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From The symbolist movement in literature (1908)
By Arthur Symons
COUNT PHILIPPE AUGUSTE MATHIAS DE VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM was born at St. Brieuc, in Brittany, November 28, 1838; he died at Paris, under the care of the Frères Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, August 19, 1889. Even before his death, his life had become a legend, and the legend is even now not to be disentangled from the actual occurrences of an existence so heroically visionary. The Don Quixote of idealism, it was not only in philosophical terms that life, to him, was the dream, and the spiritual world the reality; he lived his faith, enduring what others called reality with contempt, whenever, for a moment, he becomes conscious of it. The basis of the character of Villiers was pride, and it was pride which covered more than the universe. And this pride, first of all, was the pride of race.
Descendant of the original Rodolphe le Bel, Seigneur de Villiers (1067), through Jean de Villiers and Maria de l'Isle and their son Pierre the first Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, born in 1384, had been Marshal of France under Jean-sans-Peur, Duke of Burgundy; he took Paris during the civil war, and after being imprisoned in the Bastille, reconquered Pontoise from the English, and helped to reconquer Paris. Another Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, born in 1464, Grand Master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, defended Rhodes against 200,000 Turks for a whole year, in one of the most famous sieges in history; it was he who obtained from Charles V. the concession of the isle of Malta for his Order, henceforth the Order of the Knights of Malta.
For Villiers, to whom time, after all, was but a metaphysical abstraction, the age of the Crusaders had not passed. From a descendant of the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the nineteenth century demanded precisely the virtues which the sixteenth century had demanded of that ancestor. And these virtues were all summed up in one word, which, in its double significance, single to him, covered the whole attitude of life: the word "nobility." No word returns oftener to the lips in speaking of what is most characteristic in his work, and to Villiers moral and spiritual nobility seemed but the inevitable consequence of that other kind of nobility by which he seemed to himself still a Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It was his birthright.
To the aristocratic conception of things, nobility of soul is indeed a birthright, and the pride with which this gift of nature is accepted is a pride of exactly the opposite kind to that democratic pride to which nobility of soul is a conquest, valuable in proportion to its difficulty. This duality, always essentially aristocratic and democratic, typically Eastern and Western also, finds its place in every theory of religion, philosophy, and the ideal life. The pride of being, the pride of becoming: these are the two ultimate contradictions set before every idealist. Villiers' choice, inevitable indeed, was significant. In this measure, it must always be the choice of the artist, to whom, in his contemplation of life, the means is often so much more important than the end. That nobility of soul which comes without effort, which comes only with an unrelaxed diligence over oneself, that I should be I: there can at least be no comparison of its beauty with the stained and dusty onslaught on a never quite conquered fort of the enemy, in a divided self. And, if it be permitted to choose among degrees of sanctity, that, surely, is the highest in which a natural genius for such things accepts its own attainment with the simplicity of a birthright.
And the Catholicism of Villiers was also a part of his inheritance. His ancestors had fought for the Church, and Catholicism was still a pompous flag, under which it was possible to fight on behalf of the spirit, against that materialism which is always, in one way or another, atheist. Thus he dedicates one of his stories to the Pope, chooses ecclesiastical splendours by preference among the many splendours of the world which go to make up his stage-pictures, and is learned in the subtleties of the Fathers. The Church is his favourite symbol of austere intellectual beauty; one way, certainly, by which the temptations of external matter may be vanquished, and a way, also, by which the desire of worship may be satisfied.
But there was also, in his attitude towards the mysteries of the spiritual world, that "forbidden " curiosity which had troubled the obedience of the Templars, and which came to him, too, as a kind of knightly quality. Whether or not he was actually a Cabbalist, questions of magic began, at an early age, to preoccupy him, and, from the first wild experiment of Isis to the deliberate summing up of Axël, the "occult" world finds its way into most of his pages.
Fundamentally, the belief of Villiers is the belief common to all Eastern mystics.(1) "Know, once for all, that there is for thee no other universe than that conception thereof which is reflected at the bottom of thy thoughts." "What is knowledge but a recognition?" Therefore, "forgetting for ever that which was the illusion of thyself," hasten to become "an intelligence freed from the bonds and the desires of the present moment." "Become the flower of thyself! Thou art but what thou thinkest: therefore think thy- self eternal." "Man, if thou cease to limit in thyself a thing, that is, to desire it, if, so doing, thou withdraw thyself from it, it will follow thee, woman-like, as the water fills the place that is offered to it in the hollow of the hand. For thou possessest the real being of all things, in thy pure will, and thou art the God that thou art able to become."
To have accepted the doctrine which thus finds expression in Axël, is to have accepted this among others of its consequences: "Science states, but does not explain: she is the oldest offspring of the chimeras; all the chimeras, then, on the same terms as the world (the oldest of them!), are something more than nothing!" And in Elën there is a fragment of conversation between two young students, which has its significance also:
"Goetze. There's my philosopher in
full flight
to the regions of the sublime! Happily
we have Science, which is a torch, dear
mystic; we will analyse your sun, if the
planet does not burst into pieces sooner
than it has any right to!
Samuel. Science will not suffice. Sooner or
later you will end by coming to your
knees.
Goetze. Before what?
Samuel. Before the darkness!"
Such avowals of ignorance are possible only from the height of a great intellectual pride. Villiers' revolt against Science, so far as Science is materialistic, and his passionate curiosity in that chimera's flight towards the invisible, are one and the same impulse of a mind to which only mind is interesting. Toute cette vieille Extériorité, maligne, compliquée, inflexible, that illusion which Science accepts for the one reality: it must be the whole effort of one's consciousness to escape from its entanglements, to dominate it, or to ignore it, and one's art must be the building of an ideal world beyond its access, from which one may indeed sally out, now and again, in a desperate enough attack upon the illusions in the midst of which men live.
And just that, we find, makes up the work of Villiers, work which divides itself roughly into two divisions: one, the ideal world, or the ideal in the world (Axël, Elën, Morgane, Isis, some of the contes, and, intermediary, La Révolte); the other, satire, the mockery of reality (L'Eve Future, the Contes Cruels, Tribulat Bonhomet). It is part of the originality of Villiers that the two divisions constantly flow into one another; the idealist being never more the idealist than in his buffooneries.
Axël is the Symbolist drama, in
all its
uncompromising conflict with the "modesty"
of Nature and the limitations of the stage.
It is the drama of the soul, and at the same
time it is the most pictorial of dramas; I
should define its manner as a kind of spiritual
romanticism. The earlier dramas, Elën,
Morgane, are fixed at somewhat the same point
in space; La Révolte, which seems to
anticipate
The Doll's House, shows us an
The action takes place, it is true, in this
century, but it takes place in corners of the
world into which the modern spirit has not
yet passed; this Monastère de
Religieuses-trinitaires, le cloître de Sainte
Appolodora, situé sur les confins du littoral de
l'ancienne Flandre française, and the très
vieux
chateau fort, le burg des margraves d'Auërsperg,
isolé au milieu du Schwartzwald. The characters,
Axël d'Auërsperg, Eve Sara Emmanuèle de Maupers,
Maître Janus, the Archidiacre, the Commandeur
Kaspar d'Auërsperg, are at once more
and less than human beings: they are the
types of different ideals, and they are clothed
with just enough humanity to give form to
what would otherwise remain disembodied
spirit. The religious ideal, the occult ideal
the worldly ideal, the passionate ideal, are all
presented, one after the other, in these dazzling
and profound pages; Axël is the disdainful
choice from among them, the disdainful rejection
of life itself, of the whole illusion of life,
"since infinity alone is not a deception." And
Sara? Sara is a superb part of that life which
is rejected, which she herself comes, not without
reluctance, to reject. In that motionless figure,
during the whole of the first act silent but for a
single "No," and leaping into a moment's violent
action as the act closes, she is the haughtiest
woman in literature. But she is a woman, and she
desires life finding it in Axël. Pride, and the
woman's devotion to the man, aid her to take the
last cold step with Axël, in the transcendental
giving up of life at the moment when life becomes
ideal.
And the play is written, throughout, with
a curious solemnity, a particular kind of
eloquence, which makes no attempt to imitate
the level of the speech of every day, but which
is a sort of ideal language in which beauty is
aimed at as exclusively as if it were written in
verse. The modern drama, under the democratic
influence of Ibsen, the positive influence
of Dumas fils, has limited itself to the
expression of temperaments in the one case, of
theoretic intelligences in the other, in as nearly
as possible the words which the average man
would use for the statement of his emotions
and ideas. The form, that is, is degraded
below the level of the characters whom it attempts
to express; for it is evident that the
average man can articulate only a small enough
part of what he obscurely feels or thinks; and
the theory of Realism is that his emotions and
ideas are to be given only in so far as the words
at his own command can give them. Villiers,
choosing to concern himself only with exceptional
characters, and with them only in the
absolute, invents for them a more elaborate
and a more magnificent speech than they
would naturally employ, the speech of their
thoughts, of their dreams.
And it is a world thought or dreamt in
some more fortunate atmosphere than that
in which we live, that Villiers has created for
the final achievement of his abstract ideas.
I do not doubt that he himself always lived
in it, through all the poverty of the precipitous
Rue des Martyrs. But it is in Axël, and
in Axël only, that he has made us also
inhabitants of that world. Even in Elën we are
spectators, watching a tragical fairy play (as
if Fantasio became suddenly in deadly earnest),
watching some one else's dreams. Axël envelops
us in its own atmosphere; it is as if we
found ourselves on a mountain top on the
other side of the clouds, and without surprise
at finding ourselves there.
The ideal, to Villiers, being the real, spiritual
beauty being the essential beauty, and material
beauty its reflection, or its revelation, it is
with a sort of fury that he attacks the materialising
forces of the world: science, progress,
the worldly emphasis on "facts," on what is
"positive," "serious,"
"respectable." Satire,
with him, is the revenge of beauty upon ugliness,
the persecution of the ugly; it is not
merely social satire, it is a satire on the material
universe by one who believes in a spiritual
universe. Thus it is the only laughter of our
time which is fundamental, as fundamental as
that of Swift or Rabelais. And this lacerating
laughter of the idealist is never surer in its aim
than when it turns the arms of science against
itself, as in the vast buffoonery of L'Eve Future.
A Parisian wit, sharpened to a fineness of irony
such as only wit which is also philosophy
can attain, brings in another method of attack;
humour, which is almost English, another;
while again satire becomes tragic, fantastic,
macabre. In those enigmatic "tales of the
grotesque and arabesque," in which Villiers
rivals Poe on his own ground, there is, for the
most part, a multiplicity of meaning which is,
as it is meant to be, disconcerting. I should
not like to say how far Villiers does not,
sometimes, believe in his own magic.
It is characteristic of him, at all events,
that he employs what we call the supernatural
alike in his works of pure idealism and in
his works of sheer satire. The moment the
world ceased to be the stable object, solidly
encrusted with houses in brick and stone,
which it is to most of its so temporary
inhabitants, Villiers was at home. When he
sought the absolute beauty, it was beyond
the world that he found it; when he sought
horror, it was a breath blowing from an
invisible darkness which brought it to his
nerves; when he desired to mock the pretensions
of knowledge of or ignorance, it
was always with the unseen that his tragic
buffoonery made familiar.
There is, in everything which Villiers wrote,
a strangeness, certainly both instinctive and
deliberate, which seems to me to be the natural
consequence of that intellectual pride which,
as I have pointed out, was at the basis of his
character. He hated every kind of mediocrity:
therefore he chose to analyse exceptional souls,
to construct exceptional stories,
to invent splendid names, and to evoke singular
landscapes. It was part of his curiosity
in souls to prefer the complex to the simple,
the perverse to the straightforward, the
ambiguous to either. His heroes are
incarnations of spiritual pride, and their tragedies
are the shock of spirit against matter, the
invasion of spirit by matter, the temptation
of spirit by spiritual evil. They seek the
absolute, and find death; they seek wisdom,
find love, and fall into spiritual decay; they
seek reality, and find crime; they seek phantoms,
and find themselves. They are on
the borders of a wisdom too great for their
capacity; they are haunted by dark powers,
instincts of ambiguous passions; they are too
lucid to be quite sane in their extravagances;
they have not quite systematically transposed
their dreams into action. And his heroines,
when they are not, like L'Eve Future, the
vitalised mechanism of an Edison, have the
solemnity of dead people, and a hieratic
speech. Songe, des cœurs condamnés
à ce
supplice, de ne pas m'aimer! says Sara, in
Axël. Je ne l'aime pas, ce jeune homme.
Qu'ai-je donc fait à Dieu? says Elën. And
their voice is always like the voice of Elën:
"I listened attentively to the sound of her
voice; it was
And these strange inhabitants move in
as strange a world. They are the princes
and châtelaines of ancient castles lost in
the depths of the Black Forest; they are
the last descendants of a great race about
to come to an end; students of magic, who
have the sharp and swift swords of the soldier;
enigmatic courtesans, at the table of
strange feasts; they find incalculable treasures,
tonnantes et sonnantes cataractes d'or
liquide, only to disdain them. All the pomp
of the world approaches them, that they may
the better abnegate it, or that it may ruin
them to a deeper degree of their material
hell. And we see them always at the moment
of a crisis, before the two ways of a decision,
hesitating in the entanglements of a great
temptation. And this casuist of souls will
drag forth some horribly stunted or horribly
overgrown soul from under its obscure covering,
setting it to dance naked before our
eyes. He has no mercy on those who have
no mercy on themselves.
In the sense in which that word is ordinarily
used, Villiers has no pathos. This is
enough to explain why he can never, in the
phrase he would have disliked so greatly,
"touch the popular heart." His mind is too
abstract to contain pity, and it is in his lack
of pity that he seems to put himself outside
humanity. A chacun son infini, he has said,
and in the avidity of his search for the infinite
he has no mercy for the blind weakness which
goes stumbling over the earth, without so
much as knowing that the sun and stars are
overhead. He sees only the gross multitude,
the multitude which has the contentment of
the slave. He cannot pardon stupidity, for
it is incomprehensible to him. He sees,
rightly, that stupidity is more criminal than
vice; if only because vice is curable, stupidity
incurable. But he does not realise, as the
great novelists have realised, that stupidity
can be pathetic, and that there is not a
peasant, nor even a self-satisfied bourgeois,
in whom the soul has not its part, in whose
existence it is not possible to be interested.
Contempt, noble as it may be, anger,
righteous though it may be, cannot be indulged
in without a certain lack of sympathy;
and lack of sympathy comes from a lack of
patient understanding. It is certain that the
destiny of the greater part of the human race
is either infinitely pathetic or infinitely
ridiculous. Under which aspect, then, shall that
destiny, and those obscure fractions of humanity,
be considered? Villiers was too sincere
an idealist, too absolute in his idealism
to hesitate. "As for living," he cries, in
that splendid phrase of Axël, "our
servants
will do that for us!" And, in the Contes
Cruels, there is this not less characteristic
expression of what was always his mental
attitude: "As at the play, in a central stall,
one sits out, so as not to disturb one's
neighbours--out of courtesy, in a word--some play
written in a wearisome style and of which
one does not like the subject, so I lived, out
of politeness": je vivais par politesse. In
this haughtiness towards life, in this disdain
of ordinary human motives and ordinary
human beings, there is at once the distinction
and the weakness of Villiers. And he has
himself pointed the moral against himself
in these words of the story which forms the
epilogue to the Contes Cruels: "When the
forehead alone contains the existence of a
man, that man is enlightened only from
above his head; then his jealous shadow,
prostrate under him, draws him by the feet,
that it may drag him down into the invisible."
All his life Villiers was a poor man; though,
all his life, he was awaiting that fortune
which he refused to anticipate by any mean
employment. During most of his life, he
was practically an unknown man. Greatly
loved, ardently admired, by that inner circle
of the men who have made modern French
literature, from Verlaine to Mæterlinck, he
was looked upon by most people as an amusing
kind of madman, a little dangerous,
whose ideas, as they floated freely over the
café-table, it was at times highly profitable to
steal. For Villiers talked his works before
writing them, and sometimes he talked them
instead of writing them, in his too royally
spendthrift way. To those who knew him
he seemed genius itself, and would have
seemed so if he had never written a line;
for he had the dangerous gift of a personality
which seems to have already achieved
all that it so energetically contemplates.
But personality tells only within hands'
reach; and Villiers failed even to startle,
failed even to exasperate, the general reader.
That his Premières Poésies, published
at
the age of nineteen, should have brought him
fame was hardly to be expected, remarkable,
especially in its ideas, as that book is.
Nor was it to be expected of the enigmatic
fragment of a romance, Isis (1862),
anticipating, as it does, by so long a period, the
esoteric and spiritualistic romances which were
to have their vogue. But Elën (1864) and
Morgane (1865), those two poetic dramas in
prose, so full of distinction, of spiritual rarity;
but two years later, Claire Lenoir (afterwards
incorporated in one of his really great books,
Tribulat Bonhomet), with its macabre horror;
but La Révolte (1870), for Villiers so
"actual,"
and which had its moments of success when
it was revived in 1896 at the Odéon; but Le
Nouveau Monde (1880), a drama which, by
some extraordinary caprice, won a prize;
but Les Contes Cruels (1880), that collection
of masterpieces, in which the essentially
French conte is outdone on its own ground!
It was not till 1886 that Villiers ceased to be
an unknown writer, with the publication of
that phosphorescent buffoonery of science,
that vast parody of humanity, L'Eve Future.
Tribulat Bonhomet (which he himself defined
as bouffonnerie énorme et sombre, couleur du
siècle) was to come, in its final form, and
the superb poem in prose Akëdysséril;
and
then, more and more indifferent collections
of stories, in which Villiers, already dying, is
but the shadow of himself: L'Amour Supreme
(1886), Histoires Insolites (1888), Nouveaux
Contes Cruels (1888). He was correcting the
proofs of Axël when he died; the volume was
published in 1890, followed by Propos
d'audelà,
and a series of articles, Chez les Passants.
Once dead, the fame which had avoided him
all his life began to follow him; he had une
belle presse at his funeral.
Meanwhile, he had been preparing the spiritual
atmosphere of the new generation. Living
among believers in the material world, he
had been declaring, not in vain, his belief in
the world of the spirit; living among Realists
and Parnassians, he had been creating a
new form of art, the art of the Symbolist
drama, and of Symbolism in fiction. He had
been lonely all his life, for he had been living
in his own lifetime, the life of the next
generation. There was but o ne man among his
contemporaries to whom he could give, and from
whom he could receive, perfect sympathy.
That man was Wagner. Gradually the younger
men came about him; at the end he was not
lacking in disciples.
And after all, the last word of Villiers is
faith; faith against the evidence of the senses,
against the negations of materialistic science
against the monstrous paradox of progress,
against his own pessimism in the face of these
formidable enemies. He affirms; he "believes
in soul, is very sure of God"; requires no
witness to the spiritual world of which he is
always the inhabitant; and is content to lose
his way in the material world, brushing off its
mud from time to time with a disdainful gesture,
as he goes on his way (to apply a significant
word of Pater) "like one on a secret
errand."
(End.)3
(1) "I am far from sure," wrote Verlaine,
"that the philosophy of Villiers will not one day
become the formula of our century."
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