by Walter Pater
Flaubert’s first great trouble came in his twenty-fifth year, on the death of his father, quickly followed by that of his favourite sister Caroline: —
It was yesterday at eleven o’clock we interred her — poor damsel! They pusher in her wedding-gown, with bunches of roses, violets, and immortelles. I passed the whole night watching beside her. She lay straight, reposed on her couch, in the room where you have heard her play. She looked taller and handsomer than in life, with the long white veil down to the feet. In the morning, when all was ready, I gave her a last kiss in her coffin. I stooped down, placed my head within, felt the lead bend under my hands. — It was I who had the cast taken. I saw the coarse bands handle her and enclose her in the plaster. I shall possess her hand and her face. Pradier will make the bust for me, to be placed in my own room. I have kept for myself her large striped shawl, a lock of her hair, the table, and the desk at which she wrote. And that is all! — all that remains of those one has loved... When we got up there, in that cemetery behind the walls of which we used to go out walking in my school days, the grave was too narrow: the coffin would not go in. They shook it, pulled it this way and that, used spade and levers, and at last a gravedigger tramped upon it — where the head was — to force it into its place. I felt dried up — like the marble of a tomb — but terribly irritated. And now, since Sunday, we are at home again at Croisset. What a journey it was I alone with my mother and the infant, which cried. The last time I left, it was with yourself, you will remember. Of the four persons who then lived there two remain.... My mother is better than she might be; occupies herself with her daughter’s babe, is trying to make herself a mother once more. Will she succeed? The reaction has not yet come, and I dread it. I am crushed, stupefied. If I could but resume my tranquil life of art, of long-continued meditation I What notes of dismay, of a kind of frozen grief, of a capacity for pity, of those resources to be so largely tested by “Madame Bovary”!
“I am prepared for everything. I am like the pavement on the high road; misfortune tramps over me as it wills.”
“As for me, my eyes are dry as marble. Strange! The more expansive I find myself, fluid and abundant, in fictitious griefs, just in that proportion do the real griefs stay fixed in my heart, acrid and hard. They turn to crystal, there, one by one, as they come.”
It is the daughter of that favourite sister ‘who has now appeared as the editor of his letters from the year 1830 to 1850. She has introduced them by a sketch of his life, which the student of Flaubert’s work will value, for she became in her turn her uncle’s intimate companion, and has recorded some characteristic counsels to herself, the mature experience of his artistic life applied to the formation of the mind of a young girl. “When you take up a book,” he would say, “you must swallow it at one mouthful. That is the only way to know it in its entirety. Accustom yourself to follow out an idea. I don’t wish you should have that loose character in your thoughts which is the appanage of persons of your sex.” The author of “Salammbo” taught her ancient history. “I interrupted him sometimes,” she tells us, “by the question, ‘Was he a good man? — Cambyses, Alexander, Alcibiades.’
‘Faith! they were not very accommodating members of society — messieurs très commodes. But what has that to do with you? ‘“ He went to church with her, for the young French girl could not go alone — amazing complaisance it seemed in so marked a Freethinker — awaiting patiently, we must not be too sure with what kind of thoughts, till her duties were over.
La Bovary! — many a time she heard of that before she had any notion what the name meant. “I had a vague belief that it was a synonym for labour, perpetual labour. I assisted, a motionless witness, at the slow creation of those pages so severely elaborated.” There he sat, month after month, seeking, sometimes with so much pain, the expression, “the phrase,” weighing the retention or rejection of an epithet — his one fixed belief the belief in beauty, literary beauty, with liberal delight at beauty in other men’s work, remembering after many years the precise place on the page of some approved form of sentence. He knew his favourite passage in Scripture, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring glad tidings!”
“‘Reflect on that, get to the bottom of it, if you can,’ he would say to me, full of enthusiasm.” His “distractions” were limited to certain short absences in Paris for a day or two, about once in three months — pour me retremper. On the rare occasion of a longer visit it was necessary that his home companions should go with him; and then, on certain days, his rooms in the Boulevard du Temple were put in flowery array, and he entertained a select party of friends. “Whenever I re-enter Paris,” he writes, “I breathe at my ease.” But in truth he abhorred change. “Man is so poor a machine that a straw among the wheels spoils it.”
“I live like a Carthusian,” he says; and again, “I am but a lizard, a literary lizard, warming himself all day long at the full sun of the beautiful.”
“For writing,” his niece tells us, “he required extreme tension of mind, and he never found himself in the desired condition save in his own workroom, seated at his great round table, sure that nothing could come to disturb him. He had a passionate love of order, and ate sparingly. His force of will in all that concerned his ‘art’ was immense.” He troubled himself little about “moments of inspiration,” the waiting on which he held to be a cause of “sterility.” Get the habit of working in ordinary daylight, and then perhaps the ray of heavenly light may come. At times the monotony of his method of life, a monotony likely to continue to the end, weighed on the spirits, especially as the passing footsteps about him grew rarer and memory took the place of sensation: for, in spite of what people say, “memories don’t fill one’s house, they do but enlarge its solitude. There is now a multitude of places at which my heart bleeds as I pass. It seems to me,” he writes — only in his twenty-fifth year—” that the angles of my life are worn down under the friction of all that has passed over it.”
So his life continued to the last, as he had foreseen, somewhat painfully disturbed towards the end by the German war. That its barbarities should have been the work of a literary, a scientific people, was but the last expression of a soul of stupidity in things, to his view unmistakable. The invaders in occupation of Rouen made use of his house, but respectfully.
The end came in 1880, and found him at work, alone apparently, in his large study, with the five windows and wide views, where he had lived so long.
Madame Commanville has printed these letters, chiefly because she thought they revealed her uncle under a different light from that of his books. A kind of scandal attached to his writings, and the editor of his correspondence is certainly right in thinking that her own reminiscences of his life would, after all, make people esteem him as a man. In truth, life and letters alike reveal him not otherwise than as we divine him through his books — the passionate, laborious, conscientious artist, who had found affection and temperance indispensable to his art, abounding in sympathy for the simple people who came nearest to him, conscious of an immense mental superiority to almost every one, a superiority which kept him high and clean in all things, yet full of pity, of practical consideration for men and women as they must be. Anxious to think him a good man, his niece, with some costly generous acts known to herself in memory, was struck above all by that tranquil devotion to art which seemed to have had about it something of the “seriousness and passion that are like a consecration” — something of religion.
WORDSWORTH
THE ATHENÆUM, JANUARY 26, 1889
The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. With an Introduction by John Morley. (Macmillan & Co.)
The Recluse. By William Wordsworth. ( Same publishers. )
Selections from Wordsworth. — By William Knight and other Members of the Wordsworth Society. With Preface and Notes. ( Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. )
THE appearance of Prof. Knight’s judicious ‘Selections,’ and of Messrs. Macmillan’s collected
edition of his works in one volume, with the first book of ‘The Recluse,’ now printed in its entirety for the first time, and a sensible introductory essay by Mr. John Morley, gives sufficient proof that general interest in Wordsworth is on the increase. Nothing could be better — nothing so well calculated as a careful study of Wordsworth to correct the faults of our bustling age as regards both thought and taste, and remind people, amid the vast contemporary expansion of the means and accessories of life, of the essential value of life itself. It was none other than Mill himself, so true a representative of the main tendencies of the spirit of our day, who protested that when the battle which he and his friends were waging had been won the world would “need more than ever those qualities which Wordsworth had kept alive and nourished.”
In the new edition the poems are arranged, with their dates, as much as possible in the order of their composition — an arrangement which has its obvious uses for the student of the development of the poet’s genius, though the older method of distributing his work into various groups of subject had its service as throwing light upon his poetic motives, more especially as coming from himself.
Mr. Morley in his introduction dwells on the fact of Wordsworth’s singular personal happiness as having had much to do with the physiognomy of his work — a calm, sabbatic, mystic well-being some may think it; worldly prosperity De Quincey reckoned it. The poet’s own flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind, had, of course, something to do with that What a store of good fortune, what a contribution to happiness in the very finest sense of that word, is really involved in a cheerful, grateful, physical temperament, above all for a poet!
An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier phase of mind passed roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has been remarked as a fact in mental history again and again. It reveals itself in many forms, but is certainly strongest and most attractive in the most characteristic products of modern literature as of modern art also: it is exemplified almost equally by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and Théophile Gautier. As a curious chapter in the history of human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo. It has doubtless some latent connexion with those pantheistic theories which locate an intelligent soul in material things, and have largely exercised men’s minds in some modern systems of philosophy; while it makes as much difference between ancient and modern landscape art as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this new sense the writings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression; he is more simply and entirely preoccupied with it than any other poet, though there are fine expressions of precisely the same interest in so different a poet as Shelley. There was in Wordsworth’s own character, as we have seen, a certain natural contentment, a sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united with a sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of inanimate or imperfectly animate existence. His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt incidents, its changes being almost wholly inward; it falls, like his work, into broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it resembles most is the life of one of those early Flemish or Italian painters who, just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet systematic industry. And this sort of placid life matured in Wordsworth a quite unusual sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the natural world. It is to this world, and to a world of congruous meditation thereon, that we see him retiring in this newly published poem of ‘The Recluse’ — taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world of business, of action and ambition, as also of all that, for the majority of mankind, counts as sensuous enjoyment.
And so it came about that this sense of a life, a living soul, in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact To him every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life — to be capable of a companionship with humanity full of expression, of inexplicable affinities, and delicacies of intercourse. It was like a survival, in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive condition which some philosophers have traced in the general history of human culture, in which all outward objects alike, including even the works of men’s hands, were believed to be endowed with animation, and the world seemed “full of souls.” The eighteenth century had had but little of such mysticism. But then Wordsworth was essentially a leader of the revolt against the hard reign of the mere understanding in that century, a pioneer of thoughts which have been so different in our own.
And it was through nature thus ennobled by a semblance of passion and thought that Wordsworth approached the spectacle of human life. Human life, indeed, is for him at first only an additional accidental grace upon this expressive landscape. When he thought of men and women, it was of men and women as in the presence, and under the influence of the spell, of those effective natural objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close connexion of humanity with natural objects, the habitual association of his feelings and thoughts with a particular neighbourhood — colourless perhaps, certainly limited — has sometimes seemed to degrade those who have been the subjects of its influence, as if it did but reinforce that physical connexion of our nature with the actual lime and day of the soil which is always drawing us nearer to our end. But for Wordsworth these influences tended to the dignity of human nature, because they tended to tranquillise it. He raises nature to the level of human thought to give it power and expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and vastness and solemnity. The “leech-gatherer” on the moor, the “woman stepping westward,” are for him natural objects, almost in the same sense as the aged thorn or the lichened rock on the heath. In this sense the leader of the “Lake School,” in spite of an earnest preoccupation with man, his thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of nature.
And of nature, after all, in its modesty. The English lake country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of Wordsworth’s genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of apparently little or familiar things, would have found its true test had he become the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life. The glories of Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a little about them, had too potent a material life of their own to serve greatly his poetic purpose.
In Wordsworth’s prefatory advertisement to the first edition of ‘The Prelude,’ published in 1850, it is stated that that work was intended to be introductory to ‘The Recluse,’ and that ‘The Recluse,’ if completed, would have consisted of three parts. The second part is ‘The Excursion.’ The third part was only planned; but the first book of the first part was left in manuscript by Wordsworth — though in manuscript, it is said, in no great condition of forwardness for the printers. This book, now for the first time printed in extenso ( a very noble passage from it found place in that prose advertisement to ‘The Excursion’ ), is the great novelty of this latest edition of Wordsworth’s poetry: it was well worth adding to the poet’s great bequest to English literature. A true student of his work, who has formulated for himself what he supposes to be the leading characteristics of Wordsworth’s genius, will feel, we think, lively interest in testing them by the various fine passages in what is here presented for the first time. Let the following serve for a sample: —
Thickets fall of songsters, and the voice
Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound
Heard now and then from morn to latest eve,
Admonishing the man who walks below
Of solitude and silence in the sky?
These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth
Have also th
ese, but nowhere else is found,
Nowhere ( or is it fancy? ) can be found
The one sensation that is here; ’tis here,
Here as it found its way into my heart
In childhood, here as it abides by day,
By night, here only; or in chosen minds
That take it with them hence, where’er they go. —
’Tis, but I cannot name it, ’tis the sense
Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,
A blended holiness of earth and sky,
Something that makes this individual spot,
This small abiding-place of many men,
A termination, and a last retreat,