MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE
BY
GEORGE MOORE
CONTENTS
[IV. THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN]
[IX. IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS]
[XII. SUNDAY EVENING IN LONDON]
[APOLOGIA PRO SCRIPTIS MEIS]
[The APOLOGIA which follows needs, perhaps, a word of explanation, not to clear up Mr. Moore's text--that is as delightful, as irrelevantly definite, as paradoxically clear as anything this present wearer of the Ermine of English Literature has ever written--but to explain why it was written and why it is published. When the present publisher, who is hereinafter, in the words of Schopenhauer, "flattened against the wall of the Wisdom of the East," first read and signified his pride in being able to publish these "Memoirs," the passages now consigned to "the late Lord ----'s library" were not in the manuscript. On the arrival of the final copy they were discovered, and thereby hangs an amusing tale, consisting of a series of letters which, in so far as they were written with a certain caustic, humorous Irish pen, have taken their high place among the "Curiosities of Literature." The upshot of the matter was that the publisher, entangled in the "weeds" brought over by his Mayflower ancestors, found himself as against the author in the position of Mr. Coote as against Shakespeare; that is, the matter was so beautifully written that he had not the heart to decline it, and yet in parts so--what shall we say?--so full of the "Wisdom of the East" that he did not dare to publish it in the West. Whereupon he adopted the policy of Mr. Henry Clay, which is, no doubt, always a mistake. And the author, bearing in mind the make-up of that race of Man called publishers, gave way on condition that this APOLOGIA should appear without change. Here it is, without so much as the alteration of an Ibsen comma, and if the Mayflower "weeds" mere instrumental in calling it forth, then it is, after all, well that they grew.--THE PUBLISHER.]
Last month the post brought me two interesting letters, and the reader will understand how interesting they were to me when I tell him that one was from Mr. Sears, of the firm of Appleton, who not knowing me personally had written to Messrs. Heinemann to tell them that the firm he represented could not publish the "Memoirs" unless two stories were omitted; "The Lovers of Orelay," and "In the Luxembourg Gardens,"--Messrs. Heinemann had forwarded the letter to me; my interest in the other letter was less direct, but the reader will understand that it was not less interesting when I tell that it came from the secretary of a certain charitable institution who had been reading the book in question, and now wrote to consult me on many points of life and conduct. He had been compelled to do so, for the reading of the "Memoirs" had disturbed his mind. The reader will agree with me that disturbed is probably the right word to use. To say that the book had undermined his convictions or altered his outlook on life would be an exaggeration. "Outlook on life" and "standard of conduct" are phrases from his own vocabulary, and they depict him.
"Your outlook on life is so different from mine that I can hardly imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You range over fields where my make-up forbids me to wander.
"Such frankness as yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I do want to know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned, explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind and body, helped you to cultivate your artistic sense? Was Goethe right in looking upon all women merely as subjects for experiment, as a means of training his aesthetic sensibilities? Does it not justify the seduction of any girl by any man? And does not that take us straight back to the dissolution of Society? The degradation of woman (and of man) seems to be inextricably involved. Can you regard imperturbedly a thought of your own sister or wife passing through Doris' Orelay experience?"
The address of the charitable institution and his name are printed on the notepaper, and I experience an odd feeling of surprise whenever this printed matter catches my eye, or when I think of it; not so much a sense of surprise as a sense of incongruity, and while trying to think how I might fling myself into some mental attitude which he would understand I could not help feeling that we were very far apart, nearly as far apart as the bird in the air and the fish in the sea. "And he seems to feel toward me as I feel toward him, for does he not say in his letter that it is difficult for him to imagine me built of the same stuff as himself?" On looking into his letter again I imagined my correspondent as a young man in doubt as to which road he shall take, the free road of his instincts up the mountainside with nothing but the sky line in front of him or the puddled track along which the shepherd drives the meek sheep; and I went to my writing table asking myself if my correspondent's spiritual welfare was my real object, for I might be writing to him in order to exercise myself in a private debate before committing the article to paper, or if I was writing for his views to make use of them. One asks oneself these questions but receives no answer. He would supply me with a point of view opposed to my own, this would be an advantage; so feeling rather like a spy within the enemy's lines on the eve of the battle I began my letter. "My Dear Sir: Let me assure you that we are 'built of the same stuff.' Were it not so you would have put my book aside. I even suspect we are of the same kin; were it otherwise you would not have written to me and put your difficulties so plainly before me." Laying the pen aside I meditated quite a long while if I should tell him that I imagined him as a young man standing at the branching of the roads, deciding eventually that it would not be wise for me to let him see that reading between the lines I had guessed his difficulty to be a personal one. "We must proceed cautiously," I said, "there may be a woman in the background.... The literary compliments he pays me and the interest that my book has excited are accidental, circumstantial. Life comes before literature, for certain he stands at the branching of the roads, and the best way I can serve him is by drawing his attention to the fallacy, which till now he has accepted as a truth, that there is one immutable standard of conduct for all men and all women." But the difficulty of writing a sufficient letter on a subject so large and so intricate puzzled me and I sat smiling, for an odd thought had dropped suddenly into my mind. My correspondent was a Bible reader, no doubt, and it would be amusing to refer him to the chapter in Genesis where God is angry with our first parents because they had eaten of the tree of good and evil. "This passage" I said to myself, "has never been properly understood. Why was God angry? For no other reason except that they had set up a moral standard and could be happy no longer, even in Paradise. According to this chapter the moral standard is the origin of all our woe. God himself summoned our first parents before him, and in what plight did they appear? We know how ridiculous the diminutive fig leaf makes a statue seem in our museums; think of the poor man and woman attired in fig leaves just plucked from the trees! I experienced a thrill of satisfaction that I should have been the first to understand a text that men have been studying for thousands of years, turning each word over and over, worrying over it, all in vain, yet through no fault of the scribe who certainly underlined his intention. Could he have done it better than by exhibiting our first parents covering themselves with fig leaves, and telling how after getting a severe talking to from the Almighty they escaped from Paradise pursued by an angel? The story can have no other meaning, and that I am the first to expound it is due to no superiority of intelligence, but because my mind is free. But I must not appear to my correspondent as an exegetist. Turning to his letter again I read:
"I am sorely puzzled. Is your life all of a piece? Are your 'Memoirs' a pose? I can't think the latter, for you seem sincere and frank to the verge of brutality (or over). But what is your standard of conduct? Is there a right and a wrong? Is everything open to any man? Can you refer me now to any other book of yours in which you view life steadily and view it whole from our standpoint? Forgive my intrusion. You see I don't set myself as a judge, but you sweep away apparently all my standards. And you take your reader so quietly and closely into your confidence that you tempt a response. I see your many admirable points, but your center of living is not mine, and I do want to know as a matter of enormous human interest what your subsumptions are. I cannot analyze or express myself with literary point as you do, but you may see what I aim at. It is a bigger question to me than the value or force of your book. It goes right to the core of the big things, and I approach you as one man of limited outlook to another of wider range."
The reader will not suspect me of vanity for indulging in these quotations; he will see readily that my desire is to let the young man paint his own portrait, and I hope he will catch glimpses as I seem to do of an earnest spirit, a sort of protestant Father Gogarty, hesitating on the brink of his lake. "There is a lake in every man's heart"--but I must not quote my own writings. If I misinterpret him ... the reader will be able to judge, having the letter before him. But if my view of him is right, my task is a more subtle one than merely to point out that he will seek in vain for a moral standard whether he seeks it in the book of Nature or in the book of God. I should not move him by pointing out that in the Old Testament we are told an eye for an eye is our due, and in the New the rede is to turn the left cheek after receiving a blow on the right. Nor would he be moved by referring him to the history of mankind, to the Boer War, for instance, or the massacres which occur daily in Russia; everybody knows more or less the history of mankind, and to know it at all is to know that every virtue has at some time or other been a vice. But man cannot live by negation alone, and to persuade my correspondent over to our side it might be well to tell him that if there be no moral standard he will nevertheless find a moral idea if he looks for it in Nature. I reflected how I would tell him that he must not be disappointed because the idea changes and adapts itself to circumstance, and sometimes leaves us for long intervals; if he would make progress he must learn to understand that the moral world only becomes beautiful when we relinquish our ridiculous standards of what is right and wrong, just as the firmament became a thousand times more wonderful and beautiful when Galileo discovered that the earth moved. Had Kant lived before the astronomer he would have been a great metaphysician, but he would not have written the celebrated passage "Two things fill the soul with undying and ever-increasing admiration, the night with its heaven of stars above us and in our hearts the moral law." The only fault I find with this passage is that I read the word "law" where I expected to read the word "idea," for the word "law" seems to imply a Standard, and Kant knew there is none. Is the fault with the translator or with Kant, who did not pick his words carefully? The metaphysician spent ten years thinking out the "Critique of Pure Reason" and only six months writing it; no doubt his text might be emendated with advantage. If there was a moral standard the world within us would be as insignificant as the firmament was when the earth was the center of the universe and all the stars were little candles and Jehovah sat above them, a God who changed his mind and repented, a whimsical, fanciful God who ordered the waters to rise so that his creatures might be overwhelmed in the flood, all except one family (I need not repeat here the story of Noah's Ark and the doctrine of the Atonement) if there was one fixed standard of right and wrong, applicable to everybody, black, white, yellow, and red men alike, an eternal standard that circumstance could not change. Those who believe in spite of every proof to the contrary that there is a moral standard cannot appreciate the beautiful analogy which Kant drew, the moral idea within the heart and the night with its heaven of stars above us. "It is strange," I reflected, "how men can go on worrying themselves about Rome and Canterbury four hundred years after the discovery that the earth moved, and involuntarily a comparison rose up in my mind of a squabble between two departments in an office after the firm has gone bankrupt.... But how to get all these vagrant thoughts into a sheet of paper? St. Paul himself could not proselytize within such limitations, and apparently what I wrote was not sufficient to lead my correspondent out of the narrow lanes of conventions and prejudices into the open field of inquiry. Turning to his letter, I read it again, misjudging him, perhaps ... but the reader shall form his own estimate.
"I honestly felt and feel a big difficulty in reading and thinking over your 'Memoirs' for you are a propagandist whether you recognize that as a conscious mission or not. There is in your book a challenging standard of life which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the average man. One must go down. And it was because I felt the necessity of choosing that I wrote to you.
"'Memoirs' is clearly to me a sincere book. You have built your life on the lines there indicated. And there is a charm not merely in that sincerity but in the freedom of the life so built. I could not, for instance, follow my thoughts as you do. I do not call myself a coward for these limitations. I believe it to be a bit of my build; you say that limitation has no other sanction than convention--race inheritance, at least so I gather. Moral is derived from mos. Be it so. Does not that then fortify the common conviction that the moral is the best? Men have been hunting the best all their history long by a process of trial and error. Surely the build of things condemns the murderer, the liar, the sensualist, and the coward! and how do you come by 'natural goodness' if your moral is merely your customary? No, with all respect for your immense ability and your cultured outlook, I do not recognize the lawless variability of the right and the wrong standard which you posit. How get you your evidence? From human actions? But it is the most familiar of facts that men do things they feel to be wrong. I have known a thief who stole every time in pangs of conscience; not merely in the fear of detection. There is a higher and a lower in morals, but the lower is recognized as a lower, and does not appeal to a surface reading of the code of an aboriginal in discussing morals. That, I think is only fair. Your artistic sense is finely developed, but it is none the less firmly based, although there are Victorian back parlors and paper roses.
"You see you are a preacher, not merely an artist. Every glimpse of the beautiful urges the beholder to imitation and vice versa. And that is why your 'Memoirs' are not merely 'an exhibition' of the immoral; they are 'an incitement' to the immoral. Don't you think so? And thinking so would you not honestly admit, that society (in the wide sense, of course--civilization) would relapse, go down, deliquesce, if all of us were George Moores as depicted in your book?"
His letter dropped from my hand, and I sat muttering, "How superficially men think!" How little they trouble themselves to discover the truth! While declaring that truth is all important, they accept any prejudice and convention they happen to meet, fastening on to it like barnacles. How disappointing is that passage about the murderer, the sensualist, the liar, and the coward; but of what use would it be to remind my correspondent of Judith who went into the tent of Holofernes to lie with him, and after the love feast drove a nail into the forehead of the sleeping man. She is in Scripture held up to our admiration as a heroine, the saviour of our nation. Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath, yet who regards Charlotte Corday as anything else but a heroine? In Russia men know that the fugitives lie hidden in the cave, yet they tell the Cossack soldiers they have taken the path across the hill--would my correspondent reprove them and call them liars? I am afraid he has a lot of leeway to make up, and it is beyond my power to help him.
Picking up his letter I glanced through it for some mention of "Esther Waters," for in answer to the question if I could recommend him to any book of mine in which I viewed life--I cannot bring myself to transcribe that tag from Matthew Arnold--I referred him to "Esther Waters," saying that a critic had spoken of it as a beautiful amplification of the beatitudes. Of the book he makes no mention in his letter, but he writes: "There is a challenging standard of life in your book which will not wave placidly by the side of the standard which is generally looked up to as his regimental colors by the average man." The idea besets him, and he refers to it again in the last paragraph; he says: "You see, you are a preacher, not merely an artist." And very likely he is right; there is a messianic aspect in my writings, and I fell to thinking over "Esther Waters"; and reading between the lines for the first time, I understood that it was that desire to standardize morality that had caused the poor girl to be treated so shamefully. Once Catholicism took upon itself to torture and then to burn all those it could lay hands upon who refused to believe with its doctrines, and now in the twentieth century Protestantism persecutes those who act or think in opposition to its moralities. Even the saintly Mrs. Barfield did not dare to keep Esther; but if she sent her servant away, she spoke kindly, giving her enough money to see her through her trouble; there are good people among Christians. The usual Christian attitude would be to tell Esther that she must go into a reformatory after the birth of her child, for the idea of punishment is never long out of the Christian's thoughts. It is not necessary to recapitulate here how Esther, escaping from the network of snares spread for her destruction, takes refuge in a workhouse, and lives there till her child is reared; how she works fifteen hours a day in a lodging house, sleeping in corners of garrets, living upon insufficient food; or how, after years of struggle, she meets William, now separated from his wife, and consents to live with him that her child may have a father. For this second "transgression," so said a clergyman in a review of the book, Esther could not be regarded as a moral woman. His moral sense, dwarfed by doctrine, did not enable him to see that the whole evil came out of standard morality and the whole good out of the instinct incarnate in her; and he must have read the book without perceiving its theme, the revelation in the life of an outcast servant girl of the instinct on which the whole world rests.
Not until writing these lines did I ever think of "Esther Waters" as a book of doctrine; but it is one, I see that now, and that there is a messianic aspect in my writings. My correspondent did well to point that out, and no blame attaches to him because he seems to fail to see that I may be an admirable moralist while depreciating Christian morality and advocating a return to Nature's. He belonged to the traditions yesterday, today he is among those who are seekers, and to-morrow I doubt not he will be among those prone to think that perhaps Christianity is, after all, retrograde. His lips will curl contemptuously to-morrow when he hears the cruelty of the circus denounced by men who would, if they were allowed, relight the bon fires of the Inquisition; ... he is a Protestant, I had forgotten. Gladiators have begun to appear to us less cruel than monks, and everybody who can think has begun to think that some return to pagan morality is desirable. That is so; awaking out of the great slumber of Christianity, we are all asking if the qualities which once we deemed our exclusive possession have not been discovered among pagans--pride, courage, and heroism. Our contention has become that no superiority is claimed in any respect but one; it appears that it must be admitted that Christians are more chaste than pagans, at all events that chastity flourishes among Christian communities as it has never flourished among pagan. The Christian's boast is that all sexual indulgence outside of the marriage bed is looked upon as sinful, and he would seem to think that if he proclaims this opinion loudly, its proclamation makes amends for many transgressions of the ethical law. All he understands is the law; nothing of the subtler idea that the ethical impulse is always invading the ethical law finds a way into his mind. Women are hurried from Regent Street to Vine Street, and his conscience is soothed by these raids; the owners of the houses in which these women live are fined, and he congratulates himself that vice is not licensed in England, that, in fact, its existence is unrecognized. Prostitution thrives, nevertheless; but numbers do not discourage the moralist, and when he reads in the newspapers of degraded females, "unfortunates," he breathes a sigh; and if these reports contain descriptions of miserable circumstance and human grief, he mutters "how very sad!"
But the assurance that the women are wretched and despised soothes his conscience, and he remembers if he has not been able to abolish prostitution, he has at all events divested it of all "glamour." It would appear that practical morality consists in making the meeting of men and women as casual as that of animals. "But what do you wish--you would not have vice respected, would you?" "What you call vice was once respected and honored, and the world was as beautiful then as now, and as noble men lived in it. In many ways the world was more moral than when your ideas began to prevail." He asks me to explain, and I tell him that with the degradation of the courtesan the moral standard has fallen, for as we degrade her we disgrace the act of love. We have come to speak of it as part of our lower nature, permissible, it is true, if certain conditions are complied with, but always looked upon askance; and continuing the same strain of argument, I tell him that the act of love was once deemed a sacred rite, and that I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, "one incapable of the effort necessary to understand me if I were to tell him, for instance, that the desire of beauty is in itself a morality." It was, perhaps, the only morality the Greeks knew, and upon the memory of Greece we have been living ever since. In becoming hetairae, Aspasia, Lais, Phryne, and Sappho became the distributors of that desire of beauty necessary in a state which had already begun to dream the temples of Minerva and Zeus.
The words of Blake come into my mind, "the daring of the lion or the submission of the ox." With these words I should have headed my letter to the secretary of the charitable institution, and I should have told him that many books which he would regard as licentious are looked upon by me as sacred. "Mademoiselle de Maupin," "the golden book of spirit and sense," Swinburne has called it, I have always looked upon as a sacred book from the very beginning of my life. It cleansed me of the belief that man has a lower nature, and I learned from it that the spirit and the flesh are equal, "that earth is as beautiful as heaven, and that perfection of form is virtue." "Mademoiselle de Maupin" was a great purifying influence, a lustral water dashed by a sacred hand, and the words are forever ringing in my ear, "by exaltation of the spirit and the flesh thou shalt live." This book would be regarded by my correspondent as he regards my "Memoirs," and its publication has been interdicted in England. How could it be permitted to circulate in a country in which the kingdom of heaven is (in theory) regarded as more important than the kingdom of earth? A few pages back the idea came up under my pen that the aim of practical morality was to render illicit love as unattractive as possible, and I suppose, though he has never thought the matter out, the Christian moralist would regard Gautier as the most pernicious of writers, for his theme is always praise of the visible world, of all that we can touch and see; and in this book art and sex are not estranged. I have often wondered if the estrangement of the twain so noticeable in English literature is not the origin of this strange belief that bodily love is part of our lower nature. Our appreciation of the mauve flush dying in the west has been indefinitely heightened by descriptions seen in pictures and read in poems, and I cannot but think that if the lover's exaltation before the curve of his mistress's breast had not been forbidden, the ugly thought that the lover's ardor is inferior to the poet's would never have obtained credence. There is but one energy, and the vital fluid, whether expended in love or in a poem, is the same. The poet and the lover are creators, they participate and carry on the great work begun billions of years ago when the great Breath breathing out of chaos summoned the stars into being. But why do I address myself like this to the average moralist? How little will he understand me! In the Orelay adventure which horrified him there was an appreciation of beauty which he has, I am afraid, rendered himself incapable of. Myself and Doris were spiritual gainers by the Orelay adventure, Doris's rendering of "The Moonlight Sonata," till she went to Orelay, was merely brilliant and effective; and have not all the critics in England agreed that the story in which I relate her contains some of the best pages of prose I have written? But why talk of myself when there is Wagner's experience to speak about? Did he not write to Madame Wasendonck, "I owe you Tristan for all eternity"? She has not left any written record of her debt to Wagner, perhaps because she could not find words to give the reader any idea how great it was.
Histories of human civilization there are in abundance, but I do not know of any history of the human intelligence. But when this comes to be written--if it ever should come to be written--the writer will hesitate, at least I can imagine him hesitating, how much of the genius of artists he would be justified in tracing back to sexual impulses. Goethe, as my correspondent informs me, looked upon love of woman as a means of increasing his aesthetic sensibilities, and my correspondent seems to think that he did them wrong thereby, whereas I think he honored them exceedingly. Balzac held the contrary belief, so Gautier tells us, maintaining that great spiritual elation could be gained by restraint, and when inquiry was made into his precise beliefs on this point he confessed that he could not allow an author more than half an hour once a year with his beloved; he placed no restriction, however, on correspondence, "for that helped to form a style." When Gautier mentioned the names of certain great men whose lives offered a striking refutation of this theory, Balzac answered they would have written better if they had lived chastely. Gautier seems to have left the question there, and so will we, remarking only that Balzac was prone to formulating laws out of his single experience. I remember having written, or having heard somebody say, "in other writers we discover this or that thing, but everything exists in Balzac." And in his conversation with Gautier we do not find him praising chastity as a virtue, but extolling the results that may be gotten from chastity as a Yogi might. It is said that English missionaries in India sometimes drive out in their pony chaises to visit a holy man who has left his womenfolk, plentiful food, and a luxurious dwelling for a cave in some lonely ravine. The pony chaise only takes the parson to the mouth of the ravine, and leaving his wife and children in charge of his servant, the parson ascends the rocky way on foot, meeting, perchance, a fat peasant priest from Maynooth bent on the same mission as himself--the conversion of the Yogi. It is amusing for a moment to imagine these two Western barbarians sitting with the emaciated saint on the ledge in front of the cave. Thinking to win his sympathy, they tell him that on one point they are all agreed. The Brahman's eyes would dilate; how can this thing be? his eyes would seem to ask, and it is easy to imagine how contemptuously he would raise his eyes when he gathered gradually from their discourse that his visitors believed that chastity was incumbent upon all men. "But all men are not the same," he would answer, if he answered his visitors; "I dwell in solitude and in silence, and am chaste, and live upon the rice that the pious leave on the rocks for me, but I do not regard chastity and abstinence as possessed of any inherent merits; as virtues, they are but a means to an end. How would you impose chastity upon all men, since every man brings a different idea into the world with him? There are men who would die if forced to live chaste lives, and there are men who would choose death rather than live unchaste, and many a woman if she were forced to live with one husband would make him very unhappy, whereas if she lived with two men she would make them both supremely happy. But the news has reached me even here that in the West you seek a moral standard, and this quest always fills me with wonder. There are priests among you, I can see that, and soldiers, and fishermen, and artists and princes and folk who labor in the fields--now do you expect all these men, living in different conditions of life, to live under the same rule? I am afraid that the East and the West will never understand each other. The sun is setting, my time for speech is over," and the wise man, rising from the stone on which he has been sitting, enters into the cave, leaving the priest and the parson to descend the rocks together in the twilight, their differences hushed for the moment, to break forth again the next day.
Schopenhauer has a fine phrase, one that has haunted my mind these many years, that the follies of the West flatten against the sublime wisdom of the East like bullets fired against a cliff.
How can it be otherwise? For when we were naked savages the Brahmans were learned philosophers, and had seen as far into every mystery as mortal eyes will ever see. We have progressed a little lately; our universities, it is true, are a few hundred years old, but in comparison with the East we are still savages; our culture is but rudimentary, and my correspondent's letter is proof of it. It is characteristic of the ideas that still flourish on the banks of the Thames, ideas that have changed only a little since the Mayflower sailed. It would have been better if Columbus had delayed his discovery for, let us say, a thousand years. I am afraid the Mayflower carried over a great many intellectual weeds which have caught root and flourished exceedingly in your States--Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington. A letter arrived from Washington some two or three months ago. The writer was a lady who used to write to me on all subjects under the sun; about fifteen years ago we had ceased to write to each other, so she began her letter, not unnaturally, by speaking of the surprise she guessed her handwriting would cause me. She had broken the long silence, for she had been reading "The Lake," and had been much interested in the book. It would have been impolite to write to me without alluding to the aesthetic pleasure the book had given her, but her interest was mainly a religious one. About five years ago she had become a Roman Catholic, she was writing a book on the subject of her conversion, and would like to find out from me why I had made Father Gogarty's conversion turn upon his love of woman, "for it seems to me clear, unless I have misunderstood your book, that you intended to represent Gogarty as an intellectual man." It is difficult to trace one's motives back, but I remember the irritation her letter caused me, and how I felt it would not be dignified for me to explain; my book was there for her to interpret or misinterpret, as she pleased; added to which her "conversion" to Rome was an annoying piece of news. Fifteen years ago she was an intelligent woman and a beautiful woman, if photographs do not lie, and it was disagreeable for me to think of her going on her knees in a confessional, receiving the sacraments, wearing scapulars, trying to persuade herself that she believed in the Pope's indulgences. She must now be middle-aged, but the decay of physical beauty is not so sad a spectacle as the mind's declension. "She began to think," I said, "of another world only when she found herself unable to enjoy this one any longer; weariness of this world produces what the theologians call 'faith.' How often have we heard the phrase 'You will believe when you are dying'? She would have had," I said, "Father Gogarty leave his church for doctrinal rather than natural reasons, believing scrolls to be more intellectual than the instincts; Father Gogarty poring over some early edition of the Scriptures in his little house on the hilltop, reading by the light of the lamp at midnight and deciding that he would go out of his parish because, according to recent exegesis, a certain verset in the Gospel had been added three hundred years after the death of Christ." I fell to thinking how dry, common, and uninteresting the tale would be had it been written on these doctrinal lines. Carlyle said that Cardinal Newman had the brain of a half-grown rabbit, and he was right; Newman never got further than a scroll, and man must think with his body, as well as with his brain. To think well the whole man must think, and it seems to me that Father Gogarty thought in this complete way. Rose Leicester revealed to him the enchantment and the grace of life, and his quest became life. Had it been Hose Leicester herself the story would have merely been a sensual incident. The instinct to go rose up within him, he could not tell how or whence it came, and he went as the bird goes, finding his way toward a country where he had never been, led as the bird is led by some nostalgic instinct. And I do not doubt that he found life, whether in the form of political or literary ambition or in some other woman who would remind him of the woman he had lost; perhaps he found it in all these things, perhaps in none. Told as I told it the story seems to me a true and human one, and one that might easily occur in these modern days; much more easily than the story my correspondent would have had me write. The story of a priest abandoning his parish for theological reasons is not an improbable one, but I think such a story would be more typical of the sixteenth century, when men were more interested in the authenticity of the Biblical texts than they are in the twentieth. The Bible has been sifted again and again; its history is known, every word has been weighed, and it is difficult to imagine the most scrupulous exegetist throwing a search light into any unexplored corner. Even Catholic scholarship, if Loisy can be regarded as a Catholic, has abandoned the theory that the gospels were written by the Apostles. The earliest, that of Mark, was written sixty years after the death of Christ, and it is the only one for which any scholar claims the faintest historical value. With this knowledge of history in our possession belief has become in modern times merely a matter of temperament, entirely dissociated from the intellect. Some painter once said that Nature put him out. The theologian can say the same about the intellect--it puts him out. Out of a great deal of temperament and a minimum of intellect he gets a precipitate, if I may be permitted to drop into the parlance of the chemist, for dregs would be an impolite word to use, and the precipitate always delights in the fetich. There will always be men and women, the cleric has discovered, who will barter their souls for the sake of rosaries and scapulars and the Pope's indulgences. The two great enemies of religion, as the clerics know well, are the desire to live and the desire to know. We find this in Genesis: God: i. e., the clerics, was angry because his creatures ate of these different fruits. God's comprehension of the danger of the tree of life is not wonderful, but his foreseeing of the danger of the tree of knowledge was extraordinary foreseeing, for very little of the fruit of this tree had been eaten at the time the text was written. All through the Middle Ages the clerics strove to keep men from it with tortures and burnings at the stake, and they were so anxiously striving for success in protecting their flocks from this tree that they allowed the sheep to wander, the rams to follow the ewes, and to gambol as they pleased. But the efforts of the clerics were vain. There were rams who renounced the ewes, and the succulent herbage that grows about the tree of life, for the sake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; all the fences that the clerics had erected were broken down one by one; and during the nineteenth century a great feast was held under the tree. But after every feast there are always ailing stomachs; these denouncing the feast go about in great depression of spirit, surfeited feasters, saying the branches of the tree have been plucked bare; others complain they have eaten bitter fruit. This is the moment for the prowling cleric. Hell is remote, it has been going down in the world for some time, and biology, if no conclusions be drawn, serves the clerical purpose almost as well. "The origins of existence are humble enough, my son, but think of the glorious heritage," and the faint-hearted sheep is folded again.... The tree of life is more abundant; whenever a fruit is plucked another instantly takes its place, and all the efforts of the clerics are now directed to keep their flocks from this tree. "Back to the tree of knowledge!" they cry. "Hu! Hu! Hu! Both trees," they mutter among themselves, "are accursed, but this one, from which sweet fruit may always be plucked, is the worser." And they collect together in groups to pass censure on their predecessors. "My predecessors were infallible fools," cries the Pope, "to have permitted praise of this fatal tree, wasting their energies on such men as Bruno, who said the earth was round, and Galileo, whom they forced to say he was mistaken when he said the earth moves. A pretty set of difficulties they have involved us in with their accursed astronomy. Boccaccio and the Troubadours should have been burned instead, and if this had been done all the abominable modern literature which would persuade the faithful that this world is not all sackcloth and ashes would never have been written. Away with him who says that the earth is as beautiful as heaven," and Gautier's phrase, "Moi, je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu," has become the heresy more intolerable than any other to the modern cleric, and to me and to all the ardent and intellectual spirits of my generation a complete and perfect expression of doctrine. To some it will always seem absurd to look to Gautier rather than to a Bedouin for light. Nature produces certain attitudes of mind, and among these is an attitude which regards archbishops as more serious than pretty women. These will never be among my disciples. So leaving them in full possession of the sacraments, I pass on.
My generation was in sympathy with "Mademoiselle de Maupin" and it did more than to reveal and clarify the ideas we were seeking. It would be vain for me, as for any other man, to attempt to follow the course of an idea and to try to determine its action upon life. Perhaps the part of the book which interested us the least was that very part which would be read aloud in court if a prosecution were attempted: I am alluding to the scene when Mademoiselle de Maupin comes into Albert's room. This scene was, however, inevitable, and could not be omitted, for does it not contain that vision of beauty which Albert had been seeking and which was vouchsafed to him for a little while? Never did he see Mademoiselle de Maupin afterwards, she was but a phantom of his own imagination made visible by some prodigy to him. For a still briefer space Rosette shared Albert's dream, and man and wife remained faithful to each other. It is easy to imagine the vileness which a prosecuting counsel could extract from these beautiful pages made entirely of vision and ecstasy. How false and shameful is the whole business. We are allowed to state that we prefer pagan morality to Christian, but are interdicted from illustrating our beliefs by incident. So long as we confine ourselves to theory we are unmolested. But these are subtleties which do not trouble the minds of the members of vigilance associations, the men and women who gather together in back parlors with lead pencils to mark out passages which they consider "un-Kur-istean" (a good strong accent on the second syllable). Their thoughts pursue beaten tracks. Books like "Mademoiselle de Maupin" they hold would act directly on the temperament, and we know that they do not do this, we know that the things of the intellect belong to the intellect and the things of the flesh to the flesh. Were it otherwise Rose Leicester, the pretty school mistress, might have been left out of my story entitled "The Lake," and her place taken by a book. My lady correspondent, it will be remembered, was in favor of some doctrinal difficulty. My second correspondent, the secretary of the charitable institution, would have chosen as the cause of Father Oliver's flight a sensual book. His choice might have been Burton's "Arabian Nights"; better still Casanova's "Memoirs," for this is a book written almost entirely with the senses; the intellect hardly ever intrudes itself; and instead of an emaciated priest poring over a dusty folio we should have had an inflamed young man curled up in an armchair reading eagerly, walking up and down the room from time to time, unable to contain himself, and eventually throwing the book aside, he would find his way down to the lake.
These two versions of "The Lake," as it might have been written by my correspondents, will convince, I think, almost anyone, even them, that the desire of life which set Father Gogarty free could have been inspired only by a woman's personality. It was not necessary that he should go after the woman herself--but that point has already been explained. What concerns us now to understand is how the strange idea could have come into men's minds that literature is a more potent influence than life itself. The solving of this problem has beguiled many an hour, but the solution seems as far away as ever, and I have never got nearer than the supposition that perhaps this fear of literature is a survival of the very legitimate fear that prevailed in the Middle Ages against writing. In my childhood I remember hearing an old woman say that writing was an invention of the devil, and what an old woman believed forty years ago in outlying districts was almost the universal opinion of the Middle Ages. Denunciations and burnings of books were frequent, and ideas die slowly, finding a slow extinction many generations after the reason for their existence has ceased. In the famous trial of Gille de Rais we have it on record that the Breton baron was asked by his ecclesiastical judges if pagan literature had inspired the strange crimes of which he was accused, if he had read of them in--I have forgotten the names of the Latin authors mentioned, but I remember Gille de Rais' quite simple answer that his own heart had inspired the crimes. Whereupon the judges not unnaturally were shocked, for the conclusion was forced upon them that if Gille's confession were true they were not trying a man who had been perverted by outward influence but one who had been born perverted. Who then was responsible for his crimes? Lunacy sometimes in these modern days serves as a scapegoat, but the knowledge of lunacy in the fifteenth century was not so complete as it is now and the judges preferred to believe that Gille was lying. And about ten years ago London found itself in the same moral quandary. Three or four little boys were discovered to have planned the murder of one of their comrades--sixpence, I think, was the object of the murder; not one was over eight, yet they planned the crime skillfully and very nearly succeeded in avoiding detection. To credit these little boys with instinctive crime was intolerable, and just as in the Middle Ages a scapegoat had to be found. Apuleius and his Ass were out of the question, but the little boys admitted having read penny dreadfuls; London breathed again, the way now was clear, these newspapers must be prosecuted, and this recrudescence of wickedness in the heart of a little boy would never be heard of again. A little later or maybe it was a little earlier, I relate these things in the order in which they come into my mind, the London Vigilance Association instituted a prosecution against Mr. Henry Vizetelly, a man of letters and the publisher of Zola's novels. With the exception of Mr. Robert Buchanan and myself not a single man of letters could be found to speak in Mr. Vizetelly's defense. Everybody urged some excuse, his wife was ill, his children were at the seaside and he had to go down to see them, or that he had never cared much about naturalistic literature; whereas, if the prosecution had been directed against something romantic, etc.--Stranger still is the fact that it was almost impossible to find a counsel willing to defend Mr. Vizetelly. One man threw up the case, giving as his reason that he would have to read the books, another said that it would be impossible to adequately defend Mr. Vizetelly's case because no one could say what one had a right to put into a book. This remark seemed to me at the time contemptible, but there was more in it than I thought, for will it be believed that when the case came into court the judge ruled that the fact that standard writers had availed themselves of a great deal of license could not be taken as a proof that such license was permissible? Two wrongs do not make a right he said. In these circumstances perhaps counsel was wise to tell Mr. Vizetelly to plead guilty to having published an indecent libel; but the advice seemed so cruel that, justly or unjustly, I suspect the lawyer of a wish to escape the odium that would have attached to him if he had defended a book accused of immorality. The old man was heavily fined. On going out of court he set to work to have the books revised, spending hundreds of pounds having the plates altered, but the Vigilance Association attacked him again, and this time they succeeded in killing him. Mr. Vizetelly was over seventy years of age when he went to prison, and the shame, anxiety, and three months of prison life killed him. Five years afterwards the Authors' Society, who would not say a word in his favor, voted a great banquet for Zola when he came to London. Zola received every homage that could be paid to a man of letters. The Vigilance Association raised no protest, and I do not blame them. None would have been heard. But while the banquets were held and the speeches were published in the newspapers some of the members of the Association must have meditated sadly on the futility of their efforts and the death of Mr. Vizetelly. It requires a heavy blow of a very heavy mallet to get anything into some people's heads, and nothing short of the reception that was given to Zola could have affected the minds of the Vigilance Association. The significance of the judge's words that the fact that classical writers had availed themselves of a certain license could not be taken as proof that such license was permissible escaped them altogether, for some time afterwards the question of immorality in literature arose again--I have forgotten the circumstances of this case--but I remember that Mr. Coote, the secretary of the Association, was asked if Shakespeare had not written many very reprehensible passages. Mr. Coote was obliged to admit that he had, and when asked why the Association he represented did mot proceed against Shakespeare he answered because Shakespeare wrote beautifully. A strangely immoral doctrine, for if the license of expression that Shakespeare availed himself of be harmful, Shakespeare should be prosecuted; that he wrote beautifully is no defense whatever. Life comes before literature, and the Vigilance Association lays itself open to a charge of neglect of duty by not proceeding at once against Shakespeare and against all those who have indulged in the same license of expression. The members and their secretary have indeed set themselves a stiff job, but they must not shrink from it if they would avoid shocking other people's moral sense by exhibiting themselves in the light of mere busybodies with a taste for what boys and old men speak of as "spicy bits." Proceedings will have to be taken against all the literature that Mr. Coote believes to be harmful (I accept him as the representative of the ideas of his Association), and the plea must not be raised again that because a reprehensible passage is well written it should be acquitted. We must consider the question impartially. It is true that a magistrate may be found presiding at Bow Street who will refuse to issue a warrant against the publishers, let us say of Byron, Sterne, the Restoration, and the Elizabethan dramatists. The Association will have to risk the refusal; but I would not discourage the Association from the adventure. It must not abandon the tope of finding a magistrate who, anxious to prove himself no moral laggard, will do all that is asked of him. A very pretty selection of "spicy bits" can be picked from "Don Juan," and toward this compilation every member, male and female, might contribute. The reading of these selections in Bow Street in a crowded court would prove quite a literary entertainment, and if the magistrate refused to issue a warrant he could only do so on the pretext that the book had been published a long while, a pretext which can hardly be held to be more valid than the pretext put forward by Mr. Coote for not prosecuting Shakespeare. Of one thing only would I warn the Society which I seem to be taking under my wing, and that is, even if it should succeed in interdicting two-thirds of English literature its task will still be only half accomplished. The newspaper question will still have to be faced. Books are relatively expensive, but the newspaper can be bought for a halfpenny, and it will be admitted that no author is as indecent as the common reporter. The reader thinks that I am going to draw his attention to some celebrated divorce case, an account of which was reported in full in the columns of some daily paper under a large heading "Painful Details," the details being the account the chambermaid gave the outraged husband of--I will spare my reader.
About fifteen years ago I was asked if I would care to go over to ---- College to see the sports. We walked across the downs, and while watching the racing I was accosted by the head master, who asked me if I would like to see the college. The sports were more interesting than refectories and dormitories, but it seemed a little churlish to refuse and we went together. No doubt we visited the kitchens and the chapel, but what I remember was a long hall wainscoted with oak and furnished with oak tables and chairs and benches, In this hall there were some thirty or forty boys, of ages varying from twelve to eighteen, reading the newspapers, reading the reports of the Oscar Wilde trial; each daily paper contained three or four columns of it. I asked the head master if it were right to allow the boys to read such reports and he answered that lately the newspapers contained a great deal of objectionable matter, "But how am I to keep the daily papers out of the college?" Now I am not easily scandalized, but I could not help feeling that a grave scandal was being committed in allowing these boys to read the newspapers during the week of that trial. But if you admit the newspapers one day how can you forbid them on another occasion? And while appreciating the head master's difficulty I walked out into the open air unable to take any further interest in the sports. Nor has time obliterated anything of the shame I felt that day. I don't want to make a fuss, I don't want to pose as a moralist, but I cannot help thinking that while newspapers continue to be published, the Vigilance Society need not trouble lest certain books should fall into the hands of young people. My correspondent forgot that thousands of newspapers are published to-day when he wrote to me saying that my book roused sensuality. I am afraid I omitted the passage in which these words occur, fearing to burden my article with quotation. Here it is:
"The perusal of the episodes (Doris' Orelay experiences) does certainly not ennoble me, it rouses sensuality, it lowers woman from a friend and helpmeet into a convenience and a minister to pleasure. I am less able and less willing to think 'high' after your book; poetry is distasteful, art is narrowed, I look out for the licentious, the suggestive, the low, and the mean; and don't you? You seem in passage after passage to be world-weary in a sense that no sane man ought to be, sated, disgusted, tired of life--is it not so? You see I speak from what I am sure you will regard as a narrow platform, my ideals are certainly not yours but I am simply and frankly curious as to the ultimates in your book and in yourself."
Let us suppose now that the Vigilance Association after a sharp crusade has succeeded in redeeming our literature from all reprehensible matter, and flushed with success has attacked the newspapers and obtained an interdiction against the publication of all reports of sexual crimes and misdemeanors. And having extended our imagination so far we may presume as the sequence a world of such highly developed moral susceptibilities that Miss Austen's novels are beginning to cause uneasiness. Miss Austen's novels are still permitted, but in current literature nothing is said that would lead the reader to suppose that men and women are not of the same sex. But men and women still continue to meet and hold conversation. Only some advanced members of the Association are in favor of that complete separation of the sexes which obtains in Ireland in the rural districts. In the imaginary time of which I am writing the Association has only obtained complete control over literature. The theaters are either closed or given over to the representation of plays on religious subjects; but private life has not been invaded by the Puritan missionary, and waltz tunes are still heard and figures seen whirling past lighted windows in Grosvenor Square and Fifth Avenue. Mr. Coote has at this time become a moderate, he is no longer among the progressives, and is in danger of losing his post, so I have no difficulty in imagining what he would do in such a dilemma. He would disguise himself as a waiter and at the next meeting of the Society tell how he had until now showed some reluctance to--the sentence would be a difficult one to finish, perhaps Mr. Coote would break off and say--reluctance to put restraint on the action of men and women as long as they kept within their own doors, but after what he has seen, he finds himself obliged to pass from the moderates to the progressives. What has Mr. Coote seen. How would he tell his tale?
He would tell of the length and the breadth of the ball room, of the parquet floor usually covered with an aubusson carpet but the carpet had been lifted and the gilded furniture taken away; the windows and the recesses had been filled with flowers, and to keep these fresh, great blocks of ice had been placed in the niches. He would tell of the lighting arrangements, for are not flowers and lights incentives to immorality? But his descriptions of the roses and the lilies would only lead up to his descriptions of the shameless animality that came up the staircase between twelve and one. A half-naked lady, the hostess, stood at the head of the stairs receiving her guests with smiles and words of welcome. The dresses the women wore resembled the dress worn by the hostess; young and old alike went about their pleasure with necks and bosoms and arms uncovered, and he saw these undressed creatures slip into the arms of men who whirled them round and round; it was but a whirling of silk ankles and a shuffling of glazed shoes; and every now and then the men and women looked into each other's eyes, and the whole scene was reflected shamelessly in tall mirrors. Notwithstanding the fact that most of Mr. Coote's time was spent behind the buffet serving out ices, he nevertheless contrived to find a spare moment for investigation. On the pretext of seeking a lady who had dropped a handkerchief he had crossed the ball room and was therefore in a position to give an accurate account of the waltzes he had heard, dulcet, undulating, capricious measures, far more provocative than Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" which Tolstoy has denounced. The lady that Mr. Coote sought was not in the ball room, and so he had an opportunity of investigating all the retiring rooms, and I need not describe the pensive and shocked faces that listened to his descriptions of the shady nooks. Sometimes it was a screen, sometimes it was a palm that was employed to hide the couple from observation. Mr. Coote at last discovered the owner of the handkerchief in one of those shady nooks, she was there with a gentleman.... Mr. Coote, of course, would refuse to relate what he saw, he would hesitate, but the members of his Association would insist upon knowing everything, and he would at last confess: "Well, the gentleman had kissed the lady on the point of her shoulder." From this scandalous incident he would pass to tell all that he remembered of the conversation he had heard at the table round which he had worked till nearly four o'clock in the morning handing cutlets, chicken patties, and other delicacies, the names of which he was not acquainted with.
Mr. Coote's description of what he saw may be ingenuous, but is his description untrue? And when Mr. Coote finished up his speech as I imagine him finishing it, by stating that the dancing, the music, the dresses, the wines, and the meats were arranged and learnedly chosen for one purpose and one only, the stimulation of sexual passion, I cannot imagine anyone accusing him of having spoken an untruth. Mr. Coote added that no one went to the ball for the pleasure of the conversation--he was convinced that old and young derived their pleasure, consciously or unconsciously, from sex.
We will imagine the members of Mr. Coote's Society being greatly moved by his description, and the sudden determination of everybody that dancing must be stopped. Had not Byron declared the waltz to be "half a whore"? Tolstoy has gone one better and asked people to say if a woman can remain chaste if a low dress is permitted and Beethoven's "Kreutzer Sonata" is played. Forgetful, of course, that they have prosecuted "Don Juan," the Society accepts Byron's dictum as their war cry, and henceforth the business of Mr. Coote is to inquire into what is immoral in dress, in music, in wine, and in food. After a long consultation with experts and expensive law proceedings the Vigilance Association has (in our imagination) succeeded in reforming society as completely as it succeeded in reforming literature; and the months go by, October, November, December, January, February, March ... but one night the wind changes, and coming out of our houses in the morning we are taken with a sense of delight, a soft south wind is blowing and the lilacs are coming into bloom. My correspondent says that my book rouses sensuality. Perhaps it does, but not nearly so much as a spring day, and no one has yet thought of suppressing or curtailing spring days. Yet how infinitely more pernicious is their influence than any book! What thoughts they put into the hearts of lads and lasses! and perforce even the moralist has to accept the irrepressible feeling of union and growth, the loosening of the earth about the hyacinth shoots and the birds going about their amorous business, and the white clouds floating up gladly through the blue air. Why, then, should he look askance at my book, which is no more than memories of my spring days? If the thing itself cannot be suppressed, why is it worth while to interfere with the recollection? What strange twist in his mind leads him to decry in art what he accepts in nature? A strange twist indeed, one which may be described as a sort of inverted sexuality, finding its pleasure not in the spring day, but in odd corners of ancient literature read only for the sake of passages which he declares to be disgusting, and in spying on modern literature, seeking out passages and expressions which might be denounced in the newspapers or proceeded against in the police court. The psychology of one of these purity mongers is more interesting to the alienist than to a man of letters. Let us take a typical case, that of the late Lord ----. Forty or fifty years ago he was one of the most strenuous advocates of purity in literature, and more shops were raided at his instigation than at any other; yet when he died his library was found to contain the finest collection of impure literature in Europe, and his executors were left wondering whether the prosecutions were prompted by a desire to increase the value of his collection by the destruction of rare books, copies of which were in his possession, or whether he had been moved by conscientious scruples; a man might bamboozle himself in this way: "I am a man of letters and possess these books because they are rare, a curious corner of literature, but it would be highly inexpedient for others to possess them." His conscience might take a still more curious turn, leading to a dizzier height: "I am a sinner; that, alas! is so; but I can prevent others from sinning likewise." No doubt the greater part of the literature which the noble lord collected with so much industry was of that frankly indecent kind which is debarred from every library, Continental as well as English and American. There is a literature which does not come within the scope of the present inquiry, and there is what may perhaps be called a border literature, books which are found in public libraries in the German, the French, and the Italian texts. It seems pertinent to ask why a little knowledge of French and German and Italian should procure the right to read Brantôme's "Femmes Gallantes." It would be difficult for anybody to say that this book is not frankly obscene, and yet in the French text I suppose every library contains it. Casanova's "Memoirs" is another book of the same kind; I am not aware of any complete translation of Boccaccio's tales, but every library possesses an edition in the original Italian. The only reason that can be put forward for the suppression of a book is that it is harmful, and if Brantôme, Casanova, and Boccaccio are harmful in English, they do harm to those who can read them in the original texts. But perhaps I have pointed out enough inconsistencies, and the reader, growing weary, may say: "Are you so young, then, that you don't know that the world is a mass of contradictions? that life is no more than a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing?" Shakespeare did no more than to put into eloquent language every man's belief, that we are all mad on one subject or another. If this be so, every race is mad on some point, for have we not often heard that what is true of the individual is true of the race? Anglo-Saxon madness is book morality. Madness has been defined as a lack of consequence in ideas, and can anything be less consequent than--we need look no further back than Ibsen? The great genius who died in May last was decried by the English people as one of the most immoral of writers; for twenty years at least this opinion obtained in the press, and even among men of letters; suddenly the opinion disappeared, it went out like the flame of a candle; the text is the same, not a comma has been changed, yet now everybody reads it differently. But I must not allow myself to be drawn into speaking of the moral crusades directed against other writers; the task is tempting, and I hope it will be undertaken one of these days. Here, at all events, my concern is with my own writings, as indicated by the title of the article, and it is doubtful if reference to any book would make my point clearer than the tale of what happened in America to my own book, "Esther Waters." The proof sheets were sent in turn to three leading firms, Scribner, Harper, and Appleton, and all three refused the book on the ground that, while recognizing, etc., they did not think it was exactly the kind of book, etc. Even experts make mistakes; this is not denied; what makes my story so remarkable is that all three firms offered to publish an authorized edition of the book as soon as news of its success in England had been cabled to New York. Mr. Appleton, whom I met in Paris, expressed his regret that expert opinion regarding this book had been at fault. "The book," he said, "was quite a proper book to publish, a most admirable book, which would do honor to any firm." I answered: "Very likely all you say, Mr. Appleton, is true, but three weeks ago the experts thought differently. How is it that an immoral book can become moral in three weeks?" My next book, "Evelyn Innes," disturbed the house of Appleton as much as "Esther Waters," and a gentleman of leisure connected with the firm was deputed to mark out not the passages to which he himself took exception, but to which, being an expert, he felt sure that others would take exception. The gentleman was kind enough to insist on submitting his marked copy to me, and my wonderment increased as I turned over the pages, and it reached a climax when I happened upon the following passage, which had been marked to be omitted by the American printer. The passage was: "... in her stage life Evelyn was an agent of the sensual passion, not only with her voice, but in her arms, her neck, and hair, and in every expression of her face; and it was the craving music that had thrown her into Ulick's arms. If it had subjugated her how much more would it subjugate and hold within its persuasion the listener--the listener, who perceived in the music nothing but its sensuality?" "But for what reason," I asked the expert, "do you suggest the elimination of this passage? This is the Puritan point of view. I thought that your proposal was to draw my attention to the passages to which you thought the Puritan would object." "Ah," he said, "that is how I began, but as I got on with the work I thought it better to mark every passage that might give offense." "And to whom would this passage give offense?" I said. "Certainly not to any religious body?" "No," he answered, "not to any religious body, but it would give offense to the subscribers to the New Opera House. If parents read that the music of 'Tristan' threw Evelyn Innes into the arms of Ulick Dean, they would not care to bring their daughters to hear the opera, and might possibly discontinue their subscriptions." Everybody will agree that "expert opinion" can hardly go further, yet the folly which this "expert" was betrayed into did not arise from any congenital stupidity; it is the mistake that you and I, every one of us, would make when we seek the truth in our casual experience instead of in our hearts.
One would have thought that my pointing out the absurdity of this expurgation of "Evelyn Innes" to the house of Appleton would have saved it ever afterwards from similar folly, and forgetful that experience is, as Coleridge describes it, only a lamp in a vessel's stern which throws a light on the waters we have passed through, none on those which lie before us, the publication of "The Lake" was issued by Messrs. Appleton with my consent. The book, as the American public already know, is free from all matter to which the most severe moralist could take exception, yet the American edition did not conform entirely with the English; a dedication written in French was omitted, for what reason I do not know, but it was omitted. The matter may seem a small one, and it may seem invidious to allude to it at all, but on an occasion like the present nothing must be passed over. The English proofs of the "Memoirs" were read, and the book was accepted, but when it was set up in America it did not seem quite so moral in the American type as it did in the English and difficulties arose; these have been alluded to in the first paragraph of this article, and perhaps wrongly I agreed that the two stories, "The Lovers of Orelay" and "In the Luxembourg Gardens," should be left out. On September 28th I wrote, suggesting that "In the Luxembourg Gardens" might be retained, that it was only necessary to drop out a few sentences to make it, as the expert would say, "acceptable to the American public," but it never occurred to me that "The Lovers of Orelay" could be published in any form except the form in which I wrote it. This morning I received a letter from Mr. Sears.
October 8, 1906. DEAR MR. MOORE:
Your letter of September 28th has just arrived this morning. I hope that by the time you receive this I shall have the open letter which we are to print in "Memoirs of My Dead Life." The book is all ready, waiting for it. As a matter of fact, we have not cut out either "In the Luxembourg Gardens" or "The Lovers of Orelay." We simply have taken out parts of each. Very truly yours, J. H. SEARS.
"Simply have taken out parts of each!" My book, then, is a sort of unfortunate animal, whose destiny was to be thrown on the American vivisecting table and pieces taken out of it. Well, I raise no objection. The promise that this preface will be published without alteration soothes me (it is the anaesthetic), and after all, is it not an honor to be Bowdlerized? Only the best are deemed dangerous.... I am not aware that anybody ever took liberties with Miss Braddon's texts. And the day of the Bowdlerizer is a brief one! Sooner or later the original text is published. This is the rule, and I am confident I shall not prove an exception to the rule.
GEORGE MOORE.
MEMOIRS OF MY DEAD LIFE
[CHAPTER I]
SPRING IN LONDON
As I sit at my window on Sunday morning, lazily watching the sparrows--restless black dots that haunt the old tree at the corner of King's Bench Walk--I begin to distinguish a faint green haze in the branches of the old lime. Yes, there it is green in the branches; and I'm moved by an impulse--the impulse of Spring is in my feet; india-rubber seems to have come into the soles of my feet, and I would see London. It is delightful to walk across Temple Gardens, to stop--pigeons are sweeping down from the roofs--to call a hansom, and to notice, as one passes, the sapling behind St. Clement's Danes. The quality of the green is exquisite on the smoke-black wall. London can be seen better on Sundays than on week-days; lying back in a hansom, one is alone with London. London is beautiful in that narrow street, celebrated for licentious literature. The blue and white sky shows above a seventeenth-century gable, and a few moments after we are in Drury Lane. The fine weather has enticed the population out of grim courts and alleys; skipping-ropes are whirling everywhere. The children hardly escape being run over. Coster girls sit wrapped in shawls, contentedly, like rabbits at the edge of a burrow; the men smoke their pipes in sullen groups, their eyes on the closed doors of the public house. At the corner of the great theatre a vendor of cheap ices is rapidly absorbing the few spare pennies of the neighbourhood. The hansom turns out of the lane into the great thoroughfare, a bright glow like the sunset fills the roadway, and upon it a triangular block of masonry and St. Giles's church rise, the spire aloft in the faint blue and delicate air. Spires are so beautiful that we would fain believe that they will outlast creeds; religion or no religion we must have spires, and in town and country--spires showing between trees and rising out of the city purlieus.
The spring tide is rising; the almond trees are in bloom, that one growing in an area spreads its Japanese decoration fan-like upon the wall. The hedges in the time-worn streets of Fitzroy Square light up--how the green runs along? The spring is more winsome here than in the country. One must be in London to see the spring. One can see the spring from afar dancing in St. John's wood, haze and sun playing together like a lad and a lass. The sweet air, how tempting! How exciting! It melts on the lips in fond kisses, instilling a delicate gluttony of life. It would be pleasant in these gardens walking through shadowy alleys, lit here and there by a ray, to see girls walking hand in hand, catching at branches, as girls do when dreaming of lovers. But alas! the gardens are empty; only some daffodils! But how beautiful is the curve of the flower when seen in profile, and still more beautiful is the starry yellow when the flower is seen full face. That antique flower carries my mind back--not to Greek times, for the daffodil has lost something of its ancient loveliness; it is more reminiscent of a Wedgwood than of a Greek vase. My nonsense thoughts amuse me; I follow my thoughts as a child follows butterflies; and all this ecstasy in and about me, is the joy of health--my health and the health of the world. This April day has set brain and blood on fire. Now it would be well to ponder by this old canal! It looks as if it had fallen into disuse, and that is charming; an abandoned canal is a perfect symbol of--well, I do not know of what. A river flows or rushes, even an artificial lake harbours waterfowl, children sail their boats upon it; but a canal does nothing.
Here comes a boat! The canal has not been abandoned. Ah! that boat has interrupted my dreams, and I feel quite wretched. I had hoped that the last had passed twenty years ago. Here it comes with its lean horse, the rope tightening and stretching, a great black mass with ripples at the prow and a figure bearing against the rudder. A canal reminds me of my childhood; every child likes a canal. A canal recalls the first wonder. We all remember the wonder with which we watched the first barge, the wonder which the smoke coming out of the funnel excited. When my father asked me why I'd like to go to Dublin better by canal than by railroad, I couldn't tell him. Nor could I tell any one to-day why I love a canal. One never loses one's fondness for canals. The boats glide like the days, and the toiling horse is a symbol! how he strains, sticking his toes into the path!
There are visits to pay. Three hours pass--of course women, always women. But at six I am free, and I resume my meditations in declining light as the cab rolls through the old brick streets that crowd round Golden Square; streets whose names you meet in old novels; streets full of studios where Hayden, Fuseli, and others of the rank historical tribe talked art with a big A, drank their despair away, and died wondering why the world did not recognise their genius. Children are scrambling round a neglected archway, striving to reach to a lantern of old time. The smell of these dry faded streets is peculiar to London; there is something of the odour of the original marsh in the smell of these streets; it rises through the pavement and mingles with the smoke. Fancy follows fancy, image succeeds image; till all is but a seeming, and mystery envelops everything. That white Arch seems to speak to me out of the twilight. I would fain believe it has its secret to reveal. London wraps herself in mists; blue scarfs are falling--trailing. London has a secret! Let me peer into her veiled face and read. I have only to fix my thoughts to decipher--what? I know not. Something ... perhaps. But I cannot control my thoughts. I am absorbed in turn by the beauty of the Marble Arch and the perspective of the Bayswater Road, fading like an apparition amid the romance of great trees.
As I turn away, for the wind thrills and obliges me to walk rapidly, I think how fortunate I am to experience these emotions in Hyde Park, whereas my fellows have to go to Switzerland and to climb up Mont Blanc, to feel half what I am feeling now, as I stand looking across the level park watching the sunset, a dusky one. The last red bar of light fades, and nothing remains but the grey park with the blue of the suburb behind it, flowing away full of mist and people, dim and mournful to the pallid lights of Kensington; and its crowds are like strips of black tape scattered here and there. By the railings the tape has been wound into a black ball, and, no doubt, the peg on which it is wound is some preacher promising human nature deliverance from evil if it will forego the spring time. But the spring time continues, despite the preacher, over yonder, under branches swelling with leaf and noisy with sparrows; the spring is there amid the boys and girls, boys dressed in ill-fitting suits of broadcloth, daffodils in their buttonholes; girls hardly less coarse, creatures made for work, escaped for a while from the thraldom of the kitchen, now doing the business of the world better than the preacher; poor servants of sacred Spring. A woman in a close-fitting green cloth dress passes me to meet a young man; a rich fur hangs from her shoulders; and they go towards Park Lane, towards the wilful little houses with low balconies and pendent flower-baskets swinging in the areas. Circumspect little gardens! There is one, Greek as an eighteenth-century engraving, and the woman in the close-fitting green cloth dress, rich fur hanging from her shoulders, almost hiding the pleasant waist, enters one of these. She is Park Lane. Park Lane supper parties and divorce are written in her eyes and manner. The old beau, walking swiftly lest he should catch cold, his moustache clearly dyed, his waist certainly pinched by a belt, he, too, is Park Lane. And those two young men, talking joyously--admirable specimens of Anglo-Saxons, slender feet, varnished boots, health and abundant youth--they, too, are characteristic of Park Lane.
Park Lane dips in a narrow and old-fashioned way as it enters Piccadilly. Piccadilly has not yet grown vulgar, only a little modern, a little out of keeping with the beauty of the Green Park, of that beautiful dell, about whose mounds I should like to see a comedy of the Restoration acted.
I used to stand here, at this very spot, twenty years ago, to watch the moonlight between the trees, and the shadows of the trees floating over that beautiful dell; I used to think of Wycherly's comedy, "Love in St. James's Park," and I think of it still. In those days the Argyle Rooms, Kate Hamilton's in Panton Street, and the Café de la Régence were the fashion. But Paris drew me from these, towards other pleasures, towards the Nouvelle Athènes and the Elysée Montmartre; and when I returned to London after an absence of ten years I found a new London, a less English London. Paris draws me still, and I shall be there in three weeks, when the chestnuts are in bloom.
[CHAPTER II]
FLOWERING NORMANDY
On my arrival in Paris, though the hour was that stupid hour of seven in the morning, while I walked up the grey platform, my head was filled with memories of the sea, for all the way across it had seemed like a beautiful blue plain without beginning or end, a plain on which the ship threw a little circle of light, moving always like life itself, with darkness before and after. I remembered how we steamed into the long winding harbour in the dusk, half an hour before we were due--at daybreak. Against the green sky, along the cliff's edge, a line of broken paling zigzagged; one star shone in the dawning sky, one reflection wavered in the tranquil harbour. There was no sound except the splashing of paddle-wheels, and not wind enough to take the fishing boats out to sea; the boats rolled in the tide, their sails only half-filled. From the deck of the steamer we watched the strange crews, wild-looking men and boys, leaning over the bulwarks; and I remembered how I had sought for the town amid the shadow, but nowhere could I discover trace of it; yet I knew it was there, smothered in the dusk, under the green sky, its streets leading to the cathedral, the end of every one crossed by flying buttresses, and the round roof disappearing amid the chimney-stacks. A curious, pathetic town, full of nuns and pigeons and old gables and strange dormer windows, and courtyards where French nobles once assembled--fish will be sold there in a few hours. Once I spent a summer in Dieppe. And during the hour we had to wait for the train, during the hour that we watched the green sky widening between masses of shrouding cloud, I thought of ten years ago. The town emerged very slowly, and only a few roofs were visible when the fisher girl clanked down the quays with a clumsy movement of the hips, and we were called upon to take our seats in the train. We moved along the quays, into the suburbs, and then into a quiet garden country of little fields and brooks and hillsides breaking into cliffs. The fields and the hills were still shadowless and grey, and even the orchards in bloom seemed sad. But what shall I say of their beauty when the first faint lights appeared, when the first rose clouds appeared above the hills? Orchard succeeded orchard, and the farmhouses were all asleep. There is no such journey in the world as the journey from Dieppe to Paris on a fine May morning. Never shall I forget the first glimpse of Rouen Cathedral in the diamond air, the branching river, and the tall ships anchored in the deep current. I was dreaming of the cathedral when we had left Rouen far behind us, and when I awoke from my dream we were in the midst of a flat green country, the river winding about islands and through fields in which stood solitary poplar-trees, formerly haunts of Corot and Daubigny. I could see the spots where they had set their easels--that slight rise with the solitary poplar for Corot, that rich river bank and shady backwater for Daubigny. Soon after I saw the first weir, and then the first hay-boat; and at every moment the river grew more serene, more gracious, it passed its arms about a flat, green-wooded island, on which there was a rookery; and sometimes we saw it ahead of us, looping up the verdant landscape as if it were a gown, running through it like a white silk ribbon, and over there the green gown disappearing in fine muslin vapours, drawn about the low horizon.
I did not weary of this landscape, and was sorry when the first villa appeared. Another and then another showed between the chestnut-trees in bloom; and there were often blue vases on the steps and sometimes lanterns in metalwork hung from wooden balconies. The shutters were not yet open, those heavy French shutters that we all know so well, and that give the French houses such a look of comfort, of ease, of long tradition. Suddenly the aspect of a street struck me as a place I had known, and I said, "Is it possible that we are passing through Asnières?" The name flitted past, and I was glad I had recognised Asnières, for at the end of that very long road is the restaurant where we used to dine, and between it and the bridge is the bal where we used to dance. It was there I saw the beautiful Blanche D'Antigny surrounded by her admirers. It was there she used to sit by the side of the composer of the musical follies which she sang--in those days I thought she sang enchantingly. Those were the days of L'Oeil, Crevé, and Chilpéric. She once passed under the chestnut-trees of that dusty little bal de banlieue with me by her side, proud of being with her. She has gone and Julia Baron has gone; Hortense has outlived them all. She must be very old, eighty-five at least. It would be wonderful to hear her sing "Mon cher amant, je te jure" in the quavering voice of eighty-five; it would be wonderful to hear her sing it because she doesn't know how wonderful she is; the old light of love requires an interpreter, and she has had many; many great poets have voiced her woe and decadence.
Not five minutes from that bal was the little house in which Hervé lived, and to which he used to invite us to supper; and where, after supper, he used to play to us the last music he had composed. We listened, but the public would listen to it no longer. Sedan had taken all the tinkle out of it, and the poor compositeur toqué never caught the public ear again. We listened to his chirpy scores, believing that they would revive that old nervous fever which was the Empire when Hortense used to dance, when Hortense took the Empire for a spring-board, when Paris cried out, "Cascade ma fille, Hortense, cascade." The great Hortense Schneider, the great goddess of folly, used to come down there to sing the songs which were intended to revive her triumphs. She was growing old then, her days were over, and Hervé's day was over. Vainly did he pile parody upon parody; vainly did he seize the conductor's bâton; the days of their glory had gone. Now Asnières itself is forgotten; the modern youth has chosen another suburb to disport himself in; the ballroom has been pulled down, and never again will an orchestra play a note of these poor scores; even their names are unknown. A few bars of a chorus of pages came back to me, remembered only by me, all are gone, like Hortense and Blanche and Julia.
But after all I am in Paris. Almost the same Paris; almost the same George Moore, my senses awake as before to all enjoyment, my soul as enwrapped as ever in the divine sensation of life. Once my youth moved through thy whiteness, O City, and its dreams lay down to dreams in the freedom of thy fields! Years come and years go, but every year I see city and plain in the happy exaltation of Spring, and departing before the cuckoo, while the blossom is still bright on the bough, it has come to me to think that Paris and May are one.
[CHAPTER III]
A WAITRESS
Feeling that he would never see Scotland again, Stevenson wrote in a preface to "Catriona":--"I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny." Does not this sentence read as if it were written in stress of some effusive febrile emotion, as if he wrote while still pursuing his idea? And so it reminds us of a moth fluttering after a light. But however vacillating, the sentence contains some pretty clauses, and it will be remembered though not perhaps in its original form. We shall forget the "laughter and the tears" and the "sudden freshet," and a simpler phrase will form itself in our memories. The emotion that Stevenson had to express transpires only in the words, "romance of destiny, ultimate islands." Who does not feel his destiny to be a romance, and who does not admire the ultimate island whither his destiny will cast him? Giacomo Cenci, whom the Pope ordered to be flayed alive, no doubt admired the romance of destiny that laid him on his ultimate island, a raised plank, so that the executioner might conveniently roll up the skin of his belly like an apron. And a hare that I once saw beating a tambourine in Regent Street looked at me so wistfully that I am sure it admired in some remote way the romance of destiny that had taken it from the woodland and cast it upon its ultimate island--in this case a barrow. But neither of these strange examples of the romance of destiny seems to me more wonderful than the destiny of a wistful Irish girl whom I saw serving drinks to students in a certain ultimate café in the Latin Quarter; she, too, no doubt, admired the destiny which had cast her out, ordaining that she should die amid tobacco smoke, serving drinks to students, entertaining them with whatever conversation they desired.
Gervex, Mademoiselle D'Avary, and I had gone to this café after the theatre for half an hour's distraction; I had thought that the place seemed too rough for Mademoiselle D'Avary, but Gervex had said that we should find a quiet corner, and we had happened to choose one in charge of a thin, delicate girl, a girl touched with languor, weakness, and a grace which interested and moved me; her cheeks were thin, and the deep grey eyes were wistful as a drawing of Rossetti; her waving brown hair fell over the temples, and was looped up low over the neck after the Rossetti fashion. I had noticed how the two women looked at each other, one woman healthful and rich, the other poor and ailing; I had guessed the thought that passed across their minds. Each had doubtless asked and wondered why life had come to them so differently. But first I must tell who was Mademoiselle D'Avary, and how I came to know her. I had gone to Tortoni, a once-celebrated cafe at the corner of the Rue Taitbout, the dining place of Rossini. When Rossini had earned an income of two thousand pounds a year it is recorded that he said: "Now I've done with music, it has served its turn, and I'm going to dine every day at Tortoni's." Even in my time Tortoni was the rendezvous of the world of art and letters; every one was there at five o'clock, and to Tortoni I went the day I arrived in Paris. To be seen there would make known the fact that I was in Paris. Tortoni was a sort of publication. At Tortoni I had discovered a young man, one of my oldest friends, a painter of talent--he had a picture in the Luxembourg--and a man who was beloved by women. Gervex, for it was he, had seized me by the hand, and with voluble eagerness had told me that I was the person he was seeking: he had heard of my coming and had sought me in every cafe from the Madeleine to Tortoni. He had been seeking me because he wished to ask me to dinner to meet Mademoiselle D'Avary; we were to fetch her in the Rue des Capucines. I write the name of the street, not because it matters to my little story in what street she lived, but because the name is an evocation. Those who like Paris like to hear the names of the streets, and the long staircase turning closely up the painted walls, the brown painted doors on the landings, and the bell rope, are evocative of Parisian life; and Mademoiselle D'Avary is herself an evocation, for she was an actress of the Palais Royal. My friend, too, is an evocation, he was one of those whose pride is not to spend money upon women, whose theory of life is that "If she likes to come round to the studio when one's work is done, nous pouvons faire la fête ensemble." But however defensible this view of life may be, and there is much to be said for it, I had thought that he might have refrained from saying when I looked round the drawing-room admiring it--a drawing-room furnished with sixteenth-century bronzes, Dresden figures, étagères covered with silver ornaments, three drawings by Boucher--Boucher in three periods, a French Boucher, a Flemish Boucher, and an Italian Boucher--that I must not think that any of these things were presents from him, and from saying when she came into the room that the bracelet on her arm was not from him. It had seemed to me in slightly bad taste that he should remind her that he made no presents, for his remark had clouded her joyousness; I could see that she was not so happy at the thought of going out to dine with him as she had been.
It was chez Foyoz that we dined, an old-fashioned restaurant still free from the new taste that likes walls painted white and gold, electric lamps and fiddlers. After dinner we had gone to see a play next door at the Odéon, a play in which shepherds spoke to each other about singing brooks, and stabbed each other for false women, a play diversified with vintages, processions, wains, and songs. Nevertheless it had not interested us. And during the entr'actes Gervex had paid visits in various parts of the house, leaving Mademoiselle D'Avary to make herself agreeable to me. I dearly love to walk by the perambulator in which Love is wheeling a pair of lovers. After the play he had said, "Allons boire un bock," and we had turned into a students' café, a café furnished with tapestries and oak tables, and old-time jugs and Medicis gowns, a café in which a student occasionally caught up a tall bock in his teeth, emptied it at a gulp, and after turning head over heels, walked out without having smiled. Mademoiselle D'Avary's beauty and fashion had drawn the wild eyes of all the students gathered there. She wore a flower-enwoven dress, and from under the large hat her hair showed dark as night; and her southern skin filled with rich tints, yellow and dark green where the hair grew scanty on the neck; the shoulders drooped into opulent suggestion in the lace bodice. And it was interesting to compare her ripe beauty with the pale deciduous beauty of the waitress. Mademoiselle D'Avary sat, her fan wide-spread across her bosom, her lips parted, the small teeth showing between the red lips. The waitress sat, her thin arms leaning on the table, joining very prettily in the conversation, betraying only in one glance that she knew that she was only a failure and Mademoiselle D'Avary a success. It was some time before the ear caught the slight accent; an accent that was difficult to trace to any country. Once I heard a southern intonation, and then a northern; finally I heard an unmistakable English intonation, and said:
"But you're English."
"I'm Irish. I'm from Dublin."
And thinking of a girl reared in its Dublin conventions, but whom the romance of destiny had cast upon this ultimate café, I asked her how she had found her way here; and she told me she had left Dublin when she was sixteen; she had come to Paris six years ago to take a situation as nursery governess. She used to go with the children into the Luxembourg Gardens and talk to them in English. One day a student had sat on the bench beside her. The rest of the story is easily guessed. But he had no money to keep her, and she had to come to this café to earn her living.
"It doesn't suit me, but what am I to do? One must live, and the tobacco smoke makes me cough." I sat looking at her, and she must have guessed what was passing in my mind, for she told me that one lung was gone; and we spoke of health, of the South, and she said that the doctor had advised her to go away south.
Seeing that Gervex and Mademoiselle D'Avary were engaged in conversation, I leaned forward and devoted all my attention to this wistful Irish girl, so interesting in her phthisis, in her red Medicis gown, her thin arms showing in the long rucked sleeves. I had to offer her drink; to do so was the custom of the place. She said that drink harmed her, but she would get into trouble if she refused drink; perhaps I would not mind paying for a piece of beef-steak instead. She had been ordered raw steak! I have only to close my eyes to see her going over to the corner of the cafe and cutting a piece and putting it away. She said she would eat it before going to bed, and that would be two hours hence, about three. While talking to her I thought of a cottage in the South amid olive and orange trees, an open window full of fragrant air, and this girl sitting by it.
"I should like to take you south and attend upon you."
"I'm afraid you would grow weary of nursing me. And I should be able to give you very little in return for your care. The doctor says I'm not to love any one." We must have talked for some time, for it was like waking out of a dream when Gervex and Mademoiselle D'Avary got up to go, and, seeing how interested I was, he laughed, saying to Mademoiselle D'Avary that it would be kind to leave me with my new friend. His pleasantry jarred, and though I should like to have remained, I followed them into the street, where the moon was shining over the Luxembourg Gardens. And as I have said before, I dearly love to walk by a perambulator in which Love is wheeling a pair of lovers: but it is sad to find oneself alone on the pavement at midnight. Instead of going back to the café I wandered on, thinking of the girl I had seen, and of her certain death, for she could not live many months in that café. We all want to think at midnight, under the moon, when the city looks like a black Italian engraving, and poems come to us as we watch a swirling river. Not only the idea of a poem came to me that night, but on the Pont Neuf the words began to sing together, and I jotted down the first lines before going to bed. Next morning I continued my poem, and all day was passed in this little composition.
We are alone! Listen, a little while,
And hear the reason why your weary smile
And lute-toned speaking are so very sweet,
And how my love of you is more complete
Than any love of any lover. They
Have only been attracted by the grey
Delicious softness of your eyes, your slim
And delicate form, or some such other whim,
The simple pretexts of all lovers;--I
For other reason. Listen whilst I try
To say. I joy to see the sunset slope
Beyond the weak hours' hopeless horoscope,
Leaving the heavens a melancholy calm
Of quiet colour chaunted like a psalm,
In mildly modulated phrases; thus
Your life shall fade like a voluptuous
Vision beyond the sight, and you shall die
Like some soft evening's sad serenity....
I would possess your dying hours; indeed
My love is worthy of the gift, I plead
For them. Although I never loved as yet,
Methinks that I might love you; I would get
From out the knowledge that the time was brief,
That tenderness, whose pity grows to grief,
And grief that sanctifies, a joy, a charm
Beyond all other loves, for now the arm
Of Death is stretched to you-ward, and he claims
You as his bride. Maybe my soul misnames
Its passion; love perhaps it is not, yet
To see you fading like a violet,
Or some sweet thought, would be a very strange
And costly pleasure, far beyond the range
Of formal man's emotion. Listen, I
Will chose a country spot where fields of rye
And wheat extend in rustling yellow plains,
Broken with wooded hills and leafy lanes,
To pass our honeymoon; a cottage where
The porch and windows are festooned with fair
Green leaves of eglantine, and look upon
A shady garden where we'll walk alone
In the autumn summer evenings; each will see
Our walks grow shorter, till to the orange tree,
The garden's length, is far, and you will rest
From time to time, leaning upon my breast
Your languid lily face, then later still
Unto the sofa by the window-sill
Your wasted body I shall carry, so
That you may drink the last left lingering glow
Of evening, when the air is filled with scent
Of blossoms; and my spirits shall be rent
The while with many griefs. Like some blue day
That grows more lovely as it fades away,
Gaining that calm serenity and height
Of colour wanted, as the solemn night
Steals forward you will sweetly fall asleep
For ever and for ever; I shall weep
A day and night large tears upon your face,
Laying you then beneath a rose-red place
Where I may muse and dedicate and dream
Volumes of poesy of you; and deem
It happiness to know that you are far
From any base desires as that fair star
Set in the evening magnitude of heaven.
Death takes but little, yea, your death has given
Me that deep peace and immaculate possession
Which man may never find in earthly passion.
Good poetry of course not, but good verse, well turned every line except the penultimate. The elision is not a happy one, and the mere suppression of the "and" does not produce a satisfying line.
Death takes but little, Death I thank for giving
Me a remembrance, and a pure possession
Of unrequited love.
And mumbling the last lines of the poem, I hastened to the café near the Luxembourg Gardens, wondering if I should find courage to ask the girl to come away to the South and live, fearing that I should not, fearing it was the idea rather than the deed that tempted me; for the soul of a poet is not the soul of Florence Nightingale. I was sorry for this wistful Irish girl, and was hastening to her, I knew not why; not to show her the poem--the very thought was intolerable. Often did I stop on the way to ask myself why I was going, and on what errand. Without discovering an answer in my heart I hastened on, feeling, I suppose, in some blind way that my quest was in my own heart. I would know if it were capable of making a sacrifice; and sitting down at one of her tables I waited, but she did not come, and I asked the student by me if he knew the girl generally in charge of these tables. He said he did, and told me about her case. There was no hope for her; only a transfusion of blood could save her; she was almost bloodless. He described how blood could be taken from the arm of a healthy man and passed into the veins of the almost bloodless. But as he spoke things began to get dim and his voice to grow faint; I heard some one saying, "You're very pale," and he ordered some brandy for me. The South could not save her; practically nothing could; and I returned home thinking of her.
Twenty years have passed, and I am thinking of her again. Poor little Irish girl! Cast out in the end by a sudden freshet on an ultimate café. Poor little heap of bones! And I bow my head and admire the romance of destiny which ordained that I, who only saw her once, should be the last to remember her. Perhaps I should have forgotten her had it not been that I wrote a poem, a poem which I now inscribe and dedicate to her nameless memory.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE END OF MARIE PELLEGRIN
Octave Barrès liked his friends to come to his studio, and a few of us who believed in his talent used to drop in during the afternoon, and little by little I got to know every picture, every sketch; but one never knows everything that a painter has done, and one day, coming into the studio, I caught sight of a full-length portrait I had never seen before on the easel.
"It was in the back room turned to the wall," he said. "I took it out, thinking that the Russian prince who ordered the Pegasus decoration might buy it," and he turned away, not liking to hear my praise of it; for it neither pleases a painter to hear his early works praised nor abused. "I painted it before I knew how to paint," and standing before me, his palette in his hand, he expounded his new aestheticism: that up to the beginning of the nineteenth century all painting had been done first in monochrome and then glazed, and what we know as solid painting had been invented by Greuze. One day in the Louvre he had perceived something in Delacroix, something not wholly satisfactory; this something had set him thinking. It was Rubens, however, who had revealed the secret! It was Rubens who had taught him how to paint! He admitted that there was danger in retracing one's steps, in beginning one's education over again; but what help was there for it, since painting was not taught in the schools.
I had heard all he had to say before, and could not change my belief that every man must live in the ideas of his time, be they good or bad. It is easy to say that we must only adopt Rubens's method and jealously guard against any infringement on our personality; but in art our personality is determined by the methods we employ, and Octave's portrait interested me more than the Pegasus decoration, or the three pink Venuses holding a basket of flowers above their heads. The portrait was crude and violent, but so was the man that had painted it; he had painted it when he was a disciple of Manet's, and the methods of Manet were in agreement with my friend's temperament. We are all impressionists to-day; we are eager to note down what we feel and see; and the carefully prepared rhetorical manner of Rubens was as incompatible with Octave's temperament as the manner of John Milton is with mine. There was a thought of Goya in the background, in the contrast between the grey and the black, and there was something of Manet's simplifications in the face, but these echoes were faint, nor did they matter, for they were of our time. In looking at his model he had seen and felt something; he had noted this harshly, crudely, but he noted it; and to do this, is after all the main thing. His sitter had inspired him. The word "inspired" offended him; I withdrew it; I said that he had been fortunate in his model, and he admitted that: to see that thin, olive-complexioned girl with fine delicate features and blue-black hair lying close about her head like feathers--she wore her hair as a blackbird wears his wing--compelled one to paint; and after admiring the face I admired the black silk dress he had painted her in, a black silk dress covered with black lace. She wore grey pearls in her ears, and pearls upon her neck.
I was interested in the quality of the painting, so different from Octave's present painting, but I was more interested in the woman herself. The picture revealed to me something in human nature that I had never seen before, something that I had never thought of. The soul in this picture was so intense that I forgot the painting, and began to think of her. She was unlike any one I had ever met in Octave Barrès's studio; a studio beloved of women; the women one met there seemed to be of all sorts, but in truth they were all of a sort. They began to arrive about four o'clock in the afternoon, and they stayed on until they were sent away. He allowed them to play the piano and sing to him; he allowed them, as he would phrase it, to grouiller about the place, and they talked of the painters they had sat to, of their gowns, and they showed us their shoes and their garters. He heeded them hardly at all, walking to and fro thinking of his painting, of his archaic painting. I often wondered if his appearance counted for anything in his renunciation of modern methods, and certainly his appearance was a link of association; he did not look like a modern man, but like a sixteenth-century baron; his beard and his broken nose and his hierarchial air contributed to the resemblance; the jersey he wore reminded one of a cuirass, a coat of mail. Even in his choice of a dwelling-place he seemed instinctively to avoid the modern; he had found a studio in the street, the name of which no one had ever heard before; it was found with difficulty; and the studio, too, it was hidden behind great crumbling walls, in the middle of a plot of ground in which some one was growing cabbages. Octave was always, as he would phrase it, dans une dèche épouvantable, but he managed to keep a thoroughbred horse in the stable at the end of the garden, and this horse was ordered as soon as the light failed. He would say, "Mes amis et mes amies, je regrette, mais mon cheval m'attend." And the women liked to see him mount, and many thought, I am sure, that he looked like a Centaur as he rode away.
But who was this refined girl? this--a painting tells things that cannot be translated into words--this olive-skinned girl who might have sat to Raphael for a Virgin, so different from Octave's usual women? They were of the Montmartre kin; but this woman might be a Spanish princess. And remembering that Octave had said he had taken out the portrait hoping that the Russian who had ordered the Pegasus might buy it, the thought struck me that she might be the prince's mistress. His mistress! Oh, what fabulous fortune! What might her history be? I burned to hear it, and wearied of Octave's seemingly endless chatter about his method of painting; I had heard all he was saying many times before, but I listened to it all again, and to propitiate him I regretted that the picture was not painted in his present manner, "for there are good things in the picture," I said, "and the model--you seem to have been lucky with your model."
"Yes, she was nice to paint from, but it was difficult to get her to sit. A concierge's daughter--you wouldn't think it, would you?" My astonishment amused him, and he began to laugh. "You don't know her?" he said. "That is Marie Pellegrin," and when I asked him where he had met her he told me, at Alphonsine's; but I did not know where Alphonsine's was.
"I'm going to dine there to-night. I'm going to meet her; she's going back to Russia with the prince; she has been staying in the Quartier Bréda on her holiday. Sacré nom! Half-past five, and I haven't washed my brushes yet!"
In answer to my question, what he meant by going to the Quartier Bréda for a holiday, he said:
"I'll tell you all about that in the carriage."
But no sooner had we got into the carriage than he remembered that he must leave word for a woman who had promised to sit to him, and swearing that a message would not delay us for more than a few minutes he directed the coachman. We were shown into a drawing-room, and the lady ran out of her bedroom, wrapping herself as she ran in a peignoir, and the sitting was discussed in the middle of a polished parquet floor. We at last returned to the carriage, but we were hardly seated when he remembered another appointment. He scribbled notes in the lodges of the concierges, and between whiles told me all he knew of the story of Marie Pellegrin. This delicate woman that I had felt could not be of the Montmartre kin was the daughter of a concierge on the Boulevard Extérieur. She had run away from home at fifteen, had danced at the Elysée Montmartre.
Sa jupe avait des trous,
Elle aimait des voyous,
Ils ont des yeux si doux.
But one day a Russian prince had caught sight of her, and had built her a palace in the Champs Elysées; but the Russian prince and his palace bored her.
The stopping of the carriage interrupted Octave's narrative. "Here we are," he said, seizing a bell hanging on a jangling wire, and the green door in the crumbling wall opened, and I saw an undersized woman--I saw Alphonsine! And her portrait, a life-sized caricature drawn by Octave, faced me from the white-washed wall of the hen-coop. He had drawn her two cats purring about her legs, and had written under it, "Ils viennent après le mou." Her garden was a gravelled space; I think there was one tree in it. A tent had been stretched from wall to wall; and a seedy-looking waiter laid the tables (there were two), placing bottles of wine in front of each knife and fork, and bread in long sticks at regular intervals. He was constantly disturbed by the ringing of the bell, and had to run to the door to admit the company. Here and there I recognised faces that I had already seen in the studio; Clementine, who last year was studying the part of Elsa and this year was singing, "La femme de feu, la cui, la cui, la cuisinière," in a café chantant; and Margaret Byron, who had just retreated from Russia--a disastrous campaign hers was said to have been. The greater number were hors concours, for Alphonsine's was to the aged courtesan what Chelsea Hospital is to the aged soldier. It was a sort of human garden full of the sound and colour of October.
I scrutinised the crowd. How could any one of these women interest the woman whose portrait I had seen in Barrès's studio? That one, for instance, whom I saw every morning in the Rue des Martyres, in a greasy peignoir, going marketing, a basket on her arm. Search as I would I could not find a friend for Marie among the women nor a lover among the men--neither of those two stout middle-aged men with large whiskers, who had probably once been stockbrokers, nor the withered journalist whom I heard speaking to Octave about a duel he had fought recently; nor the little sandy Scotchman whose French was not understood by the women and whose English was nearly unintelligible to me; nor the man who looked like a head-waiter--Alphonsine's lover; he had been a waiter, and he told you with the air of Napoleon describing Waterloo that he had "created" a certain fashionable café on the Boulevard. I could not attribute any one of these men to Marie; and Octave spoke of her with indifference; she had interested him to paint, and now he hoped she would get the Russian to buy her picture.
"But she's not here," I said.
"She'll be here presently," Octave answered, and he went on talking to Clementine, a fair pretty woman whom one saw every night at the Rat Mort. It was when the soup-plates were being taken away that I saw a young woman dressed in black coming across the garden.
It was she, Marie Pellegrin.
She wore a dress similar to the one she wore in her portrait, a black silk covered with lace, and her black hair was swathed about her shapely little head. She was her portrait and something more. Her smile was her own, a sad little smile that seemed to come out of a depth of her being, and her voice was a little musical voice, irresponsible as a bird's, and during dinner I noticed how she broke into speech abruptly as a bird breaks into song, and she stopped as abruptly. I never saw a woman so like herself, and sometimes her beauty brought a little mist into my eyes, and I lost sight of her or very nearly, and I went on eating mechanically. Dinner seemed to end suddenly, and before I knew that it was over we were getting up from table.
As we went towards the house where coffee was being served, Marie asked me if I played cards, but I excused myself, saying that I would prefer to sit and look at her; and just then a thin woman with red hair, who had arrived at the same time as Marie and who had sat next her at dinner, was introduced to me, and I was told that she was Marie's intimate friend, and that the two lived together whenever Marie returned to Montmartre. She was known as La Glue, her real name was Victorine, she had sat for Manet's picture of Olympe, but that was years ago. The face was thinner, but I recognised the red hair and the brown eyes, small eyes set closely, reminding one of des petits verres de cognac. Her sketch-book was being passed round, and as it came into my hands I noticed that she did not wear stays and was dressed in old grey woollen. She lit cigarette after cigarette, and leaned over Marie with her arm about her shoulder, advising her what cards to play. The game was baccarat, and in a little while I saw that Marie was losing a great deal of money, and a little later I saw La Glue trying to persuade her away from the card-table.
"One more deal." That deal lost her the last louis she had placed on the table. "Some one will have to pay my cab," she said.
We were going to the Elysée Montmartre, and Alphonsine lent her a couple of louis, pour passer sa soirée, and we all went away in carriages, the little horses straining up the steep streets; the plumes of the women's hats floating over the carriage hoods. Marie was in one of the front carriages, and was waiting for us on the high steps leading from the street to the bal.
"It's my last night," she said, "the last night I shall see the Elysée for many a month."
"You'll soon be back again?"
"You see, I have been offered five hundred thousand francs to go to Russia for three years. Fancy three years without seeing the Elysée," and she looked round as an angel might look upon Paradise out of which she is about to be driven. "The trees are beautiful," she said, "they're like a fairy tale," and that is exactly what they were like, rising into the summer darkness, unnaturally green above the electric lights. In the middle of a circle of white globes the orchestra played upon an estrade, and everyone whirled his partner as if she were a top. "I always sit over there under the trees in the angle," she said; and she was about to invite me to come and sit with her when her attention was distracted from me; for the people had drawn together into groups, and I heard everybody whispering: "That's Marie Pellegrin." Seeing her coming, her waiter with much ostentation began to draw aside tables and chairs, and in a few minutes she was sitting under her tree, she and La Glue together, their friends about them, Marie distributing absinthe, brandy, and cigarettes. A little procession suddenly formed under the trees and came towards her, and Marie was presented with a great basket of flowers, and all her company with bouquets; and a little cheer went up from different parts of the bal, "Vive Marie Pellegrin, la reine de l'Elysée."
The music began again, the people rushed to see a quadrille where two women, with ease, were kicking off men's hats; and while watching them I heard that a special display of fireworks had been arranged in Marie's honour, the news having got about that this was her last night at the Elysée. A swishing sound was heard; the rocket rose to its height high up in the thick sky. Then it dipped over, the star fell a little way and burst: it melted into turquoise blue, and changed to ruby red, beautiful as the colour of flowers, roses or tulips. The falling fire changed again and again. And Marie stood on a chair and watched till the last sparks vanished.
"Doesn't she look like my picture now?" said Octave.
"You seemed to have divined her soul."
He shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. "I'm not a psychologist; I am a painter. But I must get a word with her," and with a carelessness that was almost insolence, he pushed his way into the crowd and called her, saying he wanted to speak to her; and they walked round the bal together. I could not understand his indifference to her charm, and asked myself if he had always been so indifferent. In a little while they returned.
"I'll do my best," I heard her say; and she ran back to join her companions.
"I suppose you've seen enough of the Elysée?"
"Ah! qu'elle est jolie ce soir; et elle ferait joliment marcher le Russe."
We walked on in silence. Octave did not notice that he had said anything to jar my feelings; he was thinking of his portrait, and presently he said that he was sorry she was going to Russia. "I should like to begin another portrait, now that I have learned to paint."
"Do you think she'll go to Russia?"
"Yes, she'll go there; but she'll come back one of these days, and I'll get her to sit again. It is extraordinary how little is known of the art of painting; the art is forgotten. The old masters did perfectly in two days what we spend weeks fumbling at. In two days Rubens finished his grisaille, and the glazing was done with certainty, with skill, with ease in half an hour! He could get more depth of colour with a glaze than any one can to-day, however much paint is put on the canvas. The old masters had method; now there's none. One brush as well as another, rub the paint up or down, it doesn't matter so long as the canvas is covered. Manet began it, and Cézanne has--well, filed the petition: painting is bankrupt."
I listened to him a little wearily, for I had heard all he was saying many times before; but Octave always talked as he wanted to talk, and this evening he wanted to talk of painting, not of Marie, and I was glad when we came to the spot where our ways parted.
"You know that the Russian is coming to the studio to-morrow; I hope he'll buy the portrait."
"I hope he will," I said. "I'd buy it myself if I could afford it."
"I'd prefer you to have something I have done since, unless it be the woman you're after ... but one minute. You're coming to sit to me the day after to-morrow?"
"Yes," I said, "I'll come."
"And then I'll be able to tell you if he has bought the picture."
Three days afterwards I asked Octave on the threshold if the Russian had bought the portrait, and he told me nothing had been definitely settled yet.
Marie had gone to St. Petersburg with the prince, and this was the last news I had of her for many months. But a week rarely passed without something happening to remind me of her. One day a books of travels in Siberia opened at a passage telling how a boy belonging to a tribe of Asiatic savages had been taken from his deserts, where he had been found deserted and dying, and brought to Moscow. The gentleman who had found him adopted and educated him, and the reclaimed savage became in time a fashionable young man about town, betraying no trace of his origin until one day he happened to meet one of his tribe. The man had come to Moscow to sell skins; and the smell of the skins awoke a longing for the desert. The reclaimed savage grew melancholy; his adopted father tried in vain to overcome the original instinct; presents of money did not soothe his homesickness. He disappeared, and was not heard of for years until one day a caravan came back with the news of a man among the savages who had betrayed himself by speaking French. On being questioned, he denied any knowledge of French; he said he had never been to St. Petersburg, nor did he wish to go there. And what was this story but the story of Marie Pellegrin, who, when weary of Russian princes and palaces, returned for her holiday to the Quartier Bréda? A few days afterwards I heard in Barrès's studio that she had escaped from Russia; and that evening I went to Alphonsine's to dinner, hoping to see her there. But she was not there. There was no one there except Clementine and the two stockbrokers; and I waited eagerly for news of her. I did not like to mention her name, and the dreary dinner was nearly over before her name was mentioned. I heard that she was ill; no, not dying, but very ill. Alphonsine gave me her address; a little higher up on the same side as the Cirque Fernando, nearly facing the Elysée Montmartre. The number I could inquire out, she said, and I went away in a cab up the steep and stony Rue des Martyres, noticing the café and then the brasserie and a little higher up the fruit-seller and the photographer. When the mind is at stress one notices the casual, and mine was at stress, and too agitated to think. The first house we stopped at happened to be the right one, and the concierge said, "The fourth floor." As I went upstairs I thought of La Glue, of her untidy dress and her red hair, and it was she who answered the bell and asked me into an unfurnished drawing-room, and we stood by the chimneypiece.
"She's talking of going to the Elysée to-night. Won't you come in? She'd like to see you. There are three or four of us here. You know them. Clementine, Margaret Byron?" And she mentioned some other names that I did not remember, and opening a door she cried: "Marie, here's a visitor for you, a gentleman from Alphonsine's. You know, dear, the Englishman, Octave Barrès's friend."
She gave me her hand, and I held it a long while.
"Comme les Anglais sont gentils. Dès qu'on est malade--"
I don't think Marie finished the sentence, if she did I did not hear her; but I remember quite well that she spoke of my distaste for cards.
"You didn't play that night at Alphonsine's when I lost all my money. You preferred to look at Victorine's drawings. She has done some better ones. Go and look at them, and let's finish our game. Then I'll talk to you. So you heard about me at Alphonsine's? They say I'm very ill, don't they? But now that I've come back I'll soon get well. I'm always well at Montmartre, amn't I, Victorine?" "Nous ne sommes pas installés encore," Marie said, referring to the scarcity of furniture, and to the clock and candelabra which stood on the floor. But if there were too few chairs, there was a good deal of money and jewellery among the bed-clothes; and Marie toyed with this jewellery during the games. She wore large lace sleeves, and the thin arms showed delicate and slight when she raised them to change her ear-rings. Her small beauty, fashioned like an ivory, contrasted with the coarse features about her, and the little nose with beautifully shaped nostrils, above all the mouth fading at the ends into faint indecisions. Every now and then a tenderness came over her face; Octave had seen the essential in her, whatever he might say; he had painted herself--her soul; and Marie's soul rose up like a water-flower in her eyes, and then the soul sank out of sight, and I saw another Marie, une grue, playing cards with five others from Alphonsine's, losing her money and her health. A bottle of absinthe stood on a beautiful Empire table that her prince had given her, and Bijou, Clementine's little dog, slept on an embroidered cushion. Bijou was one of those dear little Japanese or Chinese spaniels, those dogs that are like the King Charles. She was going to have puppies, and I was stroking her silky coat thinking of her coming trouble, when I suddenly heard Clementine's voice raised above the others, and looking up I saw a great animation in her face; I heard that the cards had not been fairly dealt, and then the women threw their cards aside, and La Glue told Clementine that she was not wanted, that elle ferait bien de débarrasser les planches, that was the expression she used. I heard further accusations, and among them the plaintive voice of Marie begging of me not to believe what they said. The women caught each other by the hair, and tore at each other's faces, and Marie raised herself up in bed and implored them to cease; and then she fell back crying. For a moment it seemed as if they were going to sit down to cards again, but suddenly everybody snatched her own money and then everybody snatched at the money within her reach; and, calling each other thieves, they struggled through the door, and I heard them quarrelling all the way down the staircase. Bijou jumped from her chair and followed her mistress.
"Help me to look," Marie said; and looking I saw her faint hands seeking through the bed-clothes. Some jewellery was missing, a bracelet and some pearls, as well as all her money. Marie fell back among the pillows unable to speak, and every moment I dreaded a flow of blood. She began to cry, and the little lace handkerchief was soon soaking. I had to find her another. The money that had been taken had been paid her by a fournisseur in the Quartier, who had given her two thousand francs for her garniture de cheminée. A few francs were found among the bed-clothes, and these few francs, she said, were sufficient pour passer sa soirée, and she begged me to go the dressmaker to inquire for the gown that had been promised for ten o'clock.
"I shall be at the Elysée by eleven. Au revoir, au revoir! Let me rest a little now. I shall see you to-night. You know where I always sit, in the left-hand corner; they always keep those seats for me."
Her eyes closed, I could see that she was already asleep, and her calm and reasonable sleep reminded me of her agitated and unreasonable life; and I stood looking at her, at this poor butterfly who was lying here all alone, robbed by her friends and associates. But she slept contentedly, having found a few francs that they had overlooked amid the bedclothes, enough to enable her to pass her evening at the Elysée! The prince might be written to; but he, no doubt, was weary of her inability to lead a respectable life, and knew, no doubt, that if he were to send her money, it would go as his last gift had gone. If she lived, Marie would one day be selling fried potatoes on the streets. And this decadence--was it her fault? Octave would say: "Qu'est ce que cela peut nous faire, une fille plus ou moins fichue ... si je pouvais réussir un peu dans ce sacré métier!" This was how he talked, but he thought more profoundly in his painting; his picture of her was something more than mere sarcasm.
She was going to the Elysée to-night. It was just six o'clock, so she wanted her dress by ten. I must hasten away to the dressmaker at once; it might be wiser not--she lay in bed peaceful and beautiful; at the Elysée she would be drinking absinthe and smoking cigarettes until three in the morning. But I had promised: she wouldn't forgive me if I didn't, and I went.
The dressmaker said that Madame Pellegrin would have her dress by nine, and at half-past ten I was at the Elysée waiting for her.
How many times did I walk round the gravel path, wearying of the unnatural green of the chestnut leaves and of the high kicking in the quadrilles? Now and then there would be a rush of people, and then the human tide would disperse again under the trees among the zinc chairs and tables, for the enjoyment of bocks and cigars. I noticed that Marie's friends spent their evening in the left-hand corner; but they did not call me to drink with them, knowing well that I knew the money they were spending was stolen money.
I left the place discontented and weary, glad in a way that Marie had not come. No doubt the dressmaker had disappointed her, or maybe she had felt too ill. There was no time to go to inquire in the morning, for I was breakfasting with Octave, and in the afternoon sitting to him.
We were in the middle of the sitting, he had just sketched in my head, when we heard footsteps on the stairs.
"Only some women," he said; "I've a mind not to open the door."
"But do," I said, feeling sure the women were Marie's friends bringing news of her. And it was so. She had been found dead on her balcony dressed in the gown that had just come home from the dressmaker.
I hoped that Octave would not try to pass the matter off with some ribald jest, and I was surprised at his gravity. "Even Octave," I said, "refrains, on ne blague pas la mort."
"But what was she doing on the balcony?" he asked. "What I don't understand is the balcony."
We all stood looking at her picture, trying to read the face.
"I suppose she went out to look at the fireworks; they begin about eleven."
It was one of the women who had spoken, and her remark seemed to explain the picture.
[CHAPTER V]
LA BUTTE
To-morrow I shall drive to breakfast, seeing Paris continuously unfolding, prospect after prospect, green swards, white buildings, villas engarlanded; to-day I drive to breakfast through the white torridities of Rue Blanche. The back of the coachman grows drowsier, and would have rounded off into sleep long ago had it not been for the great paving stones that swing the vehicle from side to side, and we have to climb the Rue Lepic, and the poor little fainting animal will never be able to draw me to the Butte. So I dismiss my carriage, half out of pity, half out of a wish to study the Rue Lepic, so typical is it of the upper lower classes. In the Rue Blanche there are portes-cochères, but in Rue Lepic there are narrow doors, partially grated, open on narrow passages at the end of which, squeezed between the wall and the stairs, are small rooms where concierges sit, eternally en camisole, amid vegetables and sewing. The wooden blinds are flung back on the faded yellow walls, revealing a portion of white bed-curtain and a heavy middle-aged woman, en camisole, passing between the cooking stove, in which a rabbit in a tin pail lies steeping, and the men sitting at their trades in the windows. The smell of leather follows me for several steps; a few doors farther a girl sits trimming a bonnet, her mother beside her. The girl looks up, pale with the exhausting heat. At the corner of the next street there is the marchand de vins, and opposite the dirty little charbonnier, and standing about a little hole which he calls his boutique a group of women in discoloured peignoirs and heavy carpet slippers. They have baskets on their arms. Everywhere traces of meagre and humble life, but nowhere do I see the demented wretch common in our London streets--the man with bare feet, the furtive and frightened creature, gnawing a crust and drawing a black, tattered shirt about his consumptive chest.
The asphalt is melting, the reverberation of the stones intolerable, my feet ache and burn. At the top of the street I enter a still poorer neighbourhood, a still steeper street, but so narrow that the shadow has already begun to draw out on the pavements. At the top of the street is a stairway, and above the stairway a grassy knoll, and above the knoll a windmill lifts its black and motionless arms. For the mill is now a mute ornament, a sign for the Bal du Moulin de la Galette.
As I ascend the street grows whiter, and at the Butte it is empty of everything except the white rays of noon. There are some dusty streets, and silhouetting against the dim sky a dilapidated façade of some broken pillars. Some stand in the midst of ruined gardens, circled by high walls crumbling and white, and looking through a broken gateway I see a fountain splashing, but nowhere the inhabitants that correspond to these houses--only a workwoman, a grisette, a child crying in the dust. The Butte Montmartre is full of suggestion; grand folk must at some time have lived there. Could it be that this place was once country? To-day it is full of romantic idleness and abandonment.
On my left an iron gateway, swinging on rusty hinges, leads on to a large terrace, at the end of which is a row of houses. It is in one of these houses that my friend lives, and as I pull the bell I think that the pleasure of seeing him is worth the ascent, and my thoughts float back over the long time I have known Paul. We have known each other always, since we began to write. But Paul is not at home. The servant comes to the door with a baby in her arms, another baby! and tells me that Monsieur et Madame are gone out for the day. No breakfast, no smoke, no talk about literature, only a long walk back--cabs are not found at these heights--a long walk back through the roasting sun. And it is no consolation to be told that I should have written and warned them I was coming.
But I must rest, and ask leave to do so, and the servant brings me in some claret and a siphon. The study is better to sit in than the front room, for in the front room, although the shutters are closed, the white rays pierce through the chinks, and lie like sword-blades along the floor. The study is pleasant and the wine refreshing. The house seems built on the sheer hillside. Fifty feet--more than that--a hundred feet under me there are gardens, gardens caught somehow in the hollow of the hill, and planted with trees, tall trees, for swings hang out of them, otherwise I should not know they were tall. From this window they look like shrubs, and beyond the houses that surround these gardens Paris spreads out over the plain, an endless tide of bricks and stone, splashed with white when the sun shines on some railway station or great boulevard: a dim reddish mass, like a gigantic brickfield, and far away a line of hills, and above the plain a sky as pale and faint as the blue ash of a cigarette.
I can never look upon this city without strong emotion; it has been all my life to me. I came here in my youth, I relinquished myself to Paris, never extending once my adventure beyond Bas Meudon, Ville d'Avray, Fontainebleau--and Paris has made me. How much of my mind do I owe to Paris? And by thus acquiring a fatherland more ideal than the one birth had arrogantly imposed, because deliberately chosen, I have doubled my span of life. Do I not exist in two countries? Have I not furnished myself with two sets of thoughts and sensations? Ah! the delicate delight of owning un pays ami--a country where you may go when you are weary to madness of the routine of life, sure of finding there all the sensations of home, plus those of irresponsible caprice. The pleasure of a literature that is yours without being wholly your own, a literature that is like an exquisite mistress, in whom you find consolation for all the commonplaces of life! The comparison is perfect, for although I know these French folk better than all else in the world, they must ever remain my pleasure, and not my work in life. It is strange that this should be so, for in truth I know them strangely well. I can see them living their lives from hour to hour; I know what they would say on any given occasion.
There is Paul. I understand nothing more completely than that man's mind. I know its habitual colour and every varying shade, and yet I may not make him the hero of a novel when I lay the scene in Montmartre, though I know it so well. I know when he dresses, how long he takes to dress, and what he wears. I know the breakfast he eats, and the streets down which he passes--their shape, their colour, their smell. I know exactly how life has come to him, how it has affected him. The day I met him in London! Paul in London! He was there to meet une petite fermière with whom he had become infatuated when he went to Normandy to finish his novel. Paul is foncièrement bon; he married her, and this is their abode. There is the salle-à-manger, furnished with a nice sideboard in oak, and six chairs to match; on the left is their bedroom, and there is the baby's cot, a present from le grand, le cher et illustre maître.
Paul and Mrs. Paul get up at twelve, and they loiter over breakfast; some friends come in and they loiter over les petits verres. About four Paul begins to write his article, which he finishes or nearly finishes before dinner. They loiter over dinner until it is time for Paul to take his article to the newspaper. He loiters in the printing office or the cafe until his proof is ready, and when that is corrected he loiters in the many cafés of the Faubourg Montmartre, smoking interminable cigars, finding his way back to the Butte between three and four in the morning. Paul is fat and of an equable temperament. He believes in naturalism all the day, particularly after a breakfast over les petits verres. He never said an unkind word to any one, and I am sure never thought one. He used to be fond of grisettes, but since he married he has thought of no one but his wife. Il écrit des choses raides, but no woman ever had a better husband. And now you know him as well as I do. Here are his own books, "The End of Lucie Pellegrin," the story that I have just finished writing: I think I must explain how it was that I have come to rewrite one of Paul's stories, the best he ever wrote. I remember asking him why he called her Lucie, and he was surprised to hear her name was Marie; he never knew her, he had never been to Alphonsine's, and he had told the story as he had picked it up from the women who turned into the Rat Mort at midnight for a soupe à l'oignon. He said it was a pity he did not know me when he was writing it, for I could have told him her story more sympathetically than the women in the Rat Mort, supplying him with many pretty details that they had never noticed or had forgotten. It would have been easy for me to have done this, for Marie Pellegrin is enshrined in my memory like a miniature in a case. I press a spring, and I see the beautifully shaped little head, the pale olive face, the dark eyes, and the blue-black hair. Marie Pellegrin is really part of my own story, so why should I have any scruple about telling it? Merely because my friend had written it from hearsay? Whereas I knew her; I saw her on her death-bed. Chance made me her natural historian. Now I think that every one will accept my excuses, and will acquit me of plagiarism.
I see the Rougon-Macquart series, each volume presented to him by the author, Goncourt, Huysmans, Duranty, Céard, Maupassant, Hennique, etc.; in a word, the works of those with whom I grew up, those who tied my first literary pinafore round my neck. But here are "Les Moralités Legendaires" by Jules Laforgue, and "Les Illuminations" by Rambaud. Paul has not read these books; they were sent to him, I suppose, for review, and put away on the bookcase, all uncut; their authors do not visit here.
And this sets me thinking that one knows very little of any generation except one's own. True that I know a little more of the symbolists than Paul. I am the youngest of the naturalists, the eldest of the symbolists. The naturalists affected the art of painting, the symbolists the art of music; and since the symbolists there has been no artistic manifestation--the game is played out. When Huysmans and Paul and myself are dead, it will be as impossible to write a naturalistic novel as to revive the megatherium. Where is Hennique? When Monet is dead it will be as impossible to paint an impressionistic picture as to revive the ichthyosaurus. A little world of ideas goes by every five-and-twenty years, and the next that emerges will be incomprehensible to me, as incomprehensible as Monet was to Corot.... Was the young generation knocking at the door of the Opéra Comique last night? If the music was the young generation, I am sorry for it. It was the second time I had gone. I had been to hear the music, and I left exasperated after the third act. A friend was with me and he left, but for different reasons; he suffered in his ears; it was my intelligence that suffered. Why did the flute play the chromatic scale when the boy said, "Il faut que cela soit un grand navire," and why were all the cellos in motion when the girl answered, "Cela ou bien tout autre chose?" I suffered because of the divorce of the orchestra and singers, uniting perhaps at the end of the scene. It was speaking through music, no more, monotonous as the Sahara, league after league, and I lost amid sands. A chord is heard in "Lohengrin" to sustain Elsa's voice, and it performs its purpose; a motive is heard to attract attention to a certain part of the story, and it fills its purpose, when Ortrud shrieks out the motive of the secret, and in its simplest form, at the church door, the method may be criticised as crude, but the crudest melodrama is better than this desert wandering. While I ponder on the music of the younger generation, remembering the perplexity it had caused me, I hear a vagrant singing on the other side of the terrace:
and I say: "I hear the truth in the mouth of the vagrant minstrel, one who possibly has no trou wherein to lay his head." Et moi aussi, je reste dans mon trou, et mon trou est assez beau pour que j'y reste, car mon trou est--Richard Wagner. My trou is the Ring--the Sacrosanct Ring. Again I fall to musing. The intention of Liszt and Wagner and Strauss was to write music. However long Wotan might ponder on Mother Earth the moment comes when the violins begin to sing; ah! how the spring uncloses in the orchestra, and the lovers fly to the woods!...
The vagrant continued his wail, and forgetful of Paul, forgetful of all things but the philosophy of the minstrel of the Butte, I picked my way down the tortuous streets repeating:
[CHAPTER VI]
SPENT LOVES
I am going to see dear and affectionate friends. The train would take me to them, that droll little chemin de fer de ceinture, and it seems a pity to miss the Gare St. Lazare, its Sunday morning tumult of Parisians starting with their mistresses and their wives for a favourite suburb. I never run up these wide stairways leading to the great wide galleries full of bookstalls (charming yellow notes), and pierced with little guichets painted round with blue, without experiencing a sensation of happy lightness--a light-headedness that I associate with the month of May in Paris. But the tramway that passes through the Place de la Concorde goes as far as Passy, and though I love the droll little chemin de fer de ceinture I love this tramway better. It speeds along the quays between the Seine and the garden of the Champs Elysées, through miles of chestnut bloom, the roadway chequered with shadows of chestnut leaves; the branches meet overhead, and in a faint delirium of the senses I catch at a bloom, cherish it for a moment, and cast it away. The plucky little steamboats are making for the landing-places, stemming the current. I love this sprightly little river better than the melancholy Thames, along whose banks saturnine immoralities flourish like bulrushes! Behold the white architecture, the pillars, the balustraded steps, the domes in the blue air, the monumented swards! Paris, like all pagan cities, is full of statues. A little later we roll past gardens, gaiety is in the air.... And then the streets of Passy begin to appear, mean streets, like London streets. I like them not; but the railway station is compensation; the little railway station like a house of cards under toy trees, and the train steaming out into the fanciful country. The bright wood along which it speeds is like the season's millinery.
It is pleasant to notice everything in Paris, the flymen asleep on their box-seats, the little horses dozing beneath the chestnut trees, the bloused workmen leaning over a green-painted table in an arbour, drinking wine at sixteen sous the litre, the villas of Auteuil, rich woodwork, rich iron railings, and the summer hush about villas engarlanded. Auteuil is so French, its symbolism enchants me. Auteuil is like a flower, its petals opening out to the kiss of the air, its roots feeling for way among the rich earth. Ah, the land of France, its vineyards and orchards, its earthly life! Thoughts come unbidden, my thoughts sing together, and I hardly knowing what they are singing. My thoughts are singing like the sun; do not ask me their meaning; they mean as much and as little as the sun that I am part of--the sun of France that I shall enjoy for thirty days. May takes me to dear and affectionate friends who await me at Auteuil, and June takes me away from them. There is the villa! And there amid the engarlanding trees my friend, dressed in pale yellow, sits in front of his easel. How the sunlight plays through the foliage, leaping through the rich, long grass; and amid the rhododendrons in bloom sits a little girl of four, his model, her frock and cap impossibly white under the great, gaudy greenery.
Year after year the same affectionate welcome, the same spontaneous welcome in this garden of rhododendrons and chestnut bloom. I would linger in the garden, but I may not, for breakfast is ready et il ne faut pas faire manquer la messe à Madame. La messe! How gentle the word is, much gentler than our word, mass, and it shocks us hardly at all to see an old lady going away in her carriage pour entendre la messe. Religion purged of faith is a pleasant, almost a pretty thing. Some fruits are better dried than fresh; religion is such a one, and religion, when nothing is left of it but the pleasant, familiar habit, may be defended, for were it not for our habits life would be unrecorded, it would be all on the flat, as we would say if we were talking about a picture without perspective. Our habits are our stories, and tell whence we have come and how we came to be what we are. This is quite a pretty reflection, but there is no time to think the matter out--here is the doctor! He lifts his skull-cap, and how beautiful is the gesture; his dignity is the dignity that only goodness gives; and his goodness is a pure gift, existing independent of formula, a thing in itself, like Manet's painting. It was Degas who said, "A man whose profile no one ever saw," and the aphorism reminds us of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from Paradise. But why from Paradise? Paradise is an ugly ecclesiastical invention, and angels are an ugly Hebrew invention. It is unpardonable to think of angels in Auteuil; an angel is a prig compared to the dear doctor, and an angel has wings. Well, so had this admirable chicken, a bird that was grown for the use of the table, produced like a vegetable. A dear bird that was never allowed to run about and weary itself as our helpless English chicken is; it lived to get fat without acquiring any useless knowledge or desire of life; it became a capon in tender years, and then a pipe was introduced into its mouth and it was fed by machinery until it could hardly walk, until it could only stagger to its bed, and there it lay in happy digestion until the hour came for it to be crammed again. So did it grow up without knowledge or sensation or feeling of life, moving gradually, peacefully towards its predestined end--a delicious repast! What better end, what greater glory than to be a fat chicken? The carcasses of sheep that hang in butchers' shops are beginning to horrify the conscience of Europe. To cut a sheep's throat is an offensive act, but to clip out a bird's tongue with a long pair of scissors made for the purpose is genteel. It is true that it beats its wings for a few moments, but we must not allow ourselves to be disturbed by a mere flutter of feathers. Man is merciful, and saved it from life. It grew like an asparagus! And talking of asparagus, here are some from Argenteuil thick as umbrellas and so succulent! A word about the wine. French red wines in England always seem to taste like ink, but in France they taste of the sun. Melons are better in June--that one comes, no doubt, from Algeria. It is, however, the kind I like best, the rich, red melon that one eats only in France; a thing of the moment, unrememberable; but the chicken will never be forgotten; twenty years hence I shall be talking of a chicken, that in becoming a fat chicken acquired twenty years of immortality--which of us will acquire as many?
As we rise from table the doctor calls me into his studio: for he would give me an excellent cigar before he bids me good-bye, and having lighted it I follow my friend to the studio at the end of the garden, to that airy drawing-room which he has furnished in pale yellow and dark blue. On the walls are examples of the great modern masters--Manet and Monet. That view of a plain by Monet--is it not facile? It flows like a Japanese water-colour: the low horizon evaporating in the low light, the spire of the town visible in the haze. And look at the celebrated "Leçon de Danse" by Degas--that dancer descending the spiral staircase, only her legs are visible, the staircase cutting the picture in twain. On the right is the dancing class and the dancing master; something has gone wrong, and he holds out his hands in entreaty; a group of dancers are seated on chairs in the foreground, and their mothers are covering their shoulders with shawls--good mothers anxious for their daughters' welfare, for their advancement in life.
This picture betrays a mind curious, inquisitive and mordant; and that plaid shawl is as unexpected as an adjective of Flaubert's. A portrait by Manet hangs close by, large, permanent and mysterious as nature. Degas is more intellectual, but how little is intellect compared with a gift like Manet's! Yesterday I was in the Louvre, and when wearied with examination and debate--I had gone there on a special errand--I turned into the Salle Carrée for relaxation, and there wandered about, waiting to be attracted. Long ago the Mona Liza was my adventure, and I remember how Titian's "Entombment" enchanted me; another year I delighted in the smooth impartiality of a Terbourg interior; but this year Rembrandt's portrait of his wife held me at gaze. The face tells of her woman's life, her woman's weakness, and she seems conscious of the burden of her sex, and of the burden of her own special lot--she is Rembrandt's wife, a servant, a satellite, a watcher. The emotion that this picture awakens is an almost physical emotion. It gets at you like music, like a sudden breath of perfume. When I approach, her eyes fade into brown shadow, but when I withdraw they begin telling her story. The mouth is no more than a little shadow, but what wistful tenderness there is in it! and the colour of the face is white, faintly tinted with bitumen, and in the cheeks some rose madder comes through the yellow. She wears a fur jacket, but the fur was no trouble to Rembrandt; he did not strive for realism. It is fur, that is sufficient. Grey pearls hang in her ears, there is a brooch upon her breast, and a hand at the bottom of the picture passing out of the frame, and that hand reminds one, as the chin does, of the old story that God took a little clay and made man out of it. That chin and that hand and arm are moulded without display of knowledge, as Nature moulds. The picture seems as if it had been breathed upon the canvas. Did not a great poet once say that God breathed into Adam? and here it is even so.
The other pictures seem dry, insignificant; the Mona Liza, celebrated in literature, hanging a few feet away, seems factitious when compared with this portrait; I have heard that tedious smile excused on the ground that she is smiling at the nonsense she hears talked about her; that hesitating smile which held my youth in tether has come to seem but a grimace; and the pale mountains no more mysterious than a globe or map seen from a little distance. The Mona Liza is a sort of riddle, an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle or ballade with double burden, a sestina, that is what it is like, a sestina or chant royal. The Mona Liza, being literature in intention rather than painting, has drawn round her many poets. We must forgive her many mediocre verses for the sake of one incomparable prose passage. She has passed out of that mysterious misuse of oil paint, that arid glazing of terre verte, and has come into her possession of eternal life, into the immortality of Pater's prose. Degas is wilting already; year after year he will wither, until one day some great prose writer will arise and transfer his spirit into its proper medium--literature. The Mona Liza and the "Leçon de Danse" are intellectual pictures; they were painted with the brains rather than with the temperaments; and what is any intellect compared with a gift like Manet's! Leonardo made roads; Degas makes witticisms. Yesterday I heard one that delighted me far more than any road would, for I have given up bicycling. Somebody was saying he did not like Daumier, and Degas preserved silence for a long while. "If you were to show Raphael," he said at last, "a Daumier, he would admire it, he would take off his hat; but if you were to show him a Cabanel he would say with a sigh 'That is my fault!'"
My reverie is broken by the piano; my friend is playing, and it is pleasant to listen to music in this airy studio. But there are women I must see, women whom I see every time I go to Paris, and too much time has been spent in the studio--I must go.
But where shall I go? My thoughts strike through the little streets of Passy, measuring the distance between Passy and the Arc de Triomphe. For a moment I think that I might sit under the trees and watch the people returning from the races. Were she not dead I might stop at her little house in the fortifications among the lilac trees. There is her portrait by Manet on the wall, the very toque she used to wear. How wonderful the touch is; the beads--how well they are rendered! And while thinking of the extraordinary handicraft I remember his studio, and the tall fair woman like a tea-rose coming into it: Mary Laurant! The daughter of a peasant, and the mistress of all the great men--perhaps I should have said of all the distinguished men. I used to call her toute la lyre.
The last time I saw her we talked about Manet. She said that every year she took the first lilac to lay upon his grave. Is there one of her many lovers who brings flowers to her grave? What was so rememberable about her was her pleasure in life, and her desire to get all the pleasure, and her consciousness of her desire to enjoy every moment of her life. Evans, the great dentist, settled two thousand a year upon her, and how angry he was one night on meeting Manet on the staircase! In order to rid herself of her lover she invited him to dinner, intending to plead a sick headache after dinner.... She must go and lie down. But as soon as her guest was gone she took off the peignoir which hid her ball dress and signed to Manet, who was waiting at the street corner, with her handkerchief. But as they went downstairs together whom should they meet but the dentist qui a oublié ses carnets. And he was so disappointed at meeting his beautiful but deceitful mistress that he didn't visit her again for three or four days. His anger mattered very little to Mary. Someone else settled two thousand a year more upon her; and having four thousand a year or thereabouts, she dedicated herself to the love and conversation of those who wrote books and music and painted pictures.
We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination, at least the imagination stimulates the senses, acting as a sort of adjuvant. The barmaid falls in love with No. 1 because he wipes a glass better than No. 2, and Mary fell in love with Coppée on account of his sonnet "Le Lys," and she grew indifferent when he wrote poems like "La Nourrice" or "Le petit épicier de Montrouge qui cassait le sucre avec mélancolie." And it was at this time when their love story was at wane that I became a competitor. But one day Madame Albazi came to Manet's studio, a splendid creature in a carriage drawn by Russian horses from the Steppes, so she said; but who can tell whether a horse comes from the Steppes or from the horse-dealers? Nor does it matter when the lady is extraordinarily attractive, when she inspires the thought--a mistress for Attila! That is not exactly how Manet saw her: but she looks like that in his pastel. In it she holds a tortoiseshell fan widespread across her bosom, and it was on one of the sticks of the fan that he signed his name. A great painter always knows where to sign his pictures, and he never signs twice in the same place. The merit of these Russians is that they never leave one in doubt. She could not sit that day, she was going to the Bois, and asked me and a young man who happened to be in Manet's studio at the time to go there with her, and we went there drawn by the Russian horses, the young man and I wondering all the while which was going to be the countess's lover; we played hard for her; but that day I was wiser than he; I let him talk and recite poetry and jingle out all the aphorisms that he had been collecting for years, feeling his witticisms were in vain, for she was dark as a raven and I was as gold as a sunflower. It was at the corner of the Rue Pontière that we got rid of him. Some days afterwards she sat to Manet. The pastel now hangs in the room of a friend of mine; I bought it for him.
The picture of a woman one knows is never so agreeable a companion as the picture of a woman one has never seen. One's memory and the painter's vision are in conflict, and I like to think better of the long delicate nose, and the sparkling eyes, and a mouth like red fruit. The pastel once belonged to me; it used to hang in my rooms; for with that grace of mind which never left him, Manet said one day, "I always promised you a picture," and searching among the pastels that lined the wall he turned to me saying, "Now I think that this comes to you by right." When I left Paris hurriedly, and left my things to be sold, the countess came to the sale and bought her picture, and then she sold it years afterwards to a picture-dealer, tempted by the price that Manet's pictures were fetching. Hearing that it was for sale, I bought it, as I have said, for a friend. And now I have told the whole story, forgetting nothing except that it was years afterwards, when I had written "Les Confessions d'un jeune Anglais" in the Revue Indépendante, that Mary Laurant asked me--oh! she was very enterprising; she sent the editor of the Revue to me; an appointment was made. She was wonderful in the garden. She said the moment I arrived, "Now, my dear ----, you must go," and we walked about, I listening to her aphorisms. Mary was beautiful, but she liked one to love her for her wit, to admire her wit; and when I asked her why she did not leave Evans, the great dentist, she said, "That would be a base thing to do. I content myself by deceiving him," and then--this confidence seemed to have a particular significance--"I am not a woman," she said, "that is made love to in a garden." Her garden was a nook at the fortifications, hidden among lilac bushes. She wished to show me her house, and we talked for a long time in her boudoir. But I knew she was Mallarmé's mistress at the time, so nothing came of this caprice littéraire.
My thoughts run upon women, and why not? On what would you have them run? on copper mines? Woman is the legitimate subject of all men's thoughts. We pretend to be interested in other things. In the smoking-rooms I have listened to men talking about hunting, and I have said to myself, "Your interest is a pretence: of what woman are you thinking?" We forget women for a little while when we are thinking about art, but only for a while. The legitimate occupation of man's mind is woman; and listening to my friend who is playing music--music I do not care to hear, Brahms--I fall to thinking which of the women I have known in years past would interest me most to visit.
In the spring weather the walk from Passy to the Champs Elysées would be pleasant and not too far; I like to see the swards and the poplars and the villas, the tall iron railings, and the flower vases hidden in bouquets of trees. These things are Paris; the mind of the country, that mind which comes out of a long past, and which may be defined as a sort of ancestral beauty and energy is manifested everywhere in Paris; and a more beautiful day for seeing the tall, white houses and the villas and the trees and the swards can hardly be imagined. I should be interested in all these things, but my real interest would be in one little hillside, a line of houses, eight or nine, close by the Arc de Triomphe, the most ordinary in the avenue. She liked the ordinary, and I have often wondered what was the link of association? Was it no more than her blonde hair drawn up from the neck, her fragrant skin, or her perverse subtle senses? It was something more, but you must not ask me to explain further. I like to remember the rustle of a flowered dress she wore as she moved, drifting like a perfume, passing from her frivolous bedroom into the drawing-room. A room without taste, stiff and middle-class, notwithstanding the crowns placed over the tall portraits. I see a picture of two children; but she is the fairer, and in her pale eyes and thinly-curved lips there is a mixture of yearning and restlessness. As the child was, so is the woman, and Georgette has lived to paper one entire wall of her bedroom with trophies won in the battlefields of ardently danced cotillons. The other child is of a stricter nature, and even in the picture her slightly darkened ringlets are less wanton than her sister's. Her eyes are more pensive, and any one could have predicted children for one and cotillon favours for the other.
We often sat on her bedroom balcony reading, talking, or watching the sky growing pale beyond Mount Valerian, the shadow drifting and defining and shaping the hill. In hours like the present, dreaming in a studio, we remember those who deceived us, those who made us suffer, and in these hours faces, fragments of faces, rise out of a past, the line of a bent neck, the whiteness of a hand, and the eyes. I remember her eyes; one day in an orchard, in the lush and luxuriance of June, her husband was walking in front with a friend, and I was pleading. "Well," she said, raising her eyes, "you can kiss me now." But her husband was in front, and he was a thick-set man, and there was a stream, and I foresaw a struggle--and an unpleasant one: confess and be done with it!--I didn't dare to kiss her, and I don't think she ever forgave me that lack of courage. All this is twenty years ago, and is it not silly to spend the afternoon thinking of such rubbish? But it is of such rubbish that our lives are made. Shall I go to her now and see her in her decadence? Grey hair has not begun to appear yet in the blonde, it will never turn grey, but she was shrivelling a little the last time I saw her. And next year she will be older. At her age a year counts for double. Others are more worthy of a visit. If I do not go to her this year, shall I go next?
In imagination I go past her house, thinking of a man she used to talk about, "the man she left her 'ome for"; that is how the London street girl would word it. He had been the centre of a disgraceful scandal in his old age, a sordid but characteristic end for the Don Juan of the nineteenth century. Perhaps she loved the big, bearded man whose photograph she had once shown me. He killed himself for not having enough money to live as he wished to live. That was her explanation. I think there was some blackmail; she had to pay some money to the dead man's relations for letters. These sensual American women are like orchids, and who would hesitate between an orchid and a rose? It was twenty years ago since she turned round on me in the gloom of her brougham unexpectedly, and it was as if some sensual spirit had come out of a world of perfume and lace.
In imagination I have descended the Champs Elysées, and have crossed the Place de la Concorde, and the Seine is flowing past just as it flowed when the workmen were building Notre Dame, just as it will flow a thousand years hence. A thousand years hence men will stand watching its current, thinking of little blonde women, and the shudder they can send through the flesh; they can, but not twenty years afterwards. The Reverend Donne has it that certain ghosts do not raise the hair but the flesh; mine do no more than to set me thinking that rivers were not created to bear ships to the sea, but to set our memories flowing. Full many a time have I crossed the Pont Neuf on my way to see another woman--an American! The time comes when desire wilts and dies, but the sexual interest never dies, and we take pleasure in thinking in middle life of those we enjoyed in youth. She, of whom I am thinking, lives far away in the Latin Quarter, in an ill-paven street. How it used to throw my carriage from side to side! I have been there so often that I know all the shops, and where the shops end, and there is a whitewashed wall opposite her house; the street bends there. The concierge is the same, a little thicker, a little heavier; she always used to have a baby in her arms, now there are no more babies; her children, I suppose, have grown up and have gone away. There used to be a darkness at the foot of the stairs, and I used to slip on those stairs, so great was my haste; the very tinkle of the bell I remember, and the trepidation with which I waited.
Her rooms looked as if they had never been sat in; even the studio was formal, and the richly-bound volumes on the tables looked as if they had never been opened. She only kept one servant, a little, redheaded girl, and seeing this girl back again after an absence of many years, I spoke to Lizzie of the old days. Lizzie told me her servant's story. She had gone away to be married, and after ten years of misfortune she had returned to her old mistress, this demure, discreet and sly New Englander, who concealed a fierce sensuality under a homely appearance. Lizzie must have had many lovers, but I knew nothing of her except her sensuality, for she had to let me into that secret.
She was a religious woman, a devout Protestant, and thinking of her my thoughts are carried across the sea, and I am in the National Gallery looking at Van Eyke's picture, studying the grave sensuality of the man's face--he speaks with uplifted hand like one in a pulpit, and the gesture and expression tell us as plainly as if we heard him that he is admonishing his wife (he is given to admonition), informing her that her condition--her new pregnancy--is an act of the Divine Will. She listens, but how curiously! with a sort of partial comprehension afloat upon her face, more of the guinea-pig than of the rabbit type. The twain are sharply differentiated, and one of the objects of the painter seems to have been to show us how far one human being may be removed from another. The husband is painfully clear to himself, the wife is happily unconscious of herself. Now everything in the picture suggests order; the man's face tells a mind the same from day to day, from year to year, the same passions, the same prayers; his apparel, the wide-brimmed hat, the cloak falling in long straight folds, the peaked shoon, are an habitual part of him. We see little of the room, but every one remembers the chandelier hanging from the ceiling reflected in the mirror opposite. These reflections have lasted for three hundred years; they are the same to-day as the day they were painted, and so is the man; he lives again, he is a type that Nature never wearies of reproducing, for I suppose he is essential to life. This sober Flemish interior expresses my mistress's character almost as well as her own apartment used to do. I always experienced a chill, a sense of formality, when the door was opened, and while I stood waiting for her in the prim drawing-room. Every chair was in its appointed place, large, gilt-edged, illustrated books lay upon the tables.... There was not much light in her rooms; heavy curtains clung about the windows, and tapestries covered the walls. In the passage there were oak chests, and you can imagine, reader, this woman waiting for me by an oak table, a little ashamed of her thoughts, but unable to overcome them. Once I heard her playing the piano, and it struck me as an affectation. As I let my thoughts run back things forgotten emerge; here comes one of her gowns! a dark-green gown, the very same olive green as the man's cloak. She wore her hair short like a boy's, and though it ran all over her head in little curls, it did not detract at all from the New England type, the woman in whose speech Biblical phraseology still lingers. Lizzie was a miraculous survival of the Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower and settled in New England. Paris had not changed her. She was le grave Puritan du tableau. The reader will notice that I write le grave Puritan, for of his submissive, childlike wife there was nothing in Lizzie except her sex. As her instinct was in conflict with her ideals, her manner was studied, and she affected a certain cheerfulness which she dared not allow to subside. She never relinquished her soul, never fell into confidence, so in a sense we always remained strangers, for it is when lovers tell their illusions and lonelinesses that they know each other, the fiercest spasm tells us little, and it is forgotten, whereas the moment when a woman sighs and breaks into a simple confidence is remembered years afterwards, and brings her before us though she be underground or a thousand miles away. These intimacies she had not, but there was something true and real in her, something which I cannot find words to express to-day; she was a clever woman, that was it, and that is why I pay her the homage of an annual visit. These courteous visits began twenty years ago; they are not always pleasant, yet I endure them. Our conversation is often laboured, there are awkward and painful pauses, and during these pauses we sit looking at each other, thinking no doubt of the changes that time has wrought. One of her chief charms was her figure--one of the prettiest I have ever seen--and she still retains a good deal of its grace. But she shows her age in her hands; they have thickened at the joints, and they were such beautiful hands. Last year she spoke of herself as an old woman, and the remark seemed to me disgraceful and useless, for no man cares to hear a woman whom he has loved call herself old; why call attention to one's age, especially when one does not look it? and last year she looked astonishingly young for fifty-five; that was her age, she said. She asked me my age; the question was unpleasant, and before I was aware of it I had told her a lie, and I hate those who force me to tell lies. The interview grew painful, and to bring it to a close she asked me if I would care to see her husband.
We found the old man alone in his studio, looking at an engraving under the light of the lamp, much more like a picture than any of his paintings. She asked him if he remembered me, and he got up muttering something, and to help him I mentioned that I had been one of his pupils. The dear old man said of course he remembered, and that he would like to show me his pictures, but Lizzie said--I suppose it was nervousness that made her say it, but it was a strangely tactless remark--"I don't think, dear, that Mr. ---- cares for your pictures." However celebrated one may be, it is always mortifying to hear that some one, however humble the person may be, does not care for one's art. But I saved the situation, and I think my remarks were judicious and witty. It is not always that one thinks of the right words at the right moment, but it would be hard to improve on the admonition that she did me a wrong, that, like every one who liked art, I had changed my opinion many times, but after many wanderings had come back to the truth, and in order to deceive the old man I spoke of Ingres. I had never failed in that love, and how could I love Ingres without loving him? The contrary was the truth, but the old man's answer was very sweet. Forgetful of his own high position, he answered, "We may both like Ingres, but it is not probable that we like the same Ingres." I said I did not know any Ingres I did not admire, and asked him which he admired, and we had a pleasant conversation about the Apotheosis of Homer, and the pictures in the Musée de Montauban. Then the old man said, "I must show Mr. ---- my pictures." No doubt he had been thinking of them all through the conversation about the Musée de Montauban. "I must show you my Virgin," and he explained that the face of the Infant Jesus was not yet finished.
It was wonderful to see this old man, who must have been nearly eighty, taking the same interest in his pictures as he took fifty years ago. Some stupid reader will think, perchance, that it mattered that I had once loved his wife. But how could such a thing matter? Think for a moment, dear reader, for all readers are dear, even the stupidest, and you will see that you are still entangled in conventions and prejudices. Perhaps, dear reader, you think she and I should have dropped on our knees and confessed. Had we done so, he would have thought us two rude people, and nothing more.
What will happen to her when he dies? Will she return to Boston? Shall I ever see her again? Last year I vowed that I would not, and I think it would please her as well if I stayed away.... And she is right, for so long as I am not by her she is with me. But in the same room, amid the familiar furniture, we are divided by the insuperable past, and to retain her I must send her away. The idea is an amusing one; I think I have read it somewhere, it seems to me like something I have read. Did I ever read of a man who sent his mistress away so that his possession might be more complete? Whether I did or didn't matters little, the idea is true to me to-day--in order to possess her I must never see her again. A pretty adventure it would be, nevertheless, to spend a week paying visits to those whom I loved about that time; and I can imagine a sort of Beau Brummel of the emotions going every year to Paris to spend a day with each of his mistresses.
There were others about that time. There was Madame ----. The name is in itself beautiful, characteristically French, and it takes me back to the middle centuries, to the middle of France. I always imagined that tall woman, who thought so quickly and spoke so sincerely, dealing out her soul rapidly, as one might cards, must have been born near Tours. She was so French that she must have come from the very heart of France; she was French as the wine of France; as Balzac, who also came from Tours; and her voice, and her thoughts, and her words transported one; by her side one was really in France; and, as her lover, one lived through every circumstance of a French love story. She lived in what is called in Paris an hotel; it had its own concierge, and it was nice to hear the man say, "Oui, monsieur, Madame la Marquise est chez elle," to walk across a courtyard and wait in a boudoir stretched with blue silk, to sit under a Louis XVI. rock crystal chandelier. She said one day, "I'm afraid you're thinking of me a great deal," and she leaned her hands on the back of the chair, making it easy for me to take them. She said her hands had not done any kitchen work for five hundred years, and at the time that seemed a very witty thing to say. The drawing-room opened onto a conservatory twenty feet high; it nearly filled the garden, and the marquise used to receive her visitors there. I do not remember who was the marquise's lover when the last fête was given, nor what play was acted; only that the ordinary guests lingered over their light refreshments, scenting the supper, and that to get rid of them we had to bid the marquise ostentatiously goodnight. Creeping round by the back of the house, we gained the bedrooms by the servants' staircase, and hid there until the ordinary guests in decency could delay no longer. As soon as the last one was gone the stage was removed, and the supper tables were laid out. Shall I ever forget the moment when the glass roof of the conservatory began to turn blue, and the shrilling of awakening sparrows! How haggard we all were, but we remained till eight in the morning. That fête was paid for with the last remnant of the poor marquise's fortune. Afterwards she was very poor, and Suzanne, her daughter, went on the stage and discovered a certain talent for acting which has been her fortune to this day. I will go to the Vaudeville to-night to see her; we might arrange to go together to see her mother's grave. To visit the grave, and to strew azaleas upon it, would be a pretty piece of sentimental mockery. But for my adventure there should be seven visits; Madame ---- would make a fourth; I hear that she is losing her sight, and lives in a chateau about fifty miles from Paris, a chateau built in the time of Louis XIII., with high-pitched roofs and many shutters, and formal gardens with balustrades and fish-ponds, yes et des charmilles--charmilles--what is that in English?--avenues of clipped limes. To walk in an avenue of clipped limes with a woman who is nearly blind, and talk to her of the past, would be indeed an adventure far "beyond the range of formal man's emotion."
Madame ---- interrupted our love story. She would be another--that would be five--and I shall think of two more during dinner. But now I must be moving on; the day has ended; Paris is defining itself upon a straw-coloured sky. I must go, the day is done; and hearing the last notes trickle out--somebody has been playing the prelude to "Tristan"--I say: "Another pretty day passed, a day of meditation on art and women--and what else is there to meditate about? To-morrow will happily be the same as to-day, and to-morrow I shall again meditate on art and women, and the day after I shall be occupied with what I once heard dear old M'Cormac, Bishop of Galway, describe in his sermon as 'the degrading passion of "loave."'"
[CHAPTER VII]
NINON'S TABLE D'HÔTE
The day dies in sultry languor. A warm night breathes upon the town, and in the exhaustion of light and hush of sound, life strikes sharply on the ear and brain.
It was early in the evening when I returned home, and, sitting in the window, I read till surprised by the dusk; and when my eyes could no longer follow the printed page, holding the book between finger and thumb, my face resting on the other hand, I looked out on the garden, allowing my heart to fill with dreams. The book that had interested me dealt with the complex technique of the art of the Low Countries--a book written by a painter. It has awakened in me memories of all kinds, heartrending struggles, youthful passion, bitter disappointments; it has called into mind a multitude of thoughts and things, and, wearied with admiring many pictures and arguing with myself, I am now glad to exchange my book for the gentle hallucinations of the twilight.
I see a line of leafage drawn across the Thames, but the line dips, revealing a slip of grey water with no gleam upon it. Warehouses and a factory chimney rise ghostly and grey, and so cold is that grey tint that it might be obtained with black and white; hardly is the warmth of umber needed. Behind the warehouses and the factory chimney the sky is murky and motionless, but higher up it is creamy white, and there is some cloud movement. Four lamps, two on either side of the factory chimney, look across the river; one constantly goes out--always the same lamp--and a moment after it springs into its place again. Across my window a beautiful branch waves like a feather fan. It is the only part of the picture worked out in detail. I watch its soft and almost imperceptible swaying, and am tempted to count the leaves. Below it, and a little beyond it, between it and the river, night gathers in the gardens; and there, amid serious greens, passes the black stain of a man's coat, and, in a line with the coat, in the beautifully swaying branch, a belated sparrow is hopping from twig to twig, awakening his mates in search for a satisfactory resting-place. In the sharp towers of Temple Gardens the pigeons have gone to sleep. I can see the cots under the conical caps of slate.
The gross, jaded, uncouth present has slipped from me as a garment might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures from the past come and go without an effort of will; many are habitual memories, but the one before me rises for the first time--for fifteen years it has lain submerged, and now like a water weed or flower it rises--the Countess Ninon de Calvador's boudoir! Her boudoir or her drawing-room, be that as it may, the room into which I was ushered many years ago when I went to see her. I was then a young man, very thin, with sloping shoulders, and that pale gold hair that Manet used to like to paint. I had come with a great bouquet for Ninon, for it was son jour de fête, and was surprised and somewhat disappointed to meet a large brunette with many creases in her neck, a loose and unstayed bosom; one could hardly imagine Ninon dressed otherwise than in a peignoir--a blue peignoir seemed inevitable. She was sitting by a dark, broad-shouldered young man when I came in; they were sitting close together; he rose out of a corner and showed me an impressionistic picture of a railway station. He was one of the many young men who at that time thought the substitution of dots of pink and yellow for the grey and slate and square brushwork of Bastien Lepage was the certain way to paint well. I learned afterwards, during the course of the evening, that he was looked at askance, for even in Montmartre it was regarded as a dishonour to allow the lady with whom you lived to pay for your dinner. Villiers de L'Isle Adam, who had once been Ninon's lover, answered the reproaches levelled against him for having accepted too largely of her hospitality with, "Que de bruit pour quelques côtelettes!" and his transgressions were forgiven him for the sake of the mot which seemed to summarise the moral endeavour and difficulties of the entire quarter. When Villiers was her lover Villiers was middle-aged, and Ninon was a young woman; but when I knew her she was interested in the young generation, yet she kept friends with all her old lovers, never denying them her board. How funny was the impressionist's indignation against Villiers! He charged him with having squandered a great part of Ninon's fortune, but Villiers's answer to the young man was, "He talks like the concierge in my story of 'Les Demoiselles de Bienfillatre.'"
Poor Villiers was not much to blame; it was part of Ninon's temperament to waste her money, and the canvases round the room testified that she spent a great deal on modern art. She certainly had been a rich woman; rumour credited her with spending fifty thousand francs a year, and in her case rumour said no more than the truth, for it would require that at least to live as she lived, keeping open house to all the literature, music, painting, and sculpture done in Montmartre. At first sight her hospitality seems unreasonable, but when one thinks one sees that it conforms to the rules of all hospitality. There must be a principle of selection, and were the ratés she entertained less amusing than the people one meets in Grosvenor Square or the Champs Elysées? Any friend could introduce another, that is common practice, but at Ninon's there was a restriction which I never met elsewhere--no friend could bring another unless the newcomer was a raté--in other words, unless he had written music or verse, or painted or carved, in a way that did not appeal to the taste of the ordinary public; inability to reach the taste of the general public was the criterion that obtained there.
The windows of Ninon's boudoir opened upon the garden, and on my expressing surprise at its size and at the large trees that grew there, she gave me permission to admire and investigate; and I walked about the pond, interested in the numerous ducks, in the cats, in the companies of macaws and cockatoos that climbed down from their perches and strutted across the swards. I came upon a badger and her brood, and at my approach they disappeared into an enormous excavation, and behind the summer-house I happened upon a bear asleep and retreated hurriedly. But on going towards the house I heard a well-known voice. "That is Augusta Holmes singing her opera," I said; "she sings all the different parts--soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass." At this time we were all talking about her, and I stood by the window listening until suddenly a well-known smell interrupted her. It was Ninon's cat that had misconducted herself. A window was thrown open, but the ventilation did not prove sufficient. Augusta and her admirers had to leave the piano, and they came from the house glad to breathe the evening air. How dear to me are flowered gowns and evening skies and women with scarfs about their shoulders. Ah! what a beautiful evening it was! And how well do I remember the poet comparing the darkening sky to a blue veil with the moon like a gold beetle upon it. One of the women had brought a guitar with her, and again Augusta's voice streamed up through the stillness, till, compelled by the beauty of the singing, we drew nearer; as the composer sang her songs attitudes grew more abandoned, and hands fell pensively. Among the half-seen faces I caught sight of a woman of exceeding fairness; her hair had only a faint tinge of gold in it; and Ninon remembered that she was a cousin of hers, one whom she had not seen for many years. How Clare had discovered her in the Rue la Moine she could not tell. It was whispered that she was the wife of a rich commerçant at Tours. This added to the mystery, and later in the evening the lady told me she had never been in artistic society before, and begged me to point out to her the celebrities present, and to tell her why they were celebrated.
"Who is he--that one slouching towards the pond, that one wearing grey trousers and a black jacket?--oh!"
My companion's exclamation was caused by a new sight of Verlaine; at that moment he had lifted off his hat (the evening was still warm), and the great bald skull, hanging like a cliff over the shaggy eyebrows, shaggy as furze bushes, frightened her. The poet continued his walk round the pond, and, turning suddenly towards us, he stopped to speak to me. I was but a pretext; he clearly wished to speak to my companion. But how strangely did he suit his conversation to her, yet how characteristic of his genius were the words I heard as I turned away, thinking to leave them together--"If I were in love with a young girl or with a young man?" My companion ran forward quickly and seized my arm. "You must not leave me with him," she said. On account of his genius Verlaine was a little slow to see things outside of himself--all that was within him was clear, all without him obscure; so we had some difficulty in getting rid of him, and as soon as he was out of hearing my companion inquired eagerly who he was, and I was astonished at the perception she showed. "Is he a priest? I mean, was he ever a priest?" "A sort of cross between a thieves' kitchen and a presbytery. He is the poet Verlaine. The singer of the sweetest verses in the French language--a sort of ambling song like a robin's. You have heard the robin singing on a coral hedge in autumn-tide; the robin confesses his little soul from the topmost twig; his song is but a tracery of his soul, and so is Verlaine's. His gift is a vision of his own soul, and he makes a tracery as you might of a drawing with a lead pencil, never troubling himself to inquire if what he traces is good or ill. He knows that society regards him as an outcast, but society's point of view is not the only one, that he knows too, and also, though he be a lecher, a crapulous and bestial fellow at times, at other times he is a poet, a visionary, the only poet that Catholicism has produced since Dante. Huysmans, the apologist of Gilles de Rais,--there he is over yonder, talking to the impressionist painter, that small thin man with hair growing thickly, low down on his forehead--Huysmans somewhere in his description of the trial of the fifteenth-century monster, the prototype, so it is said, of the nursery tale of Blue Beard, speaks of the white soul of the Middle Ages; he must have had Verlaine on his mind, for Verlaine has spoken of himself as a mediaeval Catholic, that is to say a Catholic in whom sinning and repentance alternates regularly as night and day. Verlaine has not cut the throats of so many little boys as Gilles de Rais, but Gilles de Rais always declared himself to be a good Catholic. Verlaine abandons himself to the Church as a child to a fairy tale; he does trouble to argue whether the Conception of the Virgin was Immaculate; the mediaeval sculptors have represented her attired very prettily in cloaks with long folds, they have put graceful crowns upon her head, and Verlaine likes these things; they inspire him to write, he feels that belief in the Church is part of himself, and his poetical genius is to tell his own story; he is one of the great soul-tellers. From a literary point of view there is a good deal to be said in favour of faith when it is not joined with practice; acceptation of dogma shields one from controversy; it allows Verlaine to concentrate himself entirely upon things; it weans him away from ideas--the curse of modern literature--and makes him a sort of divine vagrant living his life in the tavern and in the hospital. It is only those who have freed themselves from all prejudice that get close to life, who get the real taste of life--the aroma as from a wine that has been many years in bottle. And Verlaine is aware that this is so. Sometimes he thinks he might have written a little more poetry, and he sighs, but he quickly recovers. 'After all, I have written a good many volumes.' 'And what would art be without life, without love?' He has a verse on that subject; I wish I could remember it for you. His verse is always so winsome, so delicate, slender as the birch tree, elegiac like it; a birch bending over a lake's edge reminds me of Verlaine. He is a lake poet, but the lake is in a suburb not far from a casino. What makes me speak about the lake is that for a long time I thought these verses,
Ton âme est un lac d'amour
Dont mes pensêes sont les cygnes.
Vois comme ils font le tour....
were Verlaine's, but they are much less original; their beauty, for they are beautiful, is conventional; numbers of poets might have written them, whereas nobody but Verlaine could have written any of his, really his own, poetry. His desires go sometimes as high as the crucifix; very often they are in the gutter, hardly poetry at all, having hardly any beauty except that of truth, and of course the beauty of a versification that haunts in his ear, for he hears a song in French verse that no French poet has ever heard before, and a song so fluent, ranging from the ecstasy of the nightingale to the robin's little homily.
Oui, c'était par un soir joyeux de cabaret,
Un de ces soirs plutôt trop chauds où l'on dirait
Que le gaz du plafond conspire à notre perte
Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naïve et verte.
On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on
Entendait des soupirs voisins d'accordéon
Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence.
Quand la porte s'ouvrit de la salle de danse
Vomissant tout un flot dont toi, vers où j'étais,
Et de ta voix fait que soudain je me tais,
S'il te plaît de me donner un ordre péremptoire.
Tu t'écrias 'Dieu, qu'il fait chaud! Patron, à boire!'
"She was from Picardy; and he tells of her horrible accent, and in elegy number five he continues the confession, telling how his well beloved used to get drunk.
"Tu fis le saut de ... Seine et, depuis morte-vive,
Tu gardes le vertige et le goût du néant."
"But how can a man confess such things?" my companion asked me, and we stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape, cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with hair, I said:
"Verlaine has an extraordinary power of expression, and to be ashamed of nothing; but to be ashamed is his genius, just as it was Manet's. It is to his shamelessness that we owe his most beautiful poems, all written in garrets, in taverns, in hospitals--yes, and in prison."
"In prison! But he didn't steal, did he?" and the commerçant's wife looked at me with a frightened air, and I think her hand went towards her pocket.
"No, no; a mere love story, a dispute with Rambaud in some haunt of vice, a knife flashed, Rambaud was stabbed, and Verlaine spent three years in prison. As for Rambaud, it was said that he repented and renounced love, entered a monastery, and was digging the soil somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea for the grace of God. But these hopes proved illusory; only Verlaine knows where he is, and he will not tell. The last certain news we had of him was that he had joined a caravan of Arabs, and had wandered somewhere into the desert with these wanderers, preferring savagery to civilization. Verlaine preferred civilized savagery, and so he remained in Paris; and so he drags on, living in thieves' quarters, getting drunk, writing beautiful poems in the hospitals, coming out of hospitals and falling in love with drabs."
Dans ces femmes d'ailleurs je n'ai pas trouvé l'ange
Qu'il eût fallu pour remplacer ce diable, toi!
L'une, fille du Nord, native d'un Crotoy,
Etait rousse, mal grasse et de prestance molle;
Elle ne m'adressa guère qu'une parole
Et c'était d'un petit cadeau qu'il s'agissait,
En revanche, dans son accent d'ail et de poivre,
Une troisième, recemment chanteuse au Havre,
Affectait de dandinement des matelots
Et m'... enguelait comme un gabier tancant les flots,
Mais portrait beau vraiment, sacrédié, quel dommage
La quatrième était sage comme une image,
Châtain clair, peu de gorge et priait Dieu parfois:
Le diantre soit de ses sacrés signes de croix!
Les seize autres, autant du moins que ma mémoire
Surnage en ce vortex, contaient toutes l'histoire
Connue, un amant chic, puis des vieux, puis "l'îlot"
Tantôt bien, tantôt moins, le clair café falot
Les terasses l'été, l'hiver les brasseries
Et par degrés l'humble trottoir en théories
En attendant les bons messieurs compatissants
Capables d'un louis et pas trop repoussants
Qutorum ego parva pars erim, me disais-je.
Mais toutes, comme la première du cortège,
Dès avant la bougie éteinte et le rideau
Tiré, n'oubliaient pas le "mon petit cadeau."
"In the verses I have just quoted, you remember, he says that the fourth was chaste as an image, her hair was pale brown, she had scarcely any bosom, and prayed to God sometimes. He always hated piety when it interfered with his pleasure, and in the next verse he says, 'The devil take those sacred signs of the Cross!'"
"But do you know any of these women?"
"Oh, yes; we all know the terrible Sara. She beats him."
The commerçante's wife asked if she were here.
"He wanted to bring her here, in fact he did bring her once, only she was so drunk that she could not get beyond the threshold, and Ninon's lover, the painter you saw painting the steam engines, was charged to explain to the poet that Sara's intemperance rendered her impossible in respectable society. 'I know Sara has her faults,' he murmured in reply to all argument, and it was impossible to make him see that others did not see Sara with his eyes. 'I know she has her faults,' he repeated, 'and so have others. We all have our faults.' And it was a long time before he could be induced to come back: hunger has brought him."
"And who is that hollow-chested man? How pathetic he looks with his goat-like beard."
"That is the celebrated Cabaner. He will tell you, if you speak to him, that his father was a man like Napoleon, only more so. He is the author of many aphorisms; 'that three military bands would be necessary to give the impression of silence in music' is one. He comes every night to the Nouvelle Athènes, and is a sort of rallying-point; he will tell you that his ballad of 'The Salt Herring' is written in a way that perhaps Wagner would not, but which Liszt certainly would understand."
"Is his music ever played? Does it sell? How does he live? Not by his music, I suppose?"
"Yes, by his music, by playing waltzes and polkas in the Avenue de la Motte Piquet. His earnings are five francs a day, and for thirty-five francs a month he has a room where many of the disinherited ones of art, many of those you see here, sleep. His room is furnished--ah, you should see it! If Cabaner wants a chest of drawers he buys a fountain, and he broke off the head of the Vénus de Milo, saying that now she no longer reminded him of the people he met in the streets; he could henceforth admire her without being troubled by any sordid recollection. I could talk to you for hours about his unselfishness, his love of art, his strange music, and his stranger poems, for his music accompanies his own verses."
"Is he too clever for the public, or not clever enough?"
"Now you're asking me the question we've been asking ourselves for the last ten years.... The man fumbling at his shirt collar over yonder is the celebrated Villiers de L'Isle Adam."
And I remember how it pleased me to tell this simple-minded woman all I knew about Villiers.
"He has no talent whatever, only genius, and that is why he is a raté," I said.
But the woman was not so simple as I had imagined, and one or two questions she put to me led me to tell her that Villiers's genius only appeared in streaks, like gold in quartz.
"The comparison is an old one, but there is no better one to explain Villiers, for when he is not inspired his writing is very like quartz."
"His great name----"
"His name is part of his genius. He chose it, and it has influenced his writings. Have I not heard him say, 'Car je porte en moi les richesses stériles d'un grand nombre de rois oubliés.'"
"But is he a legitimate descendant?"
"Legitimate in the sense that he desired the name more than any of those who ever bore it legitimately."
At that moment Villiers passed by me, and I introduced him to her, and very soon he began to tell us that his Eve had just been published, and the success of it was great.
"On m'a dit hier de passer à la caisse ... l'edition était épuisée, vous voyez--il paraît, la fortune est venue ... même à moi."
But Villiers was often tiresomely talkative about trifles, and as soon as I got the chance I asked him if he were going to tell us one of his stories, reminding him of one I had heard he had been telling lately in the brasseries about a man in quest of a quiet village where he could get rest, a tired composer, something of that kind. Had he written it? No, he had not written it yet, but now that he knew I liked it he would get up earlier to-morrow. Some one took him away from us, and I had to tell my companion the story.
"Better," I said, "he should never write it, for half of it exists in his voice, and in his gestures, and every year he gets less and less of himself onto the paper. One has to hear him tell his stories in the café--how well he tells them! You must hear him tell how a man, recovering from a long illness, is advised by his doctor to seek rest in the country, and how, seeing the name of a village on the map that touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and gradually he believes them all to be robbers and assassins.
"He would escape but he dare not, for he is being followed, so turning on his pursuers he asks them if they can direct him to a lodging. The point of Villiers's story is how a suspicion begins in the man's mind, how it grows like a cancer, and very soon the villagers are convinced he is an anarchist, and that his trunks are full of material for the manufacture of bombs. And this is why they dare not touch them. So they follow him to the farmhouse whither they have directed him, and tell their fears to the farmer and his wife. Villiers can improvise the consultations in the kitchen; at midnight in the café, but when morning comes he cannot write, his brain is empty. You must come some night to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear him; leaning across the table he will tell the terror of the hinds and farmer, how they are sure the house is going to be blown up. The sound of their feet on the staircase inspires terror in the wretched convalescent. He sits up in bed, listening, great drops of sweat collected on his forehead. He dare not get out of bed, but he must; and Villiers can suggest the sound of feet on the creaking stairs--yes, and the madness of the man piling furniture against the door, and the agony of those outside hearing the noise within. When they break into the room they find a dead man; for terror has killed him. You must come to the Nouvelle Athènes to hear Villiers tell his story. I'll meet you there to-morrow night.... Will you dine with me? The dinner there is not really too bad; perhaps you'll be able to bear with it."
The commerçant's wife hesitated. She promised to come, and she came; but she did not prove an interesting mistress; why, I cannot remember, and I am glad to put her out of my mind, for I want to think of the strange poet whom we heard reciting verses, under the aspen, in which one of the apes had taken refuge. Through the dimness of the years I can see his fair hair floating about his shoulders, his blue eyes and his thin nose. Didn't somebody once describe him as a sort of sensual Christ? He, too, was after the commerçant's wife. And didn't he select her as the subject of his licentious verses--reassure yourself, reader, licentious merely from the point of view of prosody.
"Ta nuque est de santal sur les vifs frissons d'or.
Mais c'est une autre, que j'adore."
The commerçant's wife, forgetful of me, charmed by the poet, by the excitement of hearing herself made a subject of a poem, drew nearer. Strange, is it not, that I should remember a few words here and there?
"Il m'aime, il m'aime pas, et selon l'antique rite
Elle effleurait la Marguerite."
The women still sit, circlewise, as if enchanted, the night inspires him, and he improvises trifle after trifle. One remembers fragments. Some time afterwards Cabaner was singing the song of "The Salt Herring."
"He came along holding in his hands dirty, dirty, dirty,
A big nail pointed, pointed, pointed,
And a hammer heavy, heavy, heavy.
He placed the ladder high, high, high,
Against the wall white, white, white.
He went up the ladder high, high, high,
Placed the nail pointed, pointed, pointed
Against the wall--toc! toc! toc!
He tied to the nail a string long, long, long,
And at the end of it a salt herring, dry, dry, dry,
And letting fall the hammer heavy, heavy, heavy,
He got down from the ladder high, high, high,
And went away, away, away.
Since then at the end of the string long, long, long,
A salt herring dry, dry, dry,
Has been swinging slowly, slowly, slowly.
Now I have composed this story simple, simple, simple,
To make all serious men mad, mad, mad,
And to amuse children, little, little, little."
This was the libretto on which Cabaner wrote music "that Wagner would not understand, but which Liszt certainly would." Dear, dear Cabaner, how well I can see thee with thy goat-like beard, and the ape in the tree interrupting thee; he was not like Liszt, he chattered all night. Poor ape, he broke his chain earlier in the evening, and it was found impossible to persuade him to come down. The brute seemed somehow determined that we should not hear Cabaner. Soon after the cocks began answering each other, though it was but midnight; and so loud was their shrilling that I awoke, surprised to find myself sitting at my window in King's Bench Walk. A moment ago I was in Madame Ninon de Calvador's garden, and every whit as much as I am now in King's Bench Walk. Madame Ninon de Calvador--what has become of her?
Is the rest of her story unknown? As I sit looking into the darkness, a memory suddenly springs upon me. Villiers, who came in when dinner was half over, brought a young man with him. Fumbling at his shirt collar, apologising for being late, assuring us that he had dined, he introduced his friend to the company as a young man of genius, of extraordinary genius. Don't I remember Villiers's nervous, hysterical voice! Don't I remember the journalist's voice when he asked Ninon's lover if he sold his pictures, creating at once a bad impression? By some accident a plate was given to him, out of which one of the cats had been fed. The plate might have been given to any one else: Villiers would not have minded, and as for Cabaner, he never knew what he was eating; but it was given to the journalist. Now I remember the young man misconducted himself badly; he struck the table with his fist, and said, "Et bien, je casse tout." Yes, it was he who wrote the article entitled "Ninon's Table d'hôte" in the Gil Blas, and from it she learned for the first time how the world viewed her hospitality, how misinterpreted were her efforts to benefit the arts and the artists. Somebody told me this story: who I cannot tell; it is all so long ago. But it seems to me that I remember hearing that it was this article that killed her.
The passing of things is always a moving subject for meditation, and it is strange how accident will bring back a scene, explicit in every detail--a tree taking shape upon the dawning sky, the hairy ugliness of the ape in its branches, and along the grey grass a waddling squad of the ducks betaking themselves to the pond, a poet talking to a commerçant's wife, Madame de Calvador leaning on a lover's arm.
Had I a palette I could match the blue of the peignoir with the faint grey sky. I could make a picture out of that dusky suburb. Had I a pen I could write verses about these people of old time, but the picture would be a shrivelled thing compared with the dream, and the verses would limp. The moment I sought a pen the pleasure of the meditation, which is still with me, which still endures, would vanish. Better to sit by my window and enjoy what remains of the mood and the memory. The mood has nearly passed, the desire of action is approaching.... I would give much for another memory, but memory may not be beckoned, and my mind is dark now, dark as that garden; the swaying, fan-like bough by my window is nearly one mass of green; the last sparrow has fallen asleep. I hear nothing.... I hear a horse trotting in the Strand.
[CHAPTER VIII]
THE LOVERS OF ORELAY
I had come a thousand miles--rather more, nearly fifteen hundred--in the hope of picking up the thread of a love story that had got entangled some years before and had been broken off abruptly. A strange misadventure our love story had been; for Doris had given a great deal of herself while denying me much, so much that at last, in despair, I fled from a one-sided love affair; too one-sided to be borne any longer, at least by me. And it was difficult to fly from her pretty, inveigling face, delightful and winsome as the faces one finds on the panels of the early German masters. One may look for her face and find it on an oak panel in the Frankfort Gallery, painted in pale tints, the cheeks faintly touched with carmine. In the background of these pictures there are all sorts of curious things; very often a gold bower with roses clambering up everywhere. Who was that master who painted cunning virgins in rose bowers? The master of Cologne, was it not? I have forgotten. No matter. Doris's hair was darker than the hair of those virgins, a rich gold hair, a mane of hair growing as luxuriously as the meadows in June. And the golden note was continued everywhere, in the eyebrows, in the pupils of the eyes, in the freckles along her little nose so firmly and beautifully modelled about the nostrils; never was there a more lovely or affectionate mouth, weak and beautiful as a flower; and the long hands were curved like lilies.
There is her portrait, dear reader, prettily and truthfully and faithfully painted by me, the portrait of a girl I left one afternoon in London more than seventeen years ago, and whom I had lost sight of, I feared for ever. Thought of her? Yes, I thought of her occasionally. Time went by, and I wondered if she were married. What her husband was like, and why I never wrote. It were surely unkind not to write.... Reader, you know those little regrets. Perhaps life would be all on the flat without regret. Regret is like a mountaintop from which we survey our dead life, a mountaintop on which we pause and ponder, and very often looking into the twilight we ask ourselves whether it would be well to send a letter or some token. Now we had agreed upon one which should be used in case of an estrangement--a few bars of Schumann's melody, "The Nut Bush," should be sent, and the one who received it should at once hurry to the side of the other and all difference should be healed. But this token was never sent by me, perhaps because I did not know how to scribble the musical phrase: pride perhaps kept her from sending it; in any case five years are a long while, and she seemed to have died out of my life altogether; but one day the sight of a woman who had known her, brought her before my eyes, and I asked if Doris married. The woman could not tell me; she had not seen her for many years; they, too, were estranged, and I went home saying to myself: "Doris must be married. What sort of a husband has she chosen? Is she happy? Has she a baby? Oh, shameful thought!"
Do you remember, dear reader, how Balzac, when he had come to the last page of "Massimilla Doni," declares that he dare not tell you the end of this adventure. One word, he says, will suffice for the worshippers of the ideal: "Massimilla Doni was expecting." Then in a passage that is pleasanter to think about than to read--for Balzac when he spoke about art was something of a sciolist, and I am not sure that the passage is altogether grammatical--he tells how the ideas of all the great artists, painters, and sculptors--the ideas they have wrought on panels and in stone--escaped from their niches and their frames--all these disembodied maidens gathered round Massimilla's bed and wept. It would be as disgraceful for Doris to be "expecting" as it was for Massimilla Doni, and I like to think of all the peris, the nymphs, the sylphs, the fairies of ancient legend, all her kinsfolk gathering about her bed, deploring her condition, regarding her as lost to them--were such a thing to happen I should certainly kneel there in spirit with them. And feeling just as Balzac did about Massimilla Doni, that it was a sacrilege that Doris should be "expecting" or even married, I wrote, omitting, however, to tell her why I had suddenly resolved to break silence; I sent her a little note, only a few words, that I was sorry not to have heard of her for so long a time; but though we had been estranged she had not been forgotten; a little commonplace note, relieved perhaps by a touch of wistfulness, of regret. And this note was sent by a messenger duly instructed to ask for an answer. The news the messenger brought back was somewhat disappointing. The lady was away, but the letter would be forwarded to her. "She is not married," I thought; "were she married her name would be sent to me.... Perhaps not." Other thoughts came into my mind, and I did not think of her again for the next two days, not till a long telegram was put into my hand. Doris! It had come from her. It had come more than a thousand miles, "regardless of expense." I said, "This telegram must have cost her ten or twelve shillings at the least." She was delighted to hear from me; she had been ill, but was better now, and the telegram concluded with the usual "Am writing." The letter that arrived, two days afterwards, was like herself, full of impulse and affection; but it contained one phrase which put black misgiving into my heart. In her description of her illness and her health, which was returning, and how she had come to be staying in this far-away Southern town, she alluded to its dulness, saying that if I came there virtue must be its own reward. "Stupid of her to speak to me of virtue," I muttered, "for she must know well enough that it was her partial virtue that had separated us and caused this long estrangement." And I sat pondering, trying to discover if she applied the phrase to herself or to the place where she was staying. How could it apply to the place? All places would be a paradise if----
At the close of a long December evening I wrote a letter, the answer to which would decide whether I should go to her, whether I should undertake the long journey. "The journey back will be detestable," I muttered, and taking up the pen again I wrote: "Your letter contains a phrase which fills me with dismay: you say, 'Virtue must be its own reward,' and this would seem that you are determined to be more aggressively Platonic than ever. Doris, this is ill news indeed; you would not have me consider it good news, would you?"
Other letters followed, but I doubt if I knew more of Doris's intentions when I got into the train than I did when I sat pondering by my fireside, trying to discover her meaning when she wrote that vile phrase, "Virtue must be its own reward." But somehow I seemed to have come to a decision, and that was the main thing. We act obeying a law deep down in our being, a law which in normal circumstances we are not aware of. I asked myself as I drove to the station, if it were possible that I was going to undertake a journey of more than a thousand miles in quest--of what? Doris's pretty face! It might be pretty no longer; yet she could not have changed much. She had said she was sure that in ten minutes we should be talking just as in old times. Even so, none but madmen travel a thousand miles in search of a pretty face. And it was the madman that is in us all that was propelling me, or was it the primitive man who crouches in some jungle of our being? Of one thing I was sure, that I was no longer a conventional citizen of the nineteenth century; I had gone back two or three thousand years, for all characteristic traits, everything whereby I knew myself, had disappeared! Yet I seemed to have met myself somewhere, in some book or poem or opera.... I could not remember at first, but after some time I began to perceive a shadowy similarity between myself and--dare I mention the names?--the heroes of ancient legend--Menelaus or Jason--which? Both had gone a thousand miles on Beauty's quest. The colour of Helen's hair isn't mentioned in either the "Iliad" or the "Odyssey." Jason's quest was a golden fleece, and so was mine. And it was the primitive hero that I had discovered in myself that helped me to face the idea of the journey, for there is nothing that wearies me so much as a long journey in the train.
When I was twenty I started with the intention of long travel, but the train journey from Calais to Paris wearied me so much that I had rested in Paris for eight years, to return home then on account of some financial embarrassments. During those eight years I thought often of Italy and the south of France, but the train journey of sixteen or seventeen or eighteen hours to the Italian frontier always seemed so much like what purgatory must be, that the heaven of Italy on the other side never tempted me sufficiently to undertake it. A companion would be of no use; one cannot talk for fifteen or sixteen hours, and while debating with myself whether I should go to Plessy, I often glanced down the long perspective of hours. Everything, pleasure and pain alike, are greater in imagination than in reality--there is always a reaction, and having anticipated more than mortal weariness, I was surprised to find that the first two hours in the train passed very pleasantly. It seemed that I had only been in the train quite a little while when it stopped, yet Laroche is more than an hour from Paris, quite a countryside station, and it seems strange that the Côte d'Azur should stop there. That was the grand name of the train that I was travelling by. Think of any English company running a train and calling it "The Azure Shore"! Think of going to Euston or to Charing Cross, saying you are going by "The Azure Shore"! So long as the name of this train endures, it is impossible to doubt that the French mind is more picturesque than the English, and one no longer wonders why the French school of painting, etc.
A fruit seller was crying his wares along the platform, and just before we started from Laroche breakfast was preparing on board the train; I thought a basket of French grapes--the grapes that grow in the open air, not the leathery hot-house grapes filled with lumps of glue that we eat in England--would pass the time. I got out and bought a basket from him. On journeys like these one has to resort to many various little expedients. Alas! The grapes were decaying; only the bunch on the top was eatable; nor was that one worth eating, and I began to think that the railway company's attention should be directed to the fraud, for in my case a deliberate fraud had been effected. The directors of the railway would probably think that passengers should exercise some discrimination; it were surely easy for the passenger to examine the quality of a basket of grapes before purchasing--that would be the company's answer to my letter. The question of a letter to the newspaper did not arise, for French papers are not like ours--they do not print all the letters that are sent to them. The French public has no means of ventilating its grievances; a misfortune no doubt, but not such a misfortune as it seems, when one reflects on how little good a letter addressed to the public press does in the way of remedying abuses.
I don't think we stopped again till we got to Lyons, and all the way there I sat at the window looking at the landscape--the long, long plain that the French peasant cultivates unceasingly. Out of that long plain came all the money that was lost in Panama, and all the money invested in Russian bonds--fine milliards came out of the French peasants' stockings. We passed through La Beauce. I believe it was there that Zola went to study the French peasant before he wrote "La Terre." Huysmans, with that benevolent malice so characteristic of him, used to say that Zola's investigation was limited to going out once for a drive in a carriage with Madame Zola. The primitive man that had risen out of some jungle of my being did not view this immense and highly cultivated plain sympathetically. It seemed to him to differ little from the town, so utterly was nature dominated by man and portioned out. On a subject like this one can meditate for a long time, and I meditated till my meditation was broken by the stopping of the train. We were at Lyons. The tall white-painted houses reminded me of Paris--Lyons, as seen from the windows of La Côte d'Azur at the end of a grey December day might be Paris. The climate seemed the same; the sky was as sloppy and as grey. At last the train stopped at a place from which I could look down a side street, and I decided that Lyons wore a more provincial look than Paris, and I thought of the great silk trade and the dull minds of the merchants ... their dinner parties, etc. I noticed everything there was to notice in order to pass the time; but there was so little of interest that I wrote out a telegram and ran with it to the office, for Doris did not know what train I was coming by, and it is pleasant to be met at a station, to meet one familiar face, not to find oneself amid a crowd of strangers. Very nearly did I miss the train; my foot was on the footboard when the guard blew his whistle. "Just fancy if I had missed the train," I said, and settling myself in my seat I added, "now, let us study the landscape; such an opportunity as this may never occur again."
The long plain cultivated with tedious regularity that we had been passing through before we came to Lyons, flowed on field after field; it seemed as if we should never reach the end of it, and looking on those same fields, for they were the same, I said to myself: "If I were an economist that plain would interest me, but since I got Doris's letter I am primitive man, and he abhors the brown and the waving field, and 'the spirit in his feet' leads him to some grassy glen where he follows his flocks, listening to the song of the wilding bee that sings as it labours amid the gorse. What a soulless race that plain must breed," I thought; "what soulless days are lived there; peasants going forth at dusk to plough, and turning home at dusk to eat, procreate and sleep." At last a river appeared flowing amid sparse and stunted trees and reeds, a great wide sluggish river with low banks, flowing so slowly that it hardly seemed to flow at all. Rooks flew past, but they are hardly wilding birds; a crow--yes, we saw one; and I thought of a heron rising slowly out of one of the reedy islands; maybe an otter or two survives the persecution of the peasant, and I liked to think of a poacher picking up a rabbit here and there; hares must have almost disappeared, even the flock and the shepherd. France is not as picturesque a country as England; only Normandy seems to have pasturage, there alone the shepherd survives along the banks of the Seine. Picardy, though a swamp, never conveys an idea of the wild; and the middle of France, which I looked at then for the first time, shocked me, for primitive man, as I have said, was uppermost in me, and I turned away from the long plain, "Dreary," I said, "uneventful as a boarding-house."
But it is a long plain that has no hill in it, and when I looked out again a whole range showed so picturesquely that I could not refrain, but turned to a travelling companion to ask its name. It was the Esterelles; and never shall I forget the picturesqueness of one moment--the jagged end of the Esterelles projecting over the valley, showing against what remained of the sunset, one or two bars of dusky red, disappearing rapidly amid heavy clouds massing themselves as if for a storm, and soon after night closed over the landscape.
"Henceforth," I said, "I shall have to look to my own thoughts for amusement," and in my circumstances there was nothing reasonable for me to think of but Doris. Some time before midnight I should catch sight of her on the platform. It seemed to me wonderful that it should be so, and I must have been dreaming, for the voice of the guard, crying out that dinner was served awoke me with a start.
It is said to be the habit of my countrymen never to get into conversation with strangers in the train, but I doubt if that be so. Everything depends on the tact of him who first breaks silence; if his manner inspires confidence in his fellow-traveller he will receive such answers as will carry the conversation on for a minute or two, and in that time both will have come to a conclusion whether the conversation should be continued or dropped. A pleasant little book might be written about train acquaintances. If I were writing such a book I would tell of the Americans I once met at Nuremberg, and with whom I travelled to Paris; it was such a pleasant journey. I should have liked to keep up their acquaintance, but it is not the etiquette of the road to do so. But I am writing no such book; I am writing the quest of a golden fleece, and may allow myself no further deflection in the narrative; I may tell, however, of the two very interesting people I met at dinner on board La Côte d'Azur, though some readers will doubt if it be any integral part of my story. The woman was a typical French woman, pleasant and agreeable, a woman of the upper middle classes, so she seemed to me, but as I knew all her ideas the moment I looked at her, conversation with her did not flourish; or would it be more true to say that her husband interested me more, being less familiar? His accent told me he was French; but when he took off his hat I could see that he had come from the tropics--Algeria I thought; not unlikely a soldier. His talk was less stilted than a soldier's, and I began to notice that he did not look like a Frenchman, and when he told me that he lived in an oasis in the desert, and was on his way home, his Oriental appearance I explained by his long residence among the Arabs. He had lived in the desert since he was fourteen. "Almost a Saharian," I said to him. And during dinner, and long after dinner we sat talking of the difference between the Oriental races and the European; of the various Arab patois. He spoke the Tunisean patois and wrote the language of the Koran, which is understood all over the Sahara and the Soudan, as well as in Mecca. What interested me, perhaps even more than the language question, was the wilding's enterprise in attempting to cultivate the desert. He had already enlarged his estate by the discovery of two ancient Roman wells, and he had no doubt that all that part of the desert lying between the three oases could be brought into cultivation. In ancient times there were not three oases but one; the wells had been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of acres had been laid waste by the Numidians in order, I think he told me, to save themselves from the Saracens who were following them. He spent eight months of every year in his oasis, and begged of me, as soon as I had wearied of Cannes, to take the boat from Marseilles--I suppose it was from Marseilles--and spend some time with him in the wild.
"Visitors," he said, "are rare. You'll be very welcome. The railway will take you within a hundred miles; the last hundred miles will be accomplished on the back of a dromedary; I shall send you a fleet one and an escort."
"Splendid," I answered. "I see myself arriving sitting high up on the hump gathering dates--I suppose there are date palms where you are? Yes?--and wearing a turban and a bournous."
"Would you like to see my bournous?" he said, and opening his valise he showed me a splendid one which filled me with admiration, and only shame forbade me to ask him to allow me to try it on. Ideas haunt one. When I was a little child I insisted on wearing a turban and going out for a ride on the pony, flourishing a Damascus blade which my father had brought home from the East. Nothing else would have satisfied me; my father led the pony, and I have always thought this fantasy exceedingly characteristic; it must be so, for it awoke in me twenty years afterwards; and fanciful and absurd as it may appear, I certainly should have liked to have worn my travelling companion's bournous in the train if only for a few minutes. All this is twelve years ago, and I have not yet gone to visit him in his oasis, but how many times have I done so in my imagination, seeing myself arriving on the back of a dromedary crying out, "Allah! Allah! And Mohammed is his prophet!" But though one can go on thinking year after year about a bournous, one cannot talk for more than two or three hours about one; and though I looked forward to spending at least a fortnight with my friends, and making excursions in the desert, finding summer, as Fromentin says, chez lui, I was glad to say good-bye to my friends at Marseilles.
I was still quite far from the end of my journey, and so weary of talk that at first I was doubtful whether or not it would be worth while to engage again in conversation, but a pleasant gentleman had got into my carriage, and he required little encouragement to tell me his story. His beginnings were very humble, but he was now a rich merchant. It is always interesting to hear how the office boy gets his first chance; the first steps are the interesting ones, and I should be able to tell his story here if we had not been interrupted in the middle of it by his little girl. She had wearied of her mother, who was in the next carriage, and had come in to sit on her father's knee. Her hair hung about her shoulders just as Doris's had done five years ago, taking the date from the day that I journeyed in quest of the golden fleece. She was a winsome child, with a little fluttering smile about her lips and a curious intelligence in her eyes. She admitted that she was tired, but had not been ill, and her father told me that long train journeys produced the same effect on her as a sea journey. She spoke with a pretty abruptness, and went away suddenly, I thought for good, but she returned half an hour afterwards looking a little faint, I thought, green about the mouth, and smiling less frequently. One cannot remember everything, and I have forgotten at what station these people got out; they bade me a kindly farewell, telling me that in about two hours and a half I should be at Plessy, and that I should have to change at the next station, and this lag end of my journey dragged itself out very wearily.
Plessy is difficult to get at; one has to change, and while waiting for the train I seemed to lose heart; nothing seemed to matter, not even Doris. But these are momentary capitulations of the intellect and the senses, and when I saw her pretty face on the platform I congratulated myself again on my wisdom in having sent her the telegram. How much pleasanter it was to walk with her to the hotel than to walk there alone! "She is," I said to myself, "still the same pretty girl whom I so bitterly reproached for selfishness in Cumberland Place five years ago." To compliment her on her looks, to tell her that she did not look a day older, a little thinner, a little paler, that was all, but the same enchanting Doris, was the facile inspiration of the returned lover. And we walked down the platform talking, my talk full of gentle reproof--why had she waited up? There was a reason.... My hopes, till now buoyant as corks, began to sink. "She is going to tell me that I cannot come to her hotel. Why did I send that telegram from Lyons?" Had it not been for that telegram I could have gone straight to her hotel. It was just the telegram that had brought her to the station, and she had come to tell me that it was impossible for me to stay at her hotel.
After thirty hours of travel it mattered little which hotel I stayed at, but to-morrow and the next day, the long week we were to spend together passed before my eyes, the tedium of the afternoons, the irritation and emptiness of Platonic evenings--"Heavens! what have I let myself in for," I thought, and my mind went back over the long journey and the prospect of returning bredouille, as the sportsmen say. But to argue about details with a woman, to get angry, is a thing that no one versed in the arts of love ever does. We are in the hands of women always; it is they who decide, and our best plan is to accept the different hotel without betraying disappointment, or as little as possible. But we had not seen each other for so long that we could not part at once. Doris said that I must come to her hotel and eat some supper. No; I had dined on board the train, and all she could persuade me to have was a cup of chocolate. Over that cup of chocolate we talked for an hour, and then I had to bid her good-night. The moon looked down the street coldly; I crossed from shadow to light, feeling very weary in all my body, and there was a little melancholy in my heart, for after all I might not win Doris. There was sleep, however, and sleep is at times a good thing, and that night it must have come quickly, so great was the refreshment I experienced in the morning when my eyes opened and, looking through mosquito curtains (themselves symbols of the South), were delighted by the play of the sunlight flickering along the flower-papered wall. The impulse in me was to jump out of bed at once and to throw open les croisées. And what did I see? Tall palm trees in the garden, and above them a dim, alluring sky, and beyond them a blue sea in almost the same tone as the sky. And what did I feel? Soft perfumed airs moving everywhere. And what was the image that rose up in my mind? The sensuous gratification of a vision of a woman bathing at the edge of a summer wood, the intoxication of the odour of her breasts.... Why should I think of a woman bathing at the edge of a summer wood? Because the morning seemed the very one that Venus should choose to rise from the sea.
Forgive my sensuousness, dear reader; remember it was the first time I breathed the soft Southern air, the first time I saw orange trees; remember I am a poet, a modern Jason in search of a golden fleece. "Is this the garden of the Hesperides?" I asked myself, for nothing seemed more unreal than the golden fruit hanging like balls of yellow worsted among dark and sleek leaves; it reminded me of the fruit I used to see when I was a child under glass shades in lodging-houses, but I knew, nevertheless, that I was looking upon orange trees, and that the golden fruit growing amid the green leaves was the fruit I used to pick from the barrows when I was a boy; the fruit of which I ate so much in boyhood that I cannot eat it any longer; the fruit whose smell we associate with the pit of a theatre; the fruit that women never grow weary of, high and low. It seemed to me a wonderful thing that at last I should see oranges growing on trees; I so happy, so singularly happy, that I am nearly sure that happiness is, after all, no more than a faculty for being surprised. Since I was a boy I never felt so surprised as I did that morning. The valet de chambre brought in my bath, and while I bathed and dressed I reflected on the luck of him who in middle age can be astonished by a blue sky, and still find the sunlight a bewitchment. But who would not be bewitched by the pretty sunlight that finds its way into the gardens of Plessy? I knew I was going to walk with Doris by a sea blue as any drop-curtain, and for a moment Doris seemed to be but a figure on a drop-curtain. Am I very cynical? But are we not all figures on drop-curtains, and is not everything comic opera, and "La Belle Hélène" perhaps the only true reality? Amused by the idea of Jason or Paris or Menelaus in Plessy, I asked Doris what music was played by the local orchestra, and she told me it played "The March of Aïda" every evening. "Oh, the cornet," I said, and I understood that the mission of Plessy was to redeem one from the coil of one's daily existence, from Hebrew literature and its concomitants, bishops, vicars, and curates--all these, especially bishops, are regarded as being serious; whereas French novels and their concomitants, pretty girls, are supposed to represent the trivial side of life. A girl becomes serious only when she is engaged to be married; the hiring of the house in which the family is reared is regarded as serious; in fact all prejudices are serious; every deflection from the normal, from the herd, is looked upon as trivial; and I suppose that this is right: the world could not do without the herd nor could the herd do without us--the eccentrics who go to Plessy in quest of a golden fleece instead of putting stoves in the parish churches (stoves and organs are always regarded as too devilishly serious for words).
Once I had a long conversation with my archbishop concerning the Book of Daniel, and were I to write out his lordship's erudition I might even be deemed sufficiently serious for a review in the Church Gazette. But looking back on this interview and judging it with all the impartiality of which my nature is capable, I cannot in truth say that I regard it as more serious than pretty Doris's fluent conversation, or the melancholy aspect of his lordship's cathedral as more serious than the pretty Southern sunlight glancing along the seashore, lighting up the painted houses, and causing Doris to open her parasol. What a splendid article I might write on the trivial side of seriousness, but discussion is always trivial; I shall be much more serious in trying to recall the graceful movement of the opening of her parasol, and how prettily it enframed her face. True that almost every face is pretty against the distended silk full of sunlight and shadow, but Doris's, I swear to you, was as pretty as any medieval virgin despite its modernness. Memline himself never designed a more appealing little face. Think of the enchantment of such a face after a long journey, by the sea that the Romans and the Greeks used to cross in galleys, that I used to read about when I was a boy. There it was, and on the other side the shore on which Carthage used to stand; there it was, a blue bay with long red hills reaching out, reminding me of hills I had seen somewhere, I think in a battle piece by Salvator Rosa. It seemed to me that I had seen those hills before--no, not in a picture; had I dreamed them, or was there some remembrance of a previous existence struggling in my brain? There was a memory somewhere, a broken memory, and I sought for the lost thread as well as I could, for Doris rarely ceased talking.
"And there is the restaurant," she said, flinging up her parasol, "built at the end of those rocks."
We were the first swallows to arrive; the flocks would not be here for about three weeks. So we had the restaurant to ourselves, the waiter and doubtless the cook; and they gave us all their attention. Would we have breakfast in the glass pavilion? How shall I otherwise describe it, for it seemed to be all glass? The scent of the sea came through the window, and the air was like a cordial--it intoxicated; and looking across the bay one seemed to be looking on the very thing that Whistler had sought for in his Nocturnes, and that Steer had nearly caught in that picture of children paddling, that dim, optimistic blue that allures and puts the world behind one, the dream of the opium-eater, the phrase of the syrens in "Tannhäuser," the phrase which begins like a barcarolle; but the accompaniment tears underneath until we thrill with expectation.
As I looked across the bay, Doris seemed but a little thing, almost insignificant, and the thought came that I had not come for nothing even if I did not succeed in winning her.
"Doris, dear, forgive me if I am looking at this bay instead of you, but I've never seen anything like this before," and feeling I was doing very poor justice to the emotions I was experiencing, I said: "Is it not strange that all this is at once to me new and old? I seem, as it were, to have come into my inheritance."
"Your inheritance! Am I not----"
"Dearest, you are. Say that you are my inheritance, my beautiful inheritance; how many years have I waited for it?" As I took her in my arms she caught sight of the waiter, and turning from her I looked across the bay, and my desire nearly died in the infinite sweetness blowing across the bay.
"Azure hills, not blue; hitherto I have only seen blue."
"They're blue to-day because there is a slight mist, but they are in reality red."
"A red-hilled bay," I said, "and all the slopes flecked with the white sides of villas."
"Peeping through olive trees."
"Olive trees, of course. I have never yet seen the olive; the olive begins at Avignon or thereabouts, doesn't it? It was dark night when we passed through Avignon."
"You'll see very few trees here; only olives and ilex."
"The ilex I know, and there is no more beautiful tree than the ilex."
"Were not the crocuses that grew
Under that ilex tree,
As beautiful in scent and hue
As ever fed the bee?"
"Whose verses are those?"
"Shelley's. I know no others. Are the lines very wonderful? They seem no more than a statement, yet they hang about my memory. I am glad I shall see the ilex tree."
"And the eucalyptus--plenty of eucalyptus trees."
"That was the scent that followed us this morning as we came through the gardens."
"Yes, as we passed from our hotel one hung over the garden wall, and the wind carried its scent after us."
The arrival of the waiter with hors d'oeuvres distracted our attention from the olive tree to its fruit, I rarely touch olives, but that morning I ate many. Should we have mutton cutlets or lamb? Doris said the Southern mutton was detestable. "Then we'll have lamb." An idea came into my head, and it was this, that I had been mistaken about Doris's beauty. Hers was not like any face that one may find in a panel by Memline. She was like something, but I could not lay my thoughts on what she was like.
"A sail would spoil the beauty of the bay," I said when the waiter brought in the coffee, and left us--we hoped for the last time. Taking hands and going to the window we sat looking across the sailless bay. "How is it that no ships come here? Is the bay looked upon as a mere ornament and reserved exclusively for the appreciation of visitors? Those hills, too, look as if they had been designed in a like intent.... How much more beautiful the bay is without a sail--why I cannot tell, but----"
"But what?"
"A great galley rowed by fifty men would look well in this bay.... The bay is antiquity, and those hills; all the morning while talking to you a memory or a shadow of a memory has fretted in my mind like a fly on a pane. Now I know why I have been expecting a nymph to rise out of those waves during breakfast. For a thousand years men believed that nymphs came up on those rocks, and that satyrs and their progeny might be met in the woods and on the hillsides. Only a thin varnish has been passed over these beliefs. One has only to come here to look down into that blue sea-water to believe that nymphs swim about those rocks; and when we go for a drive among those hillsides we'll keep a sharp lookout for satyrs. Now I know why I like this country. It is heathen. Those mountains--how different from the shambling Irish hills from whence I have come! And you, Doris, you might have been dug up yesterday, though you are but two-and-twenty. You are a thing of yester age, not a bit like the little Memline head which I imagined you to be like when I was coming here in the train, nor like anything done by the Nuremberg painters. You are a Tanagra figure, and one of the finest. In you I read all the winsomeness of antiquity. But I must look at the bay now, for I may never see anything like it again; never have I seen anything like it before. Forgive me, remember that three days ago I was in Ireland, the day before yesterday I was in England, yesterday I was in Paris. I have come out of the greyness of the North. When I left Paris all was grey, and when the train passed through Lyons a grey night was gathering; now I see no cloud at all: the change is so wonderful. You cannot appreciate my admiration. You have been looking at the bay for the last three weeks, and La côte d'azur has become nothing to you now but palms and promenades. To me it is still quite different. I shall always see you beautiful, whereas Plessy may lose her beauty in a few days. Let me enjoy it while I may."
"Perhaps I shall not outlast Plessy."
"Yes, you will. Do you know, Doris, that you don't look a day older since the first time I saw you walking across the room to the piano in your white dress, your gold hair hanging down over your shoulders. It has darkened a little, that is all."
"It is provoking you should see me when I am thin. I wish you had seen me last year when I came from the rest cure. I went up more than a stone in weight. Every one said that I didn't look more than sixteen. I know I didn't, for all the women were jealous of me."
As I sat watching the dissolving line of the horizon, lost in a dream, I heard my companion say:
"Of what are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking of something that happened long ago in that very bay."
"Tell me about it;" and her hand sought mine for a moment.
"Would you like to hear it? I'd like to tell it, but it's a long, long story, and to remember it would be an effort. The colour of the sea and the sky is enough; the warmth of the sunlight penetrates me; I feel like a plant; the only difference between me and one of those palm trees----"
"I am sure those poor palms are shivering. There is not enough heat here for them; they come from the south, and you come from the north."
"I suppose that is so. They grow, but they don't flourish here. However, my mood is not philanthropic; I cannot pity even a palm tree at the present moment. See how my cigar smoke curls and goes out! It is strange, Doris, that I should meet you here, for some years ago it was arranged that I should come here----"
"With a woman?"