Ah yes! Simone may question her pilgrim--her pilgrim of silence --even as, in his own "Nuit au Luxembourg," the youth to whom our Lord discoursed so strangely, questioned the Master as to the ultimate mystery and received so ambiguous a response.
And Simone likewise shall receive her answer, as we all--whether we be descendants of the Puritans, crossing Boston Common, or aliens of the sweat-shops of New York, crossing Washington Square, or unemployed in Hyde Park, or nursery-maids in the Jardin des Plantes--shall receive ours, as we walk over the dead leaves of the centuries.
Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?
Quand le pied les ecrase, elles pleurent comme des ames, Elle font un bruit d"ailes ou de robes de femme.
Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?
Viens; nous serons un jour de pauvres feuilles mortes.
Viens; deja la nuit tombe et le vent nous emporte.
Simone, aimes-tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?
"Le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes"--such indeed must be, at the last, the wisdom of this great harvester of human pa.s.sions and perversions.
"Feuilles mortes," and the sound of feet that go by; that go by and return not again!
Remy de Gourmont leaves in us a bitter after-sense that we have not altogether, or perhaps even nearly, sounded the stops of his mystery.
"The rest is silence" not only because he is dead, but because it seems as if he mocked at us--he the Protean critic--until his last hour.
His remote epicurean life--the life of a pa.s.sionate scholar of the Renaissance--baffles and evades our curiosity.
To a.n.a.lyse Remy de Gourmont one would have to be a Remy de Gourmont.
He is full of inconsistencies. Proudly individualistic, an intellectual anarchist free from every scruple, he displays an objective patience almost worthy of Goethe himself in his elaborate investigations into the mysteries of life and the mysteries of the art that expresses life.
Furiously enamoured of thrilling aesthetic sensations he can yet wander, as those who know his "Promenades" can testify, through all manner of intricate and technical details.
Capable in his poetry and prose-poems of giving himself up to every sort of ambiguous and abnormal caprice, he is yet in his calmer hours able to fall back upon a sane, serene and sun-lit wisdom, tolerant towards the superst.i.tions of humanity, and full of the magic of the universe. Never for a single moment in all of his writings are we allowed to forget the essential wonder and mystery of s.e.x. s.e.x, in all its caprices and eccentricities, in all its psychological masks and ritualistic symbols, interests him ultimately more than anything else. It is this which inspires even his critical work with a sort of physiological thrill, as though the encounter with a new creative intelligence were an encounter between lover and beloved.
Remy de Gourmont would have s.e.x and s.e.x-emotions put frankly into the fore-ground of everything, as far as art and letters are concerned. He would take the timid hyperborean Muse of the modern world and bathe her once more in the sun-lit waters of the Heliconian Spring. He would paganize, Latinize and Mediterraneanize the genius of Europe.
Much of his writing will fall into oblivion. It is too occasional, too topical, too fretted by the necessity of clearing away the half-G.o.ds so that the G.o.ds may arrive. But certain of his books will live forever; a.s.sured of that smiling and amiable immortality, beyond the reach of all vulgar malice, which the high invisible ones give to those who have learnt the sacramental secret that; only through the senses do we understand the soul, and only through the soul do we understand the senses.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The strange and mysterious figure of William Blake seems continually to appear at the end of almost every vista of intellectual and aesthetic interest down which we move in these latter days.
The man"s genius must have been of a unique kind; for while writers like Wordsworth and Byron seem now to have stiffened into dignified statues of venerated and achieved pre-eminence, he--the contemporary of William Cowper--exercises now, half way through the second decade of the twentieth century, an influence as fresh, as living, as organic, as palpable, as that of authors who have only just fallen upon silence.
His so-called "Prophetic Books" may be obscure and arbitrary in their fantastic mythology. I shall leave the interpretation of these works to those who are more versed in the occult sciences than I am, or than I should greatly care to be; but a prophet in the most true sense of that distinguished word, Blake certainly was--and to prove it one need not touch these Apocalyptic oracles.
Writing while Cowper was composing evangelical hymns under the influence of the Rev. Dr. Newton, and while Burns was celebrating his Highland Mary, Blake antic.i.p.ates many of the profoundest thoughts of Nietzsche, and opens the "charmed magic cas.e.m.e.nts"
upon these perilous fairy seas, voyaged over by Verlaine and Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and Mallarme.
When one considers the fact that he was actually writing poems and engraving pictures before the eighteenth century closed and before Edgar Allan Poe was born, it is nothing short of staggering to realise how, not only in literature but in art, his astounding genius dominates our modern taste.
It might almost seem as if every single one of the poets and painters of our age--all these imagists and post-impressionists and symbolists and the rest--had done nothing during the sensitive years of their life but brood over the work of William Blake. Even in music, even in dancing--certainly in the symbolic dancing of Isadora Duncan--even in the stage decorations of our Little Theatres, one traces the mystical impulse he set in motion, and the austere lineaments, not exactly cla.s.sical or mediaeval, but partaking of the nature of both, of his elemental evocations.
It were, of course, not really possible to suppose that all these people--all the most imaginative and interesting artists of our day--definitely subjected themselves to the influence of William Blake.
The more rational way of accounting for the extraordinary resemblance is to conceive that Blake, by some premonitory inspiration of the world-spirit "brooding upon things to come,"
antic.i.p.ated in an age more emotionally alien to our own than that of Apuleius or of St. Anselm, the very "body and pressure" of the dreams that were to dominate the earth.
When one considers how between the age of Blake and the one in which we now live, extend no less than three great epochs of intellectual taste, the thing becomes almost as strange as one of his own imaginations.
The age of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, of Wordsworth and Byron, followed immediately upon his. Then we have the age of Thackeray and Tennyson and the great Mid-Victorians. Then finally at the end of the nineteenth century we have the epoch dominated in art by Aubrey Beardsley, and in literature by Swinburne and Oscar Wilde.
Now in our own age--an age that feels as though Wilde himself were growing a little old-fashioned--we find ourselves returning to William Blake and discovering him to be more entirely in harmony with the instincts of our most secret souls than any single genius we could name actually working in our midst. It is as though to find our completest expression, the pa.s.sionate and mystical soul of our materialistic age were driven back to an author who lived a hundred years ago. This phenomenon is by no means unknown in the history of the pilgrimage of the human spirit; but it has never presented itself in so emphatic a form as in the case of this extraordinary person.
In the early ages of the world, the result without doubt would be some weird deification of the clairvoyant prophet. William Blake would become a myth, a legend, an avatar of the divine Being, a Buddha, a Zoroaster, a wandering Dionysus. As it is, we are forced to confine ourselves to the fascinating pleasure of watching in individual cases, this or that modern soul, "touched to fine issues,"
meeting for the first time, as it may often happen, this century-buried incarnation of their own most evasive dreams.
I myself, who now jot down these fragmentary notes upon him, had the privilege once of witnessing the illumination--I can call it by no other name--produced upon the mind of the greatest novelist of America and the most incorrigibly realistic, by a chance encounter with the "Songs of Innocence."
One of the most obvious characteristics of our age is its cult of children. Here--in the pa.s.sion of this cult--we separate ourselves altogether, both from our mediaeval ancestors who confined their devotion to the divine child, and from the cla.s.sical ages, who kept children altogether in the background.
"When I became a man," says the apostle, "I put away childish things," and this "putting away of childish things" has always been a special note of the temper and att.i.tude of orthodox Protestants for whom these other Biblical words, spoken by a greater than St. Paul, about "becoming as little children," must seem a sort of pious rhetoric.
When one considers how this thrice accursed weight of Protestant Puritanism, the most odious and inhuman of all the perverted superst.i.tions that have darkened man"s history, a superst.i.tion which, though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a "business a.s.set," altogether dead, has, ever since it was sp.a.w.ned in Scotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct in us and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives of generations of children, it must be regarded as one of the happiest signs of the times that the double renaissance of Catholic Faith and Pagan Freedom now abroad among us, has brought the "Child in the House" into the clear sunlight of an almost religious appreciation.
Let me not, however, be misunderstood. It would be a grievous and ludicrous mistake to a.s.sociate the child-cult which runs like a thread of filmy star-light through the work of William Blake with the somewhat strained and fantastic att.i.tude of child-worship which inspires such poetry as Francis Thompson"s "Love in Dian"s Lap,"
and gives a ridiculous and affected air to so many of our little ones themselves. The child of Blake"s imagination is the immortal and undying child to be found in the heart of every man and every woman. It is the child spoken of in some of his most beautiful pa.s.sages, by Nietzsche himself--the child who will come at the last, when the days of the Camel and the days of the Lion are over, and inaugurate the beginning of the "Great Noon."
"And there the lion"s ruddy eyes Shall flow with tears of gold And pitying the tender cries And walking round the fold, Saying, "Wrath by his weakness And by his health sickness Are driven away From our immortal day.""
Using boldly and freely, and with far more genuine worship than many orthodox believers, the figure and idea of Christ; it is not exactly the Christ we know in traditional Catholic piety, to whom in a.s.sociation with this image of the man-child, Blake"s mind is constantly turning.
With a n.o.ble blasphemy--dearer, one may hope, to G.o.d, than the slavishness of many evangelical pietists--he treats the Christian legend with the same sort of freedom that the old Greek poets used in dealing with the G.o.ds of Nature.
The figure of Christ becomes under his hands, as we feel sometimes it does under the hands of the great painters of the Renaissance, a G.o.d among other G.o.ds; a power among other powers, but one possessed of a secret drawn from the hidden depths of the universe, which in the end is destined to prevail. So far does Blake stray from the barriers of traditional reverence, that we find him boldly a.s.sociating this Christ of his--this man-child who is to redeem the race--with a temper the very opposite of an ascetic one.
What makes his philosophy so interesting and original is the fact that he entirely disentangles the phenomena of s.e.xual love from any notion or idea of sin or shame. The man-child whose pitiful heart and whose tenderness toward the weak and unhappy are drawn from the Christ-Story, takes almost the form of a Pagan Eros--the full-grown, soft-limbed Eros of later Greek fancy--when the question of restraint or renunciation or ascetic chast.i.ty is brought forward.
What Blake has really done, be it said with all reverence, and far from profane ears--is to steal the Christ-child out of his cradle in the church of his worshippers and carry him into the chambers of the East, the chambers of the Sun, into the "Green fields and happy groves" of primitive Arcadian innocence, where the feet of the dancers are light upon the dew of the morning, and where the children of pa.s.sion and of pleasure sport and play, as they did in the Golden Age.
In that wonderful picture of his representing the sons of G.o.d "shouting together" in the primal joy of creation, one has a vision of the large and n.o.ble harmony he strove after between an emanc.i.p.ated flesh and a free spirit. William Blake, in his Adamic innocence of "sin," has something in him that suggests Walt Whitman, but unlike Whitman he prefers to use the figure of Christ rather than any vague "ensemble" of nature-forces to symbolise the triumphant nuptials of soul and body.
Sometimes in his strange verses one has the impression that one is reading the fragmentary and broken utterances of some great ancient poet-philosopher--some Pythagoras or Empedocles--through whose gnomic oracles runs the rhythm of the winds and tides, and for whose ears the stars in their courses have a far-flung harmony.
He often seems to make use of the Bible and Biblical usages, very much as the ancient poets made use of Hesiod or of Homer, treating such writings with reverence, but subordinating what is borrowed from them to new and original purpose.
"Hear the voice of the Bard, Who present, past and future sees, Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walked among the ancient trees.
"Calling the lapsed soul And weeping in the evening dew, That might control The starry pole And fallen, fallen light renew!
"O Earth, O Earth, return!