22 LITERARY MEMORIES AND PRESENT-DAY PROBLEMS1
“LITERARY MEMORIES?” “Present-day problems?” I hesitated between those two subjects, which at first seemed very different. Then, on reflecting over them, I understood that those two subjects interpenetrate and become one: for, in the often tragic light of recent events, the past becomes clear, and it is on looking for a present-day lesson in it, that I shall first bring out some memories.
As early as eighteen years of age, a young man makes up his mind to write. In school he is told and makes himself believe that to write well is first a matter of feeling and thinking correctly. He has read in the Characters of La Bruyère: “To make a book is a trade,” otherwise expressed: something which can and must be learned.
As for painters, they serve an apprenticeship in the studio of some celebrated master; but as for the young man of letters, where can he go?
Pierre Louys and I were schoolmates; we had discovered in each other with great delight if not exactly the same tastes, at least a commensurate love of poetry. Louys was more enterprising than I, bolder — but how gladly I allowed myself to be led by him.
He took me to Mallarmé’s.
Mallarmé entertained every Tuesday evening in his little apartment on the rue de Rome. It has often been told, and very well, what those reunions were, and I should hesitate to speak to you of them again, if it were not to bring out certain traits of the poet’s face, to clear up certain specific points in his teaching, that seem to me, from a distance, all the more remarkable because they were different from everything seen at that time, everything seen or said, or done to-day.
Nothing more modest than Mallarmé’s home or his personal appearance. His salary as a teacher of English in the Lycée Condorcet did not permit him any luxury; but everything in his home was in excellent taste. The little dining-room-where he entertained us could hold only eight persons, ten at the most, who sat around a table, where an enormous tobacco-jar had replaced the meal. The master himself remained standing, leaning against the brown faience stove. Madame Mallaré had retired. Her daughter, Geneviève, at the stroke of ten, with smiling graciousness, brought in the toddies, sometimes waited a few minutes when there was not much company; but was too reserved to take part in the conversation. Mallarmé was almost the only one who talked. The Divagations which he published later give some fairly exact reflections of his remarks. But the tone of his voice, his smile, not on his lips but in his eyes, a circumspect smile, veiled, almost apprehensive, accompanied ordinarily by a furtive gesture: an index finger raised in sign of interrogation or expectation.… Oh, how far away we were, in that little room, on the rue de Rome, far from the vain noises of the busy city, from political reports, from corruption and intrigue. With Mallarmé we entered into a supra-sensible region, where money, honors and plaudits no longer counted; and nothing was more discreet, more secret than the radiance of his reputation. The whole cultivated world knows to-day — but, at that time, we were only a few exceptions who recognized it — that Mallarmé knew how to bring our classic poetry up to a degree of sonorous perfection, of plastic and inner beauty, of enchanting power never attained before, and that I believe it will never attain again — for, in art, what is perfect can not be come back to; one must go on, search elsewhere.
But there was something else in Mallarmé, and what shone from his personality was a sort of sanetity. In his domain, which was not of this world, he exercised a sort of priesthood. His remarks alone were addressed to our minds; his example touched our souls — oh! very simply, for he was not at all pontifical. Besides what he taught us by his example, as much and more than by his remarks (and that is what makes his face so important in my eyes), he taught us virtue. Yes, indeed, he appeared to me like a saint and as such I consider him; and I should like, in a brief panegyric, to lay stress on certain merits, extra-literary in appearance, but upon which literature, and our culture depend. The elements, the components, of that virtue?… A certain belief and confidence in truths absolute, intangible and unchangeable by circumstances, by events, by everything that, around Mallarmé, we used to call “contingencies.” An attachment to a supra-sensible truth, before which everything gave way, faded out, became of little importance.
Oh! I see well, I see only too well where that contempt could lead: it invited you to turn your back on life. The poet lost contact with reality; he risked precipitating literature into abstract and glacial regions. May I be permitted to clarify this disdain of the outer world by an anecdote, for I should not like the example of Mallarmé to make my lecture too austere.
As a reaction against the Naturalist School and anxious to give Symbolism a novel it seemed to me to lack (for until then it had produced only poems), I had just written a certain Voyage d’Urien1, of which the third and last part had appeared separately in booklet form in a separate reprint, under the misleading title Voyage to Spitzberg. I had sent this booklet to Mallarmé, who had received it with a slight raising of the eyebrows, thinking, from the title, that it was the story of a real periplus. On seeing me again a few days later: “Ah! you gave me a terrible fright; I was afraid you had gone there!” he said to me. And nothing was more exquisite than his smile.
A little later, it seemed to me necessary to establish a direct and sensuous contact between literature and the outer world and, as I wrote in a later preface to my Nourritures Terrestres2, to “put a bare foot down on the ground again.” On doing that, I made a departure from Mallarmé, to be sure, but I retained from his teaching a holy horror of easiness, of complacency, of everything that flatters and charms, both in literature and in life; an uncompromising love and need of sincerity, integrity, toward oneself and toward one’s fellow-men; of the exigency, the unshakable conviction that, no matter what happens, what constitutes the value of man, his honor and his dignity, is more important, should be more important than all the rest and deserves that all the rest be subordinated to it, and, if need be, sacrificed.
One thing that seems to me worthy of notice and that I do not think has ever been remarked, at any rate sufficiently: an indirect consequence of that restlessness, of that integral love of what is true which is indistinguishable from the need for justice: it was in Mallarmé’s immediate circle that, at the time of the celebrated Dreyfus affair, uncompromising justice recruited certain of its most ardent defenders — Ferdinand Hérold, Pierre Quillard, Bernard Lazare.… I was right then in saying that the teaching of the rue de Rome was not directed at the mind only, but strained at the formation of our souls. In that regard I should like to speak now of opportunism, and all the. more willingly as to-day it is very much in style, under the form of recruited literature.
In Mallarmé’s time, “recruited literature” had one illustrious representative, Maurice Barrès.
I am grateful to him for having been the first to notice my first book: Les Cahiers d’ André Walter. This book, never having left the bookstore, was still piled up at Perrin’s, Barrès’ editor, where Barrès noticed it, and glanced at it.… The little of it that he read gave him the desire to know me. He communicated with me. At that time, I was hardly more than twenty years of age. Barrès was my elder by eight years. He already enjoyed considerable prestige among the young although he had not yet published more than a few volumes — those that form the consecrated series which he called Le Culte du Moi.1 Besides he had directed all by himself a little magazine: Taches d’encre, of which he was the sole editor — that had only three numbers, but in which could be read a study of Baudelaire, which was not, which is not yet, well known, and that I consider one of the most remarkable, truly masterly! Masterly, Barrès was everywhere and ceaselessly, in his gestures, in his bearing, in the tone, haughty, ironical and scornful, of his voice. He imposed himself, as I suppose Chateaubriand must have done, whom to be sure he resembled closely. But larger of stature, better built, and breathing from his whole being a sort of authority somewhat scornful or condescending by which, nevertheless, one liked to be taken in. He charmed, but one approached him only in trembling. Very careful of his person, and always admirably dressed, with great elegance and a sort of genteel disorderliness at the same time. I recall his tall stature, his look a little equine (but that of a timid horse, if not a frightened one), — let us remember that Homer spoke of the bovine expression of Juno, — a very prominent, aquiline nose, very black locks of hair that he brought forward or allowed to fall over his fine forehead.… He might have been Spanish. Who was it said: We all resemble our bust (it was Richepin, I think)? Barrès, in love with Toledo, resembled a portrait of El Greco.