Romance and the Devil

by SEAN O’FAOLAIN

1

As I returned to Dublin, recently, from one of those visits to London which Stephen Gwynn once described in a poem as the salmon’s visit to the sea — the Irishman leaving his only slightly brackish lagoon to be washed in seas of petrol— I asked myself: “Now, apart from the delights of conversation, what did I most enjoy in that city?”

There was an Italian film, which was alone worth the journey; without exception, it is the best film I have ever seen — Four Steps in the Clouds; warm, tender, shot with lyricism and humor; realism at its best. There were three romantic things: “Giselle” with the Marquis de Cuevas’s ballet from Monte Carlo at Covent Garden, danced to perfection by Hightower; the open-air exhibition of sculpture in Battersea Park; and two roomfuls of pictures by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats. “Giselle” was heaven, the sculpture purgatory, the Yeats show hell. It is a virtue of our times to be able to enjoy oneself at things not in themselves wholly enjoyable, so I am equally grateful for these astral, semiastral, and sub-astral experiences.

I have used such a strong word about the Yeats pictures that I must at once explain that I do not use these heavenly and infernal images either flippantly or as the jargon of a balletomane. I use them literally, in the plain sense that there is a smell of the Old Boy about much of modern art and that some of it, including some of the finest of it, is sizzling deep in his inmost circle—Mr. Yeats being no nearer than a moth hovering on the outer rim with the dawn on his snowy poll and the red glow just coloring his innocent nose.

I am far from being alone in this view and, for all I know, it is something that has gradually filtered into me from other men’s minds; and when, from time to time, I read some piece that says the same thing I wonder whether I must not have read similar pieces before and am now no more than their echo. So, I find the whole thing said all over again in the special number of Lett res issued for the fiftieth anniversary of Mallarmé’s death (1842-1898). “Romantic satantsm.” “The angélisme of Mallarmé.” “The rebel angel.” “Claudel as King David and Mallarmé as Lucifer.” “In other words the poetry of the Disincarnation seems miraculous and persuasive as long as it is dissolving the carnal substance of Creation by its pure magic; but when it sets out to create in its own right . . .”

Yet I can still remember my first sensations of dismay and horror at Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” as Finnegans H ake used to be called when it was appearing in its first form in bits and scraps in transition. I remember feeling that this is not prose; this must be music; and gradually realizing that it was neither prose nor music but something that had never been before. But can there be anything that has not been before? It took me years to realize that there cannot, but that a man might try, if he were either sufficiently mad or salanicatly arrogant, to rival Creation and the Creator.

It is a common romantic desire to want to get away from the material envelope. Any of us who has any least romantic urge — and who has not had it in his youth? — must recall the excitement of his first meeting with the Symbolists, whose strongest urge was against the material and materialism. “A revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against the materialistic tradition,” is how Arthur Symons defined the symbolist movement in 1899. And by “rhetoric” he doubtless meant eloquence, and implied the mob, and proposed solitude and inward communion; poetry, in W. B. Yeats’s words, as a private “revelation.” It is a common romantic desire to want to create new forms to match new matter.

It is nearly thirty years ago since, I remember, I found myself saying to Æ that I was sick of stories and novels in which you heard “the distant whistle of a train” and “the far-off sound of a dog barking at the moon,” and that I wished I could “do something with pins.” And I was then a raw provincial who had not yet heard that the most advanced young men in Paris were “doing something” with shirt buttons and bits of wire and banana skins stuck to canvases. I had only to see them to realize that one can, indeed, do something very extraordinary with pins, and that had I been born not in the little town of Cork but in the great city of Paris I should have begun life as an enthusiastic Dadaist. I have never since looked at a canvas of two gamboge lines on a rose ground with a fish’s eye up in the top left-hand corner without thinking, “There but for the grace of God ...” as many a critic following the mennderings of W. B. Yeats through the pallid nineties must have said, “There but for the grace of Ireland went another aesthetic poet.” For what saved him was common life and the ancient traditions thereof.

2

WHAT tho artist does is not to create but to recreate. The figurative use of that word “create” has played the devil (literally, again) with art. It was a romantic transfiguration that imperceptibly gave to the word its modern and, ultimately, blasphemous sense. To create is to make something which had not existed, to evoke out of a void. Every poem, every picture is manufactured out of nature which was alone created. Poets and painters, like the male and female, procreate, beget, found. A poet is a creator only in the sense that he is a creator urbis. He has founded a city. I agree that to this the most modern of abstract painters, as we call them, the least comprehensible writer, has one irrefutable answer: “ I project myself.” We cannot get behind that, and if the painter of the two gamboge lines on the rose ground with the fish-eye would entitle his painting “A Portrait of the Artist” we should have to stand before it respectfully and silently.

But they do not say this. There is a well-known letter from Mallarmé to Cazalis which contains the sentences: “Ma pensée s’est pensée et est arrivée à une conception pure. Je suis mainlenant impersonnel, et non plus Stéphane que tu as connu, mais une aptitude qu’a l’univers spirituel à se voir et à se développer à travers ce qui fut moi.” And Yeals wrote, confessing both the effort and its inevitable failure — for it is the essence of Satanism to fail: “Without knowing it I had come to care for impersonal beauty. I had set out in life with the thought of putting my very self into poetry and had understood this as a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the non-essentials, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my imagination became full of decorative landscapes of still life.”

Mallarmé, going much farther than Yeats ever tried to go, persisting where Yeats had the sense to stop, failed not because the “outside myself” that is, creation —insisted on coming in but because he died trying to keep it out. “Je suis impersonnel.” Though, let us not forget it, Yeats went pretty far before he turned back. Louis MacNeice shrewdly points out how many, for example, of the non-essentials of Shelley he calmly pruned away: Godwin, Rousseau, Plato, all his beliefs. “In his essay on the philosophy of Shelley’s poetry (1900) he spends his time discussing Shelley’s symbols— caves, underground rivers, towers, the morning star — and attempts to build out of these a Shelleyian system: Hamlet, in fact, without the Prince of Denmark.” Taken far enough it would have arrived at the forest without the trees - if that were possible; at nature without natural objects: at formless chaos out of which would come a new Word become Flesh. Monomania. The logical conclusion of the literature of the moi.

That is what Joyce arrived at; and that is at least one half of his immense attraction. We do not, I mean, read a work of art and that alone when we read Ulysses, or open a book and only a book when we open Finnegans Wake: we watch the heroic tragedy of a Lucifer in Starlight all over again. He scaled the mountaintop, struggled with Creation, wrested from it two immense books, and it is these books, stained by his life’s blood, that we handle.

The other half of our interest in Joyce is the achievement itself, so mingled of success and failure, of loveliness and grossness, of sobriety and drunkenness, of clear-headed sanity and obsessional insanity, of realism and romance, of learning and of pedantry, of angélisme and satanism, that these two books will always be cherished by bibliomanes and clipped into (to their considerable enjoyment) by readers. The key to his work is that he is essentially a romantic, although, in “Stephen Hero,” he speaks of his literary theory as “classical” — using the word to indicate the kind of art which is at the apex of a pyramid whose base is “the chaos of unrememhered writing” and whose middle is “literature”—u term of contempt — that deals with the protrayal of externals. (See the opening of Chapter XIX: a most interesting exposition of the Daedalan aesthetic.) This “classical,” really romantic, apex is reached when the artist is one who can disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances.” He calls this “classical” because he believes it to be “not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country.” “It is a constant slate of the artistic mind.”

Not only does the practice of all classical art. which is invariably governed by the manner and customs of societies, disprove this but his own practice runs counter to his own theory. There can have been few writers so equipped to “portray externals”; none has devoted himself so utterly to a fixed age and a fixed country. But, against this minutely portrayed naturalism, as literal as a scene by Canalel to, Stephen Daedalus stalks like a new Werther.

In his technical experiments only does he soar from a recognizable Here and Now, and in that defiance is still characteristically of the romantic temper. Indeed he might seem to be forecasting his future flights by his own definition of the romantic: “Classicism ... is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. [We must grant him heroic patience.] The romantic temper . . . sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures.”The progress of his work towards “insensible figures’ is patent between his first stories and the last immense and supremely arrogant effort to out soar the flesh, to conquer music, to create an absolute art, as free of the mesh of defining circumstances as mathematics— the Mallarméan dream.

3

IT WAS, then, an odd and shivery experience to walk through those two rooms in the Tate looking at the formless and chaotic pictures of the humorous, kindly fantastical man I know as Jack Yeats, and to feel the hot air from the Rue do Home blowing across the Irish Sea; the gleam of the old ambition; the shadow of the old disintegration; the most delicately sulphurous odor, like his own lovely ochres and greens. Horses came out of the shadow and the smoke, like horses running away from the lost battle. Familiar profiles loomed out of the dusk. What the divil, I wondered (unable to keep that gentleman out of my thoughts), is Faddy Finucane doing in that bloodshot chaos? Is that Hiddy Early over there with all the steam about her? Can Jack Yeats have been reading too many of the early poems of his brother Willy?

And then, standing before a glorious medley of paint, that might equally well have been called “Buffalo Bill’s Last Hide,” or “Custer’s Last Stand,” or “Moore Street, 6 A.M.,” I remembered his enchanting books which I had read much as one might read a book by the light of a thunderstorm, or as one listens to French radio when the boys in the power station are having a strike debate. And then, by contrast, I remembered his early work, which was always so firmly outlined, and noted that in those paintings there is hardly any drawing; and when you take drawing out of a picture it is like taking the bottle away from the wine and watching its color and its aroma spill all over the place. Has he, too, come late in life to the ambition his brother briefly held in youth: to be “a poet of pure essences”? Or is he, too, alas, attempting to “create”? Is this, too, not that romantic temper which “sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible ligures”?

Far, indeed, from “Giselle”; from Gautier and Félicien David and Flaubert. Gautier: “I am a man for whom the visible world exists.” The declaration is of a man who strongly feels some such sort of declaration necessary. Flaubert, lovingly quoted over and over by Gautier: “The idea is born of the form.” This is romanticism without deliquescence. And how romantic, and how eloquent, and with what simple conventions, one may see from “Giselle.” If one could ever sanely speak of an absolute beauty, of a disembodied essence, tho exquisite, elementary nonsense of “Giselle” is it.

The point is that any convention at all will do, it does not matter what, if only it recognizes that the visible world of creation exists and that its forms and shapes cannot be disintegrated, abused, or ignored without inviting the final disaster of Lucifer. Men may feel that the tyranny of the physical world is too much to be borne, and long to transcend it in their art. It has been done over and over again, by making the tyrant work, by making its shapes and forms say more than themselves — in other words by changing animal, mineral, and vegetable things into ciphers and celestial codes while remaining recognizably things.

It is beyond reason, though within nature. If one were to apply a cold and abstract reason to the things ballet dancers do, such as standing on one toe, throwing out the arms, bending over and slowly raising the other leg in the air behind, it is the behavior of a female lunatic. It is also, in some way, charming and eloquent, being some form of echo or mirror-play of flower, or cloud, or bird, or who knows what, except that it is in nature — or we should, indeed, think it mad. Once upon a time the romantic would “half-ereate andhalfperceive.” Today he seems to believe that the less you perceive the more you create. (From which one might believe that a blind painter should be his image of a God.) But his Crealion is autonomous. Every artist becomes his own First Cause. Inevitably we find these solipsistic and disconnected worlds difficult to understand. We pass from one of them to another as from one world to another, starting all over again with each one.

“But,” cried one of those younger painters to me once, in Paris, “you mustn’t try to understand. There is nothing to understand. Look at my picture as you would look at a tree, or a beetle or a flower.”

I thought of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”I tried to tell him that a flower is part of a coherent order and that when I see a flower-bell, like Bishop Blougram I see the Grand Perhaps. I could not make him understand. How should I? I was not talking to a painter. I was talking to a Grand Perhaps. He was God. That is to say he was the Devil who had set out to make a world of his very own.