# Critical Woodcuts/Pierre Loti and Exotic Love

* related authors: Pierre Loti.
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THERE are two sorts of people in this world: those who enjoy, above everything else, getting home, and those who enjoy, above everything else, getting away from home. One may push the distinction a little further: among those who would enjoy getting home if they could, some have a clear notion what and where home is, but there are others whose sense that somewhere there must be such a haven is engendered only by a vague homesickness, which keeps them wandering and homeless all their lives. And so, since the days of the much-experienced Odysseus, there have been two kinds of sailors on the sea: those who listen to the sirens' song and go ashore on Calypso's isle and, drinking the magic potion, take what shapes the enchantress wills; and those who stop their ears with wax and, lashed to the mast, sail by. This banality may serve as a primary distinction between the two most eloquent sailors of our time: Pierre Loti and Joseph Conrad.
The English sea captain finds the essence of romance in the testing of the hero's resistance to the elemental powers which surround and inhabit him—the power of the storm and the seduction of alien and savage manners, or some cowardice of the flesh, some insidious treachery to his own caste or calling, lurking in his own breast. Whether or not Conrad ever learned ​to write English—a point about which George Moore and others have raised doubts—certainly he learned to feel like an Englishman the burden of those self-imposed obligations which one carries in order to retain one's own respect. In his austere scrutiny of the point of honor, the ethical scruple, there is something almost "puritan," something that links him with Hawthorne, Henry James and Mrs. Wharton, writers who get their "fun" out of refining and multiplying the more or less artificial problems of life, like the proverbial Englishman who preserves the integrity of the blond Nordic by donning evening clothes and dining in solitary state in the Indian jungle.
Pierre Loti is not in that gallery. Though an officer himself, as a man of letters he has shown little interest in what men do under the stress of code and convention. As an author he is incurious about Occidental society. He wishes to forget all that. His friends and his heroes, for literary purposes, are men of the people, peasants, common sailors, whose ungovernable propensity for drink, brawling, and desertion prevents their ever winning more than a woolen stripe to their sleeves. The crises in their experience are not crises of the will but crises of the emotions. For Loti all the possibilities of romance depend upon the hero's susceptibility to seduction, depend upon his surrendering himself utterly to the deep inebriation of strange loves and lands. "This price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing." Before Loti interprets Tahiti he wishes a Tahitian baptism; before he speaks of Japan he must have a Japanese marriage. Transient unions, but while they last he craves the deepest possible impregnation of his spirit by the spirit which he woos, the utmost expatriation and self-dis​solution. Romance for Loti means an escape from the classical circle of humanity and an adventure outside its law.
How foolishly we say that the French, conceiving Paris as the end of every man's desire, are no travelers. True, they seldom visit us except on business; to the Parisian sense New York is more of the same but not so good. But tell the French of something rich and strange, talk to them of lands where "the cypress and myrtle are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime," and none are so attentive as they. Consider the reflection of Algiers, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, China, Japan and the two Indies in their imaginative literature and in their art and you conclude it is near the mark to call the French the discoverers of travel. I speak of travel not as an aspect of commerce but as an aspect of culture. The American visits Paris to confirm his Americanism. The English poet visits Italy to recover his cultural inheritance. The French poet visits Senegambia to get rid of his. They cross the sea to change their minds. They travel precisely because Paris contains everything that a civilized heart desires—except an escape from civility. For a hundred years the French have been contriving fascinating tours and detours for those tired hearts in which the Parisian paradise palls and desire is a burden, and the century moves forward with an ever more listless and monotonous hum.
Pierre Loti is not the first but only the most proficient of the long line of French prose masters who offer travel as something better than hashish or absinthe as an exit from the cul-de-sac of civilization. The man savors contrasts, and on his admission to the Academy he declared that Loti was no reader. But ​we know well enough what masters turned his steps toward the sea and the desert and the wilderness, taught him the luxury of grief and the exile's accents of anguish, the consolations of nature and the pleasures of a quivering sensibility. As a small boy he declares that he had already a clear prescience that he was to have a life of voyages and adventures, with hours of fabulous splendor and hours of infinite misery. Yes, the Arabian Nights, of course. And then Bernardin de St. Pierre, wafting his chaste lovers to an idyllic West Indian isle. Chateaubriand following his dusky maid into the American forest. Mérimée pursuing his brigands among the rocks of Corsica. Gautier inviting to Spain, Greece, and the Mediterranean. Flaubert plucking his melancholy harp above the ruins of Carthage. George Sand and her swarthy peasants among the menhirs of Celtic Brittany. The Goncourts pluming themselves on their exploitation of the acrid savors of dark-skinned races and upon their assimilation of Japan. These are the magicians who presented travel to his lips as one of the higher forms of intoxication. He inherits their taste for the exotic as Yves, in "A Tale of Brittany," inherits dipsomania.
A totally flippant person might summarize his work as thirty-five volumes about the good fortunes of a French Academician who was a larking midshipman before he was a captain, and had a sweetheart in every port. And I suppose that Loti, if asked to speak of love, might have replied like Socrates, "I certainly cannot refuse to speak on the only subject of which I profess to have any knowledge." But Loti, it should be said emphatically, is something infinitely more complex than a mere sailor-lover. His vague rich passion invades and envelops him with a ravishing melan​choly, like the music of Chopin and the poetry of Musset, in which his adolescence reveled. It has overtones of almost mystical rapture and undertones of philosophical despair. It is begotten of life poignantly conscious of itself and shuddering wide-eyed before the black gulf of annihilation. The fourteenyear-old islander Rarahu, with the red hibiscus flowers behind her ears, can neither fathom it nor reciprocate it. These little sweethearts, brown and yellow and black, fierce and real as their own passions may be, serve him but as pathetic go-betweens in his affair with "the soul of the land." When dark blood burns hot in the swift tropical spring, when tomtoms beat in the village and mad shouts rise, kinky-haired Fatou-Gaye may fancy it is she that he comes to meet under the baobab tree by the edge of the swamp at the red moonrise; but the mind of the lover wanders in that strange embrace—he has a rendezvous with Africa.
Loti is no simple-hearted sensualist. The specific "carnal sting" is sharply indicated where it is patently present, as in the vernal orgies of the "Roman d'un Spahi"; but it is the least of his preoccupations. Loti is a romanticist and an imperfect lover. He doesn't keep his mind on the object or the subject; it wanders into the moonlight and among flowers and plays with the amulets and the ancestors and the gods of his mistress. The merely fleshly relation between him and Mme. Chrysanthème he does not present as even interesting. That relation, he declares outright, was detestable. He tolerates her only when he regards her as a bit of art in amber-colored flesh, as a translation from a painted fan or a piece of porcelain. Emotionally, they have less in common than a child and a doll. She has not even the heart to be heartbroken ​when, having paid her wages, he departs for his ship. Returning unexpectedly, he finds her busy with a little hammer testing the lapful of coins he has left.
"An impious hymen," says Anatole France, and suggests that the sadness of Loti is due to his perpetual quest of little thrills and to the impassable racial and cultural abyss which yawns between the Parisian and the Japanese. Yes, Père Anatole, perhaps. A more or less flattering unction to the Occidental soul. But is this spectacle quite so inhuman after all? What about the unfathomable abyss between any two wedded mortals, surveying each other across the coffee cups—between Mr. and Mrs. Jones, who have washed their faces and brushed their hair in considerable intimacy these many years? Have Mr. and Mrs. Jones many more words than Loti and Mme. Chrysanthème, which really pass from heart to heart and make their spirits one? Suppose Jones departs for his ship—dies—to-morrow, as he may, easily enough. Won't there be three good days of mixed grief and mourning show—till Jones is safely out of sight? And then, even in this Western world, won't they pretty calmly go over the will, with the relict, and open the lockbox and tap the securities with their "little hammer" to see if they are sound, and say cheerfully enough, if all is as it should be: "Well, Jones didn't do badly by her." And life will go on much as before, and all the more tolerably because Jones and Mrs. Jones were never so close together as they pretended to be. Loti is sad because he knows that human life is like that, and he can't forget it, even in Nagasaki.
He can't forget it, but by intensifying and varying his sensations he can make almost a rapture out of his consciousness of it. In "The Iceland Fisherman" and ​"A Tale of Brittany" one is besieged by sensations from the first paragraph to the last; gray clouds, freezing rain, granite rocks, the smell of tar and salt air and steaming woolen and clay pipes, church bells for baptisms and weddings and deaths, the wayside calvaire, the summer flowers, the processions of girls in their white head-dresses, the lovers walking in the deep lanes, then the farewells, the mist and the rain again, the scream of gulls, hot liquor in the throat, cordage slipping through bleeding palms, the fishing, the voyage into the bleak north. And out of this saturation with raw sensations rises a sense of profound sympathy and intimate communion with the "soul" of Brittany and with the spirit of all sailors and of all wives and mothers and sweethearts who wait for ships that will never return from the immense and mournful monotony of the sea.
If I were to select from Loti's collection the six books which have impregnated my memory most indelibly with their color and fragrance I should probably choose "The Iceland Fisherman," "A Tale of Brittany," "A Tale of the Pyrenees," "Le Mariage de Loti," "Le Roman d'un Spahi" and "Madame Chrysanthème." Each of these is equipped with a sweetheart or so—poor little thing, and a sweetheart does unquestionably assist one's impressions and sensations to focus and compose themselves. But the enchantment of most of these tales is only very moderately dependent upon the erotic interest, unless one extends the term to include the sentiment that sailors feel for their mothers and mothers for their sons, and the bond of brotherhood, and the affection which greets the changing loveliness of the seasons, and piety toward the customs of one's ancestors and reverence for all ​forms of religious faith in all regions of our mother earth. What the reader falls in love with is in each case a milieu, to which he finds himself bound in a kind of sacramental relation—so much of its natural beauty, and so much of its elemental humanity have entered, with such an exquisitely melancholy commentary, into his heart through his thrilled senses.
Let us have one illustration of Loti's white magic, aspersing his pages with the odors of a delicious spring in the Pyrenees, on the soft nights when young Basque smugglers run their contraband over the Spanish border and return in time for early mass:
For Ramuntcho, it is the time when smuggling becomes a calling almost without fatigue, with hours of positive delight: climbing towards the mountain-tops through springtime clouds; crossing ravines, wandering in the regions of the springs and wild fig-trees; sleeping, while waiting for the hour agreed upon by the complacent carbineers, on beds of mint and ragged robin. . . . The wholesome fragrance of the plants impregnated his clothes, and his jacket, which he never wore, but used only as a pillow or a coverlet—and Gracieuse would sometimes say to him in the evening: "I know whither your smuggling took you last night, for you smell of the mint of the mountain above Mendiazpi."
There certainly is one of Loti's extraordinary achievements: to make each one of nearly two score volumes of which the scenes are wherever a French cruiser calls or the colonial empire has extended—to make each volume stir all the senses and reek of its proper scene as pungently as the jacket of Ramuntcho reeked of the mint of the mountain above Mendiazpi.
​Sensation as Loti employs it becomes romantic; it lifts horizons, it stirs racial memories, it stimulates wide-sweeping reveries, it wakens a consciousness of impersonal powers and of unshunnable destiny; and these things are bitter rivals to the affections of a young girl. There is not a love-tryst in the works of Loti to which he goes with any such breathless fullness and expectancy of soul as he takes to Gethsemane in his yearning midnight vigil in "Jerusalem." No honeyed phrase from any of the sailors' sweethearts moves him so deeply as one musical sentence which he chants to himself, standing alone by his window at night, in "Un Pèlerin d'Angkor": "In the depths of the forests of Siam, I have seen the evening star rising above the great ruins of Angkor." And how can one hold by feminine coquetries a philanderer with all nations and all cultures and all gods, who cries out at one moment that Christ is his beloved lost brother, in the next that his soul is half Arab, and Mahomet is his prophet, and lo! a little while, and this homeless pilgrim is lying prostrate at the feet of Buddha?