conception of the origin of language. T o such isolated perceptions and to Freud's familiar conception of art as "substitute gratification" our approach is indebted but it also strives to get beyond the analyst's rationalistic limitations by a more open, relativistic, frame of mind, seeing all phenomena, fictional and real, as interpenetrating. 18 A s time goes on, a repetition of the same subliming pattern •within the new field of reality, language and the advanced knowing which comes with it, brings about a division of speech into high and low, polite and obscene. T h e artist, thanks to the kind of dissociating technique he learns from society, will sometimes deal in one, sometimes another; but, at his best and most typical—true to his original ambivalent nature—both.

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mass-mind,20

assimilated into the producing a new type of cultured public, and so on. In this alternating rhythm, the artist is usually both above and below society and, temporally, one step ahead and one behind. He is above to the extent that he discovers and feels most intensely—for a while—a new ideal; below, because he performs the complementary function of giving vent, as a kind of safety valve, to forbidden desires; accordingly, he has a partial bond with the prostitute, the public W.C. attendant, the criminal pervert, the pander, and the court jester.21 Temporally, writers will likewise often feel themselves to be both pioneers and backsliders. And if, for example, in France22 as elsewhere, a primitive writer was the first to discover a cerebral substitute for heterosexuality, a dream of romantic love (and its lower concomitant, the mental orgy), he was undoubtedly the last to put his find to social account in the direct way of romantic courtship leading to a marriage more decorous (and more imaginatively sexual) than that one based on mere appropriation of the partner. Or again, if a hypothetical, somewhat less primitive, writer —perhaps a Provençal troubadour—was the first in France to indulge in a quasi-hysterical fantasy of romantic love engendering the image of a Divine Woman, he was, as is verifiable in the case of the troubadours, or, later, Villon, 20 The assimilation is relatively passive; the public does not entirely duplicate the complex processes of the genius but takes over his way of seeing reality in a relatively unconscious manner. 21 Baudelaire, Banville, Apollinaire, Jacob, Yeats are among the numerous writers who avow affinities with prostitutes or clowns. Baudelaire's Au Lecteur is the locus classicus of this sort of confession; cf. Goethe's admission that he was capable of any crime, O'Neill's "I should have been a seagull," Shakespeare's Pandarus, Eliot's Tiresias. " O u r examples will be first from French literature, with outstanding analogues from other cultures and arts.

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the last to put this impulse to social use in the way of the particular religious vocation which arose with courtly love. Moreover, when his vision has been adopted by society— the cult of the Virgin—the penman gains a momentarily enviable status, but then inevitably there comes a next time when he is moved to a provocative pronouncement and he had better take to his heels if he wants to escape burning as a heretic. Until society gets good and ready again . . .

2. from Barbarism to Young Culture

Let us, then, follow for a certain distance our procession of successive artistic types, alternating in staggered array with their respective partners from ordinary life. The life column begins with a narcissistic man who, as we picture him idling about, would do well to break out of the euphoric state of laziness and perform some work if he wants to survive. His inspired companion is the first to be awakened into an awareness of this harsh necessity and finds a way to vicariously express his ingrained narcissism by ejaculating sounds as he goes about the painful business of working; but he soon tires of this and discovers that what he really wants to do is to needle his silent, contented partner.1 The latter, a born copy-cat once he has been jabbed into action, puts the new knack to use and sets to work, partly for the benefit of the ingenious fellow who 1 A similar sequence forms one of the better episodes of Waiting for Godot.

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has—perhaps after reverse maltreatment—meantime idly donned a horrible mask and now finds he can further unsettle his partner, by frightening him as Bad Conscience, almost at will. In this way he can scare him away from certain practises, providing he also gives him something to cling to, a substitute satisfaction, such as the hope of eventual reward. In time, such visions of an inspired young genius—a prophetic or shamanistic type—become petrified into regular ritual performances led by a figure we may broadly identify as a priest.2 Whenever the oaf and his semblables threaten to backslide, the priest calls an assembly and purges them of their reactionary instincts; the original babble becomes an elaborate mumbo jumbo which develops into the tom-tom-like burial chant of barbaric ceremony, beginning, in France, no doubt, with Celts, led by Druidic priests and probably accompanying at times another primitive physical ritual, the human sacrifice, which homeopathically appeases the desire to end all living. Later examples would be the simple Christian liturgic chants adorning the passage rites of death (and later marriage), and the kindred refrains of the bloodthirsty warriorbards, of which vestiges are found in the chansons de geste. The equivalents to the French choric chant in previous cultures are not far to seek and would include prominently the Hebrew Psalms and the Dionysian ritual of the Greeks as perpetuated in the choruses of the tragic playwrights. The incantatory aspects of poetry, rhyme8 and metre, 2 Some traditional ritual observances will be led by "old men" of the tribe, some by individual fathers who are, like the priest, "initiated," in league with the awesome forces of nature. 8 In the inclusive senSe of sound-repetition; end-rhymes which are only one, rather arbitrary, form, arise late in the West (the first known example being the De Judicio Domini of Tertullian) but had existed long before in the Orient.

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begin here; even the purest babble will persist, with devastating effect, into subsequent literature: the medieval fatrasie and coq-à-Vàne, Rabelais,4 Rimbaud, Joyce, and, in more atavistic form, the surrealists* and lettristes. For, to repeat, all the stages of growth survive concentrically— shoot from within shoot—although varyingly active in their expression; within a single great writer, and certainly in a cross-section of all the writers of a lively epoch, space will be simultaneous time, "tout coexiste" (Rémy de Gourmont). When a literary phenomenon reflecting one of the deep changes becomes really noticeable in a culture, reaches its "critical density," it may be thought of as the flowering, at whatever remove (perhaps very great) on its individual branch, of that new dimension of Eros which arose at a nodal point of man's development.® Since the main matrix of literature in France was the ritual of the West, the celebration of the death, entombment, and resurrection of Christ, it is not too surprising that when a derivative ritual, theatre, branches away, its first known manifestation is the "Quem quaeritis in sepul* The speech of Bragmardo or the "ini, nim, pe, ne, ne, ne, ne, ne, turn, ne, num, num," etc., of the besieged monks are marvellous examples. 8 More atavistic generically; specifically, a rich figure like André Breton combines various tendencies of his time. 6 1 imagine the central stalk or trunk as rising only to the first branching, which, through the damming at the node, drives the sap of life higher, with a new node on each branch and so on up into the most delicate twigs and the final foliage or flowering of phenomena. The earliest flowerings will be, as in the plant, very far from the node, and as the culture proceeds to its apogee, the branches become shorter and shorter so that finally the latest of these changes and its expression as a literary phenomenon appear almost simultaneously. The culture is then probably ripe for decline, but who knows when that apogee is reached, when spirit is breathed its last?

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chro?" ("Whom are you seeking in the tomb?") response intercalated in the Mass. Or that the first known stammerings of Old French poetry—even though much later than the barbaric beginnings we are imagining here—should be the Séquence de sainte Eulalia ("Buona pulcella fut Eulalia") which tells of a martyrdom by fire and then decapitation, whereupon the saint flies to heaven in the shape of a dove. Here we come upon the first fragmentary expression of those entities of reality which represent man's basic experience of the physical universe as distinguished from the living forms which inhabit it: simple literary images of the elements of nature.7 The four elements, like the original All of which they are first emanations, are forces of both good and evil. The heavenly fire, as in the double-edged myth of Apollo, is the fountainhead of Saint Eulalia's love, and also the source of her destruction. Water, when calm, mirrors an infinite peace but equally a lethal depth in which a man may drown; when in motion, it is the image of holy enthusiasm and likewise of terror. Air is purity or friendly, cleansing winds; it is at other times a void through which a soul may fall helplessly, or, when stirred, a flattening tempest. Earth is the rich stuff of fertility, and the dust to which we return. All of the elements have infinite power over the human being and fill him with "awe;" accordingly they become mingled, in myriad myths, with the image of deity, but in varying modes according to their rhythm or density. The ethereal elements, light (fire) and air, are usually associated with a male deity or with the vision of 7

Gaston Bachelard has done outstanding work on this kind of imagery in La Psychanalyse du feu, Veau et les rêves, Uair et les songes, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté.

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heaven, the pure love to which men yearn to return in death.8 Water, the sea, may stand for the eternal in a more sensuous way and is a feminine, undulant, caressing presence of the all. The sea is an intercessor, embodied but always on the misty brink of evaporating into the sky. And so the sea, partly because of a broad harmony in Old French rhyme which will be explained in the pages to follow, is often linked with the Mother of Christ, the Virgin Mary. Earth, the last and heaviest of the elements, usually associated with maternal fecundity, may also serve in a communion with the infinite, though in an all-toohuman, bodily way. Earth and stones are, after the cadaver, the most concrete presences of death and after-life. So there will be literary images incorporating an earthy-ethereal fantasy, which would include all matings with the Ground, whether partial communion or total death and burial, followed by a flight to angelic light. With intense poets of plunging imagination like Rimbaud, the telluric communion may be very direct: "Si j'ai du goût ce n'est guères/ Que pour la terre et les pierres;" or compare the gluttonously sensual entombment and final rapture of Mallarmé's Saint Jean fragments. Again, since mating is a modified form of return to the dark tomb of the unborn,® the two levels of vision 8 Since the father comes closest to incarnating the power of the elements humanly, this image of deity is usually a Father-God like the Hebrew Jehovah, the Greek Zeus. • T h e return to not-being is obviously synonymous with total gratification as in the Tristan and Iseut story; cf. Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." Briffault's The Mothers documents the annihilatory and self-annihilatory aspects of love in animals, primitives, and modern men. The tears and demon-appeasing rhythmic chant of the burial and nuptial ceremonies point to deeper analogies.

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often coalesce in images of sexual love-death with occasional hints of necrophilia.10 The charnel house and certain tableaux of the dance of death (the whore) haunted the medieval imagination in this mixed way: the burial ground was frequently a scene of keen delight, from prostitution to gay processions (Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages). Later, as, in addition to the ethereal elements, flora and fauna arise in poetry, they too will often be joined with this "lowest" vision of the ground, as in Villon's Testament, Ronsard's Ode: De Vélection de son sépulcre, or Valéry's Cimetière marin, Milosz's Morts de Lofoten (cf. Gray's Elegy). As other important modes of this narcissistic stage of art, involving the soul's solitary communion with itself or with the universe, we might mention all literary images of selflove—from the mirror in Snow White to Valéry's Narcisses —and those of sheer laziness, which are legion in French farce, but of which the classic example is now Oblomov Such pure feeling of the isolated being will be further manifested through the subtler ways of advanced lyric poetry, in the extremely varied imagery of thresholds, of which the tomb is merely the first and last example: the exquisite poetry of windows (Mallarmé's Fenêtres, Keats's casements, Proust's Gothic stained glass, Eliot's "slotted window"); of doors, garden walls, gateways, shores or beaches, and all entrances and exits; of journeying, which brings us, more kinetically, by stages to the receding edge of the unknown, to the limits of ourselves, which we are so often eager to leave behind. All poetry of departure, 10

With a corollary of coprophilia. "Of all passions . . . laziness . . . is the most ardent and the most malignant . . . laziness is like a beatitude of the soul which consoles it for all its losses" (La Rochefoucauld). 11

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flight, beyondness, and near or far horizons implies fervent desire for partial death, the provisional end and sweet change of the weary stale soul. Some of this imagery will be found in early French art, at first as the naive expression of pagan-Christian feeling but later, as religion hardens into an institution, as an escape from the latter through magic adventure.12 For a while, after the danger of gross inactivity had been averted, panerotic sexual activity must have seemed a relatively harmless form of expression and "tous les goûts sont dans la nature" (Voltaire). But, in time, a new prodigy found that, in order for the tribe to survive, certain forms of Erotic commerce, with inanimate or vegetable nature,1" animals, parents,14 and, later, members of the same sex, will have to be ruled out and replaced by cerebral incest and the like; to this end he arms himself with an even more horrible mask. The divinization of nature, which began with the renunciation of total consummation in death, springs afresh and flows into its daughter phases, the worship of trees, flowers, beasts (and the vegetative and animal souls of man, the naked body), fathers and mothers, and similarly "distant" figures. Later, with the psychic splits attendant 12

The mysterious Fisher King, on a shore between here and the beyond, is a good example. Pilgrimages and crusades, actual or portrayed, released old urges (tribal wanderings, the quest for the unknown) under die guise of official piety. 18 The most important sense of "Erotic commerce," referring to communion with nature, is the broad one of total union in death, dispersal among the elements; but there are marginal forms of sexual communion, as portrayed in primitive myths. 14 In Totem and Taboo, Freud sees the prohibition of incest as stemming from an internecine war between fathers and sons or the "primal murder" of an archetypal father resulting in eternal guilt within succeeding generations of sons. Such intra-tribal "murder," aggravated by the frictions of early civilization, was also obviated in other ways, such as die sacrifice of selected victims or foreigners.

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upon culture, a lower level of the phenomenon becomes detached—at least in our civilized minds—as the beginnings of rock-bottom pornography, graffitti, and their public equivalents of the sort we find in all truly low societies, good examples being the fabliaux and farces15 of the French Middle Ages (preceded by Greek satyr plays and certain passages of the Bible). Early man, as we know from ancient lore and from contemporary aborigines, did not have a very clear perception of where nature left off and he himself began. The anthropomorphic nature cult which had existed powerfully in Greece, creating all the wondrous nymphs, naiads, dryads, and hamadryads of myth and, later, Ovid's Metamorphoses,16 had French equivalents in the Arthurian legends and the Druidic worship of trees. There are many survivals into formal literature, particularly in Chrétien de Troyes (the marvellous tree and fountain of Yvam) and in the fairy tales of Perrault. With the sixteenth-century Pléiade, these images will be conventionalized—though not always, vide Ronsard's Druidic communion with his familiar forêt de Gastine—and with the Classic and neo-Classic poets they petrify into mere décor (Racine's Phèdre some15 Farce derives, like all theatre, from the parent-ritual of the Church: note the birth of tragedy from Dionysian ceremony and of comedy from pornographic phases of the same (Aristotle:

Poetics).

This fascinating and important pagan work had an immense vogue in France, England, and Spain in the Middle Ages and up till the seventeenth century. Its central myths portray the transformations of a being, fleeing from forbidden or frightening love, into an enduring or monumental part of nature or reality. The artist naturally took to these myths, which reflected the inmost self: a mutation into an objective, lasting art work, under which is hidden, like a nymph in the willow trunk, the suffering, thwarted, but consenting human souL 16

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what excepted). In a reverse movement of culture, some of the real power these entities must have had is revealed by the nineteenth and twentieth-century poets who go back to the sources: among the noteworthy results are Hugo's generous animism in poems like Ce que dit la Bouche d'Ombre, Nerval's Vers dorés, E. T. A. Hoffmann's musical tree (The Golden Pot), Baudelaire's woods which "observe us with familiar looks" (Correspondances), the soul-haunted apple trees in Proust's grandfather's garden or along the highway to Balbec. But, generally, man will learn to distinguish himself and his mate from brooks, trees, and rocks and to appreciate them in their own terms. And since this process is obviously well advanced by the time any national literature begins to be set down, in France too we will always find even the most atavistic outbursts framed in civilized discernment. Nature as something man has left behind, something to return to (o rus quando ad te . . .), is the constant ground bass of art. A level of vision which borders on, and overlaps with, the foregoing is that of animate essences in nature: universal sap, juice, milk, or blood which form a link between physical matter and life.17 Like the elements, but in a more complex way, they are the underlying essences of living things and are similarly worshipped as a source to return to in a "crushing" act of love. They are sensual surrogates of the unattainable, pure, undefined Eros. They moreover incarnate—as chlorophyll does for modern science—the mystery of creation-in-becoming, not only because they are the mediums joining the inanimate to the animate, the site of an alchemy by which the noble rises from the base, but further, according to the true and paradoxical neo-Platonic 17 Cf. Hindu soma, Hebrew manna, Mallarmé's universal milk, Joyce's "liquor."

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view, they represent the reverse movement of spirit descending into matter to create life. The cult of blood, partaken of as food in the human sacrifice, will be replaced by the literary vision of the Grail, which society, in our recurrent pattern, will then adopt officially (Lateran Council of 1215) in the religious form of the sacrificial host. But the artist's thirst to adore universal purities can never be slaked by the single symbol or the fixed set of symbols of an official cult. Goaded by the growing discontents of civilization, his desire will continue to exfoliate into myriad forms as literary images, which occasionally, like the mounting of a play within a play, enact the drama of their own coming-into-being: when Perceval stares tranced at the sight of blood on snow or when Mallarmé's faun gazes raptly at the translucent grape, they are delighting in the reduction of life to its essences and so celebrating-by-profaning the one mystery of spirit and matter become presence: love, light, into life . . As the celebration of this mystery in the form of human creativity, artistic symbolism—which invites us to participate in the melting sweetness of perceiving harmony through the various civilized appearances of reality—will ripen in France as never before. It infuses some scattered images and even whole passages of early and medieval literature, but usually broken with clumsily intervening rational realism or rigid allegory. Only in Dante do we have occasionally sustained glimpses into that feeling of "universal analogy"—when all the presences swim in an 18 The crushing act of love, the shedding of blood, extracting essences: "comme le fruit se fond en jouissance" (Valéry), "breaking the grape's joy" (Dylan Thomas), are related celebrations of the mystery.

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ocean of light—that will define French symbolism par excellence in the nineteenth century. Symbolism in its most general sense may be said to arise with mentality itself: at its root the symbol embodies the dialectic of knowing; hence it is present in all human, and pre-human, expression including those earliest whines or exclamations which are the seeds of language. We may refer to these crude expressions as "signs," providing we are aware of their dialectical nature, i.e., that they also possess a sensual content, an appeal of quasi-physical or Erotic force. It is preferable therefore to reserve the term "sign" for those later abstract, or scientific, expressions which are relatively divorced emotionally from their content and to speak of all primitive language as "symbolic." Civilized general language will be considerably mixed with abstract signs, but developed artistic language embodies, rather, more complex versions of primitive symbols. Though more abstract in one sense than their early equivalents (having been reciprocally developed together with the general culture, including scientific), artistic words or phrases will be at the same time imbued with a complementary Erotic force (a "melting sweetness," all the stronger for the greater gap between man and nature to be bridged by its release) and thus tend to express the entire scope of the artistic personality:18 they are, as Burke and Blackmur emphasize, psychic gestures. This wholeness of the creative intellect, or the imagination, is implied in the word 19

Thus the individual artistic word, or symbol, reflects the relatively vertical stance of the artistic personality as a whole, though something of the horizontal quality of the linear, on-moving, tendentious prose message is preserved and the total effect of the symbol is fluid movement in these and other directions, radiation toward all the other stars in the verbal constellation (I. A. Richard's connotation vs. denotation).

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"vision;" so that symbolism arises as a noteworthy phenomenon in France together with those mystically Christian20—or competitive pagan—literary visions which come with the beginnings of a disciplined artistic culture (as opposed to a stagnant, official Church one) around the twelfth century, which saw the birth of the Grail legend. Artistic symbolism—which is synonymous with effective poetry in the broad sense of the word—not only implies a continuum between sign and designatimi, for artistic words subtly reflect the objects they depict,21 but further the kind of fluid connections all around which we once saw as the essence of the artist and now see as that of his highest art—in contradistinction to the brittle categories of blinkered, too-logical, Western (including scholastic) thought. An advanced literary symbol is accordingly a link, standing for the whole, in the one "chain of being" of mystic tradition, from divine spirit to solid incarnation.22 The term "organic metaphor" implies this fluid quality of symbolism in reference to imagery; the revere is surface decoration, rococo, preciosity. Allegory represents a crude, semirigid, attempt at artistic symbolism. 20

T h e interlocking levels of interpretation developed by Origen and later Christian exegetes helped lay the foundation for this kind of "vertical" symbolism, as in Dante's Divine Comedy. 21 Primarily by sounds and the shapes of letters; see our Oeuvre de Mallarmé, Chapter 6. 22 Certain entities naturally possess more overtones or associations than others and hence become favorite subjects of imagery, or of whole poems, e.g., the swan which by the eternal interrogation of its neck, its solitary exile in winter, its earthbound wings, its pure whiteness, and its death song is a wonderful focus of poetic reality, a season or état d'âme; it is vibrant with life. But all poetry consists of such focuses, or concentrations, of reality; it would be erroneous to assume that privileged cases like the swan are the only literary symbols. W e may distinguish them by the term "motif."

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The stage of Erotic vision following upon, and emanating from, that of vegetative nature, the cult of animals," becomes the ancient body of fables dear to the hearts of children—and of their parents.24 The popular tradition is taken up in the medieval Roman de Kmart, the Fables of Marie de France, and, best known and appreciated of all, the masterpieces of La Fontaine. All previous civilizations seem to have gone through this phase, to which we may ascribe the animal worship (and fables) of archaic Egypt, Greece, and Israel, as well as those primitive ethical attempts—when the prophetic writer shades sideways into the socially oriented priest—of certain legends: the destruction, under rational Athena's aegis, of the Minotaur,28 the Mosaic proscription of the golden calf. In our day these concerns have been overshadowed by many subsequent ones, but they were primary in early collectivities and still survive in the lowest social groups.28 The Eros of life and death and the Eros of animals had 23 Thus animal and nature eroticism coalesces with the even earlier stage of pure love-death in powerful images like: "Je pais longtemps, moutons mystérieux/ Le blanc troupeau de mes tranquilles tombes" ( Cimetière marin)-, cf. Dylan Thomas' In Country Sleep with its overtone of "sheep." 24 ". . . these stories, whose first elements went back to the most distant origins of European peoples. . . . For centuries they had lived in the memory of the people . . . they pre-existed the literary forms which fixed or transformed a certain number of them . . ." (Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française, p. 95). 2 5 Cf. Rank, Art and Artist: the Minotaur, being the progeny of a woman and a beast, represented the forbidden Eros. 2 6 Thus the "beh beh" in Pathelin undoubtedly evoked an old version of a still standard, in some quarters, joke.

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mingled pungently in Greek literature and art, at first in the muddled metamorphoses producing centaurs, satyrs, minotaurs, and the like; as things came into clearer, rational, focus, there were Plato's horses and the coursers of Poseidon (cf. the Hebrew horses of the Apocalypse). And so it was in France: the talking lion of Chrétien de Troyes (Yvain) and the anthropomorphized animals of the Roman de Renart and the bestiaries (such as Philippe de Thaun's holy pelicanus) will gradually melt into their underworld —to be resurrected much later by some sympathetic Romantics27—and be replaced by animals as we know them now, à la Buffon. The horse, in particular, received considerable male attention in medieval literature (Le vair palefroi, the chansons de geste), as apparently it still does in North Africa or Ireland.28 Its points of beauty were codified as elaborately as those of women; one could trace this single animal through an important tradition leading to our times; modern primitives like Pierre Gascar and Picasso have caught his ancient flavor of violence;29 poets like Hugo (A un Ane) and Francis Jammes (Prière pour aller au paradis avec les ânes), as well as Coleridge and Jiménez, hymn his more pathetic cousin, the donkey, who is a born show-stealer and, as Balaam's ass, frequently brought down the house in some crudely realistic scenes in medieval mysteries. Dogs—from Tristan's faithful Husdent to Claudine's Toutouque—wolves, cats, panthers, bulls, even elephants 27 Guérin (The Centaur), Hugo (The Satyr), Mallarmé (The Faun), Leconte de Lisle (Khiron), Rimbaud (Antique). 28 Cf. Shakespeare's Henry V: "my horse is my mistress." 28 The horse, with its strength, naked grace, and prominent rump, is a powerful archetype of Eros, vying with the snake, which approximates the central appetitive channel, and the spider (the nervous system), these last two being rather negative in the West— Valéry's Serpent is an exception—but worshipped in the East.

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receive comparable attention through the Gallic ages, examples being too numerous for more than this mention here.80

The next major branch of inner evolution, that of boundless love for the parent which is bound to be exhausted or thwarted, gives rise to all the adult Persons of religion and the queens, kings, witches, and ogres of fairydom, the love creating the divinely good ones, diminishment and frustrations of it, the evil ones. The latter are apt, in the dynamic West, to be separated from the former by "decomposition" (Ernest Jones), though in Oriental-type, mystic religionGnostic, Manichean, neo-Platonic81—and its equivalent art (the two faces of King Mark32) they may turn out to be the same. The original incestuous aspect of the vision is still very active in the French Middle Ages: in the Roman de Thèbes, the Life of St. Gregory, the St. Julian legend, and various fabliaux. Precedents in the Hebrew and Greek traditions would include the stories of Lot's daughter, of Noah and Japheth, Sophocles' King Oedipus, and the tale of "Myhrra" (Metamorphoses). The ruling-out of homosexuality similarly engenders in forgetful time the tradition of male companionship in adventure featuring usually some form of communion in blood—witness the obsessive carnage of the Chanson de 30 Balzac's Une Passion dans le désert deserves singling out because of its daring portrayal of a man's love for a panther. 31 These are recurrent Western forms of mysticism; early Greek and Hindu religion provide numerous vivid illustrations of prelogical thought. 32 A later example is Balzac's old antique dealer in La Peau de Chagrin.

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Roland—while the women are quite ignored.33 From time to time as some quasi-priestly34 writer fears that this sublimated form of homoeroticism will get out of hand, we have a tale like Erec and Enide, in which it is held that men should return to their wives for the good of all. The primitive vision recurs in various fabliaux; in Lanval Marie de France makes quite pointed remarks about effeminacy; in Le Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meung attacks homosexuality as being contrary to the laws of nature." Each branch of vision, the natural, animal, parental, and homoerotic, mingles with the others and with preceding and following branches to give a great number of literary situations, images, dramatic crises.38 Thus the love of the father (powerful, saintly Charlemagne), the homoerotic (the sentimental combat of Roland and Olivier), and the love of animals, blood, and nature are all combined in certain passages of the Chanson de Roland. In other texts, such as Tristan and Iseut, the themes of the sacrificial animal and of the sacrificial father—often killed by his own loving son 33 Hence the persistent boyish rite of "blood brotherhood" as classically portrayed by Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer. An obvious corollary medium of communion is wine: Sartre offers a particularly knowing modern example in La Mort dans Fame. 34 In all the foregoing cases, the writer and the prophetic religious scribe are scarcely distinguishable from one another, but as time goes on the former will go merrily, wretchedly along his daemonic way while the religious writer (who is increasingly priest rather than prophet as his religion jells into a tradition), alarmed at the implications of this life style, reintegrates rather hurriedly with his "flock" and assumes a distinct role. 88 In this he follows Alain de Lille, De planctu naturae. 3 8 A subsequent development, the literary love of children (cf. Empson's "child as swain" type of pastoral), will be treated at length in our chapter on Rimbaud. There is a noteworthy combining form of "baby-woman" (Lewis Carroll, Ernest Dowson).

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—will intertwine to form one of the most beautiful threads in the tapestry of French writing: the hunt. Perhaps the greatest step forward in the civilizing of Eros was the renunciation before a certain, gradually increasing, age of all direct erotic commerce including heterosexuality. This process began, to be sure, in the very distant past. One important leap from animality was the biological frustration of effective expression around the fifth year of the individual. Freud has located the Oedipal crisis here, and, under his tutelage, we are now inclined to consider this as a period when a major wave of love-hatred of both parents sets in." In Dostoevsky and Parricide Freud tells us how the fear of the father's reprisal (castration, or the general annihilation it symbolizes) for possession of the mother breeds latent hatred of both (outwardly suppressed but inwardly growing; of her, for being in league with him). Moreover, this is complicated by the love for the father in individuals with "strongly bisexual tendencies" which are typical of the artist (both more active and passive) and even, as Freud admits in this extraordinary late essay, of cultured mankind, a love which is likewise necessarily repressed. Then, we may add, in our own general terms, particularly within the vulnerable sensitivity of the gifted child, the process of spiritual growth gets a considerable and complicated boost. A s against the goading inner image of the father, the authentic possessor, the son will develop trickery, mentality, artifice, art (all of which will recurrently, after long delays, ring hollow in his "cowardly" soul). Simultaneously, in another compartment of the psyche, sporadically either struggling with or intermingling and even coalescing with the negative image, there grows the image of the father as an object of worship and emulation. 37

A s against the mother, the spontaneous, natural yielder, the son will develop contempt for instinctive behavior, a sense of male superiority and of duty (which will, after lengthy periods, melt). Again, the positive aspect struggles and intermingles with the negative through various crises which ambivalently involve other women, particularly a wife. Meanwhile, whenever the feeling of rejection b y the parents is thorough, the son will attempt to suffice unto himself: his feminine soul flowers in the sense of beauty which brings him solace, pas-

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The suppression of incestuous activity was apparently so harsh and thorough that, although an overgrowth, it seems to have become an integral part of the organism, blocking into the bargain all (or practically all) true potency before the age of puberty, though the desire remains in vestigial and altered forms. The infinite world of the fairy tale which arose from the earliest relations with the father and mother is created afresh and in greater detail with its giants, ogres, witches, trolls and their counterparts, the fairy godmother, the good (and often sad) king, the fatherly magician (Merlin), all representing various phases of thwarted love and concomitant hatred for the parents. Later, after deep suffering in this situation and spiritual weaning of some degree, when the child goes out to play in a new active way and creates horizontal bonds with the outside world, there are the contemporary figures of the fairy princess and the rival prince, the knave or varlet, the evil older brother. Then the child, ousted into an elementary sense of reality,88 and, deriving a new power of will from sive bliss; the male self evolves its libido dommandi or will through his active, rational organizing capacity. T h e two personae often " m a r r y " in youthfully poetic dreams; the son becomes qua budding artist an androgynous angel. T h e danger of this too perfect aloofness becomes, in repeated crises, apparent to the old, biological, preOedipal being which insists on an accounting, a coming-to-grips with the father and society, a successful action, a taking-of-possession in its turn. T h e integration of the angelic youthful creature with the stubbornly surviving being (the original organism and its late social avatar, the bourgeois) becomes die decisive task of a key crisis as the artist enters upon his mature career. Beneath this entire spiralling evolution lies our epistemological dialectic, here operating primarily between the four poles of male, female, maturity, youth (see also Ortega, The Debicmanization of Art, p. 48). 8 8 T o simplify, the ousting, often b y a new baby, creates a split in the child s affections: the split is the emotional basis for mental reflection, "second thoughts," reason (irony, duplicity, criticism). T h e ousting is a form of our earlier damming (blocking pure love).

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the increasing limitations to his behavior, sees himself as put upon and dreams of all manner of quest, rescuing the fairy princess from the ogre or the knave, and so on. Even when there are only contemporary figures involved, the parental quality lingers in them vestigially39 so that the princess is often seen as hovering above, a tower-maiden, perhaps lowering her hair in a characteristic maternal gesture (Rapunzel, Mélisande). The royal fantasy, when emotion is exhausted, ends in horrible visions of one's smallness and bestiality: perhaps the image of a cold little frog. Eventually, mitigating reason intervenes, and when the next flight of fancy occurs we may have a frog-prince, a Beast, a Bottom, who may be loved quand, même and delivered by some understanding Beauty or Titania, a Petit Poucet (Hop o' my Thumb) who may yet "faire le bonheur de sa famille." In short, ethics begins to mingle with the magic esthetic vision.40 The writhing struggle between the forces of light and darkness, beauty and bestiality, gives birth to that pathetic form of tortured childhood imagination which is the grotesque (face-making), a form which particularly haunted Gothic sculpture and the visions of distorted creatures, human and animal, described in medieval literature, which further indirectly reflects the inner tension or agony by the jagged, forced union of radically diverse styles and 88

Modern examples would include Flaubert's Education sentimentale, Daudet's Sappho, Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, Benda's Amorandes. 40 The glimmering of the power of analytic intellect to better one's lot by craft and compromise is part of the first scientific curiosity or childhood. Rudimentary ethics and science both imply a "horizontalization" of the emotions which, when it becomes its dialectical opposite—springing up into an ethical or rational excess —will be abandoned and sought anew at later levels, higher plateaus of the spirit, such as adult concepts of egalitarianism.

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subject matter. But this fairy tale and grotesque world must have arisen much earlier than the Gothic era in France, following hard upon the babbling41 and animal fable origins, still half-rooted in them and intermingling with them, as in the tale of the Beast or of Puss in Boots. The Bretons and their Welsh and Irish cousins are thought to have contributed much of the lore. According to Baron Walckenaer, Perrault's sources go back to the sixth century and are indigenous to France though closely related to the Mabinogion. These products of the Celtic merveilleux will exfoliate into the more adult versions of the Arthurian legend, and the material is constantly being revised and moralized, so that it is difficult to say to what extent the sources in oral tradition were meant for older people who had never grown beyond this vision, i.e., corresponded to a spiritual infancy of the race. But this is of comparatively little importance, for all the stages of faery, magic and ethical, still survive into the adult imagination and always will. At most, we may hypothesize that the critical period at which this lore represented the predominant form of literary vision must have been, as Walckenaer says, during the historical "childhood" of the French nation.42 The temporary erotic setback is complemented, once puberty is attained, by one more important permanent stricture: the renunciation of polygamy. This came about when, after the suppression of the various panerotic possibilities, man, as we imagine, accepted his limitations and proceeded to acquire a harem, whereupon, the supply of Which persists in formulae like "fee-fi-fo-fum." The precedents in Greek literature are the ogres (Polyphemus) and princesses (Nausicaa) of legend as told in the Odyssey. In die Bible there are similar witches (of Endor) and giants (Goliath). 41

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women being less than infinite, internecine conflict broke out between men of the same tribe. Then it was, we suppose—requesting indulgence for the simplification—that artistic vision came up with cerebral polygamy, making possible monogamy and a tremendous step forward in recorded literature with its leading theme of adulterous love. When the ancient institution of monogamy was enforced in France by the increasing severity of Christian morals—we note that marriage began to be sanctified by the Church in the ninth century—we reach one of our critical nodes whence the literary phenomena will eventually flower. The classic text in France is Tristan et Iseut.** (In Hebrew literature the equivalent was the David and Bathsheba story, in Greek it was the amours of Helen of Troy and Paris.) This august lineage will continue to produce masterpieces like La Princesse de Cl&ves and Madame Bovary. In both these later instances, as well as the peerless Anna Karenina of Tolstoy, the artist is clearly exerting his full double function in respect to his theme: frightening us away from actual adultery, allowing us a vicarious taste of the forbidden sweets.

As time goes on, the biological frustration of puberty is aggravated by a social one: the increasingly prolonged period of adolescence will become a source of poetic fantasy rivalling the fairy kingdom of childhood. A sublimated image of the long-yearned-for woman is distilled as an upper concomitant of the thriving mental orgy, and a crude form of romantic love is born into the world, at 4 3 The extant fragments are from the twelfth century, but there were undoubtedly older versions.

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first hardly distinguishable from its erotic matrix, including adultery, incest, and other nostalgias. From here on the chronology of our new types of vision can be established with greater assuredness, within broad limits. We are persuaded that, as C. S. Lewis maintains in The Allegory of Love, romantic love came into its own during the Middle Ages in France. We may trace its rise from almost total absence in the chansons de geste through the little spinning songs and pastourelles and romances like Tristan et Iseut and Lancelot, until, with the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, it holds the center of the stage, which it has more or less occupied ever since, though new visions will arise to jostle it. The difference between the child's (puppy) love and the adolescent version is that the latter is based on a real potentiality of physical expression. Historically, instead of the primitive's numbly ineffectual, endless fantasy of faëry, we have the driving inner and outer struggle to seize power resulting from both the concentrated psychic strength dammed up by the civilizing delay and its promise of imminent release and hence "real" (effectual) relationships with actual men and women in their preliminary stages. Artistic realism, which has its source in the other-relatedness of the child from its first moments of consciousness and increasing after the Oedipal crisis, takes on new force, not only in the prematurely adult, low form of popular or "bourgeois" literature (the fabliaux and farces, the Roman de Renart, and the like), but also in the idealistic aristocratic genres. Still, it continues to be mingled with magic, as in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and the other prolix manifestations of courtly love such as the prose Lancelot: though the actors seem real, the elaborate ceremony of courtly love in literature is a game for adults who have

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remained at heart very young. They are live frog-princes and princesses in imaginary gardens. They may be the actual adolescents who will raptly follow, like Paolo and Francesca, the feverish peripeties and perpetually staved-off amorous consummation of Lancelot, or they may be that growing public for whom physical love, in its by-now hopelessly muddled state, presents nearly insurmountable problems and for whom adolescence may be prolonged almost out of sight. The shift from aggressiveness to suffering is expressed with astonishing clarity by the thirteenth-century lyric poet, Thibaut de Champagne: "Never did Roland or Olivier undergo such combats. They triumphed by fighting, but to vanquish . . . the guardians of love . . . a man must humble himself. Suffering is his flag-bearer. . . (Chanson, XXXIV) In the hero of romantic love, by the thirteenth century, the ethical component which we detected in certain fairy stories has grown importantly so that the quest for the fairy princess is sharply modified toward reality and social doing, though with a violent emotional drivé (cathexis): the half-covert quest for the Rose of ripe sexual experience begins. Being unsure of lus fitness for this kind of participation, the aristocratic adolescent will first try to prove, and draw attention to, himself—and stave off the dreaded crisis—by an elaborate form of striving, with endless tears, sighs, solemn vows, and posturings. Still, the refinement of romantic love into something resembling the modern form—through sixteenth-century Petrarchism, seventeenth-century salon gallantry, L'Astrée, and Le Jeu de FAmour et du Hasard—is very gradual. Thus, in the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, there is a quite sexual character to the Rose symbol itself; even in thé delightful Aucassm et Nicolette from about the same

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period there is a medieval directness and freshness: "Alors il vit tes jambes fines/ Et fut guéri le pèlerin," with a surprising relic of earthiness in the image of Nicolette as a tracked beste.** As the intensity of the young man swells towards the image of VAmant rendu Cordelier or the numerous other "martyrs of love" *'—as Huizinga puts it, the melancholy lover is the central figure of late medieval poetry: "Je suis celuy au coeur vestu de noir" (Charles d'Orléans)— there are evocations of what we might call the adolescent or medieval agony. This form of the imagination—a later, finer version of the grotesque, which turns insensibly into the baroque—springs from the impact of a strong negative force of frustration upon an equal force of love, within a fairly youthful and inchoate emotional-intellectual equipment.48 From the collision there emerges a crumpling (as of sheet metal hit by something stout), a simple rhythmic writhing, deep-folded or jagged, of the momentarily suspended spirit, with the distortions of dear suffering evidenced in such images47 as thorny hedges through which the rose is 44 The idealizing enthusiasm shot too quickly upward and left the personality off-guard, vulnerable to a backwash of equally violent fleshliness: in the religious theater the transcendental piety was matched by ferocious obscenity among the devils represented in its scenes of hell; cf. the fête de Fane. 45 Recalling Chaucer's panting youth "who no more slept than the nightingale" or Shakespeare's sixteenth century swain "sighing like furnace." Perhaps, as Valéry suggested in Regards sur le monde actuel, the importation of syphilis from the N e w World gave a decisive impetus to this frustration. 47 The images body forth varying fragments of the rhythm, ranging from a single, angled or askew, moment of it to a series of rounded or jagged wave movements (contortions, winding or crooked shapes like the S in sinuous or the Z in zigzag or bizarre); cf. also the favored forms of the maze, and the winding road in die romans courtois. By contrast, an abstract X shape expresses the

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glimpsed ( L e Roman de la Rose, Froissart's Ballade: "Sur toutes fleurs"), fascinatingly grotesque individuals who point the way to the beloved (Tristan, Y vain, Perceval, Aucassin), the steep oceanic waves of the emotions, stormtossed between hope and despair (Christine de Pisan's Ballades, Alain Chartier's Débat, wherein the agonized swain flings himself about his bed and "se tempête"), or the oblique swinging of the hanged men, harried by the wind, in Villon's Ballade des pendus. The tension of extreme opposites is likewise recorded, tonally rather than graphically, through the deep pantomimic shadow play in the Ballade des Fendus, through the vivid contrasts of the light of paradis and the blackness of enfer in the Ballade pour prier Nostre Dame, and the shocking juxtapositions of beauty and horror, life-bloom and death-corruption throughout the Grand Testament.48 intellectual element, symmetric, "classic," as in the chess-like movement of the psychological components in Cligès, Le Roman de la Rose, or the medieval concept of the four humors and the four elements. Later, the phoenix (Scève, La Ceppède, Donne), the quincunx (Browne) and the paradox (Pascal, Donne) will add to the X feeling of medieval symmetry a sense of cancellation, fall crossing rise. 48 These tense graphic and tonal contrasts will persist with added vigor into the baroque, as torrents, lightning flashes (Scève), oblique gestures (Labé's "regards détournés"), Desportes's lovestorms: "la mer contrairement poussée," and in a significant new development will evoke the individual fate, as in Ronsard's "ondes qui menez et ramenez," or historical fate, as in du Bellay's Regrets and Antiquités where the rise and decay of Rome is compared to a storm-racked wave breaking against a rock, a twisted ancient oak downed by the wind, the harvested sheaf in a field of grain. Although through such images the artist finds partial release by the expression of mixed emotions which are most characteristic of art, we must note that there are other images in the period which tell of those rare moments when the struggle is surmounted, in a lyric outpouring, as in Charles d'Orléans. Cf. our later discussion of "poetry of light."

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The daemonic tension—not so taut as it will be in later eras—running unevenly, as the scattered moments of compressed power in the distinctive images we have described, throughout the art of this broad period is only one aspect of the characteristic rhythm of Medieval style. Such moments of depth and concentration are organized into literary form by a particular kind of thought structure (including a phase of the lasting classic temper we shall soon define) in which the Christian world view, scholastic thought, and cultural inheritances from antiquity—Aristotelian philosophy, elevated prose style, pagan heroic idealsplay a part. W e cannot define a Medieval style very precisely, but we can hit at its special rhythmic essence, its particular refinement or lack of it, by observing its refraction through various expressions of the period, both social and artistic: the knightly code of duty toward a constricted, aloofly aristocratic circle, implying highly simplified rules of conduct not unlike those of modern youth gangs; the conventional, repetitive, semi-crude (lumpish? clotted?) quality of the train of imagery fettered to the Christian myth, through typology or allegory in literature; the naively symmetric motley of heraldic or guild pageantry; the stiff strutting patterns of court ceremonies, dances, masques; the timidly rigid structure of early polyphonic music; the ritualistic, emblematic aspects of visual art. In all of this there is a notable lack of fluidity between the individual parts, something of the cellular, insulated quality of spirit we may witness today in (and between) primitive men or small children. Perhaps, as Auerbach suggests, the transcendental nature of their religion, the constant opiate habit of referring all reality upwards, "figurally," to an eternal scheme, sapped their

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interpersonal relations, as well as their attitude toward nature or things, of vitality, particularly in the later Middle Ages (although it seems likelier that then the juice of culture merely ebbed, leaving dead, imitative forms). But actually, this vertical striving is not in itself a limitation since it is the inevitable precondition for art and, when combined with a sense of reality in art works imbued with the original, unorthodox, individualistic creative power of Chrétien de Troyes or François Villon, is the sine qua non humanizing force." It would be fairer to say that, in comparison with later creators, the medievals were not transcendental enough. Probably the most adequate, however obvious, characterization of medieval culture generally is that it was, from the modern viewpoint, only partially evolved. The sublime visions and the human sense of reality, which mutually fertilize each other in subsequent art, remained apart and, in consequence, both domains lacked something in warmth of movement and complexity. Very little of free, varied, polyvalent interconnection is to be found in the imagery of the period: the described or depicted figures seem lonely in a special, formal sense, separated by impermeable barriers, like the leadings of stained glass, the dead spaces between the phrases of the prevailing paratactic syntax, the cell-like partitions of the " T r u e , this verticalism can go too far into meaningless private fancy or, again, into a fully Manichean mood (cf. the heresy of angelism) wherein the tension between spirit and flesh becomes so great that "the center cannot hold," as in schizophrenia, psychic suicide, or actual self-destruction. Art constantly reaches toward that delicate point beyond which is breakdown—the inner adventure as opposed to the outer dangers most men face—but, when successful, it knows when to stop, to return to the norm of life, and, indeed, its very expression to others is a major step in this direction.

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"mansions" of medieval stage scenery; often they are loosely linked in the flaccid structure of a procession, as in the frescoes of the Dance of Death. Partly, as we suggested, this symbolic, vertical, isolated character—scanting the rationally ethical, the historical, the common everyday—is a permanent condition of art: the singular figures, frozen in timeless hieratic gestures surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, the magic apparitions which eidetically invade the conscience of such rapt, solipsistic beholders, are direct, if simple, predecessors of the frozen imagery and epiphanies of modern "static" art.60 In this appreciative light, mad Tristan's crystal dream abode suspended in sunlit air blooming with roses; Perceval lost in his ecstatic inward vision of Blanchefleur; the lovelorn lady at the solitary window seeking heart's ease in the plaintive trill of the nightingale (Le lai du loustic); the puppetlike shape of Nicolette playing house and singing to herself as she awaits her lover in the woods; the immobile, vivid stained-glass presences of Chartres; the cosily rounded forms of the Très-riches heures du Duc de Berry, or René d'Anjou's mysterious Coeur d'amour épris, quietly glow with an enduring fairy-tale beauty. Some sensitive youths, more ugly or pimpled and, especially, more frightened than the others, will seem to abandon all hope of the Rose in this long medieval period The later versions are immeasurably more complex and powerful, made so by vastly greater intensity as well as an increasing critical spirit and susceptibility to the real, which is made over tirelessly into art. W e ought to distinguish the authentic values of early culture from what enthusiastic and nostalgia-blinded moderns bring to it, to give it no more nor less than it deserves. The task is complicated by the appeal of the freshly naive, the childlike, to civilized eyes. 50

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(as early, say, as the thirteenth century) and branch their quest away from the artistic dream of romantic love. The problematic state of soul and the frequent incidental "choice" of celibacy at this rudimentary stage of ethics help bring about not only an early form of artistic realism but also that particular combination of fact and dream which is infant science. Both are conspicuously furthered by the young men of the rising clerical caste who not only were so fitted by their rare ability to read and write, as well as their training in a coherent system of (Christian scholastic) thought inherited from antiquity, but even more by their particular psychological nature.51 As we noted in Part I, science is a form of vision divergent from the artistic.82 Basically, it is a limited, narrowly dynamic, and often blinkered and brittle vision which draws linear power from fear and avoidance of the human substrata; it reveals a strong version of the general cultural dread of instinct and of chance welling up from below, a dread frequently uncompensated, in the case of the scientists, by a saving elasticity. Realism, in one sense, is a compromise between the artistic and scientific vision;53 it attempts to cope with the turbulent forces of life or passion 8 1 The tie between bachelorhood and science is very clear at its inception; the scientific correspondents of Descartes and Pascal (bachelors both) were mostly celibate clerics. Even today the Jesuit universities are best known for their science. 52 But, in a reverse movement, contributes to it. W e cannot agree with Huizinga that the realistic detail of the Van Eycks is a decadent medieval phenomenon—no more so than the tinkering patterns of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs. They are decadent in some sense but also prefigure classical symmetry and craftsmanship. 63 On a relatively horizontal dimension; vertically, realism represents a compromise between high and low styles, the intermediate or middle style (cf. "le caractéristique," Hugo).

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by pinning them down intellectually, in a detached, objective manner." The didactic second part of the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meung illustrates this gropingly scientific, artistically realistic way. The encyclopedic knowledge of this writer is, in a sense we have defined earlier, a new dimension of infinite yearning, a Faustian drive for power over creation and revenge on the unsympathetic Others." In his hymning of (quasi-scientific) labor, the young bachelor cleric from Meung sounds a preliminary note of the Protestant Reform. The very savageness of his misogyny, like that of André le Chapelain and countless other clerics, up to and through the fifteenth-century Eustache Deschamps (Le Miroir de manage), bespeaks the youthful frustrations behind his drive. 64 Under "scientific vision" we may include here the general public rationality which is progressively nurtured by it: the factual, logical, cut-and-dried, businesslike, realistic temper of later Western culture. 55 In the work of Leonardo da Vinci we find an important trace of the revenge motif (in a peculiar document projecting the means to poison a whole community) as well as Faustian drive and scientific tinkering of a high sort. The drive, based on a new sense of the infinite, is evidenced by enhanced feeling for perspective and landscape, e.g., the distant landscapes behind the heads of the Mona Lisa and Christ ("The Last Supper"). The power of these figures lies partly in their summing up the landscape and all the levels of Eros from distant death, or the beyond, and nature up to man or woman. Thus in Mona Lisa's face we find a hint of death and a sexual ambiguity, and her strange smile echoes the twisting snake of road we glimpse behind her: an eternal womanly arabesque insinuating into our hearts like a love-lock (accroche-coeur), hooking or beckoning us lovingly back to the unknown. The unknown, the zero point of origin, is further suggested by three dimensions or lines which cross through the mysterious compression of her lips, which half smile, half are in grim earnest—sphinx, hermaphrodite, femme fatale, she is an epitome of Western Eros.

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In this continuing struggle, one of the handiest protective resources is the mental-erotic device of humor which is, at its most extreme, a means of ending the struggle (temporarily) by an arational explosion, radically reducing the whole situation to the "absurd." Less drastically, by reducing human beings to risibly wooden, unbending types (cf. Bergson, Le Rire), the author rids himself of some of his own resentment at being put-upon, "objectified," by life and society.56 Thus the real and the comic have a strong tendency to combine, in domestic and genre studies of human character, satire and the burlesque"—from the anonymous authors of Les Quinze Joy es du Mariage and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, La Salle, Deschamps, Villon, and Chastellain in the fifteenth century*8 through Rabelais and Bonaventure Despériers in the sixteenth, to Régnier, Sorel, Boileau, Molière, Scarron, and Furetière in the seventeenth. Although ostensibly remote from personal involvement, this vital spirit betrays a disturbing turbidity of soul, an early variety of that subliminal, oblique passion which buffets and twists the more complexly "quaint" or Jean de Meung emphasizes the species versus the individual, reducing all nature to types. His transparent aim is a legitimate revenge against individuals, whom he pictures in a panicky flight from the horror of death; only the species survives. His hymn to Nature is a hymn to his own vocation and glory: if he despairs of rivalling Her, yet he rides to victory over the "others" on Her apron-strings. " In painting, some of this burlesque spirit is evidenced by the work of Paul of Limburg and Broederlam. Cf. Breughel, Bosch, Diirer. The strong contrasts of simple colors (cf. the medieval "vair") in the art and the costumes of the period (culminating in the angled patches of the harlequin), the grotesque masks of dancers and comedians, all contribute a somewhat Hallowe'eny effect 8 8 There are many earlier examples, such as the Roman de Renart, in popular literature; but satire rises to a major role in higher literature with the waning of the Middle Ages. M

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grotesque characters of later artists like Balzac, Claudel, and Dickens. In some of these writers, early and late, the brittle barrier of a celibate or otherwise emotionally exclusive attitude may harden into an iron curtain extending across their mid-regions and produce disgustingly heavy forms of the burlesque and grotesque, reducing all who do not share their monistic or monastic views into the distorted, hellish shapes of yapping and braying animals or monsters, locked out from salvation.59 But, for the most part, these tormented moods are typical of individual adolescence.80 And, just as the touching awkwardness of sensitive French youth is pregnant, like a chrysalis, with intellectual grace, the struggles of this historical age are the signs that it is stirring alive with the intellectual grace of seventeenth-century French classicism. Historically, too, once the youthful dynamism of this age is released it brings about a fresh sense of drive (Aubigné), depth, historical time, space, "thrust," and therewith the new Perspective of painting and (Baroque) architecture 59

Cf. The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Breughel, Bosch, Griinewald, and other painters of the time. The heavy, violently bestial effect in a modem writer like Claudel (e.g., the judges in Jeanne au bûcher) is more shocking than in Dante or Quevedo because of the more circumscribed intellectual, and even spiritual, horizons of their era. Superior artists like Shakespeare, Joyce, and Proust occasionally indulge this mood but offset it fully by compensatory emotions of extreme irony, humor, sympathy, melting grace, and pity (their barriers are eventually porous). a0 Hence the perennial favorite of adolescents, big-nosed Cyrano, who may yet win (like his simpler prototype, the Beast) the favor of a new kind of very understanding, bourgeois, woman (cf. Molière's Eliante). Gide's blind Gertrude, emerging from her dark chrysalis, has phenomenal appeal to adolescent girls, especially since she wins out over Amélie, the unpleasant mother figure.

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and musical harmony.61 This is the period which will also project science-fiction, tales of exploring, adventure, and the marvellous voyage mingled variously with exotic geographic or other scientific fact (Jesuit missionaries' accounts,62 etc.) Adolescence is the period par excellence of bricolage— fiddling and tinkering with devices, flying-machine fantasies83—of the canular—the salty student practical joke—and of the fou rire and of rebellion against authority (such as the chahut).6* In Rabelais, the encyclopedic conatus will thus be linked with a major Renaissance revolt against constraint, and in his Panurge we have the practitioner of the canular at his best:68 we may particularly note the pathetic, substitute, infantile sexuality of the tinkering prank performed against a proud lady, who is put in the graceless situation of being pursued and urinated upon by all the dogs of the neighborhood. The science in the modern restricted sense which emerges in this period (chemistry from alchemy, botany from herb61

A newly emphasized vertical dimension of music is a definite phenomenon of the post-medieval period. An analogous development occurs in the Romantic era: a new depth of harmony through enriched tone scales. 82 Such accounts will later be taken up by Montaigne (Des Cannibales) and Cyrano ( Voyage à la lime). 63 Flying is, according to Freud, the typical sexual wish-dream. The Renaissance theme of flight to an ideal realm is often linked with scientific fantasy, e.g., astrology, via the "cosmic voyage." See A. M. Schmidt, La Poésie scientifique en France au seizième siècle, pp. 1S, 189, 295. 64 The fou rire is an extreme product of colliding psychic forces, a "convulsion vulgaire" (Valéry: Mon Faust); it will refine, with maturity, into frothier rhythms of gaiety. 65 The distortion of official language is another favorite camtlar of adolescents. It will be found again in the entr'acte of Molière's Malade imaginaire and in the macaronic latin of Stephen Hero.

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gathering, cartography from voyaging) is one form of the broad rational or scientific temper which, having emerged from, reintegrates with art in various combinations, one of which is the already-noted realism (still in a crude, relatively unindividualized form), another being the critical sense and practise of organization or composition. It brings to the artistic forms of dynamism the logical, geometrical devices to control and codify them (laws of rhetoric, verse patterns, perspective). Accordingly it is an early version of the enduring classical temper which we will discuss more fully later. A considerable body of the love and the death poetry of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries is of this jointly agonized and organized (quasi-scientific or symmetrical) sort, from the Roman de la Rose through the poetic circles of Alain Chartier, Charles d'Orléans, and the Grands Rbétoriqueurs to Aubigné, La Ceppède, Sponde, and Malherbe. (Cf. the English Spenser, the Elizabethans, and Jacobeans).6" Much of this complex spirit of terror and decorum is to be found in Villon, but, and the difference is crucial, with Villon the opposing forces of the agon had begun to interpenetrate in a developed ambivalence—the partitions are porous, membranous—and through the starkly grotesque contrasts there moves a vibrancy which is that of a truly lyric sensibility.67 Villon's most typical moments involve 6 8 The primitive rational psychology in Part I of the Roman de la Rose is preceded by some interesting psychological "chess" in Chretien's Cltgès, André le Chapelain's De Arte Honeste Amandi, etc. Behind all these was the influence of Ovid's Art of Love. Love, like the alchemist's elixir, is the primary substance on which inquiring minds base their individual, varying attempts to build a secular science or knowledge. eT Lyric poetry is, like all art only more so, "both above and below," both more refined intellectually and more instinctively emotional than comparable (coeval) ordinary discourse and, by

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suspension between opposites: the sky and earth of his pious innocence and his fleshliness (as in the powerful image of the dangling hanged men), the present-past of his memory, nostalgia, regret. His predominant mode is chiaroscuro (with touches of radiant darkness), in this lyric sense, which we shall define more fully later. There is still a medieval directness to his desire, the fresh egoism of the child. His lust for women is sensual indeed, and his appetite for other creature comforts extends to gluttony. So that there is a deliriously incarnate and even fat savor to much of Villon. But it is burnt fat: in his chiaroscuro there is something of the charred quality, the sooty tone we know well from Laforgue, Yeats, and some of Eliot's early poems. Sur le Noël, morte saison, Lors que les loups vivent de vent. Et qu'on se tient en sa maison, Pour le frimas, près du tison . . .

It is the same bitterness irrigating a fleshly desire: the ancient prostitute has "cuisses grivelées comme saucisses"; the hanged men lament "la chair, que trop avons nourrie"; and which is now black and dried; the "épanouie fleur" of his cruel mistress will wither: "Or, beuvez fort, tant que rue peult courir." extension, prose and non-lyric poetry. Therefore, if we stress its bonds with music—which is, generically, more spontaneously emotional than literature—we must put an equal emphasis on its radically intellectual qualities. The fact that lyric poetry was in its infancy—the medieval French and Provençal chanson—accompanied by music and dance indicates the strongly sensual "lower half" of lyric art to which it will remain committed in its transfigured autonomous version, the "music" of verse. It also indicates the common emotional matrix of all knowing (including mathematical; cf. Pythagoras).

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In a less lyric and accomplished way, the adolescent agony is the informing passionate spirit, evolving into the baroque, of such sixteenth-century poets as Scève, Aubigné, Sponde, and La Ceppède.68 The emphasis is on stark chiaroscuro (Scève), or sincere posturing, contorting body movements (La Ceppède's crucifixions; cf. El Greco, his contemporary), and is hence essentially dramatic rather than poetic in the best sense, which is to say that it lacks the verbal distinction and imaginative complexities of later lyric poetry (or the best Pléiade work) though it does succeed in expressing something of the fresh, strong, tragic beauty of youth.69 In the nineteenth century a kindred spirit of this particular grotesque (partly imported from the still youthful Germany), the well-known Romantic Agony, will be carried on in the Gothic novel and the tales and poetry of the "little Romantics"; it will color particularly the early 68 In a more sensuous way, the deep rhythmic folds in the naked flesh and the drapery of painters like Poussin and Rubens, as well as the flamboyant style in architecture, contain the new weight or vitality of tone. These folds represent a sinuous attempt to bring more and more reality to the surface of the canvas (or the page). Cf. the tilt in Cézanne's bowls and vases, the bending toward the viewer of Picasso's faces and limbs. 69 The youthful posturing can take on less authentic, self-escapist forms of "mannerism" (more particularly in Italy, Spain, England, with Marinism, Gongorism, Euphuism). Rather than a serious inner struggle we have exuberant, swaggering, boisterous, fanciful, operatic poses, preciosity (often astonishingly violent), fantastic conceits, surprise effects, swashbuckling "heroism," matamore bragging, and general fraudulence both in art and behavior: there are numerous portrayals of these baroque (pejorative sense) excesses in Régnier's Satires, Corneille's Menteur, Molière's Précieuses ridicules, Fâcheux, and Don ]uan. For a sympathetic treatment of the phenomenon see Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style.

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Hugo and push some long feelers of lurid, unleavened blackness (and whiteness) well into the poetry of Baudelaire and Jouve, the prose of Villiers, Proust, Mauriac, Bernanos, Green.

Having introduced the words "Renaissance" and "Baroque" into our discussion, we ought now to pause to get our bearings in relation to these much-abused terms. One of our main concerns in this book is to demonstrate the organic, historically fluid nature of all such phenomena. From the beginning we have noted the dialectical interfusion in art of a relatively daemonic, poetic mood on the one hand, with a steadyingly rationalistic, socially-oriented prose temper on the other. The daemonic heritage which has carried us through a tense dialectical struggle and union of opposites which, during the infancy of art we called the "grotesque" and which we then, during the Middle Ages, broadly identified as the "medieval agony," will evolve in the Renaissance period (early sixteenth century) into a later, further refined version which we may call, faute de mieux, the "early baroque," and then, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, "the (full) baroque." After about 1660 we may refer to a "late baroque," underlying Classicism. Eventually it will become the romantic tension of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, still later, its tautest, richest version of all, the subsumed romanticism of the Symbolist era. Throughout all these periods, the opposing mood (or epistemological dimension), the calmly organizing spirit, develops progressively subtler phases which we need not

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identify separately since each arises in conjunction with a phase of the daemonic temper and is fused therewith into a Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, etc., style. In dealing with this complex and elusive matter of style, unlike some impatient cultural imperialists, we plan to work from the inside out: to first determine the determinable, the relatively simple components of literary manner which arise at successive moments of man's inner growth and then, subsequently, to treat the more individual and subtle aspects of style, which vary immensely from writer to writer, in separate chapters. In this way we hope to avoid the learned folly of lumping the radically dissimilar styles of Rabelais and du Bellay under the catchword Renaissance—not, indeed, out of some anti-historical bias à la Croce or Valéry but rather because we believe that there is a more adequate and integrated approach to these matters. W e would likewise deflate the buoyant assumptions of the many critics who have spoken nostalgically and sentimentally of the Renaissance as a period of great gusto in literature, of optimism, exuberance, "the whole man," and the like. Such onesided characterizations can never apply very meaningfully to sensitive humans, least of all to artists. The most generally observable spirit underlying the major writing of the Renaissance era is some version of our "medieval agony," which we may now conveniently refer to as an early baroque mood. The tautly suspended opposing emotions or forces70 in each of 70 The well-known spirit-flesh tension of the Baroque is, in our conception, one dimension of a polypolar tension. It is crossed, for example, by a pleasure-pain tension. All of these tensions may be subsumed into the one daemonic tension implied in our use of the word baroque. This tension, or comparatively vertical dimension, is related as a whole to the comparatively horizontal dimension of the rational and classic mood.

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the important figures occasionally find joyous outlet in the new nationalism, naturalism, and widespread general feeling of liberation from constraint, and in this respect du Bellay may momentarily shout in glad company with Rabelais. But such exultations are rare, and this publictuned variety is scarcely characteristic of the less-thanwhole men who, like Ronsard and especially du Bellay, go off into hiding to sing themselves solace. Within the career of each Renaissancefigurewe shall usually find such darkly contrary moods, and in the sixteenth century as a whole the high general hopes are quickly dashed and seem even to turn into something like public brooding for a significant while. In this same fluid sense we shall observe how the (full) baroque emerges from its earlier Renaissance phase. Its distinctiveness, to whatever extent graspable, will lie primo in the quality of tension—a tauter struggle of spirit and flesh, evidenced in grotesque conjunctions coupling the religious and the all-too-human (the fleshly, scatological, pornographic); of light and dark, incarnated in stark contrasts, verbal or visual; of the tug of psychic forces implied in agonized, undulant, or jagged movement, expressed in writhing, contorted shapes in poetic imagery, the deep folds in drapery and flesh in painting and flamboyant sculpture—and sectmdo the release of this tension: a more violent resolution of the human dilemma as an unprecedented drive to glory, reflected in the new sense of depth, history, perspective, dramatic visual "thrust," musical verticalism, and subtle changes in the quality of faith (despite outward total fidelity to an existing order) or the inner quality (as distinguished from its outer contrasts) of light in artistic imagery. Its degree of refinement lies in the subtlety and fluidity of its verbal, visual, etc., textures,

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developed partly by a growing individual critical spirit. Further, the extreme forces implied within the daemonic —the intellectual sparkle and the animal passions—are gradually interfused with a new kind of rational, or classic, temper.71 Accordingly, if we speak of Baroque as a period or style, the Baroque tone is compounded of its particular daemonic tension and release together with the prevailing classic dimension or temper, all the corollary phenomena which spring directly from this union, and lastly all the relatively accidental—social, political, economic, personal, chronological, etc.—particulars which interest us because they cluster about important artistic names or events.72 Eventually this evolution will seem to make another ascer71 The aspect of fanciful variation or decoration in the Baroque and rococo styles—applying more clearly to nonliterary art—is a secondary phenomenon, a cropping-out of the buried spirit of daemonic freedom, which pierces through the classic regimentation like vegetation through paving. Since the feeling of connection with an organic source is diminished, the effect is usually one of superficiality, preciosity. 72 When we apprehend the tone of any period emotionally, intuitively—as in the general notion of a Baroqueflavor—weare inclined by our mood to put an emphasis on the daemonic aspect and particularly the release of its tensions into expressions of escape from discipline or rigid symmetry, hence unevenness or oddness, the strange, the bizarre (the Baroque "irregular pearl," the "broken tulip," the Romantic "broken column") and, similarly, diagonal "thrust," of which the diagonal expresses an oblique movement, flight from rectangularity, the "thrust" an escape from between opposing or constraining forces. We are also inclined to make fetiches of relatively accidental qualities of a period: what makes a particular image like the irregular pearl Baroque is the special tension and intensity of the underlying forces we described plus the layer of secondary circumstances which, say, made pearls or tulips especially available or desirable in the seventeenth century, as opposed to broken columns, etc.; all of which is germane to the "thisness" of works and styles but cannot be handled in a study of this kind.

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tainable leap, and then there arises a fresh artistic entity, the Classical period or style. These terms are fairly arbitrary and confusing since they are used in so many different fashions. Nonetheless, by now they are fixed parts of the literary landscape and must be accepted. They may even prove useful, with a modicum of clarification. To this end the following schematization is, somewhat apologetically, presented. Note that the capitalized terms indicate periods or styles, the non-capitalized, the component forces or moods. Since the increasing tension, intensity, and spiritual refinement implied in the evolving phases of the daemonic are extremely elusive gradations of a single phenomenon, flowing one from the other in a way which defies simple categorization (beyond the minimal remark "more so" at each point), no definitions of these will be included in our summary. The stages of the "classic" are, however, more commonly conceptual in nature and brief descriptions are offered.

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Style

THE WRITER'S WAY IN FRANCE Approximate Period

Phase of the Daemonic Artistic Temper

Corresponding Phase of the "Classic" Mood

Medieval

12 th to lith centuries

the "medieval agony" (prebaroque?)

some simple psychological and poetic symmetries (with weak total control of art and reality)

Renaissance

early 16th

early baroque

rising professionalism, codifications and new genres, critical spirit (uneven practise and vestigial medieval looseness of texture)

Baroque or Pre-Classic

late 16th, early 17 th

(full) baroque

fairly advanced composition, apposite prose style, stoic constructivism (vestigial garrulity)

Classic

late 17th

late baroque

Classic control, total composition, full professionalism, advanced realism (a certain stiffness and narrowness of vision)

Neo-Classic

18th century preromanticism

new subtlety of design, ambitious schemes of control of reality and, potentially,

Romantic

early 19th

romanticism

complex imperialistic visions of organization of reality and art, social romanticism (some ideational excesses, pompousness)

Symbolist

late 19th, early 20th

late romanticism

Symbolist poetics, cosmic syntax, a new myth for mankind.

3. The Vocation

In the medieval Blütezeit of romantic love the path to the Rose traversed a hedge of thorns which kept getting thicker and pricklier for feeling people. By now, the number of thwarted instincts has reached a critical point, and all kinds of urgent nostalgias producing guilt fainrings, mixed emotions, perversions, and inversions set in. For example, Freud has shown how the instinct of aggression (including that involved in direct erotic expression), when denied, joins the conscience as guilt, self-aggression, creating suffering. When this becomes intolerable for some, and there seems to be no way back, the artist comes up with a new vision of Eros: the dream of glory, the vocation and its subsequent by-product, the modern career. This fresh way of approaching reality, with its salient aspects—when fully implemented—of individualism and

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professionalism, will become the way of the Renaissance; but in order to understand it we must begin many centuries previous. The impulse to personal triumph has its roots in the earliest narcissistic self-assertion and gathers strength or shape from its very frustrations. A specific boost for it seems to arise during the period when the man turns his energies toward providing for the nascent family: he becomes the father, a food-father, a provider.1 At first his aggression and pleasure had found sufficient outlet in the direct form of the hunt for food. The hunt also took him back to vicarious forms of previous erotic expressions, combining communion with self,2 nature, animals, and other men, including the memory of the father who once initiated the youth and who will be vaguely symbolized by the sacrificial animal, as we shall see later on. The hunt, accordingly, on the one hand becomes a powerful literary theme and, on the other, in actual practise continues into modern times to satisfy some relatively simple types, such as the pipe-smoking country squire. But, early, for those seeking bigger game and material wealth for the family, the hunt developed into the manhunt, material appropriation, and war, for which the French artist furnished the glorification in cantilenes and chansons de geste. Here again the power came from the vicarious satisfaction of primitive desires, homoerotic, animal (the cult of the warrior's horse), and so on. But since the drive to glory had to have a more infinite aim than merely material food or goods—or even, eventually, than the com1 Even when this phase is by-passed in the celibate career, the mature vocation will be mainly determined by competition with that of actual fathers. 2 Line-fishing, usually catching nothing, is still an important mode of total escape.

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panionship of men and horses—in order to satisfy thwarted motivations, which by now possessed considerable force, war took on a freshly developed religious aspect. Like the Crusades they incited, the chansons de geste drew much of their coloration and impulse from the cult of the Father.8 3 Even at this early point, the increasing softness and indulgence of the cultured father generally (and of certain spiritually aristocratic fathers particularly) begin to make for an important "discontent" or problem of civilization, one which helps to account for the Charlemagne cult in a fuller way. In relatively primitive stages of Western society (and its vestigial layers later) the naturally tough father orients the negative emotions (both passive suffering through fear and the active aggressive instincts) of the son in and after the Oedipal crisis while tie woman—mother, then matereceives a fair share of simple univalent love. The father turns most of the negative emotion toward others by subtle transference, initiation (teaching him to fight, hunt, etc.), towards active doing, prework, and eventually an aggressive working career (hunting, war, construction, etc.). But in later phases of Western society (the roots of which phases can be detected already in Hebrew culture) the aggression floats free to a notable extent, contaminates the motherson relationship—making for physical difficulties and delays in, but also deeper, more complex, and spiritual versions of, heterosexuality—and, partly by her, is turned inward to suffering so that later man, and particularly the artist, must create inner versions of the Fight in order to become "worthy of" the woman and of himself. Hence the rising importance of the inner or spiritual Father, a severe tyrannical and puritanical God, or a demanding spiritual ancestor, model leader, hero, culture-hero, artistic father figure (and also the rising cult of the "authentic" early man, e.g., knights, cowboys, savages, and of animals). In sum, fanaticism. Any civilized feat, such as a major art work, is an inner "bull-fight" in which the artist, etc., faces the horror of his accumulated guilt and fears. Until he has won this victory over himself he has not attained "manhood." We note further that, with the rise in vocation, the aristocratic father turns his attention increasingly away from the home, and the orphaned feeling thus tends to grow spirally in each new generation of sons, enhancing the sense of quest, adding a further sense of anguishing but purposive direction to the spiritual career. In the case of the writer, this is often noticeably aggravated by the actual absence of the father (by death, divorce).

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Thus, in the Chanson de Roland, the main theme of sheer massacre, blood communion, is combined with a crudely spiritual theme in the figures of the deified Charlemagne and the archbishop, Turpin. 4 The rising vocation of spiritual fatherhood for the élite thus branches into the new career of politics, secular group fatherhood, nationalistic leadership with a religious flavor, best exemplified by the twelfthcentury image of Charlemagne. 5 Secondly, it branches into the bellicose religious vocation as typified by Turpin; thirdly, the distinct way of the (warlike) artist who represents his companion figures and, in the complex crisscross fashion we have defined earlier, in some sense precedes them. The great virtue of this form of Eros was that it combined the boundless gift of self—and a varying admixture of narcissism, self-love, self-glorification—with the dialectically ever-renewed resistance to give it continuing form or structure: there were as many new fields of conquest to exploit—later, new markets—as there were lands on the known earth. * T h e sensitive modern, looking back and jolted by the primitive directness, is apt to ascribe undue human depth to the author and his creatures. What is really striking, on second thought, is the lack of feeling: Roland (like Achilles) continuing to upbraid the being he has just punched the life out of. Hence it is an exaggeration to speak of tragic profundity in this or any other true epic. ( N o t because, contrary to some critics, the Christian myth sentimentally precludes it: the tragic sense is as present in Pascal or Kierkegaard as in any Greek.) T h e era of French literature which will bring us closest to the tragic mood of the Greek playwrights is the Baroque and Classic one: Montaigne, Pascal, the Racine of Phèdre. A t which point we intend to define "tragedy." 5 T h e first considerable French play, Le Mystère d'Adam, ends with a procession of prophets, wherein, with agreeable naïveté, the biblical figures shade into the secular hero Virgil. Subsequent miracle plays extend the line-up to French national heroes like Pépin and Charlemagne, who brought a measure of order and justice into the land.

The Vocation

11S

The obvious hitch in this joint venture was that war begat war in snowballing fashion and soon threatened the annihilation of ail involved. The artist, in collaboration with the Church—which begins to diverge from the monarchyfinds a momentarily less destructive form of sublimation in the more patient and long-suffering form of vocation learned from the woman and mother, the symbol of peace. This comes about via a long apprenticeship; the new way of man may be said to arise with the prolongation of childhood and the increasing role of the mother in bringing up the child, as well as in the society at large. Thus, whereas the boy Tristan was given over to the care of a man at age seven, as was the custom, the young Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes was raised by his mother alone until the age of adolescence. The chronology is somewhat arbitrary here (though we suspect a much earlier source for the Tristan story), but these texts do serve to illustrate a real shift in social customs over a long period. And the fréquentation of women, during the growing years and later through the cult of courtly love, does produce— numerically, mysteriously—sure affinities, this being the general rule in all human relations.4 The influence is felt in every branch of male endeavor, from the most socially committed to the freest: the warrior-king softens his statesmanship towards peaceful diplomacy. The militant warriorpriest tempers his preaching toward the gentler aspects of Christ's doctrine; and eventually Christ's mother, the Virgin Mary, becomes a major figure borne up on a wave of mysticism, an emotional quasi-hysterical "feminine" form •Perceval's mother defines to him the nature of the preud 'homme, the twelfth-century "gentleman," whose first principle is to aid women in distress. By the seventeenth century he will become the honnête hoTrrme.

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of belief.7 The warrior-bard likewise tunes his art to dulcet romances, soft lays, and a lovelier delicacy of language. In all of these cases, a relatively unindividual, tribal sense of honor gives way to something approaching the personal sense of glory.8 In the work of Chrétien de Troyes we find a curiously graphic illustration of the movement from crude sexual appropriation and war (Erec et Enide) through courtly love (Lancelot) to, finally, highly spiritual love (Perceval), with an accompanying refinement in style. His career was somewhat influenced by the Provençal troubadours (specifically Bernard de Ventadour, who moved north to the court of Marie de Champagne, daughter of that Aliénor d'Aquitaine who had done so much to propagate courtly love), and they had already gone far in creating the image of a Divine Woman which gradually penetrated, like the Breton legends, the more realistic northern French culture, and prepared the way for Mariolatry there. Her image is powerful because it takes up, in addition to the first flush of courtly and romantic love, the preceding fantasies of adultery and frustrated filial love. (In the hermetic poems of the troubadours, we are seldom sure whether they are speaking adulterously of some tower-cloistered mistress or of the Virgin Mary.) In this respect their impulse was given an added push by a love-heresy borrowed from the Orient in the Albigensian form of Manicheism (see D. de 7 Compare the important role of woman in the Platonic tradition (Plato's Diotima) and in the Hebrew kabbala. These traditions converge with (influence) the French one in the sixteenth century through writers like Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre Ramus, Leon Hebraeus (cf., in England, Spenser, Milton, Marvell). 8 In the quasi-tribal system of medieval feudalism, the chevalier fought for the glory of his cause, his country, or his lord. Personal pride was the cardinal sin.

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Rougemont L'Amour et F occident). About the same time, Iseut will play a similarly ambiguous role as the adulterous wife of King Mark, who is a surrogate father figure, thus conferring upon his bride something of a mother status. "Iseut is your wife and I am your son," Tristan cries. Iseut is linked with the sea in the climatic scenes:8 the first communion of love during the passage to Cornwall and the final death episode involving the black and white sails. She is accordingly very close to the spirit of Mary, for there existed in Old French a broad harmony of mèremer—amer (aimer)—amer (bitter)—Marie (which meant "bitter water" in Hebrew).10 Robert de Boron, recalling the origin of the Virgin, writes, in the Estoire du Graaì: "She was called Mary . . . Mary means bitter sea/ She is the daughter of God and also his mother." In Chrétien's Perceval Blanchefleur is similarly associated with the mystery of the Grail, symbolizing communion with the universal essences, blood and milk; the image of three drops of blood—from a wounded wild goose—lying scarlet against white snow remind Perceval of Blanchefleur's red and white cheeks and send him into a religious-erotic swoon. The sacrificial woman gathers strength as an object of worship rivalling the Father, and at first she appears as an intercessor to temper and offset the stern and cruel demands of this fanatic Figure—recalling the Jahweh of This is particularly true in the version of Marie de France, Guygemar, when the sick Tristan is cured by being set adrift in a coracle on the sea. This boat is a birth (womb) symbol (cf. Moses in the basket). The Woman-Sea is the healer, washing away all dirt and sin. Iseut's maternal quality is strongly expressed in the scene where she ministers to Tristan's wounds, bending over him solicitously in the bath. 1 0 "Je ne veux aimer que ma mère Marie" (Verlaine) maintains some of the old harmony. 9

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the first Hebrews—which was inciting to universal destruction in battle. As the image of peace, the Church eventually had to accept her because of her immense popular appeal, just as it had to adopt the Grail mystery in the form of the host.11 The religious vocation made immense gains under Her protection and She helped foster the mild virtue of a rising class, the bourgeoisie, from which the new kind of religionist is apt to be recruited. At first the priests and young clerics are shaky in their altered role—by opening themselves to the influence of Woman they open themselves also to suffering, which will be a catalyst for growth. The initial results are typically adolescent, jagged. Woman, for André le Chapelain—who went to school to Ovid, along with his epoch, but lacked Ovid's sophistication—is both angel and prostitute; and that seems to be the broad rule for the medieval or late medieval mind of clerical or artistic bent, even Shakespeare's.12 Gradually, the priesthood matures in its vocation, whether within the framework of Catholic celibacy or whether within that of the Reformation when married love is accepted and so "put in its place." In both instances a giant step toward the responsible religious career will be taken by following the demanding inner way to maturity, self-mastery—containing and harnessing the passionate 1 1 The Grail itself is a feminine symbol, a receptacle, harking back to the Greek and Oriental "vase of life." Note that the relatively feminine (fluid, passive, circular: cf. the Buddhist wheel, the Tao) religions of the East recurrently come in, frequently through the artists, who are most sensitive to these needs, to complement and heal the occasionally destructive dynamism (linear, rigid, active) of the West. 12 Jean de Meung's misogyny is balanced by a paean to Nature conceived as a beautiful Woman; cf. Eve in he feu d'Adam, source of sin and angelic creature.

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119

forces for social effectiveness, at least for an impressive period of time and outward radiancy—the very opposite of the vulnerable lack of autonomy and self-identity of the child and the primitive.111 How difficult it is is further illustrated by the way clerical writers are recurrently hoist with their own petards and pass from religion to crude eroticism before they know it:" this is a continuing story from Abélard and the Portuguese Nun through Guillaume de Machaut, the Abbé Prévost (Manon Lescaut) to ClaudeL San Juan de la Cruz tells us in his Ascension of Mount Carmel about the dangers and the discipline to overcome them and pass beyond romantic love in a constant struggle which steels one for the highest accomplishments within religion (as well as the non-artistic career). And when the artist finds out how exacting this is he will, if he is canny, separate to a considerable extent from the religious man and accept his own fertile immaturity in this special sense of failure to achieve the most rigid discipline15 of religious institutions (or comparably austere vocations). In this way he providentially escapes their narrowness of vision and the progressive 13 The attempt, no doubt, has its inner, and eventually outer, ironies—moments of violent relapse—but cannot be condemned without condemning culture itself. For the priest as for the artist— though more secretly in the former—it seems probable that a certain "porosity" of the psychic barriers offers the best chance of a perpetuation of the difficult performance. 14 Often they manage to suspend the opposites together in that uneasy mixture of sublimity and distorted or transparently veiled fleshliness which typifies the sermons and epistles of daemonic religious writers from Bernard of Clairvaux through Luther and the Puritans to present-day revivalists, with hot imagery such as "sucking the breasts of Christ" (St. Bernard, epistle 322) or "yours in the bowels of Christ" (Luther's frequent epistolary salutation). 15 Joyce at first diverged from the Jesuits because of the problem of celibacy (later, because of their provinciality).

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petrification of their forms. Not that the artist does not meet equally demanding challenges within himself and achieve his own kind of spiritual maturity, or ripeness. But only at the end of his life, when his waning sexual powers make it easier, does a Ronsard or a Shakespeare accept the specific renunciations implied in the new religious (and social) order, and by then his artistic career is over. N o t only does woman make man suffer by opening his emotions,16 but when man goes to school to her he comes up against another problem. When a vigorous male adopts the ways of women it is probably always with an added intensity. The love of a woman is humbly bound to concrete things, children and the daily affairs of the home, whereas her husband or brother, driven by his free-floating daemon, must find some equivalent in broader society, ministering to, and crystallizing, whole communities. Of course, there gradually grew up mild-tempered kinds of men who, surviving together with the women, by dint of their flexible character, came to constitute a large and settled part of the bourgeoisie. But we are interested rather in the troubled sorts of men who continue to leaven the society and bring about the truly unprecedented. And this kind of individual, in striving to emulate the feminine, did so, and does so, with that remarkable intensity which is zeal or fanaticism. Returning momentarily to our three main branches of endeavor, we may readily see what is happening: the warrior-king not only becomes the soldierstatesman and then turns from war to statecraft by peace18 Her capacity to do so is, of course, dependent upon his inner susceptibility which she has subtly influenced. The inner pain is the anguish which we now know to be the concomitant of spiritual

freedom.

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fui means, diplomacy, but now, further, we have instead of a Charlemagne or Philippe le Hardi a wily, quasibourgeois, but fanatically ambitious monarch like Louis XI—soon there will be the art-loving but equally ambitious François 1er. The bellicose religiosity exemplified by the legendary Turpin becomes, by way of the tender mission of François de Sales and Vincent de Paul, the shrewd, flexible, poetic, and fanatic vocation of Bossuet or Bourdaloue. The pace-setting writer, having refined his métier through the softening years, emerges as a fully professional figure like Ronsard. In a minor way, with an added nuance of commitment, he turns into the articulate prosateur, often putting his insights at the service of statesmanship: Froissait, Commynes. We have noted that this new vision, the idea of a vocation, is characterized by the reality principle of adolescence, based on the concrete possibility of sexual expression and competition with the father: at puberty a crucial feeling of total unreality—probably every sensitive child has experienced the notion that "I am nobody at all" "—is followed by a surge of awareness that one has been too passive and that something should be done about it. Historically, this is the beginning of political science (a part of the nascent general science), still in literary form, with a strong bias of realism à la Commynes. The revolt against outworn fantasy and acedia, particularly monastic (from Erasmus through Rabelais to Montesquieu), becomes attached to a specific class, the bourgeoisie, and a specific, though dissimulated, cause of nationalism versus narrow ultramontane theocracy. It is precisely because the bourgeoisie represents a temperate mean—arrived 17 This notion often takes the corollary form of a "changeling" fantasy.

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at by steady workdays—between warring state or church factions, and between an excessive spirit-flesh tension, that mature minds will be attracted to it as incarnating mediating reason.18 The theoretical basis for the affinity is evidenced by the fact that in all the major political thinkers, from Machiavelli through Hobbes, Spinoza, Montesquieu to Rousseau, the final option is for something between monarchy and democracy, for aristocracy in the sense of a responsible bourgeois ruling class (perhaps in the guise of a constitutional monarchy) or a republican form of government; moreover with Bodin, Grotius, Montaigne, Pascal, they will call for some international body to mediate between anarchic nations. Leaving at that the kings and advisors to kings, we shall find more literary interest in the religionists and the artists who show them the way. 19 From the troubadour's ambiguous mistress, from Iseut, Blanchefleur, and Perceval's dying mother, through Beatrice and Laura to the Olives, Délies, and Cassandres of the sixteenth century, the image of the Divine Woman grew into many secular forms, quasireligious miracle plays, and new versions of Mariolatry. Her role as a symbol of peace was somewhat altered in the Renaissance when she represented rather the need to refresh the ascetically dessicated and overly intellectualized 1 8 Note here, as in the theories to follow, the horizontal and vertical axes of mediation which are fundamentally related in our epistemologica! notion of "double-polarity." 19 Though the artist progressively diverges from the man of the cloth, up to the sixteenth century he is closer to him than to the statesman. Then he gravitates toward the new kinds of professional man as he gains professional independence of his own. Note that in this era, however, kings may overlap with priests and artists far more than in specialized modern times.

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scholastic or Neo-Aristotelian religious institution, just as a man may find relief from the excessively stern and hence sterilizing demands of a career in a woman's love. In this sense the Divine Woman bears affinities with, and is abetted by, Neo-Platonism of the effusive popular variety, as with Marguerite de Navarre and Rabelais and corollary emotional mysticisms (Pamphilus, Ramus, Paracelsus) which, however often the Church quells them—as in the Albigensian crusade—well up anew.20 On the other hand, a spontaneous reaction against such naturalism and mysticism was not slow in coming, for some men cannot long stand to lag behind the militancy of their fathers—and their Father. They must constrain, categorize, order things and people about. They end by converting—in one of those serio-comic doubletakes which spring from life's core—the reserves of emotional energy they had acquired, by opening themselves up passively, into a new active force. (Fox chases rabbit. Familiar loll 2 0 Woman is generically closer to nature (the "Cybèle" or "notre mère, la terre" frequently invoked in Pléiade poetry; Rabelaia's "Dive Bouteille"; Ronsard's fountain-nymph). Her spirit worked through the naked natural values of rediscovered antiquity as well as the self-accepting luxury and refinement of Renaissance Italy. She appears, in undine flashes, in du Bellay's river: "ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance" (III, Antiquités); Ronsard's "tout coule comme une eau"; Montaigne's "esprit ondoyant et divers" which combines the deep wave movement of Baroque with the new fluidity. When this undulation dips profoundly into the "feminine" suffering which is the catalyst of change we have the combining form of metamorphosis; hence the frequency of the phoenix image in the Baroque period (cf. Jean Rousset, Circé). Woman is even more subtly present in Rabelais's Platonic-Christian conception of "le bon Dieu clément" and the gentle father and soldier Grandgousier: Rabelais portrays a rather celibate men's world, but the men are of a new gentle kind.

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with goings-on deep underground. Rabbit chases fox.) Thus the initial fluid Platonism21 of Luther is forsaken by him for the dogma of a severe new institution, turning on its emotional, chthonian beginnings—which had plumbed the evangelical sources, sympathized with peasants—in a pattern which seems to characterize the rhythm of all revolutions, religious and political.21 Calvin and his rigid Swiss theocracy are not far off. For it is tragically the truth that, unless a society is to decline, it must face again the father authority, and with an initially augmented anguish caused by the delay. The theme of Abraham sacrifiant, the father confrontation par excellence, comes naturally to the pen of Theodore de Beze. Here too was the primary cause of the immensely important movement of stoicism which followed upon the emotional release of the Renaissance. One major aspect of this reaction, as we shall see, will be further images of the Hebraic Father in the Protestant poets and in Catholic writers of the Counter21 Platonism was a liberating force for poets in a similar way. Not only did it counter and undermine the official Aristotelian dogmatism (as in the philosophies of Bruno, Cusanus, Mirandola), but also the Platonic idea of the juror poeticus, inspiration, liberated individualistic drives to new forms. 22 The daemonic mood of Protestantism, which later combines with its bourgeois "work" mood to bring about vital and solid institutions, is evidenced by its deep concern about personal salvation personally (individually, evangelically) found. This soulsearching is a predecessor of existentialist anguish: the Calvinist (and Jansenist) doctrine of predestination meant, like the Protestant existentialism of Kierkegaard (or even of the apostate Protestant Sartre), that the individual had the gravest, goading doubts about his innocence and so was stimulated to an unending Sisyphean or Faustian quest for grace despite the absurd paradox of his so striving against a rigid determinism. His attempt to lift himself spiritually by his bootstraps leads, in rare moments of triumph, to a dangerous sense of glory: only a godlike creature could rise above such odds.

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Reformation, such as Pascal and Racine.23 The relentlessly driving religious (quasi-literary) writers of the Reformation in the sixteenth century: Calvin, de Bèze, du Bartas, Aubigné, will be followed—when Catholicism has been stung to a reawakening—by the equally impressive and severe figures of the seventeenth century, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Nicole, Arnauld, as the religious vocation continues strong." The challenge soon retroacted upon the pioneering artist, who, as we have seen, could no longer pretend, in the demanding new atmosphere, to be both priest and bard (Ronsard made a final weak attempt), and the modern artistic career begins at the great crossroads between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in France. The clear advance beyond romantic love in a few geniuses brings about the leading concept of personal glory. For example, the concept of immortality conferred by the poet, first suggested by Marot (A Arme Tancée pour Marot), is brought to fruition by Ronsard as in the famous Sonnets pour Hélène; the idea of his own immortality is powerfully put in Derniers Vers, No. VI: "Ma plume vole au ciel pour être quelque signe." ÎS Similar themes will be found plentiIn the major plays of Corneille, duty towards a father, whether individual or political (Toranius and Auguste in Cinria) or eternal (Polyeucte), together with a concomitant sense of glory, overshadows humbler forms of love. The emphasis on obedience and humility in Montaigne's Apologie de Raymond de Sebond is a kindred form of self-stiffening in the face of some stern inner image. 24 These mature, bourgeois religious types are flanked by troubled, more artistic, ones who will be less sure of their gains: Pascal, Malebranche. 26 These are typical Renaissance themes. Note that the Italianinfluenced concept of the "whole man" and of virtù, a man's individual life as a work of art, marks a partial divergence from stale 23

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fully in the work of Corneille and Racine who are as jealous as their leading characters of their own individual gloire.2" When Racine comes to Paris to write plays it is already with something of the turbane professional spirit of a Giraudoux; la gloire begins to look suspiciously like "success," of a high order.27 But we must remember that, in contrast to the self-discipline of the cleric or the wholly dedicated statesman, the maturity of the artist is rather special, and is never very sure of having put romantic love—or any other kind of love—securely in its place. Having pointed out some new directions to the priests and politicians, he goes on his daemonic way, rising ever higher and sinking ever lower, as he discovers new forms of love and life. Thus, however much Molière will seem to have mastered the sensible new approach to married love, if we listen to the Philamintes and the Henriettes (as well we might), let us not forget the Misanthrope and Don Juan, lurking behind the warmly reassuring tapestry. As for Racine, he got himself into some exemplary passes, marvellously mirrored in the obsessive intensity of Phèdre, before settling down to raise a large family and repent (therewith practically abandoning art). W e must allow that there had been, of course, isolated Christianity, but is more truly a branch of a general surge of national life which includes vital new branches of broadly Christian religion. 29 The rise of portrait painting in this period as well as the magnificently overbearing demeanor assumed by the posers are striking confirmations of die notion that this is the young and strutting heyday of the sense of personal worth. 27 This calculating aspect of the career, as opposed to the more fully artistic (and religious) vocation, is even clearer in the lawyer Corneille, in whom (as in Racine) the term gloire often implies the other-directed value of réputation.

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cases of true vocation—artistic or religious—in France, for example, Saint Bernard, before the broad period when we saw romantic love slowly giving way in some quarters to the new form of Eros, roughly during that era which Huizinga has called "the waning of the Middle Ages." But we are interested in those points at which a given tendency reaches a critical density, and the historical juncture at which religion became of crucial importance as a way of life for the élite—an enhanced Imitation of Christ—was during the Reformation and the Classical Era, with its great waves of mystic fervor (see Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France) which became no less fervent—only more fanatic—when harnessed by stoical men. The vocation of the writer was borne up and buffeted on the same swelling and swirling tides. Moreover, we can hardly repeat too often that the coming of the new forces was first recorded in the artistic sensitivity, as we have amply seen throughout our earlier pages. By the same token, we cannot say that religion and its allied art of the sixteenth or seventeenth-century variety** have disappeared even today as interesting modes of individual existence, but by the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries we begin to feel that a "division of the waters" has been crossed—Hazard's crise de la conscience européenne—and that the avant-garde of culture, in anticipation of the slower mass, has passed into a new phase beyond that of the first flush of vocational glory and beyond the narrowly sectarian religion which came with it. This leviathan struggle of a filial myth against a stubborn parent is already apparent in, and even the essence 28

The most concentrated modern attempt to revive die sixteenthcentury spirit is that of Moréas' école romane.

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of, the Baroque and Classical eras, to which we shall now turn our attention. The French writers who introduced the new vision, a new power and glory, are many, beginning perhaps with Bodin, but best exemplified at the outset by Montaigne, "the first modern man" (Emerson).

4. The Enlightened Vocation

The thing which gave decisive pause to the old-time religion was that it quite simply threatened the extinction of mankind with its sectarian fanaticism, crusades, inquisitions; the nature of this threat became irrevocably clear in France with the sixteenth-century religious civil wars. It was then that Montaigne showed the nobler members of society how best to ward off a repetition of the disaster by another step in the sublimation of erotic drive, subsuming its aggression into long-suffering, self-examination, and self-criticism, followed by their fulfillment as tolerant wisdom. The underlying élan which, in the preceding stage, was raised to a pitch that might be called (if pathological) hysterical, has not diminished—on the contrary! Although less noticeable in Montaigne, because of the outwardly limited nature of his career, his modesty about

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everything but the deeply essential, and, further, because of his chronological distance from us which allows us to build wish-dreams around his ultimate epicurean s e r e n i t y whatever was easy in it may be attributed to decline, but at his peak what superb and pain-rooted vanity!—in this new kind of writer the secret central conatus of the soul toward the infinite will bathe in a sense of glory paling even that of the religious mystics. 1 (If pathological it would be paranoia.) This will be much more ascertainable in a Balzac, or a H u g o , w h o was certainly not shy about it (Ibo); a Mallarmé too, through scarcely veiled utterances, will flaunt a boundless fervor, especially candidly in a prose rumination entitled La Gloire; Malraux, in La Condition Humaine, is quite blunt on the subject: every man, meaning himself, aspires to be God. 2 1 Montaigne gives himself almost nothing but good faith (authenticity, loyalty, sincerity, honesty) which, when we have pieced together his remarks about it, is clearly all. His insistent selfdepreciation and humility before nature and simple beings is, like that of Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Eliot, the sign of a towering pride. The traditional view has been that Montaigne's chief characteristics are moderation, sound judgment, common sense. That he appears to have these things (and, in a way, does, at a high uncommon level, so that they are better identified as Olympian wisdom) is mainly a tribute to his hard-won selfdiscipline. T o the perspicacious observer he reveals all the traits of the daemonically creative temperament: initial laziness (and the habit of late-sleeping), a Proust-like lag in the total career followed by a provisional stoic stiffening, flashes of insight, ambivalence (even his later essays on the acceptance of nature are likely to end with "reality's all nothing but wind"), narcissism, impatience with his contemporaries (faiseurs de livres), and so on. 2 This condition held few secrets for Thomas Mann (Dr. Faustus). Cf. "A final supreme thought springs from the dreamer's mind: I have become God" (Baudelaire, "Théâtre de Séraphin" in Les Paradis artificiels).

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The aggression being now turned inward, the core of Montaigne's early essays is a long meditation on suicide, just as serious as Hamlet's—and we remember that Shakespeare was a respectful contemporary (both had read Seneca on death). This youthful stoic subjectivism operating up and down an axis of which the two poles are "to be" and "not to be" 3 is happily cut across by a lively interest in all manner of things in the world surrounding the author, kept in constant motion and growth by a fluid scepticism. The two poles of the horizontal axis of intellectual involvement are the two pans of his famous scales, one of which contained the supposedly true, the other the putatively false. Happily once again the too-just scales tip somewhat, in the final epicurean analysis, through a mercifully arational preference for life: for the good, the beautiful and the true. Already during the seventeenth century a new type of cultured man will be formed in this general image, the honnête homme. We might call the particular brand of faith which is Montaigne's the "humanistic" or the "enlightened" vocation.* It implies a belief in the goodness of 3

Old friends: being and nothingness, expression and void. Note that Montaigne's early obsession with fixed being soon gives way to concern with a mature, flexible becoming. The blob of negation (which is somewhat historically determined by a general Baroque mood) breaks up, as it were, into sub-particles of doubt and scepticism which will speckle subsequent pages of Western culture. 4 The quality of faith in men who, like Montaigne and Descartes (and even Pascal), profess adherence to the existing order, is subtly changed by the fact of examining it in powerful new ways. This change is partly expressed in the altered quality of light in the imagery of art and thought. Note that we use the word "humanistic" in the broad sense (cf. Panofsky's definition in Meaning in the Visual Arts) rather than the more restricted one of "learning," which is only a part of the new way.

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mind, of cultured life, and a suspension of particular belief in this or that set of restrictive dogma.6 A feature of the stance is a new emphasis on intense male spiritual companionship,6 and the classic example was Montaigne's friendship with La Boétie (again, we may think of Shakespeare and his beloved W . H.). Montaigne weaned himself from excessive wifely and familial ties by moving periodically into his celebrated tower; from this vantage point more elevated contacts were maintained with men like La Boétie and Pasquier. The fraternity of letters takes on a considerable importance, located soon in the Latin Quarter where in the seventeenth century one could find "les amis" at La Pomme du Pin and a series of hangouts extending through the years to the present-day Deux Magots. Even the Academy, when founded in 1637, is based on this secular group spirit which goes with the enhanced professional status of the writer, the advent of an independent science, and the coming-of-age of a legal caste.7 In the Academy itself there is always a certain num5

Informed tolerance, the patience-under-pressure and intelligent empiricism of modern science, sophisticated relativism and internationalism, hard-won temperateness, and advanced prose are all corollaries of the one deliberate horizontalization implied in Montaigne's mature ethical views. Descartes, Montesquieu, and the philosophes generally, having assimilated the lesson, will offer new versions of it. 6 The friendships which are weakened at marriage thus recur at a more enlightened level. W e owe to this fraternal spirit manymasterpieces, including the Tombeaux of Hugo, Mallarmé, Ravel; in English, Lycidas, Adonais, In Memoriam. 7 Which, in the form of the Basoche—the law clerks' guild—had long been an important source of secular theatre. From now on, a surprising proportion of writers will come from this caste and allied professional ones (administrative, medical), and very often they begin their careers as law students. Note that in the rising rational or "polemical" (Kenneth Burke) stage of culture, the

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ber of figures who represent in a limited and exclusive way this attitude of male companionship (like the recent Abel Hermant), implying celibacy and even misogyny, but, as usual, in the most interesting figures "everything coexists," and all the legitimate potentialities of the human personality tend to be expressed sooner or later.8 A major step in this general direction is made when the lawyer Corneille, in Polyeucte, offers the rapidly rising bourgeoisie a lesson in how to immolate romantic love to vocation, by a kind of "self-hypnosis" (Tastevin, Les Heroines de Corneille). At the cost of what suffering, the lord of the bourgeois only knows! The marriage of •convenience or interest becomes an important feature of French life( with its by-product, the mistress), and though young love will never cease to make its claims through the jeunes premiers, the Leandres and Henriettes, still it is the Misanthrope who comes closest to representing the defections and aspirations of the writer in this period. The crack in the nature of romantic love is further revealed in Don Juan? for whom as for Hamlet there is "within the human drama, while maintaining its essentially transcendental orientation, tends to be cloaked in the secular trappings of the judicial trial, as in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka's The Trial. 8 In the Baroque period there was a noticeable wave of a less elevated form of homoeroticism practised by weaker souls such as the mignons, court favorites attacked by du Bellay and Ronsard in satires, or the later Cinq-Mars. "The old demon, the spirit of negation, continues to dog him and his many Western kinsmen, in a late guise; a spoiling wound, Faustian dissatisfaction, makes him leave one woman for another in a harried fleeing from unity or consummation. Don Juan's problem is a flightier, dynamic version of the central problem of evil in love between the sexes. Often the principle of negation is present as a person of the drama, either an "untrustworthy" woman (who is usually reasonably innocent but is victimized, deserted, in sym-

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very flame of love a kind of wick or snuff that will abate it." Molière's jealous distrust of Armande, Alceste's of Célimène (like Hamlet's distrust of Ophelia, Othello's of Desdemona, Lear's of woman in general) more than hint at the violence of the too-male—and too-female—emotion which makes reasonably constant love practically impossible for the writer of genius. The humanizing of the French cultural élite, in the spirit of Montaigne, begins in the late Renaissance and goes on dialectically, through spiralling sub-stages, for the next few centuries. This is the period of the divergence of prose from poetry as an important autonomous instrument of civilization.10 Perhaps the greatest impetus to prose came with the critical temper which arose as part of the nascent scientific spirit, in specific application to learning and art. The analytic faculty, which turns upon things to see them "crushingly" in their naked dimensions, springs from the earliest efforts of mind, as is evidenced by the quick appearance of geometry in any culture and by the crude symmetries or formalities of young art (the Chanson de Roland as well as medieval graphic art is full of these) and early (scholastic) thought. Later, growing at the forebolic revenge against an unloving mother) or some reincarnation of the father. The "stone guest," who is an obvious father figureterribly, rigidly ri^ht—dooms Don Juan finally, and we sense that he has been hovering in the background throughout this "criminal son's" restless career, like the father-ghost who haunts the love-bed of Wilhelm Meister. 10 The process began in the thirteenth century (Villehardouin, Joinville) but really got under way with Rabelais, Calvin, Montaigne.

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front of mind,11 it reappears in conjunction with the developing intellectual-emotive complexes of total mind, personality, or understanding as bodied forth in literature and erudition.12 This is the gist of the well-known critical attitude which came in with humanism. At first applied to the verification of texts, it moved, through self-criticism, to a clarification and purification of art, as exemplified in the manifestoes of the Pléiade. The fullest incarnation of this spirit, a general reappraisal of the life-style as well as artistic style, comes in this period with the essais of Montaigne. The language of the attitude is clear, precise, adequate, appropriate prose,18 typically mediating—as in •expository essays—between special and common utterance. Poetry, as Vico, Hugo, and Joyce have reminded us, is always the earliest form of any literature. It grows directly, spontaneously, from the rhythmic and rhyming babble which we saw as the first human expression: for it is always reassuringly easier and more narcissistically pleasing to repeat, sound or beat, than to vary. Later, of course, these repetitions become quite sophisticated as man moves away from his instinctive selves to rediscover them, and their rhythms, at higher levels. Such is the nature of 11

Evolving through sheer negation (in keeping with the etymologies of "analysis" and "abstract"), it is both the purest and narrowest mental faculty. Thought is a process of growth, a sort of organic effervescence, and its zone of new growth is die least stable, the freest (most strongly negating fixation). Paradoxically —just as the most fluid elements in nature (surface of water, light) produce the straightest lines—thought spontaneously generates straight dimensions and unimpededly symmetric figures. The new growth is then settled on the old, tried on it like new hats, gradually bent into more realistic, uneven, shapes. 12 Among the better-known humanist scholars are Budé, Lefèvre dTLtaples, Scaliger, Dolet, the Estiennes. 18 Occasionally rhymed as a concession to an outmoded notion of distinctive style (e.g. Vauquelin).

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alliterations, internal rhymes, anaphora, and all manner of play with words. Prose evolves in its time as a recurrence of original non-artistic language, which was at very first ad hoc communication based on the abstraction of certain signs from the general flow of things and emotion, and this plainness will persist in developed form as sobriety. Thus poetry, with its depth and concentration, and always rooted in emotion, in the final analysis is the crucially typical artistic form of expression. But in practise, once the spiral of culture gets under way, the two branches dialectically interpenetrate and fecundate each other in the same fashion as artist and philistine, man and woman (we have long ago lost count of who hit first in these realms). So that when prose reached the rich development it took toward the middle of the sixteenth century," poetry symbiotically also made great strides with the School of Lyons and the Pléiade.1* It developed an internal dialectic of its own16 in reflection of the pristine prose-poetry one: lyric17 versus non-lyric (didactic, satiric, narrative), with lyricism representing the new intensity on its way toward poésie pure. Since, as we recall, this is approximately the period when the cultured man, particularly the poet, is finding romantic love a thorny problem, we frequently discover him 1 4 Roughly; we might say in the fifteenth century, to include Alain Chartier and Jean Lemaire de Belges on the prose side, Villon and Charles d'Orléans on the poetry side. 1 8 Just as some women, b y now, egged on by unsettled men, have become quite active. Cf. the querelle des femmes, the School of Lyons. 1 6 A s always happens when a new identity arises, whether a national state, a genre, or whatever. 1 7 Lyric poetry can be traced back in France to the twelfth century or earlier, but before Villon there is no great figure of it; it lacks the kind of intense identity which, particularly with Ronsard, makes it a serious cultural force.

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seeking relief in a return to early attachments, nature and communion with self in solitude, on a downward leg of his hilly path to glory. When Ronsard's amours prove too much for him, in the will-o'-the-wisp shape of Hélène, he goes back to the paternal chateau in the Vendômois to hunt and fish and be alone with his favorite forest (Elégie: Sonnets pour Hélène, II)—and each of these entities vibrates with its particular reminiscent Eros. Seeing the lady as a rose in the first place, we now know, was a sure way to hit above and below the mark: to overidealize her on the one hand and to deny her ordinary free humanity on the other by transforming her into a lovely object, a still life. She is bound to disappoint as soon as she makes the slightest move.18 Nature is sought and found again, as fresh as on that day when the child came out into his first dazzling awareness of it; or as on that other day when he returned to it as the reliable abiding friend who alone can appreciate one when parents and their sort do not; now he returns to it once more after unrequited romantic love, remembering that it has the uncommon tact to remain silent at certain moments.19 Modern lyric poetry, the most intensely per18 La Fontaine, Théophile, and Proust came to anticipate this and so preferred the objects of their affections, their jeunes filles en fleur, to be utterly immobilized as parts of nature's tableaux: asleep. But inevitably the lady insists on waking and on making some remark which, as Prufrock laments, "wasn't it at all." There follows an attempt to make real flowers do. 18 So flowers, pools, and trees build to their lyric summits in the work of the Symbolist poets, of Pissarro "who of all painters was closest to nature" (Cézanne), and of Debussy. Under "nature" we may subsume the poetry of dwelling places, from the isolated château-fort to the modern metropolis. A few sonnets of Ronsard foreshadow the poetry of houses (CLXXX1V, Amours, I, and "Vous me dites, maîtresse, étant à la fenêtre").

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sonai, individual, and sensuously subjective of all artistic creations, really gets under way with Ronsard, caressing words occasionally as loveable objects in their own right, packing power into tight little molds like the sonnet, and developing an intimate dialectic of its own in the modes of affirmation and transfigured negation, which include various derivative modes such as the visual (or verbally evoked) polarity of light and radiant darkness. These terms may be understood roughly by comparing a rose-poem of Ronsard with a typical Villon, say the Ballade des Fendus, or, to take a modern example, Mallarmé's Après-midi d'un faune with Baudelaire's Une Charogne or the grimmer pieces of Leconte de Lisle. It all goes back to an ancient epistemological polarity of affirmation and negation—cognates of our original pair: being and nothingness—which persists into the most evolved art, including lyric poetry, in forms resembling the major and minor of music. That is to say, despite the fusion of opposites into a harmonious form or style, there can be either a positive or negative tone, or accent, given to the whole.20 We have called these modes affirmation and transfigured negation, distinguishing the latter from the lusterless horror of life's worst moments—though some scattered, contributory tones of sheer misery may be present within the negative mode—because in art there is an imbalance or positive choice implied in expressing oneself at all.21 This 20 This is done through many devices of style which w e have treated at length in L'Oeuvre de Mallarmé, chapter 6. 21 Or even in being merely alive. Moreover, as Malraux has recently reminded us, great art represents man's most impassioned attempt to rise over the dark forces of chance and death. There are, in sum, no purely hideous poems, but there are purely beautiful ones. Cf. the Aristotelian notion in the preface to Le Cid: "the

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choice is present in the very word harmony, radiating an arational quasi-divine faith over and beyond the balancing opposites of good and evil, joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness.22 It further explains such statements as Boileau's "There is no serpent or odious monster which, imitated by art, cannot please the sight" or, later, Joyce's notion, borrowed from Thomas Aquinas, that even the ugliest of realities, when apprehended by the aesthetic mind, is surrounded by a halo of claritas. Although our modes are dialectically interrelated and, in poetic practise, interfuse with each other to bring about infinite variations of total stylistic coloration, they are nonetheless useful, if we are aware of their limitations, to the discernment of some main directions of art. By the same token, we may take note of a broadly identifiable in-between mode involving a milder balance of the opposites in its overall effect, as in the sadly sweet or elegiac tone. From this abstract base we may derive all the other, more sensual, forms of cognate polarities expressive of total tone, such as the visual polarity of light and radiant darkness, with an in-between realm of chiaroscuro (mixture of light and darkness, shadow, greyness):28 then, tactile opposites of sweet-bitter, light-heavy, smooth-rough; complex pairs hero is neither all wicked nor all virtuous, but a man rather virtuous than wicked." A further discussion of this will be found in Appendix III. 12 Cf. the final "yea" of masterpieces like Faust, The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses. The ultimate affirmation is all the more glowing for the struggle which preceded it; cf. also the final alt in Montaigne's indifferent scales. 23 The mingling of light and dark which is the essence of chiaroscuro occurs along a dimension different from that implied in radiant darkness. These dimensions correspond respectively to the brilliance and saturation scales of color. A fuller discussion of these modes will be found in Appendix I.

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such as ethereal-fleshly, and so on. In subsequent pages we shall see how the three main ways interplay and evolve through a fluid hierarchy of nuances expressing changing modalities of the soul's hours and seasons by subtle verbal shading in the finest poetry. Lyric poetry, growing through its delicate new forms, is one attempt at a solution to the problems of evolving Eros: an equally important branch of literary vocation turns to the newly respectable prose, which concerns itself not so much with landscape or still lives but with busy figures and the complex workings of society. At first its perspective is limited to a sect or an elect group (Froissart, Commynes, La Salle), but eventually the embrace of the prosateur will reach out to encompass vast areas of humanity, and even envision a universal brotherhood of man. Having grown asunder, prose and poetry will meet and sever again in a recurrent rhythm; however far apart their interests may take them, they remain, in their serious artistic forms, brothers, or at very least first cousins, under the skin. So prose, which is the expression of everyday, socially determined reality, as well as of science and criticism, re-enters poetry, even lyric poetry, as an admixture of realism (note the almost reportorial quality of important passages of Villon's Grand. Testament).11* On the other hand, a new depth of feeling progressively colors prose: the clots or lumps of dogma- and class-frozen perception are acidly dissolved by the critical spirit of Rabelais, Montaigne, and their Renaissance brethren into a fluid, wide-open field of possible reality soon precipitated 24 Later we shall see how the sublime style of Parnassianism and Symbolism, become mere preciosity with the epigones, is renewed by conversation (Laforgue, Corbière, Rimbaud, Fargue, T. S. Eliot).

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afresh into richer images, vignettes of life, and idea clusters by the new and intenser burgeonings of personal, humanistic, individualistic desire to be. The interplay of poetry and prose is accompanied by the closely corollary dialectic between high and low styles,25 successive versions of which fuse into livelier and warmer "middle" styles through the same psychic alchemy of dissolution and integration.28 Between the prose of Montaigne, which will be carried on and renewed by a great essayistic, moralist tradition (Pascal, La Bruyère, Fénelon, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Voltaire), and the lyric poetry of Ronsard and his successors, there will emerge a flourishing mid-region of French literature, in realistic poetry,27 in the scrupulously composed but (usually) less-than-lyric language of the theater, and in the artistic prose of the "portrait" or caractère (La Bruyère), the conte, and the noveL

The novel rises as a significant genre together with prose and the even broader phenomenon of the bourgeois career generally:28 it expresses a specific kind of artistic attempt 20 These poles, arising from a strict separation of classes, show how literature reflects the interplay of classes in historical becoming. 26 A corollary phenomenon is the alternation of diastole (enrichment, expansion of means) and systole (purification, elimination, compression) which we discuss more fully later. 2T La Fontaine's Fables, Mathurin Régnier's and Boileau's Satires are leading examples. 28 The bourgeois career is a version of the deeper "vocation." Max Weber has emphasized the link between steady work and the Reformation, but there are obviously links in sill directions between a number of forces corollary to one underlying tendency which has reached a critical intensity in this broad period.

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to control the daemonic forces by a tempered, steady rhythm of work, an enhanced relatedness to other men or the world (realism), and, in sum, a wilful horizontalization of the creative psyche. Closely corollary aspects of the same phenomenon are the growth of empirical science and, of more direct concern to ourselves, the pervasive classic mood of seventeenth-century art. As we observed elsewhere, the influence of womanly patience is of considerable importance in this entire interrelated evolution; it is of at least symptomatic interest that actual women will occupy a prominent place in French novel writing, from Mile, de Scudery and Mme. de La Fayette to Colette and Simone de Beauvoir.29 In the typical novel (both originally and essentially) the daemonic forces are from the first drastically limited by the device of containing them objectively, quasi-scientifically, realistically, and very often satirically (implying a considerable degree of detachment and even aggression) within the leading characters, including, usually, the protagonist. The novel is apt to be in this special sense "comic," that is to say, somewhat removed from the artist's vital center by the partial, blinkered, divisive, and diverting process of humor in its narrower form, the ridiculous. As we noted of that early prophet of the bourgeois era, Jean de Meung, this kind of writer pins down a human being, symbolically deals with him by making him into a somewhat stiff, wooden, unbending—hence quasi-defunct—type. This partial shackling of the daemonic or poetic quality of vision results in a certain lack of depth in the run of novels, though usually a great deal is gained in breadth; furthermore, in a few, the depth is maintained and fused 29 W e note also the predominance of women, and feminine sensibility, in the "great tradition" of England.

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with the widening spiritual horizon to produce the rare prose masterpieces. Possessing both dimensions fully, they are felt to be "rounded" or, to put the matter more squarely, to have a certain carrure.™ Even when there is a considerable degree of identification between the writer and his protagonist31—when the satire is gentler, ironic, or when the "barriers are porous" —the novel is still likely to be characterized by the foreshortening of poetry. An excellent early example, though not French, is Don Quixote. Here the daemonic rhythm is compressed into the little vertical tension of the gangling Don Quixote and the runty Sancho Panza (this high-low pair will have many jolly avatars)." The saga of the questing duo, propelled by a wildly romantic urge which is safely reduced and contained within the reader's perspective through gentle ridicule, covers vast reaches of reality in a delightfully poised, linguistically quite varied and admirably controlled, level, witty, tone which will have an immense fortune in the West. This is, peace be to his harried soul, the favorite tone of the urbane bourgeois who wants to be reassured, in his comfortable domestic setting, that everything is in its place; that the dangerous urgings cradled in his easy-chair and, outside, the wideopen world with its siren calls and abysmal pitfalls are manageable affairs if only we learn, like the good Cervantes, to see things in an amused, on-running, poor-man's Olympian vein. 30 In a later, marginal development of the genre, the vertical will outstrip the horizontal to produce a "lyric," subjective, personal type of novel or récit (Chateaubriand, Constant, Barrés, Gide, Giraudoux, Camus). 31 The author-protagonist relationship may be thought of epistemologically as a third dimension in one of our polypolarities. 82 Bouvard and Pécuchet, Mutt and Jute, Humbert and Lolita

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This mood defines pretty closely the bourgeois realistic novels of the seventeenth century: Sorel's Francion, Scarron's Roman comique, Furetière's Roman bourgeois (though in a less refined, rather "burlesque," spirit of satire, as compared with Don Quixote). A similar daemonic quality of roguishness or libertinism "on the road" for many a winding mile is encapsuled in the various representatives of the long picaresque tradition, of which the best French examplars are the eighteenth-century Gil Bias of Alain Lesage and the later Capitaine Fracasse of Théophile Gautier.33 In a less vital, aggressive, and objective way, this same spirit informs the endless pastoral romans à clef and à tiroirs of Honoré d'Urfé, Gomberville, La Calprenède, Mlle, de Scudéry. The pastoral or idyllic manner is one of various devices, and one of the most popular, for vicariously steeping in the libertine pleasures of childhood or a simple past, making a charming little doll game or puppet tableau of the untidy business of adult loving, in an age-old Arcadian spirit. As we have observed earlier about the Roman de la Rose, this sort of grown-up playing is the crude stuff of art; actually, from the critic's viewpoint its lacks lie with its not playing hard enough. A barely structured, languorous, long-love-lettery, rosewatered mièvrerie prevails through page after sticky page. In writers like Mlle, de Scudéry the poetic dimension is limited by the natural quality of female emotion which is less apt to "come to a point" than the male,34 but is rather inclined to run on sentimentally, chatteringly—occasionally swirling into an hysterical eddy35—like the river of Anna Livia Plurabelle. 33 With a greater degree of identification as we might expect of a writer influenced by Romanticism. 34 The pale, regular moon is a steadying influence. 35 Solved, often, by the convenient feminine device of fainting.

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La Princesse de Cleves is a profound«-, tauter little novel, probably under the direct influence of La Rochefoucauld. But the prolonged, rivery revery will run on through the special mode of Prevost's, Rousseau's, or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's sensiblerie—v/e note in passing the predominance of feminine names in titles like Manon Lescaut, Marianne, Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe—or, through another mode, as a new, sharply vigorous influence comes back into prose via Voltaire and a general high heritage of Classicism in the neo-Classical period, that of the lucid, cruelly incisive, long thin snaking line of Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses. Having established this much notion about the whither of the novel by a preliminary peering into the future, we will leave the rest of the story for subsequent chapters, particularly the nineteenth century when the genre really comes into its own.

French theater arises as careful art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the same way as lyric poetry, incarnating a new intensity but with this capital difference, that it is a far more public intensity, directed toward immediate mass appeal or success.84 However, despite this grave disadvantage, the internal dialectic of theater develops—as it had begun to do long before this—into high and low, or classic and vulgar, modes. In the nobler forms, according to an abiding law of aesthetics, the new power 36In this respect of direct, personal engagement theater remains closer to the religious ritual, which is the matrix of art, than the other genres: hence the serious actor, animateur de théâtre, or playwright is often quite conscious of his quasi-priestly role.

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is partly achieved by compression: increasingly, the action which, according to Aristotle's incomplete definition, the drama imitates, becomes a static, tautly suspended inner passion, a moral crisis (whence Racine's ideal of a play in which "nothing happens"), while the popular taste for violent outer movement and episodic plot is relegated to the melodrama and the farce. TThe famous "unities" contributed, in their relatively technical way, to this one important effect of concentration and depth. Simultaneously, theater develops, parallel to lyric poetry, its inner dimension (or polarity) of modes of affirmation and negation, as evidenced by the evolution, according to the process of specialization and categorization which underlies the creation of new genres, of distinct "comic" and "tragic" forms.37 What is most strikingly new is a critical awareness of these things: there had been a spontaneous ripening of dramatic, as of lyric, art, but it was critical prodding which brought the mature works to their difficult birth, through a series of manifestoes and Art poétiques. By alternations of stubborn effort of analytic mind (du Bellay, Ronsard, Vauquelin, Malherbe, Corneille, Boileau, Racine) and instinctive emotional release, the Renaissance in art rises and expands, again dialectically, by successions of diastolenew genres, vocabulary, borrowings of all sorts from other cultures—and systole—purification of language, compression into tightened molds, rules, unities. In the theater, the codification which begins to take shape with Pelletier Le Mans is first put to the test by a minor member of the Pléiade, Etienne Jodelle, with his Cléopâtre and Eugène. 87

Note the underlying double-polarity, which helps account for the critical confusion concerning comedy that we discuss in our next pages.

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A seriously artistic play in which the tone is predominantly bright (including a happy ending) is called high or classic "comedy"; when a general dark sense of doom (ending usually in a catastrophe) prevails, there is classic "tragedy." 38 In an attempt to anchor these and other modes in a respectable tradition the theorists (Scaliger, Heinsius) turned to Aristotle's Poetics for terms and definitions. Unfortunately, Aristotle had confused tragedy with seriousness (high art), and, partly under his influence, the term comédie, instead of being assigned to the noblest forms, as strictly speaking it ought (based on its original sense of "celebration"), tended to be relegated to those plays in which a positive view was evidenced by the partial, divisive, and diverting means of humor,89 the "Ridiculous" (Aristotle's term). 40 Generically, affirmation (or, "visually," brightness)— seriousness as transcendency, high art—and comedy should 3 8 The low equivalents are the already mentioned farce and melodrama (or romanesque tragedy). " • H u m o r is one expression of mental Eros, hence, generically lower than the total and silent sense of beauty or truth. When used fluidly in combination with other forms it may occupy a high place in art, including its many registers from belly guffaw to titter. It combines, for example, with the calm sense of beauty to produce Olympian gaiety. Or its inherent partialness and detachment (implying a certain hostility by its very lack of wholler identification) may conjoin with mental aggression to produce satire or, in gentler, more mixed (part loving) form, irony or parody. Even its highest forms, Olympian gaiety or the daemomc sense of the delightfully absurd, are subordinate to the fuller aura of harmonious beauty in the best art, hence we should be chary of using it as a total tag. 4 0 Aristotle was misled by the fact that comedy grew from the pornographic satyr play of the Dionysian ritual. H e should have seen that pornographic art was, in its time, the most serious art, its proper opposite being the "darkly" silent performance of instinctive sexual activity.

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have been cognates. Once they got going, the modes enriched and vied with each other so that now one and now the other had the specific upper hand;41 a negative view recurrently, dialectically, gave substance and gravity to artistic descriptions of men's ways, and particular tragedies surpassed coeval comedies. But the reverse also happens— Shakespeare's Tempest as compared to his own Titus A ndronicus—and, to keep things orderly, it seems right that our most important religious drama (though the theater was too small for it) should be called a divine comedy. (It is interesting to note that for Goethe the peak of Greek theater art came with the comedies of manner of Menander.) Soon even good plays in which Aristotle's "pity and fear" were considerably subdued by a stoic will and reason (Leo Spitzer has called this effect "klassische Dämpfung") and even, occasionally, by happy endings were called tragédie in the seventeenth century, or else clumsy combinative terms like "tragi-comédie" or "comédie héroïque" were used.42 Le Misanthrope, in particular, fits none of these tags, no more than the great plays of Shakespeare or Tchekov do. After all, true art defies such narrow categories, for it reflects all the major aspects of personalitybright and dark—though, by some shade of the polar modes of affirmation and negation an overall accent may be inThe comedies of Molière outshine most tragedies of his time. Similarly when imitation Classic theater becomes a dead end in the eighteenth century, it is overshadowed by "vulgar" realistic drama, just as the farce, with Molière, renewed Classic comedy. *2 Later, in the eighteenth century, a more neutral term was found in the word "drame." There was already a vague tendency in this direction in the occasional use of the word "comédie" to indicate either a comic or tragic play, as in the institutional name 41

La Comédie

française.

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dicated. In the final analysis, we are better off if we speak merely of a "play," adding such modifiers (including advanced forms of our modes—"somber, elegiac, serene"—the degree of seriousness—"high," "low"—and other modalities —"witty," "amorous"—and so on) as may be necessary. Even when we come to apply the catchword tragédie to a masterpiece like Phèdre, as we may do more readily than in most cases because of the clearly prevailing tone,48 we ought to be aware that it is the deft verbal music which remains with us as much as her somber plight, surrounding it and suffusing it with a halo of claritas, raising it to a harmony of deep radiant darkness, or tragic beauty, if understood in this clarified sense. We might go farther and say that no more than their pupil Racine did the great authors of Greek tragedy seek gloom for gloom's sake but they were rather daemonic poets, either surrounding horror with a larger harmony or else distilling beautiful form in primitively deep shades such as we may find again in visual artists characterized by neo-primitive freshness, like Redon or Manet, who paint in big noticeable plots of royal blackness.*4 In sum, the tragic mood is a matter of coloring— profoundly negative emotion, a prolonged period of doubt —and not of outcome which, as we indicated in reference to the lyric modes, is always eventually positive, at least 4 3 Tone includes theme, and all the artistic devices to make the theme felt. ** In our day, an excessive admiration for silence and old night bespeaks a kind of Manichean heresy which is, at least theoretically, as menacing to the living body of art—the concrete sensuous forms —as religious Manicheism was to the human presence, or MacCarthyism to the body politic. Waiting for Godot, which reflects a v e r y serious advance in thought (Joycean, existential)—plus an historical moment of need f o r shock which has been largely surpassed in France—suffers f r o m an impoverishment in toed theater art.

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potentially, in any complete art work: either the hero (and the public which identifies itself with him) has the necessary human hope for salvation (as in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Corneille's Folyeucte), or else "the play's the thing" and the final triumph is the public's awareness of truth or beauty transcending a momentary individual plight (Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra). Although the sensual modes of light and radiant darkness apply best to lyric poetry, which has the most evolved style of all genres and employs numerous visual effects in its imagery, still even they may be illuminating when brought to play upon, say, Bérénice, Esther, Amphitryon, La Princesse d'Elide, Les Femmes savantes (all bearing affinities with the sunlit lyric poetry of the day: Théophile's Matin, La Fontaine's Adonis, Tristan l'Hermite's Promenoir sequence, as well as the clear serenity of Poussin and Lorrain); later, Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Giraudoux. On the somber side: Phèdre, Andromaque, Britamiiciis (colored by the preceding and coeval Baroque40 poetry) and, still later, Hugo, the realists (Becque), AnouÛh's pièces noires, Sartre, Camus. The autonomous development of theater is complicated by still another dimension of tone, a vertical polarity of social class: aristocratic versus popular (bourgeois). Originally, aristocracy, distinctive speech (the sublime style), heroic subjects, and poetry were all cognates; the "people" (middle class), popular speech, realism, and prose constitute another theoretical set. Now, although these various elements will in later practise be jumbled in all sorts of combinations, there is still a marked tendency to keep * s Cf. the darkly romantic poetry of ruins and solitude in SaintAmant, the tone of Pascal's truly poetic meditation on the infinite, the paintings of the Le Nain brothers and Georges De La Tour.

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them in line in the seventeenth-century French classical theater: Racine and Corneille write of and for an aristocracy,48 using noble language and rhyming verse to describe heroic actions. (We might add a dimension by mentioning an effect of somewhat "cold" purity emanating from the whole.)47 Molière, relatively, and certainly at the beginning of his career which colored the remainder of it, wrote for popular appreciation and about ordinary bourgeois, used everyday language, tuned his plays to the real state of human affairs, warmly sympathized, and put some of his best plays in prose. As he matured in his métier and therewith advanced in social standing, he managed to raise all this to a plane of exceedingly high art, partly by superb composition but also by a new kind of distinction in speech, using ordinary language in highly selective ways for the edification of a true, and partly new, intellectual, aristocracy. Something was gained in purity and sublimity while much of the old warmth and popular touch were maintained—though the French Falstaffs and Pistols of the pit no doubt felt they had been deserted; and this is the winding way to universal glory.48 *" The lively tension between heroism and baseness (Aristotle's "neither too good nor too evil"), an inner corollary to the lovehate tension between hero and heroine, is a theoretical axiom of Corneille—Preface to Le Cid—which is, unfortunately, usually violated in his later production. 47 This purity—the stoic drive to control art and life via new, and still somewhat stiff, rules—sometimes brings a divergence of style from content, leaving a margin of mere air, pomp, the enflure of rhetorical poetry, the frequently empty, if elegant, formalities of Lully. When a full convergence, happily often, occurs, we applaud the considerable feat. 48 Shakespeare's career paralleled Molière's in remarkably many ways; see P. Stapfer, Molière et Shakespeare. Something of Molière's dialectic growth is repeated in Racine's personal life, torn between Jansenism and Versailles, the attraction of settled family

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All this time the humanistic, enlightened vocation had been making progress in the tussle for men's minds: cultured secularists like Gassendi—Molière's teacher—were harking back to the attractive pagan philosophy of Lucretius and to Greek thought in its pre-Christian pristine state. But during the seventeenth century the rivalry with the official Church, contained within a successful nationalism, had not yet broken out into the open and went on rather as an unprecedented struggle within men's souls. This is the disconcerting underside of the celebrated "classical balance" between faith and reason, body and mind. The era did make a stubborn attempt to bring harmony out of the chaos of the sixteenth-century strife, and we find indirect evidence of this effort in harmonizing terms like Boileau's "nature" (implying human nature, something between intellect and the passions) or in the general classical use of the term "raison" which meant the middling "reasonableness," as in Molière's "La parfaite raison fuit toute extrémité/Et veut que l'on soit sage avec sobriété" (Le Misanthrope). But, remembering that dark shadows lurked behind Molière's reassuring tapestry—and remembering the cliché about the tragic soul behind the comic mask—we may say that, yes, there ivas a remarkable balance but remarkable precisely because it was achieved existence and bohemian liaisons with actresses. There is an enhanced warmth and sensuous quality to Phèdre which came from an increased commitment to ordinary people and no doubt also f r o m the v e r y real challenge of Molière's and La Fontaine's (see Valéry: Variété I) flourishing art.

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at such a high cost: "le classicisme est un romantisme dompté" (Gide).49 But Gide's formula may need some clarification. What, after all, is classicism? We have, in earlier pages, defined the daemonic mood of the artist (of which romanticism is an ultimate version) as being, in bare essence, the vertical, "poetic" dimension of the human spirit, linking extreme psychic opposites such as vividly bright and comparably dark emotion, or brilliant, sparkling intellect and plunging sensuality. Freedom, fieriness, passion, dynamism, yes, but caught up in an equally extreme need to be, to freeze reality into something permanent, so that the daemonic aspiration carries within itself a crowning stasis, as a tree's trunk gives forth its rounded foliage, as the wave breaks gracefully into its curving crest. The classical mood, on the other hand, represents the creator's complementary need for balance, poise, reserve, cool control, and a host of other things which come under the staid heading of horizontality or the normative.50 In this direction the writer discovers 49 This helps account for Le Cid being Corneille's masterpiece, Phèdre Racine's; both works possess both dimensions (the passionately, lyrically romantic and the coolly classic) sufficiently to be rounded literary experiences. 80 Hence we cannot define romanticism as dynamism, as some critics have done, but rather it is a particular direction (or rhythm) of the spirit in which the dynamic factor becomes more noticeable through compression. Classicism, conversely, is not primarily static since it implies its own rhythm of dynamic vigor (sustained, steady) and some lower forms of kinetic values, such as the tendentious quality of social meanings or messages. Rather than stasis we would associate classicism with the median, which, of course, has its static aspect: juste milieu, mesure. Classic writing in its purer, narrower form is hence a refined version, within literature, of the ordinary expression of society and, therefore, although often versified, has particular affinities with prose. Recalling the radial,

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certain virtues in steady work, peaceful outer circumstances, social institutions, tradition; and a rapprochement with conventionally determined concepts and percepts is conducive to artistic realism."1 suffusive quality of the artistic symbol, classic writing is relatively linear (strung-out); cf. Wôlffiin's "painterly" (baroque, romantic) vs. "linear" (classic). 61 Realism, with its objective description of "others," whether things or people, beyond the self, thus adds a growing horizontal dimension to art. It is important to distinguish such a realism built up dialectically into art by careful selection and timing from a relaxed realism which degrades art toward flat prosiness. One may trace this growth on a new high level (as opposed to gross earlier popular realism) of art, starting from some objective elements in Marot and Ronsard (houses, still life, conversational bits), through dialogues, description of various people in lyric poets like Desportes (iStances: Contre une nuit trop claire) or lyric-satiric poets like M. Régnier, until in the seventeenth century we have a style subtly transformed toward the maturity—implying, as always, a greater breadth—of which the classic era was so conscious. This consciousness is evidenced by many statements, by Guez de Balzac, La Bruyère, etc., about the enfance of literature in the sixteenth century. In the transition period there was a general stoic movement of constructiveness, away from the subjective and personal, in which the Protestant poets had a part, e.g., Aubigné s poem, UHyver, bidding farewell to youthful passions and welcoming old age which "casts less heat but as much light" (cf. Hugo's Booz). The momentary addition of horizontality to verticality produces the architectural quality of squareness, carrure, in classical art beginning with Malherbe: "Beaux et grands bâtiments d'éternelle structure" (Sonnet) and reaching its peak in the noble verbal edifices, with their long alexandrine line, of the playwrights. The dynamism or "thrust" of the baroque spirit underlying the Classical draws much of its power from this new dimension, for breadth has its own infinite, its own poetry, from the vast sweep of Versailles to the incredible width of Louis XIV's hats; cf. the wide faces of Rembrandt's portraits. The dialectic goes spiralling on through new phases of vertical and horizontal emphasis (and, momentarily, both or neither).

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There is another use of the word "classicism" 52 which overlaps with the definition of the "classical mood" but goes beyond it to imply a higher synthesis, a fusion of the two opposing moods, as in Gide's phrase. The word then takes on associations of artistic perfection, ripeness. And in the specific instance of the seventeenth-century masters we tend to use a capital C. N o w although seventeenth century, or any other, classicism—in the sense of the finest art—synthesizes the two tempers, the dosage obviously varies in the individual figures.53 In some (Boileau, Bossuet) 82 The additional sense of a cult of antique models needs no definition. Although important, its role and the use of the term are self-evident in the various contexts. Generally, at every stage of French culture, the native forces are far more important than the inherited or resought antique forms. What was gained in the way of inner confrontation with their vital spirit (and, secondarily, some added dimensions of polycultural reference) was largely offset by the absurd outer imitation which vitiates whole areas of French writing. 58 Occasionally artists will, in distinction to a preceding school, hasize one mood (through manifestoes, etc.) according to a :ctic of generations, in order to appear new and different or, to put it another way, because in the "prisoner's base" game of history a position happens to be open. The wilier ones, however, eventually slip behind our backs to the opposite station. Minor writers, conversely, cling to their onesided newness. Through them and the momentary phases of major writers we may trace (as we may do for the romantic mood: e.g., the Baroque, nineteenthcentury Romanticism, surrealism) a historical stream of classicism which would include some lesser figures of the seventeenth century (Boileau, Madame de La Fayette) as well as important aspects of the greater, certain Parnassians, Mérimée, Anatole France, Maurras, Maurois, much of Gide. But the classical temper is really ubiquitous. For example, the coolness, poise, understatement, blandness, urbanity we find in a contemporary magazine like The New Yorker represent an easygoing sort of classicism. And just as the discreet letter e sets the tone for the most typical passages of La Princesse de Clèves, The New Yorker is noticeably taken with the letter a (which occupies the exact middle of the vowel soundscale).

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a predominantly classical tone goes with a certain rigidity, a belief in a relatively fixed, absolute scheme of things which is related to the Cartesian, or Newtonian, conception of the universe. In most of their coevals, however, the tone is far more elusive and has to be sought in scattered places. And if, by beelike activity, we may succeed in distilling a classic essence, an equally busy drone in quest of romantic —or its then form, baroque—perfumes has a wide-open field. Thus happily often, in this lively period, our categories are defied. That a future generation was to call him Classic hardly spared a man from the waves of passion, doubt, and restlessness, private or public, which tugged at his merely human heart.

W e catch a good glimpse of the struggle between a still extremely powerful sectarian religion and the new broader and comparably deep vision in the Pensées of Pascal, haunted on the one hand by the figure of Montaigne (and seventeenth-century honnétes hommes like de Méré), yet held by the anguished need for a continuity of belief. In the contortions of that wrestling we may detect a version of the baroque agony which characterized the poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but raised to a higher power of individuality. A sacrificial figure of the first order, he will serve as a warning to subsequent sister souls like Voltaire and Goethe," who learned, perhaps at his expense, that beyond a certain point we must not seek to solve the world's problems alone. Because of his in54

See Henri Peyre: "Friends and Foes of Pascal," Yale French

Studies, N o . 12.

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transigence, his constantly renewed spiralling attempts to force—in the Pensées—a union of spirit and flesh through the single medium of mind, he arrived too early at the harmony of death." Had it come later, his stubborn efforts to "touch both extremes at once" would have ended inevitably in a psychic split, or madness. Most of Pascal's fragments record the attempt to gather in all the ironically escaping loops of chance and becoming, and freeze them into a fixed being, one unnecessarily limited (sectarian) vision. No one should be fooled, by his doctrine concerning the heart, into thinking Pascal practised what he preached in relation to individual human beings. Like Kierkegaard or T . E. Lawrence he was quite incapable of yielding to the reasons of the heart, of giving himself in a personal act of love. But withal he gave generously of himself to the world, and over his prostrate body the artist or writer, for all his disadvantages in the struggle for maturity, will learn some form of the latter, will learn to change directions at the crucial moment, to sidestep if not retreat altogether, to do something else, talk about people, dyke-building, interest himself in empirical matters, or take on a woman to at least try to renew himself in love or a family. For eventually, even the artist assimilates a valuable form of patience from woman86 and the bourgeois society she Negatively, his means of destroying all rational and humanistic views was the doctrine of the absurdity of mere life on earth; but this total cancellation of human good by evil, grandeur by misère, left nothing but pure faith as a "way out" (resolution, Kierkegaardian leap), so pure and uncompromising that it carried him out of this world, like Gide's Alissa. Contrast Montaigne's final humanistic resolution or faith: "j'aime la vie. . . ." 56 This is true even of Mallarmé; it is the central theme of Prose pour des Esseintes. 55

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helps bring about—the "thinking reed" of Pascal will prove capable of bending in the storm, as in La Fontaine's fable, while stiff oaks fall. And if patience solves no problems permanently—nothing here does—nonetheless the gain in the prolongation of the artist's career and achievement is immense. This does not necessarily imply a diminishment in quality, else we must reject all existence beyond the perfect Kierkegaardian Instant of some ephemerid or flameconsumed moth. 57 No, some works by men who learn to trick their way into older age will make very lovely bonfires, worthy successors to the phares of pioneering geniuses like Pascal. Even Pascal, during his so-called "wordly period," learned a good deal from the women of the flourishing and important salons, and he is thought to be the author of an anonymous treatise on the psychology of love. Probably the neatest balancing feat of all in the seventeenth century is precisely between the masculine and feminine souls of each individual, creating that combination of geometric lucidity and lovely flow that is the essence of French Classic art. This is the intellectual grace emerging masterfully, at last, from the Baroque chrysalis. Like all intellectual grace, as opposed to instinctive grace, it is won at the cost of effort, of "male" discipline and self-discipline. T h e stoic religious drive of the turn of the century (Aubigne, Du Vair, Malherbe) passes ironically and insensibly into militant secular forms via the priesthood itself; 57

Yet the fascination of this possibility maintains a strong hold on the interesting figures such as Goethe. One of his best poems, Selige Sehnsucht, is precisely about this moth. Cf. Baiif's Amours de Francine, II, 1; Charles d'Orleans's Rondeau, XXIII, "I burn myself on the candle/like the butterfly."

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Descartes and Corneille will be launched by Jesuit training,88 Racine by the competing Jansenists. Descartes is a marginally literary figure, and with him the "male" faculty of analysis (here, geometric and mathematic lucidity) takes a commanding position. If the sixteenth-century poetic sensibility be imagined a kind of fountain, transcendently fair and bright but as water is, surging sensuously from the earth (we find the image everywhere in the period, from the lovely odes of Ronsard— Bellerie—to the philosophic Fons Vitae of Peter Ramus), in the seventeenth century it becomes a brightly illuminated sourceless fountain, the cascading glass and light of the chandeliers reflected in the mirrors of Versailles, the poetry of the classic plays presented there. And it was Descartes who represented in isolated pure form the fiercely concentrated projection of this brilliant, rather Cold, light playing upon the suspended fountain of art. He had disciplined himself to the breaking point, whereupon, miraculously maintaining his balance, he was able to make himself and the cultured world believe—at least theoretically and for a dazzling moment of history—in a radical dualism,69 believe 58

When asked by August Suter what he had learned from the Jesuits, Joyce replied: "How to gather, how to order and how to present a given material" (Frank Budgen, "Further Recollections of James Joyce," Partisan Review, Fall, 1950). 59 In contrast, the theoretical dualism of the Middle Ages: city of God, city of man, was, in practise, much mitigated by the pullulating life of hierarchies of divine presence in-between. In the Cartesian scheme of things God is already rather aloof, and there is little warming consolation. Before, God, or the Devil, might frighten one near to death, but at least he was there. The modern genius-child's shocking sense of utter neglect—caused first by the mysterious fact of his sensitivity—will be purged conceptually in an existential universe of utter abandonment by God.

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that the personality was divided into two distinct regions, the lower animal part which was entirely dark, a mere soulless mechanism, and the upper spiritual part which was concentratedly bright. Here the enlightened vocation again strongly hints at its schizophrenic or paranoiac underside: the pathological counterpoint of radical dualism is the split personality.60 And we may understand why extreme geniuses like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had, and fervently expressed, particular affinities for classic éclat;61 why Valéry experienced a shock of recognition before the towering "moi" of Descartes, why Sartre admired his fearful freedom. The Cartesian vision of a combining form to offset the inner split, to help integrate his severing personality at a crucially precarious moment of his career—a fusion of geometry and algebra into a co-ordinate system, which implied a union of mind and matter—surged up from a quasi-religious mystical experience,62 the "dream" or crisis of late adolescence he underwent in the German stoveroom. There was a Method in this madness; but gradually, because of the shattering power of the experience, Descartes will sidestep vision83 and, aided by the flourishing 6 0 T h e split has another dimension: at one point in the Méditations Descartes postulates an evil deity who invades the psyche in a Manichean pattern. Cf. Ivan Karamazov or Gide's old musician in Les Faux-Monnayeurs. 8 1 Dostoevsky threatened to blow out his brother's brains if he didn't admit that Racine was the greatest playwright ever; Nietzsche similarly admired L a Rochefoucauld. 6 2 T h e rare epoch makers in science probably all went through this phase; cf. Einstein's assertion that he was a kind of artist or "architect" (cited by Valéry in L'Idée fixe). 6 3 With flashes of rejuvenescence as in the idea of a universal grammar (Letter to R. P. Mersenne, Descartes, ed. Valéry, p. 207).

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scientific fraternity, 94 gravitate more and more toward the empirical and social, contributing to the formation of science in the modern sense." Lesser men will soon learn to avoid vision altogether and to mitigate the precarious imperialism of the mind by integrating from the outset about one faculty: scientific analysis or artistic understanding, the "spirit of geometry" or of "finesse" (Pascal's terms). This is the basic meaning of Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility," which applies just as well to France—up until those fantastic attempts, beginning with Rousseau and culminating with Symbolism, to put the world back together again.86 Although, as a scientist, he represents imperfectly the art of his times, still by his extremeness he illuminates an important tendency of Classicism toward angelism or violent sublimation, followed by a painful relenting. Thus the Discours de la Méthode, summing up this movement—it is written in his fortieth year—describes a spiralling curve which, in a way, is a graph of the whole Classical period. It begins with Jesuit discipline, fuses into da/y.ling light, the 64 Cf. Descartes's correspondence with Père Mersenne, Père Noël, Huygens. 65 The big names of the eighteenth century, in a consciously Cartesian way following science at one remove (as social scientists), will enhance the "dissociation of sensibility"; at that rime a new specialized sensuous art will get under way with Parny and Bertin. Within organized thought a partial attempt at a synthesis of science and art is evidenced by a current of Spinozisric pantheism, which influenced Diderot. 69 The heaven stormers will sometimes remember the pioneering scaling of Descartes; cf. Valéry's Descartes preface; Mallarmé's Notes.

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youthful vision to outshine the glow of the Jesuit Fathers,"7 and in the later pages modulates to a modest, almost repentant, tone. In a kind of coda, the whole curve starts again toward a new level, the Cartesian dream reworked to a social perspective. Indeed, by this time, French culture, through its salons, its thriving correspondence, and its scientific societies, had matured to the point where intellectual refinement had spread to an entire, largely new, upper class. The common language of this class had become fixed, with the help of Vaugelas and the Academy, as the clearest, most adequate and graceful vehicle for conversation known to the modern world; and élite conversation formed a valuable part of Classic literature."8 Even the genius could not—and cannot, vide a purist like Valéry—escape the influence of such a society. Happily so, for one result was that the man of letters could perform feats on the highest tightrope of art and thought without undue risk of catastrophe. The society supports him all around or, past a certain point, at very least holds a net under him to break his fall. Some of Descartes's lucidity characterizes the heroic conceptions of Corneille: a superhuman clarity,69 occasionally tempered by a bourgeois legalism, guides the unwavering nobility of Horace or Nicomède. Any stoicism is inevitably turned upon others as a sort of legitimate sadism—the self87 Despite the Montaigne-like modesty of the opening remarks on "le bon sens," Descartes, like Montaigne, is clearly interested only in the "vérités un peu malaisées à découvrir" which are the illuminations of "un homme seul" as opposed to "tout un peuple" (Part II). 88 It is the essence of Mme. de Sévigné, a large part of Mme. de La Fayette, and important even in the major playwrights. 89 Which, again, somewhat riskily skirts the rigid symmetries of the schizophrenic.

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disciplined parent is also the strict one—and the eternally youthful figure of the Jesuit priest with his familiar fanatic glow70 (which becomes almost a physical quality) passes into the art of the pupil in a secular, more romantic form. The stage is set for the dashing entrance of the brilliant, cruelly right youth, Le Cid. The peak of Corneille's particular affinity for brightness is found in the Mazda-rivalling "Célestes vérités . . . éternelles clartés" of Polyeucte. But the highest focus of this artistic light is achieved by Racine," and here the sadism takes on a voyeur modality,** and clearly delights in trapping some helpless choice specimens—"Ni trop bon, ni trop méchant," Le., "à point" and "au point"—in the cage of the unities, on the mercilessly spotlighted stage, and in watching them, cat-and-mouse fashion, go to their doom. This ritual, which is the essence of theater, reaches a peak of dramatic power in Racine; it even becomes a play within a play, in Britanmcus, when Néron, peeping through a curtain, observes Junie, under perverse duress, send Britannicus to his fate. The word voir reaches a remarkable frequency throughout Racine's work.7" But, as in all such lucid strictness, the artist eventually pales and drops his pen as the period of misery Today we might dub this the "Fulton sheen." The artistic limitations of Corneille have to do with his very (bourgeois) virtues. An ancient dialectic of ethics and esthetics divides him from Racine as it will separate Sartre and Baudelaire (we note that Sartre plumps for a rehabilitation of Cornelian will in his theater). But if one hesitates, as La Bruyère did, to choose one over the other as a figure—the honest writer can never inwardly deny the value of die ethical life, as is often proven by his very fits of impotent raging against it—still, as an artist, Racine must obviously have the edge. 72 The passionate desire to see, or focus, results about this time in the creation of telescopes and microscopes. 71 See, for example, Andromaque, Act V, Scene 3; compare Descartes's "extrême désir [de] voir clair" ( Discours, Part I). 70

71

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and spiritual aridity begins. When he picks it up again to write Phèdre, after almost three years of silence, it is to send the pure intransigent youth, Hippolyte, to his doom, while the wordly and experienced old father, Thésée, survives and laments. In Hippolyte, we may say, Le Cid comes to grief just as Hamlet yields the stage to Horatio and, finally, Prospero. It is particularly fitting that Joad, the father-priest, should come last in this evolving career, at a time when Racine had become sufficiently aware of the "others" to draw up a tract in favor of the poor, which paternal deed caused his eclipse in Louis XIV's favor. The old luminosity persists in his final masterpiece, but in the significantly altered form of an omnipotent sun radiating a city of men, the scene of an annunciation. The pure shining of Esther and the Hymnes are likewise framed in a new religious and social context. The old story of the search for the father and of the attempt to achieve maturity through moderation and tolerance will be told again for royal edification at century's end by the wise old quietist Fénelon in his Télémaque. Here the father is the shrewd Greek traveller, Ulysses, a man who knew how to "bend the knee as well as the bow," and how to use language to trick his way out of a situation.74 Although Fénelon was to begin with a man of extraordinary sensitivity—witness the urbane insights of his Discours à F Académie—in him egocentric literary expres74 Ulysses persists into modern Greek folklore as the wily man; we may be reminded of Shakespeare's Pandarus, a middleman of all-too-human stripe who, at the end of Troilus and Cressida, in his ditty of the busy bee, comes to stand for the leering artist. Cf. Joyce's fully conscious recreation of Ulysses as travelling salesman Bloom, the fat, middle-aged go-between linking the youthful poet to the realer city.

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sion gives way to fatherly concern with the Utopian vision of La Bétique (Télémaque). The important writers of this mellowing fin de siècle are almost without exception moralists: La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fénelon, or else authors of historical memoirs like Saint-Simon. A minor moralist, le Père Bouhours, tries to reconcile the erstwhile radiance with the new bias of common understanding by a fascinating formula of a "bon sens qui brille." " Indeed, the balance, or juggling feat, implied in the word Classicism still runs high. In the marvellously styled portraits of La Bruyère (for whom "there is in art a point de perfection, as there is of goodness or ripeness in nature"), of Madame de La Fayette, in La Princesse de Clèves (which is a model of contained "monotonous" 76 passion, of rich aristocratic greyness à la Watteau), we have the beginning of that poetic-prosaic, socially literary genre par excellence, the artistic novel. In the eighteenth century it will be nourished by Montesquieu through the delightful Lettres Persanes, Voltaire will add precision and crispness as well as fresh concerns with his contes; then, a movement back toward individual poetic sensibility will be made by Rousseau which, both maintained and offset by a powerful reverse movement in Balzac, will turn into the leading art of another epoch of fantastic spiritual juggling: the nineteenth century. For the moment, poetry and intransigence are fairly discredited, and Montesquieu will vent particular scorn on 75

"Bon sens," was the term through which Descartes linked himself to society, following Montaigne—neither very convincingly at the time. Note also that Jansenism, e.g., Pascal's, is a specific form of the force which dampened the youthfully heroic concept of la gloire (see P. Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle ). 76 Camus's term.

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ranting versifiers." Partly, as was the case with Pascal's earlier strictures, this marked a healthy trend away from stale preciosity toward natural language, in our continuing dialectic of forms. For, although it is true that lyric poetry, which had run stronger in this period than the manuals are wont to have us believe, had made some gains in the way of self-discipline, purification, and composition, beginning with Malherbe, and culminating with La Fontaine,78 it still had far to go. Poetry will continue to profit from the lesson of prose masters like Montesquieu and Rousseau until with the Symbolists it will hurl a challenge back in the face of the greatest of them.78 The diamantine sparkle of the worldly culture which flourished in the radiance of Louis XIV's reign hushes into humility: Racine makes peace with Port Royal, Montespan and Sablé retreat to their convents and perform good works, La Fontaine commits himself to his Maker; meanwhile, Racine writes his defense of the poor, La Bruyère depicts the plight of the peasant, Fénelon breaks with his sovereign for humanitarian reasons.80 The grand siècle 77

His poets are Socrates, Montaigne, Malebranche, Toland. These gains are evident even in Voiture and Benserade and certainly in Tristan L'Hermite, Saint-Amant, Théophile de Viau, whose ode, Le Matin, reveals astonishing flashes of sensitivity, unrivalled before Romanticism. 79 Mallarmé, while quite capable of appreciating Zola and Tolstoy, was quite unawed by the latter's "simple and ample genius." 80 If it is true, as Sartre says in Qu'est-ce que la littérature, that La Bruyère's depictions are less than frontal attacks on the prevailing order, this has to do mostly with the aesthetic dimension of poetic writers of all ages (and not only the Medieval and Classical periods) who are naturally more or less ambivalent about human fate, less disposed to advocate action. But the mere awareness of "others" implies a rudimentary ethical orientation. These honest visions help engender a tenseness and consciousness of evil in more active men and incite them to change. 78

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goes out to the solemn toll of church bells. A brash group of hommes nouveauXs1 tries to seize cultural power—the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns—but is sat upon by the Classic stalwarts, who close ranks in this last defiant show of the bright old values. The last is Olympian silence, as the dead monarch is borne through the streets of the capital to the jeers of a populace which had long since ceased to be amused at the spectacle of royal pomp and circumstance kept alive by their privation. 81 One of them, however, Charles Perrault, was partly responsible for a work which rivalled in emotional depth the best the grand siècle had to offer: the Contes de Ma Mère VOye. Another, Fontenelle, is an authentic precursor of the philosophes, helping educate a broad public in the fresh scientific spirit through beautifully lucid, elegant essays.

5. In the Age of

Reason

In the eighteenth century, a moral breakdown was evident throughout the declining years of Louis XIV, and, after his death in 1715, a ravelling of the whole fabric of society threatened under the dissolute Regency. When the new struggle for control is expressed in the work of the first philosophe, Montesquieu, this time the resurgent Cartesian light is projected clearly onto the vision of a better world than the one official Catholicism and monarchic nationalism had been able to provide. At first the vision is graced with the artistic style Montesquieu had inherited from the Classical period—particularly La Bruyère—and we have Les Lettres Persanes, a masterpiece of the epistolary novel. But the satirical observations on the foot-loose and transitional French society grow in scope and precision until Montes-

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quieu becomes the first sociologist with the monumental Esprit des Lois. And whereas in the seventeenth century the poetry of Malherbe, La Fontaine, Boileau, and the poetic styles of Racine, Pascal, Bossuet, were very nearly the essence of Classicism (in its fuller sense), now, in the early and middle years of the eighteenth century, poetry or even artistic prose is reduced to a quite secondary position. True, there are the pale grace and elegance of Marivaux1 and a few scattered genuinely lyric poets sudi as Parny and Dorat.2 But the big names are Montesquieu, Diderot, d'Alembert, Voltaire, and the biggest intellectual effort is a group one, the Encyclopédie. Generally, the philosophes seem to be, like Descartes, only marginally literary and, if pursued in one direction, would lead us far from our essential concerns into the realm of the ad hoc history of the ideas, the philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, of the period. To some extent this is a matter of historical chance, of spirit of the times, even of intellectual fashion but, more importantly, it illustrates the tremendous individual scope and 1 W e have described, in a previous chapter, the rhythm of the early Baroque as a fairly rigid symmetry organizing relatively simple gushes of emotion into neat, bright (or dark), and showy "garden plots," and, on the surface of its facades, or spicing its texts, when the emotion is thoroughly dominated by stoic constructivism, releasing flourishes of rococo decoration. Through Classicism and eighteenth-century Neo-Qassicism the rhythm refines into the more integrated art work combining a delicate network of control (composition, subtle design) with discreet sensual values. Marivaux, Watteau, Couperin, Rameau, and the eighteenthcentury lyric poets illustrate some definite gains in this direction, despite the engagé nature of the cultural era as a whole. 2 The seventeenth century opened with a stoic trend, closed with a minor epicurean one in lyric poetry, graced by figures like La Fare and Chaulieu, who helped prepare the way for the warmer, more solidly human and sensual tones in Parny and Dorat.

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power of these writers. For all of the philosophes brought to their responsible tasks authentic literary gifts and, at bottom, daemonic personalities. From this constellation of forces there emerged, on the one hand, remarkably sensitive styles within essayistic limits and a perfecting of French prose into something approaching Pascal's ideal of absolute "propriétéappositeness or adequacy; on the other hand, these were prophetic, even messianic, temperaments which, in the face of the emotional power of the enemy, sectarian religion, took on the ironic quality of anti-fanatical fanaticism. Thus, when attacking the "spirit of vertigo" in proselytizing religion, which threatens to send humanity over a cliff, Montesquieu erects in its stead a passionate belief in "equity." The only reason why this new faith seems, and momentarily is, less vertiginous than the old is that at first it is held in tension by the resistance of the latter, by the concrete struggle for power. But as the resistance weakens, we shall see a strange thing happening . . . For the moment, the horizontal axis of "equity," concern for the "others," "love of mankind," 8 replaces the vertical axis of "love of God." Originally Christianity had embodied both these axes, in Christ's own doctrine, and seventeenth-century Catholicism, especially with Bossuet, had tried valiantly to maintain this balance; but the relative emphasis on narrow faith, within the egocentric interests of one successful nation, tends in a decadence to become excessive transcendence, as we amply have witnessed to be 3 This can, and does, become a typically bourgeois, familyoriented kind of sentimentality: "le drame larmoyant''' (Nivelle de la Chaussée), "le drame bourgeois" ( D i d e r o t ) . Sentimentality is a mild brand of romanticism, a bourgeois (middling: between extreme renunciation and indulgence) f o r m of emotion par excellence. It can, and does, develop a violent f o r m : sensiblerie.

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the case with Classicism, which ended in a general retreat into the self and—Jansenistic or Quietistic—communion with the Highest. As against this vertical solipsistic stance, the new horizontal emphasis is a kind of tentative return to roots, a tilting of the top to the side, a halfway revolution (literally) of the intelligentsia, aiming to make common cause with the middle class in a program of peaceful change and growth. This can be better understood by looking ahead for a comparison to Rousseau's doctrine of return to nature and Hegel's radical (from radix, root) masterslave relationship which will pave the way for a fully revolutionary ideology, the utter Utopians and Karl Marx. But, for the moment we have Montesquieu's predominantly temperate, horizontal bias:4 "love of mankind, piety towards the parents, are always the first deeds of religion" (Les Lettres Persanes). By religion, Montesquieu, with his broad comparative approach—seeing France from Persia and so covering vast international reaches in his tolerant perspective—meant universal religion as reduced to its highest common denominator in a form of deism. With hindsight, we are forewarned by the very glow of the vision: very soon now a horizontal passion for the "others" will send Napoleon's men and horses headlong across the face of the map, the ironic result of which quest will be the resurrected panache and towering hierarchy of a new empire. For, in time, the horizontal tends to become the vertical again—we may sense their underlying oneness when they meet, visually, in the distance of a perspective—as we * Awareness of the sociological significance in the fact that France lies in a temperate zone forms a fascinating theme linking four centuries from Saint-Evremond through Montesquieu, Mme. de Staël, Taine to Giraudoux, Camus, Siegfried.

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spin through the stations of an eternal cross." But still, in the long view, there are spiralling gains in breadth while depth is largely maintained (and eventually even increased in an ambitious poet or two), and, when Montesquieu tells us that the best way for him to please his God is to "live as a good citizen in the society where You had me bom and as a good father in the family You gave me," we are moved by something authentically prophetic, because the accents then were genuine, pioneering, hard-come-by, and would help humanity, in France and the entire West,® to weave a marvellous new fabric of culture in the nineteenth century. The same land of ironic reversal which characterized eighteenth-century history as a whole is found in Voltaire's Disc ours sur la vrde vertu, which first tells us "Love God, but love mortal men" and "It's not enough to be equitable, one must serve others; / The just man is a doer of good works" (he uses the neologism "bienfaisant") thus raising the ante on Montesquieu. Voltaire even momentarily plays the all-forgiving father with "lift our brother from misery and pardon our enemies." We are about to believe that here is a truly mild and rather feminine virtue at work when suddenly he swings into an attack on the "gentle and discreet" and passionately calls for "sublime heart" and hails the "male vigor . . . which repelled the assaults of the calumniator, or ardent fanaticism . . . their imbecilic troop," and so on with the true Arouet vitriol. 5 Recalling our epistemological double-polar dialectic between the dimensions, a higher power of the one occurring between the poles of one dimension. 6 In America, James Madison was a particular and effective admirer.

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There is a special revelation of the new, fertile struggle with the daemon in Voltaire's brilliant rebuttal of Pascal, who is a "misanthrope," but a "sublime" one. His triumph over Pascal was no easier than Pascal's over Montaigne, and we are impressed once more by the "passionate dialogue" (Gide) of French letters; in a real sense a Montaigne rises up and defends himself before each lively generation through spiritual sons like Voltaire: "a country gentleman of the time of Henri III, who is learned in a period of ignorance, a philosopher among the fanatics, and who paints under his name our weaknesses and our follies, is a man who will always be loved." Diderot's "pantophilia" (love of all) is of the same fiery order, but he is rather closer to Rousseau than to Montesquieu or Voltaire. Undoubtedly he spoke from first-hand knowledge when he exclaimed "How near is genius to madness!" There is something of Rousseau's thorough ambivalence (as opposed to Voltaire's snorting rejection of metaphysics and of evil as a putative part of the universal Leibnizian harmony7) and even of the Hegelian dialectical vision in his unblinking awareness of the ironies of morality as expressed in his vivacious prose satire, Le Neveu de "Rameau? In his charming novel Jacques le Fataliste (published posthumously) there is a master-servant relationship approaching Hegel's radical conception, according to which the strong-willed underdog draws from his very subjection 7 In his rejoinder to Rousseau's well-known Letter to Voltaire, Voltaire strongly emphasizes a choice of concrete values; cf. Candide and the Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne. 8 Hegel admired it and commented upon it at length; Goethe translated it; Marx and Freud knew and appreciated it (see Trilling's "Freud and Literature" in The Liberal Imagination).

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the moral power to oust his oppressor.9 So that, together with Rousseau, Diderot helps to bring the compass point of total political orientation, of ideology, all the way down from Bossuet's or Calvin's theocratic dead North through Montesquieu's aristocratic-bourgeois North-East and Voltaire's due East to something approaching the hot, primitively fertile South of the nineteenth-century Utopian socialists. His Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville steers in this direction, expressing a Rousseauistic and romantic faith in human instinct. His materialism {Le Rêve de UAlembert), his lay ethics, and whatever he retained of Spinoza's pantheism were all of this nature-embracing order; together with the leading minds of his time,10 he migrated spiritually toward the warmth of biological man. The Nature philosophy of Goethe and the organic Werden of Hegel, who also had both gone to school to the Flying Dutchman—"When one begins to philosophize one must first read Spinoza" (Hegel)—will carry us another leg of this journey, relayed by the good ship Beagle. It should now be clear that even in this eighteenthcentury Age of Reason, when poetry seems almost to disappear underground, we have really never departed decisively far from our original archetype of the writer. In appraising the literary worth of the rangy sort of writer, or man of letters, we must somehow weigh together the true poetry (a few lines of Voltaire, for example) or artistic prose, on the one hand, with, on the other, the whole gamut of diminishing art reaching toward the plain 9 There is a rising theme of servants jostling or replacing masters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, the plays of Lesage (Turcaret), Marivaux (L'Ile aux esclaves), Beaumarchais (Le Barbier de Seville, Le Mariage de Figaro). 10 French psychologists, philosophers, idéologues, like Condillac, Buffon, d'Holbach; British empiricists like Hume.

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prose of scientific fact. If there is full activity across this range the total literary weight will be considerable, despite absence of all activity at the extreme pole of poetry and despite the light artistic substance as we approach the other extreme. Granted that it is difficult to arrive at any exact estimation, nevertheless it should be evident that a Diderot, who probably never penned a line of lyric poetry as such, is a greater literary figure than, say, Tristan L'Hermite who wrote a handful of beautiful strophes.11

Jean-Jacques Rousseau may be thought of as another "sublime misanthrope," a homo lupus hojmni12 in philosophe clothing. The politically oriented times weighed heavily upon him, and the struggle between poet and social thinker produced particularly frenzied versions of Utopian synthesis, dreaming of universal, nay, cosmic brotherhood in the spirit of Tolstoy (who wore his image in a locket) or Dostoevsky. The philosophe principle of justice tempered with mercy becomes all mercy. Hence, where Montesquieu found an inner check of SquitS in all men, Rousseau saw conscience, a more primitive, less legalistic and rational, force rooted in cosmic nature (Emile). But, however plunging the vision, he managed to present it 11

W e shall come up against this same problem in balancing the clumsy but powerful Balzac with the more cautious and perfect Flaubert. Or again in pitting Jean-Paul Sartre—who can write like an angel when he puts himself to it—against Camus, who has more finished lines here and there in his slim novels and generally outclasses Sartre stylistically in his slight, youthful fashion. 12 It all depends on your view; Rousseau, like Dante, thought everybody else was a wolf. It is possible to sympathize with both views as Sartre manages to do, seeing salauds everywhere, but including himself.

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through brilliantly lucid formulas in the best tradition of eighteenth-century essayistic prose. No one is deluded any more by Rousseau's avowed belief in nature, for he is the least natural man, the "sickest animal," of them all: 13 his optimism about the instincts is completely cancelled b y his pessimism concerning concrete living forms. But, like Pascal, he attempted to embrace the extremes of life. The Social Contract in particular reveals this fantastic straddle (which becomes at times, as it threatened to do with Pascal and Descartes, a split and fits of madness): on the one hand a Spinozistic objectivity and quasi-mathematical analysis of political institutions,14 on the other, Utopia. Rousseau's attempt to find an ideal harmony of ruler and ruled here and now—instead of projecting a dialectic into an unknown future, as Hegel did1" —was bound to fail. 18 Moreover, the emotional tone of his supposedly objective exposition of the various forms of government was heavily prejudicial to the monarchy. A l Cf. his treatment of his own children as compared to Entile. " This too-perfect logic breaks down at one point into the exasperated remark, "Wait, I can't solve everything at once." Cf. Spinoza's Ethics in which an initial attempt to balance the positive and negative passions geometrically is distorted by a human distaste for negative passions like fear; but since fear keeps cropping up as a necessary step to adequation, Spinoza must deal with it in increasingly bulky footnotes. Rousseau's whole career follows this pattern, the fate of all who try to prove too neatly, conclusively, and absolutely. Note that Spinoza's pantheism is closer to Rousseau's supposed "deism" than to the deism of the other philosophes (except Diderot). The difference is that Rousseau claims belief in a personal God, First Cause, Spinoza in an immanent One who is All. But the tone of Rousseau's faith is pantheistic. 15 Not, however, in his Philosophy of History where he sees it coming in Germany under Friedrich Wilhelm III. 16 His efforts to force the issue by various schemes—e.g., by telescoping authority so that you can't quite see the hand which strikes you—are curiously self-deceptive. 13

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though, like practically all the important post-Renaissance political theorists who preceded him, he ends, in a final work (Lettres écrites de la montagne) by favoring some form of bourgeois aristocratic, or republican, government (under the guise of a constitutional monarchy) in an effort to stem the tide of his influence, this was really too little and too late. The damage had been done—not only by the anti-monarchic tone of the Social Contract and by its revolutionary doctrine that the people made and hence had the inalienable right to unmake any political covenant (actually this point is ambiguously presented) but, more importantly, by the ideological weight emerging from all his various writings, including the two Discours, Emile, and the Nouvelle Héloïse. On the whole this doctrine is radical in the true sense of a return to the roots. For example, in the Discours sur les Arts he comes close to advocating anarchy, an abolishment of all civilized institutions. In a subsequent preface he revises his remarks to mean that we should keep those civilized forms already extant; but, again, the general effect had been made. His attitudes towards theater, "natural" education, adult communion with nature, breast-feeding, all further this downward, chthonian trend. Rousseau is one of the most significantfiguresin Western civilization. Like Shakespeare's Hamlet he notably represents, as in his own self-portrait, man's problems at a critical phase of his development and, like Sigmund Freud (who also found it was time to put a damper on our sublimations) he offers new solutions. The manifold splits (or effervescent fissioning) which are the essence of mentality, seem in certain periods to outpace human control: the homo duplex, or multiplex, who is by definition homo sapiens, is menaced with disintegration as the branches of

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mental growth proceed in their spontaneous divergence; and as the cultural growth which reflects the inner one produces its increasingly isolated individuals and specialists, its divisions of labor, its separate classes (Discours sur

F origine de F inégalité), a man may easily get the sensation

of being "out on a limb." He may then nostalgically note that the true tree seasonally halts its development and, as its sap runs back down toward the ground, seems to settle for a sort of semi-existence, with the basic idea of a total return and metamorphosis always somewhat present. Rousseau's radical notions follow this pattern, a yearning for total return modified into a compromise version of a middling, semi-primitive society, something like the pastoral idyll, the peaceful village life dreamed of by, no doubt, all citified men. In sum, Rousseau illustrates, in extraordinary fruit-fly fashion, many of the determining points which, we noted earlier, characterize the serious Western writer generally: the original wound, present everywhere in his imagery from the first barrier which is singled out in the Discours as the source of all social evil—it has the blackly and divisively linear quality of the biblical serpent17—to the marital (and Oedipal) fence which separates Saint Preux from Julie in his novel; the split, around this evil-in-the-midst-of-desire, into extreme psychic opposites—on the one hand rigid male doctrine and sticklike sense of direction, or aggression against the prevailing powers, on the other a feminine suppleness in dialectic contortions, a marvellous flow of ideas and articulateness, a supine openness to suppositions and natural impressions. The two opposites combine in his " T h e eighteenth century, through its doctrine of the good natural man, tried to abolish original sin, but the banished devil returned manifold, for example, through Rousseau's obsessions.

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total achievement—which might be symbolized by Baudelaire's thyrsus—but during certain phases of his chequered life the only way he could bring the divergent parts together (and this too is highly characteristic of our most serious artists) was through the violent synthesis of collapse, nervous crises, and even fits of madness. A more controlled method was the new kind of emotion, sensitivity, or sensiblerie, he did most to propagate: the woundsoothing flow of tears, which typified Thomme sensible as did the increasingly appreciated middling, male-female, faculty of imagination. Rousseau's split between extreme opposite commitments was based, in sum, on an emotional struggle of the tensest sort.18 In his Confessions (Book VII, the Zulietta episode) he tells us that life had tantalizingly given him desires but at the same time had poured a poison into his head to spoil them. His love affairs will cathartdcally reproduce this pattern by always including a checking element, usually in the form of a third person, terzo incòmodo: in the Nouvelle Héloise, we noted, there is the eternal husband; in the delightful cherry-picking party of the Confessions there are two girls and therefore a certain limit to the equivocal proceedings (later two nymphs and a faun will re-enact the provocative tableau"). In such a situation the mind takes over in a seemingly endless revery like ariverflowing on between its two opposing banks, until some frontal barrier is inevitably met to counter the forward drift and a madly frothing, eddying whirlpool ensues, as the water 18 Note the double-polarity of male-female (or spirit-nature) as vertical, pleasure-pain as horizontal. This is the armature of Spinoza's Ethics. 19 This is a spatial (simultaneous) version of Don Juan's multiple women, with the old wound present in what Mallarmé calls "le mal (Tètre deux"

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rises "like the sea in a chasm." In the important scenes of his long novel the themes become strongly and even hysterically ambivalent: a toying with the thought of suicide, a tearful tryst, a description of "Those sorts of beauty which please only sensitive souls and seem horrible to others." Beautiful ugliness, the jagged rhythm of mountains and valleys, will grow into the imagery of the Romantic agony. These are remote descendants of the simple crumpling, the stark adolescent rhythm, which we found in the poetry of the late Medieval and Baroque periods, here combined with the important movement back toward nature, even down to glimpses of its bedrock:20 the ledgy setting of Goethe's Novelle, or the Walpurgisnacht of Faust, Wordsworth's "rocks and trees," Ossian's fierce scenery, Byron's Alps loom up in a rapid tour cThorizon. In one remarkable passage of his novel, Rousseau describes the sensational effect of simultaneous seasons superimposed up a mountain side, and we are put in mind that the best of nineteenth-century literature will be absorbed in a daemonic effort to siphon time up into simultaneous space.21 Such images of the true poet's desire to have it all "but here and now upon this bank and shoal of time" come about through a stubborn series of tensions, with a stoic emphasis on Negation as the most noticeable— because painful—fact of this way of life. In this light we may understand Rousseau's defense of Leibniz' "necessary evils" in his Letter to Voltaire, a view which can be followed to a certain point but which can obviously attain In the Chanson de Roland, for example, such glimpses were from much closer range. 21 Joseph Frank has treated this in connection with Madame Bovary (See Bibliography); cf. also our UOeuvre de Mallarmé, pp. 128-129. 20

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toppling lunatic extremes. At such a point Voltaire, and most men (long before), cry "no, it hurts too much"; but the Rousseaus go staggering on. The century comes in, all unknowing, under the banner of Hegel's extremely stubborn, however abstract, effort to embrace the worst: reine Negation.23 In his later years, Rousseau, after a lifetime of hectic wanderings and self-inflicted persecutions, begins to settle down and accept a more narrowly integrated version of himself: the muser-aloud and lyric prose poet. In the Confessions, there are passages recording privileged moments ("Une Nuit i la Belle Etoile") which attain an acuteness of sensibility perhaps unprecedented in France. And when he goes into exile on the lie de St. Pierre it is in utter isolation and communion with self far beyond that of Ronsard returning to paternal haunts or that of the worthy succession of poets of solitude—often pre-Romantic in tone—from Saint-Amant to Parny. He has reached that last stage of self-awareness, of narcissistic quasi-embryonic coiling upon self which exists, though seldom recorded, at both ends of life and occasionally in pre-sleep, at die threshold of the eternal womb. Lying on his back, drifting in his boat like the wounded Tristan, the child Rimbaud, or the embyro on the waters of birth, he lets himself go to a revery more purely free than the river of his novel, now come down home to open sea. Through this consciousness, this noumenon tingling with the highest presence of active passivity, there pass sheer phenomena, the naked 22 Voltaire, however, showed himself capable of understanding this view very deeply in his Dictionnaire philosophique, under "Homme." 23 Preceded by Spinoza's Determmatio est negatio, followed by Heidegger's Sein-Zum-Tode.

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appearances of reality, fleeting into being and disappearing like ephemeridae or the myriad pinpoint reflections sparkling the surface of the lake. He has "no other sentiment of privation or enjoyment, of pleasure or pain, of desire or fear, but that alone of our existence." For a brief eternal moment all the rest has been negated away.

At times we have seen the incarnate rhythm of the poet's more violent emotions as the contorted postures of the "Baroque agony" or again the jagged landscapes of the precursors and anticipated representatives of Romanticism; at times there have been quieter moments, as with Ronsard, when the rhythm refined into the delicate convolutions of a rose, the warbling of a bird, the pulsation of a fountain.24 Now this latter periodicity momentarily refines, with Rousseau, into the merest titillation ruffling the spirit like the surface of the lake, a shiver of pantheistic nature, as the way is prepared for the more consistently delicate sensitivities of the Romantic poets—Lamartine's nightingale, Musset's rustling spring, Hugo's trembling crepuscule— and eventually Baudelaire's "frisson nouveau." At their best, these poets, like the momentary Rousseau, will attain that awareness of pure phenomena—in the modern sense approaching Whitehead's "prehensions"— which will mark the élite sensibility of the nineteenth century, both in art and general thought. Rousseau became the great pioneer of this sensibility because, as Jean StaroThese two extremes of rhythm (the delicately lyric and the passionately, primitively dramatic) together define a complex modality of the daemonic total rhythm of the poet's temperament. Both are found in the best poems, with the violent rhythm serving as a kind of bass. 24

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binski has said, he insistently sought a state of complete honesty, of "transparency of the heart"; such lucidity requires courage as well as a kind of madness; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this courage took a militantly concrete form of Spartan religious or anti-religious discipline. Now that this battle is largely over there is little left but the courage of despair. This is the new kind of virtue which will be justified—despite the weak palinode —by Chateaubriand's René and described by Keats as "negative capability." But with some strange exceptions one suspects poets, even in the seventeenth century, had never been really militant, really stoic in the ordinary sense, though the framework of their time undoubtedly provided much support. The courage of despair is actually a higher power of the poet's ancient moral rhythm, new only in the critical awareness of it and probably in its intensity. It is the deepest quality of the individual soul now left utterly alone to its struggle within a Lucretian cosmos from which the gods are aloof indeed. The outworn religious and social forms cling on for a while and a few anguished souls—traditionalistes, like Rivarol, Joseph de Maistre, Balzac,1® Barrés—try to prop them up again, in contradiction to their own truest belief, by an external effort to shore up the crumbling walls against the cold openness. Others, like Musset and Leconte de Lisle, will futilely rail against the new social order, speak of a mal du siècle and a "rabble" as if everything were the fault of the Zeitgeist or the "others," in a highly unconvincing way. But most of these figures come to eventually 25

28

In Jean-Jacques

Rousseau:

la transparence

et Tobstacle

(Paris:

Plon, 1958). 26 More complexly and hesitantly; mostly in a practical spirit, to keep the ignorant in line.

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face themselves and the truth of their artistic being; and with the increasing isolation from society, in the initial phase of each artist's difficult growth, life becomes crammed into the individual fate. Hated, it is hasard, guignon; and when the artist comes to see the entire universe as a projection of his own being (and perhaps to understand how much of a hand he has in his own misfortunes) heaven will be momentarily repeopled with his own image, a fiendishly talented Adversary (Hugo's A Villequiers), an ironic Keeper of the silence (Vigny's Mont des Oliviers). Conversely there are moments of glory, amor fati, when the heavens are stormed, Venus is ravished with incredibily quelling "hurrahs" (Hugo's Satyre and Ibo; Mallarmé's Faune and La Gloire). When a Balzac, departing from such a sensibility—the moral depths of which are attested by La Peau de Chagrin, Louis Lambert and Le Colonel Chabert, the poetic intensity by Le Lys dans la Vallée—extends from it, in an effort to exorcise it, across the map of society with a fantastic Napoleonic ambition, the lyric poets, no less courageous and ambitious, though lacking something in outer mobility, will realize that their only chance for significant discovery lies with further penetrations into the dark places of the soul. Nerval's plunges into self will produce occasional madness and eventually suicide; Hugo and Baudelaire, who were tougher, were equally familiar with these realms. Mallarmé, who was toughest of all in this inner fight, barely skirted the abyss with Igitur, which represents a naked account of what was probably the most stubborn and successful of all attempts to stay with self, standing in total darkness before a mirror of self-consciousness, until he feels he sees the very texture of reality. The experience was as shattering as Descartes's similar one (in his Notes

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he later recalls this "Father"), and having learned patience from it and from the example of Nerval (Le Guignon), after a lifetime spent extending this vision—not across the face of the map à la Balzac but through the resources of the French language—the way is prepared for the creation of a cosmogonie Poem, the most ambitious poetic attempt of any literature. As Mallarmé himself said of Flaubert, the true revolutions are in syntax, which is the core of literary vision forged in the creative heart where the inner battles are fought and won with the courage of despair. Our nineteenth-century stage of the writer's journey will lead, starting from the crossroads of Rousseau, primarily in these two directions; the imperialistic and visionary prose of Balzac, the equally ambitious poetry of Mallarmé, brothers under the skin. At the end of this, to say the least, fertile, artistic epoch, an attempt will be made to reconcile these two paths in one work: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. At which convergent moment in literary history all ways of the writer will seem to lead Swann's Way. From Rousseau to Proust, the ripening of the French literary vocation through the richest of all golden ages of art—surely we shall be swamped. But, sticking to the very most important routes, the grandes lignes, we may yet emerge on the other side, having found some main directions out.

6. From Rousseau to Proust

Critical insight into human nature, which had grown with the gradual breakdown of the religious order, was afforded a grim opportunity to peer into the depths by the thorough rending of the social fabric during the final years of the Old Régime. Rousseau's particular insights had been somewhat obfuscated by a pre-revolutionary sentimentality concerning spontaneous human behavior, and when he did open himself to naked appearances toward the end of his career it was in the realm of outdoor nature rather than of men: he became a botanist and a lyric prose-poet. But there were others who pushed to neo-classical extremes that lucidity concerning human nature which had characterized French literature from Montaigne and Descartes on. The bare motivations of conduct now held few secrets from

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Laclos, Sade, Restif de la Bretonne, or their foreign contemporaries, Goethe1 and Blake. Coming at a time when the ruling society had failed, this perspicacity takes on an aspect of destructive cynicism in Laclos,' presented in neoclassical, almost Racinian, language, and of anarchic penetration and violence in Sade, who launches a wild individual attempt at regeneration by apocalypse, in the spirit of Blake and Dostoevsky. This double mood, fostered by the merciless analysis of the idéologues, permeates the revolutionary period. In its violence there are the germs of Romanticism. Thus within the rationality, control, and calm of neo-Classicism we find the ironic preconditions of an outburst, of which one form was the Revolution itself and which, in the following era, when public action has been discredited, will break forth anew in the individual life styles of all the little Napoleons: JuHen Sorel, Rastignac, Vautrin, who are as egocentrically passionate as they are lucid. For the moment, in the waning eighteenth century, there is a world of strange inversions in which a dream of innocence is wrung from the cruel heart of the tiger. The pithiest expression of this is found abroad, in Blake's tiger "burning bright/ In the forests of the night" or again in the escaped lion and tiger of Goethe's Novelle, the former tamed by a pure little boy's singing 1 Wilhelm Meister exhales a refreshingly whole and unhypocritical mental climate, in which even the women speak their minds; critics like Edmund Wilson and Louis Kronenberger have admired this eighteenth-century spirit; in England Pope and Gibbon contributed greatly to it. 2 T h e perverse, adulterous Eros flows through the geometry of situations which are ordered like a chess game. In one scene of the Liaisons dangereuses the husband and wife are in adjacent rooms, the lover is lodged across the corridor, and the cynical jeu de Yamowr without hasard begins its rigidly determined moves, its elective affinities.

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him a song of universal guiltlessness, of lion and lamb. The artistic image of this special union of opposites is found in the black and gold stripes of the tiger (and its cage) or again, obsessively, in the fascinating terror of a fire in the night, which vividly recalls Blake as well as the hallucinating sack of Troy in Andromaque. This baroque-tinged tradition of "fearful symmetry" will be carried into the nineteenth century by Madame de Staël, Stendhal, Balzac, all of whom are apt to observe the more soul-searing of emotions through an eighteenth-century grill-work of ideology, which is subtly present in the prison bars behind which Fabrice, Julien, Vautrin smolder and burn. Even Baudelaire is—witness the geometric hallucinations of Rêve parisien—a child of this long classical and neo-classical heritage. These manifestations are a natural artistic expression of some starkly tense moments in intellectual man's struggle to maintain a difficult but necessary balance of Eros on a high-wire of individualistic civilization.8 Another telling incarnation of the mood is found in the theme of Icarus in Goethe's Faust II, Nerval's Christ aux Oliviers, Shelley's Adonais* or the weightier version of another ancient motif, the perilous voyage, the lonely Captain, from Lamartine, Vigny, and Hugo through Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, Zola, Maupassant retain much of the pre-Symbolist version of this mood, which is more dramatic than lyric, more typical of the novel or theater than of poetry or the Symbolist novel. * Later, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses; there are numerous related images in nineteenth and twentiethcentury literature and art, such as Banville's wire-walker, Redon's "mysterious juggler," Alain-Fournier's chair-scaling, down-slithering Pierrot, the siren-haunted mariner of Régnier. 8

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While many strong minds will manage the feat, the failures will become more noticeable, partly because of the unprecedented height of the fall, partly because sensitive people in a loosening order have more time and "freefloating anxiety" to concern themselves with such, now representative, fates. This teetering with the social props falling on all sides, was, in short, alarming, and one late eighteenth-century reaction was in the pattern of Rousseau, an attempt to avoid the problems of equilibrium by turning the clock of Eros backward which, since time is irreversible, is expressed spatially by a forced, deliberate return to nature (Empson's "pastoral" spirit) or a masquerading cult of the little people and of the Arcadian past (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chinier, Mme. de Stael). The visual art of the period followed suit, with imitations of Greek and Roman classicism, but again the result was apt to be a terrifying clarity: witness the Death of Marat by David, which radiates a classically cool horror rivalling that of Ch&uer's latrtbes. There is a provisionally more successful, and more promising, attempt to break out of the prison of the intellect in the new emphasis on mystic, irrational faith. The mysticism which had recurrently been incorporated into official Christianity will soon emerge again in the form of the aesthetic Christianity of Chateaubriand; but generally the Church had been excessively compromised by its adherence to social reaction, and the important early manifestations of this mood lie with Swedenborg, Ballanche, Saint-Martin, Cagliostro, Mesmer, and a host of varyingly interesting or amusing mystagogues. Within literature and art proper, partly influenced by the professional mystics, there is a corresponding plunge into the life of the imagina-

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tion, of sensibility, of sensiblerie, and, eventually, the more primitive senses" and profound sensuality. The suffering occasioned by the Revolution catalyzed this new growth, brought about the further dissolution of spiritual barriers in all directions. When unexplored layers of the self, the deep life of the senses, are brought up into artistic consciousness there is created a new awareness of the power of the cosmos radiating from the soul, a feeling of "universal analogy" or, in later jargon, "vertical synesthesia"; simultaneously there is a fresh sense of breadth in art as all the faculties tend to be exploited including the senses of hearing and of smell, eventually with an awareness of the underlying oneness: "Perfumes, colors, sounds, harmonize" (Baudelaire); this will later receive the rather cold tag of "horizontal synesthesia." a The hunger is unappeasable, and, when some restless spirits strike out in quest of new sensations, literature is enriched by contact with sister arts, music, sculpture, painting. Momentarily (and recurrently) a general aesthetics tends to replace a poetics, though in time there will be a salutary swing back to literary autonomy. A further widening of spiritual horizons comes from beyond the borders of France itself, with an enhanced consciousness of other cultures, partly brought about by returning émigrés. In all of this shuttling back and forth and up and down there are noteworthy gains in the weaving of civilization: true to the original daemonic rhythm of the poet, the 'Hearing, smell, and touch are physiologically deeper rooted than the Racinian voir. 8 There will gradually arise a dialectic of synesthesia (Wagner, Baudelaire) versus autonomy of each art (Wickelmann, Lessing). Mallarmé marks an important systolic return to poetic autonomy after profiting from the diastolic excursion ("reprendre son bien").

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downward concerns are dialectically compensated by a rise in achieved form, in organized art and thought. Just as in Plato's Statesman the mere Mean, a "child" of the Greater and the Less, replaces the parent Greater; as in Hegel's system the mediating Synthesis replaces an original positive Thesis; as in history the inferior middle class replaces the aristocracy; as in the history of art the mixture of beauty and ugliness (the real, Hugo's "le caractéristique") replaces a sublime become preciosity, so in the growth of artistic vision through the exploitation of new faculties, a relatively primitive and in-between faculty (midway between logic and bodily sensation), the imagination, will tend to replace classic rationality7 in the aesthetic theses of Kant, Coleridge, Hegel, Hugo, Balzac, Poe. Each of the foregoing Means becomes itself a "parent," a new, higher power of the Greater, Thesis, aristocracy, the sublime, as a new "child" is born and life, like the galaxy it inhabits, goes on its spiralling way.8 If the newborn is truly original, it will be from unexploited depths of the psyche (the primitive, the child's world), of society (the proletariat, the criminal dregs), offlesh,all made into spirit by the poet's weaving rhythm. An increasing emphasis on the body's feelings fused with a growing awareness—which will move from a post-revolutionary "sad lucidity of soul" (Arnold) to less personally dramatic but, rather, seriously 7 Even though classic "raison" was itself a mean, it was, or became, sublime in relation to the new "imagination." •Morally, what first appears as realism, born between idealism and cynicism, becomes at best a new kind of unblinking, less quixotic, idealism. In this lengthening process the phase of moral realism (and even an apparent cynicism) becomes increasingly predominant in the novel, including its protagonists. See Raymond Giraud's illuminating study, The Unheroic Hero.

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gay, superior forms—will create a tingling field of poetic experience of unprecedented power, "vast as night and brightness" (Baudelaire). This mutation will be partly seen as a change in the quality of artistic light: there is, in a sense, a return to the sixteenth-century fountain of nature,® but—and the reservation is crucial—with a greater precision of sensuality, thanks to the intervening classical clarté. Perhaps the heart of our awareness of what is happening in this century will be to see how this bright precision refines into the summery shimmer of ripe Symbolism. The page, the canvas, the score will be jam-crowded with expression, full, suggested, tacit. As the poet learns to set to work for him the hidden harmonies and "jeux réciproques" emanating from the shapes and sounds of letters, the composer becomes alert to the fairy voices in half tones (chromaticism) and the overtone series vibrating around each note and chord, the painter discovers subtle nuances born from the shy encounter of two (or more) juxtaposed colors. The overtones are trawled, so to speak, out of the original air and recorded in a rich simultaneity, creating such a depth of harmony that we may speak of whole new dimensions of art, as we did upon the emergence of perspective and musical harmony during the Renaissance.10 This sort of attentiveness to one's most intimate experiences, pure phenomena as they appear to the utterly open and undistracted consciousness beginning, say, with Rousseau, brings us some memorable moments of nine8 Consciously so in the criticism of Sainte-Beuve who helped bring the Pléiade back into the active tradition. 10 The towering chords of Debussy, sprinkled with accidentals, are a vivid illustration. One obvious result is the exploitation of crepuscular or autumnal moods, but other climates and seasons are eventually found to be equally rich in hidden harmonies.

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teenth-century art: the organic spirals by which the poet descends into himself (Hugo's Tristesse (TOlympio, Les Djinns), the epistemological "contours" which surround each flower with a magic halo (Mallarmé's Prose), the motes or "mouches volantes" one sees swimming in one's own eyes when staring into summer spaces (Rimbaud's Poètes de sept ans), the leaps from one category of apprehension to another as in "j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir" (Le Bateau ivre), or "maint rameau subtil . . . demeuré les vrais bois" (L'Après-midi d'un faune). Throughout our study we have witnessed an almost consistent downward movement of increasing concern with the concrete or experiential, the practical and daily, the sensuous, which mutation, in the domain of systematic thought, may be traced through the hierarchy of sciences. The "highest," most abstract faculty of logic—which is at first undifferentiated philosophical logic, then mathematics —is represented first in any culture,11 followed by physics, 11 This paradox stems from the fact that gains in mental form are spiral: once the leap from the animal to the human intellect is made with the new mentally located sense of the infinite, it is next followed by the serial sense and numbers, measure. It then takes eons to apply this measure to all things in man's less abstract ken, to consolidate this immense gain of being human. As each scientific discipline becomes autonomous, the spiral is duplicated within each one; but the overall spiral of total mental growth continues outward and upward with very slow gains in new "syntactic" (philosophical or epistemological) vision. Theology, which Comte put first historically, would have been seen more accurately as undifferentiated logic, or rational metaphysics, and should be dissociated from religious faith here since the latter is not on the same scale with the other disciplines but, as the underlying stuff or substance of life (Eros), infuses it all die way, being a kind of sap and surrounding medium in which the organism of culture grows.

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chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, and finally, general criticism.12 The development in France (and Europe) from mathematics, inherited from ancient civilizations by way of the Arabs, through Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Kepler, Pascal, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Saint-Hilaire, Lamarck, Buffon, Condillac, the philosophes and idéologues (Condorcet, Saint-Simon, d'Holbach, Helvétius) had come very close to following this pattern chronologically. By the nineteenth century the focus is definitely on the lower half of the hierarchy: Rousseau's and Buffon's evolutionism, Goethe's nature philosophy, Hegel's biologically tempered, organic Werden, accompanying a nascent sociology and philosophy of history from Montesquieu, Vico, and Gibbon to August Comte, who will see sociology as the master science. It remains for Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Renan to shift the focus one step farther onto even more concrete and sensuous forms, those of art and life understood by criticism. The dialectical, paradoxical, nature of the growth is illustrated graphically by the fact that this hierarchy of sciences is often visualized as having logic and mathematics at its base and sociology (or criticism) at its peak. But, as we noted, growth occurs in both directions and, upon further examination, in all directions: in sum, is ripening. The vertical dialectic, a modality of the daemonic rhythm of all creativity, is complemented by a horizontal one13 between the main branches of the culture: between art and 1 2 Once the discipline is created generically with its mature autonomy, it develops an inner dialectic of its own in reflection of the overall one, just as each artistic genre developed modes: thus physics shoots out reciprocal branches of theoretical and empirical physics, etc. 1 3 T h e paradox within the vertical growth holds between the dimensions in a double-polarity and polypolarity.

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society, adding realism—this is particularly true of prose but has its important bearing even upon the loneliest poets —and between art and science (including formal philosophy) adding critical perspective, and, again, although it will be novelists from Balzac to Zola who will be most obviously affected, French poetry is equally involved with Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, and, especially, the lineage of Poe-Mallarmé-Valéry. As in any historical pendulum swing, there are those who go too far into science or pseudo-science, into tinkering philosophic schemes (René Ghil, Villiers de L'IsIe-Adam,) or into social problems (Zola at his worst), but, when art periodically remembers its autonomy and dignity and returns to itself, casting aside some mere masks and cluttering content, it is with an enhanced vision, more adequate to our complex and demanding era. The expansion of French art through relationships with younger, fresher forms of life occasionally seeks beyond the borders of the mother country. Here too there is an interesting relation between space and time: for example, to cross the frontier into Spain is to go back, in some sense, several centuries, which is just what French artists wanted to do (or so they thought), beginning, say, with Rousseau; they wanted a change of air, a vacation from the brilliant "rhetoric" (Taine) of Neo-Classicism. The Romantics, Mme. de Staèl, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo, Delacroix, will be seasoned travellers in fact and fancy, some Symbolists almost equally so—Flaubert, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam—although here the return to a primarily French art is of greater importance, particularly with Verlaine, Mallarmé, Valéry, Pissarro, Debussy, Ravel. In the thirties of the twentieth century there will be a resurgent "cosmopolitanism" with Morand, Mac Orlan, Larbaud,

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Cendrars, Pascin, and in the forties frequent excursions into the American hemisphere. This is one reason why Germany, being a younger, more primitive culture like Spain, was attractive to post-revolutionary artists generally, and when its own writers exploited these qualities in a partly spontaneous, partly willed, somewhat barbaric romanticism (Sturm uni Drang) or nationalism (Herder, early Goethe, some of Schiller, the Schlegels), including a cult of its chivalrous past, Mme. de Staël, being on the spot, had easy pickings. This inchoate, excessive assertion of the burgeoning national ego with its attendant modes of the starkly dramatic, the youthfully tragic, seemed momentarily graver than French classic order become decadence. Dark, even black, and concomitantly bright or flashy tones were borrowed by a succession of writers, from Nodier and Nerval through Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and Maeterlinck; while on their side German figures like E. T. A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Tieck, and Wagner enriched their native tradition. Eventually, as we said, there would be a reaction against the rather direct, and glamorous, appeal of this heaviness in tone and the accompanying solemnity in German thought, a movement back to classic French lightness which at its best, while deceptively frothy, has actually worked up along its winding way a seriousness that can stand with any. When Mallarmé said "gaiety is the sign of great things" 14 he meant, as Baudelaire meant in De Tessence du rire,15 an Olympian brand of it, a 14

Not in Germany, where there are few worthwhile comedies (in Austria, closer to France in spirit, there is Nestroy). Mallarmé is quoted in the Dialogue avec Mallarmé of Vielé-Griffin. 16 Baudelaire's brand of laughter, however, is more self-consciously dramatic than Mallarmé's; he is still too close to a German

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pure, merrily dancing mountain air, hovering its heady champagne over, and embracing, the familiar landscape with figures and the divined sinuous road leading up to this peak in France.18 There were comparable fascinations in Spain, the Orient, North Africa. 17 Although Delacroix and Hugo enriched their palettes with oriental tones, Manet, Gautier, Hugo, Baudelaire, with Spanish ones (particularly Goyesque), exoticism is eventually closer to direct appropriation than to earning. Even Gauguin's Tahitian canvases seem already dated in this respect, compared to his Breton landscapes or Pissarro's views of orchards in Pontoise; the dark eroticism of Wagner's Venusbcrg now appears to have reinforced some already excessively heavy tendencies in Baudelaire; a Bayreuth chromaticism and turgidity mark some of Debussy's Baudelaire songs as belonging to an Romantic influence. In addition to this (vertical) distinction of degree of refinement, we can make the following (horizontal) distinctions between the various modes of supreme mental Eros: the kinetic, explosive expression of laughter (the positive "absurd"); the calm, static sense of beauty; an in-between form, Olympian gaiety. The negative concomitants are: violent spiritual revolt against a hatefully meaningless universe (the negative "absurd"); a static, quietly despairing version of the same; an in-between form, total grousing. Other modes may be classed as subcases of these: for example, bitter satire is a form of the active, aggressive, violent revolt combined with the positive "absurd" and turned against individuals. And there are other combining submodes such as gentle satire, irony, parody which include positive elements. 1 4 Stendhal had previously asserted that "gaiety is the mark of the healthy mind." Meredith's view of Comedy as "the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence" (Preface to The Egoist) is an articulate but less artistic version of the French awareness. Nietzsche's remarks on superior gaiety in Beyond Good and Evil are closer to our point. 17 The continuing relations with England are on a more civilized and equal basis.

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early, groping period of his career. But all this is easy to see and say now, and, in the final analysis, we should be grateful for whatever the surrounding cultures contributed to French art. In another area of cross-fertilization, between art and philosophy, Germany had particularly much to offer. The gist of this influence is a furthering of the paradoxical "downward concern," through a series of minor revolutions in thought,18 each turning upon some preceding doctrine which had come full cycle into an aridly "metaphysical" or "idealistic" order. Each philosophical Putsch attempts to weight the inherited abstractions with matter, widening and deepening preoccupation with the concrete, in order to match the culturally and economically expanding epoch; each stoops a little lower to conquer society and nature, trying desperately to overcome the aggravated alienation of the contemplative man and to meet the challenge of the hustling bourgeoisie. W e have already taken note of the growing role of the imagination or "fancy" in the aesthetic theories of the period, beginning with Kant; Hegel's doctrine that the "body" of style is of substantive importance19 ( P h i l o s o p h y of Art) makes a further step in this direction. Even more important was the relativism brought about in the basic theory of knowledge of both these figures when Hume pulled the chair from under cognition by his denial of cause and effect. From now on, perception and indeed all knowledge will become increasingly unsure, mobile, relative; the fixed laws of the 1 8 The series may be said to begin in Germany with Luther's evangelical revolution, as well as empiricism and pragmatism in science. Recall that Luther's initial Platonic radicalism came around into an orthodoxy. 1 9 Buffon had already said "le style c'est Phomme."

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philosophic and scientific tradition melt into free-flowing probability. By now, thinking man's education at the hands of woman has gone so far that he has learned to disperse himself almost limitlessly over the landscape, to insinuate himself fluidly into the intimate secrets of the Eivig- Weibliche, nature. But, restoring the balance of his manhood, his power of concentration becomes correspondingly great: "the evaporation and the condensation of the self: everything is in this" (Baudelaire); his will periodically demands a synthetic reckoning, a renewal of his sense of direction.20 Since the old absolutes are gone, there follows a chain of attempts to fill the void of defunct substance (formerly Aristotle's causes and essences, Plato's Ideas, the Christian First Cause, the Deity) by the Kantian noumenon or the Categorical Imperative, which underlie shifting modes of perception, by universal Idea (supporting the Hegelian dialectic),21 by Will (Schopenhauer's one worldly sub-: stance, with a militant cast, beneath Maya, the veil of illusion) or Nietzschean Will-to-Power, and, passing into the mainstream of French philosophy, by "the pure abstract The combined male-female is found in key imagery such as the spiral (Hugo's Les Djmns, Tristesse tTOlympio) or the thyrsus (Baudelaire's Le Thyrse) as well as more-or-less androgynous Hamletic heroes (sometimes transformed into heroine-personae of men: Herodiade, Madame Bovary, La Jeune Parque). The dynamic quality of Romanticism generally is offset by approximations to Joyce's "static" art, the kinetic trunk of aspiration is covered in a rounded foliage of creation. 21 Karl Marx, "standing Hegel on his head," will try to provide a solution to the philosophical "atomism" of his times by setting up a political absolute in a vague messianic future. As we shall see, this is one of many ways in which characteristically Hebrew think-, ing colors this wide-open period during which patterns are borrowed from every conceivable culture, Greek, Hindu, etc. 20

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law . . . of nature" 22 (underlying Taine's "true hallucinations"), by "élan vital" (behind Bergson's armylike rush of phenomena). The direct and, usually, indirect influence of this international philosophical movement on French, and world, literature is very considerable, although we realize from all that has gone before that these tendencies were inherent in French culture. Moreover, although our knowledge of who influenced whom must remain vague, we again believe that the creative artist came first, preceding even the creative thinker; that the tone of this kind of fluidity and relativity had been established by the paradoxes and ironies of the moralist tradition from La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère to Diderot, accompanied and colored in the eighteenth century by the delicately ironic, sensual graces of Marivaux, Watteau, Beaumarchais, by the flow of appearances in the Concessions and Rêveries of Rousseau. However, a particular impetus was added to these native tendencies by a series of "shocks of recognition," when so many French writers found the precise tone of their considerations of the world echoed—as if providentially, with the mystic power of distance—by recent or contemporary figures abroad or in noncompetitive, fairly remote realms at home. At a time when the foundations of moral life, the philosophical and religious absolutes, have become so problematical, there is a developing tendency to seek confirmation of one's selfhood in these horizontal relationships, rangier variants of Igitur's mirror. The distant ones can never prove satisfactory in the long run, and these "recognitions" are really interesting only in a group way, because they help to define the tone of the whole period. The very intensity of the cross-seekings and returns is a nineteenth22

De

Fintelligence.

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century phenomenon; the air is filled with such activity in this and many other directions of the spirit. To mention only a few philosophic "recognitions: " Balzac—Swedenborg (Saint-Hilaire, Buffon); Flaubert—Spinoza; BaudelaireJoseph de Maistre; Villiers de L'Isle-Adam—Hegel (Eliphas Lévi); Laforgue—Hartmann; Proust—Bergson. The parallel curves which these sets of august points define move toward a total fluidity of perception and of inner vision, from Balzac's pullulating, "atomistic" (Marx) world of ambiguous types struggling for individual power in society;2' Stendhal's abrupt ironies of individual behavior in a transparent moral universe; Flaubert's undulating appearances and phrases, rising and falling like the waves at Honfleur; Leconte de Lisle's hierarchy of illusions from the slow periods of the tree-lined or mountainous horizons of nature, through heavy, scattered beasts, voluptuous or staccato humans, and die scintillation of light at high noon; Maupassant's Tainean more-than-real illusions of reality (Preface to Pierre et Jean). With Impressionism and full Symbolism this vibrant climate becomes such that we might compare it to a storm of pollen borne on a vernal flood of love: the bobbing ephemeridae of Rimbaud, the pointillist imagery of Verlaine, the verbal constellations of Mallarmé, the tiny stipplings of Pissarro ("of all painters, he was closest to nature," Cézanne), the tender divisionism of Seurat,24 the myriad rain drops and summery "luminous dust" of Debussy (his notes to Fêtes), or the sparkling play of "maint diamant d'imperceptible écume" in La Mer. 2* 2S About the same time, John Dalton's atomic theory will change the entire perspective of science. 24 Occasionally Seurat's scientific theories overcome his art and produce a coldness reminiscent of absolutely conventional Japanese art. 25 Debussy divides his strings very frequently.

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Fluidity, the sense of synthesis or communion, which we once spoke of as having to do with the "porous partitions" of the artistic temperament, becomes a conscious part of the Symbolist aesthetic: Pissarro's view that the colors in nature interpenetrate; Proust's kaleidoscopic vision wherein realities merge and change places, like the sea and shore of Elstir's canvases; Mallarmé's "suggestion," through the "reciprocal play" of words, of multiple levels of beauty.26 Meanwhile the thought curve had been moving on from Kant's antinomies, Schopenhauer's veil, and Schelling's absurdities through Taine's shifting sheaves of perception towards twentieth-century "prehensions" (Whitehead), phenomenology, uncompromising Einsteinian relativity and barest probability. The syntax, or thought structure, becomes increasingly polydimensional (following the pattern outlined in our introductory chapter): the returns upon nature and self are again returned upon, repeatedly, complexly, the whole growth being permeated and kept alive by a feeling of instability, gratuitousness, absurdity, ambiguity, and paradox far outstripping the scepticism of Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld. This brings about a climate of literary "irony" of a personal, dramatic sort, in the psychological novel, short story, and theater from Constant, Stendhal, Musset, Mérimée, Heine through Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Mann, to Blanchot, Broch, and Beckett. Irony 26 By "suggestion" Mallarmé means not vagueness but a greater precision which inevitably offers initial resistance, hence implies a dialectical becoming—"deviner peu à peu"—of artistic understanding or participation. The initial moment of mystery is one phase of artistic apprehension, making for a delightful sense of infinite possibilities (a swimming in the limpidity preciously surrounding each word), but this "feeling" phase is followed by a form of artistic apprehension closer to the word "knowing."

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originally meant "to say one thing while meaning another"; this doubleness, or duplicity,27 is then recognized (returned upon) by the reflexive mind, creating a tetrapolar pattern, and so on ad infinitum. Irony thus comes to indicate in part the tireless activity of the modern spirit. In the Symbolist poets from Nerval to the present, the structure of thought, far subtler and less dramatic than that of the novels and plays, tends to become the tacitly recorded syntax of their creations. At times this syntax is consciously apprehended by the poet, perhaps in the light of some glancing acquaintance with mystic, occult, or Neo-Platonic tradition, but usually directly, from some personal vision as we know in certain cases when the experience is described in texts like Igitur, and Aurélia. The syntax, comprehended as a vibrant whole, is described in varying but cognate forms, such as the universal "net" of Nerval (Aurélia, Part I, chapter 6), the "web" of Mallarmé (letter to Aubanel), the "wreathed trellis of a working brain" of Keats (Ode to Psyche). But, described or not, it is there underlying the élite fashioning of all the better poets: it is as if, in a plunging daemonic experience, they had wrested his secret from the spider: an expansile gossamer so light and airy as to be almost invisible between the flies, "there is magick in the web of it." Whether we understand this growth abstractly* as polydimensionality (or polypolarity), or concretely, as the exfoliating rhythms of poetic vision, the gain for art is plain to see.28 3 7 Satire is a starker, heavier, cruder form of this doubleness: the partition between the two parts is less porous; it thus bears the same relationship to irony as allegory to symbolism; there are many nuances between heavy satire ana lightest irony. 2 8 The original daemonic rhythm of the artist had, with Symbolism, refined into the subtlest of wave motions (at the surface, while

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The so-called progressive "dehumanization" (Ortega) in art is actually a mode of this becoming. At first the Romantics struck dramatic, rather than poetic, postures: Lamartine was wont to die personally in one lyric swan song only to be unaccountably resurrected in the next; Hugo strode in full regalia from ode to ballad; Musset fretted on his little stages like a "mauvais Hamlet" (Mallarmé); Berlioz's swelling melodies seemed at times overblown; Géricault's nudes were draped about their capsizing raft as if an early Diaghileff had arranged them there; Vigny's tower became as fixed a part of the landscape as the obelisk; even Baudelaire's version of the Romantic Agony was frequently too theatrical, donning masks of Gothic and "little Romantic" diabolism, celebrating childish black masses in an obvious bid to be sent off into his corner. These were merely the marginal shortcomings of otherwise very serious artists, but Symbolism found a way of avoiding hurtling vegetables by pushing the artistas-hero off the stage entirely (or else deheroizing him in a way which almost amounted to absence). Religion, at first Hebrew and latterly Christian, had discovered the same necessities, and the artist in so acting was clearly imitating the deus absconditus. From Flaubert to Joyce, he will try to be caught looking the other way, "paring his fingernails," as he feigns indifference toward a now utterly maintaining this original rhythm as a ground-bass) and the appearances of phenomena at the static crest of each becoming wave of perception, isolated for a fleeting eternal moment, are being {joints of reality, now experienced as the myriad richly "thingey" objects in nature down to the infinitesimal sparkling of "luminous dust." These points are clearly modes of the poles tipping each "dimension" of rhythm in our epistemologica! definitions, related to the latter in a version of Zeno's paradox. In contemporary science, we see this continuing dialectic as the opposing wave and corpuscular theories of light.

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objective creation. W e realize, of course, that the bond between father and child remains closer than ever under these circumstances: the most objective art, if truly worthwhile, is also the most subjective, 20 for it is really almost everything the artist has as a mere fallible man. So he will often be found peeking through the curtains of his Ark, counting the house, as it were. It is always malicious fun to catch the great man poring over footnotes or indexes for mentions of his name, trying to storm the public's affections by writing an obviously impossible play, expecting the critics to fall into his arms upon the publication of a hermetic work it will take them twenty years to begin to understand. W e may provisionally summarize the cultural gains, as we have done before, in the quality of artistic light pervading the mingled late Romantic, Symbolist, and Impressionist30 29 Joyce's mutation from the lyric through the epic to the dramatic form, in imitation of Hugo (Preface to Cromwell), has its equal reverse aspect, ending in enhanced poetic subjectivism; recall the reversibility of the hierarchy of sciences. s o Impressionism was at first applied to painting alone, then spread to the music of Debussy and the poetry of Verlaine. There is a hint of feminine slightness in the term and this may fit some vaguer paintings of Monet or Sisley. But the painting of the period early takes on solidity with Pissarro and later with his pupil Cezanne and continuously produces masterpieces worthy of Symbolism, so that eventually the two terms are practically interchangeable, especially if we do not indicate by symbolism a plodding use of mysterious individual symbols but a climate of delicate universal analogy. John Rewald seems to employ the limited sense when he sees painterly "symbolism" arising with Redon and Gustave Moreau, who emphasize some heavy effects we may also find in early Mallarmé ( Hérodiade ). A good deal of drivel has been written recently about the "literal vision" of the Impressionist painters in order to whoop it up for some more recent artists who often try to force glory impatiently by wild stylization without its necessary concomitant, inner and eventually evident connection with an eter-

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literature, music, painting of the maturing century. In place of the stoic projection of classic brightness, the variously cool or stark incandescence of neo-classical lucidity,31 there is a distinctive suffusion of keen tenderness, representing both the new power of concentration and the capacity to disperse the soul gently over nature. This special light in varying moods, or états d'âme, is the underlying substance—standing for the artistic soul behind the entire creation—which binds each delicately divisionist score, poem, canvas into a single harmony and is, at the same time, the tacit hero—"le principal personnage" (Taine) —hovering like the sun over all. Hero and substance, point and flow, man and woman, a veritable pagan god of nature, it tends to dispense with all-too-human figures posed in outer dramatic situations and to content itself with dramas of the heart, encountering in its pilgrimage through life the changing days, hours, seasons. When the figures appear—the gentle peasants of Pissarro, Emma Bovary promenading in the outskirts of Yonville, François nal (and traditional) core of truth or beauty. The Impressionists had this latter thing prominently and, further, their art is the best kind of stylization: the presentation of a new vision of reality (cf. Wilde's paradox on Turner's clouds), a previously hidden, select, essential view of the world. 3 1 The cool, ironic light of Mérimée is an excellent example of an admixture of a rational, quasi-scientific factor—the impersonal, aloof aspect—carried beyond some ideal point of balance. The detachment then becomes a (relatively) "common characteristic which, like the greyness added to color, shifts the tone of the temperament down the scale." Compare the richly tender, selfcommitting art of the leading Symbolists, including the best Balzac and most of Flaubert ("Madame Bovary, c'est moi"). The judgment is somewhat applicable to Flaubert's Salammbô (the rigidly documented quality) and, very relatively, to Stendhal and Constant.

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Seurel dreaming through the woods near Sainte-Agathe, Marcel or Stephen on a beach—they are hushed and humbled by the surpassing splendor, at least for the duration of a spelL And, on the whole, in the finest novels of the Flaubertian or Proustian era (as in the Russian tradition from Tourguenieff and Tolstoy to Pasternak) characters will tend to become, like Valéry's Jeune Parque, "porous to the universe." In England, Pater's "hard gem-like flame," the general Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic of dazzling stained glass (BurneJones, Rossetti), lushness and starry-eyed, rather sentimental, Shelleyesque idealism suggests a special mode of this light, which also characterizes, partly under the foreign influence, some French Parnassian and early Symbolist work: Baudelaire's Bijoux, Villier's Akadysseril, Gustave Moreau, early Debussy {La Damoiselle élue), early Mallarmé (parts of Hérodiade), even early Proust (the Ruskin manner: Venice observed).82 But this fairly syrupy and glassy aesthetic gently refines in an elusive way through French webs of airiest gossamer. Passing through the deft Vitrail and the "filet subtil" (La Sieste) of Heredia, Mallarmé's tender Apparition and delicate stained-glass Sainte, the "veils" and "mid-day shimmer" of Verlaine's Art 82 In a similar way, the grotesque and baroque spirit, passing through the Romantic Agony of the "little" Romantics (Nodier, Borei, Bertrand) and tar-brushing some big Romantics as well, raised to a higher power in Baudelaire, brings a marginal tone of "decadence" to the 1880's (as found in Huysmans' Des Esseintes, Villiers's Axel, the notion of poètes maudits to which Verlaine contributed). Hostile critics have often used this minor shade and the comparison with poets of the Roman and Greek decadence (abetted by writers like Baudelaire and Mallarmé who in loose moments toyed with the idea of their own "byzantine" or "alexandrian" mood) to define, darken, and depreciate Symbolism as a whole.

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the suffusion softens and sharpens into the precise network of words capturing the trembling light of Proust's magic lantern scenes or the sun refracted through the stained-glass window in the church at Combray or the dulcet claritas of the Joycean epiphany ("apparition")." Such images as webs, windows, nets, the vibrant weave of vision, adumbrate the poet's awareness of his intimate creative processes. They also suggest the woven fabric of the texts,31 the miraculous filters which distill the essence of Symbolist art. We have taken cognizance of the cross-relationships between art and formal philosophy first because they are quite remote and simple and so useful to a critical attempt to establish some basic sense of direction; far more complex are the dealings of practising artists with the less formal generalization of criticism. Now, while France has always had her share of full-dress philosophers, from Descartes and Malebranche through Maine de Biran to Bergson and Sartre, she has been particularly noteworthy for "demi-philosophes" like Diderot, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and Renan. These are men who eschew ironclad metaphysical systems in favor of broader awarenesses and responsibility, including the very French responsibility of pleasing. Actually, they are general critics, according to our definition in Part I, mediating between methodical poétique,**

3 3 A by-now classic comparison shows how the somewhat rigid, sculptural aesthetic of Gautier's Art becomes the fluid, delicately refined aesthetic of "impression" or "suggestion" in Verlaine's corresponding poem. " J o y c e copied Apparition prominently into his Trieste-period notebook; its title, die suggestion of a halo in the image of the "chapeau de clarté," the tone generally, all must have influenced his notion of the artistic "epiphany" (cf. Heredia's Epiphanie, also Leconte de Lisle's) along with Rimbaud's Illuminations. 38 Derived from Latin textus, woven.

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thought (formal epistemology, psychology) and art in one direction, between writer and public in another. They are "men of letters" and occasionally reach well over into the domain of the creative artist: Sainte-Beuve wrote a fairly good novel and some influential poems, Taine too committed a novel of sorts. In the reverse direction, the writer proper of the new ambitious order has a strong, though eventually checked, inclination to become a general critic. This has been a long-range characteristic of the penmen growing through the "enlightened vocation"—we may recall the prefaces of Corneifle and Racine—but by now the commitments of criticism have become immeasurably more demanding. At a certain point, a choice will impose itself not unlike that one confronting the writer torn between the religious vocation and art at the crossroads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or between die scientific calling and art at about the same dissociative time. Accepting the risk of being dogmatic, one may venture that after Baudelaire the writer must make an either-or decision: either he must give up his ambition to become a leading creative artist or he must sidestep the temptation to become an important critic. Since Baudelaire, the finest poets and novelists will allow their criticism to remain largely tacit, in unpublished manuscripts, marginal notes, or occasional pieces, usually dating from an indecisive early period of their careers. A Mallarmé may allow himself, at the solicitation of well-meaning friends, to brood aloud on his own processes; but his remarks on other writers, painters, ballet are extremely general and return very directly to individual concerns. A Proust, once past a dilettante journalistic fling, may lay about him as he works himself up into an expressive furia, but the notes on Sainte-Beuve which in despair he sets down as a weak substitute for "le seul livre vrai"

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are invaded from all sides and from within by his resurgent self and gradually develop into his own masterpiece. Joyce read widely, at least when he was young, and commented upon or pastiched various of his contemporaries, but as he told Frank Budgen he was first and last interested in "what I can make of your ideas." 86 These considerations apply somewhat to the most immediate critical concerns of the writer, the working-out of his own syntactical vision and its extension into living language, his poetics. The awareness of these things takes a tremendous development in the nineteenth century, beginning most noticeably with Poe, but if we want to see them as codified wholes in the French artists who come after him we must reconstruct them ourselves from oblique references, like Mallarmé's Les Mots Anglais, musings of artist-protagonists va. Ala Recherche du temps perdu, mysterious fragments in Finnegans Wake. Even Valéry, for all his having spread himself thin in endless jottings, stopped short of elaborating the general poetics which he hints he could have gleaned from his master (one suspects, however, that he failed to do it even for himself, hence the scattering abroad of both fragmentary art and coquettish bits of criticism and philosophy).37 38 Adrienne Monnier brought out very strongly (in conversation) how he alienated literary brothers like Larbaud simply because he could not consider them very far for themselves. 3 7 Alas, even Kenneth Burke (in Kenyon Review, Fall 1958) has joined the ranks of those who judge Mallarmé without understanding him. His notion that Valéry's poetics (i.e., the assembled fragments presented as such) are superior to Mallarmé's because they begin from an "inner rhythm" ignores the fact that Mallarmé, who is one of the most quoted of French poets because of the sheer music of his lines, always begins from an inner rhythm and has often spoken critically of the fact. But he also went beyond the traditional lyric (to which he continued to pay homage, as he said

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In its age-old controversial dealings with social problems, art again comes to a sort of crossroad in the nineteenth century, one way lying primarily with prose, the other with poetry.38 But again too we must take account of the ironies in the divergence. Just as the writer who foregoes a public position as a critic maintains his private awareness so that finally his whole work is handed on as a living lesson in criticism—including some direct teacherly hints at method, turning up like potsherds within and without the finished texts—so even the most uncompromising Symbolist poet sooner or later betrays an anguished concern about his role in society. But, first, the divergence, which is very clear during the period of "romantisme social," with Hugo, Lamartine, Sand, Michelet putting their art at the service of the people on the one hand and on the other the reaction in the name of art for art's sake, particularly with in the Preface to Un Coup de Dés) to undertake, not indeed a "literary charade" as Burke fecklessly claims, but an attempt to seize the inner rhythm of his total vision of reality which he experienced sensually in a well-known crisis of his late adolescence. A few other poets have had such an experience, including Valéry, who knew better than the critics that Mallarmé was the real master. 8 8 By now the condition of immediate appeal to a wide public has forced theater almost out of the running as serious literary art. W o r d s become lost in spectacle, the director becomes more important than the author. A Maeterlinck, perhaps recalling the essays of D e Quincey and Lamb on Shakespeare, conceives his best dramatic work for puppets or a fancied performance before an armchair (Preface to Pelléas et Mélisande). It is impossible to revive the conditions for the concentrated theatrical language of Shakespeare which was the art of its time, unhampered b y scenery and competitive forms; but perhaps an earnest clique can manage it f o r themselves.

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Gautier, Leconte de Lisle (and the Parnassians generally) and Baudelaire; to this we may add the aristocratic aloofness of Vigny or Musset. Now, abiding concern with social change and the people is one thing, revolution is another: poets like Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Rimbaud are all quite capable of wild revolutionary flings which suit their youthful rhythms very well. But after the first fervor of 1848, when the reaction sets in and steadfast social interest meets its acid test, a Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle (together with a poetic novelist like Flaubert) will be bitterly disappointed, just as Rimbaud and Verlaine will be after 1870, and they return to an even greater aloofness, at least on the surface. The stolider figures like Hugo continue to hope and to renew themselves by action and to enrich their art with content. But far beyond actual participation in the way of fighting, organizing, and writing manifestoes, which is useful to some while risky to the concentrated performance of a few, the greater enrichment derives from the long-term inner concern with the "other," and no novelist, no worthwhile poet altogether escapes this challenge in these lively times. The rational, social tradition of the novel continues to gather strength outwardly while modifying its inner quest from the almost forgotten ancient hunt through the vocational quest—the Bildungsroman: Les Illusions perdues, L'Education sentimentale, Wilhelm Meister—to the specialized late form of it, the novel of artistic development, with A la Recherche du temps perdu, or Portrait of the Artist. With the major novelists, always some model of an "authentic" man, a political figure with Stendhal ("le républicain" Gautier), a doctor with Balzac (Bianchon) or Flaubert (Larivière), is solidly lodged near the heart of their creations, haunting them like the ghost of Hamlet's father, goading the artist in them to higher

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achievement. T h e rejected bourgeois as le Père G o r i o t , 8 9 H o m a i s , " Marcel's doctor-father, B l o o m , Shaun, Zeitblom, each echoing with varying remoteness that old father figure w h o once stabbed them almost mortally into awakening beauty, comes perilously close to c o w i n g the artist. W e shall find similar obsessions t h r o u g h o u t the p o e t r y of N e r v a l , Baudelaire, R i m b a u d , Mallarmé; 4 1 at one instructive juncture w e shall see h o w Baudelaire, unlike R i m b a u d , renewed himself b y his " b a t h s of m u l t i t u d e " and h o w his imagery is strengthened b y real people in " L e s T a b l e a u x parisiens." Moreover, as w e said, the purest Symbolists, whether poets or poetic novelists, retain an ultimate a n d 8 9 This theme is extensive in Balzac and, as in the earlier realism of the Baroque period, brings a solid quality, carrure, to his work, adding a new horizontal emphasis (an aspect of the father, the Other, society) to a vertical, poetic, one. Cf. the Rembrandt-like quality of the face of his mature artist, Frenhofer (Le Chefd'oeuvre inconnu), further compared to Socrates, another broad father image (God the Father is always portrayed as wide compared to his Son, width coming with maturity, for better and for worse). It is perhaps significant that Rembrandt's greatest masterpiece depicts such a father embracing the returned prodigal son. We may further link with this aspect of Balzac his affinities to Rabelais, for whom paternity is a key theme. N o t only Goriot but all the numerous doctors, old soldiers, and good curés share in this "drame de la paternité" (Thibaudet) or the drama of creativity. The ambivalence of the father-son relation is brought out particularly in the mysteriously powerful and patriarchal yet fearful antique dealer of La Peau de Chagrin. 4 0 Homais goes on; later he splits into Bouvard and Pécuchet who illustrate, despite the ambivalent mood of the hénaurme, the heroic plight of ordinary men; Flaubert's remark, to his niece Caroline, concerning a plain wife and mother: "elle est dans le vrai," indicates, like Un Coeur Simple, the force of his nostalgia for everyday life. 4 1 The recurrent father image in Nerval's sonnets or the rival foster-brother, and the actor, of Sylvie; the "priest, soldier" of Baudelaire's journals; Rimbaud's génie; Mallarme's Maître, a hardy ancestor.

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quite specific social commitment: Mallarmé was as eager to offer his vision, through some ritual or myth, to the "crowd" which he said was the source of all genius, or to "purify the dialect of the tribe," as Joyce was to "forge the conscience of his race." Recent critics have rightly emphasized the relentless moral force which stays and binds the masterwork of Proust.

In a previous chapter we have sketched the development of the novel up to the revolutionary period. In retrospect, it now seems that, although the ways of prose from the beginning had been seen to emerge from and reintegrate with poetry, the lines distinguishing the two remained fairly clear. But the dialectic becomes increasingly intricate with time so that by the nineteenth century the distinctions are noticeably blurred: beginning with Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Maurice de Guérin, under the influence of forces we have described earlier, French prose, while maintaining its traditional logic and precision, will often surpass previous poetry in its concentration, sensitivity, musicality. A further branching of this evolution results in the new genre of the prose-poem (Bertrand, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud) and related forms like Renan's Prière sur UAcropole. The novel itself, in its central tradition, becomes an artistically ambitious, stylistically complex affair. With Stendhal, the first of the major modern novelists, the simple dimensions invoked in our previous discussion of fiction, the vertical and the (hitherto predominant) horizontal, come close to balancing, so that the historians are

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apt to describe him as a "romantic realist" on the one hand a tug of Irmerlichkeit, evidenced by outbursts of passion, intermittent warm identification with his protagonists, some lyric descriptions of nature, scattered personal confessions, the piling-up in depth of psychological ironies; on the other, a neo-classic rationality and detachment; a bias for reserve, Byronic wit, sensibleness; an abiding antiChateaubriand dryness of tone; concern for success formulas, theatrical effect, approval of a smart general public.4* In terms of the texture of his phrasings, the resolution of this tension appears as the nervous, rapid, occasionally abrupt oscillations of mood within a series of brief, sometimes staccato, sentences which, despite the hesitancies, broodings, emotional élans, proceed, in a marching, crisply matter-of-fact Voltairian tempo, to get on with a story. Comparing Stendhal with the preceding French novelistic tradition, we feel in him the spiritual struggle to be notably stronger, intensified and preserved for art by an increasing individualism and isolation, issuing belatedly, enriched, through unprecedented complexities of thought and feeling. But in comparison with later figures like Flaubert or Proust there is a heavier emphasis on detachment of a neo4 2 In a marginal development of the novel, the vertical may come into close proportion with the horizontal or outstrip it and yet produce books of secondary importance; this is the modern subjective lyric tradition of the novel which we trace through Barres, Giraudoux, Camus, Blanchot. In these cases the artist, influenced by the Symbolist climate to a new thoughtfulness and depth of tone but lacking the power of the major Symbolists, is simply too busy doing other things, appearing as a public figure (journalist, prophet, diplomat), writing plays for the fashionable stage, etc., to be significantly involved in any given work, i.e., in relation to the great coevals. 4 3 The "happy f e w " idea is an afterthought. This desire for success is common to all artists, but it is held in varying check.

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classic sort (as opposed to more fully artistic objectivity) which determines a slightly propulsive or compulsive drive in the protagonists, a whipcord, prematurely virile, quality of will, a linear, nakedly analytic, psychological structure, a communiqué spareness of style." Although, contrary to an insistent clique, Stendhal is hardly the greatest of French novelists, he is unique and irreplaceable: the delightful brio, the coolly egocentric yet passionate self-examination, the youthfully driven, dashing (and stumbling), ingénu air he imparts to his heroes; there has never been anything quite like him before or since. Balzac's style often bears a striking resemblance to Stendhal's, and the term "romantic realist" is applied to him with equal justification, for whatever such tags are worth. In the main, however, his phrasings are less nervous, clever, intellectually sophisticated. In flatter, less dry and detached, more flowing and "periodic" rhythms, his patiently eager manner presses and presses—and generally ends by impressing. His undeniable fits of pomposity and obtuseness are the obvious defects of his virtues: ambitiousness, generosity, idealism, and, above all, earnestness. The self-imposed comparison with Dante is not so absurd as it might seem to some hasty moderns; the looser texture goes with a broader and probably deeper scope of vision than the one the greatest of the medievals commanded; over a lifetime he worked devotedly at building up a network of analogies, correspondances**—like the fluid hierarchy of blood-bread-money-manna of Le Père Goriot— 4 4 This gives him a certain kinship with Kafka; the community of mood is particularly striking in the prison of La Chartreuse de Parme, with its hierarchized moral geometry. 4 5 Hence the frequency of syntactical formulas like de même que, as in Proust.

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which was convincing enough to hold the admiration of that specialist in correspondences, Charles Baudelaire. If we add to this the bulk of his enterprise and the range of empirical reality it embraced, we may have—despite the sizeable proportion of hack-work, the margin of mere air, the slag-chunks of bad taste—some notion of the challenge he offered to later novelists like Flaubert, Tolstoy, James, and Proust. Flaubert lies somewhere in between the romantic realists and coeval poets like Nerval and Baudelaire: his mood is apt to rise and fall, with the beautiful resignation expressed by the curving neck of the swan, within a single sentence of moderate length, pithy rather than dry, often a trifle curt; the main effect emerges from a few perfectly selected individual words, which may flow into musicality when the situation calls for it or, in more quietly sustained passages, build longer rhythmic components in paragraphs of description or action into whole rounded episodes like the ball scene or the contrapuntal market scene of Madame Bovary. Even the tautest moments of Balzac or Stendhal seem relatively flaccid. Lacking the precision and inevitability of Flaubert's deceptively simple choices, their finest passages never quite come to the fastidious intricacies of Symbolism.''8 Within this novelistic yet strangely private 44 The New Critics have established complexity as a standard of artistic excellence and rightly so; not for its own sake—if there is an easier, clearer way of saying the same thing, it should be preferred according to die principle of Occam's razor—but because of the higher forms of apprehension it makes possible. As labor, or other suffering, is the precondition for physical delight, complexity—intricate workings which build up tension through a structure of tensions—is, along with more passive negations (tragic emotion), the precondition for artistic delight. Rather like die arduous stairs of a sliding-board, it carries us step by angular step to the point of climax and at last the luxuriously simple swoop.

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reach, like the inverted bowl of sky over the little family outing of Un Coeur Simple, in those moments when Flaubert is most himself, each tiny detail of a landscape, a quiet interior, or the urban street scene is offered for its own cupped and treasured drama: as the kind light of Vermeer reaches down impartially into every fleck and pore of the textured loaf of bread, the lord of this creation—whose favorite philosopher was Spinoza—is everywhere in his art, immanent and entire. Recalling our previous considerations on how to evaluate the philosophe vis-a-vis the lyric poet, if we want to weigh Balzac against Flaubert we have to throw into the balance the staggering bulk of the former's output. Regardless of which of the two emerges as the bigger figure, there can be no doubt that Flaubert has within a single work, Madame Bovary, achieved the ripest combination of art and reality of the nineteenth century proper, each sentence representing a hard-won fusion of syntactical clarity or precision with poetic experience, each fitting admirably into its episode, all the episodes together luring us irresistibly through the looking-glass into the realer-than-real life of a French provincial town.47 But life moves on, and the limitations of Flaubert are eventually seen to lie with the restricted area of his total vision. It is primarily here that an even finer prose master, Granted that some moments of artistic pleasure are earned from previous existence, ambitious art tends to absorb experience wholly, recreate it in all its aspects: hence dialectical resistances are increasingly present -within art of the demanding new sort addressed to a leisure class. 4 7 T h e best passages of L'Education sentimentale share in this sober glow, but it is less artistically alive than Madame Bovary or Un Coeur Simple, while offering something more in the way of Bildungsroman narrative qualities a la Stendhal.

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Proust, will outstrip his forebear, drawing some of his power in this direction from the rangier preoccupations of Balzac and from certain main currents of nineteenth-century thought, particularly psychological (Constant, Baudelaire, Taine, Bourget, Janet, Freud). In another direction, at the same time, he was learning to use words more precisely from Nerval, Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Mallarmé. Somewhere between the poets and the novelists or thinkers he learns to extend expressiveness within the sentence, which now not only rises and falls in the Flaubertian pattern but winds upon itself in spiralling arabesques,4* closing in on the object in constricting coils, rather like a snake about its prey.49 The overall symphonic structure of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is a macrocosmic version of this snake, complete with coda which it chases in Kabbalistic fashion, "biting over and over its Hailing tail" (Valéry); as each privileged moment surges from memory we catch glimpses of another go-around of the eternal Return. Within this hungry, unappeasable, imperialistic reach, Proust surpasses Flaubert in other ways: his generous paragraphs and pages are simply more attentive to all that can be sensed to give us back our childhood being (or the rare equivalent moments of adulthood) in a room, a place, a season, as his word-crumbs one by one, patiently, recreate the atmosphere, the myriad fragments of the fruit48

These serpentine sentences of Proust, like the "solo long" of Mallarmé's Faune and of the slowly rising equivalent Debussy flute passages, are a sort of resultant of vertical and horizontal "depth" (infinite feeling), creating an effect of rich, full voluptuousness; cf. the long rising and plunging melodies of Prokofieff, the tense unending sentences of Faulkner. 49 Hermann Broch once complained (in conversation with the author) that a translation of his Death of Virgil had turned "my serpent-sentences into ribbon-sentences."

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Cake that was the air in Tante Léonie's chamber, the madeleine steeped in tea that was Combray, its houses, streets, and gardens, and the good, "edible" walls of its church.

50 we see that the leading tendencies of the period, from poetic authenticity and perfectionism to prosaic capacity to savor the jumbled variety of things and people, converge, as they have on a few other occasions, in one generous figure in France. But the remarkable thing about this occasion is that Proust is not at all the only figure of this stature Symbolism produces, for he is topped by the naturalized Frenchman Joyce and, despite the limitations of his range, closely rivalled by Mallarmé who preceded and taught him. All considered—including his acknowledged influence on practically every important man of letters of the twentieth century plus musicians like Debussy, Ravel, painters like Gauguin, Vuillard—Mallarmé may well be the more significant figure.50 In his own way, Mallarmé tried to bring about a convergence of prose and poetry in one OeuvreHis achieved version of it, Un Coup de Dés 80 There is a margin of eccentricity in him, as in Joyce and some other madly ambitious creators: it is difficult to maintain perfect oise up there, and no one should complain if a man overshoot a it in aiming so high. Conversely, by aiming low, one is likelier to achieve an air of perfection, smoothness, or, let's face it, slickness. 51 Prose takes up a suggestion of Huysmans in this sense; cf. also Mallarmé's statement: "The whole contemporary attempt of literature is to have the poem end as a novel, the novel as a poem" (letter to Rodenbach). Mallarmé, like all the leading Symbolists, thus moved to offset the dissociation of art and life. In a relatively secondary, but fruitful way, there is a similar attempt through new genres of the prose poem (Bertrand, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud), free verse (Rimbaud, Laforgue, Kahn), the conversational or popular-speech poem (Corbière, Laforgue), and the verset (Claudel, Perse).

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jamais ri abolira le Hasard, is profounder, at least, than anything Proust, or probably even Joyce, dreamed of. Ultimately, one gives up trying to find a single ne plus ultra and is content to say that in Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Debussy, Ravel, Pissarro, Monet, Cézanne, art seems to have done the best it could. In all of them we feel that the best tendencies of their period and of preceding French periods are summed up. We may say of each, as Edmond Jaloux has said of one; "The creation of Proust shines with faith, youth, freshness and poetry. It gives an inestimable value to life, nature, work, and beauty." Those who are deprived of the gift of understanding such faith will naturally deny it with words like "mandarin," "betrayal of the clerks," and other talismans of educated philistinism. But recalling that almost from the beginning the artist was joined to the mass through intermediaries of lesser lights who expand through history into a hierarchy of which the height is perhaps the measure of civilization, we know that, without the towering ambition and sacrifices of such artists at the top of the ladder, the whole culture, lacking this leavening and inspiration, will tend to shrink sadly. So far in the twentieth century, though few (including most critics) seem to know who their fathers were, we have been coasting on the faith of the Symbolists. We are now in a position to define Symbolism in relation to other literary catchwords of the period such as Romanticism, Naturalism, Realism. What we really mean, or should mean, by an important movement like Romanticism is an artistic climate embodying all the important tendencies of the time, which have reached a mysterious critical density before a certain reaction against some or most of these tendencies sets in, preparing the way for a new artistic climate, such as Symbolism. And since the new movement

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is important precisely because it again incarnates all the major currents sufficiently to represent its era, it is clear that in it we have actually another wave, a renaissance, of the same surge of national spiritual force which created all previous ones; so that every leading Symbolist is not only a (late) Romantic in some thorough sense, more, he takes into his work the essence of even a much earlier comparable wave of creativity, Classicism. We need to modify Gide's precept that "le classicisme est un romantisme dompté," to read that each ripe literary epoch, as indeed each important individual achievement, represents a classicism—in the fuller sense—won over youthful romantic drives which jolted and refreshed a preceding classicism. In this sense nineteenth-century Romanticism is a classical movement resurgent from an apocalyptic change in French national life. Symbolism—which might be better identified as "France's artistic prime"—is an even more powerful wave, seeming historically subsidiary to Romanticism only because waves come faster in this oceanic century,52 so that there are personal survivals into the later renaissance. While appearing to accomplish less in the way of ground-up change (partly because it is quieter in its behavior and expression), it actually builds on uncompromising revolutions in a few individuals who have sensed, more thoroughly than the earlier Romantics, the growing crack in the myth of the Enlightenment and who make a brave attempt to repair it by personal creation, to consciously and unconsciously 62 This is not only a figure of speech for its teeming, tumultuous activity: the ocean now appears in prominent texts no longer merely as an occasional trope but as the pervasive image of entire works such as Hugo's Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne, Mallarmé's Coup de Dés (cf. Debussy's La Met). Later there are Joyce's project of an "ocean" book to follow Finnegans Wake, Perse's Amers.

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provide a new myth for mankind. The secular (enlightened, occasionally masonic) Bildungsroman, having replaced the Imitation of Christ, is in turn replaced by the novel of artistic development and finally the cosmogonie Poem of the type of La Légende des Siècles, Un Coup de Dés, and Finnegans Wake. Moreover these later figures are, beyond the Romantics, utterly devoted to their art vocationally and so—thanks in part to the material security the Third Republic provided—able to concentrate single-mindedly on reaching unexplored summits.58 Regardless of whether the individual artist goes over the top to indulge some simpler values (such as the amusing or plainly anecdotal elements of the middle sections of Proust's novel, Mallarmé's friendly vers de société and amorous Contes indiens, Debussy's salon music, Joyce's occasional garrulity), to one who has once breathed the air of authentic Symbolism, once "fait un bond dans le paradis," as the author of Le Grand Meaulnes did,64 there can be no more doubt of its authoritative existence than there can be of our own identity. It is rather on the flatlands of the midtwentieth century that our sense of reality wavers; here, the front pages of the book review sections are apt to be given over to pioneering accounts such as Maurice Herzog's; the other adventure, not quite as risky but rather more promising, is shrugged off as a lost horizon. They discover that it is possible to remain within a tower—or a cork-lined room—with only occasional sorties for air, longer than anyone had suspected a man in his right mind could. This makes good folk squeamish, just as most of us gag at the idea of working underground in the foul air of the coal mine. Yet coal is dug, thanks to some. 84 Alain-Fournier prepared himself by reading poets like Mallarmé, listening for hours on end to Pelléas et Mélisande in the company of Jacques Rivière. 83

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To the Symbolists, the Romantics must have seemed like pioneering alpinists55 of an earlier period: youthfully ambitious and somewhat foolhardy, rather short on advanced technique, not to speak of helpful equipment furnished by a specializing civilization. Modern New Critics are apt to criticize their aims and expression as "vague," but this smacks of unbecoming hindsight and usually betrays a certain provincialism, a need to simplify matters, a nostalgia for a milder, perhaps eighteenth-century, world. Actually, Romanticism made signal contributions to precision—one has only to consider, for example, the verve and appositeness of the Hugolian or Keatsian vocabulary—and, in sum, it represents copiously all the phenomena which we have seen to arise in due time and place throughout our study.58 We could quote a dozen definitions by practising Romantics, all partial but adding up to something approaching Baudelaire's later broad synthesis: "Romanticism is the most recent form of the beautiful." Symbolism in its turn incarnates the full range of its French heritage, but with a differing dosage: for example, exoticism, with its heavy or flashy foreign tones, is deemphasized along with personal dramatics. Excessive solem65 While we're with the metaphor, the critic is a bit like those unseen, unsung cameramen who tag along, almost to the top. 64 A brief summary: passionate ambition and agonized sense of fate, individualism with dreams of brotherhood, dynamism and ambivalence, social revolt cum subjectivism, sense of mystery and realism ("le caractéristique"), "downward concern" (paradoxical return to nature, "pastoral" concern for the little people), imagination, sensuousness, atomism and communication between arts, synesthesia, new faiths (mysticisms), exoticism. All these things are progressively mingled with and arranged by style, order, symmetry, patience, irony, lucidity, critical awareness, and even a sense of tradition as nineteenth-century Romanticism reaches its fixed final shape as a constellation of classical works.

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nity or G r a n d G u i g n o l e s q u e sensations b o r r o w e d f r o m younger cultures and simpler arts are purified b y a return to literary a u t o n o m y and unchauvinistic b u t consciously French art, " s a n s rien qui pèse ou qui p o s e . " Mallarmé's Tombeau de Baudelaire and Symphonie littéraire express succinctly his attitude t o w a r d the cloacal, luridly morbid, and stagily diabolical aspects of his great ancestor's aesthetic. 5 7 N o t that Mallarmé didn't appreciate Baudelaire f o r w h a t he was, b u t he couldn't stop there and still be w o r t h y of him; so life m o v e s on, not to " p u r e " p o e t r y which is an unattainable ideal, b u t to a purification of its means, " t h e dialect of the t r i b e , " b y m o r e c a r e f u l and patient choosing. 5 8 W h e n these h a r d - w o n means are fused, under g r e a t pressurie, with a n e w depth of vision, the result is a richer, tighter and sweeter, art, a n y t h i n g but a bloodlessly " i d e a l " o r " p u r e " one: 5 9 w e have f u l l Symbolism. 4 7 T o o many of Baudelaire's poems are cluttered with his personal problems: the machinery or scaffolding of his creative struggles—the processes of self-torture, drug-induced hallucination, etc.— as opposed to the flawless final fruit. Of course, when he surpasses these cumbersome means, and himself, sufficiently we have masterpieces like La Chevelure or Le Jet d'eau. But L'Après-midi d'ita faune, Hérodiade, and even those Mallarméan poems which ostensibly deal with the artist's plight, are all richer in objective poetic stuff, rendu. M Debussy's (and Mallarmé's) relationship to Wagner was similar. It was no easy thing for the "musicien français" to exorcize the Wagnerian spell in the only valid way for the artist: plunge deeper. Once this is acknowledged in the name of truth and value, one is glad to cast away yardsticks and enjoy both composers. 5 9 Poets and critics of subsequent generations have often tried to simplify matters for themselves by pretending that Symbolism failed to savor "things" for their own sake. Marcel Raymond, in particular, has been guilty of serious misreading of Mallarmé in this respect. When valid writers like Jules Renard, Ponge, Michaux, critics like Bachelard, Richard, philosophers like Heidegger, emphasize "things," they are prolonging a Symbolist tradition which yields to none in artistic sensuousness, and not superseding it, though

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Realism (which never got very far in the manuals), N a turalism, these are extremely partial and Procrustean categories. If we modify "realism" by adding the word "poetic" we get some approximation of the complex climate which we immediately sense surrounding any worthwhile figure, for the real is what the artists have taught us to see in addition to the conventionally accepted modes of it; 60 but if we are going to tag the geniuses with anything, let it be the broadly useful historical terms Romantic or Symbolist.41 they may apply it to new areas. There are also those who yield to a major temptation of our time, which is to approach things in the semi-artistic, semi-acquisitive spirit of The New Yorker (Richard Wilbur has called this "commodity fetichism"). 60 Proust in particular constantly reminds us of this: "I hope to establish some day that . . . this psychological realism, this exact description of our reveries, is as valid as the other realism, since it has as its object a reality which is much livelier than the other" (Contre Sainte-Beuve, p. 279). Camus is blunter: "Art is never realistic thoujjh it occasionally has the temptation to be so" (L'Homme révolté, p. 225). Although realism in the sense of the normative is a rising phenomenon in art, especially during the Second Empire, it is always subsidiary to more properly creative considerations in any important writer (e.g., Flaubert) or painter (Courbet) and therefore should not be used as a total tag. The term "realistic" is often used confusedly to point to what are actually poetic images from the lower reaches of the daemonic "dimension," i.e., extreme pictures of fascinating ugliness, meanness, grimness, sordidness which the ordinary citizen or proletarian would not, until shown, recognize as a balanced rendering of his state. We may legitimately speak of writers like Flaubert, Maupassant, Tchekov, the Joyce of Dubliners as having realistic tendencies since they start from the ordinary scene and everyday language (as even Symbolist poetry does! ) but from these, by careful selection, omission, timing, combination, they distill a magical suffusion which is the essence of art. Cf. Wordsworth's "imagination" versus emptier "fancy." 81 The Symbolists of the school beginning around 1885: Régnier, Vielé-Griffin, Kahn, Rodenbach, Samain are interesting individual poets who usually appear as epigones of the early Mallarmé (particularly Hérodiade) and Wagner—the dream mood, vaguely medi-

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For example, there is a welcome tendency today to remove the inadequate epithet, Naturalist, from Flaubert—it applies only to the least valid aspects of his novels—and to claim him as a Symbolist (as long as we are doing that sort of thing) along with Valéry, Proust, Alain-Foumier, Larbaud, Milosz, Perse, Jouve as well as some non-French masters. Even Zola (and certainly the Goncourts and Daudet) was closer to being a Symbolist (or a late Romantic) than the critics have believed: Mallarmé, who admired his "marvellous organization," knew better. By the same token, Balzac is apt to be thought of today, with Baudelairian perspicacity, as a visionary Romantic like Hugo, certainly not a flat Realist, especially if we mean to group under this term the ephemeral clique of Duranty, Champfleury, Monnier. Again, the best works of the Parnassian poets are not Parnassian: Leconte de Lisle's Phydìlé, La Vérandah, Heredia's La Sieste; whenever "sculptural, impassible" qualities dominate a poem, whether of Baudelaire, Verlaine, or the official practitioners of the movement, we simply have inferior poetry, because valid poetry always, like Keats's Grecian vase, Eliot's Chinese jar, or Baudelaire's "rève de pierre," moves and is ever still, moves us as well as arrests us. In short, the term Parnassian is unfair as applied to the whole output of a serious writer, and we might better call Leconte de Lisle a late (exotic, apocalyptic, etc.) Romaneval, of legendary forests, princesses, swans, jewels. Easier, more popular, often amorous, elegiac, and crepuscular poets, they suffer somewhat from the mere fact of sameness (i.e., being epigones and numerous) which builds a certain heaviness in their favorite symbols but nonetheless contributes to and illustrates the remarkable artistic flowering of this period. Verhaeren is an allied but more complex and vigorous figure.

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tic.®2

But let us have done with catchwords and return to more comprehensive considerations. If we try to sum up what has been handed on to us, after the deaths of the Symbolist masters, we might repeat Baudelaire's formula "the most recent form of the beautiful" or, again, we might speak of their particular faith. Obviously we mean by this not so much traditionally understood religious faith as what tends to replace it for the cultural élite: the undefined "faith" Joyce invokes in a wellknown letter to Lady Gregory. When religion is expressed at all by leading artists it is apt to be an aesthetic variety of pantheism (Hugo, Flaubert), but often it remains nameless, in mystic tradition, though perhaps vaguely alluded to as in Mallarmé's "on ne peut pas se passer d'Eden," a kind of garden of the universe.63 Now, although the critic is hardly the person to judge the quality of the religious faith permeating his epoch, its art is another matter: be it that in the centuries of Dante, Michelangelo, Bach, religious art was second to none, in our time, despite the genuine worth of Bernanos, Messiaen, Waroquier, there is a significant shift in the whole configuration. W e may be sincerely moved listening to the church music of César Franck and still recognize that the pantheistic fervor of Claude Debussy's Martyre de Saint Sébastian has never been approached by him, or, one suspects, by any other composer. Similarly, it is in large part the narrowly held, nastily exclusive, and rather comfortable belief of Claudel which prevents him from rising to the company of the select. Claudel, "moi Paul," shouts his dogma very loudly, but, lyrically talented as he is—in a bullishly powerful, Rimbaud uses the term "second Romantique" (letter to Demeny). 63 Cf. "les jardins de cet astre" (Toast funèbre). 82

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Whitmanesque way, with something of the no-holds-barred fascination of Senator McCarthy—in the final analysis he will remain a relatively random, and surprisingly callous, figure. Despite the appearance of small protesting movements such as the neo-classical "école romane" and other, usually more vital, attempts to create fresh literary values, with populism, unanimism, naturism, neo-Catholicism, surrealism, neo-humanism, existentialism, the dominant mood of the leading literati who live on into or arise within the twentieth century will continue to be essentially Symbolist:®4 Gide, Valéry, Perse, Larbaud in France, Joyce in exile, Yeats in Ireland, Eliot in England, Rilke in Germany, Ungaretti in Italy, Stevens and Faulkner in America, all owed much to the intransigent example of Mallarmé and, more, to the ripening French culture that had produced him. If, in this moment of transition, we try to catch the prevailing attitude of these men rising up to meet a formidable challenge, we shall be inclined to respond sympathetically with a sinking feeling which begins in the mind and grows dreadfully in the lower regions. We see this fearful discernment in Valéry's remark that Mallarmé's head was "the one to cut off in order to have all Rome" or much later in Faulkner's half-admission that a novelist is a "failed poet." Publicly, particularly after World War I, there will be, as in Valéry's Regards sur le monde actuel, a sense of the general doom of Western civilization. But all this is new only in its historical context and is actually a quasi-permanent condition of the writer. Negation is always at first more noticeable than its positive result—"we understand nothing without pain" (Proust)—and so it is useful, if 64 Above and beyond the narrow line of epigones, self-styled Symbolists like Jean Royère.

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we do not allow ourselves to be carried away into sterile obsession, to observe what has become, at this point, of that series of failures, blocks, and hesitations which we said, in our introductory chapter, marked the left hand of the artist's progress. The nineteenth century came in under the banner of Rousseau's isolation, Chateaubriand's exile, and the courage of their despair, with a philosophic equivalent in Hegel's "pure Negation." It waxed strong publicly through a series of defeats in the struggle for Utopian democracy or socialism,65 culminating, after 1871, in admirable humility66 and the feeling on the part of the sensitive of a need for a thoroughgoing "réforme intellectuelle et morale" (Renan). All along artists like Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, Villiers, who needed no such concrete proof, had been railing against their times in successive waves of the Romantic "mal du siècle," of which we detect a fin de siècle version in Mallarmé's momentary dark belief that "to write a Work today is to write one's testament." Privately, negation— der Geist der stets verneint—worms about in a workmanlike manner, reaching significant shape through the selflacerating spleen of Baudelaire, Schopenhauerian pessimism in some later poets, the anguished textual eliminations of Flaubert and Maupassant, and ambivalently, the white page and the vibrant "absences" of Mallarmé, the theatrical hushes of Maeterlinck, the pregnant musical silences of As opposed to a classic insistence on the status quo, there is a significant shift to a belief in the virtue of revolt and revolution, until in the twentieth century the concept of Phomme révolté wins almost the automatic adherence of the intellectual; enlightenment and the "left" become almost synonymous. 66 Contrast Renan's tolerant and cosmopolitan views with the chauvinistic arrogance of the German christologist David Strauss in their correspondence. See D. F. Strauss, Krieg und Frieden.

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Debussy, "which are as difficult to orchestrate as the sounds." 67 Valéry's "refusals" are somewhat in this lineage (although offset by histrionic appearances accompanied by a plethora of exclamation points); however, the dadaists, surrealists, neo-humanists, and "terrorists," variously rejecting mandarin art or tradition by impatiently violent or extra-artistic means, are all reduced to a satellite status.88 The gloire du long désir which fulfills the century-long renunciations is the special quality of Symbolist and Impressionist light to which we have alluded in previous anticipatory pages. Here, the archetypal poet's ambivalence reaches something approaching its limit condition, deathin-life confronted for a tiny moment of transcendence during which things become themselves, the beauty and pathos of evanescence, of fragility and fleetingness: a vulnerable and tender lilt of spring, "frêle comme un papillon de mai"; an ephemerid midsummer moment "où frémit l'éternelle chaleur"; the last long ray of light in agonizing autumn, when the leaves, drifting in the garden pond, "creusent un froid sillon"; the pang of a gleaming mirage haunting the "lac dur" of midwinter as "un cygne se souvient." The child's bitter first experience of the world of people and their tarnished possessions occasionally turns his wayward gaze upward to the light of "ces nuages qui passent," to the "vaste et tendre apaisement" which seems to descend from the firmament, to the angelic "azur." Often it rests on empty space, ideal reflection of his primitively pure, un,7 Monsieur Croche antidilettante; cf. "the white spaces which are as important to orchestrate as the words" (Mallarmé, Preface to Un Coup de Dés). • 8 The neo-Catholic art of Ghéon and Claudel is likewise vitiated by their premature acceptance of a sectarian conformism which lodges whole slag-chunks of inherited and unearned dead weight (dogma) within their work.

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wanted love and his transparent heart: "Le ciel est," simply, as we look up from our prison, "par-dessus le toit." It is easy to judge the kind of "sulking" which precedes this experience of beauty, as Sartre has done vis-a-vis Baudelaire. But let us remember that this aesthetic negation is of the very stuff of human creativity, including Sartre's: for it is the sense of death (or "nausea"), the obverse of the sense of the infinite, which separates us, after all, from the animals. Any originality emerges by definition ex nihilo, from staring into empty space. Then, miracle of French art, while the space itself is loved as limpidity, air,49 from it is born a whole new world of presences: flowers, stones, creatures, urban objects, fresh and acceptable to that caste of men who have never altogether lost their difficult childhood. We watch how anemones and goldfish float from the Matisse air or water, move breathlessly apart,70 leaving us space to swim in the surrounding lucidity, as Mallarme's gladioli do: Telles, immenses, que chacune Ordinairement se para D'un lucide contour, lacune, Qui des jardins la separa.

Much of this pristine result is preserved in the "new 69 The scant texture (shimmer, motes) of air, like the textury surface through which we see Cezannes, the gridlike effects of cubists, the window-frames of Bonnard, all represent the organized (mental and formal) presence of the Viewer (the artist or his public), which, though shadowy, is savored and also negates what is beyond it into enhanced allure. 70 This quality, together with a tendency to approximate squareness through his curving arabesques—giving a feeling of controlled grace, classic and voluptuous—is essential to Matisse and, in a less exploratory way, Braque. Note the empty spaces in the faces and limbs of his models.

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spirit" of the prewar modernist poets: Apollinaire, Jacob, Salmon (and allied cubist painters) who strive for "simultaneity" or fuller artistic densities by the suppression of narrowly logical rhetoric with its univalent, artistically dead connectives (copulatives, pallid verbs) and rigid analytic devices (formal divisions, regular verse, punctuation) in favor of an open field of polyvalent interplay on the page. Their model, sometimes consciously as in Apollinaire's Calligrammes, or Marinetti's futurist ideograms, was Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés, where words are arranged in constellations without end-rhymes or punctuation. In the major poems, like Saltimbanques and"Lone,of Apollinaire—as in the contemporary work of his friends Picasso and Braque—these discoveries are turned to wonderful account. Still, on the whole and comparatively speaking, the prewar poets tend to use these means in a superficial way: the fine threads of meaning which radiate tacitly through the poetic fields of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry are swept away like cobwebs to be replaced by cruder relationships of contrast through clash and linkage through "action lines" between spontaneously recorded blobs and splashes of verbal imagery. Hence the high-charged artistic tension of the masters is unbalanced, short-circuited, toward arationality and kinesis, "surprise" (Apollinaire), sensational effects. The devastating return to freedom through, the purified spaces or through the explosive sense of the absurd, all of which was only one direction of the parent aesthetic, becomes the wildly liberating force, the liquidating spree, of the neo-primitive and playfully anarchic "new spirit"—and its more violent but ephemeral cousin, dadaism. The contrary drive toward intellectual authority, responsibility, and continuity with the past is largely abandoned to the insipid neo-classicists (Moréas, Maurras),

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and there momentarily reappears one of those periodic splits or "dissociations" of advanced civilization." The common twentieth-century theory that the artist should live his art—and the corollary contamination of art works by the flotsam of everyday existence72—marks a similar retreat from the lifetime evolution of a few masterpieces by men whose biographies make generally placid reading to the dilettante oscillation between relatively minor achievement, often dashed off in a few hours, and frenzied bohemian spectacle of the sort described in the banquet scene of Les Faux-Monnay eurs. In its turn surrealism, which overlaps with the "new spirit" in time and space, revives the miracle of the immaculate conception, the emergence from nothingness, and makes telling contributions to art: prolonging the "downward concern" into uncharted regions of the dream life or subconscious, bringing up strangely compelling biological shapes,78 releasing an atavistically permissive excitement, 1920's variety, a convulsive romanticism of spiritually gilded youth, and, therewith, some poems of permanent value by Breton, Char, Eluard, Desnos, Aragon. But here too there arose a dangerous temptation to isolate one aspect 71 Eventually some form of ideational coherence and tradition are re-embraced, in a slacker version of the late romantic tension, by Apollinaire, Reverdy, the fantaisistes, who have left us some quietly elegiac and lovely lyrics. 72 W e are referring here to the scraps of conversation, advertising, and the like analogous to the clippings from newspapers introduced into paintings and collages, also the baring of the underlying materials of art. This is not the same thing as the assimilated imagery of the contemporary world which is found in most authentic poets. 73 A subsidiary manifestation is the appearance of lowly creatures—insects, rodents, fish—in modern literature: Kafka's Metamorphosis and Fables, Gide's Caves du Vatican, Camus's Peste.

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of the Symbolist aesthetic into something like a "gimmick," to force the birth of beauty from juxtaposed images. The, at first, thrilling encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine is soon productive of a series of the similar, a chain of effects which may easily become monotonous.74 Eventually, this linearity and childlike automatism, this failure to vitally change direction, vitiates our taste for surrealist poetry and painting. Having attained certain depths it stays down too long and loses its capacity to walk gracefully on land.78 A new marginal kind of dissociation of sensibility occurs at the resort shores of social reality and so hardly challenges the rest of existence at all, but is usually content to "épater le bourgeois" by merely titillating him with perversely pretty confections or clown dives. This kind of posture, with Cocteau—his writings are often a pétarade of bon-bon surprises, a chain of effects, each once removed from some bourgeois value or commodity: e.g., surrealist aviators, wrinkled diamonds, winged athletes—even enters the Academy, when it is not decorating our department stores/® One may enjoy these divertissements as much as the next person, perhaps more, and still say "but. . . ." By the same token, the courage of despair, the serious "absurd," becomes a fixed formula, soon easily available to uninspired college freshmen through Camus, in a blatantly truncated version. Already with Dostoevsky, self-irony and depth of despair had threatened to degenerate into an unnecessarily thin and repetitive form of obsession; by contrast, Tolstoy, who was capable of exploring these realms 74 The subconscious, unleavened by intellect, produces a surprising conformity, as the excellent Times critic of art, Dore Ashton, has observed. 78 Not, however, Breton, who is more than a "surrealist." 76 Cocteau can also write fairly well when he puts himself to it;

e.g., Thomas

Vlmpostewr.

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at will, knew how to vary his art by promenades into nature, by occasionally abstaining from analysing people and things out of existence, and by accepting them whole, loving them, for their own mysterious sakes. A fable by Franz Kafka, another of the recent and potent foreign influences, is instructive in this regard: a mouse, caught in a trap, is bemoaning the fact that all the roads of the universe, which once seemed so wide, led to this tiny corner of fate; an unsympathetic cat, overhearing this, answers: "Why didn't you change directions?," jumps on him, and eats him. (We are reminded of the end of The Trial.) Clearly, the halftruth that we are trapped and doomed can be accepted with a kind of negative complacency. Illusion or not, there is another half-truth that says we can change directions, but to accomplish this without abandoning truth and art prematurely is a very difficult trick. Dostoevsky and Kafka, pioneers, made their attitude stick, largely through the medium of other remarkable literary gifts." With Kafka, as with Tchekov, the late Flaubert, and usually Beckett, the whole stance is saved in part by being reversible (or collapsible) into daemonic laughter. But with fixedly grim featured Malraux, Camus, Blanchot, despite certain ideational or political-moral contributions, one gets a progressive sensation of artistic rut and impoverishment. It is not easy to say why. Partly, no doubt, it is because for them and for many other contemporary writers, art is but one line of endeavor among many; they are busily successful men outwardly, prematurely, and there is no substitute in the artistic vocation for the right kind of failure. But this is itself a quality of temperament, a result; no one can say absolutely why Proust was able to "stay in a room," while 77 Kafka was a master of straight prose; cf. his funny account of an air race in the appendix of Brod's biography.

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Malraux during his best years got uncontrollable fidgets, running around after sensational action to prove himself as a man on the one hand, recording a quite naked series of humiliations to purge himself on the other. The matter lies with the nature of his obsession, his rhythm, which fits a nervous, dynamic, episodic scenario.78 Whereas, the quality of Proust's particular experience of the "absurdity" of the human condition was such that it exfoliated, not as a rather metallic, cinematic chain, but as a living network (warm, membraneous, expansile) in all directions, from the despair of the refused good-night kiss out into the garden surrounding, with the whole scene of Combray and the childhood past eventually recaptured in that net, all the precious gleams trawled out of the familiar air.79 78 These qualities temporarily renew art in an external, sensational, "kinetic" (Joyce) way. The emphasis on driving rhythms in contemporary music is equally "kinetic," though less external. Such ready-made effects soon pall, and the author or composer is dropped for some new excitement. Malraux is, of course, a serious writer and these remarks are valid in his case only in relation to the chosen few. Critics like Georges Duthuit (Le Musée inimaginable) and Claude Roy ("Sur André Malraux," (Les Temps modernes, Nos. 143-44, p. 1452) have recently pointed to an excessively dynamic quality in Les Voix du Silence. 79 The image has a deceptively feminine cast, like that of the Fisher of Souls. But, lest one think Malraux's fits of activity are the "male" way of being, his inability to control them is not; to put it another way, no woman has written a work as forceful, dominated, and organized as A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. On the other hand, there are female bullfighters who eclipse the Malrauxs and Hemingways in crude daring.

Postscript to Part II

From here on, although there are certainly literary craftsmen who carry on the tradition honorably in France and, we believe, will continue to do so, no single figure has succeeded in giving that coup de bane which could significantly shift the direction of the artistic times, "breaking the tables" in the Nietzschean sense. That need not surprise us, for there have been other periods when the epoch-making writers were separated by broad spaces, such as the late eighteenth century. This austere observation is imposed by the nature of the method; once stated, it is a relief to forget it, to pitch in and "fray into the future" along with everybody else. At the level of subtlety and honesty of general insight, urbanity, certain restrained timbres and crisp turns of style, gains continue to be made,

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by authors and public, which some day may be assimilated to a stubbornly concentrated effort with myth-making impact. So far the bard has not revealed himself (outside the pages of the Revue de Pataphysique), and we probably wouldn't recognize him if he did. Meanwhile, there is no lack of brilliant individual talents with less than Luciferian ambition but, who cares? a sheer joy to read: Ponge, Michaux, Reverdy, Follain, Devaulx. The very richness of variety of the era, abroad as here, is baffling. In the midst of Paris, at the Etoile, the way of the writer seems to lead to all the compass points at once; move toward the Left Bank, and it dishevels into a metropolitan skein of diverting side-streets, impasses, garden paths down which we can hardly afford to follow—however enticing the beckonings, frantic the yoo-hooings—in this presentation of a critical method. Even for individual appreciation by some flâneur des deux rives, we are probably too close to say who stands out decisively from the rest. To a rather hurried visitor like myself it would seem that the most interesting personality in French writing since World War II has been (regardless of his political missteps) Jean-Paul Sartre, who is only secondarily an artist—though he might have been primarily one in a slightly different historical context—but is rather a literary figure or homme de lettres, like Voltaire or Diderot. He has understood, as the fairly pallid Nouvelle NKF and Arts cliques apparently have not, that the time has come for some earnest and dirty digging in the foundations before contemporary France will be able to offer us anything to rival her cultural past (Voltaire, in his Siècle de Louis XIV, revealed a remarkably similar awareness). Since the positions of artistic and philosophic eminence have been largely filled for our era by the "mandarins" and

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the leading existentialists and phenomenologists, the scramble is on for the closely derivative positions, for example, that of moralist. Camus, with his UHomme révolté, has made an earnest early bid, but the work is a hastily patched affair, badly conceived and written. We must await the promised UHomme of Sartre, with its significantly less modish and more comprehensive title. Roughly, in the face of even worse disasters than those threatening sixteenthcentury France, the Montaignes of our day call for a new clarity of vision, a new scepticism, and the cultivation of a supremely difficult inner virtue by an even more honnête version of the honnête homme. No doubt, some day, the ethics of our time will appear as a fresh level of the centuries-long effort of bourgeois puritan culture, increasingly sensitive to social evil and the plight of the underdog, girding itself for a titanic struggle against fate with what we may term a "humane stoicism." Meanwhile, as a kind of consolation prize to the era, the overlapping Symbolist and "absurdist" 1 lesson has strengthened some humbler forms of creativity, bringing about a more worthwhile theater, quite conscious of its ritual function,2 schooled in silences and paradoxes (Beckett, Ionesco, Anouilh, the existentialists) and a new poetic depth of tone 1

This now fashionable term refers to the modern (existentialist) enhanced awareness of that ambivalence which we have traced from the original creative temperament. Mallarmé, who built lgitur around the "absurd," as well as writers like Dostoevsky and Kafka, philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, is a pioneer of this awareness. 2 Especially Sartre and Anouilh. The quasi-religious function of theater is rivalled by new individual public consciences and confessors: the psychoanalysts and certain kinds of modern "intellectual-at-large," including some journalists and even a few avuncular figures appearing on radio and television.

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(Giraudoux, Schehade). Especially, there has arisen a promising Symbolist-trained criticism, from Thibaudet to Raymond, Michaud, Poulet, Richard. M y chief attitude toward these excellent things, far outweighing the one dutiful stricture, is regret that I have not had more time or capacity to savor them.

PART III S o m e Texts

1. Tristan; Perceval

THE HUNT

The eternal return, in popular form, of the love theme from Tristan et Iseut has tended to divert our attention from the deeper meanings of this poetic tale, in certain parts of which, for the first time in French literature, we sense the vibrations of an authentically lyric soul, a soul which, if it has not yet found a fully professional body, is, so to speak, quivering on the threshold. From one of the fragments, which Bedier has incorporated in his chapter entitled "L'Enfance Tristan," we learn that the protagonist was born into the world amidst the grief caused by the recent death of his father, where-

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fore "your name shall be called Tristan, that is the child of sadness." 1 The royal infant was brought up in Lyonesse, and, in order to protect him from an invader, a court follower hid him among his own sons. Then, "When seven years were passed and the time had come to take the child from the women, Rohalt put Tristan under a good master, the squire Gorvenal, and Gorvenal taught him in a few years the arts that go with barony. He taught him the use of lance and sword and 'scutcheon and bow . . . the various kinds of song and harp-playing, and the hunter's craft . . . Later Tristan was captured by certain merchants of Norway, but soon after they had put to sea their ship was endangered by a terrific storm: . . . then they did penance, knowing that the anger of the sea came of the lad, whom they had stolen in an evil hour, and they vowed his deliverance and got ready to put him, if it might be, ashore; then the wind and the sea fell, and the sky shone, and as the Norway ship grew small in the offing, a quiet tide cast Tristan and the boat upon a beach of sand. Painfully he climbed the cliff and saw, beyond, a lonely rolling heath and a forest stretching out and endless. And he wept, remembering Gorvenal his father, and the land of Lyonesse. Then the distant cry of a hunt, with horse and hound, came suddenly and lifted his heart, and a tall stag broke cover at the forest edge. The pack and the hunt streamed after it with a tumult of cries ana winding horns, but just as the hounds were racing clustered at the haunch, the quarry turned to bay at a stoned throw from Tristan; a huntsman gave him the thrust, while all around the hunt had gathered and was winding the kill. . . . T h e huntsmen turn out to be subjects of his uncle, King Mark, and when Tristan tells them the proper way to cut 1

The translations of the text are by Hilaire Belloc (The Ro-

mance of Tristan and lseult, New York: Pantheon, 1945).

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up the stag he thereby reveals his noble birth: "When the Master Huntsman had told him all the story, and King Mark had marvelled at the . . . cutting of the stag and the high art of venery in all, yet most he wondered at the stranger boy, and still gazed at him, troubled and wondering whence came his tenderness, and his heart would answer him nothing; but, my lords, it was blood that spoke, and the love he had long since borne his sister Blanchefleur." All of us have recognized that this episode is a clear and striking enactment of the old story of the search for the father by the lost, disinherited, and psychically wounded prince, which lore will emerge in later masterpieces in the form of Hamlet and Wilhelm Meister and still later as the legendary figure of the adolescent Rimbaud. Taking a hint from Joyce's discussion of Hamlet in Ulysses, we may say that the search for the father is the aftermath of an initial sundering, and the archetypal form of this is the departure from the original All, which religion and art usually identify as a Father. We have attempted to demonstrate, in Part II, the reason for this choice: that whereas the paths of man and woman eventually cross in marriage and hence the separation of son and mother is partially assuaged, the paths of man and man, and especially of son and father, are forever parallel, never touching, and thus engender, or create a new version of, the spirit of the infinite.2 From the onesided view of a male-dominated culture, then—the Western since, say, the coming of the Hellenes or the Hebrews—man is felt to be the spiritual creature and woman is excluded even from the Trinity, though in cer2

Ernst Cassirer rightly sees the rationally located sense of the infinite as the decisive new factor in the emergence of the human mind from the animal. The male-male split is obviously but one of many possible renunciations.

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tain regions and eras, including our own, there are attempts to modify the situation. From this viewpoint we can appreciate the peculiar power of certain biblical stories— which were sometimes presented as plays in the earlier French centuries—that of Abraham and Isaac, for example. Freud had onesidedly considered that this near-sacrifice was an expression of Oedipal conflict between father and son. But, it seems fair to say that the reverse is just as true or truer, that the drama expresses the frustrated and hidden love between the two,8 of which the most positive sign would be the sweet tears the Hebrews undoubtedly shed before this ritual text as before similar episodes from the life of Kind David or the lamentations of Jacob, especially those scenes when the dying father bestows his blessing upon the son. We shall shortly see that our hunting scene from Tristan et Iseut bears precisely this ritual meaning and accordingly the tears the young Tristan shed for his father are the expression of a remoter and more spiritual version of the ambivalent love-death theme which is commonly associated with the legend. In the Abraham episode, we note, it is the son who is nearly sacrificed physically, but the father is no less wounded psychically by the ordeal, and if anything suffers the more of the two. Along with the recurrent figure of the wounded prince (Orestes, Tristan, Hamlet, Werther, René) we find the complementary theme of the sick or wounded father or surrogate father (blind Oedipus, King Mark, the Fisher King, King Lear, or le Père Goriot). As for the tears which are the tangible expression of this 8 The intensely poetic attitude toward children is typically one of excessive love and hatred: Iphigenia, the boys in Amis et Amile, the Tower twins, MacdufPs children, Pushkin's Dmitri, Little Nell, Mignon, and Tadzio ascend in procession to the altar of the mind.

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relationship, we might almost call Western man homo lacrimans: A n d you, m y father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I p r a y . (Dylan Thomas)

The Lord tells Abraham to substitute a ram for Isaac, and here the sacrificial theme is interwoven with another which is strongly present in the Tristan passage and which will persist throughout our literature and art: the theme of the hunt.4 It goes back also to ancient pagan figures like Nemrod (the hunter of God), Actaeon, and, especially, Adonis, the handsome sacrificial youth often regarded by comparative religionists as the main precursor to Christ. As Abraham both wounds and is wounded, Adonis is at once hunter and hunted. Orestes is another such chasseur maudit, a particularly anguished version of the wandering Greek or Jew: "You don't see them, you don't—but I see them: they are hunting me down, I must move on" (Aeschylus, Choephoroi). From the pagan and Hebrew traditions the theme passes into the French Christian culture with the full force of its primitive paradox: Tristan, the hunter, who will strike down his uncle, King Mark, by his adulterous love for Iseut, will in turn be tracked like a beast in the forest. The chief exemplar is, of course, Christ himself, at once ichthys and the fisher of souls, sacrificed lamb and bearer of the sword. Numerous derivative expressions, often * Not only does the child sense at moments the basic threatening animal under the more or less civilized fatherly façade but also the two images were no doubt further linked by the fact that the father traditionally initiates the son to the hunt and incidentally teaches him to turn his aggression from himself in this way. A t that moment also the "infinite parallel" of their love relationship seems to converge in a common target.

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quite moving, are to be found in French art, with St. Sebastian (perhaps best represented in the music of Debussy), or mural art of the kind described by Richard Wilbur: Sometimes, as one can see Carved at Amboise in a high relief, in the lintel stone Of the castle chapel, hunters have strangely come To a mild close of the chase, bending the knee Instead of the bow, struck sweetly dumb To see from the brow bone Of the hounded stag a cross Grown, and the eyes clear with grace. (Castles and Distances) An outstanding example of the theme in English literature is Francis Thompson's religious poem, The Hound of Heaven. Always the hunt is as beautiful as the wound is beloved, and the sound of the distant horn with its note of sad virility mingled with other deep nostalgias pervades French poetry from Tristan et Iseut and the Chanson de Roland through Vigny, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire. Its exquisiteness is partly in its distance, echo of the original sundering.® One of the most haunting texts in French literature, the medieval legend of St. Julien l'Hospitalier as told by Flaubert, presents precise parallels to our Tristan episode, particularly recalling this passage which it will be useful to repeat: "Then the distant cry of a hunt, with horse and hound came suddenly and lifted his heart, and a tall stag broke cover at the forest edge." This stag will lead 6 Cf. Wagner's Siegfried Idyll; the father-son theme emerges with comparable power from Rostand's L'Aiglon, Strindberg's To

Damascus, Kafka's Letter to my

Father.

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directly, as we observed, to the surrogate father, King Mark, who will be tragically wounded by the young prince: ". . . dear uncle, why did you not the first day send away the wandering child who came to betray you? . . . Iseut is your wife and I am your son." In the Flaubert version of the St. Julien legend, which he learned from a stained-glass window, we first see Julien as a child, mysteriously tranced at the sight of blood. Later he shoots a stag: "The prodigious animal stopped, and, eyes blazing, solemn as a patriarch and an administrator of the law, while a distant bell tolled, he repeated thrice: 'Accursed, accursed, accursed. One day, savage heart, you will assassinate your father and your mother.' He bent his knees, closed his eyes gently and died. Julien was stupefied, then overcome with a sudden fatigue; and an immense disgust, an immense sadness overwhelmed him. His forehead in his hands, he wept and wept." Chretien de Troye's Perceval offers equally rewarding parallels, but the text is less primitive than our preceding one and deserves fuller and separate treatment. For thè moment, we note that Perceval is another orphaned youth who, with a special yearning—his mother having deprived him of all association with mature men—sets out on a quest for a father, and he finds an approximation to him (or Him) in the mysterious figure of the wounded Fisher King, who turns out to be his uncle. Together with St. Julien,9 Perceval is hypnotized with religious awe at the sight of blood, three drops from a " Other parallels to the S t Julien theme are found in the Life of Saint Gregory (recently retold by Mann), in the Roman de Thèbes (the story of Oedipus), and Chretien's Guillaume