Essay（s） by William Ernest Henley
Champfleury
William Ernest Henley
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The Man.
Champfleury--novelist, dramatist, archaeologist, humourist, and literary historian--belonged to a later generation than that of Petrus Borel and Philothee O'Neddy; but he could remember the production of
les Burgraves, and was able of his own personal knowledge to laugh at the melancholy speech of poor Celestin Nanteuil--the famous 'Il n'y a plus de jeunesse' of a man grown old and incredulous and apathetic before his time: the lament over a yesterday already a hundred years behind. He had lived in the Latin quarter; he had dined with Flicoteaux, and listened to the orchestras of Habeneck and Musard; he had heard the chimes at midnight with Baudelaire and Murger, hissed the tragedies of Ponsard, applauded Deburau and Rouviere, and seen the rise and fall of Courbet and Dupont. If he was not of the giants he was of their immediate successors, and he had seen them actually at work. He had hacked for Balzac, and read romantic prose at Victor Hugo's; he had lived so near the red waistcoat of Theophile Gautier as to dare to go up and down in Paris (under the inspiration of the artist of
la Femme qui taille la Soupe) in 'un habit en bouracan vert avec col a la Marat, un gilet de couleur bachique, et une culotte en drap d'un jaune assez malseant,' together with 'une triomphante cravate de soie jaune'--a vice of Baudelaire's inventing--and 'un feutre ras dans le gout de la coiffure de Camille Desmoulins.' And having seen for himself, he could judge for himself as well. From first to last he showed himself to be out of sympathy with the ambitions and effects of romanticism. He was born a humourist and an observer, and he became a 'realist' as soon as he began to write.
The Writer.
His work is an antipodes not only of
Hernani and
Notre-Dame but of
Sarrazine and
la Cousine Bette and
Beatrix as well. For the commonplace types and incidents, the everyday passions and fortunes, of the
Aventures de Mariette and the
Mascarade de la Vie Parisienne represent a reaction not alone against the sublimities and the extravagance of Hugo but against the heroic aggrandisement of things trivial of Balzac as well. True, they deal with kindred subjects, and they purport to be a record of life as it is and not of life as it ought to be. But the pupil's point of view is poles apart from the master's; his intention, his ambition, his inspiration, belong to another order of ideas. He contents himself with observing and noting and reflecting; with making prose prosaic and adding sobriety and plainness to a plain and sober story; with being merely curious and intelligent; with using experience not as an intoxicant but as a staple of diet; with considering fact not as the raw material of inspiration but as inspiration itself. Between an artist of this sort--pedestrian, good-tempered, touched with malice, a little cynical--and the noble desperadoes of 1830 there could be little sympathy; and there seems no reason why the one should be the others' historian, and none why, if their historian he should be, his history should be other than partial and narrow--than at best an achievement in special pleading. But Champfleury's was a personality apart. His master quality was curiosity; he was interested in everything, and he was above all things interested in men and women; he had a liberal mind and no prejudices; he had the scientific spirit and the scientific intelligence, if he sometimes spoke with the voice of the humourist and in the terms of the artist in words; and his studies in romanticism are far better literature than his experiments in fiction.
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William Ernest Henley's essay: Champfleury