Bits of Criticism
By
John Burroughs

BITS OF CRITICISM

THE difference between a precious stone and a common stone is not an essential difference – not a difference of substance, but of arrangement of the particles – the crystallization. In substance the charcoal and the diamond are one, but in form and effect how widely they differ. The pearl contains nothing that is not found in the coarsest oyster-shell.

Two men have the same thoughts; they use about the same words in expressing them; yet with one the product is real literature, with the other it is a platitude.

The difference is all in the presentation; a finer and more compendious process has gone on in the one case than in the other. The elements are better fused and knitted together; they are in some way heightened and intensified. Is not here a clew to what we mean by style? Style transforms common quartz into an Egyptian pebble. We are apt to think of style as something external, that can be put on, something in and of itself. But it is not; it is in the inmost texture of the substance itself. Polish, choice words, faultless rhetoric, are only the accidents of style. Indeed, perfect workmanship is one thing; style, as the great writers have it, is quite another. It may, and often does, go with faulty workmanship. It is the use of words in a fresh and vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of a new spiritual force and personality. In the best work the style is found and hidden in the matter.

I heard a reader observe, after finishing one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books, “How well it is written!” I thought it a doubtful compliment. It should have been so well written that the reader would not have been conscious of the writing at all. If we could only get the writing, the craft, out of our stories and essays and poems, and make the reader feel he was face to face with the real thing! The complete identification of the style with the thought; the complete absorption of the man with his matter, so that the reader shall say, “How good, how real, how true!” that is the great success. Seek ye the kingdom of truth first, and all things shall be added. I think we do feel, with regard to some of Stevenson’s books, like “An Inland Voyage,” “Travels with a Donkey,” etc., how well they are written. Certainly one would not have the literary skill any less, but would have one’s attention kept from it by the richness of the matter. Hence I think a British critic hits the mark when he says Stevenson lacks homeliness.

Dr. Holmes wrote fine and eloquent poems, yet I think one does not feel that he is essentially a poet. His work has not the inevitableness of nature; it is a skilful literary feat; we admire it, but seldom return to it. His poetry is a stream in an artificial channel; his natural channel is his prose; here we get his freest and most spontaneous activity.

One fault that I find with our younger and more promising school of novelists is that their aim is too literary; we feel that they are striving mainly for artistic effects. Do we feel this at all in Scott, Dickens, Hawthorne, or Tolstoi? These men are not thinking about art but about life; how to reproduce life. In essayists like Pater, Wilde, Lang, the same thing occurs; we are constantly aware of the literary artist; they are not in love with life, reality, so much as they are with words, style, literary effects. Their seriousness is mainly an artistic seriousness. It is not so much that they have something to say, as that they are filled with a desire to say something. Nearly all our magazine poets seem filled with the same desire; what labor, what art and technique; but what a dearth of feeling and spontaneity! I read a few lines or stanzas and then stop. I see it is only deft handicraft, and that the heart and soul are not in it. One day my boy killed what an old hunter told him was a mock duck. It looked like a duck, it acted like a duck, it quacked like a duck, but when it came upon the table – it mocked us. These mock poems of the magazines remind me of it.

Is it not unfair to take any book, certainly any great piece of literature, and deliberately sit down to pass judgment upon it? Great books are not addressed to the critical judgment, but to the life, the soul. They need to slide into one’s life earnestly, and find him with his guard down, his doors open, his attitude disinterested. The reader is to give himself to them, as they give themselves to him; there must be self-sacrifice. We find the great books when we are young, eager, receptive. After we grow hard and critical we find few great books. A recent French critic says: “It seems to me works of art are not made to be judged, but to be loved, to please, to dissipate the cares of real life. It is precisely by wishing to judge them that one loses sight of their true significance.”

“How can a man learn to know himself?” inquires Goethe. “Never by reflection, only by action.” Is not this a half-truth? One can only learn his powers of action by action, and his powers of thought by thinking. He can only learn whether or not he has power to command, to lead, to be an orator or legislator, by actual trial. Has he courage, self-control, self-denial, fortitude, etc.? In life alone can he find out. Action tests his moral virtues, reflection his intellectual. If he would define himself to himself he must think. “We are weak in action,” says Renan, “by our best qualities; we are strong in action by will and a certain one-sidedness.” “The moment Byron reflects,” says Goethe, “he is a child.” Byron had no self-knowledge. We have all known people who were ready and sure in action who did not know themselves at all. Your weakness or strength as a person comes out in action; your weakness or strength as an intellectual force comes out in reflection.

Verlaine: A Feminine Appreciation
By
Mrs. Reginald de Koven

VERLAINE: A FEMININE APPRECIATION

IN early days, when the triumphs and the torments of his overwhelming vitality swept at will across his soul, Paul Verlaine was sometimes god and sometimes satyr. From aspiring altitudes of spiritual emotions he swung like a pendulum to unspoken depths of vice.

The world spirit doubly charged his strange and terrible personality, pouring into it the essences and intuitions of the body and the soul. Into the alembic were dissolved the entities of Baudelaire and Villon, floating still upon the earth.

Then the whole was set to the vibration of a new rhythm as strange and as remote from the consciousness of men as the songs of inter-lunar space, so that his utterances with the naturalness of a bird’s song or an infant’s lisp should have the accents of melody undreamed of. And this is not all – strangest and most tragically terrible in its possibilities of pain – the chrism of conscience burns his sinister brow. The phantom of the immortal soul drives him into the outer darkness.

What are the undiscovered laws of spiritual heredity and of a poetic paternity, such as are suggested in the likeness of Baudelaire and Verlaine to their prototype Villon? The secret is yet to find. It is all as strange as the mystery of Bernhardt’s strayed existence in this modern day. An emanation from some Egyptian tomb, wild spirit of genius and of vice is she, vampire-like, inhuman, wandering among a people who have thrilled to her voice and wondered, not knowing whence she came.

Behind them both – Baudelaire with his luminous, despairing eyes, and Verlaine with his terrible glabrous head – the madcap figure of Villon shines out of a cloud of time, and we hear the sound of his reckless laughter and the music of his tears.

But if the relation between these two moderns and this singing renegade of the Middle Ages is that of mysterious paternity, between Baudelaire and Verlaine there is a brotherhood which is as wonderful as an oriental dream of metempsychosis.

Baudelaire’s verses, read in early youth, so saturated and possessed the new-born soul of Paul Verlaine that he became more a reincarnation of Baudelaire than a separate existence. The passions and the madness of Baudelaire became his own – he heard the same strange music – saw the same visions. Incarnate of the mad poet, Verlaine, his second soul, fled a second slave in the footsteps of the same strange goddess – beauty in decay.

And where one had madly followed, so the other fled, enamoured of her fatal loveliness, wherever her fickle steps should lead. Sometimes she would escape them, disappearing in mists and mysterious darkness, and sometimes they would come upon her suddenly in glimpses of green light, dancing strange frivolous steps, and the color of her robes would be mingled rose and mystic blue, and the halo of her head the phosphor of decay.

And she has led them through strange paths into the dwelling-place of death, and where love and life live together, for these two are never separated, and, through many places of terror and delight, to that ultimate spot, occult, remote, where dwells the soul of woman.

There the youngest of her slaves found himself one day outstripping his brother, and saw with living eyes the mystery, – and thenceforward he was no more Paul Verlaine; he was the prophet and interpreter of woman.

To him alone has the secret been revealed; to him alone, the mantle of deceit she wears, the slavish dress of the centuries, is no concealment. He has seen, has known, and he understands. “The very worst thing in the world,” says an unknown writer, “is the soul of a woman.” Forced to inaction, and fed on lies, her principal power, founded on man’s weakness, curiosity, and the imagination of the intellect, lead her in many wandering ways. Tasting but few of the actual joys, the triumphs, and the trials of life, from the harem of her slavery her fancy has wandered with the winds. In her mind the unique and fatal experimenter, she has known all crimes, all horrors, as well as martyrdoms and joys. And this, while her gentle feminine hands have ministered to suffering, her voice has cheered, her smile has illumined, and her divine patience has endured.

Consider these lines – their spiritual intuition is the parallel of Wordsworth in his limpid moods; their knowledge, like a single glow of summer lightning, illumines all the darkened land as the glimmering patient light of Bourget’s candle in cycles of encyclopedics will never do.

Behold the woman!

 
“Beauté des femmes, leur faiblesse et ces mains pâles,
Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal.”
 

The appealing weakness of women is the first note, invariably stronger than command – and then the reference to their hands. This is very characteristic of Verlaine – they haunt him.

 
“Les chères mains qui furent miennes,
Toutes petites, toutes belles.”
 

…

 
“Mains en songes – main sur mon âme.”
 

The last is a very poignant line – and again in “Ariettes Oubliées,” —

“Le piano que baise une main frêle.”

Then comes the reflection as to the eyes of women, profoundly true and observant, contained in the last two verses of the first stanza: —

 
“Et ces yeux où plus rien ne reste d’animal
Que juste assez pour dire ‘assez’ aux fureurs mâles!”
 

Then the next stanza: —

 
“Et toujours, maternelle endormeuse des râles,
Même quand elle ment – .”
 

Here is the creature who could be both nurse and courtesan – concise and convincing classification.

Then he continues relating how, as man as well as poet, he has vibrated to the clear soprano of

 
“Cette voix! Matinal
Appel, ou chant bien doux à vêpres, ou frais signal,
Ou beau sanglot qui va mourir au pli des châles!..”
 

How he has dreamed over the tender sentiment of her twilight song, and been melted and conquered by the still greater, more beautiful appeal of the emotional soul for love and understanding, – “beau sanglot” indeed!

Then comes the wonderful third stanza, and its denunciation of man’s brutality and selfishness.

 
“Hommes durs! Vie atroce et laide d’ici-bas!
Ah! que du moins, loins des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne.”
 

Here is the appeal for sentiment, for the love of the spirit, choked in the throats of dumb and suffering women.

“Quelque chose du cœur,” he repeats and persuades, “enfantin et subtil.”

 
“Bonté, respect! car qu’est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment, quand la mort viendra, que reste-t-il?”
 

From him, the convict poet, from this heart rotten with all the sins of fancy and of deed, bursts this plea – as naive as it is earnest, for the spiritual in love – for sentiment, the essence of the soul. Strange anomaly – stranger still that it should be he who has understood.

Three lines more, from an early poem called “Vœu,” of such condensed significance and biting truth as lacks a parallel.

 
“O la femme à l’amour câlin et rechauffant,
Douce, pensive et brune, et jamais étonnée,
Et qui parfois vous baise au front, comme un enfant.”
 

What a portrait, typical and individual – “jamais étonnée,” my sisters, what an accusation!

…

Verlaine is dead. The last shred of that ruined soul which has for years been rotting away in chance Parisian brasseries, has loosened its hold upon life and slipped into the unknown; but the poetry he has left behind him, with its sighs and bitter sobbings, and its few gleams of beauty and of joy, contains the essence of his strange nature.

Although repudiating the responsibility of the position, he was the founder and leader of that school of poetic expression which has most importantly distinguished the end of his century.

Half faun, half satyr, his nature was allied to baseness and brutal animalism, but possessed a strange and childish naïveté which remained with him to the last, and a spirit remotely intact in the chaos of his wayward senses, whence issued songs of matchless purity and inimitable music.