THE YELLOW BOOK

An Illustrated Quarterly

Volume II July 1894

The Yellow Book

Volume II July, 1894

The Editor of The Yellow Book can in no case hold himself responsible for rejected manuscripts; when, however, they are accompanied by stamped addressed envelopes, every effort will be made to secure their prompt return.

The Yellow Book

An Illustrated Quarterly

Volume II July, 1894

London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane
Boston: Copeland & Day
Agents for the Colonies: Robt. A. Thompson & Co.

The Renaissance of Venus

By Walter Crane

By kind permission of G. F. Watts, Esq., R.A.

The Gospel of Content

By Frederick Greenwood

I

How it was that I, being so young a man and not a very tactful one, was sent on such an errand is more than I should be able to explain. But many years ago some one came to me with a request that I should go that evening to a certain street at King's Cross, where would be found a poor lady in great distress; that I should take a small sum of money which was given to me for the purpose in a little packet which disguised all appearance of coin, present it to her as a “parcel” which I had been desired to deliver, and ask if there were any particular service that could be done for her. For my own information I was told that she was a beautiful Russian whose husband had barely contrived to get her out of the country, with her child, before his own arrest for some deep political offence of which she was more than cognisant, and that now she was living in desperate ignorance of his fate. Moreover, she was penniless and companionless, though not quite without friends; for some there were who knew of her husband and had a little help for her, though they were almost as poor as herself. But none of these dare approach her, so fearful was she of the danger of their doing so, either to themselves or her husband or her child, and so ignorant of the perfect freedom that political exiles could count upon in England. “Then,” said I, “what expectation is there that she will admit me, an absolute stranger to her, who may be employed by the police for anything she knows to the contrary?” The answer was: “Of course that has been thought of. But you have only to send up your name, which, in the certainty that you would have no objection, has been communicated to her already. Her own name, in England, is Madame Vernet.”

It was a Saturday evening in November, the air thick with darkness and a drizzling rain, the streets black and shining where lamplight fell upon the mud on the paths and the pools in the roadway, when I found my way to King's Cross on this small errand of kindness. King's Cross is a most unlovely purlieu at its best, which must be in the first dawn of a summer day, when the innocence of morning smiles along its squalid streets, and the people of the place, who cannot be so wretched as they look, are shut within their poor and furtive homes. On a foul November night nothing can be more miserable, more melancholy. One or two great thoroughfares were crowded with foot-passengers who bustled here and there about their Saturday marketings, under the light that flared from the shops and the stalls that lined the roadway. Spreading on every hand from these thoroughfares, with their noisy trafficking so dreadfully eager and small, was a maze of streets built to be “respectable” but now run down into the forlorn poverty which is all for concealment without any rational hope of success. It was to one of these that I was directed—a narrow silent little street of three-storey houses, with two families at least in every one of them.

Arrived at No. 17, I was admitted by a child after long delay, and by her conducted to a room at the top of the house. No voice responded to the knock at the room door, and none to the announcement of the visitor's name; but before I entered I was aware of a sound which, though it was only what may be heard in the grill-room of any coffee-house at luncheon time, made me feel very guilty and ashamed. For the last ten minutes I had been gradually sinking under the fear of intrusion—of intrusion upon grief, and not less upon the wretched little secrets of poverty which pride is so fain to conceal; and now these splutterings of a frying-pan foundered me quite. What worse intrusion could there be than to come prying in upon the cooking of some poor little meal?

Too much embarrassed to make the right apology (which, to be right, would have been without any embarrassment at all) I entered the room, in which everything could be seen in one straightforward glance: the little square table in the centre, with its old green cover and the squat lamp on it, the two chairs, the dingy half carpet, the bed wherein a child lay asleep in a lovely flush of colour, and the pale woman with a still face, and with the eyes that are said to resemble agates, standing before the hearth. Under the dark cloud of her hair she looked the very picture of Suffering—Suffering too proud to complain and too tired to speak. Beautiful as the lines of her face were, it was white as ashes and spoke their meaning; but nothing had yet tamed the upspringing nobility of her tall, slight, and yet imperious form.

Receiving me with the very least appearance of curiosity or any other kind of interest, but yet with something of proud constraint (which I attributed too much, perhaps, to the untimely frying-pan), she waved her hand toward the farther chair of the two, and asked to be excused from giving me her attention for a moment. By that she evidently meant that otherwise her supper would be spoiled. It is not everything that can be left to cook unattended; and since this poor little supper was a piece of fish scarce bigger than her hand, it was all the more likely to spoil and the less could be spared in damage. So I quietly took my seat in a position which more naturally commanded the view out of window than of the cooking operations, and waited to be again addressed.

On the mantel-board a noisy little American clock ticked as if its mission was to hurry time rather than to measure it, the frying-pan fizzed and bubbled without any abatement of its usual habit or any sense of compunction, now and then the child tossed upon the bed from one pretty attitude to another; and that was all that could be heard, for Madame Vernet's movements were as silent as the movements of a shadow. In almost any part of that small room she could be seen without direct looking; but at a moment when she seemed struck into a yet deeper silence, and because of it, I ventured to turn upon her more than half an eye. Standing rigidly still, she was staring at the door in an intensity of listening that transfigured her. But the door was closed, and I with the best of hearing directed to the same place could detect no new sound: indeed, I dare swear that there was none. It was merely accidental that just at this moment the child, with another toss of the lovely black head, opened her eyes wide; but it deepened the impressiveness of the scene when her mother, seeing the little one awake, placed a finger on her own lips as she advanced nearer to the door. The gesture was for silence, and it was obeyed as if in understood fear. But still there was nothing to be heard without, unless it were a push of soft drizzle against the window-panes. And this Madame Vernet herself seemed to think when, after a little while, she turned back to the fire—her eyes mere agates again which had been all ablaze.

Stooping to the fender, she had now got her fish into one warm plate, and had covered it with another, and had placed it on the broad old-fashioned hob of the grate to keep hot (as I surmised) while she spoke with and got rid of me, when knocking was heard at the outer door, a pair of hasty feet came bounding up the stair, careless of noise, and in flashed a splendid radiant creature of a man in a thin summer coat, and literally drenched to the skin.

It was Monsieur Vernet, whose real name ended in “ieff.” By daring ingenuity, by a long chain of connivance yet more hazardous, by courage, effrontery, and one or two miraculous strokes of good fortune, he had escaped from the fortress to which he had been conveyed in secret and without the least spark of hope that he would ever be released. For many months no one but himself and his jailers knew whether he was alive or dead: his friends inclined to think him the one thing or the other according to the brightness or the gloominess of the hour. Smuggled into Germany, and running thence into Belgium, he had landed in England the night before; and walking the whole distance to London, with an interval of four hours' sleep in a cartshed, he contrived to bring home nearly all of the four shillings with which he started.

But these particulars, it will be understood, I did not learn till afterwards. For that evening my visit was at an end from the moment (the first of his appearance) when Vernet seized his wife in his arms with a partial resemblance to murder. Unobserved, I placed my small packet on the table behind the lamp, and then slipped out; but not without a last view of that affecting “domestic interior,” which showed me those two people in a relaxed embrace while they made me a courteous salute in response to another which was all awkwardness, their little daughter standing up on the bed in her night-gown, patiently yet eagerly waiting to be noticed by her father. In all likelihood she had not to wait long.

This was the beginning of my acquaintance with a man who had a greater number of positive ideas than any one else that ever I have known, with wonderful intrepidity and skill in expounding or defending them. However fine the faculties of some other Russians whom I have encountered, they seemed to move in a heavily obstructive atmosphere; Vernet appeared to be oppressed by none. His resolutions were as prompt as his thought; whatever resource he could command in any difficulty, whether the least or the greatest, presented itself to his mind instantly, with the occasion for it; and every movement of his body had the same quickness and precision. His pride, his pride of aristocracy, could tower to extraordinary heights; his sensibility to personal slights and indignities was so trenchant that I have seen him white and quivering with rage when he thought himself rudely jostled by a fellow-passenger in a crowded street. And yet any comrade in conspiracy was his familiar if he only brought daring enough into the common business; and wife, child, fortune, the exchange of ease for the most desperate misery, all were put at stake for the sake of the People and at the call of their sorrows and oppressions. And of one sort of pride he had no sense whatever—fine gentleman as he was, and used from his birth to every refinement of service and luxury: no degree of poverty, nor any blameless shift for relieving it, touched him as humiliating. Privation, whether for others or himself, angered him; the contrast between slothful wealth and toiling misery enraged him; but he had no conception of want and its wretched little expedients as mortifying.

For example. It was in November, that dreary and inclement month, when he began life anew in England with a capital of three shillings and sevenpence. It was a bleak afternoon in December, sleet lightly falling as the dusk came on and melting as it fell, when I found him gathering into a little basket what looked in the half-darkness like monstrous large snails. With as much indifference as if he were offering me a new kind of cigarette, Vernet put one of these things into my hand, and I saw that it was a beautifully-made miniature sailor's hat. The strands of which it was built were just like twisted brown straw to the eye, though they were of the smallness of packthread; and a neat band of ribbon proportionately slender made all complete. But what were they for? How were they made? The answer was that the design was to sell them, and that they were made of the cords—more artistically twisted and more neatly waxed than usual—that shoemakers use in sewing. As for the bands, Madame Vernet had amongst her treasures a cap which her little daughter had worn in her babyhood; and this cap had close frills of lace, and the frills were inter-studded with tiny loops of ribbon—a fashion of that time. There were dozens of these tiny loops, and everyone of them made a band for Vernet's little toy hats. Perhaps in tenderness for the mother's feelings, he would not let her turn the ribbons to their new use, but had applied them himself; and having spent the whole of a foodless day in the manufacture of these little articles, he was now about to go and sell them. He had selected his “pitch” in a flaring bustling street a mile away; and he asked me (“I must lose no time,” he said) to accompany him in that direction. I did so, with a cold and heavy stone in my breast which I am sure had no counterpart in his own. As he marched on, in his light and firm soldierly way, he was loud in praise of English liberty: at such a moment that was his theme. Arrived near his “pitch,” he bade me good-night with no abatement of the high and easy air that was natural to him; and though I instantly turned back of course, I knew that at a few paces farther the violently proud man moved off the pathway into the gutter, and stood there till eleven o'clock; for not before then did he sell the last of his little penny hats. Another man, equally proud, might have done the same thing in Vernet's situation, but not with Vernet's absolute indifference to everything but the coldness of the night and the too-great stress of physical want.

But this Russian revolutionist was far too capable and versatile a man to lie long in low water. He had a genius for industrial chemistry which soon got him employment and from the sufficiently comfortable made him prosperous by rapid stages. But what of that? Before long another wave of political disturbance rose in Europe; Russia, Italy, France, 'twas all one to Vernet when his sympathies were roused; and after one or two temporary disappearances he was again lost altogether. There was no news of him for months; and then his wife, who all this while had been sinking back into the pallid speechless deadness of the King's Cross days, suddenly disappeared too.

II

For more than thirty years—a period of enormous change in all that men do or think—no word of Vernet came to my knowledge. But though quite passed away he was never forgotten long, and it was with an inrush of satisfaction that, a year or two ago, I received this letter from him:

... I have been reading the —— Review, and it determines me to solicit a pleasure which I have been at full-cock to ask for many times since I returned to England in 1887. Let us meet. I have something to say to you. But let us not meet in this horrifically large and noisy town. You know Richmond? You know the Star and Garter Hotel there? Choose a day when you will go to find me in that hotel. It shall be in a quiet room looking over the trees and the river, and there we will dine and sit and talk over our dear tobacco in a right place.

“To say one word of the past, that you may know and then forget. Marie is gone—gone twelve years since; and my daughter, gone. I do not speak of them. And do not you expect to find in me any more the Vernet of old days.”

Nor was he. The splendidly robust and soldierly figure of thirty-five had changed into a thin, fine-featured old man, above all things gentle, thoughtful, considerate. Except that there was no suggestion of a second and an inner self in him, he might have been an ecclesiastic; as it was, he looked rather as if he had been all his life a recluse student of books and state affairs.

It was a good little dinner in a bright room overlooking the garden; and it was served so early that the declining sunshine of a June day shone through our claret-glasses when coffee was brought in. Our first talk was of matters of the least importance—our own changing fortunes over a period of prodigious change for the whole world. From that personal theme to the greater mutations that affect all mankind was a quick transition; and we had not long been launched on this line of talk before I found that in very truth nothing had changed more than Vernet himself. It was the story of Ignatius Loyola over again, in little and with a difference.

“Yes,” said he, my mind filling with unspoken wonder at this during a brief pause in the conversation, “Yes, prison did me good. Not in the rough way you think, perhaps, as of taking nonsense out of a man with a stick, but as solitude. Strict Catholics go into retreat once a year, and it does them good as Catholics: whether otherwise I do not know, but it is possible. You have a wild philosopher whom I love; and wild philosophers are much the best. In them there is more philosophic sport, more surprise, more shock; and it is shock that crystallises. They startle the breath into our own unborn thoughts—thoughts formed in the mind, you know, but without any ninth month for them: they wait for some outer voice to make them alive. Well, once upon a time I heard this philosopher, your Mr. Ruskin, say that only the most noble, most virtuous, most beautiful young men should be allowed to go to the war; the others, never. And he maintained it—ah! in language from some divine madhouse in heaven. But as to that, it is a great objection that your army is already small. Yet of this I am nearly sure; it is the wrong men who go to gaol. The rogues and thieves should give place to honest men—honest reflective men. Every advantage of that conclusive solitude is lost on blackguard persons and is mostly turned to harm. For them prescribe one, two, three applications of your cat-o'-nine tails——”

“There is knout like it!” said I, intending a severity of retort which I hoped would not be quite lost in the pun.

“——and then a piece of bread, a shilling, and dismissal to the most devout repentance that brutish crime is ever acquainted with, repentance in stripes. Imprisonment is wasted on persons of so inferior character. Waste it not, and you will have accommodation for wise men to learn the monk's lesson (did you ever think it all foolishness?) that a little imperious hardship, a time of seclusion with only themselves to talk to themselves, is most improving. For statesmen and reformers it should be an obligation.”

“And according to your experience what is the general course of the improvement? In what direction does it run?”

“At best? In sum total? You know me that I am no monk nor lover of monks, but I say to you what the monk would say were he still a man and intelligent. The chief good is rising above petty irritation, petty contentiousness; it is patience with ills that must last long; it is choosing to build out the east wind instead of running at it with a sword.”

“And, if I remember aright, you never had that sword out of your hand.”

“From twenty years old to fifty, never out of my hand. But there were excuses—no, but more than excuses; remember that that was another time. Now how different it is, and what satisfaction to have lived to see the change!”

“And what is the change you are thinking of!”

“One that I have read of—only he must not flatter himself that he alone could find it out—in some Review articles of an old friend of Vernet's whose portrait is before me now.” And then, a little to my distress, but more to my pleasure, he quoted from two or three forgotten papers of mine on the later developments of social humanity, the “evolution of goodness” in the relations of men to each other, the new, great and rapid extension of brotherly kindness; observations and theories which were welcomed as novel when they were afterwards taken up and enlarged upon by Mr. Kidd in his book on “Social Evolution.”

“For an ancient conspirator and man of the barricades,” continued Vernet, by this time pacing the room in the dusk which he would not allow to be disturbed, “for a blood-and-iron man who put all his hopes of a better day for his poor devils of fellow-creatures on the smashing of forms and institutions and the substitution of others, I am rather a surprising convert, don't you think? But who could know in those days what was going on in the common stock of mind by—what shall we call it? Before your Darwin brought out his explaining word 'evolution' I should have said that the change came about by a sort of mental chemistry; that it was due to a kind of chemical ferment in the mind, unsuspected till it showed entirely new growths and developments. And even now, you know, I am not quite comfortable with 'evolution' as the word for this sudden spiritual advance into what you call common kindness and more learned persons call 'altruism.' It does not satisfy me, 'evolution.'”

“But you can say why it doesn't, perhaps.”

“Nothing, more, I suppose, than the familiar association of 'evolution' with slow degrees and gradual processes. Evolution seems to speak the natural coming-out of certain developments from certain organisms under certain conditions. The change comes, and you see it coming; and you can look back and trace its advance. But here? The human mind has been the same for ages; subject to the same teaching; open to the same persuasions and dissuasions; as quick to see and as keen to think as it is now; and all the while it has been staring on the same cruel scenes of misery and privation: no, but very often worse. And then, presto! there comes a sudden growth of fraternal sentiment all over this field of the human mind; and such a growth that if it goes on, if it goes on straight and well, it will transform the whole world. Transform its economies?—it will change its very aspect. Towns, streets, houses will show the difference; while as to man himself, it will make him another being. For this is neither a physical nor a mere intellectual advance. As for that, indeed, perhaps the intellectual advance hasn't very much farther to go on its own lines, which are independent of morality, or of goodness as I prefer to say: the simple word! Well, do you care if evolution has pretty nearly done with intellect? Would you mind if intellect never made a greater shine? Will your heart break if it never ascends to a higher plane than it has reached already?”

“Not a bit; if, in time, nobody is without a good working share of what intellect there is amongst us.”

“No, not a bit! Enough of intellect for the good and happiness of mankind if we evolve no more of it. But this is another thing! This is a spiritual evolution, spiritual advance and development—a very different thing! Mark you, too, that it is not shown in a few amongst millions, but is common, general. And though, as you have said, it may perish at its beginnings, trampled out by war, the terrible war to come may absolutely confirm it. For my part, I don't despair of its surviving and spreading even from the battle-field. It is your own word that not only has the growth of common kindness been more urgent, rapid and general this last hundred years than was ever witnessed before in the whole long history of the world, but it has come out as strongly in making war as in making peace. It is seen in extending to foes a benevolence which not long ago would have been thought ludicrous and even unnatural. Why, then, if that's so, the feeling may be furthered and intensified by the very horrors of the next great war, such horrors as there must be; and—God knows! God knows!—but from this beginning the spiritual nature of man may be destined to rise as far above the rudimentary thing it is yet (I think of a staggering blind puppy) as King Solomon's wits were above an Eskimo's.”

“Still the same enthusiast,” I said to myself, “though with so great a difference.” But what struck me most was the reverence with which he said “God knows!” For the coolest Encyclopedist could not have denied the existence of God with a more settled air than did “the Vernet of old days.”

“And yet,” so he went on, “were the human race to become all-righteous in a fortnight, and to push out angels' wings from its shoulders, every one! every one! all together on Christmas Day, it would still be the Darwinian process. Yes, we must stick to it, that it is evolution, I suppose, and I'm sure it contents me well enough. What matter for the process! And yet do you know what I think?”

Lights had now been brought in by the waiter—a waiter who really could not understand why not. But we sat by the open window looking out upon the deepening darkness of the garden, beyond which the river shone as if by some pale effulgence of its own, or perhaps by a little store of light saved up from the liberal sunshine of the day.

“Do you know what I think?” said Vernet, with the look of a man who is about to confess a weakness of which he is ashamed. “I sometimes think that if I were of the orthodox I should draw an argument for supernatural religion, against your strict materialists, from this sudden change of heart in Christian countries. For that is what it is. It is a change of heart; or, if you like to have it so, of spirit; and the remarkable thing is that it is nothing else. Whether it lasts or not, this awakening of brotherliness cannot be completely understood unless that is understood. What else has changed, these hundred years? There is no fresh discovery of human suffering, no new knowledge of the desperate poverty and toil of so many of our fellow-creatures: nor can we see better with our eyes, or understand better what we hear and see. This that we are talking about is a heart-growth, which, as we know, can make the lowliest peasant divine; not a mind-growth, which can be splendid in the coldest and most devilish man. Well, then, were I of the orthodox I should say this. When, after many generations, I see a traceless movement of the spirit of man like the one we are speaking of—a movement which, if it gains in strength and goes on to its natural end, will transfigure human society and make it infinitely more like heaven—I think the divine influence upon the development of man as a spirit may be direct and continuous; or, it would be better to say, not without repetition.”

Vernet had to be reminded that the intellectual development of man had also shown itself in sudden starts and rushes toward perfection—now in one land, now in another; and never with an appearance of gradual progress, as might be expected from the nature of things. And therefore nothing in the spiritual advance which is declared by the sudden efflorescence of “altruism” dissociates it from the common theory of evolution. This he was forced to admit. “I know,” he replied; “and as to intellectual development showing itself by starts and rushes, it is very obvious.” But though he made the admission, I could see that he preferred belief in direct influence from above. And this was Vernet!—a most unexpected example of that Return to Religion which was not so manifest when we talked together as it is to-day.

“You see, I am a soldier,” he resumed, “and a soldier born and bred does not know how to get on very long without feeling the presence of a General, a Commander. That I find as I grow old; my youth would have been ashamed to acknowledge the sentiment. And for its own sake, I hope that Science is becoming an old gentleman too, and willing to see its youthful confidence in the destruction of religious belief quite upset. For upset it certainly will be, and very much by its own hands. Most of the new professors were sure that the religious idea was to perish at last in the light of scientific inquiry. None of them seemed to suspect what I remember to have read in a fantastic magazine article two or three years ago, that unbelief in the existence of a providential God, the dissolution of that belief, would not retard but probably draw on more quickly the greater and yet unfulfilled triumphs of Christ on earth. Are you surprised at that? Certainly it is not the general idea of what unbelief is capable of. 'And what,' says some one in the story, 'what are those greater triumphs?' To which the answer is: 'The extension of charity, the diffusion of brotherly love, greed suppressed, luxury shameful, service and self-sacrifice a common law'—something like what we see already between mother and child, it was said. Now what do you think of that as a consequence of settled unbelief? As for Belief, we must allow that that has not done much to bring on the greater triumphs of Christianity.”

“And how is Unbelief to do this mighty work?” said I.

"You would like to know! Why, in a most natural way, and not at all mysterious. But if you ask in how long a time——! Well, it is thus, as I understand. What the destruction of religious faith might have made of the world centuries ago we cannot tell; nothing much worse, perhaps, than it was under Belief, for belief can exist with little change of heart. But these are new times. Unbelief cannot annihilate the common feeling of humanity. On the contrary, we see that it is just when Science breaks religion down into agnosticism that a new day of tenderness for suffering begins, and poverty looks for the first time like a wrong. And why? To answer that question we should remember what centuries of belief taught us as to the place of man on earth in the plan of the Creator. This world, it was 'a scene of probation.' The mystery of pain and suffering, the burdens of life apportioned so unequally, the wicked prosperous, goodness wretched, innocent weakness trodden down or used up in starving toil—all this was explained by the scheme of probation. It was only for this life; and every hour of it we were under the eyes of a heavenly Father who knows all and weighs all; and there will be a future of redress that will leave no misery unreckoned, no weakness unconsidered, no wrong uncompensated that was patiently borne. Don't you remember? And how comfortable the doctrine was! How entirely it soothed our uneasiness when, sitting in warmth and plenty, we thought of the thousands of poor wretches outside! And it was a comfort for the poor wretches too, who believed most when they were most miserable or foully wronged that in His own good time God would requite or would avenge.

"Very well. But now, says my magazine sermoniser, suppose this idea of a heavenly Father a mistake and probation a fairy tale; suppose that there is no Divine scheme of redress beyond the grave: how do we mortals stand to each other then? How do we stand to each other in a world empty of all promise beyond it? What is to become of our scene-of-probation complacency, we who are happy and fortunate in the midst of so much wrong? And if we do not busy ourselves with a new dispensation on their behalf, what hope or consolation is there for the multitude of our fellow-creatures who are born to unmerited misery in the only world there is for any of us? It is clear that if we must give up the Divine scheme of redress as a dream, redress is an obligation returned upon ourselves. All will not be well in another world: all must be put right in this world or nowhere and never. Dispossessed of God and a future life, mankind is reduced to the condition of the wild creatures, each with a natural right to ravage for its own good. If in such conditions there is a duty of forbearance from ravaging, there is a duty of helpful surrender too; and unbelief must teach both duties, unless it would import upon earth the hell it denies. 'Unbelief is a call to bring in the justice, the compassion, the oneness of brotherhood that can never make a heaven for us elsewhere.' So the thing goes on; the end of the argument being that in this way unbelief itself may turn to the service of Heaven and do the work of the believer's God. More than that: in the doing of it the spiritual nature of man must be exalted, step by step. That may be its way of perfection. On that path it will rise higher and higher into Divine illuminations which have touched it but very feebly as yet, even after countless ages of existence.

“Do you recognise these speculations?” said Vernet, after a silence.

I recognised them well enough, without at all anticipating that so much of them would presently re-appear in the formal theory of more than one social philosopher.

There was a piano in the little room we dined in. For a minute or two Vernet, standing with his cigar between his lips, went lightly over the keys. The movement, though extremely quick, was wonderfully soft, so that he had not to raise his voice in saying:

“I have an innocent little speculation of my own. How long will it be before this spiritual perfectioning is pretty near accomplishment? Two thousand years? One thousand years? Twenty generations at the least! Ah, that is the despair of us poor wretches of to-day and to-morrow. Well, when the time comes I fancy that an entirely new literature will have a new language. There will certainly be a new literature if ever spiritual progress equals intellectual progress. The dawning of conceptions as yet undreamt of, enlightenments higher than any yet attained to, may be looked for, I suppose, as in the natural order of things; and even without extraordinary revelations to the spirit, the spiritual advance must have an enormous effect in disabusing, informing and inspiring mental faculty such as we know it now. And meanwhile? Meanwhile words are all that we speak with, and how weak are words? Already there are heights and depths of feeling which they are hardly more adequate to express than the dumbness of the dog can express his love for his master. Yet there is a language that speaks to the deeper thought and finer spirit in us as words do not—moving them profoundly though they have no power of articulate response. They heave and struggle to reply, till our breasts are actually conscious of pain sometimes; but—no articulate answer. Do you recognise——?”

I pointed to the piano with the finger of interrogation.

“Yes,” said Vernet, with a delicate sweep of the keyboard, “it is this! It is music; music, which is felt to be the most subtle, most appealing, most various of tongues even while we know that we are never more than half awake to its pregnant meanings, and have not learnt to think of it as becoming the last perfection of speech. But that may be its appointed destiny. No, I don't think so only because music itself is a thing of late, speedy and splendid development, coming just before the later diffusion of spiritual growth. Yet there is something in that, something which an evolutionist would think apposite and to be expected. There is more, however, in what music is—a voice always understood to have powerful innumerable meanings appealing to we know not what in us, we hardly know how; and more, again, in its being an exquisite voice which can make no use of reason, nor reason of it; nor calculation, nor barter, nor anything but emotion and thought. The language we are using now, we two, is animal language by direct pedigree, which is worth observation don't you think? And, for another thing, when it began it had very small likelihood of ever developing into what it has become under the constant addition of man's business in the world and the accretive demands of reason and speculation. And the poets have made it very beautiful no doubt; yes, and when it is most beautiful it is most musical, please observe: most beautiful, and at the same time most meaning. Well, then! A new nature, new needs. What do you think? What do you say against music being wrought into another language for mankind, as it nears the height of its spiritual growth?”

“I say it is a pretty fancy, and quite within reasonable speculation.”

“But yet not of the profoundest consequence,” added Vernet, coming from the piano and resuming his seat by the window. “No; but what is of consequence is the cruel tedium of these evolutionary processes. A thousand years, and how much movement?”

“Remember the sudden starts towards perfection, and that the farther we advance the more we may be able to help.”

“Well, but that is the very thing I meant to say. Help is not only desirable, it is imperatively called for. For an unfortunate offensive movement rises against this better one, which will be checked, or perhaps thrown back altogether, unless the stupid reformers who confront the new spirit of kindness with the highwayman's demand are brought to reason. What I most willingly yield to friend and brother I do not choose to yield to an insulting thief; rather will I break his head in the cause of divine Civility. Robbery is no way of righteousness, and your gallant reformers who think it a fine heroic means of bringing on a better time for humanity should be taught that some devil has put the wrong plan into their heads. It is his way of continuing under new conditions the old conflict of evil and good.”

“But taught! How should these so-earnest ones be taught?”

“Ah, how! Then leave the reformers; and while they inculcate their mistaken Gospel of Rancour, let every wise man preach the Gospel of Content.”

“Content—with things as they are?”

“Why, no, my friend; for that would be preaching content with universal uncontent, which of course cannot last into a reign of wisdom and peace. But if you ask me whether I mean content with a very very little of this world's goods, or even contentment in poverty, I say yes. There will be no better day till that gospel has found general acceptance, and has been taken into the common habitudes of life. The end may be distant enough; but it is your own opinion that the time is already ripe for the preacher, and if he were no Peter the Hermit but only another, another——”

“Father Mathew, inspired with more saintly fervour——”

“Who knows how far he might carry the divine light to which so many hearts are awakening in secret? This first Christianity, it was but 'the false dawn.' Yes, we may think so.”

Here there was a pause for a few moments, and then I put in a word to the effect that it would be difficult to commend a gospel of content to Poverty.

“But,” said Vernet, "it will be addressed more to the rich and well-to-do, as you call them, bidding them be content with enough. Not forbidding them to strive for more than enough—that would never do. The good of mankind demands that all its energies should be maintained, but not that its energies should be meanly employed in grubbing for the luxury that is no enjoyment but only a show, or that palls as soon as it is once enjoyed, and then is no more felt as luxury than the labourer's second pair of boots or the mechanic's third shirt a week. For the men of thousands per annum the Gospel of Content would be the wise, wise, wise old injunction to plain living and high thinking, only with one addition both beautiful and wise: kind thinking, and the high and the kind thinking made good in deed. And it would work, this gospel; we may be sure of it already. For luxury has became common; it is being found out. Where there was one person at the beginning of the century who had daily experience of its fatiguing disappointments, now there are fifty. Like everything else, it loses distinction by coming abundantly into all sorts of hands; and meanwhile other and nobler kinds of distinction have multiplied and have gained acknowledgment. And from losing distinction—this you must have observed—luxury is becoming vulgar; and I don't know why the time should be so very far off when it will be accounted shameful. Certain it is that year by year a greater number of minds, and such as mostly determine the currents of social sentiment, think luxury low; without going deeper than the mere look of it, perhaps. These are hopeful signs. Here is good encouragement to stand out and preach a gospel of content which would be an education in simplicity, dignity, happiness, and yet more an education of heart and spirit. For nothing that a man can do in this world works so powerfully for his own spiritual good as the habit of sacrifice to kindness. It is so like a miracle that it is, I am sure, the one way—the one way appointed by the laws of our spiritual growth.

“Yes, and what about preaching the gospel of content to Poverty? Well, there we must be careful to discriminate—careful to disentangle poverty from some other things which are the same thing in the common idea. Say but this, that there must be no content with squalor, none with any sort of uncleanness, and poverty takes its own separate place and its own unsmirched aspect. An honourable poverty, clear of squalor, any man should be able to endure with a tranquil mind. To attain to that tranquillity is to attain to nobleness; and persistence in it, though effort fail and desert go quite without reward, ennobles. Contentment in poverty does not mean crouching to it or under it. Contentment is not cowardice, but fortitude. There is no truer assertion of manliness, and none with more grace and sweetness. Before it can have an established place in the breast of any man, envy must depart from it—envy, jealousy, greed, readiness to take half-honest gains, a horde of small ignoble sentiments not only disturbing but poisonous to the ground they grow in. Ah, believe me! if a man had eloquence enough, fire enough, and that command of sympathy that your Gordon seems to have had (not to speak of a man like Mahomet or to touch on more sacred names), he might do wonders for mankind in a single generation by preaching to rich and poor the several doctrines of the Gospel of Content. A curse on the mean strivings, stealings, and hoardings that survive from our animal ancestry, and another curse (by your permission) on the gaudy vanities that we have set up for objects in life since we became reasoning creatures.”

* * * * *

In effect, here the conversation ended. More was said, but nothing worth recalling. Drifting back to less serious talk, we gossiped till midnight, and then parted with the heartiest desire (I speak for myself) of meeting soon again. But on our way back to town Vernet recurred for a moment to the subject of his discourse, saying:

“I don't make out exactly what you think now of the prospect we were talking of.”

My answer pleased him. “I incline to think,” said I, “what I have long thought: that if there is any such future for us, and I believe there is, we of the older European nations will be nowhere when it comes. In existence—yes, perhaps; but gone down. You see we are becoming greybeards already; while you in Russia are boys, with every mark of boyhood on you. You, you are a new race—the only new race in the world; and it is plain that you swarm with ideas of precisely the kind that, when you come to maturity, may re-invigorate the world. But first, who knows what deadly wars?”

He pressed his hand upon my knee in a way that spoke a great deal. We parted, and two months afterwards the Vernet whose real name ended in “ieff” was “happed in lead.”

Poor Cousin Louis

By Ella D'Arcy

There stands in the Islands a house known as “Les Calais.” It has stood there already some three hundred years, and to judge from its stout walls and weather-tight appearance, promises to stand some three hundred more. Built of brown home-quarried stone, with solid stone chimney-stacks and roof of red tiles, its door is set in the centre beneath a semi-circular arch of dressed granite, on the keystone of which is deeply cut the date of construction:

J V N I
1 6 0 3

Above the date straggle the letters, L G M M, initials of the forgotten names of the builder of the house and of the woman he married. In the summer weather of 1603 that inscription was cut, and the man and woman doubtless read it with pride and pleasure as they stood looking up at their fine new homestead. They believed it would carry their names down to posterity when they themselves should be gone; yet there stand the initials to-day, while the personalities they represent are as lost to memory as are the builders' graves.

At the moment when this little sketch opens, Les Calais had belonged for three generations to the family of Renouf (pronounced Rennuf), and it is with the closing days of Mr. Louis Renouf that it purposes to deal. But first to complete the description of the house, which is typical of the Islands: hundreds of such homesteads placed singly, or in groups—then sharing in one common name—may be found there in a day's walk, although it must be added that a day's walk almost suffices to explore any one of the Islands from end to end.

Les Calais shares its name with none. It stands alone, completely hidden, save at one point only, by its ancient elms. On either side of the doorway are two windows, each of twelve small panes, and there is a row of five similar windows above. Around the back and sides of the house cluster all sorts of outbuildings, necessary dependencies of a time when men made their own cider and candles, baked their own bread, cut and stacked their own wood, and dried the dung of their herds for extra winter fuel. Beyond these lie its vegetable and fruit gardens, which again are surrounded on every side by its many rich vergées of pasture land.

Would you find Les Calais, take the high road from Jacques-le-Port to the village of St. Gilles, then keep to the left of the schools along a narrow lane cut between high hedges. It is a cart track only, as the deep sun-baked ruts testify, leading direct from St. Gilles to Vauvert, and, likely enough, during the whole of that distance you will not meet with a solitary person. You will see nothing but the green running hedgerows on either hand, the blue-domed sky above, from whence the lark, a black pin-point in the blue, flings down a gush of song; while the thrush you have disturbed lunching off that succulent snail, takes short ground flights before you, at every pause turning back an ireful eye to judge how much farther you intend to pursue him. He is happy if you branch off midway to the left down the lane leading straight to Les Calais.

A gable end of the house faces this lane, and its one window in the days of Louis Renouf looked down upon a dilapidated farm- and stable-yard, the gate of which, turned back upon its hinges, stood wide open to the world. Within might be seen granaries empty of grain, stables where no horses fed, a long cow-house crumbling into ruin, and the broken stone sections of a cider trough dismantled more than half a century back. Cushions of emerald moss studded the thatches, and lilliputian forests of grass blades sprang thick between the cobble stones. The place might have been mistaken for some deserted grange, but for the contradiction conveyed in a bright pewter full-bellied water-can standing near the well, in a pile of firewood, with chopper still stuck in the topmost billet, and in a tatterdemalion troop of barn-door fowl lagging meditatively across the yard.

On a certain day, when summer warmth and unbroken silence brooded over all, and the broad sunshine blent the yellows, reds, and greys of tile and stone, the greens of grass and foliage, into one harmonious whole, a visitor entered the open gate. This was a tall, large young woman, with a fair, smooth, thirty-year-old face. Dressed in what was obviously her Sunday best, although it was neither Sunday nor even market-day, she wore a bonnet diademed with gas-green lilies of the valley, a netted black mantilla, and a velvet-trimmed violet silk gown, which she carefully lifted out of dust's way, thus displaying a stiffly starched petticoat and kid spring-side boots.

Such attire, unbeautiful in itself and incongruous with its surroundings, jarred harshly with the picturesque note of the scene. From being a subject to perpetuate on canvas, it shrunk, as it were, to the background of a cheap photograph, or the stage adjuncts to the heroine of a farce. The silence too was shattered as the new comer's foot fell upon the stones. An unseen dog began to mouth a joyous welcome, and the fowls, lifting their thin, apprehensive faces towards her, flopped into a clumsy run as though their last hour were visible.

The visitor meanwhile turned familiar steps to a door in the wall on the left, and raising the latch, entered the flower garden of Les Calais. This garden, lying to the south, consisted then, and perhaps does still, of two square grass-plots with a broad gravel path running round them and up to the centre of the house.

In marked contrast with the neglect of the farmyard was this exquisitely kept garden, brilliant and fragrant with flowers. From a raised bed in the centre of each plot standard rose-trees shed out gorgeous perfume from chalices of every shade of loveliness, and thousands of white pinks justled shoulder to shoulder in narrow bands cut within the borders of the grass.

Busy over these, his back towards her, was an elderly man, braces hanging, in coloured cotton shirt. “Good afternoon, Tourtel,” cried the lady, advancing. Thus addressed, he straightened himself slowly and turned round. Leaning on his hoe, he shaded his eyes with his hand. “Eh den! it's you, Missis Pedvinn,” said he; “but we didn't expec' you till to-morrow?”

“No, it's true,” said Mrs. Poidevin, “that I wrote I would come Saturday, but Pedvinn expects some friends by the English boat, and wants me to receive them. Yet as they may be staying the week, I did not like to put poor Cousin Louis off so long without a visit, so thought I had better come up to-day.”

Almost unconsciously, her phrases assumed apologetic form. She had an uneasy feeling Tourtel's wife might resent her unexpected advent; although why Mrs. Tourtel should object, or why she herself should stand in any awe of the Tourtels, she could net have explained. Tourtel was but gardener, the wife housekeeper and nurse, to her cousin Louis Renouf, master of Les Calais. “I sha'n't inconvenience Mrs. Tourtel, I hope? Of course I shouldn't think of staying tea if she is busy; I'll just sit an hour with Cousin Louis, and catch the six o'clock omnibus home from Vauvert.”

Tourtel stood looking at her with wooden countenance, in which two small shifting eyes alone gave signs of life. “Eh, but you won't be no inconvenience to de ole woman, ma'am,” said he suddenly, in so loud a voice that Mrs. Poidevin jumped; “only de apple-gôche, dat she was gain' to bake agen your visit, won't be ready, dat's all.”

He turned, and stared up at the front of the house; Mrs. Poidevin, for no reason at all, did so too. Door and windows were open wide. In the upper storey, the white roller-blinds were let down against the sun, and on the broad sills of the parlour windows were nosegays placed in blue china jars. A white trellis-work criss-crossed over the façade, for the support of climbing rose and purple clematis which hung out a curtain of blossom almost concealing the masonry behind. The whole place breathed of peace and beauty, and Louisa Poidevin was lapped round with that pleasant sense of well-being which it was her chief desire in life never to lose. Though poor Cousin Louis—feeble, childish, solitary—was so much to be pitied, at least in his comfortable home and his worthy Tourtels he found compensation.

An instant after Tourtel had spoken, a woman passed across the wide hall. She had on a blue linen skirt, white stockings, and shoes of grey list. The strings of a large, bibbed, lilac apron drew the folds of a flowered bed-jacket about her ample waist; and her thick yellow-grey hair, worn without a cap, was arranged smoothly on either side of a narrow head. She just glanced out, and Mrs. Poidevin was on the point of calling to her, when Tourtel fell into a torrent of words about his flowers. He had so much to say on the subject of horticulture; was so anxious for her to examine the freesia bulbs lying in the tool-house, just separated from the spring plants; he denounced so fiercely the grinding policy of Brehault the middleman, who purchased his garden stuff to resell it at Covent Garden—“my good! on dem freesias I didn't make not two doubles a bunch!”—that for a long quarter of an hour all memory of her cousin was driven from Mrs. Poidevin's brain. Then a voice said at her elbow, “Mr. Rennuf is quite ready to see you, ma'am,” and there stood Tourtel's wife, with pale composed face, square shoulders and hips, and feet that moved noiselessly in her list slippers.

“Ah, Mrs. Tourtel, how do you do?” said the visitor; a question which in the Islands is no mere formula, but demands and obtains a detailed answer, after which the questioner's own health is politely inquired into. Not until this ceremony had been scrupulously accomplished, and the two women were on their way to the house, did Mrs. Poidevin beg to know how things were going with her “poor cousin.”

There lay something at variance between the ruthless, calculating spirit which looked forth from the housekeeper's cold eye, and the extreme suavity of her manner of speech.

“Eh, my good! but much de same, ma'am, in his health, an' more fancies dan ever in his head. First one ting an' den anudder, an' always tinking dat everybody is robbin' him. You rem-ember de larse time you was here, an' Mister Rennuf was abed? Well, den, after you was gone, if he didn't deck-clare you had taken some of de fedders of his bed away wid you. Yes, my good! he tought you had cut a hole in de tick, as you sat dere beside him an' emptied de fedders away into your pocket.”

Mrs. Poidevin was much interested. “Dear me, is it possible?... But it's quite a mania with him. I remember now, on that very day he complained to me Tourtel was wearing his shirts, and wanted me to go in with him to Lepage's to order some new ones.”

“Eh! but what would Tourtel want wid fine white shirts like dem?” said the wife placidly. “But Mr. Louis have such dozens an' dozens of 'em dat dey gets hidden away in de presses, an' he tinks dem stolen.”

They reached the house. The interior is quite as characteristic of the Islands as is the outside. Two steps take you down into the hall, crossing the further end of which is the staircase with its balustrade of carved black oak. Instead of the mean painted sticks, known technically as “raisers,” and connected together at the top by a vulgar mahogany hand-rail—a fundamental article of faith with the modern builder—these old Island balustrades are formed of wooden panels, fretted out into scrolls, representing flower, or leaf, or curious beaked and winged creatures, which go curving, creeping, and ramping along in the direction of the stairs. In every house you will find the detail different, while each resembles all as a whole. For in the old days the workman, were he never so humble, recognised the possession of an individual mind, as well as of two eyes and two hands, and he translated fearlessly this individuality of his into his work. Every house built in those days and existing down to these, is not only a confession, in some sort, of the tastes, the habits, the character, of the man who planned it, but preserves a record likewise of every one of the subordinate minds employed in the various parts.

Off the hall of Les Calais are two rooms on the left and one on the right. The solidity of early seventeenth-century walls is shown in the embrasure depth (measuring fully three feet) of windows and doors. Up to fifty years ago all the windows had leaded casements, as had every similar Island dwelling-house. To-day, to the artist's regret, you will hardly find one. The showy taste of the Second Empire spread from Paris even to these remote parts, and plate-glass, or at least oblong panes, everywhere replaced the mediæval style. In 1854, Louis Renouf, just three and thirty, was about to bring his bride, Miss Marie Mauger, home to the old house. In her honour it was done up throughout, and the diamonded casements were replaced by guillotine windows, six panes to each sash.

The best parlour then became a “drawing-room”; its raftered ceiling was whitewashed, and its great centre-beam of oak infamously papered to match the walls. The newly married couple were not in a position to refurnish in approved Second Empire fashion. The gilt and marble, the console tables and mirrors, the impossibly curved sofas and chairs, were for the moment beyond them; the wife promised herself to acquire these later on. But later on came a brood of sickly children (only one of whom reached manhood); to the consequent expenses Les Calais owed the preservation of its inlaid wardrobes, its four-post bedsteads with slender fluted columns, and its Chippendale parlour chairs, the backs of which simulate a delicious intricacy of twisted ribbons. As a little girl, Louisa Poidevin had often amused herself studying these convolutions, and seeking to puzzle out among the rippling ribbons some beginning or some end; but as she grew up, even the simplest problem lost interest for her, and the sight of the old Chippendale chairs standing along the walls of the large parlour scarcely stirred her bovine mind now to so much as reminiscence.

It was the door of this large parlour that the housekeeper opened as she announced, “Here is Mrs. Pedvinn come to see you, sir,” and followed the visitor in.

Sitting in a capacious “berceuse,” stuffed and chintz-covered, was the shrunken figure of a more than seventy-year-old man. He was wrapped in a worn grey dressing-gown, with a black velvet skull-cap, napless at the seams, covering his spiritless hair, and he looked out upon his narrow world from dim eyes set in cavernous orbits. In their expression was something of the questioning timidity of a child, contrasting curiously with the querulousness of old age, shown in the thin sucked-in lips, now and again twitched by a movement in unison with the twitching of the withered hands spread out upon his knees.

The sunshine, slanting through the low windows, bathed hands and knees, lean shanks and slippered feet, in mote-flecked streams of gold. It bathed anew rafters and ceiling-beam, as it had done at the same hour and season these last three hundred years; it played over the worm-eaten furniture, and lent transitory colour to the faded samplers on the walls, bringing into prominence one particular sampler, which depicted in silks Adam and Eve seated beneath the fatal tree, and recorded the fact that Marie Hochedé was seventeen in 1808 and put her “trust in God”; and the same ray kissed the check of that very Marie's son, who at the time her girlish fingers pricked the canvas belonged to the enviable myriads of the unthought-of and the unborn.

“Why, how cold you are, Cousin Louis,” said Mrs. Poidevin, taking his passive hand between her two warm ones, and feeling a chill strike from it through the violet kid gloves; “and in spite of all this sunshine too!”

“Ah, I'm not always in the sunshine,” said the old man; “not always, not always in the sunshine.” She was not sure that he recognised her, yet he kept hold of her hand and would not let it go.

“No; you are not always in de sunshine, because de sunshine is not always here,” observed Mrs. Tourtel in a reasonable voice, and with a side glance for the visitor.

“And I am not always here either,” he murmured, half to himself. He took a firmer hold of his cousin's hand, and seemed to gain courage from the comfortable touch, for his thin voice changed from complaint to command. “You can go, Mrs. Tourtel,” he said; “we don't require you here. We want to talk. You can go and set the tea-things in the next room. My cousin will stay and drink tea with me.”

“Why, my cert'nly! of course Mrs. Pedvinn will stay tea. P'r'aps you'd like to put your bonnet off in the bedroom, first, ma'am?”

“No, no,” he interposed testily, “she can lay it off here. No need for you to take her upstairs.”

Servant and master exchanged a mute look; for the moment his old eyes were lighted up with the unforeseeing, unveiled triumph of a child; then they fell before hers. She turned, leaving the room with noiseless tread; although a large-built, ponderous woman, she walked with the softness of a cat.

“Sit down here close beside me,” said Louis Renouf to his cousin, “I've something to tell you, something very important to tell you.” He lowered his voice mysteriously, and glanced with apprehension at window and door, squeezing tight her hand. “I'm being robbed, my dear, robbed of everything I possess.”

Mrs. Poidevin, already prepared for such a statement, answered complacently, “Oh, it must be your fancy, Cousin Louis. Mrs. Tourtel takes too good care of you for that.”

“My dear,” he whispered, “silver, linen, everything is going; even my fine white shirts from the shelves of the wardrobe. Yet everything belongs to poor John, who is in Australia, and who never writes to his father now. His last letter is ten years old—ten years old, my dear, and I don't need to read it over, for I know it by heart.”

Tears of weakness gathered in his eyes, and began to trickle over on to his check.

“Oh, Cousin John will write soon, I'm sure,” said Mrs. Poidevin, with easy optimism; “I shouldn't wonder if he has made a fortune, and is on his way home to you at this moment.”

“Ah, he will never make a fortune, my dear, he was always too fond of change. He had excellent capabilities, Louisa, but he was too fond of change.... And yet I often sit and pretend to myself he has made money, and is as proud to be with his poor old father as he used to be when quite a little lad. I plan out all we should do, and all he would say, and just how he would look ... but that's only my make-believe; John will never make money, never. But I'd be glad if he would come back to the old home, though it were without a penny. For if he don't come soon, he'll find no home, and no welcome.... I raised all the money I could when he went away, and now, as you know, my dear, the house and land go to you and Pedvinn.... But I'd like my poor boy to have the silver and linen, and his mother's furniture and needlework to remember us by.”

“Yes, cousin, and he will have them some day, but not for a great while yet, I hope.”

Louis Renouf shook his head, with the immovable obstinacy of the very old or the very young.

“Louisa, mark my words, he will get nothing, nothing. Everything is going. They'll make away with the chairs and the tables next, with the very bed I lie on.”

“Oh, Cousin Louis, you mustn't think such things,” said Mrs. Poidevin serenely; had not the poor old man accused her to the Tourtels of filching his mattress feathers?

“Ah, you don't believe me, my dear,” said he, with a resignation which was pathetic; “but you'll remember my words when I am gone. Six dozen rat-tailed silver forks, with silver candlesticks, and tray, and snuffers. Besides odd pieces, and piles and piles of linen. Your cousin Marie was a notable housekeeper, and everything she bought was of the very best. The large table-cloths were five guineas apiece, my dear, British money—five guineas apiece.”

Louisa listened with perfect calmness and scant attention. Circumstances too comfortable, and a too abundant diet, had gradually undermined with her all perceptive and reflective powers. Though, of course, had the household effects been coming to her as well as the land, she would have felt more interest in them; but it is only human nature to contemplate the possible losses of others with equanimity.

“They must be handsome cloths, cousin,” she said pleasantly; “I'm sure Pedvinn would never allow me half so much for mine.”

At this moment there appeared, framed in the open window, the hideous vision of an animated gargoyle, with elf-locks of flaming red, and an intense malignancy of expression. With a finger dragging down the under eyelid of either eye, so that the eyeball seemed to bulge out—with a finger pulling back either corner of the wide mouth, so that it seemed to touch the ear—this repulsive apparition leered at the old man in blood-curdling fashion. Then catching sight of Mrs. Poidevin, who sat dumfounded, and with her “heart in her mouth,” as she afterwards expressed it, the fingers dropped from the face, the features sprang back into position, and the gargoyle resolved itself into a buxom red-haired girl, who, bursting into a laugh, impudently stuck her tongue out at them before skipping away.

The old man had cowered down in his chair with his hands over his eyes; now he looked up. “I thought it was the old Judy,” he said, “the old Judy she is always telling me about. But it's only Margot.”

“And who is Margot, cousin?” inquired Louisa, still shaken from the surprise.

“She helps in the kitchen. But I don't like her. She pulls faces at me, and jumps out upon me from behind doors. And when the wind blows and the windows rattle she tells me about the old Judy from Jethou, who is sailing over the sea on a broomstick, to come and beat me to death. Do you know, my dear,” he said piteously, “you'll think I'm very silly, but I'm afraid up here by myself all alone? Do not leave me, Louisa; stay with me, or take me back to town with you. Pedvinn would let me have a room in your house, I'm sure? And you wouldn't find me much trouble, and of course I would bring my own bed linen, you know.”

“You had best take your tea first, sir,” said Mrs. Tourtel from outside the window; she held scissors in her hand, and was busy trimming the roses. She offered no excuse for eavesdropping.

The meal was set out, Island fashion, with abundant cakes and sweets. Louisa saw in the silver tea-set another proof, if need be, of her cousin's unfounded suspicions. Mrs. Tourtel stood in the background, waiting. Renouf desired her to pack his things; he was going into town. “To be sure, sir,” she said civilly, and remained where she stood. He brought a clenched hand down upon the table, so that the china rattled. “Are you master here, or am I?” he cried; “I am going down to my cousin Pedvinn's. To-morrow I shall send my notary to put seals on everything, and to take an inventory. For the future I shall live in town.”

His senility had suddenly left him; he spoke with firmness; it was a flash-up of almost extinct fires. Louisa was astounded. Mrs. Tourtel looked at him steadily. Through the partition wall, Tourtel in the kitchen heard the raised voice, and followed his curiosity into the parlour. Margot followed him. Seen near, and with her features at rest, she appeared a plump touzle-headed girl, in whose low forehead and loose-lipped mouth, crassness, cruelty, and sensuality were unmistakably expressed. Yet freckled cheek, rounded chin, and bare red mottled arms, presented the beautiful curves of youth, and there was a certain sort of attractiveness about her not to be gainsaid.

“Since my servants refuse to pack what I require,” said Renouf with dignity, “I will do it myself. Come with me, Louisa.”

At a sign from the housekeeper, Tourtel and Margot made way. Mrs. Poidevin would have followed her cousin, as the easiest thing to do—although she was confused by the old man's outbreak, and incapable of deciding what course she should take—when the deep vindictive baying of the dog ushered a new personage upon the scene.

This was an individual who made his appearance from the kitchen regions—a tall thin man of about thirty years of age, with a pallid skin, a dark eye and a heavy moustache. His shabby black coat and tie, with the cords and gaiters that clothed his legs, suggested a combination of sportsman and family practitioner. He wore a bowler hat, and was pulling off tan driving gloves as he advanced.

“Ah my good! Doctor Owen, but dat's you?” said Mrs. Tourtel. “But we wants you here badly. Your patient is in one of his tantrums, and no one can't do nuddin wid him. He says he shall go right away into town. Wants to make up again wid Doctor Lelever for sure.”

The new comer and Mrs. Poidevin were examining each other with the curiosity one feels on first meeting a person long known by reputation or by sight. But now she turned to the housekeeper in surprise.

“Has my cousin quarrelled with his old friend Doctor Lelever?” she asked. “I've heard nothing of that.”

“Ah, dis long time. He tought Doctor Lelever made too little of his megrims. He won't have nobody but Dr. Owen now. P'r'aps you know Doctor Owen, ma'am? Mrs. Pedvinn, Doctor; de master's cousin, come up to visit him.”

Renouf was heard moving about overhead; opening presses, dragging boxes.

Owen hung up his hat, putting his gloves inside it. He rubbed his lean discoloured hands lightly together, as a fly cleans its forelegs.

“Shall I just step up to him?” he said. “It may calm him, and distract his thoughts.”

With soft nimbleness, in a moment he was upstairs. “So that's Doctor Owen?” observed Mrs. Poidevin with interest. “A splendid-looking gentleman! He must be very clever, I'm sure. Is he beginning to get a good practice yet?”

“Ah, bah, our people, as you know, ma'am, dey don't like no strangers, specially no Englishmen. He was very glad when Mr. Renouf sent for him.... 'Twas through Margot there. She got took bad one Saturday coming back from market from de heat or de squidge” (crowd), “and Doctor Owen he overtook her on the road in his gig, and druv her home. Den de master, he must have a talk with him, and so de next time he fancy hisself ill, he send for Doctor Owen, and since den he don't care for Dr. Lelever no more at all.”

“I ought to be getting off,” remarked Mrs. Poidevin, remembering the hour at which the omnibus left Vauvert; “had I better go up and bid cousin Louis good-bye?”

Mrs. Tourtel thought Margot should go and ask the Doctor's opinion first, but as Margot had already vanished, she went herself.

There was a longish pause, during which Mrs. Poidevin looked uneasily at Tourtel; he with restless furtive eyes at her. Then the housekeeper reappeared, noiseless, cool, determined as ever.

“Mr. Rennuf is quiet now,” she said; “de Doctor have given him a soothing draught, and will stay to see how it acts. He tinks you'd better slip quietly away.”

On this, Louisa Poidevin left Les Calais; but in spite of her easy superficiality, her unreasoning optimism, she took with her a sense of oppression. Cousin Louis's appeal rang in her ears: “Do not leave me; stay with me, or take me back with you. I am afraid up here, quite alone.” And after all, though his fears were but the folly of old age, why, she asked herself, should he not come and stay with them in town if he wished to do so? She resolved to talk it over with Pedvinn; she thought she would arrange for him the little west room, being the furthest from the nurseries; and in planning out such vastly important trifles as to which easy-chair and which bedroom candlestick she would devote to his use, she forgot the old man himself and recovered her usual stolid jocundity.

When Owen had entered the bedroom, he had found Renouf standing over an open portmanteau, into which he was placing hurriedly whatever caught his eye or took his fancy, from the surrounding tables. His hand trembled from eagerness, his pale old face was flushed with excitement and hope. Owen, going straight up to him, put his two hands on his shoulders, and without uttering a word, gently forced him backwards into a chair. Then he sat down in front of him, so close that their knees touched, and fixing his strong eyes on Renouf's wavering ones, and stroking with his finger-tips the muscles behind the ears, he threw him immediately into an hypnotic trance.

“You want to stay here, don't you?” said Owen emphatically. “I want to stay here,” repeated the old man through grey lips. His face was become the colour of ashes, his hands were cold to the sight. “You want your cousin to go away and not disturb you any more? Answer—answer me.” “I want my cousin to go away,” Renouf murmured, but in his staring, fading eye were traces of the struggle tearing him within.

Owen pressed down the eyelids, made another pass before the face, and rose on his long legs with a sardonic grin. Margot, leaning across a corner of the bed, had watched him with breathless interest.

“I b'lieve you're de Evil One himself,” she said admiringly.

Owen pinched her smooth chin between his tobacco-stained thumb and fingers.

“Pooh! nothing but a trick I learned in Paris,” said he; “it's very convenient to be able to put a person to sleep now and again.”

“Could you put any one to sleep?”

“Any one I wanted to.”

“Do it to me then,” she begged him.

“What use, my girl? Don't you do all I wish without?”

She grimaced, and picked at the bed-quilt laughing, then rose and stood in front of him, her round red arms clasped behind her head. But he only glanced at her with professional interest.

“You should get married, my dear, without delay. Pierre would be ready enough, no doubt?”—“Bah! Pierre or annuder—if I brought a weddin' portion. You don't tink to provide me wid one, I s'pose?”—“You know that I can't. But why don't you get it from the Tourtels? You've earned it before this, I dare swear.”

It was now that the housekeeper came up, and took down to Louisa Poidevin the message given above. But first she was detained by Owen, to assist him in getting his patient into bed.

The old man woke up during the process, very peevish, very determined to get to town. “Well, you can't go till to-morrow den,” said Mrs. Tourtel; “your cousin has gone home, an' now you've got to go to sleep, so be quiet.” She dropped all semblance of respect in her tones. “Come, lie down!” she said sharply, “or I'll send Margot to tickle your feet.” He shivered and whimpered into silence beneath the clothes.

“Margot tells him 'bout witches, an ogres, an scrapels her fingures 'long de wall, till he tinks dere goin' to fly 'way wid him,” she explained to Owen in an aside. “Oh, I know Margot,” he answered laconically, and thought, “May I never lie helpless within reach of such fingers as hers.”

He took a step and stumbled over a portmanteau lying open at his feet. “Put your mischievous paws to some use,” he told the girl, “and clear these things away from the floor;” then remembering his rival Le Lièvre; “if the old fool had really got away to town, it would have been a nice day's work for us all,” he added.

Downstairs he joined the Tourtels in the kitchen, a room situated behind the living-room on the left, with low green glass windows, rafters and woodwork smoke-browned with the fires of a dozen generations. In the wooden racks over by the chimney hung flitches of home-cured bacon, and the kettle was suspended by three chains over the centre of the wide hearth, where glowed and crackled an armful of sticks. So dark was the room, in spite of the daylight outside, that two candles were set in the centre of the table, enclosing in their circles of yellow light the pale face and silver hair of the housekeeper, and Tourtel's rugged head and weather-beaten countenance.

He had glasses ready, and a bottle of the cheap brandy for which the Island is famous. “You'll take a drop of something, eh, Doctor?” he said as Owen seated himself on the joncière, a padded settle—green baize covered, to replace the primitive rushes—fitted on one side of the hearth. He stretched his long legs into the light, and for a moment considered moodily the old gaiters and cobbled boots. “You've seen to the horse?” he asked Tourtel.

“My cert'nly; he's in de stable dis hour back, an' I've given him a feed. I tought maybe you'd make a night of it?”

“I may as well for all the work I have to do,” said Owen with sourness; “a damned little Island this for doctors. Nothing ever the matter with anyone except the 'creeps,' and those who have it spend their last penny in making it worse.”

“Dere's as much illness here as anywhere,” said Tourtel, defending the reputation of his native soil, “if once you gets among de right class, among de people as has de time an' de money to make dereselves ill. But if you go foolin' roun' wid de paysans, what can you expec'? We workin' folks can't afford to lay up an' buy ourselves doctors' stuff.”

“And how am I to get among the right class?” retorted Owen, sucking the ends of his moustache into his mouth and chewing them savagely. “A more confounded set of stuck-up, beggarly aristocrats I never met than your people here.” His discontented eye rested on Mrs. Tourtel. “That Mrs. Pedvinn is the wife of Pedvinn the Jurat, I suppose?”—“Yes, de Pedvinns of Rohais.” “Good people,” said Owen thoughtfully; “in with the de Càterelles, and the Dadderney (d'Aldenois) set. Are there children?”—“Tree.”

He took a drink of the spirit and water; his bad temper passed. Margot came in from upstairs.

“De marster sleeps as dough he'd never wake again,” she announced, flinging herself into the chair nearest Owen.

“It's 'bout time he did,” Tourtel growled.

“I should have thought it more to your interest to keep him alive?” Owen inquired. “A good place, surely?”

“A good place if you like to call it so,” the wife answered him; “but what, if he go to town, as he say to-night? and what, if he send de notary, to put de scellés here?—den he take up again wid Dr. Lelever, dat's certain.” And Tourtel added in his surly key, “Anyway, I've been workin' here dese tirty years now, an' dat's 'bout enough.”

“In fact, when the orange is sucked, you throw away the peel? But are you quite sure it is sucked dry?”

“De house an' de lan' go to de Pedvinns, an' all de money die too, for de little he had left when young John went 'crost de seas, he sunk in a 'nuity. Dere's nuddin' but de lining, an' plate, an' such like, as goes to de son.”

“And what he finds of that, I expect, will scarcely add to his impedimenta?” said Owen grinning. He thought, “The old man is well known in the island, the name of his medical attendant would get mentioned in the papers at least; just as well Le Lièvre should not have the advertisement.” Besides, there were the Poidevins.

“You might say a good word for me to Mrs. Pedvinn,” he said aloud, “I live nearer to Rohais than Lelever does, and with young children she might be glad to have some one at hand.”

“You may be sure you won't never find me ungrateful, sir,” answered the housekeeper; and Owen, shading his eyes with his hand, sat pondering over the use of this word “ungrateful,” with its faint yet perceptible emphasis.

Margot, meanwhile, laid the supper; the remains of a rabbit-pie, a big “pinclos” or spider crab, with thin, red knotted legs, spreading far over the edges of the dish, the apple-gôche, hot from the oven, cider, and the now half-empty bottle of brandy. The four sat down and fell to. Margot was in boisterous spirits; everything she said or did was meant to attract Owen's attention. Her cheeks flamed with excitement; she wanted his eyes to be perpetually upon her. But Owen's interest in her had long ceased. To-night, while eating heartily, he was absorbed in his ruling passion: to get on in the world, to make money, to be admitted into Island society. Behind the pallid, impenetrable mask, which always enraged yet intimidated Margot, he plotted incessantly, schemed, combined, weighed this and that, studied his prospects from every point of view.

Supper over, he lighted his meerschaum; Tourtel produced a short clay, and the bottle was passed between them. The women left them together, and for ten, twenty minutes, there was complete silence in the room. Tourtel let his pipe go out, and rapped it down brusquely upon the table.

“It must come to an end,” he said, with suppressed ferocity; “are we eider to spen' de whole of our lives here, or else be turned off at de eleventh hour after sufferin' all de heat an' burden of de day? Its onreasonable. An' dere's de cottage at Cottu standin' empty, an' me havin' to pay a man to look after de tomato houses, when I could get fifty per cent. more by lookin' after dem myself.... An' what profit is such a sickly, shiftless life as dat? My good! dere's not a man, woman, or chile in de Islan's as will shed a tear when he goes, an' dere's some, I tells you, as have suffered from his whimsies dese tirty years, as will rejoice. Why, his wife was dead already when we come here, an' his on'y son, a dirty, drunken, lazy vaurien too, has never been near him for fifteen years, nor written neider. Dead most likely, in foreign parts.... An' what's he want to stay for, contraryin' an' thwartin' dem as have sweated an' laboured, an' now, please de good God, wan's to sit 'neath de shadow of dere own fig-tree for de short time dat remains to dem?... An' what do we get for stayin'? Forty pound, Island money, between de two of us, an' de little I makes from de flowers, an' poultry, an' such like. An' what do we do for it? Bake, an' wash, an' clean, an' cook, an' keep de garden in order, an' nuss him in all his tantrums.... If we was even on his testament, I'd say nuddin. But everything goes to Pedvinns, an' de son John, and de little bit of income dies wid him. I tell you 'tis 'bout time dis came to an end.”

Owen recognised that Destiny asked no sin more heinous from him than silence, perhaps concealment; the chestnuts would reach him without risk of burning his hand. “It's time,” said he, “I thought of going home. Get your lantern, and I'll help you with the trap. But first, I'll just run up and have another look at Mr. Rennuf.”

For the last time the five personages of this obscure little tragedy found themselves together in the bedroom, now lighted by a small lamp which stood on the wash-hand-stand. Owen, who had to stoop to enter the door, could have touched the low-pitched ceiling with his hand. The bed, with its slender pillars, supporting a canopy of faded damask, took up the greater part of the room. There was a fluted headpiece of the damask, and long curtains of the same material, looped up, on either side of the pillows. Sunken in these lay the head of the old man, crowned with a cotton nightcap, the eyes closed, the skin drawn tight over the skull, the outline of the attenuated form indistinguishable beneath the clothes. The arms lay outside the counterpane, straight down on either side; and the mechanical playing movement of the fingers showed he was not asleep. Margot and Mrs. Tourtel watched him from the bed's foot. Their gigantic shadows thrown forward by the lamp, stretched up the opposite wall, and covered half the ceiling. The old-fashioned mahogany furniture, with its fillets of paler wood, drawn in ovals, upon the doors of the presses, their centrepieces of fruit and flowers, shone out here and there with reflected light; and the looking-glass, swung on corkscrew mahogany pillars between the damask window curtains, gleamed lake-like amidst the gloom.

Owen and Tourtel joined the women at the bedfoot; though each was absorbed entirely in his own egotisms, all were animated by the same secret desire. Yet, to the feeling heart, there was something unspeakably pleading in the sight of the old man lying there, in his helplessness, in the very room, on the very bed, which had seen his wedding-night fifty years before; where as a much-wished-for and welcomed infant, he had opened his eyes to the light more than seventy years since. He had been helpless then as now, but then the child had been held to loving hearts, loving fingers had tended him, a young and loving mother lay beside him, the circumference of all his tiny world, as he was the core and centre of all of hers. And from being that exquisite, well-beloved little child, he had passed thoughtlessly, hopefully, despairfully, wearily, through all the stages of life, until he had come to this—a poor, old, feeble, helpless, worn-out man, lying there where he had been born, but with all those who had loved him carried long ago to the grave: with the few who might have protected him still, his son, his cousin, his old friend Le Lièvre, as powerless to save him as the silent dead.

Renouf opened his eyes, looked in turn at the four faces before him, and read as much pity in them as in masks of stone. He turned himself to the pillow again and to his miserable thoughts.

Owen took out his watch, went round to count the pulse, and in the hush the tick of the big silver timepiece could be heard.

“There is extreme weakness,” came his quiet verdict.

“Sinking?” whispered Tourtel loudly.

“No; care and constant nourishment are all that are required; strong beef-tea, port wine jelly, cream beaten up with a little brandy at short intervals, every hour say. And of course no excitement; nothing to irritate, or alarm him” (Owen's eye met Margot's); “absolute quiet and rest.” He came back to the foot of the bed and spoke in a lower tone. “It's just one of the usual cases of senile decay,” said he, “which I observe every one comes to here in the Islands (unless he has previously killed himself by drink), the results of breeding in. But Mr. Renouf may last months, years longer. In fact, if you follow out my directions there is every probability that he will.”

Tourtel and his wife shifted their gaze from Owen to look into each other's eyes; Margot's loose mouth lapsed into a smile. Owen felt cold water running down his back. The atmosphere of the room seemed to stifle him; reminiscences of his student days crowded on him: the horror of an unperverted mind, at its first spectacle of cruelty, again seized hold of him, as though no twelve callous years were wedged in between. At all costs he must get out into the open air.

He turned to go. Louis Renouf opened his eyes, followed the form making its way to the door, and understood. “You won't leave me, doctor? surely you won't leave me?” came the last words of piercing entreaty.

The man felt his nerve going all to pieces.

“Come, come, my good sir, do you think I am going to stay here all night?” he answered brutally.... Outside the door, Tourtel touched his sleeve. “And suppose your directions are not carried out?” said he in his thick whisper.

Owen gave no spoken answer, but Tourtel was satisfied. “I'll come an' put the horse in,” he said, leading the way through the kitchen to the stables. Owen drove off with a parting curse and cut with the whip because the horse slipped upon the stones. A long ray of light from Tourtel's lantern followed him down the lane. When he turned out on to the high road to St. Gilles, he reined in a moment, to look back at Les Calais. This is the one point from which a portion of the house is visible, and he could see the lighted window of the old man's bedroom plainly through the trees.

What was happening there? he asked himself; and the Tourtel's cupidity and callousness, Margot's coarse cruel tricks, rose before him with appalling distinctness. Yet the price was in his hand, the first step of the ladder gained; he saw himself to-morrow, perhaps in the drawing-room of Rohais, paying the necessary visit of intimation and condolence. He felt he had already won Mrs. Poidevin's favour. Among women, always poor physiognomists, he knew he passed for a handsome man; among the Islanders, the assurance of his address would pass for good breeding; all he had lacked hitherto was the opportunity to shine. This his acquaintance with Mrs. Poidevin would secure him. And he had trampled on his conscience so often before, it had now little elasticity left. Just an extra glass of brandy to-morrow, and to-day would be as securely laid as those other episodes of his past.

While he watched, some one shifted the lamp ... a woman's shadow was thrown upon the white blind ... it wavered, grew monstrous, and spread, until the whole window was shrouded in gloom.... Owen put the horse into a gallop ... and from up at Les Calais, the long-drawn melancholy howling of the dog filled with forebodings the silent night.

The Lamplighter

By A. S. Hartrick

The Composer of “Carmen”

By Charles Willeby

What little has been written about poor Bizet is not the sort to satisfy. The men who have told of him cannot have written with their best pen. Even those who, one can see, have started well, albeit impelled rather than inspired by a profound admiration for the artist and the man, have fallen all too short of the mark, and ultimately drifted into the dullest of all dull things—the compilation of mere dates and doings. I know of no pamphlet devoted to him in this country. He was much misunderstood in life; he has been, I think, as much sinned against in death. The symbol of posthumous appreciation which asserts itself to the visitor to Père Lachaise, is exponential of compliment only when reckoned by avoirdupois. Neglected in life, they have in death weighed him down with an edifice that would have been obnoxious to every instinct in his sprightly soul—a memorial befitting perhaps to such an one as Johannes Brahms, but repugnant as a memento of the spirit that created “Carmen.” It is an emblem of French formalism in its most determined aspect. And in truth—as Sainte-Beuve said of the Abbé Galiani—“they owed to him an honourable, choice, and purely delicate burial; urna brevis, a little urn which should not be larger than he.” The previous inappreciation of his genius has given place to posthumous laudation, zealous indeed, but so indiscriminating as to be vulgar. Like many another man, he had to take “a thrashing from life”; and although he stood up to it unflinchingly, it was only in his death certificate that he acquired passport to fame.

Just eighteen years before it was that Bizet had written from Rome: “We are indeed sad, for there come to us the tidings of the death of Léon Benouville. Really, one works oneself half crazy to gain this Prix de Rome; then comes the huge struggle for position; and after all, perchance to end by dying at thirty-eight! Truly, the picture is the reverse of encouraging.” Here was his own destiny, nu comme la main, save that the fates begrudged him even the thirty-eight years of his brother artist—called him when he could not but

"contrast
The petty done—the undone vast."

But his early life was not unhappy. He had no pitiful struggle with poverty in childhood, at all events. Some tell us he was precocious—terribly so; but I had rather take my cue from his own words, “Je ne me suis donné qu'à contre-cœur à la musique,” than dwell upon his precocity, real or fictional. It was only hereditarily consistent that he should have a musical organisation. His father was a teacher of music, not without repute; his mother was a sister of François Delsarte, who, although unknown to Grove, has two columns and more devoted to him by Fetis, by whom he is described as an “artiste un peu étrange, quoique d'un mérite incontestable, doué de facultés très diverses et de toutes les qualités nécessaires à l'enseignement.” What there was of music in their son the parents sought to encourage assiduously, and Bizet himself has shown us in his work, more clearly than aught else could, that the true dramatic sense was innate in him. And that he loved his literature too, was well proved by a glance at the little appartement in the Rue de Douai, which he continued to occupy until well-nigh the end.

In 1849—he was just over his tenth year—Delsarte took him to Marmontel of the Conservatoire. “Without being in any sense of the word a prodigy,” says the old pianoforte master, “he played his Mozart with an unusual amount of taste. From the moment I heard him I recognised his individuality, and I made it my object to preserve it.” Then Zimmerman, with whom l'enseignement was a disease, heard of him and sought him for pupil. But Zimmerman seems to have tired of him as he tired of so many and ended by passing him on to Gounod. From entry to exit—an interval of eight years—Bizet's academic career was a series of premiers et deuxièmes prix. They were to him but so many stepping-stones to the coveted Grand Prix de Rome. He longed to secure this—to fly the crowded town and seek the secluded shelter of the Villa Medici. And in the end he had his way. In effect, he commenced to live only after he had taken up his abode on the little Pincian Hill. Even there life was a trifle close to him, and some time passed before he really fixed his focus.

In Italy, more than in any other part of the world, the life of the present rests upon the strata of successive past lives. And although Bizet was no student, carrying in his knapsack a superfluity of culture, this place appealed to him from the moment that he came to it, and the memory of it lingered long in after days.

The villa itself was a revelation to him. The masterpiece of Renaissance façade over which the artist would seem to have exhausted a veritable mine of Greek and Roman bas-reliefs; the garden with its lawns surrounded by hedges breast-high, trimmed to the evenness of a stone-wall; the green alleys overshadowed by ilex trees; the marble statues looking forlornly regretful at Time's defacing treatment; the terrace with its oaks gnarled and twisted with age; the fountains; the roses; the flower-beds; and in the distance, “over the dumb Campagna-sea,” the hills melting into light under the evening sky—all these made an intaglio upon him such as was not readily to be effaced, and which he learned to love. Perhaps because, after all, Italy is even more the land of beauty than of what is venerable in art, he did not feel the want of what Mr. Symonds calls the “mythopœic sense.” It is a land ever young, in spite of age. Its monuments, assertive as they are, so blend with the landscape, are so in harmony with the surroundings, that the yawning gulf of years that would separate us from them is made to vanish, and they come to live with us.

And the place was teeming with tradition. From the time, 1540, when it had been designed by Hannibal Lippi for Cardinal Ricci, passing thence into the hands of Alexandro de' Medici, and later into those of Leo XI., it had been the home of art; and then, on its acquisition by the French Academy in 1804, it became the home of artists. Here had lived and worked and dreamed David, Ingres, Delaroche, Vernet, Hérold, Benoist, Halévy, Berlioz, Thomas, Gounod, and the minor host of them. In truth the list awed Bizet not a little, and had he needed an incentive here it was. For the rest, he was supremely content. As a pensionnaire of the Academy he had two hundred francs a month, and he apportioned them in this wise: Nourriture, 75fr.; vin, 25fr.; retenue, 25fr.; location de piano, 15fr.; blanchissage, 5fr.; bois, chandelles, timbre-poste, &c., 10fr.; gants, 5fr.; perte sur le change de la monnaie, 5fr. Even then he wrote: “I have more than thirty francs pour faire le grand garçon.” In another letter he says: “I seem to cling to Rome more than ever. The longer I know it, the more I love it. Everything is so beautiful. Each street—even the filthiest of them—has its own charm for me. And perhaps what is most astonishing of all, is that those very things which startled me most on my arrival, have now become a part of and necessary to my very existence—the madonnas with their little lamps at every corner; the linen hanging out to dry from the windows; the very refuse of the streets; the beggars—all these things really divert me, and I should cry out if so much as a dung-heap were removed.... More too, every day, do I pity those imbeciles who have not been more fully able to appreciate their good fortune in being pensionnaires of the Academy. But then one cannot help observing that they are the very ones who have achieved nothing. Halévy, Thomas, Gounod, Berlioz, Massé—they all loved and adored their Rome.”

Then on the last day of the same year: “I seem to incline more definitely towards the theatre, for I feel a certain sense of drama, which, if I possessed it, I knew not of till now. So I hope for the best. But that is not all. Hitherto I have vacillated between Mozart and Beethoven, between Rossini and Meyerbeer, and suddenly I know upon what, upon whom to fix my faith. To me there are two distinct kinds of genius: the inspirational and the purely rational, I mean the genius of nature and the genius of erudition; and whilst I have an immense admiration for the second, I cannot deny that the first has all my sympathies. So, mon cher, I have the courage to prefer, and to say I prefer, Raphael to Michael Angelo, Mozart to Beethoven, Rossini to Meyerbeer, which is, I suppose, much the same as saying that if I had heard Rubini I would have preferred him to Duprez. Do not think for a moment that I place one above the other—that would be absurd. All I maintain is that the matter is one of taste, and that the one exercises upon my nature a stronger influence than does the other. When I hear the 'Symphonie Héroïque,' or the fourth act of the 'Huguenots,' I am spell-bound, aghast as it were; I have not eyes, ears, intelligence, enough even to admire. But when I see 'L'École D'Athènes,' or 'La Vierge de Foligno,' when I hear 'Les Noces de Figaro,' or the second act of 'Guillaume Tell,' I am completely happy; I experience a sense of comfort, a complete satisfaction: in effect, I forget everything.”

This, then, is what Rome did for Bizet; but, be it said, for Bizet très jeune encore. For a time the result is patent in his work, but afterwards there comes, although no revulsion, a distinct variation of feeling, which has in it something of compromise. The genius innate in him was inspirational before it was—if it ever was—erudite. Even in his later days there was for him no cowering before his culture. In 1867 he wrote in the Revue Nationale—the only critique, by the way, he ever wrote—under the pseudonym of Gaston de Betzi: “The artist has no name, no nationality. He is inspired or he is not. He has genius or he has not. If he has, we welcome him; if he has not, we can at most respect him, if we do not pity and forget him.”

He was the same in all things: “I have no comrades,” he said, “only friends.” And there is one sentence that he wrote from Rome that might well be held up to the gamins of the French Conservatoire. “Je ne veux rien faire de chic; je veux avoir des idées avant de commencer un morceau.”

In August of his second year Bizet left Rome on a visit to Naples. He carried a letter to Mercadente. On his return good news and bad awaited him. Ernest Guiraud, his good friend and quondam fellow-student in the class of Marmontel, has just been proclaimed Prix de Rome. And this at the very moment Bizet was to leave the Villa; for the Academy would have it that their musical pensionnaires should pass the third year in Germany. The prospect was entirely repugnant to Bizet. So he went to work against it, directing his energies in the first place against Schnetz, “the dear old director” as they called him. Schnetz, owning to a soft spot for his young pensionnaire, was overcome, and through him I fancy the powers that were in Paris. However, Bizet was permitted to remain in his beloved Rome. Delighted, he wrote off to Marmontel: “I am daily expecting Guiraud, and words cannot express how glad I shall be to see him. Would you believe it, it is two years since I have spoken with an intelligent musician? My colleague Z—— bores me frightfully. He speaks to me of Donizetti, of Fesca even, and I reply to him with Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Gounod.”

This last year spent with Guiraud was perhaps the happiest of his life. At the close of it the two set off together on a ramble through the land, with fancy for their only guide. They had got so far as Venice when news of his mother's dangerous illness called Bizet to her side. He arrived in time to say farewell, and he never returned to Italy.

Of work done at the Villa, “Vasco de Gama” is the only tangible sample; “but I have not wasted my time,” he wrote, “I have read a good many volumes of history, and ever so much more literature of all kinds. I have travelled, I have learned something of the history of art, and I really am a bit of a connoisseur in painting and sculpture. All I want now, on my return, are trois jolis actes for the Théâtre Lyrique.”

And shortly we find him in full swing with “Les Pêcheurs des Perles.” It was produced on the 30th September of 1863, and had some eighteen representations. “La Jolie Fille de Perth,” which followed it four years later, had, I think, twenty-one. In between these two works, we are told, Bizet, in a fit of violent admiration for Verdi, strove to emulate him in an opera entitled “Ivan le Terrible.” It is said to have been completed and handed to the management of the Théâtre Lyrique. Then Bizet, recognising as suddenly that he had made a mistake, withdrew the score and burned it.

M. Charles Pigot, who is chiefly responsible for this story, goes on to say that the libretto was the work of MM. Louis Gallet and Edouard Blau. But in that he is not correct, for Gallet himself tells us that he knew Bizet only ever so slightly at the time, and that neither to him nor to Blau is due a single line of this “Ivan.”

Then there were “Griselidis,” of which, in a letter dated February of 1871, Bizet speaks as très avancée; “Clarisse Harlowe”; and the “Calendal” of M. Sardou, to each of which he referred in the same year as à peine commencée. There was also an opera in one act written by M. Carvalho, and actually put into rehearsal at the Opéra Comique. But none of these saw the light, and I have little doubt they all met their fate on a certain eventful day, shortly before he died, when Bizet remorselessly destroyed a whole pile of manuscript. And in truth these early works had little value of themselves. They were but so many rungs of the ladder by which he climbed to the heights of “Djamileh,” of “L'Arlésienne,” and of “Carmen.” No musician ever took longer to know himself than did Georges Bizet. His period of hesitation, of vacillation, was unduly protracted. For why, it is hard to tell; but one cannot help feeling that the terrible lutte pour la vie had a deal to do with it. Those early years in Paris were very hard ones. “Believe me,” he wrote from le Vésinet (always a favourite spot with him), “believe me, it is exasperating to have one's work interrupted for days to write solos de piston. But what would you? I must live. I have just rushed off at a gallop half-a-dozen melodies for Heugel. I trust you may like them. At least I have carefully chosen the verses. ... My opera and my symphony are both of them en train. But when, oh when, shall I finish them? Yet I do nothing but work, and I come only once a week to Paris. Here I am well out of the way of all flaneurs, raseurs, diseurs de riens, du monde enfin, hélas.” Then a few days later: “I am completely prostrate with fatigue. I can do nothing. I have even been obliged to give up orchestrating my symphony; and now I feel it will be too late for this winter. I am going to lie down, for I have not slept for three nights, and all seems so dark to me. To-morrow, too, I have la musique gaie to write.”

Just then time was pressing him hard. He was under contract to produce “La Jolie Fille de Perth” by the end of the year, and he was already well into October. It became a matter of fifteen and sixteen hours work a day; for there were lessons to be given, proofs to be corrected, piano transcriptions to be made, and the rest. And, truth to tell, he was terribly lacking in method. He was choke-full of ideas, he was indeed borne along by a very torrent of them; and if only he could have stopped to collect himself it would have been well for him. But no; before he realised it, “La Jolie Fille” was finished and in rehearsal. Then for the time he was able to put enough distance between himself and his work to value it. And it seems to have pleased him. “The final rehearsal,” he writes to Galabert (by this time his confidant in most things), “has produced a great effect. The piece is really highly interesting, the interpretation is excellent, and the costumes are splendid. The scenery is new and the orchestra and the artists are full of enthusiasm. But more than all this, cher ami, the score of 'La Jolie Fille' is une bonne chose. The orchestra lends to all a colour and relief for which, I confess, I never dared to hope. I think I have arrived this time. Now, il faut monter, monter, monter, toujours.”

Shortly after this he married Geneviève Halévy, the daughter of the composer of “La Juive,” and lived almost exclusively at le Vésinet. There, at 8, Rue des Cultures, a rustic place enough, one might find Georges Bizet, seated in his favourite corner of the lovely garden, en chapeau de canotier, smoking his pipe and chatting to his friends. It had been the home of Jacques Halévy, and Bizet had been wont to do his courting there. Now the old man was no more, and in the long summer days, the daughter and the son—for Halévy had been as a father to Bizet—missed sorely the familiar figure hard at work with rake or hoe at his beloved flower-beds. They were the passion of his later days, and they well repaid his care. Even in the middle of a lesson—and he taught up to well-nigh the last weeks of his life—would he rush out to uproot a noxious weed that might chance to catch his eye. “How well I remember my first day there,” says Louis Gallet. "The war was not long finished, and the traces of it were with us yet. True, Paris had resumed her lovely girdle of green; but beneath this verdure reflected in the tardy waters of the Seine, there was enough still to tell the terrible tale of ruin. One could not go to Pecq or le Vésinet without some difficulty. Bizet, to save me trouble, had taken care to meet me at Rueil, whence we made for the little place where he was staying for the summer. The day was lovely, and 'Djamileh' made great strides as we talked and paced the pretty garden walks. This habit of discussing while walking, what was uppermost in his mind, was always, to me, a powerful characteristic of Georges Bizet. I do not remember any important discussion between us that did not take place during a stroll, or at all events whilst walking, if only to and from his study. We talked long that afternoon—of the influence of Wagner on the future of musical art, of the reception in store for 'Djamileh,' both by the public and by the Opéra Comique itself. This latter, indeed, was no light matter. The Direction was then undertaken by two parties: that of Du Locle, tending towards advancement in every form; that of De Leuven, clinging with all the force of tradition to the past.

"Then in the evening nothing would do but Bizet should see me well on my way to Paris. The bridges were not yet restored. So we set off on foot, in company with Madame Bizet, to find the ferry-boat. How delicious was that walk by the little islets in the cool of the twilight; along the towing-path so narrow and overrun with growth that we were obliged to proceed in Indian file. And how merry we were, until perchance we stumbled on the fragment of a shell lying hidden in the grass, or came face to face with some majestic tree, still smarting from its wounds, when there would rise before us in all its vividness the terrible scene so recently enacted on that spot. Then we talked of the war and all its sorrows; and we tried to descry there on the right, in the shade of Mount Valerien, the spot where Henri Regnault fell.

“At length we found the ferry, and reached the other bank. There at the end of the path we could see the lights of the station; so we separated. And although I made many after visits, none remained so firmly fixed in my memory, or left me so happy an impression as did this, my first to Bizet's summer home.”

During the siege itself, he had been forced to remain in Paris. But it was much against his will, and he seems to have chafed sorely at it. Yet it is difficult to picture Bizet bellicose. “Dear friend,” he writes to Guiraud, who was stationed at some outpost, “the description you give of the palace you are living in makes us all believe that luck is with you. But every day we think of the cold, the damp, the ice, the Prussians, and all the other horrors that surround you. As for me, I continue to reproach myself with my inaction, for in truth my conscience is anything but at rest; but you know well what keeps me here. We really cannot be said to eat any longer. Suzanne has just brought in some horse bones, which I believe are to form our meal. Geneviève dreams nightly of chickens and lobsters.”

Not till the following year, during the days of the Commune, do we find him at le Vésinet. Then he writes (also to Guiraud): “Here we are without half our things, without our books, without anything in fact, and absolutely there are no means of getting into Paris.... So, dear friend, if you have any news, do, I pray you, let us have it. I read the Versailles papers, but they tell their wretched readers (and expect them to believe it) that France is 'très tranquille,' Paris alone excepted (sic). The day before yesterday was anything but tranquil. For twelve hours there was nothing but a continuous cannonade.... But we are safe enough, for although the Prussian patrols continue to increase in number we are not inconvenienced by them, and they will not, in all probability, occupy le Vésinet. But it seems quite impossible to say how all this is going to end. I am absolutely discouraged, and what is more, I fear, dear friend, there is worse trouble ahead of us. I am off now to the village to look at a piano; I must work and try to forget it all.”

He finished “Djamileh” at le Vésinet. It was produced at the Opéra Comique in May of 1872. Gallet tells us that he did not write the book specially for Bizet. Under the title of “Namouna,” it had been given by M. du Locle to Jules Duprato, a musician and a “prix de Rome.” But Duprato paressait agréablement, and never got much further with it than the composition of a certain air de danse to the verses commencing: “Indolente, grave et lente,” which are to be found also in Bizet's score. Then there came a time when the Opéra Comique, truly one of the most good-natured of institutions in its own peculiar way, so far belied its reputation as to tire of this idling on the part of M. Duprato. So the work passed on to Bizet. He suggested change of title, and “Namouna” became “Djamileh.” But it remained nevertheless the poem of Musset.

"Je vous dirais qu' Hassan racheta Namouna
* * * * *
Qu'on reconnut trop tard cette tête adorée
Et cette douce nuit qu'elle avait espérée
Que pour prix de ses maux le ciel la lui donna.

Je vous dirais surtout qu' Hassan dans cette affaire
Sentit que tôt ou tard la femme avait son tour
Et que l'amour de soi ne vaut pas l'autre amour."

There you have the whole story. It is but an état d'âme—a little love scene, simple enough in a way, yet so delicate and so full of colour. It was a matter of “atmosphere,” not of structure, a masterpiece of style rather than of situation; and from its first rehearsal as an opera it was doomed. In truth, these rehearsals were amusing. There was old Avocat—they used to call him Victor—the typical régisseur of tradition; a man who could tell of the premières of “Pré-aux-Clercs” and “La Dame Blanche,” and, what is more, expected to be asked to tell of them. From his corner in the wings he listened to the music of this “Djamileh,” his face expressive of a pity far too keen for words. But it was a matter of minutes only before his pity turned to rage, and eventually he stumped off to his sanctum, banging his door behind him with a vehemence that augured badly for poor Bizet. As for De Leuven, his co-director: had he not written. “Postillon de Lonjumeau”? and was it not the most successful work of Boiledieu's successor? The fact had altered his whole life. Ever after, all he sought in opera was some similarity with Le Postillon. And there was nothing of Adam in this music, still less anything of De Leuven in the poem. That was sufficient for him. “Allons,” said he one day to Gallet, who arrived at rehearsal just as Djamileh was about to sing her lamento: “allons, vous arrivez pour le De Profundis.”

As for the public, they understood it not at all, this charming miniature. “C'est indigne,” cried one; “c'est odieux,” from another; “c'est très drôle,” said a third. “Quelle cacophonie, quelle audace, c'est se moquer du monde. Voilà, où mène le culte de Wagner à la folie. Ni tonalité, ni mesure, ni rythme; ce n'est plus de la musique,” and the rest. The press itself was no better, no whit more rational. Yet this “Djamileh” was rich in premonition of those very qualities that go to make “Carmen” the immortal work it is. It so glows with true Oriental colour, is so saturate with the true Eastern spirit, as to make us wonder for the moment—as did Mr. Henry James about Théophile Gautier—whether the natural attitude of the man was not to recline in the perfumed dusk of a Turkish divan, puffing a chibouque. Here the tints are stronger, mellower, and more carefully laid on than in “Les Pêcheurs des Perles.” There is, too, all the bizarrerie, as well as all the sensuousness of the East. Yet there is no obliteration of the human element for sake of the picturesque. Wagnerism was the cry raised against it on all sides; yet, if it be anything but Bizet, it is surely Schumann. It was, in effect, all too good for the public—too fine for their vulgar gaze, their indiscriminating comment. And Reyer, farseeing amongst his fellows, spoke truth when he said in the Débats: “I feel sure that if M. Bizet knows that his work has been appreciated by a small number of musicians—being cognoscenti—he will be more proud of that fact than he would be of a popular success. 'Djamileh,' whatever be its fortunes, heralds a new epoch in the career of this young master.”

Then came “L'Arlésienne,” as all the world knows, a dismal failure enough. It was to Bizet a true labour of love. From the day that Carvalho came to him proposing that he should add des mélodrames to this tale of fair Provence, to the day of its production some four months later, he was absorbed in it. The score as it now stands represents about half the music that he wrote. The prelude to the third act of “Carmen,” and the chorus, “Quant aux douaniers,” both belonged originally to “L'Arlésienne,” The rest was blue pencilled at rehearsal. And of all the care he lavished on it, perhaps the finest, certainly the fondest, was given to his orchestra. Every instrument is ministered to with loving care. Luckily for him, fortunately too for us, he knew not then what sort of lot awaited this scrupulous score of his. He knew he wrote for Carvalho—for the Vaudeville; but that was all. And they gave him twenty-five musicians—a couple of flutes and an oboe (this latter to do duty too for the cor-anglais); one clarinet, a couple of bassoons, a saxophone, two horns, a kettle-drum, seven violins, one solitary alto, five celli, two bass, and his choice of one other. The poor fellow chose a piano; but they never saw the irony of it. All credit to his little band, they did their best. But the most that they could do was to cull the tunes from out his score. The consolation that we have is, that, so far as the piece as a piece is concerned, no orchestra in the world could have saved it. It was doomed to failure for all sorts of reasons. Daudet himself goes very near the mark when he says that “it was unreasonable to suppose that in the middle of the boulevard, in that coquettish corner of the Chaussée d'Antin, right in the pathway of the fashions, the whims of the hour, the flashing and changing vortex of all Paris, people could be interested in this drama of love taking place in the farmyard in the plain of Camargue, full of the odour of well-plenished granaries and lavender in flower. It was a splendid failure; clothed in the prettiest music possible, with costumes of silk and velvet in the centre of comic opera scenery.” Then he goes on to tell us: “I came away discouraged and sickened, the silly laughter with which the emotional scenes were greeted still ringing in my ears; and without attempting to defend myself in the papers, where on all sides the attack was led against this play, wanting in surprises—this painting in three acts of manners and events of which I alone could appreciate the absolute fidelity. I resolved to write no more plays, and heaped one upon the other all the hostile notices as a rampart around my determination.”

At this time Bizet seems to have come a good deal into contact with Jean Baptiste Faure. They met frequently at the Opéra. “You really must do something more for Bizet,” said the baritone to Louis Gallet. “Put your heads together, you and Blau, and write something that shall be bien pour moi.” “Lorenzaccio,” perhaps the strongest of De Musset's dramatic efforts, first came up. But Faure was not at all in touch with it. The rôle of Brutus—fawning Judas that he is—revolted him. He had no fancy to distort as menteur à triple étage; so the subject was put by. Then came Bizet one morning with an old issue of Le Journal pour tous in his pocket. “Here is the very thing for us: 'Le Jeunesse du Cid' of Guilhem de Castro; not, mark you, the Cid of Corneille alone, but the inceptive Cid in all the glory of its pristine colour—the Cid, Don Rodrigue de Bivar, in the words of Sainte-Beuve 'the immortal flower of honour and of love.'” The scène du mendiant held Bizet completely. It was to him simple, touching, and great. It showed Don Rodrigue in a new light. Those—and there were many of them—who had already cast their choice upon this legend, had recognised—but recognised merely—in their hero, the son prepared to sacrifice his love for filial duty, and to yield his life for love. But they had not seen in him the Christian, the true and godly soul, the Good Samaritan that De Castro represents. The scene of Rodrigue with the leper, disdained and done away with by Corneille, with which De Castro too was so reproached, was full of attraction for Bizet. His whole interest centred round it. He was impatient and hungered to get at it; and “Carmen,” on which he was already well at work, was even laid aside the while. Faure, too, had expressed a sound approval and a hearty interest, and this alone meant much. So Bizet once again was full of hope. There follows a long and detailed correspondence on the subject with Gallet, with which I have not space to deal; but it shows up splendidly the extreme nicety of the musician's dramatic sense.

In the summer of 1873 “Don Rodrigue” was really finished, and one evening Bizet called his friends to come and listen. Around the piano were Edouard Blau, Louis Gallet, and Jean Faure. Bizet had his score before him—to common gaze a skeleton thing enough, for of “accompaniment” there was but little. But to its creator it was well alive, and he sang—in the poorest possible voice, it is true—the whole thing through from beginning to end. Chorus, soprano, tenor, bass, yea, even the choicer “bits” for orchestra—all came alike to him; all were infused with life from the spirit that created them. It was long past midnight when he ceased, and then they sat and talked till dawn. All were enthusiastic, and in the opinion of Faure (given three years later) this score was more than the equal of “Carmen.” His word is all we have for it, but it carries with it something of conviction. He was no bad judge of a work. Anyway, no sooner had he heard it than he set about securing its speedy production at the Opéra. And he succeeded in so far that it was put down early on the list. But Fate had yet to be reckoned with. She was not thus to be baulked of her prey: she had dogged the footsteps of poor Bizet far too zealously for that; and on the 28th October (less than a week after he had put finis to his work), she stepped in. On that day the Opéra was burned down.

As for the score, it was laid aside, and of its ultimate lot we are in ignorance. Inquiry on the part of Gallet seems to have elicited nothing more definite than a courteous letter from M. Ludovic Halévy, to the effect that he was quite free to dispose of the book to another composer. “It was George's favourite,” wrote his brother-in-law, “and he had great hopes for it; but it was not to be.”

Perhaps of all his powers Bizet's greatest was that of recuperation. It would be wrong to say he did not know defeat; he knew it all too well, but he never let it get the better of him. He was never without his irons upon the fire, never without a project to fall back upon. And perhaps it is not too much to say that he had no life outside his art. This too may in truth be told of him: that in all the struggle and the scramble, in all his fight with fortune, it was the sweeter qualities of his nature that came uppermost. His strength of purpose stood on a sound basis—a basis of confidence in, though not arrogance of, his own power. Where he was most handicapped was in carrying on his artistic progress coram populo. Had it been as gradual as most men's—had it been but the acquiring of an ordinary experience—all might have been well; he would probably have been accorded his niche and would have occupied it. But he progressed by leaps and bounds, and even then his ideal kept steadily miles ahead of his achievement. It was for long a very will-o'-the-wisp for him. Now and again he caught it, and it is at such moments that we have him at his best; but he can be said only to have captured it completely—so far as we are in a position to tell—in “L'Arlésienne” and certain parts of “Carmen.” His faculty of self-criticism was developed in such an extraordinary degree as to baulk him. He loved this Don Rodrigue and thought it was his masterwork, and that too at the time when “Carmen” must have been well forward. We know then that the loss is not a small one.

It had not been alone the fate of the Opéra House that had stood in the way. That institution had in course taken up its quarters at the Salle Ventadour, and once installed there had proceeded with the répertoire. But Bizet's “Rodrigue,” although well backed by Fauré, was pushed aside for others. The three names that it bore were all too impotent; and when a new work was announced, it was “L'Esclave” of Membrée that was seen to grace the bills, and not “Don Rodrigue.”

Poor Bizet, disappointed and sore at heart, vanished to hide himself once more by his beloved Seine. This time it was to Bougival he went.

M. Massenet had recently produced his “Marie Madeleine” and, curiously enough, it had been successful. This seems to have spurred Bizet on to emulation. With his usual happy knack of hitting on a subject, he wrote off to Gallet, requesting him to do a book with Geneviève de Paris—the holy Geneviève of legendary lore—for heroine. And Gallet, accommodating creature that he was, forthwith proceeded to construct his tableaux. Together they went off to Lamoureux and read the synopsis to him. He approved it heartily, and Bizet got to work. “Carmen” was then finished and was undergoing the usual stage of adjournment sine die. Three times it had been put into rehearsal, only to be withdrawn for apparently no reason, and poor Bizet was wearying of opera and its ways. This sacred work was relief to him. But hardly had he settled down to it when up came “Carmen” once again, this time in good earnest. He was forced to leave “Geneviève” and come to Paris for rehearsals. It was much against his inclination that he did so, for his health was failing fast. For long he had suffered from an abscess which had made his life a burden to him. Nor had his terrible industry been without its effect upon his physique. He did not know it, but he had sacrificed to his work the very things he had worked for. He felt exhausted, enfeebled, shattered. Probably the excitement of rehearsing “Carmen” kept him up the while; but it had its after-effect, and the strain proved all the more disastrous. A profound melancholy, too, had come over him; and do what he would he could not beat it off. A young singer (some aspirant for lyric fame) came one day to sing to him. “Ich grölle nicht” and “Aus der Heimath” were chosen. “Quel chef d'œuvre,” said he, “mais quelle désolation, c'est à vous donner la nostalgie de la mort.” Then he sat down to the piano and played the “Marche Funèbre” of Chopin. That was the frame of mind he was in.

In his gayer moments he would often long for Italy. He had never forgotten the happy days passed there with Guiraud. “I dreamed last night” (he is writing to Guiraud) “that we were all at Naples, installed in a most lovely villa, and living under a government purely artistic. The Senate was made up by Beethoven, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Giorgione, e tutti quanti. The National Guard was no more. In place of it there was a huge orchestra of which Litolff was the conductor. All suffrage was denied to idiots, humbugs, schemers, and ignoramuses—that is to say, suffrage was cut down to the smallest proportions imaginable. Geneviève was a little too amiable for Goethe, but despite this trifling circumstance the awakening was terribly bitter.”

“Carmen” was produced at last, on the 3rd of March in that year (1875). The Habanera—of which, by the way, he wrote for Mme. Galli-Marié no less than thirteen versions before he came across, in an old book, the one we know—the prelude to the second act, the toreador song, and the quintett were encored. The rest fell absolutely flat.

The blow was a terrific one to Bizet. He had dreamed of such a different lot for “Carmen.” Arm in arm with Guiraud he left the theatre, and together they paced the streets of Paris until dawn. Small wonder he felt bitter; and in vain the kindly Guiraud did his best to comfort him. Had not “Don Juan,” he argued, been accorded a reception no whit better when it was produced in Vienna? and had not poor Mozart said “I have written 'Don Juan' for myself and two of my friends”? But he found no consolation in the fact. The press, too, cut him to the quick. This “Carmen,” said they, was immoral, banale; it was all head and no heart; the composer had made up his mind to show how learned he was, with the result that he was only dull and obscure. Then again, the gipsy girl whose liaisons formed the subject of the story was at best an odious creature; the actress's gestures were the very incarnation of vice, there was something licentious even in the tones of her voice; the composer evidently belonged to the school of civet sans lièvre; there was no unity of style; it was not dramatic, and could never live; in a word, there was no health in it.

Even Du Locle—who of all men should have supported it—played him false. A minister of the Government wrote personally to the director for a box for his family. Du Locle replied with an invitation to the rehearsal, adding that he had rather that the minister came himself before he brought his daughters.

Prostrate with it all, poor Bizet returned to Bougival. When forced to give up “Geneviève,” he had written to Gallet: “I shall give the whole of May, June, and July to it.” And now May was already come, and he was in his bed. “Angine colossale,” were the words he sent to Guiraud, who was to have been with him the following Sunday. “Do not come as we arranged; imagine, if you can, a double pedal, A flat, E flat, straight through your head from left to right. This is how I am just now.”

He never wrote more than a few pages of “Geneviève.” He got worse and worse. But even so, the end came all too suddenly, and on the night of the 2nd of June he died—died as nearly as possible at the exact moment when Galli-Marié at the Opéra Comique was singing her song of fate in the card scene of the third act of his “Carmen.” The coincidence was true enough. That night it was with difficulty that she sung her song. Her nervousness, from some cause or another, was so great that it was with the utmost effort she pronounced the words: “La carte impitoyable; répétera la mort; encore, toujours la mort.” On finishing the scene, she fainted at the wings. Next morning came the news of Bizet's death. And some friends said—because it was not meet for them to see the body—that the poor fellow had killed himself. Small wonder if it were so!

Six Drawings

By Aubrey Beardsley

I. II. III.

The Comedy-Ballet of Marionnettes, as performed by the troupe of the Théâtre-Impossible, posed in three drawings

IV. Garçons de Café

V. The Slippers of Cinderella

For you must have all heard of the Princess Cinderella with her slim feet and shining slippers. She was beloved by Prince ——, who married her, but she died soon afterwards, poisoned (according to Dr. Gerschovius) by her elder sister Arabella, with powdered glass. It was ground I suspect from those very slippers she danced in at the famous ball. For the slippers of Cinderella have never been found since. They are not at Cluny.

Hector Sandus

VI. Portrait of Madame Réjane

Thirty Bob a Week

By John Davidson

I couldn't touch a stop and turn a screw,
And set the blooming world a-work for me,
Like such as cut their teeth—I hope, like you—
On the handle of a skeleton gold key.
I cut mine on leek, which I eat it every week:
I'm a clerk at thirty bob, as you can see.

But I don't allow it's luck and all a toss;
There's no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It's just the power of some to be a boss,
And the bally power of others to be bossed:
I face the music, sir; you bet I ain't a cur!
Strike me lucky if I don't believe I'm lost!

For like a mole I journey in the dark,
A-travelling along the underground
From my Pillar'd Halls and broad suburban Park
To come the daily dull official round;
And home again at night with my pipe all alight
A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound.

And it's often very cold and very wet;
And my missis stitches towels for a hunks;
And the Pillar'd Halls is half of it to let—
Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks.
And we cough, the wife and I, to dislocate a sigh,
When the noisy little kids are in their bunks.

But you'll never hear her do a growl, or whine,
For she's made of flint and roses very odd;
And I've got to cut my meaning rather fine
Or I'd blubber, for I'm made of greens and sod:
So p'rhaps we are in hell for all that I can tell,
And lost and damned and served up hot to God.

I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silvertongue;
I'm saying things a bit beyond your art:
Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung
Thirty bob a week's the rummiest start!
With your science and your books and your the'ries about spooks,
Did you ever hear of looking in your heart?

I didn't mean your pocket, Mr.; no!
I mean that having children and a wife
With thirty bob on which to come and go
Isn't dancing to the tabor and the fife;
When it doesn't make you drink, by Heaven, it makes you think,
And notice curious items about life!