M. PIERRE LOTI'S "LE DESERT."
THERE exist many preconceived notions as to each particular form of art being specially adapted to the expression of a particular class of impressions or emotions. But the possi- bilities of each different branch are limitless ; it only requires a man of genius to appear to prove that its compass may be extended indefinitely. As Wagner has made music the means of expressing a whole series of emotions and sen- sations which it was believed impossible to express excepting through other mediums of art, so Claude Monet has com- municated through painting the full significance of aspects in nature, which, before his time, the painter's medium was con- sidered powerless to render. To the man of ti ue talent his art has no restrictions. And this is what one feels in the case of Pierre Loti, who succeeds in conveying through the medium of prose, sensations and impressions one might have believed to be too vague and indefinite for language. His is that subtle power which consists in communicating such indefinable in- fluences as those of colour, scent, sound, atmosphere, which, un- consciously to ourselves, exercise such a potent action on our whole being, physical and moral. And it is by this means that he evokes objects and scenes with such a vivid and pene- trating intensity, that is to say, by communicating the par- ticular influences which are in his mind inseparably associated with them. He envelops one in an atmosphere of association, and his writings have a charm that is both dreamy and real, that appeals both to the imagination and to the senses. Loti cannot be classed among any of the nicely differentiated groups of modern French writers, nor even as a disciple of any of the more mature leaders in literature. His art escapes distinct classification, and he himself is apparently untroubled by any system or theories of art, which tend to make an artist self-conscious and cause personality to degenerate into man- nerism. He is oppressed by an ever-present sense of the pathos and melancholy of life ; and the want to express, this through an abnormally sensitive and emotional tem- perament is the beginning and end of Loti's art. Perhaps of all his works, Picheur d'Islande, which is admittedly one of the most perfect productions of modern French literatnre, represents, in their completest form, his most striking artistic idiosyncrasies. It deals with the life of the Brittany fishermen, particularly those who spend half their time engaged in the cod fisheries off the coasts of Iceland. It is with his intense instinct of human sympathy that Loti describes their lives, and with his wondrous faculty of word-painting that he reproduces the whole scheme of colouring of the northern seas and atmosphere. But it is always the dile sensible of his subject that he evokes. Not merely his personages, but his aspects of Nature, are instinct with emotional significance. He psychologises Nature as he does human beings. And the sea air does not bring us the bracing, joyous influences, the sense of animal exhilaration which we are wont to look for, but is alive with sorrowful presages and tragic visions, and Nature's brightest aspects are imbued with a latent melancholy,—a fitting atmosphere for the lives which are so mournfully confirmative of the truth to which youth alone, encased in its armour of strength and hope, remains impervious. Happiness, even of that kind, which appears to be in harmony with our most natural instincts—rational, legitimate happiness—is impossible, and this truth we should accept as one of the laws of Nature; the
law that makes a holocaust of our most beautiful hopes and ambitions, that crushes the strong sweet nature of Gaud under its iron heel, and wrecks the feeble remnant of Grand- mere Moan's existence. This is the refrain that runs through all Loti's writings, a refrain to which he lends at times the poignancy of those passionately plaintive, vibrating notes of a violin that penetrate to the innermost core of our sensibilities.
In Le Desert, his most recent production, in which he describes a journey through the deserts of Arabia, from Suez: to Jerusalem, Pierre Loti reveals his usual power of communi- cating the impressions and sensations produced by colour, light, atmosphere, and of evoking in intense and vivid images
• Le Desert. By Pierre Loti. Oalmann Levy.
the whole physiognomy of the places he passes through, in all its most subtle variations. Language, in his hands, becomes the most malleable of mediums which assumes, spontaneously, the very mould of the most delicate impression, and the most subtle meaning, which defines what is almost indefinable, and suggests what is entirely so, such as the dim world of abstract notions of time, space, vacancy, at which the human faculty of eonception stops short. An unfamiliar combination of familiar words, the sense of an everyday word negatived, and he at once conveys a new and unexperienced sensation. Thus, in the heart of the desert, where all signs of animal or vegetable
life are absent, he speaks of the non vie, of the air &respire; and in noting the effect of the Bedouin's chant at night- time in the infinity of solitude and silence—of the air deshabitue de bruit. The limitless monotony and emptiness of the landscape is suggested in the following manner :— et rien ne se passe, Hen ne change, et il n'y a plus Hen. Les heures se passent, sans etre comptees ; simplement nous nous c141afons dens le vide."
Another impression of a more sinister character is thus described :— "Tout le matin, nous marchons comme hier, dans des ruines
titanesques de remparts, de temples at de palais Pendant des millenaires et des millenaires, les pluies, les effritements, les oboulements out dii travailler là, avec d'infinies lenteurs mettant a nu les filons les plus durs, detruisant les values plus tendres, creusant, sculptant, emiettant avec des intentions d'art et de symetrie, pour crier cc simulaire de ville effrayante at surhumaine, dans lequel nous avons déjà fait vingt lieues sans en prevoir Is
fin Et la-dessas tombe un si lourd, un si morne soleil, qui no parait fait quo pour tuer en dessechant ! on etouffe dans du calcine et du sombre, oh semble s'infiltrer pour s'aneantir, toute In lumiera venue d'en haut ; on oat la comme dans les mondes finis, depeuples par la feu, qu'aucune rosee no fecondera plus."
And through the outward aspects of the scenes he describes, he insensibly penetrates to their inward significance, revealing to us the very soul of the Arabian desert, with its abstract character of mystery and stability, with eternity behind and before it :—
" Et tout cola est vide, silencienx at mort. C'est la splendeur des regions invariables, d'oil sont absents ces burros ephemeres, les forets, les verdures ou les herbages ; c'est la splendeur de la matiere presqu' eternelle, affranchie de tout l'instable do in vie; in splendour geologique d'avant les creations."
Although a work of purely descriptive character, Le Desert bears the distinctive stamp of all Loti's writings, and leaves the same impression of an almost too acute sensitiveness, a
sensitiveness that is akin to disease, since every impression he receives, even of a sensuous class, is fraught with a vague sense of pain or distress. One feels as if the natural pre- serving envelope that should protect an artist's most delicate sensibilities, were, in Loti's case, but an insufficient film, and that, almost completely exposed, they thrilled with a pain- ful intensity at every contact, even were that contact of a pleasurable nature. In all his writings there is a distinctly morbid beauty, which intensifies the almost magnetic charm they exercise upon the imagination, as in certain beautiful faces one has occasionally met with, to which a vague but unmistakable suggestion of disease and death lends an unnatural but irresistible attraction.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Loti's prose is untranslatable into English. All that is dainty and delicate in his expression becomes trivial ; that which is subtle Becomes obscure ; and the rhythmic flow of his language (one of the greatest charms in his writing) is lost in the process of translation. His thoughts and meanings, unique in their subtlety and delicacy, are enveloped in a style quite as exclusively his own, and exclusively French at the same time, and are so intricately associated that separation simply means destruction.
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