The first appearance of Pierre Loti's works, twenty years ago, causeda sensation throughout those circles wherein the creations ofintellect and imagination are felt, studied, and discussed. The authorwas one who, with a power which no one had wielded before him, carriedoff his readers into exotic lands, and whose art, in appearance mostsimple, proved a genuine enchantment for the imagination. It was thetime when M. Zola and his school stood at the head of the literarymovement. There breathed forth from Loti's writings an all-penetratingfragrance of poesy, which liberated French literary ideals from theheavy and oppressive yoke of the Naturalistic school. Truth now soaredon unhampered pinions, and the reading world was completely won by theunsurpassed intensity and faithful accuracy with which he depicted thealluring charms of far-off scenes, and painted the naive soul of theraces that seem to endure in the isles of the Pacific as survivingrepresentatives of the world's infancy.
It was then learned that this independent writer was named in reallife Louis Marie Julien Viaud, and that he was a naval officer. Thisvery fact, that he was not a writer by profession, added indeed to hissuccess. He actually had seen that which he was describing, he hadlived that which he was relating. What in any other man would haveseemed but research and oddity, remained natural in the case of asailor who returned each year with a manuscript in his hand. Africa,Asia, the isles of the Pacific, were the usual scenes of his dramas.
Finally from France itself, and from the oldest provinces of France,he drew subject-matter for two of his novels, /An Iceland Fisherman/and /Ramuntcho/. This proved a surprise. Our Breton sailors and ourBasque mountaineers were not less foreign to the Parisian drawing-roomthan was Aziyade or the little Rahahu. One claimed to have a knowledgeof Brittany, or of the Pyrenees, because one had visited Dinard orBiarritz; while in reality neither Tahiti nor the Isle of Paques couldhave remained more completely unknown to us.
The developments of human industry have brought the extremities of theworld nearer together; but the soul of each race continues to cloakitself in its own individuality and to remain a mystery to the rest ofthe world. One trait alone is common to all: the infinite sadness ofhuman destiny. This it was that Loti impressed so vividly on thereading world.
His success was great. Though a young man as yet, Loti saw his workcrowned with what in France may be considered the supreme sanction: hewas elected to membership in the French Academy. His name becamecoupled with those of Bernardin de St. Pierre and of Chateaubriand.
With the sole exception of the author of /Paul and Virginia/ and ofthe writer of /Atala/, he seemed to be one without predecessor andwithout a master. It may be well here to inquire how much reason thereis for this assertion, and what novel features are presented in hiswork.
It has become a trite saying that French genius lacks the sense ofNature, that the French tongue is colourless, and therefore wants themost striking feature of poetry. If we abandoned for one moment thedomain of letters and took a comprehensive view of the field of art,we might be permitted to express astonishment at the passing of sosummary a judgment on the genius of a nation which has, in the realsense of the term, produced two such painters of Nature as ClaudeLorrain and Corot. But even in the realm of letters it is easily seenthat this mode of thinking is due largely to insufficient knowledge ofthe language's resources, and to a study of French literature whichdoes not extend beyond the seventeenth century. Without going back tothe Duke of Orleans and to Villon, one need only read a few of thepoets of the sixteenth century to be struck by the prominence given toNature in their writings. Nothing is more delightful than Ronsard'sword-paintings of his sweet country of Vendome. Until the day ofMalherbe, the didactic Regnier and the Calvinistic Marot are the onlytwo who could be said to give colour to the preconceived and prevalentnotion as to the dryness of French poetry. And even after Malherbe, inthe seventeenth century, we find that La Fontaine, the most trulyFrench of French writers, was a passionate lover of Nature. He who cansee nothing in the latter's fables beyond the little dramas which theyunfold and the ordinary moral which the poet draws therefrom, mustconfess that he fails to understand him. His landscapes possessprecision, accuracy, and life, while such is the fragrance of hisspeech that it seems laden with the fresh perfume of the fields andfurrows.
Racine himself, the most penetrating and the most psychological ofpoets, is too well versed in the human soul not to have felt itsintimate union with Nature. His magnificent verse in Phedre,"Ah, que ne suis-je assise a l'ombre des forets!"is but the cry of despair, the appeal, filled with anguish, of a heartthat is troubled and which oft has sought peace and alleviation amidthe cold indifference of inanimate things. The small place given toNature in the French literature of the seventeenth century is not tobe ascribed to the language nor explained by a lack of sensibility onthe part of the race. The true cause is to be found in the spirit ofthat period; for investigation will disclose that the very samecondition then characterized the literatures of England, of Spain, andof Italy.
We must bear in mind that, owing to an almost unique combination ofcircumstances, there never has been a period when man was moreconvinced of the nobility and, I dare say it, of the sovereignty ofman, or was more inclined to look upon the latter as a beingindependent of the external world. He did not suspect the intimatelyclose bonds which unite the creature to the medium in which it lives.
A man of the world in the seventeenth century was utterly without anotion of those truths which in their ensemble constitute the naturalsciences. He crossed the threshold of life possessed of a deepclassical instruction, and all-imbued with stoical ideas of virtue. Atthe same time, he had received the mould of a strong but narrowChristian education, in which nothing figured save his relations withGod. This twofold training elevated his soul and fortified his will,but wrenched him violently from all communion with Nature. This is thestandpoint from which we must view the heroes of Corneille, if wewould understand those extraordinary souls which, always at thehighest degree of tension, deny themselves, as a weakness, everythingthat resembles tenderness or pity. Again, thus and thus alone can weexplain how Descartes, and with him all the philosophers of hiscentury, ran counter to all common sense, and refused to recognisethat animals might possess a soul-like principle which, howeverremotely, might link them to the human being.
When, in the eighteenth century, minds became emancipated from thenarrow restrictions of religious discipline, and when method wasintroduced into the study of scientific problems, Nature took herrevenge as well in literature as in all other fields of human thought.
Rousseau it was who inaugurated the movement in France, and the wholeof Europe followed in the wake of France. It may even be declared thatthe reaction against the seventeenth century was in many respectsexcessive, for the eighteenth century gave itself up to a species ofsentimental debauch. It is none the less a fact that the author of /LaNouvelle Heloise/ was the first to blend the moral life of man withhis exterior surroundings. He felt the savage beauty and grandeur ofthe mountains of Switzerland, the grace of the Savoy horizons, and themore familiar elegance of the Parisian suburbs. We may say that heopened the eye of humanity to the spectacle which the world offeredit. In Germany, Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling have proclaimed himtheir master; while even in England, Byron, and George Eliot herself,have recognised all that they owed to him.
The first of Rosseau's disciples in France was Bernardin de St.
Pierre, whose name has frequently been recalled in connection withLoti. Indeed, the charming masterpiece of /Paul and Virginia/ was thefirst example of exoticism in literature; and thereby it excited thecuriosity of our fathers at the same time that it dazzled them by thewealth and brilliancy of its descriptions.
Then came Chateaubriand; but Nature with him was not a merebackground. He sought from it an accompaniment, in the musical senseof the term, to the movements of his soul; and being somewhat prone tomelancholy, his taste seems to have favoured sombre landscapes, stormyand tragical. The entire romantic school was born from him, VictorHugo and George Sand, Theophile Gautier who draws from the Frenchtongue resources unequalled in wealth and colour, and even M. Zolahimself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as itwere, the end of romanticism, since it would be difficult to discoverin him any characteristic that did not exist, as a germ at least, inBalzac.
I have just said that Chateaubriand sought in Nature an accompanimentto the movements of his soul: this was the case with all theromanticists. We do not find Rene, Manfred, Indiana, living in themidst of a tranquil and monotonous Nature. The storms of heaven mustrespond to the storms of their soul; and it is a fact that all thesegreat writers, Byron as well as Victor Hugo, have not so muchcontemplated and seen Nature as they have interpreted it through themedium of their own passions; and it is in this sense that the keenAmiel could justly remark that a landscape is a condition or a stateof the soul.
M. Loti does not merely interpret a landscape; though perhaps, tobegin with, he is unconscious of doing more. With him, the human beingis a part of Nature, one of its very expressions, like animals andplants, mountain forms and sky tints. His characters are what they areonly because they issue forth from the medium in which they live. Theyare truly creatures, and not gods inhabiting the earth. Hence theirprofound and striking reality.
Hence also one of the peculiar characteristics of Loti's workers. Heloves to paint simple souls, hearts close to Nature, whose primitivepassions are singularly similar to those of animals. He is happy inthe isles of the Pacific or on the borders of Senegal; and when heshifts his scenes into old Europe it is never with men and women ofthe world that he entertains us.
What we call a man of the world is the same everywhere; he is mouldedby the society of men, but Nature and the universe have no place inhis life and thought. M. Paul Bourget's heroes might live withoutdistinction in Newport or in Monte Carlo; they take root nowhere, butlive in the large cities, in winter resorts and in drawing-rooms astransient visitors in temporary abiding-places.
Loti seeks his heroes and his heroines among those antique races ofEurope which have survived all conquests, and which have preserved,with their native tongue, the individuality of their character. He metRamuntcho in the Basque country, but dearer than all to him isBrittany: here it was that he met his Iceland fishermen.
The Breton soul bears an imprint of Armorica's primitive soil: it ismelancholy and noble. There is an undefinable charm about those aridlands and those sod-flanked hills of granite, whose sole horizon isthe far-stretching sea. Europe ends here, and beyond remains only thebroad expanse of the ocean. The poor people who dwell here are silentand tenacious: their heart is full of tenderness and of dreams. Yann,the Iceland fisherman, and his sweetheart, Gaud of Paimpol, can onlylive here, in the small houses of Brittany, where people huddletogether in a stand against the storms which come howling from thedepths of the Atlantic.
Loti's novels are never complicated with a mass of incidents. Thecharacters are of humble station and their life is as simple as theirsoul. /Aziyade/, /The Romance of a Spahi/, /An Iceland Fisherman/,/Ramuntcho/, all present the story of a love and a separation. Adeparture, or death itself, intervenes to put an end to the romance.
But the cause matters little; the separation is the same; the heartsare broken; Nature survives; it covers over and absorbs the miserableruins which we leave behind us. No one better than Loti has everbrought out the frailty of all things pertaining to us, for no onebetter than he has made us realize the persistency of life and theindifference of Nature.
This circumstance imparts to the reading of M. Loti's works acharacter of peculiar sadness. The trend of his novels is not one thatincites curiosity; his heroes are simple, and the atmosphere in whichthey live is foreign to us. What saddens us is not their history, butthe undefinable impression that our pleasures are nothing and that weare but an accident. This is a thought common to the degree oftriteness among moralists and theologians; but as they present it, itfails to move us. It troubles us as presented by M. Loti, because hehas known how to give it all the force of a sensation.
How has he accomplished this?
He writes with extreme simplicity, and is not averse to the use ofvague and indefinite expressions. And yet the wealth and precision ofGautier's and Hugo's language fail to endow their landscapes with thestriking charm and intense life which are to be found in those ofLoti. I can find no other reason for this than that which I havesuggested above: the landscape, in Hugo's and in Gautier's scenes, isa background and nothing more; while Loti makes it the predominatingfigure of his drama. Our sensibilities are necessarily aroused beforethis apparition of Nature, blind, inaccessible, and all-powerful asthe Fates of old.
It may prove interesting to inquire how Loti contrived to sound such anew note in art.
He boasted, on the day of his reception into the French Academy, thathe had never read. Many protested, some smiled, and a large number ofpersons refused to believe the assertion. Yet the statement wasactually quite credible, for the foundation and basis of M. Loti reston a naive simplicity which makes him very sensitive to the things ofthe outside world, and gives him a perfect comprehension of simplesouls. He is not a reader, for he is not imbued with book notions ofthings; his ideas of them are direct, and everything with him is notmemory, but reflected sensation.
On the other hand, that sailor-life which had enabled him to see theworld, must have confirmed in him this mental attitude. The deckofficer who watches the vessel's course may do nothing which coulddistract his attention; but while ever ready to act and alwaysunoccupied, he thinks, he dreams, he listens to the voices of the sea;and everything about him is of interest to him, the shape of theclouds, the aspect of skies and waters. He knows that a mere board'sthickness is all that separates him and defends him from death. Suchis the habitual state of mind which M. Loti has brought to thecolouring of his books.
He has related to us how, when still a little child, he first beheldthe sea. He had escaped from the parental home, allured by the briskand pungent air and by the "peculiar noise, at once feeble and great,"which could be heard beyond little hills of sand to which led acertain path. He recognised the sea; "before me something appeared,something sombre and noisy, which had loomed up from all sides atonce, and which seemed to have no end; a moving expanse which struckme with mortal vertigo; . . . above was stretched out full a sky allof one piece, of a dark gray colour like a heavy mantle; very, veryfar away, in unmeasurable depths of horizon, could be seen a break, anopening between sea and sky, a long empty crack, of a light paleyellow." He felt a sadness unspeakable, a sense of desolate solitude,of abandonment, of exile. He ran back in haste to unburden his soulupon his mother's bosom, and, as he says, "to seek consolation withher for a thousand anticipated, indescribable pangs, which had wrungmy heart at the sight of that vast green, deep expanse."A poet of the sea had been born, and his genius still bears a trace ofthe shudder of fear experienced that evening by Pierre Loti the littlechild.
Loti was born not far from the ocean, in Saintonge, of an old Huguenotfamily which had numbered many sailors among its members. While yet amere child he thumbed the old Bible which formerly, in the days ofpersecution, had been read only with cautious secrecy; and he perusedthe vessel's ancient records wherein mariners long since gone hadnoted, almost a century before, that "the weather was good," that "thewind was favourable," and that "doradoes or gilt-heads were passingnear the ship."He was passionately fond of music. He had few comrades, and hisimagination was of the exalted kind. His first ambition was to be aminister, then a missionary; and finally he decided to become asailor. He wanted to see the world, he had the curiosity of things; hewas inclined to search for the strange and the unknown; he must seekthat sensation, delightful and fascinating to complex souls, ofbetaking himself off, of withdrawing from his own world, of breakingwith his own mode of life, and of creating for himself voluntaryregrets.
He felt in the presence of Nature a species of disquietude, andexperienced therefrom sensations which might almost be expressed incolours: his head, he himself states, "might be compared to a camera,filled with sensitive plates." This power of vision permitted him toapprehend only the appearance of things, not their reality; he wasconscious of the nothingness of nothing, of the dust of dust. Theremnants of his religious education intensified still more thisdistaste for the external world.
He was wont to spend his summer vacation in the south of France, andhe preserved its warm sunny impressions. It was only later that hebecame acquainted with Brittany. She inspired him at first with afeeling of oppression and of sadness, and it was long before helearned to love her.
Thus was formed and developed, far from literary circles and fromParisian coteries, one of the most original writers that had appearedfor a long time. He noted his impressions while touring the world; onefine morning he published them, and from the very first the readingpublic was won. He related his adventures and his own romance. Thequestion could then be raised whether his skill and art would prove asconsummate if he should deviate from his own personality to write whatmight be termed impersonal poems; and it is precisely in this lastdirection that he subsequently produced what are now considered hismasterpieces.
A strange writer assuredly is this, at once logical and illusive, whomakes us feel at the same time the sensation of things and that oftheir nothingness. Amid so many works wherein the luxuries of theOrient, the quasi animal life of the Pacific, the burning passions ofAfrica, are painted with a vigour of imagination never witnessedbefore his advent, /An Iceland Fisherman/ shines forth withincomparable brilliancy. Something of the pure soul of Brittany is tobe found in these melancholy pages, which, so long as the Frenchtongue endures, must evoke the admiration of artists, and must arousethe pity and stir the emotions of men.
JULES CAMBON.